00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kell. Now Here's Kel recently published in the Calgary Herald an article titled where he Belongs The latest news regarding Calgaries deceased COVID mascot Turk Diggler Turkey's Oh Turk Diggler, named after the central fictional adult film character in the film Boogie Knights. In Boogie Knights, Dirk Diggler was played by Mark Wahlberg, which to me is just another example of Canada's ability to remain wholesome yet edgy. I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy. As you recall, the wandering, lonely urban Turkey started out primarily in the Ramsey Park neighborhood. Turk is supposed escape e from the famous Calgary Stampede fairgrounds, eventually strutted and gobbled his stuff in department store windows, looking for a mate through several neighborhoods throughout the spring, until a run in with possibly Calgary's urban coyote population ended his short run. This past July. Turk Diggler never found a mate, but despite not leaving behind a biologically successful legacy. The Wayward Turkey has some six thousand fans on the Ramsey Turkey Facebook page and a line of Turk Diggler merch proceeds going to the Alberta Children's Hospital Foundation and the Calgary Food Bank, which makes me smile, not because of the chair oritable merch line figureheaded by a turkey named after a fictional porn star, but because turkeys or food and food is figureheading donations to a food bank. I mean, you honestly didn't think I was gonna go to the Children's hospital route right? Anyway, The turkey still has his spot in the sun, and turk fans are not ready to see it fade. They are collecting signatures and soon cash to have a bronze sculpture of the bird erected on Scotsman's Hill. Mom, why did they name him turk Diggler? Uh? Parents, get ready with your answers. That's what you get when he anthropomorphizes wildlife. Okay, you have to navigate the reasons why a turkey, a bird found almost everywhere, is a sculpture, and why that turkey is named after a fictional porn star. Wonderful you reap what you so, Calgary. One last tidbit I found amusing glean from the Calgary Herald was a description of the trials and tribulations of finding the right sculpture candidate. They apparently searched far and wide, including interviewing potential sculptors in Germany and China, but ultimately a sculptor was selected just one kilometers away or forty five minutes in the US in Cranmore, which says that the Google machine in Canada must act a little different when you type in sculptors near me or The Calgary Herald was just trying to get every last drop of stock out of this Thanksgiving bird. This week we've got the Texas Desk talking trees, emails, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as this podcast is, as you know, sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. That old orange sign is hanging in just about every small town for a reason. Steel the Clock is taking my friends and neighbors. There are only a couple of short weeks left in the bird hunting season, and it is my duty and responsibility to get that dog on real live birds. Before the season ends. Last week, as you know, we were in South Dakota chasing the Chinese ringneck pheasant, which is a non native species that was introduced in the US sometime in the eighteen eighties. Well, i should say successfully introduced in the U s sometime the eighteen eighties. According to the Audubon Society, Notable figures such as George Washington attempted to release pheasants well before the eighties. Anyway, the successful stock most likely originated in Oregon's Willamette Valley, brought there by the ambassador to Shanghai at the time, Owen Denny. He then went on to create a very budget minded breakfast chain. One of those things is true listeners, and that thing has nothing to do with a ridiculous meal called moons over Mihammy. See you at Denny's. If you take things at face value. From a conservation standpoint, the pheasant is a big fan of fringe habitat. It thrives in areas where agriculture and cover meat. What benefits a pheasant will typically benefit a lot of other animals, And what a pheasant likes isn't always what our native species truly prefer. Thus, Lee The ring neck pheasant is not considered for the most part invasive or harmful, despite the fact that they have been documented fighting with prairie chickens and sage grouse, occasionally even stealing a nest to us as their own. The ring neck pheasant can fly forty miles per hour, which compared to the mallard duck, a comparison I am making because the mallard duck is another very popular or game bird. Mallards will fly at twenty five miles per hour. Your average rooster at full size, we'll get to about three and a half pounds. That's just a fun rooster fact for you, anyway. A listener from the UK writes in with the effects of COVID on the shooting industry and shooting pastimes on his side of the Atlantic. The RSPB the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which was originally a ladies society and was formed around the fact that all the fancy ladies putting feathers in their hats were actually decimating bird populations around the world fashion just like beavers. For more on that topic, you can read that book The Feather Thief that everybody's talking about it's a good one anyway. The RSPB states that the sixty million pheasant and red legged partridge we call red legged partridge chucker around here that have been released into the countryside for the