00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hey, it's the Hunting Collective and I've been a Brian. Another week coming at you, another great episode. We've got a little round table discussion on private land and public land and the culture significance of those two things. And there's a little bit of a debate going on that we address with Steve Rinella, Mark Kenyan, Sam Longer, and myself, uh, talking about all lands and that they matter. And then we're gonna travel on into Berkeley, California, So you see Berkeley and talk to Professor Luke McCulley about his work as a range land ecologist and working. Uh they did a study on private lands and how we use them, how we lease them, how we own them, and why they're important. So hopefully you stick around for all of that. But before we get to that, it's summertime, man, and uh, that's the time you should be thinking about Yetti Yetie coolers, to be exactly, and it makes a lot of things. If you go to yeti dot com you'll find that they make lots and lots of things. And nobody has really given me the products to talk about in these little bits. But I'm gonna tell you right now that the hopper flip eighteen is my favorite thing this summer, and there's a lot of reasons. One, I can put a lot of beer in it. It's also durable. I can we can put it in the drift boat, we can put it in the back of the truck. Well, I can load it up and sling it over my shoulder, carried to the river's edge, and my little boys throwing his snoopy line in the water and I'm there drinking beer while he's doing it. It's just the best portable cooler on the market in my opinion. It also comes in hopper flip twelve and it's just the best thing for summer weekends drinking beer, hanging out. I recently got sent the charcoal version, which I think is pretty hot. But there's also the fog gray, Tahoe blue original Yetie hopper that's been around forever. So go to Yettie dot com check out the hopper, Filip eighteen and all their other products. Thank those folks for being a partner of the show and making cool products for the summertime, which is right now. So out further Ado, we're gonna get started. Let's go. I guess I grew up on an older road appared through the meadows. I always did what I told until I found out that my brand new closed a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew what I mean. They have a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just wanted through a real bad dream or being and like I'm coming a part of the seams. But thank you Jack Daniel. No, hey, everybody, welcome to the Hunting Collective. I'm Ben O'Brien, and this is you're gonna be listening to this one seven nine nineteen. We get a bit of a round table of sorts here today in the meat eater offices. We'll start to my right with the man. Uh they called Stephen Renel Steve, Yeah, right here, and then it's Mark Mark Mark Mark, My first time in the news studio to this. This is very nice. Do you feel that Steve takes over the questions? I'll talk later about it. Uh. Do you feel that the that the placement of the some of the artworking here is too close together? It's very I do. For example, right there, I see that I'd like a gap. I also noticed that there's zero white tail content. Of course you do. Yeah, but there's like, I mean, there's zero zebra content, but still there's not hunters. Aren't zebra hunters? Just giving our context of our conversation, I think that, Yeah, but there's no pictures of anyone doing anything. Yeah, there's turkeys, there's plane crabs, there's planes, pro planes, mountain. I like that there's blue crabs because I'm one horn going on in here, and there's just a little bit of a moose antler in that one. There's buffalo behind us. Oh yeah, well it's it's very stylized. It doesn't that. I mean, it's a big controversy here about Steve. You were the one that kind of envisioned the collage. I'm not really open to any feedback about it. I mean, I think the spacing, the spacing, I'm open to feedback about it. Do you do you agree though, that some of these spots could be added a little bit? Yeah? No, I think that there needs to be a bigger gap. I was just curious because you said he hadn't been in here. I thought if you walked in, you were like, hey man, things a little tight, Yes, between the pictures. It's still got some filling into. You're not open to the feedback about the elements of the clause. No, I don't care. No. I mean, like I took the bull by the horns, man, you did it well. I mean it's not done yet. There's plenty of space to go. No, I don't really, I don't really care what anybody thinks about it. If someone else had had a great vision and executed, that would have been different. But it just sat here and then I executed. Moving on. I like it. Sam Lunger's here too, howdy and uh Phil, Hey, morning afternoon. I think it's morning still. Why is Phill here? Phil? I've been asking that a question every week. This is Phil's third straight appearance on The Hunting Collective that I got my first email about Phil today. The gentleman rode In said he really likes Phil. Keep mind, it feels great. This is a data informed Yeah, we're listening this. This is it's a two way conversation. Yeah. On the show, Um, we're gonna talk about we have lots of perspectives here, which is always good. We're gonna talk about private land and public land on the show. We got I went all the way to Berkeley, California to talk to this dude named Luke McCauley who's a cooperative extension specialist at you see Berkeley, and he put out a study on public or private land uses in this country with a lot of really cool statistics. So we're gonna get into that later on. There's a lot He's got piles and piles of stats on how many acreage, how much acreage in this country is least for hunting, how much is privately owned for the purpose of hunting, for what that means in a lot of ways. That is good stuff, and we'll we'll preface that with a few things. But Luke McCauley coming up soon. But before we get to that, there's been a thing in the hunting world recently where we celebrate public lands. We all agree that public lands are fantastic. Steve. Yeah, And you look like a real tool with a private land owner T shirt, though, I though I have seen guys who wear one in jazz. But it looks like you're bragging. Looks like you're bragging. You are bragging, like there's doesn't just look like a T shirt company just released a shirt last week on this whole issue. And the the front looks just like the public land shirt public landowner shirt from b h A, but it says private land leacy. That's funny. Yah uh yeah that you're not bragging in no, but it's it's definitely speaking to the phenomena of the public land excitement and that shirt and stuff, and this is a ray to that because you get to hunt public land. You just go there and hunt. Yeah, that's exciting. I don't know, is it exciting to go somewhere and pay a guy to let hunt? I would rather not That guy sounds excited about it. Well, I've I've I've hunted. I've hunted least property and had a great time. Hut my friends private ranches and farms and have a great time. I have a great time. I don't feel all like proud and excited about it. You don't feel like you you don't feel like you'd wear that T shirt only land owner t shirt. Yeah, but I mean between my place in Alaska, I'm I owned two point six so does that count as a private land? My dad owns two point five and I was see, I always enjoyed hunting that, but it wasn't a lot of opportunity. Yes, you got point one acres. Sam's father. I killed my first deer on my family's three point two acre property. You really did it run over the fence? It did? So the statute of limitations on that though, huh. And my dad was really stressed out because I had a flashlight and we're walking down to try to find it that night. He's got put that flash down. Put that flashlight down, neighbor. It's not worried. I got to go night vision. So in this study, there's a bunch of good numbers, but the analysis of thirteen nationwide studies over about I think about eleven years. There's a lot of regional things, and we're all kind of live in and are from different regions, and I have our our perspective are colored by these regions, but tend to eleven percent the land area of the South, Midwest, and Northeast are owned primarily for hunting, and that's primarily then private land ownership and leasing, while less than one percent of the land of the West is owned for hunting. So there's a lot of a lot of differences. Mark, I want you to there's there's been a are you gonna tell people what um, like what it was that? God, it's even talking about this? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm sorry, Mark, can you tell what got us talking about this? Oh? You're doing it right now. Yeah, that's what I was doing. Interrupt You interrupted me while I was doing it. Yeah, you did like you had like a like a little approach. Yeah. Yeah, you're doing an approach coloring it. I was coloring the the topic. So you're talking about the Instagram post. Yes, okay, So there was an Instagram post from a guy in the hunting world, UM speaking to how much excitement and energy there is around the public land movement right, keep it public. There's a lot of energy their backgount, trunters and anglers just going full board, lots of membership, lots of interest. Everybody wants to wear these public landowner t shirts UM tagging their Instagram post keep a public, etcetera, etcetera. His point in his Instagram post was that, yeah, that's important, but let's not forget that the vast majority of the hunting happening east of the Mississippi is happening on private land, and the vast majority of the white tail hunt, which is somewhere around eight percent of all the hunters in the country, a very very important driver of conservation and the hunting based economy and all that. That's all happening the majority again on private land. So it was it was a pretty wine. It was whiny read very whiny, very well. I would personally say this, This guy's a friend of mine and I highly respect him. I would just say that, yeah, the way he framed it, I'd say that he could have framed it differently too. He had a good point, but I think that it came off whiny. Oh yeah, well he tagged us, Yeah, he tagged us. He's like, so that's how Like I can't remember who showed it to me. But what was funny about it was like someone showed it to us and I don't remember who. Who do you know who sent who showed it to us? And I was talking about I've told his story a couple of times, but it reminded me of a thing that was that was going on when the like a summer ago, maybe two summers ago, when the Black Lives Matter movement was really picking up, and I remember there's this cartoon, like a editorial cartoon, and I saw somewhere in the newspaper, and there was two guys standing there in front of their houses, and one of the houses is burning down, and its owners out front spraying a hose on the house that's burning down. But then the other the neighbor's house is not on fire, but the guys standing out there sprang a hose on his house that is not on fire. And the guy who's not whose house is not on fire, is saying to the guy whose house is on fire, Hey, all houses matter, so I U I said. When I saw this, I said to Ben so that I talked about how that reminded me of that, and Ben had a very good hashtag, which is all lands Matters matter. I think that's a good We quickly decided that it was not a good idea for fear to be seeming that we're making light of something that doesn't warrant being made light of. But yeah, it's like I think that no one's questioning right like right now. I mean, if the political cycle goal is certain directions, I can see this happenings, like the socialists takeover. But right now, no one's questioning the legitimacy of private land ownership in America. But they're questioning the legitimacy of federally managed public lands. They're like people like actively outright saying should we do this so that house is on fire. Yeah, that's directly where the public land movement is coming to, by the way, it's because it's because it is imperiled and people need needed at that At that moment when the keep it public hashtag started becoming big, it was very much um on on the line and people needed to get together and be like, hey, no, this is something we do want to preserve. This is awesome that anyone gets to go hunt here that you own title to that land as an American citizen. So his reaction from that so that that Instagram post felt like it really lacked a lot of historically. Let me give you a little bit from the Instagram post itself. Um, this person says, in my opinion, it's almost become a cult like mantra for a new, much needed but potentially misguided segment of hunters. I mean there's now more public land teachers out there than a van Halen tour and being a killer that I would have gone like, not van Halen. Yeah, that's a little context, man, It's a little bit if you wanted to go that era, you could have gone GNR. Yeah. But like yeah, as as you know what we're telling about, like Diamond Dave are Sammy, listen, look that I think the main thing here is like he's trying to color or there's a lot of people and I feel it it's legit, Mark, you tell me if I'm wrong. But I think there's a lot of people in the East, a lot of people in the white tail world, a lot of people in the South that are feeling a little bit left out of the party. That's that's what this is driving from A little bit. I don't get it, like left out of the party. Yeah, you're invited to the party, man to show up. Like if I smoke cigarettes and then people like then there's like cigar aficionado. I'm like, oh those guys that like, don't forget a lot of us like cigarettes. Who cares? Let me be Let me just if a guy or or a gal gets into hunting by listening to like someone who celebrates public land all the time, they get into hunting and their b h A and their TRCP and that this is the thing that they are introduced to hunting through that lens. This guy is saying, Hey, also, new guy, this is what I have to offer. I'm a white tail guy. If you have a lot, a lot of money, Is it not excuse me? Is it not well known that private land there's some pretty good hunting on private land, and is it not? Is it not well known that there is a thing called private land and you can buy it if you have the money, and it's nice if you can. And do you have to have that caveat in every discussion of public land, because I feel like that's what they're asking for. But that exists all the time. You hear any rhetoric coming out of b H A and TRC P, like you listen very long, they're all like Lantani says this all the time. He's like, hell, yeah, I'd like to have my own private ranch. Everybody would like that. Everybody hunt. Every hunter aspires to that, but many of us can't afford it because the prices have been going through the roof, and land has always been expensive. It's one of the only things