Speaker 1: This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything.
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Speaker 1: Before I even introduce today's guest, I'm just gonna get
Speaker 1: something awkward out of the way because people might be
Speaker 1: able to feel the awkwardness in the room between me
Speaker 1: and Chili. Cut it with a knife. I just had to. Now,
Speaker 1: I just had to do an investigation on Chili. I
Speaker 1: had the subpoena his on X record. I had a subpoena.
Speaker 3: No, you didn't nothing, I gave it to you.
Speaker 4: He could have subpoenaed you.
Speaker 1: A subpoenaed his on ex track M. I was talking
Speaker 1: about a spot where I took Chile and she she's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know a little over west of there. I'm waiting, yeah,
Speaker 1: and get to look and he's like he thought that,
Speaker 1: he thought that. He thinks that if you take him
Speaker 1: to a spot, what what becomes private is the route
Speaker 1: to get there, not the spot.
Speaker 3: That's not true what I said.
Speaker 1: Meaning if there's a point on a map and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we came in from the east, Chili be like, okay,
Speaker 1: so if I come back with my buddies, I'll just
Speaker 1: make sure to go there from the west. But my
Speaker 1: investigation found that he was sort of correct. He was
Speaker 1: sort of in the okay and sort of not unless
Speaker 1: he unless he said, at this point, I need to
Speaker 1: turn my tracker off.
Speaker 3: If I ever showed Steve.
Speaker 1: Paused his tracker for a minute and then went about
Speaker 1: his day and then clicked it back on. There's That's
Speaker 1: all just want of people be quite. If they can
Speaker 1: say they can feel at home, they might be able
Speaker 1: to feel the Chili changed the body language.
Speaker 5: Look in the camera, make eye contact because right now
Speaker 5: you're you're giving off a very guilty air about you because.
Speaker 3: Look, I gave you some intel you did.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that intel, but you got it through crooked means.
Speaker 3: That's not that's subjective. I So the intel is you
Speaker 3: were telling Steve about the deer that's in He was.
Speaker 1: Telling about some stuff from them. No, he was telling
Speaker 1: me about some stuff that I'd never looked at. So
Speaker 1: that's why I'm not mad, because now I'm glad.
Speaker 4: That he told me that.
Speaker 1: Okay, And what I might do is make you a
Speaker 1: little line.
Speaker 3: Like don't cross this line.
Speaker 6: Don't You're gonna make me a line on public land.
Speaker 3: Which I can I can't cross.
Speaker 1: I'm not getting anything. I'm not getting any like righteous
Speaker 1: in the nation. I'm getting nothing from Cal. I'm watching
Speaker 1: Cal and see if he's got an opinion.
Speaker 3: About as high as they go.
Speaker 7: I haven't heard enough from Chile to understand what the
Speaker 7: whole situation is. I mean, I'll tell you right now,
Speaker 7: I'm thinking about going into a spot for Thanksgiving that
Speaker 7: I know some people hunted in almost a decade ago,
Speaker 7: and they haven't walked in there. And I was talking
Speaker 7: about that with a buddy of mine and he's like, well,
Speaker 7: let's just not bring that up.
Speaker 1: I always thinking about explaining this. The other day took
Speaker 1: my boy and now that's gonna be a little I
Speaker 1: took my boy and his buddy from high school to
Speaker 1: seth spot and we gave my boy's buddy a real
Speaker 1: talking to about it. No good well he respects, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we gave a real talking to and I almost went
Speaker 1: into I was almost gonna tell him, like an add
Speaker 1: of detail, saying, the situation you're in is this might
Speaker 1: prevent you from discovering something in the future that you
Speaker 1: just know about on your own. So when you do that,
Speaker 1: you're you're sort of saying, well, I would have found
Speaker 1: out about that anyway, but now I'm I can't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I appreciated when we hunted with Cal's buddy a
Speaker 5: couple of weeks ago. I met him maybe five minutes
Speaker 5: prior to him just looking at me in the eyes
Speaker 5: and saying, I better not catch you in any of
Speaker 5: these places every again without you asking me first.
Speaker 1: I just get out there. I was given some very
Speaker 1: frank I was given some very very good intel eleven
Speaker 1: years ago to the ten year point eleven years ago,
Speaker 1: and I would not dare.
Speaker 4: Do that unless I knew that those guys were.
Speaker 8: Dead as soon as all of this on public land.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm. Interesting, Thank you very.
Speaker 1: But it's not like it's a whole thing. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: a whole thing.
Speaker 6: I do feel I do feel a little guilty, But
Speaker 6: one we weren't hunting the same drantage.
Speaker 3: And two.
Speaker 1: You were looking over into my zone.
Speaker 6: You get on any top, you can see for miles
Speaker 6: on any rich.
Speaker 1: So do the homes like.
Speaker 6: And also, it's not like I brought more people in there.
Speaker 6: It's not like I brought anyone in there.
Speaker 4: No, you brought the guy that I in there. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so it's like twice as.
Speaker 1: Bad because you both are morally you both are morally bankrupt.
Speaker 5: Or it could be half as bad because they're both
Speaker 5: splitting the sin.
Speaker 1: Split the sin is among like if two of us go,
Speaker 1: it's like being a little bad.
Speaker 9: Yeah, okay, So so that brings into question whether ONYX
Speaker 9: should post where all of the extremely high density hunting
Speaker 9: locations are to help people out, because there are locations
Speaker 9: all around the National Park where you'd be shocked at
Speaker 9: how many people show up to the same spot every day,
Speaker 9: you know, and hunt sometimes fifty yards from.
Speaker 8: Each other outside the park, outside the park that day,
Speaker 8: and that were going on for over one hundred years
Speaker 8: because as they expanded the park, they just move that
Speaker 8: you know, that firing line to the new boundary.
Speaker 7: So it's funny that bring that out because of a
Speaker 7: friend of mine was like, hey, I can't go in there.
Speaker 7: But he's like, I got a spot you should go
Speaker 7: check out.
Speaker 1: And if someone talks to you. You never heard of me.
Speaker 3: Man exactly.
Speaker 7: And I looked at it on the map and I
Speaker 7: was like, that looks like a spot where you go
Speaker 7: in and you're going to be within one hundred yards
Speaker 7: of ten other dudes on the same ridge.
Speaker 3: Because I'm like, I'm looking at it on.
Speaker 1: The map, one of them secret spots.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the only place to go is right here. And
Speaker 7: he's like, that's where those guys killed those bulls.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was like, uh huh, weird.
Speaker 1: A moment ago, you heard the voice of today's special guest,
Speaker 1: Rick Wall and former former that's the kind of we like,
Speaker 1: former Yelso National Park senior bison biologists who did the
Speaker 1: role for seventeen years of monitoring.
Speaker 4: Can we say.
Speaker 1: Buffalo, yes, you cool that you know? Correct?
Speaker 4: People in the.
Speaker 1: Parking Absolutely not who performed that role for seventeen years.
Speaker 1: And this is where I mean Oftentimes on this show,
Speaker 1: we like.
Speaker 4: To explore where.
Speaker 1: We like to explore what I will call what I
Speaker 1: tend to call wildlife politics very cool, meaning where where
Speaker 1: wildlife issues take on almost political tonality. Where wildlifeishes become
Speaker 1: a partisan issue or wildlife issues become something to fight about.
Speaker 4: Where you get billboards about wildlife.
Speaker 1: Issues, wildlife politics. There's like wildlife management and then wildlife
Speaker 1: management's very close cousin.
Speaker 4: Not even that's not the right analogy.
Speaker 8: It's it's like wildlife management is really driven by politics
Speaker 8: and it's been that way for decades. There you go,
Speaker 8: and conservation, on the other hand, is a little less
Speaker 8: partisan because you see people very supportive of conservation to wildlife.
Speaker 8: They like the idea, they like the idea of it,
Speaker 8: they may not like the methods to get there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I brought up on that point. I brought up a
Speaker 1: bunch about in observations over the years, is there's not
Speaker 1: a politician in America who would not like to be
Speaker 1: favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. Absolutely absolutely, And they were
Speaker 1: probably not aware of how controversial the actions that he
Speaker 1: took were, and that if someone took those actions today,
Speaker 1: they would call them a communist and they would threaten
Speaker 1: them and they would have to have security people outside
Speaker 1: of their home.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, uh, Roosevelt did what he did then today
Speaker 1: and then you know, during my time trying to stand
Speaker 1: up for a wild bison and yellowstone and allowing them
Speaker 1: to you know, move across public land.
Speaker 8: We talked about that often whether after particular public meetings
Speaker 8: could we be seen going to the bar for a
Speaker 8: beer because we were a little nervous about, you know,
Speaker 8: the heated discussions that go on in those those debates
Speaker 8: about what you can and can't do to preserve wild
Speaker 8: bison on public land.
Speaker 1: Speaking of heated discussions, you're gonna have real problem with
Speaker 1: Chili Cool. Not only is he in trouble for what
Speaker 1: this now, but I'm just curious. I want to set
Speaker 1: the tone. Okay, Chili. So when you hear the Chili
Speaker 1: and seth thank you are are and have current and
Speaker 1: former tag holders for the Gardener hunt. Oh do you
Speaker 1: look at them and think you sons of bitches? Or
Speaker 1: do you think like, oh, that's cool.
Speaker 8: You know, hunting has been a tool for wildlife management
Speaker 8: for one hundred years.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 8: And when we debated about you know, opening up you know,
Speaker 8: bison hunting on the North boundary, we thought that hunting
Speaker 8: was going to be a really good thing for you know,
Speaker 8: allowing the animals to go a little bit farther and
Speaker 8: wider than just the park boundary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that.
Speaker 8: We'd get a great deal of support by the hunters
Speaker 8: to come out and, you know, and argue with the landowners,
Speaker 8: argue with the state Game Agency to come up with
Speaker 8: creative ways to manage the hunt so that they could
Speaker 8: expand the population boundaries or the distribution of the animals,
Speaker 8: so that there could be hunting like what I heard
Speaker 8: you guys talk about ten minutes ago, on a larger landscape,
Speaker 8: and it seems like it's much more like competitive hunting
Speaker 8: to see who can be the first one to shoot
Speaker 8: the first one that steps across the park boundary. And
Speaker 8: the hunting that I envisioned back in two thousand and
Speaker 8: nine when we were very supportive of hunting wild bison
Speaker 8: never exists, never came about, understood.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna get into that. That's the story I
Speaker 1: wanted to do, and I don't mean to cut you off.
Speaker 1: We got hit on a couple of quick bits of
Speaker 1: listener feedback. But that's the story I'd like to mainly
Speaker 1: dive into with you. Is that that that's a brand
Speaker 1: that Grand that Grand Bargain did not it never panned
Speaker 1: out as yet.
Speaker 4: There, it's not Chili's fault.
Speaker 3: On Phil's part.
Speaker 1: Like a murder podcast we had, we had the kids
Speaker 1: on that. We had a bunch of kids on the
Speaker 1: show recently and we did a podcast called Our Girls
Speaker 1: Are Here to Kick Your Ass and uh uh my
Speaker 1: my daughter, Yanni's daughters, pottery, Pat's daughter, who else we have?
Speaker 1: That was it for daughters? And we were laughing about
Speaker 1: my daughter. One time we're walking to the wood squirrel hunting.
Speaker 1: I hear behind me because she's eating a piece of
Speaker 1: deer ship thinking it was some kind of chocolate, and
Speaker 1: the skybrooed in. He had a hell of a time
Speaker 1: with his kid. He said he had a kid from
Speaker 1: twelve months to three who wouldn't stop picking up ship
Speaker 1: to eat like they became like a specialist.
Speaker 4: I had a dog like that.
Speaker 1: But he said that nothing bad ever happened to the kid,
Speaker 1: specifically for Elk, nothing bad ever happened.
Speaker 4: So there you have it.
Speaker 1: Oh, I keep saying, he Anna Anderson.
Speaker 4: I guess she wrote her name now, But the kid
Speaker 4: was the kid was a he.
Speaker 1: The person that wrote in was his mother and he
Speaker 1: this kid liked liver, big baby, real healthy, no nutritional deficiencies.
Speaker 1: Weaned on wild game like liver and had a taste
Speaker 1: for elk.
Speaker 4: Shit.
Speaker 1: We should have not got a job, especially the problems
Speaker 1: we had with Max earlier. Today down here wants Max
Speaker 1: to the job.
Speaker 3: Around here today.
Speaker 1: This this is a here's a really surprise I had.
Speaker 1: This is like I kind of don't understand how this.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe Calmel's more about sort of like the evolution
Speaker 1: of this, but I know Cal's reported on it that
Speaker 1: Australia is South Okay, South Australia is just flat out
Speaker 1: banning archery hunting, private, public whatever, like banning archery hunting.
