Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen. This is
Speaker 1: the meat Eater Podcast. We're gonna talk now about something
Speaker 1: that is perhaps the least understood in my opinion, realm
Speaker 1: of of of hunting and fishing in America, which is
Speaker 1: hunting mountain lions. Um, something that I've never done successfully,
Speaker 1: no thanks to the guy I'm sitting here with, Floyd
Speaker 1: green Um. Before I get into that, I want to
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Speaker 1: on to Yanni uhhaspitelus is joining us here. Go onto
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Speaker 1: Is Hunt to Eat t shirts. What's one of those
Speaker 1: good T shirts cost? Y? We usually can get a
Speaker 1: ship for just a couple of dollars. And if Yanni's
Speaker 1: out of stock, like he always is, just keep checking
Speaker 1: back because he'll buy two or three more and get
Speaker 1: him in stock. Okay, I'm on the subject of hunt
Speaker 1: mountain lions I have. I'm gonna give my personal mountain
Speaker 1: lion resume. I've eaten three mountain lions, which is the
Speaker 1: same number of mountain lions that I've seen in the wild,
Speaker 1: though I haven't eaten any of the ones I've seen
Speaker 1: in the while, they all separate ones. There's this place
Speaker 1: outside of Missoula, Montana, called the Rock Creek Lodge, and
Speaker 1: every year they have something called the Testicle Festival, where
Speaker 1: they served There's this whole, big, very hedonistic festival around
Speaker 1: serving deep fried nuts from castrated steers. They cast rated
Speaker 1: steers in the spring with us in the fall. It
Speaker 1: must be freezing them. I don't never. It seems like
Speaker 1: you do it around the time, right, But one time
Speaker 1: I was in there in the spring and there was
Speaker 1: a pot of uh pulled pork on the counter and
Speaker 1: they weren't selling. It was free, and I made myself
Speaker 1: a sandwich and the guy told me that it was
Speaker 1: mountain lion, and um, he said, rock Creek lodge, balls
Speaker 1: in the fall, pussy in the spring. You know that
Speaker 1: that was one of the three mountain lions I've eating
Speaker 1: on another mountain lion I ate. My old girlfriend was
Speaker 1: in line in the hardware store and Wyoming and the
Speaker 1: guy in front of her was buying a mountain lion
Speaker 1: tag and she said, what do you do with the
Speaker 1: mountain lion? He said, I just wanted to hide. She said,
Speaker 1: we'll take all the meat, and sure enough, this dude
Speaker 1: called about a week later and gave us the whole
Speaker 1: mountain lion and we ate that thing every which way.
Speaker 1: It's not bad now, it's pretty good. The backstraps on
Speaker 1: there where it's at. Yeah, but it's all, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a white meat that surprising resembles pork without
Speaker 1: the greasiness. You know, pretty good stuff. It'll test the
Speaker 1: strength of your jaw often. So so I'm joining this
Speaker 1: conversation buying a real, live, actual very serious um lion hunter.
Speaker 1: Floyd green Um. Floyd owns like some things that that
Speaker 1: you might be familiar with that that I like to
Speaker 1: use and you see often around um wilderness athlete outdoorsmans.
Speaker 1: But you've been a lion hunter longer than any of
Speaker 1: that stuff. He always started to talk lines the first
Speaker 1: time with some guys. And I was a teenage o
Speaker 1: late teens, and I didn't have my own hound star.
Speaker 1: I was around twenty. But you were you were born here.
Speaker 1: We're we're in Arizona right now, uh, in Skysdale and
Speaker 1: you were born here in Phoenix. And what was the
Speaker 1: lion hunting culture then? Like, how did you get into it? Well?
Speaker 1: I got into it actually up in show, Arizona, up
Speaker 1: there building homes and the guys were headed out one
Speaker 1: day and I just tagged along with them. And I've
Speaker 1: always been always had a lot of dogs and been
Speaker 1: around dogs my whole life. What was the reason you
Speaker 1: had them? I didn't have any lion hunting dogs that
Speaker 1: they were had one coonhound and one mutt. Uh. But
Speaker 1: after spending time with those guys and watching them work
Speaker 1: with their dogs, and you know, the first time you
Speaker 1: see a lion climb a tree, or you walk up
Speaker 1: to a tree and one is in it, it's just
Speaker 1: the buggy that generally bites people that really enjoy that
Speaker 1: and amazing on them to be up close to like that.
Speaker 1: And it's a dog thing largely too. Absolutely, we can
Speaker 1: get into that. Absolutely, that's if it wasn't for watching
Speaker 1: the young dogs transform and all the planning that goes
Speaker 1: behind putting your packet dogs together, breeding the next group
Speaker 1: of puppies, you know, just seeing lions get killed. It's
Speaker 1: certainly not why people hunt lions. So how how many
Speaker 1: years ago was that you started hunting lions early eighties
Speaker 1: somewhere right around and got your own dogs and that
Speaker 1: was I had a lot, you know, I had my
Speaker 1: own dogs within a year at that time, but they
Speaker 1: wasn't a very successful group of dogs at that point
Speaker 1: in my life. Just had a lot more dogs and
Speaker 1: headline catching going on. What what one thing that Floyd
Speaker 1: does like that? There's correct me if I'm wrong in this,
Speaker 1: But basically you would divide lion hunting into two categories.
Speaker 1: Talking him in the snow, right, is that fair? It is? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, or hunting them in what there is no snow? Well,
Speaker 1: hunting him in bare ground conditions is more challenging due
Speaker 1: to the fact that you you rely on the dogs
Speaker 1: a lot more so, it takes a lot higher level
Speaker 1: of hound. Uh. You know, you're in the snow, you're
Speaker 1: gonna drive the roads. Look for where alliance crossed in
Speaker 1: the snow. You can determine, generally, determined to some degree,
Speaker 1: how old that track is. Certainly can determine which way
Speaker 1: it's going with the hounds. When you're riding along on
Speaker 1: your muddle or some guys do it off of before wheeler. However,
Speaker 1: you may be doing it and your dogs are free
Speaker 1: casting out in front of you. There's literally dozens of
Speaker 1: animals that they have the opportunity that they smell every
Speaker 1: step of the way, they're smelling some different creature and
Speaker 1: you're relying on them to let you know that they've
Speaker 1: they've crossed the lion's path and you may go. You
Speaker 1: may go days before that happens in a lot of cases.
Speaker 1: My brother, my older half brother, was an elk guide
Speaker 1: in Colorado for many years and he did some lion
Speaker 1: He had a guy, one of his guides was a
Speaker 1: lion and hunter and they would just you know, have
Speaker 1: clients he wanted to come out and he would have
Speaker 1: a list of guys and he wouldn't call the client
Speaker 1: until he found the track, and guys would because he
Speaker 1: would have some guys like you gotta be ready to
Speaker 1: go at the drop the hat and he'd called and
Speaker 1: got and like get on a plane and come up
Speaker 1: from Dallas or whatever. And then they begin to hunt them.
Speaker 1: And then you go chase that line. And I don't
Speaker 1: you know, in some parts of the country there's just uh,
Speaker 1: nobody even thinks about lion hunting until the snowfalls. And
Speaker 1: part of that, you know, now with the wolves like
Speaker 1: they are right, you know, they can really determine whether
Speaker 1: there's wolves in the area or not. Also before they
Speaker 1: turn there, because the wolves to kill your dog. You know,
Speaker 1: the Canadian wolves are just a dangerous you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're always a threat to the guys with hounds up there.
Speaker 1: And I don't know much about hunting in in the
Speaker 1: northern part of our country, but what I see of it, it's, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, snow hunting can be very very challenging, and
Speaker 1: it can be really really tough physically. Some of the
Speaker 1: toughest hunts I've ever been on have been in the snow,
Speaker 1: just climbing around on snowy hillsides you know, go fifteen
Speaker 1: miles and two ft of snow and in and out
Speaker 1: of the Grand Canyon a couple of times, and you
Speaker 1: know you have It's just a tough, tough hunt on everybody.
Speaker 1: But what what what the snow gives you? Though? So
Speaker 1: when you when you go out and loot for a line,
Speaker 1: Let's let's just set this up first, so so people
Speaker 1: get tome about when you got a loot for line,
Speaker 1: how old does the track have to be? Like, what's
Speaker 1: the oldest track you can run? Most? You know, that's
Speaker 1: a highly controversial subject. I would say nobody's gonna catch.
Speaker 1: You're gonna catch very few lines that are over six
Speaker 1: to eight hours. Your six eight hours behind them. Okay,
Speaker 1: So step one of a lion hunt, just for listeners,
Speaker 1: like step one of the lion hunt, would be that
Speaker 1: you're going into likely lion country or a place a
Speaker 1: lion is likely to pass through, and you're trying to
Speaker 1: find either through the nose of your dog or from
Speaker 1: tracks in the snow or tracks on the ground. You're
Speaker 1: trying to find a place for a mountain line came
Speaker 1: through walk through within the last six eight hours. Ideally,
Speaker 1: I don't mean the harder on the snow thing too much.
Speaker 1: But it's just like it's just an interesting way to
Speaker 1: start thinking about some of the complexities and hunt lines.
Speaker 1: Because if there's snow on the ground, you know how
Speaker 1: big the lion was, right generally the speech or the gender,
Speaker 1: so you can tell that even right and the best
Speaker 1: you know what way it went. Absolutely we experienced that.
Speaker 1: It's you know, knowing you're going the right way is
Speaker 1: the battle. Yeah, because the dog, like like a famous
Speaker 1: thing people want to say about, like a good beagle
Speaker 1: is a bagle can zing back and forth on a
Speaker 1: rabbit track a couple of times and he can tell
Speaker 1: relative freshness just on a short stretch, and he'll know
Speaker 1: what way the rabbit went. But with the line that's
Speaker 1: not it takes them a little while longer to figure
Speaker 1: it out. Well, sometimes they the tendencies of the dog. Well,
Speaker 1: the rabbits are hot a hot scent track type track,
Speaker 1: whereas a lion I would consider a cold or you
Speaker 1: mean hot, like the rabbit just jumped out, this was there,
Speaker 1: So it's much more obvious to that that beagle which
Speaker 1: way that tracks going because it's dissipating and with a
Speaker 1: lion that track maybe laying there. You know, a lion
Speaker 1: when it walks, it's it's you know, it's off floating
Speaker 1: cells or spores, whatever you want to call them. That
Speaker 1: that that's what the dog is detecting. And for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: a lion leaves a scent longer than most animals. And it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's different in the sense that like with coon dogs.
Speaker 1: You know, coon dogs are the same thing as the
Speaker 1: beagles do on rabbits, and they almost generally figure out
Speaker 1: which way that coon's going and go the right way.
Speaker 1: Lion hellms, there's I if I can't help them, then
Speaker 1: I let them make the decision. I don't ever try
Speaker 1: and outguess them. But I'm sure gone the wrong way
Speaker 1: a lot of times. How far? Why you go the
Speaker 1: wrong way until the dog has become exhausted or the
Speaker 1: track burns out there and I've gone in. Well, Chris,
Speaker 1: but the day we caught your line, this is a
Speaker 1: line that's caught Floyd Sogen to Chris Denham here, who
Speaker 1: hosts um Western Hunter TV show and is UH publisher publisher.
