Ep. 887: The Lizards Went Down to Georgia, Securing Hunting Rights in Colorado, and Big Ol' Lake Trout

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en and the MeatEater crew discuss: Georgia's Argentine tegu problem with Daniel Sollenberger of the Georgia DNR; the Centennial State's fight for constitutional hunting rights with Dan Gates of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management; the Trump administration's opening of wildlife refuges to hunting; giant trout in Lake Superior; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:34Steven Rinella?

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• 1:10Steven Rinella?

  Welcome to the news show, ladies and gentlemen. This week, we've got the state of Georgia playing hardball with some big ass lizards that they don't want running wild. The Interior Department opens up a metric shit ton of hunting and fishing opportunities around the country. But what exactly is an opportunity? Colorado outdoorsman might have a chance to take the offensive against anti-hunting efforts in the Johnny Denver State. A Minnesota guide keeps beating his own lake trout records, and what's up with that? But first, I'll tell you what's versus Bill Tong. You ever made Bill Tong?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Have not. Made jerky. I'm assuming it's close.

• 1:49Steven Rinella?

  It's like a cousin. Not a close, it's a second cousin.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  What, what, like, the making of is different how?

• 1:58Steven Rinella?

  Well, you take, you don't slice it. You know when you make a jerky, you slice jerky. Biltong, you get a chunk. Kier it, hang up the chunk, wait till it's kinda dry, and then slice it. And it's gooey in the middle.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:11Steven Rinella?

  Alright, here.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  It's so good.

• 2:12Steven Rinella?

  This is a sample piece that I'm making, so. I'm just trying to figure it out, cause I'm just hanging it in my garage.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  It is soft in the middle.

• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so I'm just hanging this in my garage by trapper's wire. I got them hanging all over the damn place. Pass one of those down to Crin there.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  Thank you. B I L L T O N G, everybody.

• 2:29Steven Rinella?

  This is my sample batch.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  That's a much different eating experience than jerky.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, this is good.

• 2:34Steven Rinella?

  Eventually, I'm gonna be doing whole backstrap.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  Phil, you want to?

• 2:39Steven Rinella?

  All the biltong dudes tell you like, no sinu, no this, no that, whatever. That's really good.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Let's get one for Phil. This is delicious, dude.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  It tastes like you're just eating leftover steak from the night before.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, a whole backstrap from a smaller animal, like an antelope or a white tilledo.

• 2:56Steven Rinella?

  I cured it in my fridge forty-eight hours. It's vinegar, it's basically like salt, vinegar. Stuff like that, stuff that's good to eat. You add the working ingredients, vinegar, salt.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  It's not overly salty at all.

• 3:08Steven Rinella?

  And then you add stuff that's good to eat in there.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:12Steven Rinella?

  Two days, then you take some wire, or whatever you got, hooks, um. Paper clips, whatever. And just hang them around your garage.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  You can really appreciate the meat, because there's tenderness in there.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  And you feel like it's the same, you're getting a similar product to like, it being hung like, out in the sun and the wind?

• 3:33Steven Rinella?

  Mine's not in the sun.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I know, but isn't that how they do it in Africa?

• 3:37Steven Rinella?

  Sure, but my garage is dry, and I did it this time of year, because I know what, because this time of year is what I pictured being the time of year for that.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  No sun. No sun. In Africa, they do the sun.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  When I saw it done. But people also use Umi bags.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 3:53Steven Rinella?

  Which I didn't do. This is hanging in my garage.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:56Steven Rinella?

  You'd walk in there and think something weird was going on.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't. I've been in your garage.

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  It's biltong, dude.

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  It's time now for the TRCP Turkey Hunt Sweepstakes Reminder. Okay, every year we do this. We do, we, we team up with, me and Yanni Chumani, the Lavian Lover. Every year we team up with TRCP to do a turkey hunt giveaway. We take a winner and a winner's guest. On a three night, two day turkey hunt, we cover all expenses. Our guys get birds. Our guys this year got birds, day one.

• 4:34Steven Rinella?

  They get birds. Go to TRCP.org and search up the summer turkey hunt sweepstakes giveaway. You'll, you'll find it easy. You buy, it's a raffle. You buy tickets to win. Again, we cover airfare, tags, food, lodging. We cover everything. You pay nothing. If you're short on gear, we'll get you, we'll find you some gear if you're the winner.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Then anybody can win.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Anybody, well, there's some states you can't win, which is like stupid.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  But just a guy who buys one tag.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  Listen, any Joe Blow can win it. And we've got a, a list as long as your arm of satisfied past winners.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  We brought in a professional chef this year. We brought in a professional chef so that when you came in out of the woods, we had, there was a professional chef cooking. Poop Magoo.

• 5:29Steven Rinella?

  We had a hell of a good time this year.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  We were eating fresh asparagus picked right out of the garden.

• 5:33Steven Rinella?

  What's the, uh, what's the deadline?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Don't know.

• 5:37Steven Rinella?

  Why don't you look that up and chime in?

• 5:40Speaker 04

  I thought I'd do it in a more organic way.

• 5:42Steven Rinella?

  Though, if I were. I'd, I'd, I'd like to know actually. Just put some urgency around it. When are they gonna do the draw?

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Ends at 11:59 Eastern Time on 7/31/26.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Plenty of time.

• 5:54Steven Rinella?

  7/31, plenty of time. Buy some now and buy some later. Win big. Me and Yanni are gonna take care of you, man. We're gonna take care of you. You guys get your birds before we touch our shotguns. That's our motto.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  And there's also, uh, they're, they're runner up prizes, right? Like even if you don't win the big thing.

• 6:12Steven Rinella?

  They're gonna win the big thing. Don't worry. They're gonna win the big thing. You, I'm talking to you out there. You're gonna win the big thing. That's right. Get your tickets. You're winning. You're up.

• 6:23Steven Rinella?

  A guy wrote in, he says on last week's show, Steve was confident that he was insulated from criminal prosecution for unlawful possession of native wildlife.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  Because we, we had a mouse that we detained momentarily and it got away. So I was, it was pointed out to me that I was in violation of the law because I had like, had a wild pet. And I was, that, that my wife would be who they'd have the problem with because she's the one that took it home. And I was saying, well, it got away. So now no body, no case. A lawyer wrote in. He says, well, one problem, you've already confessed to it a bunch.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  On, on the recording.

• 7:04Steven Rinella?

  And made video evidence of it.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  You blamed your wife, but she hasn't confessed.

• 7:08Steven Rinella?

  So there might not be, yeah, he's like, you might not have the mouse, but there's, there's, there's room to make a case against you.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  But he's also a career criminal prosecutor and he's prosecuted numerous murder cases.

• 7:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But he says, I'm out of his jurisdiction, so he's not going to prosecute me. But I'd like to clarify again, the mouse is gone. It ran off.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Was there even a mouse to begin with?

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  No, we'll never know.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 7:33Steven Rinella?

  And how would you know that wasn't a mouse from the mouse store?

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 7:37Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 7:39Steven Rinella?

  A guy wrote in, he says, his brother-in-law has adopted a raccoon kit.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  After his father killed its parents. I don't think his father killed his parents.

• 7:54Steven Rinella?

  I think his father killed its mother.

• 7:57Steven Rinella?

  He says, we all live next to each other and we all work together.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 8:01Steven Rinella?

  It's the Phelps.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  It's the Phelps family.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Thanks, JCP.

• 8:07Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for writing in, Jason Phelps. We, we all, uh, we all live next to each other and we all work together. Every one in the family, aside from my brother-in-law, feels that the raccoon is best left outside to let nature run its course.

• 8:22Steven Rinella?

  My etiquette question is, do I call fishing game and risk family turmoil or do I let him raise? And release the raccoon for me to trap and kill later? We kept pet raccoons when I was a kid. I think they're delightful, but I don't, I'm not telling you what to do. Guy wrote in.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  That's it? That's all you got for that one?

• 8:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's why I didn't start my bit.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  I got enough legal problems.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  Go longer than that.

• 8:46Steven Rinella?

  I got enough legal problems with this mouse. I don't need to now be like.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Aiding and abetting.

• 8:52Steven Rinella?

  Giving legal advice.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Alright.

• 8:54Steven Rinella?

  We kept pet raccoons when I was little and they went back to the wild.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  After they turned vicious.

• 8:59Steven Rinella?

  They turned mean, they start biting you all the time and then they eventually turned themselves loose.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  My favorite part of this is the certainty with which it ends when he says, let him release it for me to trap and kill.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, but I would draw on the question. See, we got our pet raccoons before they opened their eyes. So I don't know how far along that raccoon is. I don't know if it's gonna live or not.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  Also, the, the kind of tacit silent agreement of this whole segment is that someone asks a question and then you tell them what they should do. I'm just, yeah, I just throwing that out there.

• 9:27Steven Rinella?

  I know, but I'm feeling particularly vulnerable in the moment because of the, because of the legal problem I'm in right now with the mouse.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  It's just smart of you.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Um, okay, I'll hit, hit this really quickly. Like dozens and dozens of people wrote in to say that I was wrong. I was wrong. I said that the capital of New York state was Buffalo. That's not true. It's Albany. I was just trying to give some context for Erie County. And so the county seat is in Buffalo. Uh, but the capital is, um, in Albany. And someone pointed out that, that Albany has been the capital of New York since, uh, 1797. So that's how wrong I was.

• 10:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh, guy wrote in, this is going back so far, people aren't gonna recall. Randall had some birds killing his chickens.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 10:16Steven Rinella?

  Randall was joking about how he's gonna kill those birds. And one guy wrote in, all worked up about that, but he's just joking. Another guy just wrote in and says there's an old timer trick, you see?

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  His, his solution, and again, I hesitate to, to read this aloud for fear of whatever legal liability.

• 10:38Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna shut him down hard. Don't worry.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, he says, he says you, uh. You you put some two by fours together, put a little plywood square on the very top to make a nice attractive perch.

• 10:49Steven Rinella?

  Basically build a fence post.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  And then on that perch, you put a leg trap and chain it to the two by fours and put that up. So it looks like a real nice place for a big bird of prey to sit there and watch your chickens.

• 11:01Steven Rinella?

  Yep. And then you're trapping that big bird of prey. I will point out to this fellow, uh, that is very, very illegal.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Very, very illegal. Yeah. With that.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Don't do that. Um, do we want to do the West Virginia fishing records?

• 11:22Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Oh, yeah. I do.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  We got a, we got a email from a gentleman, an angler in, uh, West Virginia who saw, uh, Spencer's story on West Virginia, uh, state fishing records that were getting broken. Um, and we, we kinda went pretty hard at some of those fish.

• 11:40Steven Rinella?

  So much so that he says in here, tell Steve he could suck it.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. He says, don't go trashing our new state records. And he goes on to make a point that like, a few decades ago, a lot of the water in West Virginia was so damaged by acidic rain that you couldn't even catch a fish in them. So he's got a good point there.

• 12:00Steven Rinella?

  They've done a lot of work on stream bank restoration and in, in, you know, he's, he's.

• 12:06Steven Rinella?

