00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan cal Kellan. Now Here's Cal Elliott. The elk may sound like a cartoon character, but boy is he real. Elliott made headlines after being removed from his home near the town of Sweet, Idaho. Unfortunately, the headlines surrounding Elliott fit a common theme. Someone had been feeding the young bull for so long that he's lost his fear of humans. To make matters worse, Elliott completely lost the other elk. As I mentioned in episode twenty of Cal's Weekend Review, we're into the breeding season, which can make elk super aggressive. Deer and elk have been lethally removed from many urban areas across the country because of aggressive mating season related behavior, behavior that has resulted in serious human injuries in some cases. But this particular elk has a name and a Facebook page, so he was picked up by Idaho Fishing Game and relocated to Bear Valley, Idaho. Bear Valley, Idaho, is not the home of Barry Bear or Billy Bear or Yogi Bear. It's just a spot in Idaho. Officials hoped Elliott would have his best chance at reconnecting with elk. There, you know, I just realized I'm contributing to the problem by bowing to the anthropomorphized vision. Naming an animal promotes From here on, when I say the bull or young bull, I am referring to the you know, one who shall not be named. Got it good? Like I was saying. When the young bull was moved from his first location to the second, folks hope that he would somehow learn to be an elk again, but he just made more headlines. This time. The young bull made the papers by hanging out with a group of archery hunters can to outside Bear Valley for Idaho's opening week of archery elk season. This group of hunters recognized the young bull both by his behavior and his recent time in the spotlight. The elk hung around the camp and even bedded down within ten yards of the hunters, reportedly as wolves sang in the background when Idaho Fishing Game eventually showed up to quote capture the bowl, which the capture apparently involved opening the stock trailer door and then the bowl just hopped in because that's how we got to the place. Imagine that they found him surrounded by archery elk hunters making sure no one caused the young bull any harm. These hunters knew the bowl lacked any education from his elk piers, and they wanted to avoid a nasty social media firestorm. If some unsuspecting hunter were to see a winter's worth of stakes and ross rather than a social media celebrity and put an arrow through them, you can imagine the ensuing backlash. Currently, the young bull resides in the custody of Idaho fishing game, who are trying to find him a home. Several facilities outside the state of Idaho will take in hard luck cases like this one, an animal robbed of his wildness whose best remaining option is to spend his life in captivity due to the potential spread of diseases like chronic wasting disease. However, transporting live serveds across state lines is prohibited unless the states are certified as c w D free, which Idaho is not. Consequently, this homeless elk will be denied even the comparatively sad fate of pacing around a zoo at this point, sad for the elk, but also a burden on fishing game, who now have to deal with caring for this animal. Idaho Fishing Game receives zero dollars from general taxpayers. Hunting and fishing license sales a k sportsmen and women pay for all of this, not the person who literally fed this expensive situation into existence. I couldn't even find a mention of a fine or ticket being issued. This brings me back to another point I made in last week's episode. Quit feeding wildlife. I don't care how cute or majestic you think they are. I don't care what kind of relationship you think you have with them. You haven't found your spirit animal. Feeding wild creatures robs them of their wildness and in some cases, their actual lives. Cut it out. I feel like this elk feeder missed one of life's most valuable responsibility talks. You know, the one you got when you were a kid and wanted to pet a gerbil, a cat, a dog, a goldfish, whatever the species. The talk is the same. Being as I have never had children, I thought I would bring in a pro meat eater's own. Yannas patel Us, you want to what now? Are you sure? That is a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. You understand me. Animals are expensive? How do you think you're gonna pay for it, But if the damn thing gets sick, I want you to know this. They eat a lot of food and then they poop a out And I know you say you're gonna pick it up. I'm going to hold you to it. Damn it. You can't just give it away if you get bored with it. And if it grows huge handlers and skewer some kid on their way to school, that's gonna be on you. You hear me. You know that speech. Thank you, Joannice. Moving off the soapbox and onto the show. We all know fall is the most magical time of year, and if you're like me, you'll be putting on a lot of miles getting to places to hunt fish and enjoy the cool air and fall colors. I suggest you keep some power in your vehicle in the form of the world's number one chainsaw. Steel ice do battery power. Steel saws are lightweight, clean, quiet, and you can throw them in the back of the truck without worry of gas spilling all over your hunting gear or camping equipment. If that's not enough, my mother wants used an electric chainsaw to remove a section a kitchen cabinets from the actual kitchen, so you know they're versatile. This week we've got buying and selling game meat, uk way really old milk, broken legs, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. It seems I have always trapes to cross the US. I've met a ton of people and made a lot of great friends and connections. Earlier this year, I was in New Mexico, a state that I have always loved to talk conservation with New Mexico Wildlife Federation. Fun fact about n m WF. It was founded by Although Leopold. If you don't know who he was, go find yourself a copy of a Sam County almanac right now. Another fun fact. New Mexico Wildlife Federation is full of great folks, and they had teamed up with the New Mexico Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers for this pint night situation. Anyway, I found myself speaking with a bunch of people at a brewery one night in Albuquerque and ended up in conversation with some members of the