Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the
Speaker 1: most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt
Speaker 1: app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where
Speaker 1: you stand with on X All. Right, before we even
Speaker 1: get to our guests, we need to do to show
Speaker 1: and tell pizzas Cran, do you want to do show
Speaker 1: and tell? First? Sure? Okay, explain what you made, um
Speaker 1: so from from a duck that was shot the other week. Um,
Speaker 1: I just decided to make a pair of earrings. So
Speaker 1: I it's very simple, very simple, very simple. So just
Speaker 1: these bright orange feet off the mallard and quick. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1: So it's a bright orange mallard foot hasn't even dried
Speaker 1: out yet. You can sew it back onto your duck
Speaker 1: and he'd walk away. And I just put some stainless
Speaker 1: steel steel wire around it to like kind of hold
Speaker 1: the ankle and made it like a little earring. Oh dude,
Speaker 1: that makes a statement, man, I don't know what statement
Speaker 1: it makes. It's beautiful. Krin was pointing out that people
Speaker 1: get upset did they feel like it's better just to
Speaker 1: throw out the garbage? Apparently? Yeah, right, I mean it's
Speaker 1: better to throw out the trash than to put it
Speaker 1: as earring, right, Like it feels disrespectful that you're you know,
Speaker 1: it's a detached foot. Whoever has that sentiment would have
Speaker 1: had a hell of a time with planes. Indians being
Speaker 1: their whole get up was made out of animals, extremely
Speaker 1: upsetting to them. So it's like, if you're going to
Speaker 1: save the feet for stock and boil them in a pot,
Speaker 1: you know, like in a pulse apocalyptic scenario, everybody's starving,
Speaker 1: death crens Like, right, she takes her earrings off, makes
Speaker 1: a little a bit of stock, and everybody's fine. So
Speaker 1: are you going to go into this? Do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean I love I love making stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: I love using my hands, and I'm paint a lot.
Speaker 1: I haven't done that and while I used to do
Speaker 1: a lot of ceramic, so um yeah, um all, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll come up with a line of ear rings and
Speaker 1: rings and you can get around um you know, like
Speaker 1: you can't barter in trade for wild game meat, but
Speaker 1: you could even probably go on Etsy and sell your
Speaker 1: wares or like you for for any future we neither
Speaker 1: giveaways or fundraising. You know, there can be a pair
Speaker 1: of something, pair of earrings, or something in that collection
Speaker 1: of the gift items. Me and Seth to thinking about
Speaker 1: set doesn't know about this, but me and never thinking
Speaker 1: about raising a lot of money with beaver pelts, I
Speaker 1: got a path to raise a lot of money for
Speaker 1: our land Access initiative through beaver pelts. Extremely high priced
Speaker 1: beaver pelts. I was thinking about that too, extremely high
Speaker 1: priced bea repels. They come a little certificate signed, and
Speaker 1: a pair of flip flops, and a pair of flip
Speaker 1: flops comes with every repelled uh. And then now Seth
Speaker 1: through your show and tell um. This past week, I
Speaker 1: was at deer camp in eastern Montana, and Um, I
Speaker 1: stumbled upon a chunk of bone sticking out of a bank.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a cut bank. It was just like a
Speaker 1: little rolling shoulder that fell down into a little dried
Speaker 1: up creek bottom. And um, I don't fully understand that
Speaker 1: when you say that, well, you know most people like well,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say most people. A lot of times people
Speaker 1: find bison skulls in cut banks, like sticking out of
Speaker 1: a cut bank. This was just like in the grass
Speaker 1: you know there it was fully vegetated where where I
Speaker 1: found this, and um, it was just so no erosion,
Speaker 1: nothing had fell away, no erosion at all. I just
Speaker 1: happened to see a chunk of bones sticking out of
Speaker 1: like the grass, and I just started started digging and
Speaker 1: uncovered The first one I found was not in a
Speaker 1: cut bank. It wasn't anything eroded, which I think, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think it's cool and you got it's
Speaker 1: a youngster, um I was. I was in a hurry
Speaker 1: when I was digging it out because my girlfriend Kelsey
Speaker 1: had just shot a mule deer and I was, um
Speaker 1: I did. I had to walk like two miles back
Speaker 1: to the vehicle to go get the vehicle to bring it.
Speaker 1: There was like a another road that would ended up
Speaker 1: being way closer, So I went got the vehicle and
Speaker 1: brought it around and made the back out like it said,
Speaker 1: up two miles like five yards. So I was going
Speaker 1: to do that, and in in the process of doing
Speaker 1: that is when I found this skull. And I was
Speaker 1: trying to be quick digging it out of the bank
Speaker 1: and ended up breaking some pieces off of it. But
Speaker 1: it was very fragile. Um. I don't know what's going on,
Speaker 1: but something with the cosmos. Were a lot of you
Speaker 1: know right now in in Siberia and in in Arctic Alaska.
Speaker 1: There's all this stuff coming out of the perma frost
Speaker 1: right now because the exceedingly warm summers, like mammos and
Speaker 1: dogs and all manner jump. I know, I want to
Speaker 1: go over there and poke around. Um field trip. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of I feel like there's something in the cosmos.
Speaker 1: It's not climate related, but there's just a lot of
Speaker 1: buffalo skulls right now. Because I had found one in
Speaker 1: I don't know, man late nineties and it didn't find
Speaker 1: one for forever. And last year found two. One was
Speaker 1: full of crayfish, had been colonized by crayfish. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: then found a chunk like this chunk right here, and
Speaker 1: then my brother found a couple found one. Everyone's fine.
Speaker 1: Everybody's been fine. I know, multiple dudes have found him
Speaker 1: this year. I got there's so many coming out right now.
Speaker 1: If something isn't the cosmos. I got a friend over
Speaker 1: Missoula that found one and didn't even pick it up.
Speaker 1: He sent me a photo. It was level with it
Speaker 1: was in a gravel bar. It looked like it was
Speaker 1: on display in a gravel bar, Like it was like level,
Speaker 1: like you could have walked across it in a gravel bar,
Speaker 1: but just like there in the gravel bar. Oh, we
Speaker 1: found another one earlier. Um it was later in the
Speaker 1: summer that someone we were floating the river and someone
Speaker 1: had picked it up and said it like, made a
Speaker 1: little Karen. That's what I'm thinking of, made a little
Speaker 1: Karen and set it on top of Karen. What whatever
Speaker 1: you've been stearn Karen cairn cairn. It's hard to say
Speaker 1: that word. C A I r n made a cairn
Speaker 1: and set it on top I don't know if they
Speaker 1: knew what it was or didn't know what it was. Well,
Speaker 1: if they, yeah, I mean they did like a symbolic thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just I just pictured a bunch
Speaker 1: of kids playing down by the river and they found
Speaker 1: this thing. And you didn't You didn't remember you thought
Speaker 1: that you felt that it had been corrupted and spoiled. Yes,
Speaker 1: by the touch of man. Yeah, it wasn't cool. It
Speaker 1: was cool, but it wasn't It wasn't like this one
Speaker 1: where I found it, dug it out of the earth
Speaker 1: that one had already been touched. Okay, now to our guests, Rick,
Speaker 1: Mattenee Mattenie Mannie spelled like mattenee. No, not like mattenee,
Speaker 1: not like a movie mattee Mattenee mattnee e n e. No, mate,
Speaker 1: I'm saying, that's a what's the when you go to
Speaker 1: a movie that mattee mattee. That's right, that's probably just
Speaker 1: tell us how you spell your name m A d
Speaker 1: n e Y m A t n e y and
Speaker 1: his father Mike, Yes, same last name. Yes, um, Rick,
Speaker 1: you were asking about my special anchor you made me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can you describe real quick how you make anchors. Well,
Speaker 1: I take a four inch steel pipe and fill it
Speaker 1: full of lead, and well bolts around the outside like
Speaker 1: a Mahler anchlor, except for the all steel ones clank reeloud.
Speaker 1: If you fill them with leadther a lot quieter. So
Speaker 1: I built any one, and I asked you about it
Speaker 1: when we came in here, and there's a story about Okay,
Speaker 1: so here's what happened. One. I love that anchor. Uh It.
Speaker 1: I had a compartment on one of my boats that
Speaker 1: wouldn't fit into so I took uh I took um
Speaker 1: bands off and shortened the bolts so that it would
Speaker 1: fit in a compartment down the little nubbins. Oh well, well,
Speaker 1: now I don't put in that compartment anymore. I could
Speaker 1: just left it as it was, so now you need
Speaker 1: another anchor. It works great, But like I just messed.
Speaker 1: It was just one of those stupid things that happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel terrible about it. It's okay, I got like
Speaker 1: eight more in the garage right now. When you're um,
Speaker 1: when you're melting all that lead, do you take precautions? No?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Just get a buzz and yeah, I just
Speaker 1: get the torch, grab that bush lighting uh rick. Tell
Speaker 1: people about the all the ways you kind of make
Speaker 1: ends meet. Um Well, I have an outfitting business here
Speaker 1: in the state of Montana. UM I run a Steelhead
Speaker 1: lodge out of Southeast Alaska, a guide for a private
Speaker 1: ranch down in Hawaii, as well as doing some bone
Speaker 1: fish guiding on Oahu and Hawaii. I do a little
Speaker 1: bit of cooking for you guys here at Meat Eater. UM.
Speaker 1: I also do some in home wild game cooking classes
Speaker 1: as well. On the side, UM I have rental properties
Speaker 1: in town. My job list is extreme, very outdoor focused
Speaker 1: irrigation company that I was part partner in and now
Speaker 1: I've actually got out of that finally, hopefully so that
Speaker 1: I can get a little bit more into the rest
Speaker 1: of the stuff. Can you. Uh so fish and bone
Speaker 1: fish in Hawaii is it? Oh? What what's the word? Yeah? Oh?
Speaker 1: I oh um. While in our neck of the woods,
Speaker 1: you know, they're not really regarded as not When I
Speaker 1: say our neck of the wood, I mean like in
Speaker 1: our atmosphere or whatever. Um, like when you go down
Speaker 1: to the Caribbean and stuff Ascension Bay. Yeah, they're not
Speaker 1: really regarded as people eat them, but they're not by
Speaker 1: most people of fish from there, not like regarded as
Speaker 1: a food fish. But why it's like they have a
Speaker 1: completely reception of them, right. Yeah. There's yeah, pounded fish cakes, uh,
Speaker 1: fish soup out of them. Yeah, that's uh, the locals
Speaker 1: really like eating them. Um. You know, I think America,
Speaker 1: United States is the only place you can left you
Speaker 1: can still kill a bone fish. They're protected everywhere else
Speaker 1: but Florida, Hawaii. You can still kill them there. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't advocate for that, you know, but my brother
Speaker 1: caught one in Hawaii one time. I think he said
Speaker 1: he's nine ft of water and caught a far bigger
Speaker 1: bone fish, and he'd ever caught fish and bone fish
Speaker 1: on purpose. Yeah, yeah, and they're we're they're a deep
Speaker 1: water bone fish. They come up onto the flats to feed.
Speaker 1: And there's so many pancake flats around um the islands
Speaker 1: of Hawaii that there's very little flat habitat form, so
Speaker 1: most of them are deep water fish. I mean you'll
Speaker 1: see videos of them schooling, you know, in sixty ft
Speaker 1: of water, and there's just schools, hundreds of them, and
Speaker 1: you know, you go up on the flat and there's four,
Speaker 1: but it's the same species, um, I think. So yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean there's guys that argue that the Hawaiian bone
Speaker 1: fish are in the Pacific uh Ocean bone fish are
Speaker 1: a little bit different than the Atlantic cousins. You know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of a deep water bone fish. There are
Speaker 1: what's called the sharp jaw bone fish, which I think
Speaker 1: they're gonna classify that one is a different species. And
Speaker 1: Hawaii has both the Pacific bone fish and the sharp
Speaker 1: sharp job bone fish, and so I think they do
Speaker 1: classify that one is a different one, but you know,
Speaker 1: you can noticeably tell the difference when you catch one
Speaker 1: of those versus the regular ones, who, um, what kind
Speaker 1: of people? Like? Who are your clients? Not Hawaiians? No? No,
Speaker 1: for the most part there and there's a couple of
Speaker 1: local guys that that I go out with quite a bit,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them are my clients that I
Speaker 1: roll over from either my Alaska operation or my Montana operation.
Speaker 1: And they're like, hey, you know, what are you doing
Speaker 1: in January? And I was like, well, funny you ask
Speaker 1: him downe in Hawaii guiding bone fish. It's like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: I'd really like to do that. They're really big, they're
Speaker 1: hard to edge. And it's like, yeah, well here you go.
Speaker 1: You guys go out and site fish form. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: all site fishing form on the flats. Um. We do
Speaker 1: get out of the boat sometimes depending on the tides
Speaker 1: um when the tailing tides are right. We try to
Speaker 1: do it on foot as much as possible because that's
Speaker 1: the hunt, that's the fun one, that's more fun than
Speaker 1: doing it out of the boat. The problem with the
Speaker 1: boat is is most clients and most guys can't spot
Speaker 1: them far enough out to make an effective cast before
Speaker 1: we spook them. So it's it's a hard, so you're
Speaker 1: just stuck saying like eleven o'clock, eleven o'clock fifty feet,
Speaker 1: you know, and if your guy can do it perfectly, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll catch a few of them doing it that way
Speaker 1: for sure. But we have a lot better luck doing
Speaker 1: it on foot, you know, low and slow. The slower
Speaker 1: you move. If you move your leg fast enough to
Speaker 1: where the water, the water makes a tiny bit of
Speaker 1: a ripple noise, fish will spook from a hundred feet away,
Speaker 1: so you have to go. So dudes, are they scared
Speaker 1: of sharks and stuff? They're scared of everything. Everything wants
Speaker 1: to kill them. I've seen fifty pound gt s turned
Speaker 1: sideways on the flats and chase ten pound bone fish
Speaker 1: try to eat them. You know, there's tiger sharks in
Speaker 1: the bay a hundred feet away. You know, it's everything
Speaker 1: wants to eat them. You know. On top of that,
Speaker 1: they get fished to every single day. When I first
Speaker 1: started guiding down there a little over twelve years ago,
Speaker 1: you never saw anyone bone fishing, And now every single
Speaker 1: day there's someone on every flat for the most part.
Speaker 1: So it took off in the amount of pressure they
Speaker 1: see is and their old fish, you know, they're a
Speaker 1: big bone fish will be twenty years old, and so
Speaker 1: you're gonna educate a fish like that that's been around
Speaker 1: the block. He's gonna know the drill. So you need
Speaker 1: to be better than the next guy to get them.