  Yes. I love giving credit for the habitat work that's been done, but you still catch a make believe fish.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Golden trout are, he says, bro, he's correct. They're bred and grown in hatcheries and, uh, big ones usually have some wear and tear on their noses and tails from, from the cement raceways they, they're grown up in. Um, but he also goes on to say that they're notoriously hard to catch, which wasn't, wasn't my experience when I was 10 years old with a, pitching a, a salmon, Uncle Josh's salmon egg. But, um, that's okay.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Um, he says, did you already get, you wouldn't, he bets you wouldn't pass up catching a five pound tiger trout?

• 12:42Steven Rinella?

  He says, I would not pass up. Correct. Correct.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:46Steven Rinella?

  But I wouldn't send pictures of it around and sign up and sign up for the state record. But sure, I would catch it.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  I, I.

• 12:54Steven Rinella?

  I would be like, hey, watch, I'm gonna catch that.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  I held my tongue last time. I, I just feel like you shouldn't shame people for going out and catching a fish.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  No, we're not shaming the people, we're shaming the fish.

• 13:04Steven Rinella?

  It's, I'm not hating the player. I'm not hating the player, the game.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:10Steven Rinella?

  I, I, no, I'm not even that. It's not like this is the biggest problem.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 13:14Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's like, it's like a bigger problem than the straight Hormuz situation, but it's not the biggest problem the country faces.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  But it's a big problem is if the state has brood stock in a tank and its tail is rubbed off from living in a tank. And one day they take it and they set it in a river and a guy catches out of the river and then you go, wow, a new state record. I just, it just, it's not.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:43Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's something, but not that. But this gentleman.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:48Steven Rinella?

  Had some great ins. Cause all the dumb, the dumb parts of his email are made up for by the good part.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the fish that we didn't bag on was the chain pickerel, cause that's a native fish.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  But then we proceeded to bag, well, people in the room proceeded to bag on him for fighting it for 10 minutes.

• 14:04Steven Rinella?

  Not me. I was all for him.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Anyway, the gentleman who caught the state record chain pickerel, which is not a large fish, relatively speaking, fought it for, what did they say? 20 minutes, 10 minutes, a long time.

• 14:16Steven Rinella?

  He had a big tussle. Seth said he would have taken him three seconds to boat that fish.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  To pitch that thing onto the bank. Um, the guy who wrote in says, the reason the fight lasted so long is that he didn't have a net. Every time he tried to pick it up, it took off again. He was using four pound test. So he's like baby in the fish.

• 14:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Eventually he got tired of messing with the fish and licked it, which you don't do with chain pickerel.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  Dude, just shred, shred your thumb.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Um, and the interviewer asked him, didn't the teeth cut you? The guy who caught the fish responded, bleeding is temporary. A state record is forever.

• 14:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, unless you're breaking, this is also the guy who's breaking his own state record.

• 15:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's holes in everything. You can find a hole in everything. I get the sentiment.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  I have people out there catching big fish.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, have fun. Go catch more state records.

• 15:09Steven Rinella?

  He points out that West Virginia likes Randall. Oh, I didn't even see that.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  That's because the part, but the part of Ohio that Randall is from is not really Ohio. It's more like Kentucky and West Virginia.

• 15:22Steven Rinella?

  I thought it was because his hair got long in the back for a while.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  He fit right in.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  I think I just have a certain sensibility that.

• 15:28Steven Rinella?

  West Virginians are looking at Randall now and be like, you changed Randall.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  I know.

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  I can't put my finger on it, but you changed.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  I will say, you know, there are some comments about the haircut, wondering if I got a haircut. I did in fact get a haircut. I didn't mean to get this much cut, but it will be back. It will be back.

• 15:45Steven Rinella?

  All right. That's our news, your news and now the news.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Alrighty, so Phil, we have on the line here, Georgia DNR herpetologist, Daniel Sollenberger. Daniel, thank you for joining us today.

• 16:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me on.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  So, uh, I came across a few headlines yesterday about a, uh, an issue you guys have going on down there with an animal, a lizard called a tegu. Is that the correct pronunciation? Could you, uh?

• 16:17Speaker 07

  That's, that's right. Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Could you tell us the listener, what is a tegu and why are they in the news right now?

• 16:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. So they're a, uh, a really large South American lizard. They grow, um, you know, four to four and a half feet long. Uh, not Komodo dragon size, but much bigger than anything we have here in the U.S. nor normally. And, uh, they've become established in some places in the southeast. Um, there's, you know, a few different populations in Florida. And now at least this one in South Georgia and concerns of them becoming established elsewhere. Uh, and they're, um, as you'd expect a big reptile to do, they kind of eat what they want and, uh, turns out they can kind of live where they want. So.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was reading that they, they'll actually broomate. So they will shut down for the winters. They could maybe survive in colder climates than what you might expect for an animal like that.

• 17:16Speaker 07

  Right.

• 17:18Steven Rinella?

  What's, what's the main?

• 17:19Speaker 07

  So there, you know, a lot of people think of,

• 17:23Speaker 07

  I would say a lot of people think of South America as being like tropical rainforest all over, but, you know, where these tegus are from in terms of latitude, if you were to mirror it on to North America, you know, the southern end of where they live would be equivalent to like, forty degrees south, which is roughly like Pennsylvania.

• 17:43Steven Rinella?

  Wow, man.

• 17:43Speaker 07

  In the US.

• 17:46Speaker 07

  And, and there's a lot of other things that determine climate, you know, but, but just to give you an idea, they live in a very temperate environment, very similar to what we have in the southern US.

• 17:55Steven Rinella?

  Now, when you're saying that, that they get to four, four and a half feet, do you think that right now in Georgia, in the wild, is a four foot specimen? Or is that just what they would get in native range or in a zoo? Meaning are they, are they legitimately achieving that size in Georgia?

• 18:19Speaker 07

  I mean, you're, you're asking if it's like the brood stock trout and.

• 18:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, are we talking brood stock or are we talking wild here?

• 18:28Speaker 07

  Actually be, yeah, actually being a product of the environment. Possibly, yeah. I mean, so, you know, we have harvested animals or, or the public has, has shot them and we've trapped some that are, you know, three and a half to four feet in length. I mean, it, they're, yeah, we've had some pretty big ones. It's usually the males.

• 18:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:53Speaker 07

  That get that big. So yeah, I mean, eventually I'm, I'm sure we have some four plus foot tegus out there.

• 19:01Steven Rinella?

  Man, you'd hear that thing coming through the woods, man.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And for the DNR, the concern is, is that they're eating a lot of eggs of game birds and things like that. Can you sort of put a finer point on what the issue is as far as conservation concerns?

• 19:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, they so they'll eat just about anything, plant, animal, matter, whatever they want. Uh, but they really like eggs and uh, so you know, ground nesting birds, you know, a lot of songbirds nest on the ground, turkey, quail. Um, reptile eggs, they'll dig up the nests of turtles. Uh, they've even been found raiding alligator nests in Florida. Uh, so you know, the impact they could have on, on some of those things, you know, there's a lot of concern right now for turkeys. Um, in the state, probably pretty much everywhere. Um, and having an additional nest predator

• 19:59Speaker 07

  on top of the native ones that they've adapted to deal with. We've invested a lot of money and effort into gopher tortoise conservation. Um, the public's gotten several new WMAs out of it. We do, you know, prescribed burning for them and do a lot of management for tortoises. And something like a tegu digging up nests could undermine a lot of that work.

• 20:20Speaker 07

  So their, their, their egg eating activities are a big concern.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  That's big enough, just to go back to that bigness. It's big enough where you could hit it with a bow and have to track it. Yeah. That's a big lizard.

• 20:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Um, you know.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  You did the blood trail of that lizard.

• 20:38Speaker 07

  Probably wouldn't do it, you know, like, so we do recommend that people shoot them. Um, that's usually the, the quickest way to dispatch one and not let it get away.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm only just throwing that out as just an observation. I'm not suggesting that people do that. Well, it's, that's, that's the recommendation is right. It's kill on. The bow and arrow. Oh, sure. Yeah. But the, the recommendation is to kill on sight.

• 21:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, certainly. Um, you know, if you see one and think, I'll call DNR, let them know and maybe they can come trap it later. Sometimes we try and sometimes we do get the animal. But it's very common for those animals to just run off and they're not seen again, at least not in that location. And so if, if it's safe, now if you live in a HOA and you know, man from across the street's walking her dog by, you probably shouldn't do it in your front yard, but if it's safe and legal where you're at and you have a firearm close by, just go ahead and dispatch that animal and then call us.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Give me a wild ballpark. How many are in Georgia?

• 21:41Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Okay, let's, let's play a game. More than a thousand or less than a thousand?

• 21:48Speaker 07

  Okay, um, are we talking adults or like including all the hatchlings? Because depending on the time of year, that number could.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Adults.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  So like one year plus year old animals that more than a thousand.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Alright, so it's the real deal. They're around.

• 22:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I will clarify, you know, my whole cover up my shirt like that is a guess. That is a total wild guess.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  I said a wild ballpark. Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, so they do turn up over, uh, you know, two counties, which, you know, we have one hundred and fifty nine counties, so our counties aren't very big. Um, but but they're two of our larger counties kind of across that whole area like, um, I don't know, probably a few hundred square mile area or something like that. Uh, that we've really had, you know, so to give you an idea, they turn up all over the state. Most of those animals are just people's pets that have gotten loose. And so they're in Atlanta, Milledgeville, and mountains everywhere. And we think most of those hopefully are just people's pets, but just in those two counties where your Vidalia onions come from.

• 23:03Speaker 07

  Um, they, uh, we've had like thirty plus animals that have been killed, captured, um, hit on the road, you know, something where we have a carcass or a photo of an animal. And then a lot of other credible sightings that where someone just, you know, saw one run across the road.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 23:23Speaker 07

  You know, wasn't able to get it.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Do you, and again, I'm not asking you to comment on this as a, as a representative of Georgia DNR, but just as a guy on the street, have you heard anything? Are they good to eat? What's the recommendation there?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  I knew this was coming, you know, I was sitting at last, I'm like, oh, really gonna ask? You know what? They're gonna ask what they taste like. Yeah, I've not had the pleasure. I've not had the pleasure of eating one, um, but I imagine it tastes a lot like Iguana or something like that. A lot of reptiles kind of are similar.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 23:53Speaker 07

  Um, to me.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna ask, what's the drunkest you've ever been or something?

• 23:58Speaker 07

  Nothing embarrassing.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Well, it sounds like a quick, quick hit in the deep fire is, is what's in, what's in order for the Tegus then?

• 24:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Uh, anything else we should know before we let you go here, Daniel?

• 24:16Speaker 07

  No.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  I got, I got one question. I see in the notes, sorry, uh, I see in the notes. Kill on sight order. Is that true? Or is that something in our notes?

• 24:28Speaker 07

  That's your notes? That's my notes. Okay. We can't, yeah.

• 24:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 07

  We can't force people to kill them. We really appreciate it.

• 24:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I, I, I figured that was something that generated on our end, but I just wanted to clarify that it wasn't like the cops are like ticketing people. They're ticketing people for not shooting the lizards.

• 24:52Speaker 07

  And if there's one thing the public is eager to help you do.

• 24:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 07

  Yeah. They're eager to help you kill something. That is something we can generally can get people to help with without alert.

• 25:03Steven Rinella?

  I do got one, I got, I got one last question. Maybe Randall's got more, but I got one last question.

• 25:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh, when you look at around the nation, around the world, you look at battles with invasives. Um, usually, you know, maybe early on, when there's an invasive species takes hold.

• 25:26Steven Rinella?

