Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict any ofthing. The meat Eater Podcast is brought to
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Speaker 1: T L I t E dot com. Hey Steve, calling
Speaker 1: in from Alaska. I'm here to announce that the latest
Speaker 1: volume of me Eaters Campfire Stories is available now. This
Speaker 1: volume is called Discoveries, Revelations and Near Misses. So the
Speaker 1: volume is a little twist on our normal format, like
Speaker 1: it includes all of those uh your death escapes in
Speaker 1: the wild that really define our for other two volumes
Speaker 1: of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories, but this includes something added
Speaker 1: and special, which is a few stories about life changing
Speaker 1: discoveries and revelations in the wild. The one you're gonna
Speaker 1: hear at the end of this podcast involves a guy
Speaker 1: whose friends refer to him as black Cloud Bob because
Speaker 1: this guy has a cloud of bad luck that follows him.
Speaker 1: And this story you're gonna hear is like a terrible
Speaker 1: near death experience that kind of bleeds into another terrible
Speaker 1: near death experience to make sort of like a duplex
Speaker 1: of near death experiences. It's a horrendous story and it's
Speaker 1: at the end of the podcast. You'll listen to that.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy, you can go anywhere audio books are
Speaker 1: sold and get your latest volume of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy. All right. We're recording from the
Speaker 1: Meat Eater Flagship store in downtown bos Of, Montana, and
Speaker 1: I am right below the Buffalo skull that now has
Speaker 1: its sign stick finger here. People have been sticking their
Speaker 1: finger in that hole mark have you I have not yet.
Speaker 2: You're worried it's gonna get all greasy and dirty there, No.
Speaker 1: What I would like to do is make like a
Speaker 1: I'd like to well, I don't even want to tell
Speaker 1: you what I'd like to do. I'd like to build
Speaker 1: in a little surprise, but stick your finger in that hole.
Speaker 1: People come by, they send pictures of themselves with their
Speaker 1: finger in that hole. Uh. That and all kinds of
Speaker 1: other oddities and great products down here at the Meat
Speaker 1: Eater Flagship Store downtown bows Of Montana where we are
Speaker 1: recording right now, come on down and say hi. Also
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Speaker 1: our podcast videos there and you won't miss anything. You know,
Speaker 1: we're so late on discussing well, first off, I'm joined
Speaker 1: by Brody cal Mark Kenyon and doctor Randall Crinz here,
Speaker 1: but she doesn't say much. We're so late on talking
Speaker 1: about it because I meant to talk about it, that
Speaker 1: we got to talk about it now for a minute.
Speaker 1: That we're so late on talking about it. All the flurry,
Speaker 1: the flurry of news about the Colorado deer hunters. Two
Speaker 1: old timers that two old timers that died of Creussfield
Speaker 1: Jacobs yes, and some researcher who it turns out, it
Speaker 1: was not really pointed out that these two guys hunted
Speaker 1: deer together were consumers of deer in Colorado, and then
Speaker 1: happened to developed yak of kreutz Felt and he was saying, hey,
Speaker 1: heads up, it's they deer hunted. There was the possibility
Speaker 1: that they got this disease from eating deer. I want
Speaker 1: to being that was quite irresponsible thing to pump out there.
Speaker 1: You got how much you guys know about this. I'm
Speaker 1: the only one knows about that about it?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, yeah, I think totally tracking. You're just on
Speaker 3: a roll. You haven't messed anything up too bad.
Speaker 1: Well, now I gotta jump into I gotta jump in
Speaker 1: and find some stuff. Well, I'll say that the one
Speaker 1: building the thing that happened here was that he made
Speaker 1: this little bit of conjecture which then got picked up
Speaker 1: as a sound bite across the media outlets.
Speaker 3: Which turned into a headline to get a headline.
Speaker 4: And blew up into hysteria. And they looked past the
Speaker 4: point that this was not stemming from some peer reviewed study,
Speaker 4: but this was just a piece of again conjecture. There
Speaker 4: was a question, yeah, yeah, it wasn't a study.
Speaker 5: And the implication is that they got chrotsfield Jacob from
Speaker 5: or Yakub.
Speaker 1: From eating deer deer. Yes, from the.
Speaker 5: Implication is that CWD is crossing the species barrier.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, there was a version of this years ago,
Speaker 1: equally irresponsible, where they had a guy that had Yakub
Speaker 1: kreutz Felt and in his personal history had eaten a
Speaker 1: squirrel brain. What was the headline everywhere? Man got it
Speaker 1: from eating a squirrel brain, when in fact it was
Speaker 1: simply that in his personal history he'd eat a squirrel brain.
Speaker 1: Jim Heffelfinger when this came out, this is a long
Speaker 1: time ago now, when this came out from Jim Heffelfinger,
Speaker 1: he said, in talking about this little flurry of news activity,
Speaker 1: he pointed out that he doesn't even want to post
Speaker 1: a link because he doesn't want to perpetuate a spread,
Speaker 1: the spread of this misinformation or information. He said, this
Speaker 1: is not a study, and this is not a scientific paper.
Speaker 1: The whole thing is three hundred and forty four words
Speaker 1: and is simply a mention about two hunters that died
Speaker 1: of CJD and both of them ate deer from the
Speaker 1: same deer population. There is no evidence of CWD infecting hunters.
Speaker 1: There are clusters of CJD throughout the country, some in
Speaker 1: CWD areas and some outside CWD areas. With the spread
Speaker 1: of CWD nationwide, it is not very noteworthy, meaning that
Speaker 1: now I don't know thirty states thirty some states have CWD.
Speaker 1: With the spread of CWD nationwide, it is not very
Speaker 1: noteworthy that two CJD victims in the same rural area
Speaker 1: may have both eaten venison. He points out, we have
Speaker 1: to be vigilant about the possible jump of a pry
Speaker 1: on disease from deer to hunter. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1: This is the thing, much to Doug Durn's annoyance, This
Speaker 1: is I don't want to say, the only thing, it's
Speaker 1: the primary thing that worries me about CWD is the
Speaker 1: possibility that it would jump the species barrier and go
Speaker 1: to humans. If I knew, if God came down and said, Steve,
Speaker 1: there is no chance CWD can jump to humans, I
Speaker 1: would care. This is going to really piss off Doug
Speaker 1: eighty five percent less about CWD.
Speaker 3: I think that like the human jump is like a
Speaker 3: step too far. Really, I think people should be way
Speaker 3: more concerned deer hunters should be way more concerned with
Speaker 3: CWD jumping to any sort of domestic livestock.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's what blows my mind, is why the USDA
Speaker 1: isn't more worried. Yeah, I could weigh. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys know, I'm no infectious
Speaker 1: disease specialists, but I'm worried as a person. How are
Speaker 1: they not worried about cattle?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he look a hell a lot more
Speaker 1: like a deer than I do.
Speaker 3: The USDA response to domestic livestock with these types of
Speaker 3: diseases is is severe and final. It's full eradication. So yeah,
Speaker 3: which is what.
Speaker 4: Makes it so scary if ever, if ever does jump
Speaker 4: to humans, it's going to be the end of our lifestyle,
Speaker 4: or that beginning of that end.
Speaker 1: Yeah right now.
Speaker 3: But it's not going to be as simple as turning
Speaker 3: a fan off in a chicken.
Speaker 1: House, because the fuel in the fire now drunkard to
Speaker 1: boil out, boiled out. Now. Here is from a peer
Speaker 1: reviewed paper. This is from a peer reviewed paper in Colorado.
Speaker 1: I want to point out to people Colorado. I'm very
Speaker 1: reluctant to get into this right now. Because I wanted
Speaker 1: this to be mistake. I don't want this to be
Speaker 1: taken wrong. I am an individual who is concerned about CWD.
Speaker 1: I think that we should be testing robustly. I think
Speaker 1: we should be investing a lot of money into researching CWD.
Speaker 1: I think we should find out everything we can find
Speaker 1: out about CWD, and I think we should be taking
Speaker 1: reasonable steps to slow the spread of CWD. ME saying
Speaker 1: me jumping on someone for claiming that CWD has jumped
Speaker 1: into the human population is not because I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think that CWD is gonna go away or I'm trying
Speaker 1: to whitewash the risk of CWD. It's because I don't
Speaker 1: think that you should go around saying crazy shit to
Speaker 1: really upset people based off no evidence, like let's have
Speaker 1: good clean material, good clean science around CWD, and not
Speaker 1: hysterical hogwash around CWD. A problem is I'm still I'm
Speaker 1: still ahead of what I'm going to read you next.
Speaker 1: A problem I have found even within the CWD spectrum,
Speaker 1: the CWD spectrum being CWD deniers, who once upon a time,
Speaker 1: a CWD denier was someone who said there's no such
Speaker 1: sing as CWD. The same way early on a COVID
Speaker 1: denier was someone who said there's no such thing as COVID.
Speaker 1: Eventually a COVID denier became someone who said, sure, there's COVID,
Speaker 1: I just don't think it's that alarming, which puts me
Speaker 1: in COVID denier, which COVID deniers have caught up to
Speaker 1: where I'm at, where it's like, sure it's there, I
Speaker 1: just don't think it's enough. I don't think it warrant
Speaker 1: shutting people's businesses down. A cwd D denier at a
Speaker 1: time said there's no such thing. It's all a lie.
Speaker 1: Now they say, oh, yeah, it's real. I'm just not alarmed.
Speaker 1: Well it's real. I'm alarmed, but don't go running around
Speaker 1: saying crazy shit that's not.
Speaker 2: True, especially knowing what's going to happen in the media.
Speaker 1: As and they planned that. And there are people the
Speaker 1: spectrum I was trying to get into the spectrum, on
Speaker 1: the spectrum of CWD believers whatever, you have deniers who
Speaker 1: at this current stage are like, yes, it's real, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. Two people saying if you so much
Speaker 1: as put a piece of deer meat on a stainless
Speaker 1: steel table, you could then drop a nuclear bomb on
Speaker 1: that steel table, and that steel table is still gonna
Speaker 1: give you jakub the kreutz Felt disease. Like there's this spectrum.
Speaker 1: The people on the far end, the super alarmists, also
Speaker 1: need to chill out. And I've told some of them
Speaker 1: face to face, please chill out with the zombie deer disease.
Speaker 1: The all that garbage from a peer reviewed paper. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's this passage from a peer reviewed paper. And oh,
Speaker 1: I also got a back up a lot of background here. People.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Colorado was where CWD is first identified. Cwd's
Speaker 1: first identified in Colorado at a deer and elt breeding facility,
Speaker 1: a research facility that's ground zero for CWD in terms
Speaker 1: of identification. That they identified it there does not mean
Speaker 1: that it emerged there. It was identified there, all right.
Speaker 1: The date they identified it in the seventies does not
Speaker 1: mean it was born that day. The more you look
Speaker 1: for it, the more you find it. As we're seeing,
Speaker 1: meaning as more and more states find CWD, it's often
Speaker 1: that more and more states are looking for CWD. We
Speaker 1: don't know where it came from, we don't know when
Speaker 1: it first emerged. It was the first identified in Colorado,
Speaker 1: back to this peer review paper. In seven Colorado counties
Speaker 1: with high CWD prevalence, seventy five percent of state hunting
Speaker 1: licenses are issued locally, which suggests that residents consume most
Speaker 1: regionally harvested game. So here, all they're trying to establish
Speaker 1: is that if you're looking at CWD prevalence and who's
Speaker 1: eating CWD infected meat, let's look locally. Okay, we'll go
Speaker 1: to these counties in Colorado with a lot of CWD,
Speaker 1: and we're going to look at locals, making the assumption
Speaker 1: that locals are eating most of the local deer meat.
Speaker 1: Goes on to say, we used Colorado death certificate data
Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy nine through two thousand and one to
Speaker 1: evaluate rates of death from the human prion disease. Kreutz
Speaker 1: felt YAKUB disease. Am I saying that right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say CJD so I don't have to feel like I'm
Speaker 1: messing it up every time. The relative risk of CJD
Speaker 1: for c WD endemic county residents was not significantly increased,
Speaker 1: and the rate of CJD did not increase over time
Speaker 1: in Colorado. Human prion disease resulting from CWD exposure is
Speaker 1: rare or non existent. The reason they're saying is rare
Speaker 1: non existent is because they haven't found it. Then it
Speaker 1: goes down to say, however, there's a lot we don't know.
Speaker 1: The other piece of this is even after this news
Speaker 1: came out implying a correlation between consumption and in these
Speaker 1: two cases, after this news came out, statistically, those two
Speaker 1: cases happening to come from that area was not an outlier.
Speaker 1: You have about a dozen cases a year that we found.
Speaker 1: It was like a giant nothing and like everything, like
Speaker 1: the guy that got it from eating squirrel brains. You
Speaker 1: wind up being that when a news story like that
Speaker 1: comes out, got so worked up, we gotta take my
Speaker 1: glasses off. When a news story like that comes out,
Speaker 1: the retraction never gets the retraction never gets the traction
Speaker 1: you found. This repeated use of the retraction never gets
Speaker 1: the traction. I wish I could keep it.
Speaker 3: Going that the initial action.
Speaker 1: The retraction never gets the traction. That the initial action
Speaker 1: that it just doesn't c WD scares the shit out
Speaker 1: of me. So don't be doing stuff like that because
Speaker 1: I'm already scared. Is it worth talking about the Oklahoma thing?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 3: Yes, would you like to.
Speaker 1: I know Steve wanted to leave that off or not.
Speaker 1: Can we get into it in a minute. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: here to talk about that that I think like that.
Speaker 1: God bless them for trying to find a thing. You
Speaker 1: listeners have no idea what we're talking about. God bless them.
Speaker 3: But come on, We've covered this heavily on the Week
Speaker 3: in Review, because again, when I first saw it as
Speaker 3: a as a little blurb, I was kind of like.
Speaker 1: Ha ha, it can't be little. Did you know maybe we
Speaker 1: don't even get into Randall Hoff? Well, damn it. I
Speaker 1: want to get into it a couple of things real quick.
Speaker 1: I put this in the notes, and everybody got mad.
Speaker 1: I wrote in the notes Trump is right about voter fraud.
Speaker 1: Hear me out hear me out here.
Speaker 3: I didn't hear a single person in this room get mad.
Speaker 1: Not mad. We mostly no, not mad.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to tell you brief in general.
Speaker 1: I check them out there. I'm on date night. I'm
Speaker 1: on date night, not on dateline. I'm on date night
Speaker 1: with my wife, and I'm trying to listen to what
Speaker 1: she's telling me.
Speaker 3: But there's something way more interesting.
Speaker 1: Something way more interesting going on coming to a restaurant
Speaker 1: and there's a big group of people, look like a
Speaker 1: qu for funny looking people, look like a corporate function,
Speaker 1: And I said, that's weird. What what are these guys
Speaker 1: doing in town? Just didn't something didn't fit. Turns out,
Speaker 1: I don't want to trivialize they're from World Wildlife Fund.
Speaker 1: I don't want to trivialize World Wildlife Fund. But they
Speaker 1: of the many things they do, one of the things
Speaker 1: they do is they are a thorn in the side
Speaker 1: of hunters, so that they do a lot of things
Speaker 1: for wildlife, positive things for wildlife. But anytime, they're always
Speaker 1: litigating against hunters in cases where I don't think it
Speaker 1: has anything to do with preserving bio diversity. It's just
Speaker 1: they got a is this my fair, totally overlyfair center
Speaker 1: for biological diversity. World Wildlife Fund are always going to
Speaker 1: litigate against hunters, and they're always going to sort of
Speaker 1: even with stable wildlife populations, they're gonna kind of come
Speaker 1: and act like hunting is somehow imperiling stable wildlife populations,
Speaker 1: and it'll come out. I picked this up. I hear
Speaker 1: a story about Corey Booker.
Speaker 3: Here's a senator.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and someone's telling the story as a way to
Speaker 1: demonstrate how nice Corey Booker is. And I'll point out
Speaker 1: Corey Booker's a vegan telling how nice Corey Booker is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by recounting an interaction to Corey Booker is having with
Speaker 1: a flight attendant, I'm hearing it, and I'm like, that's
Speaker 1: him scamming on a flight attendant. This is just my
Speaker 1: like the story I hear, I'm like, that's not nice,
Speaker 1: that's scamming. Not to say he scammed on a flight attendant,
Speaker 1: but just that caught That's what caught my attention. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not coming here and saying you did. I'm saying
Speaker 1: individuals telling the story. And then the individual tells a
Speaker 1: story about fixing to commit voter fraud.
