00:00:01 Speaker 1: Hey, what's up. This is the Meat Eater podcast recording. You know, this is the first media podcast we ever recorded not on the road. We're in my office. I'm on the road, that's right. Yeah, this is the first media podcast ever recorded where where I was not I Steve Ronnella, was not on the road. I'm joined here, as is often the case by Janice Patellos, who is on the road. We're in the Pacific Northwest, Um, overlooking the beautiful Lake Washington and in a little office and fixing it due somewhat of a special episode of podcast here. Because there's this thing that happens. We get, we get like like you know, the media podcast, right. The name comes from the fact, the word media comes fact that that. Um, there's a show. I do, a television show called Meat Eater. Um, hopefully you've seen it. If you haven't seen it, hopefully go check it out. But but I'd like to think if I didn't do a television show called Meter, I maybe still have a podcast by the same title. So there's these these things that exist. Um, you know, they they they circle around each other in some way. You know, I don't know why I'm explaining that to you. But anyhow, I'm the people watch this show, the show called Meat Eater, which is arguably um the next to Apocalypse now, Godfather One, Godfather too, and Strange Brew um perhaps the best thing to ever be filmed, And people watch this program and they always right in with these like hunting questions. And what you notice over time is that people keep like people ask the same questions. So something about the show or something about the subject of I think probably the latter, Like something about the subject of hunting um brings up these perpetual questions that people always ask. And a lot of times I have what's cool about having the Honest here and the Honest as a producer on the show but also a lifelong hunter, former guide, all kinds of stuff like that. A lot of times I will defer some of these questions to your Honest because they you know, they he can speak to them with some authority. So for this episode, what I want to do is is, in some way, it's like answering questions that come in all time. But it's more than just answering questions for some particular dude out there. You know, It's not like, hey, Bob, here's the answer to your arcane esoteric question, because these are things that are just on people's mind all the time when it comes to particularly the big game hunting um in order to give a little context, and we're just gonna, I'm just gonna start rolling into these and then we're gonna do a bunch of them as much as we can in an hour. And so this is just like a like a big game hunting discussion. And one of the first questions and we get all this time is like people always right and asking what's the best bang for your buck hunt? And it's usually a dude who lives somewhere east of the Mississippi River grows up. You know, he's a hundred white tails off his life on small game off his life. He's been saving up. He doesn't have a lot of dough. He's been saving up, and he wants to figure out, like what is the big wild West hunting trip he's gonna do. What's he gonna hunt for? And where is he gonna go? And this is his big chance to you know, experience the vast, beautiful vistas of the American West. And yeah, you can feel he's don't even paying attention. He's working on a side project on his computer, um, which is the completion of Yeah, yeah, I actually I want to throw it in real quick. The reason you honest to tell us is in my office right now, as we just pulled a five day Uh, I don't wanna quite call a bender because there was besides the bottle of beer here and there. You know. It wasn't like the old stories, you know, Jack Caraway getting all hopped up on pills and you know, writing for days on a big continuous piece of butcher's paper. But we did just spend five days, you know, fourteen fifteen hours a day, um, putting the finishing touches on volume two of The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Game, which will be released in the fall of two thousand fifteen. This coming fall with spiegl and Growl, the division of Random House and imprint with Random House Beautiful Books. And we've been just busting our asses on getting this thing done. That's why Yanni is here. We finally turned it in last night. So all that research and work it makes us even better boned up. But we didn't quite finish it because Yanni's messing around something over there. But yeah, so this this question is this pre new question, like if you're gonna go out, you're gonna go out west and do something you want to go do a wild West hunt. What are you gonna do? I'm gonna take the I'm gonna give the long d I'm gonna give it a long answer. We're gonna give an answer for the long thinking, detail oriented dude, and I'm gonna give an answer for the impulsive dude. The long thinking, detail oriented dude will think of a couple of species to interest him, and I would suggest, if you really don't have like a Western experience with like good availability, a good chance for success and action, um, I would think about mule dering elk. Do you disagree with that? You No, not at all. I would think about mule deering elt. I would think about the following states from the south working north. I would think about Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana. It's good to mention that he's asking about affordability as well well. I would give him the long, detail oriented answer. So let me let me go on a little bit. So so I'm just named it the western states. Some states that would rule out Like, if you're a dude from the Midwest, you know, or the East or wherever, and you want to do a Western hunt, this is gonna this, this will this will piss some people off. But I wouldn't spend a ton of time looking at Washington, Oregon, California. I just want to spend a bunch of time on those states. It's long ways to go. Yeah, add to the gas bill big time. Yeah, it as to the gas build also, It's just like, uh, I spent a lot of time looking at those states for a bunch of reasons. But the long detail oriented dude, I would pick, you're gonna You're gonna pick couple of species, and I would start doing some research in publications such as Eastman's what's the Eastman's one called Eastman's Hunting Yeah, and Bow Hunting Journal, Eastman's Magazines, and Hunting Fool Magazine, and start doing some research on what are the premier low pressure mule deer and elk units in a handful of states that seem attractive to you. Like, let's say you decided I'm gonna do like you got your heart set on the Northern Rockies, so you're gonna be like you're thinking Idaho Montana. Let's just say you love the looks Idaho Montana. Never been out there, you want to go up there. Get Eastman's and get hunting fool and start reading through those publications and finding low pressure draw units in no states and then start applying for those units. Because if you know you want to go sometime in the next five six years, start applying for like the cream of the crop top pick units. And these are not secrets, you