Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't protect anything. First thing I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: honest is a thought of us day because I was
Speaker 1: on the airplane. There's a dude next to me who
Speaker 1: wants a beer, but he only wants to beer. Like
Speaker 1: it's provisional on what beer they have. Okay, sounds like me, yeah,
Speaker 1: but what is the world coming to. It's like like
Speaker 1: people like I want a beer, okay, that you decide
Speaker 1: you want to beer, and it's it's like if you
Speaker 1: decide you want to beer, it's like you decide you
Speaker 1: want to beer absent what beer is available, and then
Speaker 1: you would hone in on now that I'm now that
Speaker 1: I've just side that I want this beer, which I'm
Speaker 1: going to have. I want to know what ones I
Speaker 1: can choose from. But this guy was like, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I really want a beer. It depends on
Speaker 1: what beers I can get. And your dead is like
Speaker 1: driving around somewhere and you're like, man, I love to
Speaker 1: have a cup of coffee. I'm like, there's a Conico
Speaker 1: right there, and you're like, yeah, you know, gass Asian coffee.
Speaker 1: Let's look for a Starbucks. Let's go so far. You
Speaker 1: can't because he's on an airplane. He can't go look elsewhere.
Speaker 1: It would be like knee waking up in the morning
Speaker 1: in a remote area with one gas station and me saying,
Speaker 1: my god, do I want a cup of coffee? And
Speaker 1: you're saying the only coffee you could possibly have is
Speaker 1: from Bob's gas station. To me say like, never mind,
Speaker 1: I don't want a coffee no way. It's like the world.
Speaker 1: It's like something's got to give with this beer situation. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: for me, it really watered down a cup of coffee anymore.
Speaker 1: There's certain breakfast joints I don't go to because I
Speaker 1: got really watered down coffee. So I would not have
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee rather than not have one at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't, Okay, come on, please in your camp. Yeah no.
Speaker 1: The other day, in fact, we were, um, we're out
Speaker 1: in a small town in Montana. We're out specifically for
Speaker 1: bear hunting, and um, I was like, I want a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee. The hotel we stayed at, awful Coffee,
Speaker 1: went to another place awful Coffee. I went to three
Speaker 1: places awful coffee. Didn't drink any of it, about three cups.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna touch it. Yep. And the first thing
Speaker 1: I said on the third place, I said, can you
Speaker 1: make me a good cup of coffee? He's like yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes back there pours a huge, tall cup of
Speaker 1: coffee that tastes like cardboard walked out. Can't do it.
Speaker 1: I'm in that camp. So if you're in a restaurant
Speaker 1: and you're like, man, a beard sound good for dinner
Speaker 1: with dinner and then they're like, yeah, you take a
Speaker 1: look at the menu. If they're like and if all
Speaker 1: they have is I don't know your you know, beard choices.
Speaker 1: But let's just say all they have like the big
Speaker 1: giant macro bruise and would you say, I'll pass? And
Speaker 1: how cocktail glass of wine? I'll pass because they made
Speaker 1: too many of those. They made too big of a
Speaker 1: container of that beer. No, it's the flavor, bro it's
Speaker 1: carl No, nothing, it's it's so ridiculous, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess there's times where, you know, for example, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about working outside on a real hot day the
Speaker 1: end of the day, all right, so I'm thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: like biling. Hey, al right, you're out throwing bails and
Speaker 1: you're sweaty and dirty and you got you got hay
Speaker 1: and like every crevice of your body and your clothing
Speaker 1: and like, man, a brew at the end of this
Speaker 1: day would be like heaven, you know, I could go
Speaker 1: for one. Uh, in that circumstance, you pull out like
Speaker 1: I'm not going to name brands, but any brand my
Speaker 1: least favorite beer, if it's cold and you're like, here
Speaker 1: you go, I'm gonna I'm gonna be very grateful for that.
Speaker 1: On the flip side, there are times where it's like
Speaker 1: I could go for a beer if there's the right beer,
Speaker 1: the right beer, and if it's not there, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: good without. So I don't have a strong opinion. I
Speaker 1: think it's more contextual, and I'd say on the airplane,
Speaker 1: you're kind of a captive audience, and depending on what
Speaker 1: kind of day you've had, maybe you're in Camp A
Speaker 1: or maybe you're in Camp BE. That is why I
Speaker 1: was reserving my contribution here. Okay, On a somewhat related note,
Speaker 1: I have multiple times, I have multiple times said that
Speaker 1: I wanted that a great name for a bar would
Speaker 1: be the Wet spot. Turns out that a lot of
Speaker 1: guys rolled in, and there are already multiple wet spots
Speaker 1: around the country. There's a wet spot bar at mile
Speaker 1: marker on the Highway forty nine and North Dakota, and
Speaker 1: there's a wet spot Barron, Texas. So I know what
Speaker 1: the moral of that story is. You might go check
Speaker 1: him out. You might have to go check him out.
Speaker 1: And just because you have a good idea and you
Speaker 1: think it was yours, oftentimes it's not. Um pete munich
Speaker 1: are you are? You? Can you guys talk about your
Speaker 1: new thing you're making you guess still be all like
Speaker 1: a squirrelly about it? No, we can talk about a
Speaker 1: couple of things, talking about tent. Yeah, okay, so now
Speaker 1: you can say that because for a long time you've
Speaker 1: been like like tippy toey No, not a tent. Oh,
Speaker 1: there's there's other things tippy toe about now, but you've tiptoed.
Speaker 1: You've like now tippy toe about but you've tiptoed. You're
Speaker 1: not tiptoey about how you guys are gonna make a
Speaker 1: new tent. Correct tent is available for preorder right now
Speaker 1: and there's shipping in a month. There on the way,
Speaker 1: so genuine stone glacier tent. Tell me, um, tell me
Speaker 1: what's awesome about? When were you last on with us
Speaker 1: A long time ago? No, no, not too long a
Speaker 1: year ago with Roscoe, because then you guys will be
Speaker 1: in tiptoey. You were like, let's just say it might
Speaker 1: be a thing to put in a backpack. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of things on the drawing table right now that
Speaker 1: go in a backpack and out of a backpack. Do
Speaker 1: you have to be tiptoey or not? Um about a
Speaker 1: couple of things. Yeah, we're not. We're there's a couple
Speaker 1: of irons in the fire, some things on the drawing
Speaker 1: board that we're not publicly talking about yet. But the
Speaker 1: tent is uh is ready to go. What's awesome about
Speaker 1: the tent? Strength to weight ratio, super lightweight tent and
Speaker 1: super strong um generously sized two man four season tent.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure everybody in this room spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in a tent and being in a small
Speaker 1: one not too much fun. So it's a it's a
Speaker 1: generously sized genuine two man tent. Dual vestibules, big vestibules.
Speaker 1: Four pounds four rounds is minimum trail weight? Was it
Speaker 1: way like all in four pounds? Tell bounces sub five
Speaker 1: pound four season tent and uh when it's all scrunched
Speaker 1: up like how big? Is it pretty typical looking tent stuff?
Speaker 1: Sack mm hmmm. I don't know. It's acting like he's
Speaker 1: hold a loaf of bread right now. Yeah, big loaf
Speaker 1: of bread. But there's only one and if I was
Speaker 1: you guys, i'd give one to me. Yeah you got
Speaker 1: you got one comment? Okay? Um, but people can go
Speaker 1: on and order it right now. Do you feel that
Speaker 1: when you look at you, like, wow, it's different than
Speaker 1: most tense Yeah. There's a couple of things I really
Speaker 1: like about it. Um, I'm six ft two. Most people
Speaker 1: are home with their tall guys too, so I do
Speaker 1: genuinely like the size of the tent um. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of canopy space. When you sit up in it,
Speaker 1: You're not crowded by nylon. There's a bit of space
Speaker 1: around your head that helps with condensation and moisture. It's
Speaker 1: a light color nylon. I spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in Hilliberg tense. Hilliberg's are notoriously dark green nylon, which
Speaker 1: can create a bit of like a dark cave vibe
Speaker 1: on day seven of a bit of a terrarium inside
Speaker 1: area like a hothouse. Yep. So we have white and
Speaker 1: gray nylons which a lot of natural light comes through.
Speaker 1: Stuff I didn't think about before I was using this tent,
Speaker 1: but it actually makes a really big difference. Um as
Speaker 1: far as just can't mark. That's a good point that
Speaker 1: I never thought of. Is I thought of, like how
Speaker 1: much the dark ones can just like you're going there
Speaker 1: in the middle of the day to grab something, You're like,
Speaker 1: you know, because like what what happens inside there? But
Speaker 1: I never thought about light transmission. Yeah, you spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time in a tent on some of these hunts,
Speaker 1: and it's important be comfortable in there. So yeah, man,
Speaker 1: a length is key for longer people because when you
Speaker 1: get in there and you sleep bag is touching the
Speaker 1: end of that tent, may you wake up with wet cold,
Speaker 1: your feet are wet, and your hat's wet. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's got a nice garage on it. What do you
Speaker 1: mean vestibule, Yeah, super big vestibules, And I love them
Speaker 1: because when your backpack hunting and you have a rifle
Speaker 1: backpack boots, vestibules are super important, and having a generously
Speaker 1: sized one that all of your stuff can comfortably fit
Speaker 1: in is really nice to have and not where you
Speaker 1: craming in there and the fabrics laying on it all
Speaker 1: correct usual last year on your sheep hunt. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been using it for about a year now. Yep, put
Speaker 1: a lot of miles on it. These ten is pretty pricey.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing five, don't. They're cheaper than we were not
Speaker 1: allowed to use that word. It's less expensive than Pete
Speaker 1: went off the competition. Pete went off the went wild
Speaker 1: there And I'm not allowed to use a couple of adjectives.
Speaker 1: It's the hue glacier that's one of them. That's a
Speaker 1: good one not to use. Um, you were just out
Speaker 1: bear hunting with the buddy years can can? I can
Speaker 1: I talk? I'm not gonna give away your spot, but
Speaker 1: we used to do endless amounts of that. Is it
Speaker 1: fair to say? You guys are out hike and closed
Speaker 1: logging roads? Correct? And when they unclosed logging roads, we
Speaker 1: just walk mild I mean miles of those things. But
Speaker 1: it works right because when they stabilize those picture if
Speaker 1: you will in your mind's eye, listener a logging road.
Speaker 1: It's like a two track through the woods, through the
Speaker 1: mountains and where it switched backs up hills. Uh, you
Speaker 1: have an erosion issue, can have an erosion issue along
Speaker 1: some of these things. And so they grade out, they
Speaker 1: grade out the banks, and they go to stabilize the
Speaker 1: banks with certain types of vegetation. And one of the
Speaker 1: types of vegetation that they stabilize a lot of the
Speaker 1: banks with as a grass called smooth brown grass. And
Speaker 1: when that comes up in the spring, it's just like
Speaker 1: what the doctor ordered for bears. They love it. You
Speaker 1: find their ships and it's just as like greasy. It's
Speaker 1: like black grease. Picture taking a ball of grass and
Speaker 1: then dipping it in the thickest, nastiest black grease. And
Speaker 1: those are the droppings you find because when they come
Speaker 1: out of hibernation or eating all that grass to sort
Speaker 1: of get their digestive system cleared out. Yeah, I'm telling
Speaker 1: Carlos like a something he doesn't lovest, right, Yeah, you are,
Speaker 1: you are. And they love that smooth brown brass. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And we've talked, you know, about the adaptability of their diet,
Speaker 1: how they have this kind of menu that shifts over
Speaker 1: the course of the year, and that initial boost in
Speaker 1: productivity that comes with the spring is something not unique
Speaker 1: to American black bears either. Um, the work I did
Speaker 1: with Asiatic black bears the same kind of thing. They
Speaker 1: get that early flush of really nutrient rich spring forage
Speaker 1: in the form of vegge. And for people who don't
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time thinking about bears or around bears,
Speaker 1: you know, you you kind of picture the classic like
Speaker 1: bear on the stream bank eating a fish or something
Speaker 1: like that, But you don't envision a bear that's almost
Speaker 1: in like col mode, just grazing, just sitting there like
Speaker 1: like a college, just taking mouthful after mouthful of that grass.
Speaker 1: People have ideas of bears, Like the idea that people
Speaker 1: have of bears is like something usually that happens to
Speaker 1: the bear now and then like yes, now and then
Speaker 1: that bear catches the salmon. Well, that bear does a
Speaker 1: lot of it's walking in the woods eating vegetation. Uh
Speaker 1: So the bear you got, like I would say, over
Speaker 1: the years, we had a walking clothes which were called
Speaker 1: walking closers, probably a ratio of I bet we walked
Speaker 1: a hundred miles of closers per bear that we got.
Speaker 1: Though you would know the spots of the bears used
Speaker 1: oftentimes to be like they're coming down because they're coming
Speaker 1: out of the snow and they're coming down drainages. So
Speaker 1: you'd find concentrations of like they're following drainages down where
Speaker 1: those drainages would have to be like a culvert going
Speaker 1: over the road, and the would be like a bunch
Speaker 1: of stabilized areas, and then you find grass patch and
Speaker 1: then you'd find droppings on one of those in the
Speaker 1: next year that be like droppings there, And there's like
Speaker 1: certain spots they go. How many miles did you guys
Speaker 1: walk to find one bear? About half of one? Really? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we shot this is right away. Yeah, we got pretty
Speaker 1: lucky that night. We hunted. I hunting bears pretty much
Speaker 1: every day in bear season, and we we knew where
Speaker 1: we were going. We were going to a good spot.
Speaker 1: And uh we started our hike down the closed road
Speaker 1: and I was telling you earlier that there were morals
Speaker 1: growing in the road and that was a good indicator
Speaker 1: that no one had been out. Yeah, it's really good spot.
Speaker 1: Put it in the show notes. He was picked a
Speaker 1: couple of Morrel's walking out throad like nobody's been up here.
Speaker 1: That's a good sign. And then the cats started. Oh
Speaker 1: so you knew there. It was just blanketed on the
Speaker 1: I mean you couldn't. You couldn't walk thirty yards without
Speaker 1: finding a pile of bear scat. And so you just
Speaker 1: have this feeling like, well, there, there are there here,
Speaker 1: They're definitely there's definitely a bear or more within a
Speaker 1: short distance of us. And yeah, I just came around
Speaker 1: one of the first turns in the road. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: made an eventually made like a conscious decision to stop
Speaker 1: hunting closers two boring. I just felt like we weren't
Speaker 1: like really learning anything, weren't really learning anything, and then
Speaker 1: started hunting avalanche slides and other kind of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say that's my preferred method as well, to
Speaker 1: hunt them in the mountains and avalanche slides and play
Speaker 1: the spot in stock game. Did you notice how we'll
Speaker 1: move on from that for a minute. You know what
Speaker 1: I've never asked you about, Michelle. I just noticed, can
Speaker 1: I ask you about what's on your wrist? Like take
Speaker 1: a left turns out that means no, not well kind
Speaker 1: of symbolically in a way, Um, it's a broken arrow,
Speaker 1: it's a brand of a ranch. I was really young
Speaker 1: when I did this. It's a brand of a ranch
Speaker 1: that kind of signified my transition out of northern California.
Speaker 1: I left my life and my career there and was like,
Speaker 1: I want to go Berienced Wyoming, So moved to Wyoming.
Speaker 1: Side Unseen worked at this ranch, had an amazing Yeah
Speaker 1: it's um. That was their original brand from nineteen o two.
Speaker 1: It was the second oldest dude ranch in the country,
Speaker 1: and it was just kind of a big life shift moment.
Speaker 1: And you know, why didn't you brand the brand right? Maybe? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: no real answer for that one, but yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a little misperceived and left turn, but kind of symbolic right,
Speaker 1: super left, super right wing and the sharp left. Did
Speaker 1: you notice how I used the word squirrely earlier? I did? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I missus. The guy actually wrote in to clarify a
Speaker 1: point about he had a couple of points who wanted
Speaker 1: to clarify. Um. Two are just observations that you can
Speaker 1: feel free to comment on. One is that he says,
Speaker 1: I'm missing an important distinction between squirrely and western. Mean,
Speaker 1: when someone says things got pretty western or thing he's
Speaker 1: got squirrely. Okay, I was arguing that there's sort of
Speaker 1: one and the same. He's saying absolutely not. He says
Speaker 1: Western is distinct and that it implies a sense of
Speaker 1: physical danger or even violence, and squirrely lacks this. Says,
Speaker 1: squirrely simply means movements or actions that are erratic or
Speaker 1: without obvious direction. Western is more sinister. For example, the
Speaker 1: arrow has shot squirrel, he's using in the sentence, the
Speaker 1: arrow has shot squirrelly ever since Johanna has stepped on it.
Speaker 1: Versus things at the Dirty Shame Saloon got a little
Speaker 1: Western when Cal made a pass at that logger's girlfriend.
Speaker 1: She says, as a writer, you should know that there
Speaker 1: is a nuance here that you need to be aware of.
Speaker 1: I think you hit the nail on the head. I
Speaker 1: think the the element of the chance of physical danger
Speaker 1: is what makes things western. If I was in a
Speaker 1: bar and the next I said, man, things got a
Speaker 1: little squirrel in that bar, you wouldn't think that. I'm no,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really doesn't work. It doesn't mean that someone
Speaker 1: got no fight broke out, No, yeah, just got squirrely.
Speaker 1: Another point he has is he thinks, oh you know
Speaker 1: what I forgot? This has ben long you know, Ben Long,
Speaker 1: you know um. Ben Long also says he thinks that
Speaker 1: the use of the phrase grand slam beyond baseball came
Speaker 1: from a guy like grand slam and hunting stuff like
Speaker 1: the turkey Grand slam, sheep sheep grand slam. Um was
Speaker 1: really the only too like really recognized, no, really recognized.
Speaker 1: But it's a dear one. Yeah, I want to start
Speaker 1: a squirrel grand slam. I want to talk about the
Speaker 1: world the words squirrely, just real quick here because your
Speaker 1: way back on that. Just go ahead there with me.
