Ep. 903: Stranded Whales, Cattle-Killing Wolves, and Maine Cleans Up Its Act

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en and the MeatEater crew discuss: Steve’s brush with the law; Drake quacks; NY hunters earn a second buck; stranded whales; Susan B. Anthony fish; wolf diets; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:09Steven Rinella?

  Welcome to the news show, everybody. Today, we've got news about my unfortunate, regrettable criminal past, damn removals in Maine, stranded whales on the Pacific coast, anti-Buffalo politicians are generally winning, but they suffered a minor setback, and you've heard of Earn a Buck. Well, welcome to Earn a Second Buck. And you won't believe this one, wolves eat cows. But first, our news. And to open up our news, we have a special guest here. The special guest's name is John Jersik. He is a retired Michigan conservation officer. Some folks call them game wardens, but in Michigan, they call them conservation officers.

• 1:54Steven Rinella?

  And I gotta give some background here. We're going back in time to around 93, or my guess would be 93 or 1994. I was parked in my truck on Manistee National Forest, where Cedar Creek crosses underneath M120, checking mink traps.

• 2:16Steven Rinella?

  In behind me pulls a game warden, a conservation officer.

• 2:22Steven Rinella?

  He gets out, we're talking, he asks me, have you been setting snares? Which alarmed me. Because I had, and they were illegal in that area and it wasn't my fault. I'll explain how it wasn't my fault. I'll explain right now. There was a game, there was a fur buyer named Abe Salasina. And I would sell some fur to Abe Salasina and Abe Salasina would always be pushing snares on you.

• 2:50Steven Rinella?

  When the snow got deep, Abe would be, you know what guys do in other areas is they set these snares and fur keeps coming in all winter. So it wasn't my fault.

• 2:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh, but it was very alarming to me and I lied, I lied. This is all terrible. This is all terrible. I'm just being upfront about my behavior. I lied and then the game warden, the conservation officer goes to my annoyance, goes through every trap in my truck. Checking the tags, you're legally obligated to have a tag on there.

• 3:23Steven Rinella?

  Checks them all. We converse, he leaves. Now I have written about this. I've talked about it. I told the story. A couple of weeks ago, my good friend from back home, Ronnie Bame is talking to a retired conservation officer. The retired conservation officer, knowing where Ronnie's from, though he's from the same twin lake. Asked him, do you know a guy?

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  Steve Rinella, who I checked for whatever back in 1994. And I thought to myself, why in the world is this on this man's mind now?

• 4:00Steven Rinella?

  Ronnie suggested I ask him.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  Here he is.

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  Thank you for coming on the show 30 years later.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  Well, well, I'm glad we've had this chance to sit down and talk and I'll tell you, you know, even though it's been a long time, you're gonna feel a lot better getting this off your chest. Okay.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  I've gotten it off my chest. I just need to hear it from your perspective because at the time, I didn't ask you what you're thinking and what you're doing. Walk me through your recollection of this.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Well, it's interesting that, you know, how you get caught with a snapshot in your brain of a spot, you know, in a, an incident or a time. I can see that. I can picture, you know, that was always a good spot, you know, there was a sand trap there and you could work trout fish right along that piece of ground and you know, we'd get trapped a little bit too, right?

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Everybody set mink traps there.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Right, right. Real common spot and it's right along a busy road. Um, yeah. So anyways, and you know, I've been there of course dozens and dozens of times in my career when I worked around here.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  And I can't remember, you know, what, you know, I think we approached this incident from two different perspectives. I may have simply just, hey, here's a guy trapping, right? I'm gonna check him. Uh, and then going through traps and mentioning about snaring. The bottom line, the, the, the end to this whole story is I was clueless that you had any snares.

• 5:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you were. Cause I was like, how does he know I have snares out?

• 5:43Speaker 06

  John, did you know, did you know that this fur buyer was out there pushing young trappers to use snares? Did you know this guy?

• 5:51Speaker 05

  That's the, the name? Oh yeah, I know the name, know who that was. Didn't know it was being pushed, so to speak. But, but here, here was, uh, and this is probably why I threw a dart and asked the question, right? That was at a time when it was, it was growing in interest locally. Uh, snaring and you know, and I knew for sure it was going on, but it wasn't at the time legal. Uh, it is today. But, uh, at the time it wasn't legal. So, you know, just like any other, you know, game ward on a fishing expedition. I'm gonna ask a few questions and see what he says, you know?

• 6:29Steven Rinella?

  But you, but you started right out with that question.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  I don't, so I don't know if it was, this part I don't honestly remember. Um, did I, was, was, did I have some knowledge that maybe you as a local guy were doing it? I don't remember that part. One, let me add this, when I was cleaning out paperwork when I retired, uh, back in nineteen, you know, remember we had the old report all poaching complaints, the rap complaints? Um, I had found one from you, um, and it was, the best I can recall again is it was Cedar Creek.

• 7:06Steven Rinella?

  No, Bear Creek.

• 7:08Speaker 05

  Bear Creek, okay. And, uh, and somebody had come across, or you had come across maybe untagged traps or something like that?

• 7:15Steven Rinella?

  Nope.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  And I, go ahead.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  I got in huge trouble with this from Abe Salasina.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:25Steven Rinella?

  I had found where a guy was trapping before season.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  And even though, even though I was, you know, as innocent as it was, even though I was a violator, I didn't want anyone else violating. And I thought that that violation was a bad violation.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 7:46Steven Rinella?

  So I called and reported a guy for trapping before season. Some informant told Abe Salasina, Abe Salasina ripped into me that you would ever report a trapper for anything and where do you get off? And you take that man to man, you do not call the state.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  Wow. Uh, okay. Well, so hold on, that's a good, that's a good story right in among itself. That in the trapper world, things do get settled out on the road. Um, you know, if, if people are stealing traps, if they're stealing fur from traps, if they're trespassing, or even, you know, if, if one guy gets on another guy's turf, that, that little war usually gets settled somewhere out there along the stream bank or in the woods or wherever. And of course, we never heard about it. There was a number of local trappers though um that I got to be pretty decent friends with and

• 8:48Speaker 05

  that you know they were pretty good. Yeah, I don't even want to call them informants. They they just tended to do the right thing. Um, and and wanted to see things done right. We're getting about four stories down the road now, but on that rap complaint, it it looked like I I can remember the uh the verbiage on it is I ended up finding a uh a young kid, you know, a teen or something like that. And I had gotten back a hold of you and you wondered if I could just handle it with a warning, which I did.

• 9:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 9:16Speaker 05

  Um, and and that's how that ended.

• 9:19Steven Rinella?

  That's probably after I got in trouble with Abe Salasino.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  It and it could well be. Um, but the uh, yeah, that that was the whole deal. And then going back to our our Cedar Creek contact. I don't know, you know, I don't, I don't recall that I specifically remembered I was after you or I had solid information that you were doing it, but the whole thing about snares at the time is kind of everybody was starting to do it, you know, it was something that uh people were doing, wasn't legal yet. It was so easy. You could cover a lot of ground. You could trespass easy. Uh, what people were doing was even it using it along the thirty-one corridor on the highways, like in the fences.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Um, doing stuff like that. And we probably didn't have the number of coyotes at that time that we do now. But um, you know, they were growing in numbers too and and and people were working it. And you know, as a trapper, um, anytime fur starts going higher than normal, right? Um, man, the incentive to cheat ends up there, whether it be trespass, another guy's turf, uh, stealing some traps. And I know I recovered quite a few stolen traps for area trappers, uh, um, you know, either out of the Whitehall Marsh or Muskegon Marsh.

• 10:33Steven Rinella?

  Yep. I'll tell you why it always stuck with me. What what I was doing is I was snaring Red Fox down in the thickets.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:42Steven Rinella?

  And when you said that, I knew you knew.

• 10:48Steven Rinella?

  But I thought, why did he not take it?

• 10:53Steven Rinella?

  Why did he not take it? Or why did he not just stake one out or do some kind of stuff to catch me?

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 11:00Steven Rinella?

  And then I was paranoid and quit for a while.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  Oh, one time, one time on a, another, uh, local trapper, I won't use a name though, but it was out at the wastewater. Okay, real, real common wastewater trapper out there.

• 11:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh, can I take a stab?

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  Did his first name start with a B and his last name start with a F?

• 11:25Speaker 05

  No.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  Was it B C?

• 11:31Speaker 05

  We should have this conversation.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  So anyways, the point was, is, uh, he, he had a few words with me out on the, out on the dirt road in the middle of the wastewater, like, you know, why are you eyes after me and all that? I concluded the conversation by turning around, getting back in my truck and said, you know, paranoia is a mighty powerful tool, isn't it? And I just drove away. So.

• 12:00Steven Rinella?

  Man, all right, my last question for you, John, and I appreciate you doing this. My last question for you is, since it was a nothing thing and you didn't give me a ticket

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  and you were just throwing that out there as a fishing expedition, uh, why did it stick in your mind? Cause I wasn't like a known figure at all. I was, I had never been in trouble, you know?

• 12:21Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. Yeah, let's clarify to the audience. You weren't anybody that I, I had on the radar or was following around or anything like that, or had, as best I can recall, any specific information, you know, on, on you doing anything.

• 12:36Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  So, so I don't know, why does it stick in my mind? You got me. Um, I, you know, I know I dealt with a number of local trappers over the years, good and bad. And I don't know, some of them, you know, you were just around for so long, you sort of got to know these guys. And, uh, you know, it's, it, nothing, nothing real specific, nothing evil. I, I don't remember, again, I think this was just a, a chance, uh, meeting out, out on the side M120. And I thought, hey, I'll, I'll throw a dart, see if the guys got sneered.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  And you know, as, as, as a trapper, finding people's snares and that sort of thing, not an easy task.

• 13:17Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  And, uh.

• 13:18Steven Rinella?

  How to find your own snares.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. And that's one of the things, if you talk to people that run a lot of snares, I don't think they recover them all every year. You know, cause how do you simply remember if you got out a hundred of them, you know, where are they all?

• 13:32Steven Rinella?

  Um, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  But yeah, they were all, snaring was also starting to gain in popularity, like in those, uh, you know, sort of the edge of Mesquite and Grand Haven, Grand Rapids. Those edges, like the fringe urban areas.

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  You know, um, you know, places where you might have fox and stuff like that down in there. Yeah. So there you go.

• 13:51Steven Rinella?

  Man, I sure appreciate you coming on. This is gonna add significant color to the story. It's going to, it's a hot tip for game wardens. Just to throw out wild stuff.

• 14:05Steven Rinella?

  Just throw out wild accusations, just to see if someone, if it hits and also to induce paranoia in poachers.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Well, you know, the, the whole nature of the job is quite a bit of smoke and mirrors, you know, a lot of times you're covering a county by yourself or more. You know, and, and vast areas, you know, you might be an hour to the other side of the area you cover or more. So like I say, it's smoke and mirrors, trying to make everybody feel that you're everywhere at once, 24/7, right? Which is impossible. So to chum the waters with a little bit of information out there, you know, and, and ask some questions. You never know. Sometimes you get lucky and they say something.

• 14:49Steven Rinella?

  Well, it worked on me. I'd formed the opinion of you that you knew all things that you were like, you had like godlike omniscience about the woods. So thank, thank you very much for coming on, John. I appreciate it, man. Enjoy, uh, enjoy the rest of your retirement.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  All right. Thank you much for having me.

• 15:05Steven Rinella?

  All right, buddy. Take it easy.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  Thanks, John.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 15:09Speaker 07

  It's great.

• 15:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh Nate, pull up where it all happened.

• 15:12Speaker 06

  Oh yeah.

• 15:12Steven Rinella?

  For you people watching on YouTube, here's where it all went down.

• 15:16Speaker 07

  What other game wardens can we interview that you've ran into in the past?

• 15:19Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's a great story.

• 15:22Steven Rinella?

  We were one time here in Montana, we're hunting ducks and we had our decoys in the canoe. We weren't in the canoe. We were using the canoe to drag our decoys, opening day. I get a ticket for no life jackets. I tried to, seventy-five dollar ticket, I tried to explain, but we're not in the canoe. He's like, come on, I'm like, I'm serious, man. It's just, we're just using to drag decoys. Still a ticket. The next year, I'm not kidding you, a year later, opening day. Same boat launch, same canoe, full of decoys, different game warden pulls in, writes me a citation.

• 15:58Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 15:59Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, but we're not in the canoe.

• 16:02Steven Rinella?

  Me and the same buddy, seventy-five dollar ticket again.

• 16:05Speaker 07

  You could have bought a lot of life jackets.

• 16:06Speaker 06

  Think you would have learned.

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  You'd think I would have learned.

• 16:11Steven Rinella?

  But that's not as good of a story. Uh, all right, what's next?

• 16:14Speaker 06

  Max is writing in.

