00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week we've got a Montana bighorn sheep hunting guide in some considerable heat for selling bighorn nutsacks containing, as nutsacks do, genetic material. Spencer shines some light on the new U.S. record Iupa. Yeah, the Iupa buck controversy. Oklahoma's plan to release CWD-resistant deer isn't as clear-cut as most lesser news organizations would like you to believe, plus a whole bunch more. But first, we're going to dig into them sheep nuts. 00:00:41 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:00:47 Speaker 1: What's your problem? 00:00:48 Speaker 3: Headliner. 00:00:49 Speaker 4: No, I'm dropping it. I'm like, I'm not going to say, Oh, I. 00:00:52 Speaker 1: Didn't know it was a headline thing. Yes. 00:00:54 Speaker 3: It's the one, the Steve Miller band you hate. 00:00:58 Speaker 1: Yeah. I went, I talked about that for five minutes. 00:01:00 Speaker 4: I decided, I decided I wasn't going to subject Steve to the poor man's weird Al version of a band that he hates. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: Yeah. I explained to Seth for 10 minutes. Why should he ever become aware of Steve Miller band? Why he should start hating them? 00:01:12 Speaker 5: Why should you hate him? 00:01:13 Speaker 3: Seth? 00:01:13 Speaker 1: Well, he only knows, he already knows a guy named Steve Miller. 00:01:16 Speaker 4: It ain't the one he's talking about. 00:01:17 Speaker 1: Okay. Who did him wrong in high school. 00:01:20 Speaker 3: No. 00:01:21 Speaker 5: Son of a gun. 00:01:22 Speaker 1: From high school. 00:01:23 Speaker 2: No, no, no. 00:01:25 Speaker 5: Which one of you wasn't listening? 00:01:27 Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure he graduated with my mom in high school. 00:01:30 Speaker 1: That's what I meant. 00:01:31 Speaker 4: I'll workshop something new, but until then. All right. 00:01:34 Speaker 1: That's my. 00:01:35 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:01:36 Speaker 1: So a bunch of recent headlines about a hunting guide in Montana named John Luton being fined $ 20, 000 for selling a nutsack, a scrotum, off a trophy-sized bighorn ram. Sold this nutsack to what the media is calling an alternative livestock ranch up near Great Falls, Montana. Now this. 00:02:10 Speaker 1: If you've read about this in the news, it's being treated as this kind of singular event. But this is part of a much larger, much more gravy-rich story that's been simmering for years about the ranch, the alternative livestock ranch, which is called Sun River Enterprises. It's around 215 acres. So a small property as ranches go. This place has been owned by an elderly fella named Arthur. Everybody calls him Jack. So, Arthur Jack Shoebars. But we're going to go with Jack from here on out. Here's a picture. 00:02:53 Speaker 2: Oh. 00:02:53 Speaker 1: For you people watching the video. 00:02:54 Speaker 5: That's a high-fenced deer. 00:02:56 Speaker 1: I don't know what he's got there. And I noticed it. It looks like it's dead, but then it's got its eyes covered up, which makes me think it's maybe sedated. 00:03:02 Speaker 3: That's a high-fenced buck. Yeah. 00:03:05 Speaker 1: So, interesting story. An interesting story here. Over the years, this guy, Jack Shubarth, has been involved in various schemes to buy, sell, and breed freak critters that he sells to high offense shooting operations. Mostly down in Texas. Now, one news source, you guys ever run into Ars Technica? 00:03:36 Speaker 2: Nope. 00:03:36 Speaker 6: No. 00:03:38 Speaker 1: They do a lot of technical reporting. They mention how people then track the animals on these shooting places, which cracks me up because they're shot. He produces these. He produces goats and sheep that he sells to these high fence operations. All the way back in 2013, up until about 2021, Shoebarth, Jack here, had been conspiring with others to illegally import genetic material from Marco Polo sheep. So this is the world's largest Argali sheep from Kyrgyzstan into the U.S. It seems like years ago, he had oddly dispatched his kid up to Kyrgyzstan to kill a Marco Polo sheep. And he kills one. And then smuggles home, because you can import parts, but you have to go through the societies process and all this kind of stuff. But he sneaks home the nutsack off the Marco Polo sheet. But the genetic material wasn't viable. 00:04:54 Speaker 3: Just the sack or the testes included? 00:04:56 Speaker 1: I'm sure. No, no. Yeah, the scroll, the whole complete scroll. The genetic material wasn't viable. He went back on another hunt. and brings back, smuggles back genetic material. So now this guy has illegally obtained tissue samples and semen, and he strikes a deal with this cloning place, and eventually gets 136 embryos, and is able to implant these embryos This dude's doing... You know sometimes you read about a poacher, and he does something real bad, but at the same time, you recognize that he was good at what he did? As much as you shouldn't point that out. Do you follow me? 00:05:51 Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought you were going to say someone made an honest mistake, but no, you're patting him on the back. 00:05:55 Speaker 1: Not patting him on the back. 00:05:56 Speaker 5: You poached real well, buddy. 00:05:57 Speaker 1: I'm pointing out that he. 00:06:00 Speaker 1: He's a breeding and i'll get into this he's a breeding enthusiast and was able to do as wrong as what he did might be was able to demonstrate a rather exceptional bit of technical prowess in his deceptions. 00:06:20 Speaker 5: Real high barrier to entry and he cleared it. 00:06:22 Speaker 1: Yeah it'd be like you know if you're watching the movie and i'm not equating this to to being a serial killer, but when you're watching, like if you're watching a serial killer movie, they'll often point out how sort of shrewd they were. It's a big part of serial killer things. They're like technically proficient murderers. You following me? Just making that point. This guy's figuring a lot of crazy stuff out at his place up by Great Falls. Now, To back up a little bit, this guy was in the Air Force, moved to Great Falls. It was a big Air Force base in Great Falls. And he starts breeding fish and pets at his home back in 1961 and opens up this place called Jack's Pet Center in 1966. Now, if you were to go in and here, Phil's got a picture of it up here. This is all backstory. If you were to go in and type up Jack's Pet Center, as I did earlier today, you will find a lot of online consternation about the conditions of this pet store. People just really not liking Jack's Pet Center and wanting to see Jack's Pet Center shut down. 00:07:32 Speaker 5: Yeah, that looks justified. 00:07:34 Speaker 1: A lot of people point out the poor condition of the monkey cage. And Montana made selling monkeys wrong, but apparently they kept some monkeys in the back. Very upsetting to a lot of clientele. A lot of online consternation about Jack's Pet Center. Eventually, as he gets into breeding pets and fish to supply this pet center. He starts licking his lips about selling stuff to shooting operations, high fence shooting operations. He eventually births at his place in Montana, outside of Great Falls. He births a genuine, like a pure Marco Polo sheep. So now he's sitting in possession of this sheep, which he doesn't have. He actually sought legal permission to have the sheep and was denied that permission. Then he starts obfuscating what he's doing and forging these various documents to engage in this whole sheep business. He's selling straws of semen off of, oh, I forgot this little detail. When he breeds this pure Marco Polo sheep, he names it Montana Mountain King and starts selling straws of semen out of state for high fence shooting operations who are then implanting it into various other sheep. Or guys are driving up sheep to him to have Montana Mountain King inseminate their sheep to then drive them back to their high fence shooting operations to go and sell them to clients. 00:09:20 Speaker 5: I imagine a client is like someone in Texas with a high fence. 00:09:23 Speaker 1: Exactly. 