00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters and Bozeman, Montana. 00:00:13 Speaker 2: This is Cal's We Can Review with Ryan cal Callahan. 00:00:17 Speaker 3: Now here's Cal. All right, everybody, this week's special drop super remote. We got three people in three different locations and probably three different recording channels. We don't like to do anything easy or consistent here on the weekend review, so thanks for coming along, all right, everybody. This week you are going to learn what it takes to create change in your state fishing game regulations. A lot of people right in and say, boy, I don't like this. What do you think of this? I'd like this change, Something's got to happen. Our guest today is Tyler Winter, who just like you, thought that and then went out there and made it happen. So listen to Tyler's story. We're going to get into it in just a minute, and you're going to know what it takes to get out there and change your state regulations and more. We have an old guest if you are familiar with the Meat Eater show, Doss Boat, where we took an old Kredi boat and we fixed it up along the way and traveled all over the US and explored different fisheries with different people. Tyler was a host, a co host of ours on Doss Boat where we targeted the big mouth buffalo. And the reason that we were targeting big mouth buffalo is because it's this amazing fish. It made headlines because it's our oldest known fish as in like the longest lived individuals that we have on record, and at the same time their population was in decline. This study of the age of the fish and was this kind of amazing, like, oh my gosh, moment of this fish that's native to North America is in decline and we only just now found out that it can live for we don't know how long, but easily, like multiple multiple individuals over the year age of eighty years old that we've recorded. What else don't we know about this fish? And by the way, it's also being shot, taught, and chucked up on the shore because people think it's a card. That was the reason that we went and tracked down Tyler winter our guests this week and did that show on dos Boat. And that's kind of where our story begins with this junk fish idea, this rough fish idea, and how they fit into our regulations and into just our normal ethical fishing behavior, so with me as always doing the heavy lifting. Jordan Sellers, Jordan, what do you got going on this week? 00:03:44 Speaker 1: What do I have going on this week? That's a great question. 00:03:49 Speaker 4: I just published, Well, we just published an article up on the meeater dot com about if you can only pick one big game caliber, pick this one. 00:04:00 Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you which one it is. You have to go read it. 00:04:03 Speaker 2: So yeah, that's kind of what I've been preoccupied with this week, along with, of course, our great guest today, Tyler Winter. 00:04:11 Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to this conversation. 00:04:14 Speaker 3: Darn right. And but I mean, let's not forget that you also are probably working your tail off because you're prepping for having a newborn baby in the house. 00:04:23 Speaker 2: Right, That's right, We're getting We're getting close. We're almost there. We're all looking forward to it. 00:04:30 Speaker 3: What are you almost there? 00:04:33 Speaker 2: July eighth is the time of arrival, so we're getting close. My birthday is July seventh, actually, so I'm hoping for a day early. 00:04:46 Speaker 3: Nice. Nice Well, Tyler, where are you at? 00:04:55 Speaker 5: Well, I'm at home right now. I'm the rain stopped, and I'm it's probably gonna go fishing after we're done with this. So I was checked out one of my fishing spots yesterday. I got a silver red horse pretty quick. And that fish is actually gonna get donated to uh Alec Lackman uh for for aging. So it didn't didn't look so good when it came in. And so I vouchered that one and filated up and uh put the flas of my freezer and labeled the labeled the specimen to send to Alex lab. 00:05:29 Speaker 3: And and so you're you're still fishing the same beat there in the heart of the cold, cold city, right many. 00:05:37 Speaker 5: Yeah, well I am. I'm really lucky to have Mississippi basically like a block from my house. And so I've got a couple of fishing spots up and down, up and down the Mississippi in my neighborhood and I can't quit. 00:05:53 Speaker 3: And and what species are you targeting? Primarily? 00:05:58 Speaker 5: Well, I like to target all sorts of stuff. I actually just got back from the boundary waters where I was targeting lake trout, and that's that's always fun. You know, you got to catch a few game fish a year, or people will think you can't. But then when I get back from the boundary waters. Then it's usually buffalo season. So the big mouth buffalo just moved into kind of their summer pattern and I am stalking them and catching red horse in between. So silver red horse and short head red horse in my section of the. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: River gorgeous fash right, oh yeah. 00:06:34 Speaker 5: And the big mouth the big mouth are are gorgeous too. They're really variable in color. Uh so some of them are kind of green, some of them are black, and the red horse are are really pretty. The short head red horse especially have really gold scales that are pretty reflective with a bright red tail, so they're kind of a metallic They flash in the water when they when they turn and then they get that bright red tail. They look kind of like a rocket going off. 00:07:05 Speaker 3: And and it's safe to say, like you have an appreciation for these fish, correct. 00:07:10 Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I mean the I I grew up in a in a hunting family, and uh was you know, taught you know, your basic hunting ethics to you know, identify your target and uh take what you can take, what you can use, and use what you can take. And I came to fishing really with no preconceptions, and so I just wanted to catch the most and the biggest and whatever. And I really liked the challenge of new species. And you know that that journey is uh continues onto onto today. But it's like I and now, as people are doing more catch and release fishing, the you know, the idea that you would care about the bones on the inside of a fish is kind of fading away and people are seeing these fish as opportunities. 00:08:00 Speaker 3: And so we'll jump back to like when we wrapped up that doss Boat episode and we had these great conversations surrounding primarily the big mouth buffalo, though we did feature a few other species, like like the red horse, which is a beautiful native fish, and we were talking about what you just said, like identification primarily, why why are we lumping in a whole set of fish that that do get commonly labeled as junk fish. If you're a little class here, you're calling them rough fish. In America, we buy and larger looking at those fish as disposable as something that gets in the way of game fish, whereas in Europe, major major industry, major major culture to go out and catch cart catch rough fish, and we just don't have that in America. But what what did you do after after that episode ended and kind of take us on the journey of bringing more awareness to rough fish. 00:09:30 Speaker 5: Yeah, so, I uh, this is my first being on the Doss Boat Show. Was a gonna be my first chance to like speak publicly about about this and about you know why I like to target these fish, and you know kind of how the deck is stacked against them, you know, and that you're talking about that European versus American perspective, and there's a great parallel between you know, bison and the buffalo fish. Right, Like the early early on settlers thought, you know, well we have to get rid of bison so we can have cows, right, Like we're going to replace, We're going to improve upon things, right, and that has you know, was kind of the perspective with a lot of these fish. It's like, well, let's get you know, let's get rid of these buffalo in this lake so that we can have fasts. And that's a false dichotomy. And so but when I was going to be on the show, I really wanted to make sure I had all my facts straight. So I went on a deep dive into the into the regulations and stuff, and realized that a lot of the things that I found pretty frustrating and distasteful, like the wanton waste of fish that are one hundred years old or more, we're technically already illegal, and that there were you know, I had a lot of questions about why things were the way they were, and so I thought that when I did the research, it would answer the questions, so that like I could say clearly, you know what was going on here, and it just and it just created a ton of more questions. And so that was really my first you know time, like you know, emailing the DNR and just being like, hey, I have a question about why you know it's legal to put fish native fish in a compost pile. And I found out that if you don't get an answer to your email, it's oftentimes because you asked a really good question. If you if you ask a simple question or a dumb question, they can pretty quickly answer you and tell you that you're wrong. When you ask a really good question, then there's a long delay before you get an answer, And that, you know, led me to realizing that there were some opportunities here and conversing with people within the DNR, and then I also ended up joining Conservation organizations. The first one I think I joined was the ISAAC wall In League of America, and they had a great perspective on it. They actually saw the Doss boat show one of the people from the local chapter and realized that we had filmed in there in there kind of behind their chapter house, and they were like, Wow, this is a great issue. This is a great issue for us. It's happening like in our backyard. And the you know, just to show you how far we had to go. Right when when I joined that chapter, they had on their bylaws that one of the purposes of the chapter was to reduce rough fish. Uh. You know, these by laws hadn't been updated since like the seventies, right, and so this is like a pretty seemed to be a pretty common blind spot. That chapter ended up passing a resolution to support, you know, encourage the management of all native species for sustainability, and and then that went to the state and uh, the state division passed it, and then that went to national and on the one hundredth anniversary of the isac WAT and League of America, they passed a resolution and national resolution calling on all state agencies to manage all native fish, you know, instead of lumping some of them off as as rough fish, which I thought was that's a great arc. So then over time realizing that you know, we had we had something here, and but also realizing that the state agency needed needed some public support, needed some a good reason to take action. 