00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ruyankel Kelly and now here's Kel Fort Keio U s d A. That's the US Department of Agriculture research station located just outside of Miles City, Montana, home of the cowboys and the world famous Bucking Horse sale as a boat ramp into the Yellowstone River, the longest undamned river in the US, and that boat ramp has a history. The Yellowstone is an absolutely amazing river starts all the way up here right next to Bozeman, Montana, home a Meat Eater World headquarters. At its start, it's a phenomenal trout river, and as you descend all the way down by Miles City, there is a crazy bounty of fish fossils, living fossils such as the paddlefish and the sturgeon pallid sturgeons down there, but also like tons of fossils coming out of the river, like mammoths and all sorts of crazy stuff. The point is people want to get to it. This boat ramp used to be frequented by families, anglers, hunters, general recreators until some nothead drove off the road to the river access and tore up an agricultural field. In response, the U. S d A closed off the boat ramp to public access. The public suffered as there is no other public boat launch within any reasonable distance on any sort of good ground to launch a boat. Being as Montana's by and large are resourceful, friendly, and good natured folks when it comes to being outside anyway, group got together came up with a solution based on accountability. To get the access, reopened a gate with a pass code. In order to get the code, you had to provide your license plate number or some sort of you know reference. A dollar amount was figured out for the installation. A loose agreement was formed saying basically, you raised the funds, will reopen the launch. Then the Eastern Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers went about collecting funds and putting together fundraisers and generally asking all sorts of people from all sorts of walks of life how they felt about this situation and asking them if they could chip in a couple of bucks. The funds were raised. Then, instead of the installation of a gate based on accountability, in the reopening of a freedom loving person's river access the process stopped. Inexplicably, the U. S d A seems to want an old part of people accessing the river, despite public statements to the contrary. Montana Senators Steve Danes and John Tester have both voiced their support for this critical public access project, and just recently, in a letter to Sonny Purdue himself, the Governor of Montana asked the Good Secretary to make this happen again, citing the overwhelming bipartisan support of a Democratic senator, a Republican senator, as well as Montana Fish, wildlife and parks, and even the anglers surrounding the Greater Miles City metropolitan area. So if you can do me a favor, I am leading the show with this call to action. Call Senators Danes and Tester and tell them their job is not done until we get this done. Keep working on behalf of access for all of us. And you can also tell Sonny Purdue and the U. S d A by going to www dot U s d A dot gov forward slash tell Sunny that's s O N N Y. Fill out the form and tell them to get access for all by opening this boat ramp at Fort KYO k e O g h Montana by hunting season. This week We've got trout, grizzlies, mushrooms, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week Uh. This is really the meat and potatoes of the whole dang show if I'm being honest, as everyone knows my week end. This podcast is powered by Steel Power Equipment. Steel has that iconic orange and white chainsaw leafblower, power sprayer make your wood lot, backyard, garden, raised bed life easier type of company. I use their pul saus electric and gas chainsaws, and I know and trust a bunch of other folk who do too. Give them a look the next time you're in the market and want to help out this podcast. Another fun thing you can do is check out f h F Gear that's fish hunt Fight Gear out of Bozeman, Montana. F h F, if you don't know, began as a customed tactical gear accessories maker that changed slowly into custom chest harnesses, fly fishing and binocular holding. Now they make all sorts of awesome stuff. All of us at the Meat Eater swear By. I have known the owner and founder, Paul Lewis for years. He is a design genius. If you ask me now, you're probably want to know what happened during my week, and I'm gonna tell you what I can. Frankly, way too much happened this week Grizzly bears, fishing, conventional and non it was wild. If you don't believe me, I'll be able to provide proof in the form of a future episode of The Cow's Weekend Review. Field reports YouTube series Grizzly Bears. I've seen grizzly bears do some wild crazy stuff. I've seen them roll boulders that they dug out of the side of a hill like the size of a v W A bug, as if it was no big deal. They've charged me several times. I've seen him cross Talas slopes. I've seen him a cross a glacier one time. I've seen him cover ground fast. I've seen him dig squirrels. I've seen him roll snowballs. I've seen him enjoy life, and I've even hunted him a bunch. I've never snapped cap on one, as we used to say, but man, I appreciate this animal. Recently, as in this week, I joined Idaho Fishing Game Regional biologists and lead grizzly bear biologist Jeremy Nicholson, as well as Chief of Wildlife Toby Boudreau, and a bunch of other great folks to trap and call her grizzly bears for an ongoing grizzly population study. I was really excited for the opportunity to watch this process, talk with the crew, and get a better understanding of what the grizzly story was on Idaho side of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or g y E. As I am sure everyone knows, this is a hotly contested topic. How many bears are there and how are they doing? If you've been paying attention to the news. Just a couple of days ago, a federal court upheld a lower court's decision to keep the grizzly bear on the threatened species list despite