00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's uncollective. Welcome to episode number eighty two. We're here in snowy Bozeman, Montana a phil Yeah, the weather, the weather has changed. It's winter. Yeah, skipped fall like we usually do every every year. It yeah, it's skip fall. I fall last about two days. We don't need fall. But we got a great episode for you. Great would be a loaded term. It's an interesting episode. We um we have our editor in chief or at media or anything to cut it on and we're gonna talk a little bit about, you know, editorial decisions. How you make a decision to run a podcast or not run a podcast, what you want to do to it, whether to cut it up. And that's because we had a very interesting, uh and I would say contentious interview with Barry Gilbert. Barry Gilberts author of a book called One of Us. He was attacked by a grizzly bear in ninety seven in yellow Stone and since then he's become a bear advocate. Uh. He's also a biologist and a teacher. So we went into the interview with a lot of interesting things to talk about. We came out of it with a lot of interesting sound bites and so you're gonna hear all that coming up. But before we get to that, talk about our friends at Yettie. Yet he was nice enough recently to send me, not don't really send me. They sent my son James a Rambler Junior twelve ounced kid's bottle. He's got his name on it. Super cool, Phil, Your kids are probably jealous. Yes, I told them all about it, so they're very up. They started crying. I will pull some strings to help him, Thank you so much. Maybe even get Mango your dog personalized Yettie little Rambler. Yeah, well maybe should get a dog bowl or a dog bit. They also have those. Wow, I know it's legit over there. Uh the Ramble Junior your kid's bottle. One for one thing, as a small child, it's very hefty. Like to swing it, you could really hurt another child now that I think. I think it comes with pros and cons because because you know they're going to drop it a lot wild Yes, built for the child. I just made that up for childs and wilds, so it's it's it's a great product and he loves it. He carries it around, but to swing it really could um. So just just a warning once you get yours, Phil, don't let anybody whack your kid with it. It's a great product though. Yeedie dot com, Yedie dot com. Oh and first Light you have to talk about them. You go to first Light dot com right now, you're gonna see the mid season rut tree stands set up from our boy Taylor Chamberlain. He's got his whole system there. And another thing you ought to do? Are my good buddy Mark Healy and are are very good buddy, Ryan Callahan are in a film called Pressure. If you don't know about Mark Heely, he's a world class surfer, spear fisherman, everything Hawaii um and he learns about the difference between hike and all mountains and swimming in the water in this film. So you're gonna want to go to first Light dot com. Check out those a couple of things you're gonna enjoy it. And one more thing, Phil, The inbox is flooding with not so sharp moments. Unbelievable. I can't keep up. A lot of them are getting tagged to spam, but I'm saving those don't work, So we got lots of them. They want to get their hands on a worksharp Field sharpener, Well, work sharp, field Sharpener. Just so you know, if you write into th HD at the Mediator dot com, we told you this last week. But if you forgot, you're right in your best not so sharp moment, your best dumb story from some time outside or in. So we don't really care where you were. Use your best pros. And if we select you, work sharp is gonna send you a field sharpener right to your house. Yes, entertaining concise, Yes, just you know, story you tell your friends at a bar or something not too short, not too long? Yeah right, Phil, All right, let's get going, Episode number eighty two. Let's go. I guess I grew up on an older road, a bartle to the meadows. I always did what I've told until I found out that my brand new clothes a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew up. I mean, there are a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just wanted through a real bad dream or being, and like I'm coming apart of the seems. But thank you Jack Daniel. No, Hey, everybody, it's honey CECT Episode eighty two. What you know by now? And we're here with Anthony Dakata, Hey man, Hey Ben, what's going down? Well, I'm just trying to stay warm in this beautiful fall weather. It's cold. It's cold in this in the podcast studio, and we're we're going to try we're gonna attempt to introduce an interview that you've listened to, that I've listened to that Phil was a part of. UM. I would say, it's how do you describe How would you describe it? Anthony? Well, things escalated quickly put it that way. He's got hot. Things got hot, and um, it didn't. It didn't turned into as much of a dialogue as I think that we had all hoped. So let me introduce our character here, Barry Kay Gilbert. And Barry is a a lot of things. Uh, he's a bear advocate, he's a wildlife biologist. UM. But most notably, he was attacked by a grizzly bear in nine seven in Yelliston National Park. The grizzly bear, as you'll hear, um removed parts of his face, scalped him um to wear out one of his eyes. Some very gnarly, very gnarly story that that he doesn't really like to sell all that much. And I'm not real surprised he actually teared up when we first started talking about it. And so, you know, some decades later, he's still obviously, yeah, following that tragedy that he's he's come back from, and so in the years after he has become a bear advocate, he's he's even in the moment as you're hearing the story, he tells that he as he was fighting for his life, he was asking those the rescuers to tell park rangers not to kill the bear. Yeah, so I would say he was. He was kind of there even before the attack. And the attack, um, you know, it was a horrific experience, but it only sort of drove him more, I think. Yeah. So he was born in Kingston, Ontario, is a PhD in zoology from Duke University, a lot of a lot of street cred and has done came to Bosman to do a bunch of public speaking events, and we were hooked up with him and wanted to chat with him. And really the impetus, as I think should be obvious for a while, you'd want to talk to somebody like that one. He went through a life changing experience about as gnarly as it possibly gets with wild creatures, so that that story is interesting. His rescue is interesting. We do talk about that in the interview, the way that he was rescued and how is his life was saved by some very brave people. So that's interesting. But like the turn, his turn really into a voice for bears, grizzly bears specifically, um is interesting. It's just an interesting turn. And he wrote a book called One of Us that talks about his time with bears. He spent a lot of time around bears. He feels very strongly, as you'll hear soon about them. And it's interesting from an editorial perspective. You're our editor in chief, Anthey, when we we decide to have people on like this that had divergent views from ours, and he does, I mean he is he is I would say, clearly anti hunting, clearly more so than I thought once we got him in the room. But I knew that he was at some level against killing bears. But that doesn't really bother me because I think any conversation in this room can can have a good outcome. So that's what we went into it with. That's the editorial decision you're making there to try to make sure to give this very interesting guy a voice here his story and if possible, you know, workout come to some sort of conclusion on what he believes about bears, what hunters believe, what the North American model says, what the endangered species X says. Get that all together in a way that is compelling for you guys to listen to. What's compelling? So I like, it's hard for me. I'm not gonna go back and re listen to the interview because it just is that contentious. Barry about thirty minutes into it, threatened to leave. I talked him down off that ledge, and then I would say, from there it got it went off the rails even further than it had uh to that point. And so you know, what do you like when I when I'm thinking about this, when we first got finished recording, I'm thinking should we run this? You know? And so luckily you're here to help me make that decision. Um So what's your what do you think about this? Obviously we're gonna run it, but what's the decision making process? I I think, um, as you said to come in and have different people come in here and talking about hunting and wildlife and conservation and these kinds of issues. We don't all have to agree. And what's interesting is when you get different perspectives. So, you know, I think this was not exactly even what we're hoping with that right, it does go off the rails. It does get kind of weird. Um, But I think it's useful to listen to, hopefully entertaining, but also useful because, um, you get a sense of people who you know, maybe have different values and we do and see things a different way, and how um it can kind of color you know, listen to this guy is experienced, he's knowledgeable, he's a scientist. I don't doubt his cred but clearly his views were his his beliefs were colored by his personal views, just like ours are. And it came across very clear, especially towards the end of the interview when he starts getting to some others stuff. It's really what he thought, Yeah, Trump guns, Yeah, you know the media things like that. No, I think it's it illustrates that one thing I think that is unfortunate here because I think by all intents, coming into this bear seems to be you know, a sharp guy with a lot of great experience and things in part on folks with the virgin views from again from mine. But I think what this ends up showing, what's what's dangerous here is that when you're so attached to a worldview like he is, I mean, he's attached to this, the world view that bear shouldn't be killed, that we should um do anything we can to protect bears in their habitat and grow their populations. He you become so attached to that worldview, it's there. You can't see any other points of view, or or at some level unwilling to to be moved in one direction or the other. I mean that I don't think there's any within conservation, especially within wild life. I don't think that. I don't think you can lean back on any universal truths because old Mother nature, the natural world has very few universal truths. But when it comes specifically to like large predators like grizzly bears, there just isn't. You have to look at every ecosystem and look at every animal. It's hard to just say kill them all or save them all. It's just a tough way to go, especially you know, you throw in their human beings interaction with wildlife, and um, you know you're not looking at it in a vacuum. You know there's been development, there's been habitat loss. It can't go. Um, you have to factor all those kinds of conflicts in. And what she said is true, like you know, for someone who has those plaefs. He kept Um, he didn't seem to me that he wanted to be challenged. And you know, he kept saying he did not want to be He did not see. He kept calling saying that you as a journalist, um, as if your role was to just let him say whatever he wanted, just give him a platform to say whatever he wanted without you challenging him. And UM, you know you have been trained as a journalist. We do a lot of journalism here, but that's not exactly what this is either. You know what we're it's a hunting collective. We very clearly have certain set of beliefs, just like we're like, you know, we like a nice walk on the beach whatever. Yeah, you're right, I mean we have like And I told him, I said, I'm not to be honest, I'm not a grizzly bear hunting advocate. I'm not out there on the stump for like, let's you have to hunt bears or else. But I am an advocate of our model, the conservation, and we should be able to talk about that in a way that it's not confrontational and it's just looking at hey, here have been the