Ep. 899: Jim Heffelfinger, The Deer Preacher

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Jim Heffelfinger about: the Rompola mystery; lead poisoning from ammo; CWD impacts on humans and deer; the future of Mule Deer; and did wolves fix Yellowstone? Follow Jim on Instagram @cervidnut https://www.instagram.com/cervidnut/ Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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• 1:14Steven Rinella?

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• 1:23Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45Steven Rinella?

  This is gonna embarrass you, Jim, but you know how I'm gonna introduce this?

• 1:48Speaker 04

  I can't imagine.

• 1:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna say, "Joined today by the smartest man in the woods, Jim Heffelfinger."

• 1:58Speaker 04

  You're lying right off the bat. You're lying.

• 1:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay, how about this? Joined today by the most well-informed man in the woods, Jim Heffelfinger. Thank you for coming in.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  It's great to be here.

• 2:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If listeners of the show know that rarely does an episode go by when someone doesn't say Heffelfinger was telling me, or Heffelfinger wrote in to explain, or Heffelfinger is mad about blank, because he, like I said, he's the, he's the smartest, most well-informed man in the woods. And when we're talking about stuff, he likes to tell us where we, where we hit and where we miss. And Jim comes on, you've been on, I don't know how many times, this is maybe your third, fourth

• 2:35Speaker 04

  This is my fifth.

• 2:35Steven Rinella?

  Fifth time for the regular podcast, yeah. And what we do is we work up a bunch of things that we're going to talk about and we agree that, and we agree on what we're going to cover and we're going to cover a bunch of those today. We're going to talk about, um, we're going to talk about Jim's thoughts and current research on a thing that we've brought up in the past is like, if you eat wild game meat, is the lead gonna get you? Is the lead gonna kill you? We're going to talk about this thing that pops up now and then that, um, if, that, that the argument that

• 3:12Steven Rinella?

  by having more predators on the landscape, we would see a decline in chronic wasting disease. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a thing you might see pop up in the news now and then, trophy cascades, particularly in the context of when wolves came back to Yellowstone National Park.

• 3:30Steven Rinella?

  People came up with all these sort of fantastical ideas about the trophy cascades that occurred in the park, thanks to wolves. We're going to talk about javelina getting their due.

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  We're going to talk about some ungulate stuff, but the first thing we're going to talk about is the rumpola buck. Now, first I want to clarify a thing. I, and I grew up near where, I grew up south of Mitch, but, but my father had, my father had met him, had known him, had handled some of the deer he'd killed in the past. He used to measure bucks for like commemorative bucks in Michigan. And somehow I had in my head, I for years have said rumpala, but, um,

• 4:12Speaker 04

  that's a, that's a lure, rappala.

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

  Cast and rock, get cast and rappalas.

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  Rumpola.

• 4:23Steven Rinella?

  We're working on a project, Jordan Sellers, who you might know from Blood Trails, is working on a podcast about, we're doing a series, a long awaited series that I've been talking about for a million years on the Rumpola buck. And for those of you that just tune in for the first time, I'll try to keep it brief, but officially, officially, the biggest buck ever killed by the hands of man was killed by, in Canada by a guy named Milo Hanson. But shortly after that buck was killed, a buck that would have beat Milo Hanson's buck to become the all-time world record typical whitetail was arrowed

• 5:07Steven Rinella?

  by a guy named Mitch Rumpola and then withdrawn from consideration. So we're doing a mystery series on is the buck real or not? Which side are you on, right? And so I've been, we've been wanting to interview, we've been wanting to interview Heffelfinger about this buck, because you have, you spend a lot of time on antlers and antler growth and deer and everything. And one of the questions I want to ask you about, and this will be included in the series, but just to kick it around, is one of the things that people

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  point out is that where this buck got killed in northern lower peninsula of Michigan is a place that does not make big bucks. They don't have, they don't make Boone and Crockett, like God does not make Boone and Crockett bucks in the Grand Traverse Bay area of Michigan.

• 6:13Steven Rinella?

  What do you make of something like that?

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've, I've heard that and I'm not an expert on, on the whole Mitch and Paula buck. I remember when it came out, you do around the Midwest. I grew up in Wisconsin. So it's right next door and, and remember all the chatter about that. Never paid much attention to it. Came back to it more recently and helped Jordan out with the, with that series. And just from a basic standpoint of can a monster buck like that come out of nowhere? And, and I, I think it can, you know, it's a matter of, it's a matter of likelihood. Always when you're, when you're thinking about that sort of thing, but I've seen cases in Sonora and the desert Southwest where you get, you've get a drought condition where all of the antlers are a little stunted that year from nutritional restrictions. And then

• 7:00Speaker 04

  out of nowhere, there's this giant desert mule deer and you just wonder, how did he do that? And antlers are secondary sex characteristics. They, they only get the extra nutrition after the body gets what it needs. And then it can throw off some, some extra nutrition to the antler growth. And so, and when they're nutritionally stressed, they don't throw that out. And sometimes you'll get a buck that who knows why, but found some good nutrition or has some kind of genetics that is able to better deal with kind of the environment. And you can get a monster out of nowhere. That, that's not a reason to discount it. When you're talking about this case.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  Another thing we're, we're looking into in this series, and it was, it's an observation that, that another whitetail freak had made. And, and I can't remember the number, but, but this, this whitetail enthusiast was saying that one problem with the Rhombola buck, it's too perfect. And I can't remember the number, but let's just say, I don't remember, let's just say at 190 inches, let's say 190 inch whitetail. He's like, once a deer gets that big, go find me an example of a perfectly symmetrical buck that's that big that doesn't have kickers.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  They're there. I mean, examples are there. I looked at the, because it was Michigan, I looked at the Michigan State records and the number two and the number seven buck in the Michigan State records is, actually, this was not Michigan State records, it was a Boone and Crockett records, but only from Michigan.

• 8:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  The Boone and Crockett records from Michigan. Number two in Michigan, number seven in Michigan, are in the 180, 190 Boone and Crockett range, and one has one inch and five eighths deductions, and the other one has two inch and change deductions. So you can get these bucks in that range that are almost perfectly symmetrical. So again, it's not a reason to discount the buck just because it's symmetrical.

• 8:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So what's your gut on the whole thing?

• 8:57Speaker 04

  I, for a while, thought, he probably just wants his privacy, doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't want the fame, but having the world record shot with an arrow, it's, that's a tough thing to overcome, that he would tell everybody about it, show people in the back of his truck, talk to some media, and then within a day or two, shut up for three decades. There's something, something strange. And one thing, I don't know if you want any spoiler alerts, but one thing I talked to Jordan about was the way that the bases, the pedicles, they come out at an unusually wide angle.

• 9:36Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  So you can have wide bucks where the antlers come straight out. You see those in South Texas all the time, but those pedicles really seem to come out like on the side of the head, kind of odd to me. And one of them actually, in the photo, and there's not many photos, one of them actually looks a little, like a little different orientation than the other one. And I wondered aloud to Jordan, whether in past years, something could have happened to that skull and cracked it a little and healed it and, and made those pedicles orient a little more. Now, if it, if, if he had done something with the skull and cracked it, those antler tines wouldn't be straight up. They would be out because he, he bent it out, but they're not. They're straight up in that buck. But if that, something happened

• 10:18Speaker 04

  to that skull in the past that widened those pedicles out, cracked it and re-healed, which there's cases of that, and then subsequent antlers, the tines would grow straight up, no matter what the orientation was.

• 10:28Steven Rinella?

  Let me interrupt. Will you pull up and put on this screen up here, shot of the round pole buck?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  So I've just wondered, and this is all speculation because we, we don't know, there isn't any evidence that it's a legitimate buck. And there's no evidence that it's not a legitimate buck. So we're all speculating. It's just all speculation. So as long as we're speculating, those pedicles, if that skull was damaged somehow and the pedicles were wider and then subsequent antler development made those tines go straight up, it would account for that. I mean, it's a theory, but it would account for kind of the unusually wide pedicles coming out of that skull. And I find it strange that he talked to the media for a day. He showed people the buck. It was apparently solid antlers. Other people saw it in the back.

• 11:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's guys, there's, yeah, there's a lot to this. There's a lot to the, the solidness of the, are you able to do that or no? Go on.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  So, so then I wonder, why was he talking to the media and talking to everyone? And then got home and skinned the buck and shut up for three days.

• 11:29Steven Rinella?

  There it is.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Now, when I look at the, the deer's left pedicle, right? When you're looking at it, but the deer's left side, it looks like that, that base is coming out a little lower to me. It could be the angle of the camera, it could be anything, but it comes out kind of in the back of the eye, like the eyes lined up with it. Whereas on the other side, the eye is below the pedicle. I was looking at that, that asymmetry in that and wondering if something didn't happen to the skull. There's even kind of a divot in the middle of that skull. I wonder if something didn't happen and then it regrew normal antlers, but it would account for that wide width. It's funny that he showed everybody, he talked to the local media and then got home and skinned it and shut up for three decades. Why was that?

• 12:16Speaker 04

  And then when they went back to measure it.

• 12:18Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you, you're familiar with all the like wild theories.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. One of the wild theories being, and I've sat on both sides of this thing and I, and I don't want to do too much, like we're, we're really, we're doing a lot on this. Okay. But one of the wild theories is people have looked at the ears, the, the difference between the way the ears lay, the difference between the positioning of the eyes. You can see it all here. We got it pulled up. Coloration issues, right? And a theory, a theory is that.

• 12:58Steven Rinella?

  He skinned that head back and put that rack on. He had made that rack and he installed that rack on that buck.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think he could have fabricated. He doesn't, there's no evidence he has any experience in doing any of that sort of thing. And, and he, he's shot a lot of big bucks. So it wasn't unusual that he would shoot a big buck. So I'm, I'm leaning more towards that it possibly being a legal harvest, but maybe not eligible. And he knew that. And so he would rather just be quiet and, and have it be a mystery.

• 13:28Steven Rinella?

  Not eligible because the skull plate was cracked?

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Possibly. That's, that's the theory. But he came home and then, you know, he was somewhat of a taxidermist. And when they came to measure the buck, he had it almost fully mounted on a shoulder mount.

• 13:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  He had the cape on it. He had the, if you look at the pictures of them actually measuring it that day, the skull plate's covered by fur. And he left, apparently he left the back open. There's no photo of the back that I've seen. He left the back open so that they could inspect the skull plate. But from the photo that I look at, the whole skull plate's covered. They could only, I would guess, see the back of the skull plate. So how would they be able to evaluate if something was funny with that, that middle suture where the bones come together? That would be covered from what I see in the photos, it would be covered.

• 14:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, stay tuned, folks. This, it's gonna be good, man. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the project.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  The theories is all I'm doing.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  No, it's great. It's great. Keep, keep them coming. And then again, we've done, we've done people like, we've called out looking for people that have any kind of information. And of course, that, that offer always stands. Let's jump to the next thing now, man. Is that, are hunters all gonna die from lead poisoning?

• 14:37Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't think they have been lead poisoning. I mean, you don't ever hear in the medical profession about one of the dangers of lead exposure is eating game meat shot with lead ammunition. The medical profession doesn't seem to know about this, apparently. But all of the bird, all of the bird enthusiasts are all concerned about hunters' health and, and what they're feeding their children.

• 14:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let me, let me set this up a little bit.

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  You probably remember when this happened. It was some years ago.

• 15:08Steven Rinella?