Speaker 1: It's a good polisher of Western Hunter, Elknor Magazines and
Speaker 1: Chris Unfairbedy line Hunting with Floyd that Yeah, we we
Speaker 1: took a large mail down in the Catalina Mountains and
Speaker 1: after the lion was shot, Chris had shock the line.
Speaker 1: One of our our better dogs turned around and trailed
Speaker 1: that track, the one that was now dead backwards till
Speaker 1: six o'clock that evening and probably went twelve miles from
Speaker 1: where we started in Bank trailing the line, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, there was no question about what went on,
Speaker 1: you know, And we ended up catching up with her
Speaker 1: in Canada del Oral almost to the bottom. Shot him
Speaker 1: at it was April fifteenth, to remember his taxing. We
Speaker 1: shot him, it was it was it's a crazy, crazy story,
Speaker 1: but it shot him with an hour of daylight and
Speaker 1: we were we got to the bottom of Kennon to
Speaker 1: Laura and finally found that that dog at dark and
Speaker 1: came pretty much out in the dark. It was fourteen
Speaker 1: hours probably that dog was trailing back on that on
Speaker 1: that lion. Yeah, when we went out those a couple
Speaker 1: of times and looking even when the dogs start running something,
Speaker 1: we were still spending a lot of time trying to
Speaker 1: find a track to verify what it was that they
Speaker 1: were after. Right, you know, a lot of these dogs,
Speaker 1: all of my dogs now, line numbers have dropped in
Speaker 1: the last five years, and all of my dogs have
Speaker 1: gotten the trailing bobcats and they never used to do that.
Speaker 1: So now we have to determine is it a bobcat
Speaker 1: or is it a lion? You know, And and it's
Speaker 1: really hard to tell. Why did you dogs start running bobcats? Well,
Speaker 1: you just it's basically you would consider that a fault
Speaker 1: and a dog in a true bear ground lion him.
Speaker 1: But almost all of them will at one time or
Speaker 1: another trail bobcats and foxes because you don't come across
Speaker 1: enough line tracks to keep them. You know, they're gonna
Speaker 1: they're gonna trail something, you know, And and it's very
Speaker 1: hard to tell the difference between the two unless you've
Speaker 1: got the soil or you find some way to find
Speaker 1: a track as foxes and bobcats wherever where lions are
Speaker 1: here in Arizona. Well that's that's always been something of
Speaker 1: a problem. But the good news is typically fox and
Speaker 1: bobcat tracks very similar to a coon or a rabbit
Speaker 1: that the track dissipates quickly, so typically is gonna run
Speaker 1: in the right direction right and typically if they don't
Speaker 1: go anywhere that's a good sign. That's probably not a
Speaker 1: line if you start moving it out as you're saying,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna like, he's not gonna They're not gonna
Speaker 1: run an eight hour old track very long, right, Well,
Speaker 1: they won't run an eight hour old Bobcat track or
Speaker 1: fox track. They won't. It's gonna be fresh to get
Speaker 1: in within probably thirty minutes or now that. Okay, what
Speaker 1: um between all the hunting you've done, like just hunting
Speaker 1: lines of people and all the stuff you've done with biologists,
Speaker 1: treating them for research purposes and tranquilizing the one, not
Speaker 1: how many lines have you run? Run? How many lions
Speaker 1: are you caught? Like like lion guys use the word
Speaker 1: caught for a lion, whether you kill the line or not,
Speaker 1: because the whole thing is catching it. Right after that,
Speaker 1: it's you know, shooting him kind of an anti climatic
Speaker 1: end to the chase. The uh. As far as lions
Speaker 1: have caught, it's between three and five hundred, you know,
Speaker 1: it's always hard to put a number on that. For me,
Speaker 1: a lot of them were caught with other hunters there
Speaker 1: in a different situation, you know, circumstances and things like that.
Speaker 1: Some of them were lions that were caught multiple times
Speaker 1: and turned loose. You know, it's always challenging to figure
Speaker 1: out how to keep score. But there's been times in
Speaker 1: my life where we've caused many as twenty five lions
Speaker 1: a year for you know, several years in a row,
Speaker 1: and there's other years you catch you know, my goal
Speaker 1: is always to catch ten a year, but there's been
Speaker 1: a few years we haven't got that done. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: maybe when you think about doing it for thirty years,
Speaker 1: that adds up pretty substantial number. As far as the
Speaker 1: lions that I've trailed, you'd be you know, thousands. How
Speaker 1: many dogs you take out to hunt a lion, I
Speaker 1: take as many as thirteen at one time. I would
Speaker 1: prefer to take a half a dozen. That's an optimum number,
Speaker 1: four to six. And I've caught a lot of lions
Speaker 1: with one dog, you know, you just it's uh. But
Speaker 1: typically for a good, good fun hunt, the number I
Speaker 1: would pick would be five or six. But a lot
Speaker 1: of times we'll take all thirteen of them just to
Speaker 1: help keep them in shape, oh, just exercise them, yea.
Speaker 1: So much about catching a lion has as much to
Speaker 1: do with the physical ability of the hound to persevere
Speaker 1: through a whole day of day of trailing and then
Speaker 1: jump the lion and actually put enough pressure on it
Speaker 1: to get it to climb a tree. So if they're
Speaker 1: not in good physical shape and their feet aren't tough
Speaker 1: and they can't go and they they got to be
Speaker 1: able to go ten twelve hours. So layout for me
Speaker 1: like how a lion hunt. Layout me like how a
Speaker 1: successful lion hunt goes. You get them the morning and
Speaker 1: like what I know each time is different, but it's like,
Speaker 1: how might a hunt go well? Chris is yours is
Speaker 1: a classic, the one we were just talking about. We
Speaker 1: got up in the morning and uh, saddle the mules
Speaker 1: and and wrote out rode up the very first. You
Speaker 1: prefer to hunt out on a mule, Yeah, that'd be
Speaker 1: my preference by far. So you're you're mounted dogs running
Speaker 1: all around, and I can stay with my dogs a
Speaker 1: lot better. Is as good as shape as you feel
Speaker 1: like you are. It's hard after a few days to
Speaker 1: physically stay with him on foot on regular basis. We
Speaker 1: cover ay enormous amount of ground. I felt I felt
Speaker 1: when I was out with you. I never hunted with
Speaker 1: a group of guys that was physically in the in
Speaker 1: the shape that you guys were when we went. Joe
Speaker 1: and I were both absolutely amazed every night when we
Speaker 1: came in and and all the guys running the cameras
Speaker 1: I mean and running them backwards up the hills and
Speaker 1: in super tough country. It was amazing. And normally guys
Speaker 1: just don't show up and that kind of physical cond issue. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we did go a long ways, you know. There
Speaker 1: was a couple of times we trailed lines that I
Speaker 1: was sure we had the one cot and uh, and
Speaker 1: we didn't. But that would have been even That's a typical,
Speaker 1: although Joe started that one early. For us, it was
Speaker 1: the distance wasn't unusual. You know, do their collars like
Speaker 1: the GPS. Their GPS is to keep a track of
Speaker 1: the distance they run. These dogs look like satellites. Man,
Speaker 1: they got like three collars on wires and stuff. Come.
Speaker 1: It was an average day that the dog puts on,
Speaker 1: well the dog's a minimum of the average days twenty miles,
Speaker 1: so you know, and I've seen thirty five mile days.
Speaker 1: You know, that's not not not a crazy deal either.
Speaker 1: But what gets tough is that's not hard for a
Speaker 1: good condition. HOWND to do on any given day, it's
Speaker 1: hard for that dog to do day after day after day.
Speaker 1: And that's where you see professional lion hunters, guys that
Speaker 1: are guiding full time, or some of our government lion hunters.
Speaker 1: That gets to be the difference between them and sport
Speaker 1: hunters is the condition of their dogs. Quality of the dogs, obviously,
Speaker 1: but the condition is huge where they can pursue a line.
Speaker 1: They may trail a lion for three days before they
Speaker 1: overtake it and actually jump it. And I'm not saying
Speaker 1: they're stopping the track and picking it up each day,
Speaker 1: but every day you learn more about that animal and
Speaker 1: you're you're getting closer to it, You're getting into a
Speaker 1: tighter area where it may be. Well in that third day,
Speaker 1: if you've been running like you're saying, three days in
Speaker 1: a row, you might pick up where that lion was
Speaker 1: the night before. Absolutely as he's daunting an area. Well,
Speaker 1: you won't pick up the exact spot, but you know
Speaker 1: the lions travel into the south. We've trailed him four
Speaker 1: miles in that direction, down this drainage. We'll try and
Speaker 1: loop ahead of him and pick him up again. And
Speaker 1: typically with good broke dogs, when you when you cross
Speaker 1: this track there, you know, they'll let you know and
Speaker 1: verify the direction and go again. Sooner or later, that
Speaker 1: lion is gonna kill something, or he's gonna lay up somewhere,
Speaker 1: and that's when you'll overtake him once he gets a
Speaker 1: belly full, or he was that because he's stopping to
Speaker 1: eat because he's just hungry, because he's full and doesn't
Speaker 1: run is good, No, well, it's because he stopped trappling. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, he just finally because you know then he's
Speaker 1: camped out on the carcass and he's there. And so
Speaker 1: I think this is an important point because I think
Speaker 1: I was like under the wrong impression too, because I
Speaker 1: always everybody or in my head, it's like you start
Speaker 1: out and it's like as soon as you're on the track,
Speaker 1: you're like, dogs are chasing this lion. But it's not
Speaker 1: that way. This lion is just out and about doing
Speaker 1: this thing for maybe three or four days, and eventually
Speaker 1: your hounds is catch up to it. For those dogs
Speaker 1: never got close, and it seems so exciting because those
Speaker 1: hounds are so excited and they're balling and carrying on
Speaker 1: that you feel like you're the lions up and running
Speaker 1: from it. But that cat might not even know about
Speaker 1: you and your dogs. That's a more more often than
Speaker 1: not when you're trailing a line. There was only one
Speaker 1: instance that I thought maybe we had a line jumped,
Speaker 1: and that was that large tom in the galeras that
Speaker 1: and I believe he out ran So I think that
Speaker 1: lion left the country. Um, But almost every other line
Speaker 1: we those lions probably never knew we were even in
Speaker 1: the vicinity. I think I think my line was a classic.
Speaker 1: As we were writing, it was the third day, and
Speaker 1: we had done the same loop the first two days,
Speaker 1: you know, probably a fifteen eighteen mile loop, you know,
Speaker 1: just country, yeah, just and working the same you know,
Speaker 1: the same trails and just kind of working out old tracks.
Speaker 1: And the third day we left camp and we weren't
Speaker 1: what a mile from camp, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: the dogs struck, I mean and you know, and and
Speaker 1: struck hard. And we've been through that exact canyon the
Speaker 1: two days previous. We knew that lion track wasn't there
Speaker 1: two days before, so we knew, you know, this is fresh,
Speaker 1: so knew the line had walked. You were sleeping in
Speaker 1: the lion passed through a mile from where you were sleeping.
Speaker 1: So then what happened on that hunt? Oh he got
Speaker 1: it got pretty crazy after that. But uh uh we
Speaker 1: were right in the bottom of a canyon in uh
Speaker 1: the dogs trying that they were going back and forth
Speaker 1: and we find to find a scratch and figure it out.
