Speaker 1: This is Me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: folk bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast,
Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators
Speaker 1: are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download
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Speaker 1: Nor where you stand with on x Okay, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: you're you're bearing witness to a feat of COVID induced
Speaker 1: technology where we're all over the damn plays not in
Speaker 1: our studio. Well that's not true. Cal's in the studio,
Speaker 1: Hello Cal, Hello, Stephen uh Brody is in the studio,
Speaker 1: Hello Brody. Hello. And Janice is in the studio. Hello,
Speaker 1: Jannae loved joined uh joined there by. I think Krin's
Speaker 1: in there, fills in there. I'm I'm quarantined at home.
Speaker 1: This is my fourth quarantine. This time I'm so quarantined
Speaker 1: that I'm out in my own guesthouse, like I'm not
Speaker 1: allowed anywhere near even my own family. So I have
Speaker 1: to look out the window into my home to see
Speaker 1: my family going about their business, which is the saddest
Speaker 1: thing on the planet. But my kids are treating me
Speaker 1: like an underdog and they're watching out from my interests
Speaker 1: and have gotten very mad at my wife for talking
Speaker 1: rudely to me. So I'm manipulating that. I'm yea, they
Speaker 1: feel they feel very bad for me. And joined by
Speaker 1: Jim Heffelfinger from Arizona. Jim and our friend Brandon Butler,
Speaker 1: who's down joining from Missouri. Correct Brandon, now, Brandon, this
Speaker 1: is like a short notice Brandon coming on here because
Speaker 1: the weirdest thing happened that I just found out about.
Speaker 1: Someone sent me a link to a go fund me.
Speaker 1: Uh that's being put on by Brandon's friend and Brandon
Speaker 1: he'll tell what happened. But his uh, someone burned his
Speaker 1: damn hunting camp down, and this hunt camp we recorded
Speaker 1: podcasts out of. So that's kind of like is the relevancy.
Speaker 1: I don't know if people remember years ago, Yanni and
Speaker 1: I were out spring turkey hunting in Missouri and it
Speaker 1: was a time if you really stretch your memory back
Speaker 1: and we're paying attention to our show. Back then, Yanni
Speaker 1: had gotten a turkey and I actually found an old
Speaker 1: crippled turkey and got that. Like I jumped up a
Speaker 1: crippled up turkey and got it and tagged it, and
Speaker 1: we were staying at Brandon's house, and so I was
Speaker 1: quite alarmed this morning to see that someone had burnt
Speaker 1: to damn camp down like full on Arson. Listen, Brandon, Yanni,
Speaker 1: you don't even know about this yet, Brandon, tell what happened.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that was. That was two thousand and eighteen
Speaker 1: when you and Janice came down and joined me and
Speaker 1: Parker Hall and Steve Jones. We had a great, great
Speaker 1: time and you guys hadn't you'd been there right when
Speaker 1: the cabin kind of started coming together. Called this place
Speaker 1: Driftwood Acres. It's down in Shannon County, Missouri. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a rough part of the world, a very almost
Speaker 1: lawless part of the world. So I knew what I
Speaker 1: was getting into going down there as a professional conservationist,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, it didn't play out so well. Back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seventeen, a friend of mine was
Speaker 1: hunting a field just off my property when a little
Speaker 1: seven pointer white tail we call them seven pointers back
Speaker 1: here in Missouri was out in this field. A road
Speaker 1: hunter shot it off the road, wounded it, it ran
Speaker 1: over onto my property. They drove out across my property,
Speaker 1: jumped it, up it ran for my buddy, who's wearing
Speaker 1: Blaze orange, stands up in the tree stand is waving
Speaker 1: at these people. They continue to fire at this deer,
Speaker 1: wounding it more. It goes into a creek, and finally
Speaker 1: they confront my friend and tell him it was his
Speaker 1: fault for not putting orange at the entrance of this
Speaker 1: field at the road so they would know not to
Speaker 1: shoot from the road. At that time, I went up
Speaker 1: and and confronted these people. I was told to know
Speaker 1: my place. I talked to the law enforcement and he
Speaker 1: suggested just kind of letting this one ride. And man,
Speaker 1: that is just eight at me for years, like the
Speaker 1: fact that I didn't press charges. I just kind of
Speaker 1: took it, moved on, tried to survive down there. This year,
Speaker 1: on Sunday of opening day a rifle season, at eight
Speaker 1: thirty at night, me and three of my friends Nathan Shags,
Speaker 1: McLeod paddle down Cranfeld and my cousin Derek Butler. We're
Speaker 1: sitting around a camp fire and the creek had flooded.
Speaker 1: And if you guys remember but this is just a
Speaker 1: couple of nights ago, well, no, I'm talking about deer season,
Speaker 1: so this would have been like November, having burned a
Speaker 1: couple of nights ago. Oh I got you, I got you.
Speaker 1: So if you guys remember I had to bring in
Speaker 1: through the forest because the creek had flooded. That happens
Speaker 1: a lot, and we're on the back side of it.
Speaker 1: So the creek is flooded and we're thinking nobody's coming
Speaker 1: in for deer season. Well, this truck comes across the creek. Anyways,
Speaker 1: they stopped at the end of my driveway, maybe a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty yards down from us. It's a long driveway.
Speaker 1: Look up at us having a fire go about two
Speaker 1: hundred yards further. Pull into this field, throw on the
Speaker 1: light bars. I mean it would be like turning on
Speaker 1: the lights at a professional baseball stadium. Just lit this
Speaker 1: thing up like crazy, jump out and start unloading so
Speaker 1: close that we're watching the muzzle flashes as they poached
Speaker 1: these deer. So, without even thinking, I jumped into my
Speaker 1: side by side and took off after him. My cousin
Speaker 1: and friends start charging down the hill on foot to
Speaker 1: follow me up, thinking I'm I'm going after poacher's unarmed.
Speaker 1: They're obviously armed. They take off. I get the license
Speaker 1: plate number, I call the license plate number. In this time,
Speaker 1: I'm pressing charges. There's no way I'm I'm never gonna
Speaker 1: live with that guilt again. I had no idea who
Speaker 1: it was. It turned out to be some locals. Uh.
Speaker 1: The threats started coming. I started being told I don't
Speaker 1: belong down there. All that uh starts coming through email,
Speaker 1: social media stuff like that, telling me that snitches end
Speaker 1: up in ditches. Um, good luck, good luck hanging out
Speaker 1: down here. And and then Monday night, at at twelve
Speaker 1: twelve o'clock at night, my wife wakes me up. The
Speaker 1: neighbor called and said the cabins burning down right now.
Speaker 1: So I jumped up, grab a few guns, take off.
Speaker 1: It's a three and a half hour drive. Get down
Speaker 1: there about sunrise, says the final flames are still flickering.
Speaker 1: So you know it was it was just a building.
Speaker 1: But the possessions that I had in there were probably
Speaker 1: thirty taxidermy amounts of mine and families, my my my
Speaker 1: grandfather's Folds of Honor flag from World War Two after
Speaker 1: he passed away, my my handmade great grandfather's bed. I mean,
Speaker 1: just the endless amount of like personal possessions that are
Speaker 1: just irreplaceable and thankfully that I had cameras all over.
Speaker 1: The person has not been apprehended yet, but they will be.
Speaker 1: And uh and yeah, so that's it. You know. It
Speaker 1: took a stand for conservation, stood up to these poachers
Speaker 1: and they burned my house down. God. Man, the pictures
Speaker 1: are really upsetting to man. Yeah, it's it's still hard
Speaker 1: to like look at the pictures because every time I
Speaker 1: look at them, I noticed something else that Uh, that's there.
Speaker 1: If you look hard, you'll see. My friend Kevin Orthman
Speaker 1: bought me an antique book press and in that book
Speaker 1: press was the uh, the Meat Eater cookbook, uh, volume one,
Speaker 1: in volume two of the Tips and Tactics books. So
Speaker 1: so even lost, even lost. That's the if if you
Speaker 1: go back to the episodes we did from there, I
Speaker 1: did the we I told a story about the steam
Speaker 1: breathing turkey and Steve you said that, man, that that
Speaker 1: was such a beautiful description. If I was a painter,
Speaker 1: I would paint that, and some dude did, and you
Speaker 1: guys used it as a tour poster on your your
Speaker 1: first go around. You were You were kind enough to
Speaker 1: make me twenty copies of the Driftwood Acres version of
Speaker 1: that poster and you and Janas signed it and sent
Speaker 1: it to me, And it was in a frame next
Speaker 1: to the actual fan from the steam breathing Turkey that
Speaker 1: was centered between two bucks that I killed down there
Speaker 1: in two bucks that shags killed down there that were mounted.
Speaker 1: All that's gone. Every Turkey fan that I ever had
Speaker 1: is gone. Every European mount that I've ever had is gone.
Speaker 1: Is the go fund me still up? Yeah? The go
Speaker 1: fund me just came up today, and your body you
Speaker 1: up yeah? And I'm I had insurance, I'm gainfully employed.
Speaker 1: I am not in in horrible need of money. So
Speaker 1: I'm I'm humbled by the outpouring of support and and
Speaker 1: the friendship and and all I can say is like
Speaker 1: whatever comes from the go fund me will not be
Speaker 1: used selfishly. I'll find a way to use this money
Speaker 1: to h to further conservation and hunting and fishing. And
Speaker 1: you know, I had a full blown raft, you know,
Speaker 1: like a west I used to live in Montana and
Speaker 1: fish all the rivers you guys fish. And I had
Speaker 1: a fourteen hundred like a pack raft and outcast pack
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred that burned up on the trailer the water
Speaker 1: Skeeter I had when I lived out there, burned up
Speaker 1: four kayaks, my kids kayaks, and man, that's the hardest part. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, my girls are teenagers, they're fourteen and fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, so sometimes dragging them down to this wilderness
Speaker 1: treat was a pain in the ass. Like I had
Speaker 1: to get the internet for them to even want to
Speaker 1: go down there, so I had like satellite internet. But
Speaker 1: they're crying, They're scared, like they're they're worried these people
Speaker 1: might like actually come to our home. So like I'm
Speaker 1: leaving the house at twelve thirty in the morning with
Speaker 1: an a R fifteen in one hand, hugging my fifteen
Speaker 1: year old crying daughter with the other hand. And it
Speaker 1: took about an hour and a lot of Metallica songs
Speaker 1: to realize like what I had done. You know, like
Speaker 1: I'm walking out of my house armed with like a
Speaker 1: military grade weapon, hugging a fifteen year old child that's crying,
Speaker 1: and I'm like the position that I've not only been
Speaker 1: putting myself, but then to react that way, like I'm
Speaker 1: I had to like sit her down and talk to her.
Speaker 1: And but you know, it's a scary situation. It's a
Speaker 1: scary place, and so why, like, why are the law
Speaker 1: why is the law enforcement so reluctant to deal with it?
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I don't even get this, man,
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain. Man, I don't have the answers
Speaker 1: for that. I'm I'm friends with the game wardens down there.
Speaker 1: They're under source. Of course, they're underpaid. I'm counting on
Speaker 1: a sheriff's deputy who probably makes you know, in the
Speaker 1: thirties as far as money, And this guy's got to
Speaker 1: put his life on the line to go after, you know,
Speaker 1: hardened criminals because my cabin burned down. Like that's a
Speaker 1: lot to ask of somebody to like go into this
Speaker 1: holler where there's no phones, no service, no internet, and
Speaker 1: try to apprehend somebody willing and able to do such
Speaker 1: a heinous crime for thirty grand a year. So then
Speaker 1: you know, there's also a huge national park there called
Speaker 1: the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, and they have law enforcement
Speaker 1: and and they have a hard time with getting the
Speaker 1: prosecutions to go through. Um there's just a real clannish
Speaker 1: culture down there, and and trying to get people prosecuted
Speaker 1: and through the judicial system is hard as well. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's just a very strange part of
Speaker 1: the world, very Appalachia, Like it's the poorest county in Missouri.
Speaker 1: But something has to change. And I've got you know,
Speaker 1: I'm friends with the Lieutenant governor of our state. I've
Speaker 1: got to call into his office, talked to a lot
Speaker 1: of law enforcement people, you know, if I have to
Speaker 1: be the martyr for this too, finally raise awareness that
Speaker 1: there's almost a lawless society existing within our state, and
Speaker 1: the fact that good people cannot go down there and
Speaker 1: build a home and enjoy the outdoors and increase the
Speaker 1: economy or anything that needs to be done to make
Speaker 1: this a more civilized society than you know, what's it
Speaker 1: gonna take. So I'm I'm really hopeful that this is
Speaker 1: a turning point in the history of this county, in
Speaker 1: the history of the Ozarks, because it's one of the
Speaker 1: most naturally beautiful parts of the country. Man. I wish
Speaker 1: we could get into the parts of this that we
Speaker 1: can't quite get into yet. But it's just like kind
Speaker 1: of a heartbreaking story. Man. It's so maddening and heartening. Man.