Speaker 1: But when you're meandering through a nice grow oaks, you
Speaker 1: might be like, man, looks looking pretty Yeah, if someone
Speaker 1: says that to me, I don't think that things that
Speaker 1: someone's gonna come up and sucker punched me in the
Speaker 1: side of the face. I think that, uh yeah, just
Speaker 1: make it sure we're covering the applications of these could
Speaker 1: be down in the area and be like, it looks
Speaker 1: very western down here, meaning that it evokes the West,
Speaker 1: so grand sol Fritz of the Boone and Crockett Club
Speaker 1: used grant that he thinks the earliest used to grand
Speaker 1: slam for hunting. Boone and Crocket Club. He used to
Speaker 1: describe the fort to described to killing the four varieties
Speaker 1: of North American wild sheep recognized by BNC records, but
Speaker 1: which are doll sheep, stone sheep, rocky, mountain, bighorn, desert
Speaker 1: bighorn um. It's said that he later regretted coining the phrase,
Speaker 1: and Ben Long editorializes here and he says, I think
Speaker 1: that if he were alive today, he would regret it
Speaker 1: even more. I don't know about that, because like as
Speaker 1: a proud turkey slam holder, I can never remember what
Speaker 1: kind of slam I had, slam holder, why do you
Speaker 1: think he would regret he doesn't. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know why Ben. I don't know why Ben Long
Speaker 1: fields that Grand sol Fritz would regret it today. He
Speaker 1: must be referring to why he regretted in the first place,
Speaker 1: because I think that he feels that we guess on
Speaker 1: my part would be a guess would be that it
Speaker 1: would be like it's like the golf if occation of hunting.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. There's a strong argument to be made that
Speaker 1: a lot of conservation dollars are raised for wild cheap
Speaker 1: conservation because this grand slam exists and it's something obtainable
Speaker 1: that these affluent guys can go after Without the Grand Slam,
Speaker 1: I don't think there would be as much interest in
Speaker 1: collecting all four of these species and subsequently raising all
Speaker 1: this money for conservation. Yeah, there's some dinky heart of
Speaker 1: my brain that knowing that, um you know, uh, knowing
Speaker 1: that were I to go to Guatemala or southern Yucatan
Speaker 1: Peninsula and go out in the jungle there and find
Speaker 1: an oscillated turkey, knowing that that would make me a
Speaker 1: World Slam turkey holder, like that that that idea of
Speaker 1: resting my head somewhere I was like and added benefit
Speaker 1: would be that I would become a I have no idea.
Speaker 1: I'm almost half joking, but I'm not. And I think
Speaker 1: that the squirrel Slam is interesting because I don't think
Speaker 1: people I think it would help promote the squirrel because
Speaker 1: I don't think people realize how many damn squirrels there are.
Speaker 1: Who would you include in this squirrel Slam. I'd put
Speaker 1: a pine squirrel in there. I'd put a gray squirrel
Speaker 1: in there, eastern and western with color phases. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what, I would put a black face, black face
Speaker 1: gray squirrel in their eastern Western gray squirrel black phase fox.
Speaker 1: Put the fox squirrel in there. You can't put the
Speaker 1: del marv a squirrel, right, Abert. I would put a
Speaker 1: it's in there, damn sure. True would be all the
Speaker 1: tree squirrels because it's not e s. It's not an
Speaker 1: e s, a listed species anymore. But it's far from being.
Speaker 1: It's far. It's it's recovered, beyond threatened. But it's it's
Speaker 1: not a there's not honible numbers of you know how
Speaker 1: you get a mountain goat slam shoot one. It's both
Speaker 1: grand superan world. Right. Um, he's got a question though, well,
Speaker 1: listening to the show, Oh it's cool. So he's listening
Speaker 1: to the show and cooking what he describes as a
Speaker 1: freezer fossil. There was some pronged warm meat that had
Speaker 1: been a bottom of this freezer for quite some time,
Speaker 1: maybe less than a decade, maybe not any tips for
Speaker 1: cooking freezer fossils. Is there a point which freezer fossils
Speaker 1: should be discarded? There's it's like my input on that.
Speaker 1: It's like that's something should really try to avoid having happened.
Speaker 1: Your brother would say no, my brother would eat it.
Speaker 1: I would eat it. I guess it somehow became unwrapped,
Speaker 1: and it became unwrapped, and slowly um just turned to
Speaker 1: like that white freezer burn, freezer burn, and it yeah,
Speaker 1: just you're kind of like you you're it's sort of
Speaker 1: becomes uh, it sort of becomes freeze driving over time.
Speaker 1: I've had six year old elk though that you when
Speaker 1: we served it, you couldn't tell. It's amazing. That's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I kind of quit putting dates. I
Speaker 1: don't usually date it sucks, I was remember anyways, Like
Speaker 1: I kind of like know what it is and how
Speaker 1: it looked, and you know, just like the idiosyncrasies of
Speaker 1: the marker used and the animal. I just kind of
Speaker 1: have a sense. The reason like to put dates on
Speaker 1: it is not only my wife always seeing the dates,
Speaker 1: because if it's two thousand seventeen somethings two thousand fifteen, Like,
Speaker 1: why invite the scrutiny. There's no difference. She's not gonna know,
Speaker 1: but in never she's gonna look like, right, that seems odd.
Speaker 1: So I don't even put dates on that. And I
Speaker 1: don't need to hear about it or have anyone noticed
Speaker 1: about it because there's no difference anyway. So why like
Speaker 1: open it up to discussion. It's like a thing that
Speaker 1: happens in marriage. I think if you start doing those
Speaker 1: things like like, it just isn't worth my time explaining it,
Speaker 1: Like why even why even invite the question? There's nothing
Speaker 1: to hide, but why invite the scrutiny. I'm still gonna
Speaker 1: keep dating. Yeah, there's lots just like it in my
Speaker 1: head to know that last year's meets going out, new
Speaker 1: fresh meats coming in, yea. But I still do the
Speaker 1: same thing. But I do it. Here's the other things.
Speaker 1: I have two freezers, so when it's in my garage freezer,
Speaker 1: it's on standby, it's not in the run. If it's
Speaker 1: in the kitchen freezer, then everyone that knows everyone knows
Speaker 1: that that's what you're supposed to eat. Only I go
Speaker 1: down into the main freezer and I constantly move stuff
Speaker 1: into the running. So I'm sort of sequencing it anyway.
Speaker 1: But the minute I put dates on there, people are
Speaker 1: gonna go in there and they're gonna see dates and
Speaker 1: shy away from dates that they feel to be outdated.
Speaker 1: Good strategy, you follow me um quick news tidbit or
Speaker 1: if Carl has anything to say about this, you're talking Wyoming. Mhmm,
Speaker 1: chrisly Bears Wyoming. I was guessing that's where you're going
Speaker 1: because that's so fresh. Okay, No, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: But we can talk about that. They voted on it,
Speaker 1: just they tags you're coming up. They're still doing the
Speaker 1: one female quota though, right, I've got the details. I
Speaker 1: can pull that up while you ask the other question. No,
Speaker 1: this isn't a question. This is just a news thing
Speaker 1: that that's interesting. So the Interior Department UM under Secretary
Speaker 1: Zinchie kind of making a cool move where they are
Speaker 1: opening up more than two forty eight thousand acres two
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing that were previously unavailable for hunting and fishing.
Speaker 1: So this has taken like thirty units of the National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Refuge System acreages in twenty two states are going
Speaker 1: to be expanded to allow hunting and fishing access. So
Speaker 1: it brings the number of refugees, the number of refuges
Speaker 1: open to public hunting to three seventy seven and the
Speaker 1: number of refugees available for public fishing to three and twelve,
Speaker 1: which is cool, increasing hunting and fishing opportunities in the
Speaker 1: refuge system. What's interesting about that, maybe it's just it's
Speaker 1: got to be a function of the opportunities available. But
Speaker 1: I was expecting the fishing opportunity to be higher than
Speaker 1: the hunting opportunity when you started going down that pack.
Speaker 1: When I was talking to my brother who's a federal
Speaker 1: who works at a federal land management agency, he was
Speaker 1: he that was the first thing he It was like,
Speaker 1: how could there be that are on the same wave
Speaker 1: and I and I thought, well, maybe just has to
Speaker 1: do with like availability kind of land. Yeah, especially in
Speaker 1: the dry West, you know, there's not a lot of availability.
Speaker 1: But again, you think of refuges, right, and maybe this
Speaker 1: is just a Midwestern bias. I think waterfowl. I associate
Speaker 1: the idea of a refuge being kind of a wet well.
Speaker 1: Their symbol is the Canada goose right on for the system,
Speaker 1: I thought, or what was the bird on a Michelle?
Speaker 1: What's the bird on a The National Wildlife Refuge was
Speaker 1: their icon. It's a Canada goose, right Yeah, sure that
Speaker 1: was a swan or something. It's one of it too.
Speaker 1: It's a long neck. It's a sweet logo. So I
Speaker 1: got a flat back last night. Hopefully it's either way
Speaker 1: that I think. Hopefully that's a Canada goose. Right, it's Canada. Um.
Speaker 1: What's cool about um the proposal? Right now? The status
Speaker 1: is folks can actually weigh in on it. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: what we actually have an article up on the mediator
Speaker 1: dot com period and folks can go to the link
Speaker 1: that we're linking out to you, put in the docket
Speaker 1: number and voice their public support. Sweet, and I'll just
Speaker 1: give you a couple of quick quick stats on this
Speaker 1: development in Wyoming. So if we've got it right, Idaho
Speaker 1: also plans to have a hunt, but it's for basically
Speaker 1: Idaho is having a symbolic thing where they're exercising their
Speaker 1: their exercising their management. Yes, in Montana, my understanding is
Speaker 1: kind of sitting back and waiting, knowing it's a contentious top. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that I think that they're reluctant to step
Speaker 1: into the reluctant to step into the into the fray,
Speaker 1: into the fray. Wyoming, on the other hand, can I
Speaker 1: real quick? So uh, I'm trying to think of how
Speaker 1: deep I want to go on this. At the time
Speaker 1: of European contact that there were you know, you had
Speaker 1: grizzly bears ranged from I don't know, like roughly the Meridian,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit west hand from Meridian, so range
Speaker 1: from portions of the Great Plains all the way to
Speaker 1: the Pacific Coast. UH. They were from through habitat destruction, poisoning, um,
Speaker 1: unregulated slaughter, conflicts with sheep grazing, cattle grazing, every bad
Speaker 1: thing that could happen to a species. They were eliminated
Speaker 1: across the bulk of their range and existed only in
Speaker 1: a few wilderness strongholds in Wyoming, Montana. UM. They were
Speaker 1: when the Endangered Species Act came into play. When President
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon signed in the sign the Endangered Species Act.
Speaker 1: In the law UH, the grizzly bears listed in the
Speaker 1: lower forty eight the grizzly bears listed at as an
Speaker 1: endangered species. UM. Later manager wildlife managers kind of hit
Speaker 1: on this idea that we would instead of looking at
Speaker 1: the grizzly across the entirety of it of its historic range,
Speaker 1: we would identify distinct population segments and sort of manage
Speaker 1: bears according to these habitat pieces that could possibly hold bears.
Speaker 1: Because bears and humans are grizzly bear, particularly grizzly bears
Speaker 1: and humans come into conflict, and so there's a lot
Speaker 1: of areas where we're never gonna have them, like Golden Gate. Uh,
Speaker 1: Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is grizzly bear country.
Speaker 1: It will not We will not be able to recover
Speaker 1: grizzlies in Golden Gate Park. We will not be able
Speaker 1: to recover grizzlies in downtown San Francisco. So we look
Speaker 1: at like where can we recover grizzlies? Where do we
Speaker 1: have populations? Now, we create these distinct population segments, and
Speaker 1: what we later realize, what later came to be, is
Speaker 1: that you could declare certain population segments as recovered and
Speaker 1: removed them from Endangered Species Act protection and then shift
Speaker 1: your focus on recovering other populations um that that still
Speaker 1: need assistance. So if anyone of the follows the news
Speaker 1: on grizzly bears, it wasn't too long ago. The Greater
Speaker 1: what's called the g y E or Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,
Speaker 1: which is a chunk of land the size of Indiana,
Speaker 1: UM that population segment of grizzly bears were delisted because
Speaker 1: they had reached recovery objectives. You know, twelve years ago
Speaker 1: or more years ago, they released they hit recovery objectives.
Speaker 1: So long time ago people look at what would it
Speaker 1: looked like to recover bears in this area, and we
Speaker 1: came up with ideas of how many, how many females,
Speaker 1: total numbers of bears, all kinds of things. We hit
Speaker 1: that point. So then the US Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: that was in charge of managing the bears are recommended
Speaker 1: that the bears be delisted and handed back to state management.
Speaker 1: And so now the states that have the states that
Speaker 1: are within the g I, which would be small portions
Speaker 1: of uh small portion of Idaho, Chunka, Montana, pretty big Chunka, Wyoming,
Speaker 1: now have the legal authority and legal right to manage
Speaker 1: the bears as a c fit. And they are going
Speaker 1: to are toying with the idea, some more than others,
Speaker 1: of allowing a very limited hunting opportunities for these bears,
Speaker 1: particularly with with kind of the focus of it being
Speaker 1: um focusing efforts on areas where you would be like
Speaker 1: reducing conflict between the bears and livestock, but still with
Speaker 1: still with the recovery objective of growing bear populations in
Speaker 1: other areas so that you do listen the greater also
Speaker 1: an ecosystem for instance, doesn't mean anything with to do
Speaker 1: with current management practices of bears, and like the Cabinet
Speaker 1: Act Northern Cascades, I don't know. So with all that said, Carl,
Speaker 1: yeah you cooled all that. I'm cool with all that.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, this is one of those
Speaker 1: issues that is going to evoke strong emotions in the
Speaker 1: non hunting public. But it really is a glowing success
Speaker 1: story when you have that transition of the management of
Speaker 1: a listed species result in the removal of said species
Speaker 1: from protection under es A, and have that management returned
Speaker 1: to the state, and it's being driven by the scientific
Speaker 1: information that justifies the decision to delist. Um. Whether you're
Speaker 1: somebody who is a okay with having grizzly bears hunted
Speaker 1: or not, you have to acknowledge that there's a conservation
Speaker 1: success story to be told here. And also, I think
Speaker 1: a story that warrants some morning, you know, the fact
Speaker 1: that we had historically so much more robust populations in
Speaker 1: such a such a massive distribution spatially. You know, I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time in New Mexico's where I
Speaker 1: live now. Historically a lot of my favorite places in
Speaker 1: New Mexico to hunt and fish were grizzly habitat and
Speaker 1: they are not there now. Um. Whether or not they'd
Speaker 1: ever return is an interesting thing to debate and philosophies about.
Speaker 1: But um per personally, I hope so yeah, I share that.
Speaker 1: You know, I've been spent a lot of time in
Speaker 1: the HeLa lately. I just had a great nine day
Speaker 1: family trip chasing turkeys down in the HeLa. And Um,
Speaker 1: I was reading this book Black Range Tales that covers
Speaker 1: a lot of history of the Southwest, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: that long ago. You're talking like the eighteen sixties eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and these miners and market hunters who were living in
Speaker 1: that country are bumping in. They call them silver tips.
Speaker 1: That was the terminology. You know. They had this um
Speaker 1: coloration kind of the silver tip guard heres um. And
Speaker 1: it was an animal. You know, the conflict was very real,
Speaker 1: and it's an animal that understandably you know, it's struck
Speaker 1: fear in the heart of these miners. But Um, I
Speaker 1: share your perception about something missing from the experience when
Speaker 1: you know that animal that historically existed on landscape is
Speaker 1: no longer there. Um. But I also acknowledge my attitude
Speaker 1: about you know, having my my wife and her friend
Speaker 1: um out turkey hunting together in that landscape with grizzlies,
Speaker 1: I might feel a little bit differently about it, you know,
Speaker 1: understand on their own. I understand those fears, and I
Speaker 1: think there's many people who would agree that we should
Speaker 1: recover the bears an all suitable habitat. The details most
Speaker 1: everyone I hang out with would say like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I agree we should recover grizzlies and all suitable habitat.
Speaker 1: And then the minute where things would start to fall apart,
Speaker 1: what I would say is like, okay, let's all define
Speaker 1: suitable habitat. So in my back well, you know, but
Speaker 1: but even uh. And this was like another surprise move,
Speaker 1: a surprise move. Uh. Interior Secretary Zincy came to Seattle
Speaker 1: and announced his support for recovering grizzly bears in the
Speaker 1: Northern Cascades, which was surprised to me, but not as
Speaker 1: surprising if probably was the cattle ranchers up there. I
Speaker 1: thought it was like, I'm all for it, man, um,
Speaker 1: so I'm I'm all There's like I have like a
Speaker 1: dual pronged approach in thinking about grizzlies. I'd like to
Speaker 1: see grizzies recovered in suitable habitat, and once the recovery
Speaker 1: objectives are met, I like to see them delisted in
Speaker 1: the hand of the state management and some people that
Speaker 1: can't get all these ideas in their heads at once.
Speaker 1: But I'm playing like I'm thinking about it in the
Speaker 1: terms of I'm thinking about it in terms of like
Speaker 1: the long game of where I think things should settle out.
Speaker 1: And to your point, this definition of suitable habitat, I
Speaker 1: think there's there's a really relevant nexus here with respect
Speaker 1: to the the upcoming hunts both in ho in Wyoming Um.
Speaker 1: Thinking about suitable habitat in the context of social acceptance
Speaker 1: and having the ability to target hunting pressure in places
Speaker 1: that are prone to conflict with the species, I think
Speaker 1: is one of those management tools that will pave the
Speaker 1: way towards social acceptance and having more places on the
Speaker 1: landscape where we can strike that balance between your kind
Speaker 1: of approach of this definition of ecological suitable habitat social
Speaker 1: suitable habitat. I think hunting has the potential to be
Speaker 1: a really critical ingredient in that mix and all of
Speaker 1: creating social acceptance because because for people who are living
Speaker 1: in these locations and whose lives are impacted by these things.
