00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. He can't predict anything, all right, very roll, that's roll. So just to be uh, just to recap real quick somewhere, just talking about a minute ago, a guy finds a dead mountain lion. But he's not just a guy. No, he's like a lion biologist. The reason he finds this lion. So he wasn't just a guy, No, he was. He was saying he wasn't just a guy, but I didn't know to what extent he wasn't just a guy. You know, he was the guy that got the message that the collar on the lion was showing was showing dead. So yeah, I mean that's why I'm glad I brought it back up because I've been ruminating on it. Yeah, okay, it was collar. Because I'm like, line, is a dead lion, which doesn't happen. Okay, that's not going to just happen. Well it could, I mean yeah, probably not very unlikely. So he's a lion guy, his lion. He gets a debt, a mortality signal from an immobile collar. Okay, yeah, and we should we should preface what we're saying right now by stating explicitly that we have not like revisited this story. We've just been kind of bs and about it for the last few minutes. So no, we haven't the specific like, we haven't pulled up the there's a peer of view journal article and we can post that when when we present this material. Well we'll make that that link to that, so folks can can then you know, get the facts absolutely straight. But the the general story here is there's a lion proce. You're listening to the buttery tones of of Carl melcol Dr Carl, thanks for the intro. Yeah, so the story goes that this researcher and you know, we should also say we're not trying to make light of this situation. This is a tragic story. It's a tragic story. Yes, we've been chatting over dinner, but it's also become it's it's also become a public tale. Yeah, and we've been we've been discussing over dinner the topic of zonotic disease. We've been going through the laundry list of all the lawns, were laying it all out. Yeah, we also explained dinner. Well, I would like to hear you and Yanni explained dinner because I would like to get your perspectives on what we just experience. Hold tight on the guy with the deadline, which is a worthwhile tale. And uh Carl and his work UM has had occasion to go to China and work on wildlife issues in China, and in China he eats all manner of things and UH. One of the ones that he decided a little bit of technology he decided to take home with him was a dish called ogaga, which translates into English hot pop pepper pots. That's totally different South American dish pepper pot hot pope walk wa. So he makes, Carl makes He's got a camp stove out on his brand new deck, which he did a wonderful job building, and UM on his camp so he's got double burner camp stove, and on each burner he's got a very peppery broth full of all kinds of peppers and and uh aromatics, um Chinese flavors. And then he cut he had frozen and then right at the moment of thaw that it becomes conducive to nice uniform thin slices, sliced, a bunch of el mule deer, turkey heart, turkey gizzard, wally, prong horn heart, prong horn heart, several fun guy, you know, crazy mushrooms. You had some good MUSHes and then you get back joy right up, flat out green leaf, loose leaf, lettuce, and uh, then you get these little things ripping and everyone just sits around. I got a fondue party, dipping hunks of meat and guts into Wait, do those organs constitute guts? When I think of guts, I don't think a heart. I guess gizzard. Yeah, gizard's gut. I'll give you that. I think of it as a gut, all right, So dip it into that, and my god, is that ship good man? The key is, don't let it? Don't don't we only I only let one piece linger. Then it just becomes boiled meat. You're not making boiled meat. You're making like you watch it. It's kind of like flash poach. I don't know what the what the problem it would be. I mean, honestly, if that water, if that not water, the broth the hot pot is simmering. Um, you can call it a blanche. I think, yeah, you blanch, you blanch the meat. Um, thirty seconds isn't too long, but it's plenty. Yeah. And as you're listening through those those ingredients the things we're cooking, one that was notably missing from that list that's really popular in China. That would be a unique culinary experience that I'm sad I couldn't provide is uh coagulated duck blood. That's one that like, just pour a blood in there and let it. Yeah, but you don't really pour it. It's almost got the consistency of like a jello gelatin. You can slice it and it retains its uh integrity as you pick it up with chopsticks. You can dip it almost like a piece of liver. Then Yeah, it's it is very livery Yeah. And I didn't think back when we were in mid December amid these massive southward traveling flocks of Mallards. At no pointed across my mind that I would have an opportunity to serve mallard blood via hot pot to you boys, because if it had, I might have been out there trying to figure out a way to extract that blood in the field. Yeah, I'm not sure how that would have worked. Out. But I've looked into it for blood sausage, and it's difficult or to capture the blood. I don't think it'd be that difficult. Now, I got a friend, a dog trainer, and he this is Jacob Zeiski up in Arena, Wisconsin. And uh, he's big into training versatile hunting dogs. And these dogs are expected to point on dry land to retrieve in the water North American versus the Hunting Dog Association. The dogs running around here are dogs that have been tested through NAVTA trials. Yeah, do you know Ronnie. I don't. Well, I know Ronnie, you know through what you do. I've not met him, but I'd love to. Guys, So this dude, Jake had to leave the room. But man, you guys talk about So this dude Jacob, like you know, there was a stint where we were hunting as college students, like more than anyone has any reason, like any right to be hunting. We're hunting a lot, and he had worked out a way to kind of capture blood from big game animals that we've shot, and you get it into jugs, you know, see, you know, and you're like field dressing a deer and in the Midwest, you typically have the opportunity to bring like the whole deer out if you want to. You could feel dressed. But just if you hit it through the lungs, just tipping on its back, wait five minutes, and scoop it all out of there totally. Yeah. So my point is it's not difficult to capture blood from a big game animal. I'm not sure how you do it from a duck. What was he doing with it? He'd freeze it and then he would use it for basically simulating blood tracking, like over time, and that's for human consumption. No, no, that's why. That's why I mentioned the whole dog. The purpose of capturing the blood was related to dog training. You only have, you know, a couple of months out of the year when you can be shooting white tailed deer. You want to have a steady supply of dear blood over the course of the training season. So we had these chest freezers that had all assortment of fish and game products in them, among which were these jugs of dear blood. Have you seen the movie Only Lovers Left Alive? I have not seen that movie. Laid on me, that's it, okay, alright, alright, watch it well, discuss next time. A. No, when I looked into making blood sausage, is that the end of your things? Blood? Yeah, that's all I have to say. Like that, I feel like that was the main missing agredient because we had surf and turf, we had some Oregon meat, we had a good representative cross section of the big game species of New Mexico. China. We would have been having a little blood too. Yeah, and China we there definitely would have been the blood would have been a key ingredient that we were missing. But I appreciate the feedback. You know, like when I'm not I'm not gonna pretend to be the culinary student that either of you guys are. But when you're gonna be hosting you know, Steve Rinella and Janice Patelis for dinner, damn you better got you got? Well, you gotta figure out like, all right, I'm not I'm not gonna like I'm not gonna pull out a package Oscar Meyer Wieners and uh slap those in a white bread bun. We'd have had something that you had shot would have been surprised. Yeah, well I think that's probably standard. Like if yeah, I'd be like, yeah, if I'm gonna go to carl sus, I'm gonna eat some wild meat that Carl went out secured for himself. Weep. But no, I don't have any I'm not like I used to be good cook, but I'm not a good cook anymore because the kids, Yeah, yeah, they change it. It's just like I just don't have that kind of time like now, it's just they eats damn early. It's like yeah, I like, yeah, I just don't have I don't I don't get the every day spend. I don't get the every day when I'm home spend hours messing around. I'm like cooking for a two year old or four year old and seven year old who at seven thirty, I'm we're brushing their teeth. The honestly were saying something blood, So you want to get your hands out some blood? No I do. I would love to make blood sausage. It's a very you know, popular, Um what do you want to say, like you know, cultural Latvian dish, right, Like I grew up eating blood sausage with cranberry, uh not jam, but like a like what do you call like a jam? That still was like the like rough rough berries and stuff kind of in it. I call that maybe like a well I can tell you the difference between jelly and jam, but it's such a dirty but anyway, I looked into like the whole like getting blood to make it right, and you can ask for it and buy it at a butcher's shop, but the you want it in a liquid state, right, and it doesn't take long for that to change to Yeah. So the whole thing is like how you cool it down? And you basically would have to have like a giant vat with an ice Wand is what it would take to do it out in the field really yes, because you could sit there and basically stir it with an ice wand to bring the tamp down, maintaining the liquid state. If you get serious about this, I would just think if you get seriously want to be the first guy, or like not the first guy, because everybody's at this point in our history, someone has done everything. But if you want to be one of the guys with the first guy you know about to do it, I would think that you'd go and do it at a place like Doug's place, you know exactly, get already, right, get already, and then on opening day when you know that ample opportunities, right, and then you're all set and blouch and then run over there and start processing your blood sausage. And yeah. So the question is would you shoot it in the lungs and go what you were just explaining that that's where I would capture the blood or would you shoot it somewhere else where you would not cause that internal hemorrhagy and cause all that blood to be in the cavity and then some sort of like try to then cut its throat and drain it that one. I see where you're going with this, But you're into ethical you're into an ethical mind field. If you're saying that you're gonna cripple it up. No, no, no no, I'm not saying so you can then run over their shot place and you can make and and dispatch an ani on the neck sure shoulder shot is probably what I would know if if I was in that situation where God comes down and puts a gun to your head and says you gotta make dear blood sausage. Um, I would uh, I would shoot it through the lungs and then hustle over there and get it on its back. So the blood's not exiting the wound. Hustle over there, get it on its back, wait some number of minutes and uh and and collect it out of there. Going there with a small picture. Yeah, just like a maybe a ladle ladled out start making blood sausage. Um you uh so you haven't watched Only Lovers Left Alive? Have you watched the film's Southern Comfort? I can't say that I have okay insating comfort. It's a great movie. Uh, kind of a ringing endorsement. Well, it tries to take a little bit too much from Easy Rider towards the end. But um, in it, some National Guard guys are on like doing a mock war game scenario and the Bayous of Louisiana and they're out there with just blanks and they get someone get lost, and they steal a you know those like the Cajun dugouts to pure rogues. They steal one because they're lost and they're sick of being lost, and they steal one. And that leads them to getting cross ways with some people that you shouldn't get cross ways with. And then all kinds of it has a lot of elements of deliverance. I was a lot of deliberance, debating whether if you if Deliverance had sex with the easy Rider, that would be the baby. Baby would be Southern comfort. So that's a better enforcement in this. In this they make blood sausage in this movie. Um, and it's like a it's a it's a it's a pretty captivating scene. And another one a documentary called Brother's Keeper. It's a documentary about three brothers who murder their father and their trial for killing their father. Um, they kill a pig and collect some blood out of it. And Yanni, before you embark on your little mission here, you should you should take in some cinema and uh and get some pointers, I will carl Um, Oh, real quick. Now the lion. Yeah, let's get back to that lion. But let's not dwell on it just kind of late. So that again the disclaimer, like we we've all heard this story Steve Johnis and I and we're kind of recounting facts that are maybe a little murky in hindsight. But the takeaway was this guy was a biologist working on the line project. One of the collars goes into a mortality mode from basically being immobile for a certain amount of time, So you know there's likely a dead cat out there. The guy goes out, finds