Speaker 1: And someone's asking the question is not so much like
Speaker 1: what do you do about something like this? And I
Speaker 1: have like the how the wheels of law turn in Australia,
Speaker 1: I have zero idea, but here saying I had made
Speaker 1: a comment one time when we were talking about the
Speaker 1: Proposition one twenty seven in Colorado, and we were talking
Speaker 1: to some houndsmen who would have been affected Proposition one
Speaker 1: twenty seven, to remind folks for the eight thousandth time,
Speaker 1: was a push from a push to ban Bobcat and
Speaker 1: lyon hunting in Colorado. It was that that proposition was
Speaker 1: defeated after after it was defeated. We had interviewed a
Speaker 1: houndsman and we had asked, like, what would you really
Speaker 1: have done if it after your whole life spent with
Speaker 1: this discipline, what would you have really done if it
Speaker 1: became illegal? And he said how he commented, you know,
Speaker 1: half joking that a law like that is a good
Speaker 1: way to make an honest man dishonest. And this person's
Speaker 1: bringing up like, if something like this happens, what is
Speaker 1: your take on how like, how would you react to it?
Speaker 1: Sort of meaning would you just bowhunt anyway? Uh? Currently,
Speaker 1: prior to this band, here's how fine tuned it was,
Speaker 1: bow hunting was allowed on private property for non native species,
Speaker 1: of which they have a great quantity in Australia. Non
Speaker 1: native species rabbits, hairs, fox's goats, deer, red deer. However,
Speaker 1: this upcoming band bowhunting will be illegal. This seems so
Speaker 1: uh you know, I remember a move. Remember we had
Speaker 1: that guy who's that kind of h he's kind of
Speaker 1: a controversial figure in the if you can be controversial
Speaker 1: in the broadhead world. He is doctor ed, Oh, doctor
Speaker 1: ed Ashby. Do you remember when there was a country
Speaker 1: in Africa that did not allow bow hunting and he
Speaker 1: was doing a bunch of efficacy.
Speaker 10: The area I think he was in was Quazulu Natal,
Speaker 10: if that makes sense, and.
Speaker 1: They were doing these efficacy programs to bring in bow hunting.
Speaker 1: Right now, this is the first example I've heard of.
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with people bringing in archery seasons. This is
Speaker 1: the first example I've heard of eliminating bow hunting. Because
Speaker 1: especially funny because so many people would be like, well, that's.
Speaker 5: Ethical eliminating bow hunting for non native species on private land,
Speaker 5: Like it was already a very narrow opportunity.
Speaker 7: And that's right, So like the context does matter. I mean,
Speaker 7: my perspective on this is it's just clearly another step
Speaker 7: in eliminating hunting altogether. But you know, it's like you're like, oh, really,
Speaker 7: the animal welfare people who always advocate for the elimination
Speaker 7: of hunting are all of a sudden concerned about ethical hunting,
Speaker 7: That's right. It's like, that's not really what they're concerned about.
Speaker 7: But their argument is like, well, is hunting a wildlife
Speaker 7: management tool. If so, let's treat it as an effective,
Speaker 7: efficient wildlife management tool. And you're in a country where
Speaker 7: you can hire, you know, people who professionally eradicate game
Speaker 7: at night using all sorts of manners and means, but
Speaker 7: you know, rifles with suppressors and taking only headshots. And
Speaker 7: it's like, well, if you want to eliminate the game
Speaker 7: or manage the game, do it in the most efficient
Speaker 7: way possible. Yeah, and or the most humane way possible,
Speaker 7: which is you know, I think we've discussed that at
Speaker 7: a gazillion times. Just an as nine word to use
Speaker 7: on things like this, in my opinion.
Speaker 1: So that's the argument, is there's a like the argument
Speaker 1: would coming from the people that want to see it
Speaker 1: gone and be like, we agree that there's some control
Speaker 1: that needs to occur with non natives, but we'd like
Speaker 1: to eliminate any's sort of like sporting flavor and do
Speaker 1: it in a more systematic, procedural fashion with trained professionals.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And so like in this guy's example, he's like,
Speaker 7: I have small acreage property that I have permission to hunt,
Speaker 7: but firing a high caliber rifle would be displeasing to
Speaker 7: the neighbors, right, and that it'd be like, we'll use
Speaker 7: a smaller caliber rifle with subsodic ammunition and shoot him
Speaker 7: in in the ear.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: Problem solved why do you need bow hunting? And the
Speaker 7: argument would go on and on. Right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so hunting is also a cultural activity that people
Speaker 8: have an opportunity to engage in in a manner that
Speaker 8: would be similar to our ancestors. And so it's it's
Speaker 8: kind of both a management tool for game agencies to
Speaker 8: manage abundance and distribution, but from society's perspective, it's a
Speaker 8: way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your
Speaker 8: family were descendants of the long hunters or you know
Speaker 8: someone like.
Speaker 4: That, so that you know it's a pride kind of
Speaker 4: a thing.
Speaker 1: I think that that that perspective. I've never even been
Speaker 1: to Australia, but we get a lot of emails from Australia,
Speaker 1: and that perspective about hunting seems to be absent from
Speaker 1: discussions in Australia. It's like you you see a lot
Speaker 1: of things about in Australia is at It's like issues
Speaker 1: of a lot of the conversations are like issues of control,
Speaker 1: controlling non natives, controlling non natives, and even like contra
Speaker 1: virtual things like if kangaroos are shot.
Speaker 4: You see there's I hesitate use example because there's.
Speaker 1: Examples like this in the US, but an example like
Speaker 1: if you're shooting kangaroos for depredation, you can you you
Speaker 1: can't utilize any resource from the kangaroo. But we have
Speaker 1: versions of that, meaning if you kill a bear for
Speaker 1: getting in your garage out of season, you don't that's
Speaker 1: not your bear, like you don't send it off to
Speaker 1: the tax ermis it becomes the property of the state's right.
Speaker 1: So we have you know, we have versions of that,
Speaker 1: but that that sentiment seems to be more widespread and
Speaker 1: more kind of leading the discussion in Australia, then perhaps
Speaker 1: here and there's like doesn't seem to be a lot
Speaker 1: of the hunters we hear from express a lack of
Speaker 1: any kind of acknowledgment of the culture of hunting and
Speaker 1: with wildlife managers and feral managers in Australia.
Speaker 7: But so that we should answer the question like what
Speaker 7: because it's kind of an advocacy question, right, It's like,
Speaker 7: how do you stick up for yourself if you want
Speaker 7: to maintain bow hunting in the state or region that
Speaker 7: they're in. One super interesting case is the waterfowl Like
Speaker 7: maintaining a waterfowl season was recently under attack in Australia,
Speaker 7: and there weren't just on paper, there were not enough
Speaker 7: waterfowl hunters to really effectively advocate for themselves.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 7: It's like what we talk about here in America is
Speaker 7: like what we need to maintain healthy hunter populations if
Speaker 7: we're going to maintain hunting, because if we dip below
Speaker 7: a certain set of percentage points, like it's just not
Speaker 7: going to be valuable enough to listen to hunters in
Speaker 7: a political sense. And in Australia they were in a
Speaker 7: very real sense going to lose their their ability to
Speaker 7: waterfowl hunt, and they were able to. And again, hunters
Speaker 7: firearm owners were not a large enough political group on
Speaker 7: their own to effectively advocate for themselves, but they were
Speaker 7: able to get support from the labor unions and trade
Speaker 7: unions because a large percentage of the labor and trade
Speaker 7: folks were younger, disposable income, liked to go out and
Speaker 7: do stuff outside.
Speaker 4: Oh, so they found representation from.
Speaker 7: From a broad, big enough political group where people were like, oh, wait,
Speaker 7: all the electricians and plumbers and those guys.
Speaker 1: There aren't many, but a lot of them are here.
Speaker 1: There aren't many, but I'm friends with a lot of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember that was one of the first times I
Speaker 1: had really seen it artier or not. That in the
Speaker 1: state of Washington was one of the first times I've
Speaker 1: seen the lack of participation get weaponized. And it was
Speaker 1: around some trapping bands and they were just making a
Speaker 1: lot of noise about well, look, how few people do it,
Speaker 1: you know? And I'd never seen someone like actually use
Speaker 1: that as the argument to not be able to do it,
Speaker 1: meaning no one's really doing it, so.
Speaker 4: Why should you be allowed to do it?
Speaker 1: It feels that important people would be doing it, and
Speaker 1: be like, so you'd be more comfortable with it if
Speaker 1: there's a lot of few. H Here's a story out
Speaker 1: of Mississippi. This one's This one's interesting because you see
Speaker 1: this so many times in different ways. I remember they
Speaker 1: did has to do with mislabeling fish and restaurants, and
Speaker 1: I remember some years ago, quite a few years ago,
Speaker 1: this piece came out that they went and they went
Speaker 1: and sampled red snapper, some organizations sampled red snapper and
Speaker 1: it was I'm not exaggerating, I think it was seventy
Speaker 1: eight percent of red snapper was at red Snapper because
Speaker 1: it's mangrove snapper, it's I don't know, name a bunch
Speaker 1: of snappers.
Speaker 3: Uh Couberra, that's a cool one.
Speaker 4: I'm sure like.
Speaker 1: A bunch of snappers non red snappers, you can't tell
Speaker 1: them apart. I mean, like, like I'm saying, if I
Speaker 1: made you like a fried up some snapper and I
Speaker 1: had a blue line, a mangrove, a mutton right on
Speaker 1: down the line, and a red snapper, and I said, like, okay,
Speaker 1: sort them all out by taste. That's a tough task
Speaker 1: to do. So I think that all these different snappers
Speaker 1: in the marketplace, at some point someone was just being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's red, red snapper. It's all red snapper. Here's an
Speaker 1: egregious example of mislabeling. And this ain't even close. Mary
Speaker 1: Mahoney's old French House in Biloxi, Mississippi, been in businesses
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, in a building that dates to seventeen
Speaker 1: thirty seven, was passing off to Lapia as a grouper.
Speaker 12: Come on, that's dear shit. As dear me, I've eaten
Speaker 12: a lot of to Lapia.
Speaker 1: Not a lot. I've eaten enough to know a group
Speaker 1: of uh five years of probation in order to pay
Speaker 1: one point five million dollars in fines.
Speaker 10: They got locked, so that's deserving geez.
Speaker 1: So what they came after they okay, they had a
Speaker 1: criminal fine of what makes sense, So you go like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you arrive at that number? A criminal fine
Speaker 1: of only one hundred not only a criminal fine of
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand bucks. But uh, what they
Speaker 1: came after him about is, like I guess, like a
Speaker 1: cost discrepancy thing, a four fish of forfeiture.
Speaker 4: That's a hard word to say, for dynamic.
Speaker 1: For forfeiture of one point three million dollars for fraudulent sale,
Speaker 1: so not even fine, but basically saying you have been
Speaker 1: bilking people out of yeah, you know, buying this for
Speaker 1: like seventy cents a pound, or the hell tilep he
Speaker 1: goes for when buying groupers.
Speaker 4: Probably, I'm guessing. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I wonder if on the menu, you know, it
Speaker 7: said like market price, you know how those restaurants do that.
Speaker 5: I'm really curious how this got started, if it was
Speaker 5: a disgruntled employee or a patron with a really refined palate.
Speaker 1: It's just like, I don't want to get anybody in
Speaker 1: trouble one time. We're in a very remote Alaska town
Speaker 1: that is not on the road system, and we're stuck
Speaker 1: at an airstrip and there's like a little place you
Speaker 1: could stay and eat there and like a lot of knights,
Speaker 1: they don't have any customers. And I remember he had
Speaker 1: a chicken el fredo. He's like, I have chicken el fredo,
Speaker 1: and we all sat down here to eat that ain't chicken.
Speaker 1: Like I've eaten enough spruce grouse. Spruce grouse one, but
Speaker 1: I appreciated that.
Speaker 7: We just right before flying out of Wichita, Kansas. UH
Speaker 7: two days ago, well, Peter Koon and I were at
Speaker 7: a restaurant and Mexican restaurant and they had skirt steak
Speaker 7: on the menu. I was like, skirt steak awesome. And
Speaker 7: the guy's like, how do you want that cooked? And
Speaker 7: I was like, well, there's only one way to cook
Speaker 7: a diaphragm. And he's like, medium rare is how most
Speaker 7: people get it. And I was like, well that's I'm like,
Speaker 7: what cut is it? And he's like, well it comes
Speaker 7: back here off the end of the I'm like, oh,
Speaker 7: that's a flank steak. I'm like, okay, sounds good.
Speaker 1: So a little more cold around this six they did
Speaker 1: it for six years. They sold fifty eight thousand and
Speaker 1: seven and fifty pounds of tilapia imported from Africa, India
Speaker 1: and South America at what they're calling premium at premium prices. Jeez,
Speaker 1: there's another article I was going to get into, but
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get into it. But long and
Speaker 1: short of it is, it's out of India, northern India,
Speaker 1: so from the from from far away, not Indiana. For
Speaker 1: you people that just heard Indiana India wildlife, this is
Speaker 1: a thorny one and you could picture this pissing people
Speaker 1: off in America. Wildlife researchers in India who are looking
Speaker 1: at relations with like Asian elephants, asiatic tigers, Is there
Speaker 1: any other kind of tiger? Tigers have trail cams out
Speaker 1: and part of the purpose of the trail cams is
Speaker 1: to see how their women do a lot of gathering
Speaker 1: in this community. In India, women spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time gathering natural resources in the wild. So the camera
Speaker 1: program is meant to monitor not just predator prey relations,
Speaker 1: but to monitor how area women use resources. And the
Speaker 1: women are very intimidated and don't like it and have
Speaker 1: changed changed a lot of their habits, Like they traditionally
Speaker 1: sing while they're gathering resources because there's a risk of
Speaker 1: predation from tigers. They traditionally sing, But women reporting that
Speaker 1: they don't feel comfortable doing that now because they have
Speaker 1: to be out doing their resource extraction on camera. And
Speaker 1: it's changed their it's changed their desire to be out,
Speaker 1: it's changed. It's impacted how long they liked to be
Speaker 1: in the woods, what they do in the woods. And
Speaker 1: they're reporting that, like the surveillance, and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: it's important for us to understand how people utilize the resources.