know, these are widely known things. Basically, it's the things with the minimum percent chance that you're gonna draw the tag, and start applying for those tags for five or six years, because you might just get lucky and hit some sweet unit, hit a tag for a sweet unit, and when that happens, you'll know now is my time to go, because I'm gonna have a fantastic hunt. And it also narrows down because any tag you draw like that asking me for a very specific little chunker ground, and you'll know to hammer down where you're gonna go hunt. You can start starting maps and all that. Now, if you're just a guy who's like I'm going this year, man, I don't care. I would think that the first thing you want to do is pick your species. And again one quick interjection on that note of those points and whatnot, A lot of states, Um, it doesn't really matter if you're actually already choosing the particular unit. You can just be collecting points. And that's probably the most important important thing that you need to be doing to be thinking about this grand adventure in the future, is just collecting some points. So when you do have your penny saved up, your ready to roll, you've got these great options. Yeah, I want to give a quick crash course on bonus points in big game tag draws. It's a really complicated subject. We have a ton of information about it in the complete guide book that we're working on. But the way to work is, like you put let's say you want to put in for a unit, like let's just pulling out of Like the premier multary unit in Montana is to seventy. Okay, it's in the upper bid root. If you could have any mule deer tag in Montana, you'd want unit to seventy. Now, the odds of drawing unit to seventy or single percentage points, okay, especially for a non resident, you're just not gonna do it. Montana has a bonus point system though, so every year that you put in for a tag and you don't draw, you get a point added to your name, and Montana squares. Well, let me back a minute. You get a point added to your name. That means the second year you put in, your name goes into the hat two times. But what Montana does now is they square your bonus points. So let's say you've applied two years in a row unsuccessfully for you to two seventy. The next year you apply, you have two bonus points. Your name will be going into the hat four times for your bonus points in a fifth time because you're filling out a new application. So right now, for instance, I'm sitting on you know, I think twelve bonus points for bighorn sheep in Montana, I apply for the same unit every year six eight for big horns. My name will be going into the hat this year one forty four times. I still will not draw that tag. Mule, deer and elk are different, though, because there's a lot of opportunities. So the long thinking guy, we'll start right now this moment accumulating bonus points in a handful of states. I put in for every state, but I am able, like I hunt a lot more for variety of reasons. I hunt a lot more than most people. I put in for like pretty much every Western state. But for you, pick a couple of states that you've always wanted to visit, or better yet, where you have some family or friends or some connection, some connection to resources and logistical support, and start putting in for tags every year. There's no reason not to do it. It costs a little bit of money, but just do it now. Let's say, but that's not the case, and you want to go this year or as soon as possible. Pick your species. I would suggest elker mule here, and then narrow down into what state you want to hunt. That's the first thing I would do. And I would think, like for affordable states and availability of tags, and you want to go for mule deer, elk. I'm gonna try to narrow it down a little bit and say that in Johanna's correct me on this, I would say Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, mule deer, elk, availability of tags, good hunting potential. Yeah. The only problem with Montana is they have increased their prices a big time for the nonresident hunter. I want to say that your upwards of eight hundred dollars, even maybe being close to nine hundred. If you want to do the combo tag, you're gonna wind up being shocked at what tags are gonna cost. Another states like Colorado is a cheaper state to hunt. Yeah, right now, I think you can hunt a boil in Colorado is a nonresident for about five and that's definitely one of the cheaper states. Idaho might be a little bit less. They might be in the four's. Um. Yeah, Montana, you're up there eight somewhere. It's a lot of money. And what you gotta look at is you gotta look at how you're gonna you know, this gets into the whole their subject is when you go do this, how you're gonna save money, Like you're gonna drive camp out of your truck, public land, all that kind of stuff. But the tag, it's gonna be expensive. And there are a thing that guys run into on a promise. This is like Colorado has some over the counter ELK opportunities, right, Idaho, Montana has some over technically like they basically have some over the counter opportunities because of something I'll explain where you're you're supposed to put in for a draw every year, like you have to apply around June one or late March, and in around June one you apply for a tag for the following fall. Oftentimes there's not enough applicants to fill. You have a lot of quantity of tags, so the leftover tags are sold basically in the over the counter way until the until the quota runs out, until the number of tags for sailors sold, and it usually happens sometimes in the late summer. Sometimes it doesn't even happen until season starts. So when I say over to counter, it's not technically over to counter, but it's basically over the counter availability. Um. It takes a little bit of research. You can get to find yourself with some great tags. If you do that, you find those undersubscribe units um, and they should be that you can't buy them over the counter. So the guy that's not doing any research is not finding that tag, not getting into that unit. So with a little bit of research, you can really get yourself into some good stuff. Yeah. So, um, I'm gonna try to get even more detailed. Mule deer, I would say, uh, Idaho not but not the Panhandle for availability, inexpensive all that kind of stuff, mule, deer and idahole. Not the Panhandle. Um Colorado you gotta put in for mule your tags and some of the better units take a couple of years to draw. But Idaho you're just gonna get the tag. Montana a more expensive tag. I think about the eastern half of the state for elk um Idaho in Colorado, yeah, if you're not playing the long game, Colorado is hard to be for the uh, the short game guy, because there are lots of elk there. It's something like two and fifty elk in that state. There's two seasons that are wide open over the counter. You just show up and buy attack so you can decide the week before that you know you want to go elk hunt. There's a lot of opportunity there. Randy Newburg wrote a great article I think it appeared in Bugle magazine where he lined out how