00:00:02 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cal's weekend review, presented by Steel. Steel products are available only at authorized dealers. For more, go to Steel Dealers dot com. Now here's your host, Ryan cal Callahan. The Washington State Fish and Wildlife Commission voted earlier this month to suspend the state's permit only spring black bear hunt. Opponents argued that the hunt threatens the bear population and is a quote cruel way to kill black bears as they attempt to recover from hibernation and raise their cubs. Supporters of the hunt, which include the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, argued that the spring hunt is a key tool to manage the bear population, mitigate tree and property damage, limit ungulate mortality, and reduce human bear conflicts. Side note. If you're wondering about the tree damage part of the bear situation and you need a good short read and some context regarding black bears and tree conflict, find Born under a Stump, The Life and Legend of Big Bill Hewlett by Russ Hewlett. The word can be them will forever be blazed into your brain anyway. They also pointed out that spring hunts have been taking place in the state for decades without apparent harm to the bear population. In two thousand twenty one, only a single lactating female was harvested among the one hundred and twenty four total bears killed that spring. By the way, four bears is not a lot of bears. In addition, the spring hunt represents only a fraction of the total bear harvest. Over the past five years, Washington's average fall black bear harvest was one thousand, five hundred and fifty six animals, while the spring average was only one. In short, the Commission's decision does not appear based in the science. The state of Washington invests in and hunters pay for. The hunt accomplishes several important management goals without threatening the bear population or resulting in the large scale death of sALS with cubs. So why did commissioners vote to suspend the two thousand two spring bear hunt in Washington. There are several reasons. First, you should know that the vote literally could not have been closer. The commission is supposed to have nine members representing different regions of the state, but Democratic Governor j Insley has dragged his feet appointing a ninth commissioner this spring, the spring bear hunt must be reauthorized every year, so the commissions for four split vote, suspended the hunt. Commissioners who voted against the hunt questioned whether the Department of Fish and Wildlife was accurately estimating the bear population, but one of their main arguments had nothing to do with science. Quote like it or not, it's a social issue you that we have many people concerned about, said Commissioner Frank Kuntz during a recent commission meeting. Coonts argued that if they don't succumb to social pressure to ban the hunt, animal rights groups could turn to the legislature or a ballot initiative. Then all of a sudden, we have a bigger problem than we ever imagined, he said. Commissioner Larry Carpenter, who also voted no, made a similar argument in an interview with Northwest Sportsman. Many believed Carpenter would vote to continue the spring hunt, but he disappointed expectations this year. He says to get the hunt on more solid ground for the long term, he wants to put the spring hunt on the docket again next year, when hopefully the Department of Fish and Wildlife has a firmer grasp on the current state of the black bear population. The question, of course, is whether the animal rights activists who currently opposed the hunt will be convinced by any amount of new scientific evidence. I'm gonna go out on the limb and say no, they won't at all. They don't like black bear hunting. They don't like hunting, and this is what they do. Their arguments aren't based on science or reason. They're based on emotion, and they're using their small group of passionate supporters to put pressure on commissioners. In this arena, they've kicked our butts. At the public comment meeting, fifty of the fifty three people who testified opposed the hunt. According to Northwest Sportsman, they described the hunt as unethical, a trophy hunt, an outrage end quote, recreational assassination. In light of this overwhelming public opposition, it's no wonder the Commission voted to suspend the hunt. Maybe it goes without saying, but the hunting community has to do better. We need to show up to these commission meetings, we need to contact our representatives, and we need to stop assuming that the anti hunting lobby will ever be satisfied with anything but a total hunting band. Back in the nineties, these animal rights groups convinced Washington to band bear baiting and bear hunting with dogs, but they weren't satisfied. Now they're going after bear hunting altogether, and they're picking the spring hunt as their first easy target. It's possible the Commission votes to reinstate the spring hunt next year. I hope they do. The North American model of wildlife conservation is one of the greatest conservation success stories in history, and it's been largely driven and funded by hunters and anglers. Waterfowl, turkeys, mule deer, and black bass thrived today thanks to this model. Keep track of your state's Wildlife Commission meetings and when the time comes, tell that story. Explain why many of America's most iconic animals owe their survival to the outdoor community, And when providing testimony at your commission meeting, which I know you will do, be prepared and practiced to succinctly state why hunting is important to you, your community, and how you utilize the animals you kill when you are fortunate enough to connect with one. My experience at meetings like this is that non