  Maybe there's some optimism or some hope that you'll actually get rid of it, right? But oftentimes it turns into a continued management issue. And people will point out that, you know, outside of some pathogen emerging, we're not getting out of this problem. Um, Asiatic carp, I mean, I could go on all day, but like Asiatic carp in the Mississippi watersheds. Zebra mussels, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, wild hogs in Texas. No serious person is suggesting that we're going to take care of the problem.

• 26:03Steven Rinella?

  In, in your mind, where do we sit? On the, on, on, on this lizard issue in Georgia?

• 26:12Speaker 07

  We're, we're still early in that curve. You know, but the, the, so it's, it's a thousand animals. Sounds like a lot. Let's say it actually was a thousand, but it's really not like that's doable. And the area is fairly well known um in terms of the extent of the invasion. The problem is it's almost entirely private land. There aren't a lot of people there. It's, it's very rural farmland, timberland, and there's a ton of places for these animals to hide. Um, it, I don't, it's hard for me to say for sure. I think there's some optimism to at the very least contain it to that area.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Gotcha.

• 26:59Speaker 07

  El- eradicating them will, we'll have to see, you know, it's, it's really, it's going to take a lot of help from the public on that. And then there's no magic bullet yet for them. So.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 27:11Speaker 07

  We'll see where we're at in another 10 years.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Sounds good, Daniel. Thanks so much for joining us.

• 27:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, no problem. I appreciate it.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Thank you, sir.

• 27:21Speaker 06

  Thanks, Daniel.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  Yep. Y'all have a good one.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  You too.

• 27:25Steven Rinella?

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• 28:10Steven Rinella?

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• 29:04Steven Rinella?

  fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made, floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do you start building credit? It's easy. With OnePay's Builder Card, there's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 29:49Steven Rinella?

  OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast. Okay, next up here on the news show, we're joined in the studio by Dan Gates from Coloradoans for Responsible Wildlife Management. Dan Gates has been on the show before. The reason he's here now is we're going to talk about, we're always reporting on all kinds of bad, crazy things coming out of Colorado of late, right? People looking to suppress rights and kind of subvert wildlife management to conform to a animal rights agenda in the state of Colorado. And rather than just pointing out all the things that are wrong with the world,

• 30:33Steven Rinella?

  Dan's here to tell us about a way that hunters and anglers might move forward in a more proactive and constructive manner with the passage of an amendment that would provide a constitutional right to hunt and fish.

• 30:50Speaker 07

  Yes, sir.

• 30:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:52Steven Rinella?

  Called what? 302.

• 30:54Speaker 07

  Initiative 302 is what it is right now. Um, if it passes and we get the signatures on it with the support of the International Order of T Roosevelt, uh, those signatures are due on August 4th. And if that, if we get the signatures, it'll be on the ballot for people to vote on this year.

• 31:11Steven Rinella?

  How many signatures do you need?

• 31:12Speaker 07

  Hundred and 25,000 roughly. So we're looking at probably trying to gather 200,000 to make sure that we have enough to clear the threshold and get certified.

• 31:20Steven Rinella?

  If that dude in Oregon could get the necessary number of, if he could get the right number of signatures to ban ranching and, and having rodeos, I feel like you should be able, yeah, I feel like you should be able to get the right number of signatures to get this going. But is, in all seriousness, is there a concern about signature gathering?

• 31:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, to, to, to some degree there is, Steve. I think that the biggest problem that we probably have in the long run is getting people to understand why you need something and, and what it does. And it actually codifies what we have at existing statute. But it, it does it in a constitutional right manner and it gives you another tool in the toolbox to where you can go say, you can't do this unless we have the science and the data to be able to support that. This doesn't give anybody the unequivocal ability or authority to hunt from January 1st to December 31st on private property and all species and methods of taking, no limit.

• 32:09Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 32:10Speaker 07

  The agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, still has the overwhelming authority, just like what they should. And the commission, even though it's a bad commission at this point in time, still has the ability to interact with the agency in that, in that process. So it just codifies it.

• 32:23Steven Rinella?

  So that, that's kind of one of the main things I wanted to dig in on this issue. But I mean, I want to alert Coloradans to, to make sure to go get their signature taken care of.

• 32:32Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 32:32Steven Rinella?

  Make sure to start telling, you know, when it makes the ballot, right? That they start telling, you know, whatever their aunt who doesn't hunt, hey, heads up, when this thing comes out, here's what you gotta do to support me. So make sure the word gets out. But I wanted to narrow in on something with you. How is it, how many states have this now?

• 32:51Speaker 07

  Twenty twenty four.

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  Twenty four states.

• 32:54Speaker 07

  Colorado would be the twenty fifth.

• 32:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay, Colorado would be the twenty fifth state to have a constitutional right to hunt and fish.

• 32:58Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 32:59Steven Rinella?

  But here's the thing I always wondered. How does it have teeth? Like, are you aware of the of the states that have it? Are you aware that the states have ever been able to use the constitutional right to hunt and fish? Um, to combat a piece of a bad regulatory piece, to combat a bill? Jimmy, like, how does it become actionable? Like, let's say you're sitting there and you have it passed. How do you then use it to litigate bad legislation?

• 33:30Speaker 07

  That's a good point, and that's some of the questions that we've been asked over and over. And then if we're talking to the the Travis Thompsons and the Luke Hilgeman's with the international order, they did this in twenty twenty four in Florida.

• 33:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:43Speaker 07

  And there's many other states have attempted to do this successfully through the legislative method or madness. Um, and the ballot side of this actually provides a level of constitutionality to the point to where on certain circumstances, for certain issues, states have had to be able to turn around and challenge maybe an attack or an assault on some sort of prohibition or restriction on hunting or fishing. Um, but if you look at what it's probably prevented, the states that have had this in place, they haven't had the fight, the fight, because the people that are wanting to come to the to the table with those fights are like, if we go there, we better have the science on our side, and they don't.

• 34:24Speaker 07

  And so it prohibits, it's like a, I joke about this, but it's like a windshield on a on a truck.

• 34:30Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:30Speaker 07

  It doesn't stop a bee from hitting you inside the head if your window's down, but it stops a lot of the stuff from coming right into the front. And it just helps codify, like I mentioned, the opportunity for game agencies to science-based regulate what we have to do when it comes to regulation of our wildlife resources.

• 34:48Steven Rinella?

  Let me put the question, let me put the question to you a little bit different. Not that you didn't answer, but let's play it, let's play with time a little bit. Let's say, let's go back and say that ten years ago, ten years ago, Colorado passed constitutional right to hunt and fish. Okay. And then they had come up against two years ago now, when the hell was it? The, the, the.

• 35:08Speaker 07

  One twenty seven.

• 35:09Steven Rinella?

  The cat hunting ban, okay? So the constitutional right to hunt and fish was, was magically in place 10 years ago.

• 35:14Speaker 07

  Right.

• 35:15Steven Rinella?

  Let's pretend. And up comes this ballot initiative to end all hunting of wild cats in Colorado.

• 35:23Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that that constitutional right would have offered some protection to that? Prevented that, argued a counterpoint to that?

• 35:35Speaker 07

  A wholeheartedly.

• 35:36Steven Rinella?

  You, okay, you do.

• 35:37Speaker 07

  I think, I think that it would allowed us to be able to turn around and prop up the science-based wildlife management in a manner to where it would be less likely to be attacked and assaulted by the things that they're doing. Just like we've got prairie dog petitions, we've had fur bearer petitions. We've had attempts to turn around and restrict other forms of hunting, not just on the, the ballot measure, but through the legislature.

• 35:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 07

  It would have, it would have prevented that from even moving to those levels unless the agency had the science to turn around and say, hey, guys, we need to step back and we need to do some of this.

• 36:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 07

  But at, at that point, it would also be an opportunity for the antis to say, maybe we should go to someplace that is a little bit less prepared.

• 36:18Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 36:18Speaker 07

  They're typically, they're not going to places that have the constitutional right to hunt and fish and the manner that they try to do it in the other places that don't. Because they know they've got that roadblock that, that they're gonna have to fight. They can fight to get something passed, but then they gotta fight to turn around and keep it passed.

• 36:32Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't it seem, it seems so strange to me.

• 36:37Steven Rinella?

  I'm sure it's explainable, but it seems strange to me that Colorado and Washington have sort of become the.

• 36:45Speaker 07

  Oh, good, yeah.

• 36:46Steven Rinella?

  Like, like have become the sort of test grounds for how to chip away at, how to chip away at hunting practices.

• 36:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  In situations where you cannot point to hunting having a detrimental impact on the resource. So sort of like a ma- like make believe problem.

• 37:04Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:05Steven Rinella?

  Right, like, oh, we have, we have a lot of black bears. In fact, we have expanding populations of black bears, but you shouldn't be able to hunt them.

• 37:12Speaker 07

  Right.

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, that seems to have become those states.

• 37:17Speaker 07

  Look at Oregon, IP 28. I mean, that mentality floats around that you mentioned that when they want to turn around and make states a complete state and an animal sanctuary state. Uh, for, for everything under the sun. It's easy to say that that doesn't happen in other states, but Colorado is doing the exact same thing. Except for we're doing it individually, one little, small thing at a time. Try this, can't accomplish that. Let's go with this. Oregon, they're just trying the whole thing in one great big sweep. And I think that you look at the Western United States, one because of the public land side of things. Two, because of the big game resources that we have that other parts of the country don't. And the people that move to those locations, there's less of a population density of humans that you have to turn around and convince to do something.

• 37:59Speaker 07

  It's harder to do it when you're in Alabama and you got, you know, 12 million people and seven million hunt or whatever the numbers are. But when you get into a state like Colorado, we've got such a transient population that comes in, just like in Oregon, just like in Washington, Arizona, New Mexico. The West is particularly vulnerable to the ideologies of people that come in. And it's easy for those animal rights groups to sway them because it's not in their heritage or their tradition.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  But, but only in certain Western states, right? Like they're not going to try, like Wyoming is not at risk the same way Colorado.

• 38:31Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Like.

• 38:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, but, but, but Wyoming is probably just as fragile. If you turn around and look at the influx of people that could move into Wyoming and change the political spectrum. Yeah. Yeah, but you need to, you need less of those to be able to do so. Ours happened over 30 years. But you know what's funny is if you look back pre-COVID. And the people that I know in those states that we mentioned, including Idaho and Montana, people said, oh, we don't have to worry about that gates. We don't have to, we've got that barrier. We, we've got something. COVID hit and all the people from Oregon, Washington and California started moving to those other states. And everybody's calling me going, how the hell did we do, deal with this? Well, we've been dealing with it for 30 years. But everybody else thought that they were bulletproof because they didn't have that sort of influx.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, they want, it's just funny.

• 39:16Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to get political.

• 39:17Speaker 07

  But really.

• 39:21Steven Rinella?

  But, well, there's like, okay, this is a humongous issue, but it would be that people move from left-leaning states to right-leaning states and then want to then turn them into the states they left. In a little bit, not totally, but in a little bit of a mentality, like you come and you're like, I cannot believe these rednecks are allowed to hunt mountain lions.

• 39:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 39:43Steven Rinella?

  I need to fix this.