Speaker 1: But well, like I want to revisit it later on
Speaker 1: down the road. But one of the things about the
Speaker 1: go fund me, I know you were saying, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter and you had insurance. But I'll
Speaker 1: come out and say that you've been real good about
Speaker 1: sharing that place with people and being generous with it
Speaker 1: and instead of having a little chunk of ground that
Speaker 1: you that you lock up for yourself, trying to have
Speaker 1: like a place where you invite people in and and
Speaker 1: encourage conversations and try to use it as like, uh,
Speaker 1: something that's positive and to get people to relate and
Speaker 1: interact around conservation issues. Um. And I think it was
Speaker 1: it's like it's a cool spot and what you were
Speaker 1: doing there is cool, man. And I hope that people
Speaker 1: go and check out your go fund me because, uh,
Speaker 1: you didn't lose a ton of stuff, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: like a selfish project you had going on. It was
Speaker 1: something you were trying to do to be a good dude,
Speaker 1: you know. So I feel like you should tell people
Speaker 1: about the God On Me and people can come in
Speaker 1: and try to lend some support for someone that that
Speaker 1: for turning in. Some deer poachers had all their memories
Speaker 1: and something that they care a great deal about burned
Speaker 1: to the ground. Well, thank you very much. The outpouring
Speaker 1: of support has been humbling. Man. When I saw my
Speaker 1: phone go off today with your name popping up, I
Speaker 1: was like, man, this is getting around, you know. So
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you guys, all of you. And you know,
Speaker 1: Clay Nucomb has been to the cabin a few times,
Speaker 1: Hal Herring has been there, and Russell Graves out of Texas. Like,
Speaker 1: I was trying to make it something special that would
Speaker 1: hopefully bring some awareness to that area as well. I
Speaker 1: was trying to do good things for the people down
Speaker 1: there and and show that this is an incredible natural
Speaker 1: resource area of our country. But yeah, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know, man. Uh. The go fund me, whatever money
Speaker 1: comes from that, I'm going to use it for good,
Speaker 1: for conservation, for figuring out how to get more people
Speaker 1: involved in the outdoor, taking more people fishing and hunting. Um.
Speaker 1: I lost my raft that I wrote a lot of
Speaker 1: people down the river in that raft. Um. So it's
Speaker 1: on the Driftwood Outdoors Facebook page. I think the go
Speaker 1: fund me is called Brandon Butler's Cabin Burned by poachers.
Speaker 1: You can look it up, but the best way probably
Speaker 1: to find it is just to go to Driftwood Outdoors
Speaker 1: on on Facebook. But what like, like I said, you know,
Speaker 1: like this money will be used in a way that
Speaker 1: will let these people know that they didn't win that
Speaker 1: you know, we're going to continue to take a stand
Speaker 1: for conservation. You know that. I've been asked that too, Like, man,
Speaker 1: I bet you wish you wouldn't have turned him in.
Speaker 1: I'm like, absolutely not. I'll do it again tomorrow. Like,
Speaker 1: and I've had a bunch of people reach out and
Speaker 1: like my favorite thing is like a few folks have
Speaker 1: been like, dude, this is like the Pearl Harbor of
Speaker 1: Shannon County. Like they don't know what they just woke up.
Speaker 1: Like we're gonna get after it. So yeah, don't let
Speaker 1: some piece of ship with a pointless life drive you out. Man. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the absolute truth. So we're just gonna keep moving forward.
Speaker 1: It's all you can do in life, right, Like, my
Speaker 1: family is safe and healthy. Thankfully nobody was there. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, the important stuff is still intact. Yeah, Brandon,
Speaker 1: I know it hurts to lose all those material possessions,
Speaker 1: but it sounds like you've got the right attitude about it.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, thankfully, no humans got hurt and uh,
Speaker 1: what that song bitch can't take away from us are
Speaker 1: those great memories, man, And I've got some incredible memories
Speaker 1: from that place. And I can attest to what you're
Speaker 1: saying about it's natural beauty. It's absolutely incredible. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: think that, uh, southern Missouri would have water that flows
Speaker 1: of that color until you go and see it, and
Speaker 1: I urge everybody to do it. It's absolutely stunning. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the memory we have, it's burning my mind,
Speaker 1: is that opening morning a Turkey season when I snuck
Speaker 1: in there and call that old gobbler over to me
Speaker 1: and I shot him, and in my head, I could
Speaker 1: just see you and Steve up there on the other
Speaker 1: side of the ridge going was that Yanni? Could that
Speaker 1: could have been Yanni? They can't take that away from us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the feeling of knowing people are jealous of you,
Speaker 1: No one could take. Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying
Speaker 1: to hunt with Steve, you know, and I want to,
Speaker 1: of course show you guys a good hunt and a
Speaker 1: good time. And you know, it was like we we
Speaker 1: said it was like Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, like Steve
Speaker 1: and I didn't hear anything. It was like wildlife had
Speaker 1: become the void. And then we show up and Jannice
Speaker 1: is like, oh yeah, so easy killed one in thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: But me and Parker we had a good hunt too.
Speaker 1: We got three turkeys out of four and we should
Speaker 1: have had four. So it was yeah, man, that stean
Speaker 1: breath and turkey will live on forever. That's right, that's right. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll get you. We'll get you to replace with the
Speaker 1: parts of it that we can help replace, like the
Speaker 1: books and the steam breathing turkey poster. We'll get that
Speaker 1: sorted out. I appreciate you all right. Thanks for calling
Speaker 1: in on short notice or joining in on short notice. Man,
Speaker 1: when I saw that, I knew I wanted to have
Speaker 1: you on to talk about it because I was pretty upsetting. Well,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. You guys are the best. Thank
Speaker 1: you very much and look forward to talking to you soon. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I hope some dudes come in and kick down on that.
Speaker 1: Go fund me and help you out. Man. Thanks a lot,
Speaker 1: all right, take care of yourself well. When you want
Speaker 1: to come out when everything goes back to normal, we'd
Speaker 1: love to have you out in the studio. I'd love
Speaker 1: to do it. Thank you, all right, dude, talk to
Speaker 1: you soon, all right? Thanks? Oh yeah, So, Yanni, tell
Speaker 1: me now what's going on with your dog and a
Speaker 1: mountain lion and everything? Two mountain lions to be exact.
Speaker 1: But mingus and I spent some time walking tracks and
Speaker 1: and chasing lines is past week while you were in
Speaker 1: pencils talking and uh we were with Jake Gribb, who
Speaker 1: you know as well, buddy of ours. Oh yeah, we were.
Speaker 1: You were you there? And he got that Bobcat recently. No,
Speaker 1: I haven't been in on a bobcat uh kill yet,
Speaker 1: but that guy is amazing. Man. I don't even know
Speaker 1: how much we should really be like talking about how
Speaker 1: much how good he is online, because he's gonna start
Speaker 1: He's gonna be like that uh, that other Jake that
Speaker 1: we know from Wisconsin people stalking because he knows we're
Speaker 1: all the sturgeon are under the y you know, and
Speaker 1: I'm afraid we'll put too much attention on him. But anyways, um,
Speaker 1: I actually had a neighbor called me who had found
Speaker 1: a track, so we we It was a day old
Speaker 1: by the time we got to it, but we went
Speaker 1: and ran it. Anyways, eventually got on the on the cat.
Speaker 1: This was I think Monday morning on How did he
Speaker 1: find the track? How did he find the track? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I knew that he He lives just right
Speaker 1: across the drainage from me, and I had told him
Speaker 1: just to keep an eye out. And he was, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple hundred yards behind his house, just doing a
Speaker 1: little walk about with some family members, and uh and
Speaker 1: stumbled into it. And uh so we we put the
Speaker 1: cat up eventually, Um, it's late in the day by then,
Speaker 1: it's like one or two pm. And uh, Mingus had
Speaker 1: gotten had gotten to smell the We had eventually found
Speaker 1: the fresher track that was the day of and he
Speaker 1: had been on that track and smelled it a little bit.
Speaker 1: Um and he took he took off down the track.
Speaker 1: But five minutes later he came back. Jake's dog stayed
Speaker 1: on it. He came back like, hey, guys, what's going on?
Speaker 1: You know, like he just he doesn't have it quite
Speaker 1: there to stay on it yet. Well, we get to
Speaker 1: the tree. Jake's dogs are there treeing, barking up a storm,
Speaker 1: and Mingus is like kind of joining in on the barking.
Speaker 1: But more because he's like, hey, everybody else is barking.
Speaker 1: I'll bark a few times too, write, but he just can't.
Speaker 1: Like their cats kind of high, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: twenty ft maybe twenty five and it's kind of a
Speaker 1: pretty thick dug for a lot of branches in there,
Speaker 1: and you just can't get a good view, like I'm
Speaker 1: only seeing like you know, part of the tale, and
Speaker 1: like if you just get right angle, you can see
Speaker 1: his face, um, and you just like, he just can't
Speaker 1: put two. He at that point, he couldn't put two
Speaker 1: and two together. That what he was smelling on the
Speaker 1: track equal this cat up in this tree. Right, So
Speaker 1: no matter what I did, We're like, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: take his head and pointed up into the tree and
Speaker 1: Jake's looked at me like, dude, I've tried that a
Speaker 1: thousand times. It just doesn't work. And so we spent
Speaker 1: whatever half an hour there and uh, we took off.
Speaker 1: So it was a little bit of a bummer because
Speaker 1: I was like, man, we had invested, like you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. We started at five o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1: We walked out of there too. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: long day and I didn't really feel that my dog
Speaker 1: was any better for it, you know, It's just kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, I guess we had to go do
Speaker 1: it again. So two or three days later we went
Speaker 1: to run another track, and this one was very fresh,
Speaker 1: like like, you know, hours prior to Jake finding it.
Speaker 1: It was laid in there. So we get on it,
Speaker 1: and Jake he's got a young dog that he's on
Speaker 1: a train well too, so Mingus kind of gets second pick.
Speaker 1: And I was telling my girls. The best way to
Speaker 1: understand it is like Mingus is probably a kindergartener as
Speaker 1: far as like his level of understanding of this game.
Speaker 1: Jake's eight months old is probably in like fourth fifth grade,
Speaker 1: and then he's got like a two year old that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, towards the end of high school, and he's
Speaker 1: got one more that's a full on professional. So when
Speaker 1: his eighth month old is running a fresh track, he
Speaker 1: wants her to only be seeing what the other dogs
Speaker 1: with more experience are doing. And he doesn't want a
Speaker 1: dog like mine, who was a kindergartener, just run around
Speaker 1: in circles half the time playing grab bass, you know,
Speaker 1: ruining a good thing. So his dogs go first it's ah,
Speaker 1: and I'm basically behind with Mingus on a leash and
Speaker 1: just making sure that Mingus is literally taking every track,
Speaker 1: every footstep of that line, putting his nose into it
Speaker 1: and just walking. And it was great to watch because
Speaker 1: you can actually see sometimes he'd get excited and he
Speaker 1: veer off where the dog tracks went, but it wouldn't
Speaker 1: take but five or six feet and he would jump
Speaker 1: back to the actual line track. Well, I've been on
Speaker 1: a few long ones, you and I have been on
Speaker 1: a few long ones together. This one was like abnormally short,
Speaker 1: like from the time we cut Jake's dogs loose, I
Speaker 1: don't think, and the actual three minutes went by until
Speaker 1: you heard the boo boo, boo boo, the constant bark. Serious, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was fast. So we come over the
Speaker 1: ridge and I look back at Jake. I'm like, are
Speaker 1: they treating He's like, oh, yeah, this tree. So we
Speaker 1: we walked down to Mingus and I follow the track
Speaker 1: all the way to maybe fifty ft of the tree.
Speaker 1: Now let go the leash and just let him run
Speaker 1: in there, and you can see the cap plane his day.
Speaker 1: This time, it's not quite as high. It's only fifteen
Speaker 1: feet up or so ah. Same thing with his dogs.
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, two of them, the more experienced and the
Speaker 1: and the pro or all over the tree. They know
Speaker 1: what's in the tree. They're barking up a storm. The
Speaker 1: young this one is sort of like going around the
Speaker 1: tree doing a lot of barking, like she knows that
Speaker 1: that's what she's supposed to do, and that's where the
Speaker 1: scent ends. And it was interesting to watch two. You
Speaker 1: could tell when the thermals would come down just right
Speaker 1: and that cat scent would come straight down to her nose,
Speaker 1: she'd she'd light up, you know, mingus again. To three
Speaker 1: minutes into being at this tree, he's kind of like
Speaker 1: losing interest. He wants to run back on the track
Speaker 1: because that's where it was exciting what he was smelling.