Speaker 1: Picture in the US, if they said, we're gonna we
Speaker 1: want it. We're curious how hundreds what hunters are doing.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go and put out tons of trail
Speaker 1: cameras to watch how hunters are going about their business.
Speaker 7: Well, I mean that's already changed a lot of I'm
Speaker 7: always looking for cameras. There's so many stinking cameras around
Speaker 7: these days.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I sneak around. I always catch them and I
Speaker 1: like go round back.
Speaker 10: You know, I probably pete in front of trail.
Speaker 3: Yeah I did that a couple of weeks ago. Article
Speaker 3: pointed right at me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's part of this article and they put it
Speaker 1: up online. They caught a woman. They caught one of
Speaker 1: these women pee in the woods, and it wound up
Speaker 1: on What's happening? Oh no, yeah, and humiliated. Yeah.
Speaker 7: When we were hunting Phelps and I and Rick Smith
Speaker 7: and and Max. When we're filming in Washington last year,
Speaker 7: we all stopped and you know how, one guy starts
Speaker 7: PM and everyone I've good time to pee. Two and
Speaker 7: look around and yeah, trail camera right there got all
Speaker 7: of us. I don't think that's why I'm next calendar.
Speaker 3: We're on a meet or shoot one time, I think
Speaker 3: it was Florida, and I get a message on Instagram.
Speaker 3: I see you guys are hunting you know area?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he he because he had a cellular camera and
Speaker 1: I recognized this. He just yeah message.
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't think you put it online. Well
Speaker 3: maybe he did.
Speaker 7: But if I could just add, like a blanket regulation
Speaker 7: there was any sort of remote roadless wilderness designation, all
Speaker 7: of that come hunting season would just get up like
Speaker 7: a blanket dropped over the top of it was zero
Speaker 7: cell phone reception for hunting season.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw it there. Trying to take a bunch
Speaker 1: of federal money recently.
Speaker 4: You'll appreciate this.
Speaker 1: Are our guests here to increase cell phone service to
Speaker 1: national parks whatever?
Speaker 3: I believe on that right, That.
Speaker 8: Means you're getting a different kind of visitor to national parks,
Speaker 8: and the kind of wants to build exactly. They kind
Speaker 8: of doesn't really want to go there for the resources.
Speaker 8: They want to be able to take pictures and send
Speaker 8: them to someone to say, look where I'm at. I'm
Speaker 8: at this location and I found this animal. Things of
Speaker 8: that nature. God, I mean they've been doing foolish things
Speaker 8: like that for a decade or more, trying to get
Speaker 8: as close as they could to the elk with the
Speaker 8: large antler and do the selfie and then they get
Speaker 8: budded in the rear from the antler.
Speaker 4: Kind of a thing. So what drew you to working
Speaker 4: at the park?
Speaker 11: Like?
Speaker 1: What was your professional path to land to land at
Speaker 1: Yelso National Park.
Speaker 4: Oh, you know, that's a very good question.
Speaker 8: I should have thought about that and knew you might
Speaker 8: ask that, But I think it was more just fate
Speaker 8: than anything else. I grew up in Colorado and moved
Speaker 8: to Jackson Hole in the early nineteen eighties to be
Speaker 8: a trail hand on the trail crew because I'd love
Speaker 8: to be out in the wilderness. And I started to
Speaker 8: see that my undergraduate degree in biology wasn't quite enough
Speaker 8: and I needed to find a way to go to
Speaker 8: graduate school. And I picked U of M and Montana
Speaker 8: State to look for graduate school projects. And I landed
Speaker 8: here at MSU studying harlequin ducks.
Speaker 1: Oh really, I did.
Speaker 4: I did.
Speaker 8: It was a beautiful project. My professor wanted me to
Speaker 8: study rabbits at the National Engineering Lab in Idaho, and
Speaker 8: he said, no, I'm going to do my own project.
Speaker 8: I'm going to make this as hard as possible, and
Speaker 8: I'm going.
Speaker 4: To do something cool in the wilderness. And he helped
Speaker 4: me raise money.
Speaker 8: And I just fell in love with the National Parks
Speaker 8: by you know, as a trail hand, and then decided
Speaker 8: that ecology was sort of my calling because I loved nature,
Speaker 8: and I went to graduate school and fishing wilife management here.
Speaker 8: My first job was back at Grant Teeton as a
Speaker 8: biologist at Grant Teeton, and I did a big circle
Speaker 8: around the National Parks and ended up back in Yellowstone
Speaker 8: and it was I think it was fate as well.
Speaker 8: I came to do a backpack trip from the south
Speaker 8: end of Yellowstone Lake to the Buffalo Valley and Togi Pass,
Speaker 8: Big Wilderness, the most remote places in the country. And
Speaker 8: I stumbled into a friend of mine that told me
Speaker 8: pretty soon we're going to be hiring a biologist to
Speaker 8: do bison work around here. You should apply, And so
Speaker 8: I kept in touch and applied, and by golly, I
Speaker 8: got the job. So I knew what I was getting
Speaker 8: into because bison hot. I knew it would be hot
Speaker 8: because as a graduate student here in the mid eighties,
Speaker 8: there was animals starting to leave the park. They were
Speaker 8: being harvested by fish Wiliff and Parks, auctioned off at
Speaker 8: the Fish wilf And Park's regional office.
Speaker 4: Around here.
Speaker 8: It was big business, big news all over the place,
Speaker 8: and so I've been I followed it in newspapers most
Speaker 8: of my career, and I thought, oh, you know, I
Speaker 8: want to be somewhere.
Speaker 4: Where biology is interesting.
Speaker 8: And the boy, did I fall into an interesting spot
Speaker 8: at Yellowstone trying to conserve wild bison.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So can you give a real high can you
Speaker 1: give a real high level snapshot being as fair as
Speaker 1: possible to all interested parties of sort of the the
Speaker 1: landscape around the wild bison conversations that are happening in
Speaker 1: the West and how the part fits into that.
Speaker 8: So I've heard stories from everybody, and I think even
Speaker 8: on this podcast in the past, once upon a time,
Speaker 8: wild bison, you know, across you know, America, and there
Speaker 8: was a military strategy to conquer the West, and the
Speaker 8: military strategy was to eliminate bison and that would be
Speaker 8: our way to battle that all of the various native
Speaker 8: cultures that lived all over the West. And it was successful,
Speaker 8: and the thirty million wild bison that was three hundred
Speaker 8: years ago became a couple dozen animals at Yellowstone and
Speaker 8: maybe one hundred or two hundred up in the far
Speaker 8: north of Canada. Before you know, someone decided to try
Speaker 8: and turn it all around. And at Yellowstone it was
Speaker 8: the Army, because the Army ran Yellowstone at the turn
Speaker 8: of the last century. So the army hired a bison
Speaker 8: tender and he just happened to be one of the
Speaker 8: five ranchers around the West that went out and gathered.
Speaker 1: A few calves, and was that Buffalo Jones.
Speaker 8: Buffalo Jones yep. So Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and
Speaker 8: started restoring the population, and they got a small group
Speaker 8: of animals from Texas. I think it was three bulls
Speaker 8: from Colonel Goodnight, and then he had some connections up
Speaker 8: on the Flathead got eighteen females from the Flathead Valley
Speaker 8: and they're from the population that's now the National Bison
Speaker 8: Range in that area of the state. And there was
Speaker 8: twenty one animals brought to Mammoth sort of a display herd.
Speaker 4: They reproduced.
Speaker 8: Well, there was the couple a dozen animals in the
Speaker 8: interior of Yellowstone, and this whole restoration project, you know,
Speaker 8: got on the board by Congress saying, you know, we
Speaker 8: got to save wild bison. We can't just let them,
Speaker 8: you know, go extinct. And conservation of bison was part
Speaker 8: of the enabling legislation of Yellowstone conservation of most of
Speaker 8: the wildlife as well, because it was all being hunted
Speaker 8: out and I don't think anyone ever dreamed that they
Speaker 8: would recover to the level that they have. And in
Speaker 8: the nineteen forties, Yellowstone had an abundance of ison, well
Speaker 8: at that point in time, an abundance of ice, and
Speaker 8: was a thousand of them. So they were seeing that
Speaker 8: in order to make this conservation of this animal on
Speaker 8: a broader scale. They started giving away bison to farmers
Speaker 8: and ranchers and preserves all over the place, and the
Speaker 8: conservation of wild bison kind of went down a different
Speaker 8: path than elk and deer and sheep, because as we
Speaker 8: took animals from Yellowstone, like we took deer and sheep
Speaker 8: and program from Yellowstone, spread them all over the country,
Speaker 8: but we didn't put them in fences.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they all got moved as wild ass.
Speaker 8: Wild animals, free roaming for as far and let the
Speaker 8: animals make the decision on you know, where they want
Speaker 8: to migrate to who lives because they make good decisions,
Speaker 8: all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason,
Speaker 8: the country decided that in order to save wild bison,
Speaker 8: they all had to be within fences. So I think
Speaker 8: the bottom line is humans forgot how to live with
Speaker 8: wild bison and forgot how to respect the nature of
Speaker 8: wild bison on the landscape, and it was easy to
Speaker 8: just put them in fences. So for a hundred years
Speaker 8: now we've been saving wild bison from the Great Plains,
Speaker 8: even as far east as.
Speaker 4: The East Coast.
Speaker 8: There's preserves in Pennsylvania and Virginia in places like that, But.
Speaker 1: Let let's narrow in on that okay question for a second,
Speaker 1: because this is something I don't know the answer to this.
Speaker 1: This is something that baffles me, and it would be
Speaker 1: I think it'd be a great project for a really
Speaker 1: like a great project for a serious historian, like like
Speaker 1: I get it in a broad sense, but I'll lay
Speaker 1: out the question be like, we recovered grizzly bears as
Speaker 1: a wild animal. Yep, we recovered bighorn sheep as a
Speaker 1: wild animal. We recovered elk as a wild animal. I'll
Speaker 1: point out there were no elk in New Mexico. That's right, right,
Speaker 1: there was a time when there was zero elk in
Speaker 1: New Mexico. Yep, right, we recover elk as a wild
Speaker 1: old animal. Wolves get recovered as a wild animal. I
Speaker 1: would love like to really know the discussions and decisions
Speaker 1: were made. How did they arrive at? Like everything this
Speaker 1: like great Noah's arc of creatures will all be politically wild,
Speaker 1: except you.
Speaker 4: I don't have an answer for that either.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think, like the.
Speaker 5: I don't I couldn't find this in a document. But
Speaker 5: I think the answer that most people would arrive at
Speaker 5: is that the ecological niche of the Buffalo was filled
Speaker 5: in by cattle, right, I mean, at the same time
Speaker 5: that the planes are being emptied of buffalo, cattle are
Speaker 5: coming in. And I can't really think like obviously domestic
Speaker 5: sheep and wild sheep share share a same niche I guess.
Speaker 5: I wonder if it's a question of the power of
Speaker 5: the lobby, but like that would be my guess is
Speaker 5: the ranching industry would have not particularly appreciated releasing giant
Speaker 5: bovine great editors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it even but you're I
Speaker 1: guess it's a gut Yeah, I think that that's that's
Speaker 1: a huge part of it. But even if you look
Speaker 1: at like isolated inner mountain valleys that aren't even great
Speaker 1: cattle country, and at the time, probably my guess is
Speaker 1: there was not a big cattle presence, for instance, in
Speaker 1: the Upper Yellowstone Valley. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, was there a big cattle presence.
Speaker 4: In the Upper Yellowstone? I think? OK, yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: in the Paradise Valley.
Speaker 5: Definitely, Nelson's story brought cattle in there, like in the eighteen.
Speaker 4: Eighteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was going to point out and you already
Speaker 1: shot down my you know, shot down part. I was
Speaker 1: gonna point out that like that that even in areas
Speaker 1: where that that conflict wouldn't have been is acute. But
Speaker 1: you're right if people were, if people were running cattle
Speaker 1: by that by at the time when we had them
Speaker 1: all bottled up. You know, I've even I've even mentioned
Speaker 1: before that like there was a moment when we knew
Speaker 1: where they all were, right, that's right, somewhere between like
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two, between eighteen eighty two and nineteen whatever,
Speaker 1: there was a moment when someone could say, like, I
Speaker 1: know where they're all at. Yep, I know where everyone is.
Speaker 1: And in that instant, we became really comfortable with them
Speaker 1: as something that we know where they're all at.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And since then we don't have any that we don't
Speaker 1: know where they're at.
Speaker 4: And I think, I mean, I.
Speaker 7: Look at Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, all of them have elk hunts,
Speaker 7: right O. REMEF has put elk out there, and all
Speaker 7: all of those states have a geographical area where if
Speaker 7: those elks step out of that geographical area, it's an
Speaker 7: over the counter thing for landowners. Oh I didn't know that, Yeah,
Speaker 7: because there was an agreement made based on agriculture, this
Speaker 7: is where the elk are going to be, and we're
Speaker 7: all okay with that?