• 39:44Speaker 07

  You know, the amount of people that we saw during the 127 campaign on the mountain lion deal in 2024 versus the amount of people that we hear talking about this that are completely 100% animal rights extremists, often say in their testimonies and their op-eds and their public engagement, I didn't know this was going on. If I did, I would have stood up sooner. And I'm like, you're 77 years old. You've been in the state for 44 years. You don't have a clue of what the hell's going on on something. And now all of a sudden it's tragic because you heard somebody's killing mountain lions or somebody's managing fur bearers.

• 40:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but it shows the depth of their knowledge.

• 40:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, which is very shallow.

• 40:20Steven Rinella?

  About this last week.

• 40:21Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 40:21Steven Rinella?

  And it's not going to stay in.

• 40:22Speaker 07

  No, no, and they don't know anything about it, except for what somebody told them.

• 40:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 07

  If you look at the testimony that these people put out, and not to get off on a tangent, but they all say the exact same thing. They don't have an opinion for themselves because they've been told to say this, this script, this bullet point, this is what you say. And they get up and they repeat it over and over and over. And I'm like, it's like deja vu. It's like Groundhog Day. They, they don't say anything new because they don't have anything, except for what somebody told, told them to say.

• 40:50Steven Rinella?

  How do, how do people, how do people find, I guess, generally about ballot initiatives? We always joke about where they must go to get signatures. Like, you know, you might, you go to, I could, I could think if they go to Whole Foods, you can picture a guy with a little table set up.

• 41:06Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:07Steven Rinella?

  Out front.

• 41:07Speaker 07

  And that happens.

• 41:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So how do people get the signatures? And how do people find you if they want to join the ballot, if they want to join the signature?

• 41:16Speaker 07

  Well, and honestly, in your, in your waiting room out here, I was answering emails that people wanted to be able to get signature packets. And so they can become certified through the Secretary of State. It's about a 20-minute deal. You've got to take online.

• 41:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 41:27Speaker 07

  Once you get that, they can reach out to me, or they can go to savecoheritage.org, which is the website for the international order process that we're doing.

• 41:37Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:37Speaker 07

  You can actually get certified and have packets to be able to turn around and distribute. And you can't get, it's not like a statutory ballot initiative. This is constitutional.

• 41:46Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  So we need the signatures, 2% of each of the signatures need to come from 35, the 35 senate districts that we have. So you have to go to the smallest communities and the largest places to get 2% of the voters in those communities.

• 42:00Steven Rinella?

  Hawk, can you say that again? I got confused.

• 42:01Speaker 07

  Okay, so it's probably because of the way I explain it.

• 42:04Steven Rinella?

  No, as soon as I start hearing numbers, something happens in my head.

• 42:07Speaker 07

  So if there's, if there's 10,000 people in a senate district.

• 42:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  You gotta have 2% of the signatures from that senate district.

• 42:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 42:15Speaker 07

  For a constitutional amendment.

• 42:17Steven Rinella?

  So you, you'd need to walk away. How, how many districts make up Denver, Fort Collins?

• 42:22Speaker 07

  It's about 11, 12 in that general vicinity.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  You need to get 2% of all those.

• 42:27Speaker 07

  2% of all the registered voters in each one of those districts.

• 42:31Steven Rinella?

  Damn, really?

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, but if you go to a senate district like on the western slope, it might be very broad and very vast, but there's less people there. So when people keep asking us, well, I, I haven't seen anybody around. Maybe those districts have already fulfilled the threshold. And so you won't see somebody there. They try to get the farthest way, way ones first, and then concentrate on the ones that you know you're gonna have to have, you know, 35,000 or 60,000.

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  You could have some guy out in eastern Colorado just kicking ass, but after a while it's not doing any good.

• 42:58Speaker 07

  Doesn't do any good.

• 42:59Steven Rinella?

  He's like, I signed up the whole county.

• 43:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. All 12 of them. And, and pretty soon you're, and you're one, and that's, that's the frustration because people don't understand.

• 43:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 07

  If you go statutory, you can stand out literally in front of one Whole Foods in downtown Denver and get whatever you want. That's what Cats Aren't Trophies did, our friends, back in 2024. It wasn't constitutional, it was statutory. So they could get all the signatures out of Denver if they wanted to. They didn't have to go to these other rules.

• 43:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 43:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  That, man, see, this is. That's something I had ever understood. Okay, so where do you need, where do you feel you need signatures?

• 43:35Speaker 07

  Well, the hardest places are gonna be in the Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins areas. Just because of the vast amount of people that you've got.

• 43:43Steven Rinella?

  And you got a lot of people on the ground there doing it, or should you be calling for? Like, should you be calling for guys to go do that 20 minute thing and get the packet?

• 43:52Speaker 07

  No, we're, we're asking people to do the 20 minute thing and get the packet. And the main reason is.

• 43:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay, by God. Can, uh, can you bring in non-residents to collect signatures?

• 44:02Speaker 07

  That's carpet bagging.

• 44:02Steven Rinella?

  We should go down there and.

• 44:03Speaker 07

  That's carpet bagging.

• 44:04Steven Rinella?

  Knock up some doors.

• 44:05Speaker 07

  You carpet bag down there? Yeah, we can carpet bag down there. It's just that you have to be, you, you, you don't have to be a resident of the state to get the signatures. You just have to be a resident, registered voter to be able to sign them.

• 44:15Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 44:15Speaker 07

  And because there's canvassers, they call them canvassers, the petition gathers that come around and travel around the country. This is what they do. So we have a roughly.

• 44:22Steven Rinella?

  Like guns for hire.

• 44:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:24Steven Rinella?

  We should go canvas.

• 44:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. You know.

• 44:26Steven Rinella?

  It'd be fun.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  I know where I'm gonna. I know where I'm gonna put you though.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  On the Boulder campus.

• 44:35Speaker 07

  Right down on Pearl Street.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  You could, you could do a meat eater live deal down there.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  I'll go to a Rockies game, you know? So if someone wants to become a signature collector and they're not one of these roving guns for hire. And they're just a, they're just a person out there looking to do the right thing. They, they do what? They come find you?

• 44:54Speaker 07

  No, they, they, they can send an email to us through saveththehuntcolorado.com. They can also get on that other website. Save CO heritage.org. Uh, put your name on there for contact. Uh, they can reach out. We will send them the proper information to where they can go get certified.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 07

  They get certified, they come back. I mean, that, the certification deal is kind of a, it's a weeding out of the, the unwillful. You know, everybody wants to do something until they find out there's an effort to it. It's like, yeah, I gotta sign up for a test and I gotta, the Secretary of State knows who I, who I am and where I live and. They know that anyway. It's just that now you're actually putting your, your mark on your preferences and so forth.

• 45:31Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  So you get that, you turn around, we'll put you in touch with the canvasser coordinator liaison organizer. And then she's been doing very. Very good of being able to just turn around and say, okay, you got your certification. Here's your packets. This is what you need to do. The certification actually came into place in December of 2025. It didn't. It used to have to do that.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:51Speaker 07

  But there's a volunteer position that you can sort of, that you can get the signatures on. Or there's a paid level to where this is a business. And for X amount of dollars, and I don't know what the current number is, but X amount of dollars that for every signature you collect, you turn around and get three bucks or five bucks or $27 or whatever the heck it is. If it's $27, there should be a lot more people out there, but you know, most circulators that you see in front of King Supers or Whole Foods, they'll have a table set up. And they'll have maybe five different petitions for different ballot initiative. This is their job. I mean,

• 46:26Speaker 04

  See, I always associate the person collecting the signature with sort of the, that's what they want to happen, but they could be indifferent to this.

• 46:33Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, they're just, they're just money.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  There are some states, there are some states where you're required, if you're paid, you're required to tell all the signers that I'm a paid.

• 46:44Speaker 07

  Right.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Like, like different political transparency laws in different states require certain things of these, these canvassers, but it's a whole network.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Hmm. It's a complicated process and, and while I don't.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Sounds like, well, I don't want to call it crooked, but it's not a crooked process, but I, I just surprised. I just feel like it's gotta be true believers out there getting those signatures.

• 47:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, and see what, going back to 2024 on the cats aren't trophies campaign. They were having a hard time getting their volunteers to get the necessary signatures. There was a, an agreement made by Governor Polis with the oil and gas industry about a ballot initiative. And the oil and gas industry backed off, so they didn't employ the signature gathers anymore. And those signature gathers were looking for a job and they cut the price in a half or 75%. And went over to the fricking cats aren't trophies people and said, hey, we've got these people available. You couldn't pay $20 like what we were doing before. That's why the oil and gas industry was there. But now we made this deal. We'll do this for X amount of dollars and cats aren't trophies could be able to come up with that money.

• 47:46Steven Rinella?

  Wow, man.

• 47:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's racket.

• 47:49Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 47:49Speaker 07

  And it's a good racket for people that are in it for a business because they're really good at it.

• 47:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 07

  But other people are like, I don't want to stand on the street corner in a hailstorm trying to turn around.

• 47:58Steven Rinella?

  Oh, getting in all kinds of arguments with people and stuff, yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's, and we have a tremendous amount of ballot initiatives coming up that people are trying to get signatures for to meet the deadline. And there's some stuff I'd look and I'd like, I don't want to argue with those people on that stuff. I argue with enough people. I don't need to stand on the side of the road with a clipboard.

• 48:15Steven Rinella?

  So let's move ahead. You get, let's say you get all this, you're gonna get the signatures.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  We're gonna get the signatures, yeah. There's no doubt in my mind.

• 48:21Steven Rinella?

  We're getting the signatures.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:23Steven Rinella?

  Uh, how do you think the election's gonna go? Has any, has any constitutional right to hunting fish been beat at the ballot box?

• 48:31Speaker 07

  Not to the best of my knowledge. There's been some that have not made it through the initial thresholds on legislative issues because of differences between the House and the Senate in a particular state or something. But when it gets on the ballot, I mean, the overwhelming majority of the general public agrees with legal, regulated hunting methods for wildlife management in a manner to the point where, I mean, Florida passed by, I think, sixty-seven percent, and they needed sixty. The difference was, like on Cats Aren't Trophies when we did the deal in our state statutory, you needed fifty plus one percent. That's why the wolf deal passed, because it was statutory.

• 49:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 07

  We need fifty-five percent to meet that maximum, the minimum threshold on the constitutionality.

• 49:12Steven Rinella?

  It's gotta make it a little easier dragging the anglers into it, too.

• 49:16Speaker 07

  Oh, tremendously. Yeah, especially in a place like Florida, because there's a hell of a lot more fishing down there than there is hunting.

• 49:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  But in Colorado, I mean, we've got roughly a million sportsmen and women in the state of Colorado. And my, my song and dance is, if you know anybody that hunts and fishes around the country, you need to turn around and get them to support this on their social media or outreach or something, because this is something the international order wants to do nationwide.

• 49:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 07

  And if they can get done with Colorado and accomplish that, make it the twenty-fifth state, or pretty soon you'd look at maybe, maybe Arizona, maybe New Mexico. They're talking California. They're talking Nevada.

• 49:52Steven Rinella?

  I, I, I met a guy in Nevada who's pushing for it, and he's adamant. And people keep telling him, don't do it this way. He's adamant that he wants to go for hunt, fish, and trap. And they're telling him, man. You're you're you're you're clouding the waters. He's like, but I I I if he pulls it off, I think it's a stroke of genius.

• 50:14Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:15Steven Rinella?