• 16:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh, this is more our news, this is more our news here.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Oh, I'd like to preface this with, uh, well, the, the, the text chain started at four fifty-seven AM.

• 16:27Steven Rinella?

  He's got a new baby.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it also must have gotten fired up to be texting another guy at four fifty-seven AM. It's a little bit early, I feel like.

• 16:35Steven Rinella?

  I think he's up all night with that new baby, so he's probably got nothing to do. Changing diapers, all that.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  Think about it. He says, Drake's don't quack like a hen and I'll stand by that till I die. I said, yeah, the Cornell Lab proved that, but also proved that they do quack like a Drake. What I'm calling a quack is pre-specific, I think, ducks make a lot of sounds. I said, depending on how discerning the ear is, and since, in quotes, Max, they make a lot of sounds, you can see how the two could be conflated. Ha, ha, ha, but a Drake doesn't quack. Even Rocky knows that. That is not the nickname or name of his, uh, new son. But, um, uh, okay, so that's just, just pumping the tires up here a little bit, because I'm excited to see what Max came up with. You rule it. All right. Clearing the air here a little bit.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  Drake Mallards do not quack. Simple as that.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  And I'll take that to my grave, they don't quack. Yes, they make a sound.

• 17:35Speaker 07

  out of their mouth, but it's more of a buzz or a whistle, just not a quack.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  I pulled up the same website, Yanni and Seaver listening to.

• 17:51Speaker 07

  That is a Drake whistle.

• 17:59Speaker 07

  That is a hen quack.

• 18:01Steven Rinella?

  He is splitting hairs a little bit.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 07

  Whistle, quack, just two different things.

• 18:08Speaker 07

  Sort of like music, there is different pitches.

• 18:12Speaker 07

  And I think in duck calls, there's different pitches as well. A hen mallard can do a high pitched and a low pitched quack. A Drake can also do a high pitched whistle and a low pitched whistle. What I think Yanni is getting confused is that low end whistle. It's not a pure dweet, dweet, it's just like a dweet.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  It's a little more sharper, a little more crisp. Um, I'll pull up.

• 18:39Speaker 06

  Sounds a lot like a quack.

• 18:41Steven Rinella?

  No, hear him out, hear him out.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  He's getting his calls out, ladies and gentlemen.

• 18:46Speaker 07

  Drake whistle, standard.

• 18:49Speaker 07

  This is gonna be my high pitched.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  At the end, you can almost hear like a T.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  And then this is gonna be my low end.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  Nowhere near a quack.

• 19:18Speaker 07

  Simple as that.

• 19:21Speaker 07

  I am so confident.

• 19:24Speaker 07

  In my opinion, I'm gonna make a T-shirt that says, Drakes don't quack.

• 19:31Steven Rinella?

  That's confidence.

• 19:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So, there you have it. There's my opinion, there's my stance on it. Drakes don't quack. They don't quack.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  I think he just wanted to show off his turkey fan collection.

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Yanni.

• 19:50Speaker 07

  Wasn't there somebody on the crew who saw a hen turkey gobble?

• 19:55Steven Rinella?

  But that happens, but they don't gobble gobble.

• 19:57Speaker 07

  Right, but like, I, I mean, if, if you were to say they kind of gobble, but not really gobble, could you not apply the same thing here? Like a, a Drake will quack, but not really quack, just kind of a quack?

• 20:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's not a quack.

• 20:10Speaker 06

  And I think, I wish that Max would have been able to do a better Drake whistle that sounded like that Drake quack that we heard from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

• 20:18Steven Rinella?

  Drake quack. Alright, Spencer, tell us about the auction house bodies.

• 20:22Speaker 07

  Auction house has one week left. Everything has been bid on. We, we appreciate everyone throwing their money at this good cause. There's one item though, that had, does not have a bid yet, that is the boat motor. It's a Honda 150 VTEC outboard, outboard motor. You gotta pick it up in Bozeman. We have it listed at 8K right now. That's, that's like the first bid that's gonna be made.

• 20:44Steven Rinella?

  Can I talk about that? Why that is?

• 20:46Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 20:48Steven Rinella?

  This, this money all go, this is a fund, this is a fundraiser, like a nonprofit venture. All this money goes to land access fund.

• 20:57Steven Rinella?

  We know that we can take that 150 outboard Honda.

• 21:01Speaker 07

  Marketplace, we'd get 10 to 15K.

• 21:03Steven Rinella?

  Because it's worth twice what we're, it's got, it's got, oh, the only hours it has is the hours that we used to film Doss Boat. One season of Doss Boat, which is filmed over the course of a few days.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, the episode I was involved in, we floated that boat with no engine. Then we put the engine on and fished for four hours. So my episode only had four hours.

• 21:25Steven Rinella?

  And so it's, it's worth twice, if you went and bought it new, which it is, it's worth twice that. So we put the minimum at eight grand because we could just go sell it on Facebook Marketplace, or probably just take it to Townsend and bring it to an outboard dealer and sell it to him for 8,000 bucks.

• 21:41Speaker 07

  This is the rare example in our auction house where you could get something at a good deal.

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  And no one's been on the damn thing.

• 21:47Speaker 07

  No one's been on it yet.

• 21:47Steven Rinella?

  It's only been a day, but.

• 21:48Speaker 07

  So you get, we got the auction house going for another week. Uh, we also have listed my box of rocks. I don't feel like that description does it justice though. So I want to tell you about my five favorite rocks. There's 17 different rocks I have in here that I've collected over the years. I'm gonna give you my five favorite ones. First one here is Wonderstone from Nevada. Uh, we had the Meadeer Live Tour in 2024. We spent the night in Reno. Uh, I got up at 5:00 AM. I went and got a rental car. I drove out into the desert about 90 minutes to a place called Rainbow Mountain.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Was everyone like, where Spencer going?

• 22:18Speaker 07

  Steve threatened to come with me. Yeah, Steve threatened to come with me and I was like, I'll, I'll get you up at 5:00 AM. And you're like, eh, eh, maybe not.

• 22:25Steven Rinella?

  I was already up.

• 22:26Speaker 07

  Uh, so that, that was formed by layers of volcanic ash. Uh, it's a popular rock among artists who do mosaics because, uh, you know, it's got a bunch of layers of color. It's one of the prettiest rocks I own. Uh, so that is Wonderstone, also known as Rhyolite. There you go. This one's kind of an eyeball shape.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  You must own a few of these then.

• 22:44Speaker 07

  I have, I have a few pieces. Yeah, there it is. Uh, when I found it on the mountain and then the next picture is my suitcase, uh, going home. I took home plenty, plenty of Rhyolite Wonderstone with me. The, the tour bus got heavier, uh, after that day.

• 22:58Steven Rinella?

  That's a big one.

• 22:59Speaker 07

  Uh, next one, Obsidian from Oregon. I found this at the Glass Buttes in Oregon. Uh, that's one of the biggest obsidian deposits in the world. Uh, ancient humans were spreading this stuff all across the continent. Obsidian traced back to here has been found in Ohio. That ancient peoples carried their, traded their way there. Uh, so we got a big old piece of obsidian. You could keep it raw, just like that. Uh, or you, if you're a flint napper, you could turn it into something dangerous.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  That's what I was gonna, did you ever just get the urge to break some of the rocks you find?

• 23:29Steven Rinella?

  I got some of this and I did bust it all up.

• 23:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 23:31Steven Rinella?

  It's so nice.

• 23:32Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:33Steven Rinella?

  You hit that with a hammer, dude.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  Yes, this is a raw, raw piece. You do whatever you like. If you're gonna break it up, like put a towel around it and then smash that thing with a hammer.

• 23:41Steven Rinella?

  And then watch your ass, cause that stuff is sharp. It's the sharpest natural substance.

• 23:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's very sharp. This is a raw piece. It's about the size of a softball. All right, number three is a leaf fossil from Idaho. Uh, there's this landowner there who was building a dirt bike. Track back in the seventies and as he's building this dirt bike track, he uh he starts excavating the side of a mountain. And he uncovers a fifteen million year old lake bed. Uh and that lake formed when there was a volcano nearby that went off and it dammed up this river and just like in the blink of an eye. It it totally flooded this valley um and it it put all these trees and plant life under some really deep cold water. And so this is one of those leaves, looks like probably from an elm.

• 24:25Steven Rinella?

  How old is that?

• 24:27Speaker 07

  Fifteen million years old. Likely from an elm tree, really delicate rock. When you go to this guy's place and you find him just on his property somewhere, like I found him driving his tractor around, he's like, you here for the dirt bikes or the fossils? Uh and then you pay him like ten bucks or I don't remember what the what the fee was, it was real cheap, it was like ten dollars.

• 24:44Steven Rinella?

  And you found all that?

• 24:45Speaker 06

  And you can uh for ten bucks, uh that's you you pick which one you want?

• 24:50Speaker 07

  I don't remember what the dirt bike fee, uh my my rock hounding fee was real cheap. Uh it was only me and my wife and then there was one other group there, uh it was somebody from China who was doing a research project.

• 25:01Steven Rinella?

  He let you haul away all that?

• 25:03Speaker 07

  All that, didn't ask any questions, just said knock yourself out and and the ten dollar fee. So this is one of those fossils that I found there.

• 25:10Steven Rinella?

  Damn.

• 25:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't know, probably like six inches long, looks like it's probably from an elm, uh from an elm tree. Uh number two, this is a fish fossil from Wyoming, uh it's from the world famous Green River Formation. It's a really amazing place called American Fossil, you book your dig like way in advance. Uh and then you get to go there, this is a a video of what a successful uh one of these would look like.

• 25:34Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  Um this is a nightia.

• 25:36Steven Rinella?

  Was that you?

• 25:37Speaker 07

  That's me, that's the state fossil of Wyoming, uh it's an extinct type of herring. Uh it it's like one of the coolest places on planet earth, I think, you get to go to this giant quarry. You take home anything you find there, it can be absolutely anything, fish is the most common, but there's mammals, insects, birds. Uh there's been like a a three toed horse that was discovered there and you could find something worth millions of dollars, you get to take home. Uh so this is one of those fish that I found that day.

• 26:02Steven Rinella?

  Man, people don't bid this up, they could go to hell.

• 26:06Speaker 07

  And then the last one here is a dino bone that I found in Montana with the famous and infamous Jack Horner.

• 26:14Steven Rinella?

  He's been on the show.

• 26:15Speaker 07

  Put him, yeah, I put him in a real tough spot when he was on that show and I asked him if I could come with on a dino dig and how does he say no, you know, when there's microphone.

• 26:22Steven Rinella?

  That's what happened?

• 26:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, I asked him on the show, uh huh.

• 26:26Steven Rinella?

  And he's like. That's how you got in?

• 26:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, I guess so. So I'm like, okay. And I emailed him the next day and I'm like, Jack, when, when can I join you? And so like three months later, I was on a dino dig with Jack in northern Montana. And this is a, a duckbill dino, a type of duckbill that Jack actually discovered. Uh, and, and if we were doing this news show back in February, we might've talked about Jack. Because he was in the Epstein files. That's why I say the infamous, also infamous for other reasons. I never told this story, but I feel like it adds something to this.

• 26:55Steven Rinella?

  Now, just to be clear.

• 26:57Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 26:57Steven Rinella?

  Being in the Epstein files.

• 26:59Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 27:00Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't in and of itself mean anything?

• 27:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, to add context for, for Jack's involvement, uh, he went to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico to look for dino bones. And then I think they talked about him joining the ranch in Wyoming to also do some excavating.

• 27:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's just important to.

• 27:20Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 27:21Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 27:21Speaker 07

  There, there's some more Jack Horner background about his, one of his wives that he had. Okay, so.

• 27:27Steven Rinella?

  Yes, he married a student.

• 27:28Speaker 07

  When I go to this dino dig, uh, this was 2022, I believe. Um, as a volunteer, I'm teamed up with a paleontologist and then you're like given a job and a paleontologist to work with. Our job was prospecting, meaning we got to just like wander around the Badlands and look for possible fossils or, or like big, big deposits of fossils.

• 27:50Speaker 07

  And I'm asking this woman some questions and I, all of a sudden I, well, my wife, I'm like, I think this might be Jack's, um, like wife that, the student that he married. And then it comes out a little bit later that it was. So I found this rock with Jack's famous ex-wife and Jack.

• 28:05Steven Rinella?

  They got, they split up?

• 28:06Speaker 07

  They, they split up. Yeah. Uh, but they're still friends. They're great friends. And she's like, I love Jack. Jack's one of the most important people in my life. We're great friends. We still work together. Um, so like the only people have touched this bone are Jack Horner, Jack Horner's ex-wife, me, my wife. That's, that's the fossil you're getting from a type of dinosaur that he discovered back in the seventies that put Jack on the map. Uh, Duckville Diner.

• 28:29Steven Rinella?

  God, what a box of fossils.

• 28:31Speaker 07

  Seventeen of them. Those are five of my favorites.

