Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Welcome to episode number nine of The Hunting Collective.
Speaker 1: I've been O'Brien, and this week we are joined by
Speaker 1: none other than Jesse Griffis. He's the owner of Die
Speaker 1: Dowey Butcher's Shop and supper club here in Austin, Texas,
Speaker 1: the author of a book called A Field, a Chef's
Speaker 1: Guide Preparing and Cooking Wild Game that is absolutely one
Speaker 1: of the best field guys you'll ever pick up. It's
Speaker 1: it's more than a recipe book. It's more than a
Speaker 1: book to learn about how to cut up meat. It
Speaker 1: is quite frankly, a coffee table book for anybody who
Speaker 1: eats meat. So before I go any further, I will
Speaker 1: tell you that what first drew me to Jesse was
Speaker 1: that book. I have. I have it. It's amongst the
Speaker 1: must reads in my house. I flipped through it every
Speaker 1: time I'm thinking of a recipe or I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: something I need to do in the kitchen, and Jesse
Speaker 1: is always have the answer in that book. I also
Speaker 1: want to connect with him just about his his ideas
Speaker 1: around food and how we find it. Jesse's supper Club
Speaker 1: here in Austin, Texas is all locally sourced When I
Speaker 1: say locally sourced, I mean everything from the salt to
Speaker 1: the garlic, to lemons two limes, to the meat to
Speaker 1: the vegetables is all sourced, locally, grown or killed locally,
Speaker 1: and in the in the region of Texas where we
Speaker 1: are located. So he's got a lot to say about that.
Speaker 1: He's got a lot to say about why we go hunting,
Speaker 1: why he goes hunting. And he's also a guy who
Speaker 1: takes nine hunters out into the woods. They shoot hogs,
Speaker 1: and he teaches them how to butcher the entire thing.
Speaker 1: So we learned a lot in this conversation. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed connecting with Jesse. He's an interesting guy, down home
Speaker 1: dude with a lot of great insights, and I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: So without further ado, Jesse Griffith's Episode number nine. All right,
Speaker 1: Jesse Griffis, thanks for joining me. Yeah. Absolutely, we're here
Speaker 1: in uh the YETI flagship. We're gonna do it outside
Speaker 1: to be really authentic here in Austin, but it's wendy.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty wendy stuck in a green room drinking
Speaker 1: beer or canned wine in your case, in my case,
Speaker 1: so Austin, Texas you're a business owner restaurants or have
Speaker 1: a lot of history here. You're telling me when you
Speaker 1: first came to town. Yeah, yeah, What was it like
Speaker 1: when you first got out of here? Oh? You know,
Speaker 1: I mean in my perspective at the time, I was
Speaker 1: just a line cook, you know, looking for work. Um,
Speaker 1: and Austin had that had that glow. You know. I
Speaker 1: came from North Texas and I just thought this was
Speaker 1: the coolest town. And I mean, obviously I stayed here,
Speaker 1: so there's something going. But uh, you know I got
Speaker 1: down here, I really liked it. Um. I was able
Speaker 1: to you know, fish in any direction on my days off,
Speaker 1: and I think that really sealed the deal. Being able
Speaker 1: to go to the hill country are up to you know,
Speaker 1: the big reservoirs or anything. There's just endless, endless places
Speaker 1: to go out here, and so uh I stayed. I stayed. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you've you have a restaurant here was becoming
Speaker 1: pretty famous Die Dewey. Yeah. Um. And I guess that
Speaker 1: spends right into how you do things over there. I
Speaker 1: mean you take ingredients from the region and build pretty
Speaker 1: fantastic dishes from what I've my experience. Thank you. What
Speaker 1: do you feel like it's unique about this place. That's
Speaker 1: the region. Yeah, the region. Culinary wise, what's I think
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's kind of it's kind of a sleeper.
Speaker 1: You know. We always compare it to northern California, where
Speaker 1: the modern theory of of low coal sourcing started. You know,
Speaker 1: I mean local sourcing is is quite possibly the oldest
Speaker 1: uh concept known to man, maybe the second oldest and
Speaker 1: uh of just eating food that that comes from around
Speaker 1: where you live. And so but it was popularized in
Speaker 1: you know, the seventies and eighties and in the Berkeley
Speaker 1: and San Francisco, and they really kind of pushed it home.
Speaker 1: And UM, I think that the ideal of being able
Speaker 1: to do that in Central Texas. It looks pretty bleak
Speaker 1: here sometimes. Um, but if you travel in in three
Speaker 1: hours and in direction, you've got you've got so many options.
Speaker 1: You've got the you've got the Gulf to the east,
Speaker 1: you've got the hill country to the west. Up north,
Speaker 1: it's black land prairie. Um, there's dairy farms, lots of
Speaker 1: agriculture up there. And then you go south for three
Speaker 1: hours and um, they're growing mangoes. And so really we're
Speaker 1: kind of at the epicenter of this really kind of
Speaker 1: a beautiful part of the world. It's a bit hot
Speaker 1: weather is um, you know, a bit inconsistent. I know
Speaker 1: everybody thinks it there whether there's crazy, but everybody else
Speaker 1: is wrong. Yeah, we were just sitting out there on
Speaker 1: the porch. The wind was like a hard east wind
Speaker 1: and then it was a hard west wind, and it's
Speaker 1: it's it never can make up its mind down here. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a drought. And I'll let you know,
Speaker 1: the way we get out of a drought is always
Speaker 1: the same way. It's a flood. Flood. I've been here,
Speaker 1: you have been here three years, and like, is it
Speaker 1: you know what's when's the thunderstorm season start? When is
Speaker 1: it typically January through December? Yeah, we've been getting into
Speaker 1: the last a couple of months. But see, you have
Speaker 1: to have this knowledge of this from growing up here
Speaker 1: one a north north of year obviously was in the
Speaker 1: States still, and then sourcing all of that your ingredients
Speaker 1: from all these different places in the state. You have
Speaker 1: no choice, but they have knowledge of where that's coming from,
Speaker 1: then why it's good and what makes it special, and
Speaker 1: then why it's gonna work for you. I mean, is
Speaker 1: that is that right to say? I mean, you just
Speaker 1: have this it's knowledge that read just because of you
Speaker 1: have to use it to feed people, right, And I
Speaker 1: think it's you know, you can look at it two ways.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have you have to be so flexible
Speaker 1: with how you get everything. And you can either be
Speaker 1: put off or burdened by the fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: limes went out of season early this year, which they did,
Speaker 1: so we don't have limes right now, um, or you
Speaker 1: can kind of celebrate the way that that works, whereas
Speaker 1: last year we had limes year around, like it was
Speaker 1: just a great year that the lime trees just produced.
Speaker 1: We we never had any slow down. And you know,
Speaker 1: I just look back on two thousand seventeen is being
Speaker 1: the best lime year ever. Um. And this the the
Speaker 1: knowledge of of when things come and go in the
Speaker 1: how how simple that is, and when to celebrate, you know,
Speaker 1: like we we put flounder back on the menu the
Speaker 1: other day, and it's fun to explain to the staff
Speaker 1: that flounder leave for a while. You know, November December,
Speaker 1: they're they're starting their migration out into the into the
Speaker 1: gulf and then early spring, you know, right about now,
Speaker 1: maybe the last month or so, they're re entering the
Speaker 1: bays and so we're starting to see flounder again. And
Speaker 1: so I mean it's only about a two three month
Speaker 1: gap where you don't see them, but when we tend
Speaker 1: to serve flounder is in October and then again in
Speaker 1: the spring, you know, and it's just like there's a
Speaker 1: seasonality to everything, you know, and I think that's really fun.
Speaker 1: Or pelagic fish or Farrell hawks, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: they're real hard to come by in the summer because
Speaker 1: we get to get them trapped and so um they
Speaker 1: don't survive in the traps past eight nine am, and
Speaker 1: so nobody traps them. So we really we start socking
Speaker 1: away a lot of Farrell hog late spring, knowing that
Speaker 1: it's about to get tough, and we serve a lot
Speaker 1: of those things. So but I absolutely love it. I
Speaker 1: love the conversations. And a lot of people don't understand
Speaker 1: when we say that we're locally sourced, that we go
Speaker 1: all in like we don't have onions, Well, we don't
Speaker 1: have onions. We don't have bolb garlic right now out,
Speaker 1: we don't have limits, and we don't have limes. I
Speaker 1: just mentioned it's more profound. But we just opened a
Speaker 1: tak area, and so when we don't have limes at
Speaker 1: the tak area, it's a it's a it's a hard conversation.
Speaker 1: And sometimes you can have a line with this, well
Speaker 1: we don't have any, and then they're like, well I
Speaker 1: saw lines at the store. What's your problem. I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: it's just not the way we work, you know. It's
Speaker 1: just like our our food is is supposed to be
Speaker 1: a very acute and direct representative of what's available right here,
Speaker 1: and we don't have to burden anybody else by taking
Speaker 1: their resources. We don't know what the lime industry in
Speaker 1: Mexico really is, what the what the impact is, how
Speaker 1: they treat their workers, you know what? You know what
Speaker 1: that land might be better served as the lime industry here.
Speaker 1: You know, in South Texas, we know the farmer, We
Speaker 1: know where those lives are coming from, and we can
Speaker 1: feel really good supporting them. And I think that getting
Speaker 1: beyond this ideal, if we deserve to have whatever we
Speaker 1: want at all times, is incorrect. Do you feel you
Speaker 1: have any good stories about There's a lot there we
Speaker 1: can talk well, we'll talk about a lot, but it
Speaker 1: comes in my mind, like giving to get stories of
Speaker 1: relationships with these farmers or growers and people that you
Speaker 1: really appreciate that that have had tough times and you
Speaker 1: kind of flow with them as they provide you these ingredients.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's got to be many, many of those,
Speaker 1: you know. I've I've developed a lot of relationships over
Speaker 1: the years with with farmers. Um It's definitely changed my
Speaker 1: ideas about life in general, because there there are a
Speaker 1: certain bunch they are they God bless them, but they
Speaker 1: complain all the time because they have a lot to
Speaker 1: complain about. They have to deal with the worst of it,
Speaker 1: especially when they're doing it right. If they're not, you know,
Speaker 1: using pesticides things like that. There really is a lot
Speaker 1: of pestils out there that's gonna get reported on these days. Uh,
Speaker 1: you don't see that in like the hard land pandering
Speaker 1: commercials for commercials. God made a farmer and he's yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they are there. I mean, they're they're definitely
Speaker 1: the most wonderful peovil. They're hard, hard people. They have
Speaker 1: a hard job and uh yeah, dealing with the you know,
Speaker 1: the the ebb and flow of it. And you know,
Speaker 1: we've just learned to to just accept it, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: are you going to have this? Oh, yeah, we should
Speaker 1: have that through July and then you know, may might
Speaker 1: roll around be like that was that was the last
Speaker 1: to that does the last the garlic? I mean like
Speaker 1: really like, oh but she told us that and yeah,
Speaker 1: but they got other things in their minds, um, And
Speaker 1: I understand that. I don't know if I can think
Speaker 1: of a specific story right now, but there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of just give and take. But we keep our
Speaker 1: menus very much in flux for that reason, and we
Speaker 1: keep our food really simple also for that reason. So
Speaker 1: at any point we're able to take, um something off
Speaker 1: or had something on. It's just we'd like to be
Speaker 1: really flexible with it. Um. You know, we celebrate you know,
Speaker 1: blue crabs when they're in season, and crawfish and oysters
Speaker 1: and things like that that are uh seasonal, see dudes. Um,
Speaker 1: And then when they're gone, they're just gone. And people
Speaker 1: people are pretty accepting of that. Yeah, I mean, use
Speaker 1: a good word. They're celebrating. I mean you you're celebrating
Speaker 1: the seasonality of the place you live. And I find that,
Speaker 1: like we talked about this before on the podcast about
Speaker 1: how strange. It feels sometimes for me to like walk
Speaker 1: through the meat section at because being a hunter and
Speaker 1: I'm just eating elk and deer and turkeys, walking through
Speaker 1: that meat section now just feels I feel out of place.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't feel the place I don't visit, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't know what to look for if I was there. Um,
Speaker 1: if I a steak, it's when someone else serves it
Speaker 1: to me, beef steaks, someone else starts to me at
Speaker 1: a restaurant. So there's just this familiarity and it's, as
Speaker 1: you will know, the best meal has a story. And
Speaker 1: I've been when I've eaten in your place, and I
Speaker 1: was like, this is a story to this. I mean
Speaker 1: it's not written on this paper, but you damn sure
Speaker 1: know that this is. This all had to come together
Speaker 1: in some confluence of events for me to eat this thing,
Speaker 1: which is a different feeling, and it's on I mean,
Speaker 1: it's really what keeps us going. It's it's hard to
Speaker 1: I mean that that. I mean, I'm not gonna try
Speaker 1: to garner sympathy, but it's just it is a struggle,
Speaker 1: more so than other restaurants that can just make a
Speaker 1: phone call and and it all appears the next day.
