Ep. 853: Turkeys Break the Internet, Tungsten Ammo Gets Expensive, and Black Bear Politics Flare

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en and the MeatEater crew discuss: Clay’s “12 in ‘26” Utah mountain lion hunt https://youtu.be/0n__5RhSB8Q?si=WqUxQjkoDbUvkGAo; the Bear Grease YouTube channel https://youtube.com/@realbeargrease?si=8PwyKXmv6uJe6nKL; our Spring Turkey Giveaway https://firstlite.com/pages/first-lite-giveaway-sweepstakes; how to pronounce “Neanderthal”; correcting Steve on the Open Fields Doctrine; how a U. of Michigan Wolverines player may actually fish more than he plays basketball; Tony https://www.themeateater.com/people/tony-peterson experiences WI’s turkey tag system meltdown; the price of tungsten and TSS skyrocket; what’s behind proposed changes to black bear seasons in OK, WA, and AZ?; AK bottom trawling; professional golfer Rory McElroy is fueled by elk; and more. Outro credit: "The Screaming Song" written by George Alan Sparhawk Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:40Steven Rinella?

  Ahoy! And welcome to the news show. This week, we're covering skyrocketing costs on souped-up tungsten turkey ammo. We're covering turkey hunters in Wisconsin crashed the internet, or at least a tiny part of it. We're covering a famous golfer chooses fake elk meat for the Masters, and Spencer thinks that's cool.

• 2:03Steven Rinella?

  We're covering black bear news from Oklahoma, Arizona, and Washington. We're going to talk about is bottom trawling destroying Alaska's fisheries? We're going to maybe get to how Montana politics is getting juicy. As a smoke jumper and a gun control influencer wage primary bids for a U.S. congressional seat and more.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Jam packed?

• 2:29Steven Rinella?

  There can't be more. There's so much. We might, we might cut some of it.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  At the seams.

• 2:36Steven Rinella?

  For starters, we're getting fired up for spring turkey season. You're gonna want to hear this. Right now, we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway. Okay? It's packed with over thirteen thousand dollars in prizes, including a turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Benelli, a thousand dollar gift card from First Light, and a whole other pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is gonna receive a spring twenty-seven Rio Grande turkey hunt in the Texas Hill country for you and two of your buddies or family members. So a three-pack you all goes hunting, brought to you by Bird Dog.

• 3:16Steven Rinella?

  The more you spend during the giveaway at First Light, Phelps Game Calls, FHF, Gear, and the Meat Eater Store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. I hope I win.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  I think you're ineligible.

• 3:28Steven Rinella?

  People will be like thinking it's rigged.

• 3:31Steven Rinella?

  Getting entered is easy. Say it, Kay. Head over to First Light contest page at firstlight.com. So go to firstlight.com, find the contest page, fill out the entry form, then you're in. For every twenty-five bucks you spend, you get ten additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole kit and caboodle, the whole entire prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends Monday, April fif- April thirteenth, year of our Lord, twenty twenty-six, eleven fifty-nine P M,

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  Mountain Time. They even included daylight. Hmm. Daylight save. So if you, midnight, get them in by midnight, April thirteenth.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Ten entries for an additional twenty-five. That's.

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  Is that good?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  That's pretty good.

• 4:22Steven Rinella?

  Feels good to me.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  I, I wonder how the odds compare to, uh, to that, uh, oh, did you check your, uh, Alaska goat tag? Did you win?

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  Nope.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  No, I don't know about that. I didn't draw it in a normal draw, but I don't know about the raffle draw yet.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 4:38Steven Rinella?

  I didn't draw the normal draw.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz that closed.

• 4:40Steven Rinella?

  Are we, are we giving away boots right now?

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Yes, we still are.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  All right, we're giving away.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Introduce everyone.

• 4:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sorry, my bad.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Special guest.

• 4:47Steven Rinella?

  Keep my note, no, terrible oversight on my part. Joined today by Tony Peterson, Big Buck Killer, Randall Williams, Big Ape Guy. Hmm. Bear New comes here.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  You bet.

• 4:59Steven Rinella?

  Spencer Newhart and of course Brody Henderson. Uh, we're gonna start off with your news and jumping on corrections, Phil. Corrections, corrections. Okay, first one comes and here's the thing. The first one comes from Hufflefinger and Hufflefinger doesn't know this yet. Jim Hufflefinger doesn't know this yet, but we have disqualified him from winning the boots.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Is this the same guy as last week?

• 5:25Steven Rinella?

