00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Hunting Collected podcast Numero Uno number one, coming to you alive from Mexico. I'm sitting on a ridge, a nice glass and tit as some would call it, in the middle of Sonora, the middle of Cartel Country. I got a little recorder, some binos and pretty cool guests. First guest is Steve Rinella. We've been here hunting for the last six days. Jason Ko's deer or cow's deer some call them, in the middle of arid desert mountainey landscape that can only be described as as beautiful, challenging. Steve and I have been hiking around for for six days and talking about life, talking about hunting, talking about politics, just getting to know each other better as we've been known each other for years and I've been friend and then that way. That makes him the perfect first guest for a Hunty collective. Steve is of course an author, a writer, a great example of a modern hunt and because he is that, because he's a great example of an a bastion for hope for the future of hunting, I wanted to talk to him about how he feels right now, how he felt in the past about hunting. It may be ways to fix some of the problems that we've have. We feel hopeful about some of the positives. They're happening right now and I think we were able to do that and about an hour and a half, So give us a break. This is the first try to podcast, but hopefully the Honey Collective will continue to have interesting guests that can help us examine our own ideas about hunting, our own philosophies why we go outside. So, without further ado, Mr Steven Ronella Steve describe You're one of the best ortors I know. So I like how this is going. Yeah, I like to start off with a little I can start off with a little compliment to the gas, you know, really smoothing old that's the old trick man. Describe where we're at. We are in Sonora, Mexico, close enough to the US border that if we look to the north, we can see a very ominous looking surveillance blimp um that seems like that hovers over the landscape like the spaceship in the movie District nine. You've seen that, So who's that there's like? Looking at that which one would imagine has the most sophisticated equipment in the world yet I am sitting literally in rabbit droppings and comedy where um on a hillside cover it in a lot of juniper and ocatillo and oak and mesquite and very dry yellow grass. Good, Yeah, that's pretty good. I like it. A lot of exposed rock, yeah, it is expelled. A lot of stuff that looks like it does not get a lot of rainfall, that's true. A lot of dry river beds, dry creek beds, a lot of places for cus here to be hide now today, But I don't believe we've seen anything we wanted to chase. But just for those listening, we're both bindos in hands. So if we have to break a bit from the podcast, you'll know why. Because forever we found in our chasing a big but we found in our chasing a big bucket. We can start this over whenever that ends, hopefully pretty soon, because this is the last day of a six day hunt. He in Sonora country, Cartel country. We haven't seen any cartail, but we have seen and killed some cous Dear Steve, you kinda pretty damn good one. Five days good, didn't you? The first full day of the hunt, I um, which never happened. Well, Okay, I've hunted cus dear five times, you know, each time for a week or so, and I've killed cus deer two times, so you know, and those in those times I've put in a lot of hours. It also looked at a lot of deer. But hunting cuz deer you tend to like it was a couple of things about it. You hunt. I've always hand a cuz deer late in the year, always, but mostly in January, UM. And so at that point I usually have like a pretty full freezer, all right, except be hunting off fall, so I'm not feeling like in a real meat crisis. And it's a place that really just like to hang around and observe and you just spend like today we will spend from dawn till dark. We will spend the entire day on one knob, on one like Punta Alto as they say in Spanish. Um. And so it's just like really just kind of an intense focus on this observation, watching the landscape, observing deer, and you'd like to kind of drag it out. And so I think that because of how enjoyable it is and the weather, like you couldn't imagine better weather than Senora in January. And so you know, you don't go running off after the first buck, you see. So you kind of like like, in my mind like hunting couse deer is almost like a it's like a vacation, you kind of thing in some way, and uh, yeah, you like to wait and try to find a big one's having to be a couple of times in the past though, is I'd let some bucks slide and then on the last day or two be like, Okay, I'm gonna change my attention now to get a meat buck and then not be able to find one because there's a big difference out here between finding one and getting it. Yeah, oh of course we found plenty that we haven't. You see him. They step behind the bush and that's it just vanished, man. And the landscape is so it's so corrugated and just full of hell holes. Increases that. Yeah, things just pop up and then you never say again. And it's often to be looking at It's often that they're popping up thousand yards away, you know, and then it was gone. Sometimes before you can even tell what they had going on. You just get this like basic idea that you're looking at a buck and then it vanishes and you spend a day trying to find it again and never find it again. Yeah, it's the literal version of a topographic map when you're looking at this place and it's cuts and divide and dry creek beds and brush a hillsides and clear grassy hillsides and yeah, and it's like the kind of place where it's not like readily obviously even what way the rivers are flowing like you feel like you get into a river channel and somehow walk a circle. Yes, absolutely, And and for me, you're right, I mean, this is the end of the year. This is we we left the day after New Year's Day, and you know it's quiet here. It's eerily quiet. Hopefully the sound on this first podcast doesn't have a lot of wind, and you can just hear how quiet it is here. And even though we're sitting together, a lot of times we split up and you sit by yourself and you're just focused on nothing but what's in the field of view you're buying. And that's a pretty healthy reset for the whole next year to come. What I've thought of like hunting down here before I've kind of thought is that that the the astancias of the ranches down here really the only place in the West that you would that you can kind of get a sense for it would be some of the wilderness areas or some of the more remote corners of Nevada. You know, it's hard to explain. Um, just like how still I mean these guys still you know people, you see razors. It seems like you see you know, UTVs more and more, but still work cattle on horseback. It's just quiet out here, man, big huge, huge properties. Yeah, I mean we can see how many miles can we see right now in this vista to this next mountain bip. To be honest, I don't see I'm not actually looking at the blimp right now. But it's it's been it's been a constant landscape this entire time. Now, it's it's that's what strikes me about about this type of honey. And and we're here on a ranch that is a private ranch, but we kind of made the decision just to do it on our own. I mean, we don't have any guys, don't have anybody telling score the deer are where they aren't where the big deer live where they might be, so we're just finding the highest class and tip this glasses and uh, there's some purity in that. I know. I've heard, I don't know if I was you or your brother at some level talk about the purity meter. Matt, my brother Matt has a purity score talk about which has weighted very heavily to to um, which is this demonstrates a lot of bias. What's your purity score? Is this pretty high on the on the list? Yeah, it's high, man, I mean, like, you know, to steal his idea, which I guess is hardly unique of a start of purity scoring a hunt. I do rate public land higher only because just speaking very generally, like in a very general sense, is much harder to be consistently successful on public land then it is private land. I mean, this is a gross generalization, but um, public land has, you know, Jenny has open access, you know, and if you're talking about hunts that are kind of like over the counter taking place on public land, there's open access, and there's no coordination or little to no coordination between people using the landscape, so you're often instead of working in coordination with whoever else might be out there, you're working. You know, you're kind of plotting against each other and like a very like if you're like I got a feeling those guys will go there. I'm gonna get up an extra hour early and get there. You know. There's that kind of stuff hunting on private land. Yeah, generally speaking, less people out and sort of coordinating their activities and and it's just different. So if parity winds up being like some kind and a difficulty, then yeah, I rate that pretty high. Um, I rate Like, here's the way of putting it, how excited and surprised it's a hunt has high purity. I guess if you're if you're shocked that you were successful, it tends to have a higher purity. And you say that right, because it's like those hunts for you're like shocked to be successful are great. But then why is it also great to go out and realize that you're in the middle of a huge duck migration and then all you talk about is how great it was because ducks were just piling in no matter what you did. You can be shooting off flares and they're still laying the depots, and that somehow great too. But the so it's you know, it's it's so it's so full like personal biases. It's hard to really talk about in any kind of real way. But I do like the ones where you're nervous amount whether you'll be able to work it out, and then success comes down to you really working hard and putting in your best effort and having a payoff and being kind of like surprised and pleased that worked out. Is there is there a level of predictability