Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to hunt podcast,
Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt first, like go farther, stay longer. I
Speaker 1: spent five hours teaching my nephew how to play cribbage.
Speaker 1: You don't have to spend five hours teaching me because
Speaker 1: he's six years old. That is not no, you know,
Speaker 1: but he was just like, I want to learn this
Speaker 1: everybody else's playing at because it was dumping rain the
Speaker 1: whole time, and ma'am okay, Tannon five, Tanon five? What's
Speaker 1: tanon five? Like a cribbage become the We're in a cabin,
Speaker 1: we have nothing to do. Everybody, it's the best two
Speaker 1: person card game out there. That's really my old man,
Speaker 1: you might as well run it, turn it the machine
Speaker 1: on in my old man. In my old man's old age,
Speaker 1: him and his friends were very into taking any kind
Speaker 1: of oddball item and drilling whatever hundreds of holes you
Speaker 1: need to drill into it to make a cribbage score card.
Speaker 1: So if like someone found an antler, right, you do
Speaker 1: that with it. If someone's like, look at this old
Speaker 1: bowling pin at a heart at a yard sale, they
Speaker 1: would band saw the bowling pin and a half and
Speaker 1: then I want to take it home, and my dad
Speaker 1: would take his home and they'd go up and drill
Speaker 1: holes in it. Yeah, hunters, and they would have a bowl,
Speaker 1: a bowling pin, crimpage board. Yeah, it didn't matter what,
Speaker 1: anything that would accommodate one on it. I know you're
Speaker 1: not a card game enthusiast, and if either of you,
Speaker 1: if your brothers aren't either, Oh no, we played cards
Speaker 1: like a madman growing up. Yeah, but I've offered to
Speaker 1: to play with you since we've known each other. Well,
Speaker 1: I just want to saying around, I'd be honored to
Speaker 1: take it and keep it, you know, alive. When I
Speaker 1: go home. When I go home to visit my mom
Speaker 1: soon here, I will bring you back. I'll probably bring
Speaker 1: you a bowling ball, one bowling pin, one which I
Speaker 1: feel still laying around. I'll definitely find some antler ones
Speaker 1: and I'll bring him to you. We played. We used
Speaker 1: to throw craps on an army blanket because that's how
Speaker 1: my dad did it in the army we would, Um,
Speaker 1: he'd like pin He'd lay the blanket on the ground
Speaker 1: and pin it up the wall as the backboard. She said,
Speaker 1: when you're throwing apps in the army, it needs to
Speaker 1: be quiet, so you it wouldn't make any noise. You
Speaker 1: threw the dice and it hit a wall, a wool
Speaker 1: blanket hanging on the wall, and would be like silent crabs. Um.
Speaker 1: We played a lot of poker, a lot of poker,
Speaker 1: and everybody had like a sock follow change, Mm hmm,
Speaker 1: go get your sock, dude. I could tell you, like
Speaker 1: a very great story about one of those socks. Will
Speaker 1: the change if I couldn't do it on this show
Speaker 1: doesn't involve violance, it was. I would absolutely tell a
Speaker 1: violent story. It's not a violent story. It's a sexy story.
Speaker 1: But yeah. Joined today by John Mollem, who's been on
Speaker 1: the show how many times? Once twice twice, at least twice.
Speaker 1: He has a brand spickitty new book out, Serious Face
Speaker 1: Essays by John Wellem, several of which pertained to the
Speaker 1: stuff we like to talk about. That's right, because you, um,
Speaker 1: you have a things you're right about. One of the
Speaker 1: things you write about. I don't know if you describe
Speaker 1: it this way, but you write a lot about human
Speaker 1: relationships with nature, especially when they get a little they
Speaker 1: go a little haywire. I think that's like, how do
Speaker 1: you put it? I like to think of it as
Speaker 1: I like to write about people who are getting really
Speaker 1: confused by animals, you know, because the there's lots of
Speaker 1: stories where a bunch of people are doing very confusing,
Speaker 1: nutty things, trying to accomplish something, and there's an animal
Speaker 1: right in the center of the story, and the animal
Speaker 1: can't tell its side of the story, so you just
Speaker 1: get to deal with all the people acting crazy. And
Speaker 1: something about that really scratches an itch for me. Like
Speaker 1: if you could go to a monk seal and say
Speaker 1: what do you think about all of this? You know what,
Speaker 1: I think he'd say. I think he wouldn't know that
Speaker 1: it's going on, absolutely not. I always say that the
Speaker 1: animals always have no comment, you know, and that in
Speaker 1: some ways I think that that brings the crazyness of
Speaker 1: people into higher reliase because they get to speak for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you they get to speak for it, and
Speaker 1: it turns out that it says many different things to them,
Speaker 1: to many different people. And if you have a story
Speaker 1: where there's some kind of controversy among people, then you
Speaker 1: have to go around as a journalist and talk to
Speaker 1: all of those people and align their accounts and somehow
Speaker 1: makes sense of all their different stories. But if one
Speaker 1: the main character in the story is an animal and
Speaker 1: they're not talking, then you can just show the nuttiness
Speaker 1: of people. It's a very pure way I think to
Speaker 1: show how dysfunctional we are as a species is to
Speaker 1: show us kind of colliding up against some other species.
Speaker 1: I can't tell if I'm gonna beat your ass in trivia?
Speaker 1: Are you staying for trivia? You're definitely gonna beat my
Speaker 1: ass in trivia without a doubt. No, I think that
Speaker 1: you don't know. I think you're going to be a
Speaker 1: strong player. I think you're gonna be a very strong player.
Speaker 1: I think you've already gotten in my head where I'm
Speaker 1: feeling like you're gonna beat my ass trivia. So my
Speaker 1: game is collapsed. Okay, well we'll see, we'll see my
Speaker 1: game is so I started out strong. Um, we'll have
Speaker 1: already talked about this, but our trivia show has gone weekly. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a weekly release hosted by Spencer new heart. I
Speaker 1: think you'll do good, but I think I'll beat you
Speaker 1: because here's the deal. You'll do good on all the
Speaker 1: geography like history stuff, you'll do good on, but there's
Speaker 1: gonna be some like technical there's gonna be some technical
Speaker 1: archery question or something that I might be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I remember what that is, and you're just not going
Speaker 1: to know. I mean, am I the only guest you've
Speaker 1: ever had on the show who's never hunted? So I'm
Speaker 1: already a disadvantage. I feel you're of a very small few. No,
Speaker 1: that's not really true. Okay, As a casual listener to
Speaker 1: the show, I definitely feel like I'm I'm not qualified
Speaker 1: to be here. But like, but that's gonna come out
Speaker 1: in the trivia. But I know for a fact that
Speaker 1: you almost hunted, that's right, because you got real curious
Speaker 1: about the deer in your yard. Well, you've got me
Speaker 1: a real curious about it. I did go hunting once.
Speaker 1: We may have talked about this once. I did go
Speaker 1: hunting once, but we did not see an elk the
Speaker 1: whole time I was out there, and that sharpened my
Speaker 1: appreciation for hunting for sure. Where are you at with
Speaker 1: the deer in New yard right now, you haven't eaten one.
Speaker 1: Well know, the where I'm at with the deer in
Speaker 1: my yard is I spent a lot of the pandemic
Speaker 1: building a deer fence, and it became like, you know, my, my,
Speaker 1: what's what like? It was like my Vietnam. You know.
Speaker 1: It was like me just like in an intractable situation,
Speaker 1: biting off more than I could chew, trying to protect
Speaker 1: your garden, trying to protect my garden. I mean mostly okay,
Speaker 1: so it mostly started as I was really a yes, no,
Speaker 1: I mean I was so I had I had the
Speaker 1: last book I had come out, came out on March,
Speaker 1: I think, so I had all this time blocked out.
Speaker 1: I was gonna go on a big book tour, you know,
Speaker 1: it was going to be like a big deal. And
Speaker 1: then it all got crushed. And I was home doing
Speaker 1: Zoom second grade with my daughter, just hating life. And
Speaker 1: I got real mad one day and I went out
Speaker 1: and there's I live on Bambridge Island. There's not much
Speaker 1: to do there. So I drove out of my driveway
Speaker 1: in a in a huff, and I went and I bought.
Speaker 1: I went to the garden center because that was like
Speaker 1: the only place you could go to blow up some steam,
Speaker 1: and I impulse bought four little fruit trees. And then
Speaker 1: I got home and I realized the deer are gonna
Speaker 1: tear these things apart. So I decided I would just
Speaker 1: build a fence around the little fruit trees. And then
Speaker 1: I was like, well, why don't I just build a
Speaker 1: fence around everything? And that really spiraled out of control.
Speaker 1: So I built like it's something like six hundred feet
Speaker 1: of fence, and um, it took me, I mean many
Speaker 1: ups and downs, psychological as well as logistical. I think
Speaker 1: I did all right for someone had never done it.
Speaker 1: Be like what you put in a wooden post and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then deer netting through some of the woods and stuff.
Speaker 1: So I finally finished in July, and I had an
Speaker 1: opening ceremony two for all the people would help me.
Speaker 1: I invited them, I gave some some remarks, I gave
Speaker 1: a little speech. In front of the fence. We had
Speaker 1: like red, white and blue bunting on the fence. We
Speaker 1: had a cake, we had a fence cake. And since then,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to report there's only been like one or
Speaker 1: two occasions when I've seen a deer inside the fence,
Speaker 1: and I think it's because my fence butts against my
Speaker 1: neighbor's fence and they're jumping over that fence. So the
Speaker 1: next summer's project could be that's that's your Cambodia, that's
Speaker 1: that's right Vietnam. It said the right thing. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's the situation where the deer is that there. We've
Speaker 1: sort of reached an understanding. I think, um that is
Speaker 1: becoming uh, it's ZEITGEISTI in a way, because that's becoming
Speaker 1: a thing um where I grew up is they are
Speaker 1: taking orchards um, and I mean hundreds of acres of
Speaker 1: orchard and building exclosures, which was just not a thing
Speaker 1: as a kid. And I think this is going to
Speaker 1: have We're talking about major reductions in habit deer habitat
Speaker 1: in that instead of trying to protect individual saplings, these
Speaker 1: are orchards around my buddy Maths place. They're a bunch
Speaker 1: of them. Now they're doing it with state funding, like
Speaker 1: state offsets, because it's just pist and match about it's
Speaker 1: the state's deer, right. They're building these deerproof fence around
Speaker 1: like several hundred acre farms and being like there are
Speaker 1: no deer on this chunk of land anymore. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what I did with my not several Yeah, that bumbs
Speaker 1: me out that you did that. Well, I left half
Speaker 1: to write an article about that. I left half the property.
Speaker 1: The deer can go there. They just you know you
Speaker 1: you did the same thing with your garden. No, I
Speaker 1: didn't do my yard, and in my garden he didn't do.
Speaker 1: I did about it's probably like two and a half acres. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a sizeable fans. Yeah, and what do you think
Speaker 1: birds come in there? No, as soon as I see
Speaker 1: a bird, um. No, But you know, the coyotes still
Speaker 1: come through. They still come in because the wooden panels
Speaker 1: of the fence, the openings are fairly large. Build the fence,
Speaker 1: then we got a dog. The dog goes right through
Speaker 1: the fence. That was dumb, you know, get the dog first,
Speaker 1: then build a fence. But yeah, the deer, you know,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of room for the deer on Bainbridge. I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about them. John joined us on episode two
Speaker 1: sixty six. Okay, threre times a charm. Creane calls you
Speaker 1: a brilliant writer. Thank you, I love this. Um Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna getting all that. Oh we just we just
Speaker 1: reminded everybody that the podcast is not weekly. Is there
Speaker 1: anything in here and I need to say about that
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcast, Apple, Spotify, et cetera. But
Speaker 1: do you don't have to subscribe to like another show
Speaker 1: its Feet, It serves on this feed. You don't need
Speaker 1: to do ship right, So stay if you are. If
Speaker 1: you have not subscribed to the Meat Eat podcast feed
Speaker 1: on the various platforms that you listen on, please subscribe,
Speaker 1: and Trivia will just slide in on my phone. I
Speaker 1: have a little thing in my notes on my phone.
Speaker 1: I have a thing called podcast, and I just write
Speaker 1: down things that I feel like I should talk about
Speaker 1: on the show. I was in the Fort Myer, Florida
Speaker 1: airport and there was two I was like by two
Speaker 1: girls that sort of like ran it, knew each other
Speaker 1: and ran into each other unexpectedly. I love when that happens.
Speaker 1: One of them said, this is a quote where you
Speaker 1: headed end quote quote to Durango to stay in a yurt.
Speaker 1: I had pointed out that like your stairs were they
Speaker 1: very hipsterish like the rs so like I feel that
Speaker 1: yours are very left wing and it's like staying in
Speaker 1: a year has become like a thing in and of itself.
Speaker 1: You would never say, I'm going to Durango to stay
Speaker 1: in a tent. Do you know what I'm saying. You'd
Speaker 1: be like, I'm going to Durango to stay in a camper.