to basically go on this affordable western elk hunt in Colorado for a thousand dollars. And I think he did it leaving Wisconsin or Indiana one of those Midwestern states. Um driving out, you know, car camping. Uh, obviously you only drink water and you eat Ramen noodles. But even with a six dollar elk tag for a thousand dollars, you want elk hunting for a week. I used to do stuff. I've lost touch of it now, and sometimes I feel like I need a reality check, you know, because the way, like, you know, just the way I'm able to hunt, like doing a show and stuff. You know, you just you stop thinking about money in quite the same way. But to give you a sense, I mean the kind of hunts we used to do. I want time. Took a greyhound bus from Montana to Alabama to hunt ducks, and I broke down a shotgun and put it in a duffel bag and hit it in the duffel bag. Drove a two and a half days on a greyhound bus because I couldn't afford a plane ticket to Alabama to hunt ducks on public land, and it took me two days to get back home on the bus. So you know, I've done cheap hunts. And it's like the way to cut down your costs is is just like self denied, you know, privation. I think there's some expenses you're not gonna get around. You're not gonna go hunt without the tag, right, you gotta have the tag. That's gonna cost money. What is the negotiable stuff and the thing? And I also mentioned that I got a guy book on the head. I think I also mentioned my guy book. Is you gotta look at I'm getting into some life stuff here. You gotta look at like where where where are you spending your money in your life? I remember one time watching the guy pull up and to pull up to a trailhead in Montana and he pulls up, you know, brand spanking new pickup truck, and he pulls out a twenty dollar pair of binoculars and starts glass and for ail k out of his truck window. I remember thinking that, dude, is guy. His priorities all wrong, you know, all wrong. He might have bought that big hunting truck, but then he burned up all his money on something that was like a large measure of vanity project. So I think that it's like, I don't mean, you know, in aid privacy here, but I think, like, so often where's your money going? Like are you like what are you spending your money on? I understand the tags are expensive, but there's not a guy I know that I couldn't go into his personal financing and find the money necessary to buy a big game tag if he really cares about that. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back to talking about big game tags in a minute. Yeah, I just reread the question, you know the guys. Yeah, but I'm not trying to I'm not trying to pick that dude out, No, I know, I just just want I just want to specifically answer his question, you know, before we get away from it. Oh. Um, but I agree with everything you're saying there, But he's con prohibitive for a guy with a young fa Yeah, he's got he's got a young family. And just what came to mind, because I know a lot of guys actually go hunting with young families on this particularly big game hunt is a Wyoming antelope hunt. It's a nonresident you can get and then your family. Yeah, you can't probably your family in the late summer, right analopns. You do not have to get up early in the morning. You can get up, get the family going, roll out there at ten o'clock, go hunting, leave the kids at the truck for a little bit. Whatever has to happen. Um but uh and for antelope does or even a bucking wyoming, you can probably get it done in two days, two days of hunting, and the tags are cheap. Right antalope tags in Montana, I wasn't even thinking about. But you know, I want to move back and we can't spend all our time. Now here's the second mold. Like this is one of the second most common questions that ever come in, is like, what's a good all purpose rifle, both in terms of caliber and everything else? Reasonable price, reasonable price? You know this question comes in. I swear every day and in a couple and every day a couple of times in some different way. Let's start with the caliber part, like what's a great all purpose caliber. There's a movement right now in shooting, in hunting to go with lighter calibers. This has to do with recent they're sort of ongoing technical improvements to ammunition. Ammunition is becoming more reliable, the materials work better, they're bonded in better ways. The bullets themselves. Yeah yeah, but bull yeah, I mean bullets are getting well, they're getting pushed faster, and they're performing better. They're able to withstand you know, very high flight speeds or you know feet per second, high musclevelosities. They hold together better, and this is leading to like greater efficacy on part of the bullets. So people are realizing they can get away from some of the high recoil shoulder busters and shoot these faster, flatter shooting, smaller caliber rifles with high quality bullets in them. I don't really want to get into that, but like right now, sort of the hot new caliber among long distance shooters and stuff is everybody's you know, talking about how great six point five millimeter rounds are. Right, everybody used to shoot, you know, point to eight for like seven millimeter stuff, and thirty caliber stuff was sort of always like the go to calibers for all purpose, you know, general purpose, big game rifles. People are getting away with that in some way. I'm sort of a throwback or traditionalist or something, or just a guy who likes to stick with things and I'm familiar with. But when I'm thinking about and it's like, I hate, I almost hate this conversation because it's so dependent on your your personal experiences. I often tell people if I had to have one gun, that I could for the rest of my life, and I had to pick it right now, Like what's your caliber for the rest of your life? And you hunt all your interests in all forms of big game in North America, I would pick I had to pick one rifle, I think that I would pick a seven millimeter m mag if I was ruling out. Um, if someone came down and said you can't have that one, then I would start wondering, do I want a wind mag or just a two seventy And I would start vascillating between those two. Now, there's a lot of like there's a lot of ways to achieve the same thing. Like when you say, like you know three mag, there's three Wind mag or three Chester short magnim. You can get those same muzzlevelocities and trajectories and bullet weights with other guns. But those are just ones that come to my mind. That's what you'll find a lot of in my gun cabinet is that kind of stuff. And I'm like an old timey Elmer fuddy kind of guy for thinking that way, But that's what I like. I tend to also like a rifle. UM, My goal isn't to try to get away with as much as I can get away with. Like I'm not the kind of guy who's gonna go out and hunt mule deer with a two forty three. It can be done. People do it. I remember meeting the kid. He's like, this guy, tell me, oh, yeah, my kid just killed elk with the two forty three. Later I was talking to the kid. He's like, yeah, I shot at nine times. I'm not saying he couldn't