Speaker 1: And he just can't put two and two together still.
Speaker 1: And I know Jake that had he had told me,
Speaker 1: like it's been, you can't do it. I've tried a
Speaker 1: thousand times, but this time the cats like more wide
Speaker 1: in the open. It's not as high. The hill is
Speaker 1: so steep that you only had to take like five
Speaker 1: six seven steps back from the tree and you're almost
Speaker 1: eye leveled this cat. So we're about in that. Help
Speaker 1: what's that? Because I gotta understand when he says you
Speaker 1: can't do it, he means you can't make a dog
Speaker 1: look into a tree and see a cat. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: because that's what you want to do. Like it's right there,
Speaker 1: just like point his head in that direction. How could
Speaker 1: you miss it? Can the dots? Yeah? And I think it.
Speaker 1: He's he's smelling it. He just doesn't know what he's smelling. Again,
Speaker 1: I was trying to explain to my daughters. I'm like,
Speaker 1: if you were smelling an apple pie but had never
Speaker 1: seen one and never tasted one, you don't you don't
Speaker 1: have an image for what you're smelling. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: even though this might smell good, it might be pleasurable,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it looks like. Well, I had
Speaker 1: to try it again. So I grabbed that dog's head
Speaker 1: and I pointed at that, at that lion, and I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like looking at him looking at the lion,
Speaker 1: and man, it was like it was almost like that
Speaker 1: his head kind of quivered and shook just for a second,
Speaker 1: and then it just locked. And then the next thing
Speaker 1: was I mean just blew my ear drum out and
Speaker 1: just went berzerko. He was just like, holy sh it,
Speaker 1: that's what said. That's what I've been smelling, that I
Speaker 1: got it, and just he's like, everybody, look, everybody looks
Speaker 1: lying in the tree exactly, and don't ever believe what
Speaker 1: I found. You want to talk about one track mine.
Speaker 1: At that point, we were just, you know, we're just
Speaker 1: Jake and I are milling around. His youngest is kind
Speaker 1: he doesn't know for sure, but kind of a tree climber,
Speaker 1: so he's keeping a real eye on her to make
Speaker 1: sure that she doesn't get too high up into this
Speaker 1: tree because it had some low, pretty stout low branches,
Speaker 1: so she was making it up six seven feet pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: Of course he doesn't want her to do that, but
Speaker 1: we're just milling around and talking and enjoying the situation.
Speaker 1: Is so funny because every time I get between mingus
Speaker 1: and that tree, he'd get real annoyed and like had
Speaker 1: to jump to the side to be like, no, man,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I got I gotta see this thing, em
Speaker 1: bark at it, so don't get in my line of sight,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, But yeah, very uh. It was just
Speaker 1: a very awesome feeling as a dog owner, you know,
Speaker 1: to see something like that click and to see it,
Speaker 1: see it go down and see the dog get excited. Um,
Speaker 1: that was sweet. The cool thing is you got him
Speaker 1: from the pound and you yeah, yeah, he's a full
Speaker 1: on Livingston Montana shelter dog. Yeah. Do you all? Is
Speaker 1: there any a thing that you can't like? Like, can
Speaker 1: that dog be a coon hound and a lion hound
Speaker 1: or has you gotta like pick his pick his path
Speaker 1: in life? No, I think that the the owner and
Speaker 1: the handler has to uh do that. I think they're
Speaker 1: they're they're probably only limited by how much their owner
Speaker 1: trains them, I think is what I've been getting from most.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure there's some people out there that
Speaker 1: tell you that will be better if they're just a
Speaker 1: one one, one trick pony when it comes to that.
Speaker 1: But I mean, certainly Jake's dogs do bob cats and lions,
Speaker 1: and I know they're both cats. But I think that
Speaker 1: if you just spend time with them, Um, they can
Speaker 1: do it all. You know, they can figure out when
Speaker 1: they're you know, supposed to be chasing one and supposed
Speaker 1: to be chasing another. Yeah, are you gonna bring go ahead?
Speaker 1: Don't doesn't Cowboy Cody's dogs down Colorado. They run anything
Speaker 1: like pigs and cattle and that's the run. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: run lions and cattle man, he said, they'll run whatever
Speaker 1: he tells them to be interested in. Now, are you
Speaker 1: bringing that dog when we go to Arkansas coon hunting
Speaker 1: with Clay? Are you bringing that dog down? Yes? Sir?
Speaker 1: How are you getting it there? Alane? You drug it
Speaker 1: and fly it? Okay, Yeah, that's what I was planning on.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe I should drive. I don't care
Speaker 1: road trip. I was looking for you do to you
Speaker 1: drugging it and flying it in the bottom of the airplane.
Speaker 1: But whatever. You don't even have to drug them unless
Speaker 1: you know you have to draw into I guess I
Speaker 1: thought you need to drag them a little bit when
Speaker 1: they're kind of wild dogs like that. There's some some
Speaker 1: folks that think that, and a lot of other folks
Speaker 1: that I've talked to you that are like, no, the
Speaker 1: dog as long as the dogs comfortable and a kettle
Speaker 1: a plane is the same as the back your track
Speaker 1: gives the like they're just going, yeah, but you haven't
Speaker 1: seen the honest dog. And have you seen the honest's
Speaker 1: dog in the back of a truck. No, I don't
Speaker 1: know what you're getting what I've had them in the
Speaker 1: back of my track. I guess it's a loud it's
Speaker 1: a big, loudass dog that makes a lot of noise. Man,
Speaker 1: he can't be you'd hear him if you were in
Speaker 1: the plane. They're trying to sleep. You're not gonna sleep
Speaker 1: on the airplane. If that dogs underneath there, that would
Speaker 1: be a fun airplane experience because you gotta think of
Speaker 1: how a few people understand what that is the baying
Speaker 1: of a hound. Now, luckily I think that he's not.
Speaker 1: He doesn't seem to have any sort of like separation
Speaker 1: anxiety or you know, he doesn't seem to like how
Speaker 1: ball mark whatever when we're not home. Um, So I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't I don't expect that. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: expect that to happen. I've only flown a dog once
Speaker 1: and we didn't drug her. M I'm looking forward to
Speaker 1: that trip, man. Oh yeah, me too, me too. You
Speaker 1: know we already got a title for the episode, right, No,
Speaker 1: please tell me A dog in the Fight. Oh that's
Speaker 1: a good title. Now. I'm looking forward to making that episode. Man.
Speaker 1: The only reason I didn't want to make it as
Speaker 1: I don't know what we'd call it. I don't know,
Speaker 1: go ahead, go ahead. I was just saying, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I'm gonna talk about this about about hunting
Speaker 1: the squirrels or the cones. Um. That's good news. I'm glad.
Speaker 1: I like tracking the progress of mingus the dog um.
Speaker 1: I want to move. Can we move down to this
Speaker 1: this thing about how not to how not to damage
Speaker 1: your scroll on a horse? Please? After that, I'm out
Speaker 1: of where you going. I'm kidding. Oh, this dude wrote
Speaker 1: in This is one of the more interesting guys that's
Speaker 1: ever written in he Um. We had a podcast episode.
Speaker 1: It was during the COVID pandemic. I remember that. I
Speaker 1: think it was early pandemic. We had on our beloved friend,
Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy, world's greatest small game hunter, who had recently
Speaker 1: returned from Mongolia, and he had been doing some falconry
Speaker 1: uh in Mongolia, and we talked about that, and we
Speaker 1: got to talk about riding horses, and I got talking
Speaker 1: about how hard it is to ride a horse without
Speaker 1: damaging up your scroll. Um and for me at least,
Speaker 1: and he rode in and he's this guy rode in,
Speaker 1: and he's the most interesting guy I've heard from in
Speaker 1: a while. He's a blacksmith and a horse trainer. Him
Speaker 1: and his wife teach people to ride wrote and jump
Speaker 1: on horseback. And he says that we're also naturist. And
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard this term because remember that
Speaker 1: guy that rode in it was a naturist elk hunter. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: he he bow hunts elk naked and was saying how
Speaker 1: he could read the wind real good, like like he
Speaker 1: never wonders what way. Yeah, like he never wonders what
Speaker 1: way the winds on. It's like you just feel it naked.
Speaker 1: So this guy's a this guy has a lot of
Speaker 1: insight and riding and not hurting your your scroll. And
Speaker 1: he goes on to say with a lot of other
Speaker 1: people rode in to say about how if you're if
Speaker 1: it's taken a beaten, you're like your seat is wrong.
Speaker 1: You gotta sit the horse properly in a western saddle.
Speaker 1: Your ass is tucked under you, you're pressed back into
Speaker 1: the seat, your upright, you're not leaning forward your knees
Speaker 1: or bent your heels down. He says that you can,
Speaker 1: you can if you're sitting right, you can ride comfortably
Speaker 1: with pants or no pants. But he says, this is
Speaker 1: where it gets interested. He says, I still prefer a
Speaker 1: pair of bike shorts or something that's underwear, because when
Speaker 1: I am wearing clothes, my scroll them just kind of
Speaker 1: relaxes and expects support. Then he goes on to say,
Speaker 1: this is it's something that's never occurred to me before.
Speaker 1: He spends enough time nude around the farm and around
Speaker 1: the woods that he claims that his testicles have retained
Speaker 1: the natural ability, which I didn't know is like that
Speaker 1: that you lose it, But he he retains the natural
Speaker 1: ability to retract and firm up in times of physical activity,
Speaker 1: like when running or chopping wood or hunting a stretching routine.
Speaker 1: It's like hold on limber am tighten up. So he's
Speaker 1: saying that most fellows like us, who run around like
Speaker 1: suckers wearing their clothes all the time, that you're losing
Speaker 1: your ability two retract and firm up. But that he
Speaker 1: has retained the ability to retract and firm up. And
Speaker 1: then that has nothing to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: his nuts are cold. He's like, I retain the ability
Speaker 1: to firm up in cold water. So my advice is,
Speaker 1: he says, Dude, dude, I'm not even half Joe. I
Speaker 1: like this guy a bunch. I don't want to seem
Speaker 1: like in any way in any way that I'm like
Speaker 1: like I would go hang out with this guy. My
Speaker 1: advice is, unless you're gonna spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: nude and exercising the muscles that retract your boys up
Speaker 1: into your pelvis like a samurai, where something for support,
Speaker 1: and learn to sit properly in the saddles. So he's saying,
Speaker 1: there's a binary decision to be made here, go neude
Speaker 1: enough that the boys learn where to ride on their
Speaker 1: own or sit right. So I have I'm at a decision.
Speaker 1: I'm at a a pivot point as a rider this
Speaker 1: and I'm suggests that, Uh, the overwhelming majority of people
Speaker 1: have learned to sit right and skip the nunity party
Speaker 1: with virtually virtually everyone that I see riding nowadays has
Speaker 1: taken these second choice. But when we go down to
Speaker 1: hunt coons with Clay, we're gonna be riding around on
Speaker 1: mules and Yan, I just don't want you to be
Speaker 1: surprised if you see some things you maybe don't want
Speaker 1: to see. Oh, I'm fine, Well, yeah, do what you
Speaker 1: gotta do. Man, I just think of all the like
Speaker 1: pasty white, transparent, old rancher skim that has never seen
Speaker 1: the light of day, really reinforces the people just learned
Speaker 1: how to sit right. Yeah, sure, Cal, you know you
Speaker 1: know what I want to do. I want to move
Speaker 1: into something for that Cal is gonna talk about, but
Speaker 1: I want to break up Jim Heffelfingers responsibilities. Jim, do
Speaker 1: you mind um telling everybody what you were telling me
Speaker 1: about about the ocelot and the jaguar and all that,
Speaker 1: And are you gonna be able to share those images
Speaker 1: so people can go see them. The images are actually
Speaker 1: embedded into scientific paper and I would just sent this
Speaker 1: morning this paper and it was just a short note
Speaker 1: and it has a series of photos nighttime photos from
Speaker 1: a trail cam that's next to a water catchment in
Speaker 1: northern Guatemala where there's ocelots and jaguars both and they
Speaker 1: had images of a jaguar coming into the water, taking
Speaker 1: a drink and then going back off into the darkness.
Speaker 1: And while it or a taper comes by and drinks
Speaker 1: out of the water, and the jaguar don't leaves it alone.
