Speaker 1: This is me 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 presented by first light. Go farther, stay longer,
Speaker 1: quick note up top. Um, But of sad news. If
Speaker 1: you go way back in our in our library of
Speaker 1: episodes to episode one, which was called Adaptive Hunting and Fishing,
Speaker 1: you will find a pretty inspiring interview with a guy
Speaker 1: named Chris Clasby. Um, he had had an accident. Do
Speaker 1: you remember, I feel like I can't. Was a diving No,
Speaker 1: it was a vehicle vehicle accident. Yeah, I think sixteen
Speaker 1: or seventeen, pretty paralyzed from the neck down. Um, but
Speaker 1: I had enjoyed hunting and fishing, you know, and even
Speaker 1: had worked with people to devise and and and fine tune.
Speaker 1: I remember, like a way to cast a rod. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he can cast spinning rod reel it in. H did
Speaker 1: shoot a rifle, did some hunting his hunting body basically
Speaker 1: didn't hunt, but just helped. Like they just teamed up
Speaker 1: to try to help Chris. They don't have experiences anyways,
Speaker 1: Chris Classy passed away UM related to his condition, started
Speaker 1: having a difficult time breathing and and um, I think
Speaker 1: that he always kind of assumed he would not live
Speaker 1: to be an old man. But condolences to Chris Clasby's
Speaker 1: family and friends. And again episode one Adaptive Hunting and Fishing.
Speaker 1: I think we yeah, we recorded that here, not here here,
Speaker 1: but here. It was in Bozeman. It was actually the
Speaker 1: last day that I was ever in the old Bozeman
Speaker 1: ZPC office. I remember it was cleared out. It was
Speaker 1: there's just a table sitting and I remember that you
Speaker 1: were in there. But no, it's a it's a good episode.
Speaker 1: Everybody should go back and listen to that one and
Speaker 1: you'll realize that whatever your problems are, they're not as
Speaker 1: big as you think they are. Yeah, that's a good point. Um,
Speaker 1: moving down here. So you know, I've said in recent episodes,
Speaker 1: I'm always talking about how the only thing that should
Speaker 1: be allowed on Instagram is the Turkey dock. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Instagram said the Instagram should be called the Turkey Dock
Speaker 1: and that's the only page you can follow. But I said, like,
Speaker 1: if there was two, yeah, yeah, you should be able
Speaker 1: to follow Nature's medal. Um, if you hadn't really had
Speaker 1: to follow something else, you could choose that. Well, we
Speaker 1: just found out something quite titillating about the Turkey dock.
Speaker 1: Mike Chamberlain, who been on the show before here in
Speaker 1: the studio. He's been on the show in a sort
Speaker 1: of more ethereal way right where he we just had
Speaker 1: his voice because Karin conducted an off interview with him
Speaker 1: and then we played, so we were like playing a
Speaker 1: recorded interview. But uh, Dr Chamberlain came up recently because
Speaker 1: we were reading the thing that about the the what
Speaker 1: the hell you even calm? The Red Wolf of the
Speaker 1: Southeastern US, whatever partis, I'm messing up, Uh, Mike Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: Le square is the way on. But there's only like
Speaker 1: basically none left next to none left, um. And we
Speaker 1: were kind of hunting around to try to find someone
Speaker 1: who understood this world so they could explain the saga
Speaker 1: of the Red Wolf of the Eastern Um of the
Speaker 1: Deep Southeast or we're into Texas red Wolf. And the
Speaker 1: first guy we went to was a real wolf expert
Speaker 1: that we're I was talking about halfle Finger James Halflefinger,
Speaker 1: halfle Finger Um says, I know a lot about a
Speaker 1: lot of things, and I don't like to talk about
Speaker 1: things I don't know about and red wolves are one
Speaker 1: of them. But he said happened just so happens that
Speaker 1: the Turkey dock is not just the Turkey dock. He's
Speaker 1: like the red wolf dock. So we reached out and
Speaker 1: Mike Chamberlain is joining us remotely here and he's gonna
Speaker 1: give us a rundown on what the hell happened to
Speaker 1: the red wolf, Like, what happened to it, what's happening
Speaker 1: to it now? And why are there now articles saying
Speaker 1: there's ten y Yeah, yeah, that's that's right. That's right.
Speaker 1: It's been quite as sorted, uh assorted past if you will. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so red wolves. You mentioned that Steve red wolves
Speaker 1: were historically the the Canaan in the Southeast. They were
Speaker 1: the they were the top predator, if you will, um
Speaker 1: intermediate in size between gray wolves and and coyote, so
Speaker 1: not as large as a gray wolf and quite a
Speaker 1: bit bigger than a kayote. For for many many years
Speaker 1: they were the they were the top dog in the South,
Speaker 1: and then, as human beings are apt to do, we
Speaker 1: we extirpated them for most of their range. Part of
Speaker 1: that was just conflicts with humans, part of it was
Speaker 1: it was basically government mandated and and funded eradication programs
Speaker 1: too to get rid of the wolf for for human desires,
Speaker 1: if you will, Hey, let me let me let me
Speaker 1: heat with this. About the range though, um, because I
Speaker 1: know that we talked about him now in the southeast
Speaker 1: Virginia to Texas. But like the wolves that Daniel Boone encountered,
Speaker 1: Like I remember a guy and Daniel Boone's hunting party
Speaker 1: once got bit by a wolf and then got rabies
Speaker 1: and developed hydrophobia and died. Would that have been a
Speaker 1: red wolf in Kentucky? Yes? So when when when the
Speaker 1: frontiers mean we're talking about wolves, they're talking about red wolves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically from latitude Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky south to the Gulf
Speaker 1: Coast and then over to eastern Texas. Yep, got it, Okay,
Speaker 1: go on. Yeah. So so we removed the red wolf
Speaker 1: um for most of its range. And then there was
Speaker 1: a pocket of of wolves slash hybrid animals that kind
Speaker 1: of persisted in southwest Louisiana. And in the nineties seventies, UM,
Speaker 1: the US Fishing Wildlife Service went in and and captured
Speaker 1: as many of those animals as they could and using
Speaker 1: what we thought at the time, This is what a
Speaker 1: red wolf looks like. This is how big they are,
Speaker 1: this is what they're their appearances. They selected animals out
Speaker 1: of those captured animals and they considered them as pure
Speaker 1: red wolves, and they moved them to um captive breeding
Speaker 1: situations and they started a captive breeding program. What had
Speaker 1: they been hybridizing with? What had they been hybridizing with
Speaker 1: in in Louisiana? Was it not domestic dogs but coyotes?
Speaker 1: Was kayats And basically what you had and you guys
Speaker 1: know this, So you had this, You had this pocket
Speaker 1: of wolves that were left, and then you had this
Speaker 1: swarm of kayotes that you know, they're numerically superior. And
Speaker 1: as they kind of moved into areas where wolves were,
Speaker 1: they hybridized with with wolves because they're numerically superior. And um,
Speaker 1: so you had all sorts of wolf like preachers. You know,
Speaker 1: you had animals that were that were hybrids between kyotes
Speaker 1: and red wolves. Those animals were were removed and the
Speaker 1: quote unquote pure red wolves became founders for what is
Speaker 1: now the red wolf that we know as a species.
Speaker 1: Um those ended up being fourteen That quick question when
Speaker 1: the hybridization happens. Is it usually female coyote male red
Speaker 1: wolf or vice versa, or would it go both ways?
Speaker 1: It goes both ways, but it tends to be smaller
Speaker 1: red wolves, that's what that's what we've seen. The smaller
Speaker 1: red wolves tend to be the ones that that hybridize
Speaker 1: with kyos, which makes sense because there without going too
Speaker 1: far in the weeds, you know, wolves are bigger, so
Speaker 1: they can use more space, they can eat larger prey
Speaker 1: more efficiently, so a smaller wolf would be closer in
Speaker 1: size to a coyote, so they would be more compatible
Speaker 1: when it comes to pairing together and using a home
Speaker 1: range together because they're they're comparable in size, if that
Speaker 1: makes sense. If you do mean smaller like as in
Speaker 1: younger or smaller as in just smaller stature or even
Speaker 1: at maturity, smaller as a you know, morphologically smaller, they
Speaker 1: weigh less, they're they're shorter, shorter ear, shorter legs, you know, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So morphologically they look quote unquote more like a kaya
Speaker 1: than say a larger wolf would. That's the wolves that
Speaker 1: we see as being the hybridization issues, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: But but to Yanni's but I want to make sure.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know if you caught Yanni's
Speaker 1: question the particulars of it, but he's saying, like, is
Speaker 1: it generally that uh, a male red wolf breeds of
Speaker 1: female coyote or vice versa place it goes Okay, so
Speaker 1: you did catch that. Yeah, yeah, it goes both ways.
Speaker 1: It just tends to be. It tends to be size
Speaker 1: driven in particular as you would expect. I mean, you
Speaker 1: and I'd have to go back and look at our date.
Speaker 1: I think it tended to it tends to be more
Speaker 1: prominent with a with a smaller male wolf and a
Speaker 1: female kayote. But but that's kind of getting too far
Speaker 1: into weeds. But the bottom line is, yes, both males
Speaker 1: and females will hybridize with coyotes. Yes. So those fourteen
Speaker 1: founders became became what is now the red wolf, and
Speaker 1: for years the Fishing Wildlife Service, through cooperation with zoos
Speaker 1: and um island propagation sites off the East coast, bread
Speaker 1: red wolves, and the idea was to eventually create a
Speaker 1: wild population, uh, somewhere else other than where they were
Speaker 1: removed from the wild, which was southwest Louisiana, and that
Speaker 1: that happened in the late nineteen eighties. Those wolves were say,
Speaker 1: those captive bread wolves were moved and released on the
Speaker 1: Albemar Peninsula peninsula, which is northeast North Carolina. And the
Speaker 1: reasons for that were many. One, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: federal and state lands in that area. Two, there are
Speaker 1: not a lot of human beings in that area. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's an agricultural type landscape um with large private landowners.
Speaker 1: And there were no coyotes there at the time. So
Speaker 1: in seven those animals, you know, the first releases occurred
Speaker 1: and from there you saw a fairly rapid increase in
Speaker 1: the in the red wolf population Mike during that time
Speaker 1: when they did that, knowing what you run into when
Speaker 1: you get coyotes, was there anything that could be done
Speaker 1: or was attempted to be done to keep that Knowing
Speaker 1: that kyotes are spreading everywhere and moving into areas they
Speaker 1: had never been before, was there anything like a plan
Speaker 1: to prevent Kyle from getting in there, not not per
Speaker 1: se keep kyodes from getting there. But once they did
Speaker 1: get there, there was an immediate recognition that there needed
Speaker 1: to be an adaptive management program in place. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is, as soon as kayote started
Speaker 1: infiltrating the recovery area, if you will, which was a
Speaker 1: five county area. As soon as kaya started getting in there,
Speaker 1: the Fishing Wildlife Service realized they were going to have
Speaker 1: to have a plan to mitigate this hybridization potential that
Speaker 1: we knew existed with this with this sees. And that's
Speaker 1: really when the more kind of hands on management of
Speaker 1: the wolf began and what that program this was. This
Speaker 1: came about in the late nineteen nineties. There was a
Speaker 1: workshop convened. I actually attended that workshop as a graduate student.
Speaker 1: I was, I was in all of the people I was,
Speaker 1: I was sitting around because they were the gods of
Speaker 1: of the wolf and coyote world. But anyway, the outcome
Speaker 1: of that workshop, which was dedicated to trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what do we do moving forward knowing that kayots
Speaker 1: are there and they'll hybridize with wolves. And the outcome
Speaker 1: of that was an adaptive management program where the U
Speaker 1: S Fishalilife Service would go in and capture kayotes that
Speaker 1: had infiltrated into the recovery area. They rather than euthanized them,
Speaker 1: they would sterilize them and released them as sterile placeholders.
Speaker 1: And the reason for that was was simple. If you
Speaker 1: remove a kyote, then another kayote comes in and replaces
Speaker 1: he or she very very quickly. We know that with
Speaker 1: kayot with kayots in general. But if you release them
Speaker 1: sterilized and you leave their hormonal systems in place, they
Speaker 1: don't know that they're sterile. They continue to maintain space,
Speaker 1: they maintain their pairs, they continue to try to breathe,
Speaker 1: but they don't produce pups. You leave those sterile kyotes
Speaker 1: out there until you can go in and insert a
Speaker 1: wolf a wolf pair into that territory and you allow
Speaker 1: the wolf to usurp that space that that kayote was using.
Speaker 1: And as some people listen to that and they go, wow,
Speaker 1: that's crazy, uh, that it had been used previously. And
Speaker 1: when that methods started being used by the US Factionalilife Service,
Speaker 1: the recovery program continued to flourish um And what you
Speaker 1: actually saw was a stair step across the landscape of
Speaker 1: wolf territories packs that were intact and they were fighting off,
Speaker 1: if you will, kaya infiltration, because a wolf pack can
Speaker 1: take care of itself relative to coyotes that are coming
Speaker 1: in trying to to infiltrate the area. In other words,
Speaker 1: they fight, kill, expel kayats from their territories. So at
Speaker 1: some point, and this was around the mid two thousands,
Speaker 1: mid to late two thousand's, you had a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifties shred wolves across the landscape. You had intact territories,
Speaker 1: large packs, and they were maintaining themselves through this adaptive
Speaker 1: management program that was, you know, a fairly heavy handed,
Speaker 1: constant type of approach where you know, the Fish Walife Service,
Speaker 1: the recovery program. Biologists were constantly monitoring animals as you
Speaker 1: can imagine, they were constantly trapping, They were constantly trying
Speaker 1: to determine when a coyote showed up, was that kaya
Speaker 1: paired with a wolf? Was a wolf paired with a coyote.