benefits of this model. It's not perfect. As I said to him a few times throughout the interview, he just wasn't having that now. He didn't he didn't really want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about and not be challenged on his points. That's that's how I saw it to it, Phil, I mean, you were in the room. It's like here's a man that not you, Phil, but Barry that came in here. I'm mean there was there was There was clear like anger in the room. He his hands were shaking. He slammed his book on the ground, on the on the table once and it seemingly came came out of nowhere. Yeah, I mean people will hear it. I mean I think another thing, I think you mentioning valarious guys, to which you'll hear in the interview he has a history with without guys like seems seemed to be a personal one, and I think that kind of changed the tone of the conversation as well, Um, because those two men have different views as well as a personal relationship. It sounded like, yeah, they definitely had something professional interaction, right, Yeah, but he he wanted to you know, when he got angry, he's let's I didn't come here to talk about this, let's stick to bears. But then the second half the interview he got into some weird stuff that was far off the topic. And that's where and that's where like being respectful to Bear as I can be, um, and that's where it where my decision making process kicks into. Do we run this when somebody is just flying off the handle about things that aren't germane to anything that we sat down to chat about. And I'm not These aren't things that I'm just gonna fly off the handle about. If I'm gonna talk about him, I'm gonna be thoughtful, I'm gonna be measured, and I'm gonna make sure the person sitting in the room with me can contribute to the conversation in a rational way. These are things that so I'm just not going to jump into those conversations. But for me, and I know a lot of people say this, when we run these types of interviews, why would you give this person a platform? Why does they deserve a voice? Why do I have to be exposed to this lines of thinking? But I think the opposite. I think it's important to hear from folks that have these perspectives. Um, We've done it a few times already on the podcast. It has varying results. I mean, I think again, this one, I think unfortunately for for for Mr Gilbert, and maybe for this conversation even Um, I think unfortunately he comes off a little bit like the stereotypical animal rights advocate activists, and with someone who who even as a biologist, showed a lot of emotion and his reasoning and and the way that he spoke about bears, which is something I think hunters always charge for for these types of folks. Yeah, they're they're so wrapped in these ideologies. They can't see past their love of an animals see actually what it is, which is very surprising given the fact that here's a guy who actually has been has been around them, and has been attacked by one. Yeah. Absolutely, and just what you said, I mean to give voice or a platform for that. I think it is important not only for us, but for for every everyone who cares about these things to listen to that kind of stuff. You know, you hear the comment that you know, living in an echo chamber, right, if you're only around people who, um say what you think, you're not going to understand the bigger picture and what some threats are. You won't understand. Hey, not everybody likes this, and this is what I have to do to to get that point across about why these these activities, why hunting is important, what it means to me. Um, you won't be able to do that if you don't understand or really hear other points of view. And I think I would say that same thing to Berry, like, if you're just gonna sit in this place and get angry when somebody challenges you, you're never gonna be able to articulate your ideas in a way that's meaningful. Um. I said about it before. It's like taking your ideas to the gym, you know, strengthen them up, because if somebody they're sitting across from you that's intelligent, thoughtful and can challenge you on some of the even the most basis things that you believe. That's when you get to understand really one if you're right, if there's any chinks in the old armor, and two, UM, if you can really defend the points that you think you can defend. So it's something that you know in this us on this show where we're really just talking to people that I think is an important one introspection for me, but also for our community. This is a person that UM doesn't believe what we believe. And it's very clear in this conversation that he did not believe we believe. And it is a shame because I think there were some points that he made that would be worth UM talking about more in depth, but it didn't work out that way. It's kind of undercut by a lot of the other stuff. Yeah, I had a decision and Phil we talked about this. I had a decision to make somewhere during the conversation UM whether to just to to to push him very hard and see exactly I'd be like, I just didn't know what was going to happen. The dude was pretty fired up. I didn't know if we were like he was gonna stand up and throw something at me if I continue to push him. Well, I think he handled it good towards the end when he went off the rails. And like you said, you didn't want to get into a debate about something that had nothing to do with what we're talking about. Even though it must have been hard to bite your tongue, you just said, let's get back to Barry exactly, and just in the time that we had the animal rights activists on there in Berkeley, it's similar. I mean you you end like and and let me just say, for point of fact, after we stopped recording, Barry Gilbert couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have been nicer. He we had the conversation, he complimented my interviewing skills. We talked about some of the paintings in the office. He was asking about who the who the artists were, and he said, he give me his card. It was very it was just a nice interaction before and after. And so there's there's something we'll let you all get into it and hear it, but there's something that happened within in this room, within the conversation that kind of made it go off the rails, way off the rails. So for a point of fact, just it's I don't know what you're gonn to get out of it other than just a couple of guys in a room and it gets heated. Um, here Ben trying to talk somebody out back into the room out. Yeah, it's like, don't leave, man, I think we can do something here because I I don't think I was fired up during it, like a confused sure, absolutely confused, Um, like dumbfounded, like yeah, man, what a lot of that happens in there? Um. But again, I think all of these conversations they can't always go to the script. They're not always going to be what they're expected to be, and there's some learning from each one of them. Um, I'll let you guys figure out what the learning from this one. When you know, tell us right in right into tc at dot com. So, um, I don't think we're talking anymore about it. We're not gonna have any other There's a lot going on in the old right now. But I think it's proper to just prep you for what you're about to hear and then let you experience it, right Phil, Yeah, I think I mean stick around and listen to it. Yeah, Phil has to Phil has to edit these things, spend time with it. I have to listen to it again, and I'm kind of stressed out about it. Yeah, like I destribe your stress stress feel like what Well. I I was talking to Korean, our podcast producer upstairs yesterday. I'm kind of like a cringe phobic person. So if I can feel tension in a room or anything like that, I just get very, uh uncomfortable intense and if I have the option to leave the room, I will And I could not leave the room during this interview. You So I'm so I mean, but some people are are a fan of that, you know, so stick around if you want to to to be a part of it. All right, We'll stick around for th HDS Most can tentious interview ever with Dr Barry Kay Gilbert enjoy. I guess I grew up on an alder road, Mr Barry Gilber. How are you, sir? Very good? Nice to be in Bozeman. Yeah, how are you enjoying your Bozeman times thus far? It's been great. I'm staying up in the Mountain zeesa town and uh, it's a really nice wild country. I'm gonna be going down to Yellstone A couple of days too, so that'll be good. Can never get enough of that country. Well, welcome to to the media studios and to the Hunting Collective. Thanks for coming and really appreciate your time. Uh. I don't think I would guess that a lot of our listeners are unaware of your story, which I'm I'm glad to kind of go through it in detail. Yes, it was. It was a time forty two years ago, and it's in my book that I just written. Called one of us a biologist walk among bears. I'll get my plug in ear, but a trained professional. Yeah. I started out with grizzly bear work, trying to work on human their interactions, how people were affecting bears in Yellowstone and Uh I was out with a graduate student, UH ten miles from the nearest road up the Indian Creek Trail near a Big Horn Pass and U I U saw grizzly bears in the morning when we get up throum six o'clock, and they were so far away that I suggested my student we take a big circle around. UH. The bears and bush whack up a distant ridge which was nine thousand, two hundred feet the long and the short was that he stopped for a nature call and I went over the ridge and stayed lowd so I wouldn't get help barking when they saw me on the skyline and I was hunched older and moving swiftly, so I wouldn't the up there on the skyline, And unfortunately I charged a their lying and at Steve Dad and it was a female with cuts, and uh she didn't think much of that. In fact, she came out need like a freight train with their claws hitting the ground and put me in the hospital for two months. She basically took off the side of my face, my nose and ears and scout me. And I ended up with shortly short of a thousand stitches in my head. But I had a magnificent rescue. I told them not to kill that there. It was something that I did in a surprise encounter with a bad assumption, and uh I went back. Within a couple of years, my student went to Assemity to study easier easier going there's and he got a good master's thesis out of that, and uh, I got an opportunity, I think it was four or five years later, to go to Captain National Park where now upwards of fifty or sixty round there's come down on the salmon streams and there are five hundred, six hundred people a day walking along them. When I started the research in three UH it was of course a time of fewer interactions, but they still knew that the bears were being bumped off the river. And UH I designed to study two, gather very detailed data. Vote there numbers on the river and people numbers through the day and through the week from dantill dusk. We did sampling, a four hour sampling. Yeah, the lot to unpack there when we rushed through some stuff I want to definitely cover. I mean, it's seven when the attack occurred, and you say forty two years now from that time, and obviously so much of your life has kind of been defined by by that moment when you you know, when you look back on that day. Um, there's so much to go through. But I thought the most amazing part as I'm reading your story and people can read it in one of us, UM, and I was reading your stories as you've written, you're talking about the rescue. You know, a thousand suitures, you're basically scalped, You're you're losing a bunch of blood. And then how you are rescued that day. Can we go through that, you know, the moment that that your your student Bruce found you and then and then called this in And that's very interesting to me. Yeah, the short story, there's a whole chapter. Actually, the second chapter is the Martless rescue. I had, Uh we had a park Service radio and my student ticked that up and got onto the main channel with the park Service. They shut down the whole communication system just to talk