Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna do this
Speaker 1: an unorthodox fashion, and we're gonna start with intros. I
Speaker 1: feel like the day we were talking and never it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, um as though, dealing cards with introductions, and
Speaker 1: then we've got like a bunch of housekeeping issues and
Speaker 1: I need to ask Michelle some questions. I need to
Speaker 1: get the female perspective on two things. Is that cool, Michelle, Ny,
Speaker 1: you can introduce yourself. Good morning, I'm be honest for
Speaker 1: tell us from the Meat Eater crew. Good morning, I'm
Speaker 1: Sam Longering from the Meat Eater, joining us for the
Speaker 1: first time the first day in the office, excited to
Speaker 1: be here. Get your email hooked up? Yet I do,
Speaker 1: I do, and it's already full. So I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: that brief twenty minutes before I had any sort of inbox.
Speaker 1: It was glorious. Yeah, because there's no responsibilities yet. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got like things and I have work you have
Speaker 1: to do, right, Yeah. I finished my last job Friday
Speaker 1: at five, So you do like most people, game it,
Speaker 1: so you get two weeks off? Yeah, well I gave you.
Speaker 1: I gave my last employer a month and a half notice,
Speaker 1: so I figured I better hustle on over here once
Speaker 1: I got done with that. That speaks well to your
Speaker 1: work ethic. Man. Oh thanks, I appreciate that. The Michelle
Speaker 1: Michelle Michelle Chandler from the Meat Eater Crew formally Michelle
Speaker 1: Jorgensen say, who's Michelle? Right? So you did the old switch? Uh?
Speaker 1: I did the switch? Yeah? Can you real quick why?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm all for it, man, but as you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've complained about many times. My wife won't do it.
Speaker 1: She's mean, it's I think my perspective on it's a
Speaker 1: little old fashioned, but I kind of consider it. I
Speaker 1: think he's a great and and he's an honorable man,
Speaker 1: and I'm proud to take his name and yeah, and
Speaker 1: to be a part of his family. So I look
Speaker 1: at it in that, in that perspective of validation of yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: So I'm really on board with it. My wife just
Speaker 1: thinks it's annoying to go change all your stuff around.
Speaker 1: It's not easy. They don't make it easy, you know,
Speaker 1: first stop Social Security and every other agency after that
Speaker 1: kind of yeah, passport, Yeah, we did that the other day.
Speaker 1: For a long time, she's screwed with me by saying
Speaker 1: that when her passport expired, she would do it, and
Speaker 1: she made this so one of her many emails has
Speaker 1: uses my last name as like a little nod in
Speaker 1: my direction. But no, she's not. I'm an honorablewler. I
Speaker 1: don't know what. Well, yeah, viewpoint of it, Sean. I
Speaker 1: am Sean Gearty, and I'm a founder and managing director
Speaker 1: at American Perry Reserve. Right, Ryan Callahan, it's my second
Speaker 1: Monday here. As far as the Mediator crew, you're doing good.
Speaker 1: We get a lot of emails about you already. I
Speaker 1: mean we have always have gotten a lot of emails
Speaker 1: about you. But we get emails about you people curious.
Speaker 1: Do you have categories? No, No, just a lot of
Speaker 1: emails about you. People like here here you talk and
Speaker 1: you want to know more, um, real quick. Ye, honestly,
Speaker 1: you were wrong about some stuff. Uh, dudes rolled in.
Speaker 1: You were talking about if you were to hire a
Speaker 1: if you were to hire a dude to pack out
Speaker 1: your elk, you were ballparking it like a horseman a packer. No,
Speaker 1: that wasn't me bambarking it? Who ballparked it? Ed? He
Speaker 1: ballparked it. Yeah, well he was off by a factor
Speaker 1: of a couple hundred. Yeah. I thought he was on
Speaker 1: the light end even then when we're having the discussion.
Speaker 1: Felt it. At the time. I was shouting out at
Speaker 1: the radio and I was listening to I was like,
Speaker 1: that's a steel dude. A lot of people rolle in
Speaker 1: there like five hundred seven fifty, probably more like someone
Speaker 1: was throwing around two fifty depends on he get. Man.
Speaker 1: It's like Janice calls me and he's got this picture
Speaker 1: of this giant bowl on Instagram'd be like, you know what, man,
Speaker 1: this one's on me, send me the coordinates. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you're not a you're not a packer for hire. You're
Speaker 1: just a dude guy. A lot of packers for higher
Speaker 1: also have a hunting license in their pocket. Oh, meaning
Speaker 1: like I would love to come up and give a hand. Yes, No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't. I don't agree at all, because
Speaker 1: there there's no guesswork. It's like, so this is where
Speaker 1: he was. I feel like pro packers are tight lipped. No,
Speaker 1: they're working. You've made that decision, you're working man during
Speaker 1: hunting season. If I was a pro packer and all
Speaker 1: I did was go up and visit places where people
Speaker 1: have had successful hunts, and then a buddy of mine said, hey, man, um,
Speaker 1: think about heading out this weekend. You got any What
Speaker 1: would you do if you were me and I was
Speaker 1: the pro packer? Would I then say, oh, you know what,
Speaker 1: you know where I've pulled three or four bulls out
Speaker 1: of in the last week right. I don't know that
Speaker 1: that individual would really have the self restraint to not
Speaker 1: just tell hebody to tell his buddies unless he's a
Speaker 1: real pro. Well, the real pro is getting real pro
Speaker 1: tip to keep that stuff under wraps, like you know what,
Speaker 1: really probably also pricey. Here's a little something for you.
Speaker 1: Let's not talk about where this bull came out of.
Speaker 1: Guy rode in about um Santa Claus, saying that with
Speaker 1: c W D and all the bands on captive, certain
Speaker 1: moving servants across straight state lines, he thinks that Santa
Speaker 1: Claus is like the mythology of Santa Claus. He's gonna
Speaker 1: come and looking like a grade A a hole for track,
Speaker 1: and he's deer all over the whole earth. I thought,
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, it's a cute point. It's cute, um, Michelle.
Speaker 1: Two questions from female perspective. One, did you feel that
Speaker 1: when we did the like, you know, the begging and
Speaker 1: like our episode begging and pleading, right, Okay, someone thought
Speaker 1: that it was I don't understand degrading to women. I
Speaker 1: did see that email. Yeah, she was, why can you
Speaker 1: help me with that? Well? First, what I interpreted from
Speaker 1: that email was she was saying, Hey, you're assuming that
Speaker 1: your audience is all men predominantly men. Right, That's it's
Speaker 1: not true. It's you know, our our numbers. Why was
Speaker 1: she saying we're assuming that. I think she was saying
Speaker 1: or saying that we're assuming, um, that sales pitch should
Speaker 1: only be directed towards men, and that by um pitching
Speaker 1: the you know you're gonna learn how to cook and
Speaker 1: treat your sweetheart well with this fancy meal, that that's
Speaker 1: perhaps all women care about. I don't know it. I
Speaker 1: think if she kind of missed the mark there do Yeah, Kelly,
Speaker 1: and I went on you the guy wrote in we
Speaker 1: were talking about I was talking one day about taking
Speaker 1: my daughter out and duck hunting, and her feet got
Speaker 1: cold and she was crying, and I, even though I
Speaker 1: had my wife made me when we had a daughter
Speaker 1: at the minute my wife found out we were having
Speaker 1: a daughter, but she made me vow to not treat
Speaker 1: our daughter any different than I would treat our boys.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the outdoor pursuits. There's no right.
Speaker 1: Expectations are the same, pressures are the same. However, my
Speaker 1: daughter laying in the marsh crying struck me as fundamentally
Speaker 1: different than my boy laying in the marsh crying, Like
Speaker 1: it just hit me differently. And a guy wrote in
Speaker 1: to say this very very anecdotal, but a guy wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about how he works. These two guys and
Speaker 1: the guys at the same age, they make the same
Speaker 1: amount of money. Very similar. Dudes. Uh, they you have daughters.
Speaker 1: One of them when they take the when he when
Speaker 1: he takes the girls out and they would cry, he
Speaker 1: would give in and bring him back home. The other one,
Speaker 1: when his daughters would cry, he'd make him tough about,
Speaker 1: give him a tough talking to and make him stick
Speaker 1: it out. Fast forward a couple of decades or whatever
Speaker 1: amount of time, and the ones who got to go
Speaker 1: home when they were cold, um all became drug addicts
Speaker 1: and pole dancers, he was explaining, and the ones who
Speaker 1: had the tough it out are assets to our country.
Speaker 1: What do you have anything? I'm just telling you what
Speaker 1: a guy wrote, right, I'm telling what a guy wrote
Speaker 1: in this is not nothing mean nothing. What do you
Speaker 1: when you hear that? What do you feel? I think
Speaker 1: that that's funny. I also think that that's one way
Speaker 1: of looking at it or creating like an upshot of
Speaker 1: a scenario. But I also think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other factors at play there that no, can't be right,
Speaker 1: can't be nuance introduced. Um, you'll think it all stems
Speaker 1: to what happens in like a child's development course in
Speaker 1: life is all set in the dark, Marsh. I think
Speaker 1: life might be a little more enjoyable and simple. But
Speaker 1: I do think that you know, hard, difficult, challenging scenarios
Speaker 1: for kids are important and you know, like they say,
Speaker 1: it builds character and uh, I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: I think it's okay. We'll touch back with you when
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of parenting experienced a lot, right. No,
Speaker 1: I'm definitely gonna be, you know, seeking you out for
Speaker 1: some advice. Yeah, anything, all same. We needs to bring
Speaker 1: up before we talk about American Prairie Reserve. Speaking of
Speaker 1: kids being tough, I went skiing for the first day
Speaker 1: yesterday of the season with my kids, and my oldest
Speaker 1: ski all day with a bass layer and then her
Speaker 1: jacket just wide open, and it was fifteen twenty degrees
Speaker 1: up there no wind now. But I'm just like for
Speaker 1: all the times when we go through stuff like that,
Speaker 1: when they're just like in the blind or in the
Speaker 1: boat or wherever, cold and like miserable, and I just
Speaker 1: want to remember when you're up on the ski hill
Speaker 1: and you're just like open the winds blowing right through there,
Speaker 1: like you don't give a ship, like not even kind
Speaker 1: of cold, and I was chilly. I had two or
Speaker 1: three layers of wool on, plus a puffy jacket in
Speaker 1: my shell. That's what makes it hard when they're crying
Speaker 1: and cold, is you can't tell if they're leveraging because
Speaker 1: you want to be like that day. I want to
Speaker 1: be like I would love I would pay any amount
Speaker 1: of money to feel what your toes feel like right
Speaker 1: now to know if this is going on or if
Speaker 1: this is like an avenue you're taking. Yeah, a little
Speaker 1: manipulation to get into the next activity, because I would
Speaker 1: be my daughter would not have a difficult time manipulating me.
Speaker 1: My boy, I'm all over it. But again, as hard
Speaker 1: as you try, it's like it's just different, and I
Speaker 1: struggle with it being different. Oh one quick thing too,
Speaker 1: So speaking of speaking of the episode that we dedicated
Speaker 1: to the meat Eater, Fish and Game cookbook recipes and
Speaker 1: techniques for every hunter and Angler. Uh, we had a
Speaker 1: thing happened where um reception of the book we we
Speaker 1: didn't we meaning our publisher speaking grout random house like
Speaker 1: like we didn't anticipate the eager reception for that book.
Speaker 1: I mean we did, but I didn't know to what
Speaker 1: degree it would happened. And we ran into a little
Speaker 1: problem where it's a good problem to have, where the
Speaker 1: books were gone, like a like a nice good print
Speaker 1: run of books. We're gone the morning of pub day.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of frustration out there with people
Speaker 1: who are trying to go on BNN dot com, Amazon
Speaker 1: dot com, and there's seeing long lead times on book delivery.
Speaker 1: All you know, if you're going to like make your order,
Speaker 1: the book will come. We are, They're they're making more books.
Speaker 1: Everything's gonna be taken care of. I know it's a
Speaker 1: little bit frustrating. You still see stuff on our end.
Speaker 1: It's like promoting buying the book even though it's a
Speaker 1: long lead time to get it going. But just trust
Speaker 1: bear with us, um the bookleship. It's just been it's
Speaker 1: been really exciting to see how fast um the book
Speaker 1: went and how popular it's become. But it's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like a little bit of a pain in there
Speaker 1: of having run out. So it's coming Morril ship tons
Speaker 1: more around the way. If you place your order, your
Speaker 1: order will be honored and you will get the book. Um.
Speaker 1: And in the future too, we're gonna also through the
Speaker 1: meat eater dot com. You can go into the store
Speaker 1: and eventually not right now, but eventually will have we'll
Speaker 1: be selling uh signed copies there as well. That's the
Speaker 1: ways out. But it'll come good. Okay, Sean, you're ready,
Speaker 1: You're ready. How how annoying is it? How annoying is
Speaker 1: it when talking about the American Prayer Reserve? How much
Speaker 1: do you hate it? On a one to ten when
Speaker 1: people mention the Buffalo Commons, Is it totally different or
Speaker 1: do you see that there's a continuum of thought one
Speaker 1: being low. One is like that doesn't bother me at all.
Speaker 1: Ten is like, why would you bring that up? It's
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with this. I think I go
Speaker 1: for a negative too, because it's an exciting portal into
Speaker 1: talking about history and a trajectory of an idea over time.
Speaker 1: And that helps people realize because you know when they
Speaker 1: oftentimes they start off it's a negative connotation of Buffalo
Speaker 1: commons and you can actually connect dots to what I
Speaker 1: think is very positive for the public for this project.
Speaker 1: I like, I like the question. Okay, so then let's
Speaker 1: read it out again. I'm gonna give you another one
Speaker 1: ten rate all your expertise and breaking down like Frank Popper,
Speaker 1: Mary Popper, the idea of the buffalo comm and what
Speaker 1: precipitated it? Where are you at on that? Because I'll
Speaker 1: do it, but I'll do like a four. Uh say
Speaker 1: it again, like to tell the story of what the
Speaker 1: buffalo like that idea? Right? The sociologist Frank Popper, right,
Speaker 1: and Debora a Deva not Mary, not Mary, that's a
Speaker 1: British woman. And the Dick van Dyke and yeah, Mary Poppins, um,
Speaker 1: So so you know it better? You know what better mean?
Speaker 1: Do you want to tell the story? Uh, well, I
Speaker 1: can do it and you can correct me where I
Speaker 1: miss briefly you correct me. Um, very very condensed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just want to It's just an interesting idea. Debra
Speaker 1: and Frank who actually keep in touch with us because
Speaker 1: they're kind of watching this you have email a little
Speaker 1: bit and like this project. But there, and what's important
Speaker 1: is they're they're demographers from Rutgers University. They're just sociologists.
Speaker 1: They're interested in why do people move about with it,
Speaker 1: particularly within the United States, what causes people to move
Speaker 1: north to north to south to north in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: what caused people to move out of the northeas us
Speaker 1: down into the southwest, and just why why does that?
Speaker 1: How many people are moving when what was the impetus?
Speaker 1: When did the impetus go away? And they stopped moving?
Speaker 1: All that kind of stuff. So they just theorized, as
Speaker 1: they looked at patterns and themes, which sociologists should do,
Speaker 1: what was going on in rural areas all over the world,
Speaker 1: actually not just the US, but in rural are list,
Speaker 1: particularly where there's lots of agriculture. What they noticed was
Speaker 1: as agriculture like any industry, commercial fishing or logging or
Speaker 1: coal mining, whatever it is. Over time, because of increased efficiencies,
Speaker 1: it needs less and less people to get the same
Speaker 1: amount of things done. So as people found themselves hey,
Speaker 1: ten years ago as part of a threshing crew or
Speaker 1: whatever it might have been, as a cowboy, whatever it
Speaker 1: might have been. Uh, and we used to move the
Speaker 1: cows around and stay real close to them. Like now
Speaker 1: the rest rotation rausing, you don't need so many just
Speaker 1: the kind of take care of themselves whatever. But the
Speaker 1: need for people in an egg down and down and
Speaker 1: down every decade. So where do they go. They go
Speaker 1: to the city use because that's where the jobs are.
Speaker 1: So if they noticed the United States no different. Over time,
Speaker 1: particularly twenties and forties, people were beginning to drift towards
Speaker 1: urban areas where there's more job choice and you can
Speaker 1: do right by your family economically. And they said, okay,
Speaker 1: what happens and the vacuum that's left behind, and there's
Speaker 1: gonna be lots of eggs being done there. But perhaps
Speaker 1: some of this can would on its own without any
Speaker 1: projects like a pr Revert back to the more of
Speaker 1: the wildness that we heard from Catlan and Bodmer and
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark and people like that, it may actually
Speaker 1: be revert back and take over some areas of that.
Speaker 1: And they said, even maybe it's the great buffalo will
Speaker 1: come back. Maybe not as many used to be, but
Speaker 1: we have big buffalo herds. And this is about a
Speaker 1: twenty page paper and page eighteen that one thing could
Speaker 1: there could be a buffalo commons out there, and that
Speaker 1: ignited the whole thing. People went nuts, obviously, because that's
Speaker 1: kind of how that's kind of how that happened. And
Speaker 1: they said, you guys were just demographers, just were just
Speaker 1: saying a potential theory. We're not starting a project to
Speaker 1: go do it. So I think you familar with the
Speaker 1: writer Bill Kittridge his book Hole in the Sky he
Speaker 1: um he he. He has you know, a great many
Speaker 1: environmental concerns and and uh, you know in his writing
Speaker 1: and writes from an environmental perspective, his ranching background. Um.
Speaker 1: But he had tried to articulate why some why some
Speaker 1: people felt that why some people were insulted back by
Speaker 1: that idea, And it would be that you had generations
Speaker 1: of people on a landscape who had dedicated their lives
Speaker 1: to say like making the desert bloom, or or to
Speaker 1: building communities and creating an economy and for someone to
Speaker 1: and not that the people who proposed the buffalo, not
Speaker 1: that the demographers of sociologists who proposed the Buffalo commons
Speaker 1: um they weren't making a value judgment, so to speak.
Speaker 1: They're just pointing out something that could eventually happen. But
Speaker 1: people did. Some people celebrated the idea, and it was
Speaker 1: and it was, and it was, as Kittridge explained, it's
Speaker 1: like a little bit could be taken to be insulting
Speaker 1: by people whose families father's, grandfather's great grandfathers had dedicated
Speaker 1: their lives to like making community, and then for people
Speaker 1: to be uh enthusiastic about the idea of that going
Speaker 1: away was an uneasy idea for some people. I think
Speaker 1: you're exactly right. And the interesting thing is that happened
Speaker 1: not too long ago. It was like thirty years ago
Speaker 1: that first paper came out, maybe the longer, but not
Speaker 1: much has changed in terms of phenomenon you just described.
Speaker 1: They are he Uh. Debra and Frank touched a nerve
Speaker 1: when they wrote that, innocuously, they thought, but it was
Speaker 1: the the excitement that you said of other people that hey,
Speaker 1: this could be something to watch and be excited about.
Speaker 1: More public eye says better hunting things like that wildness
Speaker 1: coming back. Um, people took offense, and it's I think
Speaker 1: it's justifiably human nature when something is going away that
Speaker 1: you cherish, that's precious to you, a a lifestyle and
Speaker 1: growing up in these towns and being proud of small
Speaker 1: town sports and things like that. And you've watched it
Speaker 1: diminished since World War One in many places like a
Speaker 1: northeastern Montana ten per decade decline in population. And then
Speaker 1: someone says this in the early eighties. Whenever that came out,
Speaker 1: you're primed to be highly offended because there's already an
Speaker 1: underlying sadness. Totally understandable. It's a human thing. These are
Speaker 1: not there's no bad actors in this situation. Understandable. And
Speaker 1: someone puts a fine point on it and others start
Speaker 1: to into a ranch or farmer pile on with enthusiasm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it hasn't changed. What is the American Prairie Reserve.
Speaker 1: We kind of missed that in a real clean way,
Speaker 1: like what is it? It's a project to create the
Speaker 1: largest wildlife reserve ever assembled. In the Condell, United States
Speaker 1: to be opened up for republic access for the public's enjoyment,
Speaker 1: with all the wildlife species that were there for roughly
Speaker 1: eleven to twelve thousand years up until about eighteen to
Speaker 1: about eighteen nine years. So UM put all that back,
Speaker 1: perhaps not in pure historic numbers, but a lot more
Speaker 1: than is there now and create a lot different ways
Speaker 1: for people to go out and enjoy it and save
Speaker 1: that phenomenon I just described for three or four hundred
Speaker 1: years into the future. And doing this requires the purchasing
Speaker 1: of privately owned land as a as a small aspect
Speaker 1: of the of the strategies that we're using. One unfortunate
Speaker 1: part of it is you have to buy the land.
Speaker 1: I say unfortunate because it's a horrendous lift to go
Speaker 1: find the money and then get the land deals done.
Speaker 1: And it's a really really big project. But it's a
Speaker 1: small part of the overall thing, which is putting in
Speaker 1: the visitor infrastructure, helping people understand how to move about
Speaker 1: without disrupting UM anything from lex to wildlife corridors to
Speaker 1: whatever else. How do we work with nature and all that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to be done, and the land private
Speaker 1: land assembled which is a key component to make this
Speaker 1: whole thing work, takes just an extraordinary amount of time
Speaker 1: and effort and stress. So again, because you can have
Speaker 1: a roadblock of a relatively a quarter section of land
Speaker 1: that is absolutely necessary to open up a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: acres of land, I think the blocking, Oh, it happens
Speaker 1: over the place. So you know, the last two properties
Speaker 1: we got out there, you can see on the map
Speaker 1: the two crow on the p M. As people are
Speaker 1: now the instant people here, we get uh, some part
Speaker 1: of a property, they'll say can I go out on that? Say? Yes,
Speaker 1: this way, this way. We've got to fix this bridge.
