00:00:00 Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen. This is the meat Eater Podcast. We're gonna talk now about something that is perhaps the least understood in my opinion, realm of of of hunting and fishing in America, which is hunting mountain lions. Um, something that I've never done successfully, no thanks to the guy I'm sitting here with, Floyd green Um. Before I get into that, I want to remind everyone if you like, like, if you want to watch watch the show meat Eater, not listen to the meat Eater podcast, go to meat Eater dot VHX dot tv and you can download it and stream it to your heart's content. They sell them on their and like these blocks of episodes, and if you go on there and use the offer code meat Eater Podcast, you get five bucks off any volume. And there's a lot. How many volumes did you say around there yet? Six six volumes? I think that's about off. I think they're around way huge discount. So me eater dot VHX dot tv, offer code me Eater podcast, And while you're at it, go on to Yanni uhhaspitelus is joining us here. Go onto Janice's thing website. Plug it, go buy some of yannice Is Hunt to Eat t shirts. What's one of those good T shirts cost? Y? We usually can get a ship for just a couple of dollars. And if Yanni's out of stock, like he always is, just keep checking back because he'll buy two or three more and get him in stock. Okay, I'm on the subject of hunt mountain lions I have. I'm gonna give my personal mountain lion resume. I've eaten three mountain lions, which is the same number of mountain lions that I've seen in the wild, though I haven't eaten any of the ones I've seen in the while, they all separate ones. There's this place outside of Missoula, Montana, called the Rock Creek Lodge, and every year they have something called the Testicle Festival, where they served There's this whole, big, very hedonistic festival around serving deep fried nuts from castrated steers. They cast rated steers in the spring with us in the fall. It must be freezing them. I don't never. It seems like you do it around the time, right, But one time I was in there in the spring and there was a pot of uh pulled pork on the counter and they weren't selling. It was free, and I made myself a sandwich and the guy told me that it was mountain lion, and um, he said, rock Creek lodge, balls in the fall, pussy in the spring. You know that that was one of the three mountain lions I've eating on another mountain lion I ate. My old girlfriend was in line in the hardware store and Wyoming and the guy in front of her was buying a mountain lion tag and she said, what do you do with the mountain lion? He said, I just wanted to hide. She said, we'll take all the meat, and sure enough, this dude called about a week later and gave us the whole mountain lion and we ate that thing every which way. It's not bad now, it's pretty good. The backstraps on there where it's at. Yeah, but it's all, you know, kind of a white meat that surprising resembles pork without the greasiness. You know, pretty good stuff. It'll test the strength of your jaw often. So so I'm joining this conversation buying a real, live, actual very serious um lion hunter. Floyd green Um. Floyd owns like some things that that you might be familiar with that that I like to use and you see often around um wilderness athlete outdoorsmans. But you've been a lion hunter longer than any of that stuff. He always started to talk lines the first time with some guys. And I was a teenage o late teens, and I didn't have my own hound star. I was around twenty. But you were you were born here. We're we're in Arizona right now, uh, in Skysdale and you were born here in Phoenix. And what was the lion hunting culture then? Like, how did you get into it? Well? I got into it actually up in show, Arizona, up there building homes and the guys were headed out one day and I just tagged along with them. And I've always been always had a lot of dogs and been around dogs my whole life. What was the reason you had them? I didn't have any lion hunting dogs that they were had one coonhound and one mutt. Uh. But after spending time with those guys and watching them work with their dogs, and you know, the first time you see a lion climb a tree, or you walk up to a tree and one is in it, it's just the buggy that generally bites people that really enjoy that and amazing on them to be up close to like that. And it's a dog thing largely too. Absolutely, we can get into that. Absolutely, that's if it wasn't for watching the young dogs transform and all the planning that goes behind putting your packet dogs together, breeding the next group of puppies, you know, just seeing lions get killed. It's certainly not why people hunt lions. So how how many years ago was that you started hunting lions early eighties somewhere right around and got your own dogs and that was I had a lot, you know, I had my own dogs within a year at that time, but they wasn't a very successful group of dogs at that point in my life. Just had a lot more dogs and headline catching going on. What what one thing that Floyd does like that? There's correct me if I'm wrong in this, But basically you would divide lion hunting into two categories. Talking him in the snow, right, is that fair? It is? Uh, you know, or hunting them in what there is no snow? Well, hunting him in bare ground conditions is more challenging due to the fact that you you rely on the dogs a lot more so, it takes a lot higher level of hound. Uh. You know, you're in the snow, you're gonna drive the roads. Look for where alliance crossed in the snow. You can determine, generally, determined to some degree, how old that track is. Certainly can determine which way it's going with the hounds. When you're riding along on your muddle or some guys do it off of before wheeler. However, you may be doing it and your dogs are free casting out in front of you. There's literally dozens of animals that they have the opportunity that they smell every step of the way, they're smelling some different creature and you're relying on them to let you know that they've they've crossed the lion's path and you may go. You may go days before that happens in a lot of cases. My brother, my older half brother, was an elk guide in Colorado for many years and he did some lion He had a guy, one of his guides was a lion and hunter and they would just you know, have clients he wanted to come out and he would have a list of guys and he wouldn't call the client until he found the track, and guys would because he would have some guys like you gotta be ready to go at the drop the hat and he'd called and got and like get on a plane and come up from Dallas or whatever. And then they begin to hunt them. And then you go chase that line. And I don't you know, in some parts of the country there's just uh, nobody even thinks about lion hunting until the snowfalls. And part of that, you know, now with the wolves like they are right, you know, they can really determine whether there's wolves in the area or not. Also before they turn there, because the wolves to kill your dog. You know, the Canadian wolves are just a dangerous you know, they're they're always a threat to the guys with hounds up there. And I don't know much about hunting in in the northern part of our country, but what I see of it, it's, uh, you know, snow hunting can be very very challenging, and it can be really really tough physically. Some of the toughest hunts I've ever been on have been in the snow, just climbing around on snowy hillsides you know, go fifteen miles and two ft of snow and in and out of the Grand Canyon a couple of times, and you know you have It's just a tough, tough hunt on everybody. But what what what the snow gives you? Though? So when you when you go out and loot for a line, Let's let's just set this up first, so so people get tome about when you got a loot for line, how old does the track have to be? Like, what's the oldest track you can run? Most? You know, that's a highly controversial subject. I would say nobody's gonna catch. You're gonna catch very few lines that are over six to eight hours. Your six eight hours behind them. Okay, So step one of a lion hunt, just for listeners, like step one of the lion hunt, would be that you're going into likely lion country or a place a lion is likely to pass through, and you're trying to find either through the nose of your dog or from tracks in the snow or tracks on the ground. You're trying to find a place for a mountain line came through walk through within the last six eight hours. Ideally, I don't mean the harder on the snow thing too much. But it's just like it's just an interesting way to start thinking about some of the complexities and hunt lines. Because if there's snow on the ground, you know how big the lion was, right generally the speech or the gender, so you can tell that even right and the best you know what way it went. Absolutely we experienced that. It's you know, knowing you're going the right way is the battle. Yeah, because the dog, like like a famous thing people want to say about, like a good beagle is a bagle can zing back and forth on a rabbit track a couple of times and he can tell relative freshness just on a short stretch, and he'll know what way the rabbit went. But with the line that's not it takes them a little while longer to figure it out. Well, sometimes they the tendencies of the dog. Well, the rabbits are hot a hot scent track type track, whereas a lion I would consider a cold or you mean hot, like the rabbit just jumped out, this was there, So it's much more obvious to that that beagle which way that tracks going because it's dissipating and with a lion that track maybe laying there. You know, a lion when it walks, it's it's you know, it's off floating cells or spores, whatever you want to call them. That that that's what the dog is detecting. And for whatever reason, a lion leaves a scent longer than most animals. And it's, uh, it's it's different in the sense that like with coon dogs. You know, coon dogs are the same thing as the beagles do on rabbits, and they almost generally figure out which way that coon's going and go the right way. Lion hellms, there's I if I can't help them, then I let them make the decision. I don't ever try and outguess them. But