Speaker 1: Every every dish has to be composed one little item
Speaker 1: at a time, and things change a lot. You know that,
Speaker 1: you know when you're again with Ferrell hogs, when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with that as they can be any size. You know,
Speaker 1: you might get a twenty pounder, you might get a pounder,
Speaker 1: one might be lean, one might be a big fatty sow,
Speaker 1: you might get a big bore. And so we have
Speaker 1: to you have to be clever and how you aggregate
Speaker 1: those items onto your menu to kind of like put
Speaker 1: it all together so that you do have a moticum
Speaker 1: of consistency, because if you don't, then I mean you
Speaker 1: have to have a little bit. I'm just saying enough.
Speaker 1: Otherwise everybody just gets confused with servers don't know what's
Speaker 1: going on. Uh. Staff just they can't follow it. But um,
Speaker 1: I think that you do have to be able to
Speaker 1: be just extremely flexible with it. And I think the
Speaker 1: celebration like what you're saying. You know, if you eat strawberries,
Speaker 1: you're around, it's not special in March when they come
Speaker 1: on and they they get that first four or five
Speaker 1: days of consistent sunlight and they turn into candy. Uh
Speaker 1: and you just don't. You're not as excited about a strawberry,
Speaker 1: and you should be excited about a strawberry. Would be
Speaker 1: very excited about asparagus. It's only in season for about
Speaker 1: three or four weeks, and we, to my knowledge, get
Speaker 1: all of the local asparagus because I've got a guy,
Speaker 1: got an asparagus. Yeah. I don't know a lot of
Speaker 1: people to have asparious guys, but that's I feel like
Speaker 1: that's you gotta have that. Yeah, And that's as far
Speaker 1: as you're that's all you're gonna know. I got this guy,
Speaker 1: I meet him in an alley, Give me a couple
Speaker 1: of duffle bags, will asparagus. We go our separate ways. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that it just it strikes me that all
Speaker 1: of that and and for me, hunting drove me to garden,
Speaker 1: dream to get chickens, and jove me to do things
Speaker 1: that I just because I saw the feeling of eating
Speaker 1: a backstrap something I just killed. If I could do that,
Speaker 1: well other stuff, why wouldn't I? You know, I don't
Speaker 1: have Most people don't have the ability to to source everything.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just not it's not tangible. But you
Speaker 1: can't do some things that you feel like people have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd say we. The other subject is that you you
Speaker 1: teach a lot of people, take them out in the field,
Speaker 1: non hunters or hunters, shoot a hog, take them back
Speaker 1: to your place, and teach them how to butcher it up.
Speaker 1: I think that's also a problem in this country where
Speaker 1: even for hunters, nobody has a problem coming to your house.
Speaker 1: But like, can I borrow up deer steak? Then they
Speaker 1: go eat a deer steak and they tell somebody, I
Speaker 1: eat a deer steak. That was awesome. But do they
Speaker 1: know how to do it? You know? Do they have
Speaker 1: that skill? Yeah? I think that's special all the way around.
Speaker 1: From knowing where your lives come from, to know one
Speaker 1: where your garlett comes from, to know one where that
Speaker 1: meat comes from, and also how to take care of
Speaker 1: specifically a meat part of it, right, and I think
Speaker 1: education is is a key part of it. And with
Speaker 1: attitudes that are I'm not gonna say changing, let's just
Speaker 1: say swirling. As far as uh, where food comes from,
Speaker 1: what guns are for, what hunting is, I think that
Speaker 1: it's a there's definitely, uh, there's a there's kind of
Speaker 1: a moving line as as far as who is doing
Speaker 1: these things these days. You know, when eight years ago
Speaker 1: in Austin it was a little different. Um hunting was
Speaker 1: was definitely perceived to be kind of in the realm
Speaker 1: of gun culture. And uh, it's since shifted a bit
Speaker 1: in the inappropriate direction. And it's I love seeing that
Speaker 1: or fishing or whatever. You know, Like you said, you
Speaker 1: got chickens, and it's like, once you spend a year
Speaker 1: eating just fish and venison and um eggs from your chickens,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to go back to buying that at
Speaker 1: the tore because you you notice the way that food
Speaker 1: sits with you. It's not the same. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: saying before that. My I apologize to my wife all
Speaker 1: the time because I've becomes sort of a dick when
Speaker 1: it comes to our like our finer cuts of meat
Speaker 1: like tendoins and backstraps. If she cooks it up and
Speaker 1: it's not quite what it should be, or if she
Speaker 1: leaves it in too long in the baby's crying and
Speaker 1: she overcooks it, I get I've become a little bit indignant, like, honey,
Speaker 1: I can't go get that again. So she said said
Speaker 1: to me a couple weeks ago, you're kind of an
Speaker 1: asshole when it comes to these these nicer cuts, they maybe, yes,
Speaker 1: this is a Catharsis for me. I just I'm talking
Speaker 1: to you about it as a way to kind of
Speaker 1: send to get it out there in the public. So
Speaker 1: I change. But do you ever feel like that's a restaurant?
Speaker 1: I mean there is such pressure to to use every
Speaker 1: little bit of everything. Yeah, I mean it's a beat
Speaker 1: green or um, you know, a quail, you know. I
Speaker 1: think you know if you have Lione cooks that are
Speaker 1: spent years and other restaurants and there they can throw
Speaker 1: away a part of a chicken. But it's it's that
Speaker 1: was a life, you know. And I have no problem
Speaker 1: with tell him that either. And that was a life.
Speaker 1: You know. How I know that was a life is
Speaker 1: because um, you know, and I'm not I'm not boasting,
Speaker 1: but I mean it's just an observation that I think
Speaker 1: about all the time. I have taken a lot of lives,
Speaker 1: um a lot, and be the most of them are
Speaker 1: blue girls. But um, beyond that, I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of them are pigs, you know. And it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's profound. And you don't tew that away. Um you
Speaker 1: give you give people who are opposed to, you know,
Speaker 1: eating animals a lot of fodder by mistreating at one second,
Speaker 1: it's just disrespectful to the animal. I'm sure you know
Speaker 1: they don't really care if they're getting eating there prepared well.
Speaker 1: But um, it is incumbent on you to do that.
Speaker 1: And so absolutely it does require a bit of attention.
Speaker 1: And I think what you were just saying about how
Speaker 1: the importance that you put on sourcing meat, how it
Speaker 1: transvers everything else, and I think that it's just it's
Speaker 1: very disingenuous. Um. Sometimes when you meet someone that's a
Speaker 1: hunter and they're very specific, or a rancher for that matter,
Speaker 1: I see this a lot um. They are very um
Speaker 1: um per nickinty about where their meat comes from. The
Speaker 1: open the refrigerator and the vegetables don't have the same providence.
Speaker 1: They're not putting the same import in there. And and
Speaker 1: I don't get that. I'm you know, I'm not not judging,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying I don't I don't understand that.
Speaker 1: I don't conceptualize I choose one. You really have to
Speaker 1: go all in. And I think that you know, when
Speaker 1: you start making these decisions, than resources all around you,
Speaker 1: no matter what that resources if it's a paperback, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you start looking that a little bit differently.
Speaker 1: You know, there was a tree with an animal. That's
Speaker 1: an egg that came from a warehouse versus by my backyard,
Speaker 1: or I purchase from a farmer at a fair price,
Speaker 1: you know, a real price. You have the propensity to
Speaker 1: share two as I'm sure well aware when that's something
Speaker 1: that you have. But it's an egg that you gathered
Speaker 1: from a chicken that you helped take care of, or
Speaker 1: a piece of meat from deer do you remove from
Speaker 1: its body and you killed it? You want to share
Speaker 1: that with people. That's a more outward communal way to
Speaker 1: live than it is to just to like, you know,
Speaker 1: slice up a cucumber and eat it. And you had
Speaker 1: no idea other than it was the nicest looking one
Speaker 1: in the basket. Yeah, tell people all the time, what
Speaker 1: do I do with a big boar? I'm like, you
Speaker 1: turn the whole thing into theresa and you give it
Speaker 1: away Christmas gifts. I mean, that's that's a win win
Speaker 1: right there. You know, you shot the damn thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: you might as well make something out of it. They
Speaker 1: tend to make excellent spicy sausages. So why don't you
Speaker 1: just bag that thing up, make a hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: Theresa and make a bunch of people happy, and then
Speaker 1: you don't have to feel any of the you know,
Speaker 1: guilt not taking it or not knowing what to do
Speaker 1: with it. Just do the same thing with the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Got the backstrap, but turn that into theresa whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: if that's all you can do. But yeah, gifted, and
Speaker 1: I think there is a lot of room for sharing
Speaker 1: because I mean, you have that pride. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know I can tell you let me tell a story
Speaker 1: about this is amazing, you know how an eight yard
Speaker 1: it's full run Yeah, and uh rolled it, which never
Speaker 1: happened to me, but uh, you know it's but I
Speaker 1: think and it's compelling to them too, you know, and
Speaker 1: hopefully that will get them kickstarted on on joining in
Speaker 1: because I love, uh bringing new hunters aboard and also
Speaker 1: any kind of hunting and fishing with kids. I discovered
Speaker 1: once once I had a kid, to be absolutely my
Speaker 1: favorite thing in the world. Yeah, yeah, do you feel
Speaker 1: like that's part of your you know, you came came
Speaker 1: up in North Texas fairly humble upbringings, doing just normal
Speaker 1: stuff and you're beginning in the culinary world was just
Speaker 1: the same. You know, then you just break in by
Speaker 1: basically getting the job and learn in your way. There
Speaker 1: was no you didn't travel to France and go to
Speaker 1: culinary school. You just kind of figure it out as
Speaker 1: you went. You feel like you're position in that in
Speaker 1: that world. Is is too much to share what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, like this passion and for the food. And
Speaker 1: I think every probably every chef has passion for the food,
Speaker 1: but this singular passion for not only the food, but
Speaker 1: where it came from and how hard it was for
Speaker 1: it to get there. I mean is that? I mean
Speaker 1: that's obviously not every restaurant in this town doesn't have
Speaker 1: that idea. No, And I think you know, just to
Speaker 1: that last point is my real passion is where the
Speaker 1: food comes from. I have two chefs, Janey and Gabe,
Speaker 1: who work at the two restaurants that are both better
Speaker 1: cooks than I am. And I'm I'm very comfortable and
Speaker 1: happy to say that, but um, I I know where
Speaker 1: to get this stuff and I love I like teaching
Speaker 1: them where to get that. And then you know, the
Speaker 1: beginnings when you when you have to kind of work
Speaker 1: your way up or when you when you're when you
Speaker 1: teach yourself a lot um, it definitely makes it more
Speaker 1: attractive to turn around and try to teach other people.