hunters assumed that every time a hunter hits the woods and animal dies. A little context on how much time in the woods is needed on average to bring something home is helpful, especially when you are filling up the vehicle and buying groceries in the small communities that border your favorite locations. I guarantee you just because you don't want to show up to the meetings doesn't mean the animal rights folks don't want to either. This week, we've got Wisconsin white tails, ticks transmissions, and the King's Game. But first, I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week has all of the sudden gone from a disappointing seventy five degrees in Kansas to a feels a heck of a lot colder than the thermometer reads eleven degrees in Wisconsin. I've been visiting my friend and a longtime friend of meat eater, Doug Durham. Doug Busy as always, has had me out for the last two days of month, a loader season and the first ever Doe Derby, which coincidentally coincides with the last doe season rifle season of the year. The Dough Derby is a concoction of his that is an attempt to incentivize landowners to allow hunters, particularly new hunters, onto their property to kill white tailed does, and to incentivize hunters in general to get out and take advantage of a final rifle season aimed at you guessed at harvesting more white tailed does in previous years. Many landowners and the state of Wisconsin has recognized that there are an overabundance of white tails in many counties. Overpopulation has effects on agriculture, including wood lots, and higher deer densities lead to more accidents on the roadways and higher concentrations of c w D, brainworm, and other diseases. If you have heard of Doug Durham, you probably at this point associate him with chronic wasting disease or c w D. Doug has perhaps more than most, possibly less than some, taking c w D very seriously. Although Doug has never personally killed a deer with c w D during his hunting season, he has been positively motivated by the site of c w D infected deer to you know, be proactive about things. Chronic wasting disease, as everybody knows by now right, is a folded over protein, a pre on that builds for twelve to fourteen months to really we don't quite know, and in the later stages starts smoking little holes and undulates brains. They in turn have a slow, miserable, drooling death. It's not pretty. Chronic wasting disease is relatively new on the landscape. We don't truly know all the things that we do need to know about it. Speaking with a local biologists for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, their stance is help us out by participating in voluntary c w D testing of your dear. A negative test result or a non positive test result is just as important as a positive test result. What they're trying to do is they're trying to understand how c w D spreads at what rate, in what age of animals is at most prevalent, and they need your help to do it. Keep in mind, you could take chronic wasting disease and think about it in terms of COVID. Not a darned person on the planet loves to be told what to do. The word mandatory, be it quarantine or face mass or that super scary word vaccine, sounds very good with the word mandatory in front of it or behind it. Are associated with it in any way. However, voluntary is a good thing, and right now with chronic wasting disease before it possibly spreads to humans or other animals such as cattle that consume the exact same grass that an infected deer could cough up preons onto. Just so you know that, I'm not, you know, the preacher, but also part of the choir. I guess the deer that my girlfriend shot on the last day of Montana hunting season. We turned in the head to Montana Fishing Game. They tested for c w D and we just got a negative or non positive test result on that animal. So you know, we're harvesting deer in a zone that is not known for c w D. But we are hunters who care about the resource. It's very easy for us and for all of you truly to turn in ahead or set a lymph nodes to add to the information surrounding chronic wasting disease. We're citizens, scientists, science rules. Hunting is conservation, remember anyway, Moving on, scientists at Yale University have developed a new vaccine against ticks that's been successful in early testing on guinea pigs. Now, if you don't own a guinea pig. This still applies to you. You might think I'm being sort of imprecise here, because you know, shouldn't it be a vaccine against tick born diseases, not the ticks themselves? If we need something effective against a tick, isn't that what the flea and tick collars we get for dogs are for. But that's the extremely smart thing about this vaccine. It is actually targeting compounds in the saliva of the ticks rather than any of the specific diseases that the saliva carries, sort of like shutting down a road rather than trying to disable all the specific cars on that road. This is a good approach because ticks carry a lot of different diseases. You have likely heard of or even contracted limes disease. Is I have Rocky Mountain spotted fever or the dreaded alpha gel syndrome which makes you violently allergic to red meat. But ticks can also give you typhus rickett, Seo pox, Boutanese fever, African tick bite fever, Flinders Island spotted fever, Queensland typhus Q fever, Colorado tick fever, crimean congo hammorrhagic fever, tularemia, tick born relapsing fever, babe siosis, airliosis, meningio en cephalitis, bovine and a plasmosis heartland virus, and something called the Bourbon virus, which I need to look into further, but I guarantee is less fun that it sounds. And that's just a selection. Remember you can always correct my pronunciation at a s K C A L that's spelled ask cal at the meat eater dot