Ep. 915: Dan Moultrie on the History and Ethics of Trail Cameras and Other Thorny Issues of Wildlife Management

Steven Rinella https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella talks with Dan Moutrie about: the first trail camera; the evolution of trail cameras; fair chase standards; game management and quality deer management; drones and hunting; chronic wasting disease; the evolution of hunting technology; and more. Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com http://www.can-am.brp.com Find our favorite trail cameras and hunting products at www.moultrie.com https://www.moultrie.com 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.

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• 1:56Steven Rinella?

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  All right, joined today by Dan Moultrie. Thanks for coming, Dan. Dan is an outdoorsman, entrepreneur, conservationist, best known as the founder of Moultrie, pioneering commercial trail cameras and feeders. He served 12 years as chairman of Alabama's Department of Natural Resources, earned Wildlife Conservationist of the Year from the state of Alabama, guided Big Game in Alaska for many years, and remains very active in wildlife conservation. The first thing I want to ask is I have to ask you a solution to a problem I have.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:53Steven Rinella?

  We were down in Texas at my buddy's ranch, okay? And he's got ocelots on his ranch. And these got, these researchers ran and they had these little areas where there was ocelot activity.

• 3:08Steven Rinella?

  So we picked an area that we knew there was ocelots hanging around and went in and hung a camera.

• 3:16Steven Rinella?

  But had a last minute mind change. So we made a pin ahead of time, being like, we're gonna go put a camera at this pin, but then got there and didn't like it. And wandered off and set a camera. We haven't got an ocelot yet, but every morning I wake up and I look at, we got amazing things like all the time. Big buck yesterday, amazing things all the time. But my buddy was out there, this is way down in Texas. My buddy's there, I'm like, hey, go to this pin and find the camera. He can't find the camera.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  He can't locate it again.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, there's a bush. He goes, dude, there's a lot of bushes.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  There's a lot of bushes.

• 3:54Steven Rinella?

  So he's, and this dude, this camera is just plugging away, doing its job.

• 4:02Steven Rinella?

  I can't, it's still running.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Is it a solar so it'll continue running?

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  No, I didn't put a solar on it.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  I didn't put a solar on it, but it's like, it's, it's become a joke. Where me and the guys that I set it with, I just constantly, every day, I'm like, oh, here's what happened in front of the camera.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  I would get a multiple team to go find that. That's apparently a really good spot.

• 4:22Steven Rinella?

  No, it's a great spot, but no one knows where it is. Is it like, how do I find it?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  I don't like to be tough. I don't know.

• 4:28Steven Rinella?

  There needs to be like an equivalent of find my phone. Cause I never thought that some idiot would put one and not remember where he put it.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  That's a great question. That's good. That's good, we'll propose that.

• 4:39Steven Rinella?

  It's performing, it's performing away. I mean, I got pictures this morning. I got a big old Neil guy walking past this morning. It's a great spot if I knew where it was. It's on a, so we hung it like, when we hung it up, we hung bird wings.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  From monofilament.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:57Steven Rinella?

  I put all kinds of, I made a tree and I put all kinds of bobcat lure and bobcat piss. We scattered feathers everywhere and just tried to make it like the ocelots like dream location. And at first it was coyotes coming in all the time. The ocelots never shown, but it's, it's like the greatest hotspot. Not a, no.

• 5:20Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  That feather off.

• 5:21Steven Rinella?

  It wasn't a feline.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  I have the bobcats.

• 5:23Steven Rinella?

  It was the, the feather is so funny because that camera keeps like doing its job. The feathers are all gone, nothing smells the tree anymore. But yeah, I can't locate it.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. Y'all just gonna have to go find it again.

• 5:37Steven Rinella?

  So I thought maybe you'd have a tip on how to find your camera.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Go back and look.

• 5:41Steven Rinella?

  What's the funniest part is, as he's wandering all over looking for it, I told him, I said, man, I didn't get a picture of you looking for it. So you weren't in the right area.

• 5:51Steven Rinella?

  Cause you think at least I would've got a shot of you walking around trying to find it. So this camera's gone.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  It'd be better if you had a picture of him looking for it. You say, I'll give you, you're warm, you're warm.

• 6:01Steven Rinella?

  So all we know is wherever you went ain't the right area.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  That is great.

• 6:07Steven Rinella?

  So there might be, um, one of your cameras is out there somewhere cranking away, but I can't recall.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  I'll check with the guys, the engineers, and see if there's any way we can zoom down and find that exact one.

• 6:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I would love it if you could even give me a pointer. Like I kind, like, it's so funny because the three of us that set it,

• 6:26Steven Rinella?

  we're like, yeah, I don't really remember what we were thinking, but I remember we wandered off.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  You know, there's so many, and just like y'all doing that, you, you can't believe the calls, just like the calls you get from all your stuff. Hey, guess what we're doing with the camera? Here's what we did. And it goes from a, a, a 40 year old woman putting it out that she see what time her kids come in from dating, who she drags in with them, to, to, to, to ocelots, to everything. And that's been one of the neatest deals. I know at your Christmas event, we had talked about how many pictures we were holding in the clouds and in the billions and billions of pictures that's been made. A lot of those are hunting, a lot of them are wildlife, a lot of them are security,

• 7:11Speaker 03

  but it's the, the entire gambit to see what that product has been used for.

• 7:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  It's off the, it's off the spectrum. It's great.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  When you go into my buddy's hunting shack, he's just got, it's just sitting on the counter.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:26Steven Rinella?

  Just a camera sitting on the counter. And he's got a note on the door that says, your photo is already on my phone.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 7:35Steven Rinella?

  So he's like, turn around, turn around and go out.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  I almost end today with all the different camera companies and even just the, the numbers we put out, but you combine all the camera companies, you're out somewhere, you better know you're, you're pretty good at odds you're getting your picture taken. The, the, a lot of the stuff, the guy who in Colorado that had killed the girl years ago that they found in Florida, found her off, picture off Moultrie camera.

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, that dude, there's that guy, I can't remember if it was Wisconsin or Minnesota, that killed a state representative and her husband.

• 8:12Steven Rinella?

  They were doing a big manhunt for him. It was a hunter.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:15Steven Rinella?

  A hunter called in.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Had him on the camera.

• 8:17Steven Rinella?

  And he says, I got that guy right now on my property. And they came out and apprehended him.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's been a neat deal to see it from FC to till now. It's been neat.

• 8:28Steven Rinella?

  What like, what, I can't, I can't even remember. Like I remember it all coming to be, but what?

• 8:35Steven Rinella?

  If you, if you had to go back to like, what is the genesis in your, like, what is the genesis of the trail cam as we know it? Jimmy, like, like, how did it? Where did it even come from?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  You, I can tell you mine and ours, and I think we were, the, you know, there probably were some people working on it after the time, but in, in the early eighties, we were carrying, here's where mine came from. We were carrying customers to Canada, black bear hunting.

• 9:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Really into it. And everybody, and you've carried enough people hunting, and you say, hey, what have you taken? Now I've taken a black one with a chevron. I've got this and that. And if you got color phase bears, which we did, a guy will always say, boy, I'd like a cinnamon bear. They always want a cinnamon. Oh, I'll take a red one. They always did that. And we were trying to find out what bears were on what baits to color, if we had somebody that significantly wanted that color.

• 9:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Those earliest days, we would take big fish hooks, like tuna hooks, dull them down, weld them on the barrel. And at some point, that bear's gonna rub his arm across it and it's gonna collect hair. We would get that hair and then, and if you saw the color phase, you knew, you didn't know if he was locked in on it, but you knew one had been by there. So, and we were getting into that, well, you know, that bear that comes by, he's a. But he's a big old male, but he's he's nocturnal.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  So you had to figure out time first. In the early days, there was a little, it looked like a wristwatch. There was a little clock and it, when the string got pulled, when a bear broke a string, it would pull a plastic sliver out of that watch and it would stop the watch. And so you'd go stick the plastic sliver. This is in seventy nine, eighty, eighty one. And you slip it back in. Three M companies who ended up making that in earliest days and probably was used for something construction. It probably wouldn't even design for hunting. Back then, everything was taking ideas from other stuff, but you pull the plastic back in and it would start blinking the time that it went off. So you would have.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  Who, they were making it for what purpose?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  For, I don't know if it was for construction, for security or something like that, but you would know what time that had been broken. So you go back and this is the earliest days of of bear baits and people doing that. I mean, when it seemed like it was taking off. When that side of hunting, you'd put it back in, you'd have the time. So you'd say, okay, the first bear broke the string at four thirty in the afternoon, typical bear feeding pattern coming in late afternoon. You could get the time. We, we had two deals. We wanted to know the times and we wanted to know the colorface. And I've always been a Rue Goldberg kind of guy, building stuff, all our, most of our

• 11:31Speaker 03

  products, especially the early days, came from me going down to the shop, welding it up, building it, getting it right, trashing it, starting again.

• 11:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  And making what we want. And I got a camera. I found one that had a, and you're old enough to remember the days of film cameras. And a lot of these folks now like, huh, film, what are you talking about?

• 11:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. When I'm talking about stuff like this with my kids, man, they kind of like, they don't, yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Twelve pictures and your choices were twelve, twenty four and thirty six.

• 11:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you go down like the drugstore.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Drugstore or Walmart, whoever had them.

• 12:04Steven Rinella?

  The biggest problem with all that going away is you don't have those containers anymore.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Everybody used to.

• 12:08Steven Rinella?

  That was a great container for everything. All your fishing hooks, fishing sinkers. And I'll still say to my kids, I'll still talk to them, like, I'll be like, I'll still describe, but you know, you know, like a thirty five millimeter film canister.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And they're going, huh?

• 12:25Steven Rinella?

  But those are good containers.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  But, but there was a camera that had a single shot and you're probably old enough, and then you had to hand roll it.

• 12:34Steven Rinella?

  I know what you're talking about.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  But you got one shot.

• 12:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I took. You mean the camera you go like.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I took one of those Victor, those biggest rat traps, Victor made, not the little mouse traps, but the rat traps.

• 12:45Steven Rinella?

  None of the kind, yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Cause the treadle on it would move. And I, I built it on a frame and I de-springed it, cause if it hit it at the power it is, it would have crushed the camera. But where it just had a nice to it.

• 12:58Steven Rinella?

  But you weakened the spring.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yes. And I lined it up with that button on the camera. And so first spring, first spring, I took it up there.

• 13:06Steven Rinella?

  Not like through a string, so it would literally hit the button.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  It would hit the button, but it had to the, to where the bait goes, the string tied. And I'm gonna tell you that the stuff.

• 13:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, bad. I, I don't want to act like I understand. Tell me again about the string.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  The string went from where the bait, like if you'd put cheese on a rat trap.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  The bait, the bait holder.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  That's what holds the arm that trips, that lets the treadle fall.

• 13:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got it. Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  So the string would go to that.

• 13:32Steven Rinella?

  Entrapping lingo.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  So the bear would hit that.

• 13:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Pulls it, it trips.

• 13:38Steven Rinella?

  So you're running like a piece of mono.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Piece of mono.

• 13:41Steven Rinella?

  Over to the bait area.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Anywhere around there. Just where it get on the main trail, you know, they're always.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  Like hung the chest high so little things aren't tripping.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  So it, yeah, so it trips it.

• 13:50Steven Rinella?

  It hit that rat trap.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  One picture. First time I go into the bait. And I go in and see.

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  How, how are you holding the camera still?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Camera, camera was mounted, it's just the same way almost today. I put it on a strap right there where the treadle was, so it was pointed at the bait. And you've secured it to a tree or whatever you had around there. Bear comes down, trips it, it's gone, it turns on. We go in to check it the next morning. I go in and all this neat stuff, like I was telling you about the number of pictures and what Maltrey's grown to and the billions and billions and billions of pictures. Never has it been better. I walked in and saw that mono down and that treadle on top of that camera deal. First picture ever. Camera. I take it out, go to the deal. We're up in Tamagotchi, I mean, Canada.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  I carried it to the drugstore and you know, they go, you want one hour or three day? I said, I'll take one hour on this one. And we get that very first picture.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Every bit of it came from that and after that.

• 14:56Steven Rinella?

