00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eating podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening. Don't meet e podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we should probably start with a mega round of of introductions. The machines on right, Honny, Yes, a mega round of introduction. My job is done? Yeah? Anyone Yeah? Anyone out taking nap um? Yeah? Can you guys do some introductions kind of what you do. We're at We're at your world headquarters, national headquarters. Absolutely Sportsman's Alliance. Who wants to go first? You guys are all jesting to each other. Go ahead. I'm Brian Lynn, Vice president Marketing Communications. So website, social media, print, anything that goes out to the public comes through our department and edit it and put it out there for consumption. So the United States Sportsman's Alliance and you guys are spread out a little bit because you're out west. I'm out west, yeah, Spolkano, Washington, Uh yeah, so and uh we're sitting right now in Columbus, Ohio, which is where it all began, which we'll get into in a minute. Okay, and go ahead. Sean current Vice president Membership and Development. So everything from individual members, to business partners, to our our donors, fundraising events, anything that helps bring revenue to the organization to fund the mission. Finally, Avenge using Felled President CEO, I wear a couple of different hats right now. So I obviously have the leadership role, but I'm also still in charge of our day to day government affairs work. So all of our core mission stuff are our legislative issues, are are lobbying, our balt initiative work, and our litigation team. Is government affairs mean dealing with government at times? Yeah, absolutely, So you know it's it's it's for us we call our core mission, right and so you know when you're doing lobbying, when you're doing the legislative work, either in the state capitals or in or in d C. Um, certainly it's dealing with the branches of government that that deal with legislation. UM. In other areas, that's dealing with maybe the judicial branch for our litigation work. Uh. And then finally, you know, the ballot initiative work, the stuff that we've done in the different ballot issues across the country. Historically we've done a lot of ballot to shoe work. UM, it is dealing with the government. Really it's it's more of a legislative issue that's just before the people. Then, all right, and we have, of course, tell us Kevin Kevin Murphy, the world's greatest small game hunters here and uh, Ryan Callahan, what do you do? You do you want to introduce yourself, say anything about yourself? No, no, I don't Ryan Callahan from First Light World headquarters and catch him ido. Uh all right, So let's say let's do this. Um give like it. Give me the one liner. What's the one liner of the Sportsman Alliance? Like when someone says, hey man, what's the Sportsman Alliance? We're we're in business to protect hunting, fishing, and trapping. That's it. That's a great one liner. That's it. That's why we exist. That's why we were founded forty years ago right here in Ohio? Was it forty years ago? Nine seventy eight? Yep, there was a ballot issue in the state of Ohio, the band trapping, which and that was like the Great fur that was the beginning of the Great fur boom. Yea, so it put people like the great fur boom, meaning like fur price is kind of skyrocketed late seventies early eighties and what it put trapping kind of it made like people aware of trapping. Somehow, it didn't get coincided with the rise of the animal rights movement, the radical animal rights movement, and and and these folks who who are obviously diametrically opposed of those kinds of activities, and so those who things kind of emerged about the same time the late six late seventies and into the eighties, and that's that's kind of the genesis of where we came from. Was was working on those types of issues. What was that band? Was that a comprehensive band. It was kind of like a whittle in a way band. Know, it was a pretty pretty comprehensive band. It was a statewide ballot in missive hearing on how that would have banned trapping, So, I mean it would have been kind of the first entry into the the all out banned world for the antics. Was that the first state they ever went after? You know, I don't know if it was the first one, um it was certainly the first major one following the victory. We weren't even an organization at the point, right, were just the founders of of what has become the Sportsmen's Alliance were the folks who kind of organized sportsman in the state of Ohio, ran the campaign, raised the money, did the work needed to beat that thing at the ballot. Uh. And then after after winning, you know, they started getting phone calls from all over all over the country. I wondering how they did it, How did you do it? Can you come out here and help us. We've got these guys trying to do this. These guys are trying to do that, you know, And and that wasn't I mean, the animal rights movement hasn't gone away, and they're not gonna go away. You know. Just because they lost, he doesn't mean they're not going to try it in California or Oregon or Missouri or where else. So why Ohio back then, I don't know. It's a good question. There's a lot of famous trappers that came out of Ohio. When I when I started for trapping UM and set my first muskrat trap in fur. And remember like so many of the books I would have about trapping would be from guys down here. I mean, Ohio was an interesting state, right We've got a lot of um, We've got a lot of open spaces, but there's still a lot of urban communities in the state. There's still a lot of major metropolitan areas that that might not understand trapping, that might not understand the benefits to wildlife and the benefits to uh two people even of of those kinds of practices. And so it's a natural natural target has been a target a number of times from the antis over the years. You know, I heard explain to me one time that Colorado lost, you know, some of their trapping rights. And it happens sort of at the minute that Denver and Fort Collins comprise of the population, like just speaking rough terms, it sort of like this tipping point where Denver and Fort Collins sort of like made up the majority of Colorado, and all of a sudden you started to see the tables turned against sportsmen absolutely, especially as you talk about ballot initiatives, right, I mean, you're talking about trying to convince fifty point one percent of the people to vote a certain way, and and you're already starting behind the eight ball when you when when it comes to trapping issues, when it comes to big predator issues, those kinds of things on the ballot. You know a lot of times you do the pre pre issue polling. Sportsmen are way down, you know, hunters are way down. You've got to call your way back. And you do it through through advertising and television and and word of mouth and all these different tactics that are are used in a campaign. But oftentimes you're you're starting underwater. Yeah. It's funny that when you when you see, like if you go to people, if you pull Americans or go to different states and pull people and say like, do you support regulated hunting? Overwhelming majorities of people we'll always say they'll say yes, yeah. But then when you start getting into when you start pulling down, the more specific you get, the more people are like, wow, yeah, I don't know about that. Right, they agree with the concept, But then you can, depending on how you articulate these particular activities, they start becoming like, um, they start doing sort of a moral triage on each issue and sort of like casting opinion on it, even though it might not reflect like the main point they were trying to make that they support it. Um was the Ohio Okay, so when the Ohio band came out, here's what here's what I want to get that I want to get that that that you your organization primarily goes head to head with Humane Society United States. I mean, is that generally like that's the general adversary. Yeah, that's certainly the biggest. I mean, they're certainly the most well funded um animal rights an anti hunting organization nationally and internationally. And was that the case even in the late seventies. No, they they've grown. I mean they've been around for a long time, but they've grown and they've swallowed up other organizations. They've they've combined with Doris Day Animal League, they've combined with I believe the Fund for Animals and others over the years. But today they they certainly are the biggest and the most well funded. There's like it's I think it's a ton of confusion that people have, Like your average Joe Blow has a lot of confusion about what the Humane Society does. I think if you go to most people, they think it's about like taking care of of sheltering cats and cats and dogs. And you know, I hate to give credit where credits due, but they did a masterful job of mainstreaming their immage, right, They've done a masterful job of co opting that term the local humane Society is the guys who rescue cats and dogs. Like you said, it's where you go to get a shelter animal if you if you need a pet. They've taken that and they've they've they've they've used that to wrap their radical agenda, and so they use that moniker to use that name as a way to cover up really what the true agenda of the organizations. They don't run animal shelters, you know, they don't run pet shelters. They they're hardly doing that kind of work at all. They're they're a policy driven an organization that's based in Washington, d C. But when people say the local if someone says, like the local Humane Society is that fundamentally distinct from hs US. Absolutely, they're not associated at all. There's no association. No. A lot of the local he made sides actually are are are frustrated by by h s U s by the by the funding side of it, right, because you get people who see their commercials on TV. Right, you put a sad dog, mangy dog in with some sad music and you run a commercial. You get nineteen dollars a month out of it, and all this money flows up to Washington, d C. It's not flowing into local shelters. It's not it's not saving cats and dogs. It's pushing, pushing these these these policy agendas. See here, I am talking about how it's annoying that people are confused about it. But I'm confused about it because I thought there was some of So there's none there. It's little h in capital h. You know, your local shelters are dependent upon donations and local taxes, That's it, and they're struggling society. The United States, less than one percent of their budget goes to grants or any kind of support for local shelters. Theres opting this message, Yes, less than one percent according to their tax returns, and they've co opted it, and they've they're using to fund ballot initiatives or lobbying to stop hunting, trapping and big egg cal How familiar with you? How checked out are you on that enough to not object to anything that's being said. I'm not asking, I'm just doing a guy. I'm doing a man on the street right now. Yeah, I'm like stopping you on the street to say, hey, man, well I guess I do want to know, like where the no kill shelter comes in. So, you know, local shelters a place where you go get your your you know, discarded puppy. Um, some are kill shelters, some are no kill shelters, and I know that's always for funding, A big uh, a big issue, you know. Um. And so is is a no kill shelter associated with any organizations specifically or is that just something done on the local levels or local levels decisions. You know, there'll be parent groups that will run shelters is no kill. But you know, as far as the Humane Society, they have zero connection to any shelter the h So let's say that we're saying this is our little rule here when we we'll say h s U S how's that? And by that we mean upper case Humane society like the legal lobbying group and not where you go down where you take your kids down to get your get your pup. Yeah, that's their hs US has as zero connection to any shelters. That's not to say that those folks aren't aren't necessarily philosophically aligned at times, but they're but they're not necessarily related organizations either. So I want to talk about how um, how anti hunting fishing trapping initial atives, how they usually work in a state, just in a general sense, then we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of different or a handful of different scenarios ways in which they work. But and I pull this from some materials, materials that you guys provide with me, that there's basically three ways to work on the state level, and so the introduction of legislation, and maybe you can give me a quick run through on these the introduction of legislation, you know what, let's do this? Is it appropriate to do this? Through what happened in Maine a couple of years ago around black bear hund Okay, and by this I'm talking about that in your materials you explain that there's like a sequence where you introduce legislation, did be weighed by the state legislature. You can conduct lawsuits where you sue state fishing game agencies, and you can do ballot initiatives. Is what happened around bear hunting in Maine? Was was there something from all three of those that you could point to or only two of those? Well, yes, there were all three, but not necessarily in that linear order, right, so laid out for them. So typically what you see is is hs US looks to build a case and and other groups that push ballot is ships look to build a case for public support. Right, so oftentimes will throw a bill into the legislature, start to get media coverage about to create an issue, um where there might not be one right now, you know, there's not there's not a need to ban black bear hunting and ming. Obviously their population has tripled over the last ten years. They was voted down to two thousand four, but they decided to bring the issue back, and so you see him introduce legislation first as a way to drum up some support, drum up some um of their supporters, and then also drum up the media attention. So they lost that an anti bear hunting thing in two thousand four. Yeah, it'll probably just to test the waters too, right, I mean, if it goes dead, they might go all right, it's not a time or place yet. Yeah, I mean, they can see how much interest there is. I mean I think, you know, I can't attest to this, but I think in a lot of cases, uh, these issues, these ballot initiatives they run are probably net net fundraisers form even after all the money they spend. You know, they're advertising nationally, they're advertising and getting money sent from all over the country to work on these kinds of issues. Um. And so the more that they can drum up, bang the drum on on the need to ban these cruel and inhumane and barbaric practices as they call them, the better job they're going to do on the fundraising side as well. So, yeah, there was a there was a baltoniution of two thousand and four that they lost. Um. You know, they went away for four different cycles, they didn't come back, and then they came back in two thousand thirteen looking to to start the issue again. Um. And so there was a lawsuit that was was wrapped into that. I don't know if you want to get into the campaign itself, but there was a lawsuit that they brought during the campaign that they tried to sue us to get our TV ads taken off the air. Yeah. I wanted to ask about that, but let's let's get into the let's get into the campaign. Sell. So they introduced some legislation didn't go anywhere, meaning that that the that the state legislators that elected individuals would outside of bringing it directly to voters that they would have decided to pass them bill doesn't go anywhere. That's typically the m O right. They try to do it legislatively. For you've seen it in in Maine, we've seen it in Montana, we saw in Arizona this last cycle one on mountain lions. So they typically try to do legislation first. It's much cheaper than running a ballot initiative. Typically ballot initiatives, and especially on wildlife related issues, are one and lost on dollars spent. Can you say specifically what the ban is just? I mean, so it wasn't go ahead. In the state of Maine, the ballot initiative was on running black bears with dogs using traps and bait. Uh And in the state, I mean, I want to say it was of the bears they take each year are taken with those three methods, bait being the biggest of the three, but all three account for roughly of the harvest. Flat, very very dense, flat, thickly vegetated country. It's just that's just how it's That's is how you do it. So you you're kind of you're pushing for a sort of into basically you're effectively banning it. Yeah, and that's what we've seen on these things. And you know, we can get into other can gential issues like right the hunt amendments and stuff like that that, but the issue comes back to they don't typically try to ban bear hunting like like you said, they don't try to ban deer hunting. They try to ban means and methods. So they're going to go after the most inhumane as they call it, means and methods. And so in this case, they targeted trapping, they targeted baiting, and they targeted hounds. But it's funny when I shouldn't. Funny is not the right word that they'll use words like inhumane um when it really doesn't conform to like a definition of what's humane. But it's sort of like a way you can do it would be it would be almost like it would be almost like they're saying, like we view it as unsportsmanlike. And then because it's not, you know, if you're gonna if you're gonna say like no, and it's okay to shoot a bear, it's okay to shoot a bear of the bow or gun, but it's inhumane if it's over bait. But if you think of like the humane part