Speaker 1: And they're extremely hard to catch. Um, they're they're not
Speaker 1: that hard to get to eat as long as you
Speaker 1: can get to them without spooking. And they're neurotic. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they eat, you know, without no when you're there, they
Speaker 1: don't even care. And other times you can't buy a
Speaker 1: bite no matter what you do. Um, have you ever
Speaker 1: hunted sandhill cranes? Have? Yeah, we're hunting sand hill cranes
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago in the Texas Panhandle and
Speaker 1: they're like exceedingly decoy shy down there. They just see
Speaker 1: spreads all day every day and Discuyer hunting with skins
Speaker 1: all his sandhills and mates the zombie decoys where he
Speaker 1: makes a frame it actually puts an actual sandhill skin
Speaker 1: over it, and we're kind of like marveling at sort
Speaker 1: of like how wary they are. But then we had
Speaker 1: one that was wearing a band. It had been banded
Speaker 1: as an adult seventeen years earlier. You imagine the amount
Speaker 1: of spreads that things looked AT's in seventeen years. What's
Speaker 1: the average life span those things? Those things get way
Speaker 1: older than I thought older and mallards. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of birds can live a long time, but
Speaker 1: I think it's common to have sand hills. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: make it to be over a decade and you imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you talked about a twenty year old bone fish,
Speaker 1: just like he's up on those flats every day eating.
Speaker 1: After a while, he knows your name, you know that dude.
Speaker 1: There there's one fish they called bones Zilla. Um, he's
Speaker 1: been caught three or four times now. She would say,
Speaker 1: it's probably last thing. I think it's thirteen point seven
Speaker 1: pounds last time I got caught. I think LG caught
Speaker 1: him last time. But it's in the same spot. She
Speaker 1: lives in the same spot during the same tide. You
Speaker 1: can go there like clockwork and find that fish. Really yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's unbelievable how how they pattern I mean,
Speaker 1: there might as well be a white tailed deer. They
Speaker 1: do the same thing every day, you know, unless they
Speaker 1: you don't often think of fish like that. Yeah. Hunting,
Speaker 1: especially like an open and like an ocean environment, you
Speaker 1: don't think of a fish as being like, here's what
Speaker 1: his deal is. Yeah, here's what he does or she Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's funny because and you know you'll have
Speaker 1: new fish come out of the flats and do this
Speaker 1: and that. But I mean there's definitely a pattern, and
Speaker 1: the older fish typically do the same thing. I mean
Speaker 1: they have a thing they want to do, and during
Speaker 1: the right tide and you know, the right conditions, they
Speaker 1: do that thing. You know, repeatedly. You can see him
Speaker 1: do that month in month out. All right, Mike, tell
Speaker 1: us what you do you guys that you guys are like, uh,
Speaker 1: you guys have interesting groove. Well, I've I'm retired at
Speaker 1: this point, and I've spent my entire life trapping in
Speaker 1: my off season of working, and the had an excavation
Speaker 1: business for twenty five years and freed up my winter time,
Speaker 1: so my kids didn't see much of me during the summertime.
Speaker 1: You know, it was just our winter times are off,
Speaker 1: so our winter times was trapping. What age you start trapping?
Speaker 1: I started about twelve years old, and I think Rick
Speaker 1: was younger than that. So, uh, do the math for
Speaker 1: me real quick. And explain what what year you would
Speaker 1: have started. I want to put a relationship to the
Speaker 1: big fur boom. You just started during the during boom, yeah,
Speaker 1: eight before the before sixty eight when I probably started
Speaker 1: trapping six northeastern Washington North spoken about eighty miles and uh,
Speaker 1: what like what drew you into it being a fur trapper? Well,
Speaker 1: just the outdoor experience. I guess I just love the
Speaker 1: outdo oars and so um. My father had trapped a
Speaker 1: little bit, but very little, and he helped me get
Speaker 1: me around. I mean my mother also drove me from
Speaker 1: place to place. Uh, for when I was trapping. I
Speaker 1: remember when I was a little kid, we used to
Speaker 1: make my mom drive around and like sit in the
Speaker 1: car while you run down into some cattail marsh and
Speaker 1: then drive to the next spot. You know, It's like
Speaker 1: it's like being a soccer mob but being a muskrat. Mom,
Speaker 1: what we make that famous? What did you like? What
Speaker 1: did you start out for back then? Mainly beaver At
Speaker 1: that time, beaver was probably the more valuable pelt. And
Speaker 1: were you um lay out the economics of it back
Speaker 1: then in the sixties, like was it good? It's a
Speaker 1: whole lot better than it is now. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: actually you could, you could make a decent UH living
Speaker 1: during the winter months trapping. At that time. You know,
Speaker 1: the average worker, just like the saw mill workers there
Speaker 1: were making thirty dollars a day, and so beaver was
Speaker 1: worth an average of thirty dollars I remember, no, probably
Speaker 1: about probably sixty nine somewhere in there. Um, I remember
Speaker 1: I caught nineteen beaver on opening day, which was basically
Speaker 1: a month's wage as of a working man. And here
Speaker 1: I'm twelve year thirteen years old, so kid man. So
Speaker 1: I actually when I turned sixteen, I bought a brand
Speaker 1: new I ordered a four wheel drive pickup. Of course
Speaker 1: I put my father ordered because I couldn't put it
Speaker 1: in my name at sixteen. But um, but I had
Speaker 1: the money that I made from trapping to buy a
Speaker 1: brand new UH for four wheel drive pickup at dead age. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in comparison, and now, I mean, you couldn't trap
Speaker 1: enough beaver to buy a brand new Ford pickup. No,
Speaker 1: you can't trap enough to put gas in that Ford
Speaker 1: pick direct a bicycle. Well, the playing me and Seth
Speaker 1: they're hatched, And well I've explained for what I was
Speaker 1: gonna talk about. The rule. The law is gonna make
Speaker 1: the only a law that says only me and Seth
Speaker 1: can trap beavers, but they're worth a thousand dollars apiece
Speaker 1: a federal law. I don't know if you're gonna get Um,
Speaker 1: you could probably do that with sea otter. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you probably could. There's a limited hall on those.
Speaker 1: So oh yes, I want to talk about you. I
Speaker 1: do follow that, like the sea otter stuff a little bit,
Speaker 1: quite a bit, because I want to get to that later.
Speaker 1: Let me make a note of that. Um that, so
Speaker 1: I know, like Native Alaskans can hunt sea otters. No
Speaker 1: one traps sea otters, do they they hunt sea otters.
Speaker 1: They can sell them only under the condition that they
Speaker 1: make it into a handicraft has to be substantially altered.
Speaker 1: Altered is the word. But sea otters, as they come
Speaker 1: back so strong, some argue more than ever had ever been,
Speaker 1: are destroying the red urchin. They're destroying everything because it's
Speaker 1: all tied together. And so there's a push to make
Speaker 1: it to incentivize people to go after sea otters. There's
Speaker 1: a push correct to reduce the restrictions so that people
Speaker 1: could actually sell nonaltered sea otters correct, that's what the
Speaker 1: statement of uh. That's his last attempt that they actually
Speaker 1: failed at, but was to allow the natives to sell
Speaker 1: just sea otter hides. I was attempting to try to
Speaker 1: buy them in the round so I could personally skin
Speaker 1: them in that too. But sea otters their value is,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhere around with thousand dollars apiece. For me
Speaker 1: to make product out of it, that's to make product.
Speaker 1: But but you're not allowed. I can't, I can't physically
Speaker 1: touch it. The rules changed. If the rules changed, and
Speaker 1: the natives I think would harvest a lot more, but
Speaker 1: I still don't think they would harvest enough to make
Speaker 1: a substantial difference. You remember the carrying capacity in Southeast
Speaker 1: Alaska during the UM seventy three when they did the
Speaker 1: marine Marine Mamelak determined that twenty thousand was carrying capacity.
Speaker 1: We currently have over fifty thou so over two times
Speaker 1: the carrying capacity. So they've just they're basically eating themselves
Speaker 1: out of house and home. The interesting thing is that
Speaker 1: people that are trying to protect the sea otters are
Speaker 1: actually the ones that are killing all of them, you know,
Speaker 1: as they start basically destroy the habitat to where they'll
Speaker 1: completely die out. It's funny. This is such like a
Speaker 1: recurring theme I just saw. It's such a recurring theme around.
Speaker 1: This is a real rabbit hole. I want to get
Speaker 1: back to the sixties. Put all, we're gonna put all
Speaker 1: this hold, but I want to open up the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole real quick, or like peer into the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: Whenever we're dealing with an imperiled species, it enters a
Speaker 1: mind space with Americans. Okay, like wolves in the seventies.
Speaker 1: It enters a mind space with Americans where you're like,
Speaker 1: this thing is imperiled. There aren't many left. And we
Speaker 1: get to a point where we're like, we will forever
Speaker 1: envisioned it that way. You know. It's like you get
Speaker 1: in your head that the rarity of something, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't you know, we don't allow culturally, we don't have
Speaker 1: the elasticity in our brains to picture that someday will
Speaker 1: reverse the trend. It always feels scarce. So when we
Speaker 1: were low on sea otters and we put protections in
Speaker 1: place to recover sea otters, it's like sea otters entered
Speaker 1: like a permanent status in our brains as being imperiled
Speaker 1: without opening up the idea that we would someday hit recovery.
Speaker 1: That's why when you hit these recovery thresholds, it's like
Speaker 1: it never happened with wolves too. We hit the recovery
Speaker 1: threshold with grizzy bears. In certain areas, we hit the
Speaker 1: recovery thresholds, and people are like, yeah, we hit the
Speaker 1: recovery thresholds, but screw that. We don't want anyone to
Speaker 1: ever touch them ever again, because they're used to not
Speaker 1: be that many. Oddly, it didn't happen with elk or
Speaker 1: turkeys or deer. You know, we bought ran out of elk.
Speaker 1: No one has a problem switching the mind frame. So
Speaker 1: I guess that's an exception to my own rule. But
Speaker 1: some things like sea otters, people are never going to
Speaker 1: get comfortable with the fact that there's a bunch of them. Well,
Speaker 1: the native tribes up in Alaska, we're not nomadic so
Speaker 1: much so some of the mittens, the dump sites, they
Speaker 1: have hundreds and hundreds of years, and my understanding is
Speaker 1: that when they've digged through these mittens, that there's a
Speaker 1: hundred years where they have clamshells and hundred years where
Speaker 1: they do not have clams So meaning the natural cycle
Speaker 1: to the seat. You know, like every other animal goes
Speaker 1: in cycles. You know, if they're left alone, they will
Speaker 1: populate up and then just eat themselves out of house
Speaker 1: and home and then start all over again. That's what
Speaker 1: we're seeing. And what we're seeing now is we've exceeded
Speaker 1: the carrying capacity and they will die off and then
Speaker 1: they will slowly go back the other direction. But it
Speaker 1: appears to be a hundred year cycles from how big
Speaker 1: is one of those things to three times the size
Speaker 1: of a river otter um sixty seventy pounds of our
Speaker 1: big ones. And when the Russians used to, you know,
Speaker 1: like the Russians used to come into Alaskan waters, like
Speaker 1: way back in the old days, they were after sea otters,
Speaker 1: buying seattters back then, like people didn't trap sea otters,
Speaker 1: they always just hunted them. Correct. Well, you gotta remember
Speaker 1: a sea otters born in the water and he never
Speaker 1: leaves the water, and because of that, their prime year
Speaker 1: real because they're in I didn't know that. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: like most fur bearers you consider only harvest in the
Speaker 1: winter months. Doesn't make any difference to uh sea outter
Speaker 1: because they're in the same same environments very a little
Speaker 1: difference between a summer sea out and the winter uh
Speaker 1: in the quality of the fur. Yeah, all right, we'll
Speaker 1: get back into all that stuff. I want to get
Speaker 1: back into the sixties. My understanding of like the fur boom,
Speaker 1: Like I started trapping right when the fur boom ended. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we set our first muskrat traps in four It
Speaker 1: was so good, but it wasn't as good. Can you
Speaker 1: explain what happened with fur prices? And maybe you probably
Speaker 1: have a more detailed understanding of this. Can you explain
Speaker 1: what happened to wild fur prices in this this sort
Speaker 1: of like magic block And maybe my dates are wrong,
Speaker 1: but like from seventy eight to two, people were quitting
Speaker 1: factory jobs in order to trap in the long winter.
Speaker 1: I know that in the case of the coyotes, there
Speaker 1: were people that have bought airplanes in the high line
Speaker 1: up here in Montana, and they made more money during
Speaker 1: the evenings killing coyotes and they did in their job. Well,
Speaker 1: Like what was happening those years? Do you understand from
Speaker 1: a market perspective, like why did wild why did like
Speaker 1: all wild fur all of a sudden gets super valuable.
Speaker 1: I don't know that all wild furre did. I don't
Speaker 1: know if i'd agree with that. It's long, long haired
Speaker 1: fur became more popular, and beaver didn't greatly increase. It
Speaker 1: was the long furs and seventy three four or five
Speaker 1: in that area there when the coyotes really took off you,
Speaker 1: And that was just a fashion trend, I think, more
Speaker 1: than anything else. But for perspective, I remember, like around
Speaker 1: the time when I became exposed to it, it was
Speaker 1: very common for red fox to sell. Like in the
Speaker 1: late seventies early eighties, it was very common for red
Speaker 1: fox where I grew up to be where seventy five
Speaker 1: it was common for mink to be worth fifty bucks.
Speaker 1: Beavers you'd hear a beaver selling for an excessive a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, muskrats selling for eight Is that not? Am
Speaker 1: I remembering this wrong? I don't ever remember beaver average
Speaker 1: in a hundred. No, no, not at all. Beavers never
Speaker 1: really changed a dramatic amount. It's a lot more difficult
Speaker 1: process to uh tan and take care of beaver, and
Speaker 1: I think that's held the price down a lot on beaver,
Speaker 1: when a lot of the other fir's a lot easier
Speaker 1: to process, and a lot of it's just fashion trends.
Speaker 1: As I said, when I first started, beaver or thirty
Speaker 1: dollars in a coyote was six dollars. A bobcat was
Speaker 1: probably maybe twenty. Uh But it wasn't too much into
Speaker 1: the early seventies that we were looking at, you know,
Speaker 1: two and three hundred dollar bobcats and you know, forty
Speaker 1: or fifty dollar coyotes at that time. And then it
Speaker 1: wasn't too much later than we saw a hundred dollar coyotes.
Speaker 1: You know, when you hear or the last it's not
Speaker 1: so much right now, but like even within the last
Speaker 1: few years, you'd hear rumors of people saying that they
Speaker 1: were selling a bobcat for you hear rumors that like
Speaker 1: eight hundred dollars a thousand dollars. That's still a case
Speaker 1: right now, but they they've got a lot more specific
Speaker 1: with what they're looking for. But those real wide black
Speaker 1: and white bellies which they used for making vests and
Speaker 1: things like that, is where those real wide black and
Speaker 1: white spot and what they're after is the spots. It's
Speaker 1: basically the only spotted fur that's available now. It's surprising
Speaker 1: me that they don't just um that they care about that.
Speaker 1: It's that there's a concern about that it's actual, because
Speaker 1: doesn't it seem like you could just like replicate it.
Speaker 1: You ever felt fake for? Yeah, it feels like fake for.
Speaker 1: Can't replicate that? Yeah, nature does it better. So on
Speaker 1: those like like who's buying, um, who's buying bob hats
Speaker 1: right now? Like what country do they go to? Italy?
