Speaker 1: All right, suckers, We've been talking all the time about
Speaker 1: our our live tour me Cal Yanni, A lot of
Speaker 1: special guests, live tour coming up. Everything's sold out. We've
Speaker 1: got two dates left. Got a lock at home April fifteen.
Speaker 1: In April sixteen, April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona.
Speaker 1: So it's like your Phoenix Market April sixteen, City National Grove, Anaheim, California.
Speaker 1: Again Me the Lavine Eagle O cal Special guests, Me
Speaker 1: Eater Live April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona, April sixteen,
Speaker 1: City National Grove, Anaheim, California. Get your tickets. Let's finish
Speaker 1: this thing up. This is me Eat. Your podcast coming
Speaker 1: at you shirtless, severely, vot bitten and in my case,
Speaker 1: underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't partake anything presented by
Speaker 1: on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping
Speaker 1: system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes
Speaker 1: or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X.
Speaker 1: I think listeners ought to know that that phild engineer
Speaker 1: has uh, he's gotta like he's not good at starting
Speaker 1: that timer. You might have to go back behind the curtain.
Speaker 1: You might have to go back into the might have
Speaker 1: to go back into the back into the resumes. We're
Speaker 1: just talking about mountainlins and calsambo. What a mountline does
Speaker 1: when it drops down into like a pen full alloments.
Speaker 1: If I was a mountainlined, I would be allowed with specialists.
Speaker 1: That big neck, hard hard to miss. You could be drunk,
Speaker 1: a drunk cap, get drunk, no matter what. You're gonna
Speaker 1: get it with the net with the neck like that,
Speaker 1: That's what I would be a I would be allowed
Speaker 1: with specialist mountainlin. Yeah, they really like to keep their
Speaker 1: heads high too. Would I would quickly depopulate the nation.
Speaker 1: Would be a lama uh and epidemic of a llama
Speaker 1: losses uh. A couple of things, do you I don't
Speaker 1: know if you guys. There's a couple of news things
Speaker 1: I want to talk about before we before we get
Speaker 1: into it. Um that's gotta be. I haven't like dug
Speaker 1: into this yet, but Disney's redoing they're doing I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're doing a live action Bambi remake. I was told
Speaker 1: about this yesterday. I believe man um live action, So
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like you know that that's that's stupid
Speaker 1: thing they did with the lions talking like people. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're lion king. Real showed me the intro to the
Speaker 1: lion King deal and then he explained that it is.
Speaker 1: They didn't variate or they didn't vary the story at all.
Speaker 1: It's the exact same story from the animated the full
Speaker 1: animated version. Yeah, but it's just like actual lions being like,
Speaker 1: what's up man? Phil called it derbank, So that's gonna
Speaker 1: be like a buck anna be like, well, it's tough, man,
Speaker 1: because you got these these lions, you know, voiced by humans,
Speaker 1: but with absolutely no human facial expressions. Just it's yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean, deer is decidedly less. A deer is
Speaker 1: decidedly less, uh sort of facially active, So it's gonna
Speaker 1: be even worse than the lions. I hope there's a
Speaker 1: part of that movie where, um you ever see the
Speaker 1: trail camp footage of deer eating baby birds out of nest.
Speaker 1: I hope that's part of the movie. That would be
Speaker 1: a good part of the movie. Um, I would kill
Speaker 1: to be. I've helped out in in the movie world
Speaker 1: on on one script as far as like hunting accuracies
Speaker 1: and it's something you did some consulting. Yeah, the Last
Speaker 1: of the Mohicans. No, it was The Revenant, all the
Speaker 1: Walking Out, yeah, which I was all excited for me
Speaker 1: because I was if you didn't with any of old movies,
Speaker 1: I was gonna smack you VIP resumes. Uh yeah, but
Speaker 1: that was for for my buddy Collin helping him. And
Speaker 1: it's just like this dude like a horse dude. No,
Speaker 1: he's not a horse dude. It was up in Whitefish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a white Fish Guy's not a horse dude. A
Speaker 1: little bit like a wrangler. He used to wrangle horses
Speaker 1: for movies. No, he just kind of looks like that
Speaker 1: type of person though you met him once anyway, Well,
Speaker 1: I met a dude one's named that who was a
Speaker 1: horse wrangler for movies. Oh no, I lived up in
Speaker 1: that neck of the woods. No. I always call this
Speaker 1: guy a young McConaughey because just because it was hair
Speaker 1: more than anyway. No different guys. Yeah, but the movie
Speaker 1: world just they fight so hard against reality. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it's just they'd want no part of it. You know.
Speaker 1: Did you see that thing I did that g Q breakdown?
Speaker 1: That was fantastic, So like GQ, Like GQ magazine, they
Speaker 1: have this thing they do the breakdown, so you can
Speaker 1: go watch like a Navy seal breaking down Navy seal
Speaker 1: scenes and movies. There's a chef breaking down cooking scenes
Speaker 1: and movies. There's no, no, no, no, there's many of them.
Speaker 1: Alex Donold the Climber breaks down climbing scenes and movies.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to breaking down tracking and hunting scenes
Speaker 1: and movies. And leading up to what I was talking
Speaker 1: to someone and I was like, man, why don't these
Speaker 1: movie people like, why don't they hire a guy to
Speaker 1: come in and be like no, no, no no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you know, you should make it like this. That'll seem
Speaker 1: more real. And he said, oh, they do. They just
Speaker 1: don't listen to him. They like to have him around
Speaker 1: just you know, just to be like, oh, man, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't do it like that. You know what, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't got a tape here with a machete. And
Speaker 1: they're like, in this movie, we do plus like we said, uh,
Speaker 1: the general uh way of doing things. That has changed
Speaker 1: quite a bit because you look at the reality of
Speaker 1: the Robert Redford, Jeremiah Johnson Elk shot like that Elk died,
Speaker 1: you pointed out, and they took some heat. They took
Speaker 1: some heat for it, and Robert Redford kind of like
Speaker 1: justified and explained it. And then in mcgwayn's movie Ranchodi
Speaker 1: looks grace film never made um. They you know, they
Speaker 1: shoot a steer with a sharp's rifle. Um. And he
Speaker 1: expressed to me that he was glad they don't do
Speaker 1: it that way anymore. They bought a steer and shot it.
Speaker 1: And when you watch the movie, if you're familiar with
Speaker 1: any kind of hunting or farming or anything, when you're
Speaker 1: watching the movie, there's no confusion. You watched Last and Mohicans,
Speaker 1: it's like when they shoot a Deer's like that, dear,
Speaker 1: I don't know what happened to that deer. It wasn't shot.
Speaker 1: That was just I don't know what it went from
Speaker 1: a live deer to a stuffed thing somersault Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like stuffed like they threw a stuffed animal through the woods, somersaulting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I imagine how for the amount of folks uh that
Speaker 1: are on a film set, how some could it could
Speaker 1: probably cast a shadow over production for a day. If
Speaker 1: if you're not un familiar with watching the light fade
Speaker 1: from something's eyes. Anyone with sensitivities might want to come
Speaker 1: to work late today. You know, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: about ready to quit talking about I don't know, Phil,
Speaker 1: Let me ask you. It just has an impartial observer.
Speaker 1: Do you think we should um cease covering severed finger
Speaker 1: stories or no? Well, what has the feedback been like? More?
Speaker 1: It's just we get flooded with severed finger stories and images.
Speaker 1: Have you gotten anybody that's saying you're you're making me
Speaker 1: gag while I listen to your podcast. They just send
Speaker 1: us more and more graphics. I have pictures of severed
Speaker 1: fingers that would curl your hair. Okay, well, I think
Speaker 1: I said. I sent one of my wife and she
Speaker 1: was genuinely mad at me for two days. I would
Speaker 1: be too. It was about midnight, I was in a
Speaker 1: different time zone and I sent her an image. No,
Speaker 1: no explanation. This is an audio medium, though, so I
Speaker 1: think you know, I think you're okay. I want to
Speaker 1: post them to Instagram, but I feel like i'd get banished.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. You got sent the grinder one, right.
Speaker 1: That's that is haunting, especially if you grind your own meat,
Speaker 1: because the hand when it gets eventually cut out of
Speaker 1: the grinder is very familiar, very familiar. Tend to knee chunks.
Speaker 1: I might start a page, separate page on the dark
Speaker 1: web before I get anyways. A couple more finger stories. First,
Speaker 1: Jim halfl finger. That's the hell of a name actually,
Speaker 1: speaking of severed grandfather severed his finger at the railroad railhouse.
Speaker 1: Call them Granda half a finger from most of that's fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's unusual. Last name you have tell tell people your
Speaker 1: job real quick. Swiss German. My lame name is Swiss German.
Speaker 1: I'm the wildfe Science coordinator for AS in the game
Speaker 1: Fish department. But you got your like, you're in there, man.
Speaker 1: You mix it up. You write articles, listen to stuff,
Speaker 1: monitor stuff, argue. It's all interesting. Um. I started being
Speaker 1: interest in Jim because he sends so many clarifications and corrections.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be that guy. No, No, not
Speaker 1: at all. No, you do it very respectfully. Like we'll
Speaker 1: get a lot of guys that like sending a cracktion
Speaker 1: or two and you can just see over the months,
Speaker 1: you'll see him just become very agitated. But they're not
Speaker 1: getting the level of attention they want and then they
Speaker 1: just turned and then they turned like they like hate
Speaker 1: you but still listen and you want to be like
Speaker 1: you could not listen. Um, it doesn't accrue to him.
Speaker 1: But here, okay, this guy is talking about Uh, this
Speaker 1: guy is talking about another great story. So this guy's um.
Speaker 1: This guy got married and his best man's dad had
Speaker 1: retired and started. I don't understand. Is he tired, retired
Speaker 1: and move to a golf course and he would kill
Speaker 1: time by mowing the lawn. I feel like it must
Speaker 1: have been a spare job, not volunteer. Would you move
Speaker 1: to a golf course and volunteer to mow the golf course?
Speaker 1: Listen to my grandpa would volunteer and mow lawns out
Speaker 1: of the golf course that he loved. I did not
Speaker 1: understand it. But my buddies who were working out at
Speaker 1: that golf course as like caddies. They loved it. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw your grandpa came by on the more work today.
Speaker 1: I've been anti golf my whole life, but I'm huge.
Speaker 1: I'm super pro golf now. I don't want to tell
Speaker 1: people why. I don't want to tell people about what
Speaker 1: what happened with me in the flip flat flasher. But
Speaker 1: now we're like major golf supporters. At least it's green space.
Speaker 1: I'm not a golfer, but a major golf supporter. I
Speaker 1: support the golf industry. My dad always said, friends with
Speaker 1: the golf industry. Hit the bone chase. It hit the
Speaker 1: bone chase. It look at those simps out there, hit
Speaker 1: the bone chase. It. Oh no, listen. I'm a golf supporter,
Speaker 1: but I mean, and I love all golfers, and I
Speaker 1: support all golf courses, but uh, it's a moronic sport. Um. Anyways,
Speaker 1: this guy's ut moll on the golf course. You can
Speaker 1: just picture this. So he's he's in a more it's
Speaker 1: got a roll bar, and he's coming in and there's
Speaker 1: a there's a pole with a guideline a guy cable
Speaker 1: coming off of it. So he realizes that the roll
Speaker 1: bar in the cable are gonna make contact, so he
Speaker 1: he's got it. He breaks as he realizes, and he
Speaker 1: reaches up to put some up pressure on the guyline
Speaker 1: to clear it from the roll bar, but then his
Speaker 1: foot slips off of the brake. Phil, can you put
Speaker 1: in a good noise that sounds like this, but it's
Speaker 1: like a right I mean, is that the sound of
Speaker 1: flesh or the sound of like, what's what's happening here?
Speaker 1: With that noise? That's the cable cutting his finger off. Combination.
Speaker 1: I think the most disturbing part of all of these
Speaker 1: is there's rarely a scenario where I don't see myself
Speaker 1: having narrowly avoided that happening to me, or I can't
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I can see how I would do that.
Speaker 1: There's a great detail, he says that his the tendon.
Speaker 1: There's a tendons find their way into these stories. The
Speaker 1: tendon is someone sent us a picture of it. It's
Speaker 1: like a finger with like sixteen inches attendant. Like the
Speaker 1: tendant came off up at the elbow. But the tendon,
Speaker 1: he said, is wrapped around the cable. This is he's
Speaker 1: a good writer. He says. It's similar if you took
Speaker 1: a ribbon and run it along a pair of scissors
Speaker 1: to coil it up. That's how he's describing the coil
Speaker 1: of the tendon. And this man then getting up there
Speaker 1: and unwrapping his h unwrapping his finger from the cable.
Speaker 1: Another good figure story. It is the last one for today.
Speaker 1: There's two stories. One has nothing to do with fingers.
Speaker 1: Guy was saying, his h his old man's welder, and
Speaker 1: he had a big weald and glove on and his
Speaker 1: super hot chunk of slag got down as well and
Speaker 1: glove and lodged against his wedding ring. His wedding ring
Speaker 1: got so hot that it burned a scar circle around
Speaker 1: his finger. Now he doesn't wear a wedding rings. He's
Speaker 1: got a scar circle instead. He's got a scar as
Speaker 1: a wedding ring. And a story. Uh yeah, oh two
Speaker 1: more things, man, I just said one more, but two more? Yeah? Shoot,
Speaker 1: what do you think, Jim? You get bored? No? I
Speaker 1: like finger stories. It's not even a finger story. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not bored. All right, we're talking there to day
Speaker 1: we had an episode. We're talking all dropping stuff down
Speaker 1: ice holes, and this guy drops three fifty seven Smith
Speaker 1: and Weston down down the ice hole, which is easy
Speaker 1: to be like, why absolutely why? Like that is not
Speaker 1: a common part of my He said it was stainless,
Speaker 1: and so the real bummers. He couldn't get it with
Speaker 1: a magnet. He sends in a video of him in
Speaker 1: his ice house. He gets his ice house ripping hot
Speaker 1: with the heat and he's in his ice house but
Speaker 1: his swim trunks. He goes down the whole, can't find it,
Speaker 1: comes back up and he looks in like rough shape. Man.
Speaker 1: He gets warm back up again, his buddies filming, and
Speaker 1: it looks at like a totally rough shape. And he
Speaker 1: gets psyched up enough and dives back down here again
Speaker 1: and comes out pretty much. His buddy's like reeling back
Speaker 1: in with a rope tied around his ankle, and he's
Speaker 1: got that pistol. He says they were toting it around
Speaker 1: because they kept seeing wolves out on the ice. Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, pretty funny. Uh that's good, all right, Uh,
Speaker 1: Jim halflefinger, let's start out with this. So you know,
Speaker 1: I guess first off, tell people like what your sort
Speaker 1: of scope is your your the scope of your life's
Speaker 1: work as a wildlife guy. So I spent twenty two
Speaker 1: years as a regional biologist and too sound for his
Speaker 1: on the game Fish Department, And in the last four
Speaker 1: years I moved to kind of a statewide position called
Speaker 1: Wilife Science Coordinator. And the gist of that job is
Speaker 1: to have someone kind of free floating that can do
Speaker 1: some of the deep dives into science and and make
Speaker 1: sure that we've got good science supporting the policies and
Speaker 1: the decisions we make as an agency. So that's pretty unusual.
Speaker 1: We'll have a state wilife agency too, to be I
Speaker 1: think forward thinking enough to have someone like that to
Speaker 1: make sure that we're providing a good scientific foundation and
Speaker 1: the things we do. And your work, uh, I know
Speaker 1: that just from talking about various issues around the country.
Speaker 1: Inherently your work spreads beyond Arizona because wildlife issues don't
Speaker 1: stop at state lines, right, Yeah. And one of the
Speaker 1: biggest reasons I'm involving a lot of westwide stuff is
Speaker 1: I'm mom. Also, there's an association of of twenty four
Speaker 1: Western state wildlife agency, state and provincial wilife agencies, and
Speaker 1: it's called the Western Association Official Wildlife Agencies, and they
Speaker 1: get together twice a year and they have some subcommittees
Speaker 1: and some working groups, and I've chaired I've been on
Speaker 1: the Milder Working Group UH for more than twenty years now,
Speaker 1: and I've char it for the last thirteen or fourteen years,
Speaker 1: and so as a as a chair that oversees a
Speaker 1: meal deer expert from each of those twenty four Western agencies.
Speaker 1: We as a group and and me as the chair,
Speaker 1: are real involved in all the Western migration stuff. You
Speaker 1: had Matt Kaufman here and and Kevin Monty talking about
Speaker 1: some of the stuff they're doing. I've been working with
Speaker 1: Matt and Kevin UM actually an awful lot on a
Speaker 1: lot of these things in the West. But that that
Speaker 1: position to the Western Association, sharing that group really puts
Speaker 1: me um involved and in the seat to do a
Speaker 1: lot of things throughout the West too. Uh. I know
Speaker 1: some of the bigger things you get involved in, like
Speaker 1: you know, all your big game and your charismatic megafauna. Um.
Speaker 1: How low down in the what's the smallest thing involved in? Well,
Speaker 1: my twenty two years as a regional biologist, I was
Speaker 1: in charge of three species of quail, Google's turkey restoration
Speaker 1: um in southeastern Arizona, mountain, lion's big horn, sheep, pronghorn,
Speaker 1: all of all of the hunted species is what I
Speaker 1: dealt with, from big game to small game. That was
Speaker 1: most of my career and it's really the last four
Speaker 1: years or so that I've been doing primarily a lot
Speaker 1: of big game, a lot of big game Western stuff.
Speaker 1: UM various miscellaneous science support for the agency, and then
Speaker 1: Mexican wolf recovery, which I've been involved in for the
Speaker 1: last ten years, oh for a decade now, we'll get
Speaker 1: to that a little bit. I know. That's a yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's a constantly changing landscape. It is in minefield.