00:13:36 Speaker 3: Uh. 00:13:37 Speaker 5: I think every manager and every everyone who works in this field understands that there's limited resources and limited time, and we kind of had to make this a priority for the state, which I think they were kind of waiting for. 00:13:52 Speaker 3: I just want people to understand, like, it's a big deal to get any conservation group to change by laws like these long stances on something because they are miniature governments, so they're they're comprised of boards, presidents, CEOs. So that's a big win, especially something I mean, Isaac Walton League is a very storied organization, right, They've been around for a long time. 00:14:29 Speaker 5: So. 00:14:32 Speaker 3: Just doing something like that is where a lot of people would stop. 00:14:36 Speaker 5: So but at the beginning, yeah, so well yeah, so you know, we we'd a little taste of success, and we you know, in the process of continuous research and conversations with you know, people within the d n R and other conservation groups, I joined the Minister of Conservation Federation. I joined back huntry Hunters and angler as I joined Friends of Pool, who is a local one that I really like, like and making a lot of friends and connections and realizing that like this was a good opportunity to make to bring this issue to people, and that in every case when I would say, hey, we are currently managing a one hundred year old native fish the same as an invasive species, everyone was like, agast right, They're like, that doesn't make any sense. I'm like, yeah, that's unscientific. That's a violation of the North American model of wildlife management, and it's it's like the lowest hanging fruit in the conservation world in my opinion, to go from unlimited limits to something to some protections like this is this is an easy win. Should be an easy win. And then with the with the Isaac Walton League of America, we identified some things we could ask the DNR for in a formal way, and we wrote a petition for administrative rule making which required a formal response from the DNR, and that well, and then about the same time, I think it was about the same time, we also had Minnesota's no junk fish bill we called it, which because we had some high profile cases of somebody had speared about ninety gar and put it on YouTube and there was a lot of outrage around that. When it was found out that the fish had been disposed of, I was a little surprised that that was the thing that got people's attention, because, you know, boatloads or dumpsters or something like that hadn't previously. But they we had some other things going on, like the they there was a legislative requirement for a limit on gar and they also reclassified a couple of species as game fish, and so that had kind of started a conversation about, well, what's going to happen to the rest of the fish. And so when we put our petition in, I think we kind of hit it right at the right time, and the DNR looked over the petition and then like, you're not wrong. But because of the intricacies in the way that statutes interact with administrative rules, which then are translated into the regulations book, they couldn't just change everything that we had requested, which is one thing I did not realize before I started getting into this, you know, problem is the complexity of statutes and rules and then those becoming regulations in plain language. So we they said, you know, we want work on this with you, and so we agreed to collaborate, and they formed a work group and they locked us in a room with a bunch of different people of different perspectives. And I really also want to say, you know, an organization like the Isaac Walton League, because they are now one hundred and two years old, they have a lot of expertise, you know, and then they have some resources and stuff, and so you know, that helped us do the petition and understand that process. And we went through the work group process and butted heads with people, and then we also, because of the interest from the legislature, we had the No Junk Fish Bill, required the dn R to write a report to outline how to change Minnesota's rough fish statue statutes, because it turns out that law has been in place in Minnesota since that eighteen o seven and they've just been copying forward the phrase rough fish over and over again until it got into all sorts of places. So we had what was it twenty two statutes or something like that, but it was used like seventy times in statute and rule, and in you know, all sorts of places and egg laws, and then definitions of commercial fish and so on and so forth, and just the very definition just used like colloquial names. It just said