Speaker 1: I think Italy. They're they're lining in the pockets of
Speaker 1: jeans on they're putting little top ends on girls jeans
Speaker 1: and lining it with bobcat fur and inside the pockets too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll see a little white you know, bobcat belly for
Speaker 1: just on the top of like a set of levies
Speaker 1: on the top edge of the pocket leading into it.
Speaker 1: And I know that's pretty popular right now. And again
Speaker 1: it's it's Europe. It's not much in the United States. Uh, France, Italy,
Speaker 1: those are two of the bigger ones. I remember reading
Speaker 1: a thing on town of something about the sort of
Speaker 1: the weirdness and unpredictability of fur prices. This analyst was
Speaker 1: talking about at times that northern raccoons so like genelly,
Speaker 1: northern furs are heavier, like better furd, heavier leather crack
Speaker 1: Is that a fair Southern furs, a thinner lever, thinner leather,
Speaker 1: thinner fur just because of climate. One thing I'd like
Speaker 1: to bring up right now is the fact that you
Speaker 1: gotta remember whild or is just a reaction. It's basically
Speaker 1: the tail on the dog. Ranch for makes up of
Speaker 1: the fur market only five percent. It's actually wild fur.
Speaker 1: So the fur prices it only follows the ranch market.
Speaker 1: So like like right now they've got a huge surplus
Speaker 1: of ranch raised mink, which in turn drives down the
Speaker 1: price of muskrat and and wild mink. And it's just
Speaker 1: wild fur market just follows wherever the ranch market goes,
Speaker 1: is where the wild firm market goes. Yeah. I read
Speaker 1: a piece recently a big auction house that used to
Speaker 1: deal in wild for had just stopped wild for all
Speaker 1: together and now only deals in ranch for. I don't
Speaker 1: know about that. Like some furrier North American fur No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's like some furrier head abandon its wild fur practice
Speaker 1: because of the Because the predictability of the predictability and
Speaker 1: consistency of ranch for, it's more consistent in the quality
Speaker 1: of the fur. You know, One first is nearly exactly
Speaker 1: the same as the other. So it's really a lot
Speaker 1: easier on a soelding aspect wild furst because wild for
Speaker 1: varies real widely on the quality, texture and color. And
Speaker 1: got you So this thing, uh, this thing I was
Speaker 1: reading about just talking about the sort of idiosyncrasies oft
Speaker 1: the fur market. Was explaining that I guess there's been
Speaker 1: times when southern raccoons have been more valuable than northern raccoons,
Speaker 1: and it was pointing to the weight of a finished product,
Speaker 1: meaning it's very hard, and it was saying outside of Italy,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to sell a fur coat that weighs
Speaker 1: more than nine pounds. Generally in Asia, if you have
Speaker 1: a fur coat that weighs more than seven pounds, people
Speaker 1: will think it's too heavy and won't want to buy it.
Speaker 1: But an Italian a where a heavier fur coat than
Speaker 1: anybody else. And it was talking about so if you
Speaker 1: had a situation where um Italy was buying a lot
Speaker 1: of furs, that could affect fur markets because they're more
Speaker 1: tolerant of heavier, longer coats, Whereas when furs are popular
Speaker 1: in some other country, like if China is buying a
Speaker 1: lot of fur um, it could tend to be that
Speaker 1: that would be maybe driving up muskrat prices more because
Speaker 1: it's a lower bottom end price to buy the thing.
Speaker 1: And it was I think that when you're looking at
Speaker 1: in the US, you're trying to understand like where fur
Speaker 1: goes and what drives for prices, you tend to look
Speaker 1: around you and it doesn't really make sense because you
Speaker 1: just don't see the habits of what's going on in Italy, China, Russia,
Speaker 1: these other places, and all this stuff gets exported. What's
Speaker 1: what are the impacts of covid on for pretty poor
Speaker 1: right now? You know what I've done is I've started
Speaker 1: my own little fur shop and cut out about three
Speaker 1: middle men, and so I make all my own stuff
Speaker 1: and sell it in my live in Wrangle, Alaska, and
Speaker 1: we have a little first store there, and so I
Speaker 1: everything I catch, I cut out the auction yard houses,
Speaker 1: I cut out the you know, shipping up. More than
Speaker 1: one time, I basically shipped my fur to the tannery
Speaker 1: and it ships back. It isn't shipping to the to
Speaker 1: the auction yard and then shipping from the auction yard
Speaker 1: to the tanner and then from the tanner eat back
Speaker 1: to the furrier, and it just cuts out a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of middlemen. And and I make fur products and
Speaker 1: sell them to the tourists there. What's your shop called,
Speaker 1: It's called the Trading Post and and wrangle. We have
Speaker 1: a website to now, it's furs Alaska dot com. And
Speaker 1: so being's COVID come around. We finally decided we better
Speaker 1: start selling stuff online. And so when you if you
Speaker 1: if you've achieved a place or like a chief, a
Speaker 1: position where you're now able to be a fur trapper
Speaker 1: and for hunter and make a market for and sell
Speaker 1: all your own stuff off, has all this chit chat
Speaker 1: about fur price has become irrelevant to you completely? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know, I I view trapping as an excuse to
Speaker 1: run around in the woods and being in a place
Speaker 1: that I love to be. And so it really wouldn't
Speaker 1: make any difference if the prices were zero, I'd still
Speaker 1: be there. Uh. And I think I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: doing a steward of the land of maintaining the animals,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhere close to carr and capacity and a
Speaker 1: healthy population so they don't get to that point where
Speaker 1: they become overpopulated and it stresses the animals, and then
Speaker 1: the diseases come in, and all animals have controlling diseases,
Speaker 1: so you know, if they're completely left alone, they will
Speaker 1: reach that point. What all species do you go after? Now?
Speaker 1: I trapped basically in southeast Alaska. Probably Pine Martin is
Speaker 1: most desirable, but I trapped Pine Martin and otter wolves
Speaker 1: and wolverine beaver. Did you do any Did you do
Speaker 1: muskrats anymore? There's no muskrats up there where I'm at,
Speaker 1: but you don't trap muskrats anywhere else? Uh? I have
Speaker 1: before come down uh the state of Washington and trapped
Speaker 1: some areas that I used to trap when I was younger,
Speaker 1: but I haven't price right now is about three dollars
Speaker 1: for muskrats when they're ten. I can make pretty good
Speaker 1: money at it, make a thousand dollars a day when
Speaker 1: they're ten dollars, But making three dollars a day doesn't
Speaker 1: excite me much. Explain his contraption you made, though, this
Speaker 1: is your invention? Yeah, I developed. Well. You gotta remember
Speaker 1: in the state of Washington in the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: they banned trapping as we knew it. They decided that
Speaker 1: it would be best if they didn't have any traps
Speaker 1: that were body gripping devices, so they banned all body
Speaker 1: gripping devices. They they banned the Connterby trap, which undoubted
Speaker 1: at least probably the most humane trap every every developed.
Speaker 1: But in the interest of humanity, they decided to ban
Speaker 1: the most humane trap made and so they said we
Speaker 1: could no longer use anybody gripping devices. So that kind
Speaker 1: of forced me into a situation where I said, well,
Speaker 1: I still want to trap, So how can I trap
Speaker 1: muskrats without gripping them in any way? So I developed
Speaker 1: a floating colony trap that the animal goes into and
Speaker 1: it never grips the animal. He drives down through two
Speaker 1: opposing fingers and drowns, and then the trap resets itself
Speaker 1: when that muskrat goes in. And that was that was
Speaker 1: more palatable to the voters of Washington. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it was more palatable to do that. So so it
Speaker 1: forced me into a situation where instead of averaging sixty
Speaker 1: muskrats a day, I have now averaged twenty muskrats a day.
Speaker 1: Uh in the same amount. Oh yeah, what I'm looking at, say,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to explain. Man's what like twenty
Speaker 1: they're twenty four inches long, and then they'd be six
Speaker 1: twelve twelve inches wide. It looks like a small cage,
Speaker 1: a small cage with one inch or three quarter inch
Speaker 1: square wire twenty four inches long, uh maybe twelve inches deep,
Speaker 1: six inches of brass six inches across, with floats up
Speaker 1: towards the top, so that cage sits underwater and it floats.
Speaker 1: And there's a little trap door like kind of like
Speaker 1: a door reminiscent of like I have a heart trap
Speaker 1: door that's just not a swing, so you can just
Speaker 1: push your way in there and crawl your way in there,
Speaker 1: right And when they go in, what happens is is
Speaker 1: they bump this bump bar. The door lays down these
Speaker 1: right here adjustable so you can get it to where
Speaker 1: it's almost balanced. But once the mushgrat goes in, as
Speaker 1: you see, he canal can't get out. And this is
Speaker 1: the invert verded door model, which allows the smallest and
Speaker 1: the kits to escape, which is something trappers have never
Speaker 1: had before. So if you can imagine, now we leave
Speaker 1: all the smalls and kits which are not very valuable
Speaker 1: in relation to the adults. This one only catches adult
Speaker 1: sized muskrats. All the others escaped unharmed, and by spring
Speaker 1: the next year then they're mature rats and then you
Speaker 1: can catch them when they're worth two or three times
Speaker 1: more than what that kit was. But that's not that's
Speaker 1: for fur trappers. That's not like a guy that wants
Speaker 1: all the muskrats dad because they're destroying his landscaping. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's this one down here. This has got Basically, it's
Speaker 1: a treadle. It's a teeter totter. Uh As the muskrat
Speaker 1: goes in, the teeter totter closes the door behind it,
Speaker 1: and once the muskrats in there, he can't physically get out.
Speaker 1: It's uh just one direction in and eventually he decides
Speaker 1: he can't get out the way he came in, so
Speaker 1: then he dives down. The bottom compartment holds about eight muskrats.
Speaker 1: Although I've had a lot of customers, I sell them
Speaker 1: all over the United States, mostly to the animal damage
Speaker 1: control people. What do you call this thing? It's a
Speaker 1: voting colony trap. You have, you don't have a fancier name.
Speaker 1: And that the Lisa Watney two thousand. Lisa Wattney got
Speaker 1: to explain that Lisa Watney was the person that drove
Speaker 1: the ban on trapping in the state of Washington. So
Speaker 1: I name one time, I called it the Lisa Watney
Speaker 1: two thousand because she all she, in her attempts to
Speaker 1: make make us not catch the animals, we doubled our
Speaker 1: production and trapping the animals. What do you sell one
Speaker 1: of those things for? Do you still make? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: still make them, just hand make them all. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: make them all. I come down about two weeks every
Speaker 1: year and make a couple of hundred of them. And
Speaker 1: then yeah, so it takes me a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: to make a couple of hundred of them, and and uh.
Speaker 1: Then so in your year when I saw about you've
Speaker 1: always had an interesting lifestyle. Within your year, you account
Speaker 1: for spending a couple of weeks making muskrat colony traps
Speaker 1: and you'll sell all those throughout the year. That pretty
Speaker 1: much from one five dollars plus shipping. Wow, But you know,
Speaker 1: how how do you bait it? Okay, if you paid
Speaker 1: the back part with carrots and I usually put a
Speaker 1: couple of appetizers up here in front, they muskrat will
Speaker 1: come by and grab the carrot and you'll take it off,
Speaker 1: and he really likes carrots. It's like candy to a muskrat,
Speaker 1: and so he comes back and looks for more. But
Speaker 1: there seems to be some. I don't know whether they're
Speaker 1: bringing other muskrats back with them, because once they start
Speaker 1: hitting it, you'll just fill it up with muskrats. What's
Speaker 1: the most you've ever caught one? I've only caught eight
Speaker 1: is the most. I've got several times. But I have
Speaker 1: a lot of customers that lay claimed to ten. I
Speaker 1: had one guy that he uh was kind of funny.
Speaker 1: He had he had ordered a couple of traps from me.
Speaker 1: He's an animal damage control guy and he had a
Speaker 1: golf course pawd. He said that he called up and said,
Speaker 1: I'm not catching anything in my traps, and I said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: trice uh seed in the bank with uh. You know.
Speaker 1: I had him describe it to introduce them to carroty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to introduce him to seed the banks with carrots and
Speaker 1: see what happens. They called me back about three days
Speaker 1: later and he said, yeah, he couldn't have got another
Speaker 1: one in it without vasiline. He had ten of a
Speaker 1: minute he had to educate the muskrats on carrot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just didn't even they were. He said that that
Speaker 1: particular pond was grass all the way down to it,
Speaker 1: and the muskrats were just eating grass is all they
Speaker 1: were eating. And so they had no idea what a
Speaker 1: carrot was. But once they figured it out, it was
Speaker 1: phenomenal for him. Do you use any commercial lure? I yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd use uh just a cherry oil and and uh,
Speaker 1: petroleum jelly is what I use in it. You can
Speaker 1: use fancy lures and that wouldn't make any difference. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, we used to use mint toothpaste.
Speaker 1: So homet what's your what's your mix? Just petroleum jelly
Speaker 1: and uh, cherry oil, vasoline and cheerio cheerio like an extract. Extra.
Speaker 1: When a person gets the trap, they get a DVD
Speaker 1: with it and a little bottle of jewry all, which
Speaker 1: it's just not a name to it's just an instructional
Speaker 1: video for it that that comes with it, so they
Speaker 1: can because most you know, this is entirely different than
Speaker 1: any trap that you ever see. But do you anchor it?
Speaker 1: You just tie it off to where it doesn't float away?
Speaker 1: You know? Can I borrow that thing? Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: lots of them. So but I don't know, man, because
Speaker 1: it's like takes all the romance out of muskrat trapping. Well,
Speaker 1: you know the neat thing about they don't you don't know.
Speaker 1: You don't need to know how to read sign no correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what you don't have to because that's in a
Speaker 1: pond and walk away. Yeah. But when I take my kids,
Speaker 1: we set muskrat traps last night. It was opening day yesterday.
Speaker 1: When I take my kids out set muskrat traps, you're
Speaker 1: looking for the runs or about this. This is a
Speaker 1: push up a large bank den. Here's where they've been
Speaker 1: doing this. This. Just go throw that something biting off
Speaker 1: the edge of the pond and start stacking them up.
Speaker 1: But I bet the manager of that property would be
Speaker 1: very happy if we use that. I don't want him
Speaker 1: to even know. I hope he doesn't listen to I
Speaker 1: don't know if he listens to this show or not,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna change his whole life. He thinks I
Speaker 1: have some kind of magic. He thinks I got some
Speaker 1: kind of magic capabilities. Maybe I don't know. If I
Speaker 1: said I am going I went to tuck it into
Speaker 1: the cattail. So he doesn't know about it. I went
Speaker 1: into a pond here that a guy had had a
Speaker 1: trapper pay to come in and kill muskrats, and he
Speaker 1: killed seven muskrats, and the landowner was still seeing muskrats everywhere,
Speaker 1: and so he got ahold of me and said, well,
Speaker 1: the trapper before he got seven, do you think you
Speaker 1: can beat that? And I threw my six colony traps
Speaker 1: out and I had fifty three muskrats the next the
Speaker 1: next day. Seriously, yeah, So I came back, I said
Speaker 1: him that night. I came back the next day and
Speaker 1: I had between alright, it had it was two checks
Speaker 1: that I had fifty three, but I ended up getting
Speaker 1: fifty three and two checks. Um would just six traps
Speaker 1: and everyone of them was just completely loaded. And then
Speaker 1: I literally couldn't catch another muskrat out of that pond.