Speaker 1: Then the scratch was saying the lion was going up
Speaker 1: the canyon back up, and explain what you mean by that.
Speaker 1: With the lions will scratch, you can explain a little more,
Speaker 1: but it was with a scratches. But where they where
Speaker 1: they they're marking their territory as at Tom's and they
Speaker 1: use their front feet and they pull it. They pulled
Speaker 1: it the soil up over top of where they've urinated
Speaker 1: and and they create a it's just a pile of
Speaker 1: of leaf litter or whatever. It's in the bottom of
Speaker 1: that little canyon and you can see it from a
Speaker 1: good distance. It shows you, like what maybe six ten
Speaker 1: inches long. They can likely little places like you can anticipate,
Speaker 1: like when we were out, we kept looking at it
Speaker 1: after id be like that's the place where he would
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, you know, like we're too too. You're
Speaker 1: in the canyon and a tributary comes in it was
Speaker 1: like a leafy area or something, you know. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so we knew this, We figured the lines. We know
Speaker 1: that from the direction of the scratch, he's probably going
Speaker 1: up the canyon. But the dogs keep trying to they
Speaker 1: go up, and then they turn around. They want to
Speaker 1: come back, they want to keep wanting to come back.
Speaker 1: And finally one dog went tried went up and around
Speaker 1: us to get around us because we're trying to pull
Speaker 1: the dogs and push him the other direction. And then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden he struck. And we figured out
Speaker 1: afterwards that we probably literally jumped that lion out of
Speaker 1: that canyon and and he went he's scratched, and then
Speaker 1: went right up and over the top, and uh some
Speaker 1: as we got up over the top, and uh, do
Speaker 1: you want me tell the whole story? Yeah, okay, it's
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good story. This is explaining how Yeah,
Speaker 1: so keeping mind the miles, keeping mind miles through so
Speaker 1: people get a perspective of like the scale. Okay, this
Speaker 1: one actually happened pretty you know, pretty quick, in a
Speaker 1: short amount of time. But so that we know the
Speaker 1: line went up and over top this ridge maybe a
Speaker 1: three foot elevation half mile over the top, and we
Speaker 1: got up to the top and and we can hear
Speaker 1: the dogs barking down to the bottom just but it's
Speaker 1: kind of crazy barking. And uh, Floyd split off to
Speaker 1: get a bit a little bit of a different angle,
Speaker 1: and I stayed with the mules, and and Floyd calls me.
Speaker 1: You can hear the dogs barking down there. And Floyd
Speaker 1: calls me in the radio and says, Chris, this lion
Speaker 1: is coming right to you. Get off, you know. So
Speaker 1: I jump off my mule, and I get my pistol out,
Speaker 1: and I'm standing there like, you know, with my pistol
Speaker 1: out in front of me, just waiting for a line
Speaker 1: to come up. Anyways, another dog came up there and
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, that lion took off and
Speaker 1: went back down and back into the other hounds. And
Speaker 1: you can see this happen. No Floyd can see this happening.
Speaker 1: I can't see this. So he bails down to where
Speaker 1: the where the dogs are, and uh, and I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of standing up on top of the mules, just
Speaker 1: trying to just waiting for, you know, for Floyd tell
Speaker 1: me what he is going on. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I just hear this voice down on the bottom of
Speaker 1: the canyon, and it would be we go from R
Speaker 1: rated X rated if I actually told you everything. He
Speaker 1: was yelling at me, But it was like, Chris, get
Speaker 1: your ass down here. I can just hear him just
Speaker 1: yelling at me. And I got a radio in my
Speaker 1: hand in the in the perfect Chris, Just for everybody listening,
Speaker 1: that this line very unusual. It is gone by about
Speaker 1: fifty trees that it could have gone in, from oak
Speaker 1: trees to juniper trees. And it's fighting the dogs on
Speaker 1: the ground, which is really unusual for Mountain one. And
Speaker 1: it's fighting him like a jaguar or a bear would fight,
Speaker 1: and it's winning. I mean, it's mucking him out. And
Speaker 1: oh it was. I mean it we stapled and stitched
Speaker 1: dogs for hours after this, this whole prog. But Floyd's
Speaker 1: getting to see this, I was. I was panting Chris
Speaker 1: to hurry down there. Yeah. So he's seeing all He's
Speaker 1: seeing all this, and I'm just timeing to like trying
Speaker 1: to piece it all together in my head. So I
Speaker 1: go bailing off the ridge, you know, down to where
Speaker 1: all the screaming is coming from, and uh, I've got
Speaker 1: shaps on there's too long for me. I was stumbling
Speaker 1: and falling and and and get there and there's a
Speaker 1: big oak tree in the very bottom below me, and
Speaker 1: there's a bluff I'm standing on top of, and and
Speaker 1: right underneath the oak tree, I can see just a
Speaker 1: muck of dogs and Floyd screaming and the lions screaming
Speaker 1: and and on the ground on the ground. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're they're perfect, yeah, perfectly under a huge bit perfect tree.
Speaker 1: So I really I kind of jump off that little
Speaker 1: bluff through the tree and I land on the ground
Speaker 1: and uh, and I get there and there's a washout
Speaker 1: underneath the tree, and that washouts filled up with oak leaves.
Speaker 1: And also I can see as Floyd with a big
Speaker 1: stick in his hand in the bottom of this washed
Speaker 1: out oak leaf like pool, and uh, they're the lion.
Speaker 1: Floyd's got this big, huge stick in his hand and
Speaker 1: one end as the lions hanging on to one end,
Speaker 1: and there's dogs just jumping in. This lion's just got
Speaker 1: paws going everywhere, claws going everywhere, and with a stick
Speaker 1: in his mouth, you know's yelling at me, shooting, shooting.
Speaker 1: So I go sliding into the hole and I grab.
Speaker 1: I have my pistol in my hand, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: literally from me your foot, like three ft from the lion,
Speaker 1: and dogs are jumping in there, and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: grab dogs to to get a clear shot. And Floyd, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I was covering his face because he knows the bullet's
Speaker 1: gonna create some kind of splash. We're also close. He's
Speaker 1: you know, meanwhile, the stick's broken off between his hands
Speaker 1: and now he's down to two hands, hanging onto the
Speaker 1: stick like a fishing rod with a big you know,
Speaker 1: the sailfish on the end. And I shoot the lion
Speaker 1: through the shoulder and from you know, from three feet,
Speaker 1: there's no way I missed. And Floyd picks the cover,
Speaker 1: uncovers his eyes and he looks at the lion. He
Speaker 1: looks at me and the lions still doing the same
Speaker 1: thing he was doing before I shot him. So he
Speaker 1: yells at me shoot him again. So I shoot him again,
Speaker 1: and then then then then finally the lights go out
Speaker 1: and on the lion he's just dead, and you know,
Speaker 1: the dogs are piling in there, and I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just utter, complete chaos. But what had happened is
Speaker 1: they with those oak leaves in that pool. Nobody could
Speaker 1: get any traction to get out of there. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, you you tell what happened to your pistol. Well,
Speaker 1: I was I mean, Chris, Chris, Chris, one to shoot
Speaker 1: the lion. I didn't one shouldn't use my tag. But
Speaker 1: when I looked down in there, it was just all
Speaker 1: the dogs were they were getting killed. I mean they were.
Speaker 1: This lion was grabbing one. It wasn't that there hadn't
Speaker 1: been a group of those dogs there that he would
Speaker 1: have surely killed numerous dogs. And and he was big.
Speaker 1: It was one of the few hundred and sixty pound
Speaker 1: of lions that I caught in my life with. And
Speaker 1: I mean it was a big, big male that just
Speaker 1: didn't have any fear of us or the hounds or
Speaker 1: anything else. Anyhow, when I slid down in there, I
Speaker 1: had my pistol in my hand and just you know,
Speaker 1: you're slide and I jammed it into the dirt and
Speaker 1: I just didn't want to, you know, I didn't know
Speaker 1: if it was full of dirt or not. And I
Speaker 1: had that stick with me. Typically when lions are wounded,
Speaker 1: they'll bite down on a stick like that. I never
Speaker 1: really had to deal with one that had not wasn't
Speaker 1: wounded before, but it did the same thing, and Chris
Speaker 1: got there about the same time that bit down on
Speaker 1: the stick. But that's what I was using to beat
Speaker 1: the dogs, and it back trying to get them separated,
Speaker 1: and that's how the stick got in its mouth. So
Speaker 1: you lose a lot of dogs two lions, no, uh
Speaker 1: if you typically lose them to the bluffs, you know,
Speaker 1: and fallen off of things more than lions. Uh. This
Speaker 1: last year we had a dog or lion another lions
Speaker 1: similar to Chris's that that you know, busted the skull
Speaker 1: on one dog's head and had another one in his skull,
Speaker 1: you know, his the hound's head in its mouth, and
Speaker 1: I shot it, but you know it would have killed
Speaker 1: some dogs. But we you know, definitely lost maybe four
Speaker 1: or five over thirty years directly to a lion like that.
Speaker 1: I think, I think this is you that I asked
Speaker 1: this one time. I was asking you if if you
Speaker 1: ever have any problem, like when you bringing in dogs
Speaker 1: have been tore up by lions, if the vets ever
Speaker 1: frown on you, And I think you told me you
Speaker 1: went and found a vet who likes to hunt lions well,
Speaker 1: there's we we have a he's retired now, but we
Speaker 1: have a local beat here in the town that that
Speaker 1: and there's a couple of them that that are that
Speaker 1: are lion hunters, and there they understand about it. And
Speaker 1: even the you know, the clinic we use now, I would,
Speaker 1: you know, there's certainly not what I would consider hunting
Speaker 1: oriented or anything like that, and are always there for us.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of people that frown on it,
Speaker 1: you know. I remember one time I went into an
Speaker 1: emergency clinic with one of my hounds and it would
Speaker 1: it had had a gastric torsion where its stomach had turned.
Speaker 1: It was a great dog, and I was really worried
Speaker 1: about losing it. And this pudgy little veterinarian told me
Speaker 1: that the dog she did obviously didn't believe in hunting.
Speaker 1: And she told me she was going to turn me
Speaker 1: into the Humane Society of the Sheriff's Department from mistreatment
Speaker 1: of animals. And because my dog was was in such
Speaker 1: poor shape physically, and she was probably fifty pounds overweight,
Speaker 1: and I pointed out to her that you didn't see
Speaker 1: any fat people winning the Olympics either, and uh, and
Speaker 1: of course that didn't help our relationship. Uh they did
Speaker 1: save the dog. But yeah, once in a while you
Speaker 1: get into those clinics and run into that. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of people that disapprove a lion, you know, hunting
Speaker 1: with hounds, and they think that it's unfair to hunt lions.
