Ep. 732: Predator Management, California Style

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with BHA's Western Policy and Conservation Manager Devin O'Dea https://www.backcountryhunters.org/western_policy_and_conservation_manager, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Cory Calkins https://www.instagram.com/cman_calkins/?hl=en, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics Discussed: Steve gets the short end of the stick with a wafer cone, twice; a hot tip on using hydrogen peroxide to remove blood from fabric; an organic mass; subscribe to The MeatEater Kids Podcast https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater-kids feed to catch our fresh drop of Season 3; a crawfish Oedipus complex drama; mountain lions killing six times more deer because black bears steal their; the highest density concentration of bears in the world; more bear-human conflict; how the Humane Society of the US shockingly has police powers; California's screwy laws against hunting bears and the effort to fight them; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:50Steven Rinella?

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• 1:29Steven Rinella?

  Black Buffalo spent 20,000 hours working alongside American farmers to build a tobacco alternative that actually dips like the real thing. Long cut ampouges made from barn cured leafy greens with no tobacco leaf or stem and wintergreen mint straight and more. Check your local gas station or C store or hit blackbuffalo.com and use code MEAT for 30% off your first order. Black Buffalo Tobacco Alternative is everything you love about dip, nothing you don't. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household,

• 2:13Steven Rinella?

  if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 2:52Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F I R S T L I T E dot com.

• 3:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, everybody, joined today by, let me tell something real quick.

• 3:30Steven Rinella?

  So just hang tight Devon. I just, a lot of things going on. I can't tell my main story, which I just told, but I'm going to tell my other story. So, uh, you don't have, you have little kids, right? Yeah, two little girls. Devon O'Day. O'D. O'D, sorry. Devon O'D is here from BHA. We've met, we're like phone friends, but we haven't met in person until now.

• 3:53Steven Rinella?

  We were, he's the, he's the Western Policy and Conservation, I am doing the intro. He's the Western Policy and Conservation Manager, backcountry hunters and anglers. Devon and I met when I was doing a little article for the LA Times about the black, black bear management in California, which we're going to speak to today because it's sort of emblematic and indicative of things that happen all around the country. So even if you're not from California, you should listen in. I was telling my favorite story in the world, which I don't want to tell, just out of respect for the town. But I'll tell this story. So. Respect for the town.

• 4:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That captures everything.

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  Here's a weird deal though, man. Like a weird, like, listen to what happened to me last night. On, what was last night? Thursday? Yes. Okay. On Monday, we were gonna take our little, our two little ones to ice cream, but then we changed our mind. And man, they had a fit. A fit. You still call them little ones? There's the older one. Yeah. There'll always be the, the younger ones. I don't know how you call them. There's like an older one. Little ones are like.

• 5:03Steven Rinella?

  The younger ones. There's a ten, a twelve and a fifteen. I've met them.

• 5:10Steven Rinella?

  I don't know what the fifteen was doing. He's got like a girlfriend now and everything, but the ten and twelve, what was he doing? I don't know what he's doing.

• 5:20Steven Rinella?

  The ten and twelve, somehow it was like, we're gonna go to ice cream and then we reneged.

• 5:26Steven Rinella?

  Which just pissed him off. I mean, that's a great way to piss a kid off. Mm-hmm. So my wife is going out with her friend to dinner the next night, so she just then says, your dad will take you tomorrow. Hmm. So now I'm into that. I go down there and they're like, like, when you take, if you don't have kids, if you take kids to the ice cream, you're gonna argue about like what all cone?

• 5:50Steven Rinella?

  Everybody's gonna have? Mm-hmm.

• 5:53Steven Rinella?

  And I'm going and I make a joke, like, there's like the little shit in cone, like, I don't know what they call it. The kid's cone. Yeah. And I make a joke, like, do you have, they didn't know I was joking, but I'm like, what do you have? Just to mess with my kids. I said, what do you have that's like a step down from that baby cone?

• 6:12Steven Rinella?

  They didn't get the joke. So anyhow.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  We agree that we're all can get the, the fucking, the, the, not that word. We're gonna get the waffle cone.

• 6:27Steven Rinella?

  And like, so, my two little ones, I think it was just them. Yeah, they get, they get the waffle cone and I'm like, I'll have the same thing. They then tell me, we're out. Oh, so I now get stuck with the old kind when I was a kid.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Oh, that wafer.

• 6:44Steven Rinella?

  The wafer.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Wafer thing that's like.

• 6:47Steven Rinella?

  I would have bought.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Coffee filter.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Two of those, just to make a point that you can have whatever you want.

• 6:51Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm. Check this, that, that's the pre-story. Last night, we go down to the ice cream place. This time, it's the two little ones. The other one was getting his head shaved at a party. The older one, the two younger one, it's my, me, my wife, my two younger ones, my daughter's two friends.

• 7:14Steven Rinella?

  My buddy Matt Cook.

• 7:17Steven Rinella?

  We're in line. Rosemary, her two buddies, Matthew, my wife, all get that cone. The waffle cone, I'm not kidding you.

• 7:30Steven Rinella?

  I order, she goes, we're out of those.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, you don't say. I said, I was here the other night and that happened. My daughter's like, she thinks you're being mean.

• 7:42Steven Rinella?

  So something's going on at that ice cream place that I don't understand. I need to get to the bottom of it. What I need to do is find someone to come down later. And order that cone.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Uh-huh.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  See if they're just hiding it from you.

• 7:54Steven Rinella?

  There's something fishy at, what's that place called?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Genuine, probably.

• 7:59Steven Rinella?

  It's right by the, it's right by the elementary school.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  They got a Polaroid with your picture on there that says no cone.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's no waffle.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  No, no cone for you. Don't cash any checks.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Genuine, I love that one.

• 8:09Steven Rinella?

  It's not genuine, it's Sweet Peaks. Genuine, Genuine's too, like, you go there, it's tons of people that aren't even in the right demographic to be out for ice cream. Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Everybody likes ice cream.

• 8:22Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Or la, I mean.

• 8:24Steven Rinella?

  I'm in the demo because I have children. If you go to Genuine, it's people in their like late twenties, early thirties lined up for ice cream. I'm like, should you people all be lined up for a drink?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  That, but that goes back to what I mean. Everybody loves ice cream.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  It's really good.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  What's the demographic for ice cream?

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  Drinking culture is endangered.

• 8:47Steven Rinella?

  It's like if I go to yoga with my wife and there's a like a dude there like thirty five, whatever, there by himself. I'm always like, you, you, come on.

• 8:59Steven Rinella?

  Come on.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  I don't think the.

• 9:01Steven Rinella?

  Come on, let's talk straight.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  There's no ice cream demographic.

• 9:04Steven Rinella?

  I know plenty of dudes who do yoga.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  There is not.

• 9:06Steven Rinella?

  Dude, there is. And like, who's not in it? Randall. If I see Randall down getting ice cream, I'm gonna think like, I don't wanna say what I'm gonna think.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it, there's also things when you look at me, you'd be like, that guy's squarely in the ice cream demographic. He's walking around wearing basketball shoes.

• 9:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Doesn't really fit in his jeans.

• 9:30Steven Rinella?

  I'm not a big government guy, but I don't, I don't think, I don't think there should be like a, like a little card that you get from the government that like, says you have business at the ice cream place. And it would be like, like, how old are you? You should be eating a pint in shame above your sink.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  I actually, I actually, when I walk into the ice cream place, I like to think that the people behind the counter are thinking, good, finally, somebody who knows what they want, they'll look me in the eye. They're not gonna fight with the people they came in with.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  They're not on their tippy toes trying to look over the counter.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  They don't want a taste of everything.

• 10:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Actually, I'm the one who wants a taste of everything. Oh, yeah, my wife embarrassed me last night. She sampled two things before she made the order and I was getting embarrassed about it. Oh, yeah, I can't stand that. She took two samples. I was like, you're gonna, I'm gonna have to ask you to step outside.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Was the order one of those two or did she order something different?

• 10:24Steven Rinella?

  No, she settled on the set.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  That's the really embarrassing one.

• 10:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, no, I'm the really embarrassing one. I was embarrassed about it. That's when you should have slipped in there and ordered yours. You would have got a cone. Yeah, she walked out with a waffle. Right. But the funny part, this isn't even the main part of the story. Like, at the, the elementary school is right there.

• 10:42Steven Rinella?

  At the end of the year, they wheel all the junk, all the kids leave. They just, they wheel it outside. I'm not kidding you. Like, all the lost and found, when they're done, they're done.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Like a bad breakup.

• 10:53Steven Rinella?

  So, the playground, like, if you want, if you need to outfit a kid, the day school ends, go to the playground. It's all out there.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Oh, there's some nice clothes in this town, too.

• 11:06Steven Rinella?

  Real nice clothes. We go down there and my kid's like, we're gonna go to the playground. I'm like, no, man, don't go to the playground. But my wife overrode me. And so, we go down to the playground and walk in through the open gate. There's kids all over playing. And all the clothes, and the first thing my wife lays eyes on is our boys' clothes.

• 11:27Steven Rinella?

  We retrieve three hoodies and I pick up a pair of muck boots.

• 11:33Steven Rinella?

  And I, I know my own work. There was like a pair of muck boots that had an L shape cutting them. And I had sewed them and put neoprene patch. I pick up these muck boots and I'm like, that's my work. He doesn't even have a recollection of owning these muck boots.

• 11:51Steven Rinella?

  So, we walk out of there and then everybody's probably thinking, like, all the other people are probably thinking we're like shopping off the free rack. I wanted to yell out like, this is actually our stuff. Hands off.

• 12:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, we're not just taking, this is our kid, like, this is our stuff in this playground.

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  Very eventful evening.

• 12:15Steven Rinella?

  Very eventful evening. Devin O'Day is here from Bad Country Hunters and Angers, Western Policy and Conservation Manager, to talk about black bears. Can we talk about black bears outside of California for a minute?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Is this your picture of the giant black bear?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  No, that's not me. That's my buddy Ned.

• 12:30Steven Rinella?

  What I'm saying, you, you, you gave us the picture.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:33Steven Rinella?

  Phil, pull that picture up. That's a nice black bear.

• 12:37Steven Rinella?

  That's gotta make REI proud.

• 12:41Steven Rinella?

  You know? Cause they might wonder if anyone ever does anything legitimate in those packs. And then there it is right there.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I wonder how they'd react if you came into the store and asked them if they had tips for washing blood out of their backpacks.

• 12:56Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you know, the hydrogen peroxide tip. Mm hmm. Do you know that someone was saying that for you folks that don't know, if you, if you have a bloody pack and put, put hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle, anything you got blood on. My God, does it come out. Not that you don't want to use the heavy duty.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:13Steven Rinella?

  Peroxide. Blood hates, yeah, don't use like the stuff, use the bleach of skull, which is what percent forty five? Yeah, it's a forty or something like that. Yeah. Dude, we could do a whole show on hydrogen peroxide.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  I could use this like.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  Down, you'll come back some more time.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, my.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  Do you have something or you have a skull you're cleaning?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Uh, I got a, I couldn't find my normal pack that I put my laptop in, so I just brought my hunting pack on the airplane. And when I got to the airport, I noticed there's just blood all over it. I thought I'm sure I was gonna get pulled to the side.

• 13:41Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I'm gonna use that trick next time.

• 13:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Um, I got pulled to the side the other day and, and before I got pulled over, I had a big tongue. A buffalo's tongue frozen. And the guy used the term like, we need to look at your pack and he used the term organic mass. So the other day in Catch Can, um, I had like a chunk of deer meat roast that was left over. And he's like, I need to check your pack. And I said, I think there's an organic mass in there. And he goes, you know that term? Oh my God, I learned it from your people. I don't know that naturally. Uh, yeah, three percent. So if you're gonna bleach a skull, you brush on. The paint, the gel stuff.

• 14:28Steven Rinella?

  Which is like heavy duty. It's what, it's what people. It'll peel your skin. Yeah, it's what people use when they're to bleach hair and it also, when you go look on Amazon and you're trying to buy the really heavy duty hydrogen peroxide that'll bleach a skull. It's, you know what they have it listed as is to sanitize greenhouse equipment. Oh, I didn't know that. No, I didn't know that either. Um, it must kill like molds and funguses and stuff on greenhouse equipment. On your backpack, this is a Yanni trick. To be put hydrogen, three percent hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle and

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  spray it, let it sit a minute and turn a hose out on it. I don't know. Blood hates hydrogen peroxide. Hates it. If you're on blood thinners, just drink hydrogen peroxide.

• 15:16Steven Rinella?

  Save money. Um.

• 15:21Steven Rinella?

  But here's the catch of someone, before you do that, someone told me that it uh, I think it can degrade the stitching.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely.

• 15:30Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was told.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think like a lot of pack companies will tell you just to use water. Do like a long cold soak.

• 15:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Cause they don't want to be responsible for their stitching falling apart.

• 15:41Steven Rinella?

  A thing that I'll do, um, when I can, I did it there. In fact, I did it the other day in Alaska is I'll put rocks, I'll just put some big rocks in my backpack and throw it in the river.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:53Steven Rinella?