buffalo. It's like there's three species of buffalo, and then it exempted the species that were listed as having a conservation designation. Well, it's like, you know, could you actually enforce that if somebody takes a black buffalo, which is a threatened species in Minnesota? Can you enforce that if the REGs book says that the limit for buffalo is unlimited? Finding out about those sort of confusions and contradictions. Really, that's I made a lot of hay with that, right that you could kind of force people to reckon that we need to have some consistent sort of terminology that's like enforceable, no good. 00:20:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, So in that example, right, you don't necessarily have to say you have to agree with me m m that you like this fish or want my end result. You just have to recognize that your regulations that your officers have to enforce are overly broad m hm. Yep. 00:20:45 Speaker 5: And I would also say too, you know, the coming at this from a perspective of a rotten gun conservationist, or as a person who who eats fish, who harvests these fish, whatever I think did diffuse a lot of things. You know, nobody could could accuse me of trying to take things away from them when I have a fully knife in my hand, you know, and it's like, no, these are you know. We did dost boat and we ate cleaned a bunch of redhorse and ate them and they were delicious. And I think the one way I have a conversation with people is by talking about my hunting ethics, you know. And I said, this isn't new, These aren't new ideas. This is the same ethics I apply when I hunt squirrels. If you bring your your squirrel hunting ethics to the to the river, you'll be fine. But you don't. You don't go out hunting and shoot things that you can identify, right, You don't shoot something you've never seen before. But that's a pretty common response with fish. Apparently, you know, more than a few fish get get killed because people haven't haven't seen them before, and they assume that anything new must be invasive. Sure, there's there's probably more rare fish in you know, in your watershed than there are invasive you know, so I think that those perspectives are changing. But that was an easy way to have a conversation with people. Probably the other hard, hard part we had, and this came up in the work group, but it comes up a lot, is the diversity we're talking about. These topics are a little simpler when you're dealing with one species or two interacting. You know, we're talking about twenty six species of fish here in this Minnesota statue, you know that were in this category. And on top of needing to explain that all of these fish are native, but yes, some of them are more common than others, but they none of them should be have their habitat impaired or have you know, their populations intentionally minimized or be devalued because they all play a role in the ecosystem. But then on top of that, you have a lot of variability in their populations, and it wasn't uncommon for people to say, you know, oh, though you think those are rare, come to and then it was always followed up by in the spring and below a dam or a culvert. 00:23:23 Speaker 3: Uh, It's like it's like, yeah, they're congregating for a purpose, and that purpose is. 00:23:32 Speaker 5: Yeah, you're trying to spawn and get to habitat and you know they're concentrated for a time. But when you have fish that migrate one hundred and fifty miles, yeah, yeah, you will have an abundance of them in the springtime because it's it's all the fish, you know, for one hundred miles. The big mouth buffalo in the Red River Valley apparently average one hundred and fifty mile migration. But if you even have a ten mile migration, yeah, you will see a school of fish. You're supposed to see a school of fish. You're not supposed to see it below a dam or a culvert. And then if you go above that dam, guess what there may be zero. 00:24:12 Speaker 3: Can you just give us an idea of like who's at this table, who's this diverse set of perspectives, Like who's represented when you're when you're talking these through Like, right, who's at the table? 00:24:29 Speaker 5: Yeah? So, the the work group had people from Isaac Watt League, Corey Geving who founded roughfish dot com. He's also on the Native Fish for Tomorrow board. We had the Nature Conservancy. They've been a great ally and champion of this. Brad from the Minnesota Conservation Federation. We had a couple of anglers who just brought their perspective. We had commercial fishermen, and we had two members from the Land of Lakes Bowfishing Association and a bowfishing guide, and we all agree that, you know, these fish like they should their habitat should be protected, you know, culvert should be removed where possible, and that there was a lack of education that people didn't necessarily understand the diversity. The bow fishing guides they obviously saw it, and they they recognize that these fish sometimes get disparaged because they get confused with carb So those were things everybody could agree on. The things that we maybe disagreed on were like, are there an unlimited number of fish. 00:25:35 Speaker 3: Right because people are seeing large concentrations that at certain times a year when maybe their preferred activity is is happening the most or some something along those lines. 