00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: The meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com, f I R S T L I t E dot com. 00:00:40 Speaker 1: Before I even introduce today's guest, I'm just gonna get something awkward out of the way because people might be able to feel the awkwardness in the room between me and Chili. Cut it with a knife. I just had to. Now, I just had to do an investigation on Chili. I had the subpoena his on X record. I had a subpoena. 00:01:03 Speaker 3: No, you didn't nothing, I gave it to you. 00:01:07 Speaker 4: He could have subpoenaed you. 00:01:08 Speaker 1: A subpoenaed his on ex track M. I was talking about a spot where I took Chile and she she's like, oh, you know a little over west of there. I'm waiting, yeah, and get to look and he's like he thought that, he thought that. He thinks that if you take him to a spot, what what becomes private is the route to get there, not the spot. 00:01:33 Speaker 3: That's not true what I said. 00:01:37 Speaker 1: Meaning if there's a point on a map and you're like, well, we came in from the east, Chili be like, okay, so if I come back with my buddies, I'll just make sure to go there from the west. But my investigation found that he was sort of correct. He was sort of in the okay and sort of not unless he unless he said, at this point, I need to turn my tracker off. 00:02:05 Speaker 3: If I ever showed Steve. 00:02:07 Speaker 1: Paused his tracker for a minute and then went about his day and then clicked it back on. There's That's all just want of people be quite. If they can say they can feel at home, they might be able to feel the Chili changed the body language. 00:02:23 Speaker 5: Look in the camera, make eye contact because right now you're you're giving off a very guilty air about you because. 00:02:35 Speaker 3: Look, I gave you some intel you did. 00:02:39 Speaker 1: I appreciate that intel, but you got it through crooked means. 00:02:43 Speaker 3: That's not that's subjective. I So the intel is you were telling Steve about the deer that's in He was. 00:02:53 Speaker 1: Telling about some stuff from them. No, he was telling me about some stuff that I'd never looked at. So that's why I'm not mad, because now I'm glad. 00:03:00 Speaker 4: That he told me that. 00:03:01 Speaker 1: Okay, And what I might do is make you a little line. 00:03:06 Speaker 3: Like don't cross this line. 00:03:09 Speaker 6: Don't You're gonna make me a line on public land. 00:03:16 Speaker 3: Which I can I can't cross. 00:03:18 Speaker 1: I'm not getting anything. I'm not getting any like righteous in the nation. I'm getting nothing from Cal. I'm watching Cal and see if he's got an opinion. 00:03:27 Speaker 3: About as high as they go. 00:03:29 Speaker 7: I haven't heard enough from Chile to understand what the whole situation is. I mean, I'll tell you right now, I'm thinking about going into a spot for Thanksgiving that I know some people hunted in almost a decade ago, and they haven't walked in there. And I was talking about that with a buddy of mine and he's like, well, let's just not bring that up. 00:03:56 Speaker 1: I always thinking about explaining this. The other day took my boy and now that's gonna be a little I took my boy and his buddy from high school to seth spot and we gave my boy's buddy a real talking to about it. No good well he respects, you know. Yeah, we gave a real talking to and I almost went into I was almost gonna tell him, like an add of detail, saying, the situation you're in is this might prevent you from discovering something in the future that you just know about on your own. So when you do that, you're you're sort of saying, well, I would have found out about that anyway, but now I'm I can't. 00:04:41 Speaker 5: Yeah, I appreciated when we hunted with Cal's buddy a couple of weeks ago. I met him maybe five minutes prior to him just looking at me in the eyes and saying, I better not catch you in any of these places every again without you asking me first. 00:04:58 Speaker 1: I just get out there. I was given some very frank I was given some very very good intel eleven years ago to the ten year point eleven years ago, and I would not dare. 00:05:17 Speaker 4: Do that unless I knew that those guys were. 00:05:19 Speaker 8: Dead as soon as all of this on public land. 00:05:25 Speaker 4: Mm hmm. Interesting, Thank you very. 00:05:30 Speaker 1: But it's not like it's a whole thing. Okay, it's a whole thing. 00:05:34 Speaker 6: I do feel I do feel a little guilty, But one we weren't hunting the same drantage. 00:05:39 Speaker 3: And two. 00:05:42 Speaker 1: You were looking over into my zone. 00:05:44 Speaker 6: You get on any top, you can see for miles on any rich. 00:05:50 Speaker 1: So do the homes like. 00:05:53 Speaker 6: And also, it's not like I brought more people in there. It's not like I brought anyone in there. 00:05:58 Speaker 4: No, you brought the guy that I in there. Yeah, so it's like twice as. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: Bad because you both are morally you both are morally bankrupt. 00:06:08 Speaker 5: Or it could be half as bad because they're both splitting the sin. 00:06:13 Speaker 1: Split the sin is among like if two of us go, it's like being a little bad. 00:06:19 Speaker 9: Yeah, okay, So so that brings into question whether ONYX should post where all of the extremely high density hunting locations are to help people out, because there are locations all around the National Park where you'd be shocked at how many people show up to the same spot every day, you know, and hunt sometimes fifty yards from. 00:06:44 Speaker 8: Each other outside the park, outside the park that day, and that were going on for over one hundred years because as they expanded the park, they just move that you know, that firing line to the new boundary. 00:06:59 Speaker 7: So it's funny that bring that out because of a friend of mine was like, hey, I can't go in there. But he's like, I got a spot you should go check out. 00:07:10 Speaker 1: And if someone talks to you. You never heard of me. 00:07:13 Speaker 3: Man exactly. 00:07:14 Speaker 7: And I looked at it on the map and I was like, that looks like a spot where you go in and you're going to be within one hundred yards of ten other dudes on the same ridge. 00:07:26 Speaker 3: Because I'm like, I'm looking at it on. 00:07:27 Speaker 1: The map, one of them secret spots. 00:07:29 Speaker 7: Yeah, the only place to go is right here. And he's like, that's where those guys killed those bulls. 00:07:35 Speaker 8: Yeah. 00:07:35 Speaker 3: I was like, uh huh, weird. 00:07:40 Speaker 1: A moment ago, you heard the voice of today's special guest, Rick Wall and former former that's the kind of we like, former Yelso National Park senior bison biologists who did the role for seventeen years of monitoring. 00:07:57 Speaker 4: Can we say. 00:07:57 Speaker 1: Buffalo, yes, you cool that you know? Correct? 00:08:00 Speaker 4: People in the. 00:08:01 Speaker 1: Parking Absolutely not who performed that role for seventeen years. And this is where I mean Oftentimes on this show, we like. 00:08:08 Speaker 4: To explore where. 00:08:12 Speaker 1: We like to explore what I will call what I tend to call wildlife politics very cool, meaning where where wildlife issues take on almost political tonality. Where wildlifeishes become a partisan issue or wildlife issues become something to fight about. 00:08:30 Speaker 4: Where you get billboards about wildlife. 00:08:32 Speaker 1: Issues, wildlife politics. There's like wildlife management and then wildlife management's very close cousin. 00:08:38 Speaker 4: Not even that's not the right analogy. 00:08:40 Speaker 8: It's it's like wildlife management is really driven by politics and it's been that way for decades. There you go, and conservation, on the other hand, is a little less partisan because you see people very supportive of conservation to wildlife. They like the idea, they like the idea of it, they may not like the methods to get there. 00:09:02 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:09:03 Speaker 1: I brought up on that point. I brought up a bunch about in observations over the years, is there's not a politician in America who would not like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. Absolutely absolutely, And they were probably not aware of how controversial the actions that he took were, and that if someone took those actions today, they would call them a communist and they would threaten them and they would have to have security people outside of their home. 00:09:36 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:09:36 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, uh, Roosevelt did what he did then today and then you know, during my time trying to stand up for a wild bison and yellowstone and allowing them to you know, move across public land. 00:09:49 Speaker 8: We talked about that often whether after particular public meetings could we be seen going to the bar for a beer because we were a little nervous about, you know, the heated discussions that go on in those those debates about what you can and can't do to preserve wild bison on public land. 00:10:07 Speaker 1: Speaking of heated discussions, you're gonna have real problem with Chili Cool. Not only is he in trouble for what this now, but I'm just curious. I want to set the tone. Okay, Chili. So when you hear the Chili and seth thank you are are and have current and former tag holders for the Gardener hunt. Oh do you look at them and think you sons of bitches? Or do you think like, oh, that's cool. 00:10:35 Speaker 8: You know, hunting has been a tool for wildlife management for one hundred years. 00:10:40 Speaker 4: Uh huh. 00:10:41 Speaker 8: And when we debated about you know, opening up you know, bison hunting on the North boundary, we thought that hunting was going to be a really good thing for you know, allowing the animals to go a little bit farther and wider than just the park boundary. 00:10:57 Speaker 4: Yeah, and that. 00:10:58 Speaker 8: We'd get a great deal of support by the hunters to come out and, you know, and argue with the landowners, argue with the state Game Agency to come up with creative ways to manage the hunt so that they could expand the population boundaries or the distribution of the animals, so that there could be hunting like what I heard you guys talk about ten minutes ago, on a larger landscape, and it seems like it's much more like competitive hunting to see who can be the first one to shoot the first one that steps across the park boundary. And the hunting that I envisioned back in two thousand and nine when we were very supportive of hunting wild bison never exists, never came about, understood. 00:11:46 Speaker 1: So we're gonna get into that. That's the story I wanted to do, and I don't mean to cut you off. We got hit on a couple of quick bits of listener feedback. But that's the story I'd like to mainly dive into with you. Is that that that's a brand that Grand that Grand Bargain did not it never panned out as yet. 00:12:08 Speaker 4: There, it's not Chili's fault. 00:12:12 Speaker 3: On Phil's part. 00:12:14 Speaker 1: Like a murder podcast we had, we had the kids on that. We had a bunch of kids on the show recently and we did a podcast called Our Girls Are Here to Kick Your Ass and uh uh my my daughter, Yanni's daughters, pottery, Pat's daughter, who else we have? That was it for daughters? And we were laughing about my daughter. One time we're walking to the wood squirrel hunting. I hear behind me because she's eating a piece of deer ship thinking it was some kind of chocolate, and the skybrooed in. He had a hell of a time with his kid. He said he had a kid from twelve months to three who wouldn't stop picking up ship to eat like they became like a specialist. 00:12:55 Speaker 4: I had a dog like that. 00:12:57 Speaker 1: But he said that nothing bad ever happened to the kid, specifically for Elk, nothing bad ever happened. 00:13:05 Speaker 4: So there you have it. 00:13:08 Speaker 1: Oh, I keep saying, he Anna Anderson. 00:13:12 Speaker 4: I guess she wrote her name now, But the kid was the kid was a he. 00:13:17 Speaker 1: The person that wrote in was his mother and he this kid liked liver, big baby, real healthy, no nutritional deficiencies. Weaned on wild game like liver and had a taste for elk. 00:13:31 Speaker 4: Shit. 00:13:33 Speaker 1: We should have not got a job, especially the problems we had with Max earlier. Today down here wants Max to the job. 00:13:47 Speaker 3: Around here today. 