Speaker 1: If a wolf was lost to gunshot, mortality or vehicle collision,
Speaker 1: well who did he or she pair with? As you
Speaker 1: can imagine, this was essentially a year round activity that
Speaker 1: these biologists conducted to keep to keep this population and
Speaker 1: you know intact. And what are those wolves feed. None
Speaker 1: Red wolves eat a lot of deer um. They eat
Speaker 1: other things as you can imagine, you know, fifty sixty
Speaker 1: pound cane id that's living in a pack. In North Carolina,
Speaker 1: they can eat pretty much whatever they want. So you
Speaker 1: see deer, raccoons, anything mammal wise they would tend to eat.
Speaker 1: But deer was a was a primary prey item. And
Speaker 1: our residents in this area on this peninsula, with a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty of them, are residents seeing them frequently,
Speaker 1: like like wolves are sort of a part of their life.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, as you can imagine if you
Speaker 1: go to northeast North Carolina, you see kind of wood lots,
Speaker 1: you know, in these precosin wetland areas and and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of agriculture and wolves being a fairly large animal, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see them all the time, you know, if and
Speaker 1: they what we've showed, what are the research that we
Speaker 1: were doing. I did a lot of research in that
Speaker 1: area obviously with students graduate students. Um is those wolves
Speaker 1: used agricultural fields a lot, So they hung out in
Speaker 1: those fields, they raised pups in those fields, they hunted
Speaker 1: in those yields, so they were readily observed. Did they
Speaker 1: did they run into trouble with livestock predation much at all?
Speaker 1: Not a lot um you know, you you'd see occasional losses,
Speaker 1: and the Fishing Wilife Service their recovery program biologists at
Speaker 1: the time they're there now gone. They most of them,
Speaker 1: they're few on on site. They maintained really close working
Speaker 1: relationships with the local landowners and if there were issues
Speaker 1: with with livestock take they address those issues. Um. But
Speaker 1: that landscape is a pretty prey rich landscape. The deer
Speaker 1: density in that area is quite high, so you didn't
Speaker 1: see a lot of livestock issues, and there was broad
Speaker 1: support from the public for wolves being there. Of course,
Speaker 1: as you which public though, like the public meaning North
Speaker 1: Carolina in general, or the public meeting the residents of
Speaker 1: the peninsul both both there there there was broad support
Speaker 1: both locally and and across the state for the wolf
Speaker 1: being there. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure you're familiar with
Speaker 1: the phenomenon of UM. When you pull people in a
Speaker 1: state about who loves wolves, they tend to score lower
Speaker 1: among the people that lived by them than they do
Speaker 1: the people that are in cities thinking about them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. So obviously, you know, you you could it
Speaker 1: was a lot easier to find somebody in Dare County
Speaker 1: or Hyde County, North Carolina that had that wasn't in
Speaker 1: favor of wolves than there was in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Speaker 1: You know that that wasn't experiencing kind of day to
Speaker 1: day life with the wolf. Yeah. Absolutely, but in a
Speaker 1: broad sense there was. There was There was a lot
Speaker 1: of support for the for the wolf being there. So
Speaker 1: we go from such broad support, which is a little
Speaker 1: surprising to me. I've spent a fair minded time up
Speaker 1: in that country, and uh, it's not the country where
Speaker 1: I would expect the locals to be like, yeah, wolves
Speaker 1: kicking around and eating our deer. So what happened? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, despite the fact that there was broad support,
Speaker 1: you know, not everybody is is pro wolf, And I
Speaker 1: will say, you know, and it's heyday. The recovery program.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason that that the interactions between the
Speaker 1: wolf and the private landowners was kept on a kind
Speaker 1: of a positive was the recovery program. Biologists worked their
Speaker 1: asses off, educating people, talking with people, trying to help
Speaker 1: mitigate any concerns or complaints with the wolf. Um those
Speaker 1: biologists would go on and and obviously they needed access
Speaker 1: to private lands to trap wolves every year as part
Speaker 1: of the adaptive management program, so they had a really
Speaker 1: strong working relationship with those with those local land owners,
Speaker 1: and they were able to walk up to the front
Speaker 1: door and and have a forth right, honest conversation about
Speaker 1: concerns that those landowners expressed. So when there was a
Speaker 1: wolf that was was a problem, Chris lu Cash or
Speaker 1: or one of the other biologists would go knock on
Speaker 1: the door and have a conversation, and and sometimes those
Speaker 1: conversations were very pointed and very difficult, but that willingness
Speaker 1: to go have those conversations was one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that the program continued to flourish um And then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, and it wasn't really sudden, but what
Speaker 1: we started seeing around the mid two thousand's was an
Speaker 1: increase in gunshot mortalities. As an aside um, when the
Speaker 1: red wolf was restored to that part of the world,
Speaker 1: they were considered as a non essential population and therefore
Speaker 1: they did not carry the same protections as other species
Speaker 1: would under the Endangered Species Act. So shooting a wolf
Speaker 1: in mistakingly shooting a wolf did not carry the same
Speaker 1: consequences as it would in other areas. So what started
Speaker 1: happening around the mid two thousand's is gunshot mortality started skyrocketing,
Speaker 1: and part of that was was mistaking identity. You know,
Speaker 1: someone thinking they were shooting at a coyote or honestly
Speaker 1: not caring what they we're shooting at. They it was
Speaker 1: a canaid of some kind, and and they shot it.
Speaker 1: And we started seeing that with this gunshot mortality, that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, these breeding pairs were being dissolved
Speaker 1: because of of us, because of humans. And what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is, you know, you had this pack
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, you lose the breeding female
Speaker 1: or the breeding male, and chaos and sues and those
Speaker 1: packs started being whittled away by gunshot mortalities. Instead of ten,
Speaker 1: there were six. Instead of six, there were three. And
Speaker 1: now all of a sudden, the pack dissolves, and now
Speaker 1: you're essentially managing in favor of a coyote and against
Speaker 1: a wolf, because coyotes weren't numerically superior and still are.
Speaker 1: Was the was the gunshot mortality? Was that a concerted
Speaker 1: effort or do you think there was? It was just randomness,
Speaker 1: but but an increasing randomness. I think there was probably
Speaker 1: and this is me, this is me speaking um just
Speaker 1: kind of a from a logical person's perspective, not an academic.
Speaker 1: I think it was both, Steve, You know, you you
Speaker 1: probably had some people that I don't say probably. We
Speaker 1: know there were people that targeted wolves, and we also
Speaker 1: know from our own field interactions with people that there
Speaker 1: were some people that legitim and Lee thought they were
Speaker 1: shooting a coyote and and we're shocked, were stunned that
Speaker 1: they had killed a red wolf and weren't happy about it.
Speaker 1: You know that that they were not pleased with themselves
Speaker 1: that that they had done that. So it was a
Speaker 1: combination of both. And honestly, I think part of it
Speaker 1: centered around the kind of the narrative, the rhetoric that
Speaker 1: you started seeing in the Deep South around two thousand five,
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, you started seeing a lot of
Speaker 1: discussion about coyotes and their impacts on game species. And
Speaker 1: this is my this is my speculation, but it seems
Speaker 1: a bit coincidental that we started seeing these issues skyrocket
Speaker 1: about the time A lot of that that rhetoric was
Speaker 1: going around, and people like me were actually part of
Speaker 1: that because we were we were publishing a lot of
Speaker 1: information at the time about the importance of coyotes on
Speaker 1: deer populations and how they can affect dear population, and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of talk and there still is
Speaker 1: a lot of talk about the coyote being a problem
Speaker 1: for dear populations and therefore if we didn't have the coyote,
Speaker 1: we would have more hunting and harvest opportunities. And I
Speaker 1: think the red wolf in some ways got caught up
Speaker 1: in that, and that's that's truly truly unfortunate. But so
Speaker 1: you started seeing a lot of gunshot mortalities. The population
Speaker 1: started declining. At the same time, you started seeing issues
Speaker 1: with with private landowners that were politically connected UM clamoring
Speaker 1: for uh a lack of protection for wolves, clamoring for
Speaker 1: the US Fishing Wilife Service to remove wolves from private
Speaker 1: lands and put them back on public lands quote unquote
Speaker 1: where they belonged. UM. There was pressure on the Fishing
Speaker 1: Wildife Service to issue take permits where wolves could be
Speaker 1: taken on private lands because they were quote unquote a problem.
Speaker 1: And that was pretty much the beginning of what I
Speaker 1: consider now to be the end. Is the wolf population plummeted.
Speaker 1: UM A series of lawsuits resulted. Those lawsuits involved the
Speaker 1: State of North Carolina, the US Fishing Wildlife Service private groups,
Speaker 1: and basically the outcome predictably was poor for the wolf.
Speaker 1: And now what you have is you have the Fishing
Speaker 1: Wildlife Service that has abandoned the recovery program. They have
Speaker 1: UM basically said we're only going to quote unquote managed
Speaker 1: this species and captivity and we're going to let them
Speaker 1: do their own thing as wolves on federal lands on
Speaker 1: the peninsula. And now, as you mentioned at the opener,
Speaker 1: we have just a handful of red wolves left in
Speaker 1: the wild. The remainder of them have been assimilated into
Speaker 1: the Kayote population as hybrids. And if you want to
Speaker 1: go see a red wolf, if you can't get your
Speaker 1: eyes on that tin or so that are left out there,
Speaker 1: you need to go to a zoo. UM and that
Speaker 1: in about fifteen minutes is what I consider the sad
Speaker 1: and unfortunate um recovery and then loss of law red wolves.
Speaker 1: Is there not another place across its historical range where
Speaker 1: maybe people and in the state would would welcome the population.
Speaker 1: Has that been discussed? Yes, it has, guys. We we
Speaker 1: and I say we have only been tangential in some
Speaker 1: of these conversations, but yeah, there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: discussion about well, Okay, could we go somewhere else with
Speaker 1: these animals? And as an aside, and I didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't mention this, but that's a great question. This was
Speaker 1: attempted a second time, so after the population on the
Speaker 1: Peninsula got got rolling, the Fishmaller Service also tried this
Speaker 1: in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And if you've if
Speaker 1: you've visited that beautiful part of the world, you know
Speaker 1: that it's very rugged. Um there's a lot of federal
Speaker 1: land there, but there are not a tremendous number of
Speaker 1: deer and other prey items in most of the Smokies
Speaker 1: Outside of these um these open kind of manage early
Speaker 1: successful areas like Cade's Cove and some of those places.
Speaker 1: So what happened in that in that instance, the wolves
Speaker 1: were released in the park and they almost immediately went
Speaker 1: to private lands and went down to lower elevation areas
Speaker 1: where there's agricultural properties. And of course they encountered some
Speaker 1: some problems with people there, uh pulp survival and that
Speaker 1: study was very very low, almost zero. So it didn't
Speaker 1: take long for the Fishing Wilife Service to pull that
Speaker 1: that effort and put those animals back in the North
Speaker 1: Carolina into the album or peninsula because that effort was
Speaker 1: a failure. Since then, yes, there have been discussions on okay,
Speaker 1: well where do we go from here? Could we go
Speaker 1: somewhere else? And there are areas that in many ways
Speaker 1: are are suitable for wolves. The problem is twofold. One
Speaker 1: is us as humans and two is the recognition that
Speaker 1: you don't have anywhere in the Southeast that is absent
Speaker 1: of cayats. So this issue that that the recovery program
Speaker 1: ran into again, that the sterilization and release of of
Speaker 1: sterile place holders that would need to be conducted wherever
Speaker 1: we go with this wolf um and and it was
Speaker 1: working right well, you know, as we meant, as we discussed,
Speaker 1: but but that is something that would have to be
Speaker 1: in place. Do you think that with new leadership um
Speaker 1: with with a new administration and new leadership at the
Speaker 1: US Fish and Wildlife Service, do you imagine that there
Speaker 1: might be a real about face in the next couple
Speaker 1: of years and that they might reinitiate this and then
Speaker 1: I'll hate My second question right now is we know
Speaker 1: that we don't win. We know that we can't win
Speaker 1: every conservation fight. And there's such a thing as throwing
Speaker 1: good money after bad mm hmm. What's you take on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the answer to the first question is is no, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't see uh uh about face, um, unless it's
Speaker 1: perhaps a half hearted about face. And and maybe that's
Speaker 1: a maybe that's a jaded um and a sarcastic answer.
Speaker 1: But you asked me the question, and that's my honest
Speaker 1: that's my honest assessment is given given the past, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't see, regardless of a change in administration, I
Speaker 1: don't see about face unless it's again a half hearted um,
Speaker 1: not really a genuine about face the good money bad man, Steve.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. And as you can imagine this,
Speaker 1: this program costs money. I mean, it cost money to
Speaker 1: do this. It costs money to pay the people that
Speaker 1: that did this, It costs money to have the framework
Speaker 1: in place, the logistics in place. These animals were monitored
Speaker 1: weekly by airplanes, as many wolves and other populations are,
Speaker 1: so there. Yeah, there was a lot of expense associated
Speaker 1: with this program, and there would be. There will be
Speaker 1: if they continue it, if they expand it, there will be.
Speaker 1: And that competition for resources is certainly something that that
Speaker 1: would be at play. Yeah, and that's some of the
Speaker 1: some of the anti wolf rhetoric, if you will, that
Speaker 1: was generated in the late two thousand's and early two
Speaker 1: thousand's that resulted in a lot of those there's lawsuits.
Speaker 1: That was one of the complaints is you know, look
Speaker 1: how much money is being spent on this program and
Speaker 1: for for what? This is what the critics were saying,
Speaker 1: and for what for so that we can have a
Speaker 1: wolf in North Carolina that we constantly have to help that.
Speaker 1: This was one of their arguments. What's that? What's that term?
