00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, what's up? Another episode of The Hunting Collective, one of my favorite episodes of all time is coming at you right now. We have Doctor Valerious Geist. I'm not really sure. Normally I would describe who the person is, but I'm not really sure how to describe Dr Larious Geist other than he's an amazing man. Uh. He is the original author of the North American Model the Wildlife conservation. He is a zoologist, a wildlife biologist. Um, and he's got more stories to tell than I could recount right now. So please stick around for that. We all said Cren Schneider, our podcast producer, to tell us the amazing tale of how we got him on the podcast and how he became a guest, probably one of the most impressive guests, impressive people I've ever been privileged to spend time around. So hopefully you'll stick around for that. But before we get there, I want to talk to you a little bit about First Light. The first Light. We talked to you last week about Ryan Callahan's kit. Well, right now we've got Mark Kenyon's early season white out kit up on first light dot Com, So go there first dot Com check out Mark Kenyon's early season white Tail Kid and all that it entails. And after you do that, this is a little special announcement here on the show. We launched a contest to go win a hunt white Tail Hunt with Mark Kenyon and Steven Ronnella on a new property that we purchased called the Back forty and it's in Michigan where you there's a new content series that's rolling out now. You can go check all this information out at the mediator dot com slash Win a Hunt. You can learn about our new content that's coming next week and all the weeks after, and also learn about how to win a hunt in Michigan with those two gentlemen, which I think a lot of you might want to do. So, without further ado, we're gonna take you to Dr Valarious Guist and his amazing tales. I guess I grew up on an alder row to the medal, always did what I've told until I found out that my brand new close the game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast, like it's like grew up. I mean, they have a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, And now I just wanted the real bad dream of being a like I'm coming apart of the scenes, but thank you Jack Daniels. No, hey, everybody, episode number seventy nine. Right last week, I got the number wrong, and now we had to go back and dub over. And you'll hear in the future podcast the story if we had to dub over because I got the number wrong. But this is seventy nine. I'm fucking sure of it. And we're here in the Meat Eater headquarters in Bosamontana. We have a great show for you. One of the the most amazing UH guests I've We've had in the upwards of eight shows and conversations we've recorded. I'm we just got to finished recording and I'm reeling at this point. I'm not sure what to say or how to describe our guest, Dr Valarius geist You know, I had heard of Dr geist Um, obviously for for many reasons, but I was unaware of what he's just like a majestic human being. He defies description and logic, and he is the most well read, well spoken, and articulate person I've ever met in my life. And that is not being hyperbolic at all. So I'm here with Karine Sneider are wonderful podcast producer All Things podcast. Is that right? You've been on the Being your podcast, so people know you're becoming a name. I guess. I guess so in the family. And the first thing we should describe is how Dr Guys came to be a guest on The Hunt Collective And I think this may be like in the Annals of Hunting Collective lore, this maybe the best behind the scenes story that there is. Do you feel Do you agree steakouts are always fun? Yeah? So bass Sickly, I've always wanted to have Doctor Guys on the podcast. I didn't never know how to make that happen. I tried to get a hold of him. He lives in the Vancouver Island. He's widower, and he doesn't have doesn't know how to use his phone, doesn't really do email communication. It's pretty hard to get ahold of I knew some people that knew him. We were unsuccessful, and then I heard last week that he was going to be actually earlier this week, that he was going to be in Bozeman for a conference with the Wild Sheep Foundation, And so I called some of my good buddy Garrett long or Karin got Ahold of Garret along at the Wild Cheap Foundation. He went over to Dr Geist during the conference and just said, Hey, there's this brandom guy almost the podcast with your dr. Guy said I don't know what my number is. I don't You can give my number, but I'm not sure what it is, so just uh have him come over to the conference and find me. And that's where Karan comes in. So that's what a steak out is in a way. And you've you've done steakouts before. Yeah, I've done some steakout steakouts before. You did a stakeout with like the Korean Army. It was the North Korean delegation coming in through JFK Airport. So we yeah, we got stuck in the little not the turnstyle. What do you call that? You know, you're doing a lot of it's a circle fell down the well, you know, it's you know, it's like the entrance to airports. I don't know, maybe I'm having like a stroke right now and forgetting the name the not the turn. You know when you go in and it's like glass and it's a glass, it's like a fish, you know, it's like a revolving door. There we go. That's what you're trying to describe to me. You're using your hand and using a circle motion describing revolving Yeah. So anyway, moving on, so uh yeah, steakouts um. I first went to the incorrect hotel, my bad um, and then I found the correct hotel. And you had a little piece of paper that I had. I had a handwritten note. My plan was to find this man, hand him the note with Ben's business card, and now it was you know, like, this is us from the meet in company and Ben's podcast and et cetera. Here's our contact information. We would love to have you on. So then you found so I went. I went to the Hilton Garden. I was gonna drop this off with the front desk, but instead to the right side there were a couple of glass doors and a conference billboard and I was like, I bet that's the Youngulate conference. I bet that's what that is. And they were um in the reception area, and I just had it, looked at my phone, found that picture Dr Geist and just checked out every single person there. So you were just like creepily in the room absolutely where I did not belong. And I was just probably would have been good at the say I've seen the CIA, but maybe not anyway, So yeah, I try to look cash weally like drinking a drink. I didn't even I just kind of, you know, I just walked through the people. I found a man who I was almost sure was him. He was talking to another woman, and I waited patiently and uh, And then I asked him if he was, in fact Dr Valerius Guist, and he said yes, And then we started a conversation that lasted for a long time, and then I was finally able to introduce why, why the hell I was talking to in the first place? Um? And he was absolutely lovely and incredibly receptive and said he would be happy to join and thankfully was going to be in town for a few more days. And that was that. The life of a producer, The life of a producer, it's your an unsung hero. And like all of the knowledge, the immense amount of knowledge, and as we were talking about before we started recording this, it goes all over the place. We talked about wolves and mule deer and his family life. When he cried at least three times, we laughed many times like this is this is a conversation that I didn't have much to do with other than like asking questions. But it's just the information that's within this um I think is substantial. I think everybody will be better for it. So I just want to make sure we had the backstory as to how he ended up here and then he got He came here in a taxi. He said he had to wait like forty five minutes for a taxi, and he was sitting in the front seat of the taxi when he arrived, you know, like legitly everyone like an old like like a taxi, not a ride sharing. I just put him in his first ever uber to get him back to his hotel. I mean all of this to say that here's a guy that doesn't do a lot of public speaking in this way, and I, I don't know, I'm not sure how to articulate how astounded I was by by his presence and like what he brought to the podcast of the conversation. He stood out in our office and talked to ten people and described his uh leaving Germany after World War Two and growing up in Russia, and he just is so fluently talked about these things. We cried about his his wife passing away, We cried about a pet moose, all the things in this podcast that happened. I there's a tear in Ben's eye every it's like it's this was Legitimately. I'm gonna go home and hug my wife and family and read as many books as I can between now and the next podcast because I am humbled by that man, his presence in the conversation. So I could go on all day about that. I'm probably stammering a little bit because I feel like I just had a shot of adrenaline from from listening to this guy, and it all came together because you wrote a little hand right now. Did you ever give him the note? It was the last thing I did. He was like, I'll do it. Here's a note. Now. I'm really I'm really glad that that worked out. Me too, um, because it worked out. It worked out well. So hopefully you enjoy this conversation with Dr Proce, guyst and m Karant and I have other adventures another podcast that we can like the new You want to tell everybody about the new organization we're starting for kids. Oh no, that's terrible, you know? Is it offensive? All right? We won't talk about it, then we won't talk about it. Maybe maybe stay tuned, Stay tuned. We're starting KRANT and are starting a new nonprofit organization for kids, and it has to do with cups. That's that's all we're gonna tell me. Um, all right, well we're gonna get you to this conversation again. I can't um, I can't tell you how much I appreciated this this and hopefully you can hear my voice that. UM, the energy is still in this room and talk to you guys just left it, So hopefully that comes through and hopefully you enjoy Dr hilarious guist. I guess I grew up on an alder road. Dr guys, welcome to the studio. Welcome to meet Eater. How are you? Thank you? I'm fine, Well, you were just commenting on the studio. We often start these interviews by asking people to describe their surroundings. Were not often uh not planted in the studio, will be out in the field and you're able to kind of describe the natural landscape. But in this case, you're making a comment on our studio. What do you feel like? You're well, it's abody, I can atching studio it has a lot of things where the eye bounces two comes to rest and then realize that's something very interesting and cute as being communicated like that moose with the forked and the good eatings, and they are very good to eat. They are they can also be very terrible to eat, particularly if you shoot a bowl in December. That's true. That's true. Now you're commenting on we have a mule there European mount hanging on the wall above me, and you're commenting on the unique nature of that. Tell me, well, yes, I realized that this is a muletea that has come basically, well your montana. That's a prairie mule deer. That's a footill mule. And the mule deer have very large eyes. The eyes of these multia are within one millimeter in diameter of those of pronghorn antelope, and the prongoe antelope is the beast with the largest eyes. The mule deer box in the interior of British Columbia, on the other hand, have very small eyes and narrow skulls, and the skulls are so different from the prairie muleia that there would be a different subspecies except that outside they still look exactly like mule deer. Wow. Yeah, and just just from just over my shoulder before hit record that you called that out. I was very impressed. Another. You see, I've worked for eight years every running season and quite close to here um Water the National Park with ease deer. Yeah, and so I can tell you also that because of us so tame and I was able to stand with them, these bucks will observe other mule deer at half a mile away very very carefully. They have excellent vision, whereas the mule deer from the interior of British Columbia are in mountain regions that don't quite reach the timber line, which means that you have their heavy time, that heavy heavy timber. When you hunt that country, you're often hunt the timber cuts. That's that's that's correct. That's right. So that that makes a whole lot of sense that you say that right. That's that's that's right. But the astonishing thing is that these animals are only a few hundred miles apart, and they're so vastly, vastly different in their skull morphology. It's the relationship from that will as wild creatures to the landscape that they live is so well painted by that well, actually well paint. The mule deer here that I'm looking at is unique. In another way, the mule deer here in Montana is running on the mitochondrial DNAs of white tail deer. Yeah, how so the mule deer is a black tail, But the black tail mitochondial DNA that you find in Washington, Oregon, and California, Vancouver Island up into Alaska is completely different. The mule deer is basically a hybrid species and it Arose I suspect relatively recently. At recent times when after megaphonal extinctions, white tailed deer spread all over the continent, they were confined pretty well too small pockets. But once the competition of the many many general of big large mammals was down and out through extinction, they spread all over the place and they met black tails. So the mule deer is derived from female white tails being bred by black tailed mane males. Yes, yes, that's often the story. And and I've heard, you know, Steve and all are Founder and others talk about and posit that maybe that the meal there is a very brief blip that's correct in the wildlife and you kind of the lineage of that. That's exactly what I wrote in my first book on mule deer. Yes, exactly, He's right. Is it's a very sensitive species, particularly because if they meet white tailed deer, and the mule deer is heavily hunted, and so you don't have these big bucks around. The white tailed bucks, which are shy and survive much better the hunting pressure than the mulier do, come out and breathe the mulier dos and the In fact, it's only about one out of a hundred hybrids that is coming out of a junction of male mule deer and female white tail. Everyone else has a mule deer as her mother and the white taller as her father. But the they don't survive very well because once they get on their own year and a half and have to escape predators, they completely mix up the running strategies of the two species into a non functioning mess. Oh, it's something to build. You see what we did, because we experimented with that. We built a runway and we put obstacles into the runway, and then we chased white tails, mule deer and hybrids, and what time was this, Where was this in Calgary days drive from here and earlier in your life or when at one point when I was professor of the use of Calgary and it's was Dr Susan Lingle that did these experiments. So we set up, as I said, the runway with the obstacles, and then we chased the deer through the white tail. What comes at high speed and very elegantly glides over top of each obstacles, clearing it by a couple of inches or so. Yeah, the mule deer comes starting in in great enthusiasm, flies over the first flies over the second obstacle. By that time he's he's jumping so wide that he flies right over the eight ft fence by the way, Oh god, yes, And now comes the hybrid. The hybrid jumps with the trajectory of the white tail, but he lets the legs hang down like the mule there, so he hits the every obstacle and hits the nose on the ground first. Every single time, was he persistent, They keep going. They can't do it. They can't because they see they don't lift their legs up. Interesting, Oh, white tails run away from coyotes and dogs. Mule there may turn around and give your dog a thrashing or kyote thrashing. They really go after it. And then, like you said, they're very territorial in the sense that day if an elk move in. Let's say they're living in a in a basin and elk move and they move out, Well they do. But the point that I'm trying to bring up is the anti predator strategies. They the female mule deer attacks coyotes. In fact, when there is sort of a mixed bunch of multiar females vital females giving birth, the white tailed fonts are actually protected by the action of the muleteer dough because she really gets rid of the predator. Yeah, it's incredible, but this has been verified, so I'm not telling your story. This is true. But now what happens when you bring in a hybrid. What the hybrid does is well, first of all, when we came in with the big dog to test this, the white tails ran away right away, but the muleteer gathered then started making a