Speaker 1: We don't want to falling off the bridge. Wait until
Speaker 1: we fix this bridge across the Judas. But you can
Speaker 1: come in here part here right across our private land,
Speaker 1: access all this public land on top of the big
Speaker 1: sag or whatever. We get maps we hand out to
Speaker 1: people you can download on events and maps or whatever
Speaker 1: you want to use um to show people how to
Speaker 1: move about and excess every single piece of public land
Speaker 1: that's on there. And so that's let me I think,
Speaker 1: let me, I think some people. I'm just gonna guess
Speaker 1: Steve that people are interested in our technique and our
Speaker 1: strategy and all that, but some of them behind it
Speaker 1: is why a lot of us quit our day job
Speaker 1: to do this. My life was going just fine on
Speaker 1: my early forties, a lot more lucrative than working for
Speaker 1: a nonprofit. I can tell you that why would you
Speaker 1: do this? And this is really really exciting to be
Speaker 1: a part of. I'll just speak personally. Don't look for
Speaker 1: the on the website. I'm not speaking holistically for a
Speaker 1: p R right now, but to me and I started
Speaker 1: thinking about this at the w w F. Guys that
Speaker 1: are going, how do you think we had to go
Speaker 1: about this? And there's a lot of it was really
Speaker 1: interesting time. But I started. I started hunting with my
Speaker 1: dad and probably first we first rather than leaving me home,
Speaker 1: you're talking about your little kids. He probably finally acquiesced
Speaker 1: and let me go when I was seven or eight,
Speaker 1: so that'll be in the mid nineteen sixties. In Montana.
Speaker 1: I grew up mostly in Great Falls. My dad had
Speaker 1: L camps. He guided a good bit. He had L
Speaker 1: camps in the high Woods, then west of Augusta, Soun
Speaker 1: River Canyon across Gibson Lake in that area, back behind
Speaker 1: sal L Flats, and all that stuff in the sixties.
Speaker 1: But even coming out onto the flats around hayst Apute,
Speaker 1: or we'd be down in the dear Born a lot
Speaker 1: from you old year, come out here in this country
Speaker 1: for prong worn whenever he'd fortunate enough to get a tag.
Speaker 1: That's pretty exotic to come out to the northeastern Montana
Speaker 1: from Great Falls looked like the end of the earth,
Speaker 1: it felt like. But we would go true ranches and
Speaker 1: he would have the name on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: There's no electronics back then, knocking on the door, go
Speaker 1: in and sit down, have hot chocolate and sit there
Speaker 1: for an hour and a half and talk with the rancher.
Speaker 1: And we would have access and they'd say, well, here's
Speaker 1: my private section. You go in there. Please close the
Speaker 1: gate and go over here, and you can park in
Speaker 1: that corner. Just climb right over the top of it.
Speaker 1: You'll have all this public land, but you can if
Speaker 1: you see something on a private that's fine. How many
Speaker 1: tags you got? My dad, I got an a tag
Speaker 1: and a beat tag. Okay, you know, we just I
Speaker 1: watched this discussion from the time I was eight years old,
Speaker 1: Lots and lots and lots of times all over the state,
Speaker 1: not too much in the southwest, Dylan. We didn't honestly
Speaker 1: didn't get down there, but there was a way of
Speaker 1: operating at that time. And this just sounds trite and
Speaker 1: too simple, but I hope this can be a part
Speaker 1: of bringing that back. I hope when people look at
Speaker 1: a pr they go, that's how it kind of used
Speaker 1: to be. But you don't even have to sit in
Speaker 1: the kitchen. You don't have to take that step. So
Speaker 1: if you got to some prayer various other areas, you
Speaker 1: can see exactly where you go. We took down the
Speaker 1: gates and we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a
Speaker 1: lot of problems. Uh, put in cattle guards, and the
Speaker 1: idea of leaving gates open goes away that it's our
Speaker 1: it's at our expense, and we say we want you
Speaker 1: to be able to find this. We have some warnings
Speaker 1: about getting stuck. So you know, a gumbo is we
Speaker 1: we lose a lot of people out there, they eventually
Speaker 1: get out. Nobody has been lost forever, but a lot
Speaker 1: of surprises. People haven't seen gumboo before. But U I,
Speaker 1: if you look at just me personally, I'd like to
Speaker 1: take it back to how things were like fifty years
Speaker 1: ago and it was better because I've been here, I've
Speaker 1: I know this. I've been around hunting all big game
Speaker 1: hunting all my life, and bird hunting is a part
Speaker 1: of culture in our family. My mom hunted with her
Speaker 1: at six um. It's things have changed and all this
Speaker 1: to me. I've listened to your thing on Public Access.
Speaker 1: You should I can't Hember when it was, but I
Speaker 1: listened to your show on Public Access and people are
Speaker 1: you guys are getting into the details on corner hopping.
Speaker 1: I just thought, how dumb is it that we've gotten
Speaker 1: to this place that you know, do you own the
Speaker 1: airspace above that corner? It just seems can use a
Speaker 1: pole vault. No, I guess people in airspace And it's
Speaker 1: just something's happened and I'd like to just I think
Speaker 1: it's become silly. And what I'd like is a three
Speaker 1: and a half three three and a half million acre
Speaker 1: area that's well taken care of, you don't wreck it
Speaker 1: and a lot of yeah, who's running around on motorcycles
Speaker 1: and tear it up that people can go this makes sense.
Speaker 1: We've we've we've we've rejected some of the silliness. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you can do anything you want, because people
Speaker 1: wreck things quickly if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards. Anyway,
Speaker 1: just so I wanted to know what's behind this. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal
Speaker 1: motivation behind it by me. And now we got over
Speaker 1: forty employees, our new CEO. She's terrific, Alison Fox. It's
Speaker 1: put together a group of people that have really really
Speaker 1: fired up about what I'm I've just described. So when
Speaker 1: are you, like, is it fair to say that you're
Speaker 1: the architect, like the original architect of a pr um
Speaker 1: architect would be a push maybe general contractor yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess the idea. Explain how the idea came about, and
Speaker 1: if you're real good, tied into what we just talked
Speaker 1: about with the buffalo. If I'm real good, help me out, Michelle.
Speaker 1: Remind me if I space this out, um the idea.
Speaker 1: If you had a number of historians here in the room,
Speaker 1: we would all probably argue about which decade it came about.
Speaker 1: But let's just get back in the relative early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: after the French fur trappers from Hudson Bay had come
Speaker 1: out and started describing this incredible wildlife phenomenon that they
Speaker 1: saw ten fifteen years for Lewis and Clark out here.
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark chronicled that because the President said, you
Speaker 1: shall write down every single thing you see, so inadvertently
Speaker 1: we got these great journals, particularly the three hundred mile
Speaker 1: right spot that we're seeing, we're working in that they
Speaker 1: didn't see anywhere on their four thousand mile round trip
Speaker 1: walking from St. Louis to the coast and back. But
Speaker 1: later on other people came to and corroborated what was there.
Speaker 1: George Catlin, the painter who's out probably twenty times nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties in the nineteen forty, has wrote some incredible books,
Speaker 1: but in the nineteen thirty six he said, every time
Speaker 1: I come out here, he didn't use the words and
Speaker 1: paraphrasing blown away by the wildlife situation in this one
Speaker 1: particular spot about three hundred miles wide south of into
Speaker 1: what we now call the Brakes region, the six county area.
Speaker 1: And he were back to Congress and said, we ought
Speaker 1: to say this beautiful thing as a nation's park. This
Speaker 1: is forty years for the Park Service even got going.
Speaker 1: He said, this has got to be saved. That it's
Speaker 1: going away. Beaver's getting trapped out of here. There's hunters
Speaker 1: already happened. There's no cows at this time. There wasn't
Speaker 1: cows from the twenty years, just bison and all that
Speaker 1: was Callen kind of nailed it did. Sorry about that.
Speaker 1: That was the dark ages May thirties. Sorry about that, um,
Speaker 1: getting used to my little echo chamber here with my
Speaker 1: headset um. But afterwards a lot of other people said
Speaker 1: the same thing. Park Service came up in the night.
Speaker 1: Now we had a as you know, the Park Service
Speaker 1: got going in the e teen set eighteen seventies with
Speaker 1: the Elbow Stone, and we had a golden era of
Speaker 1: building parks. And I think if Catlan had still been alive,
Speaker 1: he'd say, well, of course they're gonna pick this. This
Speaker 1: is gonna thick fit in the suite of parks that
Speaker 1: people are imagining Roosevelt and everybody else. But we had
Speaker 1: a pretty darn good run. But our last one, Grand
Speaker 1: Titon National Park we did in nineteen fifty. We haven't
Speaker 1: done anything big since. We call the stop seventy years
Speaker 1: of nothing, no more parks. We did amazing things Yosemite
Speaker 1: and Grand Canyon and every glades on well topography. Aesthetics
Speaker 1: mostly was about aesthetics, and for the most part, if
Speaker 1: you go back and take a look at it and uh,
Speaker 1: look at ken Burns, you know, greatest idea films and
Speaker 1: things like that pretty much was for views and getting
Speaker 1: people out of nature, but nature as through the viewer
Speaker 1: aesthetic view, and they passed over the grass lands. So
Speaker 1: other people, particularly some f TOVP biologists David Daniel Lickman
Speaker 1: and Uh and uh in Uh Colorado in the nineties,
Speaker 1: said gosh, we really blew it. We should make a
Speaker 1: some day, we should get red of this park idea
Speaker 1: back up and make some sort of protected area here. Um,
Speaker 1: the paupers didn't really go that far. We already talked
Speaker 1: about them. The guy who really probably nailed it, I
Speaker 1: think who deserves the credits a guy named Robert Scott,
Speaker 1: Bob Scott. He was a rare book dealer in Missoula, Montana,
Speaker 1: and he came up with who knows what He camped
Speaker 1: with the Big Open, Ok, he did the Big Open.
Speaker 1: The Big Open was first time he said. The Buffalo
Speaker 1: Commons was a demographic shifts statement that was happening in
Speaker 1: the world. Real people going to the cities and perhaps
Speaker 1: certain areas could would be rewild and on their own.
Speaker 1: Bob Scott in the early to mid nineties said, there
Speaker 1: ought to be a protected area right here, five million
Speaker 1: acres to thirds south of the third north of the river.
Speaker 1: We'll call it. We're gonna call it the Big Open.
Speaker 1: That will be the name of the thing, just like
Speaker 1: Big Ben National Park. But you can hunt in it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to bring everything back full ecology. I've got
Speaker 1: his papers like thirty pages long. He wrote it in
Speaker 1: the eighties. He was the first to totally nail it,
Speaker 1: and he went around talked to college students all of
Speaker 1: the United States. He was a huge cult hero. Had
Speaker 1: a hard time starting any any business uh too around it,
Speaker 1: and he got more than can you imagine the blowback
Speaker 1: in the eighties. Timing is everything right? So that was
Speaker 1: a big one nature conservancy. He can say more about
Speaker 1: bomb he's a great guy. But but back up in
Speaker 1: the Big Open a minute. Yeah. So he was like, like,
Speaker 1: can you set the stage a little bit, like set
Speaker 1: the table about what is up there where you have
Speaker 1: the CMR. You have large federally managed lands already in place.
Speaker 1: What we have up there, well, I think Bob rightly,
Speaker 1: he's a very astute um. He said, this is the
Speaker 1: thing is this can be affordable. One of the reasons
Speaker 1: we stopped making National Park because we got got extremely contentious,
Speaker 1: just really hard in the park to service just said
Speaker 1: it wasn't because they were out of money. They're hard
Speaker 1: of being beat on, like this is not the highest
Speaker 1: and best use in Grand Teton. It was a lot
Speaker 1: to get that shoehorned in and then be done. That
Speaker 1: was rough, you know, the Snake River Land Company and all.
Speaker 1: How to get that in It got to be very,
Speaker 1: very difficult and contentious because you're excluding so many activities,
Speaker 1: excluding activities ranching, farming, everything else, excluding commerce and in
Speaker 1: our our society, you know or capitalism. Uh, it better
Speaker 1: be able to make money some way or it's gonna
Speaker 1: often an awful, amazing intrinsic value. That's really clear to
Speaker 1: everyone that we back away and not want to make
Speaker 1: money on that piece of land. So, yeah, it got difficult.
Speaker 1: But he said, how about this. It's already there because
Speaker 1: we have b O M land, we have state sections.
Speaker 1: We have one point one like an acres of the
Speaker 1: c MR Native Americans, both bell Nap and Fort Peck
Speaker 1: Reservation will be into this and all the puzzle pieces
Speaker 1: are there. You only have to get a little bit
Speaker 1: of private land glued all together. Airbrush it bring the
Speaker 1: animals back. Not mammoths and mastodons and short faced bearers, etcetera,
Speaker 1: but the stuff that was there just a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years ago before it's eradicated. We're so close, We're
Speaker 1: so close. And that's what he crystallized when he talked
Speaker 1: about the big Open. How did he have a square
Speaker 1: mileage idea of what would be like an adequate size
Speaker 1: five million grasslands park? He's he kept he up and
Speaker 1: said five million acres And for for context, what's Yellowstone
Speaker 1: two point one two two? Okay, So to make a
Speaker 1: to to make a patchwork of federally managed lands, state lands,
Speaker 1: reservation lands, and then private purchase lands, you would make
Speaker 1: something twice as big as a grassland. I don't want
Speaker 1: to call it the park, But what's the good word? Honestly, Bob,
Speaker 1: if he somehow here's this podcast down the note, he
Speaker 1: may write an email and say, SHAUNO slightly off, are
Speaker 1: really off? But it's probably the closest model we have
Speaker 1: out there is the Blackfoot challenge over by Alvando is
Speaker 1: what are he's shooting for. He was assuming ranchers would
Speaker 1: stay there, and he was assuming they would allow they
Speaker 1: were a lot of hunting on their properties. But what
Speaker 1: he was trying to get them to do is tolerate
Speaker 1: by in order of magnitude more wildlife out there, use
Speaker 1: less fences. Bring the idea of cowboys back, push your
Speaker 1: cattle around, bison, go that way. Problemly with that way,
Speaker 1: oh go that way, you got your you move your
Speaker 1: cows around kind of deal. So, managing fenceless cattle operations
Speaker 1: in the midst of wildlife abundance, I think he was
Speaker 1: very much blackfoot challenge oriented. So Bob please write and
Speaker 1: correct me on that. But I think so that's the model,
Speaker 1: not a park. Uh not no hunting, Uh, definitely. He
Speaker 1: was big into access. It's pretty you know, it's very
Speaker 1: very interesting. Surprisingly, how close um to what to what
Speaker 1: we're doing? What happened? Then? Are you comfortable with how
Speaker 1: we're walking through this? Yeah? You know, it's great gold outside,
Speaker 1: it's warming here. I'm good. So what was the what
Speaker 1: was the next? Like? If we imagine that this is
Speaker 1: like a continue there's some sort of continuum of inspirational thought. Right,
Speaker 1: two more steps, really important ones, and all the way along.
Speaker 1: I think what I want to make sure is people
Speaker 1: feel like there's a lot of credit to pass around.
Speaker 1: This is like a rugby game. The ball has been
Speaker 1: going down through the ages and people working hard, trying
Speaker 1: to crystallize and trying to change hearts and minds to
Speaker 1: see how this can work. So from Catlin to Lick
Speaker 1: to Uh to UM, I'm gonna skip over the because
Speaker 1: I don't think the Poppers are trying to push anything.
Speaker 1: They're just making a statement. But Bob Scott, Bob Scott
Speaker 1: was pushing hard. And it's in the Poppers interesting to
Speaker 1: me because that was I remember I would have been
Speaker 1: too young remember one it was proposed, but that was
Speaker 1: the first idea I heard about this and it was
Speaker 1: like a really just interesting concept. So I I bring
Speaker 1: it up because in my understanding of that landscape and
Speaker 1: in this story, that was my point of entry. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you're right to see it's not only did
Speaker 1: you intersect time when you're old enough to have consciousness
Speaker 1: to see it, but it's also they were trying to say, guys,
Speaker 1: this is a trend, and I in I spent more
Speaker 1: time in for profit business than I have a nonprofit business.
Speaker 1: And trends. I want to talk about that later. If
Speaker 1: we can't put something in the queue, is what trends.
Speaker 1: It's really important to take a look at long, long
Speaker 1: term trends. That's all they're trying to say is, guys,
Speaker 1: here's a trend that we see because we think about
Speaker 1: every day. We just want to put it out there
Speaker 1: that it's happening in Brazil, over the world, that's happening here,
Speaker 1: so you might want to think about it. That was
Speaker 1: their point of view. Uh. Now, if you're gonna get
Speaker 1: mad at somebody, get mad at Bob Scott Army or
Speaker 1: Nathanservance he or WF because we're really talking about doing something.
Speaker 1: So the next really important nature Conservancy of Montiana and
Speaker 1: deserve a lot of credit for crystallizing that. Moving forward
Speaker 1: in the early nineties and mid nineteen nineties, they took
Speaker 1: a look at well, if you were if if by
Speaker 1: chance anybody was to try to fire up this not
Speaker 1: the park Service idea after titon, but try to save
Speaker 1: a big space, I mean, really go for it with guts.
Speaker 1: Try to save a big space where in the northern
Speaker 1: Great Plains all five states and two provinces of Canada.
Speaker 1: We're in the Northern Great Plains at the bioregion. I
Speaker 1: mean it's a it's a it's an eco region they
Speaker 1: call it. Where would be the best spots to really
Speaker 1: really go big? And they didn't. They identified ten thunder
Speaker 1: basin and places in South Dakota were thunder basin. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: my buddy from wis gonna kill me. Thunder basin is
Speaker 1: in southern Colorado? Is a right south Dakota. I'm not familiar.
Speaker 1: Look it up, gonna look it up. And I'm my
Speaker 1: buddy is from WFF just cringing right now because I
Speaker 1: don't know where it is because I haven't been there.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the uh. And they wrote a seminal article
Speaker 1: on if you were to do it, here's ten spots
Speaker 1: top ranked if someone was going to do it. We're
Speaker 1: not saying we're gonna do it. And so they got
Speaker 1: were a whilelife on a cast of characters, probably eight
Speaker 1: or nine really innovative thinkers inside w WF w w
Speaker 1: f US not out of Switzerman. And they took a
Speaker 1: look at Dan, this is amazing. Let's take the ball
Speaker 1: again and run with it, and how can we how
Speaker 1: can we get something going that actually someone like the
Speaker 1: fuse on this, just get someone to consider doing it.
Speaker 1: As they looked at the ten uh, this area in
Speaker 1: Montana came up probably in the top two or three
Speaker 1: for a variety of reasons. So much public land is
Speaker 1: already there, so hopefully this is this is a misjudgment.
Speaker 1: But people can't possibly howl about it because its public land.
Speaker 1: It's the public's land, or turn it over to the public,
Speaker 1: taking down keep out signs and fences, more wildlife. What's
Speaker 1: not to like? Turned out there is plenty that I learned. Um,
Speaker 1: the public Uh, it can be upset about. Um. So
Speaker 1: it's it's affordable. It's really really important trying to buy
Speaker 1: all this land with costume. Maybe I don't know, twenty
Speaker 1: billion dollars to do if you had to buy it
Speaker 1: all private, right, But because you don't have to buy
Speaker 1: at all or hard to buy anything at all to
Speaker 1: make the model work, it's affordable. Really important from TNC
Speaker 1: to their credit in w WS is the amount of
Speaker 1: intact grassland that has not yet been plowed. It's been
Speaker 1: there for thousands of years, looks like it did all
Speaker 1: the way back to the Wisconsin Glacier, right, and then
Speaker 1: the wildlife history. So in some of those other places big,
Speaker 1: yes they're cheap, um, yes, the lands intact, but there's
Speaker 1: no record of them having the the population numbers and
Speaker 1: the diversity of wildlife that all those people I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier saw, Even though they didn't meet each other, they
Speaker 1: all reported the same thing. This is just unbelievable cornercope
Speaker 1: of wildlife here from grassland birds, waterfowl, you know, the
Speaker 1: angulusts of predators everything. So because in an open grassland
Speaker 1: environment that had um a history. Yeah, so you had
Speaker 1: a unique history. Bison, l mulder, white tailed deer, grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, badgers, yea,
Speaker 1: all the grassland birds everything. It was just and we
Speaker 1: can talk, we can take a whole podcast. Why was
Speaker 1: that as a compared to the town their tan areas.
Speaker 1: How Come there wasn't that kind of stuff and that
Speaker 1: we'd see in the sandhills in Nebraska or upan Saskatchewan,
Speaker 1: our Calgary. How come it wasn't just didn't have that
Speaker 1: kind of concentration. But that's for another time. But it did,
Speaker 1: so I think, and then what happened was uh, what's
Speaker 1: keep this short, but word Wildlife Fund was struggling to
Speaker 1: figure out a model because there are no models to
Speaker 1: copy anywhere in the world. Blackfoot challenges something like it
Speaker 1: a little bit. But the landowners stay in the fences,
Speaker 1: stay up in the public a lot is not allowed
Speaker 1: onto their property. So the music bears can move up
Speaker 1: and down the Old Stone to Yukon Corridor, but you're
Speaker 1: not able to move as freely as that bear is
Speaker 1: because you're crossing private property. The added thing with our
Speaker 1: model was it would be open to the public and
Speaker 1: we take down science and take down fences and invite
Speaker 1: people out to enjoy this. And that's where we're a
Speaker 1: little bit different than what was happening over there. So
Speaker 1: um uh wide open at the public owns this land,
Speaker 1: we're actually going to count the private land as accessible
Speaker 1: to We want to be able to walk across it
Speaker 1: and not get locked out and have the donor holes
Speaker 1: and corner hopping, all that stuff you guys are familiar with.
Speaker 1: So so when you hit on corner hop I think
Speaker 1: it'd just be helpful for everybody listening if if you
Speaker 1: kind of just to jump back, say like if you
Speaker 1: had to buy all of it. It would cost twenty billion.