have done it cleaner, but I'm just but I like to have. I like to, you know, have plenty of gun, plenty of bullet, plenty of speed, and plenty of weight. And you know, that seems to be a fading perspective. It seems to be now this competition to like get away with as much as you can get away with, like shrink it down as watches you can shrink it down. And also, at the same time, I think you're gonna shoot things from farther and farther away. So I'm gonna use a really teeny bullet this borderline already, and I'm gonna toy around this idea that I'm gonna be shooting stuff at seven yards with it. I'm not that crazy about it. I'm done talking about him. I'm gonna be honest talking about it now. It's a very very in depth subject, that's for sure, and we certainly don't have enough time or I don't have the experience and knowledge to really really uh speak to it too. But just speak in your own Like I said, it is a personal thing. You've been in. You've watched a hundred elk in your career, right right, and in our camp. You know it's gonna toy contradict what you just said. But in our camp, yes, you pellet rifles. No, the one rifle every guy in our camp used to always like drop his shoulders, drop his head when it walked the camp when it was time to go l Connie with a new group of clients was a seven millimeter Remington magnets. Personal experience like not big enough. Uh yeah, you know, too fast, too small, and yeah it just didn't whatever. We just had bad experiences with that caliber and whatever. You know, that's just how it went. It just happened to be that way. You know, it could be a total how does your brother saying like we're just getting fulled fooled by randomness, Brothers, My brother is a cologist, but he's a statistician. Um. Even more technically, he like he's does a type of work or a discipline or something called basie and analysis. I could be screwing. I hope he's not listening to this, but he's a statistician. He's really big into the science of science, or he's big into, you know, how scientists approach things, how scientists think, how their influenced, what they're biases are. And one of the things that he's interested in, too, is his idea of being fooled by randomness. Like you're out fishing and you got are all fishing a pumpkin colored grub for small mouth, and someone puts a black grub on and hooks a fish that he's like, oh, they're hitting black, and everyone switches to black. He thinks that those situations are ripe for being fooled by randomness. Um. But anyhow, so yeah, back very quickly to calibers without going into the rifles themselves. Um, I'm I'm even older, more fundier traditionalist guy than you. So I'm gonna go with to seventy and the thirty six multiple reasons, but always find ammo for it. And uh, those calibers have been killing stuff for many, many, many years. Um. But my takeaway, or what I'd like the listener to takeaway would be, is to pick the caliber, use a premium bullet, whatever caliber you choose, use the best bullet you can afford, and shoot the caliber that you can shoot comfortably and confidently until sick of these guys to make their whole decision based on recoil. Well, it's a big deal. So if if you listen, if he has to funk up, it's such a it's such bullshit because guys say that, oh yeah, man, I can handle that going. I'm bucking up. And you watch him shoot, and the guy pulls his head of foot away from the sculpt before he pulls the trigger because he's got the flinch him so bad. So you can't say that he's he's got I don't mean buck up physically, I mean buck up psychologically. Okay, Well that you know that takes time and practice. But what I'm saying, whatever it is, if you some guys, maybe just or or any person. We shouldn't say, guys, some person might never ever be able to shoot a thirty caliber um, you know, magnum rifle. It just might not be in their things, small framed, just they don't have the you know, my kids starts hunting, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna have him home with the seven mm a weight I think recoil issue. Yeah, So I'm not saying, but listen to seven M I was talking about the seven millimeter remake, and again it's like there's so much personal bias. Right, I just happened to own very nice shooting seven millimeter round mag shooting like one sixty grain bullet at about three thousand ft per second mulciplocity, and it just shoots good for me, right, and I've had some good hunting experiences with it. So therefore I'm extolling this caliber based on just a very small thing. I happen to own one that I've had good experiences with and that I like, could I have had that same rifle chambered in a different round and taking it on those hunts and had those experiences. Absolutely, And if that was the case, I'd be talking up that one. So Janice is right there. If kicks, like there's kick, I have a three that kicks like a very slow kick. A seven milliment around meg kicks you like like getting kicked in the face by Joe Rogan because we're just watching him kick a kicking bag the other day. It's like, that's a seven millimeter ram meg and it's so abrupt and fast that it gives you a headache. And all those things can be managed a little bit. You know. There's also a big fat of very lightweight what they call mountain rifles. If you're packing on a rifle the only weighs seven pounds, all loaded up with the scope on everything, it's gonna kick and bark and want to jump that same rifle. You know. The heavier stock or heavier this that that comes in at ten pounds is gonna recoil a lot less. And my my seven mm m bag with a scope on it is twelve pounds nine ounces, right heavy. But you like my brother Danny said, he's got an old Ruger Ruger Model seventy seven. It's a thing weighs a ton um. But he said, man, you as you lay that thing over your backpack and you know something's gonna die. It's just like right, a heavy right folds just settles in. Yeah, you're like he was just talking about that, you know, just like you lay that thing up in your pack and you get nestled in there and it's just like that thing is just there's no doubt where that bullets going. And those light rifles. I had a rifle. It was too light. I couldn't shoot it. I never felt good mhm in a real world hunting scenario. That's a big thing. Not a lot of people talk about there's this big push for light rifles. Is it's like it seems like a recoil thing to me, this big push for light rifles. People are talking about carrying them around. But the reason I'm carrying mine around is I'm hoping to shoot it at some point and if I need a couple more pounds to make that thing feel good when I go to shoot it. And the vast the bulk of the shooting I do, and I hunt, you know, Western hunts a lot, the bulk of the shooting I do is prone. With my pack. What was the word you use the your day for certain kind of rests improvised? Is shooting prone with an improvised rest backpack? Why to jackets your buddy's shoulder or whatever? And doing that, I find the little bit of weight on that rifle makes a huge difference Okay, we gotta take a quick break. We'll be right