Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukleman. This is a production of
Speaker 1: the Bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render, where
Speaker 1: we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes
Speaker 1: of the actual bear Grease podcast. Presented by f h
Speaker 1: F Gear, American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear
Speaker 1: that's designed to be as rugged as the place. As
Speaker 1: we explore. We got an incredible podcast lined up very
Speaker 1: We're gonna have a very interesting conversation. We're joined today
Speaker 1: by Travis Thompson from Florida and we are going to
Speaker 1: talk about Florida bears, I mean, one of our favor
Speaker 1: no willy nilly and around here like how was your week?
Speaker 1: What have you been doing, Josh, You've been fly fishing.
Speaker 1: Nobody cares about your fly fishing. We are we are
Speaker 1: getting into.
Speaker 2: There are a loyal few that email me and say
Speaker 2: Clay needs to lay off the fly fishing comments and that.
Speaker 3: That could be me.
Speaker 1: I could I have alienated half of our listenership by
Speaker 1: my by my my Adamacy talking about fly.
Speaker 2: And support fly fishing on the.
Speaker 1: Well baron newcom told me we should have Dwayne Hayda
Speaker 1: on this podcast. Wayne had would be an excellent well,
Speaker 1: I would like to extend the formal invitation to Dwayne
Speaker 1: Hayda on the podcast.
Speaker 3: If we can talk about fly Have you noticed there's
Speaker 3: a ven diagram that is a complete overlap of fly
Speaker 3: fishermen and then it just barely shifts in the turkey hunters.
Speaker 3: Is that they're almost I yeah, they're the same people
Speaker 3: that I'm telling you in Florida. They're the same people.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're consumed with those two practices, and those two
Speaker 3: practices only.
Speaker 1: That is very interesting. I can't I can't, I don't.
Speaker 1: I can't describe it, but I understand it.
Speaker 3: It's like CrossFit, like you go somewhere and that's all
Speaker 3: they could talk about is fly fishing or turkey hunt
Speaker 3: depending on the time of year. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Interesting, So Josh saved the fly fishing small talk. My
Speaker 1: moment is here, man. There was just just to give
Speaker 1: a small introduction of what we're going to spend the
Speaker 1: next hour and a half talking about. Is that last
Speaker 1: week in Florida, the Game Commission approved a Florida bear hunt,
Speaker 1: which we're going to get into all the history, but
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about. This is major, this is significant,
Speaker 1: and Travis was heavily involved in everything that went on
Speaker 1: around that. Now, Travis, tell me who you work for,
Speaker 1: what you do, kind of your history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I got kind of a three throng three prong.
Speaker 3: Who I work for? I run ironically for talking about bears.
Speaker 3: I run the largest waterfowl hunting operation in the state
Speaker 3: of Florida. Oh so I'm a big duck hunter. So
Speaker 3: you're an outfitter. Yeah, well, yeah, we'll call it that
Speaker 3: in Florida. I don't have a lodge or anything like that,
Speaker 3: but most of what we do is by the day stuff.
Speaker 3: And I used to be a fishing guide before I
Speaker 3: got into hunting. More so, I do ducks, alligators, snipe,
Speaker 3: and some hogs. I don't love hog hunting, but that's
Speaker 3: a different story anyway. And then I grew up. I'm
Speaker 3: fifth generation Florida and grew up there hunting fishing my
Speaker 3: whole life. My dad worked for a department environmental protection,
Speaker 3: so I kind of grew up with a dad that
Speaker 3: was carrying a gun around and was a tree hugger,
Speaker 3: so like, very heavy in the conservation space. I have
Speaker 3: a nonprofit in Florida. It's called All Florida where we
Speaker 3: work on issues like this. Anything Nick touches conservation, so
Speaker 3: ag ranching, timber, prescribe fire stuff, water quality, and consumpt
Speaker 3: of use. You know, I heard Ranella say years ago
Speaker 3: on The Stars in the Sky that a conservation is
Speaker 3: as an environmentalist with a gun. Yeah, I'm trying to
Speaker 3: reclaim that in Florida as a conservationists environmentalist with a gun.
Speaker 3: I like that. And then the other thing I do
Speaker 3: kind of my day jobs. I work for a group
Speaker 3: called the International Order Theodore Roosevelt, and we do constitutional
Speaker 3: rights to fish and hunt in states. So I got
Speaker 3: hooked up with those guys a couple of years back,
Speaker 3: and in the state of Florida, we did a constitutional
Speaker 3: right to fish in hunt, which like the bear hunt.
Speaker 3: Everybody said, well, you're never going to get a bear
Speaker 3: hunt again. Everybody said you're never going to get that passed.
Speaker 3: We passed it with sixty seven percent, with a huge
Speaker 3: grassroots movement in the state, and so that was a
Speaker 3: big deal. But that's that's who I am. That's kind
Speaker 3: of how I entered the conversation, is like, I'm passionate
Speaker 3: about keeping Florida wild. Yeah, and I believe hunting fishing
Speaker 3: are two of the most important tools on that landscape
Speaker 3: to do it.
Speaker 1: So Florida, let's start off by describing Florida. I've not
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time there, but but I'm aware
Speaker 1: of kind of culturally, what's what's going on in that
Speaker 1: Florida is one of the fastest growing states in the country.
Speaker 3: Yep, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know the exact stats, but but I've heard
Speaker 1: it said that, you know, there's there's a band around
Speaker 1: the coast of Florida of development, of massive development, massive cities,
Speaker 1: massive development. But the interior of Florida, essentially, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm putting stop me and you take over this, But
Speaker 1: I mean, like the interior of Florida is like the
Speaker 1: rural rural America.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the joke used to be the further south
Speaker 3: you go in Florida, the further north you get. That
Speaker 3: used to be kind of the joke because it was
Speaker 3: so developed, like in Miami or Fort Myers or these places.
Speaker 3: But in reality, Florida is deep south. Like I live
Speaker 3: in Polk County, which is the dead center of the state.
Speaker 3: It's I mean, it's a different terrain, but it's like
Speaker 3: driving out here, right, there's a lot of cattle a
Speaker 3: lot of Florida was the first state with cattle, right,
Speaker 3: so cattle ranching in the United States, originating cattle, and
Speaker 3: I think it's in the top ten now still.
Speaker 1: For huge cattle production.
Speaker 3: Cowboys, real cowboys. We call them cow hunters because Florida
Speaker 3: didn't have fences until the fifties. So cattle you branded
Speaker 3: them and just let them go and then you would
Speaker 3: go round them up and take them sell them. So
Speaker 3: we didn't have fences that so they called them cow hunters.
Speaker 3: You went into this really rough stuff and rooted out
Speaker 3: your cows. Florida's the only state you know, there's a
Speaker 3: conservation easement program called in rcs they have Eastman's Florida
Speaker 3: is the only state where you're allowed grazing on the
Speaker 3: easements because it's such an important tool for keeping our
Speaker 3: state wild. And about Man is probably ten years ago.
Speaker 3: A friend of mine, a gentleman named Carlton Ward. He's
Speaker 3: a National Geographic guy, real big in panther stuff. He
Speaker 3: did Path of the Panther. It's on National Geographic. I
Speaker 3: don't know if you'll ever seen that, but and Carlton
Speaker 3: is a hunter, was a hunter, but he's very much
Speaker 3: into environmental stuff. He kind of helped originate or codify
Speaker 3: this idea of a Florida Wildlife Corridor, which was the
Speaker 3: idea that if you took a panther and you stuck
Speaker 3: him in Flamingo at the south end of the state,
Speaker 3: he could walk to the Okefinoki Swamp in Georgia and
Speaker 3: never cross the road, you know, have prey along the way,
Speaker 3: and create this green infrastructure through our state. Florida's got
Speaker 3: the most public lands, I think east of the Mississippi River.
Speaker 3: We have seven million acres six point eight million acres
Speaker 3: of public lands. So we've got a lot of public
Speaker 3: land out there and a lot of that's available to hunt.
Speaker 3: So Carlton and a team and there's an organization called
Speaker 3: the Florida Wildlife Corridor. They went and passed a legislation
Speaker 3: to codify the Florida Wildlife Corridor and create this green infrastructure.
Speaker 3: And the animal they used was not the panther. The
Speaker 3: animal they used was a black bear. They wanted a
Speaker 3: black bear and to show that this black bear could
Speaker 3: go from Big Cypress National Preserve and wander two Okala
Speaker 3: National Forest or Appalachicola National Forest or Osciola National Forest
Speaker 3: and they use that and they kind of created that
Speaker 3: animal as at avatar. And there's days where I'm like, man,
Speaker 3: that's a game species, so we want to make sure
Speaker 3: we talk about it as a game species. But they
Speaker 3: did a really good job of kind of go into ranchers,
Speaker 3: go into private landowners, and then inter working those properties
Speaker 3: with public lands so that we had these corridors for
Speaker 3: animals to traverse. And it's not just bears, it's deer
Speaker 3: and turkeys and quail and go for towardous and everything else.
Speaker 3: And so the black bear has kind of become this
Speaker 3: avatar for protecting what's wild in in Florida, in the
Speaker 3: heartland of Florida, what we would call the heartland of Florida.
Speaker 3: And you talk about the coast being all developed out,
Speaker 3: and we want to grow, like there's there's places that
Speaker 3: need economic development in the state, good development, and there's
Speaker 3: good development and bad development. Right, there's some places that
Speaker 3: need some of that, but we want to grow in
Speaker 3: a way that allows species to thrive and work. A
Speaker 3: friend of mine, he's a new commissioner, but he, Josh
Speaker 3: Kellum said last week, we want to we want to
Speaker 3: make sure conservation and development are able to work together
Speaker 3: so that we have these wild places and wild things
Speaker 3: that are able to exist a long time. So that
Speaker 3: was a roundabout way of answering your question. But I
Speaker 3: think yes, Florida is still real wild. Yes, we got
Speaker 3: the oat trees with the moss growing on them. And
Speaker 3: for us, it's it's cabbage palms. I don't know if
Speaker 3: y'all have seen cabbage palms, but cabbage palms. They're critically
Speaker 3: important to black bears as a forest source.
Speaker 1: But they're eating the leaves of them, the berries they
Speaker 1: get berries and cabbage palms, they love them.
Speaker 3: And uh, we just got force of cabbage palms. You know,
Speaker 3: have thickets of cabbage palms, and it's just a unique
Speaker 3: landscape even to just see like silhouetted it's very different
Speaker 3: than an oak hamick or a pine thicket or something
Speaker 3: that you'd see someplace else. You see these cabbage palms
Speaker 3: with their like pointy leaves and everything. It's it's a
Speaker 3: really unique landscape. It's it's special, man, it's special.
Speaker 1: So this this corridor is it down to the granular
Speaker 1: understanding where they're actually mapping like they could show on
Speaker 1: a map. Oh, like like this property connects to this property,
Speaker 1: which connects to this So it's not just kind of
Speaker 1: like an arbitrary like there's like a like a bike
Speaker 1: not a bike trail, but it's exactly like a map.
Speaker 3: The idea, and so University Florida doctor Tom Hogger at
Speaker 3: University of Florida got involved in it, and the Corridor
Speaker 3: Foundation itself. They've sat down and mapped it all out.
Speaker 3: And so if you were to protect it all it
Speaker 3: would be eighteen million acres protected lands. That's not all
Speaker 3: public lands. That's private conservation easement sold or land put
Speaker 3: into less than fee acquisition or whatever. But today we
Speaker 3: have about ten million protected in it and the rest
Speaker 3: isn't developed yet. So we're trying to figure out ways
Speaker 3: that we can protect it. And Travis a guy that contends.
Speaker 3: You know, I talk about Aldo Leopold's plow cow ax
Speaker 3: match gun. Those are the five tools that are going
Speaker 3: to save wildlife. We don't talk about that gun nearly enough.
Speaker 3: And when we talk about a species like black bear
Speaker 3: or you know, in North Florida, we got timber, heavy timber.
Speaker 3: Those guys run qual hunting operations or turkey hunting operations,
Speaker 3: and that's another revenue stream that's helping off set the
Speaker 3: pressure because the developer is going to come in there
Speaker 3: and offer you x thousand dollars a year to turn
Speaker 3: this into a subdivision or a solar farm or whatever.
Speaker 3: If you can stack some revenue streams on top of
Speaker 3: an e has been and produced something like solar or
Speaker 3: cattle or cross man, we can keep Florida wild for
Speaker 3: a long time.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say something that you said some good but but I've
Speaker 1: I've kind of said the same thing, but I don't
Speaker 1: hear it enough. And that is and it's essentially encapsulating
Speaker 1: what you just said is that the cultural and economical
Speaker 1: value of hunting in North America will be the thing
Speaker 1: that a massive factor on saving wild places. So and
Speaker 1: in in today's world where where expansion of civilization, roads, concrete,
Speaker 1: urban sprawl, neighborhoods put you know, going out and being built,
Speaker 1: people wanting to have five acres in a house like
Speaker 1: all that sprawl a thing. And and and you know
Speaker 1: how much of the percentage of America's private land, like uh,
Speaker 1: like ninety five percent or something big at least ninety
Speaker 1: percent of America is private land. So if you think
Speaker 1: about wildlife conservation on this macro scale, it's actually the
Speaker 1: private land that's going to be the main thing. Like
Speaker 1: we think about public land and habitat conservation, but private
Speaker 1: land ninety percent of the country. We we when people
Speaker 1: are incentivized to keep their places unfragmented undeveloped because of
Speaker 1: the hunting value of that land, we win. In fifty
Speaker 1: years from now, should the earth persist, they'll be like,
Speaker 1: thank God that there was cultural value of hunting that
Speaker 1: kept some places wild. And I mean it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's an incredible point that I don't hear enough
Speaker 1: people say, and it resonates with people when when you
Speaker 1: say it, it's like, you know what, hunting is incentivizing
Speaker 1: the keeping places wild because just like if I had
Speaker 1: forty acres right here at Arkansas and right up against town,
Speaker 1: and I could sell it to a developer, or I
Speaker 1: could keep it because my kids valued hunting, my family
Speaker 1: valued hunting, or sell it to a hunter who's going
Speaker 1: to put little food plots on it and cameras all
Speaker 1: over it. And I mean, like that is a win,
Speaker 1: massive win for there to be a blank spot on
Speaker 1: a map like Aldo Leopold would say.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny. So I mentioned a minute ago
Speaker 3: I worked on the right deficient hunt. And what hooked
Speaker 3: me on that was not that I wanted to protect
Speaker 3: the right efficient hunt, although I do, like I'm a
Speaker 3: hunter angler, like, of course I want to protect the
Speaker 3: right defiicient hunt. But in that we looked at language
Speaker 3: in other states, and there's these magic words you use anyway.
Speaker 3: We looked at language in the state of North Carolina,
Speaker 3: and the Supreme Court in North Carolina determined that those
Speaker 3: rights can't exist in the abstract, which means you have
Speaker 3: to be able to exercise them, which means in a
Speaker 3: state that's feeling development pressure like Florida, putting that in place.
Speaker 3: And I think this is important to put in place
Speaker 3: everywhere before it becomes because I when I talk to
Speaker 3: guys in Montana, they're like, man, you never seen development
Speaker 3: like this. I'm like, dude, come to Floria to let
Speaker 3: me show how the big boys play. But the yeah,
Speaker 3: that right can't exist in the abstract, which means the
Speaker 3: state can't say you got the right to hunt, but
Speaker 3: we're going to eradicate white tailed deer. You have to
Speaker 3: be able to exercise the right, and I think that's
Speaker 3: an important thing. So it folds into the same thing
Speaker 3: your tastes. I think hunting is. I like to say
Speaker 3: hunting is the tool. Maybe not everywhere I know there's
Speaker 3: pockets where it may be timber, or it may be ranching,
Speaker 3: or it may be agriculture. But those tools are going
Speaker 3: to stave off development in this country. Those are the
Speaker 3: tools that are going to We didn't invent that Audo
Speaker 3: did one hundred years ago, and it's gone unchanged in
Speaker 3: that time period. So I'm really passionate about somebody's got
Speaker 3: to speak up and make sure this stuff's protected, because
Speaker 3: otherwise they think nothing about shaving off places where you
Speaker 3: had a hunting lease, or's places where you publicly.
Speaker 1: In this country my age, I'm forty five, that hasn't
Speaker 1: lost a property to development.
Speaker 3: It's exactly right.