Speaker 8: Is that true? Oh?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean I do.
Speaker 5: I do agree with you that I have not seen
Speaker 5: like a history of the debates, like the actual Like
Speaker 5: I would love to read letters and debates within agencies
Speaker 5: about how it was that bison became.
Speaker 1: Not wild or unwilded, recovered, but not.
Speaker 8: I know, there's some congressional record that would be valuable
Speaker 8: to get a hold of in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 8: because that was part of George Catlin's perspective that we
Speaker 8: needed to save, you know, some great national park where
Speaker 8: we could save, you know, all these wildlife species that
Speaker 8: were be hunted for assistance at that point in time.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and continue your story. I just wanted to
Speaker 1: ask a little about that, because that's the thing, like
Speaker 1: of all the interesting parts of what you're telling us,
Speaker 1: like that decision that we as a culture, as a
Speaker 1: society made.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's never been adequately explained to me, and I
Speaker 4: don't think it ever could be.
Speaker 8: And I think competition for grass is probably a key
Speaker 8: component of it, and that there's been a probably an
Speaker 8: unrealistic perspective that you could restore thirty million again and
Speaker 8: still have the same level of you know, human occupancy
Speaker 8: on the landscape. But there's no reason that you couldn't
Speaker 8: at least restore a couple of populations. Like cal pointed out,
Speaker 8: you know, we've done it with elk in a few
Speaker 8: places where they disappeared many years ago. And in fact,
Speaker 8: there was a hunting club in Utah and early nineteen
Speaker 8: forties that got a group bison from Yellowstone and took
Speaker 8: them to the Henry Mountains of Utah, turned them loose,
Speaker 8: and they wanted to have a wild population. And I'm
Speaker 8: sure they felt like, well, you know, this is a
Speaker 8: remote location, they'll probably just stay here. And I think
Speaker 8: the first thing they did is, you know, move fifty
Speaker 8: or sixty miles, all right, so they have a new location.
Speaker 8: But Utah's figured out how to do it, you know,
Speaker 8: and it's not been easy, you know, there's been a
Speaker 8: lot of conflict with the local ranchers, but they've learned
Speaker 8: how to do it. And they have a very sporting
Speaker 8: bison l hunt for managing abundance and distribution, and bison
Speaker 8: really are sort of an indicator of where the most
Speaker 8: productive habitats are in that area.
Speaker 4: With that they occupy, I.
Speaker 1: Mean they'll find it.
Speaker 8: They'll find it. Yeah, they'll definitely find it. So I
Speaker 8: think that you could do that in a few other places,
Speaker 8: but you'll never be able to have because of the
Speaker 8: ecology of wild bison. They do compete with habitat, with cattle,
Speaker 8: with humans, with agriculture. And in order to do our
Speaker 8: national mammal right, you know, it would be valuable to
Speaker 8: do just like what you described, designate an area that's
Speaker 8: legitimate for wild bison to distribute around the greater Yellowstone
Speaker 8: Area and allow the culture of you know, tribal hunting
Speaker 8: and you know, subsistence hunting by the rest of us.
Speaker 8: You know that like to go out and do something
Speaker 8: that our ancestors did. But I really think that the
Speaker 8: states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming felt like they had
Speaker 8: their eye on the Yellowstone Restoration and wild bison from
Speaker 8: the very beginning and have always assumed that they would
Speaker 8: just be kept within the national park, just like we've
Speaker 8: done at all other national parks where wild bison are.
Speaker 8: But all those other national parks have fences, so wind
Speaker 8: Cave bad Lands, all those places have fences for keeping
Speaker 8: their buce Teddy. Roosevelt has fences around it.
Speaker 1: So at Yellowstone, those parks have taken the responsibility of
Speaker 1: fencing those creatures in well, that depends on whose responsibility is.
Speaker 8: I don't know whether those are fence out or fence
Speaker 8: in states. You know, in Montana it's a fence out,
Speaker 8: and if you don't want the wildlife or you don't
Speaker 8: want your neighbor's cattle on your property, you're supposed to
Speaker 8: fence your own property to keep that kind of stuff
Speaker 8: off of it. So Yellowstones one of the few National
Speaker 8: parks that's large enough in the lower forty eight states
Speaker 8: that can allow ecology to play its.
Speaker 4: Role on the landscape.
Speaker 8: And we don't prohibit bighorn sheep from staying in the
Speaker 8: national park, and we don't prohibit elk or deer or
Speaker 8: pronghorn or any of the other you know, native species
Speaker 8: from leaving the national park. But we do have you know,
Speaker 8: laws in Montana that say as soon as they leave
Speaker 8: the national park. It's an agriculture department that manages wild
Speaker 8: bison on Montana lands. So that was done primarily because
Speaker 8: of a cattle disease that was brought to the area
Speaker 8: a bacteria that you know, affects the reproductive track of mammal,
Speaker 8: large mammals, brucellosis, And.
Speaker 4: That's kind of been the.
Speaker 8: Arguing point as to why bison can't be restored as
Speaker 8: wildlife like the other animals.
Speaker 4: And I think that it was.
Speaker 8: I mean, it was somewhat legitimate because initially the farmers
Speaker 8: and ranchers, you know, they want to make a profit,
Speaker 8: and so if you're in business for yourself and you
Speaker 8: want to make a profit, you don't want things to
Speaker 8: come to your ranch that would cause mortality, you know,
Speaker 8: to your your profit making machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it causes hafers to abort pregnant.
Speaker 1: They'll aboard their first uh, they'll abort their first calf.
Speaker 8: Right. It's yeah, by and large, that's what it is.
Speaker 8: It's a little more complicated than that, but you know,
Speaker 8: it's not every one of them.
Speaker 4: But then there's a.
Speaker 8: Few that just never recover from the disease. But by
Speaker 8: and large, animal gets infected, gets pregnant, aborts pregnancy, gets.
Speaker 4: Immune to the disease.
Speaker 8: Any other future pregnancy, they're gonna have their calf.
Speaker 4: It's gonna be fine.
Speaker 8: But a farmer is gonna you know, that's a that's
Speaker 8: money in the bank for him if he loses.
Speaker 7: A couple of years ago, I did right along with
Speaker 7: Montana Fish and Parks. And it was during the most
Speaker 7: successful buy some harvest hunting season two years ago.
Speaker 3: And there is nothing right. Yeah, So.
Speaker 7: If you go by the numbers, it was like an
Speaker 7: unbelievable amount of iis and taken out.
Speaker 1: Buffalo killed.
Speaker 7: Comparatively, but it was still an over you know, Buffalo
Speaker 7: remained over an objective for like that carrying capacity number
Speaker 7: that was agreed to.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the social carrying capacity was a court negotiated number
Speaker 8: in a court case between nineteen ninety five and two thousand.
Speaker 7: And there's like a starting line and a finish line
Speaker 7: on that gardener zone and at the finish line, so
Speaker 7: the starting line would be the park boundary.
Speaker 1: Yep, you're paying attention to chili, oh yeah.
Speaker 7: And the finish line is the end of the negotiated
Speaker 7: outside of the park bison range.
Speaker 8: Right right, and state calls it a tolerance zone, the
Speaker 8: taller people call it a conservation area.
Speaker 7: And at the finish line was and this is something
Speaker 7: I had never heard or seen before, but at the
Speaker 7: finish line. Was the state brand inspector what? Yeah, and
Speaker 7: his job is to be the guy on the finish
Speaker 7: line and make sure no no bison crossed the tolerance zone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which I was just like I was he having
Speaker 1: any action?
Speaker 3: I think he was.
Speaker 7: He's a pretty hands on participant down there as far
Speaker 7: as like, you know, he's he's rounding up people and
Speaker 7: making sure that they know where the buffalo are.
Speaker 1: But was he getting that year? Was he getting stuff
Speaker 1: that was making it through the zone?
Speaker 12: You know?
Speaker 7: I didn't get a talk with him.
Speaker 8: I believe a few animals went beyond that line in
Speaker 8: the sand, if you will, but not many. There's so
Speaker 8: many hunters now, and I would say that the state
Speaker 8: offers like forty four permits or something like that. I
Speaker 8: haven't checked lately, but forty okay, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Speaker 8: But the trib is much much larger. Yeah, the tribal
Speaker 8: numbers are much much larger. There's no limit really. Each
Speaker 8: tribe issues a tag to anyone that wants won, and
Speaker 8: some tribes issue four or five tags to various families
Speaker 8: if they want to gather multiple bisons.
Speaker 7: Yeah, because they can still provide meat for uh, for everybody.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, yeah, for the whole family.
Speaker 1: Let's hit on this brucelloss thing for a little bit
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of questions about this that that
Speaker 1: I have. I've heard other's voice, guys like me who
Speaker 1: are buffalo advocates and who would like to see a
Speaker 1: much bigger tolerance zone. Okay, uh, a bigger tolerance zone
Speaker 1: and more of them.
Speaker 4: Okay, A lot of people would like to see that.
Speaker 1: Now, I will say to people, don't get me the
Speaker 1: whole brucellosis thing, because elkev brucellosis. You nailed it, So, okay,
Speaker 1: did I nail it? Is there something I'm not seeing?
Speaker 4: Can you speak to this for a minute? I can't
Speaker 4: speak to that. That's a really good question for So.
Speaker 8: In nineteen ninety five, when governor of Montana sued the
Speaker 8: federal agencies to not let any bison leave the National
Speaker 8: Park because some were infected with brucellosis, the assumptions were
Speaker 8: because we didn't have good science on it. All, the
Speaker 8: assumptions were that bison were the primary vector for infecting
Speaker 8: the system, and that elk were infected because buffalo were
Speaker 8: infecting the elk, and if we could eliminate brucellosis from
Speaker 8: the buffalo population that lived in Yellowstone. Brucellosis would just disappear.
Speaker 4: In the elk.
Speaker 8: They were the super spreaders, exactly, the super spreaders exactly,
Speaker 8: that's a good term for it.
Speaker 4: They were the Gavin Newsom's of sure.
Speaker 8: Sure anyway, you know, that was the assumption of the time,
Speaker 8: and it was a bad assumption, you know, to begin with.
Speaker 8: And the Park Service argued with the US Department of
Speaker 8: Agriculture about that assumption.
Speaker 4: Because in Jackson, holl.
Speaker 1: Can you give the background on that assumption, like how
Speaker 1: is that?
Speaker 4: Like how has that arrived at? I don't know.
Speaker 8: I can only suspect, and I suspect that it had
Speaker 8: to do with, you know, like a capitalistic perspective that
Speaker 8: you know, buffalo compete with our cattle, and we got
Speaker 8: to get rid of buffalo. So we got to find
Speaker 8: some sort of legal way to show that, you know,
Speaker 8: we have backing to get rid of it. And an
Speaker 8: analogy is that the people that really argue to preserve
Speaker 8: wilderness use the Wilderness Act, you know, things like that
Speaker 8: they and they use the Endangered Species Act, you know,
Speaker 8: as a sort of a political tool to try and
Speaker 8: win you know, in court kind of a thing. And
Speaker 8: you know, brucellosis came to North America when we brought
Speaker 8: cattle from Europe and Africa and places like that. So
Speaker 8: it's ironic that we colonized the Gray Plains with cattle
Speaker 8: and we brought this disease with many some of those cattle,
Speaker 8: and that disease is something that is a problem for profit.
Speaker 8: And the USDA started in the nineteen thirties to eliminate
Speaker 8: brucellosis because back then there were a lot of people
Speaker 8: that milk their cows and they had brucellosis and they
Speaker 8: would create infection in humans. So because it was a
Speaker 8: factor to humans an ungula fever and so it creates
Speaker 8: sort of you know, by late in the day you
Speaker 8: feel lethargic and you have a fever.
Speaker 4: It creates some i think other infection.
Speaker 8: Within the lymph system of the human being to basically
Speaker 8: drain energy from you. So you recover at nighttime, you
Speaker 8: get up in the morning and feel good, but by
Speaker 8: you know, sometime during the day you're starting to feel
Speaker 8: tired again.
Speaker 1: I was I got that problem.
Speaker 8: There was a lot of humans across the country and
Speaker 8: that the infection actually caused problems to the military all
Speaker 8: the way back when there was Mediterranean Wars, and it
Speaker 8: was called Malta fever originally when it was first discovered
Speaker 8: because an army over in the little tiny, you know,
Speaker 8: island of Malta.
Speaker 4: You know, all the soldiers were.
Speaker 8: Getting you know, infected because they'd been drinking milk from
Speaker 8: you know, the cows and stuff around the afternoon.
Speaker 1: You can't fight, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 8: So, so brucellosis is a worldwide issue, especially in developed countries.
Speaker 8: But pastation made it a bit of a non issue.
Speaker 8: And as we pasteurized milk over time, you know, we
Speaker 8: eliminated the bacteria from milk products. And the USDA was
Speaker 8: very strategic and going around the country from nineteen thirty
Speaker 8: to they started getting states bruce losis free in the
Speaker 8: nineteen sixties and seventies. But what what they would do
Speaker 8: is go to the farm, test the farm animals. If
Speaker 8: an animal had bruce losis. They'd make the farmer get
Speaker 8: rid of all their cows and they'd pay them, you know.
