Ep. 870: Chimp Wars, Cocaine Hippos, and Steve Destroys Animal Rights People

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en and the MeatEater crew discuss: House cat jerky; Seth's baby; Save Tuckertown! https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/public-lands-and-waters/we-need-your-help-to-save-the-tuckertown-gamelands; Lane Legacy Beef https://www.lanelegacybeef.com/; how warped Colorado's animal rights folks are; a Ken Burn's-level Philandering Randimals production on the chimp civil wars; El Chapo's cocaine hippos; proposed federal cuts to conservation for 2027; black bears biting; an American hunter killed by elephants in Africa; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46Steven Rinella?

  Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week, we've got cows not condos, a bit about house cat jerky, Army tanks are using up all the turkey ammo, Randall covers a chimpanzee war, an American hunter is killed by elephants, Spencer covers a war on cocaine hippos, and more, including for real this time, we cover the ongoing goofiness and cluelessness of Colorado's animal rights movement. But first, Seth Morris is back from his year-long paternity leave. He has a new baby.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I do, yeah. A new baby kept me up all night last night.

• 2:25Steven Rinella?

  Tell everybody about that baby. It's the only kid in America named Virgil.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Yep, Virgil. It's an old timey name that we're bringing back.

• 2:32Steven Rinella?

  Virgil Morris.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Virgil Kane.

• 2:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, he didn't get that joke.

• 2:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  No, no. Right. I didn't get it right away. Spencer sent me the song.

• 2:42Steven Rinella?

  Right away. My buddy, my buddy Andy goes, does he ride the Danville train? He comes over. We're like, does he ride the Danville train? Over his head. And then he thought about it and then he goes, someone else made that joke. It was Spencer.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Virgil Kane is my name.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yep. Uh, no, Virgil, he's, he's two months old now and uh, he's doing good. He's, so our pediatrician said,

• 3:08Speaker 03

  he's the fastest growing baby she's ever seen.

• 3:10Steven Rinella?

  Wow. How long's she been in the biz?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I, I didn't ask her.

• 3:15Steven Rinella?

  That'd be the first thing I'd ask.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  How big?

• 3:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, be like, we're going how far back? Did you start last week?

• 3:21Speaker 04

  I'd get that in writing.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  No, she, I think, it seems like she's been around a while. Um, but no, he's, he was, was gaining, he gained like 18 ounces in a week or something like that.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  That's exceptional. Great.

• 3:33Steven Rinella?

  Man, you should do the math. At that rate, how much will he weigh when he's 80?

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  You'd be big.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  You've already had him fishing and hunting, haven't you, Seth?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, we took him out in the, the turkey opener here in Montana and my wife and I both killed turkeys. He wasn't, he was in the truck with an earshot.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  With someone there with him.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  He wasn't listening to the radio with a pack of smokes, you know, like.

• 4:02Steven Rinella?

  So he doesn't already have a hearing problem from shooting the gun next to his little baby head?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Uh, but no, yeah, we, my wife and I took turns going out while one stayed in the, in the ring.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  It's okay. When he's three, you can just get him, you know, like that story last week.

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, a guy wrote in, we don't have it in the, we don't have it in the show today, but a guy wrote in, based on that, the, the story we covered, the guy, the three-year-old who, the, the guy that supposedly had his three-year-old hunting turkeys. And this guy, guy sent in a picture of a three-year-old standing next to his shotgun.

• 4:38Steven Rinella?

  The gun's way taller than the kid. He's like, this kid is not shooting that gun. Oh, oh, my house cat jerky story. So, I got, man, I just gave the punchline away. Anyhow.

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  So Guy Melitz, the editor, brings me this jerky that he likes a lot. It's made in Kansas or something. It's his favorite jerky. It's like these square sheets of jerky. It's very unique. I'm on the plane with my little boy going out to hunt turkeys at Doug's and I give my little boy a piece of the jerky and he pauses because it's square. Do you know what I mean? He pauses, kind of like, he's like not getting how you could have square jerky.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 5:18Steven Rinella?

  And he's eating it, you know? And I said, he goes, well, our jerky's not like this. I said, there's more than one way to skin a cat. He then goes, this is cat?

• 5:32Speaker 04

  And keeps eating.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 5:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, uh, here's another, since you're back, Seth, this occurred to me when we used to want to do our show. Seth and I were trying to, wanted to do a show called Deep Drop Boys, where we go around the world to the deepest places and put a deep drop rig down. But the thing is, most fishermen don't even recognize it as fishing. And they all agree that it's the most boring thing in the world. So our show never got off the ground. Like my wife refuses, my wife refuses to go deep dropping.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  At the shack, you have to work a little to round up a deep drop crew. I make sure I'm running a boat that day and I, otherwise.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  No one wants to watch me, because going deep dropping means watching me do.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  It means watching you do nothing.

• 6:27Steven Rinella?

  You have to watch me catch nothing. But then I thought we could do the first episode, the Strait of Hormuz. So be like, deep drop boys, the Strait of Hormuz.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it sounds risky, but let's.

• 6:40Steven Rinella?

  I know, because then people would tune in and we'd get our show off the ground.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  That, I mean, people would tune in for that one.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna deep drop the Strait.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  Is it, is it deep enough?

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Wonder how deep it is.

• 6:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, how deep is the Strait? Can you check how deep the Strait of Hormuz is? Like, is it gonna be good or not?

• 6:54Speaker 05

  The deepest parts are 650 feet.

• 6:57Steven Rinella?

  That counts.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it'll work.

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  That's fine. Where, can you send me a pin?

• 7:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:01Steven Rinella?

  Uh, oh, our safe Tucker town update, Randall?

• 7:06Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. Save Tucker Town. If you haven't heard of it, we teamed up with OnX to help raise money for a cause in North Carolina. The Three Rivers Land Trust is spearheading this. And in short, there's a whole bunch of private land that was, is owned by Alcoa, and it was accessible for outdoor recreation, hunting, fishing, camping, all that stuff for years and years. And it's going up for sale. So it would likely transfer into hands of other private landowners who wouldn't be as open to public access. And so the Three Rivers Land Trust is leading a campaign to raise money to purchase some of that so that

• 7:51Speaker 05

  it becomes public land. And we are matching, we, meaning MeatEater, we're matching every dollar given, along with OnX, between April 14th and May 14th. So we're halfway, we're not quite halfway through that time period, but we're more than halfway to our goal. So we're matching, OnX and MeatEater are matching up to $200,000. And right now, there's been $103,580 raised. So that's at 52% of the $200,000 goal. And there's still, again, I guess about two weeks before May 14th. So keep the, keep the money coming.

• 8:36Steven Rinella?

  Keep coming.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Yeah, we're good. That's a good job.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Can I add?

• 8:43Steven Rinella?

  Do you want to add more?

• 8:44Speaker 05

  No, no. I just didn't know. I wanted to make sure it was good.

• 8:47Steven Rinella?

  Well, I didn't feel like it was impassioned, like an impassioned plea in the end.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  We're halfway.

• 8:59Speaker 05

  We're halfway.

• 8:59Steven Rinella?

  I mean, like, I want you to bring like some Jerry Lewis.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Telethon.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  No, we need some Sarah McLachlan music running in the background.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe next time.

• 9:11Steven Rinella?

  Kick in now. We're on, we're on schedule.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Let's go. We're still on schedule halfway through.

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Oh, we have, we have, we have a live guest here today. Uh, her name is Katie Lane and she's going to talk to us about the ranching business, cattle ranching business. Um, tell us now, so you guys are, you, your family operates a ranch in Eastern Montana and you are primarily a cow calf operation.

• 9:38Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 9:38Steven Rinella?

  Tell people what that is.

• 9:40Speaker 07

  So cow calf operation is we raise the cattle and, uh, we raise the mother cows and then, uh, breed them every summer. Have calves in the spring and then we raise them until the fall. They're about six months old and then we sell them to a cattle buyer. And they buy them and put them in feedlots all around the country and that's where they get fattened up and go into the grocery store.

• 10:08Steven Rinella?

  And that, that's, that's your traditional business.

• 10:11Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 10:12Steven Rinella?

  And you have been, you have embarked on an interesting enterprise.

• 10:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:17Steven Rinella?

  Where you have, you are trying to build, not trying, you have built it. You are growing a sort of, I don't want to call it a side business. But like switching the, switching your model around. This is what I think might be interesting to, to listeners. So you, you've been a traditional Great Plains, arid, grassland beef business.

• 10:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:39Steven Rinella?

  And you're, you're trying to switch your model and tell people what the model, the model you're trying to switch to. And, and, and within this, like all anybody hears about is like beef prices are crazy right now. So is it, is it even a good time to switch the model?

• 10:53Speaker 07

  Well, it's tough because I started back shortly after COVID. And that was kind of, I've had people asking to buy our beef for years.

• 11:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:01Speaker 07

  I would take coolers home to Minneapolis, where I'm from, every summer. And I would take a couple of coolers home with steaks and ground beef and give it to our family and friends. And they would just hum about it when they were eating it. And they're like, can we buy this from you?

• 11:15Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  I said, we don't really have that type of an operation. We just process one steer a year for our family and our crew.

• 11:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 07

  And they were like, well, if you're ever interested in selling it, we're interested in buying it. So I had those requests for several years. And I'm a nurse by trade, so I help on the ranch, but I would go to the clinic and see patients. And that was my job. So COVID hits. And there's this huge shift. More people want to know what's in their food. They're cooking from home. They're filling freezers. The grocery store shelves are empty. And there's just this huge shift of people want to know what's in their food. They want to,

• 11:57Speaker 07

  they want to take better care of themselves. And so I said to my husband, Bill, I said, I think I can sell our beef. There are so many people asking for it. And a lot more people are interested in grass fed.

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:11Speaker 07

  And so I did a little trial run. I actually took two steers and I called family and friends back in Minnesota. And I said, hey, I'm going to bring out some beef. Are you guys interested? And I had it all sold before I went out there.

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 12:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 12:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:24Speaker 07

  So I'm coming, we're coming home and everybody's like, when are you coming back? It's like, I don't know. So I got home and I said, Bill, I think we've got something here. And so I developed a logo and started building a website to tell our story. And it started out with just a couple of cows, a couple of beef every couple of months. And I decided to just sell it farmer's markets, direct to consumer. So locally, I went to some places in North Dakota, Miles City, Billings, regionally. And all of our beef is USDA inspected. That's where it's processed at a USDA inspected facility. So I can sell it.

• 13:03Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Got it.

• 13:04Speaker 07

  And Bill said, okay, every time you process a beef, you're going to have hundreds and hundreds of pounds of burger. What are you going to do with all that ground beef?