Speaker 1: So like the grid system out here, the Jeffersonian grid system, UM,
Speaker 1: we have private sections UM that can basically open up
Speaker 1: the access to public sections UM. And so just like
Speaker 1: quick and dirty you guys, I think basically you have
Speaker 1: like a third deeded and if if hundred roughly a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand deeded, roughly three hundred thousand that you count
Speaker 1: as part of the A p R. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: how the ratio is going so far. It's a good question.
Speaker 1: People can be lost right now. Yeah. I think what's
Speaker 1: important is go now that you did that, you bet
Speaker 1: you better do it. I guess the Jefferson what do
Speaker 1: you mean check if you had to buy all of it?
Speaker 1: So then you're saying we didn't have to buy all
Speaker 1: of it, and that that is the deal. You have
Speaker 1: this checkerboarded landscape where there's public land that can be
Speaker 1: blocked by private land. So UM, you can have two
Speaker 1: sections of UM BLM or UH state land UM that
Speaker 1: you cannot get to because you have a section or
Speaker 1: two sections of private ground. UM. So you buy the
Speaker 1: private ground and you essentially have two extra sections of
Speaker 1: land because that public land the private ground was the
Speaker 1: gateway to the public land. Is that helpful? Yeah? The
Speaker 1: Jeffersonian part would be when they were parceling out and
Speaker 1: handing out chunks of land, they would often create a
Speaker 1: pattern of federally owned or state owned and privately owned
Speaker 1: land that resembled when looking at the grid work, that
Speaker 1: resembled the checkerboard where things are joined up corner to corner.
Speaker 1: Sections of land joined corner to corner, so you didn't
Speaker 1: wind up with big, contiguous pieces of ownership. In some areas,
Speaker 1: nice tidy squares. UM typically spurn off a railroad lines. M.
Speaker 1: That's cool. I'm happier, Okay, But I feel we're missing
Speaker 1: something right now, Like I think I want to touch
Speaker 1: on um, what is I feel we haven't done this yet,
Speaker 1: Like what is the a p R? What is the
Speaker 1: American Prairie Reserve? We kind of missed that in a
Speaker 1: real clean way, Like what is it? It's a project
Speaker 1: to create the largest wildlife reserve ever assembled in the
Speaker 1: continent United States, to be opened up for a public
Speaker 1: access for the public's and enjoyment with all the wildlife
Speaker 1: species that were there for roughly eleven to twelve th
Speaker 1: yars up until about eighteen to about eighteen nine years.
Speaker 1: So um put all that back, perhaps not in pure
Speaker 1: historic numbers, but a lot more than is there now,
Speaker 1: and create a lot different ways for people to go
Speaker 1: out and enjoy it and save that phenomenon that I
Speaker 1: just described for three or four hundred years into the future.
Speaker 1: And doing this requires the purchasing of privately owned land
Speaker 1: as a as a small aspect of the of the
Speaker 1: strategies that we're using. One unfortunate part of it is
Speaker 1: you have to buy the land. I say unfortunate because
Speaker 1: it's a horrendous lift to go find the money and
Speaker 1: then get the land deals done. And it's a really
Speaker 1: really big project, but it's a small part of the
Speaker 1: overall thing, which is putting in the visitor infrastructure, helping
Speaker 1: people understand how to move about without disrupt thing um
Speaker 1: anything from lex to wildlife corridors to whatever else. How
Speaker 1: do we work with nature and all that. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to be done, and the land private land assembled,
Speaker 1: which is a key component to make this whole thing work,
Speaker 1: takes just an extraordinary amount of time and effort and stress.
Speaker 1: So again, because you can have a roadblock of a
Speaker 1: relatively a quarter section of land that is absolutely necessary
Speaker 1: to open up a hundred thousand acres of land. I
Speaker 1: think the blocking, Oh what happens over the place. So
Speaker 1: you know the last two properties we got out there,
Speaker 1: you can see on the map the two crow on
Speaker 1: the piano. As people are now the instant people here.
Speaker 1: We get some part of a property, they'll say can
Speaker 1: I go out on that? Say yes, this way, this way.
Speaker 1: We've got to fix this bridge. We don't want to
Speaker 1: falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge
Speaker 1: across the Judas. But you can come in here part
Speaker 1: here got right across our private land. Access all this
Speaker 1: public land on top of the big sag or whatever.
Speaker 1: We get maps we hand out to people you can
Speaker 1: download on events and maps or whatever you want to
Speaker 1: use um to show people how to move about and
Speaker 1: excess every single piece of public leile that's on there.
Speaker 1: And so that's let me I think, let me I
Speaker 1: think some people. I'm just gonna guess Steve that people
Speaker 1: are interested in our technique and our strategy and all that,
Speaker 1: but some of them behind it is why a lot
Speaker 1: of us quit our day jobs to do this. My
Speaker 1: life was going just fine on my early forties a
Speaker 1: lot more lucrative than working for a nonprofit. I can
Speaker 1: tell you that why would you do this? And this
Speaker 1: is really really exciting to be a part of. I'll
Speaker 1: just speak personally. Don't look for the on the website.
Speaker 1: I'm not speaking holistically for a p R right now,
Speaker 1: but to me and I started thinking about this at
Speaker 1: the w WF. Guys that are going, how do you
Speaker 1: think we got to go about this? And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of it was really interesting time. But I started.
Speaker 1: I started hunting with my dad and probably first me first,
Speaker 1: rather than leaving me home. You're talking about your little kids.
Speaker 1: He probably finally acquiesced and let me go when I
Speaker 1: was seven or eight. So let'll be in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties in Montana. I grew up mostly in Great Falls.
Speaker 1: My dad had L camps. He guided a good bady
Speaker 1: had L camps in the high Woods then west of
Speaker 1: Augusta from the Sun River Canyon across Gibson Lake in
Speaker 1: that area, back behind some L flats and all that
Speaker 1: stuff in the sixties, but even coming out onto the
Speaker 1: flats around Haystapute or we'd be down in the Deer
Speaker 1: Born a lot from you, old dear come out here
Speaker 1: in this country for prong worn whenever he'd fortunate enough
Speaker 1: to get a tag. That's pretty exotic to come out
Speaker 1: to the northeastern Montana from Great Falls looks like the
Speaker 1: end of the earth, it felt like. But we would
Speaker 1: go true ranches and he would have the name on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper. There's no electronics back then, knocking
Speaker 1: on the door, go in and sit down, have hot chocolate,
Speaker 1: and sit there for an hour and a half and
Speaker 1: talk of the rancher. And we would have access and
Speaker 1: they'd say, well, here's my private section. You go in there.
Speaker 1: Please close the gate and go over here, and you
Speaker 1: can park in that corner. Just climb right over the
Speaker 1: top of it. You'll have all this public land, but
Speaker 1: you can if you see something on the private that's fine.
Speaker 1: How many tags you got, my dad, I got an
Speaker 1: eight gonna be tag? Okay, you know, we just I
Speaker 1: watched this discussion from the time I was eight years old.
Speaker 1: Lots and lots and lots of times all over the state,
Speaker 1: not too much in the southwest, Dylan, we didn't honestly
Speaker 1: didn't get down there. But there was a way of
Speaker 1: operating at that time, and this just sounds trite and
Speaker 1: too simple. But I hope this can be a part
Speaker 1: of bringing that back. I hope when people look at
Speaker 1: APR they go, that's how it kind of used to be.
Speaker 1: But you don't even have to sit in the kitchen.
Speaker 1: You don't have to take that step. So if you
Speaker 1: got to some prayer, various other areas, you can see
Speaker 1: exactly where you go. We took down the gates and
Speaker 1: we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a lot of problems. Uh,
Speaker 1: put in cattle guards, and the idea of leaving gates
Speaker 1: open goes away. It's at it's our it's at our expense,
Speaker 1: and we say, we want you to be able to
Speaker 1: find this. We have some warnings about getting stuck. So
Speaker 1: you know, a gumbo is we we lose a lot
Speaker 1: of people out there. They eventually get out. Nobody has
Speaker 1: been lost forever, but a lot of surprises. People haven't
Speaker 1: seen GUMBOO before. But I if you look at just
Speaker 1: me personally, I'd like to take it back to how
Speaker 1: things were like fifty years ago, and it was better
Speaker 1: because I've been here, I've I know this. I've been
Speaker 1: around hunting all big game hunting all my life, and
Speaker 1: bird Hunting is a part of culture in our family.
Speaker 1: My mom hunted with her at six um. It's things
Speaker 1: have changed and all this to me. I've listened to
Speaker 1: your thing on Public Access. You show. I can't hearb
Speaker 1: when it was, but I listened to your show on
Speaker 1: public Access and people are you guys are getting into
Speaker 1: the details on corner hopping. I just thought, how dumb
Speaker 1: is it that we've gotten to this place that you know,
Speaker 1: do you own the airspace above that corner? It just
Speaker 1: seems can use a pole vault. No, I guess people
Speaker 1: own airspace. And it's just something's happened and I'd like
Speaker 1: to just I think it's become silly. And what I'd
Speaker 1: like is a three and a half three three and
Speaker 1: a half million acre area that's well taken care of.
Speaker 1: You don't wreck it and a lot of yah who's
Speaker 1: running around on motorcycles and tear it up that people
Speaker 1: can go This makes sense. We've we've we've we've red
Speaker 1: e acted some of the silliness. It doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: can do anything you want because people wreck things quickly
Speaker 1: if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards. Anyway, just
Speaker 1: so I want you to know what's behind this. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal
Speaker 1: motivation behind it by me. And now we got over
Speaker 1: forty employees. Our new CEO, she's terrific. Alison Fox's put
Speaker 1: together a group of people that are really really fired
Speaker 1: up about what I'm I've just described. How is the
Speaker 1: how is the money? How do you guys raise money
Speaker 1: to buy the lands that you've bought? And how many
Speaker 1: and how many acres does the American Pray Reserve own? Now, uh,
Speaker 1: I should have a lifeline to call back to the office.
Speaker 1: But I think we're private acres um and owned as
Speaker 1: a squishy owns, just like if you have houses, you
Speaker 1: own some of it in the bank, ons other parts
Speaker 1: of so, but we own better than six of all
Speaker 1: that land you see on the map, free and clear.
Speaker 1: So we manage to balance sheet very very carefully. And
Speaker 1: but yeah, those are our private acres um. I think
Speaker 1: all told her a little over four hundred thousand acres
Speaker 1: with state sections as you were describing and BLM sections.
Speaker 1: The way we get the money, I say, unfortunately, because
Speaker 1: it's hard, is just pure fundraising. It's asking people describing
Speaker 1: to people in various ways. Sometimes using social media, sometimes
Speaker 1: on our website, sometimes flying all over the place and
Speaker 1: sitting down one on one if you can finally get
Speaker 1: a dinner with them or something. Say this is what
Speaker 1: I'm doing, we'd like to take this next step. Would
Speaker 1: you like to help us take this next step? People
Speaker 1: hundred years smell, I really appreciate the action you might
Speaker 1: take here because of this, and as they like it.
Speaker 1: They don't always, but if they like it, let's say,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna get your money right now, but keep
Speaker 1: me informed maybe a couple of years. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: tied up right now some other commitments. So you go
Speaker 1: back over and over and over and over again. The
Speaker 1: biggest mixed miscalculation I made leaving for profit business. Uh,
Speaker 1: my own whole company is running. It's been around about
Speaker 1: thirty five years in Silicon Valley. I had no idea
Speaker 1: how hard fundraising was going to be. I thought it's
Speaker 1: like sales. You know, you just get you do it
Speaker 1: for a while when you're small, and you finally get
Speaker 1: the sales team and you get a VP of sales,
Speaker 1: and you're good that you don't have to do it.
Speaker 1: It's not like that. It's unbelievably difficult, and particularly in
Speaker 1: a very crowded fundraising environment in the world. And if
Speaker 1: you they can look at what people give to philanthropically,
Speaker 1: they give to their churches, they give to their home
Speaker 1: and maters, they get to the arts and way way
Speaker 1: way way down below you've seen these these tow ranked
Speaker 1: list is conservation. It's like a sliver. Within that sliver,
Speaker 1: a lot of competition, a lot of sharp elbows. You
Speaker 1: gotta move it and NonStop. You can hardly stop for
Speaker 1: a brass I've been doing it for seventeen years. Do
Speaker 1: you do you primarily draw small donations from private individuals
Speaker 1: or do you primarily draw like large donations from extraordinarily
Speaker 1: wealthy people. We do everything. Our strategy on fundraising is
Speaker 1: everybody go along. So we've got a huge team that
Speaker 1: focuses on this because unfortunately got to buy the land's expensive.
Speaker 1: The way it works right now is we get money
Speaker 1: from all fifty states in the United States and ten
Speaker 1: different countries around the world. If you put that in
Speaker 1: the top rank, the most people donating to American Prairie
Speaker 1: Reserve are Montanan's and then a descending order down to
Speaker 1: their I can't tell you all fifty how it actually
Speaker 1: stack up, but I can send it to if you
Speaker 1: want to put it on your website or something different.
Speaker 1: Some people, um are what you call sustaining donors. They
Speaker 1: let us hit their credit card for five bucks a month.
Speaker 1: We love those people. Lots of those people adds up
Speaker 1: to a lot of keeping this project moving. So that's
Speaker 1: the big one. That's the really, that's the big thing.
Speaker 1: We're trying to grow. And there's some thousands of people
Speaker 1: in that arena. But to buy these properties, you also
Speaker 1: do have to have in your portfolio a certain number
Speaker 1: of bigger donors. So they're forty or fifty people out
Speaker 1: there that can give that. We have to travel a
Speaker 1: lot to see summer in Montana most unfortunately or not
Speaker 1: so even have a cup of coffees of plane ride
Speaker 1: expensive and difficult, time consuming, but they will sometimes give
Speaker 1: us enough to get, you know, with a few other
Speaker 1: people enough to take a run out of particular medium
Speaker 1: sized piece of property or something like that. So it's
Speaker 1: everybody maybe everything Steve so across the gamut. Have you
Speaker 1: guys had pieces of land that would fall within the
Speaker 1: area you're trying to do this come up for sale,
Speaker 1: but you weren't in a position to to try to
Speaker 1: make a play on it, or are you usually able
Speaker 1: to when something comes up for sale to get in
Speaker 1: there and try to be a purchaser. Uh, the only
Speaker 1: time that was not the case where things there's a
Speaker 1: short anomaly, and that was in the tech crash. Couldn't
Speaker 1: have been a dumber time to start this project in
Speaker 1: two thousand one, because the tech crash. Tech crash happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand two. Anybody I knew had money, they
Speaker 1: didn't have money anymore. It's pretty bleak. That was the
Speaker 1: only time for about a three year run when there
Speaker 1: was not property out there that we would like to buy.
Speaker 1: Since then, since I'd say about two thousand six, if
Speaker 1: and I've been around every property we've deal, deal we've done,
Speaker 1: we've done twenty nine of them so far. Any snapshot
Speaker 1: in time on that whole continuum until this morning, and
Speaker 1: this morning is still true. There's far more property for
Speaker 1: sale on this map than we can afford to buy.
Speaker 1: So there's like six and more than half of those
Speaker 1: people have called us and say, before we go on
Speaker 1: the multiple listings, would you like to do it? Because
Speaker 1: you know, with the rumor real they know how we operate,
Speaker 1: fair price, all that kind of stuff. We perform well,
Speaker 1: it's frustrating because we don't have the money to buy
Speaker 1: all six at once. That's always the case. It used
Speaker 1: to be like there's two and there's like four. I'm
Speaker 1: probably about five or six years ago. Now there's probably five, six,
Speaker 1: seven properties any given time, any morning, I can come
Speaker 1: in and see which ones are there. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of you know, you do something like the pan
Speaker 1: of the two crow, and you gotta at a rabbit
Speaker 1: going through the snake, and you've gotta get that digested
Speaker 1: before you can go eat some more rabbits. Right, that's
Speaker 1: bad analogy, but it's uh. It makes us. It makes
Speaker 1: us feel it's hard to you can't move and just
Speaker 1: go wow, I'd love to be able to do this.
Speaker 1: And what happens is we eventually we lose those two
Speaker 1: other buyers. Generally someone will buy it and plow it
Speaker 1: up for farming or another reason we lose properties actually
Speaker 1: is we're in a we're in a bit of a
Speaker 1: buying that other people don't have to deal with. We're
Speaker 1: a nonprofit. We're audited every year, so it kind of
Speaker 1: looks like this room. People have never seen before, come
Speaker 1: into the table, open up their laptop, except they have
Speaker 1: white shirts and ties on, and they're the auditors, and
Speaker 1: they audited every move we make, and they tear our
Speaker 1: books apart, and I see where we got our money,
Speaker 1: how we spent it, and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: One thing you got to do is a nonprofit to
Speaker 1: spend your donor money responsibly. So if we're paying out
Speaker 1: of fair market value of that range, they'll soon go
Speaker 1: why are you doing that? You're just throwing money around.
Speaker 1: That's not responsible. You can lose your status as a nonprofit.
Speaker 1: You're done. You can become a four provit, which can't
Speaker 1: be a non profit by doing that. So we have
Speaker 1: to work with an a range. If we had more time,
Speaker 1: another podcast to show you a map of where property
Speaker 1: that I just would have loved to have had up
Speaker 1: on one ninety one by Fort Bell nap Uh, and
Speaker 1: we did have the money to do it. We thought
Speaker 1: in the range. For instance, we get to the very
Speaker 1: top of the range, we call up and say we'd
Speaker 1: like to get this offer before somebody else gets this,
Speaker 1: and they go that, I'm not even gonna put that
Speaker 1: in front of the owner. We already have two offers
Speaker 1: well above that when we back off and they're bought
Speaker 1: by local ranchers, they're not by Californians to buy out
Speaker 1: build a ten thousand square foot house. We just lost
Speaker 1: one south of the two crow actually down by win It.
Speaker 1: It was really really perfect for us. Three ranchers bought
Speaker 1: it and they paid more than we're willing to pay.
Speaker 1: So I got a story after a story of that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of painful ones that we would have
Speaker 1: loved to have had it some up and around Malta
Speaker 1: when a state legislature beat us out one day on
Speaker 1: a phone call on auction. We got to the top
Speaker 1: of what we think we could justify and we had
Speaker 1: to back off, and he bought it for more than
Speaker 1: are more than we were willing to pay. So that happens.
Speaker 1: There's a misnomer out there that we can pay anything
Speaker 1: and we're driving up prices. Absolutely not completely false. How
Speaker 1: often do you run into situation where a landowner um
Speaker 1: just doesn't want to sell it to you because they
Speaker 1: have an emotional connection to it being a working cattle
Speaker 1: ranch that fits their definition of what that looks like,
Speaker 1: and that their adversarial to the idea that there sort
Speaker 1: of legacy and work on the land would be upended,
Speaker 1: and they don't want to sell it to you less
Speaker 1: than five percent of the time. But it does happen.
Speaker 1: How is it articulated to you when that does happen.
Speaker 1: M I don't want to take the flak from my
Speaker 1: neighbors that I sold to the a p r um
Speaker 1: funny thing though it does happen where someone will say
Speaker 1: I'll sell it to somebody else if they sell it
Speaker 1: to you, that's not my fault. Yeah, yeah, not. But
Speaker 1: the truth is, you guys are technically running cattle right um.
Speaker 1: You you have properties that have um uh leases or BLM.
Speaker 1: In order to keep certain BLM less read you gotta
Speaker 1: have some working component to it. Um yeah, for the
Speaker 1: most part, you need to keep some grazing animal on
Speaker 1: there to maintain your allotments that are associated with your
Speaker 1: base property. You can rest it. The BLM allows you
Speaker 1: rest for two years, three years, and you can ask
Speaker 1: for another extension or whatever. But um yeah, we do lease,
Speaker 1: and we have these numbers wrong throughout whe We got
Speaker 1: somewhere between four thousand and five thousand cows on our
Speaker 1: property right now. Most of the property you're looking at
Speaker 1: is is leased out. UM. Part of that's a business
Speaker 1: decision is a very expensive project. Leasing it out is
Speaker 1: you you rant it until we can get there with
Speaker 1: our model UM to have ice and and other things.
Speaker 1: We lease it out and that helps our overhead costs.
Speaker 1: And some leases as to three years. There's some out
Speaker 1: there that's a big one over in Valley County that
Speaker 1: was a twelve year lease. We've had about four thousand
Speaker 1: yearlings on that something like that. So, and that's that's
Speaker 1: about clarified as situation where it's land that you own
Speaker 1: and you're allowing a local cattle operator to graze cow
Speaker 1: calf pairs or whatever to graze cattle on your land.
Speaker 1: And are you guys doing some uh, you know, like
Speaker 1: trying out some different practices as part of that lease
Speaker 1: UM as far as uh, do you guys write like
Speaker 1: a grazing management plan or anything like that right now?
Speaker 1: Very specifically we do, and we call it the Crazy
Speaker 1: Scale for Grassland Management and it has nine points on it.
Speaker 1: How do you want to see repairian areas? Look? How
Speaker 1: big we want patch sizes? Like we don't want two
Speaker 1: small fencing pens? Uh total amount of fense for a
Speaker 1: wild easy wildlife movement. So a big priority for US
Speaker 1: is American propiser is trying to maximize for biodiversity, not
Speaker 1: for livestock poundage off take. We're happy to deal with
Speaker 1: livestock producers, but they've got to realize our number one
Speaker 1: thing is we're optimizing for nature and biodiversity. So we'll say,
Speaker 1: if you want to lease on our place, and not
Speaker 1: everybody does, but most people look at and think, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not so bad. I've changed a little bit. A
Speaker 1: lot of times we'll ask them to have a lower
Speaker 1: stocking rate than they would like to have. Take it
Speaker 1: right to the wall maximum they can have lower stocking rate.
