Speaker 1: Hey, it's the Hunting Collective and I've been a Brian.
Speaker 1: Another week coming at you, another great episode. We've got
Speaker 1: a little round table discussion on private land and public
Speaker 1: land and the culture significance of those two things. And
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of a debate going on that
Speaker 1: we address with Steve Rinella, Mark Kenyan, Sam Longer, and myself, uh,
Speaker 1: talking about all lands and that they matter. And then
Speaker 1: we're gonna travel on into Berkeley, California, So you see
Speaker 1: Berkeley and talk to Professor Luke McCulley about his work
Speaker 1: as a range land ecologist and working. Uh they did
Speaker 1: a study on private lands and how we use them,
Speaker 1: how we lease them, how we own them, and why
Speaker 1: they're important. So hopefully you stick around for all of that.
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Speaker 1: Let's go. I guess I grew up on an older
Speaker 1: road appared through the meadows. I always did what I
Speaker 1: told until I found out that my brand new closed
Speaker 1: a game second hand from the rich kids next door.
Speaker 1: And I grew up fast. I guess I grew what
Speaker 1: I mean. They have a thousand things inside of my
Speaker 1: head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just
Speaker 1: wanted through a real bad dream or being and like
Speaker 1: I'm coming a part of the seams. But thank you
Speaker 1: Jack Daniel. No, hey, everybody, welcome to the Hunting Collective.
Speaker 1: I'm Ben O'Brien, and this is you're gonna be listening
Speaker 1: to this one seven nine nineteen. We get a bit
Speaker 1: of a round table of sorts here today in the
Speaker 1: meat eater offices. We'll start to my right with the man.
Speaker 1: Uh they called Stephen Renel Steve, Yeah, right here, and
Speaker 1: then it's Mark Mark Mark Mark, My first time in
Speaker 1: the news studio to this. This is very nice. Do
Speaker 1: you feel that Steve takes over the questions? I'll talk
Speaker 1: later about it. Uh. Do you feel that the that
Speaker 1: the placement of the some of the artworking here is
Speaker 1: too close together? It's very I do. For example, right there,
Speaker 1: I see that I'd like a gap. I also noticed
Speaker 1: that there's zero white tail content. Of course you do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's like, I mean, there's zero zebra content, but
Speaker 1: still there's not hunters. Aren't zebra hunters? Just giving our
Speaker 1: context of our conversation, I think that, Yeah, but there's
Speaker 1: no pictures of anyone doing anything. Yeah, there's turkeys, there's
Speaker 1: plane crabs, there's planes, pro planes, mountain. I like that
Speaker 1: there's blue crabs because I'm one horn going on in here,
Speaker 1: and there's just a little bit of a moose antler
Speaker 1: in that one. There's buffalo behind us. Oh yeah, well
Speaker 1: it's it's very stylized. It doesn't that. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a big controversy here about Steve. You were the one
Speaker 1: that kind of envisioned the collage. I'm not really open
Speaker 1: to any feedback about it. I mean, I think the spacing,
Speaker 1: the spacing, I'm open to feedback about it. Do you
Speaker 1: do you agree though, that some of these spots could
Speaker 1: be added a little bit? Yeah? No, I think that
Speaker 1: there needs to be a bigger gap. I was just
Speaker 1: curious because you said he hadn't been in here. I
Speaker 1: thought if you walked in, you were like, hey man,
Speaker 1: things a little tight, Yes, between the pictures. It's still
Speaker 1: got some filling into. You're not open to the feedback
Speaker 1: about the elements of the clause. No, I don't care. No.
Speaker 1: I mean, like I took the bull by the horns, man,
Speaker 1: you did it well. I mean it's not done yet.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of space to go. No, I don't really,
Speaker 1: I don't really care what anybody thinks about it. If
Speaker 1: someone else had had a great vision and executed, that
Speaker 1: would have been different. But it just sat here and
Speaker 1: then I executed. Moving on. I like it. Sam Lunger's
Speaker 1: here too, howdy and uh Phil, Hey, morning afternoon. I
Speaker 1: think it's morning still. Why is Phill here? Phil? I've
Speaker 1: been asking that a question every week. This is Phil's
Speaker 1: third straight appearance on The Hunting Collective that I got
Speaker 1: my first email about Phil today. The gentleman rode In
Speaker 1: said he really likes Phil. Keep mind, it feels great.
Speaker 1: This is a data informed Yeah, we're listening this. This
Speaker 1: is it's a two way conversation. Yeah. On the show, Um,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about we have lots of perspectives here,
Speaker 1: which is always good. We're gonna talk about private land
Speaker 1: and public land on the show. We got I went
Speaker 1: all the way to Berkeley, California to talk to this
Speaker 1: dude named Luke McCauley who's a cooperative extension specialist at
Speaker 1: you see Berkeley, and he put out a study on
Speaker 1: public or private land uses in this country with a
Speaker 1: lot of really cool statistics. So we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: that later on. There's a lot He's got piles and
Speaker 1: piles of stats on how many acreage, how much acreage
Speaker 1: in this country is least for hunting, how much is
Speaker 1: privately owned for the purpose of hunting, for what that
Speaker 1: means in a lot of ways. That is good stuff,
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll preface that with a few things. But
Speaker 1: Luke McCauley coming up soon. But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: there's been a thing in the hunting world recently where
Speaker 1: we celebrate public lands. We all agree that public lands
Speaker 1: are fantastic. Steve. Yeah, And you look like a real
Speaker 1: tool with a private land owner T shirt, though, I
Speaker 1: though I have seen guys who wear one in jazz.
Speaker 1: But it looks like you're bragging. Looks like you're bragging.
Speaker 1: You are bragging, like there's doesn't just look like a
Speaker 1: T shirt company just released a shirt last week on
Speaker 1: this whole issue. And the the front looks just like
Speaker 1: the public land shirt public landowner shirt from b h A,
Speaker 1: but it says private land leacy. That's funny. Yah uh
Speaker 1: yeah that you're not bragging in no, but it's it's
Speaker 1: definitely speaking to the phenomena of the public land excitement
Speaker 1: and that shirt and stuff, and this is a ray
Speaker 1: to that because you get to hunt public land. You
Speaker 1: just go there and hunt. Yeah, that's exciting. I don't know,
Speaker 1: is it exciting to go somewhere and pay a guy
Speaker 1: to let hunt? I would rather not That guy sounds
Speaker 1: excited about it. Well, I've I've I've hunted. I've hunted
Speaker 1: least property and had a great time. Hut my friends
Speaker 1: private ranches and farms and have a great time. I
Speaker 1: have a great time. I don't feel all like proud
Speaker 1: and excited about it. You don't feel like you you
Speaker 1: don't feel like you'd wear that T shirt only land
Speaker 1: owner t shirt. Yeah, but I mean between my place
Speaker 1: in Alaska, I'm I owned two point six so does
Speaker 1: that count as a private land? My dad owns two
Speaker 1: point five and I was see, I always enjoyed hunting that,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't a lot of opportunity. Yes, you got
Speaker 1: point one acres. Sam's father. I killed my first deer
Speaker 1: on my family's three point two acre property. You really
Speaker 1: did it run over the fence? It did? So the
Speaker 1: statute of limitations on that though, huh. And my dad
Speaker 1: was really stressed out because I had a flashlight and
Speaker 1: we're walking down to try to find it that night.
Speaker 1: He's got put that flash down. Put that flashlight down, neighbor.
Speaker 1: It's not worried. I got to go night vision. So
Speaker 1: in this study, there's a bunch of good numbers, but
Speaker 1: the analysis of thirteen nationwide studies over about I think
Speaker 1: about eleven years. There's a lot of regional things, and
Speaker 1: we're all kind of live in and are from different regions,
Speaker 1: and I have our our perspective are colored by these regions,
Speaker 1: but tend to eleven percent the land area of the South, Midwest,
Speaker 1: and Northeast are owned primarily for hunting, and that's primarily
Speaker 1: then private land ownership and leasing, while less than one
Speaker 1: percent of the land of the West is owned for hunting.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of a lot of differences. Mark,
Speaker 1: I want you to there's there's been a are you
Speaker 1: gonna tell people what um, like what it was that? God,
Speaker 1: it's even talking about this? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm sorry, Mark,
Speaker 1: can you tell what got us talking about this? Oh?
Speaker 1: You're doing it right now. Yeah, that's what I was doing.
Speaker 1: Interrupt You interrupted me while I was doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you did like you had like a like a little approach. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're doing an approach coloring it. I was coloring the
Speaker 1: the topic. So you're talking about the Instagram post. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: So there was an Instagram post from a guy in
Speaker 1: the hunting world, UM speaking to how much excitement and
Speaker 1: energy there is around the public land movement right, keep
Speaker 1: it public. There's a lot of energy their backgount, trunters
Speaker 1: and anglers just going full board, lots of membership, lots
Speaker 1: of interest. Everybody wants to wear these public landowner t
Speaker 1: shirts UM tagging their Instagram post keep a public, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: His point in his Instagram post was that, yeah, that's important,
Speaker 1: but let's not forget that the vast majority of the
Speaker 1: hunting happening east of the Mississippi is happening on private land,
Speaker 1: and the vast majority of the white tail hunt, which
Speaker 1: is somewhere around eight percent of all the hunters in
Speaker 1: the country, a very very important driver of conservation and
Speaker 1: the hunting based economy and all that. That's all happening
Speaker 1: the majority again on private land. So it was it
Speaker 1: was a pretty wine. It was whiny read very whiny,
Speaker 1: very well. I would personally say this, This guy's a
Speaker 1: friend of mine and I highly respect him. I would
Speaker 1: just say that, yeah, the way he framed it, I'd
Speaker 1: say that he could have framed it differently too. He
Speaker 1: had a good point, but I think that it came
Speaker 1: off whiny. Oh yeah, well he tagged us, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: tagged us. He's like, so that's how Like I can't
Speaker 1: remember who showed it to me. But what was funny
Speaker 1: about it was like someone showed it to us and
Speaker 1: I don't remember who. Who do you know who sent
Speaker 1: who showed it to us? And I was talking about
Speaker 1: I've told his story a couple of times, but it
Speaker 1: reminded me of a thing that was that was going
Speaker 1: on when the like a summer ago, maybe two summers ago,
Speaker 1: when the Black Lives Matter movement was really picking up,
Speaker 1: and I remember there's this cartoon, like a editorial cartoon,
Speaker 1: and I saw somewhere in the newspaper, and there was
Speaker 1: two guys standing there in front of their houses, and
Speaker 1: one of the houses is burning down, and its owners
Speaker 1: out front spraying a hose on the house that's burning down.
Speaker 1: But then the other the neighbor's house is not on fire,
Speaker 1: but the guys standing out there sprang a hose on
Speaker 1: his house that is not on fire. And the guy
Speaker 1: who's not whose house is not on fire, is saying
Speaker 1: to the guy whose house is on fire, Hey, all
Speaker 1: houses matter, so I U I said. When I saw this,
Speaker 1: I said to Ben so that I talked about how
Speaker 1: that reminded me of that, and Ben had a very
Speaker 1: good hashtag, which is all lands Matters matter. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good We quickly decided that it was not
Speaker 1: a good idea for fear to be seeming that we're
Speaker 1: making light of something that doesn't warrant being made light of.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's like I think that no one's questioning
Speaker 1: right like right now. I mean, if the political cycle
Speaker 1: goal is certain directions, I can see this happenings, like
Speaker 1: the socialists takeover. But right now, no one's questioning the
Speaker 1: legitimacy of private land ownership in America. But they're questioning
Speaker 1: the legitimacy of federally managed public lands. They're like people
Speaker 1: like actively outright saying should we do this so that
Speaker 1: house is on fire. Yeah, that's directly where the public
Speaker 1: land movement is coming to, by the way, it's because
Speaker 1: it's because it is imperiled and people need needed at
Speaker 1: that At that moment when the keep it public hashtag
Speaker 1: started becoming big, it was very much um on on
Speaker 1: the line and people needed to get together and be like, hey, no,
Speaker 1: this is something we do want to preserve. This is
Speaker 1: awesome that anyone gets to go hunt here that you
Speaker 1: own title to that land as an American citizen. So
Speaker 1: his reaction from that so that that Instagram post felt
Speaker 1: like it really lacked a lot of historically. Let me
Speaker 1: give you a little bit from the Instagram post itself. Um,
Speaker 1: this person says, in my opinion, it's almost become a
Speaker 1: cult like mantra for a new, much needed but potentially
Speaker 1: misguided segment of hunters. I mean there's now more public
Speaker 1: land teachers out there than a van Halen tour and
Speaker 1: being a killer that I would have gone like, not
Speaker 1: van Halen. Yeah, that's a little context, man, It's a
Speaker 1: little bit if you wanted to go that era, you
Speaker 1: could have gone GNR. Yeah. But like yeah, as as
Speaker 1: you know what we're telling about, like Diamond Dave are Sammy, listen,
Speaker 1: look that I think the main thing here is like
Speaker 1: he's trying to color or there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: and I feel it it's legit, Mark, you tell me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong. But I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the East, a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: white tail world, a lot of people in the South
Speaker 1: that are feeling a little bit left out of the party.
Speaker 1: That's that's what this is driving from A little bit.
Speaker 1: I don't get it, like left out of the party. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're invited to the party, man to show up. Like
Speaker 1: if I smoke cigarettes and then people like then there's
Speaker 1: like cigar aficionado. I'm like, oh those guys that like,
Speaker 1: don't forget a lot of us like cigarettes. Who cares?
Speaker 1: Let me be Let me just if a guy or
Speaker 1: or a gal gets into hunting by listening to like
Speaker 1: someone who celebrates public land all the time, they get
Speaker 1: into hunting and their b h A and their TRCP
Speaker 1: and that this is the thing that they are introduced
Speaker 1: to hunting through that lens. This guy is saying, Hey, also,
Speaker 1: new guy, this is what I have to offer. I'm
Speaker 1: a white tail guy. If you have a lot, a
Speaker 1: lot of money, Is it not excuse me? Is it
Speaker 1: not well known that private land there's some pretty good
Speaker 1: hunting on private land, and is it not? Is it
Speaker 1: not well known that there is a thing called private
Speaker 1: land and you can buy it if you have the money,
Speaker 1: and it's nice if you can. And do you have
Speaker 1: to have that caveat in every discussion of public land,
Speaker 1: because I feel like that's what they're asking for. But
Speaker 1: that exists all the time. You hear any rhetoric coming
Speaker 1: out of b H A and TRC P, like you
Speaker 1: listen very long, they're all like Lantani says this all
Speaker 1: the time. He's like, hell, yeah, I'd like to have
Speaker 1: my own private ranch. Everybody would like that. Everybody hunt.
Speaker 1: Every hunter aspires to that, but many of us can't
Speaker 1: afford it because the prices have been going through the roof,
Speaker 1: and land has always been expensive. It's one of the
Speaker 1: only things that doesn't really depreciate. So I hunt private
Speaker 1: lands much of the public land. Everybody loves it. It's
Speaker 1: all about both. I'd like to keep this this going.