that doesn't really depreciate. So I hunt private lands much of the public land. Everybody loves it. It's all about both. I'd like to keep this this going. This guy is saying that that the over uh emphasis on public land is hoping that we do not lose focus on what really impacts conservation. So I think what this is coming from this is like it's like when you have it's it's a cultural thing, and it's when a band gets really cool. There's sometimes a reaction to that band getting so cool and now you don't want to like it anymore. As I feel about Van Halen. Man, I feel like a lot of people, a lot of people are getting like into Van Halen and I'm kind of like, dude, man, it was cool when like you know, like a year ago, right, It's like it's like the bandwagon thing, like everyone like the Golden State Warriors got really great at basketball, and then everybody bring it back in, bring it back in. Mark is there is there a Warrior clan and this state, this sporting event you speak of, the team doesn't matter. I think I don't feel no no going on with the analogy, but I do think that there's sometimes people will become irritated with like the social energy around a thing because like everyone's seen SEMs to want to be a Golden State Warrior fan, in this case the social media. If you were to look at how much like excitement and energy and in in social plays there around public land stuff right now, it probably seems disproportionate to the amount of people that actually hunt public land or how much money gets spent on el consin Mulier hunts versus white to hunts out east. So there's some small loud not even loud, but there's some small minority of people that are just kind of like, this is annoying. There's my argument, takes your lease money and and buy gas and drive west and hunt public lands every year. And I'm not saying and I'm not but what why why is it annoying? Like I don't understand me? Well, so like you've got to like some people now find it like you're trying to be cool by talking about how much you on public land, or like public land hunters are somehow like, okay, let me take a step back. I do think that there is a little bit of a feeling like the Midwestern East Coast typical white tail hunter that public land Western guys our latest a little bit like we're better because we hike in fourteen miles and we hunt public land and we wear this shirt and everyone you know, it's it's a really cool thing to be a part of right now. So are there are people that uh wakeboard, Are they annoyed about how surfers like surfing? It could be, I don't know. And and the thing is the public land guys out west who here this kind of stuff think they're elitist because they have kind of resources or connections to be able to hunt private land. A lot of people would like to be able to do that, but they're they're finding a way to celebrate what was what used to be looked down upon as really second class. And I don't know. And no means am I defending this viewpoint. I'm just trying to explain what I think. There is a little bit of a feeling like why would someone make this new T shirt that says private land leaser on it, except for it's in spite of all these people think they're so cool wearing public land owner shirts. Well, guess what, you can be cool. No, that's not why. It's like like the guy that came to one of our live events with a private landowner T shirt, he just thought it was funny, right, He's like, nah, Yes, it's that kind of thing. But the thing is, well, go ahead, I'm just gonna say it's it's it's funny. But then it's also kind of making like a counterculture statement, like flipping the bird to everyone who thinks this is so cool. Here's what I'm gonna say. I have I struggle greatly with the elitist thing that makes absolutely absolutely no sense at all, Like you're talking about the most it's absurd. It's absurd. It's the most democratic thing that there ever was. And the person that says it's elitist could get in their car and drive and go do it tomorrow. Go on opening day, on opening day, go to Michigan. You know it well, you know all the spots. Go to Michigan and do a sort of economic portrait of the people who are hunting private land and the people who are running public land and find out what their annual salaries are and education levels. Okay, and then go tell me how elite is the guys are who are down at the state game. Give me a break and then and then go do that in Montana too, and it's gonna be a similar breakdown. Come on, I think. And again, I'm not saying this, I'm saying that I picked up vibes some people. I don't feel this way. But what I do think is that people public land hung is more difficult. Like there's a some cache that public land hunters are getting now right, So it's like a cool thing. It's it's a badge. It's a badge of honor to put on you, to say I killed this buck in public. It's it's I feel that it's. Yeah, And there are a thousand variables. There are a thousand variables, but uh, I would yes, I count it if I look at all the things, all the components, and and something like that happens. Like someone gets like a like, I like big meal of your bucks a lot. If someone gets a big meal to your buck and it's on an eight acre ranch, I don't have a how did that dude pull that off? If a guy gets, uh, you know, a big meal of your buck on over the counter tag and he's hunting BLM land down in Colorado and he does it again next year, I'm like, what does that guy have that I don't have? Guys a good hunter and that's why that's why when you describe a thing you killed, you you modify it with where, yeah, this is my public land buck. You know, you don't say this my private land buck, because it just what Steve is saying. If they had an eye on the back of its head, I'd talk about that too. But so I'm just saying I think that the people that do hunt thousand acre leases or that have their own private land, there's like some kind of maybe it's insecurity, maybe it's I don't know what it is, but there's some pushback there. Yeah, and you're just kind of hearing it rumbling around a little bit. And the shirt in this post, I think is just a sign of that in some way. I get it. But we used to hang out on national forest land when we were kids. We grew up right at the southern terminus of what's now the Hiawatha Manistee National Forest change names anyhow, signs just say mansty Still. But that's where we grew up, and we did a lot of hunting on it, and we did a lot of hunting on Harold zeldn Russ and Alan's are lots farms. I was are you aware of how and who Alan's air Lot and Harold Zelnus came to have their farm, and I was very aware of how they managed that farm and how it was financed and who owned it and all that kind of stuff. The National Forest people treated it like ship. It's where you went to shoot signs. It's where you went to take and run over signs. It's where you went to go bahan. It's where you went to do Kegger's and not clean up and burned tires, and you treated it as though it was just this thing that everyone took for granted, and no one knows where it came from, who the men and women who work to maintain it, how it came to be the fact that there's been an increasing awareness of the of the history, mechanics and funding of these places, and and gaining and establishing and uh promoting a deepened heightened respect for these places and taking some pride in these places. I don't think that that's a comment on the work that Alan Zerlot and Harold zeldn Russ did on their farm. It's not the same thing. Those places had a guardian. It's just different. Well, there's and and a win for public lands is a win for this person who made this post and everyone else. I mean, it's it's to say that it's only a certain type of people that can use this, or it's only accessible. It's the term access and many of almost all of these cases means anyone in the east, the South, if they can get to it, they can access it. So win for public lands is a win for this person who's hating on public lands. And I think, yeah, And I've had conversations with a couple of people that have articulated this, and I agree with you, Stephen and in your count bad about it. That's not publican but yeah, it's not. It's not um But yeah, I agree, it's it's all these lands matter. But there are these different, weird little social cliques and norms, and I think that this is more like that ephemeral type of issue, And there's something be said about how that impacts why someone would spend some time and energy posting a post like that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's all kinds of missions, there's all kinds of organizations, there's all kind of in Every person that gets connected to their mission wants people to come and be a part of that. If they see some energy stealing thing out there, they want to go and and either challenge. There's one way to approach, which is like this person didn't other people have his challenge it and say it's not his valid as you think it might be. Or there's other things to embrace it and say and try to be part of it and understand it, and that's probably the better way to go. I would think, you know, oh, I was gonna say, following up on what you were saying, Steve, that people treated like ship And that was my exact same experience growing up hunting a lot of public land. That it was just like, oh, this is the land that nobody wanted. Nobody he lays claim to and you can do whatever the hell you want. No one didn't treat it like it was there exactly. And so I think that's why this this public landowner movement has been so important and so impactful because it's reinforcing. I mean, I was there when they came up with the idea for that T shirt, and I immediately I was like, that's that's awesome. That's it. People are gonna love this that you know that you do you do own this as an American citizen legally speaking, people talk about it being federally owned or stayed owned. But you know, if you if you go back into kind of the legal under underpinnings, it's property of the people. And I think that pride is very healthy and I think it will improve help help those those lands UM become better places to hunt in places to fish if people give a ship and and pick up trash instead of leaving it, or encourage others not to just go planking and blowing up washing machines and and pro pain tanks out there, and and then you know, can be a more useful part of the overall conservation UM portfolio of an area, which includes private lands as well. But I think we can improve upon all sorts of wildlife populations and opportunities for more people if if people have that sense of pride surrounding public land. I was gonna say, I do think though there's something to be said about UM acknowledging the importance of work being done on private land too, and the fact that that does have big picture impacts on wildlife in the environment. And I think that that if you have private land that you own or steward like, you should be empowered and realize that the power that you have there and the impact you can have that whether it's twenty acres or two acres um. That stuff trickles over that stuff all like, like you've talked about the study that you spoke about with this gentleman, some of the very highest quality wildlife habitat out there, some of the best opportunities we have to preserve green space and places for animals to rome does exist on private lands. So of course in the country back set up, because we spend far more on private lands conservation than we do on public and private lands, and far more we've spend far more on wildlife habitat improvements on private lands as a nation than we do on public lands. If you're the components of the farm bill, that's a piece. So I think that I don't see that this. I mean it's great, and I think that you know, and when I have friends Matt cooked dug during, I could name on and on the own properties the primary purpose of that property being to produce good wildlife habitat. And I don't feel, um, I never get a sense from them people actively doing it. I don't get a sense from them that they feel like they're the unsung hero. Yeah right, I just feel like they do they're they're doing something and the people around them know they're doing it and doing it great. And I'll point out funnything about these two is these two people are also very concerned about the well being of public lands in this country. So they're putting their money where their mouth is on private lands. And they're also miraculously, somehow able to be concerned about both these things at once. And that's a thing, is that that's that's what this is about, right like, And the reason why I want to have this conversation, the reason why I went and spoke to Luke McCauley, is exactly that, like we know it's there. It's a fact that hunting is a great like property owned at least for hunting, provides a greater economic incentive to have large tracts of unfragmented land that's good for wildlife, that has good that that harbors good habitat for wildlife. We know that that's leasing and owning property does that in many ways, right So we can discuss that is just the same way we can discuss some of the benefits of having large tracts of public land. But what we sure as ship can't do is start putting them up against each other like they need to people one versus the other. We can't piece of puzzle, Yeah, pieces of a puzzle? Can I? Can I bring up two quick points please? As I've become more familiar with UM nonprofit conservation groups, I've been surprised to learn learned that there is a competitive atmosphere among nonprofits. People know who people who run nonprofits UM in the conservation space know that most people out there don't join ten groups. They join and donate to one or two, and they compete. Grant funding is finite. They compete for UH what they might view as customers. And so I feel that there's a little bit of that at play where people that are going over holy with their finances and time and volunteer work with a very dedicated UH public land agenda that other players in the conservation space would be challenged by that because it might automatically seem to exclude their interests. And then I'm just not like cold do that smokes too much weed? You know, I don't smoke weed at all when I say this, because I'm not going to get into great details about it. But there are a lot of very powerful political figures and business figures who are deeply intimid aided by the public land movement, and they find ways to go and attack people who are vocal about public lands. Ben and I have been like hit and punished for being vocal about public lands because you're upsetting a political status quo. And so I'm particularly sensitive about this kind of thing because I often look and I wonder, are they talking about this or they talking about something else? Right? Right? And that's that's me having a hit th HCS. I'll add the bong bubble in later. Now, listen, Phil, what do you think about