Speaker 1: You know, it's too easy to say, but kind of
Speaker 1: the take half, leave half idea, leave half for wildlife,
Speaker 1: for the forbes and the grasses and things for prime
Speaker 1: learn everything else. So lighter touch on the ground with
Speaker 1: a few less CALCIE might like. So you've got to
Speaker 1: accept that. Uh. Sometimes fencing out, repairing areas, UM being
Speaker 1: okay with some fire now and again um having some
Speaker 1: natural uh water course things like less use of spreader
Speaker 1: dikes or no users edderdykes, and being okay with beaver
Speaker 1: dams and things like that. So there's these these sorts
Speaker 1: of things. They're not draconian or particularly arduous. We'll show
Speaker 1: them how to do it, and we give them time
Speaker 1: to get there. But if you don't want to do it,
Speaker 1: um uh within our way of operating, then yeah, well
Speaker 1: maybe we're not a good match. So far, we haven't
Speaker 1: any trouble, trouble leasing out, we don't have anything empty.
Speaker 1: We generally get six seventy phone calls like that. And
Speaker 1: is this a program? Um? Are you guys saying that
Speaker 1: this is going to get phased out over time or
Speaker 1: do you think long term you're gonna have um, you know,
Speaker 1: some chunks that are going to have some grazing long
Speaker 1: term or domestic cattle grazing long term. No, it's a
Speaker 1: good point. So I think, Um, one way to look
Speaker 1: at this as we're thinking about our our idea is
Speaker 1: down the road. And Ali Fox is a lot younger
Speaker 1: than me, well much more likely see this in in
Speaker 1: situation you have we might call a core reserve area, right,
Speaker 1: and that is going to be a very uh amieba
Speaker 1: like circuitous border. The days are over drawing a square
Speaker 1: on the map like Hillstone Park. The only way it's
Speaker 1: defined as who who will sell to us. We have
Speaker 1: no control over who sells to us, but eventually have
Speaker 1: this corrier that might be between three million acres three
Speaker 1: and a quarter million acre or something like that, and
Speaker 1: in a six county general area north and south of
Speaker 1: the breaks, north and south of the CMR, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Outside of that is a boundary. Or if you see
Speaker 1: the next if you think about another area outside of it,
Speaker 1: maybe like you think about fishing two miles offshore, go
Speaker 1: quite a few miles whatever it might be, forty miles
Speaker 1: around that whole thing, A band around that is a
Speaker 1: is a is all cattle. Frankly, I don't know what's
Speaker 1: going to be there. We don't have a control. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you with four or five years from now,
Speaker 1: but probably the next hundred years is going to be
Speaker 1: very robust cattle industry there. And then even beyond that,
Speaker 1: we believe there are wildlife areas that our Secretary of
Speaker 1: Materior is now talking about, corridors between us and the
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountain Front and corridors down the Greater Door Yellowstone
Speaker 1: ecosystem where elk and other critters can move back and forth.
Speaker 1: So you saw this, somebody around here is knowledgeable about
Speaker 1: which house bill that was. But the zinky just put
Speaker 1: out so that I want to take a look at
Speaker 1: these corridors, wildlife corridors between areas. We gotta start thinking
Speaker 1: about how do we make those sociologically softened so critters
Speaker 1: can move back and forth and these things. So three things.
Speaker 1: There's a core, there's a immediate surrounding area maybe thirty
Speaker 1: or forty miles thick. And then there's also this corridor
Speaker 1: idea that's going to these two other big ecosystems. We
Speaker 1: consider this a huge ecosystem of about eight million acres.
Speaker 1: That's where water drains into the milk or drains into
Speaker 1: the Missouri. So in the core to your question, eventually,
Speaker 1: over time we will uh those those property right now
Speaker 1: our stage with cattle on them. Over time, what's happened
Speaker 1: on White Rock, on Drive Forork, on sun Prairie, on
Speaker 1: Sun Prairie North, we'll turn those cattle off and we'll
Speaker 1: turn bison onto them. As the grazer, as a legal grazer,
Speaker 1: because you have to have a grazer. Llamas, sheep, goats, horses, cows,
Speaker 1: buy some. You gotta have something in there or you'll
Speaker 1: lose your allowments. I imagine that like you, you talked
Speaker 1: about your your personal interestingness and you grew up hunting. Um,
Speaker 1: I imagine that a good majority of the donors that
Speaker 1: are really paying high high dollar amounts. Do you guys
Speaker 1: are probably deeply suspicious or adversarial to hunting? Would be
Speaker 1: my guess, Like I know that you even a lot
Speaker 1: of interest from like National Geographic Society, right, and they're
Speaker 1: like very antagonistic to hunters, Like what what? Um? How
Speaker 1: do you how do you weigh that out? Like do
Speaker 1: they know do you talk about that you have an
Speaker 1: interest in hunting? And I know that hunters go on
Speaker 1: there now, But I imagine that the long plan wouldn't
Speaker 1: be that right that they probably don't like that idea. Donors,
Speaker 1: there are one that the majority that's not correct. I
Speaker 1: don't know. That would make are my life even harder
Speaker 1: to get this thing done. It would be very difficult
Speaker 1: that philosophical divide. So I would say there's some as
Speaker 1: far as people who are squeamish about it are queasy
Speaker 1: about it, I don't know. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty,
Speaker 1: I would say something like that, and where they where
Speaker 1: you knocked that down to about three percent that I
Speaker 1: don't want to hear it. I'll say, you know, people
Speaker 1: have been out there for eleven thousand years hunting animals.
Speaker 1: People have been a part of landscape. First it was
Speaker 1: thrusting spears. Later got the idea of at laddles. Later
Speaker 1: at the got the idea of archery. That numbers sitting
Speaker 1: at about fifteen right now for the fashionable keeps going.
Speaker 1: So I think it's going to go deeper. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well may well sixteen maybe because I think I heard
Speaker 1: you on one podcast listen, is it Dan Flores where
Speaker 1: you're talking with I can't remember who you're talking to?
Speaker 1: Was about the idea you correctly said the oldest has
Speaker 1: been found? And was it so the South South and
Speaker 1: South America? Yeah, there's older stuff out of a tex
Speaker 1: out of Austin, Texas. Yeah, so how do you anyway,
Speaker 1: So a long time ago people have been hunting, whether
Speaker 1: they're throwing or checking a rocket something or finally a
Speaker 1: fixed a stone to a spear. So people been hunting
Speaker 1: out here for a long long time, all right, So
Speaker 1: that's in ports most important thing. And uh, I hate
Speaker 1: to use words sustainably, So when we use that, but
Speaker 1: it works seemed to work. Okay, Yeah, there were some
Speaker 1: periods of very unsustainable hunting preper exactly. Also, it's not
Speaker 1: getting too that. But what I would say to people,
Speaker 1: and because this has come up a lot in the
Speaker 1: last seventeen years for sure, is well, why aren't you
Speaker 1: guys are gonna be like a park and not allow hunting, right,
Speaker 1: So look what our what our goal is first and
Speaker 1: foremost is extraordinarily robust wildlife populations, which do not exist
Speaker 1: there now. So our job is to create robust wildlife
Speaker 1: population something you'd see in the serengetti. You're gonna be
Speaker 1: astounded if we are successful. Give us a couple of
Speaker 1: decades to pull this off. It's a lot, a lot
Speaker 1: to do. You're gonna be astounded. So in other words,
Speaker 1: don't worry so much about the hunting. If you have
Speaker 1: that and you have access, or you're happy. Is it
Speaker 1: just a philosophical thing about hunting, or you think they'll
Speaker 1: take all the wildlife away? So I realize, okay, well,
Speaker 1: if you have serengetti like stuff that I can see
Speaker 1: and I can go view it and show my kids
Speaker 1: and my grandkids, then yeah, it all, it all can
Speaker 1: fit for sure. So that takes care of a lot
Speaker 1: of it is that people have been doing this for
Speaker 1: thousands of years and we're not about to let hunters
Speaker 1: knock back and not get back until there's no we're
Speaker 1: not gonna kill everything, right. And I tell them about
Speaker 1: my background in it, and I understand the whole the
Speaker 1: whole sport of it and all that, and it goes
Speaker 1: away pretty close, like, well, I still don't like my hunting.
Speaker 1: And they might say, why do people shoot some many coyotes?
Speaker 1: Why do you have to shoot fifty coyotes? I can't
Speaker 1: explain that to you. Why why did they trap a
Speaker 1: swift fox? What did the fifth swift fox do to you?
Speaker 1: It's the size of a housecat. I don't need to
Speaker 1: trap that thing. I think canna eat it or nail
Speaker 1: it on their wall. Or I can't explain that to you.
Speaker 1: Why do I have to say down with a with
Speaker 1: a tripod and shoot three dogs at a go? What's
Speaker 1: that about? I can't explain that. Let's let's move on
Speaker 1: to other things. You want to give me some money
Speaker 1: for some land, you know? So, yeah, So there are
Speaker 1: some places where I think hunters maybe shooting themselves in
Speaker 1: the foot in terms of capturing the hearts and minds
Speaker 1: of the general public. But as far as big as
Speaker 1: far as as far as pure big game feel the
Speaker 1: freezer kind of thing people can people can get that
Speaker 1: for the most you say robust numbers, like if you're
Speaker 1: going to compare it to what Yellowstone has now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: is there like the way that you guys can articulate
Speaker 1: that Yellowstone has three to four thousand, three to four
Speaker 1: thousand bison? Well, I want to be uh, let's make
Speaker 1: my crew that I work with very nervous when I
Speaker 1: started saying numbers. So because you can always argue that
Speaker 1: once you get a number, but bison I gets on
Speaker 1: our website, so I can say that I think we
Speaker 1: could the most importantly Yellowstone and Us, there's a bit
Speaker 1: apples and oranges, because you have size, but you also
Speaker 1: have habitat and elevation bison from six thousand feet to
Speaker 1: over eight thousand feet in that habitat on that on
Speaker 1: the sides of that volcano or in the bowl of
Speaker 1: volcano there. As you know, it's very different than where
Speaker 1: we are att with an amazing forage and again a
Speaker 1: history of wildlife that yellows don't never had, or the
Speaker 1: rocks yellows don't like the habitat's all confined to the
Speaker 1: right parian areas. I mean, like not all, but like
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of alpine timbered stuff that isn't
Speaker 1: isn't doing much good for those animals. Depends on the species.
Speaker 1: For wolverines or pretty happy to that high stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: it depends. And by the way, you have to realize
Speaker 1: who you're talking to, and I'm talking about just what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like when we look at like the size
Speaker 1: of Yellowstone, the fact that it can support you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this number, this is a hotly contested number.
Speaker 1: But the fact that Yellowstone can support three to four thousand,
Speaker 1: knowing that some number are gonna drift out every winter. Uh,
Speaker 1: that I feel like an equal patch of ground out
Speaker 1: where you're talking about would be able to support a
Speaker 1: higher number. Uh. Scientists would say the carrying capacity for
Speaker 1: wildlife where we are is indeed higher than the exact
Speaker 1: same number of acres if you had three million acres
Speaker 1: at Yellowstone smack in the middle of the call it
Speaker 1: there in the volcano, there in three million acres where
Speaker 1: we were are. And but they're looking at numbers. We're
Speaker 1: looking at pollinators, grassland birds, all kinds of game species, predators,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So we're looking at the important thing is
Speaker 1: we think about like a coral reef. We're looking at
Speaker 1: every single thing that moves or breeze or digs or
Speaker 1: flies or whatever. A very small subset of our bigger
Speaker 1: view of wildlife orbout adversity is game animals. But they
Speaker 1: agree that you guys are known for the people's the
Speaker 1: popular understanding of what you're doing as sort of this
Speaker 1: emblematic keystone species is you're known for doing bison recovery.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like that's in the air, and I
Speaker 1: hope this podcast can help correct that. So help me
Speaker 1: with that. But can you hear me from it? Can
Speaker 1: we talk about that for a Second's talk about bisons?
Speaker 1: So we're should I wrote who damn book about I
Speaker 1: read your book about it. It was quite good, by
Speaker 1: the way, and uh, someone starts. Someone told me it's
Speaker 1: funny to go pay before you go on this podcast.
Speaker 1: You gotta read this book. This book just came out.
Speaker 1: It's really important to read it. Going here another one
Speaker 1: and digging around look on Amazon, I saw the one.
Speaker 1: It was two thousand and six, two thou five something
Speaker 1: like that. Like I read that, where's the new one?
Speaker 1: This is going to be stupid if I don't read
Speaker 1: his book on bison. We got a new cookbook out
Speaker 1: that it's a very important book. But like, just okay,
Speaker 1: I'm super interested in let's talk about I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how interested I am in blackfooted ferrets everything. Okay,
Speaker 1: I am, genuinely, But just because it's it's it's a right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a big thing, and and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: like I said in the title of my book, it's
Speaker 1: an icon. So what could lay out for me what
Speaker 1: it could look like in terms of that animal. I
Speaker 1: think what it could look like is the greatest um
Speaker 1: bison viewing human experience in regards to bison that anybody
Speaker 1: alive today in North America has ever experienced, far beyond Yellowstone.
Speaker 1: That's why I think you can look like. Part of
Speaker 1: that is numbers. We're shooting for regards to bison, a
Speaker 1: minimum of ten thousand. That's a floor to get there.
Speaker 1: That's our goal as a floor. Okay, I think it
Speaker 1: depends on the year. Of course, with Yellowstone, you could
Speaker 1: be thirty one while over five thousand, so imagine ten thousand.
Speaker 1: But because it's the prairie is much more viewable, and
Speaker 1: because of how they they don't have to leave. They're
Speaker 1: in a bowl where we are. They're in a bowl right,
Speaker 1: not on the top. It's a it's a convex situation.
Speaker 1: So and every time you get sun on the south
Speaker 1: side of the slopes there you open up, even thirty
Speaker 1: below zero, you still get open grass and sage brush
Speaker 1: and lots of lots of really good forage without having
Speaker 1: to pack out anywhere else and go somewhere. So I
Speaker 1: think them being able to stay, be located and stick
Speaker 1: there is real good. We can support more numbers and
Speaker 1: people Sometimes people say ten thousand mice, and that's bigger
Speaker 1: than anything in the lower forty eight states. Isn't that
Speaker 1: just gonna be kind of nuts? And I said, well,
Speaker 1: he can look at those six counties there. There's four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand cows. Four thousand cows, and those
Speaker 1: six counties were working right now. So I think you
Speaker 1: can ten thousand miss back in there. In fact, maybe
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty, and you're still not getting in the way
Speaker 1: of that's a lot of cows. And in Montana there's
Speaker 1: a lot more cows on that there's almost half there's
Speaker 1: almost a half million cows in it. Yeah, two and
Speaker 1: a half million in the whole state, roughly two point
Speaker 1: four two point six depending on the year. Last year
Speaker 1: just about two point five million cows. So yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: do you have the human population in those six counties
Speaker 1: to have fun numbers to balance? Yeah? I imagine the
Speaker 1: big charismatic predators m play into this. Like you talked
Speaker 1: about an intact ecosystem. Um, you know, grizzlies are nosing
Speaker 1: their way out under the Great Plains, Um, wolves are expanding.
Speaker 1: What what what do you picture the American prairie reserves
Speaker 1: relationship with grizzlies and wolves would be, And what do
Speaker 1: you met, like, what are the what are sort of
Speaker 1: the the obstacles there? I picture those two species, well,
Speaker 1: black bears, cougars, wolves and grizzly bears. I picture them
Speaker 1: being there. And before anybody jumps on that and said,
Speaker 1: well they'll be bring they're they're bringing them in, we're not.
Speaker 1: We can't touch those animals. Uh, they're not going to
Speaker 1: commit any horse trailers with us or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But I've been around already. I mean you already got
Speaker 1: lions there, definitely got lions. They they suspect they got
Speaker 1: back from the little belts about they were completely extirpated.
Speaker 1: They expect they got back me and did nineteen nineties, Uh,
Speaker 1: from the little belts, but they were all gone from
Speaker 1: this particular area. And uh, we can get back to that.
Speaker 1: But most scientists I talked to, including FVP biologists, don't
Speaker 1: believe there's a viable, genetically viable population and putting out
Speaker 1: too many tags right now for it. There really really
Speaker 1: need to do their bottleneck. They're too small, but could
Speaker 1: be a robust population. But what I've seen is again
Speaker 1: we had a cabin up in what's called by Gibson
Speaker 1: Reservoir my dad built was cheap use material from UBC
Speaker 1: lumber and great falls, uh pretender son Over Canyon. And
Speaker 1: when you talked about a grizzly bear in the sixties,
Speaker 1: it was a real anomaly. I mean, if somebody saw one,
Speaker 1: they talked, We talked about it all winter, that somebody
Speaker 1: saw a grizzly bear doing something or track. Well, seventies
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit more, eighties, a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And now you as you know it's so full. A
Speaker 1: huge success story's starting to spill out onto the grasslands
Speaker 1: and it used to be just ten years ago. Kind
Speaker 1: of for a visit in the summer, just take a
Speaker 1: walk about and go back into the mountains. Well, now
Speaker 1: you can't go back upstream of that concentration from her
Speaker 1: habitat standpoint, and they're having young on the grasslands. So
Speaker 1: but then in my mind, I'm thinking Tiber Reservoir, shot
Speaker 1: O conradt, various other places. Now they're east of Fort
Speaker 1: Benton and now they're on this map. They just killed
Speaker 1: two at Denton right there, and now they're by White
Speaker 1: Silver Springs just three weeks ago after we got one
Speaker 1: on a camera trap just a little bit west of Harlowe,
Speaker 1: Harlton right, So they are well into that red air already.
Speaker 1: And so that with us doing nothing, wolves are moving
Speaker 1: north also from the southwest in that direction to into
Speaker 1: the crazies and the little belts. Now doesn't take much
Speaker 1: to find out where they are uh expanding, So I
Speaker 1: would expect why would they not get to where we
Speaker 1: are because they're already on this map already doesn't take
Speaker 1: very long. Plus the habitat is fantastic. If you're an omnivore.
Speaker 1: The brakes is terrific, and the history of bears there,
Speaker 1: if you read Paul Shillary's Lewis and Clark among the
Speaker 1: grizzlies encounters every single day as they came to that area.
Speaker 1: They're thick, all right. So no, it's no surprise. It's
Speaker 1: not that much of a stretch to figure out why
Speaker 1: what grizzies want to be here, because that's where they
Speaker 1: were all the time anyway. So what I what I think,
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta make it okay, And back to
Speaker 1: the frocky mountain front is now. I go back up
Speaker 1: there and I know ranchers who we used to knock
Speaker 1: on the doors when I was a little kid. Now
Speaker 1: I'm sixty, but I still remember that area. And those
Speaker 1: ranchers are like, yeah, we see them. Don't have that
Speaker 1: much of a problem with them. They don't slaughter my cows,
Speaker 1: and we've learned to live with them. There's a couple
Speaker 1: of adjustments you gotta make. But they're not yelling for
Speaker 1: f TOVP to come kill all these bears. They don't
Speaker 1: belong here. They're like great white sharks or something. Take
Speaker 1: them away. Uh, it's become normalized. So to your point, Steve,
Speaker 1: how do I What do I see is that over
Speaker 1: the next ten or fifteen years there'll be a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety because they've been gone for a long time,
Speaker 1: and then that front edge, that leading edge of the
Speaker 1: wolves of the bears will be People are are looking
Speaker 1: for how do we live with them? F tovps starting
Speaker 1: to do uh seminars, evening seminars in Stanford and Dent
Speaker 1: and other places saying you live in bear country. Now
Speaker 1: here's what we've learned looking two miles to the west
Speaker 1: about how to live with them. You kind of got
Speaker 1: to get ready for this. We don't have the money
Speaker 1: to helicopter every single bearer back to the front. I
Speaker 1: ain't gonna work anymore. Um. So, you know, for a while,
Speaker 1: Wyoming was spending for every grizzly bearon Wyoming, even though
Speaker 1: they were federally protected species. Every grizzly bearon Wyoming, Wyoming
Speaker 1: was spending over half on each baron at state that
Speaker 1: when Idaho spends per kid in public school expensive Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think if and if you're a hunter, and you
Speaker 1: won't have to be p to spend money on things
Speaker 1: you want opening habitat things like that helicopter rides for
Speaker 1: one animal time is taking money away from you getting
Speaker 1: on more land and more social change stuff and getting
Speaker 1: public access and uh, you know, so it's a it's
Speaker 1: a public they don't want to do it either. So
Speaker 1: what I see is them being there is going to
Speaker 1: take a long time, but I think it will get
Speaker 1: normalized exactly how we've seen it in Montana two d
Speaker 1: miles to the west. Very normalized, no big deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A thing that happens right now is when a grizzly
Speaker 1: does strike out and oftentimes one a mountain lion strikes
Speaker 1: out into a new country. Um, they get in trouble
Speaker 1: and then they die. I mean they get in trouble
Speaker 1: on the highway getting hit by a car, or they
Speaker 1: get in trouble with just coming up against that the
Speaker 1: human wildlife interface, and they kill something or turn up
Speaker 1: on someone's doorstep like that's usually the end of the
Speaker 1: story because they're going into areas where conflict. The opportunity
Speaker 1: for conflict is rich, especially with an animal doesn't have
Speaker 1: a set core home range that it knows well. He's
Speaker 1: seeing it for the first time too, and they stumble
Speaker 1: into trouble. I think that by if you were to
Speaker 1: create this big block of habitat were they were welcome
Speaker 1: or presented with a place to live, that were they
Speaker 1: were less likely to come up against that wall, the
Speaker 1: very hard wall of civilization. I think that that would
Speaker 1: probably aid in there hanging on and perhaps creating breeding
Speaker 1: pairs and more. You know, static animals, right, they had
Speaker 1: like a spot where they could live, So I mean
Speaker 1: it's definitely something that could assist in the expansion recovery
Speaker 1: of the species, whether or not you took an active
Speaker 1: roll in that or not, just by creating the habitat. Right,
Speaker 1: our role is to create habitat so that everything can
Speaker 1: be there, not to drag it all in we did
Speaker 1: with bison. Is the only way we get them there
Speaker 1: from wind Cave National Park in South Dakota and from
Speaker 1: from Elk Island, Canada. The only way to do it
Speaker 1: is trucks and trailers everything in the beginning, Um, we
Speaker 1: don't need to import anymore. But and uh, swift fox,
Speaker 1: you actually have to put them in a little cage
Speaker 1: and bring them down so they don't get hit across
Speaker 1: the highway and let them out somewhere. Other than that
Speaker 1: everything gets there on its own, like Sugers did Cougar. Well,
Speaker 1: let's go back in this period of time. You guys
Speaker 1: know this. You watched I'm sure you've watched fps movie
Speaker 1: Back from the Brink and read the books and what
Speaker 1: happened out here or every every big horn, every elk,
Speaker 1: every grizly bear, every wolf, everybodyson was completely wiped out
Speaker 1: right in this area. There wasn't one left. The elk
Speaker 1: came back in ranching trucks with FDVP in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: so they were brought back right the Rocky Mountain sheepy.