Speaker 3: And the whole time, your dear, beautiful, telling sweet wife
Speaker 3: is talking and you're going, uh huh.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm with my left ear, I'm listening to her
Speaker 1: with my right ear. I'm listening to this voter fraud plan.
Speaker 1: There's an individual in Chicago, and you're pretty deaf in
Speaker 1: that left ear. I'd love to hear Katie's perspective. I
Speaker 1: should I cut all this off for legal reasons? How bad.
Speaker 1: Is it that I that I overheard something in a restaurant?
Speaker 1: Are you allowed to do this the right? Well, I
Speaker 1: mean right. The individual's talking lives in Chicago. He lives
Speaker 1: in Chicago. Now. He did not say who he's planning
Speaker 1: on voting for this fall, but he's explaining to everyone
Speaker 1: that he knows how Illinois is going to go on
Speaker 1: this fall's presidential election. Okay, he owns a cabin in Michigan.
Speaker 1: He wants to be able to vote in a battleground
Speaker 1: state this November, so he went and got a Michigan
Speaker 1: driver's license. When he asked about the legality of what
Speaker 1: he's doing, he was told, you're supposed to spend a
Speaker 1: majority of your time in the state where you're registered
Speaker 1: to vote, but they said they only really care about
Speaker 1: that with rich people, and since he works for an NG, oh,
Speaker 1: he felt that this did not apply to him. Wow,
Speaker 1: just overheard how many how do you do the right caveat?
Speaker 1: Overheard in the restaurant? Yeah, I thought the overheard.
Speaker 5: I thought the whole crazy disquisition about the CWD Colorado
Speaker 5: Hunters scare, but you need evidence.
Speaker 1: I thought that was all.
Speaker 5: A setup for this anecdote.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's just something I overheard. Yeah, Now, I
Speaker 1: think if you, if you were to say, believe.
Speaker 3: That whole thing because overheard at a restaurant, right, like
Speaker 3: we have been the town approached by a police officer
Speaker 3: in my younger years, because during our late night dinner,
Speaker 3: we thoroughly ran through all the ways we could have
Speaker 3: dined and dashed right, eaten and eaten and left without man.
Speaker 3: Right as just a fun way to have the time
Speaker 3: where you're having dinner.
Speaker 1: Right, So you're at dinner, you're discussing ways in which
Speaker 1: you could get out of paying for said dinner, right, which.
Speaker 3: At that point in our lives was the perfect crime.
Speaker 1: Right, that's how you would really stick it to the man.
Speaker 3: Probably the first people to ever pull that off at an.
Speaker 1: I know why I brought this up because cow was
Speaker 1: laying out for me, someone laying out for him away
Speaker 1: in which you could get a non a way in
Speaker 1: which you could get a resident hunting license that you
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to get. Yes, they're sort of saying a
Speaker 1: fella could, yeah, and Cal was saying, or a fella
Speaker 1: could just buy the non resident hunting license, yes.
Speaker 3: Instead of setting purchasing a piece of land getting a
Speaker 3: po box setting up an LLC. I'm like, boy, that
Speaker 3: sounds like.
Speaker 2: Dude, we used to see like very well off second
Speaker 2: homeowners in Colorado. Dude like try to bend over backwards
Speaker 2: to get a resident fishing license instead of a non resident,
Speaker 2: which is like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know what they're doing though, they're chasing
Speaker 3: the high right.
Speaker 2: Of sticking it to the man.
Speaker 3: Well, it's not necessarily sticking it to the man, right,
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, I'm saving money and that's what really
Speaker 3: gets them, get them going. Well, that's your heritage.
Speaker 1: We should start, you know, Krin. This is Kris like
Speaker 1: this because Kritin doesn't like when we think of ways
Speaker 1: in which Krink could get more email. But if you
Speaker 1: want to send it in an email saying here's a
Speaker 1: wild ass idea in the subject line, and you got
Speaker 1: a wild ass idea, go ahead and throw it in
Speaker 1: sent to Krin. Here's a guy wrote in a wild
Speaker 1: ass idea and talking about live sonar and the controversy
Speaker 1: surrounding live sonar. He's saying, well, think about Dingle Johnson,
Speaker 1: some old timer who's digging worms out of his garden
Speaker 1: and using the same bag of evil claw hooks. He
Speaker 1: bought twenty years ago, fishing on a resident license. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fishing on a resident lifetime license that he bought. They
Speaker 1: bought sixty years ago, digging worms out of his garden.
Speaker 1: Bought a bag, bought a bag of three hundred eagle
Speaker 1: claw hooks at a sportsman show two decades ago out
Speaker 1: of some old ass rowboat that he bought at the
Speaker 1: yard sale. Right, what is he doing for Dingle Johnson?
Speaker 3: He's taken not give it.
Speaker 1: There's your enemy. That guy. He's saying a live sonar
Speaker 1: guy is not the enemy because this guy. Think about
Speaker 1: the amount of money this guy's pumping into conservation through
Speaker 1: excise taxes on fishing equipment. Yeah, yes, I added all
Speaker 1: the stuff about the old.
Speaker 5: To this guy's credit, he didn't call anyone the enemy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he was kind of filling out. I was
Speaker 1: filling out his argument.
Speaker 3: Growing up, Like how long you would have a box
Speaker 3: of large caliber ammunition, right, I mean.
Speaker 1: Like the box would corrode.
Speaker 2: Yes and yellow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the folds on the box would give out and
Speaker 1: you'd have to tape them back together before it was gone, right.
Speaker 2: And there's all kinds of corrosion on the cart just
Speaker 2: themselves exactly.
Speaker 1: When my dad died and I was able to raid
Speaker 1: his Ammo ben I thought at that time that I
Speaker 1: would never buy Ammo again. I was like, well, shit,
Speaker 1: here's forty Remington Court. That's like, you know, twenty deer
Speaker 1: and then twenty shots to make sure I'm still on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: still good. Yeah. It would be.
Speaker 4: Really interesting though, to try to run the numbers on
Speaker 4: the increased funds that we're getting in from, you know,
Speaker 4: increased purchase and and you know, folks becoming more and
Speaker 4: more fervent about this pursuit, right, if you were to
Speaker 4: compare that to the negative pressure outcomes of it and
Speaker 4: try to see, like, how does that.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, is there a balance?
Speaker 1: Here's a four thousand dollars purchase with excise taxes at eleven.
Speaker 1: That makes you feel bad for yelling at my kid
Speaker 1: about buying worms.
Speaker 3: Got a whole garden out there.
Speaker 1: He could have dug out, Oh, I'm not gonna do one,
Speaker 1: because we haven't found out if people like him or not.
Speaker 1: Play the drop fill.
Speaker 3: I liked the previous one. It just went on too long,
Speaker 3: a little too long.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to happen.
Speaker 4: But I think I bet I kind of liked that
Speaker 4: because it's awkwardly long.
Speaker 1: That was kind of what made it so great. Play
Speaker 1: the drop fill ready for this.
Speaker 3: One, but I think this should be an alternating host
Speaker 3: deal to Yeah, so you ain't got to okay.
Speaker 1: This is a teaser for a future installment. Alaska tracks
Speaker 1: life stories from hunters, fishermen, and trappers of Alaska. This
Speaker 1: is there's a Randy Zarnky Zarnk. He's a president of
Speaker 1: Alaska Trappers Association. He's doing an oral history talking to
Speaker 1: old timers. I was gonna share two quick ones for
Speaker 1: you from the from my damn glasses back on. I'd
Speaker 1: never started making a podcast, but I knew I was
Speaker 1: gonna lose my reading vision. Listen to this very quick.
Speaker 1: From the time I was about ten years old, I
Speaker 1: had to make a living for the whole family, his dad.
Speaker 1: His dad got to where he couldn't work anymore during
Speaker 1: the Spanish flu pandemic of nineteen eighteen, which hit Alaska hard.
Speaker 1: From the time I was about ten years old, I
Speaker 1: had to make a living for the whole family. The
Speaker 1: Smithsonian had been paying my brother forty five dollars a
Speaker 1: piece for black bear skulls and seventy five dollars for grizzlies.
Speaker 1: If I could get one bear a month, that was
Speaker 1: pretty good money. I'd sell the feet to the Chinese.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Krim. Yeah, I've perked right up.
Speaker 6: I still have never eaten a barefoot, though I'm looking
Speaker 6: forward to the time I can.
Speaker 1: And I got seven dollars a piece for the galls,
Speaker 1: so if you add it all up, one bear would
Speaker 1: bring in quite a bit of money. Jumping ahead, this
Speaker 1: is from a different fellow, Duke Short out of Cake, Alaska.
Speaker 1: I hunted eagles for bounty. If you tell people that,
Speaker 1: now they think you're a really bad person. We got
Speaker 1: two bucks apiece for eagles. The biggest day I had
Speaker 1: was doing a herring run. The eagles were eating the
Speaker 1: herring and I killed thirty three cow. The only reason
Speaker 1: I didn't get more was I ran out of bullets,
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen us Today's installment of Steve Reid's books.
Speaker 1: So you ain't got to.
Speaker 4: Now something you didn't do in the first one. But
Speaker 4: I wanted to know. It was just do you recommend
Speaker 4: the book? Like is this something other folks should even.
Speaker 1: Though they don't. It ain't got to read it, but
Speaker 1: they could, well, let me put the to you this way. Mark,
Speaker 1: guess how I had to read for those tidbits? Not
Speaker 1: very far? Page fourteen is all. I didn't even read
Speaker 1: all the good stuff.
Speaker 5: Steve reads the first fifteen pages of a book.
Speaker 1: Well, no, no, I'm going to do a full report.
Speaker 1: And Cal just announced that he's gonna do it full
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 2: Tidbits.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we might. We should buy a timer,
Speaker 1: maybe krinn figure out that the section what what's the
Speaker 1: reasonable length for Let's say Cal reads books that you
Speaker 1: ain't got to I mean a couple of minutes, No,
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes, and I think.
Speaker 3: I think it should with a couple of minutes, like
Speaker 3: buy it or note, buy it or don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like there's gotta be an assessment, but there should.
Speaker 3: We should work in bang for your bucks so we
Speaker 3: can have a sound.
Speaker 5: I think of a solid twenty five minutes.
Speaker 1: Past I was taking fifteen. We get a timer, and
Speaker 1: when you present a great book, you got fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: I like it? Yeah, new pot. Can we get that
Speaker 1: machine back out? Used to like stop to rate how
Speaker 1: much you like something?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's that's yeah, we.
Speaker 1: Need to so I don't know you tell me mark
Speaker 1: fourteen pages and I found that. No, that seems like
Speaker 1: a hell of in our And I fell asleep last
Speaker 1: night perfect. I mean not because the book was no good.
Speaker 1: You know, you get to a point where you're gonna
Speaker 1: get a bet. Yeah, I'm shooting eagles three bucks apiece? Random?
Speaker 1: Can you talk about the breeding mule here in Mexico?
Speaker 1: We keep wanting to get into this. Did you get
Speaker 1: boned up or not boned up? I mean I I've.
Speaker 5: I familiarized myself with the case a little.
Speaker 1: Bit, but then you know about it prior to this. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I just knock off nikes because the thing's backwards.
Speaker 5: No, they're real nikes. These are oh there's limited. These
Speaker 5: are the Yannis Antokumpo Immortality threes. Gotta met uh famous
Speaker 5: footwear for forty nine ninety nine because I think they're
Speaker 5: a few generations old.
Speaker 1: But sorry, it's got distracted. This seems so just unlike you.
Speaker 5: I mean, you put a pair of shoes in front
Speaker 5: of me, a new pair of shoes for forty nine
Speaker 5: ninety nine. I'm gonna have hard time walking away.
Speaker 1: Okay, someone walked me through the breeding milder in Mexico
Speaker 1: because I used to like to say, I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned sport. I used to like to say the thing
Speaker 1: I love about mulders you can't buy a big one,
Speaker 1: which is not true.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this I mean my understanding of the case
Speaker 5: was that it's an American citizen and he's he's in
Speaker 5: business with two Mexican citizens who own a ranch in Mexico,
Speaker 5: and he'd been working with them to improve mule deer genetics.
Speaker 5: And uh, he grew the business and then got the
Speaker 5: first permit to bring those genetics across the border, and
Speaker 5: then in and in the form of semen, in the
Speaker 5: form of semens draws. There was a note in here
Speaker 5: about how many semens fourteen hundred and sixty semens draws,
Speaker 5: and those are coming from more than I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: Those are coming from like a captive breeding facility.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and two hundred and sixty nine embryos. Mueled your embryos.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 5: And essentially the case is that the guy, the guy's
Speaker 5: partners in Mexico, he claims, became jealous of how successful
Speaker 5: this guy had become as a result of their joint business,
Speaker 5: and he says that they they started threatening his life
Speaker 5: and tried to take some of this stuff back and
Speaker 5: have engaged in defamation against him. And so he's he's
Speaker 5: trying to get some of that genetic material back from
Speaker 5: them because it's a partnership gone wrong.
Speaker 1: Got it. Yeah? Uh, this I don't I don't really
Speaker 1: care about all that. I didn't care about them fighting
Speaker 1: about whatever. It's just what. Yeah, I don't mean to
Speaker 1: be callous, no, but I guess this guy got What
Speaker 1: was interesting to me was that this is going on
Speaker 1: in the first and.
Speaker 5: Well, he got the first ever permit to move as
Speaker 5: I understand, he got the first ever permit to move
Speaker 5: meal deer DNA genetics embryos across the border in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what's like, what's happened to that stuffs border?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's in a it's I think it was in
Speaker 5: a lab in in uh in Texas or at a
Speaker 5: breeding facility in Texas, the facility that does both livestock
Speaker 5: and apparently meal deer.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That was the part that was surprising me because
Speaker 1: I have been noticing on social media accounts of these
Speaker 1: some of these ranches in Mexico they're offering these really
Speaker 1: high dollar mildeer hunts. The staggering numbers of two hundred
Speaker 1: in just one year after the other after the other,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, how could this be true? But it's
Speaker 1: that they're getting really good. And I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: I'm not pointing, I'm not saying that there's something like
Speaker 1: nothing criminal. They're getting really good at producing giant mule
Speaker 1: deer out in the desert by using tricks of the
Speaker 1: trade developed through white tail management, meaning bringing in food,
Speaker 1: water development, it's all that, and they're kind of like
Speaker 1: creating a they're kind of creating a resource of giant
Speaker 1: box that just wasn't there before by employing strategies developed
Speaker 1: by you know, the Texas white tail community. So now
Speaker 1: they've kind of created like the new mule deer. It's
Speaker 1: like Utah and the seventies down there, What.
Speaker 2: Is it happening behind fences?
Speaker 1: It's got it a lot of it. It's because when
Speaker 1: you see one of these social media pages I follow,
Speaker 1: when I've seen enough guys standing there with like a
Speaker 1: beer in each hand in a golf cart. There you go,
Speaker 1: in a two and twenty inch merely laying there and
Speaker 1: sixteen other guys standing back behind him, I'm like, there's
Speaker 1: something just like, yeah, there's something that does not make sense.
Speaker 1: Worked our tails off.
Speaker 3: Well, Yet you can take the best areas in the
Speaker 3: in the the the North. Yeah really, I mean really
Speaker 3: in North America, and to have like a success rate
Speaker 3: of like three weeks in a row, six people go
Speaker 3: and all six get thirty inch wide bucks, Like it
Speaker 3: just doesn't even it just doesn't happen. No, it just
Speaker 3: does not happen.
Speaker 1: It's it's so weird looking. And part of the problem,
Speaker 1: it's a minor problem, but part of the problem with
Speaker 1: it is it's gotten to the point with white tails
Speaker 1: where when you if you walk into someone's house and
Speaker 1: you there's certain white tails you'll see and you'll just
Speaker 1: know it's not a wild white tail. Yeah right, you
Speaker 1: look and you don't even ask the guy, oh sweet,
Speaker 1: where'd you get that? Because you just know, like that's
Speaker 1: a high fense white tail. You just know the second
Speaker 1: he walk in the door, and it why wasn't being
Speaker 1: it like it kind of a little I don't want
Speaker 1: to say ruins looking at deer, but it with meal
Speaker 1: deer walked in and I've always been like, damn yeah, because.