all this? Then? Uh? Well, I mean for me, what ice coming from? Just like hunting one on one, I think a lot of people also just take a sense of a massive sense of pride and something that they grew up doing and at least like, for example, I grew up in Portland and I don't give a shit about basketball, but when the Blazers were doing well, there's like a little part of me that was kind of like, who go team? And I like, if you grew up. I was like that with the Seahawks when they were very briefly and then now I don't care anymore. Hunting mostly private lands or like that's what you know, you're dead, your grandpa took you too. And then all of a sudden, public lands get more clout kind of in the hunting the hunting community, there's a little you get kind of defensive, right, trying to defend like something that you grew up with with or are proud of. Um, yeah, that's a great point, man, And I think, wait a minute, you should be proud of my farm. Yeah well yeah, but but but but they but they hear, they hear people like Steve and myself and Ben's say that like you know, it bumps up the purity score or whatever when it's when it's a big buck taken on on public land, and they they're like, well, hell, I put in a lot of work to get to grow a big buck on my land. That's still valuable. It's still just as cool. And I would I would have to agree with them. It's still really cool. It's still cool to kill a big buck unless it's behind the hund be like, hey, can I can I hunt your place? Yeah, let me come see how cool it is. Prove it? Yeah, I prove it. Yeah, there'sh But I hear what you're saying, man, that point points very well. On the show Phil comes in, we should probably just end on Phil like a Phil comment at the end of every opening segment, just to really get people to transition into here's the guy who's never hunting and he just pulled out a gym. Could you play a doctor on radio? What's that? Don't Dr Doctor thought that? Dr Phil? Um, We're gonna we'll end on Dr Phil his his perspective. But I have one more question, please do What's what's up that dog collar laying there? Um? My dog likes to shake his head because he gets those ear infections, and I figured that'd probably sound pretty bad on the audio if he started rattling that thing around, So I take it off. Oh where's this going? Did I come in? And did we take our lunch break? Seriously? Here? All right, guys, we're all good here. We figured it out, did yeah? Oh yeah? What what? What? What we designed? Well? We all lands matter, That's what we decided matter. Speaking of that, we're gonna go transport back in time a couple of weeks. We're gonna go to Berkeley, California. Talked to Luke McCauley at in his office in the grand old Campus of Berkeley. Do you see Berkeley. We're gonna learn more about private lands, least lands and their impacts on this country and continue this discussion over there. So enjoy. Thank you, Ben. Thanks Ben. I guess I grew up. Hey, Looke, how's it going, man going? Well? How are you doing? I mean, I'm doing really good. I mean, you see Berkeley. I feel oddly comfortable. I don't feel strange. People told me that I would have to like watch out when I was here, right, it seems fine to me. A lot of nice people around, yeah, a lot of interesting people. Um, A lot of interesting people, A lot of nice people. Yeah. And we're sitting in your office UM at hill Guard Hall at the College. When I came in, it's like this giant metal door, this really beautiful architecture. It screams history and the place has a lot of that. You're you're saying, it does it does. This building was built around the nineteen twenties, a series of buildings right here as part of the originally the Agricultural College for University of California, Berkeley UM. Berkeley is one of the land grants for California, and California is a little bit different in a lot of ways, including how their university systems set up. Most states have a single land grant college, which really delivers a lot of the applied research out to farmers and ranchers and their agricultural colleges here in Berkeley. It started here at Berkeley, and it's extended out to University of California, Davis, where the majority of that agricultural research occurs today. And there's also quite a bit that's happening down at you see Riverside. But UM Berkeley maintains some of this agricultural research that's designed to bring the best conservation practices, the best production practices out to farmers and ranchers to improve outcomes for the people living out there as well as the natural resources that we all rely upon. Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's when you walk into the door, there's like glass cases with soil samples. Yeah. So Hill Guard was the is considered the father of modern soil science, so he has streets named after him here in Berkeley. Created some of the first textbooks describing um soils. So that's some of the main components of how we grow crops and how things how plants grow and animals grow and all the things we're interested in. So, um, he was an instrumental figure here at Berkeley, and there's been a number of those people here. It's really it's really quite humbling to be here among people, the Nobel laureates who have come out of this university and to look out and think that, you know, you might be passing by somebody like that on the streets, whether it's a nuclear physicist or a um or somebody's instrumental in agriculture. Yeah, it's a beautiful place and pactful place. Um, I'm happy to be here. When you were explaining the cooperative extension and some of your work, there's a big history to that a long long time that's been happening. Um, give people a little bit more color into that, just to understand. Yeah, so all of our land grant colleges. I had mentioned how Berkeley's part of the land grant system. They were back in the nineteen tens and twenties. Somewhere around then there was agricultural researcher found that he had developed some new varieties of corn or different crops, and he found that farmers weren't adopting him. He and they were reluctant to try new things, and so he found there was a real need to bring research that he was performing out to the farmers and ranches so that they could actually try him out. It was a it was a problem of adopting new technologies. So he began this effort where he would have demonstrations on the research site to bring farmers out to sea Um. If you've ever heard of four h um, that's part of cooperative extension. It's the effort to bring kids that One of the ideas behind that was that they could give some of these new crop varieties to kids to plant in the little home garden. And when the parents saw the kids crops growing better than the crops in the fields, they start thinking about adopting some of these new technologies too. So it was a way to get new information out and to promote adoption of new and the best practices. And so you were telling me that you're probably one of the only folks around here, especially in this building, thinking about hunting specifically. Probably I'm a little bit of a novelty over here at Berkeley UM. Other people do work on hunting. It's oftentimes in the context of UM. I have some some great colleagues who work in Africa working on bush meat hunting and very different context of where people are hunting monkeys, hunting endangered species um for their livelihoods, to survive, for protein and so and those our whole different set of challenges that fortunately we don't. We have a much more developed and regulated system here in the in the United States. That's uh, that functions really well. And is we're really we're really blessed to have that sort of system here, that's true. And and for you know, somebody like you sit in a place like this to to focus on this subject that was subject we're gonna cover here over the next um hour. So I think is was enlightening to me and the guys that Congressional Sports Is Foundation. Andy Treyharn sent me an email like, Hey, here's a guy that you should look at. Because as much as we in the hunting space talk about and advocate for public lands and do so um as we should, there's this this there's a little bit of data here that opens up the door to a whole big conversation on private lands and what they mean and range land and the real impact that they have on not only our ecosystems, but our economy and different things like that. So that's what brought me here because I think I think it's an important topic. I think it we can make that, make it as popular as our public land movement. Keep it public is something everybody likes to say. I think we need to also understand like what private lands do and what they mean. And you're the guy, yeah, and how private lands came about. You know, a lot of a lot of times we don't even think, um, what how did private lands become private? How did public lands become public? And it really comes back to the early settlers days when the country is being founded and there's this westward expansion really and and the reason I like to focus on private lands is that private lands are some of the most productive lands in the United States. I think about sixty or seventy percent if you include Alaska six lands or private lands. If you exclude Alaska, it's up to because Alaska has just said a huge land mass, but um, you have this vaster the US is private. And why is that? Was because there was as people the Homestead Act was moving people, and people were going out to farm land and to make it productive. They really focused on the areas where they could grow, grow crops and make a living. Um, that hundred and sixty acres estimate for Homestead Act land that you could acquire by moving westward worked pretty well until you hit about the hundredth meridian and your rainfall started drop below thirty inches a year, you didn't have enough to grow crops. You hit some of the deserts to Nevada and Utahn, it's really clear hundred sixty acres you're not gonna be able to make living off of for a family. So what ended up happening is some of these early explorers noted that we need to rethink this Homestead Act and in the West, because you're going to need at least two thousand, three thousand, five thousand acres to be able to apport a family unit out here. And so that I don't think those those numbers did end up happening in the Homestead Act. What ended up happening was that, UM, these lands were sort of left unsettled because people couldn't make living on a small parcel of land, and so you have these these areas and mountains and deserts essentially that were left unsettled and became part of our public federal public lands. So they're beautiful, they're a huge and wonderful natural resource thing to to behold and wonder and walk through and see. But they're also some of the least productive lands. But they don't have good flat soils, they don't have sometimes good water resources um and as it was, and also those same productivity issues that make them difficult and challenging for humans to live on and settle and to make living on. In some ways, they're difficult for animals. They don't have the same densities of deer that you would have on the bottom lands soil in the south. So because of that, it's really these public lands are really great, but they're not really representative of all the different resources that we have in our country and so um So that's why I think private lands are really important part of our conversation. They're they're the most productive lands. They host a whole range of biodiversity that's not represented in our public lands. Um. There are species that aren't found in public lands that are they're only found in some of our private lands in the in the eastern side of the country or even in the in California for example. So, um, and in California here where we are, the Central Valley, which is the the bread basket of the country, is almost entirely agricultural land now and some of those bottom land areas where there were huge valley oaks back in the day, some of those laws that that habit has been lost, and so we've lost some of those those aspects to support game species, the other species, birds and other things like that. Yeah, and you mentioned a lot in your work of biodiversity, um, explain kind of how you're like, how you would measure and say, there's two things I think that what was production? What does productive really mean? You know? And and what is how does private land? And then maybe publicly And it's hard to talk about these things as monoliths. I mean, there's so there's some very very and I've seen them very very biodiverse public lands, and there's some very very uh, non diverse private lands. It's just it's hard to talk about them in those ways. But when you reference them as productive, what do you what do you mean? What's that product for private land? Wherever? Any land? What's what's productive in your mind? Because there Yeah, that's a good question again, because it's like I said, it's hard to talk about these things like that in those ways. But product production means a lot of different things to different people. Obviously, Yeah, um, I generally probably would think of it in terms of UM. I would think of it probably in terms of how humans use the land, and so often times I would think of it in terms of soil quality, UM and the ability to produce biomass and so. Uh that generally a thought of as yields for crops, um grass grown for livestock, um water for people to drink, or for animals to drink, groundwater resources, so all those types of aspects that UM, I think humans in particular will look at, but also animals. You know, water is key a key resource for for animals and for life, and so having good water resources in an area is really important for productivity, and that's why there's been efforts to put out guzzlers and water resources in our public lands to increase that productivity. Yeah, it's a good point, especially for sheep. Guzzlers are a huge thing for desert big horn sheep and beyond. UM. So let's get to the actual research you've done and the paper that you guys have published UM, and I think there's a lot of numbers in here. I don't want to get to I don't want to just rattle off a bunch of numbers, but there are some really impactful kind of bottom line statements in and what's here? UM, So kind of take us through what this paper is called. I'll make sure everybody has access to it. That's listening what this paper is called, and kind of how you came to want to write this, and how you wrote the abstract, and yeah, it's a long ask questions. Well it wasn't It was quite an interesting story. When I started my dissertation, my doctoral research, I did not think I would end up doing a big nationwide study pulling together three big giant data sets from different national surveys. I was actually a little bit afraid of statistics and big data sets when I started my my doctoral work. Um, this paper is titled the Role of Wildlife