little round, and then they came running and they ran around me. If I had the dog and all of a sudden one would jump clear, go over the dog and hit it on poissant and the dogs would scream and try to get between my legs and so on. That's what the mule di did. Do you know what the hybrid did. He walked up to the dog and stopped. Unbelievable. Yeah, you see, they can have no capacity to survive in the wild. In captivity, they survived very well, of course, because we keep them. They produce big farms, they produce lots of milk. They are good mothers. But they could don't. So if you have the situation where you have a heavy hunting pressure on mule deer and the white tales come in, you wipe out the mule deer because the muletier females from now on produce a non viable farm every year. And the way the multi population goes extinct. So many taba for instance. Yeah, and around the turn of the century, nine century, there was nothing else but multier. Then the white tals came in, and then the muleteer survived only on the sandhills and many Tooba went from several million muleteer down to about a couple of hundred. That's all. And so the question is why were they few mule you're able to hang on. And what is the significance of the sandials. That's exactly what you Finally tran Saskatchewan and Alberta am that's the only place in Mulier survived. And the reason is very simple. When a mule deer buck chase pardon me, when a white tailed buck chases a mule deer dough, the mule deer dog runs up the steep slope like a jack rabbit, absolutely straight and way over top. And why a tail buck cannot follow. He has a rotary gallop and he can only go up diagonally up that. But when the dough flies over top, something else that happens. Usually in the rutting season, the big mule deer bucks are on high vantage points and they see the dough flying over, runs over and breeds her, and so it will be a mule deer baby that comes out, and too bad, the white tail is out. Secondly, the mule deer bucks are hopelessly dominant over white tails, hopelessly dominant. No white tail will dare come in that that body size. That just aggressive nature that I don't know exactly what it is, but I've seen that myself. But the other thing that it's even more funnier is the white tail females love mule deer bucks, except they're ignoring them. We don't know why, but ignoring them. But sus lingln said, if the world was made according to white tails, all the white tails, those would have a muleteer lover. Do you feel, you know, thinking about the way that these these species inhabit and subspecies and hybrid species inhabit these places and kind of shift each other around, do you feel like it's more predominant that I think I know the answer based on what you're saying, especially with these species, that it's the genetics that predispose them these activities or it's conditioning. No, it's it's both actually, but the genetics is very very powerful. See, a muleteer cannot run in any other way except the way it is genetically cut to yes, and that is until we see them that the hybrid switches back and forth and does everything wrong because it is not a clean cut genetic principle. Genetic can enjoy them good, it's must joan. Listeners can look that up. They can translate that word. It's a pattern. It's a genetic pattern. They're kind of locked in this genetic case. Putting in conditioning can move them around without that structure, but cannot It's limited. That's right. Well, I want to get to a lot of things with you. I think we might be here for a while. It sounds like we just want to a conversation off meal deer skull one. I want to say thank you so much for coming over. It. It dawned on me when when you agree to come over that the weight of your work. Yeah, you spent, you've and it's almost it will be impossible to cover it all here there it we'd be here for a week. I feel I've done a few things, yes, and so we'll try to hit some of them, the more relevant to the conversations up today. But then also I want to really just dive into, um, who you are and where you came from and kind of what shaped your views, because I think that's this podcast, um you know, yes, is about that. It's about every person that we've been able to talk to her on. This will be episode number eighty, who talked to eighty folks, including your friend, Shane Mahoney and others. Beautiful, beautiful person. He is trying to connect all of the why why do you think the way you do? Why do you push wildlife the way you do? Why have you committed your life to what you've committed it to? UM? You know why the North American model wildlife conservation. So those wise kind of connected to everyone else we've talked to UM to kind of weave together a fabric of us as hunters and wildlife lovers and things of that nature. So, so I want to start with where you were born and your upbringing. UM, I imagine there's lots of good stories. You were born in Night. I was born in second February, which is very close to the Black Sea and the enabled city in the UK in the Ukraine, but today it's Ukraine. In those days was Russia basically USR. Well, we never spoke Ukrainian. We spoke Russian at those times, and my mother spoke Ukrainian as a second language. Well mind you, she spoke five languages, but Ukrainian was one of them, and Ukrainians differed significantly from Russian. Yes, at anyway, No, I was born there. My father was born in White Russia on the prepat Rover, which today has been depopulated because of Chuna bil So my whole ancestry which comes from that areas today without people and it's strictly wildlife in the area. While that is dealing with the radiation and rather successful manner would say any related family moved out there. Obviously, I have no clue what relatives are alive. I don't think any art. I do know that the village from which my where my father was born, was apparently totally destroyed in the Second World War, and it may very well have been that my uh my grandmother grandfather had died much much, much earlier, they would probably have been killed either in in the terms of war. But there's another possibility which is really a painful one, and that is that Hitler, to begin with, the Preparart river borders, the huge, huge marshes they're famous for. Jingis count couldn't get through. Napoleon couldn't get through, the wear marcht couldn't get through, and they called it in German as we Martloch, which means the hole in the wear Wacht. Because so this was an ideal place for the partisans to hide out, you see, and so the Germans developed specials, commander units, murderous units from jailed poachers from Germany, poachers which were good at operating at night and the dusk and so on, and so these commanders went and they've destroyed one village after the other. So it could be that my grandmother fell victim to those as well during during the war that side. So my father was a ship building engineer. His specialty was battleships. My mother's specialities were submarines. They were boards in cheese, an engineer like my father was. And we left Nikolaia when I was four years old in the nineteen forty three November the eighth amount of Fact and went to Austria and then to Germany, and that is where I became became basically culturally a German. And you can still hear it in my language. Yes, that's a wonderful it's a wonderful accent at any rage. Then we came to Canada in nineteen fifty three. I was then fifteen years old, and one of the first thing I did I joined the regined, the rifle regiment. And for the very sample reason I had enough experience on the receiving side in World War two, uh and I realized that in the nineteen fifties, we had the Cold War. It could become a hot water in the time. I didn't want to be repaired, and I thought the best way to prepare myself in this new land which I came to, my new home, Canada. I was going to join the rifle Regiment. And why Canada? Why why from from Germany to Canada. Well, to begin with, it had been an earlier choice, and my aunt had come in to Canada, and we simply followed, were able to follow. God Thanks. At that time it was a wonderful choice. And also my choice to become a Canadian soldier was a wonderful choice because I was so amazed at the kindness, at the understanding tolerance of the veterans that had fought. And but when now teaching us kids, I was fifteen years old, six mostly other one sixteen seventeen. At that age, they had experienced terrible things during there, during the war, and yet they were ready to serve their country again. They put on the uniform again and they took us kids under their wings, and God Thanks, they were wonderful men, absolutely wonderful men. Do you do you remember the first time you were interested in wildlife? Do you remember whether growing up in Oh, yeah, so you remember the first moment that you knew that you weren't going to be because your parents were engineered. That's right. But my grandfather was a professor of botany, and unfortunately he was taken away by the Secret Service. Uh. He died in our ultimately archipel Gulag, but he was taken away when I was six months old, and that was a terrible blow to the family. My grandfather and grandmother had a wonderful marriage, and my aunt and my mother eulogized their father. He was a wonderfully humorous man. And as I grew up around these wonderful women, Uh, it dawned on me that if everyone were half as good as my grandfather would be a fantastic father who did that way, I have a similar situation. Oh that's wonder It's a wonderful gift to have. Oh, it is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Trying to live up to that. Yeah, you have to live up to that, that's right. So it was a great blow to the family, which is one reason why we took the first opportunity to leave Russia. And my mother, when she was nine, she died at Hunton too, by the way portel Bernie here in British Columbia. She told me when she just came to portel Bernie and to us that the reason I was the only one is because when grandfather was taken, she determined no more children for Stalin, no more children for Stalin. So I'm the only one. But no, I was interested in living things very early on, and I have more memories about pestering my grandmother to teach me how to cook and bake and do things, because I was from early age convinced that I would be in the wilderness alone, and you're gonna have to learn how to cook. You have to cook and bake and look after yourself. So I that's a good trade and I got the best training. Why were you convinced? Convinced that early on? Because I was interested in the very early on. I was interested in the Canadian wilderness. Yeah, before I came to Canada, I already read the book by Lautograph Hunsbruck. That was a German um count that came to Canada hunt on the profit drivel Musqua River in British Columbia. When he returned, the RCMP was waiting for him because the Second World War had started and he was interned in Calgary, and later on I was a professor in Calgary, you see. But the point is, before I came to Canada, had read his books and was familiar and stimulated as also many about Canada. And we think this is the wonderful broad land with wildlife in British Columbia. Yeah, well Canada as a whole, Indians and so on. There's a romance, and this is such an important romance for instance, that I'll give you two examples. We were going to speak about wolves. Yes, one of the great mysteries that permeated North America the Good Globe is why did American wolves not attack people? Well it finally they did attack Kent and Carnegie and I investigated his death on behalf of the family. But the point of the matter is we discussed with my friend Eric Klinghammer, who created Wolf Park in the Battleground, Indiana, professor like myself and mythologists, he also studied under Conduct Lawrence, the great mythologist that said, I and we were discussing what is it that these wolves don't attack people? And why do Siberian wolves, but particularly Russian wolves do attack people. Well, you will not find an answer in English, but you'll find it in Germany. Because two Romantics wrote something that gave us a clue. One was a taxidermist, basic but a well educated man. In the brilliant writer. He spent eight years in the oil sands regions, and that was four and he wrote about trapping and the life of trappers. You see, can you find me a book that speaks romantically about the life of American trappers in the wilderness. No, because these were socially of people of very low standing. They were desperate men. They were poverty strict in man. Yeah, if the kid didn't go trapping, they die because there was nothing. We've glorified it. Later, at the point of a matter of fact, there wasn't a glorification. But this man wrote in detail about the lives. And now he began to open my eyes about the wolves involved. You see, um trappers didn't like wolves, and they didn't like wolves. First of all, when the wolves come into an area, wildlife panics, and I can guarantee you they do. And then these men, poverty strict and men that depend on this wildlife were be standing there with nothing to hunt. And Max Sinschey, that's the name of this gentleman, almost staff to death because of that. Secondly, they follow trap lines. The wolves followed trap lines and destroy for when you make three four hundred dollars of winter, every pelt counts, for Heaven's sake, desperation. It's desperation, that's right. Thirdly, the mode of transportation, it was dog sled Now, dogs and wolves don't get along. And the best story of that that I know of is the stories from Greenland. It's one of the explorers who was a meteorologist in the state, in the med station. Now, the point of the matter is the following. He was in the med station in the Arctic winter, sending out signals about he was supposed to be provided for, but no, the relief arrived. The reason was that all they tried and tried and tried to get through with dog sleds, the wolf cut them down every single time. In other words, if you are traveling with dog sleds, you are not going to be very tolerant of wolves. I'll guarantee you. So you have your three things here, Yeah, of intolerance. Now, in Northern Canada there lived about sixty thousand trappers. Today there are there about sixty thousand wolves. Then about fifty sixty seventy eighty years ago there were probably only about thirty thousand wolves or less, so you had for every wolf one or two trappers. Wolves have very large territories, so they were meeting continuously people that were hostile. And that doesn't count the natives that lived there, the white settlers that lived there, the hunters that cave there to hunt you in the all killed wolves. And besides that, if the wolves could got out of that area into the settled landscapes, then government trappers who take care of them. Yeah, and on top of that, they were throwing out poisoned horsemeat onto rivers and creeks in wintertime to bring down wolves. So the point of the matter was that every wolf was continuously experiencing a pretty negative condition from humans, and wolves are very smart, very smart. That result is there was absolute peace. The mono attacks on humans conditioning we're talking about the that's the answer. That's the answer, that's the answer. Yeah, and wolves, on the other hand, do become well. Life been attacked by wolves. I've been attacked by grizzly bears, have been attacked by black bears have been even attacked by coyotes. Good heavements when this breaks down. Yeah, is the Russian experience is excellent in this regard. During the Second World War, the Russian army became took the young men out of the villages and they at the same time removed their shotguns and rifles and everything else. So you had now women and children and old people undefended, and the wolves took advantage of that immediately. Yes, we wrote about that recently on our website. That's right around the same time that they had to stop fighting to both sides of the war. And that's a that's a different one. As a matter of fact, this is a bit of a bit. I'll tell you specific instances of this. During the Balkan War when the Turks and the oh one of the neighbors one another. The situation got so bad that they they had their truth and in one day a cavalry regiment killed hundred forty five wolves. But the wolf, traditionally in Old Sagas is called the beast of battle, along with the raven, along with the eagle and the vulture. Those are the beasts of battle. And the significance is that if a man fell and he could not be rescued, he would fall victims to the beasts of battle, and he would never be able to get to Valhalla, and there would be eternal shame of his family. That's well, yeah, so this idea that there would be the wolves present on the battlefield is an ancient one, absolutely, agent that you're thinking about the New York article the nineteen sixteen with the Germans and the Russians quit for a while and killed wolves. Yes, that's been passed around and many times times. But actually