00:25:52 Speaker 5: Yeah, And those conversations happen all the time, you know, just like on a riverbank or something, they're like, oh, you think suckers are rare, you come over here in the springtime and whatever, and I'm like, you know, which also obscures the point or maybe changes the topic from the fact that these fit. We're trying to conserve these fish and bring the North American model of wildlife management before they're rare, because these fish are not going to get a hatchery, right, they're not going to get a big restoration plan or reintroduction, and they provide ecosystem services. One of the you know, uh, there was a doss Boat episode about freshwater drum and yeah, they're not necessarily rare where they exist, but we also know they might be missing from above sixty percent of dams, and they eat zebra muscles and they also host eleven species of native muscles, and so you do need to have them around or you're going to lose those native muscles, you know. So it's like they're not necessarily going extinct. But like also if they're missing from that much of their range, we shouldn't continue to block them from you know, we need to do something to help bring them back so they can eat their zebra muscles and do what we want them to do. 00:27:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, or make that regulation change that reduces the amount of take in some of those areas right where they're they may be present, but they're not prolific. 00:27:20 Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think too. You know, these uh, they we're getting ahead of ourselves. But the the coming regulations, which they're not here yet, but the in the reclassification, it changes the way we manage these fish and the perspectives we're going to have on them, because how are you going to get people motivated to allow fish passage to dam if they think those fish are invasive? Right, Like we have to you know, give them some of the same habitat protections and list them separate from invasive species so that we can do habitat work, right, and so that you know, the fish regulations work in part by conveying value. We understand that a muskie with a limit of one is more valuable than perch with a limit of twenty. 00:28:12 Speaker 3: Five, right. And I do want to say, you know, like the observation of large numbers of animals then gets extrapolated out to like, well, they're obviously like this everywhere. That's not just a fish thing, Jordan. I'm sure you've got all sorts of circumstances in Texas where you get permission to hunt hogs someplace and the ranch manager's like, there are pigs everywhere, and then you're like, man, I didn't see a pin, right, it happens. 00:28:46 Speaker 2: Yeah, so where I am, you can't. You can only hunt does white tail does the first two weeks of the season, And I, you know, just in my kind of conversations with landowners trying to get permission, some of them say, we have way too many does you know? I wish we could hunt them all year. And then like a neighboring landowner will say, I don't know where all the deer went, right, So that just these kind of small perspectives on your property, aren't you know? You can't extrapolate necessarily to the larger region, right. 00:29:23 Speaker 3: It's the random sample observation of like, well, when I go out and sit on my porch and have my coffee, there's a bunch of deer in my yard. Yeah, obviously there's a bunch everywhere. And then so Tyler to get us back on track. Here, you've gone from a conservation group that deals with fish to state regulations and where do you go? 00:29:57 Speaker 5: So the the last fall, the DNR authored a report that brought together the input from the work group and was required by last year's No Junk Fish Bill, which I ended up which I testified for in the House and Senate. And then this year there was a minute of the first comprehensive Native fish conservation bill in the country where we were able to because we had the support of the of the DNR and because we had support from representatives and senators and conservation groups, we were able to go in and amend it was like forty two statutes. It ended up being there, I think is forty two sections in this bill. It's huge. That reverses all of the you know, terrible legislation from the last one hundred and seventeen years that use that phrase rough fish, and it included, you know, things like you were able to make a rough fish barrier in a stream so that you could you could block you know, fish from getting upstream. But we were literally managing our buffalo, our red horse, our drum, all these native fish. We were managing them like an invasive species. So now we can still make a cart barrier, but it's a cart barrier for invasive species, and you know that provides habitat protections. Then for native fish, we got restitution values. Now that was one that had been missing. Uh, these fish didn't have a restitution value, which was a requirement if they were going to enforce a wildlife crime, so we've got restitution values. You know, a prohibition on transporting more than one limit that you still only apply to game fish makes it pretty hard to enforce a limit if you can't stop someone from transporting more than a limit. All sorts of those sort of things that were support actually the the regulations right that make those enforceable. So there it turned into a big thing. And I got to testify for this bill four times, because why do it twice? It came up twice in the House and in the Senate, and we went through Environment Committee in the House and Senate twice with no opposition. And that that was quite the experience of trying to learn how things go through committees and trying to get your comments in on time and and those sort of staying on top of that was like a full time job for a while. 