Speaker 1: They're experiencing it very differently than you are from say,
Speaker 1: Golden Gate Park totally. And you're talking about the opportunity
Speaker 1: to manage any very surgical, precise fashion. Right, It's not
Speaker 1: like you're gonna have a whole bunch of tags available
Speaker 1: and a bunch of people out on the land escape.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to issue tags and target hunting
Speaker 1: pressure in a way that is very focused in places
Speaker 1: that are prone to that kind of conflict. So I
Speaker 1: think there's you know, there's a real tension and a
Speaker 1: lot of these natural resources management issues um between what
Speaker 1: the public would like to see in the places where
Speaker 1: they're actually directly interacting with the animal versus what the
Speaker 1: public would like to see happen from AFAR and the
Speaker 1: ability for local managers to be able to make decisions
Speaker 1: that address the concerns of the local constituents who have
Speaker 1: to coexist with that species day in and day out.
Speaker 1: I think it's one of the critical elements of being
Speaker 1: able to talk about a broader recovery beyond where they
Speaker 1: currently are and where they currently are. So that being said,
Speaker 1: here a couple of details on the Wyoming hunt. Under
Speaker 1: the Wyoming proposal, you've got the potential for up to
Speaker 1: one female and ten male grizzlies killed this fall inside
Speaker 1: the states section of federally designated demographic monitoring area, so
Speaker 1: they'd have a cap at at one female, ten males, well,
Speaker 1: one female, everything ends, that's right, and and that's similar
Speaker 1: to other states where you have UM like in New Mexico,
Speaker 1: for example, most of the units have unlimited hunting opportunity
Speaker 1: up until the quotas met, and it's the hunter's responsibility
Speaker 1: to keep tabs on where we are with respect to
Speaker 1: the the total um cap and also the female cap.
Speaker 1: So if either of those are reached, boom the season closes.
Speaker 1: And then outside of that demographic monitoring area there's the
Speaker 1: potential for another twelve grizzlies to be taken, and those
Speaker 1: could be male or female. So they're being really careful,
Speaker 1: very very conservative hunt inside that designated portion and then
Speaker 1: beyond that, which again this would be the area where
Speaker 1: the bears are starting to expand out beyond kind of
Speaker 1: that core prime habitat, i e. The places where there's
Speaker 1: more likelihood for conflict with humans. Those places you've got
Speaker 1: more flexibility, so a similar number of bears twelve bears,
Speaker 1: but they could be male or female. So that's the
Speaker 1: plan in the season is set to start September one,
Speaker 1: and you know, again getting back to the different values
Speaker 1: that people have around wildlife. UM, I don't see it
Speaker 1: as being unreasonable for somebody who lives far far away
Speaker 1: from Montana two have some consternation about it hunt like
Speaker 1: this happening. No, it's not surprising to me. I think
Speaker 1: there's a there's a ton of perspectives on it that
Speaker 1: are all not surprising to me. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: that if you're like completely removed from it, you might
Speaker 1: look and just if you're completely removed from it and
Speaker 1: you just know the bear from looking at calendars and
Speaker 1: stuff and and and social media pictures and you don't
Speaker 1: you don't have like three hours to go take a
Speaker 1: look at like the history of this whole thing. Absolutely
Speaker 1: you're gonna it can be like what Yeah, And that's
Speaker 1: why I think that's why I think the biggest talking
Speaker 1: point here if if if people have an opportunity to
Speaker 1: communicate one thing to someone who will listen to him
Speaker 1: for ten seconds, it's that the reason these hunts are
Speaker 1: being opened up is a conservation success story. The species
Speaker 1: has rebounded, at least in this small portion of its
Speaker 1: historic range to the point that the states are able
Speaker 1: to manage it guided by sound population ecology, and they're
Speaker 1: going to be able to have a sustainable hunt that
Speaker 1: helps address some of these conflict concerns. But there's not
Speaker 1: anybody who works for these state agencies who's not passionate
Speaker 1: about the recovery of the species. I mean, you're not
Speaker 1: gonna find a commissioner for the Wyoming Department of Game
Speaker 1: and Fish who doesn't think it's cool that grizzly bears
Speaker 1: are delisted and recovered to the point that they can
Speaker 1: have a hunt, a sustainable hunt. So I personally have
Speaker 1: a lot of admiration for the professionals that work at
Speaker 1: these state game and phish agencies. And I know, based
Speaker 1: on all the personal friends that I have who work
Speaker 1: for these agencies, that they come at this work with
Speaker 1: a really strong conservation ethic and passion for the resource. Um.
Speaker 1: So I view this, this delisting and opportunity to hunt
Speaker 1: as um evidence of a really cool story that I
Speaker 1: hope we can replicate us we're on the landscape. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I've spent a ton of time around grizzlies, love being
Speaker 1: around them, have had mix ups with them, have never
Speaker 1: killed one. I'm not gonna apply from one of the tags,
Speaker 1: but applaud, applaud the work and effort that's gone into this,
Speaker 1: and applaud the path they're taken on it, and uh
Speaker 1: wishing the best of luck on it. And and I
Speaker 1: hope it goes well. I have concerns about how this
Speaker 1: might play out, but hopefully my concerns won't be found.
Speaker 1: And you pointed out an interesting thing, like and I
Speaker 1: think this thing people struggle with. It's like, but they're
Speaker 1: not recovered across the entirety of the range. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm sorry with neither our elk. Elk are
Speaker 1: still absent from their historic range. But no one's running
Speaker 1: around saying like, hey man, we don't have uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a healthy herd of elk in Iowa. How in the
Speaker 1: world are you hunt them in Colorado? It's absurd. Yeah,
Speaker 1: elk used to exist across Like if you look at
Speaker 1: a map of the US, it was all elk country,
Speaker 1: excluding like the Florida, probably the Florida Peninsula, probably parts
Speaker 1: of Maine. Elk. We're everywhere. We've recovered some chunks, and
Speaker 1: we hunt elk in those chunks, and we're still simultaneously
Speaker 1: trying to work to put them back on the ground
Speaker 1: in all the places that they belong. And I'll point
Speaker 1: out that the people who are doing this are hunters.
Speaker 1: New Jersey cat ladies are not doing a ton of
Speaker 1: work to put elk back in Iowa. Right. Uh? What
Speaker 1: what kind of things you guys make a pete the tent?
Speaker 1: You can't. It's all the rest of it's all the
Speaker 1: rest of it's all secret. Huh. I suppose it matters
Speaker 1: when when the podcast is gonna be posted. Um, give
Speaker 1: a little hinty hint some No, we're gonna rush some
Speaker 1: technical performance pieces of gear that you put on your
Speaker 1: body to touch your skin or not. You know, it
Speaker 1: might touch your boots. It might it might touch your boots.
Speaker 1: It just might touch your boots. Does it cover your
Speaker 1: ankles bigger than a bread box? It's about a loaf
Speaker 1: of bread and it has to do with your ankles.
Speaker 1: That's uh, that's one of the irons in the fire. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's something someone wrote in UM. I like this guy
Speaker 1: right off the bat because he said he listened to
Speaker 1: seventy episodes of the podcast in a month's insane must
Speaker 1: do a lot of driving. Now. He takes great with
Speaker 1: a number of people who have come on the podcast,
Speaker 1: and I think what he's thinking about is Pat Durkin,
Speaker 1: are good? Are our good friend? The lovely Pat Durkin,
Speaker 1: who argues that he draws the question like just what okay?
Speaker 1: He says how Pat Durkin, who he doesn't name by name,
Speaker 1: is always saying that coyotes don't kill many deer. I
Speaker 1: think what Pat was saying is that coyotes are probably
Speaker 1: not having a very dramatic impact on total dear numbers. Right,
Speaker 1: he's saying they don't kill deer, But I think he's saying,
Speaker 1: like when you look at dear numbers, so like numbers
Speaker 1: of adult deer on the ground, um that kyles don't
Speaker 1: seem to be having as dramatic of an impact on
Speaker 1: dear numbers as some people like the claim. But this
Speaker 1: guy goes on to have some pretty compelling anecdotal evidence
Speaker 1: where he says he has but he knows about a
Speaker 1: couple of coyote dens. He mounts some trail cams on
Speaker 1: these kyote dens, he's got two trail cams posted up
Speaker 1: over two different kyote dens, and last year alone, he
Speaker 1: caught images of coyotes dragging in thirty nine different fonts.
Speaker 1: So he's having a hard time believing. Um, he's having
Speaker 1: a hard time reconciling that with the idea that they're
Speaker 1: not impacting local populations. I feel like it would be
Speaker 1: nice to have Pat here to kind of defend whatever
Speaker 1: it is he did or didn't say. And I would
Speaker 1: not ordinarily speak for Pat Durkin, but I will speak
Speaker 1: for Pat Durkin and saying he certainly did not say
Speaker 1: he doesn't think coyotes kills some deer um coyotes. In
Speaker 1: like studies out of Pennsylvania, coyotes and domestic dog are
Speaker 1: the number one killers fawn mortality. Number one fahon mortality
Speaker 1: is kyles and dogs. And the reason you have to
Speaker 1: say that is because when you do a knee cropsy,
Speaker 1: do you say new crops or knee crops? When you
Speaker 1: do a knee crops, he's hard to tell the difference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to tell it it feels killed by domestic
Speaker 1: dog or yeah, and coyotes. I mean, Pat, everybody at
Speaker 1: this table would agree. Kyotes certainly do kill a fair
Speaker 1: number of fonds and a whole lot of other creators do.
Speaker 1: I mean, in the in the Upper Midwest. This guy
Speaker 1: was from Minnesota, I have that right. But let me
Speaker 1: look here, does he say where he's from? I had
Speaker 1: it he was. I had in my head that he
Speaker 1: was in. Uh, he's up on the Canadian border. I'm
Speaker 1: imagining like boundary on northern Minnesota, ninety miles from the
Speaker 1: Canadian border. So yeah, black bears are gonna be killing
Speaker 1: a bounch of fonds too in that country. But a
Speaker 1: couple of points I would make one is you know there,
Speaker 1: this is a species, the white tailed deer is a
Speaker 1: species that has eat that adapted to um withstand very
Speaker 1: strong predation pressure on fawns that occurs in a very
Speaker 1: short period of time. So there's this this idea of
Speaker 1: predators swamping. And that's the reason why you know, the
Speaker 1: deer hunting up in that neck of the woods probably
Speaker 1: in late October early November for a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: is really really good because all those does are in
Speaker 1: estrous and all being bred at the same time. That
Speaker 1: translates into a very narrow window of maybe a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks. The same kind of duration of time that
Speaker 1: the rut would last would be the amount of time
Speaker 1: that all those all those pregnancies would be would be
Speaker 1: coming to parturition to birth. And so you have a
Speaker 1: landscape that suddenly has a whole lot of food on
Speaker 1: it in a for a very short window of time,
Speaker 1: and everything is eating those fawns. Coyotes are eating them.
Speaker 1: I mean, one interesting question would be, I'm not doubting
Speaker 1: this guy's story, but if you've got trail cams providing
Speaker 1: pictures of coyotes going to a den with fawns, how
Speaker 1: he arrived at the count of the number of fawnds
Speaker 1: he's actually seeing versus pieces of fawns being carried around.
Speaker 1: You know how you come to like there was thirty
Speaker 1: nine fawns through a series of static pictures. I believe
Speaker 1: the guy though, that there's a bunch of fawns getting
Speaker 1: dragged back. The point is you're talking about an animal
Speaker 1: that has evolved to flood the market with lots of
Speaker 1: offspring predators swamping. It's the exact same thing that oak
Speaker 1: trees do when they massed every few years, right there,
Speaker 1: just dumping tons of acorns out all at the same time,
Speaker 1: and the predator in this case would be something like
Speaker 1: squirrels um and over the or deer um and the
Speaker 1: the driver there would be that over the long haul,
Speaker 1: those oak trees or that deer herd is able to
Speaker 1: support a relatively small base of predators by occasionally flooding
Speaker 1: the market with offspring, as opposed to trickling out a
Speaker 1: corns or fawns over a longer window. Like like put
Speaker 1: in an extreme Like to put in an extreme sort
Speaker 1: of scenario is imagine you have a let's say you
Speaker 1: have an enclosure, right, just just a picture like the
Speaker 1: idea of predators. You have an enclosure, and then this
Speaker 1: enclosure you put a black bear, and you put ten
Speaker 1: white tailed dos uh and the does all ten of
Speaker 1: those doughs all dropped their fonds on the same day,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna be vulnerable to predation for forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: That black bear is gonna eat one or two in
Speaker 1: that forty eight hour window, and the other eight are
Speaker 1: gonna be by that point up and running around. Now,
Speaker 1: picture that those doughs came in and they spread it
Speaker 1: out so that one had a baby every two weeks,
Speaker 1: probably all those fonds will be dead exactly, so which
Speaker 1: just in this predator swamping is something that takes place
Speaker 1: with like bird nesting colonies. Yeah, so having having those
Speaker 1: those carnival or is consuming some fonts as part of
Speaker 1: the system. Um. You know, another interesting question for the
Speaker 1: guy would be how's his deer hunting ben? Has he
Speaker 1: been able to fill his tags? As you see in
Speaker 1: Dear it sounds like you know a guy who's paying
Speaker 1: attention to the local landscape. My guess is he's probably
Speaker 1: a on the upper end of the distribution tail in
Speaker 1: terms of hunter success. Right, he's curious, he's active in
Speaker 1: the outdoors, so he's probably a good hunter. Um. But
Speaker 1: here there's another thing too that you gotta get into it.
Speaker 1: This is, uh, there's there's the idea of like carrying capacity,
Speaker 1: So how many adult deer can the landscape support? And
Speaker 1: oftentimes you're gonna wind up with a somewhat. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of variabilities and things are happening in
Speaker 1: mass crops and weather and all this stuff. But you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a sort of sense that that that the
Speaker 1: area can support x number of deer through the winter,
Speaker 1: and if and that number is going to stay relatively fixed,
Speaker 1: and you could be losing tons of fawns to coyotes,
Speaker 1: but still finding that at the end of their most
Speaker 1: vulnerable stretch of time, so that every year in March
Speaker 1: or every year in April, you're gonna be you have
Speaker 1: that same number of deer have made it through the winter,
Speaker 1: and that when you when these fawns are getting killed,
Speaker 1: it's just making room for the next one, because they're
Speaker 1: gonna find there there the bottleneck that they're gonna pass through,
Speaker 1: is they're gonna pass through a bottleneck usually like white
Speaker 1: tails and northern climates are passing through a bottleneck in
Speaker 1: the late winter, and only a certain number going to
Speaker 1: fit through that bottleneck anyway, that's right, And there's usually
Speaker 1: disproportionate mortality for those young of the year, right, So
Speaker 1: those those are the ones that typically have less likelihood
Speaker 1: of passing through that bottleneck. And the ecological term you're
Speaker 1: touching on is the idea of compensatory mortality versus additive mortality.
Speaker 1: So the idea that um, if a fawn is killed
Speaker 1: by a coyote in the summer that would have otherwise
Speaker 1: made it through the winter, there's potential for that to
Speaker 1: be an additive source of mortality. But if you say
Speaker 1: the coyote wasn't there, you had let me back up,
Speaker 1: I'll simplify it. You've got ten fawns, okay, and only
Speaker 1: five of those fawns are going to make it through
Speaker 1: that bottleneck you're talking about late in the winter. So
Speaker 1: there's enough resources for five of them to survive. And
Speaker 1: you have no coyotes in the system. So you have
Speaker 1: five of the ten that die as a result of
Speaker 1: hardship in the wintertime. If you have coyotes there that
Speaker 1: kill those five during the summertime and the other five
Speaker 1: make it through the harsh times of late winter, you
Speaker 1: would say that that's that source of mortality. The five
Speaker 1: went to the coyotes was compensated for you had higher
Speaker 1: survival a hundred percent of the remaining individuals. Those five
Speaker 1: individuals made it through winter, as opposed to only fifty
Speaker 1: of those individuals making it through winter. So there's all
Speaker 1: kinds of things that kill fawns. Um the fact that
Speaker 1: they've evolved with these predators, the coyotes and others and
Speaker 1: have these reproductive strategies. And you know, another another um
Speaker 1: form of defense they have is the fact, as you
Speaker 1: touched on, it's not a long window of time that
Speaker 1: they're super susceptible to being killed by coyotes. It's a
Speaker 1: matter of a couple of days that they're able to
Speaker 1: run and be up on their feet. Super success. Super
Speaker 1: success was the word super susceptible. Susceptible Like when you're
Speaker 1: off hunting morals and you find a fawn just laying there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like that's a pile and stumbled across at at in
Speaker 1: a very narrow window of time, and and you know
Speaker 1: when that's the case, I mean, everything on the landscape
Speaker 1: is fat and happy. The bears are doing really well
Speaker 1: for that narrow window of time. But there aren't too
Speaker 1: many places that come to my mind where you know,
Speaker 1: as a biologist, I'm thinking, man, I'm really concerned about
Speaker 1: a lack of abundance and white tail deer. You know,
Speaker 1: I know there's places that the numbers are higher and lower,
Speaker 1: and everybody likes to see deer when they're out there hunting,
Speaker 1: but um recognizing there's going to be some predation on
Speaker 1: the landscape, and the fact that this guy gets to
Speaker 1: see that on his trail cameras, you know, I'd be
Speaker 1: fascinated looking at the pictures and think cool to see
Speaker 1: the coyotes doing their thing. Hopefully I'm still seeing some
Speaker 1: some deer in the fall. I guess as this guy is.
Speaker 1: If he's in a situation where the coyotes are able
Speaker 1: to capture that many fawns from that small area, chances
Speaker 1: are there's a heck of a lot of deer kicking
Speaker 1: out fawns. So it doesn't sound like a situation where
Speaker 1: the white tail numbers or something anybody should be really
Speaker 1: worried about. It did man, I was going to roll
Speaker 1: through it, man, just play a little. But uh, I'm good.
Speaker 1: I'm good at a place called Stone Glaciers Old, I
Speaker 1: gotta I got a little follow up on this before
Speaker 1: we jump back to pestering Pete. Just I'm not getting
Speaker 1: the kind of answers out of them that want to
Speaker 1: get out of them, But go ahead. Talking about this
Speaker 1: brings up this thing that I hear a lot in
Speaker 1: our community about. And it seems like hunters are kind
Speaker 1: of talking about out of both sides of their mouth
Speaker 1: on this one, because at one one Instagram post is
Speaker 1: hunters are such a big part of controlling these populations.