00:13:51 Speaker 1: This this is a here's a really surprise I had. This is like I kind of don't understand how this. Maybe maybe Calmel's more about sort of like the evolution of this, but I know Cal's reported on it that Australia is South Okay, South Australia is just flat out banning archery hunting, private, public whatever, like banning archery hunting. And someone's asking the question is not so much like what do you do about something like this? And I have like the how the wheels of law turn in Australia, I have zero idea, but here saying I had made a comment one time when we were talking about the Proposition one twenty seven in Colorado, and we were talking to some houndsmen who would have been affected Proposition one twenty seven, to remind folks for the eight thousandth time, was a push from a push to ban Bobcat and lyon hunting in Colorado. It was that that proposition was defeated after after it was defeated. We had interviewed a houndsman and we had asked, like, what would you really have done if it after your whole life spent with this discipline, what would you have really done if it became illegal? And he said how he commented, you know, half joking that a law like that is a good way to make an honest man dishonest. And this person's bringing up like, if something like this happens, what is your take on how like, how would you react to it? Sort of meaning would you just bowhunt anyway? Uh? Currently, prior to this band, here's how fine tuned it was, bow hunting was allowed on private property for non native species, of which they have a great quantity in Australia. Non native species rabbits, hairs, fox's goats, deer, red deer. However, this upcoming band bowhunting will be illegal. This seems so uh you know, I remember a move. Remember we had that guy who's that kind of h he's kind of a controversial figure in the if you can be controversial in the broadhead world. He is doctor ed, Oh, doctor ed Ashby. Do you remember when there was a country in Africa that did not allow bow hunting and he was doing a bunch of efficacy. 00:16:21 Speaker 10: The area I think he was in was Quazulu Natal, if that makes sense, and. 00:16:25 Speaker 1: They were doing these efficacy programs to bring in bow hunting. Right now, this is the first example I've heard of. I'm familiar with people bringing in archery seasons. This is the first example I've heard of eliminating bow hunting. Because especially funny because so many people would be like, well, that's. 00:16:44 Speaker 5: Ethical eliminating bow hunting for non native species on private land, Like it was already a very narrow opportunity. 00:16:51 Speaker 7: And that's right, So like the context does matter. I mean, my perspective on this is it's just clearly another step in eliminating hunting altogether. But you know, it's like you're like, oh, really, the animal welfare people who always advocate for the elimination of hunting are all of a sudden concerned about ethical hunting, That's right. It's like, that's not really what they're concerned about. But their argument is like, well, is hunting a wildlife management tool. If so, let's treat it as an effective, efficient wildlife management tool. And you're in a country where you can hire, you know, people who professionally eradicate game at night using all sorts of manners and means, but you know, rifles with suppressors and taking only headshots. And it's like, well, if you want to eliminate the game or manage the game, do it in the most efficient way possible. Yeah, and or the most humane way possible, which is you know, I think we've discussed that at a gazillion times. Just an as nine word to use on things like this, in my opinion. 00:18:10 Speaker 1: So that's the argument, is there's a like the argument would coming from the people that want to see it gone and be like, we agree that there's some control that needs to occur with non natives, but we'd like to eliminate any's sort of like sporting flavor and do it in a more systematic, procedural fashion with trained professionals. 00:18:33 Speaker 7: Yeah, And so like in this guy's example, he's like, I have small acreage property that I have permission to hunt, but firing a high caliber rifle would be displeasing to the neighbors, right, and that it'd be like, we'll use a smaller caliber rifle with subsodic ammunition and shoot him in in the ear. 00:18:56 Speaker 3: Right. 00:18:56 Speaker 7: Problem solved why do you need bow hunting? And the argument would go on and on. Right. 00:19:01 Speaker 8: Yeah, so hunting is also a cultural activity that people have an opportunity to engage in in a manner that would be similar to our ancestors. And so it's it's kind of both a management tool for game agencies to manage abundance and distribution, but from society's perspective, it's a way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your family were descendants of the long hunters or you know someone like. 00:19:30 Speaker 4: That, so that you know it's a pride kind of a thing. 00:19:34 Speaker 1: I think that that that perspective. I've never even been to Australia, but we get a lot of emails from Australia, and that perspective about hunting seems to be absent from discussions in Australia. It's like you you see a lot of things about in Australia is at It's like issues of a lot of the conversations are like issues of control, controlling non natives, controlling non natives, and even like contra virtual things like if kangaroos are shot. 00:20:03 Speaker 4: You see there's I hesitate use example because there's. 00:20:07 Speaker 1: Examples like this in the US, but an example like if you're shooting kangaroos for depredation, you can you you can't utilize any resource from the kangaroo. But we have versions of that, meaning if you kill a bear for getting in your garage out of season, you don't that's not your bear, like you don't send it off to the tax ermis it becomes the property of the state's right. So we have you know, we have versions of that, but that that sentiment seems to be more widespread and more kind of leading the discussion in Australia, then perhaps here and there's like doesn't seem to be a lot of the hunters we hear from express a lack of any kind of acknowledgment of the culture of hunting and with wildlife managers and feral managers in Australia. 00:21:04 Speaker 7: But so that we should answer the question like what because it's kind of an advocacy question, right, It's like, how do you stick up for yourself if you want to maintain bow hunting in the state or region that they're in. One super interesting case is the waterfowl Like maintaining a waterfowl season was recently under attack in Australia, and there weren't just on paper, there were not enough waterfowl hunters to really effectively advocate for themselves. 00:21:42 Speaker 11: Right. 00:21:42 Speaker 7: It's like what we talk about here in America is like what we need to maintain healthy hunter populations if we're going to maintain hunting, because if we dip below a certain set of percentage points, like it's just not going to be valuable enough to listen to hunters in a political sense. And in Australia they were in a very real sense going to lose their their ability to waterfowl hunt, and they were able to. And again, hunters firearm owners were not a large enough political group on their own to effectively advocate for themselves, but they were able to get support from the labor unions and trade unions because a large percentage of the labor and trade folks were younger, disposable income, liked to go out and do stuff outside. 00:22:42 Speaker 4: Oh, so they found representation from. 00:22:45 Speaker 7: From a broad, big enough political group where people were like, oh, wait, all the electricians and plumbers and those guys. 00:22:53 Speaker 1: There aren't many, but a lot of them are here. There aren't many, but I'm friends with a lot of them. Yeah, I remember that was one of the first times I had really seen it artier or not. That in the state of Washington was one of the first times I've seen the lack of participation get weaponized. And it was around some trapping bands and they were just making a lot of noise about well, look, how few people do it, you know? And I'd never seen someone like actually use that as the argument to not be able to do it, meaning no one's really doing it, so. 00:23:29 Speaker 4: Why should you be allowed to do it? 00:23:31 Speaker 1: It feels that important people would be doing it, and be like, so you'd be more comfortable with it if there's a lot of few. H Here's a story out of Mississippi. This one's This one's interesting because you see this so many times in different ways. I remember they did has to do with mislabeling fish and restaurants, and I remember some years ago, quite a few years ago, this piece came out that they went and they went and sampled red snapper, some organizations sampled red snapper and it was I'm not exaggerating, I think it was seventy eight percent of red snapper was at red Snapper because it's mangrove snapper, it's I don't know, name a bunch of snappers. 00:24:10 Speaker 3: Uh Couberra, that's a cool one. 00:24:12 Speaker 4: I'm sure like. 00:24:14 Speaker 1: A bunch of snappers non red snappers, you can't tell them apart. I mean, like, like I'm saying, if I made you like a fried up some snapper and I had a blue line, a mangrove, a mutton right on down the line, and a red snapper, and I said, like, okay, sort them all out by taste. That's a tough task to do. So I think that all these different snappers in the marketplace, at some point someone was just being like, yeah, it's red, red snapper. It's all red snapper. Here's an egregious example of mislabeling. And this ain't even close. Mary Mahoney's old French House in Biloxi, Mississippi, been in businesses nineteen sixty two, in a building that dates to seventeen thirty seven, was passing off to Lapia as a grouper. 00:25:09 Speaker 12: Come on, that's dear shit. As dear me, I've eaten a lot of to Lapia. 00:25:21 Speaker 1: Not a lot. I've eaten enough to know a group of uh five years of probation in order to pay one point five million dollars in fines. 00:25:33 Speaker 10: They got locked, so that's deserving geez. 00:25:37 Speaker 1: So what they came after they okay, they had a criminal fine of what makes sense, So you go like, well, how do you arrive at that number? A criminal fine of only one hundred not only a criminal fine of one hundred and fifty thousand bucks. But uh, what they came after him about is, like I guess, like a cost discrepancy thing, a four fish of forfeiture. 00:26:01 Speaker 4: That's a hard word to say, for dynamic. 00:26:03 Speaker 1: For forfeiture of one point three million dollars for fraudulent sale, so not even fine, but basically saying you have been bilking people out of yeah, you know, buying this for like seventy cents a pound, or the hell tilep he goes for when buying groupers. 00:26:20 Speaker 4: Probably, I'm guessing. Yeah. 00:26:23 Speaker 7: So I wonder if on the menu, you know, it said like market price, you know how those restaurants do that. 00:26:29 Speaker 5: I'm really curious how this got started, if it was a disgruntled employee or a patron with a really refined palate. 00:26:38 Speaker 1: It's just like, I don't want to get anybody in trouble one time. We're in a very remote Alaska town that is not on the road system, and we're stuck at an airstrip and there's like a little place you could stay and eat there and like a lot of knights, they don't have any customers. And I remember he had a chicken el fredo. He's like, I have chicken el fredo, and we all sat down here to eat that ain't chicken. Like I've eaten enough spruce grouse. Spruce grouse one, but I appreciated that. 00:27:12 Speaker 7: We just right before flying out of Wichita, Kansas. UH two days ago, well, Peter Koon and I were at a restaurant and Mexican restaurant and they had skirt steak on the menu. I was like, skirt steak awesome. And the guy's like, how do you want that cooked? And I was like, well, there's only one way to cook a diaphragm. And he's like, medium rare is how most people get it. And I was like, well that's I'm like, what cut is it? And he's like, well it comes back here off the end of the I'm like, oh, that's a flank steak. I'm like, okay, sounds good. 00:27:52 Speaker 1: So a little more cold around this six they did it for six years. They sold fifty eight thousand and seven and fifty pounds of tilapia imported from Africa, India and South America at what they're calling premium at premium prices. Jeez, there's another article I was going to get into, but I'm not going to get into it. But long and short of it is, it's out of India, northern India, so from the from from far away, not Indiana. For you people that just heard Indiana India wildlife, this is a thorny one and you could picture this pissing people off in America. Wildlife researchers in India who are looking at relations with like Asian elephants, asiatic tigers, Is there any other kind of tiger? Tigers have trail cams out and part of the purpose of the trail cams is to see how their women do a lot of gathering in this community. In India, women spend a lot of time gathering natural resources in the wild. So the camera program is meant to monitor not just predator prey relations, but to monitor how area women use resources. And the women are very intimidated and don't like it and have changed changed a lot of their habits, Like they traditionally sing while they're gathering resources because there's a risk of predation from tigers. They traditionally sing, But women reporting that they don't feel comfortable doing that now because they have to be out doing their resource extraction on camera. And it's changed their it's changed their desire to be out, it's changed. It's impacted how long they liked to be in the woods, what they do in the woods. And they're reporting that, like the surveillance, and they're like, well, it's important for us to understand how people utilize the resources. Picture in the US, if they said, we're gonna we want it. We're curious how hundreds what hunters are doing. So we're gonna go and put out tons of trail cameras to watch how hunters are going about their business. 