a Trump order to US Fish and Wildlife to remove the grizz from the threatened species list. So that's kind of where we are. This basically means that the grizz in the lower forty eight is federally managed. But if you recall, as I just said, I was out with the state of Idaho. So how does that work? Well, there are federal grants that help pay for the states of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho to manage the threatened grizzly bear. Management is a big word in this case. The state biologists, conservation officers, technicians, and volunteers manage grizzly bears by trapping, tracking, releasing, relocating, and recording data lots and lots of data. They manage by coordinating with multiple agencies and nonprofits to educate an ever changing group of people who come to recreate, visit, fish, hunt, owned cabins, own second homes in grizzly country. They educate these folks to behave in a bear safe way. They manage grizzlies by investigating incidents that may involve a problem bear. In the case of a problem bear that refuses to take the training provided by hazing, capture and relocating, and that bear becomes a repetitive problem bear, the bear is killed. This shouldn't be shocking. This is what happens in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and even inside Yellowstone Park on occasion. There is, of course, some federal oversight and compliance. Certain decisions like the one to kill or remove a grizzly from the ecosystem certainly requires okays from multiple people, but at the end of the day, of the state is doing the work. If this factoid is revolting to you, A lot of these federally threatened bare deaths are linked back to folks vacationing in some form and being too darned lazy to keep their trash or coolers or bird feeders or dog food inside or in a bear proof container. Just can't be bothered and bear dies for it. And these uh, poor folks who love to be outside, who are working for Idaho Fish and Game have to do it, or some other state agency have to take care of this bear because you know it was influenced by folks who just couldn't clean up after themselves. So I ask you what's more revolting. Pick off your trash, pick it up, it up, it up, Thank you, sweetie. Let me tell you from what I experienced, it is a lot of work to manage grizzly bears, and it isn't all glamorous. Over the week I dealt in fermented fish, which is gill netted fish from another fishery study that sat in buckets until they turned into a putrid bubbling almost cheesy smelling gray gravy. Got a little bit of that on my shoes, and I can tell you you can tell anyway. I dealton road kill, moose, elk, and deer at various stages of decay, buckets of fermented blood, and literal handfuls of partially congested green stomach contents or rooming from the aforementioned ungulus. Keep in mind, our temperatures are in the eighties and the mosquitoes were real bad too. We moved two hundred fifty pound live traps made out of welded aluminum what used to be called culvert traps, are hauled into bait sites selected for the catching of either conflict bears or study bears. The difference between a conflict site and a study site could be the difference between a you know, good looking treed ridgeline that runs from a nice clear looking creek up to the alpine and uh campsite or someone's yard. The thing these sites would have in common would be the presence are likely presence of grizzly bears and possibly a heavily trafficked and recreated road. We were doing all this just outside of Island Park, Idaho, which is the most heavily trafficked recreation corridor in the whole darned state. The trapping site is baited with all the goodies I described earlier, and finally a few trail cameras are placed around to see what's going on, and then a bunch of signs are posted in a three and sixty degree circle all the way around the bait site. That's what you know. Three and sixty degrees me to warn any human visitors that all this stinky stuff is going to be bringing in bears and to stay away. The Grizzly Beared management team here then checks the trap line both remotely and physically. Some of the traps are set with the transmitter that sends a signal when the trap door drops, but even if that signal doesn't go off, they physically go in and check the sites every day early in the morning before temperatures rise. In fact, that's how we found one of the bears that we trapped. Spoiler Alert trapped a couple of bears. When a bear is trapped, the team gathers. They visually assess the bears weight and condition. Then they administer a dissociative anesthetic related to like ketamine, which as eyewitness, rendered a five hundred and thirty nine pound bore grizzly very very calm and basically a mobile in about five minutes. Now it's important to note that this dissociative anesthetic doesn't exactly make the bear go to sleep. The bears awake. I would think that they're aware to some point, which is interesting, Like their eyes stay open. You actually put like a lubricant on their eyes and then put like a bandana over the top of their eyes. Jeremy's a graduate of Tennessee, so he had a State of Tennessee beanie that he cut up specifically to put over a bear's eyes. I thought that was real cute anyway. Then you lay the stretcher out in front of the trap door and then you open the trap door, which I found thrilling to say the least, because do you really know if he's asleep? Apparently these guys do. And then the team and I got to act as part of the team, which was just incredibly awesome. You grab on, you physically grab onto the bear, grab a chunk of hide, and we slide the bear out of the live trap onto the stretcher. A live grizzly bear. The bear is wade, it's temperature is taken, the mouth is open again with with human hands, you're reaching into the mouth the jaws of a grizzly bear. An oximeter is placed on the bear's tongue to make sure the bear is getting enough oxygen. If the oxygen level is low, the bear is given oxygen by a small