Ep. 742: Alpha-Gal, Timber Management, and Oozing Velvet Bucks | MeatEater Radio Live!

Hosts Clay Newcomb, Brent Reaves, and Tony Peterson go over their time in Bozeman, chat with biologist Ronnie Cowan about living with Alpha Gal Syndrome, share some photos for Throwback Thursday, talk with the director of the Public Timber Project, Ich Stewart, and hold another Moultrie trail cam photo contest. Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

  Anywhere worth going this holiday season is better in comfortable boots. You can find the perfect pair for you or them if you're shopping for someone at Tacovus. My Tacovus are so comfortable, it's a problem because my high schooler is always trying to steal them. I love the feel of quality leather boots because then you know you're ready for anything. And Tacovus delivers that feeling with confidence and quality. I love them. And if you go to Tacovus store, prepare to be wowed by the customer service. Tacovus boots are handcrafted with over 200 meticulous steps for broken-in comfort right out of the box for the whole family. It's time to bring on the holiday cheer in classic fits and comfortable styles with a new pair of Tacovus Western Boots.

• 0:50Steven Rinella?

  From cowhide and goat to exotic leathers like ostrich and caiman, whether it's your first pair or your 50th pair, Tacovus has your new favorites. Right now, get 10% off at tacovus.com/meateater when you sign up for email and text. That's 10% off at T E C O V A S dot com slash meat eater. Tacovus.com slash meat eater. See site for details. Tacovus, point your toes west. Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Black Buffalo products are intended for adults aged 21 and older who are consumers of nicotine or tobacco.

• 1:29Steven Rinella?

  Black Buffalo spent 20,000 hours working alongside American farmers to build a tobacco alternative that actually dips like the real thing. Long cut ampouges made from barn cured leafy greens with no tobacco leaf or stem and wintergreen mint straight and more. Check your local gas station or C store or hit blackbuffalo.com and use code MEAT for 30% off your first order. Black Buffalo Tobacco Alternative is everything you love about dip, nothing you don't. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household,

• 2:13Steven Rinella?

  if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault. Doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 2:47Steven Rinella?

  Smell us now lady. Welcome to Meat Eater Trivia. Meat Eater Podcast.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Welcome everybody to Meat Eater.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Radio.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Live. Welcome to Meat Eater Radio Live. I'm your host today, Clay Newcomb, straight out of Arkansas. And I'm pretty sure this will, this will rank up there with the top Meat Eater Radio Lives maybe of all time because of my co-hosts Brett Reeves and Tony Peterson. Great to see you, boys. What's going on Brett?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  It's great to be here, man.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Are you happy to be here?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Why are you here?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Why am I here?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Because our boss told us to come here.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Right. So we're in Bozeman this week and Tony's in Bozeman. We're, we're like that, we're a little bit of the, of the, what do you call it? When, you know, we're like the extensions of Meat Eater that live out in the real world out there.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. We live in Fort Arkansas. You live in?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  We are definitely a touch point to real people where we live and what we do.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Tell us, where do you live, Tony?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  I live in just central Minnesota.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Central Minnesota.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Far cry from Bozeman.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Did you know that bears in Minnesota have the largest, in the expanding?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  ranges between the eastern deciduous forests and the, and the, and the great plains. Minnesota black bears have the largest documented home ranges of any bears in North America. Black bears.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Uh, I didn't know that, but I believe that.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  There's some, there's some boars that have 400 square mile home ranges.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Holy cow.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  I'll, I'll tell you what, I live, I live in the suburbs, just north of the cities. When everybody started getting Ring cameras and all these next door Facebook things, pages and stuff like that. The amount of awareness of black bears, just general population stuff went through the roof. Crazy. They're everywhere.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Crazy. Well, I'm going to give you a chance in just a second to introduce yourself, Brent. But on today's show, we are in Montana and we're going to interview a Tennessee wildlife biologist who's been diagnosed with alpha gout. Which is a major deal, really interesting tick-borne illness. And we're going to take you way back to a throwback Thursday, one of the Meat Eater Live favorites. We've got some great photos from Tony, Brent and I that have never been shown before, never will be shown again. Will be deleted off the internet after this. These are these kinds of photos, folks. We're going to show those. Then we're going to go back to talk with the director of the Public Timber Project, H Stewart.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And finally, we're going to wrap up with a Moultrie trail camera contest, velvet contest and.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Also, we'll be talking to Ronnie Cohen, who is a.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tennessee wildlife biologist.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Oh, is that, you, you did that?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I said that like about 10 seconds.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Oh, that's an echo. I wasn't listening.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, so that's going to be great. And then we're going to go back and, and get some listener questions. So we really appreciate everybody signing on and we're going to, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna talk to everybody online. It's really cool to have everybody there. So Brent Reeves.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Sir.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Man, what have you been doing? What's, what are you excited about?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  I'm excited. I'm getting ready for a big hunt in northern, uh, Canada, in Manitoba in September. Just finished a project.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Uh, just about a month ago in Kansas on some decoy decoy dog stuff with coyotes.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Now I'm getting ready to go on this this moose hunt, absolute dream hunt for me. Uh, archery moose hunt, but I'm I may I may take a have a rifle and backup. We get to the ninth inning and we ain't got any meat in the in the freezer because I'm counting on. I had a piece of of of moose steak that that you cooked uh from one of the ones that you killed and it's fabulous. So the ultimate goal is to fill the freezer. Second goal will be to do it with archery.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Tony, I'll tell you what I told Brent and I I don't I really don't want to influence him in in any unnatural way. But I've decided on the big, big hunts in wild country that I've never been in that are kind of like these once in a lifetime, once in three decade type trips to take a bow, which a bow is what I've gravitated towards since I was a kid. That's what I typically want to do is bow hunt. And I have taken a bow on some of those trips and I find that rather enjoying this wild country that I'm in for ten days of my life. I'm thinking about the limiting factor of that hunt, which is trying to get within forty yards of that animal and kill it with a bow rather than enjoying being there.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  So I the older I get, the more I'm kind of like less interested in the weapon on a hunt like that. Now, if I'm hunting somewhere else, I might be like, I'm taking a bow. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Uh, I absolutely understand what you're saying.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  It's just different strokes, man. Like I I wouldn't, people ask me about moose hunting all the time. I wouldn't moose hunt with anything other than a bow. Just like for me personally, that's what I'd want to do, but I get, I absolutely get why you would do where you would have that backup rifle with you and to your point, Clay. I find myself, even though like I just, I just love bow hunting more than anything. But I find myself more and more where I'm like, I just want to be someplace really special. Like I don't care about going here because I can kill a big one here or whatever. It's like I want to be in those places. Before I get too old. And so, you know, the weapon choice for me is like, it's just kind of set in stone. I don't know why. I'm just, that's just the way I am.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  But the important thing, it's the same thing as you're talking about. Like, I want that experience. I want to be in those places.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  It's a big part of it. I'm just looking forward to it. I'm going with some good folks. Craig McCarthy. North Mountain Adventures and they're, I mean, those folks, I killed a bear with them last year, big old chocolate bear. They're just good folks. They actually came down, went coon hunting with us. Whole family, just good folks, good folks. Where you went with me?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Where you went with me down there, they came down.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Stayed at the camp, yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Hmm. So that's the hunt you're excited about. Tony, what's the, what's the hunt this fall you're excited about?

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Uh, honestly, this is going to be a little crazy, but I picked up permission to, to bear hunt in Minnesota. In this, on this property that's only an hour from my house. So the lightest lift to get there that I've ever had for a bear hunt, you know, for a do it yourself deal. And I'm not going to hunt them, but my daughters, you know, one of my daughters shot one in Wisconsin last year. One of them hunted Wisconsin, didn't get one. And so this is a no quota zone. We won't have big bears, but we should have some to work with. And I'm like weirdly excited about that because both of my daughters are just geeked up to hunt bears, probably because they know. I'm going to pull them out of school the first week of school or first two, you know.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  They're, they're going to get some vacation time early for this, but that, that one is kind of caught me off guard because bears haven't always been my thing. But when my daughters want to hunt them, man, it's fun.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's cool. You always say that. It always surprises me because you're known as the whitetail guy. So I always think you're going to be like, oh, this tag that I got here or there. And like almost every year I talk to you, you tell me something about a bear. And I'm like, I mean. I want to hear some comments. Do you think Tony's feeding me what I want to hear? Is he feeding Clay Newcomb what Clay Newcomb wants to hear? Or is he being honest with the world? I want to hear your comments there. How authentic that was. I, I think he's telling the truth.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, when you do what we do for a job? And like, I love the whitetail hunts. I have a, I'm going to go try to decoy one in, in late October in western North Dakota, which is a place I just love to hunt.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  And so I'm excited about that, but we sort of take whitetail hunts for granted because we do a lot of them. And that's just like such an omnipresent part of your life. So anything that I can deviate.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  That's just different.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Right. If I can deviate outside of it, and I just, I feel like I learn a lot when I bear hunt because I'm not very good at it. Same thing with duck hunting. When I go duck hunting, I'm like, I'm not very good at this. And I just enjoy it because I'm figuring stuff out. Absolutely.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  The novelty of it. Yeah. So I was with Brent and Tony all week. We're here at the, uh, at the, the meat eater go to market. Meeting for the, for the year. So we've been seeing all the new first light products that are coming out, FHF gear products. Um, Dave Smith decoy stuff, Phelps stuff. We've been seeing all that. And I heard Brent the other day casually talking to Tony, who he's known for like a very long time. And Brent was like, hey, how's Wisconsin? And Tony's like, I don't know. I don't live in Wisconsin, but Minnesota's great.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  It's not even close.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Not even close.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  That's pretty much what happened.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Well, you got the state mixed up. Okay. People do this with, with us in the South. They're like, yeah, you're from Mississippi, right? And I'm like, no, I'm not from Mississippi. And I'm like Arkansas. And they go, oh yeah. I mean, it's kind of the same. How many of you online do that between the Great Lakes states? And the southern states? Like if you just kind of get it right, that Tony's from somewhere up there, it's okay. And you know, how many, like which one do you get more confused with? Cause I probably would have done the same thing, Tony. They're kind of all the same.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  So I'm from Minnesota and we have Steve from Michigan, Mark from Michigan. We have a lot of, a lot of dudes here from Michigan. People think I'm from-