00:30:11 Speaker 7: Well, I mean that's already changed a lot of I'm always looking for cameras. There's so many stinking cameras around these days. 00:30:18 Speaker 1: Yeah. I sneak around. I always catch them and I like go round back. 00:30:21 Speaker 10: You know, I probably pete in front of trail. 00:30:24 Speaker 3: Yeah I did that a couple of weeks ago. Article pointed right at me. 00:30:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's part of this article and they put it up online. They caught a woman. They caught one of these women pee in the woods, and it wound up on What's happening? Oh no, yeah, and humiliated. Yeah. 00:30:41 Speaker 7: When we were hunting Phelps and I and Rick Smith and and Max. When we're filming in Washington last year, we all stopped and you know how, one guy starts PM and everyone I've good time to pee. Two and look around and yeah, trail camera right there got all of us. I don't think that's why I'm next calendar. 00:31:03 Speaker 3: We're on a meet or shoot one time, I think it was Florida, and I get a message on Instagram. I see you guys are hunting you know area? 00:31:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, he he because he had a cellular camera and I recognized this. He just yeah message. 00:31:22 Speaker 3: I don't. I don't think you put it online. Well maybe he did. 00:31:24 Speaker 7: But if I could just add, like a blanket regulation there was any sort of remote roadless wilderness designation, all of that come hunting season would just get up like a blanket dropped over the top of it was zero cell phone reception for hunting season. 00:31:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw it there. Trying to take a bunch of federal money recently. 00:31:47 Speaker 4: You'll appreciate this. 00:31:48 Speaker 1: Are our guests here to increase cell phone service to national parks whatever? 00:31:57 Speaker 3: I believe on that right, That. 00:31:59 Speaker 8: Means you're getting a different kind of visitor to national parks, and the kind of wants to build exactly. They kind of doesn't really want to go there for the resources. They want to be able to take pictures and send them to someone to say, look where I'm at. I'm at this location and I found this animal. Things of that nature. God, I mean they've been doing foolish things like that for a decade or more, trying to get as close as they could to the elk with the large antler and do the selfie and then they get budded in the rear from the antler. 00:32:29 Speaker 4: Kind of a thing. So what drew you to working at the park? 00:32:32 Speaker 11: Like? 00:32:32 Speaker 1: What was your professional path to land to land at Yelso National Park. 00:32:36 Speaker 4: Oh, you know, that's a very good question. 00:32:38 Speaker 8: I should have thought about that and knew you might ask that, But I think it was more just fate than anything else. I grew up in Colorado and moved to Jackson Hole in the early nineteen eighties to be a trail hand on the trail crew because I'd love to be out in the wilderness. And I started to see that my undergraduate degree in biology wasn't quite enough and I needed to find a way to go to graduate school. And I picked U of M and Montana State to look for graduate school projects. And I landed here at MSU studying harlequin ducks. 00:33:17 Speaker 1: Oh really, I did. 00:33:18 Speaker 4: I did. 00:33:18 Speaker 8: It was a beautiful project. My professor wanted me to study rabbits at the National Engineering Lab in Idaho, and he said, no, I'm going to do my own project. I'm going to make this as hard as possible, and I'm going. 00:33:29 Speaker 4: To do something cool in the wilderness. And he helped me raise money. 00:33:33 Speaker 8: And I just fell in love with the National Parks by you know, as a trail hand, and then decided that ecology was sort of my calling because I loved nature, and I went to graduate school and fishing wilife management here. My first job was back at Grant Teeton as a biologist at Grant Teeton, and I did a big circle around the National Parks and ended up back in Yellowstone and it was I think it was fate as well. I came to do a backpack trip from the south end of Yellowstone Lake to the Buffalo Valley and Togi Pass, Big Wilderness, the most remote places in the country. And I stumbled into a friend of mine that told me pretty soon we're going to be hiring a biologist to do bison work around here. You should apply, And so I kept in touch and applied, and by golly, I got the job. So I knew what I was getting into because bison hot. I knew it would be hot because as a graduate student here in the mid eighties, there was animals starting to leave the park. They were being harvested by fish Wiliff and Parks, auctioned off at the Fish wilf And Park's regional office. 00:34:46 Speaker 4: Around here. 00:34:47 Speaker 8: It was big business, big news all over the place, and so I've been I followed it in newspapers most of my career, and I thought, oh, you know, I want to be somewhere. 00:34:59 Speaker 4: Where biology is interesting. 00:35:02 Speaker 8: And the boy, did I fall into an interesting spot at Yellowstone trying to conserve wild bison. 00:35:08 Speaker 1: Yeah. So can you give a real high can you give a real high level snapshot being as fair as possible to all interested parties of sort of the the landscape around the wild bison conversations that are happening in the West and how the part fits into that. 00:35:33 Speaker 8: So I've heard stories from everybody, and I think even on this podcast in the past, once upon a time, wild bison, you know, across you know, America, and there was a military strategy to conquer the West, and the military strategy was to eliminate bison and that would be our way to battle that all of the various native cultures that lived all over the West. And it was successful, and the thirty million wild bison that was three hundred years ago became a couple dozen animals at Yellowstone and maybe one hundred or two hundred up in the far north of Canada. Before you know, someone decided to try and turn it all around. And at Yellowstone it was the Army, because the Army ran Yellowstone at the turn of the last century. So the army hired a bison tender and he just happened to be one of the five ranchers around the West that went out and gathered. 00:36:39 Speaker 1: A few calves, and was that Buffalo Jones. 00:36:41 Speaker 8: Buffalo Jones yep. So Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population, and they got a small group of animals from Texas. I think it was three bulls from Colonel Goodnight, and then he had some connections up on the Flathead got eighteen females from the Flathead Valley and they're from the population that's now the National Bison Range in that area of the state. And there was twenty one animals brought to Mammoth sort of a display herd. 00:37:15 Speaker 4: They reproduced. 00:37:16 Speaker 8: Well, there was the couple a dozen animals in the interior of Yellowstone, and this whole restoration project, you know, got on the board by Congress saying, you know, we got to save wild bison. We can't just let them, you know, go extinct. And conservation of bison was part of the enabling legislation of Yellowstone conservation of most of the wildlife as well, because it was all being hunted out and I don't think anyone ever dreamed that they would recover to the level that they have. And in the nineteen forties, Yellowstone had an abundance of ison, well at that point in time, an abundance of ice, and was a thousand of them. So they were seeing that in order to make this conservation of this animal on a broader scale. They started giving away bison to farmers and ranchers and preserves all over the place, and the conservation of wild bison kind of went down a different path than elk and deer and sheep, because as we took animals from Yellowstone, like we took deer and sheep and program from Yellowstone, spread them all over the country, but we didn't put them in fences. 00:38:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, they all got moved as wild ass. 00:38:35 Speaker 8: Wild animals, free roaming for as far and let the animals make the decision on you know, where they want to migrate to who lives because they make good decisions, all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason, the country decided that in order to save wild bison, they all had to be within fences. So I think the bottom line is humans forgot how to live with wild bison and forgot how to respect the nature of wild bison on the landscape, and it was easy to just put them in fences. So for a hundred years now we've been saving wild bison from the Great Plains, even as far east as. 00:39:17 Speaker 4: The East Coast. 00:39:18 Speaker 8: There's preserves in Pennsylvania and Virginia in places like that, But. 00:39:23 Speaker 1: Let let's narrow in on that okay question for a second, because this is something I don't know the answer to this. This is something that baffles me, and it would be I think it'd be a great project for a really like a great project for a serious historian, like like I get it in a broad sense, but I'll lay out the question be like, we recovered grizzly bears as a wild animal. Yep, we recovered bighorn sheep as a wild animal. We recovered elk as a wild animal. I'll point out there were no elk in New Mexico. That's right, right, there was a time when there was zero elk in New Mexico. Yep, right, we recover elk as a wild old animal. Wolves get recovered as a wild animal. I would love like to really know the discussions and decisions were made. How did they arrive at? Like everything this like great Noah's arc of creatures will all be politically wild, except you. 00:40:24 Speaker 4: I don't have an answer for that either. 00:40:27 Speaker 1: I mean, I think, like the. 00:40:30 Speaker 5: I don't I couldn't find this in a document. But I think the answer that most people would arrive at is that the ecological niche of the Buffalo was filled in by cattle, right, I mean, at the same time that the planes are being emptied of buffalo, cattle are coming in. And I can't really think like obviously domestic sheep and wild sheep share share a same niche I guess. I wonder if it's a question of the power of the lobby, but like that would be my guess is the ranching industry would have not particularly appreciated releasing giant bovine great editors. 00:41:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it even but you're I guess it's a gut Yeah, I think that that's that's a huge part of it. But even if you look at like isolated inner mountain valleys that aren't even great cattle country, and at the time, probably my guess is there was not a big cattle presence, for instance, in the Upper Yellowstone Valley. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, early nineteen hundreds, was there a big cattle presence. 00:41:46 Speaker 4: In the Upper Yellowstone? I think? OK, yeah, I mean in the Paradise Valley. 00:41:51 Speaker 5: Definitely, Nelson's story brought cattle in there, like in the eighteen. 00:41:57 Speaker 4: Eighteen seventy. 00:41:58 Speaker 1: Yeah. I was going to point out and you already shot down my you know, shot down part. I was gonna point out that like that that even in areas where that that conflict wouldn't have been is acute. But you're right if people were, if people were running cattle by that by at the time when we had them all bottled up. You know, I've even I've even mentioned before that like there was a moment when we knew where they all were, right, that's right, somewhere between like eighteen eighty two, between eighteen eighty two and nineteen whatever, there was a moment when someone could say, like, I know where they're all at. Yep, I know where everyone is. And in that instant, we became really comfortable with them as something that we know where they're all at. 00:42:45 Speaker 4: That's exactly right. 00:42:46 Speaker 1: And since then we don't have any that we don't know where they're at. 00:42:48 Speaker 4: And I think, I mean, I. 00:42:52 Speaker 7: Look at Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, all of them have elk hunts, right O. REMEF has put elk out there, and all all of those states have a geographical area where if those elks step out of that geographical area, it's an over the counter thing for landowners. Oh I didn't know that, Yeah, because there was an agreement made based on agriculture, this is where the elk are going to be, and we're all okay with that? 00:43:17 Speaker 8: Is that true? Oh? 00:43:18 Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean I do. 00:43:20 Speaker 5: I do agree with you that I have not seen like a history of the debates, like the actual Like I would love to read letters and debates within agencies about how it was that bison became. 