  But some people are like, you gotta keep it hunting fish, write it in such a way, write it in such a way that it covers what you want. But once you throw the word trap in, they're like, it just is gonna get harder.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:26Steven Rinella?

  But he's he the guy I met, and I don't even know how serious he is about it. He is a he's a lawmaker, state lawmaker. He wants to go for hunt, fish and trap. And he's like, I'm not, he don't want to leave anything unspoken.

• 50:37Speaker 07

  Well, and there's there's something that needs to be mentioned, too, because this talks about traditional methods and and legally, it talks about the the traditional methods that are legal at the time of passage. So when people keep coming out and saying, we're gonna get bear hunting back, not through this, you're not. We're gonna get trapping back, not through this, you're not.

• 50:53Steven Rinella?

  I see, I see.

• 50:54Speaker 07

  The trapping amendment in nineteen ninety six, amendment fourteen, was a constitutional amendment. Initiative ten, which was the spring bear hunting, hounds, bait and everything in ninety two, that passed by sixty nine to thirty one percent. That is not, this is not going to bring that back.

• 51:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 07

  Now, if you want to go back and try that after this is an effect, but anybody that believes that you're going to get that stuff back by putting this into place, th- those laws precede this.

• 51:20Steven Rinella?

  This is protective of what you have now.

• 51:22Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. And if we want to go back down that road at some point in time, you won't be able to hunt wolves with this. It does not give you that privilege to be able to do so.

• 51:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's not like, hey, go hunt anything you want, you know, the rest of your lives and.

• 51:33Speaker 07

  I've had guys, I've had guys come up and say, well, I can kill a bighorn sheep. And I'm like, if you draw a tag, yes, you can. You know, it's it's not. And, uh, you know, a guy from guy from Mississippi comes up and has one point now, and then he wants to kill a bighorn sheep, and he thinks this is gonna open it up. It's not. This is very strict, and it's very sideboarded. It's got blinders on it, and there are laws, rules and regulations that adhere to this. It still gives the agency the overwhelming authority to be able to manage our wildlife resources in perpetuity.

• 52:03Steven Rinella?

  Excellent.

• 52:04Speaker 07

  It's good.

• 52:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 07

  Everybody needs it.

• 52:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Man, good luck on that.

• 52:08Speaker 07

  We're trying. We're trying to do everything we possibly can. Money is the deal.

• 52:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Everybody needs to turn around and figure out a way to help every other state on the money side. Um, I already gave the websites and stuff, but if, if you don't mind, I'll give a plug real quick.

• 52:20Steven Rinella?

  Please.

• 52:20Speaker 07

  The, the raffles that we're doing, that we've got going, the big one, is on the Hill Ranch. Uh, the deadline for that is the 12th of June, but it is a tag that non-residents cannot get through the draw. This is the only way you're going to hunt this unless you pay an exorbitant fee.

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  What is it?

• 52:39Speaker 07

  It's, it's 34 points to be able to get on that if you draw through the Ranching for Wildlife Program through the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Draw. Nobody's going to draw that.

• 52:47Steven Rinella?

  For what?

• 52:48Speaker 07

  Elk. Elk. Yeah. For Elk on the Hill Ranch. And it's, I mean, it's, we, we, we encourage people to-

• 52:54Steven Rinella?

  And that money goes to you guys for this fight?

• 52:56Speaker 07

  Every single thing.

• 52:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh dude, I'm doing it.

• 52:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, and, and then we've got a fishing trip up in-

• 53:00Steven Rinella?

  Tell, tell me how I go do that again?

• 53:01Speaker 07

  So you can go to SCIColorado.org.

• 53:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 53:06Speaker 07

  For that. And that, we've got stuff on Instagram and Facebook. Uh, but Bobby and Dottie Hill at the Hill Ranch contributed to this. This is, this is where the buns of the big guys hunt. This is where they do a lot of their filming.

• 53:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 07

  And, and this is an opportunity that everybody should take advantage of because you're just not going to find it. This is Lorenzo Sartini. He commented when we did the Go Hunt Podcast and he said, "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to get on this ranch."

• 53:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:32Speaker 07

  And so that's, that's, there's the fishing trip and that one there combined on the same deal, SCIColorado.org.

• 53:37Steven Rinella?

  It's raffle.

• 53:38Speaker 07

  The raffle.

• 53:38Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I'm going.

• 53:39Speaker 07

  Drawing is, drawing is June 15th?

• 53:41Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to win.

• 53:43Speaker 07

  What?

• 53:43Steven Rinella?

  I'm feeling my bones.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, we gotta get, we gotta get buying tickets here.

• 53:47Speaker 07

  You get buying tickets and if, if you do that, you gotta come, if you, if you win, you gotta come down and collect signatures.

• 53:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 07

  Deal.

• 53:55Steven Rinella?

  All right, Dan Gates, thanks for coming out, man.

• 53:58Speaker 07

  Appreciate your time.

• 53:58Steven Rinella?

  Keep us posted on the fight. We're here to help get that thing on the ballot and we'll be plugging away on it.

• 54:04Speaker 07

  We got a ton of information coming down to Pike and you seem to be interested in Colorado stuff anyway because it's always flavorful.

• 54:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. It's just close. You can smell it from up here. Brody spent many a good year down there. Jan, you lived down there, so yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  What's the signature deadline again?

• 54:22Speaker 07

  Signature deadline is August 4th.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  August 4th, yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 07

  And then, once we get that, then it's going to be certification and after that, it's full-blown election cycle, just like what we've done every other time.

• 54:31Steven Rinella?

  All right, I'm buying them tickets.

• 54:33Speaker 07

  Okay, appreciate your guys' time.

• 54:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man, appreciate it.

• 54:35Speaker 07

  Thanks.

• 54:37Steven Rinella?

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

• 55:17Steven Rinella?

  You need credit to buy, well, pretty much any big thing. So, how do you get started? Easy. The OnePay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. OnePay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans. And the OnePay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit. Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones. Buying a new car, or a new house, or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the OnePay Builder Card. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 56:14Steven Rinella?

  Cold mornings spent outside and long days of hard work can really take a toll on your hands. Whether you're outside cleaning fish, digging around in your garden, or grinding through a long day of your day job, your hands take a beating. That is why. O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream is an essential part of any daily routine. It provides guaranteed relief for extremely dry, cracked hands with a concentrated, unscented formula designed to deliver serious hydration where it's needed most. Here's the best thing about this stuff. It doesn't leave your hands all greasy. I've been using it. It's like, I've always looked for sort of the right hand cream. My hands get kind of cooked at our place up in Alaska for some reason. This stuff, you put it on and your hands are ready to work. Your hands

• 56:56Steven Rinella?

  are not greasy. They're not slippery. It works really good. A little goes a long way. Making O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream effective, dependable, and economical. For hands that work hard every day, it's great to have something that works hard for them. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It really does really work. Keep your hands hydrated, comfortable, and smooth all season long. Visit O'Keefe'sCompany.com. That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S Company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works for real. Speaking of initiatives and petitions and whatnot, we just touched on that thing in Oregon where they're fixing to, there's a ballot initiative coming out to, it'll never

• 57:41Steven Rinella?

  in a million years pass. A ballot initiative that would ban ranching, rodeos, that would ban hunting, okay, it'll never pass. But they got the signatures to put it on the ballot and Oregon's governor, Tina Kotek, came out and publicly announced her opposition. Is it worth playing the video?

• 58:03Speaker 06

  We can, we can play the first.

• 58:04Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  So she's getting a lot of calls.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  Hi, Oregon. Governor Kotek here. After hearing from concerned Oregonians, I want to take a moment to be very clear about where I stand on IP 28. I oppose it. Criminalizing activities like hunting and fishing would be wrong for Oregon. I know tribal leaders, family farmers and ranchers and Oregonians

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Across the state who care deeply about protecting our land, waters and wildlife. This petition does nothing to help them and it risks criminalizing common agricultural practices that are critical to Oregon's economy.

• 58:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, keep playing.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 58:44Steven Rinella?

  Cause there's a little, there's a little.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  You told me to stop it there.

• 58:47Steven Rinella?

  There's a, no, no, no, no, I did not. No, I did not.

• 58:49Speaker 05

  After the, sorry.

• 58:50Steven Rinella?

  Keep playing.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  After that.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  I believe that we can have an honest conversation about responsible conservation and animal welfare.

• 58:57Steven Rinella?

  Pause.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Without attacking.

• 58:59Steven Rinella?

  That's, there's a little like, you're watching it and you're like, hell yeah, go woo. And then she does that, sure, we could have an honest conversation about animal welfare.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's got.

• 59:13Steven Rinella?

  What does that conversation look like?

• 59:15Speaker 03

  She's got to acknowledge a certain segment of demographics in that state.

• 59:19Steven Rinella?

  She's throwing, she's throwing a little bone.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:23Steven Rinella?

  But still, thank you, governor. Thank you, thank you. Okay, on the national wildlife refuges. Lot of news. Yeah, this gets tricky. Lot of news.

• 59:37Steven Rinella?

  I almost want to stop it. No, we're doing it.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  Can I start by saying the headline that I saw?

• 59:42Steven Rinella?

  Please.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Okay, we'll lead into it with this.

• 59:44Steven Rinella?

  Then I'm gonna do, then I'm gonna do the whole.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like this will give you a place to start.

• 59:49Steven Rinella?

  Please, please.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Um, I got a text from my buddy last week or the week before. With a headline that said, Trump creates 92 million acres of hunting and fishing access.

• 1:00:00Steven Rinella?

  Yes, okay.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  And then there's the Times headline.

• 1:00:03Steven Rinella?

  Yes, then there's the Times, okay. During Trump one, during the Biden administration and during Trump two, we have been witness to, we have seen a general relaxing.

• 1:00:20Steven Rinella?

  Of hunting and fishing regulations on certain federal lands.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  Which create opportunity.

• 1:00:26Steven Rinella?

  Trump won, picked it up where they would look and be like, well, why can't you fish here? You know, let's, I'm just pulling out an example, not a concrete example, but a loose example would be like, let's say there's a, there's a waterfowl refuge that hosts, uh, where, where birds spend on their migratory journey. They're, they're spending time there in the winter, but someone realizes that for some reason you can't fish there in June. You know, and there's, there's no birds, right? So they said, well, why can't you fish there in June? And so they would open up and they'd say, you know what? There's no real reason you shouldn't be fishing there in June, so we're going to increase these opportunities. Trump one started it under Secretary Bernhardt, that's, that started up.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  I think Obama, Obama did.

• 1:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Did Obama do something? Okay. Biden did some. Trump two, though, has announced the biggest one. Like this is the biggest one. So just to give you a little fact about it, okay? This, there's a press release the Interior Department put out and here's some lines. I'm going to give you some lines from the press release. This is from the Department of the Interior. Okay. So lines such as, "The Department of the Interior today announced major actions to expand hunting and fishing access across lands and waters managed by the department. The actions include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's proposed largest expansion of hunting and fish,

• 1:01:45Steven Rinella?

  hunting and sport fishing opportunities in agency history, alongside National Park Service actions to remove unnecessary hunting-related restrictions across national park system units where hunting is authorized by law." That's an important thing, where authorized by law. Now, but just, just, this is coming from me, not the DOI. Before anyone gets excited here, we're going to be throwing around national park system units, but just trust me.

• 1:02:16Steven Rinella?