  When you were doing that, you were, did you think about? You were just trying to, you were just trying to hunt bears.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Oh, we were doing something bears. In fact, really and truly, probably I was more interested in the hunting side, like you would have been, than I was the business side of it. And for years, we had it. And one of the moguls in our industry, a guy named Ray Mersky, I don't know if you knew Ray out of Texas, just, I mean, a mogul in the hunting industry. The hunting industry wouldn't be where it was today if it wasn't for Ray. And he, he was, he and I hunted together all the time and he saw that and I showed him some of those pictures and he goes, what do you have? And I was telling him how it works and he said, you've got to develop that for, for, he said, you know how good that would be?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  And I said, you really think that'd sell that well? And he said, Maltrey, he said, it'll be off the chart. I'll swing back to another comment here in a minute that proves Ray was smart about what he did. So we started developing, came up with one, came up with that was, he, heat censored or motion censored. Had our very first camera that we got.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Go to see the buyers, our traditional buyers that were selling feeders and, and management stuff all over.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  I got hit with, you really think somebody's wife's gonna let them put a three hundred something dollar camera out in the woods, Maltrey? I said, yeah, I think so. Had trouble getting, it, it was, it didn't take legs. And today, probably besides, I don't know what, I think cameras may be part of the best selling item in our industry right now. The, the

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Ray Mersky comes back in. I'd been to Walmart and showed it to the buyer. Ah, it's just a little outside our deal. Ray was on the sporting good board so far. He got in front of those people, went back and he said, guys, let me tell you all, I've been around this as long as anybody and, and Ray was so well respected, one of Sam Walton's closest friends. And he said, if y'all put this in, he said, I think it'll be one of the biggest items ever in the hunting and fishing category. He foresaw that forty years ago.

• 17:07Steven Rinella?

  But what? By that point, I mean, the rat trap contraption.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  We, we had gone by that and had an infrared switch on it, an infrared and motion switch.

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  When it first came, when first you go by trail cameras, infrared motion.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  First one by was, was infrared motion.

• 17:26Steven Rinella?

  Which is the same thing that trips your garage door.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 17:30Steven Rinella?

  How did that work?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  It worked really good.

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  But did you guys, was it all contained by that point?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  It was all contained. Only, you know, I always viewed being in our industry, the sales and the marketing was the side. I never patented anything. All our stuff, I never patented. It's up, it's up. We were so on the front edge of the trail camera deal. I thought, you know what? It's gonna be out in the weather. Nothing envisioned of where it's gonna, it is now. I thought the secret to this is gonna be protecting it from the weather. And we had like a baseball cap hat over the camera box. And it protected it and we patented that. Only patent I've ever held and.

• 18:09Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Patented, but who knows? After they got sealed up, it was a useless deal and didn't, you know, but I thought it would protect it. But that's kind of where it evolved. In fact, I had several guys that was testing them. They go, man, we sprayed it with water and it all went all in the front. I said, yeah, that's protecting it from this way of water, not that way of water. But all that has developed from there, but so then we got, you know, that first generation turned into second generation, second generation to third generation. Taking it from a, a infrared motion switch off a film camera, remember, every bit of this film. So you had to have massive battery draw.

• 18:49Steven Rinella?

  So those early ones were filmed.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Oh, I, every one.

• 18:52Steven Rinella?

  Early commercially available.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Every ones that we sold, the earliest ones were all film based.

• 18:57Steven Rinella?

  See, that's funny bringing it up cause like I'm trying to match up sort of my own awareness. And I have no.

• 19:06Steven Rinella?

  Recollection of seeing a film one. But here's what I do remember. I remember that you'd go out fishing. Trolling salmon.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:17Steven Rinella?

  And you'd come home with a big scroll of paper.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:19Steven Rinella?

  Because your sonar, your fish finder.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 19:22Steven Rinella?

  Had a scroll of paper and a pencil.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Right. And you finding those spots.

• 19:26Steven Rinella?

  And you could, people would be walking around with those rolls of paper in their pocket.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:30Steven Rinella?

  And they'd open them up and show you fish marks. And you'd carry it around like that. I remember that, but I have no recollection of there being a trail camera with film in it.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Do you remember at the earliest days of the shot show? I mean, this is back when.

• 19:47Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know shot show existed.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  When we got into it, there was the Browning and Ramingtons and Winchesters. And we were so early in it. I mean, we're coming up on 50 years in it. There'd be like maybe Baker tree stands and some old, old, old categories. And but every year when you would meet in those earliest shot shows and you'd go to the show. And of course now, just like this morning, like me showing you the airheads earlier. Everybody whips out the phone and whips to them. You would carry packs of photos that you had had enlarged or and you'd be at the show. And people are whipping those out and got the, got the photos.

• 20:28Steven Rinella?

  And they're trail cam photos.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  They're the trail cam photos.

• 20:30Steven Rinella?

  God, I have no, like, what year would that have been? You put a roll of film and a camera and hung it on a tree.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  That was in the eighties. That was in the eighties because we, when we developed digital, we were the first in digital. We were all the way through. I think it's first cellular and, and all that development came from everybody. When digital cameras came, everybody, and, and you were old enough to remember this. Everybody had cameras and they were all film. Digital comes out and they're like, you mean, I don't have to buy more film?

• 21:01Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  But the problem with digital, this was a, this, this light to have got us. This worked us to death figuring this out. That for a digital camera to work, it has to be on. Because I don't know if you remember the digitals, when they would warm up, you'd hear it. Sounded like, and they'd warm up.

• 21:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  So by the time they warm up, the game had already gone by or it spooked them.

• 21:24Steven Rinella?

  That's a good point. I kind of forgot about that noise they would make when you turn them on.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  So when we were doing all the early prototypes and testing.

• 21:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  We had car batteries out there and they were draining car batteries down because it had to stay on the entire time. You didn't have the, the time, you know how one of the, the selling items on cameras now are camera or shutter speed?

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  There was no shutter speed if you had to wait on that camera to warm up. Everything would have been by, but.

• 21:52Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Once we got that figured out, then the digital came, that, that.

• 21:57Steven Rinella?

  Cause you knew, cause, cause, but, but you guys knew. You guys knew that the film thing was done.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  It, it, oh, yeah.

• 22:04Steven Rinella?

  Cause like if cam, like if people are done buying film for their normal cameras, they're not going to be putting them in trail cameras.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 22:11Steven Rinella?

  Like film is over.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  One of the deals that we would go by and, and I was talking with one of your guys this morning about it. You see so much item, if you go to any sporting goods store, any of the, the national chains. You see 60 feet of, of an item they're selling. They're selling quite a bit of those. You can judge by square footage of the store.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  You go in Walmart, the impulse buyer for Walmart at that time was a guy named Clifford Young. And he was telling me how much, if you go by the checkout at Walmart.

• 22:39Steven Rinella?

  What, his title was impulse buyer?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Impulse buyer. And, and Clifford's probably retired now, but he was in overall impulse items. When you went through the checkout, and if you think about what was there, there was film.

• 22:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  He had all three film. They had Mars candy bars. They had actually combs was on there. Items that somebody's going to pick up that they would go, oh yeah, oh yeah, I need to get that right there. And he told me back then, when I was showing him and he and I'd hunt together about the cameras. He said, film's dead, Maltr. He said, our sales on film is going like that.

• 23:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no kidding, man.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  And so that, that forced that and that guaranteed in the same deal. You see that shelf space gone at all at Walmart? I guarantee it's changing.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 23:35Speaker 07

  There's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 23:41Speaker 07

  I will send swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Brian Philippi joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate. An available multi-century feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 24:56Steven Rinella?

  I just want to go back to the call to impulse buyer. Cause you know, like in fishing, you had bobbers.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:03Steven Rinella?

  And fly fishermen wanted to feel special.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:05Steven Rinella?

  So they named them strike indicators, right?

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:09Steven Rinella?

  Because they just wanted, they couldn't handle it. It seems that the dude that's the impulse buyer would want to rebrand his position. Because most people have, like I have a perception that an impulse buyer is impulsive.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  No, no, they saw the way around.

• 25:26Steven Rinella?

  What? It's, it's the customer, not the buyer. Like the, I don't know, man, like the last minute thing you forgot you needed buyer. Cause you'd be like, dude, I don't want to be an impulse buyer. Like, I don't want to make an impulse purchase. That's, that's impulsive.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Well, Walmart had a deal and we learned so much from every category, every, whether it was the Cabela's, whether it was. Dons, where it was, whatever in the industry and 50 years of learning and, and working with all the merchants and everything's different. Walmart had a deal and I don't know how many people knew about it, but it was, and, and we learned about it from the impulse guy. They had an item every year they called the, uh, VPI item. You ever heard of that?

• 26:12Steven Rinella?

  What, what was it?

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Volume producing item.

• 26:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, VP.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  VP, uh, VPI, volume producing item. They would pick one item a year.

• 26:22Steven Rinella?

  That was cranking volume.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  That was cranking volume. If you, you'll remember this, you go through the checkout at Walmart, they had a huge drum, probably a 30 gallon drum. Ring pops. Remember when all those kids had?

• 26:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  VPI item.

• 26:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  The only sporting good item that ever made it that I know of, we had a multi item as a VPI.

• 26:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what was it?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  It was a, when we came out with the demand feeders for the, the, um, the, for the, that the deer would come up and activate it.

• 26:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  And it qualified because it low price point, high volume, lot people buy, people that won't pay $500 for a feeder. If they pick, and I've forgotten what the retail was, it on $15, $17. It fit that and it, and it was, it was unbelievable. I mean, but, but just, so we learned that from them and, and, and that volume that you could reach with that. We knew the cameras, we were on to something, but we had to go through the generations of it, just what you were talking about.

• 27:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, hit me, but hit me with that thing where, because I kind of got you derailed a little bit when I was on the film thing. But like, if you, when you, if, if, if people knew film, and I don't even remember putting film in a trail camera. But, but what wound up being the solve? For, for having a, but I'm saying for having a digital camera hanging on a tree that's just on all the time. And it's, and you got a couple of those batteries in there and they're going to smoke through in two days.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  The, the solve was finding enough battery power to keep that digital camera on. But finding a digital camera that didn't use much battery power.

• 27:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  And finally, we found those and got the two of those to me.

• 28:03Steven Rinella?

  So there would be for a while that was like powered by car batteries.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  We, all our testing was done with car batteries and it's draining them like there was no more. It was, I, in those days, I didn't think we'd get over that hump. That was a very tough hump in trail cameras to get over.

• 28:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Um, now with the, like, when you look at the solar stuff coming in. What, what do you think is the lag? Okay, if you go, like, if I, if I'm thinking in my mind, like when you first started seeing solar become popularized, right? What do you feel is the lag where like a thing will happen like battery technology, rechargeable battery, lithium, solar, right? What is the lag between some user group somewhere identifying solar? And then being like, I'm probably gonna need to figure out how to bake that into a camera. Do you mean like, what like, what is the delay like?

• 29:03Speaker 03

  We stay, and I'm not, I don't think I'm telling any trade secrets here that you know hadn't discussed or that you don't know. We stay about at least three years out on what we're developing.

• 29:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  The stuff we got coming in three years is gonna, you, you, you're not gonna, I mean Steve, it's unbelievable. We just introduced the solar edge four. The technology on it, it should be undrainable. You ought to be able to put it out and don't ever touch it.

• 29:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I already kinda, I already got that with one of the external solar panels.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:38Steven Rinella?

  The problem is it's, it's, uh, bears love those things.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I used to, I used to joke with a lot of people, it's hard to teach those bears to tear up all that stuff. So we said, but no.

• 29:48Steven Rinella?

  I got it. So I'll tell you about that, a funny situation. I put one on a, I put one on a, a trail. You know, and, um, the first, I'm not kidding you, the first image I got, the first image I got was a bear coming down the trail. Right?

• 30:06Steven Rinella?

  The second image I got is that camera aimed at the sky.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  He'd always roll.

• 30:10Steven Rinella?

  The second image I got is that camera aimed off of one part of the woods. The third image I got is that camera aimed off another part of the woods. And then from there it was just, but like, what's funny is, once he does that,

• 30:25Steven Rinella?

  he's done with it.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 30:27Steven Rinella?

  He's like, okay, I'm done with that now. And then he put it back and he just walks by it and walks back. But the first time he's like, what in the world is that?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Because he didn't find the tree. You know, I know you've done as much black bear baiting probably as anybody.

• 30:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, this is not where this was. This bear has no idea.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  But he could smell your handprints on it. And these people that run them where their bait sites, and you see the, I see the shows on TV, the bear climbing. And then the guy goes, oh, look at the bear coming up. That bear's not going up that stand to get that guy. He smells where those hands were on that day old donut.

• 31:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  And that he's falling up that trail to find the tree at the end of the trail. That's why that bear is going up. There's no doubt. There's no doubt. That's why they go and tear up the cameras. That's why we made boxes.

• 31:14Steven Rinella?

  He's more drawn to the smell of it than just the look of it?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's, he smells where those, you know how good a bear's nose is.