Speaker 1: And it also gives you that perspective like I I
Speaker 1: didn't hunt when I was a kid. I I fished
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I mean I have been a lifetime fisher. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hunting I came to I don't remember, it was ten
Speaker 1: or eleven years ago, so later in life definitely. But
Speaker 1: I think it's, um, it's been very positive for me
Speaker 1: to have that uh, that adult entrance into the hunting world,
Speaker 1: and then I can understand better adult hunters, like the
Speaker 1: questions they have and then you know the concerns and
Speaker 1: this and that, and so I think from an empathetic perspective,
Speaker 1: it's it's been really good for me. That's a great
Speaker 1: word to empathy. I found the same for me, like
Speaker 1: talking about hunting, and people just want to be spoken
Speaker 1: to with in real terms, like this is what you're
Speaker 1: gonna experience. I'm not going to give you the bullet
Speaker 1: points that you know, these conservation groups or somebody wants
Speaker 1: to of you. It's not what you learn hunter safety.
Speaker 1: This is this damn thing is complex. And I think
Speaker 1: to the point you're making, it's harder to teach kids
Speaker 1: that because you can't present them with the entirety of
Speaker 1: the picture in the beginning. You have to give them
Speaker 1: like small prism, like hey, look at this thing. Climb
Speaker 1: up in this box and shoot this thing, and we'll
Speaker 1: start there and then we'll get to it eventually. Whereas
Speaker 1: somebody's thirty five years old just start signing. You can
Speaker 1: give him the whole thing, like, here's all of it,
Speaker 1: and it's complex, sense, it's crazy, and you might cry,
Speaker 1: you might laugh, it's gonna be crazy. And then for
Speaker 1: you just to connect the food to it, which a
Speaker 1: lot of folks don't um. Even I am very guilty
Speaker 1: of taking. You know, if I get a deer and
Speaker 1: I don't have the weekend to to process it, take
Speaker 1: out the good cuts, you know, cut the steaks out
Speaker 1: of the hams and take the rest of the butcher
Speaker 1: let them do it. And even there and I feel
Speaker 1: I feel bad. I'm like, man, I'm well, you're still
Speaker 1: getting it back. Yeah, I mean, it's still coming back.
Speaker 1: And it's like if you could, if there was enough
Speaker 1: time of the day to really have that entire connection.
Speaker 1: You would. I would, um, but the adult too. You
Speaker 1: can go to them, especially from our perspective, and say
Speaker 1: what what do you want? What is it that you
Speaker 1: want on this? Well, I've got a family. I've got
Speaker 1: five people in my family. I would really like to
Speaker 1: be able to provide them with meat for the year.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, well that's gonna be a challenge. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, do you have a place to hunt army?
Speaker 1: Do you have a place to process this? Do you
Speaker 1: have a freezer? Freezer? And you gotta good a freezer? Um,
Speaker 1: things like that. But and to be able to go
Speaker 1: to them and then like, oh, yeah, well what do
Speaker 1: you can't eat? Will they eat anything? Will they only
Speaker 1: eat burgers? I mean ground or sausage or this and that?
Speaker 1: And then like and I think most of them are like,
Speaker 1: oh I thought that, you know, you have to do this,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, no, you can make this work for you.
Speaker 1: You can go in there and uh totally get out
Speaker 1: of it what you want and just and have that comfort,
Speaker 1: you know, because I'll do these classes where we might
Speaker 1: do fairly uh complex butchery sequence, you know, and like
Speaker 1: is how you cut the chops and there's this steak
Speaker 1: and that steak and this roast and that roast. And
Speaker 1: people be like, well what do you do? I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: grind most of it, make a bunch of it into
Speaker 1: a like a breakfast sausage. Um, make hot dogs and uh,
Speaker 1: it's very very simple what I do because that's my
Speaker 1: my needs. You know, my daughter will eat like the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean endlessly. I've got a lot of buddies that
Speaker 1: are like that. So just do you want to take
Speaker 1: the steaks? Take them because you and your wife love that.
Speaker 1: My kid will eat the ground. That's it at a
Speaker 1: lot of levels. So you've I mean, you're taking how
Speaker 1: many people a year hunting that I've never hunted before
Speaker 1: or at least have like not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: experience doing it. Well, that's our our public classes we do.
Speaker 1: We do public and we do private. So most of
Speaker 1: the private classes that everybody has been before, because we're
Speaker 1: typically being brought to a ranch and nine times out
Speaker 1: of ten it's we're dealing with hogs. We have a
Speaker 1: hog problem. We need to know what to do with
Speaker 1: these hogs. Um, come out to our ranch for this weekend.
Speaker 1: We roll out, we cook all the food. We you know,
Speaker 1: you know, show them a few tricks and cleaning them
Speaker 1: just to you know, make the whole process go a
Speaker 1: little bit better. Um, we teach them how to butcher, cook,
Speaker 1: package all that. But the public classes where anybody can
Speaker 1: sign up, just one person if you want to come along.
Speaker 1: Usually you know, a group about six seven people together. Um,
Speaker 1: you know we're doing about uh three hunting and two
Speaker 1: fishing a year. We're not doing as many as we
Speaker 1: used to do. But and about half of them are
Speaker 1: new hunters, so you're looking at about ten probably new hunters,
Speaker 1: which is not much but uh definitely the best, the
Speaker 1: best experience to sit in the blind with the person
Speaker 1: when they shoot their first year hog and it's on
Speaker 1: the ground, they get it and they you know, they've
Speaker 1: sealed the deal and they know now how to go
Speaker 1: about it, you know, and you you want to instill confidence,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't we don't want to hide any
Speaker 1: of our secrets. We want to give you everything that
Speaker 1: you need to know to get out there and do it,
Speaker 1: down to where to hunt, how how to get on land,
Speaker 1: how to how to talk to a farmer that may
Speaker 1: have a hog problem, to to get on that land
Speaker 1: and help them with it and nothing fancy. You know,
Speaker 1: we're not we're not trying to teach people how to
Speaker 1: do a week long trek in Wyoming for elk. You know,
Speaker 1: we're we're talking down home, getting mostly city people out
Speaker 1: there and uh connected with the hunt. And these days,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm just really I stay pretty focused on hogs
Speaker 1: because it just makes so much sense. You gotta pay
Speaker 1: a lot fair dear LEAs. Um. But hogs are you know,
Speaker 1: and no input, invasive, highly destructive animal that's breeding at
Speaker 1: a rate that you know, we we don't even understand.
Speaker 1: Right it's it's gonna be bad. We're in there. We're
Speaker 1: on like the golden days of the hog problem right now. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so in my mind, teaching people to get out
Speaker 1: there and and source hog and and work, you know,
Speaker 1: work towards at least controlling them a bit is uh
Speaker 1: that's good work. Well, it's damn delicious. That's so good.
Speaker 1: People don't understand. I mean, I think they even Hovelina's
Speaker 1: to some extent. People see the animal, it's smelly, it
Speaker 1: rolls in its own ship, and but that's what a
Speaker 1: domesticalg does the same. I think the eighty ninety pound
Speaker 1: board is you know, one of those that's some of
Speaker 1: the best meat you ever gonna It's utterly misunderstood, and
Speaker 1: I've I've heard all the myths. I've heard all the
Speaker 1: you know, the tricks and everything in order or or
Speaker 1: people just leave them lay because they they say they're terrible.
Speaker 1: And it's the best meat I have ever had. UM
Speaker 1: has been fair long. And you know, I remember one
Speaker 1: night we were sitting at the at the restaurant and
Speaker 1: we've just gotten in some uh some whole fairal hawks
Speaker 1: and they just looked beautiful. They were coming off of
Speaker 1: uh some really not I mean really good land out
Speaker 1: in the hell Country, and they had a lot of
Speaker 1: fat on them, but not too much. They were intermuscular fat,
Speaker 1: the marbling. And we cut these little steaks off the shoulders,
Speaker 1: which is my favorite, and we grilled one up and
Speaker 1: it was profound. I was sitting there and I called
Speaker 1: her it was my dinner, but I was like I
Speaker 1: was calling everybody over and I was like, just try this,
Speaker 1: try this, and everybody walked up. It was like, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: I've never tasting anything like that. It was so good. UM,
Speaker 1: And you know, we're I'm I'm working on a second
Speaker 1: book right now that is dedicated only to fair log. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's the elephant in the room. Everybody wants to know
Speaker 1: how to deal with them. We used to do venison
Speaker 1: classes and people would just like, well, what about a hog?
Speaker 1: What about a hog? And it's just every every class.
Speaker 1: It's like I felt, I felt like I spent half
Speaker 1: my time talking about pigs. It seems like the perfect
Speaker 1: storm too. It's an animal that Wait, they're plentiful, there's
Speaker 1: no seasons, you can hunt any which way you'd like. Um,
Speaker 1: people want you to kill them, and they're delicious at
Speaker 1: almost all levels. Why not? Why not expand the palette
Speaker 1: so you can serve almost every purpose imaginable for wildlife.
Speaker 1: I mean you're taking and uh basi species off the
Speaker 1: land and you're eating it and it's delicious. Ship like
Speaker 1: that is? How's that not the best equation from teaching
Speaker 1: somebody that. I would love to have a very civil
Speaker 1: dialogue with a vegan about farrell hawks, because my first
Speaker 1: point is they're eating your food, they're rooting through your figures. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're polluting your water supply. We could probably find a
Speaker 1: vegan pretty quick. I bet we could go outside and
Speaker 1: yet hopper and hit one in the head. I mean,
Speaker 1: which I don't advocate lightly. They're usually pretty weak, they
Speaker 1: might fall over injured. But yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that's what a beautiful way to teach people and what like.
Speaker 1: There's no I often think if you were to continue
Speaker 1: to promote, promote and promote, say, elk is the most
Speaker 1: delicious thing, and everybody in America suddenly wanted a piece
Speaker 1: of that, me be in trouble. But not with Farrell Hawks,
Speaker 1: not for I mean, how many was the three Sounders
Speaker 1: a year? More than that? Um, you know, probably a
Speaker 1: little more than a round two. But I mean it's
Speaker 1: just I mean, sexual maturity at five or six months,
Speaker 1: just station, three months, three weeks, three days, um. And
Speaker 1: then litter size. You know, you've seen him roll down.