Speaker 2: They were like they were unsullied by that.
Speaker 1: It was like holy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so does this hurt a little bit more to
Speaker 4: see this with your beloved mule deer and know that
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: White tail has been turnished for so long, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because those big giants are now now knowing that
Speaker 1: when you see a big giant now in the back
Speaker 1: of your head, you gotta be war you gotta be
Speaker 1: warm about that. The other thing you can just you
Speaker 1: just know is when some guy comes back from New Zealand,
Speaker 1: right and he's got a four hundred inch red stag. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, didn't shoot that? No, right? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: But with with mule deer, you're talking like, I don't
Speaker 2: know what the numbers would be in in the United States,
Speaker 2: but like it's almost like a handful of two hundred
Speaker 2: inches get shot in the whole country every year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, handful. I don't know what. It's not more
Speaker 1: than fifty.
Speaker 2: Right, so now when fifty are coming back every year,
Speaker 2: it's not.
Speaker 1: More than twenty yeh shit, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's not a lot. But now they're just like all
Speaker 2: coming north from Mexico. It's like you got it.
Speaker 3: Ruins really wrong. When the con when I'm more apt
Speaker 3: to ask how was the chef right then about your hunt?
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, though I have been looking see I gotta
Speaker 1: admit though, man, looking at those Mexico nil deer, I
Speaker 1: was licking my lips.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, Oh for sure, because you don't see those
Speaker 2: wide ones.
Speaker 1: You know, I was licking my lips. I still kind
Speaker 1: of am.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 3: The other thing to think about rad is like through
Speaker 3: all the conversations we've had, right, like that desert environment
Speaker 3: for big animals, there's just not a.
Speaker 1: Lot of them mm hmm.
Speaker 3: But somehow there's a lot of them, right.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm just gonna sit back in my chair and
Speaker 1: someone's gonna explain everyone but besides me, and then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you what I think. It's gonna talk about
Speaker 1: the that this idea that you're gonna breed you're gonna
Speaker 1: breed c w D resistance into wild deer. I could
Speaker 1: take a first step at it, Okay, can I can
Speaker 1: I give you my comment now and you can weave
Speaker 1: that in or give you my comment later.
Speaker 4: I want to see you squirm in your chair for
Speaker 4: a while, wanting to say it it happened to wait,
Speaker 4: you should.
Speaker 1: Just interject naturally, sit back I'm to take my watch,
Speaker 1: I'm taking my mouth talker.
Speaker 3: Okay, oh, this is the type of juicy stuff people
Speaker 3: can see up the new YouTube channel.
Speaker 1: Mediator podcast network does off.
Speaker 4: So so the cliff notes here is that a peer
Speaker 4: review peer review study came out in twenty twenty or
Speaker 4: twenty one out of Texas A and M where they
Speaker 4: had identified genetic markers that can point to the susceptibility
Speaker 4: of a deer to CWD. I basically say, hey, these two,
Speaker 4: we'll tell you whether I think it was eighty one
Speaker 4: percent rate of accuracy, how susceptible this individual whitetail will
Speaker 4: be to contracting chronic wasting disease. So, with that information
Speaker 4: until then, the next thought that some folks had was, well,
Speaker 4: if we can identify if a deer is susceptible or not,
Speaker 4: that means we should be able to selectively breed for
Speaker 4: those more resistant traits.
Speaker 1: So Oklahoma.
Speaker 4: Propose a law recently in which they would develop a
Speaker 4: program to do just that. So this proposal came out
Speaker 4: that first said, all right, we want to start this
Speaker 4: program which will involve number one, establishing a genetic baseline
Speaker 4: of what the wild deer population looks like. As far
Speaker 4: as this resistance. Number two, they would then start a
Speaker 4: captive breeding, selective breeding program in which they would try
Speaker 4: to breed for this. And then number three and number
Speaker 4: three is the real big, really big concern, is that
Speaker 4: starting in twenty twenty six, they may create and open
Speaker 4: up the ability for private individuals to purchase these supposedly
Speaker 4: CWD resistant deer and release them, and not just on
Speaker 4: high fence ranches, but low fence.
Speaker 1: So any Tom.
Speaker 4: Dick or Harry could hypothetically purchase start buying these captive
Speaker 4: red deer and start releasing them into the wild.
Speaker 3: But only in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: Only in Oklahoma. But to my knowledge, there's no other
Speaker 1: state in which you had to put my thing back
Speaker 1: just to say, and those deer will know they got
Speaker 1: to stay in Oklahoma, right yeahs. And so this is
Speaker 1: like a Pandora's box.
Speaker 4: There's all sorts of ways this could go wrong that
Speaker 4: we can get into.
Speaker 2: They're trying. What they're trying to do, right, is uh
Speaker 2: like speed up natural selection if it even exists.
Speaker 1: I got it? Could I do my thing now? I
Speaker 1: put my thing back? Sure? My talkers back in position
Speaker 1: presumably if it's in captive deer there's no reason to
Speaker 1: think that this disposition, this resistance, this natural resistance is
Speaker 1: also in wild deer. Just believe that it is. Why
Speaker 1: would it just be there when you have millions of
Speaker 1: wild deer. How in the world do you think that
Speaker 1: turning out some small handful of deer with a certain
Speaker 1: genetic characteristic that already exists in wild deer is going
Speaker 1: to accelerate the natural selection that, if you're right, is
Speaker 1: already occurring right now. Like, if you're right that there's
Speaker 1: a resistance and that that resistance is going to win
Speaker 1: out through natural selection, then it already is you putting
Speaker 1: one loose? Yeah, I mean, like, I'm not even I'm
Speaker 1: not even against the like, I'm not even going down
Speaker 1: the path of being against the idea because let's say
Speaker 1: there's a version like this, let's say you had some
Speaker 1: way well.
Speaker 3: Sorry, the version that this idea is based off of,
Speaker 3: right is, uh, the near eradication of scrapie and in chigia.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of like what they point to.
Speaker 1: But that's all domestic, yes, where you control all breeding.
Speaker 4: Well, here's the thing, We've already basically tested this idea
Speaker 4: in wild populations of deer and that is through the
Speaker 4: act of trying to cull for genetics. Right, So, there's
Speaker 4: been all sorts of people in Texas and other parts
Speaker 4: of the country where they have, you know, very fervently
Speaker 4: studied the idea of whether or not you can influence
Speaker 4: genetics within a deer population through culling.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, he's got a wonky right side. Kill him.
Speaker 1: For a long time, that was that was yeah, he
Speaker 1: looked at me. Funny.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So long story short on that, a slew of
Speaker 4: studies have come out over recent years that have completely
Speaker 4: disproven that as an effective approach at all. You just
Speaker 4: can't do it because of the very things you're saying.
Speaker 4: In a wild population, it's just impossible to actually influence
Speaker 4: it enough with our degree of effect. So if that
Speaker 4: can't work in impacting genetics of white tail deer antler quality,
Speaker 4: same thing's gonna.
Speaker 1: Be the truth the case of this. But I don't
Speaker 1: Here's why I don't want to come out and just
Speaker 1: say I condemned the whole idea of Pandora's box and
Speaker 1: all that, because think about this scenario. Let's say, for
Speaker 1: some somehow I don't understand how, but somehow you're able
Speaker 1: to sample a deer. You're be able to shoot it
Speaker 1: with one of those darts out of a pneumatic gun
Speaker 1: that they use to shoot tranquisers. You're able to shoot
Speaker 1: a deer and pull a genetic sample from it. A
Speaker 1: little plug right hits, the deer falls off, It's got
Speaker 1: a little chunk of hair on it, and you're able
Speaker 1: to determ and Okay, that deer has a genetic resistance
Speaker 1: to CWD. Maybe it's you know, maybe you realize that
Speaker 1: that deer is eleven years old in a area that
Speaker 1: has high prevalence of CWD. So you're like, Wow, that deer,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, survived. You test it. It doesn't have CWD,
Speaker 1: even though you got to test them now dead. Let's
Speaker 1: just say scientifically, you know that you can test a
Speaker 1: deer alive see that it does not have CWD. Also,
Speaker 1: you can make the determination that it carries this gene
Speaker 1: that gives it a level of CWD resistance. And then
Speaker 1: someone proposed, well, let's catch that deer and let's pull
Speaker 1: all of her eggs and go make twenty more and
Speaker 1: then turn that group of twenty deer back out on
Speaker 1: the same landscape where the dough came from. Are you
Speaker 1: do you oppose that much less? So okay, So I'm
Speaker 1: saying I'm not all the way thinking that this is
Speaker 1: the worst idea in the world, because there's different ways
Speaker 1: that it might be approached. I just think it sounds
Speaker 1: silly because there's no reason to think that this resistance
Speaker 1: is only in captive deer. All captive deer came from
Speaker 1: wild deer. They're not from another continent. The captive deer
Speaker 1: industry its birth was just catching wild deer from North America.
Speaker 1: So whatever you're seeing represented in that genetic pool of
Speaker 1: captive deer is going to be represented in the wild.
Speaker 1: I would just guess that the same percentage of resistance
Speaker 1: is out there in the wild if this whole thing
Speaker 1: would work, that it's already working or not, and you
Speaker 1: putting a couple more out there ain't gonna make shit
Speaker 1: for deerfs.
Speaker 2: Gonna cost a lot of money.
Speaker 5: I mean, well, and it's gonna make someone a lot
Speaker 5: of money. That was the other part of that article
Speaker 5: is that captive deer interests are involved in this plan.
Speaker 4: In the in the in the legislature, and on the
Speaker 4: Fishing Game Commission. There are interests that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it almost seems like an underhanded way of being
Speaker 2: able to move.
Speaker 1: Deer around exactly.
Speaker 4: And that's where you get into some real sticky worries
Speaker 4: here is that Number one, you can't like, a CWD
Speaker 4: can lie dormant. It can be positive in a deer
Speaker 4: for several years before we might ever be able to
Speaker 4: identify that. So you can get many false negatives. So
Speaker 4: they're gonna let's type of hypothetically say that a deer
Speaker 4: tests negative. There are live tests, but they're not terribly accurate.
Speaker 4: But you could do a test and say, okay, well
Speaker 4: this deer supposedly is resistant, and we tested it before
Speaker 4: release and it came back negative. Two years later, that
Speaker 4: deer could then end up testing positive and it was
Speaker 4: positive at that moment, but now we've already released it
Speaker 4: and transported across the state all over the place.
Speaker 1: But I have to assume they're only going to cut
Speaker 1: these loose in areas of high prevalence anyway. Maybe, So
Speaker 1: if someone was going to do it prophylactically, I think
Speaker 1: that that would be hugely problematic, right. I think the
Speaker 1: propylactics are always.
Speaker 5: Oh, my Robberts, my father, my father in law, or
Speaker 5: not my father in law prophilactically, number of content toothbrush
Speaker 5: is a prophylactic.
Speaker 1: To do it prophylactically. No one is going to get
Speaker 1: into that. No one is gonna before that.
Speaker 3: Well right now, I think a huge thing to keep
Speaker 3: in mind is there's no consensus on what resistance is.
Speaker 1: Mmmm.
Speaker 3: So is the deer that dies a day after the
Speaker 3: other group of deer more resistant?
Speaker 1: Oh? Like yeah, some people lived a year longer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So that's another huge question mark as to why
Speaker 3: people who are conservatively approaching this topic are like, well,
Speaker 3: this step is putting the cart way before the horse
Speaker 3: because we don't even know what resistance is at this
Speaker 3: release program.
Speaker 1: But give me, give me the Pandora's box. I'm failing
Speaker 1: to see it. I can see it as a waste
Speaker 1: of effort because of because like I said, it's like
Speaker 1: you're trying to go into a population is that have
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of animals and you're trying You're thinking
Speaker 1: you're going to influence it with some small number of
Speaker 1: released animals. But give me the Pandora's box, because these
Speaker 1: aren't GMOs. These are just deer that you've just These
Speaker 1: are just white tail deer.
Speaker 5: Are Virginia oticle Leonis Virginia virginianus.
Speaker 1: They're white tail deer from the continent. They're not genetically modified.
Speaker 1: You're not doing gene insertion. They're not robo deer. They
Speaker 1: are a deer that you have identified having some disease
Speaker 1: potential disease resistance.
Speaker 3: I'll give you mind and you.
Speaker 1: Let it run out, like give me the negative.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the simple one right now is I
Speaker 3: know we we covered like the first known w CWD hotspot,
Speaker 3: but we have a lot of other known CWD hotspots.
Speaker 3: They for the most part, all tend to be at
Speaker 3: or very near close proximity to captive servid facilities. Correct,
Speaker 3: So haven't we already seen the Pandora's box, Like we
Speaker 3: have captive servant facilities. Just so happens like a new
Speaker 3: K shows up and five miles away. So now we're
Speaker 3: thinking we're gonna throw it back into the court of
Speaker 3: the captive service facility. Let's see what you guys come
Speaker 3: up with next. I'm sure it's got to be better,
Speaker 3: right then current CWD.
Speaker 1: And then one of the chances something like that it
Speaker 1: happened again. Right, Yes, hey, I got you, And we're
Speaker 1: creating a.
Speaker 4: This hypothetically would create a private market for individuals to
Speaker 4: purchase captively bred deer and release them into the wild,
Speaker 4: which we've never done before. And I just can't I
Speaker 4: can't imagine the future in which, Okay, if we start,
Speaker 4: if captive breeding facilities can start breeding these animals and
Speaker 4: marketing them to the general public, right, trying to convince
Speaker 4: folks to buy, right, buy these deer and release the
Speaker 4: CWD resistant deer. You can't tell me that ten twenty
Speaker 4: years down the road, not only will they market them
Speaker 4: as CWD resistant, but also this came from one hundred
Speaker 4: eighty inch genetics. So you can start releasing your selectively
Speaker 4: bred mega antler deer.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden.
Speaker 4: Now that's not just a high fence thing, but any
Speaker 4: guy could go and start releasing these on their Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's pandorian.
Speaker 5: And it's not the it's not the same as like introduced.
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously it's it's the same species. It's a
Speaker 5: native species, but it has like this bucket biology kind
Speaker 5: of feel to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 5: It's just a very slippery slope moving moving wild animals around.
Speaker 1: It's just I like what I think that you you, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that was very pandorian of Hey, now that I
Speaker 1: can start buying deer and cutting them loose. H, I
Speaker 1: want that CWD thing you're talking about, But like, can
Speaker 1: you send a picture of the buck? Yeah? Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: for sure. Well, but you just pointed out that that's
Speaker 1: not actually true. What do you mean?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: Well, right, but that doesn't mean people will try Yeah,
Speaker 4: I get it, I get it.
Speaker 1: Here's the biggest thing I can see, uh, not the
Speaker 1: big I shouldn't say that. Here's the thing I think
Speaker 1: that's that's noteworthy about this issue. Here you have the
Speaker 1: captive servid industry has been has been villainized for years
Speaker 1: around CWD. And imagine how and how uh, when you're
Speaker 1: looking at this as a pr problem, that you'd be
Speaker 1: able to come back around and turn this whole thing
Speaker 1: on its head and emerge as the savior. That's got
Speaker 1: to be an intriguing that's exactly what's happening. That's got
Speaker 1: to feel good.
Speaker 5: Well, I think too. One of the issues with the
Speaker 5: law that just passed, at least from what I've seen
Speaker 5: pointed out, is that it's not just like looking at
Speaker 5: this idea, but it's laying out it's not only putting
Speaker 5: the cart before the horse. It's like paving that road.
Speaker 5: And there's like a timeline for this to happen, and
Speaker 5: and before it's it's like determine whether or not this
Speaker 5: is really feasible.
Speaker 1: There's like a target a target date.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like a year and a half out. And we
Speaker 4: didn't we didn't mention at the beginning when I led
Speaker 4: this off, I said, this law was proposed. This isn't
Speaker 4: just a proposed law. Now, this is a past and
Speaker 4: sign in the law.
Speaker 1: Yeah, happening. Do you think they could work up with
Speaker 1: skunk that don't smell and cut him loose.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't be a skunk anymore. Yeah, but yeah they could,
Speaker 2: like when they're marketing their their big giant bucks, they
Speaker 2: can be like disease free two hundred and fifty incher
Speaker 2: you know, selt that way all right?
Speaker 3: Sk that just shoots out fabreeze?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 1: All right? You want to hear a guy's suggestion to
Speaker 1: the Michigan DNR while run the subject deer?