Speaker 1: So there's not too many deer and not too many elk,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're like the ones that are keeping
Speaker 1: all this and check and then out of the other
Speaker 1: side of their mouth, it's and that's why we gotta
Speaker 1: kill all the wolves and coyotes, because if we don't
Speaker 1: manage that population, they're gonna kill off all the deer
Speaker 1: that we're also managing. And so you don't mean to
Speaker 1: tell me that there's some hunters who has some squirrel justification,
Speaker 1: squirreling justification. Yeah, just say you like to go out
Speaker 1: and hunt a bunch um, And yeah, I like to
Speaker 1: hunt a bunch and I hope that there's like maintains,
Speaker 1: like good stable, huntable populations of animals out there. That
Speaker 1: is funny that you're like, no, man, we gott a
Speaker 1: hunt deer because I'll be overpopulated, and we gotta kill
Speaker 1: kyles because they're killing deer. Yeah, totally. And the only
Speaker 1: reason I bring it up is because like I just think,
Speaker 1: like that argument is full of holes. And so if
Speaker 1: if you're also of the group that is like saying like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, hunting is dying right now, Like it's
Speaker 1: not good to be going out there with arguments that
Speaker 1: don't really hold up. That's right. I've been following some
Speaker 1: Australian hunters and they they got the whole other weird
Speaker 1: thing there Elwyes doing. Or they're always saying like, um,
Speaker 1: hey man, this is all non native. We need to
Speaker 1: kill all these animals because they're non native and we're
Speaker 1: doing a great service to the you know, the biota
Speaker 1: of Australia by killing all these non native animals. But
Speaker 1: then they're like, damn do I love these animals? This
Speaker 1: is all we eat all the time, love being on
Speaker 1: the wild with these animals. But man, we gotta kill
Speaker 1: all these animals. Or they always shoot there like it's
Speaker 1: big males, so they're shooting like stags and bucks because
Speaker 1: we've got to control the animals. Like, if you want
Speaker 1: to control the animals, I don't know if you've taken
Speaker 1: while they biology one on one yet shoot the females.
Speaker 1: If that's really what this is about, shoot females. It
Speaker 1: doesn't do any good for anything in terms of number
Speaker 1: control to kill males. And people are smart, man, you've
Speaker 1: got to be I think authentic in these conversations. There's
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong, in my opinion with really liking to
Speaker 1: hunt and havn't it be motivated by a desire to
Speaker 1: be outside getting good food, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: But if you're just trying to argue points that are
Speaker 1: all all the holes, somebody who has no affiliation with
Speaker 1: hunting or the outdoors is going to pretty easily start
Speaker 1: picking at this idea of talking on both sides of
Speaker 1: your mouth. And I think, you know, it's a really
Speaker 1: good observation you made. Be honest with respect to the
Speaker 1: predator control versus the key role of hunters. If you
Speaker 1: were to pull every hunter in Americans say, hey, man,
Speaker 1: if we could snap our fingers right now and have
Speaker 1: the full the full cast of of predators back on
Speaker 1: the landscape and have these systems function with natural predator
Speaker 1: prey dynamics, no need for human beings to be part
Speaker 1: of that equation anymore. It's gonna be wolves and bears
Speaker 1: and lions and coyotes bobcats doing all that work for us.
Speaker 1: We can wipe our hands, We're we're good to go.
Speaker 1: How many hunters are gonna be like, oh yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: that's cool. I don't think any of them. So I
Speaker 1: was only doing it to make sure everything was going
Speaker 1: to be the reality, actually hate hunt. I actually hate hunting,
Speaker 1: but I was just very worried about too many deer.
Speaker 1: So this is there's nothing wrong with saying this is
Speaker 1: something you know that we deeply enjoy and we you know,
Speaker 1: identify fundamentally in our our personal identities as being hunters
Speaker 1: and people who are connected to the land and participatory.
Speaker 1: And I would make the argument too that if you
Speaker 1: want to talk about the full cast of North American
Speaker 1: predators or global predators, that for many, many years Homo
Speaker 1: sapiens have been part of that cast of characters, and
Speaker 1: celebrating that point um and this desire to maintain a
Speaker 1: connection to who we are fundamentally in our species identity,
Speaker 1: I think is a much stronger case than saying, well,
Speaker 1: we've got this job to do and you know, we
Speaker 1: gotta we gotta make sure there aren't too many deer,
Speaker 1: and oh yeah, we got gotta make sure there aren't
Speaker 1: too many predators. It's like, no, man, celebrate the fact
Speaker 1: that we are maintaining a strong personal connection to the land,
Speaker 1: a personal connection to our identity. The species that we
Speaker 1: evolved as would is one of that, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the key species in that cast of predators. And
Speaker 1: be able to, you know, to share authentic stories and
Speaker 1: authentic information about what we do and not try to
Speaker 1: not try to paint it with some inauthentic brush, because
Speaker 1: you have to give credit to the people with whom
Speaker 1: are communicating about this stuff. They're going to be perceptive,
Speaker 1: They're going to be able to poke holes. And if
Speaker 1: you're in a thoughtful conversation, my hope would be people
Speaker 1: are eager to question and pick and ask. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of our our community of hunters, you know,
Speaker 1: we point to these kind of tired, um, overused justifications
Speaker 1: that we maybe haven't put as much thought into. And
Speaker 1: it's absolutely okay to really enjoy hunting and have that
Speaker 1: be a primary motivation and not feel like you have
Speaker 1: to talk about it. Is this what we've got this
Speaker 1: job to do in the ecosystem, because I think, frankly,
Speaker 1: that's one of the weakest arguments that we have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think it's helpful to point out, though, to
Speaker 1: to to focus on your particular love of the natural world,
Speaker 1: your love of being out of doors, um. Could be
Speaker 1: your love of hunting for food that you feed to
Speaker 1: your family, your interactions, um. And it's helpful to point
Speaker 1: out and say, and in addition to all of that,
Speaker 1: the system that we've developed in this country makes it
Speaker 1: that my participation in these activities is normally is like
Speaker 1: enormously productive in terms of land management and funding for
Speaker 1: wildlife work. Yes, it's it's it's a it's it's a
Speaker 1: valuable thing to point out. It's not that I don't
Speaker 1: think anyone's gonna say like, I'd have a hard time.
Speaker 1: As someone said, dude, the only reason I hunt is
Speaker 1: because when I buy a hunting license, that provides the
Speaker 1: funding for my state Phishing Game Agency to work on
Speaker 1: disease issues and enforcement of wildlife regulations and land enhancement projects.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm out, Because if that was the case,
Speaker 1: you just send the money, You just send them a check. Right.
Speaker 1: So I guess like, there's what I personally like about this,
Speaker 1: and you can take pride in the fact that the
Speaker 1: systems that we've developed over time make it that my
Speaker 1: participation in the activity is actually productive for the land
Speaker 1: and the animals. I'm not a problems there's no problem
Speaker 1: with that at all. What I what I think. What
Speaker 1: I think shines through though, when you have somebody making
Speaker 1: a justification like Joannie was talking about where you're saying simultaneously,
Speaker 1: I need to be able to play a role in
Speaker 1: helping control the white tailed deer heard for example, and
Speaker 1: then meanwhile, yeah, we've got these issues with too many coyotes.
Speaker 1: If we don't manage the coyote numbers, we're not going
Speaker 1: to have any deer to hunt. Um. That kind of
Speaker 1: a conversation where holes can be poked. I think that's
Speaker 1: coming from a place of and and this might frustrate
Speaker 1: some listeners. I apologize, but thoughtful discourse here. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a selfish kind of mindset, right, Like I want
Speaker 1: to have deer on the landscape so that I, as
Speaker 1: a hunter can get a deer. It's coming from a
Speaker 1: place of I'm totally comfortable centrism. Okay, yeah, but but okay.
Speaker 1: But my argument is the problem is saying like, no,
Speaker 1: I want there to be deer because I like to
Speaker 1: hunt deer. Yeah, let me finish my my point though,
Speaker 1: because I I like getting a deer as much as
Speaker 1: the next guy. But I'm also interested in having that
Speaker 1: resource available to support other species on the landscape that
Speaker 1: have evolved there to be part of that system. So
Speaker 1: for me, I want to have deer on the landscape
Speaker 1: because I like to get a deer. I mean, if
Speaker 1: there there has not been a year in a long time.
Speaker 1: And this is not some braggadocio about my hunting prowess.
Speaker 1: I'm not the greatest hunter in the world, but I
Speaker 1: have a steady I appreciate the kind words. I have
Speaker 1: a steady supply of hard earned game meat in my freezer,
Speaker 1: like all of us here at the table, do okay,
Speaker 1: And that's a fundamental element of my identity. If you
Speaker 1: took that away from me, that would be a major
Speaker 1: impact to me and my family in terms of our lifestyle,
Speaker 1: how we eat. Um. So I like having a deer
Speaker 1: as much as the next guy, but I would submit
Speaker 1: to you that on an equal level of appreciation in
Speaker 1: my mind with my own use of that resource, I
Speaker 1: value the fact that that dear herd exists and is
Speaker 1: supporting a whole cast of other awesome animals in that
Speaker 1: trophic web, that food web. So I this is the
Speaker 1: selfishness that I was touching on. It's not saying I
Speaker 1: have a problem with somebody saying they really want to
Speaker 1: get a deer. What I have a problem with is
Speaker 1: somebody saying, I feel like I have the corner around
Speaker 1: the market for deer, and these deer are all here
Speaker 1: for human beings, and I don't have any tolerant. It's
Speaker 1: for all these other animals in the landscape that are
Speaker 1: also working hard two transfer those deer into their calories.
Speaker 1: So I love the idea of sharing my deer hunting
Speaker 1: spots with the full cast of species that evolved to
Speaker 1: be part of that system. And if you gave me
Speaker 1: the choice of hunting in a place where I could
Speaker 1: easily kill a deer every year in the absence of
Speaker 1: that sharing, or another word would be that competition versus
Speaker 1: a place where maybe I'd kill a deer every other year,
Speaker 1: but there's this robust community of all these other organisms
Speaker 1: that depend on each other for their existence, I would take.
Speaker 1: I would take the latter option. And I think the
Speaker 1: extreme example of you know, the ease of killing something
Speaker 1: every year and in the total control you could talk
Speaker 1: about like a high fenced deer kind of operation where
Speaker 1: there's no predators, very high likelihood of success, and increasingly artificial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm looking for a situation where you're experiencing the ecosystem
Speaker 1: and it's full complement of species, and if that comes
Speaker 1: with potential for a lower degree of success in my hunting,
Speaker 1: so be it, because I would rather have an intact
Speaker 1: ecosystem in which I can be an active participant, maybe
Speaker 1: with a lower success rate, than a situation where there's
Speaker 1: a whole pile of deer out there and I'm going
Speaker 1: to get two bucks and four does every year without
Speaker 1: a whole lot of work because the system has been
Speaker 1: so manipulated that that opportunity exists. I think that that's
Speaker 1: the thing we've touched on the past is I think
Speaker 1: that's why I kind of like caution people against assessing
Speaker 1: the health of the lands gate by looking at how
Speaker 1: many deer I have, how many turkeys I have, Because
Speaker 1: you could go into a property, go into a chunk
Speaker 1: of ground and scrub it of its bio diversity. In
Speaker 1: scrubbed of like well, you know, Leopold's cogs and wheels,
Speaker 1: right of the natural world. Scrub it all out, and
Speaker 1: you've got like the right ratio of soybeans to multi
Speaker 1: flora rose, you know, to blow down timber and have
Speaker 1: a ton of deer and all other you've gotten rid
Speaker 1: of all other native much of the other native fauna
Speaker 1: and flora, and you go out like, look it's healthy
Speaker 1: because there's deer here. It's like you could be looking
Speaker 1: at a very unhealthy landscape. It's got a shiploaded deer
Speaker 1: on it, and it has been another way to measure it.
Speaker 1: So I agree, like, there's there's nothing you're saying that
Speaker 1: I think even like borders on like a controversial sentiment.
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, I feel like there's an element
Speaker 1: of our community of hunters that is um overly focused
Speaker 1: on simple measures of what success looks like did I
Speaker 1: get a deer? Did I not get a deer, as
Speaker 1: opposed to being more considerate of the health of the
Speaker 1: systems that they are participating in. So, you know, I
Speaker 1: do believe there's an element of our community that's fairly
Speaker 1: self centered and selfish and the idea of scrubbing every
Speaker 1: predator from the landscape so that they could have more dear,
Speaker 1: which has been something that the hunting community has wrestled
Speaker 1: with for a hundred plus years. Um, I think that's
Speaker 1: still alive and well in some quarters. And for me personally,
Speaker 1: I'm speaking you know, about my own philosophy here, I
Speaker 1: think it's I think it's flawed, and I think it's
Speaker 1: detrimental to our ability to have thoughtful conversations with the
Speaker 1: non hunting public about the activity when it's coming from
Speaker 1: a really selfish place. If you're saying, and this is
Speaker 1: getting back to Yanni's observation about um, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: playing this role as a as a deer manager. I'm
Speaker 1: playing this role as a predator manager. I think what
Speaker 1: starts to come through there is just this idea that
Speaker 1: the deer are here from me, as opposed to I'm
Speaker 1: a participant in this system that I treasure, that I cherish,
Speaker 1: and that I know something about. That's a very different conversation.
Speaker 1: And I think that conversation about being an active participant
Speaker 1: in a community that you know something about, and by
Speaker 1: community I mean an ecological community where you're a predator
Speaker 1: involved in this system that you've come to understand and
Speaker 1: appreciate and cherish. That kind of conversation I think can resonate,
Speaker 1: should resonate with a whole lot of people who might
Speaker 1: never want to hunt. And the days of us, you know,
Speaker 1: arguing about this stuff from a position of feeling like
Speaker 1: we've got these really strong rights. You know, we exist
Speaker 1: in a democrat out of society, and I think we
Speaker 1: are our ability to continue participating in these activities, maybe
Speaker 1: not in our generation, but maybe in our grandkids generation.
Speaker 1: It's going to hinge on whether or not we can
Speaker 1: communicate authentically and effectively. And that conversation about being an
Speaker 1: active participant who's immersed in the systems that evolved us
Speaker 1: as a species, I think that's that's an argument, that's
Speaker 1: a set of observations that's going to continue to resonate
Speaker 1: with the non hunting and hunting public in perpetuity. Whereas
Speaker 1: a conversation about I need to manage the deer so
Speaker 1: they don't get over abundant, I need to manage the
Speaker 1: coyotes so they don't need all my dear, that conversation
Speaker 1: is gonna gonna fall flat on its face. I'm tracking.
Speaker 1: I'd like to point out too, very quickly that you know, hunting,
Speaker 1: the animals that we take as hunters are compensatory, right, yes,
Speaker 1: And in most you know, unless they're really trying to
Speaker 1: down a population of said, you know, certain animal, where
Speaker 1: they're also they're like, O could kill a bunch of dollars,
Speaker 1: kill a bunch of this, right, most most of these
Speaker 1: systems we manage so that we're sort of like, not
Speaker 1: like extra doing extra killing. We're like, if you took
Speaker 1: us out, you roughly have the same population. It's not
Speaker 1: quite that simplenny. I mean, what drives the establishment of
Speaker 1: quotas is gonna is going to be a combination of
Speaker 1: ecological science and social science. The reality is, in any
Speaker 1: one of these systems, we could be managing it up
Speaker 1: or down potentially um for more fewer animals. And it's
Speaker 1: a matter of yeah, making sure it's sustainable, but you
Speaker 1: could have a sustainable number of animals on the landscape
Speaker 1: that is higher or lower than what we do. So
Speaker 1: not all the hunting associated mortality is going to be
Speaker 1: compensatory or additive. Yeah, this is something that comes up
Speaker 1: all the time. Um. And we've talked about a bunch
Speaker 1: of times when people say, like deer overpopulated, it's kind
Speaker 1: of well by whose measure, right, because it could be
Speaker 1: that oftentimes from a hunter's perspective, they're hardly overpopulated. Like
Speaker 1: I don't see it. A matter of fact, I didn't
Speaker 1: even get one last year. But from a from the
Speaker 1: automobile insurance industry might think they're way overpopulated. When you
Speaker 1: look at how many claims they're handling for deer car collisions.
Speaker 1: Agricultural interests might say they're overpopulated when they're looking at
Speaker 1: orchard damage or people who are losing whole orchard plantings
Speaker 1: two deer, and they might argue that it's overabundant. And
Speaker 1: so I think that they're that the wildlife managers are
Speaker 1: always needing to manipulate the valve because on one hand,
Speaker 1: they're they're hearing from hunters, we want more deer on
Speaker 1: the landscape, we want hire success rates, and other people,
Speaker 1: you know, automobile insurance, egg and the host of others.
Speaker 1: In some places, even like the landscaping industry is saying like, man,
Speaker 1: we've got close at valva and and you're you're making
Speaker 1: like constant microadjustments. Yeah, and they're rooted in different value sets.
Speaker 1: And and for me, you know, as somebody who um
Speaker 1: as a trend ecologist and somebody who values a system
Speaker 1: in which you have all the all the players present
Speaker 1: and interacting the way they have evolved to interact. Another
Speaker 1: criterion by which you could you could measure deer over
Speaker 1: abundance would be are there so many deer on the landscape?
Speaker 1: That they're having a negative effect on other species that
Speaker 1: are part of that ecosystem, and there are plenty of
Speaker 1: examples where that's been shown to be the case. So
Speaker 1: like the big drive to lower snow geese numbers has
Speaker 1: as much to do with protecting their habitat Arctic like
Speaker 1: Arctic coastal habitat as it does grain fields in Louisy
Speaker 1: in Texas. And there are places where that's true for
Speaker 1: white tailed deer as well, where um the idea of
Speaker 1: trying to bring deer to meet a particular objective, um
Speaker 1: bring numbers down, is driven by trying to protect other
Speaker 1: elements of that ecosystem. So I think it's the the Canada.
Speaker 1: You as a plant up in northern Wisconsin that historically
Speaker 1: was much more abundant, and it's it's, you know, like
Speaker 1: candy to the deer in the wintertime, and it's basically
Speaker 1: been eliminated from much of northern Wisconsin. And the only
Speaker 1: places you have little pockets of it are on the
Speaker 1: Apostle Islands, where the the deer densities are either zero
Speaker 1: or really low. So there are plenty of examples for
Speaker 1: a variety of species where they're over abundance has resulted
Speaker 1: in major implications to the ecosystem. So you have these
Speaker 1: criteria that are social, like the insurance example, or the
Speaker 1: the farmer trying to grow corn or soybeans, and then
Speaker 1: you have other other criteria that are driven more around ecology.