Speaker 1: There's not a single one of them that's spent, you know,
Speaker 1: a good chunk of their life being a hunter that
Speaker 1: hasn't lost a property literally to development. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of it probably right now that is literally a
Speaker 1: subdivision that I used to hunt.
Speaker 3: And so instead of demonizing the developers, what we try
Speaker 3: to do is go sit down with them and figure out, like,
Speaker 3: how can we develop better, how can we do redevelopment,
Speaker 3: how can we grow up not out, how can we
Speaker 3: protect wild lands or corridors through developments so that animals.
Speaker 3: Then you got home owners that are able to see wildlife,
Speaker 3: they're able to connect it and care about it, and
Speaker 3: then you're able to continue to for me, touch it
Speaker 3: in a way like I want to touch it and
Speaker 3: need it, but there's people that just want to photograph
Speaker 3: it or whatever.
Speaker 1: So one thing about the philosophy that we're just talking
Speaker 1: about right here that I think we've got to bring
Speaker 1: up just because it's interesting, is that inside the hunting circle,
Speaker 1: people when they hear about cultural value and economic value
Speaker 1: of hunting, that does mean that my forty acres that
Speaker 1: I sell is going to have a higher value than
Speaker 1: it did before because of its that is hunting, And
Speaker 1: somebody's going to buy that, and somebody that can't afford
Speaker 1: to buy that is going to say, well, the rich
Speaker 1: guy's got it and they are are are pricing me
Speaker 1: out of hunting. I mean, it's kind of a because
Speaker 1: that's a narrative you hear inside the hunting circles. Oh,
Speaker 1: we're all being priced out of hunting because it's now
Speaker 1: becoming a rich man's sport. It's becoming like Europe. I
Speaker 1: think that those two worlds kind of you can't have
Speaker 1: one without the other. I mean, when I go down
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River, me and Brent Reeves took a boat
Speaker 1: ten or fifty miles down the Misissippi River a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. Ninety nine percent of that land is
Speaker 1: owned and in hunting leases or specific properties made for hunting.
Speaker 1: They've kept the riperian zone of that river in pretty
Speaker 1: incredible shape. Really, that land is so valuable. There's no
Speaker 1: way that a common man is going to own that land.
Speaker 1: Incredibly valuable pretty much one hundred percent because of hunting.
Speaker 1: And there's people that would say that was bad. I
Speaker 1: would say, thank god, at least it's protected well. And
Speaker 1: maybe twice in my lifetime I'll get to go over
Speaker 1: there and hunt on the Mississippi River and it's still there.
Speaker 1: Do you understand what I'm saying?
Speaker 3: And I think there's another point off of that. And
Speaker 3: we hadn't even got a bears yet, but I think
Speaker 3: there's another point off that, and that is, you know,
Speaker 3: you can talk to the turkey doctors, Chamberlain or lastly
Speaker 3: or call your any of those guys. They'll tell you
Speaker 3: ninety five percent of turkeys are produced on private land.
Speaker 3: But then they spread out. So it's like you and
Speaker 3: I were talking off air where your bears came, they
Speaker 3: were re established narkosas and then they spread it Outright,
Speaker 3: I run a waterfowl hunting operational private land. We do
Speaker 3: a lot of work to that land. There's ducks. Don't
Speaker 3: all stay on that private land. They end up on
Speaker 3: the Cokeachobee, they end up on the coast, on public
Speaker 3: land where a lot of people. And so by increasing
Speaker 3: the habitat and ensuring we want the maximum return on
Speaker 3: this land from a from a wildlife value standpoint, whether
Speaker 3: it's white tailed deer, turkeys or ducks or whatever, squirrels, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's going to spill out from there and hopefully spill
Speaker 3: out into areas where the average guy is going to
Speaker 3: be able to do. So. I'm always a big proponent
Speaker 3: of I've heard this around ducks unlimited before. Right, Oh,
Speaker 3: they're just locking up land and doing it for the Yeah,
Speaker 3: but at the end of the day, they're producing more
Speaker 3: ducks and more habitat for wildlife, which is going to
Speaker 3: benefit everybody in the grand scheme. This is not it's
Speaker 3: not just this local population. It's a it's a globe
Speaker 3: or an international or a flyway population or whatever the
Speaker 3: larger population's on is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all this is so so interesting. So
Speaker 1: let's let's go ahead and get into give me the
Speaker 1: biography of Florida bear hunting, if it just to the
Speaker 1: best of your knowledge. I mean, historically they were hunting bears.
Speaker 1: They're like crazy, yep. And then when did it end?
Speaker 3: It did when I was in high school. So ninety
Speaker 3: four is when they shut the hunt down completely, shut
Speaker 3: it completely, shut it down. And if you went back historically,
Speaker 3: and I'd encourage you, if you really wanted a deep dive,
Speaker 3: FWC has on their website you could do google FWC
Speaker 3: Bear Report. There's a two hundred page document that is
Speaker 3: really good. I mean, it's if you want a history
Speaker 3: of bears in Florida. I mean it goes into the
Speaker 3: way they used to do agriculture because Florida's big in turpentine, okay,
Speaker 3: and so they would burn forest, but they would burn
Speaker 3: them too aggressively sometimes, and it basically wiped out the understory,
Speaker 3: which hurt bears on forge. Now we understand burning science
Speaker 3: a lot better, and that's an important tool. So the
Speaker 3: bear population dropped into the fifties, but it seemed like
Speaker 3: it kind of stabilized from the fifties to like the
Speaker 3: eighties or so, and then it dropped again. And so
Speaker 3: in the early nineteen hundreds they guessed, I'm sorry, the
Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties, their speculation population was as low as
Speaker 3: five hundred bear. Okay, wow. So now in white history
Speaker 3: and settled history, prior to that, they guesstimated there were
Speaker 3: eleven thousand bears in the state of Florida, in the
Speaker 3: state of floor like pre European contre pre Hernando de
Speaker 3: Soto or whoever it was that came there first. So
Speaker 3: it was about eleven thousand bears in the state of Florida.
Speaker 1: So the sad vaka who it was, I got his
Speaker 1: book up there. First guy, first European guy had coming
Speaker 1: to Florida. Incredible book two years before Desta. A few
Speaker 1: years yeah, fews before Desota.
Speaker 3: So we closed it down. It stayed untouched until twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen when a hunt was brought back. There were a
Speaker 3: couple of rules made to bear existence, like you could
Speaker 3: shoot a bear to protect livestock. I think was a
Speaker 3: rule that was made arow twenty ten or eleven, but
Speaker 3: largely bears went untouched for whatever. That is twenty one years.
Speaker 1: Only twenty one years, right, and what do we think?
Speaker 1: The population had grown to about twenty fifteen, So.
Speaker 3: The state had science twenty fifteen, they believe the population
Speaker 3: was over four thousand.
Speaker 1: So in in bear management, they typically say that that
Speaker 1: an one hundred population will increase by ten percent per year.
Speaker 1: And so I've done the math and extrapolated out like
Speaker 1: if you have four hundred bears, and that this includes
Speaker 1: natural mortality and recruitment ten percent per year. So if
Speaker 1: you have four hundred bears year one, year two, help
Speaker 1: me with my math, You're gonna have four hundred and forty.
Speaker 1: The next year you're gonna have You're gonna have four
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty four, four hundred and eighty four, the
Speaker 1: next year you're gonna have.
Speaker 3: Oh, this guy's a math wizard. Impressive.
Speaker 1: By the time you get out into decades, like decades,
Speaker 1: you're talking about exponential growth, exponential growth, and typically populations
Speaker 1: that are recovering where a bear has like unlimited or
Speaker 1: the habitat is not limiting, like there's not stressed on
Speaker 1: the habitat because of other bears, where they'll increase by
Speaker 1: as much as eighteen percent per year. And so basically
Speaker 1: a nine hundred population in twenty years can triple in size.
Speaker 3: That's that's pretty much. I mean, So we went from
Speaker 3: a guestimate of five hundred to two thousand bears to
Speaker 3: four thousand, right, So yeah.
Speaker 1: It went up tenfold. Yeah, I mean about tenfold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: five hundred to four thousand, is that right? Yeah, about
Speaker 1: ten eight eight eightfold eightfold eightfold.
Speaker 3: So you got to this bear. We did a bear
Speaker 3: hunt in twenty fifteen. Depending on what side of the
Speaker 3: story you are about a bear hunt, it was either
Speaker 3: an unmitigated disaster or it was a wild success. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you know the story. But the background on
Speaker 3: that was they issued a number of tags based off
Speaker 3: success what they believed a successful harvest would be. So
Speaker 3: I don't remember the right number tags, but they had
Speaker 3: a quota of three hundred and twenty bears I think
Speaker 3: that they wanted to take. So they issued let's say
Speaker 3: a thousand tags forty eight hours in they'd killed three
Speaker 3: hundred five bears. Wow. So I believe we could all
Speaker 3: sit here and say, well, that shows how many bears
Speaker 3: there were, yes, how quickly they were harvested, like a
Speaker 3: hunt needed to occur. There was so much anti hunting
Speaker 3: pressure Florida. Hunters in Florida, and conservation in Florida does
Speaker 3: not look like it does in other places. And I
Speaker 3: know it's different in every place from the state, and
Speaker 3: everybody'd say that, but man, I'm telling you all, it's
Speaker 3: the wild West. So there was so much public pressure,
Speaker 3: you know, the polling around acceptance of hunting. And you
Speaker 3: look at a bear versus a a white tail deer,
Speaker 3: like a bear's way lower on the list than a
Speaker 3: white tail deer. Yes, it seemed like every one of
Speaker 3: those people had a vocal voice that they were going
Speaker 3: to share in that pole. So they came, and the
Speaker 3: hunt was intended to come back to the next year,
Speaker 3: and it did not.
Speaker 1: So let's stop right there a little bit, because that
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen hunt was historic in nature. It was just
Speaker 1: it was well, it was different in that there was
Speaker 1: a lot of publicity about it before it happened, and
Speaker 1: a lot of us were talking about it before, and
Speaker 1: it was one of these deals where a new bear
Speaker 1: hunt was coming on the scene in this population that
Speaker 1: was clearly doing really well, and just a couple of
Speaker 1: little nerd out facts. I mean, if they were wanting
Speaker 1: to kill three hundred and twenty bears and they felt
Speaker 1: like the population was four thousand, that's less than ten percent.
Speaker 1: So typically in bear management, if you want to stabilize
Speaker 1: the population, which there's a many many, many many places
Speaker 1: would love to just stabilize.
Speaker 3: Their bear population.
Speaker 1: Yeah, zero growth, Just let's just keep it where it's at,
Speaker 1: because human conflict is tall tolerable, habitat for bears is tolerable.
Speaker 1: The bears are healthy, and that's what people and it's
Speaker 1: it's so, it's so it's such a human problem. But
Speaker 1: a population of bears that is not j curving in
Speaker 1: population that's stable is really healthy. I mean, because if
Speaker 1: I'm a mama black bear and I go any direction
Speaker 1: a half mile and I'm in some other bears region
Speaker 1: and there's conflict and there's there's big politian it's like
Speaker 1: it's better when there's a there's just the right amount
Speaker 1: point being Florida was that three to twenty was probably
Speaker 1: a conservative management number because it was less than ten
Speaker 1: percent that they were trying to take out, which probably
Speaker 1: they were like, we really ought to kill five hundred bears,
Speaker 1: but let's kill three twenty. So I mean it was
Speaker 1: a probably a wise move by them to just enter
Speaker 1: in and then the quota phils in two days and
Speaker 1: the optics.
Speaker 3: I mean, so we had check stations where he had
Speaker 3: to take the bears to get checked. The anti hunting
Speaker 3: community was out in mass with photographs. Yeah, so there
Speaker 3: were photos of a bear under a hundred pounds that
Speaker 3: was killed. There were photos of lactating females that were killed.
Speaker 3: Like the optics that they then used, and the grassroots
Speaker 3: storm that they created on the backside of that made
Speaker 3: it to where politically no one wanted to touch bears. Yes,
Speaker 3: it became such a third rail to grab. No one
Speaker 3: wanted to touch bears, and and in hallways everybody say, man,
Speaker 3: we need to have another bear hunt for years after that.
Speaker 3: And so it's a funny story. Clay and I we
Speaker 3: reconnected the to day, and our previous correspondence was in
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen in our text messages and he came on
Speaker 3: my podcast. I used to have a podcast in Florida,
Speaker 3: and we talked about the twenty nineteen bear plan on
Speaker 3: that podcast, and we kind of candidly said, I don't
Speaker 3: know if we'll ever see a bear hunt again. We
Speaker 3: don't know if we'll ever hunt.
Speaker 1: That was interesting. He told me that today. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have remembered saying that, but that's that's what That's what
Speaker 1: I said the other day in a little video I did,
Speaker 1: I said I didn't think that it would ever come back,
Speaker 1: but I said that in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it was the public sentiment was so bad
Speaker 3: that I look, man, I mean it really is, truly.
Speaker 3: People love to talk conservation, but when you talk about
Speaker 3: dead animals, Yeah, the charismatic megafauon of thing triggers and
Speaker 3: they do not want to talk about bears yep, and
Speaker 3: it becomes a major problem. And so that was a tactic.
Speaker 3: Now we got to spend the next decade getting through, right,
Speaker 3: Like we got to go from twenty fifteen to twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five, and we didn't know when this would happen,
Speaker 3: but everything from gubernatorial offices to legislators to people that
Speaker 3: would fly out and hunt a bear somewhere else, but
Speaker 3: they wouldn't talk about it in Florida, and I was like,
Speaker 3: we've got to do something different here. And I say, I,
Speaker 3: I want to be clear. The hunting commune d in
Speaker 3: Florida got this done like that was that was this
Speaker 3: was a big push from a lot of different people
Speaker 3: and a lot of different groups. The dog hunting community
Speaker 3: showed up in mass Wow, that is now Florida. I
Speaker 3: grew up doll hunting for deer, right, that was my
Speaker 3: that was my back. I've never I've never heard a
Speaker 3: bear in my life, but dog hunting for deer was like,
Speaker 3: that's how we spent our saturdays at Sundays was deer
Speaker 3: camp and we were listening to the dogs run. There's
Speaker 3: a strong, uh a hog dog community community in Florida.
Speaker 3: So dog hunting in Florida is a part of the cultural,
Speaker 3: like it's part of the culture.
Speaker 1: Of long time history of Florida's hunting with dogs.
Speaker 3: We call people, there's not a connotation to it. We
Speaker 3: call people from Florida crackers. The background on that was
Speaker 3: they would crack whips.
Speaker 1: They were.
Speaker 3: The cow hunters.
Speaker 1: I was actually gonna say that the original crackers came
Speaker 1: from Florida because they cow drives.
Speaker 3: That was the term was a cracker Florida cracker because
Speaker 3: of the whip cracking and the palmettas and you couldn't
Speaker 3: see the cows and that's how you got them out.
Speaker 3: And that's still something that the cattleman like man to
Speaker 3: this day. You go to an event and they they'll
Speaker 3: sell whips, have crack whips like it's part of their
Speaker 3: part of their culture. As Similarly, dog hunting in Florida
Speaker 3: is part of the culture of if you identify as
Speaker 3: a as a Floridian that hunts, like you've got some
Speaker 3: kind of dogs. I don't dog hunt anymore, but I've
Speaker 3: got a soft spot for dog hunting because it belongs here,
Speaker 3: it belongs on this landscape.
Speaker 1: And so man, when you when you when you get
Speaker 1: into places as thick as Florida, like literally vegetatively thick
Speaker 1: as Florida, people that don't have never been around dogs
Speaker 1: and be like, why would you need a dog to
Speaker 1: shoot a deer? Why would you need a dog to
Speaker 1: shoot a bear? They've never been to Florida, they've never
Speaker 1: been to South Arkansas that you know. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a highly functional way to hunt because animals
Speaker 1: live in stuff that you literally can't see for the
Speaker 1: length of your arm in some places.
Speaker 3: Oh am, I right, it's nasty.
Speaker 1: It's so you send some dogs in there and you
Speaker 1: get that game moving, and I mean that's the way
Speaker 1: you hunt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's some stuff you don't want to
Speaker 3: go through. I mean, you, I'm in decent shape. You're
Speaker 3: three hundred yards in your watch is like are you
Speaker 3: working out? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And it's like, man, congratulations, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you just completed your exercise goal for the day and
Speaker 3: you've gone you can still see the truck. It's like,
Speaker 3: what is happening here? Like it's hard hunting. It's hard
Speaker 3: hunting in period. It's just a harsh environment. So we
Speaker 3: come out of twenty fifteen, the bear hunt gets or
Speaker 3: the bear plan gets released to twenty nineteen. That's when
Speaker 3: you and I first talked and constantly. And I'm gonna
Speaker 3: give credit to an old gentleman. He runs an organization
Speaker 3: called United Waterfowlers of Florida. There's this guy named Newton
Speaker 3: Earl Cook, and Newton is I think he's in his eighties.