Speaker 1: This guy is saying that that the over uh emphasis
Speaker 1: on public land is hoping that we do not lose
Speaker 1: focus on what really impacts conservation. So I think what
Speaker 1: this is coming from this is like it's like when
Speaker 1: you have it's it's a cultural thing, and it's when
Speaker 1: a band gets really cool. There's sometimes a reaction to
Speaker 1: that band getting so cool and now you don't want
Speaker 1: to like it anymore. As I feel about Van Halen. Man,
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of people, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are getting like into Van Halen and I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like, dude, man, it was cool when like you know,
Speaker 1: like a year ago, right, It's like it's like the
Speaker 1: bandwagon thing, like everyone like the Golden State Warriors got
Speaker 1: really great at basketball, and then everybody bring it back in,
Speaker 1: bring it back in. Mark is there is there a
Speaker 1: Warrior clan and this state, this sporting event you speak of,
Speaker 1: the team doesn't matter. I think I don't feel no
Speaker 1: no going on with the analogy, but I do think
Speaker 1: that there's sometimes people will become irritated with like the
Speaker 1: social energy around a thing because like everyone's seen SEMs
Speaker 1: to want to be a Golden State Warrior fan, in
Speaker 1: this case the social media. If you were to look
Speaker 1: at how much like excitement and energy and in in
Speaker 1: social plays there around public land stuff right now, it
Speaker 1: probably seems disproportionate to the amount of people that actually
Speaker 1: hunt public land or how much money gets spent on
Speaker 1: el consin Mulier hunts versus white to hunts out east.
Speaker 1: So there's some small loud not even loud, but there's
Speaker 1: some small minority of people that are just kind of like,
Speaker 1: this is annoying. There's my argument, takes your lease money
Speaker 1: and and buy gas and drive west and hunt public
Speaker 1: lands every year. And I'm not saying and I'm not
Speaker 1: but what why why is it annoying? Like I don't
Speaker 1: understand me? Well, so like you've got to like some
Speaker 1: people now find it like you're trying to be cool
Speaker 1: by talking about how much you on public land, or
Speaker 1: like public land hunters are somehow like, okay, let me
Speaker 1: take a step back. I do think that there is
Speaker 1: a little bit of a feeling like the Midwestern East
Speaker 1: Coast typical white tail hunter that public land Western guys
Speaker 1: our latest a little bit like we're better because we
Speaker 1: hike in fourteen miles and we hunt public land and
Speaker 1: we wear this shirt and everyone you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: a really cool thing to be a part of right now.
Speaker 1: So are there are people that uh wakeboard, Are they
Speaker 1: annoyed about how surfers like surfing? It could be, I
Speaker 1: don't know. And and the thing is the public land
Speaker 1: guys out west who here this kind of stuff think
Speaker 1: they're elitist because they have kind of resources or connections
Speaker 1: to be able to hunt private land. A lot of
Speaker 1: people would like to be able to do that, but
Speaker 1: they're they're finding a way to celebrate what was what
Speaker 1: used to be looked down upon as really second class.
Speaker 1: And I don't know. And no means am I defending
Speaker 1: this viewpoint. I'm just trying to explain what I think.
Speaker 1: There is a little bit of a feeling like why
Speaker 1: would someone make this new T shirt that says private
Speaker 1: land leaser on it, except for it's in spite of
Speaker 1: all these people think they're so cool wearing public land
Speaker 1: owner shirts. Well, guess what, you can be cool. No,
Speaker 1: that's not why. It's like like the guy that came
Speaker 1: to one of our live events with a private landowner
Speaker 1: T shirt, he just thought it was funny, right, He's like, nah, Yes,
Speaker 1: it's that kind of thing. But the thing is, well,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I'm just gonna say it's it's it's funny.
Speaker 1: But then it's also kind of making like a counterculture statement,
Speaker 1: like flipping the bird to everyone who thinks this is
Speaker 1: so cool. Here's what I'm gonna say. I have I
Speaker 1: struggle greatly with the elitist thing that makes absolutely absolutely
Speaker 1: no sense at all, Like you're talking about the most
Speaker 1: it's absurd. It's absurd. It's the most democratic thing that
Speaker 1: there ever was. And the person that says it's elitist
Speaker 1: could get in their car and drive and go do
Speaker 1: it tomorrow. Go on opening day, on opening day, go
Speaker 1: to Michigan. You know it well, you know all the spots.
Speaker 1: Go to Michigan and do a sort of economic portrait
Speaker 1: of the people who are hunting private land and the
Speaker 1: people who are running public land and find out what
Speaker 1: their annual salaries are and education levels. Okay, and then
Speaker 1: go tell me how elite is the guys are who
Speaker 1: are down at the state game. Give me a break
Speaker 1: and then and then go do that in Montana too,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be a similar breakdown. Come on, I think.
Speaker 1: And again, I'm not saying this, I'm saying that I
Speaker 1: picked up vibes some people. I don't feel this way.
Speaker 1: But what I do think is that people public land
Speaker 1: hung is more difficult. Like there's a some cache that
Speaker 1: public land hunters are getting now right, So it's like
Speaker 1: a cool thing. It's it's a badge. It's a badge
Speaker 1: of honor to put on you, to say I killed
Speaker 1: this buck in public. It's it's I feel that it's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there are a thousand variables. There are a thousand variables,
Speaker 1: but uh, I would yes, I count it if I
Speaker 1: look at all the things, all the components, and and
Speaker 1: something like that happens. Like someone gets like a like,
Speaker 1: I like big meal of your bucks a lot. If
Speaker 1: someone gets a big meal to your buck and it's
Speaker 1: on an eight acre ranch, I don't have a how
Speaker 1: did that dude pull that off? If a guy gets, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a big meal of your buck on over
Speaker 1: the counter tag and he's hunting BLM land down in
Speaker 1: Colorado and he does it again next year, I'm like,
Speaker 1: what does that guy have that I don't have? Guys
Speaker 1: a good hunter and that's why that's why when you
Speaker 1: describe a thing you killed, you you modify it with where, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is my public land buck. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: say this my private land buck, because it just what
Speaker 1: Steve is saying. If they had an eye on the
Speaker 1: back of its head, I'd talk about that too. But
Speaker 1: so I'm just saying I think that the people that
Speaker 1: do hunt thousand acre leases or that have their own
Speaker 1: private land, there's like some kind of maybe it's insecurity,
Speaker 1: maybe it's I don't know what it is, but there's
Speaker 1: some pushback there. Yeah, and you're just kind of hearing
Speaker 1: it rumbling around a little bit. And the shirt in
Speaker 1: this post, I think is just a sign of that
Speaker 1: in some way. I get it. But we used to
Speaker 1: hang out on national forest land when we were kids.
Speaker 1: We grew up right at the southern terminus of what's
Speaker 1: now the Hiawatha Manistee National Forest change names anyhow, signs
Speaker 1: just say mansty Still. But that's where we grew up,
Speaker 1: and we did a lot of hunting on it, and
Speaker 1: we did a lot of hunting on Harold zeldn Russ
Speaker 1: and Alan's are lots farms. I was are you aware
Speaker 1: of how and who Alan's air Lot and Harold Zelnus
Speaker 1: came to have their farm, and I was very aware
Speaker 1: of how they managed that farm and how it was
Speaker 1: financed and who owned it and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: The National Forest people treated it like ship. It's where
Speaker 1: you went to shoot signs. It's where you went to
Speaker 1: take and run over signs. It's where you went to
Speaker 1: go bahan. It's where you went to do Kegger's and
Speaker 1: not clean up and burned tires, and you treated it
Speaker 1: as though it was just this thing that everyone took
Speaker 1: for granted, and no one knows where it came from,
Speaker 1: who the men and women who work to maintain it,
Speaker 1: how it came to be the fact that there's been
Speaker 1: an increasing awareness of the of the history, mechanics and
Speaker 1: funding of these places, and and gaining and establishing and
Speaker 1: uh promoting a deepened heightened respect for these places and
Speaker 1: taking some pride in these places. I don't think that
Speaker 1: that's a comment on the work that Alan Zerlot and
Speaker 1: Harold zeldn Russ did on their farm. It's not the
Speaker 1: same thing. Those places had a guardian. It's just different. Well,
Speaker 1: there's and and a win for public lands is a
Speaker 1: win for this person who made this post and everyone else.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's to say that it's only a
Speaker 1: certain type of people that can use this, or it's
Speaker 1: only accessible. It's the term access and many of almost
Speaker 1: all of these cases means anyone in the east, the South,
Speaker 1: if they can get to it, they can access it.
Speaker 1: So win for public lands is a win for this
Speaker 1: person who's hating on public lands. And I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I've had conversations with a couple of people that
Speaker 1: have articulated this, and I agree with you, Stephen and
Speaker 1: in your count bad about it. That's not publican but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not um But yeah, I agree, it's
Speaker 1: it's all these lands matter. But there are these different,
Speaker 1: weird little social cliques and norms, and I think that
Speaker 1: this is more like that ephemeral type of issue, And
Speaker 1: there's something be said about how that impacts why someone
Speaker 1: would spend some time and energy posting a post like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's there's all kinds of missions,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of organizations, there's all kind of in
Speaker 1: Every person that gets connected to their mission wants people
Speaker 1: to come and be a part of that. If they
Speaker 1: see some energy stealing thing out there, they want to
Speaker 1: go and and either challenge. There's one way to approach,
Speaker 1: which is like this person didn't other people have his
Speaker 1: challenge it and say it's not his valid as you
Speaker 1: think it might be. Or there's other things to embrace
Speaker 1: it and say and try to be part of it
Speaker 1: and understand it, and that's probably the better way to go.
Speaker 1: I would think, you know, oh, I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: following up on what you were saying, Steve, that people
Speaker 1: treated like ship And that was my exact same experience
Speaker 1: growing up hunting a lot of public land. That it
Speaker 1: was just like, oh, this is the land that nobody wanted.
Speaker 1: Nobody he lays claim to and you can do whatever
Speaker 1: the hell you want. No one didn't treat it like
Speaker 1: it was there exactly. And so I think that's why
Speaker 1: this this public landowner movement has been so important and
Speaker 1: so impactful because it's reinforcing. I mean, I was there
Speaker 1: when they came up with the idea for that T shirt,
Speaker 1: and I immediately I was like, that's that's awesome. That's it.
Speaker 1: People are gonna love this that you know that you
Speaker 1: do you do own this as an American citizen legally speaking,
Speaker 1: people talk about it being federally owned or stayed owned.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you if you go back into
Speaker 1: kind of the legal under underpinnings, it's property of the people.
Speaker 1: And I think that pride is very healthy and I
Speaker 1: think it will improve help help those those lands UM
Speaker 1: become better places to hunt in places to fish if
Speaker 1: people give a ship and and pick up trash instead
Speaker 1: of leaving it, or encourage others not to just go
Speaker 1: planking and blowing up washing machines and and pro pain
Speaker 1: tanks out there, and and then you know, can be
Speaker 1: a more useful part of the overall conservation UM portfolio
Speaker 1: of an area, which includes private lands as well. But
Speaker 1: I think we can improve upon all sorts of wildlife
Speaker 1: populations and opportunities for more people if if people have
Speaker 1: that sense of pride surrounding public land. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: I do think though there's something to be said about
Speaker 1: UM acknowledging the importance of work being done on private
Speaker 1: land too, and the fact that that does have big
Speaker 1: picture impacts on wildlife in the environment. And I think
Speaker 1: that that if you have private land that you own
Speaker 1: or steward like, you should be empowered and realize that
Speaker 1: the power that you have there and the impact you
Speaker 1: can have that whether it's twenty acres or two acres um.
Speaker 1: That stuff trickles over that stuff all like, like you've
Speaker 1: talked about the study that you spoke about with this gentleman,
Speaker 1: some of the very highest quality wildlife habitat out there,
Speaker 1: some of the best opportunities we have to preserve green
Speaker 1: space and places for animals to rome does exist on
Speaker 1: private lands. So of course in the country back set up,
Speaker 1: because we spend far more on private lands conservation than
Speaker 1: we do on public and private lands, and far more
Speaker 1: we've spend far more on wildlife habitat improvements on private
Speaker 1: lands as a nation than we do on public lands.
Speaker 1: If you're the components of the farm bill, that's a piece.
Speaker 1: So I think that I don't see that this. I
Speaker 1: mean it's great, and I think that you know, and
Speaker 1: when I have friends Matt cooked dug during, I could
Speaker 1: name on and on the own properties the primary purpose
Speaker 1: of that property being to produce good wildlife habitat. And
Speaker 1: I don't feel, um, I never get a sense from
Speaker 1: them people actively doing it. I don't get a sense
Speaker 1: from them that they feel like they're the unsung hero.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, I just feel like they do they're they're
Speaker 1: doing something and the people around them know they're doing
Speaker 1: it and doing it great. And I'll point out funnything
Speaker 1: about these two is these two people are also very
Speaker 1: concerned about the well being of public lands in this country.
Speaker 1: So they're putting their money where their mouth is on
Speaker 1: private lands. And they're also miraculously, somehow able to be
Speaker 1: concerned about both these things at once. And that's a thing,
Speaker 1: is that that's that's what this is about, right like,
Speaker 1: And the reason why I want to have this conversation,
Speaker 1: the reason why I went and spoke to Luke McCauley,
Speaker 1: is exactly that, like we know it's there. It's a
Speaker 1: fact that hunting is a great like property owned at
Speaker 1: least for hunting, provides a greater economic incentive to have
Speaker 1: large tracts of unfragmented land that's good for wildlife, that
Speaker 1: has good that that harbors good habitat for wildlife. We
Speaker 1: know that that's leasing and owning property does that in
Speaker 1: many ways, right So we can discuss that is just
Speaker 1: the same way we can discuss some of the benefits
Speaker 1: of having large tracts of public land. But what we
Speaker 1: sure as ship can't do is start putting them up
Speaker 1: against each other like they need to people one versus
Speaker 1: the other. We can't piece of puzzle, Yeah, pieces of
Speaker 1: a puzzle? Can I? Can I bring up two quick
Speaker 1: points please? As I've become more familiar with UM nonprofit
Speaker 1: conservation groups, I've been surprised to learn learned that there
Speaker 1: is a competitive atmosphere among nonprofits. People know who people
Speaker 1: who run nonprofits UM in the conservation space know that
Speaker 1: most people out there don't join ten groups. They join
Speaker 1: and donate to one or two, and they compete. Grant
Speaker 1: funding is finite. They compete for UH what they might
Speaker 1: view as customers. And so I feel that there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of that at play where people that are
Speaker 1: going over holy with their finances and time and volunteer
Speaker 1: work with a very dedicated UH public land agenda that
Speaker 1: other players in the conservation space would be challenged by
Speaker 1: that because it might automatically seem to exclude their interests.
Speaker 1: And then I'm just not like cold do that smokes
Speaker 1: too much weed? You know, I don't smoke weed at
Speaker 1: all when I say this, because I'm not going to
Speaker 1: get into great details about it. But there are a
Speaker 1: lot of very powerful political figures and business figures who
Speaker 1: are deeply intimid aided by the public land movement, and
Speaker 1: they find ways to go and attack people who are
Speaker 1: vocal about public lands. Ben and I have been like
Speaker 1: hit and punished for being vocal about public lands because
Speaker 1: you're upsetting a political status quo. And so I'm particularly
Speaker 1: sensitive about this kind of thing because I often look
Speaker 1: and I wonder, are they talking about this or they
Speaker 1: talking about something else? Right? Right? And that's that's me
Speaker 1: having a hit th HCS. I'll add the bong bubble
Speaker 1: in later. Now, listen, Phil, what do you think about
Speaker 1: all this? Then? Uh? Well, I mean for me, what
Speaker 1: ice coming from? Just like hunting one on one, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people also just take a sense
Speaker 1: of a massive sense of pride and something that they
Speaker 1: grew up doing and at least like, for example, I
Speaker 1: grew up in Portland and I don't give a shit
Speaker 1: about basketball, but when the Blazers were doing well, there's
Speaker 1: like a little part of me that was kind of like,
Speaker 1: who go team? And I like, if you grew up.