  Or throw it in a fast flowing creek. If the blood's still fresh and when you come back a few hours later, it's just

• 16:00Steven Rinella?

  just the cold blood, the cold water, the running cold water. Carefree. Uh, so Devin, you're gonna do the opposite of spot burning.

• 16:10Steven Rinella?

  Like you're like, come to my state.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, we got, we got plenty of bears, so.

• 16:14Steven Rinella?

  Come to your state.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  That's what the department's talking about too, is figuring out how to get more people to come. You know, how do we entice these out of state hunters? Cause California in most places, it's not exactly the, the out of state, uh, dream destination of most people on their, their wish list, unless you're trying to get that like 30 year sheep tag.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  What's a non-resident bear tag cost in California?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Non-resident bear tag is a great question. I can pull that up for you. Uh, I think it's a couple hundred bucks.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  That's not bad.

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  I know, you know, I know what the problem is, why they won't go there. And they don't know, and I don't think you know. You wanna know what it is?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  I wanna know.

• 16:47Steven Rinella?

  The, the, the primary vegetation is poison oak.

• 16:51Steven Rinella?

  Me and Yanis, me and Yanis have like conscious, when we're thinking about hunting in California, the number one thing on our mind is like, but do I really wanna have poison oak for three months? Because we're very, we are very susceptible.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I am too.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  387 for a black bear tag. Non-resident.

• 17:13Steven Rinella?

  I bet you in this picture, if you look carefully, everything you're looking at is poison oak.

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  You gotta be rugged. Like that's the thing that people don't think about. If you're susceptible, you gotta be prepared to be miserable. I'm like a, I got, I have the skin of a little baby.

• 17:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, when it comes to poison oak.

• 17:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, Kids Podcast is out. Came out on January 30th. Which hasn't happened yet.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  January.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  January. No, what am I saying? What's the other J month?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  June, July.

• 17:48Steven Rinella?

  There's a few of them. September.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so today, in the future, when you're listening to this, Episode 2 is out.

• 17:59Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  And importantly, it's on its own feed, just like last season. You can't listen to it in the Media to Kids podcast feed. You have to please go and listen and subscribe. Exactly.

• 18:12Steven Rinella?

  Uh, how old are your daughters, Devon?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Uh, 2 and 5.

• 18:15Steven Rinella?

  Have they ever listened to the Media to Kids podcast? Just lie and say they have.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Uh, it's their favorite podcast, dude.

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  They love it.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they beg me to listen to it every week.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Phil's masterpiece.

• 18:24Steven Rinella?

  They like the jingles. Don't be being a smart ass. It's a good podcast for kids. You should play it for them.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Alright, you know, part of their education.

• 18:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  I am gonna have to get them the, uh, the crayfish book, though.

• 18:35Steven Rinella?

  Sure, I'll sign it for you.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you, when you called me, uh, talk about black bears, whatever, last year or the year before, um, I was actually, I had a kiddie pool filled with crayfish.

• 18:46Steven Rinella?

  You talked about that.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Couple hundred of them. I got a, I got a good story there, too. We had one of them, uh, actually escape. Uh, and then we found him the next day, and my wi- we had eaten all of them. We boiled all the crayfish, and...

• 18:57Steven Rinella?

  That last crayfish.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  And so then we were like, you know, we had the whole neighborhood over, which is funny, too, because this is San Diego, and everyone's like, "Where'd you get the baby lobsters?"

• 19:08Steven Rinella?

  With claws.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Mudbugs. They're mudbugs. But, uh, we had one escape, and then my wife's like, "Well, you know, we, we gotta keep him now." And, uh, so he, he became stowey. Stowey the stowaway.

• 19:20Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  He lived in a little, uh, flower vase for a couple of weeks, and I was like, "Well, this isn't cool. We gotta get him in an aquarium at least." You know, we're gonna eat him, or we're gonna give him a aquarium.

• 19:27Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  And then ended up going out, catching more crayfish at, uh, we're doing like, removals with the Forest Service, uh, where they have some endangered species habitat, and did a whole nother boil, got another one, gave him a little friend they mated, had a bunch of little baby crayfish.

• 19:41Steven Rinella?

  No!

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Then my neighbor, we had a shitty little aquarium, then my neighbor gave me this amazing tank.

• 19:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And so we had this, like, mansion. And so Stowe went from, you know, hot in this little flower vase to an aquarium to a mansion. He's got a wife, he's got a bunch of kids, then, you know, this is like the American dream. This is where it goes off the rails.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  Aquaculture.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 20:02Steven Rinella?

  But you know what? I wonder though, him having witnessed the carnage that he witnessed, I wonder if he still hates you.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, certainly. Well, there was like, you know.

• 20:13Steven Rinella?

  Like if I came in here, I come in here, I kill everybody in here, in this room, but I take you. And I'm like, now I'm gonna set you up with a sweet house and a wife.

• 20:23Steven Rinella?

  Are you like, uh, man, this guy's great? Or are you like, this guy's a monster?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Cause he did, you did kidnap him originally.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  And then if you have children, do you stare at them and, and know in the back of your mind, something's gonna happen someday?

• 20:39Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  I've seen it before. I don't want to let you in on the secret, but he has to live with that, that guilt.

• 20:45Steven Rinella?

  I know.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  That foreknowledge of what awaits.

• 20:48Steven Rinella?

  Too bad you can't interview that crayfish.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  He just died. This is, this is the, he just died like three days ago. No, it's not over. This is, this is the eulogy, uh, cause this is like the American, the American dream of a, of a crayfish. But, you know, you know, things got really sour when, you know, he and, you know, his, his mate, they got into a tizzy. She ripped off his arm.

• 21:09Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  And then somehow she escaped, which blows my mind. Our babysitter found the female walking across the kitchen floor, put it back in the tank and, you know, this was too much for Stowe. He couldn't handle it. So he killed her. And then it was just him with the kids. And then one of the kids got revenge on him. Once the kid got big enough and killed him. Just like five days ago.

• 21:32Steven Rinella?

  That's the story of Oedipus.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is. Yeah.

• 21:36Steven Rinella?

  Life and death on the farm. Mm-hmm.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Life and death.

• 21:40Steven Rinella?

  So I wanna do this quick, but like, if you guys, if, if people out there, if you hear someone say like Oedipus or the Oedipal complex, it's that like, that you'll, that you wanna kill your dad and marry your mom? Oedipus didn't know he was adopted.

• 21:57Steven Rinella?

  And someone comes to him like a soothsayer says, hey, heads up, you're gonna kill your dad and marry your ma. He's like, to hell I am, and takes off and goes to a new town. Cause he thinks his parents are the wrong people. So he shows up in the new town, promptly kills the guy, marries a lady. His real mom dad.

• 22:21Steven Rinella?

  Just, that's just a little bit of background.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  And then doesn't he take his eyes out? Doesn't he take his own eyes out?

• 22:25Steven Rinella?

  Rather than look at what he's done.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That's, that's, that's a terrible story. I mean, that's a lot of ups and downs in that story. So where are you at now? You have just the babies.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I mean, they're not babies anymore. Now we got the new, you know, there's a, there's a power struggle going on. It's kind of like.

• 22:41Steven Rinella?

  How many are in there?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  There's a six.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And we got a bunch of fish too, except I thought the crayfish would eat the fish.

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  But they're just not interested.

• 22:51Steven Rinella?

  Years ago, I did something real similar. We gotta get to the show in a minute here, but.

• 22:58Steven Rinella?

  We went out, this was a, I want, we went out and chopped a huge hole in the ice. In a river where we knew that there's a lot of crayfish in the summer. And flipped all the rock, like chopped, you could get in with waiters and walk around in this hole. And we catch a ton of crayfish that are comatose under the rocks. Like out of it, the water's so cold.

• 23:23Steven Rinella?

  Bring them in, put them in a wash tub and the minute they warm up, they're all just super energetic, like instantly.

• 23:29Steven Rinella?

  They had a crawfish boil.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  Took one little dinker that was too small and put it in an aquarium with my roommate's little baby. He had this crazy little white, some kind of sinking frog, like a little white aquarium frog. That would live at the bottom of the aquarium. He was worried about it, so we took the crayfish's pinchers away from him.

• 23:54Steven Rinella?

  And put them in there. He gradually grows back a little mini claw.

• 24:00Steven Rinella?

  And one day my roommate peers in there and here's that son of a bitch laying in the bottom of the aquarium, holding that dead frog.

• 24:08Steven Rinella?

  Like you caught it.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  The whole time he was growing that claw back, his eyeball in that frog.

• 24:13Steven Rinella?

  He's like, one of these days. One of these days, you mother licker. I'm gonna have my claw back.

• 24:24Steven Rinella?

  This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Holiday season is damn near upon us. In my house, we've been talking about Thanksgiving pretty soon. We're going to start talking about Christmas and it could bring on a lot of stress. Also, holidays can bring on a lot of family issues. And sometimes when it comes to family issues, it might be smart for you to go and find someone you can talk to about it and to help make sense out of it all. Well, insurance options may now be available nationwide with BetterHelp. With insurance, many members pay $15 or less. Some pay nothing. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences.

• 25:06Steven Rinella?

  And their 10-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, go ahead and switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the U.S., you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/meateater. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com slash meat eater. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you've got dogs, you've got kids,

• 25:51Steven Rinella?

  you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our little fleet of vehicles that I have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Because that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there. You're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on

• 26:32Steven Rinella?

  the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert

• 27:17Steven Rinella?

  the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. If Clay Newcomb's listening, here's a story that has everything that Clay would like. A Kentucky man, Kentucky man arrested for releasing a raccoon into a business months after fleeing police on a mule.

• 27:47Steven Rinella?

  Only in Kentucky.

• 27:50Steven Rinella?

  I know that town, Murray, Kentucky. A man from Murray, Kentucky, I've spent a bunch of time there. A man from Murray, Kentucky was arrested last week after police say he released a raccoon inside a business.

• 28:03Steven Rinella?

  This is the same man, just months after the same man was arrested for attempting to evade police officers on a mule. Why can't we have him on the show?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  I can maybe think of a few reasons.

• 28:17Steven Rinella?

  Radio live.

• 28:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Guy wrote in.

• 28:30Steven Rinella?

  They're having a baby and they got it narrowed down to two names. Yanis and Callahan.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  I mean, this must be a super fan.

• 28:39Steven Rinella?

  Well, well, it's not half. He's half. He's like Yanis because of Yanis. Callahan is just coincidence because it's after Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry Callahan. So it's like Cal is like just caught the crossfire. Mm hmm.

• 28:56Steven Rinella?

  We don't have to tell him that. Anyhow, this is the guy writing in Brad. Anyhow, I was telling a person I help out at an auction in Coldwater, Michigan, that we were between Yanis and Callahan. He's so this this individual Brad is explaining to someone, hey, we're gonna name it Callahan or Yanis. This he's talking to a gal. The gal then informs him.

• 29:18Steven Rinella?

  Back to the letter. She then informed me that she knew a Yanis and said, his name is Yanis Poutellis.

• 29:28Steven Rinella?

  She said he was a real estate appraiser in Michigan who she worked with as an attorney.

• 29:37Steven Rinella?

  Couple of things. If you meant a building inspector, is that the same thing? No. No. If you meant the building inspector, Yanis's dad, also named Yanis, is a building inspector in Michigan, but what you're overlooking is that all Latvians are named Yanis.

• 29:57Steven Rinella?

  They all are named Yanis. So there are some hundreds of Yanis Poutellis is running around.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  So it may or may not be Yanis's dad. Okay.

• 30:09Steven Rinella?

  Papa Yanis. Or it could be one of his relatives.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  I think that it's he's a building inspector. This woman calls him a real. I feel like that's

• 30:18Steven Rinella?

  Rather than just being like too many Yanis is running around.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, there still could be too many, but I feel like this checks out.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna disagree with you on the point that there are too many Yanises.

• 30:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, very confusing. So is Brad hoping we come up with an answer for him here? I would name it Steve.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Waiting for that.

• 30:38Steven Rinella?

  Which dudes named Steve are die and breed, man.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  I would say just know that if you name it Yanis, you're also naming the child Janis as well.

• 30:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, yeah. And Siri won't know how to spell it.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  And you're gonna, you're gonna condemn him to a life of explaining how to spell his name to every, like, like restaurant host or hostess, every DMV person.

• 31:00Steven Rinella?

  No one believes him.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 31:02Steven Rinella?

  Anyone. If he goes into a coffee shop and he tells one person, like, they're like, what's the name for your order? He'll be like, Yanis. And then they'll be like, how you spell it? And he'll spell it for them. And then it goes to the next person who yells out when their order's ready. There's no way it's not gonna be Janis. I was staying there with Yanis one time and we're weighing bags to get on a charter plane. And there's a guy there taking everybody's weight.

• 31:25Steven Rinella?

  So he looked, he's saying people's names. And he goes, Janis. And Yanis steps forward and he goes, it's Yanis. And stands on the scale and the guy looks at Yanis and looks at the guy next to him and says, Janis 172.

• 31:45Steven Rinella?

  He's like, don't bullshit me, buddy. I know what your name is.

• 31:51Steven Rinella?