  We're not talking about hunting in Yellowstone or Yosemite or whatever, not, not these big marquee national parks.

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  This isn't National Park Derangement Syndrome.

• 1:02:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, these, yeah, these National Park System units, okay? So we're not talking about, no one's hunting Yellowstone, no one's hunting Yosemite. So put that out of your mind, all right? Back to the DOI. Together, these actions reflect the department's commitment to expanding responsible access to America's public lands while maintaining strong conservation stewardship and aligning federal management with state wildlife frameworks where appropriate. Okay? There's a quote from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. He says, "America's public lands belong to the American people and they should be able to access them without unnecessary bureaucracy standing in the way."

• 1:03:08Steven Rinella?

  We are, he goes, Burgum goes on, "We are expanding opportunities for hunters and anglers, reducing duplicative restrictions and making federal land management more practical, consistent, and acceptable." Okay? And they go on to say, here, I'm gonna throw some numbers your way. They're proposing to open or expand, now you got, here's, all this stuff is where the words start to matter. And this, this is good, I'm not saying this is good news, but let's just look at it in a measured way. Open or expand more than 1,450 hunting and sport fishing opportunities across 111 stations in 32 states.

• 1:03:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay? Sounds huge. It's good. It's good. First off, let's define opportunity. When they say, "Open up an opportunity," what they mean is, "Open up an opportunity for a specific species on a specific unit." Okay? So there could be a place where, for whatever reason, and this would be, this would be a totally normal example of something, that there's a refuge where you're allowed to hunt, um, you're allowed to hunt big game, you're allowed to hunt waterfowl, you're allowed to hunt upland birds.

• 1:04:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, drop that one because of the example I'm going to use. I'm making my own thing confusing. You're allowed to hunt wild pigs. You're allowed to hunt deer. You're allowed to hunt waterfowl. But for some reason, it was closed to alligator hunting, but all of the surrounding areas are open for alligators.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  The state, like.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  The state allows alligator hunting in all the surrounding areas, but for whatever reason, the refuge was closed. If you then make it that, you can hunt alligators at a specific time of year in a place where you couldn't before. That is counted as an opportunity.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  And let's say there was 10,000 acres on that refuge. That adds 10,000 acres of opportunity to hunt for alligators.

• 1:05:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And likewise, let's say there's a 10,000 acre refuge and historically you could hunt alligators on 9,000 acres. And they open up the remaining 1,000 for alligator. That would be bing.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:05:24Steven Rinella?

  An opportunity. They don't split hairs on fish. Okay? So fish is like fishing on, fishing off. They like, meaning if you could fish bass and all of a sudden they're like, hey, now you can fish crappie. They're not calling that an opportunity.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:38Steven Rinella?

  So they're not trying to inflate the numbers by doing weird little things. They treat a fishing opportunity as fishing, right? But they would look at if you open up big game hunting where it wasn't previously done, that might create multiple opportunities.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Or they might even do it where it's like you could hunt grouse and you could hunt some other upland bird, but you couldn't hunt pheasant.

• 1:05:59Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  And now they're allowing you to hunt pheasant there. So now that whole 10,000 acres where people are already hunting grouse and other upland birds, when they add pheasant, that's 10,000 acres added to that total.

• 1:06:10Steven Rinella?

  Hey, 10,000 acres.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Another example, I think it's not specific to species.

• 1:06:15Steven Rinella?

  I got millions, I got millions of examples. Go ahead.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  But like I used to run into this in Nebraska where you would go to a national wildlife refuge to hunt deer. When you get there, it says non-toxic ammunition only.

• 1:06:29Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I got a whole segment on this.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Okay, go ahead then.

• 1:06:33Steven Rinella?

  Thank you though.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Jumping the gun.

• 1:06:34Steven Rinella?

  And again, you got excited. I get excited all the time.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  This is all good stuff, but it's nuanced as much as I hate to use the word.

• 1:06:42Steven Rinella?

  It's good news. It's good news, but it's not as good a news as some people want it to be. They're not. And some people want it to be bad news.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  And some people.

• 1:06:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay. This is new though. This is, this is the new part that's interesting. Okay. The Department of Interior's new perspective is this. When it comes to lands under their management. Consider it open. Unless otherwise. Used to be historically was considerate closed. Unless otherwise. So they're, they're, they're flipping. The sort of philosophical angle at which they look at these not, hey, convince me that it should be open for alligators. It's, you'll have to convince me that it shouldn't be open for alligators. It's just flipping how they look at it. That's big. Right?

• 1:07:36Steven Rinella?

  Here's an overstatement.

• 1:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Uh, there's an organization that comes out and says that the proposal would make more than 90. No, they're all, sorry. Not a, this is not an organization.

• 1:07:49Steven Rinella?

  The proposal itself, the Department of Interior itself says the proposal would make more than 92 million acres. Or more than 95% of national wildlife refuge system lands available for hunting. It's important to point out. That it would be that around 91.6 million are.

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Already.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, but you look at that, you'd be like, my God, where are they finding 92 million acres of land open up? What they're saying is with these additions, the number jumps to 92 million from somewhere around 91 point something million.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Steven Rinella?

  But it's a little.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  It's, it's all in the presentation.

• 1:08:30Steven Rinella?

  It's a little misleading. Um. I'd have to check where this came from. SCI. Was feeling that it was going to open around 2 million acres of new open or expanded lands now expanded or open for hunting. I think that the other organizations have looked at that and I think it's probably about a few hundred thousand acres, not 2 million, but a few hundred thousand, which is a ton. That these expansions and openings will affect and create opportunities on a few hundred thousand acres.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and getting rid of the kind of like red tape or like confusion around regulations is huge too.

• 1:09:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. The New York Times, and I'm a New York Times subscriber and reader, I get a lot of great news from the New York Times. I read a lot of different things. I intentionally guard myself against bias by reading, I recognize that all things have a bias, so I just read things that I recognize the bias on one side and I read things where I can recognize the bias on the other side. And I don't pretend that there's a flat line of no bias. This show, there's no bias on this show.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:42Steven Rinella?

  No, this is the only non-bias news source out there.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:46Steven Rinella?

  The news show. But the New York Times pointed, they looked at this and they tried to find the weirdest things, the most alarming things they could find.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  This will be good.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  So they do nothing to point out like all the, you know.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Common sense.

• 1:10:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like the fact that there used to be places where you could hunt invasive hogs all around an area, but you couldn't hunt them on the refuge even though like, why would you not be able to hunt the invasive hogs on a refuge, trying to get rid of the hogs? Anyways, instead of pointing out those things, they point out like that there's a new rule that would make it that you can clean, then they're like, good lord, according to this, you'd be able to clean fish in the bathroom. This is in the New York Times. We're still trying to figure out what this is talking about, but like, it would open up the cleaning of.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  At a very, at a specific refuge.

• 1:10:36Steven Rinella?

  I think that that sounds like good news.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Steven Rinella?

  But they found it to be very alarming, this idea that somewhere, was it in Louisiana?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  I forget, but it's like one specific refuge. Those restrooms are now open.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  They are now closed for fish cleaning. And I'm like, if you know what's going on with this, please write in there. There is obviously more to the story here. But the New York Times has read it to be that now they could clean fish in the bathroom. But there's some story here that I don't know.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  If I walked into a bathroom, somebody was in there cleaning fish, I'd be like, huh? And then I'd go to the bathroom.

• 1:11:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, take a leak. I'd be like, what'd you guys catch? And if it was little kids, if it was kids.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Steven Rinella?

  I would go, boys, make sure you clean that up.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:21Steven Rinella?

  Cause you're gonna get someone all pissed off. Just make sure you clean. Nice fish. Nice fish.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Steven Rinella?

  Just clean that up.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  The Lake Meredith National Recreation Area in Texas, specifically you can clean fish and game in the bathroom.

• 1:11:33Steven Rinella?

  There's more to the story. If someone down there can write in, tell me why this is a thing, please let me know.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Cause it's in every article about this.

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  I'm all for you cleaning fish in the bathroom, scaling them on the toilet seat.

• 1:11:46Steven Rinella?

  I'm joking, but there's gotta be more to the story. New York Times also pointed out that there's like a place in Colorado where you can now shoot from or across trails.

• 1:11:58Steven Rinella?

  Without mentioning that you can always shoot from or across trails on all national forest land in wilderness areas. Like if you're walking down a footpath and you see a deer, you don't have to step across the footpath. It's not unusual. And again, I don't know the specifics of the area, but that in and of itself is not unusual because on any national forest land, when you're out there, you're, there's designated marked trails. There is never rules about shooting from trails. Roads, yes.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's just like, I just see that as like a typical example of a disconnect from a New York Times writer.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Someone saying, yeah, I wish, I was pointing out to someone today, I wish, uh, Jim Robbins has written the article. But yeah, cause it's meant to be, people are meant to read it and go like, good lord.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Steven Rinella?

  The world's coming to an end. Um, and it might not. Okay.

• 1:12:55Steven Rinella?

  Now, we've shot down, okay, we've talked about extremes on both sides. There's the, there's the extreme that, good lord, they're gonna, there's gonna be hillbillies cleaning fish in bathrooms. And, and there's gonna be people shooting from trails. That's terrible. Two people kind of like, a little bit overstating.

• 1:13:14Steven Rinella?

  The benefits here, and the benefits are many. Like, let me give you an example.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  There is a 4,300 acre complex of, uh, prairie and wetland in central Montana. Okay.

• 1:13:30Steven Rinella?

  It used to be called the Half Breed NWR. It's now Grass Lake National Wildlife Refuge. All right. Um, it was previously closed, so 4,300 acres, flat out, 4,300 acres was previously closed to all hunting. Not no more. So that is a straightforward opening of hunting opportunities on 4,300 acres, like, like, like, from off to on.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  And that's the problem with the na- like, na- the name National Wildlife Refuge. Because a lot of people hear that name and they're like, how could you ever allow hunting on a wildlife refuge?

• 1:14:06Steven Rinella?

  It's all over the place.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  I know, but it's like.

• 1:14:08Steven Rinella?

  You can hunt, you can hunt virtually all of them.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  A lot of people are, don't, like, it's just a problem with that name.

• 1:14:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:14:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh, Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge. Here's another one. 6,000 acre property. It was established in 1990. Okay. Its purpose is to, um, its purpose is to restore and protect Tall Grass Prairie and Oak Savannah.

• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Steven Rinella?

  Previously, so it's, it's, it's Tall Grass Prairie and Oak Savannah, but for some reason, previously, you could not hunt waterfowl or upland birds. But you could hunt some big game. You can now hunt birds and waterfowl on 6,000 acres that you previously could not. So that's just flat out, that's good stuff. Okay? It creates first ever hunting or sport fishing opportunities at 14 refuges and three fish hatcheries. Another thing it does is it, sometimes you'll have regulatory rules. Here's Brody's lead thing.

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  I think I'm on the lead thing now. Sometimes you'll have regulatory rules that apply in all the surrounding lands, but they'll be a little bit different on the refuge and it can create confusion. So where they can, where possible, they're taking away refuges having seemingly arbitrary restrictions that sit alongside the regular state restrictions that govern all the surrounding lands. For instance, there's a, there's a location where, there's a refuge location where, for some reason, Sunday hunting was prohibited. And it didn't conform to the surrounding lands. Okay.

• 1:16:06Steven Rinella?