Speaker 1: It's like one of the lion hunts. One of the
Speaker 1: things that when anti hunting groups anti hunting money, Humane
Speaker 1: Society love the money comes from other organizations. When they
Speaker 1: look at what they can go after, that's one of
Speaker 1: the things they go after. Like you'll like, I remember
Speaker 1: reading this thing where it was a series of polls
Speaker 1: on acceptance of hunting. I remember reading one in Arizona
Speaker 1: or if you just ask people, do you support you know,
Speaker 1: a person's right to hunt? Okay? And it was surprising
Speaker 1: to me. I can't remember exactly, but it was somewhere
Speaker 1: on lines of like you know, like seventy four sevent
Speaker 1: of people supported it. But anytime you ask them a
Speaker 1: specific thing, the acceptance rate would go down. So people
Speaker 1: like the idea, but you say, like, okay, how about
Speaker 1: you know, hunting like bow hunting much less Okay, any
Speaker 1: no matter what secific inquiry you put to them. It
Speaker 1: was always like less people approved of the specific and
Speaker 1: to the concept. And when you want to go after something,
Speaker 1: you you can make the case pretty easy. And you've
Speaker 1: done it effectively in several states. Now you can make
Speaker 1: the case pretty easily that it's real bad to hunt
Speaker 1: lions with dogs. Absolutely, we've lost it in Washington, California, Oregon.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why, Like I guess I kind of
Speaker 1: get what they're thinking, but I think that they're thinking
Speaker 1: that the dogs they're doing all the work, or I
Speaker 1: don't like, what is the Have you ever gotten a
Speaker 1: sense and you're well, it's you know, I always kind
Speaker 1: of it's it's always tough for me to approach those people. Whatever.
Speaker 1: People have a strong opinion about something that they have
Speaker 1: no knowledge about. You got it almost assume that you're
Speaker 1: dealing with an idiot. Yeah, So at that point the
Speaker 1: discussion for me becomes hard to engage. And I'll sit
Speaker 1: down with some people and talk to him about it.
Speaker 1: But the one thing I always tell people is, you
Speaker 1: know in my life that you know, I learned to
Speaker 1: fly helicopter in thirty days. You can run multiple businesses.
Speaker 1: Everything is relatively easy compared to getting up in the
Speaker 1: morning and saying I'm gonna go catch the outline today.
Speaker 1: So it's really insulting when somebody says it's not sportsmanlike
Speaker 1: or it's it's unfair because they have no it just
Speaker 1: haven't got a clue. You know, when you look at
Speaker 1: that and you think about that being put to a
Speaker 1: ballot or an initiative. I can make the case your
Speaker 1: lions are very probably the most noble creature in the woods,
Speaker 1: probably certainly one of the most beautiful, and when people
Speaker 1: look at that, they say, how could you go kill
Speaker 1: that animal? You know, in in wildlife management, all animals
Speaker 1: have to be managed. There's not you don't get to
Speaker 1: pick and choose which ones you do or don't manage.
Speaker 1: So I I get really, you know, I I understand
Speaker 1: how they make the case. I can probably do a
Speaker 1: lot better job than they do. But it's mostly they
Speaker 1: don't understand how sporting it is. That's you know, it
Speaker 1: used to be the sport of kings chasing the hounds.
Speaker 1: It was chasing boxes in England. Yeah, a thing that
Speaker 1: I find works for people. It's like it's helpful when
Speaker 1: you're like sort of conceptualizing what kind of hunting is
Speaker 1: acceptable or not acceptable, or likely to be shot down
Speaker 1: in a public battlet or not. Um, I'm stumbling around us.
Speaker 1: But but there's like a sort of a thing like
Speaker 1: a traditional use. Okay, so in areas where people have
Speaker 1: traditionally haunted lions with dogs, I would tend to think
Speaker 1: and I think most people agree that you would continue
Speaker 1: doing what was traditional. So if you had an area
Speaker 1: like there's states where you've never been able to bait,
Speaker 1: to set out bait for black bears, Okay, you can't
Speaker 1: bait black bears Montana, for instance, It's been like that
Speaker 1: for a long time. Now. I'm not like uh pressing,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not encouraging someone to legalize baiting bears
Speaker 1: in Montana because the way it was set, it was
Speaker 1: set from a wildlife management issue. It was set from
Speaker 1: a traditional used issue. And they have a system that works,
Speaker 1: you know. But it's like when you start taking away
Speaker 1: traditional use practices, that's more upsetting me, and that like
Speaker 1: makes me more suspicious than preventing new practices from entering
Speaker 1: the realm. That makes sense, And I think I think
Speaker 1: it's something that like comes up all time, like when
Speaker 1: when guys down South, like for me, Like I grew
Speaker 1: up in the Upper Midwest, no one hunts deer with dogs.
Speaker 1: If you went and said we're gonna start a new
Speaker 1: rule you can hunt near with dogs, people particularly deer hunters,
Speaker 1: would be up in arms. Okay, they'd be like burning
Speaker 1: buildings down over this. Meanwhile, you hunt deer with dogs
Speaker 1: in the southeast many states. It's just what they've done,
Speaker 1: you know, And you have to kind of respect traditional
Speaker 1: use practices, I think. And the thing with lions is
Speaker 1: because the way lions behave when they're active, how they travel,
Speaker 1: you just you can kill them with predator calls kind
Speaker 1: of now and then a guy will run into one
Speaker 1: and shoot it. But it's like you hunt lions with dogs.
Speaker 1: To stop dog hunting for lions, you're basically saying you
Speaker 1: can't hunt lions, correct, basically, And I know, like in
Speaker 1: South Dakota that guys call them in a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, we just got the data back for
Speaker 1: our two thousand fourteen harvests here, and I believe there
Speaker 1: was two hundred and these are round numbers, but tw
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy lions harvested, and at least two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty of those were with the eight at hounds,
Speaker 1: you know, and and uh, I say to thirty, maybe
Speaker 1: it's just somewhere in there. But basically, you when you
Speaker 1: remove how hunting from the scope of wildlife management, lion
Speaker 1: hunting lions with hounds from the scope of wildlife management,
Speaker 1: you've effectively removed your ability to manage lions, whether it's
Speaker 1: to benefit a sheep or deer or any other pray species.
Speaker 1: So now California is a great example. Go to California
Speaker 1: and try and find a deer. Yeah, they thought they
Speaker 1: had a lion hunting problem, not only had a line problem.
Speaker 1: And and right now we're seeing a decline in the
Speaker 1: line numbers in the Western states, at least in the
Speaker 1: states I'm familiar with, which which are Utah, Nevada, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and Arizona. Line numbers are far lower now than they
Speaker 1: were five years ago. And we've got you know, i'd
Speaker 1: hate to guess, I'd say that there's a third a
Speaker 1: half the lions that we had five to ten years ago.
Speaker 1: But it really doesn't have him to do with hunting pressure.
Speaker 1: It has more to do with a cyclic following prey
Speaker 1: basis and and everything cycles and all wildlife animal species do,
Speaker 1: but they're definitely down now. It's one of the things
Speaker 1: we've encountered, Like we were on that that's weird because
Speaker 1: they're having like an like outside of this area they're
Speaker 1: having they're experiencing an expansion of range, like expanding, expanding
Speaker 1: in the more urban areas, expanding in the states that
Speaker 1: you have traditionally not had them. And I would question
Speaker 1: too whether those states have or haven't had them. I
Speaker 1: mean they have everywhere has had them well, but has
Speaker 1: been of trail cameras has given us a lot more documentation.
Speaker 1: You know, there's always been claims of lions in Maine,
Speaker 1: and everybody thought, you know, somebody was just seeing things.
Speaker 1: But now with trail cameras, you know, it's obviously more
Speaker 1: much more documented situation. And and they are and I
Speaker 1: do believe they are expanding the range and very dynamic,
Speaker 1: very healthy population of lions the United States. And that
Speaker 1: expansion is a lot less if you take out young males.
Speaker 1: Like if you're in the drawing map of where females
Speaker 1: are showing up, that map is not nearly as big
Speaker 1: as where males are showing up. So a lot of
Speaker 1: times when you find these when these lines are coming
Speaker 1: out of the eastern US, and people used to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a runaway pat like there's a hell a lot
Speaker 1: of people of mountain lions. But now they're fine. You know,
Speaker 1: these are like these male mountainlins. They're traveling several states,
Speaker 1: over coming out of the Black Hills, you know, turning
Speaker 1: up in crazy places. Researchers termed those transient lines, and
Speaker 1: they're almost always males, and males tend to be the
Speaker 1: ones that get in the most trouble. A friend of
Speaker 1: mine that works for the government is I think it
Speaker 1: was five hundred lions were removed in a I forget
Speaker 1: how many year period of time, but the vast majority
Speaker 1: of them were males. And that's typically what you see.
Speaker 1: They're they're the ones that get in the most strokes.
Speaker 1: You treat more males and females. They're easier to treat,
Speaker 1: and I would say, yes we do. Why the easier
Speaker 1: to drink, you know, they leave more scent. They travel
Speaker 1: the country. The example I always used as a guy
Speaker 1: going into the store and buying something. He goes in
Speaker 1: and he gets what he wants and he comes back,
Speaker 1: he's gone. He hit straight lighted in straight light out.
Speaker 1: You send your girlfriend or your wife in there. She
Speaker 1: might be there an hour to do this, get the
Speaker 1: same thing, and wonder all over the damn store. That's
Speaker 1: how female lines are, so it makes much more challenging
Speaker 1: to trail. They leave less scent, so they you know,
Speaker 1: it's just the males are generally much like in the
Speaker 1: case of Chris's lion that day when some of the
Speaker 1: gun came right straight down that canyon for two or
Speaker 1: three miles, you know, And and when we were going
Speaker 1: backwards trying to find the dog, we saw every place
Speaker 1: that he scratched and every mark that he made along there.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I'd say that they used their
Speaker 1: hind feet most of the time. It's just a nine feeahs,
Speaker 1: what I mean. Their thought has always been. But there's
Speaker 1: an awful lot of pictures on trail cameras. Now I'm
Speaker 1: using the hind feet, but and they used both, but
Speaker 1: sometimes they use their front feet. Two. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a story I know, I told you this in the
Speaker 1: past play where in the in Florida it was generally
Speaker 1: accepted that the Florida panther was gone. You know, there
Speaker 1: was rumors of sightings in the same way that now
Speaker 1: they could take some state like Missouri or something. We're
Speaker 1: like now and then a guy will see one. Everybody
Speaker 1: tells me he's crazy. Right, That was the situation in Florida.
Speaker 1: But there was some guys who just knew they were there.
Speaker 1: And there's a story where a guy in some someone
Speaker 1: in the early thirties, I think it was, he got
Speaker 1: in touch with some houndsman in Arizona and they came
Speaker 1: out and within a couple of weeks had killed seven
Speaker 1: lions in Florida, at which point we said, okay, we
Speaker 1: at the point and like the guy was just basically saying,
Speaker 1: stopped telling me there's no lions in Florida. And I
Speaker 1: don't remember who the line hunter was, but that could
Speaker 1: have been one of the Lee brothers or any number
Speaker 1: of you know, there was a lot of famous line hunters.
Speaker 1: I went and reread it because you had mentioned there
Speaker 1: was some famous lion guys. I went read he the name,
Speaker 1: the name of the guy that came well, a man
Speaker 1: out of Texas his name, And there's a whole family
Speaker 1: of the McBride's, and Roy McBride is the one that
Speaker 1: I believe that I don't remember where maybe out of
Speaker 1: Texas that they took lions back to Florida and infused
Speaker 1: him into that population and helped to help bring it
Speaker 1: back around and some fresh genetics in there, you know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's been a dynamic population down there now
Speaker 1: and it seems like they've got a very healthy population.