Speaker 1: The litter can be anywhere from two to twelve. So
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to it's hard to guess. But I
Speaker 1: mean I heard a stat the other day for every
Speaker 1: hundred people in Texas, there's ten Farrell Hogs. And that's
Speaker 1: where we stand, right, that's where we stay today. It's
Speaker 1: probably eleven we're talking national debt that you can have
Speaker 1: a t numbers are going up saw. I mean, I
Speaker 1: live right out west of town here and I had
Speaker 1: four of them in my front yard the other day
Speaker 1: and I thought, no way, that absolutely absolutely and I thought,
Speaker 1: I'll get the crossbow out here, go to work if
Speaker 1: I have to do. Yeah. I mean, I live on
Speaker 1: the east side. We Um go on the hike and
Speaker 1: bike trail, um, and see sign out there, and I thought,
Speaker 1: there's no way that this is hog sign. And then
Speaker 1: one of my guides one days said that he saw
Speaker 1: hogs of that exact same spot on the trail and
Speaker 1: sure enough, I mean you see their track. Uh. It
Speaker 1: is crazy and it but it just I mean it
Speaker 1: feels good to hunt him and it's and it's coming
Speaker 1: down to where that's just my favorite thing to hunt.
Speaker 1: I really enjoy it. Um. I really like eating them.
Speaker 1: I respect them a lot too. And it's like I
Speaker 1: hate the whole I hate hogs. I want them all.
Speaker 1: I like to shoot him in the guts and all this,
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know, they're like I think humans
Speaker 1: have this flaw where you know, like zombies and Nazis
Speaker 1: are You can kill all you want, of course zombies,
Speaker 1: but whatever, but like there's this you get this once
Speaker 1: you give this license to be like, oh well, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's culturally acceptable to just violently kill these things
Speaker 1: as much as you want. And those are that picks
Speaker 1: fall in that category. And I think that's a that's
Speaker 1: a bit. I mean, you still have to remember that
Speaker 1: as oppression an animal, and then animal has an interesting
Speaker 1: story of how it that's where it is. Uh. I
Speaker 1: do believe that we brought them here? Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: mean wasn't Maybe you unless you you know you're you
Speaker 1: can trace your roots back to the Spanish Irish. We
Speaker 1: were too drunk to pull off that coordination, could have
Speaker 1: never figured that out. But it is a problem that
Speaker 1: we brought on ourselves. And so I mean I think
Speaker 1: that you know, have have a bit of respect for
Speaker 1: well and you see that in New Zealand a lot
Speaker 1: they have all these fairal I mean fairal term non
Speaker 1: native mammals they have there and their get up an alicopter,
Speaker 1: fly around, shoot red deer like it's going out of style,
Speaker 1: or shoot shammy and tar and just throw them in
Speaker 1: a ditch. Like those animals are there now, they're part
Speaker 1: of the landscape. You put them there. Maybe you didn't,
Speaker 1: but your your grandfather did. So why not treat them
Speaker 1: like even if they're even if they're destructive and invasive,
Speaker 1: why not treat them as part of the landscape and
Speaker 1: something to go in and manage. And as you you're
Speaker 1: well aware, as soon as you take the gloves off,
Speaker 1: as far as don't respect this animal, we don't care anymore.
Speaker 1: It starts to be playtime. And it starts to be
Speaker 1: like I can kill it anyway I want, and I
Speaker 1: throw grenade at it. If I miss whatever blow, it's
Speaker 1: leg off, doesn't matter. Just the hal like man that
Speaker 1: like surfaces a lot of the ship that anti hunters
Speaker 1: think is down hiding there that we're trying to be like, Wow,
Speaker 1: we're conservationist but not really precise. Yeah, and so it's
Speaker 1: hogs have tended to like surface this. Uh well, what
Speaker 1: I can do whatever I want now and just sure
Speaker 1: do like killing and I don't like killing elk, I'll
Speaker 1: do like killing these hogs. And wait, man, do you
Speaker 1: I feel like you feel like that about everything? Um?
Speaker 1: And so that's a problem I've had with the jumping
Speaker 1: a helicopter and you know, mow him down or and
Speaker 1: I get it as a as a control like if
Speaker 1: your land is completely overrun, which is which is very common,
Speaker 1: and I don't that is not my land, So I'm
Speaker 1: not there to make that decision. And I'm not judging,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying that the motivations and the the
Speaker 1: joy taken out of just the wounding, I do have
Speaker 1: a problem with that, um. And I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: every hog needs to be retained in order to feed people,
Speaker 1: but I don't see anything wrong with making it a go. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like if we don't start thinking about
Speaker 1: these things now, um, you know, when are we going
Speaker 1: to it? Would it would be a nice thing. You know,
Speaker 1: there are people in this state that don't have enough food.
Speaker 1: There are hogs that are killed from helicopters and they
Speaker 1: just rot. And I don't have a clear solution for that.
Speaker 1: But I'm just saying avoiding the conversation or or pretending like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's there's nothing that could be done in that case,
Speaker 1: I think it's not. It's not correct. Like much of
Speaker 1: those things, it's complicated, but it's not. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we're not going to talk about it and examine it, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's currently it's kind of like the gloves are off.
Speaker 1: That's so that's at some level that's okay, because that's necessary.
Speaker 1: At some level. We we gotta like make sure we
Speaker 1: rain that in sometimes like okay, okay, night time tactical
Speaker 1: halk cunning is fine. But you can palm up in
Speaker 1: the back of your truck and take him into town,
Speaker 1: take them to a processor and give him away, or
Speaker 1: eat them yourself whatever you're gonna do, or shoot them
Speaker 1: out a helicopter. That's great, but just have an idea
Speaker 1: what's happened at the end of that. It would be
Speaker 1: something to strive for. And you know, and that said also,
Speaker 1: I would never take a running shot on a deer.
Speaker 1: I will take a running shot on totally agree. I
Speaker 1: mean that's those animals are different. You would treat them
Speaker 1: differently because of what they are. Um, it's an entangled one.
Speaker 1: It's one that I always think like, it's a cash
Speaker 1: crop for a lot of outfitters. Um, you pay people.
Speaker 1: You know, if it was really that big a problem,
Speaker 1: dudes wouldn't be taking your money. They'd be like, come on,
Speaker 1: it's costing me money. I don't know. If you've got
Speaker 1: a hog problem, if you charge two dollars day, if
Speaker 1: you see how you can shoot one. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about. Yeah, twenty bullets right here,
Speaker 1: twenty that should work. So I've seen that how it
Speaker 1: becomes a bit of a cash crop. Now that's not
Speaker 1: totally true all over the place, but some people treated like, well,
Speaker 1: I can make a little bit of money off this,
Speaker 1: it is still hunting, and it's a grander sense, So
Speaker 1: I have to charge somebody for it. If if you're
Speaker 1: doing that, it's simple act of doing that, you're already
Speaker 1: giving up the eradication idea because that's now you're out
Speaker 1: to commodity. You don't want to eradicate a commodity exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's the whole that's like a weird conundrum with
Speaker 1: our value system. Like hunting provides value fully, ship honeys
Speaker 1: now provide value to something that we run eradicate. Look
Speaker 1: at the simitar orics. You know, it's preserved through hunting. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, people you know got all up in arms
Speaker 1: because they thought we're going to kill all of them.
Speaker 1: But hunters don't want to kill all of them. They
Speaker 1: want to keep them around. Um. And so the complicating
Speaker 1: factor with hogs is, you know, the state agencies want
Speaker 1: them all gone in staid. Monetize them in any way
Speaker 1: through hunting and so forth is detrimental to their efforts.
Speaker 1: And I know a couple of states I can't name them,
Speaker 1: but they have outlawed recreational hog hunting and as an
Speaker 1: experiment to see what happens if you demonetize the hunting
Speaker 1: of hogs, to see if that affects their population. And
Speaker 1: I know what the it's not. The rangers aren't just
Speaker 1: gonna all of a sudden give that up. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I've never paid down a hog, and but every time
Speaker 1: I see one, I'm like, it's an exciting experience. Like
Speaker 1: there's a hog. I'm gonna shoot that, I'm gonna eat that,
Speaker 1: and I'm excited about that. Yeah, I see a whole hog.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I see a fifty pound hog. I don't
Speaker 1: see like a cute little fella. I see that's a
Speaker 1: whole hog. And I can put on my trigger, I
Speaker 1: can close that and thing covered in bacon, ironically covering bacon,
Speaker 1: go back in the house and come back, and it's delicious.
Speaker 1: Like that's what I see. And I think if if
Speaker 1: other folks would see that, And I don't be interested
Speaker 1: being a text and what you think about Havelina, because
Speaker 1: I start now that I shot and eight If you Havevelina,
Speaker 1: I think the same thing about that when I see
Speaker 1: when I'm like dinner boom. Yeah. You know. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: limitations on those though too. Yeah. And I mean as
Speaker 1: game animal and not as prolific. And you know, like
Speaker 1: I said, it's like all of my hunting efforts are
Speaker 1: pretty much. I mean, I go, I go to the
Speaker 1: deer store once year, and like, I just want to
Speaker 1: knock down some big does as fast as I can.
Speaker 1: If I saw fourteen point buck walk out, I take
Speaker 1: a picture of it and show it to somebody that
Speaker 1: cares to be like, I saw him over there. If
Speaker 1: you're interested, I think he might be there, but I
Speaker 1: am not. I don't care. Um uh you know, shoot
Speaker 1: a few does, shoot a few ducks. Um. And beyond that,
Speaker 1: it's just it's gotten down to being hogs for me,
Speaker 1: and that's great. That's I look forward to reading that
Speaker 1: book because there's a lot. There's a lot that I
Speaker 1: think people need to know. One about the history of
Speaker 1: the animal, and too about like where it stands out
Speaker 1: and where it stands to go in the future, because
Speaker 1: it's certainly isn't entangled in Texas is like the flag way,
Speaker 1: We're gonna set the standard here, um, you know, in control.
Speaker 1: And it's such an interesting environment because you know, privately
Speaker 1: owned state has uh it's it's helped the hogs quite
Speaker 1: a bit because there's these vast ranches and they have
Speaker 1: these hogs huge areas where they can go, huge sanctuaries
Speaker 1: that that they can they can be untouched and breed. Um.
Speaker 1: And then they're fed corn almost year round in a
Speaker 1: lot of places too. So um, you know, the problem
Speaker 1: is exacerbated by the almost cultural climate of Texas. So
Speaker 1: you know, I find it very fascinating and I really
Speaker 1: want to be able to delve into it. And I
Speaker 1: think that this project that we're working on, you know,
Speaker 1: we're trying to approach you know, cooking them in a
Speaker 1: in a way where kind of empower people to to
Speaker 1: look at their an individual hog and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can get this in that out of them, instead
Speaker 1: of treating each hog as the same animal, because you know,
Speaker 1: thirty pound the pig is not the same as a
Speaker 1: two hundred pound bore. Yeah, I'm I had a Texas
Speaker 1: rancher telling me not too long ago that any any
Speaker 1: hog ever throws in a ditch like like you said,
Speaker 1: I probably are going to cut the backstraps out him
Speaker 1: at night, but I'll figure something out. But you know,
Speaker 1: those hundred forty nine pounders suck succulent sixty pounds of ruins.
Speaker 1: No way, I can't have it. But that's you know,
Speaker 1: insane with Haaveolina's guys like, well the little skunk pigs
Speaker 1: and can't eat those. I'm like they stick. I'm like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they stick, so do hogs. But you just peel off
Speaker 1: those glands and they're above their hip and they taste
Speaker 1: as good as anything I've ever tasted. Dad. Um, you
Speaker 1: know we've been told you know when we we were
Speaker 1: on a ranch. We worked on a ranch for about
Speaker 1: five years for public classes, and the last two years
Speaker 1: they allowed us to take some all Dad, and you
Speaker 1: know my favorite conversations, Oh you know, hey, you ever
Speaker 1: had all that? No? I heard it's inedible? Did you
Speaker 1: try it? No? Okay? Good? I shot down a scientist.