Speaker 1: Remember when we had John mu Aluman, the author John
Speaker 1: MoU Alum, he introduced the terms that hadn't heard before
Speaker 1: was something like conservation reliance. What's that expression? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: conservation reli. It is like a conservation reliance species, like
Speaker 1: it's only gonna cut it if we're putting time money,
Speaker 1: protection effort is never going to get on autopilot. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: that's yeah. Now, the interesting sing and some of the
Speaker 1: wolf the pro wolf people and and I won't label
Speaker 1: myself as that, but the research was very clear if
Speaker 1: if you had enough wolves out there, they were capable
Speaker 1: of managing themselves. In other words, what you saw if
Speaker 1: if you look at a map of the album or peninsula.
Speaker 1: If you look all the way over to the east
Speaker 1: and Derrick County, and then you moved westward, you know,
Speaker 1: towards Raleigh Durham, on the easternmost part of the peninsula,
Speaker 1: there were no coyotes. And what coyotes were there, there
Speaker 1: were very few because the wolves maintained space and they
Speaker 1: excluded coyotes from the landscape. And as you moved westward,
Speaker 1: you moved into an area where at the far edge
Speaker 1: there was hybridization going on, as you'd expect. But as
Speaker 1: soon as you moved far enough east to where you
Speaker 1: had large, intact packs of wolves, they took are of
Speaker 1: their own business, if you will. They excluded kyotes from
Speaker 1: those territories. And therefore, and this is something I think
Speaker 1: is sadly ironic. Would you rather have six or eight
Speaker 1: red wolves consuming deer or sixty two hundred kyats? And
Speaker 1: that's what that's what you see in in wolf territories,
Speaker 1: you only have a small number of wolves that are
Speaker 1: eating deer or any other prey. But in the absence
Speaker 1: of those wolves, you replaced them with the species that
Speaker 1: uses a much smaller home range eats a much greater
Speaker 1: diversity of prey, including many, many birds, and you replace
Speaker 1: them in in a situation where they're now numerically two,
Speaker 1: three or four or five times superior to the wolf
Speaker 1: that was there. That's something that I I would often
Speaker 1: talk to people about and and sometimes you know, it
Speaker 1: fell on deaf ears, but that is that is something
Speaker 1: we saw with the research. Sure, the timelines don't add
Speaker 1: up for this what I'm gonna ask you next, They
Speaker 1: don't add up in a real literal way, because while
Speaker 1: they've populations can move so slowly. But would you think
Speaker 1: it's safe to say that had we not extra pated,
Speaker 1: wolves in the eastern US are virtually everywhere um at
Speaker 1: a time in the lower forty eight do you, like,
Speaker 1: would you ever look at that and be like, if
Speaker 1: that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had the explosion of coyotes,
Speaker 1: or do you think it would have been inevitable? I
Speaker 1: think it's it's kind of somewhere in a gray area
Speaker 1: in between, because you know, removing wolves from certain parts
Speaker 1: of our landscape was inevitable, whether we actually tried to
Speaker 1: extirpate them or not. You know, so if you kind
Speaker 1: of look at the Eastern United States. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: just because of population, human population, you were going to
Speaker 1: be in a situation where would create parts of the
Speaker 1: landscape that a kayote can use but a wolf can't,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense, just the urban suburban landscape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can have wolves that are you have coyotes in
Speaker 1: Central Park, but you don't you don't see many gray
Speaker 1: wolves running around in Central Park. Yeah, thankfully. Um so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's probably a little in both directions
Speaker 1: on that, but I think yes, in many broad areas,
Speaker 1: rural areas, the removal of the wolf, there's no question
Speaker 1: it's benefited the kayak. There's no question the removal of wolves,
Speaker 1: in particular the red wolf allowed the kaya to colonize
Speaker 1: the southeastern United States in a ridiculously fast manner. Um,
Speaker 1: had they encountered intact wolf territories, that expansion would not
Speaker 1: have been nearly as rapid as it has been. And Mike, Um,
Speaker 1: why why and how is it do you think that
Speaker 1: this is like kind of flown under the radar, like
Speaker 1: as his population has gotten whittled down to nothing, like
Speaker 1: you're not seeing it on the national news, like pro
Speaker 1: wolf advocacacy groups aren't making a big deal out of it,
Speaker 1: like anything anytime anything happens with gray wolves, like the
Speaker 1: Wisconsin hunt or Idaho saying they're gonna kill the gray
Speaker 1: wolf population. That is not what they said. Okay, that
Speaker 1: is what that That is what the lame stream, the
Speaker 1: lame stream, That's what I'm getting at. It becomes a story.
Speaker 1: It becomes this national story. Pro wolf advocacy groups jump
Speaker 1: on it, like, why haven't we've seen that with this?
Speaker 1: Can you please clarify what they said. Now that you
Speaker 1: said that, I'll let you do it. Since am it Brody.
Speaker 1: They had agreed, they had agreed in that state many
Speaker 1: decades ago that wolf recovery looked like a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty wolves. They're now sitting on one thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: to say that they're still operating on that recovery objective,
Speaker 1: which everybody agreed to. Don't yell at me. I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not I know, I know. I'm not mad at you.
Speaker 1: I'm mad at Reuters. I'm mad at every click bait
Speaker 1: generating not not you, Spencer, but every every click bait
Speaker 1: generating person on the planet. They're loosening some hunting restrictions.
Speaker 1: They've loosened to hunting restrictions all the way along to
Speaker 1: no effect. You Like, It's not like all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the Idaho is gonna loosen a couple more restrictions and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden they're gonna be like bamo at
Speaker 1: recovery objective. You're not gonna do it. I understand that.
Speaker 1: I'm not mad at you, Brodie. I'm just saying, why
Speaker 1: hasn't there been that level of scrutiny put on this situation? Especially?
Speaker 1: I have no I know someone's governor kills the gray
Speaker 1: wolf and holy smokes, Yeah, that is a really good question, man, Um.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you had a problem in the question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the question itself was flawed. But as Steven is the latest,
Speaker 1: but the root of the question was was was a
Speaker 1: good one? That that question has been bannered about amongst
Speaker 1: myself and many others. And and I don't have a
Speaker 1: great answer, guys, Um. I think in some ways because
Speaker 1: of where this this occurred. You know, northeastern North Carolina
Speaker 1: is a very rural area the state of North Carolina. Uh,
Speaker 1: the state agency UM was not particularly vested in this
Speaker 1: in this project, there will there were conflicts between the
Speaker 1: agency and the US Fishing Wilife Service. So you basically
Speaker 1: had a small group of people the recovery program that
Speaker 1: we're working in isolation out in in this area. And
Speaker 1: when these issues started popping up and these things started happening,
Speaker 1: instead of going to the top of the mountaintop and saying,
Speaker 1: damn it, people, we've got a problem here and we
Speaker 1: need help, we need you to help us figure out
Speaker 1: a way to stop what's happening to this animal being
Speaker 1: there being shot. That didn't happen. And it didn't matter
Speaker 1: if I got up at a conference and and gave
Speaker 1: a talk about what was going on, which I did,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter. Um if people interviewed me or students
Speaker 1: are biologists, it just didn't. It didn't seem to matter.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a lot of traction around it. And a
Speaker 1: lot of us have openly discussed why that, why that was.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a travesty. You know. I wish I
Speaker 1: could be like a traffic cop and direct American sentiment
Speaker 1: two to like proper areas, because we get distracted by things.
Speaker 1: But if we we had this conversation about caribou herds
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight in our lifetimes in my
Speaker 1: in my young little lifetime here we watched and allowed
Speaker 1: caribou and the lower forty eight to blink out. It
Speaker 1: just gave up. No one ever gave a shit about
Speaker 1: that ever. Ever. Yeah, we're just in Hawaii. There's a
Speaker 1: group of people in Hawaii who made it their mission
Speaker 1: to go around feeding feral house cats at night, and
Speaker 1: they have a legal team. Just just the fact that
Speaker 1: that exists is ridiculous. That coincides with like, oh, we'll
Speaker 1: just kiss the red wolf goodbye, kiss the caribou goodbye. Um,
Speaker 1: and then poor our Oh my god, what was your fault?
Speaker 1: I got thick skin. I'm okay, I just I just
Speaker 1: read too many of those headlines. Mike, you're telling you,
Speaker 1: you're telling me that you think the red wolf got
Speaker 1: kind of caught up in the hatred of the coyote
Speaker 1: and whether in the minds of folks they were really
Speaker 1: ever seen as a distinct species or there's some gray
Speaker 1: area around that. Yeah. Yeah, and that's that's something we
Speaker 1: haven't talked about, but it's a it's a very important point.
Speaker 1: Thank you Korean for bringing that up. But there has
Speaker 1: been some taxonomic debate about this. This critter as well.
Speaker 1: And and I'm not a tax on must and and
Speaker 1: I kind of look at this from the standpoint and
Speaker 1: I have from the start as long as this canaid
Speaker 1: is recognized as its own species, then I'm going to
Speaker 1: study it. Because at the time I was I was
Speaker 1: really the only p I principal investigator that was studying
Speaker 1: red wolves in the wild. And and the graduate student
Speaker 1: that was working for me, Joey hinton Um, was really
Speaker 1: the the forefront of red wolf research. There were there
Speaker 1: were other and I'm not trying to step on other
Speaker 1: anybody's toes, there were other researchers that were doing red
Speaker 1: wolf work, but Joey's dissertation research was really the the
Speaker 1: penultimate work on red wolves. And while all of this
Speaker 1: was going on, there were constant taxonomic debates about well
Speaker 1: is it is the red wolf really a species or
Speaker 1: is it just a hybrid? And yahda, and you know
Speaker 1: taxonomists and offensive taxonomists, but you know, they get paid
Speaker 1: to have these debates, and yeah, and they got hijacked
Speaker 1: by they got hijacked by the geneticist. Man like, they
Speaker 1: got overthrown by the geneticist. Yeah. Yeah, And there there
Speaker 1: was a lot of back and forth. You know, well,
Speaker 1: they're the red wolf is not a wolf, it's a hybrid. Well, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually a species and etcetera, etcetera. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're hybrids. We're human, we're human neander tall hybrids. At
Speaker 1: about the you know, it's you'd have thrown out bison recovery.
Speaker 1: They tried to throw out bison recovery on the same grounds.
Speaker 1: There's a little teatsy bit of cattle intro aggression at
Speaker 1: the screw Now when when you say hybrids, Mike, like,
Speaker 1: hybrids of what like a gray wolf and a coyote,
Speaker 1: Like they're basically that that they're just a they're hybrid canid,
Speaker 1: that that there was no such thing as a And
Speaker 1: there are are some that argue this there there's never
Speaker 1: been any such thing as a red wolf. That actually
Speaker 1: what's running around there is just a a kind of
Speaker 1: gray wolf slash you know, mutt if you will. And yeah,
Speaker 1: again that argument that mindset has been at play and
Speaker 1: has been out there for for decades. Really what's funny
Speaker 1: about that too, is it that's how species I mean,
Speaker 1: that's species creation. Yeah, you could you could say the
Speaker 1: same thing. By some understandings. You could be like, screw
Speaker 1: muled here, It's just it's a it's a it's a
Speaker 1: white tail blacktail hybrid, yeah or some such you know, yep, yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I get this question A lot in in the
Speaker 1: Turkey arena is like, well, hey, doc, this picture is
Speaker 1: this ario or amariums or an Eastern or whatever? And
Speaker 1: I'm like, um, well looks like an Eastern. But let
Speaker 1: me ask you who cares? Who really cares? Well, I
Speaker 1: wanted it from my you know, for my slam, and
Speaker 1: I'm in whatever state. Well are you within the rains
Speaker 1: that's considered that subspecies? Well yeah, then just okay, move on, man.
Speaker 1: I mean you shot a turkey and it was awesome. Um,
Speaker 1: good opportunity to bring up your slam. Steve. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I can never remember what slam I have, something like
Speaker 1: the Super Great Slay, the Royal Great Slam. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so to Cren's point, yeah, that the taxonomic issues certainly
Speaker 1: didn't help didn't help what went on with this animal
Speaker 1: because there was a narrative around well wait a minute,
Speaker 1: there's some scientists saying this is you know, it's not
Speaker 1: supposed to be a species, really, and that didn't help
Speaker 1: for sure, yeah, okay, can we ask you a turkey question? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's not as depressing as the Red Wolf for sure,
Speaker 1: Someday it might be. I don't know. I hope not,
Speaker 1: I really do. Uh. I want to ask you turkey question.
Speaker 1: Then I want you to tell people how to find
Speaker 1: you and everything. But we had a guy right in um,
Speaker 1: he says, in Missouri, and now in Idaho where I live,
Speaker 1: he hears about how a primary turkey predator is crows
Speaker 1: and ravens. We're gonna talk and later in this episode,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk a bit about ravens killing some some
Speaker 1: crazy stories about ravens killing stuff, um, and how they'll
Speaker 1: find the nests. They'll see hatchlings poults and kill them.
Speaker 1: They'll find nests and eat the eggs. And you're saying,
Speaker 1: anytime he kicks up this this Hunters saying, anytime he
Speaker 1: kicks up a hen, they'll set to him scrounging around
Speaker 1: on the ground. And this is no easy task, I'll
Speaker 1: point out, but they'll set the looking around on the
Speaker 1: ground him until they find the female's nest. M Then
Speaker 1: they'll camouflage that nest with sticks and leaves. Do her
Speaker 1: the favor of camouflage and her nest with sticks and
Speaker 1: leaves so that nothing eats them while she's gone. And
Speaker 1: he says they'll even be working a time kick up
Speaker 1: a hen, stop working the time in order to locate
Speaker 1: the nest and camouflage it. And he's wondering, Um, if
Speaker 1: anyone else does this, and if you would, as a biologist,
Speaker 1: if you would discourage or encourage this very you know,
Speaker 1: admittedly like very well intentioned conservation move. Yeah, well intentioned. Um,
Speaker 1: don't do it that. That would be my recommendation for
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. I understand the notion of
Speaker 1: the bird leaves the nest and you feel like it's
Speaker 1: your fault. You want to hide those eggs and keep
Speaker 1: these mariting predators from from getting the eggs. I know
Speaker 1: a couple of things. One, if you just get the
Speaker 1: hell out of there, she's coming back most likely. Um,
Speaker 1: if she's later an incubation, after say the first eight
Speaker 1: ten days, she's almost guaranteed to come back. And she's
Speaker 1: not going to wait that long to do it. It's
Speaker 1: not like she's going to be gone for half the day.