• 13:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 07

  And I said, well, so the people that own the butcher facility also own a smokehouse. And they make snack sticks and jerky. So that's where I started taking some of the extra trim to make beef sticks made out of grass fed beef. And then some of the extra whole muscle. So like round steak, stuff that's a little tougher. As a steak, still makes really good jerky, even sirloin. So we started doing that and that kind of took on a whole nother. Life of its own. I it was shelf stable. Now I'm not having to transport frozen meat. And we got into, we're in over a hundred retail locations now. Town Pump carries our beef sticks.

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 13:58Speaker 07

  Um, which is great.

• 13:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 07

  And, yeah.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  And so how do you picture a pathway? Is there a pathway to be that you would, uh? That you would only do that, like that you wouldn't even sell to cattle buyers anymore?

• 14:13Speaker 07

  Yes, that is the ultimate plan.

• 14:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  And when this took off. The biggest problem is having. A facility that can take cattle on a regular basis to process it. That's USDA inspected because I'm selling it in grocery stores.

• 14:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because you're not pre, you're not, because a lot of times I'll see like a friend of mine, Doug, used to do this business. He would have a very small amount.

• 14:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  He would pre sell them all.

• 14:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:37Steven Rinella?

  So, so the, the, the consumer was basically buying it on the hoof.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  And then it, it wasn't an inspected facility, but you're selling it like piece by piece.

• 14:46Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  After the fact, so you have to have it inspected.

• 14:48Speaker 07

  Yep. Yep. So I have a big walk in freezer out at the ranch that I have all the beef. After I pick it up from the processor, it's all divided out by cuts. And then even if somebody wants a quarter beef or a half beef, I sell it that way.

• 15:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:02Speaker 07

  I just go basically pick. The cuts that would make up that. So it's not always coming from the same animal, but we butcher in small quantities. So I'm not picking from a hundred. You know, steers at a time I'm picking from six, eight.

• 15:18Steven Rinella?

  So when you go out on your place, because you guys are running a regular cattle operation. When you go on your place and you're going out to get the stuff that you yourself are going to sell. How do you, do you like pick the, do you, do you select?

• 15:30Speaker 07

  I have my own grass fed herd.

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. Specifically for this business. So you're not, it's not even out of the same pool.

• 15:36Speaker 07

  No.

• 15:36Steven Rinella?

  You have this whole separate operation.

• 15:38Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 15:38Steven Rinella?

  And then how do you get them? How do you get them from the ranch to the slaughterhouse?

• 15:43Speaker 07

  I take them in a trailer.

• 15:44Steven Rinella?

  You load them up.

• 15:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, we literally go out into the pasture in the morning.

• 15:48Steven Rinella?

  Load them up.

• 15:48Speaker 07

  Load them up, whatever looks finished.

• 15:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 07

  And I take them in and.

• 15:52Steven Rinella?

  It's all grass fed.

• 15:53Speaker 07

  It's all grass fed. We just got AGA certified, which is American Grass Fed Association.

• 15:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:59Speaker 07

  So that's going to be on our logo now, on our labels.

• 16:02Steven Rinella?

  All right, man.

• 16:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:03Steven Rinella?

  But now, help me understand this part because like when, when beef, if beef prices are so high. Do you see that more like, if you're a cow calf operation, you're just selling to cattle buyers. Who, who is winning when beef prices are high? Do the, are the ranchers winning more? Are the feedlots winning more? Are the restaurants winning more? Is it spread pretty evenly?

• 16:27Speaker 07

  Well, right now I think the ranchers are winning more.

• 16:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  But we weren't for a long time.

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  You guys will feel that beef price increase.

• 16:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:34Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Our calves are selling for more than they've ever sold.

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And all the inputs are like right now, fuel's probably very expensive. So there's certain inputs that go like inflation inputs that make it.

• 16:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, even like the tractors and the equipment that we use on the ranch. That's expensive now.

• 16:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 07

  I mean, you're looking at half a million dollar pieces of equipment to go out and farm.

• 16:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 07

  And to put, like, we put up our own hay. So we've got a swather, a rake, a baler.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:02Speaker 07

  All those things and the fuel to run it out in the field. And sometimes we don't have a lot of hay, so.

• 17:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  We've always got a storage, back storage.

• 17:11Steven Rinella?

  So that partially like having, trying to run like a family business to try to figure out a way like what you're doing. To, I don't know, branch out or diversify. There's probably a lot of incentive to do that.

• 17:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 07

  I mean, it was, it was probably a lot better when I first started because the market was a lot lower.

• 17:30Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  So I was turning, you know, obviously the cattle are on our property for longer. We're sell, when we're selling them as calves, they're only six months old.

• 17:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  So now I'm keeping them for another year and a half. But we've got the grass. We've got the land to keep them.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  And so, you know, it started out as just a little side hustle and it's really grown into something bigger. And Bill said, I would love to eventually shift our whole herd into what you're doing.

• 17:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Sure, man. Just take control of it all.

• 17:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:58Steven Rinella?

  And you, and you hop in your truck. I know this. You hop in your truck.

• 18:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 18:02Steven Rinella?

  You got a trailer. You got freezers.

• 18:04Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 18:05Steven Rinella?

  And you make deliveries all over the place.

• 18:06Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 18:07Steven Rinella?

  You got restaurants.

• 18:08Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 18:08Steven Rinella?

  So, so tell people about that, that aspect of it.

• 18:11Speaker 07

  Um, so we're in several grocery stores, Town and Country. I go all the way up to Big Sky. I don't cover the whole state.

• 18:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  But I kind of have this, um, I ninety, I ninety-four corridor that I drive and have several deliveries along the way. We're in a couple of restaurants and billings, um, that have us on the menu, which is wonderful.

• 18:31Steven Rinella?

  So they'll, they'll say, the menu will say where it's from.

• 18:33Speaker 07

  Actually says, yeah, Lane Legacy Beef.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's cool.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 18:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Um, and then I, I ship most of the smoke products because I can.

• 18:40Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 18:41Speaker 07

  The frozen stuff I just deliver. I don't want to deal with, we live so remote that to overnight dry ice.

• 18:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 07

  Just not interested in doing that right now.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  But you'll pull up to the restaurant and do the delivery.

• 18:53Speaker 07

  Yep. I go to the loading dock. Show up with my cowboy boots and sometimes I walk back into a kitchen and it's a bunch of guys and like, what are you doing here? You've got your beef delivery. I'm the one doing it.

• 19:07Steven Rinella?

  All right. So tell folks again, because I, I, I, this is great. Um, and again, uh, you know, I love ranch land and grassland and, uh, A lot better than condos. So it's, it's good to see people that can like producers out on the landscape be able to hold on to like large properties that serve as wildlife habitat.

• 19:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  And able to make those things work and not need to carve them up and you know.

• 19:33Speaker 07

  Well, and it's fun. We just started doing virtual fencing here in the last six months.

• 19:36Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 19:37Speaker 07

  So our cows have collars.

• 19:39Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding?

• 19:40Speaker 07

  No, and we can move them with the push of a button on our cell phone.

• 19:44Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 19:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. We've had, we've had neighbors come out because there's just a few people that have started doing it in our area and they will come out and we'll do a shift and they, and it's, they're not getting shocked. They just get a vibration on their neck. And so you can literally pick up the virtual boundary and shift it over and the cows start getting up and they start walking. And then when one goes, then the other ones go and then they all kind of want to go together.

• 20:09Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 20:09Speaker 07

  So we're moving cows without, yeah. It's incredible.

• 20:13Speaker 06

  No kidding?

• 20:14Speaker 07

  So you can, you can heavily graze a smaller area and then shift them and give that a break.

• 20:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  Um, if you have bigger pastures with maybe a couple of stock tanks, they all want to hang out around that one stock tank and they're just overly grazing that area. So you can create these like corridors. You can divide a square pasture into, you know, four rectangles and let them, they can still get access to water, but they can only, they have to eat over here or.

• 20:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You guys are in some dry country.

• 20:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 20:46Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you got.

• 20:47Speaker 07

  So water is an issue sometimes.

• 20:48Steven Rinella?

  There's like, you could be selling cactuses.

• 20:50Speaker 07

  We do. Cactus jerky, the next thing.

• 20:55Steven Rinella?

  Uh, so tell people again how to, how to, like if you're on the I-90, I-94 corridor, you want to buy some, uh, you want to buy some Lane Legacy Beef from some cattle ranchers in Montana, tell them how to find you?

• 21:06Speaker 07

  LaneLegacyBeef.com. You can order online. Um, we ship all over the country as far as the smoked products. So you can order online.

• 21:15Speaker 07

  And then if you can buy our stuff at the grocery store and if you want to buy more than a couple of packages of ground beef or a steak, you can order directly from me and I can meet you along my delivery routes and I I come out this way every month. So

• 21:29Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 21:29Speaker 07

  You're always getting fresh beef. You're not getting stuff that's, you know, six months or a year old.

• 21:35Steven Rinella?

  Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for coming by.

• 21:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

• 21:37Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for educating our, you know, the ones that don't already know, educating our audience about the beef business.

• 21:43Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 21:44Steven Rinella?

  We'll, we'll let you get out of here unless you want to stick around.

• 21:46Speaker 07

  Okay. Sounds good.

• 21:47Steven Rinella?

  Totally up to you. All right. Again, Katie Lane, Lane Legacy Beef, um, like super cool business. It's cool to see you guys making a go of it like that. Thank you. We're not doing corrections this week, not formally at least, not with the prize giveaway. We'll resume that next week. We're do, but we, we do have one small correction to make only because it's funny.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  And it's from our calendar.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  And timely.

• 22:08Steven Rinella?

  Time.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  It is. Our F'd up old calendar series, which Steve thought was a dead business, but um, we might be bringing it back. That's all I'm saying right now.

• 22:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we're gonna like, shut us. The calendar business is waning.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 22:23Steven Rinella?

  Like calendars are going out. It's on the way of the wagon wheel.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  We've tried. We've tried.

• 22:29Steven Rinella?

  And so every year I think that the calendar will do bad enough that we won't be asked to do another calendar.

• 22:37Steven Rinella?

  But they don't do that bad.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 22:39Steven Rinella?

  So next year we're doing a calendar of wildlife diseases.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 22:44Steven Rinella?

  Every month will be a photo. Every month will be a disturbing photo of a wildlife disease.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  This is your plan to kill it once and for all.

• 22:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  But you'll learn a lot because wildlife.

• 22:55Steven Rinella?

  The worst calendar you've ever looked at.

• 22:58Speaker 06

  This is like, this is like the producers.

• 23:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, the producers.

