Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 635: Working on Grizzly Bears About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Dusty Lasseter, Cory Calkins https://www.instagram.com/cman_calkins/?hl=en, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en.
Topics discussed: Catching 67 grizzlies in barrel traps; figuring out where to put grizzlies you’re relocating; being trap savvy; the death of 399; Steve spilling coffee all over his laptop; the “My Favorite Animal Act”; a sow’s home range size; how bears eat over 260 different plants and animals in the Yellowstone ecosystem; when a bear eats human meat; avoiding eye contact; false charging vs. actual charging; management decisions; delisting; how many grizzly die per year; Steve's promise to never put in for a grizzly tag; and more.
Outro song "1187" by Shad Peters https://www.instagram.com/shadpeters/
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.
Transcript 21,655 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
0:32 Steven Rinella? You ever get that feeling the wall's closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own? Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins. Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around.
1:16 Steven Rinella? And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area, so you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life, so use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall.
1:56 Speaker 03 This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless.
2:02 Speaker 04 The Meat Eater Podcast.
2:05 Steven Rinella? You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. Joined today by Dusty Lassiter, former Wyoming game and fish bear management specialist. The key word there being former.
2:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:36 Steven Rinella? I love the agency guys, but the problem with having agency guys on to talk about wildlife management is they gotta worry about them getting in trouble.
2:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't have to worry about getting in trouble anymore.
2:45 Steven Rinella? Really, just no trouble, nothing they can do to you.
2:47 Speaker 05 Um, I don't think so.
2:48 Steven Rinella? Let the air out of your tires?
2:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. Write me a ticket, I guess.
2:53 Steven Rinella? No, again, I have nothing but, you know, I have like a lot of respect and admiration for agency biologists and game wardens, like, you know, I love it. So many of them are driven by passion and a desire to do good, but when talking about policy, it just gets tricky for them because, you know, they, they get reprimanded.
3:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, you get muzzled a little bit and, you know, you're trying to walk the party line a little bit, you know, the department line.
3:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Doug, give everybody a run through of what you've done in your career around grizzly bears and wolves and?
3:29 Speaker 05 Oh, man. So I started in 2010 and I was just supposed to be on for one fall and one spring. I got hired on because one of my coworkers was going back to college and that was the busiest year that we'd ever had. We caught 67 grizzly bears in Wyoming outside of Yellowstone National Park in, in that year.
3:56 Steven Rinella? Damn, man.
3:57 Speaker 05 So, yeah, yeah, it was.
3:59 Steven Rinella? All in barrel traps.
4:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, we, we call them covert traps, but they're really big square box traps now. The Montana guys still use those culverts, but it's a pain in the butt to pull a bear in and out of them.
4:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah, remember that, remember that video Callahan climbing in there, climbing in one of them tubes that Barry's basically like laid out on it?
4:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, so we, we, I think we dealt with enough bears. We came up with a better trap design, honestly.
4:28 Steven Rinella? What do you, what were you guys, uh, man, I got so many questions. Go on. Uh, just remember that later I want to ask you about what kind of, how you like, uh, what your favorite bait and stuff is, but keep going.
4:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:37 Steven Rinella? So you got on, you guys started just hammering bears?
4:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was just call after call. I would try to go home just to take a nap and I would get flagged down on the road. Like somebody being like, I, I gotta, I gotta bear. Um, actually, one of those guys was, uh, Jim Zumbo.
4:53 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
4:54 Speaker 05 You know, he flagged me down on the road and he's like, yeah, I just got back from Alaska. I'd killed my 20th black bear. And, uh, he was, he was smoking some salmon and a grizzly bear came by and smashed his salmon smoker.
5:08 Steven Rinella? Oh, I got it.
5:08 Speaker 05 Uh, so, um, yeah, so I, I start.
5:12 Steven Rinella? Jim Zumbo.
5:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:13 Steven Rinella? Came home from Alaska, was smoking salmon that he brought home from Alaska and a grizzly showed up and smashed Jim Zumbo's smoker.
5:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. So.
5:25 Steven Rinella? Pretty legit.
5:26 Speaker 05 Kind of funny. Yeah.
5:28 Steven Rinella? So now I'm on a one up with my George Bush story.
5:35 Speaker 05 Uh oh.
5:35 Steven Rinella? But go on, Joe, go on.
5:38 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, so that was just a really busy season and, and there was a need for more help. Uh, so they hired me on another season and.
5:48 Steven Rinella? Cause you were a big game guide.
5:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was. I, you know, I, I went to the University of Wyoming, got a finance degree, came home and just loved where I lived and, uh, when I came home, I was working in the thoroughfare as a guide and, you know, just doing construction, trying to make ends meet and.
6:07 Steven Rinella? And home is Cody.
6:08 Speaker 05 Home is Cody. That's where I grew up and, and I was just, wrong place, wrong time, honestly, because, um, there weren't a lot of people that went to college and came back and I had a lot of knowledge and skill about horses in the back country and, you know, my life was immersed in wildlife and bears growing up and my parents worked for outfitters and, you know, they were stopping in at the house and telling crazy stories and I was just sucked in. So that's why I came home and, I wasn't intending to get into bear work and I just fell into it and the timing was right. And yeah, they hired me on and.
6:51 Speaker 05 You know, that first year I saw 25 bears and then that next season I was in on another 25 grizzly captures and had 50 under my belt in a pretty quick, you know, amount of time, so.
7:06 Steven Rinella? Were you doing all the, were you doing all the relocations on those two? Like, how many are euthanized and how many are relocated?
7:14 Speaker 05 So, at the time, my boss was a guy named Mark Bressino and we were really still in the recovery phase with these bears and, and we probably only euthanized one out of five when I started and they were in really bad shape. You know, they, they'd been repeat offenders, um, never, it's never the three strikes and you're out. People say that all the time and I get so sick of that.
7:42 Steven Rinella? That's not true.
7:43 Speaker 05 No, that's not true. It's not California, so, um, but yeah, there were some bears that, you know, had been in multiple livestock conflicts that we were removing or I caught a female that year that her back leg was broke and it was six inches shorter than her other back leg.
8:00 Steven Rinella? Okay.
8:00 Speaker 05 And I had the bone in my office and it's just a, you know, melded piece of calcium.
8:06 Steven Rinella? How you think she broke her leg?
8:08 Speaker 05 No idea. Always wondered that, you know.
8:10 Steven Rinella? So on a bear like that, on a grizzly like that, uh, it's in heart, it's in bad shape, it's desperate and it's not gonna, you're not gonna, uh, you know, what the word to use, you're not gonna rehabilitate it.
8:23 Speaker 05 No, um, it just wasn't gonna be successful relocating that kind of bear.
8:27 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
8:27 Speaker 05 And she was emaciated and she actually had a yearling, um, that we didn't know about at the time. You know, she was, she was trying to orphan a, a yearling bear because she was not even producing milk. She was in such poor physical shape.
8:43 Steven Rinella? Got it. Hmm. You say she was trying to orphan it?
8:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, it was, it was following her around, but it, I, she's not providing for it at all. And we ended up catching that bear too and, and we relocated that bear, but, um, she just wasn't a good candidate for relocation.
9:05 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And when you relocate the grizzlies, how do you, how do you figure out where to try? Cause you gotta put them so far away from.
9:14 Steven Rinella? You gotta put them so far away uh
9:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:18 Steven Rinella? To reduce the temptation, they're gonna get in trouble again. And that's and that's gotta be like very time consuming.
9:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. Um, it definitely takes some manpower. But you're trying to take it as far away from the conflict as possible. And there's really about six relocation sites in Wyoming that we use.
9:40 Speaker 05 You know, and that kinda had changed over the time that I'd been at the department. We started doing some relocations that weren't as far and.
9:48 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm. Use helicopters to dump them off?
9:51 Speaker 05 Uh, we don't, we, we had one bear trap that you could take off the, the wheels and haul with the helicopter. But in the time that I was there, the 11 years I was there, we never did that.
10:03 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Uh, now, tell me how you catch one?
10:07 Speaker 05 So, most of the time you're using a covert trap and, and you wanna get that thing as low to the ground as possible. You wanna set it as close to the conflict as possible. And um, you just put a piece of bait in the front of that thing, usually a roadkill deer with a string that goes up, up the front wall around the top. And then it's sitting on a pair of vice grips. And the door is sitting on those vice grips. So, bear comes in, pulls that bait.
10:39 Steven Rinella? Springs the vice grip?
10:40 Speaker 05 Springs the vice grip. And the, the door shuts and there's a pin that shoots.
10:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
10:46 Speaker 05 A lot of times we use Beavercaster is always my favorite thing to.
10:50 Steven Rinella? So use a little lure?
10:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, a little bit of lure in there. If it's uh keyed in on fruit, we'd use apples and, and watermelon, things like that.
10:59 Steven Rinella? Stick that back of the trap?
11:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, even like a trail into it a lot of times. A lot of times you make a drag and they'll follow a drag for a long, long ways.
11:08 Steven Rinella? Like drag a roadkill deer?
11:10 Speaker 05 Right, yep.
11:12 Steven Rinella? How, how far might you drag that deer to make a scent trail?
11:16 Speaker 05 I mean. My old boss had done it a couple of miles and caught bears.
11:21 Steven Rinella? Wow.
11:21 Speaker 05 Running a couple of miles on them. Yep. And they're finding now with these GPS collars that a bear can smell a carcass 10 to 15 miles away and will just start beelining it for a carcass.
11:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, I followed a grizzly bear track in the Bob once, nine miles to a, I don't know how far he started, but I followed the tracks for nine miles in front of me to a moose carcass.
11:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:42 Speaker 06 It was impressive.
11:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
11:43 Speaker 05 They got a pretty good sniffer.
11:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I've told the story to anyone that'll listen to it, but we were one time camped up on the Arctic slope, you know, off the, off the north slope of the Brooks Range.
11:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:56 Steven Rinella? And we were camped where a creek came into a bigger river. And one morning we got up and walked three miles up that tributary and killed a caribou. Okay. Spent the day up there, carried it down that tributary to our camp. That night we're sitting in our camp and here comes a grizzly down the gravel bar digging roots. You see him move and dig and move and digging. He gets to the mouth of that tributary. It's kind of like a slight little canyon. He gets in the mouth of that tributary and stands up like someone shocked him.
12:25 Speaker 05 Wow.
12:26 Speaker 06 Hmm.
12:27 Steven Rinella? Waves his nose in the air and took off at a full run. So I don't, I can't tell you for sure.
12:34 Steven Rinella? You know what I mean? But it was like, there was no discussing it. It was like, that son of a bitch smells that caribou.
12:39 Speaker 05 Yeah. I'm sure that's exactly what happened. Yeah.
12:41 Steven Rinella? Coming down that, coming down that creek. And that's only three miles. And you're talking about how far?
12:45 Speaker 05 Uh, GPS collars, they're saying 10 to 15.
12:48 Steven Rinella? What do you, what do you see on a GPS collar that suggests to you that a grizzly is on to something?
12:53 Speaker 05 Well, it's meandering and then all of a sudden it's a straight line, you know? It's like, just like you're talking about. There wasn't any
13:02 Speaker 05 second thoughts in that bear's mind.
13:04 Steven Rinella? Got it. And then he's just going then.
13:05 Speaker 05 He's going.
13:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of Bruja on the news right now. There's always been a bear, there's always been a very polarizing bear.
13:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:13 Steven Rinella? In the, um, a polarizing bear in the Yellowstone National Park area.
13:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:21 Steven Rinella? Um, goes by the handle 399, which I always like, cause um, I like it when they, you know, when they give the animals like a name like petals or something, then you know it's trouble.
13:30 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
13:31 Steven Rinella? So if it has its research number.
13:33 Speaker 05 There's some clinical detachment there.
13:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah, a research number allows the citizens at large to stay a little, usually allows citizens at large to stay a little chilled out about celebrity animals. But 399, it was, it, it might as well have been named Cookie.
13:52 Speaker 05 Right.
13:53 Steven Rinella? Right. It just got really famous and the American public, particularly those who are very unfamiliar with wildlife, will have this view that, that they look at an individual animal and they see it with like, like crystalline clarity, that one, and they, they cease to view it as in context of its like species at large. Meaning you could have 800 grizzlies in an area and, and it's kind of, eh, whatever. But that one, nothing better happen to.
14:28 Speaker 05 Right.
14:29 Steven Rinella? Right. They're not, it's sort of, it's not like, it's not like they don't have an awareness of the population at large. They have an awareness of that one. Um, I'm not lecturing you. I'm just trying to update listeners.
14:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:40 Steven Rinella? Uh, when making an analogy about it, I'll make the analogy of that someone like a hunter, someone in the concert, like someone in wildlife, hunter-based wildlife conservation might view habitat as an apple tree.
14:57 Steven Rinella? Um, and if this apple tree is taken care of, it will continuously produce apples and the apples are somewhat expendable. Some get eaten, some die and rot. Take care of the tree in perpetuity. It'll put apples out. Animal rights people, um, and preservation minded, preservationist minded people aren't that interested in the apple tree. But now and then there's an apple that really catches their eye.
15:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:26 Steven Rinella? And they are very concerned about what happens to that apple.
15:31 Speaker 05 Yeah. It's a good analogy, I guess.
15:34 Steven Rinella? This bear became that apple.
15:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:38 Steven Rinella? Bear 399.
15:39 Speaker 04 It's usually an apple that photographs well.
15:42 Steven Rinella? And photographs a lot.
15:43 Speaker 04 It's pretty dependable.
15:44 Speaker 05 Doesn't rot.
15:45 Speaker 04 It's an apple that shows up again and again.
15:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
15:48 Speaker 04 You know?
15:49 Steven Rinella? Or it'd be like a moose that's piebald.
15:52 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
15:53 Steven Rinella? So, because moose, you know, generally people aren't able to distinguish one from the other. Then you get a moose in some neighborhood that has a white splotch on it. And then people are able to put individuality to it. And then someone gets that moose and it causes a whole shit show. 399, the bear, um, has had books written about it. It just got hit by a car.
16:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:17 Steven Rinella? In our little preamble chat, I brought up to you, um, that it's that bear now is getting its final, it's being put to rest with, with much fanfare and consternation.
16:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:30 Steven Rinella? I mentioned it to you and you had a comment about your view on, on this particular bear. You didn't deal with it professionally, correct?
16:37 Speaker 05 No, I know her type, though.
16:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Tell, tell me about that bear. What, that, like, you, you mentioned a thing about management.
16:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, I think that's poor wildlife management. And we learned this lesson early on with a bear named 104. So before 399, there was a bear named, the number was 104.
16:59 Steven Rinella? It was a celebrity bear.
17:00 Speaker 05 Celebrity bear, another shiny apple.
17:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:02 Speaker 05 If you will. And, um, my predecessors tried to relocate that bear, move her. She got so, um, not trap shy, but trap.