Speaker 4: Sure do I've heard a few of my day.
Speaker 1: My family owns a farm, and this is not me.
Speaker 1: We don't know a farman southern Michigan. This is someone
Speaker 1: that wrote in My family owns a farm in southern Michigan.
Speaker 1: Every year, we require everyone who hunts with us to
Speaker 1: kill does on our property. For at least the last decade,
Speaker 1: there have been multiple processors in our area that would
Speaker 1: accept cleaned deer as donations free of charge. I would
Speaker 1: regularly drop off donations throughout the season. I have always
Speaker 1: made it a habit of regularly calling processors. I should
Speaker 1: preface this by saying this. The head of Michigan's DNR
Speaker 1: was it last year. Last fall the year before, basically
Speaker 1: wrote a public letter the Dear Biologist of Michiganists Michigan
Speaker 1: saying we need to kill more does and we can't
Speaker 1: get people to kill does. We reported on that, and
Speaker 1: I got a call from Doug Duran reminding me that
Speaker 1: I have often said, when someone tells you there's too
Speaker 1: many blank, there's too many deer, there's too many whatever,
Speaker 1: there's too many bears, always ask by whose measure? Because
Speaker 1: I like to point out I don't know elk hunters.
Speaker 1: I never hear an elk hunter telling me there's too
Speaker 1: many elk. Right, people go out, they want to see elk.
Speaker 1: People go out deer hunt and they want to see deer,
Speaker 1: so when they hear there's too many deer, it puzzles them.
Speaker 1: They didn't feel like they saw too many deer. They
Speaker 1: want to see more deer, but they feel they have
Speaker 1: too many deer and they can't get people to kill
Speaker 1: does And Chad did it.
Speaker 4: He did a good job in that email and that
Speaker 4: note articulating the why. I do think he did a
Speaker 4: good job of trying to explain to the general hunting
Speaker 4: public of Michigan that you addressing that question like, hey,
Speaker 4: I understand you want to see a lot of deer,
Speaker 4: but here are the possible negative outcomes of this the situation.
Speaker 1: He goes on to say, this year, none of our
Speaker 1: processors accept the donations at all. It was explained to
Speaker 1: me by the processors that the state of Michigan now
Speaker 1: requires that each donation must be CWD screened, which takes
Speaker 1: two to three weeks. Then a random meat sample from
Speaker 1: every donated deer needed to be state evaluated for metal
Speaker 1: from bullet fragments. That translates into deer hanging in processors
Speaker 1: or being stored in their freezers for weeks. Therefore, because
Speaker 1: of that storage problem, they're not willing or able to
Speaker 1: participate in the program. He said, I can kill twenty
Speaker 1: to twenty five dos a year, but without being able
Speaker 1: to donate the meat, it's almost impossible for him to
Speaker 1: kill that many does. He also goes on to say,
Speaker 1: why are they charging twenty bucks for an antler this
Speaker 1: deer tag? You should price them to sell and sell
Speaker 1: them at five dollars. He also says Michigan ends their
Speaker 1: deer season in January. Why don't they let it run
Speaker 1: into the spring. If they really want to get killed those,
Speaker 1: I'll say, too bad, you can't donate your deer. Have
Speaker 1: you tried this? Have you tried putting up a sign
Speaker 1: just like how normal people put up no trespassing signs?
Speaker 1: Have you put up tried putting up signs that say
Speaker 1: please do you hunt my place? You will get a
Speaker 1: lot of does killed? Or say put up signs that say,
Speaker 1: if you're interested in harvesting whitetail, does, contact me at blank.
Speaker 2: Put an add the local paper, add the local paper.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for a place to hunt does with
Speaker 1: your kids, please contact me at blank. I think you
Speaker 1: will get a lot of does killed.
Speaker 3: Even at twenty bucks apiece.
Speaker 1: Although I know that Sorry, it's a problem where he's
Speaker 1: writing in about it.
Speaker 4: I think what we found though, is that you almost
Speaker 4: I can't remember who if I spoke to, if this
Speaker 4: was Russ Mason with the DNR at one point or
Speaker 4: fist Chad, But someone I spoke to basically said, no
Speaker 4: matter how they liberalize the regulations with dill harvest, no
Speaker 4: matter how many tags they give out, no lever they
Speaker 4: can push has been able to significantly increase dill harvest.
Speaker 6: Me.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's let's keep it up until early February. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know I could kill any more dogs. There's just yeah,
Speaker 1: people have a certain number they're willing to and but
Speaker 1: if this guy wants to kill does, and now he
Speaker 1: can't shoot them because they don't want to accept them
Speaker 1: at the donation place. I have a feeling in Michigan
Speaker 1: hunters would be really helpful, good old hunters.
Speaker 4: I don't think that it's a bad idea though, to
Speaker 4: consider new ideas, like like having a free done tag
Speaker 4: with every buck hunters come.
Speaker 1: If he if he opened up dog durn wants to shoot.
Speaker 1: Does you know how Doug Duran gets forty does removed
Speaker 1: off his place.
Speaker 3: I had a back, got a line out the door.
Speaker 1: Come shoot the dose please, and what happens people show
Speaker 1: start shooting those forty a year.
Speaker 6: I had an exchange with this gentleman because the first
Speaker 6: thing I did was recommend checking out Doug's.
Speaker 2: Organization sharing the land.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say, saving the land, and that's not
Speaker 6: sharing sharing the land, and he he he's going to
Speaker 6: look into that. But in the past he shared with
Speaker 6: me that he has opened up the land to hunters
Speaker 6: and uh, it's just caused some problems.
Speaker 1: Well, not with Dougs program that Doug vets all the
Speaker 1: That's exactly you have to go through the application process
Speaker 1: to participate that what I.
Speaker 6: Said, I thought that the bar would maybe be much higher.
Speaker 1: So one of the funniest conversations I had around this
Speaker 1: issue is Cal and I. This is Cal's I'm gonna
Speaker 1: steal Cal's joke. Cal and I were hunting on a
Speaker 1: place in Hawaii, a coffee plantation Hawaii where they have
Speaker 1: a lot of problem with pigs rooting everything up. I saw,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you one way to get rid of these pigs.
Speaker 1: Put up a sign that says come hunt picks. And
Speaker 1: he said, do you know what kind of people we
Speaker 1: would get if we put up a sign like that,
Speaker 1: Cal said barbecuers.
Speaker 3: I am so funny.
Speaker 2: I can see the problem this guys have and becoming
Speaker 2: more common though with donation programs.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, well, and then I mean, I guess the
Speaker 5: to the point made by the Michigan dn R, if
Speaker 5: he opens up his place net, there's probably no increased
Speaker 5: dough harvest in that county.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: It's like the people that are going to come shoot
Speaker 5: a dough and his place aren't going to go shoot
Speaker 5: one somewhere else. I'm just basing.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's a person I was just talking with at
Speaker 1: my mom's where I grew up. Okay, this individual his
Speaker 1: grandfather hunted, His father hunted. He just didn't get into it.
Speaker 1: Now he has a boy, and it skipped the generation
Speaker 1: with him, just it was never interested in it. His
Speaker 1: boy is dying to go deer hunting. But here he's
Speaker 1: sort of missed this whole thing, of like he doesn't
Speaker 1: know how the whole thing works. That guy and that
Speaker 1: kid go shoot a shitload of those doughs. In his mind,
Speaker 1: he's like, the more I think about it, I would
Speaker 1: just eat that deer meat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm just saying the macro I don't know if
Speaker 5: it would have the sort of macro effect, then.
Speaker 3: Are you thinking like local huntered local hunters equate to
Speaker 3: doe harvest versus the further away you get from the
Speaker 3: hunting spot, people are less interested in traveling to shoot
Speaker 3: a dough.
Speaker 5: No, I'm just thinking about the I mean the idea
Speaker 5: that liberalizing doe harvest or liberalizing hunting seasons doesn't seem
Speaker 5: to generate more dead does.
Speaker 2: I think if you give, if you people who will
Speaker 2: shoot dose more places to shoot dose, more will get
Speaker 2: if you.
Speaker 5: Went, if you went, if you went to make I
Speaker 5: didn't say this is like I'm fully convinced of it.
Speaker 1: I just threw that out as like a as a Michigander. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mark's a Michigander. I'm telling you this. If everyone in
Speaker 1: Michigan that wanted to shoot a doe this year had
Speaker 1: a place to shoot a dough, there wouldn't be no
Speaker 1: does so so just there would Yeah.
Speaker 4: I gotta I gotta tell you about a pretty cool idea.
Speaker 4: An interesting example of this problem.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: I've been pretty involved with the field to Ford program
Speaker 4: in Michigan and on the back forty and UH, a
Speaker 4: couple of the new hunters that have gone through that program. Uh,
Speaker 4: are are similar to the type of person you're describing,
Speaker 4: somebody who wants more meat.
Speaker 1: They're getting into hunting.
Speaker 4: They're trying to find ways to you know, fill the freezer,
Speaker 4: and the biggest problem they've had is found finding places
Speaker 4: to do it. And so at first, you know, they
Speaker 4: started trying to hunt public land, and then they've tried
Speaker 4: to get private access and they continue to struggle, like
Speaker 4: go to a lot of places and there's guys that
Speaker 4: are already hunting it, or there's people that will let
Speaker 4: them hunt, but they're really just focused on bucks that
Speaker 4: they don't want them in there hunting for does when
Speaker 4: they're guys that there hunting for bucks. But they bumped
Speaker 4: into a farmer, and this farmer brought the fact that
Speaker 4: he gets these depredation permits and he has twenty five
Speaker 4: or fifty dough tags a year and can never get
Speaker 4: enough people to use them really m hm, And he
Speaker 4: would love these deer get shot, but can't get anyone
Speaker 4: to do it.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 4: So my two friends said, well, hey, that's all we want.
Speaker 4: We want to shoot does, and hey we don't mind
Speaker 4: doing it in the summer. That's great, We'll do it,
Speaker 4: and so they have started and I'm jumping the gun
Speaker 4: for them here, but they are going to pilot a
Speaker 4: program this year in which they try to connect new
Speaker 4: hunters looking for access, trying to find ways to kill
Speaker 4: deer with farmers with depredation permits who want does killed.
Speaker 4: So get a bunch of new hunters who want to
Speaker 4: have an opportunity to do this out there in the
Speaker 4: summer when nobody else wants to do it. But they
Speaker 4: don't care they can't shoot bucks because they don't know
Speaker 4: about shooting a buck.
Speaker 1: They just want to shooting dose.
Speaker 4: So this year they're going to be doing that and uh,
Speaker 4: we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 2: Heck, yeah, the summer.
Speaker 1: How low do they want? Dear? Like I always get,
Speaker 1: I get a little as soon as people come up
Speaker 1: with like great deer extermination ideas, I always get like
Speaker 1: a little nervous. Sure, we've been through this before. Remember
Speaker 1: I just read a minute ago, I killed thirty three
Speaker 1: bald eagles in one day.
Speaker 3: Right, all of a sudden, you're like, boy, there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of bald eagles.
Speaker 1: And then they got to a point where they had
Speaker 1: to put him on the ESA, right.
Speaker 3: So what Uh, Doug always brings up earn a buck,
Speaker 3: but it's everybody got pissed. Everybody it was that was
Speaker 3: it effective though? Yeah, well other than making people pissed.
Speaker 1: I don't know he he had. I wish Doug was
Speaker 1: here to explain it. But I'm sure this wasn't so
Speaker 1: widespread in the gate of the program, but it spawned
Speaker 1: this whole industry of can I borrow your dough? But
Speaker 1: what I do not follow your dough?
Speaker 4: As I understand it, though, the rate of CWD spread
Speaker 4: during that time period was significantly lower as compared to
Speaker 4: when they removed that. It's like this kind of trend
Speaker 4: dramatically increased because they were able to slow down. They
Speaker 4: were able to increase harvest and slow that spread. And
Speaker 4: when they removed that tool from the toolbox, it changed things.
Speaker 4: And it also from the folks that I know in
Speaker 4: Wisconsin who were interested in having a more natural deer
Speaker 4: herd and balanced age structure, balanced buck todal ratio, things
Speaker 4: were a lot better.
Speaker 1: During that time period. On that book. We should clarify
Speaker 1: just in case someone's new to wildlife politics and all that.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about wanting to reduce deer numbers, want
Speaker 1: of the lower deer numbers. There's historically been a single driver.
Speaker 1: The single driver's been agricultu damage.
Speaker 4: Right, yep, Well you're saying white people would want to historically,
Speaker 4: and insurance company.
Speaker 1: Just heard it. That's kind of like I used to
Speaker 1: cite that, and then I've read in places where people
Speaker 1: have tried to go in and search like sort of
Speaker 1: the powerful car insurance lobby moving to lower deer numbers.
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of a thing that's not I
Speaker 1: could be wrong. Someone could write in if they found otherwise.
Speaker 1: That's been kind of proven as a thing that's like
Speaker 1: not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the farm lobby has a lot of.
Speaker 1: Pool with that. The I always thought that the auto insurres.
Speaker 1: Someone's like, that's that's like an urban legend. The auto
Speaker 1: insurers were leaning on state game agencies to lower deer
Speaker 1: populations to lower claims. If someone can contradict that, I
Speaker 1: don't really know. I always cited that, and then I
Speaker 1: can't even remember who told me that. It's kind of horseshit.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Just on the on the dough harvest side of things,
Speaker 3: you know, I got to go hang out with Doug
Speaker 3: for opening weekend and days after. I was shocked at
Speaker 3: the just general buck activity despite what to my you know,
Speaker 3: tender Montana ears sounded like an absolute battle going on
Speaker 3: for three days straight. More shots opening morning that I
Speaker 3: would hear walking around in Western Hills in a whole season, and.
Speaker 1: That's the big hunt for you, Oh dude, it's still
Speaker 1: seeing bucks run around.
Speaker 3: And still seeing bucks running around. I shot a really cool,
Speaker 3: bigger buck and went to drag it out to the
Speaker 3: closest like four wheeler track road and kind of came
Speaker 3: into this opening where one of Doug's buddies had been
Speaker 3: shooting all morning. Shooting would be the accurate, accurate description,
Speaker 3: And there's it looked like a scene from like The
Speaker 3: Walking Dead. There were dose legs up everywhere you looked
Speaker 3: in this field, to the degree that I was like,
Speaker 3: you know what, I'm just gonna fade back into the
Speaker 3: canopy and wait until it's dark dark before I go
Speaker 3: walking out into this field.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: And but the proximity kind of going back to this
Speaker 3: guy right and end to a processor is really close.
Speaker 3: You know, you start stacking up all those does it's
Speaker 3: a lot of work. But like there's a big part
Speaker 3: of me that wants to go back, just shoot dose,
Speaker 3: take them to that processor because the broughtwurst was so good, unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Cal's Brod's holy shit.
Speaker 3: It's nuts. And I liked making sausage. But that's a
Speaker 3: lot of work too.
Speaker 1: Uh. Back to this thought for a second. Historically, too
Speaker 1: many deer meant too much agricultural damage. That's still is.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to explain that where are people getting
Speaker 1: the idea of too many deer? Where's it coming from? Now?
Speaker 1: It's that that remains constant agricultural damage. And there's this
Speaker 1: other idea laid on that that too many deer two
Speaker 1: dens of populations of deer facilitates an accelerated disease transmission.
Speaker 4: And two other things. Oh please, you've got herd health things,
Speaker 4: and you have habitat health as well. So when you have,
Speaker 4: like you know in Dug's area, so many deer, here's
Speaker 4: a really hard time, you know, seeing okra generation. There's
Speaker 4: many many states across the country where you have these
Speaker 4: browse lines where it's nothing five feet down, and then
Speaker 4: you see leaf structure again, So we see all sorts
Speaker 4: of cascading biodiversity effects by these exorbitantly high white tailed
Speaker 4: deer populations, which then and this is I think where
Speaker 4: the standard deer hunter becomes interested. When you have a
Speaker 4: unnaturally high deer population, your deer hunting experience this might
Speaker 4: be different than you would imagine, but it's not going
Speaker 4: to be as great because you're going to see a
Speaker 4: whole lot of deer, but you're not going to see
Speaker 4: a lot of natural deer behavior that you would in
Speaker 4: a more balanced, healthy deer herd. When you have a
Speaker 4: relatively balanced dough to buck ratio, you are going to
Speaker 4: see a much more exciting rut. Bucks are actually going
Speaker 4: to do running things. They're going to be chasing, they're
Speaker 4: gonna be fighting, they're gonna be doing all that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff you're going to have. When you have way
Speaker 4: too many doughs compared to bucks, it's going to stagger
Speaker 4: and mess up. The breeding and the fawn drop and
Speaker 4: things like that all get out of whack, and so
Speaker 4: you have this kind of cascade of different effects when
Speaker 4: you do not have the natural balance that you achieve
Speaker 4: when you have some level of you know, it's like
Speaker 4: thirty dos to one buck is just not natural. We
Speaker 4: get that in some of these states and these very
Speaker 4: very very high deer populations. It messes a lot of
Speaker 4: stuff up that impacts not only the habitat but our
Speaker 4: experience as hunters too.