Speaker 1: It's like a market. It's like you're defining yourself. You know,
Speaker 1: you're attaching yourself to that type of person who goes
Speaker 1: around and stays in another thing. I might not. I
Speaker 1: gotta hit a couple of these things. And does this
Speaker 1: person even though that your is a ubiquitous term. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of different structures like, um, yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't interview that. John would have been in their interviewing,
Speaker 1: But no, I didn't even know that. Um My, buddy,
Speaker 1: ron he's telling me about his pet crow as a kid,
Speaker 1: like Seth had a crow and Ronnie had a crow,
Speaker 1: and he when he was little, he got it out
Speaker 1: of the cemetery him his buddies each took one, climbed
Speaker 1: up and got him out of a nest, and he
Speaker 1: raised it up and the crow would like to go
Speaker 1: out with him hunting other birds. He was little, he
Speaker 1: had a pellet gun, and he'd shoot a bird okay,
Speaker 1: and the crow would Peckett's eyes out, and then the
Speaker 1: crow would eat the bird's liver. And I knew that much,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know this. One day, Ronnie and this crow,
Speaker 1: we're out and Ronnie dropped a pellet while he was
Speaker 1: loading his pellet gun. The crow ate it and died
Speaker 1: right in front of him. That's some lived by the sword,
Speaker 1: died by the sword ship right there. Last one, Cal,
Speaker 1: I had a dream in which you said, and this
Speaker 1: is the greatest line you've ever said. You said that
Speaker 1: you hold on in your dream dream state. The only
Speaker 1: good thing Calls said is something that's the best thing
Speaker 1: your version of Cal. You imagine it's you using cow.
Speaker 1: It's like a ventrilo because dummy in your sleep, he said,
Speaker 1: he said he's so tired that his nose hairs are
Speaker 1: hanging straight down. That's like, that's so tired. Your nose
Speaker 1: hair has lost their curl. You know that type of
Speaker 1: that type of tired. It's great. That should be on
Speaker 1: the shirt. Oh, tune in right now because tomorrow tune
Speaker 1: to the meat Eater YouTube channel. Go on YouTube, subscribe
Speaker 1: to meat eater and you'll see Uh, a very own
Speaker 1: Jannis to tell Us and Kevin Gillespie preparing a dish
Speaker 1: with Yanni's special big horn. Ram, Yanni can't remember what
Speaker 1: it was delicious. I have all the ingredients to make
Speaker 1: more of it. I'm trying to Masala. No, wasn't Massala.
Speaker 1: I feel like I heard like vind like something that's spicy.
Speaker 1: What We're losing a lot of lists. They're not listening
Speaker 1: to this. Uh. We just had the Dustin Hoff shooter
Speaker 1: of the huff Buck, so he was on the show.
Speaker 1: If he were listening, Um, Dustin Hoff from Indiana killed
Speaker 1: a giant buck. Realize pretty quickly that it must be
Speaker 1: the biggest buck ever killed in Indiana. Turns was the
Speaker 1: biggest typical white tail ever killed in the U. S A.
Speaker 1: As a joke, kind of as a joke, he was
Speaker 1: giving away so much information about where the buck was
Speaker 1: that kind of as a joke. We were bleeping out
Speaker 1: names of surrounding landowners. Doug rode In, Doug durn Our, beloved,
Speaker 1: Dug durn bubbly Doug rode In. The bleeping of the
Speaker 1: names of the landowners near where this guy killed that
Speaker 1: big giant buck is funny and adds to the story
Speaker 1: in a great and humorous way. But it makes me
Speaker 1: think of two things. One that Buck is dead. The
Speaker 1: odds of another like him being around is unlikely. So
Speaker 1: that's chasing a ghost. This from a man that killed
Speaker 1: the standard, which remains. He was shocked when he found it,
Speaker 1: killed it, and never another one. Right, but a lot
Speaker 1: of nice knocks and ye like, maybe not, maybe they're
Speaker 1: not the freak, but nice but right his second comment,
Speaker 1: it reminds me this is Doug talking again. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of what the wise and beautiful Pat Dirkin said
Speaker 1: to me when I brought up my concerns about drawing
Speaker 1: hunters from out of the area to the Casanovia Northeast
Speaker 1: Richland County by saying where I killed the standard In
Speaker 1: an article he was writing for the national publication Quality
Speaker 1: White Tails. He goes on to say, I'm paraphrasing Pat
Speaker 1: and my experience, So this is this is him paraphrasing
Speaker 1: Pat Dirkin says, in my experience, people from outside the
Speaker 1: area don't become a problem. It's the locals that were
Speaker 1: and are the problem. And they already know all about
Speaker 1: the big deer on your place and the area Doug
Speaker 1: then goes on to say my experiences that Pat was
Speaker 1: spot on with that assessment. Dustin Huff pointed out in
Speaker 1: the podcast episode is me talking, not Pat or Doug.
Speaker 1: Dust Huff point out the podcast episode that since that
Speaker 1: he killed this big giant buck, they have found a
Speaker 1: few bucks dead with their heads cut off, decapitated um.
Speaker 1: And he was talking about that, and he was attributing
Speaker 1: it to people coming to that area now with big
Speaker 1: buck fever. Doug says, I guarantee you the bucks found
Speaker 1: dead with the heads cut off after this fella killed
Speaker 1: that big giant buck was the work of locals, not
Speaker 1: some poacher's drawn to the area. About hearing about this
Speaker 1: b G B and three. If you've got kids around,
Speaker 1: plug their ears and three this Doug talking. When I
Speaker 1: heard he killed it with a crossbow. I said, fuck yeah,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, need do this. He's also he's also really
Speaker 1: happy that a mostly casual hunter killed that deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was too. I was happy about that. It was
Speaker 1: kind of like the I don't want to say it
Speaker 1: was the focus of the interview. Yeah, you give everybody
Speaker 1: the story about bighorn sheep tags in New Mexico. This
Speaker 1: is interesting This is a trend that I don't think
Speaker 1: is going away. I'm not prepared for this, but I'll
Speaker 1: give it a go. What the hell were you doing
Speaker 1: when you got she sent you the stuff? You don't
Speaker 1: starty the song and do all ancillary research and yeah,
Speaker 1: I do, I do what I can. I do what
Speaker 1: I can. Yeah, I just picked you up all night
Speaker 1: like reading, like prior finding. I see how it goes.
Speaker 1: So that way, when Steve doesn't do what he just
Speaker 1: suggested I do, he can just throw it. I've seen
Speaker 1: this for the first time. Uh. It sounds like there's
Speaker 1: some folks that want to locals in New Mexico want
Speaker 1: to have more opportunities to hunt big horn sheep in
Speaker 1: their own state, and one of the options they're throwing
Speaker 1: around to figure that out is to um take away
Speaker 1: all of the big horn sheep tags that are available
Speaker 1: to non residents. There's only seven permits available for non
Speaker 1: residents in New Mexico. Um. But that's an idea of
Speaker 1: getting thrown around, and it's going to be heard by
Speaker 1: I don't know some you know New Mexican game and
Speaker 1: fish the commission and whatnot. Person wrote in well, I
Speaker 1: was gonna hit this point. Okay, go ahead. Well I
Speaker 1: was just gonna we're gonna tag team the story Steve.
Speaker 1: Steve read up as I was giving you that. So
Speaker 1: here's a perspective on it. Residents of New Mexico would
Speaker 1: be like, it doesn't make sense that I have to
Speaker 1: try to get a sheep tag my whole life and
Speaker 1: never get one, and it's stayed owned wildlife, and I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm here in state. And and then when they
Speaker 1: give a ram take out it's some hoser from wherever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some holes are from Minnesota draws the sheep tag and
Speaker 1: and this you know, yeah, Yanni's a nonresident big horn
Speaker 1: hunter because he he used to live in Colorado, moved away,
Speaker 1: drew a tag. And now here's an example of you know,
Speaker 1: he should have liked by some people's perspective, Um, he
Speaker 1: should have when he moved away. That should have been
Speaker 1: the end of him trying to get a tag there
Speaker 1: because he doesn't live there. This guy points this out,
Speaker 1: This is a fallure rights in from Texas. Um never
Speaker 1: hunted big horns as a Texas resident, he has We'll
Speaker 1: just say he has zero chance because they give out
Speaker 1: a tag. I think Texas does one like only do
Speaker 1: one general draw tag a year in Texas. I think
Speaker 1: it's something like that one or two. Yea. It's like
Speaker 1: there's like uh tag in Texas. So it's never gonna
Speaker 1: happen for me. Yet he's a supporter of the Wild
Speaker 1: Chief Foundation because he dreams of someday hunting a ram.
Speaker 1: This trend word to catch on and continue. Um, he
Speaker 1: doesn't see in his view residents Uh, you know, aspiring
Speaker 1: sheep hunters from outside of New Mexico are gonna have
Speaker 1: zero incentive to give two ships about what's going on
Speaker 1: with sheep or sheep in New Mexico if this were
Speaker 1: to become a trend. The guy in Florida who is
Speaker 1: a big wild Sheep supporter, but the Western states all say, like,
Speaker 1: no non residents, what is that? What are the implications
Speaker 1: for that? His relationship to sheep and sheep conservation? Good question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the sheep thing is an amazing deal. Right. You go
Speaker 1: to Wild Sheep Foundation, which raises an unbelievable amount of
Speaker 1: cash at their annual banquet sheep show, and if you
Speaker 1: really wanted to do the math, it is the tiniest majority,
Speaker 1: your tiniest minority of people in that room have killed
Speaker 1: the greatest majority of sheep, and the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people there at this point will likely never draw a
Speaker 1: sheep tag, but their cough up cash too. What was
Speaker 1: that was that sort of like club they have the
Speaker 1: less than one is the So there's multiple clubs in there,
Speaker 1: but there's the less than one club, which is if
Speaker 1: you have never drawn a sheep tag or I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: you've never successfully harvested a sheep, then you can pay
Speaker 1: some cash to uh ideally up your odds for a
Speaker 1: series of drawings that you must be present to win,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. I drew a sheep tag. Remember
Speaker 1: it was in the wrong continent. No, No. The outfitter
Speaker 1: was like, oh god, you're not seventy and they kind
Speaker 1: of like refused to call me back. And I got
Speaker 1: ahold of sheep wild Sheep, and I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys paid a lot of money for this hunt.
Speaker 1: This isn't working out and it just kind of died
Speaker 1: from there. Yeah, and they're like, well, you know you
Speaker 1: could sell that uh hunt. I said, So this outfitter
Speaker 1: that I'm having all sorts of good luck with, you
Speaker 1: want me to sell the to somebody else. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to go on it. Why would I
Speaker 1: sell it to somebody. I think you're right, though, Steve,
Speaker 1: that states are going to continue to clamp down on
Speaker 1: the number of like once in a lifetime tags available
Speaker 1: to non residents. I'm pretty sure Wyoming's working something. I
Speaker 1: know Wyoming is working on half of its residence. When
Speaker 1: we were talking about the like recent issues around you know,
Speaker 1: the conversation around lead non lead, and I all I said,
Speaker 1: I said one day on this same digital radio program,
Speaker 1: I said that conversation ain't going away, and that got
Speaker 1: people mad to observe that a conversation ain't going away.
Speaker 1: This conversation is not going away. But one thing that's
Speaker 1: confus using to me is from the Wild Sheeps the
Speaker 1: Wild Cheep Foundation's website, even though they seemed well, I
Speaker 1: don't know what their position is, but at the at
Speaker 1: the end of their notes as bottom line, this discussion
Speaker 1: over New Mexico big horn sheep would be dramatically different
Speaker 1: if it were not for the decades of support brought
Speaker 1: by nonresident hunters that have significantly contributed to successfully growing
Speaker 1: the state's sheep population. The discussion would be why don't
Speaker 1: we have more sheep? Real conservation work is growing the
Speaker 1: pie for everyone, not fighting over the slice. The point
Speaker 1: this is a proposal to this is not so then
Speaker 1: I so that kind of seems to be in the
Speaker 1: spirit of what the listener is. For sure, you have
Speaker 1: this argument of like, well they're paying more money, you
Speaker 1: guys should like that. And then you get into this
Speaker 1: whole other world of auction tags and governors tags, and
Speaker 1: he's like, well, these people are paying the most money, right,
Speaker 1: so should we give them more to it? Sure? And
Speaker 1: then you got res in so they're like, what the hell? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like when it used to be
Speaker 1: able to what did prior in the nineties here in Montana,
Speaker 1: what were your special draw applications? What was the cost
Speaker 1: prior to the big bump up to two? It was
Speaker 1: something I know that not for non residents it was
Speaker 1: six hundred bucks a pop. And I think for residents
Speaker 1: it was like twenty bucks a pop or fort sub
Speaker 1: twenty not more something like that. Oh no, no no, I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. I think it was seventy five bucks. I
Speaker 1: don't know anyway, when that jump, how about not a shipload?
Speaker 1: Not a shipload would be great to what most people
Speaker 1: would consider a shipload when that jump occurred here. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you how many people. We're like, well, that
Speaker 1: prices me out of the Game's weird because the ones
Speaker 1: in a lifetime tag, like in Colorado, residents kicking like
Speaker 1: two for once in a lifetime tags, and it's ten
Speaker 1: times that for a nonresident. But it's still like Montana
Speaker 1: is cheap for ye sheep. It is, but it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, we we talked about it all the time.