  Scattered around on the internet, there'd be all these photos where they were doing like x-rays of deer carcasses that had been shot by rifles. Okay. And you look at these carcasses and you see that that that those bullet fragments really scatter and travel around. They do. And so you'd see, you know, let's say it's a x-ray of a deer's rib cage, scapula. And you can see the the area where the bullet hit. But then you'd see all these little bright spots and they're metallic fragments that were, I guess they could get in the vascular system and move a little bit. They kind of explode outward and move a little bit. And it and that, among other things, really got people talking about the impacts of

• 15:51Steven Rinella?

  lead consumption. Because as you know, there's all this stuff about child development and like you hear about like whatever kids eat in lead paint, lead pipes, leaching water into into lead. And California is very staunch position on, you know, all the lead warnings. You can't buy anything that doesn't come with some lead warning for California. You buy a lead headed jig and it's got a warning about how the lead headed jig is going to kill you. So there's definitely like an alarm, a sense of alarm about consumption of lead. But it carried over into this idea that that there's all this lead contamination out there and game meat. And you even now will see instances where a state might say, we're no longer accepting venison donations because of the risk of lead. It's well documented

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  that, well, maybe you'll counter this, but it's well documented that raptors, the most commonly excited example being California condors, can get lead poisoning from eating game meat killed by lead bullets. That seems to be scientifically accepted. Yep. And so it jumped to, well, it must be bad for us too. Right? Yep. Yeah. Let's let me ask you like a series of questions. Okay. What's your take on?

• 17:09Steven Rinella?

  Your personal take, the scientific understanding of like Raptors.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:15Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Do Raptors, is it accepted in your mind, is it accepted that Raptors die from lead exposure, from eating hunter killed deer carcasses?

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Yep. At the individual level, lead can be really, really toxic to Raptors. They have a different, and birds in general, they have a different digestive system. And, and so Raptors are very susceptible. They can get even a small fragment of lead when they're feeding out an animal that was a carcass left in the field, or an animal that was wounded, a quail that was hit with, with lead shot.

• 17:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  And then it wasn't retrieved. If they get a little bit of lead in them, it, it, it can make them sick and it certainly can kill them. So at the individual level, it's very dangerous. The problem is when you scale this up and say, is this really a conservation issue that should force hunters to switch to a non-lead ammunition? And, and you look at the data that we have available, there is a population level effect of accidental secondary lead ingestion by Raptors from, from ammunition. But what I encourage people to look at is not just the fact that there's a population level effect, but what is the magnitude of that effect? Is it a serious issue from the population level? And when you look at research that's been done, there were seven northeastern states.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  They looked at eagles ingestion, they did some modeling and they determined that the having, using lead ammunition on the landscape dampened the bald eagle population growth rate by four to 6%. So bald eagles all over the country are just rocketing up. They're doing really well.

• 18:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  Record numbers, trajectories going up. Their models showed that that trajectory upward would be dampened 4 to 6% if we use lead ammunition in those seven northeastern states. So I encourage people to think, is that a serious conservation concern that everybody in those seven northeastern states should switch the kind of ammo they use so that bald eagles can increase 4 to 6% faster than they already are? Golden eagles, it was less than 1%.

• 19:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Effect. Another research and another completely different project in the West looked and found that golden eagle population growth rate was dampened by 0.8%, so less than 1% go effect on golden eagle population growth rate. And so when you look in Europe, they did studies on 22 different raptor species. If you average the effect on 22 different raptor species in Europe, which had just announced a ban in Europe on lead ammunition.

• 19:42Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Just yesterday, I saw that.

• 19:45Steven Rinella?

  Home like an EU ban?

• 19:46Speaker 04

  I don't think it's, I don't know. That's what I asked. I actually asked, is this EU or what? And I don't know. I didn't get the answer. But in 22 different raptor species in Europe, the average effect on the population was that it increased, using lead ammunition on the landscape for big game hunting, increased mortality rates by a half a percent using lead. So if you, if you banned all lead in Europe, the mortality rates would be a half a percent lower for 22 raptor species. So to me, I'm wondering where, where is this giant conservation concern that everybody would need to change ammo? So that's a long, that's a long answer to the individual question, but I think it's important. It's lethal to individuals.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's the number one thing that's inhibiting condor recovery. Condor endangered species, so every mortality counts and they're very susceptible to lead poisoning. So it's a serious issue within condor range. Arizona has a voluntary program where hunters can voluntarily switch to non-lead ammunition or take their gut piles out of the field completely. So they're not leaving anything for the condors. And that has been adopted by 88 to 91% of the hunters in Arizona. So it's a very successful voluntary program compared to other states like California that just have a top-down draconian ban on lead ammo.

• 21:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 22:14Steven Rinella?

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• 22:59Steven Rinella?

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• 23:45Steven Rinella?

  Lead going through a condor's digestive tract is different than lead going through a human being's digestive tract.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:51Steven Rinella?

  Is it something to do with the pH?

• 23:52Speaker 04

  They it's it's pH with the acidic digestive tract. And it's also the they don't have just a stomach like like we do. They have other organs that the the lead pellets and the meat that they eat sit in there a long time to dissolve in that that acidic environment. And it's the length of time that that metallic lead sits in there. So I hope we talk about different kinds of lead. That's an important part.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So what is are you aware of cases? And I feel like I've read these, but I can't remember what happened. Where they'd go in and look at people that have been consuming game meat their whole life and then go try to see like, well, how much this person? How much lead is in this person's system?

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Yes, there's been several studies like that. And it started in North Dakota in 2007. A dermatologist who happened to be on the board of directors of a major major raptor organization. He went into a food bank in North Dakota, grabbed 93 packages, x-rayed them, and about half of those had lead fragments in there. So he sounded the alarm and people have questioned the motives being on the board of directors for a raptor organization. But he sounded the alarm. And so the Department of Health in North Dakota tested blood samples for North Dakota people all over the state. They had 736 samples, I think. And they found that those that said they hunted had twice the lead level as those that didn't. And that spread like wildfire.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Everybody picked that up and said hunters are poisoning themselves. They have twice the lead level. What wasn't reported was that level of hunters, twice the lead level, was about the national average of lead for everybody at that time. It was 1.27 micrograms per deciliter and the national average was 1.25 at the time. And so it was twice the level of non hunters, but it was still below any level that any medical science has shown lead problems in in humans. And in fact, the reality was that those that didn't hunt, because it's probably sparsely populated North Dakota, the ones that didn't hunt had below average lead levels.

• 25:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Because the hunters had about the national average lead levels. There's been that study. I think one of the most important studies on human effects of eating game meat with lead. Comes from a First Nations up in Ontario, where they looked at people during the waterfall season, these communities were eating a lot of ducks killed with lead shot. So they tested lead levels before the waterfall season, they tested them after the waterfall season, they found that that people that people that hunted ducks had a higher blood lead level at the end of the the duck season, because they were eating a lot of ducks. And so they were getting lead pretty frequently in their diet. But what they found out in that study

• 26:33Speaker 04

  was that those that were sitting at the supper table, eating the same meals, but didn't go out on the hunt, had normal, they did not have an increase in blood lead levels. So it was something about actually being on the hunt, that seemed to increase the lead level, not eating the meals, because other people are eating the same meals at the same table.

• 26:52Steven Rinella?

  What does that mean?

• 26:54Speaker 04

  That the the primers in in shot shells and in pistol rounds and rifle rounds, the primers, and here's where we're getting into different kinds of lead, the primers have a different kind of lead that's highly absorbable, it's an organic lead compound in the primers of cartridges. And that that lead compound can be absorbed through the skin, it can be absorbed through your lung tissue by breathing it, that these organic lead compounds that are used in strengthening plastics, clutch shoes and brake shoes and all kinds of different products, waterproofing products, they use these organic lead compounds because it improves

• 27:33Speaker 04

  the product in some way. But that organic lead compound is different than the metallic, the inorganic metallic lead. And so those compounds can be absorbed through the skin. If you give them your digestive tract, you eat something with it on there, that goes right into your bloodstream. Metallic lead, like what might be in a quail, a number eight pellet, or a little fragment of bullet that ends up in your burger, that's metallic lead that goes through the human digestive system 24 to 48 hours, and passes through so quickly, it doesn't have time to dissolve, it's not sitting in there and dissolving. And so that metallic lead occasionally hunters don't Get lead in their system very often, but very occasionally lead coming through the

• 28:16Speaker 04

  system and then leaving the system is not going to elevate blood lead levels like on organic compound, lead compound. And so handling shotgun shells, breathing the gun smoke that has some aerosolized primer residue, picking up your shot shells. I shoot pistols competitively and I'm concerned about when I pick up all my pistol brass to reload it. I'm careful not to touch my face because I know that that has primer, lead primer residue. But I'll hold lead bullets reloading all day long. That metallic lead's not going to come through my skin, but that primer residue with organic lead compounds can. So when you have these people talk about lead is obviously a toxin, they're talking about these organic lead compounds that were in leaded paint, organic lead compounds that were in leaded gasoline,

• 29:00Speaker 04

  all of that stuff that causes these human health issues was a different form of lead. You don't have doctors talking about eating game meat shot with lead ammunition as being a problem, because if you look on the websites for like the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, the American Academy of Pediatricians, you look on their websites, they have page after page of things that you should be careful of. So you don't increase your lead exposure, what kind of ways you can increase your lead exposure. None of those websites say anything about eating game meat shot with lead ammunition. It's just not an issue in the medical profession. With one exception, the CDC had added one sentence a couple of years ago that said, if you're breastfeeding, you may want to limit your, your eating of, of game meat

• 29:45Speaker 04

  shot with ammunition. So, so why is it that the entire medical profession is not warning people about this? But there's a lot of bird groups that are warning people about it. It's because it's, it's the ulterior, it's their ulterior motive just to try to save bird mortalities. But I think we should talk about bird mortalities and not try to use this red herring to, as a hammer to try to get laws changed. And I've seen in Maryland, New Jersey, the full court pressed to ban lead ammunition statewide in some of these states is this human health aspect, which is not really an issue.

• 30:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're, they're thinking about one thing and talking about a different thing.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They, they know that human health and children and lead poisoning will resonate with people and they're getting laws passed with misinformation like that.

• 30:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Steven Rinella?

  It wouldn't be hard to find dudes that just shoot all the time, but never eat game meat. It'd be interesting to look at their lead.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, use me for an example. If you look at a bar chart of different studies have been done with people that eat a lot of game meat with lead and, and, and the more they like, there was an, an Inuit community that ate sea ducks shot with lead. It was a different study than the other one. And, and they asked people how often they eat sea ducks. So how often they might be exposed to lead shot. And it wasn't until you got to the people who ate sea ducks daily or almost daily, that their lead levels were up to a point where over a doctor, 10 micrograms per deciliter, where a doctor normally says, where are you getting this lead exposure from? If you had to eat sea ducks almost daily for that, my lead levels are higher than that from my pistol shooting, from breathing that smoke

• 31:24Speaker 04

  that has some of the primer aerosolized in it, from handling shells. Mine was at 18 at one point, and it's been at 12 micrograms per deciliter. CDC used to use 10 for the safe level. They don't do that anymore. But mine was at 18, 12. And then I started religiously washing my hands after a pistol match and washing my hands really good after I reloaded and handle all that. And it came right down to five and six.

• 31:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you're kidding me.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  So that's where my lead exposure was obviously coming from. And throughout all that high lead, blood levels, when I was at 18, our family has been using nothing but copper bullets since 2009. So I had these high blood lead levels. I've been using nothing but copper ammo at that time for 15 years.