• 28:33Steven Rinella?

  That's just five. That's the worst five.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, we got petrified wooden here clam fossils, snail fossils, agates, all kinds of stuff.

• 28:40Steven Rinella?

  Inga of gold?

• 28:41Speaker 07

  No.

• 28:43Steven Rinella?

  Damn. Love it.

• 28:45Speaker 01

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• 29:50Steven Rinella?

  Most Lamos in the world get their meat at the grocery store, but we prefer to pack ours out of the field. That's why we made the Meat Eater Grocery Bags. Ultra lightweight, breathable nylon game bags that cool your meat fast and keep it clean from the field to the cooler. With reflective print and features to help you find your game bags in the dark, meaning like reflective stuff so your flashlight shines off it even when you got it hanging way up in a tree. We have two sets, okay? We got sets for whether you're packing out a deer or whether you're packing out an elk or moose, and they're reusable season after season. I've had some of mine for many years. I just, I give them a good rinse, run them through my wash machine, hang them up to dry. These are your grocery

• 30:34Steven Rinella?

  bags. These are a thinking man's grocery bags. Head over to the meat eater store.com and get yourself a brand new set of excellent game bags for this coming season.

• 30:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay, on to your news. Now, your news today is brought to you by banished suppressors, which I'm holding in my hand here. What I'm holding in my hand specifically is the Meat Eater Banished Collab Suppressor, which has the equivalent of like a little adjustable muzzle brake apparatus on the end. It's 30 cal can. You can run on anything. I run one of these on my 22 Creedmoor on up. Brought to you by that. Okay. The your news is a guy that wrote in today. He comes in looking for life advice and he's gonna get it. He says he was at a, what was he at?

• 31:18Speaker 06

  Estate sale.

• 31:20Steven Rinella?

  He was at an estate sale. I don't know how he got there and Randall wasn't there, but he was at an estate sale. And he sees that there's a beaver pelt for sale. Winds up that there's two beaver pelts. Once he gets to asking about it. The old lady wants 25 bucks for both of them. He somehow gets her down to 20 bucks. So he gets two beaver pelts for 20 bucks. He bought them because they seemed cool. He didn't want them to get thrown away. And he bought them because, quote, "You guys have talked a lot about fur as such an interesting and high quality material." He goes on to say, "But having them, I don't really know

• 32:04Steven Rinella?

  what to do with them." Have a hat made? It's not that cold here. I wouldn't get to use it hardly ever. My wife... Okay, it's hard for me to say this without crying. He says, "My wife is unlikely to allow them as decor."

• 32:25Speaker 06

  I feel like he should have gone a little further here and like, act like, he hasn't even asked her yet. You know what I mean?

• 32:32Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  We should, we should...

• 32:34Steven Rinella?

  Scared of her.

• 32:35Speaker 06

  I know. We, we, we need...

• 32:36Steven Rinella?

  I'll sometimes need to ask my wife about something for three months. Just waiting for the right moment.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  Scaredy cat.

• 32:42Steven Rinella?

  I am. The other, I'm petrified. Anyway, I thought you guys might have some suggestions. Happy if you want to discuss on the pod, or even drop me a line or email. Thanks in advance. I got a ton of suggestions. There's all kinds of stuff you could do with it. Nate pulled a picture here where my feet are resting on a beaver fur ottoman. How does a guy like this, how does a guy make something like this? I'll tell you. We had an ottoman and it had a little pad.

• 33:13Steven Rinella?

  I went and got some super thin, so scrap of super thin plywood.

• 33:19Steven Rinella?

  Wrap, put the plywood on the bottom, wrap the beaver hide around the pad and took a staple gun and

• 33:26Steven Rinella?

  and there you have it. It still started making my back too sweaty. There was always a beaver pelt over this chair I'm leaning on.

• 33:35Steven Rinella?

  You could take your two beaver pelts and have a hat made and send it to a person that lives in a cold place.

• 33:41Steven Rinella?

  You could just have it laying over pieces of furniture and when people come over, you'd go, see that? That's a beaver pelt.

• 33:45Speaker 06

  Well, he's got his wife to contend with.

• 33:47Steven Rinella?

  The biggest problem he's got, the biggest problem he's got is what do you mean your wife won't let you? Like, what is, it's not even none of her business.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  We're not talking about not asking my wife something for two weeks. It's not about something like that.

• 34:03Speaker 06

  Right. You would just lay it across the couch and be done with it.

• 34:08Steven Rinella?

  A hundred percent.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  Well, yeah. So I mean, that's what I would do.

• 34:11Steven Rinella?

  Nothing else is there. What, you don't want to be in a happy marriage?

• 34:15Speaker 06

  No, I would do the same thing. And it was like.

• 34:17Steven Rinella?

  I was at my dentist the other day. Yesterday I was at my dentist.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  Those dentists are problems, you know?

• 34:21Steven Rinella?

  He was telling me his wife's out of town. He hung a bunch of taxidermy up in a certain place in the living room. His wife comes back out of town, doesn't like it. He said, but she can't even climb up there.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  Dude, I got, my wife just built these shelves and there's 24 nooks. Guess how many nooks I am allocated? 12. One.

• 34:41Steven Rinella?

  No, it should be 12.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  That's what I said. And?

• 34:43Steven Rinella?

  You're not?

• 34:44Speaker 06

  No. You're gonna let it slide? I'm trying my best, but dude. How many, how many?

• 34:48Speaker 07

  What you do is you build your own thing with 30 nooks. Put that where you want it.

• 34:54Speaker 06

  Give her one.

• 34:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Man, there's all kinds of bad stuff about my wife, but the one thing. Like, she never, there's certain things she just does not mess with me about.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 35:08Steven Rinella?

  She would never mess with me about something like this.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  About home decor.

• 35:12Steven Rinella?

  About skulls and all that kind of stuff. Never messes with me about it.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  That's gift.

• 35:17Steven Rinella?

  And like never messes with me about doing stuff in the kitchen. I could take a roadkill moose and put it on that counter and she is not gonna mention it.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  I feel like unless someone was like a vegan or seriously anti hunting or something like a beaver pellet's not offensive in any way.

• 35:32Steven Rinella?

  No, my, my wife is always mad at me. But like she doesn't mess with me about some things. She's perpetually mad about some stuff. But this is just not an issue I have to deal with. So it's hard for me to even empathize.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Can we make that a regular segment? Like things that she's mad at you about?

• 35:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh yeah, she could host it.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  How's it working in your house Spencer? Around home decor?

• 35:54Speaker 07

  I have a pretty good guess by now as to like what my wife would approve of and not approve of. And so I don't, I don't get that one wrong too often, but also if there's something I really want and she doesn't, I'll be like, this is really important to me. I really want this buck up in here that I killed.

• 36:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 07

  Uh, and then I, that, that usually wins it for me. Uh, and I think that, but that's also like a powerful sentence to say like this is important to me. Um, so I don't use that one often either.

• 36:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 07

  I think you could tell your wife that these beaver pellets from this estate sale are very important to, uh, email her.

• 36:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 07

  That might just do it.

• 36:26Steven Rinella?

  If not, time to get a new one. I'll call her. Onto the news.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  You didn't even mention getting them turned into a, a, a pillow. Those are some of my favorite things I like at your house are those beaver pillows.

• 36:38Steven Rinella?

  Why didn't I think of that? You're gonna turn this into a win for your wife.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 36:42Steven Rinella?

  Hadn't thought of that. I'm gonna give you a hot tip.

• 36:47Steven Rinella?

  Sewing by soami. Should we even say that? Should we bleep that out?

• 36:53Speaker 06

  I'm sure she'd love the business.

• 36:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'll give you a hot tip. Sewing by soami.

• 36:59Speaker 06

  How you spell soami?

• 37:00Steven Rinella?

  S O A M I.

• 37:04Steven Rinella?

  That's your hot tip. Say you want a pillow, leather backed pillow. Your wife.

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  Your wife will be praising you. This is gonna turn all your marriage around. You're gonna become a household hero.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  She'll ask you to start trapping beavers.

• 37:22Steven Rinella?

  When you get that leather back beaver fur throw pillow in that house.

• 37:29Steven Rinella?

  She's not gonna get off it.

• 37:33Steven Rinella?

  You're not gonna see her in your bedroom anymore because she's gonna be sleeping with her head on that couch pillow.

• 37:38Steven Rinella?

  Onto the news.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  Earn a buck is back, except now it's earn a second buck.

• 37:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it sounds that.

• 37:46Speaker 06

  I like it.

• 37:47Steven Rinella?

  That's got more of a, that's got more of a ring to it.

• 37:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. We'll give you the first one. You gotta earn the second one. Um, in New York state this time. Beginning this year, uh, New York hunters must harvest and report an antlerless deer doe or antlerless buck. Uh, before becoming eligible to shoot a second, uh, antler buck or antler deer. It's a statewide rule. It replaces the previous system that allowed many hunters to harvest two bucks without taking an antlerless deer.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  Every licensed hunter will still receive an antler deer tag. And they'll earn that second antler deer tag only after legally harvesting and reporting an antlerless deer.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Can you back up a minute?

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 38:32Steven Rinella?

  And explain to people why? Why is this even a thing?

• 38:37Speaker 06

  Oh, that's, that's all next. So, New York state's got a million whitetails. 500,000 hunters, deer hunters, uh, annual harvest is around 225,000 deer. But only 100,000 of those are does. So in a lot of wildlife management units, the deer population is greatly exceeding objectives. Um, and, and they're starting to see that excessive browsing is creating poor habitat. Nutritional stress on the deer that are there and it slows down forest regeneration. They're also seeing crop damage. More deer vehicle collisions. So that the doe harvest is, the rate is too low.

• 39:20Speaker 06

  And in fact, only about 13% of New York deer hunters harvest one. Antlerless deer, only 3% are harvested in two or more.

• 39:30Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 39:31Speaker 06

  Yep. I, I, I don't, it's a, I don't get it personally. Like it was never a big, like, we always were all about harvesting does, you know? I don't know why it's a big deal these days. Um, but DEC, uh, Department of Environmental Conservation, can you look that up?

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  Department of Environmental Conservation.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Environmental Conservation, yeah. So they did like focus groups and surveys and things and they had input from biologists all over the state.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  But before they came to this, like this idea for harvesting more does and actually something that came out in that same, those same surveys is a lot of hunters preferred going back to a one buck limit, but uh, DEC concluded, you know, that's not going to do anything to increase antlerless harvest. So there, there was no reason to do that. Um.

• 40:20Steven Rinella?

  But at, at its inception, the earn a buck concept was you, they were going into, to try to control deer numbers and particularly around CWD. They were going to places where you traditionally would just get a buck tag.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:35Steven Rinella?

  And they were going to hunters and saying, no longer can you just get a buck?

• 40:40Speaker 06

  You gotta.

• 40:41Steven Rinella?

  You have to kill a doe to get a buck. And that wound up being in some areas exceedingly unpopular. Wisconsin did it and undid it.

• 40:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, we'll get, well, I'm going to get to all that stuff. Um, so the regular season deer tag is now called the antler deer tag. And you, and you qualify for that second buck by using, uh, you know, just a rifle doe tag, a bow muzzleloader. Um, whatever you get the doe with, it doesn't matter. You'll get that second buck tag after you prove that you've killed that doe. And, and this was, this was some interesting stuff here. Um,

• 41:18Speaker 06

  the state's going to implement verification measures to, to prove, to, to make sure hunters prove that they actually killed the deer because there was some concern around people just like filling out a tag and saying, you know, I killed one. And then they get straight to that second buck. They were never interested in, in shooting a doe. So they're they're gonna do field checks. Hunters may be required to sign an attestation verifying their report. They if if requested hunters must provide proof of the harvest within a week. And that could be a photograph. It could be a like a receipt from a deer processor.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  They're just trying to like dissuade people from faking it. And if they do get caught faking it, it's two fifty two hundred fifty dollars per fence up to two grand. And possibly one year in jail.

• 42:07Steven Rinella?

  I imagine that. What are you in for?

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, but this.

• 42:11Steven Rinella?

  What do you I'm in for murder. What are you in for? He's like, well, you know, the earn a buck program?

• 42:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 06

  Like, New York's going big on proving this. Michigan also just like they just came out with a a new proposal for a similar earn a second buck program. They're they're looking to do a pilot program in five counties in southern Michigan. And their proof is just like the tag. They're just like, we kind of looked at the proving it all these different ways. It was too expensive. So a tag's good enough. So Michigan's going a much different direction. A tag as in I bought a tag? No, like you like like, you know.

• 42:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's some blood on it.

• 42:53Speaker 06

  They just looked at like dealing with photos and and like game check stations, all that. And it was just too much money.

• 43:00Steven Rinella?