• 31:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  If that guy had been over there refreshing his bait barrel and then he goes, let's put up a camera. There's no way. If a bloodhound can smell a human in 14 days track, you think that bear can't smell where somebody had had their hands in jelly donuts and then moved it to the camera? That's why they're going to.

• 31:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. In my mind, and I don't know why, in my mind, he was like visually, I don't know, I wasn't able to interview him. In my mind, he's like, what is that?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. When they first see it, that is. But, but there still could have had your human scent on it. That him saying, I wonder what that is.

• 31:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. No, I hadn't thought of that.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  So you, you feel that, I, I, what I was gonna say is it's already kinda there because I've had camera, I've had, I've had your cameras with a solar, with your external solar that you can kinda move up the tree. I've had them run for years.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  But, but the new stuff is so, it, it, in fact, Ashley was asking me, I, I was trying to upgrade my camera supply because I ought to be out there running our newest stuff and getting, and I was trying to count up how many cameras we got everywhere. And I mean, it's a bunch of, everybody always says, how many are you running? It's a bunch. But to get all the new edge stuff, the, the, the difference in technology every year like right now, Steve, is off the chart difference. Our new stuff eclipses the old stuff. But it's just like anything. That's what's new. That's what's come. That's what's been researched.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  So we, we finally find the, the best of the best in the world solar deal. We finally got engineers that figured out a better diagram of schematic to make it do this. It's improving every year. It's beyond where I ever imagined. And it's beyond where most people is. But the technology on it, don't mistake, the technology put behind these cameras, it's a force, the team we've had there is off, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people working on the technology out.

• 33:19Steven Rinella?

  And trying to bring that stuff into it.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Oh, the, the new stuff's off. It's, it's great. And it didn't, this is no selling deal. This is, it's just evolving now. We're right in the evolution of that getting to the best of the best of the bad.

• 33:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, there's all these, it, it makes sense because you're dealing when you're dealing in, you're using technologies

• 33:41Steven Rinella?

  that are of significance, like, like of significance to aerospace, of significance to defense, of, of significance to security. It's like, so you have a million, not a million, but a bunch of different industries being like, how do you make smaller batteries that last longer? How do you do, how do you use renewable, right? So just all these inputs of like, of, of things, you know?

• 34:06Speaker 03

  And it comes from different areas. There's, there's inputs we get from law enforcement. There's inputs we get from military applications that's been done. Look at, um, uh, fishing. If somebody's fishing and GPS is taking them to their spot where they've built a reef, that wasn't available till military discounted that GPS and, and for, you know, and went to newer technology where they can put a missile through a window at a thousand miles away. A lot of that's coming through our industry. You get that. We had, we had a military guy approach us. We went and, so he said, what if I could show you that if there was fog or, you know, when you get camera pictures early in the morning and late in the afternoon,

• 34:50Speaker 03

  there's fog or rain and he said, we, we've got the technology. And this was a military guy application. He said, it'll shoot through the fog. You'll never have another fogged out picture. Yeah. And, and so that.

• 35:02Steven Rinella?

  Cause you ever notice like, like rangefinders?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:06Steven Rinella?

  They hate the fog, man.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, and they hate the fog and the bright. So I have the problem. You're trying to get an animal. You know, you might have, what, 15 seconds you're trying to get a range, especially if you're bow hunting and that sun's reflecting and you can't get that to bounce back off that reflection. And you're just like, oh gosh, I need to know the range. But same thing then. And so that technology's out there and it's coming to our, our industry really well.

• 35:33Steven Rinella?

  When, when I think about the history, the history of trail cameras and like the impact, the trail cams, and I know that in, in my notes, I know that you've brought it up as well, is, um,

• 35:47Steven Rinella?

  that it, it introduced this whole world of finding out that something existed that you didn't know existed. I mean, if you're gonna look like, like deer in particular, okay?

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:02Steven Rinella?

  If you were to look at like, what is, if you said like, well, it's changed everything. It's changed like home security. It's changed everything. But you're gonna be like, but let's think of like discreet, single things that happened. It would be that it introduced the conversation of, I got a buck on camera.

• 36:21Steven Rinella?

  Right? That you'd all of a sudden, but it didn't have to be that you had to be present to see it. And all of a sudden people were aware that this stuff is going on that they didn't know was going on.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  I made in my notes when I was coming out, we, we were flying out and I was looking through the items I saw that y'all wanted to talk about. And the same deal, I identified that the, the one thing I saw the camera do that I think some people might've missed, you didn't, cause you just talked about it. But especially in the southeast, those big deer out west, animals aren't harassed as much as they are in the southeast. Our populations are higher. They've been hunted longer. They're harder to have. People, and we talked about it when you came down for the Christmas show in Alabama. The level, y'all may have a lot of 160 deer running around here. They're not running around the south like that.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  When we came out with that camera, I can't tell you how many trade shows I went to and I'd have a guy came up and he goes, oh my gosh, we're never gonna not use your stuff. Maltris said, you, you can't imagine this. I got a picture of a 150 on my property or a 140 or whatever size. He said, I never have seen, we've never killed a deer that big. You know what it gave them? And especially for the QDMA side of, of managing property, Steve, it gave them hope. They had no idea those deer were there. But you know what? Dogs running them, people hunting them, those deer go purely nocturnal. They don't get seen. Guess what that camera did? Hey, you're holding a deer this size.

• 37:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Where people had no idea there were deer that size, they finally started, yes, we do have them. That was one of the neatest deals about it. And that, that was multiple people telling me that.

• 38:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That, that, that was like, that was an impactful thing to be that, and it's kinda like this thing you always run in your head. Remember I was talking about sonar for a minute, fish finders? So it just, it just brings up this interesting conversation where.

• 38:22Steven Rinella?

  What these, these competing views of, of looking at this stuff where no doubt, like every piece of technology that comes out, there will always be a person that, that bemoans the technology.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:34Steven Rinella?

  And then you always kind of, you always like, meaning that they feel that something is dying with, with the technology, like some skill is lost or some aspect of the experience is dying. Uh, I am, there's no doubt that the bolt action rifle at the time had its detractors, right? Uh, those pencil fish finders that were, there's like the piece of lead, there's no doubt, there's no doubt they had their detractors. But you look and you think of, um, the ways in which the, the, the, the human mind, like the ways in which it changed your understanding of what's going on. Meaning, uh, take sonar fish finders.

• 39:20Steven Rinella?

  You got on a lake, you're never quite clear of the contours of the bottom, of features of the bottom, that there's like an old shipwreck down there where fish like to sit, that, that fish sit, oftentimes fish are 10 feet below the surface. You always visualize fish on the bottom. And so it's like a technology and someone's going to go like, oh, it's a crutch. But you'd also go, but, but I didn't understand the area and now I have all this added understanding of the intricacies of what's going on there. And that makes the experience more valuable. Uh, another example is we, we have a fish place in Alaska. We fish there all the time. We used to fish off charts, nautical charts, that just had no contours. It was, the ocean was a blank. Okay.

• 40:05Steven Rinella?

  And on that blank was just fathom numbers. No lines between fathom markers, there's just fathom numbers interspersed. And we were under the belief that in our area, we like, we knew there to the west of us, but we were under the belief that we did not have Linkot.

• 40:28Steven Rinella?

  Maybe now and then someone would get a Linkot. We, we were like, there's no Linkot around. Then out came like sophisticated GPS mapping systems with very detailed hydrographical markings. And all of a sudden then it was like Linkot bonanza.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:48Steven Rinella?

  Cause they like a very specific thing. And so your view of the ocean went from being that it was sort of this unknown basin like thing that you only experience from the surface to being like, oh, right? It's like looking at a mountain. Stuff travels the ridges, like deer like the benches. And all of a sudden you understood underwater in the same way. And it heightened your appreciation for the ocean, made you more effective, but sort of like gave you more info.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  That, that is.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  And that's like a thing about cameras is like, you're all of a sudden like, oh, I had no idea. I have a picture. Um, I have a picture where I had no idea they're around. I, there's a place I hang out, we camp there all the time. I had no idea they're around. There's a Wolverine that lives there and he comes through now and then I would not know. I would not know.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  If you didn't have.

• 41:40Steven Rinella?

  That that Wolverine comes through there. Had I not hung a camera there. So I'm like, so is it bad that I know? Or is it good that I know? I love knowing that it's there.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of our stuff, we've worked with different state agencies, state game and fish agencies. There was one of the states that was having to spend too much overtime on their wardens or, or biologists.

• 42:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  To check traps. And so we worked with them and put cameras on them. If a wolf got in a trap, the, it would go to the, the, uh, um, notification would go to the woman or, or man that was on dispatch.

• 42:20Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Dispatch should call whoever was on duty. They were able to continue the program because they were eating up all their, their, uh, money they had allocated for payroll.

• 42:30Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  To do that, and it worked great. You know, a lot of the states have 20 or 24 hour check policies. You've got to set a foothold trap and check it within 24 hours. I like putting a camera on it because you're going to know within seconds that you have that.

• 42:44Steven Rinella?

  That's funny because, uh, that's something that's not clearly articulated. Um, you'll see regulations like in states that have check laws. I think that you'll see how they term it. Um, do they term it visually inspect like?

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:58Steven Rinella?

  It, it's a thing that needs to be clarified.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:00Steven Rinella?

  Like what, what inspection looks like.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  But all the, and, and to what you were saying about fish finders, one of the items right now that's in the marine and fishing industry that's bringing up, I'm talking about it, you talking about it this spring's game and fish meetings of all the states.

• 43:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, live.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Live scope.

• 43:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Oh my.

• 43:17Steven Rinella?

  We cover it, we cover the live scope conversation and it, and it's a classic example. It's a classic example of two wildly different views. And like, I'm of the age, I guess, where I look at live, I look at live scope, even though I got buddies, I've fished, I've got buddies that fish it. There's young guys running around this office that they're like, they don't want to fish without it.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:39Steven Rinella?

  But I'm like, ah, man, I don't know.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  You and I are on exactly the same page. I don't have one on my boats. I don't fish with live scope, but I've fished with guys that have it and it's incredibly effective. But I had one of the guys off Lake Martin down there and tremendous crappie lakes. And he said, he said, Mr. Maltrey, he said, I need to talk to you. He said, if y'all don't do something at game and fish about live scope, he said, there are going to be no crappie left.

• 44:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  He said, it's that effective. It's heavily being discussed. And again, where's that point?

• 44:12Steven Rinella?

  I don't know. It is, I, I don't know where the point is. There's a huge age element to it. There's also, there's an age element to it. And there's also like a short memory element to it. Meaning, why is it so acceptable for me to use a fish finder?

• 44:36Steven Rinella?

  Right? I'm totally like, I use a fish, like when I'm out running, I got a chart, I got a split screen. I got a chart, I toggle between different fish finder views. But then for some reason, I feel it's okay to question the validity of a, of a one that's a little better or a lot better. But I'm saying like, what about the guy that, that when I, when fish finders came out, what about the guy that's like, that's not fair?

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 45:04Steven Rinella?

  He's forgotten now. And you re, we, we constantly reset the clock.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  We, we are. And the eight, the technology and age and technology has come so fast, so far now. I mean, I'm from the group there. When we had the big, great big giant cell phones in that age group, and now you've got them. And if you don't have something operating from your cell phone, so all that's changing. But you, you know, I think you have to have something that benefits the resource, but doesn't abuse the resource. I think that's key in that. Now, where is abuse of the resource? That's where the biologist or whoever for each state have to decide. But that's one of the keys to me is, is, does it benefit the resource?

• 45:51Speaker 03

  And everything had to me, when we were in, you know, all those years in game and fish, is it data based and does it benefit the resource?

• 45:58Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  That's where it's got to come from.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 46:06Speaker 06

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 46:13Speaker 06

  It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions. All since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plates for bio. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Ryan Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 46:32Speaker 04

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• 46:54Speaker 02

  May be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Breathe in and reset with Lincoln rejuvenate. An available multi sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage visuals and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 47:31Steven Rinella?

  Let me lay out for you. I'd like to get your opinion on this because let me, let me lay out for you just we're sitting in the state of Montana right now. So the main of my state of Montana has been.

• 47:43Steven Rinella?

  Um, we have a great agency and we have a great agency, our fishing game agency.

• 47:50Steven Rinella?

  Like.

• 47:52Steven Rinella?

  There's some agencies around the country where I think that, that, that hunters anglers, they become suspicious of their agency. They maybe feel that their agency doesn't have their best interests in mind. Their agency perhaps like, like is happening in Colorado, like is happening in Washington. The agency can become hijacked by people who are sort of adversarial to a natural resources perspective. On fishing game management, they're uncomfortable with the idea of people viewing wildlife as a resource, right? And so they, they lose the respect, but like, we have a great agency.