purpose of shooting and eating will out compete the native songbird populations for food. Why is this happening now because shooters can't congregate to shoot a bunch of birds because of COVID restrictions, which is leaving a lot of unhappy bird dogs and a heck of a lot of birds in the UK. So all these birds, these sixty million birds are just wandering around competing with the native birds by eating amount of house and home. This, friends and neighbors is a real time happening right now example of non native invasive species versus what's happening here in the US with pheasant as a non native species that we don't call invasive, invasive means harmful. Another interesting aside is South Dakota's annual harvest of pheasants is over a million birds on most years. South Dakota is typically the most talked about pheasant state in the US, so let's say it has as the most pheasants killed in the US. But for the sake of argument, we're going to say that every other state in the Union is also killing one million birds a year. The United Kingdom, Britain, Scotland, Northern Ireland would be killing ten million more pheasants than the United States in that case, and doing it on only one quarter of the land mass. Now I took a few liberties with the math there, but it's close enough for this theoretical situation. The fact is South Dakota kills the most birds. The numbers drop off dramatically from there. In fact, most states that have them may only report a few thousand pheasants, which means to me that folks in the UK are wild game bird eaten sons of guns. In fact, I was just shown a picture of a beautifully wrapped like shrink wrapped grouse that says beware of shot. Because remember, in the UK you can sell game. It's almost like it's a different country. I could have had it a way, which is I can judy my old China. Are you telling pulp pies in the bag of tripe? Because if you of feeling quickly, why not just have a jay author Moving on, quick update on the Snort report eyeball chief. The little girl had a ring of scabs that did look slightly infected around her eyes, caused by repeated abrasion from grass, sorghum and corn tassels. I gooped up Rise with antibiotic ointment, which must have felt great because I am not lying to you. After the first dose, which was a wrestling match to administer, I would then show her the bottle and she would line up for treatment. Instant relief. We all like it, anyway. Thank you to the listeners who wrote in, including this gem from Paul Kinderman quote, Hey, I use a mix of bees wax and coconut oil on those areas nose paws and in the cold balls. I hope you mean the dog Paul. Moving on to the ever popular, yet seldom visited Texas desk, possible mountain lion attack in Hood County, Texas leaves one dead. Officers were called to the scene of a missing person's report in Lapan, Texas, on December five. If Lapan, Texas is familiar to you, it probably isn't for the only stat listed on the town's Wikipedia page, which is that a governor from Oklahoma once died there. Anyway, the current victim, not the governor from Oklahoma, had apparently been missing since the morning of December. SECO officers found the body of the twenty eight year old man in a wooded area. His wounds were that of an animal attack. Although there have been less than thirty confirmed lion related deaths in the US in the last one hundred years, a mountain lion is the suspect and will more than likely knock that old dead Oklahoma governor down a notch on the Lipan Wikipedia page. The Hood County Sheriff's Office, Texas Game Wardens, and the Governmental Trapper are working on locating the mountain lion. The public in the Lipan area are urged to be mindful of their surroundings and keep young children and animals inside at night. Now, anywhere mountain lions are present, a corner may have a relatively simple job of identifying cat claw wounds, but this is Texas. Just in native species, the corner had to rule out bobcat awesol lot, jaggerundi, and jaguar On the non native side. As my friend Joe Rogan often likes to state, there are more tigers in Texas than the rest of the world, where tigers are wild and native. Current world population estimates for tiger are only about four thousand, whereas in the whole of the US there may be five thousand in captivity, which is a lot, even for a state as big as Texas. If you thought that last one was a crappy story, Texas Parks and Wildlife recently responded to an anonymous tip reporting that a bunch of croppy carcasses had been dumped in Lake of the Pines, which is a giant impoundment of Big Cypress Bayou, located west of Shreveport, Louisiana, and east of Dallas, about a hundred and fifty miles. Officers responded and eventually hooked two anglers who had in their possession three hundred and fifty croppy filets. The legal possession limit for croppy in this part of Texas is fifty per person, which put these two about a hundred and seventy three croppy over the legal possession limit, which is a croppy way to behave if you want to call yourself an angler. WHOA Now, aside from that bad joke, there's some discussion as to what bag limit and possession limit mean, So let's break that down using the Texas Parks and Wildlife website. Daily bag limit quantity of a species of wildlife resource, such as fish, that may be taken in one day. A day is a twenty four hour period of time beginning at midnight and ends at midnight. Possession limit the maximum number of fish a person may possess before returning to their