Speaker 1: Taper leaves, and then a little as lot comes in,
Speaker 1: starts drinking, and the jaguar pounces out of the darkness,
Speaker 1: kills the jag kills the ocelot, and then drags the
Speaker 1: ocelot off, And the scientific paper has the images embedded
Speaker 1: in the paper itself. But then there's some note that
Speaker 1: I haven't followed yet that says that there's supplemental information,
Speaker 1: which usually means there's more information somewhere online. But a
Speaker 1: lot of times those scientific papers are are you've got
Speaker 1: to subscribe to the journals to get into. It's not
Speaker 1: always open access. So I haven't checked yet whether those
Speaker 1: images are available. I can send you the paper and
Speaker 1: we can see if that's available in the public. Why
Speaker 1: do you think he would kill um? Why would he
Speaker 1: not kill the tape here, but he would kill the ocelot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those the tapers are kind of big, but that's part
Speaker 1: of their that's part of their diet down there in
Speaker 1: the jungle. Why he would kill an azla? That's what
Speaker 1: makes it so bizarre, That's what makes it so noteworthy
Speaker 1: to show up in a scientific paper as a note.
Speaker 1: It's just it's not really a competitor, so it's strange. Well,
Speaker 1: and I don't think we know for sure just from
Speaker 1: those pictures if the thing disappeared into the darkness, that
Speaker 1: it was necessarily just sitting there that whole time period,
Speaker 1: and maybe it was out for a walk about while
Speaker 1: the tape here was there just happened to be back
Speaker 1: when the oslats showed up. I mean, is there like
Speaker 1: any evidence that they do the same thing that wolves
Speaker 1: do with coyotes and just kill him to kill them
Speaker 1: like they're just I don't think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: evidence of cats doing that because they're more solitary animals,
Speaker 1: just living in the jungle, kind of doing their own things.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty strange. Hey, do you think, Jim, right now,
Speaker 1: at this like very second, do you think there are
Speaker 1: is a jaguar in the US right now? Do they know?
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know. We normally have had one,
Speaker 1: it's not always the same one. We've normally had one,
Speaker 1: But I haven't heard since before we talked last time.
Speaker 1: It has been a year since I've heard any fresh information,
Speaker 1: So I don't really know. Yeah, so there might not be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't remember. Do you root for jaguars root against jaguars?
Speaker 1: So have we had that conversation. I root for the
Speaker 1: same thing you do, that they continue to be able
Speaker 1: to come up and visit and hang out in these
Speaker 1: mountain islands in southeastern Arizona. There was some talk and
Speaker 1: there still is, of putting them the crates and moving
Speaker 1: them to the Pondrosa Pine high elevation forest in central Arizona.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't make any sense to me. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: why not? Why doesn't it make any sense? Oh? There
Speaker 1: that was that was really beyond the range of um
Speaker 1: the core of jaguar habitats. So there's like there's hundreds
Speaker 1: of over a hundred thousand jaguars throughout the range in
Speaker 1: Central America, and the Amazon is the epicenter of jaguars.
Speaker 1: And they came up, and they came out and visited Arizona,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. They came up, being a little farther than
Speaker 1: that in prehistoric times like the places the scene. But
Speaker 1: this Arizona, New Mexico is a northern fringe of their habitat,
Speaker 1: and they should be able to do what what animals
Speaker 1: do with the northern fringe, come up and visit and
Speaker 1: colonize and stay. But this really isn't the core of
Speaker 1: their habitat, and to take them from other populations like
Speaker 1: northern Mexico and then putting them up into what is
Speaker 1: really not good jaguar habits had a real dry ponderos
Speaker 1: of pine forest is not ideal jaguar habitat, even though
Speaker 1: a two hundred years ago we have some evidence of
Speaker 1: them moving through there. So it's like trying to re
Speaker 1: They would be trying to re establish a population in
Speaker 1: a place where you feel it would be dubious at
Speaker 1: best to say that they were that they had a
Speaker 1: breeding population there. Yeah, we know a lot about what
Speaker 1: kind of habitat jaguar do really well on, and they
Speaker 1: do the best in those more tropical habitats, and then
Speaker 1: they do okay in in areas like northern Mexico and
Speaker 1: the mountains and the sky Islands in southeastern Arizona and
Speaker 1: central Arizona were just really areas where they moved through.
Speaker 1: And like we talked about last time, but if you
Speaker 1: look at the Native American cultures in the southwestern Arizona,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, the jaguar wasn't part of their their culture.
Speaker 1: They don't have motif they didn't revere the jaguar and
Speaker 1: that's really the case in Central America where they were
Speaker 1: really common and writing center of their distribution. Oh man, I,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we've talked about this for I
Speaker 1: love those things. I think it would be you know,
Speaker 1: it'd be pretty great to be walking through the woods
Speaker 1: and there's one standing there. Now. I did send you
Speaker 1: that book Borderland Jaguars. Did you go, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that book. I like that book. That's got
Speaker 1: a good documentation of these jaguars in this northern end
Speaker 1: of their habitat. Yep, all right, cal uh, We're gonna
Speaker 1: touch on this a little bit because this dude rode
Speaker 1: in Um. It's kind of interesting. A guy wrote in
Speaker 1: about possession limits and he's not the first person to
Speaker 1: write in about possession limits, and just some people understand
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. We talk about possession limits to
Speaker 1: be in hunting, you'll you'll quite often see that you'll
Speaker 1: encounter a species where you have a what's called the
Speaker 1: daily bag limit. And this goes for fishing, this goes
Speaker 1: for hunting. For our case here, let's say that we're
Speaker 1: talking about fishing. Let's say you go somewhere and they
Speaker 1: have a daily bag limit of five walleye. Okay, that
Speaker 1: means in a day, in a given day, you're allowed
Speaker 1: to catch and retain five walleye. You'll often see tack
Speaker 1: down to that, a possession limit would be Typically, it's
Speaker 1: very common to see a possession limit be two daily
Speaker 1: bag limits. What that would mean is, let's say you're
Speaker 1: camping out and you're you gotta fish camp set up,
Speaker 1: you're at the river access, you got your camp or
Speaker 1: trader there, um, you've been there for a couple of days.
Speaker 1: They're saying that you could have in your cooler or
Speaker 1: in your camp two bag limits. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: out in your boat, in your live will you have
Speaker 1: to bag limits. But like you went out caught five
Speaker 1: on Saturday, you went out and caught five on Sunday.
Speaker 1: They're cool with you having Saturday and Sunday's daily bag
Speaker 1: limits in your possession. And this this system starts to
Speaker 1: get really complicated for people because a lot of times
Speaker 1: it winds up being like, Okay, does that mean that
Speaker 1: I can have it in my freezer at home? What
Speaker 1: if I have it where I've already turned it into
Speaker 1: a jerky or sausage, does that count as my limit?
Speaker 1: This guy that wrote in, brought up a really interesting
Speaker 1: twist on this question of how possession limits work, where
Speaker 1: he says he it is dude from Illinois, writes in.
Speaker 1: He says, for example, Illinois has an early goose season
Speaker 1: in September, but there are two zones with different limits.
Speaker 1: The North zone has a five goose daily limit and
Speaker 1: a fifteen goose possession limits, so there you can have
Speaker 1: three daily bag limits. The South zone has a two
Speaker 1: goose daily limit and a six goose possession limit. He
Speaker 1: then goes down to ask, let's say I live in
Speaker 1: the South zone but hunt for three days in the
Speaker 1: North zone and bring home eight geese. Am I breaking
Speaker 1: the law since I am two over the possession limit?
Speaker 1: Or another scenario, I live in the North zone and
Speaker 1: have twelve geese in my freezer from the early season.
Speaker 1: Then in October the regular water fall season starts and
Speaker 1: the possession limit changes to nine. Am I then violating
Speaker 1: the law? Cal take this one away. So this is
Speaker 1: a great, great topic, and um it, it really doesn't
Speaker 1: get confusing as long as you keep in mind that
Speaker 1: hunting is a management tool and fishing is a management tool,
Speaker 1: and your bag limits and possession limits change by state,
Speaker 1: by zone, by region, uh, and by and by fishery
Speaker 1: and fly away um, such as the North South zone
Speaker 1: uh that this fellow rode in with. And in Montana,
Speaker 1: all right, we have a Pacific flyway and a Central
Speaker 1: flyway that you can hunt without leaving the state and
Speaker 1: UM it gets really interesting when you start looking at
Speaker 1: fisheries as well. A great example, right is your your
Speaker 1: bucket biology examples of taking let's say, perch and uh
Speaker 1: dumping them in to new ponds. So there's an example
Speaker 1: here in the state of Montana where uh you can
Speaker 1: have uh two bodies of water on the same highway.
Speaker 1: One has a daily possession limit or I'm sorry, daily
Speaker 1: bag limit. You know, your daily take of perch. The
Speaker 1: possession limit is three times the daily take it. Possession
Speaker 1: in Montana is your possession of that species in total.
Speaker 1: So it means what you have on you, what you
Speaker 1: have at your camp, whatever that camp maybe, and whatever
Speaker 1: you have at your home. Uh. It doesn't say the
Speaker 1: example that the uh dude rode in with is hilarious
Speaker 1: because he threw on something that I hadn't even thought of.
Speaker 1: When she's like, well, what if I have a mounted
Speaker 1: bird on my wall? It's like it's a bird. A
Speaker 1: great question. I hadn't thought of it. UM. And in
Speaker 1: the state of Montana, it doesn't say anything about taxidermy. UM.
Speaker 1: It does in the fact that if you're going to
Speaker 1: transfer a bird to a taxidermist, the state that it
Speaker 1: needs to be in. UM. But possession limit is anything
Speaker 1: cammed smoked. It implies whatever state that meat is in,
Speaker 1: if it is the species in question, it pertains to
Speaker 1: your possession limit. So to finish with this example, if
Speaker 1: you go further down the same highway into a new
Speaker 1: drainage where they have somebody has transplanted those perch illegally
Speaker 1: into this other fishery where they do not want the perch.
Speaker 1: There is no daily limit on perch, and there is
Speaker 1: no daily possession limit on perch. So what the hell
Speaker 1: does a game warden do then, especially if Steve's fishing
Speaker 1: at the reservoir where there is a daily limit and
Speaker 1: a possession limit, and I want to stop in and
Speaker 1: see Steve on my way home, which would make sense
Speaker 1: because it's on the same highway, right, But I have
Speaker 1: a cooler full of fish that are totally illegal. I
Speaker 1: just happened to be passing through a zone where had
Speaker 1: I been fishing and catching fish in that zone, it
Speaker 1: would then be illegal. Um. I I had to call
Speaker 1: a game warden on this add you know they they
Speaker 1: laugh typically because the what ifs can really run rampant,
Speaker 1: but UM, you know it always comes down to a
Speaker 1: game warden's discretion. UM. And those possession limits, the definition
Speaker 1: of possession is different in every state. So I was
Speaker 1: looking at an example. Uh, this couple of guys in
Speaker 1: Texas got caught with boy I can't even remember now,
Speaker 1: like seven times the daily uh or seven times the
Speaker 1: possession limit. The legal possession limit for croppy A ton
Speaker 1: of croppy. UM, very illegal. But if you read the
Speaker 1: law in Texas the way the possession limit is written
Speaker 1: in Texas, if you have a permanent camp as in
Speaker 1: a real deal cabin that you live at and can
Speaker 1: get mail at, your possession Anything that you store at
Speaker 1: that place does not count towards your possession limit. But
Speaker 1: if your buddy is right right next to your cabin
Speaker 1: where you get your mail, and they're in a camper
Speaker 1: trailer that they do not get their mail at, the
Speaker 1: fish that they bring back to their camper trailer counts
Speaker 1: against their possession limit. So to me, that's almost like
Speaker 1: an odd sort of you're kind of getting into the
Speaker 1: halves and have not there where. It's like, well, if
Speaker 1: you can afford to have a house on the lake,
Speaker 1: not a house two blocks from the lake, you're more
Speaker 1: than likely to be able to retain a hell of
Speaker 1: a lot more fish just because you don't have to
Speaker 1: spend time and travel to get the fish to the
Speaker 1: place where they don't count against your possession limit. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think, let me yes, go ahead. I want
Speaker 1: I want to throw another wrinkle into this, and I
Speaker 1: know we're like that maybe you have a final hopefully
Speaker 1: you have like an answer, because we're like it's like
Speaker 1: a question with a question, because these are all things
Speaker 1: that I ought to be curious that you have. Jim
Speaker 1: speak to this too. I feel like these are things
Speaker 1: that are are well meaning laws that are so confusing
Speaker 1: that it's like setting people up for failure because you
Speaker 1: can't figure out how to be compliant, Like you cal
Speaker 1: you brought up. Let's say you go get a bunch
Speaker 1: of geese and you make sausage. Yeah, I mean so
Speaker 1: now you have a bunch of goose sausage sticks. Uh,
Speaker 1: how do you figure out like you still you save
Speaker 1: one bag of goose sausage sticks and then the next
Speaker 1: goose season starts up. How do you go like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need to account for this, being like what is
Speaker 1: this portions of five geese? Is this like a goose
Speaker 1: is worth? I feel like you're putting people into a
Speaker 1: situation where you're kind of like and it's probably why
Speaker 1: you don't read about people getting busted for this stuff
Speaker 1: unless they're like big time poachers, because you can't roll
Speaker 1: into someone's house dismantled their freezer and start trying to
Speaker 1: reconstruct their last year of activities and and that that
Speaker 1: is the answer, though, is documentation. And in this day
Speaker 1: and age that it's so easy to to document. Um,
Speaker 1: so you know, you just got to label your stuff
Speaker 1: and you do need to be accountable for it. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you're exactly right, Like a bag of jerky,
Speaker 1: I turned a lot of meat into jerky last year,
Speaker 1: Um it was it was big game, so it's easy
Speaker 1: to take keep track of. But um yeah, if if
Speaker 1: game wardens came into the house and grabbed that bag
Speaker 1: of jerky and decided to start doing uh DNA analysis
Speaker 1: on it, you know they're gonna have a single bag
Speaker 1: that has an elk from Idaho, a mule deer from Idaho,
Speaker 1: a cuse deer from Mexico, you know, and or coots
Speaker 1: and yeah, and and that. You know, all that testing
Speaker 1: costs money, So what's what's the end result gonna be? Right? So? Um?