I'm sure gone the wrong way a lot of times. How far? Why you go the wrong way until the dog has become exhausted or the track burns out there and I've gone in. Well, Chris, but the day we caught your line, this is a line that's caught Floyd Sogen to Chris Denham here, who hosts um Western Hunter TV show and is UH publisher publisher. It's a good polisher of Western Hunter, Elknor Magazines and Chris Unfairbedy line Hunting with Floyd that Yeah, we we took a large mail down in the Catalina Mountains and after the lion was shot, Chris had shock the line. One of our our better dogs turned around and trailed that track, the one that was now dead backwards till six o'clock that evening and probably went twelve miles from where we started in Bank trailing the line, you know, I mean, there was no question about what went on, you know, And we ended up catching up with her in Canada del Oral almost to the bottom. Shot him at it was April fifteenth, to remember his taxing. We shot him, it was it was it's a crazy, crazy story, but it shot him with an hour of daylight and we were we got to the bottom of Kennon to Laura and finally found that that dog at dark and came pretty much out in the dark. It was fourteen hours probably that dog was trailing back on that on that lion. Yeah, when we went out those a couple of times and looking even when the dogs start running something, we were still spending a lot of time trying to find a track to verify what it was that they were after. Right, you know, a lot of these dogs, all of my dogs now, line numbers have dropped in the last five years, and all of my dogs have gotten the trailing bobcats and they never used to do that. So now we have to determine is it a bobcat or is it a lion? You know, And and it's really hard to tell. Why did you dogs start running bobcats? Well, you just it's basically you would consider that a fault and a dog in a true bear ground lion him. But almost all of them will at one time or another trail bobcats and foxes because you don't come across enough line tracks to keep them. You know, they're gonna they're gonna trail something, you know, And and it's very hard to tell the difference between the two unless you've got the soil or you find some way to find a track as foxes and bobcats wherever where lions are here in Arizona. Well that's that's always been something of a problem. But the good news is typically fox and bobcat tracks very similar to a coon or a rabbit that the track dissipates quickly, so typically is gonna run in the right direction right and typically if they don't go anywhere that's a good sign. That's probably not a line if you start moving it out as you're saying, it's not gonna like, he's not gonna They're not gonna run an eight hour old track very long, right, Well, they won't run an eight hour old Bobcat track or fox track. They won't. It's gonna be fresh to get in within probably thirty minutes or now that. Okay, what um between all the hunting you've done, like just hunting lines of people and all the stuff you've done with biologists, treating them for research purposes and tranquilizing the one, not how many lines have you run? Run? How many lions are you caught? Like like lion guys use the word caught for a lion, whether you kill the line or not, because the whole thing is catching it. Right after that, it's you know, shooting him kind of an anti climatic end to the chase. The uh. As far as lions have caught, it's between three and five hundred, you know, it's always hard to put a number on that. For me, a lot of them were caught with other hunters there in a different situation, you know, circumstances and things like that. Some of them were lions that were caught multiple times and turned loose. You know, it's always challenging to figure out how to keep score. But there's been times in my life where we've caused many as twenty five lions a year for you know, several years in a row, and there's other years you catch you know, my goal is always to catch ten a year, but there's been a few years we haven't got that done. Yeah, so maybe when you think about doing it for thirty years, that adds up pretty substantial number. As far as the lions that I've trailed, you'd be you know, thousands. How many dogs you take out to hunt a lion, I take as many as thirteen at one time. I would prefer to take a half a dozen. That's an optimum number, four to six. And I've caught a lot of lions with one dog, you know, you just it's uh. But typically for a good, good fun hunt, the number I would pick would be five or six. But a lot of times we'll take all thirteen of them just to help keep them in shape, oh, just exercise them, yea. So much about catching a lion has as much to do with the physical ability of the hound to persevere through a whole day of day of trailing and then jump the lion and actually put enough pressure on it to get it to climb a tree. So if they're not in good physical shape and their feet aren't tough and they can't go and they they got to be able to go ten twelve hours. So layout for me like how a lion hunt. Layout me like how a successful lion hunt goes. You get them the morning and like what I know each time is different, but it's like, how might a hunt go well? Chris is yours is a classic, the one we were just talking about. We got up in the morning and uh, saddle the mules and and wrote out rode up the very first. You prefer to hunt out on a mule, Yeah, that'd be my preference by far. So you're you're mounted dogs running all around, and I can stay with my dogs a lot better. Is as good as shape as you feel like you are. It's hard after a few days to physically stay with him on foot on regular basis. We cover ay enormous amount of ground. I felt I felt when I was out with you. I never hunted with a group of guys that was physically in the in the shape that you guys were when we went. Joe and I were both absolutely amazed every night when we came in and and all the guys running the cameras I mean and running them backwards up the hills and in super tough country. It was amazing. And normally guys just don't show up and that kind of physical cond issue. Uh. And we did go a long ways, you know. There was a couple of times we trailed lines that I was sure we had the one cot and uh, and we didn't. But that would have been even That's a typical, although Joe started that one early. For us, it was the distance wasn't unusual. You know, do their collars like the GPS. Their GPS is to keep a track of the distance they run. These dogs look like satellites. Man, they got like three collars on wires and stuff. Come. It was an average day that the dog puts on, well the dog's a minimum of the average days twenty miles, so you know, and I've seen thirty five mile days. You know, that's not not not a crazy deal either. But what gets tough is that's not hard for a good condition. HOWND to do on any given day, it's hard for that dog to do day after day after day. And that's where you see professional lion hunters, guys that are guiding full time, or some of our government lion hunters. That gets to be the difference between them and sport hunters is the condition of their dogs. Quality of the dogs, obviously, but the condition is huge where they can pursue a line. They may trail a lion for three days before they overtake it and actually jump it. And I'm not saying they're stopping the track and picking it up each day, but every day you learn more about that animal and you're you're getting closer to it, You're getting into a tighter area where it may be. Well in that third day, if you've been running like you're saying, three days in a row, you might pick up where that lion was the night before. Absolutely as he's daunting an area. Well, you won't pick up the exact spot, but you know the lions travel into the south. We've trailed him four miles in that direction, down this drainage. We'll try and loop ahead of him and pick him up again. And typically with good broke dogs, when you when you cross this track there, you know, they'll let you know and verify the direction and go again. Sooner or later, that lion is gonna kill something, or he's gonna lay up somewhere, and that's when you'll overtake him once he gets a belly full, or he was that because he's stopping to eat because he's just hungry, because he's full and doesn't run is good, No, well, it's because he stopped trappling. Okay, you know, he just finally because you know then he's camped out on the carcass and he's there. And so I think this is an important point because I think I was like under the wrong impression too, because I always everybody or in my head, it's like you start out and it's like as soon as you're on the track, you're like, dogs are chasing this lion. But it's not that way. This lion is just out and about doing this thing for maybe three or four days, and eventually your hounds is catch up to it. For those dogs never got close, and it seems so exciting because those hounds are so excited and they're balling and carrying on that you feel like you're the lions up and running from it. But that cat might not even know about you and your dogs. That's a more more often than not when you're trailing a line. There was only one instance that I thought maybe we had a line jumped, and that was that large tom in the galeras that and I believe he out ran So I think that lion left the country. Um, But almost every other line we those lions probably never knew we were even in the vicinity. I think I think my line was a classic. As we were writing, it was the third day, and we had done the same loop the first two days, you know, probably a fifteen eighteen mile loop, you know, just country, yeah, just and working the same you know, the same trails and just kind of working out old tracks. And the third day we left camp and we weren't what a mile from camp, and all of a sudden the dogs struck, I mean and you know, and and struck hard. And we've been through that exact canyon the two days previous. We knew that lion track wasn't there two days before, so we knew, you know, this is fresh, so knew the line had walked. You were sleeping in the lion passed through a mile from where you were sleeping. So then what happened on that hunt? Oh he got it got pretty crazy after that. But uh uh we were right in the bottom of a