  No, it's just he's a friend of the show.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Uh, and he's always right.

• 5:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Yanni once brought up, he's like said to Hufflefinger says, has Steve ever, uh, talked about hiring you?

• 5:36Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 5:36Steven Rinella?

  And he said, why buy the cow?

• 5:40Steven Rinella?

  You get the milk for free. Hufflefinger wrote in with a correction, but we're, we're eliminating him from the running because he's a known person who's been on the show. So it wouldn't be fair if he won the Tacovas boots.

• 5:53Steven Rinella?

  But here's Hufflefinger's correction. We were on, on a previous episode, uh, Neanderthal love. We were talking about whether or not if you want to sound Johnny big time, you go Neanderthal. If you want to sound like some dullard, you say Neanderthal. I was saying that, something to that effect. Hufflefinger wrote in. The th, th, T H in Neanderthal was part of the original spelling and used in the scientific name in the 1800s. Homo neanderthalensis.

• 6:30Steven Rinella?

  Science values stability over willy nilly updates. Later, the German language was modernized and reformed and they dropped the H.

• 6:41Steven Rinella?

  But it was already in such popular usage in English that it remains more correct to use the in English and in scientific writings. It is more correct to drop the H in German language. And when talking about the location of the first Neanderthal fossils found in a valley named after.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  Something or another. Neander. Tall. So that means the tall means valley in German. So the Neander Valley.

• 7:16Speaker 06

  I'm confused by this a little bit.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So am I, because I don't know whether he's saying he's talking about spelling or pronunciation here.

• 7:23Steven Rinella?

  He's saying that. That the Krauts.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  I get that part.

• 7:27Steven Rinella?

  Changed it.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  But.

• 7:29Steven Rinella?

  For themselves, but it was already in such usage here that Americans didn't need to change.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  I know, but I think it was always an American mispronunciation because in German. T H A L is tall.

• 7:41Steven Rinella?

  So you're throwing the correction back at.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  I I'm just throwing another wrinkle into the story here.

• 7:47Steven Rinella?

  I've thought about it long and hard. I'm going back to Neanderthal, which is where I came from.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Tall sounds pretentious.

• 7:52Steven Rinella?

  So that's why I did it. I did it to sound.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  You wouldn't say you're an enthusiast of Neanderthals.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Let's start talking like that. I like that.

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Neanderthal enthusiast. I'd be like, he has a speech.

• 8:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Like the U P.

• 8:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay, here's another one. I think this one's, is this eligible or ineligible? No, this is eligible.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  The rest of them are eligible.

• 8:21Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Okay, so now we're in the contest. Bear, if you're not familiar. You we're gonna read corrections. You vote on what's the best correction.

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 8:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  And then you get a pair of boots.

• 8:33Steven Rinella?

  And the winner of the best correction gets a pair of, he picks out whatever he wants.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:37Steven Rinella?

  She, we haven't had a woman win yet. Hold the boots up. This is just an example of what you could select.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  One of many.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  Brand spikety new Tacoba's boots. Spencer, put your nose to that boot and take deep whiff.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Hmm. No one's had these on yet.

• 8:49Steven Rinella?

  What do you smell? No, no, not that part.

• 8:52Steven Rinella?

  Well, the inside of it. Tell me what you smell when you smell that.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Hmm. Quality leather.

• 8:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, smells like leather through and through.

• 9:00Steven Rinella?

  Here's a correction for Yanis during episode eight forty seven, Neanderthal love.

• 9:07Steven Rinella?

  Well, the, okay. The, the episode was titled Neanderthal Love: Mule Deer Eradication and Mink Eyelashes. Anyways, Yanni was doing a report about the Catalina Island Mule Deer Debate, and how they may be moving forward with a plan to eradicate, or attempt to eradicate, mule deer off of Catalina Island, where they are not native, but where they're in looking sight of where they are native.

• 9:33Steven Rinella?

  Brody asked Yanis, this is the corrector writing him. Brody asked Yanis what the Catalina Island Conservancy plans to do with the deer after they kill them. Yanis replied, "There's no plan for it." Well, here's the correction. The Catalina Island Conservancy has on their website that they will, quote, "provide" the meat to the California Condor Recovery Program, where they will lay the carcasses in remote hills to allow them to decompose naturally and get eaten by condors.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  That sounds a lot like doing nothing with them.

• 10:15Steven Rinella?