  Um, yeah, I don't know what's named that kid.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  Doug Duren, uh, doubling down on something here. I was goofing on Doug. When I was with, when I, last time I was with Doug,

• 32:06Steven Rinella?

  he was telling my kids a story. He was, he was trying to convince my kids that you should always back in.

• 32:13Steven Rinella?

  Like, your car.

• 32:15Steven Rinella?

  Apparently in the oil field, they call it first move forward. Like Doug always back, no matter how much hassle he has to go through, he always backs in. He always claim, like, he says that his dad got attacked by his own chainsaw. And Doug's telling my kids, like,

• 32:31Steven Rinella?

  my, if my dad hadn't backed in, he wouldn't be alive, even though his dad's died at old age. But he would've died that day had he not backed in. And I'm telling my kids, like, listen, Doug wants you to back in. That didn't make the difference between Doug's dad dying or not that day, because he drove down the road. Doug rode in doubling down.

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  I do, here's Doug. I do want to correct you about something with my dad's chainsaw story. He didn't drive himself to the hospital. He was barely able to get to town. So literally every second was important. Had there not been an EMT in downtown Cas at that moment when he pulled in and fell out of the truck? And had the ambulance not been just down the road? He would have died. Maybe we should reenact it sometime when you are here.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  I'm not sure what that means, like, like actually.

• 33:30Steven Rinella?

  Um. When he does our mediator shed shoot, he's gonna take you to, he's gonna take the viewer to the spot where Doug's dad was attacked by the chainsaw.

• 33:41Steven Rinella?

  I had turned Doug on to a book, one of the best I've read in a long time called The Land Breakers. It's an old book. Holy cow, is it good?

• 33:50Steven Rinella?

  It's about, uh, it's like the first it's kind of after the long hunters, but it's like the first farmers to begin moving into the Appalachian valleys. And it's like the story of farmers trickling into this valley in Appalachia and establishing corn patches. It's, they're hunting bears all the time. It's a phenomenal novel.

• 34:13Steven Rinella?

  Um. Doug is surprised that I liked that book. He's delighted that I liked it and says, the surprise comes from the amount of personal reflections, human condition, and even romance.

• 34:28Steven Rinella?

  Wonderful book. Have you read it?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  I haven't.

• 34:31Steven Rinella?

  I sent it to Doug because the, the knowledge about trees that the author has that he then gives to, like, the author's very knowledgeable purposes for wood.

• 34:43Steven Rinella?

  A guy wrote in about something that I don't really understand.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, Randall and I were trying to figure this out earlier.

• 34:49Steven Rinella?

  Basically, someone has submitted a formal petition.

• 34:56Steven Rinella?

  To the EPA. It's kind of an interesting concept, but you can see where it's going.

• 35:02Steven Rinella?

  Someone submitted a formal petition to the EPA, which probably happens every day, but requesting that humans become wildlife.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Officially.

• 35:15Steven Rinella?

  Be considered as. Be like, why are humans not officially considered as wildlife?

• 35:22Steven Rinella?

  Because he, the play would here would be for regulatory effects, meaning that you wouldn't be able, like, there's certain things you can't do that would be damaging to wildlife and you wouldn't be able to

• 35:37Steven Rinella?

  do certain things to human habitats because it would be like, you'd be affecting wildlife. I gather that's the play. It's a very interesting concept.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  As if NEPA isn't long enough already, man, that's gonna really, really throw a wrench in the system.

• 35:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I see a thousand ways this isn't gonna go down. Um, because then are they gonna do lethal control? In overpopulated areas? You know, I mean, like, there's a lot, it's just an interesting concept.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:02Steven Rinella?

  Why would we not?

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Not sure I want to back hunting as a management strategy.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  It's more like a barroom conversation than a.

• 36:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:11Steven Rinella?

  I, as a parent, um, especially when my kids were younger, I always tried to like over accentuate to them that we were an animal. Do you know what I mean? I would be like, a lot of animals, like bears, like us humans, right? I would always do that to sort of get them in that frame of considering us as animals. But that's not gonna fly. Uh, there's a move to,

• 36:41Steven Rinella?

  how far, who knows this story well? Guy says, uh, I was gonna read what the guy says, because this is a fascinating topic and it bleeds into what we are gonna talk about today. Um, reinstatement of black bear hunting in Florida. Longtime listener, first time caller.

• 37:00Steven Rinella?

  Was that from Rush Limbaugh's show? Longtime listener, first time caller? I don't know if it's Rush specifically. I thought it was just sort of a convention of talk radio. I remember Limbaugh would have, you would call in and say ditto's. And it meant all that stuff.

• 37:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause every caller's like, long time listener, first time caller, love the show. So then it would become, you'd just call and go like ditto's. And then just get to the point.

• 37:28Steven Rinella?

  Florida has been in the process of evaluating and getting public input about reinstatement of a quota black bear hunt. It has been a wildly controversial topic. And has been gaining huge traction in the media lately. He's attached the proposal from the Black Bear Commission.

• 37:48Steven Rinella?

  Um, he's going on, talking about more and more bear interactions, um, in Florida.

• 37:57Steven Rinella?

  Uh, bear interactions and bear sightings in places where they didn't historically have them, beach visitors, tourists.

• 38:06Steven Rinella?

  Uh, the other day he took his first bear attack call two weeks ago, made national news.

• 38:15Steven Rinella?

  He says, I know the meat eater crew normally handle more Midwest and Northern issues. That is completely untrue. Go all over the place. Dude.

• 38:26Steven Rinella?

  I think unintentionally. That hurts my heart.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  We talk about Florida more than any other state. We do. I'm sure they have ice cream down there.

• 38:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, but people with kids. Only. Yeah, like dudes like Randall down there would lock you up. I had a person in Florida one time tell me like cold, stone cold. She's probably like 23, 24 year old woman, tell me stone cold, like she's telling me a fact. She told me Florida's the freest state.

• 39:00Steven Rinella?

  That was a story how you calibrate that like how you measure that. Um.

• 39:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man. I this is like a little, this is a little bit Machiavellian. But like, if you want, if you were a bear hunter in Florida and you wanted to take like a Machiavellian approach to pursuing your interests, you would almost hope, not for bear attacks, you would hope for more.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Conflict.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  Bear conflict. Cause this is what happened in New Jersey.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  It's a, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's just like a rerun.

• 39:33Steven Rinella?

  In New Jersey, New Jersey had historically had bear hunting. Through poor management, bear numbers were greatly reduced. They did a pause on bear hunting and some other moves. They rebuilt bears to where they had the highest density in the country.

• 39:52Steven Rinella?

  Did a bear hunt. The anti hunters had a shit fit.

• 39:57Steven Rinella?

  Their governor was, is Murphy's first name?

• 40:00Speaker 04

  Murphy, Phil Murphy.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  Phil Murphy campaigns on an anti bear hunting plank in his platform.

• 40:08Steven Rinella?

  Gets elected. They shut down the bear hunt in New Jersey. First, like they closed public land.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, state, state on land. And then he just let the bear management plan expire, which essentially just outlawed all bear hunting.

• 40:25Steven Rinella?

  One of the things they did in New Jersey to just totally screw hunters too. You had to do a check mandatory check. They would publicize, like you would need to pull into a rest area. That was known to the public and they like publicly openly seal everybody's bears so that all the protesters can stand there heckling you. Taking pictures of you while you check your bear. Any other state, when you go to check your bear, you go in, talk to someone at the desk and then you go to a little whatever garage, back room, you'd meet with a biologist, they check your bear. They don't turn it into like a public spectacle of subjecting people to

• 41:10Steven Rinella?

  that kind of exposure.

• 41:14Steven Rinella?

  Murphy then, all of a sudden, what happens? Bear conflicts shoot through the roof so much that Murphy comes back and says, it pains me to say it. But I was wrong.

• 41:28Steven Rinella?

  We have to have the bear hunt.

• 41:31Steven Rinella?

  So if you were like, like I said, the Machiavellian approach to bear hunting in Florida is hoping for bear conflict. Um, because that's your clearest path. The same day, in fact, this is kind of weird. The same day in the same place where the girl told me that Florida is the freest state in the nation.

• 41:49Steven Rinella?

  That same day, in that same place, I met a Florida game commissioner who told me he opposed the bear hunt. Only because of not wanting to deal with the public blowback that would come his way. He told me that. I don't want to say his name because he's kind of telling me in confidentiality. He told me I didn't want to deal with the antis.

• 42:13Steven Rinella?

  They like swayed his vote. What happened on that hunt?

• 42:23Steven Rinella?

  What did they have 48 hours? Well, so they, Randall's gonna do a little report.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  They had, Florida had a, a black bear season from, uh, like the 30s up until 1994. And then it was closed from 94 to 2015. They reopened a fall hunt in 2015 and, um, they shut it down within two days, uh, because they had, they were, I don't think they actually went over the quota.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  But they were speeding toward.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  They were killing so many that like another day of hunting probably would have taken them well over the quota. So they killed 300 bears in two days.

• 43:01Steven Rinella?

  You're ruining the story.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 43:03Steven Rinella?

  You're not getting it right.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 43:05Steven Rinella?

  I asked you one thing to do here.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Well, you, then you said Randall's gonna give a little account of.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you're not, your account's not right. My understanding, and your professional research.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  I've got my research right in front of me.

• 43:20Steven Rinella?

  I thought it went like this. That like,

• 43:25Steven Rinella?

  they build a buffer in.

• 43:28Steven Rinella?

  When, when they close, there's a 48 hour window or 20, no, in Florida, I think it was a 24 hour window.

• 43:40Steven Rinella?

  Do you have a PhD or not?

• 43:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm just going by what I, uh, I do. I'm just going by what I read.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Waiting for that.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think you could just close it because you're not gonna read like you have to.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  My recollection. My recollection is they were speeding toward the quota. Yes, and so they.

• 44:01Steven Rinella?

  Called it closed, but it they can't immediately close it because how are people supposed to get the word? Like, let's say you're like waiting for one to step out, you know, you got a shot, but he's not quite clear. And they go like, hey, season's over, but you're not looking at your phone. And then the bear steps clear, you're not in violation.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Well, they did. Uh, that makes sense to me. That's how we run our, our unlimited hunts here, but, uh, they shut down Central and East Panhandle regions after the first day of Saturday. They shut, they said.

• 44:33Steven Rinella?

  But?

• 44:36Speaker 03

  But what?

• 44:38Steven Rinella?

  There was a 24 hour window. They were speeding toward it, but by the end of the 24 hours, they had overshot it. And then everybody had a conniption.

• 44:49Steven Rinella?

  The antis had a conniption.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I s- I see now. Then the Panhandle, they did go into Sunday and killed triple the quota.

• 45:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Um, and so they killed, the overall quota was 320 and they shut it down on Sunday night with 295 bears killed.

• 45:11Steven Rinella?

  But then by the time it wrapped, what was it?

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Um.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Oh geez.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  See, this is the, the real issue with hastily assembled research here.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Actual harvest, uh, three oh four.

• 45:36Steven Rinella?

  And the quota was what?

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Three twenty. Well, for the overall state, the quota was, was three twenty, but they, the one, the, the area where they met the quota on the first day, they'd ended up that they went, they tripled the quota. And so I think they just shut the whole thing down before the rest of the state. That's generally speaking, but yeah, they killed three hundred bears in two days, uh, thirty eight of them were sows with cubs. And, uh, it, they haven't had a hunt since then.

• 46:05Steven Rinella?

  Sows with cubs? Cause it was treated in the, you know, with all due respect, I didn't give Randall much time. Did you notice like this group of Rand, there's like a fan group about Randall?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:17Steven Rinella?

  I wonder what they're thinking right now. Well, I think this-

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Their support, they're all those dedicated and loyal randomals.

• 46:24Steven Rinella?

  Randomals?

• 46:24Speaker 00

  They are, I'm sure.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  I think they understand the constraints of what I was asked to do here.

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  They're reasonable people.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Shout out to the randomals.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  But, um,

• 46:36Speaker 03

  yeah, I, I mean,

• 46:38Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  I, I've, I've pieced it together, I feel like.

• 46:42Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, I thought you did well. I wanted to know more about-

• 46:45Speaker 03

  A lot of times I'm wrong about stories. Ted Nugent bought a, uh, Florida bear tag.

• 46:50Steven Rinella?

  Good for him.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Twenty fifteen.

• 46:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh,

• 46:55Steven Rinella?

  we were gonna, uh, we don't have time anymore. We were gonna spend a bunch of time goofing on this thing in California where they got an orphaned bear cub and they're trying, and they're raising it up and it's a bunch of like furries who are all dressed as black bears.

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  Like, like that's the problem.

• 47:12Steven Rinella?

  To not have it to that, like, that's the problem. That's the way to keep it from not acclimating to people.

• 47:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, those bears are doomed. Like, like the bear is gonna like, get out and be like, I'm just another wild bear.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 47:32Steven Rinella?

  Hey, there's some things, but they're not like the bears I'm used to.

• 47:38Steven Rinella?

  I'm not gonna talk about that. Um, that would have been funny had we goofed on that for a long time. We're not gonna. Um, alright.

• 47:48Steven Rinella?

  The story of the California black bear. It's taken us a long time to get here, Devon.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Usually does.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  I see you're an avid listener.

• 47:57Steven Rinella?