Speaker 1: You might say, al right, first question, some quick hit
Speaker 1: or topics for you. Um, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: is inspired by feedback you've given us when questions emerge
Speaker 1: on other shows. One of the things we've emailed about
Speaker 1: was this, and we've we've touched on this, like news
Speaker 1: reports about this or confusion about this is uh, there's this.
Speaker 1: It seems to be this emerging idea that people are like, well,
Speaker 1: if if hunters go out and they want to like
Speaker 1: hunters want to get big bucks, right, hunters want to
Speaker 1: shoot big box, they want to shoot big bighorn sheep,
Speaker 1: they want to shoot big moves. If you go out
Speaker 1: and selectively target big bucks, are you changing the evolutionary
Speaker 1: path of the species, Meaning you're putting on you know,
Speaker 1: you're putting a selective pressure against big antler dear, This
Speaker 1: is an argument against trophy hunting, right, and that by
Speaker 1: doing that, you're making them. You're driving them to become smaller, right,
Speaker 1: all right, you're buying it, not buying it. No, with
Speaker 1: with servants with a deer family there there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of that at all. But this all came to light.
Speaker 1: It's not even that new. It's just once in a
Speaker 1: while a reporter will learn about it and write an
Speaker 1: article about it and think they're the first one to
Speaker 1: write about it. But it really call That's a good
Speaker 1: way of expressing how things like this come up and
Speaker 1: they and they stay alive like that. Um, someone thinks that, hey,
Speaker 1: I just found out this new thing, but everybody's been
Speaker 1: discussing it for seventeen years, which has been about the
Speaker 1: case with this. In two thousand three, David Colton came
Speaker 1: out at we're talking about severed fingers. You don't feel
Speaker 1: that way, you know, we can keep doing that, keep
Speaker 1: doing that. These guys think they discovered severed fingers. So
Speaker 1: there was a there was a paper in two thousand
Speaker 1: three that really lit the world on fire on this
Speaker 1: whole topic. He didn't hear two thousand three, two thousand three,
Speaker 1: that's all long and that's really the genesis of all
Speaker 1: this recent kind of interests in that in that topic.
Speaker 1: But they there was a there's a population on the
Speaker 1: east side of the Alberta Rockies and it's separated from
Speaker 1: the main part of the Rockies Bigne. It's called Ram
Speaker 1: Mountain and it's a it's a really small little dot
Speaker 1: out away from the rest of the sheep populations. I
Speaker 1: gotta stop you. Okay, you mentioned with servants, but now
Speaker 1: we're talking about yep cheap. Yeah, right, to help people
Speaker 1: get through that, And I just I just mentioned servants
Speaker 1: right off the bat to to almost dismissed that because
Speaker 1: and we can talk about some of the reasons and
Speaker 1: tell me what servants are too, just because it's a
Speaker 1: deer family, so it's a moose and alcan deer and
Speaker 1: and um anything in the deer family with basically with
Speaker 1: antlers with a few exceptions. So so this whole idea
Speaker 1: of trophy hunters ruining the gene pool, degrading the gene pool.
Speaker 1: Some of the popular media called evolution in reverse that
Speaker 1: has really been focused on big horn cheap or why
Speaker 1: out cheap and and it all comes from this one isolated,
Speaker 1: unique population called Ram Mountain and Alberta. And they did
Speaker 1: some research on there and they reported in two thousand
Speaker 1: three in Nature that hunters selecting the largest rams were
Speaker 1: actually causing a genetic change in the population, so that
Speaker 1: there was smaller and smaller rams uh in that population.
Speaker 1: And then that same author even came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight and said, well, my work in two
Speaker 1: thousand three really probably over exaggerated the genetic component of that.
Speaker 1: There's really more nutrition um than I originally said in
Speaker 1: that paper, but it was too late. The popular media
Speaker 1: took that and just ran with it, and you saw it.
Speaker 1: You saw it everywhere, and part of it was for
Speaker 1: people who don't like hunting and people who don't like
Speaker 1: trophy hunting. It was such an irresistible story. Trophy under
Speaker 1: something negative about trophy hunters, and some people just love that,
Speaker 1: and so trophy hunters are ruining the gene pool, and
Speaker 1: all the popular media picked up on that. And then
Speaker 1: there's even some scientists who don't like trophy hunting and
Speaker 1: don't like hunting, and so they started looking at other
Speaker 1: data set and and see if they could produce a
Speaker 1: paper that looked something similar, And all the subsequent papers
Speaker 1: that came out they would cite the Ram mountain information,
Speaker 1: which were later found out to be over exaggerated in
Speaker 1: the genetic component, and these and these other scientists would
Speaker 1: speculate um sighting Ram Mountain and then speculate that this
Speaker 1: may be happening in these other areas, and it may
Speaker 1: be happening with all big game, may be happening with
Speaker 1: all species worldwide that humans harvest, and so these other
Speaker 1: papers were just full of speculation. But every time someone
Speaker 1: published a paper to speculate, someone else could cite the
Speaker 1: speculative paper and the Ram Mountain paper, and these started
Speaker 1: to build this body of speculation. And and now we're
Speaker 1: starting to get back and apply some science to that
Speaker 1: and find out that it's it's it may happen in
Speaker 1: a few cases, but it's certainly not widespread. But it's
Speaker 1: too late. The public has has seen the popular message
Speaker 1: and aren't reading scientific papers. But the bottom line is
Speaker 1: if selection is intensive enough, it can affect the gene
Speaker 1: pool in the future. What you need to think about
Speaker 1: is in what cases is selection intensive enough to actually
Speaker 1: change the gene pool in cheap or or deer or
Speaker 1: any other species that we hunt. And the answer is
Speaker 1: it's a very rare case. And and the case on
Speaker 1: Ram Mountain was unique because it was isolated. The population
Speaker 1: swelled and bottlenecked a few times, which can affect the genetics.
Speaker 1: And also they had a hunting regime there where it
Speaker 1: was an unlimited number of hunters could hunt that little
Speaker 1: isolated mountain range the isolated mountain, but they had to
Speaker 1: be four fifths curl before they were legal to harvest.
Speaker 1: And so that's a situation where the rams that have
Speaker 1: faster growing horns, better genetics, faster growing horns are going
Speaker 1: to get truncated. They're gonna get taken out of the
Speaker 1: field as soon as they hit four fifths. And so
Speaker 1: that's the case where the rams that have faster growing
Speaker 1: horns are going to be removed at a higher proportion
Speaker 1: than rams of slower growing horns. So that was the
Speaker 1: basis of this Coldman and so there's it's so theoretically
Speaker 1: and in practice there it's not flawed that in certain
Speaker 1: situations that can happen. We did some more recent search
Speaker 1: with with Kevin Montiese Lab Taylor Lashar is a graduate student,
Speaker 1: where we took state big horn sheep records, and state
Speaker 1: records were important because we had horn measurements and we
Speaker 1: also had ages on those rams, which is something the
Speaker 1: Boone Crockett, Pope and Young Rocket books don't have ages.
Speaker 1: They just have measurements, and they don't they don't record
Speaker 1: the number annually on a horn um not not Buona Crockett. No,
Speaker 1: it's measurements, you know. They got their measurement system and
Speaker 1: then on the data sheet there they can put um
Speaker 1: age on some of the species. But I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if they even do it with big horn sheet on there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the problem too is you have to be like
Speaker 1: pretty well trained. Yeah, it's not it's not that easy.
Speaker 1: There's some there's some experience that goes into it. But
Speaker 1: state agencies do record age and record some measurements, sometimes
Speaker 1: full Boone Crockett, sometimes just basis plus the length of
Speaker 1: the horn. And so we went to the state records
Speaker 1: and got all the state records we could assembled into
Speaker 1: a database where we had age and we had the
Speaker 1: antler or the horn measurements, and then we were able
Speaker 1: to analyze these the sheep records and we were able
Speaker 1: to to accommodator neutralized the effective age because obviously the
Speaker 1: older the ramble, the bigger the horns. And so you
Speaker 1: got it in your analysis, you've you've got to be
Speaker 1: able to UM look at that and fair at that
Speaker 1: part of the analysis out. And then we're also able
Speaker 1: to look at some UM in d v I index,
Speaker 1: which is a greenness index of satellite imagery, and we
Speaker 1: were able to look at at nutrition and environment and
Speaker 1: how that affected horn size in these in these states
Speaker 1: and in these populations, and and in the end, we
Speaker 1: analyzed UM data from thirty five years from seventy two
Speaker 1: different hunt units around North America UM and and in
Speaker 1: the end we found that of those seventy two units UM,
Speaker 1: seventy eight percent of them were either stable or the
Speaker 1: horn size was increasing, so only even showed a decline.
Speaker 1: Now we don't even know yet what that decline is,
Speaker 1: but in those twenty two that declined, only half of
Speaker 1: those had a hunt regime that even even could possibly
Speaker 1: exert some kind of stuf the pressure. You know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you can just look at a hunt system and and
Speaker 1: like a complete permit system that Arizona has, where someone
Speaker 1: just takes just one rams monge, so you're not you
Speaker 1: don't have that kind of selective pressure like you have
Speaker 1: if you have unlimited number of hunters creaming that horn
Speaker 1: size at a certain level. And so even in the
Speaker 1: twenty two where they weren't stable or increasing in horn length,
Speaker 1: they were decreasing UM still about half of those could
Speaker 1: even have possibly been due to some selective pressure. And
Speaker 1: so the bottom line is, even in sheep, which is
Speaker 1: the only species that this has really been um found
Speaker 1: in a in a controlled setting, it's very unusual to
Speaker 1: have that kind of hunting regime that that would actually
Speaker 1: apply that selected pressure to cause kind of genetic changes.
Speaker 1: And all this is confounded terribly with with nutrition. More nutrition,
Speaker 1: and animal gets the bigger the horns and antlers. The
Speaker 1: older the animal gets, the bigger the horns and antlers,
Speaker 1: And and there's um all kinds of obstacles, which is
Speaker 1: a paper you saw that I wrote, all kinds of
Speaker 1: obstacles that get in the way of hunters actually affecting
Speaker 1: the gene pool. And when the hunter goes out and shoots,
Speaker 1: passes up a spike and shoots an eight point white
Speaker 1: tailed buck in Iowa, technically that's selection because they passed
Speaker 1: up one buck and they selected a bigger buck. But
Speaker 1: you have to look at the intensity of selection. Is
Speaker 1: that anywhere near um intensive enough to cause any genetic changes?
Speaker 1: And you think about all of the other things that
Speaker 1: are removing animals from the population that have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with horn or antlers size. You have, for example,
Speaker 1: a fawn crop, you lose half of the fonds every
Speaker 1: year before their first birthday UH in general, and those
Speaker 1: losses of half of that annual cohort have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with horn or antlers size. You've got mountain lions,
Speaker 1: you've got predators killing adults that have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with antler size. And the idea that hunters going out
Speaker 1: during daylight hours in the hunt unit they have a
Speaker 1: permit for only able to take males. The fact that
Speaker 1: the idea that they're affecting that entire gene pool, it's
Speaker 1: just ludicrous that you would apply that kind of pressure.
Speaker 1: That could happen in some cases and cheap, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty rare. Well, there's some so much conflicting data out
Speaker 1: there too as to how much we're actually even we
Speaker 1: I guess hunters in certain cases are actually even affecting behavior.
Speaker 1: Like you see all these white tail papers that come
Speaker 1: out and it's like, well the bucks have gone nocturnal.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, no, we tracked them and they do
Speaker 1: just as much walking around during the day as they
Speaker 1: do at night. I mean, honing effects behavior hugely. Oh
Speaker 1: of game animals, But like you look at these clubs
Speaker 1: situations right where it's like you got five guys hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, a thousand acres. They're out there, maybe twenty
Speaker 1: five days total between the five guys, and they all
Speaker 1: have the same story as Joe Dude going out on
Speaker 1: public land. It's like the deer are so educated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's generational to the mean they're raised by. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are animals that spend a year with their mothers,
Speaker 1: spend a year with her mother, who's spent a year
Speaker 1: with her mother. There's a learned you know, there's learned response.
Speaker 1: I mean you just go look at landscapes where you
Speaker 1: always had hunting and then took it away. Oh that
Speaker 1: that spot that we hunted or Eric Siegfried from on
Speaker 1: acc and I hunted this year. It's this funky access
Speaker 1: deal where you kind of have to get up on
Speaker 1: this rock room and I swear to God or more
Speaker 1: of the mule deer dose just walked below staring at
Speaker 1: that rock room like they just were it locked on
Speaker 1: it and when you and your body sneak in and
Speaker 1: always hunt Yellowstone. I mean you always always act like
Speaker 1: you hunted somewhere else. But I mean you guys are
Speaker 1: really well in all right, you and your body well
Speaker 1: better than anybody else. Um. Do you get frustrated by
Speaker 1: the way stuffs covered in the media. It's gotta make
Speaker 1: you mad. Not not even a scientist, it does. But
Speaker 1: when you know the science, and the public is not
Speaker 1: reading scientific papers, when you know the science and you
Speaker 1: see something like that just catch fire and run away
Speaker 1: in the popular media and it's not true and it's exaggerated,
Speaker 1: and everything that you read is just full of errors,
Speaker 1: and and that's what everybody, that's what most of the
Speaker 1: general public readings. And there's like credible places that run
Speaker 1: with it too. Like National Geographic could cover the piss
Speaker 1: out of a story like that. They would never cover
Speaker 1: the like when it wanted, being that it wasn't accurate,
Speaker 1: they would have zero interest in it because they love
Speaker 1: anything that can be like a little bit like put
Speaker 1: a little taint down hunting. They love it. They go
Speaker 1: out of their way to find it. They would never
Speaker 1: be like, oh, you know what turns out that that
Speaker 1: wasn't actually true. Um, I mean like like the bias
Speaker 1: is so within the organization like that, Like the bias
Speaker 1: is so severe, and like you look at this thing
Speaker 1: that's going on with Donald Trump Jr. Right, he's doing
Speaker 1: a fundraiser. He's doing a fundraiser where they're gonna go
Speaker 1: hunt ducks and blacktail deer, and the media is covering
Speaker 1: it like a trophy animal hunt. That's a hunting ducks
Speaker 1: and blacktails. Is a trophy animal hunt? Now, well, it's
Speaker 1: like that's how, that's how it's described that you guys
Speaker 1: saw the UM so that i u c n UH
Speaker 1: is a body that I pay attention to for a
Speaker 1: lot of conservation up to date conservation facts and knowledge
Speaker 1: and UM A lot of stories came out earlier or
Speaker 1: late last year on how the i u c n
Speaker 1: has determined that trophy hunting is this terrible thing and
Speaker 1: it's killing these animal populations. And you start reading into
Speaker 1: it and you not not bush hunting, not bush me hunting.
Speaker 1: But the paper is they're like, well, this is a
Speaker 1: something that was being researched and it's not even the conclusion.
Speaker 1: Somebody just took it and ran this out. This is
Speaker 1: not our finding. But nobody covered that story. It was
Speaker 1: always here it is. That's a good pushback some letters.
Speaker 1: I think I sent you something recently with the conservation
Speaker 1: front Lines is a is an email um service you
Speaker 1: can subscribe to free and they have some really good
Speaker 1: information about some scientists have gotten together and some some
Speaker 1: people in Africa have gotten together and representing local African communities,
Speaker 1: and the African communities are saying, how dare western um
Speaker 1: people take away our livelihood? You know, this is sustainable conservation,
Speaker 1: it's funding conservations, funding our villages, and how how dare
Speaker 1: someone sitting there white house someplace in the US and
Speaker 1: and say this isn't a good thing. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the it's like left wing imperialism. Man, the band's going on.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's like a softer, gentler imperialism.
Speaker 1: Do you think the UK bands are kind of a
Speaker 1: little long term guilt laden thing is from the days
Speaker 1: of British imperialism where it's like, yeah, that's fine all
Speaker 1: they're like they're like tacking a little like the old pendulum.
Speaker 1: Um Chaine Mahoney asked me to be on the u
Speaker 1: c N Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Committee, So that's one
Speaker 1: of the committees that he chairs and real active with
Speaker 1: and it's all about this. I like the i u
Speaker 1: c N ratings. Yeah, um, I tend to. I tend
Speaker 1: to um. I tend to eat a lot of things
Speaker 1: that are of least concern. Yeah, exactly. I was recently
Speaker 1: looking at the mountain lion um um they changed it.
Speaker 1: It says that it's decreasing. It says that the populations
Speaker 1: are decading. Yeah, I looked at that. I understand for
Speaker 1: the mountainline, I don't understand that either. In fact, one
Speaker 1: of the main paper they cite for that um is
Speaker 1: someone I worked with with Mexican Wolf Recovery. I sent
Speaker 1: him an email with a link to that, and since
Speaker 1: they were citing their work, I just asked him what
Speaker 1: what is that all about? And I haven't heard from
Speaker 1: him yet, but they get it. They I feel that
Speaker 1: the i u c N does a little bit play
Speaker 1: a predictive game. But but even that would not line
Speaker 1: predicting a decline when something's on an increase, How do
Speaker 1: you predict? Yeah, so that that's just apparently wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we should say International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you go, you know, the Wikipedia gives a lot
Speaker 1: of ink to the i U c N. So if
Speaker 1: you type in any species, like if you're going the
Speaker 1: other day, we're looking at uh, we're looking at um
Speaker 1: the long tailed weasel, So the i U c N
Speaker 1: long tail weasel. It would have it like population of
Speaker 1: least concern, which is the which is like the best
Speaker 1: news the species can get. The thing you want is
Speaker 1: to be in the least concern and it's it's great
Speaker 1: at out over. I don't know how many designations, and
Speaker 1: it's six. It's a spectrum there and there's like a
Speaker 1: most concern and then a critical concern. There's extinct. I
Speaker 1: think we're just yeah, okay, next question we have before
Speaker 1: you've done some work with that. We talked about Vale
Speaker 1: guys all damn time. He's a good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: good friend twenty years. Uh. In fact, I brought Ben
Speaker 1: O'Brien val guys bone broth recipe. That's Vale for it.