Speaker 1: Okay, so egg disease and Mark Kenyon, Man, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get all into Governor's Tags. Sh'd save that krin, you
Speaker 1: think so?
Speaker 2: I mean saving that one for a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think if we do it, it's gonna risk
Speaker 3: we're gonna generate a longer format conversation in the future.
Speaker 3: So I'd say we just talk about it because we
Speaker 3: can do it quick.
Speaker 1: What's that? Okay? Tell me? Uh, let me tee it up.
Speaker 2: Are we gonna give our own like thumbs up thumbs
Speaker 2: down on our thoughts?
Speaker 1: How many times have I told the story about the
Speaker 1: GMO guy that came on?
Speaker 2: Four?
Speaker 1: Four times? Here's the fifth. I'm not gonna do it. It's
Speaker 1: my favorite quote of all time. Actually, my favorite quote
Speaker 1: of all time was from Ike Turner. But I'm not
Speaker 1: going to tell that quote Governor's Tags. All right, sure,
Speaker 1: picture you have a wildlife resource. Don't really have to
Speaker 1: do this. Picture. You have a wildlife resource where the
Speaker 1: demand exceeds the supply wildly exceeds, where the demand wildly
Speaker 1: exceeds the supply. In this case, we'll talk about bighorn sheep.
Speaker 1: You have thousands and thousands of people in every western
Speaker 1: state want to draw a bighorn sheep tag, but there's
Speaker 1: only one hundred or two hundred or fifty available, or
Speaker 1: in the case of Texas, one available. How do you
Speaker 1: allocate those tags? Generally, historically in this country we have
Speaker 1: given them out in a democratic fashion, which is consistent
Speaker 1: with our wildlife management values, where we have lotteries. You
Speaker 1: send in a few bucks, your name, you know, as
Speaker 1: we say, your name goes into a hat, and there
Speaker 1: is a lottery drawing and you pull them out. At
Speaker 1: some point in time, I was hoping to get a
Speaker 1: governor's tag expert on to talk about the inception of
Speaker 1: governor's tags. At some point in time, I don't know
Speaker 1: when someone had the bright idea to say, man, why
Speaker 1: don't we do that, like give them out to all
Speaker 1: the little people through lottery. But let's just sell one
Speaker 1: and see how much it goes for, and then we'll
Speaker 1: take all that money. Because that's gonna look horrible, but
Speaker 1: we'll take all that money and use it for sheep habitat.
Speaker 1: And they said let's just see what happen. Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out that what happens is this, people are willing
Speaker 1: to pay one hundred thousand dollars, two hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars, four hundred thousand dollars, and now
Speaker 1: close to five hundred thousand dollars to jump in line
Speaker 1: a line that you might not ever get to the
Speaker 1: front of if you're a Joe blow most people will
Speaker 1: never get They'll never get to the front of the line.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that getting to the front of
Speaker 1: the line on a big horn sheep tag is worth
Speaker 1: regularly hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's not.
Speaker 2: And the idea is so successful in raising money that
Speaker 2: it spread out to a bunch of other species too.
Speaker 1: Yep. Then they're like, well, shit, let's try that with deer.
Speaker 1: Let's try it out, try anelo anything where the demand
Speaker 1: exceeds the supply. With that said, take it away.
Speaker 2: Well, there's only a finite number of tags, right, I
Speaker 2: just said that. So when when someone with the money
Speaker 2: can go in there and win that auction, that tag
Speaker 2: is coming from a pool of tags.
Speaker 1: I don't agree with that that I don't think it
Speaker 1: comes from the pool. I think they made an extra okay,
Speaker 1: because you just said there's like I have laugh. Well,
Speaker 1: because think of how they did it. Think of how
Speaker 1: Arizona did Arizona spawned this whole conversation because I'll point
Speaker 1: out just a spoiler alert, Arizona's Game Commission voted to
Speaker 1: get rid of governor tags in Arizona. When you get
Speaker 1: a governor's tag, your tag, Like if you draw a
Speaker 1: big horn tag in Arizona, you have a season in
Speaker 1: a unit when you buy the governor's tag. To sweeten
Speaker 1: the deal, this is insane. Seeming to sweeten the deal,
Speaker 1: they said, oh, in your season, Bud, three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty five days is your hunting season, and you can
Speaker 1: hunt any unit that is open to sheep hunting. That
Speaker 1: tag did not come out of the pool.
Speaker 2: Even if it didn't, that guy goes let's say you're
Speaker 2: the one dude who draws the big horn tag and
Speaker 2: a unit. Yep, the governor's guy goes in there and
Speaker 2: shoots the.
Speaker 1: Big ram in there. Oh yeah, and he's got months right,
Speaker 1: he can do it. When you find out if your
Speaker 1: season opens like September fifteenth, that's some bitch as all
Speaker 1: summer to hunt.
Speaker 3: So I will I will say, like in the state
Speaker 3: of Idaho, there's a Governor's tag for the the numbers increased,
Speaker 3: but Hell's Canyon, the Hell's Canyon tag, arguably the best
Speaker 3: big horn sheep tag in the state of Idaho, is
Speaker 3: at one. There's one tag. This is I get. I
Speaker 3: don't know what it's at right now, but at the time,
Speaker 3: one tag. And they factored in that there's a ninety
Speaker 3: chance that if the Governor's tag or whoever gets the
Speaker 3: Governor's tag is gonna hunt that unit, gonna hunt that unit,
Speaker 3: which is why there's one tag.
Speaker 1: Oh, because it would have been too because it would
Speaker 1: have been okay, So there's one extra.
Speaker 5: Yes, there's it's not necessarily taking a tag out of
Speaker 5: the pool, but there's gonna be one more dead ram.
Speaker 1: Yep. Now, I gotta before what we even get into
Speaker 1: some listener feedback on this, I gotta say I am
Speaker 1: so torn on the issue that is the It is
Speaker 1: one of the very few areas of wildlife politics where
Speaker 1: I do not have an opinion.
Speaker 3: Bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can think of a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: I don't have an opinion.
Speaker 3: Done this is the one area. One of the area
Speaker 3: Stephen Ranella tattooed on his gravestone.
Speaker 2: I can't think anything good or bad to say about it.
Speaker 1: No, no, I can think of all kinds of good and bad.
Speaker 1: I think, no, not that I don't know. I didn't
Speaker 1: mean that. I have conflicting opinions, meaning okay, you're right,
Speaker 1: cal I'll phrase it differently. If I was emperor of
Speaker 1: the country and they said, oh, yeah, one last thing,
Speaker 1: what about governor's tags, I'd be like, I still haven't decided, Okay,
Speaker 1: I got to think about it longer. Yeah, that's what I.
Speaker 4: Just when I think about it, I go back to what, Yeah,
Speaker 4: what's better for the resource in the end, and in
Speaker 4: then the government a million dollars in habitat respiration the resource.
Speaker 1: It's better for the resource. What's better for us emotionally.
Speaker 3: Better for the resource.
Speaker 1: But it's not.
Speaker 2: It doesn't American mode.
Speaker 5: If you have ten governors tags, right, if it's simply
Speaker 5: about maximizing the slippers of the market value for the
Speaker 5: economic value of those wildlife resources, you'd auction all the tags.
Speaker 1: I think there is.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say that the Arizona the guy the
Speaker 5: email from the guy in Arizona, I think, pointed out
Speaker 5: something that's relevant to us here in Montana, and that
Speaker 5: is that there are other ways of of allocating these
Speaker 5: special opportunities, in one of which is because he I
Speaker 5: believe he pointed out that in Arizona they're not doing
Speaker 5: away with.
Speaker 1: Well, i'll tell you what he said, unless you'd like
Speaker 1: to read it.
Speaker 5: No, no, go ahead.
Speaker 1: It was so well worded, I think it. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: this gentleman describes himself as someone who has been intimately
Speaker 1: involved in the commission appointments and Arizona wildlife policy. He
Speaker 1: wrote in a bullet pointed email. He goes on to
Speaker 1: say the rhetoric that Arizona votes to eliminate governor's tags
Speaker 1: is wrong. Okay, how are that'd be true? Well, he
Speaker 1: says this, Arizona has quote special big game tags which
Speaker 1: are administered by the Game and Fish Department along with
Speaker 1: other tags, rather than the more political administration of governor's
Speaker 1: tags and other states. Okay, so he's saying they don't
Speaker 1: actually have a thing. They don't have a pool called
Speaker 1: governor's tags. They have special big game tags. He's getting
Speaker 1: a little bit into semantics here, but that's fine. The
Speaker 1: Arizona Game and Fish Commission did not eliminate special big
Speaker 1: game tags. They voted to phase out the practice of
Speaker 1: allocating these tags through an auction process in order to
Speaker 1: rely more on raffles. So he is making a semantic argument.
Speaker 1: They don't call them governor's tags, but in defense of
Speaker 1: our language, they are functional Colloquially, they are colloquially functionally
Speaker 1: govern tags. Well, it's not the governor.
Speaker 5: When you think of a governor's tag, that's what it
Speaker 5: looks like.
Speaker 1: It's an auction.
Speaker 4: Now is the will the raffle? Do they believe the
Speaker 4: raffle will bring in equivalent funds?
Speaker 2: What did the Montana to be determined?
Speaker 1: I don't think so, But let me go on, since
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. This is the same individual since
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Auction tags. Okay, so what we've
Speaker 1: been calling governor's tags. Auction tags have accounted for seventy
Speaker 1: percent of the thirty two point four million dollars raised
Speaker 1: by special tags, with raffle tags raising thirty percent, or
Speaker 1: nearly ten million dollars.
Speaker 2: What my question would be how many tags were auctioned
Speaker 2: and how many were raffled?
Speaker 1: I was wondering the same thing. I wish this email
Speaker 1: got into that, But he gives information where you would
Speaker 1: go find it, because he sends in a whole slide
Speaker 1: presentation on the subject. Now he goes on to say,
Speaker 1: while the sheep and meal deer tags have generated eye
Speaker 1: popping headlines, the department's data shows that for other species,
Speaker 1: including turkey, bison, coosier, black bear, mountain lion, have Alina
Speaker 1: pronghorn raffle tags generate more than auction tags. Okay, so
Speaker 1: it's species dependent. He has another thing, the notion that
Speaker 1: Arizona and now I don't think he got this from us,
Speaker 1: but the notion that Arizona is becoming purple and therefore
Speaker 1: the Commission's being influenced by anti hunting interests is flat
Speaker 1: out wrong. Oh I know where this came from. There's
Speaker 1: a guy that's coming on the podcast, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: let him put this in his own phrasing. We have
Speaker 1: a guest in the future coming on the podcast who
Speaker 1: felt that the move against governor's tags was a anti
Speaker 1: hunting thing. Okay, and I might have quoted him on
Speaker 1: that anti like that. It's anti hunters arguing against governor's tags.
Speaker 1: How dare they auction off the life of an animal.
Speaker 1: Oh but this individual who will be coming on the
Speaker 1: podcast expressed to me, I don't want to say his
Speaker 1: name because it was a private conversation and I don't
Speaker 1: want to quote him on it, expressed to me that
Speaker 1: he felt like it was a loss to the anti hunters. Hmmm, interesting,
Speaker 1: this guy says that's flat out wrong. The commissioners very
Speaker 1: very clearly articulated their reasons for taking this step. Retired
Speaker 1: US Army Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan said he understood the
Speaker 1: argument that the ends justify the means, meaning he understands
Speaker 1: the argument that, hey, it's a lot of money, but
Speaker 1: it's not democratic. And he says, we cannot compromise our
Speaker 1: values to make money, meaning it might be ugly to
Speaker 1: auction off hunting opportunities when you have people that in
Speaker 1: ways in which it excludes the general population. Sure, but
Speaker 1: that's true, but it's a compromise of our values. Therefore
Speaker 1: the money shouldn't matter. He also cited founding principles of
Speaker 1: this nation and inserting that we should not be setting
Speaker 1: aside a special privilege for the rich and elite. He
Speaker 1: spent thirty seven years in the military. That's not what
Speaker 1: he was there defending. Okay, he was not there to
Speaker 1: defend special privileges for the rich and elite. He was
Speaker 1: there to defend all Americans, which influenced his decision that
Speaker 1: governor tags are on American Former chair James Sorry, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna mutilate this name. James Goner was cited, among other concerns,
Speaker 1: the concentration of these tags in just a few hands,
Speaker 1: meaning check this out. Thirty six governor's tags have fallen
Speaker 1: into the hands of three individuals. Wow, which is also
Speaker 1: in the slide. He goes on to say these individuals
Speaker 1: are not sympathetic to anti hunting advocates. Should I keep
Speaker 1: going about this guy? This guy's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean it's all I'll get info.
Speaker 1: I served as a policy advisor to the previous Arizona
Speaker 1: governor and was personally involved in the selection of several
Speaker 1: of these commissioners. I am intimately familiar with the process
Speaker 1: for the appointment of the others and can state confidently confident. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can state confidently. Why am I saying I can
Speaker 1: say confident, But he's saying he can state with confidence.
Speaker 1: There you go that the wishes of anti hunters played
Speaker 1: no role in these appointments. I was similarly, similarly, very
Speaker 1: closely involved in the banning of trail cameras in the
Speaker 1: state for taking of wildlife. As we're a number of
Speaker 1: these commissioners, I can tell you personally that the decision
Speaker 1: was driven by hunters for the benefit of hunters and
Speaker 1: our model of wildlife conservation. To see either of these
Speaker 1: actions as being motivated by anti hunting forces is just
Speaker 1: flat out wrong. Yeah shuck, I like that guy. Yep,
Speaker 1: it's good. Email Okay, who wants to do? Email number two?
Speaker 3: I can read it. I haven't read it before.
Speaker 1: Who I'm looking forward to? Email number three?
Speaker 3: This is from Mark, not the guy that's sitting next
Speaker 3: to me, but he describes himself as a spare time
Speaker 3: economist and a spare time hunter. The idea that governor's
Speaker 3: tags or any other market mechanisms to manage scarce wildlife
Speaker 3: resources counter the democratic allocation pillar of the North American
Speaker 3: model of wildlife conservation is a misconception held by many
Speaker 3: conservationists and hunters. When discussing a scarce resource like a
Speaker 3: big horn, cheap tag, a random draw isn't democratic in
Speaker 3: the same way electing a president is everyone doesn't vote
Speaker 3: for who gets the tag. John Stikovich of Cleveland, Ohio
Speaker 3: isn't the favorite to win because he saved an eleven
Speaker 3: month old baby from a burning building and deserves that
Speaker 3: the most parentheses. True stories, random draws are just one
Speaker 3: imperfect way to allocate resources when demand exceed supply. It
Speaker 3: just so happens that that it is an indisputably suboptimal
Speaker 3: way to do so.
Speaker 1: No, he's contradicting himself. A merit based system is not
Speaker 1: democratic in this case. That's merit based. Does he ever
Speaker 1: think we're going to hold an election to see who
Speaker 1: gets the governor's day.
Speaker 3: Everybody's essays need to be to do it now. The
Speaker 3: debate's going to be held halfway through.
Speaker 5: It's democratic in the sense of everyone's equal before the law,
Speaker 5: like democratic culture voting one.
Speaker 1: If the governor was given the tag and the governor
Speaker 1: could honor a person who deserved it on merit, it
Speaker 1: would open up big problems with cronyism.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't raise money either.
Speaker 1: But get.
Speaker 3: He's saying the market will decide who's right or wrong.
Speaker 3: You shouldn't take seriously state game agencies complaining about managing
Speaker 3: white tailed dough populations while still charging for licenses to
Speaker 3: hunt them. If they were really felt that there were
Speaker 3: too many deer on the landscape, they would reimburse hunters
Speaker 3: for shooting. Does not charge them?
