00:00:03 Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater podcast. We're recording in in uh Seattle, Washington, not far from my house, in a in a in a rental house that the T shirt magnate, uh, Janice Telis rented for a shoot. Um you got do you guys? Have? Have you ever bought one of the Honest's T shirts? I have not. That's Randall our guests, Randall Williams Williams Williams admitting to having not bought one of Janice's Hunt Eat shirts. Andy, I'm interested in the T shirts for sale. I just made a sale for you, honest. That's that's my very old Andy. How long we've been friends? Uh, probably goes back to mid nineties. Maybe we've been friends almost half the time that I've been alive. Just about dead nuts half the time I've been alive. Um, Andy, was like you were because you were still becoming one, but you were the first chef I ever actually met besides like a dude who cooks fried food in the bar. Yeah. Actually when we when training to be a chef. When our path across, Yeah, I was just starting culinary school. Yeah, that's probably nineties six right there? Where was that faris day in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So just down the road from Ferres. Yeah, I was at g V. I moved, I went to like I graduated from the third college that I enrolled in. But you were at the culinary arts program. Yeah. I was at Grand Valley for a little bit and then switched gears and ended up at the culinary program right there in downtown Grand Rapids. And that was a fun time. We did the first meal thing we ever did, besides cooking steel head or something, was when we cooked we had a pig with a road killed deer. We did, and we sold the I believe we sold the road killed deer inside of a pig and had a party, big old party, wild, big pig, small deer. What. No. We were coming back Me and my brother Matt were coming back from fishing into PM, remember the PM from Michigan. We're coming back from fishing salmon. Must have been late summer, coming back from fishing salm On the PM. Guy in front of us hit a deer with his car. He didn't want it. We called the cops. Cops gave us no. We never even got I could. I'm sure the statute limitations is worn out by now. Did not get a permit for the deer, drove the deer from Baldwin down to your Grand Rapids and hung it in a garage at a house we were renting. And this was a full on flophouse. I mean, none of the dudes that lived in that house were on that lease. Probably. Well. A funny side note about that is being Mark Schmidt. We're up in that same neck of the woods the same time you guys were, and we were coming home the day the morning after that and saw that gut pile on the side of the road and made mention of it, and then got all the way back to our house, opened the garage door and there was that darranging. We pieced it together. Um, that's a great recipe to put a deer cut up in a pig. And I think we sold it with bangling wire. It was twenty years ago though. Anyhow, that's not where you're top about. So Joannice, who tells uh of of of plug your T shirts? Yanny Janna is on the conversation, Yanayana, get so little, so little out of this. Let it let's talk. He's dumb bunch t shirts. No, this has really helped our T shirt business. And by the time you guys listen to this, we're gonna have of Texas T shirts and Montana T shirts. So Yanni makes the shirts hunt to Eat and um, he had an original one that wasn't state specific, then in Colorado because that's his roots are in Colorado. Then now you're doing Texas. It's got a big fence on it. It's got an a fence in a corn feeder. No, I'm joking, it's made to look like the Texas flag, Texas license plate. He's coming out with Montana doing Alaska. We've been trying talking into do in Jersey. She hasn't gotten around to yet. So yeah, Hunty dot com go by one of Yanni's teachers. The reason we're here to talk though, Randall Williams. Now, when I was in I went after regular college, I went to graduate school. When I was in graduate school, I took a class with a with an environmental historian by the name of Dan Flores. And um, if everyone read great history stuff, go check out Dan's books. But Dan writes a lot of I mean some of his most influence correct me if I'm wrong, but thinks one of the most cited, like when an academic does a paper. One way to gauge like writes an article, they'll call it the paper right now'll publish it. A way to gauge a paper success is how many times it's cited, right, right, And his thing Bison ecology, Bison diplomacy. Yeah, this cited and anthologized, and it's just like that has been like a hugely successful paper, right Yeah. Now that's from the Journal of American History, which is a really prestigious journal, and I think that was from maybe and it's been reproduced in countless anthologies. Yeah, And in it, Dan Floores argues quite beautifully that the planes Indians never had never reached equilibrium with the bison herds, and that had correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure you know it, say better Id Randall, And and he argues, had you just introduced the firearm and the horse, you'd have had eventually had the same outcome. Yeah. I mean, the larger argument is um essentially that there are so many variables that go into determining what the what the bison population of the planes would be that you can't simply blame this mass extinction on market hunters. At the end of the nineteenth century, because that's always been what most historians have have done, is to blame white market hunters, the industrial hide hunt for the extinction of or the near extinction of the bison. And so Dan is arguing that they're larger um climactic patterns, periods of drought on the planes that uh, you know affect with bison populations. Native hunters they had, you know, they're their long standing traditions and practices changed wholesale with the introduction of the horse and the firearm and so probably yeah, the opening of markets, um. And Indians participated in in the market hunting as well. Um. And So essentially what his article does is it takes this story that had really been rendered into something of morality play, um and and makes it much more complex and I think ultimately much more interesting. UM. So yeah, that's that's sort of the gist of the bison piece. Yeah. I don't want to dwell on that. I'm just getting to dance. But the reason, like I wrote about that animal from not from an academic standpoint, but more from a popular standpoint. Um. But I became very like I tried to become versed in these various arguments. I think that a thing about like why the hide hunter thing was so dramatic as it was so complete and final that even though those guys were coming in and whittling away at was just a fraction of the animals. The fashionable number for for bison in the US, the fashionable number buffalo bison. It's the same damn thing. The fashionable number used to be like sixty million. And that came from some really strange calculations by a guy named earned A. Seaton. Right, he like, read about a big herd that Colonel Dodge who's who Dodges gave the name dot to Dodge City. Colonel Dodgers, like, I saw a big gass, heard of buffalo. It took this may day in the past. It was this many miles wide. So Seaton went and said, Wow, there must have been x number and that herd. He's like, there must have been I don't know what whatever million animals and that heard and they lived here, and so there's probably like six or seven or eight other areas that are that big, and so each of those areas has that many, and that became how you always heard that there was sixty million these animals at the time of European colonization. Now the fashionable figure is you see often maybe it's changed because it's been a few years since I've been in the game, the fashionable figure million, you know. But the thing that's weird about it as you get where by the time the hide hunters, like by the time euro American hide hunters came on the scene and we're shooting them to put on rail cars, to send the hides on rail cars to the East to have them tanned, there were way fewer. You know, it was already a vulnerable population because by the end of the Civil War that number again this is debatable, but but a reasonable gas or a reasonable theory would be by the end of the Civil War you had maybe fifteen million, maybe ten millions. So they've already been whacked down by a half two thirds, and you wind up having these pretty big, substantial herds left a couple you know, you have these eight herds of like a couple million, a million, and so to our eyes today, it would seem like unfathomable amounts of animals in the herd and the high owners of rolling and they would kill thousands, you know. So it would be like right now, we don't have nearly as many. Uh, take your pick, I don't name something naming equivalent. We don't have nearly as many what as we did at the time of European contact. Big horn sheet? Okay, you so if a bunch of guys went out right now and made did their best to shoot every big horn sheet and they shot them pretty much all, would you later say, you know what happened to the big horn sheep? These one assholes in two thousand fifteen shot them all, and then someone else would be like, oh no, because they were way down from all these other factors have been planning out for the last two hundred years, So it wasn't really that much of a sin because there they were already missing from nine of their range from the from nd when these dudes in two thousand fifteen went and shot the rest, does that make sin less or more so? The Highlanders shot a lot of ship. Maybe they didn't shoot thirty two million, but they mopped up what was left of like some big herds at shirt were a fraction of the original, but it's still kind of like catastrophic. Yeah, and and Dan's article basically um highlights a whole host of factors that sort of set the stage for hide hunters to come in and just deliver the death blow. Right, And so that's I think it was a pretty pretty significant intervention, and um sort of a controversial one too, because it it disrupts um. You know, a lot of people like to make the past into simple morality place. And the bison was always this example of uh, just expl naked exploitation, breed Native Americans used every part of the animal right, never wasted anything, right, complete sanctimonious, you know. And then evil guys came into Star of the Indians. Yeah, and and to and ands just it's just I'm sorry, it's just not true, right, And but and to acknowledge all these other factors that led to this catastrophe isn't to absolve hide hunters of any blame, right, it's not uneducated guys were uneducated, guys were years old. Yeah. And even though I would have been a hide hunter, like, there's no way the same way Like when I was in my early twenties, I moved out to Mountainics, I wanted to hunting fish, remove any aspect of of any any idea about history and the idea about education, and always grew up on a farm in Michigan with no phone, no internet, no nothing. Turned twenty years old. You can make money hunting buffalo. You go out on buffalo. You have no idea what you're engaged in, right, you might get it on some like. It wasn't like an evil thing. This is the last thing I say about it. But later Horn today, who collected specimens for the Smithsonian. Later he went to Miles City trying to find he wanted to shoot a cup buffalo for the Smiths, and they knew they were going to