in officially, the Germans and the Russians on the Eastern Front quite frequently twit the world for a while to settle things. But you won't find that in the official records because something like how can you have bet Russians discuss things with him? Well, and you actually have a book called Wolves and Russia Anxiety through the Ages, wrote, Yes, that's right. Well, actually yes it was. Bill Graves is one of a brilliant man and he's one of your senior Uh how shure, I'll call it officers that deals with secret matters, etcetera. How do you call intelligence intelligence? And he's one of the senior ones. But the cute thing is that how he got to that book because he was trying to learn Russian. He was at the embassy in Moscow, and the Russians, in their brilliance, had put out very very young soldiers from Siberia as guards because they were politically naive, and so the poor kids were standing there and he came and talked to them, and he was a hunter and fisherman's on and they loved it, and so they looked forward to speaking with him. And they told them all about their experiences in Siberia and the wolves, and TRIP said, my god, their experiences are very, very different from what we have in the United States. So if he began to write things down at that point, and he began visiting Russian scientists and Russian editors hunting journals, yeah, and he masked, in fact, quite a book. Now don't ask me how the damn thing walked wound up on my desk, but he did. And I read it and I said, oh, my goodness, this is very good. But it's too big, it's too redundant. And so I called him and I said, look, I think I think I can get it published in Canada, provided we can cut this down and make it, condense it, and in other ways I said I'll volunteer, I'll be the editor or no. He was delighted by that, and I rewrote it verbatim from front aproat also the introduction to that book um and tried to but every sentence that went down was cleared through Will Graves. We are to this day friends. He calls me every month. We're on email on the internet daily. Yea. So we have had we have had a wonderful relation to trust relationship. Now in that book, I had as an editor some difficulties because I no longer no longer speak Russian. So I tried my very best, and many of the footnotes and notes are mine, and that just as the introduction is mine. And well, we couldn't give the book away when it was first published. We tried to get to libraries that were sent back. No, we don't want it day the fascination of Wolves. Today today we can't even buy back a second hand copy because it's cost you so much more going for on the internet. Oh, then they're they're down in price. Then there used to be much than By the way the book was translated into Finnish and the Finns even got a second edition out. It was that interesting. We are now Will and I are sort of working on the second edition, except we don't have a publisher, and we're pinning to get one, so we can probably get you one of this podcast, would you please we can, Oh my god, everybody listening right now, because it is now ninety years old and I'm eighty two, almost eighty two, and we would love to spend a couple of years getting the second edition hot, and we were very far into it, of course, we would love to do it. Le'll see what we can do for you there, I hope, so thank you anybody listening. But we're gonna try here. Mediator too, and I read some portions of the book online and we're looking through your works and this one struck me is is we can talk about this one all day, but I want to return back to, you know, talking about your years prior to to all of your works and and finding out why. So you're in Canada, that's right, how you joined the rifle Regiment, joined the rifle Regiment, that's right. I spent four years in Canadian uniform and I became of course after the first cadet and then it was militia that reserve soldiers. So I'm a trained soldier. And at what point, fairly soon after that you you were interested in zoology. I was always in. It was into theology before I came to let's talk about that, let's talk about exactly how that manifested itself. And well, I was interested in hunting. That came on very early. Is this your parents that hunted? Was this summer in your family? Well, the only one? Well, remember they were in Russia. You can't get firearms easily in Russia. My grandfather for a while had a shotgun, double ball, shot shots, a few things. But I had from the very beginning dreams of going out and hunting. And when we were in Germany walking collecting mushrooms in the fortest with my grandmother. I started mushrooming when I was this high six years old, and I promised grandmother that when I grew up, I would bring her game and deer and fishing, and I did. Eventually. You've hit on a few points. It's like this holistic life of wanting to bake and wanting to learn the custom, and want to learn about child life. That's right, and all the things that I think that that's right. We hunting appreciate. I was, you see, I was preparing myself in Germany already at age fifteen to take the very very onerous hunting exam by which you become a hunter in Europe. And by the way, just a little thing about the European past. In fifty that time when they began looking into the literature on and began studying to become a hunter, I learned the following that if you hunt in boarder regions were poachers can across the border and return again safely. These are very dangerous areas where foresters and hunters have been killed in firefights. Yeah, And the instructions were that if you over hunted in the water regions, you should carry military cartridges, military caliber and in your pocket you should have a strip of five armor piercing ammunition because if a poacher takes covered behind the tree, you can kill him. Fifteen year old boy, that I'm a little bit specious. Well, yes, because in Europe there has been quite a history of very very ugly poaching because the wildlife was in the private domain and there was a market for it and it could be sold, whereas in North America. God, thanks you don't. Nevertheless, I'll guarantee you that you still have illicit markets here on wildlife, and I recommend you really reading the books by Terry Gross. Terry is West, a wonderful author. He was the Frothwestern United States. He was in charge of the US Social Wildlife Service law enforcement Unit. I invited him to the University of Calgary. I still have a film of an absolutely superlative talk that he gave. I highly recommend his books. My God, They're good, yes, but they tell you just how vicious even in the United States, the underground legal um wildlife consumption looks like. Look. One of his top catches was a judge. He caught lawyers. God knows what people. Yeah, when you don't have the value systems set up, that's right there, that's those things, how quickly those that's right, that's right, that's right. We have many examples. That's right now. Um. I'm very very strong on the thing that when you hunt that they meet not be sold, you don't generate the market. And I can only say that I'm very I've been very, very fortunate that when I raised my family and so on, I was able to raise them largely on wild meat. It's so cute only wild meat ran out that my children began to slip at the beef they did, and my wife didn't like the bee final very much. But that has very much happened in my home as well. Kidding very much. We have gone through We have gone through years, maybe maybe eight years that really we go out the dinner, you have a stake or whatever. But when we go out, my wife and I go out, we you know, we will go to a steakhouse and get a steak beef. Of course that isn't venison. It's some other thing that I have killed. It doesn't taste the same, completely different profile and different explainable, well, it is explainable. It's very explainable amount. But let me try as well not to be able to eat a mountain sheep out of the canyons of Idaho, the sage Brush canyons Ido. It is the foulest meat you will ever encounter, and you will eat the fingers off when you eat the meat from a high, high elevation sheep. You know why, up high you have the largest amount of sunlight during the day, so the plants there are continuously photosynthizing sugar. Then you also have very cold conditions during the night, and the plants cannot metabolize that a way, So the the plants up there are always sweet, and that translates into the most beautiful meat of elk or deer, or mountain sheep or mountain goat when they come from the high mountains. Their superlative do you believe it? The in the cattle industry where you know when you're eating it, say you're eating a ribby steak from a cow, it is that that the flavor profile of corn that we're used to, the corn fed, grain fed animals were so used to those flavor profiles in our meat that that also explains a little bit of the difference between the delicate nature and the difference between the wild meat. I was more interested, not so much in the flavor, but I was interested in the profile of um fatty acids that you find. And venison and grass fed beef are very much alike in terms of omega three fatty acids. For instance, you see the amount in venison omega for three to omega six is roughly one in four. But when you get it from a fattening station, how do you call them began, Well, that's a ranch, that's right. You get one omega three to forty omega six. No good, Yeah, yeah, no good. The best thing you can do is to eat wild meat. You cannot do any better. Amen. Amen. And that's and once you've become you know, for lack of a better term, a conisseurs into different wild meat, that's right, you're able to understand the nature of how these things going to be. And and as you say, we're arguing the other day about how much animals that live and say the sage brush see taste of sage brush handloper are historically damn For the first three antelope that we got was shot by my two sons and myself the first time we went hunting, and I was thrilled. And then we tasted them. They were impossible to eat. And now I went through weeks of trying to make that meat edible. I put it into beer, it didn't work. I put it into tomato juice. U discunk clothing in the meat to juice. It didn't work. And one and then a friend of mine in Germany, Wolth kung Shruder, professor in Munich, wrote me a recipe and said, well, try that, because our mountain people use this to tame the wildest ibex in the worst shammy that they can't get. So I tried that recipe and low and behold, it worked, and this horrible meat became delicious. My children ate it, so I said, not, this is great. I've wrote down the recipe and sent it to Outdoor Life and they sent me one thousand three d that that recipe has been republished four times, and the last time in my book, my antelo book. I've wrote an antelo book. That's right, Yes, I can tell you what it is. Basically, you start with one liter of red wine and you add one leader of of orange juice or apple juice to it, and then you go and find um the or these blueberries that you find the prickly um do you find it here them all over the the your mountains. Put a little handful of that inside. Then you put some carrots inside, some onions, and you boil it and let it cool. Then you put your meat inside and you have what actually happens is you it draws out the albumen fraction. Yeah, and then I braised it. That was the first and it worked. Wonderfully. You can use that Brian twice. It won't work on the third time, but you refresh it with some sherry wine, for instance here, and you boil it a second time, you take out all the scum. You can use it, as said, twice beautifully, but not not not any longer. But it does team back, I'll guarantee you that. Yeah, And you feel like the acidic nature of those it's hard. It's hard to say what it is, but you do get a lot of foam and form is albumen, so it extracts something. So the bad taste appears to be associated with the album fraction. But most of the time antelope a delicious. That's that's the that's good to hear you say that. I was, Oh, I love them. Agree to disagree with them, it's right now. That's something that we often talk about out West. I've had outfitters tell me that they have clients who shoot antelope and they advise them not to eat it at all. Well, I know that, you see, and that happened convergently. It's so similar to the African antelope. It's almost embarrassing. The courtship behavior of the grand gazelle of the of the antelope, very very similar. But that's life. That's what you have to get used to. Because convergent you get crazy things. You know. The craziest thing of all is can you imagine that the blue whale runs on the genome of pigs? No? Now you do? Who could? Now? I do? No? You do? This is the incredible thing. The basic genetics of the whale is that of the hippo pig. There's related to both families. And it's another way. It's the same genes basically patent and programmed in a different way generate these unbelievably different creatures. And those for those of us who hunt, we we just especially in this in this kind of we're mostly always hunting ungli. Its right, they're so similar yet so different. They have four hooves, but they're good to eat, and they're all good to eat somehow. That's when the African antelope similar problem is wonderful to I really, except with some exceptions. And I know how to handle the damn sage brush. Oh yes, so let's let's uh, we can go on million directions here. Let's let's get back to UM where your learnings. You have PhD in zoology, you start to you know, it's really not we're gonna say developed, but start to hone in on your skills as a zoologist, as a wildlife biologist, as an educator. Talked to how that starts the maturity. Of course, when I came to Canada, came to rejoined the Saskatchewan opposite our high school, Central Collegiate. What's the museum, the Natural History Museum of of Saskatchewan. Quite came in there, and of course I was wildly interested in anything Canadian wildlife. I see an older gentleman standing there who's painting in the background that I step up to him and I looked at it, and he turns and I turned greet each other. And he was an Englishman that had come as a young child to Canada. He had been from a very well off family. He had sat on the lap of Rudyard Kipling at one point as a child, and he and I learned quite quite a bit of painting from him at that time. But the important thing was I mentioned the stones sheep to him and he was aware, and I was aware of this um German count that had hunted in the profit of region. He had been a rancher at one point in St. John's in that same general region. So he knew by minute that everybody talked about this year. Here is this German count coming in and being taken away by the RCMP. We're all Canadian Mounted Police and being put into clink, and so on so forth. So we had something in common to start out. And I told him about the book that this man had written, which of course he couldn't read. I read read German. Let me put this way. We became very good friends and visit him frequently, and the director of the museum came by listened to it, and he said, well, you know what, with your interests, you should be going to the Muncy Bridge, Columbia, to my friend Ian mctagg at Cowen. To Ian mctag at Coown. I went. When the time came, we became the best of friends, and we were the best of friends till he died, almost at the age of hundred. He became my supervisor in the phdeam time, and of course I spilled those means, and he also knew about the count. You see now I was somebody who told them more about and he was fascinated by this. These are the little bonds that united, you see, of course, and in no time flat he took me into his museum in Mctaget County. Was also a hunter, of course, and he was fascinated by mountain sheep. He had written the biggest monograph on mountain sheep at that time, the Taxonomy of Mountain Sheep, and I was fascinated by it. And so on the fourth and one thing led to the next, so that when I graduated and was ready to go, we made an arrangement for me to go to the spots and study stone sheep. And I am the first scientist who has ever studied stone sheep, by the way, and it was a place where we knew that in winter some rams that assemble. There's all which we knew, and we got there by aircraft and so on. But by that time, of course, I was married, and I was very very I was kissed by the gods, believe you me. That was still the NFT seven. When I came to university, I saw this very very pretty girl. She was a Nordic blonde. I thought she was I thought she was Swedish, and as it turns out, she thought I was Hungarian. And it turned out that we had come from the same city in Germany, Marburg, during the at the end of the war. We not only came from the same city, we lived on the same mountain, probably within three yards of each other. We had experienced the end of the world, the last bombing since on the fourth Well, one thing left to the next. And