Speaker 1: She's coming back quickly too. If you walk around that
Speaker 1: nest and you're looking searching, you're trampling vegetation, you're leaving
Speaker 1: your scent in the area, and that's something that that
Speaker 1: predators can queue in on um beyond just the sin
Speaker 1: of the hen or or the nest. So I think
Speaker 1: in many cases, particularly with predators that our old factory,
Speaker 1: that that smell that us approaching the nest is a
Speaker 1: real problem. And that's one of the reasons that my
Speaker 1: field crews we don't We don't go to the nest
Speaker 1: until it hatches or it fails, even though we know
Speaker 1: exactly where it is. We don't go. We have but
Speaker 1: we don't typically put cameras at nest. We don't do
Speaker 1: any of these things that compromise the situation at the
Speaker 1: nest site because we're concerned with predators queuing in on
Speaker 1: on our activities and are sent more importantly so that
Speaker 1: I would I would not encourage people to do that.
Speaker 1: And if that person contacts me and he's really mad,
Speaker 1: I understand, but that would not be something I would
Speaker 1: encourage people to do. He uh, he's definitely not framing
Speaker 1: it up like, by God, this is the way to
Speaker 1: do it, and I'll do it for the rest of
Speaker 1: my life. Come hell or high. I think he's saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: I've been doing this. Yeah, it's a good idea, not
Speaker 1: not not a great idea. All right, we're gonna move
Speaker 1: on to some other stuff. Uh, Mike, but hit us
Speaker 1: with um, you know, hit us with your how to
Speaker 1: finding stuff. Yeah. So if if you want to see
Speaker 1: not red Wolf stuff, but Turkey stuff, UM, you can
Speaker 1: hit me up on any of my social media accounts
Speaker 1: on Instagram and Twitter. It's just at Wild Turkey Doc.
Speaker 1: It's all one word Wild Turkey DC and you'll see
Speaker 1: up post stuff every week about Turkey stuff of some kind, research,
Speaker 1: just general anecdotes, great but great graphics. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: tried a lot of stuff, like what animals are doing
Speaker 1: when they're wearing tracking devices and kind of how they
Speaker 1: move on the landscape, where they stay, how they react
Speaker 1: to each other, how they react to hunters. It's fat.
Speaker 1: I've got some I've got some pretty cool ones coming
Speaker 1: up for this summer too. Some stuff some students are
Speaker 1: doing now that that's pretty cool. We were doing some
Speaker 1: drone work which is really cool looking at vegetation and stuff.
Speaker 1: So I've got some pretty sweet things I think people
Speaker 1: will be interested in. So Yeah, you can find me
Speaker 1: there on Facebook. You just type in my name and
Speaker 1: if you can get the same information you want to
Speaker 1: get some radio collar action, you need to put a
Speaker 1: collar on me and my son this weekend for the
Speaker 1: last couple of days of Turkey season. Man, you can
Speaker 1: see a hardcore mortality event. I'm jealous. I hung it up.
Speaker 1: I hung it up for the year. I've I'm so
Speaker 1: tired and my wife is so mad at me. All right, man,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, man, take care
Speaker 1: of guys. Thanks Mike. Thanks. Uh. You know, we're talking
Speaker 1: about this guy, you know, Ravens killing Turkey nows uh
Speaker 1: Native Alaskan uh wroting about Ravens. He works on the
Speaker 1: remote island outside of Juno. It sounds like he's in
Speaker 1: the mining business. They got a mill shop, they got
Speaker 1: a rock pile. But he said that at their camp
Speaker 1: where he works. When I say Native Alaska, I don't
Speaker 1: mean like, like know, when someone says like I'm a
Speaker 1: Native Idahoan, they mean that they were born in Idaho.
Speaker 1: Native Alaskan. Um, you don't say Native American in Alaska.
Speaker 1: They'll say Native Alaskan. Uh says that they had they
Speaker 1: found a fawn with a broken leg at their mining camp,
Speaker 1: stumbling around, and they were able to grab it and
Speaker 1: splint its leg, and it made it back to his mom.
Speaker 1: But um, a small gang of ravens got onto it,
Speaker 1: plucked it to death, picked it to death, picking its eyes,
Speaker 1: picking at its snout. Eventually they killed it, got through
Speaker 1: its rib cage, and got to its vitals to eat.
Speaker 1: Then around their camp this is where it gets weird.
Speaker 1: It was a group of he says, four to five
Speaker 1: young male ravens around their camp like they He's wondered
Speaker 1: did this group just learned to do this? Because around
Speaker 1: their camp they then started laying waste of fawns. They
Speaker 1: watched one they were attacking a fawn and the dope
Speaker 1: kept coming in trying to defend it. And eventually the
Speaker 1: dope got some injuries on her ears, injuries on her eyes,
Speaker 1: gave up. They killed that. The best they can tell,
Speaker 1: they killed six to ten fawns around him, he said something,
Speaker 1: they just left, like they once they figured out how
Speaker 1: to do it, they just left and they got to learn.
Speaker 1: The his co workers, they were worried about what to do,
Speaker 1: and there's a you know, migratory bird act. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't legally kill them. And they were asking him, like,
Speaker 1: as an Alaska Native, maybe he can kill the ravens. Um.
Speaker 1: He explained that the relationship between his people and the
Speaker 1: ravens and their cultural beliefs and um, that was out
Speaker 1: of the question for him. And he's warning, has anybody
Speaker 1: ever heard of this? So we got looking at it
Speaker 1: a little bit. Man, they're in the livestock world. Ah,
Speaker 1: it's a real known thing. There's like manuals. What is
Speaker 1: some of this stuff here? We got manuals about, um,
Speaker 1: the cost to livestock of ravens killing baby lambs. We
Speaker 1: got a picture of someone made a little pile of
Speaker 1: lambs that all look like they have like racket not
Speaker 1: even like like like golf ball sized holes bored into
Speaker 1: them all over the place. Is this just a this
Speaker 1: is just a raven thing, not a crow thing? Do
Speaker 1: we know crows as well? Crows as well? And so
Speaker 1: Heffelfinger brought this up. He brought up, how there's that
Speaker 1: old saying, you know, like the how the different herds
Speaker 1: and stuff are murder of crows. He doesn't know, but
Speaker 1: he brought up it makes you think about the term
Speaker 1: murder of crows when they'll descend on livestock out when
Speaker 1: they'll descend on livestock operations. A livestock manager in Colorado
Speaker 1: was saying they had a very hard winter in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight tons of snow food got real scarce. They
Speaker 1: lost a lot of calves. The two ravens getting them
Speaker 1: around the eyes, the tailhead, which I guess is where
Speaker 1: the tail joins the body. I've never heard of that
Speaker 1: term tailhead, meaty part of the hip. She's talks about
Speaker 1: golf golf balls. Oh, there it is, golf ball size
Speaker 1: holes pecked all the way over down to the bone.
Speaker 1: He said, it's sickening. Yeah, that was a bad winner.
Speaker 1: There's a huge meal to kill that one. There's a
Speaker 1: book the American Crowing the common raven and it gets
Speaker 1: into their predatory instincts. And then the Department of agg
Speaker 1: has this paper about ravens and it talks about just
Speaker 1: their insane intelligence and that groups of them will learn
Speaker 1: to do things. Talks about being bad for crop damage,
Speaker 1: but also praying on livestock, newborn livestock, and then complications
Speaker 1: where ravens become a hindrance to endangered threatened in sensitive
Speaker 1: speed sees this, uh Department Agriculture report gets into where
Speaker 1: they have impacts on sensitive threatened endangered species. Um we're
Speaker 1: part of, like we're part of recovery plans are impacted
Speaker 1: by them, Desert tortoises, California least terms, snowy plovers, piping plovers, plovers,
Speaker 1: What hell is that word? Plover? Plover, piping plover, the
Speaker 1: old California condor, marbled mr letts, San Clemente loggerhead shrikes,
Speaker 1: greater stage grouse are good friends. Uh goes on and on.
Speaker 1: So that guy is it's interesting that that guy had
Speaker 1: that like occurrence around that camp and it winds up
Speaker 1: being like pretty well corroborated as not not unusual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not unusual at all. I mean this Department of agg
Speaker 1: paper is fascinating in terms of like what behaviors it seems,
Speaker 1: documents of of ravens and just kind of digging into
Speaker 1: like local town public publications. You'd see that this happens
Speaker 1: so much with livestock. But I wonder if other listeners
Speaker 1: have ever come across you know, like we're looking at
Speaker 1: this photo of of a bunch of young lamb exactly
Speaker 1: as Steve had mentioned, with like golf ball size holes
Speaker 1: like a cookie cutter, you know, part of their abdomen
Speaker 1: in their eyes. And I just wonder if any hunters
Speaker 1: or you know, folks around the outdoors have ever come
Speaker 1: across a fallen or some young deer I got. I
Speaker 1: got a tree surgeon I used to work with when
Speaker 1: I was in the tree bizz. He watched and he
Speaker 1: had like a blow by blow account, like I have
Speaker 1: no doubt that this guy watched it happen, not not
Speaker 1: Crols and Ravens. He watched two golden eagles kill a
Speaker 1: prong horn. He said, man, it took They took their
Speaker 1: time with it too, And he said they very much
Speaker 1: knew what they were doing. And it wouldn't run. It's
Speaker 1: just going circles and hang out. It's like, how are
Speaker 1: you gonna run? Remembering the fog night, we saw those
Speaker 1: golden eagles dive bomb in that elk and they were
Speaker 1: really harassing it. And there was something about it that
Speaker 1: was acting weird too, like they were like they were
Speaker 1: very intent on it. Dive bomb in its neck, dive
Speaker 1: down its face. The guy that saw him hit the
Speaker 1: kill the pronghorn, he said they'd come down and rake
Speaker 1: it's back. They'd come down, rake it's back and then
Speaker 1: crashing into the ground like they maintained that level of velocity.
Speaker 1: So he goes it actually like kind of like poof
Speaker 1: when they hit the dirt. They'd be going so fast
Speaker 1: and just rake their talent and it's aid. Eventually they
Speaker 1: got a big wound on its back and and uh
Speaker 1: got down into the backbone and tendons and stuff, and
Speaker 1: that was it. He said, it was just running circles.
Speaker 1: So did it well, you may not know, but did
Speaker 1: it die of exhaustion or blood loss or they just
Speaker 1: wore it down and picked it apart. He said, they
Speaker 1: got a wound on it. I mean grass, I mean,
Speaker 1: the stress has to be just such an enormous factor.
Speaker 1: Couldn't run anymore. Uh, we're just out in Hawaii. I
Speaker 1: was gonna talk about this stuff. Remind me of something
Speaker 1: I was gonna mention about the spear. The spear fisher.
Speaker 1: Kimmy Werner was telling me just about predation things and
Speaker 1: she was one time in the water with killer whales
Speaker 1: workers is the PC term for him. Uh, Their feed
Speaker 1: on herring and they're just chasing these big balls and
Speaker 1: harring around underneath her bubbling them, or she didn't. She
Speaker 1: didn't mention that part, but she mentioned this. She sees
Speaker 1: a half of a herring coming up, floating up towards
Speaker 1: the surface, bubbling, and she's like, why hell's it bubbling
Speaker 1: and realized it was like like it's swim bladder had
Speaker 1: just been nicked when it was cut in half, so
Speaker 1: it was like kind of making a bubble line as
Speaker 1: it came up half of you know, a big herring
Speaker 1: is means not as long as your hand, right half
Speaker 1: of a herring. All of a sudden here comes a
Speaker 1: bull killer whale up SIPs that little half harrying down
Speaker 1: and goes back down again, just for a little crumb,
Speaker 1: like the thousands of pounds of that thing. And he's like, oh, miss,
Speaker 1: that one came up and nabbed it. What should be like? Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it'd be like you going out of your
Speaker 1: way to go grab a a quarter of a smartie
Speaker 1: wait waiting like the chalkiness like sugar and chalk mixed together.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about neco waifs? Those are? Those
Speaker 1: are heinous? Anyway? A guy wrote in a couple of
Speaker 1: interesting things that we got from other good piece of
Speaker 1: feedback is uh, we're talking about getting accidentally shot. Guy
Speaker 1: was messing around the be begun when he was a kid,
Speaker 1: and he had one of those kinds where you had
Speaker 1: to unscrew the bear old cap to load it. And
Speaker 1: he was unscrewing the barrel cat with his teeth, got
Speaker 1: a baby shot into his tongue and carried the baby
Speaker 1: in his tongue and dental X rays he could keep
Speaker 1: an eye on that little b because dental X rays
Speaker 1: had turned it up there. Another guy wrote in there
Speaker 1: were in Kentucky on a southeast Kentucky on a float trip.
Speaker 1: They get to a gravel bar. This is like the
Speaker 1: list of things that will make a turkey gobble wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning. They got a camp on the beach.
Speaker 1: There's a big cliff cross from camp. He gets up
Speaker 1: in the morning, makes some mimosas pops open the prosecco
Speaker 1: and got a shot gobl off prosecco. Bottle man, that's
Speaker 1: good stuff. Uh Northerly that came in is interesting? Me
Speaker 1: is I used to fish right when I lived in Seattle.