00:43:39 Speaker 1: Not wild or unwilded, recovered, but not. 00:43:43 Speaker 8: I know, there's some congressional record that would be valuable to get a hold of in the late eighteen hundreds, because that was part of George Catlin's perspective that we needed to save, you know, some great national park where we could save, you know, all these wildlife species that were be hunted for assistance at that point in time. 00:44:04 Speaker 1: Go ahead and continue your story. I just wanted to ask a little about that, because that's the thing, like of all the interesting parts of what you're telling us, like that decision that we as a culture, as a society made. 00:44:16 Speaker 4: Yes, it's never been adequately explained to me, and I don't think it ever could be. 00:44:20 Speaker 8: And I think competition for grass is probably a key component of it, and that there's been a probably an unrealistic perspective that you could restore thirty million again and still have the same level of you know, human occupancy on the landscape. But there's no reason that you couldn't at least restore a couple of populations. Like cal pointed out, you know, we've done it with elk in a few places where they disappeared many years ago. And in fact, there was a hunting club in Utah and early nineteen forties that got a group bison from Yellowstone and took them to the Henry Mountains of Utah, turned them loose, and they wanted to have a wild population. And I'm sure they felt like, well, you know, this is a remote location, they'll probably just stay here. And I think the first thing they did is, you know, move fifty or sixty miles, all right, so they have a new location. But Utah's figured out how to do it, you know, and it's not been easy, you know, there's been a lot of conflict with the local ranchers, but they've learned how to do it. And they have a very sporting bison l hunt for managing abundance and distribution, and bison really are sort of an indicator of where the most productive habitats are in that area. 00:45:40 Speaker 4: With that they occupy, I. 00:45:41 Speaker 1: Mean they'll find it. 00:45:42 Speaker 8: They'll find it. Yeah, they'll definitely find it. So I think that you could do that in a few other places, but you'll never be able to have because of the ecology of wild bison. They do compete with habitat, with cattle, with humans, with agriculture. And in order to do our national mammal right, you know, it would be valuable to do just like what you described, designate an area that's legitimate for wild bison to distribute around the greater Yellowstone Area and allow the culture of you know, tribal hunting and you know, subsistence hunting by the rest of us. You know that like to go out and do something that our ancestors did. But I really think that the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming felt like they had their eye on the Yellowstone Restoration and wild bison from the very beginning and have always assumed that they would just be kept within the national park, just like we've done at all other national parks where wild bison are. But all those other national parks have fences, so wind Cave bad Lands, all those places have fences for keeping their buce Teddy. Roosevelt has fences around it. 00:47:08 Speaker 1: So at Yellowstone, those parks have taken the responsibility of fencing those creatures in well, that depends on whose responsibility is. 00:47:17 Speaker 8: I don't know whether those are fence out or fence in states. You know, in Montana it's a fence out, and if you don't want the wildlife or you don't want your neighbor's cattle on your property, you're supposed to fence your own property to keep that kind of stuff off of it. So Yellowstones one of the few National parks that's large enough in the lower forty eight states that can allow ecology to play its. 00:47:44 Speaker 4: Role on the landscape. 00:47:46 Speaker 8: And we don't prohibit bighorn sheep from staying in the national park, and we don't prohibit elk or deer or pronghorn or any of the other you know, native species from leaving the national park. But we do have you know, laws in Montana that say as soon as they leave the national park. It's an agriculture department that manages wild bison on Montana lands. So that was done primarily because of a cattle disease that was brought to the area a bacteria that you know, affects the reproductive track of mammal, large mammals, brucellosis, And. 00:48:32 Speaker 4: That's kind of been the. 00:48:35 Speaker 8: Arguing point as to why bison can't be restored as wildlife like the other animals. 00:48:43 Speaker 4: And I think that it was. 00:48:46 Speaker 8: I mean, it was somewhat legitimate because initially the farmers and ranchers, you know, they want to make a profit, and so if you're in business for yourself and you want to make a profit, you don't want things to come to your ranch that would cause mortality, you know, to your your profit making machine. 00:49:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it causes hafers to abort pregnant. They'll aboard their first uh, they'll abort their first calf. 00:49:15 Speaker 8: Right. It's yeah, by and large, that's what it is. It's a little more complicated than that, but you know, it's not every one of them. 00:49:22 Speaker 4: But then there's a. 00:49:23 Speaker 8: Few that just never recover from the disease. But by and large, animal gets infected, gets pregnant, aborts pregnancy, gets. 00:49:33 Speaker 4: Immune to the disease. 00:49:35 Speaker 8: Any other future pregnancy, they're gonna have their calf. 00:49:39 Speaker 4: It's gonna be fine. 00:49:40 Speaker 8: But a farmer is gonna you know, that's a that's money in the bank for him if he loses. 00:49:46 Speaker 7: A couple of years ago, I did right along with Montana Fish and Parks. And it was during the most successful buy some harvest hunting season two years ago. 00:49:58 Speaker 3: And there is nothing right. Yeah, So. 00:50:02 Speaker 7: If you go by the numbers, it was like an unbelievable amount of iis and taken out. 00:50:07 Speaker 1: Buffalo killed. 00:50:10 Speaker 7: Comparatively, but it was still an over you know, Buffalo remained over an objective for like that carrying capacity number that was agreed to. 00:50:21 Speaker 8: Yeah, the social carrying capacity was a court negotiated number in a court case between nineteen ninety five and two thousand. 00:50:31 Speaker 7: And there's like a starting line and a finish line on that gardener zone and at the finish line, so the starting line would be the park boundary. 00:50:41 Speaker 1: Yep, you're paying attention to chili, oh yeah. 00:50:45 Speaker 7: And the finish line is the end of the negotiated outside of the park bison range. 00:50:54 Speaker 8: Right right, and state calls it a tolerance zone, the taller people call it a conservation area. 00:51:00 Speaker 7: And at the finish line was and this is something I had never heard or seen before, but at the finish line. Was the state brand inspector what? Yeah, and his job is to be the guy on the finish line and make sure no no bison crossed the tolerance zone. 00:51:21 Speaker 1: Yeah, which I was just like I was he having any action? 00:51:26 Speaker 3: I think he was. 00:51:27 Speaker 7: He's a pretty hands on participant down there as far as like, you know, he's he's rounding up people and making sure that they know where the buffalo are. 00:51:37 Speaker 1: But was he getting that year? Was he getting stuff that was making it through the zone? 00:51:43 Speaker 12: You know? 00:51:43 Speaker 7: I didn't get a talk with him. 00:51:46 Speaker 8: I believe a few animals went beyond that line in the sand, if you will, but not many. There's so many hunters now, and I would say that the state offers like forty four permits or something like that. I haven't checked lately, but forty okay, somewhere in that neighborhood. But the trib is much much larger. Yeah, the tribal numbers are much much larger. There's no limit really. Each tribe issues a tag to anyone that wants won, and some tribes issue four or five tags to various families if they want to gather multiple bisons. 00:52:21 Speaker 7: Yeah, because they can still provide meat for uh, for everybody. 00:52:25 Speaker 4: Absolutely, yeah, for the whole family. 00:52:30 Speaker 1: Let's hit on this brucelloss thing for a little bit because there's a lot of questions about this that that I have. I've heard other's voice, guys like me who are buffalo advocates and who would like to see a much bigger tolerance zone. Okay, uh, a bigger tolerance zone and more of them. 00:52:54 Speaker 4: Okay, A lot of people would like to see that. 00:52:57 Speaker 1: Now, I will say to people, don't get me the whole brucellosis thing, because elkev brucellosis. You nailed it, So, okay, did I nail it? Is there something I'm not seeing? 00:53:08 Speaker 4: Can you speak to this for a minute? I can't speak to that. That's a really good question for So. 00:53:13 Speaker 8: In nineteen ninety five, when governor of Montana sued the federal agencies to not let any bison leave the National Park because some were infected with brucellosis, the assumptions were because we didn't have good science on it. All, the assumptions were that bison were the primary vector for infecting the system, and that elk were infected because buffalo were infecting the elk, and if we could eliminate brucellosis from the buffalo population that lived in Yellowstone. Brucellosis would just disappear. 00:53:50 Speaker 4: In the elk. 00:53:51 Speaker 8: They were the super spreaders, exactly, the super spreaders exactly, that's a good term for it. 00:53:55 Speaker 4: They were the Gavin Newsom's of sure. 00:54:00 Speaker 8: Sure anyway, you know, that was the assumption of the time, and it was a bad assumption, you know, to begin with. And the Park Service argued with the US Department of Agriculture about that assumption. 00:54:15 Speaker 4: Because in Jackson, holl. 00:54:17 Speaker 1: Can you give the background on that assumption, like how is that? 00:54:20 Speaker 4: Like how has that arrived at? I don't know. 00:54:24 Speaker 8: I can only suspect, and I suspect that it had to do with, you know, like a capitalistic perspective that you know, buffalo compete with our cattle, and we got to get rid of buffalo. So we got to find some sort of legal way to show that, you know, we have backing to get rid of it. And an analogy is that the people that really argue to preserve wilderness use the Wilderness Act, you know, things like that they and they use the Endangered Species Act, you know, as a sort of a political tool to try and win you know, in court kind of a thing. And you know, brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa and places like that. So it's ironic that we colonized the Gray Plains with cattle and we brought this disease with many some of those cattle, and that disease is something that is a problem for profit. And the USDA started in the nineteen thirties to eliminate brucellosis because back then there were a lot of people that milk their cows and they had brucellosis and they would create infection in humans. So because it was a factor to humans an ungula fever and so it creates sort of you know, by late in the day you feel lethargic and you have a fever. 00:55:53 Speaker 4: It creates some i think other infection. 00:55:58 Speaker 8: Within the lymph system of the human being to basically drain energy from you. So you recover at nighttime, you get up in the morning and feel good, but by you know, sometime during the day you're starting to feel tired again. 00:56:17 Speaker 1: I was I got that problem. 00:56:19 Speaker 8: There was a lot of humans across the country and that the infection actually caused problems to the military all the way back when there was Mediterranean Wars, and it was called Malta fever originally when it was first discovered because an army over in the little tiny, you know, island of Malta. 00:56:39 Speaker 4: You know, all the soldiers were. 00:56:41 Speaker 8: Getting you know, infected because they'd been drinking milk from you know, the cows and stuff around the afternoon. 00:56:47 Speaker 1: You can't fight, that's right, that's right. 00:56:53 Speaker 8: So, so brucellosis is a worldwide issue, especially in developed countries. But pastation made it a bit of a non issue. And as we pasteurized milk over time, you know, we eliminated the bacteria from milk products. And the USDA was very strategic and going around the country from nineteen thirty to they started getting states bruce losis free in the nineteen sixties and seventies. But what what they would do is go to the farm, test the farm animals. If an animal had bruce losis. They'd make the farmer get rid of all their cows and they'd pay them, you know. 00:57:32 Speaker 4: Some price. 