17:15 Speaker 04 Savvy.
17:16 Speaker 05 Not savvy, like she enjoyed traps. You could, you, you could drive down the road with the door open and she'd come running down the road and jump in the trap and you would catch her. You know, she was that.
17:27 Speaker 04 Kind of freak.
17:28 Speaker 05 Like.
17:28 Steven Rinella? Because it just associated it with food.
17:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, because there were so many positive experiences jumping in traps and.
17:34 Steven Rinella? Just you eat the whole damn deer and then some guy lets you out.
17:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. And you walk back home.
17:39 Steven Rinella? I get it, I get it.
17:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, so um we just learned early on that those habituated bears aren't successful and she also got hit by a vehicle. One oh four and you know, I always thought that was gonna happen to three ninety nine. It took longer than I I would have guessed.
17:57 Steven Rinella? You pictured it getting struck by a car?
17:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, and one of her cubs got hit by a car um you know, and and really.
18:06 Speaker 05 The park service could talk about more. They probably know all the individual cubs that she had, but as far as I'm aware, there's only one of her cubs that's still alive and existing because they just. Get so habituated to people. They don't learn normal uh bear manners is what I call it. So you know, one of her cubs got shot by a guy who. He was he was hunting and he's in his camper and this bear's walking right at him like it's coming to eat him, you know, but that bear's used to getting its picture taken. And that guy's scared for his life because he thinks this bear is gonna hurt him.
18:44 Steven Rinella? And you don't you don't think it was?
18:47 Speaker 05 It was so used to people. It was smiling the whole way. It was coming in, I'm sure, you know.
18:54 Speaker 05 So I just don't think it sets bears up for success and three ninety nine was really polarizing. I mean, some people loved her. Some people hated her. Um I think people forget that she mauled a guy years ago. So I mean, she was still a grizzly bear and.
19:12 Steven Rinella? When you say people hated that bear, do you mean that they hated that bear because what it because it was a symbol for something?
19:17 Speaker 05 I think so. I think I think people would make comments that I would see and it would really ruffle feathers where you know. They would say things like if they deal with grizzly bears and I can hunt, I'm gonna shoot that bear and that just.
19:34 Speaker 05 That really affected people negatively, so.
19:39 Speaker 04 Well, that Shane uh Shane who got scratched up by the bear.
19:44 Steven Rinella? Said he sat right in his chair.
19:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, and and he he had good reason to believe that it was three ninety nine.
19:52 Speaker 04 That's what he'd said.
19:53 Steven Rinella? Well, they, how would they not know for certain?
19:55 Speaker 07 That he was scratched up by 399?
19:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's, that was one of the things that he said.
20:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, she was in the vicinity.
20:02 Speaker 04 She was in the vicinity, but it was like, if 399 was the one that did this to you, we don't want to know about it. Was that kind of a thing?
20:12 Speaker 04 So it's, I mean, that was, that was one of the things that he mentioned sort of offhandedly. And he's like, if it was 399, I don't think anybody would come out and declare to the world that 399 had done this and needs to get destroyed because it would just cause such an uproar.
20:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
20:26 Speaker 04 So it was kind of like there were, there's like a buffer zone built around this bear to protect it from the consequences of its bad behavior once people get so attached to it.
20:38 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I got you.
20:40 Speaker 04 But he, he posted, I think when 399 died too, he posted something again to the effect of like, there's a good chance that this was the bear that did it.
20:49 Steven Rinella? Wow.
20:51 Steven Rinella? Let me ask you another one.
20:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, that was, that was a hard question. I'm sure people are going to cry over that. So 399 was just, touched a lot of heartstrings.
21:00 Steven Rinella? Rip.
21:01 Speaker 05 Yep.
21:01 Steven Rinella? Rest in peace.
21:02 Speaker 04 399 was never going to die, you know, in a warm bed with a roaring fire surrounded by loved ones. Right? Like?
21:10 Steven Rinella? No.
21:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:12 Speaker 04 I was sick. That's the, the craziest part is like getting whacked by cars. Not the worst way to go if you're a wild animal.
21:20 Steven Rinella? Cal went out, Cal did. There's a Cal in the Field about this on YouTube. If you type in Cal in the Field Grizzly Bear, you'll see this one, but there's a Cal in the Field where he goes out with some Idaho guys and they work and they, they covert trap a grizzly and work up the grizzly. So they covert trap a grizzly. And it's got a lip tattoo.
21:41 Steven Rinella? So they, like an identifying marker.
21:43 Speaker 05 Right.
21:44 Steven Rinella? They call in the lip tattoo.
21:47 Steven Rinella? And they're like, oh, we know that bear.
21:51 Steven Rinella? They had had a collared female grizzly in the park. She found a carcass. She found a buffalo carcass.
22:03 Steven Rinella? It was on it and they get a mortality signal and they go there and there's their sow with the collar dead on top of the buffalo carcass and standing on top of the both of them is this male bear.
22:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:19 Steven Rinella? Right? But man, you could explain that kind of stuff all day long, like that the number one cause of death of Yellowstone wolves is wolves. Like you could explain that stuff all day long, but um, it is never gonna, it, it just doesn't resonate, you know? People will look at certain causes of death, like if 399 had been killed by a male grizzly, I don't think people would be upset.
22:45 Steven Rinella? You know what I mean?
22:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, people.
22:47 Steven Rinella? They're upset because it's, they're upset because it's human caused.
22:50 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm. Yeah, people put different values on different animals and, and they even, yeah, even at the individual level, put values on animals and.
22:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
23:00 Speaker 05 People just really valued that bear, so.
23:03 Steven Rinella? Onyx Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's, it's my favorite app. I use the thing on, on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. Onyx Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map so you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't gotta guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from Onyx Hunt. Every successful hunt eventually leads to the workbench or the kitchen counter.
23:47 Steven Rinella? The deer is broken down, the meat is trimmed and it's time to grind burger, make sausage, prepare jerky and package everything for the freezer. It's an important part of the field to table process. L E M products makes the equipment designed to help you get the job done. From big bite grinders, which are phenomenal and sausage stuffers to slicers, dehydrators, vacuum sealers and more. LEM offers professional-grade equipment built for home meat processing. For more than 30 years, LEM has been helping hunters, anglers, and field-to-table enthusiasts process and preserve their harvest with confidence.
24:26 Steven Rinella? Visit lemproducts.com and use promo code STEVE15 to get 15% off plus free shipping. That's lemproducts.com promo code STEVE15. LEM, built for the work, there for the journey. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things.
25:11 Steven Rinella? If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big-time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.
25:37 Steven Rinella? Let me hit you with another easier to answer one, but you'll get, this will make other people mad.
25:41 Speaker 05 Good.
25:44 Steven Rinella? Now you're gonna, now you're gonna, we have, you know, we have a full spectrum of listeners.
25:51 Speaker 05 Sure.
25:51 Steven Rinella? We got, we got the horseshoe, we got, we got left, we got righties, lefties, and then we got where the righties and the lefties meet, which is crazy redneck hippies.
26:01 Speaker 05 Sure, yeah.
26:03 Steven Rinella? So no matter what you say, your eyes are gonna get, someone's gonna get mad. And this will be a thing where the, the, the, the right bottom of the horseshoe will get very irritated, no matter what you say. Bear spray or pistols. Like when you're out.
26:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:18 Steven Rinella? Knowing what you know, having dealt with as many grizzlies as you've dealt with. And been to as many conflict sites as you've been to. And touched as many of them as you touched to.
26:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:28 Steven Rinella? And talked to as many people that have been messed up by grizzlies as you've talked to.
26:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:32 Steven Rinella? Bear spray or pistol?
26:33 Speaker 05 Without a doubt, bear spray.
26:35 Steven Rinella? Really?
26:36 Speaker 05 Yeah. And.
26:37 Steven Rinella? Tell me more. Now I'm mad.
26:42 Speaker 04 He did promise.
26:43 Steven Rinella? He's a gun grabber. I knew it. He's a gun grabber. The other day, Yanni was talking about them needing to ban the red rider.
26:51 Speaker 05 Hmm.
26:52 Steven Rinella? I was like, now you're a gun grabber. Trying to take away people's red riders.
26:55 Speaker 04 What was his, uh?
26:56 Steven Rinella? He's got some cockamamie theory that of teaching a kid to shoot on a red rider to get used to a heavy trigger pull.
27:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, he was bashing the trigger.
27:06 Steven Rinella? My little kids.
27:07 Speaker 05 Fair point.
27:07 Steven Rinella? Yeah, my little kids shooting red riders, I remember they used to shoot them with two fingers because you cannot get that thing to go off.
27:12 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. I thought it was gonna be like he was anti BB gunfights.
27:15 Steven Rinella? No. He's, he thinks, he thinks a red rider teaches bad form.
27:20 Speaker 05 Hmm.
27:20 Steven Rinella? And I think that's a very un-American statement, but let's return.
27:23 Speaker 05 That's how you shoot your eye out.
27:24 Steven Rinella? Bear spray unequivocally.
27:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, I, I have one caveat to that. If, if you're really well experienced with, with handguns, then by all means, carry a handgun.
27:36 Steven Rinella? Okay.
27:37 Speaker 05 But a lot of people just aren't. And I investigated so many cases of self-defense, defensive life shootings, and people are just really bad shots with pistols.
27:48 Steven Rinella? Okay.
27:48 Speaker 05 Um, and a lot of times they would even hit the bear, but they don't hit it lethally.
27:54 Steven Rinella? Okay.
27:54 Speaker 05 And bear spray, the, the beauty of it is it makes a four foot cloud. So you don't have to be accurate.
28:01 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
28:02 Speaker 05 Um.
28:03 Steven Rinella? And how much do they hate that bear spray?
28:05 Speaker 05 I've never seen it not work.
28:07 Steven Rinella? Really?
28:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
28:08 Steven Rinella? You know, I read a statistic and I didn't really spend a lot of time on it.
28:11 Speaker 05 If you, if you spray it on the ground, they'll come sniff it though. It becomes an attractant.
28:15 Steven Rinella? Oh. Um, yeah, I got, I'll tell you a good one about that a little bit. Um, but I read a statistic and I never really spent much time on it, but it seemed like, it seemed significant. That 25% of the time. A pistol, or sorry, 25% of the time when a firearm is discharged in a bear attack, it hits a human.
28:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the other reason.
28:39 Steven Rinella? Have you heard that?
28:41 Speaker 05 No, I haven't heard that statistic. That seems high. There's a lot of shooters out there.
28:46 Steven Rinella? But listen, man, like, I know, yeah, I know a bunch of cases where that's happened. And I haven't looked into it. I just read it.
28:53 Speaker 05 You know, there was a case on the Montana Idaho border. It ended up being in Montana where a guy was getting mauled and his, his buddy tried to shoot the bear off him and actually killed his friend.
29:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they had, they had shot that, that bear, they were black bear hunting. They mistook it for a black bear. So they shot it and the bear runs into the, into the brush. He thinks he hit a black bear, so he goes trailing in there after it and boom.
29:22 Speaker 05 I just remember it was so close on the border, they didn't know who had jurisdiction.
29:27 Steven Rinella? Got it, got it.
29:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, so that's, that's why I carry bear spray and, um, you know, ultimately it's up to people. I know there's gun lovers. They want to carry guns and that's fine, but a lot of people just don't practice shooting pistols enough.
29:41 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah, I think it does say a lot about your, um, the choice might say more about your mind frame than it does your, like, your strat, your sense of strategy.
29:51 Speaker 05 Right.
29:52 Speaker 04 I remember being like up at Sports's Warehouse in Anchorage and seeing people that just got off a plane. And they were gonna buy a pistol for their Alaska vacation. And then, you know, pawn it off or whatever at the end of the vacation. Like, I think there's like a, there's an assumption that if you, if you believe in the handgun, like you just go get one, you get a box of ammo and you keep it near you. And like, that's just a recipe for disaster, but I think there's a lot of overconfident. And I'm, I'm myself, I have no confidence in my handgun shooting ability and I shoot one pretty regularly, but.
30:31 Steven Rinella? I'll tell you my little, my, I'll walk you through my irrational thoughts on it.
30:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:36 Steven Rinella? If there's slight risk of, first off, I, I condemn and yell at and harass and tease anyone that carries bear spray where there's no grizzlies. Indefensible.
30:47 Speaker 05 It works on lions.
30:48 Speaker 07 What if it's just on your binoharness?
30:51 Steven Rinella? Then I'll tease you.
30:51 Speaker 07 Like mine is all the time.
30:52 Steven Rinella? I'll tease you and harass you.
30:53 Speaker 07 I guess I'm tease worthy and harass worthy.
30:55 Steven Rinella? Cause bear spray is not nice to get shot with. And they, and it, they, they go off. I've been in two, I've been never mauled by a bear, been charged by them, but never mauled. But twice I've been hosed by people's bear spray.
31:09 Speaker 07 Yeah, mine doesn't come off my binoharness.
31:11 Speaker 05 That's the gift that keeps giving.
31:13 Speaker 07 So I should start moving.
31:14 Speaker 04 Are you replacing it every two years?
31:16 Speaker 07 Yes.
31:17 Steven Rinella? Trust me. It's like, it happens. Those are not, those, the plastic nozzles on those cans are not invulnerable. Um, one time, unload, just standing around a car, unloading backpacks, someone stepped on the plastic nozzle.
31:34 Steven Rinella? Everything. And one time I got pickpocketed in the thick, in a, like a willow choked hellhole. And all of a sudden I was like, what is that noise going?
31:44 Steven Rinella? All your shit's done. All your gear is gone. You cannot get it out.
31:49 Speaker 07 Wait, is it bad to keep your bear spray?
31:51 Steven Rinella? In your car?
31:52 Speaker 07 In the binoharness? Yeah.
31:53 Steven Rinella? Yeah, keep an ammo.
31:54 Speaker 07 Like with the fluctuating temperature?
31:55 Steven Rinella? It'll, it'll total your car.
31:57 Speaker 05 You don't want to wreck something.
31:58 Steven Rinella? And I know, I know people whose car has been told, your car, when that goes off in your car, it will total your car.
32:02 Speaker 07 Right now, temperatures are dropping.
32:04 Speaker 05 I, I had a friend who did that and he's still driving his vehicle.
32:07 Steven Rinella? Oh, really?
32:07 Speaker 05 He says it's the gift that keeps on giving.
32:09 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
32:10 Speaker 07 Right, right, right.
32:10 Speaker 05 It's just all the time.
32:11 Steven Rinella? Put, get a small ammo can, there's one right outside the door of the, of the studio. Get a small ammo can and put it in the ammo can. And then when you're using it, carry it. When you're done using it, put it in ammo can. I was, I was gonna tell you, I'm gonna tell you my irrational logic, but let me tell you my funny story. We had the, the Rinella, uh, family. We had, we went into the summer with two bear sprays. And we have like a little camping spot where there's grizzlies. So when we get there, before I get a sense of what's going on, I'll like tell my kids like, take the spray if you're gonna go fish or take the spray and bring the dog.