Speaker 1: All right, I'm done. In general, there was zeno state agency.
Speaker 3: In general, game agencies unwillingness to manage.
Speaker 1: That they had to run out of deficit. Not that
Speaker 1: state agencies can get revenue to fund biologists. How about
Speaker 1: the state agency with now that we've stripped its funding
Speaker 1: source anyways, now needs to pay people to hunt? Does yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh, I am as Steve put it a way ass
Speaker 3: pro governor's tag person who wants to read that one
Speaker 3: I can jump the brod well.
Speaker 2: It may be true that people used to have a
Speaker 2: we're all in it together attitude, and that years ago
Speaker 2: one was not able to pay extra to skip lines
Speaker 2: at Disneyland or bored an airplane faster. This tear system
Speaker 2: is most certainly not new. An argument could be made
Speaker 2: that the average American today is is today more aware
Speaker 2: of the financial tier systems that inherently exists in a
Speaker 2: capital society than they were thirty, forty or fifty years ago.
Speaker 2: But the fact that rich people are able to buy
Speaker 2: things that are either coveted or rare and thus expensive,
Speaker 2: while poor middle class people are unable to buy such things.
Speaker 2: Is in no way a surprise to anyone, nor has
Speaker 2: it ever been a surprise to anyone. The foundation of
Speaker 2: this argument is what exact is exactly equal opportunity means,
Speaker 2: and where it exists in our North American model of
Speaker 2: wildlife conservation. I'm not following that regarding the draw system,
Speaker 2: which is integral to our conservation model, equal opportunity means
Speaker 2: that every American has an equal right to apply. It
Speaker 2: does not mean that every American has an equal ability
Speaker 2: to apply. Someone who asks the financial means to apply
Speaker 2: across multiple states of which they are not a resident
Speaker 2: stands a much greater chance of being successful in a
Speaker 2: draw by virtue of having entered more draws. In the opposite,
Speaker 2: someone who does not have the financial means has a
Speaker 2: significantly lower probability of successfully drawing a tag. There's inherent
Speaker 2: inequality in this, but it is in financial ability, not
Speaker 2: opportunity to apply. In the very same vein he's gonna.
Speaker 1: Get to this, he's gonna get to And since anyone
Speaker 1: can bid on a governor's.
Speaker 2: Sag right in the very same vein. Everyone has afforded
Speaker 2: the equal opportunity to write of bidding on a governor's tag.
Speaker 2: Yet not everyone is afforded an equal financial ability. The
Speaker 2: person with a greater financial means will be more successful
Speaker 2: in terms of attaining a tag. The buck stops here there.
Speaker 1: I think you know what? Can you read his last sentence?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: There's a litany of other pro governor's tag arguments, but
Speaker 2: I believe this to be the most compelling. Sincerely, Sexton.
Speaker 1: Now when I hear a name like Saxton, you're immediately suspicious.
Speaker 1: He's got grease, he's got jingle. Of course, Saxton name
Speaker 1: Saxons because rich people know how to name their kids
Speaker 1: to sound rich.
Speaker 3: Right, you don't get that like this is this is
Speaker 3: a better argument.
Speaker 2: It is a better argument, but the whole like where
Speaker 2: it exists in our North American model, Like, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not the King's deer, so I'm not sure what
Speaker 2: he's getting.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean this, right, is an argument that
Speaker 3: you could apply to anything. Right, It's like, well, the
Speaker 3: systems messed up, Yeah, so why pick on this part
Speaker 3: of the system, cherry pick this when this is our
Speaker 3: messed up over here too. If you're really invested in
Speaker 3: making it equitable and democratic, then you need to tear
Speaker 3: down this part of the system.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna sum up email for yep. I was gonna
Speaker 1: sum it up. Y'all's jealous. People jealous about all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff. They don't realize they're jealous. Y'all's jealous of
Speaker 1: people who can buy governor's tags. That's what this is
Speaker 1: all about, yep.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the one of the things that
Speaker 5: the argument about, if you can't afford it, you're just
Speaker 5: why is that we own the wildlife right, and so
Speaker 5: it's not the same as like going to Disneyland and
Speaker 5: paying to cut in line. It's a public resource and
Speaker 5: everybody has a right to say how they think it
Speaker 5: should be managed.
Speaker 1: This guy goes on here's email number five. He's like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I'm torn. Here's a couple of questions. Why is there
Speaker 1: only one tag? If one tag is worth six hundred,
Speaker 1: then why not sell two tags for one point two million? Two?
Speaker 1: His second question is the amount raised? Truly the thing
Speaker 1: that allows this to be considered If the tag went
Speaker 1: for twenty thousand dollars one year rather than six hundred
Speaker 1: dollars six hundred thousand, would it still be worth violating
Speaker 1: the North American conservation model or is it the amount
Speaker 1: of money?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What what?
Speaker 3: There's definitely a threshold. Yeah, definitely threshold. All good questions,
Speaker 3: he believed.
Speaker 1: Here's another question he's got. I believe asking our governor's
Speaker 1: tag's good hides behind words the truth. The true question, then,
Speaker 1: is are our ethical beliefs for sale? In pointing out
Speaker 1: this threshold. We'll do it for six, we'll do it
Speaker 1: lest it, not do extremes. We'll do it for two hundred,
Speaker 1: not gonna do that for ten? Okay, uh yeah, At
Speaker 1: what point do we go, like, well, for that amount
Speaker 1: of money? I think there's a movie about this one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Demi Moore, some guy. Yeah, they're like a
Speaker 1: loyal couple, but she could get a bunch of grease,
Speaker 1: which is slang for jingle, which is slang for night
Speaker 1: with everyone has a price.
Speaker 3: Leaving Las Vegas. Not leaving Las Vegas was the.
Speaker 5: You know that one movie that Nick Cage did, Raising Arizona.
Speaker 2: I think you can just the opposite though. If it
Speaker 2: was only twenty thousand, people be like, oh that's cool,
Speaker 2: But it would they wouldn't get so pissed.
Speaker 1: Because of because of email number four, because y'all's jealous
Speaker 1: and you're and you're more jealous of a dude with
Speaker 1: massive grease.
Speaker 2: Totally, because you're like, I know that seven hundred thousand
Speaker 2: for that antelope island mule deer tag, Like it's like
Speaker 2: a drop in the bucket for that guy. He didn't
Speaker 2: give a shit.
Speaker 1: What if it went the opposite way though?
Speaker 4: What if what if I told you that such and
Speaker 4: such a Saxon guy was going to put in thirty
Speaker 4: million dollars enough to pay double the entire Saxon bombuler
Speaker 4: the seven Yeah, what if it was such an astronomical
Speaker 4: amount that it could change everything that state was able
Speaker 4: to do? Is there is there a tier where it's
Speaker 4: like undeniably useful we have right?
Speaker 1: I mean, if someone said, hey, man, I'm going to
Speaker 1: give you a billion dollar and you can take that
Speaker 1: billion dollars and spend it on wildlife habitat. But here's
Speaker 1: the rub, I'm gonna shoot one of them.
Speaker 5: She's and that she would have died that winter anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're giving musks and my das here.
Speaker 7: Would you just said no, no, no, no, we should
Speaker 7: introduce into evidence the Montana Bha experiment this year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then we're gonna finish Krinn wrote end.
Speaker 3: Which is which is raffle the auction, right, And and
Speaker 3: I think there's a bunch of ways that I find
Speaker 3: to be like irrefutable that this should If we're gonna
Speaker 3: do fundraising this way, it should be through raffle, not
Speaker 3: through auction.
Speaker 1: And like.
Speaker 3: The wild cheap situation is the best example that we have, right, Like,
Speaker 3: there's no data out there that says, you know, a
Speaker 3: hell of a lot more people would be invested in
Speaker 3: big horn cheap conservation if they had some way to
Speaker 3: access bighorn sheep or even the opportunity at big horns.
Speaker 1: There's no data supporting that.
Speaker 3: Right, But you're like, Okay, you could have your name
Speaker 3: in the hat for a big horn sheep tag for
Speaker 3: five bucks, but that chance doesn't really exist, right. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, like once a year, we all
Speaker 3: gather in a room and we pat each other on
Speaker 3: the backs by being like that dude is getting his
Speaker 3: third World Slam of sheep. What a conservationist, right, And
Speaker 3: he'd I mean six hundred and fifty thousand dollars ah
Speaker 3: what a conservationist. Right, That same conservationist can buy six
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of raffle tickets, right
Speaker 3: and be like, what a great conservationist. He's just not
Speaker 3: guaranteed the sheep hunt to go with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, here's the thing though, My wife recently bid
Speaker 1: on a thing where you get to go get donuts
Speaker 1: with the school resource officer and a fundraiser for the school. Yep,
Speaker 1: it's like donuts with Tom the cop. Uh. She could
Speaker 1: have just given that money, not gone to donuts with
Speaker 1: that cop.
Speaker 3: But he's super good looking, but he listens to her
Speaker 3: dropping on the neighboring tables one thousand attention.
Speaker 1: It was actually, Uh, the intention was that our kids
Speaker 1: would get to go get donuts with the cops. I
Speaker 1: don't like this. I don't like this.
Speaker 3: It seems like.
Speaker 1: Is to go to donuts with the cops in order
Speaker 1: to be heard.
Speaker 3: Okay. So the Montana example that that Randall brought up,
Speaker 3: Montana BHA gets the statewide mule deer tag this year
Speaker 3: and and typically the state will give it to different
Speaker 3: conservation groups as that fundraising mechanism the very typical way
Speaker 3: of fundraising with the tag, right, the conservation group doesn't
Speaker 3: get the money from the tag. The conservation group gets
Speaker 3: to use that tag as kind of like the carrot
Speaker 3: to bait folks into a fancy banquet where that tag
Speaker 3: gets auctioned off.
Speaker 1: Oh that's how that works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they's like.
Speaker 4: Raff off a bunch of other things, and then they
Speaker 4: raffle off a bunch of other things.
Speaker 1: To make their money.
Speaker 3: But this it's a decoy, yes, really, yeah, yep, because
Speaker 3: you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: Know how I thought it worked, but I didn't know
Speaker 1: that well.
Speaker 3: Because arguments like this, right, these states that have those
Speaker 3: those tags, that money has got to go back to
Speaker 3: the conservation of that species, for the habitat of that species,
Speaker 3: for the benefit of bighorn cheap or moose or goats
Speaker 3: or mule.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, everything you're saying makes sense as their thought.
Speaker 5: I think they get a cut, or they can take
Speaker 5: a cut.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, there's like the but it's outlined in here, right, you're.
Speaker 1: Right, it doesn't go into their general fund, right, the.
Speaker 3: Handling fee, so you know, yep, it's twenty bucks a chance,
Speaker 3: but your card gets danged for twenty two fifty type
Speaker 3: of thing. So anyway, what was interesting here is like
Speaker 3: we talked about like you put in six hundred thousand
Speaker 3: dollars at auction, but you could put six hundred thousand
Speaker 3: dollars into the raffle if you really wanted to do that.
Speaker 3: Nobody did that. So historically the highest price the Montanas,
Speaker 3: the statewide Montana mule deer tag has ever gone for,
Speaker 3: was forty one thousand dollars. A lot of money for
Speaker 3: mule deer tag. Nowhere nearer the amount of money that
Speaker 3: mule deer tags and other states go for it to.
Speaker 1: We don't have that kind of mild are yeah, because
Speaker 1: we get to hunt them all through the front.
Speaker 3: Well, the raffle version raised fifty six swenty dollars, a
Speaker 3: thirty eight percent increase from the all time high. And
Speaker 3: what's interesting is the the mean purchase price was forty
Speaker 3: three dollars, so kind of on average, two chances to
Speaker 3: name in the hat per participant, yep, right, so you know,
Speaker 3: very equitable. It was spread really evenly amongst the people
Speaker 3: who chose to participate.
Speaker 1: Tank of gas ranging to two tanks of gas, and
Speaker 1: the guys, the guy.
Speaker 5: Who actually won, The guy who actually won spent like
Speaker 5: under one hundred dollars or something. He spent one hundred
Speaker 5: bucks on tickets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he spent one hundred bucks through the winner.
Speaker 1: I think that that could be the start of the arms, right,
Speaker 1: I think that in that case, you made more off
Speaker 1: a mule around raffle in Montana. I don't think that
Speaker 1: you would that that's that's not going to hold true
Speaker 1: in big horns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like I would love to see that. So
Speaker 3: if the marketing mechanism were to change from curating individual
Speaker 3: donors with super deep pockets, right, like you don't hold
Speaker 3: a raffle or an auction like that and being like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, a totally random person off the street
Speaker 3: walked in here and bought that thing. Can you believe that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Is not done right?
Speaker 1: You know the.
Speaker 3: Person or the top two people who are going to
Speaker 3: end up with.
Speaker 1: They're in communication with the people that are going to
Speaker 1: buy it.
Speaker 3: Yes, yep. So if you took that level of effort
Speaker 3: and did a nationwide.
Speaker 2: Ideally what's five hundred thousand at fifty bucks an entry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just a matter of removing some number of zeros.
Speaker 2: And like, would you get that many people to do it?
Speaker 2: I bet you would.
Speaker 3: Well, but and you advertise to these areas that are like,
Speaker 3: I am so detached from big horn sheep, I don't
Speaker 3: even participate, right, And I'm just saying, like, anecdotally, in
Speaker 3: the state of Montana, as we increased the bar price
Speaker 3: wise for these speed that are very very limited, right,
Speaker 3: the supply demand that we already talked about. I had
Speaker 3: people within my personal circle that there was never ever
Speaker 3: a question, nor would there ever be a question of
Speaker 3: how serious a hunter they are. But they were just
Speaker 3: like unpriced out of the game, and they just made
Speaker 3: that decision early on. I can't float two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty bucks out there for a chance. I'm just going
Speaker 3: to concentrate on other things. So I mean, whether you
Speaker 3: think that's a significant number or not, that is happening.
Speaker 3: So I want to know if we said, here's the
Speaker 3: places that don't participate in the conservation of this species,
Speaker 3: and we put our efforts into saying like, okay, here's
Speaker 3: a way, would that then lead to greater participation in
Speaker 3: the conservation of that species in general?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Because well, I had threw five dollars in and then
Speaker 3: I read some stuff on big horn sheep, and boy,
Speaker 3: I like that idea. Now I'm just a little more
Speaker 3: invested than I was.
Speaker 1: You know that.
Speaker 4: You know that sheep day we went to at the
Speaker 4: Hunt Expo where we put in our raffle tickets and
Speaker 4: sat there. I've never thought about and cared about sheep
Speaker 4: so much as I did for that hour.
Speaker 1: I think it's safe to say this on the raffle front,
Speaker 1: even if you do a big horned sheep, it's not
Speaker 1: a question of It's definitely not a question of do
Speaker 1: we want four hundred thousand dollars or zero? Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: probably some question of do we want four hundred or
Speaker 1: two fifty or four hundred or two or whatever the
Speaker 1: hell it is. It's not like you're giving to move
Speaker 1: to a raffle or you're not giving up the whole thing.
Speaker 1: You're giving up probably something, but you're not losing the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Well, I mean, you're gaining a public participation.
Speaker 5: I believe that Idaho Wild Sheep Foundation for that state
Speaker 5: wide tag they switch every other year. I believe so
Speaker 5: they one year they auction it, than the next year
Speaker 5: they raffle it.
Speaker 1: Yep. I how you put that Wall Street Main Street?
Speaker 3: There you go brand, but there's no there's just like
Speaker 3: I feel like, by I mean, look at look at
Speaker 3: the state of skiing in the United States right these
Speaker 3: major veil Oh, there's only.
Speaker 2: Two ski companies left in the whole country.
Speaker 3: And they have made a very public decision to raise
Speaker 3: prices cater to fewer customers year over year, at at
Speaker 3: a higher price to that customer. And that's just the
Speaker 3: way skiing is going to be, right, I mean, I
Speaker 3: think that that is a very good example of where hunting,
Speaker 3: at least right now for certain species already is. And
Speaker 3: it went that way a long time ago. Right, It's
Speaker 3: like I always remind people when I'm in that cheap auction,
Speaker 3: I'm like, what's fun here is the percentage of people
Speaker 3: who have ever actually had a sheep tag that are
Speaker 3: in this room right now? This whole industry is here,
Speaker 3: but relative like the amount of actual sheep hunters very very.