Associated Recreation and Private land Use and Conservation. Providing the Missing Baseline. Bam, bam. That's like, that's that's not gonna get to people clicking on the old webside. We have to rewrite that headline providing the missing Baseline Yeah, that's that's that's a little a little bit of something sensationalize at something or public land sucks. It was, you know, I found uh private land. I would talk to people. I was interested in in interviewing ranchers and learning how ranchers might be using hunting, and hunting might being incentive for ranchers to maintain more wildlife habitat. It's an old concept that Aldo Leopold came up with and and suggested in the nineteen thirties. He said, you know, if farmers and ranchers are going to be able to earn something from having wildlife on their land, it's going to incentivize them to keep some habitat for these fonds in the in the back forty or in the certain parts of their areas, or leave the edges of their crops for quail or other different wildlife species. So, as I was talking to different ranchers and experts in this field, they said kept saying, well, private land, we really don't really know that much about how much private lands being used for hunting. Um. And so I began looking and started finding I've started learning about US Department of Agriculture had these big data sets that were available, and they they pulled every um, every farmer and rancher in the country every five years, every few years, there was different variety of different surveys, and I said, well, I should before I go and interview a bunch of ranchers asking them how much of their land is used for hunting, I should use data sort of been collected by our government. So I started looking into the Department of Agriculture Agricultural Resource Management survey, which they hold every year. There's some great folks over in Economic Research Service over at USDA who helped me out. I'll give a shout out to Bob Dubman who helped me out getting these data set up. And I had to go to a cold room up and Sacramento, which was totally cut off from the Internet because this is this economic data farmer and ranchers and they have to keep it very protected. So I made trips up to Sacramento and h and started learning how to use are and only statistic EGAL programs to figure out what are these numbers, how many farmers and ranchers are doing? Is how many acres are there? Well, I dug into that and I found well, there's certain limitations to that data set. And there's the another data set, the National Survey of UH Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Associated Recreation or wildlife watching. UM, And I said, well, I should take a look at that one. And it turns out there's a question there about private land that's used for hunting, both owned for hunting and least for hunting, and that people used for like day use fees, sort of like guided hunts. So I added that to my analysis. I pulled that in and figured out all three I pulled up, pulled pulled together three of those UH surveys over the course of like ten years. Because there's really the sample, the way the sampling works, you had to I had to aggregate these things to improve the standard deviations and statistical stuff. But all that exciting stuff, all that exciting fun stuff that your listeners, I'm sure really excited. It's just it, it's just me. So if he's just fast forward to the data, I love comparing like it's funny, I'm not gonna I'm jumping ahead. Um, I'm not going to jump ahead. In fact, when you're doing all that research and you're you're kind of jumping your lily padding to these like the spears of relevance to kind of to get are you changing your goals during that or you kind of you have a north star like I want to get to find out this thing. Or as you see the different available data sets, to you change or your goal? Well, I think there's a key overarching question. And I think that's one thing I learned from some of my mentors um in my research program, is that you do have a key guiding question and that that helps you helps to guide your your program um. And for me, it was like, what is what is the role of hunting and conservation? Is it actually helping with conservation, especially on the private land side. Um? So as you gather data and somebody articulated this really well, um, you you allow when you're writing science, I oftentimes didn't like to think of like science as a story because I felt like sciences is all about facts and data. We don't I don't I don't want to tell stories. I'm here to tell facts. But actually somebody actually changed my mind about them. They said, actually, you're telling a story, but your data are the characters. Your surveys are the characters, and you have to let them speak and let them be part of your story. So that's that's where I think how this process occurs. Right, I had one servant. I said, they're telling me something, but it's limited and I don't know about this other type of landscape, and so I'm missing some nuance to the story. And this character can only tell me so much. I need more characters to make the story. And that's where I went to the National Survey, and then I ended up going to the US Force Service had a big National woodland Owner Survey. Some of your some of your listeners might even have filled out some of these surveys they have passed UM. So Brett Butler Forced Service helped set me up with some of their data. So we pulled all these things together to understand, you know what describe the broader picture for private land use and the land use types that are um utilized. For this is if forest is a range land, turns out the majority's forest land. A lot of the South is really considered forest land, and that's the dominant area for for hunting in the in the country as well as the Upper Midwest area Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan huge areas of forests that are hunted, oftentimes for free sometimes under leases. Um. But a lot of really interesting nuances came out of out of analyzing these and so so just so everyone's tracking with us, we are talking about a study here that's pulling to get a lot of national data to determine you know, what you said before, kind of the hypothesis is is conservation? Is hunting a valuable way to produce conservation on public lands or on private lands? Beyond that, like, how are people using these lands? Um? You and you have some really interesting stuff about owned versus least and reading you said the regionalities and state by states. Um, I'm not sure how you crack the egg and walk through this. I'm sure you thought about this through. What's the first when you say, what here's the things we found? What's the first thing you would say to people? You know, what's the overarching abstract? Here? A big area of the United States is used for wildlife associated recreation, and of I think it's estimated at well. I think the paper shows about of the whole of the contiguous US has used for wildlife associated recreation. Of that hunting is a dominant contributor. And that's like in your study when you started looking at this, there's there's It's like wildlife watching is one of them. Hunting and fishing and fishing, Yeah, hunting is dominates the area, absolutely right. And you didn't go into that thinking, oh, yeah, hunting will be the thing that knocks it out of the park, did you. I mean, well, in some ways I do, and some ways I had some ideas to that because I've hunted on on lands and you go to big ranches, you need big areas deer crack traveling over hundreds of acres or traveling over thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of acres, miles and miles being crossed. So when I think of a hunting lease, I think of multiple hundreds, if not thousands of acres. Ideally, I think of a fishing lease. You really just need access to the stream, You just need an acre, And I think of wildlife watching. Some people can do that in their backyard from the road, you can. A lot of people do. And this survey did show that. Um but so it wasn't too surprising, but it was surprising to me to quantify for the first time the actual millions and millions of acres twenty million acres of land least for hunting in the United States. That's a huge that's a huge land. And when I think about hunting and conservation, you know, I often times people just say, well, hunting is conservation, and I wonder what is that? How do what do you mean by that? How do how do we actually say that? What does that mean? Because we buy hunting licenses because our money goes to the state agencies, is that is that conservation of the state agencies necessarily putting that back into conservation on the ground. Um? I think in a lot of cases yes, yes, um, but it's not necessarily a straight line. There might be other things with some of those funds go to that aren't necessarily conservation. Yeah, there's a lot of there's hunter recruitment, there's a lot of mean, if you look at how the dollars are a mass and what they're spent on, it's complex. It's a complicated state by state. You know, we always roll out this like of state revenues come from. It's it's but it's varies so much state by state that it's hard to nail down. And you're right, I say this all the time. Hunting is not conservation. Conservation is conservation. I think it's hunting. We've done a great job in this country of kind of intertwining the two in ways that we we really can't now separate. But you don't have a choice to pay the excise tax. In the Pitman Robertson, you do not have a choice to buy a tag. I mean, you're either buy a tag or you're a poacher. Um. And so, yes, they are intertwined. But conservation is to me still sits parallel and is a byproduct of of hunting, not not hunting in and of itself. Absolutely, And I was when I think about this topic, especially in this paper, I thought there's really two ways in which one which one can think of conservation. One is what I still see as one of the biggest things UM causing habitat causing losses of wildlife is habitat loss. It's still one of the main drivers. We talk a lot about climate change, and climate change does change. Habitat loss can contrive that. But really we're talking about paved, paved roads, We're talking about housing developments that are taking up thousands of acres now of more additional previously habitat, or we're talking about agriculture that's intensive agriculture that's moved into previously uncultivated areas. That is a known loss, and that is still the main way in which we are losing species and losing the quality of our natural resources. So I think land use and that's why it was this paper is published in Land Use Policy because I thought hunting is actually contributing to a reduction and conversion of land out of natural spaces. That would be a really great finding. We oftentimes think of I think of hunting, we think of conservation is okay practices on the ground, and we'll get to that next because we did get into that this paper. But I also thought, well, what's the indirect aspect of people are paying money to keep land and this Aldo Leopold method. They're paying money to a rancher and he's keeping his land as a ranch instead of selling off twenty acres here and thirty acres there for whether it's a vineyard or housing development or whatever. And he's keeping and hunting is helping him stay in business, so he keeps his unit contiguous. That's a win for conservation. So that the land use aspect, the lack of fragmentation aspect, So it's it's it's this happens we we apply this to a lot of the international hunting issues, you know, trophy trophy hunting based conservation. For lack of a really much better term than that, it's like hunting creates value, right in this case is what I'm from reading your paper when I'm what I'm getting from from it is hunting creates this value, and value really is what conservation is all about. If something has value, you want to conserve it, right, So, and then conservation leads to if this equation one one step further, the propagation of wildlife pushing it down those three levels. And so that's I think what when this was introduced to me, I was like, whoa perfect like this fits right into that this This is data that someone has done a lot of work to compile, kind of illustrating that equation in some way. Yeah, yeah, you know. Value. I think it's a really great way to think about this is the value of our natural resources, the value of of range land versus a vineyard. And economically, if you look at the dollars and cents, there's a lot of money we found there was billions of dollars being spent for I think it's two billion dollars a year going towards private land conservation or so private land recreation. And that's a that's a lot of money, and I mean two billion dollars a lot of money. But compared to the US economy, compared to agriculture, it's it's really quite small. And it is a contribution. And I think what I wanted to show was say, well, how much of a contribution. Where is it working at the edges where it's actually helping. And if you were to lose it, you would be losing potentially a subsidy of real value of economic value of billions of dollars of real value of dollar values for natural lands. Um. So if you were to ban hunting, you'd lose You lose this, you lose this incentive for ranchers stan ranching the money that they would say this is a value. There's a whole another aspect of value though too for ranchers that has been uncovered with some of my colleagues, researchers Dr Lynn Hunt Singer, my my colleague here, it's found that ranchers aren't ranching for money. Ranting is a horrible business to get into. Oftentimes you'll make. You'll make one percent return on your uh, on all your money, on all your land capital, you make one percent return. You do way better just to go stick it in the stock market, far better. Um, But people do because they enjoy it. Often times, he's ranches will lose one percent a year or they'll break even many years, but they do it because they like it, and there's a lifestyle aspect, and there's a value that they place on it that's the equivalent of what they what they could make in the stock market. That's funny. Yeah, at some level, this is probably over generalization, Like hunting can subsidize someone's you know, there's there's the ways that subsidies kind of support this, this ranching lifestyle, farming lifestyle. The government does it all the time, but hunting lease is kind of a way to do that as well. Yeah, it's a it's a way that they can help them if they're I've talked to ranchers who said, you know, at least I know my hunting income is solid. Every year, I'm gonna get ninety a year from my hunting lease. And this is a big ranch. So um, he's like, I know, I'm getting that the cattle the cattle might make ten thousand that year, they might make a hundred thousand that year, and there's it's highly variable in the cattle market. But at least he knew he got