• 32:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  So it's not the lead fragments. And we eat game meat all the time, but it's shot with copper, copper bullets. And then I'm over here reloading, getting my lead exposure. So when they survey hunters versus non-hunters, those hunters are, they're making fishing sinkers, they're reloading, they're shooting, they're doing a lot of other things that are exposing them to the real dangerous sources of lead. And the game meat eating is probably not registering that at all. There's some very rare exceptions. If you eat, if you eat game meat every day and you shoot lead and you're, you've got burger, burgers is more of an issue. Burgers can have 20, around 20, 25% of the packages might have one lead fragment in it, according to some studies.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  And, and hole cuts like steaks and roast, it's only two or 3% have even one lead fragment. So burger is more of an issue. If you're eating burger like daily, if you think you might be getting lead fragments more days than not, and there, there was one guy in New Zealand that was eating meat shot with lead every day and he had super high lead levels. So there's, there's extreme cases of individuals like that, that you see. And another strange case is everybody has an appendix unless they've had it taken out. And that's like a blind sack in the digestive system. And if you're a quail hunter and you've, you're, you're eating a lot of birds, dove and quail, number eight shot, there's been cases where a couple number eight pellets have

• 33:32Speaker 04

  dropped into that blind appendix and then been trapped in there. And it may stay in there for years. And then if it's in there for years, then it's going to start absorbing some of that metallic lead, just because of the length of exposure. Gunshot victims have been shown too, especially for some reason, if it's near a joint, maybe it's a lymphatic system or something. A gunshot victim where they leave a lead bullet in can have dangerously high blood level levels in future years. So if it's metallic lead, passing through your system in a day or two is not an issue. If it's metallic lead that stays in your system a long time, it can be.

• 34:07Steven Rinella?

  Man, when we were kids, we, we had the stuff to pour our own split shot, you know? And we would go down to the gun range, sift the berms out, get the shot out, melt it.

• 34:22Steven Rinella?

  Separate the garbage from the lead, pour the lead into the molds, making sinkers, no respirators or nothing, just doing it right in the garage. And then you spend all day with those sinkers packed in your lip like a chaw.

• 34:36Steven Rinella?

  I always kind of wanted to get my lead tested, but I've never gotten to test it.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I always encourage competitive shooters, a lot of them aren't aware of it, to get it tested because if you're not being careful like I started to washing my hands, it can be an issue. But, but the, the whole issue of eating game meat, when you look at packages like commercially produced, commercially ground venison burger has a higher level. People that grind it themselves, they keep all those bloody scraps out of their burger pile. You know, they're, they're more careful about what's in the burger pile. Personally, until the, the number of fragments in personally ground venison is a lot lower.

• 35:12Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 35:13Speaker 04

  If you do the math on how many meals of venison a family has, a family of four has, and what percentage of those packages might have one fragment that only one person at the table gets, you do the math on it, it's, it's like someone might get a fragment once a month. I did the math for Arizona using some data that we had. And, and maybe once a month, you get an occasional fragment that passes through your system. So if you look at the reality and the science that's there, it's not an issue, but politicians are not looking at any of that. They're not interested in that. Someone tells them that hunters are poisoning their kids and they feel like they gotta do something.

• 35:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Get into trouble with, with laws that don't make sense.

• 35:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:55Steven Rinella?

  CWD and predators.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:57Steven Rinella?

  This is another example of people in my mind, this is another example of people thinking one thing and talking about another. Okay. So you will have,

• 36:10Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to color this, I'm going to color this heavily with personal opinion. Okay. And you can walk it back if you, if you choose.

• 36:20Steven Rinella?

  Predator advocates, of which I sort of count myself as one, but I like, I like, I like living on a predator environment. I like having the animals, all the native wildlife present. I get excited when I see mountain lions. I get excited when I see wolves. I get a kick out of seeing coyotes, bobcats. I'm not like an anti predator guy, but I also am a predator management advocate and I track, we hunt predators, we use fur products. Okay. So I have a nuanced relationship with predators, but I noticed that people that have a view that no, that are absolutists that like predators should not be managed,

• 37:02Steven Rinella?

  predators should not be killed, predators shouldn't be hunted. They probably never think for a minute about CWD. Oftentimes because most of them are not educated on wildlife issues. They don't follow wildlife issues. They're like, they're like predator saviors first and foremost, and they divorce their love for predators from any conversation about wildlife management, about issues of biodiversity. They are pro predator and that's it. It seems like that group, that group of people is all of a sudden now interested in chronic wasting disease. Why? Because they're now saying, oh, you know how I always felt that no one should hurt a predator? Well, check this out.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  This is why.

• 37:48Steven Rinella?

  If there was more predators on the landscape, they'd take care of chronic wasting disease and we wouldn't have any chronic wasting disease because everybody who's seen Never Cry Wolf knows that they always pick the sick animal and eat it. Therefore, we shouldn't have any predator management, any predator control, because I all of a sudden care a ton about CWD. And I would like these predators to eliminate CWD.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  So that's, so that's, so that's exactly what happened. People are laser focused on their favorite toothy animal and they're always hungry for and always promoting any notion of little information that might indicate that, that these things are renovating whole ecosystems. They're changing the course of rivers. They're managing CWD for us. They're curbing climate change and they're just generally saving the planet. I mean, if they, if they can latch onto a piece of information that supports that kind of idea, they run with it. And there's, and there's a ton of reporters in big cities that have no exposure to wildlife that, that don't really understand hunting culture, don't really understand wildlife management

• 39:01Speaker 04

  at all. And they're, and they're very eager to grab those kinds of stories and say, yeah, predators are great. The predators are just going to manage the ecosystem and the diseases.

• 39:10Steven Rinella?

  It's an urban journalist's wet dream, dude.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:12Steven Rinella?

  To see that pop up, you know?

• 39:15Speaker 04

  And that's what happens. It like spreads like wildfire. Well, what, what happened was a number of years ago, quite a few years ago, people doing research found out that mountain lions were killing a disproportionate number of CWD positive mule deer, more so disproportionate from healthy mule deer.

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  And so that-

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  Which I have zero problem believing. Like, like, of course, yeah, makes sense.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. Especially in the later stages of CWD, animals just are unaware. Even in the earlier stages, there's probably cues that predators pick up on that we don't even notice, but animals a little less thrifty, a little less able to get away. Like the mountain lions hiding in the bushes and charges a group of mule deer. If you've got the CWD animal might be a little slower in detecting that flash of fur coming out of the brush. And so there's a lot of reasons why they can be disproportionate.

• 40:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If he's 10% less observant. Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  And it's going to come out. And so people found that these urban writers and, and carnivore cheerleaders grabbed onto this and, and just they ran with it. And so you heard this everywhere. And that was just the first little bit of information. And then later on-

• 40:21Steven Rinella?

  But in that, within that, and I don't have the time to do this, but someone that studies the media, it would have been interesting to go look and say, how interested has this person been in CWD?

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Yep, or a number of topics like that.

• 40:39Steven Rinella?

  Historically interested in CWD or are they just interested today because they just saw this?

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Yep, that and so that bit of information like started spreading like wildfire and everybody started thinking about, hey, and they're just making bold statements about not only like mountain lions are going to control CWD and mule deer, but carnivores are going to control CWD in all the whole, the whole deer family. And so that chugged along and then people started, people started doing some research on that to look into it a little further because that was a number of years ago. And there was some modeling that was done. And if you build a population model and you say, okay, we're going to keep everything consistent, except we're going to have mountain lions kill CWD positive mule deer at a higher rate. Well, guess what happens? They're going to control CWD. It's just a mathematical certainty.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  If you just build a simple model, there's some people that build a, built a real complex model and took a lot of things into consideration. They, they ran a whole bunch of different modeling scenarios. Some of the scenarios, they varied whether, where the predators killed CWD positive animals at a higher rate or at a one to one rate with healthy animals. Other things they varied in the model is like as CWD progressed in an individual deer or elk, does, as soon as it gets infected with CWD, do predators start preying right away at the beginning of the phase of, of infection? Or does it ramp up and they prey a lot more higher predation? When the animal gets sicker and sicker and they could model that into the model and they did that and they varied that.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  And they varied the overall level of, of predation on the animals and they ran these, they ran thousands and thousands of these scenarios. And it wasn't to see if, if carnivores were, were controlling CWD, but it was to look at, under what conditions would they possibly control CWD? And the paper, the research paper.

• 42:29Steven Rinella?

  Can I, can I, I just want to explain a thing real quick that, that's why I make sure people are getting when you're, when you're talking about this is, is um.

• 42:39Steven Rinella?

  Imagine that, okay, imagine you have a whitetail deer and he's, he's, it's a terrible winter and he's starving to death. He's depleted.

• 42:48Steven Rinella?

  But he gets killed by a coyote. But he was probably doomed anyway. What do you call that?

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  Right? Is that, is that winter kill?

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  Or is that predation?

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:58Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me? So, so I get the point you're making is, is, um, as they get, like as an infected animal gets near death, does it wind up being that almost like,

• 43:12Steven Rinella?

  that almost, that the predation event would almost be a symptom?

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  Like a symptom of the disease being, being predated?

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Yep. There's, there's, they call it proximate and alternate causes of mortality. Some of the more recent research is actually assigning probabilities to the different causes of mortality.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Like that was, and, and through modeling, that was like 75% mountain lion predation, 25% CWD. They're actually starting to do things like that. But, but that's true. When you get to the later stages, the animal's probably going to die in the next six months from CWD anyway, because they only last two years, once they get infected. And so an animal takes it out, that's somewhat compensatory between those two mortality sources. But, but they, they did a model that varied all these different things. Some of the model outputs, and the, and the research paper will say predators can control CWD. That would be the result. But then you read the paper itself, and those scenarios where predators did control CWD and kept it at a low level, the, the deer and elk populations were cut in half.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  And so that may not be an ideal situation for people that like robust deer and elk populations. You know, maybe that's not a great thing to, to have that situation. They had other modeling scenarios where predators actually eradicated or almost eradicated the CWD in that population. But the deer and elk populations, they were gone in, in 30 years, they were gone. Like nowhere deer and elk. So they controlled CWD because there was no deer and elk left in the model run.

• 44:44Steven Rinella?

  This is in when you run a model?

• 44:46Speaker 04

  When you run a model. Right. Right. So, so, and so the models are valuable, you know, they say all models are wrong, some are valuable. And they say that because models are valuable because you can look at different relationships of different scenarios. And, and the, the first result they got from that modeling was in that predators could control CWD in a population, but, under certain conditions, but those conditions weren't operating in Yellowstone National Park. And what that was, was predators in the model that showed that if predators preyed on prime age animals primarily, and primarily on infected prime age animals, they could control CWD. But predators aren't in Yellowstone.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Wolves and, and mountain lions are preying on young, and they're preying on old individuals. They're preying on the wrong classes of animals to actually control CWD. So they, in their, in their report, in their, in their paper, they will say predators could control CWD. But, and people will quote that, people will cite that and say, see, they can. But you read the paper and they say, but they're killing the wrong classes of animals to do it. And so you have to, that's nuance that you have to all take into account. But people don't, they'll grab what nugget they want, and they'll cite it, and you have to go to that paper, which most people don't do, and, and read the, the entire paper. Like, they can eradicate CWD, but that means there's no deer and elk left. So is that valuable?

• 46:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 48:31Steven Rinella?

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• 48:50Steven Rinella?