to us, and uh and uh, my students said that I was badly enough injured. Well, he asked me how I was, and I occurred to the gargled, I'm okay, I think I'm me I'm still alive. But then I thought, Bruce, tell him I'm dying, because I really was dying. I was bleeding out right there. And uh. They launched a small Nash type helicopter. They found a plilot downtown shopping Jim Thompson. Yeah, Nartilius guy. Uh and he got in this sort of rickety uh uh helicopter that was losing its supercharger and he's coming in at nine thousand feet trying to pick up a guy in a windstorm, I mean the air out there, and he couldn't land next to me anyway. He landed in the small valley next door. Uh, and he brought with him Tom Black, who was the leader of the rescue operations, and Uh, Tom realized when he saw me with Jim that they needed some serious help there. So they called smoke jumpers from West Jellostone smoke jump base, and a d C three launched from there with eight smoke jumpers who dropped packages right almost hit me. Uh and uh. The guys did a nartilust job getting me stabilized, and they took me down to Lake Hospital, which was maybe twenty minutes by chopper and uh lo and behold, the University Utah Medical Center had rotated in for Vietnam Toronto surgeons who are just going up for a couple of weeks at a clinic. And so these guys had seen people blown apart by shrapnel and all kinds of nasty wounds. And they further stabilized me, and then the ambulance took me out to West Yellowstone Airport and a Salt Lake had sent up a basically a flying operating room and got me down and they started working on the love them clock at night and eleven hour surgery closing all those wounds, and of course then you gotta beat the section infections. Infections. Every time we talk about bear attacks, that's that's the thing that you try to talk about, is when you have an open wound that was caused by an animal. They've got one filthy mouth, yeah, and they can't and you can't really just close that wind right back up. I was just colored with toodes. Yeah, that's unbelievable. I can laugh now. It's sort of like gallows here there. But it was nip and tuck. I my attempt at shur in the hospital kept going out around a hundred and four. You know, I could have clocked out right then right then. Do you ever do you think of moments during during I'm sure what was kind of like a and very intense and very wild whirlwind to get out of there, to get you know, there's some serendipity involved with with your medical care too. It was there moments in there where you thought, you know, this is this is it for me? You need dying or or the end of the research either both. Just I'm interested in moments during that time that's a good question. I don't dwell on that, and I don't like to talk publican too much about it, but uh, you know, you get a TV producer, stick of candle in your face and Dr Gilder, howd you feel when you lost your face and you thought you were going to die in your family was going to be without a husband, And I thought, you know, f you dons of those kind of things. But I realized that I was close to death. And one day in the hospital, I was watching television and I saw turtle walk across on the television screen and I started to cry and I couldn't stop crying. I knew I was going to live. So, yeah, there you go. I choke him out the already years later. Yeah, but we're not gonna We're not gonna go. I just wanted to, you know, kind of just understand a little bit of well, and it's a reasonable question because then the next one is, well, how the heck did you decide to go back and study even bigger? There's exactly so exactly and when you're it's it's hard to And again we were talking before this, we I know, with this podcast and with our company or to media or were a media company, and we know we look at the numbers, we look at what people want to hear about, and when we talk about bear attacks, more people listen, more people pay attention, and we don't. You know, I'm not going to base our audience to say it's just a sensationalist part of it, but there is some version of that intrigue for well, you know, there's a lot of both ignorance and fear, and that's very normal. I don't say that to the majority towards people, but if we really want to fear something, we had to fear the automo deal it. It kills and names more people, and you can go on YouTube or whatever and see people's arms with their watch still on and that there's torn and pieces. You don't see that with automobiles. All that sort of stuff happens and you don't get visuals of it. Actually, my wife, as I was going out hunting not too long a couple weeks ago, she said, are there gonna be bears? Are you gonna get attacked? And there's been bear at tax recently. I said, I'm more it's more dangerous for me to drive over to the hunting spot because I I've been there than it is to actually out there, and I believe I believe that solely, and I don't let My personal belief is I can't let that inherent there's danger and inherited everything, and to sensationalize one version of it, because it seems a little bit more visceral, a little bit more scary, it's just not intellectually honest for me. So I just try to sing with everything. Only the sociologists could tell us why we're so obsessed with carnivores attacking people. Maybe it's a control thing, but look at the numbers of people have been dying from otioid. It's seven hundred thousand people. Yet too grizzly. Their attacks will get held a lot more pressed than all these deaths of fine young people that are on a draw that shouldn't be on the market. Yeah, you know that that there's those comparisons are they're pretty stark when you start to think about how like you said, one and we've we've had, like I said, four bear tacks in the Gravelly Mountain range here in south of Bosan recently, and when I was traveling around prior to Elk opening day, we had more I had more conversations with hunters that I know in the industry and without the industry that about grizzy bears and I did about ELK. We weren't talking about like what did you see? What bull were you on? We're talking about are there grizzly bears in your area? And the other thing about hunters is some of them have the John Wayne neath that. If they've got a three fifty seven magnum or something, they'll be stopping that there. Believe me, you won't be stopping there with a tistel. Your arms will be jumping like like your heart, it'll be trying to get out of your chest. And unless you've had combat training, Uh, if you really wanted to defend yourself to something like a short barrel shotgun or a testle, go to a garbage don't get one of your friends to roll a truck tired down at you from the hill. And you stop that truck dire tire with a with a pistol or a shotgun. And if you can stand there and stop that remaining cool, you'd be okay with killing it there. But who wants to kill it there? What do you mean, spray? I'm a believer. I think the studies of it are are sufficient. Uh. People always say, well, it doesn't work every time. Well, of course it doesn't work every time. Uh, skunks developed pretty good bear spray and they still get eaten. So you know, Uh, but it's it'll blind and make the bears choke and filler lungs. And people say, oh, well of the window blow back. No it won't. It's got so much pressure with that gas, it'll just go out. Uh. You know, I've shown people how to use it lots of times. I'm a believer. But you know, the unknown aspect of it is that when you stay and there with your weapon there spray, your behavior is tells that there that you're not a chicken. If if you don't have a bear spray, your instinct is to run, which I did, because you have to get some distance. Maybe you can collapse, maybe you can wet your pants. But um, if you're holding bear spray, you're standing facing the bear, and of course you have to believe it's gonna work, which it does. Then the bear says, hell, no, I was just wanted to chase you, but I don't want to fight you. Yeah, you and what choice you like you said, what choices when when you're facing down a bear like that. There's a lot of things you can say you would do, but until you've been in that situation, I would like to say, you know, we were talking about this, h one of our editors outside early today, when we were thinking about you coming in. I was saying, like carrying a pistol, we all think, oh, we'll do it. It's just I'd like to have both rather than just one. I was thinking of, and it's something I had never really considered, is that I feel safer with a pistol in my hand than I do bear spray, just innately, just sure, I feel the pistols more powerful, so I'm probably gonna reach that for before I reach for bear spray. But to your point, and I've I've shot three gun matches in different competitions where in practice I can hit you know, I can hit a pretty I can hit the ten ring with the pistol. And then when somebody's behind me timing me, and they're fifteen other people watching, and I've got to run up to a thing and shoot, there's any pressure applied. I am the most inaccurate person that you could ever So to try to even compare to that, which is, you know, tangibly comparable to the moment of frenzy and there's a bear, you know, coming down, and I think it's it's it's difficult to do well, you know. I was on the ground with There's a lot and we did some darting for collering for a lawge owner. I don't do any callering myself for nine projects. But whenever I was out on the ground, I carried a shotgun pump mossburg with you know, slugs and deer shot buck shot, and I I figured always carried their spray, and their spray was the first reach for me. I'm not a I'm a gun guy, but I'm not a hundred a big game. Uh. I figure that I might have to use the shotgun to shoot a there off my student. I want to backups. I want their spray and then if there's got them down, I can walk up and plug them in the head or the neck or the shoulders or do whatever you can. You know, you're running on instinct there. They don't have their shooting classes like they have sailboat classes. You know, yes that, yeah, that would be a difficult and I know FWP for some time they had a trailer they would pull around that had a charging bear saying, and they would say that that woman is speaking tonight at at the Lindley Center, just before I give the talk. Yeah. So like then they would do bear spray training. And I don't want to get the number one, but it was a very small percentage of people that could get the bear spray and effectively get it in the air before that bear, that charging fake bear, We're talking milliseconds there, decides to charge, uh, standing facing it and hoping to God, uh that it's a bluff charge and you can change your underwear later, you know. And I I was telling you before, I'm an East Coast kid. We just didn't. I never had to think about this hunting my entire life or even going outside for any reason. And now I've got a small son three years old. Every basically every time I hunt in the National forest around here, any public lands there are, there is the chance. Even sometimes it's more remote than others, other times it's more elevated than others. But there always is a chance that I'm going to run into a grizzly bear. Always, And it's a different feeling and that's why we love the wilderness. You think the bear owed that it's not the same wilderness exactly. You know exactly that we say. I always say, like you, if you would remove and we've done this as a as a nation, like remove the predator predators from the environment with the elk. The elk aren't elk anymore if they're not being preyed upon by these things that have chased. So their elkness has derived somehow by their instincts that are elevated by the evolved with wolves, cougars, whatever. So you know, the way we think of elk is is very much informed by you know, our prong horn is faster than any carnivore. It evolved with a with a North American cheetah, which was a lion that they found in sinkholes and u and why only which is really interesting. There were thor pronghorn