Speaker 3: But every commission meeting we'd have a thing called items
Speaker 3: Not on the Agenda and our Commission moves around the state,
Speaker 3: so Florida to drive from one end to the others,
Speaker 3: like sixteen hours from like Pensacola to Key West, and
Speaker 3: our Commission meeting moves to make it more convenient for
Speaker 3: so it's not always where everybody has to drive. Right.
Speaker 3: Newton would show up at every single Commission meeting and
Speaker 3: then his items on on the agenda. He'd say he's
Speaker 3: got this old Tennessee voice. He says, it's time for
Speaker 3: us to bring back a bear hunt. And he would
Speaker 3: he would do this to the point where you almost
Speaker 3: rolled drys at some point, but he just stayed on
Speaker 3: it and stayed on and stayed on it. And we'd
Speaker 3: have conversations in the hallway, and there were a lot
Speaker 3: of folks in the Honey community having those conversations. But
Speaker 3: we have a conversations all the way of.
Speaker 1: Like, look, what was the guys the old guy's name Newton,
Speaker 1: Earl Cook. Newton Earl Cook. That's a great name, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Soon we're gonna make a bronze statue in him and
Speaker 1: being erected in Florida.
Speaker 3: When we just gave him an award at the Commission meeting,
Speaker 3: not the most reasonab one before that. But anyway, he'd
Speaker 3: bring it up in the public record over and over
Speaker 3: and over again. And I didn't want to go dial
Speaker 3: on that hill over and over again because you get
Speaker 3: death threats and everything else every time you bring it up.
Speaker 3: So but we'd start having these conversations off to the
Speaker 3: side of like, what's it gonna take to get a
Speaker 3: bear hunt back? What's it gonna take to get the
Speaker 3: bear hunt back? Can you talk in the hunting community,
Speaker 3: especially your guys that have feeders on their property. Man,
Speaker 3: it's a mess out there, Like the way that the
Speaker 3: ingenuity that's going on to protect your deer feeder from
Speaker 3: bears has gotten outlandish to where they're like they're put
Speaker 3: hard tops on their can ams and a ladder on
Speaker 3: top of that so that they can get to the
Speaker 3: winch so they can lower the feeder down to keep
Speaker 3: the bear out of it. And I mean, it's just
Speaker 3: this ongoing engineering battle between black bears and land.
Speaker 1: And corn feeders.
Speaker 3: I mean it's bad. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen it,
Speaker 3: but it's yes, it's.
Speaker 1: They're destructive on corn feeders, and you almost can't beat
Speaker 1: them unless you've got it, you know, on a wire
Speaker 1: and a pulley system.
Speaker 3: But then they had to move the pulleys up because
Speaker 3: that's there's one engineer start he figured out how to
Speaker 3: break the pulley and it was just like you'd walk
Speaker 3: out there and he's like, man, is that you know
Speaker 3: you got tree cover and you'd see these feet It's like,
Speaker 3: is that a radio tower? And then you walk out
Speaker 3: from under the trees and it's a feeder that's twenty
Speaker 3: five feet up in the air because they've they've just
Speaker 3: re engineered at these you.
Speaker 1: Know, I got I gotta interrupt you. This is such
Speaker 1: so interesting in some of the research I'm doing for
Speaker 1: my book that black bears have been academically documented as
Speaker 1: the most curious animal in North America. Really like in
Speaker 1: in in controlled tests where they've been able to test
Speaker 1: animal curiosity, the American black bear is the most curious.
Speaker 1: And they tested weasels and raccoons and we call smart yeah,
Speaker 1: polar bears. I don't know that they tested any ungulates
Speaker 1: or something, because they knew that they're not going to
Speaker 1: be curious like that. But the cats, uh more than bobcats.
Speaker 1: Like in the way they tested them, it was really interesting.
Speaker 1: They were they were confined animals, and they would put
Speaker 1: they would put objects all in the in the space
Speaker 1: and just turn an animal loose and observe them for
Speaker 1: hours and watch and document every single thing that they
Speaker 1: did with the little trinkets that were in the in
Speaker 1: the place, and the black bear like blew them all out.
Speaker 3: Of the water because you just examined everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, black bear was like picking up chains and laying
Speaker 1: on its back and like playing the chains in the air.
Speaker 1: Point being a black bear will figure out how to
Speaker 1: get anything it wants if it's physically possible. Yas Boutell
Speaker 1: has told me, he described a scene of watching a
Speaker 1: bear get a beaver carcass that they had hung fifteen
Speaker 1: feet in the air and like ten or twelve feet
Speaker 1: out from any tree. Like basically, there's this hanging beaver
Speaker 1: carcass that's like, let's say it's twelve feet in the air,
Speaker 1: I mean just out of a black bear can't jump
Speaker 1: like a mountain lion son, and it's ten feet at
Speaker 1: least from any tree. And basically, he said, he watched
Speaker 1: this bear for an hour climb up every tree within reach,
Speaker 1: you know, within side just range of that deal the bear,
Speaker 1: did you know tried to climb out, and finally the
Speaker 1: bear realized that if it grabbed the pulley rope and
Speaker 1: walked back and dropped it, that that it would cause
Speaker 1: that beaver to move. And before long he had pulled
Speaker 1: it so many times and dropped it that the beaver
Speaker 1: carcass went to the ground. Took him an hour, and
Speaker 1: basically no other animal in the world would have got
Speaker 1: that beaver carcass.
Speaker 2: I mean, think about how many times they just tear
Speaker 2: came I mean he can't tear cameras off the trees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, well, and it's it's then the point
Speaker 1: of all that. People might be like, well, yeah, bears
Speaker 1: are notoriously curious, and it just kind of like glaze
Speaker 1: over it. Like they tear up your cameras, they to
Speaker 1: up your four wheeler seats, they get into your feeders.
Speaker 1: That's why bears are successful.
Speaker 2: And they're intelligent. They're not just curious.
Speaker 1: Well curiosity is it correlates with intelligence? I mean, that's
Speaker 1: what we would say. But that's why they're so successful.
Speaker 1: That's why they're thriving in Florida because they can eat anything,
Speaker 1: and they they are they are generalists. They're the world's
Speaker 1: greatest generalist omnivore and they will do anything to get food. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty it's brilliant.
Speaker 3: Really, it's funny because bears, and maybe you may know
Speaker 3: more about this than I do, but bears seem to
Speaker 3: exist in Florida, in the wild bear population and the
Speaker 3: urbanized bear population that very much like are different. I
Speaker 3: think we spent at the time of that bear report
Speaker 3: I've read we'd spent two and a half million dollars
Speaker 3: on bear proofing trash cans and municipalities trying to cop
Speaker 3: out of garbage because they just My photographer lives, my
Speaker 3: videographer photographer that we use a lot. He lives like
Speaker 3: I'll say, six streets from the woods, like cross streets,
Speaker 3: and it's in a neighborhood and bears are in his yard.
Speaker 3: I mean, he can go get a bear photo for
Speaker 3: me anytime he wants with the right, like you can
Speaker 3: distort the background and take a picture of a bear
Speaker 3: because they're always in the front yard eating his mom's plants. Wow,
Speaker 3: and yes, those are bears that go back into the
Speaker 3: Wikaiva forest, but they're not I mean they're they're not
Speaker 3: just coming into the yard on the edge. They're getting
Speaker 3: they're coming six. Yeah, they're actually taking an uber Yeah,
Speaker 3: like they're in the neighborhood and they're not like just
Speaker 3: on it. You know, it's not a common in the
Speaker 3: every lage you're on the edge of. They're swamp behind
Speaker 3: you in a panther walks through your backyard, but you
Speaker 3: don't see one five streets over unless you've got a
Speaker 3: cat that's outside. But the bears are just like they're
Speaker 3: happily existing there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like they have an incredible awareness about them, and
Speaker 1: a lot of wildlife does inside of these urban settings,
Speaker 1: you know, like deer know that they can they're okay
Speaker 1: in your yard. But typically the big predators don't. They
Speaker 1: get shine usually aware of I am perfectly safe right here.
Speaker 1: And they then they turned to anthropogenic foods big term
Speaker 1: from human foods.
Speaker 3: I guess in twenty twenty three is when we started
Speaker 3: having some serious conversations about, Okay, what would a hunt
Speaker 3: look like if it came back, Like what what do
Speaker 3: we need to change from the last time we did
Speaker 3: a hunt to get it right, And that was presented
Speaker 3: in May of this year. So in May that was
Speaker 3: brought back to the Commission and my opinion. They got
Speaker 3: it right. Now, I want to say something. FWC is
Speaker 3: one of the leading agencies Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission,
Speaker 3: one of the leading agencies in the country on social science,
Speaker 3: and we as hunters, we love to say, man, I
Speaker 3: want biological science to drive everything, not social science. But
Speaker 3: the end of the day, that's a factor. Social science
Speaker 3: is playing, man, it's playing, and so to ignore it
Speaker 3: as a tool in the toolbox, I'm telling you this
Speaker 3: is a guy that's going out there and saying, Man,
Speaker 3: I don't want to use social science. Like I've said
Speaker 3: that on the record at podiums and stuff before. I'm like,
Speaker 3: science should drive this, and I'm talking about biology. Social
Speaker 3: science is gonna play. They did an incredible job of
Speaker 3: meeting with stakeholders and figuring out what the concerns were
Speaker 3: with the last hunt and addressing those with this hunt
Speaker 3: and so kind of one of the dominant things they
Speaker 3: heard was selectivity in sex in harvest. I think in
Speaker 3: the last hunt, sixty percent of the bears that were
Speaker 3: taking were soals. Okay, And as I mentioned earlier, that
Speaker 3: was a quota that was issued and then you went
Speaker 3: out if you didn't kill your bear like you checked in, Like,
Speaker 3: if you didn't kill your bear and they called the
Speaker 3: hunt off, you didn't get to fill your task. And
Speaker 3: that's things. Yes, So what they've brought back is a
Speaker 3: hunt that is one hundred and eighty seven hard tacks.
Speaker 3: It's either I think it's a hundred and eighty seven.
Speaker 3: It's either one eighty six or eighty seven.
Speaker 1: Can I stop you because I feel I think we're
Speaker 1: gonna go over it and I'm gonna forget to say it. Sure,
Speaker 1: these quota hunts where the hunt ends at a quota
Speaker 1: caught and you insinuated it, but we didn't say it,
Speaker 1: it causes people to be highly unselective.
Speaker 3: It is selectivity because it is if you kill the
Speaker 3: first bear. Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oklahoma, Oklahoma. Well, I don't know the details on it.
Speaker 1: Oklahoma had a similar thing where they where they had
Speaker 1: a quota and the quota wasn't even being met, but
Speaker 1: the very nature of the quota caused people to be unselective.
Speaker 1: And I'm pretty sure they took the quota off and
Speaker 1: they never went over it and people were a lot
Speaker 1: more selective. Yeah, if you think the hunt's gonna end tomorrow,
Speaker 1: you're gonna shoot the first bearer that you see, and
Speaker 1: oftentimes that's the juvenile or female.
Speaker 3: Which could force and it's on the hunter, right, the
Speaker 3: hunter should be a better hunter. But oftentimes, you know,
Speaker 3: we've all done it with a deer or something. You're like, man,
Speaker 3: that deer was way bigger when I looked through the
Speaker 3: scope than he was when I got up to it. Right.
Speaker 3: The so things they addressed they addressed selectivity with that,
Speaker 3: that's good. They also address selectivity by allowing bait stations
Speaker 3: and and dogs, because you know as well as I
Speaker 3: do that both of those things are going to give
Speaker 3: you time to say, hey, is that a sal? Hey
Speaker 3: does she have cubs with her? How big are the cubs?
Speaker 3: Like you can look and study this situation. Yes, and
Speaker 3: you're gonna have camera set up on your bait station, yes,
Speaker 3: to where you're gonna know the bears that are coming
Speaker 3: in and out and be like, oh, that's a sal
Speaker 3: but I got a bore over here, like that's that's
Speaker 3: what I'm gonna And it allows people, all of us
Speaker 3: as hunters, we're in it for everything, right, the meat,
Speaker 3: the hide, the fat that like we want to but
Speaker 3: the end of the day, we'd like to take the
Speaker 3: biggest thing we can or the best thing we can,
Speaker 3: and in this case, removing that that urgency allows for
Speaker 3: us to have way more selectivity in this hunt. And
Speaker 3: to me, the agency got that exactly right. The anti
Speaker 3: hunters will tell you, and I don't. I live in
Speaker 3: a world where I have to deal with them. I
Speaker 3: will tell you I don't necessarily care what they say.
Speaker 3: I do I pay attention to it. The anti hangers
Speaker 3: will tell you, well, these are barbaric methods. This, that,
Speaker 3: and the other. These methods are because you guys wanted
Speaker 3: better selectivity in the hunt. Yes, it was nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with the first hunt, but we've changed it based off
Speaker 3: your feedback, and these are the methods that we've allowed
Speaker 3: to get into it.
Speaker 1: Right, man, that I can't believe you're saying this with
Speaker 1: such clarity, because I think ten years ago the articulation
Speaker 1: of that idea just wasn't widely known inside of bear hunting.
Speaker 1: These these these methods allow hunters to be selective. And
Speaker 1: you could say that that is just big talk and
Speaker 1: that actually doesn't happen in the field, but it does.
Speaker 1: I mean, hound hunters let way more bears go they
Speaker 1: than they harvest even in play is where they could.
Speaker 1: I mean they're being selective, not everyone. I mean sometimes
Speaker 1: you got a kid with you and it's their first bear,
Speaker 1: and you let them shoot a dry sow sometimes. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying juveniles and souths don't get harvested sometimes,
Speaker 1: but in general, hound hunters are trying to be selective
Speaker 1: for older age class males period baiting bears. The cameras, man,
Speaker 1: I am the most selective period when I'm baiting a bear,
Speaker 1: because I know every bear that's coming in there, and
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to kill that older age male, and
Speaker 1: it becomes a challenge, it becomes it's what makes it
Speaker 1: enjoyable and fun to try to kill a big bear
Speaker 1: over bait, which is actually quite difficult.
Speaker 2: And anybody who says that that hunting bears over bait
Speaker 2: is unethical and easy has never baited for bears.
Speaker 3: Talk to me about that for a minute. Sure, this
Speaker 3: is one of the things old explain fair chase and baiting. Yeah, like,
Speaker 3: can you can you do that? Can you just tell
Speaker 3: me that jump in.
Speaker 1: Like to me, when you describe fair chase, you know
Speaker 1: you're you're capitalizing on that. Bears natural tendency for hyperphagia
Speaker 1: in the fall. I mean you're you're capitalizing on a
Speaker 1: biological process inside of that animal to hyper fixate on
Speaker 1: a food source, just like they would an acorn flat
Speaker 1: or a cabbage palm flat, or berries in the summer,
Speaker 1: or a salmon stream in the Northwest. So you're capitalizing
Speaker 1: on something this animal is doing naturally.
Speaker 3: Number one.
Speaker 1: Number two, if if you have this North American idea
Speaker 1: of taking an older age class male, that animal is
Speaker 1: incredibly intelligent, intelligent acts completely different than juveniles and females.
Speaker 1: And it's very difficult to kill over bait because when
Speaker 1: you're hunting over bait, you have a stationary bait. A
Speaker 1: human has got to be within a bow shot distance
Speaker 1: of that if you're hunting with a bow, which most
Speaker 1: baiting six bears is archery hunting. And that big bear
Speaker 1: knows he is made a living with his nose, and
Speaker 1: he knows when you're there, and he knows when you leave,
Speaker 1: and you got to kill him while you're there. You
Speaker 1: can't not be there and kill him. And killing a
Speaker 1: large I'm talking like a ten plus year old boar
Speaker 1: bear over bait anywhere in the country is as hard
Speaker 1: as just about as hard as any big game hunt
Speaker 1: you would ever have. And so the hunter that's sitting
Speaker 1: there that kills a big bear, he has let go
Speaker 1: a bunch of animals that came in before it. And
Speaker 1: that's just what people wouldn't understand or see why I.