• 23:02Steven Rinella?

  It'll be the ugliest, most upsetting, worst calendar you've ever seen. And then we'll never make another calendar.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Now, we're, we're gonna probably use a lot. We're gonna get our own pictures for this one on like the last few calendars, but. You got a real good picture of a messed up animal?

• 23:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you hit a real pus pocket or something, let us know.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, where do you go? If this, if this doesn't work, where do you go after that?

• 23:24Steven Rinella?

  I got ideas.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Rotten fish on beaches.

• 23:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Like a calendar of, yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 06

  Desiccated.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the best rotten fish on a beach photo from all seven continents.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Roadkill.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  We could do another outhouse calendar, but just from the inside.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  The inside.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  Forgotten. This typo is funny.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Now, Steve and I are the creative force behind these calendars, so you can't blame us for this, this typo. I'm not sure if you're aware, but May 5th is Cinco de Mayo.

• 23:58Steven Rinella?

  Not on that calendar.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  On this calendar, Cinco de Mayo is on, May the 4th be with you.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 24:08Steven Rinella?

  And for you people that don't speak Spanish, if one was to translate Cinco de Mayo, it translates to the 5th of May.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  It does.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Cuatro de Mayo.

• 24:20Steven Rinella?

  But here we have it on the 4th. I don't know who would have made that mistake.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  And we just wanted to get it out there so that no one is confused and goes to their Cinco de Mayo gatherings on the 4th of May.

• 24:30Steven Rinella?

  And then we get sued.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  May, it's, uh, May the 4th be with you, not, not Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de Mayo's on the 5th. There we go.

• 24:39Steven Rinella?

  Thank you, Brody. Good job.

• 24:41Speaker 01

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• 25:11Steven Rinella?

  I travel quite a bit and when I'm home, it's very easy to stay on a rigid food routine and eat the right kinds of food at the right time. But when you're on the road, it's hard to stay in your routine and like diet can really start to fall apart. I've seen it and that's why I like Athletic Greens. Now AG1 is already the standard for daily foundational nutrition. AG1 Pro is what's next. It's built for people who don't want to stop there. Creatine, CAHMB, advanced gut lining support on top of everything AG1 Next Gen already delivers. You can get it in travel packs. One travel pack, 10 to 12 ounces of cold water every morning. If you're already taking creatine separately, AG1 Pro simplifies your stack.

• 25:55Steven Rinella?

  One thing in the morning covers more than your current routine might for less than a dollar more per serving. AG1 Pro supports protein synthesis, helps reduce protein breakdown and supports muscle recovery and consistent training performance. Visit drinkag1.com/meateater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Again, that's drinkag1.com/meateater. Grab yours now. 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

• 26:39Steven Rinella?

  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 liner, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 27:09Steven Rinella?

  So a guy wrote in, no, he didn't write in. We just found this out because it's publicly available information. We were talking about how, so, so all the cool kids over the last,

• 27:23Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, six years, five years, all the cool kids hunt turkeys with something called tungsten super shot. Extremely expensive and getting now insanely expensive. Now, if you shoot a tungsten super shot load, it's about $11 to pull the trigger with tungsten. Uh, tungsten is kind of going off the market and part of the thing is they use it in munitions. So we're talking about how the government is buying up all the tungsten. Tungsten for, for homo, tungsten for just regular sportsmen is getting insanely expensive to the point where it's probably not even going to be around anymore. And we have heard rumors, murmurings that, that in the future, in the near future, in a year or two, you won't even

• 28:08Steven Rinella?

  be able to buy tungsten shot shells anymore. So, so check this out. So an Abrams tank, okay? A guy wrote in with a bunch of information about Abrams tanks. They carry Abrams tanks carry three kinds of shells. One is a depleted uranium rod called a kinetic penetrator. I was reading up on this, and I understood it. It really is like, if you take uranium and use it to, to make fissile, like nuclear material, these rods are, when they say depleted uranium, it's like, it's, it's uranium rod that has already had somehow the, the radioactivity

• 28:48Steven Rinella?

  has been harvested off it in a way that I'll never understand. But it produces a rod. When you sharpen it, it, it depleted uranium rod self-sharpened on impact. I didn't know this. It doesn't mushroom.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Wild.

• 29:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So when you make it pointed on impact, it sharpens more. That's how it sheds material. It doesn't have a tendency to want to mushroom. Also.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  So if you want to poke a hole in something.

• 29:14Steven Rinella?

  Like you want to poke a hole in another army tank, it shoots four to five times the speed of sound and it just really is a sharp rod. But when it abrades on something at high speed, it, the flakes come off as white hot metal that ignite gas and ammunition and stuff. They carry those.

• 29:35Steven Rinella?

  One of the things they carry is a can round. Okay. Now, here's where all your tungsten, here's, if you're a taxpayer. Here's where your tungsten ammo is going. I had no idea about this. A can round fired from an Abrams tank. Contains 1,104 buck tungsten pellets.

• 30:02Steven Rinella?

  Picture this.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Quad ought.

• 30:05Steven Rinella?

  Quad ought buck. 1100 tungsten buckshot balls. At 4.5 times the speed of sound. No. Four and a half times faster than your federal premium TSS load.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Well, you talk about killing turkeys at long range.

• 30:24Steven Rinella?

  So if you shoot a turkey out of a shotgun, this, this, this four ought buck. It's going 4.5 times faster than out of your shotgun.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Which is like. 4,500 feet per second.

• 30:37Steven Rinella?

  He says that every time they shoot this tank shell. And this is meant to be like for anti-tank crews or masked personnel. Every time they touch off one of these tank rounds, he said, there goes 155. Shotgun loads worth of TSS.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna do the math.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  How much is that?

• 30:58Steven Rinella?

  Lot.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  It's a tungsten jig heads for fishing right now are just outrageous.

• 31:07Steven Rinella?

  Yep, because of this guy.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  A. Two quarter ounce, two quarter ounce jig heads on Rappel's website is $19.49.

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  For two.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  All those tungsten beads that fly fishermen use, they're gonna go away too. I didn't even think about the fishing end of it.

• 31:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're killing tungsten users. It's fine.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  The thing about it, there's, there's, there's lakes out there that are. Like no lead lakes.

• 31:33Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, but

• 31:35Steven Rinella?

  Can't fish him anymore now.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Big lead's gonna make a comeback, though.

• 31:37Steven Rinella?

  I think so. This guy also waited on something. Um, who in here says a sabited?

• 31:44Speaker 04

  I was gonna bring this up. I had no idea that this is wrong.

• 31:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, I knew that it's split. He's very firmly that it's a Sabo. It is not a sabited, a sabit. I say sabit.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  French.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  I say sad, but he argues Sabo.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  I pulled up Merriam-Webster and they accept both pronunciations.

• 32:03Steven Rinella?

  Of course they do. Not this guy. Not this army, not this army tank driver guy.

• 32:10Steven Rinella?

  I just outed him. He said not to say who he was. He's an army tank driver. Hopefully, there's enough of them around that they won't be able to.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 32:19Steven Rinella?

  Stick it to them.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  I feel like that that'd be the only type of guy that would have this information.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Oh, it's all public.

• 32:24Steven Rinella?

  He said it's publicly.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Don't say he's a driver. Just says he works with tanks. It could mean anything. Okay. Wider net. Yeah.

• 32:31Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay. Now we got a correction special edition. This is gonna take a ton of time. This is like a long, this is a long time correction. Okay? So, we covered on a past, I'll get this whole thing. We covered on a past episode Colorado's fur sale ban that is in the rulemaking process in Colorado. So, in that correction, we talked about a woman named Samantha Miller. Okay? So Samantha Miller helped bring you the end of Washington's spring black bear season.

• 33:10Steven Rinella?

  Her org helped bring on a malfeasant game commission in Washington, which is under investigation. We'll cover that soon. A derelict game commission in Colorado. They helped bring you a failed effort to ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado. And now the proposed ban on the sale of products from all fur-bearing animals in Colorado. Well, she herself has written in some corrections about our coverage of the anti-hunting and trapping efforts of the Center for Biological Diversity. So I'm gonna deliver these corrections with commentary. Okay, but first some background.

• 33:45Steven Rinella?

  You handled this story, didn't you, Brody?

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay, in March, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission voted six to four to advance to rulemaking a citizen's petition to prohibit the lawful sale, barter, and trade of fur-bearing animals. So it would become illegal in Colorado to sell, barter, or trade hides from parts or hides, parts, by which we mean, unless you're talking about bacalhams. Oh, all this stuff about RFK Junior and the raccoon penis? Of all the news people that have touched this, how come not one of them has made the guess of what was going on there?

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Because they don't know.

• 34:27Steven Rinella?

  There's all these news stories, RFK Junior stopped and took a penis from a dead raccoon.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:33Steven Rinella?

  Not one of these news, it hasn't occurred to any of them, he was getting the baculum.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:38Steven Rinella?

  He was getting the baculum to make like a drink stirrer.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 34:42Steven Rinella?

  No one says this.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought that was in the news story.

• 34:45Steven Rinella?

  Find me a news story that includes that he was after the baculum.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Did it say he wanted for a drink stirrer?

• 34:53Steven Rinella?

  No, but of course that's what he was doing.

• 34:55Speaker 06

  Or earrings, you know.

• 34:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but he wanted the baculum.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Or he's got a moonshine still.

• 35:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:03Steven Rinella?

  Back, this, this, I need like three hours to go through it, I have to.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Let's get back to Samantha Miller.

• 35:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So it would become illegal in Colorado to sell hides of raccoons, possums, skunks, muskrats, bobcats, and a bunch of other fur bears. A deeper background here. Colorado's outgoing governor is a guy named Jared Polis. His husband is a self-described animal welfare advocate. So when this guy does his little bio, that's what he puts that down. Okay, he puts down how he's a first gentleman and he puts down that he's a animal welfare advocate. He's chummy, he's chummy with animal rights radicals like the crew at Center for Biological Diversity.

• 35:51Steven Rinella?

  So like Nancy Reagan, if you think like first gentleman, first lady thing, like Nancy Reagan had just say no to drugs. Barbara Bush, universal literacy, Carter's wife, mental health, did you know this?

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Who is the one that was anti swearing in songs?

• 36:09Steven Rinella?

  Al Gore's wife?

• 36:10Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Huh.

• 36:11Steven Rinella?

  But, but he wasn't present.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  I know, it's the same thing.

• 36:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, come on.

• 36:17Steven Rinella?

  Uh, it was close.

• 36:21Steven Rinella?

  It was close. This guy's got animal rights. That's his, that's his shtick. Um.

• 36:29Steven Rinella?