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Okay, it was Michigan and Minnesota.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  But I don't take offense to that. I don't care at all. But I wondered if somebody says, "Oh, you're from Mississippi." Does that like make your blood boil? Or are you like, "Oh, it's an honest mistake."

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Hey, listen, the states like Arkansas and Mississippi, they're at the bottom of the pile for every single thing. Built into our culture is an insecurity complex. I mean, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a sociological thing. We're built with it. That's why we're so passionate about the Razorbacks. It's like the only thing we've got. So if you try to staple me to another state, I'm like, dude, the only thing I've got is this state. That's all I got going for me.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  How, how much do you two think that you've personally elevated Arkansas, just being from there?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  The governor probably has a warrant out for our arrest, probably. I, I don't know. I think we probably, we brought some eyes on Arkansas. We had, matter of fact, we had some, a guy contacted us, sent us an email that because of the stuff that he was listening to on, on very grease in this country life, they were moving to Arkansas.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Oh, don't say that stuff.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  So we, I seen him-

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Arkansas is terrible.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  I sent him an email and said, "Don't do that."

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Terrible place.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  We were lying. Don't come.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Did you ask him if he's heard of Bozeman?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  You should move. Bozeman's a great town. And it is.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  All right. Well, I can't wait to see you guys' photos. It's great.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Is that next?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  No, it's not. But we are going to interview Ronnie Cohen, Cowan. Uh, Ronnie is, I'll let him introduce himself, but Ronnie is in Tennessee. And we're gonna talk with him about what he does, but specifically about Alpha Gal, which is a tick-borne illness, which for years I've always told my kids, I was like, "I'm more afraid of ticks than I am snakes." You know, when I was a kid, it was the snakes that our moms were scared of. Today, it's the ticks. Because-

• 14:24Speaker 00

  With good reason.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  They're, they're way more consequential, really. But if we can get Ronnie up. Hey Ronnie, can you hear us?

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. Can you hear me?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Hey, Ronnie.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Man, look at where you're, tell us where you're standing. What do you got out in front of you there, Ronnie?

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. We're here at our UT Gardens. It's a demonstration garden. We have native plant species, ornamentals. That's very popular and we do a lot of dendrology. A hung tree stands out here. I do a lot of hunter advocacy and hunting skills education. And I'm standing behind Smokey Four here. He is our school mascot. And I have a freezer queen here to my right that we teach shot placement. And we do a little bit of waterfowl stuff too in Tennessee. So I bought some teaching aids.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Oh, man. So the blue tick though is a permanent, is that a permanent statue there?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  We have statues of the, of Smokey all around the campus. This happens to be Smokey Four. We're all the way up to the, to the young teens here. For our official real mascot, the Smokey Dog. I think we're on 12 or 13. We've had several, but he is our official mascot here at the University.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  I love it, man. Every time I see that blue tick come out, I get fired up. If I, if I had a team other than the Razorbacks, it would be the Tennessee Vols. I mean, I just.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  We appreciate that.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  It's true. It's true. I was, I tailgated there last year at one of the big games with Brent.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Yep. It was a lot of fun, dude. In fact, we saw Ronnie there.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right. We met Ronnie, didn't we?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I actually coon hunted with Ronnie and he can't, he and some of his friends came down and hunted with me and Michael at, at the duck camp. And that's, that's when Ronnie told me about contracting alpha gale.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  And it's, it's interesting too because of his job. He's a wildlife biologist and he's with the extension service and they do a lot of educational stuff with kids there in Tennessee. And Ronnie's always out in the field teaching stuff to kids and stuff. And he's having to deal with this alpha gale. And I thought it would be interesting to have Ronnie on here to talk about how, what, how it's changed his life.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. How did you, how long have you had it, Ronnie?

• 16:42Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, what was that Clay?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  How long have you had Alpha Gout?

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've had the Alpha Gout for about two and a half, close to three years now. And I contracted it, what I suspect to be during early archer season, pulled a bunch of ticks off of me. And it's the Lone Star tick that messes you up there down here in the south. And I suspect that it came from that area because I was getting a bunch of ticks on me. But Brent's right, I'm out in the field a lot. I'm an outdoor recreation specialist, so I'm in the woods a lot. And you know, if you recreate the south, you come in contact with ticks all the time.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Was the tick, I've always heard that it's got to be on you for like over eight hours before you can get any kind of infection from the tick. Is that true?

• 17:29Speaker 04

  I'm not sure. That's what I've heard too. I'm not, I don't specialize in ticks or anything. Unfortunately, I just contracted this allergen. But yeah, I have heard that too.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  And you know, I've tried to take care of that and pull them off. But you know, it's real easy to get those ticks that you can't see and they're not always real detectable. So if that is true, that, that makes you feel a little bit better.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Maybe, could you fact check that? What, what is, what's the internet say? I'll look. Yeah, Brent's gonna look at that. Well, tell us, tell us what Alpha Gout is for somebody that might not know and how it's affected you, Ronnie?

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Alpha Gout is an allergen to carbohydrate and the million meat. There's a lot of misinformation out there that I have found because it's such a new thing. Some people call it just a red meat allergen, but actually Alpha Gout is an allergen to all the million meats or anything with fur or gives milk, you can't eat meat from it. So one night I had a really bad reaction. I don't know how to explain it other than having lizard skin, woke up in a cold sweat and couldn't hardly breathe and didn't know what was going on. Took a cold shower. I took some Benadryl and Benadryl puts me to sleep, so I was able to get through that. Knew I needed help, went to the doctor and they got me into an allergist. And by the, by the time I got to see a specialist, I had my second reaction.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  It was very similar, but with some bad stomach issues. Eventually got into the allergist and they were asking questions and. Uh, he, he would say, you know, have you heard of Alpha Gal? And I said, yeah, I'm a wildlife biologist and I do a lot in the outdoors. I've heard of that, but I eat red meat every day and I don't think that's it. And he said, well, we're going to test you anyways. And they did an official blood panel and, uh, at that particular clinic, they said that I had the highest levels of that allergen that they've ever seen. I was living in Florida at the time, coming back up here in Tennessee and recreating. And so that was really kind of life changing for me, being a ball biologist.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  And every meal that I eat had some kind of meat in it. So, uh, it's really life changing and really hard to kind of mold around that. And it changed how I hunted and, and everything after finding that news out.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  How do you eat now, Ronnie? Like you, you can eat, you can eat chicken, birds, fish. Is that the kind of protein you can eat?

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. So poultry, seafood and fish, uh, you know, I eat a lot of, and I tell my wife, if I ever get over this, I'll never eat fried chicken sandwiches again. Cause if you're on the road, that's about the only fast food you have. But luckily, you know, poultry is pretty good. I do like seafood. Uh, but, uh, I, I do miss red meat and pork and I'm just about giving up breakfast because it's hard to have a good breakfast without sausage and, and bacon. So I do a protein bar now and out the door.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Will you ever shed the allergy? Because I've heard of it kind of going up and going down inside of people. Do you think you'll ever shed it?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have heard of people getting over it and the allergists that I have see here in Tennessee. They claim that, uh, you can build a tolerance to it, just like any allergen that sometimes it leaves, but other individuals have it for the rest of their life. It really depends on the person. And I think they need to do some more research on it. But yeah, it can, uh, it can come and go. And, uh, there's, uh, different avenues. There's no medicine for it that I'm aware of. There's some, uh, holistic approaches with acupuncture and things that I've not tried. Some people swear by it, but I've not been told how that affects the allergen to the sugar molecule. But, uh, you know, it was a big deal to me because I'm in the deer woods. I target deer species a lot, uh, in my hunting.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  And, and, uh, when I would harvest the deer, just the raw blood, uh, would bother me, you know?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Wow. So are you deer hunting at all? Are you deer hunting at all now?