Speaker 1: It's just all of a sudden, there's no muskrats in them.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you where it is left. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you this thing's vulnerability. And you probably realized this
Speaker 1: in Michigan. We used you know, I didn't travel out,
Speaker 1: but like I think, like a good year when I
Speaker 1: was like probably the most I ever caught muskrats. One
Speaker 1: year when I was not a kid, but like community
Speaker 1: college age um, and you could trap for weeks before
Speaker 1: freeze up. But hereabouts, like in the Northern Rockies, higher elevation,
Speaker 1: by the time the season opens, you're in freeze up.
Speaker 1: So have you made us? Have you made an under ice?
Speaker 1: You know this this is strictly for open water. Why
Speaker 1: have you not done any invented for an under a
Speaker 1: thing that you chop a hole? Because then that son
Speaker 1: of a bit down and they find it when they're
Speaker 1: cruising around under the ice because it's Martin trapping season.
Speaker 1: The next This hasn't This hasn't bothered you know that's
Speaker 1: inventored me a bit. You know. I I'm liking to
Speaker 1: do all kinds of things, and muskrat season is muskrat
Speaker 1: Season's time to go and tell might appreciate an under
Speaker 1: ice solution. If I say you ought right now to
Speaker 1: trap a muskrat through the ice, what would be your
Speaker 1: what's your go to? You set? You just look for
Speaker 1: the runs. One tan Connabar in the run, you just
Speaker 1: look for the runs the bubbles probably, but his clientele
Speaker 1: mostly is nuisance trappers right there trying to they can trap.
Speaker 1: They're trapping your runevera up and yeah, they're not gonna
Speaker 1: be trapping during the ice up. I don't want to
Speaker 1: infringe on your business. But here's the thing, uh Me
Speaker 1: and Seth here you might not have heard of us,
Speaker 1: but we're small scale free nuisance trappers meaning volunteer. We're volunteering,
Speaker 1: but we're volunteer newsance travers. But you gotta our customers
Speaker 1: all work on our schedule. Like I'll have you know,
Speaker 1: people who within a couple of hours driving here, if
Speaker 1: they have beaver problems or muskrat problems, Um, I'll be
Speaker 1: you know, they'll say like, oh my god, we gotta
Speaker 1: blank beaver problem, you know, And I'll say, well, we'll
Speaker 1: come out in the middle of the winter when it
Speaker 1: suits our likings. So not doing any kind of damage stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's a free service. But it's hard to really
Speaker 1: um and those at that time of year, it's hard
Speaker 1: to give them what they're after, which is eradication. M hm.
Speaker 1: You know, like I don't know, like through the ice
Speaker 1: I don't know that you can really totally clean them out.
Speaker 1: Probably not unless you just keep going and going and
Speaker 1: going and going and going. You know, the people that
Speaker 1: are doing the animal damage control or charging fifty bucks
Speaker 1: of muskrat or you know, a hundred and fifty dollars
Speaker 1: of beaver to remove it, or you know, whatever their
Speaker 1: prices getting that amount of money. You know, it depends
Speaker 1: on where what I know, volunteers, we need to make
Speaker 1: a website. You know, these guys are making a living
Speaker 1: doing it. You're not going to make a living trap
Speaker 1: and beaver for their fur. What a website be called
Speaker 1: free nuisance trapping? I don't know. I'd have to think
Speaker 1: about it work on that. I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of or a fair amount of our audience as hunters
Speaker 1: may also have qualms about trapping. You find that to
Speaker 1: be the case. Yeah, right, So I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: curious to hear from everyone, not like it's necessary to
Speaker 1: make an indefensive but to just kind of go into
Speaker 1: a little bit of you're kind of thinking your thought
Speaker 1: process about it, you know, and why hunters would think
Speaker 1: that trapping is is different. I'll go first, Yeah, are
Speaker 1: you asking me? Yeah, I'm asking all of you. I
Speaker 1: could ask this question fair bit. And uh, I think
Speaker 1: that as a harvester of of anything, um like, it
Speaker 1: does a matter if you fish or hunter trap, you
Speaker 1: are beholden to a regulatory structure. Okay, there are rules
Speaker 1: that there are rules of engagement UM, and the rules
Speaker 1: that you live by when you're hunting fish and trap
Speaker 1: are generally meant to ensure that they're generally meant to
Speaker 1: limit efficacy UM, so that people don't have the tools
Speaker 1: at their disposal to like annihilate species, so that they're
Speaker 1: meant to make it UM that the means of harvest
Speaker 1: aren't so effective that everybody is putting themselves out of business.
Speaker 1: They also are very informed by historical use and common practice.
Speaker 1: Meaning if we devise some new thing and we realized
Speaker 1: that all of our fishing harvest goals could be met
Speaker 1: with these very precise specific poisons, say, regulators or people
Speaker 1: that set wildlife laws wouldn't necessarily just jump to that
Speaker 1: because that's not a historic use. It's not a common
Speaker 1: use pattern to use poisons. So you kind of prefer
Speaker 1: ways things have always been done in terms of like
Speaker 1: cultural longevity and how we go about our practices UM.
Speaker 1: Due to the regulatory thing, and because beavers have commercial value, say,
Speaker 1: or fur bears have commercial value, oftentimes fur bears are
Speaker 1: the only allowable harvest is by trapping. Take Michigan, for instance,
Speaker 1: where I grew up, you could not The only legal
Speaker 1: method of take for muskrat, mink, beaver, otter, the only
Speaker 1: legal method of take was by licensed for harvesters using
Speaker 1: trapping technology at a time, and it still will come back.
Speaker 1: It just ebbs and flows. Those things are of commercial
Speaker 1: value and support a commercial industry, and it was protecting
Speaker 1: those fur bears from want and slaughtered by people with
Speaker 1: firearms year round. So they said, like, these things have value,
Speaker 1: We're going to protect the people that participate in this
Speaker 1: protected industry and make it that they are fur bears
Speaker 1: are meant for fur harvesters. Point being is you're operating
Speaker 1: usually within an pre existing regulatory structure. So with beavers,
Speaker 1: for instance here, um, you can't hunt them, right, you
Speaker 1: trapped them. If you think it's okay to use a
Speaker 1: renewable resource beavers as a renewable resource, and you accept
Speaker 1: that people who are in agriculture, irrigation, um, people who
Speaker 1: are trying to protect timber, trying to check landscaping, fruit trees,
Speaker 1: streamside vegetation, aspen groves, what have you, that these people
Speaker 1: at times have a legitimate reason to want to get
Speaker 1: rid of some beavers. That's how it's done. So you're
Speaker 1: not making a decision like do I want to hunt
Speaker 1: beavers or trap beavers? It's that's how beavers are caught,
Speaker 1: is through trapping. So I don't view it as it
Speaker 1: would be. I don't. I wouldn't get into a situation
Speaker 1: where I'm like, because I can't shoot it with my gun,
Speaker 1: therefore I think that they should not be harvested. Do
Speaker 1: you feel like that's the argument you get or or
Speaker 1: there's a there's some kind of conceptual traps are me
Speaker 1: but and stuff, so okay running an arrow through it?
Speaker 1: And then you get into this weird, weird ship with
Speaker 1: people who think that like, hunting with a bow is
Speaker 1: more ethical than hunting with a rifle. It might be like,
Speaker 1: it's harder. It's definitely harder to be consistent with the
Speaker 1: bow takes a greater skill set. But for the animal,
Speaker 1: you think you're doing the animal of favor by killing
Speaker 1: it one way and not another, Like I don't you either.
Speaker 1: Are you either at a position where you think that
Speaker 1: that it's that we have it's okay to harvest renewable
Speaker 1: resources or not right? That's probably if you get to
Speaker 1: where it's not okay, cool, it's not, but if it is,
Speaker 1: then that's how we do it. It's the most effective,
Speaker 1: most humane way to get it done, and historically that's
Speaker 1: how people going about it. So I just don't like,
Speaker 1: you know, every time I have a converse, like, I
Speaker 1: don't feel like I need to predicate every conversation about
Speaker 1: harvesting beavers or muskrats or whatever with a big thing
Speaker 1: explaining why I think it's okay. The same way every
Speaker 1: time you go through the drive through and order chicken nuggets?
Speaker 1: Is there someone waiting there to like question your ethics?
Speaker 1: Why do trappers have to face it all the time?
Speaker 1: You know why? Like I'm not, I'm not like why
Speaker 1: why does it do you have to justify it every
Speaker 1: time you turn around? But people that eat chicken never
Speaker 1: have to. So for our listeners, I think we are
Speaker 1: we take out this bit of the podcast and play
Speaker 1: it on repeat, so Steve never has to be again.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. I want to make a
Speaker 1: sign of McDonald's and protest chicken nuggets. Yeah, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you like, how do you feel about how
Speaker 1: they kill those chickens? You know what? The answer you
Speaker 1: to get I have, dude, I have no idea how
Speaker 1: they kill those chickens. Yeah, nor do they care. I
Speaker 1: one time did some work at a place called it
Speaker 1: was called um it was like Bill Mar, but not
Speaker 1: like Bill Mar, but like Bill like a turkey processing plant.
Speaker 1: Turkeys would show up weird. They're working on some equipment.
Speaker 1: They'd bring in all these turkeys in trucks. Okay, the
Speaker 1: turkeys are on these little boxes in the truck. So
Speaker 1: they were raised somewhere. I mean, if you've ever gone
Speaker 1: And I'm not even hacking on him, I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that's how it goes. Like they're raising these like warehouses,
Speaker 1: thousands of turkeys packed into a warehouse. Then they pull
Speaker 1: up a truck and you take all the turkeys and
Speaker 1: load them into a little box on the truck and
Speaker 1: drive that down the highway. Uh. I'm not a turkey.
Speaker 1: But being loaded down after spending my life in a warehouse,
Speaker 1: never seeing the sun, to be loaded down a semi
Speaker 1: in a little box and hauled down an interstate system
Speaker 1: for X number of hours, I don't know what that
Speaker 1: experience is like. And then it gets to the parking
Speaker 1: lot and it waits there in the parking lot, and
Speaker 1: eventually it's that truck's turn, and they go and pull
Speaker 1: it in, and a guy grabs the turkey out and
Speaker 1: hooks its feet into a little hook and suspends it
Speaker 1: upside down, and then it goes down the conveyor and
Speaker 1: its head gets dragged across an electrified plate, which gives
Speaker 1: it a good zap, and then it gets caught in
Speaker 1: this little v thing and it passes through that and
Speaker 1: a little spinning blade cuts his throat. But trapping, that's
Speaker 1: mean as ship. It's like, I just you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, like why is it turkeys? Folks? But like you,
Speaker 1: you find a muskrat den instead of body grip and
Speaker 1: trapping there the musgrat goes into then body grit trap
Speaker 1: grips around the back of the neck or over the lungs.
Speaker 1: He's underwater, can't move, he's dead and seconds and that
Speaker 1: is so upsetting. I'd like to address that because I
Speaker 1: have my little Okay, I have this little first shop here,
Speaker 1: and I get a lot of people coming into the shop,
Speaker 1: you know, and a lot of them are posed to
Speaker 1: trapping in that, you know, and you ask talk to
Speaker 1: him a little bit, and you know, you know, what
Speaker 1: do you dislike about you? I don't they can consider
Speaker 1: it inhumane, And I said, well, you know, we probably
Speaker 1: got some things we could agree on here. You know,
Speaker 1: we can probably all agree that all animals, wild animals
Speaker 1: die and you know, you usually get an agreement out
Speaker 1: of that. And so you know, next question is, well
Speaker 1: do you agree that you know, out of all wild animals,
Speaker 1: almost none of them die of old age, and they
Speaker 1: sometimes you'll get some squawk of that. So you pull
Speaker 1: out your smartphone, you google what percentage of wild animals
Speaker 1: die of old age? And most all researches none or
Speaker 1: a non negligible amount. Okay, so you know we're talking
Speaker 1: about the human and treatment of an animal and trapping
Speaker 1: is in humane. Well, now we've decided that the animal
Speaker 1: basically has four ways that that animal can die. He
Speaker 1: can die from a conno bear that relatively kills him instantly.
Speaker 1: He can die of starvation, he can die of a disease,
Speaker 1: or he can die from consumed by another predator. Out
Speaker 1: of those four deaths, which one do you consider the
Speaker 1: most humane? And when in fact, trapping is the most
Speaker 1: humane death that that animal could possibly receive. You know,
Speaker 1: if you think of it in human terms, would you
Speaker 1: rather be hit by a train traveling sixty mile or
Speaker 1: die of a disease over three weeks or a month period,
Speaker 1: or die from being consumed by a bear, or die
Speaker 1: from um starving to death or starve to death or
Speaker 1: starving to death. So of the four possibilities that that
Speaker 1: animal is going to die, the actual most humane death
Speaker 1: is being trapped. We had a wolf freeze to dry
Speaker 1: one time. We asked her what kills wolves and she
Speaker 1: said wolves, Yeah, smart all the study subjects. And the
Speaker 1: other thing is is, you know most people can they
Speaker 1: figure trappers are out there to catch everything they can,
Speaker 1: and when in fact that's the direct opposite. The trapper
Speaker 1: wants to be able to maintain a healthy population, to
Speaker 1: be able to go out next year. What would be
Speaker 1: the benefit of a for example, a cattle farmer that
Speaker 1: has a pasture that supports a hundred cattle, You know
Speaker 1: he's gonna want a hundred cattle out there producing for
Speaker 1: him so he can harvest the surplus every year. So
Speaker 1: the trappers are no different. We want to go out
Speaker 1: next year, we want to trap as many as we can.
Speaker 1: We want a healthy population. As stewarts of the land.
Speaker 1: We want to maintain that healthy animal. So you know,
Speaker 1: in the case where the people that don't want any
Speaker 1: any animals killed, the animals make natural cycles where they'll
Speaker 1: popular laid up over years, disease out, and they just
Speaker 1: go from peak and crash, peak and crash. As stewards
Speaker 1: of the land. As a trapper, I'm able to maintain
Speaker 1: healthy populations right straight through. Any time you have, for example,
Speaker 1: kyotes getting overpopulated and getting manes or distemper, then you
Speaker 1: have the potential of that spreading into the dogs of
Speaker 1: the pomesticated canine populations, yeah, getting into the the population
Speaker 1: of of domestic animals, where if you maintain a healthy
Speaker 1: population of the kyo, you don't have that problem. I've
Speaker 1: found that people are comfortable with the cycles um like
Speaker 1: it doesn't upset them because people have this idea that like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's natural. So like wolves getting killed by wolves, They're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fine, that's natural. UM disease is fine, that's natural.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the discord and um acrimony
Speaker 1: the trapping rings about is because people this is a phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I guess at the last two hundred years, people have
Speaker 1: gotten to the point where, um, nothing we do that
Speaker 1: they like us. They like our species to sit entirely
Speaker 1: outside of nature. Are you being a steward of the
Speaker 1: land by doing that? Well, no, but it's comfortable for
Speaker 1: people to imagine that we're we're tainted. Um, we do
Speaker 1: all the things we do, but we're tainted, and like
Speaker 1: any role we play in nature is very upsetting to them,
Speaker 1: Like they want everyone to live divorced from nature, so
Speaker 1: that all the ways the muskrat dies, all the uses
Speaker 1: of the muskrat goes toward to feed things, Like the
Speaker 1: minute it enters into the human sphere, something's wrong, something
Speaker 1: is something has occurred that was bad. You know that,
Speaker 1: like of all the predation that drives things that a
Speaker 1: human predator would get, it feels like naughty to them. Um,
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of hang up. It's hard to address.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. It's like, I guess we're not animals.