Speaker 1: Are you not a theorist either? I shot one down
Speaker 1: in Del Rio and the cook was Mexican and he
Speaker 1: would not let me in. They said, well, we don't
Speaker 1: cook that here, like will you kill it here? Were
Speaker 1: cooking herely, so we don't. The cook doesn't allow it
Speaker 1: in this kitchen, like not even I said I'll cook it.
Speaker 1: I would like. They said that he doesn't allow the
Speaker 1: meat anywhere near his kitchen. That's how And they were
Speaker 1: at some level and all that outfit or so I
Speaker 1: cook cooked it up over the open fire and it
Speaker 1: was terrible because it was I didn't really care at
Speaker 1: that point, but um I talked to him and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: they stay stink, they smell, they're nasty animals, face of animals.
Speaker 1: Like that doesn't mean all that can't be good, that's true.
Speaker 1: I mean, but you know people tend to also shoot
Speaker 1: the biggest male. Yeah, it's like which it's like an
Speaker 1: old ram too. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like people
Speaker 1: like yourself that are, you know, really in it for
Speaker 1: the culinary aspects and in it for the wild food?
Speaker 1: I always asked, you feel like unburdened by not having
Speaker 1: to worry about what's what's on top of animal's head.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're absolutely I feel like, you know, you
Speaker 1: feel like you're getting it right somehow, or other people
Speaker 1: got it wrong. Uh, you know, I really don't care
Speaker 1: what other people do, and you know, if they if
Speaker 1: they are really into that, then I support that. I
Speaker 1: think that's wonderful, you know. But personally, you know, this
Speaker 1: last year, we we do a deer hunt, me and
Speaker 1: and three of my friends. And it's our it's our
Speaker 1: freezer filler. We go out and we shoot deer, we
Speaker 1: get it all together, process it, and we divided amongst
Speaker 1: four families. Um. In years past, we've always hit it
Speaker 1: uh perfectly when the does are really active, and we've
Speaker 1: always it's in South Texas and the doughs are typically
Speaker 1: just huge and beautiful and super tasty. This year, the
Speaker 1: deer had already bachelored up when we went down there.
Speaker 1: We went down there about two weeks later than we
Speaker 1: normally do, and we ended up just shooting WESLEYE. Spikes
Speaker 1: and I just really noticed the difference in the meat,
Speaker 1: you know, and I just I kind of I missed
Speaker 1: my does, you know. I mean, I like my ladies
Speaker 1: and I like a big lady, big run, and it's
Speaker 1: just it's not the same. And to me, that's, uh,
Speaker 1: that's what it's all about, you know. And I of
Speaker 1: course I enjoy hunting, I love it, um, but I
Speaker 1: enjoy you know, at the end of the day when
Speaker 1: the four of us come back and we've got four
Speaker 1: or five, maybe six does on the ground, and it's like,
Speaker 1: that's a good day. Man. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: skinning parties, like hunting was great. Killing an animal was
Speaker 1: always a big event. But just four or five guys
Speaker 1: in a garage for two years, strung up was the
Speaker 1: best part of it for me. I look forward to
Speaker 1: that more thing. Yeah, I love it too, you know,
Speaker 1: and just you know, peeking under there, seeing how much
Speaker 1: fat they've got, seeing how good your shot was, um,
Speaker 1: and just looking forward to that, to that deer. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you know, I love you know, listening to like Stephen
Speaker 1: Ronnella reading his books and stuff like that. But it's um,
Speaker 1: and I think this is really interestingness. I'm not that
Speaker 1: kind of hunter at all. You know. I was talking
Speaker 1: to a friend of mine the other day and we
Speaker 1: we are very much on the same page. And that well,
Speaker 1: I'll back up. He it out the other day to
Speaker 1: a local creek right after a rain. He nailed three
Speaker 1: big channel catfish. He drove twenty minutes from his house.
Speaker 1: He went out there, he got those channel cats. He
Speaker 1: brought him home his family is rabid for catfish. I
Speaker 1: love catfish too, I mean, and and he was telling
Speaker 1: me this, and I was like, Duddy fucking hailed it.
Speaker 1: Like that's that. That is it right there to me
Speaker 1: and to me and him, and we really see eyed eye.
Speaker 1: Some people want to fly to Alaska. I don't. I
Speaker 1: want to. I want to travel the shortest distance to
Speaker 1: get myself dinner from my own region. I just think
Speaker 1: that there's like I think that's where all the romances
Speaker 1: and luckily everybody else's you know, wants to travel. But
Speaker 1: man roommates is such a good word. But I I,
Speaker 1: you know, I was hunting pigs. Um. I had a
Speaker 1: little spot about five minutes from where we're sitting, and
Speaker 1: I had a lot of pigs up there, and we
Speaker 1: managed to kill two out of there. And it's I mean,
Speaker 1: we're talking right outside the suburbs. By the way. I
Speaker 1: got checked by the sheriff one day and he said
Speaker 1: I was cool. Yeah, that was scary anyway, But to me,
Speaker 1: that is the best to be able to, like, you know,
Speaker 1: drive out there, shoot a pig, get in the cooler,
Speaker 1: take a shower, and be sitting down for dinner at
Speaker 1: eight pm. Um, that's really what I want, you know,
Speaker 1: And it's not this uh not this long torturous hunt.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I see the beauty and that, but
Speaker 1: really I am I am mostly in it for the food,
Speaker 1: and the more efficient I can be about that, the
Speaker 1: more excited. It's funny that I see, you know, we
Speaker 1: talk to people that do it for all these different reasons,
Speaker 1: and there's some people that I know that do it
Speaker 1: for that personal experience, that arduous journey, the bettering of
Speaker 1: self and like the animal. Yeah, the animal at the
Speaker 1: end is great, the meat at the end is great.
Speaker 1: But they wouldn't None of that would be a special
Speaker 1: if it was there was this like journey, this hard
Speaker 1: journey that was all about perspective and challenge that kind
Speaker 1: of that's awesome. I'm glad there's a spectrum of people
Speaker 1: that somebody like yourself be like, I'd rather not mess
Speaker 1: with that. I'd love to give catch a catfish that's
Speaker 1: just as beautiful. And I think the romance for a
Speaker 1: place that is right in front of you, he's a
Speaker 1: little bit more intense than the romance for a place
Speaker 1: that's far away. And I think that is that's key
Speaker 1: to what you're talking about I mean, like you can
Speaker 1: take your kids, can understand because of that catfish, what
Speaker 1: it means when it rains, what it means when the
Speaker 1: spring bloom starts, what these trees mean, what those trees mean,
Speaker 1: what that al hoot means, what that turkey gobble means.
Speaker 1: Like that is I have a small sun and I
Speaker 1: walk outside him. I can't wait to tell him all,
Speaker 1: like how all this is connected to what who he
Speaker 1: is and what he does as a human. And you can't.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can come back and talk about a caribet,
Speaker 1: but you sure you can't show anyone unless it's Christmas times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now I think that's that's really that's really profound, and
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's why I love it. You know,
Speaker 1: I got to go on a grouse hunting Idaho and
Speaker 1: it was amazing, and you know, I really loved it.
Speaker 1: But you know I would have been just as I
Speaker 1: be catching you know, some croppy in minutes northeast. He
Speaker 1: would have been absolutely absolutely And that's you know the people.
Speaker 1: I think we tend to add value to more beautiful animals.
Speaker 1: We can tend to add value to elk. I think
Speaker 1: we probably also had value regionally tannials that are more plentiful,
Speaker 1: you know, turkeys and teer and such. But for me,
Speaker 1: when I think about, like what's the most regal animal,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, man, the wild sheep. Like I've never
Speaker 1: I've seen like a few wild sheep out in nature before,
Speaker 1: And I think, I why not have the same respect
Speaker 1: or the same admiration for a catfish absolutely that lives
Speaker 1: where you live and does basically is a part of
Speaker 1: your daily existence, whereas this sheep there's very little I
Speaker 1: can do to affect that sheep's life and vice versa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you what you're touching on is exactly that,
Speaker 1: Like you can reach in that water and touch that
Speaker 1: catfish whenever you feel like if you're good at noodle
Speaker 1: and yeah, in a in that sense, you feel like
Speaker 1: when you're teaching, when you're taking somebody through all of
Speaker 1: the just killed and they're cutting the meat out, they're
Speaker 1: dissecting it, you feel like they're that romances is there
Speaker 1: during the process, they're feeling out as they're doing it
Speaker 1: or is it just like yeah, paint by numbers at
Speaker 1: that point. No, No, they're they're they're in it um
Speaker 1: And I think it's it's The most fun part of
Speaker 1: my job is we know the hunt. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's where the real adrenaline build happens, you know.
Speaker 1: And I remember I do a Parks and Wildlife hunt
Speaker 1: a guide and uh do uh cook dinner and then
Speaker 1: do a little class the next day out at Inks Lake,
Speaker 1: which is really fun state park around here. Um, they
Speaker 1: close off for hunting, and so it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: there's something really exciting about going to a state park
Speaker 1: that's closed for hunting. And so it's you feel like
Speaker 1: you're just you're getting to pick all that for a
Speaker 1: bid to step over the rope and you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like the deer that we're on the playground, you know what,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden. But it's available to new hunters
Speaker 1: and it's to expose them and uh it's you know,
Speaker 1: being able to sit with them when they shoot their
Speaker 1: first dear. And man, I you know, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, my heart is just racing when when I
Speaker 1: see that deer walk out and you're like, oh, that
Speaker 1: is your dear, I know it, that's your dear, And
Speaker 1: I'm like, take your time, and I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: be cool because if I'm not cool. That guy is
Speaker 1: not gonna be cool. So uh, it's I just I
Speaker 1: love it, I really really love it. And then in
Speaker 1: the cleaning when they you know, when they you know,
Speaker 1: they touch it for the first time and they realize
Speaker 1: it's hot not cold, you know, and like there's all
Speaker 1: these these little, these little steps that they gotta take,
Speaker 1: and then the guts and it's like us a little stinky, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you'll get better here in a second, will be fine.
Speaker 1: And then you know, kind of work through it. And
Speaker 1: then you show them all the different cuts and what
Speaker 1: you can do with it and how to you know,
Speaker 1: get the most out of it. And you know, again
Speaker 1: have that conversation it's like what do you want? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Like what do you like to eat?
Speaker 1: This is do you have a blank slate in front
Speaker 1: of you? You like, if you like sausage, man, you
Speaker 1: just hit the jackpot. So, uh, you know all those
Speaker 1: things and and no, I I there's such a tangible
Speaker 1: excitement with with new hunters and also teaching life long
Speaker 1: hunters how to cut and do things a little better. Oh.
Speaker 1: I never knew you could take the rib meat off
Speaker 1: of a deer and make anything worth while I'm absolutely
Speaker 1: you can, um, because yeah, I think it's a hunter,
Speaker 1: even if somebody else. All the time you learn that
Speaker 1: in little pieces. You don't learn it's one sitting You're like,
Speaker 1: oh this is kind of cool. I'll do this one time.