well, we married and we lived a wonderful, wonderful life for fifty three years. She passed away four years ago, and we don't I'm sorry. I was kissed by the God. You can hear it in your voice when you when you speak of her, and and the way that you the way that you remember. Yeah. Well we have three children, beauties all I've forgotten five grandchildren, and I'm a great grandfather. What has it feel to be a great grandfather. I don't know, it does feel anything at all. It's just simply wonderful to know about it, you know. And my little great grandfather, this great grandson is half Native. My second oldest granddaughter fell in love with a football player who was a huge man, beautiful man, huge, but it was Native and they married and he got uh and I'll fortunately the marriage fell apart. But the little kid, well, it's not that little he's not three years older, and he is a boomer. He is bright, he's alert like a wild animal. He's going to be a wonderful one time. I have my own three year old wonderful. He has alert and bright And believe me, the wild food helps. Yes, your damn rights. Last night we were eating venison and he justled it in and right came in after and he just threw it on the ground. I thought, that's right, we've made it. You've made it. I agree with you. And all that you learned and all of you studied, and all all the things you know about the wild world and the wild places and animals. How much how much do you gain from your family? Like? How much? Oh, my god, inspiration? How much? You see? I was kissed by the gods because my wife was brilliant and she was um very very good in social matters. Yeah, and what I'm so missing right now is a person to talk to on the basis because we shared so many interests together and said we lived in wonder life. I cannot remember whether we ever quarreled. It just didn't exist. Then she became her breast cancer and she was operated on the remission, but it came back again. And then I quit doing everything. I didn't answer telephone calls, I didn't answer the emails. The only thing I did is I continued working on my book, on my second book, by the way, on the human evolution, because she was very interested in that. And we lived her life a very quiet contentment of the highest quality until she passed away. So when she passed away, I threw myself into work. And yes, I'm flying high again professionally. I have published and published in speeches and spoken so on the woth and well into all songs. But um I married nine and in my wife and I went into the spots Ez where I spent then the next two years in the wilderness. And well it was real wilderness because my next door neighbors were two Indian families, talltan families that lived forty miles away, two days by dogs lad to reach my cabin. Yeah, And when they came and they told me about, well, if you have troubles you come to us, Well that's two days travel. But if you want to go and go to Telegraph Creek, then you look at that mountain, Well you got around the left side of that mountain and then you've got to go on under thirty kilometers of the hundred miles or something like that. It was long distance. That tells you how empty the landscape was. And the landscape was filled with wildlife. This is filled with sixties before before this has been touched. No, no, see that was This is where all of us in my taget count, my deepest friend, professor of Vladimir Creina, the great Great plant E Colleges, we were also innocent because this was so empty of human beings, this vast land, and so rich in wildlife. We thought we were looking at something original. No, no, we were not. What we were looking at was a man made artifact. I can't explain it to you. Okay, it is today now this area that was so filled of wildlife, where we saw hundreds of caribou bulls, and one day think about this area, rich, rich place, rich, rich, very very Let's try. Let's try try me try, Let's try to get you an idea. Um I had closely videotaped and therefore three hunts in Siberia for snow cheap, and they all were repetitive in the following way, magnificent sheep country. Wherever you looked, and not a single sheep anywhere. They traveled for days on end without seeing a wild life. If they saw anything, it might have been a reindeer, maybe a U or two. And they were so happy when they found four rams killed a ram, of course, and they were successful in so this was successful hunt. But I began then looking at other hunts which are recorded in similar facts, the same thing for days on end, no game, magnificent game country everywhere now and they're a black bear, a brown bear. And when you find something, it's two or three rams or four rams. In one case it was eight rams, and they were the first ram band I met in this but eas was twenty two and the one next over the next valley system was fifteen. I spent eight weeks studying that ram band. Every day I sat opposite them in the mountain with spotting scope because then I was studying the behavior of these animals have tried. Nobody knew what the signaling meant that they were doing, and that is what I cracked at that time. Now, twenty two rams for me, yeah, and I could find I could have found other ram bands at that time, yeah, and four rams most of the time. In one case it was eight rams with the u con territory. What's going on, But what you're looking at as a predator pit. And this these hunts took place in classical predator pits because the predator pit wolves primarily take down the wildlife and it is bears that keep it down. The reason is this, you have tremendous growth of vegetation because there's nothing to eat it. Yeah, and the bears live off that vegetation. And when the fawning season comes along, when the season of births come along, the bears move into what little ungulate populations are left and they eat on the calves and fauns and kids, whatever they can find. And they're very fixed efficient. We have beautiful, beautiful studies in Alaska now of where bears were instrumented with cameras and it shows that they were killing forty calves in succession. Yeah. One of the worst one only killed in three weeks seven calves. Yeah. Yeah, they are extremely good predators. So basically, you generate a um predator pit and the black bear or grizzly bear maintains it. Now, how do you get around the predator pit. First of all, the native people were the ones that had done it. Originally, And the best that I can tell you is they specialized in going and removing pups from the dens of wolves and keeping them down. And they spoke about Banks Island a beautiful example. They have a ritual almost and they kill every cup except too. They eat the cups that delicious apparently, and they use the skin for babe clothing. Yeah. The other one is I just told you about the trappers which had dog teams all over There were no ski doos available, so where do you had trappers with their dog teams. You also had the reduction of wolves. Now here's some unbelievable data. When you get rid of wolves, you increase the number of surviving and then multiplying m prey tenfold, that's a hellful lot of big game that comes out. Yeah, okay, So the predator pitch is generated then by the wolves, and what opposes it is human hands that try to preserve dogs in this case, and the other one which was quite widespread was our guides and outfitters used horses. And when they got horses in the back country, that was precious, very very precious, and they to ensure that their horses did not get killed by wolves. So in this Patizi where I was, we had about twenty years people that went with dog sleds in winter, looked after horses and made sure the horses were So after twenty years we had an enormous abundance of stone sheep, of mountain goats, of caribou, of moose. There were still wolves there, of course, because even if you reduce wolves by somewhat, you have a very great payback coming out. Yeah, and because of this payback, there's wildlife available, and the wolves that are remaining actually the few wolves that generally remained grown to giants, so this is another sign that they had been released artificially. So what happens was is that we retained numerous wilder populations only where we were able to control the wolves during wintertime. And this happened most frequently where there were trappers or where the guide's an outlet with horses. The secret And is this the most pronounced to this point in your life that you've seen this kind of balance take place or counterbalance or imbalance. Well, yeah, you see, the spots Easy became a national park and we thought that would continue. It didn't complete collapse. It did today. It's the wildlife desert. You have a friend of mine rode three weeks through the spots easy without seeing a single game of head of big game. But he saw the old old shed antlers of the caribou everywhere along the trails, surprising to you. Did you see it coming from your time spent there? No, we didn't, you see, we didn't. We were so innocent. I was innocent about wolves until four years into retirement. It's when a pack of wolves showed up around my house on Vancouver Island that I couldn't believe my eyes. The dear absolutely panicked, and the panic was shown in at night time by deer. Having vacated all the places they were, they were now in around the barns of my neighbors. There was one deer beside deer another deer, and we use flashlights, floodlights, and we were about eighty paces away so we could see it. These frightened animals were clustering themselves around the barns of my friend. That lasted about three or four days, and all the things that stressed us to those animals, and then these animals went into the suburb behind us. Young up to that time we were four years living their wonderful place while the paradise. But we had flower bit and I had planted um apple trees. Well, within a few days all that was gone because for the very first time we were flooded by deer, which had not happened previously. They were about eighty m trumpeter swans that came to the meadows around us. They vanished right away, and they didn't come back till the wolf pack was killed out, and then only one half of them came back. And when the next pack came, they left and never came back again. Yeah, I mean, these are dramatic things which I have observed with my own eyes. You see, and you and you talk about in some of your writing about wolves that first you must see these things. First, you must have, you know, personal experience and perspective that heather the way that you've help And there there's the color kind of I hope this color is at least your current view on wolves. But you wrote there's a French saying that he who desires a beautiful park must have a very sharp acte and a heart of stone. Right. I think that's a wonderful saying. That's exactly what you have to do in wildlife management and you feel, you feel, particularly in walls, we should heed that advice absolutely. You see, we can recreate. You see right now what happened in Yellowstone. You had in the northern hood about nine d elk. They down to four thousand, but the four thousands were outside the park on private land, on the ranch lands, away from the wolves. That's why they survived. You say, your moose in Yellowstone virtually died out. I rode for a whole week daylight too, for from dawn to dusk in some of the finest moose country I have ever seen. That would be now eight days. We didn't see a single moose. We didn't see a single track, we didn't see a single feeding set. And that was the rotting season of moose. That was the effect of wolves. Yeah, in Band National Park when I was there doing my studies on big horns, that was before wolves were present, because wolves had been exterminated in the Band and they came back in nineteen seventy two. And I stayed there in nineteen sixty three to sixty studying big horns, and we had about two thousand five dred elk. All the valleys were ringing with the bugle of elk during rotting season. After the wolves came in, the elk number dropped to about three hundred. The elk ward hiding and they quit bugling. Okay, yeah, that's you talk about it. Low wolf to pray ratios. Wolves grow, they grow very large. Oh god do they ever. They become shy, very shy. They shunned humans absolutely, And like in this this equation leads to what what you write and and and talk about is like the rich landscape that we desire. Well, if you want to have a rich landscape, you're going to have to do predator control. Yeah, and how do you define party control and what what is? Obviously it's depending on the ecosyst Okay, let's put it this way. You have now in the United States a park system that is complaining that they're losing bio diversity, which means that that animals going extinct in the national parks because you have to do nothing policy. This is holy God will look after the park. Nature knows best. That's the philosophy. It doesn't, by the way, it's rubbish. But on top of that, you have now the invasive species and in the United States, according to your own park records. You have about six thousand, five hundred invasive species in your parks. See when you protect, that's what happens. Yeah, that's why invasive species are invasive. That's right, And they are in other ways. When you protect a large piece of land and do nothing, it degrades over time. Yeah. Now I will give you another example. Mark Wonderpol, colleague of mine in California. Twenty nine years ago, I mentioned that he bought a four acres on which there was sixty clair plants, native and non native. Today, after twenty eight years of hard work, he has two hundred and thirty five species of native plants and hundred eighty five species for non native plants. And he says you can control them. Well, what do you say about that? Biodiversity? See, this is human made. This is where you have a heart, where you have a heart of stone and a very sharp acts. This is where you use a road to tiller in the spade and fire. And when you have to with animals poison, God knows snares. I don't think you use those that at all, or traps or whatever it is. You have to go in and play god. And if you go out to maximize biodiversity. You cannot lose, yes, because then you retain everything. I recently went to Berkeley, California and met with some animal rights activists, and I wish you were there with me to explain these principles, because there is a there is as we remove ourselves from these landscapes, as we push or are pulled away from these relationships that you speak of. Yes, we even me as a hunter, I believe that I really true that I speak about health of ecosystems, and I try to understand the balance. And I spent a lot of my time thinking about this, but I feel inferior. I feel unable to understand. No, don't worry, you can't understand. Let's go back to the prepredator pisa Us talking about the wolves come in destroy the wildlife. Basically, the bears maintain the destruction and you have an empty landscape for decades or decades on end. Why well, before the extinction of the megafauna about years ago. Yeah, wolves were a very very rare species on the landscape. They're very rare in piantological records. Why we get a hint from Siberia. In Siberia natives to Tungus venerate the tiger. Why because the tiger cleans out wolves, doesn't tolerate them on his territory, and with the tiger present, they still have lots of wildlife. When they remove the tiger, the wolves come in and sweeps away everything that is gives a hint. In other words, the large cats, the lions, the tigers, the pumas, the jaguars, the leopards, and so on, but also the predaceous bears kept the number of wolves way way down. That's why the wolf has such an incredible reproductive capacity and incredible capacity to spread. And one reason he's such a very smart animal because over time he's been he was always in the last two million years, wolves were rare. They were controlled. Once the his his natural enemies were removed died out. Once we got rid of the lions and the predationous bears, wolves exploded and that's the result. The wolf is therefore literally an animal out of control. What would you say to those that have anthropomorphized that animal and then believe that you know, believe in what's happening in yellastone believe that you can set wolves into a landscape and allow them to help control the balance of anglids. Another there's no such thing because there's no balance wunglids. There are no angelids left practically after the wolves are through and by the way, and there are after a while no wolves either around because the bears ensure that there is nothing for the wolves left to eat. You see there, there there are many, none in this office, none in this room. But there are many in this country that that's so care about wolves that they feel like they should not be killed. Well, you see, this has nothing to do with wildlife management. This is not a belief. Oh, this is not an action orientated belief. This is a semi religious belief and the individuals spouts it. But it's