  That's like, great, like, if you got busted, let's say you got busted by fishing game for like one waste, like you killed a deer and you left it, and they're like, "Hey, you know, you're in trouble, you can't do that." You'd be like, "Oh, no, you don't understand." You don't understand.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  I'm feeding nature.

• 10:30Steven Rinella?

  I'm feeding magpies.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:33Steven Rinella?

  This is magpie conservation.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  I place them in a strategic spot where magpies will find them.

• 10:39Steven Rinella?

  So that's what they say, and it is like such a little, it's like, it's like, it's cynical, you know, like, "Oh, no, no, we're not wasting them. California condors will consume them." Um, sure, they're gonna have a mighty square meal, when, for a brief period of time, they're not, they're not planning on like, laying it out over time, like, for a brief period of time, they will have hundreds of mule deer carcasses to choose from. Okay, a lot of corrections about the open field doctrine. That was a great correction, by the way. Um, a lot of corrections about the open field doctrine. Some of them came in like very adversarial to me. About how dumb I am and everything. Okay?

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  We heard from many folks across the country. This was a, this was a hot, this generated a lot. We had lawyers write in. We had law enforcement guys write in. We had a fellow Montana and over at the sheriff's department in Stillwater County wrote in. So to all you folks, thanks for writing in about the open field doctrine. We selected one. Because it kind of laid things out the most cleanly, the cleanest. So apologies to those of you who wrote in, but you're not in the running for the brand spikity new boots. The, the correction goes like this. Good morning.

• 11:54Steven Rinella?

  Hoy to you.

• 11:56Steven Rinella?

  I just listened to episode eight forty-eight. Now here's where he lays out his credentials, which is. A tip to people doing corrections. Get the credentials. I am a retired FBI agent. And currently teach constitutional criminal procedure. At the FBI academy.

• 12:19Steven Rinella?

  So there he's like laying it out, dude.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Don't mess with me.

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  Who's gonna argue with him?

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Then he goes on to say, I have to take exception with whoever explained the open fields doctrine to Steve. I like this approach.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:34Steven Rinella?

  He's.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  It's not a compliment sandwich. It's like something else.

• 12:39Steven Rinella?

  He's like, oh no, it's not your fault. You were misled.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  He might, he might teach interrogation techniques as well.

• 12:44Steven Rinella?

  This is a, this is a great, like, yeah, it's like. Yeah, I don't, hey, I'm not attacking you, bro. I'm attacking whoever told you the dumb thing you think.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  It's also an out. You could, oh, listen.

• 12:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like, hey, it must have been, it was explained to me by an idiot.

• 13:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:02Steven Rinella?

  And here I am, an innocent victim of like this idiot idiocy.

• 13:08Steven Rinella?

  So he's taking exception, as he should, to who told me about it. Which sort of assumes that they told me wrong, maybe that I didn't twist it up in my head. But he says this, okay, here, here's it, here it is, I'm laying it out for you. In the 1987 Supreme Court decision, United States versus Dunn.

• 13:29Steven Rinella?

  The court defined open fields as different from the curtilage, I've never even heard that word. As different from the curtilage of one's home. Yeah, now I gotta back up. He didn't do a great job explaining this. What we were talking about was this.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  An area of land around a house.

• 13:47Steven Rinella?

  What we're talking about is, we're speaking about this thing. Where if a game ward, let's say you're on your private property and a game ward has reason to believe there's poaching taking place on that property. Like he's hearing a bunch of gunshots in a duck marsh, private property. It's 30 minutes before shooting light and you're just hearing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He can go in there without a search warrant and find out what's going on. It's like the open fields doctrine. I was saying that it was a tool of game wardens. All the correctors are like, this is not, this is not particular to game ward. It might be utilized by game wardens, but not particularly.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  We've said they have powers that law enforcement, other law enforcement officers don't have.

• 14:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I was at, they had powers that other people didn't have. And it goes back to this whole thing where they were like working moonshiners. They were working moonshiners and see some moonshine from a moonshiner. And, and that's what led to this thing, that, that the moonshiner was out in the open fields and not in his home when he got searched, something to that effect, right into correction about that. This guy says, in the 1987 Supreme Court decision, United States versus Dunn. The court defined open fields as different from the curtilage, Brody.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  An area around one's house.

• 15:03Steven Rinella?

  Of one's home, which involves the activities associated with the living space. Law enforcement officers, not just game wardens, can enter private property on open fields without a warrant. Traditionally, game wardens have had even greater scope to enter outbuildings and even dwellings in search of evidence of game violations.

• 15:31Steven Rinella?