Speaker 3: Would to ask you. As a beer hunting expert, I
Speaker 3: can see this, but you.
Speaker 1: Well, you're so you've got to practice a high level
Speaker 1: of selection. And basically to me, when I think about
Speaker 1: fair chase and ethics and just kind of this big
Speaker 1: North American model, when you understand that baiting or and
Speaker 1: we can talk about hounds too, where baiting is a
Speaker 1: cool for selection, it's like that makes it ethical just
Speaker 1: in its own sense. If we could even just go
Speaker 1: in and extract a mail easily, that would make it
Speaker 1: worth it.
Speaker 3: But we can't. But we can't.
Speaker 1: Mails are very hard to get to come into a
Speaker 1: bait like that. And so to me, it it completely
Speaker 1: fits the idea of of of fair chase three components.
Speaker 1: You're you're capitalizing on an animal's natural tendency, just like
Speaker 1: it would in the wild. Your your you've got to
Speaker 1: be in very close proximity and you cannot hide from bear.
Speaker 1: Everybody in the planet, every white tail hunting of the
Speaker 1: planet that thinks that they can hide from a black
Speaker 1: bear over bait using all the different scent control products
Speaker 1: has never done it because you cannot. Period A thousand
Speaker 1: years from now, they're going to replay this and they're
Speaker 1: gonna say that old Hillbuilding was right because technology has
Speaker 1: never become good enough for us to eat a black
Speaker 1: bear's nose. It is supernatural. When you see a bear's
Speaker 1: nose flexing like this in the wind, he literally is
Speaker 1: talking to God. Not literally, that's a metaphor.
Speaker 3: He is.
Speaker 1: It is a super it is it's so powerful, it's
Speaker 1: almost supernatural.
Speaker 3: That's my point, John Well.
Speaker 1: And and then and then the third prong of the
Speaker 1: fair chase component to me is that it's a powerful
Speaker 1: management tool to be selective period done over and out
Speaker 1: bear hunting with bait.
Speaker 2: Well and and what like what we experienced last year,
Speaker 2: you know you can have you can have great bears
Speaker 2: coming into your bait because that's what they want. And
Speaker 2: then you're playing this this match with nature and just
Speaker 2: because you've got all this high fat, delicious bait. As
Speaker 2: soon as those acrons start falling.
Speaker 1: And they would they would rather eat natural food than
Speaker 1: any I mean, they've been built for one point five
Speaker 1: million years off eating natural food, and here in the
Speaker 1: last you know, one hundred years, we would put out
Speaker 1: anthiprogenet food for them, that would that they would be
Speaker 1: attracted to. They want to go back to natural food
Speaker 1: anywhere in the country.
Speaker 3: So it's interesting you say that. So in Florida we're
Speaker 3: not allowed we're allowing basic I don't know why we're
Speaker 3: calling them bait stations. They're feeders. We're not allowing donuts
Speaker 3: or or like we're not allowing it's corn or sort
Speaker 3: like it can be like it's natural, it's what it's
Speaker 3: what we put in at feed Yeah, it's And so
Speaker 3: this conversation has gotten high. I think it's a bad marketing.
Speaker 3: I think the agency did a bad marketing job and
Speaker 3: the anti honey community grabbed onto it because we talked
Speaker 3: about bait and then they go get pictures of a
Speaker 3: grizzly bear eating donuts or something, and it's like, that's
Speaker 3: not what we're talking about here. We're talking about trying
Speaker 3: to get a bear to come to a corn feeder. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and especially in an okaymic, this's got just a huge mast.
Speaker 1: Here like well, and and the other thing too is
Speaker 1: that you can get a bear to come to corn
Speaker 1: and grain and all this stuff during the summer very
Speaker 1: easily in the fall, which I would assume the despair
Speaker 1: hound's going to be taking place in what's in December.
Speaker 3: So the first year is a three week in December. Okay,
Speaker 3: after that it'll extend out.
Speaker 1: But go ahead, well, just just like right now in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: you get every bear in the country to come to
Speaker 1: a pile of corn. A month from now, when the
Speaker 1: acorns start to trickle down, you will have a very
Speaker 1: difficult time getting a bear to come to a pilot
Speaker 1: corn at the point being in December. The effectiveness of
Speaker 1: using this kind of natural more natural food for a
Speaker 1: bear is probably not going to be great.
Speaker 3: And that's what That's a harder nuanced conversation to have,
Speaker 3: right That's why I wanted to have it with you.
Speaker 3: It's a nuanced conversation that gets missed yea by the
Speaker 3: general public. And I'm hoping a lot of them will
Speaker 3: watch this and say, oh, well, that makes way more sense.
Speaker 3: You're not putting a feeder out there and saying I'm
Speaker 3: gonna roll out here about eleven to shoot a bear
Speaker 3: by eleven thirty because he's going to be on that
Speaker 3: feeder eating.
Speaker 1: Well, right, that's what was going and that's probably why
Speaker 1: people here as they hear, well, they're tearing down corn feeders.
Speaker 1: You can't keep my bears off corn. You know, this
Speaker 1: is just gonna be so easy. But in December it's different.
Speaker 1: And now I've never been around bears in Florida, it's
Speaker 1: possible there's a slight different everywhere they're a little different,
Speaker 1: but in general, I guarantee you that getting them to
Speaker 1: come to that in December is going to be different
Speaker 1: than getting to come to that in August during a
Speaker 1: stress period in August, probably when they're mainly hurting people's
Speaker 1: feeders and whatnot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me just throw this out there for color
Speaker 3: has nothing to do with bears, but it talks about Florida.
Speaker 3: Our south is on Archery opens in July, does it really?
Speaker 3: Because the rut is so early and then we have
Speaker 3: zones No that you can't hunt the key here. But
Speaker 3: this is like Everglades, like Big Cyprus and south of
Speaker 3: seventy It opens in July. Archery opens like this year,
Speaker 3: I think it was July twenty eighth night. So you
Speaker 3: want to talk about fun sitting in that in a tree,
Speaker 3: like you'll strip down to your underwear. It's bad out here,
Speaker 3: Moisquita is just going, but you.
Speaker 2: Just put and then we have fan all over your
Speaker 2: whole body and set up their naked.
Speaker 3: I am an hour and a half north of that
Speaker 3: road and the wa closest to me their rut is
Speaker 3: in February. Wow. So so just the way that landscape
Speaker 3: is is so and we have different zones around this.
Speaker 3: I think we have five different zones for deer because
Speaker 3: they rud at different times and everything. So I think
Speaker 3: we will begin to figure that out with bear as
Speaker 3: well over time of when they do feed heavier when
Speaker 3: they don't. And I think that's I think our agency
Speaker 3: has probably already looked at that, but they'll continue to
Speaker 3: look at that and study it as we see hunter success.
Speaker 3: So hunter success is a thing when we're talking about
Speaker 3: the number of permits they're issue in one hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty seven. Have you ever done a sight tag like
Speaker 3: a like a like an alligator hunt, like we have
Speaker 3: to put a tag, a hard tag in the gator.
Speaker 3: You get those two tags if you don't harvest, you
Speaker 3: send them back. At the end of the year, you
Speaker 3: gotta return them. The bear hunt's gonna be the same.
Speaker 3: It's not Siety's tag, but it's it's gonna be the
Speaker 3: same kind of way where you're issued a hard tag
Speaker 3: and when you take that bear, you've got to report
Speaker 3: it immediately. It's no longer checkstations. So we're not gonna
Speaker 3: give the antis, you know, this place where you just
Speaker 3: set up their cameras and harass hunters and then you've
Speaker 3: got to put that tag into the bear, or if
Speaker 3: you don't harvest, you're gonna return it. So the agency
Speaker 3: set the threshold for harvest. If one hundred percent of
Speaker 3: those tags are females and one hundred percent of them
Speaker 3: are successful, the population will grow zero. It will not decline.
Speaker 3: It'll it'll be at least a zero percent growth zero
Speaker 3: or greater. Then, so that's not gonna hurt the popular
Speaker 3: There is no mortality that's gonna cause it to go
Speaker 3: down from hunting. Yes, So it's really interesting in the
Speaker 3: court of public opinion, people are like, well, they're doing
Speaker 3: this because we've got too many bears. This isn't really
Speaker 3: gonna change how many bears we have, it's gonna be
Speaker 3: at least the same number of bears. We have, probably
Speaker 3: a slow growth because you know as well as I do.
Speaker 3: What is the I'm putting you all on the spot.
Speaker 3: What's the average success rate for a bear hunter? Sixty
Speaker 3: forty percent? Like, I don't know than that. That would
Speaker 3: be my guest too. One hundred and eighty seven tags,
Speaker 3: we could do some math real quick. Fifty of them
Speaker 3: get filled, one hundred of them get filled would be.
Speaker 1: Well, right, if you're talking about in general, like in
Speaker 1: North America, I would say way less than that. In
Speaker 1: a hunt like this this news, I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 1: if they didn't fill ninety percent of them.
Speaker 3: It may be the first year. Yeah. The other side
Speaker 3: of that is we've put tools in place that are
Speaker 3: given a selectivity. So again that's based on new population growth.
Speaker 3: If you have harvest only soals and one hundred percent success, yeah,
Speaker 3: we know we're not gonna have one hundred percent success,
Speaker 3: and we know given selectivity, right.
Speaker 1: So like you're gonna choose the board worst possible scenario.
Speaker 1: It still doesn't hurt anything, does it change anything?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So I've heard so much pushback about it and
Speaker 3: They're like, how can you support this. I'm like, well,
Speaker 3: this is conservation man. Yeah, absolutely, I've got this sustainable
Speaker 3: resource that I can take. And I've said this for
Speaker 3: I've said this for a long time. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: there were some number of bears we could take that
Speaker 3: did not matter five thirty seventy five. I don't know
Speaker 3: the number. I'm not a scientist, but there were some
Speaker 3: number of bears that would have fallen under compensatory mortality
Speaker 3: in the state. Yes, that could have been taken. Continually,
Speaker 3: we fell into a social science trap, a little bit
Speaker 3: of we should not hunt this charismatic megafauna. Now we
Speaker 3: are back to where we have turned on this hunt,
Speaker 3: and this hunt should stay on for forever as long
Speaker 3: as the population is say the population is not going
Speaker 3: to decline because of hunting, yes, but if a disease
Speaker 3: came in or whatever, and we could turn the hunt off.
Speaker 3: But the hunt is now on. We're not going to
Speaker 3: have to go through this iteration year after year after year.
Speaker 3: It'll be up to the agency to look at the
Speaker 3: population and say, well, we had this much success rate
Speaker 3: last year, we had this much harvest rate on boors
Speaker 3: versus south and we're going to issue three hundred tags
Speaker 3: this year instead of one hundred and eighty seven, or
Speaker 3: we're going to issue a hundred tags this year instead
Speaker 3: one hundred and eighty seven. Like the agency's going to
Speaker 3: be able to follow adaptive management is what we call it,
Speaker 3: going to use that to set the threshold for how
Speaker 3: many bears can be taken, and then they're gonna have
Speaker 3: a three month span in the fall. I think it's October, November,
Speaker 3: December that will be open for hunting. So this first year,
Speaker 3: no dogs in year one. I think actually dogs are
Speaker 3: on until twenty seven because it's kind of a staggered approach.
Speaker 3: I think you told me this a long time ago.
Speaker 3: I vaguely remember somebody telling me this long term, to
Speaker 3: hunt bears, you're gonna have to use dogs to have
Speaker 3: any measure of success, right, Like dogs are not sure
Speaker 3: I've said that, but I'm paraphrasing. Maybe, but like, dogs
Speaker 3: are one of the most effective ways to hunt bears. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but initially with this bear population, they haven't been hunted,
Speaker 3: so we'll probably have a higher success rate initially for
Speaker 3: a couple of years. Then we're going to need some
Speaker 3: other tools to move these bears around and run them
Speaker 3: out and have success because you're not going to be
Speaker 3: able to just pop one at your deer feeder. They're
Speaker 3: going to get conditioned pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: They will, they will, they'll they'll they'll learn, they'll adapt,
Speaker 1: and they'll they will get harder to hunt over time.
Speaker 3: And dogs are going to be critical to being able
Speaker 3: to hunt them. Yes, that's yes. So that's where we're
Speaker 3: at today. It's going to be five dollars for a
Speaker 3: tag to apply and then if you get issue only residents, no,
Speaker 3: it's resident and non resident are it's one hundred dollars
Speaker 3: for resident, three hundred dollars for a non resident if
Speaker 3: you get if you get drawn.
Speaker 1: Wow, So I could apply for attack.
Speaker 3: I hope you do.
Speaker 1: Don't tell them, Josh, edit this out.
Speaker 3: I love it. Man. And so the anti hunting community do.
Speaker 3: Their new movement is they're trying to get everyone to
Speaker 3: apply for as many tags as they can afford and
Speaker 3: buy a honey license. Oh. I am thrilled with this.
Speaker 3: Just stef Wire, I'm over the moon.
Speaker 1: Wow, they're going to contribute to this thing.
Speaker 3: They're contributing to conservation.
Speaker 1: I've had I had a thought, and I think I'm
Speaker 1: changing on this and it's not a conscious change, but
Speaker 1: it's my my attitudes towards towards anti hunters and some
Speaker 1: of the expressed truly ignorance. I don't mean that word drivetory,
Speaker 1: but in the truest nature sense of the nature that
Speaker 1: the ignorance oftentimes of anti hunting community, just in their
Speaker 1: lack of knowledge of conservation, why we do what we do,
Speaker 1: hunting culture, historic use practices, you know, has has caused
Speaker 1: my blood pressure to go up, and I would I
Speaker 1: would probably have been a little more like, I don't
Speaker 1: care what you think, this is who we are, kind
Speaker 1: of make it like a tribal identity thing in a way,
Speaker 1: like just personally, maybe me in the in the claw,
Speaker 1: you know, in a in private setting. I really feel
Speaker 1: like the wind is for us as a community to
Speaker 1: become a much much more understanding of people's ignorance, ignorance
Speaker 1: and be a little more merciful. Most people. There's probably
Speaker 1: three percent of the anti hunting community that are just jackwagons.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that are that are like not interested in changing,
Speaker 1: not interested in the facts, are just interested in causing trouble.
Speaker 2: They're probably and they're probably ugly too.
Speaker 1: They're probably ugly, yes, but most of them probably just
Speaker 1: have never set with somebody that they could make eye
Speaker 1: contact with and they could go, this is a real
Speaker 1: human I want to hear their story, and they hear
Speaker 1: about my life and eating bear and my family and
Speaker 1: me taking my kids and us literally preserving land for
Speaker 1: bear hunting, and when they hear about some of the
Speaker 1: deep history of bear hunting, and when they hear what me,
Speaker 1: you and I were talking about earlier about the eight
Speaker 1: bear species on planet Earth. They are twice as many
Speaker 1: American black bears as of all other species combined. This
Speaker 1: is a massive success story. I mean, if I sat
Speaker 1: with or you sat with, or anybody of us set
Speaker 1: with somebody, most of those anti hunters would go, you
Speaker 1: know what, I didn't know that. I mean, most people
Speaker 1: would probably be a little bit reasonable. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the play is not because right now in the country,
Speaker 1: the political the political atmosphere is to just like be
Speaker 1: vehemently opposed to your enemies, just smack them in the
Speaker 1: mouth with this is who we are. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just all over from both sides and every side, and
Speaker 1: that just doesn't it just creates bigger enemies and I
Speaker 1: just feel like we need to and that the practical
Speaker 1: solutions and way to do this. It's hard to say,
Speaker 1: but just like a grassroots tenor change of us being like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're all on the same team. We want bears on
Speaker 1: the landscape.
Speaker 3: And and.
Speaker 1: It's okay. I understand why you might be concerned.