at one time. They're six I forget which some double horned and all that sort of stuff. But there's only one left. But that baby can run. You know, nothing can catch that pronghorn. Isn't it really interesting? So I studied them for two years. It was wonderful, and Yellowstone mostly sent in marketing. It was sort of technical stuff, but I just loved the going out watching pronghorn behavior. Yeah, they're interesting all one thing like during you know, during the attack that you already mentioned, but I wanted to return to um in the hours after the attack, when when things were pretty dire, you wrote that you said that you asked that the bear not be destroyed. That's the quote, the words that not one of the range of how many bears they had killed, and that I could I can remember they sort of anger welling up and these saying, please don't do that, don't track this there they knew it went downhill, bloody footprints our downhill. I never saw the dave that. Of course, I didn't see anything after that, but I have the color slides of the rescue because the helicopter pilot grabbed my thirty five million here camel and took pictures, which is crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I think the stories as I was reading Love Your rescuers were as interesting as anything. The people that they were, isn't that. Yeah. Jim Compson did a wonderful job describing and I quoted him comes uh in the book because he talked about he'd been two tours in Vietnam, and that day he had more adrenaline pumping than on any any operation in Vietnam. So uh, and he isn't the guy that exaggerates easily. Yeah, I mean that's what struck me. I mean, did you I think from the moment where you're near death and asking for this bear not to be destroyed as his as his common occurrence when there's a bear attack, they'll go in and dispatch the bear if they can find it. Yeah, go back to especially if it's predatory, it's different, you know, the surprise encounter, but if you get there that that has surprise encounters all the time at the time, right, Yeah, take me back to um, you're kind of the first time that you were interested in bears, maybe the first moment that you remember or or something in your life that was very important that got you ahead of that direction. You know. I started working with There's really accidentally, I was a wildlife biologists for the Province of Alberta and There's were wrecking havoc with the yards or a paris up there, and uh uh, Young Barry Gilbert was supposed to come up with some kind of management solution. So we did some uh studies on sixty b yards using electric fences and taste the version conditioning where we used a chemical called lithium chlora. I'd try to make the bear sick and then they'd be off eating honey. So uh to be frank. I started out as a biology major wanting to do fisheries work, and I had a couple of summers there I was at on sword fishing boats and that stuff. Then I went to graduate school and one places I've played was the University of Miami because they had shark studies and I thought, this guy's a junkie third nasty animals. But I didn't get accepted there. I got accepted at Duke, and the professor wanted to study of dear behavior and a young another young relationships, and that's what I did my master's on communication and thallow deer of all things. And then I did a communication really yeah, that was heard from I think the New York Zoo that was so averse to being near people know that he could see them. So they gave them to my professor Duke, and he had enough money to build a nile enclosure and release them there. But what I did was just shorten it because they're talking bearrass. But I studied the bonding between mother and young and baby dear and people, and I found out, uh, that are there that I sat with for six hours on its first day beside it had a changed behavior towards people five years later, and none of the other dear did. So it was an imprinting study basically. But uh then when I you know, I got my job trying to save v rds from black bears in Alberta, I uh, I applied for a teaching job at Utah State, and uh, I've done pronghorn work in Yellowstone. I thought I loved the Yellowstone because the animals are more natural and anywhere else they're not haunted. You can approach them. And I looked at buck behavior, territorial behavior, and all that sort of stuff. And then when I came back, uh, Yellowstone wanted a study of bears and people on trails because they knew that neither bears would be in bump off trails or people were running into too many of them females and cubs, uh like up Pelican Creek or something like that. And they in fact had a student carry Gunther did his master's on just that issue after I a couple of years after I got involved, and he's now the chief bear manager there, but he was up on a mountaintop looking at bear people interactions from the two kilometers away, so he he was much safer. Of course, I wanted to be as close as was safe. And here the bears. Bears do a lot of low level chuffing and when they alarmed there there youngsters, when they there's something dangerous, they go there's a throat click that goes on that you have to be quite a way from the waterfalls and everything else to to hear that. But that doesn't mean I want to, you know, sit on a chair next to six bears and hear them talk. So, yeah, you were, you wanted to be. You felt like, is it a part of your research that drew you to bears want to be close? That's what it sounds like, obviously, Yeah, but it was I think it'd be closer to problem solving. I had a feeling and knowing a lot about observational study of theirs used using an anthropological approach. You go into the culture, you sit down. It's like they say, the average Inuit family as a husband and wife and two children and an anthropologist. You've got to be uh in the culture to understand what's going on, you know. And the Craig has studied their's first grizzlies in the Yellowstone, but they captured all of theirs at dumps, so that was a dump culture, and uh, they didn't spend much time at all looking at their behavior. One of the students looked at so called territorial behavior, but what he was really looking at is a uh bunch of fighting and threats between theirs that are trying to eat garbage. And you'll read that a lot like in Yellowstone forty fifty years ago, that most of the grizzly bear interactions were at like at the dunk, that's where most of the bears got their food. Yeah, the growth rate so dump fed theirs were much better than the ones that were feeding on cutthroat trout or white bark kind seds or any of the other things they eat. It's just a lot of ea here to get to. You know. One of the dumps, Trout Creek dump I read in the late fifties had fifty one thousand cans of guardeny just come in and compactors were just dumping all this stuff. And you know in a park you got Todato's steak bones and PRK chops, and why wouldn't a bear habituated going in there and get a snack man? That's an easy one. Absolutely. So as you as you you know, developed through the years with bears, when did did well? Two questions is kind of the same. Did things change for you where you saw bears a certain way? And then the proximity to bears and the time you spent kind of change what they are because I mean, you're now I would say. People will say a noted authority on like people in bears, like how do people in bears co exist? When did it? Did it change for you? Ever? Oh? Absolutely? And uh the time I can remember, well, I wasn't totally aware of how much difference there was. But when I went to Katmai and Brooks River and saw bears walking up and down the trails with people on the beaches, with people, uh, anglers fly casting in the middle of the river there's going by, I said to myself, something really different is going on here, and I want to know what the difference is between mountain bears that aren't very well fed. Some of them, like Denalie bears, are grazing and eating insects for eighteen hours a day. And these uh salmon living bears that they can eat twenty three salmon in an hour and a half. I counted one that did that, and then they go and sleep for a good bit of the day. They've got all the calories they need. And but in order to access the salmon river, they have to be able to tolerate people. Well, they also have to tolerate other theres because these are bears that aren't that are defensive of their turf, and uh, you can't have much turf when you're on a Sandon street. And then you ask the question, well, why don't there's flight and are And the answer I think is it isn't worth it. If you and I were kind of hungry and the table here was covered with sixteen steaks, uh t blow and steaks, I'm not gonna start fighting you for you know fifteen of them. Both of us are going to sit down and start eating. And that's that's what bears do. It's and now there's though, could be much more aggressive. And one of the questions I ask, now and I have haven't got the answer is what does all of capturing and collering bears do. It might be making nan haters, woman haters, people haters out of some bears. Now as an example something I see, Well, yeah, you can make up all the coins of stories you want. You're probably against callering, which I am, especially in the National Park now that we've done it for fifty years. But nobody's other studied the change and behavior theres as a result of collering them. Now, one example, it's indicative to me. It was a bear studied by Bart Schlyer, there's master's thesis. Uh, they're fifteen, ended up killing Roger Ney in the Rainbow Creek campground west of West Yellowstone. That there have been captured eighteen times ever since. It was a club and it kept Schreyer Schlyer, Art Schlyer up the tree for four hours. It really wanted to eat his lunch and his shorts and his ears. Yeah. So to me, uh, you've gotta make the linkage that if you keep capturing their's and you've probably seen this on television, you opened the gate for a Culdert trap and that bear wants to tear the truck on the trap and everything apart and then it runs up when you guys blow the horn. So you changed the relationship of theirs to people. And one of in my talk tonight at the the Center, UH will be about uh contrasts in there's in different places and they're just like anthropologists, you know. In the famous anthropologist France Bois went to the Arctic in the eighteen hundreds to study the Inuit. He thought he was just going to study people, you know, another primitive people that eat meat. Totally, he found that their whole worldview was so different than the European one that he was familiar with. I think he was a German, and uh that set him off on a on a course in life to say, you know, anthropologists don't study people. They study different cultures in different places. Cultural anthropologists, I'm not talking about the ones that collect bones, you know, physical anthropologists. Yeah. We we had just had a gentleman named Dr Larry's Geist on the podcast a couple episodes ago, and he's got the author of our North American Mile Conservation, and he talked he studied wolves in North America as compared to wolves in Russia and Siberia, which are heavily predatory on humans and very opportunistic when it comes to us. I'd like to see the evidence of that because American students um so he was so his studies. I won't speak for him, but he has some books on some stories and of specifically Russian wolves in their attack that he shouldn't but he was looking at as much as you say, the comparison of wolf attacks and the violence with wolves in you know, eastern Eastern Europe and other places, why it's different in North Americas. There's less evidence of that much much much less aviagent wolf of the tax on humans here in North American how almost none. Yeah, And so he's looking into how these things. That's it's super interesting to me. And we had a lot of people, you know, want to disagree with his stance on wolves, and my point to them was, look, this guy is taking research from Germany, from Siberia, from Russia and