  Whatever the models reveal, I mean, do you feel that it's helped? Like, would you argue, like, let's say you were a man, you were a state agency manager and you were tasked with, or you're like the CWD czar for an animal, for a, for a state agency. You're the CWD guy and like a lever you can pull is how many coyotes around the landscape? And you're looking at all the things you have available to you. Would you go and be like, one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to turn up that, that, I'm going to turn up the coyote dial. I'm going to turn up the lion dial as part of my management strategy.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, because there isn't any evidence that shows that making those, pulling those levers will improve CWD. I'm interested in, in population level effects, not whether mountain lions kill disproportionately kill positive animals. I'm looking at big picture, having carnivores on the landscape. Does that make a difference from having maybe a also robust, healthy population of carnivores, but in, but sustainably hunted, a small percentage of the population? Or compared to having no carnivores? There isn't any evidence yet that shows at a population level that, that changing the management or limiting the harvest of, of coyotes and wolves and mountain lions is going

• 50:10Speaker 04

  to change the CWD trajectory.

• 50:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Where do you sit on CWD these days? It's such a constantly evolving thing. My own opinions, my own fears morph and mature and, you know, all the time. Where are you at? Like just in a very general way, where are you at?

• 50:28Speaker 04

  I'm not solidly on one side or the other. What I think about is, is, and we've talked about it before, I think 40, 50 years of people in the Rocky Mountain states eating CWD positive venison. And they've done a lot of studies to see if there's an increase in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or any other variant that might be related to that. And nothing, they've done intensive research, nothing, no evidence that it's crossed over into humans at all. But when I talk to my wildlife, my disease expert friends, they say, you know, mad cow disease created a variant that went into humans in, in England. And so, yes, we have this decades and decades of proof that it doesn't cross into humans, but it would only take once.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  And so that's why the CDC and most of the disease experts will recommend not eating animals you know are CWD positive. And so I'm, I'm, I'm not on one side or the other. It gives me great comfort to know that we've tested this and it's not crossing a human barrier with a lot of testing.

• 51:32Steven Rinella?

  I know, I've always known I ate a boatload of it without knowing it. But now I ate it. Not knowing it, but I found out after the fact. So now I've, now I've 100% know I've eaten infected meat.

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:47Steven Rinella?

  But I didn't lose any sleep. And in fact, a buddy of mine was there too. I think I told, I don't know if I told you this. I'm at my buddy's house. I'm with a buddy of mine. I take a buddy of mine to another buddy's house. This is a, this is a doctor lawyer couple.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 52:01Steven Rinella?

  And I got a buddy of mine, we go there and he, the lawyer of the couple says to his doctor wife, not to me, but to his doctor wife. Says, heads up, I haven't gotten the results back on this deer. Like he discloses to her. She doesn't do anything. She just eats. So we're all eating it. Eat a pile of it. While later he calls me, he's like, man, I got, I just called you to tell you that I got the results back and it was, you know, it was infected.

• 52:33Steven Rinella?

  And so I was like, I'm gonna call my buddy now and tell my buddy, but I kind of forgot. Not kind of, I forgot, forgot. One day, months go by and this dude calls me. And no, it's text me. And I don't know why it's even on his mind, but he says, have you knowingly eaten CWD positive meat? And I said, I forgot to tell you, we both have.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  Not only that I have, not only have I.

• 52:59Steven Rinella?

  And I expected my phone to ring, no call. So I was like, okay, he's not alarmed. He's not alarmed by it either.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think it has, I mean, it's an individual choice, obviously, but it might have a lot to do with how much venison you have in the freezer. And I go to Texas and I've killed three or four deer just as a shopping trip to fill the freezer full of venison. It's a little harder to get a deer in, in Arizona. And there has been some CDB positive cases near where we harvest those and we haven't been getting them tested. Maybe that tells you something. I haven't been getting them tested at all. Now it's different too. I think one thing that worries me is when you look at kuru, which is another form of this kind of disease, TSC disease. Likes grape and sheep, CWD and deer, crucell Yakub's and humans. There's another human form called kuru. That was found in some tribes in Papua New Guinea.

• 53:50Steven Rinella?

  Papua New Guinea.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  They're eating the brains of their elders as a cultural thing. And they were getting these infectious prions because they were eating brains. They were infecting themselves with this cannibal, cannibalism. Uh, action. And so some of the anthropologists then figured that out and a disease expert, they got them to stop doing that. And and then Kuru went away.

• 54:09Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  But i- if you read the scientific papers, there were Kuru cases that were like thirty and forty years after the person ate the their meal of Kuru.

• 54:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  That that worries me a little bit. So so it's your choice whether you want to feed your kids. I mean, I I'm not too worried about it, but if I had kids around the table, that's a it's a different different equation.

• 54:29Steven Rinella?

  It's too late for mine, man. They're brought up on deer meat. Yeah. Last night, we ate quite a pile of it. Uh, okay, never mind the health, human health. Population level, then we're gonna move on. Population level impacts on deer.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely.

• 54:45Steven Rinella?

  You think you need to see it?

• 54:46Speaker 04

  Documented all over now.

• 54:47Steven Rinella?

  Let's not see it.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Not in question, hasn't been in question for a while.

• 54:50Steven Rinella?

  Big buck impacts, you think?

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, one thing that was interesting is one of the studies in um in Table Mesa, Colorado, um, which I should talk about more, but one of the results they said in there, they had um, they had about forty three percent of the deer had CWD. And they were studying them a couple times through a couple decades. And and after probably twenty years of fairly high prevalence rates, like twenty five to forty percent, they couldn't, in in all of the sixty four deer, I think they captured, they not one of them was over five years old. They couldn't find a buck over five years old. And I thought, they didn't even talk about that much, but that's a symptom of what happens when an animal doesn't live more than two years after they've been infected and they're getting infected early, you're not gonna have an older age structure.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Uh Saskatchewan's got some game management units that are seventy percent positive for CWD.

• 55:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  And when you reach that level and you've got animals dying after two years, you you you have to affect the population. There's no way you couldn't.

• 55:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, got it, got it. You know, it gave me a lot of uh hope, if that's the right word.

• 55:59Steven Rinella?

  This idea that yeah, that you're gonna have that animals get infected, they're always gonna die within a couple of years, the preseason, you won't have old bucks, you're not gonna have six-year-old bucks, seven-year-old bucks. But earlier we mentioned the Hanson buck.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 56:12Steven Rinella?

  And four years old.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a sketch one, but the four years old, right?

• 56:16Steven Rinella?

  And biggest buck ever killed was four.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Another thing about the, another study that was done in Colorado, the Table Mesa Study Area, done by a number of people in 2005, they went in there and they studied prevalence rates of CWD, what percent had CWD. They looked at predation rates on the deer population. They looked at causes of mortality, how the deer were dying, and studied it a couple of years. And they said, throughout this period, CWD was going up and up, and there was a heavy predation on mule deer, mountain lions on mule deer. Not only heavy predation, but almost four CWD positive deer were preyed upon for every one healthy deer by mountain lions. So there was a differential predation

• 56:59Speaker 04

  on CWD sick animals, a heavy predation overall, and throughout all CWD levels kept going up and up and up. And so they concluded in 2008, when they published, they concluded, even with a heavy predation by mountain lions, there's still, the mountain lions are not able to control CWD. But then 13 years later, some of those same people came back into the same population, collected the same kind of information, and they found that after 13 more years, now mountain lions were killing four and a half infected deer for every one healthy deer. So still, high predation, differential predation on CWD positive animals, and the

• 57:39Speaker 04

  CWD, the percent that had CWD went from, from 28% to, from 38% to 42. So CWD still increased with that heavy predation for 13 more years. But their conclusion in that paper was, we think, among other things, predators might be assisting in controlling CWD. And so people can cite that paper, but the reason they said that-

• 58:07Steven Rinella?

  Like they thought maybe it would have been even worse?

• 58:09Speaker 04

  That's exactly it. So that was just on the speculation-

• 58:12Steven Rinella?

  With lions killing four and a half sick deer to every healthy deer, CWD still increased, but they hold out that well, maybe it would be even worse.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  It would have been, that was their speculation even worse. So I think, you know, an alternate, an alternate conclusion would be even in that condition, they still weren't able to manage CWD. It still went up. Now, the people doing that research, some of them are friends of mine. They're good. They're solid researchers. That was just their conclusion. And, you know, we don't all agree sometimes when we look at the same data. And I'm not willing to take that speculative step and say, yeah, they were probably controlling CWD because it probably would have been higher. It's too many probabilities for me.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Let's move on to another one. Another, another subject. If you follow wildlife, wildlife news, wildlife politics, conservation news, you know, the, the trophy cascade thing. Okay. So wolves have returned to, to release sites. You got Yellowstone National Park, Frank Church, 97, 96, somewhere in there. And then a while later, outcomes like that they have transformed riparian ecosystems. And now like the rivers are returned, the beavers are back, there's willows everywhere. You know, there was a, unbeknownst to us,

• 59:36Steven Rinella?

  it was a sick landscape that is now healthy, all thanks to this handful of wolves that are, that are running around. People are doing Ted, it's the perfect, right? Ted Talk thing. It's very inspiring. And then over time, you see pieces of research coming out that sort of have this, well, maybe it's not that tidy. Maybe that's not quite, quite right. The last one of these I read was the authors, the, the trophy cascade theory relied on some work done by some willows, some people doing research on willows. And even the people that did the research that is cited in the trophy cascade thing part started saying,

• 1:00:20Steven Rinella?

  you kind of got our numbers wrong.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  I'll correct that a little bit.

• 1:00:25Steven Rinella?

  Please, that's what you're here for.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Yep. So first of all, trophy cascades, if people understand that basically a trophic level is like the grass is one trophic level, the grass eaters, the herbivores are another trophic level, and then the predators are another trophic level. And the idea is you can, you can take the predators away, or you can add predators. And if you add predators, there's less grass eaters. And so there's more grass. So it causes this, this cascading effect through these trophic levels. That's what trophy cascade is. And so, and so we, so we brought wolves back in Yellowstone in 95, 96, 97, wolves were released, I think a total of 41 wolves were released. And then just a couple, just about, so 97, in 98 already, there was a couple of researchers from the Pacific Northwest that were in there

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  measuring the tallest aspens. In retrospect, there's been a lot of scientific papers showing that their methodology was, was biased, not, they weren't trying to be biased, but it just was not randomly distributed sampling. It wasn't very good sampling. But regardless, they measured the tallest aspen in a bunch of these aspen stands. And this is just, they, they started in 98. It was a year after the, the third wave of, of release of wolves came in. And they published in 2001. And they said, in that publication 2001, aspens are recovering in the riparian areas. And it's probably, we're probably seeing the beginning of wolves triggering a trophy cascade. So they didn't have any data on that. They just measured

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  some tallest aspens, which wasn't a very good method of measuring aspens anyway. And they made this, this, this comment. And once again, the media picked it up and it was a wonderful story. Wolves were coming back, brought, well, brought wolves back to Yellowstone. And now the stream side vegetation, the aspens were recovering and, and doing great. And, and that spread like wildfire for a number of years. And then the first paper I saw with Matt Kaufman, remember you had Matt Kaufman on the podcast with Monteith. Matt Kaufman went and did some research in the 2000s. He published in 2010 with some people. And they said, and, and they, they did a very good scientifically robust measuring of

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  aspen throughout the park in a more robust way than, than the, the original.

• 1:02:40Steven Rinella?

  Can I, can I wedge in here that just, just to make the connection? The idea was that elk.

• 1:02:48Steven Rinella?

  Ungulates were over like we're over grazing.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  And so now that there's more predation on the landscape, more animal predation on the landscape. It was giving, it was giving a break to the vegetation regime from elk grazing. Therefore, the it's coming back and recovering.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  I need to clarify something. I should have started with that. There's two different kinds of trophy cascades that people have talked about in Yellowstone. One is the behavior, one is the, the density mediated trophy cascade. And that just means there's fewer elk, so there's more vegetation. That's just a, a real simple kind of relationship. And so people will say, look, we brought wolves back. There's fewer elk. We had 19,000 elk in Yellowstone, two years before the wolves came. They started declining before the wolves were released, actually, for two years. We had 19,000 elk two years before.