Speaker 1: I guess we're not part of the uh natural world.
Speaker 1: You know, we've brought technology to the place where it
Speaker 1: is so we can just be like robots that sit
Speaker 1: in the sidelines, and like we live in apartment buildings,
Speaker 1: we don't live in the woods. I guess so. Yeah. People,
Speaker 1: a lot of people I think regard themselves as kind
Speaker 1: of ikey. They think they're like ikey and evil in
Speaker 1: that context. But I don't, like, I don't feel that way,
Speaker 1: Like I don't like to be an agent out in nature. Um,
Speaker 1: like a person who does things and consumes things and
Speaker 1: supports things and and you know, uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: well intentioned predator like that doesn't make me feel nasty
Speaker 1: and icky. It's interesting, but it's a sentiment that people have.
Speaker 1: My wife had struggles with trapping. What's her She struggles
Speaker 1: with electric reels because because you know what it is
Speaker 1: when I inquire about it, because you're not there. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see, so you're not bearing witness to it. It's
Speaker 1: like a mechanical you're not. Actually, it's not active. It's
Speaker 1: because you set it. You set a trap and you
Speaker 1: don't need to be there. And electric reels because your
Speaker 1: hand doesn't need to like going circles. So she feels
Speaker 1: like it's most of the most of the time, the
Speaker 1: definition of trapping is hunting with mechanical devices. Most places,
Speaker 1: most states. I think that's how they define trapping, is
Speaker 1: hunting with mechanical devices. Maybe that's upsetting to people. But
Speaker 1: what's a firearm mechanical device? Is that far more sophisticated.
Speaker 1: That's why hunting and trapping a lot of times follow
Speaker 1: the same regulatory guidelines too as well. You'll find a
Speaker 1: lot of hunting and trapping laws that coincide with each other.
Speaker 1: But I can see that. It's like you're I can
Speaker 1: see where she's coming from. I don't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know how I feel either way, but like you're
Speaker 1: in the moment confronting an animal, and your action in
Speaker 1: that moment, that engagement with that creature in that moment
Speaker 1: is like an active choice that you're making right, and
Speaker 1: if you're setting something out that's going to do its
Speaker 1: job by yourself in your absence, I can I can
Speaker 1: see where she is sitting waiting out a deer to
Speaker 1: in her mind is like that's great, yeah, waiting it out.
Speaker 1: But you go out in the warm part of the
Speaker 1: day instead of beaver trap, and then you go back
Speaker 1: to bed and some point during the night your ass
Speaker 1: isn't even sitting there freezing, and what you got him?
Speaker 1: It just strikes her as you're cheating. She might have
Speaker 1: an arguable point there to completely disagree. It's also just
Speaker 1: more variables that you have less control over, right, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's in my defense of what I always
Speaker 1: when I'm having this argument with her, I tell her,
Speaker 1: like the electrical real for the electric real friends. When
Speaker 1: she thinks is like she was offended by electric reels
Speaker 1: deep dropping because you don't see the fish and all
Speaker 1: this stuff, I said to her. And I said the
Speaker 1: same thing to her about beaver trapping, as I said,
Speaker 1: I could lay a gun out for someone and say
Speaker 1: I want you to kill a deer. Okay, So let's
Speaker 1: say I'm one pile, I put a gun, and I say,
Speaker 1: I why it's you to kill it? Here? In one pile,
Speaker 1: I put all the ship that it requires a deep
Speaker 1: drop of black cod in the pile. Or I put
Speaker 1: all the ship that's required to trap a beaver in
Speaker 1: a pile. Which pile are you gonna grab? Figure it out? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I said, okay, crant, here's the choice. You can
Speaker 1: take this and shoot catch a deer. You can take
Speaker 1: all this ship and catch a black cod, or you
Speaker 1: can take all this ship and catch a beaver. What
Speaker 1: are you gonna go for? What's gonna strike you? As
Speaker 1: the easiest thing the action, of course, because it takes
Speaker 1: the skill set require draped myself in options. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: bits of information, the bits of information required to catch
Speaker 1: a beaver are greater than the bits of information required
Speaker 1: to shoot it here, Okay, they just are. It takes
Speaker 1: more know how to like, it just takes more know
Speaker 1: how to get up and running. Yep, got it, Like
Speaker 1: trying to set that thing up. One of my limbs
Speaker 1: might be in there. Not just that, but to read
Speaker 1: the sign, to understand even where to begin. It's like
Speaker 1: not an easy thing. And so that whole like how
Speaker 1: that whole like challenge aspect, which is different than ethics.
Speaker 1: It's still substantive. There is a huge challenge aspect, but
Speaker 1: people don't see it because they don't experience and they
Speaker 1: don't go out and see what it requires. It is.
Speaker 1: They have this idea of how easy it is, like
Speaker 1: how easy it is to criticize people that run mountain
Speaker 1: lines of dogs until you go and see what goes
Speaker 1: into it hard. Could it be shooting line out of
Speaker 1: a tree that I don't think, I don't know any
Speaker 1: houndsman to think that's hard. Maybe the concept is like
Speaker 1: setting out traps is like setting out like a mouse trap. Well,
Speaker 1: it's like this muskrant thing we're looking at that looks
Speaker 1: a lot more complicated than a mouse In the case
Speaker 1: of a kyote trap, where you've got a two inch
Speaker 1: circle that out of a square mile, you're trying to
Speaker 1: get a coyote to step on a two inch circle.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many two inch circles there are
Speaker 1: in a square mile, but you know, that's kind of
Speaker 1: amazing in itself. That's something I've I've heard that express
Speaker 1: and it's a it's a very valid point that you
Speaker 1: are not only that you're trying to get him a
Speaker 1: step on a two inch man made circle. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: smells bad, It's incredible. Yeah, how affective people are figuring
Speaker 1: that stuff out? What else you got, kran No, that's
Speaker 1: that's it. I just wanted to touch on that because
Speaker 1: I think that comes up a lot here and I
Speaker 1: just I mean, I don't know either way. You know, Hey,
Speaker 1: this is this is all new to me, so I
Speaker 1: kind of just appreciate the information in the in the perspective,
Speaker 1: I think that, but in all fairness of the subject,
Speaker 1: I think that, um, when trappers are defending trapping, they
Speaker 1: often want to go to. They often jump to conna bears,
Speaker 1: which are body gripping traps, because it's sort of like
Speaker 1: very they're like demonstrably effective, like they kill things very quickly.
Speaker 1: Very few trappers go to defend trapping and jump to
Speaker 1: footholds that restrain an animal for a day or two alive.
Speaker 1: Oh that so now now I want to show up.
Speaker 1: And then you show up and yeah, like when we
Speaker 1: used to like trapping fox, red fox, you would dispass
Speaker 1: like you'd catch the file. You check every morning. It
Speaker 1: was it just made more sense to check in the morning,
Speaker 1: but you didn't have to um. Some states have check
Speaker 1: laws twenty four hours, forty eight hours, whatever. You go there,
Speaker 1: it is, he's on, he's in the trap, he's been
Speaker 1: there all night. And you go up and take a
Speaker 1: trowel and smack him across the bridge of the nose
Speaker 1: and stun him and then take your heel and and
Speaker 1: crush his rib cage with your heel. Is how trappers
Speaker 1: dispatch red foxes. That's upsetting to people, But trappers always
Speaker 1: want to talk about connor bears. I do too. It's
Speaker 1: a bad habit of mine. Then it gets a little,
Speaker 1: then it gets like then it's different. It's a different conversation.
Speaker 1: Maybe if I was arguing with the trapper, that's what
Speaker 1: I would talk about. I'd be like, no, no no, don't
Speaker 1: want to talk about converse. Well, recognize just a lot
Speaker 1: of snares with the development of a stench or kill
Speaker 1: spring in that well. I don't know how many coyotes
Speaker 1: we have that the cable stretch out where you out
Speaker 1: a skiff of snow and you can see exactly what
Speaker 1: took place. You can see where the kayok goes into
Speaker 1: the snare, he takes a lunge and he's laying dead
Speaker 1: at the end of it, and his foot has made
Speaker 1: maybe a couple of swipes of his foot where it's
Speaker 1: killed him extremely quickly. Just so, I don't really use
Speaker 1: traps all that much anymore because of the efficiency of
Speaker 1: the the snares that are available to us now. It
Speaker 1: cuts off that card artery and I mean they're dead
Speaker 1: at the end of the cable. I've got a number
Speaker 1: of wolves that the cable is stretched out and the
Speaker 1: wolf is laying dead at the end of it. Zero
Speaker 1: disruption to the to the you can reset your set
Speaker 1: and needed the grass didn't even get beat down or
Speaker 1: anything like literally it goes to the end of the rope,
Speaker 1: they drop. That's it, you know. Sometimes their leg doesn't
Speaker 1: even move. There's I mean, it's you couldn't stone an
Speaker 1: anim all that quickly, couldn't shoot it, You couldn't show
Speaker 1: in the forehead and have it die as quickly as
Speaker 1: they do with it. When they cut off that blood
Speaker 1: to the brain, they basically just die instantly. So when
Speaker 1: you do you not like, do you know guys that
Speaker 1: don't use let me, let me, let me back up
Speaker 1: from it and just explain something listeners. You'll often hear
Speaker 1: like dry dry land dry ground sets being differentiated from
Speaker 1: water sets because water sets theres a hundred ways, not
Speaker 1: a hunter ways. There's a handful of ways with water
Speaker 1: sets to kill stuff real quick, drowner wires and all
Speaker 1: kinds of things like you get stuff underwater and drown
Speaker 1: it or it's just killed by the trap. So dry
Speaker 1: land sets, dry land leg hold or foothold sets um
Speaker 1: oftentimes are just restraining the animals you get there. I'll
Speaker 1: point out that wolf researchers often catch the wolves they're
Speaker 1: doing for coloring projects. They catch the wolves use the
Speaker 1: exact same technology that people are talking about being crueling inhumane.
Speaker 1: Wolf researchers use. I know, there's a lot of wolf
Speaker 1: researchers to use an MB seven fifty, which is what
Speaker 1: a foothold trap. So when they want to put a
Speaker 1: collar on a wolf or do damage work, they're using
Speaker 1: the thing that everyone agrees is so nasty. So it's
Speaker 1: important to keep that in mind. Can we can we
Speaker 1: picture it as like you know, your foot, you know,
Speaker 1: is grabbed hold of by something and and you're just
Speaker 1: maybe you're, you know, trying to struggle and get away,
Speaker 1: but there it is. It's like it's a thing that
Speaker 1: pinches your foot. Predator with canines. It usually gets them
Speaker 1: around the pad. It's usually like held in around the
Speaker 1: pad with a couple of toes, same stuff researchers use.
Speaker 1: You do not want a trap that breaks the bone
Speaker 1: on them. The trap that is just restraining the animal.
Speaker 1: That's the goal, because anything more than that you have
Speaker 1: more of a chance of losing them. So the whole
Speaker 1: idea of a foothold trap is to just restrain the
Speaker 1: animal with doing his men them amount of damage as
Speaker 1: you can. Okay, one of the points when I wanted
Speaker 1: to set that up to one of the points I
Speaker 1: wanted to get at was um, there are there, there
Speaker 1: are perfect scenarios in setting traps and like best practices
Speaker 1: and humane practices. But things happen all the time that
Speaker 1: caused the systems to go awry. And I think the
Speaker 1: people that have a hard time with trapping are probably
Speaker 1: deeply informed by the situations where something goes awry for
Speaker 1: whatever reason. The kyot pulls out, pulls a steak out,
Speaker 1: breaks the chain, I don't know, and then it's run
Speaker 1: around neighborhood the tramp on its leg or I have
Speaker 1: even in like beaver sets where the drowner cable I use,
Speaker 1: something gets kinked up, some stuff drifts down, it gets
Speaker 1: the cable gets a curl q in it, a drift
Speaker 1: log comes down and messes it up. Something messes it up,
Speaker 1: and you do like just like, I'll admit it flat out.
Speaker 1: You'll come down and have a beaver's front foot in
Speaker 1: a trap. It can happen. They twist out that your
Speaker 1: equipment fails and there you have, you've like tore the
Speaker 1: foot off of beaver. So somehow trappers like need to
Speaker 1: account for that more than other people who might have
Speaker 1: something go wrong now and then well, what about how
Speaker 1: many deer get killed by combines harvesting wheat? Sure, or
Speaker 1: how many how many deer and elk um are wounded
Speaker 1: and survived from bullet and arrow strikes. But I think
Speaker 1: that trappers are held more to the mistakes, yeah, than
Speaker 1: hunters and farmers and everyone else has held to They're
Speaker 1: held more to the mistakes. I think it's a smaller community.
Speaker 1: It's easier to target them. I mean, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: go fight all the farmers in the United States of
Speaker 1: America for killing rabbits, you know, the trappers, they're so
Speaker 1: small and rare now that it makes a very easy
Speaker 1: target to hone in on one group. You know, if
Speaker 1: you look at the total number of named animals by
Speaker 1: any user group out there, you're gonna have a hard
Speaker 1: time convincing me anyways, that trappers many more animals than
Speaker 1: any other user group, you know, or in general them,
Speaker 1: you know, to the point where they aren't dispatched. So
Speaker 1: I think it's because of the population. And this, I mean,
Speaker 1: how many trappers do you know? You know, ask that
Speaker 1: to someone on the street. Yeah, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be a big number, you know, And so it's a
Speaker 1: small number, and I don't think it's I think trappers
Speaker 1: got an unfair targeting because of that, because of their
Speaker 1: eliteness isn't the word, but because of their fraternity and
Speaker 1: how tight they are with each other and how small
Speaker 1: of a group it is. Um, they do get picked
Speaker 1: on more. It's a minority, you know, it's a minority.
Speaker 1: It's of um people who are opposed the animal harvests.
Speaker 1: It's in the playbook to go after and the death
Speaker 1: by thousand cuts routine. The smaller user groups are always
Speaker 1: where you're going to go after. Yeah, early houndsman, trappers, whatever,
Speaker 1: It's just like an easier victory. It seems very other
Speaker 1: two people. Yeah, for sure, it's more acceptable to go
Speaker 1: after them because not a lot is known about them.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a group that most people don't
Speaker 1: have any firsthand contact with. You know, I'd say a
Speaker 1: lot of hunters probably have never talked to a trapper.