this sort of baseline from the hunting. The King Ranch in Texas has some really great um descriptions showing this the stability of their wildlife and hunting revenue compared to the livestock industry, which is really volatile. So yeah, if and in a lot of places in Texas it ends up about half and half, hunting ends up being about as much as the livestock. So in that case, that's a big component to the economic picture for these ranchers, in addition to the fact that they did do it because they love it. Yeah, then you've got one thing I pulled out here. Private landers in the US are an approximate at one point five billion dollars in the annual income from hunting over two million acres. And there's a lot of these percentages and stuff I I like it, which is sixteen four six four percent of all private lands in the US. Yeah, that's just an interesting stack to me. Yeah, and interesting to see it presented in that way. Big areas and you know, we went further beyond sort of this sort of big that all this stuff we've talked about so far is this sort of big picture of like how land is used and how people value it, and we're what happens is really at the edges of land use. So if something's on the edge of shifting into a great orchard or almond orchard or some other sort of intensive agriculture, if if you reduce you're hunting revenue and take it out of the picture, it will just accelerate that transition. At these edges. It will make it that much less profitable, profitable, and so people will move into new, more profitable uses more quickly. That's sort of the larger economic theory of how this happens, and I think it plays out on our landscapes. The second thing we got some data on is why we looked into some of this U S Department of Agriculture datas. They gather information on what are people actually doing on the ground for conservation practices. Are they involved in some of these working lands programs which are um any of the people in your audience, you might be landowner, is probably familiar with the EQUIP program. Environmental Quality and Centers programs, the U s D a program that helps does cast share to to some conservation practices. We found people who were who had hunting leases there were more involved with these conservation programs. We found they were also more likely to hire private consultants to do conservation practices on their land. So we found additional correlations. We can't say for sure causation, but we did see people who had hunting leases, we're doing, we're participating more in these conservation programs, and they were participating in hiring private conservation folks. Those hunters were not arguing, I don't even look into the causation. We'll take it. I do. I do think there's a funny there's a funny point there. And we were talking earlier about the Quality Deer Management Association at q d m a UM and managing land for deer. Now you're you're doing, you're manipulating the land in certain ways. And if you talk about in the Midwest or the East or the south, all of the land is disturbed. I mean, there's very few pristine places that haven't already been disturbed in some way. So a lot of deer hundles will come in pay for a lease and then plant food plots, hinge cut you know, make cover, screening cover from different areas where there's roads and things like that to give the deer a better place to thrive. And the question that we always ask is is that is are those activities, by happenstance driving biodiversity. How much is that kind of like single species driven changes to the landscape really helping everything. I don't know if you have that answer, but it's just something that we've we've been looking at and talking about recently. Absolutely, I think it's something to think about. Absolutely. UM. I'd say, like if you talk to any any sort of academic, they'll say, well, it depends. That's the that's the big things that it depends. UM. Look, if you're look, if you're planting food plots for deer and having some cover and providing some of these habitat aspects, it's going to benefit some species and it might not be as beneficial for others. I think it's pretty safe to say it's probably better than a housing development, and that when I feel pretty sure about UM, it's probably better than an intensive agricultural operation. So UM to the extent that we make that comparison, I think, yeah, it's probably a win. It's probably win for conservation, even if it's single species management. Um. There are so many ways to measure biodiversity. We don't even oftentimes don't even think about invertebrate biodiversity. For example, it's hard to measure that. It's really hard to even get in there and measure the diversity of the thousands of species that you could find. And then you can go down down to bacteria and think about, well, what are the nematodes in the soil. What's about about the diversity at that level. So um, But I think that's where I think, you know, I think even hunters have a responsibility. Yeah, I think about that, Well, what are the what other species in your local area that might might really depend upon thick forests. Maybe there's some you know, uh, there's a some thick cedar forests in central Type because for example, they are important habitat for I think black cat vireos, are golden cheek warblers, these endangered species. You know, I think it's the responsibility of hunters and landowners when they get that landed dig in to call their local um in ourcs, their U S T a personnel call their local cooperative extension advisors find out, well, what what might not want to be thinking about beyond just deer. And there's so many, Like you say, there's so many reasons. We have a top secret project that media we're working on right now that that is running into this. You know, it's I can't I don't know how much I could say, but it's top secrets. But we're working on. We have a piece of land and we're trying to involve as many state and federal agencies as we can to come in and tell us what we can do better. And I think your point in the causation of I think hunters are just more inclined to think about conservation because the more you can serve the land and conserve the habitat, the more you have the game that you seek. It's just take it one step further. Is there more you can do not only to conserve that that have that for the game you seek, but for the other species as well? That will just help the entire ecosystem which you which you live and work and play. Absolutely. No. I you know Steve Keller. Have you heard of Steve Keller? He was a Yale professor. I think he's retired now. He he did a really interesting stud He did surveys of hunters around the world, and he wrote up this brief publication and it didn't get it got published into some some small journal. It wasn't really out. It's not really easy to find the internet. I should put it on my website. Maybe I'll do that after this I'd like to read it. He describes that he found through all of his efforts to of of serving hunters around the world, the US and Africa, all over the place, he found there was three types of hunters. He said. They were utilitarian hunters who just wanted meat, they wanted to bring home food. There were ecologistic hunters, who I think is the kind that we're trying to maybe advocate for or encourage people to think about. When we talked about this topic of well, what other species might you want to think about? And those folks, I think he was really articulate. He said, the's ecologistic hunters. They wanted to participate in the circle of life. They wanted to be part of it. And I think that was for me, helped me to describe for myself, like why I like to hunt it's not that I enjoy the kill. Um, I mean there there are aspects of that, Like I think this is part of being a predator in the predator prey system, like participating in nature in a way that you don't if you're just watching it from the outside. Yeah, I'm getting ready to go and talk to some animal rights folks, and I'm that's very much the point I make always I feel this intense like proximity to how this all works. I can't I'm not sitting on the sidelines and and you know, using my emotions or using some sort of circular logic to kind of get to the point where I feel good about what's happening. I'm inserting myself into it and trying to, over years and years, figure out what's the best way to interact with it. Yea, and it takes You're not gonna walk in with the answer. It probably won't walk out with it either, But yeah, it's better than sitting on the sidelines. Yeah, in a lot of ways. Well, when you think about our evolutionary history, I think pent of our history we were hunter gatherers, So I think there is some deeply embedded aspects of our of our genetics that are tied to hunting and tied to finding our own food, and we have We'll also have another guy I'm talking to who's a human evolutionary biologist, and it says, like kids throw rocks. You know, I have a three year old son. He throws rocks like you wouldn't believe. Like he sees he picks up a rock, he doesn't think, what is this. He picks up a rock and he immediately looks around to what he can throw it, and he's like, dude, that's that's because humans, when we first figured out how to throw things, then we first started to figure out that we could procure our own meat. And and there's some kind of biological ticker in there that when your son picks up a rock, he doesn't see something he might lick or put in his pocket. He sees something he needs to throw. So there's a connection in there for sure. Yeah. The third type of hunters is to close that top. That's that topic that Steve Kellet raised was the sportsman hunters, the trophy hunters that we think about today, which I think there was an interesting thing to think about um for the hunting community. And I'm sure You've probably had great um people on your podcast, but I find that to be a really interesting thing. You know, one thing people don't think about with the sport that trophy hunting community, is that it really came out of Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to reduce the amount of harvest of wildlife. The idea was he would just take a single specimen that was hopefully past his prime, just past his prime. It's bread, it's it's lived a full life, and you take the single trophy, you take one instead of it is in a time of market hunting when people were taking hundreds and hundreds of animals, and it was an idea to think, wow, we really actually can conserve the species by doing trophy hunting and encouraging people to just take a single animal. And I think today it's really taken on such a different tone. Yeah, And it's hard when you start to examine, as as Keller lays out there, like the motivations of hunters. And that's why I think where it gets all twisted up, it's like, what's what's our motivation? Well, I mean, there those are three really good types. I've met a lot of types. Those are three pretty there's three pretty universal types that kind of covers probably hunters I've ever met. There's some some outliers there, I'm sure that kind of like that. People people that don't like people that sometimes are when I hunt when I'm not a trophy hunter, when I hunt pheasants, Yeah, but when I'm when I'm hunting a mule deer, I'm a trophy hunter, all right. So there there are just it's it's such an intertwining and twisting and turning story. But when you start to and that's what I think in the modern sense we've done is trying to really look at what is the motivation of a hunter because there's so many people that aren't motivated to do it. There's of the country that that are not motivated to do it, and there's there's a chunk of those folks that are motivated to stop it. And so that's I think we get so locked in on the motivations that it's hard to see. I think that's what a lot of what what your paper because it's hard to see. You know, there's a lot of trophy hunters that have leases and what they're doing is benefiting the landscape. Now you have to separate I always are you. You need to separate those two things, you know, but it's also good to be aware of the benefits of of every part of every motivation and hunting, yeah, no matter what it is. And I think those ecologists motivated hunters are. I mean there's a lot of them, and they have a lot of them in the white tail space. And in fact, we had a gentleman from the q d m A write a little social post about Hey, look, you know I think it was I don't want to miss quote a hunters live not in the West. There's like there's hunters that live in West, but there's yeah, the bulk of that as public lands. I'll have to get the right numbers of our public lands are in the West, only of our hunters. Yeah, And like your research, your research backs up the power of the South and the East and the Midwest and that private land, Yeah, chunk of what we do and access in getting people the ability to get out there and to participate in this nature. I think that that's how I got into conservation, because I wanted to be outside. I wanted to participate in this cycle of life out on ranches. I fell in love with ranches, working it today. Um And I think the more that we can encourage, you know, ranchers, farmers and ranchers who might have a bad opinion of hunters to think about, well, maybe I should open my lands up for hunters. Maybe I should consider this as a something that can not only benefit me economically, but also benefit the natural resources on my land through their work. Oftentimes hunters will will volunteer their time and effort to do that work. Um. And so I think they're while we show there's the land areas and for us for wildlife Associate recreation, a bunch of that's hunting, that's still theres still a whole lot of other land that's not being used, so that's closed off. People might think that huntings or hunters are going to shoot your cow or shoot your horse. I've never actually met anybody who actually experienced that. Um, But it's a sort of a narrative that is an excuse to not let people on. But I think the more we can allow people in these urban areas to get into get out into that nature. Look, we're we're we have too much too much at stake to not work together. Right Like, if you don't think animals, you shouldn't hunt animals, um, but you still want to. I think animal rights folks they want to maintain wildlife. They want to maintain natural areas well. I guess what hunters do to. But we have a fundamental difference on whether you should harvest an animal or not. But in the end, our goal is to maintain natural areas. And if we're fighting each other, we're just really we're missing an opportunity to work together and find the common ground. And yeah, considered pland I always tell this folks, we start from the exact same place like you. It's almost if we were standing back to back and we turned around like, hey, well we're in the same spot. We both care about natural places and wildlife, and ECO says we