Speaker 4: Some price.
Speaker 1: And that's how they tackled it.
Speaker 4: That's how they tackled it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so can you talk about transmission from one
Speaker 1: animal to the next.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the bacteria manifests itself in pretty concentrated forms in
Speaker 8: the amniotic.
Speaker 4: Fluid of the reproductive track.
Speaker 8: So whenever there's a still birth or even a natural birth,
Speaker 8: you know, an animal infected has a full term calf,
Speaker 8: the calf is born, the amniotic sack is spilled out,
Speaker 8: all that fluid becomes a transmission factor, and they.
Speaker 1: Got a desire to lick it.
Speaker 8: For absolutely, yeah, absolutely, almost all of the you know,
Speaker 8: the mammals of that nature that are hurting, you know,
Speaker 8: grouping type animals.
Speaker 4: You know, they're in groups.
Speaker 8: So when they see that first calf born, they all
Speaker 8: want to go see it and you know, see.
Speaker 4: What's going on.
Speaker 8: And as the first ten or fifteen percent of them
Speaker 8: are born, they're super curious, and then you know, the
Speaker 8: fascination wanes and by your time you're halfway through the
Speaker 8: breeding or calving season, they're not as interested in that
Speaker 8: because it's not new anymore.
Speaker 7: So they do they eat that they after birth, yep,
Speaker 7: And that's all.
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely, that's a survival mechanism for deer and elk
Speaker 8: and pronghorn because it cleans up the site, you know,
Speaker 8: and predators don't smell the offspring, the newborn fawns and calves.
Speaker 8: They don't have any odor for a short while, so
Speaker 8: you know, mom cleans up the burs, site stashes the calf.
Speaker 8: There's no smell in the predators you know, have to
Speaker 8: more visually identify their prey than to do it through smell.
Speaker 4: So so and there's no reason just to like, you know,
Speaker 4: go back into this this point again.
Speaker 1: There's no reason that there's no thing about transmission to
Speaker 1: a cow like cattle cow. There's no reason that it
Speaker 1: getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from a
Speaker 1: bison's after birth. It's sort of like more concentrated or
Speaker 1: more likely to transmit to a cow than if a
Speaker 1: cow were to interact with the elks after birth.
Speaker 8: It's all at all the biology is all the same,
Speaker 8: all the same, and so.
Speaker 1: So if elk was infected in a cow lick that
Speaker 1: after birth, it's just as likely to transmit. It's just
Speaker 1: as likely to pick up that bacteria as if it
Speaker 1: came off of Oh yeah, absolutely sign a super bacteria
Speaker 1: in a bison.
Speaker 8: And there's some small concentrated areas of the Paradise Valley
Speaker 8: where the elk down there test positive at like almost
Speaker 8: fifty percent, and then other places in the system it's
Speaker 8: lower than that. And then the argument in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 8: after you know, the state of Montana became brucellosis free,
Speaker 8: was that we can't afford to let our cattle ranchers
Speaker 8: have you know, any new brucellosis infection because of that.
Speaker 8: You know that policy I told you about if they
Speaker 8: get caught and one of their cows has brucellosis, the
Speaker 8: policy was, well, the USDA comes in, makes you get
Speaker 8: rid of all your cows, and I don't think they
Speaker 8: give them the fair market value, at least not considering
Speaker 8: what the future value would have been in those animals
Speaker 8: as well. So it's not as profitable for ranchers to
Speaker 8: just you know, live on the landscape and learn how
Speaker 8: to live with with brucellosis in the system.
Speaker 1: My understanding too on the brucellosis issue from a rancher's
Speaker 1: perspective is that when you have free status, you're there's
Speaker 1: some testing alleviation. But when you're in a when you
Speaker 1: when you're not operating in brucellosis free status, you're there's
Speaker 1: there's a testing requirement.
Speaker 7: Your region is designated as a brucellosis zone or brucellosis
Speaker 7: free zone, depending on where you are. That's that's what
Speaker 7: you're saying.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, yeah, So the the debate in Montana was that,
Speaker 8: you know, a rancher in Galaton County and Park County,
Speaker 8: you know, probably had a much higher probably, oh definitely
Speaker 8: has much higher probability of that as a threat to
Speaker 8: his livestock then a rancher from Calspell, because there isn't
Speaker 8: any brucellosis affected herds anywhere near Calispell. Got so when
Speaker 8: USDA would come in and, you know, find brucellosis in
Speaker 8: a cattle herd, they would shut down sales by the state,
Speaker 8: you know, statewide. And so that's why it was a problem,
Speaker 8: you know, economically for the state of Montana.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Some guy on weavo Montana like what, yeah, exactly, and
Speaker 1: so he would not be in the elk buffalo in years.
Speaker 4: Exactly the century maybe right now.
Speaker 8: So the USDA realized that that was an undue burden
Speaker 8: on that livestock industry, and in twenty ten they kind
Speaker 8: of changed all of the rules.
Speaker 4: Most of the rest of.
Speaker 8: The country had become brucellosis free industry was humming along brilliantly,
Speaker 8: and in twenty ten, USDA drew a line around basically
Speaker 8: the greater Yellowstone System. In fact, the line coincided exactly
Speaker 8: with where they thought brucellosis infected ELK occurred throughout the
Speaker 8: Yellowstone system, and said, all right, here's where.
Speaker 4: The thread is.
Speaker 8: Let's just apply this policy only in this area where
Speaker 8: ranchers are likely to encounter that issue. And so it
Speaker 8: greatly relieved, you know, ranchers from away from Yellowstone in
Speaker 8: the three states surrounding this region. So it changed the
Speaker 8: game completely in twenty ten. And so the court case
Speaker 8: between the governor of Montana and the federal agencies in
Speaker 8: nineteen ninety five was.
Speaker 1: That was that Governor Roscoe.
Speaker 4: It was Governor Roscoe, Yes.
Speaker 8: And so the complaint against the Feds was that, you know,
Speaker 8: if the state were to lose their brucellosis free status,
Speaker 8: it's going to affect a huge number of businessmen throughout
Speaker 8: the whole state. And so we can't let any bison
Speaker 8: leave the national park. Well, now that zone you know
Speaker 8: of acceptance anyway for brucellosis. And then new conservation measures
Speaker 8: put in place, you know, to protect the industry of
Speaker 8: farmers and ranchers within that zone, you know, change the
Speaker 8: name of change that game to the point where you know,
Speaker 8: ELK is still a threat to them and they won't
Speaker 8: lose their brucellosis status. But that farmer and rancher has
Speaker 8: to do that more intensive testing like you were talking about,
Speaker 8: And so they have to go in and test about
Speaker 8: every five or six months, and they have to have
Speaker 8: three tests in a row where none of the animals
Speaker 8: in their herd test positive. God, and then they clear
Speaker 8: that brucellosis effected herd. So it's very it's very burdens
Speaker 8: for a rancher to have to go do that, I believe,
Speaker 8: at least at one point, and I think it's still
Speaker 8: the case that USDA covers the cost of all that testing.
Speaker 8: And I'm pretty sure that ranchers round their cows up
Speaker 8: at least once a year to go through vaccinations and
Speaker 8: you know, weaning and what else, branding, all kinds of things.
Speaker 8: So at least one of those three roundups could be
Speaker 8: done at sort of the routine time of year, you know,
Speaker 8: when they do that kind of stuff, but having to
Speaker 8: do it three times in a row, and if they
Speaker 8: miss a time, you know, then it becomes four or
Speaker 8: five or six until they get to that three times
Speaker 8: in a row. So you can see that there is
Speaker 8: some economic impact to the cattle industry within this zone.
Speaker 8: So in twenty seventeen, the National Academy of Sciences came
Speaker 8: to the region and brought scientists that have been studying
Speaker 8: brucellosis all around the you know, the area and in
Speaker 8: their careers, and they looked at the issue and the
Speaker 8: questions that they were facing was, you know, is elk
Speaker 8: really a significant impact?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 8: And that assumption that I talked about earlier that that
Speaker 8: would just go away if we got rid.
Speaker 4: Of brucellosis and bison. They disproved that.
Speaker 8: And the way they disproved that was to show that,
Speaker 8: you know, the elk in areas like Idaho where there's
Speaker 8: no bison interaction and the Green River Valley of Wyoming
Speaker 8: there's no buffalo interaction, there's a few places around where
Speaker 8: elk are infected with brucellosis, and they were infecting cattle
Speaker 8: of the area, and there was enough information on how
Speaker 8: elk move about the system. I heard you guys talking
Speaker 8: to Matt Kaufman not long ago, and Matt did a
Speaker 8: lot of studies with his students at the University of Wyoming,
Speaker 8: you know, with putting radio callers on and showing animal movements,
Speaker 8: and there are radio callers studies that show elk moving
Speaker 8: out of places like Jackson holl into Idaho into Montana,
Speaker 8: never even migrating through Yolstale National Park or anywhere where
Speaker 8: there's buffalo involved and cattle are getting infected with brucellosis.
Speaker 8: So it pretty much resolved the debate that elk are
Speaker 8: a maintenance reservoir of the disease, and you can't you
Speaker 8: can't just assume that solving the problem with buffalo will
Speaker 8: solve it with elk. And there's no way we're going
Speaker 8: to go around and round up every elk in the
Speaker 8: greater Yellowstone System suicide.
Speaker 4: That would be absolutely.
Speaker 1: And no one would proposed the hall.
Speaker 8: The elk need to go away, and that's the only
Speaker 8: way that you could do that, like they did it
Speaker 8: in the livestock industry, and they wouldn't have to do
Speaker 8: it once, they'd have to do it multiple times. I
Speaker 8: think that the industry is starting to realize that, well,
Speaker 8: until there's some sort of technology for learning how to
Speaker 8: you know, inoculate livestock, that is one hundred percent, you know,
Speaker 8: fool proof that their animals won't become infected. If they're
Speaker 8: you know, in counter of brucellosis affected birth site, then
Speaker 8: we're going to be living with brucellosis in the Greater
Speaker 8: Gilstone area. And so there's a great deal of debate
Speaker 8: among the staunch conservationists that, well, now, if elk are
Speaker 8: allowed to move along that around the system like that,
Speaker 8: why can't bison? You know, why do we have to
Speaker 8: have the conservation zone, you know, the Gardener Basin and
Speaker 8: the West Yellowstone Valley, and why can't it be that
Speaker 8: same zone that brucellosis infected elk have opportunity to roam around?
Speaker 8: And it'll take citizen debate, you know, to try and
Speaker 8: change the state of Montana's respect is to do something
Speaker 8: like that, because it won't just happen because Montana thinks
Speaker 8: that that that's the right thing to do.
Speaker 7: Even though elk destroy a lot of fences they do,
Speaker 7: they can still go over them absolutely, whereas the bison, well,
Speaker 7: you know, I'll argue with you on that one, Calvi
Speaker 7: because because I lived in the Gardener Basin for a
Speaker 7: long time, and I lived, you know, thirteen miles from
Speaker 7: the park boundary, and we periodically had twenty five thirty
Speaker 7: animals roll through our property of you know, four or.
Speaker 8: Five acres, and if you don't chase them, they'll figure
Speaker 8: out where the gate is and they'll walk to the gate.
Speaker 8: And if you go out and tell them you don't
Speaker 8: want them tearing up your new landscaping, they'll walk back.
Speaker 4: Over the gate and leave.
Speaker 8: And so I think it's a matter of humans learning
Speaker 8: how to live with wild bison, and it's inconvenient. It's
Speaker 8: more inconvenient to live with wild bison than it is
Speaker 8: to live with wild pronghorn, wild deer and things of
Speaker 8: that nature. And I think that bison as fence destroyers
Speaker 8: gets a bad name. You're right, you get to run
Speaker 8: in them and all they see the fence there, they
Speaker 8: don't even bother, They just blow right through it.
Speaker 7: I was I was like very shocked that day that
Speaker 7: I went to you know, admittedly one day, but there's
Speaker 7: this line of cows walking back towards the park, and
Speaker 7: you know, they'd lost a few members along the way,
Speaker 7: but they were still just just walking. And eventually the
Speaker 7: people who must have harassed them closer to the finish
Speaker 7: line than the start line came back a whole side
Speaker 7: of them, and that lead cow started trotting and just
Speaker 7: picked up steam and and she crossed the road, blew
Speaker 7: through a fence, went right through the ranch yard there,
Speaker 7: blew through the next fance, and I mean, and did
Speaker 7: so in a way that you're like, nothing would have
Speaker 7: diverted those changed her mind.
Speaker 4: That's right, nothing was exactly right.
Speaker 8: That was due to them learning the landscape and they
Speaker 8: recognized the hunters. You know, there's levels of stress goes
Speaker 8: up because they lost twenty five percent of their group,
Speaker 8: you know, ten miles behind them, and they knew where
Speaker 8: they were going. And if the hunters hadn't caught up
Speaker 8: with them and created that vision that they had just
Speaker 8: faced two hours ago, you know, they'd probably just kept
Speaker 8: walking and just walked, and they'd have gone to the gate.
Speaker 8: I'm positive they would have gone to the gate.
Speaker 7: I was pretty blown away though, because I was like, oh,
Speaker 7: that's a different wafer.
Speaker 1: For animals to act different.