Speaker 3: You said it earlier in your statement. I think you
Speaker 3: said the word tribal. Yeah, it's demystifying the badge that
Speaker 3: you wear, right, Like it's easy for me to go
Speaker 3: outside and say man, meat eater man. But then you
Speaker 3: sit down and talk to Clay or you talk to
Speaker 3: another you talk to like you get to know these
Speaker 3: people and it's like, well, wait a second, they're all
Speaker 3: really good guy, you know, like I'm using it as
Speaker 3: as an avatar for this conversation, but that we see
Speaker 3: that a lot. We hate the Wildlife Agency, but you
Speaker 3: sit down and talk to this scientist or that scientist
Speaker 3: or whatever, and it's like, man, they really are looking
Speaker 3: out for our best interest, the wildlife's best interest, to
Speaker 3: making decisions that are looking at everybody broadly. I have
Speaker 3: gotten personally docked multiple times over this issue, like address name,
Speaker 3: phone number put on the internet, we pray nothing bad
Speaker 3: happens to this guy, and then my picture Remember the
Speaker 3: that actually happened to you? Oh, it's happened multiple Remember
Speaker 3: the would you rather encounter a man or a bear
Speaker 3: in the wild thing that was kind of going out
Speaker 3: on the internet. There was like this whole thing where
Speaker 3: women were like, we'd rather encounter a bear in the
Speaker 3: wild than a man in the woods. They actually took
Speaker 3: my picture and put it next to a bear and
Speaker 3: like plastered it everywhere, And there were people coming and say, well,
Speaker 3: if we're going to open a season, we want to
Speaker 3: open them on this guy, and like they were, it's
Speaker 3: easy for me to just get defensive over that, right,
Speaker 3: It's easy for me to there's a handful of people
Speaker 3: five seven nine that are responsible for that. The vast
Speaker 3: majority of the people even commenting on it don't understand,
Speaker 3: don't know the nuance. And if they walked in this room,
Speaker 3: first off, they wouldn't be that aggressive. And second off,
Speaker 3: if they sat here and talked to me for a minute,
Speaker 3: they'd realize I care. Just as the presupposition is that
Speaker 3: I don't want wild Florida to exist, Dude, I want
Speaker 3: wild Florida exists. Way more than you do. I want
Speaker 3: black bears everywhere. I want ducks everywhere. I want turkeys
Speaker 3: to wear our trip over them like I want. I
Speaker 3: want cabbage palms at oak trees and cows. That's what
Speaker 3: I want. I don't want concrete jungles. And the way
Speaker 3: I'm going to do it, I've got a solution to
Speaker 3: do it that I'm working on right here. I don't
Speaker 3: know what your plan is other than demonizing me, Like
Speaker 3: I'm on your team trying to fix this thing. And
Speaker 3: I don't say that in a defense way. I like,
Speaker 3: I'm pretty cavalier about I'll just sit down with anybody'd
Speaker 3: have that conversation, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like,
Speaker 3: let's get to it, man, Yeah, get to us the
Speaker 3: way through it.
Speaker 1: People are capitalizing on our desire to strike an enemy,
Speaker 1: and we're letting the five percent get it so riled
Speaker 1: up that we become we become radicals. Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean and and and.
Speaker 3: There's a game theory If you ever get a free time,
Speaker 3: there's a you can read about game theory stuff. And
Speaker 3: there's the thing called an Overton window in the middle
Speaker 3: of like a number line, and you're trying to shift
Speaker 3: that overton window your way. And so if you looked
Speaker 3: at the I'm backwards to the camera. But this is
Speaker 3: the far right, this is the far left, and and
Speaker 3: you try to fire up your base, and it pulls
Speaker 3: people this way because the people in the middle don't
Speaker 3: have a choice. They're like, well, I've got to v
Speaker 3: this way or I got to vote that way. And
Speaker 3: so you don't go to the middle, you go to
Speaker 3: the edges, okay, and you create this thing called an
Speaker 3: over the window that you're trying to shift your way
Speaker 3: on this number line.
Speaker 1: That's what touches people to be radical.
Speaker 3: It pushes people to be radical because that's where you're
Speaker 3: going to raise money, that's where you're gonna raise support,
Speaker 3: and that's where you're gonna fire up your base.
Speaker 1: But what if radical was just reasonable?
Speaker 3: And I think that's the conversation that I try to
Speaker 3: change every day, is like, what if radical didn't exist?
Speaker 3: What if we just took a common sense approach to conversation,
Speaker 3: to conservation. You know, what if we I'll go back
Speaker 3: to development in Florida, people say all the time, I'm
Speaker 3: anti development. You gotta stop, dude. Do you know how
Speaker 3: many people in Florida make their living off building houses
Speaker 3: or and then and then you're a fishing guide or
Speaker 3: a hunting guy, like do you check W two's for
Speaker 3: people when they get on your boat, like that they
Speaker 3: work for a fertilizer company, or they work for the
Speaker 3: like they're all connected to it somehow. Like economic growth
Speaker 3: is economic growth. I'm not anti development. I'm pro smart growth, Like,
Speaker 3: let's sit down and figure out ways forward that take
Speaker 3: care of my natural resources in your financial needs or
Speaker 3: economic needs, your tax base is what's going to grow
Speaker 3: your economy. I just think we get into these binaries.
Speaker 3: You have to stop growing, you have to grow at
Speaker 3: all costs. Dude, most of us are right here at
Speaker 3: some game. Most it's not binary, right, It's most of
Speaker 3: us sit somewhere here in the middle. And I think
Speaker 3: there's a whole lot of good conservation that is missed
Speaker 3: because we spend time in this fight and in this fight,
Speaker 3: and that's not the fight. The conversations right here in
Speaker 3: the middle where we can move it forward. And I
Speaker 3: think this whole thing, I think bears perfect example of that.
Speaker 3: Because I said earlier, the agency went and addressed these
Speaker 3: concerns over here were we never want to hunt. But
Speaker 3: their reasons were because you killed too many sous and
Speaker 3: he killed them. It was a blood bath. It was
Speaker 3: too fast, and the hunters could have been over here
Speaker 3: said well, we did it right the first time. And
Speaker 3: I could make the argument that quote a hunt was
Speaker 3: handled right the first time. The hunters could get over
Speaker 3: here and in turn and say, well, we're going to
Speaker 3: do it this way. By golly, we're not changing with
Speaker 3: the agency did a really good job, and the sportsman's
Speaker 3: community did a really good job was coming up with
Speaker 3: a solution that really did address their concerns. Yes, now
Speaker 3: they don't want any hunting to take place, we're not
Speaker 3: going to move there, but they did address their concerns
Speaker 3: with selectivity, with season and everything else. Man, that's what
Speaker 3: conservation is supposed to look like. I believe that in
Speaker 3: my heart that's what conservation is supposed to look like.
Speaker 3: And now we have the sustainable renewable resource that is
Speaker 3: a game species. By the way, you you're the best
Speaker 3: bear guy that I know. Why are bears considered a
Speaker 3: game species? Can you can you talk about that for me?
Speaker 3: Because that's a question I get all the time.
Speaker 1: What Lets let me put a pause right there on
Speaker 1: that question, because I want to say one thing and
Speaker 1: then I want to go to that right there. If
Speaker 1: the reason bears are so important is if we can
Speaker 1: win on bears, we can win on anything.
Speaker 3: Guard the gate.
Speaker 1: Is what you've said so to me, and we've said
Speaker 1: this for a decade, is that when you look at
Speaker 1: the whole of North American hunting, if we can protect
Speaker 1: the thing that's the gate for you know, the lowest
Speaker 1: hanging fruit, which is always going to be predators, I
Speaker 1: mean everything above it is safe essentially, you know, deer.
Speaker 1: I mean people, people aren't as going to be as
Speaker 1: concerned about if we're talking about actually legislatively hunting opportunities
Speaker 1: being taken away. I mean, when I think about bears
Speaker 1: in Florida, it's almost it's almost like the bear being
Speaker 1: the keystone species biologically, Like if you have bears, then
Speaker 1: you probably got good turkey habitat, and good deer habitat,
Speaker 1: and good habitat and good gopher gopher shorts habitat. In
Speaker 1: a way, if you've got a bear hunt in your state,
Speaker 1: you probably got a lot of things in order to
Speaker 1: even legislatively And that's why I've always said that I
Speaker 1: feel like bear hunting is probably as critical a topic
Speaker 1: of discussion and interest for us to understand and be
Speaker 1: able to articulate and talk through. Because if you can
Speaker 1: explain bear hunting to somebody that's starting from zero and
Speaker 1: get them to go, you know what, I kind of
Speaker 1: understand why you'd hunt a bear now, man, you have one,
Speaker 1: You're the hero, And I just think bears are really important.
Speaker 1: It's critically important.
Speaker 3: I'm a guy that's never hunted a bear spending a
Speaker 3: lot of time with bears because of because I think
Speaker 3: it is. I think it's crucial to saving what matters
Speaker 3: in my state, yes, And I think it's crucial to
Speaker 3: saving this tool that matters in my state, yes, right,
Speaker 3: Like it's critical to keeping the wild places wild, but
Speaker 3: it's also critical to saving hunting, which is going to
Speaker 3: help keep the wild police as wild. Man.
Speaker 1: I think it's so cool that you're such an advocate
Speaker 1: for it, and I love it that you say you've
Speaker 1: never hunted a bear. I mean, we don't need everybody
Speaker 1: to go hunt a bear. I mean they can that
Speaker 1: there's plenty of opportunity to, but it's like people getting
Speaker 1: involved in something bigger than them themselves. Is important right
Speaker 1: now in this time, is.
Speaker 3: It matters a great deal? Your question? Let me ask
Speaker 3: you again because this is and I'm asking you. I
Speaker 3: know how to answer this, but I'm asking you. Is
Speaker 3: the bear hunting experted guy, Yeah, he's the guy. Sister.
Speaker 3: I get asked all the time, why do we consider
Speaker 3: bear game species?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 3: This is being asked by Florida environmentalist primary and I
Speaker 3: was like, let me ask Clay.
Speaker 1: Like, well, I think I think that there's two might
Speaker 1: be two ways to view that. Like in the past,
Speaker 1: a lot of game agencies managed bears as as a
Speaker 1: as a vermin, essentially managed them from a as a
Speaker 1: nuisance species as a nuisance species because they wanted them
Speaker 1: off the landscape. I mean that's that's actually I mean,
Speaker 1: just in the last thirty years, I think have all
Speaker 1: the states now made bear black bears a game species,
Speaker 1: which game species meaning that what that translates to, it's
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot more protection, it's gonna have science
Speaker 1: based studies going into how many are there, how many
Speaker 1: are taken? Like when an animal comes a game species
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it's getting a lot more attention,
Speaker 1: a lot more regulation, And it's good now I think
Speaker 1: what an anti hunter and Florida might The tunnel that
Speaker 1: their question is coming from is why are we even
Speaker 1: hunting them? This shouldn't be an animal that we even hunt,
Speaker 1: so like they're not saying, let's manage it as a
Speaker 1: vermin or a nuisance animal. Am I right?
Speaker 3: You know you're exactly right, But I want you to
Speaker 3: talk about the well bears are the species we do
Speaker 3: the most with, right.
Speaker 1: The historic historic practice on this continent is humans on
Speaker 1: this place have been hunting bears since the since the
Speaker 1: time they set their feet on this continent, long deep,
Speaker 1: deep history. Utilization of BlackBerry in this continent. I mean
Speaker 1: we talk about utilization of wild game, like we kill
Speaker 1: a deer and we want to eat all the meat
Speaker 1: and you know, save the horns for a memory.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: Black bears. We use more of a black bear than
Speaker 1: any other big game species that we harvest. How many
Speaker 1: deer hides do you have hanging in your house? Okay,
Speaker 1: bear hides on a black bear? You eat the meat.
Speaker 1: I would say eighty percent of blackberries. Their hides are
Speaker 1: tanned when people harvest them, and we render the fat,
Speaker 1: which is something that's revival. There's a bear fat revival
Speaker 1: in this country, and guys are starting to harvest fat
Speaker 1: from their animals and rendered into bear grease, so historic use.
Speaker 1: Native Americans use bear like crazy. They're incredible table fare.
Speaker 1: I mean, in the frontier days, people killed deer for
Speaker 1: their skins and bear for the meat. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was crazy to think about eating deer. Guys were the
Speaker 1: the long hunters were shooting deer and leaving the carcasses
Speaker 1: on the ground and killing bears for food. So essentially,
Speaker 1: the answer to your question would be they're an incredible
Speaker 1: animal for eating and for for utilizing for bear fat.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could go into all the things you
Speaker 1: do with bear fat. But uh, I mean does that
Speaker 1: does that answer your question?
Speaker 3: I think that is the That's what I have said
Speaker 3: to people, But I'm not a bear hunter, so it
Speaker 3: rings hollow when I say it. I'm asking you the
Speaker 3: bear expert, like, this is the animal right I.
Speaker 1: Mean, is if a white tailed deer is a game animal,
Speaker 1: manages a game animal because we eat it. A bear
Speaker 1: is managed as a game animal because it's better than
Speaker 1: a white tailed.
Speaker 3: Deer, that's the answer.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just true. And and uh, and we've
Speaker 1: got that that deep historical data that that that says
Speaker 1: that you know, I love it.
Speaker 2: Well, I'd eat a bear burger any day over just
Speaker 2: about any other meat.
Speaker 1: What did you say. You've had two bear burgers in
Speaker 1: my house in the last month.
Speaker 2: They are the best that you can eat.
Speaker 1: Anybody that I don't know. Three out of ten guys
Speaker 1: I talked to, go man, I don't like bear meat.
Speaker 1: I had at once and it was tasted to a man.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what people are doing if they
Speaker 1: have any meat that tastes bad delicious. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know what to tell them.
Speaker 1: It's it's really great meat.
Speaker 3: I've never had a bear burger. I've had a I've
Speaker 3: had roast. I've had a bunch of roast, but never
Speaker 3: had a burger.
Speaker 1: I wish I would have cooked you one if you
Speaker 1: were here long.
Speaker 3: Well, we'll have to do Florida. Come to Florida Harvest
Speaker 3: Bear and then we.
Speaker 1: Can if I draw one of those tags. But we're
Speaker 1: not going to tell them that no non residents can't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's no way that a non resident could
Speaker 2: ever get a Florida bear tag.
Speaker 3: Really neat, that was a joke. Really neat thing they're
Speaker 3: doing too, is they wanted to make sure private lands
Speaker 3: were in corporated, because obviously you can't have a feeder
Speaker 3: on public land. We can use dogs on a lot
Speaker 3: of public land. We have a lot of National Force billowed,
Speaker 3: but not in this season, in this this first year, right,
Speaker 3: but not the second one. It'd be twenty seven before
Speaker 3: dogs were used. Okay, dogs would utilize but we'll see. Oh,
Speaker 3: so the private landowner will be able to apply for
Speaker 3: tags and those tags would come out of the whole quota,
Speaker 3: which you could argue, well, that's less opportunities for me,
Speaker 3: But I think it's a really good management tool, and.
Speaker 1: I think landowner isn't it has a better chance of
Speaker 1: getting the tag.
Speaker 3: Is that what you're saying? No, But if they apply,
Speaker 3: they could get those tags taken out of the one
Speaker 3: hundred and eighty seven. So if you have three thousand
Speaker 3: acres in North Florida and you got bears all over it,
Speaker 3: you can apply for the private landowner tags now.
Speaker 1: But they wouldn't go in the draw.
Speaker 3: They would have to is it their own draw?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: I think they still have to go through the draw process.
Speaker 3: But if they got drawn, it would come out of that.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm not understanding. I feel like there's
Speaker 1: something else you're saying. Because if me and a landowner
Speaker 1: with ten thousand acres put in, I would have the
Speaker 1: same odds as drawn as him.
Speaker 3: That's the way I understand it work. But I can
Speaker 3: get you a clarification on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I thought maybe you were saying there
Speaker 1: with those guys were given a preference.
Speaker 3: No, they're not giving a preference. They're not giving a preference.
Speaker 3: But I think what will happen is we'll see that
Speaker 3: program grow out over the time and so this first
Speaker 3: year we may see someone in a private landowners take
Speaker 3: some of those on hundred and eighty seven tacks as
Speaker 3: through an application process. I would think arguably they're going
Speaker 3: to have a higher success rate because they got feeders
Speaker 3: and they've got private land. This man is different. You
Speaker 3: don't have the romping stamp of people like driving their
Speaker 3: cheeks and riding horses. But then long term, I think
Speaker 3: we'll see a private land program.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm all for it. See anybody that is like man,
Speaker 1: the private land guys getting any kind of a preference
Speaker 1: over non private land, I'm not for it. And I
Speaker 1: don't own big properties.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 1: But if I owned four thousand acres in Florida and
Speaker 1: I got bear, it's just crawling with bears. Give me
Speaker 1: an incentive exactly to not gut shoot those bears with
Speaker 1: a twenty two rifle, which that's very crass and I
Speaker 1: don't even.
Speaker 3: Like to say, but it's a shut up, right, Like, Oh.
Speaker 1: It happens all the time in places where there's no
Speaker 1: season and there's no outlet for.