be gone the Museum Natural History, Sorry was I can remember which one was? Anyways, someone they wanted some collections, They wanted some pristine mounts before the animals were completely gone. He went out to Miles City. It was in the e in late eight eighties, I think, And he commented that in Miles City, the ranchers around there mostly came to that area because they were high and hunters, and they stuck around because they were convinced, after they had shot them all that there must be more somewhere, and they're just gonna hang tight until they show up. And then a few years went by and they all got into cattle ranching. They didn't even know what they had done. There was rumors about a bunch of Canada millions would come from Canada. They weren't like, we got them all, good job boys. I mean, it's just the scale of that, that destruction is sort of unimaginable to us today. But and so how could we even expect any of these guys running around UH to have any idea what they're going? I bet you. Illiteracy? Ill literacy and then another thing like it's a slam. Illiteracy was probably rampant among the high honors, and there was probably very little education among the high honors. Oh I'm sure yeah they were. If you factory and where those guys are mostly from and where they wound up, and you do some kind of calculation you had about communication and stuff, it would be like if you sent kids from here from current day rural America to Kazakhstan and told him that shoot that thing and we will pay you to shoot it, yeah, I mean, and then to them be like, dude, you didn't realize that the populations in Kazakhstan. It's like it would mean nothing to him. Yeah, yeah, I mean the h and so it was a lucrative business. You know, you could make a lot of money just running around rolling over bison, skinning them out higher skinners three or four five bucks apiece, throw them, throw them on a train. And that's and then and then even still, it's not as if they're just doing this um in a vacuum. Right. The leather from these hides are going onto factory belts in Chicago and New York. It's fueling the industrial revolution um to some degree. So uh yeah, I mean it's they're they're part of their their cogs in a much larger process. And and to place you know, some sort of burden of guilt on them is uh, I don't know, it's it's not a very intellectually serious exercise. So they were filthy. They were filthy. They were filthy. No, but I only bring up Dan the historian Dan Flores, because Dan Floors uh contacted me and said that I should speak to you about your dissertation, which I'm gonna have you explained. But first, what is explain for the listeners? Like what is the dissertation? Do you just finished your PhD? I did, Yeah, it just has one of those he says. He says he says he has two and one of them stands for pretty huge. Uh huh um. Filling the blank, but okay, explain what the dissertation is, like, how how that how that whole thing plays out. Yeah, so the dissertation is the final step on the road two a doctoral degree. Um. And so you did your you did your doctoral work under Dan Flores. Yeah, so Dan was my Dan was my doctoral advisor, UM. And I studied history at the University of Montana environmental history. Um. And explain that real quick. Environmental history. Yeah, it's like in a nutshell. Yeah. Environmental historians are interested in questions, uh, pertaining to how humans in the past have interacted with the environment and how human behavior has shaped the environment and also in turn, how the environment has shaped human behave of heer. Um. And so it's a pretty it's a relatively recent, uh sub field, and it really came about in the seventies. Dan was one of the I mean, there have always been intellectuals concerned with these questions, but in terms of sort of a professional sub field within history, UM, environmental history came about, uh really in the seventies, as environmental concern became a large part of American Life. And yeah, Cronan is a he's got a couple of classic works. Um, who's the guy that did the thing about the death of the frontier? Um? Like, who wrote the thing declaring the frontier was dead? In whatever your turn turn Yeah. But Turner wasn't an environmental historian. No, No, Turner. Turner is a Western historian. Frederick Jackson Turnderi Jackson Turner. Yeah. Yeah. Turner had this idea that he would look at the census data, right, right, and one day found out that on the census report things were in the US were so lowly or so unpopulated that they would be called the frontier. And then one day a census came in and they realized there is no frontier anymore, right, And he had this and then was it Cronin that then kind of interpreted that later? Well, yeah, I mean almost all of Western history that said is is sort of produced in conversation with Turner. Um. And yeah, I mean the history of the American West. And and there's this long standing debate about whether the West is a process or a place, um. And so Turner is really arguing that the Western, the West is a process, right, It's a process of frontier settlement. It's a process of sort of rendering wilderness into civilization. And that's that's sort of Turner's thesis. And he's he's writing at the turn of the twentieth century, UM, and he's he's looking at this census date and saying, well, once we as Americans run out of uh trees to cut down or or sort of bison to shoot, right, um, native people's to fight, Um, what's what effect is that going to have on uh, the American people? Because he is really attributing a lot of the distinctive characteristics of American civilization to this process of of western or of of sort of frontier settlement. Um. And so he's tracing um, you know, the the democrat the origins of America and of America's democratic political culture to all of this availa quote unquote available land right um. And so Western historians of the American West, or Western historians sort of interchangeable there um throughout the twentieth century have been trying to write because Turner was so influential, UM, Western historians have been wrestling with this question of um, is the West a process? Is it a place? I think environmental historians would argue that the West is a place and that it's defined by um aridity. Uh, there are certain you know, certain key characteristics, environmental characteristics, and also characteristics related to its political organization of the federal government is really uh inescapable in the West, whereas in the East, a lot of issues of governance are resolved at the municipal or a state level. Whereas you know, you look at uh landownership rates and you can live in a federally owned land. Yeah. So so this is you know, not to get into the the minutia of the historiography in Western history, but basically there's this long standing debate place process. How do we define the West? If you say that you're interested in the American West and that's what you study, how do you define that, um, is Alaska part of the West? Is Hawaii part of the West? Yes? No, m all right, Well it's it's you know, this is this is what academics do. Is you just come up with inventive questions to all these yes. No, well yeah, um, I just got back from Hawaii. I don't want to get into that, but I'd love to hear someone tell me what would tell me you like the pros and cons of calling at the West. So now you did your dissertation, which is like your final, the final, Like it's it's the final I want to take. I want to go way back for people who have who haven't dabbled around in college that much like when you go to college, you go to regular college four years that you probably had some kind of graduate degree which took you two or three years. Well, I went straight from so I did my undergraduate degree, uh in Chicago, and then I came out to the University of Montana. I was I was admitted directly into the doctoral program. And now the years that take five years, And how many years have you just been working on what would become your dissertation the whole time, the whole time. Yeah, I sort of began. I mean it's evolved over time, but it began in that first semester of graduate school. So like it turned into a five year project. Yeah, essentially, So I did two years of course work, UM seminars, this and that, and then UM the next step is your comprehensive exam. So you come up with a list of the essential books and in a number of fields. So I did four fields Um, and you each of those lists about a hundred books, so you you read, you know, I read about four hundred books and sit down and have a conversation with your advisors and they you know, or you'll hear the more or less. Yeah, skim to quite a few of them. But read strategically. So kids, I don't, man, that ship goes down the kids, man, but I have to read, Like I don't want to start talking about that. I love them, I love them. Yeah, but the first thing that goal is the ability to read books. Yeah, I mean, that's that's. Uh. There's not a whole lot of glamour to graduate school or you know, graduate studies and the humanities. But the the the undeniable luxury of it all is that, you know, people expect you to read a lot, and uh if that's something that that you like doing, which is what drawing, what drew me to it. Um, you're expected to read a lot and you have that time available. So when I went to grad, all we did was read many Yeah. So yeah, the amount of work you had to do for that, especially I was in fine arts like writing. It's like basically basically like you could have summed up by saying discore, read for two years and and then if you can, if you got time, write something. Yeah. So that's what yeah, I mean, we I did reading. You know, the first two years are reading seminars and writing seminars. So in reading seminar you might read ten books a term, and then in writing seminar you're expected to produce an article length paper um. And then after two years of that you sort of sent off to prepare for your exams and essentially master these fields um. And then once you pass your exams, then you move on to the dissertation phase where you're actually um right. And what a dissertation is is it's a book length piece of writing that is expected or or must make an original contribution to uh, the literature. So you have to either engage with a new body of sources, or engage with new questions or or um applied you know, a new line of thinking to an old question, something along those lines. So you have to do something original, um. And basically it's sort of can you can you do you have the talent? Do you have the requisite knowledge to be a practicing historian? And so it's a it's a process of professionalization essentially, now, because there's probably some dude sitting out there feeling like they tuned into the wrong thing because they're trying to UNI podcast reveal for me. What's the name of your dissertation. So the name of my dissertation is green Voters, gun voters, Hunting in politics in Modern America. Oh man, that's rich. Um, that's why I want to talk about before you get into that. Uh, give me a quick if you had to do. What's your hunting in fishing background? My hunting and fishing background. I grew up in outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, grew up fishing, and group of friends and I in high school decided we want to get into hunting. And uh, none of ours, none of our dads hunted, well, one of one of our