canyon in uh the dogs trying that they were going back and forth and we find to find a scratch and figure it out. Then the scratch was saying the lion was going up the canyon back up, and explain what you mean by that. With the lions will scratch, you can explain a little more, but it was with a scratches. But where they where they they're marking their territory as at Tom's and they use their front feet and they pull it. They pulled it the soil up over top of where they've urinated and and they create a it's just a pile of of leaf litter or whatever. It's in the bottom of that little canyon and you can see it from a good distance. It shows you, like what maybe six ten inches long. They can likely little places like you can anticipate, like when we were out, we kept looking at it after id be like that's the place where he would do that. Yeah, you know, like we're too too. You're in the canyon and a tributary comes in it was like a leafy area or something, you know. Yeah, and so we knew this, We figured the lines. We know that from the direction of the scratch, he's probably going up the canyon. But the dogs keep trying to they go up, and then they turn around. They want to come back, they want to keep wanting to come back. And finally one dog went tried went up and around us to get around us because we're trying to pull the dogs and push him the other direction. And then all of a sudden he struck. And we figured out afterwards that we probably literally jumped that lion out of that canyon and and he went he's scratched, and then went right up and over the top, and uh some as we got up over the top, and uh, do you want me tell the whole story? Yeah, okay, it's it's a pretty good story. This is explaining how Yeah, so keeping mind the miles, keeping mind miles through so people get a perspective of like the scale. Okay, this one actually happened pretty you know, pretty quick, in a short amount of time. But so that we know the line went up and over top this ridge maybe a three foot elevation half mile over the top, and we got up to the top and and we can hear the dogs barking down to the bottom just but it's kind of crazy barking. And uh, Floyd split off to get a bit a little bit of a different angle, and I stayed with the mules, and and Floyd calls me. You can hear the dogs barking down there. And Floyd calls me in the radio and says, Chris, this lion is coming right to you. Get off, you know. So I jump off my mule, and I get my pistol out, and I'm standing there like, you know, with my pistol out in front of me, just waiting for a line to come up. Anyways, another dog came up there and and all of a sudden, that lion took off and went back down and back into the other hounds. And you can see this happen. No Floyd can see this happening. I can't see this. So he bails down to where the where the dogs are, and uh, and I'm just kind of standing up on top of the mules, just trying to just waiting for, you know, for Floyd tell me what he is going on. And all of a sudden, I just hear this voice down on the bottom of the canyon, and it would be we go from R rated X rated if I actually told you everything. He was yelling at me, But it was like, Chris, get your ass down here. I can just hear him just yelling at me. And I got a radio in my hand in the in the perfect Chris, Just for everybody listening, that this line very unusual. It is gone by about fifty trees that it could have gone in, from oak trees to juniper trees. And it's fighting the dogs on the ground, which is really unusual for Mountain one. And it's fighting him like a jaguar or a bear would fight, and it's winning. I mean, it's mucking him out. And oh it was. I mean it we stapled and stitched dogs for hours after this, this whole prog. But Floyd's getting to see this, I was. I was panting Chris to hurry down there. Yeah. So he's seeing all He's seeing all this, and I'm just timeing to like trying to piece it all together in my head. So I go bailing off the ridge, you know, down to where all the screaming is coming from, and uh, I've got shaps on there's too long for me. I was stumbling and falling and and and get there and there's a big oak tree in the very bottom below me, and there's a bluff I'm standing on top of, and and right underneath the oak tree, I can see just a muck of dogs and Floyd screaming and the lions screaming and and on the ground on the ground. I mean, they're they're perfect, yeah, perfectly under a huge bit perfect tree. So I really I kind of jump off that little bluff through the tree and I land on the ground and uh, and I get there and there's a washout underneath the tree, and that washouts filled up with oak leaves. And also I can see as Floyd with a big stick in his hand in the bottom of this washed out oak leaf like pool, and uh, they're the lion. Floyd's got this big, huge stick in his hand and one end as the lions hanging on to one end, and there's dogs just jumping in. This lion's just got paws going everywhere, claws going everywhere, and with a stick in his mouth, you know's yelling at me, shooting, shooting. So I go sliding into the hole and I grab. I have my pistol in my hand, and I'm I'm literally from me your foot, like three ft from the lion, and dogs are jumping in there, and I'm trying to grab dogs to to get a clear shot. And Floyd, meanwhile, I was covering his face because he knows the bullet's gonna create some kind of splash. We're also close. He's you know, meanwhile, the stick's broken off between his hands and now he's down to two hands, hanging onto the stick like a fishing rod with a big you know, the sailfish on the end. And I shoot the lion through the shoulder and from you know, from three feet, there's no way I missed. And Floyd picks the cover, uncovers his eyes and he looks at the lion. He looks at me and the lions still doing the same thing he was doing before I shot him. So he yells at me shoot him again. So I shoot him again, and then then then then finally the lights go out and on the lion he's just dead, and you know, the dogs are piling in there, and I mean, it was just utter, complete chaos. But what had happened is they with those oak leaves in that pool. Nobody could get any traction to get out of there. And I'll tell you, you you tell what happened to your pistol. Well, I was I mean, Chris, Chris, Chris, one to shoot the lion. I didn't one shouldn't use my tag. But when I looked down in there, it was just all the dogs were they were getting killed. I mean they were. This lion was grabbing one. It wasn't that there hadn't been a group of those dogs there that he would have surely killed numerous dogs. And and he was big. It was one of the few hundred and sixty pound of lions that I caught in my life with. And I mean it was a big, big male that just didn't have any fear of us or the hounds or anything else. Anyhow, when I slid down in there, I had my pistol in my hand and just you know, you're slide and I jammed it into the dirt and I just didn't want to, you know, I didn't know if it was full of dirt or not. And I had that stick with me. Typically when lions are wounded, they'll bite down on a stick like that. I never really had to deal with one that had not wasn't wounded before, but it did the same thing, and Chris got there about the same time that bit down on the stick. But that's what I was using to beat the dogs, and it back trying to get them separated, and that's how the stick got in its mouth. So you lose a lot of dogs two lions, no, uh if you typically lose them to the bluffs, you know, and fallen off of things more than lions. Uh. This last year we had a dog or lion another lions similar to Chris's that that you know, busted the skull on one dog's head and had another one in his skull, you know, his the hound's head in its mouth, and I shot it, but you know it would have killed some dogs. But we you know, definitely lost maybe four or five over thirty years directly to a lion like that. I think, I think this is you that I asked this one time. I was asking you if if you ever have any problem, like when you bringing in dogs have been tore up by lions, if the vets ever frown on you, And I think you told me you went and found a vet who likes to hunt lions well, there's we we have a he's retired now, but we have a local beat here in the town that that and there's a couple of them that that are that are lion hunters, and there they understand about it. And even the you know, the clinic we use now, I would, you know, there's certainly not what I would consider hunting oriented or anything like that, and are always there for us. But there are a lot of people that frown on it, you know. I remember one time I went into an emergency clinic with one of my hounds and it would it had had a gastric torsion where its stomach had turned. It was a great dog, and I was really worried about losing it. And this pudgy little veterinarian told me that the dog she did obviously didn't believe in hunting. And she told me she was going to turn me into the Humane Society of the Sheriff's Department from mistreatment of animals. And because my dog was was in such poor shape physically, and she was probably fifty pounds overweight, and I pointed out to her that you didn't see any fat people winning the Olympics either, and uh, and of course that didn't help our relationship. Uh they did save the dog. But yeah, once in a while you get into those clinics and run into that. There's a lot of people that disapprove a lion, you know, hunting with hounds, and they think that it's unfair to hunt lions. It's like one of the lion hunts. One of the things that when anti hunting groups anti hunting money, Humane Society love the money comes from other organizations. When they look at what they can go after, that's one of the things they go after. Like you'll like, I remember reading this thing where it was a series of polls on acceptance of hunting. I remember reading one in Arizona or if you just ask people, do you support you know, a person's right to hunt? Okay? And it was surprising to me. I can't remember exactly, but it was somewhere on lines of like you know, like seventy four sevent of people supported it. But anytime you ask them a specific thing, the acceptance rate would go down. So people like the idea, but you say, like, okay, how about you