one would assume meant like the method of kill, right, like is it a clean method of kill? So there you have a lot of people say like, well, over bait really winds up being a cleaner method of kill because you're getting a short you're getting a shorter range shot, you're better able to identify the target, you have a longer window you know, in which to place your shot. So one could feasibly argue to be like like this, you know this practical argument that is more humane to do it that way if you're really interested in parsing out what humane is. They're not, though, but it's like a term that they grab onto because it means something, and I think that what they're like. Another way that they would put it out be like what's unsportsmanlike? And then you put like, so you're you're concerned with sportsmanlike practices, like you're you're concerned with enforcing a code of ethics. You turned it around on them, like so you know, at the end of the day, they're not gonna be okay with black poter hunting at all if they're using that because in a ballot is ship specifically, you're you're not dealing with with the legislature, you're not dealing with a finite body. You're dealing with the public. And so they're trying to convince the soccer mom in Portland or Augusta or in bangor that that they need to care about this issue. And so gonna pick out on those things. Right, they're gonna they're gonna isolate those things. But if you've got if you got them into a one on one conversation, they're not gonna be okay with with with blackber hunting at all. Exactly exactly. So they in that state in Maine, with the ballot initiae, with the vote, yeah, fifty point one one one more vote than yeah, okay, And how did it go? We we won. We won by a bigger margin they want. In two thousand four, h they spent a little bit bigger margin. Yeah, they spent. They spent three million dollars in the state two point seven two point yeah, two point seven and change. How much was spent on the other side. That's what they spent. They spent. HSU has spent their their group spent two point seven Where are our campaign raised about two point three and about it? Yeah, about two point three. Well, so that doesn't conform to your idea that it's dollars spent, you guys underspent. You have to be good too, I mean you have to put the right stuff on TV, you have to put the right campaign plan in place. Uh. And it's it's not equitable either, right, because you know, if you look at the two point seven million dollars at other side raised two point six and change came directly from DC, came directly from hs US, but it was under the guys of Mayners for fair bear Hunting. That's the name of the campaign. It's it's called a front group. Right, we're there, yeah, but we're there bear hunters in Manners for fair bear Hunting. Well they found a few, yeah, I mean they found some guys that could trot out there to say, you know, hey, we're we don't we don't like these practices either. I mean, that's that's typical. You know, it's it's it's a misnomer to think that we're gonna carry hunters, you know, lock stock and barrel, and you know, you look at these things. And Brian I were just talking about this the other day though, the Montana trapping issue. Yeah, they found some they found some bird doggers that come out. Well, if you if we did pulling on the thing before we ran the campaign of hunting licensed buyers, guys would hunt in the last year, would have voted for it because it's worried about the dogs. Yeah, so it was the same. It was a similar kind of pulling in Maine as well. We were losing of hunting licensed buyers who were going to vote for the black Bear band. So it's it's all those things that you can't always assume that those folks are gonna be with you. You gotta do the education. You gotta put the right kind of TV commercials together up with the right kind of campaign plan together. And we talk about it in two senses, right. We talked about messenger and messages. You have to have impactful messengers. You have to have believable messengers. But if they're not saying an impactful message, if they don't have an emotional message to drive home, it's not going to be impactful in terms of pulling and moving the needle. So when you when you look at one of these ballot issue campaigns, the entire thing is built around the idea of how do you change the way that fifty point one percent of the people are going to vote in that twelve hour window on election day. Nothing else matters. Doesn't matter how they feel the day before, It doesn't matter how they feel the day after. It all comes down to how are they going to vote on that day? And that's what your campaign has to be built around. What was the split on votes? It was pretty sound defeat, wasn't it. I want to say it was fifty seven forty three? Is that right? I can pull it up here? Right? I can't. I can't remember off the top of my head. That's bad. I should know that. I can't believe that did better than in two thousand four. Hut about a percent of point point and a half better than, uh than it was in two thousand four. Okay, so you guys are talking about, um, the messaging and the messenger. Can you explain a little bit like what exactly what that means, like what's sort of like the message or who the messenger was, and use either example, whether it's Spontana or Maine. Yeah, it's uh, you know, you look at voting and what the other side is doing. What we're doing as hunters, we love to say, we got the science, we got the facts, we can prove all this and we can. But the other side uses pure emotion. You know, the soccer moms in the cities. It's a battle for those urban areas and the people that don't understand it. And what moves the needle there and with those people is emotion. And it's the simple emotions. You know, you're killing these things unethically or inhumanely or whatever they want to say. Trophy hunt, you know, they throw that term out there, and that sways everybody um and so that message and messenger we have to counteract that. We can use facts, we can point out that there's going to be an increased barre attacks or more depredation permits or more issues or whatever, but we also have to tap into that emotion, you know. And in Montana and in Maine, that's what we did. You know, we had to slowly ramp up that emotional argument and make them realize that eight these are apex predators. You're going to have issues, you know. And here's the other side, and it had to flip that coin and use the same thing. We still have all the facts, but you have to make somebody who doesn't care about wildlife management, care about this issue. You know, I can let Evan talk about how we slowly ramped up those emotional things. But you know, using polling and data and being able to get into get into the populations that are going to move the needle, you know, the messaging can work for all these different groups and age classes and you know demographics, but you've got to find where it's not moving. And that's where Evan and his team do a fantastic job finding out what's going to move that needle and sway that vote and how do you find that out polling? I mean, obviously we want to do a high level of public opinion polling to not only understand the messengers side of things, who who is a credible messenger, but also what what messages actually move the needle? Right. You know, we go into these campaigns and we've we've got a lot of history of doing them. We have a pretty good gut sense of you know, message X gonna work well here, and message why might work well. They're based on demographics and past history and past campaigns, like in the main campaign where you know, ten years later down the road we're doing the second second round of this thing. So we have a pretty good idea where to go, but that's not always right, and so we want to pull test those messages. We want to pull test the arguments not only that we believe will work, we also want to pull test what the other side is going to use. What messages do we believe they're going to use against us, and see what that does to the general public, right, Because it ultimately, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what message I think is best or what message volunteer why thinks is best. What message that works the best is the one that changes the way people are going to vote. And when you're trying in those out, do you feel that you have to enter into like the dirty pool world? Like do you do you catch yourself? Because I think hunters do this all the time. Man. Hunters are always using rhetoric that that they don't actually believe. I think you have to be willing to to say impactful messages, right. You have to be willing to tell an emotional story because you're gonna be going up against emotional as from the other side the mede. You say the word heritage, you're talking about emotion, right, And I think that's that's one of the things that we saw in in Montana specifically, is you know the heritage message in Montana that you clarify what had because or just keep it focused the Maine for now and then because I don't we haven't talked about like what actually happened in in the Montana's story. So we could either introduce Montana yeah, like, well we can, okays the same message. Um, you know the bottom line at the end of the day, talking about these are these are historical practices, these are things we've always done, These are these are these are methods and means that that we've always used. It doesn't mean a lot to to you know, a mom with three young kids in in suburbia. At the end of the day, you got you gotta find a way to to impact her what what what matters to her, And so sometimes you have to look at messages that are a little bit stronger. You know, those folks are concerned about public safety, those folks are concerned about what's going to happen to the bear population if it's left unchecked moving forward. If you take away on the way we're harvesting bears in the state of Maine. What's gonna happen to a population that from two thousand four to two thousand fourteen, damn near doubled with the take. You know that they were already talking inteen about about expanding main seasons and expanding the opportunity there and potentially going to two bears to account for the rise and bear numbers. Yeah, so now you take away ninety three percent of the way you're taking bears. What's going to happen moving forward? We already had you know, one of our TV commercials was filmed in downtown Portland where they had a bear in the backyard. They warrants had to come down and remove the bear. Yeah, well that, Yeah, I mean I think that there's a fair way to I think it would probably be statistically, it's probably like a little bit unfair to say bears are gonna come kill all your children, because I don't know when Maine's last black bear fatality was. But they're not that often. No, but but but the thing about but, the thing about just conflict and the costs of tax payers of doing all that conflict work is enormous. But that might not be something that registers as emotional. No, No, absolutely not, and so you look at like you know, you look at the deaths are are extremely rare nationally, but there are there are instances where there are bear attacks. You know, we had one in Florida that happened right before UM, right before the main campaign. There's there's text there was one in Colorado here recently, a couple of years ago, I believe, UM. There are some of these attacks that happened, and so you ask the question of its bears start to move back down into the Portland suburbs. In Portland's growing in Portland's becoming a suburb you know now almost of Boston, right, I mean, you've got people that are moving up into southern Maine. The demographics have changed dramatically over the last ten years. There are gonna be a dish conflicts moving forward as the air population increases unchecked. So it's it's about how do you keep those checks in place? How do you how do you how do you convince voters that they need to do this for their own good? A lot of people are going to vote their own their own perspective, and so what's in it for them? There's a public safety aspect to this, you know, the message isn't necessarily bears are gonna come eat your children, But there is a public safety idea that you've got bears running through schools, you've got bears in backyards, you've got bears wandering around suburban neighborhoods. There can be problems that arise from that. But but one of the things you guys did, uh that want of causing more trouble and causing another lawsuit wasn't really an emotional peal, is that you were using the state. You had State Fishing Game Agency people who were opposed to this ballot initiative speaking about from their perspective why they didn't support it. Can you tell that story? So that's that gets back to what we're talking about earlier with the third leg of this, which is the lawsuit side of it. So we our campaign. When I say we as, I mean our campaign paid for the TV advertising that we filmed, the commercials, we wrote the scripts, we did all the polling. The state wasn't doing any of that. The state wasn't involved at all in in that part of the process. You know, the state was obviously concerned about the the the issue. They had concerns about the implications of what the what it would look like on the management side moving forward if it were to pass. But they weren't involved in the campaign. They weren't involved in any of that because they could not be, or they just weren't both yeah, both, um. But we did have them in the commercials, right. These were These were state employees on their own personal time. They had clearance from from the administration to appear in the ads. They weren't instructing people how to vote. They were just telling people that they were concerned. They had they were opposed to the measure themselves. Um, because they were being they were they felt as though they were being stripped of their management authority. Yeah, and so what would be like Can can you give me an idea of what just one example of what a state employee might have said about the ballot initiative? Yes, oh, we've got actually right up there on the wall that you can see the picture from the TV shoot we did. But they may Basically the message was mains game wardens and bear biologists supposed measure one the bear biologists. Yeah, yeah, they're both together. And and that piste off hsu Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, And so that you know, they obviously thought that there was misuses. That's hard to argue, man, Yeah, well, yeah exactly, and that's a very effective tool for us to have to be able to play. But they felt like the state was spending money to produce these TV ads, and so they actually sued the state to basically take the ads off the air in our in our campaign, which is not an unusual tactic. You're talking about a campaign that is is being voted on in the early part of November, right, so you back that up six seven, eight weeks, that's really when your TV ads are running. So it's a very short period of time that you're actually on TV with your political ads. So if you can sue us and you can get our ads taken down for a week or two weeks or three weeks while we figured it out in court, that's a pretty impactful way too to take take our messaging and remind it um. So obviously we went to court, we suit or we we and we enjoined in the lawsuit ourselves because there are ads, there are campaign it's not the state's ads, and we ended up winning. We ended up winning the lawsuit and all that kind of stuff. We kept our ads on the TV. But so did you ever have to pull the ads? No, did you feel that those ads are effective when you did a polling? Yeah, absolutely, you can see it in the now. That's to me feels like that to me feels such a solid thing. But then I have a lot of, um, you know, I have a lot of sort of like like like a native faith in state wildlife management. So that would speak to me. But I'm not the I'm not the person you really need to change the mind of. Well, I mean, they're they're they're a highly credible messenger, right, and so they're they're a they're a person that the general public is going to trust that they're they're going to view as a voice of authority. You know, people look to the state and effish and wildlife agencies as as experts, and they should. These are the guys who have the day to day management of these species and are doing a fantastic job. At the same time, though, they have to say the right thing. They have to say the right messages that are going to be impact. They can't just say oh, trust us, we've got this. That's not gonna be enough to change that. Again, I go back to the soccer mom in Portland. Right, it's not gonna be enough to change her mind. All right, let's jump along to the There's a lot I want to talk about, you know what, because here's another interesting one. Man, another main one I want to bring up because even though we're talking about stuff that already happened, I think it's really informative for people to understand, it's almost like more informative to understand how it plays out, right, because because that how it's it's informative to understand how these things played out from start to finish in order to begin understanding like what will happen in the future. Right, So it might seem what we're talking about like already happened. Who cares, But it's it's illustrative of of something. And another main issue that thought was really interesting was the issue with links and Maine. So here you have a an ees a protective species in Maine and someone comes up with the idea to say, hey, you know what, no one should be able to trap in the area that could potentially have links because you might accidentally catch a links and if you accidentally catch