hose that is lubricated and gently slid into the bear's nostril. Measurements of length, girth, headwidth, and head length they're taken. Hair and blood samples are taken. The bear's tracks are carefully measured, partially as an identifier to be used in case a bear needs to be identified by its track and like conflict situation, and eventually it is fitted for a tracking collar. Two types of collars are used. One is like the super fancy GPS kind that's like constantly spitting out information to a satellite. They typically put those on the mail bears because the mail bears, due to being you know, a bunch of not had uh, lose their collars really fast. So they try to get as much information on the movements and whereabouts of these male bears as they can and then the female bears they get kind of the older school style of transmitting callers that they don't get quite the up to date info, but the info coming from a female's caller kind of catches up to the males data because the where the collar for a much longer period of time, sometimes up to two years. Okay, After all of this, the bear is carefully slid back into the trap facing the door. This is done by having someone grabbed the bears hind legs and kind of shuffle crab walk backwards all the way back to the closed end of the trap, while the rest of the team helps slide the rest of the bear in tandem with the person pulling's efforts until the bears all the way in the trap. I did this on one of the bears we trapped. You know. I just like helping out, it doesn't matter kind of what the job is. I don't mind getting dirty and stinky, and I love to learn new things from folks who know what they're talking about. So when Jeremy asked me to crawl into the bear trap dragging a bear with me, I really didn't think much about it at all. I just jumped in and started to help but let me tell you. When you're in a tiny space and you got your back against the wall, all hunched over, and in order to look outside to the wide open you have to look over six ft plus of grizzly bear harry humping, big old claws included, you know your heart starts to thump a little bit. My brain at least started to remind me that this isn't a situation you typically want to be in. In fact, my brain said, you know, most folks want to avoid volunteering for this sort of thing. The last thing you do before the bear trap is closed and the bear is left inside the trap to relax and clear its head before being released. You know they don't want to release drugged up bears. They want these bears to go on living a long, long life, so they want them to be fully recovered before you open that trap and let him go. The last thing you do is you give four shots of penicillin to the bear, one in each quarter, one in his shoulder, one in each ham. This is to pre emptively get ahead of any possible infections. The process of pulling samples get have given the bear preemptive because you know the bear isn't just going to show up for a follow up appointment if it gets sick. The penicillan is thick and I guess kind of cold. According to the bear team, the bear can field the shot, so it must be given really slowly. And this again is happening at the end of the process, which really only takes about half an hour once you actually start working on the bear. So you're getting close to the time that the air starting to come back to its senses as this dissociative anesthetic is wearing off, both bears kind of started having a little bit of head movement and making some noises, and you can feel them kind of making these minute movements of limbering back up. So anyway, I was in charge of administering the hind quarter penicillan shots, you know, because I guess I was already stuck way in the back of the trap with the grizzly bear between me and the wide open world. And let's just say, you really start to listen and take notice of any movements or sounds your patients makes at that point, and as you try to slowly administer that shot of penicillan, you really come up with some fanciful consequences of administering that shot too fast. If you could possibly just wake that bear up by doing it so uh, you know, obviously I'm here quite the weak, friends and neighbors. These bears are incredibly cool. The first one we trapped was fifteen years old. That bear had been trapped before at three years of age, which means, you know, it took him twelve years to forget the ruse. He'd never been in any human trouble, and he weighed five hundred and thirty nine pounds. Before that boar grizz goes into hiberd nation, he could be within spitting distance of seven hundred pounds. The second bore we trapped was twenty two years old, which was amazing. He was much skinnier than the younger bear. You could feel this bear's hips distinctly through his hide, and he weighed three hundred and seventy nine pounds. This bear had also never been in any human trouble. Another difference between these two is the bigger younger bear had much shorter claws than the old timer. The old is had those kind of cinematic long, white sharp claws. The younger bears were much more worn, making me really want to know the difference and feed, Like, what was the old bear specializing in that kept his claws so pretty? According to Jeremy the bear biologists, the bears that frequent the Idaho side have a diet that consists of animal protein, which seemed high to me. You know that includes insects, lots of log rolling and rock tipping for these bears. The other thing that I really want to impress upon you, other than the fact that I was greatly impressed by this whole situation and really like the care of the bears. There's a lot of like personal human safety thinking involved here too. But when we lifted those bears in the stretcher to hook the stretcher up to a hanging scale, it was very called out, like very practiced, and you did not scrape that bear on the ground despite being in five thirty nine pounds and a super super tough critter. That was impressive too. But another