Speaker 3: Management of that species. That's right. And oh, you've got
Speaker 3: an animal that's destructive. You said he's curious. He's destructive
Speaker 3: to I don't know that they would take a cap,
Speaker 3: but I know they take goats and cheap and things
Speaker 3: like that. Like they will opportunistically take livestock. They'll destroy
Speaker 3: fences and sheds and barns and like they just we
Speaker 3: had our first fatality from a bear.
Speaker 1: I was going to bring that up. Do you think
Speaker 1: that was part of the what helped push this hunt over?
Speaker 1: You don't think you had anything they had anything to
Speaker 1: do with it. Tell me about that fatality.
Speaker 3: When was it? This was in May so so the
Speaker 3: commission meeting, I don't remember the dates. May was kind
Speaker 3: of a blurb. But the commission meeting, it was like
Speaker 3: two weeks before the FBC Commission meeting, we had we
Speaker 3: had a guy. He lives in the Everglades and the bear.
Speaker 3: The details have not been released fully so so the
Speaker 3: report's not out there yet. But the agency calls it
Speaker 3: a predatory attack. Wow. So it's a really sad situation.
Speaker 1: And was it was it in his neighborhood or was
Speaker 1: it out in the wild.
Speaker 3: It was he kind of lived remotely, so uh, he
Speaker 3: lived in like a like a for lack of a
Speaker 3: better term, I called an in holding, like like he
Speaker 3: lived in the woods. It killed his dog and it
Speaker 3: killed him. They and the agency ended up killing three
Speaker 3: bears in reaction to that, to that attack, and it
Speaker 3: was it was there. I have heard it is some
Speaker 3: of the grizzliest stuff that people have ever seen. Wow,
Speaker 3: like really yeah, unsettling. The photos and the I haven't
Speaker 3: seen them, but it was unsettling.
Speaker 1: So black bear, it's pretty it's pretty interesting. On average,
Speaker 1: like one American gets killed a year by black bear.
Speaker 3: Really on average, I.
Speaker 1: Want to say three or four on average get killed
Speaker 1: by grizzlies, which is super interesting because the grizzly home
Speaker 1: the range of grizzlies is three percent of what the
Speaker 1: range of black bears is. On average, reported black bear
Speaker 1: attacks over the last like sixty years, there's like thirteen
Speaker 1: documented black bear what they would consider an attack on humans.
Speaker 1: So and this is general data. One death, thirteen attacks. Wow,
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff doesn't go reported. Like my friend
Speaker 1: Moe Shepherd who got charged by salve black bear and
Speaker 1: punched it in the face with his bow and kicked
Speaker 1: it in the teeth, and like it didn't hurt him,
Speaker 1: Like that wasn't considered an attack.
Speaker 3: It wasn't.
Speaker 1: It didn't counted like if it's if there's contact, Well
Speaker 1: there was contact in that one, but point bing. There's
Speaker 1: a lot more skirmishes that happen, but actual attacks where
Speaker 1: somebody gets malled. Statistically, the people that get attacked are
Speaker 1: people that have dogs because they go for the dog. Well,
Speaker 1: the dog goes for the bear. If you've got a
Speaker 1: leash dog, it's actually better. But if you have an
Speaker 1: unleashed dog, like I don't want to say the percentage,
Speaker 1: but a vast a lot of those thirteen attacks that
Speaker 1: are going to happen by a dog is running loose.
Speaker 1: You're just walking down a trail. Your dog sees the
Speaker 1: bear before you goes in barks at the bear. The
Speaker 1: bear turns on the dog, and the dog goes, oh crap.
Speaker 1: The dog runs back to you. The bear follows the
Speaker 1: dog right back to you and attacks you. Yep, So
Speaker 1: the the consistent theme inside of attacks is dogs, which
Speaker 1: people actually usually would think a dog would be protecting
Speaker 1: them from the bear. Right, But that's why people are
Speaker 1: getting attacked. And then, but the most deaths are from
Speaker 1: predatory attacks, usually juvenile males, and they literally are when
Speaker 1: a bear is stalking people. You know, there's a way
Speaker 1: that they categorize a predatory attack. It's not like a surprise.
Speaker 1: It's not a salad defending her cubs. Salad defending her
Speaker 1: cubs is not gonna kill you. She's just gonna eradicate
Speaker 1: those you're sure in the threat, in the threat, and
Speaker 1: as soon as she can get away from it, she's
Speaker 1: going to So you're gonna get whooped on a little bit,
Speaker 1: but you very unlikely she's gonna kill you. The one
Speaker 1: that's gonna kill you is a three year old male
Speaker 1: that you're walking down a trail and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you look back thirty yards and he's following you,
Speaker 1: just like walking, looking at you, making an eye contact,
Speaker 1: lowered head, and you start walking faster and he starts
Speaker 1: walking faster, and I mean that that's a bear that
Speaker 1: will kill you. And what happens. It's happened several times, uh,
Speaker 1: where basically a bear starts coming around somebody's house, like
Speaker 1: an inn holding where they're you know, just like this
Speaker 1: lone house out in the woods somewhere, and a bear
Speaker 1: just starts coming around, coming around, getting more more familiar
Speaker 1: with who's there, what's going on, and pretty soon that
Speaker 1: bear has killed somebody. There was a story, uh believe
Speaker 1: in California a couple of years ago, I mean in
Speaker 1: modern times, in the last decade, where a bear was
Speaker 1: just coming around this lady's house. She she called it
Speaker 1: the she she actually called it the big old B
Speaker 1: A S T A R D. That's what she called it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say the word. Uh did I
Speaker 1: spell it right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, y'all looking at you.
Speaker 2: We're gonna have a caption on the bottom.
Speaker 1: She called she called 's what she called it. All
Speaker 1: her family knew, you know, he's here, the big B word.
Speaker 1: That's like her broken her window ate that woman in
Speaker 1: her house. Oh my, yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Very rare.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you've got a much You shouldn't be
Speaker 1: afraid of black bears. You really shouldn't, but it does happen.
Speaker 1: Right anyway, I was going to ask you about that.
Speaker 2: You give them a name like that, If you give
Speaker 2: it a name like that, just expect to get attacked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, be more respectful of your names. Right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Another dynamic of the black bear situation in America, and
Speaker 1: it's happening in Florida, is never before in history has
Speaker 1: there been so much overlap with black bears and humans.
Speaker 1: Never in history. We've got more black bears today that
Speaker 1: we've had in the last two hundred years. And what
Speaker 1: was the American population two hundred years ago, I mean
Speaker 1: probably like ten million, twenty million, maybe today we've got
Speaker 1: three in a thirty million. And it's like j curving,
Speaker 1: you know, the so never before in history. So this
Speaker 1: idea that you'd think, like the American bear story is
Speaker 1: kind of this old like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett deal,
Speaker 1: you know, those are the guys that you know, had
Speaker 1: these overlaps with bears. They didn't have nothing compared to
Speaker 1: what we got today.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny you say that too. I want
Speaker 3: to not to hijack where you're going there, but going
Speaker 3: back to like the conservation success, like you said, when
Speaker 3: when vodka got there, De Soto got there, there were
Speaker 3: probably eleven thousand bears prior to that. Then we went
Speaker 3: into this massive slump. And now we have twenty two
Speaker 3: and a half million people in this state, and we
Speaker 3: got over four thousand bears.
Speaker 1: You got almost a third of them.
Speaker 3: We have not half of We're almost back to where
Speaker 3: like and we've grown and I mean none of what's
Speaker 3: in Florida existed when they set foot there, right, And
Speaker 3: we've the species and so we talk about what's wrong
Speaker 3: in conservation all the time. Leopold talked about the world
Speaker 3: of wounds that we live in. You see all the
Speaker 3: problems in reality, that's pretty good, man, Like the species
Speaker 3: has been restored to such a place that we could
Speaker 3: take some of them as a sustainable, renewable, yeah resource,
Speaker 3: and they likely are continuing to grow. We're continuing to
Speaker 3: study them. Like that's yes.
Speaker 1: If one hundred years ago you you you said, okay,
Speaker 1: one day there's gonna be twenty two million people in Florida.
Speaker 1: All these people are gonna have a place to live,
Speaker 1: All these resources are gonna be extracted. There's gonna be roads.
Speaker 1: You don't know much about roads two hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: but there's gonna be pavement on them. Let's pavement, right.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And you would have said, what's gonna happen to the bears.
Speaker 3: They're gonna be gone.
Speaker 1: You would think they're gonna be completely gone. And it
Speaker 1: is still a little bit of a mystery how bears
Speaker 1: have done so well. I mean, we do know that
Speaker 1: the magic that populations, I mean, it's it's like white
Speaker 1: tailed deer, like disturbed landscapes produce more more vegetation, more feed,
Speaker 1: potentially more cover even at times than undisturbed landscapes. So
Speaker 1: just like white tailed deer, there there are twice as
Speaker 1: many white tailed deer today in America as there was
Speaker 1: pre European settlement. I mean, they say, and I don't
Speaker 1: know what the new numbers.
Speaker 3: Are, because they thrive with disturbance ecology.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. And they're they're they're animals of the edges,
Speaker 1: and so we've created exponential amounts of edges compared to
Speaker 1: what would have been here pre European settlements, so white
Speaker 1: tailed deer have gone. Bear kind of fit into that
Speaker 1: same category. They're not quite like deer. They don't cone
Speaker 1: in on the ecological niches. But disturbance to the landscape
Speaker 1: has has produced success. And the thing that a bear
Speaker 1: can do that a deer can't is bears have learned
Speaker 1: how to use anthrogenic foods to their advantage. So in
Speaker 1: these urban centers and and even even in rural places
Speaker 1: like Arkansas, bears are capitalizing on some man made food
Speaker 1: and agricultural areas. Their man made food is skyrocketing and
Speaker 1: so it but it's still kind of a history. It's
Speaker 1: still like, wait a minute, why are bears doing so well?
Speaker 1: And this is a stat that's in the academic literature
Speaker 1: and has been for a decade plus, is that every
Speaker 1: research population of bears in North America is increasing or
Speaker 1: stable period. I mean, what other population of hunted animals,
Speaker 1: big game animals could you say that about. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of things that are doing well. I'm not
Speaker 1: but every population study, and the reason they say studied
Speaker 1: population is because they haven't really studied every population to
Speaker 1: the extent of others. Because if you have a limited
Speaker 1: amount of resources in your game agency. And there are
Speaker 1: bears everywhere, and you got you know, the bob black
Speaker 1: quail that's about to struggling kick the bucket, like you're
Speaker 1: putting a lot of energy towards here. They're kind of
Speaker 1: like this is particularly what I There is a lot
Speaker 1: of bear research that goes on in Canada, but it's
Speaker 1: almost like, hey, the bears are fine, let's study caribou.
Speaker 1: Do you kind of see what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like I gotta put your money where you
Speaker 3: think it's gonna.
Speaker 1: And and and bears are one of the most research
Speaker 1: big game animals in North America, if not the most
Speaker 1: researched animal in North America. I mean, like incredible amount
Speaker 1: of research. But all that to say they're thriving.
Speaker 3: You said something else a minute ago too that as
Speaker 3: you're talking now, reminded me you talked about them being
Speaker 3: a game species when I asked you that question, and
Speaker 3: that we fund research. We I've run through this. In
Speaker 3: Florida a few years back, they wanted to close a
Speaker 3: fishing pier over pelicans on it, and I said, well,
Speaker 3: what's our what's our mortality rate on pelicans? What's compenstory.
Speaker 3: What's additive, Like I'm I'm I'm a I'm a hunter,
Speaker 3: Like we should know these well, we don't have the
Speaker 3: money to study them like that because they're not a
Speaker 3: game species. They're not they're not regulated in that way,
Speaker 3: they're not managed that way. We're versus game species. We
Speaker 3: know those details inside and out. Like I can go
Speaker 3: down the list of ducks and turkeys and yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean we can get into it on what really is
Speaker 3: happening with those species. Bear fit into that, and that's
Speaker 3: where hunters fit into this conversation. Right. We've been paying
Speaker 3: for that for a long long time and we're going
Speaker 3: to continue to pay for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Walk may ride up to last week when
Speaker 1: this is hot off the press, Walk may ride up
Speaker 1: to the commission meeting and tell me what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we The commission meeting was in a little
Speaker 3: town called Havana, Florida. You ever heard of Havana. I've
Speaker 3: heard of Havana, Cuba. It's not near that. It's about
Speaker 3: twenty minutes outside of Tallahassee. It is where the one
Speaker 3: thing f to BC does I've alluded to this early
Speaker 3: they moved around the state, so that it's not it's
Speaker 3: not always in Orlando, and you got to go there.
Speaker 3: It's not always in Tallhassee and you got to go there. Havana.
Speaker 3: The facility didn't cost taxpayer much because it's the law
Speaker 3: enforcement training facility, so we had a kind of a
Speaker 3: cheap facility to use there. We coordinated in advance. A
Speaker 3: lot of the hunting groups ordated in advance of Hey,
Speaker 3: we need to make sure we packed this room. I
Speaker 3: don't love that game because I don't think that should matter.
Speaker 3: How many people are in attendance in their area should
Speaker 3: not matter. Science should drive wild like Paulic. But there's
Speaker 3: a social science game a foot there. And so we
Speaker 3: showed up in mass Like I mentioned earlier, the dog
Speaker 3: hunting community. That's obviously a dog hunting stronghold the North
Speaker 3: Florida world, but we had folks drive from South Florida.
Speaker 3: I mean there were guys there from around the state.
Speaker 3: The dog hunters largely wore orange. So when you looked
Speaker 3: at the room, like, I can send you some pictures,
Speaker 3: but when you look at the room like, it's just
Speaker 3: a sea of orange in that room. Wow, Sierra Club
Speaker 3: bust people in. They had three bus locations around the state.
Speaker 3: One I think in Daytona, one in Tampa, and one
Speaker 3: somewhere south, and they bust people to the event to
Speaker 3: speak in opposition to the to the hunt and staff
Speaker 3: came up there, gave presentation. It was the same presentation
Speaker 3: they had in May. And because they bring it, they
Speaker 3: bring it to May for approval as a draft, and
Speaker 3: then they give some time for people to kind of
Speaker 3: and we had one no vote in May who flipped
Speaker 3: devoted just this time. One commister voted no in May
Speaker 3: and he flipped and voted yes this time. He didn't
Speaker 3: understand think it was dogs was one of his concerned
Speaker 3: dogs in bait. So we got to we got to
Speaker 3: you know, the staff did the presentation. Then they allow
Speaker 3: public comment and bye. By rule they say they're going
Speaker 3: to allow two hours for public comments and you typically
Speaker 3: get three minutes per person. Well, we had one hundred
Speaker 3: and seventy people sign up, so what are you gonna do.
Speaker 3: What they did is they gave every person a minute. See,
Speaker 3: I mean it's hard, you got to consolidate your three
Speaker 3: minutes down to a minute, but you get to go
Speaker 3: up there say your piece. And they made sure every
Speaker 3: person got to speak in that room. Really. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: and I get that recorded. It is, it is, it'd
Speaker 3: be an interesting thing. It is because I learned some
Speaker 3: things one minute to speak man. I learned some things there.
Speaker 3: That you could kill bears just by staring at him.
Speaker 3: I did not know that that was. That was what
Speaker 3: one of the anti hunters said. And I was like,
Speaker 3: in DDE, now don't look at me, like that's dangerous
Speaker 3: what you doing right now? Like they a lady walked
Speaker 3: up there and she was determined that you could kill bears.
Speaker 3: She could scare them to death just by staring at them.
Speaker 3: We had another woman proposed that we that we hunt
Speaker 3: white tail deer granted coon out of a tree, right,
Speaker 3: so who knows? I'm interested in digging into that. Would
Speaker 3: another person say that we could we should look at
Speaker 3: a honety white tail deer. We've checked that box already.
Speaker 3: Another woman offered to give money to the Wildlife Commission
Speaker 3: directly if they would instead of a bear hunt, fund
Speaker 3: a python hunt, which you can hunt pythons anytime in Florida.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's been massive mass so like there was
Speaker 1: just like people just didn't know.
Speaker 3: It was just a detachment from reality. That was fostered
Speaker 3: in and it's it's the people we were talking about
Speaker 3: a minute ago. I don't think those people, Like I'm
Speaker 3: kind of poking fun out, but I don't think those
Speaker 3: people are probably bad people. If you could sit down
Speaker 3: and have a conversation and be like the eye lady,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure how to even start that one, But
Speaker 3: like the other ones, I'm like, man, we hunt white
Speaker 3: tail deer. That's a game species that we've hunted for
Speaker 3: since we've been hunting. Yeah, it's just like a detachment.