Speaker 1: It's like that, what are you getting for that cost
Speaker 1: at the pump? It's like, well, I do burn a
Speaker 1: lot of gas, but I go here and I do
Speaker 1: all this stuff and it makes me super happy. But
Speaker 1: a lot of people are like, I'm not driving. Here's
Speaker 1: a little tidbit some people might appreciate different states that
Speaker 1: do like nonresident tag draws. They run different programs where
Speaker 1: in some states you have to pre pay. I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is now, but it used to be
Speaker 1: in Montana you had to prepay for any tag that
Speaker 1: you applied for. So if you applied for Moose, sheep
Speaker 1: and goat as a nonresident, you had to send a
Speaker 1: cash year's check. I think it was eight hundred bucks
Speaker 1: a piece because you had to send a cashiers check
Speaker 1: I think for dollars if you're gonna do all three.
Speaker 1: Oh and then because the problem they would run into
Speaker 1: is people would apply for stuff they had no way
Speaker 1: of paying for, and then you do the draw, and
Speaker 1: then you got all these these people that then they
Speaker 1: can wait all these months for they buy the tag.
Speaker 1: They never come up with the money, so then they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you gotta pay up front. Some states do it where
Speaker 1: you submit a credit card number and they're like, you
Speaker 1: need to make sure that credit card is active and
Speaker 1: that your credit card company is aware that there could
Speaker 1: be a ding, because if that credit card is rejected,
Speaker 1: we go to the next name. And so they do
Speaker 1: their draw, It spits out names, they run the credit card.
Speaker 1: If that credit card has any problem, it's onto the
Speaker 1: next name. And I've heard from people over the years
Speaker 1: who like, for whatever reason, head over, didn't pay overdrawn
Speaker 1: and miss their chance because their credit card got no
Speaker 1: second chance. It's like when that thing goes, it goes.
Speaker 1: And the remember when Chris Denim used to do from
Speaker 1: Western Hunter, when he used to do tag draw stuff,
Speaker 1: he said, I keep a credit card only for this purpose.
Speaker 1: And I know that there's no problem with that credit card.
Speaker 1: There's nothing on it. Does he make like ten dollar
Speaker 1: charges like you know soda pop at the cast and
Speaker 1: on time? Uh? And I heard someone won't say that. Um,
Speaker 1: the reason States made you prepay is they're making all
Speaker 1: this money on interest, and so they like to have
Speaker 1: this two months where they're holding hundreds or millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Someone said, man, when you and someone said the interest
Speaker 1: if you, if you think about the time, the interest
Speaker 1: wouldn't pay for the return postage to send that person's
Speaker 1: check back, not counting like the banking fees and all
Speaker 1: that for how long they're actually holding this pile of money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why they all went digital now, is because they
Speaker 1: were losing money with the amount for what it costs
Speaker 1: to deal with the processing of the checks and then
Speaker 1: and then mailing back refunds, et cetera very costly. Watch
Speaker 1: this transition. You're ready, I'm ready. The guy tam Van
Speaker 1: Tron is a licensed commercial fishermen in the region of
Speaker 1: San Francisco, California. He goes out into a protected marine
Speaker 1: preserve at the Fairy Lan Islands, sets traps in the
Speaker 1: marine preserve. The Fairy Island Marine Preserve where he's not
Speaker 1: you dassn't set your traps there, says traps catches nearly
Speaker 1: three hundred dungees, Dungeoness craps, two sixty Dungeoness crabs in
Speaker 1: those traps. Dungeoness crab. Right now, it's going for a
Speaker 1: dead middle price. So we're we're assuming, like you know,
Speaker 1: it's a varied price. We're saying about it's about pound okay,
Speaker 1: the middle of the road Dungeoness crab. Wait, it's two pounds.
Speaker 1: This all your math? Grin, No, this was a podcast listener.
Speaker 1: But I think I think I bought Dungeoness crab for
Speaker 1: like before. But I spent some time in San Jose
Speaker 1: and um, you know what's funny. Oh no, we were
Speaker 1: eating shrimp last night, but I gave away a bag
Speaker 1: of Dungeoness crab last night. I realized I gave away
Speaker 1: probably the dungeons last night. But um, uh no, I
Speaker 1: know last night I gave away twenty four dollars for
Speaker 1: the Dungeoness crab. So I remember buying it when it
Speaker 1: would come in, and I remember buying it that you
Speaker 1: could buy, uh, Dungeoness crab for seven dollars. Oh huh
Speaker 1: in California. That's like live crab, probably coming right off
Speaker 1: the boat. You know, I used to buy it because
Speaker 1: I liked it. So this guy has seven thousand dollars
Speaker 1: worth of illegally caught crab more or less more rounding
Speaker 1: off figures the fine for doing such the fine million
Speaker 1: bucks fair excessive. I think that the rub is that
Speaker 1: he was in, not that he like overcapped in an
Speaker 1: area he was supposed to be in. It's like intentionally
Speaker 1: went to a marine preserve. Oh, he's claiming that he
Speaker 1: didn't know the waters were closed. Come on, according to
Speaker 1: the right. And then they and then they also said
Speaker 1: don't touch your traps, don't retrieve anything, don't move them nothing,
Speaker 1: leave them alone. And after he was told this by
Speaker 1: the authorities, the authorities did find that some traps were
Speaker 1: they were pulling traps and letting crabs going. They knew
Speaker 1: where they all were, and while they're pulling them, they
Speaker 1: realized that two dozen were missing. What are they were
Speaker 1: doing that just to kind of gay estimate how many
Speaker 1: crabs could have been caught? That wasn't really explained in
Speaker 1: the arm. They probably wanted to seize them all. I
Speaker 1: would imagine, can we get that broken. The traps, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were leaving them like pulling traps, throwing the crabs
Speaker 1: back and then leaving them in the water, even in
Speaker 1: the water the traps. Let's say, get by the cops
Speaker 1: for a d y right then go okay, this is
Speaker 1: the thing you're yeah, okay, now go park your vehicle
Speaker 1: and we'll take you to jail. That's what's happening here
Speaker 1: right there. Like you stay away from all this stuff
Speaker 1: because you you can no longer fish. That's the situation
Speaker 1: that you're in. And then they got to go go
Speaker 1: deal with it. I don't think there's much like a
Speaker 1: like they come out, here's all his traps. They say,
Speaker 1: you're in restricted waters. Don't mess at the traps. We're
Speaker 1: gonna pull up traps. Many crabs you caught, and then
Speaker 1: they're not putting the traps back down. The area is
Speaker 1: closed because of whale migrations, is not closed as like
Speaker 1: a crabbing protection area anyways. In California, UM, the Dungeoness
Speaker 1: crab industry UH drove thirty million dollars in revenue. One
Speaker 1: million dollar fine can break that down per crab a
Speaker 1: million dollars. The one million divided by two sixty, that's
Speaker 1: going to be more. I don't know, caviar, Hey, have
Speaker 1: anything we talked about? Strike your fancy? Can you see
Speaker 1: any big features about anything we've talked about? Six bucks? Yeah? Crap.
Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna titillate folks with something. Uh. They in
Speaker 1: big game poaching a lot of states. I think this
Speaker 1: is more and more common all the time, in big
Speaker 1: game poaching a lot of states. Uh, they do a
Speaker 1: thing where they have to value the wildlife. Are you
Speaker 1: famor with this? And then if you, like, for instance,
Speaker 1: if you killed like a dull white tail, they're gonna
Speaker 1: sign a value to that dull white tail, and it's
Speaker 1: gonna be like a modest value. If you were to
Speaker 1: kill like the huffbuck, like the biggest typical white tail
Speaker 1: ever killed right in Indiana, and you poach that, they're
Speaker 1: gonna assign a very different value to that dear and
Speaker 1: they're gonna look at like what it's market value would be,
Speaker 1: Like what would some two they have a formula, have
Speaker 1: a math formula for it. What would some two inch
Speaker 1: white tail costs someone to go shoot it? In a
Speaker 1: high fence operation? And like your dear that white tailed
Speaker 1: dough was worth a hunter box to hunter box, dear
Speaker 1: you shots worth, we're gonna say that's worth. But this
Speaker 1: is this is this is crab crab. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: got a transition, but then I also wanted to ask
Speaker 1: John something before we transition, but he's not interested in that.
Speaker 1: He just told me he doesn't if we transition to
Speaker 1: his monk Seal story. They're all kinds of numbers listed
Speaker 1: for like rewards given to people who have uh information
Speaker 1: on as you know, killed animal. You have a whole list,
Speaker 1: but I think yeah, but I think too, you're dealing
Speaker 1: with two separate things, right, because you're dealing with the
Speaker 1: value of the wildlife. But also it's penalizing, right, it's
Speaker 1: a deterrent right to say this guy went out there,
Speaker 1: he's going to spend a million dollars now for his mistake.
Speaker 1: That's a deterrent. That's not because they can claim he
Speaker 1: did a million dollars worth of damage. So and the rewards,
Speaker 1: to my knowledge, are often put up not by the
Speaker 1: government but by like humane society. These are like for killings,
Speaker 1: you know, like um not as assassinations to call them assassinations.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about hunting violations. We're talking about you know,
Speaker 1: someone you know, wrenching the head off a pelican because frustrated.
Speaker 1: Are sure over in Idaho like that. There's a group
Speaker 1: that pays bounties you know to uh two trappers and
Speaker 1: two wolf hunters, private order that kicks in money. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's pretty but you gotta be a member.
Speaker 1: Just sign up ahead of time. It's like joining the
Speaker 1: Turkey Derby, I think. So. Yeah. I do like to
Speaker 1: see a fine, though, that seems like more than less
Speaker 1: because I always feel like when I hear about wildlife,
Speaker 1: uh finds given out for you know, wildlife crimes or
Speaker 1: public land sort of infractions or whatever. Really well, if
Speaker 1: that's all cause, let's all go and do it, and
Speaker 1: when we get caught, we'll just pay the fine and
Speaker 1: keep on doing it, you know. I sometimes I feel
Speaker 1: that when you're reading about a poaching thing and then
Speaker 1: you you know, it's like this elaborate, premeditated deal, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and uh, it winds up being like
Speaker 1: like even more like people are selling stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: and it winds up being not well. This was also
Speaker 1: a commercial fishing violation, which I'm sure factored into that
Speaker 1: fine too. It's not like some recreational fisherman went out
Speaker 1: and was over the limit. Be a higher standard of regulation.
Speaker 1: If people want to talk about monks, he was last summer,
Speaker 1: Well we're gonna talk about them big time. Well I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start it right now. Then last summer, you gotta woman,
Speaker 1: you gotta set the whole thing up. Man, Can I
Speaker 1: give you this little anecdote just like this is right
Speaker 1: last last summer? So then it sounds like a natural transition.
Speaker 1: Last summer, you had a woman I think from Louisiana
Speaker 1: who was on in Hawaii and was you know, there's
Speaker 1: a monk seal hauled out on the beach and she
Speaker 1: filmed herself going and touching the monk sealift fine for that.
Speaker 1: You know, the video went viral, and I think that's
Speaker 1: all de terrence. She did not she did not cause
Speaker 1: fifty dollars. She ever actually pay it that, I do
Speaker 1: not know. You never hear these things after the fact, right,
Speaker 1: But but that was the fine they level on the
Speaker 1: last did her lawyer get away down and you don't
Speaker 1: know what happened. What happened? It was levied against her.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a Dangerous Species Act violation, right, that's
Speaker 1: harassment quote unquote is defined by the law. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: and that's why they have they have seal exclusion zones
Speaker 1: where they have volunteers and back me up, Steve, backed
Speaker 1: me up because this is fast nating. But I want
Speaker 1: to get to this um in your new book, Serious
Speaker 1: Face is a what's that one called about the monk seals?
Speaker 1: I can't believe this is happening? Yeah, can you even
Speaker 1: believe this is happening? And you even believe this is happening?
Speaker 1: And it tells the story of the It's kind of
Speaker 1: an endangered species story. It's like a like a C.
Speaker 1: S I endangered species of um. Targeted intentional targeted killings
Speaker 1: of an endangered species. That's right. I call them assassinate.
Speaker 1: You called want to fight about that. I wanted to
Speaker 1: fight about it because when when a hunter shot pedals
Speaker 1: the bear, So there was a bear was just itching
Speaker 1: to get right back to that. There there was a
Speaker 1: bear in New Jersey that had had some deformity at bird.
Speaker 1: People debate whether it had a deformity at birth or
Speaker 1: it had been injured, but it would it's it's front
Speaker 1: feet weren't very functional. It would spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time walking around on its back feet. Some guy during
Speaker 1: the Bear season, Um, I don't know if anyone. We
Speaker 1: should try to get him on the show, but he's
Speaker 1: tryably not talking. We have been identified, but he's he
Speaker 1: talking to he's doing interviews. Know that the hunter has
Speaker 1: never been identified. There was a lot of everyone thought
Speaker 1: was one guy, and he started receiving death threats, but
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty clear it wasn't actually him. Well
Speaker 1: here's the deal, Um, he would get a sympathetic audience.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he would. I don't have anything I would want.