there if it's an unpredictable landscape like in this In this case, it's it's fairly predictable where we can it can't go I mean we can we can go the borders of this ranch, and we kind of can talk to locals and get a bit of a prediction on what's good and what's bad. But we don't have we can't predict a migration, we can't predict the rut we're here just trying to catch. It. Is predictability like a little bit far out. Yeah, So if you're gonna like map out like let's say we're map out the purity score, let's do it. Well. The thing that I would bring into is that so our body like we we have a friend, Jay Scott, who facilitates both guided and non guided hunts for Cou's deer in Sonora. Um, so this is a rancher. He's worked, but he doesn't like he hasn't hunted it. So that in my mind, as I'm like doing this very biased, very personal purity score thing, like in my mind, the fact that we're sort of on the van guard of hunting this place, that adds a little purity to me. That we've never hunted it before adds a little purity to me because discovery is important something. So if we can't if we learned, because now we know this summitch pretty well. Yeah, not all the way, but we've learned a lot. Like we've hunted duntled Dusk, a lot of guys, swapping a lot of notes, so we know a lot about it. Coming back next year, yes, absolutely, there will be a teensy bit less purity in my mind because we already knew it, right. So this the fact that we're just kind of like figuring it out and don't even have like super strong guidance, um makes it kind of fun. But then I've done this sort of thing a lot of times, so I kind of like understand how to put it together. There's a lot of hunting rodby clueless, but this, even though we're south of the border, this is a type like arid open country spot and stock hunting is something that I've devoted a great deal of, you know, time to figuring out and I kind of like understand it now you know, and I'm able to apply it to a handful of different kinds of animals wells. As you get going in your life, and I've found this, I'm sure you're the same. Your purity score, it's harder and harder to score high. The more you hunt, the more places you go, the more things you see, the more experiences you have, it's harder to score high im purity. Give yourself a bigger um, you know, bigger room for error. Early on, you're like, man, it's cool just to see Mexico. Once you see in Mexico, once you see in this country and you understand what it is and hunting kus do you And maybe you're not so next time. The pretty score is just just a little bit further. So maybe next time, if you're looking to introduce a difficulty you didn't have on this trip, you bring your bow if you'd put me out here twenty years ago, No, I know exactly how I would have hunted it, and I think that I would have been shocked and surprised where I had to get any buck, Yeah, because we would have come out and we'd just walked up and down, up and down, up and down, thinking you're gonna like jump one up or that's just how we would have hunted it back then, and so back then it had I gotten one, I would have been like stunned, right, and we'd be like if like me and my brothers had come down, we all want up getting the buck, even just spikes and for keys, right, we'd be all worked up. But yeah, just through kind of like learning how to do this um over, you know, a long period of time, you do kind of come into situations. You come into a lot of hunting situations feel a little bit more cocky. Like I did a hunt this year with our mutual friend Remy and I. I had been applying for years for an elk tag on the fog Nack Island. Um finally drew one, and just so happens that a body of mine had drawn it and been on the hun a couple of times before, so he came with now because he went before, he just knew like how it goes right, and he just knew how to work it, and so going with him it was an completely different experience what I expected because he knew. He kind of told me like, here's where I think will happen when we go, and that woind up happening. And he was very much in the driver's seat on that hunt because he was coming in with with with the knowledge. Um, and that's the kind of stuff you seek out, right, So you seek out people who know what's going on, and that's like an important part of learning. But it just winds up being a different experience. Not that I didn't have a great time on that hunt, but it was very different than if I just went in cold rolled into it. I think one of the highest, like one of the highest purity score hunts I ever did was I was probably and I was like my I think it was in my first year graduate school and my brother had gone down he was going to graduate school in Auburn, Alabama, and he started messing around out onto Skegee National Forest. So he had just moved there and me, both my brothers and a buddy bars all decided to go do a hunt in Tuskegee National Forest. And we don't know anyone. I didn't have any kind of network. This is like before stuff was widely available on the web, Like you didn't go find information like this on the web. And we just went down and started hunting to Skegee. And we had, you know, a week or so, and everybody got a buck. And I got a buck on the last day that was so small that when I school captin, I could put it in my shirt pocket. That buck rack, that little spike rack rode home with me in the shirt pocket of my shirt front, the front shirt pocket. Oh my god, that's how our school captain. I just left a little narrow sliver of bone and had two like inch and a half spikes. Not a button buck, but a small spike. But dude, we'd like done it right. Everyone in the world that goes I went. Everyone in the world, like in the east, everyone once the dreams going the West. We went from Montana to go hunt Alabama in the National Forest. What Alabama? Because my brother gone down for graduate school. I'd go in to Montana for graduate school. He went to Alabama for graduate school, And so we just went hunted Alabama and like figured it out on a national forest. And I still count that as being like one of the coolest sons ever went on. I think that's true. I mean, the coolest sons ever went on when I was growing up where those songs where we just we had Green Ridge State Forest in Maryland, grew up and you just get a couple of buddies to get your dad and your neighbor. You go up there and you walk around. You shot a spike. That was the best if you made it to a spot where you could camp and camped out by the creek. And when I was old enough, had a few beers. That was just as well. But we had no that we didn't wrap any kind of trophy measurements other than the fact that we were together with people that we cared about. That's all we ever did. And um, I found that hunting became more complicated once I kind of developed my own sensibilities and um and heard about everyone else's sensibilities and what they wanted to do, and and got into this business and and learned that I had to figure out, you know, what my ideologies were and what my ideas were about hunting because I can't just walk around the woods of my dad and my neighbor anymore. At first, the different perspectives on the outdoor world natural world hunting, they come as this like day lose, right, and it's disorienting, and you might look at it and think, like you just see all kinds of things that seems sort of ugly. But then when you realize that all of those practices are coming from something that probably developed very naturally, it was passed on patrilineally, and then lady, you try to dig through it and find out what parts of the world at large are worth keeping and what parts of the world at large you'd like to see vanish, and uh, you know, it's it's like fun to be able to it's fun to be able to toy with all these ideas. Yeah. Well, with a much more narrow um, a much more narrow understanding of the world. Yeah. Well, that that's what I think about when you take new new hunters that are, you know, twenty years and older in their adult stages of their life, I get a lot of that. I'm sure you get the same a lot of people. No, I think that new hunters you struggle when you're you know, say you're twenty five or thirty or thirty five or even older, and you seeing hunting and social media or you experienced someplace in your life and you want to pick it up. I think it's tough. Social media makes it tougher because you see, you know, people that you either respect or admire doing you know, the ultimate maybe it's a private ranch, L Cohn or something like that. And you see those things, the films that we make in that hunting industry, in the ways that we portray it, and you see those things, you see the pinnacle of hunting represented in our media. And I don't know that you get a sense that you can just be like you were in Dusky, You're like I might have been in Maryland. You can just be someone who is exploring the natural world, learned about animals, and you just haven't to have a bow or a rifle in your hand. I mean, I think that's something you lose if you don't. If you don't pick up hunting early on, and you're you you're introduced to it through the modern media cycle. I think that's a struggle something that we should think about. Means that it creates unrealistic, absolutely, but it and it creates this ideologue that that you have to do with a certain way. You have to look a certain way and act a certain way, and you have to the bigger the animal, the more successful you might be. But when you were in Tuskegee and when I was in green Rid State Forest, we never thought twice. We never had the ability to think twice or the perspective of the sensibility to think twice about whether that four point or six point or ten point was was success? It was? There was the other thing. I'm allays interested in your relationship with your dad wanted then your relationship with your brother as well. But brothers dating Matt, I think that lays a strong base about who you are as a hunter and what you're what the rules are and and what your expectations are. Um, talk about that. Talk about your