Speaker 1: And which one of those you put more weight on
Speaker 1: is going to be very subjective, Right, what do you
Speaker 1: care most about? If you're the farmer, you might think
Speaker 1: of deer as rats with antlers, um. And if you're
Speaker 1: a guy who waits all year to have that week
Speaker 1: of deer season and you want to be able to
Speaker 1: fill X number of tags, you might have a very
Speaker 1: different perception of what too many deer looks like. This
Speaker 1: leads into another question, Pet you cool? What I was
Speaker 1: gonna ask you men for? Um? I just wanta how
Speaker 1: bad your Australian accent was. Let's say you work at
Speaker 1: the place like Stone Glacier. Um, why do companies Why
Speaker 1: are companies secrety about? Like? What's the argument to be
Speaker 1: secrety about a product you're gonna make sure? Like? What
Speaker 1: are they afraid of? Um? I don't. I think there's
Speaker 1: just a time and a place to kind of to
Speaker 1: lay out the unveiling of it in the hype. Um
Speaker 1: that that hype is valuable and market you want to
Speaker 1: time that correctly, got with the with the delivering of
Speaker 1: the product. But look, man, when a new Star Wars
Speaker 1: movies coming out, they release trailers. They released trailers for trailers.
Speaker 1: The questions because I had one one time I asked
Speaker 1: this to a guy who works in apparel. Heugh was,
Speaker 1: explain me, there is when you announce new stuff coming out,
Speaker 1: people will stop buying the currently available stuff because like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna wait for the new stuff. And then
Speaker 1: you could be in a situation where you're left holding
Speaker 1: sure because they're like, well I was gonna buy a
Speaker 1: two thousand and sixteen, but screw it now, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna wait for the sweet news you can see like
Speaker 1: in cars. Right. And also, you realize, man, once we
Speaker 1: told about this bit a new truck, two eighteen trucks
Speaker 1: sales every we just put it off because of waiting
Speaker 1: for the new one. But in the situation like this,
Speaker 1: where company's launching a product they don't currently make, that
Speaker 1: argument doesn't hold water. It's very true. Just think about
Speaker 1: all this. Yeah, I'm taking notes. Um, that's funny because
Speaker 1: I haven't seen you writ anything. You can give me
Speaker 1: a pen when I came in. Ah. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's just the timing of the of the hype. And
Speaker 1: you know, you don't want people forget about it. You
Speaker 1: want to tell them about it when they can actually
Speaker 1: buy it or close to it. Yeah, yeah, and not
Speaker 1: just get forgotten and blown away in the wind. Can
Speaker 1: I get one of those blue hoodies? Yeah, we just
Speaker 1: came out with these yesterday. Can you tell people about it?
Speaker 1: It's a blue hoodie. It's a blue it's a bright
Speaker 1: blue hoodie, and it has the American flag on my
Speaker 1: chest and the Stone Glacier logo as well. I wear
Speaker 1: this here Stone Glacier shirt because my wife's that it
Speaker 1: makes me look a little younger. Yeah. It's got a yeah,
Speaker 1: which apparently is um something she cares about. Our shadow
Speaker 1: being a shadow lady, the shadow leader issues. That's our
Speaker 1: jersey for a softball team. Don't look like a little
Speaker 1: league player in this some badass mountain hunter man. Our
Speaker 1: softball team name is the Stone Glacier. You crushers. That's good.
Speaker 1: That's a good name. You like not you would, but
Speaker 1: you e w okay, Carl, This is a real doozy,
Speaker 1: the major doozy. All right, and it's long. It's a
Speaker 1: long angry email. Favorite kind a long angry email. And
Speaker 1: I love the guy. He owns the entire collection of
Speaker 1: the Mediator TV show, so he's not a freeloader. Wants
Speaker 1: to point that out. He is critical here where he says, boys,
Speaker 1: I know you guys generally don't find fault and biologists
Speaker 1: and over the agencies and whatnot. But come on, but
Speaker 1: come on, and you know, I don't know that's that's
Speaker 1: an entirely fair statement. I feel that I can find
Speaker 1: plenty of situations where where I have not been happy
Speaker 1: about something that the government agency has done. For instance, uh,
Speaker 1: the State of New Jersey closing bear season. That's a
Speaker 1: government agency making a move that I think is ridiculous
Speaker 1: and misguided. So we've talked about plenty of times and
Speaker 1: government agencies are screwed up. But here's his here's where
Speaker 1: he here's his angry nous, here's his problem. He's from
Speaker 1: Georgia and he keeps wanting to go up to hunt
Speaker 1: moose and Maine. And he's saying, how they keep counting
Speaker 1: moose and Maine. They're like, oh so Maine's thirty five thousand,
Speaker 1: five square miles huge place. It's got one year, they
Speaker 1: say maybe they got sixty thousand moose in Maine on
Speaker 1: the low end. Then there's account that comes out and
Speaker 1: there's someone that doesn't estimate, maybe we've got seventy five
Speaker 1: thousand moose in Maine. So he's pointing out, man shiploads
Speaker 1: a moose in Maine. But then there's some talk about
Speaker 1: how they're wondering what the increasingly warm weather and Maine
Speaker 1: kind of what kind of impacts it's having on moose,
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of worry about increasingly warm summers
Speaker 1: and what and it's concreasingly warm winters, and they're reducing
Speaker 1: the number of tags available to hunters even though they
Speaker 1: still have apparently quite a lot of moose. Like, how
Speaker 1: in the world he's wondering, could it be that the
Speaker 1: number of tags they're issuing, how could it be as
Speaker 1: low as two thousand, one forty moose tags when you've
Speaker 1: got perhaps seventy five thousand moose. Then the writer does
Speaker 1: something a bit confusing where he starts pointing out that
Speaker 1: the Canadian provinces to the north of Maine have many
Speaker 1: more moose two hundred twelve thousand, Newfoundland maybe has around
Speaker 1: three thirty thousand. So he's saying, you got all these
Speaker 1: moose all over the place, why isn't Maine killing more.
Speaker 1: I want to dispatch with a couple of that's before
Speaker 1: we turn it over to Carl and a couple thats
Speaker 1: be one. If you're the moose manager in Maine who
Speaker 1: cares what they have in Newfoundland or New Brunswick, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't say I'm gonna kill all the deer in Iowa
Speaker 1: because Ohio has got a lot of deer, right, So
Speaker 1: that really isn't like a valid point. And not only that,
Speaker 1: but if you look, Maine doesn't manage moose by Maine.
Speaker 1: They manage moose by very like micro chunks of ground,
Speaker 1: so they have, you know, you have districts and regions,
Speaker 1: and you're making like micro management decisions, sometimes down to
Speaker 1: a single valley. So it doesn't like it's germane to
Speaker 1: be like to talk about how many you're in other places.
Speaker 1: Let's focus on the core of the question. He's sort
Speaker 1: of accusing them of saying they're all worried about climate change,
Speaker 1: so they're saying we can't go kill moose, even though
Speaker 1: it's a ton of moose and they're not letting us
Speaker 1: get at as many. No, Carl, can you speak to
Speaker 1: what's going on? And it's happening in more places than Maine.
Speaker 1: What's going on with some of the trepidation around what's
Speaker 1: where moose are at, what role hunting is playing with moose?
Speaker 1: What might be happening to moose? Right? Can you dig
Speaker 1: in totally? And before I before I dig into the
Speaker 1: science side of it, I'm thinking about a strategy for
Speaker 1: trying to get a moose tag. Right, Because you're thinking
Speaker 1: about this guy's strategy, I guess Maine would be awesome.
Speaker 1: But this is getting back to the beginning of the podcast.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the idea of having a beer. If
Speaker 1: I said you want to go moose hunting, you're gonna say, well,
Speaker 1: only if it's in Maine. Well he can drive. He's
Speaker 1: in Georgia and he can drive main And Pete was
Speaker 1: just telling Pete telling me, tell these guys, tell yeah,
Speaker 1: I I also put in for a moose tag in
Speaker 1: Maine this year. Um for a couple of different reasons. One,
Speaker 1: I really want to go moose hunting a lot like this, Uh,
Speaker 1: this guy that wrote in um Phil Phil, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: sounds like Phil really wants a moose tag. I do too.
Speaker 1: I have ten bonus points in Montana as a resident
Speaker 1: in the area I put in for my draw, odds
Speaker 1: are still sub four percent. It's like three and a
Speaker 1: half percent chance that I'll draw this tag this year.
Speaker 1: There are no bonus points in Maine. It's very affordable
Speaker 1: to put your name in the hat, and I think
Speaker 1: I have a seven or eight percent chance. So Pete
Speaker 1: would argue that they're still doing a good job on
Speaker 1: giving out opportunity in Maine. I was doing a quick
Speaker 1: math in my head. I'm not real good at math,
Speaker 1: but uh, a little over two thousand tags to sixty
Speaker 1: thousand moose that seems like somewhere in the ball park
Speaker 1: of what a three or four target objective of harvest.
Speaker 1: That seems pretty normal to me, so I guess it can.
Speaker 1: It can vary. Those percentages can vary widely depending on
Speaker 1: the host of factors, but it's definitely not unusual. I
Speaker 1: think like you would know this. I think with mountain goats,
Speaker 1: I think like in excessive five percent is dangerous, correct, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like Washington manages for a one percent harvest objective of
Speaker 1: mountain goats. Montana manages for four, so different states choose
Speaker 1: different numbers to shoot for. But if moose or anything
Speaker 1: like mountain goats sounds like men on par for the
Speaker 1: course here for Phil, I'm going to criticize the state agency.
Speaker 1: I think, I think I think that the Washington I
Speaker 1: think at Washington Fishing Game, I think their perspective on
Speaker 1: harvest numbers from mountain goasts is ridiculous. And I think,
Speaker 1: and this is a bowl, I can't back it up,
Speaker 1: but I feel there's kind of a there is a
Speaker 1: there's there's a sentiment there seems that at times be
Speaker 1: a sentiment there um of of not maximizing, of not
Speaker 1: maximizing opportunity. They're kind of like, I guess we gotta
Speaker 1: allow him to do some hunting. Yeah, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think you're alone in that feeling. Because the one percent
Speaker 1: is you know, or whatever it is like to be
Speaker 1: on such the low end of the acceptable spectrum. I
Speaker 1: think there's a great argument, and I've read the argument
Speaker 1: made that like in excess of five percent can get
Speaker 1: dangerous on these on mountain goat populations because the low
Speaker 1: fecundity high risk of natural disaster. You know that they
Speaker 1: die by accident and avalanches, rock slides, falling. Um. It
Speaker 1: takes a lot to get a mature nanny who's reproductively successful, right,
Speaker 1: I understand all that, So I'm not disparaging the idea
Speaker 1: of applying for a main moose teg. My point is,
Speaker 1: if he'd even limited himself to the lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: he could be thrown in. If his idea is like
Speaker 1: I want to go on a moose hunt, he should
Speaker 1: be applying. I would say anywhere there's an opportunity, and
Speaker 1: they can't do that much farther to drive from Georgia.
Speaker 1: It's not like Maine is in the backyard. It's not
Speaker 1: like Maine is in the backyard of Georgia. So he
Speaker 1: could be he could be applying eight or nine states. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm coming at this from the standpoint of having
Speaker 1: just hunted moose in Idaho last year as a non resident.
Speaker 1: As a nonresident and shout out to the state of Idaho.
Speaker 1: I love the way. I'm sure some people hate it.
Speaker 1: But forcing you to choose one species and then having
Speaker 1: a real likelihood of actually drawn a tag with no
Speaker 1: point system, I think is really cool you want calling
Speaker 1: in the bull there? I called in several bulls and
Speaker 1: managed to get one at close range. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: an awesome hunt, had a great group of friends there.
Speaker 1: It was a once in a lifetime experience, literally, because
Speaker 1: now I'm you know, prohibited from ever a plan for
Speaker 1: a bull tag and Idaho again. And you ran into
Speaker 1: our resident enforcement specialist. I did. The guy called when
Speaker 1: I got an enforcement and I got an enforcement question.
Speaker 1: Ic Crawford. Wonderful guy. He actually man. He was kind
Speaker 1: enough to come out and visit camp and register the
Speaker 1: bull for me. But um, the reason I'm bringing up
Speaker 1: Idaho is can I kind of enough real quick? Sure? Uh?
Speaker 1: Did you did you enjoy? Was the moose meat? Pretty good?
Speaker 1: It's been excellent. I'm still I mean, yeah, you use
Speaker 1: it past past tense is not appropriate here because I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be eating that moose. Did you data or when
Speaker 1: you see moose? You know what that moose was? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about like which moose was this?
Speaker 1: And my freezer a fossils? There will there will be
Speaker 1: no freezer fossils. I agree with Steve's advice on that, um,
Speaker 1: but I have been very generous too. That's the other
Speaker 1: nice thing about having a moose is being able to
Speaker 1: dole out some meat. And this is the smallest of
Speaker 1: the subspecies to rights shiris bulls, so but still a
Speaker 1: very large animal. And my buds who came and joined
Speaker 1: me each left with a cooler full of meat. So
Speaker 1: I'm digressing here, But the point is for this listener,
Speaker 1: don't limit yourself just the main first start, you're starting
Speaker 1: out with some advice. Yeah, don't limit yourself just to
Speaker 1: Main if you want to go moose hunting and you
Speaker 1: want to drive there, because you could just go buy
Speaker 1: over the counter up in Alaska right and make it happen,
Speaker 1: which is going to be more expensive, more logistically challenging.
Speaker 1: But if you want to hunt moose in the meat
Speaker 1: home is very tough, yes, and not tough. So if
Speaker 1: you want to limit yourself to the lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: I would point out Maine is not in the backyard
Speaker 1: of Georgia. For a similar distance of driving, you could
Speaker 1: be going up and and hunting some of those other
Speaker 1: um you know, Northern Rockies States, Northwest States, and and
Speaker 1: if you're lucky enough to draw obviously, the more hats
Speaker 1: you have, your name in the higher the chances. So
Speaker 1: all that being said, UM, I like it though, all right,
Speaker 1: because you start you know what my dad always said,
Speaker 1: he didn't invent us, don't curse the darkness. Light a candle,
Speaker 1: Light a candle. Nice like to think the old man
Speaker 1: came up with that bound. I think he did. I'd
Speaker 1: like to think that maybe we're lighting a candle here
Speaker 1: and and just lit fills candle. Well, it feels lucky
Speaker 1: enough to draw a tag up in Idaho. I'd be
Speaker 1: happy to chat with him to about the planning there.
Speaker 1: It was a fantastic experience, all right. So what's going
Speaker 1: on with moose? Um? I would I would refute something
Speaker 1: that Steve said where it's not allowed. You made this.
Speaker 1: Don't worry it's it's nothing to major, But you made
Speaker 1: this comment that, Um, what's happening in those more northern
Speaker 1: provinces is not relevant to what's happening in Maine. But
Speaker 1: in fact it's part of the story because Maine and
Speaker 1: our other um moose hunning opportunities in the lower forty
Speaker 1: eight represent the southern of this species range. So when
Speaker 1: you're in that situation and you're you're talking about hunting
Speaker 1: opportunity at the very fringes of a species distribution. You're
Speaker 1: already kind of starting off on a difficult foot because
Speaker 1: you're talking about hunting an animal that is inherently existing
Speaker 1: at the limits of its capacity to exist. So moose
Speaker 1: are an animal. I'm sorry, But what's the part that
Speaker 1: I said that's bad? You said, what was happening in
Speaker 1: those in those Canadian provinces. I think you mentioned Newfoundland
Speaker 1: and New Brunswick. It wasn't relevant. You said, just because
Speaker 1: they're killing all the deer and state X, I don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about you know, I'm gonna you said,
Speaker 1: just because the hunting is great in Iowa, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go ahead and kill all the deer here in whatever state.
Speaker 1: I'm ok. And I'm saying to set the stage for
Speaker 1: the biology the story here, it's important to recognize that
Speaker 1: there's a fundamental difference as you oh north for the
Speaker 1: moose into the core of its range. I don't want
Speaker 1: to belabor this, but this isn't That was not what
Speaker 1: I was saying. You Okay, that's true. You said for
Speaker 1: him to say, hey, Maine has sixty thousand moose, they
Speaker 1: should give out more tags in Maine because a neighboring
Speaker 1: Canadian province has three. Okay I was I thought you
Speaker 1: were saying, in essence, what's happening in those other provinces
Speaker 1: is irrelevant to what's happening here. No, okay, all ahead,
Speaker 1: Well then I'll I apologize for misinterpreting. The point is
Speaker 1: what's happening in those other provinces, thank you, is that
Speaker 1: they are they represent really kind of the core of
Speaker 1: the of the distribution. That is a place where, for
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons, moose are able to thrive in
Speaker 1: contrast to the southern limits of their range, I e. Maine. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in Maine, you're talking about an animal that has
Speaker 1: evolved to withstand very cold weather. Um, there's this idea
Speaker 1: um an ecology in species evolution of a thermo and
Speaker 1: you you talked about this actually with some of your
Speaker 1: buffalo work. But the thermo neutral zone. So if you
Speaker 1: think about being a human being, you know the range
Speaker 1: of temperatures where we can hang out and be pretty comfortable.
Speaker 1: Let's say it the lower limit is maybe fifty degrees
Speaker 1: and you know, you could ask a human um a
Speaker 1: biologist who who studies people, physiologist, you could ask what
Speaker 1: the what the actual numbers are. But let's say it's
Speaker 1: fifty degrees. Yeah, if you get below that, you start shivering, right,
Speaker 1: and that shivering comes with an energetic cost. And on
Speaker 1: the upper limit, when do you start getting uncomfortable? What
Speaker 1: do you say? You're a better man than I am. Damn,
Speaker 1: he's durable. So I started, I start breaking a sweat
Speaker 1: if I'm just hanging out, let's say whatever, you get
Speaker 1: the idea. So, whether you're trying to keep yourself warm
Speaker 1: through shivering, or trying to cool yourself off through sweating
Speaker 1: in our case, or if you can't sweat, panting some
Speaker 1: sort of um physiological response to either heat or cool yourself,
Speaker 1: those things come at a cost. So there's this envelope
Speaker 1: where you can exist without any energetic cost associated with
Speaker 1: addressing an uncomfortable temperature. Yeah, you know, and you're talking
Speaker 1: for the Buffalo. I remember you writing that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's some absurd like you can crank them down. They
Speaker 1: couldn't find it. So yeah, in my book American, that's
Speaker 1: about the study they did where they took a like
Speaker 1: a whole stein or just some running the mill cow.