know, hunting like bow hunting much less Okay, any no matter what secific inquiry you put to them. It was always like less people approved of the specific and to the concept. And when you want to go after something, you you can make the case pretty easy. And you've done it effectively in several states. Now you can make the case pretty easily that it's real bad to hunt lions with dogs. Absolutely, we've lost it in Washington, California, Oregon. I don't understand why, Like I guess I kind of get what they're thinking, but I think that they're thinking that the dogs they're doing all the work, or I don't like, what is the Have you ever gotten a sense and you're well, it's you know, I always kind of it's it's always tough for me to approach those people. Whatever. People have a strong opinion about something that they have no knowledge about. You got it almost assume that you're dealing with an idiot. Yeah, So at that point the discussion for me becomes hard to engage. And I'll sit down with some people and talk to him about it. But the one thing I always tell people is, you know in my life that you know, I learned to fly helicopter in thirty days. You can run multiple businesses. Everything is relatively easy compared to getting up in the morning and saying I'm gonna go catch the outline today. So it's really insulting when somebody says it's not sportsmanlike or it's it's unfair because they have no it just haven't got a clue. You know, when you look at that and you think about that being put to a ballot or an initiative. I can make the case your lions are very probably the most noble creature in the woods, probably certainly one of the most beautiful, and when people look at that, they say, how could you go kill that animal? You know, in in wildlife management, all animals have to be managed. There's not you don't get to pick and choose which ones you do or don't manage. So I I get really, you know, I I understand how they make the case. I can probably do a lot better job than they do. But it's mostly they don't understand how sporting it is. That's you know, it used to be the sport of kings chasing the hounds. It was chasing boxes in England. Yeah, a thing that I find works for people. It's like it's helpful when you're like sort of conceptualizing what kind of hunting is acceptable or not acceptable, or likely to be shot down in a public battlet or not. Um, I'm stumbling around us. But but there's like a sort of a thing like a traditional use. Okay, so in areas where people have traditionally haunted lions with dogs, I would tend to think and I think most people agree that you would continue doing what was traditional. So if you had an area like there's states where you've never been able to bait, to set out bait for black bears, Okay, you can't bait black bears Montana, for instance, It's been like that for a long time. Now. I'm not like uh pressing, you know, I'm not encouraging someone to legalize baiting bears in Montana because the way it was set, it was set from a wildlife management issue. It was set from a traditional used issue. And they have a system that works, you know. But it's like when you start taking away traditional use practices, that's more upsetting me, and that like makes me more suspicious than preventing new practices from entering the realm. That makes sense, And I think I think it's something that like comes up all time, like when when guys down South, like for me, Like I grew up in the Upper Midwest, no one hunts deer with dogs. If you went and said we're gonna start a new rule you can hunt near with dogs, people particularly deer hunters, would be up in arms. Okay, they'd be like burning buildings down over this. Meanwhile, you hunt deer with dogs in the southeast many states. It's just what they've done, you know, And you have to kind of respect traditional use practices, I think. And the thing with lions is because the way lions behave when they're active, how they travel, you just you can kill them with predator calls kind of now and then a guy will run into one and shoot it. But it's like you hunt lions with dogs. To stop dog hunting for lions, you're basically saying you can't hunt lions, correct, basically, And I know, like in South Dakota that guys call them in a little bit. You know. Well, we just got the data back for our two thousand fourteen harvests here, and I believe there was two hundred and these are round numbers, but tw hundred and seventy lions harvested, and at least two hundred and thirty of those were with the eight at hounds, you know, and and uh, I say to thirty, maybe it's just somewhere in there. But basically, you when you remove how hunting from the scope of wildlife management, lion hunting lions with hounds from the scope of wildlife management, you've effectively removed your ability to manage lions, whether it's to benefit a sheep or deer or any other pray species. So now California is a great example. Go to California and try and find a deer. Yeah, they thought they had a lion hunting problem, not only had a line problem. And and right now we're seeing a decline in the line numbers in the Western states, at least in the states I'm familiar with, which which are Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. Line numbers are far lower now than they were five years ago. And we've got you know, i'd hate to guess, I'd say that there's a third a half the lions that we had five to ten years ago. But it really doesn't have him to do with hunting pressure. It has more to do with a cyclic following prey basis and and everything cycles and all wildlife animal species do, but they're definitely down now. It's one of the things we've encountered, Like we were on that that's weird because they're having like an like outside of this area they're having they're experiencing an expansion of range, like expanding, expanding in the more urban areas, expanding in the states that you have traditionally not had them. And I would question too whether those states have or haven't had them. I mean they have everywhere has had them well, but has been of trail cameras has given us a lot more documentation. You know, there's always been claims of lions in Maine, and everybody thought, you know, somebody was just seeing things. But now with trail cameras, you know, it's obviously more much more documented situation. And and they are and I do believe they are expanding the range and very dynamic, very healthy population of lions the United States. And that expansion is a lot less if you take out young males. Like if you're in the drawing map of where females are showing up, that map is not nearly as big as where males are showing up. So a lot of times when you find these when these lines are coming out of the eastern US, and people used to say, like, oh, it's a runaway pat like there's a hell a lot of people of mountain lions. But now they're fine. You know, these are like these male mountainlins. They're traveling several states, over coming out of the Black Hills, you know, turning up in crazy places. Researchers termed those transient lines, and they're almost always males, and males tend to be the ones that get in the most trouble. A friend of mine that works for the government is I think it was five hundred lions were removed in a I forget how many year period of time, but the vast majority of them were males. And that's typically what you see. They're they're the ones that get in the most strokes. You treat more males and females. They're easier to treat, and I would say, yes we do. Why the easier to drink, you know, they leave more scent. They travel the country. The example I always used as a guy going into the store and buying something. He goes in and he gets what he wants and he comes back, he's gone. He hit straight lighted in straight light out. You send your girlfriend or your wife in there. She might be there an hour to do this, get the same thing, and wonder all over the damn store. That's how female lines are, so it makes much more challenging to trail. They leave less scent, so they you know, it's just the males are generally much like in the case of Chris's lion that day when some of the gun came right straight down that canyon for two or three miles, you know, And and when we were going backwards trying to find the dog, we saw every place that he scratched and every mark that he made along there. And by the way, I'd say that they used their hind feet most of the time. It's just a nine feeahs, what I mean. Their thought has always been. But there's an awful lot of pictures on trail cameras. Now I'm using the hind feet, but and they used both, but sometimes they use their front feet. Two. You know, there's a story I know, I told you this in the past play where in the in Florida it was generally accepted that the Florida panther was gone. You know, there was rumors of sightings in the same way that now they could take some state like Missouri or something. We're like now and then a guy will see one. Everybody tells me he's crazy. Right, That was the situation in Florida. But there was some guys who just knew they were there. And there's a story where a guy in some someone in the early thirties, I think it was, he got in touch with some houndsman in Arizona and they came out and within a couple of weeks had killed seven lions in Florida, at which point we said, okay, we at the point and like the guy was just basically saying, stopped telling me there's no lions in Florida. And I don't remember who the line hunter was, but that could have been one of the Lee brothers or any number of you know, there was a lot of famous line hunters. I went and reread it because you had mentioned there was some famous lion guys. I went read he the name, the name of the guy that came well, a man out of Texas his name, And there's a whole family of the McBride's, and Roy McBride is the one that I believe that I don't remember where maybe out of Texas that they took lions back to Florida and infused him into that population and helped to help bring it back around and some fresh genetics in there, you know. But yeah, that's been a dynamic population down there now and it seems like they've got a very healthy population. It's doing better now. And it was a funny thing because when we talk about mountains, were talking