a very damaging belief because wolves out of control are enormously damage, not only destroying wildlife, but they destroy of course your cattle. They destroy sheep. The biggest destruction in one night recorded from Europe just recently was four hundred sheep dead in one night. Yeah. Uh, And of course we have here excessive killings also of elk. But you have nineteen elk and this includes surplus killing. Well, that's the sorts killing. That's right, we'll do that, that's right. So what we have if we want to have a live landscape with high biodiversity, you have to control predators. You have to control invasive species, and this is something that is an obligation. You cannot leave that to nature because it won't work. We can have beautiful landscapes, and we have done that by accident in a sense. And I was the recipient of this. Uh you know, I was stunned the first time I came out on the Spots Plateau and four hundred yards away across a little canyon. My we were freshly married. My young wife was standing beside me then and we couldn't believe our eyes. There was about three hundred yards across a body of milling caribou bulls and they're moving antless formed the wall. That's what we had and this is gone, gone, completely gone today. When was the first time you kind of realized your own place and all this and what you could achieve. Was there a time, Has it been recently or was there a time during your career, during all your works that you realized kind of your place it was? I had. I was totally innocent of wolves um till four years after retirement. Now, when it wasn't the spots I saw wolves every two weeks. Yeah, I decided to leave them alone. I wanted to see what they were doing, and of course they created panic that was taking for granted. The sheep disappeared for three to ten days, the mountain ghosts disappeared, the moose disappeared. So what I mean that I accepted that that's art of what is going on, and I thought very very little about wolves. It was not till this band of wolves, four years after retirement, showed up around our house when I saw the panic that it caused amongst blacktailed deer, When I saw that in no time flat, they had cleaned out the landscape of pheasants, of rough grouse, of whip poor wills, another ground nesting or ground resting birds were gone, of swans and sorts of forth. That well, what I did, of course, I called Eric Klinghammer, my good friend, now the lady professor Eric Klinghammer. He had created wolf Park in Battleground, Indiana, and I wanted to speak with him, and did, of course, and we from then on communicated at least once a month on the telephone, and I was relating what I was seeing. Also spoke with Ray Coping or unfortunately also dead right now. About wonderful man and his wonderful wife as well, and with Harry Martha Frank and the visitor her In Martha Frank. Eventually both of them had they lived with wolves in their own rooms and they understood the social behaviors of wolves cold. Yeah, So I was being coached at that point. I was the eye I was observing. At the same time, my colleagues, which were really new wolves yeah, were there, and we were because they themselves never had an opportunity to discussed with anybody what happens when wolves suddenly come to human contact, but the previously had not been This was an accident. There's an accident that here somebody trained in animal behavior was there and preserving and these wolves, my god, these rascals began to sit and watch us. I was totally bad. And then of course I was told, oh, yeah, we know what that's going on. Wolves are site learners. Unlike dogs. They learned so well that they can sit and watch you handle the locks on doors and they will open the locks. You need two doors to keep both safely out or in. They're very clever. So the wolf sits and he observes you. That's the danger side. Now he's interested in you and what happens in of course, they get closer and closer and closer, and they come into the settlements. They interact with dogs, they interact with cattle, and so I've seen cattle run through fences in order to escape wolves. How many have seen that? I've seen ultimately the ultimate side. When the first wolf pack was almost destroyed, I was only one mayor left. You know what he did? He joined my neighbor's sheep herding dogs. He became number six in a group of five. Yeah, do you feel like wolves and your experience are one of the better ways observing them? Learning them, the best ways to honor stand all these principles of cohabitation? Of just are studying them? Is that the best information? Well, you see the best information. But I was observing was new. Even my good friend, he said, if anybody else had told him what I had observed, you called him a liar, Because where in North America have you got a trained observer, familiar with animal behavior, exposed to wolves which are beginning to colonize the area. And I was so lucky or unlucky? Would you worry to be there? At the right time. Yeah. And so I developed an understanding that they would zero in on us and that they would approach us gradually, gradually, gradually, And I made sort of a step wise model. So they begin by sitting down and watching you, yeah, and then they get closer and closer and on to forth. And the last stages are actually quite cute because that we didn't I didn't observe because we killed them before the stage came. But about a mile and a half away Ins Island, little island of Vancouver Island where I live, two wolves came into a campground and there we could see the progression continuing because they came to the campground and they approached people and they started to lick the exposed skin of people, and they tried to pull their clothing, and that went on for about three weeks, and then they attacked. They attacked the person at night. He screamed as he was being scalped, and people around him jumped out of their out of their tents. And so there was a camping ground and saved him and he was brought to Victoria Hospital. I think it was about eighty stitches were required to close his wounds, and the two wolves were killed, and they were filled to the hilt with the fauns of black tail deer. They didn't kill because they were hungry. They didn't attack the human because they were hungry. They attacked because we're curious. They were learning. They we're learning. That's right now. This model is now known formally as the escalation model, and in Europe it carries my name. But I reported it for the first time at a conference in two zero zero five Milwaukee, I think it was September twenty seven. And the irony is that six years earlier, two colleagues, Bob tim and Rex Baker in California, had observed diligently coyotes targeting children in urban parks, and they developed a model which was almost identical. Their model is six steps minded seven steps. We're good friends, we're laughing about it. How could we so totally independently? But you see the important thing here. The little wolf and the big wolf use the identical method of targeting people. That's what came out of that. Yeah, and in Europe this is known the escalation model, and everybody agrees that predicts why shouldn't it The wolves are aptrol wolves, why can't it. What do you think about before we move on to the North American mono, because we certainly have to cover that in North America today, specifically where you live in Canada and then in the States here. How would you predict the future of wolves? How how do you look into the future and see where we are today and kind of where we need to move to. The horrible thing is that you are going to You have legislated the presence of big wolves virtually everywhere with the small wolf exists. In other words, you're going to replace the coyote with the big wolf. The present, you're killing a thousand coyotes a day because there's such a nuisance. Do you think you're going to be living easier with the big wolf and the little wolf? No, okay, that's number one. Number two, You're going to completely devalue d value your public lands because your public lands today are a rich source of human experience for hunters, for hikers and so on, because there is wildlife in them. Yeah, that wildlife will disappear, or whatever wildlife is left will be winding up on private ranches. In other ways, you're going to create a predator pit throughout your country, and with you feel, but that point we're talking earlier, you feel that the rich will never stop trying to privatize wildlife or own wildlife. Correct And in other words, what you're doing now is with the wolf, because the prince, you're transferring what remains of wildlife onto private land, and wildlife is precious, absolutely precious, and those that have wildlife eventually will use it in the marketplace, and it will become even more pressures. So the very very very simple and environmentalism of today will see, for instance, the almost complete destruction of predators again on private land, because that's what the wild it will be. Yeah, and it may well be that pressures to privatize public lands will grow because and there will be few defenders because it's worthless. You can't go hunting there anymore. Why should I be interested in maintaining that wild that does not remain if that habit had still defended. And besides that, you're proud Americans with your Second Amendment. Your second Amendment isn't worth the paper it's written on when you haven't a wildlife left. Even in under communism, even under communism in Siberia and in Outer Mongolia, the people were still armed because they needed it for wildlife. The gun was a way too great food which is is in my hands. If you you clean it, you eat it. If you don't want to eat it, you don't kill it. I've passed up enormous nobles of record bull moves. You wouldn't believe what I've had in front of me. There was no point killing them. I couldn't eat them or I had meat. I didn't need to kill them, so I didn't. Do you feel you know that this great, great pool for wildlife As as a hunter over the last few years, you know, I think under the two religious folks that I work with here, and then in learning my own motivations that I and when if someone would ask me, what do I think my purposes as a hunter? Maybe my greater purpose? I think my singular purpose is to eat get meat for my family and to myself. I think that's my personal purpose. That's why. So that's why a fish. There is a greater purpose though, and I think often that it might be to understand one the ecosystem on which I live, and then the greater ecosystems habitats, how these things connect together, and be able to articulate that the folks who are not outdoorsman, who do not hunt, who do not fish, And and that understanding, my understanding, that that maybe my greater purpose leads me to think about hunting in a different way. And when you talk about the private lands, be the public lands. How wildlife can be moved? You know, land ownership, wildlife knows no land ownership bounced. And as we manipulate predatory behavior, we create predator pits that can that can change the way we feel about these lands. And that's that's you have an empty landscape, believe you'll be it's empty. And if you know the difference, then it's painful. If you don't know the difference, if you're innocent about it. So I wrote to my colleague in Moscow, Benny MH. Lenny Buskin, with whom I published, by the way, good Russian friend, and I told you the story of the predator pit. And he said, you're right, you know the landscape. But you know what was so peculiar when you look at the landscape but its siberience, considered empty it it would be with willows and with fire weeds and with various trees. Exactly that landscape generated dense dense, smooth populations in the Yukon for reasons that I told you it was humans, trappers controlling wolves. Okay, so the empty landscape became filled with creatures and became again in ecological miracle. If we controlled predators, it's pretty powerful. Well, it is, because it's when you compare it. You see, I have lived in all of these I've lived under conditions of extreme wildlife abundance, and I've lived under conditions of the green streme poverty involved life. Right now in this country, we're in the best of times. I feel you're losing it right now. In fact, you're losing quite a bit already. You've lost a lot in Montana, and Colorado is next. And not only that, but you're saturating your landscape now with the both born diseases. The word it's a high dady disease. And believe you me, that is a horror story. And you see, here is again something that happened to us in Canada didn't happen to you. When I was a graduate student, we had quite a few cases of high daddy disease. I will explain to you in a moment in British Columbia, in Canada, and it was the General Hospital in Vancouver that had to treat treat the operations, and we had a professor James Adams, who was very interested. He made a specific study of their Dady disease and he went into these operating rooms with the doctors and he took the photographs of the operations. They are the most horrendous, horrendous things to see. And he came back with the shop talk about it. But let's explain to you had added disease in the first place. Had added disease comes from the dog tape worm. It's a tiny tape worm of which there are hundreds of thousands. In the gut, the rear gut of the wolf. They produce eggs. They eggs are shed with the feces. They feces dries. The eggs become airborne and are distributed around the vegetation, and n l comes along feeds on the vegetation. These little eggs hatch inside, drill themselves into his blood stream, are caught by the first capillary bed, which is the liver and the lung and the brain. Occasionally, and now these tiny things develop into a cyst, and the cyst grows and grows and grows and becomes the size of a grapefruit or larger, eventually own and it er. When this is the lungs, particularly, breathing becomes difficult. The animals have a difficult time. They're caught easily by wolves. The wolves eat the animal, they devoured the lung and deliver and they devoured the cysts, and the cysts again develop in wolves into the adult and the cycle continues. Now human beings. The first thing that we learned from Professor Adams was never to poke into the feces of a wolf. Never, because you liberate these eggs and you can inhale them and with the sputeum it comes out. You swallow the spute um. Now you have it. It's serious and there are many documented cations of this. Well, of course, that's what why he was photographing this disease in the General Hospital in Vancouver. And first of all, these thists grow and they fill the body cavity and they begin to interfere the function of the organs and they have to be removed. But if one of the cysts bursts and even the little tiny sliver of the inside remains undetected in the peral, cavity of the patient, it grows into another system. So after you close up the patient, there's no guarantee that the disease will not return again. And hum. The the reason why we had that was the following We had no ski doos in those days because the trappers in the north had dog teams, and the dog teams were frequently fed the offer of moose or caribou or elk, whatever their shot and therefofore they were being fed the cysts, and therefore the dogs then were infected with it. They produced eggs that goes went into the harness by which the dog teams pulled the sled. And this was being handled by the human and he licked his hands or eight and he got it. It's a horrible disease. And if the greatest danger from the disease as when the house dog gets it. I'll show you the scenario that is most likely happening here. You have elk coming out of the mountains in winter, living on private land on ranches. They will crowd the ranges the houses. I'll guarantee you that, yeah, because that's right. They're afraid of the wolves still there. Some of them may die unnoticed the far the ranch dog will find that we will eat the cyst in just the now, in seven weeks, he's going to pass these eggs on the lawn on the driveway, on the verandah he mentioned the house. The little baby that is there, Pitter patter, pitter patter, comes along, gets it into his mouth. And now he's got a load of cysts growing inside of him. It will take ten years before they grow large. So here's a ten, twelve or thirty year old now, yeah, and suddenly things don't really are very funny in his body. And during a play, hit something and one of the cysts bursts. About three of the cases, the child dies on the spot from anaphylactic shock. If it doesn't die, he is in a miserable position. He will have to be operated on and those cysts will have to be removed in one way or another, and there's no guarantee that it will come back. And these cysts operations will be will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's what you're getting with the wolves right now, right now. Shock. So the first thing that you have to tell everybody, don't poke