Speaker 1: They took a Tibetan yak. I think they had a
Speaker 1: Scottish highland some variety like Scottish Highland cow in a
Speaker 1: buffalo and they put them in these shipping containers with
Speaker 1: monitors on to see and they had like a metabolic
Speaker 1: increase related to the temperature so basically that it will
Speaker 1: start to shiver or start to expend energy to keep warm.
Speaker 1: And they hit it like very quickly with the regular cow.
Speaker 1: Um how mare what it was twenty degrees or whatever
Speaker 1: the hell was like like surprisingly like still surprisingly warm,
Speaker 1: and he hit it with a regular cow. And then
Speaker 1: I think the Scottish Highland cattle, the Scottish Highland cow
Speaker 1: tapped out. The Tibetan yak might have tapped out at
Speaker 1: negative thirty and they couldn't get they could never get
Speaker 1: the container cold enough to tap it out. They couldn't
Speaker 1: tap it out of the buffalo. Yeah, And it might
Speaker 1: have tried, like I don't know, I don't know if
Speaker 1: they got to negative seventy, but they couldn't find the
Speaker 1: point when it had a metabolic increase for dated to cold,
Speaker 1: meaning some bits cold tolerant as are moose, they're very
Speaker 1: cold tolerant. And can I tell no quick story, Yeah, sure, man,
Speaker 1: this is your gig baby. So cold tolerant, so cold
Speaker 1: toller that there was a there was trying to do
Speaker 1: some account on a buffalo herd in Canada, and they're
Speaker 1: out in the winter and they were using thermal imaging
Speaker 1: to find the animals. They could never find them because
Speaker 1: they're so well insulated. One day a guy noticed, when
Speaker 1: he's looking at the images, how he sees these little
Speaker 1: teeny crescent these little teeny black crescent shapes that didn't
Speaker 1: make sense. And what he later realized was the horn
Speaker 1: is their belly. That when one's laying on its side
Speaker 1: and it's belly hair is exposed, you would now and
Speaker 1: then hit a little bit of its belly, but it's
Speaker 1: so well insulated that you're not picking up warmth off
Speaker 1: of his back. It's a great a great story and
Speaker 1: a great example of how a given animal can be
Speaker 1: so well adapted to, uh, you know, a very cold envelope.
Speaker 1: All right. So moose like the buffalo are well adapted
Speaker 1: to withstands some extremely cold temperatures. But it doesn't take
Speaker 1: particularly warm temperatures for them to need to start regulating
Speaker 1: their body heat down, which is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that in the summertime, in addition to their being plenty
Speaker 1: of good forage in aquatic habitats, you see moose in
Speaker 1: the water like all day. They're there to escape insects,
Speaker 1: they're there to access really rich food supplies, and they're
Speaker 1: also there to cool down. So the issue of keeping
Speaker 1: cool in the summer for a moose is a way
Speaker 1: bigger deal than the issue of keeping warm in the winter.
Speaker 1: So in a place like Maine, throughout the southern extent
Speaker 1: of their range, and as we have climate warming and
Speaker 1: temperature envelopes shifting north, it gets increasingly difficult for moose
Speaker 1: to thermal regulate in the summer. At the lower extend
Speaker 1: of their range. There's a a very real cost to
Speaker 1: their fitness associated with those warmer temperatures in the summer,
Speaker 1: a longer summer season. But that's just the beginning of
Speaker 1: the story, because there are a number of other complex
Speaker 1: interactions occurring on the landscape associated with relatively mild winters
Speaker 1: relatively warm summers that planned this as well. And part
Speaker 1: of the story here is with warmer winters milder winters,
Speaker 1: um the ticks do much better at over wintering. So
Speaker 1: there are there are a number of examples of kind
Speaker 1: of natural biological processes that can really ramp up in
Speaker 1: the absence of super cold winters, ticks being one another.
Speaker 1: One is um the example of some of these pine
Speaker 1: beetle infestation in the West, where it takes a really
Speaker 1: cold winter to kill off the larvae, and in the
Speaker 1: absence of a cold winter for a few years, you
Speaker 1: end up with these huge insect outbreaks, these huge insect epidemics.
Speaker 1: And another example would be um relatively warm falls and
Speaker 1: springs and wetter weather resulting in more episodic hemorrhagic disease
Speaker 1: outbreaks in white tail deer e h D. So changes
Speaker 1: in weather associated with our climate can have major impacts
Speaker 1: to wildlife and habitat look in those cases, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't get cold enough, doesn't Yes, And with the moose
Speaker 1: population in Maine, part of the story is these these
Speaker 1: tick loads getting to be so severe than portions of
Speaker 1: the state. They're clearly having a major impact on the
Speaker 1: survivorship of moose. So not only is it harder for
Speaker 1: them to last through warmer summers, but then they're they're
Speaker 1: added on with this heavy load of ticks. But the
Speaker 1: story doesn't end there either, as these as these warmer,
Speaker 1: milder conditions continue to shift north. Another trend is that
Speaker 1: you have increasing overlap between white tailed deer and moose.
Speaker 1: The deer dew relatively well. Really cold, gnarly winters are
Speaker 1: much harder for white tails to withstand than for moose
Speaker 1: to withstand, and there's limited evidence to suggest that there's
Speaker 1: direct competition for forage between the two species. Um Some
Speaker 1: folks think maybe dear are a significant direct competitor with
Speaker 1: moose for forage. Other folks think maybe not. But one
Speaker 1: thing that the white tails do bring with them are
Speaker 1: these meningeal worms, so another parasite story. And the species
Speaker 1: name of the maningeal worm is peril of strugilous teneous.
Speaker 1: So given that that's such a mouthful, you can understand
Speaker 1: why they like to refer to him as ningel worms.
Speaker 1: And them ninjis are these three layers that wrap around
Speaker 1: the brain and spinal cord of all mammals. And if
Speaker 1: you ever have heard of anybody going in to get
Speaker 1: like a cerebro spinal fluid tap, that fluid exists between
Speaker 1: a couple of these ma ningel layers, and the whole
Speaker 1: system exists to provide kind of a a shield, like
Speaker 1: a layer of protection and cushioning around these really important
Speaker 1: spinal marriage Spinal meningitis will come from the same word. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So meningitis just means the swelling of the ma ninji's,
Speaker 1: these three layers. So in white tailed deer, this worm,
Speaker 1: it has a super fascinating um life cycle. And I'll
Speaker 1: start with the adults laying eggs in the me ninji's
Speaker 1: in these these layers that wrap around the brain and
Speaker 1: the spinal cord. So the adults ladies eggs, the eggs
Speaker 1: on the deer's nostrils. No, so we'll start with an
Speaker 1: infected and infected white tailed deer with adults that start,
Speaker 1: and we'll come back around to it. So we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the mode of exposure. I'll let you do it,
Speaker 1: but I don't agree. Okay, where do you want to start.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do it that way. I would start with
Speaker 1: the introduction, all right, But I'm just telling what, dude,
Speaker 1: I'll go with you. So, imagine a white tailed deer
Speaker 1: is walking through the woods, dicking around in the woods,
Speaker 1: cruising along and whirling around. Yeah, it comes upon a
Speaker 1: a tuft of it's preferred browse pick a pick a species.
Speaker 1: What do you want to be eaten? Man? See that
Speaker 1: footage of a deer eating eggs out of a bird nest.
Speaker 1: Pick something, Pick something, pick something more? Yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: pick little baby birds? Uh? Comes across it desized to
Speaker 1: um can pick a mushroom? Sure? Okay, size of Eta
Speaker 1: Morrell Okay. So this deer comes upon black or white
Speaker 1: morele Morchella canicus okay, Morchella canicus. And as it lowers
Speaker 1: its muzzle to nibble upon the head of this morale
Speaker 1: inadvertently without even knowing it has done, so, it happens
Speaker 1: to consume a gastropod. Do you want it to be
Speaker 1: a snail or a slug because it could be either snail? Okay?
Speaker 1: So this this two year old dough, which this is
Speaker 1: making a lot of sense because you find those things
Speaker 1: and Morrel's yes, you do. And it's an interesting part
Speaker 1: of the story to in terms of the distribution of
Speaker 1: this disease. And I'll come to that. So this two
Speaker 1: year old white tail dough nibbles down on this morale
Speaker 1: mushroom and then is up consuming, inadvertently and unbeknownced to itself,
Speaker 1: a snail. Okay. That snail is infected, and I will
Speaker 1: come back around to how the snail got infected. But
Speaker 1: the deer, Yeah, because we're talking about the cycles, right,
Speaker 1: So you can jump into that circle anywhere along the way.
Speaker 1: So the deer ingests the snail. The snail has an
Speaker 1: advanced larval phase of this worm living inside of itself,
Speaker 1: inside of it, yes, which it has contracted by eating
Speaker 1: the mucus on a fecal pellet from a different deer.
Speaker 1: I'll come back around to that pellet. Why you wanted
Speaker 1: to start where you wanted to Start's confusing, but I
Speaker 1: think I'm good. One thing about the listenership of this
Speaker 1: digital radio program is they're a pretty savvy bunch, so
Speaker 1: they'll be able to they'll be able to track this.
Speaker 1: So the dough has consumed omed the snail. Upon doing so,
Speaker 1: the larval phase of the worm is consumed, ends up
Speaker 1: in the stomach, matures makes it into the stomach wall.
Speaker 1: From the stomach wall travels to the central nervous system.
Speaker 1: The blood stream through the bloodstream makes it too. In
Speaker 1: white tailed deer, the meningel tissues the layers around the
Speaker 1: brain and the spinal cord, where it then proceeds to
Speaker 1: lay eggs. Those eggs hatch into stage one larvae, dislodge
Speaker 1: travel to the lungs, where they are then coughed up
Speaker 1: by the deer and ingested into the stomach. Wow, at
Speaker 1: which point in the stomach they are defecated and end
Speaker 1: up in the mucus where a snail or slug consumes
Speaker 1: the mucus that is infected with the larvae. That's another
Speaker 1: thing you see. No, then snails on snails and slugs
Speaker 1: on snails on droppings. Yeah, they eat that that mucus
Speaker 1: which can be infected. So you have this cycle of
Speaker 1: adult worm two long too digestive track, two feces, mucus
Speaker 1: two gastropods, snails or slugs consuming it to those snails
Speaker 1: or slugs than being eaten inadvertently by other servants other ungulates.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing about this worm, though, is that white
Speaker 1: tailed deer are uniquely able to carry the carry the
Speaker 1: infection without having really negative consequences associated. So even even
Speaker 1: other deer species, of course, which the moose is one,
Speaker 1: but mule deer, moose, caribou all have the potential for
Speaker 1: this infestation. This infection, this parasitism two go beyond the
Speaker 1: maningel layers and actually have the infection end up in
Speaker 1: their brain tissue. So in white tailed deer the worm
Speaker 1: is limited to existing in the maningeal tissue. In these
Speaker 1: other species it can end up in the brain and
Speaker 1: have a major impact, including causing potentially mortality. Is it
Speaker 1: is it reasonable to assume here that white tailed deer
Speaker 1: have been exposed to this for very very long time.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting and this this gets to the common
Speaker 1: earlier about you know, seeing a snail or a slug
Speaker 1: on a pile um. That's something I think you see
Speaker 1: quite a bit when you're in the east. You know,
Speaker 1: these relatively moist forests. This is not an issue that
Speaker 1: we see west of the Great Plains. So this is
Speaker 1: something that in moose populations in Minnesota and Maine has
Speaker 1: been a big issue, but not so much west. And
Speaker 1: it's thought that those grassland biomes that exist between kind
Speaker 1: of the eastern moose populations in the western moose population
Speaker 1: serve as a barrier for the spread of this disease.
Speaker 1: The arid landscapes, right, and those arid landscapes it's poor
Speaker 1: habitat for gastropods, right, So as white tailed deer expand
Speaker 1: their range northward, they bring with them this worm that
Speaker 1: has the potential to have a very different effect on
Speaker 1: moose than it has on deer. And you could understand
Speaker 1: moose that are out there foraging, consuming vegetation, and also
Speaker 1: potentially gastropods, there's plenty of opportunity for dear to infect moose.
Speaker 1: So again getting back to the idea of climate and
Speaker 1: how how changes even if it's a matter of like
Speaker 1: a one year that's particularly warm or dry, and this
Speaker 1: is why there's so much complexity in the system. If
Speaker 1: you have a hot and dry year, you know that
Speaker 1: that might be a worse year for gaster pods. If
Speaker 1: it's hot and dry, snails and slugs aren't going to
Speaker 1: be doing as as well. But if you have a
Speaker 1: relatively long window of non snow time, that's gonna be
Speaker 1: a longer window of potential infection when those gaster pods
Speaker 1: can be active. So you have changes in the distribution
Speaker 1: of white tail deer, you have changes in the web
Speaker 1: they're in the climate that have the potential to impact
Speaker 1: the activity and window of exposure opportunity. Through the life
Speaker 1: history of snails and slugs, you have these thermoregulatory considerations
Speaker 1: that the species is already existing kind of at the
Speaker 1: limit of its range, its ability to deal with those conditions,
Speaker 1: you have the ticks, and so there's no one answer, right.
Speaker 1: It's a very complex story, but it gets back to
Speaker 1: the topic of compensatory versus additive mortality. One thing is
Speaker 1: for sure, and it is that the decline of moose
Speaker 1: at the lower limit of their range is not happening
Speaker 1: as a result of hunting. It's happening independent of hunting.
Speaker 1: But it's very hard for wildlife managers to justify issuing
Speaker 1: a lot of tags to hunt a population that's in decline.
Speaker 1: And in another one of the states being affected by
Speaker 1: these dynamics, the state of Minnesota, which has a very
Speaker 1: rich history of moose hunting. Um they made the tough
Speaker 1: call in two thousand thirteen to completely stop their moose hunt,
Speaker 1: and it's some of these same drivers. My understanding is
Speaker 1: in in Maine it's much more of the ticks are
Speaker 1: a way bigger deal. But this story about the ninel
Speaker 1: worms in the northward expansion of white tailed deer, that's
Speaker 1: something in in Minnesota that goes back to nineteen twelve
Speaker 1: was the first year that they were really starting to
Speaker 1: try to figure out we've got these declines and moose
Speaker 1: what's going on. A lot of research has been done
Speaker 1: in Minnesota around these white tail moose interactions. But that's
Speaker 1: an example where UM in the state of Minnesota, they
Speaker 1: ran a population viability assessment a few years ago basically
Speaker 1: looking at recruitment and mortality of the moose population, and
Speaker 1: their projections for the state of Minnesota that it's were
Speaker 1: that it is possible within the next fifty years they
Speaker 1: might not have moose in Minnesota anymore in the absence
Speaker 1: of any further hunting. So totally appreciate Phil's excitement about
Speaker 1: hunting moose, and having now punched my card as a
Speaker 1: bona fide moose hunter, I would strongly encourage him to
Speaker 1: explore possibilities. But these questions, UM, they might seem really
Speaker 1: simple on their surface. Why won't the state of minister
Speaker 1: Why won't the state of Maine issue more moose tags?
Speaker 1: It's hard for me to draw a moose tag. And
Speaker 1: then you start getting into the complexities of the system
Speaker 1: and the specialized evolutionary traits of the moose with this
Speaker 1: disease ecology layered over it, and a changing climate and
Speaker 1: distribution in white tails layered over it, and what I
Speaker 1: take away from that are a couple of things. One,
Speaker 1: these management decisions are very complex and difficult. Two, there's
Speaker 1: huge value in having wildlife professionals on the landscape looking
Speaker 1: into this stuff, trying to figure out what's going on,
Speaker 1: and then applying that science to management decisions. And one
Speaker 1: other point I'd share is there are other issues, other
Speaker 1: interests being considered in the issuance of tags. That moose
Speaker 1: population is also UM, something that plenty of other recreational
Speaker 1: users appreciate and want to see on the landscape. And
Speaker 1: when a state is deciding how many tags to issue,
Speaker 1: they're taking into consideration providing hunting opportunity. They're also taking
Speaker 1: into consideration UM, wildlife viewing, and all the other folks
Speaker 1: that want to be UM involved in the conversation. In
Speaker 1: some states are more UM, more geared towards providing maximized
Speaker 1: hunting opportunity. Other states, like what you are saying for
Speaker 1: the state of Washington, maybe they're trying to balance a
Speaker 1: variety of public values when they're coming to these wildlife
Speaker 1: UM management decisions in terms of issuing tag allocations. So
Speaker 1: if you're sitting there in the chair of the biologist,
Speaker 1: whose job it is to say, all right, we are
Speaker 1: going to issue X number of tags this year, and
Speaker 1: you've got the social considerations, you've got the disease considerations,
Speaker 1: You've got all this information at your disposal. It's a
Speaker 1: tough chair to sit in. I think that where someone
Speaker 1: would wind up becoming frustrated is if you were looking at, well,
Speaker 1: we don't have a population problem right now, but we're
Speaker 1: concerned about what climate issues might mean in the future. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we're gonna throttle back hunting because we have a big
Speaker 1: question mark about what's going on ahead. I think that
Speaker 1: people could look at that, you get frustrated, so and
Speaker 1: they could look at it and get frustrated to and
Speaker 1: in the social consideration thing, where you might where a
Speaker 1: state might be like, you know what, We're gonna start
Speaker 1: paying more attention to people who identify as a wildlife
Speaker 1: viewer and make sure that they're having more opportunity and
Speaker 1: shift away from a user group that we used to Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I used to put emphasis on and I could
Speaker 1: see getting like really frustrated with that. Yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: to Another piece of the story that we didn't talk
Speaker 1: about is some of the ongoing research that they've done,
Speaker 1: and one of the more recent moose studies that occurred
Speaker 1: in Maine, they had very high mortality among a number
Speaker 1: of colored individuals, thirty of seventy, thirty of seventy. And
Speaker 1: that's a gross simplification of the study. You've got some
Speaker 1: information in front of you, but I'm just I'm just
Speaker 1: pulling us some filth. Yeah, so Phil knows about the study.