  Many states have curtailed those powers. But generally, the open field doctrine is explained and done. The open field doctrine as explained and done applies to all law enforcement officers. In that case, a DEA agent, along with a Houston Harris County deputy, entered the defendant's property to look through a woman, to look through the windows of a barn about 100 yards behind the main dwelling. The court ruled this entry onto the property was not a Fourth Amendment violation

• 16:14Steven Rinella?

  because open fields are not protected as part of the person's houses, papers, and effects, which are covered by the Fourth Amendment. He goes on, "Obviously, with all constitutional law, there are nuances. And all states can grant greater protections than the US Constitution, but not lesser protections." Not trying to be nitpicky, but I've taught this area of the law for the last 16 years, and have 29, see, he's going back around to double up on his credentials.

• 16:50Speaker 06

  You missed the highlight of this email.

• 16:51Steven Rinella?

  Please, go ahead.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  He did this with text to type. And you missed the typo that in discussing the open fields doctrine. The law enforcement officers.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that should be what they call the HOA.

• 17:07Speaker 06

  It's a great, it's a great, I don't know if that's a pun.

• 17:09Steven Rinella?

  Out of respect for Todd.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  Oh, I loved it.

• 17:13Steven Rinella?

  I skipped it out of respect.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  I still respect Todd, but I thought that was too good to gloss over.

• 17:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so to review, we've only had two, we need three.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Oh, we didn't, we did.

• 17:25Steven Rinella?

  Heffelfinger. Heffelfinger's not in the run.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  You guys cut too many. We don't have internet, so I can't stick something else back.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  We can just do one of the next ones.

• 17:34Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm doing the Gomer. Number three.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 17:38Steven Rinella?

  Perfect. You tracking Bear?

• 17:40Speaker 05

  I'm tracking.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  This person who wrote in, didn't even write it really in as a correction, but more like as a clarification, so now you're in the running.

• 17:47Steven Rinella?

  But corrections, clarifications are, in my book.

• 17:52Steven Rinella?

  Pointing out something that was omitted.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 17:56Steven Rinella?

  It's like error by omission counts, clarifications count.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Hmm, great for him.

• 18:01Speaker 06

  See, this is both a clarification and a correction.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  Hmm, I, yeah, got it. Well, good for this guy. He might get a pair of boots.

• 18:07Steven Rinella?

  We're talking about Gomer bull insemination, and this goes back to a conversation I had with my dear friend Kevin Murphy, who was describing to me his ranch work as a child and how they had a bull whose penis was reoriented to come out the wrong direction. When cows were coming into heat, they would take this bull and put a big ink blotter on his neck. He would go out and try to mount ripe cows. And then ink blot them. Then rancher comes out, notices the ink blot on a cow, runs out artificially inseminates it. So it was a way of identifying a cow coming into heat. Drag him.

• 18:43Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 18:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay, then we talked about that a bunch. And we've had other corrections about it. This guy wants to clarify, and they dubbed these things Gomer bulls. This one guy calls them a Gomer bull. Steven Crew, I teach a cattle artificial insemination course with University of Idaho. Again, comes in hard, lays out his credentials.

• 19:07Steven Rinella?

  You had a cowboy write in about Gomer bulls, which were a common way to check for standing heat in cattle. However,

• 19:15Steven Rinella?

  Gomer bulls are not extremely common in today's world. The cowboy talked about a lottery ticket style scratcher, which is common use. However, it does not have to be a bull riding those females.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 19:32Steven Rinella?

  They ride each other.

• 19:35Steven Rinella?

  If you got young children nearby, cover their ears.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  That's the natural world.

• 19:40Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm joking.

• 19:44Steven Rinella?

  In a pen or pasture, they ride each other. Other females will scratch. So, okay. They put a patch on the cows. Other females are trying to ride each other. The females will scratch off the patch and show the artificial insemination technician that the cow is in heat and ready to be inseminated. See, this is a little surprising. I've seen, I didn't know, like, I've seen plenty of that go on in my day. But I didn't know that they were queuing in on the cow being in heat. I just thought it was just general, whatever.

• 20:18Steven Rinella?

  Another common practice is to use hormones that stop or start an ovulation cycle to time them. So a majority of animals understanding heat at the same time. I'm familiar with that. I think they call them heat sinking. You're familiar with heat sink, seeking missiles? Uh huh. This is heat sinking. Artificial insemination is a great tool for genetic improvement in cattle and other species, as well as removing some dangers and additional expenses, expense of having bulls on a farmer ranch.