Speaker 8: So, I mean, that brings up a good question that
Speaker 8: you guys discussed earlier about sort.
Speaker 4: Of the ethics of hunting.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to ask a different questions.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, go.
Speaker 1: Can you walk me through that time period. I think
Speaker 1: of the the mid nineties, but maybe it was earlier
Speaker 1: that time period when the park hit a certain population
Speaker 1: of the animals, okay, where they needed to expand range.
Speaker 1: Do I understand?
Speaker 8: No, you got that right if you look back on
Speaker 8: over time, we brought all those animals I talked about. Oh,
Speaker 8: in the nineteen oh two was the first year they
Speaker 8: came to Mammoth. Nineteen oh seven they took you know,
Speaker 8: they filled up their capacity or of the pen around
Speaker 8: Mammoth and they moved them out to the Lamar Valley
Speaker 8: and they didn't put any fences up.
Speaker 4: They just let them roam. Well.
Speaker 8: They kind of stayed around there for a while, and
Speaker 8: the early park rangers and the old buffalo tenders used
Speaker 8: to get out on horseback and they'd chase them up
Speaker 8: into the hills, hoping that they could introduce the introduced
Speaker 8: herd to the native herd, because the native herd summered
Speaker 8: on the high plateau south of Lamar Valley up along
Speaker 8: the east boundary, and the native herd would migrate to
Speaker 8: Pelican Valley down by Yellowstone Lake in the winter, and
Speaker 8: so at the early teens into maybe nineteen twenty was
Speaker 8: sort of this you know, meeting of the two herds,
Speaker 8: and from there the Park Service thought that they really
Speaker 8: needed to, you know, ranch bison. It's the prevailing thought
Speaker 8: of how you restore wildlife populations. So they took plows
Speaker 8: to the Lamar Valley. If you go out, you can
Speaker 8: find old irrigation ditch lines. The Lamar Valley truly was
Speaker 8: a big ranch back in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: If they were raisin grass, they were raisin grass.
Speaker 8: They were pushing it up with the beaver slides and
Speaker 8: stacking it all up, and then they would bring it
Speaker 8: into you know, the area that the bison could get
Speaker 8: to it, and they were helping the bison. You know,
Speaker 8: they might have even still been killing wolves and stuff,
Speaker 8: you know, in the early part of that century. Well,
Speaker 8: that was great for long term survival, and then the
Speaker 8: brucellosis issue came along. There was a bunch of up
Speaker 8: and down of population abundance because we tried to eliminate brucellosis.
Speaker 4: But in nineteen sixties nineteen sixty.
Speaker 8: Six, the park said, We're not going to do any
Speaker 8: of this ranching business anymore. We're going to follow this
Speaker 8: sort of let ecological processes play out. You know, people
Speaker 8: call it natural regulation, people call it all kinds of things.
Speaker 8: But ecology became sort of the leading edge of policy
Speaker 8: for the National Park Service, and.
Speaker 4: The bison knew what to do.
Speaker 8: You know that it was all about survival of the fittest.
Speaker 8: They knew where to go to find those old hay fields.
Speaker 8: And there are records that in the nineteen forties there
Speaker 8: was some big winters, like maybe a couple of years ago,
Speaker 8: and some pretty good size groups went to Gardner Basin.
Speaker 8: A group of forty some animals in nineteen forty three
Speaker 8: migrated almost to immigrant.
Speaker 1: No kidd, no kidding, They let them.
Speaker 8: Well, I think there was some sympathy because of how
Speaker 8: how difficult.
Speaker 4: The winter was.
Speaker 1: I had no idea they were leaving the park at
Speaker 1: that back that longer yep.
Speaker 8: And so about that time is when you started seeing
Speaker 8: in the historic record observations at least the sort of
Speaker 8: older males leaving the the winter range up in the
Speaker 8: Lamar Valley and around Gardener you could find a few
Speaker 8: nearly every year.
Speaker 1: At that point, what's the farthest you know of of
Speaker 1: a park? Uh?
Speaker 4: Buffalo ever making it out of the park.
Speaker 8: Let's see I'm guessing that's about it. The winter of
Speaker 8: ninety six ninety seven was another really big winter if
Speaker 8: anyone was around here, though.
Speaker 1: Oh that was that's when this killer. That's when the
Speaker 1: issue just blew up, totally blew because it was a
Speaker 1: department of livestock guys on snow machines, just dumping hundreds
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 5: That's from the Buffalo Field campaign, that's right.
Speaker 8: They started up about that time, and animals were on
Speaker 8: in little nooks and crannies again as far south or east? No, north, No,
Speaker 8: it's north, isn't it? As an immigrant and some of
Speaker 8: the farms around.
Speaker 10: How far how many miles north I live?
Speaker 8: So I should immigrant to the Lamar Valley? Is the
Speaker 8: audience can get us eighty miles?
Speaker 4: Probably?
Speaker 11: So?
Speaker 8: And bison migrate differently.
Speaker 4: It's sort of a.
Speaker 8: Combination of nomadism and migration because when you see them
Speaker 8: in the fall, they're a little bit more nomadic early
Speaker 8: in the fall, because they kind of they reach out
Speaker 8: and walk to where they think they might go three
Speaker 8: or four months from now, and then.
Speaker 4: They walk back like a mission exactly.
Speaker 8: So bison will leave like the Hayden Valley and they'll
Speaker 8: go over the top of the Merry Mountain and down
Speaker 8: into the Old Faithful area, and they might mill around
Speaker 8: Old Faithful for three or four months, and then the
Speaker 8: next time they want to move, they'll move down to
Speaker 8: Madison Junction. And there they have two avenues. They either
Speaker 8: go west or go north, you know, from that and
Speaker 8: and some of those migrations are a little over one
Speaker 8: hundred miles. So animals that you could find near the
Speaker 8: mud mud pots of Hayden Valley could end up in
Speaker 8: the gardener Hunt just outside the park. And that's a
Speaker 8: little over one hundred miles if you if you follow
Speaker 8: the route that they take, and we've seen animals move
Speaker 8: from the Hayden Valley out west, they end up out
Speaker 8: at West Yellowstone. They would get harassed, you know, and
Speaker 8: pushed back to the park. And they knew they needed
Speaker 8: to go somewhere because they're looking for that green up
Speaker 8: and the low elevator that Matt talked about, you know
Speaker 8: several podcasts.
Speaker 4: And the green wave.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they're going down to surf and when they can't
Speaker 8: get to it going west at West Yellowstone. All of
Speaker 8: that pressure to push them back into the park I
Speaker 8: think generated more exploratory behavior and they push north and
Speaker 8: gardener basins like the first place to green up unless
Speaker 8: you're at one of the hot springs all around.
Speaker 4: But it's that low elevation area.
Speaker 8: You know, it has the least amount of snow pack,
Speaker 8: it's got the earliest amount of our earliest temperature of
Speaker 8: thirty two degrees and warmer, you know, you get the
Speaker 8: green up. And once they find the green up, they'll
Speaker 8: just camp on it and follow the green up back
Speaker 8: through the elevational gradient until they get to some of
Speaker 8: the bigger grasslands in the park, and then they'll kind
Speaker 8: of let the greenup go on higher and they'll camp
Speaker 8: and make lawns.
Speaker 3: Is this snowpack that pushes those bison.
Speaker 8: Yes, it's a combination of abundance and snowpack.
Speaker 3: And in the.
Speaker 8: In the nineteen nineties, in the early two thousands, there
Speaker 8: was a thought that it was abundance of about two
Speaker 8: thousand animals that would really, you know, create that social
Speaker 8: social competition for bites of grass underneath the snow, and
Speaker 8: that some would leave and some would keep working the snowpack.
Speaker 8: And I think because of all of the pressure in
Speaker 8: the last twenty or thirty years of pushing them back
Speaker 8: into the park. What we've really done is we've made
Speaker 8: them search farther and wider, and now there's more that
Speaker 8: are the you know diggers that dig the big pits
Speaker 8: to find that the grass under the snow, and there's
Speaker 8: an ecology behind that, and that the larger animals move
Speaker 8: those big heads and make little craters for feeding in,
Speaker 8: and the younger animals with the smaller heads wait till
Speaker 8: they abandon the craters and they.
Speaker 4: Go over and they eat the residual.
Speaker 8: Groups of animals have learned how to you know, carry
Speaker 8: young animals through the winter by digging all those feeding
Speaker 8: craters and tramping down all those ski trails or you
Speaker 8: know trails for walking around. Like we make ski trails,
Speaker 8: they make buffalo trails. You pack it down and you
Speaker 8: can take your skis off and jump in those trails
Speaker 8: and walk just like they do. And so there's two
Speaker 8: or three different strategies now for wild bison to survive.
Speaker 8: You know, there's the stay in the park and avoid
Speaker 8: the hunt, and there's the migrate to lower elevation hunt
Speaker 8: looking for the early spring green up and you know,
Speaker 8: not wanting to plow through the snow, but then you
Speaker 8: run the risk of the harvest. You know, once you
Speaker 8: leave the national park.
Speaker 1: If you had to take a wild ass guess on
Speaker 1: a bad winter, if no one messed with them, do
Speaker 1: you think animals would leave the park and then not
Speaker 1: even come back.
Speaker 4: No, you think they'd go back. I think they'd go back.
Speaker 8: I think you'd see I mean, there's always the exception, right, sure,
Speaker 8: so you might see a few. But the way animals
Speaker 8: expand their range, and I didn't finish that story earlier,
Speaker 8: is that the bulls are the pioneers, and the bulls
Speaker 8: wander farther because you know, they're bigger animals. You know,
Speaker 8: they can't compete with the big crowds of bison that
Speaker 8: hang out in the big groups. So bulls are going
Speaker 8: to go out and look for small, little pockets of
Speaker 8: high productivity and just camp on that pocket. You know,
Speaker 8: they might live in a one acre patch in the
Speaker 8: forest of trees, but if it's a you know of marsh,
Speaker 8: you know, and super productive, you know, they'll do fine
Speaker 8: feeding themselves for a long period of time if they don't.
Speaker 4: Have to compete with anybody else.
Speaker 8: And so bulls are the much more expected pieeers. On
Speaker 8: how bison would expand their range and the females are
Speaker 8: the trackers, you know, they follow, follow footprints, they follow
Speaker 8: you know, buffalo patties. The whole works follow the trails
Speaker 8: that are left behind. And in the nineteen eighties, when
Speaker 8: the population in the Hayden Valley area grew to I
Speaker 8: think it was a little over two thousand at that point,
Speaker 8: just in that part of the park, you know, the
Speaker 8: firehole geyser basin wasn't big enough for him in the wintertime,
Speaker 8: and so they started pioneering down to the west boundary
Speaker 8: and we started seeing these rare bull occurrences in West
Speaker 8: Yellowstone and Horse Butte in places like that, And then
Speaker 8: there was some there was a couple of big snow
Speaker 8: years in that decade too, and so it was those
Speaker 8: big snow years that create you know, deeper snow pack.
Speaker 8: And in later years, during those years of deep snowpack,
Speaker 8: as you start to get longer days, a little bit
Speaker 8: more warmth, you get a little melting of that snow.
Speaker 8: Nighttime it gets who cold, Bison can't do their thing,
Speaker 8: you know, their heads don't dig ice, they only move
Speaker 8: like fluffy snow out of the way. And in fact
Speaker 8: you can see, you know, herds of buffalo walking on
Speaker 8: top of the snow and Maybruary in March sometimes with
Speaker 8: you know, significant melt and refreezing, and that's when they
Speaker 8: simply bail and they walk long distances and they follow
Speaker 8: those trails that the bulls laid down, and they go, Okay,
Speaker 8: the bulls know where they're going. Let's go find those
Speaker 8: guys and maybe there's something better at lower elevations.
Speaker 4: So in the mid nineteen.
Speaker 8: Eighties, Montana instituted buffalo hunts, you know, and a few
Speaker 8: animals were harvested by hunters and it was, you know,
Speaker 8: it was a good thing for hunters, you know, there
Speaker 8: was something knew to go out and try and harvest.
Speaker 8: But in the winter following the big fires of nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty eight, you know, two things happened. The fires burned
Speaker 8: up a lot of that summer forage production, so the
Speaker 8: animals would dig down through the snow and find black
Speaker 8: and it wasn't it wasn't what they expected. And so
Speaker 8: there was pretty good sized migrations both to West Yellowstone
Speaker 8: and to Gardner, and the hunters couldn't keep up with
Speaker 8: the harvest. So the game wardens were down there. The
Speaker 8: Department of Livestock guys were down there enforcing, you know,
Speaker 8: we don't want any bison out of the park. And
Speaker 8: I think that I think that year it was like
Speaker 8: eight hundred animals were killed by hunters, game wardens, dol
Speaker 8: agents and the park Service rangers even pitched in and
Speaker 8: helped out.
Speaker 1: How many what was the total population if they killed
Speaker 1: eight hundred, how many were the That's a good question.
Speaker 4: I have to think.