around in the feces of wolves. Ever, ever, ever stay away from it. You see that experience. My colleagues here have never had I got it. We all got it at the University of Bridge, Columbia because we're the specialist who was investigating that disease, who had some of the most shocking slices sing. Now, this is one of the dangers and these this right now, you will have infection rate right now of your wolves between sixty. Yeah. So about eight years nine years ago, the Montana legislator there was a special committee asked me to speak to that. I presented it together with the chief veterinarian of the province of British Columbia, doctor Chantier, Helen Schwantier, wonderful lady, and we made a presentation here in Montana. It was actually over the telephone, but I shipped them. And by the way, you are absolutely welcome to my presentation. I have it still. I'll give it to you please. I still have it, and I explained in detail this disease. Yeah, so your legislature was familiar with that. Now you have had a lot of biologists were one of the problems with your biologists as concerned to my Canadian biologies is your biologists have been raised by different pilosophy that we have been We in Canada were being traded a scientist. Your wild apendagers are trained as administrators, so they are very short at times, particularly of presidology. Who's teaching that? Yeah, you see, you are shocked by what I'm telling you know very much so. And that is what I knew as a graduate student. I mean, and there's there's so many diseases and parasites, parasitic that we are aware of, you know, trick gnosis and things of this nature. Yes, yes, we're not aware of this that I've never heard it spoken of. Okay, now we who have heard it. Yeah, this is what I learned. This is what my colleagues learned. That's what we all learned because as budding wild apologists, this man, Professor Adams said, for the first thing, do not get infected yourself and respect the fact that every wolf feces is potentially infective. Yea. Also wash your hands. Now I have another reason. One distant relative in my family was killed by that disease. My grandfather was paranoid about it. No dogs in the house, please, my mother and my grandmother and my aunt whoards the doctor herself, very very very cautious about this. You see in Russia in the Far East, you have a different culture of keeping dogs in the house. First of all, they're not kept in the house. They kept outside. Secondly, in Finland and in Russia, when you came as a guest to a house, the first thing you got then was a basin of hot water and soap and you wash your hands, then you're permitted to come inside. The Many of the Arab nations considered dogs unclean. That's the reason why i'd ady disease. Yeah, why do you think this isn't more prevalent. I could be mistaken and just have no us to it. But why is this not a more profit And what are the administrators there have to say about it? Well, first and form, it's not the administrators, it's your biologists where they have belittle this because if you just handle wolves by and large, you may be contaminated. You may not be contaminated. The real danger comes from the dog that has ingested infected offsera. Yeah, so when you have the condition, now you should never you should after you kill an elk, burn the visca and it's well, then then you you reduced it. Yeah, as I said, I have written a whole paper specifically outlining this and all other mitigating steps that can be taken. It's available. I know it's been where people have been concerned about it. They love that paper because it tells them something. It's available. I can give it to you please. Well, I'm glad too. That's a shocking story. That's not a story. It's a shocking way to hear of that of that disease and how it well. The other one, of course, is rabies, and a rabbit wolf is an incredible beast. First of all, they target your face. They don't eat you, They just buy two and unless you have immediate medical attention, you will die. And that was the fate of people hit by rabbit wolves made evil med evil times. Imagine the fear they had of wolves, of course, because they knew if there was a scratch from a wolf, you would die. So this fear that people had that new wolves was justified. There was no unjustified fear. And besides that, of course, the trouble in so many of the countries were that people were disarmed, and when they were disarmed, wolves can get the upper hand. An interesting case. It's to and because the wolves were venerated in Japan, there was like they were gods, semi gods. And the reason they had special temples and altars, it's all built for them, was that the peasantry was disarmed by the samurai. The peasants had no weapons and they could not deal with the marauding pigs and the marauding deer that destroyed their fields. So they prayed for wolves to come in. It was the holy animal because it helped them. Yeah, so you can see that here has is a culture that venerates wolves, and that very same culture after rabbit wolves, after wolves became rabbit. It's such a horrible experience, so horrible they exterminated wolf by gone. Yeah is that culture all? I mean, we we only have a cultural love for wolves at this point in aren't. Well you have. But it's a misguided culture, you see. And in part of it is understandable because you say, your young biologists in the nineteen fifties, which we're starting to look at wolves and onto fourth and we're very enthusiastic about wolves and the um first. I know these individuals personally when they were raising wolves. A baby wolf is the most charming thing you can imagine. And they remain charming till there about eight nine months of age, absolutely charming, wonderful little things. You know. After that they become adult and now they treat you as a rival and they will watch you. And if you have a table wolf at home between the ages of three to five, it's a guarantee that you will be attacked. If you put the wolf then down, you control them. Yeah, he's okay for the rest of his life, although he will still snap at you. So for instance, the when I visited the Mautha and Harry Frank, they are fourteen year old wolf had just died and a female, and I asked, are you going to have another one? And they both smiled and chuckled and said, look, we're now sixty one. It was a long time to go a visit to them. By the time we sixty five, I don't know if we can withstand the attack that comes. And they raised the skirt and their pants and their legs were scarred from top two bottom with wolf bites. That's what you see. I love dogs. I cannot be without dogs, but I thank God that they are not wolves. You think about that relationship quite often, like what what what I love? I love animals, of course, that's why I'm an animal bere. First, I have tamed in the wild a fox, and oh, I had a ball with him. I tamed a weasel. Was the name Foxy. What's what I'll see if your name something like that? Foxy? Foxy and Foxy came regularly got two heads off lake trout. You see, I I was provisioning myself by going out and catching trout, or two to four pounds in weight a couple of trout. That what I did is I would cut off the head and the tail, cut down the middle and stick them into a hot oven, and that encrusted them on top and cooked them inside. It's a wonderful breakfast. But the head I kept for Foxy. And every time Foxy came, he got the head. And you have weaseley. I didn't call it. It didn'tn't have a name, but the way I the way things went with weasel. I had seen him around and about, and he was white with a little tip at the tail. He was long tailed weasel. And one day I came back and I couldn't believe my eyes. Um. Every morning it was wintertime. Every morning I left my cabin and went on snowshoes and so on. I cut off a moose steak or two and left them on the window sill to thaw out. Because there was fire in my stove, I just shut it down. It was nice warm, uh. And I came back one day and there was the empty plate. The door was closed, an empty plate. Where did the stakes go? I looked around and I saw one stake underneath the bed. Now, holy cow, how did you get legs to get underneath the bed? So I reached down, cleaned it out, fried it, ate it and on. It was very very fine. But where was the second stake? I couldn't find it? Well. The night came and I had two libraries flown in. I did a lot of reading, philosophy, et cetera. Was a wonderful time. And I'm sitting and I hope it had built the cabin and the floor was made from whipsog logs, but got the logs aren't even. There were some nice cracks in my floor, which was great because you just swept stuff over the top. It disappeared forever. Let's say perfect on perfect, that's right, and never see it again, Never see it again, that's right. And all of a sudden left and right off my heels is a crack. Outcomes a little black nose, into little black eyes, and swoop over top of my foot, a little white body and into the corner underneath the bed, and then they here. That was my second stake. Oh weasel, okay, precocious, I of course tamed it, which was very quick. The little fellow understood it by three whistles. That when I whistled, he got fit, and then he didn't bother me. Then he could observe him to all my content whatever he was doing, weasel. It's also fun to watch them. Yeah, they oh yeah, they're they're very cute and very interesting things. And when I whistle, he came. So that's what's right, my oh whiskey Jack's of course around the cabin. There's no way to really transition to the North American model from this conversation, but we're gonna do it anyway. So this is what I spent two winters in the Spats, studying stone sheep and mountain goats and of course caribou and moose and everything else. But had studied moose before that, and moose is one of my favorites. It's a great, great speak with high regard about moose. I mean, I think you, oh, I love them. Of all the things that we've talked about thus far, like your love them, your love of Moses, absolutely very apparent. Well, they are all tay. Moose are incredible, incredible animals. You see if my my book Deer of the World, I wrote quite extensively about moose, and because I'm a German, I was able to get the experience from Europe into the English language, and there was quite a bit of that. You see, the moose was quite a cultural animal in Europe. For instance, in Sweden it was used for postal service in winter. Yeah, I was going to say that, And it was an attempt was made by one of the Swedish kings to put a whole regiment of dragoons on top of moose because they make a superlative and I mean it a superlative mount. And had that succeeded, I can just see this miracle weapon because when horses for the first time confront moose, they see a ghost and they spook. So if that cavalry regiment of dragoons would have run into another there would have been horses scattered from here up and down picturing this. That's right, but it failed because moose are very fickle in feeding, and that's the difficulty. They make a fantastic mount so fantastically. Yes, throughout history, Yes, this is this is common, this is history. I'm not I'm not putting anything onto you know, I don't think you are. It's very excited about this idea. And in Russia. Yeah, when the conquerors of severe began, they've they discovered that anybody mounted on moose could out around the Cossacks because the moose will run much faster and much more better over uneven terrain. Yeah. Now, if you take a tame moose and train him to carry a pack, you put on the pack. And the Russians have done that, by the way, They packed these moves with very delicate instruments, because that moose will carry that pack without the slightest movement of anything through swamp, he will swim through raging rivers with that, he will crawl underneath dead faults, he will slither over top of dead faults. In the evening, he will deliver you that pack undisturbed. That tame moves. That's right. How they so easy. Oh, there's such babies, some of the cute things. Ah there, they're wonderful. They're very very they're very curious. Yeah, they're very sweet and they follow you around about them. They are sweet and they have such a lovely song. You just make a fear they can. Yeah. So for instance, one baby moods. It was a little ball. Had learned that with my defeat, he can't get into the house. So he would call lift his legs, wait till they were cleaned, and then he went in and let dark sat down beside the fireplace. That was sort of the typical thing. They're very curious. They will follow you around. They put that big nose into everything that you have, and so and so forth. And to give you some examples, a forester raised one female and she loved to go hunting. I love to go hunting with him. If she heard a gun going off in the distance, she would take off. And the foresters in East Germany were very surprised how accurate she could track with her nose. Yeah, they said, she's as good as the best tracking blood track moose. Oh yeah, they can track. I'm losing it. This is the best. Oh god, now it gets even better because this forester um so when he took the shotgun, the moose was right there and they went out. But moose also have the habit and they don't kick that habit of suddenly up and they're gone for a little walk hundred miles away, I mean like that. Yeah, So the moose was gone for a while, and the forester happened to be in a boat and one of the canals and he's pulling down and suddenly there the moose shows up. And the moose recognizes the foresters that's mother, and she jumps, turns over the boat. There you are. I can listen to moose stories like this one. This one, this one, yeah, this one's a bit tragic one. Last one. It's a bit tragic because she was a pest, no twice about it. And when the forester was transferred to another district that quite long distance away, they thought the moose would stay. She didn't. She found them or a long distance and they decided to this point, no, we do not want you. Now, you remember that every moose experienced that in his lifetime. There comes a point when there's a calf, the female says no more, and that moose understood and what happened next? Briggs tears to buy eyes. She appeared frequently at night standing under the window. Oh you see, still moved by that. This is what moose are. They are like a six ft dog. They're sweet, absolutely sweet. Oh, they make wonderful mounts and even the biggest bulls. Yeah, during the rut, that's a bit awkward at that time, But then I see pictures of a nice bull moose with antless flared being tamed around the house and the three year old kid being placed on his back and he runs around. I feel do you feel with moose? These are there with with every animal that can be labeled as gregarious. Well, I'll tell you the following when by the time I finished in bamp National Park with my big horns, the females physically try to keep me in the group, physically blocked my way, deliberately pushed me back in, and when they broke, they tried to follow me, and they followed me everywhere, and the males attacked me. Some people might ask, given your relationship to you've studied goats, you studied mountain goats, you studied wild sheep, you've studied moose, You studied. How do you still could be a hunter? I would not ask that, but some mighty how do you answer that question? How can you still moose? Knowing that brings it tears? The point, the point of the matter is hunting is provision. You bring in food. Yes, I will keep the antlers of a moose that I kill. It's a treasured member of one. I have no difficulties say that is food and the only obligation I have is to kill that animal as quickly as possible. That's my only obligation in this regard. And the other obligation is not to waste. Uh. Let's like overwhelmingly pragmatic. The first deer that I killed was a mule, your doll I brought back. Of course, Grandma and I were great pals, to say the very least. She took the head and she made head cheese out of it. Now, how many people will take the head of a mule they make headcheese out of it? Not many, not many. It's delicious head cheese. To this day, when I kill a buck and I do all the cutting myself and so on, the last thing that I do is I skinned the head and I carefully with a very very sharp scalpel remove the edible meat, and that makes a magnificent stew. Magnificent as one of the best tasting stews you can head. It's only once a year or twice a year, depending how many bucks I killed. Now I kill one or two bucks a year. That's that's it. Well, nothing depends on the circumstances. But and I don't waste the bones. The bones are so wonderful in stock. In fact, I'm almost fanatical about bone stock. I boiled two big parts of bone stock a week. For the first thing I'll do when I get home is I'll be doing just that bone stock. Now. Of course you add a few more things like chicken feet, chicken gizzarts and so on. Pigfoot is a good thing so that you have a very gelatinous result. Of course, gin um um, turmeric and well, oh, all