  Him, this is my personal theory, I don't know if this is true for the truth, but him having such close proximity to the governor, meaning they're married. Um, the governor then appointed, in Colorado, the governor appointed a bunch of animal rights advocate game commissioners, who are sort of hostile to the traditional job of what game commissioners do. And so, once they got the game commission stocked up with these people in June of last year, they submitted a petition to the game commission to amend Colorado's regulations to outlaw trade in fur-bearing animals.

• 37:04Steven Rinella?

  Um, part of what makes this whole thing interesting is that Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director, Laura Cleland, who was appointed by the governor.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  She's new.

• 37:13Steven Rinella?

  Objected, objected to the petition

• 37:18Steven Rinella?

  on several grounds. So, the, the agency director says, I don't want this petition. Um, one, the petitioners, Center for Biological Diversity, they couldn't demonstrate any decline in fur-bearing animals. Okay? They couldn't demonstrate a relationship between sales of fur and declining animal numbers. It didn't acknowledge the existing strict regulations on the take of fur bears. It cited misleading research that had nothing to do with Colorado and it conflicts with state statute. And its exceptions are badly defined and would create unenforceable rules. This is coming from the governor's own appointed commissioner. But.

• 38:03Steven Rinella?

  They go through it anyways. So.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Director, not commissioner.

• 38:06Steven Rinella?

  Sorry, director. So back to the, to the corrections came in from, from Samantha Miller. So she runs state level anti-hunting and anti-trapping campaigns. So she's with the Center for Biological Diversity is called a campaigner is the job. And that means you campaign for like anti-hunting and trapping campaigns.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  She was predator campaigner, wasn't she?

• 38:29Steven Rinella?

  Carnivore.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Carnivore.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, even though they deal with omnivores and herbivores here. Um, her own bio, one of the things she says, she says in the past, "I advocated alongside Mountain Lion Foundation in my role as the executive director of Washington Wildlife First, a pre, a former gig." During that time, she says, "We achieved significant victories for wildlife in Washington State, such as the prohibition of spring bear hunting." So right there. "Part of the aim of the job is to reform wildlife commissions, which means working with what I feel to be like gullible governors, to bring anti-hunting and anti-trapping folks into commissions." Which is what she worked on over in Washington, where they had the placement of commissioners,

• 39:13Steven Rinella?

  who then ended the spring bear hunt. Um, what's really fascinating is this same group of commissioners are being investigated for malfeasance and destruction of government property in Washington. We have a show coming up where we'll dig into that investigation and that's saucy. Also, one of the commissioners that, that polls put on hadn't gone, did this vote, voted for the fur sales ban in Colorado, but they hadn't yet been approved by the Senate.

• 39:44Steven Rinella?

  They didn't get the votes to get approved. So now they resigned because once, like they were appointed, voted for the fur ban, and then the date came, they were acting, right?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  And some of that vote still stands.

• 39:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but then the date came up for them to get voted on by the state senate, and he doesn't have the vote, so he just resigns. Rather than, I feel like that's chicken shit. I feel like you should stick it out, like,

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:06Steven Rinella?

  It get voted. But he like Hari Kari, like death before dishonor. So he's not even on the commission anymore.

• 40:14Steven Rinella?

  They were, he wasn't going to get voted in, but he got to vote on this.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  He did, he did what he was there to do, which is cast that vote.

• 40:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So Miller campaigns on behalf of anti-hunting initiatives. Okay. So she worked on the recently failed effort to ban bobcat, mountain lion, and even lynx hunting. And lynx hunting doesn't exist in the lower 48 because they are an endangered species act protected animal. But who let that little detail get in the way of something that sounds important?

• 40:44Steven Rinella?

  So I think that when we get into these corrections, it's important to keep that in mind because you've already laid out. You've laid out, when you said like, I want to ban bobcat, mountain lion hunting. You've already laid out like what your end goal is. Do you know what I'm saying? Like if you took a guy like, if Mike Lee came up with a thing where he said, oh, I just want to sell some public lands. You'd be like, yeah, but I kind of know you don't like any of them. Right? Like I already know what you think. So that's already been like, the end goal has already been like quite clear. Okay. But correction one, she says, our petition, this is a correction from Miller. Our petition is not the same as the Denver fur ban and that distinction matters. The Denver measure concerned retail sale of fur products regardless of source.

• 41:30Steven Rinella?

  Our petition is far narrower. It addresses the commercial sale of pelts and parts from Colorado wild fur bears killed in Colorado. Now, I'd have to go re-listen to the whole thing. I don't think in any way you said, or I said, this is the same as the Denver.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  I, I certainly said something like this was attempted a couple of years ago.

• 41:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So you're guilty. Correction taken.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Sure. Um, yeah, we didn't get into the details of.

• 42:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But I'm glad she brought it up. I'm glad the correction brought it up because I want to point out the Denver fur ban was defeated by voters in Denver.

• 42:10Steven Rinella?

  In Denver, not Colorado in general, it was defeated by voters in Denver.

• 42:18Steven Rinella?

  So this new effort, this new Colorado wide fur sale ban is like taking your Trojan horse anti-hunting commissioners and getting them to do what voters didn't even want to do. Okay. Well, a funny addition here on to get to this. Pushback, one of the things that helped tank the Denver fur sale ban was the fly fishing community. I was reading about the other day, the fly fishing community was pissed about it because they're like, what about our flies? Right? Keep that in mind because that ties into what I'm going to get into in a minute. So fly fishermen of which Colorado has a great many, we're like, hold on a minute, you wouldn't

• 43:01Steven Rinella?

  be able to buy certain flies.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Beaver.

• 43:05Steven Rinella?

  And so they learned their lesson there as I'll get to in a minute. Okay. Here's her second. Here's another correction. She gave a bunch, but I'm doing a bunch of them. She gave, if she gave eight, I'm doing four or something like that.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  What was her tone? Was she angry? Was she like, I want you to understand this better?

• 43:24Steven Rinella?

  Understand it better.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 43:25Steven Rinella?

  That we were wrong about some things. She says, "The petition would not eliminate the economic viability of nuisance wildlife control or similar work. Colorado law already allows continued sale of pelts and parts in certain nuisance and agricultural contexts. That sale would continue to be allowed and is protected by law." Okay. Got it. Correction taken.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  We had a, we had a guy write in with that same.

• 43:56Steven Rinella?

  But this is where this creates huge problems. Okay. As pointed out by the wildlife director. A person working on agricultural depredation stuff doesn't even need a license. Okay. So here's what the state director, here's where their thing is. How can the state possibly distinguish? If a farmer kills raccoons from getting into a grain bin, or if a kid down the road from that farmer kills a raccoon not getting into a grain bin, how would the state ever distinguish between these two raccoons when they come up for sale?

• 44:33Steven Rinella?

  There's no tagging system. So part of the state saying this is so dumb is they're like, we already have a way that things can hit the market. You're trying to make another way that things can hit the market and then we're supposed to be able to tell?

• 44:46Steven Rinella?

  So that's part of the unenforceable quality to it.

• 44:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay, here's another correction and I'm gonna bring all this together in a minute, but here's another correction. She says, "The petition applies to a narrow category of Colorado wild fur bearers under Title 33. It does not apply to all wild animals." Okay, got it. Understood.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Fur bears only.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  Fur bears only.

• 45:11Steven Rinella?

  "It applies to fur-bearing animals that can be legally hunted or trapped." Okay, so raccoons, opossums, skunks, muskrats, beavers, long-tailed weasels, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mink, muskrat. Hold all that in mind. I'm gonna come back around to this too. She says, "It is not accurate to suggest commercial markets pose no population-level concern when population status and harvest data for several fur bearer species remain uncertain."

• 45:49Steven Rinella?

  I get the point you're making, but your state agency disagrees. Okay, but she routinely attacks state agency workers in an effort to delegitimize them. For instance, her words, this is her, she describes the state commission as having extremist views. Her words, "I thought state agencies took care of wildlife, that they were managing for wild animals, but really they managed for humans' interest in wild animals and the value that they can put on each species, which is usually by selling tags for hunting or fishing licenses."

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  Going on, her words, "Agencies like Colorado Parks and Wildlife are enterprise agencies. They are there to make money and they make money by selling tags."

• 46:45Steven Rinella?

  Let's get to the population thing. Of all those fur bears in Colorado, each of them has a listing from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature called IUCN. Anyone at home, if you go to look up any animal you can think of on Wikipedia, go on Wikipedia and look up, name an animal, Striped Skunk. Type in Striped Skunk on Wikipedia, you'll see the entry hovering off to the right, you'll see a icon and a IUCN status for that species.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Like they have colors, maybe.

• 47:17Steven Rinella?

  It's a color icon.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Vulnerable, near threatened.

• 47:20Steven Rinella?

  It's a very nuanced system.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Species of least concern.

• 47:23Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to get to how nuanced it is. It is a very nuanced system. The IUCN system goes like this. Extinct, extinct in the wild, critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, near threatened, and least concerned. Every one of these fur bears in Colorado has an IUCN ranking of least concern.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Can I point out something else about all those species? You haven't made up a trap, I'm in Colorado for 30 years. You can still hunt them, but people aren't trapping for fur in Colorado anymore. Like it just does, it's not a thing.

• 48:05Steven Rinella?

  A little bit.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  A little bit.

• 48:07Steven Rinella?

  Cause you can cage trap, private land, you can private land trap.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Foot hole, conibert, like it's just not a thing.

• 48:12Steven Rinella?

  They've already, they've already crippled it.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:14Steven Rinella?

  Which maybe someday will undo.

• 48:54Steven Rinella?

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• 49:38Steven Rinella?

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• 49:53Speaker 05

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• 50:08Steven Rinella?

  So, all of these things, the IUCN offers, one, two, three, four, five, six, the IUCN offers seven levels.

• 50:19Steven Rinella?

  Each of these fur bears that we're talking about here are all least concerned. But here's where this gets interesting. Colorado has, if you're interested, if you're the Center for Biological Diversity and you're interested in biological diversity, why are you not focused on the 17 species in Colorado that are, that are listed as federally threatened or endangered? Why are you not spending your time on black-footed ferrets, New Mexico metal jumping mice, humpback chubs, razorback suckers, southwestern willow flycatchers, pawnee montane skippers, 17 plant species?

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  Why not do that? If you were interested in biological diversity, this is gonna be distasteful to you. You would, you would be volunteering for Ducks Unlimited or RMEF and doing habitat work.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Trout Unlimited.

• 51:14Steven Rinella?