Speaker 1: So if you have indicators like that, you know they're
Speaker 1: investing money and research, They're they're tracking the population. He
Speaker 1: provided some of the historical data and context in his email. UM,
Speaker 1: they have information at their disposal that leads them to
Speaker 1: believe this is a this is a population that is
Speaker 1: in decline. They're trying to get to the bottom of
Speaker 1: what the management options are. But it's not it's not
Speaker 1: like they're just thinking, well down the line, this might
Speaker 1: be an issue, so we're gonna make a very conservative
Speaker 1: management call today. They believe there's a need to act today,
Speaker 1: and they're issuing tags based on the information they have
Speaker 1: at their disposal. I absolutely agree with you that, UM,
Speaker 1: it would be a source of frustration if they were
Speaker 1: taking an overly conservative UM. Management call now thinking there's
Speaker 1: this long term climate trajectory that they're trying to be
Speaker 1: responsive to. That's not the case. They've got an issue
Speaker 1: with declining moose. They've got an issue with high mortality.
Speaker 1: There were about hunting being a source of additive mortality
Speaker 1: to that population, very similar to the call in Minnesota
Speaker 1: to close the hunt. Could they have a few tags
Speaker 1: being issued in Minnesota? Probably so, But at what point
Speaker 1: do you make the call that you've got enough concern,
Speaker 1: sufficient concern about the decline that you need to take action.
Speaker 1: So I think the throttling back of tags, I certainly
Speaker 1: would not UM second guests any of my counterparts there
Speaker 1: in the state who are looking at the day to
Speaker 1: day in and day out and investing time in those
Speaker 1: surveys and having all that information, all that science. UM
Speaker 1: it really puts people on good footing to be able
Speaker 1: to make well informed decisions. And getting back to something
Speaker 1: you said earlier about UM the funding and how you know,
Speaker 1: we should be quick to tell out the fact that
Speaker 1: hunters and fisher fishermen, in their license dollars are going
Speaker 1: to do all this good habit at work. We wouldn't
Speaker 1: have any of these studies occurring in the absence of
Speaker 1: support from the hunting and fishing community. Either. It's not
Speaker 1: just money going to support law enforcement and habits at work,
Speaker 1: it's providing all this scientific information that underpins these management decisions.
Speaker 1: So when you've got such a complicated life history story
Speaker 1: as this ninel worm, think about how much research went
Speaker 1: into picking that apart and understanding what the dynamics are,
Speaker 1: just so you can have information in your hands to
Speaker 1: start to talk about what your management options are. Imagine
Speaker 1: if you're trying to make a management decision about this
Speaker 1: and you don't understand these nuances about the ecology of
Speaker 1: what's happening on the landscape. So I come away with
Speaker 1: just a lot of gratitude and um appreciation for how
Speaker 1: fundamentally difficult some of these management decisions are. As opposed
Speaker 1: to a desire to cast stones. I think it's helpful
Speaker 1: too for someone who starts to think, like, man, I'm
Speaker 1: starting to detect a TI hunting bias in my state
Speaker 1: Fish and Game agency. If you if you feel that,
Speaker 1: I think you should probably go and try to find
Speaker 1: where it's a theme that you're seeing occurring across a
Speaker 1: bunch of different wildlife resources. So if you find that
Speaker 1: deer tags going through the roof, no real change, no dramatic,
Speaker 1: inexplicable change, and bear tag numbers, that's a great suggestion.
Speaker 1: Turkey season is still long, water foul season is still long.
Speaker 1: Fish trees are still right. But there's this one anomaly, Like, man,
Speaker 1: they're really cutting back on moose. You probably look at
Speaker 1: that and but like this is probably about moose. I
Speaker 1: think that's a fair assessment and not seeing some like
Speaker 1: general thing where they're generally being like, you know what,
Speaker 1: let's try to get fewer hunters out of the landscape.
Speaker 1: But anyway we can think of and will manipulate data
Speaker 1: and use you know, hypothetical scenarios that could occur in
Speaker 1: the future as a justification to throttle back hunter participation. Um,
Speaker 1: you gotta get a big picture. And that's in contrast
Speaker 1: to a statewide bear hunting closure or a statewide lion
Speaker 1: hunting closure that's not at all rooted in any kind
Speaker 1: of science. Yeah, well, you know what, Maine, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you followed this. There was a they try to do
Speaker 1: a referendum to ban uh baiting and the hounds for bears,
Speaker 1: which would basically make you know, a lot of hunting
Speaker 1: mane very difficult and it got soundly defeat defeated by
Speaker 1: the voting public. So there you even have. You still
Speaker 1: have a strongly pro hunting, yeah, voting population in Maine,
Speaker 1: like they trounced that thing, that initiative referendum. So hopefully
Speaker 1: that story helps a bit. But dude, if this guy
Speaker 1: listened to seventy podcasts a one month, I'm having to
Speaker 1: think he's gonna get to this and and and find
Speaker 1: where we addresses concerns. Hopefill draws his tag, Fee's gonna
Speaker 1: run into him and put in for I at home. Man,
Speaker 1: when Pete draws, is gonna have some other guys come
Speaker 1: in and like blow out his area and be like
Speaker 1: you na mean? Phil? Is it a quick question? Can
Speaker 1: those miningel worms transmit to humans? There is not any
Speaker 1: evidence in the literature I've come upon that um indicates
Speaker 1: that to be the case. But there is a host
Speaker 1: of other species I talked about mule, deer, elk, caribou, um,
Speaker 1: domestic sheep, and goats, And then your bro might be
Speaker 1: interested to notice, Steve, but llamas and alpacas can also
Speaker 1: be infected with miningel worm. I didn't want to have
Speaker 1: to think about quitting any more. Else. Yeah, well you
Speaker 1: are you eating him raw? I mean I have sounded
Speaker 1: very trigger gnosis like parasites swimming around in you can
Speaker 1: I give a couple of points just to just to
Speaker 1: add a little bit, a couple of points that came
Speaker 1: from at our net when I put this moose question
Speaker 1: to him. Yeah, he had a couple of good points.
Speaker 1: He usually does, so he has He bullet points out
Speaker 1: a few things to think about here. Um. He points
Speaker 1: out that residents always have top priority for special trophy animals,
Speaker 1: and in Maine only ten percent of the tags for
Speaker 1: each of the four management units. So Maine divides this
Speaker 1: moves up into four management units. Only ten percent even
Speaker 1: go to non residents. So he goes on to say
Speaker 1: that a non residents odds stay proportionately the same as
Speaker 1: everyone else and vary with how many Georgia and other
Speaker 1: nonresident guys are applying for any given tag. Um. He
Speaker 1: says that people in Maine are inherently conditioned to having
Speaker 1: a very conservative number of hunting tags. Uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: they'd like to play it safe, and proposed increases in
Speaker 1: tag allocations are often met with considerable pushback. He says
Speaker 1: there's a cultural social aspect here that a person from
Speaker 1: Georgia may not fully appreciate um because apparently a few
Speaker 1: years ago the department did get more aggressive and issued
Speaker 1: more tags, more moose tags, and happened to coincide with
Speaker 1: one of the big tick outbreaks that resulted and higher
Speaker 1: than expected mortality. It was a double whammy, if you will,
Speaker 1: and they took a lot of ship from the public.
Speaker 1: He also says, in the last ten years, they've perfected
Speaker 1: better survey methods, data and modeling approaches, and they're probably
Speaker 1: operating now on better population estimates than they were operating
Speaker 1: on in past years. So they may have had assumptions
Speaker 1: about how many moves they had that were different than
Speaker 1: what they're now thinking is true. And if you're shooting
Speaker 1: for those certain percentages, you're going to see a lowering
Speaker 1: just because you're operating on better information. He also goes
Speaker 1: down and say this where tick outbreaks have had the
Speaker 1: highest impact, the department would like to kill more animals
Speaker 1: to reduce densities. But as you might guess, the public
Speaker 1: doesn't get that too well, meaning they're gonna say you
Speaker 1: want to kill more moose who are already dying from ticks,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna push back on this good stuff, man,
Speaker 1: deadly edly. Um uh, I didn't even get to the
Speaker 1: main thing I wanted to talk about. Man, what was that?
Speaker 1: We've covered some ground, dude, Oh my god? What it
Speaker 1: maybe I want to talk about? Was the Okay, ny,
Speaker 1: how long we've been talking here. We've been going for
Speaker 1: a while. We could do one more at all if
Speaker 1: you can do it in ten minutes. This is my
Speaker 1: concluding thought. We have over the months, got many, many
Speaker 1: requests for comment about an issue that's going on in
Speaker 1: Alaska that's been generating a ton of headlines here in
Speaker 1: the lower forty eight in the national medium. It has
Speaker 1: to do with something that's happened with certain hunting practices
Speaker 1: being banned on certain lands in Alaska. UM. To give
Speaker 1: you a little bit of background, Uh, states manage their
Speaker 1: own wildlife, and with exceptions of if something is protected
Speaker 1: under the Endangered Species Act or it has federal oversight
Speaker 1: because it's migratory and actually moves very fluidly across geopolitical boundaries,
Speaker 1: right then the federal government was going to provide some
Speaker 1: management oversight so that one state is inadvertently screwing another
Speaker 1: state over, meaning you kill all the ducks. Let's just
Speaker 1: say you were to kill all the ducks in Alaska, Well,
Speaker 1: a dude in Texas is gonna have, you know, or
Speaker 1: a dude down in the you know, the valley in California.
Speaker 1: You've just screwed that guy over. So there's some insulation
Speaker 1: from one state making a bad move on migratory stuff. NASA,
Speaker 1: we might have federal oversight, but generally if things aren't
Speaker 1: you know, another example like marine mammals, there's a Federal
Speaker 1: Marine Mammal Protection Act, but generally the state manages on
Speaker 1: wildlife as it sees fit um. In two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: during the Obama administration, there was a ruling that came
Speaker 1: through the Interior Department at the time that eliminated certain
Speaker 1: management tools or certain things that the State of Alaska
Speaker 1: at times allowed, and they limited their ability. They eliminated
Speaker 1: the state's ability to use certain management tools on federal
Speaker 1: preserve land in Alaska. This did not affect the remainder
Speaker 1: of the state. So about thirteen percent of Alaska is
Speaker 1: federal preserve and they said, on this thirteen percent of Alaska,
Speaker 1: we're gonna eliminate such things as the ability to um
Speaker 1: shoot caribou from a boat, so you'd use a boat
Speaker 1: to go shoot a swimming cariboo. Um, that you would
Speaker 1: be able to use dogs or bait for hunting bears,
Speaker 1: that you would have wolf and bear seasons that were
Speaker 1: opened during spring like denning and calving and pup raising
Speaker 1: times of year. This was like deeply unpopular with the
Speaker 1: Alaska Department Fishing Game because it would be similar to
Speaker 1: let's say you have a city like let's let's say
Speaker 1: take New York and they have all their traffic laws
Speaker 1: and their traffic laws work very well. No one can
Speaker 1: look and say, man, your traffic laws are screwed up.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna do something. If a road passes by
Speaker 1: a federal building, We're gonna give you a different set
Speaker 1: of traffic laws that we would like you to enforce.
Speaker 1: It's not based on the fact that there's a problem
Speaker 1: with your traffic laws, just we've decided that we think,
Speaker 1: um that a few things should be different. That you
Speaker 1: should drive on the uh left side of the road
Speaker 1: if you're passing federal property, and we'd like you to
Speaker 1: go in and have the little discrepancies on your landscape
Speaker 1: these management discrepancies with how you're handling traffic and the
Speaker 1: police there might be like, uh, one was the problem.
Speaker 1: You're not showing us, you're not demonstrating that we've done
Speaker 1: something wrong. You're making our jobs much more complicated. It's
Speaker 1: more complicated for the public to understand what's going on.
Speaker 1: So we just generally don't like the fact that you're
Speaker 1: inserting yourself here in this way. Um, and it created
Speaker 1: some real like states rights federal rights issues. So now
Speaker 1: the State Department, I'm sorry, Now the Interior Department is
Speaker 1: moving to correct this and they're setting the regulations back
Speaker 1: to the way they were prior to this earlier law
Speaker 1: that went into place in making it that the state
Speaker 1: can manage wildlife as it sees fit on federal preserves
Speaker 1: as they had always done except for this narrow window
Speaker 1: of time of three years when they weren't able to
Speaker 1: do certain practices of the state. As the way it's
Speaker 1: covered though, and the media is it's like they're changing
Speaker 1: the laws so that people can now go dig cubs
Speaker 1: out of the den and kill them. Okay, where does
Speaker 1: that come from? When someone says that, what are they
Speaker 1: talking about? What they're talking about is this. There are
Speaker 1: some areas in Alaska where they have a lot of
Speaker 1: black bears. Let's say they have tons of black bears,
Speaker 1: not a lot of harvest upset black bears, and for
Speaker 1: management's sake, they just say that there's no close season
Speaker 1: on black bears. A person is allowed to black bears
Speaker 1: a year, no close season. Someone might look at that
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, if that's the case, I suppose
Speaker 1: that means you could go dig a bear out of
Speaker 1: its den and kill it. But does that mean that
Speaker 1: anyone actually does this? Already right now, seven percent of
Speaker 1: Alaska is already open to people pulling cubs out of
Speaker 1: dens and killing them. I can't think of a single
Speaker 1: instance where this has happened outside of the Koyakuk and
Speaker 1: Native Alaskan group, an indigenous group who resides along the
Speaker 1: Yukon and Koyukon rivers. They traditionally hunt bears in the
Speaker 1: winter by digging them out of Den's a practice that
Speaker 1: they have engaged in for thousands of years. That's how
Speaker 1: they hunt. Now, if you're the kind of person who
Speaker 1: likes the sort of cultural imperialism that would come in
Speaker 1: and tell an indigenous group of people who has acted
Speaker 1: a certain way for many thousands of years and live
Speaker 1: in harmony with its environment. That they've got it all wrong,
Speaker 1: that they're not sportsmanlike because they have a traditional use
Speaker 1: practice of eating bear met in the winter that they
Speaker 1: pull out of den's, then go ahead and be that
Speaker 1: kind of guy. But as far as what goes on
Speaker 1: with regular hunters, like people who are operating under sport
Speaker 1: hunting licenses, it is not a practice to dig cubs
Speaker 1: out of their dens and kill them. There's no like need,
Speaker 1: there's no demand. It would be like saying this, if
Speaker 1: you live in New York and you open your trash
Speaker 1: can up and you find a little nest of rat
Speaker 1: babies in your trash can, Okay, it would theoretically be
Speaker 1: legal for you to take a dull knitting needle and
Speaker 1: slowly kill all those rat babies with a dull knitting needle.
Speaker 1: Theoretically one could go do that. So to say that
Speaker 1: people in New York are allowed to kill rats that
Speaker 1: they find in their home or in their garbage cans,
Speaker 1: you could put it that way, or you could be
Speaker 1: the kind of guy who says it's not illegal for
Speaker 1: people in New York to brutally slaughter baby rats with
Speaker 1: dull knitting needles. Because sure, I'm sure if you're the
Speaker 1: kind of person who reads that that way. Yeah, another
Speaker 1: way it would be to put it is that you're
Speaker 1: allowed to like control rats in your home. So like
Speaker 1: the constant twisting is the other thing is an article
Speaker 1: and you see news which like because you're because you're
Speaker 1: allowed to already bait bears depending on where you are
Speaker 1: in in a three percent or eighties seven percent of Alaska,
Speaker 1: it's like, now you can kill bears using donuts and bacon,
Speaker 1: Like the journalists went to such specificity they've called out
Speaker 1: like they're like, what would be the most egregious sort
Speaker 1: of bear bait? I guess it would be donuts and bacon,
Speaker 1: And I'll use that as a headline to explain my story.
Speaker 1: Or that they said you can use a spotlight to
Speaker 1: go kill baby cubs in their den. This isn't something
Speaker 1: anyone's doing. And in fact, just because the state has
Speaker 1: the ability to make it legal in this new thirteen
Speaker 1: percent of their land masks and they've already had the
Speaker 1: ability to make it legal and eight seven percent of
Speaker 1: their land masks doesn't mean that it already is you
Speaker 1: can kill caribou from a boat in a couple a
Speaker 1: couple extremely remote locations north of the Brooks Range. It's
Speaker 1: a practice generally done by subsistence in digital. This hunters
Speaker 1: who traditionally target caribou as they go through as their
Speaker 1: migration paths take them across some major rivers because other
Speaker 1: than that, these are inaccessible areas and you cannot get
Speaker 1: into the areas and transport the meat back. So they
Speaker 1: hunt along rivers, and there's certain bottleneck points where migrating
Speaker 1: herds of thousands of cariboo will come and encounter a river.
Speaker 1: It's the only place these people have an opportunity to
Speaker 1: intersect these herds of cariboo, and that's where they hunt them,
Speaker 1: is on the river. There is nowhere. In fact, I've
Speaker 1: hunted all over Laska, I've never hunted in the unit
Speaker 1: where you could kill a caribou from a boat in
Speaker 1: the water. So the fact that the state can allow
Speaker 1: it doesn't even mean that it can be allowed. Where
Speaker 1: I hunt black bears in Alaska, the state could say
Speaker 1: you can go dig them out of a den, but
Speaker 1: you can't. There's a specific season, in a specific quota.
Speaker 1: You have to apply for a permit. You would get
Speaker 1: the permit about once every two years if you apply.
Speaker 1: When you apply, you have to specify whether you want
Speaker 1: to hunt the spring or the fall season. They both
Speaker 1: have pramp date parameters around them. If you wound a
Speaker 1: bear and don't recover, you notch your tag. It's that
Speaker 1: specific in the legality of it. Okay, So it's not
Speaker 1: that now Alaska is going to make it that I
Speaker 1: could go over there and dig baby bears out of
Speaker 1: their dens and torture them to death, because you already
Speaker 1: can't anyway. But when they look at when they're trying
Speaker 1: to do these management practices of maintaining stable populations of
Speaker 1: cariboan moves often with an eye tord, providing subsistence cultures
Speaker 1: access two readily available protein sources, and these are things
Speaker 1: they can do in certain cases when they decide they
Speaker 1: might want to. Doesn't mean it's gonna now be like
Speaker 1: the wholesale slaughter of baby animals everywhere. It's just it's
Speaker 1: egregious how poorly represented this has been in the media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the headlines are outrageous. It's almost become like
Speaker 1: a joke to kill bears with bacon and doughnuts. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably not gonna be bacon and donuts, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be dog food. Oh my god, it drives me nuts.
