00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can Review with Ryan Kel Kelly and now Here's Kel. A Washington man was recently charged with failure to report the killing of a grizzly bear and violating the Lacy Act by transporting the bear's claws across state lines. The Spokane man killed the bear in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana sometime between September of two thousand and seventeen and March of two thousand eighteen in a self defense situation. Failure to report shooting grizzly bear, which is still listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, is punishable by up to six months in prison and twenty five thousand dollar fine. So that's one issue. The other is his violation of the Lacy Act. To clarify, the Lacy Act was created d band trafficking, transport, being, or possession of illegal wildlife. To further clarify, if you shoot, kill and just lop off the toes of any bear, that would be considered illegal. But if you were then to transport those toes across state lines, that's a whole new world. Of illegality. Now, I'm a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty, and this man is pleaded not guilty, So let's reserve judgment. In my experience, if you start off lying to a game warden, which he did by not reporting the bear shooting in the first place, and you happen to save some grizzly bear toes in your house, you aren't exactly stepping into court on the right foot. This week, we've got fanged deer, migration corridors, mammoths, whales, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I joined up with some old college friends spent the weekend catching up over a couple of long nights. Basically, we behaved like college kids, but we managed to get some hunting in as well, primarily for antelope, pronghorn antelope or incredible animals for a number of reasons. First, they taste phenomenal, can they're the only horned animal in the world that sheds its horns. The horn sheath is the part that actually comes off, and the horn core, the hard part on the inside, remains. Additionally, the horn is forked, hence prong horn, and it is the only forked horn in the world. Third, it's arguably the fastest land animal on Earth. Annuet Capra americana tops out at about sixty miles per hour at a dead sprint. The cheetah, which the antelope is often compared to, can run faster, but not by much, and cheetahs don't have near the endurance of a prong horn. This comparison is kind of silly, however, since an African cheetah will never meet an American prong horned antelope. None of the current North American predators like wolves, bears, cougars, jaguars, lynx, coyotes, oss lots, and bobcats, to name a few, can even come close to running as fast as the antelope can. Wolves come the closest, but still top out at roughly thirty seven miles per hour. So why the hecker antelope so fast. One theory goes that they developed their speed eat alongside extinct predators like the American cheetah. American cheetah fossils have been found in Wyoming, so we know they were in the same prairies. I think the lesson here is that if you can outrun your biggest predator, you will likely outlive them by a roughly twelve thousand years and counting. But speed won't get you everything. Just look at your father in his midlife crisis car. Today's antelope run into issues with fences literally, as in they actually collide with fences and get torn open or hung up on a regular basis, sometimes with lethal consequences. The evolutionary theory here goes that they never really needed to jump, as there earn allow of down logs on the prairie, and fencing is a relatively new, though very pervasive addition to their habitat. To be clear, these animals cam jump, just not very well. If you watch a group of antelope long enough, if you will hurtle over low fence lines. But fencing and prong horned country presents a serious issue. The good news is that just about every state with antelope as a program to help folks with fences. You can switch those old grotta, your jeans and antalope ripping fences over to wildlife friendly fences. If you are interested, call your state fishing game agency. You may even save yourself from hard earned dough as an animal that can get through a fence without tearing themselves up. I also won't tear your fence up causing you to force your kids to fix them. By the way, we got a bunch of opportunities at filling two antalope tags. We hunted a mix at BLM block management, state and private land. My good buddy Strown came to the conclusion multiple times that flying with your own rifle isn't that big of a pain after all, and he'll probably do so on the next trip. Are good buddy Carl got a nice young antelope buck, but he just turned thirty nine, so those days are nearly over for him. Moving on to our Wyoming desk, and this has something in line with mending fences. If you like healthy game populations and you like diverse interests working together like ranchers, hunters, county commissioners, miners, and workers, you could probably fit into Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon's Migration Corridor Advisory Group. This collection of strange bedfellows has been working exhaustively to find a solution to Wyoming's migration corridors that will likely make nobody entirely happy, but everybody kind of sort of happy. Most importantly, this group keeps Wyoming fishing game biologists involved in corridor designations and management. Recently, a new bill, the Easily Readable Designation of Migration Corridors from the Select Federal Natural Resource Management Committee for the Wyoming State Legislature. Draft Bill number two zero l s O zero to five zero five was introduced in the Wyoming Statehouse have passed. This legislation would exclude game managers from conversations about resolving the migration corridor issue. Instead, this bill relies on opinion from agencies like the Department of Revenue, Department of Environmental Quality, and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to determine how and where animals can Great economics play a role in everything. I'm not blind to that. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, let's call it a duck. If we were deciding the fate of animals and migration corridors from sage grouse to giant screaming bull elk and Wiley World renowned mule beer, shouldn't the folks who are experts on those animals be involved in the process. Anyone who lives, recreates, or hopes to recreate in the State of Wyoming needs to pay attention to this one again. You can always call the duly elected state representatives to let them know you care about these things, and of course it always helps if you let them know how much you care. And dollars spent on hotels, fishing and hunting licenses, gas, food, and those little license plates, spoons, cups and trinkets with your name on them that you just can't find anywhere else then in the great state of Wyoming. If you did not know already, Col's we Can Review is brought to you by Steel Power Equipment. They make all sorts of great stuff for those of us who like to cut things like firewood, kitchen cabinets, and even antlers off alive deer. As a general rule, I don't recommend that last one, but drastic circumstances require drastic measures. This past November six, a couple of Michiganders and bound township which is real close to a Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is kind of off on the lower. Lookers left of the Minten State noticed a couple of eight point bucks, what we would call four by four bucks here in Montana, locked up in a duel. The sparring Bucks had literally mashed their antlers together in such a way that they became completely locked together. The Michigan men approached the deer, who by this time had worked themselves into a creek, and we're approaching dire consequences. Fast work, quick thinking, and handy tools seemed to have saved the lives of these two deer. The men in question employed a tree limb saw which I'm not sure on this but appears to be a steel pole pruner. Could have been an HT one oh three, maybe even an HT one thirty two. It's hard to say for sure. What we do know is that features like the semi automatic choke lever one touch stop, no slip grip clamp in one quarter inch Steve Opikuo micro three saw chain make for a fast and convenient tool that delivers clean cuts even on antlers still attached to thrashing deer. The other fact that comes as no surprise is all the men involved, Mark Johnson, Brad Lyons, and Randy Wilcox are hunters. Now, if you're one of those people thinking wow, two big eight point bucks, I wonder what their poop looks like. To be more specific, you might wonder if a person can tell the difference between their poop and that of a mature dough. If so, you're not alone. Turns out a lot of people have pondered this question. Meat Eater's own Spencer new Hearth gives a definitive answer to this and many other burning conundrums at the meat eater dot COM's fact checker. Everyone knows that scattered piles of pellet shaped scat are from does and large piles of soft scat are produced by bucks. Right wrong. In fact, you don't know crap. Pellet shape, density, and configuration have nothing to do with the sex of the author, just the diet. This of worse flies in the face of years of knowledge handed down from grandfathers and uncles to kids. Find out more at the meat eater dot com Full disclosure on this one. I have often remarked about the size of the ball in front of us to a fellow hunter based upon the fee, seas and the trail. Turns out I wasn't just seeing the bull crap. I was full of it too. Moving on to the Lost and Found desk, if you've been wondering where the silver backed chevrotaine had gone, you can rest easy turns out they were and are in the same place you last saw them, the region spanning Vietnam and Laos called the Greater Anamites. The last official recognized specimen of a silver back chevrotaine was presented to a joint Vietnamese Russian expedition by a local hunter in nine Prior to that, researchers obtained four of the commonly called Vietnamese mouse dear in, which is quite the gap. The chevrotaine is the world's smallest undulate, about the size of a large rabbit. The biggest tops out at about seventeen pounds. For compare US and the smallest deer in the US is the key deer, and they weigh about seventy pounds at their largest. Interestingly enough, if you're looking for the world's smallest deer and not just the world's smallest ungulate, you'll have to go to South America, not Vietnam, where you'll find the southern poodu. The southern poodo stands fourteen inches tall and max is out around thirteen pounds. But we aren't talking about poodo. We're talking about silver back chevrotaines. Getting back on track, the Vietnamese mouse deer, as they've been called, have been lost from science for nearly thirty years. In addition to being highly elusive and small and stature, the chevrotaine has fangs or tusks instead of antlers, and they're not unique in that way. Quite a few deer across the world match that description, if you ask the University of Montana professor and writer of the book Animal Weapons, Doug Emlyn. All deer started out with fangs or tuss including the deer we know here in the US. Those black patches on the chin of the white tail would have made an ideal background to show off a pearly white tusk to a friendly fee mail or an intrusive mail. Just the other day, our own senior editor, Brodie Henderson was cleaning mule deer skulls and found on one skull a set of teeth that looks strange today. Back about twelve thousand years ago or so, would have beenned commonplace. But while mule deer and white tail traded those long teeth for antlers, somewhere along the way, the must deer, Chinese water deer, munk jack, and the silver flank chev rottine did not recently, researchers gathered photographic evidence of live chev routines by using camera traps. The wildlife conservation community is really excited and currently trying to figure out how to make sure these reclusive deer stick around for the long term. What they have against them is nothing new, habitat loss and unrestricted subsistence and market hunting. But hope isn't lost for these deer. They inhabit the