friends. They just didn't grow up in a hunting family. So we sort of were like a self talk guy essentially. I mean, we we read a lot of magazines, we watched a lot of shows. One of my buddies, my best friend, his dad did hunt, but he, you know, his dad didn't take us all out hunting, right, So we sort of figured it out on our own. And it's you know, it's a different ballgame in outside of Cincinnati because you're sort of setting up a tree. We we got into white tail hunting, so it's find a game, trail, set up a tree. Stand sit wait, sit wait. He hasn't throw it on a sack carrots or anything. No we do. We couldn't in Ohio, but yeah, I know. So so we got into it in high school and we you know, growing up, we we lived by the Little Miami River and would run around set and try lines and fishing all summer and that was our I mean, that was our big thing. And so we're thinking, yeah, you know, we should become hunters, and so we uh so that's I mean, that sort of led me to the project in some respects. Is these what my source space for this project is pretty much just field and stream, outdoor life, local hunting, of fishing columns, um and and so that's that's sort of how I was introduced to the sport primarily, UM and we did a lot of figuring out on our own, but um, these magazines have always been sort of a source of fascination for me, and also coming from a non hunting family. UM, you know, in some respects, you feel like an observer, right um And so so anyway, that's that's sort of my background. And now I'm out in Montana and uh, i've the past. I just finished the doctorate, but uh past six years. You know, I was out. I was in Alaska prior to going to Montana, and so I was split my time between guiding fishing in Alaska in the summer and then run back to Montana for the academic calendar. So it's been it's been a pretty good uh, pretty good life so far. Yeah. Uh, south central Alaska about ninety hundred miles northwest of Anchorage, Mary called Lake Creek for what uh salmon and trout u And it's just people come out to fly out trips for the week or for the out of lodge. So we're just running jet sleds around and good times. Yeah. Alright, so break break down, break down your research, Like how would you look at So I look primarily at um like I said, field and stream, outdoor life, nationally circulated hunting magazines, fishing game I didn't do. Yeah, I know, I first be for a fishing game. At some point you have to put the blinders on and just say I think I've got what I need here, and you can always bring in the big venerables like field stream out or sports, ports the field, the big three, and I didn't I didn't do so much for sports the field. UM. But I also I what I'm what I'm looking at in the dissertation is huntings changing, huntings transforming or evolving or changing public culture from the end of World War Two up until about the nineteen nineties. And so I looked for any place where hunters are sort of publicly celebrating or articulating, rationalizing, uh, explaining what they do, what it means to them, how they see themselves as hunters, how they identify and understand themselves and what they're doing. Um. And also where they sort of butt up against the non hunting public and how they define themselves in relation to uh, non hunters, anti hunters, etcetera. UM, and so so so focusing on the friction, not internal friction, but the friction between the friction or lubrication or whatever between people who are hunting people who don't like the broader culture. Yeah. And I like conflict within the hunting world about where do we feel what how do we feel about? No? And I do look at I do look at that as well. Um, I look at you know how you know you see it. You know you see it in today's you know, letters to the editor, this and that. You know, somebody says we as sportsmen should do this, we as sportsman should be on this page. Um and and there is conflict within these ranks. So what I'm looking at is how hunters have um identified over the course about fifty years, how they've identified in relation to one another and in relation to the non hunting public um and And it's sort of a mutually constitutive process. And that you know, they're not they're not in a vacuum. Uh. They're they're defining themselves in relation to a changing world around them. Um and they're but but they're not just sort of um blank slates either, right, if that makes sense. So some of the some of the changing public culture comes from within, and some of it is in um in response to outside forces as well. So tell me, like you guys hate generalizations and stuff like that, I know, tell me something like tell me something that was tell me something that would surprise me. You found out, like what what in the end one of being like what's the what? Right? Well, so they're there there are five chapters to the thing. There's five chapters in an epilogue, and they're all, um, they all sort of track a different story throughout about a fifty year span, so it's not written chronologically. Um. And what might interest you the most one of the chapters is right now, will interests me the most is one of the five chapters, So the first one. So the first chapter looks at um hunters and environmental politics from about nineteen to the mid nineteen seventies. And what I do in that is there's there's sort of this old paradigm of you know, we have conservationists from turn of the century, and we have and this is what a sort of an academic historian would tell you. There are conservationists and they're properly modern environmentalists, and there's this moment of rupture whereas you know, at the turn of the century of guys like Difford pin Show, Teddy Roosevelt, um, all these, you know, just the horrid heroes of conservation um. And and they are really dominating environmental policy making of this period. And then in the post war period, a new set of actors steps in with a new set of values and they are the driving force behind some of the landmark legislation in the sixties and seventies. Yeah. Yeah, And so what I try to do in that first chapter is basically say that there's much more continuity than that, and that it it makes for an easy story to tell if you say, you know, hunters did had did this at the turn of the century, and then non hunters had their their moment in the sixties and seventies, and I'm saying, no, Look, if you look through the nineties, forties, fifties, sixties and seve of these uh hunters remain a powerful, engaged, UH political block that are really driving policy making at a local and UH federal level throughout this period. So I'm looking at the ways in which these magazines are So it wasn't like the counterculture spawned this sudden group of environmentalists. You went out and like rewrote the books. Yeah, And I think I mean, if I were to sort of oversimplify what most is no, no, but but but I think that's a that's a good way of sort of summing up or simplifying what a lot of historians who haven't looked at this stuff would tell you is that there's sort of a counterculture, a new set of values in the sixties and seventies that's really responsible for the environmental legislation and policies that have given us the world that we live in today, essentially UM and that their values and their issues and UM issues of concern supplanted these older uh issues of concern that guys like Roosevelt are concerned that viewpoint in the among historians. Why do people think that that happened? Well, I think that, I mean, I think that in part it it comes from you know, a lot of environment a lot of historians, a lot of academics in general, UM study things that they're interested in, concerned concerned with, are concerned about UM, and so a lot of the initial scholarship on this subject was written by people who came of age in the sixties and seventies. Yeah. Um, so, I mean that's sort of how Dan got into environmental The criticism of that generation is how ego centric that generation was. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's so so this but this is how history has written, is that you know, uh, there's there's there's sort of a thesis. One group puts out a thesis, they put out an argument, and then other people come revisit that and say, you know, things might have been oversimplified here, they might have been overlooked and sort of the initial group that makes sense of things and periodizes things and say is this is you know, environment modern quote unquote modern environmentalists are this their X, Y and Z. They believe A, B and c um. That's how they make sense of the past and of of a really messy reality. And and so they come in and do that initial work. And then what I'm trying to do in my project to say, you've you've overlooked UM a much more uh, you know, complex reality. If you've overlooked UM stories that might make it a little more difficult to to uh makes sense of what happened in the sixth season seven where where we get you know, the Clean Water Act, of Clean Air Act, things like that, UM, the National Environmental Protection Act, Endangered Species Act, UM. So, so that's sort of what my projects is. So that's the that's the first chapter is is trying to write sort of a counter narrative of the twentieth century environmental movement through the eyes of field and stream readers outsoor life readers UM. Was Chapter two. Chapter two, Chapter two looks at the emergence of anti hunting sentiment UH in the nineteen seventies and the ways in which anti hunting advocates try to harness their own agenda to some of these powerful new environmental laws, and how this dynamic reshapes the way that a lot of hunters perceived these laws. But let me let me back up from it. What what what when did the word well their anti owners? I mean, of course they were, but what were they Bambi's in ninety two, right, So, um, but Bambi isn't Yeah, I mean Bambi's nineteen forty two. One of the things that I that I do with this is and and opposition to hunting goes back further than that. Um yeah, I mean you ever read the Old Testament? Yeah? Jacobs? Right? Yeah? And and so this is I mean there there's a huge literature out here. But one of the there's an interesting book, I don't know if you've read it, Daniel Justin Herman's Hunting in the American Imagination. And one of his arguments is that, um, sort of the early Puritans actually, if they knew that, you know, what would become who would become Americans were people that prided themselves on their hunting culture. Um, the Puritans would have been really dismayed by that, because they hunting is something that you do when you're not working, and you should always be working, and it's something and so yeah, and so one of his arguments is that sort of early that hunting occupied a different place in the American imagination in colonial times, and what his book does is sort of traced that through. Uh, once once the United States is created, then you need some American heroes and heroes that differentiate your culture from that of Europe. And so Americans embraced sort of the Daniel Boone types, right, And so that's a really interesting book. I'm you'd really enjoy that one. But but anyway, Um, there's always been sort of you know, hunting has has occupied different places in the American imagination over time, and what my project does sort of track that through the twentieth century. So to get back to the question of anti hunting sentiment, Um, there's