Speaker 1: I don't even. It's like, I don't, I can't even.
Speaker 1: I don't even know where to begin when talking about this.
Speaker 1: I read an article that, uh that there was an
Speaker 1: animal advocacy group from Florida that traveled up to Anchorage
Speaker 1: to protest all of this, the bear cup killing, and um,
Speaker 1: they were met with a group, a college group of
Speaker 1: kids that were all indigenous Native American kids that changed
Speaker 1: their mind. I think the group is called Protest one.
Speaker 1: I'm remembering it correctly, and two advocates are going up
Speaker 1: to protest for it and uh publicly speak out against
Speaker 1: it in this like college club explained it to them
Speaker 1: their traditional use practice correct, and they went to Florida
Speaker 1: and had a public statement or released that they change
Speaker 1: their position on it. This NBC News article points out, well,
Speaker 1: it kind of the right of the NBCY article kind
Speaker 1: of goes crazy because pretty soon he's like talking about
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it has something to do with
Speaker 1: how Donald Trump's kids have been up to a lask
Speaker 1: on it. It's like this guy is like grabbing its
Speaker 1: straws right, like trying to drag anything in and in it.
Speaker 1: He says, like things that are cruel. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about that for a minute. If there's if
Speaker 1: there's a group of people who traditionally hunt cariboo as
Speaker 1: they're swimming across the river, do you understand anatomy and
Speaker 1: ballistics and stuff so much that you're saying that that's
Speaker 1: cruel or are you talking about something else? Because I
Speaker 1: don't really know. I don't really buy that that shooting
Speaker 1: a caribou at point blank range out of a boat
Speaker 1: they're usually shooting in the head when they do this,
Speaker 1: that that's more cruel then when he's standing on the ground.
Speaker 1: So you're like, you're trying to like introduce these sort
Speaker 1: of you're trying to introduce these sort of like subjective
Speaker 1: words into a discussion where they don't really fit, Like
Speaker 1: it's not a cruelty issue that you kill a caribou
Speaker 1: in the water versus on land. I think what you're
Speaker 1: trying to get at, what this writer is trying to
Speaker 1: get at as some idea of like sportsmanlike and I'll
Speaker 1: ask them to like, Okay, Are you really concerned with
Speaker 1: what sportsmanlike or not is that? Are you honestly concerned
Speaker 1: with that? Are you honestly concerned with what's cruel or
Speaker 1: not cruel? Or do you kind of just hate the idea?
Speaker 1: And I would love to know if the sun bitch
Speaker 1: eats me, because I guarantee does. But you just kind
Speaker 1: of like hate the idea of people utilizing like renewable resources,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna jump on any little point you can
Speaker 1: find to make it seem bad. I sent that to
Speaker 1: the buddy of mine sent that article to me, and
Speaker 1: I've already seen it, but he's like, oh, you mean
Speaker 1: to tell me that NBC News wasn't open to nuance.
Speaker 1: It's just, oh my god, it's maddening. Michelle, what are
Speaker 1: your concluding thoughts? I agree with you, it's maddening. Um.
Speaker 1: But I've been thinking about how our discussion on identifying
Speaker 1: and sharing our values and motivations of why we hunt,
Speaker 1: how that kind of should be introduced and tied into
Speaker 1: the hunt purity scale. I think those should be some
Speaker 1: variables that we add and uh, I think by the
Speaker 1: end of this grand experiment and UH with meat eater, um,
Speaker 1: we're gonna end up with a really refined tool scale
Speaker 1: the problem. And I love the hunt purity scale idea
Speaker 1: introduced my my brother. I think that it's gonna wind
Speaker 1: up needing to have like a lot of emotional factors.
Speaker 1: In fact, you know, I have to start capturing state
Speaker 1: of mind, right, Yeah, Like how do you define success?
Speaker 1: There's variables within that, Like it's it's really have their
Speaker 1: own personal scales scales. There's like it reveals a trem
Speaker 1: in this amount of bias. So in crafting a hunt
Speaker 1: purity scale that doesn't reveal personal bias or regional specific activities,
Speaker 1: like it might be like a person in Texas would
Speaker 1: uh like inherently they wouldn't get a high score on
Speaker 1: my brother's Hunt Purity scale because he puts he puts
Speaker 1: the land management on his own hunt purity scale. So
Speaker 1: he if he kills the elk on public land, he
Speaker 1: considers it like harder and more rewarding. But if you
Speaker 1: live in a state that's privately held, his hunt purity
Speaker 1: skill doesn't do you any good. It's a lot of
Speaker 1: personal a lot of personal bias, but super interesting to
Speaker 1: think about how those how those subjective values play into
Speaker 1: that whole idea. Carl concluding thoughts, well, you had it,
Speaker 1: you had when you wanted to get into like a
Speaker 1: real one. I do, I have a concluder, so ye
Speaker 1: can you? Can you hit your concluders off? Quiet? You
Speaker 1: still think about those cold beers? Depends what kind of
Speaker 1: beer it is. Oh no, if I get side tracked
Speaker 1: right now, it's still still Turkey, still golblers. But John No,
Speaker 1: I'll just go ahead and in the name of time
Speaker 1: and efficiency, I'll pass today because we have a lot
Speaker 1: ahead of us today. So beat beat. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: have any any singers here, you know, nothing can drop
Speaker 1: that product. Big epiphanies. Yeah, stay tuned, that's coming. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for thanks for inviting men, So stay tuned at
Speaker 1: stone Glacier dot com, lots lots of coming. Is that
Speaker 1: what it is Stone Glacier dot com. Yes, yeah, hell
Speaker 1: of a website. Good backpacks, Yeah, like them, they're backpacks
Speaker 1: the formative website. Lots thanks to Pete Man. Like info videos.
Speaker 1: You go there, you know exactly what's going on with
Speaker 1: your pack. They're good, man, I'm telling you man. The
Speaker 1: packs though, it's like there's a little bit like when
Speaker 1: you get it packed, you kind of gotta like that
Speaker 1: does stuff. At first you're like, uh what, But to me,
Speaker 1: you start like figuring out how it all works. It's
Speaker 1: like a whole different deal. But some people just want
Speaker 1: like a bag hooked to a shoulder strap, right, which
Speaker 1: is the kind of backpass we had when we were kids.
Speaker 1: Are like canvas sacks with two leather straps on them.
Speaker 1: But once you get a bag, at first you're like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: like I got a mess with it. But once you
Speaker 1: learn to mess with it, it changes everything. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a technical piece of gear, and like any piece of
Speaker 1: technical piece of gear, there's a learning curve with it,
Speaker 1: and we certainly encourage people to master that learning curve
Speaker 1: before you you're standing over a dead elk. Yeah. That
Speaker 1: it's like an adaptable it's like an adaptable type of
Speaker 1: backpack that like does a bunch of different things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they packed meat. Holler yeah okay, Carl. Literally all right,
Speaker 1: So yesterday was a long day. I had like a
Speaker 1: full work day and then flew up from Albuquerque to
Speaker 1: Bozeman And can I interrupt you from it? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't take long, man, But I'm not gonna say
Speaker 1: another word appens. But I want to point something out.
Speaker 1: I'd like you to justify this. I like to think
Speaker 1: that when someone does a concluder that it's informed by
Speaker 1: what happened here today. But you're throwing a concluder at
Speaker 1: us that is like a preconceived concluder. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: has your So this is my question. Is your concluder?
Speaker 1: And I don't care, but do you feel that your
Speaker 1: concluder has been influenced by today's conversation? Oh? Yeah, Oh really, Okay,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I'm done. Yeah, because you know, you've had
Speaker 1: a chance to talk a little bit about um kind
Speaker 1: of the the psychology, the the spiritual aspects of being
Speaker 1: involved actively in these systems. We've talked about that a
Speaker 1: bit today and I did take the conversation there because
Speaker 1: it's been on my mind. And UM, where I was
Speaker 1: going with my concluder is that yesterday was a long
Speaker 1: day and when I finally got into Bozeman last night
Speaker 1: was putting my head on the pill. I had a
Speaker 1: hard time falling asleep right off the bat, and I
Speaker 1: had these these few sort of recent um pieces of
Speaker 1: information floating around in my head in in an interesting concoction,
Speaker 1: and I'll try to lay it out so folks can
Speaker 1: follow me here. But what happened was I got picked
Speaker 1: up by a by a hired car at the airport
Speaker 1: and was driving along with this dude, you know, making
Speaker 1: some small talk apt apot dependent uh ride ride hailing service.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm making small talk with the driver,
Speaker 1: a nice guy, um, talking about our families, and he
Speaker 1: mentioned he'd been married for thirty six years, right, and
Speaker 1: I'm coming up on my tenth anniversary this year. I
Speaker 1: was like, he's still yea. And so when I meet people,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a fan of trying to tap into
Speaker 1: the wisdom of our elders, you know, So if I
Speaker 1: meet somebody who's been married for thirty six years, I'm
Speaker 1: always interested to hear some words of wisdom. So I
Speaker 1: took the conversation there, and he, I think, saw that
Speaker 1: as an opportunity to proselytize a little bit about his faith.
Speaker 1: And he's like, as long as you're asking me for advice,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I think is the main piece
Speaker 1: of advice. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. I mean I'm
Speaker 1: open minded, and I've got friends from all different religious
Speaker 1: backgrounds and secular backgrounds, and I'm always interested to hear
Speaker 1: what folks believe at their cores. And so this guy
Speaker 1: he summarized his perspectives on his religious faith as being
Speaker 1: the goal of trying to walk through life as if
Speaker 1: you're in a crowd without pushing anybody, Like navigating through
Speaker 1: a crowd without pushing anybody, all right. And I've never
Speaker 1: heard anybody refer to the refer to their faith in
Speaker 1: that manner. So I thought that was an interesting sort
Speaker 1: of piece of wisdom. And I think right now, um,
Speaker 1: in our in our culture as a country and in
Speaker 1: our culture as a globe, there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: pushing each other, um. And so this idea of trying
Speaker 1: to navigate in a way where you're mindful of other people,
Speaker 1: still moving, still moving, but mindful, right, I thought that
Speaker 1: was cool. And then as I was trying to fall
Speaker 1: asleep less and I was thinking about that, and then
Speaker 1: I was thinking about a couple of papers, like scientific
Speaker 1: papers that will include in the show notes so people
Speaker 1: can dive a little deeper if they're interested in this.
Speaker 1: And they're both very very recent papers that have been
Speaker 1: picked up in the popular press. Um. The first paper
Speaker 1: is titled the Biomass Distribution on Earth, and this group
Speaker 1: of scientists UM basically tried to assess in terms of
Speaker 1: carbon weight, if you take all the life on the planet,
Speaker 1: how is it distributed? And then how has it changed
Speaker 1: during the time that human beings have been on the planet.
Speaker 1: And there's some incredible takeaways. And if if folks are
Speaker 1: even remotely interested, UM, please take a look at the
Speaker 1: paper itself, because I'm going to do a very huge
Speaker 1: disservice by just skimming. Give us, give us a zinger,
Speaker 1: a few stats. Okay, so right now today, and and
Speaker 1: this is the units here are giga tons, which is
Speaker 1: like a huge amount of carbon. It's some if you
Speaker 1: imagine one kilogram and then put twelve zeros after it,
Speaker 1: that's a gig a ton of carbon. And the reason
Speaker 1: they chose giga tons of carbon is because it it
Speaker 1: controls for all the creatures who have like a lot
Speaker 1: of water in their bodies, so it kind of normalizes
Speaker 1: among plants and animals. But a couple of takeaways are
Speaker 1: that humans represent an infinitesimal fraction of the total weight
Speaker 1: of biomass, but during the course of our existence, we
Speaker 1: have influenced this distribution of biomass, unlike anything that has
Speaker 1: ever existed in the history of the planet, right, And
Speaker 1: we've done that by reducing the amount of wild animals
Speaker 1: and dramatically increasing the amount of domestic animals to the
Speaker 1: point that today um livestock represents zero point one gigatons
Speaker 1: of the biomass compared to wild mammals representing zero point
Speaker 1: zero zero seven gigatons. And that's for mammals. If you
Speaker 1: look at birds, domestic birds zero point zero zero five
Speaker 1: compared to wild birds zero point zero zero two. So
Speaker 1: there are more and this is in terms of biomass,
Speaker 1: more bio massive domestic birds more than twice as much
Speaker 1: biomass of domestic birds as wildbirds. The other day, my
Speaker 1: kid was asking me if there were more roly polies
Speaker 1: or people, there are more roly pollies. I said, there's
Speaker 1: more roly polies in your state than there are people
Speaker 1: on Earth. But then we got into like adjusting for size,
Speaker 1: and I was explaining that as far as large mammals go,
Speaker 1: there are far more people than any large mammal of
Speaker 1: comparable weight. And if you if you want to go
Speaker 1: with weight, if you take humans and our live stock
Speaker 1: and put us together, we outweigh the entire world. Of
Speaker 1: vertebrates except fish. There are more humans and livestock in
Speaker 1: terms of biomass than all of their vertebrates if you
Speaker 1: put fish out of the equation, because there's a there's
Speaker 1: a lot of weight and fish, and it's in the
Speaker 1: water covers our planet. Right, So the paper talks about
Speaker 1: our contributions to species loss and biomass loss during the
Speaker 1: coortinary mega fontal extinction. We get a back up from it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything with a backbone on land, everything with a backbone,
Speaker 1: it's not a fit. Does all the whales? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: blue whale being the largest creature. To check this out,
Speaker 1: marine mammals, if you want to go to marine mammals,
Speaker 1: they have declined from point zero two giga tons to
Speaker 1: point zero zero four giga tons, which is a fivefold
Speaker 1: loss in marine mammal biomass as a result of human exploitation.
Speaker 1: So this paper is really fascinating, um and in particular
Speaker 1: the conversation about the change that this you know, horrified
Speaker 1: primate that represents just a tiny little fraction of the
Speaker 1: global biomass has contributed to just shifting the distribution. So
Speaker 1: today now the vast majority of of biomass is woody
Speaker 1: vegetation fifty giga tons of um total carbon fifty giga
Speaker 1: tons of that as plants, but based on land use change,
Speaker 1: it's estimated in the paper we have lost half the
Speaker 1: global biomass of plants. So if you consider that the
Speaker 1: implications associated with our our existence, our growth, and our
Speaker 1: ability to thrive on the planet, we have had, you know,
Speaker 1: to put it, very mildly and outsized impact on the
Speaker 1: ecology of the Earth. So I've been thinking about that paper, okay,
Speaker 1: and then coupled with the taxi driver, hold on for
Speaker 1: a minute, I promise I'm going to conclude shortly. Then
Speaker 1: there's this other paper that will also post about the
Speaker 1: changing attitudes people have towards natural resources. And this is
Speaker 1: a paper published by some researchers from Colorado State and
Speaker 1: Ohio State in biological conservation. The lead authors guy named
Speaker 1: Michael Manfredo, and they talk about people who either have
Speaker 1: domination type values towards wildlife and they also refer to
Speaker 1: these as more traditional values. So the idea that wildlife
Speaker 1: are here to benefit people. Um, you know, this idea
Speaker 1: of like the subservience of wildlife to human beings as
Speaker 1: opposed to mutualist values which are on the rise as
Speaker 1: we become more detached from the land increasingly urbanized. These
Speaker 1: mutualist values, which are along the lines of, you know,
Speaker 1: treating these others BECs in a way where we give
Speaker 1: them deference. That's on the rise now that we've completely Yeah,
Speaker 1: the people who are most likely to live in a
Speaker 1: place where they have completely displaced, well, most likely to
Speaker 1: be like, you know what, we should treat it all.
Speaker 1: We should have mutual respect now that we've vanquished it. Yes,
Speaker 1: so they talk about this paper really focuses on how
Speaker 1: this this trend towards more mutualistic attitudes about wildlife is
Speaker 1: is already driving and will continue to drive a lot
Speaker 1: of conflict around fish and wildlife management decisions. But in
Speaker 1: the paper they also talk about this idea of being
Speaker 1: a pluralist, which is someone who feels like fish and
Speaker 1: wildlife cannon should be used sustainably, but also that fish
Speaker 1: and wildlife warrant a high degree of reverence and appreciation
Speaker 1: and we need to figure out how to co exist
Speaker 1: with them. That's called pluralism. Pluralist. Yeah, so somebody sign
Speaker 1: me up, dude, totally, I'm right there with you. When
Speaker 1: they when this paper talks abou ut pluralists. I felt
Speaker 1: like that's hit in the mark and this is something
Speaker 1: we could talk a lot more about. But in the
Speaker 1: interest of my concluding thought, I had this paper about
Speaker 1: the changing distribution of biomass on the landscape on on
Speaker 1: the on the planet, the planetary landscape, coupled with this
Speaker 1: idea of a growing disconnect between our species and the
Speaker 1: systems in which we evolved, in the systems that still
Speaker 1: still sustain us, right the flow of energy from the
Speaker 1: Sun to our bodies, and having all that coupled with
Speaker 1: this idea that my drivers shared last night of trying
Speaker 1: to navigate in a crowd without pushing. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if we as a species are capable of finding a
Speaker 1: way to operate where we thrive and we can extend
Speaker 1: this idea of not pushing to all of the non
Speaker 1: human inhabitants of the planet we occupy. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: good concluder. I don't care if you did have that
Speaker 1: pretty thought up the warrants it. That's what when I'm
Speaker 1: when I'm up at night land there trying to fall asleep,
Speaker 1: that's kind of stuff that's in my mind. And that's
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that makes me feel supremely fortunate
Speaker 1: and privileged and grateful to be in this line of work,
Speaker 1: to be involved on a day to day basis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with these tough kind of questions and conversations, you know,
Speaker 1: and whether we're talking about h