32:43 Steven Rinella? And then once we kind of get a sense of what's up, everybody relaxes about it. But at first it's thick, you know? At first I'll be like, take the bear spray. So at the end of the summer, we only have now, uh, there's one bear spray. And of course, no one knows what happened to the other bear spray. Well, me and my wife are up shutting our little camping area down. And here, right outside of our little composting outhouse toilet.
33:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:06 Steven Rinella? Right outside the door is the can of bear spray, empty with four holes in it.
33:15 Steven Rinella? It got et by a bear.
33:16 Speaker 05 Got, yeah, got eaten by a bear. Seen that before, yeah.
33:19 Steven Rinella? Uh, here's my irrational logic.
33:21 Speaker 05 Okay.
33:22 Steven Rinella? Slight risk of grizzlies, I use spray. High risk of grizzlies, I bring my 10 millimeter pistol. Ultra high risk of grizzlies, I bring my sawed off pump 12 gauge with slugs in it.
33:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:38 Speaker 05 Spray and pray.
33:42 Steven Rinella? And I always look at it, and I always look at all three of them. I'm like, hey, man, like, what are you thinking here?
33:47 Speaker 05 That's a, that's a myth I can dispel too, is people, uh, people take shotguns and they, they alternate buckshot and slugs.
33:57 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, cuz you know, I know that. No, I think it's supposed, Brody told me you're supposed to run two bird shots.
34:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:04 Steven Rinella? Then you start going, then you start going slug buckshot. Cuz it's like, you warn it, boom. You warn it, boom. Then like, it's getting closer. Now you hit it with a slug, boom. Then it's so close and everything's so chaotic, then you start going buckshot.
34:21 Speaker 04 And most bears are aware of this choreography, this elaborate choreography before they.
34:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, all the time in the world to reload.
34:28 Steven Rinella? There's the warning shot. There's the warning shot. He tells his buddy, listen, when you coming in, he's gonna hit you two bird shots.
34:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:35 Steven Rinella? Then you gotta dodge the slug. Watch out for the buckshot.
34:39 Speaker 05 A zig and then a zag. Here's my scenario that I find myself in all the time. As most hunters, we don't get to pick our weather, but we do get to pick which direction we walk when we're out hunting. And most of the time, the wind's in my face. And a lot of times, the wind's honking. I don't trust bear spray when the wind's blowing. Okay, so I've had that question a bunch over the years, and I had a really good friend who was horn hunting in the spring. It was super windy out. Um, a sow with cubs, real little cubs, charges him. And, you know, the wind's in his face. He sprays bear spray. Half of it goes in her face, half of it gets in his face.
35:18 Speaker 05 They both ran off crying. So, it did work though. Yeah, it worked. The propellant still gets out there, but not as far as it normally would. I'd love to practice in the wind, but I don't wanna.
35:29 Steven Rinella? I'd like to get a case of those inert cans.
35:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.
35:34 Steven Rinella? We should get a case of those inert cans. Just like, shoot each other around like laser tag around the office.
35:39 Speaker 05 That would be fun.
35:40 Speaker 04 I tried to shoot, um. A sow and cubs with a can of bear spray out of a window. And the, when I was working up in Alaska.
35:50 Speaker 05 And Yellowstone?
35:51 Speaker 04 They were coming in and tearing up our, our cat. When I was working up in Alaska, they'd come in and tear up stuff on the porch.
35:57 Steven Rinella? Or you're trying to give them a bad taste.
35:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, and like they would come in, they'd get into the fish shack, they'd get into the tool shed, they'd eat rubber boots, they'd do all this stuff. And like, so I was, I stayed in the main lodge that they kept coming into and opened the window. And they were walking past and I sprayed and it might've been just outside of the range. But all that bear spray went along the building and they like went 10 feet back and stood up. And then kind of circled around and came right back in.
36:25 Steven Rinella? I would laugh. They come there and killed you.
36:28 Speaker 05 They're licking the cabin.
36:29 Speaker 04 Shut the window real quick. And then actually we sat around, I was with this kid, we just like we're sitting in the cabin, like later on, like 45 minutes later and we were both kind of like, does it smell weird in here? And then we started getting like, you know, like licking your cheeks and like your lips and stuff and and we'd gotten like a trace amount inside and it'd been swirling and swirling and we spent like the rest of the night, just like kind of licking our lips and rubbing our noses and stuff. But yeah, that was my one experience actually discharging a can.
37:00 Speaker 05 Can I tell you a story?
37:01 Speaker 04 Yep.
37:02 Steven Rinella? Please.
37:03 Speaker 04 Sorry, you're here?
37:03 Steven Rinella? I'm jealous. I was, I was impressed that Randall got to shoot at one with a spray. But go on.
37:10 Speaker 04 I have video of it somewhere.
37:11 Speaker 05 I actually never did get a, get a spray of a bear with one, but I was deer hunting one fall and I was going in some really heavy dark timber and my, my dad always taught me to load a round in my gun. So I'm going through the timber and I walk under this tree and there's a magpie sitting in the tree and he's just staring at me. He's just looking right down at me and I'm looking up at him. And I'm thinking, boy, that's weird. You know, that that magpie.
37:39 Steven Rinella? Why is he hanging out here?
37:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, why is he hanging out? We're just staring at each other. And I go another, I don't know, 30 yards. And I hear something and I, I turn around and there's this boar coming down the hill at me. He's coming right at me.
37:55 Steven Rinella? How many yards away?
37:56 Speaker 05 Maybe twenty.
37:57 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
37:58 Speaker 05 I mean, he's coming for me. And I was thinking to myself, I got one shot with this rifle, you know? I got one chance to kill this thing and it's gonna be on top of me. And I realized what my dad was trying to teach me was just to be prepared.
38:14 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
38:14 Speaker 05 You know, and I would have been way better off with a can of bear spray in my hand, just walking through the woods. And as a guide, I do that sometimes, you know? If it's real tight quarters, I don't have a problem walking around with a can of bear spray. Even if you spray yourself, you're gonna live to talk about it.
38:31 Steven Rinella? So what happened?
38:33 Speaker 05 He, yeah, I, I-
38:36 Steven Rinella? I sprayed him and he didn't care.
38:37 Speaker 05 I, yeah. I started yelling at him and he was coming down the hill at me and he just kinda did a quarter pass, which is-
38:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
38:45 Speaker 05 Like a classic bear move, you know? It was, it was a bluff, but um, I thought it was the real deal. And I just remember thinking like, I gotta wait until this thing is right on top of me before I shoot, cause I only got one chance. So.
39:01 Steven Rinella? What is, after all those bears you worked up? Um, what is a big bear in the Rockies?
39:09 Speaker 05 A big bear is five hundred pounds. Uh, the biggest bear I ever caught was six twenty-four in the spring. Would have been a true seven hundred pound bear in the fall. Um, when people come in the office-
39:20 Steven Rinella? That's a big bear.
39:21 Speaker 05 That's a huge bear.
39:22 Steven Rinella? Cause every bear is like, thousand pounds, eight hundred pounds.
39:24 Speaker 05 I just cut people's number in half immediately. Whatever it is, I cut it in half.
39:30 Steven Rinella? You mean when they tell you how big the bear was?
39:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, yep. And, you know, all those bears I worked up, the sows, are almost always right around three hundred pounds. Two seventy-five, three twenty-five.
39:42 Steven Rinella? Hmm, okay.
39:43 Speaker 05 They stop growing when they're about seven to eight years old.
39:45 Steven Rinella? Okay.
39:46 Speaker 05 Where the males just keep putting on weight, keep getting bigger. So, a five hundred pound adult male is a huge bear in the Yellowstone ecosystem.
39:55 Steven Rinella? That's a huge bear.
39:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:56 Steven Rinella? And what's a more typical male? Like, like, what is like a four or five year old male?
40:01 Speaker 05 Two fifty, you know, I don't know. Three hundred.
40:06 Steven Rinella? God, they seem so much bigger and better. I mean, they're bad, but they seem so much bigger.
40:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, and people overestimate wolves too, and really, you know, lions are way bigger than wolves, but people. Because of the hair, especially in the fall. Bears and wolves, but bears especially, they get that. That winter coat on and people just think they're way bigger than they are.
40:30 Speaker 05 They're like, it's a sow with the.
40:33 Speaker 05 Two full grown cubs and it's like, no, that thing weighs. Hundred and fifty pounds, but it's got so much hair, it looks like as big as her.
40:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You were with the agency when. The delisting looked like it was gonna go through.
40:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:49 Steven Rinella? Okay.
40:50 Speaker 05 It did go through.
40:53 Steven Rinella? Well, sorry, when it looked like they were, no, well, it did and it undid.
40:57 Speaker 05 They were delisted.
40:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah, multiple times.
40:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:59 Steven Rinella? Okay, so.
41:00 Speaker 05 Right.
41:01 Steven Rinella? Help me with the timeline here, just to give people a rough sense. What'll happen is.
41:09 Steven Rinella? Well, first off, let me say, this is not, this is surprisingly not a partisan, like Democrat versus Republican issue generally.
41:20 Steven Rinella? Grizzly bears, well, hear me out, because I'm gonna talk about the delistings, okay?
41:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:25 Steven Rinella? So, you can, you can, you can give that, because there's definitely a tendency and a tendency, but just, I just think that people have the opinion. They have the erroneous idea that somehow like a governor or whatever can just declare, right?
41:38 Speaker 05 Right.
41:39 Steven Rinella? That, that something would happen, right, that you'd.
41:41 Speaker 05 Right.
41:41 Steven Rinella? That, that it's, that it's a simple, that doing this is a simple process, it just takes the right political figure to do it. It's, I'm gonna explain how it's a little bit more complicated than that.
41:51 Speaker 05 Right.
41:53 Steven Rinella? In seventy four, seventy, nineteen seventy four, nineteen seventy five, grizzly bears in the lower forty eight. Were listed as an endangered, they're listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. So they're given federal Endangered Species Act, Species Act protection. Under the ESA in seventy four, seventy five. Richard Nixon, Dick Nixon.
42:17 Speaker 04 Don't remember him. Heard of him.
42:19 Steven Rinella? Okay. Republican, signed in the ESA, signed in, um,
42:27 Speaker 04 NEPA.
42:28 Steven Rinella? NEPA, signed in, um, um, didn't he establish the EPA?
42:34 Speaker 04 That's, that's NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act.
42:38 Steven Rinella? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about the native, no, sorry.
42:43 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
42:43 Steven Rinella? Nevermind. Uh, Richard Nixon creates the Endangered Species Act and one of the first like marquee species to get protection under that is, is grizzly bears in lower 48. All kinds of years go by and, and wildlife managers kind of look and say, well, the saying the lower 48 is not a great way of looking at this. Uh, for instance, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, once upon a time had grizzly bears and I don't, we don't view that Golden Gate Park is going to recover, that San Francisco is going to recover its grizzly bear population.
43:21 Speaker 04 Right.
43:21 Steven Rinella? Just never going to work. So over time, they establish, um, they, they take a look and they go like, where really could we have grizzly bears? Like where are, is the right food resources, low enough human population, proper habitat, where you could feasibly have a population of grizzly bears? And they come up with six. One is in the northern casc- what they call the northern cascade ecosystem. So one is like basically, uh, the northern cascades in Washington where you're kind of rolling into BC.
43:56 Speaker 04 Zero bears.
43:57 Steven Rinella? Sometimes one.
43:58 Speaker 04 Sometimes one.
43:59 Steven Rinella? Depends on what side of the.
44:00 Speaker 04 He's Canadian.
44:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it depends on what side of the border.
44:04 Speaker 04 If you're, if you're from Wyoming, it looks a lot like zero bears. Yeah, yeah.
44:08 Steven Rinella? So yeah, if they have a bear, it's because one walked over there for a minute.
44:13 Speaker 05 Right.
44:15 Steven Rinella? Moving eastward, you have the Bitterroot Selkirk.
44:21 Speaker 05 Selway.
44:22 Steven Rinella? Selway. None. Kind of none.
44:26 Speaker 05 Selkirk's have bears, the bitter root doesn't.
44:28 Steven Rinella? The bitter side. That's one. Oh, I forgot. They gave a name to these things. Did I already say the name? They call them distinct, distinct population segments.
44:36 Speaker 05 Right.
44:36 Steven Rinella? So they say, okay, we're going to say that there's a grizzly bear population or the possibility of a grizzly bear population in the lower Cascades.
44:46 Steven Rinella? There's another one in.
44:47 Speaker 05 Cabinet Yak's.
44:48 Steven Rinella? That's right. Cabinet Yak has bears.
44:50 Speaker 05 Yep.
44:52 Steven Rinella? Bitterroot Selkirk.
44:53 Speaker 05 Bitterroot Selway.
44:54 Steven Rinella? Selway, sorry.
44:55 Speaker 05 Selkirk's are in B.C.
44:57 Steven Rinella? Yep. Bitterroot Selway, Northern Continental Divide.
45:01 Speaker 05 Yep.
45:02 Steven Rinella? Which is Bob Marshall Glacier National Park and some other areas up there.
45:09 Steven Rinella? All the way out to the Front Range.
45:12 Steven Rinella? Then the G Y E. Did I do them all? Am I missing any?
45:16 Speaker 05 Oh, you got them all. I think that's it. Yeah.
45:19 Steven Rinella? And they go like, so let's stop talking about the lower 48 writ large and let's talk about, let's get real. Okay.
45:27 Speaker 05 Right.
45:28 Steven Rinella? And talk about where could we actually have these bears? And then they looked at like, okay, so instead of saying that we're going to recover them across their range in the lower 48, which basically was the 100th meridian westward.
45:40 Steven Rinella? New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, into northern old Mexico, coastal California, right? Like, let's just look at this. And so they say, let's say that we're going to try to recover and manage these as distinct population segments. And they look and say, if we're going to do that, there's two places. The Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. In the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, um, which is a chunk of ground about the size of Indiana. And they're like, those are recovered. The rest of the lower 48 not, but these areas are recovered. And so let's move those out of the, let's move those out of endangered species act protection.
46:24 Steven Rinella? The US Fish and Wildlife Service has management, has management authority.
46:27 Speaker 05 Right.
46:28 Steven Rinella? The US Fish and Wildlife Service has to come forward and they do this. The US, this has happened with, with Democrats in the White House. This is happening with Republicans in the White House. They'll come forward and say, the US Fish and Wildlife Service says, we propose
46:45 Steven Rinella? that, that we propose that we de-list the grizzly.
46:50 Steven Rinella? Then you have preservationists or like 399 type people. Preservation organizations will go like, well, Jesus, that could mean that 399 could get hunted. So then they will sue
47:03 Steven Rinella? in federal court to block the de-listing.