Speaker 1: I would I would look like the first question I
Speaker 1: would be like, did you see it coming walking on
Speaker 1: its back feet? And if so, did you wonder what
Speaker 1: it was doing? Did you know there was a bear
Speaker 1: hereabouts that walks on his back feet and has the
Speaker 1: name Pedals? Or would he say I had no idea
Speaker 1: to do what it was on It's all four ft
Speaker 1: when I saw it, I had no idea about any
Speaker 1: of this. It was just right. But when when Pedals
Speaker 1: was killed, it was billed that he had been assassinated?
Speaker 1: Was it now? Yes, dude? And I could we could
Speaker 1: find the article. I did not say that one. And
Speaker 1: when you wrote in a bit you were doing a
Speaker 1: recap of like important deaths throughout the year, and you
Speaker 1: did a thing about because you're interested in when wildlife
Speaker 1: makes people nuts. You recap the pedals story. I don't
Speaker 1: remember you using assassinated in it. But then and talking
Speaker 1: about the killing of monk seals by Hawaiians, you said,
Speaker 1: you say, I struggle to find the right word for
Speaker 1: what it is, and you say it's like an assassination.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to take I wanted to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, but I'm like no, because it is a
Speaker 1: political yes, right, like assassination is like a it's a
Speaker 1: political killing. It's a statement, the golden to achieve. It's
Speaker 1: to achieve a goal. I would say. I mean, I
Speaker 1: haven't looked up and it's a statement. It's meant to
Speaker 1: be perceived in political terms. I think that guys are
Speaker 1: really good because I just looked it up on Merriam
Speaker 1: Webster and it says murdered by sudden or secret attack,
Speaker 1: often for political core reasons. So in that way, in
Speaker 1: the story you're going to tell um, I think, does
Speaker 1: it say people? It doesn't even specify who's doing well, Um,
Speaker 1: the it's it was comma the act or an instance
Speaker 1: of an ass of assassinating someone such as a prominent
Speaker 1: political leader. But that's why I'm an innovative writer. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the beauty of what I'm doing in that piece.
Speaker 1: Is I'm applying that, you know, I'm I'm seeing it
Speaker 1: for what it is is that we have built up
Speaker 1: such a political controversy over this species the other species
Speaker 1: that we can only really understand it's killing in political terms.
Speaker 1: And this is crazy, right, It's crazy to say that
Speaker 1: I'm not That's what I'm acknowledging is it's crazy to
Speaker 1: think that a marine mammal can be assassinated. But when
Speaker 1: you see the facts, that's exactly what's been going on.
Speaker 1: In a way, I decided where I want you to start.
Speaker 1: There's a tinge of anthropomorphization there too. There's more than
Speaker 1: a tingion. I'm just going to back up for hot second.
Speaker 1: A lot of the headlines that I'm seeing just say
Speaker 1: killed from like Washington Post, et cetera. Just says killed petals.
Speaker 1: But I see it the Newsweek. God Newsweek is infamous
Speaker 1: for their like beheaded elk headline real quick in Rocky
Speaker 1: Mountain National Park was a huge bowl and it died.
Speaker 1: They think it got killed by what do you killed by?
Speaker 1: Mountain lined mountaine, and so some guy took its head
Speaker 1: in the headline was that it was They don't say
Speaker 1: like the famous decapitated, no beheaded, no famous behaded in
Speaker 1: Rocky National Park And you're like, oh, that's weird. Like
Speaker 1: someone walked out to the broad It's like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: it died and then someone like took the head home.
Speaker 1: Oh but the newswork headline says the the shameful slaughter
Speaker 1: of petals the bear crant. If you want to make
Speaker 1: a cash bet. Hmm. That word was used. It was
Speaker 1: used in the Pope, not the post. It was used
Speaker 1: in like one of those digital huff post. Just you
Speaker 1: go ahead and follow that up up on that. Um,
Speaker 1: here's what I want you to start, the Monk Seals.
Speaker 1: I want you to start the Monk Seals story one
Speaker 1: thousand five years ago. Sure, one thousand five. Look good,
Speaker 1: this guy, look at good. This guys he's like, no problem.
Speaker 1: It was a Wednesday. Um no, I mean that's when.
Speaker 1: So that's when Polynesians reach Hawaii, right and everything ecologically
Speaker 1: starts to change, and so you had monk seals, which
Speaker 1: are because we all know what monk seals are there,
Speaker 1: giant ass seals. Yeah, I wouldn't say we all know,
Speaker 1: come on a little bit. I think they're about eight
Speaker 1: hundred pounds. That's what blows my mind when we get
Speaker 1: to the part about the kid that killed one of
Speaker 1: the rock Yeah, hundred pounds. Yeah, but they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're sort of defenseless, right, they're not meant so they
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time. We'll get back to years ago,
Speaker 1: but well, years ago, they also spent a lot of time.
Speaker 1: You know, they swim around, they're eating octopus, they're eating stuff,
Speaker 1: turning over rocks, and then they come out on the
Speaker 1: beach and they lay there for hours just digesting, hauled
Speaker 1: out fully out of the water on the beach and
Speaker 1: they'll spend hours and hours like that. And their native
Speaker 1: to them, their native to the islands, and so no,
Speaker 1: they are there. Yeah, you'll get to that. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: so once the Polynesians come, it's pretty fast. It seems
Speaker 1: that the monk seals disappear, at least from the main
Speaker 1: Hawaiian islands. Right. They probably have retreated like up into
Speaker 1: the Leeward Islands. You know, they like frigate shoals, all
Speaker 1: the ones that we don't really talk about when we
Speaker 1: talk about Hawaii, the little archipelago that's off to the
Speaker 1: west toward Fiji, and that's where they stay. Right. So
Speaker 1: then you fast forward, uh to you know what, I
Speaker 1: think a thing that people do that annoys me a
Speaker 1: little bit, and you just did it. What bring it, Steve?
Speaker 1: Bring it? There is this thing. There's this thing people
Speaker 1: say or they're like, you know, there used to be
Speaker 1: a lot of elk in the Great Plains. Okay, there's
Speaker 1: this idea that that they retreated from the Great Plains
Speaker 1: and went into the mountains. What I think happened is
Speaker 1: they were in the mountains, they were on the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: and now they're gone from the Great Plants. That's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that these monk seals moved there.
Speaker 1: I think they were eliminated from parts of their range
Speaker 1: and remained in other parts. So you're saying the word
Speaker 1: retreat implies that there was a conscious group decision, like
Speaker 1: a movement, rather than they were like killed off here
Speaker 1: but not here. You're absolutely right. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: monk seals story. I mean, no, I think that's we
Speaker 1: know that. And thank you for I don't want to
Speaker 1: come in hot. You know, you're very particular about language.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it, so thank you. So they remained in
Speaker 1: the Leeward Islands, which I didn't know we're a thing
Speaker 1: till I didn't. I mean I knew, I knew they
Speaker 1: were there. I didn't know that we call them Hawaii.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. And um, and then what started
Speaker 1: happening was so basically then in nineteen seventy six, So
Speaker 1: that's three years after you know, fast forward a thousand
Speaker 1: years and change, and the three years after the Endangered
Speaker 1: Species Act has passed UM in nineteen seventy six, the
Speaker 1: federal government protects the monk seals. They are at that time,
Speaker 1: I believe, the most endangered um marine mammal in terms
Speaker 1: of their numbers. We absolutely, like I think in the
Speaker 1: like the low hundreds, like maybe two. So I don't
Speaker 1: know at that moment how many there were. And they
Speaker 1: launched this project that even at this point I think
Speaker 1: is still projected to take forty five years and close
Speaker 1: to four hundred million dollars to recover the species. According
Speaker 1: to the government's plan, and at first nothing's happening, and
Speaker 1: then slowly, like starting in the you know, nineties, mid
Speaker 1: nineties or so, the monk seals start to appear in
Speaker 1: the main Hawaiian islands, mostly in Kauai because that's the
Speaker 1: you know, the westernmost island, and people who have grown
Speaker 1: up in Hawaii, whose families have been there for generations
Speaker 1: have never seen monk seals, start to see monk seals.
Speaker 1: You know, they're out fishing or whatever. They see monk
Speaker 1: seals taking their fish, scaring away their fish, and uh
Speaker 1: eight eight hundred pound fish eater. Yes, yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: the tiny, charubic little face with whiskers, very beautiful little
Speaker 1: face as a button. Most biologists would describe the very
Speaker 1: cute face really kind of disgusting, lovery body, you know,
Speaker 1: just with that cute little button face attached to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not only had they not only had native wines not
Speaker 1: seen them, but the animals must have disappeared so quickly
Speaker 1: upon colonization that they point out that they don't have
Speaker 1: a word for them. But you could also you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you talk with this your but
Speaker 1: but you could also argue that there was but in
Speaker 1: the eight hundred years or whatever of non use, it
Speaker 1: hasn't needed to be carried out. Yeah, and the and
Speaker 1: the federal government. So, I mean a lot of what
Speaker 1: I'm writing about in that in that piece is that
Speaker 1: just the complete breakdown, like the bungling breakdown of communication
Speaker 1: between the government and the people. Because you, right, you
Speaker 1: have you have Native Hawaiian saying, what is this thing?
Speaker 1: You know, we don't and it's getting in our way.
Speaker 1: You're giving it all this money. Meanwhile, you're the same
Speaker 1: government that stole our land, right, and we don't get
Speaker 1: anything from you, right, So there's a lot of resentment
Speaker 1: towards this animal. And they say, and we don't even
Speaker 1: have a word for it, which it's not in any chance,
Speaker 1: it's not in there's no you know, carvings of it anything.
Speaker 1: And the government does some research and they say, well,
Speaker 1: we think it's this this word, which I think translates
Speaker 1: something like dog, right, And and that doesn't go over
Speaker 1: too well, you know, I think that's the translation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so so that goes on. You know, there's about
Speaker 1: a decade of that of that kind of intractable conflict.
Speaker 1: By the time show up in Hawaii, tell about the
Speaker 1: protect protect people. Yeah, so these are you know, like
Speaker 1: a lot of endangered species. They have um gathered a
Speaker 1: constituency around them, right fan club, Yeah, fan you know,
Speaker 1: people people who want to do right by this vulnerable animal,
Speaker 1: you know, for whatever reason, because they love the animal,
Speaker 1: because they see it as a symbol, you know, the
Speaker 1: way to help in the larger mess of human society,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to say. And the government has mobilized
Speaker 1: these people, um to create seal protection zones or exclusion
Speaker 1: zones so that when a seal hauls out on the beach,
Speaker 1: you you know, a call goes out and you immediately
Speaker 1: get you know, half a dozen mostly white people, uh,
Speaker 1: putting you know, yellow tape around them and steaks and
Speaker 1: protecting the seal. So you can understand that that also
Speaker 1: doesn't look so good to the people who do not
Speaker 1: like the seals, do not want the seals around is
Speaker 1: um all maybe like air is one of those around
Speaker 1: this island? Right to have kept everybody? And the title,
Speaker 1: the title of the piece, can you even believe this
Speaker 1: is happening? Is actually comes from a native Hawaiian guy
Speaker 1: who I spent you know a couple of hours with
Speaker 1: where he was basically just you know, shouting his side
Speaker 1: of the story at me increasingly, you know, frustrated by
Speaker 1: the whole situation. And I say in the piece that
Speaker 1: was kind of the look in his eyes the whole
Speaker 1: time was like can you even believe this has happened?
Speaker 1: You know, just like complete disbelief that this government would
Speaker 1: do this. So, you know, I'm simplifying a little bit.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to generalize that like all Native Hawaiians
Speaker 1: don't like whatever, but to point out that this is
Speaker 1: a very long piece of investigative reporting collected in the
Speaker 1: book serious face, and we are doing a abbreviated yes,
Speaker 1: now it's not as bad as coming on NPR and
Speaker 1: have to do it in four minutes. No, I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Does you can't even remember saying and make it like
Speaker 1: the main thing you said, that's right. Um. So, anyway,
Speaker 1: so that the situation when I go to Kauai in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve early two thousand and exacerbated by the
Speaker 1: fact that the previous year in in about the six
Speaker 1: months prior, there have been for assassinations of steals um
Speaker 1: a string of assassinations that started with one on Molokai,
Speaker 1: which is a you know, the least populated of the
Speaker 1: of the islands, and then also on kauai Qui favor too.
Speaker 1: There's a piece, there's a part of your story that
Speaker 1: you probably don't think is that important. But the what
Speaker 1: were the birds that were showing up with the broken wings?
Speaker 1: Newles sheerwaters. So this is another people were just like
Speaker 1: it seems like fishermen when these birds are coming down
Speaker 1: the Oh sorry, those are pelicans. Yeah, so they were,
Speaker 1: so in the piece, I kind of do a roundup
Speaker 1: of assassinations. Well I would, I'd say those are all assassinations.
Speaker 1: I'd be careful about qualifying them all. Some of those
Speaker 1: I think are just you know, people losing their ship
Speaker 1: momentarily and hurting an animal, you know, but because there
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily the political you know, discourse around those animals.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean kind of the the point of
Speaker 1: the piece in my mind, what was interested in me is,
Speaker 1: you know, we talk a lot about conservation. We talk
Speaker 1: a lot about bringing species back to levels approaching what
Speaker 1: they maybe once were. But we because conservation doesn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, it's mostly failures. You know,
Speaker 1: when you look at the whole of the endangered Species Act.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wouldn't say failure because it's not done,
Speaker 1: but it's not like you know, it's very hard work.