  Longtime listener, first time guest. Diddos.

• 48:03Steven Rinella?

  Just a couple of quick points on that. We thought about killing that whole part of the show, but we're not gonna.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Good.

• 48:09Steven Rinella?

  But what I am gonna do is I'm looking to, in the near future, split the shows and just do interviews and just do, this is something we've considered for a long time, very clean interviews. So you'd be like, on as a clean interview, and then a different thing, which is just talking about dumb stuff.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  So, audience, feel free to let us know your thoughts on that.

• 48:38Steven Rinella?

  Thinking about doing that.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I'm against it.

• 48:39Steven Rinella?

  It's part of my professional development.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  It might be a little too serious. I don't know. Not sure how I feel about it.

• 48:45Steven Rinella?

  1948. Did you supply this timeline? Like, you know this stuff inside and out. In 1948, black bears get classified as a game animal in California. Like, what does that mean, right? What does that mean for people, to hear that they're classified as a game animal?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  That they're regulated, you know, by the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

• 49:05Steven Rinella?

  So prior to that, it was like, have at them.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Prior to that, we're just killing grizzlies till we extirpated them and people are just, you know, kinda running around hunting. I mean, we had our, our commission was established prior to that, but I don't think they were formally classified as a game animal until.

• 49:22Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So that that's kind of the state at which the, you know, a way to think about that too, is that if Sand Hill cranes, like this is a pet, little pet subject of mine that I'm interested in, if my home state of Michigan were to enact a Sand Hill crane season, which they should, it would require them declaring it, it would require them doing this. It's classified as one thing now, which makes it not like subject to being listed with a season. The first step is to go like, we hereby declare the Sand Hill crane to be a game animal. And that's like part of the pathway.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And that usually triggers like a management plan too.

• 50:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Um, I know like, we'll go on tangents, but, um, you know, recently there's a proposal in California to classify coyotes as a game animal. And so that would trigger a management plan and everyone's like, no, I don't think that's going anywhere. Hopefully not. Uh, but that's part of the process, right?

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  And that's coming from people who don't want, that that's coming from people that don't want them to be a game animal. They want to be able to curb, right?

• 50:39Speaker 02

  I

• 50:40Steven Rinella?

  Their their aim is to be like, yeah, that it won't be year round, unlimited, whatever.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Classifying them as a game animal allows you to protect them. It's not like, oh, oh, here's an open season. It's a game animal now.

• 50:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's not dudes that hate coyotes doing that. It's dudes that love coyotes.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 50:57Steven Rinella?

  In that case.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault. Doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put weather tech in there. You're going to be happy you did it. And check this out. American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 51:40Steven Rinella?

  I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture. Titanium hardware. A custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush.

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy.

• 53:06Steven Rinella?

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• 53:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we're going to jump up the, we're going to jump up to 1980 where we have a sort of black bear benchmark. This is all deep history. Hit me with like in 1980, what was the status? So Reagan.

• 53:47Steven Rinella?

  Reagan comes in, right? 80? Well, he was elected in 80.

• 53:54Steven Rinella?

  And then took office in January eighty one. Okay.

• 53:59Steven Rinella?

  So just for you people to remember this. So it's Carter.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  There's that PhD.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  On his way out.

• 54:06Steven Rinella?

  Reagan on his, Carter on his way out, Reagan on his way in.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Carter, lame duck.

• 54:09Steven Rinella?

  What's going on in California? Hit me with what, what's the status of black bears in California in nineteen eighty?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  So nineteen eighty, uh, I think they've got the population around ten to fifteen thousand bears. That's the estimate.

• 54:22Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Um, started getting a little bit more restrictive as far as management goes. So that's when they took, uh, prohibited trapping, um, no killing cows, uh, uh, no killing of cubs and sows.

• 54:34Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Um, and then, uh, they reduced the bag limit from two to one.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  And if I can, if I can jump in because I didn't know what ten to fifteen thousand bears meant. I'm looking here that Montana has between thirteen thousand and seventeen thousand black bears.

• 54:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  So it's, yeah, so like that's a fairly robust population.

• 54:54Steven Rinella?

  Not like it is now and.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Just wait.

• 54:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, just wait. Not like it is now and counting bears, uh, I think has gotten a little more refined.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:02Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I think it used to be like a little bit tougher to, to count bears back in those days. But I mean, it's a guideline, right?

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 55:08Steven Rinella?

  It's a general sense, but of course, if you're saying ten to fifteen thousand, you're opening yourself up to

• 55:16Steven Rinella?

  a wide gap.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:18Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of numbers.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Right, but still like. Yeah, but still it's, it's in the, it's in the vicinity of where, like what we think of as black bear numbers in Montana where we obviously don't have a shortage.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  Was Reagan the Gipper or the Kipper?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  The Gipper.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  Gipper. Uh,

• 55:36Steven Rinella?

  as much as he is like celebrated among traditional conservative, like as much as he is celebrated among like pre-Trump Republicans.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:43Steven Rinella?

  The old kind of Republicans from a couple of years ago, um.

• 55:48Steven Rinella?

  He wound up not being the hunter's best friend when it came to black bear management. Isn't that correct? Like, wasn't it on, didn't Reagan sign?

• 55:58Speaker 02

  He was about, that was mountain lions. I don't know about.

• 56:00Steven Rinella?

  He signed on mountain lions, okay. He signed the ban on dogs for mountain lions, right?

• 56:04Speaker 03

  He also signed the ban on, uh, no open carry in California.

• 56:09Steven Rinella?

  Did he?

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Cause he didn't, I mean, basically so the Black Panthers couldn't.

• 56:15Steven Rinella?

  So you had to start wearing your pistol in your pants, not out of your pants. You had to start hiding it in your pants instead of exposing.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Reagan, Reagan's a big Hollywood guy, you know, he's full of all sorts of contradictions.

• 56:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Okay, now we're gonna, this is gonna, we're gonna start narrowing in on much more, just for you listeners. We're just laying a little groundwork here. We're just laying some background before we start getting into like how bear management works in our most populous state. And how bear management white work in a state near you, coming soon. Uh, 1998. So now we're getting closer. I'm a young buck.

• 56:52Steven Rinella?

  I'm kind of an older buck.

• 56:56Steven Rinella?

  Six years out of high school, gone, 1998.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  That, that was when the.

• 57:02Steven Rinella?

  Clinton.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  We'll do this presidentially. Uh, that was when the management plan, the previous management plan was established.

• 57:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  And so that was the framework that we operated on in California just up until this year. When we updated the new management plan.

• 57:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so 1998, they're like, here's how we're gonna handle bears and then 20 some years goes by. And it's how we're managing bears.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  And in 98, the population had.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Had increased, yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  Had increased.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  And all this data is just coming from hunter harvest. So they're using, you know, age, sex ratio, and just hunter harvest from pre-molars. That's it. Uh, I mean, they're not doing like a ton of, they don't have the current integrated population model that we have now. That gives you a much more accurate representation of.

• 57:49Steven Rinella?

  So they're able to determine, they're able to make a stab back in 1998. They're able to make a stab at how many bears are there based strictly on what they're seeing hunters bring in.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's some scientific stuff, but that is the core of the model. It's just hunter harvest data.

• 58:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And in 98, so again, that, that population estimate in 1980, we're gonna get into some wild numbers now, but coming up here.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  And eighty, ten to fifteen thousand bears estimated. Jump ahead almost twenty years. The estimate seventeen to twenty-three thousand bears.

• 58:27Steven Rinella?

  Um, notably, the plan indicated an increase in the bear population and documented an expansion of black bears along the central coast in Southern California. So bears moving into new places, right?

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And that's because historically they were grizzlies. And, you know.

• 58:44Steven Rinella?

  That's a good point.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Grizzlies are extirpated and black bears are now like filling the void and they're like, oh, hey, there's nothing killing us down here, right?

• 58:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I would, yeah, that's, that's funny how s- slow some of that stuff takes place, right? That you're still seeing adjustments. Do you know what I mean? Like even today, you're still, you're probably seeing adjustments from extirpations of wolves in the early two thousand, or not the early two, what am I saying? In the early twentieth century, you're still seeing wildlife adjust, but it takes like a hundred years, right? For things to get used, or how long it takes wildlife to get used to people. It takes generations of mountain lions, generations of bears to get like used to people and figure it out and raise their offspring to be like, no, no, no, no.

• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  Like you can do this, but you can't do that. You gotta like, when you get to a road, here's how I like to do it. Do you know what I mean? And they like gradually learned or like, oh, no, no, no, you can like totally go into a neighborhood, man, and, and.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Trash cans.

• 59:50Steven Rinella?

  But not that neighborhood. Like not that neighborhood. Yeah, they like, they figure it out somehow, you know? Uh, okay. Two thousand twelve, this is one, this is when the story starts getting kind of juicy and interesting. So hit us with two thousand twelve.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  So up until this point, uh, you could hunt dog, you can hunt bears with dogs. And that was, you know, we were hitting the quota, um, every once in a while, right? Like pretty regularly that quota.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  Can I stop you for a second? Before this, like, was there spring and fall? Was there baiting?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  None of that?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  All that was back in like, I think around the eighties. A lot of that stuff got, they, they went pretty restricted.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  That had already been taken away.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  So we had dogs, um, but no baiting, no spring season, just one tag. And we're hitting the quota, you know, not every year, but around that, like 1700 bears were with dogs.

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  Fall hunting with dogs, hitting the quota of how many bears?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  1700.

• 1:00:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay, out of an estimated, say?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  They did change that, uh, by like a hundred or so. So I think it maybe like was 1600 and went up to 1700, but it's been, it's hovered around there. It hasn't changed dramatically over time.

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And they got this quote and periodically people, periodically hunters are like capping it and hitting a close season.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Primarily with the use of hounds.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was instrumental to people being successful, for sure.

• 1:01:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And then 2012, how, what, how, what goes on and how does that happen?

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Well, the legislature, you know, that story of legislature gets involved. Um, there's a, an effort to ban, uh, hunting with dogs. They're successful and immediately following that, the harvest rate drops significantly. So we don't hit the quota after that, uh, legislative session, after that bill was passed. Um, we do not hit the quota until today. We still haven't hit the quota. Um, and that is, is really like why everything got so sideways with the petition from the Humane Society and all the efforts to ban bear hunting is because the population model, when you just take it strictly on hunter harvest data, everyone went, oh no, the bear population's collapsing.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Look, they're not killing as many bears. Look, they're only killing half as many bears. There must be half as many bears on the landscape.

• 1:02:08Steven Rinella?

  That's the great irony and perversity in this story that gets to me is like the same people that pushed to end dog hunting for bears, then trumpet the reduction in harvest as a way of showing that bear numbers are collapsing when you know that they know. You know that they know what happened.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  But it's an argument people will buy if they don't think about it. They don't understand it, you know?

• 1:02:35Steven Rinella?

  If you wanted to see bear uh numbers in California really collapse, you'd end all bear hunting. Like, no one's checking a bear anymore. There's none left, you know?

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. In the new management plan, they actually have uh an interesting little snippet that says that in some areas where there isn't bear hunting, you know, where bear hunting is not allowed, you get higher rates of like infanticide and like starvation and intercompetition because there's just so many bears that like some of the younger bears aren't making it. Um their mortality rate increases. That I thought that was kind of fascinating.

• 1:03:13Steven Rinella?

  Uh, do you have some of those stats in here about like black bear predation on mule deer and stuff?

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, yeah, there's some crazy ones. So that new management plan, uh, you know, I think it was, I think they put a couple million dollars like into all the work that went into that. They built out an entirely new integrated population model, which utilizes hunter harvest data, but it also um they collared a bunch of bears. They have a bunch of hair snares. They have a bunch of camera traps and data. That's all building out this plan.

• 1:03:43Steven Rinella?

  To give you a much more robust picture of what's going on.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and regionally specific too. But you know, some of those crazy stats that they include in that, um, they did a study on mountain lions and kleptoparesitism up in Northwest California.

• 1:03:56Steven Rinella?

  Explain that term.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  So that's where you have a mountain lion that typically, let's say, kills a black tail a week up there. And there are so many black bears that black bears are opportunistic. They, you know, smell a dead deer like, oh, breakfast. So they come in, push the mountain lion off the kill. And of all the the mountain lions that they had collared and were studying, I think only one of them was willing to defend her uh her kills. All the rest of them were like, it's not worth it. I'm not fighting this bear. So then the mountain lions go out and kill another deer.

• 1:04:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because wasn't it that over 50% of the deer that mountain lions killed were stolen from them by black bears?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  They ended up killing six times the normal amount of deer that they would because of kleptoparesitism.

• 1:04:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  So you, I mean, the, the whole coming back to spot burning, you know, if you're a deer hunter, yeah, we want a lot more people to kill bears. And in that region where they did that study, it's the presumed to be from the data is the densest concentration of black bears in the world.

• 1:05:03Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  In the world. Four bears, over four bears per square mile.

• 1:05:08Steven Rinella?

  Hot, hot.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  And a lot of poison oak, though. A whole lot of poison oak.

• 1:05:12Steven Rinella?

  That's why they're there. That's an overlooked thing. That's why they're there.