about there's so many names, so mountain, lion, cougar, puma, puma, catamount when you don't hear it very often, I mean that was like a older term in the East primarily was catamount. Um, it's all the same thing. And so like again, like you go back to the time of European contact, these things were everywhere, right, you know, Yeah, there was no real division, so there was probably no genetic barrier. Really when you factored like how much they could travel, how many places, there were probably no genetic barrier between the ones in Florida and the ones in Washington State. There's a lions you know. Um, when the lion population in Florida got so low, people made an argument that, um, they were talking, they were talking like a subspecies, and it's just constant like in in biology, had this constant like lumping and splitting. But people were arguing that you had this like subspecies in Florida and it would damage it somehow to bring you know, blood in from somewhere else. But they did and and and you know, literally every mountain range can have its own subspecies if you get carried away just because the animals may or may not ever travel out of that and they have the same kind of thing. They called it the hum of puma here in Arizona, and you know, it was was a lion that was geographically isolated, just like the Florida pants. And at that point they will take on their own genetic characteristics, but they're still all mountain lines. Yeah, and those things in Florida we're having that they needed genetic diversity brought in so bad. They were like their tails are shaped wrong, and there's all kinds of problems. And it was a funny thing because like you look at people who argue in favor of the existence of bigfoot, okay that you've had, you know, like people say it was all these big foots in the up big foots of California and big foots in Washington big foots in Oregon. So you've got a sizeable population, you must, right, And they've been here continuously now since people would argue pre before the arrival of Native Americans across the barrin Land Bridge. Um, no one's hit one with a car yet, no one has a trail campot. Well, but in Florida, just like take just like the dead on the street thing. Okay, in Florida, at a point they were down to a known like forty seven or fifty mountain lions in Florida. And every year they're losing multiple cats to getting hit by cars. And this is in the Everglades, which is not a huge abundance of roads, And you've got fifty of a species and you're hitting several year with cars. That to me is the greatest argument against the existence of bigfoot. If you could be hitting like a significant percentage of mount lions of cars every year. But no one's running into one of these things, a real one. It's always like it's like a real dead one that we can just show around. I run into people occasionally that actually believe that there is you know what I mean. I have two of my life that I can think of that we're dead serious about it. And I in the general goes back to an experience they had out in the woods where they saw something that they thought was Bigfoot. But I spent thirty years of my life right into the state of Arizona staring at the ground. I've never seen anything that even came close to looking like big Foot this country. Yeah, well, I mean that's probably true. We have a lot of sightings here. Yeah. Um, what is some of the work you've done with going out with government people or biologists or whatever to like get lions. We all the bulk of it was probably the late eighties. I haven't done much in the last ten or fifteen years, but it would be the studies over by Wickenburg and over in that area in the in the desert country and uh from Wicky Up and all through the western portion of our state over there. Well, they do they hire you just to put lions into trees? Yeah, but there was It was hired in one case, and then the other is generally volunteering my time because it's all the Typically the biologists were friends of mine and people like that that that knew us. But you and in those in those places, you almost always put them up in a rock, you know, want to bluff, and they darted, put a collar on them, and then a lot of times we have to go back out and change called you know, and the back in those days, the telemetric systems weren't what they are today, and we certainly didn't have any satellite stuff, so it was all they would change them, which, you know, those lions get to be pretty savvy after you have to do that with him a couple of times, because like if a lion trees once and gets caught, he's less likely to tree again the second time. He darn's you're not gonna tree is easily typically uh particularly, I say that the females seemed to be worse than the males. But you know, Julie and I this year had a mail lion that well. We started the track in the morning at six or seven in the morning and went from Arizona to New Mexico eight miles as the crow flies air air miles eight miles, and at three o'clock in the afternoon, the lion was across the canyon from US actual Mile Creek Canyon drainage and we could see the lion. It was laying on the side of the rim looking back, watching the dogs come, and that turned into second pack of dogs in that process, so that lion wasn't gonna be coughed. And then we watched. We saw it twice that day. You never caught it, never caught it. In fact, the second time we saw it, I called a friend of mine that owned the ranch, and he came and got on the track with the lions and the dogs, and you know, we ended up getting caught up with him and getting the hound stopped. But that line, I doubt that that line will ever be caught by hounds. And it's obviously learned that that's a learn because he's just not going to go into a tree. And what they do is they get out in front of the dog. In that case, he would get about you might say it was a half mile. He started moving again, and they start trotting and for whatever reason. Typically it's there's a lot of different theories behind it. But a lion that is trotting or running is much harder for a dog to trail if the scent has landed on the ground, if the scent still floating in the air, and the hound can take it out of the air. It can really put some pressure on it on an animal, But as soon as that scentence in the air dissipate, it's the dog has to go back to smelling it on the ground. And now the scent and the spores that were very evenly laid because the lion was casually walking are now in bounded piles where it's landing, if it's jumping, or even when it's trotting, it's just dispersing those those cells elsewhere for it. So it makes it harder for me to trade it. Yea. And there again, that's when it comes into the case if the dogs are in good enough shape. I thought mine were in really good shape at that time, but they're there are guys that hunt that to do it professionally that their dogs might have been in better shape and put more pressure on that cap and made it climb a tree. But it was a long day. So when you saw that land across the cane, what you mean he just looked over there, he was, Julie saw and she's can't wanted me to shoot it, And of course I had a pistol and I told her, I said, I wasn't gonna be able to shoot it and she filmed. In the filmed it will be laying under the tree, and it did its mouth hanging wide open. It's like how many yards away d fifties, hundred seventy five. It's one of those. It's just you know, real abrupt, bluffy canyon. And then you saw him get back up and start going right as in the dog and it laid down under a big pine tree. Was interesting to watch this that the dogs. There was three dogs coming and we we knew, you know, they're all we knew which dogs they were. They were coming fast. When they got to the tree, they thought the lion had gone up the tree because the scent was so strong. So they fooled around there for another five minutes or so while the lions just getting farther ahead and going and going, and I'm sure it got ahead of and now the hounds never quit going, so that you know, the lions were doing this where it's running for a while and it'll go through a really rough spot and then take a break, and it just it was there are a lot smarter than people think they are. That's uh. You know, there's a lot of people that will make the case that a cat's i Q was greater than that of a dog. And I never really thought that most of my life, but you know, some of these experiences like that really makes you think about it. Yeah, have you encountered Uh well, let me let me go back to to the to the to the biology things. So you guys would go out and catch them with the collar on. Does that make it super easy to catch a line when you got a telemetry deal? Yes, typically when you do that, doesn't know where he is and when he's there, right. Uh, it's you know, half of the hunt is trying to locate a track a lot of times. And you know, once you locate the track, then you start trailing the line and we're you know, really when you have the collar on a line like that, you're going to a spot to to catch the line with you with fresh dogs, and so it's a lot different. So what happens between when you run the line and the line doesn't know you're after him, He's just going about his business. When you say jump a line, what do you like? What happens when they jump the lion? That just means the lion is now aware of dogs. That means we've come to the place. You know, the Lions, they travel a great deal or afternoon, late evening, and then again they travel some in the morning, but most of their traveling starts about three or four in the afternoon and then probably eight nine o'clock that you know they're they're either laying up somewhere. I know, I've learned a lot from people's trail camp photos. They just don't travel as much as I thought they'd traveled all night, and they don't. It seems like the sweet spot for them is that early evening stuff. So if you started to track the daylight hours, right, most through traveling is daylight hours, that gray light type stuff, and you're liable to see them at any time, but the the evening, early evening and in that, you know, eight nine o'clock seems to be the time that they do most of their hunt. So if you're picking up on one of those tracks, you're now, say