• 21:19Speaker 04

  So yeah, I still deer hunt and I deer hunt with friends. And so if I do harvest one and I've got some really good friends when I harvest one, they help me with it. And it, uh, for some reason, the, or the raw blood breaks me out. And alpha galle, what's strange about it affects people differently in their sensitivity. So some folks can't even stand the smell of it. I'm, I don't have that bad of a reaction to it. But the raw blood, once it's been field dressed and, and, and hanged, I can cut the meat, I can work it, I can fabricate it. I was a butcher in college, so we grew up, uh, doing our own meat, our own processing. I can still do that part of it. But getting it out of the woods, uh, the first season after I

• 22:00Speaker 04

  had alpha galle, I harvested a, a nice buck and just, you know, moving the horns, taking pictures, grifting grins, I'd get the blood on, then it would cause a lot of itching and a lot of irritation. And so my friends helped me out. But still, you know, it's, it's had to change the way I hunt. And luckily, my good friends turned me on to birds. And I went on my first duck hunt a couple of years ago in Arkansas, fell in love with it, came back, bought a dog, a shotgun, and a, and a new habit. And so I've kind of changed. I grew up on the side of a mountain here in East Tennessee, so the, so the duck hunt was totally new. And making a long story short, uh, in my job, I get new people into hunting.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  And I grew up hunting as a, as a, as long as I was old enough to tote a firearm. So me having to transition to another, uh, discipline, if you call it, really opened my eyes what it needs to take to learn a new skill. So even that, you know, someone that's very experienced big game hunting, uh, for whitetail deer in Tennessee, transitioning to waterfowl, it was a whole new ballgame. And, uh, my responsibility is getting other folks into it. So it actually, I think, gave me a, a good perspective of how to do so.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hey Ronnie, I got a question. And I did a podcast on, about ticks several episodes ago. And we talked about alpha galle and, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever and, and, and the ones that are predominantly in the U.S. But I had some folks contact me and reach out about acupuncture treatment for alpha galle being a successful treatment. What, what's your experience with that? And have, have you discussed that with anybody there with your physician or anything?

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, yeah, my wife, uh, uh, has, uh, was the first person brought that to my attention. I know people personally have done it and they swear by it and, uh, they really believe it. And, uh, you know, I'm not a doctor. I don't, uh, judge them, but it seems like they help it. I do know that they really think it helps them. Uh, I've looked into further research and there's not a lot out there, but I do know that it goes in and out of remission or can as far as an allergen goes, but just through what I have seen. So I don't know if they're experiencing just, you know, a delayed response or if it's actually working. But my friends that have done it, they go and they get acupuncture. They get a series of needles in their ear

• 24:21Speaker 04

  and they have to walk around for a couple of days with those needles in their ear and come back and take it out. But I don't know how that affects the sugar.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  That sounds as bad as not being able to eat red meat, Ronnie.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  I don't know. I don't know if that's the answer, but I do know those folks truly believe it. And so I'm not going to say it don't work. It's just, I don't know how it works and I haven't done that. So.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Last question here from Tony, Ronnie.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  So Ronnie, I've, I've lived in tick territory my whole life. I'm, I'm just curious, after you got diagnosed with this and it sort of changed the arc of your life and, you know, just your time in the outdoors. Did you kind of not take ticks as seriously before and are you pretty, pretty vigilant about treatments, paying attention? Like how has, how has your preventative, you know, kind of mindset? How has that changed ever since your diagnosis?

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. So I always thought I took ticks seriously, you know? We were, uh, concerned about Rocky Mountain spot fever and, uh, Lyme disease and things like that. And I would use your, your sprays and your deets and really where I hunted at particularly, we worried about tiggers more than we did ticks. Um, we've got a bad batch of them down here too, but I, or I was pretty serious, but since I've caught this, I've been real serious. Cause the allergist says a great way to get over this is to keep the ticks off of you, which is a tall chore, uh, if you're recreating outdoors. So, uh, you know, I have a pretty intensive plan where I dip my clothes in that paratheron or paratheron, however you pronounce it. And then I spray deep and even, you know, this is not. Uh, maybe not the best advice, but you know, even putting around your ankles on bare

• 25:53Speaker 04

  skin, I don't know what they say about that, but it has helped me tremendously and shut a lot of that down where you put it on contact points around your ankles, around your waist. Uh, use the products available out there because I will obviously want to get over this. Um, so I'm trying to take the doctor's orders and try to keep those ticks off of me. But, uh, we also, you know, now that I bird hunt a lot, I take care of my dog too, and make sure that he's got a lot of the tick protection too, because another great way is for them bringing it into your house, bringing it into your kennels and things. So, uh, my hunting companions like my lab, my bird dog, I always take care of that too and try to keep it out of the home. Just real cautious of it because if you're in

• 26:34Speaker 04

  shade, um, you know, you're, uh, you're, uh, you're probably more likely to get it. And the bad thing about that, uh, spotted tick, the lone star tick is from my knowledge, if they sense your carbon dioxide and they actually hunt you, it's not like a deer tick that kind of hangs out and grabs on to you when you walk by it. Those ticks actively crawl and hunt you. So do the best you can in keeping those things off.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Hey man, we're rooting for you and, uh, I think you're gonna kick it, man. Uh, mark my words, two and a half years, you're gonna be good to go.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  I appreciate that, but I'm still, uh, keeping out there recreating and, uh, just making a positive and getting more people in the out, the outdoors. And, uh, if you don't care, I'd like to tell a little bit about what we're doing with hunter advocacy before we go. Just real quickly that, you know, uh, we focused on the positives with hunter advocacy. We talked about that tick protection, but we also try to bring everybody into it for hunter advocacy. Part of my job here at UT is, um, you know, teaching these, uh, new hunters and kids how to get into outdoor recreation. So we talk about those dangers of, uh, of the ticks and the bugs, but we also bring it back into the culture where they have a lot of fun and the importance of conservation.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Thank you for watching me, Ronnie. Awesome work. Thank you, Ronnie. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it, man.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  All right. Man, that's scary stuff. It really is. For real, man. It could change your life. Those dang ticks. I had Ehrlichiosis one time and the best way I describe it to people is it's what it feels like when you die. Yeah. I mean, like, that's the sickest I've ever been was with Ehrlichiosis, which is also a tick-borne illness that's more concentrated over in our part of the world. Yeah. Our dogs get it. We get it.

• 28:16Steven Rinella?

  This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Holiday season is damn near upon us. In my house, we've been talking about Thanksgiving pretty soon. We're going to start talking about Christmas and it could bring on a lot of stress. Also, holidays could bring on a lot of family issues and sometimes when it comes to family issues, it might be smart for you to go and find someone you can talk to about it and to help make sense out of it all. Well, insurance options may now be available nationwide with BetterHelp. With insurance, many members pay $15 or less. Some pay nothing.

• 28:50Steven Rinella?

  BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 10-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, go ahead and switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month.

• 29:30Steven Rinella?

  Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/meateater. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash meat eater.

• 29:40Steven Rinella?

  Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Black Buffalo products are intended for adults aged 21 and older who are consumers of nicotine or tobacco. Now, you know how long it takes to build something that actually holds up? Well, Black Buffalo spent 20,000 hours on it. 20,000 hours, working alongside American farmers, growing and barn-carrying leafy greens to mimic the taste and texture of real dip without the tobacco leaf or stem. That's not a shortcut. That's a commitment. They started this thing in 2015, right here in America, and they got it right.

• 30:24Steven Rinella?

  In wintergreen, mint, and straight. The taste you already know. And long cut and pouches. It dips like the real thing, because they refuse to settle for less. Check out your local gas station or convenience store. Chances are, it's already on a shelf near you, or head to blackbuffalo.com and use code MEAT for 30% off your first order. Black Buffalo Tobacco Alternative. It's everything you love about dip, nothing you don't. Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut.

• 31:05Steven Rinella?

  It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you, and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area, so you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life, so use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Now it's time for listener feedback. I see a lot of listener feedback up here. Phil, what do you have for us? What are some highlight comments, questions directed to the team? What do we got?

• 31:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, get them in now. We'll do this again at the end of the show, but first we have a question from Adam. Clay and Brent, what can you tell us about this year's squirrel cook-off? And will you guys be there?

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Ah, absolutely. We'll be there and it will be bigger and it's like the World's Fair. It gets bigger and better every year.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  September 13th, Springdale, Arkansas. It's a free event. It's the World Championship Squirrel Cook-off. And yeah, Brent and I will be there.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  We'll be there. We wouldn't miss it. It's like Christmas. It's like redneck Christmas.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a really neat event because the highlight of the event is that there'll be 40 teams cooking gourmet squirrel and they feed it to the public. So.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Come hungry, leave full.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yep, it's really great. Yeah, I hope to see you there. What else we got, Phil?

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Uh, Freddie Rick, he asks this question every single week, even if we don't, but since we don't have a meat eater menu segment today, I will ask the crew. Well, first Freddie Rick says, I'm cooking a pronghorn neck right now to make barbacoa. What have the guys been cooking lately with their name?