• 48:26Steven Rinella?

  And, and I feel that they sort of operate with, with what I'm imagining to be generally operate with the best interests of hunters and anglers in mind. Like they, they make, they, they do a good job. They have jumped around.

• 48:43Steven Rinella?

  On what are we going to do about trail cameras? What's the appropriate use of trail cameras, what's not? So it, it changes. There's been some changing in direction around two way communications as that's come in, right? So where we sit now is, um, we sit that. I can, I'm a, I like a trap. I'm a fur trapper, just recreational hobby fur trapper.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  I, I, I saw your show in the deal on stretching cow hides and grading them. That was fantastic.

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Fantastic. I'm not there, but that was fantastic.

• 49:11Steven Rinella?

  Love that stuff. And we're allowed so, because it's non. So we can't, we can't currently use a, um, what, what's the best way to describe like a digital, but, but sends to your. Like, what's the best terminology for one that sends to your phone? You'd call it a cellular.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Oh, that cellular phone.

• 49:30Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, but soon it'll be satellite and then we'll have a different word for it. But for what now is cellular network.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Automatically that you don't have to retrieve it yourself from the woods.

• 49:38Steven Rinella?

  So currently cellular, which is the current way that it's transmitted. So we can't use a cellular camera.

• 49:46Steven Rinella?

  For hunting game animals. You can use a, but I can use a cellular camera. For whatever, like I can put it on a beaver, like a, a crossing and watch otters go by. I use it all the time. I'll, I'll put it on set. Right? I'll, I'll set a spot waiting for an otter to come through or something. I'll put a camera on it and I know exactly what's going on, right? That's permissible. Like, a, as someone in the trail cam industry and a pioneer in the trail cam industry.

• 50:20Steven Rinella?

  How do you think about what goes through your mind when you look at states, particularly in the West?

• 50:28Steven Rinella?

  Making regulations that kind of like, that, that, that impact your products and impact innovations you work on. Do you, do you, do you just, do you sit back and watch it happen? Do you try to be responsive to it? Do you weigh in on it? Like, what is your view on it?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  It's, you know what? And I've got a lifetime of sitting on the hunting and fishing side. I've got 40, 35 years gaming fish side.

• 50:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You, so yeah, you were in game of fish. You were on the commission for 12 years.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So I'm on both sides of it.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  And I, I, I'm going to tell you. The, the, when we first started reviewing stuff like that. Whether it be go to the most controversial issues, go to, that are in almost all the states, go to high fences.

• 51:19Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Go to dog hunting. Go to anything that tests the theory of what we just talked about. Where is it?

• 51:27Speaker 03

  The, the deal.

• 51:28Steven Rinella?

  I want to add to that list. Maybe we'll talk about it.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:30Steven Rinella?

  I think that right now the hot one is going to be drones. It is drones and will remain drones.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  And I'm glad you're asking because I've got a lot of, I've got a lot of thoughts in my. But you have to set the bar. And again, the job is to protect the resource. I don't care what anybody else says, that's the job. And so how do you equate if something is good or bad with it? I always kind of defined it as, does the animal have a fair chance of escape?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  You go, look at almost any issue. Does that animal have a fair chance of escape? Let's say there's a water hole in Montana that there's no water for a hundred miles. And there's 80 cameras on it that we've heard these stories about that. And everybody's finding the exact times they come. Does that animal have a fair chance to escape? Probably not. I'll agree with that. If I was on that commission, I'd vote absolutely not.

• 52:26Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  If I'm using it to find out research to know if we've got the correct age class of almost everybody's managing by age class now.

• 52:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  On deer and elk and everything else heard. That, am I managing it right? Do I see two year olds, three year olds, four year olds? Do you have the bell curve for that? Yeah, that's using it responsibly. So there's a line in there, but I always to said. So GM makes automobiles. Somebody's mad and got road rage and runs somebody down. Is that using that responsibly?

• 52:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Is that, was that intended to be used for that? There's a lot of things product gets used for that's not intended. So let's go back to, does the animal have a fair chance for escape? That's kind of a good place to start.

• 53:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  The one thing I learned that I didn't know about, I was not, I'd never been in politics, fool with politics, done anything in politics. Do not mistake. And it's in every phase of even game and fish where it shouldn't be. It used to make me mad. I, I'd, man, this is game and fish. We've got to make sure the resource is protected. And you see a group come in and I always called them political footballs.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  That drone, that camera, that whatever. Hey, they've got five other issues that they've promised their membership that they want to try to get pushed through.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Let's pick up a political football and play. We don't care if we lose or gain that. But if we do that and attach to the legislation, this other, we may can approve this. If you look what gets to attach to legislation versus what the legislation was intended for. That's the way that stuff slips in. So, and I guess this is, is bad to say, but I'd warn everybody who's watching issues. Watch out for what's being slipped in and watch out for what's being attached. They may not, they may seem like they're wor, they may seem like they're more worried about your drone issue than anybody. When in reality, they know it's going to come and go. Let's attack, it's a political football.

• 54:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  So that has to be looked at. Now, all that mixed up is going to make a cake somewhere down the road.

• 54:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  But it has to go through all that. I used to always say, somebody would bring us an issue, the game and fish that needed to be voted on by the advisory board. And it, it, somebody told it to me early on, but it's true. You push one cork under the water, four more pop back up. And, and I don't care what the issue, it may seem like the greatest idea that's ever been. You voted in 50% going to like it, 50% not going to like it.

• 55:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Every time. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're helping little old ladies cross streets, somebody's going to say, oh, I don't like that.

• 55:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. No, I understand what you mean.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:16Steven Rinella?

  How, you know, uh, on that point, how did you wind up being, how did you want to? Like, what is the process of being a game commissioner? How did that happen for you?

• 55:24Speaker 03

  The, I had always been interested in it. We had just done the, our partnership with EBSCO. And EBSCO is the largest privately held company in the state of Alabama. They were very backing in that they wanted people to be involved in their industries. And Governor Riley was just coming in, running for, he was a US congressman coming in, going to run for the governor of Alabama. And he said, he said, would you be interested in chairing our game and fish? And I said, absolutely, I would. But again, these are six year term appointments in our state and they're different in different states. But ours are six year terms on that chair position. And I said, I'd love to. I got with them and I said, hey, this is going to take a lot of time.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  And these are our non paid position. These are total volunteer positions. Number one requested in the state of Alabama, number one requested appointment is that appointment. Even more than the judge.

• 56:21Steven Rinella?

  People want that one.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Even more than the judgeships.

• 56:23Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  So, oh yeah. And, and, and you've been down to Alabama.

• 56:27Steven Rinella?

  Cause people have been, people have been hunting and fishing their whole lives and they want to get in there. They want to get in there and make some change.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Three things matter in, in Alabama that'll get a, somebody elected the governor or not. And of course, religion is always one of them. But hunting, fishing and college football.

• 56:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  In our area of the country, and it changes different. You better be in line on those or you're going to lose a lot of votes. But, and so, uh, he, Governor Riley was generous enough to consider me. We had backing from a lot of people saying, hey, I think they do a good job. I felt qualified for it. I've been all over to every state near about in the United States hunting, had been involved in. One of the neatest deals about evolving the feeders and cameras and all the other saunter products we did. People would say, Steve Rennello would call and say, hey, fly out here to my ranch. Let me show you how we're going to be using this. And everybody, all these ranches we got to go visit. Everybody's got good ideas. Nobody has the, the lock on all the good ideas.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  And so the secret is to go take some of those good ideas and bring them back and combine them all.

• 57:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  In, in game management to get to be a total game management company like Maltree has. That's where that came from. I didn't come up with all those ideas. There's no way, all that from going and seeing.

• 57:49Steven Rinella?

  Travel and seeing what people are doing.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  So we did that and we, I remember the very first day, Barnett Lawley was our commissioner and it was commissioner and governor. And I would work very close together. And Governor Riley told me, he said, look, in this deal, I know y'all haven't been in the political circle. He said, just remember this, do the right thing. I got your back. And I thought, this is great.

• 58:10Steven Rinella?

  That was the direction?

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is great. I can do that. I always try to do that.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  But got it.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Boy, you have no idea how many skeletons in the closet with knives coming out to cut your throat. You know, when you, when you mess with their little sandbox, it's different. So there's a lot to be done with that. That, that probably the biggest deal we did.

• 58:32Steven Rinella?

  But tell me, when you, when you say when you mess their sandbox, you mean like different user groups? So you mentioned, you mentioned like dog hunters, right?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Oh, the dog.

• 58:38Steven Rinella?

  So like, dog hunters are, I don't want, I don't want to say, I don't want to degrade anything and say like, well, not even them. It's clicky.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  It's, it's beyond.

• 58:46Steven Rinella?

  There's like, there's like, there's like clicks. So you got guys that like to whatever. You got guys like to set line catfish.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  And then the minute you poke into their world.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh.

• 58:56Steven Rinella?

  They're, they're fired up.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, you knock a hornet's nest out of the tree.

• 59:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  And one of the biggest items we did, and it needed, and, and I, I was happy to see it be one of the very first items. And I don't know if you remember this, I remember you told me you'd been to Alabama some. Our quality of deer had eroded to almost nothing. You could kill legally in the state of Alabama, 117 bucks per year.

• 59:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Now, what that resulted in, you, it was hard to get good numbers. I worked closely with, um, Dr. Ditchkov at Auburn University and their, their deer labs and all the, and, and we would get good data input from all the different people that we could find that was, that were professionals or experts in that group. The best we could figure was that 85% of the, the deer killed bucks, killed in the state of Alabama at that time were a year and a half old.

• 59:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Our bell curve was out of whack.

• 59:58Steven Rinella?

  I'll buy that.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Totally because, and, and the viewpoint back then was people would go and they'd see a four point mark. And I think Colorado's going through this same deal with their mule deer right now. But they'd see, and they'd think, I'm gonna shoot it today. I'll, I'll kill the big one tomorrow. Guess what? There are no big ones.

• 1:00:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  There was, there was very, very few in the bell curve of the age class that would hit much, what people perceive as mature now, five and a half, six and a half, almost none.

• 1:00:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  We go in, we start to change that. If, as a group of people in a state, if somebody has given them for the last 40 or 50 years that Alabama had, you can hunt every day of the season, you can kill 117 bucks a year. And all of a sudden, we're gonna say, no, you know what? We'd probably like to change that to one or two. You think there was any pushback?

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Oh, it was unbelievable. The, the, we had the database and I was looking at.

• 1:01:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, people read Hangy.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Oh, beyond Hangy. I was looking at what Kentucky had gone and what happened in Kansas and factual things that happened in states and, and what, how Kentucky had improved their herd. Then you could go to the state of, of whoever that, whichever commissioner, and you could say, hey, I think I could up our tourism in our state. If we had a better state for viable trophy deer. So there was different areas you had to reach to, to get them backing you also.

• 1:01:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  But I, I had settled on two was where I thought that should be. And the, the groups and the people that we had working on that.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  Like lowering the annual limit from 120 bucks, 117 bucks to two.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Now, so, so we're sitting up, we're over at the gaming fish building and, and Commissioner Lawley called me. He said, multi come on governor wants us over to the state house and see, he wants to talk to us. And I'm thinking, oh, great. No telling what this is. But I, I knew what I thought it was. We go in and Governor Riley was a big Alabama guy. And he had a football. He was pitching, he was sitting at his desk pitching it up and down. He pitches it to me when I walk in. He goes, here y'all are fishing, change our deer limit. And I said, yes, sir. He said, what do you think it's gonna be? And I said, well, we're looking at, and all this is database. We've got data out to gazeng, but probably two deer. And

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  I see him look down and he, he's, he looks up and says, and he's, he's such a great guy. He goes, do you know what y'all are doing to me politically, changing the deer limit from 117 to two? And I said, well, it's, it's all data driven. It makes us a better state. It makes the deer herd better. Everything about it's gonna be better if we get from over utilization of the resource to what can be managed for a reoccurring base on the resource. And he said, uh, he listened to the whole spiel and he said, uh, you know what? That's good, but I've got to have three. And I thought, I thought, I'm gonna hold my ground. I thought, you know, I really wanted to, I went the other way. I said, I

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  really wanted to see it go to one.