all other goodies into it as well. Usually there are three species of animals and seven eight species of plants which go into my stock. As such, it's very very healthy, and it has kept me free of especially colds and influences. Haven't had a cold enough for three years. Yeah, it's that. That's that's kind of let's talk about kind of the ethos of of our company and what we do and the reason I joined this, Yes, and I'm in Bozeman, and that we were sitting here is very much what you're talking about. The the idea that we can be pragmatic but also feel an emotion for this animal beating and taking up, and we can go a step further. And you are aware that I'm writing my second book on doom re evolution. Yes. So one of the things that I'm very much aware of is that we have biochemical pathways which evolved only because we ate meat. The first biochemical pathway, for instance, is will digest the digestion of elastin, which is found in muscle fibers and only in animals. And you and I share the same enzyme elastees, which suggested that tells you something. Yeah. The one that I really like, The one that I really like are the trans fats. Well, if you take trans fats in margarine or trans fats in oils, they are awful. They are very very bad for your health. Never eat the bloody things, but take a peek at what you find in male milk, or in cheese or in butter. There are trans fats in cheese and butter and milk. You know where they come from from natural hydrogenation in the room of the cow or the sheep or whatever it is, and you know what your body does with them. You have an enzyme specifically to pick up those trans fats and change them into conjugated lino laic acid, which you need for brain development. Now that tells me that we've been eating the fat of ruminants for a very very long time and you need you need, by the way, meat very much for brain development. That cannot be overstated. And we've talked about that here on this podcast with the Professor William von hippel Down and Queens when we talked about human evolutionary biology and kind of philosophy of and not only are those pathways created through that, but our our social structure, how we communicate with each other, how we set up our societies, was often driven by no. No. Hunting was vitally, vitally important of right from the outset in human evolution. The moment we became humans, we were killers, were such efficient killers that we dramatically changed the diversity of Africa and continued to chase to change it. I have written a whole chapter on that. I'm going to read it. Let's get that we gotta get before we go here, the North American Model A while left conservation because I would I would say that I believe most people will know your name from that, uh in the in in the sense of our audience, and then just in the general sense, because it is, in my mind, the most important set of principles that we have in wildlife and conservation and in any model across the world which you have vast experience, North American Model is Yeah, it's a model, and it is a real wonderful creation of North American society. It is a gift, a cultural gift to the world. Absolutely absolutely. Now when you we have we've had, we've just we've heard from Shane here, he called us earlier. We've had Shane on this podcast before to talk about the origins of North American Model, his role in marketing it. For lack of God, Thanks God, thanks Without changing it wouldn't have flown. You know what a voice he was, Yes, he wasn't. Also, John Oregon was another one of them. With those those people, it would have failed. Because I was condemned when I first published that model. Not Yeah. When I first published the Comprehensive Model, the wild of Society wouldn't review the book. Yeah, they took Shane and other and took of them on the road. And when they did basically that reference to conference, right, they did talk about these things. I am in debt forever, but that. Yeah, so let's talk about the you know, the origins of the model, where it came from, and then then get because some of the hardships you had pushing it for well, uh, let me put it this way. I was interested in the early early nineties, in the nineties, six and seventies about how to make wildlife, um, well pay for itself or it's a bad bay putting it, But how do I make wild that more valuable? And in my innocence in those days, I thought that maybe game farming would be a way to go. And I had God thanks, a bit of money, and I organized the conference where game farmers from South Africa, from Texas, from Alberta, places like England and son came and where we had a wonderful set of papers and discussions, and that was published by the i u C And in two volumes, and I was the editor. Fritz Walta, My dear friend was the editor as well, And as I was editing this, I suddenly realized, oh my god, to push that is an absolute idiocy in North America because what it does it would destroy your system of wild of conservation. Now you you didn't know that you have a system of wild of conservation. I was just gonna say that like we weren't aware that, in fact there were. The stimulus to write it down came from a discussion I had with two senior colleagues of the Canadian Wild of Service. They were pushing game farming, and I said to them, for heaven's sake, what are you doing. Don't you realize that you're destroying your system of world of conservation? And they both shot back me, we have no system of wildlife conservation. I said, you damn rights you have. When I'll write it down for you, take a break. We can take a brief moment to think about that statement. And this is after many of the like the key legislation of our time, that that built our models right in other ways, what I did was I summarized that existing model the genius had. The model is not I, it's you, yeah, not me. Well, no, it has been You see, all the principles that model have gone through the heart school of democratic debate. They survived. That is not a person that this world who has the wisdom to construct that model. It could only have happened culturally over time. And you reverse and if you reverse time and listener to this podcast, will will know we talked about this often. You reverse time. You think about in and thirty seven, the first National Wildlife Conference Together Together the Lazy. That's right, But no American could have written that model. No, your Americans who wrote about that had a totally different thing. And you can look at Aldo Leopold's book Game Management yea, and take a look at Larry hans Jahn's introduction where he speaks about this. It's a totally different way of looking at it. Yeah. Well I was. I'm European, as you know, and the I was very familiar with the hunting, very deeply familiar with the hunting in Europe. And when I wrote that model, basically when I started it, I contrasted it what you do in North America comparing what you do in Europe. Yeah, and wrote that down. So for instance, you have the wildlife large wildlife largely except for for in the well for also in the public domain. But you don't have that in Europe, although by law it should be. The reality is while there is privately controlled yea. So it was one step after the other. And I first wrote out a model with four steps, then I thought about it, eventually developed it to seven steps, which are found in my book, which I published in McTaggart Cowen together and there I had the most detailed in some regards that still is one of the most detailed accounts of the North American system. While of conservation, it had, by the way, a review of chronic wasting disease. It had a review of the tuberculosis outbreaks and there and this is you know, that's right, that's right, that's right because most of your chronic bastics is basically spread by game farms, was somebody said in the United States, nicely, c w D is spread by trucks very much, but well and only quarter five This moral in a way, the fact that it's driven by like your study, you know, your studies and game farms. And then well I probably expended to papers yeah on it. So and the very last one that by that and was quite accepted. I presented at an international conference in Ireland because one of the gentleman who invited me had studied and he said, this is the best model we know in the world, and why don't you expound on it? And I emphasized there its role in public health because most of the human diseases we have come from wildlife or tame animals or domestic animals. Yeah, and the best thing you can do from a perspective public health, the best thing we could have ever done is to keep all our wildlife wild, not in That's what CUT comes from. And today we are faced with the enormous dilemma. No one was talking about c W d well. I had the first review of that. You can read it. And once I have at the behest of Shane Mahoney, you're talking about you predicting. When you read it, you're like, well, this this is ten fifteen years before this thing is pop fort and here are here's someone calling to to bear what CWD can that I first warned about the disease in in my book l Country, page hundred sixty nine. Please read. In those days the disease mode it was not even known as chronic wasting disease. It was called some kind of a scrapy. Yeah. See, and I had done my homework on the German side. See that is the advantage of having another language at times. Yeah, the Germans had been very much concerned with the t s S. I realized, oh my god, what is coming our way? And I warned in that. I was told later on that a game farmer who loved my writing came to that spot read and burst out into red face and ripped the book apart. Too bad. Yeah, I mean t SCS. It's something that ts S we now very much understand. But but i'm, you know, having but eight years old, but we're not ten years old. Whatever. But to think back that far, that these kind of things bore the you know, for you to codify that that model came from an understanding of game farms, understanding of disease like cw D, and then this is what's driving this is incredibly it's remarkable to me. But at the same time, it was still futile, you say, because we still have not controlled the the c blood you d pre onto spreading, spreading, and the dangers are so acute to our economy because Norway has already banned all products from straw and hay from areas with contemnitated with cw D two enter Norway. So that's your a big hint with a telephone pole. I believe you me. That's good. That's that's going to be a spider way, that's going to be something. Yeah and big Siically you have to blame now the politicians. They were very well informed. But of course game farmers thought, oh, forget this, stupid professor. We know better. You know that always happens always. And there's there's you know, CWD funding mechanisms in in I know in a proparation in Corcress right now that are sitting in committee, they're probably likely will knock it out. And this is just asking for more funding to do research. But that's the wrong thing to do. This is the wrong thing to do. We don't need any more research right now. We need action. We need implementing policies. And I have written that I'm chief author in fact on a policy document which you produced, which, by the way, your leading scientists acknowledged agreed with coorporated with us. They realize what we were doing. When you write a policy document, you write it in you spread out the understanding that you have and feed in the understanding from various places so that you can come out with several principles what do you have to do to stop the disease. And the first one is that you stop the transport of all animals and parts and so on, and that means like like it on all the commercial side. Yeah, that's the first step, and that's I think that's something where within the hunting community it's accepted that this is something that we should do. The hunting community is coming along, that's right. But you had you must you know that we have so much knowledge and headed for decades that we should have acted then. And I am horrified at the potential consequences of this. Yeah, but I'm sorry. I was not able to convince them people, and they threatened me and court and threatened my wife with death and god knows what else. Well, let's see. I don't want to go over too many of these types of things. But you had there was a lot of pushback to the North American model when you first presented correct and I think it's important to examine that pushback to kind of in its place and time. Why it happened. Well, it was based on misunderstanding. But the misunderstand think that a rose was because I spoke of this model of wild being in the public domain. Uh, this was considered to be politically socialism, and they accused me of of that. Well, of course, I am a great fan of courageous wildlife and environmental action on private land. In fact, one of the great things about North America, your country, is that we do have a large amount of land in private hand outside the public domain, because on these lands we have some of the most brilliant examples of what to do in order to rectify problems on public land. You see, I am enthusiastic about this. I am a great defender of private property precisely because here we can have actions that mitigate We can learn so much in the value it creates, tremendous value private I want the opposite. I am enthusiastically in favor of it. And at the time when you read, when you read like wildlife as a public trust resource, elimination of markets for game, these are things that are capitalist. Probably not digging too much, well, you see, don't accuse the capitalists. Most capitalists have a brain. If I have a chance to talk to the capitalists, why we should have no markets in game when he sees the consequences of having illegal markets, like the wonderful work by Terry Gross, who used to be your in the West, your head hauntcho in Wildlife but with the Wildlife Service in wildlf law enforcement, and he was very much involved in getting the Ashland Laboratory up and running. A great man. In his retirement he wrote fantastic books, I mean it, and each chapter dealt with an episode, and there you learn just how big an underground of illegal activities you have. No capitalist that I think who had a brain would disagree. Do you remember any any moments of where you harely had to defend the model that you felt were seminal? They were, They were cute, really really cute. One of the most outracious things that happened was in Texas. My friend Fritz Walter, very very dear friend. He was a mythologist, the great antelope expert, have retired Texas and m and the students put on a very nice seminar for him, and they asked me to be the keynote speaker. Fritz Walda and I were close friends for decades. That's I don't hear anything anymore. One day, I think getting close note to that, Let's give them a call. And I called and the poor students said, dr guys, we were told that if we were divite you all our conference funding would be taken away. Oh boy. Well I called Fritz and Sad and he said, look, if you don't come, I won't come. So I came and I gave one of the most innocent papers I've ever given my lifetime. I explained the reason why the Irish elk had these enormous antlers. We were in a h auditorium on high school, I think it was. And that's itself an interesting thing. Why Irish evolved these enormous antlers. Yeah, and as I was going off the stage out of the curtain, stepped to texts and colleagues can grab hold of my hands as well. We're all with you, but I cannot be seen with you. You're an anti hero. Well today I'm a hero in Texas because I also published how too Um Grow Trophy antless Baby, how it was done in Europe? Because I knew that intimately for a long time, and some Texas ranchers in the South of Texas read it. I thought it was very sensible tried, and of course it looks like a chip. We should we should get into this story. Can't leave this on the table because it involves Herman Geary. Take us into the take us into this one. Well, yeah, that's right. But first of all, I was telling Will to do the following. Um, these ranchers are using the thought patterns and so on, not from the past, but also from our own and from our own observations. And the result is the ranch that I've seen, it's beautiful natural vegetation, magnificent deer growing on it. In one week, I saw three bucks that would break the world, and that the record, it would enter the record book of boone Crocket Club. And if you and your lifetime see one, you've been kissed by the gods. I saw three in one week. And right now you have all over the United States the score buone crackety club, scores of white tail endless dropping. Except on those Texas ranches. They're going up and up, and they will go up. I know, because we are now discussing things that we're introducing other measures, and you have wonderfully healthy populations. Yeah, and this is all because of a buck to their ratio. Not quite. Not quite, it is, it's it's a little