comparing it to North America and shaping So it's a very different worldview than just and that goes to my point that you can't generalize these wolves have different cultures just like and solve all. We had nan eating lions that didn't do anything but capture Chinese railroad workers out of their sleeping cars and eat them. Yeah, we're gonna have David Kuaman on hopefully soon. Yeah, try to talk to him about Monster for God his book. That's just a very interesting thing to me. Like I said, I'm no expert on predators are bear biologists, but there is you know, when you talk about bears, they're not it's not a monolith, it's not sure, you know, and it's it's the illustrated. Don't you think we stereotyped them though? I mean if you got a crowd of people and said, Okay, I'm going to give you a word and I want you to write a word down that goes with it, and if you said grizzly there, what do you think people would write? Yeah? I mean it goes both ways, right, it goes in the way like Paddington Bear he has he wears shorts and goes to them all and we you know, I want did a think about Yeah, but we're talking grizzly bears. Yeah, I think if you had the term grizzly, then you start to get into you start to get into that. But there's I think it's clearly your view on bears in mind different a lot of ways, and I think that's maybe one of them, because I I do think pragmatically, there's two ends of that spectrum. Right. I look at my three year old son. He's surrounded by fluffy, cuddly brown bears. Grizzly bears. They sell them at the Yellowstone, you know, park stores, and like we we um we personify and anthromorphized bears and ways that I don't think we understand. But in the in the same vein, we also sensationalize the more violent nature of bears as well. So I think there's two sides of the coin, well at least, and there's a whole field of the differences. Yeah, they're all over the map. Yeah, you know, I clarified in my mind by saying these are values. We're talking about values, and you and I started talking about, well, let's have a hunting season on bald eagles. Well, that's there's no biological reason not to shoot eagles. There's a value reason. People love them. They're dig we don't eat them, and then they don't do any damage to us. Unless you're orn a fish hat tree. Oh yeah, unless you're unless you're on the Prince of Wales Island, and you see little like street buzzards over there, and again, like I think your value systems, they're still beautiful and they're still nervelous to watch. I am not a their lother. Uh. Somebody asked me out of an audience a couple of days ago whether I loved theirs. Well, I could get all technical and say, what do you mean by love? I mean I love my six or something like this, or I love my Golden Retriever, or I loved my sailboat. But if you love, there's uh the bad kind of love. There's a sympathetic fallacy if which Timothy Treadwell suffered from. I knew tim he called their advice and another Tuck didn't well. He was one of those that thought of he was real nice to bears and loved them. They would love him back, and most of them tolerated him. He was a wildlife uh abuser in a way. He approached them much more than he should have in the park. Shore should have kicked his lily white Ayshota there actually, but he uh, he've ended up being killed by a bear late in the season that I think probably was a nan heater and it had bad teeth, and it was old, had been captured. I'm not saying captured nat him the killer, but that bear was intent on eating people. Yeah, and I think that do you? Is how I feel about it. I wonder if you agree that it's incombat upon us as humans to understand a bear, understand what it does, especially me as a hunter. I gotta understand kind of not just that single bear, but what a bear is and how I can better interact. And also it's motivation of the toms motivations, right, you need to know. And so if I'm just like Timothy treadwell, if I am ignorant to the motivations of a bear, and I want to, you know, somehow apply my own emotional values to the bear. That's not doing the bear any justice because that sucker is going to kill you, and then we're gonna kill it, and then you're both it's a wild and it's not. It's not a little kid with a third coat. Yeah, you know. As as as evidence, I think your words, I think to a lot of people and a lot of writings and things I've read about you and stuff you've written, I think your scars one stop people to make them listen, but to our our evidence of someone who can understand what a bear is so so holy. And then and then step away from that and try to determine, you know, what a bear really means to you, and then to us as a society, and then to wild life, and and it's it's a relationship, Isn't that sure? We relate as humans to theirs, and we should be relating to Mother Earth in a similar way. Respect care for it, naked continue. I'm originally an Easterner, still an I guess because that's where I live. But I spent a lot of time in the West, and I kept asking myself, now, all these people that that consider themselves true Westerners, how could you possibly want to eliminate grizzly There's which is so much a part of the West. Who wants to eliminate grizz But we got a lot of people that want to eliminate grizzly bears. I think we do? You think so? Well? Uh? Look at Wyoming and Montana and Idaho had planned for the so called recovery of the Yellowstone Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Grizzly there that want the ultimate hunting season immediately they were going to have twenty three tournits sent out. That means that there will never connect with any other Uh. I know we're talking hunting turn that's we're not talking ranchers that can now shoot them and make up their own story. You know some sheep sheep herder, industrial sheep herder, or ranchers that, in my view, most of them have resolutely no interest in having grizzly bears around. And you can understand it. Yeah, I think that's again, there's not a monolith there. I mean you're looking at like when when they studied bears in Yellowstone there was a the demographic care was like what two acres and they're looking at Okay, I think it's six D seventy four bears this area can hold, right, and they think that they think, Yeah, the best I can do is say within the I'm a staunch believer in the North American model, and I think we should talk about bald eagles and some things like that too. But within our North American model, who are trusting these state biologists they're hired to do a job. Well, there's a lot of times we disagree with them, a lot of times we agree with them. But they're telling me, Okay, this this area can old six seventy four bears if within our model. That is, I think if you look at the Endangered Species Act and all these other things, when that animals are covered, hunting them to me is a positive thing, right because not looking at the killing of the individual. Let me give you another data back of the Enlote math. People love to talk about the bear's going from three hundred out to the park Service killed so many of them three and they've gone to six hundred, seven hundred bears now and uh, the North American model people will say wow, and the recovery people, wow, they've doubled hundred increase. But if I give you, uh, fifty thousand grizzly bears is the number that are estimated in North America. When they go from three hundred to six hundred, that's going from point at six to one point two. And since when there's one point two of the original population recovery, let's hunt them and kill them. Well, you're looking at it, but you're looking at the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. So the bear pope police within that ecosystem does have a carrying capacity. There has to be. But we have all their habitat in Idaho and Montana where bears would go and not be eating cows and all that sort of stuff. But when you old on a hunt that is on the border of the Greater Elstone ecosystem, you dropped the gate on all the movements of those bears. Not only that some jerk water poacher can say, oh, I was attacked and I shot that they're there. There are no witnesses say that. There's a reductive way to think about it, right, I don't think about hunters and posters certainly different things altogether. I came to the interview you with you not to argue with you. I'm giving my point of view, and I don't want to argue with you either. I want well you seem to be so I'm be honest about it. I'm not here to argue with you at okay at all. This is not the way that we approach these things. But I do want I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to avoid it because it's because we don't agree. I mean, I think you're here because but there you are a believer and biased to the North American model. You're not just a journalist right now, Well, I just tell you I believe in the North American but I think that I think the value of yours. It may not be mine for sure, but I think that's an interesting way to go about this conversation. We have differing values. Where can we come and find middle ground, because like that's an important thing to do, especially when it comes to an animals important it's a grizzly bear. Because where we can find middle ground is I don't I don't devalue to hunt grizzly bear. And I already told you, well maybe not on on maybe before we hit record, but I'm not I don't hunt grizzly bears if somebody handing me a tag at all, but taken in my pocket hunters alcan deer. I know thou Geist quite well at he's one of the guys that's pumped out as an academic the North American model. He really doesn't like carnivores. He's never studied, uh their viewing. I was I was on sabbatical for six months with thu Geist in his university. He gave me some room. He never asked me any questions about theirs or anything. And you know, let me let me tell you about hunters. It isn't about their hunters that I disagree with. It's hunters that believe that there's and cougars are taking their ungulates, they're out their dear and and uh Alaska caribou. Now, if we start managing from state and federal fishing game units, if we start managing uh pronghorn, deer, elk you name it, Uh, we're game ranching if we kill all the predators. So any hunter, any hunter would said this table and argue that predators need to be killed so they can go hunting. That's not that's not part of what I think the core hunts Colorado Fishing Game just did that. They invited wildlife services, you know, the gopher chokers that work for the federal government. Uh, they want to kill cougars and black there's because they believe that they're knocking down the newly neil dear population. There's no evidence that they're doing that, but it's quite a popular program presumably. And the garden that if you're a Colorado and I were, our tax money will be paid for to kill cougars and black bears. So that's a position that isn't science based. It's based on if you like greed of hunters, they think every well, I won't tell you what hunters think, but I mean there's a belief that when a cougar kills the deer, that's the deer that you and me can't put in our freezer. I've been in the hunting industry for twelve or thirteen years. I've never heard that. Never. Well, that's that's what Colorado and an Anchorage, uh sorry, Alaska is doing it. The Gloria Game has that as a policy. Now, it comes not from tree huggers. It comes from hunters. They don't want to lose caribou. There's old their hunting going on. They don't want to lose cariboo, noose, uh whatever, other ungulates, bighorn sheep, to any carnivor. Because the Board of Game is UH is allowing hunters to kill bears uh in the dam with cubs in Alaska. In Alaska, that's a policy. Now, are you sure about that? Because I know that there. I wouldn't say it if I wasn't sure. There was two hunters that did that and they were prosecuted. How long ago, oh, within a year. So I don't have. I don't have those game lalls in front of you, but I'm well, I know a bunch of their biologists and one of them was a lead researcher who's now