Speaker 1: That's good Val guys. Okay, we talked. We've covered this before.
Speaker 1: Val guys had a he took at ab at what
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to redo it. He
Speaker 1: took a stab on how the mule deer came to be.
Speaker 1: I presented this as some mule dear researchers, and they
Speaker 1: were they were not titillated by it. They didn't even
Speaker 1: want to take it on. It was like fanciful and
Speaker 1: like not understandable. But it was this idea that for
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do a short version, hold your thumb out
Speaker 1: and as you get bored, start going down. I was
Speaker 1: gonna start in the plio scene. So you're doing better,
Speaker 1: I'm not going okay, if you know you were here,
Speaker 1: what we could do. Let me try to do a
Speaker 1: crash course and what I had read he floored to
Speaker 1: this idea that three million years ago and the like
Speaker 1: what is now the southeastern US, There's always been white
Speaker 1: tailed deer Kelson, I'm still up. What you do? Bang
Speaker 1: your thumb of the hammer. Your kid asked me that too,
Speaker 1: and I gotta tell you the same thing. I don't
Speaker 1: know it n fifty right there? Uh what was I saying? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's always been white tailed deer and was not the
Speaker 1: southeastern US. We had this big wet, you know, period
Speaker 1: of of of lush growth, and these deer colonized coast
Speaker 1: to coast, colonized the mid continent from the east coast
Speaker 1: of the US to the west coast. Then there was
Speaker 1: a big dry period and the empty in the middle
Speaker 1: emptied out, and these deer on the west that were
Speaker 1: remained on the west coast gradually evolved into black tails.
Speaker 1: Then there was another period where it was moist and
Speaker 1: conditions were good, and this population of black tails moved east.
Speaker 1: The white tails, which had retreated to the southeastern US,
Speaker 1: had moved back west. They met along the Rocky Front,
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountain Front, had sex um and spawned hybridized,
Speaker 1: and then there was another great retraction. Blacktails went back
Speaker 1: to the coast, white tails went back down to the southeast,
Speaker 1: and this lingering population of these hybridized. I think it
Speaker 1: was black tailed bucks making love to white tail does um,
Speaker 1: that's your mule dere um? Yeah, And they said, uh,
Speaker 1: I presented to some mule deer people and and they
Speaker 1: had a response kind of like uh, let's move on. Well,
Speaker 1: there was some there was some There was a scientific
Speaker 1: basis for val coming up with that theory, which has
Speaker 1: been superseded by other genetic work that came along time
Speaker 1: for you to tell us, like what's up with all
Speaker 1: the deals? So that was that was basically I think
Speaker 1: it was it was glacier's advancing and receding rather than
Speaker 1: wet and dry. I think probably it was changing environment,
Speaker 1: changing habitats that were calling again split. But but regardless,
Speaker 1: that's basically the story that that Val came up with,
Speaker 1: and and he did that for a reason because when
Speaker 1: they start first started doing genetic work, they found out
Speaker 1: that blacktailed deer have completely different mitochondrial DNA than mule
Speaker 1: there yet their subspecies. So there's two kinds of DNA.
Speaker 1: There's there's DNA in the nucleus and you get this
Speaker 1: nuclear DNA and you get half of that from your mother,
Speaker 1: half from your father. There's another kind of DNA floating
Speaker 1: around in the sets outside the nucleus called mitochondrial DNA
Speaker 1: mighticondra DNA you only get from your mother, so it's
Speaker 1: like a clone. It comes from your mother and your
Speaker 1: grandmother and her mother. Yeah, that's how they like contract
Speaker 1: down sort of the you know, like all of Western
Speaker 1: Europe theoretically track all of Western Europe to like a
Speaker 1: female to an mitochondrial eve so so the mitochondria, so
Speaker 1: you can you want to analyze both types of DNA,
Speaker 1: and they yield different answers to different kinds of questions,
Speaker 1: But initial mitochondrial DNA analysis showed you think about, really,
Speaker 1: the two black tailed deer subspecies are just subspecies of
Speaker 1: mule deer. They're all oticoles Hemionus some subspecies, and then
Speaker 1: you have white tail, which for a different species Virginianus.
Speaker 1: And yet when they looked at the mitochondrial DNA, they
Speaker 1: found out that mule deer and white tailed deer have
Speaker 1: basically the same mitochondrial DNA, which is bizarre because they're
Speaker 1: different species and and both of them, including mule deer,
Speaker 1: have different mitochondrial DNA from black tail, so blacktails have
Speaker 1: this unique mitochondrial DNA. So Val took that just thinking
Speaker 1: about that, Val said, well, could probably occur if female
Speaker 1: if if black tailed deer bred with white tailed deer
Speaker 1: and in the offspring brought in that wet white tail
Speaker 1: deer might have condrial DNA. So if you had female
Speaker 1: white tailed deer breeding with black tail males and they
Speaker 1: spawned some kind of the hybrid mule deer, then all
Speaker 1: those mulder would have the same mitochondrial DNA as the
Speaker 1: white tail because because it comes to the female line,
Speaker 1: and so it was female white tail, then mulder would
Speaker 1: have that same mitochondrial DNA and black tails would be different.
Speaker 1: And so that just going on that that was a
Speaker 1: basis of that's what inspired that. That's what inspired it.
Speaker 1: So it made sense at the time, but later on
Speaker 1: more work, especially with nuclear DNA, that you get half
Speaker 1: from your mother, half from your father. You look at
Speaker 1: muled or nuclear DNA and and it's it's closely aligned
Speaker 1: with black tails. Blacktail and mule deer are all closely associated,
Speaker 1: and then white tails completely different. So if they really
Speaker 1: were hybrids, then the mule deer, when you look at
Speaker 1: the nuclear DNA, they would have about half for the
Speaker 1: white tailed genome and about half of the blacktail genome.
Speaker 1: But they don't. Mule deer and blacktailed deer evolved as
Speaker 1: one group and then black tailed deer split off during
Speaker 1: one of the advances of the ice ages over in
Speaker 1: the Pacific coast. So there, okay, So in this version
Speaker 1: of events, mule deer um predated black tails. Yes, yea
Speaker 1: in that version, but here sick of white tail looks
Speaker 1: or sick of blacktail looks so damn much like a
Speaker 1: white tail. I know that that under growth and everything, well,
Speaker 1: even like metatarsal glands. There's other things where the black
Speaker 1: tailed deer actually looks like a hybrid, which makes it
Speaker 1: is confusing as hell, because the black tailed deer looks
Speaker 1: almost like it's got some white tail like characteristics. But
Speaker 1: when you're at genetics, the blacktail can't be can't be
Speaker 1: a hybrid between those two, and so it's got to
Speaker 1: be convergent evolution where they they kind of acquire traits
Speaker 1: that are similar even though they're not um like dragon
Speaker 1: m We talked about this the other day. Dragonfly asanna
Speaker 1: hummingbirds both fly. That doesn't mean their cousins yep. So
Speaker 1: we did genetic analysis. We did some genetic analysis all
Speaker 1: up and down the coast in black tails from California
Speaker 1: up to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and then mid British Columbia.
Speaker 1: It starts you start getting into Sitka blacktails up into Alaska,
Speaker 1: and we had them all and analyze all of those
Speaker 1: and and found the highest concentration of genetic diversity was
Speaker 1: the coast of Oregon and Washington in blacktail deer both
Speaker 1: subspecies of blacktail deer and and geneticis population geneticis will
Speaker 1: tell you that where you have a focal point with
Speaker 1: high genetic diversity right there, and then lower genetic diversity
Speaker 1: rating out from that. That indicates that was the refugium,
Speaker 1: that's the that's ground zero for that species or that animal.
Speaker 1: And so likely the blacktail deer were isolated for a
Speaker 1: long time during one of the many glacial advances and
Speaker 1: receding over on that coast, and then gradually expanded out
Speaker 1: from there with the receding of the glaciers. And so
Speaker 1: so why does a sitka then look different than the
Speaker 1: Colombian And I don't know the answer to why he
Speaker 1: doesn't typically have a buy for hated antler like a
Speaker 1: forked antler. Well, the mature could, but like they mean
Speaker 1: that Washington, they tend to throw a rack a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot like a white tail. They look they're small,
Speaker 1: they're about the same side like that. The mature ones
Speaker 1: will have the G two s. But sitkas have a
Speaker 1: double white bib on their throat um. They're kind of
Speaker 1: a different tail. They look real different. And that nobody
Speaker 1: knows for sure what kind of separation there might have
Speaker 1: been in some glacial period between Columbian black tail and
Speaker 1: Sitka black tail. The sitka could just be a phenotypic
Speaker 1: or a physical adaptation to that marine environment. Swimming and
Speaker 1: living on islands in that kind of environment. It could
Speaker 1: be adaptation and they're physically changing not so much because
Speaker 1: of the separation. Nobody really knows that for sure. Do
Speaker 1: you what's the refuge of the white tail? Like, like
Speaker 1: how far back in time? Trying to think how to
Speaker 1: express this question. If you had a time machine and
Speaker 1: it said it like a random it just randomly throw
Speaker 1: you back to randomize dates, and you wanted to set
Speaker 1: a location on your time machine to maximize the chances
Speaker 1: that you would stumble into a white tail, what would
Speaker 1: you set Florida, Florida. Yeah, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: white tail fossils in Florida, in fact that they've been
Speaker 1: hanging around there a long time. They have been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've been in the place of seeing there's a there's
Speaker 1: just a ton of of places seeing white tail fossils
Speaker 1: in Florida. And actually brought you one ship. It's an
Speaker 1: epicenter so that you can see that fossilized material and
Speaker 1: that's just the just handed me a fossilized the bone
Speaker 1: base from the skull so the pedicle, get the pedicle um,
Speaker 1: the antler about inch and a half antler about an
Speaker 1: inch of skull and it fields like stone and it
Speaker 1: is stone. Yea. You know. The word pedicle comes from
Speaker 1: George Bobin, famous antler researcher, George and and George and
Speaker 1: his his father, Anthony and Anthony. They wrote a book
Speaker 1: in nine called Horns Prong, Horns and Antlers and it's
Speaker 1: like the Bible for Antler kind of antler science speaking
Speaker 1: out um. But Anthony Bubinick Coin didn't coin the phrase pedicle,
Speaker 1: but he told us how to pronounce it pedical. He
Speaker 1: says it rhymes with medical. But Anthony Bubinick spoke about
Speaker 1: six languages and English was like his fifth language. And
Speaker 1: so I always think it's kind of funny that we're
Speaker 1: all taking our pronunciation of from this guy who nobody
Speaker 1: can understand when he spoke English. This is amazing, man.
Speaker 1: This is out of Florida. Yeah, Florida. So this deer
Speaker 1: was running around he bumped into masodons now and that's dated,
Speaker 1: that's dated. Pleist to scene. Yeah. Jim. Also Broad's show
Speaker 1: us a replica of a saber tooth tooth smile ad
Speaker 1: on fake tal us his canine and smile. Ad On
Speaker 1: is uh and this thing is leven inches long? Yeah,
Speaker 1: smile and was not because they had a big smile
Speaker 1: with those big tooth. The smile addon comes from. I
Speaker 1: think it's meetly. I don't have how to pronounce it,
Speaker 1: but it's Latin for double edged sword. I'd laugh. They
Speaker 1: just jumped out. It's grabbed Phil. It would make a
Speaker 1: bike ride to work a little bit eating, like you know,
Speaker 1: I just killed him. I'd be like that, can you
Speaker 1: believe that? Cow? That's what I would be. Moved real slow,
Speaker 1: real slow. So Florida had a lot of white tails,
Speaker 1: go ahead, caw. Florida also has the spring site where
Speaker 1: they got all the fossils out of, including the giant
Speaker 1: tortoise with not familiar with that giant tortoises that once
Speaker 1: roamed what is now the United States, But they found
Speaker 1: a tortoise shell in this spring in Florida that had
Speaker 1: a spear point in it. I need to talk to
Speaker 1: our I need to talk to our performer podcast guests.
Speaker 1: So then you start digging into the actual paper. It's
Speaker 1: like it was laying nearby. He was laying in the
Speaker 1: shell as they brought the thing out, and they're like,
Speaker 1: so it could be this, but very well would be this,
Speaker 1: But then it's clear evidence of ceremonial turtles. This exactly.
Speaker 1: It was a religious total. There was a paleontologist in
Speaker 1: New Mexico that was knocking one of the arrow points,
Speaker 1: knocking one of the little shoulders off and saying that
Speaker 1: was indicative of Sandia man and and he wrote papers
Speaker 1: and constructed this big because he always knocked the shoulder off.
Speaker 1: But he but they found out later he would knocking
Speaker 1: the shoulders off and saying it with diagnostic of this.
Speaker 1: There's some bad that's some bad stuff. But he wasn't
Speaker 1: doing it as a greater social experiment. Can I Can
Speaker 1: I tell people what you were musing before we started
Speaker 1: recording your observation about archaeology or is that just too hard?
Speaker 1: That's fine, that's tell him yourself the truth. Yeah, truth
Speaker 1: is hard. A friend of mine always call archaeology a
Speaker 1: soft science because they just so much of it is
Speaker 1: just made up. They'll find a toebone and then they'll
Speaker 1: write a paper about what the home range was and
Speaker 1: and what the color of the fur was. And unfortunately
Speaker 1: there's just a lot of a lot of garbage. I
Speaker 1: was looking into archaeological evidence of elk in Arizona, and
Speaker 1: we're doing some Miriam Delk stuff. And and there was
Speaker 1: a son who was a paleontologist and archaeologist and his
Speaker 1: dad was too at the university, and he had forty
Speaker 1: four thousand deer family bones out of this site in Arizona,
Speaker 1: and he had like fourteen or so elk. And so
Speaker 1: I was really interested in those elk specimens. And I
Speaker 1: couldn't get ahold of the sun. But I talked to
Speaker 1: the dad, and the dad says, all those were those
Speaker 1: are big out icolio. So those are big meal there.
Speaker 1: Those weren't elk. He didn't know what he was talking
Speaker 1: about talking about his own son in his paper. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of that in there. And you just
Speaker 1: got to really be skeptical and be cautious. He can't
Speaker 1: read a paper and then just go, um, you know,
Speaker 1: repeating it without some skepticism of thinking thinking about it.
Speaker 1: When when I was when I was working on my Buffalo,
Speaker 1: but um, it came up like I was came up
Speaker 1: where I was reading about where there were accounts of
Speaker 1: them occurring. And there's a lot of versions of why Buffalo,
Speaker 1: New York became Buffalo New York. But you'll often read
Speaker 1: in old books that, like, Buffalo New York was Buffalo
Speaker 1: New York because someone had encountered Buffalo. I thought it
Speaker 1: was the wings. Well, you know there's a I get
Speaker 1: I think I get into it in the book hit
Speaker 1: or explain or not. A bunch of different theories about
Speaker 1: how it got the name, but it would not be
Speaker 1: in that that. Sometimes you'll see distribution maps for where
Speaker 1: buffalo roamed, bison bison bison roamed, and people have it
Speaker 1: going up in New York. The range map. We'll go
Speaker 1: up in New York and it comes from people included
Speaker 1: because two skulls came out of some campsite, some excavation
Speaker 1: of a campsite in New York, just the schools, and
Speaker 1: both of them, uh had cultural markings on them, and
Speaker 1: later people looked at it and thought were they living
Speaker 1: here or did someone get some from someone and bring
Speaker 1: them home? The same way copper that comes out of
Speaker 1: Michigan's Upper Peninsula can be found anywhere in the Midwest
Speaker 1: and trace back like people took stuff they thought stuff
Speaker 1: was cool and brought home with them. Arizona parrot feathers
Speaker 1: in Arizona and all kinds of things from Central Americas.
Speaker 1: There was these big trade routes. And if you look
Speaker 1: in the not the Last Elka North America book, I
Speaker 1: think it was a one before it, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was the last. No, it was the one before the
Speaker 1: last one. And they show elk distribution all the way
Speaker 1: down to Mexico City. And it's only because Montezuma had
Speaker 1: some elk. He had a menagerie, he had a menagerie,
Speaker 1: and he had some elk in the menagerie, and and
Speaker 1: the people doing the distribution map to include Mexico City,
Speaker 1: and in fact the elk really weren't in there. In
Speaker 1: in Mexico, Cortez his his like recorders describe the first
Speaker 1: the first bison ever witnessed by a European um was
Speaker 1: probably in Montezumas menagerie witnessed by cortez expedition. And I
Speaker 1: think that somehow and somehow they describe it as having
Speaker 1: come from the north. Yeah, probably having come from the north,
Speaker 1: and not that it lived there. The mealier was first
Speaker 1: described um from the journals of u Laray, and he
Speaker 1: first described what amelier looked like in the west, and
Speaker 1: it was found out later that there was no such
Speaker 1: person as Charles Lay, and that his journals were entirely
Speaker 1: fabricated by someone they don't even know who, but entirely
Speaker 1: fabricated the journals, taking pieces some of from Lewis and Clark,
Speaker 1: some from different journals from explorers, and put it together
Speaker 1: and and made up this story about Charles Lay, who
Speaker 1: was in the West. He was captured by Sue Indians.