• 1:03:18Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you're like, I already compromised.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  He said, no, no, three. That's why today, and this is all was discussed that afternoon has all, it, it, um, that's why today in Alabama, you kill two bucks per year of your choice. One deer has to have more than four points off one. That was because where we were, and I said, look, let's do this. Let's, and that's how we got to the, to the deer that had to have a little more requirement for it. But since that time, here's the coolest deal. The research that came out of Auburn and the universities and the biologists that were studying it. When we passed that, Steve, that, that, Steve, I remember growing up,

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  there are people never, he hadn't seen a mature deer in Alabama. And, and they thought through the studies that we would say 50,000 bucks a year's life by passing that legislation. How long does it take to refill that curve? And you're talking about that whole group that was against you. And they go out and they see deer now that they've never seen.

• 1:04:25Steven Rinella?

  Five years later, they're seeing big bucks.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  We're putting buck deer in the book. That's never, that never happened in Alabama. This deer regularly kill 160s, 170s, 180s now in Alabama. That's changed because it's got a healthy bell curve. Now those people are behind it. By golly, we know you won't change this.

• 1:04:42Steven Rinella?

  Isn't it funny? Remember I was talking about short memories?

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Steven Rinella?

  Like, like people in wildlife have short memories? Imagine if now a commissioner came in and he said, I'm thinking about bumping the deer limit to 117.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:04:57Steven Rinella?

  People be, you know what I mean? The same people would lose their mind. They would have lost their mind when you went, you know what I'm saying? But people get used to a thing normal. But I want, I want to tell you my, my kind of main Alabama hunting story from years ago is, uh, it has a lot to do with forkeys. So my brother Danny, he's, he was studying aquatic entomology. He's a fisheries biologist. So he was, he did his, he went to graduate school at Auburn. And he grew up in Michigan, which is a one buck state. I mean, you get excited if you draw a doe tag in Michigan. Um, one buck state. I, when he was down there at Auburn, I was in Montana. And Montana remains a one buck state. It

• 1:05:39Steven Rinella?

  was a one buck state then. And he moves down to Auburn. He's shooting all these deer, man. He's like, I killed five bucks. Like, you kill five, he goes, you kill deer a day.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  So four of us, well, three, three of us, three buddies, right? We go down to hunt. We go down to Auburn to hunt. I think it was between Christmas and New Year's. And we just go out into Tuskegee National Forest. I mean, just wander out into the woods, dude, and set up on trails. And I remember hanging a tree stand in a magnolium, thinking that was the weirdest thing in the world, you know? It's so, like, one day, the next day, the next day, the next day, we all got bucks. And, um, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. But my buck, I always like tell the story, when I cut the cap, when I cut the skull cap off my buck and trimmed it down, I flew home with it. This is not

• 1:06:30Steven Rinella?

  a joke. I flew home with it in my shirt pocket. It had two little devil horns. And I trimmed that bone plate up and I was carrying it around in my pocket. But it was just, he was killing, he was killing a lot of bucks, but it's just all just dinky little bucks.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  That was about 85%.

• 1:06:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Imagine.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  But we still, I mean, I'm not to discredit that, but we still had the time of our lives.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No. And, and the same deal. There was a lot of, don't think there weren't a lot of people that was enjoying that.

• 1:06:57Steven Rinella?

  But we only killed, we only killed, but just to be clear, we only got one, one each. But it was just like, I blew my mind after living in the north. It blew my mind that there'd be such a thing as that, that you could just kill a deer a day.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Oh, and one of the most controversial areas in those first years of going in was the dog deer hunting. And because it'd been so, and, and this is exactly like the drone issue. Where do you draw the line? If somebody wants to use a drone for animal recovery, somebody wants to use a dog for animal recovery.

• 1:07:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Are there people that abuse that? Is there dog deer hunting? Our state allows dog deer hunting. It is an old, hundreds of year old tradition in the southeast for dog deer hunts. One of the most expensive lodges to join, that's probably over a half million a year to get in this place. They do dog deer hunts. And it's, it's well received. But all that ties back to, of, of what you were talking about at the drone. You get a guy, it's Steve Rinella, and, and it's different. Out west, there's a lot of federal property. In Texas, Alabama, some of the southern states is probably 98, 99% private property.

• 1:08:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  So if Steve Rinella spends a half million dollars a year developing his property, would it be legal or would it be responsible for somebody to be able to lease 20 acres next to you and release 20 dogs every weekend that they know they're going off their 20 acres and go on your deal? So all the states have had to fight that.

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• 1:10:00Steven Rinella?

  I want to talk about, I'd love to talk about, because I don't have familiarity. I want to talk about drones and I want to talk about dogs. But the fundamental difference between drones and dogs is ones like a historical.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  That is a traditional use practice. My granddaddy, my great granddaddy, same deal where that's the story that gets brought to you.

• 1:10:17Steven Rinella?

  And that's what you hear, like, I'm totally unfamiliar. I've never hunted deer. I've hunted a lot of stuff behind dogs. I've never hunted deer behind and front of dogs. But that's one of those issues, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it. Is this one of those issues where people point to it's not what's okay. It's what it's what is naturally going to come from that.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:10:39Steven Rinella?

  Meaning, meaning you doing dogs on your property is one thing. But it becomes that it just doesn't work for you to keep them off your neighbor's property. And so when you, when people criticize it, they're not criticizing the act. Some people are, but generally they're not criticizing the act in and of itself. They're criticizing what they know will come with it.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Is it, and I used to, in the early dog day arguments, go back to the resource again. And I came up with, one of the meetings, I said, and the people always bring in the ethics. Do you think, is it ethical to have that camera on that water hole with 80? Is it ethical to do this or that?

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  I would ask the question in the meeting, Steve. Is it more ethical to, to push a deer or to pull a deer?

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  You see what I'm saying?

• 1:11:37Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  If I'm on plan of green fill and I'm bringing them to me, a guy's got an argument. Well, that's unnatural. They're not green fields naturally for deer and they're going to come. So you're pulling them. With that dog, you're pushing them.

• 1:11:49Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  You're driving them.

• 1:11:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  Of course, that's the one.

• 1:11:54Steven Rinella?

  That's why, I don't want to stray too far.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  That's tough.

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  There's a concept, there's a concept that's interesting in these discussions. And I can't, I wish I could remember the name of the guy that I first heard, but who brought it up. But the argument would be.

• 1:12:10Steven Rinella?

  Stop calling it, stop talking about fair chase. Okay. I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint. It's got problems, but talking about fair chase has problems. Cause you're like, is, is it fair? Like you said, is it more fair to create an environment they like?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:26Steven Rinella?

  Or is it more fair to have a thing that like repels them and you pursue them? But like he's, this guy proposed, um, let's start talking about fair share. And we look at, we have, we have, we're dealing in wildlife management, fisheries management. We're dealing at a finite resource. It's just, there's numbers to it. There are X numbers of halibut. There are X numbers of crappie, there are X numbers of deer, right? There's a finite resource. Um, what is an individual's share? And within that, meaning also what is your impact on the share? It's just, it's a, it's like, it's a concept that I think is worth thinking about.

• 1:13:12Steven Rinella?

  Because it's like, like, what is your, what impact are your activities having on the share? And you could look in this, in this viewpoint, you could look at a land manager.

• 1:13:23Steven Rinella?

  Who's doing habitat work, putting in food plots, leaving quail habitat, whatever, doing improvements. Okay. Putting in nest boxes and wrapping the, and wrapping the tree in sheet metal. Okay. It's like, this dude is growing the share.

• 1:13:39Steven Rinella?

  So if we're talking about fair share, it changes the dynamic. If he's also got a camera out, does that mean he's like, is he, is he negatively impacting the share?

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:13:48Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, but if you have, but if you have, if you have a use practice that is hazing animals off good habitat. You know, having, having like, you know, negative impacts on neighboring hunters impacting their ability to get their share. Like, maybe that's a better way of talking about this whole thing. And.

• 1:14:10Steven Rinella?

  I'm not saying I advocate one over the other, but it's just an interesting perspective.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  It's very controversial and there's always a difference of opinions. When we were researching, I tried to get every bit of, you know how you own the argument? And you know this from being an author. If you own the research, you own the argument. You know more about it, you've got it. We pulled, I pulled every state's legislation on dog, dog hunting, whatnot during those days. Texas defined theirs and some of the, the research I had pulled, they had defined that they thought it took 10,000 acres to run dogs. So they go in and say, okay, if you own more than this, then you could run that amount of dogs. Is that?

• 1:14:50Steven Rinella?

  Cause it was at least plausible for you to do it.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Don't worry. I had one of the senators come up and he said, look, I'm with y'all on, on what your beliefs are. He said, but every person that puts me in office has the, the, the, the most popular size track in the state of Alabama is 40, 40 acres and under. You gonna hold, you gonna hold a pack of walker hounds on 40, 40 acres?

• 1:15:13Steven Rinella?

  That'll keep busy for about, for about 90 seconds.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  So all that has to be and find the correct deal. Is there, there are ways and that it will work? Yeah. And the, the other deal that I, I probably said more at any meeting, bow group, I mean, people are defist the cuffs in this deal, Steve. And I would say, you know what? We gotta learn, guys, and this is the thousand people in the audience. We got, we gotta learn to be good neighbors.

• 1:15:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Let's, let's remember that.

• 1:15:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  And, because you're always going to join somebody and just because you like bow hunting, they may be avid gun hunter.

• 1:15:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  We gotta be good neighbors. Everybody has their, their way of doing it.

• 1:15:54Steven Rinella?

  I got a buddy that hates the, the coyote dog guys. I'm like, what's so bad about that? He's like, what's bad about it is I can't be in my tree with all the damn dogs coming through my place. He goes, it's not the thing. It's like, just stop, don't hunt my place. When I'm hunting my place.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Hunters hating hunting.

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  May not be their deal. I, you know, I never got it. I kept thinking, we're going to pass some bow hunting legislation. And when we pass crossbows, everybody that gets older, have bad shoulders, they get doctor's excuses, get crossbows. And the, the bow hunters call it X bows at that time, you know, for crossbows. And when they were illegal before we passed them to be hunted with responsibly. Uh, I, I had a guy that worked for me and it never clicked with me. And he said, I hear y'all going to pass some crossbow legislation. I said, possibly. I said, depends what the board's viewpoint, what items get brought up. I said, but it's a possibility. He said, they may be, they'll never be true bow hunters. It hit me then.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  That's an ego deal. That's a group that they wear that badge of honor. My golly, I'm a bow hunter.

• 1:17:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  And I, I told him, I said, look, you better know this, at that time, I said, less than 7% of the people in the United States hunt. I said, it's going down. It went down to about three and a half percent. I said, you better embrace every person there is that will hunt with a bow. No matter if you like the type bow or whatnot, so we can get those user numbers back up. Thank goodness that's been turned around and brought back the other way a little bit. But that, in our sport especially, Steve, it's a little bitty sport. Everybody knows everybody and everybody knows, hey, I'm hunting White Mountain this weekend. And you know, he's at the best place of the best. It's a small sport. Better be good neighbors.

• 1:17:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Better get along. And that, that's what was driving that. It's their group. They're proud of it.

• 1:17:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. But I mean, like, like 90% of it is just in good humor. But there is like a tribalism and, and we like all around our office. Like we engage in it all the time. It's like, you know, what, it's kind of like basic. It's like what you're into is dumb. It's like, it's the general joke, you know what I mean?

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely gospel truth. We got in and I don't know if you met them down there. It's a popular national radio show, Rick and Bubba.

• 1:18:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Nationwide. We did that show, we had every two weeks a segment on, we did the outdoor.

• 1:18:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  For 20 something years.

• 1:18:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  We got into, one of the guys, Bubba on that deal had said, and they had 3 million estimated audience. And so we were going at all the, you know, there wasn't that many in Anchorage, Alaska listening, but they still listened in Anchorage, Alaska.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  And we that he said, hey, I saw a black panther this weekend. He said, what do you think about that? And I said, I don't think you saw a black panther. He said, oh, I did. Absolutely. This is what started this whole deal.

• 1:18:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Oh, I did. I said, no. I said, there's, there's first, there's no melanistic phase of panther.

• 1:18:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  I said, secondly, there's no breeding population.

• 1:19:00Steven Rinella?

  I've explained this all a thousand times.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  There's the closest panther to us is Florida Panthers. There's not but estimated 200 in the herd. They estimate how many get there's 20 get killed a year, 10%. The herd is at 200. I said, they travel sometimes come up. There's no way. First, there's no such thing as a black panther.

• 1:19:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and if there was, it wouldn't be here.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  You talking about kicking over an ant bed.

• 1:19:23Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  This deal goes, it becomes number one segment on the show. Number one, every week the phones are like, you can't get a spot on the phone line in.