Speaker 1: I was like that with the Seahawks when they were
Speaker 1: very briefly and then now I don't care anymore. Hunting
Speaker 1: mostly private lands or like that's what you know, you're dead,
Speaker 1: your grandpa took you too. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: public lands get more clout kind of in the hunting
Speaker 1: the hunting community, there's a little you get kind of defensive, right,
Speaker 1: trying to defend like something that you grew up with
Speaker 1: with or are proud of. Um, yeah, that's a great point, man,
Speaker 1: And I think, wait a minute, you should be proud
Speaker 1: of my farm. Yeah well yeah, but but but but
Speaker 1: they but they hear, they hear people like Steve and
Speaker 1: myself and Ben's say that like you know, it bumps
Speaker 1: up the purity score or whatever when it's when it's
Speaker 1: a big buck taken on on public land, and they
Speaker 1: they're like, well, hell, I put in a lot of
Speaker 1: work to get to grow a big buck on my land.
Speaker 1: That's still valuable. It's still just as cool. And I
Speaker 1: would I would have to agree with them. It's still
Speaker 1: really cool. It's still cool to kill a big buck
Speaker 1: unless it's behind the hund be like, hey, can I
Speaker 1: can I hunt your place? Yeah, let me come see
Speaker 1: how cool it is. Prove it? Yeah, I prove it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there'sh But I hear what you're saying, man, that point
Speaker 1: points very well. On the show Phil comes in, we
Speaker 1: should probably just end on Phil like a Phil comment
Speaker 1: at the end of every opening segment, just to really
Speaker 1: get people to transition into here's the guy who's never
Speaker 1: hunting and he just pulled out a gym. Could you
Speaker 1: play a doctor on radio? What's that? Don't Dr Doctor
Speaker 1: thought that? Dr Phil? Um, We're gonna we'll end on
Speaker 1: Dr Phil his his perspective. But I have one more question,
Speaker 1: please do What's what's up that dog collar laying there? Um?
Speaker 1: My dog likes to shake his head because he gets
Speaker 1: those ear infections, and I figured that'd probably sound pretty
Speaker 1: bad on the audio if he started rattling that thing around,
Speaker 1: So I take it off. Oh where's this going? Did
Speaker 1: I come in? And did we take our lunch break? Seriously? Here?
Speaker 1: All right, guys, we're all good here. We figured it out,
Speaker 1: did yeah? Oh yeah? What what? What? What we designed? Well?
Speaker 1: We all lands matter, That's what we decided matter. Speaking
Speaker 1: of that, we're gonna go transport back in time a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. We're gonna go to Berkeley, California. Talked
Speaker 1: to Luke McCauley at in his office in the grand
Speaker 1: old Campus of Berkeley. Do you see Berkeley. We're gonna
Speaker 1: learn more about private lands, least lands and their impacts
Speaker 1: on this country and continue this discussion over there. So enjoy.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Ben. Thanks Ben. I guess I grew up. Hey, Looke,
Speaker 1: how's it going, man going? Well? How are you doing?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm doing really good. I mean, you see Berkeley.
Speaker 1: I feel oddly comfortable. I don't feel strange. People told
Speaker 1: me that I would have to like watch out when
Speaker 1: I was here, right, it seems fine to me. A
Speaker 1: lot of nice people around, yeah, a lot of interesting people. Um,
Speaker 1: A lot of interesting people, A lot of nice people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And we're sitting in your office UM at hill Guard
Speaker 1: Hall at the College. When I came in, it's like
Speaker 1: this giant metal door, this really beautiful architecture. It screams
Speaker 1: history and the place has a lot of that. You're
Speaker 1: you're saying, it does it does. This building was built
Speaker 1: around the nineteen twenties, a series of buildings right here
Speaker 1: as part of the originally the Agricultural College for University
Speaker 1: of California, Berkeley UM. Berkeley is one of the land
Speaker 1: grants for California, and California is a little bit different
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, including how their university systems
Speaker 1: set up. Most states have a single land grant college,
Speaker 1: which really delivers a lot of the applied research out
Speaker 1: to farmers and ranchers and their agricultural colleges here in Berkeley.
Speaker 1: It started here at Berkeley, and it's extended out to
Speaker 1: University of California, Davis, where the majority of that agricultural
Speaker 1: research occurs today. And there's also quite a bit that's
Speaker 1: happening down at you see Riverside. But UM Berkeley maintains
Speaker 1: some of this agricultural research that's designed to bring the
Speaker 1: best conservation practices, the best production practices out to farmers
Speaker 1: and ranchers to improve outcomes for the people living out
Speaker 1: there as well as the natural resources that we all
Speaker 1: rely upon. Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's when you
Speaker 1: walk into the door, there's like glass cases with soil samples. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Hill Guard was the is considered the father of
Speaker 1: modern soil science, so he has streets named after him
Speaker 1: here in Berkeley. Created some of the first textbooks describing
Speaker 1: um soils. So that's some of the main components of
Speaker 1: how we grow crops and how things how plants grow
Speaker 1: and animals grow and all the things we're interested in. So, um,
Speaker 1: he was an instrumental figure here at Berkeley, and there's
Speaker 1: been a number of those people here. It's really it's
Speaker 1: really quite humbling to be here among people, the Nobel
Speaker 1: laureates who have come out of this university and to
Speaker 1: look out and think that, you know, you might be
Speaker 1: passing by somebody like that on the streets, whether it's
Speaker 1: a nuclear physicist or a um or somebody's instrumental in agriculture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful place and pactful place. Um, I'm happy
Speaker 1: to be here. When you were explaining the cooperative extension
Speaker 1: and some of your work, there's a big history to
Speaker 1: that a long long time that's been happening. Um, give
Speaker 1: people a little bit more color into that, just to understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so all of our land grant colleges. I had mentioned
Speaker 1: how Berkeley's part of the land grant system. They were
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen tens and twenties. Somewhere around then
Speaker 1: there was agricultural researcher found that he had developed some
Speaker 1: new varieties of corn or different crops, and he found
Speaker 1: that farmers weren't adopting him. He and they were reluctant
Speaker 1: to try new things, and so he found there was
Speaker 1: a real need to bring research that he was performing
Speaker 1: out to the farmers and ranches so that they could
Speaker 1: actually try him out. It was a it was a
Speaker 1: problem of adopting new technologies. So he began this effort
Speaker 1: where he would have demonstrations on the research site to
Speaker 1: bring farmers out to sea Um. If you've ever heard
Speaker 1: of four h um, that's part of cooperative extension. It's
Speaker 1: the effort to bring kids that One of the ideas
Speaker 1: behind that was that they could give some of these
Speaker 1: new crop varieties to kids to plant in the little
Speaker 1: home garden. And when the parents saw the kids crops
Speaker 1: growing better than the crops in the fields, they start
Speaker 1: thinking about adopting some of these new technologies too. So
Speaker 1: it was a way to get new information out and
Speaker 1: to promote adoption of new and the best practices. And
Speaker 1: so you were telling me that you're probably one of
Speaker 1: the only folks around here, especially in this building, thinking
Speaker 1: about hunting specifically. Probably I'm a little bit of a
Speaker 1: novelty over here at Berkeley UM. Other people do work
Speaker 1: on hunting. It's oftentimes in the context of UM. I
Speaker 1: have some some great colleagues who work in Africa working
Speaker 1: on bush meat hunting and very different context of where
Speaker 1: people are hunting monkeys, hunting endangered species um for their livelihoods,
Speaker 1: to survive, for protein and so and those our whole
Speaker 1: different set of challenges that fortunately we don't. We have
Speaker 1: a much more developed and regulated system here in the
Speaker 1: in the United States. That's uh, that functions really well.
Speaker 1: And is we're really we're really blessed to have that
Speaker 1: sort of system here, that's true. And and for you know,
Speaker 1: somebody like you sit in a place like this to
Speaker 1: to focus on this subject that was subject we're gonna
Speaker 1: cover here over the next um hour. So I think
Speaker 1: is was enlightening to me and the guys that Congressional
Speaker 1: Sports Is Foundation. Andy Treyharn sent me an email like, Hey,
Speaker 1: here's a guy that you should look at. Because as
Speaker 1: much as we in the hunting space talk about and
Speaker 1: advocate for public lands and do so um as we should,
Speaker 1: there's this this there's a little bit of data here
Speaker 1: that opens up the door to a whole big conversation
Speaker 1: on private lands and what they mean and range land
Speaker 1: and the real impact that they have on not only
Speaker 1: our ecosystems, but our economy and different things like that.
Speaker 1: So that's what brought me here because I think I
Speaker 1: think it's an important topic. I think it we can
Speaker 1: make that, make it as popular as our public land movement.
Speaker 1: Keep it public is something everybody likes to say. I
Speaker 1: think we need to also understand like what private lands
Speaker 1: do and what they mean. And you're the guy, yeah,
Speaker 1: and how private lands came about. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of times we don't even think, um,
Speaker 1: what how did private lands become private? How did public
Speaker 1: lands become public? And it really comes back to the
Speaker 1: early settlers days when the country is being founded and
Speaker 1: there's this westward expansion really and and the reason I
Speaker 1: like to focus on private lands is that private lands
Speaker 1: are some of the most productive lands in the United States.
Speaker 1: I think about sixty or seventy percent if you include
Speaker 1: Alaska six lands or private lands. If you exclude Alaska,
Speaker 1: it's up to because Alaska has just said a huge
Speaker 1: land mass, but um, you have this vaster the US
Speaker 1: is private. And why is that? Was because there was
Speaker 1: as people the Homestead Act was moving people, and people
Speaker 1: were going out to farm land and to make it productive.
Speaker 1: They really focused on the areas where they could grow,
Speaker 1: grow crops and make a living. Um, that hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty acres estimate for Homestead Act land that you could
Speaker 1: acquire by moving westward worked pretty well until you hit
Speaker 1: about the hundredth meridian and your rainfall started drop below
Speaker 1: thirty inches a year, you didn't have enough to grow crops.
Speaker 1: You hit some of the deserts to Nevada and Utahn,
Speaker 1: it's really clear hundred sixty acres you're not gonna be
Speaker 1: able to make living off of for a family. So
Speaker 1: what ended up happening is some of these early explorers
Speaker 1: noted that we need to rethink this Homestead Act and
Speaker 1: in the West, because you're going to need at least
Speaker 1: two thousand, three thousand, five thousand acres to be able
Speaker 1: to apport a family unit out here. And so that
Speaker 1: I don't think those those numbers did end up happening
Speaker 1: in the Homestead Act. What ended up happening was that, UM,
Speaker 1: these lands were sort of left unsettled because people couldn't
Speaker 1: make living on a small parcel of land, and so
Speaker 1: you have these these areas and mountains and deserts essentially
Speaker 1: that were left unsettled and became part of our public
Speaker 1: federal public lands. So they're beautiful, they're a huge and
Speaker 1: wonderful natural resource thing to to behold and wonder and
Speaker 1: walk through and see. But they're also some of the
Speaker 1: least productive lands. But they don't have good flat soils,
Speaker 1: they don't have sometimes good water resources um and as
Speaker 1: it was, and also those same productivity issues that make
Speaker 1: them difficult and challenging for humans to live on and
Speaker 1: settle and to make living on. In some ways, they're
Speaker 1: difficult for animals. They don't have the same densities of
Speaker 1: deer that you would have on the bottom lands soil
Speaker 1: in the south. So because of that, it's really these
Speaker 1: public lands are really great, but they're not really representative
Speaker 1: of all the different resources that we have in our
Speaker 1: country and so um So that's why I think private
Speaker 1: lands are really important part of our conversation. They're they're
Speaker 1: the most productive lands. They host a whole range of
Speaker 1: biodiversity that's not represented in our public lands. Um. There
Speaker 1: are species that aren't found in public lands that are
Speaker 1: they're only found in some of our private lands in
Speaker 1: the in the eastern side of the country or even
Speaker 1: in the in California for example. So, um, and in
Speaker 1: California here where we are, the Central Valley, which is
Speaker 1: the the bread basket of the country, is almost entirely
Speaker 1: agricultural land now and some of those bottom land areas
Speaker 1: where there were huge valley oaks back in the day,
Speaker 1: some of those laws that that habit has been lost,
Speaker 1: and so we've lost some of those those aspects to
Speaker 1: support game species, the other species, birds and other things
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, and you mentioned a lot in your
Speaker 1: work of biodiversity, um, explain kind of how you're like,
Speaker 1: how you would measure and say, there's two things I
Speaker 1: think that what was production? What does productive really mean?
Speaker 1: You know? And and what is how does private land?
Speaker 1: And then maybe publicly And it's hard to talk about
Speaker 1: these things as monoliths. I mean, there's so there's some
Speaker 1: very very and I've seen them very very biodiverse public lands,
Speaker 1: and there's some very very uh, non diverse private lands.
Speaker 1: It's just it's hard to talk about them in those ways.
Speaker 1: But when you reference them as productive, what do you
Speaker 1: what do you mean? What's that product for private land? Wherever?
Speaker 1: Any land? What's what's productive in your mind? Because there Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good question again, because it's like I said,
Speaker 1: it's hard to talk about these things like that in
Speaker 1: those ways. But product production means a lot of different
Speaker 1: things to different people. Obviously, Yeah, um, I generally probably
Speaker 1: would think of it in terms of UM. I would
Speaker 1: think of it probably in terms of how humans use
Speaker 1: the land, and so often times I would think of
Speaker 1: it in terms of soil quality, UM and the ability
Speaker 1: to produce biomass and so. Uh that generally a thought
Speaker 1: of as yields for crops, um grass grown for livestock,
Speaker 1: um water for people to drink, or for animals to drink,
Speaker 1: groundwater resources, so all those types of aspects that UM,
Speaker 1: I think humans in particular will look at, but also animals.
Speaker 1: You know, water is key a key resource for for
Speaker 1: animals and for life, and so having good water resources
Speaker 1: in an area is really important for productivity, and that's
Speaker 1: why there's been efforts to put out guzzlers and water
Speaker 1: resources in our public lands to increase that productivity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good point, especially for sheep. Guzzlers are a
Speaker 1: huge thing for desert big horn sheep and beyond. UM.
Speaker 1: So let's get to the actual research you've done and
Speaker 1: the paper that you guys have published UM, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of numbers in here. I don't
Speaker 1: want to get to I don't want to just rattle
Speaker 1: off a bunch of numbers, but there are some really
Speaker 1: impactful kind of bottom line statements in and what's here? UM,
Speaker 1: So kind of take us through what this paper is called.
Speaker 1: I'll make sure everybody has access to it. That's listening
Speaker 1: what this paper is called, and kind of how you
Speaker 1: came to want to write this, and how you wrote
Speaker 1: the abstract, and yeah, it's a long ask questions. Well
Speaker 1: it wasn't It was quite an interesting story. When I
Speaker 1: started my dissertation, my doctoral research, I did not think
Speaker 1: I would end up doing a big nationwide study pulling
Speaker 1: together three big giant data sets from different national surveys.
Speaker 1: I was actually a little bit afraid of statistics and
Speaker 1: big data sets when I started my my doctoral work. Um,
Speaker 1: this paper is titled the Role of Wildlife Associated Recreation
Speaker 1: and Private land Use and Conservation. Providing the Missing Baseline. Bam, bam.
Speaker 1: That's like, that's that's not gonna get to people clicking
Speaker 1: on the old webside. We have to rewrite that headline
Speaker 1: providing the missing Baseline Yeah, that's that's that's a little
Speaker 1: a little bit of something sensationalize at something or public
Speaker 1: land sucks. It was, you know, I found uh private land.