you hit it at seven or eight o'clock in the morning, you're twelve hours behind this thing. So it's going to be a grind. And if it's a mail in the conditions are right like this time of year, those mails put off a lot more scent and the trailing conditions are a lot better than say if it was in September or in in October. But when you you'll you know, the dogs are barking and trailing, doing a hundred miles of what we did together. When they get to where that lion is laid up, that lion jumps and runs. Now that tracks very fresh, and a lot of times they're taking it out of the air. They'll be chasing that line and it just you can tell the dogs had jumped it. It just the intensity and the and their excitement and some dogs that may not have barked all day all of a sudden be joining in and that's when you know they've jumped the line. And that's that's when the race is on. And sometimes it'll just last at the bottom of the canyon. Uh, And then sometimes it may be a mile or but it generally is typically a normal lion, it would be over that's you know, you would expect to get it caught at that point. And when you when he's getting caught, what's he usually going into? Trees are rock piles in Arizona. We probably catch them them in the rocks. Do they go in the holes? Oh? Yeah, Mine all kinds of and it's I think that cats just wonder through their domain throughout time, because they seemed to find the craziest places to go get in, and they also seem to know how to get out of them. And we Dave Martin's lion, the fellow that puts the rim to rim On this year, the lion Joe Mitchell called and said, you know, we're coming your way. And anyhow, when they he actually saw the lion get up and go on the rock pile, he was above us. And we hiked up to where the rock pile was, and Dave and Joe were standing on one side of the rock pile, and I watched the lion come out the other side, and I say a rock pilot. It's probably a seventy five yard long pilot boulders and that lion had traveled through that maze of boulders and come out somehow on our side. And unfortunately for all of us that were hunting the lion, I had dogs with me and saw it, and then we got Joe's dogs over there and managed to get it in a tree. But you know that that lion, and that's how smart they are. The underground passing toway. Yeah, had an underground passageway and the lion had gotten away the week before doing something similar to that. Okay, you know, but they're they're cats. You know, they probably spend their lifetime prowling around that mountain, investigating all those nooks and cranny's and that kind of thing. I was hunting. How often kind of quick question, how often can you jump on like that and be on like a hot track where there where you're like the chases on, but then you don't get them treated. You know, it's happened once this year, you know, a out of a dozen lins haven't done Yeah, so it's uh it Typically when they jump a line, you should catch it, but you just never know. It's you know, that's kind of what makes it exciting now. And the lions are definitely this, you know, as the numbers of lions decrease, the lines that are in existence, or just smarter genetically, you know, whether it's a genetic thing or learned trait from having been hunted, or whatever it may be. They certainly seem to be jumping and running and they're evolving more and that sense. I recently, I have a dog out in the backyard. You haven't seen Steve that's a friend of mine out at Wisconsin helped me acquire and they call him Lurchers, but it's half border Collie and half Staghund and his only job is to handle those kinds of things. And he's just a physical specimen as far as an animal that's super high intelligence and unbelievable physical ability. And he just meant to handle a jump line, right, jump lines lines that that do things that the hounds. The hounds typically if one jumps and they're looking at it, that they handled that very well. But this dog would be more along the lines of with his intelligence and the fact that he isn't a trailhound. When he thinks we might be getting close to a place where we're gonna jump a lion, he gets out and he's he spends a lot of time doing things that the hounds aren't doing trying to get the jump on that line. He's kind of just kicks out the intensity just a little bit, and he doesn't even normally leave us until he thinks they might be getting close to catching it, and then all of a sudden he'll just disappear and and I don't know, I mean, I never been there right when it happens. But I feel like he has definitely helped. I know that he helps when they jump in the tree jump type stuff. He doesn't really do a lot of things like a hound does, but he never quits looking at him. And you know, when like that lion hits and he's only seen maybe ten or fifteen lions. Now, when that lion heads out to a tree limb, he looks like he's trying to catch a pop fly, you know. I mean he's right there trying you know it's gonna do. Yeah, and he's you know, he's anticipating it the whole way. Yeah. And your dogs might be oblivious to the fact that the lions leaving the tree. No, they some are, but most of them kind of get that. But they tend to be more reactive. In the border Collie in him is you can see the intelligence factor there. You know, you're talking about that lion going underground, you know and coming on. In our spot, we were hunting pigs, wild pigs in New Zealand with dogs and the guy had the GPS collars on the dogs and of a sudden his dogs just vanished off of his He's not getting on his unit. He's not getting their signal anymore, and we start going to drags we'd last heard him, and then now and then he'd be like it popped the dog and pop up. One of the dogs will be like, oh, there it is. But then it to go away. And it was because this pig had gone down into a tunnel. The dog went in and the yeah it wasn't getting satellite reception anymore on his collar. But then the pig went up getting stuck in the tunnel. So the dogs just down there holding on the pig's tail and no one's coming out of that hole. Wow. So we went up digging a shaft down to the pig and pulled up a dog still hanging off it on the other end. Like the dogs were just never going to give up, no they You know, that's a good that's generally your best dogs, you know, the ones that quit earlier and all that. Those are the ones that you probably wonder if you shouldn't find him a good home. But those that and and unfortunately those a lot of times you're the dogs that get killed because they jump off bluffs after their quarry or whatever it may be. But those are the good ones. It's kind of funny you talk about um. It's like we have such a weird relationship with dogs in this country where on some on some level, we want to bestow on them like human characteristics, you know, and that they have almost like human rights. But then how can you then tell the dog that he shouldn't want to hunt lions? Yeah? Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like an honest question I always think about, is um, if you really are like, let's say you're like adamant. You know you're vegan, right, do you think that wolves should stop killing the ones? That ever? Actually answered this question for me? But you know what I mean, It's like, who were we to tell the dog that he don't want to hunt that lion? Well, think about your animal rights. People are cat and dog lovers that have some form of an animal in their home, and if they let that animal be wild for one second, it would go back to going killing its own, particularly cat Like, you don't need to talk the dog into one to hunt lions. They get up in the No, that's I mean, And that's what really Probably the breeding of those dogs is the single most important part, is to breed that drive and desire and those those characteristics into them. I'm fortunate enough of a man here in Arizona that's hunted lions his entire life named Steve Smith, and a man that's mentored me, Jim Bueler out of Nevada. Those guys have the breeding that they've created. I've been the beneficiary of. And it's a game changer for you as a lion hunter to have those genetics that where that dog get you know, when it's the day it's born, it's it's almost as though they want to hunt lions. So you've got dogs that come from generations of do dogs have been selected like selectively bred Ford lion hunting decades? Thirty forty years? Did you were you on lines and all during the bounty days when you could get a bounty on lines? No, that was that was in the I think they late sixties. That one a wedding here. So if you refer to that at the time away ago when you just like back turn in the scalp on that line, right, and there was and there was guys that and we still to this day have government guys that are on payroll to do that. To protect the livestock industry, you know, some of these lions just they can wreck havoc uh in Nevada. I know Jim Deeler's dealt with as many as twenty and thirty sheep killed in one one evening, and there's numbers where they're much higher than that. But that's not a crazy thing to see. Julie and I showed up one time in the line had killed twelve sheet that day. Yeah, it just looks like a massacre. And I I'm not sure why they do it, you know they I think they just get to be like a large mount bass eat and chad, you know, I mean, they just get to kill them. Did the lion? Did you guys catch the line and killed all those sheep? We did? I remember when I was a kid, I used to read Tracker and Predator Caller magazine. I remember an article in there. It was called like the hundred thousand dollar lion, and it was because they had done a big horn sheep transplant and in a lion killed all the sheep they transported. You know that they've brought into this area. I feel like it was in Arizona. Well, there's been, of course, the the brilliance of our Game and Fish Department here to transplant sheep on a mountain called Lion Mountain. This is back in the days when they didn't acknowledge that lions had an effect on sheep, which in the last decade they have certainly come light years around on that. But even today we have the Derringers are just world class line hunters here in Arizona are working on the air Viper sheeper to preserve it. Another man, Jim Bedlin, has done a lot of work. Steve