Speaker 8: In nineteen eighty eight, I think it was twenty five
Speaker 8: hundred or something. It wasn't huge because now it'll get
Speaker 8: to three or four, right, right, And that's where I
Speaker 8: was telling you that we thought that two thousand was
Speaker 8: the sort of number that they'd get to that would
Speaker 8: sort of drive social capacity of the system to you know,
Speaker 8: dig the feeding craves and migrate to the boundary. Well, now,
Speaker 8: because of forty years of this aggressive management on the boundary,
Speaker 8: I think that number is now more like, you know,
Speaker 8: three thousand or so on sort of average to slightly
Speaker 8: above average years. Two years ago was not even close
Speaker 8: to that.
Speaker 4: It was like the storm of the last.
Speaker 8: Three or four decades, I think, And so I would
Speaker 8: bet that eighty percent of the population.
Speaker 4: Leaves when you have one of those storms.
Speaker 8: Of you know, of the half century or greater. So
Speaker 8: that's where society has to decide, well, what is the
Speaker 8: right number to try and manage for because you know,
Speaker 8: it's easy to think that you could do it when
Speaker 8: you have below average average, maybe even slightly above average
Speaker 8: years where a bunch of animals are leaving, you use
Speaker 8: hunters to manage distribution. You know, if things got really bad,
Speaker 8: you'd put some traps in place and catch some animals,
Speaker 8: much like the park does it at Stevens Creek there
Speaker 8: in the gardener basin. The state has a trap they
Speaker 8: can set up over by West Yellowstone and they used to,
Speaker 8: you know, use it a lot when there was more
Speaker 8: migration that way. So for the last twenty years or
Speaker 8: thirty years, I think we've tried so many different things
Speaker 8: that I think we've learned to live with wild bison.
Speaker 8: And I think that we have the technology, we have
Speaker 8: the communications skill to get hunters in the right places
Speaker 8: to harvest animals. And it seems like there's interest by
Speaker 8: more and more tribes to want to go and harvest
Speaker 8: bison from the Yellowstone population because they're the remnants of
Speaker 8: the last wild herds that never were gone from this
Speaker 8: particular latinscape, and so their cultural significance is way above
Speaker 8: the cultural significance of other herds of bison all across
Speaker 8: the country. So if a tribal member of the you know,
Speaker 8: you name it different tribe that buffalo are a part
Speaker 8: of their culture, you know, were to go harvest an animal,
Speaker 8: going to Yellowstone and doing it is at the top
Speaker 8: of their list. Going to Fort Peck to do it
Speaker 8: like you did once upon a time becaun't as high
Speaker 8: on their list as going to Yellowstone, you know, to
Speaker 8: harvest and animals. Sure, so there's a great deal of
Speaker 8: national significance to preserve you know, this population because of
Speaker 8: its you know, sol remaining wild herd that never evaporated
Speaker 8: from the system in the in the history is history.
Speaker 1: Is it plausible that there's like a does the tolerance
Speaker 1: zone have to include major valleys?
Speaker 13: You know you're asking you're asking me, well, no, I
Speaker 13: think the animal I'm saying from the animals perspectives, because
Speaker 13: they're saying pointless if it doesn't include the Upper Madison,
Speaker 13: if it doesn't include the Upper Yellowstone, is it pointless?
Speaker 4: I think you're right, you.
Speaker 1: Know, so to say, like, okay, anything that's designated wilderness
Speaker 1: area is now a tolerant zone.
Speaker 4: They're not going to go there anyway. In the summer
Speaker 4: they might, they won't stay there. They'll need to go
Speaker 4: somewhere else.
Speaker 8: And I mean, yeah, a few of them, the hardy bulls,
Speaker 8: the tough guys of the population, they'll figure out how
Speaker 8: to find a wind blown ridge.
Speaker 1: But to open up more of the to open up
Speaker 1: more of the landscape, you have to open up the
Speaker 1: big You're gonna have to open up like tom Minor Basin,
Speaker 1: you know, in the upper part of Paris Valley, or
Speaker 1: even you know, even down to Immigrant or something like that.
Speaker 8: You need some grassland kind of areas that have lower elevation.
Speaker 1: Have something, because exactly they're giving them a ground that
Speaker 1: doesn't matter to them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they're gonna go somewhere where there's six inches of snow.
Speaker 8: They're not going to migrate to somewhere where there's three
Speaker 8: feet of snow. I'm kind of like, let's go to
Speaker 8: the high country. Yeah, unless you've got hot springs. And
Speaker 8: that's why the central interior part of Yellowstone saved so
Speaker 8: many animals is the Firehole Geyser Basin has a bunch
Speaker 8: of hot springs. Even Hayden Valley has a couple of
Speaker 8: really cool geyser basins that create a melting phenomena that
Speaker 8: can they can find sedges. They're green, they're green year round,
Speaker 8: and that's good.
Speaker 4: Stuff for them.
Speaker 8: And so you'd need places like and Wyoming you'd want
Speaker 8: to preserve or identify trying to think of the name
Speaker 8: of it.
Speaker 4: It's called Sun Sun something.
Speaker 8: Just outside the northeast corner of the of the park,
Speaker 8: there's a couple of high elevation grasslands that might work,
Speaker 8: you know, And I'll bet historically, prehistorically bison out of
Speaker 8: Wyoming would venture all the way up to the high
Speaker 8: Country from that east side and would utilize some of
Speaker 8: that area as well.
Speaker 1: Do you know what the skull I found? No, I
Speaker 1: found a skull over nine thousand feet in the Madison's
Speaker 1: see that.
Speaker 8: I bet that's a probably was a bull, huh, had
Speaker 8: a radio carbon dated oh cool, And it probably was
Speaker 8: going up there in the summertime because followed the green
Speaker 8: wave the whole way to where the green waves are
Speaker 8: way up there, and there's some lush, productive, you know,
Speaker 8: places to graze in that high country area, and there's
Speaker 8: some places like that in the park where there's some
Speaker 8: archaeological sites of single animal kills, you know, up around
Speaker 8: Yellowstone Lake, and I think there's one on the Buffalo
Speaker 8: Plateau too. I don't remember the archaeological record very well.
Speaker 8: I used to rely on my colleagues at the park
Speaker 8: tell me all those stories of all those cool places that, yeah,
Speaker 8: there's evidence that bison have been in the system for
Speaker 8: basically the time they migrated to around here from the Siberia.
Speaker 8: So I think there's room for wild bison on public
Speaker 8: lands outside the National Park. I think society is gonna
Speaker 8: have to make a few concessions learn how to live
Speaker 8: with wild bison. I think that it's gonna be harder
Speaker 8: for fish wilder parks to manage wild bison than it
Speaker 8: is for them to manage pronghorn and deer. So they're
Speaker 8: gonna have to have a source of funding to maybe
Speaker 8: hire you know, a couple of problem solver types fence creuse,
Speaker 8: the fence cruse or you know. My thought is you
Speaker 8: made a great point earlier when you said we restored
Speaker 8: grizzly bears, and we've restored wolves on the landscape, but
Speaker 8: we haven't restored wild bison. And the way Fish, Wilife
Speaker 8: and Parks manages grizzly bears and wolves is they have
Speaker 8: conflict resolution teams. Yeah, you know, and there's you know,
Speaker 8: folks out of Livingston and Bozeman that work in this area,
Speaker 8: all in Region one and two. They have a couple
Speaker 8: of different teams over there. A model like that for
Speaker 8: bison could help Fishwilife and Parks deal with conflict resolutions
Speaker 8: where conflicts occur and not just trying to draw what
Speaker 8: they call a tolerance zone, develop like a true conservation
Speaker 8: area that they manage bison within. And the staunch conservations
Speaker 8: that want thirty million are going to have to recognize
Speaker 8: that that's an impossible dream.
Speaker 4: That is that's way, that's a waste time.
Speaker 8: I'm talking about that a few hundred would be something
Speaker 8: that the state of Montana could pride themselves in and say, yeah,
Speaker 8: there's not very many places in the world where wild
Speaker 8: bison can roam on public lands and be managed by
Speaker 8: a state game agency, where you know, hunters could experience,
Speaker 8: you know, the same experience that their forefathers four or
Speaker 8: five generations ago got to experience by going out and
Speaker 8: harvesting wild bison.
Speaker 4: And I think that if you've.
Speaker 8: Driven around Montana very much, you'll see these signs that
Speaker 8: say save the cowboy, eliminate the American.
Speaker 1: Style, saying the cowboys stop America Prayer, which even the
Speaker 1: guy that runs the American Prayer Reserve has acknowledged that
Speaker 1: it's the genius campaign.
Speaker 8: It's well, it's actually he's like, it's somewhat foolish by
Speaker 8: my perspective, because the skills that defined the cowboy, that
Speaker 8: the romantic cowboy of the historic past is being able
Speaker 8: to ride and heard and rope and you know, deal
Speaker 8: with wild cattle. You know, they could preserve those skills
Speaker 8: by preserving wild bison, so that in reality there should
Speaker 8: be sort of a counter campaign to say, well, you
Speaker 8: can preserve the cowboy by preserving wild bison, and then
Speaker 8: you have preserved the skills that you know, are the
Speaker 8: more high end cowboys than the cowboys that ride for
Speaker 8: wheelers to manage their cattle.
Speaker 1: Curtsey, you find what episode number we had the we
Speaker 1: had a guest Sean Garrity who runs the American Prairie Reserve.
Speaker 4: Oh yes, the CEO.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was on the podcast. So if you can
Speaker 1: find that Matt Kaufman stuff about migrations.
Speaker 11: I was on a flight yesterday coming in episode titled
Speaker 11: The American Prairie Reserve. That's one with Sean Garrity number
Speaker 11: one and what was the.
Speaker 1: Other one, Matt Gaufman. We had Kaufman and Kevin Monteeth.
Speaker 4: We recorded it.
Speaker 1: Down Lander.
Speaker 10: Landscape of Fear Landscape, so.
Speaker 1: American Prairie Reserve and Landscape of Fear gets into a lot.
Speaker 4: Of these same issues.
Speaker 7: But I'm sorry, Oh, it's just my flight yesterday was
Speaker 7: full of cowboys, full of calbo. Yeah, little kids with hats,
Speaker 7: people in track suits with hats, all converging on the
Speaker 7: cowboy capital of the world, Big sky.
Speaker 1: Cowboys.
Speaker 4: And that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: I had some thought about the Oh what I was
Speaker 1: gonna say about the and the America Prairie Reserve is
Speaker 1: not without its own controvert as. I recommend that people
Speaker 1: listen to the episode. There's so much going on there.
Speaker 1: It's a whole other conversation. But at one hand, it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's an organization that buys land on the
Speaker 1: open market, yep. And what they choose to do with
Speaker 1: the land they buy on the open market is try
Speaker 1: to restore the great planes and try to restore bison. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's like there's that end of it. There's another
Speaker 1: end of it of people looking at a real threat
Speaker 1: of reduced area to hunt on because a fear that
Speaker 1: the APR's ultimate objective is to create a national park,
Speaker 1: which would you know, eliminate a lot of hunting opportunity.
Speaker 1: It's a really rich subject. But Garretty had an interesting
Speaker 1: point is, you know, they're talking about having like three
Speaker 1: or four thousand buffalo and and he was talking about
Speaker 1: the friction between the APR and the cattle industry in Montana, right,
Speaker 1: and he was putting it in numbers. He says, there
Speaker 1: are two million cows in Montana. Wow, I'm talking about
Speaker 1: three thousand buffalo. You know, there's a couple of there's
Speaker 1: a couple of just this has gotten yeah, reallysize absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 8: There's a couple of things that I really like about
Speaker 8: APR that have some applicability to the greater Yellowstone Area.
Speaker 4: And one of them is that they've.
Speaker 8: They've developed a sort of a subsidiary connection to a
Speaker 8: cattle raising paradigm where they're they're generating money to pay
Speaker 8: ranchers to be more tolerant of wildlife on their lands
Speaker 8: and potentially pay them more for the cost of each
Speaker 8: pound of beef that they raise, so that, you know,
Speaker 8: the conscious American citizen that really wants to preserve wildlife
Speaker 8: and doesn't buy guns and doesn't buy ammunition and doesn't
Speaker 8: contribute to conservation dollars anywhere else, could contribute to conservation
Speaker 8: dollars by buying beef from those farmers and ranchers that
Speaker 8: are wildlife friendly. And if there was someone willing to
Speaker 8: develop a franchise around here, I bet there's enough you know,
Speaker 8: committed conservationists that would do the same thing and buy
Speaker 8: products from a company that's paying farmers and ranchers to
Speaker 8: live in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and learn to build
Speaker 8: bigger fences, you know, build a way that during the
Speaker 8: infection period of bruce losis to move all their cattle
Speaker 8: to the high fence area and then preserve you know,
Speaker 8: a place for wild animals to move across, you know,
Speaker 8: twenty five or thirty percent of their property that the
Speaker 8: cattle don't go to during that sort of critical time
Speaker 8: period for infection spread. And the other thing about American
Speaker 8: prairie is by turning it into some sort of national
Speaker 8: park they could generate the kind of rules and regulations. See,
Speaker 8: national parks are enabled by Congress, and each are unique
Speaker 8: in their you know, commitment to what they do for
Speaker 8: the landscape where they're at, and like granted down National
Speaker 8: Park when they established that National Park, and there's a
Speaker 8: handful of them around the system. They preserve hunting in
Speaker 8: a proportion a proportion of the national park. An American
Speaker 8: prairie could do the same thing.
Speaker 4: I don't think they will. You don't think they will, No, interesting, No,
Speaker 4: I think I think that they have.