all we care about this. And in our country, we're lucky enough that most people value these things. Like the bulk of the people this country would would say, there's hurt help. Do you value that? You want that to be there? Yes, of course I do, um, And we have a structure in place to keep it there. But then for animal rights folks, for hunters, you start to kind of walk away from each other and you forget that you started in the same spot. Because that's so I mean, it's so easy to sensationalize the animal rights folks beliefs. You know, I think, oh, animal personhood, that's silly. They think killing something and say you care about it, that's silly. And you get caught up in like those really you know, those videosyncrasies and and and the fact that we kill we want to kill them, they don't want to kill them, right, But that's I mean, that's what the conversation is. That's where that's where the heads come together, and like, how can we figure this out where we can co exist. We're both you know, there's a lot of hunting stories that have led to a lot of wildlife, a lot more wild life. And how how nice if we every time we heard those sort of those sort of descriptions that you just said, like if we had instead it, Well, actually we both want the same thing. We both really want to make sure these species survive in the future as a whole, that the population are viable and the ecosystems are maintained. Your hands off, I'm hands on. Can we just agree that that's what where we are? And well, I mean, let's raise the deficiency. Who who does better for wild or each has a role, Yeah, each has a Yeah better, that's way better. Uh So you one thing that interesting. I don't know that this shock people is interesting, It said the anally in your paper. The analysis revealed that ten point two to eleven point three of the land area the South, Midwest, and Northeast are primarily owned for hunting, while less than one percent of the land and the West was owned for hunting. In terms of leasse lands the South and Northeast of their respective land us for hunting leases, there's only four two percent of the land in the Midwest and West are at least for hunting. Yeah, it wasn't that interesting. I mean, there's a lot of numbers you through out there, but there's some some nuances, especially in the Midwest, where you had a lot of people owning land for hunting but very few people leasing land for hunting. And I started digging in, like what is happening in the Midwest. That's that's a bunch of hunters live in Wisconsin, and that's that's some of the highest density of hunters in our country in that area. And as I dug into some of those states, if I found some policies and This is where the paper sort of ends, is sort of like to think about in the future and has become a new research avenue for US. But Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan, I believe all three of those states. Maybe maybe it's just Michigan and Wisconsin have these forest land and Acts which give property tax breaks to landowners forced landowners if they open up their land for free public hunting, so it cannot be leased, so you have that tax break is sort of allowed opening up a lot of free, free land, but it's reducing I think. I mean, millions of acres are in some of these programs in Wisconsin and Michigan, so I think that really reduces the sort of area that's that's leased in these states. But it points to the power of policies and how policies can incentivize and change the dynamics for access for hunters. And what does that mean. Yeah, I mean when we talk about in Texas, you're from there and I live there, and we talk about like what it means to go hunting in that state leases, I think if you were to ask all hunters, could we eliminate leases and just give free access to every place where you'd like to go hunting big. Yeah, sure, I'll keep my money about spend it on something else. I think we would all agree on that. I mean, we will all agree that are all of our most hunters goal. My goal is to own land one day. If ever it's way far it, I'm gonna have to do a lot more podcasts. Tell your friends, folks, I wanna need more downloads. But that's I think, you know, that's the American gold, American dreams part of my goal. But there's these like things you know in the middle, and leasing is kind of like the next best thing. But we would all I think we would all agree. If we didn't have to do that, we wouldn't do it. But that's the reality of Texas in a lot of places where leasing happens. And to see a lot of your numbers looking at least land, you know, just just shows me how how many people are doing and how how as a hunting company that I work for, this pod podcast about honey, we don't talk about how to least land, How where did lease land, what to do with it, how to how to be a good lease e, how to how to find people to come and leash your land that will take good care of it. And we don't really talk about that subject all that much. And it's it's the numbers that you're buried out to be a pretty impactful thing. There's so many opportunities. I've met so many where this works well. Land owners who really love their they're hunting their hunters, they love having them out there. They provide a service to them. They know there's not going to be an illegal pot grow in the back back of the ranch. They know that there's gonna be guys crawling around the property and keeping an eye on it. Um A lot of times people do free work, take care of the property, fixed wells, report if the water, if the water troughs empty for the livestock, or they see livestock sick. It's nice to have this sort of eyes on the ground for us, some of his landowners. The other thing about leases I think we haven't touched on yet is that you know and and this is right. I actually questioned Steve Ronnella at the recent Congressional Sportsman's Foundation uh National Assembly of Sportsmen's Caucuses. He was he was speaking in New Hampshire, Breton Woods, New Hampshire, beautiful place and he he had mentioned, you know, the importance of access and the ability to get out. I coming from Texas, I grew up and hunted on private lands, friends lands and friends ranches, and it's a white tail system, so there's a lot higher density of deer. But coming out to California and becoming a public land hunter that it is exceedingly hard and sometimes to even see a single legal animal over the course of a week. Um it takes a whole another level of skill, which is good. It's it's if you want to become an excellent hunter, being able to harvest a solid trophy buck on public land, you have to be a really quite a good hunter, or very you might get really lucky too, that's right, But um it, I think it can be discouraging for a new hunter going out, um and to spend a week out and not even see a legal buck because they have gotten so attuned to the to the pressures that they just become totally nocturnal. At whenever the cunning season opens, they can hear. It is remarkable too. I mean, we have half of California's public land and even though there's very there's only what two percent of the state population as hunters. You go out into the men to see no national forests on opening day of archery season and every campground is full. There are vehicles driving those roads. There are lots of people here. Yeah, these dear no, they can smell the smell the exhaust in the forest and thinking something's going on today, I better high tail out of here. And that was that's uh So, some of these challenges in the public land and when you talked about were eliminate all leases and let free public access. You know, in some ways there's there's some beneficial aspects to having that limitation, to to be able to really limit the density of hunters out there. Um, I don't know. I don't know how to how to manage that in some of these systems because I am torn. It is great to have public access and be able to go out whenever you want, But then if you don't see a deer, you don't see a harvestable animal, that's that's tough. It's hard. I've been flipping about it in the past, say things like, well, you know, you gotta value the experience, you gotta value the time outside, and then at the end of the day you're like wait, wait, wait, wait wait, Um, If I'm playing chess, I'm trump beach the goal. I have a goal. If I'm hunting, I'm trying to kill an animal. Like it's it's it's just silly for someone so well, yeah, it's like being outside. No, I'm I'd like to have some nice fresh meat on the round. So yeah, I know that it's it's a point to be made that there's a balance, right, And that's what I think, I really think this conversation really is all about. Is in my mind, is that's what it's about. It's about understanding the whole picture, and not that I feel that we need to over emphasize one thing or the other. But I've always said, and I've said this on this podcast many times, public lands. It's like apple Pie and bald Eagles and Teddy Rose about it's easy to love public lands. I mean it's and it's also easy to promote them. I mean, what is it. It's free access, it's not for you to pay for it. But we all own them. We have these shirts public land owners. We all own this land. We have this. I've I've hunted primarily National Forest for the last for all the Turkey season, and my Dad's from the East Coast and he comes to hunt with me, and I don't know that he really understands. And I don't know that I do yet because I've only been living in Montana for six, six or eight months, not that I that I don't really understand that. So it's it's public is an easy sell. It's like, we all pay into this, we all get to use it. It's beautiful landscapes. It's open for for us to fish, to hunt, to recreate in the ways that we want, as long as we take care of it right. It's easy. It's hard, and it's harder to sell leases to people. It's harder to talk about private lands and talk about leases. It's just not as it's not as marketable. It just isn't. I don't know. I see this is this is my Texas up upbring coming up because I go out to public land and I see a full campground and I see cars all over the roads, and I'm like, oh man, this is not what I was looking for I want. I'm thirty miles down a dirt road in the middle of Mendisine National Forest and there's people everywhere and the nice I mean, there's a certain aspect of density of people that that can also I mean, it's easy to sell. But also I mean I've seen hunting videos were like, yeah, we're planning and going this one valley and for a sheep hunt, but there was twenty cars in the parking lot. We had to change plans. We're going somewhere else. And so there is I mean, that's another thing in this paper found is that the density of people using hunting lands that you can use these big, wide open spaces, and part of what we want is hunters is to kind of get away from it all and get away from the crowds, and so the I think there are public plans where you can find that, but as they get discovered, you can have it. Can we definitely love them to death? We we can love what we have loved. I mean I was talking to a buddy from Colorado and he's he's like, we are loving the outdoors to death in the state. You know, I said, it's coming for all the other states that have these resources. People want to use them and then they can be loved to death. So that that is a point. I think they're these competing principles. One of the principles in public lands is like, there's no elitism in public lands. You could be rich, you could be poor. You could have a dollar, you could have a million, but you can still go. If you have enough money for the tag and enough time, you could still go and use this source. We all it kind of levels the playing field, and that's beautiful. But what happens with private land and leasing. There's this this idea that that's what we came to this this new world to kind of to escape some way. But at the same time, like you said, I think both these things that play together, both these ideas that played together helped disperse the opportunity, helped disperse the number of hunters, and so that it all has to matter, um provide opportunities. Yeah, it all has to matter together. So I'm just trying to better understand that I would admit to not really when I read your paper, I'm like, there's a portion of this that I don't understand. There's a portion of this entire land news picture that I'm not picking up here and and reading your paper, I started to pick up some of it um in better detail, because I understand, Yeah, in the East, in the South, a lot of people in Eastland in Texas, A lot of people in Eastland, a lot of people just have to be really friendly to landowners to get a chance to go hunt and equality of game. I knew that, but this starts to paint a picture that's important. I think, Yeah. And I also think it's a you know, the elite ism thing. Maybe it's I you know, I when I go out and talk to ranchers, I rarely meet a rancher who's elite. I usually find somebody who's we're in jeans that are dirty, an old shirt, and they're working to land. They're working hard. And I mean, there certainly are elite landowners for sure, but by and large i've I didn't. One of my doctoral chapters was to interview ranchers and they're like, and I'd tell people hear at Berkeley. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go interview ranchers around the state. And they're like, you're gonna tell me you're from Berkeley. I was like, yeah, yeah, I guess so I have to. I've got to introduce myself. And you know, like I was amazed how few people of these ranchers. I sometimes get a little bit of eyebrow raised but a lot of these people their kids came to Berkeley, or their grandparents went to Berkeley, but their parents so that they themselves did. So there's you know, a lot of these things are sceptions about like how different we are. And as soon as you meet somebody, shake their hand, you tell me you're just interested in knowing their perspective. They want us to share their story too. And I think I think that plays with private leases as well. I think if you look at it as this as this big no trespassing sign and this big scary thing, if you instead just call him up. I've had remarkable luck just calling up a landowner. And I called up a couple of landowners. I had some some staff flower growing up growing on it just north of Davis for dove hunting. Uh, and it it takes a lot of courage to call, to make a cold call to a landowner. And I called two people and both of them granted me access, and they were so they were grateful that I even called them. They're like, wow, thank you so much for calling. That's really nice of you. Um, it's it's and they actually felt I think pleased to be able to be generous to to you know, at the time a graduate student, somebody kind of lower income, and I just wanted to get out in the nature. So they have something at stake. They love these lands too. They have some mistake to encourage people to get out there and to enjoy and love these lands in the same way they do. So, so I I don't. I don't like that sort of I mean, I grew up in a place where, yeah, knew ranches that were super friendly, so they're from these people I knew, and so I don't. I don't necessarily see that elitism thing is driving the private land lease arrangement. I see it more as as an opportunity for controlled and also for the ability to to go to a place and sort of making your own. Um. Somebody described like the best hunting leases they've set up. It was it was a guide. It was an operator who set up leases hunting leases around the state, and he said, you know, the best time is if you can get guys in there. They start treating the property as if it's their own, and once somebody is there for three or five years, their kids start going, they grow up there, their kids take over the lease. You know, it really is part of the landscape is part of their they're being. So I think that's the thing that that that's a real opportunity. And in the places where there aren't leases for whatever perceptions, whether it's oh you're you're a leader, Oh hunters are just gonna come and shoot my cows or pop hole or shoot holes in my trough, you know, to the extent we can get past those sort of caricatures, I think there's some real opportunities to expand are yeah, yeah, and it's it's it's a real important part of the conversation. I think, Um, there is like I said, there're there, they're these ideas that well, I would just say that it's leases and things of that nature aren't something that we dig too deep into. We just don't we dig deep into. Every time there's a we need access to a certain you know, say the Crazy the Crazy Mountain Range there in Montana, we will fight for that. There's a lot of examples of things that we fought for, um, the Sabinoso Wilderness and and things that we're fighting for to have a direct action. Right we if we do this, if we get a walk in area here, if we get an easement here, we're gonna open up all this access to people. And so when you talk about, like pushing back on Steve's comment on access, this access thing is is such a it's it's not a chicken. It's like, it's not a chicken in the egg. But like, if I can get an easement right here on this square chunk of land, then that's then I've provided access and anybody that wants to go through there can go through there, So that there really is a good feeling that that you're making a difference there. It's harder to say, well, I mean, we really talked a lot about leases and more people started. It's just not it's easy of equation. It's relationships, right, It's like building relationships, and there's thousands and tens of thousands of ways those can work out, and they can change, and they're not permanent. The nice thing about public lands and a conservation easement, you've got a permanent access, which is really nice. Um, so what are we missing here? There's so much I feel like we've got to be missing some stuff in your Yeah, well, I think one thing that's kind of interesting is we're digging in now. After this we started thinking about what are states doing to seeing the impact of these policies and that Midwest area on affecting lease rate and things like that. We started digging into how all the different states and we're gonna present we're gonna pronoun a proposal to present this at the en NASK Summit for the National Assembly of Sportsmen's Caucuses with Congressional Sportsman's Foundation. Um, we're gonna propose that we've dug into six different policy areas for all fifty states. We've got three great undergraduates who have been working on three four undergraduates have been working on this over the course of the last year and its painstaking worth. They go to every single state and they dig into, well, what are the cost share programs that are around. There's a big you know, federal government has a big cost share programs for conservation through the NRCS. Well, there a lot of states we found we started digg into this, a lot of states have their own cost share programs. What are the property tax systems? Obviously we saw the impacts of Wisconsin and um in Michigan's property tax laws on and the effects that are likely affecting their leasing rates. Well, what how what are other states doing? For property tax exemptions. Does does Some states you only get your property TAXI exemption if it's an agriculture. You don't get it if it's in wildlife conservation. Some states do, like in California, put in wildlife conservation, you put in recreation, it'll can still count for your agricultural tax exemption. But some states don't. These are some things that there's a lot, yeah, we could think about and our super secret media to project where there's a lot of things where well, if you'll if you'll do this to the land, if you'll plant this, if you'll rotate these crops, if you'll do this, this will pay you. But now so I'm so now I'm I'm just leasing a property or or I bought a small piece of fragmented acre. It's just because I know there's some deer on there and that's gonna be my family might build a little capital there. And I've got forty acres of my own. Finally, well, the government will come in and say, if you do this, this, this, and this, we'll give you a monthly will basically rent this from you to give you a month payment. That might help to subside like subsidize you're buying it a property or or leasing the property out whatever. But then you also have a bunch of work to do. Yeah, And if you just want to recreate and you just want to hang some tree stands and kill some to hear, now you have this obligation to you know, keep up the work that you've you've promised the government that you'll do. So it's a it's a weird there's a weird dichotomy there. How do you how do you balance those things? Yeah, they're trade offs, yeah, for different for how much you want to get involved with these things. And some people might might want to do these things even without the government support. One rancher told me this joke once. He said, I just gotta repeat it because it is so funny, and I'm probably gonna get in trouble for saying it. Um, I have to have you censored out. Later. Um, I could beat I'll beat it out. And he said, he said, he said, we don't work, We don't do any government programs, and this is just a big land under in California. He said, we don't do any of those because get in bed with the government, you get a lot more than a good night's sleep. That is a strong opinion and some aspects of of the private land under community. But so I just to illustrate there's just such a diversity of ways in which people look at this. But I also think some of those landowners still might do a lot of these same practices anyways, they just don't want the government involved. Yeah, that's yeah, that's true. Like I said, once you get him involved, there's there's been they'll they'll give you the benefits, right, there's financial benefits there, but it it is you're now working with a complicated entity. So you have a there's a big, a big data thing here. It's a bunch of numbers. It's down in the middle of the paper table too. This is land areaan property, characters is for wildife associated recreation and and total acre total acres and millions for these two things by region. If you go to hunting, there's two d and twenty million, as we've discussed, lease acres and a hundred and thirty five million own acres. It's pretty interesting obviously, So explain those two numbers. Because when I look at this, I was like, so this survey look asked landowners are asked hunters, do you own or least land primarily for hunting, um, And so they could answer yes to either those UM. So they answered so they owned land primarily for the purpose of hunting, which was a whole lot. Hundred thirty five million acres was for people owned land primarily for hunting. Now, the interesting difference is there's a lot more. There's quite a bit more for leasing million acres for leasing land for hunting. But um. The difference that's interesting is this mean size of the property. If you scoot over to the fourth or fifth column on there, the average size of the least property is acres. So two thousand, four hundred acres you get on average if you're leasing land, because if you're owning land is down at the average is three six acres. I mean that that makes sense. Lands expensive, it makes sense, makes no But you can lease a lot of land for acre uh, and you can. You can make your money go a lot farther and get a lot bigger acreage. After looking at this, I've always to own land to yeah, But after looking at this, I also want access to thousands of acres from my hunting. UM. It would be nice if I was in the high density area with white tail and turkeys were all over the place. Yeah, a few acres probably do it. But in the West for sure. Yeah, the numbers say least at least get get to spend your money in two thousand acres lea well, and you wonder, you know, just that I'm thinking of my future, Like, if I'm gonna spend the money for twenty years to least the same properties, I'd say it's two twenty years to least two thousand acres. I don't gotta pay the property tax, I don't go through the upkeep. I still have access to that property. I'm gonna take a really good care of it, probably have great relationships to the landowners. Or I could buy a couple of hundred acres and struggle with all the things we've talked about, which is keeping up with a boid adversity, making sure um the land is taken care of and it's it's part of a healthier ecosystem overall. So I mean, yeah, if I'm just if I'm just thinking about my hunting, yeah, I mean, I'm least you can if you can lock in a good least and you can find somebody in that's that's where the work comes in. If I got enough money for a land manager on my O'Brien ranch that we're gonna buy. Um. But the other thing that's interesting here just you broke this also down into the four regions obviously Northeast, Midwest, South and West. UM. So take people through both the lease and owned percentages just by region, because I think that's interesting. Yeah. The leasing, So about the land least in the countries in the South, Um, you think about Texas has a huge leasing industry, UM, as well as I think of the states like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. So it's just a culture of it. Um. Somebody once I think I make reference in the paper. One suggestion for why this is is that, oh gosh, it was a sociology paper. They said the South was predominantly settled by people of from upland areas in Scotland and I think Ireland, and they tended to be more uh. I think they used the word territorial. Now we're getting real deep. So they were they were expecting to have payment for access on their land. And this is this is going way back to like you know, eighteen hundreds of time frame, whereas people in North came from areas in England where there was more of an open land culture, and so that this might have been I think I suggested this might be some of the reason why you see this very different rates of leasing in the South versus other um parts of the kinds pretty crazy. I mean the Midwest is five or the Midwest of six, Northeast five, West eight forty two for the South. Yeah, it's very Yeah, that's it's interesting. That's not a number that that that's a number that the bears explaining and if that's the way, and I think it's I think Texas is a big state, UM and that probably is a big part of that. And I think that same culture follows in place like Alabama. Damn you, Texas. You're always skewing the numbers owned total. There's there's some interesting things in the own total that the Northeast there's only three point seven percent, in the West only one nine, and then in the Midwest and the South fifteen and sixteen cent or practically so interesting that if you were combined the South and the Midwest, that's that's roughly, you know of of a thirty percent number. A huge portion of that was I was really surprised by that sort of dichotomy in the Midwest that you have this really large number of people owning land the large a lot of the owned lands in the Midwest, but very little the least lands in the Midwest. And that came down to those sort of I think those policies up in those states. Um, but then you think those policies are pretty neat. But then if it's encouraging people to own land, might this also be encouraging fragmentation of those two thousand acre properties into three acre properties. Because if if you if you only need, if you can only af forward or only need three hundred acres for your hunting end of splitting up land into smaller and smaller chunks, that might be all right, but in the end you're probably gonna have more human impact the more fragments you take sixty acres and breaking up a bunch of forty acre parcels you I mean, you have you go from it's obvious and you go from one contiguous management to a bunch of different types of management that we all as hunch as we all know you like if you buy back forty is it's about your neighbors, man. You gotta have good neighbors. If they're over there on opening day just shooting every year that walks, you're not gonna have the best experience on your forty and the impact of fencing. You know, there's been some really interesting things that my colleagues, justin Dr Justin Bushchairs is working on up at the Hopland Research Station up north. They here and they're looking at fences. They have GPS colors on deer and there's they're noticing that some deer, even though it's just a barb wire fence, a standard you know, three or four five strand bar wire fans, these these deer will just walk and it will affect their home range. When you look at their home range and where they're going, there is a solid border where they just don't really want to cross this fence. It's not that much energy to get over it, but maybe it's on the edge and they don't go. So it does create these even standard bob wire fences that deer have generally no problem getting over, do impact some of their movement and you start looking at large migrations. Cross number ten fences versus one is a big deal. Yeah, to travel back to Texas for a moment, there's a lot of high fences there. Oh yeah, well that's a whole another thing. It's like what does that do to wild Yeah, that's just that. That's I don't want to get into that. I just want to get into that. But this is all you know, well I did look into that, but this is kind of interesting to look at. Yeah, because I was thinking, I was like, well, what does this mean for it? Is there gonna be inbreeding because of this, Like if you have these fragmented populations, like I called some of those folks the biologies out there in Texas Parks and Wildlife, and they said, you know, there's no such thing as a deer proof fence. And if you have just one deer get through every year or every couple of years or something some very small rate which they expected, they did not expect to have