this cat and it looks flawless, like there's no visible evidence that could lead to a an obvious conclusion about the cause of death. So the biologist scoops up the mountain lion takes it back to his garage. If I remember properly, and I want to say it was, it was kind of like the in retrospect looking at it's like the perfect storm because it's the weekend, right, so it's not like during the week where he would then have maybe taken to a lab. And I remember you telling me this part of it. Yea, so, and and that's a perfect example of a detail that I either didn't know or have forgotten already. So hopefully I sufficiently like, listen, trust your instinct, trust remember, because I was recounting es a plane crash that I witnessed the aftermath of and and and this was when I was a child, yeah, okay, not even ten probably, And I was recounting details and I'm like, I can't remember. I think this happened, Think that happened. And then someone found the article and sent it to me, And dude, you gotta when it comes to stuff like this, I feel like you can generally kind of trust the little feelings, like things you kind of felt like you remember. Yeah, And I would feel like that would be a more applicable mindset if this was something that I had experienced as opposed to articles that I'd read, but I did where you're coming from. So, Yeah, the guy takes the cat back to his garage, and, like a good biologist would want to do, he's hell bent on determining the cause of death of this mountain lion and elects to perform a necropsy on the cat, which is basically not a necropsy. Nope, knee crops. Knee crops. I'm gonna I'm gonna give that a firm did that, because I was always confused about that word. Yeah, and I'm sure there's some people who would disagree, but I'd be happy to hash it out with them at a later date. So the process of knee crops, he's essentially going through an eliminating possible causes of death. So one of the first things you do is try to get the skin off the cat and look to see if there's any evidence of trauma that's visible. Kind of superficially once you once you skin the animal out, is there any you know, any explanation, um. And essentially the guy made some mistakes in terms of the standard protocols around limiting your exposure to potential pathogens. And again, if memory serves me correctly, he was using some standard like the kind of tools you would find in your average garage to conduct this knee crops, like reciprocating saw yeah, saws all. And in the process of cutting this cat apart trying to figure out what killed the cat, he ends up exposing himself to a various bodily fluids from the cat. And I don't recall what the exact mode of exposure was, whether something got in his eyes, or whether it got in his mouth or cut in his hand, or if they ever even determined what the route of exposure was. But the takeaway was that within a matter of a very short period of time, like on the order of a day and a half or two days something to that effect, the guy was dead from the plague, which is what had killed the mountain lion. Yeah, And we got on this subject because we were going down the laundry the impressive laundry list of zonotic diseases that Steve and or Janice have wrestled with, which is which is a no? And that's when you don't want to And I used to be used to do tree work, tree surgeon work, and um, the guy worked for hated squirrels, and we differed on that because I always love squirrels, but he hated squirrels because of the plague. Really, and I was like, come on, dude, the plague. But apparently it's something to watch out for. And I don't want to make light of this man's debt. No, I don't either go and find to go and find. Uh. If you go to the me eater dot com slash podcasts, you will find podcast descriptions of all the episodes and within that, when you're listening to this, go there and we will have that. We will find that pure reviewed journal article and put it up. Yeah, and I'm glad that you said that, Steve, because I could I could see myself or any number of colleagues potentially making that kind of a mistake, you know, like the notion of being killed by the plague when you're trying to do any cropsy on the mountain line. It was not the first thing on that gentleman's mind. And you know, we're obviously not trying to make light of the situation in any way, but it's a it's a powerful story because um zoonotic diseases are not something to mess around with. And I feel like, you know, we have a tendency to kind of get cavalier with the way we handle dead animals. Yeah, there's no reason why I don't use latex gloves, but I don't use latex gloves. Um. I even sometimes carry him with me and don't use them. Well, even when I use them, I feel like half the time I end up with as much blood inside the glove as you know, more than I would I have for garage chores. I have some very heavy duty ones that I keep thinking about bringing with me, but I don't do it because one, I don't like it when I don't like going down that path, and I don't like going down it with myself or with my kids, of always thinking that everything's gonna hurt you. Yeah, And I don't like when I catch myself in a paranoid state, and and I don't like to act like the world so dangerous all the time, and that everything's bad and gonna get you. Well, let's let's talk on this. What is the threat of um, Like, just let's take the white tail deer and you're gutting it. I don't know, I don't know what blood born what blood born pathogens one is trying to avoid on a white tail deer. Yeah, I would say, I am not really well equipped to answer that, but I'll give you a brief tail along these lines. Um, some good friends of mine up in Wisconsin, we would have these annual parties where we would all make a mountain of sausage, right the annual sausage Fest. And so you're you butcher and deer and all the random cuts that you wouldn't be packaging as like a roast or steak or whatever. You throw those in a big heap. And then at some point later on in the year, after the hunting was over, though, have a big sausage party. So not naming names, you guys know who I'm talking about here, the guy. The guy's listening will know we had a sausage party where the the rules of proper like hygiene and handling the meat we're not followed. And by all accounts, the series of events was one of our sausage making team with meaty hands, touched the door knob with the meaty hands not doing enough hand washing between touching the meat touching the door knob, and ended up later like, not not very long later, but after the sausages are made, grabbing the door handle which still probably had some of this meat juice on it. And other members of this individual's family also did the same thing and ended up with a pretty wicked case of food born illness cranking through the family from well, you know, it came from the door knob. Well, like, the series of events is what leads to the conclusion that it had to do with the meat handling. So the door knob is the the point on the house that was identified as the likely thing. A lot of people were handling, and there was a point in time where the hands went from the sausage meat to the door and this person was like, oh, it's no big deal. Yeah, And the conclusion, and it's not bulletproof, but the conclusion is that it likely came from getting this meat juice, So it's kind of a food born thing as opposed to his ownoutic disease. But I do think like in general, we have a tendency to be kind of cav leer around this stuff. That said, your point about choosing what you want to be scared of. You know, when I think, you know, you don't have to be an an actuary scientist to recognize that the things we do that are the most dangerous do not involve handling dead animals. Right, It's like getting behind the wheel. So if you want to be scared about something, I would suggest that's like at the top of your list. That would be like a high priority scary thing. Yeah, so your point is well taken. But I the reason I I'm going on about this is that I could see a lot of really good people, like sound biologists being a little bit cavalier in approaching a dead animal like that, wanting to get to the bottom of what killed it, and making the same mistakes. So I have a lot of sympathy for what that man went through and also his family. You know, it's a horrible story. Yeah, and it's like what what what not? That you blame the debt, But what's to alleviates blame is it it was so unusual that we're now sitting around talking about it. This was a couple of years ago too, they wrote someone wrote a paper about in a peer review journal. So it's like if it was just a thing that like, oh, any idiot would know right right, me and Yanni got sick from eating undercook bear meat while talking about how we're probably gonna get sick from eating undercook bear meat. So that's like a level of stupidity that this really isn't because something that just like so unexpected and without precedent struck this guy. It wasn't like, ha ha, uh this is really stupid. We could get sick from this undercook bear meat. Let's have some more, you know. Yeah, like if we'd have died from that, I'd be like, yeah, that's worth a chuckle, like the stupid ending. Yeah, now, just changed subject real quick. The thing I wanted to tell people about, um, you know, they're unrelated, like not that any of this is related. Can you real quick get into that? You used to uh be a contract dear shooter for airport, So I'll get into that. Uh, it's not not a very accurate that's not inspanation of how it went, Like me isn't a good job? No, well, but it was not far enough off the off the mark. So here's the deal. Um, I actually, as an undergraduate, incorporated my own business and then bid for a number of contracts to wildlife management work. And I had a number of clientele that included, uh proving grounds for automobiles and no airport work in essence. It was very similar to airport work where you were trying to alleviate human wildlife conflicts in essence by removing wildlife from the scene. And uh, so I've shot a lot of deer, a lot of turkeys, and situations that were far from hunting context. And for folks who haven't done that kind of work, you know, it might sound like, oh, man getting paid to shoot deer, that sounds awesome that you get over that real quick. Yeah, And it's you know, it's really hard work. And also, you know, my my mentality around hunting around wildlife is such that I don't take killing lightly. And when I when I have a successful hunt, and my mindset is in this mode of thinking about meals like the one we just had and stocking up. You know that the translation of death to food. It feels good, it feels something to celebrate and feel happy about. But when you're thinking when the animal is in this context of being a problem, and you're like, I need to eliminate this problem by killing this animal. It is a very different set of emotions that I personally experienced in that sort of a setting. So we're talking, you know, like in a given year, I might I might shoot or I might have shot in some of those years in the neighborhood of like fifty or sixty deer in a year, and it doesn't take too many deer into that fifty dear, let's say before You're kind of like, man, this is not pleasant at least again for me personally, that Lincoln was all that. If that was your only relationship, it might have been different. But you're juxtaposing it to the feeling, to the celebratory feeling of hunting for meat. So you had that that confusion occurring in your head. I don't know if it's confusion. I've feel like even now and yeah, I feel like it's just it's so disparate. They're so there's such different things, you know, Like and again in the hunting world, this this word hunting two folks who haven't especially to folks who haven't experienced it, a lot of different things kind of get put under that umbrella. A lot of different activities and this this is very much we're talking about calling wildlife, which is a very different thing from hunting. Both involve killing wildlife. One of them, to me is something you know that I enjoy more than almost any other activity, Like it's one of the most satisfying things I've experienced is being able to hunt and feed my family through that activity. The other thing calling UM, I see the I see the merit, I see the value in that management approach, and there's there's a utility to being able to manage wildlife in that way. But when you're the person pulling the trigger, at least based on my experience being in that role, it is a night and day different experience from going out with the hope that you're going to fill your freezer. How how would you how would you get paid for that kind of work? Well, I had a had a corporation I incorporated. It would have been about two thousand three, and I ran that business for ten years. UM. I had contracts in place where I was I would essentially charge by the hour, so I keep track of the amount of time I was out doing the work. UM and then for virtually all the species. All this work was done in Michigan, by the way, and none of it involved migratory wildlife species. So it was always the situation that the State of Michigan would issue a special essentially permit to be able to kill those species in the interest of of managing Were they sanctioned to do that for geese or would that fall under migratory waterfil Yeah, so geese are a good example and actually resident in the It doesn't matter if the resident or not because it's a migratory species. So in order to secure a similar permit to manage migratory