a links would be an e s A violation or you know we'd like to make it an es A violation. So therefore, let's stop trapping anywhere with links. And you brought up an interesting point in some of your materials that you put out to the public that like, with that line of thinking, you could close fishing in the river where an e s a listed fish happened to be present. So it becomes like a really important fight. Like someone might look at it and be like, oh, it's like this really detailed policy thing, but it's not. It's just kind of a way to to put like a special little twist on something, a little back door attempt to get at something a little bit broader. Right, And you know, we're not gonna sit here and argue that, yeah, we want to see a whole bunch of of federally protected links species killed um by trappers. No, that's not the argument. The argument is that at the end of the day, most of the links that were caught were being released unharmed, right, And so if you have a a few links that are caught incidentally to other trapping seasons that are going on, that doesn't have a population level impact, even if the species is federally threatened or federally endangered. That's not having a population level impact on the on the links species of the whole. But if you use that line of thinking, like you said, you can expand that pretty quickly to other things where you can say, okay, well, there there are endangered wolves in the area, and they are about the same size and look like coyotes. And you know that It gets back to the wolf discussion too. With with this idea that there are two wolf species, uh in the eastern part of the US. There's the um one that is very very this isn't the antis theory, right, but there's one that is very rare, looks identical to the western Great Lakes gray wolf. The only way you can tell a party is genetically. Well, if they if you have a wolf subspecies or endangered species of wolf that's separate from the Great Lakes gray wolf in the same area as the gray wolf, how could you ever possibly allow a hunting season. So you can see how they can take these arguments, and if they can get that established in case law in in in the Links lawsuit, then you can apply it to other areas, whether it's it's fishing or whether it's it's hunting for other species. So what happened with the what happened with the links situation that they put out. So we've had we've had numerous lawsuits on this. There's been at least two rounds of of of links lawsuits in in Maine, there's a there's a Lynx lawsuit in Minnesota. UM, this really dates back to started probably two thousand and six, two thousand seven time frame, and has been litigated over the years since then. We've had some favorable outcomes that trappers have had to put some stuff in place that would help to ensure that they don't unnecessarily catch additional links. But the bottom line is, I think the population at a level now where you'll see the Fish and Wildlife Service start to move forward with with a dlisting effort and getting them back off the essay the adjustments that the trappers had to make, because that just like how the what kind of trap and how those traps are placed. Right, Yeah, Yeah, there's that. That's an interesting thing with I want to spend some time on this lag later, but it's but since it came up, it's an interesting thing with how we sort of, um, the ways in which sportsmen can kind of cooperate to alleviate issues like this, like for instance, when you get into um that you'd be able to release and you know, if you had a by catch incident trapping, like you caught a links in the area where you're not allowed to retain the links, that you would take steps to modify your equipment to enable you to release things unharmed. And it comes down like really like technical stuff like jaw thickness right like like a lot of trappers you know, will laminate the jaws on their trap to increase the like to increase the surface area. Okay, adding inline adding inline swivels. So you have a trap is staked out, and you have a chain that connects to the trap, and you have a swivel at the trap base, you have a swivel at the stake, and guys will add inline swivel into the chain. So there's all these little steps of a person can take right to do it and now and then someone would come in and say, you know what, We're gonna mandate that trappers take certain steps. That doesn't that that doesn't decrease the efficacy of the equipment. Some would argue actually increases the efficacy of equipment, and then you have to weigh out like, Okay, is this like big brother stepping in to tell me how to conduct my business or is this something that's actually gonna enable me to conduct my business long term? And that's the thing that I think a lot of sportsmen have to look at when these kind of issues come up. Man. Yeah, and for for a lot of it, in this case specifically, Um, it comes down to another. It seems like all this stuff comes back to Endangered Species Act policy. But there's a there's a there's a method in the Endangered Species Act where you can allow for the incidental take of of protected species. It's called an I T P Incidental take permit. And so what we saw in them in the main Links case specifically, was the state of main applied to the federal government said look, we've got this issue. We know that we're having Uh, there's the potential and trappers are are incidentally catching links. Um. If the Feds will issue that permit, it basically is a basically precludes them then from prosecuting those folks under Endangered Species Act violations. And as part of that application process and part of the awarding of that of that permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service. There are there are typically steps or concessions that are made to say those concerns. So there's a bit there's a bit of a back and forth on what it's gonna take to make it it's allowed to go through. An interesting point that came up when I was looking at the Links issue in Maine was here here, what was that an H s U S issue? Primarily? Was that coming from another source? No, I don't believe H. S U S was the main litigant in that case. I want to say that was Animal Welfare Institute or Animal Protections and I can't remember which was which, but they've they've been involved in those cases over the years. In a case like that, you have someone presumably like feigning a great interest in the well being of the links with concealed goal or camouflage goal, just like hindering trapping activities. But it brings up an interesting thing where there was a loss. This is the cormorant issue in Oregon, where there's perilously low stocks of salmon returning from rivers into the ocean, and there was a situation where they were trying to control cormorant numbers. They were killing corm rants in an area to enable greater returns of salmon. So corm raan is a fish eating bird. They're pounding salmon returning out in the ocean from river, so to alleviate the pressure from the cormorants. There was a project where they were cooling corm rants to increase salmon returns, and there you have lawsuits to prevent them from doing it. So here you're trying to you're trying to use a management tool to help an imperiled species, but that action gets flagged and get suit against, and so you have to ask like it kind of reveals that sort of bias and reveals the things that you're not really we're not really talking about wildlife well being here in a long term sense. We're talking about some it's a proxy argument. What we're talking about is like, you're just opposed to certain kinds of animal deaths caused by certain kinds of people, particularly people who are paying money to go do it licensed, people who it might be deemed like recreational. That's the greatest you know, irony is that they want to stop hunters from paying into a system that supports conservation, that ensures the long term viability of these species. But at the end of the day, when they actually accomplish that, now we're paying the state to take that place, and they take on that burden and they don't seem to have a problem with it. The animals still dying, you're still having conflict, but now you're doing it at a with a debt. But the other thing is who's paying. Right in that synthetic situation that hopefully we never get to, is like there's gonna have to be something put in place to fund the state agency. They don't. They don't do that, I mean, And then take the California mountain lion stuff as as a perfect example. You know, mountain lion hunting is banned there. Now they issue four times as many depredation permits and they're killing more animals, more mountain lions than they did before. But there's no hunter paying for a tag. Now the state has to go out there, pay for people to do it or issue the depredation permits, and then they have to knee crops. He's on top of that. So now you got now they're operating operating at a loss, at a deficit. Yes, and there was no funding mechanism in the ballot initiative to fun now scenario is like you're talking about state Washington, right, notice is happening in Oregon. But it was a suit against the It was a suit I believe against the Coast Guard for killing cormorants. Know it was it would use a euphemism cooling cormorants from that we're praying on salm and small returning. Yeah, and it wasn't only not returning going out into the ocean for their feeding. So I think it's the wildlife services of uh, not Coastguard, right. Yeah. But that I mean, that's such a messed up situation over there too, because what we don't have diminishing salmon returns because of the cormer ants. The cormer ants are taking advantage of a giant system that we've put in place through many man made sure there's there's many factors. I mean, that's a way deep conversation. Yeah, we caused, We've created a human caused that. There's a human caused problem that we've created with damning and habitat destruction and other things to create a situation where now we just have to stop the bleeding. So we get sea lions taken advantage. But it's but it's to have your but to have your perspective. But your perspective winds up being like a little bit cynical because here we have everything like, yeah, we created a huge problem with salmon. Okay, it's gonna take a lot of public and political will to fix the underlying problem. In the meantime, you just have to try to keep the thing breathing, sam and being the thing breathing. So when people then go like, oh, you know, the problem is damns and so now you're trying to like do these little micro adjustments. Yeah, you need to do anything you can to just have something be there while we take the decades necessary to take care of the long term main problem. I don't think that I don't think that our inability to fix the main long term problem means that we shouldn't look at little microadjustments we could make to kind of immediately aid the situation that stock should be taken though, be like, yeah, do you know why we are killing cormarants? Do you know why all these sea lions are gathered at the base of this dam? You know why we have so many? Okay, so you feel this is a side arguments. Excuse me, guys. At some point we can't take down all the damns. I mean, we depend upon them for hydro electricity and everything else. So at some point it is a you know, Wayne, and if you want to weigh it even more, you'd be look at that. It's infinitely deep. That's why I feel like you should and I know that that we this country a long time ago decided against rightfully so decided against putting unnecessary restrictions on voters. But in a draconian sense, I feel like we need to go back to voters need to be able to pass and when when I think, I just think should only be on wildlife issues. Voters need to go pass a very stringent test about what's your understanding of wildlife history? And you know it well. I'm not saying you don't know it well, but if you want to spend time getting into the corremant, I just think stock should be taken like people when they say, okay, we're gonna kill these corns rats, and just so you know, the reason they're piled up right here is because X y Z please keep that in mind. Yes, I agree, it would be nice if everyone was infinitely aware of all the factors. That play was the thing that people do and you're doing it right now? Is acting like that because there's a bigger underlying problem. It makes it that we can't morally address micro issues. Yeah, I guess I'm not worried about the mite. Yeah, I don't know. You're saying we made these damns and we did the habitat destruction in the industrial pollution, and so therefore we should be made to suffering. We should let samon go extinct just to remind us of how awful we are. That's taken a little far. Do you think because I'm not anti bomb, came some corm rats in this issue, right, Like I want the salmon to exist, But I think that should just be included in the campaign. Right. There should be a sign we are killing these corme rants because we you have destroyed these rivers our decisions sixty years ago. It highlights the challenge of wildlife management, right, and this idea that things just don't happen in a vacuum. We wanted to steal stuff down to you know, good versus bad, black versus white. You know, these issues are are highly complicated and you look at you know another example. You you raised the question of whether or not to me, this is the question I've been struggling to write a story about. But the animal rights an anti hunting community in certain instances elevate one species over another right and so in this case corn rance versus salmon, I'll give you another one about wolves versus moose in the Northern Minnesota. So at the same time they're pushing lawsuits to keep wolves federally protected that have recovered and a blown past recovery goals, the moose population in Northern Minnesota's crashing. Now, is that all because of wolves? No, absolutely not. There are other environmental factors that are that play into that, but there's certainly an impact from wolves. And so how in their minds are do they square of the idea that we're gonna keep wolves federally protected and continue to sue for that even though they've they've blown past recovery goals. At the same time, we're seeing it have a direct impact on other species in the area. Yeah, we're yeah, we're willing to let moose walk. That's a great that's a great segue, Cal and I will pick this up later in from we'll pick this up later in public. Can can you give like a mile high walk through on Great Lakes the Great Lakes wolves situation. It's difficult for people to follow becaure's a lot of twists and turns, and I don't want to get too I don't want to get so um deep that we lose people, but just a general sense of how the conversation has gone and where it is right now. So you're talking about a multi year series of lawsuits right this goes back to mid two thousand's. It's been through the Bush administration, the Obama administration, now the Trump administration multiple different times over that Over that ten twelve four teen years, presidential administrations have moved to delist recovered species of gray wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Each time the antis have sued, Each time, the antis have taken into court, and and each time they've gone a federal judge to overturn the d listing for for various reasons. So where we're at right now is that we just wrapped up a lawsuit last year that the final round of this lawsuit. I'm hopeful that basically issued a ruling that was both good and bad for our side, right. The ruling said, yes, you can do the d listing of wolves. Were talked about distinct population segment policy or the Endangered Species Act is really what we're dealing with here. The broader question was can you use the Endangered Species Act to delist a distinct population segment of a broader national listing? Wolves are listed nationally as a matter of convenience under the SA back in the late seventies. Um, they were listed nationally because there's just there's just a matter of convenience back then. There wasn't a DP policy in those days. Since then, we figured out that, look, we're not gonna have wolves recovered in their entire historic range. Nobody's calling for that. We're not gonna have them Seattle. We're not gonna have in Chicago. That's not a reasonable expectation for delisting. We we we we appeal the latest round of rulings because the federal judge in Washington said, unless until wolves are recovering their entire historic range, they can't be considered recovered in the Upper Great Lake States. So it doesn't matter how many wolves you have in the in the up if they're not back in their entire historic range, they can't be considered recovered, which is ludicrous. Yeah, when when we talked without in other contexts and one on time of this, always like to point out that elk are only recovered in about ten to fourteen percent of their range. Absolutely, So it would be like saying, we're not gonna hunt elk in Colorado, which has two fifty elk. We're not gonna held out in Colorado because we haven't recovered elk in Ohio. That's right, that's right, and that's ultimately what you're getting down here is a question of law. Is that when you use the Endangered Species Act, when you use the distinct population segment policy of the Nague Species Act, are you talking about historic range? Are you talking about current intended range? Right? Are you talking about recovering wolves in these states? Are you come about recovering grizzly bears in these areas? Or you talk about the entire historic range because that's under that status. And you're right, elk aren't recovered yet, and so how can you possibly have a hunting season on elk if they're not recovered everywhere? And that's the argument they're