  That would be a thing this could take care of. You have hogs, which are an invasive, exotic, deleterious species. You have nutria, which are an invasive, exotic, deleterious species. There's some refuges where you used to be able to hunt them part of the year, you'd now be able to hunt them year round. Okay. At Padre Island, you'll see an expansion of hog hunting opportunities. For some reason, there was a refuge where you weren't allowed to hunt from tree stands. But in the surrounding lands, you were allowed to hunt from tree stands. That tree stand ban would be lifted.

• 1:16:48Steven Rinella?

  Also taking a look at areas where refuges have different rules about lead, shot shells, and fishing tackle. Okay. So they're looking at, and all this stuff is open to public comment. The public comment period runs through June 26, I believe.

• 1:17:07Steven Rinella?

  Let me make sure that's right. June 26th, public comment period ends June 26th. So you can go chime in about all this, right? But there's some refuge lands where they have banned lead fishing tackle. I understand a waterfall refuge land, I understand, well, you can't use lead for, Right. You can't use lead for waterfall federally. Okay. But let's say there's refuge land, waterfall refuge land where you can hunt pheasants. And you're allowed to hunt pheasants with lead and the refuge would say, because it's a waterfall refuge area, we want you using non-toxic shot for pheasants. The conversations such as that, I'm totally open to. But the not, the lead thing has even moved over to fishing tackle, which I'm skeptical of.

• 1:17:51Steven Rinella?

  Banning lead head jigs, banning lead sinkers. I, I have a hard time accepting that you would ever accumulate any kind of meaningful quantity of lead head jigs and lead sinkers. I, I, it's just, it's tough for me to accept. Lead shot, I get it. I get it, get it, get it. Lead fishing tackle seems a little extreme. Anyways, revisiting lead restrictions in Indiana and on refuge land in Indiana, revisiting lead restrictions in Maryland, revisiting lead restrictions in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maine. Okay. And other places. So

• 1:18:34Steven Rinella?

  big news, biggish news, huge news, huge news. If you live next to one of these places. It might be somewhere out there, some lucky fella. Um, some lucky person who all of a sudden realizes that all of a sudden now they have, you know, next door, down the road, hour's drive away, 4,000 acres of new waterfall hunting opportunity opened up. If so, congratulations. Um,

• 1:19:01Steven Rinella?

  with all that, the final caveat I want, not the, oh caveat I would like to add is

• 1:19:08Steven Rinella?

  there will be situations where that there will be situations where you're going to have to have restrictions in order to make the refuge make sense.

• 1:19:19Steven Rinella?

  You know, there, there's a refuge in this state that hosts a, you know, there, there's a refuge in this state that hosts tons of migratory waterfowl. You can't hunt it in the fall. You can hunt around it and it creates phenomenal waterfowl hunting around it. If they were to come in and say, "Hey, you know what? Anybody can hunt at any time." And all of a sudden, guys are zipping around in boats.

• 1:19:43Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna, you're gonna negate the quality, you're gonna negate the purpose of that refuge. Right? So I don't think it should, it shouldn't be like all regulations need to go away. But when we're talking about the ones that aren't compromising the core mission of the refuge, I agree, let's get rid of the unnecessary regulations. If it winds up being that it's, that, that the restrictions create the core mission of the refuge, like providing a sanctuary for migratory waterfowl, which then drives phenomenal waterfowl hunting opportunities all around the region, because you have safe roosting ground, keep it. Don't throw it out. It's like, they, they should be doing wildlife conservation on these lands, but agreed,

• 1:20:24Steven Rinella?

  they shouldn't be doing arbitrary, unnecessary restrictions because someone decided 20 years ago that they could.

• 1:20:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Good job, Steve.

• 1:20:39Steven Rinella?

  Thanks, man. I'll try.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  It's a sprawling topic.

• 1:20:44Steven Rinella?

  It is. Yeah. Some of these topics are so big, you're hesitant to get into them.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  I dug up an old press release for one of these announcements because it's, they, you know, like annually, they make these and, and this one is formatted in a way, it says, "This rule opens the following refuges to hunting for the first time, colon, and then it says it, and then it's, they, they do it in a much easier to understand way."

• 1:21:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  It says, "Expand migratory big game bird hunting." And then the next sentence is, "This is already open to game bird hunting, migratory game bird hunting."

• 1:21:15Steven Rinella?

  Hey, man, you kind of lost me there.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  I think, like, there's so much information in these announcements, the way that it's presented, you have to really dig in to wrap your head around it.

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And it makes you almost want to not talk about it because it's so complicated.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. It's like, do you even touch it? Because it's just sprawling.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  Just go check the regs for the National Wildlife Refuge near you.

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  Sorry to deflate deflate the strong ending to your segment.

• 1:21:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it did end powerful, didn't it?

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Steven Rinella?

  And then you kind of chimed in and kind of ruined it.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  I was trying to get the banner going again because I feel like we quieted down.

• 1:21:47Steven Rinella?

  The work stands.

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, stands on its own.

• 1:21:51Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech 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 weather tech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right?

• 1:22:35Steven Rinella?

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• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 1:23:12Steven Rinella?

  When you're outside cleaning fish, working in your garden, or just grinding through a long day of work, your hands take a beating. Dry cracked hands can be brutal when you need to get work done. Or keeps working hands hand cream. Get your hands back and work in order. This stuff is the greatest stuff in the world. Like most hand creams, you put them on and then you're all kind of greasy and slimy and you can't grab stuff. You put the stuff on, your hands are ready to get back to work. It absorbs fast, creates a barrier to lock in moisture and doesn't leave your hands greasy at all.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  Do yourself a favor. Next time your hands feel like dried out fish scales, get O'Keefe's Working Hands. I'm telling you, this stuff is amazing. Go to O'Keefe'scompany.com to get yours today. That's O K E E F F E S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works good.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Uh, would you like to tell us about what you're going to tell us about? Uh, are we going to do the Texas mountain lion? Did I skip something?

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Oh, just real quick.

• 1:24:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Uh, we discussed Texas, um, having this outlandish idea that you'd have to report your mountain lion harvest. A lot of people got worked up about that. We talked about people getting worked up about it. I kind of explained my take on it. Well, the proposals is withdrawn. If you are a Texan who does not want to tell any government official that you got a mountain lion, rest easy. You will continue to not tell.

• 1:24:44Speaker 04

  You will be able to continue to be able to not tell. Your little secret. It'll be your little secret because they withdrew the proposal that you should tell.

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  All right. On to more, uh, federal news here. Uh, President Trump signed an executive order on May 29th that rescinded two longstanding executive orders, uh, which guided federal management of off-road vehicle or off-highway vehicle, uh, use on public lands. And these are two, again, he rescinded two pre-existing executive orders, one from Nixon, one from Carter, that were sort of the framework of, of how the federal government manages vehicle travel.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Is this, correct me if I'm wrong. This is tied to when you get to a trailhead and you see those little signs? And they'll have like a jeep with a X through it.

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  And it'll say, or there'll be a horse and that's okay. And a dude and that's okay. And.

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So, so the, the first executive order that got rescinded, uh, was Nixon and he ordered the heads of public land management agencies to develop regulations and policies to designate where you can use motorized vehicles and where you can't. So he's basically, he basically just said. You need to plan for this and it outlined what they should consider when designating motorized routes. Soil damage, watershed impacts, vegetation, minimize harassment of wildlife and minimize conflicts between different user groups. And part of that order is that in developing these regulations that the public has to have a say.

• 1:26:29Speaker 04

  So it's, it's follows like the public, public process. The second order that was rescinded came from Carter and that basically stepped up what Nixon had laid out and he empowered agencies to issue emergency closures when motorized vehicles are causing damage to a resource. So they don't have to, you know, that doesn't have to go through a full planning process, but when there's considerable adverse effects to the resource, the agency is empowered to shut down that motorized route. And it also, we were just talking about how on refuge lands in respect to hunting and fishing and they're closed unless open and they're moving towards open unless closed.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Right. That was sort of what Carter put in place with this executive order that, that routes are closed to motorized traffic unless designated as open. Hmm. So that's out the door. The argument behind the executive order rescinding these two prior orders is that it was too vague. These are too vague and they put unnecessary restrictions on access to federal lands. They want to reduce regulatory burden and increase public access and they, the administration says that NEPA, which is the National Environmental Protection Act and the ESA provides sufficient framework for managing motorized vehicle use on public lands.

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  They also make a point here that I thought was interesting. They say that restrictions on motorized vehicle use amount to de facto bans on hiking and other forms of recreation that require accessing remote areas, all while doing little to benefit multiple use of public lands. So again, this is one of those, one of those things where you have to read past the headlines because there's folks on both sides that are either cheering or criticizing this. It doesn't open up the floodgates to just drive your vehicle anywhere you want on, on national parkland or national forest land or anything like that. It's kind of

• 1:28:42Speaker 04

  hard to predict what the exact results will be. But those executive orders that were rescinded created a framework for rulemaking. And so doing away with them doesn't get rid of the rules that resulted from that.

• 1:28:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  It just means that in future, travel management planning, things of that nature, it's, it's going to look different. And it's important that people keep a close eye on what's going on there.

• 1:29:08Steven Rinella?

  I give that a big old boo dude. I don't like it.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Steven Rinella?

  I always say, man, I think, call me crazy.

• 1:29:16Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:29:17Steven Rinella?

  I just don't think we're going to run out of roads.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:29:20Steven Rinella?

  I don't picture a future where people are like, dude, what happened to all the roads?

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  You can't go nowhere now. It's like what we're going to run out of is places that don't have any roads. That's what we'll run out of.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's something like, I saw this statistic that there, at the end of World War II, there were 100,000 miles of road in the national forest system.

• 1:29:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  In 50 years, that quadrupled.

• 1:29:50Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  And at this point, we have 10 times as many miles of Forest Service road as we have in the interstate highway system.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  It's, it's damn hard to find a place in this country, like in the lower 48, where you can walk five miles without hitting the road.

• 1:30:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Real hard.

• 1:30:08Steven Rinella?

  But people act like it's just like that they're just locked out. It's like, dude, this road's a lord damn place. You ever been up in a, like, well, one, you've been out driving around? Or two, should you ever be coming into some airport? Look out the window. I just, they're just everywhere I looked, this is a road.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Steven Rinella?

  We got one right here up against the office.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:30:26Speaker 04

  And it's important that like the, the travel management planning that is meant to mitigate the impact of recreational use of these places. Like that doesn't affect, the agencies can still use those closed roads for fire suppression and all that stuff.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  Um, the minute I saw this headline without even, you know, I understand it better now. The minute I saw the headline, my initial feeling was that ain't good. Yeah. Cause I know like, I know the secret conversations happening. Do you remember years ago? Years ago, we, we interviewed Rob Bishop.

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:01Steven Rinella?

  Congressman Rob Bishop from Utah. Um, and it was, it was not right when, but the word access was becoming a real buzzword.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:11Steven Rinella?

  You know, it had always been, but people were really narrowing in on access, access, access. And when people in my circle are saying access, we were talking about, um, being allowed, right? Opening up new lands where you'd be allowed to hunt fish or maintaining.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Steven Rinella?

  Or maintaining access to public lands. And that if people wanted to sell public lands, it would reduce access. So we're like, oh, I'm pro access, meaning I'm pro having these places where you can go. If he, those, this must've been seven, eight years ago. He was shrewd enough to say, oh, I'm pro access.