Speaker 1: I'll do that next time. That's still learning. I'm still learning, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And every animals a little different and he just you know,
Speaker 1: it always changes and I love that and I'm always
Speaker 1: you know, try this out with that, you know, see
Speaker 1: if that's good. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but
Speaker 1: it is the beauty of it and UM, but it's yours. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Food wise, is there anything that you know there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people out there that shoot a deer? Specifically, dear,
Speaker 1: i'd say, venison, Is there any tips that you've learned
Speaker 1: that are full proof that you just think people need
Speaker 1: to know because I'm interested in that, like as I
Speaker 1: cut up an elk or cut up a deer. Is
Speaker 1: there something that's a universal that you've seen that that
Speaker 1: always works and that people never do? Um? You know,
Speaker 1: I think there's yes, there is, UM and I think
Speaker 1: that specifically with venison, is people battle silver skin too much? UM.
Speaker 1: Silver skin, it's collagen, it's gonna melt into gelatine if
Speaker 1: it's cooked at a consistent, you know, pretty relatively low temperature,
Speaker 1: you know, like one nine or over for a long
Speaker 1: period of time, let's say three, four or five hours.
Speaker 1: So all those pieces the deer, like the shanks, the neck,
Speaker 1: things like that, that have a lot of silver in them, um,
Speaker 1: use those to your advantage. Just cut those off in
Speaker 1: big pieces and slow cook those. Don't try to bone
Speaker 1: them out and then clean all the silver off. You're
Speaker 1: wasting your time. And also what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: undermining the base fact that that silver skin has a quality,
Speaker 1: that quality being gelatine, gelatine being a richness also nutrition.
Speaker 1: So take those shanks and those neck pieces and just
Speaker 1: cut those into big chunks and slow cook those and
Speaker 1: then let them meat fall off the bone instead of
Speaker 1: trying to go in there and meticulously trim all that
Speaker 1: silver out so you can get it to your grinder.
Speaker 1: There's other cuts on that animal, namely the hams, the shoulders, um,
Speaker 1: that are going to be way easier to put in
Speaker 1: the grinder, And in fact, you can just throw them
Speaker 1: right in if you have a powerful grinder. You don't
Speaker 1: really need to even worry about cleaning them up at all.
Speaker 1: So what we've done there is is not only getting
Speaker 1: more nutrition or in flavor out of that animal, but
Speaker 1: you're also doing a lot less work. It's kind of
Speaker 1: this lazy approach, but I feel that people get frustrated, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it takes so much time to trim all the silver
Speaker 1: silver out and I'm like, I spend zero minutes backstraps. No,
Speaker 1: absolutely got to take it off, Yeah, exactly, exactly. Any
Speaker 1: any muscle that doesn't get worked a lot, like your backstrap,
Speaker 1: your tenderloin has to be quickly obviously. Um. But uh,
Speaker 1: that silver can go into stock, you know. Of course,
Speaker 1: if you're not dealing with chronic wasting disease, there's the
Speaker 1: big asterisk right there. But you can take that silver
Speaker 1: in all the bones and make make stock out of it.
Speaker 1: That silver skin won't convert again into gelatine in your stock,
Speaker 1: and so there is zero waste coming off that animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: clean up the backstrap really well. Um, but those those
Speaker 1: those legs. Basically, when I say shank, I mean from
Speaker 1: the elbow to the wrist or from the knee to
Speaker 1: the ankle. A lot of guys shanks becoming I mean,
Speaker 1: guys like Remmy Warren step Ranella, and that's what shanks are.
Speaker 1: One of the first things they're looking at. Shanks, tongues. Tongues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great. You know, these cuts, these off cuts, they're
Speaker 1: so good. And I've always on venison, I've always been
Speaker 1: a big fan of the belly or the flank meat,
Speaker 1: the the belly on the you know, taking it off
Speaker 1: in the whole. Yeah, the whole rib section. Cut that off. Um.
Speaker 1: At worst, you can take it and grind it into
Speaker 1: a really beautiful stew or chili meat, but it needs
Speaker 1: to be cooked for a long time because it contains
Speaker 1: a lot of silver skin. It won't make a good burger,
Speaker 1: but diced or ground it's gonna make excellent chili because,
Speaker 1: as I said earlier, over time that collagen breaks down
Speaker 1: into gelatine and it becomes it's a textural thing and
Speaker 1: it has a really nice flavor. So um, you can
Speaker 1: take that and and make a whole bunch of different things.
Speaker 1: In my first book in the field, we roll saw osagen,
Speaker 1: egg and breadcrumbs um around. We roll the belly around
Speaker 1: that and then braise it for a very long time,
Speaker 1: and I mean a very long time six hours. You know,
Speaker 1: croc pot low of and with lots of tomatoes, you know,
Speaker 1: lots of acid, and then you come in and slice
Speaker 1: it and it's perfectly tender, and people are, I try
Speaker 1: to cook that before it was tough. It's like you didn't.
Speaker 1: It didn't break down. You know, these are wild animals.
Speaker 1: Their legs had to break down. Your prime example would
Speaker 1: be the breast of a turkey versus the legs of
Speaker 1: a turkey. How often do turkeys run? How often do
Speaker 1: turkeys fly? That's how long you got to cook each
Speaker 1: one of those. Conversely, I wish there was a rule,
Speaker 1: would be like how long do you think this thing fluid?
Speaker 1: That's only gotta cook it? And I'm I'm I cut
Speaker 1: the legs and thighs off every turkey I killed. Fact,
Speaker 1: I just killed one in Florida a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: and I eat one breast delicious. Got that down. Don't
Speaker 1: need any help with that. But legs and thighs, Like,
Speaker 1: what the hell do I do? You've got to cook
Speaker 1: them for a very long time. They need to be
Speaker 1: I would say, close to submerged in the liquid. Croc
Speaker 1: pot is going to serve you really well. And any
Speaker 1: kind of acid is also going to serve you well
Speaker 1: to be it. Tomato would be a classic um um.
Speaker 1: Just you could sear the leg off and throw it
Speaker 1: into a croc pod with stock onions, sorry, carrots, whatever
Speaker 1: um you want to put in there, tomato, maybe a
Speaker 1: little wine if you if you want to, and then
Speaker 1: you're going to cook that until it's tender. How long,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know how old your turkey was.
Speaker 1: I don't know how hot your croc pod is. So uh,
Speaker 1: it will get tinder, I promise you that, but I
Speaker 1: mean it's gonna be a a very long time. It
Speaker 1: could be seven hours. I tend to just go overnight
Speaker 1: with that stuff or before work. And croc pod is
Speaker 1: because you don't have an open flame and so you
Speaker 1: can just put stuff in there and let it go. Um.
Speaker 1: But a lot of complaints about the tougher cuts of
Speaker 1: game are they are tough. And if they're tough, it's
Speaker 1: because they they first off, weren't cooked in a moist
Speaker 1: enough environment, and secondly, they weren't cooked for long enough
Speaker 1: to actually break down that collagen has to break down
Speaker 1: reverse he here, yes, sure, I'm I'm an old dog.
Speaker 1: You know, I see pictures online all the time of
Speaker 1: successful reverse sears. I'm I'm a traditionalist. Um. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a shooting big deer. I don't care what
Speaker 1: you do. I'm just gonna cook. I'm just gonna cook
Speaker 1: the This is so easy for me to do it
Speaker 1: this way. So um, you know, I might eventually come
Speaker 1: around to it, but for now, I love You know,
Speaker 1: a venison backstrap is just goes into a marinade of
Speaker 1: olive oil, salt, and pepper um, and then it goes
Speaker 1: on to an extremely hot grill, and uh, it's seared
Speaker 1: hard on three sides. I feel like a backstrap has
Speaker 1: three sides, and that's triangle to it. And I I
Speaker 1: like to see her the most, you know, so medium rare,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit north of that. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: pushing medium. It's fine with me. I tend to like
Speaker 1: meat a little more cooked, um than than rare. A
Speaker 1: medium rare. So you throw it on there, and you
Speaker 1: have you ever oven it or at all, just cast
Speaker 1: iron or a grill or you know, just like a
Speaker 1: very hot charcoal fire that is ripping hot. How do
Speaker 1: you what's the best way to get that crust that
Speaker 1: everybody's always after because I've I've had some steaks for guys,
Speaker 1: Like I've got that awesome crust, but it tastes like
Speaker 1: pepper and salt oil. Well, there's no fat in that.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get um more of that. Like I said,
Speaker 1: that marinatee of olive oil and not a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: just rub it with olive oil. But that's really going
Speaker 1: to help it. Um. You know, a smaller game animals,
Speaker 1: like if I was to grow a quail or dove,
Speaker 1: I usually am going to incorporate something sweet in there
Speaker 1: to expedite that carmelization process. So a little bit of
Speaker 1: honey in with the oil will help that char on
Speaker 1: the outside before the interior is overcooked. And so just
Speaker 1: adding a little bit of that in there. Typically with
Speaker 1: the backstrap, it's thick enough where you can get and
Speaker 1: if your fire is hot enough, you can get a
Speaker 1: good enough steer on all three sides before the inside
Speaker 1: has ever cooked. And so you don't need that kind
Speaker 1: of that honey crutch. So then your your rest for
Speaker 1: as long as you want. As long as you want, yeah,
Speaker 1: minimum ten minutes. But I mean, I I think that
Speaker 1: food is great at room temperature Um, so you know,
Speaker 1: ten fifteen minutes, it will become pretty tender if you
Speaker 1: let it, you know, sit for fifteen minutes and then
Speaker 1: then slices against the grain and then just medallion type.
Speaker 1: Whatever you do beyond that is up to you. Beautiful,
Speaker 1: pretty hungry? Now is there any other it's trying to
Speaker 1: think of all the questions I have. These are mostly
Speaker 1: my questions. So I'm sorry everybody listening. You have to
Speaker 1: deal with what I freaking want to know? Um ribs? Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: how do you say you should? You know, in this
Speaker 1: local environment, you shoot a deer, you have a full
Speaker 1: rack of ribs to deal with, and kinds of good
Speaker 1: size of deer. It's healthy. You want the rib meat.
Speaker 1: You're taking it on the bone. I assume you want.
Speaker 1: You're talking a standard rack and rob standard racket deer ribs.
Speaker 1: Always just get back to deer, because that's sure. This
Speaker 1: is what I do. Um, and it's and it's good
Speaker 1: and it's you know, I mean well, I mean it's
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's two thousand and eighteen. You're gonna
Speaker 1: piss off somebody no matter what you do. We're here
Speaker 1: to piss off. I'm gonna comments section to this. Oh yo, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't wait. Give it to them, give them to
Speaker 1: it types of dumb sh it already, So don't worry
Speaker 1: about that. I've already whacked a vegan in the head
Speaker 1: with a yetie hopper. So here I go. That's good product.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna tell somebody to boil ribs. Holy sh it,
Speaker 1: I didn't say boil. I did say boil. But that's
Speaker 1: what the comment section, that's what the comment outrage is
Speaker 1: going to say. I'm going to simmer those ribs until
Speaker 1: the tender and it's it's the reverse. Here is what
Speaker 1: it is. It's crazy. So what I'm gonna do is,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take those ribs and i'm gonna take a
Speaker 1: very highly seasoned mean water. You know. I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: some bay leaves and put some salt, some garlic, tender
Speaker 1: whatever whatever you want to put it there again, free country.