Zuni Pueblo tribe. Naturally, we started talking hunting, and one thing struck me as funny was one of the guys entered used himself as a mule deer insurance man, which caught me off guard. The reason he was a mule deer insurance man is all he hunts our mountain lions and bobcats, things that eat mule deer. Another topic of conversation was in regards to hunting tradition and the fact that many Zuni hunters carry with them a personal hunting fetish. I'll let this guy Joshua tell his next part in his own words, read by me, you get them. We Zunis have an oral belief that the original fetishes discovered in our homelands were of once living wild animals that were struck with arrows. These animals were turned to stone as they attempted to attack our people during our origin journey to discover the center of the world. This area is a valley basin in western New Mexico, now called Zuni Pueblo. Since then, Zunis believed that the fetishes we carry out hunting today still hold the spirit of whatever wild animal that was entombed within that stone before it became our hunting fetishes. Thus, it is the responsibility of the artist to remove that animal from that stone and return it back to its physical being in order to aid and protect us as we carry them with us on our hunts and journeys, where these same living wild animals still rome. So the fetish that Joshua gave me is this bear, and he goes into really awesome detail as to why it is a bear. On top of the bear. Tied to the top of bear is a small stone arrowhead. Point. This is the second part of the letter. Here the stone and arrowhead were both gathered from our reservation to create your fetish. The arrowhead that adorns the bear's back was collected by my father in his place. There to serve two purposes. The first is to ensure that we, as hunters, must always provide the quickest and most ethical means of harvesting that animal in order to minimize the suffering felt. It is also there to aid in protecting you. It reminds other predators that you too carry the ability and the potential to take life of whatever animal wishes to cause you harm. The stone was carved by a distant relative of mine, and he added some personalization to it as well. On one side of the bear, you will notice a traditional turquoise arrowline. We considered the arrow to be the heartline and serves as a reminder to us that although the bear is made of stone, the spirit and lifeline of the animal remains within. On the opposite side of the bear is a coral and turquoise star. My family is known for wearing this type of star on our traditional wears. We again view it as a symbol of strength and protection. The artist thought it was appropriate to add this star to your bear as another way of connecting my family to you. Well, Joshua, I really can't tell you how much this means to me. I've never really been one for gifts, so I'm taken it back to New Mexico. You see. About twenty minutes after this fetish and really amazing letter landed in my lap, I received a phone call from my friend Brian Broderick telling me that another good friend, Dirk Durham a k a. The Bugler, had fallen and torn his shoulder in Idaho. Dirk had a Unit thirteen archery ELK tag for the HeLa National Forest in New Mexico, which he could not use because he can't draws bow. This scenario of having that tag in your pocket and not being able to even attempt to fill it is basically the all time biggest gut punch for an archery elk gay. This area of New Mexico is full of elk and his downright beautiful. I felt terrible for Dirk and related how bad I felt to my friend on the other line. Then Old Brian said, well, do you want to go or not? Twenty minutes after a real gift of a lifetime from a new friend in New Mexico lands on my desk, I get an opportunity to hunt in an elk unit in New Mexico. I have always wanted to hunt. How the heck does that work? So, Joshua, I am taking my fetish back to New Mexico. It will be our first journey together. I hope I can make you and your family proud. So we just said so long and good luck to Elliot the elk he who should not be named. Let me introduce you to Broken Leg, the lion. Broken Leg lives on Santa Anna Pueblo, a seventy nine thousand acre area located in New Mexico's fertile Rio Grand Valley. Broken Leg received his moniker by researchers who captured the cat and noticed a bulbous calcification on its right rear leg, the result of an old break. If humans use that same logic when referring to each other, then you could call me old broken nose or old torn meniscus. Biologists equipped Broken Leg with a GPS collar and kept close tabs on his whereabouts, so close, in fact, that they were able to document many of the cats kills over a fifteen month period. What they found was astounding. At the top of the cougar menu was, of all things badger, Broken Leg killed in eighty four badgers during their study, which is an average of one point six badgers per month. During that time, the cat also ate one move flaw on sheet, one feral dog, two porkypines, eight beavers, and nine coyotes. Besides addie eats, Broken Leg killed two mule deer, two antelope, and seventeen elk. Ninety yolk were calves, six were cows, and two were bulls. His diet is quite impressive, and it makes me damn jealous of Broken Legs hunting skills. Um willing to deem this cougar the best hunter in the American Southwest, second only two cutting the distance as host Remy Warren. Of course, yeah, dunkee eaton. Let's hopefull broken leg doesn't run into that mule deer insurance guy. I was talking about moving on but sticking with fractured limbs. I want to tell you about North America's most venomous caterpillar, the puss moth caterpillar, whose sting is so painful that it's often been compared to breaking a bone. The real simp ms, which somehow sound worse than breaking a bone, include burning, swelling, nausea, headache, abdominal distress, rashes, blisters, chest pain, numbness, and difficulty breathing. A hospital in Houston unwittingly created a puss moth caterpillar outbreak, and they put nets around a grove of oak trees to keep out birds. The nets proved successful at keeping grackles and pigeons from swarming and pooping everywhere, but the puss moth caterpillar population exploded in the absence of avian predators. The hospital now has to decide the lesser of two evils, mounds of bird guana or venomous