waterfall as an example, um, you need to also have federal involvement fishing, Wildlife Service involvement to get a permit for that. So never crossed into that arena. Predominantly what we were dealing with, we're white tailed deer and wild turkeys. So I've shot, like for a midwesterner, I've shot more turkeys with a rifle than probably any guy you'll meet. Um. And again that also was very you know, a lot of this was shooting from vehicles. A lot of the culling work with white tail deer happens at night. Shooting him with spotlight. So it's not at all about fair chase. You're not. You don't charge by the deer, You're charged by the hour. That's correct, Yep, got you. You know that was gonna be. My question is it's like, so sure, the point the trigger is different, you know that aspect of it was different, But did you ever feel like you're hunting during the things like you're using totally different You're just max like you know, one of the and I love to I love to bow hunt. Um, I love hunting and challenging situations. We've been talking a little bit about this archery Ibex hunt here in New Mexico that I've enjoyed the last few years, which has a very low success rate. So I like havin the deck stacked against me. I like the challenge and with the culling operations, you are doing everything you can to be as efficient as you can be while accounting for human safety, because that's another element here as we're talking about wildlife management, oftentimes in a landscape that is very much human dominated, so you have people all around you know you're you're dealing with trying to be absolutely safe with every shot you're taking. As is the case obviously when you're hunting as well, but it's so much easier to accomplish that when you're in a remote landscape, when you're in like suburbia. Um so yeah, like no holds barred. You're talking about shooting at night, shooting from vehicles, baiting, um you name it. And that also, you know, feeds into this easily discernible, discernible disparity that I've I've been talking about a little bit already. Yeah, I would. I wouldn't do that. I mean there's many times for the bulk of my life I would have It's a luxury to be able to say that I wouldn't take that work now because I don't need to. But I did do like work like that, trapping, animal controls, animal damage control, trapping, but never shooting, and um no, no, man, I wouldn't be like sweet, it's like a type a hunt. Yeah, it wouldn't. I wouldn't feel like that. Another thing that makes it feel way more like work is when you're talking about dealing with that number of animals, because a lot of times what we end up doing is like donating the meat to a food bank, you know, like you couldn't do that. I was gonna guess that you had that you had to discard it because of the permit process, now we were able to we were able to donate, donate the meat from the turkeys and the deer. So you dress all those deer out, yeah, yeah. And when so imagine you're on like a five day deer hunt and you succeed in filling your tag and getting a deer, and all that work of field dressing, dragging the animal around or quartering it up, packing it out, that all feels kind of like a celebratory part of the process. You know, it's hard work, but it's kind of the icing on the cake. It's like the hard the hard work that you have earned the privilege of doing through your successful hunt. But when you start talking about like okay, we know we want to try to remove forty or fifty deer from this site, that that becomes a huge amount of work. So I got like I thought I knew how to feel, dress and handle a white tail based on my hunting experience leading up to that point. But I got a lot of a lot of experience in a short period of time handling that many deer. But it felt entirely like work. I was. I had to like, I don't want to call it hunting, um uh, but because I can't think of a better word right now. I I hunted in Scotland one time, and in Scotland, you know, in Scotland, hunting typically refers to fox hunting. We start say stalking, right That's it was funny about it was it there's this guy and he and you know, and they're like, what we have the North American model of wildlife and here wildlife is public property. So whether if wildlife on private properties still owned by the public, it just happens to be residing on private in Scotland. If you own the land, you on the animals on it. And uh they sell the meat into marketplaces. So when you go into a butcher's shop in Scotland, it's you'll find rabbits and ducks that have shotgun pellets in them, and you'll find deer that have been shot by guns hanging in there. And so on one hand they're running an operation where they're coaling deer and selling them, but when there's a client, they put on a different, even different outfit of clothing. You get dressed up in the like the tweeds, which is ridiculous, dressed up in a little suit and you go out and stock or hunt red deer. So I went and did this with the gamekeeper, um, the yeager meister, right, the gamekeeper, and I remember what we did this, And the next day he was going back out to coal, different clothes, different firearm, but would go out into the same area and set up on a knob and shoot red deer. And he somehow was able to maintain the dichotomy that there's no there's cooling and then they're stalking, and I'm like, but as best as I could tell, they had to do with the tweeds, right. And when it gets when hunting gets that like hunting that borders that close on something else, it's like, it's just like you said, it's just not honey, it's not hunting. It's like you're shooting in a semi wild form of lot. You're like dispatching a semi wild form of livestock. You know, there's nothing I want to ask you about. Oh what kind of gun? Jeus, and you're doing that. I shot a Tica M in a two forty three caliber, so I've shot with like a suppressor. I did not shoot a suppressor and the reason for that was the licensing process in Michigan was sufficiently difficult to navigate that I did not embark down that path. That was a funny thing about Scotland. This is before suppressors started to be able to use here, and um, you know, quite a few years ago and I was like, man, I can't believe you boys can use suppressors. And they're like, I can't believe you boys hunt without them? You crazy? Yeah, they thought it was irresponsible to hunt without a suppressor. My ears would agree with you, not just yours, with the dude next to you. Um, let me now, let me ask you this question, because is something you told me about. Uh, You're in China and you're at the latitude roughly the same latitude where you spent your entire life, and you're telling me how you're out in the woods and there's like equivalents yeah for everything. Yeah, tell that, explain that and untell the like the big exception. Yeah, do you know what I'm talking about? I do. I totally do. And in Michigan, at least one of the cool things is you travel from south to north um the state of Michigan along the side of the highway has these signs that indicate when you've passed the parallel. I don't know if other states do that or not. Have you seen those other places, but I know I think of it as a distinctly Michigan thing that sells you when you passed that was that was where Dixon line I think is the Yeah. So the like if you look at a map of the US, that big arcing line that defines most of our northern borders, the forty nine. But when you you crossed the fort they put a line because you're halfway between the equator in the North Pole, and like each degree of latitude I think gives you about seventy miles as you march up. It sounds about right. Yeah, So that was my you know, like as a middle school student, I remember passing those signs and that was finally what helped me like differentiate between longitude and latitude. And I have fond memories of traveling traveling up to the cabin and passing the parallel sign on our way up there. And so if you think you would say, like halfway between the equator and North Pole, yeah or something, it worded it beyond just explain what that meant. I would love to have that sign in front of me right now to refresh my memory. But I do remember, like the notion of equidistant between the equator and the north pole. So if you were to hop on that forty parallel and just start trapsing along that line at the same latitude and then get over to China, the same kind of distance between your equator and through Wisconsin Minnesota, Well that's if you go north. I'm just you could go either way. Damn near the same distance either way. So the study sites. Can I interrupt you, because remind me of something? Bring it, you know, like when your kid and they say, like, oh, if you dug a hole straight down, you'd come out in China, like you wouldn't you would if you got your angle right most people in America. But you know what that's called. It's called the antipities. Wherever you are, if you burrowed the hole nuts down through the the core of the earth and hit you would arrive at your previous locations antipities. And that's that's singular or those those two points would be antipoities that I don't know all right, but there you are, so follow that around the globe halfway, and you know, somewhere in like west west central China, Sichuan Province, so I was doing I was doing some research there in eight different nature reserves in Sichuan, Shanxi, and Yunan provinces, kind of the southwestern part of the country. And for for folks to imagine kind of the geography of China, it's got some striking similarities to the layout of the United States, where along the eastern coast of China you have these major concentrations of people, like huge cities, you know that like the termite mound housing just like high rises with tons and tons of people. But then if you go out to the wild west of Chinese, startetting into some rugged country that is relatively remote um and in that chunk of the country kind of west central southern China is where you'll find Shanshi, Sichuan, Yunan provinces. And I was doing some work the Asiatic black bears in eight different nature reserves in those three provinces, and one of the study sites where I worked is in northern Sichuan Province and a nature reserve called Tanja hu and this this place, it's kind of it reminds me kind of like the Chronicles of Narnia, where you'd see vegetation. That makes sense because you're at this latitude where you know, I grew up around oak trees and kind of maple beech forest, and you know, I knew the pine trees and the spruce trees of my home forests in northern Michigan. But if you caught a glimpse of a deer in Michigan, you know you didn't have to double take. You know it was a white tailed deer, whereas in Tanjah Huh. I believe there are seven different ungulate species in that reserve. So you might catch a little glimmer of how big is this reserve. It's a good question, and I would have to do a little digging. I think I've actually got that fig year. I I printed off a couple of papers from there, so I'll try to get you get your number on that while I chatting here. But you would see species like musk deer, um mount jack or barking deer as they're called gorel zero. There was this amazing you know, one of the most epic animals I've ever seen in the wild is the Sichuan Golden Talking, which is this huge mountain Yeah. This this description won't do it justice, Like people should just look this animal up and check out pictures of its Sichuan Golden Talking. But it's like a stout, really sort of front heavy goat of the mountains that's massive, like on the order of I'm just winging a guest here. They probably weigh five d six hundred pounds the wild mountain goat. Yeah, but I'm staying mountain goat. And it's like, you're gonna see a picture of this thing, be like that doesn't look like a mountain goat, this big golden uh like flowing for they stick out on the side of a hill like you wouldn't need good glass defying these things. They just stick out like a sore thumb. And when I was when I was working in these nature reserves, I was thinking, you know, what kind of animals do you need to be worried about out here? Asiatic black bears are notoriously more aggressive than American black bears, So I was always kind of like bears in the back of my mind. And then I'd heard stories about nature reserve staff having gnarly encounters with wild boars from time to time, especially if they had young with them. So it's you know, kind of hip to the fact, and that's wild boars in their native ring yep. And then what I didn't realize is that this animal to talking. According to the folks who live in that chunk of country and told me all their stories, that was the animal to be the most worried about. And the reason for that is that they lived in such rugged stuff. There were these these paths us is that villagers would use to traverse the reserve between communities, so like footpaths, and they'd be up in the rugged high country and on the same trail as a talking and people would fairly often, apparently based on the stories I was told, have situations where they would they would have an option of either getting run over by these things because they they'll charge you if they feel like they're threatened, or bailing off the side of some nasty cliff and breaking their legs, or even dying. And there was a researcher on a talking project working in that chunk of country who um, I was trying to dart one of these things, and I didn't witness this happen, but I heard the story and the guy was in kind of a tight spot when he took the shot and