Speaker 1: So and I'm gonna cook those ribs at a simmer,
Speaker 1: not a boil, until they are tender, um, not falling
Speaker 1: apart tender, but just tender. And then I'm gonna pull
Speaker 1: them out and I'm gonna cool them a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna taste a little bit and if it's if
Speaker 1: it's seasoned enough, I'm not gonna season them anymore. If
Speaker 1: it needs a little salt and pepper, I'm going to
Speaker 1: salt and pepper them, and then i'm gonna get again
Speaker 1: a ripping hot fire. Maybe you're doing a mixed girl
Speaker 1: of a little backstrap a little bit of ribs, great,
Speaker 1: because you just need one fire on there now. Um,
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna take a fifty fifty mix of vinegar
Speaker 1: and honey. Whatever vinegar you want to use, fine, I prefer,
Speaker 1: you know, an apple cider vinegar is gonna be really good.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take those ribs and i am going to
Speaker 1: brush them with that, and i'm gonna put them on
Speaker 1: the grill and flip and flip and based and based
Speaker 1: and based until they get a crust. And so what
Speaker 1: I've done with the initial cook is I've got them tender,
Speaker 1: and then with the secondary cook, I've add a little
Speaker 1: bit of smoke. I've added some char, I've added some sour,
Speaker 1: and I've added some sweet um. And the reason that
Speaker 1: you can't go all the way on the smoker with
Speaker 1: those venison ribs is they just don't have the fat
Speaker 1: really to self based when they're breaking down. But I
Speaker 1: mean in order not to just throw them away. This
Speaker 1: is a really good method. You can also free cook
Speaker 1: them and then three days later throw them on the grill.
Speaker 1: You can cook them in your stock pot and then
Speaker 1: pull them out and then you know use you know,
Speaker 1: get secondary nutrition out of those bones in the form
Speaker 1: of the venison stock. There's all kinds of things you
Speaker 1: can do with it. But for ribs, that's what I do.
Speaker 1: A hog ribs is a case by case. If they've
Speaker 1: got enough fat, you can do it for aditional, just
Speaker 1: straight up smoke on them. Um. If they're super lean,
Speaker 1: revert to the the pre cook pre cook. Um, we'll
Speaker 1: call it pre cook for the for this, UM, take
Speaker 1: you back to there's a dead deer in the ground, skinned,
Speaker 1: its guts are out. How do I go about getting
Speaker 1: these ribs off in a way that makes sense and
Speaker 1: it's quick and clean and I'm not snapping bones all
Speaker 1: over the place. Clever in a mallet. You gotta get
Speaker 1: the clever and mallet um very very basic. Once you
Speaker 1: get the hang of it, you can take down any
Speaker 1: animal with a boning knife, a clever and a millet
Speaker 1: pretty much. Um. You know, get rid of the saw
Speaker 1: and the dust. Instead, you know, a nice sharp clever.
Speaker 1: I love a old hickory carbon steel clever my favorite. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then just a rubber mallet from a hardware store,
Speaker 1: perfectly locally owned, um, locally sourced wood rubber. Yeah all right,
Speaker 1: so but I think the Cleveland mallet um, you just
Speaker 1: tap tap tap right to those ribs. Um. You can
Speaker 1: use a saw saus get a little, they get a
Speaker 1: little funky and there, um, but yeah, it's the best
Speaker 1: way to get them off and on a deer. I
Speaker 1: never made. I never cut chops off a deer. I
Speaker 1: always take cleaned backstrap. There's too much connective tissue in
Speaker 1: that chop. I think the backstrap is superior. I had.
Speaker 1: So there's been some um somebody's mind. They'll go unnamed.
Speaker 1: His name is John Dudley who posted something through tragorub
Speaker 1: with with chopped like backstrap chop the bone still in them. Now.
Speaker 1: Definitely do it is that legit? I mean make it absolutely.
Speaker 1: I just find there to be a bit too much
Speaker 1: connective tissue in there compared to the just that pure
Speaker 1: a really well cleaned um backstrap on the grill. I
Speaker 1: kind of prefer that experience over it. But again we
Speaker 1: are in Texas extra for it's it's an extra free here.
Speaker 1: Are there any um, I don't know why I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this when we were talking earlier. There anything
Speaker 1: that anything that frustrate you that you want to talk about?
Speaker 1: Just not in not in not much time. I got left,
Speaker 1: Let's go, he said, you gotta pick your kid aub
Speaker 1: at five. Are there anything like in the hunting in
Speaker 1: the culinary worlds, because this is a hunting podcast, is
Speaker 1: there anything that frustrates you that you feel like that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know sometimes I feel like, you know, I read
Speaker 1: a lot of forums on hunting. I never ever post
Speaker 1: on there, and I don't feel like my opinion is
Speaker 1: that valid. But um, I kind of dislike when people say,
Speaker 1: as we're a hunting community, we all have to be
Speaker 1: unified on this, and it's like there's no there's no
Speaker 1: community in the world that has to be completely unified
Speaker 1: on anything. You know, we all don't have to be
Speaker 1: of the same mind. Um, I don't have to shoot
Speaker 1: a kyati. I don't want to. Well, I have a
Speaker 1: terrible kylotie problem on my land. I'm gonna shot kyotes, Okay,
Speaker 1: I get that you know, it's I understand that, but um,
Speaker 1: I don't want to shoot one and I don't and
Speaker 1: I'm never going to, so you know, and we don't
Speaker 1: have to be unified. We can have these differences of
Speaker 1: opinion and you can you can do as you wish
Speaker 1: on on your land and things like that. You know,
Speaker 1: I wish that, you know, we I understand as as
Speaker 1: hunters right now, there is kind of a call for
Speaker 1: unity because certain aspects might be considered to be under attack.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, and you know, we we
Speaker 1: have to have kind of a spectrum of ideals um
Speaker 1: in order to be you know, plausible, and that will
Speaker 1: always be true. Hunting will always be under attack as
Speaker 1: long as it's I mean, maybe there was a time
Speaker 1: in our society where it wasn't, but like modern sport,
Speaker 1: hunting has almost always been on attack. For the say,
Speaker 1: it's been around for ninety years, it's been under attack
Speaker 1: the entire nightey and it's only intensifying because organization things
Speaker 1: like that. But your point is well taken, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people in our industry that are big
Speaker 1: names that are calling for this this you know, out
Speaker 1: and out unity. Look, I get what you're saying. I
Speaker 1: get the idea of what you're saying, but that's that
Speaker 1: idea of this is this you know, this unity that
Speaker 1: has to be uh in perpetuity. That's more dangerous than
Speaker 1: a bunch of smart freethinkers with the same goal coming
Speaker 1: together and be like, how we figure this thing out?
Speaker 1: Super competent. It's complex. Yeah, I think it's very complex.
Speaker 1: I think just you know, I mean, of course I'll
Speaker 1: respect other people's opinions. Is and it's legal, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are many cases where you need to shoot
Speaker 1: that coyote um, but you're gonna have to do that. Well, Ronnella,
Speaker 1: he's made the best. If I could come up with
Speaker 1: a better analogy's like, look, we're all in a boat
Speaker 1: and somebody's in their shooting holes in it. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna be like, well, we're all in the boat together.
Speaker 1: We gotta let him keep shooting holes in it. Now
Speaker 1: you push him over the edge, like you just say,
Speaker 1: if you please walk the plank, we would like to
Speaker 1: plug the holes up and for you to get out.
Speaker 1: And so that's a harsh, you know, It's I don't
Speaker 1: feel like I would never tell everybody to like kick
Speaker 1: out people that do something I don't agree with. But
Speaker 1: I think it would be much better if we all
Speaker 1: codified a little bit of like what are the barriers
Speaker 1: with which hunting exists, and then try to if we
Speaker 1: can better defind those, then we don't have to so
Speaker 1: worry about all our conversations being in this weird gray
Speaker 1: area where you don't agree. You know, high fence being
Speaker 1: the perfect example of that. Like you live in Texas,
Speaker 1: high fences are everywhere? Um I would I just drove
Speaker 1: here from Houston. That's all you see, you know, black
Speaker 1: Buck Ranch freaking high fence. I mean, I've never been ever.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like, um, as a Texan you have
Speaker 1: well as a as a pretty by now you've been
Speaker 1: here long enough that you could say you're a Texing.
Speaker 1: You can tell me I'm not. I'm not texting coming
Speaker 1: from North Texas or something. I'm like, I be called
Speaker 1: it was from North It's a little bit further north
Speaker 1: than North Texas. That's not the intense. Sorry, I didn't
Speaker 1: mean derail no. Um. I just think that how we
Speaker 1: define that matters, and how we define like if high
Speaker 1: fence is it could save the Scimitar Horne orics in
Speaker 1: some way that's important for that animal. But is it
Speaker 1: hunting now, Like is it just game farming, which is
Speaker 1: okay because you run a restaurant. You can't just buy
Speaker 1: you know, Billy Bob's deer from down the street. It's
Speaker 1: got to come from an approved um game farms at right. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that's I mean, not to make that muddy
Speaker 1: that water, but ours comes they're trapped and so they
Speaker 1: tend to come either from a coal on them, typically
Speaker 1: a high fence ranch or escape bees that are trapped trapped. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that they are definitely a couple of steps
Speaker 1: more wild than a farm most definitely. UM. As in
Speaker 1: respect to the venison that we get in the black buck,
Speaker 1: the psycha, red deer, elk, things like that, UM non native,
Speaker 1: and I like to think of him as invasive. You know.
Speaker 1: The same thing goes with the Farrell hogs. They're trapped. UM.
Speaker 1: But uh yeah, I mean that's a that's a great point, um,
Speaker 1: I think. I mean, the way I think about it,
Speaker 1: it's just like we're we're kind of dealing with our
Speaker 1: situation and high fences exist. I think the jury's out
Speaker 1: as to the long term effects of what sequestering groups
Speaker 1: of wildlife can do that. Chronic wasting disease might illuminate that,
Speaker 1: um a little bit more because um, that might be
Speaker 1: how it gets here. And but at the same time,
Speaker 1: you know, we live in a in a place that's
Speaker 1: got a lot of wild land and it's because people
Speaker 1: steward it through private ownership, and that is that's a
Speaker 1: great thing in my mind. And so if you put
Speaker 1: a high fence surround it, then maybe that's gonna you know,
Speaker 1: just work in your benefit forward towards stewarding that land. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's just there's a lot of argument, and I just
Speaker 1: I really I really don't know. And again it just
Speaker 1: boils down to you know, I just do what you
Speaker 1: want to do. Yeah, I mean, that's that's this is America.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna I would never be like, let's regulate
Speaker 1: high fence, Like you want to have high fence ranch, perfect,
Speaker 1: go for it. If somebody wants to come there and
Speaker 1: shoot one of those animals and do whatever they want
Speaker 1: to hang on their wall or I'm I'm almost I'm
Speaker 1: fine with that. But what I but I think where
Speaker 1: we as hunters should probably draw the line is like, look,
Speaker 1: it's not hunting per se, Like just call it something different,
Speaker 1: don't try to you know, like there's an elk on
Speaker 1: the wall in front of us. If if that elk
Speaker 1: was killed in a high fence and I came over
Speaker 1: and you were like, how did you kill that elk?
Speaker 1: And you said, well, you know what, I went out
Speaker 1: early in the morning, crawled up a hill. There he
Speaker 1: wasn't a shot him, and there he's on my wall.
Speaker 1: You're like, well, that's a misrepresentation of hunting. Like that's
Speaker 1: that's you taking the easy route and then trying to
Speaker 1: represent the hard route that I took or you took.
Speaker 1: You know, that's using the aspect of the trophy to
Speaker 1: signify something that that's false. And so that's that that
Speaker 1: concept is wrong. So what what do you do? Not
Speaker 1: let that person hanging on the wall or making put
Speaker 1: a plaque underneath, Like yeah, I mean you can't regulate it.