47:06 Speaker 05 Right.
47:07 Steven Rinella? So they'll de-list and then there's a lawsuit and they'll, they'll never sue on basis. They don't sue on how many bears there are. They sue on, uh, well, we don't think the DPS thing was fair.
47:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, right.
47:22 Steven Rinella? Because you can't treat them as distinct because, because a bear could move from one to the other. So, so we, we're going to attack the logic of the, of the DPS. Or they'll say, well, have you considered white bark pine blister rust? And how there's a fungus that's killing white bark pines and grizzlies like to eat white bark pines. And since we don't know what will really happen in the long term to white bark pines, we're suing to block the listing. Or well, what if cutthroat trout don't do that well in the future? And 10% of bears might eat a cutthroat trout at some point in their life. So we're going to sue to block the de-listing because we don't really know how well cutthroats are doing.
48:05 Speaker 05 The risks.
48:07 Steven Rinella? Because the, the Fish and Wildlife Service is required as part of that review process to consider all factors. And they kind of have an impossible.
48:17 Speaker 04 Job, right? I mean, like they're supposed, they basically are saying, we did a comprehensive review, our conclusions are X, Y, and Z. And the litigators are saying, well, it's not that comprehensive. You missed this, you missed that. And they're kind of poking holes in the bigger picture.
48:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And it will be, it will come from anti-hunting organizations like Center for Biological Diversity, H Humane Society, United States.
48:42 Speaker 05 Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
48:44 Steven Rinella? Greater Yellowstone Coalition. Who else is a common player here? Um, Center for Biological
48:48 Speaker 05 Western Watershed.
48:50 Steven Rinella? Okay. Uh, and they'll, they'll do these delistings. Um, or they'll, they'll sue to block the delistings.
48:56 Speaker 05 Last one was the Crow.
48:58 Steven Rinella? The Crow Tribe?
48:59 Speaker 05 Crow Tribe.
48:59 Steven Rinella? I didn't know that. What was the argument there?
49:02 Speaker 05 Uh, that we shouldn't be delisting, you know?
49:07 Steven Rinella? That's interesting. Timeout in the field is not free. Okay. Every time you go on the woods, there's a trade-off happening. Like you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever. You forego some family gathering. If that applies to you, what you gotta do is you gotta learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. An OnX Hunt's Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions. So you're not missing the kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce. The Deer Movement Forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at
49:52 Steven Rinella? my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping. In their rig, nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set.
50:33 Steven Rinella? Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture. Titanium hardware.
51:16 Steven Rinella? A custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com.
52:02 Steven Rinella? That was a long preamble to my question.
52:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
52:05 Steven Rinella? You were around for all this.
52:06 Speaker 05 Yes. Yeah.
52:07 Steven Rinella? Now.
52:07 Speaker 05 Both of them.
52:08 Steven Rinella? Okay. What I remember being really interesting about this is the three, the three states that have chunks of ground in what we call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. A name that I resent because they should call it the Greater Cody Ecosystem.
52:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, they should call Wyoming Bears.
52:24 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they should call it the Greater Cody Ecosystem.
52:26 Speaker 05 Most of them are in Wyoming.
52:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the Wyoming Ecosystem.
52:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
52:30 Steven Rinella? There's three states, the bulk of it's in Wyoming. But the three states take an attitude where they're like, okay, if delisting goes through and we take, what that means is the states now manage it as a wildlife, as wildlife under their jurisdiction. Idaho says, this is 2020, is this when this happened last?
52:48 Speaker 05 17.
52:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:51 Steven Rinella? Idaho says, we're going to give out one grizzly tag.
52:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
52:57 Steven Rinella? Montana, chicken shit's out.
53:00 Speaker 05 Right.
53:01 Steven Rinella? And they say, not going to play this game. We're not doing any grizzly tags.
53:04 Speaker 05 Montana actually had to give part of their quota to Idaho, so that Idaho could have one.
53:10 Steven Rinella? Oh, is that right?
53:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Wyoming just lays all on the table.
53:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:15 Steven Rinella? And they're gonna give out 24 tags.
53:17 Speaker 05 Right. Yeah.
53:19 Steven Rinella? Uh, guys like me, who really want, who really think that the grizzlies should be delisted, and I think that state management, and I'm very open and enthusiastic about a very limited grizzly bear hunting season. Guys like me, as part of our rhetoric, if we were being unscrupulous, we would say that by opening up a hunting season, it'll reduce conflict, because bears will learn to be scared of people.
53:45 Speaker 05 Not true.
53:48 Steven Rinella? That's why I stopped saying it, because it was intellectually dishonest.
53:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:51 Steven Rinella? Talk about that. That was, I just spent like an hour setting up the question. But give me your feelings on all of this, all of this whole deal. All of this hunt, don't hunt. The bears need to learn to be scared and respect humans and blah, blah, blah.
54:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't know where you even start. You opened up so many holes there.
54:11 Steven Rinella? I opened up a bait shop, not just a cannibal. Bait shop.
54:14 Speaker 05 Do you think grizzlies would be nervous of people if we started hunting them again? I'd personally.
54:19 Steven Rinella? If Idaho got one.
54:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. If Idaho got one.
54:22 Steven Rinella? Did you hear about bear 422?
54:26 Speaker 05 I mean, maybe at some level, I, I don't know personally, because I haven't been there, but they talk about bears on Kodiak Island being like really weary of human scent. Because they're heavily hunted.
54:37 Steven Rinella? And always have been.
54:38 Speaker 05 And always have been, and same with Sweden. So maybe at some level, but the reality is, you know, you have black bear populations all over America that are hunted, and there's still black bear conflicts. So you're still gonna have conflicts with bears.
54:56 Speaker 05 Bears do learn on experience with, with humans. If they have a negative encounter, then they're more likely to run away from a human, but I just don't think you'll hunt them at a level that would be.
55:10 Speaker 05 That would change their behavior.
55:12 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
55:12 Speaker 05 So, you know, they delisted in 2007. And that delisting went from 2007 to 2009 when a judge put him back on the list because of-
55:23 Steven Rinella? It's always the same judge in Missoula.
55:26 Speaker 05 Well, this was a different judge.
55:27 Steven Rinella? Oh, it was? Oh.
55:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, there was Malloy and then Dana Christensen. And we knew we were in trouble when Dana Christensen had said, "My spirit animal is the Wolverine." You know? Any judge with a-
55:39 Steven Rinella? That's cultural appropriation anyways.
55:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't know. Any judge with a spirit animal.
55:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, taking it personal.
55:44 Steven Rinella? They should have gotten him, they should have attacked him from the woke spectrum and said that that's cultural appropriation and you should be fired.
55:52 Speaker 05 That was before wokeness, I believe.
55:54 Steven Rinella? Man, my computer's freaking out, man. I just dumped a huge coffee, it just died.
56:00 Speaker 05 Put some more coffee on that.
56:01 Speaker 04 For, for anyone listening, Steve spilled a large cup of coffee on his computer moments before we began recording.
56:10 Steven Rinella? Phil, do you have the technical capabilities to plug that clip in?
56:14 Speaker 06 Which clip?
56:15 Steven Rinella? Well, no, because I was kind of talking about-
56:16 Speaker 06 The coffee stuff. Oh, absolutely, yeah, so we can do a little rewind.
56:19 Steven Rinella? Cut out me saying that bad stuff about that actor, though.
56:26 Steven Rinella? One of those dudes that doesn't really inspire-
56:29 Speaker 06 Oh, shit.
56:31 Steven Rinella? He's one of those dudes that doesn't really inspire, like-
56:34 Speaker 06 IT guy.
56:35 Steven Rinella? Real fandom. No.
56:38 Steven Rinella? I was observing that there's an actor that's in a lot of movies, but no one cares about him, and I don't want that to get on-
56:43 Speaker 06 Well, that's, I feel like that's, that's the definition of a great character actor. No one cares about him, but you're, you're happy to see him, right? I am, I don't know.
56:50 Speaker 04 He always brings it.
56:51 Speaker 06 Yeah.
56:53 Steven Rinella? So, so, yeah, so back, back to this, and, and, and pardon me for not knowing what I'm talking about, I thought it was the same judge both times, but anyways.
56:59 Speaker 05 No, you're right that they do go judge shopping. That, that's part of this whole thing.
57:05 Speaker 05 But, yeah, 2007, 2009, Wyoming didn't have a hunting season, even though the population was recovered, we could have used hunting as management tool. And when they got relisted, I, I think the state's opinion was the next time they get delisted, we're going to hunt these things. And we're, it's not to control the population, it's to create a social- Pattern of hunting.
57:27 Steven Rinella? That's what, see, that's, that's a good way of putting it.
57:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
57:31 Steven Rinella? That's what I, I, I want the states to do it because I want them to quickly exercise the management authority.
57:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, and Montana, and Montana chickening out, chickening out was a, a, a bad move in my opinion because you're setting a precedent that,
57:45 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
57:45 Speaker 05 That you're not hunting them.
57:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah, and I remember they were going to chicken out for five years or something like that.
57:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think that's true this, this time around too. They've said that recently in recent history.
57:56 Steven Rinella? Yeah. I don't know that they would make that choice now, but at the time they were, they had a plan to like formally chicken out for five years.
58:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
58:05 Steven Rinella? Uh, you know what's interesting about that, like when I say like, the, even the Idaho play, as weird as it was to do one, the Idaho play of the social maneuver of doing the hunt.
58:15 Speaker 05 Right.
58:15 Steven Rinella? I remember I was talking to these guys that were really involved in the elk reintroduction in Kentucky. And, uh, they were nervous about this. So they, ever since, when, when they started working on the elk reintroduction, which was state agency, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, it was like, because of hunting, and we'll hunt them. And we'll hunt them, even though it's years in the future.
58:40 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
58:41 Steven Rinella? They baked it into every cons- conversation to not then down the road, go like, oh, hey, now that we got all these elk, how about we have a hunting season? It was like, they were, they were deliberate about setting an expectation that that's where this would go. And you see, when you see signs around, any, anywhere you go around in this area, you'll see signs, de-listing means hunting. And it's, it's meant to be, uh, de-listing means hunting, and it's meant to be like an anti-de-listing.
59:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
59:12 Steven Rinella? They're coming right out and saying, we're not gonna, we're not looking to argue about how many bears there are, because no one's going to argue that bears are stable. They're looking to be like, they're using the ESA, they're using the Endangered Species Act, not as a management tool, they're using it as a way that they can prevent something from happening that they don't want to happen.
59:34 Speaker 05 Right.
59:34 Steven Rinella? It's like, it's the my favorite animal protection act, it is not the Endangered Species Act. And they even know, and their rhetoric mirrors it, but when I look and I see that sign, de-listing means hunting, I always think, I sure hope they're right.
59:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
59:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're rooting for that.
59:52 Steven Rinella? And they'll always show a sow with cubs, the, the one they use around here.
59:56 Speaker 05 Sure.
59:56 Steven Rinella? They show a sow with cubs with a crosshair.
1:00:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:00:00 Steven Rinella? I'm like, but you can't shoot sows with cubs.
1:00:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, that wouldn't be legal anyways.
1:00:04 Steven Rinella? So there's a poacher. They should arrest that person.
1:00:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:00:08 Speaker 05 We actually had like, I remember having fights, talking about how many bears we were going to harvest. And a game warden in a district that has a lot of bears thought that 24 was like, not nearly enough.
1:00:22 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
1:00:23 Speaker 05 And was upset about it. And it's like, we're not trying to manage the population totally through hunting. We're trying to create a social standard for hunting.
1:00:32 Steven Rinella? You know, um.
1:00:36 Speaker 05 I say we, but that was past.
1:00:39 Steven Rinella? Years, when we first started this podcast a million years ago, um, in the office where me and my, uh, wife, my, me and my wife had dinner. Not a great one either.
1:00:48 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:00:48 Steven Rinella? Crossed the road from our original old office. Uh, last night on our little date night. Anyways, in that office upstairs. We and our, one of our early, early podcasts, when we first launched the podcast, we had a guy from the USGS. Frank McMahon.
1:01:04 Speaker 05 Van Manen.
1:01:05 Steven Rinella? Van, what is his name?
1:01:06 Speaker 05 Van Manen.
1:01:07 Steven Rinella? Van Manen. We had him on to talk about, he, uh.
1:01:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:01:10 Steven Rinella? He does demographics on grizzly bears.
1:01:11 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:01:12 Steven Rinella? So the USGS is a, it's a federal organization and the USGS doesn't do policy. The USGS doesn't manage land. Okay. Like the US Forest Service, USDA manages land. US Fish and Wildlife Service manages refuges. The National Park Service manages parks. You have a bunch of land management, federal agencies. The USGS doesn't do land management. They don't do policy. Their mandate is information.
1:01:38 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:01:38 Steven Rinella? They provide information.
1:01:39 Speaker 05 Right.
1:01:40 Steven Rinella? So this, this guest we had, it's a great podcast. If you want to go back and listen, the live is still relevant today. This guest we had explained, we, we got to talk about demographics, grizzly bear demographics. And there's the number at that time, I don't know what the number is now, the number at that time was something like, it was like fixed. It was like carved in stone.
1:02:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:00 Steven Rinella? 700.
1:02:01 Speaker 05 740.
1:02:02 Steven Rinella? So, okay.
1:02:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:03 Steven Rinella? And it wa, and he explained, I was like, where does that number come from? What they had looked at is, at, at a time they looked at, okay, in this ecosystem. How much space does a breeding age female use?
1:02:19 Speaker 05 Thirty square kilometers was the estimate at that time.
1:02:22 Steven Rinella? That was the estimate, okay.
1:02:22 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:02:23 Steven Rinella? And they would draw, what's that little shape you draw on a map? An octagon or?
1:02:26 Speaker 05 Polygon.
1:02:27 Steven Rinella? A polygon.
1:02:28 Speaker 05 Yeah. The, it was actually a grid.
1:02:31 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:02:32 Speaker 05 But, yeah, and that was called the Chow two model.
1:02:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah, explain, yeah, okay, so you know about this shit.
1:02:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:38 Steven Rinella? Explain how the number was arrived at and then I'm, and then I'm gonna share with you something he told me about the number that I was like, that we spent an hour talking about.
1:02:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:48 Steven Rinella? Cause he would say, at least, I'd go, how many? At least seven forty. Well, how many? At least seven forty.
1:02:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:57 Steven Rinella? Well, how many? At least seven forty.
1:03:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, so that model's been updated twice since then.
1:03:03 Steven Rinella? Okay, but explain how it's like, it's really fascinating how you make a model like this.
1:03:06 Speaker 05 Okay, so bears are really hard to count because they're solitary in nature, they're not territorial. Their home ranges overlap, so.