Speaker 1: It's doing better now. And it was a funny thing
Speaker 1: because when we talk about mountains, were talking about there's
Speaker 1: so many names, so mountain, lion, cougar, puma, puma, catamount
Speaker 1: when you don't hear it very often, I mean that
Speaker 1: was like a older term in the East primarily was catamount. Um,
Speaker 1: it's all the same thing. And so like again, like
Speaker 1: you go back to the time of European contact, these
Speaker 1: things were everywhere, right, you know, Yeah, there was no
Speaker 1: real division, so there was probably no genetic barrier. Really
Speaker 1: when you factored like how much they could travel, how
Speaker 1: many places, there were probably no genetic barrier between the
Speaker 1: ones in Florida and the ones in Washington State. There's
Speaker 1: a lions you know. Um, when the lion population in
Speaker 1: Florida got so low, people made an argument that, um,
Speaker 1: they were talking, they were talking like a subspecies, and
Speaker 1: it's just constant like in in biology, had this constant
Speaker 1: like lumping and splitting. But people were arguing that you
Speaker 1: had this like subspecies in Florida and it would damage
Speaker 1: it somehow to bring you know, blood in from somewhere else.
Speaker 1: But they did and and and you know, literally every
Speaker 1: mountain range can have its own subspecies if you get
Speaker 1: carried away just because the animals may or may not
Speaker 1: ever travel out of that and they have the same
Speaker 1: kind of thing. They called it the hum of puma
Speaker 1: here in Arizona, and you know, it was was a
Speaker 1: lion that was geographically isolated, just like the Florida pants.
Speaker 1: And at that point they will take on their own
Speaker 1: genetic characteristics, but they're still all mountain lines. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: those things in Florida we're having that they needed genetic
Speaker 1: diversity brought in so bad. They were like their tails
Speaker 1: are shaped wrong, and there's all kinds of problems. And
Speaker 1: it was a funny thing because like you look at
Speaker 1: people who argue in favor of the existence of bigfoot,
Speaker 1: okay that you've had, you know, like people say it
Speaker 1: was all these big foots in the up big foots
Speaker 1: of California and big foots in Washington big foots in Oregon.
Speaker 1: So you've got a sizeable population, you must, right, And
Speaker 1: they've been here continuously now since people would argue pre
Speaker 1: before the arrival of Native Americans across the barrin Land Bridge. Um,
Speaker 1: no one's hit one with a car yet, no one
Speaker 1: has a trail campot. Well, but in Florida, just like
Speaker 1: take just like the dead on the street thing. Okay,
Speaker 1: in Florida, at a point they were down to a
Speaker 1: known like forty seven or fifty mountain lions in Florida.
Speaker 1: And every year they're losing multiple cats to getting hit
Speaker 1: by cars. And this is in the Everglades, which is
Speaker 1: not a huge abundance of roads, And you've got fifty
Speaker 1: of a species and you're hitting several year with cars.
Speaker 1: That to me is the greatest argument against the existence
Speaker 1: of bigfoot. If you could be hitting like a significant
Speaker 1: percentage of mount lions of cars every year. But no
Speaker 1: one's running into one of these things, a real one.
Speaker 1: It's always like it's like a real dead one that
Speaker 1: we can just show around. I run into people occasionally
Speaker 1: that actually believe that there is you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I have two of my life that I can think
Speaker 1: of that we're dead serious about it. And I in
Speaker 1: the general goes back to an experience they had out
Speaker 1: in the woods where they saw something that they thought
Speaker 1: was Bigfoot. But I spent thirty years of my life
Speaker 1: right into the state of Arizona staring at the ground.
Speaker 1: I've never seen anything that even came close to looking
Speaker 1: like big Foot this country. Yeah, well, I mean that's
Speaker 1: probably true. We have a lot of sightings here. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: what is some of the work you've done with going
Speaker 1: out with government people or biologists or whatever to like
Speaker 1: get lions. We all the bulk of it was probably
Speaker 1: the late eighties. I haven't done much in the last
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen years, but it would be the studies
Speaker 1: over by Wickenburg and over in that area in the
Speaker 1: in the desert country and uh from Wicky Up and
Speaker 1: all through the western portion of our state over there. Well,
Speaker 1: they do they hire you just to put lions into trees? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there was It was hired in one case, and
Speaker 1: then the other is generally volunteering my time because it's
Speaker 1: all the Typically the biologists were friends of mine and
Speaker 1: people like that that that knew us. But you and
Speaker 1: in those in those places, you almost always put them
Speaker 1: up in a rock, you know, want to bluff, and
Speaker 1: they darted, put a collar on them, and then a
Speaker 1: lot of times we have to go back out and
Speaker 1: change called you know, and the back in those days,
Speaker 1: the telemetric systems weren't what they are today, and we
Speaker 1: certainly didn't have any satellite stuff, so it was all
Speaker 1: they would change them, which, you know, those lions get
Speaker 1: to be pretty savvy after you have to do that
Speaker 1: with him a couple of times, because like if a
Speaker 1: lion trees once and gets caught, he's less likely to
Speaker 1: tree again the second time. He darn's you're not gonna
Speaker 1: tree is easily typically uh particularly, I say that the
Speaker 1: females seemed to be worse than the males. But you know,
Speaker 1: Julie and I this year had a mail lion that well.
Speaker 1: We started the track in the morning at six or
Speaker 1: seven in the morning and went from Arizona to New
Speaker 1: Mexico eight miles as the crow flies air air miles
Speaker 1: eight miles, and at three o'clock in the afternoon, the
Speaker 1: lion was across the canyon from US actual Mile Creek
Speaker 1: Canyon drainage and we could see the lion. It was
Speaker 1: laying on the side of the rim looking back, watching
Speaker 1: the dogs come, and that turned into second pack of
Speaker 1: dogs in that process, so that lion wasn't gonna be coughed.
Speaker 1: And then we watched. We saw it twice that day.
Speaker 1: You never caught it, never caught it. In fact, the
Speaker 1: second time we saw it, I called a friend of
Speaker 1: mine that owned the ranch, and he came and got
Speaker 1: on the track with the lions and the dogs, and
Speaker 1: you know, we ended up getting caught up with him
Speaker 1: and getting the hound stopped. But that line, I doubt
Speaker 1: that that line will ever be caught by hounds. And
Speaker 1: it's obviously learned that that's a learn because he's just
Speaker 1: not going to go into a tree. And what they
Speaker 1: do is they get out in front of the dog.
Speaker 1: In that case, he would get about you might say
Speaker 1: it was a half mile. He started moving again, and
Speaker 1: they start trotting and for whatever reason. Typically it's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different theories behind it. But a lion
Speaker 1: that is trotting or running is much harder for a
Speaker 1: dog to trail if the scent has landed on the ground,
Speaker 1: if the scent still floating in the air, and the
Speaker 1: hound can take it out of the air. It can
Speaker 1: really put some pressure on it on an animal, But
Speaker 1: as soon as that scentence in the air dissipate, it's
Speaker 1: the dog has to go back to smelling it on
Speaker 1: the ground. And now the scent and the spores that
Speaker 1: were very evenly laid because the lion was casually walking
Speaker 1: are now in bounded piles where it's landing, if it's jumping,
Speaker 1: or even when it's trotting, it's just dispersing those those
Speaker 1: cells elsewhere for it. So it makes it harder for
Speaker 1: me to trade it. Yea. And there again, that's when
Speaker 1: it comes into the case if the dogs are in
Speaker 1: good enough shape. I thought mine were in really good
Speaker 1: shape at that time, but they're there are guys that
Speaker 1: hunt that to do it professionally that their dogs might
Speaker 1: have been in better shape and put more pressure on
Speaker 1: that cap and made it climb a tree. But it
Speaker 1: was a long day. So when you saw that land
Speaker 1: across the cane, what you mean he just looked over there,
Speaker 1: he was, Julie saw and she's can't wanted me to
Speaker 1: shoot it, And of course I had a pistol and
Speaker 1: I told her, I said, I wasn't gonna be able
Speaker 1: to shoot it and she filmed. In the filmed it
Speaker 1: will be laying under the tree, and it did its
Speaker 1: mouth hanging wide open. It's like how many yards away
Speaker 1: d fifties, hundred seventy five. It's one of those. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, real abrupt, bluffy canyon. And then you
Speaker 1: saw him get back up and start going right as
Speaker 1: in the dog and it laid down under a big
Speaker 1: pine tree. Was interesting to watch this that the dogs.
Speaker 1: There was three dogs coming and we we knew, you know,
Speaker 1: they're all we knew which dogs they were. They were
Speaker 1: coming fast. When they got to the tree, they thought
Speaker 1: the lion had gone up the tree because the scent
Speaker 1: was so strong. So they fooled around there for another
Speaker 1: five minutes or so while the lions just getting farther
Speaker 1: ahead and going and going, and I'm sure it got
Speaker 1: ahead of and now the hounds never quit going, so
Speaker 1: that you know, the lions were doing this where it's
Speaker 1: running for a while and it'll go through a really
Speaker 1: rough spot and then take a break, and it just
Speaker 1: it was there are a lot smarter than people think
Speaker 1: they are. That's uh. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people that will make the case that a cat's i
Speaker 1: Q was greater than that of a dog. And I
Speaker 1: never really thought that most of my life, but you know,
Speaker 1: some of these experiences like that really makes you think
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, have you encountered Uh well, let me
Speaker 1: let me go back to to the to the to
Speaker 1: the biology things. So you guys would go out and
Speaker 1: catch them with the collar on. Does that make it
Speaker 1: super easy to catch a line when you got a
Speaker 1: telemetry deal? Yes, typically when you do that, doesn't know
Speaker 1: where he is and when he's there, right. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: you know, half of the hunt is trying to locate
Speaker 1: a track a lot of times. And you know, once
Speaker 1: you locate the track, then you start trailing the line
Speaker 1: and we're you know, really when you have the collar
Speaker 1: on a line like that, you're going to a spot
Speaker 1: to to catch the line with you with fresh dogs,
Speaker 1: and so it's a lot different. So what happens between
Speaker 1: when you run the line and the line doesn't know
Speaker 1: you're after him, He's just going about his business. When
Speaker 1: you say jump a line, what do you like? What
Speaker 1: happens when they jump the lion? That just means the
Speaker 1: lion is now aware of dogs. That means we've come
Speaker 1: to the place. You know, the Lions, they travel a
Speaker 1: great deal or afternoon, late evening, and then again they
Speaker 1: travel some in the morning, but most of their traveling
Speaker 1: starts about three or four in the afternoon and then
Speaker 1: probably eight nine o'clock that you know they're they're either
Speaker 1: laying up somewhere. I know, I've learned a lot from
Speaker 1: people's trail camp photos. They just don't travel as much
Speaker 1: as I thought they'd traveled all night, and they don't.
Speaker 1: It seems like the sweet spot for them is that
Speaker 1: early evening stuff. So if you started to track the
Speaker 1: daylight hours, right, most through traveling is daylight hours, that
Speaker 1: gray light type stuff, and you're liable to see them
Speaker 1: at any time, but the the evening, early evening and
Speaker 1: in that, you know, eight nine o'clock seems to be
Speaker 1: the time that they do most of their hunt. So
Speaker 1: if you're picking up on one of those tracks, you're now,
Speaker 1: say you hit it at seven or eight o'clock in
Speaker 1: the morning, you're twelve hours behind this thing. So it's
Speaker 1: going to be a grind. And if it's a mail
Speaker 1: in the conditions are right like this time of year,
Speaker 1: those mails put off a lot more scent and the
Speaker 1: trailing conditions are a lot better than say if it
Speaker 1: was in September or in in October. But when you
Speaker 1: you'll you know, the dogs are barking and trailing, doing
Speaker 1: a hundred miles of what we did together. When they
Speaker 1: get to where that lion is laid up, that lion
Speaker 1: jumps and runs. Now that tracks very fresh, and a
Speaker 1: lot of times they're taking it out of the air.