00:32:49 Speaker 3: Yeah, and you have that background though, right, you're you're a trained lawyer or political science major. 00:32:57 Speaker 5: Correct, you know, in another lifetime, maybe I was maybe that, maybe that's it, But honestly I leaned on the partners from the Isaac Walton League and the Nature Conservancy, which we're definitely better at that than than I was. You know, if if we're want to get started on something like this, try to try to meet a government relations person. They're really helpful. 00:33:27 Speaker 3: But nobody said you can't do this because you aren't experienced in the way government works, right. 00:33:35 Speaker 5: No. In fact, you know I was. I think the first time I went to testify at a at a House House committee hearing, I kept waiting for like, uh, a security person or some check in, some registration, and I just like ended up walking into the chamber and was like, oh, this is this is just open, like you just the public, you know, like most of the seats are empty. You can just show up, like, you know, like I think in every hearing I've been too, they've had like, you know, a moment where they're like, does anyone else want to testify? Nobody ever says yet, you know, nobody ever stands up, but they're you know, I'm mostly familiar with with Minnesota, but I'm sure every every legislature and committees have email sign ups with alerts. Those are invaluable signing up to an environment committee or you know, whatever committee is that is going to tackle an issue that you're concerned about. Signing up to their email alerts that alert you when they're going to have a hearing and what's going to be on the docket is free and easy and invaluable. I definitely ran across things that weren't fish related this year that I was concerned about, you know, or had an interest in, and then you know, they probably have directions on how to submit comments. And there was a huge we had a huge win this year, and you know, I was kind of waiting for somebody to say, you're going to up end and restructure our fishing regulations that we've known for over one hundred years. When you create this new category of fish that doesn't get treated like an invasive species. It was just waiting for that moment. And the Senate author held up a stack of paper he printed off, and he was like, we had an outpouring of public support in favor of this bill, and there was twelve. We had twelve people, you know, or organizations had submitted submitted written testimony. 00:35:37 Speaker 3: That's the out pouring. 00:35:39 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there were other there were other bills, you know. I think that maybe the same hearing that had like nine that were dealing with regulations for feed lots, and I was shocked. I mean, but that's what it took. And you know, because I made friends and made connections and and put myself out there to drum up public support. And you know, a really simple thing was making a template for people to submit their written testimony with the the header that they needed, you know, for the with the chairman's name and address and saying like and type in something a paragraph and send it to this you know, committee administrator, you know, by Wednesday at five o'clock. And that made it so much easier for people. And we got, you know, that enough testimony that the author can say, we have an outpouring of support. 00:36:35 Speaker 3: That's amazing. And so why, I'm sorry, this just wasn't clear to me. Why wasn't this just a done deal at the Department of Wildlife Resources regulation level? Why did you have to go to the Senate and the House and pass an actual bill. 00:36:54 Speaker 5: That's an excellent question. I'm glad you asked. So the there was a statue that defined rough fish in Minnesota as carp buffalo gar bofen like literally just like that kind of language, gold eye, and so the DNR couldn't change the regulatory definition to exclude Karp without changing the statute. 00:37:22 Speaker 3: Got it. Got it. So they're like, yeah, love the track that you're on. We recognize that here's this next little roadblock that, by the way, is out of our hands. 00:37:34 Speaker 5: Mm hmm. 00:37:36 Speaker 3: Yeah, didn't stop. That's amazing. 