• 32:51Speaker 00

  I've been cooking fried fish and a lot of it.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Fried fish?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  I love.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Tony?

• 32:56Speaker 03

  I've been, so what I like to do is take my backstraps out whole in the fall and then in the summer grill a whole backstrap for the family. And since we had a bunch of redfish from Louisiana last year, I've been doing surf and turf, even though I can't eat the fish. My wife and kids love it. And so we've been, we've been going pretty simple, but it's so good.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Hmm, hmm.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Can't beat it.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  I've been doing bear smash burgers. I've, I've, I've developed quite a reputation around our house for making some mean black bear smash burgers. And so I've got the patty like hanging out a half inch outside the bun and I cook them on the grill. I don't cook them on like a griddle, like on a fire grill, but press them down real thin. And so been hitting a lot of those this summer. And I'm on my annual watermelon. I try to, for 60 days straight from July and August, full month, often bleeds into September, eat watermelon every single day.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  That's a good, that's a good.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  But I've actually, I just realized in Montana, I haven't done that. But thanks, Freddie. Thanks, Freddie. What else we got, Phil?

• 34:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, Tony, I think we might have gotten something like this the last time you were a part of the show. But Alan, it says, Tony, best advice for getting your daughter into hunting. My daughter is four years old and this will be her first season getting into the woods with me. And I think this, this can extend to Brent and Clay as well, who are also fathers of daughters.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  You know, I would say four years old. One thing that we do with kids a lot that I think we get wrong is we take them the first time, like on a hunt where we're like, we're, we're going to try to be the most successful as possible. Even if your daughter's just observing, because at four, she's probably not going to be shooting anything. But so for my daughters, it was a big deal to go out and set a blind with me, something simple, you know, eat some candy, talk about the deer tracks, just sort of get them involved. So they have that connection to it. When I'm going to take them back there on some nice September evening or something, when the conditions are going to be right, and they're actually going to sit with me. And so it's just like, you know, it's kind of like training a puppy, right? Like you have like a short attention span to get this thing to stick. And you want them, you want to leave them wanting more. So you make it special, right?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  You stop at Dairy Queen, get blizzards on the way home, whatever. But it's always like, this just tight window thing. You get in something cool, do something that's tied to the next thing. Right? Or you walk them into the woods and you're like, we're going to go look for some berries or something. And oh, by the way, here's this little brook trout stream that we're going to come back to next week. And it's just this connection to nature, instead of just this going in and being like, this is how I'm going to kill a deer and you're going to watch it, which, you know, whatever, might work for some kids. But for girls, I think especially like daughters, just that overall connection. And like the recurring, like, we did this, now this, we did this, now this. And I just, and plus, that's just a good excuse to get out there more.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  You know, Bailey's introduction was with, with my coon dog, Waylon. When, when we got Waylon, he was nine or 10 months old. And this was 2020. So Bailey was like in this second grade, first, second grade, I think. And we just, we, we take an evening and we were all learning together and we were just walking and talking. Only coon hunt, when I coon hunted with, when Bailey went with me, only time I ever remember talking about glitter, hair bows, anything along that line, but we made it fun and we just had fun out there. And the best part about it was just being with her, just walking out there and showing her the things that I was interested in.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Speaking of Bailey, I think she might have hijacked your wife's YouTube account. She says, it's your favorite daughter with four Rs. And she says, Mr. Clay, look at my comments.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Hey Bailey.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  They're on, they're on their way to Texas.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Say hi to me.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Hello Bailey. And Alexis B. Reeves.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think getting kids in, Tony's advice was so good, but I, to me, a, a, another point is involve them in the, in the family culture inside of it. Like if it's just this isolated incident, like that you just, their whole life is not connected to nature, then all of a sudden, one day it is. You know, I think the, the, and I had, I had, I'd say I had overall success with my kids and, and the, the goal, which was not to make them hunters, but to make them appreciate hunting and wildlife conservation and wild places. And just, I think with, with my son, who really stuck with hunting and it was that involvement in the culture. Like he saw that his granddad did it and I

• 37:28Speaker 02

  did it and we eat this meat. And this is, this is part of just like what makes our family, kind of who we are in a way, you know? So bring them in, bring them into the culture.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  I want to touch on one more thing about that. Even with four-year-olds, make them do just like a little bit of work so they have a buy-in. Like this, like when you see a lot of parenting these days, we're doing an awful lot of stuff for our kids and like prioritizing their schedules and their lives. But e- even like when my daughters were little like that, if I made them carry a trail camera.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Or some, like do something. So I'm like, honey, you, you gotta lug this into the woods and then when we need it, we'll set it up together. And they, there's just a different level of buy-in for them. Like they feel different about it because they did a little bit of work. So like bear baiting with my daughters when they were young, which horrified my wife, but I'd be like, you're carrying a little bucket, a trail mix and gummies or whatever, and you're going to be a part of this too.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  You know, and I, I think there's just like a, I think there, there's a little bit different impact there.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Phil, do we have one more hot, hot question? Or shall we go?

• 38:31Speaker 05

  We have a ton of hot questions.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Okay, keep them coming. We'll try to move a little faster.

• 38:36Speaker 05

  Sure. Uh, Mitchell says, question for Tony, is it plausible to train my lab GSP mix to both hunt grouse and track deer? I realize the season can overlap, but is there a risk of confusing her?

• 38:46Speaker 03

  That's a great question. Dual purpose dogs used to be, can my dog duck hunt and, or you know, waterfall hunt? Can my dog upland hunt? And then somewhere along the line, guys like Tom Dock and a few other people started training for shed antlers. And so then people would be like, well, if I train my dogs for shed antlers, is it going to run off and forget about the roosters and look for antlers? It's like, that's not how it works. When you, when you look at a long enough timeline with training a dog, we, we way underutilize them. Like a good sporting dog, a good working dog can handle a lot of tasks. So if you, if you take that dog and you train it to, to blood trail, to, which is, or you know, tracking dog essentially, they're not really blood trailing. That dog's not going to get distracted when it's time to go points and grouse.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  It's just not, but it's also an amazing off-season thing you can train for. Cause a lot of bird hunting, you can train for parts of bird hunting, right? Especially, especially if you have a retriever, you know, you're, uh, where you can do a lot of long distance work and marks and all that stuff, but you can't, you can't do the hunt. You know, like you just mostly can't, but with shed antlers, with blood tracking or, or game trailing dogs, you can set that up all off-season long. And people kind of, we look at that and go, well, that's a, that's a really good skill I want my dog to have, right? With my buddies, you know, gut shoot an elk or whatever, I want to be able to bring my dog out there and find it. But it's also as a dog owner, just going to help you level up that relationship.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Cause now you have another reason to work with them and read them and for them to read you. And now you have another way for them to solve problems with you and just level up. Like I, I encourage people to do whatever, whatever they can train their dog, like in this kind of, uh, arena, add on that skillset, work on it. Good, good stuff.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's good. When Brent thinks about a dual purpose dog, he, he thinks about his dog that'll tree coons and possums.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  That's a deep inside coon hunter joke.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Nobody's laughing.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Thing possible that a dog could, a coon dog could do would be.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Nobody's laughing.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  Well, let us know in the chat if you appreciated that joke.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Uh, no, Brett, Brett has a, I can joke with Brett because he's got a top notch walker dog.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Jealous.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Um, hey, I see two questions.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  Oh yeah. I was gonna, we, we have another round of these at the end and I was gonna hit you with a bunch of these. Clay, if you want to tackle any of these now, let's, let's do it.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Well, let's go, let's move on. I'll tell you what, let's move on. Let's come back to some of those. I saw a question about my book, which I would like to respond to. I saw a question about the Bear Grease Hall of Fame.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Which I would like to, I would like to address, but now it's time for Throwback Thursday. Cannot wait.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  Throwback on a Thursday morning. Stephen Brody, take me back to 1974. Throwback, I can't believe it.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  This is Tom Chell.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  This is one of my favorites.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  All right.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Phil Taylor, ladies and gentlemen.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Throwback Thursday. We're gonna, we're gonna put up a photo that Brent Reeves has sent in and Brent's gonna tell us about this picture.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  That right there.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Is my great grandfather, Lovett Reeves. That is on our old home place in Cleveland County. That would be in the mid 50s, right there, when deer.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  That is a cool photo, man.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  When deer were scarce and.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  That could be the cover of a book.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Few and far between. And if you look in the background back there.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  There's that possum tree in water.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  There's a coon dog laying back there.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Now, my grandfather was a, uh, if you see the, uh, the overalls and the pocket watch there, and I would give anything, if I could have one thing out of that photograph. It wouldn't be the antlers and the watch would be number two, but my first item that I would love to have is that hat that he's wearing right there. But he was a farmer and a woodsman and he is the guy that introduced case knives into our family. That's the guy that started it all and that that would be Bailey's uh great great grandfather and there's six generations.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Did you know him?