• 1:03:39Steven Rinella?

  That was fun hunting back in them days, man.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  And then it dropped to a low of 4,000. So 19,000 to 4,000, you're definitely going to have more vegetation growing in Yellowstone. So that's the density mediated. That just means there's fewer elk, so there's more vegetation. But the problem is people want to give wolves all the credit for that. But at the same time, we had a little handful of wolves at that time. But we have grizzly bear populations increased to the extent that their predation on elk calves was three times what it was prior, prior to that earlier, it increased three times. Mountain lion population doubled in Yellowstone. Fires burned 36% of Yellowstone in 1988. That had huge effect on, on the ecology of that. We had one of the worst droughts during that time, shortly after wolves were released.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  We had one of the most severe winters at that time. And then we were hunting cow elk off the park in Montana to help try to manage the Yellowstone population and we, we kept cow elk tags too long and too high. And so hunters contributed to that population decline because all this stuff was happening at once and the people managing the elk tags didn't, didn't really, at the time, didn't know that all this stuff was going to affect the population.

• 1:04:55Steven Rinella?

  So you're bursting the bubble of everyone. That just wants to blame wolves.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  Right. And so you hear, I mean, wolves are precipitating this, this trophy cascade. So that's the first one. I think we, we can, we can dismiss that wolves did not cause that decline of 19,000 to 3,000. All those factors did. So we can't give wolves credit for trophy cascades because of density reductions in elk. So then they very quickly switched to the, the behaviorally mediated trophy cascade, which means that elk like to hang out along the streams and wolves were hunting along the streams and they were scaring the elk out away from the streams. And so that stream side vegetation could respond because the elk were scaring them out of there. They call that the landscape of fear. But that first study that kind of talked about that, which was, was actually part of the

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  2001 study, first study that talked about that didn't mention the fact other researchers have later that, you know, if you're comparing aspen that grow along the stream and aspen that grow on the drier uplands, the aspen along the stream are going to grow a lot more than the uplands. And that wasn't ever mentioned in the original discussion of that. But other people like Kaufman came, came by later in 2010. Not only did he measure the aspen in a more randomly, um, and more scientifically robust way throughout the park, but he took the last 10 years of locations of where a wolf killed an elk and took all those spots and he mapped the landscape of fear. He mapped for the first time because people talking about the landscape of fear

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  were using other metrics that weren't very direct. But Kaufman mapped kill locations and then related that to close to stream, not close to stream, other effects. And actually had a map of very risky places for wolves to be and not risky ways, places for wolves.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  For elk to be.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  For elk to be, right. Because of wolf predation. And, and, and there was, when they did the analysis of high risk areas and low risk areas for, for elk to be preyed on by wolves. They found no difference in aspen regeneration in riskier areas versus areas that weren't risky. And so he published that paper in, in 2010. That was the first one I saw that said, hold the boat. You know, aspen, the title was aspens are not recovering. In Yellowstone, because they weren't. And at the time, there was a 60% reduction in the Yellowstone elk population, and still, there was no evidence of aspens recovering. And so that really, that was the first one I saw, and I think it is.

• 1:07:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but that wasn't the trophy cast, the trophy cascade heyday came after that.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Yes. And, and the trophy cascade heyday were the, where everybody was talking about it. They were all talking about this behaviorally mediated. They're all talking about wolves are just redistributing elk away from some of these areas. And then those, those streamside vegetations recovering. And then another researcher, Thomas Hobbes, came in and he focused on willows, not aspen. And he measured willows and where they grew and where the wolves were. And his conclusion was wolves, aspen are recovering, but wolves have nothing to do with, with the willow recovery. The interesting thing is you hear, there's the YouTube video that's got 44 million views now about how wolves are restoring the Yellowstone ecosystem and changing the course of rivers, changing the hydrology, and bringing the beavers back was one of the things.

• 1:08:09Steven Rinella?

  That, that was peak trophy.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Yes, that. And, and, but the biologist brought the beavers back, not the wolves. Biologists released beavers in seven drainages in the Galveston National Forest, right on the edge of Yellowstone, about 130 beavers. And those beavers then dammed up the tributaries, changed the hydrology, made habitat for willows to now return. So beavers probably should get more credit than wolves for trophy cascades in Yellowstone because of their changes in hydrology. But beavers don't have the, the big public relations campaign that, that wolves do.

• 1:08:41Steven Rinella?

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• 1:09:47Steven Rinella?

  Hey, are you the kind of person whose truck looks like a hurricane rolled through a sporting goods store when you open the door? And when you hit washboard dirt roads, does gear come loose on your console? Your binos slide off the seat? Water bottles are rolling around on the floorboards? Well, check this out. Our very own FHF Gear teamed up with X Overland to build a modular system engineered to keep your gear organized while the truck is in motion. The same way FHF solved the problem of how to keep your gear organized around your bino harness and on your chest, okay? They're working on rigs now. It's built around a system called the Bulkhead, which is a semi-rigid moly panel that anchors between your truck seats.

• 1:10:31Steven Rinella?

  You snap the waypoint GP pouch right onto it using the FHF SnapCore Buckle System to keep your optics or your comms secure and accessible from any door. You get the Horizon Vizer Panel overhead. You put tags, calls, registration, whatever in there. Then they got the Flex Med Kit, a med kit that mounts on your headrest for instant emergency access. You can just reach through the truck in any window and grab that sucker out of there. It keeps your cab dead quiet and organized while you drive and prepared for anything that comes at you. Check it out at FHFGear.com. Another funny thing, and I made the same point earlier.

• 1:11:16Steven Rinella?

  And this is about public perception. This is a comment about public perception about media and not a comment about wildlife, but the people that were so happy. It's cynical to point this out, but the people that were suddenly so happy about willow regeneration.

• 1:11:35Steven Rinella?

  If you studied the media, I would ask you, can you go find me situations in the past where they were expressing their concern about willow regeneration? And can you show me where that they were aware of this?

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  Or beavers. You know, they weren't concerned about beavers not being on the landscape.

• 1:11:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So it's like, it's, it drives, they're, they're going through life. They're not aware that there's an Aspen issue. They're not aware that there's a willow issue. They don't care that there's an Aspen issue. They don't care that there's a willow issue. They've never heard the word riparian, but suddenly hear that wolves have made it better. Therefore, I now believe that it was a problem. But it was, it was the discovery day for them.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep. And it's interesting that the first two people that published that paper in 2001, they've been on a campaign to convince everyone that wolves have been the drivers or the triggers of a major trophy cascade. Just they've published a paper almost every year in the last 25 years, talking about wolves.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  Initiating a trophy cascade and they're unrelenting, even with all of this mounting body of scientific evidence that shows that that's really not true, that, that this story is not like that at all.

• 1:12:51Steven Rinella?

  And because it doesn't suffice, it somehow doesn't suffice just to be like, they're cool to have around.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  You're right.

• 1:12:58Steven Rinella?

  It's cool to see them. They're cool to have around. They're like, I need something more.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  We have to justify them on the landscape and we don't need to justify large predators on the landscape. They were, they were part of the native fauna. We, we recovered almost all of the native other animals and we've got a couple more and they happen to be carnivores to finish up.

• 1:13:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I think it's like a. The best word I could think of it, I don't mean to give it like a religious aspect, but the best word I could think of it is I think of it like it's a sin. I think it's immoral or whatever to eliminate, to intentionally eliminate native wildlife, I think of as like a sin against God and man. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't think it's right.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what Theodore Roosevelt thought.

• 1:13:43Steven Rinella?

  It's like, it's human. It's, it's hubris, you know, to be like, oh, there's this thing that's lived here. It's always lived here, but I deciding that I, that it needs to go away. I'm just like, we can't be making that decision.

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. David Meach, L. David Meach is, is the leading wolf guy really in, in the world. He's been researching wolves for more than six decades, researching wolves for more than six decades. And, and he came and taught, gave a talk at the University of Arizona one time. I picked him up at the airport. We were at breakfast and he, he said something to me and he said it later in his talk. He said that the people that think returning, this is the, like the largest wolf advocate, well, maybe not a wolf advocate, largest wolf scientist in the world. He says, people think that returning wolves to Yellowstone created this situation where it brought back the birds and the bees and the butterflies. He said, that's more religion than it is science. But he was quick to add that those people

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  that say that bringing wolves back is going to decimate all of our big game herds in the state. He said, that's more religion than it is science. The truth is really in, in the middle. They're not going to be destructive and they're not saints. And he wrote another paper that said that, that, and you've probably heard, heard this before, but that wolves are neither saints nor sinners, except to people who make them so. People want to make them out to be saints and sinners and they're not.

• 1:15:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They, within that, they have an impact.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:11Steven Rinella?

  They have an impact.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  They sure and certainly in locally, they can have an impact and we can manage that. We should be able to manage that impact. But the, the two that have been publishing trophy cascade papers almost every year. I think they have 25 papers I've read since that 2001. They just published one last year and in the abstract, it says that wolves triggered the strongest trophus, trophic cascade in the world. This is just last year. They, they're still saying this. And that was followed by a rebuttal this year by some Yellowstone researchers, people are making their living researching the Yellowstone ecosystem. And it was a rebuttal and the title of the, um, the rebuttal was flawed analysis invalidates

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  the idea of a strong trophy cascade in Yellowstone.

• 1:16:00Steven Rinella?

  I mean, that's a heavy hit title.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  That's like, that's as clear as you can possibly make it. And, and I think you in an email once said, uh, let's talk about this latest, um, um, there's some kind of news article that said that the trophy cascade stuff is, um, doesn't have scientific support, but this has been happening since Kaufman wrote that paper in 2010. I mean, this is 16 years people have been saying things aren't happening like the media is telling you it's happening and they're using good, solid science, but nobody wants to hear that story. I mean, the original story is so beautiful. I know it's not true and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And so there's just no getting rid of that. I constantly see on social media how wolves have, have changed the ecosystem in Yellowstone.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  And then once in a while someone publishes a paper that says, you know, a lot of that's not true, that, that the science just doesn't support that. And I've been seeing that for 15 years, but nobody, people are still telling the original story. You said, no, there's no getting out in front of that. It's too late. It's like a freight train that left.

• 1:17:05Steven Rinella?

  As a writer who, like, like as a writer that deals in history and wildlife issues and other things, I will sometimes hear a thing, I'll hear a thing and I'll get really excited.

• 1:17:19Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's going to be great for the thing I'm writing. Okay. And I'm like, that is great. But then when I look into it and I learned that it's not true, I feel a disappointment.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  I do. Yeah. I've, I've been there before too. Like this is really going to support what I'm writing.

• 1:17:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then I'm like, damn it. Really? That's a lie. Or that's like, you know, this thing that everyone knows is now I know is not true.

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Steven Rinella?

  And I'm disappointed.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Because I wanted the truth to be other than it was. I will say to wildlife researchers, which I have many friends that do that, that they're in that line of work. And they'll be talking about something they're doing and I'll say, what do you hope happens?

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:17:59Steven Rinella?

  And they're like, I can't do that. What do you mean? What do I hope happens? Except, but I'm like, cause you're a human being.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Steven Rinella?

  There's gotta be like, let's just be honest. There's gotta be something. I'm not saying you'd bend the truth, right? You're a person of integrity, but in, in your head, there's gotta be, I hope that this, something happens that would be like of note, right? Cause you're, you're only human. And so the, the question I would ask is if you look at the people that started from year one, trophy cascades, trophy cascades, would they have had it in them? Would they have had it in them to publish a piece that said, turns out there isn't one?