Speaker 3: And so they're picking up on a narrative. And I
Speaker 3: sat next to a girl. It was from Sierra Club
Speaker 3: and she said, can I ask you some questions? I
Speaker 3: said sure, And she said, this is a trophy hunt, right,
Speaker 3: And I'm like, well, no, it's not a trophy hunt.
Speaker 3: I said, trophy hunting is like a missed omer. Secondly,
Speaker 3: no one trophy hunts anything in Florida. Like we have
Speaker 3: wanting waste balls and everything else. Like, you're not coming
Speaker 3: here to trophy hunt a deer. You know you're coming
Speaker 3: here because you want to hunt, you taking the meat
Speaker 3: and everything else. I was like, this is not a
Speaker 3: trophy hunt. You could just tell she'd kind of been misled.
Speaker 3: She had a tender heart for bears. She probably is
Speaker 3: never going to go hunt. But you know, I don't
Speaker 3: know if I changed her mind or anything else, but
Speaker 3: it was it was the conversation you're talking about, right,
Speaker 3: And I looked around the room and you see people
Speaker 3: around the room having those conversations where people are sitting
Speaker 3: next to you.
Speaker 1: You feel like the guys in Orange did a good
Speaker 1: job of interacting with the Sierra, and I realized that
Speaker 1: there was some that didn't didn't Probably.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna say that this is a Polk County redneck.
Speaker 3: There is the Pole County redneck, and then the probably
Speaker 3: the conservationist hunter. That's a little more some of the
Speaker 3: Pole County redneck types maybe not so much. But I
Speaker 3: was really proud of how the hunting community showed up
Speaker 3: and conducted themselves. When you got one minute on a subject,
Speaker 3: that spend this teased out for this long. Like those
Speaker 3: commissioners are briefed like they are in Florida. The commissioners
Speaker 3: are appointed by the governor. They oversee the they vote
Speaker 3: on the rules. The scientists present the rules, so the
Speaker 3: science are saying, here, here's what we think the hunt
Speaker 3: can be. The commission asked questions and dig into it
Speaker 3: a little bit, but they vote on whether or not
Speaker 3: we approve this recommendation. So seven of them man to
Speaker 3: stay engaged that long for three hours, listening to person
Speaker 3: after person is tough.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What we did as a honey community is we went
Speaker 3: to it and everybody did this. We went to our
Speaker 3: people and said, look, if you're here and you're representing
Speaker 3: meat eater, you're here and you represent BHA or whatever,
Speaker 3: sure go up there and fly the flag. But if
Speaker 3: you got fifteen people here, have the other fourteen of
Speaker 3: them just stand up and say I wave and support.
Speaker 3: There's no reason to labor this. Yes. Yes, So the
Speaker 3: one hundred and seventy comments probably became one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty people going to a microphone, which also it did
Speaker 3: force that number that time limit down. That wasn't intentional,
Speaker 3: but it did force that time limit down because those
Speaker 3: people all waved in support of this hunt. Really proud
Speaker 3: of how that was handled, and it was handled in
Speaker 3: a very organic I don't know everybody in the hunting community.
Speaker 3: You know, you go to the girls were there from
Speaker 3: American Daughters Conservations, this group we have down there of women, hunters, fishermen.
Speaker 3: They showed up in mass They made sure that everybody
Speaker 3: they talked to they went and said, hey, make sure
Speaker 3: you wave and support if you don't want to go
Speaker 3: to the microphone, and so you just stand up where
Speaker 3: you worry. You didn't even go to the mic and record,
Speaker 3: like your name's already up there, literally your hands, Hey,
Speaker 3: I wave and support, sit back down. And that was
Speaker 3: really well received I think by the Commission because it
Speaker 3: was respectful of their time. We had a long day.
Speaker 3: We had a lot of stuff to work on. I mean,
Speaker 3: there were other conservation issues we had to tackle besides bears.
Speaker 3: And that the next day, you and I played fone
Speaker 3: tag because I was I was in and out working
Speaker 3: on oysters and shrimp and bonefish and stuff that day.
Speaker 3: The hunting community, that was a high point. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was a really proud moment for me. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: it was a really proud moment for me because I
Speaker 3: look at I look at the broader hunting conservation world.
Speaker 3: And in the last year, we beat back Prop one
Speaker 3: twenty seven in Colorado, we beat back this Mike Lee
Speaker 3: public land sale. We passed the right to fish and
Speaker 3: hunting in Florida, which no one thought we would do.
Speaker 3: We just re established a bear hunt in Florida. What
Speaker 3: was it two years ago? They re established a bear hunt.
Speaker 3: Louisian like. It's easy for us to sit back and say, man,
Speaker 3: we are getting our butts whooked, but in fact we're
Speaker 3: drawing some pretty strong lines in the sand and saying
Speaker 3: we're reclaiming some of this ground for conservation, not just hunting.
Speaker 3: I don't talk about hunting as much as I talk
Speaker 3: about conservation. That's the verb that I use, or the
Speaker 3: now that I used to describe it, because that's the
Speaker 3: that's the activity that I care the most about, is
Speaker 3: conserving wildlife and conserving these things. I just happen to
Speaker 3: want to do it with shotgun. So really a high
Speaker 3: water moment. The commissioners, I think they asked good questions
Speaker 3: about they'll call staff back up at the end and
Speaker 3: they'll dig in, you know, clarify what dogs mean, clarify
Speaker 3: and sometimes it's something that maybe even somedd they've heard
Speaker 3: from an anti hunter and they're like, she doesn't understand
Speaker 3: it or he doesn't understand it. I want to ask
Speaker 3: a question to clarify it so that it's on the
Speaker 3: record as weird. People say, these dogs are going to
Speaker 3: go in there and attack the bears and kill them.
Speaker 3: That's not how this works. That's not the intention of
Speaker 3: dog hunting. People say, because you if you get a
Speaker 3: permit and you want a dog hunt, you're allowed to
Speaker 3: bring nine people with you. They believe that all nine
Speaker 3: people are going to or all ten people are going
Speaker 3: to shoot at the same time. That's not how it's
Speaker 3: going to work. Like you heard that over and over
Speaker 3: again in comments. It's like, this is going to be
Speaker 3: a firing squad on this bear. No, you guys know this,
Speaker 3: but like that's and so the commissioners will tease out
Speaker 3: those questions and asks like so what does this mean?
Speaker 3: What does that mean? And some of it they really
Speaker 3: were asking, and some of it they were asking to
Speaker 3: clarify for the other side. Get done, and Commissioner Gary
Speaker 3: Lester called for a vote. I think Commissioner Josh Kellum,
Speaker 3: who's our new commissioner, he seconded it, and they said
Speaker 3: let's vote, and it passed unanimously. All five of them
Speaker 3: went for it.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: So and man, I command the courage of all five
Speaker 1: of those commissioners in Florida for doing that.
Speaker 3: You know, it's sad to me that we've gotten to
Speaker 3: a societal place where these groups, these anti hunting groups
Speaker 3: have targeted their businesses because this is not their job.
Speaker 3: They're by vocational right. They don't get paid at all,
Speaker 3: they get reimbursed for travel. It's a huge job to
Speaker 3: be are and so ten days a year, eight days
Speaker 3: a year, they have to sit there and listen to again,
Speaker 3: not just bears, not the sexy stuff. We spent two
Speaker 3: hours on oysters the next day at how many we
Speaker 3: could harvest in a bucket or something like. It's not
Speaker 3: all the fun sexy stuff I love to eat ois.
Speaker 3: But they sit there and they participate and they engage
Speaker 3: well on it, and then we go and demonize them.
Speaker 3: And there's two sides of that too, right, Like that's
Speaker 3: another thing out of coming out of this is we
Speaker 3: left that meeting and I heard people in the honey
Speaker 3: community say, well, it was only one hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: seven and it was only these zones, and we need
Speaker 3: more and there's ten thousand bears, and say, guys, there's
Speaker 3: a way that this works. And we're working really hard
Speaker 3: to get as many bear permits as we can in
Speaker 3: a sustainable way, like just check yourself where you wreck
Speaker 3: yourself a little bit here, because we really are trying
Speaker 3: to navigate these things that are hard to get them
Speaker 3: done so that we can go out there and enjoy
Speaker 3: the resources that we love and experience. For me, it's
Speaker 3: never about killing an animal. It's about sitting in a
Speaker 3: stand and watching the world wake up, or being with
Speaker 3: my daughter, my son, or whoever you know. It's about
Speaker 3: the camaraderie. And yeah, I love to hang stuff on
Speaker 3: the wall and I love to eat the meat, but
Speaker 3: it's really about the time that I get to spend outdoors,
Speaker 3: and that's how I enter and exit it. It's carrying
Speaker 3: a rifle or carrying a shotgun or carrying a fishing ball.
Speaker 3: That's how I get in and out of it. So
Speaker 3: it was a watermark moment. I was really proud of
Speaker 3: those guys for standing strong. But there's people who have
Speaker 3: targeted their businesses. They are protesting. There's one who owns
Speaker 3: a car a lot in Tampa, So if you need
Speaker 3: a car, go to buy one from him, because he
Speaker 3: owns a car a lot in Tampa and he there's
Speaker 3: people protesting in front of his business targeting him specifically.
Speaker 3: And this is a guy that cares deeply about wildlife. Man,
Speaker 3: did they are.
Speaker 1: There any other species that people are doing that in Florida?
Speaker 1: I mean like protesting in the street. They're not worried
Speaker 1: about oysters, They're not worried about white tailed they're.
Speaker 3: Just bear bears. We get a lot of protests about developments.
Speaker 3: People don't have a real good understanding of private property
Speaker 3: rights and how that works in Florida, So we get
Speaker 3: a lot of protests about developments. And then we see
Speaker 3: a lot of protests around manatees.
Speaker 1: But I mean, nobody's you can't hunt.
Speaker 3: Manatees, it's not a thing, but it's a water quality manatees.
Speaker 3: That's a whole other thing. But manatees are a large
Speaker 3: grazing animal, Like there's a probably a carrying capacity for
Speaker 3: how many of them can exist in this state. And
Speaker 3: then we create more water discharges and we feed them
Speaker 3: let us and we kind of artificially inflate it. And
Speaker 3: you can get into some ecology of that. But there's
Speaker 3: a lot of protests about manatees when they die off
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, But bears are pretty much yet
Speaker 3: and the same anti honey community. What we've seen them
Speaker 3: move on now is archery. They've determined that archery is
Speaker 3: is inhumane and so we should not be allowed to
Speaker 3: archery hunt anymore. That's their next kind of ill to
Speaker 3: die on. There's no traction there. We're talking about a
Speaker 3: very small but very noisy, but very small group of people.
Speaker 3: And then they've also started dabbling into coyote honeting. They
Speaker 3: don't want. They don't want coyote honey. I don't know why.
Speaker 3: Coyote's pretty sustainable resource. We got plenty of them, and
Speaker 3: I'm not huge coyote hunter, but I've killed plenty of them.
Speaker 3: From a predator management standpoint for turkeys or whatever. It
Speaker 3: was a win.
Speaker 1: Should we expect more turbulence? Was there any thing legally
Speaker 1: about this hunt that sets it in perpetuity for a
Speaker 1: period of time.
Speaker 3: Nope, So it does not need to come back to
Speaker 3: the commission.
Speaker 1: But I mean, are they gonna last time in fifteen
Speaker 1: when we had a hunt, it was shut down the
Speaker 1: next year because of public opinion and all the stuff
Speaker 1: that happened after the hunt. Do you I don't think
Speaker 1: that to happen again. Are we kind of over it?
Speaker 3: You're asking Travis's opinion, I'd say I think we're going
Speaker 3: to be fine moving forward. Okay, I do think. Okay,
Speaker 3: so they do, and you know more about this than
Speaker 3: I do, but they do bear Den studies on a
Speaker 3: on a generational cycle, right something to this effect, so
Speaker 3: that every ten years they'll have new updated data. So
Speaker 3: twenty twenty nine is when they'll have the latest real
Speaker 3: population estimate for the state. We know that there's at
Speaker 3: least four thousand bears in Florida, and we also know
Speaker 3: that no matter what, this hunt's not going to change
Speaker 3: that population, right right, Like this goes back to what
Speaker 3: I said real early it could be five, could be
Speaker 3: twenty five, or you remember when they re established ELK
Speaker 3: in Tennessee, or they allowed seven to be taken, like
Speaker 3: it could be like that. The one hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: seven is such a it's a rounding error like it
Speaker 3: is nothing. So we're gonna see bear populations continue to thrive,
Speaker 3: and over time we're going to get better and better
Speaker 3: data to go with that because we don't not have data.
Speaker 3: We've got hair corral data and things like that. We
Speaker 3: know in different they call them BMus Bear Management units.
Speaker 3: In different BMus we know like some level of how
Speaker 3: many bears are using a particular fence line or whatever,
Speaker 3: so we know that that population is going to continue
Speaker 3: to grow. We know that the hunt is going to
Speaker 3: be very different from how it was last time, just
Speaker 3: from the removal of check stations, doing digital check in,
Speaker 3: doing the hard tag, allowing for selectivity, not forcing everybody
Speaker 3: to hunt all at once. We know that those factors,
Speaker 3: there's so many have changed. It's going to look very
Speaker 3: different coming out of it. And then we do know
Speaker 3: too that a lawsuit has already been filed by the
Speaker 3: anti honeting world, but it got dismissed out right in
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen, like they were sued at twenty fifteen for
Speaker 3: the hunt and the case was dismissed. So I don't
Speaker 3: want to be flipping about anything because you never know
Speaker 3: what's going to happen on any given day. But I
Speaker 3: just don't see any merit to that suit. Like FBC
Speaker 3: is a not to get too far in the policy weeds,
Speaker 3: but in most states you have a legislatively created body,
Speaker 3: a statutorily created body, where I think Arkansas is actually
Speaker 3: constitutionally as well. In Florida, FWBC was created by the constitution,
Speaker 3: so they're almost like a de facto fourth You got
Speaker 3: the executive, legislative, judicial, and a conservation branch. Now is
Speaker 3: the crossover with the governor appointees and stuff. Sure there is,
Speaker 3: And the legislature controls their budget, so they can force
Speaker 3: them budgetarily to do certain things. But the end of
Speaker 3: the day, FBC is an isolated body that's able to
Speaker 3: kind of make their own determinations on this stuff. I
Speaker 3: don't see how you win a lawsuit because they're constitutionally
Speaker 3: in powered to manage fish and wildlife. Like if you
Speaker 3: sue and say they breach their duty, well, their constitutional
Speaker 3: duties to manage fish and wildlife, and it's a pretty
Speaker 3: broad purview it's given to them. I just don't I
Speaker 3: don't see that.
Speaker 2: Holy merit.
Speaker 3: Maybe you get the right judge and the right jurisdiction,
Speaker 3: but I just don't see that.
Speaker 1: You know, when you when we talk about I think
Speaker 1: I think the the narrative, the way that we speak
Speaker 1: about hunting is important, and oftentimes you hear like there's
Speaker 1: a bear population in Florida, there's a new bear hunt.
Speaker 1: There's an expanding population, we're hunting them to control the population.
Speaker 1: Like that's what people will say, But that's that's actually
Speaker 1: not true because because the amount of bears that we're
Speaker 1: taking out of Florida is basically going to be ecologically inconsequential,
Speaker 1: it's insignificant. So what it comes down to really the
Speaker 1: what people like us that love wildlife and love wild
Speaker 1: places and love to eat wild game, what we believe
Speaker 1: is that, I mean, the philosophy is that a hunter
Speaker 1: should be able to take from the surplus of a
Speaker 1: of a healthy population of animals and use that resource
Speaker 1: from traditional use practice. I'm an American, I'm a eighth
Speaker 1: ninth generation American. My family has been hunting for a
Speaker 1: long time. I mean that, you know, there's all these
Speaker 1: reasons why it's like you ought to be able to
Speaker 1: hunt if it's not hurting anything. I mean, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the philosophy. And that is absolutely the doctrine is like, hey,
Speaker 1: if I can go out in my backyard and kill
Speaker 1: a couple of deer and feed my family and it's
Speaker 1: actually not hurting the population, I have the right to
Speaker 1: do that. And and and that's what we're saying. Even
Speaker 1: with bears, they're a game animal, they're they're an animal
Speaker 1: that we eat. Animal that we utilize heavily a animal
Speaker 1: that we have all this historic documentation on this continent.