back after this message. I don't mind toting around some extra pounds. My twelve pound nine ounce rifle was ridiculous, too heavy, too heavy. These six seven pound rifles, I don't know, they're light. Yeah, I think that eight to nine is really optimal, you know, I mean everybody, And look a lot a lot of people that are packing around six pound rifles. They could shoot better with a seven or eight pound rifle, and they could just shave those two pounds off their gut and be all the same going up the hill. That's a good point, man. I had a rifle that not long ago I sent to a gunsmith to put a heavier barrel on it. Not because I want, not for anything to do with like the barrel, overheating or anything. I just wanted more white. The rifle never felt good to me shooting it. Loved carrying it, you know, It's like carrying around a chopstick. Yeah. Lastly, for me, on caliber, I feel like you need to be able to put that bullet confidently in the spot. So again, shoot what you're comfortable and confident with, and I would rather you put it in the spot that you know, I tell you to put it as opposed to flinch thems and you know who knows where the bullet goes. And then we're just hoping that big overrides. Uh. You know, bad shot placement. That's the point that's brought up so much. Man, I mean, you kill elk with a pen knife, You've put in the right place. That's right. Uh, let's move on to your best, reasonably priced, affordable good rifle. No, I want to I want to change. Let's get to that, but I want to change. I want to interlude with one that comes up all the time. Can you dry age venison and elk and stuff? Okay, yeah, there's a companies. You don't want to age at all. Don't age bears and don't age pigs because the fat isn't tolerant. The fat sour is bad. And not only that, but the fat on wild pigs and the fat on bears, well, fat on everything sours in your freezer taste a lot longer, but it will happen. You can put a fatio chunk of bear meat in your freezer and pull it out eight months later, and that stuff will have turned a bluish green color. I'm not joking. If you're trim the fat away right away, kill a bear, skin it, trim the fat away, get the thing into your freezer. Kill a bear or kill a wild pig, skin it, get the fat off. There's a lot of uses for the fat. You can render it out and do great stuff with it. Because when it's rendered, it's has a great shelf life. It doesn't on the animal other than that on hoof dance. So birds, well, we're not gonna talk about births. That's the whole other thing. On hooved animals. You can definitely age them, the all kinds of thinking about how you age them, hide on, hide off. Do you recommend it? Yeah, if you have the facility for it. Because what I was gonna point out, in so much of my life, I'm always like thinking of this situation where I'm gonna, you know, have like a walk in cooler. It just never all standless steel meat hooks on rollers. It never happens. What does happen is you're in some hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to butcher a deer in a bathtub because you're flying out the next morning. Or you and your buddy go up and you gotta come back home, and you know that at home it's seventy degrees out. You gotta work the next morning. You got too dead deer. You know, it's just not like it. Just those those are games. Let's talk about. Let's just say you are living in um you know a little bit of a northern latitude, and you do have a garage with a concrete flu or that does stay cool. What can we do that? I tell you an anecdote my old roommate when I was in h school, my roommate killed a calf elk in the in the late season hunt. It was a January hunt. He killed a calf elk. We hung that calf elk in my garage, skin off, and never froze any of that elk, and ate the entire thing with it hanging in that garage with the temperature hovering a tad below a tad above freezing in the wintertime it hung in there. It must have been an are It must have taken us probably about seven weeks to eat that thing. We just will. Sometimes you go out there and did field kind of frozeny sometimes to be fine, and we just ate it. My old man talks about my dad was born. He hadn't use fifties dead now, but he's got some old timey experiences. He was talking about hanging deer skin off until there was a quarter inch of mold covering the deer, at which point they would butcher the deer. This calf elk I'm talking about that we had hanging there. You could, I'm not joking you. You could stick your thumb through that meat. It was so beautifully like dry aged by the end of it. But it was perfect conditions. This is in Montana, dry cold, sheltered area. It's good what I do now, and I want to talk about real world stuff. The only talk about my my brother Danny's experience. What a strategy my brother Danny's. Oh, I also wanna say. We had that elkin Kentucky and a guy in that case we we're going somewhere else couldn't bring the elk comb And that was like one of the only times in recent memory I've ever had something butchered by a butcher. He hung that thing ten days and dude, I couldn't tell. It wasn't like it was like tender regular old doubt right old out. My brother Danny, uh kills the moose every year. It's kind of like his main thing as his main parties. He kills a moose and that's what his family eats. Everything else is just extra. He don't think about having his freezer like I often think, like, okay, falls coming, October is coming. I want to have my freezer emptied out all of last year's game eating up because I'm gonna be filling it with new game this year. Um. He thinks about it the other way around. He doesn't want his freezer to be empty around September, which is his main hunting time. He doesn't want his freezer to be empty in September. He wants to have like if he's in't going into a new year. So let's say he's fall of this, he's following two thousand fifteen. He wants two thousand fourteen is game to be Peter and Out midwinner because that allows the animals this he's killed in the fall to age in his freezer. This is something people don't talk about. They should talk about it more. HOOFD game ages intend arizes in your freezer the same way if you leave something in your freezer too long, it can go south on you can go bad. Some of that decay is good, and some of that decay is called aging, like aging is just breaking down. He kills the moose in September. He don't want to even look at that thing for a few months. He forgets about it. Butcher's it right away. He's got that time of year. You got blowflies everywhere. It's just like, you know, it's wet, rainy. The thing is already coming back a mess. You know. He hunts out of canoes and stuff. They come back. They got a moose all chopped up in game bags. You get home, there's you know, meat bees, blowfly. Lord knows what it gets in the freezer, forgets about it because it ages. Then what you do, and this is what I do all the time. If I'm home for a week and I know, okay, i'm home, I'm working from home, I'm gonna be cooking every night. I don't just do all my thawing the morning. I'm gonna cook something. If I know on Friday, I'm like Friday, I'm gonna make a big elk crost. I will thaw that thing out maybe on Saturday. I don't know if I'm saying all kinds of stuff that violates the U. S d A protocol. I guess I don't really care. I'll pull that thing out on Saturday and and I don't even know this is the right word. Basically, I dry age that thing for five six days in my fridge. I don't care. Like I it makes it more tender, and it makes the texture nicer to dry ryot because you know, it's wild game more than like when when you thought a wild game out. You know, it's like when you freeze it fresh and stuff, you notice that it bleeds a lot. You know. I've also heard it that's a big part of off flavors. And that's why you should do what you're talking about, is because when you're letting it sit like that, you'll see that it does release some more of that blood. You get rid of that blood. Sometimes that blood can is where that the texture gets. I'll let it sit, I like, ideally, I like to let it sit until a little rind forms on the outside of that block of meat, and then I trim that rind off and that stuff. Sometimes it looks so beautiful under there. But yeah, let's say I just live and I and I have this. I have this just to answer the question, I live in some place. I hunt near there. I got a boatload of money. I go out and build myself uh factory spec meat aging walk in cooler. Yeah, there's not a thing that I kill outside of wild pigs and bears that I wouldn't go hanging there for a couple of weeks. For as long as I could. I'd monitor it closely, but absolutely unhang everything. Just to answer the question, yeah, my quick answer is at least to twenty four hours because and again I'm no expert on this, because but from what I've read, that's how long it takes forga mortis to set and then leave those muscles and so um. And I've had that. I've eaten meat that was, you know, too fresh. We talked about that a lot on the show, because we're eating meat right there in the field and sometimes that too fresh meat needs to be pounded with a rock to make it tender. And so I give it. I try to give it at least twenty four hours from when it hit the dirt, which isn't too hard. Usually by the time you get home it's been that long. I want to hit U super quickly. They're gonna go back up to the money wanted to get. What's your opinion on hunting wolves. I think wolve should be managed like big game, managed like all big game. UM, don't push them to the point where their viability is threatened. Same way I wouldn't want to hunt elk until their viability is threatened. It's a renewable resource. There's hunter interest in it. If you can allow some extraction of the renewable resource without damaging the viability of the resource, I think you should do it. Yahny, Well, now, don't you want to talk about wolves? Boys? You were you were hot from one of these questions. Oh, we just we're gonna finish up on the caliber rifles thing. If you want to talk about like a model, you know, a maker and a model of a good affordable rifle, that's pretty should be able to answer that in a couple of sentences. But what is affordable less than a thousand bucks? Um, I guess there's a couple of tiers. Let's let's let's do one less and one under a thousand. About that, I don't know. I mean, I just buy so few like I just don't buy rifles. I have rifles that I've always had. I have rifles that I've gotten from friends, and I've had rifles that I've gotten through work, So I can't. I don't really know, like I would be a really I would be really bad hunting equipment prices right because the peculiarity of my occupation in in life. You know, I don't know what stuff costs. It's embarrassing. I mean I know what stuff costs, I don't know what that kind of stuff costs that much. What you tell me, what's the good five rifle? Is there a rifle? Yeah? I believe that it's I think you can get a Remington's seven hundred in like the bottom tier that's right at that price mark. I want to tell a red Aster. There's also a Ruger American, which I think comes in right at that price mark. And then when just a model seventy, they probably have one as a more of a plastic e composite stock on it. It's seven nice synthetic or a nice wood stock um, but all three of those makers too. You can get into that seven ellar range and get yourself a really nice rifle that will last many, many years, probably many generations, as long as you take care of it. I want to tell Remington Model seven story. My old man. He died in December two thousand two. In two thousand he bought a brand spiggotty spangety new Remington Model seven Hunter. I remember at the time, I remember, I feel like it cost him, you know, four or five bucks at the time he dies, I don't even if you ever shot anything with this thing. He dies, and we have this little drawing where we put uh me and all my sip, my brothers, and all my half siblings and stuff. We wrote down the name of all his guns. Like he got a little pieces of paper. On each of the piece of paper. He wrote down the name of one of our old man's guns and put him in a hat and started drawn the pieces of paper out of a hat to see who got what. He didn't specify any of this in his will, you know. So I drew this new Reming to Model seven, left in my minds for years. At some point I got it and brought up to my cabin in Alaska, and never really shot it carefully. I mean, we sighted it in by by shooting it at old oil drum, just to make sure it was kind of right on. I took it up a mountain shot a blacktail deer. Uh took it out in the boat on salt water. My brothers shot at blacktail deer with it. This is a thirty OT six model. Then I hung it on the wall in my cabin, which is the wettest, rustiest, nastiest place on the planet, and I just sprayed it down with w D forty, but didn't do anything to the boar, you know, the inside of the barrel. And UH left it up there for a decade, for almost a decade, to the point where you look down this barrel and you could barely see down it the boar. So rusty took that thing home, cleaned it up, and for the first time in my life, probably the first time in the gun's life, took it down to a rifle range to shoot box ammo, to actually, like on a bench, shoot this rifle. Oh, this is the one that I cleaned out. Dude, Oh, Johanna's cleaned it out right. Let me tell you. I'm telling you the first twenty patches that came out of the bore. I don't know if I can say it, but it mean it looked like diarrhea. I mean, it was just brown, goopy soupy, and I was almost scared to fire the thing. Yeah, Joanna's even expressed fear about firing, and He's like, I don't know what's gonna happen that rifle. Of all the rifles I own, and I owned some expensive ask custom rifles, if I had to go out right now to shoot and someone said you gotta shoot me the tightest group you can shoot, I would take that rifle. I take that rifle the range and shot three shot group after three shot group after three shot group that were two touching like be like two touching and one just off of touch. Yeah, they were pouting about half inch to three quarter inch groups, which is just that's that's an abuse model seven hundred shooting box AMMLE. So I don't know. And I'm a guy who owned some expensive as custom rifles, I don't get that kind of group out of so. You know, I know a lot of guys like t K three lights, but those are more expensive. That seems like a very popular out of the box gun. You just gotta shop around. Man. If I was really going to buy a new rifle, I don't. I don't think I would buy new. I would spend a bunch of time on gunbroker dot com and stuff like that. That and a great tip. Find a dude who's got a custom rifler is some kind of souped up rifle that is old lady is mad about him halving and he's gotta sell it. Yeah, and the used gun racks at all, the Sportsman's and the Cabellas are great places to be looking. You kind of need to know what you're looking for. Um, but they they have quality stuff and they're not gonna They're not gonna just have junk in there. But what a guy told me once, and I was in there perusing the guy that worked in the gun library or whatever, I forget what I was looking for. I was looking for a dear calibern It just happened to be November. So he's like, man, it's just it's just you're looking for that to seventy or whatever. It's the wrong time of year. You should come back about January, because what happens after big game season Now everybody wants to go hunt coyotes, environments and stuff. So everybody comes in switching out their six is there two seventies or just a short magnums and they want the two hopped up to forty three or the hopped up you know, the little bitty guns to shoot you know, uh, coyotes with, and then the same thing happens again. They do all that in the summer, and then they drop off all those vomit guns and one so it's kind of never ending cycle. I want to read it. I want to read a question that cracks me up. This is a good guy I don't know, Chris Rao. Okay, this kind of this in some way to me, really expresses everything we're talking about here. He says, I noticed you switched to the two seventy WSM Winchester short mag. So it's like a two seventy, but you know, a short version of two seventy short action version in lieu of the long action seven millimeter mag. I have a two seventy w SM, and I absolutely love it. I was wondering what ammo you are shooting or handloads for elk. I've taken eight bucks and probably a dozen hogs here in northern California where I live, few more, four mule deer out of state, and two elk. But I'm always looking for new information about hunting or components in my hunting gear. I hand load and have taken all these animals to date with one bullet on forty grain nozzler accupond, all with one shot from thirty to sixty eight yards. From my handloads there are fairly fast at three thousand one d fifty feet per second on the chronograph and very accurate. But everyone is telling me to switch to Burger or Barnes. I'm the kind of guy. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I'm always willing to experiment with new things. Thanks for your feedback, dude, I would like don't do I wouldn't change anything. That's a great bullet. The occupon only probably are getting with the occupon is it's it's got letting it. So if you're hunting, you know in more and more areas are gonna eventually be going lead free. You might run into trouble there. But for a guy like that with that track record to be sweating this stuff kind of shows you the poor state of affairs were in when it comes to people acting like these little things are gonna fix problems. The dude could obviously shoot he's ambitious. Don't change anything. Yeah, it doesn't sound like he's got any problems with his brig No, I don't care everybody's talking about no. Nope, way to hack on Barnes and Burger. I of Barnes and Burger bullets. Here's no when it comes in all the time. What's your painting on camouflage? I don't see you wear a ton of it. Um, I'll tell you what. Here's a couple of things about camouflage. Absolutely for turkeys, Absolutely for waterfowl, always mostly had to toe and that not a lot of times. It's not just the cameras is important self. It's just covering up your white, flashy hands or even if you have darker skin, just the oils and our skins. You know that that it tends to shine, so that needs to be covered up and muted. Yeah, So like it's almost like camouflage. It's funny because I think when people I'm guessing when this guy says it, what he means is like like garments with camouflage, garments with camouflage patterns on them. My wife's taken off, not that she's here. She has ducked in to say AUTI, Um, he saw about garments with like printed camouflage patterns. I'm guessing camouflage. Yeah, I mean you can go out and hunt ducks with just earth tones on, of course, but you gotta be careful about blinds and camouflage yourself with vegetation, with material. But to to to get through this question, if I'm going hunting for waterfowl or turkeys, I am very serious about wearing camouflage clothing. I have get this could be a fool by randomness, but I don't think it is. Remember one time when I first became a believer in camouflage. I mean, my brother Danny, or hunt ducks in Michigan, kept flaring ducks out of our decoys on his little pond. And I had a gray hoodie on light gray whitish gray hoodie on my hood and I had a duck jacket on, like a duck brown coax. We're hunting dead grass, dead dead grass and cat tails. A bit of my hoodie was sticking out. We kept flaring ducks. Danny's like tuck that hooden. I tucked that hooden. Stop flaring ducks. It could be fooled by randos, but I've seen a lot of stuff like that happen over the years, particularly face shine you're blowing birds, and then someone puts a face mask on and you quit blowing birds because your face is just like oily and shiny, so covered up. I wear camel, and I don't know. I can't tell you this empirically. I wear camel bow hunting because why not. It's just not that hard to get camel. It's like you're never gonna regret having Like I can't imagine a situation where I would regret having camel on, Like, oh I would have got that thing had I been wearing solid colors. It just isn't gonna happen. Sometimes. I do think that with some of the camel patterns that are very very dark, that at a distance grater of even ten fifty, you start to look like a black bear. And so in that case I'd rather just be wearing like a nice light gray or or that first light dry earth, because even at a hundred yards I might look more like that light rock on the hillside than that black bear. I don't care. I don't worry about it. Hunting, um, I don't worry about it. Rifle hunting for big game, I never wear all. Growing up bow hunting, white tails, we didn't wear a camel. My mom would stitch us clothes out of wool. We'd wear that. We'd wear army surplus wool earth tones. My dad always hunted muted earth tones. You know, he blended good. Um. We used to just wear mostly because I do a lot of mountain hunting. For years and years we did all of our mountain hunting and mountaineering clothes. My especialty was going into good wheels and stuff like that, Salvation Armies in high end mountain towns. If you can go to a good Will in Bozeman, Montana, or Jackson, Wyoming, Aspen, Colorado, you're gonna get all kinds of like great mountaineering type clothes. And I would hunt that stuff, high quality stuff that I would get for cheap. Had I found awesome camel Jackson there, I would have bought him too. But you know, um, but if you have it, you're not gonna regret it. Just if you have a good camera, wear it. If you don't have a good camera and you like can't afford good camel, I wouldn't stay home about it. For big game for me, I feel that with the cameo and clothing and gear, the quiet uh Trump's the camouflage we sat guiding. We used to have a lot of guys that would show up with all sorts of cameo, this, that and the other, and it was covered in velco. Nothing worse than trying to sneak through the woods, still hunting, hoping to catch an elk just over the next rise at a hundred yards and then behind you you here and that velco this out of the other rips open and the guys you know, squeezing and just playing with all the gadgets and whatever and being noisy, you know, stuff scratching against his legs because his pants were too noisy, because he was decided to bring out, you know, a brand new pair of car hearts elk hunting versus like a nice you know, shammi cloth pair of pants or um, you know, some quiet wool or something. So I would certainly go go find something quiet to go hunt big game in versus uh, something cameo. You want another hypothetical, like a not a hype not hypothetical. I don't even know what I'm so fried out from from our from guide book right, um, yeah, And he's holding the paper to says fifty five minutes here's the interesting question. What's your opinion on how hunting is going and what trends should we support to cry and hunting today if you want to continue to see a tendency towards smarter and more realistic world war, real world hunting for future generation satans of hunters and anglers trappers. This dude's name actually is hunter. Um. I don't like high wire stuff, man, you know, I don't like it being confused with hunting, and I don't like it taking on tendencies of hunting. My brother raises these lambs. He gave one to me, my buddy, you know, but he said, you know, you gotta go out and shoot the lamb. So we went out and shot our lambs with a twenty two out in the you know, in his pasture there. Did I then go and post a bunch of pictures of me sitting with that lamb, acting like I was out hunting lambs. No, we were harvesting livestock. Um. The other problem, I have a high wire stuff. Besides all that bad ethical stuff paints a bad picture. Also just too risky. Um with disease issues, disease vectors packing these animals into these you know situations and then having disease transmission escaped the wild herd. It's not worth the risk. You can give you all the economic numbers you want about Oh listen, that and this and that. I just don't I don't like it. I don't like it wild animals, h if you want to, you know, I don't like it seeing these animals, you know what, those ear tags and stuff. It just just like, on a personal level, it disgust me. I don't like it. I hate seeing it. What I do like is uh, people taking great care to utilize to the maximum potential the resources provided by the animals that they kill. Catching released angling. There's no real damage there, but it's just it's just you know, playing with your food to be a catch for these angler. And I still end today, but we did a whole podcast on catch and release. I'm not gonna talk about it now. Grab another question, Joannie. How do you cook red fox? Yeah? I we cooked coyote not long ago, a couple of years ago. I just burned. I did it like how I've had I saw how they cooked dogs in Vietnam, and I just cooked the coyote like that, burn the hair off, and then roast it wasn't that good. If I had to eat a red fox, like if I was doing it for fun, like people were coming over, We're gonna eat a red fox, I'll just burn the hair off and roasted just like a roast pig. If I just had to eat it, like if someone came down and said, you can only eat red fox for the rest of your life, and that's what you have to feed your family, I would bone all of my red fox out, grind them up, and make stuff like chrees, oh and stuff like that, strong flavored sausages with it. Yeah, you can pretty much take any meat like that and braise it, which is basically like slow simmer cooking for a long period of time, and whether it's two hours or six hours. When it's done, you let it cool, you pick it off the bone, and then season it. Put in a bunch of barbecue sauce, and man, you could probably save that fox. And that's even better. I take it back when I said I wouldn't make trees O. I would take my red fox yank to hide off it, trim whatever fat on. There is a way, quarter it out, rub h just a lot of salt and pepper on all those quarters. Brown them up in half butter and half oil. It's just me what I would do. Get a big pan, brown all those quarters, pack them into a big roasting dish, cover it two thirds away with water, put a lid on it. Put in my oven at between two seventy and three d degrees. Start poking it with a fork. About three hours later, when that thing was such that I could grab one of the bones and flick it and all the meat would fly off the bone. I would shred that stuff up and I would use it on barbecue sandwiches. I'd put it on bridles. I'd put it on tacos. I got some I got some moose meat. Not that moose is like red fox. I got some moose meat by freezer, by fridge right now, Like that big roast I did. It's all set up in the aspect. I just keep warming that thing up, grabbing a handful out and doing stuff with it. I gave some of Yanni there night we had it on bridles. I'll do that with my fox. And if someone did come down from from wherever heaven outer space and said you have to eat red fox the rest of your life, I would I would be a little bummed, but I would I would figure it out. I'm not afraid about it. We will make it a point uh here soon to try to harvest one during a meat eat or shoot and uh cook one up, see what it tastes like. I want to do one last quick because this comes up last quick, because otherwise I'm gonna miss my flight. How do you get meat home on on you know trips? Uh? When I'm on a trip, flying or driving or whatever, I kill something, I take it apart in big pieces, so I bone out muscle groups. Put those muscle groups wrapping up in surrand wrapper. Better yet, put him into receivable bags, zip block bags, gallon size zip block bags. Big muscle group stuff. Get into a freezer evey. I go bang on the door at some restaurant and beg some dude who's like walking washing dishes on late night shift to put in the freezer for a night. Get a good freeze on it. Pack those bags and the coolers, duct, take the coolers shut. It'll stay frozen for days in there. When I get home, I let it thought a little bit so it's kind of soft. Then I do my final detail work and repackage it for my home freezer. Thanks for listening me Ner Podcast. Make sure to tune in Sportsman channel watch the show Meat Eater, Take Care,