  You would be doing habitat work if you were interested in biodiversity. Ducks Unlimited, wetlands. Rocky Mountain Dog Foundation, grassland ecosystems. Trout Unlimited, river ecosystems. That's what you would do if you were interested in biodiversity. You wouldn't be messing around like with striped skunk protections. It's because you're not, like, they're not looking at what matters for biodiversity. They're looking at where they can successfully shut down hunting activities. Here's another one. Correction, another correction. Fly tying materials were explicitly accounted for in drafting. This is from Miller. She says, "The petition was designed narrowly to avoid disrupting

• 51:58Steven Rinella?

  ordinary fly tying and retail supply chains. It is aimed at the commercial sale of pelts and parts from Colorado wild fur bearers, not at ending fly tying." Understood. Correction, understood. And I'll, I want to take this a step further. Here's the agency director on the fly fishing thing. This is the agency director's words. "There are two significant problems with the first exemption in the proposed amendment for, quote, 'finished hand-tied fishing flies.'" That's what the petition says. That's okay. The petition says it is okay to have, quote,

• 52:43Steven Rinella?

  "finished hand-tied fishing flies." Okay. The director. "This proposed exemption is too narrow, as it would exempt finished hand-tied flies but prohibit the sale of the raw materials typically used to tie flies. The resulting ban on fly tying products could result in significant impacts to the Colorado fishing community, both fly shops and individual consumers." Two. This proposed exemption is unworkable under the current regulatory framework. The current framework does not define fishing flies generally. Rather, it only defines artificial flies and lures.

• 53:26Steven Rinella?

  In order for the ban to be enforceable, its exemptions must be clearly applied. And the commission would need to develop a separate definition for a finished, hand-tied fishing fly. However, there can be misunderstandings or disagreements as to whether something qualifies as a fly versus a lure. Furthermore, because the exemption language does not include handmade lures, any such lures using fur products would fall outside this exemption and be banned for sale. So flies are okay. Bucktail jigs are illegal.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yep. And as someone who ran a fly shop for a long time, there was a lot of stuff on that fly tying wall. We would have to yank off the wall.

• 54:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  You know?

• 54:15Steven Rinella?

  It's so funny, but you're like, well, why would they care about fly fishermen? Because fly fishermen boned them on their Denver fur ban. So now they're so short sighted, they're like, yeah, wall eye guy with a bucktail jig, screw that guy. A fly fisherman, cool, if it's hand tied. So there's, there's this quote I like, it's, um, uh, you can get, there's bumper stickers to say this. People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than motorcycle gangs. I've changed that quote. I've, I've adapted that quote. People are more violently opposed to fur than flies because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than rich old men.

• 54:59Steven Rinella?

  You get it? You get it? Okay. Here's another exemption.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Oh, there's more.

• 55:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, this. I'm just getting warmed up.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Did you, was this all?

• 55:13Steven Rinella?

  This exemption is insane.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  Was this all done through email or did you talk to her?

• 55:18Steven Rinella?

  Me reading and me reading and getting emails. Okay, now here, here's another, this is, this demonstrates the insanity of this, this stupid petition. Okay. The petition, okay, the, this is the petition's words, the, okay, they have an exemption and it, it pertains to felted fur western hats. If, okay, if, if the hat is quote, I'm quoting, if the hat is quote, crafted using heritage techniques like wet felting that promote sustainability and cultural craftsmanship, unquote.

• 56:02Steven Rinella?

  From the director. The petition does not define the necessary elements of the exemption. For this exemption to be meaningful, the commission or the division would need to define a felted fur western hat as well as to define accepted quote heritage techniques as well as determining which, whether such techniques quote, promote sustainability and cultural craftsmanship. The commission and the division cannot guess what petitioners mean by these terms. Nor do they have the historic or artistic expertise to meaningfully determine what qualifies as a quote, heritage technique that promotes quote, cultural craftsmanship.

• 56:49Steven Rinella?

  It's so dumb.

• 56:52Steven Rinella?

  If you had a hat, if you were selling a hat that was just a beaver fur and you could have made it with a bone all. Okay, you could be a Native American woman making a beaver fur hat with a bone all and it would not be regarded as a heritage technique or cultural craftsmanship, it has to be in the form of a cowboy hat.

• 57:13Steven Rinella?

  It's so dumb. You have to take all the hair off and make it a cowboy hat and then in their mind it becomes okay. I redid my quote again. Remember the quote?

• 57:25Steven Rinella?

  Where's the original quote? People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than motorcycle gangs.

• 57:34Steven Rinella?

  People are more violently opposed to fur than cowboy hats because it's safer to harass rich old ladies than 30 year old women from New Jersey buying a big goofy hat for a summertime outdoor wedding in Vail.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  I like it.

• 57:49Steven Rinella?

  I made that quote up.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Could say Bozeman too.

• 57:52Steven Rinella?

  Miller. Well, I was trying to keep it Colorado.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, true.

• 57:55Steven Rinella?

  Here's another correction from Miller.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 57:58Steven Rinella?

  Rabbits are small game, not fur, not fur.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Yes, I did say rabbit.

• 58:03Steven Rinella?

  They would not be considered under this petition. Got it. Brody's wrong.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  Another correction. This petition does not ban personal use. Hunters and trappers could still keep and use animals they lawfully take for personal purposes. I know. We framed the whole conversation as being about a fur sale ban. We never talked about a use ban. Now, I was discussing the logic of this all by demonstrating what is considered to be okay in the Center for Biological Diversity's eyes and what's not okay, right? Like, like things like flies? Cool. Spinners? Not cool. Felt made from a beaver hat? Cool. Or like, a hat made from felt made from beaver? Cool. A hat made from fur from a beaver? Not cool. Okay. And again, it's tainted by other efforts like the bobcat and mountain lion ban they

• 58:51Steven Rinella?

  just tried to do. This doesn't occur in a vacuum.

• 58:57Steven Rinella?

  Now, here's some other quotes to get an idea how Miller thinks. Okay?

• 59:05Steven Rinella?

  She, she, she, people like to make this point with talking about this fur thing. They like, they love to make this point that like, it goes against the north, our own north. They like to take the North American model of wildlife conservation, throw it back in hunters faces. Okay. So she's like,

• 59:20Steven Rinella?

  "The commercialization of fur bears," she says, "it is to make commercialization of fur bears," this petition, "is to make commercialization of fur bears align with other big game species." To me, this is a simple question.

• 59:36Steven Rinella?

  This is Miller talking. "Why are we allowing the sale of wildlife in one species, in one category of species, rather than others?"

• 59:46Steven Rinella?

  She also says this. "Today, I really do urge you to support this petition. It's a common sense change. It's a low bar for our wildlife. It should not be for sale." Okay. When, when, when Miller walks into a Whole Foods, and her mind must be absolutely blown when she sees wild-caught Alaska salmon in Whole Foods. Her mind must be blown when she sees Gulf shrimp for sale in Whole Foods. How could that be? How could we be selling wildlife? Because different wildlife has different conservation histories.

• 1:00:25Steven Rinella?

  Game animals became a no-sale item. Fur-bearing animals never went through a collapse that necessitated it. Same thing like, why can you sell wild-caught salmon? If our wildlife shouldn't be for sale, why is it okay to buy wild-caught salmon? Because salmon, which is wildlife, is under an entirely different management structure with a different conservation story. It's just different. Fur bears are different. When, when, when Roosevelt was considering ways to stop the market slaughter, they were concerned about raccoons and possums. Because those things weren't critically, they weren't like at a, at a critical conservation point. There was never a recovery effort. So it's just they have a just like how you can buy salmon, you can buy raccoon furs.

• 1:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay. She also says that she says, I don't believe carnivore, I don't believe carnivores need, this is a thing you'll find again and again in this language and careful with the language. She says, I don't believe carnivores need to be killed period. Like that's just where I'm at. That's a quote. Okay. And apparently not omnivores either, because she's worked to end bear hunts. Okay. But it's an interesting wildlife distinction. And, and, and, and when we in wildlife management, not often do we manage wildlife by diet. Okay. Like a northern pike is a carnivore.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Sure. Well, I, I mean, a raccoon's an omnivore.

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  A raccoon is an omnivore.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  A fox is they pro.

• 1:01:50Steven Rinella?

  It's an interesting way to like manage wildlife. You'd be like, I'm going to do it by diet. Okay. Herbivores, cool. Well, beavers are herbivorous, but that's not cool. So like, stop talking to me about what they eat as a management tool.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  And a management tool is not, I just feel like carnivores should not be killed. That's not a management strategy.

• 1:02:12Steven Rinella?

  She says this, I think that people that hunt predators for fun. Okay. Remember that word need, I'm going to come back to the word need and I'll come back to the word fun. She says, I think that people that hunt predators for fun have a very specific personality type that I would not want to be around by myself.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  Right. Oh.

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. Wow.

• 1:02:33Steven Rinella?

  Also this, let's just remove, this is a quote, let's just remove the four funsies part. The killing for funsies. Let's maybe take that away while we figure out how to get these animals back where we want them. She says this, this is commercial killing with lion hunting guides charging an $8,000 fee to guarantee a trophy and trappers selling bobcat pelts to China.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay, often describes hunters as remorseless, which is a weird one. She says, "This is animal cruelty that's allowed to continue to our wildlife, and I think every Coloradan knows that this isn't really hunting." Okay, there's real hunting, and that this isn't it.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  She should tell me what real hunting is.

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay, well, this is this. This is a quote, "Trophy exercise for heads and coats and nothing more than that." Here's another word that comes up again, quote, "Needless killing of mountain lions and bobcats for their heads and beauty and beautiful fur coats." Okay, she says this about bear hunters in Washington, "A fraction of a percentage of Washingtonians, including Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susslewind, have fun killing bears in spring."

• 1:03:59Steven Rinella?

  She says this, "The commission continued to approve spring bear hunting long after the department could show any management need."

• 1:04:09Steven Rinella?

  So if you look at what they say, what they're saying is, if there's no need,

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  Why have it?

• 1:04:16Steven Rinella?

  If there's no management need, don't hunt it. Okay, well, I have news for you. There is no need to fish walleye.

• 1:04:26Steven Rinella?

  There is no management need to fish walleye. There is no management need to fish rainbow trout. There is no management need to hunt pheasants. There's no management need to hunt turkeys. Turkeys do not have a demonstrable like effect in a negative way. So when you introduce that idea, like, do you need, is there a management need for a hunt? You're left with like hogs in Texas.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  Sure. Maybe whitetails where they're over.

• 1:04:53Steven Rinella?

  Whitetails, that, but that's the, that's her way of looking at it. Is there a management need?

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Steven Rinella?