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  You, you know, kleptoparasitism, um, you could do a study on that. Like if, if I'm in my kitchen with my kids and I make a quesadilla.

• 1:05:25Steven Rinella?

  They'd be like, this individual winds up making four times as many quesadillas.

• 1:05:30Steven Rinella?

  As he normally would have made. Because of kleptoparasitism. Parasitism.

• 1:05:37Steven Rinella?

  That's pretty fascinating that they had always met the quota. Then when you banned hound hunting, so from 2012 to 2021, with the ban of hound hunting, the quota never gets met.

• 1:05:48Steven Rinella?

  So then you just, you've taken away people's primary way of get, or you take away one of the most effective ways to get bears. And then you have it that you're just going to have more bears, more bears, more bears, more bears, because they're not even able to hit the number that they've regarded to be a very safe number anyway.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Very safe. I mean, that's like, the harvest rates in California are well below what would be considered the threshold for sustainable. They, uh, estimated about 15%.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Take would be like a sustainable level for the population.

• 1:06:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  In California, at least recently, um, we're not over 5% for the entire state, uh, 5% for more than one zone and 3% for the entire state. So, I mean, the harvest rates are incredibly low. And there's some estimates that say you can go up to 20%. I think Pennsylvania and a couple of other states have even higher harvest rates and they have no issues.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  Because they got sows with a lot of food and they're dropping three cubs, four cubs, whatever. You see videos of, you know, in the east, you know, some bear goes across the road and five cubs come running after it. Right? Stuff that you just don't see around here.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  When, uh, when those quotas, or when they stopped meeting those quotas did, was there a correlation between an increase in bear conflict? And an increase in the number of bears that were getting, what they like to say euthanized, but you know, just shot by management officials, whatever.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, bear conflict generally from that time period up until today has kind of steadily increased, um, like human bear conflict. And the department actually, prior to the release of the management plan, they updated their sort of depredation strategy and their human bear conflict strategy. And after that, there's been a lot less euthanasia of bears, but a lot more conflict as well. So it's just a little bit more difficult for the department to go in there and approve for a bear to get taken.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  Because of like social pressure or?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Pretty much.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, it's, it follows what the depredation strategy is for mountain lions, which is, you know, previously there is, you know, procedures, but you could kind of, I think. My understanding is that wardens could make, you know, a determination like it's kind of on the fly. Like, yes, this is a problem bear. We need to like go in and take care of this. Now there needs to be, you know, a lot, there needs to be a record of documentation of attempts to haze the bear. Um, you need to have, um, a number of steps that go through before that depredation tag is issued and before the department will consider actually going in.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  I have a question about not hitting that quota. Is that, is the success rate for black bear hunters in Cal? Obviously, like, the success rate goes down when they do away with dogs, right? And you're just doing spot and stalk.

• 1:08:42Steven Rinella?

  They drop 50%. Or no, sorry, not the success rate. Harvest drop 50%.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so success, but yeah, I mean, hound hunting is, has, is higher efficacy. So I'm wondering, like, in the time that the quota hasn't been met, in the time that the quota has not been met, are success rates among hunters on par with fall bear, non-hound seasons in other states? Like, is it a question of there not enough people buying bear tags?

• 1:09:10Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  Or is it a question that success rates are much lower in California compared to a similar season in, say, Washington?

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  My understanding is that they're, like, some of the lowest

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  of the states that have bears. And I think part of that is cultural. I think in California, people, I mean, there's like something like 25,000 bear tags that get bought every year. It's a good amount of revenue for the department, but there's only about 1,000 to 1,300 bears that are actually getting harvested every year.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  And I think a lot of that is cultural, and it's just like, it's

• 1:09:45Steven Rinella?

  Smoking dope, surfing?

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's my problem, but

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  it's people that, that are going deer hunting and are just buying a bear tag.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  Opportunistic.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  It's opportunistic, and, you know, if, if you don't run into one, all right, whatever.

• 1:10:00Steven Rinella?

  It's like me and my wolf tag.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, maybe.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Carrying around wolf tags.

• 1:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Hate to get caught without it, you know?

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And it's not, you know, a super expensive tag, so it's, people just kind of buy one and if they run into a bear, great. But that, I think, skews some of the data, too, of like, how much are hunters really trying? And how does that success ratio factor in?

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess that, that was, that was sort of, rather than how many people are buying tags, it's like, how many people are actually hunting them? And it sounds like that's where the sort of

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you probably lost a ton of hunters once hounds went away, like, people are like, well, I'm not gonna

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna hunt them a different way, you know?

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  In 2021, they put forth, they, Humane Society, right?

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:10:49Steven Rinella?

  Do we need to once again explain the Humane Society? There's HSUS. I answered my own question. If you're sitting there and you're getting, you're at, you're buying something and it, there's like a little roundup thing. Do you want to round up for the Humane Society? Right? You're thinking, oh, it's the local puppies. Like HSUS is an anti-hunting organization. You can have a local Humane Society shelter. But HSUS is an anti-hunting organization. There's tons of confusion about this that people have.

• 1:11:32Steven Rinella?

  The difference between the Humane Society writ large, like as a big umbrella, and then like Humane Society shelters. Don't do anything to ever help HSUS, ever.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  I had a question too, because I was having this debate just two days ago in California. And I'm curious for you guys, if you know the answer to this, if it's outside of California. But in California, the Humane Society has police powers where they can actually write you a ticket. And, and it's enforceable as if it were a police officer. And if you like run from them, it's like you're running from the cops.

• 1:12:08Steven Rinella?

  That can't be true.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  They can write you a ticket.

• 1:12:10Steven Rinella?

  For what?

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  Yelling at your dog?

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Pretty much for having your dog on off leash at the beach.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. I've, I've, I've seen it happen and it blew my mind. And so I did a bunch of research and I was like, is this just California where they have this police power? Or is it elsewhere? Because it's, it's definitely problematic.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Man, Corinne be getting a lot of tickets.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  They got all worked up about the National Guard. And meanwhile, they got the HSUS running around writing tickets. Here's a, uh, here's a journal article from 1998 in the, uh, what? The Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference. And the title of the paper is Humane Society, Good Guys or Gestapo? Very provocative. That is a great title. I'm jealous of that title. But it does, it does sound like, yeah. Societies are private organizations that have no inherent power, but derive all their powers and authority to enforce animal laws from the state. As in most states in California, the counties can choose to operate their own animal control services or to hire the society to perform animal control services for the county.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  And they can serve search warrants.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  At the time of this, they they can serve search warrants, they can carry firearms. Um, and may even use reasonable force and deadly force to prevent the perpetration of any act of cruelty upon an animal.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Wow, deadly force.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  So I guess they're like.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Kind of put your dog on a leash.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  Like a county, a county that has to provide animal control services can sort of rent a cop the humane society and.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:13:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we're talking about the other day with our camera guy, Rick Smith.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:50Steven Rinella?

  He was working on this dog, this documentary about dogs in Mexico, street dogs.

• 1:13:57Steven Rinella?

  And he's talking about like, he's like psychologically, a street dog in Mexico is a way healthier dog.

• 1:14:04Steven Rinella?

  Psychologically.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:14:06Steven Rinella?

  They they wake up, they hang out with their dogs, they're in a pack form.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:12Steven Rinella?

  People look at them like, oh, that dog has an infected eye. And they think the dog's hating life. But he's like, they have total autonomy. They have dynamics.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:14:22Steven Rinella?

  They hang out, the dogs, they want to hang out, they travel where they want. And we're talking about this concept that Americans have, people around the world, but like you take a dog. You remove its reproductive organs.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:35Steven Rinella?

  You lock it in the house all day and you act like you're doing the dog a favor. And I think that all those dogs have, uh.

• 1:14:47Steven Rinella?

  What's that syndrome when you get caught?

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 1:14:51Steven Rinella?

  Stockholm. All dogs have, I think dogs are very susceptible to Stockholm syndrome. And they empathize with their captors. I think that they're like a highly susceptible species. And that's why when you come home and your dog's happy, your dog has Stockholm syndrome.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:08Steven Rinella?

  He has come to empathize with his captor.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  You ever seen the way dogs in Mexico will try to attack a car like?

• 1:15:19Steven Rinella?

  Cause they they're they got chutzpah. It's Yiddish.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  It's their only natural predator, like a an urban dog, an urban pack of dogs. I swear there's a pecking order.

• 1:15:29Steven Rinella?

  It's a great point.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  The biggest one will go after like cars and they'll come in and they'll try to bite the wheel.

• 1:15:34Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's a natural predator.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  And they're like showing their dominance. It's it's a wild thing. I was I did a study abroad in Santiago.

• 1:15:40Steven Rinella?

  Great point, man.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  And I was on a skateboard and if you're on a skateboard, you'll get like 20 stray dogs that will just come in like they're they're trying to kill you. And then the second you hop off the board, they're like.

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 1:15:56Steven Rinella?

  Cat cats. I got signed out of my thing.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought you were looking for videos of dogs chasing cars.

• 1:16:02Steven Rinella?

  No, but no.

• 1:16:06Steven Rinella?

  Cats are remarkably

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  less susceptible to Stockholm syndrome. But dogs, for whatever reason, weirdly are like highly susceptible to empathizing with their captors. People that restrain them, don't let them do what they want to do. Don't let them hang out with who they want to hang out with. Make them eat what they want them to eat when they want them to eat it.

• 1:16:28Steven Rinella?

  No autonomy, no autonomy. Like you get to go to the yard. It's like prison.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  You could say that.

• 1:16:37Steven Rinella?

  They even call it the same thing. Let them out in the yard. Let the prisoners out in the yard.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  I love that this is your new crusade. I hope you chase this.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you'd have to like, cause you could say say same thing about horses.

• 1:16:51Steven Rinella?

  I don't know about that.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  Well, sure.

• 1:16:53Steven Rinella?

  Let me think about it for a minute. I want to get back to Tom.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them. They all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put weather tech in there. You're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 1:17:39Steven Rinella?

  I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture. Titanium hardware. A custom deep carry clip with flat head screws set flush.

• 1:18:22Steven Rinella?

  This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy.

• 1:19:05Steven Rinella?

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• 1:19:32Steven Rinella?

  The Bear Protection Act.

• 1:19:36Steven Rinella?

  Here's a move where the HSUS, correct?

• 1:19:40Steven Rinella?

  HSUS comes out and says, hey, I got an idea. How about you can't hunt bears at all anymore in California?

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  SB 252, that was a Senator Weiner's bill.

• 1:19:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:19:51Steven Rinella?

  What happens with the Bear Protection Act?

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  It got squashed. It was a, a big uprising from a lot of different organizations and it got pulled back very quickly.

• 1:20:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:20:04Steven Rinella?

  Um, that's 2021. 2022, they, there's a different approach made.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  Through the commission.

• 1:20:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay, explain this now.

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Uh, the Humane Society filed a petition, uh, to the Fish and Game Commission, which honestly, you know.

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  HSUS.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  HSUS, uh, respectfully, like, that is the process, right? The legislature had no business taking that on. And so at least they're going through the proper channel now, right? The commission, but they failed the legislature, so.

• 1:20:32Steven Rinella?

  Like, people complain about ballot biology or whatever, but this is like, hey, okay, we'll play by the rules. We'll go to the commission and we'll.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yep, so they, they bring forward this petition and the, the whole argument is based off of this population model and the collapse of bears. So they're saying, according to their science, they're saying there's only 10,000 bears left in California. And this is a, you know, we need a moratorium on bear hunting until we can update the management plan and until we have a better population model so that we can, and they're citing, you know, mega fires and climate change. This is, uh, causing a catastrophic drop in the bear population.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  And they're going back to that, like.

• 1:21:11Steven Rinella?

  Evidence by decline.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  That's what they're saying.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Everything is built around that hunter harvest model, which is, when you look, when you break down the science, I mean, it's not, it's not a solid argument at all. It doesn't take an expert to look at that and go, okay, well, this doesn't, you know, this clearly doesn't really, you know, pass the smell test here.

• 1:21:30Steven Rinella?

  And it being 2022, they just throw in climate change for a zinger.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  And we'd had some huge fires in California, massive fires, right? And so, uh, I think that's, that was the, the topic of the time, right? Is like, you know, what could these giant fires be doing to our bear populations and what are the impacts? And, you know, that's something that I think a lot of people are genuinely curious about and we actually. Uh, used a chapter money and funded a study on pre and post fire population uh status of black bears in California um in Lassen National Park. Just because at this time, you know, we're saying, okay, well, humane society like if, if you want to talk about this, well, let's put your money where your mouth is. Let's, let's fund some research, right? Let's get to the answer. And so as a part of like BHA and wanting to be an organization that stands for science based management of wildlife.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  We had this opportunity from one of the old carnivore biologists in the state. Um, who's a great guy came out to like one of our bear camps and talked to people about bear hunting. He mentioned this study and so we put some money towards it and it's ongoing. But you know, I think this is like where we want to be as hunters, like, you know, making sure that we have good data and good science.

• 1:22:38Steven Rinella?

  And that's like, but I would think just, just intuitively, I would think that the, that the fire outside of mega fires, I would think that the fires are basically generating more and more black hair habitat.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  That's the assumption.