wanting to use on wolves is that they're not recovered across the entire historic range. So how can you possibly have a hunting season in Michigan. Well, they're recovered in Michigan. They are. I mean, nobody's arguing about the population science, nobody's arguing about the data. They're arguing about ourcane policies, the Endangered Species Act and trying to apply that to this situation. Because at the end of the day, if they were very truthful about what they're going after, they don't want a wolf hunt. That's it. It's as simple as that. They want to preclude a wolf und So how do you do that? You use these federal tools to tie you up in court for a decade, decade and a half and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the litigation. So what are you think is gonna happen? I mean, they the d listing went through. I mean, I don't know how many times, like how many times has the US Fish and Wildlife Service, um, how many times has the US Fish and Wildlife Service recommended delisting where the delisting happened for a moment and then management policy was stripped away, like just in the last few recent years. It's been like a c like three or four or five times. It's happened across It was in the Bush administration and the Bomb administration, now on the Trump administration. In each of these cases, the federal management agency, so the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is the one that oversees ees a protected species. In each of these cases, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is saying it's time to delist. Where do the states fall on it? Well, the states? The states agree at a couple of the states moved to open their own hunting seasons, but they don't have a lot of power. Um, they're in the lawsuits as well, but they don't have a lot of power to to allow for seasons or allow for incident or for for take while they're federally protected. So they're involved in the lawsuits that they want to see them de listed. The states wanted to have them returned to state management like they should be. You know, that's the way the e s A was intended to to be applied, right. It wasn't intended to be this hotel California policy where you can check in an animal onto the list and it never can check out. That's not the way it was intended to be. It was intended to be used as a tool to recover imperiled species, get them back to health, and then return them to state management. But the antis don't see it to the don't in the animal rights community don't see it that way. You know, you talk about charismatic, charismatic megafauna. Right, these are the species they want to protect and perpetuity, and that's one way to do it if you can keep them listed as a as a federally protected species and you can't have hunts on them. Yeah, but they they only resist, they only resist the de listing of species that might potentially that might potentially become a game animal like no one. You know, when when we went to delist the bald eagle, it was a great celebration because there's no historic use pattern of like, you know, using bald eagles as a renewable resource. I mean outside of out of certain Native American groups. They would use them for ceremonial purposes. So it's like there was no risk. I think that from their perspective, it winds up being they want to block any animal moving off the ES A list that might potentially that might potentially it's a tool to preclude hunting. And so ultimately, I mean, you look at the ESA and we can we can debate es a policy for for weeks, right, and we have Ultimately, you talk about endangered animal is one that is in danger of going extinct um in all our significant portion of its range. A threatened species is one that will will meet that standard in the foreseeable future. Those don't apply to wolves, that doesn't apply to grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Area. These species have recovered, and if the populations start to slide, there are tools in the essay that allow for emergency protections to be put into place. So at the very core level of this, these animals no longer meet the definition of what is a protected species. And what's interesting about the some of the ESA species two is we mapped out what recovery would look like before we achieved it. Like where everyone said, like even in the absence in some places, even in the absence of certain species, we said, okay, like, uh, what would what would success look like? You paint out this roadmap of what success would look like down to kind of excruciating details, and then we blow past those benchmarks and people are like, yeah, but yeah, but that didn't really mean it. It's moving that bullpost didn't really mean it. You also hear a lot, well you just want to see that so he can hunt them. And my response is always that is the best case scenario. If you love this animal. Yeah, that would mean if you have like a huntable population, that means you're doing pretty good, means they're recovered. It should be celebrated. If it's focus on them, there's dollars going to them, and it's a sustainable This is where we get into our idea of hunt ovationist, right, Like, okay, we get to this point. Now there's dollars going in, we're hunting them. It's conservation is taking place, and that's kind of our little term we've coined as honer rationist, you know. And and that's what's happening when you get to that level. They would happen with grizzly bears, with wolves whatever. Um, just stepping back, Yeah, they don't. They don't oppose the red bellied Creek chub getting delisted. It's these mega faunas he said. I I like to use the idea of the bigger the eye and the longer the eyelash, the greater the outrage, you know, and then they can fundraise on that, they can piggyback and fundraise on that and use that to fund all these lawsuits that they stretch this stuff out. Meanwhile, the sportsmen were cobbling stuff together. Does the cormera have an eyelash? The salmon? Salmon, damer don't sal and don't have one. That's whether being sacrificed to the cormorants. So bringing this back to the original question, because that was kind of a long answer to where the wolves situation stands today. So we fought these lawsuits time and time again. The latest round, like I said, was a good news bad news story. Right for the immediate future, wolves remain listed as a protected species in those states, but the court did come back with a very clear pathway for the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist wolves appropriately. In their view, right, if you follow these steps, then then we would find that that that you have basically done this correctly. What is the scope of those steps? Oh boy, there's I mean, I'd have to go back and pull it up. I don't have it off the top of my head, unfortunately, but there there is a pathway there that basically says, you know you need to do that, do it appropriately if you if you if you consider these factors. Right, we talked about range earlier. You don't have to you don't have to necessarily show that they have recovered in their entire historic range, but you have to consider that impact on its current range. And so some things like that where you have to go back, and the court basically went back and gave them this this clear pathway that says, go to the d listing effort again and do it for you, these these these methods, and I think you'll be okay, um am, I correct? Right now? Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, none of those states has had any kind of wolf season for a couple of years, not right, right, And the most that any of them had one for was a year or two? Okay, yeah, I think it was just one season. Actually, maybe how long do you think like when they laid out that path to that path to state management? Is that a decades long path there could be much shorter than that ultimately will depend on the litigation. Right, So at the Fish and Wildlife Service at this point is is moving forward with that process. I think you'll see a delisting effort out of the service, maybe yet this year. Um, it will depend on what kind of delisting they they issue, what kind of order it is, uh, do they check the boxes correctly, and how creative can the other side get ensuing to stop it? Um. If the Fish and Wildlife Service meets all the criteria that set out in the court's ruling, then they probably have a pretty good chance of having it upheld. But I would be I would be very very surprised if we don't see those same groups line up to sue, regardless of what they put out there. So so you're back into every year. Can there ever be an end? Yeah, there can be. Ultimately we'll get to a point where this thing comes to a head. But we're does it come to the head to cut? Does it have to go come to a head at the Supreme Court? No, I don't think it'll get to that level. I think I think we're probably I think we're in the home stretch here. I think we're round a third and head for home. It's it's you know, this this latest round of you know, they depend on what the service puts out. You know, we don't know what they're gonna do. Um, if they come back and check the boxes correctly, then I'm sure there'll be there'll be a lawsuit. Well at last six, eight, ten months. I don't know. You know, these things tend to be, you know, typically a year long to multiple years long to pay on how many appeals there are if they do things correctly, I would think would be a pretty short short window of the of the lawsuit. Right, there's not gonna be a lot of appeals. There's not a lot of stuff to appeal then, Um, so you're talking about a delisting word by the end of the year, a public comment period, and then off to courts. You're probably looking most of twenty nineteen is going to be eaten up with this, and maybe we'll have wolves back off the list. I don't know, that's just a guess. Yeah, you know, there is some there is some validity to the question about what are the implications for delisting a little segment of wolves or grizzly bears or links or what have you, like, what does that mean for everywhere else? Like, I think it's a legitimate question because if you look at an area that I'm infinitely more familiar with, would be the grizzly bear delisting in and portions of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming. Because on one hand, you know, the state management agency in Montana, for instance, is has you know, expressed the idea that we should maintain the idea of genetic exchange between these different isolated populations of grizzly bears. Right, it's a goal to have connectivity between what's called the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. So that's the goal. You would have a place for bears to freely move back and forth. And isn't your interesting question if you get to where you have absolute saturation of grizzly bears in these certain areas and you're gonna have increased likelihood of human bearer conflicts, and you have a variety of reasons they want to go to state management and some limited amount of hunting, you do really have a responsibility to look at like, Okay, what does this mean to our other our other objectives, Because the same people need to understand the state agencies that are wanting to have state management of these recovered resources are certainly not anti grizzly, They're not anti wolf, right, They're trying to like do something that's very nuanced, you know, control in certain areas, open up public involvement in it, but also allow for some managed expansion of the resource. It winds up being like it's like, it's not easy, No, it's it's the great balance question. Right where do you where do you draw the line to balance the situation out? If you try to connect the Northern Continental Divide population with the greater Yellowstone population, you run right up through Helena, Missoula, and you're running right up through the population centers of Montana. You know, what does that look like in in conflict terms? Um, I mean you're you're you're inviting additional conflict at that point. But but there can be arguments made on the other side that there are there are needs for genetic diversity and other things that must be balanced as well. This is ultimately the great challenge for wildlife managers forever, any species is is how do you find the appropriate balance between the resource, the user base, and the general public. And for those people who are just like really deep into this, it has to be so frustrating when these issues come up and it winds up being like waged out through these kind of emotion based campaigns exactly. You just imagine like when you've devoted your life to these like to balancing out these complex things, and then all then your life's worked as vantages. In the second it's alreduced down to a meme on Facebook. Well, it's it's reduced and you look at BC, right, I mean BC is a great example of that. It's it's reduced down to the ability to get rid of a hunt because they use the word trophy in a poll. Right, if you pull a question of you know, how do you guys feel about a trophy hunt for grizzly bears? Well, of course people are gonna have a negative reaction to that term. You know, people support hunting by wide margins in the country. As you said earlier, that's regulated hunting. That's the idea that there is, there is a a state management system. People view that public public, the public views that differently than when you say, how do you feel about trophy hunting? It doesn't matter if you define them exactly the same. They're not asking that question, They're just asking what's your visceral reaction to those two separate questions. The polls also gonna be are gonna be very different. Yeah, okay, you guys cool to move on in our thing? Are you still seething? I just got well. Kel loves fish. Kel loves loves fish. Um, are you ready to move on? Yeah, let's move on. The I just see a lot of these arguments are always made in this blue sky world where the human population does not exist. Go ahead, please, And it's like, well, if we just let it happen, it all be fine. And I just think people need to be reminded that we have screwed up this fishery for existence or for example, from where these fish spawn four seventy miles away all the way to where they're coming back into the ocean. So please keep that in mind when we're bunking these cormorants. You're back on that. This is just nick. That's an example. And these guys were nodding in agreement. It's like the arguments get made as if the human population is not here and expanding, well, and that the other side does that though we just leave it alone and let nature take its course. Well, we can't. We manage everything from the ground up. Yes, and you know you got your habitat, your prey species and your predator species. We can't just let a grizzly barrel wolf run free and not manage it. I mean, it's like Bart Simpson at all. You can eat seafood, but fat it's gonna go crazy and eat and keep reproducing. And now our praise pieces are out of whack and the only result that they can do is reduced tags to hunters, and there goes the funding for conservation. So it's like the other side uses that argument of hey, we've we've you know, just let it go. We've impacted land. Let them do their things. Like no, we manage everything. I mean, we kind of passed that moment like several hundred years ago in some areas. Unless we're all going back to following the herds and uh tearing down the cities. You know, at some point reality has to set in here. Now, are you good? Uh? Callen we we if you would like, and you can allow you to you can do allow you a guest opportunity, a guest hosting position, if you would like to arrange a discussion on um. We discussed salmon in Alaska at length. We haven't discussed Oregon st in California. You can arrange the whole show. All right, I got some good folks. It's gonna be called it's gonna be called monk and corner rants, the cow uh and moving into more in more recent time. Oh, the cormarant thing. If you really want to get us something, there's an interesting story because corm rants were e s a species for a while and then recovered beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And I think that some people still like aren't hip to what happened there now. I think you need a real tasty cormorant recipe in order to change that thing around. When when um let me chime in here from Kevin Ry please. Yeah. Water turkeys is what we call them back hop and they are a nuisance species. Uh. They have recovered in giant flocks. They destroy the remaining islands that we have out in the middle of Lake Barkley, which was formed by come the river uh Kentucky Lake Tennessee River. Uh. They have become nothing but a nuisance. And it's kind of sad to see an island that was out there with vegetation on it and now it's got these black dots out there with this whitewash. It's yes, yes, so we are fighting that issue back home to try to get because the fish habitat is a trollway now and the island is washing away down to the delta. And one of my brother's first jobs when he was becoming a fisheries professional was, uh, yellow perch, we're vanishing from the Latianal Islands area in the northern Great Lakes. And they went through this big project where they were netting yellow perch, putting these little markers in the yellow perch, and you wait a period of time and then you go dig through cormorant scat trying to find your little markers to ascertain the cormorant impact on yellow perch. In that case, they learned that that wasn't the problem. Same thing in Kentucky through the League of Kentucky Sportsman the resolution was made to go in and do a sampling of the cormorants out there, and a lot of the sports fishermen were thinking that they were impacting the sport fish. They found out they were eating the gizzard's cats shad the non