Speaker 1: I used to point out that fishermen fishermen fish, and
Speaker 1: they might not do anything else. Correct, hunters, most hunters fish,
Speaker 1: trappers hunting fish. You got it. There's a hierarchy there.
Speaker 1: Walk through height even like let's let's say you're explained
Speaker 1: to someone, Um, you run your trap line basically gotta wrangle. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've got to have a cabin and permit that's forty
Speaker 1: two miles from town. Uh. That's the same type of
Speaker 1: permit as a is uh the interior of Alaska where
Speaker 1: you're allowed to build a cabin on state ground. Permit
Speaker 1: cost a hundred dollars and it is a ten year
Speaker 1: permit and you can put yourself up a cabin and
Speaker 1: then at the end of the ten years it's either
Speaker 1: renewable or any time during that period you can tear
Speaker 1: it down and it's better does have to be removed.
Speaker 1: You have to put up a bond that for removal.
Speaker 1: Explain to someone how they would like. Let's say you
Speaker 1: were trying to explain to someone you gotta go catch
Speaker 1: a wolverine. Here's what I would tell you if I
Speaker 1: had a couple of seconds, a couple minutes to explain
Speaker 1: to you that you need to go catch one, Like,
Speaker 1: how do you even begin to think about how it's
Speaker 1: even begin to think about what would go into catching
Speaker 1: a wolverine. Okay, first of all, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: go to some place that wolverianes live. So at that point,
Speaker 1: then you know, try to find bottlenecks or funnels. For example,
Speaker 1: as I go up the rivers, where a river comes
Speaker 1: in against a high steep embankment or something like that,
Speaker 1: that's going to crowd the crowd the wolverine into that spot.
Speaker 1: So you're trapping when the rivers are clean. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: they're they're still open most of the time. When I'm
Speaker 1: going up the rivers, they're still staying open up there.
Speaker 1: I think you need to elaborate how you get up
Speaker 1: the river. Oh, I have an airboat with a O
Speaker 1: forty like combing on it that I get up the
Speaker 1: rivers with. That's what you trap out of. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: do you like to bat them with? Um? Beavers will
Speaker 1: go to bait for almost everything. I found. The duck
Speaker 1: works really well for pine martin and duck. Yeah, duck works,
Speaker 1: and carcasses work really well for pine martin better than
Speaker 1: beaver meat. You mean, it's like that when you clean
Speaker 1: a duck, like whatever is left over, Cassy says, bones
Speaker 1: basically bones and feathers. Yeah, after once the duck has
Speaker 1: been breasted, Um, you can use it for bait at
Speaker 1: that point. In the case of geese, you also have
Speaker 1: to take the legs, but then whatever is left over
Speaker 1: after you've breasted and taking the legs, and you can
Speaker 1: use that for bait. Yeah, it's like how you can
Speaker 1: bait a crab trap with a salmon head, but you
Speaker 1: can't say a crab trap with I mean most sport
Speaker 1: caught sam and you can't stick the whole damn for
Speaker 1: the edible parts have been removed. Yeah. What time of
Speaker 1: year do you like to start? The season starts December
Speaker 1: one and runs through February short. Yeah, so you can
Speaker 1: still in the middle of the winter and that country
Speaker 1: have enough open water to run your whole to run
Speaker 1: the sea. The thing about the airboat is because it's
Speaker 1: in that particular environment. It's not like the interior where
Speaker 1: everything is completely froze over. You can run snowmobiles up
Speaker 1: the river. I wouldn't think it would take very long,
Speaker 1: and you'd break a snowmobile through someplace on these rivers
Speaker 1: because it's fluctuating between freezing and not freezing all the time.
Speaker 1: And so with the airboat, which it'll go on snow
Speaker 1: ice water that just basically goes over almost a gravel bars.
Speaker 1: Gravel bars does not like mud. Mud is basically airboat
Speaker 1: epoxy is there right, Yeah? Yeah, you stick it in
Speaker 1: the mud and it's stuck. Got you just too much friction. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A pretty major travel barrier for a lot of the
Speaker 1: rivers in southeast is that the bays will ice up.
Speaker 1: There's enough fresh water in them that's not moving very much.
Speaker 1: You'll end up with these ice barriers. We used to
Speaker 1: trap out a little john boats, and you can only
Speaker 1: go so far up into them before you basically the
Speaker 1: rivers at ice up, and once you get above the
Speaker 1: ice dams in the bottom, then the river is moving
Speaker 1: enough to where it opens back up again. So the
Speaker 1: logistics of trying to figure out how to get up
Speaker 1: one of these rivers very far was was one that
Speaker 1: was fairly challenging. So, I mean, my dad took it
Speaker 1: upon himself to figure out one way to get up
Speaker 1: above there. He knew the wolverines were further up the river.
Speaker 1: They weren't coming all the way down as far. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of the natural funnels where the points come
Speaker 1: out where these these wolverines would have to travel were
Speaker 1: further up than we could get with a little illuminum boat.
Speaker 1: How many miles up river are you trapping about? Eight
Speaker 1: miles up, each one up, So you got multiple rivers,
Speaker 1: all right, and wolverines roam all around, and you try
Speaker 1: to find someplace where they'll their movements will be constricted,
Speaker 1: like down to a bottleneck of sorts, and that might
Speaker 1: be bank configurations, river bank of steepness, so that you
Speaker 1: know if they're saddles. Yeah, just any place that's a funnel.
Speaker 1: The same way as you trap anything, you go to
Speaker 1: where they're gonna be traveling. How many, just like just
Speaker 1: like a human being, I mean, how many times have
Speaker 1: you went to a hunting in a certain spot, You
Speaker 1: go back three year years later, you find yourself walking
Speaker 1: in the exact same space place that you walked three
Speaker 1: years earlier. Yeah, how many do you take? Each year?
Speaker 1: I have I have caught, not caught that many wolverine.
Speaker 1: I caught one year last year and and that, and
Speaker 1: so this is something new for me. I've never been
Speaker 1: able to trap wolverine before until, like Rick said, I
Speaker 1: spent about thirty thou dollars to catch my first wolverine.
Speaker 1: So I could have I think that I could. I
Speaker 1: could have bought built an air or built a cabin,
Speaker 1: got an air about but lots of years of trial
Speaker 1: and error. I mean, how much how many trials and
Speaker 1: errors do we do before finally figuring out, No, I'm
Speaker 1: not a big wolverine trapper. However, it's like I said,
Speaker 1: it's an excuse to run around the woods. So the
Speaker 1: great white buffalo, how do you catch Pine Martin? Pine
Speaker 1: Martin is generally in a box as well too. Although
Speaker 1: one thing that I did take from my trapping experience
Speaker 1: in Washington when they banned all body gripping devices, we
Speaker 1: went to box trapping Pine Martin and I found up
Speaker 1: in the live trapping them. Yeah, live trapping, Okay, And
Speaker 1: then you know, I mean that type of trap, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that type of trap, just a cage trap. And so
Speaker 1: I started doing up that up there as well, in
Speaker 1: the fact that I could turn loose the females and
Speaker 1: maintain a higher population, uh for the closer to the
Speaker 1: carrying capacity, and have more producing females. Uh not no
Speaker 1: different than a cattle. Female pine Martin worth more than
Speaker 1: male Pine Martin. No, male worth much more. So that's
Speaker 1: just that's always that way. Yeah, I got males are
Speaker 1: much bigger, and they're they're much more desirable price wise females.
Speaker 1: Females are just smaller. So much of furs is based
Speaker 1: on square inches. Yeah, I got you. Like if it's
Speaker 1: twice as big as probably twice as m exactly with you.
Speaker 1: So how do you catch them? Well, with either one
Speaker 1: of two ways, either con of trap, which is far
Speaker 1: more humane than a cage trap. But the cage trap
Speaker 1: does allow you the ability to be able to be
Speaker 1: more selective in your harvest where I'm just harvesting just males, retort,
Speaker 1: letting the females go, and uh being able to maintain
Speaker 1: a higher number of productivity out of the area. Pine
Speaker 1: Martin are extremely easy to overtrap. Yeah, I hear that
Speaker 1: all the time. Why is that, Well, they're slow, they're
Speaker 1: delayed implantation, meaning that they're they're basically pregnant when you
Speaker 1: when you catch them. And so when I turn a
Speaker 1: female loose, I'm probably turning loose two or three Martin
Speaker 1: in reality, because they normally only have one or two
Speaker 1: kit or pups whatever you want to call them. But
Speaker 1: so they don't have you know, like the main cap
Speaker 1: five or six in a litter or pine Martin only
Speaker 1: has one or two. Yeah, it's funny that make like
Speaker 1: make have a reputation is being hard to catch. But
Speaker 1: pine Martin's have a reputation is being easy, extremely easy
Speaker 1: to catch. Like what makes it that way? Mank are
Speaker 1: afraid of their own shadow. I've done a lot of
Speaker 1: videotaping on my sets and stuff like that, trying to
Speaker 1: find out, you know, some difference. Pine Martin will just
Speaker 1: plow right into a trap, but he's not smelling. He's
Speaker 1: not worried about the smell of steel, the smell of humans. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they just plow right into things. They don't really care
Speaker 1: if it's food there after it. And the mink they're
Speaker 1: they're pretty skittish. I wonder if it's um that the
Speaker 1: mink just lives in a he lives in a more
Speaker 1: food rich environment and can afford to be a little particular.
Speaker 1: But a Pine Martin in the winter has just got
Speaker 1: to be balls out all the time. I think Martin
Speaker 1: most of his life is on the verge of starvation.
Speaker 1: I think they just they work hard to make a
Speaker 1: living where a mink has got a pretty easy life,
Speaker 1: and then you make a little box like a cubby,
Speaker 1: put bait in the back guard the front of the trap.
Speaker 1: Connor Bear, what do you how do you deal with
Speaker 1: all the snow, like all the snow, bearing all yourself
Speaker 1: all time. Well, you can put it on the side
Speaker 1: of a tree, just nail boxes side of a tree. Well,
Speaker 1: wolverine run up a tree though, Yeah, yeah, so you
Speaker 1: can get this that up out of the snow. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: I've got a set I'm working with this year. That's
Speaker 1: uh what I I've actually got this from another individual
Speaker 1: up and uh, I believe it's Northwest Territories where he's at.
Speaker 1: But he used a tip up, which is basically a
Speaker 1: long pole attached to your trap. So when the trap
Speaker 1: is sprung, it falls away and the tip up brings
Speaker 1: the animal up in the air and suspends him. He's
Speaker 1: already caught and killed in the trap. But one in
Speaker 1: real big advantage of that is in the case of
Speaker 1: Pine Martin, he's suspended so the voles and shrews don't
Speaker 1: chew up the first start eating them. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: he's suspended up out of the way. And so I'm
Speaker 1: experimenting with that and making a set that's designed to
Speaker 1: catch links wolverine, fisher, Pine Martin. We have very few
Speaker 1: of all of those items, and there's a fair number
Speaker 1: of wolverine, but uh, mainly just pine martin is what
Speaker 1: I'm after, but it eliminates the problem. Last year I
Speaker 1: had about six pine martin eating by wolverine. Had a
Speaker 1: wolf that I had caught that got eaten by a
Speaker 1: wolverine as well. So the wolverine ate the wolf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he found a wolf that I had caughten a
Speaker 1: snare and he ate it. So. Uh, Wolverines used to
Speaker 1: have like a real bad rip. Not used to in
Speaker 1: the North, Like I don't have any experience trapping like
Speaker 1: in the far North, you know, but wolverines, you know,
Speaker 1: they got the name like whatever, like the devil and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. For how much trouble they
Speaker 1: gave the trappers. They just kind of get your number.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, Well they basically figure out that wherever you're going,
Speaker 1: there's food. So I mean that's just like any other predator.
Speaker 1: They eat and they sleep, and they don't sleep very
Speaker 1: damn much. So I mean they just go to what's
Speaker 1: available for him for food, and that's just a turns
Speaker 1: out to be a food source for him. A friend
Speaker 1: of mine in Alaska who used to trap wolverines, I
Speaker 1: was asking about how he found the wolverine and how
Speaker 1: he looked for him, and he just said, they just
Speaker 1: found me. They just follow my snowshoe trail. He would
Speaker 1: make his sets in his snowshoe tracks. She's like, as
Speaker 1: soon as they hit my snowshy tracks, A're gonna follow.
Speaker 1: It's an easy way to travel to once they hit that,
Speaker 1: and they can run. It's like gravy running and somehow
Speaker 1: there's always food. Oh yeah, it's like always follow the
Speaker 1: snowshoe trail around. Oh look, Pine Martin delicious links, love links.
Speaker 1: What time of year do you trap beavers? I try
Speaker 1: to trap beaver up there. I'll start off by trapping
Speaker 1: beaver in order to get some bait for my Pine
Speaker 1: Martin or wolverine and other sets. So I'll start with
Speaker 1: beaver right off the get go, so I've got bait
Speaker 1: as much as anything. And then most of the beaver
Speaker 1: I'll catch for my store is gonna be beaver. In
Speaker 1: the springtime, the fur qualities a lot better in the spring.
Speaker 1: When does the fur get primed? Like, do they do
Speaker 1: do the do the regulators you know who set the seasons,
Speaker 1: do they good job? Do they do a good job
Speaker 1: of matching the opening and closing day with for quality? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think most states do. Yeah, I think they do
Speaker 1: a real good job of that. But you like, the
Speaker 1: beaver is better in the spring, Yeah, better quality for
Speaker 1: in the spring, particularly if you're plucking and cheering the beaver.
Speaker 1: Really it's not good in the fall, not as good.
Speaker 1: But you know, they what they call silkies are normally
Speaker 1: a fall beaver. They're a lot they're a little bit
Speaker 1: thinner furred, but they're a lot silkier or if they've
Speaker 1: been all all through the winter and yeah, yeah, they're thicker,
Speaker 1: you know, under fur, thicker in that which makes the
Speaker 1: better plucking and cheering. Got you? How do you catch
Speaker 1: those the beaver? I use a lot of floats, a
Speaker 1: frame type floats and I'm follow um can show you
Speaker 1: pictures on my phone, right, you might be new to this,
Speaker 1: so he might be new to this. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: used to take Like when I was growing up, they
Speaker 1: never worked that well. We just take two pieces of
Speaker 1: firewood and make a loss piece and nail two pieces
Speaker 1: of firewood together and then notch it out with a hatchet.
Speaker 1: So you can set a couple set a couple of
Speaker 1: stop loss on it and stable to stop lost trap
Speaker 1: chain down to the bottom of the float and stick
Speaker 1: a couple of dollars, drill some holes so you had
Speaker 1: a couple of dollars and put apples on the top
Speaker 1: for muscratch never work where the ship not as good
Speaker 1: as feed beds and bank dens. Yeah. Correct, But in
Speaker 1: the springtime that set will be a lot more effective
Speaker 1: than it will be in the fall when they're hungry.