living in Montana, and he argued with me. He says, the the government tells us to manage carnivor's for the minimum number, and they open up killing ground. There's and five or six hundred are killed in Alaska every year and part of the goal is to reduce the number. And they other people they've had shooting wolves from aircraft. You know, you know that whole story. Well, that doesn't that doesn't come from some accountant in Anchorage. You know, that comes from pressured by the hunters that want just like commercial fishermen don't want uh individuals netting so Dan manny king salmon, they want to net them all. I mean, I think, yeah, I don't agree with that at all. I think that's a pretty bombastic statement about all hunters. This or that. I didn't say a hunter. I'm talking about policy. I'm talking about policy. I'm talking about hunter motivation. Because if you don't believe that the government policy pull politicians aren't listening to the people on the land that want to do these things. Politicians, of course they are, yeah, saying that at all. I'm saying that, like, if you look at the way our model of conservation works, hunters hundred dollars Pittman Robertson dollars paid for a lot of grizzly bear studies and a lot of grizzly bear uh projects within the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. It does that in Alaska Douse too. If you buy a rifle uh in the pim roor somebody think that I buy fishing licenses fifty bucks and I don't catch a salmon. But I don't know. I think that's I don't think it's generally the argument I would make anyway. But I think that there's there's some things that are intertwined there that you can't just say, yeah, we're not going to solve it in an hour. No, No, And I think it's it's still a fine. Like I would just say, have flatly disagree with saying that hunters are driving policy to have less grizzly bears. Every hunter I've had in this room on this podcast, it doesn't matter where they're from. I didn't say I want to put ranchers in there too. You don't believe there are some hunters that would like to have fewer carnivores eating deer and elk. Sure, but I don't think that's driving policy, and I don't think that's the prevailing feeling. Fine, last the sociologists, they'll tell you, I mean, we need studies of just those questions. I would like to see that, and I liked I wouldn't presume to say that that the hunter is the every single hunter in every single state and all these policies. Um, we're the great conservationists. We have a lot of flaws in our in our community and trophy hunting and sounding you sound defensive to me, that's fine in what way? Well, you're you're attacking what I say about hundred motivation. You're saying all some are some rogue or some guy does this. I taught wildlife management, So does that qualify the policy? Why? I've studied where policy comes from. I tried to do studies in Utah on black bears. The guys that control the money wouldn't let me do any studies. They took it to a private university b y U because I was considered to be anti sheep, anti cows and somewhere, and I suggested that there were some troat streams and salmon streams in Utah, believe it or not, where there's command to feed on spawning salmon. The guy looked at me like I had rocks in my head that people would want to watch bears eat salmon, and Alaska is as a gold mine. Right now. There are sixty companies and Bertie's colony alone that authored their viewing as part of their eco tourism. Watching bears and photographing bears is a land office business. Now people don't want them. Something like nine of the people pulled in various Columbia we're against their hunting. Now there's a surplus of bears that could be hunted according to the model. The hunting was ended. It became political and they stopped the hunt. So that's it's a different policy. That's a difficult situation, right because you can't At the same time, you wouldn't want if there are so like hunters out there that are driving policy based on less predators, if that is, if that does exist and that is prevailing, you wouldn't want that to drive policy, and you wouldn't want folks in Vancouver to tell, you know, central British Columbia, the folks near Quinnel and some on these logging towns where there there's you know, cohabitation issues, and there's hunting economy, and there's all these things that are happening at the same way. You wouldn't want somebody in Vancouver who has never seen a grizzy bear to vote on and have dominion over, you know, how bears are managed in those areas, Like both of those things would be wrong. Those people in Vancouver are interested. Bears are a public resource to be managed as a as a public trust. It's a heritage that it doesn't belong to any buddy, and it belongs to everybody. You and I have as much right to have an opinion and vote on federal lands in Alaska, and that person in Vancouver has every right to say that there's should not be hunted. Well, we need to give them the right perspectives and the right information say there there there can't be you know, I've been to I've been to Vancouver, I've been in New York City. There's no way that someone in New York City could could accurately understand the ecosystem of the Greater Yellowstone. Well, what you're saying to me is that they don't have the same values that you did. I would say, that's true. You are you gonna say that their values aren't legitimate? Years are I would say that their perspectives aren't the same as somebody who's who's closer to bears. I think your stories is very much about that, your perspective, the proximity to bear a lot of people want to be close to it there without a K forty seven if they had one. So yeah, I don't think that's an unfortunate I think it's an unfortunate you. And I let me just say quickly kind of how what I feel, just me personally, and I think probably this company I would just maybe represent me I feel, especially when you go back to the Great Yellowstone ecosystem, I feel when and this is not me as a hunter dictating policy, I think it's the reverse. Based on our model of conservation. Knowing that hunting, to me is a sustainable use of a natural resources, I think matches a little bit of what you're saying. And in the line that hunting is sustainable use of natural resource, I'm saying within our model, wildlife is a public trust. We're we are going to rely on state game officials and biologists who we fund through our dollars. Yeah. I mean just because it's the party line doesn't make it wrong. I didn't say that. I said it's the party line, and it's a it's a statement of values, but it's a statement of values that are people by people that are pro hunting. And as you and I covered before, not to overdo it. If we have the North American model, we'd be shooting eagles and sandhill cranes. Well, we can, we can choose, we say in hill cranes a lot. I mean, you can get Utah. I'm out of touch with that. It was the reason I say it is that it was an issue that got shot down. Pardon the fun in Utah because people didn't want crane shot. It wasn't because there wasn't a surplus. I I teach wildlife management right, and I was sucked into the North American model, just as I was sucked into the multiple use model. Uh. We talked of the multiple use of public lands, but when you look at what's going on, it's private interests like ranchers. UH and tender operators that are are the top dogs and wildlife and recreation and skiing whatever our way down in the so called multiple use. Multiple uses give a little bit to every body, but in actuality the resource goes to the big money guys, wire houser, industrial ranchers, cheap grazing fees. Uh, let's not get into that. But multiply used. I have my dean who's used to see the uh ecological world through the eyes of the cow. He was a Texan say that multiply use is a is a bogus concept. And I don't want to see management of wildlife just representing the interests of hunters like the North American model that becomes game ranching. In in the North America modelement it says that that hunting is a tool for conservation. It's not the other way around. Conservations are not a tool for hunters. Um. And that's that's how I believe. That's what I believe. I believe that hunting has benefited not only as benefited not only deer, but birds, elk and it's and if it adut and we brought them back through the North American No, no, no, it was brought back by conservations to New York City or initially, and then they of the states asked for them. The ship all over the United States. We had to reintroduce them. We did. We did that turkeys. That was market hunting. That wasn't hunting. That was the mass killing of something for market, which was within the North American models. That's that's history. Let's not go there. Yeah, and I think that you're you're making out the model like it's some some kind of value system that somehow it is close to Heaven. It's not perfect, and there's and there's a lot of things in the modern sense that we could do to Let's just leave that. That's highly debatable model. It isn't it isn't all sure. No, I don't think it's all great. I think there's a lot of things, and I think, you know, large charismatic predators are are one of the things that needs to be addressed within the greater conversation. And that's why I kind of resent you, uh asking me to come in here and talk about grizzly bears, and all I've got in a lot of ways is a god damned lecture about the North American model and how biased I am so let's wrap this up. I've I've spent my time. You know, you guys aren't even giving me a baseball cap for coming in here, and now you're foisting your view over the radio about the North American model their biology. We can tisk me about my goddamn book. We can continue talking about grizzly bears in your book. I wanted to. I don't want to continue. Are you sure? Yes? I think I'm sorry that. I'm sorry that it's contentious. I didn't. It was not meant to be that way. Well, you don't know how you behave. Then I've had somebody asked me to come in, asked me about my forty five years of research and give me the kind of defense you're giving me about big game hunting, and you're acting like I've got some kind of uh left wing, weird old view. I'm not not at all. Well, that's the way I feel. I can I'm sorry, I can only tell you the way I feel. Okay, you can defend yourself, you see whatever, Like you can chot this whole thing up, and I'm not going to chop it up at all. If you don't, like, we can we can say that there you go putting some words in them. Though I don't want you not to air it. I want good things to be done for bears, grizzly bears, and I let's talk about that. Let's let's talk about what you want to do for grizzly bears and put it out. I pointed out how going from three hundred to six hundred and fifty is not recovery in my view, it's not recovery. Okay, you can't make the case genetically. If we're talking about whales in the North Atlantic, any species you want to pick, spurn whales whatever. Three thousand is about the number for genetically minimum numbers of the animals to continue on forether, Uh, we have fifty thousand grizzly bears, and somehow one increase in a small number. It's easy to double a small number, right. Uh. If you had two dollars and I gave the two dollars, well you just got hundreds per cent richer. That's uh, that's balder dash. So anyway, I'm I'm understand, I understand. I don't want and listen, I did not intend for it to get heat it. I did not intend for for that to be the situation. You've given your time here, and I respect that. I'm not in any way trying to push my views on you or on vice versa. I think maybe we can close better debating you will admitting I want to talk about Grizzly Bears, and so I didn't come in here for a debate. I'll get hate mail, I'm sure, and people will write me about my book and calling me all kinds of natives. Great, but I want to see your evidence. I want to know what your experiences. Because I spent my life and almost gave my life for grizzly Bears. Let's talk about