dad, your first experience hunting and just what it what it shaped in you. Now that that's important. We uh, I was raising Western Michigan. Um, my dad had been you know, my dad was born in South side of Chicago. He's raised by his grandparents who spoke Italian in the home. Um, he brought that radio, so let this go on the podcast. This is I believe Yanni be honest to tell us the lobby an eagle. Go, Yanni, you're on the podcast. Wow, Um, these boys got the rangers. We're sitting here thinking about coming up towards you guys. You guys still down with the plan of out in the north end. Yeah, we're down with that plan. If you just follow that road up to the around the tip where where we are, you should be able to spread out and see into Black territory when you guys were walking that road this morning, when you guys go to might be a good Yeah, there's plenty of good stuff in there to hang the meat. Excellent. We'll ring. They're gonna tell them you have to packet for a few want you're gonna have to packet for Yeah, you'll be close to in your part, but you may have to pack in a couple hundred yards. Thanks for joining the podcast, Yanni, and I hopefully I can do it again. It's been great. You're just a great guest. Thanks. Thanks. Johnnie the great lot Peen Eagle, who is Steve's right hand right hand man for everything everything meat eater. Um yeah, so my ow man, so so like he drew up with no idea boon. He was always drawn to it and really interested in it, but he didn't start hunt until after World War Two. Then he got serious about it. But um, so I was born, But I was born in the best of Michigan. We grew up hunting a mix of of farms, people that my parents knew through church and just through the community. Uh, you know, two hundred acre three hundred acre farms, and then mixed public land. The first deer I ever missed I missed on public land with my bow when I was eleven. And the first dear I killed I killed on private land with a gun when I was thirteen. And you would you know, we had long hunting seasons, so we would start kind of rule in our household was that you could take a half day off school for the opening of squirrel season on September. You could take a half day off school for the opening of bowl season on October one. Um, we could always take November one off because you could. That was the opening of trapping season, so we could start. We'd start setting muskrat traps at midnight on Halloween and then usually got to run, you know, set traps off through the first and then you could take the full day off school for November fifteen gun opener um, and you didn't have to go to school on your birthday. So I would always go ice fish and on my birthday with my dad. But on November, like, if you didn't kill a deer by about you know, like how that moment when the morning seems to kind of end right post on, you would just if you didn't have If you didn't kill a deer by like nine in the morning, you just get a sinking family and statistically you were backed up. It's like you killed if you didn't kill a deer on Open Day, like your chances are getting a deer early. Put this away. You had a greater chance of killing a deer on Opening Day then you would if you hunted all whatever it was fourteen days of the season. So more than half the deer I killed him over your day. That's crazy. It sounds like sounds similar while the step team and yeah, do you you would ever pass up any buck? It was a laughable notion back then because there weren't big bucks. Bucks got like two and a half aridle bucks were rare, rare, um in the places we hunted like Bucks just got shot and you did your fair share of the shooting. And to even and to even begin the idea of like getting on board if people are gonna start passing up Bucks just what it was just an idea whose time had not yet come. Um. And so to be a very successful deer season would be did you'd get a deer with your bow and get a deer with your gun? That was a very successful season. If there were guys you knew about, guys who would like could kill a deer every year? What they're gone and killing you every year at the Bowl? Like those were the dudes you would go and ask for advice. But are you always one of those guys? Your brothers, Well, we would get deer, but I would spend Here's the thing is like during those kind of like during those those years, I was very devoted to for trapping. So I didn't put, uh, I prioritize that I prioritized trapping. I would kind of measure the success of my year more by kind of like trapping activities. But yeah, there would never be a year. I mean from the time I was thirteen nine, there would never be a year when I wouldn't get a deer, you know, like I would. I would always get a deer with somehow usually you know, on him with my bow and then and then getting with my gun. Um. But no, I wasn't like a two deer year guy. I remember later in college up in the up of Michigan. I remember the first time I shot two deer today. I killed it falling with my bow in the morning, and then killed a little Michigan eight point buck in the evening, and I felt like I was hunting guy that that didn't happen. And then I killed another buck that year, like another little Michian ate with my gun that year, and that was like yeah, I mean that was just like sort of like the kind of like quit hunting after them, right. There was no more that could be done in the hunting world besides that. And I remember that we had eating all of those deer by Christmas break. Okay, we just ate deer meat and hunted deer. So it was. But here's the thing. I wasn't trapping anymore. I had quit trapping. Its trappers. They started out trapping, but they were more interesting hunting, um. And as the fur prices went down, they just got less and less interesting in it. It was funny because there was one year around when I was twelve or thirteen. I kind of like didn't really trapped that much that year, and they went out and caught to mink one day and mink, we're worth like forty bucks and um, and I was so overcome by jealousy that I got backing hard to trapping and then trapped until I was twenty two. And you're what ages of your brother? What ages worried brothers both older than you, They're like staggered out like a year and a half in the year half, So I was I was the little brother, um, which was it was kind of a luxury because you wind up getting all the get all the privileges early. You know, my parents didn't enforce multiple sets of rules. Was too confusing, so as my older brother when it would become like okay for him to do something, they were just like, okay, it's okay for everyone to do that too. So like in high school, I had no al what do you call we're supposed to be home at a certain time, not alibi. I never had one of those either curfew curfew, So like in high school, I was like I didn't have a curfew anymore because obviously my older brothers like doesn't because he's in college, and so they would just be rather than having all these rules, they would just get that rule. So what it meant was I could do it kind of like more, you know, I was able to get in and do more kinds of hunting and have more sort of freedom out in the woods earlier than he did, even because you know, because he was there, he was like the first one coming up. Kind of like I know with our own kids that you tend to be a little bit slower than when the other ones coming. You realize that knowing nothing bad has happened to anyone, yet you kind of caught them all loose. So I had like a lot of freedom be around out in the woods and to do just to be gone all day wandering around. You know, what are your your memories? I have always I've written about this before, and I know you have to just early memories that you're I don't know, with your dad, I've got little things like what we packed for lunch, and how he'd sit and where he how he told the shooting sticks, and how I'd miss all the dear good memories. Yeah, my mind is packed full of stuff like that about like he use just the food thing you brought it, like what you have from that prior to hunting season, prior to like small game opening, he would fill milk crates up with like a collection of food. So that would be prunes with the pits in him for what he'd like to have those in his tree stand just to like keep busy eating something. Jars of jar glass, jars of jard Venison, bags of jerky, um, boxes of saltine crackers. He had some way he would buy that, like those huge blocks of cheese that are given out like government che met a guy that would sell my dad his government cheese, so some of that and he would just like get this. I remember it was like a big part of the year be filling these milk crates up with food that was going to live in the back of his jeep grand charity as we hunted that year and um. And he would build these when we went camping to hunt up on public lay into the north, he would build these like old timey lll bean camps where you're lashing yeah sticks and and wash. It would make like wash basin platforms that it's like crazy ship that would take be so labor intensive that just like not how we camp now now you tend to camp with like you stead of stoving them, you know, in the dirt and sleep in the dirt. And it's just really simple, but it's kind of annoyingly elaborate. Old timey camps remember it all. And there's just little things like that. My dad used to pack toast cheese crackers. There's orange. I just remember, like in the morning and like the pre dawn morning. I remember opening those and him getting pissed at me because they were loud, and I'll be crunching them. Because little things like that I always remember. And I wonder how when you get to this level, when you get to this kind of hunting that we're doing now, you miss those little those little details, the things aren't special, that aren't a nostalgic just because how many you know how many days a year this year if you go on, had been down the field, Oh man, a lot a lot. I do miss them. You know what I'm gonna what I'm nostalgic or is not so much that And I'm sure that will come later. Um to be nostalgic for that time with my