Speaker 1: Not when they're hungry, they're actually breeding and they're just
Speaker 1: traveling a lot more, and then they're just running hilter
Speaker 1: skelter and running all over the place. They just travel
Speaker 1: a lot more and that makes them more a lot
Speaker 1: easier to catch. And that's one of the things like
Speaker 1: the mink up there, you know, most mink trappers, you know,
Speaker 1: they consider a time frame for mink to come by.
Speaker 1: Might be a week before they come back through in
Speaker 1: the lower forty eight. But up where I'm out in
Speaker 1: southeast Alaska, those mink can only travel a hundred yards
Speaker 1: from their din. I mean, the tide goes out and
Speaker 1: their breck for stair, the supper tables set and they
Speaker 1: go down in fift twenty minutes or a half an hour.
Speaker 1: They get a full belly and go back up and
Speaker 1: go back to sleep. So yeah, I uh, it's funny
Speaker 1: you mentioned that, because growing up catching mank is like
Speaker 1: very difficult to catch mink, and people do always be
Speaker 1: surprised to hear that there's mink living around. At our
Speaker 1: shock in southeast Alaska, we had a mink a few
Speaker 1: years ago. Something got hold of it and tore its
Speaker 1: tail off, most of its tail off, and gave it
Speaker 1: a big wound right at the base of his tail.
Speaker 1: And this wound was about like the size of like
Speaker 1: two of your fingers put together your middle finger and
Speaker 1: pointer finger. Um, like a wound like that up it's
Speaker 1: back on the back of its tail, at the base
Speaker 1: of its tail. And this moon festered and for a
Speaker 1: while this mink got lost all fear of people, and
Speaker 1: it would run across your shoes and it just looks sickly,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of times I thought, man, I should
Speaker 1: shoot that poor mink. UM just put it off. It's
Speaker 1: misery or it was acting so weird. I was worried
Speaker 1: about it biting my kids. That The next year, the
Speaker 1: mink is totally back to normal, except has a large
Speaker 1: scar in discoloration where it had healed up. And we
Speaker 1: have since and that mank is now, um I now
Speaker 1: know like lives there. We know a hole it lives in.
Speaker 1: And we've seen that mak now for four years hanging
Speaker 1: out in one little spot and you'll see it every day.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, where I grew up and we caught mank
Speaker 1: and people trapped making there's a lot of we had
Speaker 1: mink longliners. You would go your most people will go
Speaker 1: their entire lives and be unaware that they lived there.
Speaker 1: But these like Southeast Alaska, mank are like squirrels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: middle of the day on the porch in the house.
Speaker 1: Just a way different man yeah, way different mank. I've
Speaker 1: I've had a different time to kill. Yeah, I've had
Speaker 1: difficult time catching them because of that, I think, And
Speaker 1: just I I'm used to that mink that makes week
Speaker 1: long cycles in that and it Uh, it's been a
Speaker 1: learning learning curve for me. They say that if you
Speaker 1: move a hundred miles, you gotta learn how to trap
Speaker 1: all over again. And with truly the case, what do
Speaker 1: you um, what's the main thing Like like you're saying
Speaker 1: you catch a lot of pine martins, what's the main
Speaker 1: thing you use pine martins for? Oh, I'm making hats
Speaker 1: out of him. I make different things. Uh, I don't
Speaker 1: think I've made any cuzies with them. One of one
Speaker 1: of my big sellers is beer cuzies, and I really
Speaker 1: enjoy making those, and I enjoy the Californians that come
Speaker 1: up to Alaska, and I explained to them that, you know,
Speaker 1: these are the perfect bear cuzie for a Californian, for
Speaker 1: you know, a an environmentalist, if you want to call
Speaker 1: him an environmentalist. Yeah, it's biodegradable, it's ourgan think, it's
Speaker 1: a renewable resource. It's everything a Californian should like. What
Speaker 1: do you get for a beer couzy? Bucks? Twenty bucks,
Speaker 1: twenty five for a bottled, twenty for a beer cam
Speaker 1: So pine Martin beer coozies are a good seller. Well,
Speaker 1: actually I make most of them out of beaver and
Speaker 1: otter pine Martin headbands and hats. Probably mostly the pine
Speaker 1: Martin get made into the earwarmer's head bands hats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the thing about well, basically, a pine Martin is
Speaker 1: the same thing as a sable. It's type of sable.
Speaker 1: And when you think of pine martin, once it becomes
Speaker 1: into a fur product, it's a sable and how that.
Speaker 1: I just thought they called him sable in Eurasia, that's
Speaker 1: where you know the Russian sable is for that. But
Speaker 1: it's the same animal. It's the same animal. We just
Speaker 1: called a pine martin. We called a pine martin when
Speaker 1: it's made into sable. So if you caught a bunch
Speaker 1: of pine martins in America and made a coat, it's
Speaker 1: still a stable cable ship. No, I didn't know that,
Speaker 1: Seth wants. I've had a top lot Manke. He used
Speaker 1: to put up for for a living. They had a
Speaker 1: top lot maker went for eighteen dollars. That's not bad.
Speaker 1: I've had lots of top lot Morris. Uh, Mike, you've
Speaker 1: brought up I noticed you brought up like the idea
Speaker 1: of plastics and things um that fors biodegradable, organic renewable
Speaker 1: Are you just being cynical, like are you anti plastic?
Speaker 1: Not particularly just rubbing in their nose. Yeah, Well, it's
Speaker 1: just that they may trying to make a point that
Speaker 1: you know that for is a bad thing, and when
Speaker 1: in reality it's exactly what those people desire, renewable, organic
Speaker 1: renewable resource. That's why would they not want that? But
Speaker 1: yet they're completely opposed to fur. You know, so I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, this doesn't make sense. Do you understand why
Speaker 1: people aren't offended by leather? Like why once you pep
Speaker 1: fur away from something, is it so easy? Why is not?
Speaker 1: If that's acceptable, but you leave the fur on it
Speaker 1: pisces people off. It's all leather head hair on it,
Speaker 1: all leather head fur on it. It should come with
Speaker 1: a reminder it just used to be haired. I think
Speaker 1: he scraped it away. It speaks to the detachment that
Speaker 1: we as a society have from nature, and I think
Speaker 1: that's the biggest problem. It's why people have problems and
Speaker 1: want to put humans in a separate category from animals.
Speaker 1: I think it also comes back to what you were
Speaker 1: talking about with Crin's earrings. How you said no one
Speaker 1: would have an issue if it were a feather, But
Speaker 1: something about that foot, it's it's a more tangible reminder
Speaker 1: of this living, this thing that once was living. Like
Speaker 1: fur is to leather, Like leather doesn't really remind you
Speaker 1: just looking at it on the coat or whatever. But
Speaker 1: if you see something covered in fur, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it kind of just triggers that like, oh that was
Speaker 1: that was an animal? You know that law. I wanted
Speaker 1: to make the only me and Seth could catch beavers,
Speaker 1: but they had to be with a thousand dollars apiece.
Speaker 1: I think there should be another law that one day
Speaker 1: out of the year, everything that's leather has to still
Speaker 1: have its fur on. Yeah, that would be a hell
Speaker 1: of a day. People would be like, my god, my god,
Speaker 1: the amount of fur running around is out of control.
Speaker 1: Those ostrich boots would look real weird. Yeah, feathered boots
Speaker 1: be like Liberaci's boots. That's the text time I mentioned Liberaci.
Speaker 1: Do you know what? You know? Who? That is? It?
Speaker 1: You don't know who I mentioned it. I should probably
Speaker 1: get rid of that reference because I think right piano
Speaker 1: player type in Liberaci is a musician, American pianist. Go
Speaker 1: to images. Oh, very fla boyant, very flat. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: stop using that reference. So except he's got to be
Speaker 1: dead or dead? Uh? So, have you quit using footholds
Speaker 1: because the hemane like pretty much? Really because of personal
Speaker 1: feeling about humane Yeah, I think I'm being a better
Speaker 1: steward and better respect to the animal by killing him instant.
Speaker 1: I don't hardly use footholds at all. I can't think
Speaker 1: of any place. I actually use foot holds occasionally on
Speaker 1: a mink set, but predominantly all conivers. Did you look
Speaker 1: down on people to use foolds? No, not at all.
Speaker 1: Just put you personally, me personally. I just I prefer
Speaker 1: to use connivers myself. I feel I'm being a better,
Speaker 1: better stewart to the You know when you look at
Speaker 1: the Canadians where they have the best management practices. You know,
Speaker 1: they require their economers to kill an animal as a
Speaker 1: certain time frame and if it doesn't meet that requirement,
Speaker 1: it's not a legal trap. Ye speaking of the word Canada. Uh,
Speaker 1: what's the parker company can a Goose? Yeah? So they
Speaker 1: had a hit park of everybody else on wanted one.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing they started out being cool with like sled doggers,
Speaker 1: and then they just got cool city people New York.
Speaker 1: I mean everyone in New York, cana want to just
Speaker 1: go to Soho and it's like everyone's got the same coat,
Speaker 1: looks the same. And this company is in Canada, not
Speaker 1: in Canada, Canada. So Canada Goose is a parker company
Speaker 1: and they were trimming all their parks with kyote. Right.
Speaker 1: My understanding is one of the board members is anti
Speaker 1: fur and he was the one that kind of spearheaded
Speaker 1: to the elimination of the coyotes, but their kyote trimm parting. Historically,
Speaker 1: parkers were trimmed with wolverine and kyote. Um the high
Speaker 1: or super high end park is with wolverine because it
Speaker 1: doesn't freeze up and frost up. But they were buying
Speaker 1: this Canada Goose company was buying enough kyotes to actually
Speaker 1: impact the kyote market. Yeah, yeah, totally. I'd like to
Speaker 1: thank them, Thank you, Canada Goose. And then they came
Speaker 1: out and said we're gonna stop using for do a
Speaker 1: book report on this stuff, sort of sort of sort
Speaker 1: of New York Times article says Canna Goose will stop
Speaker 1: buying for sort of um, Cana Goose announced that's starting
Speaker 1: in the company will no longer buy new fur from trappers.
Speaker 1: By then, can in a couple of years, By then,
Speaker 1: can the Goose will start using reclaim for Oh that's
Speaker 1: what for fur that already exists in supply chain. So
Speaker 1: just between now and then, they're gonna buy up every
Speaker 1: okayot coat they can find. Yeah, but it's not fake
Speaker 1: for that they're replacing it with. And does it talk
Speaker 1: about why public pressure uh no, no, um it says
Speaker 1: the shift is an eco friendly measure. Year. This is
Speaker 1: this the CEO. This is his uh his comment the
Speaker 1: shift is an eco friendly measure and not related to
Speaker 1: public pressure from activists. I would also like to point
Speaker 1: out that what fills their jacket is not like some
Speaker 1: shaved fuzz off a bird birds feathers, and in a
Speaker 1: quick note to people at home, you can shear a
Speaker 1: sheep and then turn that sheep back out and get
Speaker 1: another harvest the wool off it. You can do that
Speaker 1: a few times. In fact, when you fill a coat
Speaker 1: with a goose's feathers, that's some bitch, and goose is
Speaker 1: not alive anymore unless it's ethically harvested down, which you
Speaker 1: kill the goose as opposed to the practice of life plucking. Yes,
Speaker 1: a lot of companies I was reading this, like Eddie
Speaker 1: Bau or a bunch of other companies. They find live
Speaker 1: plucking to be so abhorrent that they're trying to remove
Speaker 1: live plucked down where you just grab the burden rip
Speaker 1: its feathers out. They're trying to remove live plucked down
Speaker 1: from their supply chain, or arguing about whether they have
Speaker 1: live plucked down in their supply chain, because it's better
Speaker 1: to kill the damn goose and get its feathers than
Speaker 1: to rip them off alive. Hile for now, that's mean.
Speaker 1: It's just it's one of those things that just makes
Speaker 1: you sound like an old man complaining about it. So
Speaker 1: it's hard to complain about. But come on, man, yea,
Speaker 1: if people don't see it, they don't care about it.
Speaker 1: So you'll buy a coat filled with down from I
Speaker 1: don't know how many damn geese. But then you trim
Speaker 1: it it just it's trimmed with Kyle like that's bad.
Speaker 1: It's because like people can't handle like reality laid out
Speaker 1: in front of them. It's learned later. Because my kid's
Speaker 1: best friend, his daddy raises uh turkeys, and they had
Speaker 1: an extra one for us to have for Thanksgiving turkey.
Speaker 1: So I took my kid over there stay the twenty
Speaker 1: two to get the turkey. Uh. They'd cut the feet
Speaker 1: off the day before, so it wasn't fed, so it's
Speaker 1: crop was empty, his digestive track was emptied out. Just
Speaker 1: gave it water. It's in a little barn. My kid
Speaker 1: walked out in there and shot that turkey. Didn't even
Speaker 1: occur to him. To think that there was something wrong
Speaker 1: with it. He is very, very aware of the processes
Speaker 1: of life. But the fact that some people have to
Speaker 1: have all this ship shielded from them and any little
Speaker 1: visual reminder of this pisces him off. It's like, just
Speaker 1: like people are just becoming too like weak brained. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's very easy, I think not to think a little
Speaker 1: step further of you know, how the meats in front
Speaker 1: of them, or if they have a nice plush uh
Speaker 1: pillow on their on their sofa, how it got there
Speaker 1: is full of dead stuff? But the trim, now that
Speaker 1: that's the that's what tops it off. I'm not like
Speaker 1: a book burner, but if I have one of those coats,
Speaker 1: I'd go burn that some of a bitch and coat.
Speaker 1: I'm still really shocked about the live plucking there you go.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I assumed that the animal would
Speaker 1: be dead. So if they line it with or they
Speaker 1: put the caller on with fake for, then that would
Speaker 1: be acceptable. But yet it's a non renewable resource. No,
Speaker 1: it's recycled for. Yeah, they're using recycled for just go
Speaker 1: buy old for coats, I guess, yeah, But I don't
Speaker 1: see where they're going to be able to find enough
Speaker 1: of that to even come close to their market. So
Speaker 1: they'll have to turn to fake fur at some point
Speaker 1: or back to real fur or back to real fur
Speaker 1: is the only two directions because they're not going to
Speaker 1: find enough. And besides that, when you is your leathers
Speaker 1: get older, they get less and less. They know, the
Speaker 1: leather itself does deteriorate because you know, leather is biodegradable,
Speaker 1: where fake fur is not really biodegradable. So what they
Speaker 1: were into New York prior to this was I remember
Speaker 1: when like north Face puffies. Then they got into the
Speaker 1: Canada goose down. Everyone had a north Face black north
Speaker 1: Face puffy all gave away to Kyo hide. So you
Speaker 1: got a month and you gotta go up and start
Speaker 1: trapping in Alaska? What do you do the month before that?
Speaker 1: I'm going up to hunt coyotes for a month. You're
Speaker 1: going to Kyo hunting now snaring too? How many? How
Speaker 1: many when you go out? Like how many hours you
Speaker 1: putting in a day? Whatever? Whatever I can, most I can.