what I would like to talk about that. Let's move on from where we disagree and talk about your time with bears and your philosophies and cohabitation and those things. So this is absolutely what I want to talk about. And again I will say, I apologize that that this went away, that you're not accept your apologies, it's not okay, that's not a big deal. I don't what I did not mean for that to happen. I did not. I did not come here to have some debate. In fact, I read a lot about you and was very excited just to have this conversation about cohabitation and what you think. So if we can get to that, I'd love to. But if you like to try and to make the case that you can't generalize the grizzly bears, there's a tendency even along PhD their researchers to uh stereotype their view of theirs. If you call her there's you captured and abused them and you haven't watched them. Uh. So I'm an animal behavior is to use an anthropological approach, right. And what I've seen now and I find marvelous, is that we can see grizzly bears as different cultures. They learn things and pass along to their young. In Alaska they swim out to island, some as far as thirty miles to raid seed third nests, and that's a trait, a cultural trait that they've learned. And we can go uh to Yellowstone and see in the fifties a garbage don't there that can be there. The craigheads called an equal center and related to salmon streams. So I think that's uh breaking out of the ignorant model that all bears are pretty much the same, unpredictable goneat your mama. Uh kind of thing. And people generate a lot of fear. But if we think of them as a sentient animal like chimta zis or wolves, we realize that they have a social life, they have mother young relationships. Wolves are are violent killers. If you know their watch a bear or a wolf take a on a baby. Help they did alive. They just pulled big chunks off at need it while it's trying to breathe and escape. So I don't I know the different sides of theirs, but uh, they are a different culture. We have another, you know again, the anthropological one. We wouldn't say, oh, I'm an anthropologist. I study people. People say, well, what tribes do you study? Because uh, and I could say any kind. I could say, well, I study gangs in Chicago. It's a different tribe than the Mandoga more or uh Samoans or something like that. Well, I think your point is something that I that's something worth looking into. Because bears at the same time or like can be and we've already kind of covered this through the from like the personification of bears persus violence, that bears are very social, very a lot of times gregarious, and then you spend a lot of times, I'm sure in close proximity to bears where they're doing things that people love to watch bears. I love the watchers when I see a bear and yellows and I stop and get out and get the bonos. You know, in the end, we stereotype them through As I mentioned, the PhDs that only do computer population analysis don't know theirs. They know uh numbers of theirs, and if they've captured them, they've dealt with a angry captured there that would love to get at them and chew their face off. So is there away from like a biology standpoint, and you know, from your standpoint, to kind of meld those two things together, like the data and and and all the things that are collected and then the feeling of this is what a bear is because I think what I think what you're saying is like there's a bareness. Bears are there a certain way when you're around them, and you must understand the bear. Is there a way to kind of meld those two things together and effectively, Well, if you if you're dealing with oathen minded people, they are willing to consider another view of theirs rather than just recover them. So let's play the numbers games. So let's get to six fifty and then drop the protection. I don't think we should drop the protection, but uh, it's about oathen mindedness, and uh, I don't. I don't see any way that people are going to change. I mean, I read uh population literature. I appreciate the effort that those guys go to are then involved in callering programs with with satellite callers because I thought the data would stop some timber operations that were hurting bears. I don't believe that anymore. I don't believe that science is giving us better management all the time, because politicians come in for the wealthy the corporation's tender companies mining oil and gas, and they say, screw the greater sage gross. We used to have millions of them. We don't even have ten square niles where there's nothing that can come in on stage gross. To me, sage gross is my favorite third. I studied them at a distance, and in Utah, I used to go on the early morning down to Hardware ranch, which was an elk branch, and uh take pictures of them and watch them. They're just fabulous birds that they don't get the time of day anymore. Well, this brand meat eater and and Steve Ronella guy founded it. We've he's been very active. Me less. So I wish I had understood that issue more um with the governor former governors of Yoma, governor meat and things like that, of of making sure that this that that stage bust see that greater um sage gross habitat has been has been looked after and maintained. That's a tough thing to do in a state like Wyoming. So because the ranchers are controlling the politics and they put cows on all our our least land which is subsidized grazing. And that will be another program you convicted back for a laugh about Well, it's it's so uh bizarre, Uh what h ranchers get away with dollar thirty nine for animal unit month that needs They can graze an animal on your land and my land for a month for a dollar and a half or less, and it hasn't changed in thirty years. That's a giveaway to ranchers. That's why people like George Worthner and not in journal, uh your local journal here with editor Todd Wilkinson, do such a nice job because he's trying to educate people about what's actually going on. But if you're love with the independent ranchers being the lifeblood of the West, uh, you're in favor of a lot of stuff that's harming the environment. We've had two hundred years of sheep grazing and cattle grazing since the more and Thons first came to Utah, for example, and they ran sheep everywhere until erosion uh pulled the mountains down and the Forest Service came in and took it over. And so we don't right now, we don't have a square mile of land that hasn't been grazed somehow. So we don't even know how lush the West was. That's what's incredible. And you know what they call at the ecologists call that the shifting baseline. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a reality and it's not really well, I guess it's a theory because it works so often, is there? Um, Like I said, I've I've this reminds me of like some some of the conversation I had when I went to to talk to you know, vegan philosophers and trying to like work through some of the things, like some of the real broad things where we disagree and get get down to that um and I think, yeah. I mean, if you've pointed out how you feel certain groups, you know, diverge when it comes to conservation policy and biology and when it comes to their motivations for whatever they do. I feel I feel real strongly about the group we have here at Meat Eater, and and this the audience of this podcast. There's a lot of people that care about their being more bears and the and the a lot of those people one are wrestling with what to do hunt bears or not? Is this the thing that is with our value system? So there's a lot of that I've seen, But then there's also a lot of like trusting in uh the model, but all of that is kind of based on the value system of I'd like there to be more bears. I think that this thing that we've come up with would allow them to be more bears. And I think obviously for your standpoint, you you want there to be more bears too, and so but but you know, let me give you an example you're talking about maybe we can come together on something. I have a colleague at Utah State who had a master's thesis student who was going to ask what do Utah's think about wolves coming into Utah? He almost lost his job because he was going to ask the question. I talked to him yesterday and the day before. Now, that is a form of political censure, even about a question. I mean, that sort of thing drives me goddamn nuts because here, here is a belief system that you can't even ask a question about a controversial issue. Why do you think it is with wolves and bears that that is? I mean, you're obviously, you know, like you're passionate about it. I'm, like I said, I'm not. I haven't spent as much time with it as you, but I'm but I'm as objective as I can in the data and the science. And that's what I've done with my students. I don't say, uh, your thesis will be much better if you make a lot of statements about how nice and more bears would be. No, so you say what your results are in the implications of them for management. Right, So that's the way, Yeah, we should talk about And I was doing a little bit of I will admit I didn't get as far enough as I wanted into this, Like your your thoughts on how expanded bear populations, expanded bear habitat, expanded bear protections would work. I think that's an important thing to cover. We haven't covered that. We should, so run us through kind of your philosophies when it comes to that. Well, we have protections as the Europeans have for keeping wolves away from cattle. For example, there are breeds of dogs, mountain dogs that are race of sheep and basically stop predation. But you know, the French and the Spanish are still fighting over brown there's they're bringing them back in three or four areas, and uh, in Sweden they're expanding from in a Norway and the Norwegians don't like them at all because they raise a lot of sheep. They also kill whales in large numbers. Uh. I think it's always going to be contentious because partly it's it still goes back to values. People don't like to believe that, but they United States has tremendous differences of opinion. You have a president right now whose view of women is pretty atrocious, but he is pretty damn popular. He didn't win the vote in the United States, but he has a lot of people backing him. I don't know what they think he's going to bring to the middle class because he's the richest condmn we've rather seen in the presidential chair. I think, uh so, it's it's about values and uh P don't seem to want to shift that much. I'm I'm to get on the gun issue. Uh. The United States to me, I was born in Canada, raised to went through university and then went the States, and the American government paid for much of my education, uh through the spotnik era. But uh the United States is a gun culture through and through and the rest of the countries of the world can't understand this Second Amendment, which is such a so abused, regulated, militious. Uh So you've got values there that people won't bend on. There are more guns than people in the United States Canada. I wanted to get a shotgun. I've handled shotguns. I've owned three fifty seven magnums rifles. I've certified the Park Service to handle weapons. I couldn't buy a gun in Canada until I spent a week on learning how to handle guns and then paying a hundred dollars for a permit to be able to eave and have the shotgun. So, uh, there there's two countries that are very similar. We have much in common. Uh. And I like the americansistently government much more than the Canadian by and large, because you can see the ass off people if they don't If e p. A doesn't do what it's supposed to do, we can't sue organizations in a parliamentary system. That's my personal grief. But getting back to values. People are so intent on guns being for protection, their sprays for protection. Get a knife for protection. You don't need a a K forty seven or Collisha cough to defend yourself. How many people in America use a weapon to defend their for their family. Just get back to bears. You should probably go back to bears. That is another