dad. Uh, what I think about now in terms of my dad was I think about how just kind of like off we got were always work. He was a demanding person, um very difficult person, a high expectations. Okay, so I resented that a lot, and now only see there was like a mathod to his madness, right like I see now where he was getting. Now that I had kids, I understand what he was getting. He didn't care, He wasn't interested in being anyone's friend, like I think in his mind he was like, I need to raise pete bowl that are self sufficient in hard working and then know how to figure it out. And that's all I'm really doing. I don't care about anyone having fond memories of this whole thing, of anyone feeling like we're buddies, Like that's not my priority. My priority is like I'm trying to produce something here. I'll produced it at any cost. And I resented it, but now I understand it. So but I have yet to get to a point where I'm like nostalgic for those times. What I am nostalgic for is for those times in my twenties early twenties when when we were with me and my brothers and our buddies from growing up, we're sort of just starting to realize there's this big outdoor world beyond the handful activities that we participated in. Like that we you know, we knew like the spots we hunted, the spots we fish, but also we started like would drive a long ways to go to a certain river, you know, um, and just started like really kind of like stretch our legs and check out new stuff and just go hunt stuff we've never hunted before, and fish stuff we've never hunted for. Drive down to the floor to keys and try to catch a bone fish, you're like, you know, go up and try to catch a summer run steel heads somewhere. That's what I'm nostalgic for, is that like early exploration where you hadn't seen anything yet and it was just all like this kind of moment where you're like, holy shit, are you kidding me? Like this is all out there? Yeah, I thought the only thing was out there was an eight mile radius in my house. Could you imagine twenty years ago this type of life that you're leading now, this this adventuring public speaking writing a leadership position in that world and hunting world. No, not really, man and no, because I think that if you look at every however, you want to chop it up, if you want to chop up life. For the point I'm trying to make a say, chop up life in five years or ten year increments, There's never been a point at which I wouldn't have been if I looked into crystal ball and saw the next five or next ten years. There's never been a point at which I wouldn't have been like shocked by what I saw, and I wondered how that would possibly have come to be. I anticipate that that feeling might end at some point in time, but so far has not. I feel the same way I would have like in personal life too, like that I would have like three children because no, wait, I was you know when we I think when we first podcast at a media last year, I was just just a new dad. I'd probably had been a month, and even up to that point, I didn't believe it my entire life. I thought, well, there's no way I'm going to have a kid. I see other people that have kids, a lot of other people that I have kids, But I don't think that I'm well suited enough for that thing. I'm ever be prepared for that. I'll never know what that feels like. And I kind of just I'd like to point out and interrupt that you might not be prepared for I don't, and I don't mean that I agree. I can agree with that. Yeah, I mean I still did this day. I go home and I see this kid there, and I think I'm lucky to have this, But what is this? How do I handle this? What five years ago me would have just looked on this like some kind of fictional fairy tale that I had written. I'm sure is that something you feel and you're when you're in Guyana, were sitting in a place like this and you just try to think about that kid that was squirrel hunting, or even the kid that was exploring from from graduate school. I mean, is there a comparison. No, I don't think about it like that. And I think the reason why is because it all had because I was there for it all. So it wasn't like that Chris, like like that crystal ball feeling is if you, if you a man, magine looking ahead. You didn't see all the steps, you know, But because you're kind of like there for every moment. It all has this sort of logical progression to it. Um, there's a there's a I can't remember who the writer was, but there was a writer that describe the process of writing a book as that they equated it to driving at night where you can never see any farther than your headlights, but somehow you just keep moving and eventually get there. And I feel that like that their analogy about writing a book is kind of truth with your life, where you just see like what's ahead of you, but at all every little step, how do you kind of make sense? And you just keep moving along and the things immediately in front of you make sense, and then all of a sudden you arrive somewhere else. What's interesting now, as if I've pushed towards, if I've pushed towards sort of these like pinnacles of hunting, and to say that I don't, I don't want to act like, um, I don't. I don't want to seem to be suggesting that there's like kinds of hunting that that are great, and I do kinds of hunting that are great, and other people do kinds of hunting that are just fun. I'm not trying to say that, but like like but like sort of and these attics not the right word either, but really kind of like challenging kind of hunts where you're like deeply immersed in the experience for days on end and just focused on doing something very difficult in a pretty wild place. Okay, like I've been able to do that kind of stuff, but right now, now that my kids are getting a little bit older, I'm actually looking forward now too, sort of regressing back to like the very introductory stuff, like to be totally to be totally honest with you, like outside of purse professional things like you know, like I sort of my ideas and at work are kind of based around hunting is what I do. But to be honest with you, to go back to the to the to that farm where I killed my first dear and take my kids out there squirrel hunting on a September, dude, like that that's the hunt I want, Like, that's the hon I want to do, and I'm trying to really find a way to I'm trying to find a way to be able to do that a lot more, um even though I have a lot of you know, I still have a lot of desires to do the other kind of stuff. I'm trying to find a way to like add that in because I don't really know that I want to take my kids and and introduce them to I want them to see all layers of it, right, and not just have it be that, Oh, you know, I know some guys have this big private ranch. We're gonna go out to a private ranch and hunt turkeys and you can call in ten times a day. Uh. I don't know that that's like what their first experience it should be. Really, I don't know. I feel like I kind of wanted them to see it sort of like how I did it, because everyone feels that that there's what most people feel that how that there's some value and how you were raised. Right. I think that when people, when parents and people in other ways somehow get rid of the idea that there was any value and how they were raised and try to just do everything in this novel fashion or that they try to like read about how to do it, and they don't think that there was that there's any sense or rhyme or reason and what their own experiences were that made them a person that they might be proud of. Like, if you're the kind of person, if you've become something that you're proud of, you have to go look at like, what are the factors that made me this way? Not that all of it was great, but there has to be some components to it that were important and um, and we're just talking about like like a hunting life and life spent outdoors and life spent around Wow, Like I just I can't get away from the feeling that there's something about want around a little chunk of woods, the two looking for squirrels because a lot of the people that I enjoy most in life and want to spend the most time hunting and fishing with that's how they grew up. There has to be something that has to do something to you to kind of make you um, to kind of prime you for the bigger stuff. Like well, I think and I know you probably don't talk about this much, you know, because when you're a podcasting you're learning about people and talking to them. But I think in a way those of us, I think you more than more than most that have a platform. And honey, are you doing that? And the and with here with meat either with the podcast with the TV show with with social media? Are you leading people down the path that you've been led without being able to take them there? I try to I try to if Yeah, I think that I like try to celebrate, um, some of the things that are more accessible to people, like like in I'm gonna handle that question a couple of ways, because one, I try to celebrate the kind of outdoor activities that are easily accessible to people. Um, I'll go and every year we go to fish catfish. You know, we go to fish one and two pound channel cats. I take my kids to fish with their uncle Mat for one and two pound channel cats. Like I try to put as much of an emphasis on that, which means a lot to me and I love doing it, or with small game and squirrel, and I try to celebrate those experiences so that everyone sees it. There's like try to help people see the value in the resources and activities that they're able to engage in. The Other thing I tried to do, like if I have sort of a you know, a mission. Yeah, If if there's a thing that I would like try to convince people love, it would be that I would try to teach people something that I learned very slowly, and I wish I maybe would have learned it a little bit quicker. Would be that you need to look and find out in this world what you love, okay, and identify the feeling you have as love. I was obsessed with nature as a kid. I was obsessed with animals as a kid. I wanted to be out hunting and fishing all