00:09:23 Speaker 5: Is that what you'd assume? Yeah. 00:09:25 Speaker 1: No, that's, that's what he's feeding mostly in Texas. Right. High fence shooting operations who are advertising, you know, these opportunities. There's also a big one in Oklahoma that I read about a lot where they'll advertise like world record, this and that, you know, kind of drugged up standing there, guys come down and kind of pretend to hunt it. Um, eventually this guy gets in a bunch of trouble. They euthanized a bunch of these critters. What's funny is it points out that when they euthanized a bunch of these sheep, the meat was donated to needy families in Montana, which is a strange detail. You'd be sitting there eating some burger and feel like that's like a Marco Polo hybrid in your burger. Over the years, he had a a couple of disease outbreaks on this place, okay? Which is part of the problem why you're not supposed to do this because what decimated Rocky Mountain bighorns in the first place is like pneumonia coming from domestic livestock and making its way into wildlife. Just this past year, a couple months ago in September, he had a, some kind of bighorn sheep hybrid escape his place wearing an ear tag. The FWP, that's Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, they put out all these notices trying to get people to call in and report the location of this hybrid sheep that escaped his place. Here we are 60 days in, no one's found that damn sheep yet. 00:11:12 Speaker 5: Oh, I didn't know that. 00:11:13 Speaker 1: As far as I know. Now, I texted, checked with people, they put out feelers, it seems, as far as I know, it's not been located. I was reading where someone from this breeding operation has a theory about what happened to it, which differs than the theory the FWP has about what happened to it, but its whereabouts are, I believe, to be unknown. So back to this new headline about this hunting guy named John Luton, who again was just fine, 20,000 bucks. So here we sit in late 2026. What he did goes all the way back to the, goes all the way back to the height of this breeding operations, sheep crimes, is in October 2019, Luton was guiding a client who killed a bighorn sheep. A lot of his operations take place up in the Missouri breaks. I'm kind of assuming he was hunting up in the Missouri breaks. The client kills a bighorn. He cuts off the nutsack from the client's bighorn and brings it and sells it to Jack the breeder. I've read that he sold this nutsack for 400 bucks. The trouble is I read it from a guy that I don't know how the guy would know that. And I can't corroborate how he knows that price. But there's at least a rumor out there that he only got 400 bucks for this thing. But has been investigated ever since. And so now here we are seven years down the road. And the guy has gotten a $ 20, 000 fine for LASIAC violations. And then a one-year prohibition on commercial hunting, commercial trapping, accompanying people, commercial hunting, commercial trapping. 00:13:22 Speaker 5: From the Montana State News Bureau, they reported that he sold the testicles for $ 400. They did? 00:13:28 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:13:29 Speaker 1: So that's legitimate. 00:13:30 Speaker 5: Yes. Doesn't seem like a lot of money. 00:13:33 Speaker 1: No, this is one of those... We got into this last time with the bobcat poachers, where people. 00:13:39 Speaker 1: They're not like, like if you go to rob a bank. 00:13:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:13:43 Speaker 1: And you, and you say like, man, if we pull this off, we're going to walk out of here with, or those dudes just did that crypto heist. Like if we pull off this crypto heist and we, we could make, we could steal 600 or sorry, we could steal $ 6 billion in crypto. There's that. But if we get in trouble, there's the caught the defined. or the jail time, and you sort of look and you're like, reward, risk. Oftentimes with wildlife crimes, you find where there's exceptionally low reward and outsized risk. Meaning, you get 400 bucks for a nutsack and your fine is 20,000 bucks. 00:14:28 Speaker 3: And he probably just thinks, it's like beer money, it's no big deal. 00:14:32 Speaker 1: Probably no big deal. There's an interesting story that this guy i was connected to so i looked him up uh here's his instagram page it's funny because when i looked him up a lot of people i know well three of them and i texted all of them a lot of people i know follow him and follow him as a as like a bighorn sheep enthusiast on instagram he's wild sheep 24 7 365 um and i i have yeah i have no idea like I don't know if he was broke. I don't know if he even understood what he was getting into, whatever. But this connection date, this individual is connected to a really interesting bighorn sheep story that came out of Montana years ago that I want to touch on because the circumstances of this story were so peculiar. The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks was investigating a bighorn sheep guide for doing various practices, various illegal practices. One thing he had been involved in was filming without a permit. Okay, so not a pretty low-scale violation. They sent out an undercover agent to go on a bighorn sheep trip with him. So here's an undercover guy posing as a bighorn sheep tag holder. While the undercover agent is out hunting. 00:16:10 Speaker 5: In 2008. This is 2008. 00:16:11 Speaker 1: While the undercover bighorn tag holder is out hunting, they do witness some violations. For one, finding bighorns with an airplane is And using two-way communications to communicate the whereabouts of these sheep. 00:16:34 Speaker 5: And trespassing on private land. 00:16:36 Speaker 1: Trespassing without permission. So this undercover agent is documenting these crimes. Which, again, these are not felony-level wildlife crimes. I'm not excusing them, but it ties into the story in the end. Because eventually the undercover guy is presented with a shot opportunity on a giant sheep. And he deliberately misses. But then they keep the investigation open. He's presented with another shot opportunity. 00:17:16 Speaker 5: The next day. 00:17:17 Speaker 1: Deliberately misses. 00:17:18 Speaker 5: And misses again. And misses again. 00:17:20 Speaker 1: The hunt goes on and the undercover guy starts to fear that they're going to be on to him. if he continues to miss, like they're going to recognize he's deliberately missing his shots. 00:17:33 Speaker 5: So the undercover agents words where he felt tension in the. 00:17:36 Speaker 1: Group at that point, I'm sure he did. Yes. I'm sure as I was witness to him, missed the other day and there was tension in the air. 00:17:43 Speaker 5: So nonplaced by Steve. 00:17:46 Speaker 1: So I'm joking, but so he, to keep his undercover status and keep in mind, this is such a coveted tag. Your odds of drawing this tag are way less. Well, your odds of drawing this tag are expressed in 0.0 something percent. When the governor's tag gets sold, the governor's tag holder always hunts this area. These governor's tags go for a quarter million. They've approached a half million dollars. 00:18:25 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:18:26 Speaker 1: For a governor's tag in this area. 00:18:28 Speaker 5: This isn't once in a lifetime. This is once in 500 lifetimes? Yes. 1,000 lifetimes? 00:18:33 Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, it's an experience that is annually, it's an experience that is tested in the financial market annually, and annually, consumers value this experience into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The undercover agent in trying to keep his cover, kills a 204-inch bighorn. 00:19:04 Speaker 5: He says that it was 100 yards away at that point and he couldn't miss a fourth time. 00:19:10 Speaker 1: Which brought a lot of. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: Which brought in intense criticism of this operation to be... You decided to kill an animal. A... a a top end trophy class bighorn i. 00:19:31 Speaker 5: See one article describing it as the state record at the time another article from recently said it's the third biggest in state history so it's somewhere between one and three. 00:19:40 Speaker 1: Yeah like breaking 200 inches with the bighorn is huge guys are gonna be happy with 180 inch bighorn so he kills a bighorn that like let's just i mean that that would have a half million dollars value on it to a governor's tag holder in order to keep his undercover thing going not when they're investigating like a murderer yeah but A trespasser and an illegal user of two-way radio communications. So all of the focus on that little bust all shifted to this particular operation with intense criticism of the people involved in this operation. And in a jury trial, the guy was acquitted. 00:20:28 Speaker 5: There were three different folks charged. All three had jury trials where they walked away without being charged with anything. 00:20:34 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:20:36 Speaker 5: And mostly because it was verbalized that the FWP went too hard in this case. They way overstepped what they were trying to pull off here. 00:20:46 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: Like something, you know, and again, it's just violations that a game warden outdoing normal operations, violations that a game warden is just going to find possible. quite easily outside of needing to do an elaborate sting operation that results in the death of a potentially state record bighorn sheep. 00:21:14 Speaker 5: And so that's the guide who sold the testicles. It's also the guide who got the $ 5, 000 fine for filming without a permit. 00:21:21 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:21:25 Speaker 1: To back up to Jack real quick, for all that stuff I was talking about he did with the Argali sheep and all that, He wound up with some fines. I think his fines were in the tune of around $ 21, 000 total. He was sentenced to six months in federal prison, but the guy was already 81 years old. In the end, seemingly because of his age and health considerations, he was just put on probation, never served a day of jail time. 00:21:56 Speaker 5: To address the $ 400 one more time, Luton said that the $ 400 from the buyer was not for the testicles. It was gas money. And that was paying, that was $ 400 for him to deliver the testicles. And he was just doing it for free. Uh, but that, that was not believed by the folks who gave him the charges. He did cash the $ 400 check though. 