00:57:34 Speaker 1: And that's how they tackled it. 00:57:35 Speaker 4: That's how they tackled it. 00:57:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, And so can you talk about transmission from one animal to the next. 00:57:40 Speaker 8: Yeah, the bacteria manifests itself in pretty concentrated forms in the amniotic. 00:57:47 Speaker 4: Fluid of the reproductive track. 00:57:49 Speaker 8: So whenever there's a still birth or even a natural birth, you know, an animal infected has a full term calf, the calf is born, the amniotic sack is spilled out, all that fluid becomes a transmission factor, and they. 00:58:04 Speaker 1: Got a desire to lick it. 00:58:05 Speaker 8: For absolutely, yeah, absolutely, almost all of the you know, the mammals of that nature that are hurting, you know, grouping type animals. 00:58:13 Speaker 4: You know, they're in groups. 00:58:14 Speaker 8: So when they see that first calf born, they all want to go see it and you know, see. 00:58:18 Speaker 4: What's going on. 00:58:19 Speaker 8: And as the first ten or fifteen percent of them are born, they're super curious, and then you know, the fascination wanes and by your time you're halfway through the breeding or calving season, they're not as interested in that because it's not new anymore. 00:58:35 Speaker 7: So they do they eat that they after birth, yep, And that's all. 00:58:40 Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely, that's a survival mechanism for deer and elk and pronghorn because it cleans up the site, you know, and predators don't smell the offspring, the newborn fawns and calves. They don't have any odor for a short while, so you know, mom cleans up the burs, site stashes the calf. There's no smell in the predators you know, have to more visually identify their prey than to do it through smell. 00:59:08 Speaker 4: So so and there's no reason just to like, you know, go back into this this point again. 00:59:17 Speaker 1: There's no reason that there's no thing about transmission to a cow like cattle cow. There's no reason that it getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from a bison's after birth. It's sort of like more concentrated or more likely to transmit to a cow than if a cow were to interact with the elks after birth. 00:59:46 Speaker 8: It's all at all the biology is all the same, all the same, and so. 00:59:50 Speaker 1: So if elk was infected in a cow lick that after birth, it's just as likely to transmit. It's just as likely to pick up that bacteria as if it came off of Oh yeah, absolutely sign a super bacteria in a bison. 01:00:03 Speaker 8: And there's some small concentrated areas of the Paradise Valley where the elk down there test positive at like almost fifty percent, and then other places in the system it's lower than that. And then the argument in the nineteen nineties, after you know, the state of Montana became brucellosis free, was that we can't afford to let our cattle ranchers have you know, any new brucellosis infection because of that. You know that policy I told you about if they get caught and one of their cows has brucellosis, the policy was, well, the USDA comes in, makes you get rid of all your cows, and I don't think they give them the fair market value, at least not considering what the future value would have been in those animals as well. So it's not as profitable for ranchers to just you know, live on the landscape and learn how to live with with brucellosis in the system. 01:01:02 Speaker 1: My understanding too on the brucellosis issue from a rancher's perspective is that when you have free status, you're there's some testing alleviation. But when you're in a when you when you're not operating in brucellosis free status, you're there's there's a testing requirement. 01:01:21 Speaker 7: Your region is designated as a brucellosis zone or brucellosis free zone, depending on where you are. That's that's what you're saying. 01:01:29 Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, yeah, So the the debate in Montana was that, you know, a rancher in Galaton County and Park County, you know, probably had a much higher probably, oh definitely has much higher probability of that as a threat to his livestock then a rancher from Calspell, because there isn't any brucellosis affected herds anywhere near Calispell. Got so when USDA would come in and, you know, find brucellosis in a cattle herd, they would shut down sales by the state, you know, statewide. And so that's why it was a problem, you know, economically for the state of Montana. 01:02:13 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:02:13 Speaker 1: Some guy on weavo Montana like what, yeah, exactly, and so he would not be in the elk buffalo in years. 01:02:20 Speaker 4: Exactly the century maybe right now. 01:02:23 Speaker 8: So the USDA realized that that was an undue burden on that livestock industry, and in twenty ten they kind of changed all of the rules. 01:02:35 Speaker 4: Most of the rest of. 01:02:36 Speaker 8: The country had become brucellosis free industry was humming along brilliantly, and in twenty ten, USDA drew a line around basically the greater Yellowstone System. In fact, the line coincided exactly with where they thought brucellosis infected ELK occurred throughout the Yellowstone system, and said, all right, here's where. 01:03:00 Speaker 4: The thread is. 01:03:01 Speaker 8: Let's just apply this policy only in this area where ranchers are likely to encounter that issue. And so it greatly relieved, you know, ranchers from away from Yellowstone in the three states surrounding this region. So it changed the game completely in twenty ten. And so the court case between the governor of Montana and the federal agencies in nineteen ninety five was. 01:03:29 Speaker 1: That was that Governor Roscoe. 01:03:31 Speaker 4: It was Governor Roscoe, Yes. 01:03:32 Speaker 8: And so the complaint against the Feds was that, you know, if the state were to lose their brucellosis free status, it's going to affect a huge number of businessmen throughout the whole state. And so we can't let any bison leave the national park. Well, now that zone you know of acceptance anyway for brucellosis. And then new conservation measures put in place, you know, to protect the industry of farmers and ranchers within that zone, you know, change the name of change that game to the point where you know, ELK is still a threat to them and they won't lose their brucellosis status. But that farmer and rancher has to do that more intensive testing like you were talking about, And so they have to go in and test about every five or six months, and they have to have three tests in a row where none of the animals in their herd test positive. God, and then they clear that brucellosis effected herd. So it's very it's very burdens for a rancher to have to go do that, I believe, at least at one point, and I think it's still the case that USDA covers the cost of all that testing. And I'm pretty sure that ranchers round their cows up at least once a year to go through vaccinations and you know, weaning and what else, branding, all kinds of things. So at least one of those three roundups could be done at sort of the routine time of year, you know, when they do that kind of stuff, but having to do it three times in a row, and if they miss a time, you know, then it becomes four or five or six until they get to that three times in a row. So you can see that there is some economic impact to the cattle industry within this zone. So in twenty seventeen, the National Academy of Sciences came to the region and brought scientists that have been studying brucellosis all around the you know, the area and in their careers, and they looked at the issue and the questions that they were facing was, you know, is elk really a significant impact? 01:05:51 Speaker 1: You know? 01:05:51 Speaker 8: And that assumption that I talked about earlier that that would just go away if we got rid. 01:05:56 Speaker 4: Of brucellosis and bison. They disproved that. 01:06:00 Speaker 8: And the way they disproved that was to show that, you know, the elk in areas like Idaho where there's no bison interaction and the Green River Valley of Wyoming there's no buffalo interaction, there's a few places around where elk are infected with brucellosis, and they were infecting cattle of the area, and there was enough information on how elk move about the system. I heard you guys talking to Matt Kaufman not long ago, and Matt did a lot of studies with his students at the University of Wyoming, you know, with putting radio callers on and showing animal movements, and there are radio callers studies that show elk moving out of places like Jackson holl into Idaho into Montana, never even migrating through Yolstale National Park or anywhere where there's buffalo involved and cattle are getting infected with brucellosis. So it pretty much resolved the debate that elk are a maintenance reservoir of the disease, and you can't you can't just assume that solving the problem with buffalo will solve it with elk. And there's no way we're going to go around and round up every elk in the greater Yellowstone System suicide. 01:07:22 Speaker 4: That would be absolutely. 01:07:25 Speaker 1: And no one would proposed the hall. 01:07:28 Speaker 8: The elk need to go away, and that's the only way that you could do that, like they did it in the livestock industry, and they wouldn't have to do it once, they'd have to do it multiple times. I think that the industry is starting to realize that, well, until there's some sort of technology for learning how to you know, inoculate livestock, that is one hundred percent, you know, fool proof that their animals won't become infected. If they're you know, in counter of brucellosis affected birth site, then we're going to be living with brucellosis in the Greater Gilstone area. And so there's a great deal of debate among the staunch conservationists that, well, now, if elk are allowed to move along that around the system like that, why can't bison? You know, why do we have to have the conservation zone, you know, the Gardener Basin and the West Yellowstone Valley, and why can't it be that same zone that brucellosis infected elk have opportunity to roam around? And it'll take citizen debate, you know, to try and change the state of Montana's respect is to do something like that, because it won't just happen because Montana thinks that that that's the right thing to do. 01:08:53 Speaker 7: Even though elk destroy a lot of fences they do, they can still go over them absolutely, whereas the bison, well, you know, I'll argue with you on that one, Calvi because because I lived in the Gardener Basin for a long time, and I lived, you know, thirteen miles from the park boundary, and we periodically had twenty five thirty animals roll through our property of you know, four or. 01:09:17 Speaker 8: Five acres, and if you don't chase them, they'll figure out where the gate is and they'll walk to the gate. And if you go out and tell them you don't want them tearing up your new landscaping, they'll walk back. 01:09:31 Speaker 4: Over the gate and leave. 01:09:33 Speaker 8: And so I think it's a matter of humans learning how to live with wild bison, and it's inconvenient. It's more inconvenient to live with wild bison than it is to live with wild pronghorn, wild deer and things of that nature. And I think that bison as fence destroyers gets a bad name. You're right, you get to run in them and all they see the fence there, they don't even bother, They just blow right through it. 01:10:03 Speaker 7: I was I was like very shocked that day that I went to you know, admittedly one day, but there's this line of cows walking back towards the park, and you know, they'd lost a few members along the way, but they were still just just walking. And eventually the people who must have harassed them closer to the finish line than the start line came back a whole side of them, and that lead cow started trotting and just picked up steam and and she crossed the road, blew through a fence, went right through the ranch yard there, blew through the next fance, and I mean, and did so in a way that you're like, nothing would have diverted those changed her mind. 01:10:51 Speaker 4: That's right, nothing was exactly right. 01:10:53 Speaker 8: That was due to them learning the landscape and they recognized the hunters. You know, there's levels of stress goes up because they lost twenty five percent of their group, you know, ten miles behind them, and they knew where they were going. And if the hunters hadn't caught up with them and created that vision that they had just faced two hours ago, you know, they'd probably just kept walking and just walked, and they'd have gone to the gate. I'm positive they would have gone to the gate. 01:11:22 Speaker 7: I was pretty blown away though, because I was like, oh, that's a different wafer. 