Speaker 1: I would talk to people. I was interested in in
Speaker 1: interviewing ranchers and learning how ranchers might be using hunting,
Speaker 1: and hunting might being incentive for ranchers to maintain more
Speaker 1: wildlife habitat. It's an old concept that Aldo Leopold came
Speaker 1: up with and and suggested in the nineteen thirties. He said,
Speaker 1: you know, if farmers and ranchers are going to be
Speaker 1: able to earn something from having wildlife on their land,
Speaker 1: it's going to incentivize them to keep some habitat for
Speaker 1: these fonds in the in the back forty or in
Speaker 1: the certain parts of their areas, or leave the edges
Speaker 1: of their crops for quail or other different wildlife species. So,
Speaker 1: as I was talking to different ranchers and experts in
Speaker 1: this field, they said kept saying, well, private land, we
Speaker 1: really don't really know that much about how much private
Speaker 1: lands being used for hunting. Um. And so I began
Speaker 1: looking and started finding I've started learning about US Department
Speaker 1: of Agriculture had these big data sets that were available,
Speaker 1: and they they pulled every um, every farmer and rancher
Speaker 1: in the country every five years, every few years, there
Speaker 1: was different variety of different surveys, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: I should before I go and interview a bunch of
Speaker 1: ranchers asking them how much of their land is used
Speaker 1: for hunting, I should use data sort of been collected
Speaker 1: by our government. So I started looking into the Department
Speaker 1: of Agriculture Agricultural Resource Management survey, which they hold every year.
Speaker 1: There's some great folks over in Economic Research Service over
Speaker 1: at USDA who helped me out. I'll give a shout
Speaker 1: out to Bob Dubman who helped me out getting these
Speaker 1: data set up. And I had to go to a
Speaker 1: cold room up and Sacramento, which was totally cut off
Speaker 1: from the Internet because this is this economic data farmer
Speaker 1: and ranchers and they have to keep it very protected.
Speaker 1: So I made trips up to Sacramento and h and
Speaker 1: started learning how to use are and only statistic EGAL
Speaker 1: programs to figure out what are these numbers, how many
Speaker 1: farmers and ranchers are doing? Is how many acres are there? Well,
Speaker 1: I dug into that and I found well, there's certain
Speaker 1: limitations to that data set. And there's the another data set,
Speaker 1: the National Survey of UH Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Associated
Speaker 1: Recreation or wildlife watching. UM, And I said, well, I
Speaker 1: should take a look at that one. And it turns
Speaker 1: out there's a question there about private land that's used
Speaker 1: for hunting, both owned for hunting and least for hunting,
Speaker 1: and that people used for like day use fees, sort
Speaker 1: of like guided hunts. So I added that to my analysis.
Speaker 1: I pulled that in and figured out all three I
Speaker 1: pulled up, pulled pulled together three of those UH surveys
Speaker 1: over the course of like ten years. Because there's really
Speaker 1: the sample, the way the sampling works, you had to
Speaker 1: I had to aggregate these things to improve the standard
Speaker 1: deviations and statistical stuff. But all that exciting stuff, all
Speaker 1: that exciting fun stuff that your listeners, I'm sure really excited.
Speaker 1: It's just it, it's just me. So if he's just
Speaker 1: fast forward to the data, I love comparing like it's funny,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna I'm jumping ahead. Um, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to jump ahead. In fact, when you're doing all that
Speaker 1: research and you're you're kind of jumping your lily padding
Speaker 1: to these like the spears of relevance to kind of
Speaker 1: to get are you changing your goals during that or
Speaker 1: you kind of you have a north star like I
Speaker 1: want to get to find out this thing. Or as
Speaker 1: you see the different available data sets, to you change
Speaker 1: or your goal? Well, I think there's a key overarching question.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one thing I learned from some
Speaker 1: of my mentors um in my research program, is that
Speaker 1: you do have a key guiding question and that that
Speaker 1: helps you helps to guide your your program um. And
Speaker 1: for me, it was like, what is what is the
Speaker 1: role of hunting and conservation? Is it actually helping with conservation,
Speaker 1: especially on the private land side. Um? So as you
Speaker 1: gather data and somebody articulated this really well, um, you
Speaker 1: you allow when you're writing science, I oftentimes didn't like
Speaker 1: to think of like science as a story because I
Speaker 1: felt like sciences is all about facts and data. We
Speaker 1: don't I don't I don't want to tell stories. I'm
Speaker 1: here to tell facts. But actually somebody actually changed my
Speaker 1: mind about them. They said, actually, you're telling a story,
Speaker 1: but your data are the characters. Your surveys are the characters,
Speaker 1: and you have to let them speak and let them
Speaker 1: be part of your story. So that's that's where I
Speaker 1: think how this process occurs. Right, I had one servant.
Speaker 1: I said, they're telling me something, but it's limited and
Speaker 1: I don't know about this other type of landscape, and
Speaker 1: so I'm missing some nuance to the story. And this
Speaker 1: character can only tell me so much. I need more
Speaker 1: characters to make the story. And that's where I went
Speaker 1: to the National Survey, and then I ended up going
Speaker 1: to the US Force Service had a big National woodland
Speaker 1: Owner Survey. Some of your some of your listeners might
Speaker 1: even have filled out some of these surveys they have
Speaker 1: passed UM. So Brett Butler Forced Service helped set me
Speaker 1: up with some of their data. So we pulled all
Speaker 1: these things together to understand, you know what describe the
Speaker 1: broader picture for private land use and the land use
Speaker 1: types that are um utilized. For this is if forest
Speaker 1: is a range land, turns out the majority's forest land.
Speaker 1: A lot of the South is really considered forest land,
Speaker 1: and that's the dominant area for for hunting in the
Speaker 1: in the country as well as the Upper Midwest area Wisconsin, Minnesota,
Speaker 1: Michigan huge areas of forests that are hunted, oftentimes for
Speaker 1: free sometimes under leases. Um. But a lot of really
Speaker 1: interesting nuances came out of out of analyzing these and
Speaker 1: so so just so everyone's tracking with us, we are
Speaker 1: talking about a study here that's pulling to get a
Speaker 1: lot of national data to determine you know, what you
Speaker 1: said before, kind of the hypothesis is is conservation? Is
Speaker 1: hunting a valuable way to produce conservation on public lands
Speaker 1: or on private lands? Beyond that, like, how are people
Speaker 1: using these lands? Um? You and you have some really
Speaker 1: interesting stuff about owned versus least and reading you said
Speaker 1: the regionalities and state by states. Um, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how you crack the egg and walk through this. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you thought about this through. What's the first when
Speaker 1: you say, what here's the things we found? What's the
Speaker 1: first thing you would say to people? You know, what's
Speaker 1: the overarching abstract? Here? A big area of the United
Speaker 1: States is used for wildlife associated recreation, and of I
Speaker 1: think it's estimated at well. I think the paper shows
Speaker 1: about of the whole of the contiguous US has used
Speaker 1: for wildlife associated recreation. Of that hunting is a dominant contributor.
Speaker 1: And that's like in your study when you started looking
Speaker 1: at this, there's there's It's like wildlife watching is one
Speaker 1: of them. Hunting and fishing and fishing, Yeah, hunting is
Speaker 1: dominates the area, absolutely right. And you didn't go into
Speaker 1: that thinking, oh, yeah, hunting will be the thing that
Speaker 1: knocks it out of the park, did you. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: in some ways I do, and some ways I had
Speaker 1: some ideas to that because I've hunted on on lands
Speaker 1: and you go to big ranches, you need big areas
Speaker 1: deer crack traveling over hundreds of acres or traveling over thousands,
Speaker 1: sometimes tens of thousands of acres, miles and miles being crossed.
Speaker 1: So when I think of a hunting lease, I think
Speaker 1: of multiple hundreds, if not thousands of acres. Ideally, I
Speaker 1: think of a fishing lease. You really just need access
Speaker 1: to the stream, You just need an acre, And I
Speaker 1: think of wildlife watching. Some people can do that in
Speaker 1: their backyard from the road, you can. A lot of
Speaker 1: people do. And this survey did show that. Um but
Speaker 1: so it wasn't too surprising, but it was surprising to
Speaker 1: me to quantify for the first time the actual millions
Speaker 1: and millions of acres twenty million acres of land least
Speaker 1: for hunting in the United States. That's a huge that's
Speaker 1: a huge land. And when I think about hunting and conservation,
Speaker 1: you know, I often times people just say, well, hunting
Speaker 1: is conservation, and I wonder what is that? How do
Speaker 1: what do you mean by that? How do how do
Speaker 1: we actually say that? What does that mean? Because we
Speaker 1: buy hunting licenses because our money goes to the state agencies,
Speaker 1: is that is that conservation of the state agencies necessarily
Speaker 1: putting that back into conservation on the ground. Um? I
Speaker 1: think in a lot of cases yes, yes, um, but
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily a straight line. There might be other
Speaker 1: things with some of those funds go to that aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily conservation. Yeah, there's a lot of there's hunter recruitment,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of mean, if you look at how
Speaker 1: the dollars are a mass and what they're spent on,
Speaker 1: it's complex. It's a complicated state by state. You know,
Speaker 1: we always roll out this like of state revenues come from.
Speaker 1: It's it's but it's varies so much state by state
Speaker 1: that it's hard to nail down. And you're right, I
Speaker 1: say this all the time. Hunting is not conservation. Conservation
Speaker 1: is conservation. I think it's hunting. We've done a great
Speaker 1: job in this country of kind of intertwining the two
Speaker 1: in ways that we we really can't now separate. But
Speaker 1: you don't have a choice to pay the excise tax.
Speaker 1: In the Pitman Robertson, you do not have a choice
Speaker 1: to buy a tag. I mean, you're either buy a
Speaker 1: tag or you're a poacher. Um. And so, yes, they
Speaker 1: are intertwined. But conservation is to me still sits parallel
Speaker 1: and is a byproduct of of hunting, not not hunting
Speaker 1: in and of itself. Absolutely, And I was when I
Speaker 1: think about this topic, especially in this paper, I thought
Speaker 1: there's really two ways in which one which one can
Speaker 1: think of conservation. One is what I still see as
Speaker 1: one of the biggest things UM causing habitat causing losses
Speaker 1: of wildlife is habitat loss. It's still one of the
Speaker 1: main drivers. We talk a lot about climate change, and
Speaker 1: climate change does change. Habitat loss can contrive that. But
Speaker 1: really we're talking about paved, paved roads, We're talking about
Speaker 1: housing developments that are taking up thousands of acres now
Speaker 1: of more additional previously habitat, or we're talking about agriculture
Speaker 1: that's intensive agriculture that's moved into previously uncultivated areas. That
Speaker 1: is a known loss, and that is still the main
Speaker 1: way in which we are losing species and losing the
Speaker 1: quality of our natural resources. So I think land use
Speaker 1: and that's why it was this paper is published in
Speaker 1: Land Use Policy because I thought hunting is actually contributing
Speaker 1: to a reduction and conversion of land out of natural spaces.
Speaker 1: That would be a really great finding. We oftentimes think
Speaker 1: of I think of hunting, we think of conservation is
Speaker 1: okay practices on the ground, and we'll get to that
Speaker 1: next because we did get into that this paper. But
Speaker 1: I also thought, well, what's the indirect aspect of people
Speaker 1: are paying money to keep land and this Aldo Leopold method.
Speaker 1: They're paying money to a rancher and he's keeping his
Speaker 1: land as a ranch instead of selling off twenty acres
Speaker 1: here and thirty acres there for whether it's a vineyard
Speaker 1: or housing development or whatever. And he's keeping and hunting
Speaker 1: is helping him stay in business, so he keeps his
Speaker 1: unit contiguous. That's a win for conservation. So that the
Speaker 1: land use aspect, the lack of fragmentation aspect, So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's this happens we we apply this to a
Speaker 1: lot of the international hunting issues, you know, trophy trophy
Speaker 1: hunting based conservation. For lack of a really much better
Speaker 1: term than that, it's like hunting creates value, right in
Speaker 1: this case is what I'm from reading your paper when
Speaker 1: I'm what I'm getting from from it is hunting creates
Speaker 1: this value, and value really is what conservation is all about.
Speaker 1: If something has value, you want to conserve it, right, So,
Speaker 1: and then conservation leads to if this equation one one
Speaker 1: step further, the propagation of wildlife pushing it down those
Speaker 1: three levels. And so that's I think what when this
Speaker 1: was introduced to me, I was like, whoa perfect like
Speaker 1: this fits right into that this This is data that
Speaker 1: someone has done a lot of work to compile, kind
Speaker 1: of illustrating that equation in some way. Yeah, yeah, you know. Value.
Speaker 1: I think it's a really great way to think about
Speaker 1: this is the value of our natural resources, the value
Speaker 1: of of range land versus a vineyard. And economically, if
Speaker 1: you look at the dollars and cents, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of money we found there was billions of dollars being
Speaker 1: spent for I think it's two billion dollars a year
Speaker 1: going towards private land conservation or so private land recreation.
Speaker 1: And that's a that's a lot of money, and I
Speaker 1: mean two billion dollars a lot of money. But compared
Speaker 1: to the US economy, compared to agriculture, it's it's really
Speaker 1: quite small. And it is a contribution. And I think
Speaker 1: what I wanted to show was say, well, how much
Speaker 1: of a contribution. Where is it working at the edges
Speaker 1: where it's actually helping. And if you were to lose it,
Speaker 1: you would be losing potentially a subsidy of real value
Speaker 1: of economic value of billions of dollars of real value
Speaker 1: of dollar values for natural lands. Um. So if you
Speaker 1: were to ban hunting, you'd lose You lose this, you
Speaker 1: lose this incentive for ranchers stan ranching the money that
Speaker 1: they would say this is a value. There's a whole
Speaker 1: another aspect of value though too for ranchers that has
Speaker 1: been uncovered with some of my colleagues, researchers Dr Lynn
Speaker 1: Hunt Singer, my my colleague here, it's found that ranchers
Speaker 1: aren't ranching for money. Ranting is a horrible business to
Speaker 1: get into. Oftentimes you'll make. You'll make one percent return
Speaker 1: on your uh, on all your money, on all your
Speaker 1: land capital, you make one percent return. You do way
Speaker 1: better just to go stick it in the stock market,
Speaker 1: far better. Um, But people do because they enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Often times, he's ranches will lose one percent a year
Speaker 1: or they'll break even many years, but they do it
Speaker 1: because they like it, and there's a lifestyle aspect, and
Speaker 1: there's a value that they place on it that's the
Speaker 1: equivalent of what they what they could make in the
Speaker 1: stock market. That's funny. Yeah, at some level, this is
Speaker 1: probably over generalization, Like hunting can subsidize someone's you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's the ways that subsidies kind of support this,
Speaker 1: this ranching lifestyle, farming lifestyle. The government does it all
Speaker 1: the time, but hunting lease is kind of a way
Speaker 1: to do that as well. Yeah, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: way that they can help them if they're I've talked
Speaker 1: to ranchers who said, you know, at least I know
Speaker 1: my hunting income is solid. Every year, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: ninety a year from my hunting lease. And this is
Speaker 1: a big ranch. So um, he's like, I know, I'm
Speaker 1: getting that the cattle the cattle might make ten thousand
Speaker 1: that year, they might make a hundred thousand that year,
Speaker 1: and there's it's highly variable in the cattle market. But
Speaker 1: at least he knew he got this sort of baseline
Speaker 1: from the hunting. The King Ranch in Texas has some
Speaker 1: really great um descriptions showing this the stability of their
Speaker 1: wildlife and hunting revenue compared to the livestock industry, which
Speaker 1: is really volatile. So yeah, if and in a lot
Speaker 1: of places in Texas it ends up about half and half,
Speaker 1: hunting ends up being about as much as the livestock.