Speaker 1: I was I was a a major cause of perch
Speaker 1: mortality in Lake Washington. And I don't mind like I
Speaker 1: don't like the spot burned, dude, but it's beyond it.
Speaker 1: Like it's a huge lake. Anywhere you go at the
Speaker 1: edge of a weed bed, which is the entire perimeter
Speaker 1: of the lake, go out to eighteen feet of water,
Speaker 1: and as you catch perch, a cyclone of perch comes
Speaker 1: up with the perch. Me and my boy caught seventy
Speaker 1: in an hour, like usually like doubles. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna mess it up. And now that lake was
Speaker 1: in the Midwest, old men with lun skiffs would empty
Speaker 1: it out. They would part camper trailers along the banks
Speaker 1: and emptied out, but no one there cares. When I
Speaker 1: was serch scenary, they had health advisories on the perch,
Speaker 1: and I'd always be I'd always be having perch fries
Speaker 1: and pete. They're not supposed to those fish. The health
Speaker 1: advisory was pertain to perch over ten inches or some
Speaker 1: such and it was you always supposed to eat certain
Speaker 1: amounts like so many ounces every so many months of
Speaker 1: fit of perch over a certain size. And the health
Speaker 1: advice because they used to have a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: heavy metals, industrial solvents from all the manufacturing in Seattle, Um,
Speaker 1: someone just said, you'll be pleased to know a lot
Speaker 1: of those health advisories for Lake Washington have been dropped.
Speaker 1: Now there's only to fish from Lake Washington with the
Speaker 1: health advisory the common carp in the Northern pikemantal. The
Speaker 1: health advisory is everyone should not eat but perch. Karina
Speaker 1: is gonna find out. Is this because it's getting cleaner?
Speaker 1: And it is? Right? It is we're like limiting pollution,
Speaker 1: doing clean up measures and then time and flushing and
Speaker 1: rain water, right, all all help dilution is the solution
Speaker 1: to pollution? Uh? Is it that? Or is it that
Speaker 1: they realize that you can eat a lot more of
Speaker 1: that nasty ship than you thought you could. Karin's gonna
Speaker 1: find out is the water better or is the monitoring
Speaker 1: or the recommendations different? Right? Um, I need to know.
Speaker 1: But it is good to know because now when I
Speaker 1: if I was ever go back there and have a
Speaker 1: giant perch fry, I wouldn't yelled just need I wouldn't
Speaker 1: need to be able to say to people, well you
Speaker 1: see these aren't These are all nine and three quarters
Speaker 1: of an inch long, and they don't get they don't
Speaker 1: kill you till they're ten like now, I just be
Speaker 1: able to be like. In fact, no, there is no
Speaker 1: health advisory on yellow perch in Lake Washington. It would
Speaker 1: have made perch fries more fun. That was some good
Speaker 1: fishing there. Missouri had its first black bear season. Someone
Speaker 1: explained this, Yeah, first black bear season and quite some time,
Speaker 1: might be like a hundred years. I don't know when
Speaker 1: the last one was. We don't have that in our notes.
Speaker 1: But they were dang mere extra payting, just like next
Speaker 1: door over there, and uh, we're not next door. I
Speaker 1: guess Arkansas would be to the south, correct, which is
Speaker 1: next door? Ask lay Oh speaking in Arkansas, guys sent
Speaker 1: in a new one. This is terrible, but we're talking
Speaker 1: about Arkansas and dogs. He says. What they call a
Speaker 1: siphoning hose is Arkansas credit card as for clean too.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, I'm sorry. Well anyways, Uh, conservation efforts have
Speaker 1: have brought the bears back in Missouri and now they
Speaker 1: have a estimated eight hundred and they're going to give
Speaker 1: out four hundred black bear permits for for October. Damn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool. Nine year over your population growth. They're
Speaker 1: figuring that they're gonna have um in the next ten years,
Speaker 1: they'll double their population. I just saw something from I
Speaker 1: think it was Iowa Fishing Game that said they're expecting
Speaker 1: bears to become more and more prevalent in Iowa. So
Speaker 1: they're spreading. They're good, They're good, they're good at uh
Speaker 1: they figured out. Remember we had Carl Malcolm on years
Speaker 1: ago when we talked about the Wisconsin supersow and his
Speaker 1: he was specifically studying black bears on the edges of range.
Speaker 1: So his particular thing was, I mean in different areas,
Speaker 1: they're moving in different directions, right, but in his area,
Speaker 1: it was bears in Wisconsin moving to the south, and um,
Speaker 1: what was crazy is the health in fecundity of those
Speaker 1: bears on the edge, bigger, more cubs, batter like they
Speaker 1: you know, because they're in there moving into new untapped resources. Man,
Speaker 1: and presuming you're talking about smart bears, because they're coming
Speaker 1: from population. It's not like you're like moving them into
Speaker 1: a whole new area. It's like he's familiar with the area.
Speaker 1: He's just pioneering new spots where no other bears are
Speaker 1: in there messing around. And that super saw remember that
Speaker 1: put off something like four years, four years in a
Speaker 1: row four cubs or something. It did five, it did
Speaker 1: five that it got to one hundred pounds, took a
Speaker 1: year off as they do, did five cubs, got them
Speaker 1: all to a hundred pounds. That's when they quit monitoring them.
Speaker 1: And then when they left her off, she was pregnant
Speaker 1: with five super sou super sou pretty soon. Man, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be like the bald eagle. You know. When we
Speaker 1: were kids, like anytime someone saw one, if you were
Speaker 1: traveling somewhere where they lived, you'd be like, oh, we
Speaker 1: could see a bald eagle. And now people are just like,
Speaker 1: it's scavenging something like that. Franklin thought about him. He
Speaker 1: thought they were just gross scavengers. Yeah. Where I grew
Speaker 1: up in northwestern Pennsylvania, there was never bears when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, and they're all over them. They got
Speaker 1: the biggest damn bears in the country. Well, there was
Speaker 1: always bears, but not like way up in the northwest
Speaker 1: part of the state along Lake Erie. And now they're
Speaker 1: like in the city of Erie. Do we know what
Speaker 1: percentage of bare tags purchased across states are filled? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That I was when I was surprised to see the
Speaker 1: four hundred I would like to know as a slow
Speaker 1: open slow can't open right there? Um, I'd be curious
Speaker 1: to know if you were allowed, Like I'm I'm assuming
Speaker 1: you can't bait and you can't run hounds, because if
Speaker 1: you had a hundred bears and you'd never hunted the
Speaker 1: population and it was gloves off, I'm baiting and hounding,
Speaker 1: You're gonna kill a lot of bears. I wonder if
Speaker 1: it's that you can't and they're giving out four hundred
Speaker 1: tags because they think they'll kill a hunter bears because
Speaker 1: they think the efficacy efficacy even that would be a
Speaker 1: pretty high. But I mean, if you I'd be curious
Speaker 1: because I was like, man, that's like, I wonder if
Speaker 1: you know I bet Reuter's right now. I was writing
Speaker 1: an article, Um, Missouri to kill half of all bears.
Speaker 1: This is something we don't cover Taiwan. We need to
Speaker 1: Taiwan death. This is an interesting this. I was shocked
Speaker 1: to find this out about Taiwan. Taiwan has indigenous groups.
Speaker 1: So as we'll talk about a little bit later here
Speaker 1: in the US we have our predominant Euro American population
Speaker 1: that displays indigenous peoples, and in Taiwan, the have indigenous
Speaker 1: groups and people are gunning. That's a good pun. People
Speaker 1: are gunning for their hunting rights. So they've been Taiwan
Speaker 1: has sixteen indigenous groups that hunt two point five percent
Speaker 1: of the population. Uh. They can only hunt on certain
Speaker 1: days and they have to use homemade rifles. This one like,
Speaker 1: I don't understand that. Yeah, so traditionally they had use
Speaker 1: homemade rifles. Homemade rifles are dangerous. So they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to keep hunting as our tradition dictates,
Speaker 1: we would like to do it with safer firearms. But
Speaker 1: there's a big battle going on. The Wildlife Conservation Act
Speaker 1: is seeking to restrict indigenous hunting rights, saying you can
Speaker 1: only use homemade guns. And this is interesting. They would
Speaker 1: have to file an application and then report how many
Speaker 1: and what kind of animals they'd hunt. So beforehand you
Speaker 1: gotta tell what your plans are. Then afterwards you got
Speaker 1: to issue a report about what you got. This is
Speaker 1: where it gets interesting. In their tradition, hunting animals are
Speaker 1: the blessing of ancestral spirits. You cannot boast or show off.
Speaker 1: These people are probably not on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: would not like my Instagram page, which I use the
Speaker 1: boast and show off about stuff I caught. So if
Speaker 1: you boast or show off about your hunting prowess, you're
Speaker 1: punished by God in their legal system. So they don't
Speaker 1: want to issue reports tallying up what they got that
Speaker 1: you then sent off in the mail. It looks like
Speaker 1: they're not gonna overturn these new rules because they say
Speaker 1: that environmental protections are as equally important as indigenous rights.
Speaker 1: This all started with a lengthy legal battle. Guy named
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I don't I don't know how he pronounces
Speaker 1: the name. Tama Tuloom, Toma Taloom. I don't know Toma Taloom.
Speaker 1: Let's say he's sixty two years old. Back in two thousand,
Speaker 1: um he killed a couple protected species were a modified rifle,
Speaker 1: so um, he was trying to feed his mother and
Speaker 1: she had always been raised on wild game, preferred wild game,
Speaker 1: and he killed a car and protected species got three
Speaker 1: and a half years in the old clink. And that's
Speaker 1: what started this whole brew HAA, I'm rooting for the
Speaker 1: indigenous hunters. It seems unlikely that they're the ones that
Speaker 1: are responsible for That's what it gets into. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: used to have so market hunting. Up until nine, they
Speaker 1: had commercial market hunting. They banned commercial market hunting, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the endanger they hunt mount jack deer,
Speaker 1: they hunt monkeys. A lot of that stuff started to recover.
Speaker 1: And they're saying that subsistence hunting by indigenous peoples is
Speaker 1: not what's driving extinctions. Yeah, m hm hm hm hm bullshits?
Speaker 1: What would I say? Alright, So moving on, but but
Speaker 1: keeping what. We're gonna move away from our Thai our
Speaker 1: Taiwan desk, but we're gonna stay on and and and
Speaker 1: stay on indigenous culture, indigenous hunting rights. We're gonna talk about.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk to our next guests here. Also joining remotely,
Speaker 1: we're still having like residual let me explain this real quick.
Speaker 1: So COVID forced us to do a lot of remote stuff,
Speaker 1: which I don't really like. But then I started to
Speaker 1: kind of like aspects of it because it allows you.
Speaker 1: We used to I used to have a firm like
Speaker 1: no remote guest rule. But and as much as I'd
Speaker 1: like to have people here, it kind of opened up
Speaker 1: like there's people that we wanted to talk to you
Speaker 1: that simply couldn't talk to you. Because of issues lining
Speaker 1: up schedules, so um one of the long term pandemic results.
Speaker 1: You know, I keep meeting people who say, like, I,
Speaker 1: for now, I will always wear a mask on airplanes
Speaker 1: now that I'm used to it. Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: if we talked about this recently, but I've been talking
Speaker 1: with quite a few people about a couple of interesting
Speaker 1: things that we realized that we haven't had a cold
Speaker 1: or a flu in well over a year. It's come
Speaker 1: through our household, and I've talked to a couple of
Speaker 1: doctors and they said that you can look at national
Speaker 1: flu numbers and there was no peak last winter. It
Speaker 1: just stayed as flat as a pancake all through the winter.
Speaker 1: And you're like, there's two thoughts. One it's like, oh, great,
Speaker 1: we should just all wear masks all the time and
Speaker 1: nobody's gonna get sick, and you know, great, But at
Speaker 1: the same time, we do need to get sick to
Speaker 1: build immunities and stuff. So yeah, there's there's that, And
Speaker 1: there's also like if someone said to me, you can
Speaker 1: kind of go where you want to go and do
Speaker 1: what you want to do, but you might get a
Speaker 1: cold now and then, or you can hide in your
Speaker 1: house with a mask on and never get a cold.
Speaker 1: I'd probably be like, yeah, I'll take the cold definitely.
Speaker 1: UM be the way like some people I know, like
Speaker 1: very reasonable rational people are like, now that I'm used
Speaker 1: to it, I always fly with the freaking mask because
Speaker 1: every time I go somewhere in the winter, I get sick.
Speaker 1: Another long term COVID impact will be that we will
Speaker 1: always allow to limit a degree from moote people to
Speaker 1: come in and tell us about stuff. It's a long
Speaker 1: term like COVID impact. So today telling us about some stuff, Jacob,
Speaker 1: I know, he just told me how to say it.
Speaker 1: Jacob Brusard. Jacob Brusard, that's right, okay. Uh comes from
Speaker 1: his family. It's from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians,
Speaker 1: and he's a law student Arizona State University UM doing
Speaker 1: his law degree along with a certificate in Federal Indian
Speaker 1: Law and a concerned and passionate hunter. Jacob, Jacob, I
Speaker 1: know I filled it in, but go ahead and hit
Speaker 1: any missing points there, a little bit about where you're
Speaker 1: at in your in your in your in your young career,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna get into some we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into some definitions and stuff like that that are helpful
Speaker 1: to know. Yeah, I appreciate the introduction, Steve. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: like you said, I'm in law school now, but prior
Speaker 1: to coming to law school, I graduated from University of
Speaker 1: Southern California, and and I worked for a year in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. For the National Congress of American Indians, which
Speaker 1: is the largest most representative Indian advocacy organization on the
Speaker 1: Hill and in the nation. UM. And we did a
Speaker 1: lot of work advocating for Indian country, addressing issues that
Speaker 1: are pertinent to Indian country, including things like land use, hunting,
Speaker 1: and fishing rights on tribal lands as well as elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And I've also done some work in Los Angeles alongside
Speaker 1: the Human Relations Commission, working on again some issues that
Speaker 1: are pertinent to Indian country in uh sort of a
Speaker 1: city context, so sort of spanning the board from whether
Speaker 1: it be urban or rural land and everything in between.
Speaker 1: I've been very fortunate to have some experience learning from
Speaker 1: nationwide leaders both in Indian country and some of our
Speaker 1: elected representatives, and and how we're touching on issues as
Speaker 1: they pertained to Indian country. UH. No top here, I
Speaker 1: have a question for you. Is it equally acceptable, Like
Speaker 1: is it is it synonymous to say Native American or
Speaker 1: to say Indian, Like in your mind, is it it's
Speaker 1: either as cool? Yeah, that's a great question, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's funny because it ties into you know, some
Speaker 1: of the things we'll talk about later. And Um, the
Speaker 1: the issue comes up a lot, right, you know, folks,
Speaker 1: some folks take offense to the term Indian. Some folks
Speaker 1: are completely fine with it. Uh, I would say, in
Speaker 1: terms of navigating people's impressions around the terms native American
Speaker 1: is the term that I think is most widely accepted
Speaker 1: in referencing individuals. However, Uh, the Constitution of the United
Speaker 1: States and the laws that we have set out as
Speaker 1: it pertains to the Native community references Native Americans as Indians,
Speaker 1: and that the political designation. And so it's actually a
Speaker 1: really fascinating, uh conversation around what is most comfortable for
Speaker 1: folks from different backgrounds to use in terms of the terminology.
Speaker 1: But you'll hear me today use the term Indian and
Speaker 1: use the term Indian country. And the reason I use
Speaker 1: those terms is because we have actually codified in law
Speaker 1: those terms referencing tribal nations as Indians and referencing anything
Speaker 1: that pertains to those communities as Indian country. And Indian
Speaker 1: country can mean actual reservation lands, it can mean lands
Speaker 1: that are owned by tribes, or it can mean lands
Speaker 1: that are neither of those things, but there is perhaps
Speaker 1: a tribal community living on those lands. UH. And so
Speaker 1: Indian country is sort of the blanket term we use
Speaker 1: both in terms of legislating law. The judiciary uses that
Speaker 1: term in writing judicial opinions, and so whenever we're talking
Speaker 1: about native communities, those terms come up a lot, and
Speaker 1: I'd say you're completely fine to use the term uh
Speaker 1: Indian country and referencing the land um and in referring
Speaker 1: to the communities, I think tribal nations or tribal communities
Speaker 1: is probably the best terminology to be using, just to
Speaker 1: help create that designation of exactly who it is we're
Speaker 1: talking about in the language that our nation's leaders are
Speaker 1: using themselves. Yeah we were. I mentioned this prior, but
Speaker 1: we were on now Nevak Island in the Baring Sea
Speaker 1: one time, and it's the um, it's the coals. The
Speaker 1: people on the main land are the Yu. Pick. This
Speaker 1: is this right? The yu pick and then on the
Speaker 1: on on now Nevak they they are Chupic. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: and they would say chupick eskimo. Now I know, like
Speaker 1: in my later life, I'm always corrected from people who say,
Speaker 1: like it's a derogatory term. It's a pejorative. It means
Speaker 1: like eat raw fish. It was given to them, and
Speaker 1: you'll hear people clarify like into it, and you can't
Speaker 1: say that the word eskimo. You shouldn't say the word eskimo.
Speaker 1: And I asked some Chupicks who called themselves chupick eskimo,
Speaker 1: and I said, what what is your preferred term? And
Speaker 1: he goes, if I'm not an eskimo, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the hell I am. And was adamant in that
Speaker 1: case too, that that was like, that's what he preferred
Speaker 1: to be called. That's what he that's what his people
Speaker 1: were known as. And so I felt to put you
Speaker 1: in this weird situation a little bit where certain people
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight are reading your use of
Speaker 1: that word in a way that isn't aligned with how
Speaker 1: he traditionally spoke of and viewed himself. And so you
Speaker 1: kind of either like right, either right by the local
Speaker 1: or you're right by this maybe ill informed idea from
Speaker 1: the outside about what people are supposed to call themselves.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the things that happens with
Speaker 1: a lot of folks as they get like, um, we're
Speaker 1: open to complexity in some areas, but people get piste
Speaker 1: when it seems like it's complicated to figure out what
Speaker 1: names people like, and they're like, to hell with it,
Speaker 1: I'll just say whatever I want because those people can't
Speaker 1: get their stories straight, you know, or some such thing.
Speaker 1: And so I found it's a little more effective just
Speaker 1: to kind of like hopefully just be able to ask
Speaker 1: and not be not and not be offensive and not
Speaker 1: be offensive and asking right right, and ultimately you can't
Speaker 1: go wrong there. You know, if if someone asked me
Speaker 1: for what's, you know, your single piece of advice, I'd say,
Speaker 1: just ask, because like you said, I mean, there are
Speaker 1: I know tribal citizens who refer to themselves exclusively as Indians.
Speaker 1: I know other tribal citis citizens who take offense to
Speaker 1: that and refer to themselves exclusively as Native American. And
Speaker 1: then also, you know, depending on where you are in
Speaker 1: the world, different tribal communities in different countries might refer
Speaker 1: to themselves as native, as Aboriginal, and you slew of
Speaker 1: other terms, and I think the safest thing you can
Speaker 1: do is ask. But coming from my angle and those
Speaker 1: of us who work in and around and with the law,
Speaker 1: we use that term Indian and Indian country. Uh, specifically
Speaker 1: because that's the term used in the law, not necessarily
Speaker 1: because it's the term we prefer. Yeah. Now, our our interests,
Speaker 1: as you know, um around the term sovereign nation will
Speaker 1: often come around with that. Reservations will often have um
Speaker 1: their own wildlife management systems, right, so you can go
Speaker 1: down and you know, you go to there's some states
Speaker 1: where it might be illegal to hunt black bears with hounds,
Speaker 1: but then on on a reservation it is legal to
Speaker 1: hunt black bears with hounds. Or they have completely different
Speaker 1: season structures and you have to get a separate license.
Speaker 1: Like there's there's reservations here in Montana. You um, you
Speaker 1: need to go buy a tribal hunting license. Okay, because
Speaker 1: we'll hear the term like because it's a sovereign nation. Um,
Speaker 1: you don't need to like don't you can talk you
Speaker 1: don't need to like talk about it through the lens
Speaker 1: of just wildlife management. But but explain what we mean
Speaker 1: when we say a sovereign nation. Yeah, it's a great question,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think it's a it's a topic
Speaker 1: that not a lot of people really fully understand because
Speaker 1: it's so complex and in a lot of ways, it's
Speaker 1: almost foreign to us and doesn't come up a lot
Speaker 1: in you know, basic educational courses. As we're coming up.
Speaker 1: We we learn a lot, I think in elementary school
Speaker 1: and high school about this idea of federalism and what
Speaker 1: that means is this conversation, in this discourse between the
Speaker 1: United States federal government as a whole, and then the
Speaker 1: fifty states and their relationship between them. And states are
Speaker 1: actually their own separate sovereign entity. And that's why when
Speaker 1: you go into a given state, maybe you're traveling and
Speaker 1: you go to Montana, for example, you might not be
Speaker 1: from Montana, but you're still expected to abide by Montana's lass.
Speaker 1: And that's because Montana is their own sovereign entity. And
Speaker 1: tribes are really the same way. And the way that
Speaker 1: comes about is because during the era of colonization, the
Speaker 1: United States often entered into treaties with tribes, and when
Speaker 1: you look at when it is that the United States
Speaker 1: signs a treaty or enters into a treaty with another nation.
Speaker 1: It's just that they only sign a treaty with another nation.
Speaker 1: And so in signing a treaty, we recognize a given
Speaker 1: group as a sovereign community. And so if the United
Speaker 1: States wants to enter into a treaty with community that's
Speaker 1: in South America or that's in Africa, they are inherently
Speaker 1: in doing so, most often recognizing that group, or they
Speaker 1: have already recognized that group as its own sovereign nation.
Speaker 1: And so the treaty concept is really important in Indian
Speaker 1: country because it's a constitutionally recognized contract between two sovereign nations.
Speaker 1: And so when we understand that, we see that the
Speaker 1: United States is actually this really unique land where we're
Speaker 1: a body of three sovereigns. We have the United States
Speaker 1: federal government, we have the states, and then we have tribes.
Speaker 1: And these treaties between the United States and tribes are
Speaker 1: all protected underneath the Constitution UH and they exist, as
Speaker 1: the Judiciary has told us, the supreme law of the
Speaker 1: land um. And so it's really critical to tribal communities
Speaker 1: who want to be able to exercise some regulatory authority
Speaker 1: like you're mentioning, being able to control some of the
Speaker 1: wildlife management on their lands, to have these treaties or
Speaker 1: other agreements that established them as federally recognized tribes. So
Speaker 1: this concept of federal recognition is really important because when
Speaker 1: the United States elects to federally recognize a tribe, whether
Speaker 1: that was done decade ds ago or whether it's done today,
Speaker 1: and it still is happening today, more and more tribes
Speaker 1: are becoming federally recognized. Ah. It sort of entitles the
Speaker 1: tribe to have all of these powers that they have
Speaker 1: traditionally exercised to control certain elements of the land that
Speaker 1: they occupy, and that is designated for them and held
Speaker 1: in trust for them by the federal government. And there's
Speaker 1: a shockingly large number I think for a lot of
Speaker 1: people of these federally recognized tribes, you know, I I know,
Speaker 1: just talking with some colleagues and folks who aren't necessarily
Speaker 1: thoroughly involved in the conversation around Indian country, and maybe
Speaker 1: they learned what whatever the public schooling system taught them
Speaker 1: coming up through elementary school and such, and when they
Speaker 1: ask me about you know, is Native American is the
Speaker 1: idea of Indian communities is at all pretty uniform, is
Speaker 1: it homogeneous? And a lot of folks are shocked to
Speaker 1: find out just how many tribes there are that are
Speaker 1: distinct sovereign nations. And today in the United States there's
Speaker 1: actually five hundred and seventy three distinct federally recognized tribes.
Speaker 1: If you to put that to me, If you'd put
Speaker 1: that to me, and one of the options was like,
Speaker 1: way less than a hundred out? Is that way less
Speaker 1: than right? And I think, you know, I would argue
Speaker 1: that probably the majority of Americans would you know, not
Speaker 1: a lot of us are growing up near communities that
Speaker 1: have a tribal nation nearby. And even for those that are,
Speaker 1: again there's usually only exposure to a few tribes. And
Speaker 1: it's difficult to conceptualize that. Within the United States, we have,
Speaker 1: like I said early, we have fifty distinct sovereigns in
Speaker 1: all of the states, and then within that there's five
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy three additional independence sovereign nations um that
Speaker 1: all exist under the purview of the United States federal government. Uh.
Speaker 1: And these tribes all have their own laws, they can
Speaker 1: set up their own regulations. They can just ey'd what
Speaker 1: is the process for being deemed a citizen of that
Speaker 1: nation and then what rights you're entitled to as a
Speaker 1: citizen of that nation. And a lot of people are also,
Speaker 1: you know, shocked to see the extent of what it
Speaker 1: means to be sovereign. Uh. You know. The fun fact
Speaker 1: that kind of share with a lot of people is
Speaker 1: that tribes if they want to, and none to my
Speaker 1: knowledge do, but they could print their own money, they
Speaker 1: could form their own military if they wanted to, and
Speaker 1: they can trade with other nations. And a lot of
Speaker 1: tribes today just as a means of economic development, are
Speaker 1: doing a great deal of uh, contracting and development work
Speaker 1: with other nations besides the United States in terms of
Speaker 1: building up and bolstering their own economies and trading with
Speaker 1: other nations. Uh. And this again is just all a
Speaker 1: very meaningful exercise of what it means to be sovereign,
Speaker 1: even in a way that goes beyond just there borders
Speaker 1: in their land. We are we cover, you know, over
Speaker 1: the years, we cover a fair bit about the whoever
Speaker 1: is running the Department of Interior, because that department oversees
Speaker 1: the vast majority of our public lands. Um, we talked
Speaker 1: a lot about the you know when when Zinky came
Speaker 1: in with Trump and sort of a lot of uh
Speaker 1: high expectations around Zinky as an avowed hunter angler, and
Speaker 1: then his tenure there did not go real well. Um.
Speaker 1: His replacement was Bernhardt, who there was a lot of
Speaker 1: handwringing early on with Bernhardt because he was coming from
Speaker 1: the extraction industries. But wind up doing you know, there
Speaker 1: were some areas where we definitely had disagreement, but I
Speaker 1: want up in my in my view, Um, it was
Speaker 1: a pretty good Secretary Interior and did a lot of
Speaker 1: good work in some important places. Was disappointing other areas,
Speaker 1: but a lot of good stuff. And one the respect
Speaker 1: of the conservation community because he was fourth right. Um,
Speaker 1: if he was gonna go against you on something, he
Speaker 1: would save you a lot of time. I just know
Speaker 1: from talking. This is like the reputation. If he's gonna
Speaker 1: go against you on something, he'd save you a lot
Speaker 1: of time by saying he's gonna go against him. There's
Speaker 1: nothing that's gonna happen. If there's room to move, he
Speaker 1: tell you there's room to move, let's talk. And so
Speaker 1: he was regarded as like a good person to deal with.