• 1:22:54Steven Rinella?

  So just successional, successional vegetation. So it might, it's cooked for a couple of years, but then it goes through a very productive bunch of years with a lot of berry production.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:23:04Steven Rinella?

  Through, through the successional process. So you're right that you'd like, if you have, what, what's a big in acreage? What's a big fire in California in acreage?

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:23:17Steven Rinella?

  I mean, tens of thousands of acres.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Hundreds of thousands, yeah.

• 1:23:19Steven Rinella?

  So you do, when you, I mean, like, you can't deny it. If you go into a place and you burn 100,000 acres of ground in a catastrophic wildfire, that is a hundred thousand acres of ground that for a period of time is not going to be used by black bears for the most part. But then it'll become a patch of ground that is very well used by black bears for a pretty long period of time. But I could see that like, I could kinda see the argument, but I kinda don't see the argument.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  And I think there's, it's one of those examples also where like, do you have, can the bears move somewhere else? Right? Is there habitat for them to move into or not?

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Um, and, and I think even following like some of the, especially like low to mid severity fires. I think bears probably move in like right after the fire too. Maybe the habitat and value isn't as good, but they're not, it's not like it's gone forever. Is my understanding, right? There's going to be some bears that come right back in.

• 1:24:15Steven Rinella?

  You know, if anyone's listening that knows about this, I'd love to know this answer. Has anyone ever had the opportunity to look at collared? Black bears, collared mountain lions? And, and see how they behave with a fire? How, how, how far ahead of the fire are they? Do you ever get mortality on collared stuff for getting caught in fires? Like, I'd love to understand that. Like when you watch a giant fire cooking across a mountainside, I always say to my kids, I'm like, like can you imagine how many pine squirrels died in that thing?

• 1:24:50Steven Rinella?

  They're not getting, you know what I mean?

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  You're cooking

• 1:24:55Steven Rinella?

  thousands and thousands and thousands of pine squirrels. But like, what are bears doing? You know, some of them presumably they gotta get burned up. But I wonder like, when they move, like how well do they get it? What, how good are they at going in the right direction? That'd be fascinating if you could ever have a good sample size of like, what is it's, at, at what point did it start to shift its, you know? What point did it demonstrate any kind of awareness? I would love to see some of that. If it's out there. Uh, a couple of years ago, you could have gotten it funded as climate change research.

• 1:25:32Steven Rinella?

  But now you won't. You have to think of a different thing.

• 1:25:37Steven Rinella?

  You have to think of a different buzzword to get your money, to get your research money on. Um, at the same time that they're saying 10,000 bears using the Hunter Harvest data. The California department.

• 1:25:52Steven Rinella?

  As they're saying now, we think we got 20 to 30,000. This is in 2022.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  And that's their number they'd stuck with for a while. And there'd been some studies that had pushed that up to 35. But generally speaking, in the documents that they'd had out there, they said, you know, we're thinking it's around 20 to 30.

• 1:26:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That petition doesn't go anywhere, right?

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  I mean, it it stuck around for a little while. It was a big, a big deal, right? There all the anti hunters came out, all the hunters came out. We actually put together a huge, just all the available literature and science that we could. One of our former board members was a black bear biologist in California. So just like the perfect person to compile all this evidence. And what came of the petition was it was ultimately rejected, but it led to it lit a fire under the department to update their black bear management plan, which was something that the Hunting and Conservation Coalition in California, something that BHA participates in, prior to all this, had as one

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  of the top priorities is like, we need a new management plan. Because previously, when the management plan gets outdated, anti hunters will come in and say, you don't have good science, we can't hunt it. And so we knew that was like, square one, having a defensible position is having good, good science.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  Because they'll use it against you and be like, you haven't updated your management plans since 1998.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:27:16Steven Rinella?

  You have no idea what's going on out there. Right?

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:21Steven Rinella?

  So they start the process of doing the new management plan. And it goes up for like, public opinion, public comment. What was your general vibe on the proposed management plan? Or your general take on it?

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Our general take was it was ambitious because the director said they were going to do it in a year. And everyone went like, all you could tell all the, the scientists and the department staff were like.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Did he say a year? Cause I mean-

• 1:27:46Steven Rinella?

  We don't do anything fast.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  The sheep plan just wrapped up and that that's been going on for over a decade.

• 1:27:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  You know, these things take a long time and they, I mean, credit to the department, they got it done in a couple of years, but they got a draft out in about a year and then followed up with the final, you know, just this year. And it, you know, generally speaking, there's a lot of information in there, but there's a lot of good data, like some of those nuggets that I pulled out about kleptoparesism.

• 1:28:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. They talk about- I read like, I rarely read those whole things. I read that whole damn thing. It was, I thought it was like, I mean, I give huge credit to whoever put it together.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it was phenomenal.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  There's some really good research that went into that. And just to back up a tiny bit too, our commission, like, I gotta give a lot of credit to them because they really pushed back against this whole notion that just because hunters are the minority in the state, that we should just ban bear hunting.

• 1:28:40Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  And so the commission really like came out in favor of black bear hunting, in favor of hunters, but with the caveat of like, let's get, let's get all the data and research that we can to make an informed decision.

• 1:28:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I think it was like, what I got from when I read it was like a number of recognitions. Like, there was a sort of recognition that there's shifting social values in the state. There's a recognition that there are a ton of black bears in more places. There's a recognition that we have historically used bear hunters as a management tool. It recognized bear hunters' contribution to bear research, right? It was like, it was very even, you know?

• 1:29:25Steven Rinella?

  And it had like, you know, just like the whole state history and all their measurement stuff. I thought it was like, super informative.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  One of the cool things in there too, to check out is the, um, the range map that they updated. Because you can see some of those areas where black bears have expanded and they updated that map. And it was kind of surprising to me even, it goes all the way down to the border, um, to Mexico. And we don't have black bears in San Diego, although we did have one that ran down into like Ramona, I think it was last year. So like, it's not a, not a common occurrence, but you could imagine if things stay on the same trajectory, that those bears will probably move down there.

• 1:30:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  If they continue to, to move out. I mean, we've been, we've had bears pouring into Nevada for years and years now. Like their bear population is- Bolstered by all these bears that are just leaving California because the taxes are too high or whatever.

• 1:30:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, with the, with that black bear management plan they put out, which is like a proposal, right? I mean, they have a proposal part of it.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  Well, they had the draft management plan and then they finalized it just this year.

• 1:30:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so that, that I'm not, that, that I'm less schooled on. But I remember in there they were saying like, there's things that you could do, or people were asking for certain things like, like Californians are limited to one bear.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:30:46Steven Rinella?

  And since the quota's not being met, and you have more bears, like categorically more bears than you did when they established the quota, and the quota's not being met, they were like, we could do X, Y, and Z. We could give everybody two bear tags, which I don't think is going to make a huge difference, probably.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  It's the low, it's the lowest hanging fruit. But, and I, and I agree. I don't necessarily know that's even going to get us to the quota, but it's, it's a very logical first step. And that's actually what BHA did. We filed a petition to the commission right after the management plan was finalized and we reviewed it as the like, easy slam dunk, lowest hanging fruit. Everybody could buy two bear tags. Because then, you know, one, it's just more revenue for the department.

• 1:31:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  If some people are like, oh, well, I'm going to go deer hunting and maybe I'll see two bears. You never know. Like, uh, so that for us was just like an easy win. But there's other, other proposals that the department are going to bring forward that we're aware of, including expanding some of the bear hunting zones. So like in northeastern California and the Modoc Plateau, that has been closed to bear hunting. It's because it's not historically occupied bear habitat. But the bears have moved in there. There's, you know, good genetic diversity. There's, there's good bear hunting up there. So it seems like a logical place to, yeah, let's open that up. There's no reason not to hunt bears there. Um, you know, they're going to potentially talk about season, timing. It's a pretty wide open season right now, around when deer season starts and it goes

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  like to the end of the year in most zones. So they may look at that as well, as there, if there's any improvements there or additional opportunities. But I think those are the big first things that the department's going to try to address this year. I don't think spring bear baiting, dogs, that's not coming from the department.

• 1:32:32Speaker 04

  It's hard to bring that stuff back once you.

• 1:32:34Steven Rinella?

  What does it take to bring it back? Like, I, I, I appreciate.

• 1:32:39Steven Rinella?

  I appreciate

• 1:32:42Steven Rinella?

  the efforts. I appreciate your guys' efforts on this. I appreciate the efforts. To me, like, these are all wins. They're all the, they're battles, they're little wins, right? They're battles that you win. The war, to me, like, to win the war, it would be that we would,

• 1:33:05Steven Rinella?

  we would be able to go in and revert, we would have success in going in and reverting some of the major management, the historic major management decisions. Like, hunters look at winning, oftentimes that defeating, we look at winning-

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  We didn't lose.

• 1:33:22Steven Rinella?

  -as defeating losses, meaning Colorado's like, okay, we're gonna ban bobcat hunting, mountain lion hunting. Hunters come together, fight it, and the victory is that you didn't-

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  You maintain the status quo.

• 1:33:39Steven Rinella?

  You maintain the status quo.

• 1:33:42Steven Rinella?

  I would love to see, like, that somehow we would pull off that trapping came back to Colorado, that, right, that hound hunting came back to California, that the mountain lion season came back to California. What does that take in California? Like, is that just not, I mean, like, give me the realistic. Is that just not gonna happen?

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  I mean, when you talk about mountain lion, it's not gonna happen. Because of when that legislation was passed, the way it was passed, it will require a four fifths vote majority in the legislature to bring mountain lion hunting back in California.

• 1:34:22Steven Rinella?

  Are you serious?

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Four fifths. So, I mean, mountain lion, as much as we would like to see it, I, that is not the-

• 1:34:29Steven Rinella?

  So that's the threshold.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. For bears, it's a different story.

• 1:34:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay, hit me with bears.

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  Bears, we had a bill this year, AB 1038, that almost made it out of committee. It actually, you know, there was a lot, a lot of work done by a lot of great organizations to bring that forward. Um, you know, this is like a houndsman bill, primarily as a sponsor, and- It's, it was before the management plan was finalized. Um, and now it's a two-year bill. So, um, in California, the legislative session spans two years. So this is basically just kind of going to get recycled into next year, but doesn't have to necessarily start from square zero. Um, in order to bring hound hunting back, uh, it will require the legislature's approval. And so what this bill tried to do is this bill tried to allow the use of hounds for basically

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  tree and free. Um, from like a perspective of human bear conflict, but it also, the reason why it

• 1:35:23Steven Rinella?

  I don't mean to roll my eyes. That's great. That's great. But it's not what I'm talking about.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  Right. But, but what it did also is that it allowed for the, it delegated the authority as it should be to the commission to determine whether or not there should be a hound hunting season.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  So it took it out of the legislature's hands, put it in the commission's hands where it belongs. And that was too much for the anti-hunters in the state, but I think that it's not, it's not something that's out of the question. It just, I think these things have to happen in their stages. And now that we have the management plan, let's say we get a second bear tag, we expand the zones, we do everything we can, and we still don't hit the quota, and we can show the negative impacts to other species, mule deer, um, you know,

• 1:36:07Steven Rinella?

  Which is big.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  charismatic megafauna like mountain lions. I mean, if you want to like really make the argument, bears are negatively impacting mountain lions, right? Like we need to manage them to an extent where we can actually be successful.

• 1:36:19Steven Rinella?

  Now you're getting back into that Machiavellian stuff, man. It's like, I just feel bad for the mountain lions. We need to be able to hunt more bears.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  So I don't know if you've, oh, the one thing that sticks out to me about this new plan, and I don't know if we've touched on it and I missed it, but it's got a new population model, which again is like,

• 1:36:40Steven Rinella?

  One of these little steps that leads towards reframing the whole conversation, right? So the, the, the current statewide black bear population is what now? According to the, according to the best available science.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  According to the new IPM, the integrated population model, it's 59,000 with, uh, but, but it could be, but it could be up to 80.

• 1:37:03Steven Rinella?

  Let me scroll back up.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  And 59 is conservative.

• 1:37:06Steven Rinella?

  That's one of, I want to remind people where we are. 1980, 10 to 15,000 bears in Cali, best, best scientific guess, 10 to 15,000 in California. Hit me again now.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  59,000 up to 80,000.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  The most bears in the lower 48. The highest density of bears, black bears in the world in Northwest California.

• 1:37:33Steven Rinella?

  And that's, I mean, there's too many places claiming to have the highest density of black bears.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  This, it's in the management, they, they take it, they like put their flag in the ground, they're like, anyone else come challenge us, but this is the data that we have.

• 1:37:44Steven Rinella?

  And like getting stuff like that funded. Good thing for Atlas is the different places that compete, the different places. New Jersey and California. For the dense as well, and in portions of Southeast Alaska also claim to have the highest density.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  This is also per 100 square kilometers. So, uh, it's like 156 bears per 100 square kilometers is their metric, which is like just over four bears a square mile. So I don't know if someone else, someone else is like, we got the most bears in this quadrant or whatever, but I think a square miles are pretty.

• 1:38:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I see it. Yeah. And then it depends on how big the area, like if I put a bunch of bears on this table,

• 1:38:17Steven Rinella?

  could I say like, that's the densest population of black bears in North America?

