Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
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Speaker 1: Well, it's so okay, I'll tell you this story.
Speaker 2: You ready for the zeke?
Speaker 3: I'm ready?
Speaker 2: Okay, Then I'm gonna introduce you as soon as I
Speaker 2: tell you the story.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: We had a historian on the show, Elliott West, and
Speaker 1: then he was on an an. Elliott West was on
Speaker 1: Rogan Show and I listened and that guy is so
Speaker 1: good that he talked about totally different stuff.
Speaker 2: One of the things they were talking about is the
Speaker 2: term big wig. He's a big wig. You ever hear
Speaker 2: that term?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Okay. It used to be so.
Speaker 1: Such a disgrace to be bald that you would wear
Speaker 1: a wig made of human hair, horse hair because it
Speaker 1: was so disgraceful to be bald. The King of France
Speaker 1: goes bald, he gets a wig, then everybody's like, now
Speaker 1: I want a wig. Turned the tide. So then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, people that weren't even bald were wearing wigs.
Speaker 2: It'd be like you look up to Jeff Bezos full
Speaker 2: head of hair, but you shave your head. You follow me?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Zeke Thurston, he's tracking the whole damn deal. Uh
Speaker 1: Rodeo rider BRONC Riding specialists one how many times?
Speaker 3: Just won my fourth Canadian title and uh won three
Speaker 3: world titles.
Speaker 2: So you're I mean, how good are you?
Speaker 3: You know that's not too shabby.
Speaker 2: That's great. We're gonna talk a bunch about that.
Speaker 1: But I gotta talk about one thing is I saw
Speaker 1: you as much as you excel in your in your
Speaker 1: discipline and rodeo, I saw you get demoded this morning
Speaker 1: on decoy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, putting out I was setting the decoys out wrong
Speaker 3: and was putting the duck stands on the goosey.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I saw you. Well, you and I both made
Speaker 1: a mistake. We both took the carabineers off early and
Speaker 1: got tangled up. Rats Nest had a rats nest. We
Speaker 1: had to get bailed out of that. And then you
Speaker 1: made a second mistake. You unbagged.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I unbagged you unbagged.
Speaker 2: And then I saw you get demoted.
Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't realize decoy etiquette.
Speaker 2: You got you got taken off the job I did.
Speaker 2: I felt embarrassed. He said, Uh, you know.
Speaker 5: Is this one of your compliment sandwiches.
Speaker 1: But without you, you would you could take one hundred people. Okay,
Speaker 1: if if we were hunting with Brady Davis and Matt McCormick, uh,
Speaker 1: who've been on a number of times, the Flying ve guys,
Speaker 1: and you no disrespect, Brady's here, no disrespect, you could
Speaker 1: take not one hundred, You could take a dozen people
Speaker 1: and say, like, how should you put the decoys out?
Speaker 1: And I don't know that, Like, twelve of them aren't
Speaker 1: gonna right, twelve of them aren't gonna have the same system.
Speaker 1: But you got very rigid in the system.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: So there's a dozen on a caribbeaner. You take the
Speaker 1: carabiner off the hook and you go out and you
Speaker 1: place just play the bags in the right place. Then
Speaker 1: when that's done, you place a stand by each bag.
Speaker 1: When that's done, you go and take them out of
Speaker 1: the bag and put them on the stand and put
Speaker 1: all the bags into the yellow bag. And the yellow
Speaker 1: bags get hung up, but don't put them on the
Speaker 1: wrong stand. And when you take them in, you put
Speaker 1: a bag right. It's the whole way of doing it.
Speaker 1: And and we screwed up and and and uh and
Speaker 1: yeah they just came in and uh and said, uh,
Speaker 1: it's a zeke he said. Matt McCormick said, you know,
Speaker 1: want to be a better job for you.
Speaker 3: But I did notice that I untangled my own rat's nest.
Speaker 3: You let Matt take years over?
Speaker 2: Oh you got yours all undone?
Speaker 6: He follows through is what he's saying.
Speaker 2: It's a little emasculated. When emasculated and then he took
Speaker 2: it over and untangled my rats nest and I just
Speaker 2: stand there like a child.
Speaker 7: Watch.
Speaker 6: He reached into his pocket and gave you a lulli.
Speaker 2: He said, Hey, this might be fun.
Speaker 8: Can I tell you the behind the scenes after that happened? Right,
Speaker 8: So Matt and I are setting up decoys. So the
Speaker 8: way we got to this system is by just hundreds
Speaker 8: of days on the road together. Right, So you just
Speaker 8: you kind of figure out you got the core group
Speaker 8: of guys that know the system and then when you
Speaker 8: have guests hunting, you just kind of get in where
Speaker 8: you fit in, right. But after that happened with you two,
Speaker 8: today we're over there and we'll set out the decoys
Speaker 8: and then Matt and I at some point will always like, reconvene.
Speaker 2: You move this one that six inches and that ends.
Speaker 8: Well, reconvene. When everybody's doing the things, just he and I,
Speaker 8: it's like, all right, how you feeling? Like what are
Speaker 8: you thinking? Everything looking good here? And he goes, you know,
Speaker 8: what would be a really awesome thing to have in
Speaker 8: the next Goose trailer because we're building a new one
Speaker 8: for next year, way bigger, right, And I said what's that?
Speaker 8: And he goes, we need a whiteboard. I said okay,
Speaker 8: And he's like, imagine if in the morning before everybody
Speaker 8: just shot guns approached this whole thing. We just took
Speaker 8: five minutes. Oh, and on the whiteboard, it's like we
Speaker 8: draw it out and then we can say, Zeke, you're
Speaker 8: doing this, Garrett, you're doing this, Steve you're doing this,
Speaker 8: Brady you're doing He's like, dude, just be like sports right,
Speaker 8: Like coach has a whiteboard, comes up the playbook and
Speaker 8: it'll take us five minutes when we first get to
Speaker 8: the field. But he's like, I've been thinking about it
Speaker 8: this morning, and I think it'll save lots of time
Speaker 8: with you.
Speaker 2: I would put yardages on it. Yardages for sure.
Speaker 1: When you draw a basic picture, you're like, from here
Speaker 1: to here, that's gonna be about fifty yards. This is
Speaker 1: gonna be about ten yards.
Speaker 2: Great idea.
Speaker 6: And then you got like your your reserve players right where.
Speaker 6: You're like, you guys are going to be sitting here
Speaker 6: in the vehicle.
Speaker 2: Yeah and yeah, see, just be ready to go, Steven Zeke,
Speaker 2: you guys go ahead and have a couple of coffee.
Speaker 2: We were gamers.
Speaker 3: We just started grabbing stuff, but we was doing it wrong, NOI.
Speaker 8: Which we appreciate because a lot of times when you
Speaker 8: have people come hunting with you, it can be a
Speaker 8: little overwhelming when you look at this trailer right, and
Speaker 8: so people will come and just go, I don't know
Speaker 8: what to do. It's everybody's just moving, and so you
Speaker 8: just kind of sit. So to your point, I do
Speaker 8: like you were a gamer, like you guys will get
Speaker 8: in and get dirty, and I got I.
Speaker 9: Got yelled at right away because I unhooked the blinds wrong.
Speaker 9: And Brady came into the trailer talking to Dane with
Speaker 9: me standing right behind him and didn't realize you were there.
Speaker 9: And he goes, no, he knew I was there. He goes, uh,
Speaker 9: somebody did this that clearly doesn't understand our system.
Speaker 3: And his name is Garry.
Speaker 10: It's like, you don't screw around Matt and Brady.
Speaker 5: But you don't want to be the guest that doesn't
Speaker 5: participate in.
Speaker 2: The other option. Just sit and watch and then later
Speaker 2: they talk about how you didn't help. No, So you're
Speaker 2: exactly right.
Speaker 8: I would rather have somebody that like helps too much
Speaker 8: and makes a rat rats nest out of the you know,
Speaker 8: decoy bags, like that's better than standing with your hands
Speaker 8: because and Zeke and I talked about it. The way
Speaker 8: we set up on these hunts, there is a pile
Speaker 8: of decoys and a pile of work like a lot
Speaker 8: of gear.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: It takes takes time.
Speaker 3: To get it all out and stuff in that trailer,
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 8: All picked up, and so we are very much appreciative
Speaker 8: of those who get their hands dirty and get to work.
Speaker 2: Brady, I'll surprise learned that you studied bronc riding under
Speaker 2: Zeke's father I did. Yeah. Do you guys use the
Speaker 2: term study?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know if it'll be study, maybe like learned.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah.
Speaker 8: I think an appropriate term for me would I got
Speaker 8: my head drove in the dirt a thousand times while
Speaker 8: Zeke's dad watched me and tried to give me pointers.
Speaker 2: What's your dad's name, Skeeter, Skeeter. Yeah, and he's American.
Speaker 3: Yes, what state was he? Nebraska? Nebraska sand Hills.
Speaker 2: So you got a foot in each you gotta foot
Speaker 2: on each side of the line.
Speaker 1: You got a Canadian mother and an American father. But
Speaker 1: you know how, you know, Americans have somewhat I don't
Speaker 1: know if you caught onto this somewhat.
Speaker 2: Myopic view of the world.
Speaker 1: It always surprises me to hear that there's like a
Speaker 1: rodeo guy in Canada, because we think that we sort
Speaker 1: of own everything, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're like even up there. But it's a thriving
Speaker 2: culture up there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, especially like you know Alberta, Saskatchewan, British
Speaker 3: Columbia western side. It's it's huge, it's uh, it's a
Speaker 3: big industry up there. Some of the some of the
Speaker 3: best rodeo contestants come from there, bucking horses. The whole
Speaker 3: Born to Buck program was started up there, So it's uh, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's deeply rooted.
Speaker 1: Is uh Is it is there a regionality to the
Speaker 1: different events? I mean, like you mentioned that, right, is
Speaker 1: there like a barrel racing Mecca, a bronx Macha.
Speaker 3: And uh, I mean not not necessarily, but like I
Speaker 3: would say, like like me and Brady we're talking on
Speaker 3: the way over here, like for example, like if you
Speaker 3: want to be a calf roper, like Texas, Louisiana, your
Speaker 3: southern states are kind of where you'd want to be
Speaker 3: like that, right, yeah, just because it requires so much time,
Speaker 3: so much practice. Like them guys can rope three hundred
Speaker 3: and sixty five days of the year, where if you're
Speaker 3: from Alberta, you gotta have an indoor barn you know,
Speaker 3: to go rope from probably this time of the year
Speaker 3: till mid May, you know I.
Speaker 2: Heard recently, is surprise?
Speaker 1: I mean it's similar to that as someone's saying that
Speaker 1: it's like that rich kids always do better in skiing,
Speaker 1: and immediately you think, well, it's because they go to
Speaker 1: the big ski hills that are expensive to go to,
Speaker 1: but it's the rich kids are always gonna kick everybody's
Speaker 1: ass because they go.
Speaker 2: To New Zealand for the summer.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if your family's loaded, you're just you're gonna
Speaker 1: ski three hundred and sixt five days a year. If
Speaker 1: you're broke, you're gonna ski when you got winter. You
Speaker 1: can't chase the snow.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's it's just like sort of
Speaker 2: generally true.
Speaker 3: Right yeah. Yeah, and then like I don't know, like Alberta,
Speaker 3: like Canada is definitely known for their bronk radders, known
Speaker 3: for their you know, quality of bucking horses.
Speaker 2: And those two things go hand in hand.
Speaker 3: M hmm, yeah for sure. But I don't I mean,
Speaker 3: you can be from anywhere and do any event or
Speaker 3: discipline you.
Speaker 2: Want in your meal.
Speaker 3: Deer hunter, deer hunter, whitetail hunter, you like hunting deer, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Not a big not huge on waterfowl. I actually I
Speaker 2: saw that this morning, the way you handled the decoy strength.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've you got the only bird, dude.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we had a slow morning. Yeah we did, got
Speaker 2: the only bird. What did we find?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: He had a hold through his heart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he did heart shot him a lot better
Speaker 3: than Brady's turkey.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Brady's the invincible turkey. We heard a story
Speaker 1: this morning about an invincible turkey. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get back. We're gonna talk about what it takes to
Speaker 1: be an eight time wrangler National Finals, Rodeo qualifier and
Speaker 1: a three time world champion.
Speaker 2: Let me before we are gonna leave you and then
Speaker 2: come back to you, but let me ask you this.
Speaker 2: What's the old bron crider?
Speaker 3: Oh like Billy Epauer, probably the most legendary bron rider.
Speaker 3: I think his last in Afari was maybe like forty
Speaker 3: and you have to fact check this, but forty five
Speaker 3: to forty somewhere in there.
Speaker 2: But that's that's that's extraordinary.
Speaker 8: Sold He's an outlier.
Speaker 3: Are you you're long? Too long in the tooth?
Speaker 2: If you're so at twenty nine? Where are you? Are
Speaker 2: you in the middle, are you toward the autumn? Were
Speaker 2: you know?
Speaker 3: It just I mean it's kind of a personal preference.
Speaker 3: You know, as long as you're competitive and uh, you know,
Speaker 3: keep yourself, you know where you want to be. You
Speaker 3: can you bry a red Bronks as long as you want.
Speaker 2: To what all bones. Have you broken?
Speaker 3: Oh, I've broken. I've been pretty lucky in that that
Speaker 3: department of I broke my femur in high school. Rat
Speaker 3: and bulls have broke some ribs. I broke my ankle
Speaker 3: at the college finals. Knocked on my teeth at once.
Speaker 3: But doing what I was ratt and steers and you
Speaker 3: got kicked by a hoof. No, I took a horn
Speaker 3: in the face.
Speaker 2: Oh horn did it? How many teeth and knockout thirteen?
Speaker 3: Is that just like a fake teeth in your head?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 7: There was.
Speaker 3: I was. I was eight and so it was all
Speaker 3: my It was all my baby teeth. Still, but that's
Speaker 3: uh yeah, so.
Speaker 6: You're losing them anyway.
Speaker 5: They're going anyway.
Speaker 2: Saved them time a night for the tooth.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, pulled thirteen bucks that night instead of spread
Speaker 1: it all out over all those years. You know, you
Speaker 1: just got all that money you can invest that way
Speaker 1: for to get it all one lump sum. We'll come
Speaker 1: back to that. But I want to hit every time.
Speaker 1: We have a professional athlete, and I like to try
Speaker 1: to hammer around this like the life expectancy thing, because
Speaker 1: the interesting thing about athletes is you get like a
Speaker 1: you get such a second act. Do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean when you're well, I mean, if you're in
Speaker 1: a thing where you're gonna wrap it up when you're
Speaker 1: forty right, you look at you look at most people
Speaker 1: that dedicate themselves to some career and they're planning on
Speaker 1: I mean, they're like, I don't know, do this till
Speaker 1: I'm seventy sixty five, seventy. But to have it be
Speaker 1: that you can come out of one career and still
Speaker 1: have a lot of years ahead of you. You're still
Speaker 1: sharp mentally, maybe in your case should be a little
Speaker 1: bit beat up physically, but you also look be like, man,
Speaker 1: I got forty more years on the planet, and you
Speaker 1: go into you just change gears, you go you do
Speaker 1: some other thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, in your case you might go into teaching.
Speaker 2: But it's just interesting to be in a situa.
Speaker 1: Wis where here you are you spent your whole life
Speaker 1: trying to become like the best in the world at something,
Speaker 1: and you sacrifice everything to do it, and then you
Speaker 1: get to this age which is relatively young, meaning I'm
Speaker 1: I'm forty nine, I'm out right, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you start some whole.
Speaker 3: New, whole new never.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like you're like, you're like, what am I gonna.
Speaker 3: Do do next?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, it can make it make some people
Speaker 2: go mad for sure.
Speaker 3: Some people are a lot of people struggle with that too,
Speaker 3: you know, and not in just rodeo, but all sports. Like,
Speaker 3: because when you make your living with your body, you
Speaker 3: have a shelf life for only so long, you know,
Speaker 3: and then, like you said, you've poured everything you've ever
Speaker 3: had into this one thing, and then you're you know,
Speaker 3: when it's all over, you kind of you know, some
Speaker 3: seems like some guys almost kind of lose their identity
Speaker 3: or sure without you know, that drive or that that
Speaker 3: one thing that made them tick. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see it with people in the mill, people
Speaker 1: that retire from the military, because you got guys that
Speaker 1: are getting twenty years into the military and they're under
Speaker 1: forty some cases and just like wake up one day.
Speaker 2: You got to like make a new yeah good go
Speaker 2: for yourick. Yeah, you got to find like a whole
Speaker 2: new drag into slave. You know, I just picture it
Speaker 2: being challenging.
Speaker 1: We'll come back and talk about some of that stuff.
Speaker 1: New Audio Project is out January ninth. Now, get this,
Speaker 1: we've talked about this thousand times. We haven't talked about it.
Speaker 1: I haven't talked about to the level of detailed like
Speaker 1: to so we are if you are from with our
Speaker 1: previous audio originals, we've done a number here at me Eater.
Speaker 1: We've done a number of audio originals where we did
Speaker 1: our Close Calls series, Close Calls Volume one, Close Calls
Speaker 1: Volume two.
Speaker 2: We're working on a volume three of that.
Speaker 1: But we started this new series, this new project called
Speaker 1: me Eater's American History, and for the first one we
Speaker 1: are doing me Eaters American History, the long Hunters. So
Speaker 1: the way I can always connect people to what a
Speaker 1: long hunter was is Daniel Boone is the most famous
Speaker 1: long hunter. Everybody knows Daniel Boone was some kind of
Speaker 1: frontiersman or explorer, pioneer or whatever. What Daniel Boone really was,
Speaker 1: Like how that guy made his living. He's made his
Speaker 1: living supplying the he made his living working in the
Speaker 1: white tail deer skin trade. At that time, through all
Speaker 1: these socioeconomic, geopolitical reasoning reasons, there was a tremendous demand
Speaker 1: in Europe for American deer skins, and the good deer skins,
Speaker 1: the good numbers of deer skins came from the places
Speaker 1: you weren't supposed to go. And the long hunters like
Speaker 1: Daniel Boone were these guys that would go on long
Speaker 1: hunts and they died like flies trying to participate in
Speaker 1: the deer skin trade. As we explain in our audiobook
Speaker 1: which is called me Eater's American Histories, the long Hunters,
Speaker 1: as we explain in this this is like the so
Speaker 1: the way we're looking at American history and market hunting
Speaker 1: and commercial hunting is dicing it up in these very
Speaker 1: fine pieces.
Speaker 2: The long hunter era. Basically, as we'll explain this thing,
Speaker 2: you'll learn the long hunter area goes from seventeen sixty
Speaker 2: to seventeen seventy six. Why does it have such a
Speaker 2: tight bracket. You'll learn all about why the height of
Speaker 2: American deer hunting was bracketed by those dates. Seventeen sixty
Speaker 2: seventeen seventy six. Seventeen seventy six might ring a bell
Speaker 2: in your little noodle there, because it was American independence, right.
Speaker 2: So you'll hear the whole story about the deer hide trade.
Speaker 5: In it.
Speaker 2: We cover why deer hides, what was going on with them.
Speaker 1: We cover the beginning of the bracket We cover the
Speaker 1: end of the bracket. We covered the gear used by
Speaker 1: the long hunters. We cover how they process in the
Speaker 1: handled hides, we cover how they died, We cover the
Speaker 1: interactions they had with native hunters on the landscape, a
Speaker 1: lot of bloodshed, lot of mayhem.
Speaker 2: It's a phenomenal story.
Speaker 1: And it's like, this is because I've always liked to
Speaker 1: read about Boone, I've always liked to read about the
Speaker 1: long hunters. This is all of the information that I
Speaker 1: wish I had had, Like if I had found this somewhere,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have made this. We made it because it's
Speaker 1: all the shit when you're reading these normal Joe Blow
Speaker 1: biographies about these people who are coming from people who
Speaker 1: don't hunt, and they don't know what's interesting. So as
Speaker 1: you read their books, you guys like, well you should
Speaker 1: be explaining this, But they don't realize what's interesting. A
Speaker 1: lot of biographers don't. But I worked on it with
Speaker 1: Clay and nukemb and doctor Randall Williams, and we were
Speaker 1: able to set out and be like, what are the
Speaker 1: things you don't learn that you wish you learned when
Speaker 1: you read these books? And that's what this is. This
Speaker 1: is the stuff for people who like to do things
Speaker 1: with their hands and understand how shit worked. Why, like,
Speaker 1: when you killed a deer, what did you do.
Speaker 2: With the deer?
Speaker 1: How did you prepare the deer for transport? Right, it's
Speaker 1: everything packed in to it's about five or six hours
Speaker 1: me Eater's American History, the long Hunters. From the long Hunters,
Speaker 1: we're going to move on to the Rocky Mountain beaver trappers,
Speaker 1: the Mountain man era, which is also tightly bracketed, let's
Speaker 1: say eighteen ten to eighteen thirty four. From there, I
Speaker 1: don't know, we might go back to Clovis, or we
Speaker 1: might go forward to the Buffalo hide hunters, and then
Speaker 1: perhaps on to the whalers.
Speaker 2: Not sure yet.
Speaker 1: A lot of this depends on you and your willingness
Speaker 1: to go out and buy this damn book.
Speaker 2: You can buy it right now. It's available pre order.
Speaker 1: The more you pre order, the quicker we'll get the
Speaker 1: green light to go and continue making it and cover
Speaker 1: everything off. You'll know that we've been successful when we
Speaker 1: get to the plume hunters, the guys who hunted shore
Speaker 1: birds like egrets and flamingos and other things in order
Speaker 1: to supply feathers for the women's hat trade.
Speaker 2: Uh, this is real. This is I can't stop thinking
Speaker 2: about this.
Speaker 5: The Okay, I'm interested to get your take on this.
Speaker 1: It's so stupid. I don't think, Oh my god, is
Speaker 1: it's stupid. It's so stupid. The American Ornithological Society, who
Speaker 1: goes first? You want to tell us why it's smart first?
Speaker 1: Or do I tell why it's.
Speaker 12: It?
Speaker 1: The American Ornithological Society is now in the process of
Speaker 1: renaming all bird species currently named after people, along with
Speaker 1: any other bird names deemed defensive or exclusionary to the tune.
Speaker 1: Or they're going to rename some seventy some birds. Now
Speaker 1: I'll start by saying why it's dumb, or Yanni starts
Speaker 1: by saying why it's smart.
Speaker 11: Wait, let's mean just since Brody's not here, I'm just
Speaker 11: gonna say what Brody said. Brody says. Pretty soon, they're
Speaker 11: going to have to think of a non denominational name
Speaker 11: for the Cardinal. Maybe a little redbird with a pointy hat.
Speaker 11: I thought that was pretty fun.
Speaker 5: It's good, right, because the cardinal is named after.
Speaker 2: The Catholic authority. Figure, right, that's not going to last.
Speaker 5: I would imagine it might not but do you think
Speaker 5: it's great?
Speaker 8: I don't.
Speaker 5: I didn't say I thought it was great, But I
Speaker 5: think I think there's some after did you read the article,
Speaker 5: I mean there are.
Speaker 2: Some a lot of other coverages.
Speaker 5: Okay, I mean there's some.
Speaker 2: Are you starting.
Speaker 5: There's some people that also were against it, like heavy birders,
Speaker 5: heavy people involved in.
Speaker 1: Oh, and they're like, well at first I didn't like it,
Speaker 1: but now it's like they got with the program.
Speaker 5: They got with the program. Yeah, they understood.
Speaker 2: I don't care what they say.
Speaker 5: I think for us being white males, that skews our
Speaker 5: view of things like this big time, because I don't
Speaker 5: think that you or I have ever felt excluded from
Speaker 5: a lot of these things that we do in the
Speaker 5: outdoors that we've excluded. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, my buddy was telling this whole story to
Speaker 1: my buddy Alex yesterday, and he said, he.
Speaker 2: Goes, that's right.
Speaker 12: Man.
Speaker 1: When I look up a bird and realize it's named
Speaker 1: after a white guy, I always think.
Speaker 6: Go team. Well didn't they don't they say in here
Speaker 6: that one of these birds is like named after Hitler,
Speaker 6: Like if we can all agree on something.
Speaker 1: Well, I haven't given my spiel yet. My spiel isn't
Speaker 1: just eye roll. It's like I have a real spiel now.
Speaker 5: Something I didn't think about, but I was mentioned in
Speaker 5: this article that I think would make it much easier
Speaker 5: just to be a general birder as opposed to being like,
Speaker 5: have to remember that the gambles quail has such and
Speaker 5: such characteristics. If they changed the name to reflect those characteristics,
Speaker 5: it would be easier for me to remember and then
Speaker 5: in the future identify that bird.
Speaker 1: I agree they should have done that in the past.
Speaker 1: They should have done that in the past. The mulder
Speaker 1: is a great example. It's got big ears like a
Speaker 1: mule got it, but the coups dear. It just sucks
Speaker 1: that it got that guy's name. But that's its name.
Speaker 5: I'm done tell us why.
Speaker 2: Here's here's my issue.
Speaker 1: I used to play ball with the American Ornithological Society
Speaker 1: when the American Ornithological Society came in and said, you
Speaker 1: know what, we've been calling these birds blue grouse, but
Speaker 1: in fact we're capturing these two divergent species. When we
Speaker 1: say blue grouse, there's the dusky in the sooty and uh,
Speaker 1: they have a different call. One of them tends to
Speaker 1: strut and display on the ground. One of them tends
Speaker 1: to strut and display in a tree. They make a
Speaker 1: different noise. The I COM's different, totally different habits, right,
Speaker 1: not a lot of bleed over between the two. So
Speaker 1: we have decided that based on these criteria, there's actually
Speaker 1: a sooti grouse on the coast and a dusky grouse
Speaker 1: in the interior, and we're splitting them. I was like,
Speaker 1: that's great, that's great one of that case. It's like,
Speaker 1: you looked across the spectrum of birdiness you decided this
Speaker 1: is the case.
Speaker 2: There's another bird.
Speaker 1: There's a bird called an old squaw, a duck called
Speaker 1: an old squaw. Someone at a point. There's been a
Speaker 1: lot of there's been a lot of movement over the years.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many squaw peaks became something different.
Speaker 1: People used to call salmon candy squaw candy. It's like
Speaker 1: there's just this general movement away from a term, even
Speaker 1: though the term was used by Native peoples. There's a
Speaker 1: movement away from a term that has been deemed to
Speaker 1: be derogatory. So the old squaw became the long tailed duck,
Speaker 1: the squaw fish became the northern pike.
Speaker 2: Minno and I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, I get it
Speaker 2: to go in and do this.
Speaker 1: Under the pretext of what they're saying, they're saying that
Speaker 1: it's exclusionary, meaning that well, first off, you have to
Speaker 1: ask yourself, just take a step back from it. What
Speaker 1: is a birder. It's like, it's very hard to define
Speaker 1: a birder because we don't have the same term for
Speaker 1: a person. We don't have the same term for fish,
Speaker 1: we don't have the same term for mammals. So a birder,
Speaker 1: I would gather, means you are an individual who's interested
Speaker 1: in birds. And if you're interested in fish, like if
Speaker 1: I see a fish that I don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: I'm damn sure interested in finding out what the fish is,
Speaker 1: but there's no word for that. You're just a whatever
Speaker 1: the hell, You're just a person. If I see a
Speaker 1: mammal and I'm in a new area and I'm like,
Speaker 1: what the hell was that? I want to go find
Speaker 1: out what it is, but there's no name for that.
Speaker 1: So birding has sort of created that there's a thing
Speaker 1: called birding, and it's being interested in bird as I gather,
Speaker 1: they're proposing here that an individual who's not previously interested
Speaker 1: in birds. I mean they they've been inspired by life
Speaker 1: to become interest in birds. They decide that they want
Speaker 1: to become interested in birds, so like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm going to become more interest in birds. And they
Speaker 1: see a bird fly by and they're like, what in
Speaker 1: the hell was that bird? This is the This is
Speaker 1: the reasoning that the Ornithological Society thinks that people are
Speaker 1: going through. I'm an individual and I see a bird
Speaker 1: go by. I'm like, well, look at that crazy, purple, iridescent,
Speaker 1: loud ass bird go by. I'm like, I'm gonna find
Speaker 1: out what that bird was. So I start looking through
Speaker 1: my bird book and I'm go like, oh shit, it's
Speaker 1: a Stellar's jay. What they're saying here is that individual
Speaker 1: goes who's this stellar? Feller of white birders don't know
Speaker 1: who Stellar was, but they're saying an individual is going
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, a Stellar's j I wonder what
Speaker 1: the etymology of that is. And then they're gonna look
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, here he is. He's this guy
Speaker 1: and he went to the Arctic and has a name
Speaker 1: to sea Lion, and a and a this and that
Speaker 1: after himself. Oh he's a white male.
Speaker 2: Fuck that bird I'm getting out of birding. I just like,
Speaker 2: there's no way that's happening.
Speaker 6: That's a partial.
Speaker 2: Is your connection to birding so tenuous?
Speaker 13: I don't think that's the main because the white guy
Speaker 13: the main threast. I think it's like a waste is
Speaker 13: immortalizing someone in like in in some way that maybe
Speaker 13: I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna throw my ball
Speaker 13: in whichever direction is going, but it's imortalizing someone who
Speaker 13: maybe shouldn't be immortalized in that way. I think it's
Speaker 13: more they're like, no, I'm gonna look out who this
Speaker 13: guy is. I'm like, oh, maybe, yes.
Speaker 6: Thank you over simplifying this, Stephen, because it's a fun
Speaker 6: argument for you, which is a theme we've experienced in
Speaker 6: the past. A seventy bird species A yeah, sure, mayga,
Speaker 6: seven hundred whatever.
Speaker 2: Birds.
Speaker 6: Part of this right is like when we look at
Speaker 6: the squaw fish to northern pike Minno, there's a rebranding
Speaker 6: on behalf of the species right to where you had
Speaker 6: an association with this species that could be causing that
Speaker 6: species harm. And then when with that rebrand the idea
Speaker 6: is there's a a larger respect that comes along with
Speaker 6: the rebrand, it gets a facelift, and then.
Speaker 2: They put they put a bounty on it in its
Speaker 2: native waters.
Speaker 6: Well in some places. Right, But that's a huge different
Speaker 6: We can pick a different deal if you want, right,
Speaker 6: but you do understand what I'm saying. When we then
Speaker 6: have an association with something that has like a very well, uh,
Speaker 6: everybody has a negative opinion of a certain that could
Speaker 6: then have a negative effect on that species, which would
Speaker 6: be a pro for a rebrand. In my opinion, there's
Speaker 6: a big difference between well being like, oh, it's anti
Speaker 6: white people.
Speaker 2: No, there's a big difference between the word squaw in
Speaker 2: the word stellar.
Speaker 6: Which is not my argument at all. Yeah, Okay, absolutely
Speaker 6: they're spelled different. Both have in them. That's good. But
Speaker 6: the flip side here is for history, every time you
Speaker 6: do come across something like this, like we had, you know,
Speaker 6: great discussions on the renaming of Mount Gore, right, and
Speaker 6: that brings into light that individual's history again when these
Speaker 6: conversations come up, and I think that that's incredibly valuable,
Speaker 6: so valuable that we may not want to change these
Speaker 6: names because it would be removing this spotlight that circles
Speaker 6: back around on the past actions of these people, and
Speaker 6: that's what history is about, is going back and relearning
Speaker 6: and seeing where we are in time and try not
Speaker 6: to make those same mistakes. But some people, at the
Speaker 6: end of the day are just giant assholes, and I
Speaker 6: say they shouldn't be associated with anything.
Speaker 2: That's not the criteria here.
Speaker 1: I think again, the criteria here is focusing on very
Speaker 1: very shotgun approach.
Speaker 2: It's a very shotgun approach they could have. I don't know, there.
Speaker 1: Could be an Abe Lincoln bird and they're gonna throw
Speaker 1: out the Abe lincolnbird's brain to draw, right, it's.
Speaker 2: A ridiculous line to draw. It's distracting.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, uh, people for the ethical treatment
Speaker 1: of animals, they will often do things to generate headlines, right,
Speaker 1: because the way that they get coverage, They get coverage
Speaker 1: oftentimes from an opposing perspective, who covers Pete under the
Speaker 1: oh my god, what will they do now next? Right,
Speaker 1: So Peter will pick a thing that that just seems
Speaker 1: sort of outlandish because it puts them in the news cycle.
Speaker 1: It's like inconsequential outlandish, and you know it'll get tons
Speaker 1: of coverage because the coverage will be holy smokes. These
Speaker 1: people are crazy and they feed that narrative because that's
Speaker 1: just just.
Speaker 6: Can't beat a dead horse, you feed a fed horse
Speaker 6: or something. They did they yep, yeah, all all.
Speaker 1: They They came out of the thing that we have
Speaker 1: a lot of sayings more than one way to skin
Speaker 1: a cat, and they're like, we need to stop using
Speaker 1: all these sayings because these sayings are and they get
Speaker 1: tons of you'd get people talking about it, because even
Speaker 1: if they're talking about it negatively, they're still talking about
Speaker 1: it and it creates a conversation. I feel that this
Speaker 1: move is coming from a pr person. It's coming from
Speaker 1: a person who is generating, who's creating noise for the
Speaker 1: sake of creating noise. It's like, I find that there's
Speaker 1: a much bigger problem of people seeing a bird and
Speaker 1: not knowing what they're looking at and not caring. Then
Speaker 1: I do that they do a bunch of diligence and
Speaker 1: find out that it's named after an individual, that they're
Speaker 1: gonna wind up not liking it.
Speaker 13: What do they have to gain from making noise? It's
Speaker 13: not like Peter. What does the ornithological society have to gain.
Speaker 1: For They probably like to be in the news. They
Speaker 1: are probably very excited. I'm not saying it's like they
Speaker 1: would be excited about conversations like this.
Speaker 9: What I what I don't like about it, man is
Speaker 9: uh and I didn't read this article at all, and
Speaker 9: from Yanni's perspective, and it's right, I am coming at
Speaker 9: it from a you know, Montana born and raised white kid.
Speaker 9: But you're you're kind of like leaving it up to
Speaker 9: this society to dictate what they think is right or
Speaker 9: wrong in history too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, so like they didn't the birds in the
Speaker 2: first one.
Speaker 9: They're they're deciding what names, uh we should be able
Speaker 9: to like attribute to animals species or not, which in
Speaker 9: my opinion, like it's very well not in my opinion,
Speaker 9: it gets very political right on behalf of whatever there
Speaker 9: kind of their personal direction is like what about rivers?
Speaker 10: What if we started doing the same thing with rivers?
Speaker 10: Jefferson river goes away?
Speaker 1: People get mad when you do this because you go like, well,
Speaker 1: what will happen when Washington d C isn't Washington d C?
Speaker 1: And then go like, well, now you're just doing like
Speaker 1: trickle down, what's next?
Speaker 6: And slippery slope?
Speaker 1: Slippery slope. I don't like to do all that, but
Speaker 1: you do wonder. Here's what here. I don't want to
Speaker 1: I want to talk about I want to talk about
Speaker 1: riding crazy horses, but I mean, I want to talk
Speaker 1: about this too. But finally, there's this, there's this idea
Speaker 1: that this is the thing I like, I'm honestly curious about.
Speaker 2: If you get to if you the we have the constitution,
Speaker 2: we have a constitution that protects free it codifies free speech. Okay,
Speaker 2: so you have this this.
Speaker 1: Document that paves the way for free speech and paves
Speaker 1: the way for a separation of powers, and paves the
Speaker 1: way for a separation of church and state. And then
Speaker 1: you go and say, but we're gonna get rid of
Speaker 1: any kind of marking of the individuals that did it,
Speaker 1: because they're bad people from the beginning. At what point
Speaker 1: do you also ditch the thing they made and what
Speaker 1: do you replace it with. So if you say, there
Speaker 1: can't be a bird named after this guy, that's horrible.
Speaker 1: There shouldn't be a statue of this guy because that's horrible.
Speaker 1: There shouldn't be a talent of this guy because that's horrible.
Speaker 1: In fact, but what about the fact that we're living
Speaker 1: under a document that they created. At what point is
Speaker 1: that horrible and what is the alternative guiding national principle
Speaker 1: when you ditch all aspects of these people because there's
Speaker 1: things about them he didn't like, at what point do
Speaker 1: you go, like, and not only that, but all this
Speaker 1: stuff about like freedom of the press, free speech.
Speaker 2: Being uh, you know, double jeopardy, having your house seized
Speaker 2: by the military to store soldiers, Like, at what point
Speaker 2: is all that kind of stupid? Because the people that
Speaker 2: made it were bad people. I just think it's like.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's a I think it's a largely
Speaker 1: kind of a it's just like this, like it's an
Speaker 1: exercise and divisiveness.
Speaker 13: Well, in theory, you can amend that document. You know,
Speaker 13: it's very difficult to do. But I'm like, you know,
Speaker 13: it's not like.
Speaker 2: Well, you can amend it only by the rules of
Speaker 2: the document.
Speaker 6: Yeah, true, that's true.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that is laid out in the document.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's a there's only so far you can
Speaker 1: go with this before you run up against the real wall.
Speaker 2: Well, if there was a bird called the Rommels bird.
Speaker 6: We can agree that the distance of how far you
Speaker 6: can go is a big, big difference. Distance between changing
Speaker 6: the name of a bird and tearing up the US Constitution.
Speaker 6: That is a long way. That is so far of
Speaker 6: a long way that I would say we will never
Speaker 6: ever ever get there.
Speaker 2: I think that you'll. I think that in your lifetime
Speaker 2: it will be toyed with.
Speaker 6: I think it's been toyed with since it was written.
Speaker 1: Be toid with from a different angle. I don't want
Speaker 1: to conflate that with this bird thing. I think the
Speaker 1: birth thing is like, you can't just all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you can't just all of a sudden do it. It's
Speaker 1: going to create an earther thing like this.
Speaker 2: You know, when years ago.
Speaker 1: I was when I was working on a writing project
Speaker 1: and I was with some guys from the Buffalo Field Campaign. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a whole other angle. This is a whole
Speaker 1: of their annoyance I have with this name a thing.
Speaker 1: It was with some guys in the Buffalo Field Campaign.
Speaker 1: So the Buffalo Field Campaign is they're there. They were
Speaker 1: a preservation organization. The world got a little bit too
Speaker 1: complicated for them, but at a time it wasn't too
Speaker 1: complicated for them, and they were a fairly active preservation
Speaker 1: organization for the American bison. But they called it the
Speaker 1: old time he word buffalo, which was around hundreds of
Speaker 1: years before anybody ever thought to say the American bison.
Speaker 1: So I'm with a guy from the Buffalo Field campaign
Speaker 1: and I see off in the distance a bunch of
Speaker 1: pronghorn and I said, oh, there's some antelope, and he said,
Speaker 1: it's actually a prong horn. I'm like, well, it's actually
Speaker 1: not the buffalo. So to have to go through that
Speaker 1: now seventy or eighty times more than you have to
Speaker 1: go through it now. In all the conversations you have
Speaker 1: with some old ass duck hunter who went out and
Speaker 1: shot an old squad, you gotta be like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: actually it's a you know, it's a long tailed duck.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you caught word, but just think
Speaker 2: it's ridiculous. It's a distraction.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but man, we may never ever ever be faced
Speaker 6: with that distraction. Of these seventy species, how many do
Speaker 6: you interact with frequently?
Speaker 2: Quite a few.
Speaker 1: The stellar's j I count among my favorite birds, and
Speaker 1: the English sparrow.
Speaker 2: What happens to his ass? Yeah, I can among the sellers.
Speaker 2: You among my favorite birds. Uh, moving on, here's an
Speaker 2: interesting letter. There's a guy so guy wrote in he was.
Speaker 1: Him and his buddies are all Special Operations veterans, and
Speaker 1: they lately have gotten into going into landlocked hunting, landlocked
Speaker 1: private land, and they've done it with aircraft public land.
Speaker 2: Sorry, what did I say?
Speaker 11: Landlocked public land?
Speaker 1: Sorry, they have they have become they have become enthusiasts
Speaker 1: of hunting landlocked public land, meaning public land you can't
Speaker 1: access by walking or driving because it's surrounded by private land.
Speaker 2: And they were using.
Speaker 1: They would pitch together money and just get a helicopter
Speaker 1: to land them in these certain areas they wanted to hunt.
Speaker 1: But they found that like landing, the helicopter's very intrusive, noisy,
Speaker 1: can draw a lot of attention. And they all hold uh.
Speaker 1: And they're all former.
Speaker 2: Military guys, so they they've been.
Speaker 1: Bailing out of helicopters at seven to ten thousand feet
Speaker 1: in parachuting into land where they want to hunt, and
Speaker 1: then they just get picked up later by the helicopters.
Speaker 1: So they land parachuting and in classic special operator fashion,
Speaker 1: their eyes are all blacked out in the pictures. But
Speaker 1: he's got here. He parachuted in and he's got a
Speaker 1: grip and grin with his antelope that he killed with
Speaker 1: his parachute in the background.
Speaker 2: Oh, actually, there's a wils A way.
Speaker 11: I'm reading his email. It does his landlocked private land.
Speaker 11: But I think he meant to say because that wouldn't
Speaker 11: make any sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 9: But like we've talked about this, like on the technical
Speaker 9: gear side, like how we always what we do all
Speaker 9: year round is talk about how we go and kill critters,
Speaker 9: like we game it all year Can you imagine being
Speaker 9: an antelope in this picture and you look up and
Speaker 9: you see some sky like some guys jumping out of
Speaker 9: a helicopter coming into and be like when does it end?
Speaker 9: Like God, it's cool, though.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into the birds control thing
Speaker 1: on deercs that's been talked about a lot. Also from
Speaker 1: a high level, I think that it's interesting. So urban
Speaker 1: suburban environments where you have a lot of uh like
Speaker 1: too many deer, over abundance of deer from the standpoint
Speaker 1: of property damage, vehicular collisions, all these different issues. These
Speaker 1: guys have been having some luck with contraceptives in Canada
Speaker 1: and they bring up an interesting point in the article
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of. When you do a culling operation.
Speaker 1: If it's good habitat and you do a culling operation,
Speaker 1: what do you what do you imagine happens after you
Speaker 1: kill them all?
Speaker 2: Like other ones just move in.
Speaker 1: But they're saying through this, through this experimentation, work to
Speaker 1: doing with contraceptives is you keep the landscape occupied, but
Speaker 1: they just can't reproduce and it's less inviting to new
Speaker 1: animals coming in because you have these like dominant breeding
Speaker 1: age animals around.
Speaker 6: What's their plan for administering the contraceptives?
Speaker 2: The dark one?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's what I've heard about, is like who
Speaker 2: darted what? And it's complicated. You know. I always look
Speaker 2: at my eyes, like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's probably people whould pay money to go hunt
Speaker 1: those deer, and they is in this article, like in
Speaker 1: Oak Bay. You cannot have people running around hunting just
Speaker 1: isn't gonna.
Speaker 2: It's not workable. So that's that's the thing.
Speaker 1: A guy wrote in a very spirited bottle of our
Speaker 1: conversation around Catalina Island mules. He's a biologist who's been
Speaker 1: working out on the Let me first, let me first
Speaker 1: give a quick thing. So on Catalina Island they have, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a herd of buffalo out there, which are brought
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 2: For some movie that like in the early days of cinema.
Speaker 1: I can't remember when they brought there's a herd of
Speaker 1: buffalo out there, and there's a bunch of mule deer
Speaker 1: out there, and I talked about, well, why not just
Speaker 1: have people go hunt them?
Speaker 2: Who wouldn't want to go hunt these mule deer?
Speaker 1: And why why sharpshoot him with helicopters when you can
Speaker 1: just you know, lower their populations with hunters. He writes
Speaker 1: in a couple of thoughts on why that's not why
Speaker 1: that doesn't work quite the way you think it did.
Speaker 1: So he's been out he's been working on the California
Speaker 1: Channel Islands for twenty five years.
Speaker 2: He's a biologist.
Speaker 1: He thought he'd add a few things around the deer
Speaker 1: cold issue. Santa Cataline I'm quoting him. Santa Catalina Island
Speaker 1: is completely private property, either owned by the Santa Catalina
Speaker 1: Island Company eleven percent is owned by the Wrigley family
Speaker 1: chewing gum so owned by the Santa Catalina Island Company,
Speaker 1: the Catalina Island Conservancy, or people who own houses an avalon.
Speaker 1: There's no public land whatsoever. So I know that was
Speaker 1: pretty confusing. But the conservancy has eighty eight percent of
Speaker 1: the land. One percent of the land is just Joe
Speaker 1: Blow people who own houses in the town. Eleven percent
Speaker 1: of the land is the Wrigley family, Okay, Charley private land.
Speaker 1: He says, they got about two thousand melier on the island. Now,
Speaker 1: they've been giving out four hundred tags per year. Every year,
Speaker 1: two hundred and forty of those tags are filled.
Speaker 2: Check this out.
Speaker 1: There are four thousand residents on the island. Twenty of
Speaker 1: them get a deer, so they're killing four hundred tags.
Speaker 1: They're killing two hundred and forty meal deer a year.
Speaker 1: And as in terms of why not just let the
Speaker 1: locals shoot them? Of the four thousand locals, two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty, I'm sorry, of the four thousand locals, twenty
Speaker 1: get a deer. He says that DIY hunting out there
Speaker 1: doesn't really work. One, you can't rent a car. It's
Speaker 1: hard to even get out of town if you're not
Speaker 1: a resident because you're on the private property. Steep roads,
Speaker 1: long distances, there's no way to get there's no refrigeration
Speaker 1: facilities to keep meat cold, and there's no way.
Speaker 2: There's no easy way to quickly get it back.
Speaker 1: Onto the mainland because he's using the ferry system to
Speaker 1: transport them. He says, Thus, for these reasons, guided hunts
Speaker 1: are the rule. There's no there's no path forward in
Speaker 1: his in this guy's opinion, there's no like realistic path
Speaker 1: forward for diy meal deer hunts out there. Meal deer
Speaker 1: were brought to the island less than one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Private landowners brought them there and put them on private
Speaker 1: land to hunt them. They were brought from California mainland,
Speaker 1: and that is why the California Department of Fishing Wildlife
Speaker 1: has jurisdiction. All the land is privately owned and the
Speaker 1: private landowners who own all the land. So again here
Speaker 1: we are.
Speaker 2: These guys own eighty eight percent of the ground and
Speaker 2: they want the deer off their land. But they're holding
Speaker 2: California Department of Fishing Game responsible for their deer, and
Speaker 2: the Conservancy is paying to eradicate the deer. There is
Speaker 2: no state or federal money involved. The deer also do
Speaker 2: not belong to the people of Avalon, meaning the people
Speaker 2: who live on the island.
Speaker 1: Just like a deer eating someone's garden does not belong
Speaker 1: to someone driving by on the road, and he goes
Speaker 1: on to say that deer have docu manted negative impacts
Speaker 1: a native plants and animals which are only found so endemics,
Speaker 1: only found on the California Channel Islands. The islands are
Speaker 1: the quote Galopagos of North America, specifically because they have
Speaker 1: those unique plants and animals. He says they also use
Speaker 1: this term to market tourism. He says there are a
Speaker 1: lot of meal deer on the mainland. If the deer
Speaker 1: and other non native animals and plants are not controlled
Speaker 1: on and preferably moved removed from the islands, eventually the
Speaker 1: islands will look just like the mainland.
Speaker 2: The island's distinctiveness will be lost. Then he has a
Speaker 2: couple sum ups, basically him, Sam got that all wrong.
Speaker 6: Good point, Yeah, I mean private deer, right, is what
Speaker 6: it amounts.
Speaker 1: To trail cam CHATTICKI this is a phenomenal one, even
Speaker 1: though Chester's not here. The reason I say this is
Speaker 1: phenom because I recently heard someone say this. This guy
Speaker 1: hunts public land in Texas often comes across trail cameras. Okay,
Speaker 1: so again he's on public land, he comes across trail camera.
Speaker 1: I often come across.
Speaker 2: He this is a quote.
Speaker 1: I often come across trail cameras, which on most public
Speaker 1: land spots are not supposed to be left for more
Speaker 1: than twenty four hours or beyond your hunt. He carries
Speaker 1: his own SD car read as SD card reader.
Speaker 2: In his pack. He likes to pull the camera since
Speaker 2: it's sitting there anyway. He likes to pull the camera
Speaker 2: and have a Looxie the card.
Speaker 1: Sorry, he likes to pull the card and have a
Speaker 1: Lookxie puts everything back the way he founds it is
Speaker 1: this poor etiquette if it's on public land, I say,
Speaker 1: everybody's got a right to look. I would say the same,
Speaker 1: it seems weird, but like after kicking it around, I
Speaker 1: would say, like, like, for instance, if you put a
Speaker 1: pop up blind somewhere and that's not your yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't claim your area. You put a tree stand in
Speaker 1: a tree that doesn't claim your tree. We're hunting public
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma, and there's a tree that you look and
Speaker 1: be like any person on the planet's gonna put a
Speaker 1: tree stand in that tree.
Speaker 2: And you go there and there's all kinds of.
Speaker 1: Hooks and nails and shit, till over the years, everybody
Speaker 1: their brothers hunting this one tree over a water hole,
Speaker 1: support a tree stand there.
Speaker 2: It doesn't claim it.
Speaker 11: Uh So it's like you forfeit your ownership of the
Speaker 11: material you paid for once you put it on public land.
Speaker 2: I see both sides.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be hard to go by with with
Speaker 3: an SD reader and not check it.
Speaker 1: Oh so you agree, I think it feels Here's here's
Speaker 1: the thing is like half the cameras I set out,
Speaker 1: I don't turn them on.
Speaker 2: Right. You had one out for a whole year. Oh
Speaker 2: I put one out for a whole ye and all
Speaker 2: year all I talked about.
Speaker 1: My wife's like, oh my god, if you stop talking
Speaker 1: about stupid camera stuff, you're gonna have on that camera.
Speaker 2: You know, after a whole year out there, and I
Speaker 2: go like, dah, forgot to turn it out. Try again
Speaker 2: this year. Uh So there's that.
Speaker 1: It's like, I mean, you know, if they put it
Speaker 1: all back the way they found it and tidy everything
Speaker 1: up and turn it back on.
Speaker 2: I would feel it's one of those things that.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that I get it, But
Speaker 1: I don't think I would personally do it because I
Speaker 1: would feel so weird, have my hand caught in the
Speaker 1: cookie jar because you're on the camera. Well, yeah, the camera,
Speaker 1: you can sneak around, stumble across one, like the odds
Speaker 1: are there.
Speaker 2: Because I'm like what, there's like how many degree radius
Speaker 2: of your passing right?
Speaker 6: I've waved it a lot of trail cams in my day. Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 9: The best like video would be you seeing it going
Speaker 9: and checking the card and then setting up a blind
Speaker 9: right in front of.
Speaker 2: It because the card was so good right here.
Speaker 6: Or you could pretend to be a deer and like
Speaker 6: go down there and put your little lips up to
Speaker 6: the water, do a little splashing. Yeah, that'd be fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't have Oh, he has one of those
Speaker 1: sign off things you know when you're.
Speaker 2: On a forum. All the old men have a sign off.
Speaker 2: They're like forty four mag because shooting yeah more than once,
Speaker 2: stupid or yeah.
Speaker 11: I kept that in there for you because I knew
Speaker 11: you'd pay attention to it. It like colors his character, right.
Speaker 2: His his sign off is for God gave us a
Speaker 2: spirit not of fear, but of power and love and
Speaker 2: self control, self control, self.
Speaker 8: But he's powerful and not afraid.
Speaker 2: So uh this one, uh even though chedick is not here.
Speaker 1: We usually like to give like when we do these, well,
Speaker 1: sometimes remember to do a little quick a quick survey,
Speaker 1: a quick panel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's bad, but I wouldn't do it, zeke.
Speaker 3: I mean I probably wouldn't check it, just because I
Speaker 3: probably wouldn't have a card reader with me. But if
Speaker 3: I had the card reader, I mean I might.
Speaker 5: But if you start a hunting public land a bunch.
Speaker 3: If public, I don't know that that's a tricky one.
Speaker 3: I'd probably have my own camera out there check.
Speaker 2: Yet.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm I'm the same way. I don't think I
Speaker 8: would have a card reader, you know. Okay, okay, let
Speaker 8: me back up. You do, Okay, I do, but let's
Speaker 8: not have that.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't what of my fingers are so cold
Speaker 2: that I don't have the deck stare.
Speaker 8: There's so many this Like had I been in the
Speaker 8: mountains for say, nine days, looking and hadn't seen anything,
Speaker 8: and I had like found this area and I'm like,
Speaker 8: the bucks are here, they gotta be here, and I
Speaker 8: stumbled across the trail camera. Oh golly, would be hard
Speaker 8: not to look. But I have off and fantasized about
Speaker 8: finding a trail camera and then shooting a big animal
Speaker 8: like right in front of it on camera, like I
Speaker 8: got it. I beat you here, you're at work. I'm
Speaker 8: not guess what I win.
Speaker 6: You can make a little note and say like, please
Speaker 6: send me the photos.
Speaker 2: Right, can I have the photos of.
Speaker 8: You're welcome to come to my house for a beer
Speaker 8: and like look at it on the wall.
Speaker 6: Like that.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 8: I've never done the mental gymnastics on this question, but.
Speaker 6: If I were in an area with a high trail
Speaker 6: cam density, I'd pack a card reader with me. And
Speaker 6: it's public land, I mean that's yeah. I'll be like,
Speaker 6: if you want to leave it out here, to your point,
Speaker 6: it's on public right, Yeah, but.
Speaker 2: You feel obligated to put it back the way you
Speaker 2: found it.
Speaker 6: Yeah for sure, Oh yeah, for sure I wouldn't. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I you know, you got to like let people know
Speaker 6: because a trail cam is a I've told many people like, hey,
Speaker 6: do not put a trail cam there if you think
Speaker 6: that is an awesome spot, because then it's an indicator
Speaker 6: to other people that somebody's paying attention to that spot
Speaker 6: for a reason.
Speaker 1: Or let's say they think it through even more like
Speaker 1: he's got a trail camera here, but he's not here.
Speaker 1: It must not be any good mm mmm, because he
Speaker 1: would know. M.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you don't put trail cameras in bad spots.
Speaker 3: Yeah I have.
Speaker 6: We put Buddy mine killed the ball archere season and
Speaker 6: bob tons of grizzlies around, put a trail cam on
Speaker 6: the on the carcass just to get grizzly photos, and
Speaker 6: swung by the carcass, saw a sow and two cubs
Speaker 6: on the carcass from a respectable distance, and we were
Speaker 6: with your own two eyes, yeah, salivating over how cool
Speaker 6: these photos were going to be. Because of the grizzly activity,
Speaker 6: we couldn't pick it up the same week we were hunting,
Speaker 6: so I had to leave it for safety reasons. Came
Speaker 6: back a couple months later and got the camera and
Speaker 6: the only thing you see is this cow elk come in,
Speaker 6: mess with it, messes with the camera, rotates the camera around.
Speaker 6: We got nothing, We got just that nose in there.
Speaker 12: It was such a bummer.
Speaker 6: I was like, we're gonna, there's gonna We're gonna have
Speaker 6: these pictures on outdoor Life, you know, a long time ago.
Speaker 3: It's funny.
Speaker 11: I wouldn't I wouldn't mess with it. I like mystery.
Speaker 2: Hmm. Yeah, take a totally different angle, Garrett.
Speaker 9: I'm in it for the meat man. I'd check that
Speaker 9: camera all day. I'm out there to kill stuff. Well,
Speaker 9: I wouldn't check it all day, but I would definitely.
Speaker 9: It's a public land, like, don't met I'd rather somebody
Speaker 9: check it than screw with my camera, like I've had
Speaker 9: cameras taken before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, or steal your camera.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm right along with Garrett, a buddy of mine who's
Speaker 5: hunts not far from our place in Wisconsin on public
Speaker 5: land a lot as well. He was just telling me
Speaker 5: that he did this exact thing, and he thinks that
Speaker 5: the advent of these cellular cameras now that have GPS
Speaker 5: systems within them so you can actually track your camera
Speaker 5: and it's meant to be used as like oh I
Speaker 5: said it and I forgot it where I put it?
Speaker 5: Now someone Well, yeah, but so now people are realizing
Speaker 5: that they have these systems in them, so he feels
Speaker 5: like there's a lot less stealing of these GPS enabled
Speaker 5: cell cameras going on out there, which is a nice thing,
Speaker 5: which again in his mind, he was like, yeah, I'd
Speaker 5: much rather someone just checks my card versus takes my
Speaker 5: three hundred dollars camera.
Speaker 1: My this is not I have to pulled that conversation.
Speaker 1: But I have two trail can pictures I've gotten that
Speaker 1: I'm proud of.
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 1: I show you the odter carrying the trout, which I
Speaker 1: like a lot. And then I have a bear on
Speaker 1: New Year's Eve wading through the snow.
Speaker 3: Oh that's nice.
Speaker 5: Yep Year's e These are not.
Speaker 9: It was that same It was the same camera that
Speaker 9: you left on you didn't have on all year.
Speaker 2: No by that one.
Speaker 5: I gotta tell you a story about a dead deer
Speaker 5: picture that I saw, grip and grim. I didn't believe
Speaker 5: it at first, but then I got the pictures and
Speaker 5: I left my phone upstairs. I didn't have the issues
Speaker 5: of you know, messing with our MIC's in here. I'll
Speaker 5: show you later, but just listen up here. This dude
Speaker 5: shoots a buck from a distance. He can see there's
Speaker 5: something around its neck like the bucks obviously been entangled
Speaker 5: in some in something. Turns out that it's like that
Speaker 5: electrical wire that you'd use to or like tape that
Speaker 5: you run around to like electrify offence. You know what
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like a wired tape. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 5: pretty tough stuff. Within that tape around his neck are
Speaker 5: the deer's antlers from the previous year. No, they're not.
Speaker 5: It's not a giant bar. But like he got his
Speaker 5: sheds sheds. Yeah, so it's hard to say whether, like
Speaker 5: old Tuper, if he got it like stuck in the
Speaker 5: antlers first and then it sort of worked its way
Speaker 5: onto its neck you know later Sure as it all
Speaker 5: came down.
Speaker 2: That's phenomenal. And you're like, well, how do you know
Speaker 2: that was from that buck?
Speaker 8: You'd have to shoulder mount that deer exactly as you shot.
Speaker 2: It's that's great.
Speaker 1: One last little thing, this is this is a this
Speaker 1: is a I'm bringing this one up because it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a great, it's a it's a lost words.
Speaker 1: Brings up a lot of complexities. So the wolverine in
Speaker 1: the lower forty eight is uh Endangered Species Act protections
Speaker 1: are imminent. This is an interesting one because you're operating
Speaker 1: on the animals so poorly understood that you're you're you're
Speaker 1: sort of admitting that you're operating on a bit of
Speaker 1: assumption that here you have this animal that lives at
Speaker 1: extremely low densities. Even in the best of times, no
Speaker 1: one has ever had an adequate way to count them,
Speaker 1: so you can't demonstrate an actual decline. But you have
Speaker 1: to look at the writing on the wall and be like,
Speaker 1: this ain't good, meaning there are so few wolverines and
Speaker 1: none of the things that are happening, meaning development, loss
Speaker 1: of habitat, warming environments, like, none of the things that
Speaker 1: are happening are going to do these things any good.
Speaker 1: And it's guesswork how many there were. It's guesswork how
Speaker 1: many there are. But people are looking at being like, man,
Speaker 1: it's gotta be bad. And so you have an animal
Speaker 1: not who's population in dynamics and ecology is not at
Speaker 1: all well understood.
Speaker 2: Moving to yes a protection.
Speaker 1: The one thing about this this is uh, I'm always
Speaker 1: telling people to read Osborne and Russell's Journal of a Trapper.
Speaker 1: It was really in the end of Osborne Russell's Journal
Speaker 1: of a Trapper he has these little synopsies of animals,
Speaker 1: just kind of observations about animals. And it's so funny
Speaker 1: because that dude calls wolverine's abundant or common common animal,
Speaker 1: and you're like, what in the helmet, like you know
Speaker 1: what I mean?
Speaker 2: Was it? Was it a typo? Did you know? Who?
Speaker 2: What did he mean? But he says common a common animal,
Speaker 2: a wolverine or was he just from the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: or was he like, I'm such a badass common to.
Speaker 6: Me years and years ago as guiding out a glacier
Speaker 6: and had a wolverine climbed down a cliff in front
Speaker 6: of us, swim the river. Got it on on video
Speaker 6: at the time. I'm back and backing a camera with
Speaker 6: me a lot climb up the other side of the cliff,
Speaker 6: middle fork of the flathead, real narrow gorge section, and
Speaker 6: he sits up on top of that cliff and just
Speaker 6: like cusses us out, hmm, but like unbelievable, make it
Speaker 6: what noise? Unbelievable just kind of like spitting and kind
Speaker 6: of yeah, just like being a very ornery critter. I
Speaker 6: was kind of like, well, you chose to reveal yourself,
Speaker 6: how is it our fault? Type of thing. Yeah, but
Speaker 6: very very cool, And I thought, man, that's once in
Speaker 6: a lifetime experience.
Speaker 1: Probably almost like literally maybe once in lifetime experience.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean the swimming, the whole thing A lot
Speaker 6: of things. It is right, probably that The next June,
Speaker 6: I'm in Alaska working a brown bear hunt on the
Speaker 6: peninsula and it's a late late winter up there. Everything
Speaker 6: snowed in pretty bad bear season. But every single day
Speaker 6: I saw multiple wolverines that for the first week of
Speaker 6: that trip, multiple multiple wolverines. They were following us around,
Speaker 6: they were popping over snow banks. They seemed to be
Speaker 6: just like your general super inquisitive weasels, and you know,
Speaker 6: so I was kind of deflated from my previous wolverine experience.
Speaker 6: So I was like, well, apparently you can just go
Speaker 6: someplace and see a ton of wolverines every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is like when Osborne Russell was running around
Speaker 1: here all those years ago. Was it that because if
Speaker 1: that's the case, then they are hurting, or was it.
Speaker 6: Because like you can go out on the last Peninsula
Speaker 6: not see a wolverine all week. Was it just that
Speaker 6: late onset winter we were hiking where the squirrels and
Speaker 6: stuff were popping up, or maybe there was meat cashed
Speaker 6: underneath those snow banks from slides or who knows, But
Speaker 6: was there just a relatively unnatural concentration of wolverines at
Speaker 6: that time?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, you could have been seeing the same couple of
Speaker 5: wolverines over and over too, right, Yeah, but unless they
Speaker 5: had distinct markings, right right, Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: I was deflated when I learned that I grew up
Speaker 1: in the wolverine state. And I was deflated when I
Speaker 1: learned that. It's kind of like maybe.
Speaker 2: Oh no, way, maybe now and then I was thinking
Speaker 2: of you, but not thick. They weren't thick.
Speaker 6: The other day, I was hiking to get water out
Speaker 6: of this spring and full white ermine weasel was following
Speaker 6: me around at the spring and I was making little
Speaker 6: mouse noisles and he came into like twenty yards and
Speaker 6: got to look at him through the ten by fifties,
Speaker 6: just super awesome.
Speaker 2: Already white, completely white on the ground.
Speaker 6: Yep, pink little pads. Had his hands up like this.
Speaker 12: Do they I get sense you want to move on.
Speaker 2: But oh no, I'm good. This is interesting.
Speaker 5: Do they like mention?
Speaker 9: What you know, a wolverine being added to the endangered
Speaker 9: species list?
Speaker 10: What that means?
Speaker 1: Well, you can kind of look by. You can look
Speaker 1: at some other examples, because, for instance, there's no hunting
Speaker 1: or trapping for wolverines in lower forty eight. So it's
Speaker 1: not going to mean the cessation of those kind of activities.
Speaker 1: But one thing that they'll do is so, for instance,
Speaker 1: with links, they create like these links protection zones which
Speaker 1: come with added restrictions on fur trapping to diminish the
Speaker 1: likelihood that a trapper might accidentally catch a links. And
Speaker 1: and even like even people involved in that are admit
Speaker 1: that they overdrew the map that at the time they
Speaker 1: didn't understand links habitat, and so they got a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff rolled up into trapping prohibitions that never had
Speaker 1: and never will have a links on it. With the
Speaker 1: wolverine stuff because they're they're like rock and ice, you know,
Speaker 1: high country critters.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I could picture that it might have implications for logging projects,
Speaker 1: maybe have implications for road building, might have implications for mining,
Speaker 1: but I don't picture it bleeding over into hunting activities.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, well, just to make this about me,
Speaker 9: like where I get nervous about this kind of stuff
Speaker 9: is one of the best snowmobile places like around this area.
Speaker 2: I would look for this to change.
Speaker 9: Was uh was up highlight right, Like you used to
Speaker 9: go up there and it was just like endless powder
Speaker 9: amazing riding. And I remember I was I was pretty
Speaker 9: young when it happened, but I remember one year my
Speaker 9: dad was like, well, we can't go there anymore because
Speaker 9: it got listed as a wilderness study area for wolverine.
Speaker 9: But it wasn't wilderness. It was just like they're like, well,
Speaker 9: we want to study if there.
Speaker 2: Is a lot of wilderness study areas. Yeah. Yeah, But
Speaker 2: it was just like, but they sit in limbo.
Speaker 9: It was just like overnight, all of a sudden, they
Speaker 9: were like, oh, there could be wolverine's here and we
Speaker 9: want to study it, which means and then you know,
Speaker 9: I don't want to get too political, but then it
Speaker 9: just like all of a sudden, they like they paved
Speaker 9: like this massive trail from one of the trailheads all
Speaker 9: the way up to the lake for cross country skiers,
Speaker 9: which was like ironic to us in terms of so
Speaker 9: just whenever I read this, just selfishly, I'm like, what
Speaker 9: does that mean for playing it there?
Speaker 1: I could picture that there are certain high country snowmobile
Speaker 1: areas that could I mean, I'm totally guessing I have
Speaker 1: no idea. I could picture that that would be potentially
Speaker 1: a thing we're trying to think about what might be
Speaker 1: a thing, and you know your observation, don't want to
Speaker 1: get political. I think that everything is political. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: people said, I don't want to get political. It's like
Speaker 1: everything's political. I don't want to get political. But I
Speaker 1: couldn't put my septic system where I wanted it.
Speaker 5: That's politics.
Speaker 1: It's political political, all right, Zeke Thurston. We covered when
Speaker 1: when when when a bron rider becomes the old man,
Speaker 1: but we didn't cover how why as a young man
Speaker 1: did you get into bronc riding.
Speaker 2: Can you hit some basic definitions too, just to help
Speaker 2: people understand, like what like like what that like you
Speaker 2: got the different event different rodeo events, what your event
Speaker 2: is and what sort of you know, what distinguishes the
Speaker 2: event you like to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so rodeo is made up of well you got
Speaker 3: like six major events and team roping is uh, I
Speaker 3: guess it's probably a major event now too. But at
Speaker 3: the rough stock side of the arena, that's that's where
Speaker 3: you know we we perform or whatever.
Speaker 2: And you define that. To define the rough stock.
Speaker 3: Would be your riding events of like you got your
Speaker 3: bare back riding, saddle bront griding, and bull riding and then.
Speaker 2: Rough stock meaning like not broken.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then for the timed vent side, they've you've
Speaker 3: got roping boxes or boxes and a shoot and that's
Speaker 3: where they team rope, caf rope bulldog and uh. And
Speaker 3: then the barrel racing has just run in the middle
Speaker 3: of the arena obviously. So for for my event, you
Speaker 3: get on a horse. You have a what you call
Speaker 3: bronchrain or a hack rein and that's what you hold
Speaker 3: you hold on to. It's connected to a halter that
Speaker 3: goes on the horse's head. We have a saddle. You
Speaker 3: have free swinging stirrups, so a foot in each side,
Speaker 3: and you got to keep your free arm up and
Speaker 3: you have to ride for eight seconds. It's a judged event,
Speaker 3: so there'll be judges on the arena floor.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 3: They judge the horse and the rider. The like stipulations
Speaker 3: I guess is like you would you have to spur
Speaker 3: your horse out so that that means you have to
Speaker 3: have spur contact above the horse's shoulder the first jump
Speaker 3: out of the shoot when his front feet hit the ground,
Speaker 3: and then after that you try to pick up the
Speaker 3: horses timing, and you want to spur as high as
Speaker 3: you can set your feet in the neck in time
Speaker 3: with the horse white bucks. So the spur id just
Speaker 3: judged off of speed, spur contact, how high you spur?
Speaker 5: Is this spurring actually causing the bucking?
Speaker 3: No, No, the the animals are the animals are bred
Speaker 3: to buck like they're that's that's the way they are.
Speaker 6: But the animals judged because you don't get more points
Speaker 6: if the horse is having a bad day.
Speaker 3: No, no, you get you get less points.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh, so that I always wondered about that. I
Speaker 2: didn't understand that. I didn't understand that. Well not yea,
Speaker 2: because there the horse is just like a like just
Speaker 2: comes out and stands there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean obviously you don't get a reride.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but obvious. So so yeah, I don't need to rearticulate.
Speaker 2: But I've always wondered about how they calibrate that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the judging criteria is from one to fifty.
Speaker 3: The horses judged off of how high he jumps in
Speaker 3: the air, how like how high is back end? You know,
Speaker 3: when he kicks, how high he's kicking.
Speaker 2: And measured these are measured things. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and then obviously, like other factors come into
Speaker 3: like play, like speed, direction, change.
Speaker 2: I mean they like to see direction changes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like because that that makes the difficulty level go up. Right,
Speaker 3: So like your horses, you know, lands with his front
Speaker 3: feet over here, and then the next jump he you know,
Speaker 3: lands over here four feet. That's obviously a lot a
Speaker 3: lot harder to ride than one that's going straight chalk
Speaker 3: line straight, you know. So one to fifty for the
Speaker 3: for the bucking horse, and then one to fifty for
Speaker 3: the bronc grider, So total of one hundred points possible.
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 5: How do you get like assigned a horse?
Speaker 3: So it's a random draw. The judges at the rodeo
Speaker 3: will actually they do it in the prs A office
Speaker 3: three days prior to the rodeo. The stock contractor whoever
Speaker 3: is supplying stock or putting putting on the rodeo will
Speaker 3: send in their list of horses. So you got you know,
Speaker 3: you got your pool of bareback horses for the bareback riding,
Speaker 3: and then you have your saddle bron horses and then
Speaker 3: their bulls and the judge we'll go through there and
Speaker 3: draw just random drawing animal for each contestant that's entered
Speaker 3: in that rodeo?
Speaker 2: Is that a spectator event too?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Like do real insiders like to go watch the draw,
Speaker 2: like the way people pay attention to the way people
Speaker 2: pay attention to draft picks.
Speaker 3: No, nobody's in on the draw.
Speaker 2: Just just it just happened. Yeah, and they say, here's
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you find out three days before what horse you have,
Speaker 3: and you decide if you're gonna go get on it
Speaker 3: or not? And do you deal?
Speaker 1: I got a question for you, honest, guess what an
Speaker 1: old you know how? I asked him how old a
Speaker 1: guy can be and still depete? Guess what old horses?
Speaker 1: An old bronc old bucking horse. How long his career
Speaker 1: can be bucking horse?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Fifteen fifteen? No, that's they're just getting started at fifteen
Speaker 3: they had.
Speaker 1: He was telling me about a horse that was still
Speaker 1: kicking off pro riders at twenty four years of age.
Speaker 3: He said, they get better, oh, because they mean that's
Speaker 3: an old bucking horse for sure, but like their their career,
Speaker 3: their best years are.
Speaker 1: Is he aware that he has a career? I wonder,
Speaker 1: well the horses, like, what are you gonna do when
Speaker 1: this is all over?
Speaker 3: Man? He has reached like doctor the uh that horse
Speaker 3: I was telling you about those twenty four they what
Speaker 3: was his name, Sundance. They retired him that year he
Speaker 3: was retired, they didn't load him on the truck to
Speaker 3: go to the National Finals rodeo. The next day they
Speaker 3: found him out behind the shed and he had passed away. Oh,
Speaker 3: I bet had like a euphemism, he had passed passed away.
Speaker 3: But I bet if they loaded him on the truck,
Speaker 3: he probably would have still been ticking died of a
Speaker 3: broken heart. Thanks, I honestly think so he wanted to
Speaker 3: go to the big show. Yeah, they love it that much.
Speaker 3: They do, really, but like their best years are from
Speaker 3: ten to ten to eighteen.
Speaker 1: Se man me be a dumbass about this. I would
Speaker 1: have thought, for some reason that you find yourself like
Speaker 1: a three four year old horse and no one's ever
Speaker 1: been near, and he's gonna give the best ride he'll
Speaker 1: ever give the first time someone jumps on.
Speaker 9: Because that theory, that's that's because that's when we usually
Speaker 9: get bucked off of.
Speaker 3: That's when they start them. But that's no different than Brady,
Speaker 3: you know, training a puppy. It's gonna run out there
Speaker 3: and and mess up, you know, like there's lots of
Speaker 3: So that's what we call colts. And there's they're they're
Speaker 3: you know, they they've got it bred into them. They're
Speaker 3: really trying to buck. But there's they're trying to do
Speaker 3: too much. You know, they don't have a pattern, they
Speaker 3: don't know what they're doing. So there's there's you know,
Speaker 3: they're they can do anything.
Speaker 1: So do you think they legit I mean you're saying
Speaker 1: this essentially, but they legit learned here's how I like
Speaker 1: to get people off me. And I find that this works.
Speaker 1: I find that that works absolutely. They're smart.
Speaker 3: Like they they can feel like which which way you're
Speaker 3: you know, what side you have more weight in, and
Speaker 3: they might turn and go away from that leg no kid,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they they they get really tricky. Some of
Speaker 3: them get like, uh, they kind of like play little
Speaker 3: mind games, like when you're crawling down on them in
Speaker 3: the bucking shoot, they'll kind of like squat and like
Speaker 3: kind of stand shitty in the bucking shoot and then
Speaker 3: like and some of them you can't get to stand.
Speaker 2: You can't get a good no, get your position.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and so when you nod, then then they
Speaker 3: dart out of there and.
Speaker 2: He's already got you thrown off.
Speaker 6: They might So can you watch watch some film on
Speaker 6: these horses, you tell if you scouts and be like, oh,
Speaker 6: this is kind of this guy sty.
Speaker 3: So like when you get to the point where I'm
Speaker 3: at and you're going and you're doing it for a living,
Speaker 3: Like a lot of the horses that we compete on
Speaker 3: end up at the same rodeos as us. You know,
Speaker 3: at the biggest rodeos. They try to have the best
Speaker 3: stock for the contestants. So so we see them.
Speaker 6: You see each other in the cafeteria line.
Speaker 3: We see him. We see them over and over and over,
Speaker 3: like Calgary Stampede stuck on tracting firm from Alberta, Like
Speaker 3: we'll see those horses from January till the end of
Speaker 3: September at the end of the season.
Speaker 2: What right now is what's the horse you guys talk about,
Speaker 2: like you and your peers.
Speaker 3: Well probably like the most recently crowned bucking horse of
Speaker 3: the world is Explosive Skies, owned by Caygary.
Speaker 2: See almost like they knew he was gonna be good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's good.
Speaker 2: She is it usually she I know.
Speaker 3: They can be geldings, marrors or studs.
Speaker 2: So that's not an issue. They'll always wind up being
Speaker 2: one of the.
Speaker 3: Other No, no, And so like the theory of like the
Speaker 3: flank strap goes around the testicles is thrown out the
Speaker 3: window because half of them are are mares.
Speaker 2: Man, it really surprises me. Is there not a lot
Speaker 2: of Is there not a lot of sexual dimorphism in horses?
Speaker 2: Meaning the males aren't always a little heavier or something
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 3: Like so if you leave a horse a stud, like,
Speaker 3: they'll get like pretty distinct features like where they're like
Speaker 3: their jar or their jaw like right here will really
Speaker 3: get like it gets gets swollen almost and quite a
Speaker 3: bit more prominent than say, like if you geld a
Speaker 3: horse at two years old, they get real hard necks.
Speaker 3: They usually grow quite a bit of maine. They're kind
Speaker 3: of a little more like they're just they're just a harder,
Speaker 3: leaner animal.
Speaker 2: You can tell when you look at Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But that doesn't testosterone running through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they but they might turn around in an
Speaker 1: americor can out welcome.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure. Studs are actually kind of finicky,
Speaker 3: Like there's been some really good studs, but for the
Speaker 3: most part, a lot of a lot of contractors just
Speaker 3: use their studs at home for breeding because they can
Speaker 3: they can be kind of inconsistent just just because they
Speaker 3: can get running so hot and and uh yeah, like
Speaker 3: like studs, studs don't seem to last as long as
Speaker 3: as a gelding or a mare.
Speaker 10: Would, like a hot mare kind of throw their game
Speaker 10: off to you or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure, Like definitely, the hormones do play
Speaker 3: a part. Like if if a mayor is like in
Speaker 3: heat or something like, she might have an off day
Speaker 3: and not be as good as as she normally would be,
Speaker 3: So that all plays a role. That's like gelding's you know,
Speaker 3: they they just have one job, eat in the backpen
Speaker 3: and go out there and back pretty They're usually pretty consistent.
Speaker 6: When you're matched up at three days prior, you said,
Speaker 6: people then get to decide if they're actually gonna go
Speaker 6: out and ride that animal. What is the decision making process?
Speaker 6: Obviously it's like could you like, if you have enough
Speaker 6: points right, uh, do you go? Oh, this horse is
Speaker 6: having a really hot streak right now, so I'm not
Speaker 6: gonna ride.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like like for the most part, we I mean,
Speaker 3: you don't enter the rodeo to not go, right, so
Speaker 3: you plan on going and competing. But I mean there's
Speaker 3: you don't turn out a lot. But like the times
Speaker 3: that you would turn out is like maybe if you
Speaker 3: draw a horse that's kind of inferior to like where
Speaker 3: you know you have no chance of winning. The other
Speaker 3: time is maybe like if you have a horse that's
Speaker 3: that's maybe known for for doing something you know that
Speaker 3: where it could hurt you.
Speaker 6: Oh, so you're saying that you draw a horse that's
Speaker 6: not as good. So no matter how well you ride,
Speaker 6: that horse isn't going to get judged high enough to
Speaker 6: then give you enough points to do anything beneficial for
Speaker 6: correct Yeah.
Speaker 3: So like say, like your average bucking horse would be
Speaker 3: a twenty point horse. So if I get on that
Speaker 3: horse and I do my job correctly, I put a
Speaker 3: twenty three point spur ride on that horse. You know
Speaker 3: you double that up on eighty six points. If you
Speaker 3: draw a horse that's you know, commonly a seventeen point horse,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter how how good you ride. You know,
Speaker 3: Max Max, you can be eighty points and probably not
Speaker 3: gonna win anything.
Speaker 9: Gotcha, Zeke knows I'm good enough that like before a rodeo,
Speaker 9: he'll tell me if he's probably gonna make the short
Speaker 9: go or not.
Speaker 2: Seriously, before you even get on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you have a pretty good idea of how
Speaker 3: it's gonna go before beforehand. But I mean they're animals too,
Speaker 3: so I mean they're unpredictable. You can draw a horse
Speaker 3: that's you know, normally you know, maybe not that desirable,
Speaker 3: and you wouldn't want to draw it, and you go
Speaker 3: get on it and has the best day of its
Speaker 3: life and you can win the rodeo.
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 1: So one hundred points is max? Yeah, when you when
Speaker 1: you win the world, what kind of points you get?
Speaker 3: Well, that's so like when you win the world, it's
Speaker 3: it's based off of your whole season. So one hundred
Speaker 3: rodeos on your rodeo count and then you have ten
Speaker 3: ten rounds at the NFR, and so the basically the
Speaker 3: world champion is the guy with the most dollars one
Speaker 3: at the end of it.
Speaker 2: So what winds up being an ad Like if you
Speaker 2: could put it like, what what is a winning streak
Speaker 2: of scores?
Speaker 1: I guess is what I'm asking you know, like you
Speaker 1: got to be in the if it's one hundred top,
Speaker 1: you got to be in the mid eighties, you got.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, at the nf FR to win go rounds,
Speaker 3: I mean shoot, nowadays you probably got to be like
Speaker 3: eighty eight points to win most go rounds, but like
Speaker 3: an eighty and eighty fives is going to place you
Speaker 3: somewhere most most.
Speaker 1: And how much do you feel the judging is arbitrary
Speaker 1: and in debatable and how much it's just like it's
Speaker 1: just the facts.
Speaker 2: The facts are facts.
Speaker 3: Man, It's however you want to look at it. I mean,
Speaker 3: it is. It is a judged event, you know, And
Speaker 3: and they they're not always going to get the calls right.
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of it happens fast and with
Speaker 3: the naked eye. So I mean, but for the most part,
Speaker 3: it's it's pretty good. You'll you'll run into it more
Speaker 3: like regular season rodeos maybe where it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: not a big rodeo, and you'll be like in somebody's
Speaker 3: kind of you know, somebody's territory and you're you're riding
Speaker 3: against them kind of you know, maybe not their hometown,
Speaker 3: but like their state, you know, and they're really they're
Speaker 3: a big deal in that state. They might not have
Speaker 3: to outride you to beat you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's they realize that there's a bias for the
Speaker 2: local guy.
Speaker 9: I don't I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but
Speaker 9: I've thought that. I wondered that about the rights until
Speaker 9: I was in Pendleton watching you and I was sitting
Speaker 9: behind somebody else they didn't know me, and uh, you
Speaker 9: rode and I thought you got underscored.
Speaker 12: But the person in front of me.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the person in front of me goes of course
Speaker 9: because he's Thurston, and I was like.
Speaker 2: Oh, you got underscored, or of course he got.
Speaker 9: They were thinking he got a good score because he's like.
Speaker 2: He didn't throw that out there.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say it hasn't happened to me,
Speaker 3: but it didn't happen there. I promise you that there
Speaker 3: didn't happen.
Speaker 2: Well, how old were you when you first got on
Speaker 2: a horse?
Speaker 3: My first bronk uh No, I mean like just riding,
Speaker 3: Like oh, like I grew riding.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like he's actually never ridden a horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't even have a memory of getting
Speaker 3: on a horse. Just yeah, I just grew up riding.
Speaker 2: And would your dad put you on ones just to
Speaker 2: see you get thrown off? Or how do you get
Speaker 2: started and all that?
Speaker 3: You get started? No, No, like it's you kind of
Speaker 3: there's like stepping stones you go through, you know and stuff.
Speaker 3: But like I grew up riding a saddle horse, grew
Speaker 3: up on a ranch in Alberta, so uh like a
Speaker 3: lot of our days were spent in the saddle just
Speaker 3: cowboying and doing doing ranch work and.
Speaker 2: You guys work cattle off horseback.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So then like from there, you know, obviously road
Speaker 3: cheap when I was little and and did that stuff.
Speaker 3: And then kind of when in Canada they have at
Speaker 3: their at their pro rodeos, they have what they call
Speaker 3: boys steer adding and you can start that, I think
Speaker 3: like maybe eleven, and so I started writing steers. So
Speaker 3: I knocked my teeth out and then yeah, just kind
Speaker 3: of progressed from there to you get on some junior bulls,
Speaker 3: you know, like two three year old bulls and stuff
Speaker 3: all like age appropriate and you know type.
Speaker 6: I mean depends who you ask what for sure, And
Speaker 6: Grandma was like he only lost thirteen te It.
Speaker 2: Was like age appropriate.
Speaker 1: And then you get your teeth kicked out, did it?
Speaker 1: Did you get a little gun shy after your teeth
Speaker 1: got knocked out?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well I was pretty young. And then some time off
Speaker 3: well I was eight and it was at a at
Speaker 3: a birthday party. You know, it was more for fun,
Speaker 3: but uh, that was all I ever wanted to do.
Speaker 3: And then after that, I was I was kind of
Speaker 3: maybe second guess and what I wanted to do a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 1: Man, I can't remember I told the story not you might.
Speaker 1: I should find this article and send it to you.
Speaker 1: There's a writer, Bricard Builder. He's a Southern writer. He's
Speaker 1: the one that he's the one that kind of popularized,
Speaker 1: not for the people that do it, but popularized for
Speaker 1: the media, noodling for flatheads.
Speaker 2: He had a book, Noodling for Flatheads, and.
Speaker 1: Then it became that everybody on the planet went noodling
Speaker 1: for flatheads. It was like he kind of brought this
Speaker 1: to the public eye. You know, there's always some people
Speaker 1: got to do it, but he like people were like,
Speaker 1: what right, I want to go do that?
Speaker 3: That was him.
Speaker 2: He wrote a profile on these bull riders.
Speaker 1: He was doing all his work in Nevada and it
Speaker 1: was just about this bull riding community in Nevada and
Speaker 1: little kids learning training to be bull riders. They start
Speaker 1: him young, like you're talking about like all that, he
Speaker 1: gets into the mutton busting and on up right and
Speaker 1: as he's writing this, So he lives in Park Slope
Speaker 1: in New York, and simultaneous with him spending all his
Speaker 1: time in Nevada with bull rider kids, he's he's also
Speaker 1: in the same article, he's covering the local reception to
Speaker 1: them putting in rocks in the park down the road
Speaker 1: from his house in the upheaval, in condemnation from parents
Speaker 1: in Parkslope, Brooklyn that they would put actual rocks in
Speaker 1: the park as hard as they are and if someone
Speaker 1: needs to get these rocks out of here and couldn't.
Speaker 2: They have put a rubber at the same time, So
Speaker 2: he's like covering this community issue and he's covering these
Speaker 2: bull riders like it kind of brings the two stories together.
Speaker 2: His So it's like when you talk about like you know,
Speaker 2: within limits.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 9: I think what Zeke is kind of underplaying though, is
Speaker 9: like his dad was an absolute legend as he like
Speaker 9: touched on and he like grew up touring with dad
Speaker 9: a bit too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like I grew up in it, Like that's
Speaker 3: that's all I've ever known. Like both sides of my
Speaker 3: family are just are deeply rooted in rodeo. My dad
Speaker 3: he had a he had a successful career as a
Speaker 3: BRONC rider. My mom she did a little announcing and
Speaker 3: then they ran the grand entries that at the Canadian Finals,
Speaker 3: worked for the Calgary Stampede, did the NFR. So always
Speaker 3: always been in it and around it and yeah, just
Speaker 3: that's that's all I ever remember wanting to do. So
Speaker 3: I went through the stepping stones and uh, kind of
Speaker 3: climbing up roadsteers, did that whole deal?
Speaker 2: And what are some of the stepping stones, like just really.
Speaker 3: Just being a cowboy kid and riding, riding any animals
Speaker 3: that you have around the place.
Speaker 2: I mean, what are the like the professional ones?
Speaker 1: They meaning I can't show up at right, No, Like
Speaker 1: I can't show up at you know, a major event,
Speaker 1: like hey, I'd like to go to right, there's gotta
Speaker 1: be there's a there's a system of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so when you get to like I did the
Speaker 3: checks right. Yeah, Like we they have high school like
Speaker 3: junior high rodeos where they have like a build a
Speaker 3: cowboy program, which is you know, so like you're you
Speaker 3: have junior high kids and they put them on you know,
Speaker 3: like a bucking machine and judge them on there. Or
Speaker 3: they'll get some like Holstein cows and and uh, they'll
Speaker 3: they'll ride Holstein cows or whatever. And and you can
Speaker 3: go through that deal, get to the high school rodeos,
Speaker 3: you start getting on real bronx, real bulls, but again
Speaker 3: all for the high school level.
Speaker 2: And uh, did you ride bulls in high school?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, I did a roped, a team, roped calf, roped,
Speaker 3: rope bulls, road bronx, and then uh yeah once kind
Speaker 3: of once I went through college and stuff just kind
Speaker 3: of narrowed it down to what I really wanted to do,
Speaker 3: and that was ride bronx.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was asking about that this morning when we were
Speaker 1: goose hunting. Is uh, you know, if you're uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there's certain disciplines in the Olympics, for instance, there's there's
Speaker 1: like a you know, a skier might really excel in
Speaker 1: I don't know what helped me out, swallow right or
Speaker 1: whatever help, but then you know here they also competed
Speaker 1: in some other some other like seven. Yeah, so lay
Speaker 1: it out for me, like, if you're scared, you might
Speaker 1: do blank, blank and blank, but you have your specialty.
Speaker 5: Sure, like all the the slalom, the giant slalom and
Speaker 5: then the super g and then the downhill so so.
Speaker 1: I was asking him about that, but he's, like he
Speaker 1: was saying, nowadays, as though this used to not be
Speaker 1: the case.
Speaker 2: Nowadays, you need.
Speaker 1: To, like competition's so sharp, right, he said, Nowadays you
Speaker 1: need to you have your thing, you have your discipline.
Speaker 2: You don't do you can't do. I'm gonna go jump
Speaker 2: on a bowl and try that. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3: You can. There are guys that you know, competing more
Speaker 3: than one event like stet Stetson, right is he's arguably
Speaker 3: one of the very best brunt riders and bull riders going.
Speaker 3: It's just a lot more rare now.
Speaker 2: And you were saying, because it's because it's you're.
Speaker 3: It's just gotten really competitive, really specialized. The bucking horses
Speaker 3: have gotten and bulls have gotten so so good, they're
Speaker 3: so rank to you know, if you got to go
Speaker 3: through a season and get on like I'll get one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty broncs a year. So if you I mean,
Speaker 3: if you're doing that double time, when you're asking a
Speaker 3: lot of your body.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you might be done when you're twenty four.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I also think and you can crag me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 8: zeke in this, but you know, back in the days,
Speaker 8: the old days of rodeo, right, these old cowboys that
Speaker 8: were trying to make a living rodeo and it didn't
Speaker 8: pay what it pays now m hm, Like the pool
Speaker 8: wasn't near as good, and so they were going to
Speaker 8: the rodeo like they would want to enter more than
Speaker 8: one event just to increase our odds of making some
Speaker 8: money in order to make more money to make it
Speaker 8: to the next rodeo. Whereas now, like at Zeke's level,
Speaker 8: and when these guys are going, these rodeos, especially these
Speaker 8: big rodeos, pay so good that if you are truly
Speaker 8: good at what you do, like Zeke, you can go
Speaker 8: and actually make a living in your one event and
Speaker 8: specialize and save and preserve your body, be hyper focused
Speaker 8: on what you do, but earning a living enough that
Speaker 8: you can continue on down the road to the next
Speaker 8: where it's like back in the day, it was like, hell,
Speaker 8: let's enter the bronc riding, the bull ride and the
Speaker 8: team rope and if somebody who's got a horse wrestling
Speaker 8: and that's money, we.
Speaker 2: Can't bring a little money home, seriously, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And that's what you did at like the high school
Speaker 3: rodeos because they had an all around and you wanted
Speaker 3: to get all around points. College. You're on a college team, right,
Speaker 3: so you're trying to get your team to the college finals,
Speaker 3: so you enter multiple events to get points total for
Speaker 3: the team. When you get to the professional level, it
Speaker 3: seems like you kind of narrow in on one one
Speaker 3: one specific.
Speaker 1: Speaking of narrowing in, I don't want to make you uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: but I want to talk about the economics. So when
Speaker 1: I asked you about the economics of it, you don't
Speaker 1: need to talk about you, but you just talk about
Speaker 1: generally how it goes.
Speaker 2: But first, this one's not terribly personal.
Speaker 1: Uh, what was the first time you you walked away
Speaker 1: with money from a rodeo?
Speaker 2: How old were you?
Speaker 3: Oh, like I don't know, like probably one, you know,
Speaker 3: an envelope with forty bucks at junior rodeos when I
Speaker 3: was a little but competing. Like when I started actually
Speaker 3: to like make a little money, was when I started
Speaker 3: riding steers in Canada as a boys steer rider. And
Speaker 3: at what age that would have been, like eleven.
Speaker 2: Twelve making money eleven or twelve?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was awesome because you didn't drive and your
Speaker 3: parents paid for all the fuel, so it was all profit.
Speaker 2: And then what would be making money? What do you
Speaker 2: mean a few hundred bucks? A few thousand bucks?
Speaker 3: I think that one year after I won the Canadian
Speaker 3: title in the steer ride, and I think I had
Speaker 3: like ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Did your parents take it away?
Speaker 3: Fourteen year old kid? Thirteen year old kid?
Speaker 2: Did your parents take it from you? No you haven't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you've just inspired parties.
Speaker 2: Serious of that age.
Speaker 3: And that's serious, way better than was that regarded as accession.
Speaker 3: I think I bought my first cows when I was yeah, fourteen,
Speaker 3: thirteen fourteen with my steerd this cowboy through and through
Speaker 3: that it would have been a great opportunity for the boss.
Speaker 6: Is what trailer tires cost. This is what O a.
Speaker 2: Lot of parents to be like, oh, hand that over,
Speaker 2: you still hold me? A hundred thousands.
Speaker 3: They actually had a big steer like like, so it
Speaker 3: seems like every like my my age group, I guess
Speaker 3: especially in Canada, but but everywhere, like through high school rodeo,
Speaker 3: through my steer ide and all that stuff, like there
Speaker 3: was always like a big, a big group of kids
Speaker 3: that were you know, that were really good at it
Speaker 3: and and gamers, so like when we were riding steers.
Speaker 3: They actually put on a steer ride and in Canada,
Speaker 3: and I think it paid paid like seven thousand to
Speaker 3: win it, and I want it the one year and
Speaker 3: I got a one a buck and bull cow like
Speaker 3: I one an actual cow?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah, what did you do with the cow? Celebrate?
Speaker 3: Only just preg checked her three days ago and she's
Speaker 3: she's still alive. So that was That was in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: So that thing you want to pay in a lot
Speaker 2: of money.
Speaker 3: So she's two thousand and eight and yeah, this she's
Speaker 3: been read every year. I raised two buccoballs out of them,
Speaker 3: they out of hers, they didn't buck very hard. So
Speaker 3: I just started bringing her to a black angus bull.
Speaker 2: You kidding me?
Speaker 1: Do you mark that once so you can track the
Speaker 1: so you can track the payoff on that win on
Speaker 1: the I mean, do you mark how much you've made
Speaker 1: off that cow?
Speaker 3: Off that cow?
Speaker 13: No?
Speaker 3: I don't. I mean, I'm not sure you're interested in
Speaker 3: market fluctuates a lot, but you can tell her. She
Speaker 3: really sticks out from the herd. She looks like a
Speaker 3: she doesn't belong. Yeah, she's pretty mean.
Speaker 1: When you were okay, so at fourteen, you start buying.
Speaker 1: You bought house. Yeah, so you just knew you wanted
Speaker 1: to be in the family business.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, how many guys are there US Canada? I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's I don't know how far. Just do
Speaker 1: your best job answering this, because I'm sure you can
Speaker 1: start getting into what about Mexico or whatever, But like,
Speaker 1: give me a ballpark, how many How many guys are
Speaker 1: there that are making the bulk of their annual income
Speaker 1: bronc riding bron riding?
Speaker 2: Is it hundreds?
Speaker 3: No? Like, I mean it depends. I guess how much
Speaker 3: what you consider income.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get it, because you could be like living
Speaker 2: your parents basement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I mean to truly make a living radenbucking horses,
Speaker 3: I would say the So like for us to rodeo
Speaker 3: throughout the year, I'm gonna say you probably have around
Speaker 3: seventy seventy thousand is invested to go a full season.
Speaker 3: That's between like your your fuel, your entry fees, flights food.
Speaker 3: So so you're to make the NFR, you've got to win.
Speaker 3: Like this year, I think it took about one hundred
Speaker 3: and five thousand.
Speaker 2: So they they market by just the purse it's a dollar.
Speaker 3: For dollars dollars one. So I mean, if you're making
Speaker 3: the NFR, you're coming out on you know, you go
Speaker 3: to the NFR and don't win a dime, you're coming
Speaker 3: out on top of thirty thousand extra. You worked pretty
Speaker 3: damn hard for that thirty thousand.
Speaker 2: It took some years off your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you can.
Speaker 1: Look at someone there, like someone at that point has
Speaker 1: has pocketed.
Speaker 2: Like at a minimum, they maybe pocketed thirty grand.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, I mean that's to make it. But like
Speaker 3: your top, you're top guys. I mean last year I
Speaker 3: went out to the Vegas I won more money than
Speaker 3: any other contestant there, but I left just Vegas alone
Speaker 3: with two hundred and fifty six thousand.
Speaker 2: How many days of work was that ten days? Oh
Speaker 2: that was exceptional. That's good though.
Speaker 3: That's doing as good as you can do.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Tax has gotta be a bitch on that stuff.
Speaker 3: On Taxas Texas suck.
Speaker 2: They pretty much acted like you won the lottery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, there's not a lot of things you can
Speaker 3: write off against you know.
Speaker 2: Your ROTA, but you can't write off your bones and ship. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well that costs me. Yeah, that cost me my fever.
Speaker 2: It's gotta be worse something. I'm gonna do that as
Speaker 2: a deduction.
Speaker 3: But I mean, if you're doing good and you're in
Speaker 3: the top five or whatever, I mean, you're making you're
Speaker 3: making a decent living.
Speaker 1: What's funny about that line of work too, is I
Speaker 1: always think about this with professional athletes and stuff and others.
Speaker 1: Is uh, like I want to talk about economics and
Speaker 1: the personalness of economics is it's so public. I mean,
Speaker 1: like we had a guy on that won the British
Speaker 1: Open right.
Speaker 3: And everybody knows how much to ask them.
Speaker 2: I could, like I could three seconds tell I mean
Speaker 2: I could three seconds every much I make. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: so funny. So you come back from something people like, hey,
Speaker 2: good luck on you know, a good job on the
Speaker 2: blank dollars? Yeah, you know, there's no for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's not it's not too private, but I mean, like, uh,
Speaker 3: lost my train of thought.
Speaker 2: No, just not not private public.
Speaker 8: It's treated as the point system to your point though, right,
Speaker 8: it's so like it's it is literally the points and
Speaker 8: the currency that is used to quantify what you've achieved
Speaker 8: in rodeo is like the dollars, dollars one and so
Speaker 8: earlier today when we were goose hunting, you know how
Speaker 8: Zeke was talking about you can only go to one
Speaker 8: hundred rodeos in a year, so you have to pick.
Speaker 8: So there might be seven or eight hundred rodeos pro
Speaker 8: rodeos in the nation. The good guys like him and
Speaker 8: that top shelf group of guys, they're not going to
Speaker 8: like some po dunk rodeo and po dunk middle of nowhere, right,
Speaker 8: They're going to the big shows because that's going to
Speaker 8: pay the most. And so it gets the point where
Speaker 8: it's like we're gonna go the least amount of rodeos
Speaker 8: we can and win the most amount of money to
Speaker 8: make it to the NFR and not kill ourselves in
Speaker 8: the meantime, but still make a living going you have
Speaker 8: less travel costs, higher role.
Speaker 3: That is what I was gonna say, was, Yeah, so
Speaker 3: like rodeos, it's the only blue collar sport left where
Speaker 3: you pay your own way and you don't get paid
Speaker 3: unless you win. You know where everybody else is on
Speaker 3: a contract. And so that's what makes rodeo pretty neat
Speaker 3: because you see, like these guys.
Speaker 2: Are out there.
Speaker 3: They are giving it there all every time and they're
Speaker 3: doing it because they want to. You know, you can.
Speaker 3: You can get drafted and sign your three million dollars
Speaker 3: or your three year, ten million dollar contract and then
Speaker 3: you know, go coast around the ice or football field
Speaker 3: or whatever pretty easily. But you know, in rodeo there
Speaker 3: you have to win.
Speaker 1: Because it's blue collar and draws some blue collar do
Speaker 1: you guys have a real reputation for blowing your money.
Speaker 3: I don't know if they ever are smart. I wouldn't.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say rodeo cowboys are smart with their mind.
Speaker 3: I feel like I've done a pretty good job. But
Speaker 3: you see a lot of money the majority of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you see a lot of people burn the check off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, somebody will win, you know, a Houston for fifty thousand,
Speaker 3: and then they buy a new boat. They're like, what
Speaker 3: are you? When are you ever going to use that?
Speaker 2: You're rodeo on all summer.
Speaker 8: You can't even You're gone, could you?
Speaker 2: So? Could you?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 2: It's one hundred grand right? The entry the points system
Speaker 2: is one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: To make the NFL. I mean it fluctuates every year.
Speaker 1: So let's say you're gaming out and you can you
Speaker 1: can do a maximum of one hundred events.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 3: You can't go more than top fifteen in the world.
Speaker 2: Is there a minimum?
Speaker 3: A minimum?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: So for us we have what they call standalone events,
Speaker 3: which are and the bull riders do too, and a
Speaker 3: few in the bare back riding, but it's they call
Speaker 3: them extreme Broncs where it's just bronk riding. So like
Speaker 3: if Bozeman was to have an Extreme Bronx, you would
Speaker 3: come and watch thirty of the best brunk graders in
Speaker 3: the world get on. That's all you'd watch is thirty
Speaker 3: brunk raders. So a lot I mean in the PRC organization,
Speaker 3: like they feel like it kind of takes away from
Speaker 3: rodeos that are adding, you know, that have a full rodeo.
Speaker 3: So in order for us to you know, for your
Speaker 3: Extreme Bronx money to count, you have to go to
Speaker 3: a minimum of forty rodeos.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, because they're trying to keep the whole, the
Speaker 1: whole program rolling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we could go I mean, we have a
Speaker 3: lot of extreme brounks now, like you could go to
Speaker 3: forty extreme bronks win one hundred grand in that, you know,
Speaker 3: but not not get your forty rodeos, so that one
Speaker 3: hundred thousands, not counting towards the second.
Speaker 1: That's what I was curious is if to what degree
Speaker 1: did people game it? Meaning if you knew that, if
Speaker 1: you know that going to NFR that you're a real
Speaker 1: contestant and you might walk away over there with a
Speaker 1: sizeable chunk of money. And you're going through the season
Speaker 1: and you hit the minimum threshold, is there some part
Speaker 1: of you that says, I'm not going to risk my
Speaker 1: body unnecessarily. I'm just gonna chill and and wait and
Speaker 1: just go to the big time and not do the circuit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not not necessarily. Like as far as as far
Speaker 3: as the roughstock events go, the BRONC riding is the
Speaker 3: easiest on your body, like kind of once you once
Speaker 3: you learn it, not that you ever have it totally learned,
Speaker 3: but they call it the classic event. It's it's all
Speaker 3: timing and balance, you know. It's it's kind of like
Speaker 3: riding a rock and chair when it's going right. So
Speaker 3: I mean for us it's I mean, if you have
Speaker 3: a good horse drawn that you're gonna win on, you're
Speaker 3: gonna go get on it. If you have the say
Speaker 3: you have the finals made you know, halfway through the year,
Speaker 3: you might be a little more picky and choosy and
Speaker 3: maybe not go get on this horse that you know
Speaker 3: is known for sucking. But then on the other side
Speaker 3: of the coin, you might be on the bubble to
Speaker 3: make the NFR and you have to go get on everything.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and if you don't go, you don't get paid.
Speaker 10: No, it's just a net loss of dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I want to go off of that analogy of the
Speaker 5: rock and chair because I'd like you to go through
Speaker 5: if you can, well, first tell me I think you
Speaker 5: can tell me really quickly. Is the is what you're
Speaker 5: mimicking when you do this bronc riding event? Is it
Speaker 5: what used to be or still is probably but breaking
Speaker 5: a horse to be able to ride it with a saddle,
Speaker 5: or is there there's something else that goes on in
Speaker 5: ranching that this is mimicking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like where where rodeo and bronk like bron
Speaker 3: g riding is the event that started rodeo and where
Speaker 3: it came from was when the European settlers came over.
Speaker 3: They took the Spanish Volco's influence on how to handle
Speaker 3: cattle with horses and they you know, they've seen that
Speaker 3: as a benefit, so they started to you know, handle
Speaker 3: cattle that way. You know, before fences, you would have
Speaker 3: a big round up and everybody would gather all the
Speaker 3: cattle together and put them in a herd, a big
Speaker 3: mob whatever you want to call it, and they would
Speaker 3: call it the roe deer. And that's where you know,
Speaker 3: all the ranches would get together. They would work, work
Speaker 3: their cattle, and then you would take your calves and
Speaker 3: go ship them, and that guy would take his and
Speaker 3: go ship them. So that's you know, that's what they
Speaker 3: would do. And kind of in the midst of all this,
Speaker 3: you know, they would be out there for months at
Speaker 3: a time, and in the midst of all this they rode.
Speaker 3: They would you know, they'd have their cowboys or their
Speaker 3: day hands that would come and you know that worked
Speaker 3: for that ranch and they would do all the work.
Speaker 3: But like back in those days, like nowadays we start
Speaker 3: colts at two years old, back then, they would get
Speaker 3: on horses that you know, were untouched by people when
Speaker 3: they're you know, they'd be eight, nine, ten year old horses.
Speaker 3: So you would have to blindfold them, they'd tie back
Speaker 3: leg up, snub them up, you know, whatever and get
Speaker 3: and usually, you know, most most of them cowboys had
Speaker 3: to have some sort of a bronker had that morning
Speaker 3: just to just to get his horse snapped out and
Speaker 3: then take off and go do their work for the day.
Speaker 3: So that's I mean, cowboys being cowboys turn it into
Speaker 3: a competition of hey, you know I can ride that,
Speaker 3: so you know this is the rank of horse, I
Speaker 3: can ride him, or you couldn't ride my horse kind
Speaker 3: of thing.
Speaker 5: And it would be like a daily event. You just
Speaker 5: knew back then for them to start your day, you'd
Speaker 5: have to get on that horse in some weird way
Speaker 5: that you just described. I didn't understand half the terminology,
Speaker 5: but you had to get on him and go through
Speaker 5: eight or maybe a minute of craziness and then you
Speaker 5: go about your day of work.
Speaker 3: Yes, and they would ride him once and considered them broke,
Speaker 3: like that was a broke horse. But he might back
Speaker 3: for the next sixty days that you had them.
Speaker 2: Is the fact that he had been ridden.
Speaker 3: That somebody had been on his back at one point
Speaker 3: he was considered broke. But so that's what they did.
Speaker 1: So then you know, we got a body who uh uh, well,
Speaker 1: our body's body who's that guy? I remember was squirrel
Speaker 1: unting down. We're talking about mules. Squirrel on Maclay and
Speaker 1: he had.
Speaker 2: His friend with us. I can't remember the guy's name.
Speaker 2: He was funnier in hell were there.
Speaker 1: They got to talk about the mule trade on Craigslist
Speaker 1: and they're talking about like how bad Craigslist is for
Speaker 1: the mule trade.
Speaker 2: And this guy says, man, I broke us sold.
Speaker 1: He says, I sold a crazy horse or I sold
Speaker 1: a crazy mule to a guy on Craigslist. And two
Speaker 1: weeks later I saw that same mule being sold as
Speaker 1: a broke mules.
Speaker 3: That's how they did it. Yeah, so then they I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously it turned into you know, the the art of
Speaker 3: bronk riding just came from those everyday working cowboys, you know,
Speaker 3: making bets and trying to ride the rank his horse,
Speaker 3: and then it just kind of progressively got sportier over
Speaker 3: the years. I guess. I think maybe like somewhere in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen hundreds is when they like when the
Speaker 3: Calgary Stampede put on their first you know outdoor cargary Stampede,
Speaker 3: you know, and brought contestants from the United States and Mexico,
Speaker 3: and all over to come compete. And I think Guy
Speaker 3: Weed it was maybe the guy that kind of started
Speaker 3: like put the rules kind of in place to you know,
Speaker 3: make it more of a structured contest, and then it's
Speaker 3: kind of evolved from there.
Speaker 2: Are there any other continents where this goes on? Do
Speaker 2: you know about?
Speaker 7: There are?
Speaker 3: But like in different styles, Like I don't know if
Speaker 3: I seen videos like on social media, I don't know
Speaker 3: where even what country would be from, but like these
Speaker 3: guys get on like they'll have these horses snubbed up
Speaker 3: and they'll get on like maybe to a post and
Speaker 3: another horse be between two, you know, two riders on horse.
Speaker 3: They'll kind of sandwich the horse up and this guy
Speaker 3: will crawl on and then you'll have a quirt and
Speaker 3: honestly do not know how they stay on, but they'll
Speaker 3: have a bit in the horse's mouth, and like they
Speaker 3: don't really buck, they don't they buck nothing like ours.
Speaker 3: But there it's more of like a rearing style of bucking.
Speaker 3: And these guys will ride these horses over in Brazil,
Speaker 3: they ride with like a saddle that's got like a
Speaker 3: handle on it, you know. So I mean there's different
Speaker 3: variations of it.
Speaker 2: What's the significance of the one hand in the air.
Speaker 3: And just difficulty level.
Speaker 2: I guess just showing using one hand and then uh,
Speaker 2: you know the famous wyoming symbol. Who's that dude?
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, I don't know who that is.
Speaker 2: Okay, take can you take us through?
Speaker 5: Uh, pick up wherever you decide it's like interesting enough
Speaker 5: to tell the story, but take us through, like step
Speaker 5: by step, moment by a moment, the whole riding experience
Speaker 5: of when you get into that shoot. But it might
Speaker 5: it might start I don't know, two minutes ahead of time,
Speaker 5: like when you're the other dude's riding ahead of you,
Speaker 5: you're back there, you're getting jacked up. Just kind of
Speaker 5: take us through everything that's in your head and as
Speaker 5: that process goes down, because I think, like when I
Speaker 5: watch it on TV, like they get on whatever animal
Speaker 5: and you always see him Jimmy dicking with that rope
Speaker 5: and then and that tether or whatever it is. I
Speaker 5: mean I kind of think, oh, he's making it tighter.
Speaker 5: But iviously, there's more to it than just that. So
Speaker 5: it it'd be cool if you could just take us
Speaker 5: through through the steps. What is roughly just thirty seconds.
Speaker 5: I'm guessing it in its entirety, but it'll probably take
Speaker 5: you five or ten minutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like we try to get to the rodeo
Speaker 3: an hour before you get your equipment kind of ready.
Speaker 2: Just an hour.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, usually, I mean that's about what it takes
Speaker 3: to warm up your body, get everything firing. You know,
Speaker 3: you go get a halter. It's they supply the halter,
Speaker 3: so you go get a halter, put your hackrain on
Speaker 3: your halter. Bron Griding is usually, you know, pretty commonly
Speaker 3: in the middle of the rodeo. It's usually about third
Speaker 3: to fourth event in so you'll kind of you'll help
Speaker 3: your buddies on in the bareback riding, watch them do
Speaker 3: their thing, and then they start loading bronks and it's
Speaker 3: you get your gear on, put your vest, your shaps,
Speaker 3: all that. You take your saddle over there.
Speaker 2: What's that That vest is protective?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it's a protective vest.
Speaker 2: It's got like kevlar plates.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, I don't think it's it's like a it's
Speaker 3: just kind of like a thick foam covered in leather.
Speaker 2: Okay, so so it would it doesn't help you get.
Speaker 3: It helps, Yeah, it's just like disperse the you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: like in anything like we don't I mean, hopefully you
Speaker 3: don't have to use it for getting stepped on, and
Speaker 3: it's not super common, but it's nice to have it
Speaker 3: on when you do. But some horses, you know, like
Speaker 3: if they some smart horses will you know, try to
Speaker 3: set back in the shoot and you kind of mash
Speaker 3: you in the back of the shoot, you know, so
Speaker 3: it's nice to have it on for that. And that's
Speaker 3: us yours or not yours mine. Yeah, yeah, I know
Speaker 3: you have, but you.
Speaker 1: Go get the you're talking about getting the other equipment
Speaker 1: the halter that's not you can't bring your own.
Speaker 3: That is brought by the stock contractor just usually because
Speaker 3: they well I mean you just wouldn't want to pack
Speaker 3: a halter around. But they also have like their rodeo
Speaker 3: company's name on the noseband, and there's some famous special
Speaker 3: horses have their own name on the noseband and stuff.
Speaker 5: What about the saddle, when does that go on? And
Speaker 5: who provides them?
Speaker 3: So they'll like once they start loading the bucking horses
Speaker 3: for the bronc riding, you'll go find your horse, you know,
Speaker 3: figure out what shoot or what side you're you're here on.
Speaker 3: You take your equipment over there. You'll start by putting
Speaker 3: your halter on the horse.
Speaker 2: At this point, you know what that horse looks like.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean you've probably known it like
Speaker 3: days before.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You always go and talk to the stockgun tractor beforehand
Speaker 3: and always be friendly, shake their hand, ask them what
Speaker 3: siety's out of, you know, do that kind of deal.
Speaker 2: But then, what do you mean what siety's out of?
Speaker 3: Like, so there's at the rodeo, well most rodeos, not all,
Speaker 3: but there'll be a left hand delivery and a right hand.
Speaker 2: Delivery, and that depends on the horse's tendencies.
Speaker 3: Yes, so some horses are right leaded and some horses
Speaker 3: are left lead, just like people.
Speaker 2: Oh so they tailored to what that horse is going
Speaker 2: to want to do some horses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so if a horse likes to kind of circle
Speaker 3: to the left, they'll put them out of the left
Speaker 3: side so that he can you know, he starts in
Speaker 3: the left lead and goes out there and makes his
Speaker 3: circle to the left.
Speaker 2: Okay, they're not just mixing it up randomly.
Speaker 3: No, No, there's actually there's a lot of strategy that
Speaker 3: goes into it. But yeah, you get your horse altered
Speaker 3: I'll put my saddle.
Speaker 2: On, so you put your saddle on.
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, personal, I'm responsible for all of my own equipment,
Speaker 3: my stuff, okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like so basically when you enter the rodeo and you
Speaker 3: get there and you're gonna go compete on that horse
Speaker 3: like that, that horse is basically my horse for the
Speaker 3: time being. Like I'm I'm doing everything with it. And
Speaker 3: obviously the stock contractor owns it and you work with
Speaker 3: them too, you know, but.
Speaker 1: Those saddles like criteria, right, you can't invent some genius saddle.
Speaker 3: Oh no, there's specs for a saddle. You know where
Speaker 3: they sit and how they pull and and all that stuff.
Speaker 3: But anyways, I'll put my saddle on, and then usually
Speaker 3: about the time the Bronc rideing's starting to kick off wherever,
Speaker 3: you know, wherever you happen to fall in the lineup,
Speaker 3: like you might be first out, you might be twelfth
Speaker 3: or thirteenth out, depending on how many guys, and so
Speaker 3: you'll kind of time it, like to do my shaps
Speaker 3: up and get them tight. You know, probably five or
Speaker 3: six guys ahead of me, start pulling my horse, which
Speaker 3: is you know, start sensing your saddle.
Speaker 2: Down now, what are the chaps do for you? Because
Speaker 2: you're not riding through briars.
Speaker 3: No, So the shaps are there there their leg protection.
Speaker 3: And then we also put rosin on our swells, which
Speaker 3: is where your legs come in contact with your saddle.
Speaker 3: So it's it's kind of a sticky you know, it's
Speaker 3: a sticky tree sap. It looks sweet, yeah, in style too, but.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it helps you grip the horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it helps you grip your saddle.
Speaker 2: And you're allowed to rise, yes, because in baseball, you're not.
Speaker 3: They grip their they rosing their bats, don't they.
Speaker 2: Well they can't put sticky shit on the ball though, No,
Speaker 2: not on the ball. Yeah, but you guys are allowed to.
Speaker 3: I mean there's criterias on that too, like you can't
Speaker 3: can't be painting on gorilla glue. But yeah, So then
Speaker 3: depending on where I am in the lineup, I'll start,
Speaker 3: you know, sensing my horse pulling my saddle. I get
Speaker 3: everything squared away, and then it's, uh, it's basically just
Speaker 3: go time everything. Uh you know, they get a couple
Speaker 3: of guys away from you, I'll suck my hat down,
Speaker 3: put my MoU mouth guard in. Uh, you measure your
Speaker 3: rain because each horse takes a different rain measurement depending
Speaker 3: on where they hold their head when they buck and
Speaker 3: how they buck, and so, uh you have somebody hold
Speaker 3: the horse's head straight out in front of and uh
Speaker 3: you just pull your rain across there and measure it
Speaker 3: from the back of your swells like a one. A
Speaker 3: fist with your thumb sticking out is considered an average.
Speaker 3: So if I was going to give a horse what
Speaker 3: they call X and four, I would give them an
Speaker 3: average plus four fingers. And so measure my rain once
Speaker 3: my rein's measured. Take take my back cinch, so you'll
Speaker 3: snug your back.
Speaker 2: I feel like from watch and I feel like I
Speaker 2: know what you're talking about now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So then snug my back sinch. This it
Speaker 3: happens fast.
Speaker 2: Because they want like for the spectator's perspective, they want
Speaker 2: like a certain cad oh in.
Speaker 3: Vegas, like they want like you have to have your
Speaker 3: back cinch, you know, rain measured foot in your saddle
Speaker 3: as the other guy before you is going. So like
Speaker 3: they just snapped in one after another. It's fast. They
Speaker 3: can Yeah, regular rodeo, it's not quite who is are
Speaker 3: you doing the backsinch? I do the back sinch ye do.
Speaker 3: And then the stock contractor is in charge of the
Speaker 3: flank and they're not like usually like I I like
Speaker 3: to get my own guy. Sometimes there's a guy supplied,
Speaker 3: but you have somebody what do you call, like your
Speaker 3: head man, and that's the guy that will turn the
Speaker 3: horse's head out of the shoote once the shoot gates opened.
Speaker 3: Most of the horses that we get on, you know,
Speaker 3: they're they've done it so much that you don't you
Speaker 3: don't really you know, touch something.
Speaker 2: You feel that horse is fired up.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, like they like yes, there's some horses
Speaker 3: that they'll run in the buck and shoot and they'll
Speaker 3: just swell right up and get tight. You can tell that,
Speaker 3: you know they're ready. There's other horses that will stand
Speaker 3: in there and they act half asleep and you're like,
Speaker 3: come on, wake up, man, like we gotta to go
Speaker 3: do this. You know, they all have a personality, they're
Speaker 3: all different and uh yeah, but anyways, I'll step over
Speaker 3: the back, crawl down on and once like once I'm
Speaker 3: crawling over the buck and shoot it. Like I don't
Speaker 3: hear anything, like I don't hear the announcer. You might
Speaker 3: communicate with the stock contractor or your helper that's there.
Speaker 3: And then after that you take a deep state and
Speaker 3: far away look and nod your head.
Speaker 2: Far away look.
Speaker 5: Okay, but so you not your head. One guy swings
Speaker 5: the chute open.
Speaker 3: When the gate starts to open, the like, so like,
Speaker 3: all I can see is I'm focused on the horse's neck.
Speaker 3: I can see my rain up in front of me.
Speaker 3: So like, as soon as that horse's head starts to
Speaker 3: move like she's you know, he or she is committing
Speaker 3: to leaving the shoot, is when I'll reach up and
Speaker 3: spur them out, get a hold of them with my feet.
Speaker 3: Then I'll have to hold my feet in the front
Speaker 3: of her, you know, above her shoulders or his shoulders,
Speaker 3: until the front feet hit the ground. Ideally, how they
Speaker 3: teach it is you want to have you want to
Speaker 3: spur the horse out for two jumps, which means you
Speaker 3: you know, you you leave your feet in the front
Speaker 3: of the neck for the first two jumps, and then
Speaker 3: after that you have to pick up the timing and
Speaker 3: you want to beat the horse to the ground with
Speaker 3: your spur stroke. So as that horse is breaking and
Speaker 3: coming coming over, and then as it starts to kick
Speaker 3: and come back to the ground. You want to already
Speaker 3: have your feet in its neck.
Speaker 2: But what is that for?
Speaker 3: Uh? You can, it's you. You can honestly ride. You could.
Speaker 3: They couldn't blow you out of there with a cannon
Speaker 3: if you're if you're ahead of the horse. So that's
Speaker 3: why they call the classic ventnors. It's like riding a
Speaker 3: rocking chair. If you get behind and you know you're
Speaker 3: you're spurring, you're hitting the front as the horse's front
Speaker 3: feet are hitting the ground, or even after it you
Speaker 3: take you take all the power of the horse. So
Speaker 3: that's when you start to see guys like when they
Speaker 3: get their chin popped and they're you know, getting strung out,
Speaker 3: and then it just turns your ride progressively, Like I
Speaker 3: mean that you can catch up and get ahead of
Speaker 3: them again. It'll cause you to mess up a jump
Speaker 3: or two, which obviously reflects in your score, or it
Speaker 3: can just kind of foul up the entire ride.
Speaker 2: And if you're out of time.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, what's the significance of the we're not there yet,
Speaker 1: But what is the significance of eight seconds?
Speaker 2: Like where did that ever come from?
Speaker 3: I don't know. It used to be used to be
Speaker 3: ten Okay, I think they just shorten it. I'm not
Speaker 3: really sure.
Speaker 2: It's not like a Spanish tradition.
Speaker 3: Or no, I'm not sure where the eight seconds come from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, how well do you know when
Speaker 2: you're there, like.
Speaker 3: Well, they have a horn that goes off anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you have a you have an internal clock, and you
Speaker 3: have a pretty good idea.
Speaker 5: How far into the ride do you know if it's
Speaker 5: going to be a spectacular ride or it's a dud?
Speaker 3: Yeah, just I mean you can It kind of depends
Speaker 3: on the ride. Like you know, you get on a horse,
Speaker 3: maybe the first three or four jumps are you know, outstanding,
Speaker 3: and it's looking like you're going to be eighty eight,
Speaker 3: and then he kind of peters out or trails off
Speaker 3: at the end, and you know his last three jumps
Speaker 3: was a seventy seven, so then you end up being
Speaker 3: eighty two.
Speaker 2: So basically, riders get off.
Speaker 1: I used to ice be confused about, but this this
Speaker 1: conversation's homes playing it. Did you see riders get off?
Speaker 1: You know you think they tore it.
Speaker 2: Up and they get off on their piss. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: kicking the dirt, throwing it. And I was like, what
Speaker 2: they're pissed as the horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it could be or something, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe something that they they maybe weren't happy with themselves
Speaker 3: that they did. No, the intricacies of horse bucks hard
Speaker 3: from start to finish, and you ride it really well,
Speaker 3: you're gonna get a big score no matter what you said.
Speaker 6: You snug down your hat. Aren't a lot of folks
Speaker 6: wearing like full face protection and helmets these days?
Speaker 3: And the bull riding, just the bull riding. Yeah, No,
Speaker 3: bron graders were helmets. I mean there's maybe one, wow, so.
Speaker 6: One smart BRONC rider and out of the whole crew.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he wore a helmet because he had a
Speaker 3: soft spot on his skull from a previous injury.
Speaker 5: That makes sense.
Speaker 2: He was laid to the game.
Speaker 11: Yea.
Speaker 3: His nickname was Helmet.
Speaker 2: You'll know when you see yeah old skid Land. How
Speaker 2: often do you how often do you get like what
Speaker 2: percentage of the time do you get thrown off?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 3: I mean this year I've been bucked off twice, I guess.
Speaker 2: And what's the most common, So that'd be like wait,
Speaker 2: that that'd be like.
Speaker 1: It's just less likely to happen, right, And when you
Speaker 1: get bucked off. Are you like I screwed up? Or
Speaker 1: is it that that horse had an amazing move.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's usually it's it's on me obviously, because it's
Speaker 3: I mean the horses, you're dancing partner, they're out there
Speaker 3: making they're in the lead right and you're making the
Speaker 3: counter move. So obviously if I get bucked off, there's
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't do something correct, But there's there's
Speaker 3: just times, I mean, you can't. It's inevible. It's gonna happen,
Speaker 3: especially if you get on enough of them. Like the
Speaker 3: other day at the Canadian Finals, they bucked me off
Speaker 3: the first round, and I knew it was coming a
Speaker 3: horse that had bucked you know, all the all the
Speaker 3: best bront riders going off that same way. And I
Speaker 3: figured out a pretty good game plan for her, and
Speaker 3: she did. She did to me what she does to
Speaker 3: everybody else.
Speaker 2: But you knew that it was coming and what it
Speaker 2: might be.
Speaker 12: But I was doing every Like I.
Speaker 3: Watched the tape back and I was doing it. I
Speaker 3: was doing everything pretty cool.
Speaker 2: What was what was she doing? What was the thing?
Speaker 3: Like she just turns out of there and like the
Speaker 3: first two jumps are really big and I had her
Speaker 3: spurred out and I was gonna hold my feet for
Speaker 3: two jumps. So like the second jump, or like the
Speaker 3: first jump was is pretty good, Like it's a big jump,
Speaker 3: but like she's pretty honest about it. The second jump
Speaker 3: she like really elevates and and moves away what they
Speaker 3: call so like she starts to really jump forward, which
Speaker 3: makes you want to run out the back of your saddle.
Speaker 3: But then on top of that, like what is your
Speaker 3: your balance point or your pivot point, is your bronchrain
Speaker 3: with that she moved is moving forward, but then giving
Speaker 3: her giving her head back to you. Well, that's that's
Speaker 3: the thing. You all the pressure, like the pressure on
Speaker 3: your rain is what holds your butt down in your saddle.
Speaker 3: So when she's starting to make a thirty foot jump
Speaker 3: that way, play giving her head that way. I just
Speaker 3: slid out the back and off.
Speaker 2: But looking back, like I was doing that, that could happen. Yeah,
Speaker 2: how are you?
Speaker 5: How are you going to count?
Speaker 6: Did you learn something?
Speaker 5: Do you feel like?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I watched the thing and I was like,
Speaker 3: I don't know what I would do different. I'll probably
Speaker 3: draw her again and I'll probably try it the same way.
Speaker 3: I was doing things pretty pretty right.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, So, uh, what are the you laid out
Speaker 1: a number of injuries and talk about the woman you
Speaker 1: were a kid, but like, like at your level, now.
Speaker 2: What's the thing that you worry about happening? Like, like,
Speaker 2: what would be the thing that winds up banging up?
Speaker 3: You don't really worry about any of it happening. I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously it can't happen. I mean, if you're worried about
Speaker 3: getting hurt, you probably shouldn't do it. But I mean
Speaker 3: it's it's a high contact sport for sure, and injuries
Speaker 3: are going to happen, big ones for broncraders, groins, knees, ankles.
Speaker 3: I seem to do a knee or an ankle every year.
Speaker 3: So is it is it mostly like twisting and falling, Yeah,
Speaker 3: more than ligament stuff, more than getting like more than
Speaker 3: getting stepped on or banged into into the into the
Speaker 3: arena walls. Yeah yeah. And I mean things do happen
Speaker 3: like rex in the bron grading or I mean, they're
Speaker 3: they're few and far between. Uh for the most part.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can you can get into a situation
Speaker 3: that is just unavoidable and and get kind of wiped
Speaker 3: out or whatever. But like, like for me this year,
Speaker 3: like I sprained the snot out of my ankle pretty good.
Speaker 3: And it was just getting off on the pickup and
Speaker 3: I just got off and stepped in a hole wrong
Speaker 3: and rolled my ankle, you know. On dramatic Yeah, very
Speaker 3: very just not even a cool story. But you know,
Speaker 3: like knees twisting the wrong way and stirrups, like you
Speaker 3: say you're getting bucked off or coming off and your
Speaker 3: stirrup hangs on your on your foot for a second,
Speaker 3: and twist your knee the wrong way. You know, legaments
Speaker 3: and knees and and growing seem to be be hard
Speaker 3: on bron graders.
Speaker 2: Got it? Is there a lot of groupies in the
Speaker 2: rodeo world.
Speaker 3: I mean there's some you yeah, all right, yeah, I
Speaker 3: see you're married though I'm married.
Speaker 2: Ye oh, you've been married.
Speaker 3: I've been married. This will be well. I just have
Speaker 3: my anniversary the other day seven years.
Speaker 2: Oh, what's going on with that? Going good?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's really good. I have We've got three kids,
Speaker 3: who just welcomed our third one two weeks ago. My
Speaker 3: oldest daughter, Lucy is five. I got a boy, Hardy,
Speaker 3: he's two. And then Maggie is two weeks old. Yawn,
Speaker 3: got it going on? No, you like being married though
Speaker 3: I love being married.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the right hand.
Speaker 12: That's the right answer.
Speaker 2: The podcast have You Really Dumb? Sound different?
Speaker 9: Like, what's the gap between you and the other guys
Speaker 9: going in? Because the NFR or what when.
Speaker 10: This drops is like two weeks away?
Speaker 3: What's the gap.
Speaker 12: Between you and the other guys?
Speaker 3: Between me and first Yeah? Probably like right around thirty thousand,
Speaker 3: which ain't much because last year I think First Place
Speaker 3: had one hundred and fifteen thousand on me.
Speaker 2: I got them kidding me? Same number? Oh no, probably
Speaker 2: not the same number? Did you guys? Did you guys
Speaker 2: both hit the one hundred mark or no?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like, what do you like the like their way over that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like for the year one? Right now, I think
Speaker 3: I have two hundred and twenty three thousand one or something.
Speaker 2: No, No, I meant when you said like the guy
Speaker 2: being over, I said, I meant when you look at
Speaker 2: like who's top? Does it matter how many events they
Speaker 2: took place in? Oh?
Speaker 3: Like how many I got you? Yeah? No, you can
Speaker 3: go to you can use all hundred or you can
Speaker 3: use I mean I usually use around you know, eighty
Speaker 3: seventy five to.
Speaker 2: Eighty five, and is that a common number.
Speaker 3: Yeah, most guys, I mean, some guys like to make
Speaker 3: sure they use all one hundred and give themselves the
Speaker 3: very best chance. Other guys, you know, like for me,
Speaker 3: I have a lot of other things going on at
Speaker 3: home and stuff, So I mean I I mean going
Speaker 3: to eighty rodeos for me, that's that's that's really doing it.
Speaker 2: So if you're on a plane, so this is what
Speaker 2: do you do for a living? What do you say?
Speaker 3: It's the hardest thing to explain to people. You see
Speaker 3: you look at you, they think you're crazy. You're telling
Speaker 3: me your professional broncrider and they're like, what's that?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: My ass, I'm a gypsy that travels around and gets
Speaker 3: on horses that try to throw me off.
Speaker 2: So you will tell people that's what you do.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and some people some people are are you know,
Speaker 3: You'll run into people on airplanes that are huge radio
Speaker 3: fans that you wouldn't even think and other people, you know,
Speaker 3: might be upstate New York and I don't even know
Speaker 3: what and the feed goes in the horse.
Speaker 2: I only ever, so if I'm ever in that conversation.
Speaker 1: I only ever say that. I say I'm a writer,
Speaker 1: and they go what, And I say books and magazine stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all ever say. I never.
Speaker 6: I'm familiar with books and magazine.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I could picture at some point in your life you
Speaker 2: just be like ranching, ranching because if you say cowboy
Speaker 2: that yeah.
Speaker 8: One thing, one thing to know, you know, and he
Speaker 8: said that, you know, they could be thirty thousand dollars
Speaker 8: from the next guy. Those guys take their yearly earnings
Speaker 8: and then once they get to the NFR, there's ten rounds.
Speaker 8: Each round of the NFR pays really good. So like
Speaker 8: last year was it like twenty eight thousand dollars thirty
Speaker 8: this year thirty thousand dollars to win one round to
Speaker 8: the NFR, So you got ten goes. So say on
Speaker 8: night one you show up and Zeke wins round one
Speaker 8: of the NFR and the guy who is ahead of
Speaker 8: him doesn't win any money. Well, now they're tied. So
Speaker 8: what will happen is you have this year long race
Speaker 8: to get to the top fifteen to get to the NFR.
Speaker 8: But as soon as you get to the NFR. Man
Speaker 8: there's been times when the guy who came in in
Speaker 8: fifteenth place, has jumped up ahead and won world title
Speaker 8: because it's your year end money. So it's the year
Speaker 8: and the NFR, and so for the for these guys
Speaker 8: just getting to the NFR, they'll make oftentimes more money
Speaker 8: at the NFR in ten days than they made in
Speaker 8: the rest of their whole season.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I got Strett to get hot.
Speaker 2: Man. The more we're talking, man, I'm really seeing an
Speaker 2: approach where you just sand bag all year. Just go
Speaker 2: down there and tear it a new one. Man.
Speaker 3: That's strategy.
Speaker 2: Prom is you got to draw good to do that.
Speaker 3: You gotta make it though, which means if you make it,
Speaker 3: you gotta be I mean, if you make the NFR,
Speaker 3: you're doing pretty good.
Speaker 8: It's hard to make.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got you. So, Like, there's probably four hundred
Speaker 3: Bronc riders that hold a PRC A card. I don't
Speaker 3: I'm just guessing somewhere in there, only fifteen of them
Speaker 3: get to go to the NFR.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I think like there's like quite a
Speaker 9: few people that would say they're professional BRONC riders that
Speaker 9: don't go to the NFR.
Speaker 5: Yeah you have.
Speaker 1: But Brian Harmon, were you here when the professional golfer
Speaker 1: Brian Harmer was on, no, there's some golden ticket, Like
Speaker 1: what was he saying? There's like a golden ticket if
Speaker 1: you win something or another you get to skip all
Speaker 1: the bs and you know you're going.
Speaker 12: Yea not yeah a not.
Speaker 5: A Master's is one of the I believe four majors.
Speaker 5: And if you win a major, then you are you
Speaker 5: get to keep your card for like whatever you said.
Speaker 2: Don't have that rodeo like like you win and like buddy,
Speaker 2: take it off, take it easy.
Speaker 3: Next year, you got to do it all over again
Speaker 3: from scratch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what right now? How long do you think
Speaker 1: your ride for? Are you just gonna wait it out?
Speaker 1: Or do you got like an exit plan?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 3: I mean, and it's I'll probably just know. I'll know
Speaker 3: what I know. Mm hmm. You know, I'm healthy, I
Speaker 3: feel really good, So I got I got some good
Speaker 3: years left in me.
Speaker 2: And what does your wife support you doing that kind
Speaker 2: of work? She likes it?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah she. I wouldn't be able to do it
Speaker 3: without her. She's she's been there with me every every
Speaker 3: step of the way. Yeah she's She's not telling you that.
Speaker 3: She's just as much a part of it as I am.
Speaker 3: She travel with you a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you are you able to bring your kids now?
Speaker 3: And then yeah, yeah, like they don't go a ton
Speaker 3: like they obviously will get to quite a few of
Speaker 3: the Canadian rodeos and stuff, and then like kind of
Speaker 3: the end of the season when we're winding down, that's
Speaker 3: like September like, so they come to Pendleton, hung out
Speaker 3: there for a week, you know, go to go to
Speaker 3: a few.
Speaker 2: Do you think you're going to have any riders in
Speaker 2: your family?
Speaker 3: My little boy, he really he means too, so it's
Speaker 3: hard to tell, but he sure acts like he wants to.
Speaker 9: Do Yeah, And I think it's like this is why
Speaker 9: I think, well, for a lot of reasons why I
Speaker 9: think pro rodeo is the best professional sport. So I
Speaker 9: went to Great Falls to watch Zeke. Jane and I
Speaker 9: get in the stands and I'm texting Zeke as they're
Speaker 9: loading up the bucking horses, and Zeke's not there yet
Speaker 9: right like he's still like walking up the rodeo started.
Speaker 9: He was traveling with his daughter, walks up to the
Speaker 9: announcers stand and drops his daughter off with the announcer
Speaker 9: right goes over to.
Speaker 2: Keep an eye on her.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you have a good seat.
Speaker 12: Yeah, good seat.
Speaker 9: Gives her his phone so she can videotape him. Right,
Speaker 9: goes over, saddles his own horse, bucks out what that
Speaker 9: was like an eighty nine or something like that.
Speaker 3: That night won the go round, won the rodeo.
Speaker 12: How much was that.
Speaker 3: Has added? Maybe got eight thousand?
Speaker 12: And then he gets off. It was just this amazing
Speaker 12: ride too. We're watching it.
Speaker 5: He gets off.
Speaker 12: You see him walk up to his daughter.
Speaker 9: Ten minutes later, get a text and he's like, hey,
Speaker 9: meeting the Buffalo Wings parking lot and it's like that's
Speaker 9: pro rodeo.
Speaker 12: Like where else? What other professional sport do you see that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I can see it. I can see the appeal
Speaker 2: from that angle. Yeah, he says, like the only blue
Speaker 2: collar sport left.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 5: I got one follow up. You mentioned earlier that the
Speaker 5: I'm gonna forget that not the sinch, but the flank strap.
Speaker 5: That there's a myth that like cinches up the testicles
Speaker 5: and that's.
Speaker 2: What makes them. I've been told that. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so just like the set it straight for that strap.
Speaker 3: Okay, so the flank strap is just it's just a
Speaker 3: piece of it's just a leather strap and then it's
Speaker 3: covered in sheepskin like wool, and it's the equivalent to you,
Speaker 3: you know, tightening up your belt like the horses and
Speaker 3: the animals are bred to do it that it's just
Speaker 3: basically an encourager for them to kick. So you put
Speaker 3: a flank on, Like, they'll still buck without the flank,
Speaker 3: but the flank just encourages them to kick harder and higher.
Speaker 3: So it's just it's just a leather strap. It's got
Speaker 3: a quick release buckle on.
Speaker 5: It, so rice because after the ride you see them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's usually quit. Got an eight foot lad to
Speaker 3: go on it, two rings on each end with quick
Speaker 3: release buckle. They've got the sheep skin that goes, you know,
Speaker 3: around the horses around its mid section or whatever. They
Speaker 3: pull the flank, you know, the horse goes out there, bucks,
Speaker 3: the whistle goes, the rides over, the pick them in,
Speaker 3: ride in, they trip, the quick release, the flank falls
Speaker 3: on the ground out the horse goes.
Speaker 8: Do you have one other quick thing to note when
Speaker 8: you look at flank straps on horses and bulls, anatomically
Speaker 8: it would be impossible to go around their testicles or
Speaker 8: anything like that. Anatomically, it doesn't work, so it yeah it.
Speaker 3: Has it doesn't work like and and horses like they
Speaker 3: they don't perform under like if you have a saddle
Speaker 3: that doesn't fit right, it can you know, and it
Speaker 3: is pinching the horse, you know somewhere that and it's
Speaker 3: you know, inflicting pain. It could take you know, maybe
Speaker 3: the best bucking horse in the world and make it
Speaker 3: have a terrible day because like, you can inflict pain
Speaker 3: like they don't. They don't perform under under those circumstances.
Speaker 3: The blue, red and flank is a six foot cotton
Speaker 3: rope with a ring on it. So when you no genitalia,
Speaker 3: they're no different than us. If you're in pain, you're
Speaker 3: not going to perform your sport at the highest level.
Speaker 3: And my belt's not around my going ads right lucky
Speaker 3: for you right now it's not.
Speaker 5: But is that like, so it must be somewhat of
Speaker 5: a trained thing then right, like as they're they only
Speaker 5: get that strap when this one thing happens, right, so
Speaker 5: they know, oh the strap's on, it's time, it's go time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, remember how in the beginning we were talking about
Speaker 1: like the second act. You know that you might retire
Speaker 1: from this and go on to something. You'll just go
Speaker 1: so seamlessly into ranching though, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Mean for sure, I got a lot of hobbies that
Speaker 3: I'm pretty excited to get time to do.
Speaker 2: You're gonna go home and hunt right now.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna do a lot of hunting ranching.
Speaker 2: You got three weeks to hunt right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you go hunt, hunt before the n f R.
Speaker 3: Mule deer, white tail. My wife has a cow out draw.
Speaker 2: She likes to hunt.
Speaker 3: She likes to hunt.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: A friend of mine, Alberta Gal, just whacked day really
Speaker 6: nice mule deer. So there's one last for you.
Speaker 2: He showed me some pictures that are pretty amazing. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: he showed me a.
Speaker 6: Calgary right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's right from your randy place.
Speaker 6: Everybody knows. Everybody knows your schedule.
Speaker 2: She parachuted. And then, uh so are you in the
Speaker 2: cattle business now too, Are you're invested in cattle?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So like we Yeah, we run, we have some Me
Speaker 3: and my wife have some caw calf pairs mama cows.
Speaker 3: And then you know, for what I do. It works
Speaker 3: better for for us because we're gone so much in
Speaker 3: the winter rodeo and is we run what they call grassers.
Speaker 3: It's kind of the middle phase of you know, the
Speaker 3: beef industry. So we get yearlings in in the spring,
Speaker 3: run among grass all summer before they go to the
Speaker 3: feed lots and they're off the door, and then we
Speaker 3: don't have them around. And no, so we don't because
Speaker 3: we have we have a place in Texas and and
Speaker 3: all the winter rodeos start in January. So me and
Speaker 3: the family we load up head.
Speaker 2: To Texas and uh based down there for the winter stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for about three months. We usually leave red after
Speaker 3: after Christmas or New Year's and and be down there
Speaker 3: till you know, the first first or second week of April.
Speaker 2: Do you guys got to homeschool with your kids?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean Lucy's just this is her first year kindergarten,
Speaker 3: so yeah, they're still pretty and she'll just yeah, well
Speaker 3: she'll just take her school work with her and and
Speaker 3: stuff for this the first few years. When she gets
Speaker 3: a little older. I I'm not sure what we'll do,
Speaker 3: but uh, yeah, we don't. We don't keep try not
Speaker 3: to keep too many animals around in the wintertime, just
Speaker 3: just because we're not home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So on this mule, your hunt you got like that,
Speaker 1: you're gonna embark on tomorrow presumably, do you got like
Speaker 1: a goal in mind?
Speaker 2: You got a buck you've been watching.
Speaker 3: Actually, that's that's the other downside of rodeo is I
Speaker 3: don't get to be around enough in September October to
Speaker 3: know what's around. I do know, I haven't seen laid
Speaker 3: eyes on them, but they the neighbors say, there's there's
Speaker 3: a cranker not far away really, so yeah, we'll probably
Speaker 3: be poking around looking for him.
Speaker 5: Rifle or archery rifle.
Speaker 2: And it's spot and stock meal. Do you hunt right? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: got ya. When you guys are hunt white tails, you
Speaker 2: hunt them down the bottoms like river bottoms.
Speaker 3: So like we live four miles off of east of
Speaker 3: the Red Deer River. You'll get white tails mule deers
Speaker 3: down there. But we we got enough like there's enough
Speaker 3: mixture between passenger and grain farming where we're at that
Speaker 3: the the whitetail get in like the poplar brush and stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, bed and there in the day and then
Speaker 3: they come out and feed and in the evening and stuff.
Speaker 3: So there's actually there's there's a lot of both around
Speaker 3: and you don't farm at all. I I own some
Speaker 3: farm ground. I don't farm it myself, but it gets
Speaker 3: farmed by my in laws for me.
Speaker 2: Oh got it. Yeah, but you'll hunt that farmer.
Speaker 3: I'll hunt that oh yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: And you're saying, you guys got some moose.
Speaker 3: Running around, Yeah, we got moose elk, but it's hard
Speaker 3: to get the moose tag. Yeah, you're probably you're an
Speaker 3: eight on the moose probably, Yeah, you're probably eight years.
Speaker 2: And how often will you draw a bull elk tag?
Speaker 3: I mean, you can just buy an over the counter
Speaker 3: archery tag, but I think you're probably you're probably seven
Speaker 3: on your on your elk.
Speaker 9: Got it?
Speaker 6: Just keep in mind like I've been applying for moose
Speaker 6: here in Montana since I was twelve or yeah.
Speaker 2: And he's no closer to getting that tag than he
Speaker 2: was when he's yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly exactly. For me to be like, oh I
Speaker 6: will is just like a fun game to play with myself.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, all right, man, Well, thanks for coming on
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Dude, I gotta tell you, on the scale of one
Speaker 1: to ten and rodeo knowledge, dude, I was like one
Speaker 1: on rodeo knowledge prior.
Speaker 2: Now I'm like a ten.
Speaker 3: You're ten now.
Speaker 2: For me decoys, any future questions, you bring them to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on rodeo goose decoys. I was like a negative
Speaker 3: too before this morning. Brady got me lined out. I'm
Speaker 3: I'm freaking ten mm hmm. I can say we're gonna
Speaker 3: we're gonna do it again. Yeah, Brady's coming to Alberta.
Speaker 8: Yeah, me and Matt we're gonna head.
Speaker 2: Oh, they're gonna come up there and raise hell on
Speaker 2: your birds.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'll be fun.
Speaker 8: Well, you shoot him there and then track and then
Speaker 8: he can come back down Montana and we'll beat him
Speaker 8: up again.
Speaker 2: Here chase the same birds at you.
Speaker 12: We need uh everyone to to cheer them on. At
Speaker 12: the NFR, look for that mediator logo.
Speaker 10: It's the only rodo athlete that has a meteor logo
Speaker 10: on his chest.
Speaker 12: Bucking up.
Speaker 3: Yep, cool, so cheerm on top right chest. When is
Speaker 3: the NFR December seventh? It starts seven sixteen days.
Speaker 2: I'll know when you get off that horse, I'll know
Speaker 2: if you're waving that hat around or if you're kicking
Speaker 2: the dirty I'll know what happened. That's definitely my first
Speaker 2: indication of.
Speaker 6: How the ride yeah, next to you and be like, so,
Speaker 6: let me walk.
Speaker 2: You through what s That'll be my first indication.
Speaker 3: You'll get a Sally or nothing at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: We'll be on the live tour, so we'll be like check.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right man, it's going on, and good luck.
Speaker 2: Hope you win.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Hope you don't get hurt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, all right, man, Take care, be that.
Speaker 7: Seal shop like silver in the sun. Ride ride, ride
Speaker 7: on alone, sweetheart.
Speaker 4: We're done beat this damp horse to death, taking a
Speaker 4: new one and ride away. We're done beat this damn
Speaker 4: horse today, so take a new one and ride on.