the talking after getting hit with the dart ended up chasing him off a ledge and he jumped off this ledge and and kind of jacked up one of his ankles, like not a major or fall, but on the order like fift. So the talk and it turns out, was the animal to be most concerned about in that landscape. So just the biodiversity was amazing. But the story that I was telling you a while back, Steve, was, you know, I'm in this forest for the first time. I'm I'm kind of trying to get my bearings from a botanical perspective, understand, Like, Okay, so there's a that looks like a chestnut tree, that looks like, uh, an oak tree, it looks like a walnut tree. And I'm kind of starting to feel like, all right, I get this forest. And as I'm walking along this ridge up ahead, I see tree limbs swinging, I hear branches breaking, and I'm thinking, oh, maybe that's maybe that's a bear up there or you know who that who that knows what it's gonna be I kind of close the distance a little bit, and there's this whole string of golden monkeys in the oak forest, jumping around in the tree tops, and they see me and start vocalizing, barking, yelling, and there are monkeys running along the forest floor. There are monkeys crashing through the treetops, and I remember just standing there thinking to myself, I'm not in Michigan anymore. This is a different ball game here. So yeah, really fantastic as as a wildlife biologist, just getting a chance to experience a different a different piece of ground, um with that kind of biodiversity. And it was really humbling too, because I thought, you know, I had these these preconceived notions of what China was like that we're really really ignorant, frankly, Um, I was just imagining like a massive sea of humanity and people, you know, packed in on top of each other, and some of the cities, you know, I've I've felt that way in the cities. But there are places in these reserves that are every bit is breathtaking as anything I've seen anywhere else in the world, and the biodiversity is unbelievable. Places where you can you know, drink the water that's bubbling out of streams and high elevation rivers where you can, you know, stand on a cliff and look down and see every pebble on the bottom of the stream. Just beautiful landscapes. But another important distinction that I love to point out to folks who enjoy recreating in our public lands here in the US is that some of these reserves are in essence very difficult for the average Chinese citizen to access, and the recreational opportunities are very limited because it's cost prohibitive to get there. No, because they're not they're not the lands are not set aside to provide necessarily uh for recreational opportunity. These are these reserves were in large part established to protect the remnant habitat of pandas so they they exist primarily as a conservation tool for a species of you know, kind of globally recognized significance. It's like the poster child of Chinese conservation. And they're not operating under a multiple use now, it's a conservation mandate. Now that being said, it was also really interesting to note how much agriculture was happening inside the boundaries of some of these reserves, And that was one of the things that the research I was doing focused on was um the degree to which agricultural activity inside of the nature's or boundaries related to the stress responses of bears in that landscape. So I was looking at the relationship between the production of hormones indicative of sort of a stress response to a variety of factors, including human activity, including natural food abundance, including whether the bears were within the boundaries of a nature reserve or outside the boundaries of the nature reserve, the overall kind of quality of the habitat um. And so you hear the word nature reserve and it might elicit a picture in your mind of, you know, kind of an undisturbed landscape. But within the boundaries of some of these reserves you have people living, raising livestock, growing crops, in some cases poaching. So it's not as simple as it might seem at first. Blush, what is the um? You can approach us wherever you want. But but I know that one of the things you did there is you delivered a lecture on the North American model. So you delivered a lecture on the idea of publicly owned wildlife and public harvest of sustainable resources, which is like a foreign concept there. Explain that, but also explain what what is like and what what forms does hunting take in China. So I'll start off by saying I've presented that kind of a presentation in a variety of formats in China, and that included speaking to university classes at Peaking University about the various models of resource use around the country, including the North American model, Yeah, thank you, around the world, So talking about subsistence hunting, talking about the European model, the African model, the North American model, and what's the African model real quick? So the African model would be basically wealthy international tourists paying high dollar to come in typically in a guided form at and hunt and pay in a way that the finances directly benefit the community and the conservation of the place where the hunting is take is occurring. And China actually had a very similar model to that up until two thousand and six. So this kind of gets into your second part of your question. Um, one of the forms of hunting that has historically occurred in China is this same model where you know, wealthy international adventure seekers would pay big money, um, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for a tag and pursue any number of species, including by the way, the Sichuan golden talking that I talked about, that was one of the species that people would pay to be able to hunt. Another one that would that would incentivize local people to not kill and eat the animals. It's more alive, it's it's worth far more to some out of town dude than it is in your cooking pot. Yeah. So a really good example of that, and one of the one of the places where I presented on this subject. In two thousand and ten, there was a workshop that was hosted by a variety of partners, including the Chinese government, to essentially explore the idea of reopening this sport hunting program that had been closed in two thousand six. And this was hosted up in the northwest part of China in a province called Shinjian, in a city called Urumuchi, and that's close to the border with Mongolia. By close, I mean it's like a I don't know, fifteen hour horrendous bus ride. But if you go north in Shinjian towards Mongolia, there's this huge wildlife park where historically, prior to the two thousand six ban um, there was international sport hunting as they term it, for marco polo are golly sheep. So one of the reasons that the marco polo are golly rams are so appealing as a trophy species for these international adventure seekers is that they carry around a set of horns that would make you know, the North American wild sheep kind of pale in comparison, if you'll forgive such a comparison, all right, because we're talking about an animal with horns potentially up to six ft on each side of its head if you had to uncurl them. Yeah, So it's like it grows like so so Americans, like you know, artists are aunist. You look at a big horn or a doll sheet. Now they're getting big when they achieve what we call full curl. Okay, a lot of big doll sheep are well passed full curl, but meaning when you look at it from the side, that horn describes the three sixty degree circle. If you were to like uncurl that circle and measure the length on a big doll sheet, like forty inches is the threshold where a doll sheet becomes like, holy sh it, do you hear about Dave? He shout of forty plus inch doll sheep. So that's a big one. But these sons of bitches are six ft long horns and they get like double curlers. We used to joke about a doll sheep like because you're trying to find a full curl because it's legal, and then we joke like, he's like a double curler, But they really are double curlers, like they're darn near. I mean, I'm I'm swiping in right now on the on the phone here, and it's just I mean they so go look at a picture of a Marco poland you can see why, now I shouldn't say this, if you understand people's devotion to sheet, you can see why you might spend say six, he's seventy. Like you look at you look at what you know, a wild cheap tag goes for here in North America, and you know sometimes those get up into six figures if they're being auctioned off at like a Wild Cheap Foundation event or something like like. And well, the so if you okay, if you're gonna go doll sheep hunt in Alaska. There's no tag limitation right, generally no tag limitation. So if you want to go this year, if you can find an outfitter, he's gonna get tagged for you have if you're a nonresident UM. If you're a nonresident and you don't have a direct relative in Alaska, you can only hunt doll sheep with a guide. That hunt is gonna cost you to do, like a high quality doll hunt. It's gonna cost you north of twenty grant. You can spend more. You can get it for less, but expensive. The most expensive tag that sells in the country every year is what's called the Governor Is tag in Montana UM for big horns, which lets you hunt. It gives you the whole year and you pick your unit anywhere in the state that's open to sheep hunting, and that tag will sell UM for as high as more than four hundred thousand dollars. It's the it's and it's pushed up close to a half million dollars to hunt a big horn. But the guys that do that then go hunt along the Missouri breaks where the biggest big horns in the country are killed. UM so you get hunt a hell of a lot of Marco polos for what it would cost you to buy a governor's tag and shoot it. All Western states governors tags usually go for it. I shouldn't say, Oh, most Western states big horn governors tags go for more than one dollars. Yeah, and I with the Marco polo hunt. Man, there may be cases of them getting into the six figures, but the numbers I've heard thrown around are in like the twenty dollar range for a Marco Polo hunt. Yeah, that was a lot more expensive than that. Yeah, And and what you're all in maybe it is, Well, yeah, that's the thing, like the logistics of getting there, and you know, the logistics of traveling with a firearm. I have no idea what it would even entail to bring a rifle into China if that's an option. China is much more restrictive in terms of the the management of the public's possession of firearms. It's it's virtually prohibited for the common citizen of China to be in possession of a firearms draconian man. Yeah, you're controlling a Popwell we'll say that, so there you are. Yeah, so I went presented at this conference UM in in Shin John Province and then had a chance to go up and visit this park where historically um the ability to offer a limited number of Marco Polo our Gali sheep ram hunts was an important element of conservation on the landscape and some of the primary it was funding it was it was funding a couple of things, you know, first and foremost, it put a large finance. It attached a large financial value to an animal that otherwise might be poached and reduced to the value of you know, a plate of food. And this this conversation, actually it's kind of it's uncomfortable for me to be thinking in these terms, right, Like the notion that this animal has this high dollar value on the landscape to the point where somebody wouldn't want to eat it because it's only worth as much of its food as I'm saying that, it kind of makes me when you have that conversation and it's a it's a valid converse station around rhinos, elephants, okay, where it's generally you're generally talking about um depleted resources totally. Yeah. Yeah, so you you take away you disincentivize poaching because people recognize if I leave that thing out there, that the financial gains for my community will far exceed the caloric gains I will have from consuming that animal. Then the other thing is, uh, that's a limiting factor is poor range condition. So we're talking about a landscape where, um, pastoralists have been grazing livestock predominantly yaks for thousands of years. And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the range conditions up there, but um, the general kind of lay of the land was a very mode appearing kind of rolling hills, not as rugged as I would have sspected, but just not like a preponderance of forage for domestic or wild species to consume. Um. So part of the goal, my understanding is, was to work towards reductions of the amount of livestock grazing in occupied sheep habitat in that landscape. It's kind of a twofold conservation. So if you're going to do that, you had to bring in some sort of cash economy. Yeah. So in two thousand six, apparently, as the stories go that I've heard from my friends who are natural resource managers in China, the Chinese government wanted to revisit their policies around managing this trophy hunting program, and as part of that process, at some point, we're seeking some public engagement in the conversation. And it was a surprise to the public this hunting program existed, and there was sort of a public outcry against having this sport hunting taking place where foreigners were coming into China paying big money to hunt these big game species. So there was a moratorium placed on the sport hunting program in two thousand and six, and my understanding is that that has persisted through now that there's still no sport hunting program. So putting that part of