Speaker 1: In waterfowl terms, you know, Canada geese and Montana right
Speaker 1: now are like a plague. I've never seen so many
Speaker 1: birds in my entire life. It is unbelievable. Um. But
Speaker 1: you know, if if you know, big goose spreads, lots
Speaker 1: of decoys are big investment. And I just started kind
Speaker 1: of doing the math on if you really wanted to
Speaker 1: get involved in goose hunting and have all the decoys
Speaker 1: and be compliant with the law as it's written. In
Speaker 1: order for you to just go and hunt Saturday and
Speaker 1: Sunday and shoot limits of geese, you have to, I mean,
Speaker 1: every licensed hunter in your household has to eat six
Speaker 1: Canada geese per week during during Monday through Friday, you
Speaker 1: have to eat six candidate if you want to keep
Speaker 1: at it. Yeah, I'm sorry, Tim, right, so yeah, tan
Speaker 1: tan Canada geese per week per licensed hunter if you
Speaker 1: want to keep at it um and then we can
Speaker 1: have beyond that. So we one time asked the UH
Speaker 1: state trooper in Alaska, you don't have game wardens or troopers,
Speaker 1: but we asked the trooper, we're trying to understand possession
Speaker 1: limits and how it works there. And let's say you
Speaker 1: have UH Let's say you happen to have a fish shack,
Speaker 1: and at this fish shack you have a freezer, and
Speaker 1: you're curious. Okay, if a haliban possession limit is two
Speaker 1: daily bag limits, that means you're allowed to have four
Speaker 1: haliban in your possession. The way when when we were
Speaker 1: trying to get clarity on how this worked, we spoke
Speaker 1: to troopers who said that the men it it's processed
Speaker 1: for consumption, it no longer is in your possession limit,
Speaker 1: Meaning if you go, if you get to haliban and
Speaker 1: you take them home, and you filly those haliban and
Speaker 1: portion them and vaccine limb and freeze them, they're no
Speaker 1: longer in your possession. Then it's just a matter of
Speaker 1: that your daily bag limits don't exceed how many days
Speaker 1: you've been at your cabin, meaning if you're at your
Speaker 1: cabin five days, you could theoretically freeze ten haliban, but
Speaker 1: you better not have twelve because you haven't been there
Speaker 1: that many days to have accumulated them. And when we
Speaker 1: talked about okay, like what about something that you're not cleaning,
Speaker 1: Like let's say you're talking about shrimp. Okay, you catch
Speaker 1: shrimp and you just freeze the tails and you can
Speaker 1: be on the water with just shrimp tail because you
Speaker 1: allowed three quarts of shrimp tails. So I haven't done it.
Speaker 1: I haven't processed it. All I did is freeze it.
Speaker 1: And they said, if that's how you process it, if
Speaker 1: that's how you freeze it for later consumption, we would
Speaker 1: regard that as being processed. So when I just throw
Speaker 1: my whole poach deer straight into that baild freezer, I got,
Speaker 1: I'm good to go. If that's how you like to
Speaker 1: eat it later. Yes, I saved the guts that way. Um.
Speaker 1: So you're like, this is how I cook, this is
Speaker 1: how I cook them. Here's another wrinkle, right, Um, my
Speaker 1: girlfriend shot four geese and brought four geese home. She
Speaker 1: doesn't put the geese and her freezer. She puts them
Speaker 1: in my freezer. So those four geese are labeled with
Speaker 1: her information. Um, and but they're they're at my residence.
Speaker 1: I get my mail with my geese that because of
Speaker 1: the overlap, I have labeled with my information as well. Right,
Speaker 1: and this is like paranoia basically, like very few, but
Speaker 1: I feel like that would. I feel like a warden
Speaker 1: would respect that system. They I think they would as
Speaker 1: long as they were, uh, you know, not looking to
Speaker 1: find something else. I guess I think you know, as
Speaker 1: most of these wardens that you talk with, Right, it's like, um,
Speaker 1: we uh, I have no reason to doubt you until
Speaker 1: we do. And then if we're gonna make a case,
Speaker 1: we're gonna um make sure that we make the whole
Speaker 1: case essentially. Yeah, you know a good way to look
Speaker 1: at Oh sorry, go ahead, Yeah, go ahead. I was
Speaker 1: gonna point out. I was gonna point out a helpful
Speaker 1: way to look at this kind of stuff. Uh. We
Speaker 1: have a friend cow and your friendly with him too,
Speaker 1: who used to he's a lawyer and he used to
Speaker 1: represent the Wyoming He used to represent Wyoming as their
Speaker 1: head attorney, the Fishing Game Department. And he we were
Speaker 1: talking about all these arcane or these like little known
Speaker 1: rules and ways that seems like you could get in trouble.
Speaker 1: And we got on the subject of of bartering and
Speaker 1: selling wild game. Okay, it's illegal to barter in trade
Speaker 1: with wild game, like you can't use it like currency, right,
Speaker 1: so it would be illegal for someone to you to
Speaker 1: go to the guy that changes your oil and he's like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, don't worry about it, man um, happy to
Speaker 1: do it. Just make sure to drop me by a
Speaker 1: couple of walife lays next weekend. You're technically breaking the
Speaker 1: law because you're bartering and trading with wild game. But
Speaker 1: this attorney invited me to go and look at what,
Speaker 1: he goes, Go look at where you actually see that
Speaker 1: and forcement tool applied to people, he said, Only you'll
Speaker 1: only find it get applied in places where you have
Speaker 1: someone who is in a real, real bad position, and
Speaker 1: you'll find that Awarden will then add on every possible
Speaker 1: thing he can add on, so that when you start
Speaker 1: pleaing down, you have a mountainous ship to plea through.
Speaker 1: And he goes, that's he goes, that's the only situations
Speaker 1: where I see like this bartering and trading thing coming
Speaker 1: up when it's someone who's done like some really bad
Speaker 1: stuff and they're going through and they're being like, Okay,
Speaker 1: three counts of this. We're gonna add counts of this.
Speaker 1: We're gonna add counts to that, and it just winds
Speaker 1: up being, um, it winds up being a way to
Speaker 1: just lay it on heavy when someone really has it
Speaker 1: coming and and they kind of need to write because
Speaker 1: a lot of these you look at so many wildlife violations, uh,
Speaker 1: spread all over all the news sources, and inevitably, UM,
Speaker 1: people who are in the know and people who are
Speaker 1: just being exposed to this stuff for the first time
Speaker 1: come the same conclusion. Right, It's like, that is a
Speaker 1: reprehensible crime. I can't believe they got away so easy.
Speaker 1: But the reality is a lot of times that that
Speaker 1: is exactly what the law provides for. It's like, well
Speaker 1: that if you look at it, that is a maximum
Speaker 1: allowable fine of you know, five d a thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: two fifty dollars. And it's like, so that's why, um,
Speaker 1: when it's time to nail somebody, it's like stack them
Speaker 1: up because mhmm. If they get out of some of it,
Speaker 1: it's just it's not almost not even worth our time
Speaker 1: type of thing. So it's I called it. I called
Speaker 1: the warden the other day because we're having a hard time.
Speaker 1: We're arguing a lot about the law that we couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out what it meant. And I got to the
Speaker 1: point where I decided it wasn't just me, like, like
Speaker 1: I felt that it didn't make sense. And when I
Speaker 1: got him on the phone and I invited him to
Speaker 1: go read it, he read it. And it was kind
Speaker 1: of funny because he read it and he's kind of like, huh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, but then was able to solve it for me,
Speaker 1: like he saw something that I didn't see. But it
Speaker 1: was just it was an interesting interaction to have with
Speaker 1: someone to be confused about the law. Call up. They're
Speaker 1: really glad that you called. They respect the fact that
Speaker 1: you're trying to sort it out. And then it wasn't
Speaker 1: like you dumbass, It was like, oh, I see where
Speaker 1: you're confused here, let's look through it. Uh, consider this.
Speaker 1: And that's a way better interaction to have than to
Speaker 1: wait till later and get in trouble and then be like,
Speaker 1: but it is confusing, because at that point it's like
Speaker 1: you probably should have cleared up, cleared up the confusion. Great,
Speaker 1: great example, right. I called the Region three Montana Fishing
Speaker 1: Game Office the other day talking about accessing, um, some
Speaker 1: ground that would fall within the this late c w
Speaker 1: D hunt that we have going on, chronic wasting disease
Speaker 1: mitigation deal um, and Warden was super helpful and and
Speaker 1: um we're talking. He's like, now, remember, Montana stream access
Speaker 1: law does not provide for big game hunting. It provides
Speaker 1: for recreation and fishing. So if you want to access
Speaker 1: that spot, you better float to it or drag a
Speaker 1: canoe with you. So I could legally drag the canoe upstream,
Speaker 1: paddle the canoe upstream, and have the situation where I've
Speaker 1: got a boat with me, so I haven't exactly just
Speaker 1: walked the high water mark line. Am Uh, that would
Speaker 1: make it more legal. And I said. I was like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with this. I understand it. Um, but you
Speaker 1: know this just is not right. This like law is
Speaker 1: designed to make your life a living hell. Right And
Speaker 1: he said, well, how so? And I said, well, because
Speaker 1: in the state of Montana, no matter what season it is,
Speaker 1: hunting season or not, it's one legal two carry a
Speaker 1: firearm anywhere I want on public land under the high
Speaker 1: water mark. So how can it be legal to hike
Speaker 1: in under the high water mark with a rifle. Ah,
Speaker 1: I could be wearing orange or not and just say like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't have the intention to hunt game. I know
Speaker 1: other people are out here, so I'm wearing orange to
Speaker 1: be safe, and I like having my rifle with me.
Speaker 1: And then I had to change your mind and decided
Speaker 1: to hunt. You know. It's just that may work on
Speaker 1: the way in, but not on the way out with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you want to go to court dragging your boat
Speaker 1: and what's recreation? Yeah, Like it seems pretty obvious what
Speaker 1: you're trying to accomplish. So like the fact that you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: but I have a boat with me. I mean, I
Speaker 1: know the game wardens saying that's the way to cover
Speaker 1: your ass, but it doesn't seem right. You could have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's a odd, odd thing. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of that out there, and it's like, do you
Speaker 1: want to take the Montana stream access law to court
Speaker 1: um and try to get a specific provision put in
Speaker 1: for big game hunting where you could possibly uh, you know,
Speaker 1: they're screwing it up for everybody somehow, someway they tried
Speaker 1: to make laws black and white, but the reality is
Speaker 1: there's just a whole bunch of gray in between. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the fun parts to pick at. Man. I
Speaker 1: had another interaction we'll move on after this, but another
Speaker 1: interaction with a warden where I was looking at a
Speaker 1: spot on a map and I was like, I, it's
Speaker 1: it occurred to me that a fellow would be able
Speaker 1: to go do a certain activity there that just seemed
Speaker 1: like he shouldn't be able to. And I said, I said, man,
Speaker 1: I keep looking at this and it just seems to
Speaker 1: me like you'd be able to do X there. And
Speaker 1: he was inviting me to He's like, why does it
Speaker 1: seem not right to you? Like was asking wanted me
Speaker 1: to entertain this to myself and see if there was
Speaker 1: something there or not right. Other than being like, ah,
Speaker 1: I found a secret, you know, he was kind of
Speaker 1: like inviting to use some discretion and not try to
Speaker 1: view it like can I get away with something that
Speaker 1: maybe feels a little funny, you know, but it's not enforcement? Yanni.