residence. Possession limit is twice the daily bag limit on game and non game fish, except as provided in the guide, and does not apply to fish in the possession of or stored by a person at their residence. A residence is a permanent structure where a person regularly sleeps and keeps personal belongings such as furniture and clothes, but does not include a temporary abode or dwellings such as a hunting or fishing club, or any clubhouse, cabin, tent, or trailer house or mobile home used as a hunting or fishing camp, or any hotel, motel or rooming house used on a temporary basis, implying that if you are in transit, the possession limit applies until you get to your primary residence. Now you always have to review the regulations for changes in your home state. And get familiar with the REGs of any new states and waters you fish. For instance, if you followed the definition of possession in the state of Texas while fishing in the state of Montana, you would be on the wrong side of the law. Be it canned, smoked, salted, frozen at home or in your truck, those fish are part of your possession limit, which to me makes a lot of sense. In fact, I would go as far as to say the state at Texas does not have the health of its fisheries in mind with the way their possession limit rule is written, and be honest. With the exception of maybe some super high water content fish like halibit that holds seemingly forever in a freezer, do you want to stockpile a bunch of freshwater fish in the freezer? No, they're better fresh. Eat your fish, then go back to fishing. Don't be a horder. If these daily and possession limits seem arbitrary to you, think of it like this. If you have hunted or fished for a number of seasons, you know that sometimes when it rains, it pours, which is the reason for a daily bag limit. This is what you can kill and keep any day of the season. Some days you will get nothing, But some days you will call in a lot of turkeys or bowl elk or moose, or hit that croppy depth and water tamp combination perfectly. You won't be able to keep them off your hook. On these magical days, you won't want to stop, but if you give a rip about the resource, you will. Yes, you called in a group of Tom's early in the season, and you could have shot all three, which let's say as your seasonal allowance, but you are only allowed one per day. Yes, you will be out in the woods again tomorrow, probably in the exact same spot. So what's the difference between shooting two right now? Well, because we all know that tomorrow brings a whole new set of anomalies and dynamics to that same turkey spot. You may never call in a bird that is hunting. That is why the rules are written the way they are. A tag does not represent an animal, It represents the opportunity to take an animal. Moving on, this show is reaching you right now through a huge and extremely complex network of interrelated structures. The vibrations of my voice moving the diaphragm of this microphone, Those movements turning into electrical impulses that transmit into my computer, the resulting sound being uploaded to a server through fiber optic cable, then all of you downloading that file and hearing my humble attempts to make sense of the natural world and all of us in it. And so much of what we talked about on the Weekend Review has to do with other kinds of networks, the connections over time and space between plants and pollinators, predators and prey, humans on tinder plants, and the old string and can. One particular kind of network getting more attention recently after years of study is the web of underground fungus that spreads throughout the forest and is known as my coritza. Often we'll look in an oak tree and think that particular tree is its own thing. It's separate from the birch tree and the dug fur. That oak is just trying to get enough sunlight and water and nutrients, and it wants to drop its acorns somewhere. They'll take root and grow into more oak trees. That's it. But over the past thirty years, the biologists Susan Simard and others have been documenting how that oak might not be so separate. Those strands of microrisa connect that oak to basically every other part of the forest. The fungi thread around the roots of the different trees and can transfer carbon, water, hormones, and minerals between the trees. The resulting connection allows those trees to do amazing things. Through this system, older trees have been shown to shift resources to younger trees When one part of the forest is threatened by pests or fire, other trees in the network can prepare in advance. When certain order trees are shaded by taller trees in the summer, the network can shift more carbon to those shaded trees to allow them to keep growing. When a coniferous tree that keeps its needles continues to grow through the winter, it can transfer carbon too deciduous trees that lost their leaves in the fall. All of this and way more happens through the strands of fungus running through the soil. When a tree is separated from the network, it doesn't grow as well, even if it gets optimal sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. Dr Simard was able to show that when the new Douglas fir trees were planted in a part of the forest where other vegetation had been cleared away. Ten of those trees were likelier to die than when they were connected through mikereitsa to other different species of trees. It seems that in this case, it's less every tree for himself and more all for one and one for all. Those networks