Smith done a lot of work and Unit twenty two here to bring that those sheet that Jay send to take pressure off of remove that remove as much pressure as they could. Typically they remove the females or what you need to get out of there to get a sheet population to come back. There's no girls. The boys don't show up for the party, and the and the females when they set up and teach those kittens to kill those sheep. They're just devastating. I know. The guys in Nevada, Jim Bueler and Casey Shields are both were just working on the salmon or ever on the rockies removing lions there this last week. So that's been for what kind of stuff. Their egg purposes or for wildlife purpose. The wildlife purpose, that's all wildlife stuff. That's one thing you really lose is well, it's very expensive to keep professional lions hunters in business, and we'll always have them as long as we have lines. I mean, California they banned sport sport hunting of lions, and I think they were killing three or four lions a year, and now they kill three or four iron and do the same thing, except we pay to do and is that right? Yeah, yeah, the harvest of lions has never gone down in California. Just illegal to do it from a sports standpoint now, but from the agriculture of standpoint, you know, you just if you're gonna have I'm gonna feed this nation, you have to keep predators from meeting the sheep and the cattle. Any idea what it costs you think to keep to kill three four lions in California? No, I mean, I don't know off top of my head, but it's you know, it's it's a government agency that's functioning, and you can imagine the expense of that. But we'd have them anyway. They deal with a lot of other things. They deal with everything from the you know, controlling the waterfowl around airports so we can take off a lander airplane. Yeah, you know, deer on the runways at the military bases. And you know, because something must have shifted in California though, because you hear about that that like that the number of cats their lions are removing through predator control. But then on the other hand, you hear so many stories about just like the shifting nature of the lion population in California and lions popping up in places they hadn't popped up in before, guys losing more livestock lines than the used dude, so something must be It must not be that they were going to kill x number and now they're killing the same number. Anyways, there you probably wouldn't have these issues. No, and it's always hard to track lion actual lion harvest numbers. But one thing that when you are hunting a lion population, you know, it's especially even if guys are catching them and turn them loose. Those lions have a tendency to avoid people. And these big males christs was I mean, I think back to years was probably the worst, one of the worst I can remember. But we can't oneed in Mexico last year. That absolutely and I can tell when I come up to them whether they're going to be a problem or not. But some of those lions, they're king of the woods, those big males, they don't wonder if they can kill you. And and when you get a line like that wandering around in some place with children or people that are jogging and not paying attention if it decides to kill, I think the only reason they don't kill more people is at a their upright and they don't correlate that with their normal method of taking prey. And we probably taste bad, you know, I mean in comparison to say a deer or something they're accustomed to eating. But we've certainly lost people, I mean, and every year, you know, Colorado seems to be having more more interaction than anybody these days. The female joggers and an adult and then uh young kids. It seems like so it's like something, it is like there's some kind of like visual thing and often like the thing with like people running. Well, I think the reaction of those two types of people are where a man may stand this ground or at least not at least think not to just turn and run children. It's hard to convey that to them. You know, they're just probably they're scared and they're gonna run. And even if the cat wasn't, cats are very instinctive. If they're just like housecats. Lions are overgrown, great big version of a house cat, and if something runs from it, they just go into that predatory mode. Well, in fact, like how many lions there are, it's kind of shocking, and like how many there are, and that they have the capability to kill people, it's shocking. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen more. And I always tell people, you don't here in Arizona used to be typical for people to hunt a lifetime and see a lion. Now, with everybody doing so much more optics hunting, they tend to see a lot more with the optics than they used to. But I always told people, I said, we don't ever wonder if once has seen you. You know, I don't know how many times we've ridden by where a lion was laid up and come back the next day and trailed it, you know, and realized that some of the gun was right there and all that, you know, let us ride by and maybe it was a sleep, maybe it was watching us, who knows, but it was five hundred yards up on the side of the mountain the bluffs watching us. Probably have to digress a little bit, but just at the point you were talking about with lion harvest and lighton lion predation, employd pointing this out to me, and I think it's it's genius in the process. The thought process is that you know, we're controlling we're hunting lions, but we don't control coyotes near as well as we used to with the banning of trapping in most states and the banning of poison in all states. So a lion goes out and a lion kills a deer an average, it needs an average of one deer a week. A lion goes out and kills a deer, well, now kyle populations out of control. The kylotes come along and find the kill, eat it before the lion can even get a belly full. Practically. Now, all of a sudden, that lines back hunting again. You know, so instead of killing one deer a week, he's hope maybe killing two or three just to meet his needs, you know, you know, so it's you know, a state like California and we're killing you used to kill three hundred with sport with sport hunting. Now we're killing three hundred with government hunters. But I gotta believe if if we were controlling kyo populations, that three hundred would be was a lot more significant number back then than it is now. Yeah, because the coyotes are just basically forcing a deer hunt every the lion hunt. Interesting since we've had that conversation, I saw a studied the other day where they've documented that with the wolves, the same scenario they're getting. They're grizzly steal there, that the wolves steal the lion kills, woolf steel lion kills, and they pirate him. Which you know, there's a lot of things going on that are always hard. It's a very dynamic process when you try and figure out how lions engage the prey species, but there's always a lot of moving parts to it. To the coyote deal is a real significant problem here. They've taken some steps here to try and manage them in certain places, but it's it's definitely where our phone crop was really really getting hammered here. Losing them to that there was a video clip that came out of Washington where a deer had was wearing a collar camera and um, you're you're they have the footage from this where because he's like it's just like sort of it's sort of like the cameras hanging down where like the tags on a dog would hang down, and you can see the deer. He's just browsing. And when a lion comes and kills it. The lion comes directly on that thing, doesn't come from behind, doesn't jump from a tree. It's just all of a sudden, there's a lion running directly at this deer. Wow, and that deer's just dead in seconds. Oh, they're they're extremely effective killing. But he just came like just at it, you know. And typically I would say that they kind of ride up on him from behind and try and you think when you think that that behind, you do it. This guy this is like all of a sudden, there he is hit on his head and you got the feeling he'd done it before, you know. And you know, some of those big males and and any lion, their strength pound for pounds is just unbelievable to me. I mean, I've seen him flip dogs distances with I'm not even sure I saw quite how the dog got slung so far. And their strength is amazing. And to watch him leap up onto some bluffs since they just explode and fly through the air to they were just if you like for back to the housecat. You know, you watch a housecat, it's nothing for him to leap up on the side of the any piece of furniture or anything they decided to until those lions are just you know tenfold that. Have you ever been scratched by line the No, I haven't. The although Joe got bit two years ago and uh that was a complete fiasco. Or girls had shot the lion with the thirty eight special and it came out of the tree and the dogs were small, and it was, you know, kind of the normal problem with the lion. When Joe stepped in there to try and grab one of his dogs, the lion got ahold of his jeans and just I mean one just jerked on him a little bit and can jerked his leg out from under him and then just bid him in the right here in the calf and then proceeded to just claw its way up him. And that was and I had a pretty big oakland that I always get a stick when it when't we're about to shoot one. Anyhow, I went to hitting that thing. I couldn't get it off of him, but when I hit it, it it would quit going up him. Other than it was bidding, only bidding really hard the one time. And I remember the last time I swung at that thing. I remember thinking, if I missed this line, I'll break his femer in half. And uh, And I hit the line in the head and it turned around, came after me, and I had a pistol too, So it was, you know, kind of the end of the story there, but it was it was a painful experience for him. And we had punched moles and you have to do a bunch of stables shots like I ain't had shots for that. You've met Joe, so you can have. I mean, it was all we could do to get him to take some man about auto. He was kind of thought I was kind of a cool deal. He bleeding all over the place at That's really the only one where I've been involved in and