Speaker 1: Somewhat of a begrudging relationship with it.
Speaker 4: That's a personal pang okay. I think they have a
Speaker 4: begrudging relationship.
Speaker 8: I I.
Speaker 7: We kind of touched a little bit on like the
Speaker 7: societal tolerance of the hunting and being up there and
Speaker 7: kind of watching the gardener scene when it was really
Speaker 7: going off right right, there's buffalo crap all over the
Speaker 7: high school football field.
Speaker 3: Man, you know, I.
Speaker 7: Was just like, well, why not allow a certain amount
Speaker 7: of tribal hunting within the park boundary? Expand the hunt
Speaker 7: that way to you know, a very specific group of
Speaker 7: people that have the longest relationship with they're already you know,
Speaker 7: highly regulated there. Each tribe, each hunting group has their
Speaker 7: own game worden with them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was talking about this with my kid the other
Speaker 1: day and I was saying to him and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure on the I'm not sure on all the treaty
Speaker 1: of regulations, but I don't know that a lot of
Speaker 1: the people that signed under the Stevens Treaty, that those
Speaker 1: tribes wouldn't even be able to make the claim that
Speaker 1: they could hunt.
Speaker 4: The park if they wanted to.
Speaker 7: It came too late for the treaty or just him.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that people that were under that treaty, there's
Speaker 1: language in that treaty that I think there's an argument
Speaker 1: that the tribes could make in the argument that that
Speaker 1: I have every right to hunt the park.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, And but and then there's a
Speaker 7: handful that would not under the same language, right right,
Speaker 7: because they weren't historically in that specific area.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that the.
Speaker 8: The thing that prohibits them from going into the National
Speaker 8: Park is that their treaties have a language. And I
Speaker 8: don't remember it specifically, but it has something to do
Speaker 8: with claimed versus open and I'm claimed, Yeah, which is which?
Speaker 1: If you which part there's nothing now that's open and unclaims.
Speaker 1: So there's a there's like what does that exactly mean?
Speaker 7: And we've determined that it's it's I federally managed land,
Speaker 7: not state land, not Montana state land specifically, and somehow
Speaker 7: not the park and somehow not, but it's the National Forest.
Speaker 8: I think they've determined that the National Force fits that category.
Speaker 4: I know, and I would argue, based on no evidence,
Speaker 4: is so does the park.
Speaker 8: Well, it's it's claimed by Congress as a pleasure and
Speaker 8: ground for humans. You know, if you look at the
Speaker 8: enabling legislation of National Parks.
Speaker 4: And it was designated what you're seventy seven or something
Speaker 4: like that, No, eighteen seventy two? Was it seventy two? Yeah?
Speaker 4: So yeah, you know, I think you know you don't
Speaker 4: like that idea. I don't like that idea.
Speaker 8: I can tell I don't like that idea because the
Speaker 8: issue really is if we did it in the Boundary
Speaker 8: Lands area, there are some concessions that I think you
Speaker 8: could figure out how to do it. But what my
Speaker 8: argument is, if you do it in the National Park
Speaker 8: without and qualifying it, then what's to say it's not justified?
Speaker 8: In Lamar Valley or in Hayden Valley, and I think
Speaker 8: that hunting disrupts sort of this natural ecology of the
Speaker 8: system that it could it could create chaos, you know,
Speaker 8: and if you went there to hunt, then they might
Speaker 8: just scatter to the wind.
Speaker 1: I'm only looking. I'm only bringing that subject up, and
Speaker 1: it's like, to me, it's like it's a legal question, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm not advocating one way or the other. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying it's an interesting legal question that at some
Speaker 1: point in time in the future a tribe wouldn't say,
Speaker 1: we're going to go exercise what we understand to be
Speaker 1: our treaty rights. We're going to go exercise them, and
Speaker 1: if you'd like to arrest us, this is where we'll
Speaker 1: be on Monday.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the Crow Nation probably has the you know, most
Speaker 8: opportunity to be and.
Speaker 1: Then then they would be in this situation of like,
Speaker 1: are we really going to go arrest a bunch of
Speaker 1: crow right for hunting?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 8: Well, they've been known to push other, you know, tribal
Speaker 8: treaty rights kinds of issues, So it.
Speaker 7: Could be a heck of an educational program within the park.
Speaker 3: Just to watch.
Speaker 1: When people used to go to watch the Civil War
Speaker 1: battles like you watch on the sidelines. I'd go down
Speaker 1: here to watch.
Speaker 4: Well the gardener win.
Speaker 8: The Gardener Basin was an extension, so it's not actually
Speaker 8: part of the original National Park. And I want to
Speaker 8: say the original National Park boundary was Josh really close
Speaker 8: to the where the Arches Gardener got. And at some
Speaker 8: point in time there was this program to pay farmers
Speaker 8: market value for their land because they weren't very productive.
Speaker 4: And I don't remember if.
Speaker 8: I think it was in the nineteen twenties or nineteen
Speaker 8: thirties or something like that.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating
Speaker 1: is for this because we're running out of time. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to do it. I think we need
Speaker 1: to find I don't know how to do it. I
Speaker 1: think we need to find a way to have Buffalo
Speaker 1: on our federally managed public lands, public lands. I don't
Speaker 1: think it should cost the ranchers money.
Speaker 4: I agree.
Speaker 1: I agree, like I don't it should cost them money.
Speaker 1: I don't think it should cost them business. I think
Speaker 1: that we should find a way to do it.
Speaker 4: I agree. And it's like I just cannot accept that
Speaker 4: there's not a way to sort this out.
Speaker 1: I think there is, but in the money will follow,
Speaker 1: and I think that sportsman, like I think that sportsmen
Speaker 1: need to the same way sportsmen demanded bringing back big
Speaker 1: orange sheet, the same way sportsmen demanded and funded bringing
Speaker 1: back out in some cases black bears. I mean all
Speaker 1: around the country. Absolutely, sportsmen demanded it, paid for it,
Speaker 1: worked for it. I just don't see why hunters are
Speaker 1: not saying, let's take a look at this and let's
Speaker 1: make it be that it doesn't It doesn't need to
Speaker 1: cripple the livestock industry there. I mean, there has to
Speaker 1: be a way, but I don't know what it is.
Speaker 8: I think we need some creative minds from all industries
Speaker 8: and perspectives to get together and give them a directive
Speaker 8: that you have to find a solution. You can't argue,
Speaker 8: you know, your your heartfelt perspective. I agree completely, and
Speaker 8: I don't think it needs to go all the way
Speaker 8: to Interstate ninety, even if that designated Brush Los zone does,
Speaker 8: because then the level of difficulty is dramatically greater.
Speaker 1: And maybe maybe the park, maybe the Yellow Sunaria, is
Speaker 1: not the place to do it, that's a possibility. Maybe
Speaker 1: the place to do it is the uh, somewhere in
Speaker 1: the break.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know, I don't know. I think American word
Speaker 4: maybe it's somewhere to do it in the breaks. I
Speaker 4: like it. But the America Prey Reserve thing doesn't scratch
Speaker 4: my itch.
Speaker 8: That's a probable. It's a private enterprise. It is a
Speaker 8: private enterprise right now. But yeah, as far as the
Speaker 8: term vision.
Speaker 7: For landscapes, right, it's like, if we're talking about federally
Speaker 7: managed lands, then we're talking about either voluntary or some
Speaker 7: sort of large incentive program to buy out grazing leases
Speaker 7: right that are active. And and then the other thing
Speaker 7: is like landscape fragmentation. Like there's just so many obstacles
Speaker 7: around the federally managed lands that we have here in
Speaker 7: western Montana, which with guarantee, if you talk to all
Speaker 7: the people that were coming off the plane yesterday, is
Speaker 7: like the wild West, Like there's it's wide open out here, right,
Speaker 7: and it's just not right. So if we're going to
Speaker 7: do it, we gotta do it fast.
Speaker 1: Alaska now has five Alaska now has I think five herds.
Speaker 4: Oh uh huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they got the copper herd, yep, the Farewell Burn herd,
Speaker 1: the Delta Junction herd the Yukon Flats heard.
Speaker 8: And at least one or two of mary annual northern
Speaker 8: buffalo one one okay.
Speaker 10: Is hunting a lot.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you can't hunt the you can't hunt the
Speaker 1: wood buffalo one that they just got going. But the
Speaker 1: intention is to the intention is that you will be
Speaker 1: able to. And that's how they got local buy in
Speaker 1: with Native Alaskans. But all their herds, their source herd
Speaker 1: was their source herd was National bis Arrange in Montana,
Speaker 1: and they turned them. They brought a bunch to Delta
Speaker 1: Junction and let them trickle out here and there. And
Speaker 1: now they have these four I think it's four, they
Speaker 1: have four managed hunts, and then they have a wood
Speaker 1: buffalo population.
Speaker 4: And whether or not wood.
Speaker 1: Buffalo are actually different as this whole conversation for geneticists
Speaker 1: to argue about. But they have this other herd they're
Speaker 1: establishing there that has the potential to be that has
Speaker 1: the potential to be three four thousand animals, And again,
Speaker 1: why is that possible? It's possible, Like you know, there's
Speaker 1: a I don't want to insult anyone that has livestock
Speaker 1: in Alaska. There's effectively not a livestock industry and much
Speaker 1: of Alaska they run them as managed hunts. People are
Speaker 1: very enthusiastic. Like you know, at draw time, everybody fills
Speaker 1: out their thing to win a chance to hunt. I've
Speaker 1: done it. My brother Danny just threw his social circle
Speaker 1: has gone like six or seven times on bison hunts,
Speaker 1: not just him holding the tag, with.
Speaker 4: Bodies of his hold the tag.
Speaker 1: It's just a part of Yes, it was brought in.
Speaker 1: It's like they're here, they're not necessarily from here. They
Speaker 1: don't have they don't have an adversary. They don't have
Speaker 1: a human adversary. That's right, And they have a lot
Speaker 1: of public buy in because the hunts are cool.
Speaker 10: Has anyone at this table got harvested a bison other
Speaker 10: than you? Because I know Randall's wife Sydney has a
Speaker 10: we're gonna we're gonna go to the.
Speaker 5: PR We're gonna go up to the APR in January
Speaker 5: and very cool.
Speaker 4: My wife's got a management tag for that hurt.
Speaker 3: And then you've had it, I Drew Gardner and West Yellowstone.
Speaker 10: But you haven't harvested what it takes. And then Chili
Speaker 10: has got.
Speaker 3: This, have the snow, we'll.
Speaker 10: Do you have gardener?
Speaker 4: I have gardener. Yeah, you've got gardner right now? This winter,
Speaker 4: this winter? All right, let's talk.
Speaker 1: All right, yeah, pretty quiet. I've already met one guy.
Speaker 1: Don't show don't show them your st Wait, we should
Speaker 1: all go get in here from the other direction.
Speaker 6: I've I've been really quiet because I'm like, there's so
Speaker 6: much I want to know, just like, because you're very
Speaker 6: familiar with the area, I'm not. But I also met
Speaker 6: a guy in Bozeman that's like, yeah, I got the
Speaker 6: same tag, and.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put it on podcasts.
Speaker 4: So yeah, Chili a veteran, so give.
Speaker 1: Veterance.
Speaker 8: So we're going to get along famously perfect branch Us Army.
Speaker 4: I'm an artillery ment.
Speaker 14: You guys gonna have that little army connections, Marine Corps,
Speaker 14: raised the Marines, and I talk about Cowardice a lot
Speaker 14: our shared connection.
Speaker 1: You know, you didn't to defend your country either, becase
Speaker 1: you guys war dodgers, and.
Speaker 8: Well, harvesting a wild bison, they're harvesting any kind of
Speaker 8: bison gives you the opportunity to teach the next generation
Speaker 8: a lot of lessons, Yeah, a lot of lessons. So
Speaker 8: I mean, I took my son out to the Green
Speaker 8: Ranch out on the Madison to Harvest to Buffalo twenty
Speaker 8: years ago.
Speaker 4: We had a grand time. Took us a bit a
Speaker 4: long time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, That's why I'm super excited about this shign because,
Speaker 6: like I grew up in South Dakota and a lot
Speaker 6: of buffalo history there too. Yeah, and my dad never
Speaker 6: did it, but he always talked about like buffalo hunts
Speaker 6: and old timers that he knew going on them, And
Speaker 6: so I think this is probably the closest thing I'd
Speaker 6: ever get to doing something like that, you know.
Speaker 4: And so that's why I'm kind of.
Speaker 8: And I don't discredit places like the Custer State Park
Speaker 8: because you know, it's it's sort of canned, but again,
Speaker 8: it provides the it's a large enough landscape that it
Speaker 8: provides the opportunity to experience what our ancestors could have experienced.
Speaker 5: When Sydney drew her tag, I texted Dan Flores and
Speaker 5: I just told him, you know, we're going to be
Speaker 5: buffalo hunting in January. And his response was like, that's fantastic, Randal.
Speaker 5: I can't think of a more a single, more historical
Speaker 5: act that you could do on the Great Planes.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: So that was like a really funny way of putting.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's hard to argue with it. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh Rick Wallen, thanks for joining, man.
Speaker 4: I appreciate all your insights.
Speaker 8: I admire all you guys. Keep up the good way.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you,