  But that was the that was the accusation I heard in Wisconsin when Wisconsin did earn a buck. I would hear from guys saying that a group of guys that get a dough. And everybody'd use the damn dough.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure.

• 43:13Steven Rinella?

  To go get their buck taken.

• 43:14Speaker 06

  Now, like this, like, white tail populations are like going through the roof in a lot of places. They're like Steve mentions, there's concerns with CWD. But still, like, it's it hasn't. This program has not been popular in the past. Like hunters feel like it delays their opportunity to kill a buck. If you're a hunter who can only, you know, maybe hunt one day on the weekend or. Two days on the weekend. It's it's like limited time. Trophy hunters that aren't interested in shooting does at all, aren't interested in it. And this this this last one makes some sense because the regulation can tend to treat low density and high density deer areas of the same.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  For example, in New York, this northern zone, the Adirondacks, like that's an area with really low deer densities. So, you know, it's going to make it harder to to get that doe and then get that second buck. The D E C's D E C says it's to incentivize, not punish hunters. If they do want a second buck, they can travel to one of the wildlife management units where there's a lot of does and and do it that way.

• 44:28Speaker 06

  For those hunters that like, don't like it, maybe question whether it works, like there's proof that it does work. You control populations by shooting does. Wisconsin pioneered the earn a buck program in the late in the 1990s. It ran a little more than a decade before it got shut down just because of hunter dissatisfaction dissatisfaction with the program. But it increased doe harvest rates by 20 to 40%, reduced deer densities. And it helped improve forest regeneration.

• 45:02Speaker 06

  The wildlife manager in Wisconsin, like they concluded it was like a very successful program. But it was just like the hunters didn't like it. Doug Durn will tell you it's the most effective whitetail herd management strategy ever created. There's a few other states that have experimented with it, not like on a statewide level. Iowa and some other midwestern states have have run like localized earn a buck regulations with the same results, like higher doe harvest and faster population reductions. So like it does.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  Work. We'll see if the New York hunters embrace it or not. I'm not sure how it's gonna go like. I'm all for it, but I've never like really done it or experienced it.

• 45:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep, dude.

• 45:47Speaker 07

  Sorry, dude.

• 45:47Steven Rinella?

  I would say if you were a state and you had a rigid, you're like in a rigid one buck state.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we're in a, like, we live in a one buck state. Rigidly one buck.

• 45:57Speaker 07

  And New York is a two buck state. They're not going from one to two. They're staying at two.

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:01Steven Rinella?

  Saying, but let's say.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  Pennsylvania.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  You're a two buck state or a one buck state.

• 46:06Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 46:06Steven Rinella?

  I think the way to do it.

• 46:09Steven Rinella?

  Is you gotta, you'd be like, let's say you're a one buck state. You say. You still get your one buck, same as normal. You gotta kill two does. And then you earn an unprecedented.

• 46:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  Second buck opportunity.

• 46:25Speaker 07

  What an opportunity.

• 46:26Steven Rinella?

  That would be, people feel like they're getting more.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  Not like they gotta jump through hoops to get what they've always had, because that's when you wind up with discontent.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. But I mean, it's like falling dough harvest is like a problem all over the country these days.

• 46:41Steven Rinella?

  People don't, yeah, because people are pansies. They don't want to eat deer meat anymore. The, the. Yeah. Here, here's the, like, in 20 years, this will become more clear. Maybe it'll be 50 years to become more clear. Of the two conversa, there's two conversations happening about deer, whitetail deer in America.

• 46:58Steven Rinella?

  Conversation one. There's too many whitetail deer. Over vast portions of the range, there's too many whitetail deer by someone's measure.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay, landscaping, ticks, agriculture, highway collisions, by someone's measure, there's too many deer. The other major conversation happening on whitetail deer in America is that we have that chronic wasting disease is spreading. And ultimately, chronic wasting disease is gonna have population level impacts. Some people project it's gonna have catastrophic population level impact.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  And they're seeing falling populations in places already.

• 47:38Steven Rinella?

  I know, but these two stories, you're right. Well, yes, you can argue it.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:46Steven Rinella?

  These two stories at some point are going to need to reconcile with each other.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:50Steven Rinella?

  They're, the, these two narratives are not in sync.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  Nope.

• 47:55Steven Rinella?

  And like, and I don't know, is it 20 years, is it 50 years, when it becomes clear where one of the narratives was wrong? Or, or something, or they come together and all of a sudden we're talking about, there are no deer anymore.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, hopefully it's not that. Hopefully it's like a management strategy that everyone agrees works, you know? Like here in Montana, they have special CWD hunts, like late in the season where it's, you know, he, doesn't matter if you've already shot a buck, you can get these CWD tags and go in and kill a buck or a doe. You just gotta be prepared to deal with a deer that might be CWD positive, you know?

• 48:35Steven Rinella?

  In the same season, I hunted two different earn a buck programs in two different states. One was you could shoot a buck. It was exactly like this. You could shoot a buck and then you had to shoot a doe in order to shoot a second buck. And the other one, you had to shoot a doe before you were allowed to shoot your one buck. I shot, I, I was way more motivated to go out and kill that first doe. I traveled to, I traveled probably eight hours to go hunt over Halloween weekend, shoot a doe, came back home, then went two weeks later to shoot a buck. The other program where it was shoot a buck, shoot a doe, shoot a second buck was my home state. I shot a buck, peak rut, and I was like, cool, I'm good.

• 49:18Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. I didn't go out and shoot another doe. And I, I wanted to. It's not like I was like, oh, screw these guys. I wanted to go shoot out another doe. It was not a high enough priority for me to get out there and do it.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't get the like, not wanting to go hunt and shoot a deer and eat a deer, like.

• 49:32Steven Rinella?

  You're eating something.

• 49:33Speaker 06

  I, you're hunting too and learning and.

• 49:37Steven Rinella?

  But I still hear, there's still people out there and it might have something to do with just the, you know, high density, low density areas.

• 49:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  But, uh, there's people that have memories of years where there were more deer. In their area and they long for those times when they would see 20 deer a sit instead of just two and

• 49:57Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, that was me when I was a kid. We'd see 40 deer and one was a spike, you know?

• 50:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But people miss those days, you know, they like a target reach environment.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure.

• 50:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

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• 51:14Steven Rinella?

  Whether your season's already open or you're still counting down the days, The Meat Eater Store has what you need to get ready. We're talking First Light, FHF, Sig Sour, Moultrie, Phelps, the brands we actually run in the field, plus brand new tees, hoodies, and hats that just dropped with more dropping every month. Also, check out our new Meat Eater Grocery Game Bags. These game bags are ultra-light breathable nylon. They cool your meat fast and keep it clean from the kill site to the cooler. They got reflective trim on them so you can keep working after dark and find your bags even if you got them hanging way up in a tree in the middle of the night. And once you've got meat in the cooler, we've

• 51:56Steven Rinella?

  got you covered there too. Seasonings, cookbooks, and knives to cook up everything you bring home. To check it all out, head to themeateasterstore.com.

• 52:09Steven Rinella?

  All right, moving on to the to the Wild Buffalo reporting desk. Story about American Prairie. Some of you might know it as American Prairie Reserve. It's now American Prairie. For reference sake, if you want to go back into our library, we recently did an episode with the CEO of American Prairie about their mission. To summarize real quick before we get into the nitty gritty on this one. American Prairie is a is a conservation land preservation organization that operates out of North Central Montana. Their objective is to buy land on the open market. Okay, willing seller, willing buyer, they just bid and buy land on the open market.

• 52:50Steven Rinella?

  And then try to restore it to, you know, as pristine as possible of a landscape. They own outright deeded land. They own about 167,000 acres of deeded land. They sit on grazing leases. They sit on more grazing lease land than they sit on deeded land. So so to the tune of it, they have grazing rights. Either because they own it or they lease it on about a half million acres. Okay? I'm throwing out some big numbers and some people maybe not be able to picture this. All right.

• 53:32Steven Rinella?

  American Prairie, again, they own 167,000 acres. All right? The biggest ranch in the state of Montana, 400,000 acres is owned by Rupert Murdoch. AP American Prairie owns more acres than Ted Turner's Flying D. So this is a big ranch. Very controversial. I'll get into that in a minute. But I'm on it before saying this very controversial, I clarify, all of that land is all public. So the 167,000 acres they own is open to the public. You can walk across. You can walk your dog on it. You can go around looking around. The deeded land is state and federal public land.

• 54:13Steven Rinella?

  So the fact that they lease grazing rights on it does not make it that you can't hunt it. It's totally open and public. They just have the right to run cattle, buffalo, whatever, to graze the grass. All right? Part of the controversy of AP.

• 54:31Steven Rinella?

  There's a rallying cry to the opposition to AP, which is save the cowboy, stop American prairie. It's this idea that if you buy up ranch land and just use it for wildlife, you are creating an existential threat to the American cowboy because he's supposed to be out roping cattle. And all of a sudden now it's just deer and elk.

• 54:50Speaker 07

  It's a popular sign you see the way you'd see a politician sign in someone's driveway.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  And I'll point out that on a lot of AP's property, they're still grazing cattle. There are a lot of them.

• 55:01Steven Rinella?

  I'll point out too, AP owns, as I'm going to get into, they own about 970 buffalo. There are 2 million cattle in Montana. So the existential threat that these animals provide is a little bit, you gotta take it with, you know, you gotta think of the numbers here. Okay.

• 55:20Steven Rinella?

  I find American prairie to be controversial. Why do I think they're controversial? My concern with American prairie, as I've told everybody I know that works there or runs the place or is on the board. My concern is that their commitment to public hunting is tepid.

• 55:38Steven Rinella?

  And when I put that in my notes, I don't think anyone's ever said the word tepid on this show.

• 55:42Speaker 06

  I don't recall.

• 55:43Steven Rinella?

  Means lukewarm.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  I was just gonna say.

• 55:46Steven Rinella?

  My concern is that their commitment to public hunting is lukewarm.

• 55:50Speaker 07

  What do they say to you?

• 55:50Steven Rinella?

  They could do a lot. They say, of course not. We have this and this and this. But they put restrictions, they put hunting restrictions above and beyond what the state puts. And they basically, not basically, they put a mule deer hunting moratorium on their land. But the state is not eye to eye on that. Right? And then even like you go ask like deer researchers, they're like a limited buck harvest, limited mule deer buck harvest has zero impact on mule deer populations. Right? It doesn't matter. But, and that's what it would be. So that's, that's why they're controversial to me. But I try to look at things in this case, I look at the good and the bad. This is just the story of what's going on.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  On the hunting thing, like I'd point out that Montana's block management, which is like private land open to public. It's not uncommon for those pieces to be open to hunting, but have restrictions, right? Like you can't kill an elk here.

• 56:45Steven Rinella?

  Correct.

• 56:46Speaker 07

  You can't duck hunt.

• 56:46Steven Rinella?

  If they're right.

• 56:47Speaker 07

  You can't drive these roads. So like we, we see that in other parts of the state.

• 56:51Steven Rinella?

  But they have a lot of acreage. Again, I would say this, I did say this, I would say this with them sitting right here. Cause I'm like sympathetic to the mission. I support the buffalo part of the mission. I think that they would be doing themselves a strategic favor. By being more open, putting more lands open to hunting, less restrictions, more acres of hunting. Because then you're going to create, all the hunters are going to be your allies. But instead, you're creating an impression in people's minds, they don't want me around. And if they buy up more land, it's more land that I'm not welcome on. It's just, it's, this is way beyond what I want to talk about here. So what I want to talk about here is politics.

• 57:32Steven Rinella?

  Their buffalo, they run their buffalo as was called a conservation herd. It's not a production herd. They're not running buffalo in order to produce hide, leather, meat, right? They're running it as a restoration project. It's the native.

• 57:49Speaker 06

  They're categorized as livestock, aren't they?

• 57:53Steven Rinella?

  They have to be in the state. These are ear tagged, counted animals. Not because they necessarily want them to be. But they're not regarded, even though they're a native land mammal, they're not regarded as wildlife in Montana. They have to be regarded as livestock. So yes, out of necessity. They have to like count them, manage them like livestock, but the objective is. This is the dominant native land mammal on that landscape historically. And they're trying to put them back on the landscape. So they're doing this by buying ranch land and letting the buffalo roam on it. And they're doing it by doing leases, paying the lease fees and letting their buffalo run on state and federal grazing leases.

• 58:37Steven Rinella?

  All right. What's a grazing lease? Well, a grazing lease is, the West is full of it. A grazing lease is you got a chunk of land, let's say, let's just say for easy sake, it's a thousand acres. You strike a deal with, if it's Bureau of Land Management, federally managed, public land, Bureau of Land Management. They open up a grazing lease for a thousand acres. They will tell you, you can graze blank number, blank cow care, uh, cow calf pairs for blank months.

• 59:10Steven Rinella?

  And that's how it's like measured in animal units.