• 43:04Speaker 00

  No, he died in nineteen uh sixty four, I think, but or maybe sixty three, but just a few years.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  So that's your dad's dad.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  That's my dad's grandfather.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Oh, it's your great grandfather.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  I got it.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Man, that that for real. When I saw that picture, it looks like one of those photos that, you know, you you you got off the internet because it's so cool. You know, but it's like, that's really grand. I I love that photo.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's a great photo. It's a absolute treasure in our family.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  So those those deer horns aren't around?

• 43:36Speaker 00

  No, no idea. Well, I'm sure they went with the rest of that deer that didn't get eaten right then. It wasn't a it wasn't a thing keeping antlers back then. Probably the biggest uh trophy of the deal was absolutely encountering a a deer.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  They were probably using those walkers to run them, weren't they?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  That or I figure that that they were probably squirrel hunting and the deer came through because he he wasn't leaving the house to go deer hunting back then because he's got a squirrel vest on.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  And that's how I assumed that deer got got brought to the table. But I don't know.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  That's cool. That's a cool photo. Yeah, back when when, I mean, the the traditional way to hunt deer in in a lot of places in the country, but specifically the South, was using dogs to run them.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Because there were so few, so few deer. You just had to get them up and moving, you know?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Get them going around.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  And so. A deer and a dog just went together. Today it's not, not as popular. Good job Brent, good photo.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Thank you, buddy.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Good photo. Let's throw Tony's photo up there for Throwback Thursday. Let us know what you think in the comments. Look at that.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  That's two keepers in one photo. So, this fish, you, you guys, do you guys have smallies in Arkansas?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  We do, but they're not this big.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Right. So, Clay, you guys know this, right? Somebody shoots a bear, everybody says they're 300 pounds, you're like, they're 175 pounds, you know, somebody shoots a giant, you're like, maybe, right? But you see a picture of it, you kind of know.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  In the, in the bass world where I live, like, to, to truly break the six pound mark is like, you're just not going to do it very often, even if you fish a lot. Smallies or largemouth, right?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  So that's my little girl, when she was, I think she was six, and we went out to this rock pile at sunrise, and we like to throw top waters, right? And so I had her, she wasn't throwing a bait caster yet, but I had her with a seven foot, you know, medium heavy rod, braided line, so you could, we use a lot of whopper ploppers, you know, streamlined, pretty heavy top water that you can throw a mile.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  And so we pull up to this rock pile, and, uh, you know, she casts out there, casts it far. And that, that whopper plopper hits the water, and she reels like, half a turn, and this fish hits. You know, I just, I heard a blow up. And she set the hook, you know, she's tiny, and that fish came straight up, like they always do, smallmouth. And I saw it come up, and I, in my head, I just go, she will never get this fish in the boat. Like, I didn't, I didn't go for the net, you know, I'm cheering her on, but I'm like, there's no way this fish isn't going to throw this in the amount of time it's going to take her to get it back in. And she leaned into that fish, and fought it, and fought it, and fought it. And finally got it up by the boat, got it to where she could kind of work it around. I had a net with me.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  I netted that fish and you know, I don't, I don't mount fish, right? Like I'm, that's, that stage is kinda gone for a lot of people. And it's the first time, I'll, I'll never forget, I had the impulse, I looked into that net. And I was like, I'm throwing this sucker in the freezer and we're gonna mount it. But, so before I get judged on this. Got it into the boat, measured it, it was, just broke 22 inches, which is a crazy mark. Right? Like, when you actually start measuring big smallies, twenties and twenty ones, they're big fish. Right? But that 22 inch mark, up, up where we live is just no joke, right?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  It's almost two foot long.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Right. And so, we got really nice pictures of it. And I'm like, we gotta let this fish go. You know, and she didn't, you know, she wasn't like, we gotta keep it and stuff, or whatever, like, that's not her thing. But it was like, one of those things, when she let it go, I'm like, you, you have no idea.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  How many have you caught that big?

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I have caught, uh, two for sure. In my life, that broke, I, I caught one that was 22 and I caught one that was 23. Uh, with 10 billion hours of effort. Right? You know, I wasn't in first grade, right? And so that was just one of those things where I was like, this is just such a beautiful fish. And you know, when you look at the studies of how, how old a fish that, that could be, where we live.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Couple hours south of there, they did a pretty good study on Smoloff a long time ago. And, uh, to get to 14 inches, which on the river where that fish, or where they were studying those fish, was a keeper, the slot, whatever. Uh, it was seven, I think it was seven years old.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Seven years.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  And so you think about a fish that's a couple hours north, short growing season, hitting 22 inches, you know, I mean, you're like, that fish might've been out there for 15 years. I don't, I don't know.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Um, but a long time. And I just think that's cool as hell.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that is really cool. Now, can't, could you have gotten a replica made of that fish?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  We could've, you know, I mean, it's like,

• 48:25Speaker 02

  You're just not into that.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Right, when you get, when you get really, we, we catch a lot of big fish and we had really nice pictures of it. It was just this cool moment.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, maybe I should have measured the girth and done the whole thing. I did, I just didn't.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, in the south, we have, uh, or at least in where I'm from, we have, we have smallmouth in creeks and rivers, not as much in the lakes.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Like people, large mouth bass fish in the lakes, but you would go to the creeks and rivers in the mountains to catch smallmouth and they, you know, a big one, I don't really know length, Bear would know length pretty good, but, uh, you know, like a two or three pounder would be a nice creek fish.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  You know?

• 49:05Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, I'm, I'm sure down where you live, that's connected to water temperature and rocks.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  If you don't have rocks, you know, like boulders, you just don't have a lot of smallies.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Cool. Great photo. Great photo. All right, let's go to my, this is the final photo in our Thursday, Throwback Thursday. All right.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Which is which?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Here is a picture. In the, in the front of the four wheeler, there is my youngest son, Shepard Newcomb, crying, wearing his cowboy boots. That's Bear John Newcomb in the middle there, who, uh, who I think a lot of people know Bear. And, uh, if you'll notice, that is a live coyote tied to the back of the, uh, of the four wheeler. And that day, it was in late summer and we'd gone to this place that we were going to deer hunt from some private land and it took the boys and we'd hung a stand and it was, it was a funny moment

• 50:08Speaker 02

  because I, uh, I literally remember like wanting to make the trip fun for the boys. And I told them, I said, y'all stay here at this four wheeler. I'll be back. And I really didn't know what I was looking for. But I, I knew I was gonna find something and bring it back to him. I, I'm not kidding. I, and I took off and they're little guys and they're throwing rocks and wrestling there around the four wheeler on a little road. And I go off in the woods and I don't walk fifty yards and I see a litter of coyote pups get up in front of me and flush like a covey of quail. And they take off running and I take off running after them.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  And basically it was like a cheetah chasing a herd of gazelle, you know, one would split off to the right and I'd stick with the two. And then one split off to the left and I just picked the one and I could run as fast as that coyote pup. But I couldn't catch it. And, and it, and it took a turn and started going down this real rocky drainage. And I remember it just like it was yesterday. I'm running so fast, it's as fast as I can run downhill, running on this boulder patch. And I start to feel my chest and head lean out in front of my face. And I, and I know I'm toast. Yeah. And I just say, I just, just go straight down, just fly through the air, land on the rocks.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Figure I'm all busted up. And also Tony figured that the coyote has gotten away, cause he was like eight feet in front of me, both of us running full speed. I bite the dust. And when I stand up, I see him. I saw him duck into a little hole. Like he, he gave up the chase immediately when I bit the dust. And so I jump up and he's under this rock. And I flip over the rock, thinking mama coyote might be in there. I didn't know. Right. And there's that pup curled up on the ground. I reach and just grab him by the nape of the neck.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Grab him up like this and he just goes limp and I walk back to Baron Shepherd and boys, I'm telling you, I was the hero dad of the year. When I walked back up and I had that coyote pup by the nape of the neck and said, boys, look what I caught. And I had a little rope and tied him to the, to the, to the, to the back of the vehicle there. And I took him home and we kept him for about a week. And I also, at that time, it was legal in Arkansas to have deer. And we, we were raising the deer at that time too. And I kept the deer and the coyote in the same little kennel. And then the coyote, is everybody interested? I hope the story's not going too long. The coyote started, I thought, well, I'm gonna raise this coyote.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  We're gonna have a pet coyote. And it started getting mean and biting me. And so I knew I had to get rid of it. But I, it, it, and this, this is truth. I was worried about the legal ramifications of killing a coyote out of season. I mean, it was on a deer hunting property. Like, we're trying to get rid of coyotes. So you'd have thought I might've just exterminated the coyote. Uh, but I actually took it out into another place and turned it loose. Why didn't you take it back where you caught it? Cause it's where I deer hunt, Tony.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  He put it on my lease. So that's the story of the coyote. Wile, we called him Wiley. Very original. Very original. All right, all right. What a success. Throwback Thursday. Uh, great photos, guys.

• 53:47Steven Rinella?

  Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Black Buffalo products are intended for adults aged 21 and older who are consumers of nicotine or tobacco. Now, you know how long it takes to build something that actually holds up? Well, Black Buffalo spent 20,000 hours on it. 20,000 hours, working alongside American farmers, growing and barn curing leafy greens to mimic the taste and texture of real dip without the tobacco leaf or stem. That's not a shortcut. That's a commitment. They started this thing in 2015, right here in America, and they got it right.

• 54:30Steven Rinella?

  In wintergreen, mint, and straight. The taste you already know. And long cut and pouches. It dips like the real thing because they refuse to settle for less. Check out your local gas station or convenience store. Chances are it's already on a shelf near you. Or head to blackbuffalo.com and use code MEAT for 30% off your first order. Black Buffalo Tobacco Alternative. It's everything you love about dip. Nothing you don't. There are a few days every year when big bucks are most likely to get gotten. And knowing that exact time stacks the odds in your favor when you're

• 55:11Steven Rinella?

  targeting a big buck. OnX Hunt's Whitetail Insights tells you what phase of the rut you're in and what tactics actually work for that phase, while the deer movement forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet. Together, they tell you when to be in the tree and when to go to your kid's game instead. Get the most out of every sit with OnX Hunt. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's

• 55:56Steven Rinella?

  the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  We're now going to go on to interview number two. We're going to be interviewing a guy that Brent knows. His name is Eech Stewart from Arkansas. Brent, I'm going to let you take it over.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  My buddy Eech, he is the director of the Public Timber Project there in Arkansas. He's a dedicated lifelong duck hunter, waterfowler, good friend of mine, and I want to get him on here and talk about the stuff that, that he's doing. Eech, can you hear us, buddy?

• 56:46Speaker 07

  I got you. Can y'all hear me?

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I got you, man. Eech, tell us about-

• 56:50Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  You're very welcome. We're pleased that you're here. Tell us about the project you got going, what the name of it is, what your role in it is, and, and what you've, what the plan is for Arkansas.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  Alright, well, thanks for, thanks again. My name's Ed Stewart. I guess on paper, I'm the president of the Public Timber Project. And in reality, I'm just one of the fellows that started it, but one of us had to fall on the grenade and call ourselves the president. We formed ourselves as a form of profit here in Arkansas, so we had to get organized on paper at least at the very beginning. But in reality, the Public Timber Project is a grassroots movement for public land duck hunters all across the country. Of course, our focus was on issues that we were seeing in Arkansas and our public lands. So we're more of a social experiment and a movement than we are a form of profit.

• 57:48Speaker 07

  And at the end of this, I'll ask folks to, if you want to support us, support us by following us, reaching out. We don't really need your money. Right now, the only expenses we have is on ball caps and trash bags. But I'll step back a little bit and talk a little bit about why we started in the first place. And for folks that don't duck hunt in Arkansas and that aren't from the South and aren't aware, you know, in the duck hunting world, hunting ducks and flooded timber is sort of the holy grail of duck hunting. If you haven't seen ducks finish through the canopy of the trees and land at your feet in the woods, man, you ain't lived. And there's only so many places we can do that.

• 58:30Speaker 07

  Arkansas happens to be one of the states that has more public land available for folks to carry on this tradition than any other state in the U.S. But most of the states in the South have public lands, state and federal, where folks can go and hunt this way. And it's an old way of hunting. It's an old tradition. This is duck hunting flooded timber in the South, it's part of our culture, it's part of our identity, it's who we are. A lot of us, my folks included, I'd rather, I'd rather be skunked in the woods than shoot a limit on a rice field, because it's something about being in the woods, it's the way we hunt, it's our history, our tradition. Like I said, this is culture for us down here.

• 59:15Speaker 07

  And things are changing and not all for the better on our public lands. Here in Arkansas, we've got a lot of management issues, I don't necessarily get into, but we've got a lot of challenges, I'll leave it at that. And one of the things that's come about in the last few years, the way the state and the feds are modifying and changing how they're managing these places, is that fewer and fewer places are holding water. So all these flooded timber areas in the south that we duck hunt, these are forests. It's forest management. These are forests that flood seasonally. As the Mississippi comes up in the winter, and all the rivers in Arkansas and all the

• 59:57Speaker 07

  southern states flood up with water, these forests get water on them, and the water comes up, and it lets the ducks come in there, it gives them safety, shelter, food, they feed on acorns and all the other food in these areas. And so if you have less and less water on our public lands than the places that we do have water, what we're seeing is a huge concentration of hunters in these few areas. And probably nowhere is this more apparent than the Black River here in Arkansas. And I hate to mention the Black River so much, because folks, locals up there that live and hunt up there, they don't really want everyone knowing about the Black River, but the word is out on the Black River.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  There's no secret.

• 1:00:39Speaker 07

  I think, they ain't no secret, man. It's all over the internet and YouTube. So just to kind of paint a little bit of a picture on why the Public Timber Project exists, last season on Duck Opener, at Ashbaugh Boat Ramp, which is one of the three probably busiest boat ramps on the Black River, we had a thousand trucks and boat trailers lined up at the boat ramp. That line, it stretched out a mile and a half from the boat ramp, and fellas were in line for up to a week before opening morning. That's a thousand trucks and trailers at one boat ramp. There's no trash services, there's no porta-potties, and the impact this has happened on this

• 1:01:23Speaker 07

  area, it's an unintended consequence of our current management, if that makes sense. We're really impacting these areas in a way that's, we're causing damage to some of these areas. So we're seeing changes like that happening in duck hunting in Arkansas and the South. We're seeing a lot of areas that we used to hunt that aren't holding water and aren't holding ducks. And we're seeing this huge concentration of hunters on fewer and fewer public land areas that have water and have birds. Okay, we're seeing some other big changes on public lands down here with duck hunting that it's sort of, all this stuff fits in together.

• 1:02:04Speaker 07

  Probably one of the biggest ones we're concerned about is the changing demographic of the public land duck hunter in the South, in particular in Arkansas. Now, when we all grew up, if you duck hunted in Arkansas at all and you hunted public, if you weren't, if you weren't a rich man, if you were a poor kid like I was and you hunted because you couldn't afford membership at a private club, you were going to run into a whole litany of fellows at the boat ramp. And there was going to be plenty of old timers there that had been doing it their whole lives that had a thing or two to teach the rest of us. Well, because of this increase of pressure that we're seeing, we've run off all our old timers. You just don't see them no more out at the boat ramp.

• 1:02:47Speaker 07

  So what we have is basically a angry mob of 23-year-olds that are being mentored by YouTube. And if you want to, boy, I love YouTube. I watch you all. Well, if you, if you, if you were to talk to my dad, who's still duck hunts with me, 78 years old, he'd tell you that there ain't a show on YouTube that ain't tree popping birds. Yep. So the point being that these young fellows are getting into duck hunting, they're not being taken out by their dads and their uncles and their granddads, they're learning everything they can from YouTube. And our opinion that we're making the wrong folks famous in duck hunting. And we've got some just bad examples out there.

• 1:03:31Speaker 07

  And we're seeing our culture shift. We're seeing traditions and the ways we used to hunt, things that got passed down from generation to generation is, we're seeing it erode and change and all disappear from the landscape when we go duck hunting. And so as a response to that, like every other duck camp in Arkansas in the South, you know, we sit around and we complain about all the problems with duck hunting. And at our camp, we decided we wanted to do something about it. And you said pre- preaching, but really, everybody in duck hunting is preaching about duck hunting. So we thought from the beginning, hey, if we're going to change things for the better,

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  it needs to be through action and not just a bunch of talk. So last fall, we started doing cleanups here in Arkansas. And we started off down on the White River at Clarendon at a boat ramp. That's probably one of the most trash places that you could launch a boat to go hunt ducks or anything else, but a real busy boat ramp. We did a cleanup, not really, we didn't have everybody show up. And, but we thought this is a good place to start. We just need to start showing up, organize duck hunters and get folks to come out of the woodwork, show up to our cleanups, get involved in a positive way, making a difference in our woods. And the next cleanup we did, we had a couple of people show up.

• 1:04:59Speaker 07

  And the next one, we had a couple more folks show up. And it slowly started building and we realized early on that these cleanup projects, these boat ramps were working. The other thing that happened is we had a lot of duck hunters reaching out to us across the South and all of Minnesota, Canada, all over the place. That started finding out about us on social media and they wanted to get involved, but they couldn't make it to any of our organized cleanups. And so we started our hat campaign, which is basically duck hunters, clean up your local area, there's public lands that you love, that that's where you hunt. Take ownership, clean them up, pick them up.

• 1:05:43Speaker 07

  Be a good role model, send us the picture. And we want to fill social media with positive images coming from the duck hunting community as opposed to. The fish fights and duck holes and the horse races to get to your spot. There's far too much negative press. We're our own worst enemies out there. We're painting the picture to the AGFC and to all the land management agencies.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Each, can I, can I interrupt you just for a second, man? This, this is incredible. I'm enthralled. For just for sake of time, man. Uh, how can we help you? Where, where can people get involved?