opposition to hunting that arises in the nineteenth century. Um, the s p c A and some of these anti animal cruelty groups. Yeah, but and they're they're primary, their primary consideration in the nineteenth century was really sort of cruelty to horses because they're they're urban based reformers who are looking at these horses out in New York City, getting in London, getting whipped, getting knocked around in the street, underfed horses just being put to work. Right. And so that's really where this idea of animal cruelty um comes comes into uh more widespread, I guess uh, um it carries it carries more cloud among the wider public. Um. And so really in the in the late sixties and early seventies is when this stuff comes to a head. When you when you when there became like an anti hunting movement seventies, Yeah, a movement, yeah, Um. There there are a number of groups founded in the mid sixties, um. And and one of the reasons for this, and this is what I look at in in this chapter is that, um, some of these laws that are created in the sixties and seventies to uh for purposes unrelated to the anti hunting agenda are very quickly uh embraced by anting anti hunting advocates in order to uh secure their own uh desired outcomes. Right. And so give me an example, um, yes, yes, a protection. Yeah, that's that's a good one. I mean, the one that I really focus on in this uh, in this chapter is the National Environmental Protection Act of nineteen sixty nine UM, which is signed into law in nineteen seventy And people know ANIPA as it's known because it requires environmental impact statements, right, and so if if the federal government is going to do some thing or funds something, it requires that that experts come in and assess what impact this action is going to have on the environment, right. And this is something that if you look back at the pages of Field and Stream and out their Life, one of the more interesting things that I found was that in nineteen forty four or forty five, the editor of I believe it was Arthur Graham, who is the editor of Outdoor Life at the time, is calling for this almost this exact law because but he's worried about um channelization and the construction of huge dams in the post war era, and so he's writing in and this is like in nineteen forty four. Yeah, and so the I mean, this is this is what really fascinates me is you can go back into these magazines and this is an issue that's still selling war bonds, right, and he's he's calling for a law and he I mean, he uses the words, you know, we need a coordinating law with sharp teeth that will hold government officials accountable for what they do to the natural a world. Did he lose his job? It was like people were on board with this stuff. And what I think is and you know, what I think is interesting is if you look at these magazines through the through the forties, fifties, sixties into the seventies, a lot of the a lot of the things that they're calling for you would associate with sort of cutting edge, avant garde environmentalism, you know, if you consider them in context. Sure, man, the fact that someone we've been talking about that then yeah, and and he's he's writing in forty forty five, this law isn't isn't signed. It's signed by President Nixon in the nineteen seventy and and it's still you know, at the time of it's of its uh signing, it's it's still held as you know, the largest achievement of the crowning achievement of the environmental movement. Right, if you think about what what environmental impact statements require, it's sort of incorporating a new system, a new set of values into the policy making process. It's a big deal. And he's calling fort and forty four forty five. And when it came around the anti hunters and the hunters, yeah, so gain or had the hunters lost interest in about the seven No, they were. They were still using it um and and using targeted litigation to pursue their own ends right to to pursue UM. They used it a lot. UH. Different sportsman's groups used environment Olympac statements to challenge UM resource extraction, UH, channelization of waterways, things like that, um and and it's it's very much celebrated in the page of these magazines when this law is is enacted. UM. But very quickly, what you see that anti hunting groups are using lawsuits and making claims under underneath they're saying the environment Olympac statement for this hunting season didn't consider this alternative. And essentially what environmental impact statement does is it asked that somebody sit down and say, if we do a you know, one to three will happen if we do be four, five, six were happening. So it's sort of the systematic accounting of what might happen through these various policies, an environmental impact statement on a proposed hunting season. That's well, that's what they that's what the anti hunting activists demanded that they do in the nineteen sixties or in the nineteen seventies. Um, and they start challenging just try to make it owners, Try to make difficult, right, you slow things down and and sort of the the real fear. And you see this in the magazine some of these some of these writers are saying, well, if they challenge Pittman Robertson with the Pittman Robertson Act of seven, which is the act that places an exercise tax on firearms and sporting equipment, etcetera, etcetera, that funds much of the wildlife management in this country. Um, the fear of research, habitat and all that stuff, right, I mean, it's it's responsible for the sort of miraculous recovery of all the wild game species in this country between nineteen thirty and nine seventy. When we're talking about I mean, uh, in nineteen thirty, there's like half a million deer in nineteen seventies, of fourteen million in nineteen thirty there's uh, just a handful of and turkey and turkeys are a great example. Antelope populations increased like something like fourteen times in in this period of forty years. So, UM, it's really a Pittman Robertson and and these funding structors that are built around this model of consumptive use in hunting. UM. That's sort of the backbone of of wildlife management in this country. UM. And hunters, you know, hunters today, we'll we'll tell you that with great pride right now. You see that all the time. UM. And and actually the fear among a lot of these writers in the seventies is that Pittman Robertson will be challenged under uh NIPA. And and it actually is. Their lawsuits filed and there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes wrangling, UM. But but their wildlife wildlife officials, um, you know, government administrators that they're saying, you should do an environmental impact statement on Pittman Robertson. And what they're asking for, um is that there have to be an accounting for every single thing that Pittman Robertson dollars do, which is just uh, totally unmanageable. So you want to put in like a water tank somewhere and right exactly, you have to r exactly. And so this is the this is really a moment of crisis. Um. And you'll see, you know, if you go back and read through these magazines, you can see this all unfolding. Um. And so so in this chapter, I look at the way you know, when anti hunters harness environmental laws to their own agenda, it changes the ways in which hunters perceive environmental loss. And so this is one of you know, one of the questions that why so many hunters now seem like burdened or annoyed by the Endangered Species Act. Yeah, and and they're I mean, they're all. Endangered Species Act is used um a lot by anti hunters as sort of a marketing tool essentially, I mean has great cultural cache in the nineteen seventies. Um. You know, people have lunch boxes and stuff with charismatic megafauna, and politicians are going out waving you know, when the environmental when the Endangered Species Act has passed, it's wildly popular. It's a wildly popular piece of legislation at a moment which, uh, faith in government is declining. Precipitously right in the in the early mid nineteen seventies. And so this is one that lawmakers really hang their ad on. We're doing what the people want, um, but very quickly endanger very quickly, anti hunting advocates use claims revolving you know, using this language. They're deploying this language of endangered species to target hunters and blame hunters for environmental degradation. And so again in the concept of endangered species is sort of weaponized. Um and and and in a large part where this chapter does is explores the polarization that we see between people who identify as environmentalists and people who identifies as hunters. And I know this is a gross, you know, oversimplification of of who hunters are today, right, but I think if you, if you talk to a lot of people, the words environmentalists and hunters, they're not often used. That's That's why that's why I say I'm a conservation exactly term it too obvious, say conservations. But now and then I just also say yeah, I'll just say like, well, no, I'm an environmentalist, you know. Yeah, up until some point the seventies, Horner's said I'm an environmentalist. But they were using one of the people say, m we're using a lot of them were using, um, the terms interchangeably, right. Cons It's not as if concert the term conservationists all of a sudden supplanted the term environmentalists these magazines in the nineteen seventies. But um, one of the interesting things that you'll see is in the sixties and seventies, you know, as the article is saying, you know, covering, uh, the the development of outdoor education programs at colleges and taking sort of these long haired hippie types into the woods and teaching them about you know, camping and hiking and this and that, and the readers of these magazines are saying, this is great, we need these people on our side. Oh yeah, that rings a bell. Just republished all those articles now yeah. No, And so this is I mean it's sort of echoes to you know, contemporary development, sort of echo what I see in these sources from from forty years ago. That's amazing. Three chapter three chapters. Cool, leave chapter two for a minute. Yeah, absolutely, unless you're least you feel like we missed the point. No, No, I mean that's that's sort of what I'm doing. That's sort of what I what I look at is is um, this this polarization and the changing politics of the word sort of environmentalism in the hunting community. Um. Now, if you really want to act like you're piste off at someone, like you'd be like a tree hugger, right, you know, But dude, I'm prone to hugger tree. No, no, man um, especially when I'm trying to climb it. But you know, I wanna tell you something real quick. The the one note I had ahead of talking used to tell you the story when I was in high school. I Gradurom High schoo Okay, I grew up in western Michigan. In one or two I can't remember. Me and the guys I hung out with, largely as a joke but kind of not. We started a group called hate Hunters against teenage Environmentalists, and we had T shirts and wild game dinners and we did like a fundraise, a can goods drive as a fundraiser. Because we had never even heard the word environment mentalists. Then all of a sudden it was there, and we thought that like we were on the impression that an environmentalist that that meant anti hunter. Yeah, And because there was a school group. These kids in school who were into charismatic megaphon and dolphins and stuff, but