Speaker 1: They'll be chasing that line and it just you can
Speaker 1: tell the dogs had jumped it. It just the intensity
Speaker 1: and the and their excitement and some dogs that may
Speaker 1: not have barked all day all of a sudden be
Speaker 1: joining in and that's when you know they've jumped the line.
Speaker 1: And that's that's when the race is on. And sometimes
Speaker 1: it'll just last at the bottom of the canyon. Uh,
Speaker 1: And then sometimes it may be a mile or but
Speaker 1: it generally is typically a normal lion, it would be
Speaker 1: over that's you know, you would expect to get it
Speaker 1: caught at that point. And when you when he's getting caught,
Speaker 1: what's he usually going into? Trees are rock piles in Arizona.
Speaker 1: We probably catch them them in the rocks. Do they
Speaker 1: go in the holes? Oh? Yeah, Mine all kinds of
Speaker 1: and it's I think that cats just wonder through their
Speaker 1: domain throughout time, because they seemed to find the craziest
Speaker 1: places to go get in, and they also seem to
Speaker 1: know how to get out of them. And we Dave
Speaker 1: Martin's lion, the fellow that puts the rim to rim
Speaker 1: On this year, the lion Joe Mitchell called and said,
Speaker 1: you know, we're coming your way. And anyhow, when they
Speaker 1: he actually saw the lion get up and go on
Speaker 1: the rock pile, he was above us. And we hiked
Speaker 1: up to where the rock pile was, and Dave and
Speaker 1: Joe were standing on one side of the rock pile,
Speaker 1: and I watched the lion come out the other side,
Speaker 1: and I say a rock pilot. It's probably a seventy
Speaker 1: five yard long pilot boulders and that lion had traveled
Speaker 1: through that maze of boulders and come out somehow on
Speaker 1: our side. And unfortunately for all of us that were
Speaker 1: hunting the lion, I had dogs with me and saw it,
Speaker 1: and then we got Joe's dogs over there and managed
Speaker 1: to get it in a tree. But you know that
Speaker 1: that lion, and that's how smart they are. The underground
Speaker 1: passing toway. Yeah, had an underground passageway and the lion
Speaker 1: had gotten away the week before doing something similar to that. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, but they're they're cats. You know, they probably
Speaker 1: spend their lifetime prowling around that mountain, investigating all those
Speaker 1: nooks and cranny's and that kind of thing. I was hunting.
Speaker 1: How often kind of quick question, how often can you
Speaker 1: jump on like that and be on like a hot
Speaker 1: track where there where you're like the chases on, but
Speaker 1: then you don't get them treated. You know, it's happened
Speaker 1: once this year, you know, a out of a dozen
Speaker 1: lins haven't done Yeah, so it's uh it Typically when
Speaker 1: they jump a line, you should catch it, but you
Speaker 1: just never know. It's you know, that's kind of what
Speaker 1: makes it exciting now. And the lions are definitely this,
Speaker 1: you know, as the numbers of lions decrease, the lines
Speaker 1: that are in existence, or just smarter genetically, you know,
Speaker 1: whether it's a genetic thing or learned trait from having
Speaker 1: been hunted, or whatever it may be. They certainly seem
Speaker 1: to be jumping and running and they're evolving more and
Speaker 1: that sense. I recently, I have a dog out in
Speaker 1: the backyard. You haven't seen Steve that's a friend of
Speaker 1: mine out at Wisconsin helped me acquire and they call
Speaker 1: him Lurchers, but it's half border Collie and half Staghund
Speaker 1: and his only job is to handle those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: And he's just a physical specimen as far as an
Speaker 1: animal that's super high intelligence and unbelievable physical ability. And
Speaker 1: he just meant to handle a jump line, right, jump
Speaker 1: lines lines that that do things that the hounds. The
Speaker 1: hounds typically if one jumps and they're looking at it,
Speaker 1: that they handled that very well. But this dog would
Speaker 1: be more along the lines of with his intelligence and
Speaker 1: the fact that he isn't a trailhound. When he thinks
Speaker 1: we might be getting close to a place where we're
Speaker 1: gonna jump a lion, he gets out and he's he
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time doing things that the hounds
Speaker 1: aren't doing trying to get the jump on that line.
Speaker 1: He's kind of just kicks out the intensity just a
Speaker 1: little bit, and he doesn't even normally leave us until
Speaker 1: he thinks they might be getting close to catching it,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden he'll just disappear and
Speaker 1: and I don't know, I mean, I never been there
Speaker 1: right when it happens. But I feel like he has
Speaker 1: definitely helped. I know that he helps when they jump
Speaker 1: in the tree jump type stuff. He doesn't really do
Speaker 1: a lot of things like a hound does, but he
Speaker 1: never quits looking at him. And you know, when like
Speaker 1: that lion hits and he's only seen maybe ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen lions. Now, when that lion heads out to a
Speaker 1: tree limb, he looks like he's trying to catch a
Speaker 1: pop fly, you know. I mean he's right there trying
Speaker 1: you know it's gonna do. Yeah, and he's you know,
Speaker 1: he's anticipating it the whole way. Yeah. And your dogs
Speaker 1: might be oblivious to the fact that the lions leaving
Speaker 1: the tree. No, they some are, but most of them
Speaker 1: kind of get that. But they tend to be more reactive.
Speaker 1: In the border Collie in him is you can see
Speaker 1: the intelligence factor there. You know, you're talking about that
Speaker 1: lion going underground, you know and coming on. In our spot,
Speaker 1: we were hunting pigs, wild pigs in New Zealand with
Speaker 1: dogs and the guy had the GPS collars on the
Speaker 1: dogs and of a sudden his dogs just vanished off
Speaker 1: of his He's not getting on his unit. He's not
Speaker 1: getting their signal anymore, and we start going to drags
Speaker 1: we'd last heard him, and then now and then he'd
Speaker 1: be like it popped the dog and pop up. One
Speaker 1: of the dogs will be like, oh, there it is.
Speaker 1: But then it to go away. And it was because
Speaker 1: this pig had gone down into a tunnel. The dog
Speaker 1: went in and the yeah it wasn't getting satellite reception
Speaker 1: anymore on his collar. But then the pig went up
Speaker 1: getting stuck in the tunnel. So the dogs just down
Speaker 1: there holding on the pig's tail and no one's coming
Speaker 1: out of that hole. Wow. So we went up digging
Speaker 1: a shaft down to the pig and pulled up a
Speaker 1: dog still hanging off it on the other end. Like
Speaker 1: the dogs were just never going to give up, no
Speaker 1: they You know, that's a good that's generally your best dogs,
Speaker 1: you know, the ones that quit earlier and all that.
Speaker 1: Those are the ones that you probably wonder if you
Speaker 1: shouldn't find him a good home. But those that and
Speaker 1: and unfortunately those a lot of times you're the dogs
Speaker 1: that get killed because they jump off bluffs after their
Speaker 1: quarry or whatever it may be. But those are the
Speaker 1: good ones. It's kind of funny you talk about um.
Speaker 1: It's like we have such a weird relationship with dogs
Speaker 1: in this country where on some on some level, we
Speaker 1: want to bestow on them like human characteristics, you know,
Speaker 1: and that they have almost like human rights. But then
Speaker 1: how can you then tell the dog that he shouldn't
Speaker 1: want to hunt lions? Yeah? Do you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 1: it's like an honest question I always think about, is um,
Speaker 1: if you really are like, let's say you're like adamant.
Speaker 1: You know you're vegan, right, do you think that wolves
Speaker 1: should stop killing the ones? That ever? Actually answered this
Speaker 1: question for me? But you know what I mean, It's like,
Speaker 1: who were we to tell the dog that he don't
Speaker 1: want to hunt that lion? Well, think about your animal rights.
Speaker 1: People are cat and dog lovers that have some form
Speaker 1: of an animal in their home, and if they let
Speaker 1: that animal be wild for one second, it would go
Speaker 1: back to going killing its own, particularly cat Like, you
Speaker 1: don't need to talk the dog into one to hunt lions.
Speaker 1: They get up in the No, that's I mean, And
Speaker 1: that's what really Probably the breeding of those dogs is
Speaker 1: the single most important part, is to breed that drive
Speaker 1: and desire and those those characteristics into them. I'm fortunate
Speaker 1: enough of a man here in Arizona that's hunted lions
Speaker 1: his entire life named Steve Smith, and a man that's
Speaker 1: mentored me, Jim Bueler out of Nevada. Those guys have
Speaker 1: the breeding that they've created. I've been the beneficiary of.
Speaker 1: And it's a game changer for you as a lion
Speaker 1: hunter to have those genetics that where that dog get
Speaker 1: you know, when it's the day it's born, it's it's
Speaker 1: almost as though they want to hunt lions. So you've
Speaker 1: got dogs that come from generations of do dogs have
Speaker 1: been selected like selectively bred Ford lion hunting decades? Thirty
Speaker 1: forty years? Did you were you on lines and all
Speaker 1: during the bounty days when you could get a bounty
Speaker 1: on lines? No, that was that was in the I
Speaker 1: think they late sixties. That one a wedding here. So
Speaker 1: if you refer to that at the time away ago
Speaker 1: when you just like back turn in the scalp on
Speaker 1: that line, right, and there was and there was guys
Speaker 1: that and we still to this day have government guys
Speaker 1: that are on payroll to do that. To protect the
Speaker 1: livestock industry, you know, some of these lions just they
Speaker 1: can wreck havoc uh in Nevada. I know Jim Deeler's
Speaker 1: dealt with as many as twenty and thirty sheep killed
Speaker 1: in one one evening, and there's numbers where they're much
Speaker 1: higher than that. But that's not a crazy thing to see.
Speaker 1: Julie and I showed up one time in the line
Speaker 1: had killed twelve sheet that day. Yeah, it just looks
Speaker 1: like a massacre. And I I'm not sure why they
Speaker 1: do it, you know they I think they just get
Speaker 1: to be like a large mount bass eat and chad,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, they just get to kill them.
Speaker 1: Did the lion? Did you guys catch the line and
Speaker 1: killed all those sheep? We did? I remember when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, I used to read Tracker and Predator
Speaker 1: Caller magazine. I remember an article in there. It was
Speaker 1: called like the hundred thousand dollar lion, and it was
Speaker 1: because they had done a big horn sheep transplant and
Speaker 1: in a lion killed all the sheep they transported. You
Speaker 1: know that they've brought into this area. I feel like
Speaker 1: it was in Arizona. Well, there's been, of course, the
Speaker 1: the brilliance of our Game and Fish Department here to
Speaker 1: transplant sheep on a mountain called Lion Mountain. This is
Speaker 1: back in the days when they didn't acknowledge that lions
Speaker 1: had an effect on sheep, which in the last decade
Speaker 1: they have certainly come light years around on that. But
Speaker 1: even today we have the Derringers are just world class
Speaker 1: line hunters here in Arizona are working on the air
Speaker 1: Viper sheeper to preserve it. Another man, Jim Bedlin, has
Speaker 1: done a lot of work. Steve Smith done a lot
Speaker 1: of work and Unit twenty two here to bring that
Speaker 1: those sheet that Jay send to take pressure off of
Speaker 1: remove that remove as much pressure as they could. Typically
Speaker 1: they remove the females or what you need to get
Speaker 1: out of there to get a sheet population to come back.