Speaker 1: And then you use all these coyotes for your Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be using them in the store. Most of the
Speaker 1: coyotes I want to make blankets out of okay so
Speaker 1: or quilts or throws you ever sell them into the
Speaker 1: fur markets. In the past, I always have uh is
Speaker 1: predominantly where all the fur went. But here just four
Speaker 1: years ago I started started cutting out all the middlemen
Speaker 1: and just making products myself. And then Rick, are you participating? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be up there for a little bit. Um. We
Speaker 1: used to do it yearly and snare a whole pile
Speaker 1: of coyotes. Um and Uh, I've been so busy with
Speaker 1: other projects too. We haven't been making a living, making
Speaker 1: a living instead of losing money trapping. UM, So I've
Speaker 1: kind of had to back off a little bit on
Speaker 1: how much I used to trap. For a lot of years.
Speaker 1: We ran around and trapped almost all winter for several years,
Speaker 1: and we have quite the quite the pile at the
Speaker 1: end of the year. And that was when fur prices
Speaker 1: were a little bit better, and we did make a
Speaker 1: little money doing that. Um. Dad was getting his muskrat trap.
Speaker 1: UM kind of dialed in and we went and trapped
Speaker 1: for two weeks and I think we ended up with
Speaker 1: seven nine muskrats. We were just shy of a thousand.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. But then in two weeks. I think
Speaker 1: we got seven dollars in two weeks, so when we
Speaker 1: sold the fur it was it was actually lucrative then
Speaker 1: UM and then since the fur prices have gone down,
Speaker 1: I've kind of backed off a little and switched gears
Speaker 1: into a UM guiding down Hawaiian doing some mother stuff
Speaker 1: with ten dollar muskrats. This trap will pay for itself
Speaker 1: in about four to five days, you know, on a
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty five dollars, and then after that it's
Speaker 1: all all profit. Do you think you're in? That movie
Speaker 1: The Mountain Men with Charlton Heston is my favorite movie
Speaker 1: all time. Great, it's not nearly as good as Jeremiah Johnson,
Speaker 1: it's better. It's actually got a lot of real problems.
Speaker 1: Listen that movie. What in the world, Like they didn't
Speaker 1: bring in a trapper to give him any insight? Like
Speaker 1: what those guys are doing when they're supposed trap and
Speaker 1: beaver makes zero sense? Absolutely correct. He's standing out in
Speaker 1: the middle of a pond up to his chest and
Speaker 1: like pulls up an empty trap and it's it's like
Speaker 1: they had no idea, like how and then the beaver
Speaker 1: they have looks like a stuffed animal. Oh yeah, horrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a romanticism of it though it's really it's a
Speaker 1: real slap. I guess like they had zero They had
Speaker 1: no idea what they were showing. They could have done
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot better and demonstrated something there.
Speaker 1: Parts of it they were good, but it's bad. I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you why the Indians are all idiots? Um
Speaker 1: like the Traps. It's just I used to love that
Speaker 1: movie and I was a kid, but I can't watch
Speaker 1: it now. Well, here's why I love that movie. When
Speaker 1: I was growing up, my dad had the winners off
Speaker 1: and we had a cabin in the Selkirk Mountains that
Speaker 1: would go in backcountry skiing, and we had a full
Speaker 1: trap line from where we do unload the snowball bills
Speaker 1: all the way up to the cabin and all around
Speaker 1: the cabin, and it ran off of twelve batteries that
Speaker 1: we had an alternator from a truck that powered the
Speaker 1: thing and charged the batteries, and then we had a
Speaker 1: haunted generator, and we had a TV with a VCR.
Speaker 1: And the only movie we had the cabin was The
Speaker 1: Mountain Man. And so I couldn't even estimate the number
Speaker 1: of times I've seen it. I could. I probably know
Speaker 1: every word in it, but it was a major part
Speaker 1: of my life growing up. I'd be trapping on the
Speaker 1: way up to the cabin. The only movie I had
Speaker 1: to watch was The Mountain Men up there. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, from when I was when we built the cabin,
Speaker 1: I must have been seven or eight years I suppose
Speaker 1: something like eight years old, maybe ish. You know, I
Speaker 1: had my own trap line all the way to the
Speaker 1: cabin to wash the mountain Men in the middle of
Speaker 1: nowhere in northeastern Washington. I washed again a week or
Speaker 1: two ago. Oh yeah, that and Jeremiah Johnson. I've seen
Speaker 1: far more in another movie. But Jeremiah Johnson gets better
Speaker 1: and better, and I think Mountain, in my mind gets
Speaker 1: worse worse. And I'm offended by the lack of Uh.
Speaker 1: I'm offended by the lack of detail. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: the accuracy is definitely not there. But I mean, have
Speaker 1: you ever been lost before? I fear some confused for
Speaker 1: a month or two, but never lost. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: enough one liners in it are more classic than I
Speaker 1: think than Jeremiah Johnson that stick with you longer. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get at one of those one liners, Yeah
Speaker 1: fur is going to shine again. So here was the
Speaker 1: end of the rendezvous era eighteen forties. The fur market
Speaker 1: completely collapses. In the fur market collapse and they are despondent.
Speaker 1: It's done forever, okay. And as we know, it has
Speaker 1: been up and down a lot since then. During the
Speaker 1: Roaring twenties, prior to the Great Depression, for prices shot
Speaker 1: up and we're great. Um they got good. Thirty forty
Speaker 1: years later they got really good again. Um, they've had
Speaker 1: various spikes and things like some things that go up
Speaker 1: and down. Right now, it's just like fur prices commercial
Speaker 1: for son again. Yeah, yeah, will fur shine again? Like,
Speaker 1: is is there a way in which all of a
Speaker 1: sudden someday kids will be starting out, going out making
Speaker 1: a bunch of money trapping? I'm not seeing it. You
Speaker 1: don't need it. All happen are trapping? Are the numbers
Speaker 1: of trappers? I heard a great statistic in Michigan. This
Speaker 1: is years ago. At a point in Michigan, I heard
Speaker 1: that the average age of a fur trapper went up
Speaker 1: exactly one year every year pointing to zero. Makes sense
Speaker 1: new folk coming in. But that was during a period
Speaker 1: of very low fur prices. I got into it and
Speaker 1: still dabble with the discipline today because of the influence
Speaker 1: of the fur boom of the late seventies and early eighties.
Speaker 1: That grabbed me that you could make more money. You
Speaker 1: can catch two muskrats and sell them for more money
Speaker 1: than you'd get from mowing a big gass lawn, And
Speaker 1: it created a mystique in my head that still sits
Speaker 1: there today. That's an early memory, yeah, because people were
Speaker 1: people were selling five, six, seven dollar muskrats then, and
Speaker 1: it's still is stuck in my head, like I can't
Speaker 1: shake the idea when I see it. I can't when
Speaker 1: I see a muskrat. It still appears to me as
Speaker 1: a thing of value and ali out of scenario that
Speaker 1: it could be again is China's economy and fashion right,
Speaker 1: things could switch Korea, China um and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: they don't care, They're onto it and they want it. Well,
Speaker 1: there's some studies right now about the fibers from the
Speaker 1: the polyesters and different things are end and up in
Speaker 1: the ocean and that and I can see at some
Speaker 1: point people are going to realize that fur is biodegreable
Speaker 1: and organic and some of the things we're currently using
Speaker 1: are not as desirable. So potentially there could be you know,
Speaker 1: at least some group of people that are going to
Speaker 1: see fur as a better alternative to what we're using now.
Speaker 1: That might be where it's at, like you know, the
Speaker 1: farm to table hunt to table to table. I think
Speaker 1: than we think. I mean, I don't think we're far
Speaker 1: away from that. Well, we're there right now. Because you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saving up muskrats for. It makes yourself
Speaker 1: a fur blanket. I need, no, I need sixty for.
Speaker 1: My wife wants a fur bomber jacket. Perfect. Now her
Speaker 1: friend this wants a fur bomber jacket. And then me
Speaker 1: and Seth are getting two giant blankets. Do you guys
Speaker 1: needed trap some muskrats? Well, we're doing our giant blankets
Speaker 1: out of our beavers, and we're gonna raise a ton
Speaker 1: of money for our land access initiative through a plan
Speaker 1: that the Seth doesn't know about yet. I like it.
Speaker 1: I like the sounds of it, and we made it.
Speaker 1: How many pounds of beaver sauceage you make last year? Forty?
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, I still have a couple best for
Speaker 1: ever made. I know we're gonna make more so, how
Speaker 1: do people go find your special traps? Uh? Non grip
Speaker 1: traps dot com? What's it called non grip traps? So
Speaker 1: you just sell them directly yourself? Two year? About that?
Speaker 1: Not quite that many? But and how do people find
Speaker 1: your fur products? You make beaver wallets, what to tell
Speaker 1: people for for Alaska dot com? And you make all
Speaker 1: manner of where you make all kinds of things. I
Speaker 1: make coasters out of the beaver ales, and that was
Speaker 1: all kinds of things that pretty much use the entire beaver.
Speaker 1: I sell the beaver teeth, sell the meat. Sled doggers. No,
Speaker 1: we don't have any sled doggers where I'm at. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then Rick, how do people find all your how
Speaker 1: did how do they go hunting and fishing with you? Oh? Man,
Speaker 1: that's UM chrome Chasers dot com. Chrome Chasers dot that's
Speaker 1: for Steelhead. And then we actually just started a fall
Speaker 1: foraging week long trip to where we go and basically
Speaker 1: immerse ourselves in southeast Alaska. UM. We do some fishing,
Speaker 1: We do clamming, shrimp, crab, catch some salmon, and then
Speaker 1: we go back and do almost preparation preservation cooking type
Speaker 1: classes and we pick a lot of wild mushrooms. Um.
Speaker 1: And you basically go out and get everything you make
Speaker 1: for a meal that night, and then we go over
Speaker 1: some can canning technique, smoking techniques for fish, all of that.
Speaker 1: So that's something new, we're we're we've just adapted last year.
Speaker 1: That's not a wrangle and it's not a goo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that'll be late summer fall, So the foraging trips
Speaker 1: are late summer fall and then spring steel head fishing
Speaker 1: is in the springtime. And what if they want to
Speaker 1: go catch bone fish in Hawaii. If they want to
Speaker 1: go catch a bone fish in Hawaii, it's Hawaii on
Speaker 1: the Fly. Um. I work for a getting Mike Kennessey, Um.
Speaker 1: Captain Kenny Carrs is the other guy down there. Um,
Speaker 1: he can get you set up if I'm not there. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's a bone fish down there. Um. The ranch
Speaker 1: I work for is a private ranch which is a
Speaker 1: whole private deal on Molakai. Um. So unfortunately you can't
Speaker 1: go do that. That's an invite only. But the Oahu
Speaker 1: bone fish program is Hawaii on the Fly. And then
Speaker 1: Rick Mattney Outdoors is uh is my outfitting business here
Speaker 1: and I've been doing it long enough now to where
Speaker 1: my clientele list um is the same guys every year.
Speaker 1: And I don't even have a website even Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to know one of my clients before you get
Speaker 1: in kind of deal from yeah and for better for worse.
Speaker 1: That's the position I am. I haven't put any energy
Speaker 1: into even a website or advertising. Um. I I feel
Speaker 1: like it's almost a disservice to my current clients to
Speaker 1: do that. UM. I don't want to grow and be
Speaker 1: huge in Montana and have do a ton of trips.
Speaker 1: I don't think the resource in Montana and the fishing
Speaker 1: outfitting business is sustainable at the growth rate that it
Speaker 1: is now. So I'm not going to try to grow
Speaker 1: my business to become part of you don't see you
Speaker 1: don't want to add. I don't want to add to
Speaker 1: the insanity. Yeah, I see it being a problem. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just personally limit the number of days I do.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take the guys that I like, UM and
Speaker 1: just limit my impact about loving It's death. Man Hooly
Speaker 1: smokes that that's bad. Some of the some of the
Speaker 1: summertime fly fishing rivers here, it's just on believable. It's changed,
Speaker 1: it's different. You know, but the fish it's like the
Speaker 1: Maze's Day parade. Oh yeah, but the fish are fine,
Speaker 1: you know, the biologists the fish aren't even native most part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are. Yeah. And and so are
Speaker 1: we hurting the resource by doing it? Probably not. Are
Speaker 1: we hurting the quality of the experience probably Yes. That'll
Speaker 1: catch up to itself, for it will and people will
Speaker 1: start to look for other things. So um but yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyways, I don't have a website for my Montana
Speaker 1: alf any business. Um Rick Mattney Outdoors is what I
Speaker 1: call my business. Um So yeah. Other than that, you know,
Speaker 1: I kind of run around. I do the cooking stuff
Speaker 1: for you guys obviously here and there. Um And wild
Speaker 1: game chef dot Com is my wild cooking business, and
Speaker 1: I'm starting to do in home wild game cooking classes
Speaker 1: as well as some cooking classes out at Ross Creek Cabins,
Speaker 1: which is locally here in town. And so I'm going
Speaker 1: to start working on some stuff there too as well. Man.
Speaker 1: Any uh, you have a fair bit of time and
Speaker 1: website management. Yeah, I don't have any time into it.
Speaker 1: I don't know what even what a web website is.
Speaker 1: I'm I got guys that helped me out. You know,
Speaker 1: I help people. You know, I'm a big fan of
Speaker 1: the barter system. You know, it's it costs a lot
Speaker 1: of money to hire someone to do a website. But
Speaker 1: you know, some guys like to want to have a
Speaker 1: hunting experience in Montana, and it's like, okay, well you
Speaker 1: come out to Montana, you and I will go tromp
Speaker 1: around the woods and you help me with a website.
Speaker 1: There's there's a lot of trading to be done in
Speaker 1: the outdoor world. For sure. It doesn't include monetary stuff,
Speaker 1: and especially since you know the way the government and
Speaker 1: taxes and everything else are going these days, I like
Speaker 1: to keep as much of that out of their uh,
Speaker 1: their site as possible, reduced the amount of cash flowing around.
Speaker 1: Big fan of the barter system. Alright, guys, well thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on. Um. There's a couple of things I like.
Speaker 1: Is that method of not playing by the rules. I
Speaker 1: don't mean with hunting fishing rules, but I mean like
Speaker 1: assembling lives out of just the stuff that interests you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and not being like beholden to the man, but it's
Speaker 1: going out and like crafting a way to live where
Speaker 1: you're like like working with what's there and like building
Speaker 1: an outdoor life. Yeah, sometimes you have to figure out
Speaker 1: how to make money on your way to making money. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you got to go over here
Speaker 1: to do something, it's not a lot of work to
Speaker 1: stop and check a trap. If you're doing that same
Speaker 1: path every day, there's an extra twenty buck. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you catch a beaver nextra hundred dollars, you catch
Speaker 1: a guy out on the way. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, man,
Speaker 1: like assembling, assembling livelihoods at all these outdoor interests and
Speaker 1: being a living life where you're out and doing your
Speaker 1: own thing and working for yourself. It's cool. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much for coming on. Thank you, thank you,