Speaker 1: He was held captive for several years, um by the
Speaker 1: by the tribe, and during that time he kept a
Speaker 1: journal because and it was only because Western literature was
Speaker 1: really popular. This is some late eighteen hundreds. I think
Speaker 1: Western literature is really popular, and being held captive by
Speaker 1: Native American tribes was like a really hot story. So
Speaker 1: this guy just fabricated this whole thing. And so you'll
Speaker 1: read even some of my early writings we were talking
Speaker 1: about Charles Lay described the first meal. Dear, turns out
Speaker 1: it's just christated. Everybody keeps repeating it over and over again. Well,
Speaker 1: when we're talking ahead of this, um came right at
Speaker 1: some point in time, you'd mentioned that you wanted to
Speaker 1: discuss Elliott cous But let me tee that off with.
Speaker 1: Do you accept ioul, like, who's your kind of one
Speaker 1: of my favorite animals by far, definitely probably maybe first
Speaker 1: or second favorite thing to go hunting for it maybe
Speaker 1: third Turkey's mulder in white tail, I'm sorry, Turkey's mule deer.
Speaker 1: Who's dear? In my mind depends what time of year
Speaker 1: it is, which one of those is my favorite thing
Speaker 1: to hunt. But our cu'se dear, like, do you accept
Speaker 1: or what's the thinking? They're like a subspecies of the
Speaker 1: white tales. They're just white tails and it happened to
Speaker 1: be somewhere else. Yeah, there's no doubt there are subspecies
Speaker 1: that that really evolved differently because they were in the
Speaker 1: Sierra Madre of Mexico, and so they were really geographically
Speaker 1: fairly isolated from the Sierra Madre. That's deer, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean when you get down, you get about halfway
Speaker 1: down the Sierra Madre and they start getting all these
Speaker 1: other subspecies names. But nobody's really done science on that
Speaker 1: at all. We've got a small white tail throughout the
Speaker 1: highlands of Mexico and none of them are probably any different,
Speaker 1: probably basically Cole's dear all the way down through the
Speaker 1: Sera Money cows dear man. Yeah, didn't you didn't you hear?
Speaker 1: Didn't you hear? Yanni? A couple of weeks ago. You
Speaker 1: guys know that you were a cow's dear man. This
Speaker 1: is the first cow's dear man we've ever had in
Speaker 1: this room. I had my fifteen minutes of fame a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago, and Yanni said, there's like one
Speaker 1: guy that says Cole screw him. That's my fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: They mentioned me mentioned, well, here's the deal, Elliot, cows.
Speaker 1: That's how you pronounce it. And that's not what I heard.
Speaker 1: You heard wrong. I already pronounced it cows. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: you know where that comes from? Chris Denham, Probably Chris Denham.
Speaker 1: Chris Denham read um something Richard ockin Fells wrote, and
Speaker 1: Richard ockin Fell's rights In his annotated bibliography of Kyle's
Speaker 1: White Tail, he writes, it's it rhymes with house. And
Speaker 1: I asked, I'm friends with I've known Richard for twenty years.
Speaker 1: As Richard, where that come him? He said, well, I
Speaker 1: talked to Neil Carmeny and um, and I visit Neil
Speaker 1: Carmeny in the nursing home in Tucson every couple of
Speaker 1: months I've been I've known for twenty five years. I
Speaker 1: asked Neil, where does that come from? The cows and
Speaker 1: he says, I know, we knew somebody that um spoke
Speaker 1: some French. And he says, that's probably how it's pronounced.
Speaker 1: So that's where that's where that cows thing came from.
Speaker 1: Completely bogus. There's no question how to pronounce his name.
Speaker 1: There's a huge question on how people want to refer
Speaker 1: the deer. That's maybe different. Yeah, I think that those
Speaker 1: two subjects have their own evolutionary path they do. Okay,
Speaker 1: we go on, you calling whatever the hell you want, ladies, gentlemen.
Speaker 1: If our guest here says cow was dear, he's referring,
Speaker 1: of course, to you, cou's dear. It's really sad. I
Speaker 1: nowhere in I would say linguistical or dud logical history,
Speaker 1: do I know of a word where we're after learning
Speaker 1: how to pronounce it correctly of the public not only
Speaker 1: refuses to, but militantly refuses people. They I die, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they get you know, he has riled up the most
Speaker 1: cows your people. I would call him Cole, I called listen.
Speaker 1: I call him cause you for a simple reason. The
Speaker 1: people that introduced me to him and that I hung
Speaker 1: out with and hunted him with first, that's what they
Speaker 1: called him. I actually had Jay Scott's sake Cows on
Speaker 1: his podcast one time. When I was on it, I
Speaker 1: was like, did you just say what I thought you said?
Speaker 1: So there's also like, um, you know, there's a spirited
Speaker 1: debate around ska sitka, which confuses people because I think
Speaker 1: sick of black tails. Anyhow, Elliot Cows Elliott Cow now
Speaker 1: to put the name pronunciation to bed Elliot Cows. When
Speaker 1: he wrote the Checklist of Birds in North America, he
Speaker 1: added a footnote he was an ornithologist. He was mostly
Speaker 1: an ornithologist. He never killed a deer. Someone named the
Speaker 1: deer after him, so he wasn't really wasn't a dear guy.
Speaker 1: He was really good ecologist. But he wrote the Checklist
Speaker 1: of Birds in North America. And he has a footnote
Speaker 1: where he explains how to pronounce his name. No he
Speaker 1: does it says C and he says c O w
Speaker 1: Z house. That's a lie, not a lie in black
Speaker 1: and wh okay, here's a twitter. Hell makes a footnote
Speaker 1: in their book about how to pronounce their last name.
Speaker 1: It was a footnote on a bird species that was
Speaker 1: also Cowsy I species. So he was explaining where that
Speaker 1: where that name came from, and it was he was
Speaker 1: writing the book and he was explaining how his name
Speaker 1: was pronounced, but kind of pretentious. Okay, so you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right, it's Cole's right from Elliott cows Mouth. You're right,
Speaker 1: but we're talking about the deer. Yeah, we're talking about
Speaker 1: he's right. But so yeah, so say that there was
Speaker 1: someone who was who just had made huge contributions to
Speaker 1: outdoor education entertainment, had a podcast, had a TV show,
Speaker 1: and did so much for the industry that some dear
Speaker 1: biologists wanted to name a subspecies after him. Dear Odiocolius
Speaker 1: hemi owners for Nolla. And then so we go in
Speaker 1: the Cal's Deer. You and I go on the time
Speaker 1: machine and we go a hundred years in the future
Speaker 1: and we get out and we talked some deer hunters
Speaker 1: and they're talking about, yeah, we're all jack because we
Speaker 1: got tags for these rene a dear, you'd be like
Speaker 1: rene a dear French. The guy's name was Renella. The
Speaker 1: guy's name was Renella, and they trug and say, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call it Renee I tell the day I die.
Speaker 1: He'd be like, it's kind of weird that, my dear,
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird. That was like named to honor me,
Speaker 1: and and the deer was named honor Elliot Cows. So no,
Speaker 1: you know what I'd say, I'd be like, no, dude,
Speaker 1: I totally understand. W you I don't think so, I
Speaker 1: don't think so. As a cous dear man, I understand.
Speaker 1: But but there's a twist to that story. So Elliot
Speaker 1: Cows and Elliet Cows father Samuel and his grandfather Peter,
Speaker 1: they pronounced it cows. He was an ornithologist, not a
Speaker 1: dear guy. But did he like muse on or like, like, uh,
Speaker 1: did he was he like, oh, there's this little ship
Speaker 1: and deer running around or I'm not sure if well
Speaker 1: he did. He wrote Quadrupeds of Our Kinds of Deer
Speaker 1: and Error Zone. I think he wrote this great written
Speaker 1: about it. I like that word kinds. We talked about
Speaker 1: sub species and races. And he wrote a paper of
Speaker 1: kinds of deer that we do, that whole series kinds
Speaker 1: of So he's written about all kinds of you know,
Speaker 1: all the mammals and deer too, but not in detail.
Speaker 1: He wasn't really a dear person um in detail. But
Speaker 1: there's a twist to the cows story. So he Elliott
Speaker 1: cows and and at least two generations back um pronounced
Speaker 1: at cows. But he says that back in France, I
Speaker 1: don't know how many generations that would be we're talking about.
Speaker 1: He's a Frenchman from the name is French, and so
Speaker 1: his family originally came from northern France moved to southern England.
Speaker 1: And he says in that same footnote when when they
Speaker 1: moved to southern England, the name was changed, was changed
Speaker 1: or bastardized in and they started pronouncing it cows. And
Speaker 1: in France it was two syllables kuai's. Dad's what I'm
Speaker 1: switching too for the deer kuai's. And so if people
Speaker 1: are going to argue that that's their basis for saying coup's,
Speaker 1: then I want to hear him saying kuaiz dear. That's
Speaker 1: what I'm switching to get around all of them, like
Speaker 1: hard hitting Arizona flat brim dudes and be like, wait, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd like to inter rest in these ka I like
Speaker 1: how you held out until you found a reasonable out.
Speaker 1: I can't something contrary, and I need to find a
Speaker 1: way to get out of this. There's some people in
Speaker 1: Elliott Cows's family back before him that spelled their name
Speaker 1: CEO w e s instead of you in the middle.
Speaker 1: They put CEO w e s because they were tired
Speaker 1: of people misspronouncing it. Cou's probably. I have a newspaper
Speaker 1: article about uh an uncle of mine. No, my father's
Speaker 1: uncle hit a accidentally like crash his car into a
Speaker 1: policeman's car. An irishman named Philip to me, and Philip
Speaker 1: to me went home and got his pistol and back
Speaker 1: and shot and killed my dad's uncle. I have a
Speaker 1: newspaper article about it. But in that article my family
Speaker 1: is r I N E l l I uh huh
Speaker 1: so in the article or okay, and that's the only play. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My dad said he grew up with his grandma pulling
Speaker 1: that she kept the clothes in the box, and she
Speaker 1: pulled him down and show everybody the bloody shirt with
Speaker 1: a bullet hole in it. But the article about it
Speaker 1: describes him as with R I N yellow I. So
Speaker 1: he perhaps right, you know, just like people. I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm just coming on the way that names morph and
Speaker 1: change and yeah, and you're like, how like what like
Speaker 1: what pronounced you? What? I mean, how that dude pronounced
Speaker 1: his last name? I don't know, did you say ronella
Speaker 1: or do you have some the whole other way of
Speaker 1: doing it. My my family was originally from deeked in
Speaker 1: Switzerland in the seventeen hundreds and two miles from deek
Speaker 1: in Switzerland is helful thinking helful thinking Switzerland, and there's
Speaker 1: helful fingers back there now and they spell it the
Speaker 1: same way, which is kind of unique because names do
Speaker 1: change when they switch continents and things, but still spelt
Speaker 1: that way. Uh. Lasting on Elliott Cows, do you understand
Speaker 1: like I read like he was what was his what
Speaker 1: was his thing about levitation that I'd rather he was
Speaker 1: into levitation? Levitation? No, I just read that he was.
Speaker 1: He's probably on something stupid like his Wikipedia page, but
Speaker 1: read that he's like in into levitation. No, you can
Speaker 1: get the I bought that publication for likes Um online
Speaker 1: on Kindle. I don't know if it's available other places,
Speaker 1: probably other other places, but it's a short thing. It's
Speaker 1: more of a paper than a book, but they make
Speaker 1: it look like it's a book, and it's really entertaining
Speaker 1: because he as a scientist. He's talking about, well, okay,
Speaker 1: people don't believe in levitation, but basically, I we should
Speaker 1: hold out the idea that there's a lot of things
Speaker 1: in the natural world we don't understand and we can't explain.
Speaker 1: In future research will probably explain it. And he kind
Speaker 1: of felt that way about levitation, that we don't know
Speaker 1: what it is now he's been totally swindled by people
Speaker 1: who are levitating in front of him. But he said,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't understand it out, but future, in
Speaker 1: the future, science might might unravel what that's all about.
Speaker 1: Because people don't have any problem believing in in centrifugal
Speaker 1: force or gravity. Like if he took the Earth and
Speaker 1: you spun it wouldn't people levitate because the centrifugal force.
Speaker 1: He was talking about these forces as being understood and
Speaker 1: we just don't understand that one. He said. Everybody in
Speaker 1: the world, uh, it doesn't believe in levitation, except he
Speaker 1: says Christians, of course, I mean they have no problem
Speaker 1: believing that christiscended into Heaven through levitation, So so the
Speaker 1: Christians believe in levitation, so they're open to the idea.
Speaker 1: That's right, that was, says his tongue in cheek. But
Speaker 1: he talks in there about he he ends it kind
Speaker 1: of odd. He talks about how his wife, which he
Speaker 1: refers to a Mrs c in there, and and so
Speaker 1: those probably just gave up on that. So he talks
Speaker 1: about his wife and a friend and this big oak table,
Speaker 1: and they put their hands on the table and they
Speaker 1: tried to move it, and the table started bumping and
Speaker 1: moving by itself, and you totally convinced that they were
Speaker 1: doing this, And they pulled away from the table, and
Speaker 1: the table kept bumping and being agitated with nobody touching it.
Speaker 1: And then at the end of that kind of bizarre story,
Speaker 1: maybe he was getting seen out at the end of
Speaker 1: his career. The end of that story, he says, and
Speaker 1: therein lies my theory of telekinetic levitation. I'nnced. Now it's
Speaker 1: an interesting read, it's pretty entertaining, it's pretty short. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a this is a question that cannot be
Speaker 1: answered to my satisfaction. Um, I'm gonna phrase it in
Speaker 1: an annoying way. Why do dear lose their antlers? Evolutionarily
Speaker 1: or how does it happen? When it happened? Why do
Speaker 1: they evolutionarily? Why why should then? Yeah, I say it's
Speaker 1: annoying because you can't go like, we don't know why
Speaker 1: you We could speculate about things that may have. Right,
Speaker 1: there's some good reasons to lose antlers. You break a time,
Speaker 1: you got a new set next year. That's a great horn.
Speaker 1: You don't get a new set, No, you don't. But
Speaker 1: they're not gonna break as much as times though. You
Speaker 1: know you'll broom the tips off and sinicize, and that
Speaker 1: would that really drive No, I'm not alone. I don't think,
Speaker 1: not alone, but you know, you think if you're over
Speaker 1: wintering and you're trying to make it through winter on
Speaker 1: harsh winter range and through deep snow, be nice not
Speaker 1: to have, especially a moose, those big bones on your head.
Speaker 1: I mean they're being an advantage to to losing those
Speaker 1: during the wintertime. But you can't beat the hell out
Speaker 1: of stuff trying to kill you. No, tell you what
Speaker 1: the answer is probably is let's go nutritional signaling. And
Speaker 1: you've heard about that work. It gives you and it
Speaker 1: gives the animal an annual expression of its physical condition
Speaker 1: and its fitness for females to select the animals they
Speaker 1: are able to acquire the most resources, grow the biggest
Speaker 1: antlers because they're they're luxury organs. They grow after the
Speaker 1: body has been satisfied the nutritions. Yeah, like the difference
Speaker 1: in driving a car or having a picture of a
Speaker 1: sweet car you used to have. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: personal story, okay, But but here you've got an annual
Speaker 1: expression of of how fit you are, and it's up
Speaker 1: to the minute and and getting bigger every year. You
Speaker 1: don't as a yearling, yearling moose, you don't want to
Speaker 1: grow this gigantic fifty um set of antlers. But here, annually,
Speaker 1: as your body grows and as you get no more
Speaker 1: nutrition and maybe become dominant, you can you can express
Speaker 1: that and say, look, ladies, look at look at I got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but horned, here's the problem with that. Horned animals have
Speaker 1: the same luxury. They just keep growing, right. But there's
Speaker 1: sometimes where it's like a two year old big horn
Speaker 1: is gonna wind up having the biggest horns ever. It's
Speaker 1: like a big ass horned big horn is old. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: They you know, servants, the dear Family evolved in Asia,
Speaker 1: bob is evolved don't know where, probably Europe someplace. And
Speaker 1: so the the animals get on these different evolutionary tracks
Speaker 1: and you get you get characteristics that just develop independently
Speaker 1: and and and now looking at them now, they may
Speaker 1: not make sense when you compare them, like what you're
Speaker 1: saying that they just had They just had different um pathways.
Speaker 1: There's a procolius in in Asia. Some fossils were Looking
Speaker 1: at a set of fossils, it looks like at least
Speaker 1: that was the conclusion. Some of them shed their antlers
Speaker 1: every year and some of them didn't in that form.
Speaker 1: And so that's thought of as maybe being the root
Speaker 1: of the servant family, of the deer family. That's right
Speaker 1: at the point where animals have these things on their
Speaker 1: heads and then they're dropping off every year or not
Speaker 1: dropping off every year. We had a really really neat
Speaker 1: kind of expression of the the you know, the health
Speaker 1: of the animal being represented in the antlers. Um sam
Speaker 1: baits producer here at meat Eater. She shout her first
Speaker 1: mule deer buck and it was a really neat buck
Speaker 1: and everything about it. From my look at the deer,
Speaker 1: it was like, boy, this is a mature deer. The
Speaker 1: antlers aren't that big big, and they're kind of an
Speaker 1: interesting formation, and uh, you could have laid uh, you know,
Speaker 1: two year old deer next to this, probably three or
Speaker 1: four year old deer, and the two year old deer
Speaker 1: would have bigger antlers um. But then when he started
Speaker 1: dressing the deer, the deer had been shot the year before.
Speaker 1: There's also leg injuries. Front leg injuries will produce a
Speaker 1: non typical point on the same side as the front
Speaker 1: leg injury. Rear leg injuries. You say that like opposite, No,
Speaker 1: not always, but oh you know, I knew. I thought
Speaker 1: it was always opposite. I didn't know his front leg
Speaker 1: front leg is the same side. It's called a contralateral effect.