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Steven Rinella?

  This table, so it's gotta be like, how much air are you talking about?

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Steven Rinella?

  It's a sizable chunk of ground though.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's huge. I mean, there's a ton of public land that you can hunt in California for black bears.

• 1:38:33Steven Rinella?

  Do you do some fall, do you do some specific fall black bear hunting?

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm excited um to do some, some more fall black bear hunting. I've been living in San Diego for 10 years. Uh, been hunting for 13 years. Uh, my wife and I got into it. We've been trying to kill our San Diego uh deer, which is might as well be the, you know, unicorn of the woods.

• 1:38:55Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  Um, she was successful. She killed one with her bow. Um.

• 1:38:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, seriously?

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, and uh, we've been hunting together for a long time. Now we have a couple of kids. It's, it's trickier to like get out together and do that.

• 1:39:06Steven Rinella?

  You're focused on crayfish.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. Uh, you know, where, where I can really make bank for my buck. Stewie, rest in peace. But I've, you know, I've, I've gotten to do a little bit of black bear hunting. Um, mostly when I'm like uh traveling for work, like we did uh, we've been doing this big restoration project up in northeast California. And so when I go up there, I always have my deer tag and shot a deer a couple of years ago and almost shot a bear, but a little out of range. Usually bow hunting. Um, but I, my friend who shared that picture, um, Ned, who does some guiding in the eastern Sierra, he uh, he's been trying to get me to come up with them. So I'm pretty excited to, to get up and I got like 10 points for deer, so I'm gonna cash in next year. I'm gonna scout my deer zone and, and go hopefully kill a bear this fall.

• 1:39:48Steven Rinella?

  I was hanging out with a guy in California this winter and one, this weirdest thing, man, like

• 1:39:54Steven Rinella?

  he uh, he manages a ski area. Okay, I'm not gonna tell you what ski area.

• 1:40:01Steven Rinella?

  I don't want all hellfire to come down.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  Out of respect for the town.

• 1:40:05Steven Rinella?

  Out of respect for the individual.

• 1:40:08Steven Rinella?

  It's not like my story, my crime and punishment story. So check this out, this is January. This is January in the mountains. Okay, at a ski hill. I pull in to meet him.

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  There is a bear standing under, like you park in a parking lot and you walk up this zigzag old rickety stairs to get in, to enter the bar at the ski area. There's a bear standing under the porch, standing there. And his buddy, another bear, is standing off to the side of the stairs. I can't like, I'm like.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  Forgot his ID or what?

• 1:40:47Steven Rinella?

  It's like, yeah. You, you know, you read like, like people seeing these, they can't comprehend. I, I'm stuck in the moment. I mean, the snow is so you can't walk through the woods. Okay. You, we're using snow cats to get around. You cannot walk around without snow shoes. I'm like feeling like, homie, did I come through a, a fence? And this is like a, like I, I couldn't comprehend what I'm seeing. He's like, oh no, man. These are like the town bears. He says, they don't even hibernate anymore.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  They live in town. They walk around. He had a couple of years earlier. Got one. And he's like, he's like, dude, man, I kept that under wraps.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's funny.

• 1:41:35Steven Rinella?

  He said, there's no way. I could have told anybody about that. And it was on his property. He tagged.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Well, so this is, this is the thing with the two tags is they in Montana, in the last legislative session, they're trying to pass a bill through the Fish and Wildlife Committee. Uh, or in the House, whatever.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  To let hunters buy two lion tags in areas that had really low success rates.

• 1:42:04Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  And there's this question of like, well, if people aren't killing lions there now. What's them having an extra tag going to do? And the point was made was that a lot of these areas are places where there's not great access. And so some, or there's like considerations about hunting around city limits, things like that. And a lot of hunters wouldn't be like, are, are pretty conservative when it comes to like butting up against private property or whatever. And so in the case of like these town bears, if there are some guys that hunt and have properties where they can hunt.

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  Like having that person buy a second tag could. It's not going to tip the scale, but it, it increases harvest in these places where it's tricky to address it.

• 1:42:47Steven Rinella?

  I got me a permission on the spot.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

  For a town bear? I just don't know if I can deal with the heat.

• 1:42:56Steven Rinella?

  That's what I told them.

• 1:42:58Steven Rinella?

  They got property. He said, man, you have no problem. Hmm. I was like, I don't know, dude. That seems like a good way of getting into an argument with an old lady. Near, near wine country? An old lady with a cat or a dog on a leash.

• 1:43:11Steven Rinella?

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• 1:43:56Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44:39Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  There's an interesting tidbit too. I think it's from the management plan, but bears that get accustomed to human food and are like your town bears, they reproduce earlier and more often. And so like you're saying, they stop hibernating. I think it's just like those bears. And it's like two whole separate conversations, right? Like, how do you deal with the bears and Tahoe and mammoth?

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  And like the human bear conflicts that are there? Because some of those places, you know, there's little pockets here and there that you can hunt. But the vast majority of those bears are not necessarily like the huntable population, right? That's just like an education campaign for people to stop being idiots and start locking up their food. And, you know, that's where that whole like each, you know, human bear conflict conversation comes in. But, you know, hunting will improve human bear conflict, but it's not the like end all solution, right? Some of these places like require education, require people being smart.

• 1:46:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't, you know, I keep talking about that, that approach of, um,

• 1:46:30Steven Rinella?

  like I need to be clear about what I'm after here.

• 1:46:34Steven Rinella?

  I, I, I see people that are on my, I'm making a mess of this argument. Let me back up.

• 1:46:41Steven Rinella?

  I often see people use a rhetorical strategy in these conversations that I'm uncomfortable with. They would say, don't, we can't ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado because mountain lions are going to kill all of our children if we do that.

• 1:47:02Steven Rinella?

  Like, it's so tempting to do that.

• 1:47:06Steven Rinella?

  Because it helps you get what you want. Yeah, to scare people into. It's so tempting to vilify, to be like, grizzlies. Like, here's the thing I believe, it's time the D-list grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Rocky Mountain ecosystems, those, those, those, uh, deep distinct DPSs, it's time. But I can't then go, it's time

• 1:47:31Steven Rinella?

  because grizzlies are going to kill us all.

• 1:47:34Steven Rinella?

  Which is how you get there.

• 1:47:37Steven Rinella?

  Because then you make it an issue that

• 1:47:41Steven Rinella?

  moms, hikers, whatever, you make it their problem by intimidating them. And I see people do it, and very well-intentioned people do it, and I'm always like, man, I, I can't personally traffic in this argument that I'm so afraid of a bear, because we have bears all over our yard in the fall. I'm so afraid of a bear in my yard that we have to hunt more bears. They're going to kill us all.

• 1:48:08Steven Rinella?

  But I wish I could. Earlier, I used like being like the Machiavellian approach, it's like anything to win, right? And, um,

• 1:48:18Steven Rinella?

  I don't like it. You know, I think it's worthwhile to point out, I think it's worthwhile to point out bear-human conflict, but I can't put it that, that my motivation, that I'm motivated first and foremost by preventing bear-human conflict. You don't want to get out the pitchforks and torches for the scary monsters. Yeah, I'm motivated by, here's a renewable resource.

• 1:48:43Steven Rinella?

  There are people that want to use and utilize and enjoy this renewable resource, and it will not be a detriment to the species. Therefore, since the species is fine, they'll continue to occupy the landscape in California. Let those people who would choose to exercise their historic privilege of utilizing the resource for food, skin, whatever, allow them to continue to do so because it doesn't imperil the integrity of the species. If you got to get there by talking about bears eating your dog's food.

• 1:49:14Steven Rinella?

  I'd do it, but I'd rather not.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  I think an interesting take on that, too, is that when you talk about like problem bears, right?

• 1:49:22Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  And depredations and relocations, and this goes for like, large carnivores. In California, we have an interesting perspective for a lot of mountain lions. And we relocate a lot of these, in these depredation instances, we relocate. And I know particularly for mountain lions in the Sierra Nevadas, in the eastern Sierra, where we have an endangered subspecies of bighorn sheep. There are problem cats when the sheep come down low enough. There's like a big snow year, the sheep come down low and they just get massacred by these mountain lions.

• 1:50:01Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  And particular mountain lions will kill a bunch of sheep. So they'll take that, take, there's, you know, instances where they've taken that cat and moved them 150 miles away, comes right back, starts killing sheep again.

• 1:50:12Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  And they do it again, 300 miles away, comes right back and keeps killing sheep.

• 1:50:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  And so it's like, okay, at what point are we spending resources? Like, you know, if we can, you know, if we don't have to kill it, sure, if we can, if it can be a huntable, you know, animal, great, but, you know, at what point are we spending resources to basically just put a Band-Aid on something that's going to come right back in? So I think that's the question there of like, you can't, yeah, you can't be fear mongering that, you know, the, the bears are going to kill us all, but also like, we have to be smart about our strategies and how we're using hunting as a management tool and how we're employing depredation to, you know, like, prevent problem bears from coming in and killing like the lady in Downyville, right? Like.

• 1:50:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  Um, which was, I think, part of that, like catalyst of that story.

• 1:50:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that was like a, like, very emblematic story where here's a person complaining about a bear, the bear eventually comes in her house and kills her. And it was like, yeet, right?

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  Um. I might have seen that bear too, cause I, my friend lives like a mile or two down the road.

• 1:51:13Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Um, and, and I've seen bears in this place. I've, I've hunted deer up there and, um, you know, I had a couple of looks at bears. So a- after that, I was thinking like, I wonder if I saw that bear.

• 1:51:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  Man, I wish I could have gotten closer.

• 1:51:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Here, because grizzlies are ESA animals, they'll go to great ends to move a problem grizzly bear. For the most part, when you tattle tale on a black bear for doing something bad, I'm always telling people not to tattle tale on the ones around town. Like if you, if enough people tattle tale on a black bear, uh, he's dead. Cause think about it like this, you gotta move it 250 miles to get out of where it's not, you know what I mean? Where he's not just gonna show back up. So here you have an understaffed agency with, you know, budget constraints, like any wildlife management agency is gonna deal with. You got a very healthy population of black bears, a growing population of black bears.

• 1:52:10Steven Rinella?

  A black bear starts killing some chickens. Are you really gonna send a guy out? He's gonna catch it. You're gonna pay him the whatever days it takes to bring that thing 250 miles away.

• 1:52:26Steven Rinella?

  Come back, right? It's just, they just, it's not the time and money.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  He's gonna use dogs to do it, that, you know, dog teams are like how they'll get a contract houndsman to come in and catch those bears off. I mean, they'll do traps, but.

• 1:52:40Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 1:52:40Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:52:41Steven Rinella?

  Culvert traps, dogs, whatever, but it's like, they're not gonna, um, you know, they're not gonna spend the time and money on it. It's just, it's burdensome. And then at any given time, like September comes and, I don't know, I had a guy tell me one time, like in this town, September comes, they were, they were monitoring like 11 or 12 in town. That people are calling up complaining about.

• 1:53:07Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's just interesting about how they view it. Then you got these guys here dressing up like, dressing up like bears.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  That's just another day at the office.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  So what do you think is gonna wind up happening?

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  I think, uh, I can say with somewhat, you know, confidently that I think this year we'll see a second bear tag. Uh, we'll see expanded hunting zones into northeastern California. Okay. Maybe a little tweaks to the season, uh, but nothing substantial there. More generous tweaks. Mm-hmm. I don't, I don't know as much here. Uh, this is where we start to get into like a little bit more uncertainty. The San Luis Obispo, there's a lot of people that are calling for bear hunting down there. There was an effort, uh, maybe about like 10 years ago to, uh, establish a bear hunt there because it's been historically closed. Um, and the department had said there, there's a thousand bears and we should hunt them. And then there was a big effort, um, to block that, saying, you know, you don't have enough data, you don't have enough research.

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  They did a study in 2014 to 2015. It's pretty short, it's a pretty small sample size. But the study indicated they thought there was only like a hundred bears there. And so that was kind of like the proof of the pudding that no, we're not gonna do a bear hunt here. There's not enough. Um, and so I think San Luis Obispo still is like a wild card. The genetic diversity down there is not the same as it is in all the other areas. Good. Even though it's, it doesn't warrant any concern or management action. So I think if there were to be maybe another study or some more research that could be done into the population there, I think we could definitely see hunting established there, but I don't know that that's gonna happen this year. Um, spring season. Yeah, what's that gonna take?

• 1:54:55Speaker 02

  I think that's gonna take, I think it's gonna be a walk before you run. So I think we need to like lay this foundation where we're at. Um, show, I mean, hopefully we hit the quota. I don't think we will necessarily. Show that like, there's still more management that needs to happen. Yeah. Um, and then we start looking at, you know, what's next, right? Is it spring season? Is it dogs? Um, you know, is it dogs before spring seasons? That you can have a better opportunity to, you know. You know, sex the bear and when you got it up in a tree and make sure it doesn't have any cubs like Those are the types of arguments that I think the community is a little bit more split. But that we need to have as we move forward. But it, you know, in order to like not provoke that substantial backlash and another bill in the legislature.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  I think we gotta take these wins like and just chip away. But we are on the, you know, we're moving forward, right? We're not on the defensive anymore, which is is promising, right? It's like, it's a really, uh, it's a great time to have our department and our commission. Using the science, we have new like updated robust science to advocate for like better management and better hunting opportunity. And so I'm, I'm really optimistic in California. Where we're gonna go, hopefully we just keep chipping away.