thing was the proximity of both of these bears to plenty of human trouble. It's quite amazing. Four and a half million people visited Yellowstone National Park last year, four million to Grand Teton National Park last year. The Henry's Fork, and the town of Island Park, Idaho, is right there. Island Park, of course, home the longest main street in the world, just a couple of miles away from these bears. The Henry's Fork gets a ton of angling traffic. There's a bunch of other sites around there. They get a ton of people, and you know, you gotta figure a portion of these folks never stepped foot in the park. The West Yellowstone Park entrance is the busiest park entrance. And then all those folks that just lived there, the ranchers and everybody else, like in the former recreators. There's a ton of like just four wheeling around out there, and you know, all the folk hiking peaks and all that normal stuff. And then you got to think of, just like all places, how much human activity has increased around there. That twenty two year old bear and that fifteen year old bear have been wandering through there. It's a documented they've been wandering through those areas for fifteen and twenty two years. They've seen some major major changes in human activity. And despite all of that, neither of these big, old nasty boars had so much as an upended trash can track back to them. We also found quite near the last bait site a really good load of bleats. Uh puccini mushroom is a bleat. We've fried those up and ate them very good. I met up with my good buddy George White, a world cast anglers, and fished the south fork of the snake. Caught a bunch of fish throwing the fly rod, kept a rainbow and a cut bow, which is a hybrid between a rainbow and a cut through oroat trout, in that case, the Yellowstone cutthroat trout. We loped their heads off and put them in the Fishing Game freezers at the boat launch along with my information to have a chance at winning checks ranging from fifty to a thousand dollars, which is a program Idaho Fishing Game is instituted to try to get angler involvement and pulling rainbows out of the system so the native cutthroat trout could come back. I even went out and electro fished. That was the non traditional type of fishing, but highly highly effective way of fishing. I alluded to earlier and asked the regional Fisheries director, who is by the way, an actual Idahoan, Brett high A bunch of questions as to why in the heck you have to incentivize people who call themselves anglers by shelling out big money just to keep fish again. You will be able to see all of this plus a bunch of stuff. If I told you right now, you think I was making it up on a few true episode of the Cow's Weekend Reviewed Field Reports YouTube series, So you know, be looking for that here in a couple of months. Moving on, in what is possibly the most earth shattering scientific discovery of our lifetimes, scientists have recently discovered that one human year is not necessarily the equivalent to seven dog years. Now, as a kid, we all knew for a fact that Santa the tooth Fairy existed seven dog years to one human year. Was a fact. The last bit of childhood knowledge. Childhood certainty has left the building. Elvis is dead, by the way. In a comparative study performed at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and published in the journal Cell Systems, researchers found that at only one year of age, a dog maybe comparable to a human at the age of thirty, Think on that the next time that cute little ball of fir stares up at you after attempting to copulate with the couch cushion. Jokes aside, you know a dog is just a dog. Don't start second guessing the intentions of your canine. As per usual, they just want food. They aren't after a higher meaning, you know, like a fifteen year old human. This study looked at the accumulation of methyl groups, which are a cluster of molecules in different parts of the human genome as we age. They then search for corresponding accumulation of methyl groups in the dog genome. Then they looked for certain aging milestones, for instance the emergence of teeth, and they looked to see when these methyl groups matched up. What they found by analyzing the genomes of a test group of one hundred Labrador retrievers was that they were all boys and girls, and that the methyl groups collected much more rapidly at the early stages of life, then tapered off toward the end, meaning that a one year old lab would be the human age equivalent of thirty, which is shocking, But a twelve year old Labrador retriever is only the equivalent of seventy human years. For some reason. This kind of makes me think of an uncle of mine who also goes by Cal, who once told me I'm here for a fast sixty, not a slow eighty, which is kind of fitting. Now you may be thinking, why the heck did these folks waste their time with studies like this? Dogs are dogs? Well think about this one. If the study proves out and we can match up animal age to human age, along with the corresponding milestones of age like adolescence, puberty, that angsty age where they get to tattoo when they start packing around a guitar, midlife crisis, age of like buying sports cars when you live in Montana and they serve no practical purpose, or like arthritis, or you know all those other age related type milestones. We would have a better chance of doctoring, training, and understanding our animal companions, or maybe even developing a better understanding of the wise of animal movement. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to send me straight or tell me what's happening in your neck of the woods, shoot me an email into a s k C a L. That's asked Cal at the meat eater dot com. If you want to show your friends and neighbors how much you know about a lot of stuff, pick up a cow's Week interview hat or nifty pocket tea only at the meat eater dot com. I'll talk to you next week. Its Atom of the man as Co

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