genetic impacts to these animals. So that was interesting to me. I think, um, certainly it does seem artificial all to have, you know, this sort of completely broken off system. And it said that to me, I'd be like, yeah, but that's I mean, yeah, but you're still changing the whole city. Maybe one or two get through, but maybe they don't. I mean, you're you're certainly leaving that open to happenstance. Yeah. Yeah, man. The other thing here, as you were saying, this may not be as impactful as I thought it was when first reading it. But fishing, I mean there's thirty four million lease and owned total acres U thirty five million for hunting and then for for wildlife watching, which is the third one umt million, And so hunting is a giant chunk of the data you could pop. Yeah, in terms of the area, it's it's it's dominant. I mean compared to wildlife and fishing. Wildlife watching and fishing. Like we said, just for fishing, you just need to get access to the stream. Yeah, so it's not Yeah, yeah, you buy a cabin on a stream access and you got it. When I first read that up, like yeah, hunting, fishing, no, you can be down or not. My excited um and then the while I like watching too. You can do it on a pretty small A lot of people like to bird watch. You know, you're gonna see your deer and your you get get five ten anchars. You probably you deer coming through your property if they're deer in the area. Yeah, Well, I mean I think all this you know. What strikes me about this is time you spent, you know, in cold rooms looking at ridiculous amounts of data. I think some people can can look at this. We've done some other um things where we just looked at studies where people have questioned, well, what sample side like, there's that there surely is that those are critical parts of this. But the other part of this is what you what you've learned and doing the work to put this together. You know, you've you've been closer and closer proximity to this data than maybe anyone, and you've been able to just have this is like the empirical knowledge of of spending that time, whether you want to break down exactly the sample sizes and how accurate here or there. I feel there's value. There's just really intrinsic value and the fact that you spent the time to really analyze these things and and go deep. So I appreciate that and I think it's I think it's valuable for that reason in and of itself. Well, we report all our standard errors so you can see you can see the uncertainty, and there are there is uncertainty essocially with all these numbers, and they're all reported so um. But the you know, one thing before we wrap up of what I see is some opportunities. You know. I think we look at these data and we see some of the big numbers, and I think in the West it is interesting. The West is clearly a lot of public land. California, which people might not think of as really a big public land state is half public land. Um. I think there's there is this sort of that dichotomy that we were talking about. There's a sort of culture whereas like the hunters go out in the public land and the private land is not. I even see it among our there's a culture that suggests that private landers should not charge money for access because we're in a public lands. Hunting is a public resource. Game is a public resource, and I I again I find myself feeling like it limits us if we if we come to our landowners, so you shouldn't be charging money. A lander's gonna say, well, I'm not gonna let anybody on, and so that's a loose, that's a lose, that's a lot of lack of access entirely. Um. Even if this lander says I'm only going to sell dollar trophy, elk huts that's all I'm gonna do. And yeah, that to a lot of us that that is out of that is out of my reach. Um as a as a faculty at you see Berkeley, that's that's totally out of reach. But I don't know if it's that nice. But at the same time, at twenty acre hunt, at dollar hunt is a hunt for somebody? Is that better than a zero hunt? That than hunt for nobody? And a landowner who's probably gonna just do everything he can to get rid of those elk because he has no benefits. They're grazing his pastors there on his irrigated pastor. He has no benefit for them. He's angry at the wildlife agencies, he's angry at hunters. He hates the whole system and and everybody's mad probably hates the government, hates regulations. That's generally versus versus is a zero or is it? Is it an acceptable thing to have ian? And isn't that person paine for a hunt? Aren't they a hunter too? I mean they are. There are certainly people who have a lot of financial resources, but maybe they're also somebody who just saved up for ten years. And he said, I'm gonna do this. There's a lot of that, and and you're right, and I think I came, I came to this place. I came to Berkeley's especially to challenge my own perspectives on things. And I think that's that's what you just said. There is a very important thing too for all hunters, especially those of us who celebrate access in public lands. So much is to understand, like what's the proper cultural like stificates of each thing, what's the proper mix in our our our culture just shared ideas. How do we make sure that we were holding up the things that are important but understanding the there are other things that also contribute, and how do we balance those things in a way that makes sense. How do we not over emphasize public lands and how we talk and how we communicate to each other in our community, how do we emphasize each type of land use, each type of land ownership, and and how do we just make sure that we understand all those things together? And the big ridiculous tapestry that this is. Like I said earlier, you can't talk about these things in a monolith. There isn't public lands and private lands. There are just it's impossible, But I came here to kind of like I want to highlight that. I want to make sure everybody understands that, well, I public lands. There is American to me, is is apple pie. I don't really like apple pie, but people seem to like it. That's fine. But but there's also I also understand the need for balance and the need to examine every type of land use and every type of land. Yeah, and so hopefully folks can do that and increase opportunities and build relationships and increase these coalitions where we have common ground. And I think ranchers are solidly in the side of maintaining these landscapes, which is the saying solidly where hunters are too. And I think these sort of wedge issues that drive us apart, when we really at the at the core, we can get get past those sort of things that are dividing us. We can probably make a lot more progress. And I will tell you that I've had I have I often say things I like and don't like on this podcast. I don't really like apple pie. I just want to put that out there for everybody. So if you think that's weird, deal with more of a cheesecake family that brownies, brownies, cheesecakes. I'm not really not really there depending on the type of filling right, it could be. But also I don't like peas, and and I had I've had a lot of people who are like pea farmers be like, well, come and hunt my pea farm. There's deer walking around everywhere. Um, so maybe I'll do that. I'm trying to trying to balance my perspective to get a little nuance into it. But anyway, apple pie, if you put ice cream on it, it's fine, Like it's just fine, but it's just okay. It's not great. And bald eagles also, they're okay, not great. They're okay, they're not great. Have you been around them? They're like go to you know, go to Prince of Wales and Alaska and they're like buzzards flying around. You're not real great. Um. I don't know why. I don't know why I did that. What a horrible place to be go watch a bunch of buzzard like eagles flying over your head. Yeah, the wild turkeys better than the eagle, I feel, because I just want to put that all out there. But I don't know where I was going with any of that other than to say that I think hopefully people can listen to this and really think about you know, as we as as hunters, we have different opportunities, right, different opportunities to go interest and use different types of land, to have different types of ownership. Some we all own together, some we don't, Some we have to pay to get access to. Some no one couldn't get access to because someone bought it for their own for their own reasons. So I just understand all those things, and I'll make sure everybody has access to this paper because, um, there's a lot of numbers and a lot of words, but there's a lot of really um impactful stuff. It's good information. It shows the impact of the hunting community from an angle that generally has been thought of as a black box where people didn't know how much fun are we talking about nationwide? Um, And we've got some We've put together the best data sets we can to get the best numbers we can on that and uh, and I look forward to doing an update with what we're doing. We're carrying on with this work and seeing how policies now are impacting this stuff. So I'm looking forward. So when's that policy working. It's ongoing. You see this map on my screen right here. I got several I started the giant screen. I love big screens. You know. Once I met a lawyer who said he had a really great pen, and he said, you know, I'm a lawyer, so I have a really nice This is the tool of my trades. It depends. So I feel like, you know, I work on the computer all day and this is this is a tool of my trade. Um, let's see where is the might if I get to screen that big and make me look smarter? Yeah, there you go. That's another good reason. So we're we're looking at all these different programs and seeing how we're gonna be presenting this um in Bozeman, and we're going to do it work. This is a draft working paper for Bozeman Perk, the conference they're holding in July I think nine or so, and we'll be talking about how these different policies interact. So covering everything from public access programs, is a lot of mentorship and hunting programs that we're covering. We're gonna see like we're about at this point where the cusp of being able to pull all these big data sets together and seeing what is what is interacting between these different programs. Are our states with good public access programs for private land also doing cast share programs, so they also doing property tax exemptions for conservation. Um. Yeah, like what are the unintended consequences? Y? And and how do they interact and what um. One of my undergraduates mentioned she had studied and I was like, well, what's the what do you think is happening here? Says, well, it seems like it sort of reminds me of this class I've read this stuff about she called it. I want to look up federalism. There is different types of federalism, compensatory federalism and versus cooperative federalism and iterative federalism. And the idea was that states and sometimes in our system, they can really take the role, take on a lead on something when that they see a gap from the federal government happening, and so then the federal government might take lead from some of the states they're doing something innovative. So we found some really interesting programs like Indiana's got this program called Apple which it combines public access, habitat and cast share. I think it combines all these things together. It seems really innovative. I mean, we're going to highlight a few of these in this talk, in this paper. They'll come out for perk this working paper, and then we're hoping to present over at the with Congressional Sportsman's Foundation coming up in November. So look forward to giving an update. And you're coming to both and I'll come and uh, I'll come and cheer you on if you'll get a coffee might Yeah, I am I allowed to cheer if why you're please do that's that's the best. Yeah, I'll be like your hype man. Yeah. Federalism, yeah, bring it all right, Look well I appreciate it. I'm off now to go find a vegan and an animal rights I look forward to hearing that. That's gonna be those podcasts. It's gonna be fun. Um. But all like I said, this is as much to me like to to find ways to challenge my ideas on on land. This is it in the same way as I'll hope those folks can challenge me on some of my thinks that things of killing and eating. I look forward to hearing about it. Yeah, all right, thanks, thank you, thank you, take care. Thanks. I guess I grew up. That's it. That's all another episode of the Hunting Collectives in the Books. Thank you to Luke McCallie. Thank you to our little round table there in the beginning, including Steven Ronella, Mark Kenyan, Sam Longer and and Fill the Engineer Um. Great conversation. I don't want to get into a bunch of sales pitches at the end of the show here this week, and we're not going to have any listener feedback. I just want to address this issue because we I know this this podcast isn't going to solve some of the angst out there about public lands and the public land movement and the identity of the Western hunter and some of the Midwest and the East feeling a little angst and anger towards some of the focus uh in our community and our culture on these things. But what I will say is that you know, it would be it would it definitely be our ruination if we allow this the kind of sever the bonds that that both public lands and private lands bring to our community. So for those of you that that are in listen to this, and you're in North Carolina, or you're in Maryland, or you're in Florida, or you're in Georgia, or you're in South Carolina, or you're in Iowa. You're one of these states where you feel like maybe a little bit left out of the conversation. Maybe the conversation has changed since you came into hunting. UM. Maybe the energy is in places where you don't reside. UM one right in and let us know that, and we'll have these conversations. We'll have both the difficult conversations where we agree and disagree, and we will have conversation about how we get better. And that's why I went and talk to Luke McCauley and wanted to learn more about what leasing in private land ownership really means to economically, socially, conservation wise for our country. And UH was pleasantly surprised to find a very educated professor that was sitting in a very unlikely place talking about something that means a lot to me. So as a way to kind of bring this all together, I would just say, certainly, while public lands are trendy, we gotta watch out in our in our world UM four trends and where they're headed and make sure they're always on the right course. As we do with anything else, So thank you for listening, or take you out with old number seven and we'll see next week on the Hunting Club. Dennisee who whiskey got me drinking in Heaven? And I know I can't stay here too long because I can't go a week without doing run oh without and run drinking out and run wrong drinking in Heaven

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