  So, okay, so you can't do it if it's fun. She wants to end the stuff for fun. Okay, you shouldn't enjoy hunting. That's out. Not if you want to sell something. That's out. If you like taxidermy, that's out. If there's not a need, that's out.

• 1:05:15Steven Rinella?

  I'm, I'm, I'm lost on what's left. If it's enjoyable, don't. Um, if you're gonna have it stuffed in your house, don't, right?

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Well, it's just crazy that she spends all this time setting up these like arguments that are made to sound like reasonable and sophisticated. And then she ends with this stuff.

• 1:05:38Steven Rinella?

  Here's the, here's the, yeah, here's some of the final best stuff. Apparently there was someone secretly recorded a meeting of the biological diversity people and their followers. Someone tapped in and recorded the meeting. Okay. And this demonstrates some insanity that goes on with the commission. Okay. So they, they had these commission meetings about this fur sale ban. And they have their own commissioners they've placed within it. The animal rights community has their own commissioners sitting there. In this recorded meeting, they're, they're telling their supporters about the cohesion they've created with the commissioners. She says this, she's addressing a guy named Mark. Okay. And this, she says this, Mark, everyone, it's fine.

• 1:06:22Steven Rinella?

  Let them do that. The commissioners know that that is coming. I have run through every single scenario of things that might hit them, including children coming up there and crying and saying this is their favorite thing to do with their dad or all of those pieces. Everything that will be thrown at them. They know that all of that is coming and they are aware, they are aware to be prepared for anything. We will be your consistent and reliable support. So she's explicitly confirming that she has pre-briefed Colorado Park and Wildlife Commissioners

• 1:07:06Steven Rinella?

  on the content of public testimony they will hear.

• 1:07:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay. She's like, they're gonna tell you this, they're gonna tell you that.

• 1:07:16Steven Rinella?

  She also says, she's telling, she's telling a person in this little secret community, she's telling them, she's coaching them on what to say in the commission meeting. She says, I think you can say, support this petition. And these people are obviously commercializing wildlife. And that's the end of your comments. I think that if that's going to be your reason, Michelle, just show up and say, I support the petition. And know that I have one of the commissioners prepared to address that. That is very interested in that point you brought up and is planning to talk about it. Okay. So here they are.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  Writing this script.

• 1:08:00Steven Rinella?

  Planting a comment and planting a commissioner who's ready to address the comment.

• 1:08:07Steven Rinella?

  She says this, we have been directed from the governor's office. Don't let us be shown up in Denver. This is the next meeting. It will be in Grand Junction. It's like, quote inside a quote, this is the governor talking. It's like, you guys are in Denver. Don't let them show you up in Denver.

• 1:08:30Steven Rinella?

  So here, directly conveying that they're taking their chart, they're taking their, they're marching on behalf of the governor's office. The governor, it's planned.

• 1:08:44Steven Rinella?

  Anyways, what's next?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  What's next is, uh, May 6th and 7th in Grand Junction when the vote takes place. Like, you're in Colorado.

• 1:08:52Steven Rinella?

  It's so stupid.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  Go raise some hell in Grand Junction, uh, when they have this, this next vote.

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  The days after Cinco de Mayo.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  That's right. And May 4th.

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  Uno and those days after Cinco de Mayo.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  That was a real fantastic expose there, Steve. I'm impressed.

• 1:09:09Steven Rinella?

  Report. Yeah, it's like 60 minutes.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  Expose.

• 1:09:13Steven Rinella?

  It's like listening to 60 minutes or something.

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  But one of the most.

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  How long was that?

• 1:09:16Speaker 05

  It was a long time.

• 1:09:16Steven Rinella?

  60 minutes.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  One of the most egregious things.

• 1:09:21Steven Rinella?

  It's about, it's close to 60 minutes.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, pretty close.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  One of the most egregious things she said, I'm just paraphrasing, maybe you can find the exact quote, Steve, but it was something about.

• 1:09:28Speaker 07

  Like Colorado Parks and Wildlife's goal is to make money and they make money by selling tags and fishing license and stuff. Those agencies are not money making operations.

• 1:09:38Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:09:38Speaker 07

  Like they're money losing operations. In fact, it's like.

• 1:09:41Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's, cause it's this constant thing of like, there's this constant thing of like you delegitimize the, it's this, you delegitimize the agency. You, in people's eyes. It's that the agency is, is bad. Um, they want to kill everything off. They're just there to make money. You like delegitimize the agency and delegitimize the agency.

• 1:10:00Speaker 07

  But the way she framed is though they're like, you know, carrying around money bags from license sales.

• 1:10:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, where's it all going?

• 1:10:06Speaker 07

  What, and usually it's the other way around that like they need to take money from other parts of the state to fund this sort of thing. In Montana, like we have, what is the 20% marijuana tax that supports our public lands? So there's an example of we're like, we're going to take money out of this bucket because, you know, uh, our parks and wildlife and, and, um, division needs that kind of funding.

• 1:10:27Steven Rinella?

  That's how you know these people aren't true to mission. Cause if they're true to mission, they'd be working on an alternate funding mechanism.

• 1:10:33Speaker 07

  I looked up their mission.

• 1:10:34Steven Rinella?

  What Minnesota has, like what Missouri has.

• 1:10:36Speaker 07

  Their mission is to perpetuate the wildlife resources of the state to provide a quality state park system and to provide enjoyable and sustainable outdoor recreational.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  That's, that's FWP's mission.

• 1:10:47Speaker 07

  No, Colorado's.

• 1:10:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  Colorado DNR.

• 1:10:51Steven Rinella?

  Say their thing again?

• 1:10:52Speaker 07

  Uh, to perpetuate the wildlife resources of the state to provide a quality state parks system and to provide enjoyable and sustainable outdoor recreation opportunities. They're not a money making organization.

• 1:11:04Steven Rinella?

  They're to make jingle. That, that's why you always see those, those game wardens walk around with gold teeth and stuff, man.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Well, they get their, their tag sale bonuses every fall. Yeah. When they roll up to you, they get their keys out, big wad of cash falls on the ground.

• 1:11:20Steven Rinella?

  All right. I'm done with that.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  You're done?

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  Guess that we, am I next?

• 1:11:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  Is that where we're at? I'm serious though, and if you're in Colorado, go to Grand Junction on May 6th and 7th and make some noise.

• 1:11:33Steven Rinella?

  I think the whole thing's gotta go away. It's so funny.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's hope so. Let's hope so. Um, let me find where I'm at. What am I talking about?

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  And we are gonna do a follow up about this commission, because the commission-

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  The Washington one is even crazier.

• 1:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Where she worked too on-

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Steven Rinella?

  They got commissioners under investigation for destroying government property.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  We ought to find out the other state she's been talking to commissioners in. There's gotta be more. Um, okay, I'm gonna talk about some federal conservation funding. Steve sent an email the other day uh, to me and Corinne, which was like, hey, here's some good news, which is, which is great, but there's also some bad news. Um, the good news is on April 24th, you, you might've been in DC for the TRCP thing when you sent this to us. Um, Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, I'm gonna talk more about that.

• 1:12:26Steven Rinella?

  It's better known as the NRCS.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Um, announced the availability, availability of $52 million to increase hunting and fishing access through the voluntary public access and habitat incentive program. Um, so that's great. Money going, going towards like public access to private property. A lot of, uh, hopefully a lot of, uh, farmers and ranchers will enroll in that program and, and get more people, you know, access to good hunting grounds. Uh, let me see here.

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  The hip kids call it VPA hip.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:12:58Steven Rinella?

  They just like to say hip.

• 1:12:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  This represents the largest single investment in VPA hip since its creation in 2008 and the first opportunity for new funding since 2019.

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  Yep. So, uh, 70% low, 48 states are in private ownership. Um, sportsmen and women are reliant on private lands for hunting and outdoor recreation opportunities. And this helps address, uh, that by opening up, hopefully opening up a significant number of, uh, acres to, to hunting and fishing. So that's the good news. Um, unfortunately, that same day, I got some bad news.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Um, in 2027, the following cuts will conserve conservation cuts will be made to various agencies in the federal government.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Three hundred million from the US.

• 1:13:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, these are, these are, there's a lot of haggling left to happen. These are proposed cuts.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, this is like an initial offer.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:00Steven Rinella?

  You know.

• 1:14:01Speaker 06

  Fifty-two mil.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  Either way, it's not great news.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  No, it's not. No, it's not gonna end better. But I'm saying there's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of fighting left to be done here.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Three hundred million from the US GS Ecosystem Management Program. That's the entire budget. All of the BLM's Wilderness Budget will go to manag- uh, Management Budget. Uh, it'll be real allocated to land use projects like energy production, primarily energy production. One hundred and five million dollars will be cut from the National Wildlife Refuge System. Forty million from the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, which is eighty percent of their budget. Eleven million from Migratory Bird Management Program. The entire US Fish and Wildlife Service's Science Application Budget of thirty million dollars will be cut.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  All US Fish and Wildlife Service funding for state and tribal grants will be cut. BLM staff will be cut by an additional twenty-seven percent. That's over two thousand full-time positions. Um, the USDA's Natural Resources Conserva- Conservation Service, which we just talked about, eliminating that and eliminating the Forest Service's entire Forest and Rangeland Research Division.

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  Lot of fighting.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, like, keep your eyes open.

• 1:15:27Steven Rinella?

  That's like someone going like, I'll give you a dollar for your car.

• 1:15:32Steven Rinella?

  You know, knowing that it is, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's bad.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  And that's only part of the list. If you want to check out the list in detail of these proposed cuts, go to, uh, the Wildlife Society's webpage, which is wildlife.org.

• 1:15:45Steven Rinella?

  It'll, it'll be bad. It'll, it'll, it'll, it'll be bad. I don't know. It'll be bad.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  It'll be bad, but there's a, there's a lot.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  If it's for 27, you know, let's hopefully get through the next round of elections and then we'll see what happens for 27. I don't know.

• 1:16:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we might return to just like pure gridlock where nothing happens.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Right. Which is good.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's good.

• 1:16:07Steven Rinella?

  Just things quiet down. The, the DOI is already like such a tiny piece of the pie that, you know, they're going to cut it so much where there's like no pie left for them anymore. Oh, the interior will be. Yeah.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  When you see these budgets getting cut from whatever it was to nothing, like basically eliminating a department.

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  Just zeroing out.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you'll often bring in people to eliminate their own program, you know?

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  I mean, the fact that we just were bragging about how the conservation service is going to create, it's 50 million bucks for more access, but then they want to get rid of the conservation service. It's like, okay.

• 1:16:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a messy process.

• 1:16:47Speaker 05

  Interior is less than 1%. It's almost half a percentage of the 26 budget.