a very strong anti hunting bent. Started like an environmental group, but all they talked about was anti hunting because in their mind that's what the debate was, right. Their mind was like pitted a bit like, oh, yeah, you're an environmentalist. Oh I hate hunting to write was their tone many years ago. So we started hate. We had T shirts and said, hey and off it was hunters against teenage environmentalists. I said a joke, we'd have Wildgate dinners and like. It was only years later that I realized that that's not what that meant. Yeah, I mean this is. I think this is. That's a pretty common misconception. I think a lot of people associate the term environmentalists with the politics of anti hunting. One of my buddies from Hate just got hold of me and sent me I'd lost my T shirt. He sent me his old T shirt nice, which I hung in my close in a safe place. My wife's like, best not to share that one on social media. Yeah, but explain you had for three to me? Chapter three looks don't get less interesting, do they? Um, No, it's a writer's mistake, man to put all the good stuff in the front, you know. Yeah, No, it's uh, I sort of I wrote it backwards, so I wrote the first chapter last, and uh it was a sprint to the finish, so I was just kind of hammering it out. But um, yeah. Chapter three looks at uh gun control and the politics of gun control on the pages of these magazines, and how that conversation changes over time. When did the conversations start, um in a way that we'd recognize it today. The Yeah, I think the origins of the modern second Amendment debate are in the nineties sixties. Um and And is the Gun Control Act of ninety is sort of the the foundational piece of the modern regulatory uh framework, right and um and that's when the debate that we would recognize now, Well, the debate changes in the seventies. Um and And this is what that chapter looks at and it it really looks at it. Um. I don't do it a really detailed analysis of you know, this proposed bill, did this, this proposed bill did that? I look at more popular perception of this debate and and and the pages of these magazines. When hunters say we as hunters have a stake in this question where do we fall? UM on what side are we? Um that the answer to that is is in this sort of constant uh negotiation through the seventies and um, you know the and and and this conversation is also unfolding in relation to questions about environmental protection. UM. Yeah, and well, I mean by the eighties, you see guys writing into these magazines saying and and this is this will sound familiar to a lot of your listeners today. You know, we we vote Democratic and we lose our guns to hunt with, or we vote Republican and we lose our lands to hunt on. Dude, I always say the same. This is something, this is something that that you you know, I mean, there's a there's a letter to the editor, um that that says that exact uh that has that exact phrase in it from UH. I think it's nineteen eight or nine four. I think it's probably the the in in in the lead up to the eight four election. U. After the initial stage brush rebellion has fizzled out. Um. But but this is one of sort of my my The central assumptions of this project is that it's very hard for people to to think about one question at a time, right as we as as sort of political animals. You know, all of these things are constantly uh influx in relation to one another, and so political behavior isn't just you're not presented with sort of an ideal ticket, um. And these tickets change over time, and as a result, you know, people have to ask themselves questions, what do I believe in at this moment, where do my loyalties lie, etcetera, etcetera. And so that chapter three looks at the emergence of the modern Second Amendment debate, how it changes in the seventies, and and ultimately how sportsmen react to this um new point of fracture in American political life, and how did they react, um, I think, without with without getting to uh detailed here, in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, it was far more common to see sportsmen say, uh, we occupy sort of a position of influence in this debate because we have a legitimate purpose um. And these are the words that they're using. They're not mine, but we have a legitimate purpose for these firearms, and so we should use our position of influence um, in order to come up with reasonable solutions UM and it's in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies you see sort of the larger UH and and there's obviously exceptions to this. It's it's very much in debate, but there's there's a large element calling for a position of moderation on these issues. The debate becomes much more polarized in the mid seventies UM nineteen seventy, nineteen seventy five in particular, UM and there are some all you know, there are there are a number of other developments, but increasingly the position of sort of UM uncompromising hardline opposition to new firearm regulation becomes a more popular opinion, as expressed in these magazines, Well there had to be new firearms, Like when I look at fire are issues now, it's so much has to do with you don't hear the word very often, but a lot of it has to do with technology. Roy's grappling with when I say, oh, the American public, whatever side of this issue around or always grappling with, well, what are we gonna do about what you might consider to be emerging technologies? Right? You know? Right? UM? Availability on the marketplace of things that weren't available on the marketplace before. So is what you're talking about? Was that driven by availability of new weapons classes or was it just like well, the in the in the mid nineties seventies, the concern, uh is pistols that are called quote unquote Saturday Night specials. Right, and it's in the debates and stuff you don't even think about now. The debate sort of echoes what you hear about quote unquote assault rifles today. Right. People are arguing this as an arbitrary categorization that you know, one a gun of another type could do, could be equally as harmful or injurious whatever like just like but it's but it's a big I mean, and and you know what you think about it, Uh, it's actually a pretty um, it's a pretty mainstream debate. I Mean, there's a there's a cover of Field and stream h called Saturday Night that the title of the feature pieces Saturday Night Special the real issue. And it's got this big smoking handgun on the cover. It's this illustration and and the the author of the peace Bob Bob Brister I believe is the author of the piece. He essentially writes, Um, we have no use for these and as gun owners, we shouldn't be lumped in with um, you know, street thugs and this and that and these criminals and what that was. That was the editorial stance. There was a big blowback to that. And and and this is part of what I look at is the politics of you know, there's this larger suspicion at the time to um CBS owns Field and Stream, and CBS puts out at the time at the time, Yeah, and they put out um some really sort of nasty anti hunting hit pieces as documentaries on TV. The Guns of Autumn is one UM and and so readers there there are a lot of letters to the editor. And I also looked at the personal papers of writers and editors for these magazines, and you'll see that they're getting mail saying, are you guys in control of your magazine or is it the the guys up at CBS. UM and so there's the and so so Field and Stream has to sort of, uh steal its resolve essentially and really come out as you know, we are on the sportsman side in this one. And they adopt a more hardline position editorially. Oh yeah, And and I mean there's this is this is at the time when suspicion of the media um becomes more popular. Uh in American life. The story of Jim Zumbo. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah no, And it's very very, very exactly, it's very similar to that. It's very similar to that. And so this is well, I'm not familiar, you're not so Oh my god. I mean it's such a you know the name of Jim Zumble, venerable, long time hunt done a lot for hunting, a long time gone right, a long time hunting writer. He right when blogging kind of started. He had done a blog entry where he had come from. He was blogging, I believe from Wyoming. I've been on hunting Kyles and mentions in his blog. Let me back up and say, this guy had been I think he'd been a staffer at out their Life for twenty five years. Was sponsored by all the big players. Okay, had his own like Jerkys, his own everything, right, I mean, he was like the name he's like the Bill Dance of hunting and shared with his blog readers his opinion that or he relates the story how he was hunting Kyle to some guys who were telling him how guys have started hunting coyotes with a RS and he says, hunters have no business using these terrorist guns. I say, Bannon from the woods right now, now immediately, I mean his show, all his sponsorships, his position at the man like everything was immediately stripped through public outrage. And he later attempted or redact, like how do he say that word? Redact? He would later try to redact and he said that he had been out in the wind all day and had it has been a long day. It was very tired man when he said, and that didn't work. Um. And later he went through a he went through a very public sort of he like enlisted himself sort of in a re education camp, you know, um, in a very public way, and went hunting with the guns that he had said he was opposed to, and did a did a lot of steps to try to you know, recuperate. And it was like everything about it was sad. I don't know about what's sad, um, clearly, you know it was kind of in one way, it was kind of the beginning of uh of just like that, like here's a guy who's always gone through like an editorial process, right, and it always you know, you write something you write another draft, right, and that kind of stuff like gives you time to sort of like filter out like what you're thinking and what you're sing, you know, like what do you really believe? Like I'll get like everyone has written a really nasty email at eleven at night, right two, and then if you have the wherewithal to not hit sand at eight in the morning, you'd be like, wow, you know, I'm not gonna quite put it that way. I'm gonna put a different way. But he didn't. He did. He just put this out there like bann them, you know, and people took him very literally, like so it's never really clear like what he and it was clear like he said what he said, right, but you don't know like had he gone through his normal thinking on it, you know, and talked to his buddies, right, and the buds he said, well, you don't think about this way, Jimmy, not look at this way or whatever, and you think about the ramifications what you're saying. And but it was just like it was it was it was just painful. I mean, this guy had really in many ways devoted his life to um the promotion of hunting, you know, and it was just I mean, just eviscerated and just like people who never heard of Jim Zumble on whatever morning that was on Tuesday, we're feigning just the biggest disappointment, you know what I mean. It was like it was quick he became famous in a crowd that he who had never been famous with you know. Um, it was just it was that was sad. It was sad watching him have to sort of like do I always thought of when the communists like rolled into Saigon and put millions of people in re