Speaker 1: And and so the rear leg or left rear lego
Speaker 1: producer um messed up at around the on the right
Speaker 1: side the next year. So a lot of theories are
Speaker 1: like some kind of counterbalancing, which doesn't make a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. Some people some tell you, well, the deer
Speaker 1: is probably back there licking his injury and he's damaging
Speaker 1: that opposite side antler. But I think it's more neurological.
Speaker 1: I think it's the way the right rain um manages
Speaker 1: the left side of the body and vice versa. I
Speaker 1: think it's something with that damage to the left side
Speaker 1: of your leg is neurologically affecting the other side. Um okay,
Speaker 1: so tell me why they how they lose their antlers?
Speaker 1: What's going on? One minute're kicking ass, You've got some antlers.
Speaker 1: You're fighting? Yeah, I mean you can pick up you
Speaker 1: can pick up the animal by the and then and
Speaker 1: then the the after the breeding season, to stosterone levels,
Speaker 1: mostly to stoster and a lot of other hormones. There's
Speaker 1: this big orchestra of hormones rising and falling throughout the
Speaker 1: year in a in a deer, but really to stosterone
Speaker 1: is a driver. And after the breeding season to stosterone
Speaker 1: levels plummet. And it's that that plummeting of testosterone. There's
Speaker 1: this this certain layer of bone cells between the temporary
Speaker 1: antler material and the top of the pedicle. It's called
Speaker 1: osteo class, and they're real sensitive to hormonal changes and
Speaker 1: then dropping to stosterone erodes those osteo class and antlers
Speaker 1: just fall off. They must be strong sons of bitches though. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like you've seen deer, like you could hit a deer
Speaker 1: on the antler sometimes break the skull and it busts
Speaker 1: the skull in half. M Yeah, but then a dropping testosterone,
Speaker 1: a hormonal shift will cause whatever that glue is off
Speaker 1: and that doesn't take that long. I mean he's kicking
Speaker 1: as November, then a couple months later his antler falls off.
Speaker 1: Yelping and growing new ones in a couple of months
Speaker 1: prior to November. You could squeeze the tip of those
Speaker 1: antlers off your hands, get blood on your hands. I've
Speaker 1: talked to a number of guys have gone up, remember
Speaker 1: the circumstances going up and grabbed the deer to dragon,
Speaker 1: had the antler come off in her hand. It was happening.
Speaker 1: Shed antlers quicker if they're nutritionally depraved or if they
Speaker 1: get sick or something. I don't really cause that, it messes.
Speaker 1: It just kind of messes with their hormone system and
Speaker 1: may lose their the sauceron may go down quicker just
Speaker 1: because they're kind of sick. What do you think it
Speaker 1: takes um? You know, people talk about areas of big Bucks,
Speaker 1: and you know what, when I was like coming up
Speaker 1: as a young man, everybody was excited about the genetics
Speaker 1: that place got great genetics, right, And then we talked
Speaker 1: to some guys. You've done some work with Matt Coffin
Speaker 1: and and his colleague Kevin. Kevin looks at nutrition, and
Speaker 1: they've done studies have taken deer from supposedly shitty genetic
Speaker 1: areas or supposedly stupendous genetic areas, changing changing their diet
Speaker 1: to match diet of deer from areas that are contradictory
Speaker 1: to that, meaning like you take a deer from an
Speaker 1: area that supposed he has shitty genetics and put it
Speaker 1: on the same diet as a deer from an area
Speaker 1: that suppose he has great genetics, and lone behold, they
Speaker 1: went looking exactly the same. And he got into and
Speaker 1: we discussed like, not only is it that animal is nutrition,
Speaker 1: but it's the nutrition of its mother when she becomes pregnant, right,
Speaker 1: and his aunt, Like whether he's going to be a
Speaker 1: stomp or buck could be decided by the condition of
Speaker 1: his mother when she becomes pregnant. It could, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: can be decided condition of his mother right before she
Speaker 1: becomes pregnant, the condition she's in when she becomes pregnant.
Speaker 1: Epigenetics that probably epigenetic it's a maternal effect, is what
Speaker 1: Kevin research and talked about. Probably there's a thing called
Speaker 1: epigenetics that is kind of a new field or finding someone.
Speaker 1: Not we but there's some amazing things where an animal
Speaker 1: has genetics and passes on the genetic code. And we
Speaker 1: always thought of it, like Gregor Mendel, Mendelian genetics was
Speaker 1: just like whatever genes you had, that's what got expressed
Speaker 1: in the young. We're finding out that environmental influences like
Speaker 1: nutrition can actually switch genes on and off. So so
Speaker 1: the genetic code doesn't change because it can't change, but
Speaker 1: which genes get expressed and turned on and off can
Speaker 1: change depending on if if you've got good nutrition or
Speaker 1: poor nutrition, And so really amazing things where it looks
Speaker 1: like it's actually genetic effects, but it's the genes are
Speaker 1: the same, there's just more different ones are active. It's
Speaker 1: really amazing, amazing stuff, certainly not my expertise, but cool stuff.
Speaker 1: And that's probably what's behind this maternal effect where the
Speaker 1: condition of the female can can actually affect the antlers
Speaker 1: of her male offspring when they're mature, because it's certain, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got enough enough gas for certain things to kick
Speaker 1: in or it turns on. It's the methylation process. And
Speaker 1: I only sund that to to sound smart because I
Speaker 1: don't know anything about the methylation process. But that's the
Speaker 1: vehicle um in in the DNA transcription that turned genes
Speaker 1: on and off. And that's what's at the heart of that.
Speaker 1: If you took what's your theory on this? And why
Speaker 1: hasn't someone done yet? Get yourself a couple cuz dear
Speaker 1: bring them up to Iowa. What happens to him? Do
Speaker 1: they just die because they don't like it? Because it's
Speaker 1: they get bigger, They would get bigger. Nobody's done it
Speaker 1: UM that I know of, because c w D don't
Speaker 1: want to be moving animals around, you can't, you know.
Speaker 1: We had a we had a conversation with someone at UM,
Speaker 1: someone who does some work with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,
Speaker 1: was talking about with c w D just like the
Speaker 1: whole thing of like moving out. It's just done, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but do we need to move much? I mean we're
Speaker 1: still really now. It's unfinished work man. Yeah, but that's
Speaker 1: a that's a concern to move the the habituated Elk
Speaker 1: out of the state. And they had to that that
Speaker 1: lucky elk that somebody chose to feed is now at
Speaker 1: the Veterinary Research Station, full full life. So they get bigger,
Speaker 1: they would get bigger. Yeah, I don't you know there
Speaker 1: would they stop being the gray ghost. I don't good
Speaker 1: question what their pellege would do, whether you get like
Speaker 1: a rusty red coat in the summer, which we normally
Speaker 1: don't get. But I don't there. They're they've been so separated,
Speaker 1: and they're good legitimate subspecies. They're smaller. We did some
Speaker 1: genetic work. Bunda Crockett and Pope and Young paid for
Speaker 1: some genetic work that I orchestrated with some real geneticist
Speaker 1: where we found a genetic marker that will identify a
Speaker 1: cow's white tailed deer from the other white tailed deer.
Speaker 1: So you could bring me a rack of skull plate
Speaker 1: and we could test that and tell whether it's Cole's
Speaker 1: white til or not. And Buona Crowt and Pope and
Speaker 1: Young are using that to keep their record books clean.
Speaker 1: Now someone enters the new world record cow's white tail,
Speaker 1: and it's a skullplate that Grandpa had in the attic
Speaker 1: and Grandpa sett he shot it south of Tucson back
Speaker 1: and this has happened, and we do a genetic test
Speaker 1: and yeah, family stories sometimes get twisted and chains, and
Speaker 1: so we've done that and we've found some of these
Speaker 1: animals they're not cow's white tail, and so they're not
Speaker 1: they can't be included. That's a bomber man. Someone gets
Speaker 1: confused about the butt grampa shot in Alberta and the
Speaker 1: bucket shot in Arizona. That's what it is. Uh, we
Speaker 1: had the thing where we were You wanted to bring
Speaker 1: up something about Neanderthals. Why, yeah, I didn't. I've sent
Speaker 1: you a bunch of the Ndfel papers just because you
Speaker 1: are you interested. I think it's just you and I
Speaker 1: are in the same boat, were interested spectators and what
Speaker 1: the scientists are doing. But the reason why, be the
Speaker 1: reason I'm when Neanderthal man is uh into him is
Speaker 1: because in my life, they have gone from these crude
Speaker 1: right and these crude like you know, you know, like
Speaker 1: beating their lady over there on the rock and dragging
Speaker 1: her home kind of thing, to being just increasingly complex
Speaker 1: and sophisticated. And it's oh, they were free divers. They
Speaker 1: built a raft and I was like, yeah, they were
Speaker 1: having free divers. They had art. They like to carve things.
Speaker 1: I was so I was trying to get cal that
Speaker 1: put a thing in Cal's weekend review where um, I
Speaker 1: had a whole joke crafted up for Calvity, wouldn't use it.
Speaker 1: I was waiting for the story. I wasn't even the
Speaker 1: story to come out where it was review old that
Speaker 1: Neanderthals had laptops. They don't happen, because every story about
Speaker 1: in Airthals now is like, oh, they were just great,
Speaker 1: nice people, nice smart people. Doing start testing this out
Speaker 1: by every time you see somebody eating oysters, you stare
Speaker 1: at him and you go, you neander Well, they're two
Speaker 1: percent of VIRGINO. Well, I'm a little bit Well do
Speaker 1: you have you done twenty three? No? I did the
Speaker 1: other one. I'm a little less than less than average
Speaker 1: on Neanderthal Rogan. I had a good laugh. Joe Rogan,
Speaker 1: he's like running ahead. He's running heavy. That's not surprising.
Speaker 1: It's a sanginal crest and the eyebrows. I think it's
Speaker 1: rather real heavy. He was saying, But you know that
Speaker 1: that miniature hominid that they found in Flores Island, Yeah, Florences.
Speaker 1: I think I'm missing a syllable. But three ft tall
Speaker 1: at maturity. They're running on almost all all Neanderthal and
Speaker 1: Denisovan jeans or genetics. I mean they come from that
Speaker 1: Neanderthal stock, not from modern human stock. Yeah. At once
Speaker 1: upon a time, you could have walked. You could have
Speaker 1: wandered around Southern Europe Mediterranean area, and just like you
Speaker 1: can wander around um here and be like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: a black tail deer. Oh there's mild deer. There's a
Speaker 1: white tail, there's a couzier. How did these all fit together?
Speaker 1: You could have roamed the land and run into like
Speaker 1: different kinds of different folks. Yeah, different kind of folks
Speaker 1: did some amount of love making multiple time. But paper
Speaker 1: just came out with the Neanderthal showing that wasn't just
Speaker 1: one kind of unique population where they interbred and it
Speaker 1: spread out from there. But it was a real complex
Speaker 1: over a long period of time, thousands and thousands, probably
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands, well at least tens of thousands of years,
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of different interbreeding events between and that
Speaker 1: and really messing with people or not into it people.
Speaker 1: Would you coming from one spot, would you like trying
Speaker 1: to pick up other species? You're saying could as if
Speaker 1: it's past tense. I feel like you're trying to call
Speaker 1: me out here. Probably like back in the day you
Speaker 1: would have been like, I'm gonna go check out that
Speaker 1: other camp. What are those anyway? Yeah? I think so,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bring a some cookies over there. And we're
Speaker 1: speaking past tense hypothetically. Back then, people with all the
Speaker 1: oysters and muscles and doing the free diving a pretty
Speaker 1: good crew. Kind of small? Was it the was it
Speaker 1: the unattractive modern humans though, that were more likely to
Speaker 1: breed with Andrew? I would love to know man, and
Speaker 1: I'd like know like when they sat around talking or
Speaker 1: they talking about how you know, like, was it like
Speaker 1: if you were krol Magnet or you know, and you
Speaker 1: hooked up with the Neanderthal? Was it like did you
Speaker 1: try to like keep quiet about it right, We're like wow, know?
Speaker 1: Or did you brag it up? I would load? No,
Speaker 1: I got along with the time activities. I'll be engaging
Speaker 1: in some day. Um. Yeah. Did you have any burning
Speaker 1: observation about him? No? I just just like them. I
Speaker 1: like that the h is back in the name, you know,
Speaker 1: it was Neanderthal. And then for a period of time
Speaker 1: someone said neander tall because because it's it's the cow's
Speaker 1: dealing because damn valley in Germany. I don't give what
Speaker 1: they call their value. But but not all the papers
Speaker 1: have the H back in though. That was good because
Speaker 1: it was kind of awkward to say. I never know
Speaker 1: what to do in those circumstances, man, like how I
Speaker 1: went to switch. I've switched to pronghorn, trying to switch.
Speaker 1: I even labeled my meat pronghorn. No, it confuses people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't believe me, you go look hell yeah, And
Speaker 1: I've given it to people and they've registered confusion. Really,
Speaker 1: that's so funny. You don't label your packages prong horn.
Speaker 1: I do not. They don't antilo capra on my go.
Speaker 1: You know, there was eighteen eighteen different types of primitive
Speaker 1: antilo capra pronghorn families in North America eighteen million years ago.
Speaker 1: For eighteen million years, we had eighteen different types of
Speaker 1: prong worns. Some had corkscrew horn corps, some had three
Speaker 1: horn cores on both sides, six total horn cores. A
Speaker 1: lot of them had two on each side. I wrote
Speaker 1: a field guide it's called a Bestieri of Ancestral antilocaporates
Speaker 1: and it's illustration, wrote that, yeah, with another machine man.
Speaker 1: Well that's interesting stuff. Eighteen different kinds of prong worn
Speaker 1: and they all went extinct except for the American pronghorn
Speaker 1: that we have. And so we had illustrations that Randy
Speaker 1: bab did illustrations of each one of those skulls. And
Speaker 1: then I wrote a paragraph which was anything we knew
Speaker 1: about it. And we had a map of where the
Speaker 1: fossils have been found, so it was like a little
Speaker 1: field guide. How far are you, Florida. There's different kinds
Speaker 1: always over there. If you would have named it kinds
Speaker 1: of a kind of you would have been on the
Speaker 1: same shelf. You know. Whenever I started getting depressed about
Speaker 1: all the animals aren't around anymore, I always to help
Speaker 1: not be depressed, I remind myself that the largest animal
Speaker 1: to ever exist larger than the biggest of Brontosaurus or
Speaker 1: argent two soaurus, the biggest animal to ever have ever
Speaker 1: existed on Earth. Right now, it's still here, right, We're
Speaker 1: in the good old days. The biggest animal ever is
Speaker 1: here right now, the good old days of megafono. We've
Speaker 1: got them now. Yeah, Because you get looking at my
Speaker 1: kids like dinosaur books and I need to look at that.
Speaker 1: I'm like man kind of little jealous about that. Oh
Speaker 1: so jealous. I just to lay eyes and get your
Speaker 1: brain wrapped around the scale. I want, I want it.
Speaker 1: We talked a lot about whether they have been a
Speaker 1: good eating or not. One of my kids thinks they
Speaker 1: would have been on one of the things. They wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been very good eating. Yeah, I don't know. Reptile Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: moving on, this is a little bit I want to
Speaker 1: talk about, like you really mixed up in the wolf world.
Speaker 1: I am. Yeah. I would put on the Mexican wolf
Speaker 1: Recovery team in December and was on it for two years.
Speaker 1: Resigned in December of UM and with my resignation letter
Speaker 1: added ah about a fourteen page report sighting all of
Speaker 1: the scientific process flaws that were that I saw in
Speaker 1: the writing of what was supposed to be the draft
Speaker 1: recovery plan at that time. That's what we were put
Speaker 1: together for a couple of months later, the remainder of
Speaker 1: the team UM went had and submitted a report had
Speaker 1: so many flaws. As I pointed out, Fish and Wilad
Speaker 1: Servis couldn't do anything with it. They couldn't they couldn't
Speaker 1: make that their their draft plan. Um. They just stakeholders
Speaker 1: weren't involved. State agencies were just seen as, uh, maybe
Speaker 1: stakeholders will we'll talk to you later. Um. And it
Speaker 1: went nowhere. So back away up They're like, what's the problem,
Speaker 1: Like what happened we used to have? I mean, the
Speaker 1: wolves were like continue they had them in Alaska. There
Speaker 1: was no like place without them. They just ran all
Speaker 1: right down into Mexico. And people mistakenly just think about
Speaker 1: the Mexican wolf as um just the southern part of
Speaker 1: a blending of different wolf sizes and wolf subspecies throughout
Speaker 1: the continent. We used to have a twenty four wolf
Speaker 1: subspecies in North America and Rohn no Wack boiled that
Speaker 1: down to five that seemed ecologically different in different areas.
Speaker 1: Um Arctic, well, there was a um occide and Talus,
Speaker 1: which is a big Canadian wolf, and in Alaska and
Speaker 1: then New Bliss, which is mid continent most of the
Speaker 1: United States, and then Bailey I, which is the Mexican wolf,
Speaker 1: and then there was the Arctic wolf and I can't
Speaker 1: remember what the other one one. In the Arctic wolves
Speaker 1: they run white a fair bit, yea, yea. And so
Speaker 1: the Canadian down in the Canadian High Arctic, Elsmere Island
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. And so so these are
Speaker 1: kind of groups of wolves that it kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1: The Mexican wolf is not just the southern tip of
Speaker 1: a big wolf distribution that blended um freely with New Bliss,
Speaker 1: the other wolf to the north. The Mexican wolf evolved
Speaker 1: in the Sierra Madre, like we're talking about white tails.