• 59:12Speaker 07

  And if you're in a very lush place, that'll be a high number.

• 59:15Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 59:15Speaker 07

  And if you're in the bad lands where it's all brown for, you know, 10 months of the year, it's going to be a really low number.

• 59:20Steven Rinella?

  Exactly. It's tweaked according to the, an assessment of the productivity of the land. And you, you get a deal, you sign a lease, you pay a fee. American Prairie has, th- this is a quote from AP. There's pointing this out in, in, in terms of this grazing lease debate that I'm going to explain.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  As American Prairie says, "American Prairie has lawfully grazed bison on BLM lands for more than 20 years, complying with every rule, regulation, and permit requirement. There have been no grazing violations. And the administrative record contains objective evidence showing that rangeland conditions have improved over the last two decades with bison on the landscape." However, right now, after 20 years, for reasons I'll get into,

• 1:00:20Steven Rinella?

  the state of Montana and the feds are tag teaming American Prairie.

• 1:00:27Steven Rinella?

  They're coming at American Prairie on state leases, they're coming at American Prairie on federal leases.

• 1:00:34Steven Rinella?

  Under the direction of Secretary of Interior Burgum,

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  the Department of Interior is pulling American Prairie's federal leases. That's, that's one fight. It warrants a ton of discussion. But since this is a news show, the news right now in this moment is about the state leases that American Prairie has. Okay? American Prairie is aiming to graze bison on 5,000 acres of lands owned by the state of Montana. They already have the permit, they're just looking to put the animals out there.

• 1:01:15Steven Rinella?

  The state manages 1.4 million acres of grazing leases. So to put this another way, American Prairie is asking to graze buffalo on point zero one, one percent of the state's grazing acreage. A tenth of a percent.

• 1:01:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:40Steven Rinella?

  In seeking permission from the state to do this, the state slow walked them for seven years, would not process their request.

• 1:01:51Steven Rinella?

  Eventually, the state Supreme Court steps in and says, that's just bad government. You gotta process their request.

• 1:01:59Steven Rinella?

  So what happens now? The state now is saying, we're not gonna let permits out to people that wanna graze buffalo in a conservation herd.

• 1:02:10Steven Rinella?

  One of the perspectives on this is a stock grower, a stock growers organization opposed to them putting buffalo out. A discretion, a discussion is they're saying grazing leases were intended for what they call production livestock grazing, meaning grazing leases were intended

• 1:02:33Steven Rinella?

  to be used to produce a food product.

• 1:02:37Steven Rinella?

  And if you have a conservation herd, it's that's outside of the intention of grazing leases. However, this intention was never adequately codified by law. It's interpretation of past intention.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  So the state fought them by just slow walking their permits. Okay. And while all this is going on, they've had all these different debates. At one point, the state says, well, we can't do it right now because our state land order borders BLM land. And we need to hear from the BLM what they think about these dastardly buffalo grazing BLM land. BLM comes back. At the time, they come back and says, well, nothing bad happens. It's kind of a non-issue.

• 1:03:25Steven Rinella?

  So rather than the state then saying, okay, we've heard from the BLM, they say it's not a problem, we'll accept that. No, they go, we're gonna appeal your decision that it's not a big problem. Then the state gets into this kind of goofy debate. They start obfuscating what their objectives are. They get into this goofy debate about whether one bison actually equals one cow. Okay. Now, Montana State University has research suggesting that you can feud their an equivalency. If you put a buffalo on the grass, it's the same as putting a cow on the grass. Okay. And since the state sets the stocking ratios anyways, they can say how many are permitted to be out there. But that's not what they're after. They just don't want them out there.

• 1:04:11Steven Rinella?

  And then they put out this thing like, hey, we're not trying to obstruct buffalo being on the ground. It's just we're just trying to protect the the grasslands. And it's kind of gets into this thing like, home it. So you're trying to prevent the West from turning back into that real dump that it was back when 30 million buffalo were grazing around. And vast herds of elk occupied the American Great Plains. And like Lewis and Clark were staggered by the abundance of wildlife. And whole cultures were existing off this wildlife for 10,000 years. Like, let's not revisit that shit show. Right? That's that's the argument.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  Finally,

• 1:04:49Steven Rinella?

  the Supreme Court says, you gotta deal with these people's permit. So then the state land board comes and directs the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, saying, don't renew buffalo leases, don't give out buffalo leases.

• 1:05:07Steven Rinella?

  Just to they change the rules. Okay, they're saying it has to be production agriculture. So, America Prairie takes them to court.

• 1:05:16Steven Rinella?

  And a judge just puts in an injunction. No, you think I forgot to mention, meanwhile, America Prairie canceled all their public hunts. They do public raffle hunts. They had to cancel all their hunts because of this whole shit show going on.

• 1:05:28Speaker 06

  For bison.

• 1:05:29Steven Rinella?

  They canceled their public buffalo hunts. They do buffalo hunts for veterans. They do. They canceled it because of all this uncertainty about their herd.

• 1:05:39Steven Rinella?

  Um, they want an injunction, but to me it feels very tenuous. Their argument is that the, that the land board and the DRN DNRC didn't do the normal rulemaking process before changing the rule. So they're saying you didn't, you know, you didn't open it up for public comment and all that. And so the judge put an injunction and says they don't need to clear their animals out yet. It's a, it's a very minor victory, but it, like I said, it has a very tenuous a very tenuous feel to me. It is not like a conclusive finding. It's just an injunction on something while something else gets sorted out.

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  The federal land thing, which still lingers,

• 1:06:27Steven Rinella?

  that all hinges on the intent and definition of something called the Taylor Grazing Act. But again, the federal BLM part of this is a whole other story. The state and the feds are tag teaming this organization around their buffalo herd.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  What's funny about this, the irony of this is a lot of this is taking place against the backdrop of all this hoopla about the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening up in Madora, North Dakota. And they timed the opening of the library for the July 4 celebrations of our 250th anniversary. All these political figures converge on North Dakota for the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library over July 4 weekend. Because the political figures all want to align themselves with the vision and mission of President Theodore Roosevelt.

• 1:07:26Steven Rinella?

  What is that legacy? TR is a, it's like TR just is a conservation president. People that, that, when, when people think of TR today, they don't think, they, they don't think about him storming San Juan Hill. They don't think about him being an advocate of Panama Canal. He's a conservation president. I'm on the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. When people hear that, they don't think I'm talking about conserving Panama. The guy is a conservation president.

• 1:07:58Speaker 07

  The conservation president.

• 1:08:00Steven Rinella?

  The. Just let me do like a little year by year run through on an issue. In December 1904, President Roosevelt urged Congress to authorize

• 1:08:11Steven Rinella?

  that the government set aside portions of forest reserves as refuges for bison.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  1905. In his annual message to Congress, Theodore Roosevelt described the buffalo as the most characteristic animal of the Western plains and addressed the importance of the remaining small herds. He also acknowledged the economic advantages associated with the value of the buffalo herd. He recognized Wichita Reserve in Oklahoma as a forest reserve that could aid in buffalo preservation. The next year, he becomes the honorary president of the American Bison Society. The next year, we're now in 1906. Roosevelt congratulated Senator John F. Lacy of the of Lacy Act infamacy,

• 1:09:04Steven Rinella?

  of Lacy Act fame, not infamous fame. Congratulated Lacy for getting the Senate Committee on Agriculture to order an amendment to an appropriation bill that approved money for the Wichita Reserve, which would house buffalo. The next year, 1907, Roosevelt supported reintroductions of buffalo. Wind Cave National Park, the National Bison Range, Wichita Mountain Reserve. The next year, 1908, the American Bison Society, of which Theodore Roosevelt is the honorary president, successfully petitioned petitioned Congress to pass a bill

• 1:09:50Steven Rinella?

  that would establish a permanent bison range in Montana. So there's 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908. I could go on and on. So when these people are coming there and like and like tying themselves to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt at the same time trying to attack the restoration of the animal, like, what are you tying yourself to?

• 1:10:14Steven Rinella?

  It's because so much stuff, so much stuff is just like perform, you could get the same people in the same room and they acting like they're talking about the same thing, but they're not talking about the same thing. Like, what are they talking about?

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  It looks good to stand in front of a portrait of TR.

• 1:10:30Steven Rinella?

  That's what I always say. Every politician in America would like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. But what the guy wanted is so damn clear.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:10:43Steven Rinella?

  And they don't. It's just maddening. Over to you, Yanni.

• 1:10:48Speaker 06

  He's kind of an environmentalist by today's terms.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh, he was a radical.

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  Radical.

• 1:10:52Steven Rinella?

  That's the other thing people don't realize is how much people hated that guy for doing all this stuff. They hated him.

• 1:11:00Speaker 07

  Steve would have hated him because he liked national parks so much.

• 1:11:02Steven Rinella?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:11:05Speaker 07

  You'd have disagreed with him back then.

• 1:11:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the guy that shot at him hit that little booklet in his chest. I'd have been like, more to the left. He likes parks. Nah, I'm joking. But yeah, I would have disagreed with mine on that. I would have done a new show all about that. I would have been like, Teddy, you're misguided.

• 1:11:18Speaker 07

  You know, the like journey for that, it was his folded up speech that saved his life when he was shot. It was, it was said that that can trace all the way back to his early years when he was a president and he was really into boxing, to the point where those in his cabinet were like, Teddy, you can't be boxing with the interns anymore. Like, it's just a bad look when you show up in some public space and you've got a black eye. So he'd like, kind of started secretly boxing with people in his universe. One of

• 1:11:48Steven Rinella?

  Clinton ran with that, but he wasn't boxing.

• 1:11:51Speaker 07

  Yes. Yeah, other bad physical contact. Teddy gets lit up one day. He gets knocked in the side of the head that messes with his vision. He has to start wearing glasses. So when he goes to give speeches now, the, the font is so big that he's, he like has to have more paper physically um to do his speeches. So for that speech, he had a lot more pieces of paper. It was wadded up uh in his pocket where he was shot. And so like you can go back and say his little underground boxing ring saved his life because he had more paper in his pocket.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  You know, don't you do a thing called media experiments?

• 1:12:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's a great idea.

• 1:12:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Steven Rinella?

  He finished the speech.

• 1:12:32Speaker 06

  Put that, put a speech in your pocket and we'll start cutting loose at you.

• 1:12:35Steven Rinella?

  He finished the speech.

• 1:12:36Speaker 06

  Now it was.

• 1:12:37Steven Rinella?

  Moose. Yeah, it, it was badass. Listen, it was, it was badass that Trump had to wear with all the raised his fist. But imagine how badass it was to finish your speech.

• 1:12:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Steven Rinella?

  After a dude shot at you.

• 1:12:50Speaker 07

  Ted, Ted definitely knew that. He's like, oh, look at all the points I'm gonna win here.

• 1:12:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 07

  By doing this speech after just getting shot.

• 1:12:56Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  We have to really do some historical digging on, you know, like powder loads, bullet.

• 1:13:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  You know, cause you can't use a nice, a nice acupan and try that same.

• 1:13:10Steven Rinella?

  A couple of years ago, there was a story. Um, I think it was a boyfriend, girlfriend were messing around with that. And I think one of them killed the other one holding books up. We should just use like those.

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Steven Rinella?

  Beanbag rounds. Shooting books.

• 1:13:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Steven Rinella?

  Let's talk about Maine.

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, we'll, we'll get into it.

• 1:13:28Steven Rinella?

  Not Platter, but Maine. Cause I'm not gonna talk about that.

• 1:13:31Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:13:31Steven Rinella?

  Maine dams.

• 1:13:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, here's a, here's a conservation wind story. Um.

• 1:13:40Speaker 06

  Inside climate news. I need to get, since we're doing this show all the time, I gotta get up on my subscriptions. You boys must have a lot of subscriptions to all these different news uh sources. Is that right?

• 1:13:51Steven Rinella?

  I just got a lot of people that send me stuff.

• 1:13:53Speaker 06

  Oh, I need more of those people.

• 1:13:55Steven Rinella?

  Barge will cover a couple of them.

• 1:13:57Speaker 07

  Just a couple.

• 1:13:57Speaker 06

  Inside climate news reported that because of dam removal, Maine's. Alewives are making a significant comeback. And like me, 24 hours ago, you might be like, what's an alewife?

• 1:14:09Steven Rinella?

  Which is really humiliating for you.

• 1:14:11Speaker 06

  Yanni, you're from Michigan. How could you not know what it? How did you pronounce it?

• 1:14:16Steven Rinella?

  Alewives.

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  Alewives. Okay. I thought you said something different early, earlier. Well, I'll get to why I should know about it as a Michigander. Um. It's an anadromous herring, averaging 12 inches, but can be as big as 16, not considered a game fish. Um, although some folks smoke them and eat them. Alewives are most famous, this is why I should be embarrassed as a Michigander for using-

• 1:14:40Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm embarrassed for not knowing this.