01:11:28 Speaker 1: For animals to act different. 01:11:30 Speaker 8: So, I mean, that brings up a good question that you guys discussed earlier about sort. 01:11:35 Speaker 4: Of the ethics of hunting. 01:11:37 Speaker 1: Well, I want to ask a different questions. 01:11:38 Speaker 4: Okay, okay, go. 01:11:42 Speaker 1: Can you walk me through that time period. I think of the the mid nineties, but maybe it was earlier that time period when the park hit a certain population of the animals, okay, where they needed to expand range. Do I understand? 01:12:01 Speaker 8: No, you got that right if you look back on over time, we brought all those animals I talked about. Oh, in the nineteen oh two was the first year they came to Mammoth. Nineteen oh seven they took you know, they filled up their capacity or of the pen around Mammoth and they moved them out to the Lamar Valley and they didn't put any fences up. 01:12:20 Speaker 4: They just let them roam. Well. 01:12:23 Speaker 8: They kind of stayed around there for a while, and the early park rangers and the old buffalo tenders used to get out on horseback and they'd chase them up into the hills, hoping that they could introduce the introduced herd to the native herd, because the native herd summered on the high plateau south of Lamar Valley up along the east boundary, and the native herd would migrate to Pelican Valley down by Yellowstone Lake in the winter, and so at the early teens into maybe nineteen twenty was sort of this you know, meeting of the two herds, and from there the Park Service thought that they really needed to, you know, ranch bison. It's the prevailing thought of how you restore wildlife populations. So they took plows to the Lamar Valley. If you go out, you can find old irrigation ditch lines. The Lamar Valley truly was a big ranch back in the nineteen twenties. 01:13:27 Speaker 1: If they were raisin grass, they were raisin grass. 01:13:29 Speaker 8: They were pushing it up with the beaver slides and stacking it all up, and then they would bring it into you know, the area that the bison could get to it, and they were helping the bison. You know, they might have even still been killing wolves and stuff, you know, in the early part of that century. Well, that was great for long term survival, and then the brucellosis issue came along. There was a bunch of up and down of population abundance because we tried to eliminate brucellosis. 01:14:00 Speaker 4: But in nineteen sixties nineteen sixty. 01:14:03 Speaker 8: Six, the park said, We're not going to do any of this ranching business anymore. We're going to follow this sort of let ecological processes play out. You know, people call it natural regulation, people call it all kinds of things. But ecology became sort of the leading edge of policy for the National Park Service, and. 01:14:26 Speaker 4: The bison knew what to do. 01:14:28 Speaker 8: You know that it was all about survival of the fittest. They knew where to go to find those old hay fields. And there are records that in the nineteen forties there was some big winters, like maybe a couple of years ago, and some pretty good size groups went to Gardner Basin. A group of forty some animals in nineteen forty three migrated almost to immigrant. 01:14:52 Speaker 1: No kidd, no kidding, They let them. 01:14:55 Speaker 8: Well, I think there was some sympathy because of how how difficult. 01:15:00 Speaker 4: The winter was. 01:15:02 Speaker 1: I had no idea they were leaving the park at that back that longer yep. 01:15:06 Speaker 8: And so about that time is when you started seeing in the historic record observations at least the sort of older males leaving the the winter range up in the Lamar Valley and around Gardener you could find a few nearly every year. 01:15:26 Speaker 1: At that point, what's the farthest you know of of a park? Uh? 01:15:32 Speaker 4: Buffalo ever making it out of the park. 01:15:35 Speaker 8: Let's see I'm guessing that's about it. The winter of ninety six ninety seven was another really big winter if anyone was around here, though. 01:15:44 Speaker 1: Oh that was that's when this killer. That's when the issue just blew up, totally blew because it was a department of livestock guys on snow machines, just dumping hundreds of them. 01:15:53 Speaker 5: That's from the Buffalo Field campaign, that's right. 01:15:55 Speaker 8: They started up about that time, and animals were on in little nooks and crannies again as far south or east? No, north, No, it's north, isn't it? As an immigrant and some of the farms around. 01:16:11 Speaker 10: How far how many miles north I live? 01:16:13 Speaker 8: So I should immigrant to the Lamar Valley? Is the audience can get us eighty miles? 01:16:20 Speaker 4: Probably? 01:16:21 Speaker 11: So? 01:16:22 Speaker 8: And bison migrate differently. 01:16:25 Speaker 4: It's sort of a. 01:16:27 Speaker 8: Combination of nomadism and migration because when you see them in the fall, they're a little bit more nomadic early in the fall, because they kind of they reach out and walk to where they think they might go three or four months from now, and then. 01:16:43 Speaker 4: They walk back like a mission exactly. 01:16:46 Speaker 8: So bison will leave like the Hayden Valley and they'll go over the top of the Merry Mountain and down into the Old Faithful area, and they might mill around Old Faithful for three or four months, and then the next time they want to move, they'll move down to Madison Junction. And there they have two avenues. They either go west or go north, you know, from that and and some of those migrations are a little over one hundred miles. So animals that you could find near the mud mud pots of Hayden Valley could end up in the gardener Hunt just outside the park. And that's a little over one hundred miles if you if you follow the route that they take, and we've seen animals move from the Hayden Valley out west, they end up out at West Yellowstone. They would get harassed, you know, and pushed back to the park. And they knew they needed to go somewhere because they're looking for that green up and the low elevator that Matt talked about, you know several podcasts. 01:17:51 Speaker 4: And the green wave. 01:17:53 Speaker 8: Yeah, they're going down to surf and when they can't get to it going west at West Yellowstone. All of that pressure to push them back into the park I think generated more exploratory behavior and they push north and gardener basins like the first place to green up unless you're at one of the hot springs all around. 01:18:16 Speaker 4: But it's that low elevation area. 01:18:18 Speaker 8: You know, it has the least amount of snow pack, it's got the earliest amount of our earliest temperature of thirty two degrees and warmer, you know, you get the green up. And once they find the green up, they'll just camp on it and follow the green up back through the elevational gradient until they get to some of the bigger grasslands in the park, and then they'll kind of let the greenup go on higher and they'll camp and make lawns. 01:18:48 Speaker 3: Is this snowpack that pushes those bison. 01:18:50 Speaker 8: Yes, it's a combination of abundance and snowpack. 01:18:54 Speaker 3: And in the. 01:18:57 Speaker 8: In the nineteen nineties, in the early two thousands, there was a thought that it was abundance of about two thousand animals that would really, you know, create that social social competition for bites of grass underneath the snow, and that some would leave and some would keep working the snowpack. And I think because of all of the pressure in the last twenty or thirty years of pushing them back into the park. What we've really done is we've made them search farther and wider, and now there's more that are the you know diggers that dig the big pits to find that the grass under the snow, and there's an ecology behind that, and that the larger animals move those big heads and make little craters for feeding in, and the younger animals with the smaller heads wait till they abandon the craters and they. 01:19:56 Speaker 4: Go over and they eat the residual. 01:20:00 Speaker 8: Groups of animals have learned how to you know, carry young animals through the winter by digging all those feeding craters and tramping down all those ski trails or you know trails for walking around. Like we make ski trails, they make buffalo trails. You pack it down and you can take your skis off and jump in those trails and walk just like they do. And so there's two or three different strategies now for wild bison to survive. You know, there's the stay in the park and avoid the hunt, and there's the migrate to lower elevation hunt looking for the early spring green up and you know, not wanting to plow through the snow, but then you run the risk of the harvest. You know, once you leave the national park. 01:20:45 Speaker 1: If you had to take a wild ass guess on a bad winter, if no one messed with them, do you think animals would leave the park and then not even come back. 01:21:00 Speaker 4: No, you think they'd go back. I think they'd go back. 01:21:03 Speaker 8: I think you'd see I mean, there's always the exception, right, sure, so you might see a few. But the way animals expand their range, and I didn't finish that story earlier, is that the bulls are the pioneers, and the bulls wander farther because you know, they're bigger animals. You know, they can't compete with the big crowds of bison that hang out in the big groups. So bulls are going to go out and look for small, little pockets of high productivity and just camp on that pocket. You know, they might live in a one acre patch in the forest of trees, but if it's a you know of marsh, you know, and super productive, you know, they'll do fine feeding themselves for a long period of time if they don't. 01:21:52 Speaker 4: Have to compete with anybody else. 01:21:55 Speaker 8: And so bulls are the much more expected pieeers. On how bison would expand their range and the females are the trackers, you know, they follow, follow footprints, they follow you know, buffalo patties. The whole works follow the trails that are left behind. And in the nineteen eighties, when the population in the Hayden Valley area grew to I think it was a little over two thousand at that point, just in that part of the park, you know, the firehole geyser basin wasn't big enough for him in the wintertime, and so they started pioneering down to the west boundary and we started seeing these rare bull occurrences in West Yellowstone and Horse Butte in places like that, And then there was some there was a couple of big snow years in that decade too, and so it was those big snow years that create you know, deeper snow pack. And in later years, during those years of deep snowpack, as you start to get longer days, a little bit more warmth, you get a little melting of that snow. Nighttime it gets who cold, Bison can't do their thing, you know, their heads don't dig ice, they only move like fluffy snow out of the way. And in fact you can see, you know, herds of buffalo walking on top of the snow and Maybruary in March sometimes with you know, significant melt and refreezing, and that's when they simply bail and they walk long distances and they follow those trails that the bulls laid down, and they go, Okay, the bulls know where they're going. Let's go find those guys and maybe there's something better at lower elevations. 01:23:46 Speaker 4: So in the mid nineteen. 01:23:48 Speaker 8: Eighties, Montana instituted buffalo hunts, you know, and a few animals were harvested by hunters and it was, you know, it was a good thing for hunters, you know, there was something knew to go out and try and harvest. But in the winter following the big fires of nineteen eighty eight, you know, two things happened. The fires burned up a lot of that summer forage production, so the animals would dig down through the snow and find black and it wasn't it wasn't what they expected. And so there was pretty good sized migrations both to West Yellowstone and to Gardner, and the hunters couldn't keep up with the harvest. So the game wardens were down there. The Department of Livestock guys were down there enforcing, you know, we don't want any bison out of the park. And I think that I think that year it was like eight hundred animals were killed by hunters, game wardens, dol agents and the park Service rangers even pitched in and helped out. 01:24:56 Speaker 1: How many what was the total population if they killed eight hundred, how many were the That's a good question. 01:25:01 Speaker 4: I have to think. 01:25:01 Speaker 8: In nineteen eighty eight, I think it was twenty five hundred or something. It wasn't huge because now it'll get to three or four, right, right, And that's where I was telling you that we thought that two thousand was the sort of number that they'd get to that would sort of drive social capacity of the system to you know, dig the feeding craves and migrate to the boundary. Well, now, because of forty years of this aggressive management on the boundary, I think that number is now more like, you know, three thousand or so on sort of average to slightly above average years. Two years ago was not even close to that. 01:25:47 Speaker 4: It was like the storm of the last. 01:25:49 Speaker 8: Three or four decades, I think, And so I would bet that eighty percent of the population. 01:25:55 Speaker 4: Leaves when you have one of those storms. 01:25:59 Speaker 8: Of you know, of the half century or greater. So that's where society has to decide, well, what is the right number to try and manage for because you know, it's easy to think that you could do it when you have below average average, maybe even slightly above average years where a bunch of animals are leaving, you use hunters to manage distribution. You know, if things got really bad, you'd put some traps in place and catch some animals, much like the park does it at Stevens Creek there in the gardener basin. The state has a trap they can set up over by West Yellowstone and they used to, you know, use it a lot when there was more migration that way. So for the last twenty years or thirty years, I think we've tried so many different things that I think we've learned to live with wild bison. And I think that we have the technology, we have the communications skill to get hunters in the right places to harvest animals. And it seems like there's interest by more and more tribes to want to go and harvest bison from the Yellowstone population because they're the remnants of the last wild herds that never were gone from this particular latinscape, and so their cultural significance is way above the cultural significance of other herds of bison all across the country. So if a tribal member of the you know, you name it different tribe that buffalo are a part of their culture, you know, were to go harvest an animal, going to Yellowstone and doing it is at the top of their list. Going to Fort Peck to do it like you did once upon a time becaun't as high on their list as going to Yellowstone, you know, to harvest and animals. Sure, so there's a great deal of national significance to preserve you know, this population because of its you know, sol remaining wild herd that never evaporated from the system in the in the history is history. 01:28:12 Speaker 1: Is it plausible that there's like a does the tolerance zone have to include major valleys? 01:28:22 Speaker 13: You know you're asking you're asking me, well, no, I think the animal I'm saying from the animals perspectives, because they're saying pointless if it doesn't include the Upper Madison, if it doesn't include the Upper Yellowstone, is it pointless? 01:28:35 Speaker 4: I think you're right, you. 01:28:37 Speaker 1: Know, so to say, like, okay, anything that's designated wilderness area is now a tolerant zone. 01:28:41 Speaker 4: They're not going to go there anyway. In the summer they might, they won't stay there. They'll need to go somewhere else. 01:28:46 Speaker 8: And I mean, yeah, a few of them, the hardy bulls, the tough guys of the population, they'll figure out how to find a wind blown ridge. 01:28:54 Speaker 1: But to open up more of the to open up more of the landscape, you have to open up the big You're gonna have to open up like tom Minor Basin, you know, in the upper part of Paris Valley, or even you know, even down to Immigrant or something like that. 01:29:12 Speaker 8: You need some grassland kind of areas that have lower elevation. 01:29:16 Speaker 1: Have something, because exactly they're giving them a ground that doesn't matter to them. 01:29:21 Speaker 8: Yeah, they're gonna go somewhere where there's six inches of snow. They're not going to migrate to somewhere where there's three feet of snow. I'm kind of like, let's go to the high country. Yeah, unless you've got hot springs. And that's why the central interior part of Yellowstone saved so many animals is the Firehole Geyser Basin has a bunch of hot springs. Even Hayden Valley has a couple of really cool geyser basins that create a melting phenomena that can they can find sedges. They're green, they're green year round, and that's good. 01:29:54 Speaker 4: Stuff for them. 01:29:56 Speaker 8: And so you'd need places like and Wyoming you'd want to preserve or identify trying to think of the name of it. 01:30:06 Speaker 4: It's called Sun Sun something. 01:30:12 Speaker 8: Just outside the northeast corner of the of the park, there's a couple of high elevation grasslands that might work, you know, And I'll bet historically, prehistorically bison out of Wyoming would venture all the way up to the high Country from that east side and would utilize some of that area as well. 01:30:34 Speaker 1: Do you know what the skull I found? No, I found a skull over nine thousand feet in the Madison's see that. 01:30:40 Speaker 8: I bet that's a probably was a bull, huh, had a radio carbon dated oh cool, And it probably was going up there in the summertime because followed the green wave the whole way to where the green waves are way up there, and there's some lush, productive, you know, places to graze in that high country area, and there's some places like that in the park where there's some archaeological sites of single animal kills, you know, up around Yellowstone Lake, and I think there's one on the Buffalo Plateau too. I don't remember the archaeological record very well. I used to rely on my colleagues at the park tell me all those stories of all those cool places that, yeah, there's evidence that bison have been in the system for basically the time they migrated to around here from the Siberia. So I think there's room for wild bison on public lands outside the National Park. I think society is gonna have to make a few concessions learn how to live with wild bison. I think that it's gonna be harder for fish wilder parks to manage wild bison than it is for them to manage pronghorn and deer. So they're gonna have to have a source of funding to maybe hire you know, a couple of problem solver types fence creuse, the fence cruse or you know. My thought is you made a great point earlier when you said we restored grizzly bears, and we've restored wolves on the landscape, but we haven't restored wild bison. And the way Fish, Wilife and Parks manages grizzly bears and wolves is they have conflict resolution teams. Yeah, you know, and there's you know, folks out of Livingston and Bozeman that work in this area, all in Region one and two. They have a couple of different teams over there. A model like that for bison could help Fishwilife and Parks deal with conflict resolutions where conflicts occur and not just trying to draw what they call a tolerance zone, develop like a true conservation area that they manage bison within. And the staunch conservations that want thirty million are going to have to recognize that that's an impossible dream. 01:33:07 Speaker 4: That is that's way, that's a waste time. 01:33:09 Speaker 8: I'm talking about that a few hundred would be something that the state of Montana could pride themselves in and say, yeah, there's not very many places in the world where wild bison can roam on public lands and be managed by a state game agency, where you know, hunters could experience, you know, the same experience that their forefathers four or five generations ago got to experience by going out and harvesting wild bison. 01:33:39 Speaker 4: And I think that if you've. 01:33:42 Speaker 8: Driven around Montana very much, you'll see these signs that say save the cowboy, eliminate the American. 01:33:52 Speaker 1: Style, saying the cowboys stop America Prayer, which even the guy that runs the American Prayer Reserve has acknowledged that it's the genius campaign. 01:34:01 Speaker 8: It's well, it's actually he's like, it's somewhat foolish by my perspective, because the skills that defined the cowboy, that the romantic cowboy of the historic past is being able to ride and heard and rope and you know, deal with wild cattle. You know, they could preserve those skills by preserving wild bison, so that in reality there should be sort of a counter campaign to say, well, you can preserve the cowboy by preserving wild bison, and then you have preserved the skills that you know, are the more high end cowboys than the cowboys that ride for wheelers to manage their cattle. 01:34:48 Speaker 1: Curtsey, you find what episode number we had the we had a guest Sean Garrity who runs the American Prairie Reserve. 01:34:55 Speaker 4: Oh yes, the CEO. 01:34:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, he was on the podcast. So if you can find that Matt Kaufman stuff about migrations. 01:35:03 Speaker 11: I was on a flight yesterday coming in episode titled The American Prairie Reserve. That's one with Sean Garrity number one and what was the. 01:35:13 Speaker 1: Other one, Matt Gaufman. We had Kaufman and Kevin Monteeth. 01:35:19 Speaker 4: We recorded it. 01:35:20 Speaker 1: Down Lander. 01:35:22 Speaker 10: Landscape of Fear Landscape, so. 01:35:25 Speaker 1: American Prairie Reserve and Landscape of Fear gets into a lot. 01:35:27 Speaker 4: Of these same issues. 01:35:28 Speaker 7: But I'm sorry, Oh, it's just my flight yesterday was full of cowboys, full of calbo. Yeah, little kids with hats, people in track suits with hats, all converging on the cowboy capital of the world, Big sky. 01:35:45 Speaker 1: Cowboys. 01:35:45 Speaker 4: And that's right, that's right. 01:35:51 Speaker 1: I had some thought about the Oh what I was gonna say about the and the America Prairie Reserve is not without its own controvert as. I recommend that people listen to the episode. There's so much going on there. It's a whole other conversation. But at one hand, it's you know, it's an organization that buys land on the open market, yep. And what they choose to do with the land they buy on the open market is try to restore the great planes and try to restore bison. Okay, so there's like there's that end of it. There's another end of it of people looking at a real threat of reduced area to hunt on because a fear that the APR's ultimate objective is to create a national park, which would you know, eliminate a lot of hunting opportunity. It's a really rich subject. But Garretty had an interesting point is, you know, they're talking about having like three or four thousand buffalo and and he was talking about the friction between the APR and the cattle industry in Montana, right, and he was putting it in numbers. He says, there are two million cows in Montana. Wow, I'm talking about three thousand buffalo. You know, there's a couple of there's a couple of just this has gotten yeah, reallysize absolutely absolutely. 01:37:15 Speaker 8: There's a couple of things that I really like about APR that have some applicability to the greater Yellowstone Area. 01:37:22 Speaker 4: And one of them is that they've. 01:37:25 Speaker 8: They've developed a sort of a subsidiary connection to a cattle raising paradigm where they're they're generating money to pay ranchers to be more tolerant of wildlife on their lands and potentially pay them more for the cost of each pound of beef that they raise, so that, you know, the conscious American citizen that really wants to preserve wildlife and doesn't buy guns and doesn't buy ammunition and doesn't contribute to conservation dollars anywhere else, could contribute to conservation dollars by buying beef from those farmers and ranchers that are wildlife friendly. And if there was someone willing to develop a franchise around here, I bet there's enough you know, committed conservationists that would do the same thing and buy products from a company that's paying farmers and ranchers to live in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and learn to build bigger fences, you know, build a way that during the infection period of bruce losis to move all their cattle to the high fence area and then preserve you know, a place for wild animals to move across, you know, twenty five or thirty percent of their property that the cattle don't go to during that sort of critical time period for infection spread. And the other thing about American prairie is by turning it into some sort of national park they could generate the kind of rules and regulations. See, national parks are enabled by Congress, and each are unique in their you know, commitment to what they do for the landscape where they're at, and like granted down National Park when they established that National Park, and there's a handful of them around the system. They preserve hunting in a proportion a proportion of the national park. An American prairie could do the same thing. 01:39:31 Speaker 4: I don't think they will. You don't think they will, No, interesting, No, I think I think that they have. 01:39:39 Speaker 1: Somewhat of a begrudging relationship with it. 01:39:42 Speaker 4: That's a personal pang okay. I think they have a begrudging relationship. 01:39:45 Speaker 8: I I. 01:39:48 Speaker 7: We kind of touched a little bit on like the societal tolerance of the hunting and being up there and kind of watching the gardener scene when it was really going off right right, there's buffalo crap all over the high school football field. 01:40:03 Speaker 3: Man, you know, I. 01:40:07 Speaker 7: Was just like, well, why not allow a certain amount of tribal hunting within the park boundary? Expand the hunt that way to you know, a very specific group of people that have the longest relationship with they're already you know, highly regulated there. Each tribe, each hunting group has their own game worden with them. 01:40:36 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:40:37 Speaker 1: I was talking about this with my kid the other day and I was saying to him and I'm not sure on the I'm not sure on all the treaty of regulations, but I don't know that a lot of the people that signed under the Stevens Treaty, that those tribes wouldn't even be able to make the claim that they could hunt. 01:40:51 Speaker 4: The park if they wanted to. 01:40:53 Speaker 7: It came too late for the treaty or just him. 01:40:56 Speaker 1: I'm saying that people that were under that treaty, there's language in that treaty that I think there's an argument that the tribes could make in the argument that that I have every right to hunt the park. 01:41:05 Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, And but and then there's a handful that would not under the same language, right right, because they weren't historically in that specific area. 01:41:15 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that the. 01:41:18 Speaker 8: The thing that prohibits them from going into the National Park is that their treaties have a language. And I don't remember it specifically, but it has something to do with claimed versus open and I'm claimed, Yeah, which is which? 01:41:33 Speaker 1: If you which part there's nothing now that's open and unclaims. So there's a there's like what does that exactly mean? 01:41:39 Speaker 7: And we've determined that it's it's I federally managed land, not state land, not Montana state land specifically, and somehow not the park and somehow not, but it's the National Forest. 01:41:51 Speaker 8: I think they've determined that the National Force fits that category. 01:41:55 Speaker 4: I know, and I would argue, based on no evidence, is so does the park. 01:42:01 Speaker 8: Well, it's it's claimed by Congress as a pleasure and ground for humans. You know, if you look at the enabling legislation of National Parks. 01:42:10 Speaker 4: And it was designated what you're seventy seven or something like that, No, eighteen seventy two? Was it seventy two? Yeah? So yeah, you know, I think you know you don't like that idea. I don't like that idea. 01:42:23 Speaker 8: I can tell I don't like that idea because the issue really is if we did it in the Boundary Lands area, there are some concessions that I think you could figure out how to do it. But what my argument is, if you do it in the National Park without and qualifying it, then what's to say it's not justified? In Lamar Valley or in Hayden Valley, and I think that hunting disrupts sort of this natural ecology of the system that it could it could create chaos, you know, and if you went there to hunt, then they might just scatter to the wind. 01:43:06 Speaker 1: I'm only looking. I'm only bringing that subject up, and it's like, to me, it's like it's a legal question, right, And I'm not advocating one way or the other. I'm just saying it's an interesting legal question that at some point in time in the future a tribe wouldn't say, we're going to go exercise what we understand to be our treaty rights. We're going to go exercise them, and if you'd like to arrest us, this is where we'll be on Monday. 01:43:30 Speaker 8: Yeah, the Crow Nation probably has the you know, most opportunity to be and. 01:43:36 Speaker 1: Then then they would be in this situation of like, are we really going to go arrest a bunch of crow right for hunting? 01:43:43 Speaker 4: Right? 01:43:43 Speaker 8: Well, they've been known to push other, you know, tribal treaty rights kinds of issues, So it. 01:43:49 Speaker 7: Could be a heck of an educational program within the park. 01:43:52 Speaker 3: Just to watch. 01:43:54 Speaker 1: When people used to go to watch the Civil War battles like you watch on the sidelines. I'd go down here to watch. 01:43:59 Speaker 4: Well the gardener win. 01:44:00 Speaker 8: The Gardener Basin was an extension, so it's not actually part of the original National Park. And I want to say the original National Park boundary was Josh really close to the where the Arches Gardener got. And at some point in time there was this program to pay farmers market value for their land because they weren't very productive. 01:44:27 Speaker 4: And I don't remember if. 01:44:28 Speaker 8: I think it was in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties or something like that. 01:44:31 Speaker 1: Again, I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating is for this because we're running out of time. I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find a way to have Buffalo on our federally managed public lands, public lands. I don't think it should cost the ranchers money. 01:44:57 Speaker 4: I agree. 01:44:58 Speaker 1: I agree, like I don't it should cost them money. I don't think it should cost them business. I think that we should find a way to do it. 01:45:05 Speaker 4: I agree. And it's like I just cannot accept that there's not a way to sort this out. 01:45:10 Speaker 1: I think there is, but in the money will follow, and I think that sportsman, like I think that sportsmen need to the same way sportsmen demanded bringing back big orange sheet, the same way sportsmen demanded and funded bringing back out in some cases black bears. I mean all around the country. Absolutely, sportsmen demanded it, paid for it, worked for it. I just don't see why hunters are not saying, let's take a look at this and let's make it be that it doesn't It doesn't need to cripple the livestock industry there. I mean, there has to be a way, but I don't know what it is. 01:45:43 Speaker 8: I think we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and give them a directive that you have to find a solution. You can't argue, you know, your your heartfelt perspective. I agree completely, and I don't think it needs to go all the way to Interstate ninety, even if that designated Brush Los zone does, because then the level of difficulty is dramatically greater. 01:46:16 Speaker 1: And maybe maybe the park, maybe the Yellow Sunaria, is not the place to do it, that's a possibility. Maybe the place to do it is the uh, somewhere in the break. 01:46:28 Speaker 3: I don't know. 01:46:28 Speaker 4: I don't know, I don't know. I think American word maybe it's somewhere to do it in the breaks. I like it. But the America Prey Reserve thing doesn't scratch my itch. 01:46:37 Speaker 8: That's a probable. It's a private enterprise. It is a private enterprise right now. But yeah, as far as the term vision. 01:46:44 Speaker 7: For landscapes, right, it's like, if we're talking about federally managed lands, then we're talking about either voluntary or some sort of large incentive program to buy out grazing leases right that are active. And and then the other thing is like landscape fragmentation. Like there's just so many obstacles around the federally managed lands that we have here in western Montana, which with guarantee, if you talk to all the people that were coming off the plane yesterday, is like the wild West, Like there's it's wide open out here, right, and it's just not right. So if we're going to do it, we gotta do it fast. 01:47:25 Speaker 1: Alaska now has five Alaska now has I think five herds. 01:47:32 Speaker 4: Oh uh huh. 01:47:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, they got the copper herd, yep, the Farewell Burn herd, the Delta Junction herd the Yukon Flats heard. 01:47:42 Speaker 8: And at least one or two of mary annual northern buffalo one one okay. 01:47:47 Speaker 10: Is hunting a lot. 01:47:49 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you can't hunt the you can't hunt the wood buffalo one that they just got going. But the intention is to the intention is that you will be able to. And that's how they got local buy in with Native Alaskans. But all their herds, their source herd was their source herd was National bis Arrange in Montana, and they turned them. They brought a bunch to Delta Junction and let them trickle out here and there. And now they have these four I think it's four, they have four managed hunts, and then they have a wood buffalo population. 01:48:20 Speaker 4: And whether or not wood. 01:48:21 Speaker 1: Buffalo are actually different as this whole conversation for geneticists to argue about. But they have this other herd they're establishing there that has the potential to be that has the potential to be three four thousand animals, And again, why is that possible? It's possible, Like you know, there's a I don't want to insult anyone that has livestock in Alaska. There's effectively not a livestock industry and much of Alaska they run them as managed hunts. People are very enthusiastic. Like you know, at draw time, everybody fills out their thing to win a chance to hunt. I've done it. My brother Danny just threw his social circle has gone like six or seven times on bison hunts, not just him holding the tag, with. 01:49:04 Speaker 4: Bodies of his hold the tag. 01:49:05 Speaker 1: It's just a part of Yes, it was brought in. It's like they're here, they're not necessarily from here. They don't have they don't have an adversary. They don't have a human adversary. That's right, And they have a lot of public buy in because the hunts are cool. 01:49:19 Speaker 10: Has anyone at this table got harvested a bison other than you? Because I know Randall's wife Sydney has a we're gonna we're gonna go to the. 01:49:27 Speaker 5: PR We're gonna go up to the APR in January and very cool. 01:49:31 Speaker 4: My wife's got a management tag for that hurt. 01:49:34 Speaker 3: And then you've had it, I Drew Gardner and West Yellowstone. 01:49:38 Speaker 10: But you haven't harvested what it takes. And then Chili has got. 01:49:41 Speaker 3: This, have the snow, we'll. 01:49:44 Speaker 10: Do you have gardener? 01:49:46 Speaker 4: I have gardener. Yeah, you've got gardner right now? This winter, this winter? All right, let's talk. 01:49:51 Speaker 1: All right, yeah, pretty quiet. I've already met one guy. Don't show don't show them your st Wait, we should all go get in here from the other direction. 01:50:05 Speaker 6: I've I've been really quiet because I'm like, there's so much I want to know, just like, because you're very familiar with the area, I'm not. But I also met a guy in Bozeman that's like, yeah, I got the same tag, and. 01:50:18 Speaker 1: I don't want to put it on podcasts. 01:50:19 Speaker 4: So yeah, Chili a veteran, so give. 01:50:24 Speaker 1: Veterance. 01:50:24 Speaker 8: So we're going to get along famously perfect branch Us Army. 01:50:28 Speaker 4: I'm an artillery ment. 01:50:30 Speaker 14: You guys gonna have that little army connections, Marine Corps, raised the Marines, and I talk about Cowardice a lot our shared connection. 01:50:44 Speaker 1: You know, you didn't to defend your country either, becase you guys war dodgers, and. 01:50:53 Speaker 8: Well, harvesting a wild bison, they're harvesting any kind of bison gives you the opportunity to teach the next generation a lot of lessons, Yeah, a lot of lessons. So I mean, I took my son out to the Green Ranch out on the Madison to Harvest to Buffalo twenty years ago. 01:51:09 Speaker 4: We had a grand time. Took us a bit a long time. 01:51:12 Speaker 6: Yeah, That's why I'm super excited about this shign because, like I grew up in South Dakota and a lot of buffalo history there too. Yeah, and my dad never did it, but he always talked about like buffalo hunts and old timers that he knew going on them, And so I think this is probably the closest thing I'd ever get to doing something like that, you know. 01:51:30 Speaker 4: And so that's why I'm kind of. 01:51:33 Speaker 8: And I don't discredit places like the Custer State Park because you know, it's it's sort of canned, but again, it provides the it's a large enough landscape that it provides the opportunity to experience what our ancestors could have experienced. 01:51:57 Speaker 5: When Sydney drew her tag, I texted Dan Flores and I just told him, you know, we're going to be buffalo hunting in January. And his response was like, that's fantastic, Randal. I can't think of a more a single, more historical act that you could do on the Great Planes. 01:52:16 Speaker 3: That's right. 01:52:18 Speaker 4: So that was like a really funny way of putting. I mean, it's hard to argue with it. Yep. Yeah. 01:52:23 Speaker 1: Uh Rick Wallen, thanks for joining, man. 01:52:26 Speaker 4: I appreciate all your insights. 01:52:28 Speaker 8: I admire all you guys. Keep up the good way. 01:52:31 Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you,