Speaker 1: And that's another reason Mexican wolves are physically different. They're
Speaker 1: genetically different. They're the most genetically different wolf subspecies when
Speaker 1: they look at genetics. But they weren't just in Mexico,
Speaker 1: and they were only in Mexico and the Sky Islands
Speaker 1: in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. That was the
Speaker 1: historical range of the Mexican wolf. Some of those almost
Speaker 1: overlaps with Cosier and and Got and Got Turkey and
Speaker 1: so and and evolutionary ecologists will talk about subspecies just
Speaker 1: have more support when there's a whole bunch of other
Speaker 1: unrelated animals that have that same distribution. It just makes
Speaker 1: sense that there are some ecological forces that allowed those
Speaker 1: animals of different types to to evolve a little bit differently.
Speaker 1: As a subspecies, and in that same range you have
Speaker 1: this like very different type of turkey, very different type
Speaker 1: of deer, very different type of quail. And if you
Speaker 1: look at ecological zones plants in the plant community, that
Speaker 1: that whole Um Madri and oak woodland, they call it
Speaker 1: that the Sierra Madre is is typical of is different
Speaker 1: than the Muggian rim in northern Arizona northern New Mexico.
Speaker 1: So it all makes sense that and and all of
Speaker 1: the about twenty different mammalogists and ecologists subscribe abscribe the
Speaker 1: Mexican wolf historical range like that southern Arizona, southern New
Speaker 1: Mexico and all of the Sierra Madre. Now, some of
Speaker 1: the Mexican wolves skull measurements have shown that some of
Speaker 1: the Mexican wolves would disperse up into the Muggian rim
Speaker 1: like you would expect to the Muggian rims central Arizona
Speaker 1: and the Healand National Forest in central New Mexico. So
Speaker 1: some of the Mexican wolves dispersed up there. Those wolves
Speaker 1: in northern Arizona northern New Mexico were measurably larger. The
Speaker 1: skull measurements everything were larger, and they some of those
Speaker 1: would dispersed down the Muggian rim. If you look at
Speaker 1: the like Google Earth and you just zoom out, you
Speaker 1: see the Sierra Madrea, this big green patch where the
Speaker 1: Mexican wolf was, and then the southern Rockies is another
Speaker 1: huge green patch. And in between there there's this healand
Speaker 1: national force Muggian rim with non wolf habitat to the
Speaker 1: north of it, non wolf habitat to the south of it.
Speaker 1: So Mexican wolves dispersed up, bigger wolves, neubialists dispersed south,
Speaker 1: and those wolves from skull measurements, those wolves in the
Speaker 1: central Arizona, New Mexico are intermediate in size. Actually, the
Speaker 1: males group better with Mexican wolves down there, and the
Speaker 1: females group with the northern wolves. Con indication that they
Speaker 1: were intermediate between those two forms. So we did have
Speaker 1: some geographic separation which accounts for the genetic differences of
Speaker 1: physical differences in Mexican wolves. They're not just um some
Speaker 1: subspecies that's blending in with all the other subspecies. There's
Speaker 1: some reasons why they're geographically and and all those other
Speaker 1: reasons why they're different. Uh, give me the pros and
Speaker 1: cons as much as you're comfortable, Like, what are the
Speaker 1: pros and cons with trying to bring them back? I
Speaker 1: think they I mean, Mexican wolves were a native wildlife
Speaker 1: species um in the Southwest, and I think if if
Speaker 1: we as hunters are going to thump our chest and
Speaker 1: talk about out bringing elk back and bringing turkeys back
Speaker 1: and all these species that we call unendangered, we can't
Speaker 1: stop at the predators. I mean, I just think it
Speaker 1: makes sense. We just need to they have a place
Speaker 1: in the in the Southwest, and and we need to
Speaker 1: be working to bring them back. Most of the public
Speaker 1: thinks bowls are pretty cool. They want to see wolves back,
Speaker 1: and so as hunters do we really want to position
Speaker 1: ourselves on the other side of the table from them
Speaker 1: and say, no, we don't want to bring wolves back
Speaker 1: because um, they eat elk and we want to hunt
Speaker 1: out might impact our elk counting. So there's some real
Speaker 1: challenges with bringing wolves back, but that doesn't mean we
Speaker 1: shouldn't do it. We we need to have programs to
Speaker 1: work with lifetock industry to to make sure those operators
Speaker 1: and it's usually only a few operators that are uh
Speaker 1: impacted heavily, but those that are impact heavily. We should
Speaker 1: have programs that help them out. We can't just say, well,
Speaker 1: you're a grazing on public land and we're gonna bring
Speaker 1: wols back and we don't care about what happens to you.
Speaker 1: We need to work with them where it's not gonna
Speaker 1: work at all. And as far as the big game populations,
Speaker 1: you when where we have wolves, we have some hotspots
Speaker 1: where wolves have impact elk populations and we need to
Speaker 1: have management flexibility to do something about that when that happens.
Speaker 1: Predators have to be managed just like we managed prey.
Speaker 1: But in a lot of areas, wolves are back on
Speaker 1: the landscape and they're not heavily impacting elk populations, and
Speaker 1: so I just think we need to make room for
Speaker 1: for wolves on the on the landscape. They belong here.
Speaker 1: You know, you've been involved in state wildlife for your career.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of tension between it seizes, a lot
Speaker 1: of not seems. I mean there there is. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of tension between federal wildlife management decisions and state
Speaker 1: wildlife management decisions. Um, do you think it's fair to say,
Speaker 1: just look back at at American history, it's fair to
Speaker 1: say that if there was no federal oversight of endangered species,
Speaker 1: and there was no federal wildlife involvement. It would be
Speaker 1: fair to say that it wouldn't have happened there were
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have done any real we wouldn't have done
Speaker 1: any active reintroduction efforts that would have been at to
Speaker 1: this point in time that would have been spawned by
Speaker 1: the states. And talking about wolves specifically, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think it's something that's been, like for better
Speaker 1: or worse, the state's top now And when I talked
Speaker 1: poorly about the when I was on the Mexican wolf
Speaker 1: recovery team and that effort, we reinitiated that in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen and in December, and Fishing Wild Services did
Speaker 1: it completely different. Fishing Wild Service invited state agency people
Speaker 1: to the table in a series of workshops to develop
Speaker 1: um a recovery plan that they would they would then right.
Speaker 1: And that was a whole different process because we had
Speaker 1: a neutral facilitator who was in charge of a population
Speaker 1: viability analysis instead of in past efforts, it's been some
Speaker 1: some academics that are very advocacy oriented, very protectionists oriented,
Speaker 1: and they were in charge of writing the recovery plan
Speaker 1: which didn't work repeatedly. This The recovery team that I
Speaker 1: was on was the fourth recovery team to try to
Speaker 1: write a revision of the Mexic wolf recovery Plan. There
Speaker 1: was one written in eighty two. It wasn't adequate, it
Speaker 1: didn't have recovery criteria, and everybody agreed it need to
Speaker 1: be rewritten. They kept failing because you can't get a
Speaker 1: handful of academics with a real protectionist kind of attitude
Speaker 1: together and have them right a Mexican wolf recovery plan.
Speaker 1: Explain to protectionist attitude, not ever wanting a wolf to
Speaker 1: die at the hands of man, no matter what I mean,
Speaker 1: Just like we want to craft some recovery criteria that
Speaker 1: will make it nearly impossible for them to ever be
Speaker 1: delisted and leave the protection of the federal government, which
Speaker 1: is not what the Endangered Species Act is. Danger Species
Speaker 1: Act is is that we're supposed to. It's like an
Speaker 1: emergency room. Someone just ready to are almost close to dying.
Speaker 1: You bring in an emergency room and you just get
Speaker 1: them well enough so that they're not going to die,
Speaker 1: and then you hand them over to um. You put
Speaker 1: them in a hospital bed, You put them in the
Speaker 1: hospital and then you monitor them and then you improve
Speaker 1: their health. Endangered Species Act is supposed to be like
Speaker 1: that with species, where we're just ready to lose them,
Speaker 1: we do everything we can to save them. We get
Speaker 1: them up to a certain level where we're comfortable that
Speaker 1: they're not no longer in danger of extinction, and then
Speaker 1: we pass them off to the state agencies and they
Speaker 1: manage them like all the other carnivores. They manage. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've often joked in in some with some species. It's
Speaker 1: become the my favorite animal protection Act. It is, it
Speaker 1: absolutely is, and that's does such a disservice to the
Speaker 1: two thousand other species that are listed on the Endangered
Speaker 1: Species Act. We've got species that legitimately are going to
Speaker 1: blink out and we're gonna lose. And we've got four
Speaker 1: thousand wolves in the in the western Great Lakes, and
Speaker 1: we've got people writing scientific papers and filing lawsuits saying
Speaker 1: they're still in danger of extinction. And we've got fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred in the Northern Rockies that are delisted, got sixty
Speaker 1: five thousand in Alaska and Canada, hundred ten thousand wolves worldwide,
Speaker 1: and and we can't delist the wolves in the four
Speaker 1: thousand wolves in the Great Lakes region when the recovery
Speaker 1: criteria was about fifteen hundred wolves, and we four thousand
Speaker 1: and wolves and we've got four thousand, and people are
Speaker 1: still suing saying they're still in danger of extinction and
Speaker 1: we can't do that. We need to we need to
Speaker 1: work together on the other two thousand species that need
Speaker 1: our help where they're legitimately going to disappear from the earth. Jim,
Speaker 1: what do you say to And I'm sure you've heard
Speaker 1: this argument, because I have many times as well. There's
Speaker 1: a value in having this animal on the endangered species
Speaker 1: list because it brings attention to the endangered species. I
Speaker 1: tell you it's gonna bring that. Is that provision written
Speaker 1: into the Endangered Species Act? The last time says oh,
Speaker 1: and but you've heard of this. I'm not that familiar
Speaker 1: with this argument. But I mean, at some point, doesn't
Speaker 1: it kind of matter about the access Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely. But it's like, well, you know, nobody's gonna
Speaker 1: care about the whatever snail or butter or fly if
Speaker 1: we don't have the grizzly bear. Yeah, it's gonna That
Speaker 1: doesn't even kind of surprise me. But I haven't heard
Speaker 1: that this, if, if, this is the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that's gonna gonna ruin the Endangered Species Act is going
Speaker 1: to destroy the Endangered Species at some of these people
Speaker 1: pushing and pushing and pushing at these ridiculous notions that
Speaker 1: we need to still have federal protection on a species
Speaker 1: like wolf is just gonna fuel the fire and we'll
Speaker 1: have the Endangered Species Act completely renovated. Oh, it's already happening.
Speaker 1: People get like some state agencies get so frustrated and
Speaker 1: certain you know, live style groups whatever, get so frustrated
Speaker 1: with the conversations around grizzly bears and wolves that when
Speaker 1: they hear it's like what happened Like it's like kind
Speaker 1: of like the level of damage that happened to the
Speaker 1: e s a around the spot at owl. It's like
Speaker 1: you turn these animals into something where the animal becomes
Speaker 1: symbolic of a kind of foot dragging, and then the
Speaker 1: Act becomes that it's just like a thing used to
Speaker 1: wield power about grizzly bear management, and people just get piste. Yep,
Speaker 1: that's not gonna end well, not gonna end well. We
Speaker 1: need to get these species up so they're no longer
Speaker 1: in danger of extinction, which is what the Act is,
Speaker 1: and then pass them off to the state agencies and
Speaker 1: and ed bangs lad the wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies,
Speaker 1: he's fishing wallead service of quote unquote FED. He told
Speaker 1: everybody the entire time. He says, our goal is to
Speaker 1: get these up above the recovery criteria that everybody agreed
Speaker 1: on and pass it off to the states. They do
Speaker 1: a great job managing wildlife, and that's what my goal
Speaker 1: is to recover in the in the Rockies. That that's
Speaker 1: the thing too that happens that that is troublesome. Is
Speaker 1: this this thing that it's the feeds. Listen, it's the FEDS.
Speaker 1: They keep proposing wolves get delisted in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: It's the FEDS that proposed the grizzly bears. But people
Speaker 1: were like, oh, the Feds. Yeah, the Feds are the
Speaker 1: ones saying they want to deal it. They're the ones
Speaker 1: that put them up for delisting, and they get sued
Speaker 1: and they're not allowed to because the lawsuits. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like a handful of like you know, it's anti money
Speaker 1: groups that kind of masquerade as environmental groups or that
Speaker 1: that do both, that serve both functions. What what is
Speaker 1: the most hurtful when you go to some of these
Speaker 1: UH fish and wildlife meetings and you have you see
Speaker 1: this argument being played out before you. Is is they're
Speaker 1: trying to kill them all and state agencies will just
Speaker 1: kill them all and they'll be on the endangered species
Speaker 1: and and it's you know, they don't believe in like, well, listen,
Speaker 1: we have this mandate that says this is what we
Speaker 1: are supposed to do, and we just spend a shipload
Speaker 1: of money and get them off the list. And I
Speaker 1: just I want to say, how familiar are you with
Speaker 1: how we got rid of wolves in the first place
Speaker 1: and that time frame. I'm like, if people were trying
Speaker 1: to kill wolves now, they would be gone. They would
Speaker 1: be gone gone because we did it very very well
Speaker 1: in a time without satellites, without GPS, without two way communication,
Speaker 1: Like we just use a little bit of poison. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what what a lot of pro wolf groups and
Speaker 1: it sounds funny because I'm pro wolf too, but but
Speaker 1: a lot a lot of the protections groups won't acknowledge
Speaker 1: is that the contributions of sportsmen through the decades have
Speaker 1: brought back the prey base in in huge numbers that
Speaker 1: allows us to recover wolves, not just a better kind
Speaker 1: of conservation ethic that the population has, which is true,
Speaker 1: it's the prey base. We couldn't do it if if
Speaker 1: we didn't have all of this prey Jim talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about your article were you the article you
Speaker 1: wrote where you talk about the public's enthusiasm for like
Speaker 1: trophic cascades, that trophic cascades also becomes like everybody's favorite word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: favorite phrase. That's that's another thing like trophy hunting, that
Speaker 1: that far outpaced the science behind it. So you're always
Speaker 1: playing trophic cascades. We need to do that and then
Speaker 1: talk about the you know whatever. He's like all hopped
Speaker 1: up on the idea that all it takes is a
Speaker 1: couple of wolves and their their rivers run clear again.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so tropic cascades just basically a trophic level
Speaker 1: in in ecology is like the vegetations one trophic level,
Speaker 1: and then you may have elk representing the second trophic
Speaker 1: level above that helk eating the vegetation, and then you
Speaker 1: have a third trophic level, which might be wolves which
Speaker 1: eat the elk, and so you have these three trophic levels,
Speaker 1: and the idea of trophic cascades is that if you've
Speaker 1: got a situation where you've got elk really impacting, overpopulated
Speaker 1: elk impacting the vegetation, and you've got too many elk,
Speaker 1: you bring in wolves on that third trophic level. Wolves
Speaker 1: impact the elk in such a way that that it relaxed,
Speaker 1: It relaxes the grazing pressure on the vegetation, and you
Speaker 1: have more vegetation and you have this recovery of vegetation.
Speaker 1: So the idea is adding wolves to that system cascades
Speaker 1: this effect through the trophic levels and where you have
Speaker 1: actually the addition of wolves affecting how much vegetation there is.
Speaker 1: So that's basically trophic cascades. So in Yellowstone they put
Speaker 1: wolves in a ninety five. They put fourteen wolves one
Speaker 1: year and seventeen the next, and that wolf population grew.
Speaker 1: But that was Can I interrupt you to use a
Speaker 1: quote from that era? Yeah? Um, it was in your article.
Speaker 1: Where's that quote around? Someone described Yellowstone as three thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred square miles of paradise surrounded by reality. That
Speaker 1: was that was that he's the leader of the wolf recovery.
Speaker 1: In the Rocky Mountain. Very pragmatic. Um, awesome guy. And
Speaker 1: and so everybody's talking about what's happening in Yellowstone and
Speaker 1: getting all excited about whatever's happening Yellowstone. That's what's gonna
Speaker 1: happen everywhere when we put wolves everywhere. But Yellowstone is
Speaker 1: a whole different deal. And and so that's where he said,
Speaker 1: that's paradise pause surrounded by reality. And that's so true
Speaker 1: because what happened in Yellowstone, no matter what happened to Yellowstone,
Speaker 1: it can't be replicated on on a working landscape with
Speaker 1: people trying to make a living and working on that
Speaker 1: landscape that's not Yellowstone everywhere. So so the trophic cascades
Speaker 1: and in Yellowstone released the World of nine already five
Speaker 1: years later, some scientists went in there and they measured
Speaker 1: aspen growth in the northern range, and they concluded that
Speaker 1: aspen growth was responding. And since the wolves really had
Speaker 1: an impact of the number of elk yet that they
Speaker 1: surmised or they theorized that wolves were just chasing elk
Speaker 1: out of areas where wolf were wolves were chasing elk
Speaker 1: where the elk would camp out and feed in riparian
Speaker 1: areas in places. So this scaring elk around by the
Speaker 1: wolves was distributing the grazing pressure and causing uh A
Speaker 1: response in the aspen. And that that just kind of
Speaker 1: speculative paper um was just like the trophy hunting thing.
Speaker 1: It lit a fuse on on the um popular media
Speaker 1: and everybody started talking about how the wolf was the
Speaker 1: savior of the environment. All we did was add wolves.
Speaker 1: And now we have vegetation responding. We have butterflies coming back,
Speaker 1: we have bees coming back, we have songbirds, we have
Speaker 1: beavers coming back to Yellowstone, we have vegetation responding. And
Speaker 1: and created this narrative based on just a little it
Speaker 1: of measurement of of aspen in some riperion areas, and
Speaker 1: the popular media went crazy. They captured the imagination. They
Speaker 1: love that story. Can you imagine now not only do
Speaker 1: we do we just want to put wolves back on
Speaker 1: the landscape, but now we have to put wolves on
Speaker 1: the landscape to renovate all of this degraded ecosystems. And
Speaker 1: it's all we need is to add wolves. So can
Speaker 1: you imagine if they had opened up UM hunting and
Speaker 1: Yellowstone would have done and they saw corresponding growth and
Speaker 1: aspens in the news cycle of do you think the
Speaker 1: news would be champion of cascade? Right, anything can can
Speaker 1: can precipitate a trophic cascade like that, and so so
Speaker 1: this firestorm of popular media and then a YouTube video
Speaker 1: just about everybody has seen. It's got forty million views.