00:37:39 Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's you know, that's I think we were the What I realized is that if you can get you know, the conservation groups and the you know, managers and uh a representative and a senator to all agree, then you can move forward pretty quickly. I kind of figure that from when I started on this path before we filmed Doss Boat, you know, July of twenty twenty, you know, till now, it's been about four years of making this my hobby. But that, you know, after we passed the first comprehensive native fish conservation bill in the country, people kept coming up to me and slapping me on the shoulder and being like that was amazing. That was so fast. Yeah, like yeah, you know, but we kept having successes along the way of you know that we knew we were on the right track. 00:38:34 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:38:35 Speaker 3: I've been following this, you know, from the jump, and I just love it. A for the initiative take and be the timeline is extraordinarily tight from inception to action and more or less completion, right, And it is truly it's one of these things that is another kind of like feather in the conservation hunter angler cap where it does show that adherence to the North American model, the scientific management, the idea right that that hunters and anglers are a part of management. And we know that, Yeah, in order to be a part of management, you have to identify things while they're still swimming, not when they're sitting up on the beach, covered and sand and bloated by the sun. 00:39:40 Speaker 5: Right, right, I mean, and that's the you know, aligning with the North American models of wildlife management is just common sense. It is, you know, the most successful conservation model in the world. And I think what really spurred on and like gave us, you know, a lot of traction was the fact that these fish had often been exempted from that. You know. You can look at point one on the model of it says wildlife resources are conserved and held in trust for all citizens. I like to put the emphasis on held because that is the opposite of extirpation, that's the opposite of you know, poisoning out a lake and putting up a barrier and allowing unlimited harvest. You're not really holding in trust if you're trying to eliminate something. 00:40:31 Speaker 3: A big reason that you're here, right, is because people need to understand that instead of sitting back and bitching and moaning about things, you can start a movement like this that results in actual change. You have change at the conservation level, you have change conservation group level, you have change at the state regulatory level with the state DNR, and you have change at the actual state level that could very well have ripples across the entire country. Right, It's an example out there that is, as you've said, first of its kind, yep. Because they're not the quote unquote sexy game fish. It's taken us a long time to be like, oh, this is the role that these rough fish served in the ecosystem. This is how we could have set ourselves back when we look at I think your mustard, Yeah, your muscle example is perfect. Right, Like, if you look at the ESA Endangered Species Act on that list, America's most endangered things are our fresh water muscles. And they do what muscles do. They clean the water. That's an important role and that's not a role that's gonna go away, right. 00:42:04 Speaker 5: And every one of them starts off on a fish's gills. And here in Minnesota, we actually have a population of a federally endangered muscle of a spectacle case. And there's like three populations of spectacle case in the country. We have one of them. We share it with Wisconsin, and we are currently you know, we've been allowing unlimited harvest of a fish of its only two hosts. And so it's like, well, I you know, I don't think we need to necessarily close down the Moonai and gold Eye fishery completely, but maybe not unlimited, right. 00:42:41 Speaker 3: Sure, Yeah, there's the middle ground there, right. 00:42:44 Speaker 5: Yeah, And like the I would also say too, one of the things that I'm proud of doing is threading this needle and like this this statute change. And what we have always wanted to do is to be for the fish, right and give them value, convey their value. But we don't feel that we need to take things away from people. I don't think having a daily or a possession limit is necessarily a huge uh, Like that's not a loss for for anglers or whatever. Right, we can't eat you know, thirty buffalo anyway. The but you know this isn't about a particular method of harvest or taking anything away from people. We are doing this as as people who eat fish, and we're giving these protections to the fish without closing seasons, clothing, closing methods of take You know, we're not anti anything. Uh, you know, we're well, I'm opposed to one waste, but you know I'm for here for the fish. 00:43:45 Speaker 3: And so if somebody has an issue, right, they got to grite, they gotta grudge, you know, like in Idaho for example, right, like you don't have to consume your black bear meat, check your regulations. Most people think that legally you have to. Most people don't even think that. They just know that you shot a berry, you better eat it. Yeah, but you know that's another issue that's like buried in there. So if you have a gripe with that, Tyler Winter is right now going to tell you what you need to do to go out there and make a change. What'd you learn, Tyler? What would you tell people? 