• 1:14:41Speaker 06

  The Welland Canal to bypass Niagara Falls and invade the Great Lakes. Causing the extinction, extinction of several Cisco species. They've also had negative impacts on yellow perch and whitefish populations in the Great Lakes. Um, and how they do that is that they either outcompete them for the zooplankton or they eat the fry of the yellow perch and, and cod and other fish like that. Um, but this isn't about how they got famous. Maybe they're going to get famous because of this conservation win. Um, cause for their native range, which is like South Carolina up to Nova Scotia and the Western Atlantic. They are, uh, not doing as well. Do you have a picture of that alewife? I just, I had it on the screen.

• 1:15:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the Great Lakes ones didn't get nearly that big.

• 1:15:26Speaker 06

  What's that?

• 1:15:26Steven Rinella?

  The Great Lakes ones were small.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, they were.

• 1:15:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think it's like a food thing, you know, plankton and stuff like that.

• 1:15:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're one of 12 inches, man.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  And those, those Great Lakes ones, they do not get back to the ocean, right? They're just staying there.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  No, yep. Yeah. There's both, uh, populations that just are freshwater and then the, uh, saltwater.

• 1:15:46Steven Rinella?

  They exploded there to the point where they would like, there, how many would die? During temperature changes? That, that beaches would be uninhab- like people wouldn't go to the beach.

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  Listen to this. Old time, old time Southsiders still called the little 10 inch herrings allwives for those summer days in 1967, when a billion pounds of the dead fish washed up ashore. Beachgoers, you know?

• 1:16:14Steven Rinella?

  Lots of them. Anyways, yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 06

  Sounds stinky. Um. Why are alewives, alewives important or what do they do with them, I guess? Uh, the most common use- Which was interesting, I thought, is for bait for lobster fishing.

• 1:16:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:30Speaker 06

  That's why people are like to commercially harvest them. Like I said earlier, people do smoke them for human consumption. But really, most importantly, I think for all, all of us and, and the story is that it's a keystone species that provides food, you know, all along through the food chain and, um, you know, provides food for the bigger fish that we like to catch like striped bass and cod. Um.

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  Did you change my, uh, font size, Nate?

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  I don't think so. Oh, gosh. I'm like Teddy, man. I can't, I can't be having this smaller font size. I need, I need my readers now. You can, you can zoom in on your own. I know, I know.

• 1:17:11Speaker 06

  This is all staying in. While Yanis is doing that, you know why they're called ale wives? Yes. I let her rip. Well, they have a, they're, they got a big old belly on them. And so they were, uh, they're, they were compared to an ale wife, which is basically a, which is a, uh, portly.

• 1:17:28Steven Rinella?

  Like a lady drinking too much beer?

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  No, one that, one that would, one that would run a, a ale, uh, I don't know what you call it. Tavern, just a bartender at a tavern. Well, no, more than that. Back, back in the, I can go way, way deep here.

• 1:17:41Steven Rinella?

  Run a tavern, gave you a little belly?

• 1:17:43Speaker 06

  You don't say.

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  I'm asking.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would think so. Anybody that was around. So thi- this goes so far back. This go like the first mention of ale wife, I think was like thirteen hundred something.

• 1:17:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Speaker 06

  Back when ale was more commonly consumed than water in a lot of places because it was safer to drink it.

• 1:18:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Um, people consume like a liter a day on average, right?

• 1:18:07Steven Rinella?

  The pilgrims were scared, the pilgrims were scared of American water. They drank ale.

• 1:18:11Speaker 06

  For like a, every hundred and forty people, you had to have a place that made ale.

• 1:18:15Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:18:16Speaker 06

  Back then, it was a, it was a, a thing that women did.

• 1:18:19Steven Rinella?

  And if a dude owned that and his wife worked there.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  No, no, no.

• 1:18:23Steven Rinella?

  She would develop a beer belly.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  That's the thing. It, it was run by women. And they were called ale wives and they tended to be rotund.

• 1:18:33Steven Rinella?

  Golly, man. I didn't know that.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Tough name, nomenclature. Okay, huge, uh.

• 1:18:40Steven Rinella?

  Someday they'll get around to changing that one, man.

• 1:18:43Speaker 06

  Huge conservation.

• 1:18:44Steven Rinella?

  They'll call them like the Betsy Ross, or they'll call them like the, who's the suffrage person?

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  Ooh. Oh.

• 1:18:53Steven Rinella?

  Anthony.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  Susan B Anthony.

• 1:18:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, SB.

• 1:18:57Steven Rinella?

  They'll call him like the Susan B Anthony because they'll rebrand him. Because that's kind of, that's mean, I think. Go on.

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  Um, unprecedented population recovery. The number of migraine fish in Benton, Maine jumped from fewer than eight hundred, eight hundred, thirty-five years ago.

• 1:19:14Steven Rinella?

  Eight hundred fish?

• 1:19:15Speaker 06

  Yes, to nine million last year. That's pretty sweet.

• 1:19:21Steven Rinella?

  And that's just because. Better math. I tried to figure out what percent increase that was.

• 1:19:24Speaker 06

  When they're real low like that, they were just cut off from their spawning grounds by dams? Yes, exactly. And so they've done all kinds of things to, to help them get back, back up in there. Um, which I'll tell you about in just a second. Uh, like I was saying, um, it brings, you know, nutrients up into the, the mainland, uh, kind of like salmon in Alaska, right? Um, these l wives bring, uh, it's a vital food source for eagles, seals, otters. Um, and, uh, yeah, just makes the place, uh, nutrient rich.

• 1:19:57Steven Rinella?

  Want me to hit you with something?

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Please.

• 1:20:00Steven Rinella?

  It's a one million, one hundred and twenty-four thousand, nine hundred percent increase.

• 1:20:07Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:20:09Steven Rinella?

  I just did that in my head.

• 1:20:10Speaker 06

  It's a lot.

• 1:20:12Speaker 07

  It's like going from the people in these buildings connected to New York City.

• 1:20:16Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:18Speaker 06

  Uh, starting in the seventeen hundreds, the construction of industrial dam, dams blocked the fish from swimming upstream to spawn, trapping them downstream and causing populations to plummet. Uh, intensive commercial fishing in mid twentieth century farther decimated populations. And by nineteen ninety-four, harvest collapsed to a fraction of their historical highs, where the federal commercial fishing, um, the feds basically put a moratorium in, on them, on fishing form in two thousand and twelve. So the population rebound is driven by removing aging dams or building bypass systems. The systems that they do are, they do a bunch of different things. Um, one is high-tech fish elevators where literally, they basically have just like a channel that kind of comes out off the dam and then at the end of it, there's a bucket. And when

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  that bucket goes down into the water, it creates a current, as you can imagine, and sucks it in. And those, uh, l wives are literally attracted to it and they swim right in there. The bucket picks them up, puts them into the raceway and then on they go. Um, then they also do on smaller creeks, they basically just build, uh, little, you know, steps. So, yeah, where a fish can just jump up and go up through the rocks and get on up there. Uh, let's see. 2025 Maine saw booming migration of over 20 million l wives. Unfortunately, in contrast, states south of Maine continue to experience declining or depleted populations.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  Um, internet says likely due to warming oceans and different ocean fishing pressures. Um, Maine is one of only five states with federal approval for sustainable river herring fisheries. Uh, and as of last year, 25 Maine municipalities have regained the right to harvest locally under strict state limits. They actually have to, right now, a lot of people don't like this, but right now they have to monitor their fish returns for 10 years and produce that they have the stocks in these ponds where they're, where they do the reproduction. Like an average return. Yeah, until they can start a commercial harvest. Um, my big takeaway here was, I just thought it was so cool. We've heard this over and over on these shows that we

• 1:22:25Speaker 06

  do. And we hear, I think it was, we recently had some tribal members from the Northwest on that just talked about the, the wonder that you can achieve from nature. When you see like, I think we were talking about the size of some giant Chinooks. That was the conversation we were having. And I think the same thing here, there was a lot of locals that were interviewed that can remember like seeing some of these fish swimming up, you know, these small creeks in Maine as kids. And then they went through a period where there were literally none. And they have, you know, put their own hard work and effort into it. And now they're seeing them return and it's pretty cool. And now they're getting to pass that on to the next generation. And people just say, it's like, one, it's an amazing thing to stand there at a small little creek and live.

• 1:23:09Speaker 06

  Literally see so many fish swing along where you can just stick your hand in and pull fish out if you want.

• 1:23:15Steven Rinella?

  It points to the resiliency of my nature. If you like, give it room to do what it needs to do.

• 1:23:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's something about Maine, though, like that state compared to a lot of other states when it comes to knocking down dams. Like they're all about it. I feel like they they tend to do it at a higher rate than a lot of other states.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  I was talking about this on a run recently with the fella and I was telling him where I was researching for today. And he was saying that this is a big thing, topic in northern Michigan. We're going to probably discuss that at some point, too.

• 1:23:44Steven Rinella?

  Get some dams out.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there's a lot of people that are enjoying like the pontoon boat, lake life culture. And when you take that dam out, that little reservoir you've been putting around on might not be around anymore. And it's a, it's a real trick right now to try to sell people on saying, hey, the river version of this might be as good or better than the, than the reservoir.

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we used to pound salmon in Steelhead where they'd all get backed up on the Sixth Street Dam on the Grand River. And if that wasn't there, it'd be great. But then everybody'd have to figure out how to catch them when they're not on a roadblock.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did we cover that? How they're putting the rocks back in, in Grand Rapids to, to bring up?

• 1:24:28Steven Rinella?

  Put the rapids back.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Put the rapids back in Grand Rapids.

• 1:24:30Steven Rinella?

  Are they tearing the dams out?

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, good for them.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

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• 1:25:36Steven Rinella?

  Whether your season's already open or you're still counting down the days, The Meat Eater Store has what you need to get ready. We're talking First Light, FHF, Sig Sauer, Moultrie, Phelps, the brands we actually run in the field, plus brand-new tees, hoodies, and hats that just dropped with more dropping every month. Also, check out our new Meat Eater Grocery Game Bags. These game bags are ultra-light breathable nylon. They cool your meat fast and keep it clean from the kill site to the cooler. They got reflective trim on them, so you can keep working after dark and find your bags even if you've got them hanging way up in a tree in the middle of the night. And once you've got meat in the cooler, we've got you covered there, too.

• 1:26:19Steven Rinella?

  Seasonings, cookbooks, and knives to cook up everything you bring home. To check it all out, head to themeateasterstore.com. Whales. Whales.

• 1:26:32Speaker 07

  Whale strandings have been tracked for over 50 years in Washington. The record for gray whales was set in 2019 when 34 of them washed up dead. We are only halfway through 2026, and we already have 30 of them this year. So the record was 34, six months in, we have 30 of them this year. I talked to John Callum Bochitis, he's the founder of the Cascadia Research Collective in Washington, to find out why. First, I asked him about 2019. What caused that mass mortality? And how did biologists react then? John said that the 2019 he felt normal, and it really didn't raise any cause for alarm.

• 1:27:13Speaker 07

  Biologists had seen this before in 99, in 1990, and in all three of those cases, 1990, 1990. 29, 2019, they felt as though gray whales had approached their global carrying capacity. And so this was just a natural cycle where they, you know, self-reduced. And the biologist just said like, this is what a gray whale booming bus cycle is.

• 1:27:35Steven Rinella?

  Can I, can I comment on your graph?

• 1:27:36Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:37Steven Rinella?

  He's got a graph of one line is strandings. Is that stranding?

• 1:27:42Speaker 07

  Nope.

• 1:27:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 1:27:43Speaker 07

  That's just the global population.

• 1:27:44Steven Rinella?

  I read it wrong. Never mind. Sorry.

• 1:27:46Speaker 07

  We've, we've got a chart looking at the global population and then, and the calf recruitment.

• 1:27:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:27:52Speaker 07

  But anyway, he, he said in 1990, 1999, 2019, they're like, this is actually a good thing. Uh, you know, the, the oceans have plenty of gray whales. Um, and so they're just like naturally having some, some reduction. As for 2026, uh, biologists don't think this is a normal mortality event like the other ones. 16 of the whales that have had necropsies done, uh, all 16 were determined to be malnourished. And of those 16, 10 of them had blunt force trauma from vessel strikes. So 100% of the necropsies said the whales were starving and 63% said that the whales were starving plus struck by a ship. Uh, John said that a starving whale is a delirious whale, so it's just more likely to swim in front of a cargo ship.