hunting in China aside, there is a lot of uh, people going out into the woods and killing animals for their consumption. Um, pop hunters, pot hunters, there's definitely a lot of that. And one of the but I guess pot hunters kind of implies illegal take. Yeah, And so it's interesting to be in a country where, um, you know, you're you're you're trying to get your bearings in a lot of way as right. So I was very much on a steep learning curve about the ecology of the system, the social dynamics, the political dynamics, and I think there's a lot of gray area around the amount of risk someone is taking in pot hunting, if want to use that term, um, you know, going out and killing let's say a wild board that they're going to bring home and eat. I think a fair bit of that in these really remote rural communities is essentially condoned and not likely to result in anybody being prosecuted. But I also think it's not really legal, and I and I know that there's a fair bit of ah essentially corruption around the subject. So one of the nature reserves where I worked, as an example, I would routinely spend the morning doing some field work, come in for lunch, and then go back out in the afternoon for more field to work. And at the reserve headquarters as part of a uh eco tourism model, they had a hotel with a restaurant and I would stay at this hotel and the mountains were like right out the back. It was a beautiful place to work. And one day I came back from my field work and there were a load of police cars, like dozens of police cars that were there, and they were having a meeting of police officers from all around the surrounding communities and they had all come to this place as a gathering point. And I went in for lunch, sat down, and the waitress came out to take my order, and she asked me if I would be interested in trying any mount jack. Mm hmm, I was like, mount jack. We're in a nature reserve. And it turned out, based on what she had told me, that these police who were there for the convention in the nature reserve had gone out killed some mount jack for their lunch inside the reserve, and she was offering to share some of this meat with me. So you have the law enforcement officers there participating in what, based on my my understanding of the situation, would be a clearly illegal activity if anybody else was to engage in it, but essentially doing so with impunity. So that's an example. There was also a case that I heard about another police officer accidentally shooting a villager by mistaking the villager for a wild boar. That was his defense that he had missed mistaken this human being in the thick brush for a boar that he was out trying to hunt, and that guy was prosecuted for shooting the dude. He didn't kill him, but he shot the guy. And the whole conversation about well, what about the fact he was out there hunting? Isn't that illegal? And the reason I was digging into this stuff and asking these questions I was I was kind of curious, like, I wonder what it takes if, you know, if somebody wanted to go hunting here. So I was always kind of trying to feel out the situation and get a handle on what people were doing. But in terms of asiatic black bears, a lot of the poaching that happens there is a result of direct conflict between humans and the bears. So are they as bad as uh or is prone to getting into tangles with people as grizzlies or just worse than black bears, but not as bad as grizzlies. It's a it's a it's a good question. I think. You know, obviously, if a person gets into a tangle with the grizzly, I think the outcome is probably more likely to be fatal. But there were instances. In fact, during the research I was conducting um down in you Non Province. In one of my study sites, there was a guy who tried to run a bear out of one of his corn fields and the bear turned around and killed the guy while we were working there, and you know the people. It was actually kind of an upsetting deal because I was traveling from reserve to reserve and I'd kind of gotten to know folks in the on the staff of these different nature reserves, and they knew I was like the the foreigner bear researcher, and so I got to this. I got to this dinner one night after a long day of traveling, and this guy who worked on the reserve came running up to me. And my Chinese has never been great, and oftentimes, like virtually all the time, I'd be communicating through a translator. This guy came running straight up to me with his camera. He like he really wanted to show me something, and I had no idea, like you know what he wanted to show me. So I start flipping through these pictures and there were pictures that were taking of this this guy's corpse, after the after the bear malling, and they're pretty grotesque photos. It was pretty upsetting stuff. So the conflicts between black bears and um farmers in these communities are very real. I mean, crops get rated livestock are depredated and people are not armed, so there's a lot of poisoning, a lot of snaring. UM. And then there are these incentives. So not only does the black bear represent you know, this this difficulty for your livelihood, this animal that comes in poses a threat to you physically, has the potential to decimate your crops, has the potential to destroy your apiaries because a lot of people were keeping bees in that country, Um, has the potentially kill your goats. But there's the quick, justt physical description of the bear compared to are really really similar to American black bears in terms of size and kind of physical structure. Um, they have a more a longer, kind of more pronounced mane around their neck. And then the classic distinguishing characteristic is the crescent moon on their chest. So one of the common names given to the Asiatic black bears the moon bear. Have this beautiful white animal moon bear. So aside from you know, all of the perceived and real difficulties of coexisting with that species, for these folks who live who overlap habitats with the bear, um, these animals have a huge price tag attached to them. And there are two reasons for that one is the value of their gall bladder, which is a key ingredient in traditional Chinese medicines UM. And the other one is that their paws are a key ingredient in one of the most epic feasts that exists anywhere in the world. And have you ever eaten bear paw? Janny, You're eaten a bear paw. So there's this feast called the Manchu Han Imperial Feast, and depending on who you ask, it has somewhere between a hundred and eighty four and three hundred twenty different dishes spans over the course of three days three days. And this feast first took place during the Qing dynasty and Ching dynasty was like mid sixteen hundreds until the early nineteen hundreds, and it was exclusively for um. The elites right like emperors would be the people consuming this, and very elaborate um. You know, basically you'd go from meal to snacking, to another meal, two more snacking, and everything was all these exotic, difficult to obtain ingredients, so includes things like, uh, eating the birds nests that are made out of birds saliva. They make that into soup that I've messed around trying to make that with with you know, uh, swallows nests here swallows. That sounds like I can never distract the stuff I was after out of it. Yeah doesn't. I didn't have any luck with it. I think they consummated. Yeah, they thicken consummatee with it because the bird picks up sticks or mud and coasted with a saliva, and his slave is like sticky. And then you take that stuff and boil it down in it extract and it liquefies it and then you reduce it down and your left with like a sticky substance that you use the thickened soup and broth. Yeah, it's thought to have all kinds of medicinal benefits to I think one of the things it's believed to do is really improve the health of your skin. And a lot of these different ingredients, do you know, according to traditional Chinese medicine, and some of it's been validated by you know, Western medicinal tests as well. You know, like some of these ingredients are certainly bioactive, and bare bile is one of those things that is a bioactive ingredient. It has medicinal properties, but that that same chemical can be manufactured in a laboratory setting. But can we hold up on us from it, because yeah, for most of my life, when you killed the black bear in the US, you were not allowed to even have in your possession the bears gall bladder. And then do you know about this? What I know about this is that they've busted some major poaching operations, including you know in the Great Lake States, there was one in Minnesota for pause, pausing. But I think now you're allowed to have you're you're allowed to have it, but not sell it. Like you can retain your own bears, So so rather than screwing with you on what you use, you can retain your own thing, but it cannot be sold. Yeah, it's interesting to you know, to forbid someone from fully utilizing and you know, parts of an animal that they would want to potentially, yeah, make it's been legally, it's like legally take you can understand where it's coming from, because we know that these parts are being circulated around the globe. Like there's almost certainly right now somebody somewhere in Asia consuming an American black bear gallbladder in some product. As you and I are speaking, my body um found some bears that had just had the pause removed where in Virginia? Yea, So people everybody knows, I mean, most people are aware of the fact that there's this market for ingredients involved with traditional Chinese medicine. That's kind of a wildlife conservation challenge that a lot of folks are aware of. But this thing about the bear pause is something fewer folks realize. So this Imperial feast, the bear paw is served sometimes along with sturgeon as one of the ingredients, one of the one of the key dishes in this Emperor's feast, So it's kind of a prestigious dish to be serving. A lot of folks are aware of the Emperor's feast. Other things on that menu include like being curred simmered in various bird brains like cuckoo brain and chicken brain. So it's it's a wild list of dishes. And the longer list, the one that totals three twenty includes a hundred ninety six main dishes and a hundred and twenty four snack dishes spread over the course of three days. The first time this place, the first place this particular meal was ever served, was in the Forbidden City, so in in Beijing. So there's like there's a history of bear paw being consumed by the elites and it persists to this point in time. So from a conservation standpoint, you have this animal, asiatic black bear that presents all of these difficulties in your life, and then in the meantime has this huge you know, dollar sign or yuan sign in China over its head and to give you an idea, and that together can inspire some illegal take. Yes, yeah, so bare Bile. I was looking up some facts on this front, and bare Bile, the going rate is as high as like close to seven ounce. And to put that in perspective, the current price of gold when I checked a couple of days ago, was sixty eight dollars and ounce, so it's about half the price of gold by weight, this Bile. And so from a an outside perspective, you know, initially you can be like, man, these villagers, there's such a problem, you know, killing these bears, that there's a there's this conservation concern over But then you spend some time in these villages and you you see how hard people are working to scrape by and it doesn't take long, at least it didn't take long for me. To come to the conclusion if I would is living in this setting and I was trying to support my family here, it would be not much of a stretch for me to see myself trying to poach one of these bears and market it. Because there's there's just so so many incentives stacked up on top of each other, so it's it's pretty easy to empathize with those folks. And one of the villages where I was doing this work, um, there's a nature reserve called Yallah that's down in southern Sichuan Province. And you know a cool thing about traveling in these remote hinter lands of China. Everywhere you go, people are just wanting to meet you because they don't see a lot of Westerners. So I got to this village after a very long car ride. Village is called show Yaw and we're having dinner with a bunch of the local folks there, and I met a gentleman who was going to be helping us with field where and the guy was, you know, he was pretty relatively old to be out working in the mountains all day, like he was probably somewhere in his early sixties or so, I would say. And through the translator. He made this comment saying, you know, we don't we don't see a lot of white people here, and in fact, you guys are some of the first white people who have visited this village since the president's kids were here. I was like, the president's kids, what you was this? What year was it that I was there? Would have been two thousand and ten probably, I'm like the president's kids. I'm like, what are you? What are you talking about? And so the guy goes on to say, you know, the president who's famous for conservation. And this is all through a translator, right, I'm like, the president who's famous for conservation. He's like, yeah, when when I was a small boy, my dad this is this is the sixth year old guy talking. My dad was a guide for the President's son when when they came here to hunt for a panda. No, yes, And I was like, wait a minute. Roosevelt. Roosevelt's sons Kermit and Ted, So we're panda hunters? Yes they were, so man, that's something that