game fish majority of them on there. But you know it's it doesn't You don't have to do a study to see what they've done to the islands after so that that that species needs to be a season on them. Whatever you know we can do, then we'll come up with some recipes after we get them in the in the in the hand. But like I said, we saw that same thing in in Kentucky just recently, where they get a lot of fishermen are like, uh, I think a lot of fishermen look at cormorants and river oders all the time as being like if they're not having a good day fishing, damn cormorants. Or as they used to say in the up, it's coomer ants. Um. Okay, the lot the lion, bobcat jaguar issue. Yeah, tell this story because this is a new one Arizona. So, I mean the story is it is gonna be very familiar to the main black bear story, right. I mean it's it's a balant initiative being pushed by the mainstad United States. It was supposed to be in the mid term elections are coming up in the supposed to be on this falls ballots November November ballot um. That was the intention. They didn't qualify the issue. There. There was some stuff done in Arizona to help them not qualify the issue, but it follow the same script of fallow, the same same pathway. Right, they tried legislation, they weren't, weren't able to do it. They started creating a PR campaign to kind of push, uh, push a ban on on these protected cat species, of which really the mountain lions were the target. Obviously the rest were either already protected or didn't exist in arisone of those kinds of things. Yeah, that's funny. So they were it was about mount like if you look at the early rhetoric, it was about mountain lions, right, Like they had the thing like the five most dangerous states to be a mountain lion. Yeah, Arizona was one of them, Colorado was one, correct, Montana, Idaho. And yeah, so that came on the heels of the cecil the lion stuff in Africa, right right on the right. Right after that kind of fervor died down, h s US released the report called the five Deadliest States from Mountain Lions, and they had some junk science in there and some stuff that just doesn't make sense, and they started pushing this PR campaign. We need to protect America's lion. They called America's lions and pardon my interruption, but Brian you um I pointed out that those are like the five stays where mountain lions are doing the best. Yeah, it's got the best habitat and the best harvest, so yeah, that's a good thing. But they again view it as it's the deadliest thing. Yeah, and so they flip it. And if you looked at their report, I'm using our quotes, um, it compared a ten uere harvest statistic to a one year population statistics. So if you're the media looking, you're like, oh my god, they're killing all of the lions out there, you know, and they, you know, America the top five deadly estates. As journalists and somebody who's worked in that world, lists are great things people love, especially for online consumption. So that got picked up by everybody and spread. They didn't include that, like, for instance, that Colorado has vastly more lions than ever before right now. No, no, no, No're not gonna include that stuff. It's just that emotional reason to take it away. But what was fun about it They were talking about mout It was like a mountain lion issue, but they made it like an all cat issue. And I think to the extra confused the situation is they included that it would be a ban on hunting or trapping for things that aren't in Arizona. The Canadian links. The Canadian links has never been document in Arizona. And they're throwing like jaguars which are federally protected and that are already federally protected. There's maybe it would I think that most people would be shocked if they were to learn that at this back in right now, there's more than I mean, ten is probably a big number for how many jaguars being airs, though it might be closer to one or two. But it's just like a fun little twist to put that in there. Well, yeah, because they can manipulate the media. Then then they can go after that emotional argument and say they're killing endangered, endangered cats. We want to stop this, you know, make sure protect these endangered cats, and so well yeah, okay, well they're already protected. But the next not even there at all or not even present. Well. The the unique unifying factor of all five of those states that are the five deadliest, they're all five ballot issue states. They're all states where they get the ability to bring a ballot is ship if they want. Yeah, so it's all five of those states are are states that that gives them the pathway forward to bring a ballot miship just like they didn't mean, I mean the way the state constitution set up, he gives them the ability to to put an issue before voters, where some states don't allow that. Some states don't have direct access to the ballot. So you feel that the the lot, like the cat hunting band in Arizona was an hs US led situation, though they didn't do it under their own name in Arizona, but it definitely was. I mean, we have the application that has their name on it with the h s u S email address when they registered it for the ballot. But what was the group they created to spearheaded Arizona's for those wildcats something wildcats, Arizona's for wildlife maybe wildcats, but that's what they do. They create a front group and they have their state leader, their state h s u S leader becomes the chairperson, and then they gather around that and then make it feel local and make it feel local. It's not I mean, they it was ninety eight percent of their funding was something like their funding was directly from Washington, d C, H, s U S headquarters. They just strike that pen and to get it on the ballots to bring it in front of the voters. To bring in front of the voters, you have to cross the thresholds signature gathering. Thresholds, Yeah, signature gathering. What does that look like? So in most states, there's two ways you can qualify an issue, right, you can you can convince the legislature to pass a bill by a wide enough margin that that will directly put it on the ballot. Or you can go out and collect signatures and meet a certain threshold of valid signatures, meaning the signature comes from a person who lives in that county or lives in that legislative district. Typically, those those very wildly right. You know, in Maine it was much smaller, too much smaller state. In Arizona, it was a hundred and fifty thousand vallot signatures in that ballpark. So what you're typically looking at, as you'll see the other side, try to get above and beyond that, because they know some of those signatures are gonna be in validated. They won't be from actual voters that have the wrong address. Those kinds of things only a hundred. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's shockingly low. And a lot of these states, what what what the threshold is to place a ballot measure before the voters, because I mean there's three millions on people in Phoenix, Rhenish. Huh. So what happened when? So they started gathering to signatures, but they didn't, they didn't hit the threshold. They pulled out. They didn't. They had some issues. I'll give a lot of credit of the sportsmen down there. Uh, they organized together pretty well. Um. They came up with a game plan to to defeat this thing. Uh, and they ran their game plan. They were successful. We went down and met with those guys early on before the ballot initiative was even um launched. Tell him, look, we were seeing the tea leaves here. We can see the smoke. There's a there's a fire coming right. You know. They've released this report, they've highlighted these states. If you look at the five states, we feel like Arizona Colorado are probably the two most likely targets because of Phoenix in Denver, because the Phoenix in Denver, because we've just gotten off the heels of winning the trapping issue in Montana, the ballot issue in Montana and fourteen so just a year after that. So we've already got a kind of a campaign infrastructure left up there. Utah has some constitutional protections against wildlife related ballot measures. We just looked at those kind of two states with the demographics shift that they've seen over the last ten and fifteen years, where the populations are located. You look at Arizona, that's a tough place to do a ballot measure. Seventy percent of the households in Arizona the TV households the viewing public, or in the Phoenix media market, you're playing for one media market that drives costs way up. So, you know, we look at these states, you can kind of you can kind of predict where you think they're the other side's gonna go. And they they're looking at their own data and they're looking at their own plans and campaign ideas and trying to figure out where they're gonna go. Um. But yeah, the guys down there did a great job. They put together a campaign plan that was designed to try to put up roadblock to keep them off the ballot. Um Ultimately, the other side didn't hire a signature gathering firm, they were unable to do so, and that that that drastically hurt their their efforts. Unable to do so for what reason. So there's only a limited number of signature gathering firms in Arizona, and and and the sportsmen were working with one of them already, and so that precluded them from working for the other side. And so what you're what you're dealing with them is you have to bring in a signature gathering firm from another state. And that's not unusual, right when when they qualified the bare issue in Maine in hs US used a group out of California to come up and do it. But in Arizona there's a little bit higher. Okay, you're getting stuff now that raises all kinds of questions in the best possible way, signature gathering firms. I mean, there are companies that specialize in getting legitimate signatures to move ballot initiatives. There's companies that make a ton of money doing that, just tons of money doing they just run the logistics. Do they run the media? No? No, typically not typically you see that done by other consultants. But typically these guys are in the business for for for qualifying issues. And then every state's got them guns for higher. Yep, they go out there and higher and you pay. Some states you pay by the signature. And that's the interesting thing in Arizona, right, So Arizona passed a law of it, and you no longer can pay by the signature. So instead of saying, you know, for every signature that you get, will give you a dollar, and you don't. You're not paying a salary, you're not paying an hourly wage. You're just saying for every valid signature you get, we're gonna give you a dollar or two dollars or whatever the case might be. In Arizona, you have to be an hourly employee, so that that creates a level of infrastructure. The organization has to have to be able. Who have those people be employees? You know, you gotta do tax forms, you gotta do this stuff, and you gotta have HR and payroll and healthcare and all all kinds of stuff. Right, it's a little bit different standard than a lot of states. The Lost States don't require you to be an hourly employee. So that created a little bit more of a barrier and reduced the number of potential firms down to just a handful, and so, uh, you know, my my my opinion is that the other side got a late start on actually talking to these firms, right, they thought it was gonna be an easier time to qualify than it was. They felt like they could do a better job with volunteers than they did. And uh, you know, one thing leads or another and you run out of time, and so they wind up having volunteers go out and set up out in front of the whole foods. Yep, what have you? Yep, I mean to pull pick them out, but I just know that that was the place they were doing signature together and the zoo and wherever else. And the volunteer goes out there and starts gathering signatures. Do you want to protect these endangered cats from being slaughtered by you know, cruel hunters? And how many how many signatures did they hit? We don't know. I don't know because they never submitted them, right, so they could have had five thousand, they could have haddo in the fact that they they suspended their campaign, they just believe they didn't have very many because they didn't even they didn't even submit the signatures to the state. They didn't. They never crossed the threshold. They didn't come back and say we've got, you know, ten percent more than we need and we didn't get enough valid It was an issue where they didn't have enough to even submit the minimum threshold. So every single signature that they had was valid signature and they gave to the state. You have to hit on a percent to get the issue qualified. It wasn't even that they didn't have enough to even submit the base level signatures. How could how in the case of Arizona, how we're sportsmen? How are you? How do you battle that? Because there's nothing to battle yet. It's just like all they're doing is that they they have people out getting signatures. Are you playing like a like a like a pr game to game these one and fifty thousand people that they need to sure there's there's different methods, there's different um tactics you can use. Right, Obviously there's the main method which was main as the state, which is is a campaign you're planning or you're basically raising a bunch of money to fund a TV advertising campaign that because you know the issue is going to qualify, saying don't sign well, no, in Maine, it was it was don't vote for it. In Arizona, Arizona, what they went for was they declined to sign campaign. Right, So they did a bunch of PR around the idea of don't sign this thing. It's not what it is pretended portrayed to be. It's an outside group from d C, it's not a local Arizona group. So they did a bunch of PR stuff like that. Do you think that was effective? It can be, It can be. It's certainly um because it seems that thresholds so low. Yeah, the d thousand vote threshold is so low that you wouldn't that that you would get it from just that you'd find like the you'd have enough like radical fringe people to account for the Sure. Yeah, you know, I think it was successful this time. You know, there's some other stuff in there, like like I said, with the paid sign gathering issues and some of the other things that campaign tried to do, and the h s US had a sex games. Let's not forget the internal turmoil they had right at this time. You know, right around Christmas first of the year, they had Wayne Poselli get get caught up in the Me too movement and the sexual harassment, and that's the last thing you want on a PR campaign as you're trying to go out there and do this when the other side can start pointing back and diverting, you know. But something to think about is right about that time, they stroked a five dollar check for the campaign. So they've suspended this campaign, but it's still structurally there with almost a half a million dollars in it, if they can reignite it any time. So it's plausible. I mean, we'll never know what really have it's plausible that they hit up against the sexual scandal. I just had to pull rain everybody and we group try again later. Yeah, when you come back with you with a longer timeline to get the signatures gathering done, you get you get a firm lined up, you know, you do the stuff up front. It's it's a it's a short term victory. It's a good victory. We shouldn't be literally eyed deal that they were able to keep him off the ballot this year. But the question now it turns to what does the future look like, What does it look like in twenty two if they come back, What are we going to do to stop them a second time? If they have a longer timeline, if they decided to throw instead of five dollars at it, or if they throw two million dollars at the qualification effort, you know, what are we going to do in the meantime to protect ourselves against that future attack? And that's what hurts us as hunters a lot. Is I mean, they're a hundred and fifty million dollar organization. They can stroke that check, no problem, it's not a big deal. And our boots on the ground in individual states were all kind of fragmented, and for you know, one state group of hunters to come up with one or two million dollars on a short period of time, it's tough deal. And that's where they're taking this as the ballot and the money fight. And they've got it because they've got grannies throwing ten dollars checks at them for saving puppies that they're not saving. You know, to use main as the example, right, I mean we just talked about it. That came up once, then incubated a little bit longer, came up again, Um, the Arizona example. So I mean, what is I mean? Is there uh educational campaign going on in the interim or two, you know, both on the public and on the hunting side of things, or how does that play out? Because if this sitting in the bank way and drop in, what what is the proactive said of this from the sportsman's angle? So there's a lot of stuff you can do. Obviously, the pr side of it's important, you know, having that messaging out there talking to the general public about you know, why these species need to be managed, why the appropriate management is done by the state wildlife agency. Um, you know, a lot of it is is a reactionary game though, right, that's the that's the great challenge of an organization like ours. We don't know what the issue is going to be next year that we're gonna work on. I can give you a pretty good idea of what I think the fights are coming. The other side really really controls the agenda in a lot of regards. Right, they get to decide where and when they launched these attacks. So it might not be it might not be Arizona next time. It might be Colorado, it might be Denver. You know, they might decide to go up and and launch our campaign