• 1:56:07Steven Rinella?

  Let's do a quick round table. If you could have, if you're the king of You're like Reagan, you're Reagan, you're the king of California. Uh, and you could, someone said, okay, you can have, you can have back spring. You can have back spring bear hunting or you can have back hound hunting in the fall.

• 1:56:23Speaker 04

  I'd do hounds.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Brody's on hounds. With that number of bears, yeah, hounds.

• 1:56:30Steven Rinella?

  Corinne?

• 1:56:30Speaker 00

  I feel like I'm not qualified to speak.

• 1:56:32Speaker 03

  Are we talking about this as a management tool or just what I want to do?

• 1:56:35Steven Rinella?

  What you want to do?

• 1:56:36Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:56:37Steven Rinella?

  Not what you want to do.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:56:39Steven Rinella?

  Just for the betterment of hunters.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:56:41Steven Rinella?

  Someone said, okay, I can't do both, I can do one.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  I'd, I mean, I'd, I'd restore hound hunting because that's That was the traditional use up till the eighties, right?

• 1:56:53Steven Rinella?

  How bad's poison oak in the spring?

• 1:56:56Speaker 04

  Well, it's like, I got questions.

• 1:56:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's terrible. That's when I got it the worst, turkey hunting.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  You just get the dogs go through the poison oak and you stand on the outside.

• 1:57:03Steven Rinella?

  Hound hunting, I'm not going in there.

• 1:57:05Speaker 04

  It seems like in a lot of California, a spring season would be a lot different than like a spring season in Montana, just based on like Climate weather, right? Like when the bears are all popping out in May, like, I don't know. That that like

• 1:57:20Steven Rinella?

  No, this is a mountain.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  I know, and in places, yeah, but there's like a lot of country where it might not be like that.

• 1:57:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it might not be as, they might not be as concentrated.

• 1:57:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll vary, I think, by geography for sure.

• 1:57:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:57:33Steven Rinella?

  Even without the poison oak question, I would say, I would say as well, hounds. Just to have that, just to have that win for houndsmen.

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:57:41Steven Rinella?

  Who get beat up on all the time.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:57:44Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Hmm.

• 1:57:48Steven Rinella?

  Anything else you want to tell us about?

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  Just the three million acres of public lands for sale.

• 1:57:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but that's

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  It's off topic.

• 1:57:59Steven Rinella?

  Not off topic. It's also out of time because it's the the release schedule. We can't just put these up when we want.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I know.

• 1:58:07Steven Rinella?

  So just cut that out.

• 1:58:10Steven Rinella?

  By the time you say that, it'll be something different tomorrow.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:58:15Steven Rinella?

  If it wasn't, that's what we'd be talking about.

• 1:58:21Speaker 00

  Bullfrogs?

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you guys are gonna come, come kill some bullfrogs with me?

• 1:58:27Steven Rinella?

  How many you getting?

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  We're getting like, our good nights are like thirty, uh, twenty to thirty.

• 1:58:32Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, big one, big, big bullfrogs.

• 1:58:35Steven Rinella?

  Can you twenty two them or how are you getting them?

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Uh, we're shooting them with, uh, pole spears mostly, like wine slings.

• 1:58:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Spearfishing stuff.

• 1:58:42Steven Rinella?

  Are you allowed to twenty two them?

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  Do they, uh?

• 1:58:45Steven Rinella?

  We couldn't do that where I grew up either.

• 1:58:47Speaker 04

  Do they treat them like an invasive species there? Like you're just allowed to get as many as you want?

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:58:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 02

  No, no season invasive species. And I'm doing it with the Forest Service because they've got a population of, uh, endangered arroyo toads that the bullfrogs are just hammering.

• 1:59:01Steven Rinella?

  Eating them.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  And so we go in, shoot the bullfrogs, eat them. It's my wife's favorite food. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's a good time. Oh, I could also tell you guys about the

• 1:59:10Steven Rinella?

  What kind of ground, what kind of ground are you on? What are you, where are you doing this at?

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, riparian, little, little creeks and things that, you know, kind of spread out into the sort of marshiness.

• 1:59:21Steven Rinella?

  Are you hearing them in there? Jerome.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, if it's

• 1:59:23Steven Rinella?

  Juggerum.

• 1:59:24Speaker 02

  If it's like, you know, a, whatever it is, May, it depends on when it gets warm enough, but then when they're breeding and you hear them doing the like

• 1:59:31Steven Rinella?

  Are you lighting them up or hitting them in the daytime?

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  Oh, we're lighting them up. Yeah, we're going at night. This, I mean, as a, we're, my friend who's the biologist, I mean, we both have, he's got three kids that are little. I got two, right? We don't have time. And so kids go to bed. We're like, wives don't care. The kids are asleep, you know, we don't have to work. I have to take a day off and we just go out there for hours, shooting frogs.

• 1:59:53Steven Rinella?

  You know, it, in Michigan, it's one of the dumbest, the dumbest game laws in Michigan that I'll never understand is, um, you cannot hunt bullfrogs with an artificial light in Michigan. And this is a place where exactly zero people hunt bullfrogs since I left.

• 2:00:14Steven Rinella?

  Like how that even came to be on anyone's mind, I'll never understand. You cannot use an artificial light to spear a bullfrog like, like I'll never like how that even was like on the radar of somebody.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  Fair chase.

• 2:00:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Which means there's no bullfrog culture.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like

• 2:00:34Steven Rinella?

  That state has no bullfrog culture.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  That's sad.

• 2:00:39Steven Rinella?

  You pole spear them.

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:00:40Steven Rinella?

  Have you just tried getting a big gig with like a 12 foot handle on it?

• 2:00:44Speaker 02

  We've, I mean, I don't have one, but I've taken, I have a long pole spear. I've got like a nine foot pole spear. And I'm putting some, I put some weird things on the end of it that I've been able to find. So it's basically a gig, right? But then you've got the sling. So you can get, you can get some range on it, right?

• 2:00:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Speaker 02

  Shoot that thing out in the middle of a little pond.

• 2:01:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then big old fatties.

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  Big fatties.

• 2:01:05Steven Rinella?

  Like show me the legs up with your hands, how far the legs from the tip of his toes to his hips, to his pelvis.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, they're like that fat around.

• 2:01:13Steven Rinella?

  Doh.

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, they're like chicken legs. I mean, they're from the

• 2:01:18Steven Rinella?

  Dude, really?

• 2:01:19Speaker 02

  Just some good legs.

• 2:01:21Steven Rinella?

  California is the promised land. What's peak month out there?

• 2:01:26Speaker 02

  We just kind of, we're just kind of coming out of it probably.

• 2:01:30Steven Rinella?

  What's poison ivy situation like?

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  Oh, it's chill. Southern California is not so bad. Poison ivy, poison oak is really more like

• 2:01:36Steven Rinella?

  I'll just stay in the water.

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's, there's no

• 2:01:39Steven Rinella?

  That would be fun, man. 20 to 30 at night.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  And you're, and it's good for conservation, right? Like.

• 2:01:47Steven Rinella?

  Can I be square with you though?

• 2:01:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:01:51Steven Rinella?

  Do you really think, does, does like, there are so, when, when you look at wildlife management, invasive species management,

• 2:02:00Steven Rinella?

  with the exception of

• 2:02:03Steven Rinella?

  nutrias in Chesapeake Bay and maybe some other examples.

• 2:02:08Steven Rinella?

  Are there really any case studies in which something was mechanically removed?

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  We're never getting rid of these bullfrogs. We're not living

• 2:02:17Steven Rinella?

  Be straight with each other.

• 2:02:18Speaker 02

  Living under any false, but

• 2:02:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like People are like shooting lion, like lionfish is like, you're gonna get them all, huh?

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but in this area, like, we are hammering them to the extent that they're not there. It's allowing more Arroyo toads to reproduce. So from a conservation perspective, like, it's, it's having an impact while if we were to stop doing this in five years, be a bazillion more bullfrogs, right?

• 2:02:41Steven Rinella?

  Like, so it's, yeah, you're, you're, it's like any kind of control.

• 2:02:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:45Steven Rinella?

  It's like, it's targeted, helpful control, but it's, it winds up being that that toad will remain basically conservation dependent on some amount of mechanical removing.

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  Likely, yeah.

• 2:02:58Steven Rinella?

  But I, I mean, I'll, I'll travel for a good bullfrog hunt no matter what. Cause those are good numbers for big fatties.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and you get the spearfishing combo. You know, shoot some, shoot some frogs at night and some fish during the day.

• 2:03:11Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You want to go spearfish?

• 2:03:14Steven Rinella?

  Like, what would we, what would we go for? Calicoes and like, like sheep's head or what?

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  Um, if it's the summertime, like right now, depending on what you wanted, like, definitely could find some calicoes. You might find a halibut. If we went out into the kelp bed, good chance you find a yellowtail or a white sea bass. But if you want like a

• 2:03:31Steven Rinella?

  I don't believe in white sea bass. I don't think they're

• 2:03:34Steven Rinella?

  I don't believe

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  If you want, if you want a surefire guarantee, like, I will put you on a fish. It's the corbina.

• 2:03:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  A hundred percent because they are, they're in five feet of water, less.

• 2:03:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  I mean, they're right there feeding on sand crabs in the shore. And so I've taken people that have never spearfished before in their lives and just dragged them out. And they, you have to be somewhat comfortable in the water because every once in a while a wave will just toss you on the sand.

• 2:03:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  Cause you're in there at like this much water trying to get in and shoot these things, but, uh, you can shoot a lot. It's a lot of fun.

• 2:04:05Steven Rinella?

  I got a lucky, there, I got a, not San Diego, but I got a lucky, uh, yellowtail.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 2:04:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, doing a bunch of other stuff and then I lucked into, yeah, which is the only yellowtail I've ever gotten.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  I got one on my kayak and then had a hammerhead, uh, come in, try to get it.

• 2:04:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:20Steven Rinella?

  That's cool.

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  I was, uh, three miles out.

• 2:04:22Steven Rinella?

  Did you save the fish?

• 2:04:23Speaker 02

  Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't, I, after I got in, it was like an hour, um, paddle back in or, you know, I had one of those pedal kayaks. My neighbor let me borrow. And this thing circled us and bumped my boat for an hour. We got into shore. We have GoPro videos.

• 2:04:36Steven Rinella?

  He just wanted that fish.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Just smelled the blood. The blood from the gaff was just coming in the water. And I was holding the tail like this in between my legs as I was pedaling. And I got to shore, well, right before I got to shore, went through the surf break and I was like, the 10 foot hammerhead behind me. Sorry dudes.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  And then I got into shore and I tried to like, open my hand because I had so much adrenaline. I had to like, pry my fingers off this fish because he was just like, I'm not gonna get it.

• 2:05:05Steven Rinella?

  That frog hunt sounds fun. Big fatties.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  Big fatties.

• 2:05:10Steven Rinella?

  Round here, all you hear is bing. You know what that is? Bing.

• 2:05:15Speaker 02

  Someone shooting and missing?

• 2:05:17Steven Rinella?

  No, that's people thinking they hear a bullfrog, but it's a, it's a green frog.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  Some right out back.

• 2:05:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you want that.

• 2:05:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:29Steven Rinella?

  It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's what my dad said about the smell of German cigarettes, man.

• 2:05:36Steven Rinella?

  Made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

• 2:05:40Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on the show, man.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:05:42Steven Rinella?

  I appreciate it. I hope you like, uh, let's get, uh, let's get some, uh, bear hunting in California back on the

• 2:05:52Steven Rinella?

  thing.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  Come on down.

• 2:05:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause you know, you guys got a, people like to hack on California, but if you guys get some big winds like that, people will start being like, I love that place.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a sportsman's paradise for if you know the right species to go after. Um, or if you draw that tag that, you know, you save up your points, right?

• 2:06:12Steven Rinella?

  Well, this is the, my final thought on it and it's something I bring up a lot, like,

• 2:06:18Steven Rinella?

  everywhere you go in the country, everywhere you go, there's two people next door to each other. There's the guy that like, there's too many people now fishing game did this, the wolves did that, the duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And they sit in their house and bitch. And neck always like somewhere right around his house is the dude who's like, dude, you can't even scratch the surface. There's so much to do. Do you know what I mean? They're neighbors. Everywhere you go in the country, you will find those two people in very close proximity to each other.

• 2:07:01Steven Rinella?

  I always try to be with the dude who's like, you can't scratch the surface.

• 2:07:07Steven Rinella?

  No. So keep getting after it.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, just looking in the wrong place, man.

• 2:07:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you sound like a can't scratch the surface kind of guy. Yeah, love it.

• 2:07:13Speaker 02

  As long as I can do it after my kids go to bed.

• 2:07:18Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Thank you.

• 2:07:46Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put weather tech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 2:08:26Speaker 05

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• 2:09:26Steven Rinella?

  OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map, so you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in, and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt.

• 2:10:05Speaker 00

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