com. Trying to develop a vaccine for all of these nasties is therefore much more complicated than us going after the compounds that almost all ticks everywhere have in their saliva. In the Yale trials, vaccine antibodies attacked those proteins at the site of the tick bite, quickly creating a visible redness that lets scientists locate and remove the ticks before they had time to transmit their nasty cargo. This is important because, as you likely know, when, the most dangerous things about ticks is how hard they are to detect. When they bite you, they inject compounds known as evaisance, which deactivate the inflammatory response like itching and redness that comes with other kinds of insect bites. That term evason, as you can probably tell, comes from the word evasive, the quality of being able to avoid or bypass something if you need it. In a sentence, old cal is out evason tickboard diseases. That's called the joke folks. Anyway, making a tick bite more annoying makes it easier to find and get rid of the tick. One of the lead authors on the study, Errol Fickrigg, said, quote, when you feel a mosquito bite, you swat it with the tick vaccine. There is a redness and likely an itch, so you can recognize that you have been bitten and can pull the tick off quickly. Remember, early detection is key to curving the effects of limes disease, let alone all the rest of those hard to pronounce diseases. Interestingly, the compounds that cause this redness and itching, called chemo kinds, also cause other inflammatory diseases when they get out of control in the body, such as asthma, arthritis, and cancer. Evasance like those in tick saliva are therefore being studied as a possible treatment for inhibiting chemo kinds to treat these illnesses. One person's trash or tick bite rather as another's treasure anyway. In addition to making tick bites more detectable, the Yale vaccine also prevented ticks from feeding as successfully and them much easier to dislodge. Scientists took parts of the genetic code for tick saliva and embedded them in messenger RNA or m RNA. mRNA tells other DNA in your body what kind of proteins to create. The body reads that tick saliva code and produces the corresponding antibodies. The common metaphor for mRNA vaccines is that they are the blueprint for a virus or anagym. It's as though the body we're looking at a plan of a house and deciding where to put the furniture, rather than having to walk into a fully built speck house to make the same decisions. If you remember back to our episode on anti venom when Old Snort was bitten by Rattler, you'll recall that the anti venom works on a similar vaccine model of prompting the body to create antibodies with harmless versions of venom molecules. Some dog trainers will even use anti venom in advance too, In a fact, vaccinate their dogs against snake bites so many in our lifetimes. We'll see this development of m r NA anti venom vaccines. There's obviously been a lot of vaccine hesitancy recently, but it will be interesting to see whether the tick vaccine will get skeptics over the line. There are a whole lot of people who live for eating red meat and facing the possibility of contracting alpha gel and then finding barbecue disgusting is something anyone can take seriously, even U Texans over to the t and crumpets Desk. The National Trust in the UK has banned the practice known as trail hunting on all of its land, almost six hundred and twenty thousand acres across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Trail hunting is what people invented after fox hunting was banned in the UK in two thousand four. Instead of chasing a real fox, a rag soaked in fox scent is dragged along a course. The dogs follow the scent, and hunters on horseback in very specific outfits chase the dogs and blow horn and do all the things that you see in old cartoons, which you know approximates the original hunt as best they can. That likely sounds pretty harmless to you, and you might wonder why it would be banned. Well, earlier this year, the head of Britain's main fox hunting organization was caught leading webinars teaching people to pretend to be trail hunting while actually hunting live foxes. That's right, they're still learning what the internet is. This corroborated the claims of anti hunters, who said that trail hunting had always just been a smoke screen for illegal fox hunts, which in turn led to the trail hunting band on National Trust Lands. We talked about fox hunting around this time last year, because Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, is traditionally the biggest fox hunt of the year. In that episode, we talked about another smoke screen fox hunters had been using, toting along falcon because hunting foxes with falcons is legal in the UK, and it should be because raptors are extremely cool. However, folks even use this as another loophole to just chase foxes with horses, which equated to even more bad publicity. And no matter what you think about hunting foxes in particular, there are a whole bunch of things about this story that might make you glad to be hunting well anywhere outside the United Kingdom. First off, let's look at the entity that's implementing this particular ban. The name National Trust might make you think of our national parks, but in Britain, the public doesn't own any land at all. The National Trust is a private organization that has taken control of certain culturally important pieces of land, as well as certain historical buildings and objects, in order to preserve those things and make sure they would never get sold off, which is a fantastic mission. But when you get down to it, regular joes, or I guess regular nigels in this case can only access National Trust land because the National Trust agrees