Speaker 1: You might not win everything, but with the conservation community,
Speaker 1: cordial relationship, forthcoming, well informed, UM a respected adversary where
Speaker 1: it need be. Uh, what's your take on on Biden's
Speaker 1: appointee Deb Halen, who will point out first Native American
Speaker 1: UM to take on Secretary Interior, and so I should
Speaker 1: I'd like you to explain kind of like why that
Speaker 1: matters because there's I talked about public lands management, but
Speaker 1: there's a little hell of a lot more that the
Speaker 1: Secretary of Interior does beyond They have implications for um,
Speaker 1: the fact that Hayland is UM native, right, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a great point that you bring up
Speaker 1: that just you know, the vast scope of what it
Speaker 1: is the Department of the Interior actually handles, right, And
Speaker 1: so you know, i'd say, looking back at that idea
Speaker 1: we just talked about, which is tribal sovereignty, what sort
Speaker 1: of is the next step? Right? Okay, a tribe today,
Speaker 1: Let's say they get recognized today and they go through
Speaker 1: the process, which is a quite extensive one to receive
Speaker 1: that federal recognition, and now the tribe is in this
Speaker 1: position where they have hopefully some land set aside for them,
Speaker 1: they have their community, maybe it's a community of both
Speaker 1: native and non native individuals, tribal citizens non tribal citizens
Speaker 1: on the same land. And the question comes up, Okay,
Speaker 1: how are they now coordinating with the federal government on
Speaker 1: any relevant issue that might come up. And the department
Speaker 1: that is assigned via the Executive Branch to handle that
Speaker 1: is the Department of the Interior. And under the Department
Speaker 1: of the Interior exists the Bureau of Indian Affairs UH,
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Indian Education, and several other sub agencies
Speaker 1: that are handling and addressing issues pertinent to Indian country.
Speaker 1: And so when deb Holland was selected and appointed as
Speaker 1: UH Secretary of the Interior and subsequently confirmed, it felt like,
Speaker 1: I would say the general consensus in Indian country was
Speaker 1: just this huge success because it means a lot of things.
Speaker 1: First of all, to have representation at one of the
Speaker 1: highest levels of government is just a huge win for
Speaker 1: any community because it uh it does a lot for
Speaker 1: younger generations who are looking up and seeing people that
Speaker 1: are maybe from their community or look like them, understand
Speaker 1: some of the things they've gone through in their life.
Speaker 1: To see that leadership up there, But beyond that, it
Speaker 1: can be very meaningful to have someone who understands the
Speaker 1: needs of tribal communities having a hand in directing these
Speaker 1: sub agencies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in how
Speaker 1: they serve those communities. And so it was a really
Speaker 1: you know, big win. But even beyond just who she
Speaker 1: is as a native individual, you know, she comes from
Speaker 1: a military family, she grew up in a public schooling system,
Speaker 1: she's a parent, UM, and she's you know, been known
Speaker 1: to express some of her memories both with her family
Speaker 1: growing up in her family now spending a lot of
Speaker 1: time on public lands, and her family themselves are and
Speaker 1: she herself are all hunters. And so it's something that
Speaker 1: for me is a native individual but also a concerned
Speaker 1: hunter and angler who wants to see someone who's a
Speaker 1: responsible individual heading the helm of what is the agency
Speaker 1: responsible for my access to public lands? UM, it's encouraging
Speaker 1: to me to see an individual who has some of
Speaker 1: those similar passions that I do, uh and you know,
Speaker 1: coming from New Mexico before she became the secretary, just
Speaker 1: as a congress person having that constituency of hunter and anglers,
Speaker 1: it confirms for me that something that's on her mind,
Speaker 1: surely is the rights of outdoorsman and all individuals to
Speaker 1: access their public resource which we all share an ownership of,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that comes out of
Speaker 1: the haland nomination. And I'm I don't want to say
Speaker 1: I'm guilty of because that makes it seem like a
Speaker 1: negative is um from my perspective, Okay, someone who's benefited
Speaker 1: quite a bit from the public lands policy and availability
Speaker 1: that that I've enjoyed in my life and my perspective,
Speaker 1: I had a kind of oh, meaning that um, recognizing
Speaker 1: that that this could be something great for other people.
Speaker 1: But you know, humans are selfish, and right away I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: is this gonna mean a radical reappraisal of priorities? Okay,
Speaker 1: Like we've come to We've come to like I've come
Speaker 1: to notice, um where the Secretary of Interior, the actions
Speaker 1: they take that have implications for the areas where I
Speaker 1: go and the and the things I go and do.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know this till the other day, that
Speaker 1: the that the Secretary of Interior oversees the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education. So whatever
Speaker 1: they're doing, they're like I wasn't paying attention to it.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about it, so I had a narrow
Speaker 1: scope of where they focus their time. When I knew
Speaker 1: that someone's gonna be coming in with perhaps like very
Speaker 1: different priorities, I had oh, and still have a bit
Speaker 1: of an oh of, um, well, what about the stuff
Speaker 1: that they do that that I think of when I
Speaker 1: think of the job, is that are they going to
Speaker 1: be paying attention there? You know? Um, So for for
Speaker 1: people that are having that a little bit of like
Speaker 1: the hell's this going to mean? Like what what's your
Speaker 1: you know, what's your what's your guidance or feedback there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a great question. And I've heard those
Speaker 1: same concerns, and you know, both from people that are
Speaker 1: tribal citizens and even folks who are non tribal citizens.
Speaker 1: You know, regardless of the walk of life that you
Speaker 1: find yourself in, you want to make sure that the
Speaker 1: person who's you know, directing the Department of the Interior,
Speaker 1: who's responsible for so much, is going to be you know,
Speaker 1: catering to your needs, um and and accurately and responsibly
Speaker 1: representing all people of the United States. Uh. That said,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to note what it is that
Speaker 1: the Interior as a whole, and specifically the Secretary of
Speaker 1: the Interior, now de Bolin, can actually do in that role,
Speaker 1: because I think a lot of times, you know, depending
Speaker 1: on what media and individual consumes, you can hear some
Speaker 1: pretty big ideas of they're going to make these tremendous changes,
Speaker 1: um of just an enormous scale that are going to
Speaker 1: impact your daily life, and it's gonna happen right now,
Speaker 1: and you ought to be very concerned about it. And
Speaker 1: you know, I think we can sort of quiet that
Speaker 1: alarm a little bit when we actually look into what
Speaker 1: these individuals are entitled to do under the Constitution. And
Speaker 1: so the Secretary of the Interior, you know, you go
Speaker 1: on Department of the Interior's website, you do a little
Speaker 1: bit of research, you'll see that their role is described
Speaker 1: as having this administrative responsibility for coordinating federal policy. And
Speaker 1: what all that means is federal policy gets handed down
Speaker 1: by our lawmakers, in other words, Congress, and then when
Speaker 1: Congress passes that law, it doesn't just magical you start working.
Speaker 1: You need people who are actually putting it into play.
Speaker 1: And obviously, you know, we refer to that as the
Speaker 1: executive branch, and the Department of the Interior falls under that.
Speaker 1: That's why the President gets to nominate the Secretary of
Speaker 1: the Interior, and Secretary Holland's role is actually to carry
Speaker 1: out what Congress's intentions are. Her role does not extend
Speaker 1: beyond actually putting laws into place. Um, the executive branch
Speaker 1: does not make the law. And I think a lot
Speaker 1: of folks get concerned that the Secretary might make new
Speaker 1: laws or change laws, but legally she has no power
Speaker 1: to do that. Uh. The Secretary of the Interior's power
Speaker 1: only extends to implementation of laws and guiding regulatory agencies
Speaker 1: in their interpretation of that law. Um. And you know
Speaker 1: the I sort of use an example sometimes to describe
Speaker 1: this as this idea of you have a restaurant chain, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe I get hired as the manager
Speaker 1: of a given restaurant and I decide, I'm going to
Speaker 1: put in some certain policies at my restaurant to make
Speaker 1: things a little more efficient, to work better, maybe make
Speaker 1: sure folks get their food faster, can have access to
Speaker 1: better services, etcetera. But you're damns, you're not going to
Speaker 1: get rid of the golden arches. That's right. You're not
Speaker 1: going to get rid of those Golden arches. You're not
Speaker 1: going to get rid of the Big Mac because no
Speaker 1: matter what McDonald's go to, you don't have a choice.
Speaker 1: You can you can own that franchise, you can manage it,
Speaker 1: but you don't get to make that decision. The people
Speaker 1: at the top who are passing the laws, making the policies,
Speaker 1: they act that decision. You can you know, you have
Speaker 1: a little bit of freedom and how you want to
Speaker 1: carry it out, and you know for sure it's it's
Speaker 1: we need to be concerned in active citizens and and
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on how the Interior is actually carrying
Speaker 1: these laws out. But I think we can all rest
Speaker 1: assured that there's not going to be sudden significant change
Speaker 1: to our access to lands or to how individuals can
Speaker 1: use lands, whether lands are going to get taken away
Speaker 1: all that um. When you look to the source of
Speaker 1: power of the Interior, you'll see that they have the
Speaker 1: power to regulate, they have the power to navigate those laws,
Speaker 1: but they're not making any new laws themselves. Hit me
Speaker 1: with your take on Hit me with your take on
Speaker 1: land back. The land back movement now, when I hear
Speaker 1: it like I was view that UM, at any given year,
Speaker 1: I would like to see an increase and the number
Speaker 1: of acres open to the American public. So an increase
Speaker 1: in in particularly through a lens of hunting and fishing,
Speaker 1: like an increase in areas where we can go to
Speaker 1: hunting fish. But I'll have you know, not needing to
Speaker 1: pay trespass fees, leases, whatever, but just increase. I hear
Speaker 1: land back, and I'm like, that must mean a decrease
Speaker 1: UM And like every like I said earlier, I laid
Speaker 1: my biases out there, right, Yeah, I have the human
Speaker 1: tendency to view things through what it might mean for me. UM.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, you know, a little leary about land back,
Speaker 1: this idea that we would take presumably it's taking like
Speaker 1: public lands, because you're not gonna we're not gonna give
Speaker 1: Manhattan back to you know, the tribes. Like I could
Speaker 1: see an argument for that, but I have a feeling
Speaker 1: we're not talking about that. We're probably talking about federal lands, um.
Speaker 1: And that's where it's not coming from. It's not coming
Speaker 1: from urban areas. It's not coming from suburban areas, will
Speaker 1: be coming from open federal lands. Or maybe I'm way
Speaker 1: off I don't know. Hit me with your you can
Speaker 1: tell me I'm right and I should be scared like
Speaker 1: that one. We're still friends to be very very afraid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hit me with hit me with what if we're presumably
Speaker 1: if we're gonna hear more, if people are gonna hear
Speaker 1: more about this, what are they gonna be hearing more about?
Speaker 1: You know, and you can you can you can buyas
Speaker 1: it as much there as little as you'd like. Sure, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I would say, just to answer that question,
Speaker 1: what folks are gonna hear? I you know, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to be candid and say folks are especially as
Speaker 1: this movement continues to gain traction, folks are going to
Speaker 1: hear all manner of things. And that's going to come
Speaker 1: from you know, folks who are talking about this movement,
Speaker 1: writing about it, um all have their own perspectives that
Speaker 1: they're bringing to the table. And again I would just
Speaker 1: caution that little bit of h hesitancy from just believing
Speaker 1: what you hear right away, because there are going to
Speaker 1: be folks who are talking about what they want to happen. Um,
Speaker 1: it might leave out the realities of what actually can happen.
Speaker 1: So just kind of like what we're talking about with
Speaker 1: what the Interior can do, as you might imagine, uh,
Speaker 1: it would it would likely be a severe overreach of
Speaker 1: the Department of the Interior's power to unilaterally decide that
Speaker 1: we're going to take a huge swath of maybe let's say,
Speaker 1: National park land and just redesignated as tribal land and
Speaker 1: give it away to a tribe. Well, I have no
Speaker 1: problem with that. Yeah, they do parts zero gripes for me.
Speaker 1: I actually support it, And so you know, I think
Speaker 1: oftentimes what I like to say is, you know, let's
Speaker 1: talk about what the land back movement is not, and
Speaker 1: what it is not is just the federal government coming
Speaker 1: in taking a look at a big swath land and saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's go ahead and give this away.
Speaker 1: I'm feeling charitable today. Let's go ahead and find a
Speaker 1: given tribe who maybe had rights to this land at
Speaker 1: one point and just give it away. Um, what it
Speaker 1: is requires a little bit of a look back in history.
Speaker 1: And I was telling you earlier about how tribes received
Speaker 1: federal recognition and how tribes signed treaties. Well, oftentimes the
Speaker 1: reason for these treaties was that during the colonial era
Speaker 1: and during Western expansion, the United States came upon a
Speaker 1: tribe that was occupying lands that they had historically occupied
Speaker 1: for generations, and the United States government may be said,
Speaker 1: we really need this land because our people are spreading
Speaker 1: further and further west, and there's a lot of conflict,
Speaker 1: and we got to find a way to peaceably settle
Speaker 1: this conflict. And so what the government would do is
Speaker 1: sit down at a table with tribes and sign a treaty.
Speaker 1: And generally what would happen is that the tribes would
Speaker 1: agree to cede that land to the federal government in
Speaker 1: exchange for another piece of land somewhere else. And that's
Speaker 1: where we get this idea of reservations. The federal government said,
Speaker 1: if you give us this land you have, now, we're
Speaker 1: going to reserve for you a piece of land in
Speaker 1: perpetuity that will be yours and yours alone, and you
Speaker 1: get to control the sovereign nations. Now, obviously, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of times that those treaty agreements and people
Speaker 1: sitting at those table uh tables weren't having the same
Speaker 1: understanding of the treaty terms, and oftentimes tribes were taken
Speaker 1: advantage of um. But the treaties nonetheless, we're signed. A
Speaker 1: lot of tribes were given these reservations, and now today
Speaker 1: we see some tribes that are occupying those reservations ever since.