the time. It took me a long time to just make the very obvious realization that this is something that I loved, That these things in these places where things that I loved and had a lot of affection for, and that I would ultimately be willing to make sacrifices on the behalf of those things. Better me we I had no idea about um, and grown up, it just wasn't something I really thought of thought about that there in my mind. Resources, wildlife resources, landscape resources. In my mind, they had just kind of fallen from the sky and they were there, not because anyone did anything to make them be there or not, not that you'd make them be there, not that anyone did anything to help ensure that they were there. It just it just was right almost as like it's almost just like biblical sense that it just always was there, always would be there. And it took me a long time and to see some loss in fact, to go like, oh man, this thing that I loved so dearly is tenuous, like it's not a given that it will always be around. And so I try to like if I could have some thing that I could do, it would be helped ease people through that transition of being like, yes, admit, just admit to yourself and you love it because everyone knows, like you love your children and love your wife and would take a bullet for him, like literally would take a bullet for him, right, you take a bullet for a lot of your best friends. And so to go and work and be like, here's this other thing I love too. It's not it's like it's not as like sort of immediately tangible like my kids. You know, there's just a little contained units that live in my house. It's just different. We're talking about landscape wide ship. But to recognize that um, that that these things that we care about um and that give our lives so much meaning like require something of us. Do you feel like that that initial feeling when you're a kid and I had the same thing we had public land up. It was just where we went. There's no philosophy or ideology behind the reasons why I loved it. I just love being that went trees like the next ship that we enjoyed. We play a game called remember the show named that tune. Yeah, of course we had a game Chopped that Tree. And you say, like Dan, I believe I can chop that tree, and three strikes you taken it, just like Daous. That's the kind of guys I didn't have that would like to try to give to my children a little bit. But yeah, but I don't think he went from the message. I don't think you can get to where you are and I am of that appreciation the devotion to it, and I think it probably goes back to the headlights in the dark road. You can't get to the devotion that you currently have or that I currently have, without first having the feeling of it being this serendipitous thing that you happen to live on the earth with, you happen to be created on the same plane as this landscape. I don't know that you can have a devotion that as pure as what yours seem to be off that other steps. Yeah, it's probably true. But I think the thing that I tried to do, or I like to imagine myself doing, would be that because I have the time, UM, because I have the time and sort of a developed ability, you know, to articulate some of these things, um, and and have the luxury to be able to spend professional time on it. And I'm trying to learn how to articulate certain viewpoints that you can provide people with a little bit of short of a short cut in the thought process. Where I think that, um, because I know that there are things that could have been said to me when I was in my late teens. Um, there were things that that could have been said to me that would have helped me to understand uh, a little bit of what I eventually became to understand, and much quicker. And it would have helped me make some better choices and not have made some of the mistakes I made in the woods. And I don't mean mistakes, I mean moral transgressions that I would have not done some unethical things that I did. Uh, had someone took in a taken a minute to talk me through some of the things, like if I could talk to myself, then now I would probably give myself a swift kick, and then I would explain some stuff, you know, like I had, um, you know, I wanted to be a very successful trapper, right and and there was like a financial component to trapping, and I would take shortcuts. I would at times play pretty fast and in loose with the rules, this sort of arrogance that I knew better or that just like a kind of agreed, but not even like thought out. It wasn't like I laid in bed and had this sort of debate like well, here's the pros of being you know, here's the pros of being a bad person, here's the car. It's just like impulsive stuff. Did I not wonder how I had got there? You know? And none of it was like truly I never did anything it was like actually damaging but just looking now, um, looking now, yeah, I did some things that I'm like a little bit a little bit embarrassed. What don't you feel like when you start round trapp when you start hunting or maybe trapping the same way. I've never done it, but it could be when you start hunting, you don't unless someone has specifically said this to you, you don't think about the value of life. There's more to the activity than the value of life. You're learning how to do so many things. You're you're learning about nature, you're learning about animals, You're learned about your own abilities to do things. Shoot a gun, shoot a bow, walk in the woods while quietly sit for a long time. Be patient that the value of the life on the other end of the gun or the or the archery tackle. Doesn't it There's no room for that in the beginning, because it's almost too heavy when you start. You know, that's a that's such a heavy thing to say, Like you're nine or ten or eleven or twelve years old, let's talk about the value of this life in this grandly complicated exercise. I think that I always understood the value of what I now think of as the ness, meaning I understood the value of dearness. Yeah, I understood the value of like muskrat ness, the first animal that I've really just became just kind of like fascinated with. And one understands the bad where river otters right well, because river rotters are really valuable, but I like really wanted no river rotters, and in seeing them was so exciting that I understood sort of like the otterness and how much, but no, it was. It's only much later that you untangled all. But I think that the important part, though, and I think it's like a thing that hunters understand and people that don't hunt don't understand, would be that I think hunters put a very high value on elkness, dearness, turkeiness, sort of the idea of them or the well being of the thing in perpetuity, and not a ton of individual value, where I find that animal rights activists put a tremendous value on the individual nous with no real I shouldn't say no real would would generally with very little understanding of the nest. So a hunter might look and say, like a certain type of hunter might look and say, yeah, I kill a deer every year. Let let me take my friend Doug durn All right, Doug Durren kills a deer or two every year, but three sixty five days out of the year, Doug durn is looking at his family's farm and and also his state's wildlife policies, and thinking about what will make what will allow the deer on my farm in my county, in my state to continue to thrive and to continue to hold cultural value and what will allow us to have great, dear, healthy deer herd going into the next generation, next generation, next generation. He sees that and he would take a bullet for that notion. But does he feel bad shooting an individual deer? No, because the nest, like a dear ness matters. So I think that that's things an animal rights person would look at the picture of a dead deer and they don't see the things that created that, the situations that created that, the landscape that created that and would allow it, and what sort of what what parameters need to be met, what what things need to be satisfied in order to continue the producing that they just see, here's this individual thing that died, and um, it's just two different world views that can't really be reconciled. Well, that's what I never wanted to start this talking about the idea of what this podcast is going to be, But this is a good segue into that. I think this the idea that it's called the hunting collective and that there is a collective idea of what we are. What you just described very well. I think I want to try to answer the question, is there a way to take those two worldviews, the idea of wildlife in its totality as hunters see the value, and the idea of the individual having value, having maybe more value than than the whole. Taking those two ideas and finding a middle road and saying we both value the thing, but we value at a different end of the spectrum. You value it's cuteness, it's it's it's life, it's you know, you always see like the it's individuality, the sanctimonious nature of the way it lives and dies, like it should be able to live and die in a wild way. And maybe hunters say it should be able to live in perpetuity, maybe maybe a few of them have to die, and what some would consider an humane way or an unnatural way. That's all probably a whole another deeper level of the argument, whether it is unnatural or not hunt something, but the idea of that value system. I find that we're on the same plane and much the same as a vegan is on the same plane as a hunter. You're both trying to mitigate or or meter in some way your consumption, trying to find a way to better understand how your consumptive habits affect the world. Around you what you're trying to do. And so I think in the same way that the animal rights actifice and the hunter disagree, maybe the vegan and and the hunter disagree in the same way, But there's you're living with the same reality that this is an important and valuable asset to the natural world. How do you feel like there is? How do how do you Is there a middle road or isn't there not one? Yeah? I don't. I hope, I hope that