Speaker 1: I heard you're talking with Garrett and those guys from
Speaker 1: the Sheep Foundation. They brought those back I think from
Speaker 1: Castle Reef and the Rockies Uh to put them back
Speaker 1: in the brakes in like early nineteen sixties or something
Speaker 1: like that, late nineteen fifties. So a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: has been brought back. I think we're pretty much the
Speaker 1: end of truck and stuff in and now it's just
Speaker 1: letting populations grow. The predators will get there on their own.
Speaker 1: And you can tell every year that's the movements are happening.
Speaker 1: It's it's a it's a fore gone it's a historic
Speaker 1: inevitability they're gonna return. Um, what would let's say everything
Speaker 1: was for Let's say you don't like this. Let's say
Speaker 1: let's say everything was for sale right now that you
Speaker 1: that you guys felt like when you got a thing
Speaker 1: like to make this work, it needs to be ex big, right.
Speaker 1: Let's say it was all for sale right now and
Speaker 1: it was just market like standard market value vote a
Speaker 1: cost to buy all of it. Um, you're probably talking
Speaker 1: about another properties between two hundred and three hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars roughly maybe a little more time value of money.
Speaker 1: You have to put a qualifier on there. How much
Speaker 1: time do we get to buy it? If it's all
Speaker 1: available it's all for sale, If we buy it over
Speaker 1: fifteen years, gonna cost more. Cut the time value of
Speaker 1: money and property out there goes up about three percent
Speaker 1: sometimes four percent a year. The longer you wait, the
Speaker 1: much much more expensive. Yet so but that amount of
Speaker 1: money would push this landscape piece up to milk done million,
Speaker 1: four million acres because of the public land leverage aspect
Speaker 1: of it. So yeah, here's how we we often say.
Speaker 1: People say, well, you know, one of the reasons it's
Speaker 1: hard to do these projects they're so darn expensive. That's
Speaker 1: why the government got out of the business, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: we think about this way, this entire project, everything, all
Speaker 1: the management, all the remodeling costs. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: work being done out there, are people doing it right
Speaker 1: now today while I'm sitting here in this warm office.
Speaker 1: Is UM purchasing the land, all the remodeling and the
Speaker 1: operational costs in a very large endowment which will keep
Speaker 1: it going forever, like a university endowment, so you don't
Speaker 1: have to have the vagaries of administrations. And like Yellowstone
Speaker 1: has million dollar maintenance backlog right now, we want to
Speaker 1: avoid that. So endowment's maked into that entire thing. All right,
Speaker 1: about seven a hundred million dollars that's the price of
Speaker 1: the project. Well that's that's that's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Well think about it this way. I don't know if
Speaker 1: any of you sports fans but watch football or something
Speaker 1: like that. Not at all used to be. So the Raiders,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Raiders, you know, are the Oakland. They're gonna
Speaker 1: move to Las Vegas. So they just gotta gotta build
Speaker 1: a stadium, right, So the prices stadium at one point
Speaker 1: eight billion dollars. Lanta Falcons just did one just before
Speaker 1: the last Super Bowl one point six billion. Dallas Cowboys
Speaker 1: just did one, one point two billion, Minnesota Vikings, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: We built up a new football stadium almost every year
Speaker 1: in this country, just like that, from the idea to
Speaker 1: the paint's dry. You're playing games three years average one
Speaker 1: and a half billion dollars. So for the biggest reserve
Speaker 1: ever created the United States, a three and a half
Speaker 1: million acres, a million acres bigger than nell Stone Park,
Speaker 1: less than half the cost of one new football And
Speaker 1: that's a stadium. I'm interested in going to hot dogs.
Speaker 1: You pay some games. I'm just saying, where the heck
Speaker 1: are you gonna get that money? You say, if you've
Speaker 1: got a good idea, money doesn't exactly fall out of
Speaker 1: the sky. But you can tell just by that sports story.
Speaker 1: Entertainment venues, performing arts centers, operas, wings of hospitals are
Speaker 1: regularly in the six eight million dollars. Just like that.
Speaker 1: Martin Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are always losing that amount
Speaker 1: of money today during losing that amount of money today,
Speaker 1: and value during fluctuations in the stock market. Right, So,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ways to make it seem approachable,
Speaker 1: but it's still a bunch of money. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: our our fundraising crew, our fundraising crew, if they could
Speaker 1: call in, they'd say, but tell them that's not easy
Speaker 1: and it's not easy to raise that. Um, it's a
Speaker 1: lot easier raising money for a football stadium or anything else.
Speaker 1: Because people look at it as a big economic driver.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have. It doesn't have a big footprint. Well,
Speaker 1: it's also you have a village, you have it's a
Speaker 1: tribal thing. Okay, I'm I, I have a I have
Speaker 1: my Packers T shirt on. Yeah, we need this much money?
Speaker 1: Where where can I send in my ten bucks or
Speaker 1: whatever else it is, so we don't have in this
Speaker 1: kind of situation where a lot of things around the
Speaker 1: world I work with Geographic. I get back to the
Speaker 1: hunting idea. I think it's not this nuance. They're not
Speaker 1: as I can tell, they're actually into market hunting, including
Speaker 1: the chief scientist Jonathan Bailey. Uh So, no, when National
Speaker 1: Geographic let's go back to that in a second. But
Speaker 1: I think one thing that's hard about conservation I'd like
Speaker 1: to get onto. Actually, while hunters, I think are blowing
Speaker 1: a huge opportunity to make things better in Montana is
Speaker 1: people don't get organized. There's no sense of tribe or
Speaker 1: work together. So you have a few tribes, you have
Speaker 1: ducks unlimited, you have Rocky Mount out Foundation, Deer Foundation,
Speaker 1: back country hunters and anglers, but not enough for critical mass.
Speaker 1: Hunters could not pull off a fundraising thing to build
Speaker 1: the stadium. And hunters are not organized enough to actually
Speaker 1: make big time gutsy conservation happen because they don't want
Speaker 1: to be a part of a big don't want to
Speaker 1: be a part of a bigger tribe like a Packers
Speaker 1: fans or Atlanta fans. And you get things done in numbers.
Speaker 1: You get things done with gusto if you pull together numbers.
Speaker 1: So we have to go beyond Montana to build this
Speaker 1: thing because everyone's sitting back waiting for us to be
Speaker 1: done and say you've done yet, Can I go in
Speaker 1: and shoot something? It's kind of irritating. Yeah. But one
Speaker 1: of the things people say is they say that you
Speaker 1: won't guarantee hunting access and perpetuity. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what the hell that means, because I don't know what
Speaker 1: who has made that guarantee I mean, like, I don't
Speaker 1: know any private ranchers that have made hunting access a
Speaker 1: guarantee and perpetuity for how they would go about doing that.
Speaker 1: But that's a criticism. Well, I think, yeah, the criticism.
Speaker 1: But here's a couple of things on again, I don't
Speaker 1: even know what, Like I said, I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that looks like, how one would draft up a
Speaker 1: guarantee of hunting access and perpetuity. But but it's the
Speaker 1: thing people say, and there's suspicions that what will happen
Speaker 1: is you know all this. I'm just telling you what
Speaker 1: I hear out walking around on the streets right here too.
Speaker 1: The suspicion is what you're going to do, because you're
Speaker 1: gonna do this, and then you're gonna be like, ha, suckers,
Speaker 1: it's a park, right, That's what That's the accusation I've
Speaker 1: heard most frequently leveled at this is that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it has been mixed up in the National Park. I mean,
Speaker 1: just having that that phrase in there has complicated this enormously,
Speaker 1: I imagine, or if you don't even get there. To
Speaker 1: go back to the first part of this conversation, right,
Speaker 1: you got private land, private property rights, in Montana are strong. Um,
Speaker 1: and as we already explained, you got private land that
Speaker 1: is the key to locking up or unlocking a bunch
Speaker 1: of public land. And what is going to guarantee that
Speaker 1: you guys just don't exercise private property rights that everybody
Speaker 1: else does and says, yeah, you know what, Actually we're
Speaker 1: not gonna lay on today because all of that land
Speaker 1: is hunt Like whether the apre are never existed, all
Speaker 1: that land was accessible to hunting. So like you had
Speaker 1: ranchers that their families were hunting, people were out hunting it.
Speaker 1: So and also relative to you gotta also understand like
Speaker 1: the power of the relative perspective. Well, Lewis and Clark
Speaker 1: saw that there are many explanations for why they saw
Speaker 1: the Abunce wildlife they did and what George Catlin saw there. Um,
Speaker 1: granted it's not anywhere near that now, but relative to
Speaker 1: what people are experiencing elsewhere, you're here shifting paradigm syndrome,
Speaker 1: shifting baselines. Yeah, okay, that is still the land of
Speaker 1: milk and honey. Okay, remains relative to everything else that
Speaker 1: people are seeing. That remains like this great wildlife haven.
Speaker 1: So from it, like nothing, you have a struggle hunting.
Speaker 1: Understand the perspective I hear from people. The perspective is
Speaker 1: it's pretty great, it's all open to hunting. Um, why
Speaker 1: would I take the risk of removing millions of acres
Speaker 1: of huntable land from hunting? Was because people are just
Speaker 1: like really suspicious about the long term plan, that's all.
Speaker 1: And I don't even know. Like when I have I
Speaker 1: always say, dude, I don't know. I'd like to talk
Speaker 1: to that guy. All right, Well, I think the shifting
Speaker 1: baseline thing is very interesting to me. Um on two things.
Speaker 1: One is the amount of wildlife that used to be
Speaker 1: out there, so it's it's kind of bit frustrating. Sometimes
Speaker 1: saddens me that people go out there and see what's
Speaker 1: out there now and they think it's good. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's good. I think there can be a lot more.
Speaker 1: And I've covered that country a lot of times and
Speaker 1: airplanes all kinds of aircraft on foot twice now. I've
Speaker 1: walked five miles the entire length of that map west
Speaker 1: to east, biked it on my mountain bike. I've been
Speaker 1: out there hundreds of times, and I was raised to
Speaker 1: look for game. I've absolutely trained to do that as
Speaker 1: a kid right, and a lot of our folks who
Speaker 1: are with a pr big game hunters, and you go
Speaker 1: out there, you go. It's it is really unbelievable. This
Speaker 1: is empty, is absolutely empty. I've had folks from fish
Speaker 1: waving parks uh in aircraft flying back and forth, fly
Speaker 1: a hundred miles, go anything. They said, I can go
Speaker 1: anywhere I want. So they're pilot, fly around, U l
Speaker 1: bend whatever. Seeing in the elk yet nope, go south
Speaker 1: the river twenty more miles seen elk yet, nope, go
Speaker 1: a little further anywhere seeing an elk? Not one? And
Speaker 1: this is a hundred miles slow and slow, or walking
Speaker 1: with us five miles one time. The last time we
Speaker 1: did it, a hundred eighty five miles. We didn't see
Speaker 1: one elk in the you know, in the nine period,
Speaker 1: and you hear Lewis and Clark whoever else coming up.
Speaker 1: They didn't even start hunting until four o'clock in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: and they got done work and they got enough elk
Speaker 1: to feed forty people every night. If you tried to
Speaker 1: walk upstream and started elk hunting, imagine just every night
Speaker 1: your job, two of you, two guys to go out
Speaker 1: and get elk feast forty people. Uh could you do that?
Speaker 1: You have some pretty hungry people in the first three days. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just not the same. So I think one baseline
Speaker 1: that shifted. I think we have an amnesia about what
Speaker 1: used to be there. How do you deal with that amnesia?
Speaker 1: It's a big thing, and there's no one book would
Speaker 1: be nice. But I brought about nine books here that
Speaker 1: you read and you have to take bits and pieces
Speaker 1: from each one and piece the one together and realized
Speaker 1: it spans fifty years. They never met each other. They're
Speaker 1: all saying the same thing. That's an interesting cross referencing
Speaker 1: the other shifting baseline. You're all pretty very young that
Speaker 1: I'm looking around the five of you. But in the
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies, it was a different experience. The baseline
Speaker 1: of walking up to a ranch was like, yeah, go
Speaker 1: ahead in the Deerborn even if somebody who owned the
Speaker 1: deer born in, which they did there in California in
Speaker 1: the late sixties, we calmed down there. My dad found
Speaker 1: out who it was, Gary Cooper's old ranch and Tom
Speaker 1: Mix and we got to hunt mule there. Down there
Speaker 1: is just great or we go want to hunt elk
Speaker 1: or whatever else. It was most likely nless you got
Speaker 1: somebody really crabby. Oh yeah, how I'm gonna be here? Well,
Speaker 1: if we can put our camp over there, just a
Speaker 1: couple of days, got a lot of the year, Is
Speaker 1: that okay? Yeah, it's all right. My dad got really good.
Speaker 1: It was either George Dickle or old Crow. And they
Speaker 1: bring a fifth and you're in. And I got a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of brownies because the lady was very nice
Speaker 1: to me, a little kid. Look, I try to look
Speaker 1: really cold. So another baseline is you guys feel like
Speaker 1: you're locked out because the attitude of change. Now you
Speaker 1: knocked on the door and they say no, or hell no,
Speaker 1: go away, private property, don't bother me, or sorry, it's
Speaker 1: least out. That was not a factor. So you've got
Speaker 1: a baseline now where private property very unlikely you're going
Speaker 1: to get on it. Somebody's gotten to it before me
Speaker 1: an absentee landowner, a grouty landowner, or a hunt another
Speaker 1: hunter that's least it out. That's not that's not what
Speaker 1: I found is normal. So taking it back to normal
Speaker 1: is both wildlife populations and an a p R. Being
Speaker 1: like by the time you get there, the fences are gone,
Speaker 1: the keepout signs are gone, and there's a new sign
Speaker 1: and it says welcome into American Pury Reserve. And that's
Speaker 1: the interest to our private property. That makes sense, and
Speaker 1: you'll see that if you go. I think I think
Speaker 1: that if yeah, I think that that makes sense. I
Speaker 1: think that that would be that that's exciting to people.
Speaker 1: And I know like you have way a bit like
Speaker 1: you guys have a mission and you're driving towards the goal.
Speaker 1: And I don't expect it to be that. Um, I
Speaker 1: don't expect it to be that this is all meant
Speaker 1: to be in service of of humans, like you're doing
Speaker 1: something for wildlife and humans. I have. I have my
Speaker 1: backgrounds of psychology and sociology. I'm very interested in human beings.
Speaker 1: And I think as we pull further away from nature,
Speaker 1: you've probably seen Richard lose flash child in the woods,
Speaker 1: the nature deficit disorder idea. Adults have that disorder too,
Speaker 1: And I think sometimes it's just hard to where do
Speaker 1: I go where something big enough for full full ecology
Speaker 1: is happening. Uh. My wife and I we've probably been
Speaker 1: more thirty seven some lot of years to get there,
Speaker 1: have been to about almost forty different countries around the world.
Speaker 1: Were like diving. You get down on a coral reef,
Speaker 1: you know, you feel really small, but you can we
Speaker 1: see sharks comebine. But you get on a big coral
Speaker 1: reef and Panama or Honduras or somewhere, and you look
Speaker 1: at that and just go that's unbelievable. You're looking at
Speaker 1: the entire thing, how how it all works together, the
Speaker 1: plants and the animals, the little stuff, the big stuff, everything.
Speaker 1: And I think, unfortunately, from a trestle standpoint, what most
Speaker 1: people think about the outdoors when they drive around, uh,
Speaker 1: they see fences and cows or crops, which is cool.
Speaker 1: The nothing against that. We own a beef company, so
Speaker 1: I'm not against cattle, that's for sure. But I have
Speaker 1: a statistic here. This came from Natural Natural Agricultural Service statistics.
Speaker 1: You guys know how many acres are in montanae million acres?
Speaker 1: How many acres in agriculture ranching and farming on a
Speaker 1: nine three million, fifty nine million, fifty nine million acres
Speaker 1: at our ninety three is an egg that's of the
Speaker 1: surface of Montana's and agriculture. So I think normally, of course,
Speaker 1: when you go out there and drive around. That's mostly
Speaker 1: what you're gonna see. So I think, though there's a
Speaker 1: there's a coral reef like thing out there, to just
Speaker 1: be stunned by the beauty and be stunned by the
Speaker 1: diversity and the richness of wildlife and nature and bio diversity,
Speaker 1: just knock your socks off. I think it used to
Speaker 1: be like that. It can be again without putting a
Speaker 1: dent in the agricultural industry, not a dent or a
Speaker 1: worldfold supply anything else. So that's not to me. That's
Speaker 1: what's really exciting, and make it accessible to people. As
Speaker 1: far as as far as saving things permanently, the answer
Speaker 1: is yes, in due time. And you're taking a snapshot
Speaker 1: in time. You're looking at the first third of a
Speaker 1: really big construction project. So if I'm building a house
Speaker 1: and you know, the sheet rockers there and and there's
Speaker 1: no tapers lining the sheet rockers, framers and plumbers and
Speaker 1: concrete k lock and you walk in and say where
Speaker 1: do you want this couch? Say hang on, hang on,
Speaker 1: it's a total mess right now. I'll give me a
Speaker 1: couple of months and then I'll tell exactly where the
Speaker 1: couch is going to be permanently and forever, in perpetuity
Speaker 1: that you want to know where that couch is going
Speaker 1: to go. I don't know yet. I haven't even stood
Speaker 1: in the living room. The walls aren't up yet. So
Speaker 1: when you say, how come you're not putting permanent easements
Speaker 1: across your land right now, because we don't even understand
Speaker 1: the land. It's huge. The last property we bought is
Speaker 1: fifty two acres. That's our twenty nine one. Just to
Speaker 1: get to know that and how the wildlife moves around.
Speaker 1: How do we know where to put a permanent easement?
Speaker 1: Right now it's in block management. Go out and enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Ten twelve years from now, we'll know where we put
Speaker 1: something that sticks forever. One of the problems of conservation easements.
Speaker 1: I hate to say, but we'd be much more likely
Speaker 1: to put conservation easements where and I we have Montana
Speaker 1: landry lands easements. We're already starting to do something. Nobody
Speaker 1: knows about that, but we're starting to put things in easements.
Speaker 1: You've got to be awfully careful. If you were able
Speaker 1: to sit down with the easman entity every ten years
Speaker 1: and say, how's it working. Could we shift the footprint
Speaker 1: of the building envelope over here, or we made a
Speaker 1: mistake on that road. It's too close to the creek bed,
Speaker 1: and it's really messing up the travel of this particular species.
Speaker 1: The frontwarmer don't like at their spoots or whatever. If
Speaker 1: we go up around this hill over here and then
Speaker 1: down this other side and they go, you had your chance.
Speaker 1: Never ever, ever is that discussable ever. So when I
Speaker 1: come from business, nothing in nature is like that. Nature evolves,
Speaker 1: it's adaptable, it's resilient, it's shucks and jives with new information.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to be trapped at this point
Speaker 1: into something that is never discussable again. No matter if
Speaker 1: you made a horrible mistake, you can't change it. So
Speaker 1: fish walking parks do the same thing. They want to
Speaker 1: put easements on we would like to we like FWP.
Speaker 1: I'm in the block management all that right now. They
Speaker 1: want to put rest rotation grazing on the private land.
Speaker 1: If they do conservation easements and rest rotation grazing, even
Speaker 1: the BOM is beginning to break open. And look at
Speaker 1: they have eleven experiments around the west right now taking
Speaker 1: a look at the change or evolution towards something called
Speaker 1: outcome based grazing management outcome based, so I can read
Speaker 1: to you what you want to hear. What that says.
Speaker 1: Outcome by based grazing emphasizes conservation performance, ecological, economic and
Speaker 1: social outcomes, and cooperative management of public lands. This will
Speaker 1: help demonstrate that permitted livestock grazing on public lands can
Speaker 1: operate under a less rigid framework than is commonly used
Speaker 1: in order to better reach agreed upon habitat and vegetation goals,
Speaker 1: shared conservation, stewardship of public lands while supporting you such
Speaker 1: as livestock grazing and other things. So what they're saying
Speaker 1: saying is, rather than forcing you to use a technique
Speaker 1: like rest rotation grazing, we're going to force you to
Speaker 1: nail the outcome good looking forage for you. Yes, you
Speaker 1: can extract, it's an extracting industry. Extracts some to go
Speaker 1: in your cow and raise the poundage. But there's gotta
Speaker 1: be left for wildlife, a lot left for wildlife. Shaggy
Speaker 1: mosaic of habitat not grow. You know. I love the
Speaker 1: outdome outcome outcome based grazing idea that the BM is
Speaker 1: now spearheading. That's really cool. I think it's very smart.