would not go over well these days. So I started jointing people. Get piste. When you shoot, yes ahead, I should give so well, we'll talk a little bit more about why they were there hunting pandas. But initially I was totally skeptical about this and like, you gotta be kidding me. But the guy, like the fact that after driving for days, bouncing around on these dirt roads and arriving at this village, the fact that this guy knows that there's a president who has a conservation legacy. I thought that gave it some credibility. Amazing because you know, if you were to go to you know, a remote rural corner of the USA and asked him about the Chinese leader a hundred years ago, they're not going to know much. Dude. People watch us so much more closely than we watched them. Yeah, fair point. I still felt like it led some credibility. So I'm thinking myself, if this is true, this is just two epic of a story. I've got to capture like as many details as I can capture. So I started jotting down notes, um. And then when I got back to the USA, I started doing some digging. And the guy who was with me, his name was Suggio Muji, and his dad's name was Sugio Shila, and I caught that those details from the stories and this is all through a translator. As we're out doing the field work for my project, and when I came back to the USA, I learned about the Kelly Roosevelt's Asiatic expedition, which included a detailed account of them traveling to this exact place on the map and at like a blow by blow story of them finding and returning to Western science the first specimen of a panda bear. So they were like their old man and that they specimen hunters. They were. That's exactly right. So on that expedition, and this wasn't the first, but on that particular expedition, in addition to bringing back the panda, they brought back more than five thousand bird skins from that trip. So they're just they're shooting everything. And this was in the era the old Man was very heavily involved in that as well. For a long time. That was biology. Yes, absolutely, we're still in it, like you gotta realized, in his era. Okay, so late eighteen we were still in a descriptive phase, yes, cataloging what was here. Yeah, and a big like in a thing that Roosevelt like when he wanted to be a biologist, that's what he thought that that was. Yeah, I'm not taking anything away from this. I'm not like yelling at you about it, but I'm just saying, like, it's just like audible you mentioned like Audubon, Audubon, shoot it, um Darwin. It was a specimen hunter that was biology like comparative analysis of dead ship laying on a table. Yeah. Now there's a string of these, and so the cool thing about that experience, you know, I'd learned a little bit about about tr at that point, but it opened up all these stories about the next generation of the Roosevelts, and that's some of the most interesting you know, some of the most interesting stories that are out there are around Kermit and Ted and some of their adventures Kermit ted. Yeah. Yeah. So Roosevelt had a daughter, Um with his first wife, and she died during delivery of that daughter. Then he went on to remarry a childhood friend of his and they proceeded to have I believe five more children that were included I think four boys and a girl. And the first two sons, Ted was the oldest and Kermit was the second oldest, and they went gallivanting on these adventures with their dad. So I know you're into suggested readings. There was a there was a trip that Kermit and Teddy Senior, the President took um exploring the River of Doubt. That was nineteen nineteen fourteen, that expedition, and it damn near killed Teddy Roosevelt. He was he was threatening to overdose on morphine so as to not be a hindrance to the rest of the party and the drama of that trip they had. They had one guy, one of the most skilled canoe handlers on that trip, drown, You had another guy get murdered. You had Teddy Roosevelt so sick with malaria that he was threatening basically to overdose and commit suicide so as to not slow the party down. You had Kermit saying to his dad, if you all yourself, you're going to be more of a burden because I am guaranteeing you were going to bring your body out of here, and it's gonna be harder to lug your corpse than to have you helping us move your sick self out of here. They were down to like so little the what's some larity drug quinine? Is that right? By saying that right? So the rarium I think it was. It's like what they used to tonic water was something that in the British Empire. It was like a malarial preventative drink like tonic waters. Quiet was like Solda water with quinine and the sweetener in it. Yeah, so they're doubt that they have this. They have like a ration of quinine for the trip. And Ah, Kermit had malaria as well, and he he was basically foregoing treatment and given it to his dad and the doctors finally forced him to take an injection of it because he was all messed up but didn't want to admit it. So they got back in Later in life. You know, Teddy either here as doctor at one point claimed that like years of his life had been shaved off. It might have been a doctor who after Teddy's death said, yeah, he would have had that malaria case, he would have lived another ten years. So it was a rugged, gnarly trip. And Kermit and and Ted they did another They had done a previous uh asiatic expedition in the nineteen twenties, and they published a book from that expedition as well, and that the title that book is East of the Sun and West of the Moon. So the expedition that involved the hunting of the panda. They published a book, Trailing the Giant Panda. I got a copy of this book after hown like scrounging libraries all over the country to try to find a copy of this book, And everything in the in the account lined up perfectly with what this dude told me. A hard hunt. It actually was surprisingly hard. And what what made the big difference was the fact that they had a snow come in and they were able to pick set of tracks in a bamboo thicket and trail the bear after I mean they they had walked and ridden on horseback countless miles in search of a bear, and then finally, in this what is now the Yella Nature Reserve and southern Sichuan, they finally bumped into a man who knew the mountain well enough to get him to the right place, and they cut the track of a panda, and the story goes, then they're nibbling on some bamboot. Yeah, so the bear ended up and here they come. Yeah, if I remember right, the bear was like in the process of disappearing into the thicket as both sons fired simultaneously, taking this panda bear. And then then you know, they came back to the US, and in addition to all the all the other skins they had, they had the first panda delivered to Western Science. And if anybody's interested in seeing this panda, it is on display in Chicago at the Field Museum right now as we speak, and has been ever since. No No Kermit, Kermit, Kermit and Ted and the amount of adventures that guy got mixed up in who are we talking t r oh, Yeah, like Cuba for example, everything how he became president. So McKinley president gets killed by an anarchist. Yeah, he becomes president. He gets shot, his glasses in his pocket deflect the speech. He had, like such a lengthy speech, and it was folded up enough times in his pocket that in conjunction with his glasses case, it slowed down the slug enough that it lodged inside his rib cage. And he knew enough about anatomy. He knew he had been shot in the chest, but the fact that he was he was not coughing up blood led him to the conclusion that his lungs had not been perforated. And gave his speech and and you know how he started off his speech tougher than a bull moose, Ladies and gentlemen. This is roughly what he said, Ladies and gentlemen. I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but I've just been shot. But it will take more than one bullet to stop this old bull moose. And then he went on to or right for a couple of hours. This was in Milwaukee. See, that's that's the difference Lincoln. His speeches were so tidy and short that they wouldn't hit Like a Lincoln speech isn't gonna stop a bullet. That's true because he wrote his best one on an envelope. Yeah, I was back in the old days. Short and sweet. Yeah, my old man always he like my my father was fond of that quote some people attribute to Mark Twain. But it's ah, forgive the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. I don't know if that's actually everybody attributes everything to Twain. Yeah, but I've I've heard that one attributed to Twain by a a number of folks too, so I think that I think that might be valid. But yeah, it was like I had a little, a little chill go down my spine when this when this guy in all southern China is like, oh, yeah, the president's sons are here. We haven't seen a lot of white people around here since then. It was it was pretty cool. So do they have, um, do they have populated wildlife populations that like are even capable of sustainable harvest? Yeah? Absolutely, So they could have sustainable regulated hunting. Yeah, not enough, you know, not enough. The ratio of people to hunting opportunity would be so high, so much higher than in the USA. But yeah, I mean a lot. You know, one of the interesting species I encountered during my field work was bumping into pheasants in their native habitat. You know, I'd be hooking around looking for bear scats as part of my research. I mean, man, this looks like some pretty good bird cover. I was like the rooster and go cackling off. Yeah. Yeah. And then you know, driving around on mountain roads, come around the bend and uh, in the middle of the two track there would be a golden pheasant standing there, a wild golden pheasant. And they look they're so just incredibly bright gold in their coloration. They look like they have to be fake. But yeah, they tried to get people have tried to get golden pheasants established here in the US. Yeah. Why, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, they're you know, I love hunting. I love hunting pheasants, but I do feel like, and I mentioned earlier that I've had a great time hunting these ibex down in the Florida Mountains of southern New Mexico, and that is I think one of the toughest archery hunts probably anywhere in the world. It's an early hunt. Uh, but there is something, in my opinion, detracted from the experience when you know the animal that you're hunting is not indigenous to the landscape where you're hunting. Oh. Yeah, man, that's why I couldn't really, I couldn't. I couldn't really deeply enjoy hunting in New Zealand. All of the wildlife, not all the wildlife, all of the huntable wildlife is non native and doesn't have like a historic context on the ground. Now I'm full of hypocrisies because I'll hunt turkeys in states that aren't native turkey range. Um. I like the hunt wild pigs, but I don't like hunting them as much as I like hunting the native stuff. At the same time, I also like hunting in areas that have a deep history of human interaction with the animals. You know. That's why I'm interesting in the Arctic. But I'm not interested in the Antarctic because it's absent of of of of human history and absence of of uh a legacy of human interaction, human relationship with the wildlife. So it does detract from it for me. Now, my friend Remy, who likes to hunt in New Zealand a lot, you know, he points out that there is like they've established a culture of hunting, a cultural relationship with hunting, but there's just a big difference there where in New Zealand you might have a conversation like, or we should go hunt that area because the government cohlers haven't been in there lately. So on one hand, you have government efforts to eradicate or greatly reduced wildlife populations because they're causing irreparable environmental damage according to some people, and you're also out trying to do like, you know, a recreational sport hunting, the meat based sport hunting. It just it's just gets too damn confusing, you know. I just had a very difficult time enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah, And the same thing goes for the fisheries too, you know, like I would, I would rather and I do often hike into remote stream sect sections where I can catch the indigenous trout that exists there but which have been supplanted by non native trout farther downstream in the watersheds, you know, like there. And and I would say the most beautiful pheasant I have seen was that one that came cackling out of the thicket in China. I was like, oh, a native pheasant. I've never seen that before. That was that was awesome. So yeah, your question that led to the sorry about the pheasant is whether or not there's opportunities to hunt these species sustainably, and absolutely there would be. Um are the mechanisms in place to really manage it effectively at this point in time, not that I'm aware of. I mean, you know, we have a whole infrastructure of game, game and phish agencies operating essentially at our equivalent of the province level, which they do not have, at least in a way that specializes around hunting and angling the way ours do. Yeah, we've been toying with this for a hundred years here. Yeah, and I don't think we've got it all perfected or figured out either. Frankly, we're getting We've got it pretty good, better than anywhere in the world. We got room to im We have a more sustainable system, yes, I agree, and we have room to improve. Yeah, Okay, what do you feel we're not doing right? I feel like the most pressing needs, which are directly related, is a broader base of funding for conservation work, and linked directly to that is the notion of a consistently available form of funding for non game conservation work. So I think you're familiar with the Blue Ribbon Panel project. Yeah, I am. I've been paying close attention to that, and I got to say, some of the people who have been involved with that work, Um, the soon to retire director of Arizona Game of Fish Kindamed Larry Boyles, has been right in the middle of that work. And there's there's nobody I admire more than Larry as a conservationist right now. And so there's some brilliant minds who are putting a lot of thought into how to address that need. But that is I would say the overarching um example of what I'm when I'm talking about what I'm saying, we don't have it all figured out yet. Yeah, we don't have the money figured out from one thing. You know, you're You're at a dinner that I was at at in New Mexico and someone got up was talking about desert big horns doing desert bighorn conservation work, and he said, uh we we joke. In New Mexico the wildlife conservation comes down to water and money. But with desert big horns, you don't even need the water, just the money. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, desert big horns are I would say, one of the species that are probably easiest to raise funds for. You have a lot of a lot of individuals and organizations with relatively deep pockets who are looking to pony up money to support that work. And that's fantastic and I applaud that. I'm glad that's going on. But I'm always that association with them being a game animal, yes, but I'm also a huge fan of and in act biota that includes all of the obscure species that we can't shoot and eat, and I see those as being key elements too. A fully rounded outdoor experience you know, like going out and this is an extreme example, but to go out on a an elk hunt and have elk be the only thing you encounter would be a very hollow experience. In my opinion, No gray J is no Stellar J is the pine squirrels. Yeah, And so weasels throw another J the opinion J because we're not worried about Stellar's J is too much around here, but opinion j's we are. And it's hard to get money for UM funding the research or doing the conservation work to support that species because the way we fund conservation through hunting and fishing souse like most like state level conservation work is funded by hunters and fishermen, and hunters and fishermen are interested in fishing game and so a lot of that money goes to support fishing game. But there's the thinking that you're you're well aware of. There's a thinking that by taking care of these apex animals, UM you're taking care of that has a cascading effect. You're taking care of all these other things. Like it's a piece of rhetorics thrown out there right, that elk work often comes down to securing winning range water foul work comes down to securing wetlands. When you secure wetlands, all things benefit. When you secure big riparian zones, all things benefit. So that's like a justification or a rationale that's put forward by groups who are investing very heavily in game animals when people bring up to them. But what about everything else? Yeah, and there there's validity to that argument. And I do think hunters and anglers, you know, we have a lot to feel really good about that we have collectively accomplished and contributed to over the last century plus. That being said, um, I think there are conservation opportunities missed as a result of inadequate funding for some of these others. And so where could the money come from? Do you feel that other user group should be ponying up the way hunters and fishermen have ponied up, or how do you think it should go? I think are just hard funding from the federal government. Well, there's a few ways to skin that cat. Um. I think we've got some examples of success. You know, the ability of the state of Minnesota, as an example, to pass an increase in their state sales tax um to support this interesting combination of conservation and the arts, Um, two things I'm interested in. Yeah, likewise, I mean, so there there's an example. UM. I do think you know that people rightly point to Pittman, Robertson and Dingle Johnson as phenomenal advancements in our conservation model. And there's obviously applicability of that kind of an approach to all kinds of other gear that people buy. And it's fascinating to look back at the history of those pieces of legislation being debated and discussed and how well supported they were by the industry. And it's a little puzzling to me that there's not similar support and leadership coming from private industry now to push for similar exercise taxes on all the other stuff that outdoor enthusiasts by. And I personally I don't have any qualms about more people paying into the system and being vested as UH self identifying supporters of conservation. I think if we are able to approach discussions around UH consuming wildlife from a thoughtful place, which many of us can do well, those those discussions, I believe will open up the minds of other interested conservationists as opposed to like digging our heels in and say no, we're the ones who are paying for conservation, and you know you're not You're not welcome here in our kind of decision space, that exclusive approach um that it feels kind of like trench digging to me, Like, yeah, but oftentimes when other people come in and want to have opinions, they go against our interests. And hunters have developed over the last hundred years a sort of they kind of a stake to claim on how wildlife decisions are made. And this, this conversation um is one I've had a lot of times with a lot of people whom I really respect and admire, and I can understand that mindset, but I also I have to kind of reject it a little bit. And here's why I don't think in the long run, if we want to retain are hunting and fishing rights as our culture changes around us, we have to be able to communicate about that with the broader community of non hunters, whether or not they're paying into the system. Because the fact of the matter is people can mount challenges to hunting and angling and trapping, whether they're buying into the system or not, and they have done that successfully. There are examples, you know, the chipping, legal challenges, legal challenge, Yeah, every election. So the notion that we're gonna you know, we're gonna win in the long run by digging trenches and not be able and and not effectively with an openness to dialogue with people who have different viewpoints talk about this stuff and explain, and I think you know you, you and others do a good job of representing the the mindset and the the heart of many of us where we're coming from. We need more of that. What we don't need is like entrenchment and an unwillingness to engage in thoughtful dialogue about this stuff. Oh yeah, and I admire all that, but so much of what you hear is so ridiculous. When when other when people who aren't immersed in this decided to dip a toe into wildlife management, oftentimes it's absurd. Yeah. So that's where sound science being like that happened around the things that happened around Florida's bear hunt. Yeah, where they have a recovered, popular or recovered above objective population of black bears, open a season and put a quota system in place, we will not pass this threshold of bare more mortality get close to the threshold much quicker than they thought they would have demonstrated that they might have more bears than they thought they did, and the hunt early before they hit the quota. Anyone looking at this would be like, that's a successful that's a successful hunt allowing people to exercise the right of extracting and renewable resource in a way that is raising money for wildlife work. How is it treated in the press? Florida massacres. Yeah, three bears, let's shut it down. So no ship that you generate a lot of antipathy from people who who who aren't just not really welcoming to the new voices who are coming around who haven't aren't vested in this, aren't invested in it, aren't really aware of the underlying, like core principles of the system. But they are just like going based off some ship I heard this morning on the news. It drives you nuts. It does drive you nuts. I agree, And I think so it's like I wish like that. You sometimes wish that like New Jersey cat ladies would stick to their cat. Yes, So what's the solution to that? What's the solution to addressing this valid concern that you're raising? I don't know. I don't know, and this I I don't I don't believe that entrenchment over time will be a winning strategy. I agree with your So I think here's here's what I believe coming in forcefully. Thanks, here's what I believe the solution to be. Okay, I believe if you can talk about this stuff eloquently, we and listen. I agree with you too. I'm just bringing up a way of looking at it. Yes, and and it's a valid it's a valid way of looking at it. But I like it's like that's saying like, Okay, I'm wrong, But am I right? Right? I don't bring you up a way of looking at it. I don't think we can collectively stick our heads in the sand and ignore the cultural changes around us, the biggest one of which is the increasing urbanization of our citizenry, which comes hand in hand with a disconnection from the natural world. So I think the solution to that is that rather than sticking our heads in the sand and just digging trenches where we're in our own little echo chamber about how what we're doing is totally right and defensible, and those people out there who see things from a different vantage point have it all wrong. I believe the action is that we capitalize on what EO. Wilson termed biophilia, the fact that there's this innate desire in human beings to interact with nature. And I don't think that's going to go away over a generation. I don't think that's going to go away over two or three or four generations. I think it is innate to our species that we have this desire to be somehow interactive with nature. And I believe if we have the right ambassadors for these activities, we can welcome in folks from that urban majority to be mindful participants who engage in the outdoors and join us as ambassadors for these these thoughtful, beneficial, constructive activities, and over time, our ranks and our impact, rather than being diminished, swell, and our relevant swells, and our base of funding swells. And I think the path to that approach involves thoughtful discussion, thoughtful discourse, respect for other viewpoints, and a willingness to speak authentically about where we're coming from with people who maybe have a different set of life experiences. Have you ever done a hunt where you had to go and pass a test for you can apply for the hunt. The only thing that pops into my mind is that classic fence crossing and hunter education. I'm talking like you got to hit a plaine if you're gonna hunt moose on the Kenai Peninsula. Yeah, as of this year, you need to go in and pass the online course about antler configuration on moose in Montana. When you go to get a black bear permit, you need to pass an i D course. Can you differentiate from a grizzly? A grizzly at New Mexico has a lion identification? Colorado has a lion identification? Yes, Utah, I just did mine the other day. I did a fifteen question exam before you can apply for a tunder swan permit because they want you to damn sure know the difference between a tunder swan and a whistler. Okay, all right, ye now, I and this is this isn't just this isn't just like I'm not just applying this the hunting. But I feel like there should be a thing in a utopia, There would be a thing where in order for you to have an opinion where you're going about wildlife, wildlife politics, and wildlife conservation you need to go in and pass a course, and the course would be drawn up by people to be where it didn't reflect a particular viewpoint. It just measured your understanding of where we've been, where we are now, what the picture is, and what different people are, what vision people are trying to pursue. At which point, when you pass said test, you can then say, man, I feel real bad about pedals the bear, yeah or whatever, that's utopia. Yeah. And you know, the fact of the matter is, the sad fact of the matter is that, well beyond the discussions around hunting, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about a lot of stuff where they really don't have try so hard. Unless I'm like arguing with my wife about something, I try so hard to not articulate opinions about ship that I have no business talking about. Yeah, And I think the world would be a better place if more folks took that approach, and if more folks, you know, had a real appetite for learning new things and having broadened horizons. Unfortunately, that's not the world that we live in. But I sincerely believe, and a lot of this is based on my experience with Learn to Hunt programs and with interacting um with a lot of new hunters who have come into the activity as adults, particularly from urban backgrounds, that this desire to experience the kinds of you know, perspective altering outdoor moments that the three of us and you know, a lot of folks listen to this have a healthy dose of every year. The desire for those experiences exists in a lot of people who are just trying to figure out how to get there. Furthermore, there are a lot of people who if given the right catalysts, the lightbulb can come on. And I believe in the grand scheme of conservation in this country, one