00:44:33 Speaker 5: I would say, first off, start start emailing people and ask questions. Ask questions that you know don't have a good answer. And if you run up to a wall, or if there's a barrier something, ask ask D and R people and ask people what the problem, like, where the barrier is, what's the problem, what's the sticking point? And figure out if you can put in pressure on that, if you can put any leverage on that. And call people too, that's always a good technique. 00:45:08 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:45:09 Speaker 5: No, nobody necessarily wants an email out there that's going to contradict their boss or something, right like, we don't want that. Call people, ask them and be a real be a real person, give them a little grace if they you know, they're doing their job and they have something that's an obstacle for them, see if you can help them. You know, I would bet that the managers in Idaho probably want those bears to get eaten. 00:45:38 Speaker 3: Uh. 00:45:38 Speaker 5: They're perfectly edible, and so they may be able to point you in the right direction to where to get started on fixing that. Join up your conservation organizations, small ones, big ones, you know, join them up. You're gonna meet great people. Uh. You may find out about issues that you didn't know that you can help with. And if you've got to, you've got a problem you want to solve. They may be looking for they're looking for problems too, so so join up, go to the pint nights. You know, make a difference. Absolutely, start following the your legislation, find the email lists and alerts, contact your representatives, you get involved, and show up. That's been a huge, huge thing. I have been shocked kind of how few people are showing up. And if it's the wrong people that show up, then we lose. And I guess lastly, I would say, you know, do your best to maintain your integrity all the time if you want something like this. You know, if you want to get people to eat their black bears instead of just taking the hide, you better be eating your squirrels and your fish and everything else too, because that that can really derail something if you if you don't set a good example. 00:47:15 Speaker 3: A little walk the walk and talk the talk, right. 00:47:18 Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that's probably that's a much shorter way of saying it. But yeah, if you walk the walk and you talk the talk, and you show up, you will make a difference. 00:47:30 Speaker 3: Heck. Yeah. Well, Tyler, thank you so much for making the time and joining us. Thank you really, thank you for being such a good example of what we talked about here A lot right. 00:47:43 Speaker 5: Like I have to think I have to thank you though, because you came here with with Don's boat and fish for buffalo and red Horse for me, and that was that was gave us some momentum improved. This was an interesting story and that I think. I think that's a great like arc as well. That you know it's started off. It's like full circle. You know, we started off in the river together and here we are four years later talking about what happened. 00:48:12 Speaker 3: That's cool, man, that is cool. Well where to next? Are you just going to be a national rough fish champion or what are you thinking? 00:48:23 Speaker 5: Well, the we still have some work to do here in Minnesota. The administrative rules have to be updated now that we've solved all those outdated statutes, So there's still going to be plenty of public comment periods and engagement that I'm going to help spread the word on. And I am also already being contacted from by people from other states who have identified this exact same problem in another state, and I'm hoping to help them as much as possible. That's you know, we have Native Fisher Tomorrow has members in Wisconsin, in Illinois or direct and I have people from Iowa, who are asking me if we can help there, because I think every state, maybe except a Hawaii, has a category like this that is, you know, intended to minimize the populations of a native fish instead of conserving them for the public. 00:49:20 Speaker 3: Trust cool man. Well, as you know, doors always open over here at the Week in Review, man, So if you want to get the word out, let us know. I think if the next next time Tyler is duking it out at the state level, I'm gonna make sure to get your Instagram channel out to everybody. What is that? 00:49:46 Speaker 5: By the way, I'm on Instagram at Buffalo Underscore Catcher and. 00:49:52 Speaker 3: You can see kind of step by step what what it takes to make some change out there in the big old conservation world. So, Tyler, thank you very much. I know we got a lot of thank yous going on, but I really appreciate you coming on. And uh man, you got a heck of a result for a hobby for four years, buddy, it's been worth it. Good job, all right, Big thanks to our guest Tyler Winter, and big thanks to all of you for listening right in to ask c A L. That's Askcal at tomeeteater dot com and let us know what's going on in your neck of the woods. You know we appreciate it. Thanks again, and we'll talk to you next week.