Speaker 1: There's no girls. The boys don't show up for the party,
Speaker 1: and the and the females when they set up and
Speaker 1: teach those kittens to kill those sheep. They're just devastating.
Speaker 1: I know. The guys in Nevada, Jim Bueler and Casey
Speaker 1: Shields are both were just working on the salmon or
Speaker 1: ever on the rockies removing lions there this last week.
Speaker 1: So that's been for what kind of stuff. Their egg
Speaker 1: purposes or for wildlife purpose. The wildlife purpose, that's all
Speaker 1: wildlife stuff. That's one thing you really lose is well,
Speaker 1: it's very expensive to keep professional lions hunters in business,
Speaker 1: and we'll always have them as long as we have lines.
Speaker 1: I mean, California they banned sport sport hunting of lions,
Speaker 1: and I think they were killing three or four lions
Speaker 1: a year, and now they kill three or four iron
Speaker 1: and do the same thing, except we pay to do
Speaker 1: and is that right? Yeah, yeah, the harvest of lions
Speaker 1: has never gone down in California. Just illegal to do
Speaker 1: it from a sports standpoint now, but from the agriculture
Speaker 1: of standpoint, you know, you just if you're gonna have
Speaker 1: I'm gonna feed this nation, you have to keep predators
Speaker 1: from meeting the sheep and the cattle. Any idea what
Speaker 1: it costs you think to keep to kill three four
Speaker 1: lions in California? No, I mean, I don't know off
Speaker 1: top of my head, but it's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: a government agency that's functioning, and you can imagine the
Speaker 1: expense of that. But we'd have them anyway. They deal
Speaker 1: with a lot of other things. They deal with everything
Speaker 1: from the you know, controlling the waterfowl around airports so
Speaker 1: we can take off a lander airplane. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: deer on the runways at the military bases. And you know,
Speaker 1: because something must have shifted in California though, because you
Speaker 1: hear about that that like that the number of cats
Speaker 1: their lions are removing through predator control. But then on
Speaker 1: the other hand, you hear so many stories about just
Speaker 1: like the shifting nature of the lion population in California
Speaker 1: and lions popping up in places they hadn't popped up
Speaker 1: in before, guys losing more livestock lines than the used dude,
Speaker 1: so something must be It must not be that they
Speaker 1: were going to kill x number and now they're killing
Speaker 1: the same number. Anyways, there you probably wouldn't have these issues. No,
Speaker 1: and it's always hard to track lion actual lion harvest numbers.
Speaker 1: But one thing that when you are hunting a lion population,
Speaker 1: you know, it's especially even if guys are catching them
Speaker 1: and turn them loose. Those lions have a tendency to
Speaker 1: avoid people. And these big males christs was I mean,
Speaker 1: I think back to years was probably the worst, one
Speaker 1: of the worst I can remember. But we can't oneed
Speaker 1: in Mexico last year. That absolutely and I can tell
Speaker 1: when I come up to them whether they're going to
Speaker 1: be a problem or not. But some of those lions,
Speaker 1: they're king of the woods, those big males, they don't
Speaker 1: wonder if they can kill you. And and when you
Speaker 1: get a line like that wandering around in some place
Speaker 1: with children or people that are jogging and not paying
Speaker 1: attention if it decides to kill, I think the only
Speaker 1: reason they don't kill more people is at a their
Speaker 1: upright and they don't correlate that with their normal method
Speaker 1: of taking prey. And we probably taste bad, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean in comparison to say a deer or something
Speaker 1: they're accustomed to eating. But we've certainly lost people, I mean,
Speaker 1: and every year, you know, Colorado seems to be having
Speaker 1: more more interaction than anybody these days. The female joggers
Speaker 1: and an adult and then uh young kids. It seems
Speaker 1: like so it's like something, it is like there's some
Speaker 1: kind of like visual thing and often like the thing
Speaker 1: with like people running. Well, I think the reaction of
Speaker 1: those two types of people are where a man may
Speaker 1: stand this ground or at least not at least think
Speaker 1: not to just turn and run children. It's hard to
Speaker 1: convey that to them. You know, they're just probably they're
Speaker 1: scared and they're gonna run. And even if the cat wasn't,
Speaker 1: cats are very instinctive. If they're just like housecats. Lions
Speaker 1: are overgrown, great big version of a house cat, and
Speaker 1: if something runs from it, they just go into that
Speaker 1: predatory mode. Well, in fact, like how many lions there are,
Speaker 1: it's kind of shocking, and like how many there are,
Speaker 1: and that they have the capability to kill people, it's shocking.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen more. And I
Speaker 1: always tell people, you don't here in Arizona used to
Speaker 1: be typical for people to hunt a lifetime and see
Speaker 1: a lion. Now, with everybody doing so much more optics hunting,
Speaker 1: they tend to see a lot more with the optics
Speaker 1: than they used to. But I always told people, I said,
Speaker 1: we don't ever wonder if once has seen you. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how many times we've ridden by where
Speaker 1: a lion was laid up and come back the next
Speaker 1: day and trailed it, you know, and realized that some
Speaker 1: of the gun was right there and all that, you know,
Speaker 1: let us ride by and maybe it was a sleep,
Speaker 1: maybe it was watching us, who knows, but it was
Speaker 1: five hundred yards up on the side of the mountain
Speaker 1: the bluffs watching us. Probably have to digress a little bit,
Speaker 1: but just at the point you were talking about with
Speaker 1: lion harvest and lighton lion predation, employd pointing this out
Speaker 1: to me, and I think it's it's genius in the process.
Speaker 1: The thought process is that you know, we're controlling we're
Speaker 1: hunting lions, but we don't control coyotes near as well
Speaker 1: as we used to with the banning of trapping in
Speaker 1: most states and the banning of poison in all states.
Speaker 1: So a lion goes out and a lion kills a
Speaker 1: deer an average, it needs an average of one deer
Speaker 1: a week. A lion goes out and kills a deer, well,
Speaker 1: now kyle populations out of control. The kylotes come along
Speaker 1: and find the kill, eat it before the lion can
Speaker 1: even get a belly full. Practically. Now, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: that lines back hunting again. You know, so instead of
Speaker 1: killing one deer a week, he's hope maybe killing two
Speaker 1: or three just to meet his needs, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: so it's you know, a state like California and we're
Speaker 1: killing you used to kill three hundred with sport with
Speaker 1: sport hunting. Now we're killing three hundred with government hunters.
Speaker 1: But I gotta believe if if we were controlling kyo populations,
Speaker 1: that three hundred would be was a lot more significant
Speaker 1: number back then than it is now. Yeah, because the
Speaker 1: coyotes are just basically forcing a deer hunt every the
Speaker 1: lion hunt. Interesting since we've had that conversation, I saw
Speaker 1: a studied the other day where they've documented that with
Speaker 1: the wolves, the same scenario they're getting. They're grizzly steal there,
Speaker 1: that the wolves steal the lion kills, woolf steel lion kills,
Speaker 1: and they pirate him. Which you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things going on that are always hard. It's a
Speaker 1: very dynamic process when you try and figure out how
Speaker 1: lions engage the prey species, but there's always a lot
Speaker 1: of moving parts to it. To the coyote deal is
Speaker 1: a real significant problem here. They've taken some steps here
Speaker 1: to try and manage them in certain places, but it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely where our phone crop was really really getting
Speaker 1: hammered here. Losing them to that there was a video
Speaker 1: clip that came out of Washington where a deer had
Speaker 1: was wearing a collar camera and um, you're you're they
Speaker 1: have the footage from this where because he's like it's
Speaker 1: just like sort of it's sort of like the cameras
Speaker 1: hanging down where like the tags on a dog would
Speaker 1: hang down, and you can see the deer. He's just browsing.
Speaker 1: And when a lion comes and kills it. The lion
Speaker 1: comes directly on that thing, doesn't come from behind, doesn't
Speaker 1: jump from a tree. It's just all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's a lion running directly at this deer. Wow, and
Speaker 1: that deer's just dead in seconds. Oh, they're they're extremely
Speaker 1: effective killing. But he just came like just at it,
Speaker 1: you know. And typically I would say that they kind
Speaker 1: of ride up on him from behind and try and
Speaker 1: you think when you think that that behind, you do it.
Speaker 1: This guy this is like all of a sudden, there
Speaker 1: he is hit on his head and you got the
Speaker 1: feeling he'd done it before, you know. And you know,
Speaker 1: some of those big males and and any lion, their
Speaker 1: strength pound for pounds is just unbelievable to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've seen him flip dogs distances with I'm not even
Speaker 1: sure I saw quite how the dog got slung so far.
Speaker 1: And their strength is amazing. And to watch him leap
Speaker 1: up onto some bluffs since they just explode and fly
Speaker 1: through the air to they were just if you like
Speaker 1: for back to the housecat. You know, you watch a housecat,
Speaker 1: it's nothing for him to leap up on the side
Speaker 1: of the any piece of furniture or anything they decided
Speaker 1: to until those lions are just you know tenfold that.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been scratched by line the No, I haven't.
Speaker 1: The although Joe got bit two years ago and uh
Speaker 1: that was a complete fiasco. Or girls had shot the
Speaker 1: lion with the thirty eight special and it came out
Speaker 1: of the tree and the dogs were small, and it was,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of the normal problem with the lion.
Speaker 1: When Joe stepped in there to try and grab one
Speaker 1: of his dogs, the lion got ahold of his jeans
Speaker 1: and just I mean one just jerked on him a
Speaker 1: little bit and can jerked his leg out from under
Speaker 1: him and then just bid him in the right here
Speaker 1: in the calf and then proceeded to just claw its
Speaker 1: way up him. And that was and I had a
Speaker 1: pretty big oakland that I always get a stick when
Speaker 1: it when't we're about to shoot one. Anyhow, I went
Speaker 1: to hitting that thing. I couldn't get it off of him,
Speaker 1: but when I hit it, it it would quit going up him.
Speaker 1: Other than it was bidding, only bidding really hard the
Speaker 1: one time. And I remember the last time I swung
Speaker 1: at that thing. I remember thinking, if I missed this line,
Speaker 1: I'll break his femer in half. And uh, And I
Speaker 1: hit the line in the head and it turned around,
Speaker 1: came after me, and I had a pistol too, So
Speaker 1: it was, you know, kind of the end of the
Speaker 1: story there, but it was it was a painful experience
Speaker 1: for him. And we had punched moles and you have
Speaker 1: to do a bunch of stables shots like I ain't
Speaker 1: had shots for that. You've met Joe, so you can have.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was all we could do to get
Speaker 1: him to take some man about auto. He was kind
Speaker 1: of thought I was kind of a cool deal. He
Speaker 1: bleeding all over the place at That's really the only
Speaker 1: one where I've been involved in and somebody getting hurt.
Speaker 1: You know. The first line I ever saw I was
Speaker 1: coming back from trout fish on this lake and I'm driving.