• 1:19:32Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  And so we start picking at him. I bring in the top of, of game and fish guys, the top research biologists and everyone on them said, there's no way on it. And people start calling in though, Steve. Hey, I don't appreciate it at all, what y'all are saying about this. I'm at a wedding, a buddy of mine's getting married and I have a guy come up. There's probably 300 people at the wedding, Steve. This is how it gets. And so all this, I, I bring this back when I tell you the story to all this has to be taken in when hunting and fishing laws and, and rules are made. And he comes up and shoves my shoulder and he said, I tell you, I don't like it. I go, what are you, what are you talking about?

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  He goes, about the black Panthers. I said, what are you, what are you talking, we're at this guy's wedding? I said, what are you talking about? He said, he said, y'all making fun of that? I said, what? I said, have you seen, I'm trying to figure out now where he's coming from. He said, you think my Mamaw and my great pan Paul would have lied to me about, see, they told me they saw them all the time. You're calling my family liars.

• 1:20:40Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  And I said, well, the research, but they don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear any of that. They don't, they've been told that story. They've been there the entire time. You're gonna, you never ever in a million years will change their mindset of what is there or what wasn't there. I know it's y'all at game and fish, y'all don't want all the hunters in the state to know there's black Panthers out there. They'd stop. No, we keep really close to every investigation goes, it comes back from, you're not going to change that.

• 1:21:13Steven Rinella?

  We, we make a hat that's got a black panther on it and it says believer on it.

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Steven Rinella?

  For all those black panther believers out there.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  But that.

• 1:21:19Steven Rinella?

  You know what's funny about this, like this conversation and trail cams too, though? Is like the Bigfoot people.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Where? But we're sure like, I don't, I don't put black panther people in big, they're different buckets.

• 1:21:34Steven Rinella?

  There's like, black panther people are like people of the woods. Bigfoot people are kind of like, there's like a real kind of hippie element to Bigfoot people.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:21:42Steven Rinella?

  And there's like a backwards quality to a black panther guy. There's like different kind, kind of guys.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  Totally different.

• 1:21:48Steven Rinella?

  But when you say to the Bigfoot guys, where's all the trail cam pictures of Bigfoots? They got, oh, they can detect them. They're in another dimension and trail cameras can't capture that dimension that Bigfoot's living.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Steven Rinella?

  But everybody's going to find a way.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  They find some way to discount. They, they, when, when the black panther argument was there and I said, let, let me, I can define that for you immediately and have absolute evidence that there's not. One of the largest sports down south is raccoon hunting at night with dogs. Exactly. You, you've cat hunted, cat hunted all over. Exactly the same dog you hunt raccoons with that you hunt lines.

• 1:22:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  Why, why in the last 30 years have we never treated a lion?

• 1:22:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that's different. Wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. What, what is that different? What were we talking about?

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  They discounted.

• 1:22:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  But, but so all that, when you were asking that first deal about with the game and fish and how we operate and all that, all that's got to be taken into account.

• 1:22:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Because you, you got to make public heck, you got to guard the resource, all that. So all that ties back in, but that, I'm glad you saw some of that, that it's going on too.

• 1:23:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, I love, but I love that stuff, man. I want, I want to ask you something and, uh, it's fair to call you a technologist. I mean, you're a technologist in some, in some respect.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Steven Rinella?

  Give me your take on like, um, give me your take on drones.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:23:15Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, cause, and let me, just to set that up for listeners a little bit is, uh, when drones, like very early in the drone thing, like right when it became that you could get a drone. I remember, I think it was one year, I might be off by a state or two, but it was within a, a 12 month window. That 13 states came out and just very clearly, very early, said that drones are not allowed in big game hunting.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:45Steven Rinella?

  Applications. They all defined it in their own way, but basically it was like, couldn't use drones for big game hunting. Um, then there came a question, what about retrieval?

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so imagine you go out, you know, you go out at dusk, you hit a deer, you can't find blood, it's real thick. Well, just like, how great would it be while that thing's still holding some body heat?

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:07Steven Rinella?

  To put up a drone with thermal, fly it over the, you know, fly it over some crazy briar patch?

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:13Steven Rinella?

  And there's a little heat spot and boom, like who wouldn't want a guy to get to recover their deer?

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:18Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  What, what's ethical on recovery?

• 1:24:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so it'd be like, yeah, man, like once a deer's wounded, it should be all in.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Everybody in.

• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

  Like, if you can get it, get it. I don't care if you need like an act of God, like.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:30Steven Rinella?

  Get the deer and get it.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:31Steven Rinella?

  So, but then people would be like, but what, how do you unsee? When you're doing that, how do you unsee what you see?

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:38Steven Rinella?

  Where you're like, oh, that's where that big buck beds.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  That's where he's, he's down in that cooley roster.

• 1:24:43Steven Rinella?

  And if he's bedded there tonight, in the morning, I know he's definitely going to go north out of there and right? And so then you, you don't unsee it.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  Um, I had a some, just, just to further paint that picture for you, I had a similar thing, like we're allowed, we're allowed to, we, we can thermal hunt for coyotes.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:02Steven Rinella?

  There's no off time. I remember one time during deer season, me and my buddy are out thermal hunting coyotes at night and I'm seeing bucks, dude. And I'm, I'm like, is it supposed to, you know what I mean?

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  It.

• 1:25:15Steven Rinella?

  Do I unsee that?

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:25:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, we weren't actively deer hunting, but I was like, but I, I could just say like, oh no, I'm hunting coyotes.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Steven Rinella?

  But I can't unsee what I saw. I was seeing bucks that I would not know they were there. Okay? So a, as I, I'm just setting this all up to say like, as someone who deals in emerging technologies, employs emerging technologies, has been in the seat of needing to give legal guidance on emerging technologies, like.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:25:42Steven Rinella?

  Give me your drone spiel, right?

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  You ready?

• 1:25:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  I think the question has been solved for years.

• 1:25:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  You know who has the question? To me, this is kind of where I think that the drone there needs to go. I'm not going to tell you the answer yet. I had a call from a guy several years ago. He said, hey, he said, what should I do? Do I need to call a game or do I need to call what? I've got a drone on my greenfield and it's come up to looking in the window of my shooting house. And I said, do you know whose it is?

• 1:26:16Steven Rinella?

  Not.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  It, this is on a greenfield. He's got the drone. It's not his drone, not his people. Come to find out, it was a neighbor's drone.

• 1:26:25Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  That neighbor was flying his greenfields, pushing the deer off his greenfields.

• 1:26:29Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  No, I'm telling you straight as a rope. So that, that goes on. You, you have drones, hey, let's see what he's doing over here. And they fly in unencumbered space, whether it's their property or not their property.

• 1:26:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  And I think there's some legal aspirations to airspace.

• 1:26:50Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  And what goes on. Here's what I think.

• 1:26:53Steven Rinella?

  My wife walked out the other day, she was, she was come running in the house. We still know who, we'll never find out who it was.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Steven Rinella?

  Someone had one above our house.

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:00Steven Rinella?

  She said, what the?

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  And they want to see Steve.

• 1:27:01Steven Rinella?

  And I said, I'm going to shoot it.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Steven Rinella?

  And then, and then by the time I got out there, it was gone, you know?

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  When I, when I called one of my buddy, the director of game fish, I said, hey, here's what's going on this drive. He goes, does he have a clear shot? Tell him to put it on the ground.

• 1:27:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  The drone and like, we'll find out whose it is. But, but, but here's where I think a, a good answer may lay, Steve, is, and you and I, in our very first meeting talked about, both of us were sucked into Alaska all those times.

• 1:27:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Let me tell you, fly, let's look at fly and shoot laws in Alaska. You fly, you don't hunt for 24 hours afterwards. You fly that drone, you don't hunt for 24 hours afterwards. You are somebody who's in control of that information of that drone? Go back to the truism of what defines ethics. Does the animal have a reasonable chance for escape? Yeah, you got 24 hours separated, that animal may have moved on.

• 1:27:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, same as flying, yeah, same as flying and playing.

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  Again, do you unsee that? No. But does that give it, when you fly a float plane into camp and you see three bull moose in the bottom? You didn't choose the way, that pilot of that float plane did.

• 1:28:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  Y'all land 10 miles from there, y'all hike back. Did, did, did you do that? No. Did you unsee that? No.

• 1:28:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Did you know moose were in the bottom? Yeah, they're going to be in those bottoms every time you go in there.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  So that's a great place to hunt.

• 1:28:25Steven Rinella?

  Many times literally been in the situation as you're flying in on a normal route and you're coming, you're like, oh my God, a bull.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, oh.

• 1:28:32Steven Rinella?

  It's like.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  A, a bull or look at that bear on that kill or whatever.

• 1:28:35Steven Rinella?

  No guy, you could say what you want to say. No guy is going to be like, well, let's pretend that bull's not there.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  So, so.

• 1:28:41Steven Rinella?

  We'll wait our day.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Steven Rinella?

  But when I wait my day, I know that that bull's there.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  So, I, I would believe if we protect the resource with the drones, careful with the legislation and make it, is a drone usable to recover an animal that's been shot? I'm a thousand percent behind that.

• 1:29:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  Is that legal to push animals off somebody else's property? I'm not legal with that. Let's protect people's rights.

• 1:29:07Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  Let's be good neighbors and let's use it ethically, but go back to the fly and shoot. You have that drone up, a, a quick place to land on that until you could define legislation? You fly that drone, you don't hunt for 24 hours.

• 1:29:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Exactly like Alaska's fly and shoot.

• 1:29:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I like it.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Steven Rinella?

  I wish there was a way, and I don't even know the ramifications of this, because it's like a huge legal conundrum and you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to answer it any better than probably anybody in the country, because it's totally novel ground.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:37Steven Rinella?

  Was, um, I wish there was a way that it would be, you could fly it above ground, you have permission to fly it above.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:29:47Steven Rinella?

  But that brings in, because this is FAA stuff.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:50Steven Rinella?

  So that brings in this huge thing of like manned and unmanned. Because of course, you can't say to a plane.

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:57Steven Rinella?

  That you can't fly over land you don't own. So how do you come in and say with a drone, like you can fly a drone over land, do you have permission to fly it over? Like, that to me would be so simple and easy, but impossible, probably. I'm guessing from a legal standpoint.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  I'm sure there'll be court cases and whatnot that helps define that of what can be legal and not legal on that. And, but I agree with you. That's, that's kicking over a huge anthill. But again, is it, is what you're doing ethical helping you? Does that give you a better edge over killing that animal than it is ethically bound for you to, to, to take that animal?

• 1:30:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  That does, hey, does switching on that spotlight at night off the side of the road when there's eight mule deer down the road here? And the guy that kills that, yeah, he violated those animals' rights of fair chase.

• 1:30:53Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  Does the guy that see them in his headlights going home and goes back the next day because he knows those deer in that field?

• 1:31:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  That, I, I, I don't see anything wrong with seeing them, but using it to take that animal in an ethical way? That's not right. Absolutely not.

• 1:31:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 1:32:43Steven Rinella?

  Let me, let me ask you this one, and I'm not, and this is a promise to listeners. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm not even going to bore you with what I think about the whole thing.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:52Steven Rinella?

  Where do you sit right now? What's your take on CWD? Like, where do you sit right now?

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  You know, that was in the, the infancy of that being followed when we were in office. And first, you got to believe, first, I'm going to tell you, I'm a believer CWD can be a political football.

• 1:33:10Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  And I'm talking about from the, the federal all the way down to the state to the individual user groups.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  Do you believe starting out, and you're probably a lot more up to date on it than I am, even though I followed it pretty good. There, there's, there's a point for our industry that I'm going to bring up in a second with you that has to be looked at if you're in our industry.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  But do you think CWD was started at a, at a sheep pen in Colorado where they put mule deer in after known scrapes sheep had been in that pen? Is that what started it?

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  I don't believe so.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  That, that's what gets the rap of starting.

• 1:33:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I believe it was identified there. I, I, I honestly, um, I, I follow this closely. Like, I don't know where, I don't know where it came from and I, and, and.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  But that, that gets, that's kind of where everybody goes back to where it started. And if you look at the map of how CWD spread.

• 1:34:08Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  That looks like.

• 1:34:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  I'm not saying I'm a believer or nothing that, that.

• 1:34:12Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  Again, I watch for political.

• 1:34:15Steven Rinella?

  I, I want to hear people's takes. So you just get, like I said, I'm not going to do the whole deal where I give my take, but yeah.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Okay. But I may, I want your take on one part of it.

• 1:34:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Then, so if, if you look, you got mad cow disease.

• 1:34:28Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  You got, uh, crutch frill jactison in humans.

• 1:34:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  You got scrapies in sheep.

• 1:34:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  You got when the people, when you used to hear about moose having circling disease and they talk about circling, that's CWD.