Speaker 1: That's some British producer um with kind of a David
Speaker 1: Attenborough kind of that's all it takes, man, You put it,
Speaker 1: you put it, You put an old brit like, you know,
Speaker 1: because where they kind of like guy rid of nature
Speaker 1: to one of those guys at the helm of a
Speaker 1: nature video and people are like, and that's what happened.
Speaker 1: He starts out the video saying in the deer and
Speaker 1: they show these elk running, he says, and the deer
Speaker 1: gets scared out of And so it's full of errors.
Speaker 1: But it's got forty million views. And you talk to
Speaker 1: anyone on the street. Thousand people sent me that video.
Speaker 1: Oh I bet, I bet, and anybody on the street
Speaker 1: will when you ask him about Yellowstone and wolves say
Speaker 1: oh that In the title of the the video was
Speaker 1: when wolves changed rivers, and it was about them having
Speaker 1: such a strong ecological effect in the Yellowstone ecosystem that
Speaker 1: river courses were changing and vegetation was coming back. The
Speaker 1: problem with that whole story is that it's not just wolves.
Speaker 1: They released the wolves in shortly after that, they had
Speaker 1: a hundred year drought, the worst drought in a hundred years.
Speaker 1: They had a couple of years in that next decade
Speaker 1: with with heavy snows at that time that that knocked
Speaker 1: elk recruitment back. Grizzly bear populations increased so much that
Speaker 1: they documented three times the elk the calf elk predation
Speaker 1: by grizzly bears than than before we had wolves. There
Speaker 1: was hydrological changes in Yellowstone. We had the fires in
Speaker 1: huge changes. Their moose populations were dropping, Cougar population for
Speaker 1: coming up all the beaver reintroductions right see you here
Speaker 1: very nearby, Yes, in the Galton. Yeah, so you hear that.
Speaker 1: The bee they made that whole upper Madison and Gallant
Speaker 1: and beaver recovery areas. So the wolves didn't bring the
Speaker 1: beavers back biologistic and crates um and released them and
Speaker 1: the beaver's coming coming upstream and damning is part of
Speaker 1: the hydrological changes um in that in that ecosystem, that
Speaker 1: that was really caused by the beavers. But the beavers
Speaker 1: don't have a paparazzi following them and and champion everything
Speaker 1: that they do, and so the beavers didn't get any
Speaker 1: credit for that's right. That's so funny though, because you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: just add wolves, just add wolves and read what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, whether it's a beaver or a wolf, is
Speaker 1: heavy heavy handed management. And also we were killing cow
Speaker 1: elk off of the park in the wintertime and hunts
Speaker 1: as a way to try to trim the herds. That's
Speaker 1: what we do. We killed females and those uh cow
Speaker 1: tags were probably held a little longer than we thought
Speaker 1: as the elk population was going down. So there's a
Speaker 1: storm of things that caused the elk population to go
Speaker 1: from nineteen thousand down to less than four thousand, and
Speaker 1: some people wanted to pin all that on the wolf,
Speaker 1: and the wolf did all that, and it's just such
Speaker 1: a simplistic thing that happened. But but a lot of
Speaker 1: research has come on now. Matt Kaufman, who you had
Speaker 1: on the show, published a paper in two where he
Speaker 1: did a more robust, more widespread, more scientific analysis of
Speaker 1: of aspen in that same area in the Northern Range
Speaker 1: and and showed that Aspen wasn't recovering actually even despite
Speaker 1: a sixty in decline in the elk population, So at
Speaker 1: that point it wasn't just a behavioral thing. We've got
Speaker 1: six decline in the elk and it's still can't document
Speaker 1: an aspen recovery. And so it's a really complicated thing
Speaker 1: with a whole bunch of factors feeding into it. And
Speaker 1: to sit back and say wolves changed Yellowstone and renovated
Speaker 1: the whole ecosystem is is a fallacy. But but what
Speaker 1: do you want? What everybody knows. But when someone wants
Speaker 1: to come in, and they want to come in and
Speaker 1: be like, let's have a normal, reasonable conversation about this,
Speaker 1: you get accused of being like anti wolf. You have
Speaker 1: a quote one of your things, you wrote, I came here.
Speaker 1: It was you were someone else who said, we don't
Speaker 1: have to make the wolf out to be a hero
Speaker 1: to justify recovery. That why can't we just talk about
Speaker 1: it in a way that's I'm asking you, Why can't
Speaker 1: it just be talked about in a matter of fact way,
Speaker 1: like is this the right thing to do? How do
Speaker 1: we do it correctly? But not have it be that
Speaker 1: we need to like spend these wild yachts. It's too polarized.
Speaker 1: We've got everybody at the poles and nobody in the
Speaker 1: middle when it comes to wolves, and and I think
Speaker 1: that evolved because of of wolf recovery in the Northern
Speaker 1: Rockies and wolves are getting and they crossed two thousand two.
Speaker 1: I think they they exceeded recovery criteria and weren't the
Speaker 1: listed by Congress unfortunately until they were five times the
Speaker 1: original recovery criteria. And do you have these these these
Speaker 1: groups suing to keep wolves protected on an Endangered Species
Speaker 1: Act even as that population grows and grows and grows.
Speaker 1: I think that creates so much pull to one pole
Speaker 1: that you had an equal and opposite reaction the opposite way,
Speaker 1: with people pulling equally hard and equally unrealistic things that
Speaker 1: they were saying on the other side. And and it
Speaker 1: just got so violent. Everybody is still in their corners
Speaker 1: instead of meeting in the middle and just talking NEUTRALI
Speaker 1: about it. The opposite of your trophic cascade person, the
Speaker 1: equally ridiculous opposite, is your person who is just in
Speaker 1: love with the idea of surplus killing. Yeah, they love it,
Speaker 1: they love it, right, it's like the other extreme extreme.
Speaker 1: It's the it's the MSNBC, Fox News split is trophic, cascade,
Speaker 1: surplus killing. What is the middle like? If you, I
Speaker 1: know it's not your business, but what is the middle
Speaker 1: ground like layout for me? Like not only it has
Speaker 1: it doesn't need to be your opinion, articulate an opinion
Speaker 1: that based on all of your exposure to people a
Speaker 1: different opinions about wolves. Imagine if you will, the most
Speaker 1: sort of like moderate, kind of level headed, consensus minded
Speaker 1: sentence about collection of sentences about wolves. There's there's not
Speaker 1: many people there, but I feel like I'm close and
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm close to that because the wolves
Speaker 1: to me are not on a pedestal as some religious
Speaker 1: deity that's going to save the world. And I certainly
Speaker 1: don't hate wolves. Wolves are just the largest member of
Speaker 1: the carnivore family, and and agencies manage foxes, we manage coyotes.
Speaker 1: We couldn't manage wolves the same way. They're just another
Speaker 1: native um species. And if we just look at them
Speaker 1: that way and say, let's bring it back onto the landscape,
Speaker 1: and when they're causing some unacceptable losses to livestock or
Speaker 1: an accept the losses to native other native species like
Speaker 1: el ker deer, then were going to manage them. We
Speaker 1: bring that population down in that focal area, solve that problem,
Speaker 1: and in other areas where they're not causing any problems
Speaker 1: and they're just restored to the landscape for good. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know why more people can't look at it
Speaker 1: that way, but but they don't. It's very appealing and
Speaker 1: I know, I mean, they're just they're just big dogs.
Speaker 1: They're just another canaid out there. I don't know why
Speaker 1: they have to be so special. If you imagine looking
Speaker 1: into a crystal ball, UM, take the Northern Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: Will we get um? Will they be delisted to stay? Eventually? Yes?
Speaker 1: I think pretty soon. I mean I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know how you can justify leaving him on the list.
Speaker 1: I do think maybe this year they'll be delisted. Does it?
Speaker 1: Does it? Um? I know you don't do politics, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. If you need to answer this, you
Speaker 1: probably can't answer this. Does will that happen independent whatever
Speaker 1: happens with the next administration, Like does that have its
Speaker 1: own life course? Or does there need to be some
Speaker 1: like very top down pressure on that There isn't a
Speaker 1: lot of top down um pressure because I think there's
Speaker 1: safeguards against you know, like directives like that. There's there's
Speaker 1: influence there. There's no way you can take politics out
Speaker 1: of endangered species management, and certainly not wolf management. So
Speaker 1: there's always gonna be some political pressures and political um considerations.
Speaker 1: That's just part of wildlife management. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: pure science, for sure. It's it's an application of science
Speaker 1: and social science to manage wildlife. So I think in
Speaker 1: the future they'll be delisted. They certainly will be what
Speaker 1: what we can't do, And I've heard people say this
Speaker 1: is okay. I agree with delisting the Northern Rockies. I
Speaker 1: agree with the listing the Great Lakes, but we we
Speaker 1: need wolves in more places, and so we need to
Speaker 1: keep them listed in all of the other places until
Speaker 1: they recovered. That's not what the s A does. If
Speaker 1: they're not in danger of extinction anymore in too big
Speaker 1: popular nations, then we don't. We don't just move those
Speaker 1: polygons around the country until we get wolves everywhere we
Speaker 1: want wolves. Yeah, I know, I a little bit disagree
Speaker 1: with you because those ideas weren't around at the time
Speaker 1: they were delisted. But it makes it um It makes
Speaker 1: it better and easier to work being there. If you
Speaker 1: look at grizzly bears, it makes sense to me that
Speaker 1: we would just we would gradually, as it's acceptable, d
Speaker 1: list some some idea of population groups rather than saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, rather than like undoing the whole protection across
Speaker 1: the entirety of the lower forty eight, we would be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this region is cool. That region is cool, but that
Speaker 1: region is cool. That region is not cool. What you're
Speaker 1: talking about is those are subpopulations that were all part
Speaker 1: of the recovery, and so one subpopulation is doing really good,
Speaker 1: then definitely we want to take that one off off
Speaker 1: the table. We want to delist that, and we do
Speaker 1: want to keep those other ones because they're right from
Speaker 1: the start part of the whole recovery plant. Whereas in
Speaker 1: in gray Wolves, the whole recovery plan was three populations
Speaker 1: of a hundred, and then it was increased of three
Speaker 1: populations of a hundred fifty in the northern Great Lakes
Speaker 1: area there and and we reached that and exceeded that
Speaker 1: by five times, and then the western Great Lakes it
Speaker 1: was um like four hundred. In Minnesota where they're just threatened.
Speaker 1: And then it was a hundred more in Wisconsin and
Speaker 1: the up and they exceeded that a long time ago.
Speaker 1: And so those are too independent recovery processes and they've
Speaker 1: both been satisfied. There was a grizzly bear example. That
Speaker 1: one that they're delisting is just part of the overall
Speaker 1: recovery plan. Um, I'm gonna do another crystal ball one
Speaker 1: for you. What let's say pick a comfortable number twenty years,
Speaker 1: twenty five years. What are some states that um might
Speaker 1: have population of wolves that don't. Now if you just
Speaker 1: kind of look at the trick question, no, no, the
Speaker 1: biological aspects and the political aspects. If you'd asked this
Speaker 1: question twenty years ago, there's been some real surprises. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right right. Some of the Washington you'd have been like
Speaker 1: California people like bullshit, right, But here we are so um,
Speaker 1: you know, is Nebraska right, Like, is Nebraska gonna be
Speaker 1: like wow? Who the thought? Now Nebraska has a wolf pack?
Speaker 1: And you'd have to say Utah in Colorado because we've
Speaker 1: got wolves going into those naturally going into those areas
Speaker 1: as it is, and I think and Mexican wolf recovery
Speaker 1: we've since two thousand nine, the Mexican wolf population has
Speaker 1: been increased in average at twelve percent per year, so
Speaker 1: that the mixing wolf population is going up and up
Speaker 1: and increasing towards a recovery goal. And yet I still
Speaker 1: get emails that say the Mexican wolf is spiraling towards extinction.
Speaker 1: Press the click the button here to donate to help
Speaker 1: us save the wolves against the evil state and federal agencies.
Speaker 1: And I think maybe they have my ground pinned sideways
Speaker 1: in their office or something and they think it's going wrong.
Speaker 1: I think they hung it up wrong because the graph
Speaker 1: is going up and up. So I I do feel
Speaker 1: that Mexican wolves are gonna be I don't know when
Speaker 1: recovery will happen, because we're still in the early stages recovery,
Speaker 1: but that situation is gonna look a lot better. We're
Speaker 1: gonna have more wolves in in Mexico, and we've got
Speaker 1: two recovery areas in the US and Mexico because it
Speaker 1: has been a true binational um process. And then we're
Speaker 1: gonna have some of the rocky mountain states really gonna
Speaker 1: expand into those rocky mountain states. And and really I
Speaker 1: think a lot of this angst and polarity is going
Speaker 1: to relax once people have wolves around and realize they're
Speaker 1: not that bad and if we have management ability to
Speaker 1: take care of problems where they where they happen. I
Speaker 1: think in cases where wolves have been here a while,
Speaker 1: like for example, Alaska and Canada, they're not that big
Speaker 1: a deal because they've had them for a while, and
Speaker 1: I think all this stuff will will settle down twenty
Speaker 1: years or so. That's a really funny thing about friends
Speaker 1: of mine that just really don't like wolves. I got
Speaker 1: friends as hate wolves and um because what they what
Speaker 1: they what their belief of what they'll do to the
Speaker 1: game populations. But the Sun's bitches all want to hunt
Speaker 1: in Alaska, right, I'm like, yeah, you would like it.
Speaker 1: Another thing I mentioned David Meach. David Meach has been
Speaker 1: working on wolves for sixty years, which sounds those are,
Speaker 1: but he has. He's been working Elsmere Island every year
Speaker 1: on Archtally Worlds for sixty years, and and he he's
Speaker 1: very pragmatic about wolves. You would think some of the
Speaker 1: devoted your entire their entire life to wolves and wolf biology,
Speaker 1: but he's very pragmatic. He's the one that says um.
Speaker 1: Wolves are neither st nor sinners, except by those who
Speaker 1: try to make themselves so they're not. They're just they're
Speaker 1: just um canaans there. And the public perception I find
Speaker 1: is so skewed as to what a healthy population is.
Speaker 1: And people like to have this very unrealistic idea of
Speaker 1: how animals spread out on a landscape. So if there's
Speaker 1: a healthy population, it means I see them where I go.
Speaker 1: And like, we're looking at this big picture of Hell's
Speaker 1: Canyon that is chock full elk, but there's no elk
Speaker 1: in the picture, and people are like, something is wrong.
Speaker 1: And I've been at these public meetings. I had so
Speaker 1: many really cool wolf encounters in the UH Catcham area
Speaker 1: Catching Ranger District, and UH go to public meetings and
Speaker 1: it's like doom and gloom and the wolf population is
Speaker 1: going down and the hunters are killing them all and
Speaker 1: the damn Cattle Owners Association is killing them all. Shut up,
Speaker 1: And it's because people aren't seeing wolves when they're I mean,
Speaker 1: some of these people were obviously not walking on trails,
Speaker 1: but they said they were right. Um, but they're not
Speaker 1: seeing them when they're walking their dogs, and they're not
Speaker 1: seeing when they're driving their cars and he's seeing long
Speaker 1: tail weasels. Either, that's not that's not charismatic enough, Paul Jazz,
Speaker 1: I think they're very charismatic. I was with a lot
Speaker 1: of non game biologists last night, and uh, they're big
Speaker 1: fans of the weasel family. Are we gonna be arguing
Speaker 1: about jaguars and ten years No, I don't think so
Speaker 1: argue about jaguars. Do you want to restore jaguars? I
Speaker 1: was involved in one workshop recently um talking about jaguars
Speaker 1: and jaguars don't want to restore them. I just want
Speaker 1: them to wander back in and be cool. Well I do,
Speaker 1: I think everybody. Most everybody does. They don't know that
Speaker 1: I'm arguing yet that we put them in crates and
Speaker 1: turn them out. But the one workshop I was at
Speaker 1: where there's uh three advocacy groups that got together and
Speaker 1: wrote a big manuscript advocating translocating from Mexico into the
Speaker 1: muggy on Rim and the Healing Esgtional. This is pondrosa
Speaker 1: pine um forest and was never um, never habitat where
Speaker 1: they stayed. The southwest Arizona, New Mexico has always been
Speaker 1: places where transient animals came up. We haven't documented a
Speaker 1: female with young jaguar in the US in Arizona and
Speaker 1: New Mexico anyway for a hundred and twenty years. There
Speaker 1: hasn't been a female since since nineteen sixty three, and
Speaker 1: then a bunch of been a bunch of been killed
Speaker 1: in photographs since then. No females. Yeah, well, what about
Speaker 1: if you went back into you know, like man right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't know that. And and there were there were jaguars,
Speaker 1: and there were some females in some reproduction. But but
Speaker 1: this was a marginary. If you look at the Native
Speaker 1: American tribes, they have like no jaguar motif, not part
Speaker 1: of any of their stories. That tells you. That tells
Speaker 1: you something about how common it was in the Southwest
Speaker 1: and interesting and so we we definitely want to um
Speaker 1: make sure they can come back up and go back
Speaker 1: to Mexico they want. There was. Alan Rabinowitz is probably
Speaker 1: the most famous jaguar person. He started Panthera, which is
Speaker 1: a wild cat group worldwide. He's established jaguar conservation areas
Speaker 1: and refuges in South American Central America. Devoted his whole
Speaker 1: life to jaguars and and when he talked about well
Speaker 1: the fish Wallet's Ofervice was being pressured by some environmental
Speaker 1: groups to designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico. And
Speaker 1: when he heard that, he wrote not fed in in
Speaker 1: New York Times and said, this is ridiculous, is a
Speaker 1: ridiculous waste of money. That we've got a hundred seventy
Speaker 1: hundred seventy three thousand jaguars estimated from Sonora down to
Speaker 1: southern South America, and and some groups are saying this
Speaker 1: little dry arid land on the northern end of their
Speaker 1: distribution where they really just kind of moved in and
Speaker 1: moved out. Historically that is should be designated critical habitat
Speaker 1: and critical habitat as part of the ESA Endangered Species Act,
Speaker 1: and and habits had to be designated as critical habitat
Speaker 1: has to be critical to the conservation of the species.
Speaker 1: And the Fishing Wildad Service did population viability analyses where
Speaker 1: they included Arizona, New Mexico, and then they excluded them.
Speaker 1: And and as you would expect with a hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy three thousand jaguars elsewhere, that didn't change the probability
Speaker 1: of extinction um at all. And in Mexico itself has
Speaker 1: four thousand, eight hundred jaguars estimate, didn't that increased in
Speaker 1: the last decade. And so there's Arizona patriot man, I
Speaker 1: want American jaguars. Well, the groups that are asking for
Speaker 1: translocation up into Ariza into Central Arizona, New Mexico. At
Speaker 1: that meeting were some people that were involved in the
Speaker 1: conservation of jaguars in central Mexico where they are, and
Speaker 1: those people said, you're at you want to transplicate how
Speaker 1: many that's more than we estimate are in this northernmost
Speaker 1: population of jaguars. You can't you can't be taking our jaguars.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're trying to conserve that there so so,
Speaker 1: and then that got a lot of people looking at
Speaker 1: the carpet and scratching their heads like, oh, we didn't
Speaker 1: think of that. We're just gonna go get some jaguars
Speaker 1: and bring them up here. I didn't, you know, I
Speaker 1: never knew It's something I should research more or read
Speaker 1: up on. Mores like how oft and how many? Right?
Speaker 1: Like how many were? Really? I'd like to know. I'll
Speaker 1: send you a book, like what is the sort of
Speaker 1: you know I've seen it? I read a book um
Speaker 1: not too long ago, and it was it was just
Speaker 1: an exhaustive catalog of everything that could have possibly have
Speaker 1: been a reference of grizzly bears in the Southwest. So
Speaker 1: it's Mexico. It got up into Collar, yet it covered
Speaker 1: basically Colorado South. It was sort of like it was
Speaker 1: just a thing efter thing like from back the Spanish
Speaker 1: you know, early you know, Frontier day ranchers archaeological record,
Speaker 1: like everything that pointed to where were they? What was
Speaker 1: it like? I'd like to see that on jaguars if
Speaker 1: it was if it was in fact that this is
Speaker 1: always fringe and theyate straight up and this is just
Speaker 1: like the natural edge of their habitat, and just like
Speaker 1: you might you know, you know, Mountain Lion might kind
Speaker 1: of like flirt with the Alaska border now and then,
Speaker 1: but you'd hardly call Alaska like Mountain Lion country. But
Speaker 1: now and then one might turn up and they do.
Speaker 1: If that was the case, then I guess my ask
Speaker 1: would be that we take the necessary steps to let
Speaker 1: that contin new happening. Definitely, Yeah, I agree with just
Speaker 1: not jaguars and crates up into the Ponderous Pine. That
Speaker 1: seems really weird that that, but from from a from
Speaker 1: a like from a armchair expert, not not even that
Speaker 1: an armchair curious person. That strikes me as being a
Speaker 1: little bit much. That Ellen Robin wits I mentioned when
Speaker 1: when Fishing Wild Service was trying to designate which they
Speaker 1: did designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico for the jaguar,
Speaker 1: like the third third attempt, Ellen rabin Witz did his
Speaker 1: New York Times uh article or op ed saying that
Speaker 1: was the most ridiculous thing in the world that you're
Speaker 1: wasting money talking about critical habitat and and all the
Speaker 1: effects of critical habitat and Arizona. So here's a guy
Speaker 1: that devoted his whole life and he's like at bangs
Speaker 1: with wolves. He's just pragmatic. He said, that's not critical
Speaker 1: to the conservation of the species. But there's no doubt
Speaker 1: everybody wants to make sure that um, they're able to
Speaker 1: still come up and use that habit that come back.
Speaker 1: Because I've been in in mountain ranges where I know
Speaker 1: there's a jaguar in that mountain Rangil Mountain Island, and
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool just to know that my son and
Speaker 1: I want time carried to have Elena that he shot
Speaker 1: off a tall mountain in the Coyote Mountains and in
Speaker 1: the dark through the thick brush, and we had a
Speaker 1: bloody have Alina on our shoulders. And I knew that
Speaker 1: the jaguar, the jaguar that we knew about, was in
Speaker 1: that part of the mountain range at that time. So
Speaker 1: that has a little element of interest when when you're
Speaker 1: out there awes lots. The same way when right when
Speaker 1: we left Sonora this year, you know, the article came
Speaker 1: out on the camera traps catching down there group. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they got them in that you know that King
Speaker 1: Ranch area down there in South Texas. Yeah there, Well,
Speaker 1: and it's what's funny there is they're spending all this
Speaker 1: uh a version of things, is it? What's funny there
Speaker 1: is there like doing a lot of awes lot recovery work.
Speaker 1: And then it turns out that's sort of the strongest um.
Speaker 1: You know, the strongest populations are coming off these large
Speaker 1: cattle ranches. Yeah, there's two populations. Ones on a National
Speaker 1: Wilife Refuge and another one is on the Uturi Ranch,
Speaker 1: and I think the neighboring ranches and that's that's private
Speaker 1: lands and you've got that the old mandatory who I
Speaker 1: think passed away recently. I've permitted, have you just committed
Speaker 1: to us a lot conservation? And very much Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very much private lands. You've you've got to be managing
Speaker 1: on private lands. It's Mike Twis and and there's a
Speaker 1: graduate student that, um did I know from Arizona that's
Speaker 1: down there working on osla's right now. But I knowing
Speaker 1: Mike Twois who's run that program since I did my
Speaker 1: master's agreed down there. But obviously that that species has
Speaker 1: a little bit northerly range than than the jaguars. It's
Speaker 1: kind of well, it's kind of the same in Arizona.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the same. There's historical records that come
Speaker 1: up through central Arizona or so, but not not a
Speaker 1: breeding population in Arizona like there is in Texas. South
Speaker 1: Texas are breeding if sixty some Austles that they know
Speaker 1: I'm out there there, But Arizona it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's one here and one there. And we have so
Speaker 1: many cameras in in those mountain ranges now that we're
Speaker 1: capturing what's sneaking around in there. I checked, are there
Speaker 1: any in Arizona right now, Oh jaguars, uh yes, right
Speaker 1: now as well as of September, and I know there
Speaker 1: was one around then. It turned up. It's high turned
Speaker 1: up on social media, got shot shot in Mexico. Back
Speaker 1: to Mexico and got shot. Yeah, there's there's a different
Speaker 1: one that. When I was down by Douglas in September,
Speaker 1: someone told me about one that was down there. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I can say where. I probably won't
Speaker 1: say where, but in the US and it got picked
Speaker 1: up by a trail camera. Houndsmen founded No, a lot
Speaker 1: of trail cams I had. I had checking out a
Speaker 1: lion that a hunter killed, because all the mountain lions
Speaker 1: get checked out at the game at Fish office, and
Speaker 1: he was he got it out of the Santa Ritos
Speaker 1: and he said they had a bunch of cameras in
Speaker 1: the Santa Rita mountains. This was several years ago. And
Speaker 1: I said, oh, you got a bunch of cameras, said
Speaker 1: you ever get one of them spotted cats. He goes
Speaker 1: yeah all the time, that's cool, and like wow, I
Speaker 1: mean hunters have trail cams out and they're getting jaguars
Speaker 1: on their trail camp. We've talked about this. There's a
Speaker 1: book called Candid Creatures, and it's like trail cam images
Speaker 1: and there's a jaguar standing in the snow. The only
Speaker 1: images like the only image I think maybe like the
Speaker 1: only image in existence or something of the jaguars. There's
Speaker 1: you're talking about the historical record of jaguars. We have
Speaker 1: that list that the Game Fish Department maintained of jaguar
Speaker 1: records going all the way back, but a lot of those,
Speaker 1: even in more recent times are like like some of
Speaker 1: the jaguar records that some of these groups for using
Speaker 1: for their modeling was some high school teachers saw black
Speaker 1: jaguar across the road, and black jaguars the color phase.
Speaker 1: It's a jungle phase. It's an Amazon thing. You never
Speaker 1: have black jaguars in Mexico and to the north. Never.
Speaker 1: So someone says they see a black jaguar, we know
Speaker 1: right away, well it wasn't a jaguar. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: what it was. Yeah, it's hard to start. I mean
Speaker 1: there's a there's a thing of like measuring the validity
Speaker 1: right right, and so we've got like three classes class one,
Speaker 1: Class two, Class three. I forgot what the criteria are,
Speaker 1: but it's to rank them for for veracity, for um,
Speaker 1: how reliable they are. But some of those, some of
Speaker 1: those are are just sightings, and some groups will want
Speaker 1: to include those as reliable and not. So you have
Speaker 1: to be careful. And that's why a table like that's
Speaker 1: a important. But there's a book called Borderland Jaguars. You
Speaker 1: have not seen that one, Okay, I'll send it to you.
Speaker 1: Carlos Lopos Gonzales and and Dave Brown and and in
Speaker 1: there they have probably not as complete as our list,
Speaker 1: but they have an account of the historical records of jaguars.
Speaker 1: I'd like to see it. I need to get my
Speaker 1: opinion straight. I know I like them, all right, everybody's
Speaker 1: I'd like to get pounced and scratched, kind of scratched
Speaker 1: by one, kind of just to leave a scar. You
Speaker 1: have to. It's cool to know that there's jaguars out
Speaker 1: there right across the packs. Man. One nice scratch, rub
Speaker 1: some dirt in there to get it infected through. Yeah,
Speaker 1: got your final thoughts questions? Yeah, I dude, I got
Speaker 1: I got a question for you. I was talking with
Speaker 1: a buddy of mine, uh this morning on my drive
Speaker 1: back over here, and and he's I was checking in
Speaker 1: with him because he's well for a service dude, and
Speaker 1: he's getting getting grant money and he's getting a lot
Speaker 1: of in kine cash for habitat work on his place,
Speaker 1: and this is kind of his retirement job, as he
Speaker 1: calls it, learning to be a farmer, and he's uh
Speaker 1: planting a bunch of plant species and and setting his
Speaker 1: place up for muleteer winning habitat and upland game Big
Speaker 1: loves loves the pheasants and quail. And he is kind
Speaker 1: of running me through his list of what he's got
Speaker 1: coming up and some of his successes and failures. And uh,
Speaker 1: I said, well, yeah, a lot of work right now,
Speaker 1: but hopefully you'll figure out how to strike a balance.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, I don't think so. He's like, to
Speaker 1: be honest with you, I'm not sure any of the
Speaker 1: ship is supposed to be here. And I mean, he
Speaker 1: is working with ecologists and he's got a litany of
Speaker 1: really good contacts from his past life. But that did
Speaker 1: just make me think of this question, like do you
Speaker 1: find yourself ever get kind of bogged down in the
Speaker 1: management of things, Like we've been manipulating landscapes and species
Speaker 1: for so long do you ever kind of get to
Speaker 1: these points where you're like, sure, I guess screw it,
Speaker 1: because it's not we're so far away from what it
Speaker 1: was or what we think it was. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't. I don't think I get get
Speaker 1: that discouraged. There's there's things like in the wolf Recovery
Speaker 1: world where I just wish it wasn't a constant stream
Speaker 1: of litigation and litigation and litigation. Wish we could just
Speaker 1: get on with the business of conserving um carnivores and
Speaker 1: managing them as um as species. But but uh, I don't.
Speaker 1: I think I'm optimistic. I think there's just a lot
Speaker 1: of really good work going on right now throughout the West,
Speaker 1: habitat wise and and movement wise and everything that's great.
Speaker 1: Phil Someoney's addressed the elephant in the room that like,
Speaker 1: basically Janice has nothing to do with the show anymore.
Speaker 1: He's moved on to bigger he's he's out of honest
Speaker 1: once to get us out on assignments content I was
Speaker 1: assuming I was coming, and he's all busy with we
Speaker 1: got a lot of we've got a lot of irons
Speaker 1: in the fire and and he's tending to a couple.
Speaker 1: Got well, yeah, he's out ice fishing. But you don't
Speaker 1: have any you don't have your thing with That makes
Speaker 1: the honest sounds anymore, do you? I was thinking about
Speaker 1: bringing it to uh to Nashville next week, so you
Speaker 1: know he won't be there either. No, you got he's
Speaker 1: changing his damn thing. He's not even like a co host. Know,
Speaker 1: he's abandoned, he's moved on. He's he's left the nest.
Speaker 1: He's just busy. Yeah. Yeah, if you weren't cracking the whip,
Speaker 1: it's not true outdoors, Yeah, too much skin. He's missing
Speaker 1: some good skiing though, isn't he? I just said him
Speaker 1: to know what about out that it's puke in the
Speaker 1: nar man he's in final Like, I went to high
Speaker 1: school about forty minutes south of there, in college about
Speaker 1: an hour northwest of there, so familiar with that country.
Speaker 1: The only uh, all everything skiers say is annoying, But uh,
Speaker 1: I just hear one good one the other day is
Speaker 1: someone's talking about the powder and he said, um, that
Speaker 1: nar isn't gonna shred itself. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1: Blower all right, Jeff Helen fingering what what's your favorite
Speaker 1: of all the pamphlets and books you read? I think
Speaker 1: you you say that your masterpieces the jack Book, Hunts
Speaker 1: and Recipes. Yep. And that's even available as a pdf
Speaker 1: on my website deer nut dot com. Um, just the
Speaker 1: doughy r nut dot com. Um. I've got a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of PDFs that are magazine articles that I've written
Speaker 1: and you can. I've got Deer of the Southwest. I
Speaker 1: brought you a copy which is Cow's white Tail and
Speaker 1: Desert Meal Deer in the Southwest Northern Mexico. Um. That's
Speaker 1: available on the website and um my Instagram Jim Deer
Speaker 1: and and deer has an E after the end, like
Speaker 1: John Deere. Fact, it's a little John Deer logo that
Speaker 1: photoshop to look like a meal there. Do you want
Speaker 1: wanna come down and do a jack rabbit hunt with you, man? Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Speaker 1: I'd like to you guarantee me that we'll get tons
Speaker 1: of them right without trying very hard? Well, no, you
Speaker 1: you drive around if you want tons, you drive around
Speaker 1: and shoot him out of the window. And we don't
Speaker 1: do that. We walk, I mean walk the land, so
Speaker 1: we don't walk back with tons, but it's a fun hunt.
Speaker 1: You get bit up by Mike's quite a bit with those.
Speaker 1: No they're not no mighty, No, they've got they've got
Speaker 1: a couple of internal parasites like the the butt fly larva,
Speaker 1: a big thumb size cute. When they get under the skin,
Speaker 1: it doesn't affect the meat. But we in our junior
Speaker 1: jack camp that I developed for kids ten years ago,
Speaker 1: we bring kids together and we we show them how
Speaker 1: to jack rabbit hunt, show them how to um clean
Speaker 1: and cook the jack rabbits. We find some of those big,
Speaker 1: ugly but fly larva under the skin and and we
Speaker 1: turned a liability into a positive. When we we still
Speaker 1: did we brought a little scale, no, we started weighing
Speaker 1: them and we gave out an award for the largest
Speaker 1: buttfly large that s the kids are going, Do I
Speaker 1: have one? Do I have one? Does mine have one?
Speaker 1: Can you start on? So when you grab them, see
Speaker 1: I thought, because you guys are down where it doesn't
Speaker 1: get cold and winter enough, when you grab him your arms,
Speaker 1: don't just get them by min now. And we hunt
Speaker 1: them there open ye around but we hunt them October
Speaker 1: to March, just a season so we can keep the meat,
Speaker 1: and there is less ectoparasites on them, yep, as opposed
Speaker 1: to the endo inside were outside like like the like
Speaker 1: the insects on the outside. But it's not not bad
Speaker 1: at all. I mean, you just don't when you grab them,
Speaker 1: they're nice and clean, and you skin them and you've
Speaker 1: got some really nice clean meat that cooks up like beeft. Wow,
Speaker 1: how much did you learn, Phil? Like on one to ten,
Speaker 1: we're paying attention. It was a solid eight. You guys,
Speaker 1: You guys ran the gamut. He was so many things
Speaker 1: were talked about. Yeah, yeah, you're soaking it up. Soaking
Speaker 1: it up. Mostly I was fantasizing about my Neanderthal mingling
Speaker 1: in this hypothet nicole situation. I feel had to go back.
Speaker 1: He went back behind that curtain for a while. That's right.
Speaker 1: It's imagining like a Romeo and Juliet's situation forbidden love.
Speaker 1: Phil search history is that sounds like a movie. I
Speaker 1: know tonight, I'm gonna want it tomorrow. I try to
Speaker 1: tap into Phil's incognito search that you don't want to,
Speaker 1: all right, Jim Halflefinger outdoorsman biologists, man in the man
Speaker 1: in the arena, A man in the arena when it
Speaker 1: comes to wildlife and wildlife management and UM and a
Speaker 1: great advocate for hunters and wildlife. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thanks it would great be here. Comp