you explore so much that you wind up finding it. But I can't really picture it because here's what it would take. Like like, here's what would take the bridge the gap. If I were to die right now, Okay, I would die feeling that I had given something to the idea of American wildlife. Okay, I would feel that I had contributed to a system it allows for the continued existence of American wildlife. I had contributed to it financially, I had contributed to it in a sort of um in a sort of spiritual sense, and that I feel like I had contribute to it to maybe help people see how much it means to them and how much it helps them, how much it represents the world that they believe in and want to have around. And I would feel that I had contributed, even like even in a much more minor way and some kind of like policy sense right about how should we be doing this? How should we govern ourselves? But I think that if you went and asked, you know, if you went and asked an animal rights advocate, hey has this person contributed American wildlife? I think that there was nothing but a trail of death. But that too gets into so much more difficult things because that too, another commonality that like brings us together but also tears as a part is the idea of wild animals because if you it's much more upsetting to people too. For let's just reason animal rights, like as though it's just this monolithic thing that all animal rights people are the same way. But like an animal rights person is gonna get more upset about the idea of a wild animal dying because they value wild animals more. And it's like, here's the thing, I value wild animals so much more. So there's another way, like how are we ever going to see eye to eye on at Because if you if you think that, like if deer hunting is upsetting to you, we're we're killing more cows in a day. Yes, So it's like, how could you even live? Like if if an animal rights and this getting little off track here, but if an animal rights person feels that all life is absolutely equal and a cow and a deer and the same thing as a person, then I would have to point out and be like, you are um spineless, because if I thought that we were systematically slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Americans right now in factories, I would take up arms. So we've got we've gotten to taken up arms against the cow murners. So but you're the point you're making is that deer hunting is down the list of things to be Yeah, yeah, point, Yeah, I'm I'm being I want to back that up and saying but being ridiculous a demist or something that seems a little ridiculous in them. But the point is all these places where we have common out here, Like I like wild animals more than domestic ones. They mean more to me. I like to watch them, They're the ones I'd like to eat. So it's like, and I find I find that in common with people who have a real problem with honey is oftentimes they value well the animals more too. So it's like here we are being like, I love animals. I hope they exist into the future. I especially like the wild ones. They'll be like yeah, yeah, like and I eat them. They're like, you what, you bastard? Suff a bitch. Yeah. I don't know where the intellectual hurdle lies. Maybe it's an emotional hurdle moreover than than than something that just that people emotional hurdle because it's it's just confusing, it's just confusing. It's like these ideas are talking about are so confusing. People have an easy time understanding them if they're looking at like an indigenous group. We have a thing where we're able to say, I think that there's a thing in the American psyche of people who think about this a lot. We're able to look at an indigenous group and say it's okay, like it's good that they hunt, It's okay that they hunt because they feel a deep connection to the animals and almost spiritual connection to the animals. And I would say, yeah, yeah, I'm right there with them, right there with them. It's something that I have devoted my entire life too. Is something that my father devoted a good amount of his life too. Is something that my paternal and maternal grandfathers were interested in. I carry with me like I have a sense of of um ownership for in deep concern for the well being of the animals that sustained me. What trips people up is there's this idea that, well, you don't need to hunt. And I always wanted like, okay, so who who is the cultural force here? Who's going to step in and declare when people need to hunt and don't need to hunt? There are when when the Spanish can keus the doors were in the American Southwest, there are letters that were written back to Spain by people on the ground and the American Southwest complaining about how the Native Americans would not stop hunting. And these letters, I honestly say, I can't figure it out. We gave him homes, we gave him livestock, we taught him to farm. These people insist on roaming around hunting. So would would some of these people go like, okay, that's the point at which once they had access to another lifestyle, they should have quit. They should have ended their life by that logic. Should we be striving for a time when we would ease the wolf off of meat? Is that the ultimate goal? And of course not being like like I entered into a highly theoretical realm. But if, if, if all society is pushing towards this point when you graduate into not hunting, who is the arbiter of when people should make the leap? Well, I thank you. I think that comes to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about it, and it is. It's an interesting question. There's the arbiter when they're looking at that the point of arbitration, you know, you look at British Columbia. The recent bear said, yeah, that was an arbitration of when can you hunt? And what can you hunt? And what are the reasons you can go? Um, And so I think as hunters we now have to better work as a group to define what hunting is for us and what acceptable forms of hunting can can maintain themselves in this conversation, because trophy hunting or the term trophy hunting, which is a very difficult and we'll try here, We're gonna try right the trap or we'll find a bug before we get finished talking about it. I think that that idea and we'll talk about it the idea of itself, but that idea has become in the popular sense, not the same type of honey that you're talking about, not the same type of ancestral urge that you're talking about. So to define the urge that you have, which in my mind is a legitimate ancestral and just just a lifestyle choice, to define that and then to define the other, like what parts of our honey community are unacceptable and the ideas that we're just not going to change who we are, But what what parts of the honey community have already changed? Beyond that incestral word that you have than I have and that folks haven't, and beyond the feeling of I've got to protect this thing, I've got to protect the idea of hunting, the idea of wildlife. Um, how many hunters are thinking more about the size of the animal than those types of things? And does that disqualify them from this conversation? I think that you would have to have a much more sophisticated and nuanced lexicon to begin talking about kinds of hunting and types of honey, because it just winds up being it winds up being way too complex. Right now, for instance, UM, we're out hunting deer, We're out looking for large mature bucks. Now, I would rather get any bucked in a large mature one, or what am I trying to say? If it came down to it and I needed the meat, I would just shoot any buck. But if I can have, if I have the time to put into it and have the location to do it, I'm also gonna try to find a large mature one because I'm gonna eat the meat, and I like to have the antlers around if I didn't eat the meat. Let me approach this different. But sees you a big giant buck, and you said to me, God comes down, puts a gun to my head, says you can take that head. You can take that meat. Can't take both. Every single time, I would take the meat, not just from the pragmatic standpoint, but morally, I would feel like that would be my choice. Okay, So I would just do it naturally because I'd be like, well, I want to meet me, and that's what our family eats, and I'd be like, I would do it sort of. I have a moral obligation of like boild be maximum value. Okay's like the maximum used to like the maximum way to pay like the greatest respect to the idea of the thing, and like having a pragmatic approach of like, yeah, there's a ton of calories there, there's like a kind of approaching there. I'm gonna utilize that whether utilize something small symbolic portion of the animal, which is the antlers. So time and time again, I'm gonna make that choice. If you wanted to talk about a good kind like in my mind, like a good kind of deer hunting, um, just specific to deer, I would have to say that that when someone was faced with that choice, I think if they said, screw the meat, I'm gonna take the antlers, I feel that you might need to that you might need to re examine your perspective on it. But but it's it's all it's it's all too complicated because there's more factors in it than just that, Like am I a worst person or a better person? Because if I shoot a buck I keep the antlers on a bookcase in my house. I feel that probably I feel that it's probably because to me, what does it wind up meaning? To me? It's just winds up being this like some this symbol of the antlers, this is token of the animal that I always look at and remember. Now, if I knew that I had wasted the meat, I would look at that set of antlers and all would do is bring me shame. But as that look at the things that in my home, I look at him like, dude, that was like the greatest trip, the coolest thing. Always remember that place, remember the people I'm with, And it winds up being like this emblem of something that I'm very proud of, them feel very good about. So to act like to be like, oh, he you you have hunting trophies in your home, therefore you must be a trophy hunter, It's like, I don't really know what that