Speaker 1: And so there's only a handful of cases where we
Speaker 1: really have these animals introduced back to levels where now
Speaker 1: they're starting to be in people's way again. I think
Speaker 1: it's sub two that go on the Endangered Species Act
Speaker 1: come off due to recovery. I think you're more likely
Speaker 1: to come off because they realize that they find another
Speaker 1: population they didn't know about, or you come off because
Speaker 1: you're extinct, right or another little interesting wrinkle is that
Speaker 1: is you're more likely to go extinct I believe before
Speaker 1: you even get on the list because you're you're held
Speaker 1: in this kind of like holding area called the warranted
Speaker 1: but precluded where then yeah, where the government says like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're at you know this, this species deserves protection, but
Speaker 1: we just we just can't. Right now. We're gonna put
Speaker 1: you on this category called warranted but precluded and a
Speaker 1: species of God, we can't because we can't afford it.
Speaker 1: We can't, you know, I don't know whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: just saying like we we recognize this is worthy and
Speaker 1: we're going to get to it. But we just have
Speaker 1: to hold off on giving you the protection that it
Speaker 1: deserves right now. Um. But anyway, but yeah, So the
Speaker 1: upshot for me of this whole story they think I'll
Speaker 1: be interested in is what happens. You know, the monk
Speaker 1: seal is not a success story, but it's the fact
Speaker 1: that they're now appearing in places that they haven't appeared
Speaker 1: has been enough to raise this problem of you know,
Speaker 1: some of these animals disappeared because we didn't want them.
Speaker 1: They're right, people. People gotten mad at intentional. It was intentional,
Speaker 1: and now they're coming back, and so we've never really
Speaker 1: you know, there's a there's an environmental lawyer in the
Speaker 1: piece who says, you know, we put all this energy
Speaker 1: into saving wildlife and wildness, but we never really talked
Speaker 1: about how much wildness we want and how much we're
Speaker 1: willing to live with. And that's what was happening with
Speaker 1: the monk seals. So you had this clash right between
Speaker 1: the government and the people who wanted them to rebound,
Speaker 1: and then the people who were who's lived experience was
Speaker 1: being upset by their rebounding. I still want to hit
Speaker 1: the thing. I'll just do it myself, Okay, it's just
Speaker 1: a kind of horrific details. The birds. Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: a bird were like they would mess with fishermen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'd laying on the boats pelicans and it seems as
Speaker 1: though they were just reaching up and snapping their wingbones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're finding dead pelicans with two broken wings, like
Speaker 1: someone just going snap. Yeah, which is like worse than
Speaker 1: just cutting its head off. Yeah, do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like so like to do that, to
Speaker 1: snap its wingbones and then be like so long, buddy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just casualness of it. It's just it's like disgust.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just keep a little sharp machete on.
Speaker 1: But like, I don't know. Yeah, there's all kinds of examples,
Speaker 1: like people that are like fishing for a living treating
Speaker 1: other stuff really badly. Like I mean, in Southeast Alaska
Speaker 1: they hate those sea otters, right, sea lions too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now, and uh isn't in Washington like they're allowing
Speaker 1: the killing of a certain number of sea lions to
Speaker 1: protect salmon they've been doing in the Columbia for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Go on, Well, so yeah, so I show up and
Speaker 1: I think I'm in the right You know cs I
Speaker 1: monk seal. Right, they've got four assassinations, they've got investigators
Speaker 1: looking at the evidence, quote unquote, and they've got rewards
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollar reward for each seal. Information about each
Speaker 1: seal killing, describe how they're killed or what they know
Speaker 1: about the killings. Well, when I arrived, all I knew
Speaker 1: was one had been shot and I believe three for
Speaker 1: what they were calling blunt head trauma. And one had
Speaker 1: a spear fishing spear starter that happened while I was there,
Speaker 1: but survived and but survived. Yeah, and um, that's a
Speaker 1: hail Mary. Yeah, you can imagine that person cut the line, yeah,
Speaker 1: rather than reeling it in. I think that's right. Um,
Speaker 1: that one was a juvenile though, so it was even
Speaker 1: more adorable, you know when they put it on the
Speaker 1: evening news. Um. But yeah, So I show up and
Speaker 1: the first thing I realized is this is not there's
Speaker 1: no police work when it comes to dead seals. You know,
Speaker 1: like they've got Noah has its investigators and they're they're
Speaker 1: trying their best. But what do you do? You know,
Speaker 1: as one of the cops says, is like, you can't
Speaker 1: talk to the seals friends, right, And you don't even know,
Speaker 1: you know, if it washes up somewhere, has it been
Speaker 1: killed in that spot? Was it killed somewhere else? Did
Speaker 1: the did the head trauma happen just from bouncing around
Speaker 1: on rocks after it's been you know, killed in some
Speaker 1: other way or died in natural causes. So immediately realized like,
Speaker 1: this is a mess. You know, this is not a
Speaker 1: police procedural for me to for me to follow, and
Speaker 1: I start reporting on the clash itself, right and yeah,
Speaker 1: but you gotta get like how hard could the police
Speaker 1: work of Ben? Because you ended up talking to the
Speaker 1: guy that did it? Well, I saw, I saw the crime.
Speaker 1: I solve the crime. So that's what's so funny. But
Speaker 1: like you're not there that long and here you are
Speaker 1: having coffee with the guy who's got a reward on
Speaker 1: his head. Yeah, did you collect the money? I did
Speaker 1: not collect the movie? And it was funny because after
Speaker 1: the peace published, I got a call from the same
Speaker 1: Noah cops, you know, the investor who is it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: There and no, I mean he knew. His whole tone
Speaker 1: of voice was listen, I got a this call. You.
Speaker 1: I know you're not gonna tell me anything, but any
Speaker 1: chance you're gonna tell me, because I'm sorry I can't
Speaker 1: tell you. But but yeah, basically I had met a
Speaker 1: guy named Walter Riddy who I've hung out with him
Speaker 1: you have. Yeah, he's a phenomenal guy, and um I
Speaker 1: met him sort of by chance when I was you know,
Speaker 1: when I first arrived in Hawaii on that trip, and
Speaker 1: he had told me that he knew the person. He
Speaker 1: called him the kid who had killed the first monk seal,
Speaker 1: the one that had set off this you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote set off the string of killings, and that he
Speaker 1: was you know, very remorseful about it, YadA YadA, And
Speaker 1: I kind of kept after him and eventually I was
Speaker 1: invited to meet this guy and by that this Walt
Speaker 1: like I I met him, I should say, But anyway,
Speaker 1: he's a like not spiritual leader, but I mean he's
Speaker 1: a he's an active he's an organizer. I'd says. He's
Speaker 1: done a lot of activism against um, you know, military
Speaker 1: testing in in Malachai, against development, and he he was
Speaker 1: counseling to kill He's very revered in the community, so
Speaker 1: that when he found out that he was he was
Speaker 1: not one of the people who was anti monk seal.
Speaker 1: You know, he understood that the monk seals were supposed
Speaker 1: to be there, that there should be this kind of
Speaker 1: coexistence and an actual affinity between native Hawaiians and a
Speaker 1: native Hawaiian species. And so when he found out who
Speaker 1: this this kid was, he just went knocked on his
Speaker 1: door and he said, I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about the seal. And you know, for the kid, that
Speaker 1: was a big deal for Uncle Uncle Walter to show
Speaker 1: up at his house. And you know, I had spent
Speaker 1: a week just talking to both sides of this debate,
Speaker 1: and everyone on both sides, you know, you just get
Speaker 1: the impression that anyone who kills the seal is going
Speaker 1: to be this kind of burly, angry native Hawaiian fisherman
Speaker 1: who you know, lost his ship at a seal and finally,
Speaker 1: you know, snapped and killed it. And um and that
Speaker 1: was Uncle Walter's assumption too. And when I met the kid,
Speaker 1: what I found out was that essentially it was was
Speaker 1: an accident. Um. I mean that's a generous way of
Speaker 1: putting and not a fisherman, not a fisherman at all.
Speaker 1: That was the only time he had been fishing that
Speaker 1: hole that whole season. But he was with some friends
Speaker 1: and it was a pure pressure situation because they were
Speaker 1: looking for a spot to fish. Every every place they
Speaker 1: went there was a monk seal there, and they've been
Speaker 1: hiking and hiking and hiking. Finally they got to this
Speaker 1: one spot and there was a big male seal there
Speaker 1: and he was kind of goaded by his friends to
Speaker 1: you know, he thought he'd scare it away by throwing
Speaker 1: a rock at it and a court His story, which was,
Speaker 1: you know, I ran past the Noah investigators they said
Speaker 1: it sounded incredible based on injuries, was that he hit
Speaker 1: this thing square in the head with a rock. It
Speaker 1: went unconscious and was dead. So that was he was
Speaker 1: broken up about it. This kid was broken up about it,
Speaker 1: and he was more broken up about it when the
Speaker 1: next seal was killed and the seal after that and
Speaker 1: the seal after that, because he felt, oh, I started
Speaker 1: this whole chain reaction. You know, I uncorked all this
Speaker 1: frustration that's been going on, and I sort of showed
Speaker 1: it a way to deal with it right away, to
Speaker 1: take it out on the seals um And it was
Speaker 1: not I mean, that was one of those moments. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of moments like this in the book,
Speaker 1: but that was one of those moments where I just
Speaker 1: could not believe. I mean not to me is like
Speaker 1: the privilege of doing this work is if you can
Speaker 1: spend enough time and attention on these stories and you
Speaker 1: just keep kind of scratching layer after layer of understanding
Speaker 1: away from it until you actually get to what happened,
Speaker 1: you find the most surprising things. And that's the This
Speaker 1: was the epitome of that for me, is that I
Speaker 1: could not have invented this situation. One of the one
Speaker 1: of the early things that happened to me as I
Speaker 1: was like training to be a writer that made me
Speaker 1: appreciate the work of good journalism was after the murder
Speaker 1: of Matthew Shepard and Laramie Wyoming that it was immediately
Speaker 1: it was that some cowboys found a gay kid and
Speaker 1: out of just pure unbridled hatred, dragged him out of
Speaker 1: a bar and killed him. And that story ran and
Speaker 1: ran and ran, and then a journalist from Harper's went
Speaker 1: in just hung out in the town and met everyone involved,
Speaker 1: and when she wrote her piece about it, it it was like,
Speaker 1: that is not at all what happened at all. No
Speaker 1: one had gotten it right, like the relationship between all
Speaker 1: the individuals involved, the lack of cowboy noess that it
Speaker 1: not being motivated by that, it being like financial entanglements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, like they got for people
Speaker 1: that will going to spend three weeks somewhere and be like,
Speaker 1: so what happened now that night? I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know that story in particular, but that's the phenomenon that
Speaker 1: I've encountered again and again. It's weird because I think
Speaker 1: that we It's interesting cause I was having this conversation
Speaker 1: with someone the other day, and I think it's like
Speaker 1: we're wired to kind of just snap everything into like
Speaker 1: a tidy story so that we can make sense of it.
Speaker 1: You know. Otherwise we'd just be walking around this like
Speaker 1: incoherent cloud of facts all the time, having to use
Speaker 1: our brains all the time. Yeah. Yeah, you need things
Speaker 1: that you can just take for granted, right, And I
Speaker 1: think that's how we kind of walked through the world,
Speaker 1: just metabolizing everything that's happening, you know. The writer Joan Didion,
Speaker 1: of course, Yeah, in her in her book, I think
Speaker 1: it's in Slouching towards beth Lehem she talks about and
Speaker 1: this is pre Internet. When she wrote this, she's like
Speaker 1: there's so much information, right that, Like you get people
Speaker 1: where there's so much information they can't deal with it all,
Speaker 1: and they're thirsty for just something very simple, and all
Speaker 1: the better if they're the only one that knows it.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, it's nice, right when you can
Speaker 1: repackage it and and and tell it farther, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's like that. Yeah, that's I
Speaker 1: think what the realization I was having talking to this
Speaker 1: other person was, like I guess that's sort of what
Speaker 1: I see myself as doing now. Is like it's like
Speaker 1: Jiu jitsung the storytelling instinct, you know, to unravel the
Speaker 1: stories you know that we that we lock onto and
Speaker 1: then kind of see all of the parts laid out
Speaker 1: and put them back together into something a little more real, right, Um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's when they click back into place, like
Speaker 1: with this kid on Malakai that that I just I
Speaker 1: mean it like it almost feels like a spiritual experience,
Speaker 1: like to see like, oh my god, like the world
Speaker 1: is very very complicated and it's so much more than
Speaker 1: we understand, And what else do I walk around not
Speaker 1: appreciating the complexity of That's the thing I appreciate and
Speaker 1: all the stuff you've written and then again in this story,
Speaker 1: is that, um Like, I know your wildlife advocate, a
Speaker 1: conservation advocate, right like you. You like to see intact,
Speaker 1: healthy habitat and like a clean planet and that means
Speaker 1: a lot to you. Um, But you're able to go
Speaker 1: into a thing like this and not be like, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna root these assholes out and it's horrible, but you
Speaker 1: give like a very fair and I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: native Hawaiian, I don't know, but you give what seems
Speaker 1: to me like a very fair recounting of how we
Speaker 1: got here. Yeah, it isn't like isn't like the whole
Speaker 1: point is to like make people bleed. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: also not to make people have some kind of simplistic
Speaker 1: sense of hope. You know. I think both those things
Speaker 1: are pretty boring, right, And and I think that's why
Speaker 1: I never really read a lot of you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote in nature writing about conservation before I started doing
Speaker 1: it myself. Is it? It seemed like it was very
Speaker 1: easy to just you get the sense of what's happening
Speaker 1: in these stories pretty quick. In a lot of tellings
Speaker 1: of them that were you know, thank God for the
Speaker 1: people who are protecting the seal or you know, against
Speaker 1: the nasty you know whoever it is, hunters, landowners, whatever,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, I just feel like that's really a
Speaker 1: case where you see stories snapping into those those outlines
Speaker 1: pretty quick. You know, where you wouldn't do well as
Speaker 1: a writer where writing animated children's movies. No, because you're
Speaker 1: the bad guy. Let me guess it's the evil logging
Speaker 1: or mining consortium. Yeah, yeah, I would not. I don't
Speaker 1: think with a sadistic tinge. Yeah. I also I just
Speaker 1: don't really do morals either. I think I think the
Speaker 1: morals of the story always escaped me. You know, John,
Speaker 1: what what happened after? Like how long ago did you
Speaker 1: did you do this? Well? So that was about ten
Speaker 1: years ago that I was there, and and the story
Speaker 1: since then it's kind of just been more of the same. Honestly.