Speaker 1: You here's the thing I wanted to mention to you,
Speaker 1: and it's interesting you two cal I think, is Yanni
Speaker 1: you guys have you guys actually you guys have had
Speaker 1: babies at your house, right correct too. And then the
Speaker 1: human babies like like birthing babies. Yeah, not just like
Speaker 1: baby party. Did you use did you burn them into
Speaker 1: the water? Um, I'm trying to think now, both times
Speaker 1: we had uh we're looking at an image here of
Speaker 1: a the blow up bathtub that babies are burthen too.
Speaker 1: Sometimes both times we had those setups. But I believe it. No,
Speaker 1: I want to say, baltim, we're just on the bed um.
Speaker 1: I think that my wife actually found it too relaxing,
Speaker 1: and it took her out of that mode of get
Speaker 1: baby out and took her into more chill mode and
Speaker 1: and and yeah, so it didn't happen in the water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's interesting. This dude wrote in that his wife
Speaker 1: was having a baby at home and they had a
Speaker 1: little kiddie pool they filled up with water, and he
Speaker 1: took his Suvie circulator out of his kitchen and set
Speaker 1: the Suvie circulator in there to keep it at the
Speaker 1: right til very good thing, which is which is genius man,
Speaker 1: like a suvied baby. I might just I mean, next time,
Speaker 1: I don't take baths often, but next time, my you,
Speaker 1: I mean, the aren't we have like a porcelain claw footer,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh, boy, you start off nice and
Speaker 1: cozy and then and then you know, you read a
Speaker 1: half a chapter and it's kind of a kind of
Speaker 1: a tepid bath and it's not so much fun anymore.
Speaker 1: So this might be a thing, a little mini whirlpool.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man, you take you set that suvie thing
Speaker 1: at like one o two and jump in there. It
Speaker 1: would be like great. Man. Uh, this other guy a
Speaker 1: real quick. This other guy wrote in he he got
Speaker 1: the new survival book, the wind n Skills and Survival Book,
Speaker 1: and he went on his trip, uh and the Great
Speaker 1: Smoky National Park with his girlfriend, five day backpacking track
Speaker 1: and they ran in all these weather problems and the
Speaker 1: weather got all bad and everybody got all cold, and
Speaker 1: it was it turned into kind of an unexpected survival situation.
Speaker 1: And he wrote in to say that he used he
Speaker 1: actually burned the book and it worked great. He but
Speaker 1: he said, he leankfully. He already read all the pages.
Speaker 1: It was all wet on the rim, but he found
Speaker 1: dry in the middle and burned the book and save
Speaker 1: the day. I feel like that dude deserves and no,
Speaker 1: he deserves a new book. I think man, definitely I
Speaker 1: like his little description too, when he says, uh, later
Speaker 1: that evening, after he's all wet. He said it began
Speaker 1: to rain, didn't stop raining for thirty hours. And not
Speaker 1: only was it raining, the air seemed to be so
Speaker 1: thick with moisture I could almost drink and breathe at
Speaker 1: the same time. That line caught my eye too. Man,
Speaker 1: he's got a he's like a he's a word smith.
Speaker 1: He's like a little bit of a writer. He's pouring
Speaker 1: it on heavy. I'll admit I was getting skeptical after
Speaker 1: a while. Then I saw the picture of the book,
Speaker 1: and I believe him. Oh no, that that books, that
Speaker 1: book's been through hell man, But I feel like we should.
Speaker 1: I gotta try to figure it out and remember to
Speaker 1: send his dude named Dylan out of Omaha, Nebraska, to
Speaker 1: send his dude a new book to replace the book
Speaker 1: he had to burn up. It's nice to know when
Speaker 1: your books come in handy, you know what I mean? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: the and this is exactly what that book was it for,
Speaker 1: exactly what this guy ran into like just out for
Speaker 1: kind of a I don't want to say mundane, but
Speaker 1: like just a little regular outing, not some crazy, big adventure.
Speaker 1: It was a three hour tour. All right, there's another
Speaker 1: thing I want to get into, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: have Dn Jim Hefelfinger is gonna swing back in for us. Uh. Chris,
Speaker 1: Chris gilt Ridge Pounder is he's he's been on. He
Speaker 1: comes on the show quite a bit. He's working on
Speaker 1: a fine art project, oh where he's been taking pictures
Speaker 1: of funked up old deer stands. And we've been talking
Speaker 1: about how we want to do a coffee table book,
Speaker 1: a fine art coffee table book called fucked Up Old
Speaker 1: deer Stands. It's gonna be We created an email. It's
Speaker 1: like he's only got like he's got six or seven
Speaker 1: that are bookworthy. But to really do a good book
Speaker 1: that we can sell next Christmas. To really do a
Speaker 1: good book, we need like fifty great photos. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna start a crowd source. Chris Skills. Rich Pounder is
Speaker 1: the photo editor, so he's gonna do primary photography. He'll
Speaker 1: probably have more pictures than anybody else. But if you
Speaker 1: do a picture and see you the listener, send your
Speaker 1: pictures in, your pictures might make the fine art coffee
Speaker 1: table book. So we made an email it's fucked up
Speaker 1: old deer stands at the meat eater dot com. Send
Speaker 1: in your pictures. Cryst'll get him. We'll contact you for
Speaker 1: permissions and everything. And you gotta find the oldest, jan
Speaker 1: kiest Like we're talking about the kind of old stands
Speaker 1: that like look real hazardous to get into in a
Speaker 1: long like fifty years ago someone nailed to tarp up
Speaker 1: and it's just blue fray blown in the wind, like
Speaker 1: the worst old deer stand you know about. It could
Speaker 1: be a tree stand, ground blind, whatever. Send a picture,
Speaker 1: and Chris might need to advise you on how to
Speaker 1: get the right picture, because you remember, this is not
Speaker 1: this isn't dear camp humor. This isn't like a hat
Speaker 1: that says, you know, I didn't wake up grumpy this morning.
Speaker 1: I let her sleep. It's not like that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like fine art. It's fine art photos, No people,
Speaker 1: fine art photographs of funked up old deer stands. So
Speaker 1: send your if you're thinking about getting this done with
Speaker 1: your brand new iPhone twelve pro, don't bother you. No,
Speaker 1: maybe you can, I don't know, maybe they're maybe Yep.
Speaker 1: The email is set up. Fucked up old deer stands
Speaker 1: at the media dot Com. Send him in. Eventually Cris
Speaker 1: will start digging around in there. We'll notify you and
Speaker 1: we're gonna make a book, and we're gonna have it
Speaker 1: be for next Christmas where you'll be able to buy
Speaker 1: um a fine art coffee table book under that title.
Speaker 1: That's the title of the book. It's already been decided,
Speaker 1: so run out, go ahead. I was just gonna ask,
Speaker 1: do you have I feel like we're going to be inundated.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be a thick book. Then yeah, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: there's gonna be way more than fifty pictures. Uh. I
Speaker 1: mean Chris alone, just on the little chunk of property
Speaker 1: that he and I hunted together this year in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: I think he got to take pictures of six different
Speaker 1: very fucked up old deer stands, and well, I think
Speaker 1: that's the six he's talking about, and he got he
Speaker 1: got another one, might have two very funked up old
Speaker 1: deer stands to narrow it down. And I know if
Speaker 1: he got another, I know if too that we didn't
Speaker 1: even walk by that, I think there would be you know,
Speaker 1: very you know, high contenders um for the book. We
Speaker 1: he took we found just a section of ladder in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: a section of a ladder stand where the stand was gone,
Speaker 1: but it had snowed a lot, and so it's just
Speaker 1: kind of like this low It looked like a real metaphor,
Speaker 1: like half of a ladder standing out in the woods.
Speaker 1: And he took a picture of that, says he wasn't
Speaker 1: really feeling it, but you know, it could make the book.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's the cover photo, but it couldn't
Speaker 1: make the book. It could be the back cover. And
Speaker 1: we're gonna caption, We're gonna write captions for all the
Speaker 1: fine art photography. For me, if there's an interesting thing
Speaker 1: that goes on with these old deer stands, because when
Speaker 1: they're only like kind of old, like someone just sat
Speaker 1: at him in the last five years, and you look
Speaker 1: at it and you can tell that it's been retired.
Speaker 1: You look at and you're like, ha, I wish someone
Speaker 1: would take that thing down. It's such an eye store.
Speaker 1: But then like another ten years, fifteen years goes by,
Speaker 1: they become art. Yeah, you walk by and you have
Speaker 1: like a little nostalgia for for he's past. Yeah. Man,
Speaker 1: the last time I was in Pennsylvania, looked at my
Speaker 1: old wood stand. It was just like part of the
Speaker 1: earth that was sad, you know that men used for you.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a genre of old man type hunting
Speaker 1: camp painting where it's like an old deer stand, a
Speaker 1: funked up old deer stand, and there's a big buck
Speaker 1: standing by it. That's like a genre of art and
Speaker 1: you're supposed to look at and be like, oh man,
Speaker 1: you know that Will Kajer is probably dead now and
Speaker 1: here's a giant buck by his deer stand. So help
Speaker 1: out there if you can, folks, and we'll keep you
Speaker 1: posting on how it goes, and and Ridge Pounder will
Speaker 1: eventually get in there and reach out, and he might
Speaker 1: have advice about how to make it more fine art
Speaker 1: if it's if it's not, if it's not fine art
Speaker 1: and it's more like kitch, he'll probably help you steer
Speaker 1: it into fine art. So keep your eyes peeled. That's
Speaker 1: one of those projects where you get the title and
Speaker 1: then you have to do it. Oh yeah, well, our
Speaker 1: original title was Chris wanted to call it old funked
Speaker 1: up old deer stands, but then we cut one of
Speaker 1: the old We cut one of the olds out just
Speaker 1: to simplify the title a little bit, all right, Uh, okay, Jim,
Speaker 1: tell everybody about why we What you sent in the
Speaker 1: I thought was so interesting that I wanted you to
Speaker 1: come on and tell us more about it. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: wrote an article for Dear Deer Hunting magazine last year
Speaker 1: on specifically UM human health and lead bullet fragments and
Speaker 1: and shot pellets in in game meat. And I started
Speaker 1: getting interested in that because I felt like there were
Speaker 1: a lot of peer reviewed scientific paper, a lot of
Speaker 1: magazine articles, a lot of banter about um the dangers
Speaker 1: of using lead bullets and and lead shot to human
Speaker 1: health specifically. And the more I looked into it, the
Speaker 1: more into the science itself, the more confusing it was.
Speaker 1: It doesn't look like that the science was there to
Speaker 1: support some of the statements that that I had seen.
Speaker 1: And so UM, there's there's a lot of reasons why
Speaker 1: you might want to switch to uh, non lead bullets,
Speaker 1: for sure. I mean there's there there's impacts just individuals.
Speaker 1: We're getting individual raptors and and bird sick um populations.
Speaker 1: There could be some population effects. Certainly, Condor is absolutely
Speaker 1: a population level effect because they're an endangered species, and
Speaker 1: and lead is really a serious conservation issue with their recovery.
Speaker 1: But also you can think about what about hunter image
Speaker 1: when someone's showing this bald eagle that's getting sick from
Speaker 1: um some bullet fragments that got in a in a
Speaker 1: gut pile. And some people talk about the threat of litigation.
Speaker 1: If hunters don't take charge of this issue um of
Speaker 1: switching to non lead bullets, there's gonna be litigation that's
Speaker 1: gonna force it, and and not on their terms. And
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of reasons why we can talk
Speaker 1: about the value of lead bullets and non lead bullets,
Speaker 1: but one of those topics or sub topics is human health.
Speaker 1: And and I think there's this is a case where
Speaker 1: scientists always trying to keep their advocacy out of science
Speaker 1: and just report their science and just do good, solid research.
Speaker 1: But it's difficult in some cases that it seemed to
Speaker 1: me like someone's advocacy for switching having hunters switched from
Speaker 1: lead bullets to non lead bullets was really kind of
Speaker 1: driving some of their research results. And so it's there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with advocacy, but we should have science driving
Speaker 1: the advocacy. We should have good science, and then we
Speaker 1: should advocate for what's right. Isn't that refreshing when it
Speaker 1: would be when you when you read when you see
Speaker 1: that the biologist paper, that is like, here are the
Speaker 1: facts and there is no there's no bias that you
Speaker 1: can perceive, there's no advocacy. Um. It is so so refreshing. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and there's a great good science and you can
Speaker 1: advocate for for what's right. But a lot of times
Speaker 1: people have this endgame and that advocacy paints their science.