1:03:14 Steven Rinella? Did you say solitary but not territorial?
1:03:16 Speaker 05 Right.
1:03:18 Speaker 05 They, they like to be individualistic, but they don't have territories. Not like a mountain lion, solitary nature has a territory, it's keeping other cats out of there. So if there's food availability, their home ranges overlap.
1:03:31 Steven Rinella? Oh, I never even thought about that term, that's a great term. Solitary but not territorial.
1:03:35 Speaker 05 Right. And that's what happened with the model, that's what makes them really difficult to count. So, the early research showed that a grizzly bear sow's home range was thirty square kilometers. So, when they were counting, if you're counting bears and there's, you break the sys, the ecosystem up into a grid, and there's a sow with cubs in one of those squares, you cross off that grid because you don't want to, you wanna lean conservative, you don't wanna overestimate the population.
1:04:10 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:04:11 Speaker 05 The problem with that model is, as the population gets higher in density, your model gets more and more biased because of those home ranges overlapping.
1:04:21 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:04:22 Speaker 05 So. That model maxed out at 740, like, I can't remember, 750 maybe. You couldn't get it, you couldn't shove any more grizzly bears into the ecosystem in that model. They went back and they looked at collar data and they found out that sow's home range was more like 14 square kilometers. You know, they have-
1:04:44 Steven Rinella? I gotta, this is great, but I want to add in a thing here-
1:04:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:04:48 Steven Rinella? That he had explained is be that when they make the model, you're just, you're trying to count breeding age females. And then you look at what-
1:04:58 Speaker 05 Females with cubs of the year.
1:04:59 Steven Rinella? Okay, then you look at what you know about the demographics, meaning that you could go into a, let's say you could go into a country perhaps, and, and, and count how many, um, how many females with children are in this country? And then probably go like, okay, so we know human males and human females are born at a one-to-one ratio. We know that like, a, a, a female is, is most active reproductively between 24 and 38, and that they have on average 2.2 kids. And so, we can just look at how many moms there are and make a guess at what the human population is in that country.
1:05:43 Steven Rinella? And that's kind of what you're doing with grizzlies, right? You're like, we know that, that, that you got males, you got cubs, but if we can know this one number, we can extrapolate outward to get a sense of how many are there, rather than mechanically counting them.
1:05:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, you have, you know that they're the driver of the population. But what you're describing is actually more like a census, and that's closer to what the model is now. It's an integrated population model. But you know, yeah, the, the ratio of bears in the ecosystem, you know, you have however many adult males, you have however many sub-adult bears, and females with cubs are driving your population, so.
1:06:28 Speaker 05 It's just a multiplier.
1:06:30 Steven Rinella? Understood.
1:06:31 Speaker 05 Essentially. So it got changed to fourteen square kilometers.
1:06:37 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:06:37 Speaker 05 And that made the estimate more like twelve hundred bears.
1:06:41 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:06:42 Speaker 05 And then what you just described is is now what they're doing is an integrated population model and it's it's more of a census and you can plug in other factors.
1:06:54 Steven Rinella? I got it. So what's the number now?
1:06:56 Speaker 05 Ten, um, one thousand thirty.
1:06:59 Steven Rinella? How good you think that number is?
1:07:01 Speaker 05 Um, I think that's pretty accurate. I think there's definitely parts of the ecosystem where there's higher densities than other parts. And growing up in Cody, I just assumed everywhere had really high densities.
1:07:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:07:15 Speaker 05 And you go to other parts and they're just not. And this new modeling system is going to incorporate some of that and show you where where there's more density of bears. And that's only in the demographic monitoring monitoring area. So there's bears that live outside where they're even looking for bears. So that is a minimum because they're not counting bears that aren't in suitable habitat.
1:07:42 Steven Rinella? Oh, really?
1:07:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, they might be living year.
1:07:44 Steven Rinella? They're not counting bears that don't count. Yeah.
1:07:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:07:47 Steven Rinella? So if a bear moves out into like if a bear moves out of and moves out into like Fort Benton out of out of the Shoto area and just keeps going east, he leaves the counting area.
1:07:59 Speaker 05 If he's there year round, if he's outside of their their demographic monitoring area. And I don't know about the N C D E, but that's how they did it with the G Y E.
1:08:08 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:08:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:09 Steven Rinella? You gotta be in a bear place to be a bear. Yep. Pretty straightforward.
1:08:12 Speaker 05 You don't count outliers.
1:08:14 Steven Rinella? So there's about so tell me the number again, you think one thousand thirty?
1:08:18 Speaker 05 Yeah. And it was as high as twelve hundred was the estimate a couple of years ago before they changed to this other model. But um, it has a lot more factors. It's a lot more accurate.
1:08:28 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:08:29 Speaker 05 Is my understanding.
1:08:30 Steven Rinella? That's good to know. I still thought it was that old.
1:08:32 Speaker 05 Seven forty.
1:08:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I didn't know that anyone moved beyond that number.
1:08:35 Speaker 05 That was laughable. People in my hometown never believe that.
1:08:40 Steven Rinella? Why do they?
1:08:44 Steven Rinella? Why do they um
1:08:47 Steven Rinella? seem to congregate in these little micro areas so much? There's just some like valleys that are like such hotspots and you go to another valley and you could go to another valley and hang out there over the years, 10, 10 years. And never lay eyes on one, but then there's like, it just doesn't, you can't really tell the difference from looking at them.
1:09:04 Speaker 05 It's just food availability, food sources, and some of it's learned behavior. And my part of the woods, we have what what are called moth sites and there's these bears on moth sites. And you know, I've done flights where I've counted 40 bears on moth sites. So there's a high concentration of food. And that's one of the highest caloric value foods in the ecosystem.
1:09:25 Steven Rinella? Can you explain what that means?
1:09:27 Speaker 05 Caloric value?
1:09:28 Steven Rinella? No, the, what a moth, I know about, yeah, I know a little bit, but just tell people what that is.
1:09:33 Speaker 05 So there's these army cutworm moths that migrate from the Midwest and they come up in the mountains and at night pollinate flowers and then in the daytime they get in these talus slopes. And they they use that as a heat refugia. And bears come along and they flip over those rocks and eat those bugs and they're probably eating 20 to 40,000 of those moths a day.
1:09:58 Steven Rinella? Licking them up.
1:09:59 Speaker 05 Licking them up. Yep. And it's just a really rich food source for bears in the ecosystem. But what I was gonna say is there's places in the ecosystem where there's moth sites and there's not bears utilizing them. So they they think it's a learned behavior.
1:10:17 Steven Rinella? Like they know about it?
1:10:18 Speaker 05 Right. Yep.
1:10:21 Steven Rinella? Huh. Like if you took all the bears out and put new ones back in, they might not find those moths.
1:10:28 Speaker 05 Maybe not for a while.
1:10:29 Speaker 04 Or they'd use different ones.
1:10:31 Speaker 05 Or they could use different ones, yeah.
1:10:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Huh. What are some of the other main foods? Like we are, everybody likes to think of them just, you know, eating elk calves, but what, when you had to list like their main grub sources, what do you think it is?
1:10:44 Speaker 05 Vegetation, you know, bears eat a lot of different roots and tubers and corms and that's a big one in the spring. Elk calves is a big food source, I mean, that's kind of undeniable. These moth sites, there are a few places in the ecosystem where they eat those cutthroat trout that are spawning. White bark pine. But they did a food synthesis analysis on bears and found that they eat over 260 different plants and animals.
1:11:17 Steven Rinella? No kidding?
1:11:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, in the Yellowstone ecosystem, they have the most diverse diet.
1:11:22 Steven Rinella? 260 species?
1:11:24 Speaker 05 Yep. That bear that I caught that was 624, I figured that he was probably eating meat year round, you know? That bear was going from winter kill carcasses to elk calves to moths to killing cattle in the fall, because we'd caught him before killing cattle, to eating gut piles, you know, he was eating probably nothing but meat.
1:11:50 Speaker 06 How old was that bear?
1:11:51 Speaker 05 Hmm, I don't remember. I caught another bear that was 520 pounds in the spring, same exact location, and I caught him eight years later and he was 28 years old.
1:12:07 Speaker 06 Wow.
1:12:08 Steven Rinella? Holy cow, man.
1:12:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, so that other bear could be 30. Oh, I think, I think, well, when he was 28, that bear was past his prime, so, you know, this other bear was probably between 15 and 20.
1:12:19 Speaker 06 Gotcha.
1:12:20 Steven Rinella? Man, 28.
1:12:22 Speaker 05 Zach Turnbull caught one that was 32, in the upper green.
1:12:26 Steven Rinella? And that's got to be getting close to max.
1:12:29 Speaker 05 That's the oldest bear they've caught in the ecosystem.
1:12:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
1:12:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:12:36 Steven Rinella? Uh, in, in your mind, what is the, what is the most common sort of way things play out when people get scratched up by a bear?
1:12:47 Speaker 05 Hmm, what do you mean? Like, how did they report it?
1:12:51 Steven Rinella? If you were, no, no, no, I'm sorry. If you were gonna look at, uh, from, from all the things you've heard and seen when someone gets mauled by a bear, what is the normal scenario?
1:13:00 Speaker 05 Surprise encounter, probably, um.
1:13:04 Steven Rinella? Like you're spooking it?
1:13:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, and, and probably Sal's with cubs more than anything else.
1:13:09 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:13:10 Speaker 05 You know, I see a big adult male track, I'm not nervous. I see a little tiny cub track, and I'm like, looking, looking around. Yeah.
1:13:19 Steven Rinella? So i- it's that you like jump at that close range?
1:13:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the majority of them.
1:13:25 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
1:13:25 Speaker 05 Um, you know, there's a lot of cases every year where guys get elk down and, and there's bears coming into those dead elk, or they're going back to retrieve a bear, or, excuse me, an elk carcass, and, and they jump a bear. That's pretty common, too. I mean, it's, it's food, cubs, and, and personal space, and a lot of times, you're getting cubs and personal space at the same time.
1:13:51 Steven Rinella? Got it, and that's trouble.
1:13:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:13:53 Steven Rinella? Do you believe, you know, there's like a thing, I don't know if it's a, if it's a, what's the opposite of urban legend? Rural legend?
1:14:03 Speaker 05 Rural myth?
1:14:04 Steven Rinella? Okay, like, my, my, my brother Danny.
1:14:07 Speaker 05 Redneck talk?
1:14:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah, my brother Danny, he now and then goes and, uh, hunts Kodiak, but after, you know, he hunts in the winter for black-tailed deer, right? And he'll swear, when the bears are down, he'll swear to red fox, no, a gunshot.
1:14:24 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:14:25 Steven Rinella? There's a lot of red fox there, he's like, you shoot a deer, and they're just there.
1:14:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:14:30 Steven Rinella? And he's like, you know, they're smelling it, whatever, but it's so fast, you can't help but wonder like, are they like, oh, they hear that and like, ooh.
1:14:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:14:40 Steven Rinella? Go that way. You hear people say this about grizzlies.
1:14:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, all the time.
1:14:43 Steven Rinella? Do you think that's true?
1:14:44 Speaker 05 No, not at all.
1:14:44 Steven Rinella? You don't think they come to a gunshot?
1:14:46 Speaker 05 No, I'll tell you why. Cause I have friends that are really poor shots. I've guided hunters that are really poor shots. And you sit there for 15, 20 minutes and no bear shows up. We have a shooting range outside of Cody.
1:14:58 Steven Rinella? It's not full of bears?
1:14:59 Speaker 05 It's not full of bears.
1:15:02 Speaker 05 Even though I've caught bears adjacent to it, but they're not running to that thing, you know?
1:15:07 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:15:09 Speaker 05 So it's really, when you get an animal down, that blood, that rum and smell that guts, as soon as that hits the air, you got a clock on you. And what I like to do as a guide is start a fire, you know, as long as there's not a fire ban, if I'm in a good location, you know, and start it upwind, cause that kind of masks that scent and fire. The real reason is it calms your hunter down. Cause as soon as they kill something, they're like super bear scared.
1:15:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. We do that fire thing, cutting up moose in Alaska, especially when it's real thick. I'll get a fire going. And I don't know if it's like my own, I just have, I don't know, I like to have the idea that it somehow broadcasts the human presence more. Might be total horse shit.
1:15:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think so. I don't think bears want to come into a fire. So that's just something I've learned since after the game and fish, you know?
1:16:04 Steven Rinella? Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday. Okay. The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And on X Hunt's rut calendar, does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area. So you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too Early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life.
1:16:45 Steven Rinella? So use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car.
1:17:29 Steven Rinella? They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know, you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists
1:18:11 Steven Rinella? who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon.
1:18:53 Steven Rinella? So make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com.
1:19:06 Steven Rinella? Have you handled bears that had killed people?
1:19:09 Speaker 05 Hmm, no, I've handled bears that have mauled people. Yeah.
1:19:14 Steven Rinella? After the mauling?
1:19:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:19:16 Speaker 07 Didn't you tell me that story about how?
1:19:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:19:20 Speaker 07 The first?
1:19:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, one of my-
1:19:22 Speaker 07 Came on?
1:19:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, one of my first conflicts that I came on, uh, I wasn't even hired on full time yet. I came in the office, I was just volunteering on my days off and my boss was on the phone and he said, I remember him saying, "Three, maybe four people mauled, I'm on the way to the hospital." And he got off the phone and he said, "Hey, can you help us for a couple of days?" And I said, "Yeah," and, um, there was a mauling at, by Cook City, a campground called Soda Butte.
1:19:52 Steven Rinella? Hmm, yeah, I know this one, yeah.
1:19:53 Speaker 05 And there was a human fatality there and, um, ran up there with a trap and, you know, that was obviously in Montana, but we assisted Montana and trying to catch those bears and, um, they set the traps, they caught those bears. I, you know, set traps, but we, we didn't catch anything and then I was shuttling samples to our vet lab in Laramie.
1:20:20 Steven Rinella? What kind of samples?
1:20:21 Speaker 05 Well, tissue samples from the bear to, to make sure that it was a match.
1:20:25 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:20:27 Speaker 05 But she had mauled three people and the first tent was a young kid and his girlfriend and a dog. And she tried to, sorry, she didn't mauled, but she, she tried to attack three different people. She tried to come into that tent and the dog started barking and she left it and that kid got so afraid. I call him a kid, he's probably like eighteen, nineteen. He packed up all of his stuff and left and that sow went further down the campground. And there was a couple who slept in separate tents because the, the husband snored.
1:21:03 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:21:03 Speaker 05 And.
1:21:04 Steven Rinella? Sure they weren't in a fight?
1:21:05 Speaker 05 Maybe, maybe they're in a fight. And that sow ripped into a tent and tried to grab that woman and she fought it off. And it actually broke a tooth out of, of the bear's head in her arm.
1:21:19 Steven Rinella? Wow.