Speaker 1: So in that case, that's a big component to the
Speaker 1: economic picture for these ranchers, in addition to the fact
Speaker 1: that they did do it because they love it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then you've got one thing I pulled out here. Private
Speaker 1: landers in the US are an approximate at one point
Speaker 1: five billion dollars in the annual income from hunting over
Speaker 1: two million acres. And there's a lot of these percentages
Speaker 1: and stuff I I like it, which is sixteen four
Speaker 1: six four percent of all private lands in the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just an interesting stack to me. Yeah, and interesting
Speaker 1: to see it presented in that way. Big areas and
Speaker 1: you know, we went further beyond sort of this sort
Speaker 1: of big that all this stuff we've talked about so
Speaker 1: far is this sort of big picture of like how
Speaker 1: land is used and how people value it, and we're
Speaker 1: what happens is really at the edges of land use.
Speaker 1: So if something's on the edge of shifting into a
Speaker 1: great orchard or almond orchard or some other sort of
Speaker 1: intensive agriculture, if if you reduce you're hunting revenue and
Speaker 1: take it out of the picture, it will just accelerate
Speaker 1: that transition. At these edges. It will make it that
Speaker 1: much less profitable, profitable, and so people will move into new,
Speaker 1: more profitable uses more quickly. That's sort of the larger
Speaker 1: economic theory of how this happens, and I think it
Speaker 1: plays out on our landscapes. The second thing we got
Speaker 1: some data on is why we looked into some of
Speaker 1: this U S Department of Agriculture datas. They gather information
Speaker 1: on what are people actually doing on the ground for
Speaker 1: conservation practices. Are they involved in some of these working
Speaker 1: lands programs which are um any of the people in
Speaker 1: your audience, you might be landowner, is probably familiar with
Speaker 1: the EQUIP program. Environmental Quality and Centers programs, the U
Speaker 1: s D a program that helps does cast share to
Speaker 1: to some conservation practices. We found people who were who
Speaker 1: had hunting leases there were more involved with these conservation programs.
Speaker 1: We found they were also more likely to hire private
Speaker 1: consultants to do conservation practices on their land. So we
Speaker 1: found additional correlations. We can't say for sure causation, but
Speaker 1: we did see people who had hunting leases, we're doing,
Speaker 1: we're participating more in these conservation programs, and they were
Speaker 1: participating in hiring private conservation folks. Those hunters were not arguing,
Speaker 1: I don't even look into the causation. We'll take it.
Speaker 1: I do. I do think there's a funny there's a
Speaker 1: funny point there. And we were talking earlier about the
Speaker 1: Quality Deer Management Association at q d m a UM
Speaker 1: and managing land for deer. Now you're you're doing, you're
Speaker 1: manipulating the land in certain ways. And if you talk
Speaker 1: about in the Midwest or the East or the south,
Speaker 1: all of the land is disturbed. I mean, there's very
Speaker 1: few pristine places that haven't already been disturbed in some way.
Speaker 1: So a lot of deer hundles will come in pay
Speaker 1: for a lease and then plant food plots, hinge cut
Speaker 1: you know, make cover, screening cover from different areas where
Speaker 1: there's roads and things like that to give the deer
Speaker 1: a better place to thrive. And the question that we
Speaker 1: always ask is is that is are those activities, by
Speaker 1: happenstance driving biodiversity. How much is that kind of like
Speaker 1: single species driven changes to the landscape really helping everything.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have that answer, but it's
Speaker 1: just something that we've we've been looking at and talking
Speaker 1: about recently. Absolutely, I think it's something to think about. Absolutely. UM.
Speaker 1: I'd say, like if you talk to any any sort
Speaker 1: of academic, they'll say, well, it depends. That's the that's
Speaker 1: the big things that it depends. UM. Look, if you're look,
Speaker 1: if you're planting food plots for deer and having some
Speaker 1: cover and providing some of these habitat aspects, it's going
Speaker 1: to benefit some species and it might not be as
Speaker 1: beneficial for others. I think it's pretty safe to say
Speaker 1: it's probably better than a housing development, and that when
Speaker 1: I feel pretty sure about UM, it's probably better than
Speaker 1: an intensive agricultural operation. So UM to the extent that
Speaker 1: we make that comparison, I think, yeah, it's probably a win.
Speaker 1: It's probably win for conservation, even if it's single species management. Um.
Speaker 1: There are so many ways to measure biodiversity. We don't
Speaker 1: even oftentimes don't even think about invertebrate biodiversity. For example,
Speaker 1: it's hard to measure that. It's really hard to even
Speaker 1: get in there and measure the diversity of the thousands
Speaker 1: of species that you could find. And then you can
Speaker 1: go down down to bacteria and think about, well, what
Speaker 1: are the nematodes in the soil. What's about about the
Speaker 1: diversity at that level. So um, But I think that's
Speaker 1: where I think, you know, I think even hunters have
Speaker 1: a responsibility. Yeah, I think about that, Well, what are
Speaker 1: the what other species in your local area that might
Speaker 1: might really depend upon thick forests. Maybe there's some you know, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a some thick cedar forests in central Type because
Speaker 1: for example, they are important habitat for I think black
Speaker 1: cat vireos, are golden cheek warblers, these endangered species. You know,
Speaker 1: I think it's the responsibility of hunters and landowners when
Speaker 1: they get that landed dig in to call their local
Speaker 1: um in ourcs, their U S T a personnel call
Speaker 1: their local cooperative extension advisors find out, well, what what
Speaker 1: might not want to be thinking about beyond just deer.
Speaker 1: And there's so many, Like you say, there's so many reasons.
Speaker 1: We have a top secret project that media we're working
Speaker 1: on right now that that is running into this. You know,
Speaker 1: it's I can't I don't know how much I could say,
Speaker 1: but it's top secrets. But we're working on. We have
Speaker 1: a piece of land and we're trying to involve as
Speaker 1: many state and federal agencies as we can to come
Speaker 1: in and tell us what we can do better. And
Speaker 1: I think your point in the causation of I think
Speaker 1: hunters are just more inclined to think about conservation because
Speaker 1: the more you can serve the land and conserve the habitat,
Speaker 1: the more you have the game that you seek. It's
Speaker 1: just take it one step further. Is there more you
Speaker 1: can do not only to conserve that that have that
Speaker 1: for the game you seek, but for the other species
Speaker 1: as well? That will just help the entire ecosystem which
Speaker 1: you which you live and work and play. Absolutely. No.
Speaker 1: I you know Steve Keller. Have you heard of Steve Keller?
Speaker 1: He was a Yale professor. I think he's retired now.
Speaker 1: He he did a really interesting stud He did surveys
Speaker 1: of hunters around the world, and he wrote up this
Speaker 1: brief publication and it didn't get it got published into
Speaker 1: some some small journal. It wasn't really out. It's not
Speaker 1: really easy to find the internet. I should put it
Speaker 1: on my website. Maybe I'll do that after this I'd
Speaker 1: like to read it. He describes that he found through
Speaker 1: all of his efforts to of of serving hunters around
Speaker 1: the world, the US and Africa, all over the place,
Speaker 1: he found there was three types of hunters. He said.
Speaker 1: They were utilitarian hunters who just wanted meat, they wanted
Speaker 1: to bring home food. There were ecologistic hunters, who I
Speaker 1: think is the kind that we're trying to maybe advocate
Speaker 1: for or encourage people to think about. When we talked
Speaker 1: about this topic of well, what other species might you
Speaker 1: want to think about? And those folks, I think he
Speaker 1: was really articulate. He said, the's ecologistic hunters. They wanted
Speaker 1: to participate in the circle of life. They wanted to
Speaker 1: be part of it. And I think that was for me,
Speaker 1: helped me to describe for myself, like why I like
Speaker 1: to hunt it's not that I enjoy the kill. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean there there are aspects of that, Like I
Speaker 1: think this is part of being a predator in the
Speaker 1: predator prey system, like participating in nature in a way
Speaker 1: that you don't if you're just watching it from the outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm getting ready to go and talk to some animal
Speaker 1: rights folks, and I'm that's very much the point I
Speaker 1: make always I feel this intense like proximity to how
Speaker 1: this all works. I can't I'm not sitting on the
Speaker 1: sidelines and and you know, using my emotions or using
Speaker 1: some sort of circular logic to kind of get to
Speaker 1: the point where I feel good about what's happening. I'm
Speaker 1: inserting myself into it and trying to, over years and years,
Speaker 1: figure out what's the best way to interact with it. Yea,
Speaker 1: and it takes You're not gonna walk in with the answer.
Speaker 1: It probably won't walk out with it either, But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's better than sitting on the sidelines. Yeah, in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. Well, when you think about our evolutionary history,
Speaker 1: I think pent of our history we were hunter gatherers,
Speaker 1: So I think there is some deeply embedded aspects of
Speaker 1: our of our genetics that are tied to hunting and
Speaker 1: tied to finding our own food, and we have We'll
Speaker 1: also have another guy I'm talking to who's a human
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist, and it says, like kids throw rocks. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a three year old son. He throws rocks
Speaker 1: like you wouldn't believe. Like he sees he picks up
Speaker 1: a rock, he doesn't think, what is this. He picks
Speaker 1: up a rock and he immediately looks around to what
Speaker 1: he can throw it, and he's like, dude, that's that's
Speaker 1: because humans, when we first figured out how to throw things,
Speaker 1: then we first started to figure out that we could
Speaker 1: procure our own meat. And and there's some kind of
Speaker 1: biological ticker in there that when your son picks up
Speaker 1: a rock, he doesn't see something he might lick or
Speaker 1: put in his pocket. He sees something he needs to throw.
Speaker 1: So there's a connection in there for sure. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: third type of hunters is to close that top. That's
Speaker 1: that topic that Steve Kellet raised was the sportsman hunters,
Speaker 1: the trophy hunters that we think about today, which I
Speaker 1: think there was an interesting thing to think about um
Speaker 1: for the hunting community. And I'm sure You've probably had
Speaker 1: great um people on your podcast, but I find that
Speaker 1: to be a really interesting thing. You know, one thing
Speaker 1: people don't think about with the sport that trophy hunting community,
Speaker 1: is that it really came out of Theodore Roosevelt's efforts
Speaker 1: to reduce the amount of harvest of wildlife. The idea
Speaker 1: was he would just take a single specimen that was
Speaker 1: hopefully past his prime, just past his prime. It's bread,
Speaker 1: it's it's lived a full life, and you take the
Speaker 1: single trophy, you take one instead of it is in
Speaker 1: a time of market hunting when people were taking hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of animals, and it was an idea to think, wow,
Speaker 1: we really actually can conserve the species by doing trophy
Speaker 1: hunting and encouraging people to just take a single animal.
Speaker 1: And I think today it's really taken on such a
Speaker 1: different tone. Yeah, And it's hard when you start to examine,
Speaker 1: as as Keller lays out there, like the motivations of hunters.
Speaker 1: And that's why I think where it gets all twisted up,
Speaker 1: it's like, what's what's our motivation? Well, I mean, there
Speaker 1: those are three really good types. I've met a lot
Speaker 1: of types. Those are three pretty there's three pretty universal
Speaker 1: types that kind of covers probably hunters I've ever met.
Speaker 1: There's some some outliers there, I'm sure that kind of
Speaker 1: like that. People people that don't like people that sometimes
Speaker 1: are when I hunt when I'm not a trophy hunter,
Speaker 1: when I hunt pheasants, Yeah, but when I'm when I'm
Speaker 1: hunting a mule deer, I'm a trophy hunter, all right.
Speaker 1: So there there are just it's it's such an intertwining
Speaker 1: and twisting and turning story. But when you start to
Speaker 1: and that's what I think in the modern sense we've
Speaker 1: done is trying to really look at what is the
Speaker 1: motivation of a hunter because there's so many people that
Speaker 1: aren't motivated to do it. There's of the country that
Speaker 1: that are not motivated to do it, and there's there's
Speaker 1: a chunk of those folks that are motivated to stop it.
Speaker 1: And so that's I think we get so locked in
Speaker 1: on the motivations that it's hard to see. I think
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of what what your paper because
Speaker 1: it's hard to see. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: trophy hunters that have leases and what they're doing is
Speaker 1: benefiting the landscape. Now you have to separate I always
Speaker 1: are you. You need to separate those two things, you know,
Speaker 1: but it's also good to be aware of the benefits
Speaker 1: of of every part of every motivation and hunting, yeah,
Speaker 1: no matter what it is. And I think those ecologists
Speaker 1: motivated hunters are. I mean there's a lot of them,
Speaker 1: and they have a lot of them in the white
Speaker 1: tail space. And in fact, we had a gentleman from
Speaker 1: the q d m A write a little social post
Speaker 1: about Hey, look, you know I think it was I
Speaker 1: don't want to miss quote a hunters live not in
Speaker 1: the West. There's like there's hunters that live in West,
Speaker 1: but there's yeah, the bulk of that as public lands.
Speaker 1: I'll have to get the right numbers of our public
Speaker 1: lands are in the West, only of our hunters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like your research, your research backs up the power
Speaker 1: of the South and the East and the Midwest and
Speaker 1: that private land, Yeah, chunk of what we do and
Speaker 1: access in getting people the ability to get out there
Speaker 1: and to participate in this nature. I think that that's
Speaker 1: how I got into conservation, because I wanted to be outside.
Speaker 1: I wanted to participate in this cycle of life out
Speaker 1: on ranches. I fell in love with ranches, working it today.
Speaker 1: Um And I think the more that we can encourage,
Speaker 1: you know, ranchers, farmers and ranchers who might have a
Speaker 1: bad opinion of hunters to think about, well, maybe I
Speaker 1: should open my lands up for hunters. Maybe I should
Speaker 1: consider this as a something that can not only benefit
Speaker 1: me economically, but also benefit the natural resources on my
Speaker 1: land through their work. Oftentimes hunters will will volunteer their
Speaker 1: time and effort to do that work. Um. And so
Speaker 1: I think they're while we show there's the land areas
Speaker 1: and for us for wildlife Associate recreation, a bunch of
Speaker 1: that's hunting, that's still theres still a whole lot of
Speaker 1: other land that's not being used, so that's closed off.
Speaker 1: People might think that huntings or hunters are going to
Speaker 1: shoot your cow or shoot your horse. I've never actually
Speaker 1: met anybody who actually experienced that. Um, But it's a
Speaker 1: sort of a narrative that is an excuse to not
Speaker 1: let people on. But I think the more we can
Speaker 1: allow people in these urban areas to get into get
Speaker 1: out into that nature. Look, we're we're we have too
Speaker 1: much too much at stake to not work together. Right Like,
Speaker 1: if you don't think animals, you shouldn't hunt animals, um,
Speaker 1: but you still want to. I think animal rights folks
Speaker 1: they want to maintain wildlife. They want to maintain natural
Speaker 1: areas well. I guess what hunters do to. But we
Speaker 1: have a fundamental difference on whether you should harvest an
Speaker 1: animal or not. But in the end, our goal is
Speaker 1: to maintain natural areas. And if we're fighting each other,
Speaker 1: we're just really we're missing an opportunity to work together
Speaker 1: and find the common ground. And yeah, considered pland I
Speaker 1: always tell this folks, we start from the exact same
Speaker 1: place like you. It's almost if we were standing back
Speaker 1: to back and we turned around like, hey, well we're
Speaker 1: in the same spot. We both care about natural places
Speaker 1: and wildlife, and ECO says we all we care about this.
Speaker 1: And in our country, we're lucky enough that most people
Speaker 1: value these things. Like the bulk of the people this
Speaker 1: country would would say, there's hurt help. Do you value that?
Speaker 1: You want that to be there? Yes, of course I do, um,
Speaker 1: And we have a structure in place to keep it there.