• 1:34:41Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. Okay.

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  Do you believe CWD is naturally occurring? Or was that, did that come from something like the Colorado deal? That, that, that's a question that has to be decided.

• 1:34:52Steven Rinella?

  Are you asking that question?

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Steven Rinella?

  This is one thing, this is, this is one of the things I wish I knew most, and it would be, um, there's no way. Well, I shouldn't say there's no way. It feels to me improbable that they actually found the first case.

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:11Steven Rinella?

  Like, what are the odds that you found the first case? So it was identified on a captive deer in Colorado was identified. Did they find the first one? No. Right? Because just what are the odds they found the first one?

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:35:28Steven Rinella?

  If you, if I could, of one of the many questions about CWD is I wish there was some way that you could go into museum collections

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  of any cervids, any North American cervids from museum collections.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  D N A.

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  And, and you can go back to like archaic period, whatever, early modern, and you could go in and take all these cervid bones. And if there was some way to definitively, now, the technology I don't believe is there, but there is some way to go in and say, we've checked all these bones and all these museum collections. It's not there.

• 1:36:02Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:03Steven Rinella?

  Like, it's not there. We've checked thousands of bones.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:06Steven Rinella?

  It wasn't there. And someone could definitively say that, it would change how I view it. Where I'm sitting, if I had to do, I always like to play this game, like you, you, you're asked a question by an omniscient being. You're asked a question by like a godlike being.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:23Steven Rinella?

  Who knows the truth?

• 1:36:24Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:25Steven Rinella?

  And there's no bullshit. It's just you got to answer the question.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  One way or the other.

• 1:36:28Steven Rinella?

  And they're, and they're like, has it always, has it been here for hundreds of years or has it been here for decades?

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  Naturally occurring or not?

• 1:36:35Steven Rinella?

  Where I'm sitting right now, if I really had to get it right, or I die, okay?

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Steven Rinella?

  I would go, I don't like it that you're putting me in this position, but I'm going to go with hundreds of years.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Steven Rinella?

  That's what I would say.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:49Steven Rinella?

  But, and then I'd be like, am I right?

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  So that's in that, that's one of the questions I think that needs to be studied and answered.

• 1:36:59Steven Rinella?

  It changes everything.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  It changes everything.

• 1:37:01Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  The, now let's go back to our industry that we love.

• 1:37:07Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  The hunting and fishing. I don't care if you're a bird watcher. I don't care if you're a deer, I don't care if you're a wildlife watcher that would never shoot an animal if you had to. You have equity in that the deer are healthy, the moose are healthy, any cervid is healthy. Okay?

• 1:37:25Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  So the, the nuclear bomb that destroys what we and any nature person loves. You know what I view that as?

• 1:37:39Steven Rinella?

  Do I know the nuclear bomb is?

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  The nuclear bomb is if, if, if hunters kill cervids that transfer to humans, that it's proven that that, and that ends that game.

• 1:37:52Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  That's the nuclear bomb for our.

• 1:37:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I, I think that that, I think that that, that moment, should it come?

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:38:02Steven Rinella?

  And I don't think, like, again, if I was in a situation, I don't think it's coming.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:38:06Steven Rinella?

  I don't know. I'm just a guy sitting here.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  You or I, with information to the public, that there'll be a million people listen to your stuff. I can't tell them to, if, if I thought it was coming, then I'm wrong in telling them and leading them to something dangerous.

• 1:38:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  I don't see it coming either.

• 1:38:25Steven Rinella?

  I, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's coming. I dread that it, I, I would dread that it came. And I think that the minute the hunting public, the wildlife viewing public, the wildlife managers.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:37Steven Rinella?

  The minute a deer is no longer a symbol of wildness and natural beauty and, and natural heritage. And a deer is a symbol of like a deadly disease vector, which is already happening with ticks a little bit. But it would be like a carrier of, of, um, you know, this terrible dementia, early death, you know, Alzheimer's similarity type catastrophe.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:09Steven Rinella?

  Right? And, and the deer is saddled with that. Yeah, that changes deer hunting in America.

• 1:39:13Speaker 03

  It changes everything.

• 1:39:14Steven Rinella?

  Completely, completely.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Everything. Cervid management period is changed.

• 1:39:19Steven Rinella?

  But, but again, uh.

• 1:39:23Steven Rinella?

  If I had to sit here and guess and like as someone that follows the news and follows the science, if I was forced into making a guess, I don't, I don't think it's coming.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  The, and we had something not on that level that, and I've told a lot of people about this in a game of fish, maybe we're with the Department of Agriculture people.

• 1:39:42Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  And been a lot of cases, we studied wild hogs and one of the detriments to landowners and hunting people is the hog populations, billions and billions of dollars in damage every year.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Everybody's coming up with a way they think they control pigs. I don't think that since the Spaniards let them out in the 1500s, I don't think there's a way to control pigs.

• 1:40:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Because you can't get ahead of them breeding that I, that I see state. It's, it's going to be extremely hard to do it. But we were sitting in that meeting and they said, hey, we tested our, this is Alabama's wild hog population. And they tested and they said 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, a hundred percent of the hogs killed tested positive for brucellosis.

• 1:40:32Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  So we're sitting in a meeting, wildlife and, and ag. And I said, well, I've been around this all my life. I said, tell me about brucellosis and this. And they said, well, here's what happens and here's the way you get it. I said, no, tell me the way you get it. And they said, it's not from the blood. They said it's in the genitals of the animal and there's a little clear liquid or, or something that when you cut that, if you've got a cut on your hand.

• 1:40:59Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  You're getting brucellosis. How do you fight that? It's got a, you're going to have to have a battery of docicycline and, and you start seeing these people then that do a lot of this hog hunting. Oh yeah, I had that. I went to the doctor and had that and the disease. And I asked the question, I said, I said, do we communicate that to the public?

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  It, it, Coach Di used to tell me around Auburn football, when he came in as assistant coaches, he said, he could tell when there was an issue that he didn't want to talk about it because he looked and every coach looked down at the table. I saw it that same day.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  And I, and I said, I said, what, what's our, what are we doing on this? And that's when Alabama, we came out with, Commissioner Lawley came out and said, not only do we suggest being careful when you dress the, the wild hog, but we suggest you wear thick rubber gloves. Second state in the nation that, Texas had already put that in their rugs. They said rubber gloves. We said thick rubber gloves.

• 1:42:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  But to communicate how it's transferred that, but here we go back and it's the same with deer and we go back to the political issue, what's the political, the political football? You think the guys with the insurance commissions and the Department of Transportation want any more deer car collisions? Do you think they want any more hog car collisions? Do you think they want anybody to quit shooting deer or hogs that reduces those things?

• 1:42:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  That goes to every state, every, every state in the nation, every, every commission like that in the nation. All that's got to be looked at and a lot of people will get on that issue and say, oh, they just don't like us doing that. Buddy, there's a lot, that's, that's a lot deeper well than you think you'd deeper dipping water out of them.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I saw the, I saw the dumbest headline this morning in Wired, Wired Magazine. It was, um,

• 1:43:01Steven Rinella?

  Florida Panthers reduced deer car collisions.

• 1:43:08Steven Rinella?

  Because there's some, some, some genius, I was like, well, they eat deer. So they reduced deer car collisions. I'm like, you could have written that article a long time ago and wrote hunters on top of that.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  What's those 200 Florida Panthers going to do with?

• 1:43:23Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was laughing.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  Two million whitetails.

• 1:43:26Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was laughing about. I'm like, oh my God, man. You could have written a way better article and just changed the first word to hunters. You have a way bigger impact. But hey, this is, this is way off what we've been talking about, but this is, this is the thing that I noticed, the thing you guys did at, at Mulchey that I don't, that I don't get, maybe you can explain how this works. You know, you used to have to buy, like if you, let's say you have a Verizon phone.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:43:52Steven Rinella?

  You'd, you'd go and you'd get a camera and you'd get like a Verizon camera or a whatever camera.

• 1:43:58Steven Rinella?

  But now your cameras just do whatever signals best. Okay. So for instance, we keep, we keep one in our fish shack in Alaska, just so we can see who's coming and going. I got it on a tree and like, if you come up on our beach and go toward our shop.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  It's, it's got you.

• 1:44:14Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:14Steven Rinella?

  Like I already got your picture.

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Steven Rinella?

  But, um, that's a, there's no Verizon signals, AT&T. So all of a sudden you could be hanging a camera up and it just grabs whatever signals available.

• 1:44:27Steven Rinella?

  Is that like, do you arrange, do you have to arrange all that with AT&T and Verizon? Like, how's that whole thing work? Like, why is, why is your phone not that way?

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  All, you know, that's a great, all that has to be negotiated and done, but I don't understand, I understand it from a business standpoint.

• 1:44:46Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  If you've got your turf, if your podcasts are protected and you're only showed and nobody can come into your turf unless they sign up for your podcast or listen to them.

• 1:44:56Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  That's your turf.

• 1:44:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  Think about Verizon probably had spent billions of dollars protecting their turf.

• 1:45:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, building it and protecting it.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  You think, you think they want to be taken out by automated choice of an item? What if every cell phone did that?

• 1:45:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but how are you guys able, how are you able to do it? I mean, it was great because it solved a huge problem, but how, how is it okay to, how were you able to do it?

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  I, you know what, I, I believe probably, and I don't know this, this is my guess. There's a lot of people, let me tell you, everybody in Mulchey is smarter than I am now. They're smart. We got the smartest team. They're smart, smart folks. How they get that done, I don't know, but I think that probably somebody powers at B thought, that's not going to change anything. Little old cell cam, they're not, how many of them are out there?

• 1:45:45Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  They didn't know, and I don't, at Christmas last year, we were holding 18 billion pictures in the cloud.

• 1:45:52Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  No telling what that, that's probably double or triple that now. Now they're finding that out. I don't know, but I, I would like, would, would you not want a cell phone that it was like a satellite phone that anywhere you went, it'd feed the best signal?

• 1:46:05Steven Rinella?

  So I, on, on here, I used to carry, I used to have two, because AT&T is great in Alaska. So I used to carry on two phones. I called it my, my regular phone and then my AT&T phone.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Steven Rinella?

  Now I just pay two monthly things.

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Steven Rinella?

  Which are not cheap.

• 1:46:23Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:46:23Steven Rinella?

  And I have them both because I have two SIM cards. Right? But then on the camera, I used to not put one up in AT&T areas because like, then I gotta go buy it, like whatever. And then all of a sudden I saw you guys stuff that it like, doesn't matter, just grabs the best signal.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  That's great, best things.

• 1:46:39Steven Rinella?

  But I was like, well, how come, why aren't phones that way?

• 1:46:42Speaker 03

  Same deal. And, and think about Steve, everybody thinks, oh, we're just US, we're worldwide. I mean, you look, we go into Mexico or Canada, we have to be able to grab different signals.

• 1:46:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  We don't know what cell bases are there.

• 1:46:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got it. But what was it when it had to, what, what was it, whatever, years ago?

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  You would send people up and find out the major, you looked at the carrier maps. You know, the map that Verizon always shows when they, or T-Mobile, use us and it shows all the red is where you can get their signal, the, on, on the commercials on TV.

• 1:47:14Steven Rinella?

  Know to send where?

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  You go find out, you find out what the biggest base was, and that's the one you had to be a customer to. Or you find out if you had a, if the, let's say tractor supply in your area was you're going to be your biggest vendor there or Walmart or whoever, you find out who they had relationships with, and that's probably who you went with.

• 1:47:33Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  But it was controlled by area size.

• 1:47:36Steven Rinella?

  And then one day, boom, it doesn't matter.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Look at it this way, if, if, if Walmart is selling cameras and there's a carrier that only had, if AT&T doesn't have a 2% and Verizon has 98% coverage, which camera, which, which phone you think Walmart's going to sell?

• 1:47:54Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  They got to go with the better coverage.

• 1:47:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  So you study that and do that, but it's sure a lot better being able to do it. I wish I could take credit for that. That wasn't me, Steve, to do that, but it was somebody smart in Mulchey.

• 1:48:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it was, yeah, I just wanted, well, when you find out.

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  I will let you.

• 1:48:09Steven Rinella?

  Talk to you guys and find out, tell them that I, that I took notice.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  I will get that part. Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

• 1:48:15Steven Rinella?

  That was, that was a great development.

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was huge. You know, I, I get asked a lot in a lot of the podcasts and stuff and, and being in the commercial side of selling the hunting, being hunting and fishing my whole life, but the commercial side, right at 50 years, what's the biggest change you saw? I always thought it was the compound bow.

• 1:48:34Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  Being able to see it come from recurve to longbow or longbow to recurve to, to compound bow, round wheels, 65% let off.