Speaker 1: They're experimenting and adapting rather than saying rest rotation forever,
Speaker 1: even five years from now, rest rotation at the b
Speaker 1: all end all no innovation possible. I don't think that's
Speaker 1: a good way to look. So we're gonna be pretty
Speaker 1: slow and f VP easements if we have to put
Speaker 1: in rest rotation. Not that we don't like the ftervup,
Speaker 1: but they're forcing a technique. I often use the analogy
Speaker 1: is I like a lot of history books. I'm reading
Speaker 1: one right now. But ships in the in the lates undreds,
Speaker 1: and these Spanish course airs and the privateers, they got
Speaker 1: these boats to chase down the big boats that were
Speaker 1: laiden with all kinds of products, and they just they
Speaker 1: couldn't carry as much, but they're super fast. Well they
Speaker 1: set up the sales and everything. Uh French, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: French course airs, and they catch all the they catch
Speaker 1: these ships, and they would their ship couldn't one ship,
Speaker 1: couldn't take at all, but they brought three. But they're
Speaker 1: really fast, chase them down, take all their stuff and
Speaker 1: then leave with it. And it was well known technique.
Speaker 1: And the people who are hauling stuffs, So how do
Speaker 1: you how do you beat that ship, and we could
Speaker 1: have said, right, there is the Spanish. The French coursairs
Speaker 1: are so fast that that's the end of the shipping innovation.
Speaker 1: Let's just go with those forevermore. This is what the
Speaker 1: French nable use his coursair's sailing ships right forever. We'll
Speaker 1: try to run one of those in the America's Cup today,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do very well. Right, And the idea
Speaker 1: of rest rotation being and I've talked with Alan Savory
Speaker 1: over email. He knows about our project, likes our project,
Speaker 1: our rust Horn maze. Idea of rest rotation great for
Speaker 1: the time, but there's probably gonna be given a hundred years.
Speaker 1: I bet it will evolve. And locking down on this
Speaker 1: now as the best and we can quit thinking about
Speaker 1: there's no innovation necessary. I think it's the right way
Speaker 1: to go. So we're gonna be slow on Easeman's because
Speaker 1: Eastman's are forever. We'll we'll protect it, but just give
Speaker 1: us some time to get to know our land so
Speaker 1: we know what we're doing. Let me ask you about
Speaker 1: another manage that makes sense, It makes perfect sense. I
Speaker 1: want to ask about another management obstacle I could foresee
Speaker 1: and how you picture this um when you get the
Speaker 1: If you build a contiguous block and it's a lot
Speaker 1: of mixed ownership, there's gonna be federal lands, state lands,
Speaker 1: privately held lands, tribal lands, and block, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: really hard to get everyone on the same page in
Speaker 1: terms of management. Meaning there are places right now where,
Speaker 1: for instance, like bison, what you imagine functioning as wildlife,
Speaker 1: but in this state they fall into the domain of
Speaker 1: the Department of Livestock under a lot of situations. So
Speaker 1: you know, what is the calm? What is the conversations
Speaker 1: you're having with federal land managers if you look toward
Speaker 1: the future, what are the conversations where you're saying, we
Speaker 1: want to look like this, and we want the chunks
Speaker 1: that are under your administration to assist this. But it
Speaker 1: seems that you're gonna have these internal, very hard borders
Speaker 1: where management goals, management practices are anything but unified. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good concern, but I feel just the opposite.
Speaker 1: I'm quite optimistic about being able to come to a
Speaker 1: shared set of practices. We're never going to own the BLM.
Speaker 1: They own that and run that. We're never going to
Speaker 1: manage the public's wildlife. That's FWP. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: own or run the state lands. But uh an example
Speaker 1: sun prairie on your map there, that's about uh twenty
Speaker 1: thousand acres shrines, So you're up into a nearly forty
Speaker 1: square miles of land. It's big. A lot of bison
Speaker 1: on there. So what we have when we first got
Speaker 1: there there was miles and miles across fencing fencing out
Speaker 1: the state sections and the BLM pieces which is the
Speaker 1: light blue on that map. Dr the BLM. They go,
Speaker 1: what do you want to do? We said, well, this
Speaker 1: is different where we would like to take a cattle
Speaker 1: off and put bison on and and we'd like you
Speaker 1: a round grazing, and we'd like to have no interior fences.
Speaker 1: And we showed them lots and lots of science papers
Speaker 1: to about how bison can mostly rotate themselves, and um
Speaker 1: that we will at that time. It wasn't at that time,
Speaker 1: it is many years ago. We said, we will. Can
Speaker 1: you test, can you judge us on outcomes? Come down
Speaker 1: and take a look at the habitat after we've been
Speaker 1: there for a few years. First we asked them, what
Speaker 1: do you want this to look like? Which sometimes a
Speaker 1: lot of Landers don't do. We invited the blom who said,
Speaker 1: take a look at this. Tell us what you want
Speaker 1: to what you want us to look like. I'd like
Speaker 1: this little taller. These fours are pretty, forbes are pretty
Speaker 1: hammered um. I'd like to have this looking like this,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Plant diversity. Plant. Hete things like that, and
Speaker 1: some hit hard, some not so hard because they're big
Speaker 1: in the grassland birds as they should be in different habitat.
Speaker 1: So we started with outcome based grazing and two thousand
Speaker 1: and five with our first property. Eventually they said, you know,
Speaker 1: you guys seem to know what you're doing. They let
Speaker 1: us take down the fences between our private and our bom.
Speaker 1: Later the state did the same thing. We took down
Speaker 1: the fences between those two entities in the state and
Speaker 1: we have two or three state sections inside there. If
Speaker 1: you go to Sun Prairie and Earth, I think, Steve,
Speaker 1: what you'll see is a example of the future. You
Speaker 1: go out there, you see first, you see you species,
Speaker 1: You see elk, and you see some We don't have
Speaker 1: very many prong horn. They're starting to come back. Mule deer,
Speaker 1: a little bit of white tail not not usually on there,
Speaker 1: and bison and those animals walk across b OM and
Speaker 1: then State and then private and there's no fences. They
Speaker 1: have no idea who they are. What's really cool, we
Speaker 1: have a campground out there as full ail counters right now,
Speaker 1: right in the middle of sun prairie where you're looking
Speaker 1: at the hunters. Also they know where they are, but
Speaker 1: there's no indicate, there's no signs, and there's no fences.
Speaker 1: They walk across unimpeded, across the landscape. They're going private
Speaker 1: to BLM to state to private. It all looks and
Speaker 1: feels the same. That's a big area that's half the
Speaker 1: size of the entire Gallton Valley here. So that's a
Speaker 1: microcosm of the future. We've done it once. All I
Speaker 1: gotta do is scale that up. It can happen. And
Speaker 1: the agencies are particularly the on the ground people have
Speaker 1: to vp real good to work with. We don't see
Speaker 1: eye to eye on everything, No way, we don't. They
Speaker 1: don't want to move as fast as us um with
Speaker 1: ficial walking parks. One is the oil. One is the
Speaker 1: need for rest rotation grazing. Do we really have to
Speaker 1: do that? Okay? One is necessary then amount of hunter
Speaker 1: days if we do a conservation easement. Uh So the
Speaker 1: ease ments we're hav a little bit difficulty right now
Speaker 1: because we put a conservation easement, they'll say, we want
Speaker 1: a thousand hunter days on that piece of property. Well,
Speaker 1: a thousand hundred days right now is okay. But what
Speaker 1: if we're down to only this many big horns? How
Speaker 1: do we control that later on or there on our
Speaker 1: private property? What if it starts to get out of
Speaker 1: control in terms of people driving off road and things
Speaker 1: like that. It's, uh, this is never discussable again, right,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go slow on that. But in terms
Speaker 1: of strike agreements every year, however, well, we're we inherited
Speaker 1: some purchase properties that already had F. TOBP. Easeman on them,
Speaker 1: and some of the part, some parts, some aspects of
Speaker 1: the Easeman's feel too draconian to us and unchangeable and undiscussable.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna wait a little while before we do
Speaker 1: more until we're absolutely certain that a thousand hundred days
Speaker 1: of the right or number seven or twelve or whatever else.
Speaker 1: We gotta get to know the properties. So what we
Speaker 1: do agree on lots of things like we'd like to
Speaker 1: have um more of certain critters prong worn whatever it
Speaker 1: might be, and working on prong oar and studies right
Speaker 1: now are engaged collaborating with them on the possibility of
Speaker 1: reintroduction of possibility of re introduction of swift fox. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have an interest, We have an interest. It's all
Speaker 1: about timing. Let's guy seem like an easy win because
Speaker 1: I can't believe there's a big anti swift fox lobby.
Speaker 1: You never know they might buy. They're about that big. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like pretty cuddly man. No one's gonna get pissed.
Speaker 1: No one's because most people are never gonna know they're
Speaker 1: there anyway, right, And they're nocturnals maybe prairie dog shooters, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they but they will tell you that there's too
Speaker 1: many prairie dogs. They'll be glad to have the assistance.
Speaker 1: So fox don't eat prairie dogs. They eat bugs and
Speaker 1: grasshoppers and stuff like. Don't need dogs. Praye dogs are
Speaker 1: bigg than they are. We We we pounded in the
Speaker 1: one down in uh in Mexico that the winter. So
Speaker 1: I think so, I think, I think that I think
Speaker 1: the important thing bom the range cons the on the
Speaker 1: ground ft EP guys. Um uh, we're interested in for instance,
Speaker 1: you know, I really want to get to before you,
Speaker 1: so don't end us till I get to this. It's
Speaker 1: really important how I see hunters and what hunters can do. Um,
Speaker 1: that's putters that might trust us in our long term visions.
Speaker 1: Well hunters can do at the A p r H
Speaker 1: in Montana. I think I think you know, being in
Speaker 1: hunting and the sixties and seventies as you know, definitely
Speaker 1: big in the hunting member of the n r A,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff is just living in hunting
Speaker 1: camps and sting. But I think hunters are making some
Speaker 1: mistakes now that are hindering were things they want to
Speaker 1: go uh in this state, whether it's access or population
Speaker 1: numbers or whatever else it might be. So let me
Speaker 1: know when you want to get into that. So ahead,
Speaker 1: how much time we have? How much time we got
Speaker 1: get time to do all that? Well, I got a
Speaker 1: lot of questions, A lot of questions. Can we jump
Speaker 1: back to the relationship with f WP, So I think
Speaker 1: we missed a big one is where he has at
Speaker 1: on the bison conversation right, because we got wild bison
Speaker 1: and we got live stock. You guys have bison has
Speaker 1: livestock right now? Correct, and you man and you're that
Speaker 1: there's some benefits to that, um, But long term goal
Speaker 1: is bison has wildlife. So can you comment on like
Speaker 1: where I'm assuming right that that is the long term
Speaker 1: term goal? Correct? Yeah, I as we get a lot
Speaker 1: of bison right now, about eight hundred or so, and
Speaker 1: we're on a floor. We have to flatline him now
Speaker 1: because we're waiting for our next approval of the next
Speaker 1: piece of property where we can go out like some prairie.
Speaker 1: So we're in phase going around this block again to
Speaker 1: where we are allowed to put bison out on the
Speaker 1: bl So we have to hold but that that'll take
Speaker 1: off at some point. I can't predict when when you
Speaker 1: get approval for our environmental assessment and we go, um,
Speaker 1: but I think that's one thing like earlier you hit
Speaker 1: on it. Well, like yeah, to satisfy um, the grazing
Speaker 1: piece of this BLM least we turn that over. We
Speaker 1: turned cattle off and we turned bison on, and then
Speaker 1: a lot of people are probably like, well, bison's wild animal, right, Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: in this case you get us satisfy the least. But
Speaker 1: turning bison has livestock onto that lease. So bison have,
Speaker 1: as you know, a very funny dual citizenship status in
Speaker 1: Montana ours. There's nothing, um confusing about it. They are livestock.
Speaker 1: We pay a livestock fee about four dollars and twenty
Speaker 1: cents a year on every single animal, just like you pay.
Speaker 1: You pay like fifty on a cow for twenty or
Speaker 1: whatever on a bison. Um, they are a livestock animal
Speaker 1: on paper, meaning you pay the BLM just as listeners understand,
Speaker 1: you pay the BLM a fee to be able allowed
Speaker 1: to run your livestock on BLM land, same way a
Speaker 1: cattle ranchement buck sixty for a cow calf, just like
Speaker 1: exact same prices account, exact same price account yep. And
Speaker 1: the other thing I was just talking about was the
Speaker 1: Department of Livestock fee. There's a lot of fees associated
Speaker 1: with having livestock to different entities, so we pay exact
Speaker 1: same as cows. In some cases more. Department Livestock charges
Speaker 1: for some reason, more for a bison than for a cow.
Speaker 1: Uh So right now, I foresee for quite some time
Speaker 1: because as you take a look at trends, I want
Speaker 1: to get back to some of that the trends. You
Speaker 1: look at the trend of bison on the way to
Speaker 1: becoming wildlife. I think it will eventually happen down the road,
Speaker 1: but it's not happening very fast. So I think our
Speaker 1: our bison are going to be livestock for quite some
Speaker 1: time to come on. Perfect okay with that, probably beyond
Speaker 1: my career lifetime. I'm guessing, is there anything good? I
Speaker 1: think the way I look at it, you know, are
Speaker 1: we gonna try to ram it through somehow? I think
Speaker 1: the way I look at it back to we started
Speaker 1: the podcast with um looking at females. Let's go back
Speaker 1: to females, and funny, Michelle just raised her hand. I
Speaker 1: think I look at it like women's suffrage. And it
Speaker 1: was in the late eighteen forties and this big meeting
Speaker 1: in Seneca, New York, where they all of a sudden
Speaker 1: they realized women should have the right to vote. Susan B.
Speaker 1: Anthony and a bunch of other folks started different organizations
Speaker 1: and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and push.
Speaker 1: But that that that first seminal meeting where they got
Speaker 1: the epiphany the women should have the right to vote
Speaker 1: was in Lady eighteen forties and Seneca in New York.
Speaker 1: And you know when they got the right to vote.
Speaker 1: I mean, how obvious is that's when all those guys
Speaker 1: got together and decided to give them next Some of you, well,
Speaker 1: it's about time. Maybe even some of this we think
Speaker 1: that was a big mistake that they ever got who knows,
Speaker 1: but but you know that took. Think how long that
Speaker 1: took and how obvious that is. I think Poles keep saying,
Speaker 1: I don't know, a little over sixty in Montana, it's
Speaker 1: like to see wild bison in Montana. That's one indicator
Speaker 1: of a trend. They just became our national mammal. That's
Speaker 1: another indicator of a trend. Remember that, Uh, every animal
Speaker 1: moves creusily bear, you just name, it, goes anywhere it
Speaker 1: wants in Montana except for one who's who's our national mammal?
Speaker 1: And city of the people in Montana. Every time you
Speaker 1: pull more people want to But look at women's suffrage
Speaker 1: seventy years to get the right to vote. After people
Speaker 1: realize it was the right thing to do, and that
Speaker 1: was and a lot of people even in ninety were
Speaker 1: still upset that it happened. And I think bison. I
Speaker 1: don't know it could you know, sometimes historic inevitability, whether
Speaker 1: it's legalized marijuana, gay marriage, right to vote, bison and
Speaker 1: Montana can take a long, long, long time. What waste?
Speaker 1: What was your question, Michelle? He kind of answered it.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, beyond social tolerance and acceptability of
Speaker 1: this animal, what other factors do you think are inhibiting
Speaker 1: that acceptance? I think at different times, like inn the
Speaker 1: women's suffrage example, at different snapshots in time along that
Speaker 1: continuum until uh, it actually occurs and you tip over
Speaker 1: the edge and it's there. I think at the moment
Speaker 1: we're sitting in right now, which is kind of the
Speaker 1: only thing I can live with because it's today, is
Speaker 1: lack of understanding of the animal itself because it's been
Speaker 1: gone for so long. So the people that are most afraid, concerned, UM, skeptical,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. UM. I find the there's a correlation.
Speaker 1: The people that have the most vehemence against it have
Speaker 1: had the least experience with the animal. Our direct neighbors
Speaker 1: who see them all the time across the fence. Here's
Speaker 1: our cows, and there's our bison, hundreds and hundreds of bis,
Speaker 1: and even watching them on the runt. When they're really
Speaker 1: going at it, they go, not a big deal, because
Speaker 1: they've been desensitized. They know us, and they know the
Speaker 1: bison because they see him all the time. The people
Speaker 1: that are most hot about it. The further your weight
Speaker 1: get away from our bison, the more people get upset
Speaker 1: and start seeing those signs, those huge green signs that
Speaker 1: say don't buffalo me. Yeah, there's all kinds of signs.
Speaker 1: So but I ask you a question, Michelle. At the moment,
Speaker 1: it's just lack of understanding because it's been gone so
Speaker 1: long that, yeah, you also have there's like this there's
Speaker 1: this big sort of theoretical debate about them where it's
Speaker 1: like clashing worldviews, but the debate will get hung up
Speaker 1: on there's details along the way, you know, like like
Speaker 1: with like in Yellowstone, there's kind of like we're sort
Speaker 1: of in this this debate about like what is this animal,
Speaker 1: what's our relationship to it? Is it wildlife? Is it livestock?
Speaker 1: But then the debate gets hung up on like a
Speaker 1: snag like brucellosis, right, and brucellois Like this this disease,
Speaker 1: the disease spread issue. It winds up being that you
Speaker 1: can avoid the big conversation about where we headed as
Speaker 1: a people, what is that relationship with wildlife and native
Speaker 1: flora and fauna. And you go like, well, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, let's let's hang it up on brucellosis for
Speaker 1: a minute. And I think that will always there will
Speaker 1: always be a thing of the day where the debate
Speaker 1: centers around that. You know, there's and you know, and
Speaker 1: that's probably not even issue because you guys probably have
Speaker 1: quarantined disease free. We do. In the early two thousand's
Speaker 1: that was a really big one of the bruce loosis.
Speaker 1: But then we sat down with a lat of rancher
Speaker 1: groups sometimes you know, fifty at a time and circle
Speaker 1: of chairs and Second Creek Hall and Phillips County and
Speaker 1: US and they say, tell us what you're doing and
Speaker 1: they ask really good questions, um, and we said, here's
Speaker 1: how we do it. We at the source when Cave
Speaker 1: National Park, that the time alkhala Ash. We we do
Speaker 1: all twenty diseases, reportable diseases about the department livestock, not
Speaker 1: just bruce loosis. Make sure they don't have it. As
Speaker 1: they load up, they get TB tuberculosis checked on both sides,
Speaker 1: of the border, just a law. So they have to
Speaker 1: be quarantined here, but it's for t b When they
Speaker 1: get here, they sit for a couple of months, then
Speaker 1: they go out onto the landscape. We also do testing,
Speaker 1: random testing, knock them down with tranquilizer, darts, take care
Speaker 1: and blood samples, send that in so we get a
Speaker 1: report every year how the herd health is doing. A
Speaker 1: lot of people don't test that much. Uh so, and
Speaker 1: those tests are available to anybody who wants them. Ranchers
Speaker 1: want a hard copy, just come over. We'll give you
Speaker 1: a hard copy. We'll show you exactly what got back.
Speaker 1: So completely open book and transparent on that. So the
Speaker 1: Bruce loisis actually it pops up a little bit here
Speaker 1: and there, but since really after two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, it's really tapered off to that's gone
Speaker 1: for the most part. A little bit here and there,
Speaker 1: but mostly it's gone. And now the the idea of
Speaker 1: wild bison and what they will do to us and
Speaker 1: damaging property, and that's say like then it becomes you
Speaker 1: get my point, there will always be another thing, and
Speaker 1: so then it's like, well the integrity offenses, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really what's at issue for me is the integrity offenses.
Speaker 1: And now we'll talk about that for a long time.
Speaker 1: Bison crash are you know bison crash fenches and we'll
Speaker 1: say fish wealving parks one of the best things they've done. First,
Speaker 1: a lot of good things they do. It's a good organization.
Speaker 1: They helped us design the most wildlife friendly of fence
Speaker 1: we could possibly imagine wildlife and people friendly fence. So
Speaker 1: it's forty four inches at the top up so i'll
Speaker 1: can sail over. We've got a lot of cameras that
Speaker 1: show elk sailing over prong horn underneath eighteen inches off
Speaker 1: the deck, off the bottom, and so the prong warm
Speaker 1: can hit it at some pretty good speed. They don't
Speaker 1: have to go back and forth and back and forth.
Speaker 1: And then there's one hot wire. Bison don't like that
Speaker 1: hot wire all solar paneled or it's all solar powered
Speaker 1: and one on a quarter mile increments so the whole
Speaker 1: fans doesn't go down. But you watch wildlife, we want
Speaker 1: to make it like gortex sort of. All wildlife can
Speaker 1: go back and forth. Better stop the bison. That's a trick.
Speaker 1: That is a trick as amazing to watch these cameras
Speaker 1: and a five point boilock lazy as judgmental, but all
Speaker 1: the other up over. He sticks his head through the
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth wire, just jams through that wire and
Speaker 1: the camera shaking over the place. But he's rubbing that
Speaker 1: hot wire and his belly couldn't care less nothing that
Speaker 1: nothing bothered bother about that heat. That hot wires with
Speaker 1: the bison. They don't like it, so they back off,
Speaker 1: they stay away. So we use one hot wire to
Speaker 1: keep them where they are. The other thing we use
Speaker 1: is tons of water and amazing forage. They're happy at home.
Speaker 1: When you're happy at home, there's not a I sure
Speaker 1: to go in that direction. So yeah, some people talk
Speaker 1: about fences, but then we show them our fences and
Speaker 1: they go, wow, that actually keeps them in. And we
Speaker 1: got more than a decade and hundreds of ice and
Speaker 1: experience behind us that we know what we're doing. So
Speaker 1: you don't. You don't have an epidemic of escape. Ees
Speaker 1: get a lot of cows on our on our property.