• 1:28:37Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 1:28:37Speaker 07

  It's a lot like when we talk about CWD with deer. The CWD doesn't kill them. It's that, that they don't have their mental faculties anymore to the point where they wander in front of a semi. Uh, they walk out in front of a hunter. They don't smell a coyote anymore. And that's what kills a CWD positive deer, not the CWD itself. It's, it's similar thing. That's why all these starving whales are getting struck. Uh, so what's going on to cause the whales to starve? John's direct quote was this, there has been a profound change in the Arctic. Uh, here's why he says that. About 95% of the world's gray whales migrate to the Arctic. Uh, the other 5% are these unique populations that wind up in Russian waters. Uh, or they stay on the Pacific coast, uh, or they go into the Puget Sound.

• 1:29:22Speaker 07

  Those ones are called Sounders. That 5% gray whale population is not currently experiencing the mass die-off. Uh, the biologists. Observe that 5% say that they're doing just fine. It's the 95% that are going to the Arctic waters that are struggling. Uh, John said, clearly there's been some sort of collapse in the food in the Arctic. Uh, the, the gray whales they feed by rolling around on the bottom and they scoop up a bunch of mud and they filter out the tiny shrimp and the worms. Um, and, and he pointed out it's a statistical fact that the Arctic is, uh, heating up faster than any place else in the world. Loses 10% of its floating sea ice every decade. Uh, so obviously there's been an impact, uh, to the microscopic food that the gray whales are feeding on in the Arctic.

• 1:30:07Speaker 07

  And, uh, now it's like shine some new light, maybe on the 2019 population to collapse. Maybe this is, you know, a whole decade long thing that, that's happening. Here's some other tidbits from, from the interview with John. Uh, it's believed that about 15% of dead whales wash up on the shore. The rest of them sink to the bottom. Uh, whale strandings for humpbacks and orcas have been totally normal this year. Uh, I asked him what happens to a dead whale that washes up on shore. He said, there's three common solutions. Uh, it's buried nearby. It's towed out to see where it sinks, or it's just left to decompose. I found a juvenile dead humpback last year in California. Uh, this one was just left there to decompose. Um, the smell was so intense on that thing. You could smell it from like a mile away.

• 1:30:51Speaker 07

  I wish I could have just like showed people that smell like here to take the, take a whiff of this thing.

• 1:30:56Steven Rinella?

  You want to talk some maggots?

• 1:30:58Speaker 07

  Well, why don't you just get a little ball jar and take a chunk? I don't think I'd be in jail.

• 1:31:03Steven Rinella?

  Without an auction of oddities.

• 1:31:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, smelly whale air. Um, I also, I noticed that 81% of the dead whales have been male. And I asked him if that's normal. He said, no, that, that's a new phenomenon they're noticing. Uh, asked if he had a theory as to why. Here is his hypothesis, which has not been tested. Calf reproduction has been very low in recent years and John thinks that maybe some of the females are foregoing reproduction due to a lack of resources. Therefore, the fields, the females are more resilient to the current conditions because they're not spending that extra energy breeding and carrying a baby and caring for a calf. So that's just his, his initial guess, you know, as to why they've been seeing this for the last six months.

• 1:31:46Speaker 07

  Something else John brought up, the 34 dead gray whales in 2019 was a lot less concerning because at that time we were just coming off an all time high for their population. So 34 dead whales out of a population of 27,000 is very different than if this year, if this pace continues, that'd be 60 dead gray, 60 dead gray whales out of a population of 17,000. So just like some really problematic numbers there. I, I asked him what he thinks the short, long-term solution is. Short-term, he said to prevent vessel strikes and entanglement of fishing gear because those are often happening closer to shore, just feels like we have more control of that thing. Long-term, just like helping the gray whales in the Arctic, that, that probably just means

• 1:32:31Speaker 07

  with research right now. And, and John said this, I don't know if it's something John has been told from, you know, the federal government or if it's just like a known thing among biologists, but he said that if your like funding ask mentions climate change, that it's just like got no chance of getting off the ground.

• 1:32:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what's funny though is four years ago, if it didn't mention climate change, you had no chance.

• 1:32:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Steven Rinella?

  Four years ago, you had to take your research and make it about climate change or else you'd never get your research done.

• 1:33:00Speaker 07

  So for this specific problem.

• 1:33:01Steven Rinella?

  And people would just, and I know many researchers, you would take what you're doing and just impose a climate spin on it.

• 1:33:11Steven Rinella?

  Even to the point of, let's say you were just trying to work in public lands acquisition. You would need to say, as the earth warms.

• 1:33:19Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:33:20Steven Rinella?

  And as stress from climate change increases. People will need more outlets.

• 1:33:26Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  How will they find relaxation on public lands?

• 1:33:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Steven Rinella?

  Therefore, as a climate mitigation plan, we would like to create more public lands. You had to play this dumb game.

• 1:33:37Speaker 07

  Good.

• 1:33:38Steven Rinella?

  Now you just go back in and take it out and just keep doing the work you're doing.

• 1:33:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the problem is, John says, if you want to study gray whales in the Arctic, uh, it's impossible not to mention climate change.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  I'd find a way.

• 1:33:47Speaker 07

  For the next two years, uh, you know, probably just not happening for them. Last thing I asked, uh, what do you think the Makas tribe request to hunt gray whales? Here's a brief timeline, so you're up to speed. The 1920s, uh, the Makas tribe quits whaling because populations are so low. 1970, gray whales.

• 1:34:05Steven Rinella?

  How low?

• 1:34:06Speaker 07

  Uh, I couldn't find that number. I don't know if they even have one that exists. It's not just like a, a guess. 1970, gray whales are put on the endangered species list. 1994.

• 1:34:16Steven Rinella?

  What population?

• 1:34:17Speaker 07

  I don't have the answer for you there.

• 1:34:19Steven Rinella?

  Just real let down.

• 1:34:19Speaker 07

  1994, gray whales are removed from the endangered species list. 1995, don't have the population. 1990, well, actually the chart probably does. 1995, so this is one year after they're off the endangered species list. The Makas tribe notifies the government, uh, that they want to start whaling again.

• 1:34:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, whale.

• 1:34:39Speaker 07

  I don't know if that was the number. We get to 1999, the tribe kills one gray whale on an approved hunt. This is a picture of one of the harpoonists pursuing, uh, a whale at the time. So they do kill one that year. That brings us to today, the tribe has not been given the green light since, and the case is sad and limbo for 26 years. So they killed one gray whale in 1999, have not killed one since.

• 1:35:03Steven Rinella?

  The, the, at that point, they're historically the.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Capacity was about twenty five hundred gray whales and they sit now.

• 1:35:11Speaker 07

  Thousand?

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  Twenty five hundred.

• 1:35:12Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  Um, and then the optimum sustainable population is about thirteen hundred.

• 1:35:19Steven Rinella?

  That doesn't.

• 1:35:19Speaker 07

  I think you're missing a zero.

• 1:35:20Steven Rinella?

  No, something's missing.

• 1:35:21Speaker 07

  Or it's like a specific gray whale population.

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Eastern versus western gray whales.

• 1:35:25Speaker 07

  Global one.

• 1:35:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the we have some Macaw coming on the show to talk about their whale. They're coming out up on an upcoming show to talk about whaling. Um.

• 1:35:35Steven Rinella?

  How many have stranded?

• 1:35:37Speaker 07

  Thirty four, no thirty this year.

• 1:35:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 07

  So far.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  This tribe killing a whale doesn't matter.

• 1:35:42Speaker 07

  So I, I, that's what I'm asking John about. They've killed one since nineteen ninety nine. The government has not given them the green light since. Uh, John is fully on board with the Macaw tribe hunting. He cited this, uh, it's the only treaty between the United States and a native tribe. Uh, that specifically mentions the right to hunt whales and seals. And it was signed back in eighteen fifty five. Therefore, John feels we should honor that as the only treaty that has that specific language. Here's a direct quote from Article four of the treaty. The right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual and accustomed grounds and stations. Is further secured to said Indians. Uh, so John said he's also seen the management plan that the Macaw tribe has for the gray whales.

• 1:36:26Speaker 07

  He said he feels as though it's responsible and it makes reasonable requests regarding harvest. Uh, so if they want to go kill one tomorrow, he's, he's cool with it.

• 1:36:34Steven Rinella?

  The only thing I'd have to know here. I would want to see. I would love to see a centuries worth of din- population dynamic information.

• 1:36:45Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:36:45Steven Rinella?

  Because what I don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows this. Is if you look at over a hundred years, how dynamic is this population and how unusual is the trough?

• 1:36:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  And if they're in a population trough right now, are they in this trough every thirty years? Are they in this trough every century? Have they never been in this trough?

• 1:37:07Speaker 06

  What I'm seeing is Pacific gray whale population.

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  Um, lowest populations thirteen thousand whales, lowest population level since the early nineteen seventies.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:21Speaker 07

  So we'll see in, in the fifty years of tracking, um, he feels as though this is like the most serious it's gotten, uh, for, for the gray whales.

• 1:37:28Steven Rinella?

  Not good news.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  What's interesting is like in ninety nine when they. Did this, it was huge public backlash.

• 1:37:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh my god, yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  It was insane. It's become so much more tolerated, which is the only thing I can think of in the hunting world that people are now more excited about today than they were 25 years ago.

• 1:37:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Speaker 07

  The, the gray whale strandings, they could stop and like, you know, maybe 30 is the number they sit on for the rest of the year and then all of a sudden it's not so alarming, but.

• 1:37:55Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't seem likely.

• 1:37:56Speaker 07

  If that trend continues, this is going to be like a, a real like global topic. Um, politicians are going to talk about this.

• 1:38:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, they'll be, they'll be back to being, the next time there's a, the next democratic administration comes in and they'll be reconsidering them for endangered species act protections. Ain't gonna happen now. Tell you that.

• 1:38:18Steven Rinella?

  Thanks Spencer. So wolves eat cows.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:38:24Steven Rinella?

  Can't be true.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:38:26Steven Rinella?

  Little baby cows or big cows?

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Primarily baby cows on average between 300 and 600 pounds.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  So for almost a hundred years, there were no wild wolves in California. Today, there's about 90 individuals in 12 packs. And new genetic testing that came out just the other day shows exactly what they're eating and it's mostly cows.

• 1:38:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  If you want to pull up that map, Phil, this just gives an idea of where the study's going on. Um, we're going to talk about the Lassen pack. As well as the Harvey pack.

• 1:38:58Steven Rinella?

  What pins are we looking at here?

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Just that, just that, uh, wolf one.

• 1:39:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, not the tent.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  Steve wants to know about the tent.

• 1:39:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I, that's where I camped for sheep show last year.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:39:11Steven Rinella?

  I'm with you.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Anyhow, um, so Lassen pack trickled in in 2011 naturally from Oregon, uh, formerly identified in 2016 as the first breeding pair. Um, at the time of the study here in 2023 and 2024, there's 50 individuals in about six packs. And as I've become the scat study guy, uh, around these parts, this study is a scat pickup. Um, it covers, like I said, Lassen and Harvey packs, which cover is about 20 wolves through the summers of 2022 and 2023, which is defined by June through October because of the overlap with grazing on public land. And in this study, there were eighty six percent of the scat samples picked up had cattle

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  in them compared to in the teens and twenties for mule deer or any other wild prey.

• 1:40:00Steven Rinella?

  Man, but I got so many questions.

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  But keep going. No, lay bombing.

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  We'll keep going.

• 1:40:10Steven Rinella?

  Is it embryo? Like, are they not? Is it after birth?

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  No, we'll talk. Yeah, we'll talk about it.

• 1:40:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  This scat pickup method as opposed to the Iguano method that was just purely counting. They did a very, very rigorous, extremely scientific methods. The first being mitochondrial sequencing to confirm the species that was eaten. Microsatellite genotyping, which confirms the identity of individual wolves and DNA meta barcoding to identify the prey DNA in that scat. And then the researchers through those methods were able to measure the exact, the biomass of what was actually eaten. So they could tell in this scat, eighty percent of that is cattle, even though there might be seven different things that are, that are in that.

• 1:40:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  And so it's not just how often a prey showed up. It's relatively how much that prey was eaten.

• 1:41:05Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  And then through that.

• 1:41:06Steven Rinella?

  So they can tell like how many pounds of meat?

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Roughly, yeah. It's, it's pretty insane and I could not get into the specifics of how it works, but there is a long section about that. And so when you, when you look into the biomass, which is, which is kind of what we're talking about, cattle averaged fifty five percent of the biomass consumed versus twelve percent of mule deer and fifteen percent of small mammals. So they're just chowing on cattle. The, you cannot determine what's distinguished from predation versus scavenging, which, which makes the, the data kind of interesting. But free range cow calf operations traditionally have mortality around one or two percent. So researchers say it's reasonable to think that a meaningful share of this cattle biomass reflects actual kills, not just scavenging.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  And there are a few that were confirmed to be actual kills, but generally it's so remote and so dispersed, you can't figure out what's, what's a scavenging, what's, what's killed.

• 1:42:01Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Um, then I looked at a meta analysis of this of like, how does this compare in California to wolves?