1:21:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:21:20 Steven Rinella? It's weird, like, all the shit he bit in his life, that that would break his tooth off.
1:21:24 Speaker 05 It was, it was a sow, but she was so malnourished that she was.
1:21:28 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:21:28 Speaker 05 Um, desperate and that was, those are predatory attacks, obviously. Which is different than your defensive aggressive attacks. So then she, yeah, she went further down the campground and she got in another tent and she killed and ate a guy. And there was three other yearling bears with her.
1:21:47 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:21:47 Speaker 05 Through those attacks. So. Um, I didn't work up that bear personally, but yeah, I've worked up other bears of malt people.
1:21:56 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Does that give you a creepy feeling?
1:21:59 Speaker 05 Hmm, yeah, I mean, I, I will never forget the look in that bear's eyes. It's so to beaut, I mean, she was so demoralized and.
1:22:08 Steven Rinella? Oh, is that right?
1:22:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, I, I'll just never forget the way she had her head on her paws and just looked completely demoralized.
1:22:16 Steven Rinella? Like, what do you, what do you mean, demoralized?
1:22:18 Speaker 05 Hmm, just.
1:22:21 Speaker 05 There was like a sadness in her eyes, I don't know how else to say it.
1:22:23 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
1:22:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. And you catch a lot of bears and see a lot of bears in traps and they avoid eye contact. That's really normal, but, but there was just like a feeling about it. I don't know how else to describe it.
1:22:36 Steven Rinella? Huh.
1:22:38 Steven Rinella? When they're avoiding eye contact, what do you think that is?
1:22:41 Speaker 05 In the bear world, you know, that's aggressive posturing. Um, when I was teaching.
1:22:46 Steven Rinella? Eye contact is aggressive?
1:22:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, when I was teaching kids, I'd say, you know, especially middle school girls. You know, when you see somebody in the hallways and you kind of stare them down?
1:22:54 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:22:55 Speaker 05 That's, that's aggressive posturing. You know, you're being mean, right?
1:22:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:23:00 Speaker 05 And they all understand that and that's the same with bears. Is they pretty much avoid eye contact until they're ready to rumble, ready to fight.
1:23:08 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Hmm. Look away from one another.
1:23:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, yep. Those big adult males, when you see them fight, they'll circle each other and they'll be avoiding eye contact. And when they finally get the nerve to lock eyes, that's when they're,
1:23:23 Speaker 05 you know, trying to fight each other.
1:23:25 Steven Rinella? Do you think there's a tell if a bear is gonna false charge or, or charge, charge? Do you think there's a physical tell?
1:23:31 Speaker 05 Yep, head posture.
1:23:33 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:23:34 Speaker 05 If they're really intent on hurting you, their head is as low to the ground as possible. They're trying to get their, um, and you see that with self-defense shootings a lot of times. Guys aim center mass, center mass is the hump. You know, and it doesn't kill them when they, when they're shooting bears. If it's a bluff charge, a lot of times their head is high. You know, they're kind of high on their front legs.
1:23:58 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:23:58 Speaker 05 And they're not coming as fast as they could.
1:24:02 Steven Rinella? Head down.
1:24:03 Speaker 05 Head down.
1:24:05 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:24:06 Steven Rinella? Aim low.
1:24:07 Speaker 05 Aim low.
1:24:08 Steven Rinella? With your spray.
1:24:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:24:10 Steven Rinella? With your bird shot.
1:24:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, with your bird, yeah.
1:24:14 Steven Rinella? What, at, what, let's say one's coming and you got bear spray. At what distance, for you personally, like at what distance are you touching that spray off?
1:24:22 Speaker 05 Oh, thirty yards. Yeah.
1:24:24 Steven Rinella? And you're just letting it rip?
1:24:25 Speaker 05 Let it rip.
1:24:26 Steven Rinella? Don't be like, try to, you don't try to conserve.
1:24:28 Speaker 05 I, I would, I'd hold it down for a second and, and spray and, you know, if it kept coming, I'm gonna keep spraying, but.
1:24:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:24:37 Speaker 05 About a second's all it takes.
1:24:40 Steven Rinella? What do you think about the Wolverine situation, the Wolverine delisting?
1:24:44 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:24:45 Steven Rinella? Or sorry, the Wolverine listing? Do you think the Wolverine listing is warranted?
1:24:53 Speaker 05 I think we're living in a time and age where a lot, wildlife habitat's just getting chopped up and, uh, Wolverines need a really big home range. And there were lynx in Wyoming and they just kind of blinked out and nobody ever noticed.
1:25:08 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:25:09 Speaker 05 So, um, I don't know a ton about Wolverines, but
1:25:15 Speaker 05 I think you probably gotta do everything you can to protect their habitat at this point.
1:25:19 Steven Rinella? You think so?
1:25:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I.
1:25:23 Speaker 05 You know, they just have such a huge home range and this was probably furthest south extent of their habitat anyways.
1:25:32 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:25:32 Speaker 05 Right?
1:25:34 Steven Rinella? Well, down into Colorado.
1:25:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, historically, they're probably not far down.
1:25:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I think that they're using two, they use 250 square miles.
1:25:42 Speaker 05 500.
1:25:43 Steven Rinella? 500 square miles. It's more than I use.
1:25:49 Speaker 05 But same thing with lynx, you know, they, they went really far south and I had a friend that was a trapper and he'd always say, it's not like the Canadians are excited every time a bobcat crosses into Canada.
1:26:01 Steven Rinella? That's a good point.
1:26:03 Speaker 05 It's just, we have a different mentality because they're coming south.
1:26:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's a good point.
1:26:08 Speaker 05 What do you think about Wolverines?
1:26:10 Steven Rinella? Man.
1:26:16 Steven Rinella? I think that they, I think that we lack any kind of historic reference.
1:26:24 Steven Rinella? So when someone goes and looks and they think that there's a low number of Wolverines,
1:26:31 Steven Rinella? that no one's ever looked at it in a sophisticated sense before. One way you could look at the research they did is you'd say, man, there's Wolverines all over the place.
1:26:41 Steven Rinella? Right? Because they go out and do the, they hang the carcasses and do the trail cam stuff and catch hares.
1:26:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, I actually did that one.
1:26:47 Steven Rinella? Oh, did you?
1:26:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:26:47 Steven Rinella? And so you'd look and be like, wow, like one interpretation, it'd be like, huh, that's cool. There's a lot of Wolverines out there. Because no one knew. But instead you take that you, you realize there aren't many. But you don't know how many there ever were.
1:27:06 Speaker 05 Right.
1:27:07 Steven Rinella? And then you point to an area, you know, you point to an area in Canada that had seen a decline, but it's not the same kind of area. You're on the southern edge and you just go like, there aren't many, therefore they must be endangered. I feel like without being able to have a a baseline, like a demonstrated decline over time.
1:27:27 Steven Rinella? I'm a little suspect and I also am a little suspect because I think that they are a I think that it's a little bit of a red herring. I think that they're being used that they're being used as a tool to get at something that to get at something different.
1:27:45 Speaker 05 Sure, that's probably saving habitat.
1:27:49 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah, and it's like, it's like, we want to save habitat, which I totally understand. We want to save habitat, we want to slow certain development. The way to do that is to do the Wolverine and get the Wolverine listed, but then the Wolverine will get listed and it'll wind up being that you'll see that you can't go and snowmobiling certain areas and you can't trap in certain areas and you'd be like, but running a snowmobile and trapping our habit don't do habitat destruction. If this is all about habitat destruction, why do we got to do it this way?
1:28:22 Speaker 05 Well.
1:28:23 Steven Rinella? This is very personal.
1:28:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:28:27 Steven Rinella? Steve's still collecting his thoughts on this subject.
1:28:30 Speaker 05 You know, back to the point I made earlier about Lynx linking out in Wyoming, there's a chance that part of that was because of snowmobiles and and what that does is creates a path for coyotes to go kill snowshoe hares, which obviously Lynx are dependent on.
1:28:48 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:28:49 Speaker 05 And so, you know, it doesn't seem like snowmobiling has an impact, but it may.
1:28:55 Steven Rinella? You know, one of the weirdest ones of those.
1:28:57 Speaker 05 God, I don't want to be like a, you're making me sound very green here.
1:29:03 Steven Rinella? That's great. Listen, that's, that's, that's, that's great for me. I mean, you know, I like, it's a, it's good things to be curious about.
1:29:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:29:12 Steven Rinella? Think about this one time, we spent a lot of time years ago on one, there were still some caribou that were living in the Idaho Panhandle.
1:29:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:29:22 Steven Rinella? And the efforts to try to save those caribou in the in the Selkirk Range and they would come into Idaho Panhandle.
1:29:27 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:29:28 Steven Rinella? And that right now, there's no caribou in the lower 48.
1:29:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, super sad.
1:29:34 Steven Rinella? When they looked at that, an interesting thing was that um, they were seeing so much wolf predation on caribou. And it was like, why wasn't there, like, that's nothing new. You've had wolves on the landscape, right? In B.C., uh, the caribou there, why wasn't it? It was like, whitetail deer numbers, like, like, certain, certain timber harvest practices.
1:29:59 Speaker 05 Right.
1:30:00 Steven Rinella? Created a lot of whitetail deer and elk and moose habitat.
1:30:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:30:05 Steven Rinella? As you brought up that number of ungulates, this is a theory, obviously, as you brought up that number of ungulates at the edge of caribou habitat, it created an incentive for wolves to hunt in the area. And once wolves had taken the habit of hunting in that area, because they're killing deer, they're killing moose, they're getting some caribou. Historically, there hadn't been enough like biomass on the landscape to warrant them hunting the area. And they would just be elsewhere. It's a theory, but it's interesting. And you're thinking of like, like, you do this, and coyotes now
1:30:46 Steven Rinella? push up on snowmobile trails and hunt, and they got a way to get from spot to spot. And it, right?
1:30:52 Speaker 05 Right.
1:30:52 Steven Rinella? It, it, it's a human cause, it's a human cause, very like, step by step, kind of hard to track.
1:31:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think the
1:31:01 Steven Rinella? Sequence of events.
1:31:02 Speaker 05 The correlation is probably when snowmobiles got souped up. I'd be curious if that was like, the years when, when, when those animals' behavior started to change.
1:31:14 Steven Rinella? Got it. When high marking became a thing.
1:31:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, because when I was growing up, you know, you were about a foot off the ground, and that thing didn't go very fast.
1:31:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:31:23 Speaker 05 But now you can, you can go anywhere with a snowmobile, so.
1:31:28 Steven Rinella? I picked up a Wolverine on a trail camera last year.
1:31:32 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:31:33 Steven Rinella? And um,
1:31:33 Speaker 05 That's cool.
1:31:34 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I felt like I was, I felt like, um, I was real excited. I sent it to everybody. It was like trapping.
1:31:40 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah.
1:31:44 Steven Rinella? It was like trapping to get one.
1:31:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:31:47 Steven Rinella? On a camera.
1:31:48 Speaker 05 No. Um, we've had some game fish guys get some on cameras, but it's really rare. And when they were doing that population estimate, you know, it was, I want to say not more than five in the whole state. And they put a lot of effort into.
1:32:01 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:32:02 Speaker 05 Trying to identify Wolverines. Something that was really cool though is they had a Wolverine that had a white arm with a black spot.
1:32:11 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:32:11 Speaker 05 So really unique and she'd actually been caught in the northern part of Yellowstone and had a, had a number. And, uh, I think for a while had a transmitter in her. I'm not sure if that's true, but she was 14 years old, I want to say.
1:32:25 Steven Rinella? Wow, really?
1:32:26 Speaker 05 Yep. Cause she was so identifiable.
1:32:28 Steven Rinella? They knew about how many in Wyoming?
1:32:31 Speaker 05 Well, through all the, I, you know, I think the population estimate is probably 20.
1:32:37 Steven Rinella? Is it that low?
1:32:38 Speaker 05 It's that low. Yep.
1:32:41 Steven Rinella? Really?
1:32:42 Speaker 05 God, I might be misspeaking. 20 to 50, 100. No more than, no more than 740.
1:32:49 Speaker 07 We had this before.
1:32:51 Steven Rinella? We got a lot better habitat though here.
1:32:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:32:54 Steven Rinella? In the northwest part of the state.
1:32:56 Speaker 04 So how far away was she? She said she was, she'd been caught in the northern part of Yellowstone. Do you know where she was then reidentified? How far away?
1:33:05 Speaker 05 Fish hawk is probably.
1:33:08 Speaker 05 Hmm. 80 miles away.
1:33:10 Speaker 04 Wow.
1:33:11 Speaker 05 In 21 and 22, uh, Wyoming game and fish, she said approximately 24 Wolverines.
1:33:16 Speaker 04 Ah, look at this guy.
1:33:18 Speaker 05 It's been a while since I thought about that.
1:33:20 Steven Rinella? Man, it makes my cameras thing seem even cooler.
1:33:23 Speaker 05 You know who, uh, you know who Osborne Russell is?
1:33:25 Steven Rinella? Sure, man. He calls them common.
1:33:28 Speaker 05 Yeah. And he talks about them in, by Salt Lake.
1:33:31 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:33:32 Speaker 05 So.
1:33:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a lot of.
1:33:33 Steven Rinella? He calls them common.
1:33:35 Speaker 04 There's a lot of Carcassonne references in, in the mountain men journals.
1:33:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah. That oral history stuff does, cause I would not call them common.
1:33:44 Speaker 05 Right. So there's gotta be more than there is now.
1:33:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Osborne Russell, we covered this very, we're working on a thing called the mountain men.
1:33:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, sure.
1:33:53 Steven Rinella? Part of our American history series and, um.
1:33:57 Steven Rinella? The other thing that you just wouldn't believe is uh the number of bighorns.
1:34:03 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
1:34:03 Steven Rinella? In the early eighteen hundreds.
1:34:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:34:05 Steven Rinella? Like not elk.
1:34:06 Speaker 05 Right.
1:34:07 Steven Rinella? Larry. Bighorns, hundreds, like hundreds of bighorns.
1:34:12 Speaker 05 I've talked.
1:34:12 Steven Rinella? Living on bighorns.
1:34:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, bighorns and deer. Uh, I've talked to Larry Todd about this and there's only two Indian camps in Wyoming that have elk parts in them. So.
1:34:27 Speaker 05 What I don't understand is there's a really big elk migration that comes from Yellowstone and it goes to south of Cody and, you know, I imagine it's been going on for thousands of years, but you think maybe there weren't that many elk back then or, you know, it was more buffalo than elk and.
1:34:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah, Osborne Russell would run into people who were um like sheep specialists.
1:34:51 Speaker 05 Sheep eaters.
1:34:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah, sheep hunters.
1:34:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, we have a bunch of artifacts around us that were sheep eater artifacts. They're, they're part of the Shoshone tribe, but uh.