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  A lot of scientists do that. And, and that's just a matter of being a good scientist. Because you're right. Every single scientist has bias, has things that they, they would love if, if the results were this. Cause that would be, that would be great, especially if it's going to make big news. I mean, that's, that's how people get tenure and that's how they get promotions in the university setting is to make a lot of big splashes in the news. And that's what drives a lot of people in academia, unfortunately, but everybody has a bias. But a good scientist curbs that and, and packs it away and, and just lets the, the results speak for themselves. And in scientific papers, a lot of times you'll see here's our study area. Here's our methods. Here's our results. And then when you get to the last discussion section, there's some leeway to discuss what you think

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  the results mean. So the results are the results, but the discussion section, there's a lot of leeway for researchers to weave their personal biases in and interpret the results for you, how they see it. And that's what you have to be careful of is these. And that's where people peel quotes out of the discussion section that are just speculation and attribute it to that peer reviewed scientific paper, but it's not something they researched. It's not something in the results, not something they found. It's something they think, which is not really science.

• 1:19:53Steven Rinella?

  Let's jump to javelinas.

• 1:19:59Steven Rinella?

  This, this is something that some people might be like, why, why does this matter? But it matters. Exactly. It matters to me.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Everyone knows like you have Boone and Crockett record books. Okay. How, how was it an oversight? How was it you couldn't shoot like you couldn't get a record book javelina?

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Steven Rinella?

  I found this out the hard way. Many years ago, I got a big javelina. Okay. I shot a big javelina. And people were pointing out like, damn, that's a huge javelina. That's a huge javelina. And I go and look and I had no idea. I had no idea. I'd never entered anything before, but I go and look, I'm like, what?

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  It's not in here.

• 1:20:43Steven Rinella?

  But then I found like Safari Club had it. And it was like, and it hit the whatever, the minimums for Safari Club. But I was like, how could, how could this noble little, uh, this, this noble little desert creature not be in the Boone and Crockett record books?

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Good question. Arizona's had Arizona record books since 1971. It's had javelina in there, but I thought the same thing probably 20 years ago. And I have good friends with Buck Buckner, who is the, uh, the vice president for North American Records for Boone and Crockett at the time. And, and I asked him, why is javelina not in there? And he just said, I, you know, I don't know. There's no one's kind of made a run for it. No one's made a, um, a proposal for it. And I started a And I had a file, Havelina, Boone and Crockett, early in my career. I'm gonna do, this is gonna be my project. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get them in Boone and Crockett. And then had a family and got busy and, and the file folder went farther and farther back into my.

• 1:21:36Steven Rinella?

  What was in the, okay, what was, what were you putting in your folder?

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  Some of the Arizona, like the Arizona records, that we've got a big data set of Arizona records, like that help inform what the minimum might be. And then, and then copies of what the Boone and Crockett needs in order to establish a new category and those sorts of things. So I was just starting to have a file and think about that. And then, and then I just, it just got away from me. I never got back to it. And then Nicole Tatman from New Mexico called me just a couple of years ago and she said, would you write a letter of support? From your agency? That was one thing that was required to get them a new category. Because she said, I'd like to see if we can get Boone and Crockett to accept Havelina. And she's on the records committee and I'm on the records committee now too. And I said, write a letter. I said, I will clear my calendar next week. Let's do this. Let's.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  And so we got two people from Texas, two people from Mexico, Nicole's from New Mexico and me from Arizona. And we put together a proposal that talked about how these populations are scientifically managed by these state agencies. They have a long history of records in some states, how popular they were. We've got 58,000 Havelina hunters every year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas harvesting 33,000 Havelina. This is a significant big game animal. I mean, some, some people in Boone and Crockett initially said, is that even a big game animal?

• 1:22:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a big game animal.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  It's got hooves. What other hoofed big game animal do you mount with his mouth open, his big ferocious roar? I mean, they're cool. They're cool animals and they're really popular in the Southwest. They're really popular for non-residents to come down. So we put together this really robust proposal.

• 1:23:14Steven Rinella?

  You can call them in. I mean, I could name some, I could name reasons all day long why it's a big game animal.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  They're, they're cool and, and they're, they're not invasive like feral hogs. They have two young a year. Once a year, not like feral hogs where they have a litter of 10 twice a year. Or they'll have a litter of eight and only 10 survive. That's a joke among the, the feral hog people. So we went to the proposal. We went to a records book committee meeting and we said, here's.

• 1:23:42Steven Rinella?

  But you know, we were talking about biases earlier.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  I'm biased for javelina.

• 1:23:46Steven Rinella?

  Well, yeah, but did you have, because you got a couple of hogs that you thought should be in there?

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  No, actually, no, that's interesting.

• 1:23:51Steven Rinella?

  You didn't have a toad?

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  No, 30 years of hunting javelina and all the skulls I've measured that I cleaned, I don't have any that make the book. So I don't have that.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  I got a booker. I need to go dig that sucker out.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you should. And actually, this year, entering in the Boone to Crockett is free. There's been a benefactor that will cover all entry fees for all species until the end of December. So if you've got a headland around that you haven't got into the books, this is the year to do it because it's free for you.

• 1:24:18Steven Rinella?

  So you're not in there?

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:24:20Steven Rinella?

  So you're just doing this out of the goodness of your heart?

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  I just love javelina and I think especially in Mexico, our Mexican colleagues have, are really have more at stake of giving the javelina a little more respect as a big game animal. I think that's a big thing. Sometimes they're not given that kind of respect.

• 1:24:36Steven Rinella?

  No, I even hear, man, like people I like, you know, people, people that I count as friends, man, I'll hear people really denigrate them. And like, you know, top, oh, you know, whatever we shot a couple and left them laying or something. I hate that kind of stuff, man.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  Yep. So we went to the records committee and we said, this is before we did that proposal. And we said, we argued our case why javelina ought to be part. And some people are like, then we got to add alligators and then we got to add. But there's reasons why some of these other species aren't ready to make the book. And so we said.

• 1:25:07Steven Rinella?

  What's the logic there?

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  Like, there's some other animals that aren't in the book that are still harvested. That was what they were thinking.

• 1:25:14Steven Rinella?

  Like, what about? Oh, you were setting up, that you were setting up a, you were setting up a set of parameters that other things would be, that would, other things would reach.

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  Nope, just javelina, just focus on javelina. But some people in Boone to Crockett said, well, if we do javelina, then we're going to get pressured to do all these other animals. It's going to cascade, but it's not, there's, there's not any other animals that are right for inclusion.

• 1:25:36Steven Rinella?

  Be a trophy cascade. Did you get that joke?

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  That is a good one.

• 1:25:41Steven Rinella?

  That was a good one.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  So we asked the records committee. We're not asking you to decide now, but let us come back with a proposal. We came back with a proposal. They were pretty impressed. The proposal was pretty extensive and covered everything. And they had some board meetings. They talked about it. They agreed to include it, but they didn't have the minimum entry yet. But we have over, we have hundreds of javelina skulls that have been measured in the state record books and SCI to use as a baseline for what should the minimum be. And so we use those, those records. Roy Grace from Pope and Young Club did a whole bunch of legwork on analyzing the, that, those data. And then Boon and Crockett Club then made the decision what the minimum would be.

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  And the minimum for Boon and Crockett for, and then Pope and Young followed suit right after that, because there's a close relationship between two clubs. So Pope and Young accepted them, which is great because they're perfect for, for archery. And so Pope and Young then decided they, they approved them, decided on a minimum. Pope and Young minimum is 13 and 14 sixteenths. And then Boon and Crockett minimum is 14 and 5 sixteenths.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  And it's length and width?

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  It's, it's simply just like bears and lions. It's length and width.

• 1:26:57Steven Rinella?

  No kind of task?

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  No task or anything. No. They want to make it simple on measures. I already know how to do that measurement. They have the equipment.

• 1:27:04Steven Rinella?

  What's minimum again?

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  Minimum for Boon and Crockett. Yeah. You'll have to remember that and go back and measure it.

• 1:27:08Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna measure tonight since I go home.

• 1:27:10Speaker 04

  Boon and Crockett is 14 and 5 sixteenths.

• 1:27:14Steven Rinella?

  Damn, man.

• 1:27:16Speaker 04

  14 and 5 sixteenths.

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  I wish my wife is more handy at that kind of, I mean, she just would. If I called her right now and told her, go measure.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  Go measure that. Yeah.

• 1:27:24Steven Rinella?

  But it's not gonna go over great.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  But they have to use what's called a boss square that they use, I think for musk ox or, I think, but it's a square. It's a steel square because the back of the javelina skull has a Y.

• 1:27:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Speaker 04

  So you can't, it's not measured in the, the bottom of that Y. It's measured absolute total length. So you have to have something square across the back and square across the front. And then the width is just the zygomatic arches here.

• 1:27:48Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I'm pretty excited that, that, that now gets the respect that, that it's always deserved.

• 1:27:56Steven Rinella?

  That's great.

• 1:27:59Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna ask you about status black tailed deer and mule deer, but let me ask you about status of javelinas.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Steven Rinella?

  You don't really hear about this ever.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:28:06Steven Rinella?

  Is it just like, are javelinas just sort of always there at the same? You never hear about that it's a great year, it's a bad year, ups and downs. Are they just sort of like, just?

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  They are very stable overall and, and, and part of it is they're, they're so adapted to their desert. They're eating a lot of prickly pear, which not like Forbes are coming and going and wet year and dry year.

• 1:28:30Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Brickly pear is always there. They eat a lot of root tubers. So some of those plants are more abundant with rainfall, but they're still there.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  They're pretty drought resistant little critters.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Very drought resistant.

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  Just kind of chug along. They do a pretty good job of chugging along and not having these violent swings up and down.

• 1:28:46Steven Rinella?

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• 1:29:31Steven Rinella?

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• 1:30:09Steven Rinella?

  FHF Gear teamed up with X Overland to build a modular system engineered to keep your gear organized while the truck is in motion. The same way FHF solved the problem of how to keep your gear organized around your bino harnessing on your chest. Okay. They're working on rigs now. It's built around a system called the Bulkhead, which is a semi-rigid molly panel that anchors between your truck seats. You snap the waypoint GP pouch right onto it using the FHF Snapcore Buckle System to keep your optics or your comms secure and accessible from any door. You get the Horizon Visor Panel overhead. You put tags, calls, registration, whatever in there.

• 1:30:54Steven Rinella?

  Then they got the Flex Med Kit, a med kit that mounts on your headrest for instant emergency access. You can just reach through the truck in any window and grab that sucker out of there. It keeps your cab dead quiet and organized while you drive and prepared for anything that comes at you. Check it out at FHFgear.com. So with that, let's talk about black-tailed deer and mule deer.

• 1:31:21Steven Rinella?

  Is there reason to be? Let's, let's start with mule deer. Is there any reason to be not pessimistic about the future of mule deer?

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm not pessimistic at all.

• 1:31:32Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:31:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Steven Rinella?

  Tell me more. I feel like it's like always bad news about.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  I hope you feel better by the time you leave then. It is always bad news and some of the bad news comes from just a desire to advocate for mule deer, which I'm a hundred percent on board with. There's a lot of stresses affecting mule deer in the West. But mule deer, I chair a mule deer working group, which is for the last 20 years I've been the chairman of this group that's sponsored by the Western Association of Official Wildlife Agencies. It's 24 Western Wildlife Agencies in Western North America provinces and states. And we have one mule deer or black-tailed deer expert from each of those 24 jurisdictions. And that's the Mule Deer Working Group Committee. So it's the West's leading mule deer experts. And every year we put together for the.