• 1:06:20Speaker 07

  Thanks for reeling me in because I could talk for an hour.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  I think you did.

• 1:06:25Speaker 07

  First thing is, uh, uh, find us out on social media, uh, on Instagram at the Public Timber Project.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Okay, the pu- the Public Timber Project. Okay.

• 1:06:36Speaker 07

  The Public Timber Project. You can find us on Facebook and YouTube and TikTok under the same name.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:42Speaker 07

  We've got some short films coming out. We've got a full-length film coming out later this duck season. We post our organized clips on there and all of our contact information's on there. If anybody's interested, involved, message me on Instagram and me or Blakely, somebody else will reach back to you within the hour.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:07:01Speaker 07

  Take it there.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  Hey, thank you, Each. Really appreciate you coming on today. Really appreciate it.

• 1:07:09Speaker 07

  Love it.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Excellent. All right, man. Take care. Take care. Wow. I, I had no idea there'd be a thousand, thousand boats lined up at a ranch.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  And that's just one access. You know, that's incredible. That's one access. I remember 25 years ago, my brother and I would go to a public access on a Tuesday, hunting public ground and be the only folks in the parking lot.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Times have changed.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  The good old days.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Wow. Wow. All right. Each Stewart. All right. We're moving right along to our Moultrie Trail Camera Contest. And, uh, it's on this, our friends at Moultrie are sponsoring a contest where we're going to be giving away a camera.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  And we're gonna look at some, some photos. What do you think? Do you think we should look at the photos first? Just to get some, some, some good vibes going and then talk about the Edge 3. What do you want to do, Tony?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  We kinda need to move it along here a little bit.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  Everybody loves a good trail camera.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Let's put up the, the trail camera images. The winner will receive two Edge 2 First Light Spectre Camo Edition Moultrie cameras with a 10 watt solar pack bundle with it and a $250 gift card from the, to the Meat Eater Store, a $250 gift card to First Light. This is a huge prize package. And a case, and a case knife Brent Reeves Signature Mini Trapper.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  That may be the biggest thing there. Yeah, this is a huge prize that's going. Now, Phil, let's go into one of these.

• 1:08:47Speaker 05

  It's going to one of these and here's how it's gonna work. We have four entries. You guys are more than welcome to, uh, you know, add as much commentary and your opinions as you'd like, but the winner will be selected by the live chat. I will put up a poll.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:09:00Speaker 05

  After you look at all, after you look at all the pictures, the live chat will vote for a couple of minutes and whoever has the most votes will win that crazy prize package.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  So we're gonna need everybody's help. Phil, show us the first picture. First trail camera photo in our contest. Bam. We've got a big woods timber velvet buck and the, the, the, the, what we were trying to do here was get people to show us velvet bucks. I don't know if I mentioned that, but every trail camera, every trail camera contest has a theme. This month's theme for the Moultrie Trail Camera Contest is velvet bucks. So that is a beautiful image right there of a big old buck.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  I see white oak acorn trees.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  I see some hickory trees.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  I like that kicker in those brown tones.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  I was wondering if we were working with a river bottom situation here.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that looks like a southern river bottom buck to me.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  All right, so we got the, we're, we're gonna call that the big buck from Andrew.

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  And this is from Andrew Molina, number one.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Okay, that's number one. Andrew's my new favorite person. Ooh, airborne. Is that a mule? That's a mule deer, jumping a. Rattlesnake. A little, a little. Hila monster. Drawl there.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  Got a little buddy behind him.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I see a little buck back there. Oh, yeah, I see it back there. Yeah, that's a, that's a classic. That's an action photo. Action photo. Yep. I like that, I like that.

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  All right, number, that's from I Like Hunting.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:30Speaker 05

  Number three is from, uh, C. Nutson or C.K. Nutson.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Wow, look at that albino buck. That's impressive. Right, even the velvet's white, check that out. That's impressive. I'd like to know the history of that, that story. It looks like, um, last, looks like a 2024 photo. It, it appears to be a northern photo by the spruce or, or.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  I was gonna guess Wisconsin.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  They have a lot of white deer up there?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's impressive. I mean, you, I'll probably never get a trail camera picture of a white deer, so that one's pretty high on my list. In Missouri, not far from where we turkey ended up. Oh, is that right? Uh huh. Interesting. Okay, last photo in the trail camera contest this month. We've got a half shed velvet buck. That's it. Those are always really cool because that happens really quick. There's just this very short window of time, like hours.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  And a year. Kissler's photo. When a buck shedding his velvet.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  I watched a bachelor group when I was hunting in North Dakota one time go in and bed in a little drainage. And the buck that I wanted to shoot in the group was velvet when he went to bed. And when I watched him get out and come start walking toward my stand, he had shed it completely.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Really? Did you kill it?

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  Uh, I didn't kill him, but I killed his buddy. He ran, he ran right on through. He had a destination to go to. I couldn't stop him, but I took a consolation prize. I was pretty happy and he was in full velvet.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so we're gonna need everybody to.

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  Let's do a recap here and then we'll start the poll here. Number one.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  The, the first one is the big buck. I feel like for pure aesthetics of lighting, imagery, beauty. Woo, that's gonna be hard to beat. Go to the next one. Also a recent photo. Was it recent? Yeah. Here we got the action photo. This is our action photo. Okay, so there's something cool about that.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  The flying one.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Okay, yep. And then we got the. Once a, once in a lifetime kinda, kinda photo, you know?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Pretty impressive. Big buck too. Usually, you know, if it's some little scrapper, I'd be like, that's cool. That's a big old buck too.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  That's impressive. And then we got the, uh, we got the nighttime shedding velvet buck.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  All right, starting the poll right now.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Should we discuss what we think, Phil?

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, you guys keep talking.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Um, well, go ahead. What do y'all think? Which one you least impressed with? Which one you voting for? Let's make it quick.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  They're all impressive. The, I have at least experience with mules, so that didn't really, I mean, I liked the photo because of the action.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  But the, the big one stands out.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Didn't grab you.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  The, the big one at the end standing in that white oak bottom, that, that, that grabbed me right there.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  That, and it's a, like a three day old photograph.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  That's cool. That's cool.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  That's, that's right where I'm at too. When I look at that picture, I mean, obviously it's a beautiful deer, beautiful deer, but where it's at?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the kinda stuff I just love to hunt. So I look at that picture and that picture brings me into a place where I would see a deer like that.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm gonna have to go with the team here. I would be voting for Andrew's big buck number one. Uh, but I think you could make a case for the albino buck.

• 1:13:34Speaker 05

  It is, the poll is very tight right now, so if you haven't voted yet, get in there and let your voice be heard.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Andrew, if you're out there, what are the chances that?

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Brent.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Brent can come hunt that buck with you?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  I'll film you with my shotgun.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  No, you can film Brent.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  All right. Four photos, big buck, muley, albino buck.

• 1:14:00Speaker 05

  I'm gonna give you guys, I'm gonna, yeah, 10 more seconds on the clock here, and those 10 seconds can make a difference. That's how close this is.

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  Close guys.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  I mean, that, that is incredible.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  This gets a huge prize package. Two Moultrie cameras, Meat Eater gift card, $250 Meat Eater gift card, $250 First Lite gift card, and a Britt Reeves case knife, signature mini trapper. Huge prize package.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Huge. Drum roll, Phil?

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Uh, I, I think I actually, I might have a drum roll here. I don't have a drum roll, but I do have a winner sound, whoever wins. I'm sorry.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  I think the big buck's gonna win. I think the fact that all three of us would have picked that one.

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  I have ended the poll.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Poll is ended.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  So in last place with only 3% of the vote was the number four from Eric Kessler.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:14:51Speaker 05

  Shedding, oozing.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Thanks anyway, Eric. Yeah, thanks for the submission, Eric. Cool picture.

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  And then in third place with 27% of the vote was your guys' favorite, Angie Molino's big buck.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  And so in second place with 32% of the vote, we had

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  the flying buck from I Like Hunting, which means the albino buck from Chad Nutson. You're the winner.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Congratulations, Chad. Congratulations. I'd like to know if that's a deer that you had access to, what happened to it? Did somebody get that deer? Did he, is he still out there? That's pretty cool. Man, congratulations. And, uh, man, you got a lot of decisions to make about what to do with those gift cards and, you know, where Brent's gonna hunt up there with you. So, uh, congratulations.