Speaker 1: But then for animal rights folks, for hunters, you start
Speaker 1: to kind of walk away from each other and you
Speaker 1: forget that you started in the same spot. Because that's
Speaker 1: so I mean, it's so easy to sensationalize the animal
Speaker 1: rights folks beliefs. You know, I think, oh, animal personhood,
Speaker 1: that's silly. They think killing something and say you care
Speaker 1: about it, that's silly. And you get caught up in
Speaker 1: like those really you know, those videosyncrasies and and and
Speaker 1: the fact that we kill we want to kill them,
Speaker 1: they don't want to kill them, right, But that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what the conversation is. That's where that's where the
Speaker 1: heads come together, and like, how can we figure this
Speaker 1: out where we can co exist. We're both you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hunting stories that have led to
Speaker 1: a lot of wildlife, a lot more wild life. And
Speaker 1: how how nice if we every time we heard those
Speaker 1: sort of those sort of descriptions that you just said,
Speaker 1: like if we had instead it, Well, actually we both
Speaker 1: want the same thing. We both really want to make
Speaker 1: sure these species survive in the future as a whole,
Speaker 1: that the population are viable and the ecosystems are maintained.
Speaker 1: Your hands off, I'm hands on. Can we just agree
Speaker 1: that that's what where we are? And well, I mean,
Speaker 1: let's raise the deficiency. Who who does better for wild
Speaker 1: or each has a role, Yeah, each has a Yeah better,
Speaker 1: that's way better. Uh So you one thing that interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't know that this shock people is interesting, It
Speaker 1: said the anally in your paper. The analysis revealed that
Speaker 1: ten point two to eleven point three of the land
Speaker 1: area the South, Midwest, and Northeast are primarily owned for hunting,
Speaker 1: while less than one percent of the land and the
Speaker 1: West was owned for hunting. In terms of leasse lands
Speaker 1: the South and Northeast of their respective land us for
Speaker 1: hunting leases, there's only four two percent of the land
Speaker 1: in the Midwest and West are at least for hunting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that interesting. I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: numbers you through out there, but there's some some nuances,
Speaker 1: especially in the Midwest, where you had a lot of
Speaker 1: people owning land for hunting but very few people leasing
Speaker 1: land for hunting. And I started digging in, like what
Speaker 1: is happening in the Midwest. That's that's a bunch of
Speaker 1: hunters live in Wisconsin, and that's that's some of the
Speaker 1: highest density of hunters in our country in that area.
Speaker 1: And as I dug into some of those states, if
Speaker 1: I found some policies and This is where the paper
Speaker 1: sort of ends, is sort of like to think about
Speaker 1: in the future and has become a new research avenue
Speaker 1: for US. But Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan, I believe
Speaker 1: all three of those states. Maybe maybe it's just Michigan
Speaker 1: and Wisconsin have these forest land and Acts which give
Speaker 1: property tax breaks to landowners forced landowners if they open
Speaker 1: up their land for free public hunting, so it cannot
Speaker 1: be leased, so you have that tax break is sort
Speaker 1: of allowed opening up a lot of free, free land,
Speaker 1: but it's reducing I think. I mean, millions of acres
Speaker 1: are in some of these programs in Wisconsin and Michigan,
Speaker 1: so I think that really reduces the sort of area
Speaker 1: that's that's leased in these states. But it points to
Speaker 1: the power of policies and how policies can incentivize and
Speaker 1: change the dynamics for access for hunters. And what does
Speaker 1: that mean. Yeah, I mean when we talk about in Texas,
Speaker 1: you're from there and I live there, and we talk
Speaker 1: about like what it means to go hunting in that
Speaker 1: state leases, I think if you were to ask all hunters,
Speaker 1: could we eliminate leases and just give free access to
Speaker 1: every place where you'd like to go hunting big. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I'll keep my money about spend it on something else.
Speaker 1: I think we would all agree on that. I mean,
Speaker 1: we will all agree that are all of our most
Speaker 1: hunters goal. My goal is to own land one day.
Speaker 1: If ever it's way far it, I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: do a lot more podcasts. Tell your friends, folks, I
Speaker 1: wanna need more downloads. But that's I think, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the American gold, American dreams part of my goal.
Speaker 1: But there's these like things you know in the middle,
Speaker 1: and leasing is kind of like the next best thing.
Speaker 1: But we would all I think we would all agree.
Speaker 1: If we didn't have to do that, we wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1: But that's the reality of Texas in a lot of
Speaker 1: places where leasing happens. And to see a lot of
Speaker 1: your numbers looking at least land, you know, just just
Speaker 1: shows me how how many people are doing and how
Speaker 1: how as a hunting company that I work for, this
Speaker 1: pod podcast about honey, we don't talk about how to
Speaker 1: least land, How where did lease land, what to do
Speaker 1: with it, how to how to be a good lease e,
Speaker 1: how to how to find people to come and leash
Speaker 1: your land that will take good care of it. And
Speaker 1: we don't really talk about that subject all that much.
Speaker 1: And it's it's the numbers that you're buried out to
Speaker 1: be a pretty impactful thing. There's so many opportunities. I've
Speaker 1: met so many where this works well. Land owners who
Speaker 1: really love their they're hunting their hunters, they love having
Speaker 1: them out there. They provide a service to them. They
Speaker 1: know there's not going to be an illegal pot grow
Speaker 1: in the back back of the ranch. They know that
Speaker 1: there's gonna be guys crawling around the property and keeping
Speaker 1: an eye on it. Um A lot of times people
Speaker 1: do free work, take care of the property, fixed wells,
Speaker 1: report if the water, if the water troughs empty for
Speaker 1: the livestock, or they see livestock sick. It's nice to
Speaker 1: have this sort of eyes on the ground for us,
Speaker 1: some of his landowners. The other thing about leases I
Speaker 1: think we haven't touched on yet is that you know
Speaker 1: and and this is right. I actually questioned Steve Ronnella
Speaker 1: at the recent Congressional Sportsman's Foundation uh National Assembly of
Speaker 1: Sportsmen's Caucuses. He was he was speaking in New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: Breton Woods, New Hampshire, beautiful place and he he had mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, the importance of access and the ability to
Speaker 1: get out. I coming from Texas, I grew up and
Speaker 1: hunted on private lands, friends lands and friends ranches, and
Speaker 1: it's a white tail system, so there's a lot higher
Speaker 1: density of deer. But coming out to California and becoming
Speaker 1: a public land hunter that it is exceedingly hard and
Speaker 1: sometimes to even see a single legal animal over the
Speaker 1: course of a week. Um it takes a whole another
Speaker 1: level of skill, which is good. It's it's if you
Speaker 1: want to become an excellent hunter, being able to harvest
Speaker 1: a solid trophy buck on public land, you have to
Speaker 1: be a really quite a good hunter, or very you
Speaker 1: might get really lucky too, that's right, But um it,
Speaker 1: I think it can be discouraging for a new hunter
Speaker 1: going out, um and to spend a week out and
Speaker 1: not even see a legal buck because they have gotten
Speaker 1: so attuned to the to the pressures that they just
Speaker 1: become totally nocturnal. At whenever the cunning season opens, they
Speaker 1: can hear. It is remarkable too. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: half of California's public land and even though there's very
Speaker 1: there's only what two percent of the state population as hunters.
Speaker 1: You go out into the men to see no national
Speaker 1: forests on opening day of archery season and every campground
Speaker 1: is full. There are vehicles driving those roads. There are
Speaker 1: lots of people here. Yeah, these dear no, they can
Speaker 1: smell the smell the exhaust in the forest and thinking
Speaker 1: something's going on today, I better high tail out of here.
Speaker 1: And that was that's uh So, some of these challenges
Speaker 1: in the public land and when you talked about were
Speaker 1: eliminate all leases and let free public access. You know,
Speaker 1: in some ways there's there's some beneficial aspects to having
Speaker 1: that limitation, to to be able to really limit the
Speaker 1: density of hunters out there. Um, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to how to manage that in some
Speaker 1: of these systems because I am torn. It is great
Speaker 1: to have public access and be able to go out
Speaker 1: whenever you want, But then if you don't see a deer,
Speaker 1: you don't see a harvestable animal, that's that's tough. It's hard.
Speaker 1: I've been flipping about it in the past, say things like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, you gotta value the experience, you gotta value
Speaker 1: the time outside, and then at the end of the
Speaker 1: day you're like wait, wait, wait, wait wait, Um, If
Speaker 1: I'm playing chess, I'm trump beach the goal. I have
Speaker 1: a goal. If I'm hunting, I'm trying to kill an animal.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's just silly for someone so well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like being outside. No, I'm I'd like to have
Speaker 1: some nice fresh meat on the round. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: know that it's it's a point to be made that
Speaker 1: there's a balance, right, And that's what I think, I
Speaker 1: really think this conversation really is all about. Is in
Speaker 1: my mind, is that's what it's about. It's about understanding
Speaker 1: the whole picture, and not that I feel that we
Speaker 1: need to over emphasize one thing or the other. But
Speaker 1: I've always said, and I've said this on this podcast
Speaker 1: many times, public lands. It's like apple Pie and bald
Speaker 1: Eagles and Teddy Rose about it's easy to love public lands.
Speaker 1: I mean it's and it's also easy to promote them.
Speaker 1: I mean, what is it. It's free access, it's not
Speaker 1: for you to pay for it. But we all own them.
Speaker 1: We have these shirts public land owners. We all own
Speaker 1: this land. We have this. I've I've hunted primarily National
Speaker 1: Forest for the last for all the Turkey season, and
Speaker 1: my Dad's from the East Coast and he comes to
Speaker 1: hunt with me, and I don't know that he really understands.
Speaker 1: And I don't know that I do yet because I've
Speaker 1: only been living in Montana for six, six or eight months,
Speaker 1: not that I that I don't really understand that. So
Speaker 1: it's it's public is an easy sell. It's like, we
Speaker 1: all pay into this, we all get to use it.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful landscapes. It's open for for us to fish,
Speaker 1: to hunt, to recreate in the ways that we want,
Speaker 1: as long as we take care of it right. It's easy.
Speaker 1: It's hard, and it's harder to sell leases to people.
Speaker 1: It's harder to talk about private lands and talk about leases.
Speaker 1: It's just not as it's not as marketable. It just isn't.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I see this is this is my
Speaker 1: Texas up upbring coming up because I go out to
Speaker 1: public land and I see a full campground and I
Speaker 1: see cars all over the roads, and I'm like, oh man,
Speaker 1: this is not what I was looking for I want.
Speaker 1: I'm thirty miles down a dirt road in the middle
Speaker 1: of Mendisine National Forest and there's people everywhere and the
Speaker 1: nice I mean, there's a certain aspect of density of
Speaker 1: people that that can also I mean, it's easy to sell.
Speaker 1: But also I mean I've seen hunting videos were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're planning and going this one valley and for a
Speaker 1: sheep hunt, but there was twenty cars in the parking lot.
Speaker 1: We had to change plans. We're going somewhere else. And
Speaker 1: so there is I mean, that's another thing in this
Speaker 1: paper found is that the density of people using hunting
Speaker 1: lands that you can use these big, wide open spaces,
Speaker 1: and part of what we want is hunters is to
Speaker 1: kind of get away from it all and get away
Speaker 1: from the crowds, and so the I think there are
Speaker 1: public plans where you can find that, but as they
Speaker 1: get discovered, you can have it. Can we definitely love
Speaker 1: them to death? We we can love what we have loved.
Speaker 1: I mean I was talking to a buddy from Colorado
Speaker 1: and he's he's like, we are loving the outdoors to
Speaker 1: death in the state. You know, I said, it's coming
Speaker 1: for all the other states that have these resources. People
Speaker 1: want to use them and then they can be loved
Speaker 1: to death. So that that is a point. I think
Speaker 1: they're these competing principles. One of the principles in public
Speaker 1: lands is like, there's no elitism in public lands. You
Speaker 1: could be rich, you could be poor. You could have
Speaker 1: a dollar, you could have a million, but you can
Speaker 1: still go. If you have enough money for the tag
Speaker 1: and enough time, you could still go and use this source.
Speaker 1: We all it kind of levels the playing field, and
Speaker 1: that's beautiful. But what happens with private land and leasing.
Speaker 1: There's this this idea that that's what we came to
Speaker 1: this this new world to kind of to escape some way.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, like you said, I think
Speaker 1: both these things that play together, both these ideas that
Speaker 1: played together helped disperse the opportunity, helped disperse the number
Speaker 1: of hunters, and so that it all has to matter,
Speaker 1: um provide opportunities. Yeah, it all has to matter together.
Speaker 1: So I'm just trying to better understand that I would
Speaker 1: admit to not really when I read your paper, I'm like,
Speaker 1: there's a portion of this that I don't understand. There's
Speaker 1: a portion of this entire land news picture that I'm
Speaker 1: not picking up here and and reading your paper, I
Speaker 1: started to pick up some of it um in better detail,
Speaker 1: because I understand, Yeah, in the East, in the South,
Speaker 1: a lot of people in Eastland in Texas, A lot
Speaker 1: of people in Eastland, a lot of people just have
Speaker 1: to be really friendly to landowners to get a chance
Speaker 1: to go hunt and equality of game. I knew that,
Speaker 1: but this starts to paint a picture that's important. I think, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I also think it's a you know, the elite
Speaker 1: ism thing. Maybe it's I you know, I when I
Speaker 1: go out and talk to ranchers, I rarely meet a
Speaker 1: rancher who's elite. I usually find somebody who's we're in
Speaker 1: jeans that are dirty, an old shirt, and they're working
Speaker 1: to land. They're working hard. And I mean, there certainly
Speaker 1: are elite landowners for sure, but by and large i've
Speaker 1: I didn't. One of my doctoral chapters was to interview
Speaker 1: ranchers and they're like, and I'd tell people hear at Berkeley.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go interview ranchers around
Speaker 1: the state. And they're like, you're gonna tell me you're
Speaker 1: from Berkeley. I was like, yeah, yeah, I guess so
Speaker 1: I have to. I've got to introduce myself. And you know,
Speaker 1: like I was amazed how few people of these ranchers.
Speaker 1: I sometimes get a little bit of eyebrow raised but
Speaker 1: a lot of these people their kids came to Berkeley,
Speaker 1: or their grandparents went to Berkeley, but their parents so
Speaker 1: that they themselves did. So there's you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of these things are sceptions about like how different we are.
Speaker 1: And as soon as you meet somebody, shake their hand,
Speaker 1: you tell me you're just interested in knowing their perspective.
Speaker 1: They want us to share their story too. And I
Speaker 1: think I think that plays with private leases as well.
Speaker 1: I think if you look at it as this as
Speaker 1: this big no trespassing sign and this big scary thing,
Speaker 1: if you instead just call him up. I've had remarkable
Speaker 1: luck just calling up a landowner. And I called up
Speaker 1: a couple of landowners. I had some some staff flower
Speaker 1: growing up growing on it just north of Davis for
Speaker 1: dove hunting. Uh, and it it takes a lot of
Speaker 1: courage to call, to make a cold call to a landowner.
Speaker 1: And I called two people and both of them granted
Speaker 1: me access, and they were so they were grateful that
Speaker 1: I even called them. They're like, wow, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for calling. That's really nice of you. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's and they actually felt I think pleased to be
Speaker 1: able to be generous to to you know, at the
Speaker 1: time a graduate student, somebody kind of lower income, and
Speaker 1: I just wanted to get out in the nature. So
Speaker 1: they have something at stake. They love these lands too.
Speaker 1: They have some mistake to encourage people to get out
Speaker 1: there and to enjoy and love these lands in the
Speaker 1: same way they do. So, so I I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't like that sort of I mean, I grew up
Speaker 1: in a place where, yeah, knew ranches that were super friendly,
Speaker 1: so they're from these people I knew, and so I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily see that elitism thing is driving the
Speaker 1: private land lease arrangement. I see it more as as
Speaker 1: an opportunity for controlled and also for the ability to
Speaker 1: to go to a place and sort of making your own. Um.