means. This is a trophy of something that I care a lot about. It would take a bullet for that's the That's the I think that's the point. Do we are we able as a hunting community to say the difference trophy hunting is the idea of trophy hunting that there's no value in the life of the animal besides what's on top of its head is wrong like that the valuation of the animal is I only want to kill it if it's or two. I value that and I don't value the other being the meat or the experience or whatever. Are we willing to say that that. Let's judge whether you're in our boat as hunters, and that ancestral boat and that boat of of people that are wildlife stewards and conservations, we're all in a boat. Are we willing to push the people out of the boat who do not have or share the same values for the life that you do? Right? I like the boat? Now do you use it? I stole it from you? Well, yeah, and I had put it one time would be like, um, people say like, we're all on the same boat, and I'm like, one of the guys in this boat is shooting holes through the hole. Let's push that motherfucker out. But that's that that that means all sabotaging. That's been the most interesting thing for me always to think about, how do we determine if there was a plank on our hunting boat. We're all in the same boat and there's a plank, and we're determining who's gonna walk the plank, And I say to you, do you value the life of the animal? And you say yes. So my second question is what parts of that life do you value, and you get that question wrong and you fucking walk the plank. Okay, the only way you can the only way I can start doing it is I tend to like go towards extremes, so because extremes are helpful, and this causes a lot of friction when I'm arguing with my wife about things, because I'll tend to um instead of dealing in the gray that we're actually focused on. I'll be like, well, let's imagine that we each pursued extremes of what we're talking about and see what that would look like. Okay, And to give you a sense, like we're having an issue about the kids, say like safety of the kid, my extreme um that I would be like, my extreme will be that you're keeping them in a bubble, all right, you're keeping them in a bubble and in this and her extreme would be that you're arming them, you know, with sharp with with a bunch of sharp objects that are laced with disease. Okay, So we just like to think that. So in order to take an extreme of like a kind of hunting that I really don't understand and that I think might be getting at what you're talking about, the value and yam or not. It's like, let's say, when you hear about a case of high like high fence hunting. Okay, in a very small enclosure where a deer is raised up in a place and then it's turned loose into a small enclosure on the day that a gentleman is going to go up and shoot it. Now, he would have had ample of opportunities to shoot it when it was in the back of a truck. But they're opting in order to sort of lend this appearance of hunting. They're gonna turn it loose into some sort of enclosure where this person can go pretend to hunt it. They hunted. They don't want the meat, They just want the rack. And so they get this thing mounted on their wall and they hang it on their wall. Now, what are they doing when they hanging on their wall. They're not telling people, Oh, that buck you're asking about. Why, let me tell you about that buck. They raised it in a little farm, and they turned it loose into an enclosure and I pretended to hunt. No, they're putting the buck on the wall because they want people to look at the buck, and they want people to see the opposite of what that buck. Is they want people to see this sort of emblem of wildlife, this sort of or what this emblem of wildness, this thing that represents challenge, this thing that represents cultural value, this thing that represents sacrifice and dedication, because that is what a lot of people look at a big buck and they think, man, you must have done your work. You musty've done everything right, you must have been lucky, you must have had a great day, you must be very proud of all these accomplishments. And they're putting that symbol out. They know it's a lie, but they're putting it out because they know that they're dealing in those things. The same way you would go and make a fake the pluma and hang it on your wall because you want to revel in other people's impressions of what that is, even though you know that you're living a lie. In that case, I would look and be like, that is a bad kind that's a guy shooting a hole in the boat. And the most extreme version, it's not only if you saw this years ago, it was like, there's a guy actually pretending to drugged. Dear. I never saw that, but I can imagine. Okay, it's drugged it can barely stand up. Because he wanted to be able to go and show these antlers to his peers and have his peers seeing them something that he knew was a lot. They got another guest apparents from Yanni tell us, be honest, come in and want to go, but we might be blocked by all normal ridge itself to the actual blake bench sattle that we saw him on last night. But down here where you guys are at, we're looking at that really helped me oriented. Um. Yeah, we're talked away on the shade on the main ridge. Uh, you're still still on the podcast by the way. Um, we're gonna hang up a little signifier so you guys see where we are. But you're on the right ridge. You see us now, Steve's waving a red bag for you. Amy, No, we don't see you. Double check back in a little bit. We'll check back in a little bit. We're finishing up our podcast and a really deep ideological conversation about hunting and it's worth in the modern world. So I don't interrupt it anymore, Johnny, my apologies, man, trying to find you a bucket on the left. Damn. We'll keep smiling and keep laughing. You can't touch your baby and you're ready keep smiling. Anyway, I can agree with you on the point of that extreme. I think then we have to figure out how to identify that person within the grander scheme of hunting and not just going hunting with that person, because in the U Or I would never go do that. That's not something we would. Somebody called you, buddy, called you up, say I'm going to high fence ranch. We're gonna drug a deer and then we're gonna walk around and shoot it. Well, you'd say, I'm good, go for it. But I'm good. Some people wouldn't. They're not even hunters anyway. Yeah, it's a in the in the landscape of things. I'm not going to name the things that I think are are tending towards your notion of of trophy, but there are many organisms, there are many organizations and and things out there in the hunting space that support the kind of idea that would tolerate and support the kind of idea that you just threw out there, maybe tolerates a better term for it, but would would provide tacit support to that hunter who is misinterpreting or misrepresenting what hunting is essentially lying about it. And I wonder how we either talk those those groups and those people out of their idea of hunting, or gradually slowly change their philosophies and ideologies get them away from that, because I think a lot of it's driven by the by dollars. I don't think about the groups UM. I do think about the people, and I tend to I tend to think of like how to UM. I tend not to think of how to conduct a sort of purge as much as I tend to think about that if we continue to have conversations about what is it that we value, how do we maintain the things that we value, that people will make better, that that people will come to make better, more sustainable choices. UM. Yeah, I don't. Usually I don't find myself thinking about UM kicking people out of the club as much as I imagine making the UM more clearly, identifying the goals of the club and having people come to see value in that. And I have a conversation around what it should look like and and and we all improve our ways the same way that I feel that over the course of my life I have. UM. I thought a lot about the things I care about and figured out better ways to try to maintain the things I care about. Like you could go back and look and UM, when I was like earlier I mentioned when I was in my late teens setting snares in a zone where you weren't allowed to set snares, you might look and say, like, here's this guy, he's just you know, let's kick him out, and I would have UH. Now I would like to think that, UM, I'm thankful that I wasn't like kicking kicked out of something like. I came around to see the value in having uh. Wildlife commissions and state fishing game agencies work with teams of biologists and policymakers to craft as that we all agree to live by so that we have an even playing field and don't overexploit our resources. I didn't see that at the time. I don't think that I needed like a bullet behind my ear. I just needed to have, like some experiences, he spent some time thinking about things to see that if someone says don't set a snare in this zone, it's not like your position to just defye that there's a way you can do, but you can go to the commission and you can say, hey, it seems kind of like arbitrary and weird, like why can't I do it that side of the highway but not this side of the highway? Can you please explain to me how would I go about changing this rule. I think that it's not a fair rule, it is not well thought out. Whatever, it's not just my position to be like screw that rule. So I'm glad I wasn't like thrown out um, because I eventually came to see the value in that, Like I can see value in that type of cooperation. So in my mind, it's like, you know the guy that let's just say and I don't even know it, you know. I hate to take like a single thing, like like we got the drug dear right, Like the single thing. I don't even know the full story behind it. It's sickening. It's just this like probably a very isolated occurrence. I don't want to put too much way down it, but let's just talk about the drug deeper guy. I don't know that that guy could be rehabilitated. It's so weird. It's justice. Yeah, it's just too weird to