program. I think that, Um, the value system is an interesting is an interesting thing to say, and it's the basis of all policy. Yeah, and I think it's in There's some cultural things that we've already addressed, but I think in a value system way. UM. I think maybe I'm a little more positive about it, uh, because I think that one of the great redeeming values I think of all North America that that's not the case in the continent of Africa. It's questionable in Europe in some ways, just because they're so split up and the countries are so small. Um in North America, especially in the United States, that we have this value where everyone, most everyone that you come in contact with, if you say, like, do you want more wild life? Do you want more places to go? Most people would raise your hand and say yes, regardless of if they're an urban nite or if they live in Montana or whatever. As we talked about earlier, their's perspectives are different because they live in different places and they come to those values quite a patriot. But you know, if you look at people wanting more national parks, when they bring a park into an area, what do you think the locals want? No? Is the answer. And they just took bears Ears and chopped it in half. Hey and Utah. It turns out if you do an economic analysis, every county that had a national park near it, And this is true in Alaska for huge You and I own a huge amount. I'm there a con citizen by the way, naturalized. We own a lot of public land in Alaska, and it is making Alaska a bundle a bundle. Yet, if you asked Alaska's what do you think of the Park Service coming in and that guy Jimmy Carter, that tobacco guy uh setting aside a lot of land. They would tell you that keep the hell keep them the hell out. We Alaskans are we know how to look after our land. Do you recognize that and agree that? That's the reason I sit on the board of a group that's called the back Country Hunters and Anglers were very much a we're pro public lands, pro federal control. Those plans I followed them because they're anti a t V, because a t V s and small the deals are getting into the five country. And so to a program on not bikes too. We've been talking a lot about We've been talking a lot about e bikes here lately too. But I think I sit on the board of that that group, and I sit on that board because I think that there's a there's a huge movement. The public land movement within hunting is huge. Um. You know, the opinions that you reference, I think are are old. I think the new version of the American hunting mindset and the American hunting value system includes federally controlled public lands that are managed for wildlife. Alaska wildlife are just some wild I hope all wildlife. That's not always been the case. But we are talking groups that are out for some wildlife. Well, they're anti carnivore, we've they have no use for song birds, you know. But it's totally they're political as hell too. I think that their name I probably got a case of denial going on. Well, but I think, like I said, you've got a lot of strong opinions, man, I dig it um. But I think in general, I believe that the hunting, the sustainable hunting movement that I'm a part of, and that's that there's hundreds of thousands of people that follow this and listen to this and understand. I'm trying to trying to teach it, trying to understand it better. I taught it as a positive value when it's done right. Beats market hunting, beats poaching, beats that's what we're talking about. I think we could do everything, we could beat holes and everything and be anti This strands to that, but that's that's what That's what I believe is can be the future will be the future, and it's something that we can all agree on and we can get into like far right wing, this far left wing that. But but I don't well, I'd like I'd like to have sometimes get only women wildlife managers to command because there's a cultural shift going on there. I I was asked to be a consultant on their viewing policy for the province. I was paid two to review their draft report on their viewing big deal in British Columbia. Uh. British Clumbia has a nailed dominated hunter mentality in the in the fishing game that it's hard to describe. But the people that wrote that they're viewing were bright young women who weren't hunters. I don't know whether hunters or not. I'm not against hunting you and I could. I'd love to shoot a noose and take it home. But I I really appreciated the difference that these women brought because they didn't have a culture that there's are not anything as good as a care there or a moose on an article, as you know what I'm saying, Oh no in And I think they can be objective a lot easier than a bunch of jobs like us. And I think in general, like I don't I don't look at people. LE would say, I try not to look people just look at it. Oh your gender makes you different or your color makes you different. Like, but you're right though, in the way that our audience is mail, hunting culture has predominantly been met. Now, how we fix that, Well, there's that's arguable. Well it needs we need more and better perspective. That's the only way to do this, the right way, just talking to diversity and a single single thinking that used to be of course, drove all my friends who are nailed by and large not because of the hunting culture, that it invaded the management of all our wildlife, not just some wildlife, but all of it. So I think that's changing, and I'm very positive, but I think it's I think it's changing too. And I think we've had lots of conversations. Like I said, we just talked about geist and and a lot of a lot of opinions that are people would say, oh, that's negative predator. And then he'll slide a book across the table that has stories of Russian that has he's got a book that he wants to try to get us to publish that is just from Russia, stories of wolf attacks on humans and and some of the different things and and a lot of people got that twisted around, I thought, because I said, look, this guy's just and he did a lot of study comparing what's happening North America, what's happening, and trying to figure out what what is driving the wolves to do what they do, not kill them all, save them all, because neither of those things I think can really be applied to what we're currently working on. It's good, good information data or whatever on wolves killing people who miss grow I mean overnight. You can't even get a person that's watched a car accident describe what's actually happening. And as far as writing a book about all the wolf attacks on humans, you could write a book on the man that killed their children, uh, and write a book on going from country to country to see what fathers have killed their children, and uh, it turns out that men that haven't fathered the children were stepfathers are the biggest group of people that kill our children. So there's some evolution going on here and some sociology that we're just starting to crack the surface. So I say that because you can say the wolves uh kill people, and there's all this data from Europe, you're playing into the fear of wolves and the anti wolve sentiment in North America because they're other than a couple of cases of rabies, there haven't been wolves. Wolves are the hardest animals to get to kill people, and any other idea you can say, well, you know, talking about grabbing women's crotches, that's just locker room cock. Like Trump's wife said, I don't read with that. It isn't just locker room talk. It's a deplorable behavior. And I think some of the stuff about wolves is also deplorable. Well, I ranted it when I was in in Berkeley talking to folks. They would bring up when we were talking about animal rights per se, they would bring up things like slavery and rape and like all these really what I would say, like raally far out analogies that kind of stopped the conversation, and I just like, listen and similar with these, you know, fathers and kids things. I don't know where to do with that because I just I feel like it's far away because it's a stereotype, and there's a stereotype about the danger from wolves. Wow, But you know, I don't know, like I said, I'm not I don't speak for other guests. Saying it's a stereotype. Well, I'm sure there's a stereotype. Well there's it's perpetuated bout Hollywood's perpetuated in lots of ways. And I don't want to increase the stereotype negative. You've told me about south Side, Now heard anybody to talk about all the studies in Europe and all I said about wolves killing people? Never heard of it. I'm not. I'm not telling you that to like perpetuate a stereotype and telling you because guess what, that's what the end of the result is. Don't sit there as a journalism and tell me that you bring up a particular issue treated in a certain way, isn't isn't increasing a stereotype. Sorry, I didn't mean to keep hitting your equipment here. I know Gilbert kept hitting, but he will knock the microphone around, throwing stuff at us. Um I think that. No, I'm not trying to petuate I don't have I don't have it, and that I am. But journalists, I mean, look, listen, you can't defend that. Journalists don't have much effect. I mean that's what your business is. You're you're selling a product, and unfortunately a lot of newspapers, the lord blood. We used to say in civil rights, Uh you asked that. You see, you're going to have a march on campus in favor of integration there on talking North Carolina years ago, the news media would say, if you think there's gonna be blood, call us right, what does that mean? I don't know. What do you think? M hm, try not to I don't know. Man's let me just let me just finish the statement. It's about if there's violence, we love it. We're gonna carry it on our on our program. Alright, let's just end it there. I guess I grew up on an older all right, guys, that was interesting, right, Phil, Yeah, I think you stopped at about the right time. I would say, yeah, I don't like I don't draw many lines, but I let it. Probably let it go on way too long. I think it was. It was worth the effort. I'd say. I couldn't believe when he was out to leave, I thought you were just going to let him walk out, and I was expecting you kept you kept him in the room. And I mean the interview went on for about an hour and twenty minutes. That's a solid interview. Where about where it fell apart where it nearly fell apart several times. UM, so yeah, I thought it was. I thought you did a good job. Well, thanks Phil. I appreciate that, um, and I appreciate everybody sticking in and listening to that. That was it was one again and thanks to Mr Anthony Lecada for joining us me's editor in chief. It's one that we talked about a lot. I mean it really drove like some some energy in the room when we were done, like he kind of set a buzz the office because our our man Barry kind of came in and little fire. Yeah. I I left the room and I started walking around the office and I realized I had no purpose to where I was going. I was, I just needed to kind of keep moving. It was. It was bizarre and I was I was just getting energy plenty jittery after that. I mean it was. It was a strange happenstance. It was not to be expected. But um, hopefully it was an entertaining and somewhat informative version of the Hunting Collective, a different version what you normally get. And so thank you for listening. We won't get into any other big asks of you today. We'll let you just digest what you heard. I'm sure you'll have some comments. Hit me up on social media or the t h T at the media dot Com. Happy to talk through it with you if it needs some Catharsis after this one. So next week back to the normal show, right Phil, hopefully? I don't know. You don't you can't make any promises. I can't make any promise. I'm gonna have a white claw. We'll see you next time by because I can't go a week without doing run with drinking. Don't sit in as the boss, fool. Stop the grow roots feeling like in all on our baross shoes. All tell me, what is that a

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