Animite Range, a place where a number of the earth's rare animals have managed to hang on. The region is home to the Indo Chinese tiger, of which only twenty may remain in Vietnam, the critically endangered panguling, that scaly and eater looking creature that is poached to supply all sorts of traditional medicine for everything from hangovers to lazy libidos. And the car g a you are, which is the largest of the wild cattle, sometimes hitting ten feet in length, seven foot and height and over three thousand pounds in weight. Hopefully, if something as big as the car can hold on in the ammonites, the diminutive Vietnamese mouse dear can too, switching continents and moving on to tolta Pec, which is north the Mexico City, Mexico. So far, remains from fourteen different wooly mammoths have been found in two pits that appear to be purpose built traps. This is a big deal because it was previously thought that early humans would only hunt wooly mammoths that were sick or incapacitated in some way, or maybe even the only mammoth meat early man obtained was by scavenging the carcasses of mammoth's. This discovery suggests that health mammoths were hunted by organized early hunters who herded them, in this case into two traps five and a half foot deep and eighty two ft long. Mammoths must not have much of a vertical. During the excavation of what was originally planned to be a garbage dump in tolta Peck, eight hundred and twenty four mammoth bones were discovered, including a hundred and seventy nine rib bones, five jaws, a hundred vertebra, and eight skulls, with a bit of by catch thrown in in the form of an unlucky camel and a horse. You would think if your target were mammoth, you would throw that small stuff back anyway. As you might expect, a new, exciting, potentially game changing discovery like this involves lots of guesswork when it comes to interpreting the stories told by these old bones. For instance, there are only right shoulder blades present, no left ones. The skulls were found upside down, not right side up, and one mammoth shoulder that was found in what was determined to be, of course a ritualistic position showed a healed acture. The upside down skulls had to take some effort to turn over, so the hunters must have been after the tongues. The missing scapulas, well, we aren't sure, but it has got to have a deeper meaning. The healed shoulder bone, well, that was an old, wily mammoth that had been hunted and wounded before, and they paid that an animal particular respect by placing the bones in a manner according with their post hunt trophy rituals. You know, sure that all could very well be the case. It certainly is really neat if that's all true. There are several sites in North America and Europe that, like this one, show evidence of humans butchering mammoths. But this site alone suggests that early humans from fifteen thousand years ago organized to hunt the eleven foot tall, eight ton mammals. Even if you forget the fact that humans have progressively gotten larger since this time, and not always in good ways, if you look at obesity rates here in America, I would agree that the evidence represented here in Mexico is incredible and exciting as it shows a mam undertaking by early human hunters, and it's something to be talking about. I'll probably wait for some more stuff to come out of the ground before I subscribe to the ritual theories of broken or missing scapulas. Sometimes you just drop stuff and leave it when you have a lot of butchering work to do. But fortunately, whether a bone has just dropped or placed ritualistically, it's still really interesting when they're this old and just found. And admittedly, and I think fortunately, I have been butchering an animal and come across old scars on its hides, sometimes on its bones other times and have come up with some pretty good theories too. Now we're going to Scotland and only five thousand years back to talk about the hunting of whales. Another mammoth mammal. A new DNA analysis has revealed the origin of an ancient whale vertebra excavated an Iron Age Scottish site in the Orkney Islands to be that of a fin whale. The fin whale is the second largest whale on Earth, behind the blue whale. It can swim up to twenty eight miles brow and grow to more than eighty five feet in length. So does the presence of a fin whale bone indicate that these old Scots were hunting whales? Probably not. Is just one bone, but there are a lot of other big sea mammal bones here as well. DNA analysis confirms bones for humpback whales, sperm whales, and mink whales, all smaller than a fin whale, but still a whale. A large presence of bones, but we still don't know if they were scavenged or hunted. But if you take a look at rock art in South Korea, it appears humans were hunting, not just scavenging whales about nine thousand years ago, and people's in many other places some still known for whaling were actively hunting four thousand years ago. But the fin whale, due primarily to its size wasn't hunted with gusto until the mid nineteenth century, when technological advances like the explosive harpoon came around. So again, does the presence of a fin whale bone indicate that iron age Orkney Island Scots hunted them. We don't know, but I wouldn't say it was out of the question. I imagine the first ancient sperm whale hunter or the first mammoth hunter. That positive thinking and likely hungry hunter who first suggested that killing an eight ton eleven foot tall hairy elephant with giant tuss or an eight foot long sea creature to all of their four and a half foot to five foot tall friends was even possible probably didn't get taken too seriously by those folks, but I bet they showed up to the barbecue after that hunter proved them wrong. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for listening and has always be sure to let me know how I'm doing by leaving me a review and hitting that for this right hand start get ahold of me at ask cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s k C A L at the meat eater dot com and tell your friends to listen to Cal's weekend review. Talk to you next week.