1:35:02 Steven Rinella? Shoshone.
1:35:02 Speaker 05 Shoshone.
1:35:03 Speaker 04 We just learned that. That's why it's correct.
1:35:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:35:06 Steven Rinella? I asked, I actually asked a Shoshone person.
1:35:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's, well, I've never known.
1:35:09 Steven Rinella? He was open to either, but strongly preferred Shoshone.
1:35:12 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, what's the river that flows through Cody? Shoshone.
1:35:15 Speaker 04 Well, that's.
1:35:16 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's, I know, that's what got, yeah, so it was funny.
1:35:18 Speaker 05 There's a town.
1:35:19 Steven Rinella? He was sitting right, see, you're sitting in.
1:35:21 Speaker 05 Okay, well, he would know.
1:35:22 Speaker 04 Shoshone, Idaho, the rivers and the places go by Shoshone, but the people go by Shoshone is sort of what.
1:35:28 Steven Rinella? Oh, no, but he was, he was Arapaho.
1:35:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, but he lives with, yeah.
1:35:33 Steven Rinella? Lives on, yeah, lives with.
1:35:34 Speaker 04 But that's sort of the conclusion we collectively arrived at.
1:35:37 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:35:39 Speaker 05 Have you ever seen the bows that those sheep eaters make?
1:35:41 Steven Rinella? No, but I read Osborne Russell's description of the bows.
1:35:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, they're pretty cool. There's a guy named Bob Lucas that there's a video of him making one, but they, they take a bighorn sheep horn and they reverse the curl. And then they, they glue it and tie it together and it's basically a recurve bow.
1:36:00 Steven Rinella? They steam it and reverse it, right?
1:36:01 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:36:02 Speaker 04 Hmm.
1:36:03 Steven Rinella? Uh, Osborne Russell figures very heavily into our, into the thing we're working on.
1:36:09 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:36:10 Steven Rinella? Cause he did such a good job of.
1:36:12 Speaker 05 Documenting stuff.
1:36:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah, such a phenomenal job of making a journal.
1:36:19 Steven Rinella? Tell me about your guiding business. Who do you guide for?
1:36:23 Speaker 05 Um, I've guided for a bunch of different outfitters, to be honest, and I took this season pretty much off because I just had a kid.
1:36:33 Speaker 05 But I've, I've worked for Yellowstone Country Outfitters, 307 Outfitters, Rand Creek Outfitters, Livingston Outfitters. So I've got to see a lot of country.
1:36:44 Steven Rinella? And your specialty is horseback trips?
1:36:46 Speaker 05 Yeah. Everything's horseback, horseback and mule.
1:36:49 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
1:36:49 Speaker 06 Sawbucks or deckers?
1:36:51 Speaker 05 Sawbuck guy. Yeah. I've never understood that. The Montana guys, they can't take a toothbrush if they don't man it.
1:37:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I've always thought the same thing.
1:37:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, we always laugh at sawbucks.
1:37:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:37:06 Speaker 06 We're decker guys.
1:37:07 Speaker 05 You'll have to teach me some.
1:37:08 Speaker 06 All right.
1:37:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. Trade.
1:37:10 Speaker 06 Seems pretty easy to just hang them on the.
1:37:12 Speaker 05 So there's two style of pack saddles. One's what you call sawbuck, which is, seems self-explanatory.
1:37:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:37:19 Speaker 05 You just hang your.
1:37:20 Steven Rinella? Hang bags on it.
1:37:21 Speaker 05 Hang panniers and then you have a lash rope where you tie a hitch to keep everything pinned down. And Montana guys run what's called decker pack saddles. And they have ropes hanging off the bars on their packs and then they tie a hitch usually with something that's manied up. So they pack all their
1:37:47 Speaker 05 camping stuff in a, in a canvas mani and fold it up real nice.
1:37:54 Steven Rinella? Like a mani-pedi?
1:37:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, mani-pedi. That's right. Sort of.
1:37:58 Speaker 04 You're tracking. You're tracking.
1:38:01 Speaker 05 Help me out here.
1:38:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, no, that's accurate.
1:38:03 Speaker 05 I don't know what you guys do.
1:38:04 Speaker 06 I don't know. My, my theory is decker, like when you lash down a. Decker saddle, say with the Yeti coolers. And then you can crow's foot it to really lash it down. You can bump into a lot more trees and have it stays, stay set compared to sawbuck saddles. Might move around a little bit more or get loose. I don't know.
1:38:24 Speaker 05 I've never packed a sawbuck. I run some pretty steep country.
1:38:27 Speaker 06 Well, steep maybe. What about how thick is it?
1:38:30 Speaker 05 It's pretty thick.
1:38:30 Speaker 06 Oh, well.
1:38:32 Steven Rinella? Sounds like it's thick and steep.
1:38:34 Speaker 06 To each their own, I guess. Whatever style floats your boat.
1:38:37 Speaker 05 I know that you can pack real awkward loads with Deckers. They're a lot more versatile.
1:38:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, we would pack raft frames, 16 foot raft frames on them on the uphill side.
1:38:48 Speaker 05 Okay. Yeah, we just don't take that stuff, so.
1:38:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, very awkward boats.
1:38:53 Steven Rinella? Are you mostly deer, mostly elk?
1:38:55 Speaker 05 I've done it all, sheep, mountain goat, deer, elk. Not grizzly bear, but everything else.
1:39:03 Steven Rinella? Black bears?
1:39:04 Speaker 05 Uh, no, never have guided black bears, actually. Kind of got burnt out on the bear thing, so.
1:39:09 Steven Rinella? Oh, messing with bears? You're like a person who gets a job at an ice cream shop, then they don't like ice cream no more?
1:39:13 Speaker 05 Exactly.
1:39:16 Speaker 05 Same reason I don't eat Mexican food.
1:39:19 Steven Rinella? And you're, and you're looking for, you're, you're between careers now?
1:39:23 Speaker 05 You know, I'm, I'm doing construction, but I'm definitely open to doing something that benefits wildlife. I don't want the best thing that I've done for wildlife to be catching and killing bears, so.
1:39:34 Steven Rinella? Hmm. What drove you to, do you mind saying, why, why did you leave the state agency in Wyoming? Fishing game?
1:39:41 Speaker 05 I was just really personally conflicted with some of the management decisions that were being made. So there were a lot of reasons I was, I was super burnt out. If I had to give one more bear safety talk, I was gonna suck startup 44.
1:39:56 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:39:58 Speaker 05 Or, or bear spray.
1:39:59 Steven Rinella? What would be a, what would be an area of management? Like, what would be like an area of management that you would find conflict? You don't need to tell me the exact conflict, but when you say that, what do you mean?
1:40:10 Speaker 05 What do you mean, what do you mean?
1:40:11 Steven Rinella? Like, do you mean the way they set harvest objectives?
1:40:16 Speaker 05 Oh.
1:40:16 Steven Rinella? Or the way they?
1:40:18 Speaker 05 Where I had conflict.
1:40:19 Steven Rinella? Or was it like administrative issues, you know?
1:40:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was leadership and I just didn't feel like relocation and removal decisions were really consistent, so.
1:40:31 Steven Rinella? God, oh, on the bear question.
1:40:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's like how you're handling individual bears.
1:40:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:40:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:40:37 Speaker 05 You know, I'd had a certain standard with my old boss and I just felt like it wasn't the same.
1:40:45 Steven Rinella? There are a few days every year when big bucks are most likely to get gotten. And knowing that exact time stacks the odds in your favor when you're targeting a big buck. OnX Hunt's Whitetail Insights tells you what phase of the rut you're in and what tactics actually work for that phase, while the Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet. Together, they tell you when to be in the tree and when to go to your kid's game instead. Get the most out of every sit with OnX Hunt. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners.
1:41:27 Steven Rinella? When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.
1:42:10 Steven Rinella? You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Play they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now.
1:42:53 Steven Rinella? Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders.
1:43:14 Steven Rinella? Do you, this is my last question for you. Do you, give me your personal take. I like, like came in so hot and heavy on delisting. What's your personal take on delisting?
1:43:23 Speaker 05 Hmm, I think it's the best thing to keep states into managing bears, which is probably the best thing for the people on the landscape. And I also think hunting is a positive because it creates advocates for wildlife, creates advocates for bears. People right now say, there's too many bears on the landscape. But as soon as you start hunting them, they'll be like, I don't know where all the big bears have gone.
1:43:54 Speaker 05 These guys are hunting too many. It's the non-residents.
1:43:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it'll just be some other boogeyman. Yeah, that's a good point, man.
1:44:02 Speaker 05 So, um, but they continue to expand and, and a big issue that the courts see is that genetic connectivity between the GYE and the NCD. And right now they're only 36 miles apart. And I think that whether you delist or not, I think they eventually make that connectivity.
1:44:27 Speaker 05 But there was a bear that showed up in the Big Horns two years ago, actually. And, you know, that bear was removed, euthanized right away. And I think they're going to continue to expand, whether you try to contain them or not.
1:44:43 Steven Rinella? Oh, was that a containment decision?
1:44:47 Speaker 05 Social acceptance, you know, but we've caught and killed a lot of bears over the years and you're just trying to contain them into the absorcos. This year they'll hit 70 bears that have died in the Yellowstone ecosystem. And probably 40 of those will be management removals. And you got everything from bears getting killed and irrigation canals. There were bears electrocuted. There's bears that get hit by vehicles like 399, obviously, so.
1:45:24 Steven Rinella? Seventy to one calendar year.
1:45:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think it'll be a record year this year.
1:45:28 Speaker 06 Montana's at 28 right now.
1:45:32 Speaker 05 I don't think it's over yet. There's still bears out.
1:45:39 Steven Rinella? One of the, this, uh, one of the arguments I heard from when I talked about, I was joking, I half joking about Montana chickening out on the bear hunt. But one of the things they brought up is they had no,
1:45:54 Steven Rinella? they felt that their quota would get hit by non-hunting
1:46:01 Steven Rinella? purposes, and if they did a hunt, this is kind of like the logic, right?
1:46:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:46:06 Steven Rinella? If they did a hunt and killed a couple bears, they would burn up their quota. And then they wouldn't be able to do bear management on problem bears because they would already hit their human cause quota.
1:46:20 Speaker 05 Doesn't sound unreasonable.
1:46:21 Steven Rinella? Feels more like, feels more like across that bridge when you come to a problem.
1:46:26 Speaker 05 I think again, it's what you, what the number you believe is in the ecosystem. And the reason Wyoming was going to be so high is because 12 of those bears were going to be outside the demographic monitoring area. So they weren't even counted towards the population.
1:46:42 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:46:45 Speaker 05 You know, and the DMA is about 20,000 square miles. And bear distribution right now is about 50,000 square miles.
1:46:54 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:46:57 Steven Rinella? Is a grizzly coming to a neighborhood near you?
1:47:01 Speaker 05 Yeah. So everywhere I would go, people go, there's kids in the neighborhood. You gotta get this bear out of here, you know? And then one lady called me and she goes, there's old people in this neighborhood. You gotta get this bear out of here. I'm like, oh, there's no appropriate age to live with a bear.
1:47:17 Steven Rinella? There's two things that are gonna happen. I like to joke about golfers and Montana is uniquely situated. A golfer.
1:47:24 Speaker 05 Gophers?
1:47:24 Steven Rinella? No.
1:47:27 Steven Rinella? I believe that someday Montana will have a golfer get mauled while golfing.
1:47:31 Speaker 05 Oh.
1:47:32 Steven Rinella? And whitfish.
1:47:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, probably at Meadow Lake Resort in Columbia Falls.
1:47:36 Steven Rinella? Big Scott.
1:47:37 Speaker 04 They caught one on a golf course down the Bitterroot.
1:47:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah, we will have, it'll be like, it'll be, I hope he doesn't get it bad. If he gets it bad, I'll feel bad. But I, I, I, uh, it'll be an interesting day when we have a golfer get mauled.
1:47:51 Speaker 05 Digging through the rough, looking for his tireless.
1:47:55 Speaker 04 See, it's probably not gonna be a good golfer, because he's gonna be sticking to the fairways and greens.
1:47:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah, he's gonna be down in the ditch, he's gonna be down in the creek bottom looking for his golf ball.
1:48:03 Speaker 05 Another good reason to work on your backswing.
1:48:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, we're gonna have a golfer get mauled, and that's gonna change public opinion. And then, for whatever reason, like, we have a little mountain range right here in town.
1:48:13 Speaker 05 Bridgers?
1:48:13 Steven Rinella? Uh, you know, not right here, I mean, it's way bigger than that, but it toes off, like, you know, toes off into town. And, um, man, there's grizzlies right across the highway.
1:48:24 Speaker 05 I know, 36 miles.
1:48:26 Steven Rinella? And it's like, at some point in time, this is, we have this real popular hiking trail called the M.
1:48:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:48:31 Steven Rinella? It's not out of the, it's not out of, you know, it's like a reasonable thing that someone's gonna get scratched up on the M hill. I feel like that'll impact public opinion. When a golfer gets it?
1:48:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, there's, there's in Missoula, the Rattlesnake Wilderness right there, you know, you can take a city bus to it, and they had a sow and cubs that set up in one of the first gulches there. That's like a really popular mountain biking area. But I remember going to an event, and there's a bear biologist there talking about grizzlies coming into the Missoula area. And he's like, you know, they're in Gold Creek, they're down on the golf courses in the Bitterroot, they're, they're in the rattlesnake. And he said, I would be surprised if in five years, there aren't sort of resident, known. Bear families, you know, population groups here and there in, in the city or around the city. I should say.
1:49:27 Steven Rinella? I don't want people to think I'm bringing that up like a golfer getting scratched. I'm not bringing this up as a thing that I'm worried about. Uh, and I don't think it's a negative. I mean, I'm not the golfer get scratched. I'm not saying I want, I don't want, I, I think I, I'd love it if we had bears on. I'd like if there's grizzlies all over town. Um, like.
1:49:48 Speaker 05 Go to Anchorage.
1:49:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah, for sure.
1:49:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:49:50 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I like them. I'm not an anti bear guy whatsoever.
1:49:55 Speaker 05 Right.
1:49:55 Steven Rinella? I love the bears. I like seeing them. I get excited when I see them. Anyway, you never, I never meet anybody who's bummed out that they saw a grizzly.
1:50:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:50:03 Steven Rinella? I love them.
1:50:04 Speaker 05 As soon as you get mauled, people's attitude.
1:50:06 Steven Rinella? Sure.
1:50:06 Speaker 05 Changes.
1:50:07 Steven Rinella? I love them. I just want it to go. I want it to be that there's a bunch of bears and I want it to be that there's, there's a state managed and there's a tag draw. That's what I want.
1:50:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, everybody thinks about their self-interest, right?
1:50:19 Steven Rinella? Especially me.