caterpillars. I think I know where I land on that one. The puss moth caterpillar, is about one inch long and has Chewbacca like fur that houses its venomous spines. They live in oak, elm and wild plum trees in the eastern and southern US, and are particularly problematic in Texas, so much so that schools in San Antonio were closed in the nineteen twenties to get the caterpillar population under control. Is that like the most Texas thing you've ever heard. While most kids hope to celebrate snow days, san Antonians are just hoping for a venomous insect outbreak. Moving on to dudes and museums or the newly established curator beat, turns out the majority of mammalian specimens and scientific collections have y chromosomes. Museums collect specimens in many different ways, including donations from hunters, but hunters and museums have different interests. Hunters don't target animals because they're representative of the species necessarily. Something tells me that when Teddy Roosevelt headed over to Africa for a hunt, he lined up his iron sights on the biggest individuals he could find, which generally happened to be mail. Another way, museums get samples is through selective trapping, which also exkews toward dudes because removing mails has less impact on the population. Point is these collections inform all kinds of science and research, which is why this imbalance matters. Research based on only on sex might give an accurate picture of diet distribution, behavior in response to changing habitat. Imagine if future alien archaeologists studied only the males of our species to determine what human life was like. If I touch that joke, it may lose me a tooth. So let's talk about teeth, calcified dental plaque and you. A study in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Science has studied the teeth of ancient human remains found across southern England. Beyond the realization that poor dental hygiene can stick with you much longer than I ever expected, the report also shows that humans have been drinking the milk of domesticated animals for more than six thousand years. Problem is, the ability to break down lactose sugar and animal milk is a relatively new development. Only five to ten percent of Europeans would have been able to do that back then, so either they spent a lot of time experiencing gastro and testinal distress, or they were processing the milk into more easily digestible products like yogurt or cheese. Either way, I find the idea that someone could dig up my bones six millennia from now and figure out what I was eating and drinking kind of disturbing. I think I'll go floss when I finished this podcast. Sticking with her friends from across the Pond, the British apparently have too many game birds in their freezers. I've personally never had that problem, but then again, I don't own a private wing shooting a state in the UK. The British Game Alliance is trying to export game birds to Japan, Hong Kong, and Canada so that shooting clubs have an outlet for all the excess animals they harvest. This strikes me as just playing wrong on so many levels. But then again, so does the entire European model of wildlife management. Pay to play means not many get to play. Here in North America, we decided market hunting is a pretty bad idea more than a century ago. Of course, we also have a whole system of public lands that any of us can access for hunting, fishing, and general good times outside. So comparing the two systems doesn't really work that well. Doesn't Since I'm talking about our amazing lands and waters and they need to care for them, I can't ignore a pretty significant rule change that's about to take effect. The federal government repealed provisions of the Clean Water Act, citing that the regulations were burdens some for farmers, rural landowners, and real estate developers. The soon to be strip protections were added in two thousand fifteen to protect seasonal streams and wetlands, which offer critical habitat for birds, fish, reptiles, elk, deer, moose, and other species. Not to mention, they make clean water and clean air for us. Also, you know they tend to drain into other bodies of water. The upcoming repeals will allow drastically more polluting and habitat destruction on fifty percent of wetlands and six of stream miles across the country. The rules currently restrict certain activities on private lands, like backfilling wetlands and bogs, the use and dumping of harmful chemicals, particular types of plowing and planning certain crops. According to the financial analysis that the Administration released, small farmers represent a tiny share of the permits this rollback addresses. The real winners are the oil and gas companies, mining companies, and real estate developers who apply for the vast majority of permits near streams, wetlands, and creeks. I for one, stand with the ninety two percent of polled sportsmen and women who support existing Clean Water Act protections and recognize this rule change un does important protections. But the fact that these arguments keep getting presented as fights between landowner rights and habitat quality really ticks me off, and frankly I call bs. Almost every single one of the landowners I know, especially small farmers, take great care to protect the resources they steward. Take a poll across anywhere in eastern Montana and you'll hear this good grass makes fat cattle, as they say. This rule change inch has little to do with those folks and everything to do with big extractive and development industries. Property rights are sacred in this country, but they shouldn't extend to having the right to pollute your neighbor or pollute water that we all share collectively. What's that saying about stuff rolling downhill. If you haven't made your weekly call to your congressman or woman, this would be a great one to discuss with them. Thanks so much for listening. That's all I've got for you. If you liked what you heard, tell a friend tell too. Let's keep this conservation train rolling. If you have a story for me or want to tell me where to shove it, please write in at ask cal that's a s k c a l at the Meat Eater dot com and share, subscribe, and download wherever podcasts are downloadable, and leave me review by hitting that furthest right hand start. Thanks and have a great week.

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