Speaker 1: But that's how it is out there, and you call
Speaker 1: somebody to go, I think these are your cows. Because
Speaker 1: the people on that side have salmon tools and you
Speaker 1: have angers. These are definitely black. Do you want us
Speaker 1: to put them in a crill and say no? Can
Speaker 1: you hold until next week? And that's just how it
Speaker 1: is out there, you know, particularly bulls, they get to
Speaker 1: fight and push through a fence and then they start
Speaker 1: walking down a ditch and just going on walk about
Speaker 1: and everybody's pretty pretty easy going. Yeah about cows. Um,
Speaker 1: you had a lot of questions. Yes, I'm good, I'm done,
Speaker 1: all right. I mean I got questions that I still have.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about hunters if I don't know
Speaker 1: if you guys are into hun but I want to
Speaker 1: talk about you. I got deep Montana roots, just as
Speaker 1: it sounds like you do. And I was doing a
Speaker 1: lot of digging on you guys are gonna out Montana
Speaker 1: each other? Now? No, no, are you older than me?
Speaker 1: Um uh. But it's like a lot of the core
Speaker 1: arguments against APR are can kind of be summed up
Speaker 1: like this, right. So one thing that I got from
Speaker 1: multiple folks is like, oh yeah, Sean Garrity he uh,
Speaker 1: he's a real smooth talker. Where's tight jeans and slip
Speaker 1: on shoes? Okay? Um? Which I think is hilarious, right
Speaker 1: because every rancher in eastern Montana. They were pretty tight
Speaker 1: jeans and slip on shoes. They're just called cowboy boots, right, um.
Speaker 1: And that's how like a lot of these arguments are
Speaker 1: like driving up land property values. Um. But to me,
Speaker 1: and we talked about it a bunch and use this
Speaker 1: word access in the beginning of this thing. We we
Speaker 1: hit it pretty good. But you know, like our Secretary
Speaker 1: of the Interior at one point he was trying to
Speaker 1: hijack the word access as a place where you can
Speaker 1: drive your r V and hook it up to power
Speaker 1: and water. Right that that's not the access that you
Speaker 1: and your dad enjoyed on the Rocky Mountain front, Bob Marshall, Right, um,
Speaker 1: And so I know a lot of folks, myself included,
Speaker 1: is like there there's a hole here that I think
Speaker 1: and and I think everybody in this room is going
Speaker 1: to agree with you that hunters do plenty of shooting
Speaker 1: themselves in the foot. Um. But it's it's hard and
Speaker 1: we do good. We're doing better I think every year
Speaker 1: on activating hunters around issues and getting that united voice
Speaker 1: that I'm in full a greeance man. We need to
Speaker 1: get a hell of a lot better at that, um.
Speaker 1: But it's like, so, how is ap are going to
Speaker 1: define access? Right? And I had one real snide comment
Speaker 1: where they're like, well, yeah, access might be you gotta
Speaker 1: go drive around in one of their lifted up sprinter
Speaker 1: vans and their Serengetti model, right, um. And and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not guarantee. I'm not gonna say anything you
Speaker 1: don't already know, right, but you know, if you're looking
Speaker 1: for more funding, like every nonprofit is is like, is
Speaker 1: there can you guys add something into your mission statement
Speaker 1: that is bulletproof and long term and says, yeah, we
Speaker 1: are going to guarantee access to hunters. We're gonna guarantee
Speaker 1: hunting long term, and that's why we're gonna swing these
Speaker 1: hunters over and be like more favorable long term. And
Speaker 1: maybe we're providing a big chunk at uh dollars for
Speaker 1: the fund? Is there is there some middle ground there? Okay?
Speaker 1: Are you guys, are you guys iron clad on allowing
Speaker 1: um swift box or might you change your mind about
Speaker 1: swift fox allowing some fox? Yeah, oh we're working hard
Speaker 1: to get him in there. So that's absolutely, But you
Speaker 1: don't need to leave it open. You're gonna change your
Speaker 1: mind about it about no, but it's not in our
Speaker 1: mission statement. Were all that statement though, here's the reason
Speaker 1: why is I think to your question, why are we
Speaker 1: not going to put that in the mission mission statement.
Speaker 1: I've looked at this statement for a long time and
Speaker 1: we've made it simpler and shorter. We're trying to make
Speaker 1: it more universal and uh so that it fits a lot,
Speaker 1: because if I put that in there for hunters, this
Speaker 1: is what is to me, that would be what a
Speaker 1: politician would do. I'm gonna promise this for hunters, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And then you go down the road I just walked
Speaker 1: three blocks down. Then I'm gonna promise this for snowma builders.
Speaker 1: They are on a promises for skydivers. Then I'm gonna
Speaker 1: promise this for Audubon people in bird watchers, And pretty
Speaker 1: soon you got yourself all tangled up in a lot
Speaker 1: of promises that don't match up. So I'm gonna pick
Speaker 1: something really big, not amorphous and squishy. But you know
Speaker 1: the seven Points of the North American Hunting North American Conservation,
Speaker 1: there's seven foundation calls him the Seven Sisters. Those are
Speaker 1: pretty those are pretty high high level things and it
Speaker 1: doesn't say this and this and this and access to
Speaker 1: or whatever amounts it might be right, and that has
Speaker 1: endured for a very long time. I think you could
Speaker 1: use some tweaks. Have some comments about that, and there's
Speaker 1: tons of contradictions with it. They're not there's there's tons
Speaker 1: of things that exceptions. Yeah, well there's ton of things
Speaker 1: that aren't that we're doing that don't jive with the model.
Speaker 1: It's not working right, Yeah, privatization, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So what I want to do is try to include
Speaker 1: everybody and uh and uh you know we we want
Speaker 1: to do is include everybody in our mission statement, but
Speaker 1: not get screwed down so tight that we made this
Speaker 1: promise back in two thousand seventeen to something whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. We'll hear people say, well, you just you
Speaker 1: have this in block management the two crow because this
Speaker 1: other place over here on the p N, which is
Speaker 1: true where you can't hunt helk. There's no elk hunting allowed.
Speaker 1: The reason why is we don't have any elk on
Speaker 1: the p N and the populations out there are pathetic
Speaker 1: as it is. Let us old robust populations will open
Speaker 1: at the elk. You can hunt mule deer, sharp tail,
Speaker 1: pheasants and all kinds of other stuff on the p N,
Speaker 1: but no elk because there isn't any. We did give
Speaker 1: out two big horn sheep tags on the PN because
Speaker 1: I have to vpace regions six four ask us to
Speaker 1: do that. But yeah, we're going to try to build
Speaker 1: right now. We're trying to build robust populations. We take
Speaker 1: all this flax. See they lied. You can't hunt elk
Speaker 1: on the on the two crow there against are on
Speaker 1: the on the PN there against hunters. Life is nuanced.
Speaker 1: You have been a lot of black management properties where
Speaker 1: they have don't touch rules. Yeah, I hunted husant on
Speaker 1: show in showto you know north a Shota on Solid
Speaker 1: Road up there for pheasants on block management and you
Speaker 1: come on. You get to do the morning. You get
Speaker 1: three guns, doesn't matter how many people party. Three guns.
Speaker 1: You're off at noon because another crew comes in and
Speaker 1: Sundays only because the runners are at church. They don't
Speaker 1: want to there on Saturdays because it's too loud. All
Speaker 1: kinds of restrictions. They're not against hunting. So there's five
Speaker 1: of us. One of us has to leave a gun
Speaker 1: in the trunk truck. We just block with the ox.
Speaker 1: You know, you just got to adjust. But mostly what
Speaker 1: we get critiqued by is I want to be able
Speaker 1: to hunt and trap everything, or you're not in the hunters.
Speaker 1: I think life is not that black and white. And
Speaker 1: because of that black and whiteness, frankly, permeates some of
Speaker 1: the honey community. That's why hunting's losing some public support. Frankly,
Speaker 1: it's just too aggressive, too in your face to blunt,
Speaker 1: and nature is nuanced, and so is a big project
Speaker 1: like this. Okay, was was the big advice? That's it. No,
Speaker 1: I was just answering one of his many questions. Here
Speaker 1: here's the advice I think you guys could help with.
Speaker 1: Maybe you'll say, no, we don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: That's your you guys a job. So one of the
Speaker 1: things we get with fish five from parks and they're
Speaker 1: not against this, they're just going, guys were in a
Speaker 1: buy in here. Um, some of this is region six,
Speaker 1: some region four, and we'll say we'd love to have
Speaker 1: more of this particular thing. So let's just focus on oak.
Speaker 1: That's not so touchy, okay, And we said there, you know,
Speaker 1: as best we could tell the carrying capacity from science
Speaker 1: standpoint out here for elk is if you have four
Speaker 1: fifty cows, there could be a lot of elk out
Speaker 1: here this whole area, whole region. The counts might be
Speaker 1: six or seven thousand, a little bit more elk out there,
Speaker 1: not much in a huge area. Again, you can spend
Speaker 1: an awful lot of time and I have hunting around
Speaker 1: any time of the year, you canna have a hard
Speaker 1: time find an elk. All right, So robust populations of elk,
Speaker 1: how do we get there? And how are quotas are
Speaker 1: population criteria set in the North American conservation model says
Speaker 1: wildlife is stept through science and we talked to people
Speaker 1: in the region. They go, no landowner tolerance, So it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with science and carring capacity and
Speaker 1: where elk can be and can we fit this many
Speaker 1: in here? It's social science. Yeah, So like I said,
Speaker 1: it is social science exactly. So you go to a
Speaker 1: you go they say, we would like to raise quotas,
Speaker 1: but we get extreme pushback from a rancher and this
Speaker 1: is going to get onto something you can do, I
Speaker 1: think from a ranchers saying the elk reading me out
Speaker 1: of house and home. Uh, you're mismanaging me. You're the
Speaker 1: it's the public's wildlife. It's on my place that's eating
Speaker 1: my stuff. You're mismanaging it. Population overall, populations about you
Speaker 1: need to go down. Those people say something to the legislature.
Speaker 1: Legislature says something that they have to be be commissioned.
Speaker 1: Commission says lower those quotas. I'm getting a lot of
Speaker 1: heat up here in Helena. Quotas go down. And that's
Speaker 1: where a lot of the underground guys are of no
Speaker 1: animosity towards you have to be a few folks. They're
Speaker 1: in a difficult bind. So imagine the scenario. I just think,
Speaker 1: as in Spain last year with my wife and we
Speaker 1: were eating this unbelievable prestido, and I had time to
Speaker 1: think about philosophical things. I start imagine, I know the
Speaker 1: front pretty well. It's where I grew up. Imagine had
Speaker 1: a rancher and they're ranching cows out on the front
Speaker 1: somewhere west of Shoto, right just in those slopes underneath castle.
Speaker 1: Read for sun or or saw tooth, and that a
Speaker 1: lot of you guys have been up there before, and uh,
Speaker 1: somehow they're reading something. They go, gosh, you see what
Speaker 1: these what purshuto selves for like a you know, per pig,
Speaker 1: which you make and I gotta do a feed of
Speaker 1: acorns and things like that. We gotta we don't get
Speaker 1: ourselves about three hundred hogs. Add them to our cow
Speaker 1: situation and as a portfolio and make a whole lot
Speaker 1: of money. And we can get acorns, which is what
Speaker 1: you feed them. We finish them on acorns from California
Speaker 1: is super cheap. They're trying to get rid of them.
Speaker 1: So they do all that, get the hogs feed of acorns,
Speaker 1: make these beautiful product, cut them all up, and then
Speaker 1: they they have to air dry or age for about
Speaker 1: four weeks. So they hang them in the forest on
Speaker 1: private lands, their private land, and they hang bake front
Speaker 1: shoulders and bad bat on the back quarters in the
Speaker 1: forest to air dry. Right, this is a rocky mound
Speaker 1: in front. They're hanging ham all through the forest the
Speaker 1: grizzly bear country, but grizzly bears are evenly distributed twenty
Speaker 1: thousand acres thud acres group grizzly bear terrator home range
Speaker 1: something like that. And thing goes pretty good for about
Speaker 1: a week or so. One morning they walk out and
Speaker 1: there's nine grizzly bears and their forest having a great
Speaker 1: time with those hams. All right, call up f w P.
Speaker 1: We've got a grizzly problem here, and they got what
Speaker 1: So I got nine grozzly bears eating my stuff? So well,
Speaker 1: do you have a fence around that? No? Why should
Speaker 1: I have to fence that. That's the public's wildlife. Your
Speaker 1: mismanager them, we need to knock down the overall population
Speaker 1: of bears. This is untenable for me. It's costing me
Speaker 1: a lot of money. All right, So you hear that
Speaker 1: story and go where do I fall in this equation?
Speaker 1: How do I think about that? Moving over to where
Speaker 1: we're working, you have some ranchers and they've moved into
Speaker 1: definitely elk habitat, kind of grizzly bear habitat elk habitat,
Speaker 1: and they'll get along with cows or just fine and
Speaker 1: all that. But they've been buying hay on the open market,
Speaker 1: you know, big one ton bail, one ton round mills.
Speaker 1: They decided to produce their own, so they plow in
Speaker 1: about three acres of alfalfa in the middle of native
Speaker 1: grassland habitat that's been out there for thousands of years
Speaker 1: in the middle of elk country. Elk might be evenly
Speaker 1: distributed all over the landscape. Long about August, you go
Speaker 1: just about two more weeks and alfalfa is looking great.
Speaker 1: It's like electric green neon out there. About two more weeks,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cut this and we lost some nice bills
Speaker 1: and relatively cheap except for the diesel fuel to cut
Speaker 1: it and roll it. And they go out there just
Speaker 1: two weeks before they're gonna cut it and there's three
Speaker 1: elk in their alf alpha field. They called ft w
Speaker 1: P and say they're eating me out of house and home.
Speaker 1: You got to lower these quotas. This is ridiculous. There's
Speaker 1: there's way too many elk out here. And if l
Speaker 1: P says you got a fence around it, no, why
Speaker 1: why should I have to have do that as a
Speaker 1: cost of doing business. To have that fence around that,
Speaker 1: you're mismanaging the elk. And that is the crux those
Speaker 1: conversations actually go on. There's elk in my alf alpha fields.
Speaker 1: Push those animals down so that they'll leave me alone
Speaker 1: and stop costing me so much money. En ft VP
Speaker 1: would say, how about some cost share? How about we
Speaker 1: could help you fence that out. We can't pay for
Speaker 1: everything because we're kind of we don't have a much
Speaker 1: money right now, much budget. We can bring you some
Speaker 1: materials and maybe even help you a little bit, but
Speaker 1: you you pay for half, we'll pay for half. Why
Speaker 1: should I have to pay you for wildlife. It's the
Speaker 1: public's wildlife. You're mismanaging it. Get him out of here,
Speaker 1: and I want the quotas. And then he calls that
Speaker 1: calls the Senator to the commission back to the people
Speaker 1: they have to be p in Glasgow and said lower
Speaker 1: those quotas. And a lot of times the f W
Speaker 1: pill probably come in there and say, well, why don't
Speaker 1: you let people on there to hunt them. That's a
Speaker 1: pretty good way to get elk to run away is
Speaker 1: to let people shoot at them, at least for a
Speaker 1: little while. Second week August a little tough if you
Speaker 1: have a shoulder, seas and the backs up into that
Speaker 1: when they really hit things hard. Yeah, when they're keeping
Speaker 1: away from your haystacks and things like that. But anybody
Speaker 1: who might hear this story, it's a cultural thing. There's
Speaker 1: no right or wrong. So some people might say, well,
Speaker 1: Sean just said it's exactly right. That rancher with the
Speaker 1: grizzly bears is in a world that hurt after we
Speaker 1: should take care of that. Or the rancher with the
Speaker 1: alfalva field after should take care of that. It's exactly right.
Speaker 1: It's the public's wildlife being mismanaged other people. I don't know,
Speaker 1: you've got some of you guys, maybe I don't know
Speaker 1: what you're thinking, would say, you know, that is a
Speaker 1: cost of doing business. If you're gonna put an unnatural
Speaker 1: thing out in the middle of that country, be at
Speaker 1: Hams or bright Green alfalfa, it's your responsibility fail and
Speaker 1: set out because you're pulling these those elk are trailing
Speaker 1: from fifteen miles away to come hit your stack right,
Speaker 1: whether it's rolled up or veiled or whatever else. And
Speaker 1: after EP goes, I wish we had more money because
Speaker 1: when the conversation I'm in a lot of conversations the ranchers,
Speaker 1: it gets down it's not that they don't like yelk.
Speaker 1: They actually like yelk. A lot of them are bow hunters.
Speaker 1: It's not about the species, it's about what they do
Speaker 1: to their operation. It's finance, which is a good news
Speaker 1: for I think for you guys, because if you can
Speaker 1: come up with more money connecting the docks here, if
Speaker 1: we can come up with a whole bunch more money
Speaker 1: and we can fence that help that rancher and fence
Speaker 1: out that field, they will quick complain and the f TOVP,
Speaker 1: the college from legislature and the commission stopped, and populations
Speaker 1: from go up, and you will have lots more elk
Speaker 1: out there, a lot more elk out there. All it
Speaker 1: is just finding some money. What we have found, for instance,
Speaker 1: this is the important thing we have found, for instance
Speaker 1: with our wild Sky program, where ranchers or get paid
Speaker 1: to be more wildlife friendly, wildlife tolerant, should say everything
Speaker 1: by the way, wolves, cougars, elk, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: We pay them money for that, substantial money on top
Speaker 1: of what they sell to in the commodity market. So
Speaker 1: it's an extra bonus, and that money is enough to
Speaker 1: tip the behavior in the direction being more wildlife friendly.
Speaker 1: That's one example. So I think there are a number
Speaker 1: of things that hunters could do to conjurept some more money.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear them. I got six ideas
Speaker 1: for that. And if we can get more money into
Speaker 1: the game, you can get those ranchers feeling better, those
Speaker 1: quotas will go up and you're gonna see a lot
Speaker 1: in the more robust populations out there. Hit me with
Speaker 1: the top three. Top three. Yeah, this is ways hunters
Speaker 1: could get more money to create more wildlife friendly Sean
Speaker 1: Garretty's top three ways in which hunters could pump more
Speaker 1: money to make a more wildlife friendly habitat regime out
Speaker 1: there in the United States of America. Some wildlife equaling
Speaker 1: more alilive so that you can hunt it, you can
Speaker 1: chase it around, Yeah, and have more fun. You got
Speaker 1: my attention. Everybody wins the really big ones. I think
Speaker 1: there was the what was the what was the Act
Speaker 1: of nineteen six with a with Pittmanstoration Act, And all
Speaker 1: they did was charge on They put a tax on guns, right,
Speaker 1: and ammunition and ammunition, and then the one there's the
Speaker 1: one that followed up later on fishing equipment. If you
Speaker 1: actually lobbied I'm guessing back country or somebody has lobbyists
Speaker 1: and lobbied together in Montana and so we want to
Speaker 1: do something like that, we want to tax all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff. Oh yeah, man, we're all over this. They
Speaker 1: won't do it. So the backpack tax next idea, So yeah,
Speaker 1: I just say that comes up constantly. We want to
Speaker 1: we want to actually be taxed more, be really organized,
Speaker 1: not just one group, but a whole a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of people hammer on this, hire some lobbyists until you
Speaker 1: finally get it through. Took three tries, I think three
Speaker 1: runs of the legislature to get rid of snide heepleach
Speaker 1: mining takes a while. You gotta stay on it, don't
Speaker 1: don't give up. So we were at tax backpack skis
Speaker 1: birding a. It meant everything because yeah, guns and am
Speaker 1: ar tex, the manufacturers are paying third everything. There has
Speaker 1: been some other proposals to like specific to a species,
Speaker 1: like okay, well what if we lobbied for uh an
Speaker 1: additional dollar specific to getting bison back on that style
Speaker 1: license plate? And they'll go to it. Whatever. If you
Speaker 1: can go up against industry and get Sinai heap leach
Speaker 1: mining out of Montana, you guys can do this if
Speaker 1: you're organized and persistent as hell. Only if you persist
Speaker 1: not just throw it all. We tried once to give
Speaker 1: it up. Do we hammer we hammerun this all the time.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of a backpack ta gotta do that.
Speaker 1: Next one is let's make a note of that. Here's
Speaker 1: another team. This is interesting is you got to broaden
Speaker 1: out and let other people help. So I know a
Speaker 1: lot of biology game biologist from FTVP. Of course we
Speaker 1: could being in the business who work with them. Uh.
Speaker 1: Jeff Hagner actually used to work for APR, who used
Speaker 1: to be ahead of Fish Walking Park. So he and
Speaker 1: I spent lots and lots and lots of hours on
Speaker 1: airplanes and cars and things like that. For him, it was,
Speaker 1: you know, we got a job after being with that
Speaker 1: TVP I talked about. He said, a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: antidutes every time. So why don't we raise hunting fees
Speaker 1: to get more money or are there other ways to
Speaker 1: get more money because the revenue is going down doubled
Speaker 1: I mean not too long ago. They doubled nonresident fees, right,
Speaker 1: but I mean resident. I'm talking residents. And so they
Speaker 1: said we can't put this wildlife stamp idea. We went
Speaker 1: on the road and said, how about wildlife stamp. We
Speaker 1: can get people that we get all these artists do
Speaker 1: these cool stamps, like a duck stamp church people who
Speaker 1: don't hunt, but they'll buy the stamps for twelve bucks
Speaker 1: apiece because it's done by world class artists. He said.
Speaker 1: Everywhere we went, particularly in Livingston, that got shouted down
Speaker 1: by hunters, So why would they not want that. It's
Speaker 1: more money to manage game and make things work better
Speaker 1: at all, go into game management. He said. You know
Speaker 1: what people said, and it was hunting guides and hunters,
Speaker 1: and the loudest, most volatile one was over in Livingstone
Speaker 1: one night. He said, we just backed off. Hunters said,
Speaker 1: we don't want anybody else at the table besides hunters
Speaker 1: deciding what happens with Montana wildlife. And what a great
Speaker 1: idea to get lots of money for people who are't
Speaker 1: going to compete with you and try to shoot that deer.