Speaker 1: Since we got here, we've been hunting bears. They're still here.
Speaker 1: They're they're they're they're able to withstand human honting when
Speaker 1: it's done in the right way, which clearly this is
Speaker 1: a way that that is being done. So so could
Speaker 1: could the volume be turned up, Could the throttle be
Speaker 1: turned up to where the hunt actually did manage population numbers?
Speaker 1: It could, and in many states it does.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: I mean there's there's lots of states where thousands of
Speaker 1: bears are being killed and they're they're they're they're taken
Speaker 1: them out of the population because that populations are that
Speaker 1: big that you can't take a token one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty seven bearers out of Wisconsin and expect the population
Speaker 1: to remain stable. I mean they're killing I want to say,
Speaker 1: in some of those those those states, they're killing four
Speaker 1: thousand bears a year. In Arkansas we're taking about five
Speaker 1: hundred bears, uh, which is not very many. Really a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of Appalachian states they harvest a
Speaker 1: lot of bears. But point being, I think it's important
Speaker 1: that we be honest. I hear Rannelli's say this, and
Speaker 1: it's I like it. He's like, we shouldn't say things
Speaker 1: that aren't true, that make us that created a false narrative.
Speaker 1: I mean, could we make the Florida bear hunt actually
Speaker 1: affect the population? You absolutely could, you know, But this
Speaker 1: is not that.
Speaker 3: This is not even that, And it's not to say
Speaker 3: that they never because if you look at the BMU distribution,
Speaker 3: there are BMus that have way more bears and BMus
Speaker 3: that have way less bears. You want those BMus with
Speaker 3: way less bears to continue to grow their population, while
Speaker 3: you want to manage it in some of these others.
Speaker 3: But I also think over time, we will begin to
Speaker 3: apply more data to this and say, hey, we've got
Speaker 3: more human bear conflicts in this BMU, or we're seeing
Speaker 3: more interactions negatively in that BMU, Like we'll begin to
Speaker 3: distribute the hunt differently to maybe address this. Maybe we
Speaker 3: do want this this BMU to always be at a
Speaker 3: thousand bears or whatever the thing is. And the other
Speaker 3: thing that I heard you say that kind of stuck
Speaker 3: would be something I say all the time. This is
Speaker 3: truly and I can't stress this enough. I've said it
Speaker 3: a couple of times, but this is truly conservation. Like
Speaker 3: I say, conservation is seeking the proper use of a resource.
Speaker 3: It's utilizing a resource correctly. We are about to utilize
Speaker 3: a resource correctly that we haven't tapped into for a
Speaker 3: long time for various reasons. And now I like to
Speaker 3: say preservation is for delicious JEMs and jellies. That's nothing
Speaker 3: to do with conservation. Give me a tool that we
Speaker 3: use in certain situations, but by and large, conservation is
Speaker 3: seeking how to use it correctly. That's everything we've talked
Speaker 3: about here today, and that's everything we're talking about in general.
Speaker 3: That's everything you talk about on every episode. You do
Speaker 3: right ultimately, like you can get into the weeds, the
Speaker 3: nuts and bolts of Turkey Juton or duck hunt or whatever,
Speaker 3: but the end of the day, I want to make
Speaker 3: sure that this resource is long term, sustainably able to
Speaker 3: be used. And I'm really proud of wear Florida landed
Speaker 3: on this, and I'm really proud of everybody that worked
Speaker 3: on it because it is a I don't think people
Speaker 3: outside the bear world understand how big of a movement
Speaker 3: this was to get this done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man, that's so cool. You said something there
Speaker 1: we hadn't talked about. And I've got a data point
Speaker 1: on bear human conflict. I remember in the last year
Speaker 1: reading that there was and I'm going to say a
Speaker 1: number and at for about six months. I could quote
Speaker 1: the exact number. I've forgotten the exact number, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote a number. Five thousand, nine hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty six bear calls the state of Florida received in
Speaker 1: baar nuisance complaints in a single year. Wow, like in
Speaker 1: twenty three, yeah, or twenty two back, but it was
Speaker 1: somewhere in the fifty nine hundred range.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: And I did the math on it, and that's one
Speaker 1: bear call for every fifteen minutes of a working day.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: And basically the state of Florida. And I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know that all those calls go into the same place,
Speaker 1: but theoretically they would, they would, They could hire one
Speaker 1: person that as a full time All they did every
Speaker 1: day for a forty hour work week, from the time
Speaker 1: they got there to the time they left, was field
Speaker 1: calls of people saying, A bears in my trash can,
Speaker 1: A bears eating my flowers, A bear killed chase my dog,
Speaker 1: A bear did this or that. I mean in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: I want to say we're getting like under two hundred
Speaker 1: conuisance bear calls a year. Wow, Florida pushing six thousand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has to do with the population. There's twenty two
Speaker 1: million people there. Yeah, people, right, and there's that much,
Speaker 1: that many roads, that many people, A burgeoning bear population.
Speaker 1: I bet there's I bet they're right on there's more
Speaker 1: than four thousand bears if you were waging I bet
Speaker 1: it's more.
Speaker 3: I read. I read in the twenty nineteen report we
Speaker 3: euthanize forty a year. Okay, so one percent of the
Speaker 3: population we kill a year, just as nuisance bears. And
Speaker 3: that's on average.
Speaker 1: I bet, I bet there's I bet there's a lot
Speaker 1: more than that. And what I learned I've just seen
Speaker 1: this with bear bare numbers is that the agencies are
Speaker 1: usually pretty conservative on bearers, conservative very so they're there
Speaker 1: if they say there's four thousand, there's probably more than that,
Speaker 1: but if they don't have the actual data, Like so,
Speaker 1: the way that they're doing bear population studies today is yeah,
Speaker 1: they're using bear bears, hair snares Josh to put up
Speaker 1: a bait station, put barbed wire up about twenty inches
Speaker 1: or however long, put it around so a bear has
Speaker 1: either step over it or crawl under it, and there's
Speaker 1: barbed wire and it catches hair. And basically they do
Speaker 1: they'll take like a grid of habitat let's say ten
Speaker 1: square miles, and they'll put five bear hair snare traps
Speaker 1: in that ten square miles. They will take all the
Speaker 1: hair samples genetically analyze it to understand exactly how many
Speaker 1: individual bears came to those traps in that ten square miles.
Speaker 1: Then they will analyze the habitat in that ten square miles.
Speaker 1: This is a generalization of how they do this. And
Speaker 1: they'll say, well, we have a thousand other ten square
Speaker 1: mile blocks that the habitat is similar, and we know
Speaker 1: there's bears there. We're going to extrapolate it. And they
Speaker 1: do this like checkerboarded across the bear habitat and they go, well,
Speaker 1: in this ten square block ten square miles, we've got
Speaker 1: seventeen bears, We've got this many soals and this many cubs.
Speaker 1: And then the block twenty seven miles away has the
Speaker 1: same numbers, and they go every block in between there
Speaker 1: probably has the same. Basically, they get a really good.
Speaker 3: Look at.
Speaker 1: How bad you know, population dynamics of bears. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: how they do it now. Used two they were doing
Speaker 1: like they were using hunter harvest, not necessarily in Florida,
Speaker 1: but another place they were using hunter harvest numbers. I
Speaker 1: told the story, Well they covered it on the Medior podcast,
Speaker 1: but in California for years they used hunter harvest numbers
Speaker 1: to decide the population. Basically, they were like, whatever the
Speaker 1: hunters kill, we've probably got x number more bears than that,
Speaker 1: and so as long as we're killing two thousand bears
Speaker 1: a year, we probably got twenty thousand bears and we're okay.
Speaker 1: Well then they they gutted the management practices of Californias bait.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so all you could do is like.
Speaker 1: Spotting stock bears, which is very difficult. And so they
Speaker 1: started killing like a thousand bears a year in California.
Speaker 1: And then the anti hunting community, god bless them, they
Speaker 1: were like, the bears are in crisis because we tell
Speaker 1: our numbers of bears about how many bears are killing,
Speaker 1: they're not killing very many. Oh, we got to shut
Speaker 1: the whole hunt down. Yeah, this is not a joke.
Speaker 1: This happened and then the game and fish is like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, this is not true. This is crazy.
Speaker 1: We got to do a real study. They do a
Speaker 1: hair they do a modern hair, simple study, and they
Speaker 1: find out that there's between sixty and eighty thousand bears
Speaker 1: in California. I mean, it's a wild story, but uh
Speaker 1: but yeah, just it'll be interesting to see the numbers
Speaker 1: in Florida.
Speaker 3: It'll be really interesting to see the numbers in Florida.
Speaker 3: And I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm a Florida boy through
Speaker 3: and through. So I think, Man, I think our wildlife
Speaker 3: agency is top notch and I really trust them implicitly.
Speaker 3: Like bears weren't under We have a we have an
Speaker 3: HGM Hunting and Game Management Division, and then we have
Speaker 3: Habitat and Species Conservation, which is not honting. That's all
Speaker 3: non game and lands. Bears were under HSC and now
Speaker 3: it's becoming a it's going back under hunting. So but
Speaker 3: that HSC division, like that team has just they're incredible,
Speaker 3: Like I trust them implicitly with the science that they
Speaker 3: produced and the science that will continue to produce, They're
Speaker 3: going to get it right. And there's nobody in Florida
Speaker 3: that's affiliated with this, that that wants to see bear
Speaker 3: numbers decline at this point, like we want to see
Speaker 3: them survive and thrive. This is a win, dude, this
Speaker 3: is where we want to be. Yeah, so I'm I'm
Speaker 3: over the moon where we're at.
Speaker 1: I think it's the longest burgers we were had.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: So we've been talking for two hours. No, that's been
Speaker 1: I've loved Memphis.
Speaker 2: Everything about this is moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, this this is really really great. Well, man,
Speaker 1: is there anything we've not covered you want to cover?
Speaker 3: No? I think I think we can we How can
Speaker 3: we help you?
Speaker 1: Guys?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: Who should we? What? Is there a call to action
Speaker 1: for for us outside of Florida?
Speaker 3: Not not right now, there's not.
Speaker 2: I mean we send anybody a thank you card.
Speaker 3: The Honey community writ large like whoever, whoever it is
Speaker 3: you love in the Honey community that I don't I
Speaker 3: don't care what group it is. They all like showed
Speaker 3: up and showed out on this.
Speaker 1: I would I would like to when I think about
Speaker 1: a hunt and in these hunters who I considered my brothers,
Speaker 1: going out and going to harvest one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: seven bears.
Speaker 3: This fall.
Speaker 1: Man, I I just want I just hope everybody's just
Speaker 1: like the culture is just on their best behavior.
Speaker 3: Do your best yea, yeah, you know your best.
Speaker 1: And and I think I think that as as a
Speaker 1: hunting culture and as a as a as kind of
Speaker 1: a tribe, that we can we can ask that of people,
Speaker 1: and and I and and you know specifics would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, be tasteful and respectful on social media when
Speaker 1: you're posting these pictures. And in in somebody listened to
Speaker 1: this podcast, maybe maybe they learned something. I learned something.
Speaker 1: But man, for for for us to be able to
Speaker 1: for a hunter to kill a bear and him to
Speaker 1: actually understand bear management, understand a little bit about bears,
Speaker 1: understand some of the things we've talked about today goes
Speaker 1: a long ways. Like even in a social media post,
Speaker 1: to be like, man, I got this bear, and and
Speaker 1: and I love posting pictures on social media.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: There's been times when we'd be like, don't put any
Speaker 1: gripping grins on man, I still do. No, we own
Speaker 1: what we do, and but but to to be able
Speaker 1: to to have the words, to be able to articulate
Speaker 1: the philosophy of why we do what we do with
Speaker 1: the tenor of respect to that animal, to wild places
Speaker 1: to conserve, and even inside in a set in a
Speaker 1: tone that would be sympathetic to someone who wouldn't understand. Now,
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying you know, change who you are.
Speaker 1: It's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, we can't
Speaker 1: be mad at somebody for not knowing. We can't be
Speaker 1: mad at somebody. And I'm speaking to myself, Yeah, I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't be upset with that person because they just
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 3: It is critical how we handle this. Florida hunters, how
Speaker 3: they handle this, or out of state hunters if they come,
Speaker 3: how we how we present this will determine what future
Speaker 3: rhetoric looks like. Right, and hunting is not the mainstream
Speaker 3: thing it once was. You guys immediator have talked about
Speaker 3: this for a long time, but it's not the mainstream.
Speaker 3: I mean again, I'll refer back to stars in the Sky.
Speaker 3: I think Riddella said that in the fifties, like four
Speaker 3: percent of America hunted, or it was, it was a
Speaker 3: high number. In Florida, we got twenty two andred million
Speaker 3: people in two hundred and fifty thousand Honting mices. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's a fingernail on that state, which is why the
Speaker 3: right to fish and hunt was so important to us
Speaker 3: to protect that. But that's just a backstop, like how
Speaker 3: we conduct ourselves, how we behave in this world. And
Speaker 3: again I'm not saying I'm saying the same thing you are.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying you don't post a dead animal. I'm
Speaker 3: not saying you don't. But the way you talk about
Speaker 3: it and the way you post it, the way you
Speaker 3: present it, I'll say, selfishly makes my job way harder
Speaker 3: to go into rooms and try to move needles on
Speaker 3: getting things like this reopened. Man, it could be a
Speaker 3: tremendous help. And and again the honey community has handled
Speaker 3: themselves beautifully through this entire process, Like they've done it.
Speaker 3: If I'd have asked for them to do it, if
Speaker 3: I could have just gone to everyone, I'm gon said
Speaker 3: hit this out, wants you to do it, this is
Speaker 3: how they would have done it. So I'm really proud
Speaker 3: of where we are. We continue that going. There's no
Speaker 3: telling what else we can get done, and not just
Speaker 3: in Florida, but but Nashally. I think there's a whole
Speaker 3: lot of stuff we can get done. That is hunting,
Speaker 3: pro hunting, but pro concert. That's gonna it's gonna help
Speaker 3: keep this stuff that we care about.
Speaker 1: While Yeah, well Travis, thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 1: Travis had like three when do we talk Friday?
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, Thursday, Friday, Thursday, it was it was maybe
Speaker 3: Thursday afternoon.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Travis came here and just like super short notice.
Speaker 1: So thanks a ton man, Thanks for all your work.
Speaker 3: For real.
Speaker 1: I know you guys probably don't get a lot of
Speaker 1: pats on the back, but you should. I mean, often
Speaker 1: the thank yous goes to people that didn't have anything
Speaker 1: to do with it, like people that you know are
Speaker 1: are I just think about I had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with this.
Speaker 3: Well this this has something to do with it, and
Speaker 3: we appreciate it. But there, like I said, there was
Speaker 3: nobody that didn't. It's like you look at a football team.
Speaker 3: I'll watch sports football team. He pay praise a wide receiver,
Speaker 3: the quarterback, running back, whatever. That guy's not snapping the
Speaker 3: ball in the middle, or that right guards not holding
Speaker 3: the blindman off like nothing's happening. The defense didn't come
Speaker 3: out there and play special team like it takes a
Speaker 3: complete team to get this stuff done. Everything that we
Speaker 3: get done, it takes a complete team, so every everybody
Speaker 3: gets to play a part, and it's it's just an
Speaker 3: honor to be on that team.
Speaker 1: What's the name of your your organization all Florida. So
Speaker 1: it's A L L F L A dot O. That's
Speaker 1: your that's just your organization US.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And but then you work for International Order
Speaker 3: of Theodore Roosevelt. Okay, so that's t DASH Roosevelt dot org.
Speaker 3: I believe, is there, Carol. So those are great organizations
Speaker 3: that that I'm really proud of. And in Florida, there's
Speaker 3: not a room that we're not in when it comes
Speaker 3: to hunting, fishing, conservation stuff like like we are. We
Speaker 3: have somebody in just about every room that's that's incredible.
Speaker 3: So we're we're really proud of that and we love
Speaker 3: we love that place. So hopefully you guys will come
Speaker 3: down here. Man, I bear Turkey, really dear to my heart,
Speaker 3: come hunted duck. But we can figure it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we appreciated, man, Josh, come down there, fly fishing brother.
Speaker 1: Ah Well, I'm in thank you all for having me
Speaker 1: keep the wild place as wild because that's where the
Speaker 1: bears Living. We need a big corridor right through floor.
Speaker 3: That's right