• 1:16:53Steven Rinella?

  And they were taking some of those things and eliminating them by 100%.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

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• 1:18:01Steven Rinella?

  okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

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• 1:19:06Steven Rinella?

  So the chimpanzees are in a war?

• 1:19:08Speaker 05

  Little change of pace here. Little change of pace here, and I apologize to people that have been waiting for this segment because we were, we were gonna run it last week, you know, and then other bad stuff happened. So-

• 1:19:20Steven Rinella?

  This is the kind of thing that just gets bumped.

• 1:19:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Steven Rinella?

  Watch, I'll bump it right now.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  Please don't. Put a lot of work into this. Uh, there's a paper published earlier this month in the Journal of Science that got a lot of popular attention in, uh, New York Times, NPR, BBC picked this up. Uh, it's based on 30 years of observation and it documents, uh, an eight-year, what they described as a civil war among the, uh, largest community of chimpanzees in the world. It's about 200 individuals and, uh-

• 1:19:52Steven Rinella?

  That's a big town.

• 1:19:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so they, I mean, this is a group of chimpanzees that that's they sort of, there were two sort of factions within the larger community and they they groomed one another and mated with one another and socialized with one another. And then over the course of eight years, they split apart, they began to occupy different territories and they started raiding one another and killing first adults, but then infants from the other from the other group. So this is the first time. According to the paper's abstract, "Group conflict among non-human animals is well-known. However, lethal conflict among groups of animals that were once socially affiliated has not previously been observed outside of humans, in whom cultural ideology can drive

• 1:20:39Speaker 05

  divisions among individuals within the same group. These findings indicate that group identities can shift and escalate into lethal hostility in one of our closest living relatives in the absence of cultural markers often thought necessary for warfare."

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Is Randall Cunyner, is this like a bad blood thing or is it like a competition for resources?

• 1:20:57Speaker 05

  Based on genetic evidence, they believe that chimpanzee communities split apart every 500 years. It's a pretty rare thing. But basically what happened-

• 1:21:07Steven Rinella?

  Human communities split apart every five weeks.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  They, so like in 2015, 2014, some of the older chimps got sick and some of the alpha males, like there was among the central group, the outgoing and ingoing alpha male, like the the alpha male got sick, another guy took his place. But the new guy that took his place had actually been born into the other faction and then he took over the dominance hierarchy of the central group.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:21:39Speaker 05

  So it all kicked off where a group of them encountered, they encountered each other in the forest. Instead of socializing, the researchers saw that the one group went silent and hid and the other ones looked for them and then chased them. And then over the two, two years after that, they kept distancing geographically and socially. And then they just started killing each other. They made, the western chimps made six lethal attacks into central territory. And then they started killing infants in 2021. They killed 17 infants and another 14 chimps from the central faction have disappeared. Their bodies are never found.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  So essentially like the takeaway is that they they've tried to explain this by their hypothesis is that there were certain key figures that kind of bridged the communities.

• 1:22:33Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  These older male chimps were kind of intermediaries and they maintained relations. And when these older, older males got sick.

• 1:22:41Steven Rinella?

  Like the statesmen, the elder statesmen died.

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Hotter heads prevailed.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so basically what they're saying is like, you can have a big conflict spill out from individual interactions.

• 1:22:54Steven Rinella?

  That was a hell of a report. You know dudes like American dudes will show up and fighting in Ukraine.

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:22:59Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna, I might try to get in on this monkey war.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  Send Randall.

• 1:23:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Steven Rinella?

  What side would I want to be on? Who's winning?

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  Send, uh, Western seems to be the aggressors.

• 1:23:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Steven Rinella?

  I want to be on, I want to be on the winning side of that because last thing I want is for them chimps to get a hold of me.

• 1:23:14Speaker 05

  And then there's, there's another, the other really interesting thing is that in the 1970s, there is an episode called the Gombe War, which Jane Goodall observed. Uh, but there are doubts as to whether this is a natural behavior because quote, these chimps were eating bananas given to them by humans.

• 1:23:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  So they're wondering if that was like a jealousy resource thing. And the lead author of this paper says.

• 1:23:37Steven Rinella?

  So go to a bunch of little kids and give one of them a banana.

• 1:23:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. He says, this is the first time you can definitively say that there is a rift in this chimp community that's basically driven by the chimps themselves.

• 1:23:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:23:50Steven Rinella?

  When you first told me some months ago that you were a big eight guy.

• 1:23:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Steven Rinella?

  And I didn't think you were.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:56Steven Rinella?

  Remember I called you out on it?

• 1:23:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  I think you've proven yourself.

• 1:24:00Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  Thank you.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  What does a frontline conflict look like? Are they like strangling each other? Are they clubbing each other?

• 1:24:06Steven Rinella?

  You don't know about this?

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 1:24:07Steven Rinella?

  We had that guy, we had the photographer on the podcast that photographs chimps killing each other.

• 1:24:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were gonna include this.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they put on hunts for other monkeys.

• 1:24:16Steven Rinella?

  They rip them, they rip them piece by piece.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  They rip their genitals off.

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:24:21Steven Rinella?

  You don't want to get involved in one of them Jim boys.

• 1:24:23Speaker 05

  No, no. So, that's what I got.

• 1:24:27Speaker 06

  That was brilliant.

• 1:24:28Steven Rinella?

  Lot of war out there these days. That's your best report ever.

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:24:31Steven Rinella?

  It's great.

• 1:24:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, man, I had a lot of fun with that, thank you.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  Um, hippos are of course native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Uh, there's about 150,000 of them living on the continent. But there are also about 200 hippos that call South America home, and they are a huge headache for wildlife biologists in Colombia. Uh, now before we get to those problems, let me tell you how they got there. It's 1981, drug lord Pablo Escobar visits wildlife breeding facilities in the United States in search of his next exotic pets. Uh, his hacienda in northwest Colombia is already housing elephants, giraffes, rhinos, ostriches, uh, zebras, kangaroos, lions, tigers, panthers, llamas, antelope, dolphins, and more. Uh, there's just one thing missing.

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  He's a real nature lover.

• 1:25:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, one thing that's gonna take his personal zoo to the next level: hippos.

• 1:25:24Steven Rinella?

  If I ever get arrested, I hope I look as self-satisfied as that.

• 1:25:29Steven Rinella?

  He is not worried.

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

  He looks like he's on vacation, he's got a Hawaiian.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, looks like a man, yeah, looks like a man on spring break.

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  Uh, so Pablo is in search of hippos. He goes to America and that's what he finds. Uh, Pablo winds up bringing home four hippos, three of them are females, one is a male. Uh, it's unclear what the source of the hippos is, uh, but historians believe they came from a private dealer in either Dallas or California. That's roughly where they've been traced to.

• 1:25:57Speaker 05

  If I may, the gate to his zoo here bears an uncanny resemblance to the architecture of Jurassic Park. Even the font.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, you can see that.

• 1:26:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, and that, and he stole that airplane idea from Uncle Ted.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Inspiring stuff.

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  Super striped airplane.

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  Inspiring stuff. Okay, that was 1981. He finds his four hippos. Uh, let's fast forward to 1993. Pablo Escobar has been on the lam for 16 months after escaping prison. Eventually in December of that year, he's gunned down.

• 1:26:30Speaker 07

  By Colombian special forces while attempting to flee across a rooftop. Pablo takes bullets to the leg, torso and head and is pronounced dead at the scene. It's the day after his 44th.

• 1:26:41Steven Rinella?

  And then those American DEA agents did grip and grins with them.

• 1:26:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I I considered putting that in there. Those pictures are all over the internet. There's like 14 dudes standing with his mutilated.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  It's like guys in Arizona when they get out.

• 1:26:55Speaker 07

  It's exactly like that on the roof.

• 1:26:58Steven Rinella?

  One of them gets.

• 1:26:59Speaker 07

  Where he was killed.

• 1:27:01Speaker 07

  So in the aftermath of his death, the zoo is closed and wildlife officials start to relocate his animals. Almost everything finds a new home at a new facility besides four creatures, his hippos. This is because during the rehoming process, officials said the hippos were just simply too aggressive, too dangerous and too difficult to move, so they left them there. Well, at some point in the 1990s, the hippos take it upon themselves to find a new home and they break out of the zoo and escape to the nearby Magdalena Magdalena River, serving as the founding population for South America's cocaine hippos.

• 1:27:37Steven Rinella?

  That's how that happened.

• 1:27:38Speaker 07

  That's how it happened. I tried to find more specific details on their escape, like how did they get out of their enclosures, but nothing exists. They just got out on their own at some point in the 1990s. Now, by 2007, those four hippos turned into 16. By 2014, those 16 turned into 40. By 2019, those 40 turned into 120. And that brings us to today where it's estimated that there is a population of 200.

• 1:28:07Steven Rinella?

  And they all have the same great, they all have the same like great, great, great, great.

• 1:28:12Speaker 07

  They all came from those four founding.

• 1:28:13Steven Rinella?

  One male.

• 1:28:14Speaker 07

  Cocaine hippos. Their growth is like Seth's baby at this point. It just cannot be stopped. Biologists speculate at this rate, the hippos will exceed 1,000 in the next decade.

• 1:28:25Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:28:26Speaker 07

  Yeah. So what problems do they create? Well, for starters, 200 hippos. They take up a lot of space and a lot of food. They're displacing native fauna such as manatees, otters. Came in turtles, the hippos also increasing the nutrient levels in the water, which might sound like a good thing, but this burst of hippo fertilizers actually creating enormous algae blooms, which in turn trigger other die offs. And then there's just the sheer mass of the hippos is literally changing the waterways there. Their wallows are now filling up with water and creating side channels and ponds that otherwise did not exist.

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  You know they're supposed to be

• 1:29:01Speaker 07

  Totally scarring the landscape.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  Real dangerous, have they killed anyone, Colombia?

• 1:29:04Speaker 07

  Uh, there has been pretty minor conflict so far. It seems I could not find that they've had interactions with humans. We'll get to some of that in a second here. Uh, some folks do argue that the hippos are actually doing more good than harm. Locals have reported that illegal dynamite fishing is at an all time low because poachers are simply scared to be alone hippos. That's right. So there's there's some good. Uh, this story is also of interest to proponents of the Pleistocene Rewilding Project, uh, which advocates for reintroducing megafauna to places where they're missing. In this case, the African hippo is taking the place of Toxodons, which are a hippo-like creature that went extinct about 12,000 years ago. We're looking at one of them here.