to let them do so. This is a similar set up to all the other land that the public and access in the United Kingdom. Traditionally, large estate owners would set aside areas so that non landowners could graze, animals, cut hey, so on, and this territory is still known as the commons. Those who use it are known as commoners. And you thought you wouldn't learn anything today. Similarly, people are able to walk all across Britain because private landowners agree to leave walking trails open again. This is really nice of the private landowners, and the tradition of quote right to rome is very very strong in the UK, but there is no fundamental right at the bottom of it all for the public to be in those places. And throughout British history many pieces of land traditionally set aside for calm owners became more enclosed and inaccessible. Part of the reason fox hunting got started in the first place was because tracts of land big enough to support deer habitat were split up, and eventually there were very few deer left to hunt. The other thing about the British trail hunting news that makes me happy to live and hunt in the United States is reading about the anti hunters in the United Kingdom. Just the names of those organizations give you an idea of what it's like over there. The League against Cruel Sports is one, but my favorite is the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Over here. It is against the law of harass hunters in the field over there. The harassment you can put right in the title of your organization. These groups are pressuring other landowners in the UK to ban trail hunting as well. Like the Ministry of Defense, Forestry of England and the Crown you know, the Queen again. No public ownership of land over there. Even just finding out who owns and in the UK is almost impossible. Much of that information is a closely guarded secret. The idea of walking around with on X on your phone and seeing who owns what it's kind of out of the question. You might be wondering why am going on about hunting and landownership in Britain. Well, the first reason is that this is the time of year we traditionally pause and express our gratitude for the good things in our lives. I feel very grateful for my ability to drive down the road to land I own in common with the rest of you, and pursue animals to feed myself and my loved ones. And second, I need to include some news from the UK, not just for my listeners over there who will write in and let me know what to think about my writings, but also I'm talking about the UK because certain things here in the US of A are really not so different. After all, if you're paying attention, consider the recent ban on trapping on public land in New Mexico. Consider the closing of public land to non subsistence hunters in Alaska, or that Washington state bear hunt suspension we mentioned earlier. Just recently, the Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit against US Fish and Wildlife for expanding hunting on National wildlife refugees. And what should maybe make us most uncomfortable when we compare ourselves to the United Kingdom, Consider that only four percent of the land in Britain is considered developed, meaning very little over there is irreversibly messed up. Defining quote unquote developed land in the US is difficult, and by far the largest land use category in America is cattle grazing. But the fastest growing land use category in the US is urban sprawl, and right up there is acquisition of land by wealthy buyers. In fact, according to the Land Report magazine, between two thousand eight and two thousand eighteen, the amount of land owned by the one hundred large as private landowners grew from twenty eight million acres to forty million acres, an area larger than the state of Florida. While that in itself can be and in a lot of instances has been, a very good thing, it's only a good thing if it's left in open space and not turned into those terrible ranch ats. You know you've heard me talk about this. We want cows, not condos. Cow elk. You know. Something to consider too. Along with this list of threats is a growing push to privatize and monetize wildlife. So while we feel grateful for what we have, we've got to stay extremely frosty to protect and expand it. Let's not let the relationship between hunters and non hunters get as bad in America as it seems to be in the UK. Hunters in the UK are marginalized easily because hunting there is expensive, almost exclusively an upper class activity that long long ago excluded the commoners. So if you had success in the field this fall, how about inviting over some non hunters for some of that venison backstrapper goose leg can fi maybe during this dinner party, see if he can work in a few key concepts about hunting, licenses and tags, paying for conservation, or even how cool it is that here we have over six hundred and forty million acres of public land to go out and enjoy. And by the way, did you know that in the US the game is owned by the people, and what a great concept that is. Doesn't matter where that white tail buck deer sits, if he's on public or on private, it is not property of the landowner, but of the people and managed by the state. You know. Get all that across without being too long winded. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for list thing. If you have not noticed, winter has finally started to arrive. You may want to go to www. Dot Steel Dealers dot com and be prepared as I am with a clean, quiet, powerful steel, battery powered chainsaw. Toss her behind your seat. You never know when you'll need it. And, last, but not least, right in to a s k C A L that's asked cal at the Media Eater dot com and let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next week.