• 1:15:48Speaker 05

  Can't find the right ones.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Tony, tell us about the Moultrie Edge 3.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  All right. So I got a Moultrie Edge 3 right here in this fancy box. We learned all about these dudes yesterday. So, I mean, this, this isn't my world, but some, some of the listeners here, southern guys running feeders, they have Moultrie Connect. You can basically manage and monitor your feeders and it's a whole system. It's a totally way more efficient way to live in that world, which isn't my world. What is my world is trying to find big bucks on a natural pattern. And, you know, I know AI is sort of a buzzword out there right now. Anybody who plays in the stock market or messes around Wall Street bets, you're seeing Nvidia and you're seeing Palantir and these companies that are, they're doing a lot with AI or you hear, hear about a lot. Well, Moultrie has Moultrie AI coming up.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  On this Edge 3 and one of the things this can do is help you filter through to only get videos of bucks sent to your, sent right to your apps, that right to your phone. Instead of getting notifications for all the other critters, does, whatever, if you're, if you want to select it down pretty far, you can.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  You can kind of customize it too. If you want to get uh, just photos of non-target animals or photos of all animals, but also get videos sent to you of bucks. You can do that too. And I keep thinking about this. I'm heading back down to Nebraska where I'm hunting with Steve this fall. I have a whole bunch of cameras down on this ranch that we're hunting. It's brand new property to us, working cattle ranch. And so I put up cameras and in some spots I'm getting cattle. I'm getting beavers, I'm getting geese, I'm getting uh, lots of non-raccoons, non-target animals. And so when I go back down there, I'm going to swap out some of those cameras with these Edge 3s because I'm filtering through.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  You don't want to get notifications about cows.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  That when it sends out a, a, a picture to you, it's using battery life. So the Molestry AI, when you program it and some of these guys that are putting cameras over feeders are potentially getting hundreds of pictures a day.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Well, right. And it, when you put up a camera in a pasture that doesn't have cows in and they put in cows, you get hundreds of pictures a day too. So it's, and this is, you know, I like pictures of deer. I like pictures of all animals, but this is like our rut hunt. So I'm kind of just trying to key in on the bucks. The other thing I'll say about this quick, this isn't new to the Edge 3, but it is a feature of it. Uh, a lot of cameras for, for a while had like a live aim feature. They had a, they had some kind of, you know, viewing window, LCD screen, whatever. So you could set it up and point it in the right direction because. I do a lot of like public land hunting. I'll put them up high. Uh, in this situation, because we knew cows were gonna get rotated through there and I didn't want them to mess with the cameras. You're mounting them higher and pointing them down.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  And so there's a live aim feature on here that you can go to your phone and see exactly what you're seeing.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  So I can, I can customize that and set it up exactly the way I want to. So I know when I walk away, I'm not waiting for that test picture or anything like that. I'm like, okay, I know this is going to be aimed exactly how I want it to be.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Man, uh, the Maltries, I'll tell you, one of the things I was most impressed about was the price point on those things. And I don't know exactly what that's gonna be, but I mean, this is not, this is like under a hundred and forty dollar camera.

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  It's like a hundred and forty-nine dollars.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred and fifty dollar camera. Yeah. So I mean, that's, it's pretty inexpensive and they, and they, the, the, the, some of the other cameras are, are less, are cheaper than that.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Right. And it, and the last thing I'll say about this too is, you know, it wasn't that long ago in cellular cameras where we had to select a Verizon, select a carrier, right? Verizon, AT&T, whatever. Now you can connect to all major carriers with this. So whatever, whatever company has the best reception.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  Wherever you're gonna go. So in the whitetail world, maybe not that big of a deal in a lot of places, but if you're trying to monitor a water hole or a wallow for elk or, you know, some of the western applications. And just someplace, you know how it is, like some places you go where for whatever reason, your buddy's got Verizon, he's got awesome coverage and you have AT&T and it sucks. It's kinda nice to not have to worry about that anymore. It'll pick the best one and use it.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. We're moving on to the end of our show here, guys. We appreciate everybody being here, commenting. We're gonna take a last round here of listener feedback. Phil.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'll knock out a few. Let's go ahead and talk about your book, Clay. Uh, where's, where's the question? It was somewhere. If you just wanna start talking about it.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had somebody ask about the book.

• 1:20:22Speaker 05

  Here we go. It's from Mogor. Hey Clay, how's your book coming along? I'm really looking forward to it.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Hey, man.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  That guy right there is the most. He may be the most loyal listener ever. I see him every.

• 1:20:31Speaker 05

  He lives in Hungary, Clay. I don't know how often you watch the show, but he's here every single week. He's got great questions. He's got a bear grease hat on. He's a big fan.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man, the book is going incredible. It's, it's changing my life. It really is. Just the, the, the discipline involved in the level of research. We do a lot of research on bear grease, but I've never had to research stuff like, like we are for this book. And we're still a long, long ways from, from Clay's book coming out, Tony. But, uh, um, I'd say I've got, we've got a third of the book in a format right now that I would feel comfortable, you know, sending to somebody.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  Can you share, can you share the target date with it or is that still a?

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  It's, it's not really.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  Gotcha.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the book is about the American black bear. It's the, it's the, it is the, the bio of the American black bear told like it's never been told before. Guaranteed book has never been written like this before. It's gonna blow your mind.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  Uh, from Freddie Rick, another food centric question. He says he doesn't have much access to squirrels here in Nevada. Do you guys, do you think I could replace them with jackrabbit for recipes that call for squirrels?

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I ain't never had a jackrabbit, but if they, if they taste anything, I mean, here, what you gonna do with a squirrel is what I'm gonna do with a cotton tail and that's fry him. Powder his behind with buttermilk and flour and throw him in some hot grease.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  Hmm. I don't have a lot of experience with jackrabbits. I hear bad things about them though.

• 1:22:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, Steve, Steve was talking crap about them the other day.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  I think, I think frying them would be the best bet.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  And I don't know if you're gonna pull it off or not. Yeah, I don't know. I ain't never had one.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  But, good idea.

• 1:22:12Speaker 05

  Uh, it's good. Talk about that Hall of Fame question. Tigers, Tigersfan6884.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so if you're not familiar with the Bear Grease Podcast, we have an official Bear Grease Hall of Fame, which typically goes to, there are, I believe there are nine or 10 members that, people that have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. There's currently three living people in the Bear Grease Hall of Fame. Um, some of the more famous candidates would be Daniel Boone, Tecumseh, Osceola, Davy Crockett. Some of the less well-known people would be the, the, the living. Plot bear hunter in East Tennessee, Roy Clark, Warner Glenn's in the Hall of Fame.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  James Lawrence.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  James Lawrence, my, my, my, my buddy mentor backwoodsman from Arkansas. So a lot of variety in the Bear Grylls Hall of Fame. There's one woman in the Bear Grylls Hall of Fame, Granny Henderson, Eva Henderson, bar martyr of the Buffalo River. And, uh, man, you can't make this happen tiger. It's gotta happen on its own, brother. I mean, we may go for a decade without a Hall of Famer. This is not staged. So we just waiting for, we're just waiting for the next legend to pop up. So good question though. Appreciate you paying attention, brother.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  You're talking like Hulk Hogan.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Brother, I really appreciate what you're doing out there.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  Uh, let's do one more for Tony. Um, Jacob says, how old is too old to train a dog to blood trail? I'm colorblind. Having a dog has helped me find two deer. My lab is eight years old and I'd love to have her help me.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Well, old dogs can learn new tricks. And I think, I don't think there is an age where you can't teach them stuff. It, it changes how you train them a little bit. You know, but teach that dog to blood trail. I mean, there, you're not going to take anything away from that dog. And it will learn what to do. I mean, the, the first dog that I trained to, to shed hunt was a golden retriever. I had several dogs ago. And I think she was five or six, probably five when I started teaching her. And it wasn't any different than taking an eight week old pup and being like, you know, here's what we're starting with. We're stringing together these behaviors and you daisy chain them together until you finally have that, that skillset.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Then you work on that. So train that eight year old lab. That lab will love it and it'll help you find some deer.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  Let's call it, let's call it there, guys.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Well, hey, thanks, everybody, for joining Meat Eater Radio Live. I'm certain that this is probably one of the best ever. Hundred percent. You got my vote. Yeah, let's vote on, uh, just raise your hand if you think this is probably the best ever Meat Eater Radio Live. Oh, Phil, we got a vote. Phil voted twice. That really counts. And from Jake, our producer here. Hey, everybody, thank you so much. I can't wait to tune in next week. And, uh, you know what? Keep the wild places wild, because that's where the bears live.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Case pocket now.

• 1:25:32Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:26:12Speaker 08

  A BetterHelp ad. I would like to formally request more storage space in my brain. Because somehow I can forget why I opened my laptop where I put my keys, or the name of someone I met 30 seconds ago. But I can remember an awkward conversation from six years ago in extraordinary detail. So if your brain came with a delete button, what would you use it on? Maybe it's that tough breakup you've analyzed from every possible angle, and a rational worry you know doesn't deserve this much attention. The conversation with your boss you keep rehearsing in the shower, or that one comment someone made that you're still thinking about weeks later. We don't always get to choose what sticks around in our heads. BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to

• 1:26:56Speaker 08

  talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. Visit betterhelp.com. Cost and coverage may vary.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  A few weeks into hunting season, you usually have a pretty good idea of what gear is working and what you wish you had. That's where Tractor Supply comes in. Maybe you need another trail camera for a spot that's heating up, warmer layers for a cold front rolling in, or a cooler for when everything finally comes together. Whatever the season throws at you, Tractor Supply has the gear to keep you in the woods. Stop by your local Tractor Supply or shop tractorsupply.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.