Speaker 1: It's just after dark, and I'm driving, like I know
Speaker 1: where a roads cut into a steep hillside and also
Speaker 1: on all these white tails are like coming down the
Speaker 1: grade and just like a cloud of dust and kind
Speaker 1: of like plopping down into the road in front of me,
Speaker 1: but like they're spooked rather than being spooked from me,
Speaker 1: they're spooking from something almost like running into my into
Speaker 1: my my van and the headlights and all. And then
Speaker 1: but then the road was so sheer on the side
Speaker 1: that they sort of shuffle trying to stay on the
Speaker 1: road without going over the ledge. They sort of shuffle
Speaker 1: along like right alongside the door of the vehicle, And
Speaker 1: I rolled my window down and put it in reverse
Speaker 1: to turn the rear lights on. I'm trying to see
Speaker 1: what they're doing. And I roll the one down, put
Speaker 1: the backup lights on, and standing just feet off my
Speaker 1: bumpers a lion standing there, Like I have no idea
Speaker 1: what I drove into or what the situation was as
Speaker 1: I came around the corner. And I would like tried
Speaker 1: like the piece it together in my head. There's no
Speaker 1: way to explain like how everyone got in the position
Speaker 1: they were in when I hit him with those lights.
Speaker 1: He probably did a double take. Yeah, I was like,
Speaker 1: he's like, oh man, now what like there's a van here? Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably thinking thank God for that. It was just the
Speaker 1: weird It was the weirdest thing, man, just like standing
Speaker 1: there in the backups like, yeah, like he's trying to
Speaker 1: kill one around me. So, now, if you've been on
Speaker 1: you you on lines in Arizona in New Mexico, Now,
Speaker 1: what prevents you from his taking your lion hunting operation
Speaker 1: in in going to the next frontier of lion hunting. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we're probably in it here. I think there's
Speaker 1: probably more opportunity. Nothing prevents you from doing it. You
Speaker 1: can travel and go. But you think that, like but
Speaker 1: you feel like this is still like a good for
Speaker 1: now even it was like a good place to be
Speaker 1: a lion hunter. Yes, it's not nearly as as good
Speaker 1: as it was five years ago or even ten years ago.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in there we peeked out and it's been declining
Speaker 1: ever since. But it's, uh, it's one of the greatest
Speaker 1: places there is because here we you know it. It
Speaker 1: snows in the high country every year consistently, but there's
Speaker 1: always lots of wilderness areas and pockets that these lions
Speaker 1: can move out of that so you have a constant
Speaker 1: regeneration of most areas. And with that said, this year
Speaker 1: is the first time we've seen places where there's no
Speaker 1: lions in certain spots. And that's you know, concerning to
Speaker 1: everybody that likes to hunt lions here in Arizona right now,
Speaker 1: where do you attribute that too? I mean, in the
Speaker 1: last five years, is not like there's been like a
Speaker 1: great you know, influx of lion hunters. Well, there's been more.
Speaker 1: Is there a people have got you know, there's every
Speaker 1: day here's somebody that's a lion hunter that I've never
Speaker 1: met and never heard of, whereas years ago I kind
Speaker 1: of knew everybody that that did it very much. And
Speaker 1: the biggest thing that I think is a factor now
Speaker 1: is the mechanization. When people used to have to ride
Speaker 1: mules and that was the primary way to do it,
Speaker 1: it was limitedd is limiting, limiting in itself that just
Speaker 1: to have the livestocks, and not everybody did it. But
Speaker 1: now with the four wheelers, I see a lot of
Speaker 1: guys that wouldn't be affected normally that are very very
Speaker 1: effective because they'll drive on their fore wheelers. Still they
Speaker 1: find a track just like they were hunting in the snow,
Speaker 1: and then they'll track in the dust, right in the dust,
Speaker 1: and that and that seems to have really increase the
Speaker 1: harvest of lions. And with that said, our lion harvest
Speaker 1: has not changed significantly. The Arizona has harvested between two
Speaker 1: and three hundred lions for you know, well over a decade.
Speaker 1: So something else is going on, that's yeah. And I'm
Speaker 1: not like like you're we're talking about her like something
Speaker 1: with like like the like a cycle with the with prey,
Speaker 1: you know, and our dear bird has been in a
Speaker 1: decline for a decade anyway, maybe two decades, and possibly
Speaker 1: everything is just reaching that point where the predators are
Speaker 1: following it. Um, it's just really hard to say. And
Speaker 1: this is, you know, the first time I've ever felt
Speaker 1: like our lion numbers were low and and it's and
Speaker 1: it's not I don't think that much. There's much that
Speaker 1: could be done to change it one way or the other,
Speaker 1: if you want to increase it or decrease it more.
Speaker 1: It's just a natural thing and a natural peaks and
Speaker 1: valleys of wildlife. What's the next favorite food after deer
Speaker 1: for amount lion not counting to nasty have a lina
Speaker 1: here it's number two. Yeah, um, it'd probably go deer.
Speaker 1: Calves have a lina. Uh you know in the spring
Speaker 1: around here they can just be deadly on the cat.
Speaker 1: When we were out, we found were one and killed
Speaker 1: a fox, well fox and the deer and didn't didn't
Speaker 1: found a dead deer. Yeah, didn't we find a calf
Speaker 1: killer one than old calf killed remember that, remember I
Speaker 1: want and just like ripped the fox up and that's
Speaker 1: kind of where you saw her. They've eating tortoises or turtles, right,
Speaker 1: turtles towards happened to be riding along with Matt Pearsh
Speaker 1: was conducting the study in in the hark harkwehlers and
Speaker 1: harko bars at the time. We were actually in the
Speaker 1: Walpie Mountains and rode up for a lion and killed
Speaker 1: a desert tortoise and actually left a scratch right there by.
Speaker 1: It broke the shell off of a bit, you know,
Speaker 1: down on the bust of the shell, and then probably
Speaker 1: jerked the turtle out through the hole and then actually
Speaker 1: scratched just like he killed a deer and left that
Speaker 1: and what was crazy was he pulled meat. It was
Speaker 1: just just a shell there. And Matt actually still I'm
Speaker 1: sure he still has the shell. What was interesting was
Speaker 1: we were writing that day discussing the fact that a biologist,
Speaker 1: a lady by the name of Jenny Cashman, had She
Speaker 1: was with the U of A at the time, and
Speaker 1: she had just finished doing the fecal elexantera. They collected
Speaker 1: a bunch of scots up and they were finding tortoise
Speaker 1: feed in there, okah and there. And Matt had asked
Speaker 1: me and said, do you think they eat us? They
Speaker 1: eat everything else? Like what all have you seen when
Speaker 1: you're tracking? And what all have you seen that they've killed.
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything that lives in Arizona that
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that they've killed, badgers, skunks, man, bears, eagles,
Speaker 1: they were cubs, you know, young bears, um elk, lots
Speaker 1: of sheep, mostly dear everything. I just cannot think of
Speaker 1: a species. Antelope. We had one. It was last year
Speaker 1: or the year before. I killed an antelope right up here.
Speaker 1: My sonset point and uh, they just they I think
Speaker 1: they can kill anything they want to. They just matter
Speaker 1: whether they decided to do it or not. He said,
Speaker 1: you have killed the eagles. Yep, and that was on
Speaker 1: one of their kills. Oh he came down was because
Speaker 1: onder like, wow, he caught what the eagles doing with
Speaker 1: the eagles is eating something? It was in me somehow
Speaker 1: the lion. Of course they birds, you know, cats catch
Speaker 1: birds all the time. I guess the line, you know,
Speaker 1: it was probably laying right there when that eagle was
Speaker 1: eating on it and just took him out too. Did
Speaker 1: he eat the eagles eat the breast out of it?
Speaker 1: Remember looking at that when we rode up, thinking that
Speaker 1: I didn't want to get any credit for that at all. Burrows, burrows,
Speaker 1: they eat the wild burrows. Yeah, you don't see that
Speaker 1: very often, but they'll kill these wild burrows once in
Speaker 1: a while. Yeah, not enough of them, but none of them.
Speaker 1: As we train lines to kill burrows, we can solve
Speaker 1: a lot of problems turn those loose. Yeah, man, that's
Speaker 1: the whole issue. For a future conversation that would be
Speaker 1: I would love to have that conversation on the borough
Speaker 1: just about yeah, let's do about it. We need to
Speaker 1: not have it when Julie's around. If we're going to
Speaker 1: transfer it to the wild horse population. I just refuse
Speaker 1: to like, like, I don't like the argument of people
Speaker 1: who say they should be treated like a native animal
Speaker 1: because like somehow doing like the EO scene, they were
Speaker 1: here and then you know, like millions of years ago
Speaker 1: or that that because the Spanish brought them here, they
Speaker 1: should be treated as a native species. The Spanish brought pigs.
Speaker 1: They're fairal livestock the end of the day, they're faral livestock.
Speaker 1: And these horse lovers can make all the arguments they
Speaker 1: want to about that, but they're non native species in
Speaker 1: a fair and fairal livestock. And how we have the
Speaker 1: Wild Horse and Burrow Act boggles my mind and it
Speaker 1: is a you know, it's devastating the habitat. That's what
Speaker 1: I would think. I was thinking anytime you have a
Speaker 1: conflict between firal livestock in native wildlife, that that it's
Speaker 1: just I can't believe there's even a debate about which
Speaker 1: is gonna who's gonna take precedence. And even if you
Speaker 1: took the wildlife out of the scope of the damage
Speaker 1: that can be done through the overgrazing, the same people
Speaker 1: that want to run every cow off the land think
Speaker 1: it's okay, let the burrows and the horses destroy it.
Speaker 1: Next time, ladies and gentlemen, the Mediator Podcast, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take on the issue of wild burrow. You guys call
Speaker 1: them burrows. That's what the wild horse. We have burrows
Speaker 1: here too. Donkeys like full on wild donkeys, yea. And
Speaker 1: they're probably worse than the worst. Oh, I didn't know
Speaker 1: about that. How many of them roam Arizona in the thousands.
Speaker 1: They're really bad and desert sheep country because they'll just
Speaker 1: get into a water hole and just own it. They
Speaker 1: won't let anything come and drink. Those just hang out
Speaker 1: there for days, anything that comes into it. When you
Speaker 1: said that, that that is automatically thought you meant like mustangs.
Speaker 1: We we we have more horses here now than we
Speaker 1: ever did due to the big fires that we had
Speaker 1: a lot of domestic horses got loose and a lot
Speaker 1: and then we had the economic downturn. A lot of
Speaker 1: people turned horses loose here, you know. But also the
Speaker 1: shut the one to shut down the horse slaughter facilities,
Speaker 1: you know, cause love I remember I was talking to
Speaker 1: a stock detective. I wrote a story about livestock thefts
Speaker 1: some years ago, and one of the stock detectives was
Speaker 1: saying that there used to be a horse theft problem
Speaker 1: and now we have the opposite problem where people are
Speaker 1: always waking up to find horses they do not want
Speaker 1: inside their fence for instead of trying to go get
Speaker 1: a horse, you'reways trying to go get rid of a
Speaker 1: horse place to put them. All right, thank you for
Speaker 1: tune in. We will solve the wild horse wild burrow
Speaker 1: dilemma next time on The Meat Eater podcast