Speaker 1: But on occasion there were times where the federal government
Speaker 1: subsequently came and said, look, we know we promised you
Speaker 1: this reservation, but actually we're going to need that land back,
Speaker 1: and the federal government then through Congress would pass a
Speaker 1: law that would disestablish the reservation and take it away,
Speaker 1: breaking those treaty promises, and that has now subsequently led
Speaker 1: to this land back movement. Um. And I would just say,
Speaker 1: you know, this is sort of a very simplistic explanation.
Speaker 1: It's certainly more complex. But there are tribes today and
Speaker 1: people today who believe that when this land was set
Speaker 1: aside and promised in perpetuity and then subsequently taken away,
Speaker 1: that those tribes should have a right to come to
Speaker 1: the federal government and ask to have that land back. Um.
Speaker 1: And so again, it doesn't mean just giving land away
Speaker 1: for no reason. The people who are actually who are
Speaker 1: actually on the ground floor of this land back movement
Speaker 1: or folks who are saying, you promised us this land
Speaker 1: and you gave it to us. Uh. And then you
Speaker 1: took it away, or maybe you promised it and never
Speaker 1: gave it to us at all. And so now we're
Speaker 1: just asking the federal government to do no more than
Speaker 1: just fulfill the promises they made in these treaties, which again,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier, are considered by the United States
Speaker 1: is the supreme law of the land. And so in
Speaker 1: that way, and it just makes sense for some people,
Speaker 1: and it has proven to be a very divisive, uh subject.
Speaker 1: And I think you know, in my opinion, what the
Speaker 1: land back movement can mean in a productive way is
Speaker 1: having tribes who are responsibly handling their lands going to
Speaker 1: the federal government showing the treaty agreements and saying we
Speaker 1: want to exercise control over this land once again in
Speaker 1: a regulatory fashion, to carry through on what was promised
Speaker 1: to us. But it doesn't mean even if that tribe
Speaker 1: gets that land back, that suddenly it's gone forever. Um.
Speaker 1: You may have seen driving along the road. I know
Speaker 1: you travel a lot and you hunt a lot. You're
Speaker 1: talking about up in Alaska, You've been on different tribal lands. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, if if you're driving from California to Arizona,
Speaker 1: coming out to Phoenix, where I am. Now you'll see
Speaker 1: a sign on on the ten that says now entering
Speaker 1: the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, and you're just driving
Speaker 1: through it. And I promise you, when you're driving through
Speaker 1: that land, you're not going to see a bunch of
Speaker 1: walls put up. And oftentimes I think folks who have
Speaker 1: been on tribal lands, uh, they probably haven't seen a
Speaker 1: huge wall surrounding the borders of the reservation. And that's
Speaker 1: because most tribes, just like states, allow people to freely
Speaker 1: come on and off. And even if land goes back
Speaker 1: to a tribe, that land is held in trust for
Speaker 1: the tribe by the federal government, and now the tribe
Speaker 1: has rights to actually carry out and meaningfully apply their
Speaker 1: own regulatory regime for things like wildlife management, for things
Speaker 1: like hunting and fishing. It's no different than if you
Speaker 1: drove to another state to do some hunting and angling.
Speaker 1: You're just now doing it on a tribe on tribes land.
Speaker 1: Maybe it means going to a different website to get
Speaker 1: your permit um, but ultimately I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of concern that this means you're going to lose access forever.
Speaker 1: And I'd say my response to that would be a
Speaker 1: this isn't a quick process. It's no unilateral decision where
Speaker 1: someone can come in and take the land away. It
Speaker 1: would be a long and meaning conversation. And two, should
Speaker 1: that land be transferred to the tribe, chances are you
Speaker 1: will still have a meaningful way to access that land
Speaker 1: and still engage in recreation on it, just under the
Speaker 1: regulation of the tribe as opposed to the state. Can
Speaker 1: you hit real quick on um and we just take
Speaker 1: the lower forty eight on us because it gets infinitely
Speaker 1: complicated UM in Canada, gets infinitely complicated in Alaska. But
Speaker 1: extra privileges that tribal hunters get what you seem to
Speaker 1: hear a lot about Yeah, UM, And I noticed in
Speaker 1: in when when you and Karan were talking earlier, UM,
Speaker 1: you had a number that tribal hunters UH. Of the
Speaker 1: total take of deer and elk, tribal hunters account for
Speaker 1: two percent. I was giving Karin a great example of
Speaker 1: sort of the how a tribe and a state can
Speaker 1: work together, and a great example of that is the
Speaker 1: state of Washington. And UM. Oftentimes you get this notion
Speaker 1: that tribal members have all these extra privileges and because
Speaker 1: of those extra privileges, they're significantly harming the wildlife or
Speaker 1: the wildlife take overall in that given area. And in
Speaker 1: the state of Washington, where you have a very high
Speaker 1: number of tribes for the size of the state itself
Speaker 1: and a large number of tribal citizens who are going hunting,
Speaker 1: they're actually only taking, as you mentioned, two per cent
Speaker 1: of the harvestable deer and elk. Um. I believe the
Speaker 1: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife release some statistics and
Speaker 1: in they said that non Indian hunters took approximately thousand deer,
Speaker 1: whereas treaty tribal hunters harvested about four And in that
Speaker 1: same period, non Indian hunters took about seven thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred elk and treaty tribal hunters harvested about three hundred
Speaker 1: and five. And Washington, again is a state where you're
Speaker 1: hearing a lot of that uh that jargon around they
Speaker 1: get these extra rights maybe they have, you know, can
Speaker 1: access lands I can't access, they're going to wipe out
Speaker 1: the population. But when you look at the numbers, it
Speaker 1: just isn't the case. Um. And in fact, the state
Speaker 1: of Washington has said that most of the elk herds
Speaker 1: there are a very healthy and be the biggest threat
Speaker 1: to the health of those elk herds is the loss
Speaker 1: of habitat in the state UM and when we look
Speaker 1: at where that occurs, it's occurring not on tribal lands
Speaker 1: but on state lands and is is oftentimes a product
Speaker 1: of UH state development and infrastructure on you know, traditional
Speaker 1: habitat of those animals and of those herds UH and
Speaker 1: the tribes themselves are often the ones who are advocating
Speaker 1: the most heavily for new programs and new infrastructure that
Speaker 1: actually helps protect these animals. So, you know, we we're
Speaker 1: talking about these concerns right A lot of non Indian
Speaker 1: hunters have around extra privileges that may be some tribal
Speaker 1: citizens exercise UH and whether or not they are extra privileges,
Speaker 1: just this general concern that you know, tribal nations and
Speaker 1: tribal hunters might be harvesting more animals than anyone else
Speaker 1: um or and we just address that, but there's still
Speaker 1: that concern of well, what if I want to hunt
Speaker 1: in an area that is run by a tribe and
Speaker 1: falls under their sovereign jurisdiction and regulatory authority for hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing, and I'm concerned that I'm not going to
Speaker 1: have the means or I'm not going to have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to do that because I'm not a tribal citizen. Um.
Speaker 1: And this comes up a lot in different states that
Speaker 1: have larger, uh, you know, tribal populations, and being here
Speaker 1: in Arizona, where a third of the land mass is
Speaker 1: actually saw over in tribal land, it's a huge concern
Speaker 1: for hunters here. UM. But I can tell you that
Speaker 1: Arizona actually has one of the most fascinating examples of
Speaker 1: tribes doing excellent management of wildlife resources. And here, if
Speaker 1: let's say you want to go on a black bear hunt,
Speaker 1: the state of Arizona, like many states and and it's
Speaker 1: its own topic in itself, has prohibited hunters from hunting
Speaker 1: with hounds at certain times of the year. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they've prohibited individuals from hunting bears via baiting at all
Speaker 1: times of the year. And so you go up to
Speaker 1: perhaps north northern Arizona or central Arizona where there's larger
Speaker 1: bear populations, and maybe you've been hunting with hounds in
Speaker 1: the spring, for example, every year for decades, and now
Speaker 1: the laws passed and you can't do that. You can
Speaker 1: only do it in the fall. What some hunters are
Speaker 1: now realizing is that they can actually go onto tribal lands.
Speaker 1: And a great example of this is the Fort Apache
Speaker 1: Reservation here in Arizona, where they allow hunting with hounds
Speaker 1: year round. And just a few weeks ago, I was
Speaker 1: actually out on a hunt and I was right along
Speaker 1: the border of the Fort Uh Fort Apache Reservation, and
Speaker 1: sure enough, first thing in the morning, I hear some
Speaker 1: hounds going crazy, and I hear him going down from
Speaker 1: this ravine a couple of miles away, and I look
Speaker 1: over in that direction. I realized it's on reservation land.
Speaker 1: And maybe that party that's thinking, hey, that's not very
Speaker 1: fairy and I'm gonna call it in. I just realized, oh,
Speaker 1: that's awesome. You know, a hunter decided that's something he
Speaker 1: wanted to do, he or she wanted to do, and
Speaker 1: they got in contact with the tribe, found a tribal guide,
Speaker 1: and they now get to continue in that practice if
Speaker 1: they're a hound hunter, being able to do that year round.
Speaker 1: Um specifically because they're utilizing the resource of having a
Speaker 1: tribal hunting regime really next door uh and it's the
Speaker 1: same thing with baiting. If you want to bait bears, um,
Speaker 1: however you may feel about that, you have you're entitled
Speaker 1: to go do that on certain tribal lands here in Arizona. Again,
Speaker 1: the White Mountain Apache Nation will allow you to come
Speaker 1: onto the land and just like you would if you're
Speaker 1: an out of state resident, you would come to Arizona
Speaker 1: and buying out of state permit over the counter, you
Speaker 1: just go onto the reservation by your non member permit
Speaker 1: and you can then go and carry on a baiting
Speaker 1: hunt or a hound hunt. And the same thing applies
Speaker 1: and tribes throughout the nation. And not only that, but
Speaker 1: you you know it again brings up that issue of well,
Speaker 1: I the tribe is allowing it, isn't that just killing
Speaker 1: the numbers of animals for the rest of us? And
Speaker 1: on this sign I went on. I spoke to a
Speaker 1: game warden who used to be a guide, and he
Speaker 1: actually told me, he said, you know, we call all
Speaker 1: the bears around here res bears because the best ones
Speaker 1: that you know, the top bears that people hunt around here,
Speaker 1: we track some of their movements and we see they're
Speaker 1: coming over from the reservation oftentimes or elk. Same thing.
Speaker 1: And when you look at top ranked you know, however
Speaker 1: you may feel about ranking of animals, top ranked hunts,
Speaker 1: um and animals that are harvested in the US. Every
Speaker 1: single year, several of the top bears harvested are all
Speaker 1: coming out of the Fort Apache Reservation. UH. And so
Speaker 1: you're looking at the success rates on the reservation versus
Speaker 1: off the reservation, and the success rates just continue year
Speaker 1: after year to be incredibly high. You can do research
Speaker 1: and find uh statistics on herd health on the reservation
Speaker 1: and it's some of the best in the nation. And
Speaker 1: so oftentimes we're seeing now that the tribe's way of
Speaker 1: managing the land and of managing the wildlife resource is
Speaker 1: often superior to that of the state. And folks who
Speaker 1: want to do some of the best hunting in the
Speaker 1: country can go to a tribe, purchase a permit just
Speaker 1: like they would anywhere else, grab themselves a guide if
Speaker 1: that's what they want to do, and have just an
Speaker 1: incredible hunt and some of at least here some of
Speaker 1: Arizona most beautiful country. All right, man, uh, this is great.
Speaker 1: I got like three million questions. They're gonna have to
Speaker 1: have you on more and in and in honestly, some
Speaker 1: areas where um, some areas where I'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but what about but what about? I got a bunch
Speaker 1: of but what about bum gonna We're gonna let you
Speaker 1: go for now under the agreement that you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to come on now and then to um debate with
Speaker 1: us and explain stuff to us, and and and give
Speaker 1: your take on stuff. But I don't know if you
Speaker 1: want people to do you want? I mean, if you
Speaker 1: if I say to you, like, hey, tell people how
Speaker 1: to find you, you will get great emails and you'll
Speaker 1: get emails from some mal assholes. So it's up to you, man.
Speaker 1: Do you want to tell people how to find you? Absolutely? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I believe that. You know. It's up for everyone
Speaker 1: to decide the extent to which they want to help
Speaker 1: educate the community. But it's something I'm passionate about. I'm
Speaker 1: always happy to entertain questions. Um, you can find me
Speaker 1: on social media. I'm happy to give you some contact
Speaker 1: information to do folks. And I want to remind people
Speaker 1: this is a guy that came on in good faith, uh,
Speaker 1: in the spirit of of education cooperation to explain some stuff.
Speaker 1: So as much as you might be sitting there with
Speaker 1: your hackles up about everything's gonna be different. We invited him,
Speaker 1: I mean, he did a great job and he's now
Speaker 1: going to tell you how to get hold of him.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind it's a conversation. Go ahead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can look me up on on social media.
Speaker 1: I'm on most platforms at Jacob Broussard. Um. I'm sure
Speaker 1: if you're listening to the podcast, you'll probably see my
Speaker 1: name I imagine in the podcast description. Uh. And if
Speaker 1: you feel like sending me an email, uh, you go
Speaker 1: ahead and reach out to me as well. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: happy to give that over to the Meat Eater team
Speaker 1: and and if they want to facilitate any contact like that,
Speaker 1: you can feel free to reach out to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good idea, is um. Uh Corey Colkins who
Speaker 1: runs our email inbox, he'll he'll get everything where it
Speaker 1: needs to go. All right, thanks man, This is this
Speaker 1: is great. Uh. I like it. I learned a lot
Speaker 1: talking to you. I still got a couple of what
Speaker 1: about dress any what about anytime? I appreciate you having
Speaker 1: me on all right, thanks so much, man,