Speaker 1: There's no way put an ear tag in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's it. That's it. It's gonna have an ear
Speaker 1: tag around the head of But so I don't know
Speaker 1: how you would regulate that. And that's said. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got some we've got some clients that bring us
Speaker 1: down for a class or two a year, and they're
Speaker 1: high fenced, and it's oh, I think it's it's it's
Speaker 1: twenty five acres, it's mass, it's massive, and uh, you
Speaker 1: know they're usually on the last day, you know, we're
Speaker 1: all done, and like, hey, you want to go killog?
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I got my pants on, right, and
Speaker 1: so is that gonna be the title of your next book?
Speaker 1: I got my pants on, I got my paints on
Speaker 1: volume two. So and I've gone out there and I
Speaker 1: think I've sat four or five times, and I've never
Speaker 1: killed a pig. Um. They just gave me the slip.
Speaker 1: And they're always confounded by that. They're like, you're telling
Speaker 1: me you didn't see a pig. I'm like, I swear
Speaker 1: I did a pig. I saw I saw a horse
Speaker 1: with antlers. That's for sure the biggest deer I've ever
Speaker 1: seen in my life. Oh. And I've been like I
Speaker 1: founded turkeys on hive fence places where like a zebra
Speaker 1: scared away the bird was going. We hunted two years ago.
Speaker 1: We had in a place I had tigers and the
Speaker 1: eland in the front yard, tiger's courts in the cage
Speaker 1: eland not but I mean I was calling a burden
Speaker 1: looking up and there's like a tiger walking on the skyline.
Speaker 1: That's so strange. Only in Texas, Only in Texas. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that this culture is is. It's one. It's
Speaker 1: not indicative of the rest of the country. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the culture down to heres Is. I would say unique.
Speaker 1: It's it's not strange, it's just unique. You know, both
Speaker 1: because of the way to land is treated, the privatization
Speaker 1: of all this land, this giant state private, and then
Speaker 1: the fact that there's a whole culture around putting fences
Speaker 1: up around that, what that means and why, Like you said,
Speaker 1: I'd be more interested in reading about what it does
Speaker 1: to the landscape, whether it improves by it surely doesn't
Speaker 1: improve the biodiversity of a place to fence it off,
Speaker 1: um and just putting a bunch of invasive species in
Speaker 1: there so just the off chance they don't get out
Speaker 1: is even more dangerous because they often do get out,
Speaker 1: you know. Hence you can drive an hour west of
Speaker 1: here and shoot an access to here in the Lanta River,
Speaker 1: a free ranging one. Speaking of if anybody out there
Speaker 1: listening to this, access to access, access access, please contact
Speaker 1: me I have a have a prejudice against those things.
Speaker 1: I can I can probably make that happen for good.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, we're getting ready to go three weeks.
Speaker 1: We're going to Lanai, Hawaii. Um I killed three of
Speaker 1: them things last year and I'm out of the meat
Speaker 1: or ready. UM one here in two in Hawaii last
Speaker 1: year's I'm I'm fully I'm one of the one team. Access.
Speaker 1: It is the fact that there's not a whole lot
Speaker 1: of just as somebody who doesn't own any land or
Speaker 1: doesn't have a lease around here, there's not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of positives for Texas and hunting. It's kind of
Speaker 1: just a non sequitor. But access to here, the fact
Speaker 1: that I can drive in Big Atlanta under shooting access
Speaker 1: here in an hour away from where we're sitting right now.
Speaker 1: It's one of the more fantastic developments ever. Yes, the
Speaker 1: history of eating meat and invasive and so you know,
Speaker 1: I have to weigh that against my the white tail,
Speaker 1: you know, which we need to definitely cold their population.
Speaker 1: But then you know, a couple of factors are gonna
Speaker 1: put access ahead of that. And then is that how
Speaker 1: good they are to eat and the fact that they're
Speaker 1: invasive and highly competitive with that same white tail. So
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: we might have a conversation in five years, and at
Speaker 1: that point, I'm only going to be hunting access and
Speaker 1: hogs would be fine with that. That'd be a fantastic
Speaker 1: way to live. That would be if you're at home,
Speaker 1: you're like, honey, we got oh all, we got all.
Speaker 1: We got his acts as a hog. I'm sorry to
Speaker 1: my wife. She buys chicken here every now and then,
Speaker 1: and um, it frustrates me. And she's like, I just
Speaker 1: won't white meat. I can't eat red meat all the time.
Speaker 1: And so this year I've shot one turkey, but my
Speaker 1: goal is to shoot twelve. If I can get twelve,
Speaker 1: I gotta travel around to get that done, or beg
Speaker 1: borrow and steel to get twelve. But I feel like
Speaker 1: if I can kill twelve turkeys, then we've got to
Speaker 1: white meat for the year. That's what I I kind
Speaker 1: of figured, if one last, you know, if one turkey
Speaker 1: lasts a month, to breast two legs whatever legs and
Speaker 1: thives being more difficult, maybe less now that you gave
Speaker 1: me some tips. But that was my other goal was like,
Speaker 1: can I make lunch meat at a turkey breast freezing
Speaker 1: and make lunch of meat later. That would be and
Speaker 1: so bright it smoking easy. I done you. I do
Speaker 1: that with the honey glaze and just It's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite things in the world. But that is if
Speaker 1: you the other great thing about living in Texas. You
Speaker 1: can shoot four turkeys a year, and if you're if
Speaker 1: you don't like to eat white meat a lot, that
Speaker 1: would last year, six eight months if you do it
Speaker 1: right now. I'm gonna try to shoot two this weekend.
Speaker 1: Me too. I'll let you know how good. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna shoot four. Come in, I'm shooting four. That's how
Speaker 1: I feel. And last year I did a lot of
Speaker 1: hunting with with a bow for turkeys because I was
Speaker 1: just really into archery. And I still end. But now
Speaker 1: and I won this mission to feed the family shotgun
Speaker 1: like a full on I'm not messing. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to tickle him anymore. Like I don't need the handicap.
Speaker 1: I shoot him in seventy and a shotgun at twelve games.
Speaker 1: It just does everything for me. Have you never had
Speaker 1: any problems with that? Not the lethality with to seventy
Speaker 1: versus an arrow liket per second last turkey. I got
Speaker 1: with that to seven. I gotta set really good shot
Speaker 1: on it. I lost the zero meat on that day. Yes, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that was That was one of the few times. And
Speaker 1: I love bow hunting and I do it almost exclusively,
Speaker 1: but I just I was like, what am I doing?
Speaker 1: I can use a shotgun. I really love to eat
Speaker 1: these things. Why be less effective? What am I doing?
Speaker 1: And that was last year round this time when I realized, Hey,
Speaker 1: I gotta go with the shotgun. I gotta go and
Speaker 1: the guy we're hunting with this weekend, um my buddy
Speaker 1: Brennan owns archery country here in town, and so I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: but I'm coming with a shotgun. Archery country or not,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna. I'm just gonna shoot every long beard I
Speaker 1: can get my hands on two years old, three years old.
Speaker 1: I don't really Oh that's that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 1: Like I can have that with turkeys. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I could give that to myself with elk anymore,
Speaker 1: just because I'm too far down the what's on top
Speaker 1: of its head game? But I could do with turkeys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to see, they don't care like what's one less feather
Speaker 1: in the fan gonna bother me? Fried turkey? Oh boy,
Speaker 1: how do you fry in the turkey? I just cut this?
Speaker 1: This is ya so red neck, but I mean just
Speaker 1: cut it into strips and probably bryan it. Throw it
Speaker 1: in a little buttermilk for you know, a few hours,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe it's like twelve hours. Let it kind
Speaker 1: tender eyes a little bit and then just bread it,
Speaker 1: just butter milk. Fry it. Yeah, buttermugging hot sauce if
Speaker 1: you want, add a little more acid in there, um
Speaker 1: than just tradge and flour and uh deep fried now,
Speaker 1: I mean the pro tip would be deep fried and
Speaker 1: pure beef fat. And then you're really going to be
Speaker 1: happy about that, changing lives. We're gonna post this at lunchtime,
Speaker 1: post this right around eleven thirty, really get the viewers
Speaker 1: coming in. Yeah, well I appreciate it, man, absolute appreciate it.
Speaker 1: It's been really fun. If you haven't read, or if
Speaker 1: you don't own a field, you ought to own it. Um,
Speaker 1: it's fantastic and you wouldn't need another I don't even know.
Speaker 1: It's not a cookbook. What would you call it? Coffee
Speaker 1: table book? Coffee to Eat People, Meat Eaters Coffee table Book,
Speaker 1: because it really is that. I mean, there's it's not
Speaker 1: just recipes, it's not just butchering and butchering, it's it's
Speaker 1: every little piece of knowledge you want to have. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you. You know, I appreciate that. We can't wait
Speaker 1: filling to then if you're in Austin, come to die Dowey. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Other than that, appreciate it, man, absolutely, thank you. And
Speaker 1: that's it episode number nine in the books. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much to Mr Jesse Griffiths for sitting down with
Speaker 1: me in Austin, Texas to talk about all the things
Speaker 1: that we covered. It really was a great conversation and
Speaker 1: I hopefully you'll be able to bookmark this one when
Speaker 1: you're hungry and you're looking for a good recipe or
Speaker 1: some good tips and tricks on how to cook your
Speaker 1: turkey breasts or turkey legs, or turkey thighs, or venison
Speaker 1: backstraps or venison ribs. Hopefully that is a great takeaway
Speaker 1: from this one, but also just how important it is
Speaker 1: to source your food, not on only your meat, but
Speaker 1: your vegetables and your eggs and anything you can either
Speaker 1: locally or from from local farmers or farming your damn
Speaker 1: self if you can. I think that's something I will
Speaker 1: strive to do, and I hope everybody that can does.
Speaker 1: As always, you can go to the Hunting Collective dot
Speaker 1: com to check out more from this interview and others.
Speaker 1: Last week we had Sam Sohold and we had Charles
Speaker 1: Post a couple of great conversations with great dudes, So
Speaker 1: hopefully you can check out episode number seven and eight respectively.
Speaker 1: But there's also Ryan Callahan, Steve Ronella, John Dudley, Shane Mahoney,
Speaker 1: Aubrey Marcus and more. Don't forget Remmy Warren, my boy.
Speaker 1: All that's there at the Hunting Collective dot com. It's
Speaker 1: all their own iTunes, it's all their own Stitcher. Will
Speaker 1: soon be at adding Google Play to the mix and
Speaker 1: even more to get your more avenues to listen to
Speaker 1: this thing. But that's it. That's all there is for
Speaker 1: this week, episode number nine. Next week will be in
Speaker 1: the double digits with episode number ten. Got a really
Speaker 1: good guests lined up for the next one, I believe,
Speaker 1: don't want to let it out of the backage just yet.
Speaker 1: And then a couple of other really good guests, um
Speaker 1: and the following week will be at the b h
Speaker 1: A Rendezvous in Boise, Idaho. I'll be hanging out there
Speaker 1: Thursday all day and part of the day Friday. I
Speaker 1: gotta bounce out early. Unfortunately, won't be able to hang
Speaker 1: a whole weekend, but I hope to see some of
Speaker 1: you there, and I'll be podcasting with some of the
Speaker 1: industry's best during those couple of days. So thanks for
Speaker 1: tuning in one more time. Hunting Collective dot com at
Speaker 1: Beni B three one on Instagram. Come check us out.
Speaker 1: Until next time, see you