there. They might do both states at once. You know, we don't we don't really know that. So from our side, it's it's really tough to kind of project and predict. You know, well, if you just do X, Y and Z for the next year, you'll be fine in Arizona. Well, they might not come back to Arizona. It might be ten years before they come back to Arizona. But what the next attack might be in in Colorado and buy in large sportsmen don't like to think about these issues, right absolutely. We just want to be out there hunting, fishing, doing our thing. But this stuff pops up. We get motivated when the boogeyman's there, but if immediate threats, but if they're gone, all right, good. When's deer season coming up? We got a hundred days. Cool, you've been shooting, how's it going? You know? That's we forget about these things and move on. And it's a bigger issue in the industry. We're talking about it. You know. Right after Cecil there was a lot of different people brought together to talk about how to be proactive and keep the next ceasel the line from happening. And this goes back to our messaging is how do you run an education campaign someplace? I mean, the messaging we get into in a ballot initiative is very specific trapping on public lands in Montana, and what's going to move the needle there? How do you apply that to hunting in general across the nation? I mean, and you don't know what which attack and it's going to be. Is it predators, is it prey animals? What's it going to be. It's a great it's a great point, right because you can you can public opinion poll people and ask them who do you believe should be the primary managers of wildlife? And overwhelmingly people will tell you the state Wildlife Agency they should make the decisions on seasons and bag limits. In this kind of thing, right, you can also ask them do you want to ban black bear hunting over bait? And they'll tell you overwhelming yes. In their mind, they separate the two issues. Right. You can ask them those questions back to back and you'll see a disparag a disparity between the two answers. And so general education general you know, uh, general campaigns that just just espouse the benefits of hunting and and talk about the you know, the benefits to wildlife into populations and all this kind of thing. Certainly that there's a help there, how do you quantify what that help is? When it comes down to a specific balt initiative, it's much more difficult to do that. And then hunters have a tendency to be really provincial. Where you tend to view m say, you hunt. Hunters tend to view what they do in their act what like how they hunt, where they hunt, as the acceptable norm, and they don't really view themselves as being players in a large national picture. Hunting is very regional, it's very cultural. It's very different, right. You used the example a few episodes ago of of the deer dog hunters in the South. The guy runs through the woods up here with a pack of dogs after some deer. It's gonna get some shots by a deer hunter. You'll be shot by a deer hunter. Yeah, but that's the culture. Well, norm Donna, that's that's the practice. That's the way they've always done it. And so those, I mean just a few states over those those those cultures can shift greatly. And so you're trying and we talk about fourteen million hunters or twelve million hunters is a collective group, but it's a collective group of of of of individual practices and individual cultures and individual you know, morals and ethics and and and and heritages. That's I think it's like, it's well, it almost I was gonna make a point, but I'm gonna also then talk about why my points not really it doesn't really matter. What I was gonna say is if you look at like a Wisconsin deer hunter. Okay, so he's in he's in part of a traditional use practice hunting Wisconsin where he's sitting in the ground blind in the corner of a field on the back forty and he hears about, oh, they're gonna ban the use of dogs for hunting deer down in South Carolina. It's hard to get that guy in Wisconsin to be like, man, I should probably pay attention to this because this is a broader thing that will in lifetime come around to involve me. Um. It's hard to get him to feel it. But it's also hard to get him to be effective if he if he does feel it, because these things are playing out on the state level. But then you have a group like the h s U S, which is this national organization base in d C. But they are going out and fighting these little fights a little localized particular fights. So it's almost like hunters, fishermen, trappers need to become more interested in like gaming on the national scale and being more proactive in view and take the same approach, right that we're gonna wage small isolated, small isolated fights in support of this bigger thing that we're involved in in our own local way. So I'll have view it like this, Right, you have to find and this is this is the struggle for us as an organization to grow and to find those members who care enough because you're talking about somebody you have to you have to have them believe even the greater good because they're not going to have an issue in their backyard every single year. You know, if you if you have a hunter in California versus a hunter in Texas, you think one's gonna be more concerned about the Anian hunting community than the other. Absolutely, So how do you convince that deer hunter from Texas to care about a black bear issue in Maine? You know, these these issues, these transcend state lines. You know that you've got to go fight the battles where the battles are, otherwise their battles gonna show up in your backyard pretty soon. Yeah, Like a guy in Texas sends money to the Sportsman's Alliance and he looks at ward that morning gets spent probably not getting spent in texts, not not not that often, you know. But that's that's the issue, right. I mean, you either have to fight the battles where they are today or or they're gonna show up here eventually. You see these things spread, right, You've seen you've seen trapping issues spread. You've seen the bear issue spread. You've seen the application of the these ese es a policy spread. You know, if you don't take them on when they come up, you're just you're just opening the door for for issues ten fift twenty years down the road. You guys bring this up a lot in your publications, is that once they win one win, it just sets the precedent, and so they just go into everywhere and going to look, we want here on this, but you know these reasons in Maine, So why would you decide any differently? And yeah, it's a springboard. It's opportunity to points that you guys aren't doing as well as they are. You need to raise your standards, you have to do better, and you play one side off against the other. And we know the wildlife management is vastly different from from from Montana to Florida. There's vastly different issues, vastly different challenges. But for them, they're going to point them and say they're not they're not they're not comfortable. Yeah, that's why the heritage argument for me, I always cringe when it comes up, because, man, there's nobody in this room that couldn't shoot a lot of holes through heritage arguing up, Um, I see all the holes in it. But also it also means something to me. It does because you are a hunters were talking to hunters, right, Yeah, we can get hunters when that threat is immediate to jump on and get active a lot of the times. But you know, it's it's to me the management side of things, you know, pumping up our biologists and look at the science is the win. But you know, how do you make that sexy enough for people to come out and say, yeah, that is this is what makes more sense than yeah, I think. Unfortunately it's not always possible. It's not always possible to sexify. Is that it works to sit to sexify wildlife the complexities of wildlife management Okay, I got two more questions for you guys. Um One, how do you weigh out Okay, you're defending hunting, trapping, fishing practices, but how do you weigh out what might seem to be a restriction? Um, how do you weigh out like where it's coming from? And for instance, in your newsletter, there's a sum up of legal activities going on, and you had a sum up of what state? Well, um, um, yeah, some of in Minnesota, for instance, where there's a bill that would expand the definition of a muzzleloader to include a scope. Okay, And someone might look and be like, okay, great, because that's like I don't know, it's it's like increasing efficacy of muzzleloaders, which one might proceed to be good for hunters because it increases efficacy and lets you do a better job. But we know in the case of when state started to adopt muzzleloader seasons, there was an add on season, so it was a way to increase opportunity for hunters to be out in the field. What was interesting about muzzleloaders they have low efficacy, so you could have your general fire arm season where you're gonna kill the vast majority of of the deer that you're gonna kill. But then you could have these add on ten day, two week, three week muzzloader seasons. And because of the weather, because of the difficulty of using muzzleloaders, you knew that it wasn't going to be a great additive sense and dear mortality, So you could increase opportunity for people who want them to go hunt. I think it's been more time in the woods. Everyone's a winner. It's not going to have a dramatic effect on your deer herd, right, So that's what gave us muzzloder seasons. So when we look when a group comes in and says when the state agency comes in and defines a musload in a particular way to have low efficacy, and then someone wants to move to be like, well, I want to put a scope on top of mine. How how do you weigh it out? Because you might view it as being well, that's an unnecessary regulation, that's like big brother telling you how to hunt. But it might be like, well, the reason we can have a muzzleloader season is because they have low efficacy, and if you increase the efficacy through technology, you're negating the reason of having the muzzleloader season. But it seems to be in your newsletter, You're you feel that this is a good thing to be able to add a scope to a muzzleloader. So how do you weigh that out? Because this is not coming from the animal right This isn't like an animal rights community issue. This is a game management issue. Well, it's certainly much more clear cut when it is an animal rights issue, right, So when when it when it is a state issue like this, you typically look to the sportsman in the state to educate them and let them advocate for themselves. But you've you've hit on the important kind of distinction here is that, Yeah, there's the balance on the on the biological side, which the state is going to look at anyways when it manages dear herds and and tries to project what that will do to the increase the take during the muzzleloader season. But what else does it do on the opportunity side. You know, we've got a declining hunting population in this country. It's an endemic problem that we've been dealing with for for multiple decades now, um, you know, and so you have to kind of balance the idea of opportunity and access with the idea of you know, are we are we using a season that was originally intended for for maybe something a little bit different than is used for now? Are we going to change that by by putting a scope on a muzzleloader? I don't know there's a clear answer to it, right, I mean, I don't know that there's you know, you can draw a clear line in the sand. You know, for us as an organization, we tend not to delve too deeply into those issues, right Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't mean, yeah, I should be fair there that this is not a marquee issue for you, right right, Well, it's like I mean, you know, it's it's it's like the debate over bows and crossbows and whether crossbows should be in in the traditional archery season, you know, bow seasons or where that you have their own season where they should be with firearms for us, I feel, but that debate, I feel is a hunter debate, Like that debate is being carried out by hunters, is not being carried out by hunters versus an often not right? Absolutely right? So do you weigh in on those issues where it's hunters debating something? No, not typically right, because we're a small organization. We're a lean organization. We don't have a huge staff, right, We're one of the smaller organizations in the conservation space. You know, you look at some of these groups, Army f and Turkey Federation, all these guys we partner with do great work, but they're mass of organizations compared to ours. So for us, you know, we have we have to fight the fights that are our our core to our mission. Our mission is to protect you know, hunters from the anti hunting and animal rights movement um. You know, so certainly where where you have hunters united in in unison on an issue muzzle loaders or cross bows or whatever the case might be in the state, we might be able to find some support to that issue. We're typically not getting into the sportsman versus sportsman debate on these things because we just don't have the bandwidth, you know. We we we we have our hands full with with these lawsuits, with these ballot measures and these legislative issues in the States. And if we could get to the point where we we got done dealing with all the animal rights and anti hunting crap, and yeah, we might be able to work on some other stuff like that, because I also a view too, like issues around technology. Okay, so issues around trail cam use, Like is it to the point where we need to where where hunters would decide among themselves that we need to get a grip on trail cam use, or hunter would decide among themselves that we need to get out ahead of drone use. Right. I feel that those like that those debates are should enjoy like some kind of like sanctity, or they should be allowed to play out in some sort of natural way rather than rather than teeing them up or framing them up in sort of this anti rolling him into this sort of like anti hunting conversation. Because I think that there are times we're gonna come up with where we're gonna be self limiting technologies in advancement of like the betterment of wildlife in general. Right, And we might make those decisions and someone on the outside of it like, oh, that's an infringement on a hunter's ability to conduct his business, or that's you dictating how a hunter should go. But we're already doing it. Anyways. We decided a long time ago not to fish with dynamite, so at the time we decided that we're not going to fish with dynamite anymore. With dynamite, I don't know if that don't adult using hunt guns. Well, at the end of the day, it comes down to management, right, So when we're kind of in these things, our position as an organization is leave it in the hands of the biologist. Give him his tool chest, let him have it. Don't take trapping away, don't take baiting away, don't take dogs away, don't do this, let him have it. If the biologists say, hey, we can't sustain this with you know, the dog harvest, we're going to limit this, or bait is being too effective, or having scopes on this, leave it up to those individual biologists in those regions to do it. Give them their full tools, though we're trying to keep the animal rights movement from taking those tools away. Yeah, that that's a that's a you did a much better job of expressing what I'm what I'm trying to say that I do. But yeah, it's um, it's sort of like looking at where's the what are the motivations, what are the motivations of who's you know, providing this idea, Like for instance, it's Montana has never had bear hunting. For how they've never had bear hunting with bait that didn't come from the animal rights movement, that came from just traditional use practices in a deep legacy in that state. I would imagine that you don't look there and think that they're making a mistake, Right, It's just like a thing that's always been they have, they have a successful bear program, and it's just how it is in that state, right, Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's that's that's where the managers come in and make those decisions, and and and that gets back to the idea that that wildlife management decisions are are wildly local too, right. You know, it can vary wildly from from you know, from the hell and of Valley of Montana down to the Bitter Root, right. You know that you get over and Ida, how you get over into Washington State. There are different cultures, there's different practices, there's different heritages. And then you think about going from Alaska to Florida or from Maine to California. I mean you're talking about vastly different habitats, vastly different cultures. Yeah, there can definitely be differences there, and you just use that like that toolkit idea that management tools, um. And that's notthing with this this like very hotly debated federal preserve thing in Alaska where Alaska has state authority to use certain management practices where they see fit, and then the federal government comes in and says we're going to remove certain tools that you have access to on specific pieces of land, and in the public telling of this, they would act as though these practices are rampant, when in fact the state usually decides not even to use the tool anyway. Yeah. Yeah, the thing, the whole Alaska preserves and uh refuge stuff. If you watch a hs US Center for Biological Diversity and all these guys blow it up, it makes it sound like everybody is hired a plane. We're shooting, shooting grizzlies from plane into dens and gasing them. All. All of these things were extreme management techniques for the state biologists to use in case they needed it, and often indigenous groups and in and in and some