• 1:42:07Speaker 06

  Worldwide and how they're predating on things. And you see that livestock are hit the hardest where herds are grazing unattended and small dispersed groups. When, when you look at the occurrence of this compared to natural game, the, I should say that the game species. There actually seems to be a preference towards game species as a pro, as opposed to livestock. But the, the higher, those higher rates don't, i- it's not the same when those cattle are dispersed. And when the prey goes down proportionally. Was it, did you come across anything about like whether like introduce populations of wolves or like new emerging populations of wolves?

• 1:42:51Speaker 06

  Like, do they prey on livestock more than like established populations? Yeah, this idea that like, maybe there's these cow eaters that were brought in that have been, been talked like. Or it's just like, they go for the easy stuff because they're like in a new environment, whatever. I, I didn't find that specifically. Um, there's definitely a learning curve associated with, with. Like prey in a new species. It seems that the prey have the learning curve rather than the, the predators. But this, this meta analysis you look at, it looks like 200 different packs across the world. And there's so, so some of them are going to be introduced. Some have been there for a long time. And this is India, Europe, US. Um, and there's really not a preference for cattle across the board.

• 1:43:32Speaker 06

  Um, but when you compare that to what's going on in California, they, they have no other forms of ungulates. They have small populations of elk that currently their, their ranges don't overlap a whole ton. And their mule deer are in significant decline. So from a peak of about a million in 1970 to about 500,000 today. What it shows is that as, as prey species then free ranging cattle specifically get targeted by these wolves.

• 1:43:58Steven Rinella?

  But a problem with that.

• 1:44:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Steven Rinella?

  Is that there weren't wolves there in 1970.

• 1:44:04Speaker 06

  For the mule deer?

• 1:44:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I mean, the wolves are just there now.

• 1:44:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Steven Rinella?

  So for someone to say that wolves have switched from deer to cattle in California, they weren't there when there was a million deer.

• 1:44:15Speaker 06

  But in other places, there's been, there's like in, in, there's, there's a study in India where there's plenty of different species.

• 1:44:21Steven Rinella?

  I see where you see ungulate declines, they pick up on cattle.

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. And if there was no cattle there, they'd pick up on whatever's next, dogs.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. Um, and so it's like, so what, you know, I, I think the big thing I came out of here with is there, there really isn't a thing of cow eaters. You know, that was a big, that was a big narrative in the, in the Colorado introduction. Um, they're going to eat what's convenient. You know, they're going to eat, they, they seem to have a preference for wild game. Wait a minute. Yeah. There's not a thing, there's not packs that just like over time, it becomes a learned behavior that the pack leaders teach the rest of the pack and then it becomes a. At larger scale, it only seems to happen when prey species are at, are significantly lower than

• 1:45:08Speaker 06

  what they could be, like the low carrying capacity. Um, so they, I mean, they'll go hit the cows, they'll go hit the cattle, but only when prey species are hurting.

• 1:45:16Steven Rinella?

  A little bit of that feels off to me, but only kind of off.

• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  How so?

• 1:45:22Speaker 06

  Well, like I'll, I'll give you an example, like, uh, the, the wolves that were introduced in north, in the North Park area of Colorado that, that kept hitting cows and cows and cows. There's shitloads of elk around there. There's moose around there. There's like, they're not in a game poor environment, you know? There, I, so I, that, that's a kind of thing that you'll hear all the time. And I talked to someone who was intimately involved with that reintroduction effort. And a lot of that report from his perspective was that there were individual landowners who were intentionally causing conflict because they didn't like. That's a big accusation. I know, man, I know.

• 1:46:05Steven Rinella?

  Bold statement.

• 1:46:05Speaker 06

  And so there's, there's two things at play is that there's one, the reimbursement portion of it, which in Colorado's management system was very generous. Um, like it, you know, it's kind of like your climate change thing is like, oh, my cow died. But what, no one's gonna, they're not gonna go.

• 1:46:20Steven Rinella?

  Kill their own calf to be like, give me two thousand.

• 1:46:22Speaker 06

  But a cow might, a calf might have died and they said wolf did that.

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:46:26Steven Rinella?

  But they have investigators that come out and look at that.

• 1:46:29Speaker 06

  But then you can't, you, it's hard to split between what.

• 1:46:30Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to distract them.

• 1:46:31Speaker 06

  No, no, it's, it's okay. I do. Yeah, no, let's do it.

• 1:46:35Steven Rinella?

  I don't have a total problem with, I have a, because there's, there's, there's inverse questions.

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:46:39Steven Rinella?

  There's this thing that wolves, when you have, when you have a, early we were talking about buffalo. When you have a buffalo population on the ground, there's kind of this magic number at which wolves will start to pay attention to it.

• 1:46:54Steven Rinella?

  I can't remember what it is. You gotta have a thousand of them or you gotta have two thousand of them. At that point, the packs will start, it's sort of somehow something clicks and it becomes worthwhile in their mind to learn to kill it. And once they'd learned to kill it and develop the techniques to kill it, that's what the pack likes to hunt.

• 1:47:14Speaker 06

  It would see, again, based on a couple of studies, but these studies are, are globally. It seems that that data is not borne out. It seems that they'll eat what's there. It's not like they learn to attack a certain thing. Maybe in like localized populations, that could happen, but across the board, you're not seeing it.

• 1:47:36Steven Rinella?

  I'll have a debate about this. Not you and me.

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  We should.

• 1:47:38Steven Rinella?

  Not, not, not you versus me, but like other people versus other people. I've also heard something that the larger a pack gets, the more likely it is to turn to livestock. Cause it's big and hard to kill.

• 1:47:52Steven Rinella?

  Big packs of coyotes hunt deer. They just go, go a lot of mouse to feed. Singles hunt rodents.

• 1:47:57Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:47:59Steven Rinella?

  Go on. Just know I'm sitting over here skeptical.

• 1:48:02Speaker 06

  Okay, uh, well, you'll, you'll like this then. There's a companion study that's happening at the same time with basically the same wolf herd. In 2022 and they're measuring the stress response of cattle in this area.

• 1:48:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:48:15Speaker 06

  And so this is getting at the, the landscape of fear idea.

• 1:48:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, now I'm getting interested again.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  Yep. Um, and basically if wolves are present, whether or not they're actually killing an individual cow, are they impacting the rancher's operations because they're less, because there's

• 1:48:31Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:48:31Speaker 06

  aborted cattle because they don't lactate as well because of all the other things that cortisol can lead to.

• 1:48:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  Um, so you'll see in, in, as you compare these two herds, traditionally cortisol levels drop as summer temperatures rise. You know, it's like a more favorable growing season. Um, and, and the stress goes down and wolf exposed herds, that drop is 58% weaker.

• 1:48:51Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:48:52Speaker 06

  So basically the cattle, when wolves are around, they stay stressed out.

• 1:48:55Steven Rinella?

  Whether they're getting eaten or not.

• 1:48:56Speaker 06

  Whether they're getting eaten or not.

• 1:48:57Steven Rinella?

  It's like if you went to your own house and scared the hell out of your dog and chased it all around, but never killed it. The dog's gonna suffer.

• 1:49:06Speaker 07

  No taste is good either.

• 1:49:07Speaker 06

  No. You'll have a red cutter. Um, and so that, that raised cortisol is linked tenuously at this point to lower fertile fertility, weaken immunity, disrupted milk or colostrum transfer. And, and the, the takeaway from this researcher is living among wolves for cattle is a chronically stressful experience. And that could ultimately have production related impacts on both the short and long term. However, it's, it's not proven yet. Um, this is an idea that people like to talk about. It makes sense just when you think about it. Um, but more research is needed, um, to see how much that's going to happen, which gets back to the Colorado thing because you look at compensation and how do you prove compensation that my cattle are not producing as much because there's a general air of fear in this area.

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:53Speaker 06

  Um, and, and different, different, different regions, different countries, different places have, have looked at that problem in different ways because ultimately this conversation like wolves are going to come back, whether through ballot box biology or just walking around like wolves are going to enter landscapes that um, traditionally have had cows that don't have large predators.

• 1:50:12Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  Um, and so you, you look at three different types, three different methods. There is uh, oh, Solapure, India, which I'm sure I pronounced wrong. Um, Wisconsin and then Colorado had basically three different ways of compensating these ranchers and India.

• 1:50:27Speaker 06

  And they're pretty similar, like they're pretty similar agricultural economies and whatnot, growing cattle, um, or growing livestock, I should say. In India, the wolves have always been there. Like, people get it. They've been there. They're cool with them. And claims are managed by the government. They have very low rates of claims of livestock predation claims in that area.

• 1:50:47Steven Rinella?

  What are they running, goats and sheep?

• 1:50:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, because they're not slaughtering cattle in India. I think it's all goats and sheep. In Wisconsin, the original funding mechanism was donations from pro-wolf advocates given to ranchers who, or I should say agricultural folks, who had claims of wolf predation. That method lasted not long. It is not the way they do it anymore. And then in Colorado, they've introduced wolves. They pull from the general fund, and they have a very generous scheme of paying out, um, basically predation permits. But it's tough. It's like, how do you, how do you go about doing this? How do you determine, did that die by, you know, whatever, COVID or something, and it got eaten by a wolf?

• 1:51:30Steven Rinella?

  Let me save someone at home a mean letter. I'm just going to express their opinion now so they don't have to write you a mean letter. If you turn out a thousand cows on range, okay, and they're up doing their thing, and then the fall comes and you go to pull them off range, and you count them up, and you got 990, you're never going to know what happened to them. So someone's going to come and tell you, like, oh, the wolf mitigation thing. Just show us. Like, I don't know. I don't know where they went. They're just, they're gone. Right? You can't then go like, hey, I'm missing 10, and someone's going to cut you a check. So that's part of the frustration, is you got to be there and do like, you got to be there. Here it is. It's got this tooth mark pattern on it. And it

• 1:52:15Steven Rinella?

  leads to, I'm not saying it's undoable. They lose cows for all kinds of reasons. Like, cows die. They got a way of dying. I'm not saying this is the lead cause of death, but that is a frustration. It's like, it's on you. The burden's on you to show what happened to get the compensation. So that's one of the pain points around compensation.

• 1:52:36Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:52:36Steven Rinella?

  So someone does need to write you that letter.

• 1:52:38Speaker 06

  Thank you. You guys, so that no one has to write this letter as well. Uh, common livestock in India includes cattle, buffaloes, goats, sheep and poultry. And India has one of the world's largest cattle populations. But according to just quick A I uh, search here is that it's that's mostly for the milk. Everything else, the buffaloes, the goats, sheep, poultry, pigs, they eat those.

• 1:53:05Steven Rinella?

  There you go.

• 1:53:06Speaker 06

  Just a tough, tough nut. I started this thinking I was gonna hear all about how wolves are evil and they're cow eaters. It's so complicated.

• 1:53:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you got in over your waders on that.

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  So dude, it's deep.

• 1:53:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause listen, there's a thing, no one, there's a thing that just leads to fighting.

• 1:53:21Speaker 06

  Wolves.

• 1:53:22Steven Rinella?

  Wolves.

• 1:53:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. Hmm.

• 1:53:24Steven Rinella?

  You know, they say never talk about politics or religion at dinner.

• 1:53:28Speaker 06

  Don't talk about wolves.

• 1:53:31Speaker 06

  Water rights is another one.

• 1:53:34Speaker 07

  We should just stock more elk where these wolves live.

• 1:53:36Speaker 06

  That's what I'm, dude, we need a healthy ungulate population. That's the name of the game.

• 1:53:44Steven Rinella?

  At dinner, when you go like, no, I don't want to get political.

• 1:53:48Steven Rinella?

  You know? Then you say something real political.

• 1:53:52Steven Rinella?

  Like, no, I don't want to talk about wolves, but let me tell you something about wolves.

• 1:53:59Steven Rinella?

  Huh? That it?

• 1:54:02Speaker 06

  Think that's all we got for today.

• 1:54:03Steven Rinella?

  That's right. Cause we're gonna talk about one thing we're not gonna talk about anymore.

• 1:54:07Steven Rinella?

  It's about California. Here's one we were gonna cover, but we're not gonna. In California, there's an area where they banned dudes from the pier fishing sharks for fear that they'd hook a shark. And then swim over and bite someone who was swimming.

• 1:54:22Speaker 07

  That's what they say?

• 1:54:23Steven Rinella?

  If I was the mayor, I'd be like, no swimming. Because if a guy's fishing sharks and his shark gets tangled up on you, he might lose it.

• 1:54:34Speaker 06

  You can read more at the meat eater dot com. We'll see you next week.

• 1:54:39Speaker 06

  Better than the mayor in Jaws.

• 1:54:40Speaker 07

  The meat eater dot com slash auction. Go buy something.

• 1:54:43Speaker 06

  Oh, that's right. Check out that model ninety-four.

• 1:54:46Speaker 05

  Cow killers. Come on.

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