bit more than that. It is really the first The first thing is that you condition the landscape in such a fashion that you have rich, rich food all the time. You must make sure you had big, big fonds growing. Yeah, good mother, screw those. You have to reduce the density and you have to look after the landscape to make it rich and productive. That's number one. Number two is you eliminate some of the things that are poor performers that you take out. And the next thing is that you don't kill your big breeding bucks. What the Germans did was and that it became law when they realized that you could. They they had a system of class one and class two. The class one and class two were split into A and B. Class one A were the trophy stags that were breeders. You never touched them. They were off limits. You could only kill one B or under certain circumstances, harvest tag was allowed. That's one A. Then you could never kill two A. That's what a tag for the future, you could kill it to be. When I was last hunting in Wyoming for ELK, I had the chance to shoot a young bull with enormously long, thin antlers. I wouldn't hang such a thing on my wall. I would turn around in shame. That bull had a future. He had to live, and of course it didn't shoot it and his progeny as well, but his children others. Yes, this was a bowl that had not yet bread. But he was a big, big, magnificent ball. Yeah, but he was a satellite bull. He was not even with the writing group. Yeah, he was just entering it. That's not an animal you kill, that's an animal you allowed to live. I killed a ball ten minutes later. Who I was so happy to have. It was an old ball. It was a grass antlet ball. See this means something to me. This means almost nothing to most people. To me, this was the joy of joys. The grass antlet bulls live during the anti growing period on sedges and grasses which are very which are which have no toxins in it. Yea, And that means that he was living on some of the better grasslands created by the forest fires that you had. He was hog hog fat, but he didn't have a main shortest of protein. The antlers were relatively short, and because there were no toxins in that food, they were perfectly symmetrical, and that's the sign of a grass antle bull. I have it on hanging on my ball. Now that's what I wanted. I got it. We had to wait for fifteen minutes for the sun to rise before I could take the photographs. What's that quick? See? I called the bull end. But that's another big story. Because the German counts in the nineties and the great hunters um found themselves in the dilemma. They couldn't hunt the magnificent stags of the Carpathian Mountains or the Danube Delta because in the thick it's the animal wooden visible, and you could hunt and puts your foot as much as you want to do, you'd never see them. You never killed them. But these were noblemen, educated people, which were wonderful authors. Yea. They began to understand that if I play bull successfully, I can walk in on that thing or it will run you over, as a matter of fact, and that's exactly what happens. Now. These writings are marvelous. I internalized them early on when I had a chance to try it out on elk. It worked like a charm. It is you have to watch out that you realize that you kill the bull in the thicket. You go into the thicket, and the greatest fun of all is if you convince the females that you are a beautiful stranger and they break away from the harem and they run towards you, and they had him, good hitting bullet is behind them. Yes, it's fun. I never thought we'd get elk tips out of this podcast, but I don't know very much enjoying that well. I mean, I got so we could do this for gosh. I knew it was going to be like this. I knew I was gonna say nothing and be speechless a lot and one another five hours with you, Uh. I think we must return to to the North American model for a second, because it's hard for me to explain it's importance, and it's not something that is ingrained enough in in our hunting public right now. It is not when you buy a license, it is not listed as part of your is part of the game laws. It's not. It's not right there. I mean, people that listen to this podcast will will know a lot about it. Certainly, there's a lot of resources and you you're working on some now with Shane Uh to learn more about it. But why do you feel because it's it's such an astounding, long lasting model, even before you contified it, why do you believe that it's not You know, you don't get your game regulations book in Montana, Wyoming. Why is it not on the front back cover. Actually, that's a very good question, and I can't answer that. I do know that it is being um written up occasionally. It is being rewritten incorrectly by the way to fulfill secret wishes in part. But it is something that I feel school children should know about because it returned life and biodiversity and beauty to your land, and that is what wildlife management should be all about. It's a hands on way of generating more diversity rather than less diversity. If you let the wolves go through the landscape, you will suffer from this loss in biodiversity. If you're on the hunter hand, play god, and you have to. That is your responsibility today in landscape because there are no natural landscapes in North America. There haven't been for twelve thousand years. Your landscapes are artifacts of human activity. The way you put that is striking that these that you're looking at an artifact that has been manipulated, will continue to be manipulated. Right, And it was manipulated very, very cleverly up to the time of the discovery of North America by the Europeans. See, because when they entered, they never realized that they were entering a highly, highly civilized landscape, by which I mean that the landscapes had been manipulated in favor of human wants and needs and conditions. Yeah, they were artifacts that serve humanity, and those people that entered had not a clue about it, and now we do. One a lesson to learn from that modeling from you is that you must understand your place and time, like you must understand when you look at the landscape how it got to be that one. That's right, there's no way you can understand being in it, being a part of it if you don't understand how it got to be. But let's go. If you follow our unfortunately now misguided environmentalism, yeah, you're going to create forest fire conditions like you wouldn't believe. Yeah, a landscape of natural biodiversity which has the large mammals in it, yet is an open landscape in which the annual production of plant material is largely consumed when the forest fires occurred. They're small, they're cool. You don't have these enormous conflagrations that you now have. Yeah. You see, when human beings came to this continent about fifteen to seventeen thousand years ago, they came into a continent that was hit hard by about sixty general of large mammals, and they hit the continents so hard that the vegetation, most of the content, was so low that you evolved here like the prongrean antelope, a species of animal that is the highest speed runner in the world. You can only evolve high speed running in wide open landscapes. Yeah. The Texas deer that I talked about, the fan tails, Texas white tail, and the Texas white tail is a deal that evolved in open landscapes. And its orbits, yeah, are shaped in such a fashion that they would have been able to click up very simply because in those days you had enormous predatory and carrion feeding birds around. Yeah, the same thing with golden eagles. Golden eagles will kill deer and prongeronan antelope of course, Oh yeah, absolutely. And so this was an open country species which had eyes your Texas white tail has eyes as big as a big horn sheep. Yeah, and it was able to so you had a wide open landscape. When people came and were confronted by these mega carbivo candy boards, these huge bears, lions and so on, they began burning the landscape where they could burn it, and then they settled there because on burnt landscape they were safe from the predators. And by the way, they lived a miserable life for a thousand, five hundred years. After that, they developed a miracle weapon which was the um well, which was a sharp cutting blade mounted on a detachable spear. You put poison on it, very severe poison. They were killing mammoth on the spot several at the time. They were very, very very semie. That's the Clovis culture. Also, the Hastat culture is another one that they produced unbelievable cutting tools. The hasket cultures thin long knives that were obviously drenched in um poison most likely a knitum and that were used. Later on, you had the Foesome culture, which was also something very similar to the Clovis and the fish Tale culture in South America. And by the way, with these miracle weapons, they killed out the large founder within five years completely. But you know what happens now, The vegetation grows and you have conflagrations, you have huge fires. You have to counterburn, you have to learn how to handle vegetation so it's safe for you. And the North American Indians and the South American Indians became greatest experts, and so they burned in order to make the vegetation subservient to human needs. They became some of the greatest hortic culturists and great agriculturists. These are bright, bright people that were doing this. Yet, and by the time Columbus came to North America, you had a continent completely under human control. It was civilized, but it was also overpopulated, and wildlife was very, very very scarce. The reason you had so much more wildlife was, of course the Great Tragedy, because already in fifteen thirty nine with the Desorto expedition, UH, they brought diseases, and they began to spread diseases instantly, and Native people became aware of it very very quickly, and they fled just to get away from any contact with these Europeans. Imagine driving five hundred pigs in front of you. That's what the sorto was doing because the preceding expedition and UM seven by Kabezza Debaka, who was second in command, and he reported back one of the problems they had was getting enough food. In the first expedition, people were dying of hunger. So the second expedition thought they were going to fulfill that. They had five hundred pigs moving along with them at any one time, and they spread that as diseases like you wouldn't believe it. The minimum is that fifty six million American natives died. The more likely figures at hundred twenty billion died and wildlife exploded as a consequence. Buffalo. The real beginning is about and their maximum extent. They reached about seventy certainly in Pennsylvania. That is then they began to shrink already. But the maximums This is the image of the landscape full of wildlife, full of buffalo, full of passenger pigeons, is a consequence of the death of North American natives by the millions. So for instance, passenger pigeon, you had. The best explanation is that once the nut gardens, the fruit trees and everything else, your eastern hardwood forest is a nut garden. Yeah, once they became available, the pigeons got into it, and your genetics tells us that this was a very rapid expansion and they expanded into the billions. And so basically, what was the biomass that once walked as native people on Earth became passenger pigeons in the sky. Horrible. Yes, the passenger pigeons is one of those species that everybody understand. You see, the passenger pigeon was a rare bird at the time Columbus landed in North America. It's a rare bird in the food archeological sites. Yeah, very very rare bird. If it had been as common as that, it would have been everyone. No, it wasn't. But understanding these ebbs and flows, understanding that's the world. That's right. And it gets even better because one of the papers thinks that the release on the vegetation that happened was so massive that because now with the natives had suppressed, it was so massive that it sucked out a lot of C. O two out of the air and caused the little ice age. That's not my theory. That's one theory I cannot defend or explained, but this is one theory out there. Yeah, it could very well be true. They were trying to make the point that this was, in fact, the first example of man caused climatic change. Nothing to fool around with the little ice age. The understatement, i'd say, of the century, but longer than that's right. But you see, you should read because it's so funny. The alvaris Noonscaba Debaka was a nobleman and a Spanish officer, very successful, and he was a falconer, and they emperor that he reported to Charles the Fifth was a passion at falconer and a hunter, and so of course the Emperor was interested what he saw. Naturally, Now Cabeza Devaka begins in Florida, goes all the way to eight years to Mexico. He doesn't see a single alligator. He doesn't see a single coyote or wolf. He doesn't see any grizzly bear. He knows about black bear and puma, he doesn't see any They sees no elk, he sees no hevelina. When the natives in Florida, he describes when hunting deer, they took along water and wood because where there was water and wood. There were no dear. Can you imagine as a hunter of what that means, how rare dear were. Yet Cabeza Devaka says there are three kinds of deer in Florida, and his hundred percent correct. They still are there to be a different deer. Quite, that's how keen an observer he was. You say so, he now describes for the Bennett with the king, all the huntrble birds like the blue heron, the egrets and so on to forth. But it doesn't mention the eagle. Once. With a huge population of people on the land, every eagle has its feathers torn out. He doesn't see a single eagle, he doesn't see a single vulture. Well, if you have deer in such small populations and only dear nothing else, When you don't find a single turkey in Florida, it's a disorder. Expedition that meets the first turkey in Louisiana. Yeah, that was the continent you looked at. It was very very well used by people, and that matches the archeological data. Okay, these vast changes changes that right, disease that then sweeps over this. That's right, that's right. Change you see for twelve thousand years people change the continent till the europe Dance came, and then in rapid fire fashion, you whiplashed the whole continent. There is no natural ecosystem anywhere left in North America because of that. Sobering to wrap up on the on the North American model doesn't need to change well for the next years. You asked a good question. Um, I think what you've been doing in the past is good and it would continue as long as you accept socially that wildlife can be in the service of human beings, that it can be consumed, that it is a product and a harvest of the land. As long as you have that, and as long as you think that it's right and proper to treat everybody in the our democraty see as an equal, so that every citizen who is no longer not a criminal, etcetera, can get wildlife for their own use. It will remain and retain sustainable use. And as long as you have wildlife, your second Amendment will stay. But if you lose your wildlife, it isn't worth the paper threaten on well. Trying to gather the words to summarize our time to here I feel, um, I feel like I want you to come back number one, or I'm coming to you. Yes you can, we should, I should. Do you realize that the Germans have sent the TV crews to film me because I've taken such strong stands on the wolf issue in Europe stuff all the time, I'm gonna yeah, I'm coming to you and we're gonna hunt. I want to thank you for a life that was dedicated to to these ideas, to pursuing them, to articulating them, and for coming here and doing both of those things, because I think this is an incredibly important conversation. I think your ideas are generalation, not only important for for your generation, but for every single one that comes after it. So um, I don't think thank you quite enough. But that's all I have for right now. But thank you and thank you for this opportunity. I loved it. Thank you, thank you. I guess that's it. That's all another episode in the books. Thank you to Dr val Geist, Thanks to Karin for hooking it up. Thanks to all of you for listening. I don't have much in the way of a conclusion other than I feel not quite worthy to have sat in on a conversation with that man, I feel again humbled by his presence, and um, hopefully you can hear within the conversation my lack of talking, my lack of it's a patient because I was so enthralled with what you had to say and amazed to be sitting in a room with him. So hopefully that comes through. Hopefully you enjoyed, and hopefully you joined us next week for episode number eighty Hunting Collective. They'll send you out with old number seven as always. See you do know because I can't go a week without doing run, oh without run, bringing out and run, absolutely drinking and don't sit in at the possible would stop the rowhole root being the ling, hold on out, barrosh shoes down, my one