have led scientists to wonder whether you could see all the parts of a forest adding up to one giant organism, with all those different parts connected the way separate parts of your brain are connected by neural pathways. We think of all though Leopold's are urging to quote think like a mountain as a metaphor. But maybe in a sense that mountain really is thinking whoa, and maybe the same thinking works in reverse. After all, there are more bacteria living inside of our bodies than there are human cells, and without those bacteria, the networks inside of us wouldn't work. So can I really say that I'm a discreet, standalone organism or am I also a system of networks receiving information from sources within me that are not me? You just want things to be sim ball, don't you? Sorry to disappoint We live on a fascinating rock. Moving on to an update kind of at the man made Meat desk. This week we have to go back over to talk about man made meat made of man. Try to keep up. Last week I talked with Brad Leone, host of It's Alive, as well as butcher Brian Merkel, head butcher at White gra Acres at a Duluth, Minnesota, from which I just enjoyed a lovely pig liver pata, about the ethical and logistical ins and outs of cultured meat. When I say cultured meat, I don't mean meat that is a sophisticated understanding of French Impressionist painters. That's just the term the industry uses for living cells grown in laboratories for humans to eat. Or if you remember grade school when the biology teacher had you spitting a cup to see what grew, that's the type of culture we're talking about. The whole conversation about lab grown meat got a whole lot THORNI er recently when a conceptual artist successfully grew tissue that started with cells taken from human beings. The whole sales pitch of the lab grown meat industry is that the product is not similar to meet the way the impossible burger might be similar to meat despite being derived from plants, the product is in fact meat. It has exactly the same cellular structure. It is living tissue. So if you've taken a few cells from a person and then you do all the things you do to living cells to make them replicate, eventually you'll have a whole lot of human cells. What then, The other sales pitch of the cultured meat industry is that nothing had to die in order to result in that burger or those chickenish nuggets on your plate. And so if no human being had to die in order for patty of human cells to exist, if you ate that, let's call it humane burger. See what I did there? Would you be a cannibal? Check. As unpalatable as that idea might be, it gets us into lots of interesting questions about meat eating in general. How important ethically is the line between human beings and the other animals on the earth. Once you can eat the tissue of a human and animal alike, it might not be so easy to discount the suffering of the animals that were more used to eating or can tell. Han, the artist who created the project, has received death threats. If that ain't ironic, I truly don't know what is. Some people have also gotten in touch with tell Han to see if they could recreate his process so that they could grow me made from their own cells. That's called recycling. Although he started the project to get people to think harder about an industry that presents itself as ethically clean, most cultured meat depends heavily on fetal bovine serum that's extracted when pregnant cows are slaughtered. Just a quick note, lots of pregnant cows get slaughtered, but we're not talking about like developed calves here. We're talking about like inseminated cows. Anyway, I bet old orcan never expected to get those particular emails. Part of me is glad for this art project because maybe if we have to think about the ethical implications of eating technically human meat, we'll think more carefully about the ethical implications of all the ways meat comes to us. And by the way, if we can eat technically human meat, what about technically endangered white rhino or technically polar bear or the meat substitute we have all been waiting for. I can't believe it's not do do or commodo dragon, I think you get the point. One of the most valuable aspects of hunting is the way you cannot hide from causing death. And when you have to face that death, that act of taking a life, you become better equipped to make good decisions in that department. I think there are a lot of similarities between those that raise and eat from their garden and those that raise and eat a pig or a calf, or a lamb or a chicken, and those that hunt. We are aware of the process. We have our hands in the soil and the blood under our fingernails. With a lab grown alternative, we don't and won't, And that, my friends, is what scares the hell out of me. It's willfully forgetting where meat comes from. It's signaling that we could be open to condos and not cows land divided, not united in open space. To me, and to be clear, we are veering way into the opinion in department. Here we are saying it's okay to not care. Will come up with an alternative that is almost as good. Now, who wants a burger? And what's your flavor? That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. As per usual, please right into a s k, C a L that's asked cal at the Meat Eater dot com and let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. And of course, if you are loving what you're hearing on Cow's we can review, tell a friend or two. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next week.