Speaker 1: They just want to go out and look at birds,
Speaker 1: and they were glad to buy a stamp so they
Speaker 1: can help, so you can have more grosshand birds than
Speaker 1: whatever else. I think hunters chased away other people because
Speaker 1: you want to own the discussion. That's a big mistake.
Speaker 1: I think there's lots of people in Montana wildlife viewing
Speaker 1: is on a dramatic increase, decades long increase. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of money in those people pockets and you're leaving
Speaker 1: it on the table. Here's that one. Another one with sports.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if any of you golf or
Speaker 1: ski at Bridge Bowl or whatever. Definitely no golfing. I
Speaker 1: don't golf either. Okay, let's not go with that joke.
Speaker 1: I'm golf. My father was a golfer. So anybody downhill,
Speaker 1: ski ever you're hunting, is not keeping up with the
Speaker 1: increasing price of sports. About my first season pass in
Speaker 1: Bridge or Bowl, I think it was a hundred and
Speaker 1: ten dollars. Seemed like a king's ransom of the time.
Speaker 1: Almost killed me to pay that much money. I mean
Speaker 1: that was uh didn't leave any money for gas to go,
Speaker 1: so it's a bad move. I had to hitchhike or
Speaker 1: you know, get rides up there and call. And now
Speaker 1: let's see at Bridge of Bowl, I think a season
Speaker 1: passes eight hundred bucks. If you want to go skiing
Speaker 1: one day, I think it's fifty nine dollars for one day,
Speaker 1: and you can get a ten past thing for five
Speaker 1: ten bucks to go. So just look at other sports
Speaker 1: like golfing for three hours that okash forty bucks for
Speaker 1: one time for three hours skiing one time from nine
Speaker 1: thirty until four o'clock in the afternoon and fifty nine bucks.
Speaker 1: So you can get an elk hunting season pass ten
Speaker 1: bucks for your general tag and with the elk tag
Speaker 1: now fifteen dollars always okay anyway, so if you can, so,
Speaker 1: do you want to go ell hunting in Montana for
Speaker 1: gosh six one of the best places in the world.
Speaker 1: You want to go hunting Montana? Ten bucks for general
Speaker 1: tag and it's it's ten dollars, so twenty bucks six
Speaker 1: d I'm just talking about for get that, not on residents,
Speaker 1: you guys sitting right here right you get a season
Speaker 1: passed to hunt elk in Montana for four straight months
Speaker 1: for twenty bucks and FTW pieces. Every time we try
Speaker 1: to raise it, people come absolutely on glued. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you'll know you'll never hear okay, Okay, So I know
Speaker 1: you're like throwing out like general recommendations for general folks.
Speaker 1: I don't think that. I mean, I think general we did.
Speaker 1: How long did it take? You're not paying up, Sam,
Speaker 1: You probably know how long was the duck stand set
Speaker 1: of fifteen bucks? Oh, I mean like forty fifty years.
Speaker 1: They didn't even get it adjusted for inflation. When ye know,
Speaker 1: I think the hunters can't come, so you know, if
Speaker 1: you can't. So, if you can't do it, we want
Speaker 1: it all man, if you can't, Yeah, we want it
Speaker 1: from not to pay. I don't care if those dumb
Speaker 1: skiars pay that much of those golfers or voters or
Speaker 1: anybody else. We don't want our tags going up. And
Speaker 1: I hear I actually argue, you know, on a chair
Speaker 1: lift with people, someone who's got an eight hundred dollars
Speaker 1: key tags, saying if I have to pay twice what
Speaker 1: I'm paying now, I'm done. I cannot. Yeah, with that
Speaker 1: bottle I West whiskey cost you forty five bucks, and
Speaker 1: that MOSSI Oaks stretchy thing you're just showing me the
Speaker 1: day there was ninety bucks. Let's just take all the
Speaker 1: stuff out of your car and put you in to
Speaker 1: strip you too, your stand there naked for a few minutes.
Speaker 1: I want to price everything that you used to hunt.
Speaker 1: And you can't pay bucks for ELK tag. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think a couple of year ones are things
Speaker 1: that people are already talking about but they're not doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are things that people already talking about. There's a
Speaker 1: robust conversation. You know, I like them. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of movement. They're the one I really agree with you on.
Speaker 1: I think that the Yeah people are really resistant understanding,
Speaker 1: like knowing where the money goes and the good that
Speaker 1: it does. I think there's an irrational resistance to paying
Speaker 1: the fair price for the opportunity. So the f DPS revenues,
Speaker 1: there are fifty nine million dollars a year that they
Speaker 1: get for game stuff. They do other stuff fish million
Speaker 1: bucks a year. If you get that to a hundred
Speaker 1: million bucks or d twenty million bucks or heard in
Speaker 1: fifty million bucks, now we're gonna start to get a
Speaker 1: lot more access and a lot more animals. That's the
Speaker 1: most point to pay. Those ranchers defense that stuff out,
Speaker 1: they're calm, more wildlife. But it gets down to money,
Speaker 1: I believe. So if the easiest thing, if none of
Speaker 1: this stuff, because legislation would change and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, Hunting groups could also get together. F to
Speaker 1: VP has an f to VP foundation, there's nothing in it.
Speaker 1: It might have almost nothing in it. If you guys
Speaker 1: all got together form some organization you just raise money for.
Speaker 1: They have to be f foundation, just just like kPr
Speaker 1: money straight into that raise three four million bucks a year.
Speaker 1: That's a lot offenses around Alfalva fields. That makes a
Speaker 1: lot of ranchers happy. That gets the f t VP
Speaker 1: Regions six, Region four off the hook. No more screaming
Speaker 1: at him. You've got too many elk here or bears.
Speaker 1: He might purshoot it or whatever else. Now I'm happy.
Speaker 1: I'm cool because I'm a hunter. Two. If I'm a rancher,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are, and now all of a
Speaker 1: sudden those quotas can go up. Just give just today
Speaker 1: when I leave right a check to the F to
Speaker 1: B Foundation. You don't have to ask anybody, no change
Speaker 1: of Congress or laws or anything like that. Just give
Speaker 1: them the money, but ear market for that. I want
Speaker 1: it for wildlife damage. I wanted to be helped for
Speaker 1: wildlife damage and fill that bucket up. Fundraising is hard,
Speaker 1: but you guys, if you got with your with Steve's
Speaker 1: reach and that mouthpiece, the reach that he has and
Speaker 1: just said, I want you guys, just like I want
Speaker 1: you to buy Snaze boots, I want you to buy
Speaker 1: my cookbook or whatever else. Oh, by the way, you guys,
Speaker 1: do not go to sleep tonight until you write to
Speaker 1: check the f TVP found. It's a big damn country
Speaker 1: and Montage is Blee state. You're talking to a lot
Speaker 1: of hunters here, though. What if everybody, what if everybody
Speaker 1: wrote fifty bucks fifty bucks every guide everybody wrote fifty bucks,
Speaker 1: you'd get millions or by by three duck stamps, whatever
Speaker 1: it is. But you guys ought to be jamming for
Speaker 1: millions order that foundation. But you say to the foundation head,
Speaker 1: I want this earmarked only for wildlife damage uh mitigation,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon we'll have wildlife coming out of ears.
Speaker 1: You guys can control it. You know, we do a
Speaker 1: thing here, hot tip offs. That's your hot tip? Is it?
Speaker 1: What do you think of it? I love it, man.
Speaker 1: I wish everybody would give thousands of dollars tomorrow, so there.
Speaker 1: I wish they would buy ten duck stamps and give
Speaker 1: thousands tomorrow to their fishing Game agency. But I don't
Speaker 1: not I don't not wish they would do it. That's
Speaker 1: a good point though, right, It's like in the enclosed circles.
Speaker 1: I kind of spend this argument different ways. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, hunters as a group, that's just you can
Speaker 1: pick any group, and there's some nasty examples out there too.
Speaker 1: But hunters are can be a diverse group, and there's
Speaker 1: plenty of hunters in this Bell curve that are spending
Speaker 1: a lot of money, a lot more money um than
Speaker 1: that fifty bucks every single year to a lot of
Speaker 1: different groups, right, trying to get this ball rolling and
Speaker 1: keep it going right. So, yeah, man, there's there's plenty
Speaker 1: of folks within our our ranks that are doing the
Speaker 1: bare minimum. And a long time ago we said, you know,
Speaker 1: buying your duck stamp and you're hunting and conservation licenses,
Speaker 1: it's just not enough anymore. It used to be, you know,
Speaker 1: the price would mission. But yeah, just like just there's
Speaker 1: you're I'm looking to wrap her up. Yes, But there's
Speaker 1: also like big historical stuff, you know, the the hunters
Speaker 1: that we grow up dreaming about, Okay, that we tell
Speaker 1: the narratives of and talk about. John Coulter Um. You
Speaker 1: mentioned the guy that you know, the guy that was
Speaker 1: a chart One of the guys was a charge of
Speaker 1: hunting game to supply the Lewis and Clark expedition was
Speaker 1: a feller by the name of John Coulter. Um. We
Speaker 1: all know Daniel Boone, Um, Davy Crockett, Jed Smith, Okay,
Speaker 1: are sort of the the legacy that has shaped the
Speaker 1: identity of American hunters where guys that didn't pay to
Speaker 1: go out and be in the wood, they got paid
Speaker 1: to go out and be in the woods. So there's
Speaker 1: like your body, you know, there's this there's this this
Speaker 1: thing that it's like you have the right to go
Speaker 1: out and extract said resources without a lot of um
Speaker 1: push back and red tape. And there's people that have
Speaker 1: an expectation about that, and I think that those expectations
Speaker 1: need to get up to speed. I agree, But there
Speaker 1: is a there's a way if you want to look
Speaker 1: at it, like where did our mind frame come from?
Speaker 1: That that's mine. I should be allowed to go out
Speaker 1: and get it. Uh, you don't need It's not hard
Speaker 1: to understand how we came to view it that way.
Speaker 1: So when something when something has a real long track record,
Speaker 1: like a mentality that has a long track, it's difficult
Speaker 1: to spend it. And people did a big move towards
Speaker 1: changing it. And you know during the Franklin Roosevelt administration
Speaker 1: with the Wildlife Restoration Act um when we had to
Speaker 1: you know, when people are like had to start doing
Speaker 1: a duck stamp. That's a big step. People had to
Speaker 1: start using non toxic shot to hunt waterfall, Like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I'd rather quit duck hunting to do that. Right,
Speaker 1: So you have people go not kicking and screaming into
Speaker 1: the future, but kicking and screaming into the present. Man,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like hard. So, but anyone that's involved
Speaker 1: in wildlife policy in any kind of serious way, and
Speaker 1: anyone's involved in hunting and fishing in America in any
Speaker 1: kind of serious way, realizes and really better realized that
Speaker 1: fund that wildlife costs money. It's here because we've made
Speaker 1: It's not here by accident. It used to be here
Speaker 1: by accident, and it was here despite all of our
Speaker 1: best efforts to remove it. Now it's here for the
Speaker 1: simple reason that we've decided that it's valuable and that
Speaker 1: we're gonna make sacrifices to have it beyond the ground.
Speaker 1: And it's like that's why around it, like hunting seasons,
Speaker 1: it's here because we decided to have it be here.
Speaker 1: And what we've got missed. I think you're on a
Speaker 1: very good track. You're important track. One thing that got
Speaker 1: miss kind of snuck up on people like a ski resort.
Speaker 1: When I started skiing the seventies of Bridge of Bowl,
Speaker 1: Why why the tags keep going on, the price to
Speaker 1: keep going up when you look at the infrastructure that's
Speaker 1: there to create a good experience for you, from a
Speaker 1: keeping the ski patrol warm with a little hut, those chairlifts, obviously,
Speaker 1: safety things, uh people, all that kind of stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: but when we decided to put that structure around FTVP
Speaker 1: and say there's seasons on hunting, so we don't eradicate
Speaker 1: everything anymore, and somebody has to maintain that structure. Fish
Speaker 1: Walton Parks has nearly seven hundred employees. That's game wardens
Speaker 1: and trucks and laptops and radios and gas and buildings,
Speaker 1: all that stuff and going out there and buying easements
Speaker 1: and buying property. That's a huge infrastructure, expensive instructure infrastructure
Speaker 1: there so that you can have a great hunt. They're
Speaker 1: out there while we're sitting here drinking coffee. They're out
Speaker 1: there busting their ass, resting somebody trying to open this
Speaker 1: was closing the gate. What we're doing a talk slide show,
Speaker 1: doing disease research. But these are good people. Have to
Speaker 1: be a pete and they are broke because people go,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have to pay for hunting ten bucks, you
Speaker 1: raise it, twelve bucks. Can't do it while we load
Speaker 1: our bourbon and our guns in our truck. I don't.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have to pay for It's a rights, god
Speaker 1: given right. Well, it's not a god given right to
Speaker 1: ski a bridge of bowl for free. Uh, there's a
Speaker 1: huge cost. You live in a capital of society. Hunters
Speaker 1: need to pay up and we'll everybody'll be happy. It's
Speaker 1: not that much money compared to what your god on
Speaker 1: your body when your archery hunting. You just take the
Speaker 1: cost to your poly pro maybe your boots in one sock.
Speaker 1: That's all you gotta give. I feel like, um, you
Speaker 1: know that. I take that point well. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, I really believe that FBP should really hold
Speaker 1: other users accountable too, in terms of like really giving back.
Speaker 1: They try try with the stamp. Hunters shout them down,
Speaker 1: but hunters won't shot them down. If they want to
Speaker 1: do like um uh, ski tax I could, I'll make
Speaker 1: you personal guarantee if they want to impose a thirteen
Speaker 1: to fourteen percent tax on ski equipment in order to
Speaker 1: um fund wildlife in America. I can promise you you
Speaker 1: won't hear a lot of great from us. But that's
Speaker 1: not true. We've had this discussion. It is true. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's true that hunters are are like the way that
Speaker 1: it is now at the table, and there aren't a
Speaker 1: lot of other voices. Well, just they should give the
Speaker 1: money but have no input alright, looking to wrap her up.
Speaker 1: I appreciate the call out. I don't mean I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to be obnoxious. No no, no, no no. Some
Speaker 1: people will obviously take it that way and we'll be offended.
Speaker 1: I appreciate. Yeah, people are always offended by everything. Someone's
Speaker 1: offended by us trying to sell our book, which is
Speaker 1: a public service. Someone that was it just no, it's great.
Speaker 1: I appreciate hearing that from the from the outs and
Speaker 1: not really from the outside. I mean, you're I consider
Speaker 1: you one of us, but I think we need to
Speaker 1: be doing more of that. You gotta work together and
Speaker 1: the solutions are the solution, just not do it's not
Speaker 1: it's not undoing. I mean when people say, how did
Speaker 1: in the world do you think you could take on
Speaker 1: this project from scratch, a private enterprise the Race seven
Speaker 1: or a million dollars and build this whole thing. He's
Speaker 1: gotta get organized and execute over a very long period
Speaker 1: of time. Can't just give up because he hit a
Speaker 1: few frustrating bombs. So that's well, you guys can do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we've done an extraordinary amount of work. Yeah on
Speaker 1: behalf of American Wildlook. Yeah, absolutely absolutely, uh and you
Speaker 1: know we should do a lot better work going forward.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Tough questions, you know you did
Speaker 1: some of them. You dodged a couple did Yeah, a
Speaker 1: little bit. But it was good. It was good. I
Speaker 1: liked it because you know what, it wasn't a dodge.
Speaker 1: You just don't know. I understand sometuff I don't. I know.
Speaker 1: The older I get you guys are you're young, you older,
Speaker 1: you get, the less certain you are about a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff. Can I give you you said it? Can
Speaker 1: I give you a concluder? Oh you're allowed to having.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna let anyone else have a concluder. I
Speaker 1: had looked. I'm not gonna take a concluder, but I'll
Speaker 1: let you have a concluder. He just do you, guys, concluder.
Speaker 1: Here's I like people to take away. They probably even
Speaker 1: you guys might have another thousand questions. I'm glad to
Speaker 1: come back anytime to try to answer them. Some things
Speaker 1: something that didn't sound quite right. So we're gonna get
Speaker 1: back in here and straighten this out. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: you know, glad to do it. Please do people listening,
Speaker 1: what I like you to take away is you can
Speaker 1: count on us to keep going. So we've done property acquisitions.
Speaker 1: We're adding about thirty five thousand acres a year to
Speaker 1: our model. We will work our butts off to keep
Speaker 1: this thing going and keep adding more wildlife habitat or
Speaker 1: work really hard to take that habitat and moving into
Speaker 1: something that is going to support a huge amount of wildlife,
Speaker 1: but also change the baseline for which what is normal
Speaker 1: today in Montana. And when you come out, you'll see
Speaker 1: less fences, you'll see less takeout keep out signs, more
Speaker 1: signs saying welcome to prairie American Prairie Reserve on our
Speaker 1: private land. And we want to make things like corner
Speaker 1: hopping and all that kind of stuff moot because the
Speaker 1: fancy needed there. We've already done that. We can show
Speaker 1: you and thousands and tens of thousands of acres where
Speaker 1: we've already done that where it's a it's a You
Speaker 1: don't have to say that. You just walk right across
Speaker 1: our private the checker the world of checkerboard goes away
Speaker 1: because he can't see it anymore. Right, But um, we'll
Speaker 1: also put in infrastructure. We're just finishing our second really
Speaker 1: big campground right on one where it'll be open in
Speaker 1: the spring. But there's hunters and other so we're put
Speaker 1: in campgrounds fifteen bucks a night. If you think that's
Speaker 1: the exorbitant, you can camp on the BLM right next
Speaker 1: door for free. Gorilla camp. We're doing a two mile
Speaker 1: wide hut to hut system, one of the biggest hut
Speaker 1: systems in North America. There's hunters using those huts right now.
Speaker 1: Based on the p N. We're moving west to east
Speaker 1: all the way across towards the fourth back down. So
Speaker 1: we'll put in things for you, will buy, the land,
Speaker 1: will remodel, land, will work on wildlife populations. We'll put
Speaker 1: in places for you to stay and make it easy
Speaker 1: for you to move about. Try to take it back
Speaker 1: in some ways to the old days. But you guys
Speaker 1: can help us, mostly by helping barking up the wrong
Speaker 1: tree by hammering on us for acts us. All I
Speaker 1: can say is, don't worry about it. Come talk to me,
Speaker 1: Come talk to anybody or CEO Ali Fox. Just ask
Speaker 1: you guys really serious about public access, and then once
Speaker 1: you feel good about that, help us build wildlife populations.
Speaker 1: And you can do that by some ideas we just
Speaker 1: talked about in the last half hour. The issue is
Speaker 1: a population. So it's because everybody's chasing around tiny little
Speaker 1: fragments of what used to be there. We can grow
Speaker 1: that up big. Everybody's gonna win. But you got to
Speaker 1: help the ranchers. They're working on three percent margins. They
Speaker 1: need some help, no matter what you think, whether they
Speaker 1: should share the cost ordever else. Just let's just help.
Speaker 1: We'll get more wildline. So that's what I'd say. We'll
Speaker 1: keep working, all right, you have the weight to save
Speaker 1: your concluders. I had a good one ahead. If you
Speaker 1: I want to hear, I'm pushing and I feel like
Speaker 1: you know I'm gonna push it. Like he was saying
Speaker 1: about what the bisons like, the farther away you are
Speaker 1: from them. That like I'm anxious about bison. I don't
Speaker 1: even because I don't know that much about him. You know,
Speaker 1: I just know what's on the park. So the same
Speaker 1: thing with APR. It's like people need to go up
Speaker 1: there and check it out. Like you said, it's wide
Speaker 1: open right now, go check it out and go see
Speaker 1: what's going on there. There's hunting opportunities up there now,
Speaker 1: we don't need to talk about what they are. Go
Speaker 1: online and go check it out. And I think a
Speaker 1: lot less people would be scared of the whole thing
Speaker 1: if they just probably took a drive up through beautiful
Speaker 1: Montana and go and check it out. In fact, come
Speaker 1: on right now today as we're sitting here, there's people
Speaker 1: out in the snow hunting bison. There you go, go
Speaker 1: on some bison. Sam, Oh yeah, I was just gonna
Speaker 1: say that. My dad thinks that you already have your
Speaker 1: ten thousand bison floor there. Not too long ago, we
Speaker 1: walked out of the tent in the morning, goes Sam,
Speaker 1: come look, there's thousands of bison. I'm like, what are
Speaker 1: you talking about? Like I think they only have like
Speaker 1: a thousand bisons. And I come out and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's that grainy first light kind of dawn. Where were
Speaker 1: you Yeah, yeah, And and I go, well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: see those those three that are right up there in
Speaker 1: the foreground. Like He's like, do what you see all
Speaker 1: those other ones? I was like those that stage brush? No,
Speaker 1: but what But what what I wanted to say was
Speaker 1: that first time I went out in that that country,
Speaker 1: I was reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, biography of
Speaker 1: merywether Lewis and and talking about this area. Uh Stephen
Speaker 1: Ambrose said that it is the area that's least changed
Speaker 1: since Louis saw it. And that was just so inspiring
Speaker 1: to me in that moment because I was like six
Speaker 1: seven miles back in hiking chasing around elk Um and
Speaker 1: it's just magnificent country. And it always uh plays with
Speaker 1: my imagination too to think about what it looked like,
Speaker 1: you know, that two years ago when they saw it,
Speaker 1: and how cool would be to have that kind of
Speaker 1: population level again for wildlife someday. God, it's great glad
Speaker 1: to getting out there. We're trying to get people to
Speaker 1: see it. It's a long ways and so many people
Speaker 1: who have questions actually ever been there? A lot of
Speaker 1: Montana's I've never even seen it. I'll call you my
Speaker 1: as little wedge one in um Boy. I've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about a lot of good stuff. I gotta have
Speaker 1: you back. I'm glad to come back. Yeah, I definitely
Speaker 1: need to make field true. What's it and that's all
Speaker 1: I got? All right, everyone, thanks for joining us.