somebody getting hurt. You know. The first line I ever saw I was coming back from trout fish on this lake and I'm driving. It's just after dark, and I'm driving, like I know where a roads cut into a steep hillside and also on all these white tails are like coming down the grade and just like a cloud of dust and kind of like plopping down into the road in front of me, but like they're spooked rather than being spooked from me, they're spooking from something almost like running into my into my my van and the headlights and all. And then but then the road was so sheer on the side that they sort of shuffle trying to stay on the road without going over the ledge. They sort of shuffle along like right alongside the door of the vehicle, And I rolled my window down and put it in reverse to turn the rear lights on. I'm trying to see what they're doing. And I roll the one down, put the backup lights on, and standing just feet off my bumpers a lion standing there, Like I have no idea what I drove into or what the situation was as I came around the corner. And I would like tried like the piece it together in my head. There's no way to explain like how everyone got in the position they were in when I hit him with those lights. He probably did a double take. Yeah, I was like, he's like, oh man, now what like there's a van here? Yeah, probably thinking thank God for that. It was just the weird It was the weirdest thing, man, just like standing there in the backups like, yeah, like he's trying to kill one around me. So, now, if you've been on you you on lines in Arizona in New Mexico, Now, what prevents you from his taking your lion hunting operation in in going to the next frontier of lion hunting. Well, I think we're probably in it here. I think there's probably more opportunity. Nothing prevents you from doing it. You can travel and go. But you think that, like but you feel like this is still like a good for now even it was like a good place to be a lion hunter. Yes, it's not nearly as as good as it was five years ago or even ten years ago. Somewhere in there we peeked out and it's been declining ever since. But it's, uh, it's one of the greatest places there is because here we you know it. It snows in the high country every year consistently, but there's always lots of wilderness areas and pockets that these lions can move out of that so you have a constant regeneration of most areas. And with that said, this year is the first time we've seen places where there's no lions in certain spots. And that's you know, concerning to everybody that likes to hunt lions here in Arizona right now, where do you attribute that too? I mean, in the last five years, is not like there's been like a great you know, influx of lion hunters. Well, there's been more. Is there a people have got you know, there's every day here's somebody that's a lion hunter that I've never met and never heard of, whereas years ago I kind of knew everybody that that did it very much. And the biggest thing that I think is a factor now is the mechanization. When people used to have to ride mules and that was the primary way to do it, it was limitedd is limiting, limiting in itself that just to have the livestocks, and not everybody did it. But now with the four wheelers, I see a lot of guys that wouldn't be affected normally that are very very effective because they'll drive on their fore wheelers. Still they find a track just like they were hunting in the snow, and then they'll track in the dust, right in the dust, and that and that seems to have really increase the harvest of lions. And with that said, our lion harvest has not changed significantly. The Arizona has harvested between two and three hundred lions for you know, well over a decade. So something else is going on, that's yeah. And I'm not like like you're we're talking about her like something with like like the like a cycle with the with prey, you know, and our dear bird has been in a decline for a decade anyway, maybe two decades, and possibly everything is just reaching that point where the predators are following it. Um, it's just really hard to say. And this is, you know, the first time I've ever felt like our lion numbers were low and and it's and it's not I don't think that much. There's much that could be done to change it one way or the other, if you want to increase it or decrease it more. It's just a natural thing and a natural peaks and valleys of wildlife. What's the next favorite food after deer for amount lion not counting to nasty have a lina here it's number two. Yeah, um, it'd probably go deer. Calves have a lina. Uh you know in the spring around here they can just be deadly on the cat. When we were out, we found were one and killed a fox, well fox and the deer and didn't didn't found a dead deer. Yeah, didn't we find a calf killer one than old calf killed remember that, remember I want and just like ripped the fox up and that's kind of where you saw her. They've eating tortoises or turtles, right, turtles towards happened to be riding along with Matt Pearsh was conducting the study in in the hark harkwehlers and harko bars at the time. We were actually in the Walpie Mountains and rode up for a lion and killed a desert tortoise and actually left a scratch right there by. It broke the shell off of a bit, you know, down on the bust of the shell, and then probably jerked the turtle out through the hole and then actually scratched just like he killed a deer and left that and what was crazy was he pulled meat. It was just just a shell there. And Matt actually still I'm sure he still has the shell. What was interesting was we were writing that day discussing the fact that a biologist, a lady by the name of Jenny Cashman, had She was with the U of A at the time, and she had just finished doing the fecal elexantera. They collected a bunch of scots up and they were finding tortoise feed in there, okah and there. And Matt had asked me and said, do you think they eat us? They eat everything else? Like what all have you seen when you're tracking? And what all have you seen that they've killed. I can't think of anything that lives in Arizona that I haven't seen that they've killed, badgers, skunks, man, bears, eagles, they were cubs, you know, young bears, um elk, lots of sheep, mostly dear everything. I just cannot think of a species. Antelope. We had one. It was last year or the year before. I killed an antelope right up here. My sonset point and uh, they just they I think they can kill anything they want to. They just matter whether they decided to do it or not. He said, you have killed the eagles. Yep, and that was on one of their kills. Oh he came down was because onder like, wow, he caught what the eagles doing with the eagles is eating something? It was in me somehow the lion. Of course they birds, you know, cats catch birds all the time. I guess the line, you know, it was probably laying right there when that eagle was eating on it and just took him out too. Did he eat the eagles eat the breast out of it? Remember looking at that when we rode up, thinking that I didn't want to get any credit for that at all. Burrows, burrows, they eat the wild burrows. Yeah, you don't see that very often, but they'll kill these wild burrows once in a while. Yeah, not enough of them, but none of them. As we train lines to kill burrows, we can solve a lot of problems turn those loose. Yeah, man, that's the whole issue. For a future conversation that would be I would love to have that conversation on the borough just about yeah, let's do about it. We need to not have it when Julie's around. If we're going to transfer it to the wild horse population. I just refuse to like, like, I don't like the argument of people who say they should be treated like a native animal because like somehow doing like the EO scene, they were here and then you know, like millions of years ago or that that because the Spanish brought them here, they should be treated as a native species. The Spanish brought pigs. They're fairal livestock the end of the day, they're faral livestock. And these horse lovers can make all the arguments they want to about that, but they're non native species in a fair and fairal livestock. And how we have the Wild Horse and Burrow Act boggles my mind and it is a you know, it's devastating the habitat. That's what I would think. I was thinking anytime you have a conflict between firal livestock in native wildlife, that that it's just I can't believe there's even a debate about which is gonna who's gonna take precedence. And even if you took the wildlife out of the scope of the damage that can be done through the overgrazing, the same people that want to run every cow off the land think it's okay, let the burrows and the horses destroy it. Next time, ladies and gentlemen, the Mediator Podcast, we're gonna take on the issue of wild burrow. You guys call them burrows. That's what the wild horse. We have burrows here too. Donkeys like full on wild donkeys, yea. And they're probably worse than the worst. Oh, I didn't know about that. How many of them roam Arizona in the thousands. They're really bad and desert sheep country because they'll just get into a water hole and just own it. They won't let anything come and drink. Those just hang out there for days, anything that comes into it. When you said that, that that is automatically thought you meant like mustangs. We we we have more horses here now than we ever did due to the big fires that we had a lot of domestic horses got loose and a lot and then we had the economic downturn. A lot of people turned horses loose here, you know. But also the shut the one to shut down the horse slaughter facilities, you know, cause love I remember I was talking to a stock detective. I wrote a story about livestock thefts some years ago, and one of the stock detectives was saying that there used to be a horse theft problem and now we have the opposite problem where people are always waking up to find horses they do not want inside their fence for instead of trying to go get a horse, you'reways trying to go get rid of a horse place to put them. All right, thank you for tune in. We will solve the wild horse wild burrow dilemma next time on The Meat Eater podcast

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