Speaker 1: Few, yep. But see that guy back there, he got
Speaker 1: six yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we're like and you know, and it's this
Speaker 3: thing that we're expected to celebrate, and like, are we
Speaker 3: just so far down the road that we can't go
Speaker 3: back and be like, man, we got to try something else,
Speaker 3: because it turns out relatively very few people actually give
Speaker 3: a shit about sheep because they just will never get one.
Speaker 3: And we talk about so I have a lifetime license
Speaker 3: in Idaho, which gives me the privilege of having my
Speaker 3: name in the sheep draw as a resident, which is
Speaker 3: I believe. Still, if you're applying as a resident in
Speaker 3: the state of Idaho for bighorn sheep, that is the
Speaker 3: best odds of drawing bighorn sheep in the US. Still,
Speaker 3: I think, depending on your unit. Every year I talk
Speaker 3: about how stupid I am. I should be applying for
Speaker 3: badass mule deer tags in Idaho every year because mathematically
Speaker 3: I will not draw that tag. But I know people
Speaker 3: who have right and they're at this point like huge
Speaker 3: chip on my shoulder. I'd much rather draw or a
Speaker 3: bighorn sheep tag than buy one, because it's like that's
Speaker 3: where the hunt is.
Speaker 1: It's more fun.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's more fun. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 3: This is a legitimate issue with the hunting system in America,
Speaker 3: Like we've already made the decision to just reserve elite
Speaker 3: opportunities for folks with elite bank accounts, and I don't
Speaker 3: believe that's right. In any way, shape or form, and
Speaker 3: we're not exploring ways to change that system. And I
Speaker 3: think it's going to be at the detriment of hunting
Speaker 3: because it's like, well, why would I give a shit
Speaker 3: about that. It's like I'm not I lost that game
Speaker 3: a long time ago. Ladies, Joan Ryan Kell and Amen
Speaker 3: Cal thank you for joining.
Speaker 1: We'll find you out to the uh the hell's it called?
Speaker 1: Mediator podcast network, YouTube, good Night uncompahgre or the other
Speaker 1: Robert W service by Bob Servis. This next story came
Speaker 1: to us through Keith and Spot, the manager of the
Speaker 1: First Light store in Haley, Idaho. Keith received a call
Speaker 1: from a customer one day who phoned in to tell
Speaker 1: him about an experience he'd had while wearing a piece
Speaker 1: of First Light gear, the Uncompagreate Puffy. While I'd argue
Speaker 1: that the jacket is certainly not the star of the story,
Speaker 1: this gentleman had gotten into a very sticky situation in
Speaker 1: the mountains of northwest Montana. He felt that his survival
Speaker 1: was due in part to the quality of the jacket
Speaker 1: he was wearing. As you'll hear, there are a few
Speaker 1: other pieces of gear that would have served him well,
Speaker 1: and he readily admits that he should have been carrying them.
Speaker 1: To be honest, though, what caught my eye about this
Speaker 1: story wasn't the coat, which is a damn good puffy,
Speaker 1: but rather the narrator's name, Robert W. Service. As everyone knows,
Speaker 1: or at least they better know, Robert Service is the
Speaker 1: name of the greatest poet of all time, if he
Speaker 1: asks me, better than Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman
Speaker 1: all put together, known as the Bard of the Yukon,
Speaker 1: Service was born in eighteen seventy four and is the
Speaker 1: author of the greatest poem ever written, The Cremation of
Speaker 1: Sam McGee. It's the story of a pair of gold
Speaker 1: miners during the Yukon gold Rush, one of whom Sam McGee,
Speaker 1: is from Tennessee. He hates the cold of the North,
Speaker 1: hates it severely, and it's not until his death that
Speaker 1: he finally gets so much needed relief. The poem begins,
Speaker 1: there are strange things done in the midnight sun by
Speaker 1: the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trail have
Speaker 1: their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.
Speaker 1: The northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest
Speaker 1: they ever did see was that night on the marge
Speaker 1: of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. You'll have to
Speaker 1: read it to see how it ends, and then you
Speaker 1: might want to follow up by reading the second greatest
Speaker 1: poem of all time, also written by Service, called the
Speaker 1: Shooting of Dan McGrew. Now what binds these two Robert W. Services,
Speaker 1: one a dead Scottish Canadian poet and the other living
Speaker 1: commercial fishermen from Oregon. Isn't just their name or the
Speaker 1: fact that they are actually related. They are bound also
Speaker 1: by experiences with extreme cold. Only one of them, however,
Speaker 1: lived through two experiences so harrowing that they would earn
Speaker 1: him the nickname black Cloud Bob.
Speaker 8: My name's Bob Service. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. I
Speaker 8: live in a small coastal town in Oregon. The story
Speaker 8: I'm going to tell you took place on November fifteenth,
Speaker 8: twenty twenty three, in Sanders County, Montana. I've lived here
Speaker 8: in Astoi, Oregon, my whole entire life to make a
Speaker 8: living a commercial fish and also a member of an
Speaker 8: operating engineer's trade. It's a pretty economically depressed place, so
Speaker 8: growing up in a small coastal community. Even though my
Speaker 8: parents weren't really hardcore, we spent a lot of time
Speaker 8: outside and we ate a lot of the fish, crab, deer, elk.
Speaker 8: It just became a way of life. We lived off
Speaker 8: the land here and it just kind of morphed into
Speaker 8: my adulthood and it became what I'm all about. I
Speaker 8: started hunting when I was twelve. I've had horrible luck
Speaker 8: at it, but it's part of who I am and
Speaker 8: I love it. People approached me and you're like, man,
Speaker 8: if you didn't have bad luck, you wouldn't have any luck.
Speaker 8: I've been labeled black cloud, bob or I've also been
Speaker 8: told I'm lucky. I don't know what it is to
Speaker 8: be honest with you, but I mean I was on
Speaker 8: a crab boat one time that was sinking and we
Speaker 8: got rescued off that. I've been hit by an Amtrak train.
Speaker 8: I've had some pretty impressive things happen to me. So
Speaker 8: I'm still here and there must be some kind of
Speaker 8: a reason for the story that I'm about to tell you,
Speaker 8: which took place in November of twenty twenty three. I
Speaker 8: need to go back to twenty ten. I had been
Speaker 8: in a relationship for four or five years. I met
Speaker 8: this gal and she was like twenty and I was
Speaker 8: thirty three, and she came over to my house and
Speaker 8: she never left. She had mentioned that, you know, she
Speaker 8: had an interest in wanting to go deer hunting, and
Speaker 8: I'm like, well, let's fulfill your interest.
Speaker 3: Let's go.
Speaker 8: So I bought her a deer tag. I took her
Speaker 8: out to a gun. I let her handle a rifle.
Speaker 8: Everything in my mind that you would do to fulfill
Speaker 8: somebody that hadn't spent much time around guns. You showed
Speaker 8: them how it works, let him handle the firearm, you
Speaker 8: let him shoot. So I did all these things, and
Speaker 8: I take my ex girlfriend hunting about five hours south
Speaker 8: of where I live, so it was a camping hunting
Speaker 8: destination trip. Took her out hunting and I found a
Speaker 8: buck and I said, hey, would you like to shoot
Speaker 8: this buck? She said yes. And when I first spotted
Speaker 8: this thing, it was probably like almost a thousand yards away,
Speaker 8: so we closed the distance to about three hundred yards.
Speaker 8: I set her up and I'm like, well, here's the deer,
Speaker 8: find it in the scope, and when you're ready, shoot it.
Speaker 8: The funny thing about this story is I don't normally
Speaker 8: bring a dog with me hunting, but I had this
Speaker 8: little spring or Spaniel. She was about a thirty five
Speaker 8: pound dog, and she went with me everywhere. She was
Speaker 8: in the back seat right when all this stuff happened,
Speaker 8: she started barking and freaking out. Looking back, I still
Speaker 8: think that that dog was trying to tell me that
Speaker 8: she just had maybe like a premonition that something was
Speaker 8: gonna go wrong that day. And I scolded her for it,
Speaker 8: and I feel horrible about that because I think that
Speaker 8: dog just had maybe had a hunch. She shoots this deer,
Speaker 8: the deer falls down. I rig her up and I
Speaker 8: put the firearm on her back on a sling. I
Speaker 8: empty it. I put a pack frame on bags on
Speaker 8: my back, and I'm going to bone this deer out.
Speaker 8: We're going to hike down to it. And I'm side hill.
Speaker 8: I'm trying to find it, and we make our way
Speaker 8: over to the animal. The deer was about twenty five
Speaker 8: feet to my immediate right. The animal is mortally wounded,
Speaker 8: but it's still alive. She was up on the hill
Speaker 8: from the steep bank and I'm directly across from this animal,
Speaker 8: and I said, why don't you go ahead and chamber
Speaker 8: around up and dispatch this deer. So she started to
Speaker 8: cycle around with this rifle. It was my rifle, and
Speaker 8: it had a detachable magazine. The spring had a little
Speaker 8: bit of slack, so when you put a round into
Speaker 8: the magazine and you went to chamber it, to get
Speaker 8: that bullet to feed into the chamber, sometimes you kind
Speaker 8: of had to put your hand on the bottom of
Speaker 8: the clip to raise that spring up. In that action,
Speaker 8: she was trying to fight it. It was foreign to
Speaker 8: her and she didn't know her way around it. Unknowingly,
Speaker 8: that muzzle was coming towards my direction to my right,
Speaker 8: and about the time I'm like, oh, that muzzle's way
Speaker 8: in the danger zone and my safe. The gun went
Speaker 8: off and I felt the bullet go through my thigh,
Speaker 8: and immediately I remember saying to her, Oh my god,
Speaker 8: you just shot me in the leg. And it wasn't
Speaker 8: like the movies where you fly or fall. I just
Speaker 8: I stood there and I'm like, oh my god. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 8: I got to get out of here, and I took
Speaker 8: a step and down I went. Just by the pain
Speaker 8: and the shock and everything that I was going into,
Speaker 8: I pretty much figured that was time I was going
Speaker 8: to say goodbye right there. She called nine one one,
Speaker 8: and for about an hour and a half or two hours,
Speaker 8: she had first responders, firefighters EMTs searching this mountain for us.
Speaker 8: I had told secondhand, you know, the dispatcher that we're
Speaker 8: on this road. We're at the three and a half
Speaker 8: mile marker. It was a one ton dodged diesel crew
Speaker 8: cab truck. And it's super crazy because the dispatcher at
Speaker 8: the time had enough common sense to reach out to
Speaker 8: a local there, and this man was like eighty years
Speaker 8: old at the time. She called him up and she said, hey,
Speaker 8: I think there's a hunter behind your house. He's been shot,
Speaker 8: he's wounded. And this old timer got in his pickup
Speaker 8: just based off the description and drove up there and
Speaker 8: found me. I'm sitting there, I'm laying on my back,
Speaker 8: and I'm things are starting to get slowed down, and
Speaker 8: I'm actually playing like highlight reels of my life. I
Speaker 8: had all this real, super vivid memories of things that
Speaker 8: happened forty years ago that were as vivid as something
Speaker 8: that happened ten minutes ago. That's when I knew I
Speaker 8: was probably getting ready to say goodbye. But shortly after
Speaker 8: that old man found me. He had a bunch of
Speaker 8: EMTs right directly behind him, and they packed me down
Speaker 8: to a landing and I was life flighted to Eugene, Oregon.
Speaker 8: I woke up two weeks later and my dad was
Speaker 8: there and he's like, do you know what day it is?
Speaker 8: And I'm like no, and he's like, you've been asleep
Speaker 8: for ten days. I spent almost fifty consecutive days in
Speaker 8: the hospital and almost a year of recovery before I
Speaker 8: was able to walk. But that hunting accident, what I
Speaker 8: had to go through has been over the last fourteen
Speaker 8: years as a result of that event, quite an experience.
Speaker 8: What I bow and what I went through trying to
Speaker 8: rehabilitate myself and get myself back to work. Like I said,
Speaker 8: I work as a commercial fisherman and being a guy
Speaker 8: in a trade, I worked on a lot of heavy
Speaker 8: duty construction that required pile driving, dredging, dock wharf construction,
Speaker 8: that kind of stuff that having some debilitating injury creates
Speaker 8: a little bit of resentment. We stayed together for five
Speaker 8: or six years, but I just couldn't get over the
Speaker 8: fact that she shot me, even though it was an accident.
Speaker 8: I tried to put myself in her shoes, think about
Speaker 8: what she was going through and the trauma that she
Speaker 8: went through shooting me. But I just couldn't. I just
Speaker 8: couldn't get over it. I had times where I'd get
Speaker 8: these staff infections and it would make me just horribly sick.
Speaker 8: I got osteo melitis, which is a bone infection. I
Speaker 8: had to have my metatarsal bone cut off, and the
Speaker 8: second toe I think they called the second gist all.
Speaker 8: They had to clip that one off because I wore
Speaker 8: the end of it off. I learned a lot about
Speaker 8: it infect and how sick it can make you. I
Speaker 8: was sitting there stressing, and I was watching the money
Speaker 8: leave my bank account. I'd go for a couple months
Speaker 8: where I'd be able to work, and then I was
Speaker 8: plagued with an infection. I wouldn't be able to work
Speaker 8: for months, even though it was debilitating. Once I was upright,
Speaker 8: there was no slowing me down. I pedaled in ten
Speaker 8: miles to kill a bull elk on a logging road
Speaker 8: on a bicycle the next year, so I definitely got
Speaker 8: right back on the bike and ripped the training wheels off,
Speaker 8: and I tried to be as headstrong as I could be.
Speaker 8: I actually think it made me work harder than most
Speaker 8: people because I had this weight of this debilitating leg
Speaker 8: or this slowed down leg. November of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 8: I had just spent several months fishing every day on
Speaker 8: a commercial fishing boat out of Astoria, so I was
Speaker 8: really looking forward to the fall. And the year prior
Speaker 8: I didn't really get much hunting time in, so after
Speaker 8: going for a couple of years, I wanted to set
Speaker 8: myself up where I had some time. Our Oregon elk season,
Speaker 8: which takes place in Middle Oregon, is a big part
Speaker 8: of my life. Elk season is traditional to us as
Speaker 8: Christmas Morning is for some people. There's a lot of
Speaker 8: families involved, and we rely heavily on eating elk meat.
Speaker 8: I wanted to go hunting in Montana before our elk
Speaker 8: season started, and I had this idea in my head
Speaker 8: that I wanted to go and try and hunt for
Speaker 8: mule deer. Oregon has horrible mule deer hunting, and I
Speaker 8: wanted to shoot a nice mature mule deer bug. And
Speaker 8: I cut some corners, and that's probably another reason why
Speaker 8: I got in the trouble. I got into. It was
Speaker 8: a Sunday, and I had told my wife, I'm like, dear,
Speaker 8: I'm gonna go hunting. Wanted to utilize some hunting tags
Speaker 8: in Montana. The person that I was supposed to go
Speaker 8: with didn't draw. She's a busy woman, hard working gal,
Speaker 8: and she's like, well, I can't go, I can't leave.
Speaker 8: And I'm like, I'll just go over for a couple
Speaker 8: days and I'll come back. So that's what I did.
Speaker 8: I threw my stuff in my pickup. I was just
Speaker 8: gonna kind of cruise around and go hunting. It wasn't
Speaker 8: my first time hunting in Montana. I've probably been there
Speaker 8: five or six times prior. I went to the area
Speaker 8: that I knew first, and I spent half a morning
Speaker 8: there kind of cruising around and decided that I wanted
Speaker 8: to actually go out and just hunt and explore, spend
Speaker 8: a couple of days messing around in country that I
Speaker 8: hadn't really been to before. I went south, about two
Speaker 8: and a half hours from where i'd normally go hunting,
Speaker 8: and I drove up this ridge and I had got
Speaker 8: up to this point where I was overlooking this reservoir
Speaker 8: and mountains. It was beautiful vast, big country, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 8: put a rifle on my shoulder and my little daypack
Speaker 8: on and I'll just go for a little drawn up
Speaker 8: this ridge. It's awful weather, raining, sideways, nasty. I'm going
Speaker 8: up this ridge. And I guess it was probably around
Speaker 8: one or two in the afternoon over there in that
Speaker 8: time of the year. I think it gets dark around
Speaker 8: four thirty or a quarter after four. It was starting
Speaker 8: to be that time where the lights were starting to
Speaker 8: go out, and I'm like, well, I better turn around
Speaker 8: and make my way back down to the pickup and
Speaker 8: have some dinner and call my wife and figure out
Speaker 8: where I'm at to stay tonight. As I did that,
Speaker 8: I was coming back down the hill and everything just
Speaker 8: went black. I don't know what happened. I know I fell.