Speaker 1: So the right of scientific paper, they'll have the results
Speaker 1: of what the results found, and then the last part
Speaker 1: of the paper is generally like discussion or management implications,
Speaker 1: and there they have a little more latitude. And I
Speaker 1: was seeing um papers where people would talk about lead
Speaker 1: being dangerous to human health, and it certainly is, We've
Speaker 1: known that for for thousands of years. But they cite
Speaker 1: medical literature that talks about lead in um elevated blood
Speaker 1: lead levels, but from other sources. People aren't talking about
Speaker 1: actual how dangerous is it to take bullet fragments in
Speaker 1: and adjust bullet fragments once in a while, or lead pellets.
Speaker 1: Are talking about paint chips and they're talking about lead gasoline,
Speaker 1: and they're saying, you know, we got to let out
Speaker 1: of paint, we got to let out of gasoline. Um,
Speaker 1: why wouldn't we get to let out of bullets. But
Speaker 1: what's really important, the distinction is really important is that
Speaker 1: there's different forms of lead. And the metallic lead that
Speaker 1: we use for bullets is different than the lead that
Speaker 1: you find in in paint and the lead that you
Speaker 1: find in gasoline, and they lead you find a lot
Speaker 1: of other things. The metallic lead actually is is not
Speaker 1: very easily absorbed in your digestive system or through your skin.
Speaker 1: But there's a whole bunch of other uh lead, some
Speaker 1: soluble organic lead compounds that do absorb through your skin rapidly.
Speaker 1: They do absorb through your lung tissues if it's an
Speaker 1: aerosol or if you ingest that they go into your
Speaker 1: blood stream pretty quick. But those are different than lead bullets, lead,
Speaker 1: metallic lead, and those organic lead compounds are found in
Speaker 1: in like dryers for varnish. There use sometimes in plastic
Speaker 1: molds to to kind of help set the mold. There
Speaker 1: in um clutch pads and brake pads we we in
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, there was seven hundred thousand metric
Speaker 1: tons of lead. Mind in the US alone, we use
Speaker 1: a lot of lead for a lot of things. Ammunition
Speaker 1: batteries are big things, but there's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: of uh also organic lead compounds which are used in
Speaker 1: all kinds of different things um and as chemicals. And
Speaker 1: it's those organic compounds are really easily absorbed in the skin,
Speaker 1: and so that's the lead that we need to make
Speaker 1: sure we reduce our exposure to. The metallic lead. It's
Speaker 1: really not that easy to get your blood levels elevated
Speaker 1: just from adjusting metallic lead. And that's why is a
Speaker 1: really big difference. But why, okay, what is the difference
Speaker 1: between a condor who is getting it from metallic lead
Speaker 1: and a human? Like, why does it affect him and
Speaker 1: it doesn't affect us? Yeah, that's a bird and mammal difference.
Speaker 1: So mammals, it's not really an issue. You don't you
Speaker 1: don't see, you don't hear about lead poisoning so much
Speaker 1: in in wildlife and mammals and our our wild creatures.
Speaker 1: But birds have a gizzard, and so birds and birds
Speaker 1: also will take little pieces of grit and sand and
Speaker 1: swallow it with their food. With their seeds, and then
Speaker 1: that muscular gizzard grinds and grinds and grinds, and so
Speaker 1: when they adjust lead pellets or lead fragments from a bullet,
Speaker 1: that grinding really agitates that and and kind of grind
Speaker 1: some of the metallic out. So the bird digestis system
Speaker 1: is different than the mammal digestive system. And there's also
Speaker 1: there's also differences in species too, because the condor is
Speaker 1: really susceptible lead poisoning. The turkey vulture, they almost can't
Speaker 1: kill it with lead poisoning. They've taken captive turkey vultures
Speaker 1: and just fed it lead constantly, and after like six
Speaker 1: months they killed them and did a necropsy and and
Speaker 1: don't see any evidence of problems with lead poisoning. So
Speaker 1: there's also species differences within similar species, but the big
Speaker 1: differences the bird digestive system and the mammal digestive system
Speaker 1: is way different. Humans will pass the meal through their
Speaker 1: whole digestive system in twenty four to seventy two hours,
Speaker 1: and it only spends four or five hours in the stomach,
Speaker 1: in the acidic stomach. So when you think about ingesting
Speaker 1: a little piece of metallic lead, which is not very
Speaker 1: soluble and and doesn't go into the bud stream very easily.
Speaker 1: And it's sitting for five hours in the stomach and
Speaker 1: it's out of the digestive system in a day or two.
Speaker 1: That's not a lot of time for that that metal
Speaker 1: to actually be absorbed to the tissues. Can you walk
Speaker 1: can you walk people through? Um? You know, I know
Speaker 1: you weren't involved as from a policy standpoint, but but
Speaker 1: can you walk people through how it came to be
Speaker 1: that waterfowl hunting made the switch? Like I believe in
Speaker 1: the in the late seventies early eighties, Like, like, did
Speaker 1: they were they addressing a real problem in your view?
Speaker 1: When when they banned lead from waterfowl? And how are
Speaker 1: the ducks getting hurt by it? Yeah, lead poison showed
Speaker 1: up in waterfowl and I wasn't involved in that at all,
Speaker 1: But but from what I've read and talking to other people,
Speaker 1: there's some people I know that were involved in all
Speaker 1: of that. Um, the ducks were showing up with lead poisoning,
Speaker 1: and of course it takes a couple of weeks to
Speaker 1: kill bird, and so it's a long um, it's a
Speaker 1: long process where they suffer, but it's my understanding that
Speaker 1: it was litigation um anchored to the ball Legal Act
Speaker 1: and in protection of ball legals that were on the
Speaker 1: endangered species list at the time, And there was litigation
Speaker 1: because these ball legals were showing up after eating ducks,
Speaker 1: showing up with lead poison. So it wasn't a duck
Speaker 1: population issue. There's a small percentage of the duck population
Speaker 1: that was affected. It was I think this nexus with
Speaker 1: the endangered species acting bald eagles. That's why I understand
Speaker 1: it from those people that were involved in that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I have a couple of times in my life. Um,
Speaker 1: it was in Wyoming when I happened most recently, actually
Speaker 1: did find steel shot in a duck s gizzard where
Speaker 1: that duck and picking up grit, had managed to pick
Speaker 1: up and consume uh steel shot, which is totally safe
Speaker 1: for the bird. But in the old days that would
Speaker 1: have been you know lead can can you walk? Can
Speaker 1: you walk people through the difference when you're saying like
Speaker 1: that it leads to bird mortality and then population level
Speaker 1: like like talk about that distinction, right, And that's the
Speaker 1: that's the big thing people talk about, um, the effects
Speaker 1: of lead on wild life and they tend to just
Speaker 1: put it all in this big cauldron and kind of
Speaker 1: talk about it. But it's a really complex issue. You
Speaker 1: need to talk separately about um about individual birds dying.
Speaker 1: And we know that that eagles and hawks and and
Speaker 1: um and condors will get lead bullet fragments and they
Speaker 1: will they will die from lead poison. And so certainly
Speaker 1: we know the effects on individuals. But then people have said, well,
Speaker 1: is this really a population level effect? And I myself
Speaker 1: used to say, well, it's not a population level effect.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about individuals, but we don't really know
Speaker 1: if it was a population if we were having population
Speaker 1: level effect on things like golden eagles. We don't do
Speaker 1: annual surveys. We don't We don't really have a lot
Speaker 1: of good data to know how lead might be affecting
Speaker 1: golden eagles. I suspect there might be some valley where
Speaker 1: a lot of people rabbit hunt or a lot of
Speaker 1: people coil hunt, and golden eagles might be picking up
Speaker 1: some lead, and it might be a local issue in
Speaker 1: some places. But I've stopped saying it's not a population
Speaker 1: level effect simply because I don't think we have enough
Speaker 1: to make a blanket statement like that, But I will
Speaker 1: frequently say, is this, um Is this such an issue
Speaker 1: with raptors and wild birds that every hunter needs a
Speaker 1: switch in short order to non lead bullets? Is this?
Speaker 1: Is this a conservation issue that's serious enough that requires
Speaker 1: our intervention to to right some wrong? And I think
Speaker 1: that's I think that's a good question, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people aren't talking specifically about that. But I like
Speaker 1: to separate the effects of the individual, which no, we
Speaker 1: know absolutely they die if they get too much lead,
Speaker 1: the effects of population. Is this really a conservation level
Speaker 1: issue that people in in our profession need to be
Speaker 1: fixing um? Or is it more of a local thing
Speaker 1: that happens at a low level and it's just kind
Speaker 1: of absorbed into the natural mortality. I mean, I always
Speaker 1: get hit by cars all the time, howls once in
Speaker 1: a while, pick up some lead and die. So this
Speaker 1: is this of great importance that we need to actually
Speaker 1: act and and get people to switch. And and I'm
Speaker 1: not an advocate of of not switching, and I'm not
Speaker 1: an advocate of switching within the next couple of years.
Speaker 1: I I have my family. We've switched about ten years ago.
Speaker 1: And I shoot nothing but all all copper, all copper
Speaker 1: rifle bullets with all of our rifle hunting. And I
Speaker 1: do that because I like the clean wound channel. If
Speaker 1: you get off and you hit into a muscle group
Speaker 1: you've got with a copper bullet, you've got a hole
Speaker 1: through the muscle group. Um. And and I like the accuracy,
Speaker 1: and I like the how clean it shoots, and and
Speaker 1: it's really kind of a meat loss issue with me
Speaker 1: using copper bullets. But everybody really has to make their
Speaker 1: up their own mind if they're if they're concerned that
Speaker 1: their bullet might might kill a raptor on their property
Speaker 1: or somewhere out there, they may choose a switch that
Speaker 1: may be enough for them. UM. But I think the
Speaker 1: conversation has a center around impacts the individuals, impact to
Speaker 1: populations to the level that uh, professional need to take
Speaker 1: action and fix something that that's broken. Um. When you
Speaker 1: talk about human health separately, but we also need to
Speaker 1: talk about the impact the hunter image. That's a real
Speaker 1: issue that we should talk about. And then some people
Speaker 1: claim that litigations coming down the road if we don't
Speaker 1: do something. So it's such a it's such a multifaceted
Speaker 1: topic that when you throw it all in together, it
Speaker 1: gets it gets really confusing. Yeah, it's funny because it's
Speaker 1: it's sorry calibhood. Well, I would like to see just
Speaker 1: more data. You know. The big game is an interesting
Speaker 1: one and and this is a topic that it's it's
Speaker 1: a really good topic. It's so especially when you want
Speaker 1: to have that individual versus population effect and then you
Speaker 1: can kind of bring it together at the California condor
Speaker 1: where it's like, well enough, individual loss on such a
Speaker 1: small population is a population level effect and you could
Speaker 1: get to this point where and individual affects the population,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's a it's a great topic. My
Speaker 1: myself like having not like seriously pursued upland birds for
Speaker 1: a long time. This year, I mean I saw more
Speaker 1: wounded animals than I have in the last fifteen years
Speaker 1: this year, and they were all upland birds, you know,
Speaker 1: like wild roosters getting shot and we just could not
Speaker 1: find the things. UM hunting South Dakota. We hunted, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, probably a good three and a half four
Speaker 1: hour walk on you know, big chunk of public access
Speaker 1: ground and I found three dead roosters out there, you know,
Speaker 1: on different levels of decomposition. UM but just you know,
Speaker 1: the range of hungarian partridge with one little leg leg
Speaker 1: hanging as they fly a mile off into the distance, UM,
Speaker 1: and just not being able to recover those animals. That
Speaker 1: is where the you know. And and just like early
Speaker 1: in Montana, you can hit like those raptor migrations through October,
Speaker 1: and there are so many raptors around And for me,
Speaker 1: I just I knew there were other predators out there
Speaker 1: with their eyes on that crippled bird at some point,
Speaker 1: you know. And and sure, and the mammals you don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about, but those raptors, especially when you
Speaker 1: get a migration coming through, if there's a lot of
Speaker 1: wounded birds in an area, they're certainly picking those up
Speaker 1: and they're they're going to get sick from that. It's
Speaker 1: all about the nuance. It's all about, well, really, how
Speaker 1: many of those uh animals are out and available for
Speaker 1: raptors to see them and and actually get consumed, how
Speaker 1: many raptors are in the area, what percent of the
Speaker 1: raptor population is being affected. They've they've just in the
Speaker 1: course of doing different research projects on on hawks and eagles,
Speaker 1: they've drawn blood samples every time they capture an eagle
Speaker 1: and then analyze those for blood to see if they're
Speaker 1: picking it up. And they've documented that during the hunting season,
Speaker 1: that that raptor blood levels, that the lead level in
Speaker 1: the blood go up during the hunting season and then
Speaker 1: they drop off after the hunting season. They've shown hunted
Speaker 1: areas and non hunted areas and showing differences in lead exposure,
Speaker 1: and so there's no doubt that raptors are getting birded
Speaker 1: just exactly that way and their blood lead levels are elevated.