of the most impactful things that we can do is help open up the door to those folks, and that is a different mindset. I've taken thirty of them on their first hunting trip. Yes, so don't be telling me about this, dude. I'm I'm preaching. I'm preaching less to you and more just kind of I'm getting all defensive. My feelings are getting hurt. Oh no, dude, So what I'm what I'm saying, and you should be taking it this way. What we need is more people willing to engage in these thoughtful conversations and willing to take people under their wings. And the folks that you've taken out, you know, I think a lot of those individuals embody exactly what I'm talking about. You have a lot of a lot of adult first time hunters, a lot of women, a lot of people motivated by food. Um. These are These are like universal. The ability to to have kind of a communal experience outdoors that results in being able to eat something healthy and share that with your family. The ability to go out and actively procure the calories that you're going to use to sustain yourself and sustain those whom you love. These are like fundamental, hardwired desires in human beings. Interact with nature, Eat something good biophelia and meat fhelia, Yeah, dude, meat Yeah, I'd see. So they're one and the same. It's one and the same, interacting with nature. I had a guy email their day and said, uh, his girlfriend doesn't like to hunt. Sounds of my wife like his. They don't like to hunt. They just like to eat wild meat. And he said, is there a word for someone who just eats wild meat? Yeah? I thought was wild terrians. I gome up with I got it it wild to terran. No, it's not um so too. That's a tight word. I like wild to terran. I've got one. I've got one that's even tighter for you though. So if you look at the Latin root for venison, yeah, h venado in Spanish, then venny that means that means to pursue. It means to hunt. So technically speaking, when somebody says venison, what do you think if you think of dear meat? Right, if you were to take a literal translation of venison, it would be meat that has been hunted venison like you could. You could pull out a quail and say, here's some venison. So I think these individuals you just described they would be venivoes. Oh man, I like that. But the problem is the problem is not enough people know that that's what that means. Well, and we just invented it. Okay, let me lay it. Look Yeah, but yeah, but you got a factor in that. No, I like it, but you need to you need the factor. You can't factor in knowing. You can't have me just because you know that you're right. You gotta look at it like venison means dear meat. But they're saying, but that's not because I snaff too, right, So in pursued. But let me tell you a tale. Okay, okay, this is the last different top. Yeah, yeah, I In the mean time, have you come any closer and you're thinking about how you're gonna capture blood for blood sausage? No, I haven't been sitting here googling. No, what about like a siphon? You know, like if you're trying to drain in aquarium and you got the hose, you kind of get like the down downhill gravity thing going. Yeah, that's all fine. Like I said, you just gotta be there with the implements to cool it down. What if you shoot one on like a late season hunt when it's negative ten degrees out? Wouldn't that be part of the I would think you want to put it to a capped container and limit its exposure to air. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. That is what I would be thinking about. Oh, but here's what I want to tell you. Okay, this isn't even relican. This be our bedtime story because I think I have to go to bed and then get up and make it and get a flight all within like four hours. Isn't it beautiful out here? Though? Stars, I'm not gonna tell you the thing I was gonna tell you. You gotta can't do that. You gotta do it like a cliff notes. Okay, So I have a shirt. Um, I had a shirt that that just takes so damn long. All right, I say, I had a Savage rifle shirt. Okay. And the company is Savage, right, And their logo for a long time was it was a planes Indian with a head the head dress. I remember the rain with his head dress and it says Savage. So I go to someone and I say, hey, what do you what do you see? What's the shirt? Right? What does the shirt say to you? And she says, well, it says to me that you got an Indian on your shirt. And you're saying that that Indian is a savage or Indians are savages. The truth of the matter is that Savage the Firearm Company was founded started by a man who, due to no action of his own, happened to have the last name of Savage. Arthur Savage was the guy's name when he was starting his company out making lever action rifles or early client of his was chief Lame Dear. He gave lame dear a good deal on a bunch of rifles. They became friendly. Lame dear said, you know what, you could put my likeness. I like you so much, you can put my likeness on your rifles. Arthur Savage says that sounds great. Okay, So there's what someone hears and thinks they're seeing and what they're really seeing. And to say of veniceitarian or whatever, venivore, a venivore, a venivore, that's such a good term. You can't go around exploit like like it's like wearing my shirt where you gotta go around the people being like no, no, no, no, check it out right. Really, it just takes so much energy. Yeah, so I would have to say people be like, oh no, because I eat snap turtles and quails and ship too, And it has to been oh no, no no, because really the root word it just I just gets so tired halfway through any time you got any concluding thoughts, Yeah, you you'd have to be like me. You you have to be like me, where instead of even giving people your full name, you've been relegated to saying JP. Yeah, so that you don't have to be like, yeah, it's Lavians all of the j da da every day, this man. Every day, this man has to explain his name. Yeah, now I saw he's got Yanni has an email signature for those of you who have not emailed with Yanni, where it's got the spelling j A N I S and then in parentheses y A N I S closed parentheses, like so people can help to help people understand how to pronounce his name. That I read that and I thought, oh, his name is Janice Jannis, Yes, Prince Yannis parentheses. Now even my car I got the kind of car you can talk to you when you want to call someone who I have to say, uh, call Janice Boodless and it'll then and then my kids like that's not his day. I'm like, well, the car takes his name is that's what we're gonna call him right now, until we get him on the horn, they're gonna call him Yanni and then your your Yanka. Um. Yeah. Once the computers figure out that you can just say call and it dials me up, we know we're in trou then you'll know you've you've achieved artificial intelligence. That's when you know, like the beginning of the end has come and soon the technology you'll be taken over. Okay, I don't have any concluding thoughts because I'm my mind was my mind was the story about the T shirts. Thought about your name, that name, Thanks mom, Dad. Now I'm on board with Karl's thinking on how we should be moving forward with you know, taking the time to accept those other viewpoints. And it's I didn't feel like it's our responsibility to educate these people. And you know, I hate that word educate because people don't usually mean when people say they need to be educated. I find the people what they're really saying is they're saying I need to convince them to agree with me. That's people. It's like code. It's like a weird code language. But we're like, oh, the public needs to be educated. What you're saying, it really is like the public needs to see. Friend. Greg Blaskovic showed us, like through his research that so many people out there think that hunting is completely unregulated, that you all you need to do to go hunting is get some sort of weapon and walk out into the woods and if it's brown, it's down. Okay. So when there is that level of ignorance. Then I don't feel bad saying, yes, I should be going out and educating people. No, I agree, I like it. I like it. I understand what you're saying. But I've just over the years, I've found when people say they want to educate people, what they're saying is they want to get people to agree with them. And funny ring up Gregg's study because Greg was testing ways in which he could get people to agree with him. M hm, So yeah, let's go educate him, meaning let's get agree with us. But I also think this is like a little bit of cynicism where when people say, like, oh, we I want to be opened up to other people's viewpoints, you're sort of saying I want to pretend to be open to your viewpoints so that I can educate on my you about my viewpoints and have it be that you come out agreeing with me. You're not saying. You're not saying that I am this mushy, undecisive thing open to you telling me ship that's gonna make me requestion my core fundamental beliefs. So the dialogue you're supposedly fixing to have you might not even have a core fundamental belief about what we're talking about. I have core fundamental beliefs about what I'm talking about right now, but wildlife management in America. Okay. So I'm not gonna go around acting to people like I'm open to your viewpoints, because I'm not. Really. I'm curious to hear what you think so that I can hear what you think and then tell you some ship to make you think otherwise, kinda kind I'm nodding my head in agreement, like agree with what I'm saying, or you want to go to bed, so that I'm done, I have I swear to God I'm not saying in our thing. Just turn that sheen off and you're ready. Honest, it's been a good discussion. It's been a lively, lively chat. So this notion about h now a whole lot of it. That was a joke because I'm not saying anything, all right, This this notion about educating folks, um. I think there's utility in sharing information that is pertinent to the topic where to discussing. And I think there's a lot of folks out there who have no clue of the basics, and in those instances, if they have the desire to actually be informed. A degree of education is warranted, absolutely, But the fact is where we have the most potency around this topic I think has less to do with like convincing people of hard facts with data and speaking about this in more personal ways that I believe are broadly relevant to our fellow human beings on like a species level. So reverence for nature, desire to eat well, desire to be active, desire to have healthy functioning ecosystems in which we can be participants. Those are those I believe for most people who have their their basics met. You know, folks who are otherwise, they're covered and they have they have the ability to think beyond just survival mode. And it's important to acknowledge that for some people their reality is survival mode. People who have have survival mode box checked. What we're talking about here around healthy land, eating well, being active, getting a good dose in nature. I think those are like universally appealing, and I believe that based in part on my experience interacting with people from other countries that are far more ecologically degraded than ours is, you know, talking to people who have spent their whole lives living in urban centers in China about the recreational opportunities that we have here in North America and having them say I want to come do that with you sometime, and then having them come and experience that, and having those experiences literally bring tears to people's eyes, like the star I was telling you earlier today about the deer hunt. So these are things that I believe are hardwired into us. And I think it's more about communicating on a personal emotional level, um than it is presenting facts. But I agree the facts are relevant, YOHNI. Yeah, I could. I could rephrase it to uh to uh, I guess, I guess appease you so that it's more of just like exposing you appease me, Yeah, so that you're like, yeah, I like what you're saying, So that they're just like, expose people to whatever we do. Don't try to educate them, but just expose them to what it is and then let them make up make their own decisions. You know, I'm not gonna be mad if if they don't jump on, you know, jump on my side and all of a sudden becoming the biggest conservationists and hunters in the in you know, history, United States. Remember how Michael Jordan quit basketball then came back. Yeah, I'm back into this recording. I'm coming out of retirement hard. I quit earlier right when I'm back now. And that's why i'd beverages around this table. I've quite clarified that I am real comfortable with people who don't agree with me, especially if they have a good reason for it, um, the reason that I accept as valid. So it's complicated, Carl, Thank you very much for joining us, Batman. Always glad to be here. Um. You always say things that make despite all the ship I've been saying, you always say things that made me think a little bit different. I come out of the experience of talking to you every time, UM, a changed person. So thanks for that. Appreciate it. Man, that's a great compliment and you're honest. Thank you, Hey, pleasure to be here. Yeah, what a nice night. God dude, glad you guys like the deck man that that means a lot too. Well. The light pollution is low here so you can see the night sky beautiful. If you've made it through this marathon podcast, please go to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and uh leave a review, give us A rating we'd much appreciate it

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