education camps. It was like it was like him having to go to re education camp because he's just like a like an old guy. And then out of that came the term like a fud, right, a fud and you're a fund as a dude again, I've been accused of being a fund. A fund is a guy who looks at firearm issues through the lens of a hunter, because like Elmer Fund, I guess he's got a shitty gun. I don't know, so I'll be like, you're like a fud if you view because in all honesty, the Second Amendment has no mention hunting. Like I'll always have people say like, oh yeah, well you should be able to have guns because you hunt. I'm like, wow, you know, you know, in some respect, maybe I'm glad you feel that way because at least you allowed that there is a reason to have guns, like in your mind, like it's not like a dead end deal. But the frameworers of the Constitution, the Second Amendment, we're not thinking about the guys right to go out and shoot squirrels right there, Like it wasn't what they were trying to protect. If it was, they would have said something like that it was not on their mind. So that's not like a plausible argument. But the whole thing was sad. The whole thing was sad. Read up on. I wrote a thing in Salon about Jim zombo Um when it was just like I just wish he had sad on what he said and thought about it for a couple of days because I feel, having never met the guy, um, I feel that he would have like whatever, a couple of days later he'd be like, well, you know, I don't like it, Like there's what, like, let's think about the message we're sending. He would have like he wouldn't have went out and said like let's ban him. Now. I think it was just I don't think it's what he would have I don't think it's what he meant. Well, I don't do it's what he would have said had he thought about it longer. And I think that he got so just like it was just watching like a nice old man just get beat to death on the curb. But a lot of people look at like a great victory, great victory, and it kind of sent a message like don't method us, you know, And I think that that, you know, the message resonated. But anyhow, it's just funny, like when you talk about that story, it's like you that story plays out now and then Yeah, I mean a lot of what I see in these magazines thirty forty fifty years ago, um, they they echo events and developments that I remember from my own time in my lifetime reading these mag as a reader, right and as a researcher. So that was really interesting to see. I mean, the blowback from that wasn't you know, it wasn't this swift, And I think technology tightens that. People just falling in love. People were falling in love with the web man. But you absolutely get uh, you know, you absolutely would see letters to the editor from from the mid nineties seventies, saying who's in control of of the editorial position of this magazine? Is it you, guys um or can we trust you? Or as CBS dictating the content here? Did another editor recently publish a anti gun letter to the editor and lost his job? I'm not sure. I can't remember where I think he published. Just telling you listeners, I could be messing this up. I don't think I am. If i'm if I'm messing it up, I'm not messing up the main just I'm messing up a detail. A an editor I believe published a anti gun like a gun editor at a gun magazine published an anti gun letter to the editor was in losses lost the position, which is like which which is weirder than the zumble thing weirder because it's sort of like, uh, you know, it was almost like he was sort of using the magazine as sort of like a place for debate in a place that where debate wasn't welcome in it is It's like, you know, that's a tricky thing I would never do. Like an episode on my show, well, I remember, like this week a meat eater, We're not going hunting, We're going to an anti hunting convention, right, you know, I mean it would be like, uh, it'd be weird. Well that's I mean, what's funny though, And this is one of the larger takeaways from the project that I see over in terms of measuring sort of the larger change over time is that hunting's public culture. I feel in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties before you have these these uh, larger public challenges to hunting, it's a it's a it's a public culture that's much more open to debate. I mean in in Outdoor Life publishes and and uh, oh fifty four maybe um or maybe this is forty eight, they published an article called why I gave Up Hunting and they say, this guy makes it. You know, we're not we're not saying we're on board with this, but he he makes a compelling case, and we thought that this voice should be heard. Have you seen something he didn't want to see? Um? I mean he he basically just described this as a he he sort of woke up one day that the author of the piece. I'm not sure i'ming to remember is the author's name, but basically says I woke up one day and sort of realized that um, what I was doing, uh was sort of indulging a more primitive uh side of me that that right, yeah, yeah, And and they publish it, right, and you can't imagine that story. You could get it published, but it wouldn't be published in field stream outdoor life, right, right exactly. And so the question I mean, and and you can sort of be, uh be skeptical and say they're just you know, publishing that piece, They're fanning the flames and sort of you know, drawing lines and sam, but I really do you know, you look at there there's debate about the morality of hunting in the forties and fifties and early sixties before the anti hunting movement really gains attraction, But the debate is much more um Ah, I don't know what the right word to use. I mean there there's a spirit of sort of honest consideration of other viewpoints that that you don't see as much in contemporary culture. Well, I would argue that honestly, we know what I mean, like the hunting like the hunting community. Who who feels the compulsion to engage in the debate about hunting? Right? Lovely? This hunt right right, Like my brothers when you talk about they don't like they don't you know, it's just not what they're doing, right, They're not like sitting talking to someone about it right now all day in time, but they're talking about something else, right. So Anyways, those of us who you're right grapple with this stuff verbally with other people. Um, we're not like talking right now. The broader hunting community isn't talking right now about like so much like to hunt or not to hunt. But we are having a very spirited, very divisive debates about high fence, right, yeah, about long range shooting, long range technologies. Um, the drone thing. I thought it was gonna become big, but so many states are getting out ahead of it so quickly that it might not become an issue. Laser range finders right, souped up compound bows. It's like we're always sort of Um, there is still that debate because I can't think of a hunting writer or or a shooting magazine editor who has a weighed in on what's too far a shot. But I think too that there's another side to these conversations. There's there's a very vocal element of the hunting public today that says hunters shouldn't be criticized and other hunters right, and that I think that's a product of this, this this cultural shift that that I tracked in the in the in the dissertation of the seven sixties, seventies, primarily the seventies is sort of my big pivotal decade. But I think this, you know, us hunters have our backs to the wall. We don't need to be debating the ethics of what the guy next to you is doing. And and I think that is an unhealthy I think that's that's that guy's pulling that guy's pulling the plug on the boat. Yeah, like when we're on this boat together. But just cut ahold at the bottom up and there's there's all chapter four. But if you got any concluding thoughts about three later, I want to make sure to cover your whole deal for chapter four. Chapter four was the one I was going to begin with because chapter four tracks the changing culture of wild game consumption from to and that's pretty interesting in the way in which the changing and sort of sort of how the changing ways in which hunters used to meet that they that they kill, that they harvest, whatever, um. That how that changes how they imagine what they're doing. So if you can't fill the freezer for the winner to feed your family all year because you don't own a freezer, because it's what are you doing? Right? And yeah, and and I mean refrigerators. Refrigerators are far more widespread in the immediate post war period, but freezer ownership is it doesn't really take off until the mid sixties. I've never thought about that. I mean, that's similar to that. Yeah, Daniel Boone, Okay, on up, Jim Bridger, jet Smith. They did all that ship without flashlights. Man, when it got dark it was dark. Yeah. Yeah, you can do some shop with a candle or a fire, but they did without flashlights. You go out and spend a couple of weeks in the was of no flashlight. And I'm not talking about Alaska in July, but like I spent a couple weeks and realize how much stuff you get done under artificial illumination and how much like really important stuff happens on artificial illumination. Imagine, like it's like one day I was a currenty Like wow, man, when it got dark it was dark. Yeah, but no refridge, Like what were they? What did they what did they say when they had no fridge? Well, it's hard to I mean, it's it's hard to generalize, right, But one of the things that you so, so what what struck? And this wasn't initially a chapter in the project, but as I'm reading through these magazines I and and especially local newspaper columns, you kept I kept running into these anecdotes about, uh, you know, people only eat things they shoot because they want an excuse to shoot another something like that. Whereas I think that the people still say that, well, yeah, but I think that and obviously they're options, but I think that for the most part, Um, what what I saw over this several decade long period is a changing, uh, a much more widespread adoption of the ethics of consuming what you kill. Right. Um. And obviously people have consumed what they killed since the dawn of time, right, but there's certain it's why people into hunting. Yeah, it is right. But but if you look at like the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, Um, I mean one of the things that I one of the things that I never really thought about before I got into the project is um hunting became much more popular in the immediate post war decade. We we often think about hunting is sort of this declension. You know, at one point in history all people hunted to to live, and that number has just been steadily declining. But hunting um sort of like religiosity. There are moments of revival, right yeah, huge, Basically this whole generation like that my dad started. My dad started getting serious about big game hunting immediately after World War Two. I mean, like, there's a lot of guys round who used to traveling around, used to hang. All those guys having a good time. They were stir crazy, right, like they didn't want to get into the thing. The Hell's Angels came out at the same time, my dad like cruised around with buddies of his and they hunted because they were out of their mind. I mean, it's a it's a phenomenon, yeah, I mean it's it's a it's a post war phenomenon. So in nineteen forty there's like seven millions something