00:22:17 Speaker 1: You know what that's like? You know how you can still in Mississippi, you can still kill deer with poison arrows. 00:22:23 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:22:24 Speaker 1: When you buy deer poison in Mississippi, uh, to put on your arrows. It's a sedative that sedates that any contact that it's like, it's like imagine a little condom that sits behind your broadhead, any contact that powder has that deer's vascular system. If you so much as Nick that deer, that deer's dead. It's a sedative that stops its breathing. Anyways, a friend of mine was telling me when you buy that poison, It's not that it says it's legal. It just doesn't say it's not legal. The only state. It's the weirdest deal. They don't like talking about it. They don't like anyone talking about it down in Mississippi. But when you buy that poison, the bottle of the poison comes and clarifies that you are not buying the contents. 00:23:15 Speaker 3: Of the bottle. 00:23:15 Speaker 1: You're buying the bottle. It just happens to be, this is like this gas money thing. It's like you're not buying the poison, you're buying the bottle, which happens to be full of a powder. 00:23:27 Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it was a common thing in New York City when weed became legal. You couldn't deliver weed to somebody, but for like a hundred bucks, you could deliver somebody a bag that had like a Wendy's hamburger in it, plus an ounce of weed. And so that was happening quite often where folks were getting food deliveries that also came with some weed. 00:23:48 Speaker 3: That's a real. 00:23:52 Speaker 3: Titillating tale. 00:23:53 Speaker 1: You like that one, don't you? Yeah. It's got a good hook. Cause anybody, you bring up a bighorn nutsack, Phil, pull up a big, just, just for people to see. Well, Phil, pull up a bighorn ram from behind. 00:24:06 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:24:07 Speaker 5: That is a Rocky mountain oyster. 00:24:08 Speaker 1: Yeah. That is just, we just need to just quickly. 00:24:11 Speaker 8: Well, he's pulling that up. Um, this is actually sent in from a listener, Chad Crossley. And we get, we get so many great stories sent in by listeners. Um, We want to say thank you. And so in this case, we'll send Chad a Moultrie cell cam. And if you have a great news story that you think we should cover, write in. The Meat Eater podcast at TheMeatEater.com. 00:24:30 Speaker 1: That was such a good story. I think we should sweeten the pot. 00:24:32 Speaker 3: Oh, what else should we give them? 00:24:33 Speaker 5: I don't know. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: Send them something nice. I don't know. Like some t-shirts. 00:24:36 Speaker 5: I don't know. 00:24:37 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:24:37 Speaker 3: I'll put a little swag bag together. 00:24:39 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:24:39 Speaker 1: I got a question. Something that looks like we're being real nice, but doesn't actually cost the same. 00:24:43 Speaker 3: The fastest I could get. 00:24:44 Speaker 2: No. 00:24:45 Speaker 5: No. 00:24:45 Speaker 1: That's the worst picture I've ever seen. 00:24:48 Speaker 3: Omar, what's your question? 00:24:49 Speaker 4: Is that a female? 00:24:49 Speaker 1: That doesn't titillate. 00:24:50 Speaker 6: If you guys are that undercover agent, what would you do to get yourself out of shooting that big old ram? 00:24:56 Speaker 1: I would have turned to him and I would have said, buddy, we ain't actually hunting. If you haven't gotten the... If you haven't put it together, here's my badge and I'd like you to set your weapon down. 00:25:09 Speaker 7: Yeah. 00:25:10 Speaker 1: And this whole thing's over. 00:25:12 Speaker 5: I'm afraid I'd have folded just like that agent. I'd have drilled that ram and I'd have been like, son of a gun, what was I to do? 00:25:18 Speaker 1: I think I would have. 00:25:20 Speaker 6: taken something that would have made me cause me like to have the runs and be like i gotta go really. 00:25:25 Speaker 1: Bad i wonder where i said this has gone far enough man let me level with you i'm undercover. 00:25:30 Speaker 5: And i'm the one with the gun i. 00:25:32 Speaker 4: Wonder if that ram's hanging somewhere in like a courthouse or something. 00:25:36 Speaker 5: I'm sure the fwp that's better. 00:25:37 Speaker 1: That's better double trouble they're out there standing out. 00:25:40 Speaker 5: In front of a school yeah it looks like a university in the background. 00:25:46 Speaker 1: You'd need gas money to haul that sack around man yeah He had to take his three-quarter ton pickup to haul that sack. Alright, anyways. That story's over. 00:25:59 Speaker 3: We're on to our news. 00:26:01 Speaker 2: Our news. 00:26:04 Speaker 1: The other day, Did you. 00:26:07 Speaker 3: Bring this up? 00:26:07 Speaker 8: Yeah, I was texting you about how I could have shot a bear, but I didn't have a slug for my shotgun. 00:26:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, Nate was pointing out he's out growling something and it comes around the corner and there's just a bear standing there and there he is like some idiot. 00:26:17 Speaker 3: So killable, dude. 00:26:17 Speaker 1: Like some idiot with nothing but a birdshot. 00:26:20 Speaker 3: Yep. 00:26:21 Speaker 1: He said if I'd have had a slug, I'd have had a bear. I shared a story with him about, I've always heard, I had always heard about, but never experimented with what's called a cut shell. And I was explaining to him that I knew the concept of it even as a young man where you take a shotgun shell and you take your pocket knife and you score the plastic right up ahead of the brass. 00:26:47 Speaker 8: Oh. 00:26:47 Speaker 1: I feel like my old man used to talk about this. You score the plastic up ahead of the brass until you're almost through. 00:26:54 Speaker 5: Like a girdle cut. 00:26:55 Speaker 1: And you shoot and the whole damn thing comes out. 00:26:58 Speaker 3: So it doesn't open up the end of the shell. 00:27:00 Speaker 1: It just takes the whole end of the shell with you. One day, me and my brother, Dan, are sitting in, we were not in my, I was brought up in Dalton Township. We were over in Lake Township, sitting on a place called Orange Lake, duck hunting. And we look up and here's a buck coming down the beach of the, coming down the shoreline of the marsh, heading right to us. It was deer season. Not like Aupa here. It was like legit deer season. And we start trying to very quickly fabricate a cut shell. But the deer before he got to us veered off. And so we never like tested our cut shell. And I was sharing this story with Nate. And I said, to this day, I don't know how well it actually works. 00:27:46 Speaker 8: And I think I was cutting back my tomatoes at the time. Found it very unlikely that that was real. But YouTube heard me, the gods in the algorithm, and they fed me this video. 00:27:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, check this out. 00:28:01 Speaker 1: Go ahead and play it. You'll see that he sounds like a villain from a cartoon. 00:28:05 Speaker 3: He's showing two shells and a cool-looking shotgun. 00:28:08 Speaker 5: I was picturing the cut closer to the brass. 00:28:12 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's right below the wad. 00:28:13 Speaker 1: Oh, so I was wrong there. 00:28:14 Speaker 5: Listen to the guy from it. 00:28:15 Speaker 1: Or clay pigeons or whatever else. 00:28:22 Speaker 7: Now, this is the same round, but it's cut all around here. Now, this is an old idea. It's kind of like a poor man's slug. 00:28:30 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:28:31 Speaker 3: The cut is almost halfway up. 00:28:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, so not at the brass, but below. Basically, he's cutting it at the wad. 00:28:38 Speaker 7: This whole piece will fly out. 00:28:41 Speaker 1: Oh, no, he cut it all the way up. 00:28:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: Oh, we might not have got our buck anyway. Okay, so he's loading it in his. 00:28:50 Speaker 5: Short little shotgun. 00:28:52 Speaker 1: Yeah. Now he's putting a regular. Shooting a different target with a regular. 00:29:03 Speaker 5: I have some faith in it. 00:29:05 Speaker 1: Oh, listen, man. Wait until he gets downrange. He's got a sweet shooting range. Thousands and thousands of tires. 00:29:13 Speaker 3: Typical birdshot pattern. 00:29:14 Speaker 2: It looks like a slug. 00:29:21 Speaker 1: And I think it cannot get more perfect than this. Now, if you're wondering why, if you're irritated that we're talking over Boris there, Igor, it's because we have to. Or else we get in trouble with the YouTube gods. 00:29:37 Speaker 8: Yeah. 00:29:38 Speaker 1: You have to editorialize. a video or else you get in trouble. Right? 00:29:44 Speaker 3: They can give and they can take away. 00:29:45 Speaker 5: Do you think that would penetrate a buck? 00:29:48 Speaker 3: We gotta try, man. 00:29:49 Speaker 1: If this buck would have assumed his trajectory... Because he would have been in our laps. 00:29:55 Speaker 5: What do they shoot when there's a riot? 00:29:57 Speaker 1: Oh, beanbags. 00:29:59 Speaker 5: I felt like it would have that effect. It would hurt real bad. 00:30:03 Speaker 3: I really want to do an experiment on this one. 00:30:05 Speaker 1: Oh, you know what? Let's do that. Let's just shoot some cut plugs and do a little cut shells and do a little experiment. 00:30:10 Speaker 4: I wonder how accurate you can get with them. 00:30:12 Speaker 1: I don't know. 00:30:13 Speaker 3: I was raised to know about it. 00:30:14 Speaker 4: I don't know how. 00:30:15 Speaker 1: It was part of what I knew about. In high school, I had an opportunity, and then it just never came up again. So yeah, we should do some ballistic gel. We still have some of that stuff laying around? 00:30:31 Speaker 3: We could find it. 00:30:32 Speaker 1: I think so. We should make some cut shells and do some ballistic gel test and see. Part of the problem, I think, is you'd want a picture that you made that you took a tungsten around, high brass tungsten. That's a whopper. Yeah. But if you're shooting some dove load, you know what I mean? Like, what's it really going to do? That's what we got to test. You can catch it in a baseball mitt. 00:30:57 Speaker 3: Probably not. 00:30:59 Speaker 1: I bet it weighs out. You can catch it in a baseball mitt. 00:31:01 Speaker 5: Should I, like, freeze a ham off of a deer for this experiment? Would that be better to shoot than gel? 00:31:07 Speaker 1: I don't know. Do you really want that all like that? 00:31:12 Speaker 6: I don't know. 00:31:13 Speaker 5: I want to know the answer real bad. 00:31:15 Speaker 3: We should start with ballistic gel. 00:31:16 Speaker 5: I would say ballistic gel is fine. Talk me out of it. 00:31:19 Speaker 1: Save the bone, though, maybe. 00:31:20 Speaker 5: Now we're talking. Scapula. That can go on the other side. All right. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: We ran our appeal for emoji designs. 00:31:31 Speaker 5: Your news. 00:31:33 Speaker 4: You know, if he goes by the drop, it's totally fine. 00:31:37 Speaker 1: The drops are so subtle. 00:31:39 Speaker 3: Well, you never wait for them. 00:31:41 Speaker 4: It was by design. 00:31:43 Speaker 1: People wrote in like a conspicuous absence of fishing emojis. People were soliciting emojis because we're going to make what's called in the business, a sticker package that you can just download and it'll be sweet emojis. Because I was lamenting that there's no tough titty emoji. And that's the only emoji I would use to my kids. I would just send them that every time they asked me about something. And I'm like, no. And they're like, but, and I'd send them that emoji. So one, I was wondering how you would make a tough titty emoji. Like, what would it be if you were going to make it? And two, what other emojis should exist? A lot of guys wrote in with tough titty emoji ideas that surround the tufted titmouse. Like a Rosie the Riveter body with a tufted titmouse head. 00:32:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, basically. 00:32:30 Speaker 1: But I don't think... I don't like that. It's too. 00:32:37 Speaker 1: My kid isn't going to see that and know what I mean by that. 00:32:42 Speaker 3: There were two. 00:32:42 Speaker 4: There's something more direct. 00:32:44 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:32:45 Speaker 8: Kristen Nichols wrote in. She said a cow or a cat teat squirting milk into a kitten's mouth, drawn Wren and Stimpy style. 00:32:54 Speaker 1: I don't like that. 00:32:56 Speaker 8: Zane wrote in and he said an old hound with saggy calloused teats dragging on the ground. 00:33:01 Speaker 1: I like that. 00:33:01 Speaker 5: Seems closer. 00:33:02 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's kind of the direction I was thinking. 00:33:03 Speaker 1: But I'm thinking a hog. 00:33:05 Speaker 3: The hog with saggy teats. 00:33:07 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:33:08 Speaker 1: When I think of a tough titty, I'm thinking of a hog. 00:33:10 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:33:11 Speaker 5: Fair one. 00:33:11 Speaker 4: It's got to be something that you can understand what's going on in such a small little scene. 00:33:16 Speaker 1: That's a good point, yeah. So a guy was like, there should be an emoji of a hunter in a tree stand, which just means, hey, man, I'm out hunting. A tag soup emoji. A skunked emoji, like maybe just a skunk spraying. I kind of like that. 00:33:33 Speaker 3: I like that one. 00:33:33 Speaker 1: Hey, what happened this morning when you guys were out duck hunting? Right? Just sent him a skunk spraying. A big buck down emoji. He suggests a dead bleeding buck, but I don't know. 00:33:47 Speaker 3: It'd be a lot to fit into a little emoji. 00:33:49 Speaker 7: Yeah. 00:33:51 Speaker 3: I like the idea of a buck doing that high kick. 00:33:54 Speaker 5: Mule kick. 00:33:55 Speaker 1: Oh, the mule kick. 00:33:56 Speaker 5: Or a hunched up one. 00:33:58 Speaker 1: Busted. 00:33:58 Speaker 2: Busted. 00:33:59 Speaker 1: Like you got busted. So a doe stomping or blowing, that's tough. A emoji of a bear shitting in the woods that would be used as affirmative. 00:34:09 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:34:11 Speaker 1: Because that's synonymous with affirmative. A strap of ducks. Meaning, you know, okay, we've limited out. A missed shot emoji. So you have a target with the arrow way off. Could be a useful emoji. And then there's a backpack with a hindquarter in it. Very few fishing emojis. So if you have things that you wish was an emoji, send them in and we're going to continue until we get about a dozen good emojis and then we'll make our emoji sticker package. 00:34:42 Speaker 3: Send it to The Meteor Podcast at TheMeteor.com. 00:34:46 Speaker 1: Okay, over to Spencer for the Iupa buck intrigue. Now this is a buck that for a minute was the country's biggest whitetail. 00:34:56 Speaker 5: Buck yeah when it was killed in the early 1990s it was the world's biggest typical whitetail because it didn't come on folks's radar until 30 years later though it now just has the title as the biggest buck in the united states. 00:35:09 Speaker 1: And we reported on it as being this newly found yes u.s record whitetail. 00:35:16 Speaker 5: And now appropriately so there were a lot of red flags that i think were noticed by people as the story is being laid out because A pheasant hunter who says, I'm only a pheasant hunter. I don't know anything about these old deer. Kills, you know, a world-class buck. Puts it in his basement for 30 years and an electrician finds it. 00:35:36 Speaker 1: And he's like, oh, that old thing? 00:35:37 Speaker 8: Yes. 00:35:38 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:35:39 Speaker 5: And so now we're answering some of those questions as to how that came to be. And maybe there's some nefarious things that happened. 00:35:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:35:47 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:35:48 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:35:48 Speaker 1: So we're going to. We're going to hear the latest on this, but like officially, we'll hear where this buck officially stands. 00:35:58 Speaker 5: I'm going to talk to Craig Mitchell, the Illinois Department of Game and Fish, their DNR. They opened up an investigation. They had a 36-page document that Craig has gone through. He's interviewed some other folks about this. He is closer to this story than maybe anybody in the world. So we're going to talk to Craig. 00:36:14 Speaker 2: All right. 00:36:15 Speaker 1: Take it away. 00:36:17 Speaker 2: All right. 00:36:17 Speaker 5: Joining us on the line now is outdoor writer Craig Mitchell. He has been reporting on the Sam Iupa buck that we covered on the new show last month, and Craig has some new developments to share. For listeners who aren't familiar, here's a real quick summary. Sam Iupa is a hunter in Illinois who killed one of the world's biggest whitetails in the early 90s. Nobody knew about it until 2023 when an electrician saw the buck at Sam's house. He encouraged Sam to get it scored, and it wound up being the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in the USA. with a measurement just shy of 208 inches. But now some questions are being raised about the deer's validity. And we have Craig here to talk about it. The first red flag, Craig, is a really big one. Did Sam Iupa have a deer license in 1991, the year he claims to have killed it? 00:37:09 Speaker 2: Thanks, Spencer. I really appreciate you having me on. Just to kind of backpedal a bit, I think it was Steve a couple of weeks ago when this first came to light on MeatEater News. He was even commenting that something smelled fishy, and of course he was right. To answer your question, it looks like he didn't. The 36-page DNR report that the Illinois Department of Resources put out basically says that they cannot verify that he did in fact have a tag for 1991, the year that he put forth as the year he killed the buck. Okay. 00:37:45 Speaker 5: Now this has led to more issues regarding the date that he killed it. Unravel that for us, please. 00:37:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the kind of, this is what kind of really set this whole thing off into a high speed chase, if you will. In 19, sorry, in 2023, Boone and Crockett came out with an article about the buck. In that article, they highlighted a kill date of August 20, sorry, November 28th. When it, took, I guess, two years for everything to be validated by Boone and Crockett for the official record book. And when they did, their records now said that it was a kill date of November 1st. So I did a little bit of digging. And if you go back in the Illinois deer hunting regulations for 1991, there were only a handful of dates in which you could actually shoot a whitetail with a firearm. And neither of those dates, November 1st or November 28th, would have been within the legal season. 00:38:46 Speaker 5: And how did we line, how do we end up with those two dates, November 1, November 28? Those are very different answers to when the deer was killed. 00:38:55 Speaker 2: Drastically. And for the purposes of a legal harvest, it's the, well, both of them constitute poaching, but I mean, the dates are everything. And basically, the November 1st date, Essentially, Boone and Crockett's been very tight-lipped about this whole thing. And what they were able to tell us was that November 1st was listed as essentially a placeholder date. Basically, they chalked it up, and you find this in repeated interviews, interwebs. with James Martin, the antler collector. Everyone seems to repeat the same thing that, you know, he's 85, he's an old man, and his memory's not great, which, you know, fair enough. But even when the DNR officers... presented him with this evidence about only November 15th, 16th, and 17th being the legal days, none of which were the first or the 28th. He just commented or responded with, okay, all right. So even that is, there's a lot of things. 00:40:05 Speaker 1: Going on here. 00:40:06 Speaker 5: All right. The next red flag is regarding wanton waste laws. What do we know about the meat from this buck? 00:40:14 Speaker 2: I think, honestly, all dates, and let's just go with the assumption that he, for some reason, didn't remember the date, didn't remember the year. I think what really grinds my gears the most is the disrespect to the buck. The DNR records indicate, in fact, we have Sam Iupa quoted, as well as his mysterious hunting buddy who's mentioned in the stories as well as the report, that they just took the head and left the meat. And that was where it was literally as cold and calculated as that. They didn't elaborate any further. To quote them, they left it. 00:40:52 Speaker 5: Yeah, that's too bad. And it's just another red flag in a series of many here about, did he even have a license? It seems like the answer is no. Did he kill it in a legal gun season? Also seems like the answer is no. And we have direct quotes from him saying they did not take any of the meat. Now, in your reporting, you reviewed a 36-page document regarding an investigation that was done by the Illinois DNR. What was the conclusion of their report? 00:41:24 Speaker 2: Ultimately, the investigation focused on the hunting without a deer tag and wanton waste. As I mentioned before, the Illinois historical deer records, they couldn't find a deer license for 91, just 89 and 90, but not 91. So unfortunately, due to the time that has expired, it's been 30 years, the statute of limitations has expired. So quote their investigation, although the investigation identified significant discrepancies concerning the reported harvest date, deer permit, and post-harvest handling, the wanted waste, the actual date and year of harvest could not be established. The investigation could not establish that the deer was lawfully harvested under the Illinois deer hunting regulations. So in a nutshell, they confirmed that there was in fact wanton waste, wasted venison, and they couldn't also verify that it was harvested legally. 00:42:24 Speaker 5: Does that mean from their standpoint that this is over with, this investigation is done and there's not going to be any charges for Sam Ayupa? 00:42:34 Speaker 2: Correct, correct. 00:42:35 Speaker 5: Okay. 00:42:36 Speaker 2: Again, statute of limitations expired. I know the DNR was very, very interested in making sure things were set right. But unfortunately, the law is what it is. And, you know, that time has elapsed. Yeah. 00:42:48 Speaker 5: Since these things have come to light, have we heard anything from the antler collector? 00:42:54 Speaker 2: Jamie Martin's a really nice guy. He was kind enough to respond and correspond with me quite a few times. 00:43:00 Speaker 6: But. 00:43:00 Speaker 2: After I reached out with the final news, as well as notification of the meat eater article that came out last week, he's kind of gone quiet. So I'm not sure what the status of the $ 30, 000 rack is. I can say that based on the DNR report, they were concerned about him being defrauded. But Jamie Martin emphatically said that he felt really good about it. He had receipts for the purchase. But you got to feel bad for the guy for about, two weeks there, he had the investment of a lifetime, and I don't know what the status is for that now. 00:43:35 Speaker 5: Now, you also attempted to interview Sam for this story. How did that go? 00:43:40 Speaker 1: Not well. 00:43:41 Speaker 2: I'm trying to speak with him directly for the better part of three and a half years. Likely due to his age, his son, also named Sam, has been playing gatekeeper, and fair enough. I don't know the specific Ayupa situation these days. But when I did reach Sam Jr., his son, he immediately requested that I sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, in order to speak with him with the family. I immediately asked why that would be necessary for a hunting and fishing story or a hunting story in this situation. And he just said, I'll get back to you. And that was the last thing I heard from him. Fortunately, though, I've been able to reach some other IUPAA family members who have been more forthcoming with validating some of this information. 00:44:26 Speaker 5: Yeah, I think we're the only ones that Sam hasn't talked to at this point because he has a lot of quotes out there with other writers. Now, Boone and Crockett has been paying attention to all of this. What is their current stance on the deer? 00:44:41 Speaker 2: Unfortunately, for Boone and Crockett, it's an organization's foundations dependent on accurate details and, of course, valid fair chase records. So I was surprised that they weren't more eager to investigate this. I mentioned I reached out in 2023 when this first kind of piqued my interest, and they just basically gave me a carbon copy, copy and pasted section of their fair chase rules. When I reached out again in 2024 and 2025 and kind of was prodding a little bit harder, they kind of just clammed up and continued, even on the phone, just to repeat it to me, we utilize the information provided in the affidavit. Even two weeks ago, when I knew this was going live and I had the DNR documentation, I reached out again to try and get a quote. And again, they repeated the affidavit statements, but eventually they did finally give us a comment. And they said that we received the report from the DNR and we're following our procedures to review the information contained within that report. But there have been no updates since. 00:45:47 Speaker 5: Okay, so as of now, it is still recognized by Boone and Crockett as the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in the United States. 00:45:55 Speaker 2: As of right now, it is. And you know what? Considering with the statute of limitations being expired, personally, my personal opinion is the only justice that could be had is to revoke it from the record books. I mean, it violates their own fair chase guidelines, and I'm confident that they'll do the right thing. 00:46:14 Speaker 5: Yeah, an interesting detail I saw in your most recent article about the Sam Iupa buck was you had saw in the 36-page report how Sam had asked the game warden or the detective, well, is my buck still going to be in the Illinois record books? He said something like that, correct? 00:46:34 Speaker 2: Absolutely. And it kind of paints a different picture from a guy that was quoted repeatedly as saying, you know, I'm just a bird hunter. I don't care about deer. Well, you know, first of all, just taking the antlers or the head as well as, you know, 30 years later, one of the few questions he asked was whether or not it was going to stay in the record books. You know, I don't buy it. Yeah. 00:46:54 Speaker 1: All right. 00:46:55 Speaker 5: In some new, in some new reporting that you just wrapped up, and this is an article that is now live on the meat eater.com. You talk about Sam's connection to the Chicago mob through his uncle, Joey. Tell us about that uncle. 00:47:09 Speaker 2: This was the connection that blew my mind. So not only is his uncle Joey, Joey Ayupa, a very, I mean, he worked for Capone. I mean, he was one of the, at one time, the head of the Chicago Mafia. Again, worked for Capone back in the day. Early in the day in his career, he went by Joey O'Brien. Didn't want to get this. He figured that an Italian sounding last name would close doors not open. But he was a boxer. He worked for Capone protecting his prostitution and gambling rackets. He was connected to everyone from Dillinger to some really influential murders. Now, the FBI were only able to associate with him. He was never convicted of it. But, you know, Teamster, Alan Dorfman, Mafia boss Sam Giancana. These are some big names in the mob world that he was, you know, those are just the ones that the FBI was able to connect him with. But, I mean, documents, just to give you an idea of who this guy was, on multiple, multiple FBI documents, he is quoted as being one of the most ruthless killers and hoodlums in the Chicago area. Wow. So this wasn't, you know, some guy hanging out on a street corner. This was a, you know, mob leader in every respect of the word. 00:48:30 Speaker 5: And on top of all of that, he was an outdoorsman and his nickname was Doves. Tell us about how he got that moniker. 00:48:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, this is, again, a very interesting story. He loved the outdoors. Now, to quote his nephew, Nick, who I've spoke to, and I won't use the exact same verbiage, but he's an effing huge outdoorsman. He loved to fish, but he really loved to hunt. And he'd go all over the place, fishing in Bimini, doves in Texas, pheasants in the Midwest, and of course, doves in Kansas, which is where this story comes from. So in 1962, Joey, as he often did, would go off into the woods to blow off some steam and often hide from law enforcement. And he went with a crew of guys to Kansas. When all was said and done, reports vary between 1,000 and 1,400 morning doves were shot by this crew. The newspapers at the time reported that they used auto loaders and shot them off of telephone lines and tree limbs. And eventually, when he pulled into his driveway, being such a big mobster, the cops were watching. And they basically nabbed him as soon as he pulled into his driveway with his wife. When they popped the trunk, they found 562 doves. My goodness. The legal limit was only 24. So he ended up doing three months in jail and had to pay a few fines, but the nickname stuck, Joey Doves. 00:49:56 Speaker 5: Okay. One other great story you cover in your article is about Joey's link to the world record muskie. Tell us about that. 00:50:05 Speaker 2: Yeah, again, the story, what's Steve's famous phrase? 00:50:09 Speaker 5: Makes its own gravy. 00:50:11 Speaker 2: And again, it just gets deeper and deeper, but I'm sure a lot of your readers, in fact, you guys have got a great article, The Meat Eater does, on the muskie wars and this world record muskie caught out of Wisconsin. 00:50:28 Speaker 5: Written by Pat Durkin. He did some great reporting on this. 00:50:32 Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Pat's a big inspiration for me, especially for this story. But the story goes, Joey Ayupu was hiding out in Wisconsin, and he was hiding out from a congressional hearing. Now, not one to miss out on a hunting or fishing opportunity. He went down to the local Chippewa flowage, which was a restricted fishing zone. Not that he cared. And as the story goes, he caught this enormous fish, ended up putting a bullet or two in its head, and sold it to Louis Spray simply because he couldn't take credit for it if he was hiding from Congress. So he thought, you know, why not make 50 bucks? And he sold it to Louis Spray, who was a known associate. He was involved with prohibition and bootlegging. And he was also a record chaser. So he knew that he could sell it to Louis Spray and get away with it. Now, that story has not been 100% verified, but it has been... verified by a few different individuals, including Spence Petros, Iupa's fishing buddy, Pepsi Bonanno, and as well, recently, his nephew, Nick Majchek, who also confirmed that his uncle did, in fact, actually. Wow. Or whatever. 00:51:44 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:51:45 Speaker 5: Those are some great details. Now, with all of that said, Craig, have you found any connection between the mafia and the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in the United States? 00:51:55 Speaker 2: I mean, it's important to say that the sins of the uncle are not that of the nephew. Um, the Ayupa family certainly took care of their own, um, to give you a couple of quick examples. They, uh, Ayupa before he went to jail, he was made famous in the movie casino. So the famous casino skimming scam of the late eighties, early nineties, uh, he ended up going to jail for that. Um, Before he did that, he put all his family, all his wealth, his property into something called Rosemar Realty, which was named after his mother. And all of his family members live in properties owned by Rosemar Realty. 00:52:32 Speaker 5: So not only the. 00:52:33 Speaker 2: Homes, but he has family. So the town hotel in Cistero, which was once Capone's hideout, which later became Joey Iupa's hideout. So his brother, Sam, was listed as a secretary on the investment firm that owned that. So that would have been Sam Iupa's father. The story goes that he also owned the Yorkshire Quail Club, which Iupa, Joey Iupa, wanted to keep a low profile, supposedly used Sam Iupa and his father's names to take out all of the required hunting permits with the state of Indiana. So yeah, there's going to be a great piece on that with a lot more information. Obviously, you can check it out at themeateater.com. 00:53:13 Speaker 5: Okay, last question here. You've been following this story as closely as anybody in the world, so I want your take. Do you think the Sam Iupa buck was poached? 00:53:24 Speaker 2: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. I know it's corny, but in my opinion, Sam was out pheasant hunting, got struck by buck fever in a one in a million chance, and he took it. Unfortunately, I don't think it was within the legal parameters, and I do believe that it was poached. 00:53:46 Speaker 5: Yeah, there's just... There's too many red flags that the deer sat in his basement for 30 years that, you know, it seems as though he didn't have a deer license. The date he says he killed it wasn't within the season, didn't take any of the meat. It seems fairly cut and dry at this point, even if the Illinois DNR is not going to be writing a ticket for it. 00:54:07 Speaker 2: I agree. 00:54:07 Speaker 1: All right. 00:54:07 Speaker 5: You can read more of Craig's reporting at TheMeatEater.com. His two most recent articles cover all of this in greater detail. Thank you for joining us, Craig. 00:54:17 Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Spencer. 00:54:18 Speaker 3: Take care. 00:54:19 Speaker 5: You too. 00:54:19 Speaker 1: Okay, Nate Mason. Oklahoma's CWD-resistant deer proposal. 00:54:27 Speaker 4: Man, tell me more. 00:54:29 Speaker 8: Last spring, an Oklahoman let a pen-raised whitetail out into the wild on purpose, without permission, allegedly to fight CWD. And now, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife has written rules for future releases... And the fine print is very, very interesting. 00:54:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. They put the headlines on this are like, Oklahoma, okay, is it to release CWD resistant deer? And then they kind of skipped all the parts. 00:55:00 Speaker 3: Au contraire. We've covered this extensively as it's progressed. 00:55:05 Speaker 8: Our very own Jordan Sellers did a great write-up at Meteor.com if you want even more background information. But for those of you who haven't followed it, this is kind of a classic case of a state legislature attempting to usurp control of wildlife management. And so I'll give you a quick rundown and then we'll get to these new rules that Department of Wildlife has proposed. 00:55:26 Speaker 3: The who's who. 00:55:27 Speaker 8: There's government agencies. Oklahoma legislature, it's your state house and senate. They passed the 2024 law that created this deer release program to fight CWD. and eventually they will vote on the Department of Wildlife's new rules in February. The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, which we'll just call the Department of Wildlife, is the state wildlife agency. It runs on hunting and fishing license sales, plus federal Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson money, and there's no state tax dollars that fund them. It's run by the Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Commission, eight members appointed by the governor, staggered eight-year terms. And then finally, the Department of Ag... Agriculture, Food, and Forestry, which we'll call Department of Ag, is a state ag department, and it regulates deer farms and captive deer, and the legislature funds it with state tax dollars. 00:56:18 Speaker 3: This is all important. 00:56:19 Speaker 8: There's three main legislatures you want to know. Representative Nick Archer, he's written a lot of these bills that we've covered, and he would like to cut the Department of Wildlife out of this release program and give control to the Department of Ag. Representative Scott Fetgatter, He is a lame duck. He's until December, and he's a representative and deer breeder who has pushed this deer breeding legislation. And then there's Representative Rusty Cornwell, who's also a deer breeder, but he has recused himself from the voting procedures ostensibly on moral grounds. 00:56:53 Speaker 2: Wow. 00:56:53 Speaker 8: That's the best I can tell. Rusty is like legit, like I shouldn't be involved in this. 00:56:57 Speaker 1: That sounds like, yeah, he sounds like an interesting guy. 00:57:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd like to talk to him. 00:57:01 Speaker 1: To recuse himself. 00:57:01 Speaker 5: Yep. 00:57:03 Speaker 8: There's two lobbyists you need to know. There's Whitetails of Oklahoma, which is a nonprofit that promotes deer farming and hunting ranches in Oklahoma. It lobbied for and celebrated the Genetic Improvement Act. And that's headed by Chris Ezell, a longtime president. And he's also served as president of North American Deer Farmers Association. He's recently spoke against the Department of Wildlife Rules, which we're getting to. And then there's the Oklahoma Wildlife Management Association. 00:57:28 Speaker 1: That might be a good guy to have on the show. I'd be interested. 00:57:31 Speaker 8: He just retired as president, so maybe he'll talk. There's an advocacy group that advocates for preserves, hunting ranches, captive deer breeders, focused on property rights and legal interests. The family that's intertwined there is the Brewster family. There's three generations of lobbying, both at the federal and state level. Bill Brewster was a former U.S. 00:57:50 Speaker 5: Congressman. 00:57:51 Speaker 3: He later lobbied for captive deer breeding. 00:57:55 Speaker 8: He did lobby for international hunting rights, and he's done some good stuff for hunters. And he also served as the OWDC or the Department of Wildlife Commissioner. 00:58:05 Speaker 3: And he's a deer breeder. He died in 2022. 00:58:07 Speaker 8: Carol Brewster, his daughter, has taken up the flag. She runs Brewster's and Associates, which is an Oklahoma City lobbying and PR firm. It's a registered lobbyist for the Department of Ag. And her other clients include pharmaceutical companies. 00:58:25 Speaker 1: Finally, Dr. 00:58:26 Speaker 3: Chris Seabury. 00:58:27 Speaker 8: He's a researcher in Texas behind kind of the deer breeding program that we've talked about, the genetics behind how this could work. 00:58:35 Speaker 3: And Dr. 00:58:35 Speaker 8: Jennifer Malmberg, who's a researcher at the USDA, National Wildlife Research Center, she modeled the population dynamics for the Oklahoma Commission that proves or disproves that this could work. Okay, those are all the players. Quick timeline of how we got here. 2024 CWD Genetic Improvement Act. Representative Nick Archer, from before, drove this, It started as a feral swine bill that I don't fully understand, but it was gutted and rewritten last minute to let captive deer that are allegedly resistant to CWD out into the wild. This was kind of a last minute. 00:59:10 Speaker 3: Minute change. 00:59:10 Speaker 8: It passed the legislator 69 to three and it caught wildlife groups pretty flat footed. They just didn't think it was going to happen. What this law does, it allows the release of captive deer bred to resist CWD that have the SS gene. So what is the SS gene? Briefly, CWD is a misfolded protein. The every deer carries called the prion protein. One spot in that protein's gene, codon 96, comes in two versions, G or S, most wild DRGG. Deer with S copies, especially SS, get infected less readily and the disease progresses more slowly. However, they still can get CWD. They will still die from it. They just have a resistance, not an immunity. This idea was modeled by Dr. Seabury on sheep farmers who bred scrapie out of their flocks, but it has never been tested in a wild herd. Fast forward to spring of 26, the Department of Ag released two deer in Wagoner County. The Department of Wildlife was not involved, did not have input in the rollout, and there's no information on how this happened. There's no tracking afterwards. There's no kind of follow-up on how this is going to go. 01:00:21 Speaker 3: Spencer, what were you going to say? 01:00:22 Speaker 5: Department of Ag, it's the state or the feds? 01:00:24 Speaker 8: Department of Ag is the state, but it's the organization that's funded by the state legislature and covers deer breeding, does not cover wildlife. 01:00:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a real church and state division here between... And I get it. I understand the Department of Agriculture controlling deer breeder facilities because those deer aren't wildlife, they're livestock. 01:00:45 Speaker 3: Right, exactly. 01:00:47 Speaker 2: But. 01:00:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a weird one for them to then take their livestock and cut it loose into the purview, into the responsibility area of the wildlife department. 01:01:02 Speaker 8: And that's the way the law is written right now. As convoluted as that may be, that's how it's written. After that release in, I think, March of 26, Representative Archer tried to pass another bill which would have moved the permitting authority from Department of Wildlife. So basically the authority to like let those captive deer loose from wildlife to Department of Ag, which he controls the funding for. 01:01:27 Speaker 3: And he has more sway over. 01:01:29 Speaker 8: Allegedly, his rationale was that the Department of Wildlife was moving too slow and they weren't following the mandate of the legislature. A coalition banded against it. This was led by Catherine Appling Pooler of the NDA, who's contributed a lot to this. Oklahoma's five tribes all said no. The Oklahoma Wildlife Commission, which normally doesn't take positions on anything legislative, but publicly opposed this bill. And then hunters, hunters calling their legislatures. They pushed against it. It still passed the House, but the bill died. The Senate died in the Senate in committee, which is crazy because the author of that Senate bill is the head of that committee. And he still got shut down by his own committee, nine to three. So the Senate doesn't want it. Our stance, so all that in the past is our stance has generally been as like meat eater is this isn't going to work and it's a cash grab by the deer industry. The math doesn't work on the population modeling. 01:02:23 Speaker 5: Dr. 01:02:23 Speaker 8: Malmberg mentioned before is laid out. They would even releasing 7,500 resistant deer in a year for 10 years would have no effect. 01:02:31 Speaker 1: Can I clarify the thing? 01:02:33 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:02:36 Speaker 1: I understand what you just said about like, I don't know that it's a cash grab. 01:02:40 Speaker 3: Okay, I should say, let me clarify that. 01:02:44 Speaker 1: My personal, I'm not speaking for anybody else here, my personal view on it has been the point that you make right here. The state of Oklahoma is sitting on 750,000 deer. You cutting loose one, two, a dozen, a few thousand isn't going to Move isn't going to have a genetic impact. Right. That would be a very, very, very slow play. It would require, it seems like centuries to play out. That's been my view. 01:03:27 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:03:27 Speaker 8: And I guess it's an extrapolation on my part that the only people who think this, who want to go forward with this right now because the science doesn't exist. is lobbyists and people in the deer breeding industry. 01:03:38 Speaker 1: Which has always confused me. 01:03:40 Speaker 3: Right, and so we'll get. 01:03:42 Speaker 8: Into the CWD denying conversation, but it's not like there's a bunch of researchers and hunters who say, yeah, go for this. We want it tomorrow. We want to run an experiment in the public trust herd. It's guys who have a vested interest in releasing 7,500 deer. 01:03:58 Speaker 1: And then there's a point that's brought up by wildlife professionals. that if you take these SS deer, there could be other genetic differences with these deer, susceptibility to other diseases or behavioral differences, which kind of puts them in a weird position, because on one hand they'll be like, well, that won't be effective, because you can't, it would take millennia or whatever to change the genetic makeup of this population. So then you'd be like, okay, well that would then also take millennia for any negative attributes that these deer carry to be integrated into the population. So it's kind of like a chicken or the egg sort of thing. But people do point out that like, well, what else is weird about these deer? 01:04:57 Speaker 3: They've been created to have 300-inch racks. What else? 01:05:01 Speaker 8: Is that beneficial for the wild? That population study doesn't even factor in. Maybe these bred deer suck at breeding. 01:05:09 Speaker 1: You don't know. That's a thing people bring up. 01:05:15 Speaker 8: To your point, the two stakeholders I spoke to down there, Matt Gamble and Catherine Appling-Pooler, they said they're not dogmatically opposed to this idea. There's just no evidence that it works. And I'm not like, don't run an experiment on the people's deer. Run an experiment on your own deer, demonstrate that it works. And then we can find a way to study it and test it. 01:05:41 Speaker 1: And as you go through this, I will share a couple more things because the scenarios... that are acceptable for this as you'll get into. When I look at those scenarios, I'm like, dude, try anything. So, but yeah. 01:05:59 Speaker 8: This takes us to where we're at right now. So thanks for bearing with me with a quick history lesson. The Department of Wildlife's proposed rules, because those two that were let out, they were very unhappy with that release because they didn't have any oversight into it and it kind of snuck by. Here's a couple of the stipulations. The land to receive a permit to release these quote unquote CWD resistant deer that are bred by a captive deer industry. You have to have at least 1000 contiguous acres, private, owned outright and entirely in Oklahoma. The releases are only allowed if harvest has fallen below 50% of the 10 year average Or CWD prevalence is over 50% and the commission declares there's no normal deer population. Basically, the herd has. 01:06:45 Speaker 3: To have already been wiped out. 01:06:46 Speaker 5: That's a lot of fine print. 01:06:48 Speaker 3: That's just the start. 01:06:49 Speaker 1: And it's amazing that people, it's amazing that news organizations skip the fine print and just basically said, hey, they're going to be cutting all these deer loose. 01:06:59 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:06:59 Speaker 1: Because these are very specific scenarios where you're allowed to do this. 01:07:03 Speaker 8: Neighbors, you have to have written sign off and an affidavit from every landowner within three miles, which is roughly 1800 acres. You can't be near a state line. And if you are, you have to get out of state landowners to sign off of it. Before you release your deer, you have to test that. You have to have a live CWD test showing that it's not detected because there's no. 01:07:24 Speaker 3: Such thing as negative CWD test. 01:07:26 Speaker 1: On every deer. 01:07:27 Speaker 8: On every deer you release. And the deer must come from USDA certified herds. After that, you have to mark and track them. Blazed orange ear tags in both ears, plus a USDA tag. A GPS collar may be required, paid for by the landowner. You have to pay a $ 500 permanent fee. And then there's stipulations about when it goes on, testing afterwards, and the commission will. 01:07:49 Speaker 3: Review your permit. You got to jump through a lot of hoops to release these deer. 01:07:54 Speaker 1: But it even goes on. 01:07:57 Speaker 4: Seems like it's impossible. 01:07:59 Speaker 1: Doles of any age, bucks under 24 months. For five years after the release, for five years, every deer that dies or is killed on the property gets CWD and genetic testing paid for by the landowner. 01:08:14 Speaker 3: If you want to release these deer, you got to really want to release these deer. 01:08:18 Speaker 1: And the scenarios, like in those scenarios, and I might come to regret this as I learn more about this. In a scenario where you're killing, the harvest is 50% of the 10-year average, and 50% of the deer have CWD, where I'm sitting at this moment right now, understanding what I understand, I would be like, please. 01:08:41 Speaker 5: Yeah, that's Armageddon. 01:08:42 Speaker 1: I'd be like, please, go ahead. 01:08:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:08:44 Speaker 1: Go ahead it's that bad and as researchers point out at 50 infection rates it ain't getting better so sure i don't know maybe i'll regret saying that but i'd be like right now that like i said it's Armageddon. But I don't think that people are going to be able to fulfill these obligations. 01:09:06 Speaker 2: No way. 01:09:07 Speaker 3: We'll see. 01:09:07 Speaker 5: I would only wonder, is there a way around this? Just like the guy sold the testicles, but he didn't sell them. He got $ 400 for gas money. Can somebody go cut captive deer loose and be like those are my pets or like i i don't know they they actually got loose the gate was left. 01:09:26 Speaker 8: You'd have you'd have the same issue like because they're managed by live as livestock you know. 01:09:29 Speaker 1: But all these same things someone would be cute can say like they accidentally got away. 01:09:34 Speaker 5: This wasn't for cwd it was just the gate was left open and uh. 01:09:38 Speaker 8: I don't i don't think you'd end up making any money off it then yeah so i mean if someone was like altruistic and really believed this work then sure yeah but i i'm not my feeling and this is just my feeling I don't think anybody actually believes that. 01:09:51 Speaker 3: Believes what? That this program will lower CWD. 01:09:55 Speaker 1: They must believe it or else they wouldn't do it. What is in it for them? 01:09:59 Speaker 3: Expanding the captive deer industry. 01:10:02 Speaker 1: It doesn't expand the captive deer industry. You're taking captive deer and making them wild. 01:10:07 Speaker 5: But they're buying those captive deer to go cut them loose all over the state. 01:10:10 Speaker 1: The thing, when I was trying to think of what would be a motivation, if you were, let's just say that First off, if you have a high-fence captive deer place, that doesn't mean that you don't care about CWD. A person that's just a general deer enthusiast loves deer, and they happen to love them in a fence as much as they love them outside of a fence. I can't say that that person wouldn't believe.... 01:10:49 Speaker 3: That's a good point. 01:10:49 Speaker 1: That here I have a thing that could help. And maybe it's a long shot. Maybe it doesn't make much sense. Maybe I just find a way to dismiss the math as people do in life. People that buy lotto tickets are dismissive of the math. Like they dismiss the math and they feel like they're doing a positive by helping a beleaguered population of deer that is stricken with CWD. But when I did search for like, what would be a motive? Outside of wanting to help deer, I used to think it would be that you were taking giants. 01:11:29 Speaker 5: Okay. 01:11:31 Speaker 1: That you're taking giants. And even though this also, if you went to a geneticist, like this would also probably be ineffective. But like you're taking giants and you're kind of goosing the local population. You might think you are. You might think you're turning loose these big giant stud bucks. And then all of a sudden you're going to have big giant stud bucks running around the local cemetery and stuff because all the deer are going to get huge. I could picture a person thinking that. So that's what I used to think. But in this, you can't release them over 24 months anyways. So you're not even, you don't even have time to really confirm that he's some giant exceptional stud buck. And at the same time, if you have a giant exceptional stud buck, are you going to let it go? So the whole motivation thing, I have a hard time calling into question the motivations because I don't see what's in it for them. 01:12:25 Speaker 8: I feel like it's just the normalization of the deer breeding industry. 01:12:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, if I put a totally cynical hat on. 01:12:33 Speaker 3: I wear a pretty cynical hat. 01:12:34 Speaker 1: And I have put this hat on. I could see that it would say that a deer breeder might see, here I've been over all these years. My community has been vilified. 01:12:46 Speaker 2: And.... 01:12:48 Speaker 1: This problem has been blamed on us. We've been treated as though we're the ones that are being reckless. And then here we are, quite ironic, isn't it? That we hold the key to solving this issue, which is our pet deer. That might feel like vindication to somebody. 01:13:14 Speaker 2: Maybe. 01:13:14 Speaker 5: They're doing the Lord's work. 01:13:16 Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe. But the motivation thing is. 01:13:23 Speaker 1: We would have to get somebody in here who can talk about it. 01:13:26 Speaker 3: If you're one of those deer breeders, I'd love to talk to you. 01:13:29 Speaker 1: This guy might be the guy. 01:13:30 Speaker 3: Representative of Rusty Cornwell? No, no, no. 01:13:35 Speaker 1: Oh, good name. The guy that was the president of the. 01:13:39 Speaker 3: Oh, Chris Eazell. 01:13:40 Speaker 5: Maybe. 01:13:44 Speaker 1: He might do a good job of explaining it. I can't speak to the motivation thing. The most obvious motivation to me is that they want to help the deer population out. Maybe. Right or wrong. I think that that seems to me the most likely thing. Rather than some Machiavellian play. Like, I don't get what the play is. You letting your deer go? 01:14:07 Speaker 3: I just wear a tinfoil hat all the time. 01:14:10 Speaker 8: All that to say, the legislature needs to pass this in February 2027. whatever you think it is right into your state representative that down there in Oklahoma and tell them what you think. 01:14:24 Speaker 1: But to sum up, no one's released squat. 01:14:29 Speaker 3: No, no. 01:14:29 Speaker 1: Cause that's a high bar. 01:14:31 Speaker 5: It's a lot of red tape. 01:14:33 Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's like someone handed a thing. You're like, here's the rule or here's the general thing. Like it's okay now. you just need to make the rules. And they go like, I'm going to make a set of rules. It's like saying to your kid, like, Oh no, no, you can go out with your friends tonight. You need to mow, weed the garden, clean the whole house. 01:14:57 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:14:59 Speaker 1: Like vacuum all the cars, call. 01:15:01 Speaker 5: Your grandma, and then feel free. 01:15:03 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:15:03 Speaker 3: Feel free to go out. 01:15:11 Speaker 1: Okay, thanks everybody for joining the news show. Tune in next week for more breaking news and analysis at the Meat Eater podcast, the news show. Thanks for joining me. 01:15:41 Speaker 8: Thank you.

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