• 1:31:52Steven Rinella?

  We need more roads. And I was like, oh.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, I mean.

• 1:31:56Steven Rinella?

  That kind of.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  The people who are kind of anti wilderness area, like that ain't the kind of access they want.

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  They'll talk about, there needs to be access to that. And you're like, well, hey, I'm pro access. Tell me more. And it's like, well, what I'm talking about is roads.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Steven Rinella?

  We need roads.

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  And like Randall, in your research, you may have come across, I don't know, but like the, the, the kind of back room conversations, like is this?

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  Setting up.

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Oh, like, is it setting up? Opening everything up to roads for development of one form or another?

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  No, and I didn't, um, you know, I saw suggestions not only in response to this immediate news, but I saw reports from a few months prior that suggested the administration is looking at overhauling or doing away with travel management planning. I, I looked as best I could for any sort of official communication of that, and I didn't see any, uh, but taken in hand with the roadless rule rescission and.

• 1:33:04Steven Rinella?

  I was just gonna bring that up. There's no question what they're gunning for here because they want to repeal the roadless rule.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  And so I think like my takeaway from this was it's not the end of the story, right? There's a next move because what this does isn't necessarily clear for in terms of on the ground impacts, but I did, I did talk to Cal and he said, you know, no mistake about it. It, this is a serious thing that happened and, um, he says, you know, whenever you talk about access, it's always a trade off between impact on the resource and access, you know, no matter if you're talking about a hiker, a biker, a, a side by side, whatever else. Like when you talk about putting more people on the ground and more places, it always is going to have an impact on the resource.

• 1:33:52Speaker 04

  So it's not like a, a conversation you can have in absence of the other conversation.

• 1:33:57Steven Rinella?

  I want to do a terrible analogy on some of these things. We brought it up when we were talking about the M44 devices.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:04Steven Rinella?

  Where, let's say you tell your kids, don't even ask me.

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  If you can go spend the night at your friend's house, I'm not open to even, there's a prohibition on you even asking.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:34:21Steven Rinella?

  Right? And then one day you say, I'm open to you asking.

• 1:34:27Steven Rinella?

  They might be like, sweet. Yeah. But I still have to say yes or no. So some of these things, what they're doing like on the M44 thing. It was, don't ask. Don't even ask. Now it's like, okay, we're open to you asking. Yeah. Right. But you still don't know what, how the decisions are going to end up being made. So some of these pieces like this say like, okay, we're, we're removing the absolute ban, but it's still case by case. Mm hmm. Right. How bad was that analogy? Like on a one to 10?

• 1:34:59Speaker 04

  No, I, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's fair because it, this is something that signals future action.

• 1:35:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 04

  And, and you can guess what that future action is. And from where I'm sitting, it's not good.

• 1:35:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like my kids, if I said, okay, I'm open to the question. Yeah. It's, that's good news for them. Mm hmm. If you're a dude that likes to hot dog around in the woods. Yeah. Um, off trail or whatever, or on like seldom used trails and like to burn it up. You could probably read this as good news, but it doesn't, it doesn't immediately mean anything to you yet.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I like, I wouldn't take my dirt bike and just rip across the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, thinking that I'm off the hook there, but.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  I read the news.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  I read the coverage in the Times that said he's opening all public lands to do whatever you want, but I mean, I do like, you know, it's, it's one of those things. It's like, you know that they're not doing this for no reason, right? Like there's a longer play in mind. And so, um, you know, the groups that, the groups that stand up for roadless areas are, they are waving the red flag at this point.

• 1:36:10Steven Rinella?

  Um, it's making me nervous.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's making me nervous too.

• 1:36:14Steven Rinella?

  I'm excited about those, I'm excited about those new fishing and hunting opportunities on the refuges. And this is making me nervous.

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  You'd be able to drive right to those new opportunities.

• 1:36:22Steven Rinella?

  You know what's making me hungry is these new lake trout records.

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  These don't, these don't get eaten. Um, yeah. So out of Minnesota, Lake Superior. This is going to be a record fish thing. That's about real fish, unlike Spencer.

• 1:36:38Steven Rinella?

  Unlike Spencer's bullshit reporting. Yeah.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Um, so.

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  West Virginia, I love you.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Uh, Phil, can you pull up the number one photo?

• 1:36:46Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Uh, okay.

• 1:36:49Steven Rinella?

  My.

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  That gentleman's name is May Joe Buddha.

• 1:36:53Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

• 1:36:55Steven Rinella?

  What's his name?

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  May hyphen Joe Buddha. B O U T A.

• 1:37:02Steven Rinella?

  Jedi Knight, dude.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  On May 9.

• 1:37:04Speaker 06

  It's like something Jaba would say, "May Joe Buddha."

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  On May 9.

• 1:37:06Steven Rinella?

  May Joe Lake Trout.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. May 9th, uh, Lake Superior, this year.

• 1:37:11Steven Rinella?

  Holy cow, look at that fish.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  Forty-five and a half inches long. Now, that fish was landed, vertical jigging, in approximately a hundred feet of water.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so jealous. Are you serious?

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  Fifteen minutes to bring it to the net, and it's certified as the most recent Minnesota catch and release, uh, lake trout record.

• 1:37:33Steven Rinella?

  Look at that thing.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Estimated to be about...

• 1:37:35Steven Rinella?

  Gorgeous fish, man.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  Estimated to be about thirty pounds.

• 1:37:39Speaker 04

  I, um... I hate to do this. I hate to do this.

• 1:37:42Steven Rinella?

  Then don't.

• 1:37:42Speaker 04

  I wanted to find the spelling of May Joe Buddha.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  You might have had a transposition error where you deleted that it was caught on May 9th and you deleted a nine and a comma before it said Joe Buddha of Benson.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Well, he's known as May Joe Buddha now because he catches records in, in May. That is what happened. I like May Joe.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  Mr. October.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  That's awesome. Um, now, you should be thinking, "Wow, that's a great fish," right?

• 1:38:07Steven Rinella?

  Joe Buddha.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay, less Star Wars-y, but still.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  Salt of the earth.

• 1:38:12Steven Rinella?

  Goddamn fish.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  Yes. Um, okay, so...

• 1:38:17Steven Rinella?

  What a beautiful fish.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  What a beautiful fish. That fish beat a record that was caught a month ago on Lake Superior. That measured forty-four inches long. Pull it up, Phil.

• 1:38:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh! Oh, my gosh!

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  Not as, I mean, it's the good old days.

• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  Forty-four inches long.

• 1:38:35Steven Rinella?

  That dude was fishing on a nice, calm day, man.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Also caught... In Minnesota, Lake Superior.

• 1:38:41Steven Rinella?

  Look at that thing.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  That was the catch and release state record for like two weeks. Um, here's the thing, both of those fish were caught. Th- these guys were clients of a guide named Ethan Whiteaschek. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Um, he's got a, a business called Lake Superior Jigging Guide Service.

• 1:39:02Steven Rinella?

  He gets right to it with that name.

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:04Steven Rinella?

  He ain't trolling.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Yep. Uh, they're out of Twin Har- Two Harbors, Minnesota. Whiteaschek focuses on using electronics to find large lakers and catches them by vertical jigging with two ounce lead, lead head jigs with a white tube tipped with smelt.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh my God. That's just like makes me.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  So you're probably thinking this, this.

• 1:39:25Steven Rinella?

  Wrong thing in life, dude. I should have been that guy. What's his name?

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Ethan Whiteaschek. Now, listen.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  Son of a bitch.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  It doesn't end there. Last year, Whiteaschek guided Isaiah Bartlett to what was then the state record catch and release lake trout.

• 1:39:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh my goodness.

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  Isaiah Bartlett.

• 1:39:48Steven Rinella?

  Look at the heads on those things. That is a fish.

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  And the year before that, Whiteaschek guided Kelsey Vanderhayden to the state record catcher, release, uh, lake trout at forty two and a half inches.

• 1:40:03Steven Rinella?

  Look at that thing.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  My goodness.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Now, you might be thinking this guy's just catching the same fish each year, but I don't think that's.

• 1:40:10Steven Rinella?

  That's a big body of water, dude. He's got some good electronics if he's finding that same fish.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Like this guy knows what he's doing, man.

• 1:40:19Steven Rinella?

  Dude.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Um, the, and, uh, so Minnesota, like a lot of states, keeps traditional state records, which are based on weight. You gotta kill the fish and bring it to a certified scale. These are catch and release records and there, there's like a. You're seeing this in more and more states that have this category for anglers that want to let the fish go and not kill it.

• 1:40:42Steven Rinella?

  What's this company's name again?

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  What's, what's that?

• 1:40:44Steven Rinella?

  What's this company?

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Jigging Wal.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Lake Superior Jigging Guide Service. He's getting, he's gonna get a lot of calls.

• 1:40:52Steven Rinella?

  Dude, he, those fish, man, he's gonna be getting calls because you go out, that dude dropped, man, you want to talk about fun, man, two ounces of lead, hundred feet of water.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good practice for halibut fishing.

• 1:41:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  Um, so for catch and release record, you need multiple photographs that clearly show the fish being measured, a witness who can sign their name, and the fish has to be at least one quarter inch longer than the existing record. So, uh, these fish met all those qualifications.

• 1:41:20Steven Rinella?

  They don't want to be splitting hairs on that shit.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  No, no, especially with catch and release stuff since you can't, you know, you don't have the fish that right there. Um, Lake Superior has like been a traditional, uh, big giant lake trout fishery. Um, and this just shows that it's, it's still going on, which is like a lot different than other great lakes that have had trouble with lake trout fisheries. Lake Erie, where I grew up, like there's hardly even any lake trout left there. I'm not sure where Lake Michigan's at.

• 1:41:51Steven Rinella?

  They, they came, they, they came back good in Michigan.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  They did come back, yeah. Um, but the, the reason why Lake Superior is so good for lake trout is extremely cold, deep water with abundant forage fish such as ciscos and smelt. Like to grow a lake trout like that takes 30 to 40 years, I think.

• 1:42:09Steven Rinella?

  Man, you put that, you just picture that sucker into smoke or just that fat dripping off there, man. I'm glad he threw him back. That's cool.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  So, the, the one guy, he had the record, but only for a couple of weeks and, and now it's, it's, it's May Joe Buddha's record now.

• 1:42:23Steven Rinella?

  May Joe.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thanks for pointing that out, Randall, because I did not, I, I feel like that's a weird name.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Well, then I want to go back to the guy that, the, the, the West Virginia guy, he said bleeding is temporary, his state record is forever.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  Not if you're lake trout fishing with Vertical Jigging Guide Service.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  Um, I should have had a picture of Ethan, but I'm sure you can, you can find a picture of him, the actual guide. Um, so yeah, good news out of, good news out of the Minnesota side of Lake Superior.

• 1:42:54Steven Rinella?

  Hell, yes. Please subscribe to the Meat Eater Podcast YouTube channel. If you're watching, if you're seeing this happen on a video screen, go sniffing around down there and hit subscribe. If you're listening, driving around in your car or whatever, hit follow wherever you listen so that this show gets served up to you every week and so you can keep up on all things going on outdoor news. Thanks for listening.

• 1:43:50Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44:34Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:17Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45:59Steven Rinella?

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• 1:46:21Speaker 00

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