of the indigenous stuff. Um. But from the state side. One one wolf and the pups were killed in like two thousand nine used it once they killed they killed the adult wolves, found the den that had pups in it and because they were in a high I can't remember which disease it was area, they had to kill the pups. They couldn't take the pups and relocate them or put them in a zoo or anything. It was distemper I think it was, and so they had to kill him. That's the one time these tactics have been used. And H. S U S and CBD and everybody else blew it up, like sportsmen go up there and you know, are drinking bear and shooting out of a plane and crawling in dens with them and which is strangling pups and stuff. And I know, if I have hunted extensively in Alaska, I know quite I have never heard of uh someone using the contested practice of fact when it came like like that, you can kill a swimming caribou most places you cannot. I think there's two gay there's two portions of there's portions of two game management units north of the Brooks Range, where it's a traditional practice with Indigenous Alaskans to head off caribou at pinch points where they are crossing rivers. They've hunted them that way for probably thousands of years, and but they sell it like, oh, now, um, that's going to be going on here when it's a tool kit, like the state of Alaska has has the ability to open up that method of take, which they have chosen not to do across about of the state and there's a couple of places where they allow it because of traditional use practices, and most of the way it's sold in the media in the media is that there's this last little bastion where you cannot shoot swimming caribou from a boat. So it goes back to our message and messenger that we were talking about. That's exactly what they're doing. They're spinning it and spinning the pr and they get a lot because emotional arguments and emotional things were great in the press. They get a lot of example of the way this information came out could have been delivered in a hell of a lot better way with much better context, where yeah, we could have been delivered in a way to where the other side what wouldn't be able to take that information and run with it the way they have Because I'm getting this question all the time too, and well, yeah, well they're good at what they do, Yeah they are. And they have a ton of money and they have a ton of media connections and so they can put this out there, and once it's out, it takes off. I mean, you watch it go viral, and it's hard for us to turn around and flip that, you know, like what do we say? Well, you know, NBC ran probably the worst article about the story and then corrected. I think it was because of this digital radio program when and uh, which is I'm joking uh, And then did and then did a some weeks later, did a very sophisticated, very sophisticated follow up at it. And I was like, I was in pressing that that was a good article and that's about as balanced as we're gonna be able to get as a hunting community. The first even threw in like Bacon and Dona. It was just like they tried to act like and they tried to tie it into wild stuff. So just act like it was it was a war on predators, right. And then they filed up and did a thing where they went and actually like looked at where the practices are used, how they're u as an explanation of the management tools. Well, it's a very complex issue, more complex than management the lower forty eight even because you're dealing with, like you said, indigenous and subsistence use, which is spelled out in state law is there's, there's, there's there are different parts of Alaska's entry to the to the Union that it's spelled out some of these things that that commerce has ratified. Right, the Statehooded Act provides for a sustained use, a sustained yield policy. There you have a nilka out there that also has these these these these in roads that that allow for certain practices to take place, and the state is is supposed to manage wildlife to allow for those subsistence hunters. And so you comp can't the issue of just trying to understand what are the practices that we're talking about, and then what did the Obama administration do to change the long running practice? You know, this is this is a great idea of the toolbox, right, the state of Alaska had these tools in their toolbox up until when the Obama administration changed and stripped it away, and they were mostly never happening, that's right, never, that's right. And so it was it was a vast federal overreach in terms of the federal government for the first time in this instance, saying we're going to sever the tie between the state management of the species on federal lands and we're gonna take that back and say, you know, we just don't like those practices. Those practices are just tasteful, and you're not allowed to do them anymore. These are practices that have been reserved even though they're still able to do of the state that's right, and they're able to but are generally not doing the practices of the state that's right. And so the biggest issue for us, the reason why we sued over that whole issue, the reason why we petitioned the Department of Interior to undo the rule and they've started that process, was in doing so, they vastly changed the definition of pragator management. Right. There's a lot of comes down to the predator management side of things, whether or not you can hunt wolves in the summer, whether or not you can hunt bears over bait, or like you said, the cariboo issue where they're swimming that kind of thing. Um, But the predator side is the big one because they change the definition definition of predator management in their rule, and they changed the way it was applied. Right before the state talked about these intensive predator management issues, right, those things that a lot of folks are gonna find troubling in the media. But it's not just the idea that you're gonna go out there and take a bearer, take a wolf. But they expanded that to mean that any time, any time you change the rules that could be viewed as an expansion of predator management, that's in violation of federal rule. Now, and you can't do it. So what what in essence, and this is a silly example, but if the Board of Game in Alaska said, all of a sudden, you know what, we're gonna extend the summer wolf hunting season by one minute one minute, now, you're in violation of federal That's that's how hamstrong they would be. You couldn't change anything that would have an impact on expanding predator management. And so you're seeing these things. You know, it's it's also important to to understand that, you know, yeah, three percent of the state. If if that's the number, you can already do these practices on But you're talking about this was Fish and Wildlife Service land, and this was Park Service preserve land. It's ninety seven million acres. If that were a state would be the fourth largest state in the country just it would be bigger than Montana's express it. I mean, it's a huge, huge, vast area of land that we're talking about here, and you're really talking about the idea of them and why the lower forty eight guys should care because you have the federal government stepping in and saying, you know what, state, we got this. No longer you're you're no longer in charge of management. We're gonna take it over. We're gonna we're gonna do what we think is right. But in the case of Alaska, it's we're gonna take it over without being able to demonstrate you that you're doing something wrong. Yeah, yeah, well you can't. You can't point to they weren't able to point to a mismanagement. They weren't able to point to a collapsing population. There was like nothing to back it up. I could see if some if a state had some policy that was run some species into the ground or driving them toward an e s A listing. But and here you have a state that like really the only here you have a state where they have uh wolves and grizzlies on whatever percent of historic range so it's like an absence of a problem, you're creating an oversight issue. Be like coming into a problem, like coming in like I've I've expressed it support it be like coming into a city where there's not like a high incident of traffic accidents. They have like pretty safe traffic record, it's in line with everything else. But you come and say, like, you know what, if your road passes a federal building, I want you to change all of the traffic laws. They're kind of arbitrarily, but just because that's how I would like to see it happen. And and it's your responsibility to manage that and go and make that clear, not that there's a problem. The funny part about all this, and that's a fantastic point. The funny part about this is in the environmental assessment that the federal government did, they actually, and i'll read this to you, they actually admit that this policy could cause extra pation of certain species under some conditions and in some location. This may include either predator prey or both populations declining to a point that they are below the threshold for detection through current monitoring techniques, or they may actually become locally extrapated. They're actually admitting that that policy of changing the predator management stuff could cause some prey species to become extrapated. Yeah, like you would probably see with trying to recover desert reopening an old one, trying to recover desert big horns in Arizona. If you lost the if you lost the lion hunting management tool, you're probably gonna be kissing goodbye. Or if you lost water causlers, absolutely you're like you're kissing goodbye little isolated desert big horn population. So are you for a wild life or not? Exactly? Because all right, my last question, um, are you know the answers? I want to put it out there. Is there a potential truce? Okay, let's say get rid of bear hunting. Let's say hunters come to the table. We're like, hey, we'll make a deal. We'll quick hunting bears, quit trapping beavers. We're cool. Right, that's the end of everything. But that's the end of that's the end of this whole thing. Right, let's shake on it. Is there a truce to be made? No, we lose what are the only side giving anything up? You know it can't be a truce when when you know you're gonna say, well, let's just let's have a compromise. Right, Instead of the ten things I want to do, we're just gonna do five them. We're gonna fay on five methods. Well, we've lost that. Now you can't get that back. The truce to them is that there's no more hunting. Like that's where this is headed. Yeah, what what do we get out of that? I mean, you know, we're basically negotiating against ourselves. And that's the that's the great challenge here. We have to win every time. They only have to win once. The they win one out of ten every ten issues they put out there, they're still moving the ball down the field. You know, it's just death by a thousand cuts approach. They're gonna try stuff all over the place and they're gonna see what sticks. They're gonna take their victories where they can get them. They're gonna put them on the shelf, and we're not gonna get that back. Just like we didn't get Mountainlin back and California, it's like, we're not gonna get bear hunting back in California. Likely. Once you lose these these opportunities, they're gone. So for the other side, I don't believe there's anything to be had there for them. Why con I mean, I I don't I don't see it. Well, they came into Washington State, they banned the use of hounds and hounds and bait. Then they came back ten years later in bend trapping, So they're not happy. They just want to take it away and they want the world to run according to their belief system. I think it gets back to the idea you hit on upon earlier, Right, it's that they want to point these inhumane and barbaric and cruel whatever whatever terms they used to define the the the method of take as the reason why they're doing this. Right, we're only doing it because it's the most inhumane forms of hunting or it's the most inhumane take. But the truth of the matters, they're not okay with it at all, you know, they're they're not okay with the idea of you know, you hear about shooting a bear out of a tree or shooting a line out of a tree, but if you shot that bear eight hundred yards across the canyon. They have a reason why they're opposed that they have circular arguments. It's all circular arguments to seither. If you're using a primit of weapon, then it's a primitive weapon and you're gonna higher chance of injuring that animal and getting away, and it's suffering. If you use high tech where you gotta scope and your dialing and you can shoot it at a hundred yards thousand yards, now you're not ethical and you're not fair. So it doesn't matter what you do or say. They have an argument against the work kind of good exactly, you know. And it's in the the average deer hunter needs to care about these fringe benefits or these fringe sports just as much because one, those animals eat the deer in the elk and everything else. But when they finished with that, they're coming after the bow hunters. They had a big thing in the eighties and early nineties where they went after bow hunting, and they've been pushing looking at that again, you know. So it's they'll go after the bow hunting and say it's uh, you know, not ethical, and then the muzzle loader and they'll just keep chipping away. They don't care. It's like negotiating with terrorists. Cal uh, do you go ahead? Concluders. I'm guessing you want to get back into Cormorant that was just now we've now stone that bird. Um yeah, I mean I think the we just need to get to a spot where it's like we have kids that are growing up in non hunting families want to wanting to be the next Kevin Murphy, you know, wanting to be the next Steven Ronella and saying like hey, these people are making a difference and they're contributing, um a bright spot. Yeah, I think there's there's a hell of an opportunity there, you know. And uh, we have a lot of media out there. You know when you said like, oh, it's a war on predators, Right, man, I can sit down with Final Cut pro and YouTube and make a hell of video that shows a war on predators. Right. I'll take you up on that, go right. Um So yeah, man, I mean it's it's advancing the advancing the sport for the next generation. I'm not it's saying at all losing anything. But for example, like the Montana trapping issue, right, you guys have a picture of it up here on your wall. I was like that made my skin crawl. I hated it that I couldn't believe that my home state that would ever even come up. But when I started waiting in on that issue and um, you know, trying to do my own advocacy on it, there's a lot of folks out there that I didn't want to associate with that were some of the loudest voices. And how do we get everybody on the same page and say, hey, if you want this to exist, maybe you guys should not be talking the way you're talking or addressing the general public the way you're talking. You know, it's kind of both sides, right, Like, we can do better pr we can be our our own worst enemies at times. At the at the other end of the spectrum, we have to get off our high horse sometimes and meet in the middle. Like, right, so we got to protect these guys, but we also can't condemn them. So it's it's that in the middle we both have to do a little both sides. The Yeah, the own worst enemy argument is one that it's a huge argument and it's one that UH warrants getting into and it's it's a difficult one. It's a different one. But I think that there's a lot of people who you know, there are a lot of well meeting people who seem to provide a never ending stream of awful pr and oftentimes it's coming from a really cynical perspective where it's like, well, I'm going to shove it in their face and I think they're doing well. I think they're doing good. But a lot of times it hurts, or a lot of times it's uh selfish. You know, We've seen people construct drama in order to get the hunting community to rally around them, and now they're getting financial benefit out of it, and they call us. We're like, hey, we're getting harrassed by ani hunters. How do we do this? Well, it's pretty easy. Make your page private. Quick, quit jumping around and hold people recording, inviting disaster. I've been doing this for twenty years. I used to troll pets message boards and I still haven't got a death threat message boards. You just you just show you the Kevin Murphy got any final thoughts? Yeah, I know you haven't had an opportunity to say a whole lot coming. I know you're just absorbing, absorbing, but do you have any I've been doing some technical issues to you, my man here um A lot of these topics that we've talked about do affect the small game hunters in the central Southern States. A lot head to the north into summer. In the early fall, honey season opens up early. We had those hunting opportunities. I was in Maine grouse hunting with some friends of mine from West Virginia. In Virginia. Uh, we saw the Barry Is shoe firsthand up there. I was concerned. UM. I called back home through the league Kentucky Sportsman asked them to put some show some support up there, try to send something unding to help find this issue. Uh. There's a case example of what I was talking about earlier. And um uh we have very hunting in the city Kentucky for a long time. We didn't have it. Just when the last like ten years, I personally pen wrote the resolution so through our sportsman club, the OLBL Sportsman Club, so that you could hunt bears in Kentucky with dogs. They were starting to become a nuisance in there. They had a gun hunt slight slight gun hunting there. But finally we wrote that resolution. We we took it through the leak of Kentucky Sportsmen. They presented it to the wildlife biologists. They reviewed