begin to think about. But I think that if people if you have a person who looks at an animal and recognizes its symbolic value, I feel that that person could come around and through some thinking and reading and kind of understanding our conservation history in this country and how we came to have the richest the richness of resources that we enjoy. I don't know, I feel that they might come to it and be like, you know what, UM, I'm changing over time and my value system is changing. And I think you're right on because there isn't any way. There's no tangible way. There isn't a boat that we can we're going to push people off of, and there isn't a set of rules beyond the game laws that we have that are going to allow us to kick anybody out of anything. As long as it's legal, it can be done. So I think, what the reason why we're talking on a podcast, and I'm sure the reason why you do what you do is to continue I think the way to to fight what we see as a negative force in hunting is to continue to talk about this kind of stuff, is to continue to examine the important measures that we've taken, continue to examine important ways to adjust our philosophies and ideologists for the future, and that the discussion is really the only one of the only ways that we can continue to change people's value systems. I'd tell you what I think that like in in some of them, I'm a professional, you know, a professional talker in some ways. Um, it sounds horrible when you say it, but just like kind of reality. So it makes sense that that would value intercourse like I would value like people having interactions and discussing things and time with things, because I know that there were the thoughts and words of other people wind up having a tremendous impact on me. My my older brother, We've talked about quite a bit. I have two older bones. But when I've alluded to more than the other, I remember he had a conservation epiphany when he read I will leave Old Sand County eliminat Okay. Because here's a person and sort of framing the natural world and the things that he cared, elderly pods, a hundred fishermen, and the conservations. And he explained, like in this book he lays out in Ethos, and my brother must have saw so much of himself in there, and it was such a challenging way to view it that it changed him. I remember, and I remember an essay by Tom mcgwaen where he said a thing and I'm like, I had never thought about it that way, but that's exactly right. I do feel that way, and I'm so glad I just heard it because it now makes it seem valid. And it's a quote that I've quart a thousand times and now quarts of the day I died. Where mcguain, who's a novelist, you know, you know, his written screenplays and may novels. But years ago, I feel like it was in Maybe or something, he wrote a um essay about hunting, and in it, the he's sort of imagining this conversation between a hunter and a non hunter, and the non hunter says that the hunter like, you know, why do you why do you kill a deer? What did you ever do to you? And the hunter says, I can't talk about it this way? And the nounhn says no, like, why do deer have to die for you? Would you die for deer? And the hunter says, if it came to that, And I think that, like, in that perspective, there's such like I was like, it just hit me like and like they say in Apocalypse Now, it hit me like a diamond bully that thought, which is one of the most impossible things to explain to other people. But it has to do like like you if you have If you take a lifelong hunter who spends all of their free time out in the woods, hunting and fishing and enjoying nature, I can tell you one thing. They're not doing it because they hate it. They are not if you spend your entire life in your house in front of your TV fretting about the well being of a mountain lion that you would never be able to find if you needed to. I think that there might be something a little bit disingenuous there because you haven't done anything to demonstrate to meet your actual love for the natural world, because you're ignoring it and living in existence entirely outside of it. So if there's a love there, I feel like you might love it the same way that guys in high school who had pin ups a Pamela Anderson loved Pamela Anderson loved the idea of no idea by anything, but there's just something about it you love. You like the look of it baseless because if you like the guys I know that live outdoors are living outdoors because they love the stuff that's out there. That's true, And I think that's the idea. I mean, this conversation and all the conversations and the words you've written, things you've done in your life are are leading to those moments where someone else has that epiphany, or someone else listens to this or listens to one of your media or podcasts or reason for one of your books and has relatively small or large epiphany in and of itself, it doesn't really matter. I think that's that's when you think about hunting into totality and where it is today and the decrease in numbers, and I would imagine the decrease in public acceptance of some parts of it. It could be pretty daunting. You can look at that and think we're never gonna win, That this thing might go away on our watch. We may be my your kids generation, my kids generation maybe looking at it an entirely different landscape when they are are age. But I think the way we can push back against that is to have these conversations and talk about the ways that we need to get better in the ways that that we can establish a system of values that works into the future, because I don't know that we've done that yet as a hunting community, uh, as a whole the There's an environmental historian that I'm friends with name Randall Williams, and he was telling me about another writer who said that hunting is like the constellations in the sky, where they're like constituent parts are always fixed, they don't change. The Big Dipper doesn't change shape, but it's position relative to the horizon is constantly shifting. So every time you look at this thing, it hasn't changed, but it appears different depending on where it is. And I think that that's it's a very helpful way to think about, Honey. We are a couple of guys sitting up on a mountainside in a bed of rabbit ship trying to find a deer. We're engaged in an activity that has been going on, no matter how you define it has been going on for millions of years, and we're doing it and it at its core, like bare bones parts. We're out on the landscape pursuing animals that we will eat. That's the constellation. But how what we're doing would look to someone else constantly. Yeah, that's one thing. Can I You can't really quote yourself on a thing, can you okay say something like I always think? I always say. Something I said one time is that the landscape of hunting will all will change, but the pursuit and the pursuer will remain the same. Those two things will always be constant. We will always as long as there is hunting, we will pursue animals, and they will run the hell away from us when we scare them. Yeah, And I think that's important to realize that you have in this country. You have a small percentage of people who hunt. You have an even smaller percentage of people who oppose hunting. And what you have in the middle is some seventy percent of Americans who are generally kind of like ambivalent above the object, don't give it too much thought. If you pull them and ask them do you support regulated hunting, they buy a wide margin say yes. When I talk about hunting and I represent hunting, I am not talking about it and representing it in a way that is meant to antagonize or piss off that very small percentage on the other extreme. I'm talking about it and representing it in a way that I hope will wind up making sense to that vast, vast middle ground who doesn't think about it too much. But now and then is presented with a question at the ballot box that basically the question changes, but it basically is asking is this activity constructive and positive or is a destructive and negative? And if you're living your hunting life in a way that is constructive and positive, I think that it will help guide those decisions down the road. And I do not have a fatalistic pastimistic view towards the future. Nor do I I don't. I don't have that either realistic, I mean, pragmatic. But this is the last thing I'm gonna say, is you imagine the day going. You're like a dimmer switch kind of light where there's no clicks, right, it's just a smooth turn. You imagine like days would pass sort of as like a smooth turn. But out here it's like a clickie it's click. It's like this like pre dumb dust. And also it's like click and there's this kind of like long morning and someone goes click and it's like very definitely all of a sudden, like mid day dead. Then also click and it's evening. They're better ready clicking day evening the evening, and it won't be grand, it'll just be almost something like, holy shit, it's time to look for deer. We've solved a few problems. We'll get back to the reel problem, which is a buffe we gotta kill. We're headed back to America tomorrow and uh back to that big Thanks dude, appreciate it. Well, Damn, that was a good conversation. I enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Thanks for bearing with me. I'm a rookie podcaster, so I may suck completely, but hopefully we'll get better every week. And we're gonna do this every Tuesday morning. We're gona launch a new podcast for the Uncollective with a new guest or a new group of guests, and we'll see how she goes, So stay tuned in the weeks to come. We're gonna have folks like Adam Greentree, Remmy Warren, hopefully guys from Hushing. We'll stop by enjoying us at some point. We're gonna do our best to round up some of those interesting people in hunting and delve into some of the issues that you guys want to hear about, so make sure you check us out The Hunting Collective, dot com, iTunes, Stitcher, all that fun stuff. Appreciate you hanging out, See you next time.

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