Speaker 8: All I remember is my legs being above my head
Speaker 8: and then everything went black. I wake up and it's dark,
Speaker 8: and I kind of panicked because it's pitch black, and
Speaker 8: I don't know how long I'd been out, and my
Speaker 8: leg is really really messed up, I mean messed up, bad,
Speaker 8: hurt and bad, and I could tell my ankle was
Speaker 8: all cocked over, and I thought I would expedite things,
Speaker 8: and I would go down this ridge and get down
Speaker 8: to the road that I had driven my truck up
Speaker 8: to where I was well. When I bailed off the ridge,
Speaker 8: I kept on taking it down, thinking I was going
Speaker 8: to cut this road, and I never cut it. I
Speaker 8: was wearing a Boa type ratcheting hunting boot. This particular
Speaker 8: hunting boot had a sole on it that was super
Speaker 8: hard and slick. I'd walk over the blowdown limbs and
Speaker 8: it was like walking on a sheet of ice. Everything
Speaker 8: was just slick and slimy and wet and saturated. And
Speaker 8: if it wasn't rain and sideways, it was snowing. I
Speaker 8: would just be walking along and all of a sudden,
Speaker 8: I'd be right on my back smack. And I don't
Speaker 8: know how many times I fell because of that. With
Speaker 8: my experience in twenty ten, you'd think I'd be pretty
Speaker 8: set up as far as having some kind of GPS
Speaker 8: or some kind of transponder type apparatus. My phone battery
Speaker 8: was dead. I couldn't access any maps, ONYX maps or anything,
Speaker 8: and I just completely put myself into a situation where
Speaker 8: I got bit. I had taken compass readings, and I
Speaker 8: knew before I had left where I needed to go
Speaker 8: to get back to my pickup. However, I just couldn't
Speaker 8: achieve that it was very humbling to be a mile
Speaker 8: or two away from your vehicle and have a broken
Speaker 8: leg that you can barely stand on, and some injuries
Speaker 8: that you knew that you might not walk away from.
Speaker 8: I kept taking this ridge down, and I got down
Speaker 8: in this creek bottom and I'm like, well, I can
Speaker 8: take a crick to somewhere. The very first night I
Speaker 8: went through this country where it was hands and knees
Speaker 8: crawling through and over, and I remember getting to this point.
Speaker 8: The whole night had been up trying to get out,
Speaker 8: and I was so freaking exhausted. I remember reaching in
Speaker 8: my pocket, I pulled out my keys, and I hit
Speaker 8: my teeth off to see if I was close to
Speaker 8: my truck. I remember hearing my horn and I'm like,
Speaker 8: I'm okay, I can just fall asleep. I was so exhausted.
Speaker 8: I just fell asleep on this hillside. And I wake
Speaker 8: up to this mule deer dough blowing and hissing at
Speaker 8: me and stomping at me, and it's sunny. I'm looking
Speaker 8: at her, and this deer is just completely agitated that
Speaker 8: I'm around. She's hissing, and then finally I kind of
Speaker 8: shoot her away. And I had this little rim rock
Speaker 8: thing that I was laying next to on this hillside
Speaker 8: and the sun was beaten on me, and I was
Speaker 8: warming up, drying out and kind of trying to wake up,
Speaker 8: and I could hear that dough, that mule deer dough
Speaker 8: up there, still blowing, and I could hear hooves hitting
Speaker 8: the ground, and the next thing I know, she kicked
Speaker 8: up this boulder directly above me. In this rock that
Speaker 8: was the size of a basketball or a cantalope comes
Speaker 8: hurling down over this hillside, and I felt the wind
Speaker 8: of that rock go by my head, and I'm thinking
Speaker 8: to myself, I'm like, geez, the deer even trying to
Speaker 8: get me well her tracks, I kind of noticed that
Speaker 8: was kind of the direction I needed to go.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 8: I ended up running into this deer a couple more times.
Speaker 8: It was really strange because when I caught up to her,
Speaker 8: she had a nice, mature mule deer with her, like
Speaker 8: a four point that was just a beautiful buck. At
Speaker 8: that point, hunting was the last thing on my agenda.
Speaker 8: There could have been a world record deer there, and
Speaker 8: I wouldn't have shot it. I needed to get out
Speaker 8: of there. I didn't even know if my gun was
Speaker 8: operable because it had fallen twenty feet and taken a
Speaker 8: pretty hard hit and a whole muzzle was fouled, so
Speaker 8: I couldn't even shoot the gun safely. And I end
Speaker 8: up running into these deer, and now there's four. There's
Speaker 8: a mule deer dough, a mule deer buck, and a
Speaker 8: white tail buck and a white tail dough and they're
Speaker 8: all hanging out together, and I'm like, man, that is
Speaker 8: really weird. That is really bizarre. Well, they ended up
Speaker 8: taking off, and I ended up making my way down
Speaker 8: to this road and I'm like, oh, this must be
Speaker 8: the road where I drove up with my truck. And
Speaker 8: so I'm down there all night, piecing around looking for
Speaker 8: my tracks on this road and I literally am just
Speaker 8: going over the same country over and over again. And
Speaker 8: I look up this road and I see three kids.
Speaker 8: And I look over to my right and there's a gate,
Speaker 8: a farmer gate type thing, and behind is this massive
Speaker 8: white tail buck. I still can't believe how big it was.
Speaker 8: But I saw these what I thought were three kids
Speaker 8: trying to yell at them and get their attention, and
Speaker 8: they're not yelling back at me. Well the whole time,
Speaker 8: what I'm thinking are kids is a hallucination. I'm hallucinating.
Speaker 8: I spent four whole nights out in the woods with
Speaker 8: no food, and the only water I was drinking was
Speaker 8: drinking from you know, springs in the ground. I was weak,
Speaker 8: I was tired, I was hurt, havn't eaten, haven't drank,
Speaker 8: and I was so freaking exhausted. I'd be walking along
Speaker 8: and I would just pass out and fall down on
Speaker 8: the ground. I was in trouble. All I could think
Speaker 8: about in my head was God, I missed the check
Speaker 8: in last night. But what is my wife thinking? What
Speaker 8: is my poor wife going through right now?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 8: And I'm just trying to beat my way back. Every
Speaker 8: step I took was like taking five back. Nothing was
Speaker 8: working out. I was just terrified and worried about my daughter.
Speaker 8: I knew my wife would be okay, but I just
Speaker 8: couldn't stomach my daughter not having a dad. So it
Speaker 8: was it was a hell the time. I mean, just
Speaker 8: the fear and being hurt and the helplessness. I don't
Speaker 8: have any idea how much country I traversed when your
Speaker 8: legs broke, trying to use your gun as a crutch,
Speaker 8: and just trying to transit through that country with all
Speaker 8: the elevation and it being covered in snow and slick
Speaker 8: and overblowdown trees. You can only get around so much.
Speaker 8: But I just never would stop. I just kept on
Speaker 8: trying to beat my way ahead and through and trying
Speaker 8: to get out of this situation. This ridge that I
Speaker 8: was on, it was open on the east facing slope,
Speaker 8: and then on the west facing slope it was timbered
Speaker 8: terrain and country. I got into these bluffs and I
Speaker 8: could see a trail below me, and it was so
Speaker 8: steep and it was so sketchy. It was like being
Speaker 8: placed on a rock wall where you're looking down where
Speaker 8: you have twelve or fourteen feet where you're going to
Speaker 8: hit bottom. The very last night, it would have been
Speaker 8: like the fourth night I was out there. I'm laying
Speaker 8: under this fir tree on the side of this mountain
Speaker 8: and I found myself over into these bluffs and I'm
Speaker 8: kind of covered up, and I'm soaking wet, I'm cold,
Speaker 8: and I've got one of the first light puffy coats
Speaker 8: on the down coats, and I couldn't believe how tough
Speaker 8: that was, because I thought I would absolutely shred it.
Speaker 8: I tore it in one spot. But the amount of
Speaker 8: brutality that I put on that coat was incredible. There
Speaker 8: was one night where it rained almost two inches. I
Speaker 8: encountered snow, rain, sleet, just about everything you can encounter.
Speaker 8: But it kept me warm and kept me dry. But
Speaker 8: I was wearing like danhim jeans. At my bottom half
Speaker 8: was soaked and it was just a miserable time to
Speaker 8: never really warm up or dry out. But I had
Speaker 8: a space blanket, and if I would say to have
Speaker 8: anything in a hunting pack, have a space blanket, because
Speaker 8: if you can insulate yourself even after getting wet, it'll
Speaker 8: be all right. People ask me if you build a fire,
Speaker 8: and I'm like, how do you build a fire in
Speaker 8: country and ground that's completely saturated. You're so critical that
Speaker 8: you're now thinking about yourself like your cell phone. It's
Speaker 8: like I only have thirty six percent life left. I
Speaker 8: need to protect that thirty six percent. That's kind of
Speaker 8: how I viewed my leg and my body in that situation.
Speaker 8: So I was warm enough with the space blanket, and
Speaker 8: I didn't see where I was going to benefit from
Speaker 8: having a fire that I couldn't even hardly start to
Speaker 8: begin with. Everything was just wet, saturated. It was more
Speaker 8: important to keep the energy. And that last night, I'm
Speaker 8: curled up in a ball under that tree and I
Speaker 8: hear a siren middle of the night. I have no
Speaker 8: idea what time it is. I hear this just siren,
Speaker 8: and I'm looking down this ridge and I see what
Speaker 8: I think is somebody who shining the spotlight. But they're
Speaker 8: probably over a mile away, and I'm like, well, that's
Speaker 8: where my pickup is, but I can't get there. I
Speaker 8: was blowing on a whistle trying to get their attention.
Speaker 8: I had a headlamp on. This guy that found me
Speaker 8: later on told me he saw my sos strobe. So
Speaker 8: they had me located and they knew where I was
Speaker 8: at because they were at my pickup, and because I
Speaker 8: was in such a rough spot, they were going to
Speaker 8: go up there and extract me with a helicopter. The
Speaker 8: weather had changed and it was just pea soup fog
Speaker 8: and they couldn't fly. They figured that I obviously was injured,
Speaker 8: and that's why I was hung up where I was
Speaker 8: hung up, but they didn't know how they were going
Speaker 8: to get me out of there, and I don't think
Speaker 8: they were expecting what I did. I'm up on this
Speaker 8: cliff and I'm looking at the shale, and it's probably
Speaker 8: a quarter mile down to this trail head, and I'm
Speaker 8: thinking I can't climb thirty feet up a vertical rock
Speaker 8: face to get over these bluffs, so I guess at
Speaker 8: this point my only option is to slide down this mountain.
Speaker 8: I just got on my butt and I slid.
Speaker 3: Down the hill.
Speaker 8: There wasn't really much left in my jeans, but at
Speaker 8: that point I didn't care. I just took it slow
Speaker 8: and rode her all the way to the bottom of
Speaker 8: the trail, and I got down to this trail head
Speaker 8: and pretty much drugged myself out. I didn't know where
Speaker 8: the trail was going to pop out at, but I
Speaker 8: ended up encountering this kiosk where this fire had occurred
Speaker 8: in four or five wild land firefighters had lost their
Speaker 8: life at this particular spot, and I'm like, well, I
Speaker 8: must be getting close to some kind of parking lot
Speaker 8: or something. I went maybe one hundred or two hundred
Speaker 8: yards further, and I heard people talking and that's when Mason,
Speaker 8: who was head of the search and rescue where I
Speaker 8: was at, He's like, we've been looking for you for
Speaker 8: a couple of days. They actually had an ambulance there,
Speaker 8: and I got up and crawled me back to the
Speaker 8: ambulance and they started evaluating me, and they're like, you're
Speaker 8: going to the hospital. Your bitals are pretty dangerous, my
Speaker 8: kidney functions that things were getting ready to shut down.
Speaker 8: So I was one more day and I probably wouldn't
Speaker 8: be here anymore telling you his story, but it was
Speaker 8: kind of comical. He just couldn't over the fact that
Speaker 8: I just went there by myself. He was certain that
Speaker 8: somebody had dropped me some info or a coordinance or
Speaker 8: a pan or something, and I'm like, nope, I just
Speaker 8: came here on my own. One of the things that
Speaker 8: is just everlasting in my head is when my wife
Speaker 8: got to the hospital. Obviously it was a little bit
Speaker 8: of an emotional thing. So heard my father in law,
Speaker 8: are there living in a small town when you know everybody.
Speaker 8: When we got married was a big event. We had
Speaker 8: a lot of people there and stuff, and she said
Speaker 8: something to me that will always stick. She goes, I
Speaker 8: didn't know if it would be morbid to have your
Speaker 8: funeral the same place we got married. I didn't know.
Speaker 3: What to say.
Speaker 8: Pretty emotional. My whole ankle was cocked ninety degrees off
Speaker 8: my right leg. It was completely dislocated from where it
Speaker 8: was supposed to be. I also had frostbite, hypothermia, and
Speaker 8: all the emotion being in a hospital, the hospital visits,
Speaker 8: even getting home and transitioning to home. My leg was
Speaker 8: already damaged before from the bullet going through my thigh,
Speaker 8: but when I got out of the woods in Montana,
Speaker 8: I had just worn my right leg down to a
Speaker 8: there was just nothing left. I mean, I was down
Speaker 8: to bones, just trying to beat my way out of there,
Speaker 8: and I just did irreplaceable damage to it and finished
Speaker 8: it off. I had this horrible infection in my leg,
Speaker 8: and I went to multiple doctor visits, vascular physicians and whatnot,
Speaker 8: and they did all this stuff, and they're like, we
Speaker 8: can preserve your leg, that it'll be a fused joint.
Speaker 8: You'll have a very noticeable limp the rest of your life.
Speaker 3: That just did.
Speaker 8: I didn't really fit into my schedule when they told
Speaker 8: me that I was going to be close to fourteen
Speaker 8: months with non weight bearing and pins. I just elected
Speaker 8: to have my leg amputated. So I had a below
Speaker 8: the knee amputation done on February fourteenth, and I'm going
Speaker 8: to be receiving a prosthetic on the seventeenth of April.
Speaker 8: Losing this leg is actually a good thing. It's a
Speaker 8: positive thing. Because my leg was so damaged from my
Speaker 8: hunting accident, my leg would swell up and sometimes it
Speaker 8: would be near impossible to get a shoe on or
Speaker 8: a boot on or anything because my ankle was so swollen.
Speaker 8: I don't have to deal with that anymore, so I'm
Speaker 8: actually just grateful to not live in chronic pain anymore.
Speaker 8: I can go down to the beach and dig a
Speaker 8: limited razor clams, or drive out to the creek and
Speaker 8: drift a little salmon egg through a hole hitch steel head.
Speaker 8: I mean, I did that the other day on crutches.
Speaker 8: It's just it's part of who I am. But it's
Speaker 8: still a big wild place, and we just don't want
Speaker 8: to lose touch of how quick things can go bad.
Speaker 8: And that's why I wanted to tell this story. What
Speaker 8: happened to me shouldn't have happened. I should have had
Speaker 8: everything on me that I needed. That's what I can't
Speaker 8: stress enough is if you leave the road, you better
Speaker 8: be prepared to leave the road. What happened to me
Speaker 8: is just due to my personality and my ignorance and
Speaker 8: trying to be in a hurry and cutting corners and
Speaker 8: just trying to fit too much into one small bag,
Speaker 8: got me hurt and could have got me killed, and
Speaker 8: has now put a real big skew in my life
Speaker 8: at this age. Last night, it was my daughter's birth
Speaker 8: and we're singing her Happy Birthday, and I'm looking in
Speaker 8: that little girl's eyes and i just glad to be here.
Speaker 8: You know, you just don't know when you're gonna meet
Speaker 8: your maker, So maybe just kind of give everything a
Speaker 8: second thought. Go Is that a good idea? You can
Speaker 8: go out there and have a good time, but make
Speaker 8: sure you have your keys crossed and your eyes dotted.