• 1:29:48Speaker 07

  Uh, but for the most part, it's agreed upon that having these hippos is not sustainable and something needs to be done. Uh, in 2020, they tried castrating the hippos, which was a ton of work and cost about $50,000 per hippo. That was a short-lived effort.

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  Did anyone get injured doing that?

• 1:30:05Speaker 07

  They did one singular hippo and we're like, we're done. This, this is not

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Fifty grand?

• 1:30:10Speaker 07

  The answer, 50 grand to castrate one hippo that they then let go.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  I'll give it a shot.

• 1:30:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, be like, the hippo be like, how about you give me 50 grand? I just promise. I just promise.

• 1:30:21Speaker 07

  In 2021, they explored sterilizing the hippos with a vaccine, uh, but that got litigated to hell and it quickly fell out of favor. In 2023, a trap and transfer program was pitched, uh, that will place these hippos in zoos across the world, but so far that hasn't gone anywhere. And then earlier this month, Colombian officials approved a euthanasia program that aims to eliminate 80 hippos from the herd. It remains to be seen if and when that plan will go into action. And then the most recent development comes from 24 hours ago, uh, which is when Indian billionaire Anant Ambani. Made a formal request to the Colombian government to let him take some of the hippos. This just happened yesterday.

• 1:31:01Speaker 07

  Uh, he's offering to foot the 3.5 million dollar bill to have 80 of them relocated to his wildlife preserve in India. It's, uh, considered the world's biggest animal rehabilitation center. It's called Ventara. Uh, it's already home to 250 leopards, 900 crocodiles, 200 lions, 160 tigers and 50 bears.

• 1:31:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh my.

• 1:31:23Speaker 07

  There is no word yet on if the Columbia is going to agree to his ambition.

• 1:31:27Steven Rinella?

  But you gotta bring in some, some serious hard hitting wranglers.

• 1:31:31Speaker 07

  I mean, that's why it's gonna cost four million dollars.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, then you gotta get them all the way across the damn world.

• 1:31:37Steven Rinella?

  Cody Ferrian level kinda stuff, man.

• 1:31:39Speaker 06

  This is the buyer, the buyer's the son of the richest man in Asia.

• 1:31:45Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:31:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 07

  So this, this has been something.

• 1:31:48Steven Rinella?

  Get him on the pod.

• 1:31:49Speaker 07

  That's been simmering in Columbia for like a decade, but now it, it feels like it's boiling because they keep reproducing at such an insane rate.

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  That's a great.

• 1:31:57Steven Rinella?

  Hell of a report, man.

• 1:31:59Speaker 06

  That's a great breaking news hit too.

• 1:32:01Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:32:01Speaker 05

  We saw a hippo skull at the museum of the Rockies.

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Speaker 05

  That was the, one of the wildest. One of the wildest things I've ever looked at.

• 1:32:09Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. So, and you know how I'm like an expert on Africa?

• 1:32:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Steven Rinella?

  Well, here's what I heard. When they hunt those hippos, uh, you'll shoot them. Like you hang out where they're gonna pop up and they'll shoot them and the hippo sinks.

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:32:26Steven Rinella?

  You just hang out and wait till it bloats and hmm, it'll surface.

• 1:32:34Speaker 07

  Is that hours or days?

• 1:32:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, hours.

• 1:32:35Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:32:36Steven Rinella?

  Like think about how a deer, like if you don't, if you find a deer like an hour later, it's sort of, you know, you hang out for a couple hours and he rises up to the surface with bloated gas. Then you gotta pick someone and no one wants this job. They're swimming out there and getting a rope on it.

• 1:32:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Steven Rinella?

  Because crocodiles.

• 1:32:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Steven Rinella?

  Not a job anybody wants. It's getting a rope on it and then you drag it up to the beach.

• 1:32:57Speaker 07

  It's how we've solved dynamite fishing in there. So, less of that.

• 1:33:02Steven Rinella?

  Hell of a report.

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  Good job Spencer.

• 1:33:04Steven Rinella?

  My God, man, this should be like an award.

• 1:33:07Speaker 04

  I'll give my prize to Randall.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  Oh, no, you don't have to do that. Don't have to do that.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  So you're prematurely accepting the prize?

• 1:33:14Speaker 05

  It's appreciated, sure.

• 1:33:16Speaker 06

  This report is more like a little brief PSA. If anyone has plans to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, please be bear aware. It's the other weekend that there were six separate black bear-related incidents in various areas of the park.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that amazing? Six separate?

• 1:33:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, some of them was with the same bear. But yes, six incidents. And so this park runs across.

• 1:33:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, incident?

• 1:33:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  Not like someone got scratched?

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  Well, no, I mean, somebody got bit.

• 1:33:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it, there are a couple of different things that happened. But yeah, so this, if anyone doesn't know where Great Smoky Mountains National Park is, it spans part of eastern Tennessee into western North Carolina.

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  And as of now, it seems that most of these areas have reopened, but they were closed for a couple of days and then reopened with no bear activity. But the following incidents were reported. So

• 1:34:22Speaker 06

  two bears approached visitors and stole backpacks. And a third bear displayed aggressive behavior and chased off a group of visitors. And then there was an aggressive bear involved in three incidents at the same location, the same bear. And one

• 1:34:46Speaker 06

  one instance

• 1:34:49Speaker 06

  was, is that a bear, this bear actually bit a visitor who had gone into an area that was restricted and closed. So.

• 1:35:02Speaker 06

  That is kind of, I think, more action than we've seen recently. And there are nineteen hundred, approximately nineteen hundred black bears in that park. And this is the time where mama bears are coming out of dens with their cubs. And there are a lot of visitors.

• 1:35:20Speaker 04

  I was, I was reading Corinne, Gatlinburg's like right next to the park.

• 1:35:25Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  Right there Gatlinburg, Tennessee. And they, they like, they have a bad urban bear.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  They think the park is like helping to create this urban bear problem.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  Tennessee is in the top five bear tax states.

• 1:35:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  But when you look at it, it's like one of those things where five is not, you're getting down to a very small number.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:48Steven Rinella?

  Meaning you look at like Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, you know, you're up in the teens or whatever. And then by the time you get down to number five, you're down to like two or three.

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Steven Rinella?

  But it's still number, it's still within top five bear tax states.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  But it makes sense, because, you know, Smoky Mountain National Park's like surrounded by millions of people. So it's like. Most visited national park.

• 1:36:07Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  You know, that's gonna, all those bears are gonna spill over, you know?

• 1:36:10Speaker 06

  I, I tried to find out if any of those bears had been euthanized. And I didn't find information that they had been captured or euthanized. But on the NPS website, it, it stated that if, if they're dangerous, they will euthanize black bears.

• 1:36:31Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we're gonna close out with, um,

• 1:36:36Steven Rinella?

  a story from Gabon, how do you say it?

• 1:36:38Speaker 06

  Gabon.

• 1:36:39Steven Rinella?

  Gabon?

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  I think it's Gabon.

• 1:36:40Steven Rinella?

  Gabon, which Brody says has phenomenal fishing.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I wanna go. I've wanted to go for decades.

• 1:36:46Steven Rinella?

  I wanna go there. I wanna go there, because it's like, it's like jungle, you know?

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  But they got nice beaches there, too.

• 1:36:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh, so a hunter from California was killed there. It's important to point out here, the hunter that was killed there, and, and, yeah, an American, you know, guy from California was there on a big game hunt, hunting dikers. Yellow-backed dikers, okay? But he, he was killed by elephants. The party, his hunting party, they ran across a group of, I don't know, five elephants.

• 1:37:13Steven Rinella?

  They were trampled and he got gored by a female elephant. So it's, it's, you know, a tragic thing. It happens. I remember like last year, the year we were in Africa filming. I remember two Americans got killed by Cape buffalo that year. Um, I guess it's still the same year now, or is it a different year now? It's a different year now.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Steven Rinella?

  An American killed by an elephant hunting there, but um, the coverage on it is very predictable. Ricky Gervais, like big PETA guy.

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  He's glad, like he says, the best thing is they'll never forget it. But it's like, he wasn't even, he was hunting elephants.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  This wrong place.

• 1:37:57Steven Rinella?

  He was hunting diapers, but it's like celebrated. What's also funny is like people ha- this happens every time something happens in Africa. Is the amount of money that the individual is worth becomes a big part of the story. So it's like, he was killed, but a millionaire was killed in Africa. So people are like,

• 1:38:19Steven Rinella?

  they got.

• 1:38:21Steven Rinella?

  They got it wasn't a guy with less money.

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  You don't see a headline like, blue collar hunter escapes elephant in Africa.

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  No, it's, it's just, it's like weird. They always, that's like always a point. It's always a point. Cause you're like millionaire, US big game hunter, trampled to death by elephants while hunting in Central Africa.

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  Especially if it's British coverage. They really like to point out that.

• 1:38:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're the ones that named Brian Harmon, Brian the Butcher. Because he likes to hunt deer. The golfer, yeah.

• 1:38:58Steven Rinella?

  Um, dude hunting all over the place.

• 1:39:03Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, man.

• 1:39:05Steven Rinella?

  Always gets covered that way. The only thing that you can do, if, the only thing worse, if you are a, if, if you, if something happens to you in Africa and you're a rich white guy, the only thing worse than being a rich white guy would be an attractive young woman. That especially infuriates people. Remember that young woman killed that lion? It didn't, they're like, oh, I was hoping to be a rich white guy. It's an attractive young woman. I'm gonna be outraged, outraged. Yeah, it's like, they get more mad. What's this fellow's name?

• 1:39:42Speaker 05

  Ernie Dosio.

• 1:39:44Steven Rinella?

  Ernie Dosio.

• 1:39:45Speaker 05

  Or Dosio, I don't know.

• 1:39:47Steven Rinella?

  Big game hunter killed in Africa by an elephant. Um, ugh.

• 1:39:53Speaker 06

  Seventy-five years old, has family outliving him. It's sad.

• 1:39:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, we should end on a happier note. What's something we could do that was like a happier note?

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  Would play the.

• 1:40:04Steven Rinella?

  Seth had a new baby.

• 1:40:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Well, it's white. With death, there's life, you know?

• 1:40:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 05

  How's Kelsey doing on your first day back?

• 1:40:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let's end happy.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  Oh, she said he's, he won't go down for a nap and he's pretty restless today, so.

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  Well, I said to end on a happy note.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  He's cute as hell.

• 1:40:21Steven Rinella?

  He's cute. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Seth's new baby's cute.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  Good looking baby.

• 1:40:25Steven Rinella?

  See you next week on the new show.

• 1:40:53Steven Rinella?

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• 1:41:37Steven Rinella?

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• 1:42:21Steven Rinella?

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• 1:43:10Speaker 00

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