1:50:19 Speaker 05 Yeah. Um, I think it's the story that you, that you portray into the future here. Um, it's how people paint bears. So 399 is a great example. Like you could paint her as a bear that mauled people, or you could paint her as the biggest advocate for bears in the,
1:50:38 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:50:39 Speaker 05 In the world, so.
1:50:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:50:41 Speaker 05 Future bears is up to the public, really.
1:50:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And my, you know, you, you mentioned like everybody wants what their own self-interest is. I should clarify that, uh, I'm not gonna draw a grizzly bear tag. I live in a state that one, um, had they done, I don't know that I'd even put in for the tag.
1:50:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:51:00 Steven Rinella? Okay. Uh, we didn't do it. If we did one, you're not gonna draw it. I mean, what are the odds you're gonna draw it? You know, it's like I've been applying for a bighorn sheep tag for decades. Haven't drawn one yet.
1:51:12 Speaker 07 Do you think a lot of people would? A lot, a lot?
1:51:15 Steven Rinella? No, not, not like, yeah, you get, you're not gonna draw, like, the draws are gonna be slim. So it's not like, it's not like I feel that this is my pathway.
1:51:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:51:23 Steven Rinella? I mean, I hunt Alaska every year. This isn't my like, I'm not pursuing this as, cause it's my personal pathway to getting a grizzly. It's like, it's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna get a grizzly in Montana. I'm not gonna get a grizzly in Idaho. I'm not gonna get a grizzly in Wyoming. I don't, um, this isn't all me, you know, with some like Machiavellian, uh, plan by which I'll be able to hunt grizzlies.
1:51:43 Speaker 05 You're just being a realist.
1:51:44 Steven Rinella? In my neighborhood, it's like, just as an advocate for hunters and as an advocate for state management and as an advocate for responsible use of renewable resources. Here's an animal that, that peep, that has, was historically a game animal, that has people, that, that there's people that hunt them in other places. There's a desire to hunt them. Hunting them is not incompatible with having a stable population as we've demonstrated with mountain lions, black bears, whitetail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, big horned sheep, mountain goats. I could go on and on.
1:52:20 Speaker 05 Right.
1:52:20 Steven Rinella? It's not incompatible. I don't know why this should be any different.
1:52:24 Speaker 05 This guy's put in.
1:52:28 Steven Rinella? You know what I'll do right now? You know what I'm gonna do right now?
1:52:31 Speaker 07 He's gonna make a bet, right?
1:52:32 Steven Rinella? No, I'm gonna tell you something right now. I'm gonna tell you something right now. Just because you said that, I, I promise I won't put in.
1:52:38 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:52:39 Speaker 07 For how long?
1:52:40 Steven Rinella? Ever.
1:52:42 Steven Rinella? I won't put in.
1:52:43 Speaker 07 Wow.
1:52:43 Steven Rinella? I won't put in.
1:52:44 Speaker 05 It's a true advocate.
1:52:46 Steven Rinella? And you go scroll the records and see if you ever see me put in. I won't put in.
1:52:50 Speaker 05 I got friends. I'll call.
1:52:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah, not gonna put in.
1:52:54 Steven Rinella? I said one time before, like, you talk about in drilling in Anwar.
1:52:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:52:59 Steven Rinella? And people are like, oh yeah, just cause you hunt up there all the time. I'm like, okay. If I could sign a contract that said they won't drill Anwar, um, but I can't ever go there, I would sign the contract.
1:53:08 Speaker 05 Right. Me too. Cause I'm not going there.
1:53:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. It's like, okay, fine. I'll need to go there. Just whatever. It's fine. And if I had to sign a contract, uh, we'll de-list and turn over to state management and create a hunting season tomorrow, but you have to agree that you'll never apply for a tag. I'd be like, okay, cool. It's like, it's not, that's not what it is for me.
1:53:28 Speaker 05 I think the real question here is, can you get bears off the list? Can you have state management without people continuing to sue and, and tear down the ESA? Or do you have to change the ESA in order to get animals delisted? And I think that would be horrible. If, if you don't get bears off the list, you know?
1:53:52 Steven Rinella? That's why my advice to people who support the ESA is to stop effing around with the ESA.
1:53:59 Speaker 05 Weaponizing it.
1:54:00 Steven Rinella? Because you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna do, you're gonna do to the ESA what they did to the spotted owl. Like, the spotted owl used to be an owl.
1:54:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:54:11 Steven Rinella? And then it became a symbol of overreach, right? You're gonna now create, you're gonna be like, you have, here you sit. Like, let's say you were like, Joe ESA, right? You're like, the diehard defender of the ESA. My advice to you, stop weaponizing the ESA then. De-list that bear, which is hit recovery, which, which hit recovery objectives, uh, 25 years ago.
1:54:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, but.
1:54:39 Steven Rinella? And move on to what's next.
1:54:41 Speaker 05 The reason I brought up that bear and the big horns is that's in the DPS and that's unoccupied habitat. So, you know, in theory, the ESA calls for bears moving into that suitable habitat.
1:54:54 Steven Rinella? But they mapped out, when they listed them, they mapped out recovery objectives and they hit recovery objectives 20 some years ago.
1:55:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
1:55:02 Steven Rinella? Okay, so why bother? Why bother having an endangered species act? Why bother making recovery objectives if it's just bullshit?
1:55:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:55:14 Steven Rinella? If you don't mean it.
1:55:16 Speaker 05 Yeah. It, it erodes public trust, no doubt about it.
1:55:20 Steven Rinella? 2% of the things that go on the ESA come off because of recovery.
1:55:26 Steven Rinella? Okay, things will come off because they realize it wasn't warranted. Things will come off because they'll go extinct. 2% of the things that go on the ESA come off because recovery. Here you have a recovered thing. Why is it not celebrated?
1:55:38 Speaker 05 Right.
1:55:39 Steven Rinella? They didn't bitch, like eagles came off, no problem. Paragon fought, yuck.
1:55:44 Steven Rinella? But this one, they just got to hold it tight to their chest.
1:55:47 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:55:48 Steven Rinella? Cause it's not about the ESA.
1:55:49 Speaker 05 It's a moneymaker, is what it is.
1:55:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So, forget me saying I'm coming at it from a perspective of a hunter. I'm coming at it from a perspective of someone that wants to get on with, uh, to, to like salvage the ESA and not make it that it just is a thing of, of derision.
1:56:06 Speaker 05 Glad I bolstered your argument.
1:56:07 Steven Rinella? No, thank you. Cut all that out, Phil, so I can just start saying that like I thought of it.
1:56:15 Steven Rinella? Well, man, thanks for coming on the show.
1:56:17 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me, appreciate it. It's good to meet you guys.
1:56:19 Steven Rinella? Is there anything that I, that you wish you got to talk about that I didn't ask about?
1:56:22 Speaker 05 I meant to talk about snaring bears. That's something I didn't talk about.
1:56:25 Steven Rinella? Tell me about that.
1:56:27 Speaker 05 So, another way we catch them is with foot snares.
1:56:29 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:56:30 Speaker 05 And you use what's called an Aldridge spring. And you, um, put the spring in a snare loop and you dig a hole. And then you recreate the surface as though it's just ground. And you try to get a bear to step in that, and that's a fun part of trapping, so.
1:56:50 Steven Rinella? How do you give them a step in there, hanging a bait?
1:56:52 Speaker 05 A lot of times you have a cubby set and you're trying to direct them into, um, your set. But, um, you're putting sticks and bears don't like to step on sticks and hurt their feet. So you can kind of control their foot movement with those.
1:57:07 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Um, when you're doing that, so he actually thinks he's putting his foot on the ground and his foot breaks through the ground?
1:57:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it hits this.
1:57:17 Steven Rinella? Pit trap.
1:57:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a pit trap. It, it hits this trigger and that trigger flings a spring and that pulls that snare cable tight. And the snare cable just has a little bracket that only slides one way.
1:57:29 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:57:29 Speaker 05 You know, and you, you caught a bear.
1:57:31 Steven Rinella? And can you, is, is he too messed up or can you release him?
1:57:34 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, no, you, you release those bears.
1:57:36 Steven Rinella? He's gotta be pissed. Do you get him on video when you do that?
1:57:40 Speaker 05 Uh, I got some.
1:57:41 Steven Rinella? Sounds like a fun visual.
1:57:42 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm. Got some pictures somewhere, I think, but.
1:57:44 Steven Rinella? He's pissed.
1:57:46 Speaker 05 A lot of times they're trying to run off and, and they hit the end of that snare cable and they roll over. Sometimes they are pissed and they try to charge you.
1:57:54 Steven Rinella? Yep. In, in regular trapping, you call that blocking.
1:57:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
1:57:59 Steven Rinella? A bobcat trapper was explaining one time that people would use blocking for bobcats, but what they don't realize is bobcats want to stand on little things.
1:58:08 Steven Rinella? So they'd put little rocks to block or put a log to block, but he wants to be on that. So this guy, you know, you know, the sycamore, you know, a sycamore ball, they don't live around here, but it's like that little porky little, it's like a porky little seed pod. There's this trapper, he doesn't even live in that area, but he gets big things of those sycamore things because it's real spiky. And the cat don't want to put his foot on it. So then you can actually control his foot placement, but you put a stick there and that cat's like, oh, sweet, thanks.
1:58:39 Steven Rinella? And misses the pan because he's standing on your blocking, you know, the stuff that's supposed to keep him from wanting to do it. So you want stuff that looks like uncomfortable for his foot.
1:58:47 Speaker 05 Interesting.
1:58:49 Steven Rinella? Keep that in mind.
1:58:51 Speaker 05 I might just go trap bears on my own, just for fun.
1:58:54 Steven Rinella? Just catch and release bear trapping?
1:58:57 Speaker 05 Whose ear tag is this?
1:59:00 Steven Rinella? Well, dude, thanks. Thanks for coming out, man. I appreciate it.
1:59:02 Speaker 05 Yeah. Thanks for having me.
1:59:03 Steven Rinella? And good luck on your job hunt.
1:59:05 Speaker 05 Thanks. Appreciate that.
1:59:06 Steven Rinella? Name, name what line of work you want, because maybe someone will call you and give you a job.
1:59:09 Speaker 05 Uh, land conservation, I think, could be up my alley. I think that would be beneficial to wildlife. So should I throw out my email? Can I do that?
1:59:16 Steven Rinella? Hell, yeah, man.
1:59:17 Speaker 07 They, they, you can throw out your email if you want a bajillion people messaging you, or they can email us. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Or they can also email us.
1:59:27 Speaker 07 Yep, that's true.
1:59:29 Speaker 05 My email's just dusty.lasseter, L A S S E T E R, 10 at gmail.
1:59:35 Steven Rinella? Looking for work.
1:59:36 Speaker 05 Looking for work. I got a great job. I have a great boss, but I still want to, uh, do something that benefits wildlife.
1:59:43 Steven Rinella? I got a construction project I might lay out in front of you too.
1:59:46 Speaker 05 I can handle it.
1:59:47 Steven Rinella? It's in grizzly country.
1:59:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. I'm a mediocre carpenter, but...
1:59:52 Steven Rinella? That's the kind I'm looking for.
1:59:54 Speaker 05 Yeah. More of a painter? Just kidding.
1:59:59 Steven Rinella? Alright, man, thanks so much.
2:00:00 Speaker 05 Thanks.
2:00:01 Speaker 06 Thank you. (singing)
2:00:43 Speaker 06 I was just ten, but I got to join in. Carol protested, grandpa was firm. I've had him shooting since he was knee-high. This is the day that he earned. Then Annie broke loose with a ball on the wind. Hot on the trail, and bringing her round. Moved up ahead, just into the lane. Where Case Colored Stevens put two on the ground.
2:01:25 Speaker 06 Morning turned hot, and he was singing. Game boughs spilled as a shot shell all flew. Headed toward home, and I couldn't help grinning. My fingers all numb and my lips turning blue. Every year at the end of November, the memories all wash over.
2:01:52 Speaker 06 Over me, bittersweet. Dawn is the early morn, cotton-tail hunting. An afternoon targets and skeets.
2:02:06 Speaker 06 A dinner feast for forty hot people. Cousins and uncles who I've half forgotten. Grandma, all hairy, rarely so happy. Her house full of bursting and meat in the pot.
2:02:31 Speaker 06 That was the way of it back in my youth. I watched it all change through the years.
2:02:42 Speaker 03 As time will erode, both bedrock and bone. An old age will teem in the most fierce. Grandpa we lost in the cold of December. Caro a few turns before.
2:03:02 Speaker 03 I bought the farm when they couldn't remember. Nothing's the same anymore.
2:03:13 Speaker 03 The barn got a lean, the old home lost its shape. You can hear the wind whistle a tune.
2:03:23 Speaker 03 She creaks and she moans and it's all overgrown. But we'll get her looking brand new.
2:03:33 Speaker 03 Every year at the end of November. The memories all wash over me, bittersweet. Dawn is the early morn, cotton-tail hunting. An afternoon targets and skeets.
2:03:54 Speaker 03 A dinner feast for forty hot people. Cousins and uncles who I've half forgotten.
2:04:03 Speaker 03 Grandma all harried, rarely so happy. Her house full of bursting and meat in the pot. Swear I'll raise up a few kids of my own. Maybe one day grandson or two. And I'll walk through the same hills with a hand on each shoulder. Hoping maybe we kick up a few. Praying low that they feel this way too. Every year at the end of November.
2:04:45 Speaker 03 Memories all wash over me, bittersweet. Dawn is early morn, cotton-tail hunting. And afternoon targets and skeet. Dinner feast for forty hot people. Cousins and uncles who I've half forgotten. Grandma all harried, rarely so happy. Her house full of bursting and meat in the pot.
2:06:15 Steven Rinella? I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of
2:06:59 Steven Rinella? a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. The new Dual Threat Pro SD climber is the ultimate companion for both bow and rifle hunters, thanks to its adjustable dual threat front bar. This innovative feature allows you to tailor the climber based on your preferred hunting method. So you can choose between two climbing modes and two hunting modes. So I like having something that's got this level of versatility. Get 20% off all tree stands by using the code MEATEATER at summitstands.com. That's a phenomenal deal. That's summitstands.com. A few weeks into hunting season, you usually have a pretty good idea of what gear is working
2:07:40 Steven Rinella? and what you wish you had. That's where Tractor Supply comes in. Maybe you need another trail camera for a spot that's heating up, warmer layers for a cold front rolling in, or a cooler for when everything finally comes together. Whatever the season throws at you, Tractor Supply has the gear to keep you in the woods. Stop by your local Tractor Supply or shop tractorsupply.com.
2:08:06 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Previous Ep. 634: MeatEater Radio Live! Bluefin Tuna, Bear Chaps, and Phil Trivia Next Ep. 636: Game On, Suckers! MeatEater Trivia CXLII Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated