Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 643: Should Yellowstone's Buffalo Roam Free? About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Rick Wallen, Ryan Callaghan https://www.instagram.com/olcal406/, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Austin Chleborad, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en.
Topics discussed: General spot burning on public land; drawing a line for Chilly; hunting density outside Yellowstone National Park; how south Australia is banning archery hunting; getting in very big trouble for passing off tilapia as grouper; Buffalo Jones restoring the buffalo population; how humans have forgotten how to live; how the brucellosis argument is bull; eating the afterbirth; how bison will figure out where the gate is; bison migrating far from their winter range in the Lamar Valley; bulls as pioneers and females as trackers; harvesting buffalo; preserving the historic skills of the cowboy by preserving wild buffalo; and more.
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Transcript 20,603 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 Steven Rinella? In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. Listen, we're all trying to save up for something. I got buddies saving up to buy their new house. I got people eyeing a new boat. I know buddies that are trying to switch out trucks and get an upgrade in their truck. Whatever, people are always saving up for stuff.
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1:22 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank, or LEED Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/rewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.
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2:56 Speaker 03 This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.
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3:28 Steven Rinella? Before I even introduce today's guest, I'm just gonna get something awkward out of the way. Cause people might be able to feel the awkwardness in the room between me and Chili.
3:36 Speaker 04 Cut it with a knife.
3:37 Steven Rinella? I just had to. It wasn't awkward, cause you just started to say something. I just had to do an investigation on Chili. I had to subpoena his on X record. What? I had to subpoena. No, you didn't subpoena nothing. I just gave it to you.
3:55 Speaker 04 He could have subpoenaed you.
3:56 Steven Rinella? I subpoenaed his on X track.
4:01 Steven Rinella? I was talking about a spot where I took Chili and Chili's like, oh, you know, a little over west of there.
4:10 Speaker 04 I'm wait, yeah.
4:11 Steven Rinella? And get to looking. He's like, he thought that, he thought that, he thinks that if you take him to a spot, what, what becomes private is the route to get there, not the spot.
4:21 Speaker 04 That's not true at all. That is not what I said.
4:25 Steven Rinella? Meaning if there's a point on a map and you're like, well, we came in from the east, Chili would be like, okay, so if I come back with my buddies, I'll just make sure to go there from the west.
4:37 Steven Rinella? But my investigation found that he was sort of correct. He was sort of in the okay.
4:45 Speaker 04 And sort of not?
4:46 Steven Rinella? Unless he, unless he said at this point, I need to turn my tracker off.
4:52 Speaker 04 If I had to, yeah, if I ever show this to Steve, I need to stop this.
4:56 Steven Rinella? His tracker for a minute and then went about his day and then clicked it back on.
5:02 Speaker 04 There's.
5:04 Steven Rinella? That's all. Just want people to be quiet. If they can, they can feel at home, they might be able to feel the tension.
5:09 Speaker 04 Chili, change the body language. Look in the camera, make eye contact. Cause right now you're, you're giving off a very guilty air about you. Yeah, cause I'm on Steve's show and he's ridiculing me.
5:23 Speaker 04 Look the man in the eyes. I, I gave you some intel.
5:27 Steven Rinella? You did. I appreciate that intel.
5:28 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:29 Steven Rinella? But you got it through crooked means.
5:30 Speaker 04 That's not, no.
5:33 Speaker 04 That's subjective. I. So the intel is you were telling Steve about the deer that's in his spot?
5:41 Steven Rinella? Some stuff from, no, he was telling me about some stuff that I'd never looked at.
5:45 Speaker 04 Oh.
5:45 Steven Rinella? So that's why I'm not mad. Cause now I'm glad that he told me that.
5:49 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
5:50 Steven Rinella? And what I might do is make you a little line.
5:54 Speaker 04 Like, don't cross this line?
5:55 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
5:56 Speaker 04 A DMZ? Don't, you're gonna make me a line on public land?
6:04 Speaker 04 Which I can't, I can't cross?
6:06 Steven Rinella? I'm not getting any, I'm not getting any righteous information. I'm getting nothing from Cal. I'm watching Cal to see if he's got an opinion.
6:13 Speaker 04 His eyebrows are about as high as they go.
6:17 Speaker 05 I haven't heard enough from Chile to understand what the whole situation is. I mean, I'll tell you right now. I'm thinking about going into a spa for Thanksgiving.
6:27 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
6:28 Speaker 05 That, um, I know some people hunted in almost a decade ago and they haven't walked in there. And I was talking about that with a buddy of mine and he's like, well, let's just not bring that up.
6:44 Steven Rinella? I was thinking about explaining this. Their dad took my boy and, um, now this is gonna be a little. I took my boy and his buddy from high school to Seth's spot. And we gave my boy's buddy a real talking to about it.
7:00 Speaker 05 Oh, good.
7:01 Steven Rinella? Well, and he respects.
7:03 Speaker 06 Is this the first you're finding out about this?
7:05 Steven Rinella? No, he knows.
7:05 Speaker 05 So, oh, yeah.
7:06 Steven Rinella? We gave him a real talking to and I almost went into, I was almost gonna tell him like an added detail saying the situation you're in. Is this might prevent you from discovering something in the future that you would just know about on your own. So when you do that, you're, you're sort of saying, um, well, I would have found out about that anyway, but now I'm, I can't.
7:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. I appreciated when we hunted with Cal's buddy a couple of weeks ago. I met him maybe five minutes prior to him just looking me in the eyes and saying, I better not catch you in any of these places ever again. Without you asking me first.
7:46 Steven Rinella? I.
7:46 Speaker 05 Just get it out there right away.
7:48 Steven Rinella? I was given some very.
7:49 Speaker 04 Very frank.
7:51 Steven Rinella? I was given some very, very good intel 11 years ago to the 10 year point, 11 years ago, and I would not dare.
8:03 Steven Rinella? Um, do that unless I knew that those guys were dead.
8:10 Speaker 04 So is all of this on public land?
8:13 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
8:14 Speaker 04 Oh, interesting.
8:15 Speaker 05 Thank you.
8:15 Speaker 04 Very.
8:18 Speaker 05 But it's not like.
8:19 Steven Rinella? It's a whole thing.
8:20 Speaker 05 Okay.
8:21 Steven Rinella? It's a whole thing.
8:21 Speaker 05 I do, I do feel, I do feel a little guilty, but one, we weren't hunting the same drainage and two.
8:29 Steven Rinella? You were looking over into my zone.
8:32 Speaker 05 You get on any top, you can see for miles on any ridge.
8:38 Steven Rinella? Some dude at home is like.
8:41 Speaker 05 But and also it's not like I brought more people in there. It's not like I brought anyone in there.
8:46 Steven Rinella? No, you brought the guy that I brought in there.
8:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:50 Steven Rinella? So it's like twice as bad.
8:53 Steven Rinella? Cause you both are morally, you both are morally bankrupt.
8:56 Speaker 05 Or it could be half as bad because they're both splitting the sin. The split, the sin is divided amongst the two of them.
9:04 Steven Rinella? They're like, if two of us go, it's like we're each being a little bad.
9:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:08 Speaker 06 Instead of one whole.
9:09 Speaker 05 Okay.
9:10 Speaker 04 So, so that brings into question whether Onyx should post where all of the extremely high density hunting locations are to help people out because there are locations all around the national park where you'd be shocked at how many people show up to the same spot every day. You know, and hunt sometimes 50 yards from each other.
9:33 Steven Rinella? Outside the park.
9:34 Speaker 04 Outside the park.
9:35 Steven Rinella? I saw some of that the other day.
9:36 Speaker 04 And that's been going on for over a hundred years.
9:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:39 Speaker 04 Because as they expanded the park, they just moved that, you know, that firing line out to the new boundary of the national park.
9:46 Speaker 05 So it's funny that you bring that up because a friend of mine was like, hey, I can't go in there, but. He's like, I got a spot you should go check out.
9:58 Steven Rinella? And if someone talks to you, you never heard of me, man.
10:01 Speaker 05 Exactly. And I looked at it on the map and I was like, that looks like a spot where you go in and you're going to be within a hundred yards of 10 other dudes on the same ridge. Cause I'm like, I'm looking at it on the map, the only place.
10:16 Steven Rinella? One of them secret spots.
10:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. The only place to go is right here. And he's like, that's where those guys killed those bulls.
10:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
10:23 Speaker 05 Like, uh huh, weird.
10:27 Steven Rinella? A moment ago, you heard the voice of today's special guest, Rick Wall and former, former. That's the kind we like.
10:37 Steven Rinella? Former Yellowstone National Park Senior Bison Biologist, who did the role for 17 years of monitoring. Can we say buffalo? Yes. You cool with that? I'm totally cool with that. You don't correct people in the park when they say that? Absolutely not, absolutely not. Who performed that role for 17 years. And this is where, I mean, oftentimes on this show, we like to explore where,
11:00 Steven Rinella? we like to explore what I would call, what I tend to call wildlife politics. Very cool. Meaning where, where wildlife issues take on almost political tonality. Where wildlife issues become a partisan issue, or wildlife issues become something to fight about. Or you get billboards about wildlife issues. Yeah, wildlife politics. There's like wildlife management, and then wildlife management's very close cousin. Not even, that's not even the right analogy. It's, it's like, um. Wildlife management is really driven by politics, and it's been that way for decades. There you go. And conservation, on the other hand, is a little less partisan because you see people very supportive of conservation of wildlife.
11:44 Steven Rinella? They like, they like the idea of it. They like the idea of it. They may not like the methods to get there. Yeah. I brought up, on that point, I brought up a bunch about, uh, and observations over the years. There's not a politician in America who would not like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. Absolutely, absolutely. And they are probably not aware of how controversial, um, the actions that he took were. And that if someone took those actions today, they would call them a communist. And they would threaten them and they would have to have security people outside of their home.
12:24 Speaker 07 Yeah, oh yeah.
12:25 Steven Rinella? If Theodore Roosevelt did what he did then today.
12:28 Speaker 07 Yep. And then, you know, during my time trying to stand up for wild bison in Yellowstone and allowing them to, you know, move across public land, we talked about that often. Whether after particular public meetings, could we be seen going to the bar for a beer?
12:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
12:45 Speaker 07 Because we were a little nervous about, you know, the heated discussions that go on in those, those debates about what you can and can't do to preserve wild bison on public land.
12:54 Steven Rinella? Speaking of heated discussions, you're gonna have a real problem with chili.
12:59 Speaker 07 Cool.
13:00 Steven Rinella? Not only is he in trouble for what this now, but I'm just curious, I want to set the tone.
13:05 Speaker 07 Okay.
13:06 Steven Rinella? Chili, so when you hear that Chili and Seth.
13:09 Speaker 07 Thank you.
13:10 Steven Rinella? Are, are and have current and former tag holders for the gardener hunt.
13:17 Speaker 07 Oh.
13:18 Steven Rinella? Do you look at them and think, you sons of bitches? Or do you think like, oh, that's cool?
13:23 Speaker 07 You know, hunting has been a tool for wildlife management for a hundred years. And when we debated about, you know, opening up, you know, bison hunting on the north boundary, we thought that hunting was gonna be a really good thing for, you know, allowing the animals to go a little bit farther and wider than just the park boundary.
13:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
13:46 Speaker 07 And that we'd get a great deal of support by the hunters to come out and, you know, and argue with the landowners, argue with the state game agency, to come up with creative ways to manage the hunt so that they could expand the population boundaries or the distribution of the animals.
14:04 Steven Rinella? Yep.
14:05 Speaker 07 So that there could be hunting like what I heard you guys talk about 10 minutes ago on a larger landscape. And it seems like it's much more like competitive hunting to see who can be the first one to shoot, the first one that steps across the park boundary. And the hunting that I envisioned back in 2009, when we were very supportive of hunting wild bison, never exists, never came about.
14:32 Steven Rinella? Understood.
14:33 Speaker 07 So.
14:34 Steven Rinella? We're gonna, we're gonna get into that.
14:36 Speaker 07 Great.
14:37 Steven Rinella? That's the story I want to get into.
14:38 Speaker 07 That's great.
14:39 Steven Rinella? And I don't mean to cut you off, we got to hit on a couple of quick bits of listener feedback, but that's the story I'd like to mainly dive into with you is that, that, that.
14:48 Steven Rinella? Um. That's a story that needs to be told. That grand bargain did not. That never had panned out as yet.
14:54 Speaker 05 It would have been a great cliffhanger right there.
14:56 Steven Rinella? Yep. It's not Chili's fault.
14:58 Speaker 05 A little heavier editing on Phil's part.
15:02 Speaker 05 Like a murder podcast.
15:04 Steven Rinella? We had, uh, we had the kids on the, we had a bunch of kids on the show recently and we did a podcast called Our Girls Are Here To Kick Your Ass and, uh, uh, my, my daughter, Yanni's daughters, Pottery Pat's daughter, who else we have? Those it for daughters?
15:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
15:19 Steven Rinella? And we were, we were laughing about my daughter. One time we were walking through the woods squirrel hunting and I hear her behind me go.
15:26 Steven Rinella? Cause she'd eaten a piece of deer shit thinking it was some kind of chocolate and this guy wrote in, he had a hell of a time with his kid. He said he had a kid from 12 months to three who wouldn't stop picking up shit to eat.
15:39 Speaker 06 Elk poop.
15:40 Steven Rinella? Like they became like a specialist. I had a dog like that. But he said that nothing bad ever happened to the kid.
15:47 Speaker 06 It said he's specifically selected for elk.
15:50 Steven Rinella? Nothing bad ever happened. So. There you have it. Oh, I keep saying he. Anna Anderson. Oh, I guess she wrote her name down.
16:01 Speaker 06 Yep, but the kid was a.
16:04 Steven Rinella? The kid was a he.
16:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:05 Steven Rinella? The, the, the person that wrote in was his mother.
16:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:08 Steven Rinella? And he, um, this kid liked liver. Big baby, real healthy, no nutritional deficiencies, weaned on wild game, liked liver and had a taste for elk shit.
16:21 Steven Rinella? We should know if I got a job. Yeah.
16:25 Steven Rinella? Especially after the problems we have with Max earlier today down here. Yep. We're doing Max's job.
16:33 Steven Rinella? Brutal. Nobody can do anything right around here today.
16:36 Speaker 06 He's just whipping.
16:39 Steven Rinella? This, this is a, here's a really surprise. I had, I, this is like, I kind of don't understand how this. Maybe, maybe Cal moves more about sort of like the, the evolution of this, but, um. I know Cal's reported on it. That Australia is south, okay, South Australia is just flat out banning archery hunting.
17:07 Steven Rinella? Private, public, whatever, like banning archery hunting. And someone's asking, the question is not so much like, what do you do about something like this? And I have like, how the wheels of law turn in Australia, I have zero idea. But he was saying, I had made a comment one time when we were talking about the Proposition 127 in Colorado. And we were talking to some houndsmen who would have been affected. Proposition 127 to remind folks for the 8,000th time was a push from, a push to ban bobcat and lion hunting in Colorado. It was that proposition was defeated.
17:48 Steven Rinella? After, after it was defeated, we had interviewed a houndsman and we had asked like, what would you really have done if it, after your whole life spent with this discipline, what would you have really done if it became illegal? And he said, how he commented, you know, half joking that a law like that is a good way to make an honest man dishonest. And this person's bringing up like, if something like this happens, what is your take on how, like, how would you react to it? Sort of meaning, would you just bow hunt anyway? Currently, prior to this ban, here's how fine tuned it was. Bow hunting was allowed on private property for non-native species, of which they have
18:32 Steven Rinella? a great quantity in Australia. Non-native species, rabbits, hares, foxes, goats, deer.
18:38 Speaker 07 Red deer.
18:39 Steven Rinella? However, this upcoming ban, bow hunting will be illegal. It seems so, you know, I remember a move, remember we had that guy? Who's that kind of, he's kind of a controversial figure in the, if you can be controversial in the broadhead world, he is, Dr. Ed?
18:59 Speaker 06 Oh, Dr. Ed Ashby.
19:01 Steven Rinella? Do you remember when there was a country in Africa that did not allow bow hunting? And he was doing a bunch of efficacy?
19:08 Speaker 06 The area I think he was in was KwaZulu-Natal, if that makes sense.
19:13 Steven Rinella? And they were doing these efficacy programs to bring in bow hunting.
19:16 Speaker 06 Right.
19:17 Steven Rinella? This is the first example I've heard of.
19:21 Steven Rinella? I'm familiar with people bringing in archery seasons. This is the first example I've heard of of eliminating bow hunting. Cause especially funny, cause so many people would be like, well, that's ethical.
19:32 Speaker 04 Eliminating bow hunting for non-native species on private land. Like it was already a very narrow opportunity.
19:39 Speaker 05 And that's right. So like the context does matter. I mean, I, my perspective on this is, is it's just clearly another step in eliminating hunting altogether. But you know, it's like, you're like, oh really? The animal welfare people who always advocate for the elimination of hunting are all of a sudden concerned about ethical hunting. That's right. It's like, that's not really what they're concerned about, but their argument is like, well,
20:09 Speaker 05 is hunting a wildlife management tool? If so, let's treat it as an effective, efficient wildlife management tool. Uh, and you're in a country where you can hire,
20:25 Speaker 05 you know, people who professionally eradicate game at night, um, using, uh, all sorts of manners and means, but you know, rifles with, um, suppressors and, uh, taking only headshots. And it's like, well, if you want to eliminate the game or manage the game, do it in the most efficient way possible.
20:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
20:48 Speaker 05 And, and or the most humane way possible, which is, you know, I think we've discussed that a gajillion times, just a asinine word to use on things like this, in my opinion. So.
20:58 Steven Rinella? So that, that's the argument is there's a, like the argument would coming from the people that want to see it gone and be like, we agree that there's some control that needs to occur with non-natives, but we'd like to eliminate any sort of like sporting flavor and do it in a more systematic procedural fashion with trained professionals.
21:21 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so like in this guy's example, he's like, I have small acreage property that I have permission to hunt, but firing a, a high caliber rifle would be, uh, displeasing to the neighbors. Right. And the, it'd be like, well, use a, a smaller caliber rifle with subsonic ammunition and shoot them in the, in the ear.
21:44 Speaker 05 Right, problem solved. Why do you need bow hunting? And the argument would go on and on, right?
21:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
21:50 Speaker 07 So hunting is also a cultural activity that people have an opportunity to engage in in a manner that would be similar to our ancestors.
22:00 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
22:01 Speaker 07 And so it's, it's kind of both, a management tool for game agencies to manage abundance and distribution, but from society's perspective, it's a way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your family were descendants of the long hunters, or, you know, someone like that.
22:18 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
22:19 Speaker 07 So that, you know, it's a pride kind of a thing.
22:22 Steven Rinella? I think that that, that perspective, I've never even been to Australia, but we get a lot of emails from Australia and that perspective about hunting seems to be absent from discussions in Australia.
22:32 Speaker 07 That's what I'm hearing.
22:33 Steven Rinella? It's like, it's like you, you see a lot of things about in Australia is about, it's like issues of, a lot of the conversations are like issues of control, controlling non-natives, controlling non-natives, and even like controversial things like if kangaroos are shot, you see there's, I hesitate to use example because there, there's examples like this in the US, but an example like if you're shooting kangaroos for depredation, you can, you, you can't utilize any resource from the kangaroo, but we have versions of that, meaning if you kill a bear for getting in your garage out of season, um, um, you don't, that's not your bear, like
23:18 Steven Rinella? you don't send it off to the taxidermist, it becomes the property of the state.
23:22 Speaker 07 That's right.
23:23 Steven Rinella? So, so we have, you know, we have versions of that, but that, that sentiment seems to be more widespread and, and, and more kind of leading the discussion in Australia.
23:37 Steven Rinella? Then perhaps here and there's like, doesn't seem to be a lot of, uh, the, the hunters we hear from express a lack of any kind of acknowledgement of, of the culture of hunting and with wildlife managers and feral managers in Australia.
23:52 Speaker 05 But so that we should answer the question like what, cause it's kind of an advocacy question, right? It's like, how do you stick up for yourself if you want to maintain bow hunting in the state or a region that they're in? Um, one super interesting case is, uh, the, uh, waterfowl, like maintaining a waterfowl season was recently under attack in Australia. And there weren't, just on paper, there were not enough waterfowl hunters to, uh, really effectively advocate for themselves, right? It's like what we talk about here and in America is like, well, we need to
24:34 Speaker 05 maintain healthy hunter populations if we're going to maintain hunting because if we dip below a certain set of percentage points, like it's just not going to be valuable enough to listen to hunters, uh, in a political sense. Um, and in Australia, they were, they were in a very real sense, going to lose their, their ability to waterfowl hunt. And they were able to, and again, hunters, fire arm owners were not a large enough political group on their own to, um, effectively advocate for themselves, but they were able to, um, get support from
25:17 Speaker 05 the, the labor unions and trade unions because a large percentage of the labor and trade folks were younger, disposable income, liked to go out and do stuff outside.
25:30 Steven Rinella? Oh, so they found representation from?
25:32 Speaker 05 From a big enough political group where people were like, oh, wait, all the electricians and plumbers and those guys?
25:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Be like, there aren't many, but a lot of them are here. There aren't many, but I'm friends with a lot of them.
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27:06 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank, or LEED Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/prewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.
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28:03 Steven Rinella? I remember that was one of the first times I had really seen it, not that. In the state of Washington was one of the first times I've seen the lack of participation get weaponized. And it was around some trapping bands and they were just making a lot of noise about, well, look how few people do it.
28:23 Steven Rinella? You know, I'd never seen someone like actually use that as the argument to not be able to do it. Meaning no one's really doing it. So why should you be allowed to do it? It feels that important. People would be doing it. And it'd be like, so you'd be more comfortable with it if there's a lot of people.
28:44 Steven Rinella? Here's a story out of Mississippi and this one's, this one's interesting because you see this so many times in different ways. I remember they did, uh, it has to do with mislabeling fish in restaurants. And I remember some years ago, quite a few years ago, this piece came out that they went and they went and sampled red snapper. Some organization sampled red snapper and it was, I'm not exaggerating. I think it was 78% of red snapper wasn't red snapper. Cause it's mangrove snapper. It's, I don't know. Name a bunch of snappers.
29:12 Speaker 05 Uh, Kubera. That's a cool one.
29:14 Steven Rinella? Sure. Like a bunch of snappers.
29:17 Speaker 05 Non-red snappers.
29:18 Steven Rinella? You can't tell them apart. I mean, like, like I'm saying, if I made you like a fried up some snapper and I had a, a, a, a blue line, a mangrove, a mutton, right? On down the line. Um, and a red snapper. And I said like, okay, sort them all out by taste.
29:39 Steven Rinella? That's a tough task to do. So I think that all these different snappers in the marketplace, at some point someone was just being like, yeah. It's red, red snapper. It's all red snapper. Here's an egregious example of mislabeling, and this ain't even close. Uh, Mary Mahoney's Old French House in Biloxi, Mississippi.
30:02 Steven Rinella? Been in business since 1962 and a building that dates to 1737 was passing off tilapia as grouper.
30:12 Speaker 06 Oh, come on.
30:14 Steven Rinella? That's like deer shit as deer meat.
30:21 Steven Rinella? I've eaten a lot of tilapia. Not a lot, I've eaten enough to know.
30:26 Speaker 06 That's a good, yeah.
30:28 Steven Rinella? Uh, five years of probation in order to pay 1.5 million dollars in fines.
30:35 Speaker 06 They got wa, so that's deserving.
30:38 Steven Rinella? Geez. So, what they came after, they, they, they, okay, they, a criminal fine of what makes sense. So you go like, well, how do you arrive at that number? A criminal fine of only 100, not only, a criminal fine of 150,000 bucks. But, uh, what they came after him about is like, I guess like a cost discrepancy thing.
31:01 Steven Rinella? A forfeiture, of forfeiture, that's a hard word to say, did I nail it?
31:05 Speaker 05 Forfeiture.
31:06 Steven Rinella? Forfeiture. Of 1.3 million dollars for fraudulent sales. So not even fine, but basically saying you have been bilking people out of.
31:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
31:18 Steven Rinella? You know, buying this for like 70 cents a pound or whatever the hell tilapia goes for when buying groupers probably, I'm guessing.
31:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I wonder if on the menu, you know, it said like market price. You know how those seafood restaurants do that?
31:31 Speaker 04 I'm really curious how this got started, if it was a disgruntled employee or a patron with a really refined palate.
31:40 Steven Rinella? Oh.
31:40 Speaker 04 It's just like.
31:41 Steven Rinella? I don't want to get anybody in trouble. One time we were in a very remote Alaska town that is not on the road system.
31:48 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
31:49 Steven Rinella? And we were stuck at an airstrip and there was like a little place you could stay and eat there. And like a lot of nights they don't have any customers. And I remember he had, uh, chicken Alfredo. He's like, I'm gonna have chicken Alfredo. And we all sat down there to eat like, that ain't chicken. Like I've eaten enough spruce grouse, no spruce grouse, not seafood. But I appreciated that.
32:15 Speaker 05 Well, we just, right before flying out of Wichita, Kansas, uh, two days ago.
32:22 Speaker 05 Well, Peter Kung and I were at a restaurant and Mexican restaurant. And they had skirt steak on the menu. And I was like skirt steak, awesome. And the guy's like, how do you want that cooked? And I was like,
32:36 Speaker 05 well, there's only one way to cook a diaphragm.
32:42 Speaker 05 And he's like, medium rare is how most people get it. And I was like, well, that's, I'm like, what cut is it? And he's like, well, it comes back here off the end of the, I'm like, oh, that's a flank steak.
32:53 Speaker 05 I'm like, okay, sounds good, so.
32:56 Steven Rinella? Uh, little more color on this. Six, they did it for six years.
33:02 Steven Rinella? They sold fifty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds of tilapia imported from Africa, India, and South America at what they're calling premium, uh, at premium prices.
33:20 Steven Rinella? There's another article I was gonna get into, but I'm not gonna get into, but the long and short of it is,
33:26 Steven Rinella? it's out of India, northern India. So from the, from, from far away, uh, not Indiana, for you people that just heard Indiana, India.
33:36 Steven Rinella? Wildlife, this is a thorny one, and you can picture this pissing people off in America. Wildlife researchers in India who are looking at relations with like Asian elephants, Asiatic tigers, is there any other kind of tiger? Tigers.
33:54 Steven Rinella? Have trail cams out and part of the purpose of the trail cams is to see how their women do a lot of gathering in, in, in this community in India. Women spend a lot of time gathering natural resources in the wild. So the camera program is meant to monitor not just predator prey relations, but to monitor how area women use resources. And the women are very intimidated.
34:21 Steven Rinella? And don't like it and have changed, changed a lot of their habits. Like they traditionally sing while they're gathering resources because there's a risk of predation from tigers. They traditionally sing, but women reporting that they don't feel comfortable doing that now because they have to be out doing their resource extraction on camera. And it's changed their desire.
34:44 Speaker 04 I don't like singing on camera either.
34:45 Steven Rinella? It's, it's changed their desire to be out. It's changed, it's impacted how long they like to be in the woods, what they do in the woods. And they're reporting that like the surveillance and they're like, well, it's important for us to understand how people utilize the resources.
35:01 Steven Rinella? Picture in the U S if they said, we're gonna, we want, we're curious how hunters, what hunters are doing. So we're gonna go and put out tons of trail cameras to watch how hunters are going about their business.
35:13 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, that's already changed a lot of, I'm always looking for cameras. There's so many stinking cameras around these days.
35:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I sneak around. I always catch them and I like go around back, you know?
35:24 Speaker 06 I probably peed in front of trail cameras.
35:26 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
35:27 Speaker 04 I did that a couple of weeks ago.
35:28 Steven Rinella? That's part of this article.
35:30 Speaker 04 Trail cameras pointed right at me.
35:32 Speaker 06 Everyone's, yeah.
35:33 Steven Rinella? That's part of this article and they put it up online. They caught a woman, they caught one of these women peeing in the woods and it wound up on WhatsApp.
35:40 Speaker 05 Oh, no. Yeah.
35:42 Steven Rinella? And humiliated her.
35:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, when we were hunting Phelps and I and Rick Smith and, and Max. When we were filming in Washington last year, we all stopped and you know how one guy starts peeing and everyone, ah, it's a good time to pee too. And look around and, and yeah, trail camera right there. Got all of us. I don't think that's wound up online.
36:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's gonna be the next calendar.
36:06 Speaker 04 We were on a meteor shoot one time, I think it was Florida, and I get a message on Instagram. I see. You guys are hunting.
36:12 Steven Rinella? Yep.
36:12 Speaker 04 To the area.
36:14 Speaker 06 What?
36:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah, he, he, cause he had a cellular camera. And.
36:19 Speaker 06 Like, look, it's Stephen.
36:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah, recognized us.
36:21 Speaker 06 And put it on.
36:23 Speaker 04 He just, yeah, missed, I don't, I don't think he put it online. Well, maybe he did, but.
36:27 Speaker 05 If, uh, I could just add like a blanket regulation, there are any sort of uh, remote, roadless wilderness designation, all of that come hunting season would just get up like a blanket dropped over the top of it with zero cellphone reception for hunting season.
36:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I saw they're trying to take a bunch of federal money recently. You'll appreciate this, our, our guest here, uh, to increase cellphone service in national parks. Whatever.
36:59 Speaker 04 I believe on that, Rick.
37:00 Speaker 07 That means we're getting a different kind of, of visitor to national parks and.
37:06 Steven Rinella? The kind that wants to build chat.
37:07 Speaker 07 Exactly. The kind that doesn't really want to go there for the resources. They want to be able to take pictures and send them to someone to say, look where I'm at. I'm at this location and I found this animal, things of that nature.
37:18 Steven Rinella? Got it.
37:19 Speaker 07 I mean, they've been doing foolish things like that for a decade or more, trying to get as close as they could to the elk with the large antler and do the selfie. And then they get butted in, in the rear from the antler, kind of a thing, so.
37:33 Steven Rinella? What, what drew you to working at the park? Like, what was your professional path to land, uh, to land at Yalesville National Park?
37:39 Speaker 07 Oh, you know, that's a very good question. I should have thought about that and knew you might ask that. But I think it was more just, um, fate than anything else.
37:49 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
37:50 Speaker 07 Um, I grew up in Colorado. I moved to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s to be a trail hand on the trail crew, cause I love to be out in the wilderness. And, um, I started to see that my undergraduate degree in biology wasn't quite enough and I needed to find a way to go to graduate school. And I picked U of M and Montana State to look for graduate school projects. And I landed here at MSU studying Harlequin ducks.
38:19 Steven Rinella? Oh, really?
38:19 Speaker 07 I did, I did. It was a beautiful project. My professor wanted me to study rabbits at the National Engineering Lab in Idaho. And he said, no, I'm going to do my own project. I'm going to make this as hard as possible. I want to do something cool in the wilderness. And he helped me raise money and I just fell in love with the national parks by, you know, as a trail hand and then decided that ecology was sort of my calling because I loved nature and I went to graduate school in Fish and Wildlife Management here. My first job was back at Grand Teton as a biologist at Grand Teton and I did a big circle around the national parks and ended up back in Yellowstone and it was, I think it was fate
39:03 Speaker 07 as well. I came to do a backpack trip from the south end of Yellowstone Lake to the Buffalo Valley and Togety Pass, big wilderness, the most remote places in the, in the country. And I stumbled into a friend of mine that told me, pretty soon we're going to be hiring a biologist to do bison work around here. You should apply.
39:24 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
39:25 Speaker 07 And so I kept in touch and applied and by golly, I got the job. So I knew what I was getting into because bison-
39:33 Steven Rinella? You knew, you knew it'd be hot.
39:34 Speaker 07 I knew it'd be hot because as a graduate student here in the mid eighties, there was animals starting to leave the park. They were being harvested by Fish Wildlife and Parks, auctioned off at the Fish Wildlife and Parks Regional Office around here. It was big business, big news all over the place. And so I've been, I followed it in newspapers most of my career and I thought, oh, you know, I want to be somewhere where biology's interesting.
40:04 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
40:04 Speaker 07 And boy, did I fall into an interesting spot at Yellowstone trying to conserve wild bison.
40:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
40:10 Speaker 07 So.
40:11 Steven Rinella? Uh, can you give a real high, uh, can you give a real high level, uh, snapshot, um, being as fair as possible to all interested parties of sort of the-
40:26 Steven Rinella? The landscape around the wild bison conversations that are happening in the West and how the park fits into that.
40:35 Speaker 07 So I've heard stories from everybody and I think even on this podcast in the past, once upon a time there were thirty million wild bison, you know, across, you know, America. And there was a military strategy to conquer the West and the military strategy was to eliminate bison and that would be our way to battle the, all of the various native cultures that lived all over the West. And it was successful. And the thirty million wild bison that was three hundred years ago became a couple dozen animals at Yellowstone and maybe a hundred or two hundred up in the far north of Canada before, you know, someone
41:20 Speaker 07 decided to try and turn it all around. And at Yellowstone, it was the Army because the Army ran Yellowstone at the turn of the last century. So the Army hired a bison tender and he just happened to be one of the five ranchers around the West that went out and gathered a few calves and-
41:42 Steven Rinella? Was that Buffalo Jones?
41:43 Speaker 07 Buffalo Jones, yep. And so Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population and they got a small group of animals from Texas. I think it was three bulls from Colonel Goodnight. And then he had some connections up in the Flathead Valley, got eighteen females from the Flathead Valley. And they're from the population that's now the National Bison Range in that area of the state. And there was twenty-one animals, brought the mammoth, sort of a display herd. They reproduced well. There was the couple of dozen animals in the interior of Yellowstone. And this whole restoration project, you
42:26 Speaker 07 know, got on the board by Congress saying, you know, we gotta save wild bison. We can't just let them, you know, go extinct. And conservation of bison was part of the enabling legislation in Yellowstone, conservation of most of the wildlife as well, because it was all being hunted out. And-
42:49 Speaker 07 I don't think anyone ever dreamed that they would recover to the level that they have.
42:54 Steven Rinella? Okay.
42:55 Speaker 07 And in the 1940s Yellowstone had an abundance of bison. Well, at that point in time, an abundance of bison was a thousand of them. So they were seeing that in order to make this conservation of this animal on a broader scale, they started giving away bison to farmers and ranchers and preserves all over the place. And the conservation of wild bison kind of went down a different path than elk and deer and sheep because as we took animals from Yellowstone, like we took deer and sheep and pronghorn from Yellowstone, spread them all over the country, but we didn't put them in fences.
43:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they all got moved as wild animals.
43:37 Speaker 07 As wild animals, free roaming for as far and let the animals make the decision on, you know, where they want to migrate to, who lives because they make good decisions, all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason, the country decided that in order to save wild bison, they all had to be within fences. So I think the bottom line is humans forgot how to live with wild bison and forgot how to respect the nature of wild bison on the landscape. And it was easy to just put them in fences. So for a hundred years now, we've been saving wild bison from the Great Plains and even as far east as the East Coast, there's
44:20 Speaker 07 preserves in Pennsylvania and Virginia and places like that.
44:24 Steven Rinella? But let's narrow in on that.
44:27 Speaker 07 Okay.
44:27 Steven Rinella? Question for a second because this is something, I don't know the answer to this. This is something that baffles me and it'd be, I think it'd be a great project for a really, like a great project for a serious historian.
44:39 Steven Rinella? Like, like, I get it in a broad sense, but I'll lay out the question, be like, we recovered grizzly bears as a wild animal.
44:49 Speaker 07 Yep.
44:49 Steven Rinella? We recovered bighorn sheep as a wild animal.
44:52 Speaker 07 Yep.
44:52 Steven Rinella? We recovered elk as a wild animal. I'll point out, there were no elk in New Mexico.
44:56 Speaker 07 That's right.
44:57 Steven Rinella? Right? There was a time when there was zero elk in New Mexico.
44:59 Speaker 07 Yep.
45:00 Steven Rinella? Right? We recover elk as a wild animal.
45:04 Steven Rinella? Wolves get recovered as a wild animal. I would love, like, to really know the discussions and decisions were made. How did they arrive at, like, everything? This, like, great Noah's Ark of creatures will all be politically wild, except you.
45:27 Speaker 07 I don't have an answer for that either.
45:29 Steven Rinella? Randall?
45:30 Speaker 04 I mean, I think like the, I don't, I couldn't find this in, in a document, but I think the answer that most people would arrive at is that the ecological niche of the buffalo was, uh, filled in by cattle. Right? I mean, at the same time that the plains are being emptied of, of buffalo, cattle are coming in. And I, I can't really think, like, obviously, domestic sheep and wild sheep share, share the same niche. I guess, I wonder if it's a question of the power of the lobby, but like, that would be my guess is, is, um,
46:12 Speaker 04 the ranching industry would have not particularly appreciated releasing giant bovine grazers.
46:21 Speaker 07 Competitors.
46:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
46:23 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think it.
46:24 Steven Rinella? But even, but you're.
46:26 Speaker 04 That's just a gut.
46:27 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I think that that's, that's a huge part of it, but even if you look at, like, isolated inner mountain valleys. That aren't even great cattle country, and at the time, probably, my guess is there was not a big cattle presence, for instance, in the Upper Yellowstone Valley. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Early 1900s, was there a big cattle presence in the Upper Yellowstone?
46:49 Speaker 07 I think there was. In the Paradise Valley, definitely.
46:54 Speaker 04 Nelson's story brought cattle in there, like, in the 18, yep, like, 1870s.
47:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I was gonna point out, and you already shot down my, you know, shot down part of it, I was gonna point out that, like,
47:08 Steven Rinella? That that even in areas where that that conflict wouldn't have been is acute. But you're right, if people were if if people were running cattle by that by at the time when we had them all bottled up. You know, I've even I've even mentioned before that like there was a moment when we knew where they all were. Right?
47:28 Speaker 07 That's right.
47:28 Steven Rinella? Somewhere between like eighteen eighty-two, between eighteen eighty-two and nineteen whatever. There was a moment when someone could say like, I know where they're all at.
47:38 Speaker 07 Yep.
47:38 Steven Rinella? I know where everyone is. And in that instant, we became really comfortable with them. As something that we know where they're all at.
47:47 Speaker 07 That's exactly right.
47:48 Steven Rinella? And since then, we don't have any that we don't know where they're at.
47:51 Speaker 04 And I think, I mean, I I.
47:54 Speaker 05 Well, look at Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, all of them have elk hunts, right? RMEF has put elk out there and all of those states have a geographical area. Where if those elk step out of that geographical area, it's an over the counter thing for landowners.
48:11 Steven Rinella? Oh, I didn't know that.
48:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, because there was an agreement made based on agriculture. That this is where the elk are going to be and we're all okay with that.
48:19 Steven Rinella? Is that true?
48:20 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
48:20 Steven Rinella? Oh, I didn't know that.
48:21 Speaker 04 I mean, I do. I do agree with you that I have not seen like a a history of the debates. Like the actual like, I would love to read letters and and debates within agencies about. How it was that bison became not wild or unwilded, recovered, but not.
48:46 Speaker 07 I know there's some congressional record that would be valuable to get a hold of in the late eighteen hundreds. Because that was part of George Catlin's perspective that we needed to save. You know, some great national park where we could save, you know, all these wildlife species that would be hunted for subsistence at that point in time.
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51:27 Steven Rinella? Go ahead and continue your story. I just wanted to ask a little about that because that's the thing, like of all the interesting parts of what you're telling us, like that decision that we as a culture, as a society made.
51:39 Speaker 07 Yes.
51:39 Steven Rinella? It's never been adequately explained to me.
51:41 Speaker 07 And I don't think it ever could be, and I think competition for grass is probably a key component of it, and that there's been a probably unrealistic perspective that you could restore 30 million again and still have the same level of, you know, human occupancy on the landscape. But there's no reason that you couldn't at least restore a couple of populations, like Cal pointed out, you know, we'd done it with elk in a few places where they disappeared many years ago. And in fact, there was a hunting club in Utah in like early 1940s that got a group bison from Yellowstone and took them to the Henry Mountains of Utah, turned them loose, and they wanted to have a wild population. And I'm sure they
52:26 Speaker 07 felt like, well, you know, this is a remote location, they'll probably just stay here. And I think the first thing they did is, you know, move 50 or 60 miles.
52:34 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
52:35 Speaker 07 So they have, they have a new location. But Utah's figured out how to do it, you know, and it's not been easy, you know, there's been a lot of conflict with the local ranchers. But they've learned how to do it, and they have a very sporting bison elk hunt for managing abundance and distribution. And bison really are sort of an indicator of where the most productive habitats are in that area that they occupy.
53:04 Steven Rinella? You mean they'll find it?
53:05 Speaker 07 They'll find it, yeah. They'll definitely find it. So I think that you could do that in a few other places, but you'll never be able to have, because of the ecology of wild bison, they do compete with habitat.
53:23 Speaker 07 With cattle, with humans, with agriculture. And in order to do our national mammal right, you know, it would be valuable to do just like what you described, designate an area that's legitimate for wild bison to distribute around the Greater Yellowstone area and allow the culture of, you know, tribal hunting and, you know, subsistence hunting by the rest of us, you know, that like to go out and do something that our ancestors did.
53:53 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
53:54 Speaker 07 Um, but I, I really think that the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming felt like they had their eye on the Yellowstone restoration of wild bison from the very beginning and have always assumed that they would just be kept within the national park, just like we've done at all other national parks where wild bison are. But all those other national parks have fences. So Wind Cave, Badlands, all those places have fences for keeping their bison. Teddy Roosevelt has fences around it. So at Yellowstone-
54:32 Steven Rinella? Like, those parks have taken the responsibility of fencing those creatures in.
54:36 Speaker 07 Um, well, that depends on what, whose responsibility is. I don't know whether those are fence out or fence in states.
54:44 Steven Rinella? I understand, yeah, got it.
54:45 Speaker 07 Um, you know, in Montana, it's a fence out. And if you don't want the wildlife or you don't want your neighbor's cattle on your property, you're supposed to fence your own property to keep that kind of stuff off of it, so.
54:57 Steven Rinella? Got it, yeah.
54:58 Speaker 07 So Yellowstone's one of the few national parks that's large enough in the lower 48 states that can allow ecology to play its role on the landscape. And we don't prohibit-
55:13 Speaker 07 Bighorn sheep from staying in the national park and we don't prohibit elk or deer or pronghorn or any of the other, you know, native species from leaving the national park. But we do have, you know, laws in Montana that say as soon as they leave the national park, it's agriculture department that manages wild bison on Montana lands. So that was done primarily because of a cattle disease that was brought to the area, a bacteria that, you know, affects the reproductive tract of mammal, large mammals, brucellosis.
55:54 Speaker 07 And that's kind of been the arguing point as to why bison can't be restored as wildlife like the other animals. And I think that it was, I mean, it was somewhat legitimate because-
56:12 Steven Rinella? You think it was?
56:13 Speaker 07 Initially, the farmers and ranchers, you know, they want to make a profit. And so if you're in business for yourself and you want to make a profit, you don't want things to come to your ranch that would have caused mortality, you know, to your profit making machine.
56:30 Steven Rinella? Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it causes heifers to abort-
56:33 Speaker 07 Abort pregnancies.
56:34 Steven Rinella? They'll abort their first, they'll abort their first calf.
56:37 Speaker 07 Right, it's, yeah, by and large, that's what it is. It's a little more complicated than that, but you know, it's not every one of them. But then there's a few that just never recover from the disease.
56:48 Steven Rinella? I see.
56:49 Speaker 07 But by and large, animal gets infected, gets pregnant, aborts pregnancy, gets immune to the disease, any other future pregnancy, they're gonna have their calf. It's gonna be fine. But a farmer's gonna, you know, that's a, that's money in the bank for him if he loses-
57:08 Speaker 05 A couple of years ago, I did a ride along with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks. And it was during the most successful bison harvest hunting season, two years ago, yeah.
57:20 Speaker 06 I did mine the year before.
57:21 Speaker 05 And there was nothing, right? Yeah. So if you go by the numbers, it was like-
57:28 Speaker 05 An unbelievable amount of bison taken out, buffalo killed. Um comparatively, but it was still an over. You know, buffalo remained over objective for like that carrying capacity number that was agreed to.
57:44 Speaker 07 Yeah, the social carrying capacity was a court negotiated number. In a court case between 1995 and 2000.
57:54 Speaker 05 And there's like a, a starting line and a finish line.
57:58 Speaker 07 Yes.
57:59 Speaker 05 Uh, on that gardener's own.
58:00 Speaker 07 Yeah.
58:00 Speaker 05 And at the finish line, so the starting line would be the, the park boundary.
58:04 Speaker 07 Hmm.
58:05 Steven Rinella? You pay, you pay attention, Chili?
58:06 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
58:07 Speaker 05 And the finish line is the, the end of the negotiated. Um, outside of the park, bison range.
58:17 Speaker 07 Right, right. The state calls it a tolerance zone. Most people call it a conservation area, so.
58:23 Speaker 05 And at the finish line was, and I, this is something. I had never heard or seen before, but at the finish line was the state brand inspector.
58:34 Speaker 07 What?
58:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, and his job is to be the guy on the finish line. And make sure no, no bison cross the, the tolerance zone. Yeah, which I was just like. I.
58:47 Steven Rinella? Was he having any action?
58:49 Speaker 05 Uh, I think he, he's a pretty hands-on participant down there as far as like. You know, he's, he's rounding up people and making sure that they know where the buffalo are.
59:00 Steven Rinella? But was he getting, was he getting, um, that year, was he getting stuff that was making it through the zone?
59:05 Speaker 05 You know, I, I didn't get to talk with him. Um.
59:09 Speaker 07 I believe a few animals went beyond that line in the sand, if you will.
59:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
59:14 Speaker 07 But not many. There's so many hunters now. Um, and I would say that the state offers like 44 permits or something like that. I haven't checked lately. Um, but.
59:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think they ended up 40.
59:27 Speaker 07 40, okay. Somewhere in that neighborhood, but the tribes.
59:30 Steven Rinella? The tribal number is much, much larger.
59:32 Speaker 07 Yeah, the tribal numbers are much, much larger. There's no limit really. Each tribe issues a tag to anyone that wants one. And some tribes issue four or five tags to various families if they want to gather multiple bison.
59:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
59:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, cause they can still provide meat for, uh, for everybody.
59:48 Speaker 07 Absolutely, yeah. For the whole family, their whole neighborhood.
59:50 Speaker 05 Traditional harvest type method, yeah.
59:53 Steven Rinella? Let's hit on this brucellosis thing for a little bit, uh, cause there's a lot of questions about this, um, that, that I have that I've heard others voice, um, guys like me who are buffalo advocates and who would like to see, um, a much bigger tolerant zone. Okay.
1:00:15 Steven Rinella? A bigger tolerant zone and more of them. Okay.
1:00:18 Speaker 07 A lot of people would like to see that.
1:00:19 Steven Rinella? Now, I will say to people, don't give me the whole brucellosis thing because elk have brucellosis.
1:00:26 Speaker 07 You're na- you nailed it.
1:00:27 Steven Rinella? So, okay. Did I nail it? Is there something I'm not seeing? Can you speak to this for a minute?
1:00:33 Speaker 07 I can speak to that. And it's a really good question. So, so in 1995, when the governor of Montana sued the federal agencies to not let any bison leave the national park because some were infected with brucellosis, the assumptions were, because we didn't have good science on it all, the assumptions were that bison were the primary vector for infecting the system and that elk were infected because buffalo were infecting the elk. And if we could eliminate brucellosis from the buffalo population that lived in Yellowstone, brucellosis would just disappear in the elk.
1:01:14 Steven Rinella? They were the super spreaders.
1:01:15 Speaker 07 Exact- the super spreaders. Exactly. That's a good term for it.
1:01:18 Steven Rinella? They were the Gavin Newsom's of, uh...
1:01:22 Speaker 07 Sure. Sure. Anyway, you know, that was the assumption of the time.
1:01:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:27 Speaker 07 And, um, it was a bad assumption, you know, to begin with, and the park service argued with the US Department of Agriculture about that assumption.
1:01:36 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:01:38 Speaker 07 Because in Jackson Hole...
1:01:40 Steven Rinella? Can you give the background on that assumption? Like, how was that, like, how was that arrived at?
1:01:45 Speaker 07 I don't know.
1:01:46 Steven Rinella? No.
1:01:47 Speaker 07 I can only suspect. And I suspect that it had to do with, you know, like a capitalistic perspective that, you know, buffalo compete with our cattle and we got to get rid of buffalo. So we got to find some sort of legal way to show that, you know, we have backing to get rid of it. And an analogy is that the people that really argue to preserve wilderness use the Wilderness Act, you know, things like that. They, and they use the Endangered Species Act, you know, as a sort of a political tool.
1:02:20 Steven Rinella? Sure.
1:02:20 Speaker 07 To try and win, you know, in court, kind of a thing. And, you know, brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa and places like that. So it's ironic that we colonized the Great Plains with cattle and we brought this disease with many, some of those cattle. And that disease is something that is a problem for profit. And the USDA started in the 1930s to eliminate brucellosis because back then there were a lot of people that milked their cows and they had brucellosis and they would create infection in humans.
1:03:02 Speaker 07 So because it was a vector to humans. Undulup fever. And so it creates sort of a, you know, by late in the day, you feel lethargic and you have a fever. It creates, um, um, I think other infection within the lymph system of the human being.
1:03:23 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:03:23 Speaker 07 Um, to basically drain energy from you. So you, you recover at nighttime, you get up in the morning and feel good. But by, you know, sometime during the day, you're starting to feel tired again.
1:03:33 Steven Rinella? Sounds very familiar. I see Randall.
1:03:39 Steven Rinella? I don't know, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, I got that problem.
1:03:41 Speaker 07 There was a lot of humans across the country.
1:03:43 Steven Rinella? I got that problem bad.
1:03:44 Speaker 07 And, and the, the infection actually caused problems to the military all the way back when there was Mediterranean wars and it was called Malt. The fever originally when it was first discovered because an army over in the little tiny, you know, island of Malta, you know, all the soldiers were getting, you know, infected because they'd been drinking milk from, you know, the cows and stuff.
1:04:08 Steven Rinella? Couldn't fight in the afternoons.
1:04:10 Speaker 07 You can't fight period if you're tired all the time.
1:04:14 Speaker 07 That's right. That's right. So, so brucellosis is a worldwide issue, especially in developed countries, but pasteurization made it a bit of a non-issue.
1:04:25 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:04:26 Speaker 07 And as we pasteurized milk over time, you know, we eliminated the bacteria from milk products and the USDA was very strategic and going around the country from 1930 to, they started getting states brucellosis free in the 1960s and 70s. But what they would do is go to the farm, test the farm animals. If an animal had brucellosis, they'd make the farmer get rid of all their cows and they'd pay them, you know, some price.
1:04:57 Steven Rinella? And that's how they tackled it.
1:04:58 Speaker 07 That's how they tackled it. Yeah. And so.
1:05:00 Steven Rinella? Can you talk about transmission from one animal to the next?
1:05:03 Speaker 07 Yeah, the bacteria manifests itself in, um, in pretty concentrated forms in the amniotic fluid of the reproductive tract. So whenever there's a stillbirth or even a natural birth, you know, an animal infected has a full-term calf, the calf is born, the amniotic sac is spilled out, all that fluid becomes a transmission vector and.
1:05:27 Steven Rinella? And they got a desire to lick it for some reason.
1:05:29 Speaker 07 Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. Almost all of the, you know, the mammals of that nature that are herding, you know, grouping type animals, you know, they're in groups. So when they see that first calf born, they all want to go see it and, you know, see what's going on. And as the first 10 or 15% of them are born, they're super curious and then, you know, the fascination wanes and by the time you're halfway through the breeding or, uh, calving season, they're not as interested in, in that because it's not new anymore.
1:05:58 Steven Rinella? No.
1:05:58 Speaker 07 So.
1:05:59 Steven Rinella? But they do, they eat that after birth.
1:06:01 Speaker 07 Yep. And that's.
1:06:02 Steven Rinella? AB we like to call it.
1:06:03 Speaker 07 Yep, absolutely. It's a survival mechanism for deer and elk and pronghorn. Because it cleans up the site. You know, predators don't smell the offspring, the newborn fawns and calves. They don't have any odor for a short while. So, you know, mom cleans up the birth site. Stashes the calf. There's no smell and the predators, you know, have to more visually identify their prey than to do it through smell. So, so.
1:06:32 Steven Rinella? And there's no reason, just to. Like, you know, go back into this, this, this point again. There's no reason that.
1:06:44 Steven Rinella? There's no thing about transmission to a cow. Like cattle cow. There's no reason that, that it getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from. A bison's afterbirth is sort of like more. Concentrated or more likely to transmit to a cow than if a cow were to interact with the elk's afterbirth.
1:07:09 Speaker 07 It's all, the biology is all the same.
1:07:11 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:07:11 Speaker 07 All the same. And so.
1:07:13 Steven Rinella? So if elk was infected and a cow licked that afterbirth, it's just as likely to transmit. It's just as likely to pick up that bacteria if it came off of.
1:07:23 Speaker 07 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
1:07:24 Steven Rinella? It's not like a super bacteria in a bison.
1:07:26 Speaker 07 And there's some small concentrated areas of the Paradise Valley where the elk down there test positive at like almost 50%. And then other places in the system, it's lower than that. And then the argument in the 1990s after, you know, the state of Montana became brucellosis free was that. We can't afford to let our cattle ranchers have, you know, any new brucellosis infection because of that, you know, that policy I told you about. If they get caught and one of their cows has brucellosis, the policy was, well, the USDA comes in and makes you get rid of all your cows.
1:08:05 Speaker 07 And I don't think they give them the fair market value, at least not considering what the future value would have been in those animals as well.
1:08:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:08:15 Speaker 07 So it's not as profitable for ranchers to just, you know, live on the landscape and learn how to live with, with brucellosis in the system.
1:08:24 Steven Rinella? My, my understanding too on the brucellosis issue from a rancher's perspective is that. When you have free status, you're, there's some testing alleviation.
1:08:36 Steven Rinella? Um, but when you're in a, when you, when you're not operating a brucellosis free status, you're, there's, there's a testing requirement.
1:08:44 Speaker 05 Like your region is designated as a brucellosis zone or a brucellosis free zone. Depending on where you are. That's, that's what you're saying, right?
1:08:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:08:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:52 Speaker 07 So the, the debate in Montana was that, you know, a rancher in Galton County and Park County, you know, probably had a much higher proba-, oh, definitely has a much higher probability of that as a threat to his livestock than a rancher from Kalispell. Because there isn't any brucellosis affected herds anywhere near Kalispell.
1:09:14 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:09:14 Speaker 07 So when USDA would come in and, you know, find brucellosis in the cattle herd, they would shut down sales by the state, you know, statewide.
1:09:27 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
1:09:28 Speaker 07 And so that's, that's why it was a problem, you know, um, economically for the state of Montana.
1:09:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Some guy out in Wevo, Montana was like, what?
1:09:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, exactly. And so he would not be-
1:09:41 Steven Rinella? I haven't seen an elk or buffalo in years.
1:09:43 Speaker 07 Exactly. A century maybe, right? So, um, the USDA realized that that was an undue burden on the livestock industry. And in 2010, it kind of changed all of the rules. Most of the rest of the country had become brucellosis free. Industry was humming along brilliantly. And in 2010 USDA drew a line around basically the greater Yellowstone system. In fact, it, the line coincided exactly with where they thought brucellosis infected elk occurred throughout the Yellowstone system. And said, all right, here's where the threat is.
1:10:24 Speaker 07 Let's just apply this policy only in this area where ranchers are likely to encounter that issue. And so it greatly relieved, you know, ranchers from, away from Yellowstone in the three states surrounding, um, this region. So it changed the game completely, um, in 2010.
1:10:45 Speaker 07 And so the court case between the governor of Montana and the federal agencies in 1995 was that Was that Governor Roscoe? It was Governor Roscoe, yes. And so the complaint against the feds was that, you know, if the state were to lose their brucellosis-free status, it's going to affect a huge number of businessmen throughout the whole state. And so we can't let any bison leave the national park. Well, now that zone, you know, of acceptance anyway for brucellosis, and then new conservation measures put in place, you know, to protect the industry of farmers and ranchers within that zone, you know, change the name, or change that
1:11:29 Speaker 07 game to the point where, you know, elk are still a threat to them, and they won't lose their brucellosis status, but that farmer and rancher has to do that more intensive testing like you were talking about. Okay. And so they have to go in and test about every five or six months. And they have to have three tests in a row where none of the animals in their herd test positive. Got it. And then they clear that brucellosis-affected herd. So it's a very burdensome... It's very burdensome for a rancher to have to go do that. I believe, at least at one point, and I think it's still the case, that USDA covers the cost of all that
1:12:08 Speaker 07 testing. And I'm pretty sure that ranchers round their cows up at least once a year to go through vaccinations and, you know, weaning and what else, branding, all kinds of things. So at least one of those three roundups could be done at sort of the routine time of year, you know, when they do that kind of stuff. But having to do it three times in a row, and if they miss a time, you know, then it becomes four, five, or six until they get to that three times in a row. So you can see that there is some economic impact to the cattle industry within this zone. So...
1:12:49 Speaker 07 In 2017, the National Academy of Sciences came to the region and brought scientists that have been studying brucellosis all around, you know, the area and in their careers. And they looked at the issue and the questions that they were facing was, you know, is elk really a significant impact, you know, and that assumption that I talked about earlier that it would just go away if we got rid of brucellosis in bison, they disproved that. And the way they disproved that was to show that, you know, the elk in areas like Idaho,
1:13:30 Speaker 07 where there's no bison interaction, and the Green River Valley of Wyoming, there's no buffalo interaction. There's a few places around where elk are infected with brucellosis and they were infecting cattle of the area. And there was enough information on how elk move about the system. I heard you guys talking to Matt Kaufman not long ago. And Matt did a lot of studies with his students at the University of Wyoming, you know, with putting radio collars on and showing animal movements. And there are radio collar studies that show elk moving out of places like Jackson Hole into Idaho, into Montana, never even
1:14:13 Speaker 07 migrating through Yellowstone National Park or anywhere where there's buffalo involved. And cattle are getting infected with brucellosis. So it pretty much resolved the debate that elk are a maintenance reservoir of the disease.
1:14:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:14:30 Speaker 07 And you can't, you can't just assume that solving the problem with buffalo will solve it with elk. And there's no way we're gonna go around and round up every elk in the greater Yellowstone system.
1:14:43 Steven Rinella? That would, that'd be political suicide.
1:14:44 Speaker 07 That would be, absolutely. That is absolutely correct.
1:14:47 Steven Rinella? We just can't do an election and no one involved in that election would have proposed that all the elk need to go away.
1:14:52 Speaker 07 And that's the only way that you could do that, like they did it in the livestock industry. And they wouldn't have to do it once. They'd have to do it multiple times.
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1:16:57 Speaker 07 I think that the industry is starting to realize that, well, until there's some sort of technology for learning how to inoculate livestock that is 100% foolproof that their animals won't become infected if they encounter a brucellosis-infected birth site, then we're going to be living with brucellosis in the greater Yellowstone area. And so there's a great deal of debate among the staunch conservationists that, well, now, if elk are allowed to move along around the system like that, why can't bison? Why do we have to have the conservation zone,
1:17:39 Speaker 07 the Gardner Basin and the West Yellowstone Valley? And why can't it be that same zone that brucellosis-infected elk have opportunity to roam around? And it'll take citizen debate to try and change the state of Montana's perspective to do something like that, because it won't just happen because Montana thinks that that's the right thing to do.
1:18:07 Speaker 05 Even though elk destroy a lot of fences.
1:18:09 Speaker 07 They do.
1:18:10 Speaker 05 They can still go over them.
1:18:11 Speaker 07 Absolutely.
1:18:12 Speaker 05 Whereas the bison.
1:18:13 Steven Rinella? He's going one way.
1:18:15 Speaker 07 Well, you know, I'll argue with you on that one, Cal, because I lived in the Gardner Basin for a long time, and I lived 13 miles from the park boundary, and we periodically had 25, 30 animals roll through our property of 4 or 5 acres. And if you don't chase them, they'll figure out where the gate is. And they'll walk to the gate, and if you go out and tell them you don't want them tearing up your new landscaping, they'll walk back over to the gate and leave. And so I think it's a matter of humans learning how to live with wild bison. And it's inconvenient.
1:18:55 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:18:55 Speaker 07 It's more inconvenient to live with wild bison than it is to live with wild pronghorn, wild deer, things of that nature. And I think that bison as fence destroyers gets a bad name. You're right. You get to run in them and all. They see the fence there. They don't even bother. They just blow right through it.
1:19:17 Speaker 05 I was, I was like very shocked that day that I went out, you know, admittedly one day, but there's this line of cows walking back towards the park.
1:19:28 Speaker 07 Oh, uh huh.
1:19:29 Speaker 05 And, you know, they'd lost a few members along the way.
1:19:31 Speaker 07 Yeah.
1:19:32 Speaker 05 But they were still just, just walking.
1:19:33 Speaker 07 Yep.
1:19:34 Speaker 05 And eventually the, the people who must have harassed them closer to the finish line than the start line came back up alongside of them and that lead cow started trotting and just picked up steam and, and she crossed the road, blew through a fence, went right through the ranch yard there, blew through the next fence and I mean, and did so in a way that you're like, nothing would have diverted those.
1:20:04 Speaker 07 Changed your mind. That's right.
1:20:06 Speaker 05 Nothing would have.
1:20:06 Speaker 07 That's exactly right.
1:20:07 Speaker 05 I was amazed.
1:20:08 Speaker 07 That was due to them learning the landscape and they recognized the hunters, you know, their level of stress goes up because they lost 25% of their group, you know, 10 miles behind them and they knew where they were going. And if the hunters hadn't caught up with them and created that vision that they had just faced two hours ago, you know, they'd have probably just kept walking.
1:20:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:20:32 Speaker 07 And just walked and they'd, they'd have gone to the gate. I'm positive they would have gone to the gate.
1:20:37 Speaker 05 I was, I was pretty blown away though, because I was like, oh, that's a different way for, for animals to act, different way for bison to act.
1:20:44 Speaker 07 So, I mean, that brings up a good question that you guys discussed earlier about sort of the ethics of hunting. Well, I want to ask a different question first. Okay, okay, go.
1:20:56 Steven Rinella? Can you, can you walk me through that time period? I, I, I think of the, the mid nineties, but maybe it was earlier. That time period when the park hit a certain population of the animals.
1:21:10 Speaker 07 Oh, okay.
1:21:10 Steven Rinella? Where they needed to expand range. Right? Or do I, do I understand this wrong?
1:21:16 Speaker 07 No, you got that right. Um, if you look back on, over time, um, we brought all those animals I talked about, oh, in the 1902 was the first year they came to Mammoth. 1907, they took, they, you know, they filled up their capacity of the pen around Mammoth and they moved them out to the Lamar Valley and they didn't put any fences up. They just let them roam. Well, um, they kind of stayed around there for a while and, uh, the early park rangers and the old buffalo tenders used to get out on horseback and they'd chase them up into the hills, hoping that they could introduce the, introduced herd to the native herd. Because the native herd summered on the high plateau, south of Lamar Valley,
1:22:00 Speaker 07 up along the east boundary. And the native herd would migrate to Pelican Valley down by Yellowstone Lake in the winter. And so at the early teens into maybe 1920 was sort of this, you know, meeting of the two herds. And from there, the park service thought that they really needed to, you know, ranch bison. It was the prevailing thought of how you restore wildlife populations. So they took plows to the Lamar Valley. If you go out, you can find old irrigation ditch lines. The Lamar Valley truly was a big ranch back in the 1920s.
1:22:41 Steven Rinella? They were raising grass.
1:22:43 Speaker 07 They were raising grass. They were pushing it up with the beaver slides and stacking it all up. And then they would bring it into, you know, the area that the bison could get to it. And they were helping the bison. You know, they might've even still been killing wolves and stuff, you know, in the, the early part of that century. Well, that was great for long-term survival. And then the brucellosis issue came along. There was a bunch of up and down of population abundance because we tried to eliminate brucellosis. But in 1960s, 1966, the park said, we're not going to do any of this ranching business anymore.
1:23:22 Speaker 07 We're going to follow this sort of, let ecological processes play out. You know, people call it natural regulation, people call it all kinds of things. But ecology became sort of the, the leading edge of policy for the National Park Service. And the bison knew what to do. You know, it was all about survival of the fittest. They knew where to go to find those old hay fields. And there are records that in the 1940s, there were some big winters, like maybe a couple of years ago. And some pretty good-sized groups went to Gardner Basin. A group of forty-some animals in 1943 migrated almost to immigrant.
1:24:06 Steven Rinella? No kidding?
1:24:07 Speaker 07 No kidding.
1:24:08 Steven Rinella? And they let them?
1:24:09 Speaker 07 Well, I think there was some sympathy because of how difficult the winter was.
1:24:16 Steven Rinella? Got it. I had no idea they were leaving the park at that, back that long ago.
1:24:20 Speaker 07 And so about that time is when you started seeing in the historic record, observations of at least the sort of older males leaving the, the winter range up in the Lamar Valley. And around Gardner, you could find a few nearly every year at that point.
1:24:42 Steven Rinella? What's the farthest you know of, of a park buffalo ever making it out of the park?
1:24:49 Speaker 07 Let's see, I'm guessing that's about it. The winter of 96, 97 was another really big winter, if anyone was around here then.
1:24:58 Steven Rinella? Oh, that was, that's when this, that's when the issue just blew up.
1:25:02 Speaker 07 Totally blew up.
1:25:02 Steven Rinella? Because it was departmental livestock guys on snow machines just dumping hundreds of them.
1:25:07 Speaker 04 And that's when the buffalo field campaign.
1:25:09 Speaker 07 That's right, they started up about that time. And animals were on in little nooks and crannies, again, as far south or east, no, north, north, isn't it, as immigrant, some of the farms around.
1:25:23 Speaker 06 People to know, um, how far, how many miles north, I used to live in immigrant, so I should know this.
1:25:29 Speaker 07 So immigrant to the Lamar Valley is.
1:25:32 Speaker 06 Just so that the audience can get a sense of that.
1:25:34 Speaker 07 Eighty miles, probably. So, and bison migrate differently, it's sort of a combination of nomadism and migration, because when you see them in the fall, they're a little bit more nomadic early in the fall, because they kind of, they, they reach out and walk to where they think they might go three or four months from now. Oh. And then they walk back. Like a scout mission. Exactly. And so, bison will leave, like, the Hayden Valley, and they'll go over the top of the Mary Mountain and down into the Old Faithful area, and they might mill around Old Faithful for three or four months, and then the next time they want to move, they'll move down
1:26:17 Speaker 07 to Madison Junction, and there they have two avenues, they either go west or go north, you know, from that, and, and some of those migrations are a little over a hundred miles. So, animals that you could find near the mud, mud pots of Hayden Valley could end up in the gardener hunt, um, just outside the park, and that's a little over a hundred miles, if you, if you follow the route that they take. Yeah. And, um, we've seen animals move from the Hayden Valley out west, they end up out at West Yellowstone, they would get harassed, you know, and pushed back to the park, and they knew they needed to go somewhere because they're looking for that green up, and the
1:27:00 Speaker 07 low elevation that Matt talked about, you know, several, um, podcasts ago. What's his term, the surf in the green wave? Surfing the green wave, yeah, they're going down to surf, and, um, when they can't get to it going west at West Yellowstone, all of that pressure to push them back into the park, I think, generated more exploratory behavior, and they pushed north and.
1:27:23 Speaker 07 Gardner Basin's like the first place to green up. Unless you're at one of the hot springs all around. But it's that low elevation area. You know, it has the least amount of, of, uh, snowpack. It's got the earliest amount of, or, or earliest temperature of 32 degrees and warmer. You know, you get the green up and once they find the green up, they'll just camp on it and follow the green up back through the elevational gradient until they get to some of the bigger grasslands in the park. And then they'll kind of let the green up go on higher and they'll camp and make, um, lawns.
1:28:02 Speaker 04 Is it snowpack that pushes those bison?
1:28:05 Speaker 07 Yes. It, it's a combination of abundance and snowpack. And in the, um, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there was a, a thought that it was, um, abundance of about 2,000 animals that would really, you know, create that social, um, that social competition for bites of grass underneath the snow. And that some would leave and some would keep working the, the snowpack.
1:28:34 Speaker 04 Gotcha.
1:28:35 Speaker 07 And I think because of all of the pressure, um, in the last 20 or 30 years of pushing them back into the park, what we've really done is we've made them search farther and wider. And now there's more that are the, you know, diggers that dig the big pits to find the, the grass under the snow. Um, and they, it, there's an ecology behind that in that the larger animals move those big heads and make little craters for feeding in. And the younger animals with the smaller heads wait till they abandon the craters and they go over and they eat the residual. Um, and so groups of animals have learned how to, you know, carry young animals through
1:29:18 Speaker 07 the winter by digging all those feeding craters and tromping down all those ski trails or, you know, trails for walking around. Like we make ski trails, they make buffalo trails.
1:29:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:29:30 Speaker 07 Pack it down and you can take your skis off and jump in those trails and, and walk just like they do in them. So, so there's two or three different strategies now for wild bison to survive. You know, there's the stay in the park and. Avoid the hunt and there's the migrate to lower elevation hunt, looking for the early spring green up and you know, not wanting to plow through the snow, but then you run the risk of the harvest.
1:29:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:29:58 Speaker 07 You know, once you leave the national park.
1:30:00 Steven Rinella? If you had to take a wild ass guess, um, on a bad winter, if no one messed with them, do you think animals would leave the park and, and then not even come back?
1:30:14 Speaker 07 No.
1:30:15 Steven Rinella? You think they'd go back?
1:30:16 Speaker 07 I think they'd go back.
1:30:17 Steven Rinella? No.
1:30:17 Speaker 07 I think you'd see, I mean, there, there's always the exception, right?
1:30:22 Steven Rinella? Sure.
1:30:23 Speaker 07 So you might see a few, but the way animals expand their range, and I didn't finish that story earlier, is that, um, the, the bulls are the pioneers and the bulls wander farther because you know, they're bigger animals, you know, they, they can't compete with the big crowds of bison that hang out in the big groups. So bulls are going to go out and look for small little pockets of high productivity and just camp on that pocket.
1:30:52 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:30:52 Speaker 07 You know, they might live in a one acre patch in the forest of trees, but if it's a, you know, a marsh, you know, and super productive, you know, they'll do fine feeding themselves for a long period of time if they don't have to compete with anybody else.
1:31:08 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:31:09 Speaker 07 Um, and so bulls are the much more, um, expected pioneers on how bison would expand their range and the females are the trackers, you know, they follow, follow footprints, they follow cow pat, or you know, buffalo patties, the whole works, follow the trails that are left behind. And in the 1980s, when the population in the Hayden Valley area grew to, I think it was a little over 2,000 at that point, just in that part of the park. You know, the Firehole Geyser Basin wasn't big enough for them in the wintertime. And so they started pioneering down to the west boundary.
1:31:53 Speaker 07 And we started seeing these rare bull occurrences in West Yellowstone and Horse Butte and places like that. Dope. And then there was some, there was a couple of big snow years in that decade, too. And so it was those big snow years that create, you know, deeper snowpack. And in later years, during those years of deep snowpack, as you start to get longer days, a little bit more warmth, you get a little melting of that snow, nighttime it gets whole, cold. Bison can't do their thing, you know, their, their heads don't dig ice. They only move like fluffy snow out of the way.
1:32:33 Speaker 07 In fact, you can see, you know, herds of buffalo walking on top of the snow in February and March sometimes with, you know, significant melt and refreezing. And that's when they simply bale and they walk long distances. And they follow those trails that the bulls laid down. And they go, okay, the bulls know where they're going. Let's go find those guys and maybe there's something better at lower elevations. So in the mid 1980s, Montana instituted buffalo hunts, you know, and a few animals were harvested by hunters. And it was, you know, it was a good thing for hunters, you know, there was something new to go out and try and harvest.
1:33:17 Speaker 07 But in the winter following the big fires of 1988, you know, two things happened. The fires burned up a lot of that summer forage production. So the animals would dig down through the snow and find black. And it wasn't, wasn't what they expected. And so there was pretty good sized migrations, both to West Yellowstone and to Gardner. And the hunters couldn't keep up with the harvest. So the game wardens were down there, the Department of Livestock guys were down there enforcing, you know, we don't want any bison out of the park. Yeah. And I think that, I think that year, it was like 800 animals were killed by hunters.
1:34:04 Speaker 07 Game wardens, DOL agents, and the park service rangers even pitched in and helped out.
1:34:11 Steven Rinella? How many, what was the total population? If they killed eight hundred, how many were there?
1:34:14 Speaker 07 That's a good question. I'll have to think in eighteen, nineteen eighty-eight. I think it was twenty-five hundred or something like that.
1:34:23 Steven Rinella? Oh, so not a huge number.
1:34:24 Speaker 07 It wasn't huge.
1:34:25 Steven Rinella? Cause now it'll get to three or four, right?
1:34:26 Speaker 07 Right. And that's where I was telling you that we thought that two thousand was the sort of number that they'd get to that would sort of drive social capacity of the system to, you know, dig the feeding craters and migrate to the boundary. Well, now, because of forty years of this aggressive management on the boundary, I think that number is now more like, you know, three thousand or so. On sort of average to slightly above average years, two years ago was not even close to that. It was like the, the storm of the last three or four decades, I think. And so I would bet that eighty percent of the population leaves
1:35:11 Speaker 07 when you have one of those storms of, you know, of the half century or, or greater. So that's where society has to decide, well, what is the right number to try and manage for because, you know, it's easy to think that you could do it when you have below average, average, maybe even slightly above average years where a bunch of animals are leaving. You use hunters to manage distribution. You know, if things got really bad, you'd put some traps in place and catch some animals, much like the park does at, at Stevens Creek there in the Gardner Basin. The state has a trap they can set up over by West Yellowstone.
1:35:52 Speaker 07 And they used to, you know, use it a lot when there was more migration that way. So. For the last 20 years or 30 years, I think we've tried so many different things that I think we've learned to live with wild bison. And I think that we have the technology, we have the communication skills to get hunters in the right places to harvest animals. And it seems like there's interest by more and more tribes to want to go and harvest bison from the Yellowstone population because they're the remnants of the last wild herds that never
1:36:31 Speaker 07 were gone from this particular Ladensgate. And so their cultural significance is way above the cultural significance of other herds of bison all across the country. So if a tribal member of the, you know, you name it, different tribe that buffalo are a part of their culture, you know, were to go harvest an animal, going to Yellowstone and doing it is at the top of their list. Going to Fort Peck to do it like you did once upon a time isn't as high on their list as going to Yellowstone, you know, to harvest an animal.
1:37:08 Steven Rinella? Sure.
1:37:09 Speaker 07 So there's a great deal of national significance to preserve, you know, this population because of its, you know, sole remaining wild herd that never evaporated from the system in the, in the history, the history of life.
1:37:27 Steven Rinella? Is it plausible that there's like a, does the tolerant zone have to include major valleys?
1:37:36 Speaker 07 Um, you know, you're asking, you're asking me.
1:37:39 Steven Rinella? Well, no, I mean, from the animal, I'm saying from the animal's perspective, is it all pointless if it doesn't include the Upper Madison, if it doesn't include the Upper Yellowstone, is it pointless?
1:37:50 Speaker 07 I think you're right, you know.
1:37:51 Steven Rinella? So to say like, okay, anything that's designated wilderness area is now a tolerant zone, they're not going to go there anyway.
1:37:56 Speaker 07 In the summer, they might.
1:37:57 Steven Rinella? But they won't stay there. They can't survive.
1:37:59 Speaker 07 They'll need to go somewhere else. And I mean, yeah, a few of them, the hardy bulls, the tough guys of the population, they'll figure out how to find a windblown ridge and make it through the winter.
1:38:10 Steven Rinella? But to open up more of the, to open up more of the landscape.
1:38:13 Speaker 07 Yep.
1:38:14 Steven Rinella? You have to open up the big.
1:38:16 Speaker 07 You're going to have to open up like Tom Minor Basin, you know, in the upper part of Paradise Valley, or even, you know, even down to. Immigrant or something like that. You need some grassland kind of areas that have lower elevation, have something.
1:38:32 Steven Rinella? Or else you're just whistling Dixie because you're giving them ground that doesn't matter to them.
1:38:36 Speaker 07 Yeah, they're gonna go somewhere where there's six inches of snow. They're not gonna migrate to somewhere where there's three feet of snow. I'm kind of.
1:38:42 Steven Rinella? They're not like, let's go up to the high country.
1:38:43 Speaker 07 Yeah, unless you've got hot springs. And that's why the central interior part of Yellowstone saved so many animals is the Firehole Geyser Basin has a bunch of hot springs. Even Hayden Valley has a couple of really cool geyser basins that create a melting phenomena that can, they can find sedges that are green. They're green year round and that's good stuff for them. And so you'd need places like, in Wyoming, you'd want to preserve or identify, I'm trying to think of the name of it. It's called Sun, Sun something.
1:39:26 Speaker 07 Just outside the northeast corner of the, of the park, there's a couple of high elevation grasslands that might work, you know, and I'll bet historically, prehistorically, bison out of Wyoming would venture all the way up to the high country from that east side and would utilize some of that area as well.
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1:42:15 Steven Rinella? Do you know about the skull I found?
1:42:16 Speaker 07 No.
1:42:17 Steven Rinella? I found a skull over 9,000 feet in the Madisons.
1:42:20 Speaker 07 See, I bet that's a, it probably was a bull, huh?
1:42:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it was a bull. I had it radiocarbon dated.
1:42:25 Speaker 07 Oh, cool. And it probably was going up there in the summertime because it followed the green wave the whole way.
1:42:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:42:33 Speaker 07 To where the green wave went way up there. And there's some lush, productive, you know, places to graze in that high country area. And there's some places like that in the park where there's some archaeological sites of single animal kills, you know, up around Yellowstone Lake. And I think there's one on the Buffalo Plateau, too. I don't remember the archaeological record very well. I used to rely on my colleagues at the park to tell me all those stories of all those cool places that, yeah, there's evidence that bison have been in the system for basically the time they migrated to around here from the Siberia.
1:43:15 Speaker 07 So I think there's room for wild bison on public lands outside the national park. I think society's gonna have to make a few concessions, learn how to live with wild bison. I think that it's gonna be harder for Fish Wildlife and Parks to manage wild bison than it is for them to manage pronghorn and deer. So they're gonna have to have a source of funding to maybe hire, you know, a couple of problem solver types.
1:43:46 Steven Rinella? Fence crews.
1:43:46 Speaker 07 The fence crews. Or, you know, my thought is, you made a great point earlier when you said, we restored grizzly bears and we've restored wolves on the landscape, but we haven't restored wild bison. And the way Fish Wildlife and Parks manages grizzly bears and wolves is they have conflict resolution teams.
1:44:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:44:07 Speaker 07 You know, and there's, you know, folks out of Livingston and Bozeman that work in this area, all in Region 1 and 2. They have a couple of different teams over there. A model like that for bison could help fish wildlife parks deal with conflict resolutions where conflicts occur and not just trying to draw what they call a tolerance zone, develop like a true conservation area that they manage bison within. And the staunch conservationists that want 30 million are going to have to recognize that that's an impossible dream.
1:44:47 Steven Rinella? No.
1:44:48 Speaker 07 That is impossible.
1:44:49 Steven Rinella? That's a waste of time talking about that.
1:44:51 Speaker 07 A few hundred would be something that the state of Montana could pride themselves in and say, yeah, there's not very many places in the world where wild bison can roam on public land and be managed by a state game agency where, you know, hunters could experience, you know, the same experience that their forefathers four or five generations ago got to experience by going out and harvesting wild bison. And I think that if you've driven around Montana very much, you'll see these signs that say, save the cowboy.
1:45:29 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
1:45:31 Speaker 07 Eliminate the American prairie or something like that.
1:45:35 Steven Rinella? Stop, no, save the cowboy, stop American prairie reserve.
1:45:37 Speaker 07 That's it, that's it.
1:45:38 Steven Rinella? Which even the guy that runs the American prairie reserve has acknowledged that it's just a genius campaign.
1:45:42 Speaker 07 It's, well, it's actually.
1:45:44 Steven Rinella? He's like, ah, that's good.
1:45:45 Speaker 07 It's somewhat foolish by my perspective because the skills that defined the cowboy, that the romantic cowboy of the historic past is being able to ride and herd and rope and, you know, deal with wild cattle, you know, they could preserve those skills by preserving wild bison. So that in reality, there should be sort of a counter campaign to say, well, you can preserve the cowboy by preserving wild bison and then you have preserved the skills that, you know, are the more high end cowboys than the cowboys that ride four wheelers to manage their cattle herds.
1:46:29 Steven Rinella? Chris, can you find what episode number? We had the, we had a guest, Sean Garrity, who runs American Prairie Reserve.
1:46:36 Speaker 07 Oh, yes.
1:46:37 Steven Rinella? He's the CEO. Yeah, he was on the podcast. Also, if you can find the Matt Kaufman stuff about migrations.
1:46:43 Speaker 05 I was on a flight yesterday coming in.
1:46:46 Speaker 06 Episode 148, titled The American Prairie Reserve. That's one with Sean Garrity. Uh, number 148. What was the other one?
1:46:55 Speaker 05 Matt Kaufman.
1:46:55 Steven Rinella? Matt Kaufman. We had Kaufman and Kevin Monteith. We recorded it down in Lander.
1:47:02 Speaker 06 Um, Landscape of Fear.
1:47:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, Landscape of Fear. So, American Prairie Reserve, Landscape of Fear gets into a lot of these same issues, but Cal, I'm sorry.
1:47:10 Speaker 05 Oh, I was just, uh, my flight yesterday was full of cowboys. Full of cowboys.
1:47:14 Steven Rinella? You're talking about the hats?
1:47:15 Speaker 05 Oh, man. Little kids with hats, people in tracksuits with hats. All, all converging on the cowboy capital of the world, Big Sky, Montana.
1:47:25 Speaker 04 We're not running out of cowboys and Bozeman.
1:47:27 Steven Rinella? Stolen valor.
1:47:28 Speaker 05 Man, I was impressed.
1:47:30 Speaker 07 That's right.
1:47:30 Steven Rinella? Um, uh, I had some thought about the, oh, what I was gonna say about the, and, and the American Prairie Reserve is not without its own controversies.
1:47:41 Speaker 07 That's right.
1:47:42 Steven Rinella? As, uh, I, I recommend that people listen to the episode. Um, there's so much going on there. It's a whole other conversation, but at one hand, it's, you know, it's an organization that buys land on the open market.
1:47:55 Speaker 07 Yep.
1:47:56 Steven Rinella? And what they choose to do with the land they buy on the open market is try to restore.
1:48:01 Steven Rinella? The Great Plains try to restore bison. Okay, so there's like, there's that end of it. There's another end of it, um, of people looking at a real threat of reduced area to hunt on. Because a fear that the APR's ultimate objective is to create a national park, which would, um, you know, eliminate a lot of hunting opportunities. It's a, it's a really rich subject. But Garrity had an interesting point is, um, you know, they're talking about having like three or four thousand buffalo. And, um, and he was talking about the friction between the APR and the cattle industry in Montana.
1:48:37 Speaker 07 Right.
1:48:37 Steven Rinella? And he was putting it in numbers. He said, um, there are two million cows in Montana.
1:48:45 Speaker 07 Wow.
1:48:45 Steven Rinella? I'm talking about 3,000 buffalo.
1:48:49 Speaker 07 You know, there's a couple, there's a couple.
1:48:51 Steven Rinella? It's just, this has gotten really lopsided.
1:48:54 Speaker 07 Absolutely, absolutely. There's a couple of things that I really like about APR that have some applicability to the Greater Yellowstone area. And one of them is that they've, they've developed a sort of a subsidiary connection to a cattle raising paradigm. Where they're, they're generating money to pay ranchers to be more tolerant of wildlife on their lands. And potentially pay them more for the cost of each pound of beef that they raise. So that, you know, the conscious American citizen that really wants to preserve wildlife
1:49:36 Speaker 07 and doesn't buy guns and doesn't buy ammunition and doesn't contribute to conservation dollars anywhere else. Could contribute to conservation dollars by buying beef from those farmers and ranchers that are wildlife friendly.
1:49:51 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:49:52 Speaker 07 And if there was someone willing to develop a franchise around here, I bet there's enough.
1:50:00 Speaker 07 You know, committed conservationists that would do the same thing and buy products from a company that's paying farmers and ranchers to live in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and learn to build bigger fences, you know, build a way that during the infection period of Bruce Llosis, they move all their cattle to the high fence area and then preserve, you know, a place for wild animals to move across, you know, 25 or 30% of their property that the cattle don't go to during that sort of critical time period.
1:50:35 Steven Rinella? Well.
1:50:36 Speaker 07 For infection spread. And the other thing about American Prairie is by turning it into some sort of national park, they could generate the kind of rules and regulations. See, national parks are enabled by Congress and each are unique in their, you know, commitment to what they do for the landscape where they're at. And like Grand Teton National Park, when they established that national park, and there's a handful of them around the system, they preserved hunting in a proportion, a proportion of the national park. And American Prairie could do the same thing.
1:51:12 Steven Rinella? I don't think they will.
1:51:13 Speaker 07 You don't think they will?
1:51:14 Steven Rinella? No.
1:51:15 Speaker 07 Interesting.
1:51:15 Steven Rinella? No.
1:51:16 Speaker 07 Very interesting.
1:51:17 Steven Rinella? I think that they have a somewhat of a begrudging relationship with it. That's a personal opinion.
1:51:23 Speaker 07 Okay.
1:51:24 Steven Rinella? I think they have a begrudging relationship.
1:51:25 Speaker 07 All right.
1:51:25 Speaker 05 I, I, my, we kind of touched a little bit on like the societal tolerance of, of the hunting and, and being up there and kind of watching the, the gardener scene when it was really going off, right?
1:51:39 Speaker 07 Right.
1:51:40 Speaker 05 There's buffalo crap all over the high school football field.
1:51:44 Speaker 07 Yeah.
1:51:44 Speaker 05 You know, I was just like, well.
1:51:51 Speaker 05 Why not allow a certain amount of tribal hunting within the park boundary? Expand the hunt that way to, you know, a very specific group of people that have the longest relationship with it. They're already, you know, highly regulated. Each tribe, each hunting group has their own game warden with them.
1:52:16 Steven Rinella? Yeah. I was talking about this with my kid the other day and I was saying to him, and I'm not sure on the, I'm not sure on all the treaty regulations, but I don't know that a lot of the people that signed under the Stevens Treaty, that those tribes wouldn't even be able to make the claim that they could hunt the park if they wanted to.
1:52:34 Speaker 05 It came too late for the treaty or just?
1:52:36 Steven Rinella? I'm saying that people that were under that treaty, there's language in that treaty that I think there's an argument that tribes could make an argument that, that I have every right to hunt the park.
1:52:45 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. Yeah. And but then there's a handful that would not, under the same language, right? Because they weren't historically in that specific area.
1:52:56 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think that the, the thing that prohibits them from going into the national park is that their treaties have a language and I don't remember it specifically, but it has something to do with claimed versus unclaimed.
1:53:10 Steven Rinella? Open and unclaimed.
1:53:11 Speaker 07 And unclaimed, yeah.
1:53:12 Steven Rinella? Which there's not, which if you, which there's nothing now that's open and unclaimed. So there's a, there's like, what does that exactly mean?
1:53:20 Speaker 05 And we've determined that it's federally managed land, not state land, not Montana state land specifically.
1:53:28 Steven Rinella? And somehow not the park.
1:53:29 Speaker 05 And somehow not.
1:53:30 Steven Rinella? But it's the national forest.
1:53:32 Speaker 07 I think they've determined that the national forest fits that category.
1:53:36 Steven Rinella? I know, and I would argue, based on no evidence, so does the park.
1:53:41 Speaker 07 Well, it's claimed by Congress as a pleasure and ground for humans. You know, if you look at the enabling legislation of national parks.
1:53:51 Steven Rinella? And it was designated, what year, 77 or something like that?
1:53:53 Speaker 07 No, 1872.
1:53:56 Steven Rinella? Was it 72?
1:53:57 Speaker 07 Yeah. So, yeah, you know, I think that-
1:54:01 Steven Rinella? You don't like that idea?
1:54:02 Speaker 07 I don't like that idea.
1:54:03 Steven Rinella? I can tell.
1:54:04 Speaker 07 I don't like that idea. Because the issue really is, if we did it in the Boundarylands area, there are some concessions that I think you could figure out how to do it. But what my argument is, if you do it in the national park without, you know, qualifying it, then what's to say it's not justified in Lamar Valley or in Hayden Valley? And I think that hunting disrupts sort of this natural ecology of the system, that it could create chaos, you know? And if you went there to hunt, then they might just scatter to the wind.
1:54:46 Steven Rinella? I'm only bringing that subject up, and it's like, to me, it's a legal question.
1:54:52 Speaker 07 Right.
1:54:53 Steven Rinella? And I'm not advocating one way or the other, I'm just saying it's an interesting legal question that at some point in time in the future, a tribe wouldn't say, "We're gonna go exercise what we understand to be our treaty rights."
1:55:07 Speaker 07 Right.
1:55:08 Steven Rinella? "We're gonna go exercise them, and if you'd like to arrest us, this is where we'll be on Monday."
1:55:11 Speaker 07 Yeah, the Crow Nation probably has the, you know, most opportunity to be successful.
1:55:17 Steven Rinella? And then they would be in the situation of like, "Are we really gonna go arrest a bunch of Crow?"
1:55:22 Speaker 07 Right.
1:55:23 Steven Rinella? For hunting.
1:55:24 Speaker 07 Right, well, they've been known to push other, you know, tribal treaty rights kinds of issues, so.
1:55:29 Speaker 05 I think it'd be a heck of an educational program within the park.
1:55:32 Steven Rinella? I'd go down there just to watch. It'd be like when people used to go to watch the Civil War battles, like, you'd watch on the sidelines, I'd go down there to watch.
1:55:40 Speaker 07 Well, the Gardner Basin was an extension, so it's not actually part of the original national park. And I want to say- Um, the original national park boundary was, gosh, really close to the, where the arch is.
1:55:55 Steven Rinella? Gardner. Got it.
1:55:56 Speaker 07 And at some point in time, there was this program to, um, pay farmers market value for their land because they weren't very productive.
1:56:07 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:56:07 Speaker 07 And I don't remember, I think it was in the 1920s or 1930s or something like that.
1:56:12 Steven Rinella? Again, I, yeah, I, I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating is for this, because, uh, we're running out of time. Um,
1:56:21 Steven Rinella? uh, I, I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find, um, I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find a way to have, uh, buffalo on our, our federally managed public lands.
1:56:36 Speaker 07 Public lands.
1:56:36 Steven Rinella? I don't think it should cost the ranchers money.
1:56:38 Speaker 07 I agree. I agree.
1:56:40 Steven Rinella? Like, I don't think it should cost them money. I don't think it should cost them business. I think that we should find a way to do it.
1:56:46 Speaker 07 I agree.
1:56:46 Steven Rinella? And it's like, I, I, I just cannot accept that there's not a way to sort this out.
1:56:51 Speaker 07 I think there is, um, but.
1:56:53 Steven Rinella? And the money will follow. And I think that sportsmen, like, I, I think that sportsmen need to, the same way sportsmen demanded rea- bringing back bighorn sheep, the same way sportsmen demanded and funded bringing back elk, in some cases, black bears, I mean, all around the country.
1:57:08 Speaker 07 Absolutely.
1:57:08 Steven Rinella? Sportsmen demanded it.
1:57:10 Speaker 07 Yep.
1:57:10 Steven Rinella? Paid for it, worked for it. I just don't see why hunters are not saying, let's take a look at this and let's make it be that it doesn't, it, it doesn't need to cripple the livestock industry. There, I mean, there has to be a way. But I don't know what it is.
1:57:23 Speaker 07 I, I think we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and, and to give them a directive that you have to find a solution. You can't argue, you know, your, your heartfelt perspective.
1:57:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:57:39 Speaker 07 So.
1:57:42 Speaker 07 I agree completely, and um, I don't think it needs to go all the way to Interstate 90, even if that designated Bruce Losa's zone does. Because then the level of difficulty is dramatically greater.
1:57:57 Steven Rinella? And maybe the, maybe the park, maybe the yellow sonary is not the place to do it.
1:58:03 Speaker 07 That's a possibility.
1:58:04 Steven Rinella? Maybe the place to do it is um, the uh, somewhere in the break, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
1:58:11 Speaker 07 I think American Prairie.
1:58:12 Steven Rinella? My word, maybe it's somewhere to do it in the breaks, like, but the American Prairie Reserve thing doesn't scratch my itch. That's a private, it's a private enterprise.
1:58:21 Speaker 07 It is a private enterprise, right now.
1:58:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:58:23 Speaker 07 But yeah, as far as like. Long-term vision for something different.
1:58:27 Speaker 05 Landscapes, right, it's like if we're talking about federally managed lands, then we're talking about either voluntary or um, some sort of large incentive program to buy out grazing leases.
1:58:37 Speaker 07 Right.
1:58:37 Speaker 05 That are active. And um, and then the other thing is like landscape fragmentation. Like there's just so many obstacles around the federally managed lands that we have here in, in western Montana, which with guarantee, if you talk to all the people uh, that were coming off the plane yesterday, is like the wild west. Like there's, it's wide open out here, right? And it's just not, right? So if we're gonna do it, we gotta do it fast.
1:59:06 Steven Rinella? Alaska now has five, Alaska now has, I think, five herds.
1:59:13 Speaker 07 Oh, uh huh.
1:59:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they got the copper herd.
1:59:16 Speaker 07 Yep.
1:59:16 Steven Rinella? The farewell burn herd, the delta junction herd, the Yukon flats herd.
1:59:23 Speaker 07 And at least one or two of them are the actual northern buffalo.
1:59:26 Steven Rinella? One.
1:59:27 Speaker 07 One, okay.
1:59:28 Speaker 06 Is hunting allowed?
1:59:30 Steven Rinella? Oh yeah.
1:59:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, okay.
1:59:31 Steven Rinella? You can't hunt the, you can't hunt the wood buffalo one that they just got going, but the intention is to, the intention is that you will be able to, and that's how they got local buy-in with native Alaskans. But all their herds, their source herd was uh, their source herd was National Bison Range in Montana.
1:59:49 Speaker 06 Okay.
1:59:51 Steven Rinella? And they turned them, they brought a bunch to Delta Junction and let them trickle out here and there. And now they have these four, I think it's four, they have four managed hunts. And then they have a wood buffalo population and whether or not wood buffalo are actually different is this whole conversation for geneticists to argue about. But uh, they have this other herd they're establishing there that has the potential to be, that has the potential to be three, four thousand animals.
2:00:13 Speaker 06 Oh, wow.
2:00:15 Steven Rinella? And, and again, why is that possible? It's possible like, you know, there's, I don't want to insult anyone that has livestock in Alaska. There's effectively not a livestock industry in much of Alaska. Uh, they run them as managed hunts. People are very enthusiastic, like every, you know, at draw time, everybody fills out their thing to win a chance to hunt. Um, I've done it. My, my, my brother Danny, just through his social circle has gone like six or seven times. On bison hunts, not just him holding the tag, but buddies of his holding the tag. It's just a part of.
2:00:48 Speaker 07 Yes.
2:00:48 Steven Rinella? It was brought in as like, they're here, they're not necessarily from here. They don't have, they don't have an adversary. They don't have a human adversary.
2:00:56 Speaker 07 That's right.
2:00:57 Steven Rinella? And they have a lot of public buy-in because the hunts are cool.
2:01:00 Speaker 06 Has anyone at this table got harvested a bison other than you? Cause I know Randall's wife Sydney has a, we're gonna.
2:01:07 Speaker 04 We're gonna go up to the. We're gonna go up to the APR in January and.
2:01:11 Speaker 06 Very cool.
2:01:12 Speaker 04 My wife's got a management tag for that herd.
2:01:15 Speaker 06 And then Seth, you've had it. I drew Gardner and West Yellowstone. But you haven't harvested.
2:01:20 Steven Rinella? You know what it takes.
2:01:21 Speaker 06 And then Chili's got this. Didn't have the snow. Wait Chili, which one do you have? Do you have Gardner or West Yellowstone?
2:01:27 Speaker 04 I have Gardner, yeah.
2:01:28 Speaker 07 You've got Gardner right now, this winter?
2:01:30 Speaker 04 This winter.
2:01:31 Speaker 07 All right, let's talk.
2:01:32 Speaker 04 All right, yeah, I was gonna. That's why I've been pretty quiet because I was like, I've already met one guy.
2:01:38 Steven Rinella? Don't show them, don't show them your secret spot.
2:01:40 Speaker 04 Oh, my God.
2:01:42 Speaker 06 Wait, we should all go along.
2:01:43 Steven Rinella? Should be like, can I get in here from the other direction?
2:01:46 Speaker 04 No, I've been really quiet because I'm like, ah, there's so much I want to know, just like, because you're very familiar with the area and I'm not. But I also, I've met a guy in Bozeman that's like, yeah, I got the same tag and I don't want to put it on podcasts, so.
2:02:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Chili's a veteran too, so give him good special treatment.
2:02:03 Speaker 07 Oh, I'm a veteran too, so we're going to get along famously.
2:02:06 Speaker 04 Perfect. What branch?
2:02:08 Speaker 07 US Army. I'm an artilleryman, so.
2:02:10 Speaker 04 Okay.
2:02:11 Steven Rinella? You guys can have that little Army's shirt.
2:02:14 Speaker 07 Connection stuff.
2:02:15 Speaker 04 Oh, Marine Corps.
2:02:16 Steven Rinella? Marine Corps shirt.
2:02:17 Speaker 07 I raised a Marine, so.
2:02:18 Speaker 04 Seth and I talk about cowardice a lot. Our shared connection.
2:02:25 Speaker 07 You know, this is the brother.
2:02:27 Steven Rinella? You didn't commit to defend your country either.
2:02:30 Speaker 04 We call you guys, uh, War Dodgers. And in the end, so.
2:02:33 Speaker 07 Well, harvesting a wild bison or harvesting any kind of bison gives you the opportunity to teach the next generation a lot of lessons.
2:02:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:02:42 Speaker 07 A lot of lessons. So, I mean, I took my son out to the Green Ranch out on the Madison to harvest a buffalo 20 years ago.
2:02:50 Speaker 04 Hmm.
2:02:50 Speaker 07 We had a grand time. Took us a long time.
2:02:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's why I'm super excited about this hunt because like, I grew up in South Dakota and there's a lot of buffalo history there too.
2:02:59 Speaker 07 Yep.
2:02:59 Speaker 04 And my dad never did it, but he always talked about like buffalo hunts and old timers that he knew going on them. And so I think this is probably the closest thing I'd ever get to doing something like that, you know, and so that's why I'm kind of excited to do
2:03:14 Speaker 07 it. I, I don't discredit places like the Custer State Park because, you know, it's, it's sort of canned, but again, it provides the, it's a large enough landscape that it provides the opportunity to experience what our ancestors could have experienced.
2:03:37 Speaker 04 I, when Sydney drew her tag, I texted Dan Flores and I just told him, you know, we're going to be buffalo hunting in January and his response was like, that's fantastic, Randall. I can't think of a more, a single more historical act that you could do on the Great Plains.
2:03:57 Speaker 07 Yep, that's right.
2:03:59 Speaker 04 That was like a really funny way of putting it. I mean, it's hard to argue with it.
2:04:03 Speaker 07 Yep, yep.
2:04:05 Steven Rinella? Rick Wallen, thanks for joining, man. Appreciate it. All your insights.
2:04:09 Speaker 07 I admire all you guys. Keep up the good work and thanks for the invite.
2:04:12 Steven Rinella? Yep, thank you.
2:04:13 Speaker 07 Thank you.
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