Speaker 1: The the monk seal numbers are up, um modestly, but
Speaker 1: I think they still getting assassinated. There were four killings
Speaker 1: last year, I believe, and there were two this year
Speaker 1: on Molokai. And there was a study, yeah, and there
Speaker 1: was a study recently that as I read it this morning,
Speaker 1: after you phoned me to tell me i'd better have
Speaker 1: some contemporary monk seal facts, Steve. As I read this study,
Speaker 1: it was showing that what I would call assassination, um,
Speaker 1: intentional killings are the leading cause of monk sealed deaths
Speaker 1: by well, you know, anthropogenic monks that more than more
Speaker 1: than tanglings, more than exactly um that there are now
Speaker 1: more more seals have died because they've been intentionally killed
Speaker 1: rather than other human calls. Uh, tell quick about that
Speaker 1: island I had never heard of. And the brothers that
Speaker 1: own the island, Knee How. I that was an interesting
Speaker 1: It sounds a good fishing spot. Yeah. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: put up with an old man yelling at you from
Speaker 1: the shore all the monk seals. Yeah, so Knee How,
Speaker 1: which I had never heard of. Um, is a it's
Speaker 1: an island. Um. I mean it's big, it's you know,
Speaker 1: they think it's about seventies square miles and it's right
Speaker 1: across from Kauai and uh. In eighteen sixty four, King
Speaker 1: Kamaya May has sold the island to a ranching family,
Speaker 1: a white ranching family. I don't know. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: cheap I'm sure and uh, and that descendence of that
Speaker 1: family still own it's it's now under the control of
Speaker 1: two brothers, Keith and Bruce Robinson. They're both getting up
Speaker 1: there in years and it's known as the Forbidden Island
Speaker 1: because the Robinson's do not like to have people on there.
Speaker 1: You can, they will. They've taken a limited number of
Speaker 1: tourists there. I guess you can hunt there hot tip um,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's very expensive to get there, and
Speaker 1: they control the helicopter company that takes you in and out,
Speaker 1: and it's very very difficult to access, very very difficult
Speaker 1: to know what's going on there. There are some Native
Speaker 1: knee howandsh or Nee How people who live on the
Speaker 1: island and have lived there for generations. There's been like
Speaker 1: and they've been entangled with that family for years. I mean,
Speaker 1: as Keith Robinson put it to me, they are a
Speaker 1: feudal landlord. Those people are their tenants. Feudal landlord. Yes. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a very bizarre situation to exist in the Centurion.
Speaker 1: You point out that they use it for training down
Speaker 1: the pilots and evasion. Uh, they have in the past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there and in the Native Nie How when they
Speaker 1: run them down down in the training and they said
Speaker 1: that they they get them pretty easy. Yeah that's there.
Speaker 1: That's their only extra mural sport. Um. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: they you know, the robin doesn't have just had to
Speaker 1: find ways like that to make money. They do a
Speaker 1: lot of military you know, they have a radar station there,
Speaker 1: I believe, on on the mountain side. And I was
Speaker 1: able for some reason, uh you know, which wasn't clear,
Speaker 1: which only became clear to me later, I was able
Speaker 1: to talk my way on to knee How flew over
Speaker 1: with Keith Robinson because knee How happens to be one
Speaker 1: of the best places for monks seals right now. The
Speaker 1: Robinson's out of a kind of like very right wing
Speaker 1: anti government, um, you know, wanting to stick it to
Speaker 1: the government instead of killing the seals, they've saved the seals,
Speaker 1: so they're they're conservation proms. It's great. The rub being
Speaker 1: they won't let the government come look at them. No,
Speaker 1: not at all, not at all. And it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're interested in these seals? Are you plethora of endangered
Speaker 1: seals that we have here? You can't, you can't and
Speaker 1: you don't want you counting them. And the reason, according
Speaker 1: to Keith, is because they don't have to put up
Speaker 1: with any you know, fussy community meetings and hearings and
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. They just tell the people living there,
Speaker 1: who are their tenants again, their feudal tenants and employees,
Speaker 1: we're going to protect the seals, so and then and
Speaker 1: then then they do it. Um and so, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: government has been you know really, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: they may have made a little more progress. But at
Speaker 1: the time I was there, they were they were definitely
Speaker 1: just like really, I mean, they were like fascinated, what
Speaker 1: what did you see there? You know, like I was.
Speaker 1: But but when I got there, it also became apparent
Speaker 1: that um, the Robinsons that were really upset that fisherman
Speaker 1: from Kauai. We're coming too close to knee how and
Speaker 1: they I think as I interpreted it, and I'm you know,
Speaker 1: Keith Robinson was not very happy with me after this
Speaker 1: this story because he didn't I don't think he liked
Speaker 1: this interpretation. But he was trying to broke her some
Speaker 1: deal with the with Noah to set up a marine
Speaker 1: preserve around his island so that the fisherman could not
Speaker 1: come anymore and his quiver. Yeah, he was using the seal.
Speaker 1: So he when he took me there, he really wanted
Speaker 1: to show me how there weren't actually that many seals
Speaker 1: and they were suffering and it was all because of
Speaker 1: these intruding fishermen from kwaiet and to to you know,
Speaker 1: create this atmosphere where it's like now and even knee
Speaker 1: house seals are are in trouble. Yeah, that's what he
Speaker 1: John's explained. Like in this navigation of this the owner
Speaker 1: is like where they all go, this is a disaster,
Speaker 1: but his drivers like seems like it's about and then
Speaker 1: he just he just stormed off, stormed off. You know.
Speaker 1: It was like so yeah, it was a wild day.
Speaker 1: It was a wild day. I mean, Keith is a
Speaker 1: very interesting character. And you know when I met him,
Speaker 1: he was wearing in a uh, you know, work clothes
Speaker 1: and a green hard hat and he handed me a
Speaker 1: self published book about the apocalypse, which had a painting
Speaker 1: of mushroom clouds and fires and then a little figure
Speaker 1: in the corner wearing the same work clothes in a
Speaker 1: green heart hat. And so that was like some reading
Speaker 1: material for the helicopter flight over See, I don't want
Speaker 1: this to be taking because I I would like nothing
Speaker 1: more than the foster friendship with this individual. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I don't want if he's listening, I don't want to
Speaker 1: take listen. I want to be friends. Okay, I want
Speaker 1: to hang out on the island. I want to hunt.
Speaker 1: I'll interview about the book. Anything mean John saying I
Speaker 1: wanna be really tight? Yeah? And I was very tight?
Speaker 1: Would I would say? I mean, he's in a very
Speaker 1: untenable position, you know, So I don't think there's any
Speaker 1: right way to be Keith Robinson right now? You know
Speaker 1: it's John. When you sat down in the helicopter and
Speaker 1: he thumbed open the first page of the book, did
Speaker 1: it say something along the lines of, so you're in
Speaker 1: my helicopter, things you know about me? Yeah? No, I
Speaker 1: do remember that he was like nagging the pilot to
Speaker 1: fly in a perfectly straight line to save money on gas. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, he's very cash poor. He owns this island,
Speaker 1: but he's he's really having some cash fallow problems. That
Speaker 1: seemed so, but in all fairness, is like, do you
Speaker 1: feel that he's legitimately interested in the ecology of the island. Oh? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: He's like one of the most successful conservationists in America
Speaker 1: right now. I mean he's done, he's you know, bred
Speaker 1: a lot of endangered native plants. Oh and he I
Speaker 1: forgot he had that tree. Yeah, he had a He
Speaker 1: had a one was it the last one of the
Speaker 1: of the native a particular native Hawaiian hardwood tree. This
Speaker 1: was in the nineties, that he kept from a seed,
Speaker 1: that he kept from a seed. And and as I
Speaker 1: understand this was this was something I could not definitively
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of. But as I understand it,
Speaker 1: and this this is a little bit speculative, but it
Speaker 1: seems like he had misread a Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: document about about his tree that made it seem to
Speaker 1: him that they were going to come and claim his
Speaker 1: tree by imminent domain. And he just implied very strongly
Speaker 1: to me that he then killed the tree rather than
Speaker 1: let the government take it because it was against his principles,
Speaker 1: and that he told them that if they were going
Speaker 1: to come take his tree, there'd be like another Ruby
Speaker 1: Ridge on Nihow. Because the headline to the thing or
Speaker 1: somewhere in it said something about like the containment and
Speaker 1: I believe it was like support and protect. And then
Speaker 1: in the bottom it was like, we really need to
Speaker 1: work with this guy, yeah, to keep his tree happy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he would not be very specific about the story,
Speaker 1: although he wanted to tell me that story many times.
Speaker 1: He told you three days later the tree was dead. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that was his That's why I said, strongly implied,
Speaker 1: strongly implied that he killed that tree rather than let
Speaker 1: the government take it. I'd love to get this guy
Speaker 1: on the show. Don't tell him, you know me that
Speaker 1: helicopter pilot better find out a straight asked way to
Speaker 1: fly over here. It out as you say, tell them,
Speaker 1: we'll find a very efficient means of travel. Okay, you're
Speaker 1: ready to move on to the macaques. Hold on, you
Speaker 1: gotta cover just because it is the cutest thing. Monks
Speaker 1: seals with eels coming out of their noses. It's so sad,
Speaker 1: like big slimy boger. You didn't see this happen. This
Speaker 1: is a frequent thing. And that's what job of the
Speaker 1: hut was created off of man eating the seals and
Speaker 1: then like a spaghetti noodle when your kid tells one
Speaker 1: of those funny jokes, the seals eat the seals eating
Speaker 1: the eel. Yeah, and then like a lugie. You know
Speaker 1: they hack up the seal or the eel through their
Speaker 1: little seals. Yeah, it is. That's that's your first kid's book, John,
Speaker 1: Which ones are the bad guys exactly? And then at
Speaker 1: the end you can be like you tell me they
Speaker 1: Pixar is not gonna pick that one up anyways. Is
Speaker 1: it a live when it comes out? No, he's got
Speaker 1: a dead heel hanging out his nose. Yeah. People, these
Speaker 1: these folks that protect the seals get very concerned over
Speaker 1: the well being of the seal and uh, I think
Speaker 1: maybe one of one has died from some blockage and stuff.
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, it's been a few years since I
Speaker 1: research that one. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a
Speaker 1: lot of I mean it's not just killing, you know,
Speaker 1: like we're talking before, they've they've got a toxic plasmosis
Speaker 1: threat from feral cat species that they think are affecting
Speaker 1: the seals. Now we've covered that very heavily on the
Speaker 1: show Eels. Yeah, how does that because all he's got
Speaker 1: to do is get out there and that when he's
Speaker 1: because cats like ship in the sand and are out
Speaker 1: in the sand. But I think it's a great point
Speaker 1: to bring up right, it's like we always protect animals
Speaker 1: on our terms. Then they're living this entire other life,
Speaker 1: in this case in the ocean, which is a giant
Speaker 1: place that is full of dangers that they have to
Speaker 1: conquer on their own, and it's you know, then they
Speaker 1: show up and they got a eel dangling out of
Speaker 1: their nose and people are like, well, that's not part
Speaker 1: of the plan. He's like, listen, but you know what
Speaker 1: my main problem is this eel hang out. If you
Speaker 1: want to help me, let me tell you yanked a
Speaker 1: some bitch out of my nose kills me. You ready
Speaker 1: for mccaques? Which what was I calling this morning? Macause?
Speaker 1: And I had you all confused? Yeah, I thought you
Speaker 1: were talking about that little monkeys called him maccaque. Now
Speaker 1: I thought it was a macaw. And it's also apparently
Speaker 1: a tribe. Yeah, is it mccoq or maccaque maccaque friends
Speaker 1: of s Chaster. Yeah, yeah, it sounds right, it sounds wrong, right,
Speaker 1: It sounds like mccoq would be a little more civilized.
Speaker 1: But you know it's m a who's looking at it?
Speaker 1: A yeah? Alright, already want to start. You don't need
Speaker 1: to go back hundred years, hundred years ago. They were
Speaker 1: not they were non Florida. I mean we can go
Speaker 1: back a hundred years. That's yeah, okay, go ahead, picture
Speaker 1: it Ferris Wheel, well a lot more fish it was.
Speaker 1: It was a land of amusements, the land of the
Speaker 1: vacation land already, and a New Yorker named Colonel Twoey,
Speaker 1: Colonel being his first name, not a rank, started a
Speaker 1: tourist name it is. It's pretty badass, colonel dog want
Speaker 1: to name him? Why not name your kid general? He's
Speaker 1: got to earn admiral. He starts at colonel. See how
Speaker 1: he does? How does he get how does he get advancement?
Speaker 1: Maybe he started his private video. It was spelled CEO
Speaker 1: L not k R K E R. Yeah, like like
Speaker 1: uh popcorn colonel, Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, not like the
Speaker 1: popcorn colonel, like the military colonel. So Mr Colonel Tooey
Speaker 1: had some kind of tourist attraction going in the middle
Speaker 1: of Florida in a town called Akala on a silver river,
Speaker 1: and he decided he wanted to up his game a notch.
Speaker 1: And he brought over six macaques from somewhere I don't
Speaker 1: know where, and decided he was going to put them
Speaker 1: on a little island in the river and you'd get
Speaker 1: to be able to see monkeys. When he came to
Speaker 1: visit his place, he did not realize that mccas are
Speaker 1: tremendous swimmers. This is my favorite detail story. Within minutes,
Speaker 1: certainly by some accounts, they were off the island. Um,
Speaker 1: so that was that was in the thirties. You'd like
Speaker 1: to imagine I'm kind of standing there, you know, feeling
Speaker 1: very proud, just gazing out at his little monkey island,
Speaker 1: and then sort of dawning on him. Um, tell some kids, Okay,
Speaker 1: now go feed the monkeys, and they're like, which ones? Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I just imagine he's still standing there. Just they're just
Speaker 1: slashing toward him. It's like normandy, you know. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and then but so then you've got wild monkeys in Florida,
Speaker 1: and by the eighties there were about four hundred of
Speaker 1: them each separate troops. Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna preface
Speaker 1: all this by saying this, the census, the monkey censuses
Speaker 1: in Florida are very fuzzy. Several recounts. We never write
Speaker 1: a lot of hanging chads. We never really have very
Speaker 1: good information. It seems about how many monkeys there are
Speaker 1: in Florida any given time. But you know, there's wild
Speaker 1: monkeys living in Florida, something I did not know, so
Speaker 1: pause that story. In two thousand twelve, the summer of
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, I went to Tampa to um look
Speaker 1: for the mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, which was a
Speaker 1: maccaque that had first appeared behind the Bennigan's um in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, I believe a hundred miles away from
Speaker 1: the very far away. Yeah, yeah, this is way out,
Speaker 1: you know, Tampa. It's like way out on the coast. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's crossed the whole interior of the state. And
Speaker 1: the theory was when they called out um a gentleman
Speaker 1: named Vernon Yates, who's a renowned freelance animal trapper in Florida,
Speaker 1: to come corral this monkey behind the Bennigan's, he was floored.
Speaker 1: He could not believe that this thing was, as he
Speaker 1: put it, very streetwise because when a pet maccaque um,
Speaker 1: of which there apparently are many licensed pet maccaques in Florida,
Speaker 1: when they escape, they tend to just fry themselves immediately
Speaker 1: on a our line or get hit in traffic or something.
Speaker 1: But this thing, this thing could boogie, this thing could
Speaker 1: get through, it could read your mind. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It had a kind of a ninja like a nimbleness
Speaker 1: that was evading both Vernon and the Fishing Wildlife Commission
Speaker 1: officers who were sent out to travel. And he darted
Speaker 1: it like multiple time to get away before it fell.
Speaker 1: He's like, look and pull out the dark the line
Speaker 1: where he looks him in the eye and like pulls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that detail we work. We used to work a
Speaker 1: lot with a guy named Mo and he was a
Speaker 1: cameraman and he described being in the jungle in South
Speaker 1: America and he's with some guys. This wasn't working with us,
Speaker 1: working with someone else. He's with some guys that were
Speaker 1: blowgun hunters. They were in Columbia and they're blowgun hunters.
Speaker 1: And he's said one of these guys was his monkey
Speaker 1: up in a tree. He said, it's kind of the
Speaker 1: most disturbing thing you've ever seen in his life. These
Speaker 1: guys like with that blowgun and that dart hits the
Speaker 1: monkey in the back. He said, that monkey reaches around
Speaker 1: behind his back pulls the dart out. Yeah, he said,
Speaker 1: just not what you expect like a game animal to
Speaker 1: do right right, because they don't have a possible he said,
Speaker 1: just seemed like at that moment, he's like everything was wrong.
Speaker 1: My other favorite details. Apparently there was a moment because
Speaker 1: this was this Bennigan's pursuit was just the first of many, right,
Speaker 1: So I think Vernon, by the time I saw Vernon
Speaker 1: in two thousand talking, this has been going on for
Speaker 1: three and a half years, and he had said he
Speaker 1: had more than a hundred occasions he had gone out
Speaker 1: after this monkey. On one of them, there was a
Speaker 1: fish and wildlife officer caught it in three years. He
Speaker 1: hadn't caught in three and a half years. And he
Speaker 1: was you know. I went to his house and he
Speaker 1: he took a map of Florida out to show me
Speaker 1: kind of where the monkeys travels had taken him. And
Speaker 1: he just kept having to flip the map over, like
Speaker 1: bring out a different map at a bigger scale. He
Speaker 1: just kept getting more and more elaborate, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And he was sure it was the same monkey, like
Speaker 1: he was marked somehow, he would They were, well, they
Speaker 1: were very sure it was the same monkey, just by
Speaker 1: its behavior, I think, And that's what I guess that
Speaker 1: an open question, but there it seemed to be consensus
Speaker 1: of very long causeway, probably in the back of a truck. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it started. It was in different neighborhoods. It was
Speaker 1: eating fruit off people's roofs um, it was getting around
Speaker 1: and uh. And what happened again in a in a
Speaker 1: similar and yet extremely different Yeah, he's abounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's a little guy. He's pretty adorable, I think
Speaker 1: he Uh. And he became known as the Mystery Monkey
Speaker 1: of Tampa Bay. And in the same way as this
Speaker 1: Monk Seal story unfolded, but in a very different version
Speaker 1: of it. A there was a political dynamic around the
Speaker 1: Mystery Monkey in that here you had um Vernon Yates.
Speaker 1: It was sort of caricatured as this you know, dopey
Speaker 1: small town sheriff animal, trapper guy out to you know,
Speaker 1: trap this innocent creature, and the state, you know, the
Speaker 1: power of the state clamping down on the the animal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the populace wanted the monkey to be free. You know.
Speaker 1: They were they were t shirts stay free Mystery Monkey,
Speaker 1: they were billboards, um, you know, social media accounts, and
Speaker 1: it became again another intractable kind of um, you know,
Speaker 1: disagreement about what this monkey was all about and what
Speaker 1: we what we should do with it, right, you know,
Speaker 1: you had the state saying it's a danger to people.
Speaker 1: It's probably um suffering itself because they're communal animals, they're
Speaker 1: social animals, and this one's been you know, outside of
Speaker 1: its troop, and they have hepatitises over there. They all
Speaker 1: have herpies, not all, a lot of them have herpes
Speaker 1: b I believe, which is was used as a as
Speaker 1: kind of scare tactic as I see it by the
Speaker 1: state to say, this is another reason we have to
Speaker 1: get this monkey. Although when you kind of dig into
Speaker 1: the science, because everybody will make love with the monkey
Speaker 1: and wind up yeah you know, yeah, people love and
Speaker 1: the monkeys with herpes are definitely telling the monkeys without
Speaker 1: herpes like, hey, everybody's got it. Yeah, you know, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: um so yeah, so so uh so I was, and
Speaker 1: I was there, um right before Republican Convention, you know,
Speaker 1: in two thousand and twelve. This was the Romney in
Speaker 1: their freedom was in the air, the Tea Party was ascendant. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of you know, in a way,
Speaker 1: the monkey debate really mirrored the American debate of like,
Speaker 1: you know, what is the line between tyranny and lawlessness?
Speaker 1: And you know what is the government for? And um,
Speaker 1: you know, shouldn't we all just be free? And uh,
Speaker 1: it was fascinating. It was fascinating. I mean, the characters
Speaker 1: involved were fascinating. This guy Vernon shown, you know, he
Speaker 1: had like seventeen tigers at his house and uh, a
Speaker 1: big pile of alligators in the concrete pool. And uh
Speaker 1: and again in in just as I solved that monks
Speaker 1: monksil crime, I managed to find the monkey, um, living
Speaker 1: very happily in someone's backyard. They had sort of reached
Speaker 1: a kind of daytent with the monkey, and we're letting
Speaker 1: it hang around their property. Um. It was actually through
Speaker 1: some reporter from the Tampa Bay Times had had had
Speaker 1: found this out, and I knew another source who had
Speaker 1: been working with the family to kind of take care
Speaker 1: of the monkey and keep the monkey, you know, close
Speaker 1: and and well cared for, but also not bring it
Speaker 1: too close to you know, everyone bringing into their house
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It seemed to be working out
Speaker 1: in a weird way. It was a weird kind of
Speaker 1: compromise happening between the monkeys rights and the humans need
Speaker 1: to keep the monkey a monkey. Did you ever get
Speaker 1: Vernon's like personal opinion on whether or not the monkey
Speaker 1: should be caught, like, aside from the fact that it's
Speaker 1: his job, he absolutely thought the monkeys should be caught.
Speaker 1: He thought, I mean, like like this, like the wildlife officers,
Speaker 1: imagine your job is to keep wildlife healthy and keep
Speaker 1: people safe from wildlife, and now you've got a monkey
Speaker 1: running around and everyone's more concerned about the monkeys rights.
Speaker 1: So Vernon was was adamant that, um, you know, he
Speaker 1: was doing this for the monkey, that the monkey needed
Speaker 1: to be captured. And we can jump ahead because the
Speaker 1: you know, some stuff happened after I did this story,
Speaker 1: but that it was in the monkey's best interest to
Speaker 1: be brought into captivity where it could be with other
Speaker 1: monkeys of its kind and live out its life there.
Speaker 1: It was safer for the monkey and was safer for people.
Speaker 1: Was there any talk about putting the monkey back on
Speaker 1: the river. No, because that's a I don't know that
Speaker 1: this is why, but the monkeys on the river themselves
Speaker 1: have been a huge source of controversy and aggravation because
Speaker 1: at different times the state has tried to um trap
Speaker 1: that population and extinguish that population, which doesn't go over well,
Speaker 1: which does not go over well with people who like adorable,
Speaker 1: anthropomorphized monkeys. Um, so there was I don't think there
Speaker 1: was any sense that they were going to like relocate
Speaker 1: the mystery monkey. Everyone knows about the non native situation Florida,
Speaker 1: but very few people know about the non native monkeys
Speaker 1: in Florida. Yeah, I had no idea. And there's other
Speaker 1: there's another monkey population. Apparently there's a very monkeys by
Speaker 1: the lad that. Yeah, that's been there for as long
Speaker 1: as I was interested in monkeys in Florida, popular popular
Speaker 1: uprisings around monkeys in Florida. Ever, did they ever get him? Oh? Sorry, Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess I was just wondering about Vernon's opinion too,
Speaker 1: because in his role, right, he's got a pool full
Speaker 1: of alligators, he's got tigers, he knows that so much
Speaker 1: of that exists in the state of Florida. It just
Speaker 1: crossed my mind that he could possibly have an opinion
Speaker 1: of like, I'm glad I'm getting paid to go try
Speaker 1: to capture the monkey. But doesn't matter. No, he doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because there's already so many exactly. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: he the reason why he has those animals is that
Speaker 1: those are animals that have that he has offered to
Speaker 1: read home from licensed or unlicensed owners in the state
Speaker 1: of Florida who did not you know, who were not
Speaker 1: keeping their animals humanely. He complained to John about losing
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars or the tortoises, and a divorce
Speaker 1: settlement that's right, came after my turtles. Yeah, he loves tortoises.
Speaker 1: Was his sweet spot. I think he had a special
Speaker 1: special place in his heart for tortoises. Um. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of his five divorces, he got cleaned out of his tortoises.
Speaker 1: So so the mystery monkeys settled down and lived his life.
Speaker 1: Well that was where my story. That was where my
Speaker 1: story ended. And then a few months later, um, the
Speaker 1: monkey was you know, everything was still peaceable at the house.
Speaker 1: And then the monkey jumped on the woman the homeowners
Speaker 1: back and startled her classic monkey on your back, absolutely
Speaker 1: that you know, startled her. She reacted, that freaked out
Speaker 1: the monkey, and the monkey bit her on the shoulder
Speaker 1: and then it was game over. So at that point
Speaker 1: the monkey had to be caught to be I guess
Speaker 1: tested in the same way you know you get bit
Speaker 1: by a stray dollar or something. I don't know the
Speaker 1: ins and outs of it, and involves decapitations often. Well,
Speaker 1: this monkey was not decapitated, were beheaded. Um so Vernon
Speaker 1: came back in with this the state will Vernon was
Speaker 1: probably the first call. I mean, you're not gonna at
Speaker 1: the time he had sunk into this, do you think
Speaker 1: they're gonna give it to someone else? And this time
Speaker 1: they were able to get him. They trapped the monkey,
Speaker 1: who was then named Cornelius after the monkey and Planet
Speaker 1: of the Apes, which I think I could take a
Speaker 1: little bit of credit for because there's a part in
Speaker 1: the piece where I sort of have this delusional fever
Speaker 1: dream while I'm reading Planet of the Apes at a
Speaker 1: La Quinta in in Ocala. But they named him, uh,
Speaker 1: they named him Cornelius. They brought him to a kind
Speaker 1: of like a roadside attraction type zoo thing where he
Speaker 1: was paired with another monkey named Cora. Settled down, he
Speaker 1: had children, seemed to be living a happy life until
Speaker 1: until his hours ago he developed as they had given
Speaker 1: him a cyanide pillow to keep in his cheek and
Speaker 1: when Um, no, until a few years ago. I guess
Speaker 1: that that facility where he was had come under fire
Speaker 1: from Peter and some other organizations and they started, um
Speaker 1: they had a dozen or more tigers at this place,
Speaker 1: and there were some complaints and they started offloading their tigers,
Speaker 1: driving them out to Oklahoma to the guy in that
Speaker 1: Netflix show. Yeah, and Somes got tangled up with a
Speaker 1: tiger king. Well, that's where this So there was a
Speaker 1: follow up report in the Tampa Bay Times trying to
Speaker 1: figure this out, and it seems like in the confusion
Speaker 1: over all of this, Cornelius, the trail on Cornelius went cold.
Speaker 1: We don't know where he is and where he wound up,
Speaker 1: and uh, there's really no paper trail or anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are you going back down? I mean, I think it's
Speaker 1: been it's been covered to death, but I'm curious. I'd
Speaker 1: like to know where he is. But if the trail
Speaker 1: is cold, then it's obviously just right for John Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm gonna crack that one. But what
Speaker 1: you found the monks, the little sass in days, you
Speaker 1: will find that monkey. Feel like it's like a lethal weapon. Lie,
Speaker 1: I'm getting too old for this. One last time. I
Speaker 1: think it's hilarious how you're staying at a Laquinta too,
Speaker 1: you know, because they're claimed to fame is they're always
Speaker 1: pet friendly. There's no chance you have that monkey. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say they were getting into and they
Speaker 1: were getting into Netflix documentary territory. If it turns out
Speaker 1: that you have pretty well, there's a whole dome. Turn
Speaker 1: your friend in or not for reward, you know. But
Speaker 1: that's actually the weird thing is that the monkey is
Speaker 1: not the reason why we don't know where the monkey
Speaker 1: is is because there's really no regulation that would require
Speaker 1: them to stay where the monkey is there. As this
Speaker 1: there was a quote in this Tampa Bay Times to
Speaker 1: followup where the someone from the state was basically, it's
Speaker 1: just like a TV. You don't have to tell us
Speaker 1: when you sell your TV to someone, right, So that
Speaker 1: person who has the monkey should theoretically have papers for
Speaker 1: the monkey, but there's no database where you can look
Speaker 1: up who has what monkey, so they're just property. M Um.
Speaker 1: In my Buffalo book, I wrote about uh, you know
Speaker 1: the buffalo from the buffalohead Nickel. Not long after the
Speaker 1: artist Um did his sculpture, which became the buffalo head nickel.
Speaker 1: That buffalo's name is Black Diamond. He was sold um
Speaker 1: in the meatpacking district in Manhattan and butchered and um
Speaker 1: yielded an incredible eleven pounds bones meat. The guy that
Speaker 1: owned the meat pack was a guy named Sills. I
Speaker 1: think it was his last name. S I LZ got stuffed.
Speaker 1: So he for years had Black Diamond's head stuff from
Speaker 1: the buffalo head nickel. He sold it right now someone. Ah,
Speaker 1: it's speculated that someone has that stuffed head and doesn't
Speaker 1: know what it is, because no one's ever come forward
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, I have Black Diamond's head. So
Speaker 1: unless it got lost in the house firedever, it likes
Speaker 1: like someone's like, I don't know where. It's just the
Speaker 1: thing I got from my grandpa. Yeah, there should be
Speaker 1: some way, like you could get an alert on your phone,
Speaker 1: like an Amber alert and it would just be like,
Speaker 1: do you have a buffalo head? Can you send a
Speaker 1: picture of it to this? Can you know we just
Speaker 1: did it, just large buffalo head that looks like the
Speaker 1: buffalo head nickel. Yeah. Yeah, we keep cracked this in
Speaker 1: thirty seconds if we had a will to do it.
Speaker 1: UM so working on next. I know you can't you
Speaker 1: say not not that you're working on like a murder mystery,
Speaker 1: but you don't want to talk about it because you're
Speaker 1: waiting on some permissions. But what what can you tell us?
Speaker 1: Can you say what it involves without saying where it
Speaker 1: involves it? This is my favorite subject. Yeah, well we've
Speaker 1: talked about neandertals before, right, So yeah, so I got
Speaker 1: really after I did a story about Neandertals, I got,
Speaker 1: you know, just kind of reawakened to how cool deep
Speaker 1: time is that there were there were people so long ago.
Speaker 1: So yes, I've been really interested in writing about Paleolithic
Speaker 1: cave art and I've been trying to find a way
Speaker 1: to do it. Um. What I didn't understand is that
Speaker 1: these caves are like, um, the people who study these caves,
Speaker 1: it's very proprietary, so like it's you know, this person
Speaker 1: will they're the person for that cave, you know, and
Speaker 1: then yeah, kind of if you're an up and coming researcher,
Speaker 1: you have to wait until that person retires or to
Speaker 1: get your hands on a cave. Yeah. They're sort of
Speaker 1: like Supreme Court appointments or something. So yeah, so I've
Speaker 1: been talking to a lot of people, you know, all
Speaker 1: spring about trying to trying to talk my way into
Speaker 1: a into a cave because I think it's um. I
Speaker 1: think there was this feeling in the past that the
Speaker 1: people studying cave art we're we're trying to over interpret
Speaker 1: what they were seeing, you know, so they would everything
Speaker 1: had to have like the biggest mediat possible explanation, like
Speaker 1: you know, we see X on a cave wall, and
Speaker 1: therefore it means this about the Testament to the extinctions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were you know, they revered the elk because here's
Speaker 1: a you know, and I think that that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of that approaches in my mind from what I've learned,
Speaker 1: is it's kind of being deflated a little bit and
Speaker 1: people are studying more like the material culture of it,
Speaker 1: like how was this actually made? What do we know
Speaker 1: about the moment that it was made? And things like that.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of comments is that you kind
Speaker 1: of down like the religious spiritual side of things too,
Speaker 1: Like the people who painted were very special and because
Speaker 1: because they had to be. There's no way it was
Speaker 1: There's no way it was like fourteen fifty year old
Speaker 1: kids dicking around in the cave but it was predominantly
Speaker 1: male also, but they did some I think fingerprint analysis
Speaker 1: something something pretty cool. And there's a lot of surprisingly
Speaker 1: a lot of small children, females get out of my
Speaker 1: way and go paint on the wall. You're telling me
Speaker 1: kids drew stuff on walls. Well, yeah, And that one
Speaker 1: thing that I didn't realize either is like so many
Speaker 1: of these sites because you know, you see, I've never
Speaker 1: been in any of these caves, but you see, you know,
Speaker 1: the photographs of the walls. But I didn't realize is
Speaker 1: that a lot of these places where the biggest they
Speaker 1: call them galleries, where the biggest galleries are actually like
Speaker 1: really deep inside caves so that you like, you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're through narrow passages, like they're very purposeful places
Speaker 1: that you had to try to get to, you know.
Speaker 1: They didn't just walk in the cave and start drawing.
Speaker 1: And so that suggests like little crawls, like crawl spaces
Speaker 1: your crime and understuffing around it and exactly so they
Speaker 1: were very specific about where they wanted to do this.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that means, but that just seemed
Speaker 1: like an interesting fact. I mean, I think that one
Speaker 1: points to little people like children going in there and
Speaker 1: doing it. Yeah, that's actually an interesting thought. I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about that yet. You know, Uh, you've no doubt
Speaker 1: seen her Zog's movie about cave paintings, so I'm big
Speaker 1: her Zog. I was deeply disappointed with that movie. I
Speaker 1: want to see that movie with another writer who's been
Speaker 1: on this podcast. I would almost regard you guys as
Speaker 1: peers and contemporaries. Ben Wallace Um. I went to see
Speaker 1: it with him and we laughed and I said, I
Speaker 1: don't know how you could make a bad movie about
Speaker 1: cave paintings, And he said, I was just wondering myself
Speaker 1: the exact opposite. What did you what didn't you like
Speaker 1: about it? I love that movie. It was too it
Speaker 1: was too it was too like it made it all ethereal,
Speaker 1: it was too like what were they dreaming? This must
Speaker 1: be their dreams? And you're kind of just what was
Speaker 1: it like? What was it made out of? What do
Speaker 1: we think it was? Like? Stop stop this nonsense about
Speaker 1: that these are like shamans capturing their dreams. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can see that. I mean they did just things just
Speaker 1: so overblown. You got guys like dressed up like they're
Speaker 1: from a long time ago. Like you like role play?
Speaker 1: What do they call them? People? Large? There's like lar
Speaker 1: Per's in it, live action role players of like cave people.
Speaker 1: I love that. I don't think you want to alienate
Speaker 1: the larking audience already most I'm a fan That Little
Speaker 1: Deader needs to Fly. He's got some masterpieces. Grizzly Man.
Speaker 1: He's got a novel out now. Yeah, it just came
Speaker 1: out and then he made, Um, what's that one Little
Speaker 1: Deader needs a Fly? Then he made a fictionalized version
Speaker 1: with Christian Bale. Yeah, I met him. I met him
Speaker 1: once at a in the We were trapped in the
Speaker 1: room of an ideas festival in Mexico together. They wouldn't
Speaker 1: let us out for a few hours school and uh,
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of us and I slowly kind
Speaker 1: of made my way over to Werner Hertzog to ship
Speaker 1: a little bit. He was telling me. This was right
Speaker 1: before he was making that documentary about volcanos, and he
Speaker 1: kept he just wanted to talk about volcanoes all the time,
Speaker 1: and that felt like the perfect way to meet. He's
Speaker 1: like a method actor, but a documents artists. Um he uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he wrote he made that crazy ass when
Speaker 1: he used to do fictional films, not used to, but
Speaker 1: focused on He did Fits Crawl though, and it's about
Speaker 1: it like a deranged Robbert rubber Baron who the movie
Speaker 1: is that a guy does the impossible. He like build,
Speaker 1: He moves his boat from one drainage in the Amazon
Speaker 1: to the other, which involves like hoisting it up and
Speaker 1: over a ridge and down in another valley. So you think,
Speaker 1: like today you'd be like, oh, we'll just make a
Speaker 1: thing look like c G I whatever. But he did
Speaker 1: the insane thing. They did exactly that. They took a
Speaker 1: boat and moved it. People like died on the production,
Speaker 1: and they made a movie about the movie called Burden
Speaker 1: of Dreams. And in Burden of Dreams, Herzog is losing
Speaker 1: his mind over that he can't get his movie finished,
Speaker 1: which he did eventually finished, and he's going off about
Speaker 1: how much he hates the jungle, and Herzog says, birds
Speaker 1: don't sing, they scream in agony. All right, man, thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. Thank you, Thanks for tell
Speaker 1: everybody your other books. We didn't really do we do
Speaker 1: a show about about this is chance. I think we
Speaker 1: focused on that specific Okay, So John MoU Alum like
Speaker 1: move like cow Alum, not like Alan John m o
Speaker 1: A L L E M no h in the John
Speaker 1: New book is serious face, author of This is Chance,
Speaker 1: author of what was the Candidate? Not the creatures, wild
Speaker 1: wild Ones, more about all about animals, about animals, well
Speaker 1: people all people going wacky about animals. Um am I
Speaker 1: missing books. This is Chance was about the biggest earthquake
Speaker 1: to ever strike, sixty four earthquake. Yeah, good Friday earthquake.
Speaker 1: Focuses on narrows in on a woman who became very
Speaker 1: influential in the chaos, Yeah, translating and providing news as
Speaker 1: this as the catastrophe unfolded. That's right, radio reporter named
Speaker 1: Genie Chance, who kind of was in the right place
Speaker 1: at the right time and spent all of that weekend
Speaker 1: on the air pretty much as just chaos, as just
Speaker 1: being one source of like concrete information in a situation
Speaker 1: that did not seem to have much certainty at all,
Speaker 1: and stay tuned for his thing on campaigns, which I
Speaker 1: promise you'll be good. Thank you, you know, all right,
Speaker 1: Thanks everybody, Thanks, Thanks