hunting license is sold, and by nineteen fifty it's like fourteen million. It's it nearly doubles. And think how ald those guys were too. It's like now the average hunter is what like in his late forties or fifties or something like that. I mean, this guys years old and so and and it's funny, I mean the way that you phrase that there's an editorial and outdoor life before the end of the war, and and the I'm the author's escaping me at the moment, But he writes, you can't introduce millions of young men to the joys of firearms and living in the woods and not expect and expect them to just give it up, you know, at the drop of that hat. Right. Remember a neighbor down the road of ours who was a pilot, like flew a plane in World War Two, And he later talked about getting home from World War two and and asked some kind of like the things he did for a while, and he said, I enrolled like he had the g I bill enrolled in school, sat there for a couple of days and just realized, after what I just did for two years, you've got to be kidding me. Sitting chair, you know, Yeah, there's just no way. And and so this is I mean, it's it's a new passion for a lot of a lot of young men in this period. And if you think about the numbers of wildlife that existed in the nineteen thirties or you know, prior to Pittman Robertson, prior to this through rebounding of all these wild game populations. You think about how that changed, um, sort of the culture of hunting, right, if there's if there aren't any deer in your backyard to shoot, sort of what it means to to drive to the north Woods, get your deer and come back home. You're not taking you know, your little kid out on the weekend and going hunting with them, right, It's it's your your war buddies. You're taking your red and black checkered outright. But but what you know, with the novelty of this behavior for a lot of these guys, Um, there are some complications. Rates of accidental shooting skyrocket in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen shot Oh yeah, yeah, I mean this is this is a huge sports illustrated I think in like the nineteen fifty two predicted that more hunters would get shot that year than like moose, big horn, wild goat, and they list you know, basically everything other than deer. They said more, you know, more American men are going to get shot in this hunting season and all of these species of big game combined. My old man loved the irony of the fact that he had was on the Anzio Beach, had invasion. Okay, fought all through the Italian Peninsula, marks all way to France, and was injured, but never by a bullet, never scratched to buy a bullet, and came home and they were hunting rabbits and the guy shot him in the foot of the twelve gate shotgun point blank range. You know, yeah, it's just like he's like, how could that be? I mean, it was a common experience, relatively speaking, but get but get me into the like, okay, how would they deal what what? Before? When these guys all start hunting deer, they don't have freezers. They're not like seasoned woodsman who know how to smoke hands and know how to do like primitive old school meat preservation techniques. Would you just good deering, party with it and eat it in a week? Well that's that's why I mean, I found a lot of references to guys running around town trying to hand meat off to neighbors and and this and that, right, trying to get rid of the thing. Before it's spoiled. Um. And there you know, you could rent freezer space. Um. And sportsmen were earlier adopters of this technology, freezers and and other Americans and and freezer companies. Actually you'll see these advertisements in in the late early nineteen fifties when these freezer manufacturers starting to really push this technology. They're saying, hey, imagine eating year round what you killed this fall. Yeah, And they're actually laws on the books in the late nineteen forties. Um. You know. One of the ways in which some of the early wildlife regulations prohibitor intended to curtail poaching was by um criminalizing possession of wild game within X number of days after the end of the season. And in some states, I think it was like five or six states when the season ended, you can't have any any wild game in your house, yeah, and so and so there, because social was if you have it, you probably shot it last Yeah. Um, you know, why would you why would you have a tenderloin from Why tell you shot you know, six months ago? Something like that, as so many people do today. But so so in these magazines. If you look at these magazines in in the late nineteen forties, some of these editors are saying, we need to we need to reinvent these laws because there's more and more sportsmen by freezers and have the means to preserve while gaming around. These laws are actually going to penalize law abiding sportsmen, or they're gonna penalize sportsman who want to conserve this this meat music to feed their family. Um. And so I mean another side story or another sort of thing that you'll see in these magazines again again and also in in newspapers. Um, these accounts people sort of openly acknowledging that most and you'll you'll see these words. And so it's not my sort of me poking at people in the past, but you'll see these words again again. Most of the wild game in this country is wasted. You'll see that. I mean, you'll see it in anywhere from Ladies home journal to UH to field and streamed outdoor life. It's sort of this open, ugly secret. Well it's not, yeah, I mean, And but I think back then the difference is back then the there wasn't a sort of the the ethical consideration of wasting what you kill wasn't nearly as prominent on the page of these magazines UM and that really is it because they didn't have an awareness of finiteness or or or is it something different. It's a point of concern I think for a lot of wildlife officials and administrators who are tasked with conserving this resource, and those are sort of the terms that they view it in. And so in the nineteen sixties you see state fish and Game UH departments putting out cookbooks and putting out guides on how to prey and and this is something that agricultural extension services throughout the country had been doing, you know, piecemeal, but it really takes off in the sixties, especially as freezer has become more available. And then especially once hunting comes under um pressure from anti hunting activists who are saying, you're doing this, you know, just to serve some kind of blood lust or this or that, you know, it's a wasteful, destructive practice. Increasingly UM hunters are defending their pastime by um highlighting that they're using this as a means to feed their family. UM. And and there's a huge social scientific literature from the nineties seventies where there are public opinion polls of of the general public, not just hunters and anti hunters, but of the non hunting sort of disinterested public right, and the approval figures of hunting are much much higher as they are today when you emphasize, uh, the the eating, the consumptive aspect of it, right, eating what you kill, UM, And so that in the seventies this really takes off in it also, I also tie it in or dovetail it with um the economic misfortune of a lot of uh the country during this period, Like if you think about again d industrialization, economic stagnation. UH. You see in the sources, you'll see in magazine articles that you know, verbatim, Deer hunting in the North Woods this year took on a new uh, a new level of significance as out of work, Yeah, as as laid off auto workers are trying to figure out a way to provide for their families. You know, we had that a few years ago. It was announced too much fanfare that there had been a slight uptick in license sales. You know, people were very excited about it, and UM, many people interpreted those numbers, and one interpretation you kept seeing again and again was it was contemporaneous with economic crash. And then you had a lot of dudes who had a lot of time on their hands and did a lot of hunt in those couple of years. Yeah, I mean, and the people that are that really uh, some of some of the people that were hit the hardest by the the economics stagnation in the nineties seventies. Um, we're blue collar, middle class breadwinners in you know, the upper rust belt Michigan. You think about strong deer hunting culture, right, and so in that context, this behavior, this practice takes on a new significance. This is how and this is you'll see this again and again if you look at local newspapers and like Youngstown, Ohio, places like that, there's a story, you know, a local interest story come Christmas time about an out of work, uh, out of work guy who went out and fed his family for the winner, you know, with a deer too. And it becomes yeah, and it becomes sort of this trope um that you just don't really see. And and it's not to say that people didn't consume what they killed in the forties and fifties, but it just takes it resonates in new ways in the imagination in these other contexts. Chatter five, Chapter five after five time. Yeah, how long we've been talking? Probably overboard. We're getting there, but no, I think we can. We can finish up Chapter five. Chapter five some final thoughts or yeah. Chapter five. Chapter five looks at UM, the ways in which the hunting in American life is increasingly debated with rights based claims UM in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. You know, people claiming I have a right to hunt and and and conversely, I also look at the politics of of tribal hunting and fishing rights because the two unfold simultaneously. UM and and I really sort of tell the story of UM. Obviously, people have claimed that their rights to hunt, dating back UM much longer, right, further back than than this period that I'm considering. But Daniel Boone had no right to be doing what he was doing. Much one he was doing was land claimed by the British clown crown, and he was like trespassing not only on a Native American land, he was trespassing on the land claimed by another country. Yeah. So, so one of the interesting things that I discovered in my research was this article from like a law review in the nineteen thirties. And this guy's making mention of the fact that Pennsylvania at the time of the Constitutional Convention had a pretty radical democratic, small d democratic political culture. Um and in Pennsylvania, I'm I'm certain that it's Pennsylvania. I'm also certain that nobody else is gonna call me out on this one, but I think Pennsylvania suggested incorporating into the Bill of Rights a right to hunt on all unoccupied lands within the new nation. Man. And it was Jettison, really yeah, yeah, yeah, so that was that was But yeah, so this this guy like in the nineteen thirties, apparently a dug up some transcript of of the Philadelphia delegation or something like that when they're meeting to debate the ratification of the Constitution. Anyway, Um so I look at I look at the ways in which and and part of it stems from the rise of new anti hunting strategies like um, um, you know, folks showing up in the woods trying to disrupt hunts and hunters making claims I have a right to be here. This is a little it's like a lot of states ratified rassment. Yeah, this is the sort of the origins of the modern debate over hunter harassment loss which is what I look at, I have a right to hunt. I'm doing something lawful, authorized