Speaker 1: Somebody described like the best hunting leases they've set up.
Speaker 1: It was it was a guide. It was an operator
Speaker 1: who set up leases hunting leases around the state, and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, the best time is if you
Speaker 1: can get guys in there. They start treating the property
Speaker 1: as if it's their own, and once somebody is there
Speaker 1: for three or five years, their kids start going, they
Speaker 1: grow up there, their kids take over the lease. You know,
Speaker 1: it really is part of the landscape is part of
Speaker 1: their they're being. So I think that's the thing that
Speaker 1: that that's a real opportunity. And in the places where
Speaker 1: there aren't leases for whatever perceptions, whether it's oh you're
Speaker 1: you're a leader, Oh hunters are just gonna come and
Speaker 1: shoot my cows or pop hole or shoot holes in
Speaker 1: my trough, you know, to the extent we can get
Speaker 1: past those sort of caricatures, I think there's some real
Speaker 1: opportunities to expand are yeah, yeah, and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a real important part of the conversation. I think, Um,
Speaker 1: there is like I said, there're there, they're these ideas
Speaker 1: that well, I would just say that it's leases and
Speaker 1: things of that nature aren't something that we dig too
Speaker 1: deep into. We just don't we dig deep into. Every
Speaker 1: time there's a we need access to a certain you know,
Speaker 1: say the Crazy the Crazy Mountain Range there in Montana,
Speaker 1: we will fight for that. There's a lot of examples
Speaker 1: of things that we fought for, um, the Sabinoso Wilderness
Speaker 1: and and things that we're fighting for to have a
Speaker 1: direct action. Right we if we do this, if we
Speaker 1: get a walk in area here, if we get an
Speaker 1: easement here, we're gonna open up all this access to people.
Speaker 1: And so when you talk about, like pushing back on
Speaker 1: Steve's comment on access, this access thing is is such
Speaker 1: a it's it's not a chicken. It's like, it's not
Speaker 1: a chicken in the egg. But like, if I can
Speaker 1: get an easement right here on this square chunk of land,
Speaker 1: then that's then I've provided access and anybody that wants
Speaker 1: to go through there can go through there, So that
Speaker 1: there really is a good feeling that that you're making
Speaker 1: a difference there. It's harder to say, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: we really talked a lot about leases and more people started.
Speaker 1: It's just not it's easy of equation. It's relationships, right,
Speaker 1: It's like building relationships, and there's thousands and tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of ways those can work out, and they can change,
Speaker 1: and they're not permanent. The nice thing about public lands
Speaker 1: and a conservation easement, you've got a permanent access, which
Speaker 1: is really nice. Um, so what are we missing here?
Speaker 1: There's so much I feel like we've got to be
Speaker 1: missing some stuff in your Yeah, well, I think one
Speaker 1: thing that's kind of interesting is we're digging in now.
Speaker 1: After this we started thinking about what are states doing
Speaker 1: to seeing the impact of these policies and that Midwest
Speaker 1: area on affecting lease rate and things like that. We
Speaker 1: started digging into how all the different states and we're
Speaker 1: gonna present we're gonna pronoun a proposal to present this
Speaker 1: at the en NASK Summit for the National Assembly of
Speaker 1: Sportsmen's Caucuses with Congressional Sportsman's Foundation. Um, we're gonna propose
Speaker 1: that we've dug into six different policy areas for all
Speaker 1: fifty states. We've got three great undergraduates who have been
Speaker 1: working on three four undergraduates have been working on this
Speaker 1: over the course of the last year and its painstaking worth.
Speaker 1: They go to every single state and they dig into, well,
Speaker 1: what are the cost share programs that are around. There's
Speaker 1: a big you know, federal government has a big cost
Speaker 1: share programs for conservation through the NRCS. Well, there a
Speaker 1: lot of states we found we started digg into this,
Speaker 1: a lot of states have their own cost share programs.
Speaker 1: What are the property tax systems? Obviously we saw the
Speaker 1: impacts of Wisconsin and um in Michigan's property tax laws
Speaker 1: on and the effects that are likely affecting their leasing rates. Well,
Speaker 1: what how what are other states doing? For property tax exemptions.
Speaker 1: Does does Some states you only get your property TAXI
Speaker 1: exemption if it's an agriculture. You don't get it if
Speaker 1: it's in wildlife conservation. Some states do, like in California,
Speaker 1: put in wildlife conservation, you put in recreation, it'll can
Speaker 1: still count for your agricultural tax exemption. But some states don't.
Speaker 1: These are some things that there's a lot, yeah, we
Speaker 1: could think about and our super secret media to project
Speaker 1: where there's a lot of things where well, if you'll
Speaker 1: if you'll do this to the land, if you'll plant this,
Speaker 1: if you'll rotate these crops, if you'll do this, this
Speaker 1: will pay you. But now so I'm so now I'm
Speaker 1: I'm just leasing a property or or I bought a
Speaker 1: small piece of fragmented acre. It's just because I know
Speaker 1: there's some deer on there and that's gonna be my
Speaker 1: family might build a little capital there. And I've got
Speaker 1: forty acres of my own. Finally, well, the government will
Speaker 1: come in and say, if you do this, this, this,
Speaker 1: and this, we'll give you a monthly will basically rent
Speaker 1: this from you to give you a month payment. That
Speaker 1: might help to subside like subsidize you're buying it a
Speaker 1: property or or leasing the property out whatever. But then
Speaker 1: you also have a bunch of work to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if you just want to recreate and you just
Speaker 1: want to hang some tree stands and kill some to hear,
Speaker 1: now you have this obligation to you know, keep up
Speaker 1: the work that you've you've promised the government that you'll do.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a weird there's a weird dichotomy there.
Speaker 1: How do you how do you balance those things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're trade offs, yeah, for different for how much you
Speaker 1: want to get involved with these things. And some people
Speaker 1: might might want to do these things even without the
Speaker 1: government support. One rancher told me this joke once. He said,
Speaker 1: I just gotta repeat it because it is so funny,
Speaker 1: and I'm probably gonna get in trouble for saying it. Um,
Speaker 1: I have to have you censored out. Later. Um, I
Speaker 1: could beat I'll beat it out. And he said, he said,
Speaker 1: he said, we don't work, We don't do any government programs,
Speaker 1: and this is just a big land under in California.
Speaker 1: He said, we don't do any of those because get
Speaker 1: in bed with the government, you get a lot more
Speaker 1: than a good night's sleep. That is a strong opinion
Speaker 1: and some aspects of of the private land under community.
Speaker 1: But so I just to illustrate there's just such a
Speaker 1: diversity of ways in which people look at this. But
Speaker 1: I also think some of those landowners still might do
Speaker 1: a lot of these same practices anyways, they just don't
Speaker 1: want the government involved. Yeah, that's yeah, that's true. Like
Speaker 1: I said, once you get him involved, there's there's been
Speaker 1: they'll they'll give you the benefits, right, there's financial benefits there,
Speaker 1: but it it is you're now working with a complicated entity.
Speaker 1: So you have a there's a big, a big data
Speaker 1: thing here. It's a bunch of numbers. It's down in
Speaker 1: the middle of the paper table too. This is land
Speaker 1: areaan property, characters is for wildife associated recreation and and
Speaker 1: total acre total acres and millions for these two things
Speaker 1: by region. If you go to hunting, there's two d
Speaker 1: and twenty million, as we've discussed, lease acres and a
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty five million own acres. It's pretty interesting obviously,
Speaker 1: So explain those two numbers. Because when I look at this,
Speaker 1: I was like, so this survey look asked landowners are
Speaker 1: asked hunters, do you own or least land primarily for hunting, um,
Speaker 1: And so they could answer yes to either those UM.
Speaker 1: So they answered so they owned land primarily for the
Speaker 1: purpose of hunting, which was a whole lot. Hundred thirty
Speaker 1: five million acres was for people owned land primarily for hunting. Now,
Speaker 1: the interesting difference is there's a lot more. There's quite
Speaker 1: a bit more for leasing million acres for leasing land
Speaker 1: for hunting. But um. The difference that's interesting is this
Speaker 1: mean size of the property. If you scoot over to
Speaker 1: the fourth or fifth column on there, the average size
Speaker 1: of the least property is acres. So two thousand, four
Speaker 1: hundred acres you get on average if you're leasing land,
Speaker 1: because if you're owning land is down at the average
Speaker 1: is three six acres. I mean that that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Lands expensive, it makes sense, makes no But you can
Speaker 1: lease a lot of land for acre uh, and you can.
Speaker 1: You can make your money go a lot farther and
Speaker 1: get a lot bigger acreage. After looking at this, I've
Speaker 1: always to own land to yeah, But after looking at this,
Speaker 1: I also want access to thousands of acres from my hunting. UM.
Speaker 1: It would be nice if I was in the high
Speaker 1: density area with white tail and turkeys were all over
Speaker 1: the place. Yeah, a few acres probably do it. But
Speaker 1: in the West for sure. Yeah, the numbers say least
Speaker 1: at least get get to spend your money in two
Speaker 1: thousand acres lea well, and you wonder, you know, just
Speaker 1: that I'm thinking of my future, Like, if I'm gonna
Speaker 1: spend the money for twenty years to least the same properties,
Speaker 1: I'd say it's two twenty years to least two thousand acres.
Speaker 1: I don't gotta pay the property tax, I don't go
Speaker 1: through the upkeep. I still have access to that property.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take a really good care of it, probably
Speaker 1: have great relationships to the landowners. Or I could buy
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred acres and struggle with all the
Speaker 1: things we've talked about, which is keeping up with a
Speaker 1: boid adversity, making sure um the land is taken care
Speaker 1: of and it's it's part of a healthier ecosystem overall.
Speaker 1: So I mean, yeah, if I'm just if I'm just
Speaker 1: thinking about my hunting, yeah, I mean, I'm least you
Speaker 1: can if you can lock in a good least and
Speaker 1: you can find somebody in that's that's where the work
Speaker 1: comes in. If I got enough money for a land
Speaker 1: manager on my O'Brien ranch that we're gonna buy. Um.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that's interesting here just you broke
Speaker 1: this also down into the four regions obviously Northeast, Midwest,
Speaker 1: South and West. UM. So take people through both the
Speaker 1: lease and owned percentages just by region, because I think
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Yeah. The leasing, So about the land least
Speaker 1: in the countries in the South, Um, you think about
Speaker 1: Texas has a huge leasing industry, UM, as well as
Speaker 1: I think of the states like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. So
Speaker 1: it's just a culture of it. Um. Somebody once I
Speaker 1: think I make reference in the paper. One suggestion for
Speaker 1: why this is is that, oh gosh, it was a
Speaker 1: sociology paper. They said the South was predominantly settled by
Speaker 1: people of from upland areas in Scotland and I think Ireland,
Speaker 1: and they tended to be more uh. I think they
Speaker 1: used the word territorial. Now we're getting real deep. So
Speaker 1: they were they were expecting to have payment for access
Speaker 1: on their land. And this is this is going way
Speaker 1: back to like you know, eighteen hundreds of time frame,
Speaker 1: whereas people in North came from areas in England where
Speaker 1: there was more of an open land culture, and so
Speaker 1: that this might have been I think I suggested this
Speaker 1: might be some of the reason why you see this
Speaker 1: very different rates of leasing in the South versus other
Speaker 1: um parts of the kinds pretty crazy. I mean the
Speaker 1: Midwest is five or the Midwest of six, Northeast five,
Speaker 1: West eight forty two for the South. Yeah, it's very Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it's interesting. That's not a number that that that's
Speaker 1: a number that the bears explaining and if that's the way,
Speaker 1: and I think it's I think Texas is a big state,
Speaker 1: UM and that probably is a big part of that.
Speaker 1: And I think that same culture follows in place like Alabama.
Speaker 1: Damn you, Texas. You're always skewing the numbers owned total.
Speaker 1: There's there's some interesting things in the own total that
Speaker 1: the Northeast there's only three point seven percent, in the
Speaker 1: West only one nine, and then in the Midwest and
Speaker 1: the South fifteen and sixteen cent or practically so interesting
Speaker 1: that if you were combined the South and the Midwest,
Speaker 1: that's that's roughly, you know of of a thirty percent number.
Speaker 1: A huge portion of that was I was really surprised
Speaker 1: by that sort of dichotomy in the Midwest that you
Speaker 1: have this really large number of people owning land the
Speaker 1: large a lot of the owned lands in the Midwest,
Speaker 1: but very little the least lands in the Midwest. And
Speaker 1: that came down to those sort of I think those
Speaker 1: policies up in those states. Um, but then you think
Speaker 1: those policies are pretty neat. But then if it's encouraging
Speaker 1: people to own land, might this also be encouraging fragmentation
Speaker 1: of those two thousand acre properties into three acre properties.
Speaker 1: Because if if you if you only need, if you
Speaker 1: can only af forward or only need three hundred acres
Speaker 1: for your hunting end of splitting up land into smaller
Speaker 1: and smaller chunks, that might be all right, but in
Speaker 1: the end you're probably gonna have more human impact the
Speaker 1: more fragments you take sixty acres and breaking up a
Speaker 1: bunch of forty acre parcels you I mean, you have
Speaker 1: you go from it's obvious and you go from one
Speaker 1: contiguous management to a bunch of different types of management
Speaker 1: that we all as hunch as we all know you
Speaker 1: like if you buy back forty is it's about your neighbors, man.
Speaker 1: You gotta have good neighbors. If they're over there on
Speaker 1: opening day just shooting every year that walks, you're not
Speaker 1: gonna have the best experience on your forty and the
Speaker 1: impact of fencing. You know, there's been some really interesting
Speaker 1: things that my colleagues, justin Dr Justin Bushchairs is working
Speaker 1: on up at the Hopland Research Station up north. They
Speaker 1: here and they're looking at fences. They have GPS colors
Speaker 1: on deer and there's they're noticing that some deer, even
Speaker 1: though it's just a barb wire fence, a standard you know,
Speaker 1: three or four five strand bar wire fans, these these
Speaker 1: deer will just walk and it will affect their home range.
Speaker 1: When you look at their home range and where they're going,
Speaker 1: there is a solid border where they just don't really
Speaker 1: want to cross this fence. It's not that much energy
Speaker 1: to get over it, but maybe it's on the edge
Speaker 1: and they don't go. So it does create these even
Speaker 1: standard bob wire fences that deer have generally no problem
Speaker 1: getting over, do impact some of their movement and you
Speaker 1: start looking at large migrations. Cross number ten fences versus
Speaker 1: one is a big deal. Yeah, to travel back to
Speaker 1: Texas for a moment, there's a lot of high fences there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well that's a whole another thing. It's like
Speaker 1: what does that do to wild Yeah, that's just that.
Speaker 1: That's I don't want to get into that. I just
Speaker 1: want to get into that. But this is all you know,
Speaker 1: well I did look into that, but this is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to look at. Yeah, because I was thinking,
Speaker 1: I was like, well, what does this mean for it?
Speaker 1: Is there gonna be inbreeding because of this, Like if
Speaker 1: you have these fragmented populations, like I called some of
Speaker 1: those folks the biologies out there in Texas Parks and Wildlife,
Speaker 1: and they said, you know, there's no such thing as
Speaker 1: a deer proof fence. And if you have just one
Speaker 1: deer get through every year or every couple of years
Speaker 1: or something some very small rate which they expected, they
Speaker 1: did not expect to have genetic impacts to these animals.
Speaker 1: So that was interesting to me. I think, um, certainly
Speaker 1: it does seem artificial all to have, you know, this
Speaker 1: sort of completely broken off system. And it said that
Speaker 1: to me, I'd be like, yeah, but that's I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're still changing the whole city. Maybe one or
Speaker 1: two get through, but maybe they don't. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: you're certainly leaving that open to happenstance. Yeah. Yeah, man.
Speaker 1: The other thing here, as you were saying, this may
Speaker 1: not be as impactful as I thought it was when
Speaker 1: first reading it. But fishing, I mean there's thirty four
Speaker 1: million lease and owned total acres U thirty five million
Speaker 1: for hunting and then for for wildlife watching, which is
Speaker 1: the third one umt million, And so hunting is a
Speaker 1: giant chunk of the data you could pop. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: terms of the area, it's it's it's dominant. I mean
Speaker 1: compared to wildlife and fishing. Wildlife watching and fishing. Like
Speaker 1: we said, just for fishing, you just need to get
Speaker 1: access to the stream. Yeah, so it's not Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you buy a cabin on a stream access and you
Speaker 1: got it. When I first read that up, like yeah, hunting, fishing, no,
Speaker 1: you can be down or not. My excited um and
Speaker 1: then the while I like watching too. You can do
Speaker 1: it on a pretty small A lot of people like
Speaker 1: to bird watch. You know, you're gonna see your deer
Speaker 1: and your you get get five ten anchars. You probably
Speaker 1: you deer coming through your property if they're deer in
Speaker 1: the area. Yeah, Well, I mean I think all this
Speaker 1: you know. What strikes me about this is time you spent,
Speaker 1: you know, in cold rooms looking at ridiculous amounts of data.
Speaker 1: I think some people can can look at this. We've
Speaker 1: done some other um things where we just looked at
Speaker 1: studies where people have questioned, well, what sample side like,
Speaker 1: there's that there surely is that those are critical parts
Speaker 1: of this. But the other part of this is what
Speaker 1: you what you've learned and doing the work to put
Speaker 1: this together. You know, you've you've been closer and closer
Speaker 1: proximity to this data than maybe anyone, and you've been
Speaker 1: able to just have this is like the empirical knowledge
Speaker 1: of of spending that time, whether you want to break
Speaker 1: down exactly the sample sizes and how accurate here or there.
Speaker 1: I feel there's value. There's just really intrinsic value and
Speaker 1: the fact that you spent the time to really analyze
Speaker 1: these things and and go deep. So I appreciate that
Speaker 1: and I think it's I think it's valuable for that
Speaker 1: reason in and of itself. Well, we report all our
Speaker 1: standard errors so you can see you can see the uncertainty,
Speaker 1: and there are there is uncertainty essocially with all these numbers,
Speaker 1: and they're all reported so um. But the you know,
Speaker 1: one thing before we wrap up of what I see
Speaker 1: is some opportunities. You know. I think we look at
Speaker 1: these data and we see some of the big numbers,
Speaker 1: and I think in the West it is interesting. The
Speaker 1: West is clearly a lot of public land. California, which
Speaker 1: people might not think of as really a big public
Speaker 1: land state is half public land. Um. I think there's
Speaker 1: there is this sort of that dichotomy that we were
Speaker 1: talking about. There's a sort of culture whereas like the
Speaker 1: hunters go out in the public land and the private
Speaker 1: land is not. I even see it among our there's
Speaker 1: a culture that suggests that private landers should not charge
Speaker 1: money for access because we're in a public lands. Hunting
Speaker 1: is a public resource. Game is a public resource, and
Speaker 1: I I again I find myself feeling like it limits
Speaker 1: us if we if we come to our landowners, so
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be charging money. A lander's gonna say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna let anybody on, and so that's a loose,
Speaker 1: that's a lose, that's a lot of lack of access entirely. Um.
Speaker 1: Even if this lander says I'm only going to sell
Speaker 1: dollar trophy, elk huts that's all I'm gonna do. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that to a lot of us that that is out
Speaker 1: of that is out of my reach. Um as a
Speaker 1: as a faculty at you see Berkeley, that's that's totally
Speaker 1: out of reach. But I don't know if it's that nice.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, at twenty acre hunt, at
Speaker 1: dollar hunt is a hunt for somebody? Is that better
Speaker 1: than a zero hunt? That than hunt for nobody? And
Speaker 1: a landowner who's probably gonna just do everything he can
Speaker 1: to get rid of those elk because he has no benefits.
Speaker 1: They're grazing his pastors there on his irrigated pastor. He
Speaker 1: has no benefit for them. He's angry at the wildlife agencies,
Speaker 1: he's angry at hunters. He hates the whole system and
Speaker 1: and everybody's mad probably hates the government, hates regulations. That's
Speaker 1: generally versus versus is a zero or is it? Is
Speaker 1: it an acceptable thing to have ian? And isn't that
Speaker 1: person paine for a hunt? Aren't they a hunter too?
Speaker 1: I mean they are. There are certainly people who have
Speaker 1: a lot of financial resources, but maybe they're also somebody
Speaker 1: who just saved up for ten years. And he said,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this. There's a lot of that, and
Speaker 1: and you're right, and I think I came, I came
Speaker 1: to this place. I came to Berkeley's especially to challenge
Speaker 1: my own perspectives on things. And I think that's that's
Speaker 1: what you just said. There is a very important thing
Speaker 1: too for all hunters, especially those of us who celebrate
Speaker 1: access in public lands. So much is to understand, like
Speaker 1: what's the proper cultural like stificates of each thing, what's
Speaker 1: the proper mix in our our our culture just shared ideas.
Speaker 1: How do we make sure that we were holding up
Speaker 1: the things that are important but understanding the there are
Speaker 1: other things that also contribute, and how do we balance
Speaker 1: those things in a way that makes sense. How do
Speaker 1: we not over emphasize public lands and how we talk
Speaker 1: and how we communicate to each other in our community,
Speaker 1: how do we emphasize each type of land use, each
Speaker 1: type of land ownership, and and how do we just
Speaker 1: make sure that we understand all those things together? And
Speaker 1: the big ridiculous tapestry that this is. Like I said earlier,
Speaker 1: you can't talk about these things in a monolith. There
Speaker 1: isn't public lands and private lands. There are just it's impossible,
Speaker 1: But I came here to kind of like I want
Speaker 1: to highlight that. I want to make sure everybody understands that, well,
Speaker 1: I public lands. There is American to me, is is
Speaker 1: apple pie. I don't really like apple pie, but people
Speaker 1: seem to like it. That's fine. But but there's also
Speaker 1: I also understand the need for balance and the need
Speaker 1: to examine every type of land use and every type
Speaker 1: of land. Yeah, and so hopefully folks can do that
Speaker 1: and increase opportunities and build relationships and increase these coalitions
Speaker 1: where we have common ground. And I think ranchers are
Speaker 1: solidly in the side of maintaining these landscapes, which is
Speaker 1: the saying solidly where hunters are too. And I think
Speaker 1: these sort of wedge issues that drive us apart, when
Speaker 1: we really at the at the core, we can get
Speaker 1: get past those sort of things that are dividing us.
Speaker 1: We can probably make a lot more progress. And I
Speaker 1: will tell you that I've had I have I often
Speaker 1: say things I like and don't like on this podcast.
Speaker 1: I don't really like apple pie. I just want to
Speaker 1: put that out there for everybody. So if you think
Speaker 1: that's weird, deal with more of a cheesecake family that brownies, brownies, cheesecakes.
Speaker 1: I'm not really not really there depending on the type
Speaker 1: of filling right, it could be. But also I don't
Speaker 1: like peas, and and I had I've had a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are like pea farmers be like, well,
Speaker 1: come and hunt my pea farm. There's deer walking around everywhere. Um,
Speaker 1: so maybe I'll do that. I'm trying to trying to
Speaker 1: balance my perspective to get a little nuance into it.
Speaker 1: But anyway, apple pie, if you put ice cream on it,
Speaker 1: it's fine, Like it's just fine, but it's just okay.
Speaker 1: It's not great. And bald eagles also, they're okay, not great.
Speaker 1: They're okay, they're not great. Have you been around them?
Speaker 1: They're like go to you know, go to Prince of
Speaker 1: Wales and Alaska and they're like buzzards flying around. You're
Speaker 1: not real great. Um. I don't know why. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I did that. What a horrible place to
Speaker 1: be go watch a bunch of buzzard like eagles flying
Speaker 1: over your head. Yeah, the wild turkeys better than the eagle,
Speaker 1: I feel, because I just want to put that all
Speaker 1: out there. But I don't know where I was going
Speaker 1: with any of that other than to say that I
Speaker 1: think hopefully people can listen to this and really think
Speaker 1: about you know, as we as as hunters, we have
Speaker 1: different opportunities, right, different opportunities to go interest and use
Speaker 1: different types of land, to have different types of ownership.
Speaker 1: Some we all own together, some we don't, Some we
Speaker 1: have to pay to get access to. Some no one
Speaker 1: couldn't get access to because someone bought it for their
Speaker 1: own for their own reasons. So I just understand all
Speaker 1: those things, and I'll make sure everybody has access to
Speaker 1: this paper because, um, there's a lot of numbers and
Speaker 1: a lot of words, but there's a lot of really
Speaker 1: um impactful stuff. It's good information. It shows the impact
Speaker 1: of the hunting community from an angle that generally has
Speaker 1: been thought of as a black box where people didn't
Speaker 1: know how much fun are we talking about nationwide? Um,
Speaker 1: And we've got some We've put together the best data
Speaker 1: sets we can to get the best numbers we can
Speaker 1: on that and uh, and I look forward to doing
Speaker 1: an update with what we're doing. We're carrying on with
Speaker 1: this work and seeing how policies now are impacting this stuff.
Speaker 1: So I'm looking forward. So when's that policy working. It's ongoing.
Speaker 1: You see this map on my screen right here. I
Speaker 1: got several I started the giant screen. I love big screens.
Speaker 1: You know. Once I met a lawyer who said he
Speaker 1: had a really great pen, and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a lawyer, so I have a really nice This
Speaker 1: is the tool of my trades. It depends. So I
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, I work on the computer all
Speaker 1: day and this is this is a tool of my trade. Um,
Speaker 1: let's see where is the might if I get to
Speaker 1: screen that big and make me look smarter? Yeah, there
Speaker 1: you go. That's another good reason. So we're we're looking
Speaker 1: at all these different programs and seeing how we're gonna
Speaker 1: be presenting this um in Bozeman, and we're going to
Speaker 1: do it work. This is a draft working paper for
Speaker 1: Bozeman Perk, the conference they're holding in July I think
Speaker 1: nine or so, and we'll be talking about how these
Speaker 1: different policies interact. So covering everything from public access programs,
Speaker 1: is a lot of mentorship and hunting programs that we're covering.
Speaker 1: We're gonna see like we're about at this point where
Speaker 1: the cusp of being able to pull all these big
Speaker 1: data sets together and seeing what is what is interacting
Speaker 1: between these different programs. Are our states with good public
Speaker 1: access programs for private land also doing cast share programs,
Speaker 1: so they also doing property tax exemptions for conservation. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like what are the unintended consequences? Y? And and how
Speaker 1: do they interact and what um. One of my undergraduates
Speaker 1: mentioned she had studied and I was like, well, what's
Speaker 1: the what do you think is happening here? Says, well,
Speaker 1: it seems like it sort of reminds me of this
Speaker 1: class I've read this stuff about she called it. I
Speaker 1: want to look up federalism. There is different types of federalism,
Speaker 1: compensatory federalism and versus cooperative federalism and iterative federalism. And
Speaker 1: the idea was that states and sometimes in our system,
Speaker 1: they can really take the role, take on a lead
Speaker 1: on something when that they see a gap from the
Speaker 1: federal government happening, and so then the federal government might
Speaker 1: take lead from some of the states they're doing something innovative.
Speaker 1: So we found some really interesting programs like Indiana's got
Speaker 1: this program called Apple which it combines public access, habitat
Speaker 1: and cast share. I think it combines all these things together.
Speaker 1: It seems really innovative. I mean, we're going to highlight
Speaker 1: a few of these in this talk, in this paper.
Speaker 1: They'll come out for perk this working paper, and then
Speaker 1: we're hoping to present over at the with Congressional Sportsman's
Speaker 1: Foundation coming up in November. So look forward to giving
Speaker 1: an update. And you're coming to both and I'll come
Speaker 1: and uh, I'll come and cheer you on if you'll
Speaker 1: get a coffee might Yeah, I am I allowed to
Speaker 1: cheer if why you're please do that's that's the best. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be like your hype man. Yeah. Federalism, yeah, bring
Speaker 1: it all right, Look well I appreciate it. I'm off
Speaker 1: now to go find a vegan and an animal rights
Speaker 1: I look forward to hearing that. That's gonna be those podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be fun. Um. But all like I said,
Speaker 1: this is as much to me like to to find
Speaker 1: ways to challenge my ideas on on land. This is
Speaker 1: it in the same way as I'll hope those folks
Speaker 1: can challenge me on some of my thinks that things
Speaker 1: of killing and eating. I look forward to hearing about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, thanks, thank you, thank you, take care. Thanks.
Speaker 1: I guess I grew up. That's it. That's all another
Speaker 1: episode of the Hunting Collectives in the Books. Thank you
Speaker 1: to Luke McCallie. Thank you to our little round table
Speaker 1: there in the beginning, including Steven Ronella, Mark Kenyan, Sam
Speaker 1: Longer and and Fill the Engineer Um. Great conversation. I
Speaker 1: don't want to get into a bunch of sales pitches
Speaker 1: at the end of the show here this week, and
Speaker 1: we're not going to have any listener feedback. I just
Speaker 1: want to address this issue because we I know this
Speaker 1: this podcast isn't going to solve some of the angst
Speaker 1: out there about public lands and the public land movement
Speaker 1: and the identity of the Western hunter and some of
Speaker 1: the Midwest and the East feeling a little angst and
Speaker 1: anger towards some of the focus uh in our community
Speaker 1: and our culture on these things. But what I will
Speaker 1: say is that you know, it would be it would
Speaker 1: it definitely be our ruination if we allow this the
Speaker 1: kind of sever the bonds that that both public lands
Speaker 1: and private lands bring to our community. So for those
Speaker 1: of you that that are in listen to this, and
Speaker 1: you're in North Carolina, or you're in Maryland, or you're
Speaker 1: in Florida, or you're in Georgia, or you're in South Carolina,
Speaker 1: or you're in Iowa. You're one of these states where
Speaker 1: you feel like maybe a little bit left out of
Speaker 1: the conversation. Maybe the conversation has changed since you came
Speaker 1: into hunting. UM. Maybe the energy is in places where
Speaker 1: you don't reside. UM one right in and let us
Speaker 1: know that, and we'll have these conversations. We'll have both
Speaker 1: the difficult conversations where we agree and disagree, and we
Speaker 1: will have conversation about how we get better. And that's
Speaker 1: why I went and talk to Luke McCauley and wanted
Speaker 1: to learn more about what leasing in private land ownership
Speaker 1: really means to economically, socially, conservation wise for our country.
Speaker 1: And UH was pleasantly surprised to find a very educated
Speaker 1: professor that was sitting in a very unlikely place talking
Speaker 1: about something that means a lot to me. So as
Speaker 1: a way to kind of bring this all together, I
Speaker 1: would just say, certainly, while public lands are trendy, we
Speaker 1: gotta watch out in our in our world UM four
Speaker 1: trends and where they're headed and make sure they're always
Speaker 1: on the right course. As we do with anything else,
Speaker 1: So thank you for listening, or take you out with
Speaker 1: old number seven and we'll see next week on the
Speaker 1: Hunting Club. Dennisee who whiskey got me drinking in Heaven?
Speaker 1: And I know I can't stay here too long because
Speaker 1: I can't go a week without doing run oh without
Speaker 1: and run drinking out and run wrong drinking in Heaven