it says there's no problem hunting hunting bears in Kentucky with with dogs. That's something to happen. Yes, yes, I wrote them, like I said the resolution. We have a sportsman club and if you remember that, you can you can look at the game laws if you want to try to help help just those were your hunter. You think that that they may need to be tweaked a little bit, so you know, he's got to go through a chain. You just don't write something and and send it in. You get to support from from the leagal Kentucky sportsman. They take it in and and hand it over to the State Fishing Game uh Department. They review that resolution and say yeah or nay whatever, and then they'll have a vote on it. That's some good Kentucky elbow grease right there. Man. We've getting in there learning what the law is, learning how to work within the system, Engaging with sportsmen, engaging with biologists, are learning all about stuff. You know, our state motto and what we've talked about here is, you know, on our flag is is united, we stand divided. We file you know as sportsman, outdoors mon fisherman. You know we need to stay together. We do not let need to let the anti se fragment our hunting and fishing and outdoor activities join, join a sportsman club locally, pay attention to what's going on, just like you guys have discussed, but being vibe, because there's gonna be residual effects from these negative laws that impact hunting fishing that can trickle down to you personally. Put in some elga will grease, not just sit back and bitch. I like it. I love that thing that you were up doing a little diplomacy. You were in Maine, made some connections, came home and said, hey, fellas, I didn't I did it from there. I saw some of the newspaper articles they uh uh television ads. Um. I had been up there a time or two. So I had a friendship a bond with the people that I was hunting with up there. We stay in a typically a bear hunting lodge that just prints that out to us during some of his off season when we're hitting birds. I've been with some of the bear hunters up there, uh, just as um sidekick to blow the horn, and um, you know there's a great bunch of people up in mind there, and just like I said, you know, we just cannot let them fragment are hunting and fishing opportunities out there, because if if they do, it's just gonna all crumble one of these days. Ye. Speaking about how we can be proactive, you mentioned that there's a couple of states and I don't know if I caught it right, but there's a couple of states that have it in their state constitution where you can't have about initiatives mess with wildlife management. So can we get that in more states? Yeah, they're they're not that clean. It's not that it's not just a flat out prohibition. But there's things you can do. Like you look at Utah, it has a supermajority requirement vote on those types of issues, so instead of the plus one voter, you have to get to sixty or sixty three or sixty or or a higher percentage, which makes it all that more difficult. Um, there's other things you can do in in in in law and in the constitutional law that that would provide barrier, but they're very tough to get done. Um, They're tough to get done in a manner that actually provides some teeth, that provides protections right, because getting back to Cal's question earlier, they don't go after banning bear hunting. They're going after a specific meaning method. So you have to be very careful on how you write those protections and and and when you look at like these right to hunt amendments, when you look at costumes protections doesn't actually provide the necessary level of protection or are we just making ourselves feel like, well, they can't harm us? And so it's a challenge there there's some stuff we can do. Um, we've looked at uh, we looked at some stuff in Maine, we looked at some stuff in Montana after both of those campaigns, to try to suggest changes to either law or constitutional law that would provide some of those protections. But oftentimes you're you know, you're talking about changing the constitution, you're talking about running another ballotis you campaign yourselves, So you're still talking about raising a whole bunch of money, spend in a couple of years, putting a campaign together, and then going head to head with H. S. U. S or whoever else on the animal right side would would want to come to the table. And so if you if you really write of these things and push one of these campaigns that would put some teeth in and put some real protection in. You're gonna see the other side spend money because they know they're that's gonna be a it's gonna be a barrier to them coming back in the front. It could be a win. Like you said, you put on yourself and be like, all right, we got that one and it's it's you know, it's you know, you look at who used me as an example, and we beat this to death today. But like like Kevin said, you know their group sent money up from Kentucky. That that two point three million dollars be raised was done at the grassroots level. There wasn't a five dollar check coming from Washington, d C. Like h S U. S had. It was done here and a thousand dollars there and five dollars here from Houndsman out west and guys in Kentucky and people in Minnesota and all over the place. We raise that money grassroots style. It took it took a year and a half to raise the two point three million dollars. We beat the bushes, We beat the snot out of the folks in Main trying to raise that money. Those guys gave everything they had. You have guys up there who are who aren't making a ton of money giving you what they can give you. And so to turn around the heels of winning after that and come back to them and say, yeah, and now we gotta do it again a second time, to go put the constitutional protection in there. That's tough, man, I'll tell you what. It's really really tough to get those people to be fired up and engaged a second time when they've just given you the shirt off their back to try to protect their way of life. They want to get back to deer hunt. They want to get back to deer hunt. That's right. Is that your concluding? All? Right? Well for me, I guess I'll expand on what Kevin was saying. And and and I really truly believe like we're an inflection point in the hunting community that we're going to see over the next ten to fifteen years. You know, we've got this whole generation of people that are growing up today who are living in a world and they're becoming voting age, and they're all voting age right now, who are living in a world where their entire lives they have never known wildlife to be in peril. Right, we didn't have to restore turkeys. We don't have to restore dear they were on the landscape. They can't see back to the reasons why we started some of these programs, the reasons why groups like r M e F for NWT, yeah, for any of these other great conservation organizations, why they were founded in the first place. And so in their mind's eye, we've got wildlife everywhere. We don't need to worry about management. We don't need to worry about hunter Well, you know, you talk, you talk about the distinction between how do hunter's play into the management side of this thing. Those folks have no idea, They just no wildlife exists. At the same time, you're marrying that against the idea of the folks that have have created these concrete jungles where wildlife no longer lives. Are the ones who are now having the power to dictate wildlife management laws and rules and regulations, And a lot of times of voting comes down to those individuals. So I really feel like we're at that inflection point where in the next ten to fifteen years we've got to stick together. There's gonna be more attacks, There's gonna be more issues, There's gonna be a need to be involved in these issues and and and keep the wolves at bay. Otherwise we're gonna we're gonna face a drastic future. It's gonna be a drastically different landscape where I can't I struggle to think what the future looks like in that scenario. So I do think we're at that inflection point. You know, it's it's a theme we've talked about a lot today. But how do we protect that future? How do we how do we ensure that this this great experiment we've been going through the last hundred and hundred and twenty years lives on. And if not, what's that future gonna look like? What's the future of conservation look like? If if if you, if you, if you sever that bond, if you break break that tie between the goose that weighs the gold neck, right, you get rid of hunters and the conservation dollars they're pouring into into these states, into the federal government. What are we gonna do? I like it that you mentioned Nason Wild Turkey Federation in that conversation, because here, you know, on top of the billion dollars annually that goes into conservation from guns, ammunition, sporting goods, equipment, fishing equipment, and then the other you know, I don't know, billions some dollars from tags, licenses, and stamps that goes into funding wild I've at the state in every state, at the state level a group like then of you TF I think in the history of that organization, they've put it's just slightly south of five million dollars in the wildlife habitat. And we've got a lot of great work with those guys over the years. It's it's an amazing organization. It's like you and then like you look at that like the impact of the habitat work that has gone to wildlife, and you compare that to what an animal rights group is actually find an animal rights group is actually working to do the work on habitat. Like, what is gonna the thing that's going to measure the success of wildlife in this country? The future success of wildlife in this country is gonna come down to a habit It's gonna come down to habitat. That's what it is. It's not the one by one numerica, it's not the one by one mechanical removal of animals is not the issue. The issue is is there a place for them to exist? And hunters, through mandatory span and man in a self imposed taxation system and then voluntary spending are driving the habitat programs in this country. Absolutely, and that's where wildlife will live. And we'll be remissed and not mentioned target shooters in that as well. You know, you look at some of our business partners are spending. It was a Vista spends eighty seven million dollars last year and in in PR money, I mean not PR like public relations PR, like Pittman Roberts's excise tax dollars are coming back into conservation, you know, recreational shooters versus your hunter and they pitch into that fund. Yeah, it's funny that, like like you know, some little grant you live in the city somewhere and she's got like a pistol in her nightstand is paying for conservation, like yeah, unknown, Yeah, unbeknownst to her, she's paying for wildlife conservation. New Jersey cat lady was against bear hunting, wants to pay for conservation too. So yeah, we'll take the money, though, I'll tell you what go we covered a lot of ground and uh, Florida to Alaska, California, to Maine, California, and we just scratched the surface on so many different things. And and that's what's fun about these conversations because they're they're always eye openers for folks. Um these heavy subjects. That's it sucks to think about, you know, because it's it's what we all love. Everybody here loves getting outdoors and just loves enjoying that time outside. But there's so many things, everything is so complex. The basic premise behind you know, what we need from people is involvement. You know, we need every deer hunter out there involved. We need every duck hunter out there involved. They've got to understand the bigger picture of these issues. They've got to look beyond their back forty beyond their immediate hunting season and see what else is out there, see those threats, understand them. Uh, and they've got to get engaged, you know, like like Kevin said, Hey, starting your sportsman's club, joy there. Get involved at the local level. Know what's going on in your own state, know what's going on in your neighboring states and within your regions, and pay attention to those things. Um, obviously we want them to become members of the Sportsman's Alliance. We talked about, you know, if we just had one percent of every license buying hunter out there to be a member of this organization, that's an absolute game changer our mission protecting and advancing hunting, fishing, trapping. Right, we spend most of our time on that protecting side. What can we do on the advancing side? How many more states can we get involved in with with families of field legislation, how many more um, you know, youth programs can we put together? Can we get people out there, not only youth, but young adults who want to learn how to hunt, who want to understand, Hey, I kind of want to know a little bit more about where my food comes from, and hunting seems like a pretty organic process for me to get involved in and do those types of things. So, how many more advancing side of things can we get involved in If hunters start getting more engaged and we you know, we're the key to all of this. If we want wildlife to continue, it's going to come down to habitat and it's going to come down to our involvement. So we've got to get I guess a little more outside of just being a selfish hunter. And we've we've done that throughout our history, you know, I mean to Evan's point where we've got people who have grown up in generation where they haven't seen wildlife in peril. Turkeys are pretty prominent deer everywhere. Um. You know, we need that more involvement, that more engagement so that we can continue those things. We can have them in perpetuity for future generations to get out there and enjoy. Amen. Yeah, we very often, but there you go. First of all, I just just like to thank you all for coming out and having us on the show. It it's huge for us. We're a small organization. I mean there's fifteen twenty of us and that's it. You know, get overshadowed by a lot of guys, bigger groups. Um. But I've been involved with Sportsman's Alliance. I've been here for four years almost, but going back ten fifteen years when I was at ESPN outdoors dot com and editor at Outdoor Life. Um, and this is a solid organization, I mean doing the work that needs done without getting the headlines. Don't have a huge PR department to push it out and uh and do it. And like Sean said, if we had more help and had one percent of hunters, you know, we could do so much more. When it when you're talking lobbying, lawsuits and ballot initiatives, it all comes down to money. That's what it is, you know. And it sucks that it's that, but that's what it takes to win these things. And that's where the fight is. And the other side H s U, S, CBD, Sierra, all these guys have tons and tons of money that they can just drive us all out of business piece by piece. So we all need to stick together, look ahead and uh, you know, take the fight to where they're at. And you guys have a regular annual membership program. Yeah, if you go to Sportsman's Alliance dot org, it's right there at the top under Alliance Membership. Just click on there and join the basic membership level. It's thirty five dollars a year. You know, it's it's right there. So it goes up from there. There's yeah, and then there's clubs. You know, you're Sportsman's clubs. You want to be part of it, you can do that. We business partners. There's anybody that wants to be a part of the alliance. We're we're allies. What's the public sorry, what's the publication you guys put out? And how often that's our that's our newsletter that goes out to the members. It's uh every two months and so we call it a Sportsman's monthly every two months. So it kind of big pictures stuff in the feature well down to the legislation and members and the businesses that support us. It's worth thirty five bucks. You just to have someone keep your prize to what's going on. Man, we'll take we'll take more than thirty No, I understand, but it's it's a way for people to know. It's it's easy you think about that. It's it's a pack of broad heads, right, that's right, it's thirty five bucks. It's it's good insurance on the future of our our way of life. Right. You're talking about trying to trying to quantify what our group does in the protection and aspect of who we are. We're you know, we're not like Army f for NWTF and that they've got a critter, they've got a tangible item you can wrap your arms around. You're doing habitat work, you're restoring a population of a species. We're kind of selling insurance, you know, we're kind of selling a protection way of life. We're like the fire department. Right, nobody wants to pay taxes until your house is on fire. You want to pick up the phone and call somebody who's gonna come help you. And so we don't have those tangible items. We're not doing the conservation work. And then the habitat work that these groups are doing, they're doing a fantastic job at that. That's not us. What we're doing is protecting the way of life that that supports. And so for us, it's a little bit different argument. We're in the same space, but coming in to put fires out. Man, that's right, So we're coming out from the other side. Yeah. We spend a lot of time pushing um and I will continue to do so. Pushing those you know, the advancing the agenda of wildlife groups, advancing the agenda habitat groups and that stuff is extremely important. But I think it's also important to stay to stay in the game and stay in the fight on on protection of rights, protection of hunter rights. Man. Yeah, it's a two, it's a two. Pronged battle that everyone that hunts and fishes needs to needs to pay attention to. Alright, guys, I appreciate you've given us so much of your time. Thanks for joining us than you

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