by the state, um and and my rights are being infringed upon. But yeah, it's kind of you probably know better, but it's like an implied right. Be like like because you know, people are talk about the right deprivacy the constitution, right, there is no it's an interpretation, right, there's no one because there's a you know, the right privacy, which is like a thing where like we accept that that's an that that's implied. That's what idea, that right privacy. So people talk about you have a right to hunt, it kind of winds up. It's like, um, you have like an implied right. There's like a cult. There's like an hereditary cultural thing enabling you to hunt. And then it's interesting to see like the hunter harassment stuff was almost kind of a step in the direction of saying like, well, at least have the right to hunt without you messing with me. Yeah, And and the debate over these hunter harassment laws centers around competing rights claims because the anti hunting activists advocates whatever you want to call them, um argue that these laws are infringing my right to test or to free speech or whatever you want to call it right and so so ultimately, um, sort of the the stakes of this hunting and anti hunting debate are amplified by the arena in which it's taking place, or the the language in which it's taking place of rights claims, right space claims, which are pretty powerful claims in American political culture, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, following all of the big so you know, social movements, the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties whatever. So. Um, So, the fact that this is a language that's being adopted and appropriated in order to you know, engage in this contest over the the the ethics of hunting, the morality of hunting, heightens heightens the sort of emotional stakes that people have in it. Um. And so that's that's that chapter, UM. And then that blog. That blog looks at and it's just really briefly, UM, looks at this debate over public lands that you know, it's around the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, rears its head again in the eighties and seems to be rearing its head again. Yeah, just like and so yeah, so that's that chapter sort of sketches out the role that the hunting public has played in this eight and uh it's a pretty powerful role, dude. Man, I hope that in twenty years you can write another dissertation about how this whole anti public land thing got just squashed by hunters in the two thousand and sixteen two era. Well, if I'm writing another dissertation in twenty years, I have made a series of terrible mistakes. Oh, which leaves me the last thing I want to ask you. This is my concluding thought. What do you gotta do now? Get the thing published in like a major Uh yeah, so I mean you gotta do. I'm sort of catching my breath and uh, it was, like I said, it was kind of a sprint to the finish there, to get to get wrapped up, and uh, I'm sort of thinking about publication options and and thinking about publishers and and uh like academic type publishers. Well, yeah, I think there's an I think there's a popular audience for it. So at the moment I submitted, but I know I'm not saying that needs to be academic. I mean to make it be a dissertation. Once let's say Scruber publishes it, does that still count? Okay? I don't know if he had to be like it had to go through the academics publishes it. Yeah, but it doesn't have to go so it doesn't have to go through like the peer review process. No that So, so what happens is after you write the dissertation, you submit it to a committee of examiners and they read it, and they're ultimately the arbiters of whether or not this constitute say an original, valuable uh contribution to the literature. And so Dan it was as my advisor was the head of that committee. And then I had five other professors of history and a professor of environmental studies who read the thing, and we sat down and you defend. It's a defense. So they sit down and ask you, why did you do it this way? You know, what are you missing here? It's as I readgious, I would have done this this way. And you you answer and address their concerns as best you can, and then you're asked to leave the room, and they ultimately come back and say he either passed it or you didn't, so well, I passed. That's why I'm sitting here. So now now that you've done that, can take any publication venue you want. Yeah, it's mine. Um it. You submit it to an online database, but you can put a hold on it for several years as you're working out how exactly you want to publish it. Um and and ideally you publish it with the oppress that will give you the widest audience possible. So you don't want to send it to something I don't even want you to kind of think I was suggesting that it wasn't Yeah for that. I just thought that because you're involved in this process, that you have to stay within that world. No, no, once you once people will publish a dissertation as a popular book. Typically typically not because most dissertations are written in a like heavily footnote of they're not written in a in a literary style that people are gonna they're not accessible because they're written for an academic audience to sort of show your chops, test your you know, show show your metal to an academic audience. But you have to go in and douce it up right and take out all like de footnote it and and um citations and present all that in a different way. Yeah. I mean it's it's up to the publisher. It's up to the press how they how they want to do it. I mean I I wrote it in such a way that I mean a lot of people they write thousand page dissertations and they have to chop it down to like a twoe book. And so I approached it. I tried to save myself some work on the back end by by keeping it as tight as I could as I wrote it. So so my concluding thought is, yeah, I don't want to ask you like there's a lot there's a lot of unknowns. My conclude thought is I I hope that this that this work sees the that this work becomes available for you to look at. Yeah. And then don't mean like them going in you know, like I hope it's like published. Yeah, Now, that's that's what they're not going on to j store or trying to buy, like trying to buy your disstation for twenty bucks. Yeah. No, that's that's the that's the hope, that's the goal. Um. And yeah, I finished. I just finished about a month or so ago, and I got a lot of balls in the air right now? And are you gonna go work at a university? UM. At the moment, I'm teaching online and and UH for university and UM sort of figure out the next step. I mean, I'm interested in teaching. I love teaching. UM, I'm not sure if I want to necessarily go through the academic ten your track job market. UM, I'm interested in also finding employment and conservation and sort of working towards bringing groups together resolving some of the issues that I've tracked as they emerged in the nineteen seventy nine, nineteen seventies. So literally, this man up and give him a job. How much? How much money do you make? No joke? Yeah, I just came off a salary is a teaching assistant. So anything anything, Listen, you're gonna get this guy cheap. Anything sounds good to this guy. Yeah. Any concluding thoughts too many really for the time I have. UM, congratulations first off for getting that done. Thank you. It's quite the project. That's gonna feel good. Yeah, it's quite the dragon to sligh as you like to say. Um. Yeah, man, I hope that your work opens opens up some discussion. It's important to know for everybody, it's important to know your history and where you come from, and not only your family history, but now us as hunters. And it's some interesting stuff that you've you know, looked at and shared. So yeah, open. Hopefully it opened the discussion everybody out there. You can label me as a tree hugger, environmentalist that likes to shoot stuff. That's my concluding thought, like shoot trees. And you didn't say, well a lot. Yeah, this is your first This is the first time you ever said I I wanted this conversation. Yeah, yeah, and I thanks thanks for the opportunity to let me sit in. It's interesting stuff. I learned quite a bit. Do you any concluding thoughts? Well, you're probably thinking about that big link had you gotta flay and he's got a cooler too, Lane cot on ice that won't fit in the fridge. Well like like like Randall, I came from a non hunting family, So this is all good dodged, you know, it's it's stuff that I didn't thinking about. So it's this is this is good to hear. Yeah, congratulations on getting through it. And thinks it sounds like a pretty pretty interesting piece. I can't tell if you're allowed to have concluding thoughts or not. What do you think thoughts? Yea, what you hear me? Don't know what thought. It's just it's just a little tradition of having concluding thoughts. I'm just just happy and honored to be here. Good time, dude, don't start, don't give me the old and then uh then you know, visit your local bookseller in about two years. Once we get this thing on the on the shelf and pick it up, and you know, we'll get put up on We'll get it put up. When your book comes out, we'll get up put up on our our website and you're honest, maybe we'll get a deal where you buy a hundred T shirts to get a copy for free, about a hundred bucks and get a T shirt for free package. All right, um man, I'm just you know, now I feel guilty to the view to the listeners that we've been discussing and like, because usually you know, a book will get published, then you go and do you talk about it. You know, yeah, because now I'm like, stay tuned because something to read this book available. It's hard way, yeah, it's hard to say. Once you start setting out queer, he's depresses, it's you never know when what the timeline is, so we'll see, but well, we got the basic idea. It was fascinating. Man, thank you. I'm glad. I'm glad you're I'm glad you're able to come and talk with us. I mean, definitely stuff I never thought about, and some stuff I had thought about, but I thought about it wrong. Yeah, I mean it was a different Uh. You know, when I set out to write the thing, I thought I was gonna tell once story, and I realized that there so many more stories out there. And I guess, you know, if you're interested in this, if the listeners are interested in this stuff. Outdoor Life just recently digitized their whole uh back catalog to like eighteen eighty seven eight something like that. You can buy a monthly. Yeah, And so this saved me because prior to that, I was carrying home these huge bound volumes that weighed like twenty pounds apiece, and it was like ten issues of of Outdoor Life, and I was just hauling them back from the library in my backpack. And then you know, in January, I'm I'm cranking through this thing. And you can go online now and get a subscription. It's like it's like five bucks a month or something, and they have full page scan so you can go you can look at the advertisements all that stuff, and then field and stream too is available on Google Books digitally from like nineteen sixty to the early two thousands. So if you know, if if you want to go, and I'd be curious to have someone go do a dissertation on the changing nag you of chewing tobacco ads in field streamed outdoor lives. Yeah, there's there's a rich history there. All right, thanks for listening. Um, we'll keep making them keep listening. Take care,