• 1:48:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  Hoping you're on Booney Crockett, if you don't shoot it with, you can't go over this let off, then you got some bows a hundred percent let off and it goes everywhere across the board. Boy, look how many bow hunters there are now from the Fred Bear days. That, and I thought, you know, that may have been the, it's one of the biggest changes.

• 1:49:05Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  I keep, that's what I truly believed. I, you know, I was watching that, the entire term of my industry involvement. I get pointed out at maybe that the camera's right there.

• 1:49:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sometimes to be cute.

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Steven Rinella?

  I'll say another one.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:24Steven Rinella?

  And it's not just to be cute, there's an argument to be made. I'll say the digital rangefinder.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 1:49:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause the old days are like, well, if I zero my gun three inches, I had a hundred and you know, and like, and then, I mean, for archery too.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. How, how many caddies on golf courses or golfers are using that rangefinder to find the distance to the pin and they're supposed to be or not supposed to be?

• 1:49:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like the whole thing, oh, it's a good flat shooting rifle, like all that goes out the window.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you exactly where the bullet's going to be. Like it can, it can arc all at once. I'll tell you right where it's going to be.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  I'm going to tell you that, the, the, and we used to call them, um, um,

• 1:50:05Steven Rinella?

  I said, I was saying digital, not digital, laser rangefinders.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, laser, sorry. Um, we used to, to call the hunts where you could show up for a hunt and just pack a bag and just suitcase hunts where you didn't have to take a gun, but nobody ever trusted the guns.

• 1:50:21Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  You go now, these guides and outfitters, they got nice firearms than anybody and they, they know every concept of minute of angle, velocity, what the bullet does. They know how to, their, their binoculars are talking to their scope and all that. That has changed the distance that people harvest game.

• 1:50:42Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  I think this is in the last five year deal is off the chart now. I think there, what do you, I, I think there's a lot more animals shot at further distances than they used to be.

• 1:50:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  That technology's off the charts.

• 1:50:55Steven Rinella?

  It's gonna wind up playing in, it'll wind up playing into what I talked about when I talked about the fair share discussion.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  You, you knew where I was going, Stephen.

• 1:51:03Steven Rinella?

  I just, like, yesterday, I had a text exchange with a friend of mine that I'm gonna bow hunt elk with this fall. And he says, man, I feel great out to 60, but a lot of guys are saying 70 to 80. And I'm like, man, just shoot all you want at 70, 80, but we're gonna rein it back when we're out there, man. Cause I'm like, I'll tell you something that's not fun is chasing wounded elk and they can take a hit, you know?

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  We make them when we bring them out to bar and I, first thing, they shoot. We wanna see them shoot. You watch how they handle, you know all this, you watch how they handle the bow. You look to their nervousness, can they handle the crowd watching them? Does that get them shook up? If that shakes them up, that elk bugling in their face is gonna shake them up.

• 1:51:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's a good indicator.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  And you look at that indicator, then you look at the guy that stacks them and you know, all the guides will be out there, there'll be six of us out there and everybody's like, I'm taking him. You know, they know, the guy can shoot. The deal that, I, I went to a PSC, we, we went to a PSC antelope hunt one year and they had some tremendous long range shooter, this is 30 years ago. And we were talking about hunting caribou and we were making those long shots and they said, how do you train for that? And I said, I go to that target and shoot that, that distance and I'll shoot 60 or 80 arrows a day right before I go, you know, just to make sure it's dead on. And the guy told me, and this is really good advice, he said, if you wanna shoot 60, shoot 100.

• 1:52:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  And you back, back up. And I tell most of our hunters who are coming in, if you wanna get proficient at 50, shoot 70.

• 1:52:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Speaker 03

  And that target gets a lot easier to hit when you back it up like that. But besides that, besides repetition and doing it, I don't know of any guy, and, and it's no different than y'all's weight room down there. Some of those guys can bench press 380, most of them can't. Some of those archers can, can make 70 yard shots.

• 1:52:59Steven Rinella?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  Most of them can't.

• 1:53:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's guys out there that can shoot 70 better and you can shoot 30.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  Go back to the ethical rule.

• 1:53:05Steven Rinella?

  But there's a lot of guys I know, and, and like, I, you know, I, we've been guilt, I've been guilty of this with my kids and whatever, like situations where the longest shot they ever took.

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Steven Rinella?

  The longest shot they ever took was at a deer.

• 1:53:21Steven Rinella?

  Right? So, yeah, it's like, it's what you train for, what you practice for, how comfortable you are. You can't, yeah, you could, you could never come in and say, hereby I declare that people can't shoot more than blank yards, cause it's different for everybody.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  And if, let's say you're in the 20th day of September and the elk are rutting so hard there in your face, you deprive the guy of hunting because he can't shoot 40, but you're gonna shoot one at 10 yards that day?

• 1:53:44Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  Every, every situation's different.

• 1:53:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:47Speaker 03

  You gotta be comfortable.

• 1:53:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  And I think the astute guy watches that and keeps a guy within his comfort range.

• 1:53:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  And again, all that being said on the ethical side of, take care of that.

• 1:53:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, Dan Moultrie, thanks for joining, man.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:01Steven Rinella?

  It's great to talk about, I love, I have so much fun.

• 1:54:07Steven Rinella?

  I wake up in the morning, I mean, every morning, I wake up in the morning and I open my Moultrie app, I see what's going on with that camera, I can't find. We got, I got just, I got little projects going on. My friends all laugh, cause I got a camera called the Beaver Cam and it's a camera that sits between a creek and a pond.

• 1:54:27Steven Rinella?

  And there's like a slide.

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  You watch them come down the slide?

• 1:54:30Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I have every animal on the planet that walks through that, that walks through, yeah, I just love it, man. I love like finding out what's going on out there, you know?

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  How many guy, and especially in our industry, but I always wonder, any industry, we'll be in a meeting somewhere and you'll see guys and you know they're hunting, they're kicked back and they're looking at the phone, paying attention to what they're saying, but they're looking, how many of those guys you think are looking at their Moultrie app, looking at this camera? There's a bunch of them, buddy.

• 1:54:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, my friend, like, I take my kids every spring to hunt, um, I take my kids every spring to hunt turkeys in Wisconsin for the youth turkey season. Anyways, my buddy out there. What, what month is it?

• 1:55:08Steven Rinella?

  What, right now, it's August, early August?

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  August.

• 1:55:10Steven Rinella?

  He, he took a, he took a break, you know, from May, but it's early August. He, it's already started. He's like rope dragger, rope dragger, texting me images, cause they're like, we're already thinking about next spring, you know, and it's just funny, cause I like, like through that, I'll kinda live, you know, like through those pictures and stuff, we'll kinda like live this long, fun kinda thing, you know what I mean?

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  You get to watch the progression.

• 1:55:38Steven Rinella?

  It just brings, it's like, it brings a lot of, I mean, it's great, cause it tells you what's out, but it just brings a lot of enjoyment. It brings a lot of enjoyment, sharing the, just sharing the pictures, man.

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  I want you to, at some point, if you can do it, we, we, almost everybody, I think, in the hunting industry, one of our biggest achievements we've done at the state of Alabama is we have the governor's turkey hunt every year. At one time, I think it was probably the biggest hunting event in the nation. I'd, I'd hunted on the governor's hunt in, in, um, for antelope, the antelope hunt, the...

• 1:56:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, the one shot?

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hunted the one shot.

• 1:56:12Steven Rinella?

  The Wyoming?

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, it was me, I got to hunt with Charlie Daniels for those five days.

• 1:56:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, did you really?

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  Oh, it was just, it was, that was the greatest five days. It was unbelievable, good.

• 1:56:21Steven Rinella?

  I was on, when I did it, I was on the actual governor's deal. So I was like hunting with the governors, you know?

• 1:56:26Speaker 03

  I was on the sportsman's sale when we did it there, but, but, but we do the governor's hunt, we raise all our money for all our, our, our hunters helping the hungry, the, getting women into hunting, the, we have the largest two scholarships in wildlife at all the state universities that, at Auburn and Alabama, even though we like Auburn a little more than Alabama, I didn't say that, but you saw, you saw some of that when you were down there, but, but I want you to come hunt that hunt with us.

• 1:56:51Steven Rinella?

  The governor's hunt.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  We, we hunt the governor's hunt every year.

• 1:56:54Steven Rinella?

  Well, how many, uh, there must be a bunch of participating landowners.

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  Lot of participation, we'll run up to, I think, probably the highest 130 or 140 farms in the state.

• 1:57:04Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  But, but it's quite, the, the, every farm, what, what we learned in growing that as a fundraiser was every person that owns a farm is proud of what they do.

• 1:57:16Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  And they wanna show off those farms and they wanna show they were the best game managers and they do such a good job. And let me tell you, that's been the best, we, I did a segment on CNBC about how successful it was, because they all want to, the, the, the best stewards and the best people in the state to talk about how great wildlife is in the state, were the ones that had their farms giving away their hunts for this hunt with everybody that had come in. But a, a lot, a lot of people, you need to come hunt that one with us one year.

• 1:57:50Steven Rinella?

  When do you guys do, is it April or what is it?

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it's usually the second, third weekend of the season, but...

• 1:57:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And, and, and tell me again, the orgs you guys raise money for?

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  We, we raise money for hunters helping the hungry, anything that, when we came into gaming fish, almost always that had been in the red, we put it in the black with the governor's turkey.

• 1:58:07Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:58:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:58:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  That's how big a fundraiser it is. And, and huge deal in Alabama.

• 1:58:13Steven Rinella?

  And successive governors pick it up?

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  Yes, successive governors pick it up. It, it was so successful at getting the, uh, people participating. One of the governors came in and said, everybody we go to raise money, y'all have already hit them for, for donating money to be in this deal. Why don't we do that every other year so it doesn't fall on a year that the governor's gonna be elected when they're raising money for the, that's how effective this deal is.

• 1:58:41Steven Rinella?

  People are like, I already gave, man, I gave for the turkeys.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  But I want you to come down and be my guest and, and, uh, we'll, uh, we'll make a run at winning it and, and, uh, it's, it's, it's a really good event. I'm, I'm awful, I, I think, and, and of seeing all the different gaming fish agencies coming from where we were to where it is, I think Alabama has done just a tremendous job. Our gaming fish department is off the chart good. From our red snapper programs to our wildlife programs, a lot of them could pay attention to what we've done.

• 1:59:17Steven Rinella?

  I like to hear that, man, like, like you heard me earlier, you know, acknowledging the work of the state agency, I feel that those guys, a lot of those agencies, I mean, especially, you know, even the very well intentioned, very effective ones, it's people's favorite thing to like trash on.

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Steven Rinella?

  But a lot of times they're trashing on it without having any idea of the complexities and what goes into doing that, that work, man.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:59:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, if they got, if they got the right motivations and you feel that they're, that they're looking out for the best interests of outdoorsmen and land users and managers, it's like, give them a shout, you know, if they're doing a good job.

• 1:59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Steven Rinella?

  You know? It's, it's good to hear you compliment them, cause I feel like those guys get beat up.

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  Oh, they get beat up and, and blamed for everything, but they do, they, they're just,

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  from the biologist side all the way down to the guys that worked the, the state properties to the, the wardens, they do a fantastic.

• 2:00:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Really, really do a good job. And, and a lot of the states really, really do. There's some that politics, as we've talked about, ease into, but you know what, they may change today.

• 2:00:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, again, Dan Moultrie, uh, thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  It, it really, really enjoyed it. It's, it, getting out here, I, I told you the very first time I met you, and this is a huge compliment to you, listening to you talk about Alaska hunting, anybody that has done Alaska hunting, it's a different hunting. And it's easy to tell a fraud.

• 2:00:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  And you know, you know what I'm talking about, Steve, in, in five seconds, you know if they're full of, full of crap or not. You speak from the heart, you speak from what you know about, and it's a joy to watch your show when you're, when you're giving those shows.

• 2:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, well, thank you, man, appreciate it.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  Absolutely is.

• 2:01:06Steven Rinella?

  We'll keep them coming.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:01:08Steven Rinella?

  Thank you.

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  Don't forget Arrowhead Hunt, I think, I think I may have got your attention early before the show.

• 2:01:13Steven Rinella?

  I'm in.

• 2:01:15Steven Rinella?

  Next time you come out, we're gonna talk, we're gonna show the Arrowhead, we're gonna bore everybody and show Arrowhead pictures.

• 2:01:19Speaker 03

  I bet we can, I bet we can, we can roll with that.

• 2:01:23Steven Rinella?

  We'd do good. Thanks, man.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

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