• 1:32:19Speaker 04

  11th year now this year, uh, status of mule deer and black tailed deer in North America. And you can't just write one paragraph about how mule deer and black tailed deer are doing because they're doing differently all over and for different reasons. And so we take a page or two for each jurisdiction. So you can read about Saskatchewan, you can read about Arizona, you can read about Montana, written by the mule deer expert in that, in that state.

• 1:32:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  And then we do some summary stuff at the beginning, um, of that. And, um, and that gives you a snapshot of how deer populations are doing. And more than half of the mule deer populations are stable or increasing right now. Some of the Rocky Mountain states had a bad winter of 2023 and then they're recovering from that. Southwestern states, New Mexico, Arizona are suffering from multi-year drought. But we had, we had the decline in the, the 1990, it's several declines, um, in mule deer through time. And the latest one was in 1990 and that's when the mule deer working group was established.

• 1:33:18Steven Rinella?

  You mean decline, holistic decline?

• 1:33:21Speaker 04

  West wide decline.

• 1:33:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Um, and that's happened a couple of times. And, and when you, when you look at it in retrospect, it, when it happened in the nineties, we were like, what's happening in mule deer? Um, something is affecting mule deer everywhere. That's what it seemed like because it seemed to be declining everywhere. When you look back now at the history, it's obvious that when you have really wet years in the desert southwest, that means a lot of rain, a lot of forbs in the winter, really nutritious and deer do really well. Reproduction rates go up, but that same wet winter in the Rocky Mountains might be heavy snowpack and a harsh winter in the Rocky Mountains. So the same kind of a wet year can make deer population in the Rocky Mountain states decline and increase in the southwest.

• 1:34:05Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting that, that same weather pattern.

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  Can do something different.

• 1:34:10Steven Rinella?

  Good one place and bad another place.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  So you have these different things happening in different regions of mule deer range all the time. And then periodically, every couple of decades, they synchronize just by chance, really. They synchronize where you, you might have a harsh winter and you've also have a drought in the southwest and deer population decline. And so looking back, it looks like. Like just once in a while, all those regional differences synchronize and everybody says, oh my God, there's a, there's a deer decline in the West and that happened in the nineties. And then populations recovered from that decline and probably no state or province would say, not many of them would say they have all the mule deer they want. They're all below population objective, but there's no west wide mule deer decline. Like you see some people talking about right now, like it's going down.

• 1:34:56Speaker 04

  Arizona, after the 1990s decline because of drought, had 15 years of steady growth.

• 1:35:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:35:03Speaker 04

  Population growth up and it's just the last six years or so drought that has caused that to hook down.

• 1:35:08Steven Rinella?

  What, what made, what made the mule deer glory days?

• 1:35:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Good question. That was a

• 1:35:15Steven Rinella?

  Whether you call that, that was like the late sixties, late seventies, whatever sometime a long time ago was the mule deer glory days.

• 1:35:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:23Steven Rinella?

  Was that, that everything aligned and lifted instead of everything aligned and declined?

• 1:35:27Speaker 04

  There was a lot of other things going on at the time, you know, our, our deer population, like everything else, 1800s or early 1920s decline, just because over exploitation and no management. Then from the twenties to sixties, west wide deer population generally increased. And during that period, we had now restrictions on harvest, not killing does in some places or limiting the killing of does, limiting the harvest. Um, we had 1080 predator poison and predator control everywhere.

• 1:35:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:35:55Speaker 04

  Dropping poison baits everywhere, reduce the predation pressure. We had some wet, um, years in there, all that. And then there was a lot of logging going on. So we're removing the overstory shrubs are coming up. Forbes are growing.

• 1:36:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:36:08Speaker 04

  Great for mule deer. So all of that stuff combined was happening from the twenties to thirties and then into the fifties and early sixties. So fifties and sixties was like the heyday of mule deer. We had a lot of mule deer, but that was the result of conditions and activities that we will never repeat. We can't go back and do that. We're not going to do that wholesale logging. We're not going to drop 1080 baits, one every square mile across the West. We're not going to do those things. So looking at mule deer populations in the fifties and sixties is Not the benchmark to compare today's mule deer. That was an unusual bubble because of all those things happening. And then in the seventies, we had a mule deer decline coming off of that, that bubble.

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  And we even had, there was a symposium in, in Utah in 1976 that was about mule deer decline in the West. And it was a whole symposium concerned about this decline in the seventies. Then we got rainfall generally in the eighties was, was a pretty lush year and deer populations throughout the West increased in the eighties. And then if you remember late eighties, 1988 is when Yellowstone burned. There was barges running aground in the Mississippi River because it was so low. We had really, really bad drought throughout a lot of the West. That precipitated this late eighties, 1990s decline that, that initiated the mule deer working group at that time. And so we've gone through these swings for different reasons and we've, we've recovered a lot from that 1990s decline.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  And now more than half of the, the jurisdictions are, are stable or increasing. Some of them are certainly declining, all of them below objective, but.

• 1:37:43Steven Rinella?

  All of them below objective.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  I'd say all of them, I don't know if you'd, you'd find many mule deer biologists that say, we don't want any more mule deer. We've got enough, you know, the habitat's full, you know, we're still, we're still need to build deer herds almost everywhere. Even though I think Colorado, half of the, the units I read from, from that biologist are, are at population objectives. So there's, there's places where they are, but, but we're, we're not in dire straits. There's no west wide mule deer decline right now. We're, we're chugging along in, in weather conditions, whether it's drought or harsh winters. Is causing these annual fluctuations against a backdrop of long-term habitat change.

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  You know, the West looks a little bit different now than it did in 1950 as far as urban development, urban sprawl, communities, roads, all that stuff. We're not going back to the 1950s. So we should not be saying, well, deer populations are such and such lower than the 1950s.

• 1:38:43Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  It's not fair. It's not fair to do that, but I'm, I'm, as long as we keep working. On preserving migration corridors, improving habitat on large scales. I think the future of mule deer is bright. We're going to keep chugging along with good mule deer herds if we keep paying attention and doing everything we can.

• 1:39:03Steven Rinella?

  If every area is below objective, what do you think of, what do you think if someone says?

• 1:39:10Steven Rinella?

  And before I say this, I'll recognize you're arguing for like a nuanced approach where you have 24 different regions and every region has its own story and various factors. But let's say I come to you and say, generally, should it be that we're not killing female mule deer anymore? We shouldn't be killing doe mule deer.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  And see, that's on a unit by unit basis. There's some areas like, like if half of the units in Colorado are at population objective, then that's the case where you, you need to maintain that population at that, in that population objective range. So I would not, I would not outlaw doe hunting throughout the West. In Arizona, when populations got really low, then, then doe hunts were removed. And so, and you see in units, even within a single state, certain units will have doe harvest and other units won't. And that's the biologist doing what they do and managing those populations based on where they are in relation to objectives and where they need to be.

• 1:40:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:40:08Speaker 04

  So I wouldn't broad brush and say we shouldn't be killing females. It depends on the area.

• 1:40:13Steven Rinella?

  What about black tailed deer?

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  Black tailed deer are harder to survey. They're doing, they're doing pellet counts historically. They, they do.

• 1:40:21Steven Rinella?

  They're looking for deer shit.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. And they'll use dogs, they'll use sniffing dogs to find pellets and they'll record all that. They collect in Alaska, they've done a lot of pellet collecting where they, they do genetics and they look at how many individual, minimum number of individual deer they have per square mile based on genetic fingerprints.

• 1:40:39Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:40:39Speaker 04

  So they're hard to, they're hard to.

• 1:40:43Speaker 04

  To monitor, they're very susceptible, especially Southeast Alaska, very susceptible to heavy snow winters. You get those islands, Prince of Whale, all those islands, you get a heavy, heavy snow winter and you can lose 50, 60% of the blacktail population. But then in the years after that, they come roaring back. Once it, once the population's down, there's a lot of food for the remaining animals, those populations bounce right back. So they, they dip and they grow based on mostly on weather conditions. But then again, I said, weather conditions in the forefront and the background is long-term habitat changes. And one of the things in Sitka blacktail range is the, the logging that was done in the past that has now all grown up into second growth, really thick, not very easily marketed

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  for anything commercially. So we've got, it's called stem exclusion or stand exclusion, where the sunlight's not reaching the ground to make forbs and shrubs that the deer eat. It's just blocking out the light. So you have all this secondary growth that needs to be cut. But other than maybe cutting it and making wood pellets, you know, is a possibility, someone needs to commercialize something to get in there and open up some of that. But that doesn't mean that, that the old, old growth forests in Southeast Alaska need to be logged. The old growth forest is really important for the same reason. Those big old trees, they, they stop the snowfall. And in heavy snowfall events, the deer have that, have to have that mature old growth forest to go in and move around and feed a little

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  bit until the snow melts enough that they can go back out into the clear cuts and some of the places with more food. So the old growth forest is really important. And then that stem exclusion is keeping that habitat from having more food than it could have if it was, if it was managed better. So that stuff's going on in the background of, of these, of these annual blacktail fluctuations.

• 1:42:31Steven Rinella?

  You know, those clear cuts.

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  They're, they're so good for 10 years or whatever in that country. They're so good for deer for 10 years and then they're so terrible for deer.

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, when they grow up.

• 1:42:49Steven Rinella?

  For 30 or 40.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

  For 40.

• 1:42:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  Like when, when there's a new one, you're like, ah, it's cool now, but man, then it's just gonna suck.

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and even if they leave, if they go in and leave a lot of slash and horizontal logs, it becomes an issue of deer not being able to move around as well either in some of those clear cuts.

• 1:43:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's just total obstacle course. Yeah. So chairmanship of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Mule Deer Working Group.

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh, how long you been doing that?

• 1:43:17Speaker 04

  28 years. I was one of the original, I'm the only remaining original member that was approved by the Western Directors in 1997. Our first meeting was in 98 in Jackson, Wyoming. About eight years later, the chairman retired and passed the torch to me. So I've been chairman for 20 years. And if you go on to see what we've been up to for 20 years or 28 years, uh, we've got a website, mule deer working group.com. It's just all one word, Mule Deer Working Group. And you see a lot of publications on there. And what we put together is like, we've established, we've established seven eco-regions in North America that were related to mule deer management and mule deer ecology. And we, we produce habitat guidelines for each one of those seven eco-regions.

• 1:44:00Speaker 04

  So a practitioner on the ground, a BLM biologist in the Southwest deserts can pull out the Southwest deserts habitat guidelines and read about what deer need to thrive in the Southwest deserts or the coastal rainforest. We've done that. We produce other documents about disease concerns, translocating wildlife. We produce the North American Mule Deer Conservation Plan, which, which guided conservation in a very general way throughout the West. And with that plan, we wrote an MOU and we had the chief of the Forest Service, the director of the BLM, and about seven agency heads signed this MOU saying that their documents, their forest management plans, their BLM resource management plans would incorporate these things and be consistent with the North American Mule Deer Conservation Plan.

• 1:44:42Speaker 04

  So if anybody, any local biologist said, uh, we're not going to do that. We said, well, your director says that you're going to do things that are consistent with what mule deer need and black-tailed deer need. And we're revamping that now, but we've got a guidance document on if you're monitoring mule deer populations. Here's some of the metrics you should monitor and here's some advantages and disadvantages of monitoring them different ways. Kind of for, for, for biologists. We did something on movements and migration barriers to a movement. And that website has all of these documents as a PDF. And a lot of the mule deer working group members then contributed to our latest mule deer book, that big one that you have, the big black one that you have.

• 1:45:25Speaker 04

  There's 82 chapters and each 82 co-authors, 23 chapters, and each chapter is written by the national expert for that particular topic with a team of, of writers. It's all the latest mule deer and black-tailed deer information. And the mule deer working group had us and a lot of our friends that are working on mule deer work on that book.

• 1:45:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. If you want to be the guy in your circle that knows the most about mule deer or blacktails, you should get that book and memorize it.

• 1:45:52Speaker 04

  It's got.

• 1:45:52Steven Rinella?

  Beat everybody.

• 1:45:53Speaker 04

  It's comprehensive.

• 1:45:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:56Steven Rinella?

  You, so this is a funny one.

• 1:45:59Steven Rinella?

  You recently went into, to New Zealand to speak about cervid conservation.

• 1:46:08Steven Rinella?

  But there, I mean, I feel like they spend more energy trying to, to get rid of wildlife.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  They absolutely do.

• 1:46:15Steven Rinella?

  They spend more energy trying to get rid of, not wildlife, but more energy trying to get rid of hoofed.

• 1:46:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:46:20Steven Rinella?

  Animals.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:46:21Steven Rinella?

  There's no, no one talks in New Zealand about like conservation.

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  I know. It's like gloves off as it should be.

• 1:46:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like the helicopter gun them. You know what I mean? It's like, they're not, they're not, they're not trying to make robust populations for hunters to be able to go out and do.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

  This, this meeting was, it, it happens every four years somewhere around the world. So it's been in China, been in Peru, in the Czech Republic. I helped organize the one in 2018 in Estes Park, Colorado. We had it in the U S. And this year it rotated. It was in Croatia four years ago, in New Zealand this time. And, and I don't get, I got to go to the Colorado one because I helped organize it and it was in a neighboring state. My department's not going to send me to China and to Peru. And so I didn't think I was going to be able to go to the New Zealand one. And they asked me, it's called the International Deer Biology Congress. And they asked me to be a keynote speaker with, with the expenses paid. So I was able to finally get to an international version of that.

• 1:47:15Speaker 04

  And I went there and I talked about how we manage deer and elk, all cervids in North America, amid the mosaic of BLM land, forest land, private land, national park service land. And you have biologists for all those different agencies and around that. And then you have funding, all these different funding sources for conservation. And among this mess that we have in North America, we somehow have this beautiful, well functioning system that works really, really well. So that was my keynote address in, in New Zealand at that, at that talk. But it was interesting because that conference sponsored by the New Zealanders, that conference, the, the title, the theme of that conference was your deer here.

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  And it was about, New Zealand didn't have any deer. It was all of our deer that were in New Zealand. It just said our deer, your deer here. And, um, and so there was talks about trying to, they're, they're poisoning brush tailed possums. They're poisoning whitetails in some areas with, with poison.

• 1:48:18Steven Rinella?

  Are they really?

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  Trying to control them. Yeah, it's, um, it's like when you go there, you don't need, you don't need a hunting license on, on public land.

• 1:48:25Steven Rinella?

  They're poisoning whitetails.

• 1:48:27Speaker 04

  They're poisoning, which makes me feel kind of strange, but they're talking about endangered plants and trying to save what eco, what native ecosystem they had. They had, they had three, those reports between one and three mammals that were native to New Zealand. And there were bats.

• 1:48:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Speaker 04

  And there was one bat that was there and there was another, I think the other ones were fossils of bat species. So they had no mammals, basically no predators at all. And they had, they had nine different species of moa, these nine foot, the largest one with nine foot flightless birds running around the island. Polynesians got there, I think 800 years ago and it only took them about a hundred years. A hundred years to wipe out all of the the MOAs on the island. And the only thing big, you imagine you're on an island and you've got nine foot chickens running around. I mean, they they used them, they ate them.

• 1:49:18Steven Rinella?

  That had to been egg harvest too, man.

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I bet.

• 1:49:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz that's like tough to do.

• 1:49:22Speaker 04

  So there was eight or nine different species of cervids that were brought to New Zealand from different places in the world. And they still have most of them. There's I was surprised to hear at the meeting, they brought moose a hundred years ago. Teddy Roosevelt was involved in some of the training locations. They brought moose and I was surprised to hear some people talking about maybe there being a couple moose still there.

• 1:49:44Steven Rinella?

  I've heard that. There's rumors of that.

• 1:49:46Speaker 04

  It seems kinda like they're Bigfoot. Their version of Bigfoot is what it seems like. There's never any proof, but there's there's reports.

• 1:49:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, like, it's gotta be. And I hunted there, you know? And the sense I got from the the guys in that community is uh same when I get when I'm hanging out with Hawaiians is uh they've built the whole culture and lifestyle around big game hunting.

• 1:50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, right?

• 1:50:11Steven Rinella?

  And so a lot of the people, it's it's funny cuz you get this idea here that um you know, you get this idea here that that, you know, like, like, whatever, that the tree huggers want to save the deer, you know, or something. But it seems like the tree huggers want them, the tree huggers want the deer dead, dude.

• 1:50:29Speaker 04

  We have a we have a representative on the Mealer Working Group from Hawaii. And that's because in 1961, they brought some Colombian blacktail from Oregon and put them on Kauai, the island of Kauai. And they're still there and they're hunted. And the locals that like the deer hunt, like them. So they're not eradicating them. But like the we had a meeting in Hawaii once, and I asked the Hawaiian representative for the Mealer Working Group, I said, you finally get to go to a meeting cuz we're here in Hawaii. And he said, no, I've gotten an endangered plant meeting I gotta be at. He said, honestly, we're not looking to conserve and increase our deer. He said, like, like, there's 50 different species in their diet and almost all of them are endangered plant species.

• 1:51:12Speaker 04

  So we don't want more. We don't want more. It's an interesting, different perspective.

• 1:51:16Steven Rinella?

  One of the conversations that sticks with me most wasn't New Zealand, but it was in Hawaii. It was around the same issue is I was talking to a native Hawaiian. Okay.

• 1:51:27Steven Rinella?

  Like an ancestral Hawaiian or like an ethnic, I don't know what you call it, like a Hawaiian, not a guy that lives in Hawaii, but a, but a native Hawaiian. And you know, historically the idea is that when, when the Polynesians, when the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii sometime around 1100 years ago, they brought, they brought this menagerie of things with them, including pigs. Right. The pigs have been there a long time and he was sharing with me, he goes, how can I be native?

• 1:51:54Steven Rinella?

  I'm native, but the pigs that my people brought gotta go.

• 1:51:59Speaker 04

  In the same canoe.

• 1:52:00Steven Rinella?

  They gotta go, but I'm native.

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:52:03Steven Rinella?

  And his take was, he didn't want, his take was, he didn't need outsiders.

• 1:52:12Steven Rinella?

  You know, he didn't need howlies coming and telling him what animals belonged on the island.

• 1:52:18Speaker 04

  That's such an important part of their culture. It's not just like an animal, whether it needs to be there or not, it's part of the culture. It's part of them.

• 1:52:26Steven Rinella?

  It was just so offensive to him.

• 1:52:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:52:28Steven Rinella?

  This conversation that like, oh, no, no, you're native mad respect, but the, your pigs, nah.

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, gotta go.

• 1:52:34Steven Rinella?

  Get them out of here.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:52:38Steven Rinella?

  Did you hunt New Zealand? It's my last question for you.

• 1:52:40Speaker 04

  I have, yeah, I have a friend, Pete Caldwell. I met a few years prior to that and he said, he knew about the New Zealand deer meeting. He said, if you get to that meeting, he said, let's go out and do something fun. And so the meeting was over and my son Levi and I, and, and Pete took us out along with another guy, P A Ellen from Sweden. Big Swedish guy. We went out and, and we did a little blitzkrieg about two days of, of hunting, staying out there, staying in one of the old hunting shacks. That was more than a hundred years old, probably. And we shot red deer and we shot tar.

• 1:53:18Speaker 04

  Brush tailed possum shot. I got a European hare, European rabbit, which excites Jack Rabbit Jim. Be able to get some European, European hares. Almost got a feral house cat, but I couldn't, couldn't get my sights fast enough. David, Pete was with me and he's like, he's like, come here, come here, come here. Get, get in position, get in position. And I'm like, what, what, what is it? What's over there? It's a cat. Hurry up. He was like really excited about getting a cat.

• 1:53:43Steven Rinella?

  Imagine why those gone.

• 1:53:44Speaker 04

  It slunk away. It slunk away before I could. That would have been interesting. Griffin grin. I don't know. Sun shot a wallaby. Wallabies are hated. I mean, they're cute. They're cute. My wife says, you're not shooting a wallaby. And I didn't, but Levi didn't hesitate.

• 1:53:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but they're on the extermination list.

• 1:53:59Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. Big time. Big time. The browse line, when we were up in those mountains, the browse line was just tremendous. Like everything gone. From, from three and a half feet down, just like dirt, everything eaten with tars up there and, and the wallabies. Pete didn't even want us shooting at a wallaby because he was afraid we'd miss. He wanted to make sure that that thing hit the ground.

• 1:54:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh really?

• 1:54:22Speaker 04

  It was in a new area that, that is a really nice area and they're starting to pioneer into that area. And so like every pioneer needs to go. He was adamant about it.

• 1:54:31Steven Rinella?

  Are you kidding me?

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Steven Rinella?

  What I had fun there, man hunting there, but the reason I couldn't get into it for like, I couldn't get into like, to consider going back or anything is that

• 1:54:44Steven Rinella?

  the, the non-native aspect of it.

• 1:54:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Steven Rinella?

  That it's not.

• 1:54:49Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's not like a heritage thing.

• 1:54:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like a giant game farm.

• 1:54:53Steven Rinella?

  They came in on a boat. There's not like a human hunting heritage there. It was just, it was, it was hunting without, hunting without cultural history, hunting without wildlife history. And it just like, I had fun, but there was just something gone. And another thing that really struck me is the, the, the, the, the no predators on the landscape.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Right.

• 1:55:17Steven Rinella?

  It, there was something about it. And I don't want to hack like, like, you know, I mean, this isn't meant to disparage dudes in New Zealand. Just an observation from a guy far away that doesn't matter, but. Just there's certain things that were missing that I didn't know meant so much to me.

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and sheep raising is such a huge part of New Zealand culture, sheep raising. So you can imagine how interested they are bringing a complement of predators over to.

• 1:55:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, that's not gonna happen. Whenever I'm in Hawaii, I always think like some parts of Hawaii, the dry side like Kona, you know. I'm always like, dude, if you turn a rattlesnake out here, he'd love it. Not that I would do that, but I, you know, you think about like, there's certain predators who just love New Zealand.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:55:58Steven Rinella?

  But it's not gonna happen. Well, Jim Heffelfinger, thanks for joining, man.

• 1:56:02Speaker 04

  I enjoyed it. I always enjoy coming back.

• 1:56:04Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate all your work on behalf of American wildlife and then also just the effort you take as a, as a, as a scientist, the effort you take to come and talk to just Joe Blow, outdoor people, Joe Blow hunters and anglers and try to help them, ask the right questions, understand what they're reading.

• 1:56:27Speaker 04

  I think that's.

• 1:56:28Steven Rinella?

  See through the noise and follow wildlife and be like a concerned, be a concerned resource user.

• 1:56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've written a lot of magazine articles and I, I enjoy and I think I've honed the skill of taking complex scientific stuff and just explaining it so that anybody can understand it. And I think that's valuable. So I'm driven by the desire to provide reliable, unbiased information and let people just learn from that.

• 1:56:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Well, until next time. Thank you.

• 1:56:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks.

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