Speaker 1: The conversation I think should center around um it is
Speaker 1: that causing morbidity or mortality. Is that impacting them in
Speaker 1: such a way that it's um It's such a serious
Speaker 1: issue that that something, you know, dramatic needs to be
Speaker 1: done when we talk about advocating all hunters switching to
Speaker 1: non let animal, For me, it matters because I want
Speaker 1: to know what I'm killing um and that the population
Speaker 1: level argument kind of goes out the window because I
Speaker 1: just want to know what I killed. And so then
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, like, okay, one lead bullet through an ELK carcass.
Speaker 1: Let's say you hit it a little bit back and
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of lead fragments in in the paunch
Speaker 1: and that's what's left out there. What's the effect of that? Like,
Speaker 1: how much are you killing with that versus a season
Speaker 1: of upland bird hunting and you have, you know, these
Speaker 1: smaller meals out there that are probably more likely to
Speaker 1: contain lead than a well placed shot in my opinion
Speaker 1: on on a big game animal. Um. And that stuff
Speaker 1: just was constantly going through my head head this season.
Speaker 1: But if you walk four strand barbed wire fence long enough,
Speaker 1: you're gonna see raptor deaths on that four strand barbedwire fence,
Speaker 1: wheel lines, power lines. Um. These birds are are are
Speaker 1: definitely dying from a lot of man made stuff out there,
Speaker 1: and we still have them around. Yeah. This this is
Speaker 1: where it gets. This is where the subject gets like
Speaker 1: hard for me to sort out. Is that on one hand,
Speaker 1: I see places where people within the industry get really
Speaker 1: uneasy when people start having a conversation that we're having
Speaker 1: right now, because they would they would prefer that no
Speaker 1: one talked about it because uh, you know, um, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like a taboo subject because you're pointing out
Speaker 1: some kind of problem with how everybody does things better.
Speaker 1: Just shut up about it. We're gonna get regulations that
Speaker 1: we don't want. Like you hear that from people. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, UM and I and I, and that
Speaker 1: gets my hackles up a little bit, like this sort
Speaker 1: of idea that you need to censor um, real conversations
Speaker 1: about trying to find out information and put a plan
Speaker 1: together and have an open discussion about something like I
Speaker 1: think that's important to do that. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: lead works really well. Let us inexpensive lead is widely available. Uh,
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot of non lead ammunition is
Speaker 1: is like limited in abundance. It can be very expensive.
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't want to see that level like
Speaker 1: that kind of onerous. Um. I don't want to see
Speaker 1: that kind of onerous regulations put in on people and
Speaker 1: have everybody need to spend more money, have ammunition be
Speaker 1: more limited. But I also realized that we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to probably talk about this stuff and figure out things
Speaker 1: we can do in order to head off getting forced
Speaker 1: into a place where you're gonna wind up in just
Speaker 1: that situation like you did in certain areas well. I
Speaker 1: think now pretty soon all of California where's just like
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to use lad Man, California, July from
Speaker 1: July twenty nine, and all of California is not let
Speaker 1: So we're we're gonna have to, like as a community,
Speaker 1: start talking about it and start thinking it and hopefully
Speaker 1: land somewhere where we're in the driver's seat and how
Speaker 1: we're gonna proceed less like you're saying, Um, we lose
Speaker 1: our seat at the table and and and land in
Speaker 1: a place where we could have done a lot better
Speaker 1: had we been a little more proactive about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't know. I don't know the answer, man.
Speaker 1: My opinion about all these complex about this whole complex topic,
Speaker 1: my opinions are kind of all over the map. I'm
Speaker 1: because I see all of like you're just saying, I
Speaker 1: i'd see all of the pros and the cons and
Speaker 1: and I'm not on one side or the other when
Speaker 1: it comes specifically to human health. That I wrote the
Speaker 1: article about human health. Um, I think there's people using
Speaker 1: human health as a hammer because that there and I've
Speaker 1: heard people tell me that's very effective. One person told
Speaker 1: me at the wild of Society and Albuquerque had a
Speaker 1: m a symposium on wildlife and and lead and one
Speaker 1: guy at the break tell me. Sometimes, he says, what's
Speaker 1: most effective is we show up to the check stations,
Speaker 1: the deer check stations, especially if there's a wife or
Speaker 1: a girlfriend there, we start talking to her about how
Speaker 1: do you know that your your husband, your boyfriend's poisoning
Speaker 1: you with lead, you know, meat, and they and they
Speaker 1: were laughing, saying that that is really the most effective way,
Speaker 1: because I guarantee that guy is not using lead next year.
Speaker 1: And so you see the human health um as a
Speaker 1: as an exaggeration for the true risk that it provides
Speaker 1: the humans. That's what I really have a problem with,
Speaker 1: this other stuff about the individual versus population and pending
Speaker 1: litigation and the image of hunters. I just I see
Speaker 1: all of that stuff, and I haven't worked through it
Speaker 1: all myself and where I stand and all that. Oh yeah, Jim,
Speaker 1: you know, I know exactly what we're talking about, and I
Speaker 1: I know we drifted from it a little bit. But sure, man,
Speaker 1: I've seen that. I've seen people like I've seen raptor
Speaker 1: people um switch and and want to talk about human
Speaker 1: health because they're driving at something with raptors. I think
Speaker 1: one of the most like weirdest versions I've seen of
Speaker 1: this is there's this group that's always been opposed to
Speaker 1: wildlife markets. They're having a heyday with COVID where they're
Speaker 1: acting like we always knew. They used to oppose wildlife
Speaker 1: markets because they're trading an endangered species. Now they've switched
Speaker 1: their hotelality. Wildlife markets are bad because of the disease issue,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, you're using the disease issue to
Speaker 1: get where you want it to land before. You're using
Speaker 1: this as a new tool to to to win your
Speaker 1: old war. I don't like to see that either, man,
Speaker 1: Like I don't like when I don't like when people
Speaker 1: do that. It's like, be intellectually honest, you know. And
Speaker 1: I've looked at it, to man, and I've and I've
Speaker 1: always been a little suspicious of the human health thing.
Speaker 1: I first got interested in it when I had high
Speaker 1: lead levels in my garden and that led me to
Speaker 1: reading about you know, how to lead get there? How
Speaker 1: does it? How does it move? What? How does what
Speaker 1: impacts does it have on people? And I've often, uh
Speaker 1: looked at that and thought about that these like chunks
Speaker 1: of bullet lead passing through your system, it's just not
Speaker 1: the same thing. Is some of these ways in which
Speaker 1: people are getting led from inhalation and other issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's what the title of my article was, Great
Speaker 1: toxin or red herring. And that's what a red herring
Speaker 1: is is when you're you're you're arguing one thing, but
Speaker 1: that's not really what you're interested in. You may be
Speaker 1: arguing about human health, but you're really interested in rapt
Speaker 1: or mortality. I don't know if you've ever talked about
Speaker 1: talk to your wife about something and you're disagreeing, and
Speaker 1: you suddenly realize that what you're arguing about isn't really
Speaker 1: what she's was with the problem is it's really something else,
Speaker 1: and you end up arguing about something else. And so
Speaker 1: I think people find what's the what's going to be
Speaker 1: the most effective message, and they they gravitate to that.
Speaker 1: And and my message is just let's be honest, let's
Speaker 1: talk about all these different facets of this topic. And
Speaker 1: when we talk about human health, let's talk about lead
Speaker 1: fragments and and um and shot and how that really
Speaker 1: can translate to problems with human health because that connection,
Speaker 1: the connection is not very strong. There's there are some
Speaker 1: cases where people there's a guy in in that living
Speaker 1: in the bush in New Zealand, I think. And he
Speaker 1: was eating meat bush meat that he was shooting with
Speaker 1: lead bullets, and he was eating every day, so he
Speaker 1: basically had lead in his digestive system every day of
Speaker 1: the year. And they tested his blood and it was
Speaker 1: it was skyrocketed with lead levels. And then there was
Speaker 1: a case of the Inuit community up in Greenland that
Speaker 1: was that was eating a lot of sea ducks that
Speaker 1: were shot with with lead pellets. And so they asked
Speaker 1: how often do you eat sea ducks because they had
Speaker 1: a lot of lead pellets in them, And those that
Speaker 1: eight sea ducks once a week or less were below
Speaker 1: the center for these control um limit for for a
Speaker 1: danger zone. And those that as they approached one sea
Speaker 1: duck approached daily consumption of sea ducks, they're lead levels.
Speaker 1: We're tend to seventeen above that CDC level of ten
Speaker 1: ten to seventeen um. So, and so there are cases
Speaker 1: where people basically have are eating lead every day or
Speaker 1: pretty close to every day and it's always in their system.
Speaker 1: You can definitely have your blood lead levels up to
Speaker 1: unhealthy levels for sure. The indiscriminate killing argument, right is
Speaker 1: the one that kills me Like I'm like there's just nothing.
Speaker 1: I guess you could argue that you just randomly decided that, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna shoot that buck, but that's not the way
Speaker 1: I see it. For or, I do a lot of
Speaker 1: looking looking over animals before I pull the trigger. And uh,
Speaker 1: I'm just like a long way past uh sitting out
Speaker 1: and going through a brick of two m oh shooting
Speaker 1: ground squirrels just don't do that anymore, having a long
Speaker 1: long time, And so that's why I'm always like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: that bird that's sailing off with one leg hanging down?
Speaker 1: Is that a dead raptor? Like did I just kill
Speaker 1: something that I didn't intend to kill? Like I'm okay
Speaker 1: with the little bit of wound loss over the course
Speaker 1: of a season, Like I've mentally set myself up for that, uh,
Speaker 1: for these birds, but I'm not quite mentally set up
Speaker 1: to say, yep, that is a prairie falcon or something
Speaker 1: else that is just badass that's out there. So if
Speaker 1: you started shooting your upland birds with steel, I finally
Speaker 1: got ahold of some bismuth. It took me a long
Speaker 1: time to get get ahold of bismus. But I mean,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what you're talking about, Steve. That bismuth
Speaker 1: is expansive. Stuff makes you think about pulling the trigger.
Speaker 1: My god, has that stuff work though? Man, it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: I just bought some. I bought some Federal Premium TSS
Speaker 1: for turkey hunting because it's so amazingly effective, and I
Speaker 1: just I just spent on five shot gun hills. That's
Speaker 1: that tungsten t SS. You gotta line up, you gotta
Speaker 1: line up their heads, make sure you're getting getting miss
Speaker 1: turkey the first time. And so it costs me thirty
Speaker 1: eight dollars for him to shoot a turkey when he
Speaker 1: had a second thing. You know, it's nice to you'll
Speaker 1: see Jim with those ts s. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you already hunted it with them, uh last season, but
Speaker 1: you know, if they're so dense and so heavy that
Speaker 1: even if you your patterns a little bit low and
Speaker 1: you hit that breast, they tend to just whistle through
Speaker 1: that whole bird and you don't end up having, you know,
Speaker 1: shot stuck in the breast. Yeah up. I shot my
Speaker 1: Gould's last year with TSS about forty yards and the
Speaker 1: pattern was pretty dense. I actually messed up the tail
Speaker 1: fan because there's just so much. I'm using sevens and
Speaker 1: nine together and kind of messed up the tail fan.
Speaker 1: But my son killed a Miriam last year at at
Speaker 1: sixty yards laser range finders sixty yards with a twelve
Speaker 1: games with TSS. It's amazing. Oh man, No, I'm getting
Speaker 1: all worked up for turkey hunting. I've been trying to
Speaker 1: not think about turkey season alright, Jim dude, thanks a
Speaker 1: lot for coming on. Sorry you couldn't be like normal
Speaker 1: where you come up in the studio. But we gotta
Speaker 1: get through this, Uh, get through this pandemic. It's killing me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean not literally killing me, it's literally killing some people. Um.
Speaker 1: You gotta get those vaccines rolling out. Get everybody back together, um,
Speaker 1: Mr Jim, thank you, appreciate you coming on. Cal Yanni,
Speaker 1: Brody Crane, Phil, thanks a lot, Thank you, easy, good luck,
Speaker 1: stay well, we'll see each other later. Take are like