• 20:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, tough competition. Let me review in my head. So to remind everybody voting. Open fields doctrine.

• 21:01Steven Rinella?

  Catalina. And Gomer bulls.

• 21:07Steven Rinella?

  Catalina, how many votes, how many voters you got today? One, two, three, four. Eight. Eight votes. Catalina.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Me, me.

• 21:17Steven Rinella?

  Open fields.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Well, that's like.

• 21:20Steven Rinella?

  Unanimous.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Tremendous respect for law enforcement.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Sorry, Gomer.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 21:28Steven Rinella?

  Well, you know why?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Mr. Todd, thank you.

• 21:30Steven Rinella?

  Dude.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:31Steven Rinella?

  Right. A lot of people, and I, and God bless them, people writing in with the math questions. That's all great. Keep them coming. But that's got real teeth right there.

• 21:42Speaker 06

  And I, not to take anything away from Gomer bull insemination. It's fascinating.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very interesting.

• 21:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  But yeah, thanks, Todd. We'll get in touch. And you can choose your own pair of Tacovas boots.

• 21:53Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  A law man with some new boots.

• 21:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep, I like that. Yep. Hopefully, he's gonna, he's gonna shotgun those new boots and get his holsters out and Mm hmm. Go down to Main Street. Mm hmm.

• 22:06Speaker 07

  Can I add one more thing to Hepplefingers email?

• 22:08Steven Rinella?

  Please.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  A 2016 Discovery article covered it, if it should be Neanderthal or Neanderthal.

• 22:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 22:15Speaker 07

  They determined both are fine, but they likened it to if you say Neanderthal, that's like calling Paris, Paris instead.

• 22:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Oh, so you're walking around with that label?

• 22:29Speaker 04

  That settles it.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  We go back to all the old episodes of Big City.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  Terrible.

• 22:35Speaker 07

  Or just commit and start calling it Paris.

• 22:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, just switch everything.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. You've got to get the throw the in there.

• 22:42Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm going back to Neanderthal bad, dude. I'm not ashamed, man.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  You're not a Paris kind of gentleman?

• 22:49Steven Rinella?

  We had a previous episode where we were goofing on a guy. So a guy wrote in talking about his daughter's boyfriend. And he's saying that normally he's kind of a numbskull, but he had a good idea about using E-Bird, like a birding app where people share their bird sightings, using E-Bird to scout ducks. And he says, like, normally this kid's a numbskull, but that's a good idea. Well, the kid heard that and he wrote in. He's like, I think that's me.

• 23:20Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:22Steven Rinella?

  I was just telling my girlfriend's dad about this.

• 23:25Speaker 07

  Yep. And, and he knows that the girlfriend's dad listens to the show.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  There's going to be a conversation that happens between those two.

• 23:35Steven Rinella?

  Now, he points out, he goes, he was under the assumption that the discussions he was having with his future father-in-law were, would be kept under wraps. But now that the secret is out and that his father-in-law, future father-in-law, whatever, didn't respect the privacy of the conversation anyways, he wants to clarify something. I was pointing out that I don't think that that scouting tool is going to be as quick as ducks.

• 24:02Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, like geese hit a field. There's, I mean, you know, if, if geese are in a field in the evening, you know, there's, that's where you want to be in the morning, but there's no like guarantee, you know, I mean, it's like, so I'm like, by the time you like build up a bunch of hosers driving by being like, oh, I saw a goose, you know, that, that you're not going to hunt off that.

• 24:22Speaker 07

  Old info.

• 24:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  But a gobbler strutting in a Field dude.

• 24:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, well, that's.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  That's legit.

• 24:27Steven Rinella?

  A gobblers strutting field is like he's somewhere around there, man. Especially like old church, old cemetery nearby. He's there.

• 24:36Steven Rinella?

  So I was like, it doesn't really work. And he he writes in this this should have been a damn correction. He goes, um, he he brings up how I question the up to dateness of the material. And he says, I'm not sure if Steve is aware of a handy e bird, of a handy e bird tool called alerts.

• 24:57Steven Rinella?

  You can request on eBird's website to be notified as often as hourly.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 25:05Steven Rinella?

  Of sightings of birds.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  So good.

• 25:09Steven Rinella?

  These alerts can be personalized. There are ways to set the alerts up to notify you of species of particular interest.

• 25:18Steven Rinella?

  I'm often doing homework, he says. You can't be that bad of a kid.

• 25:23Steven Rinella?

  And driving around. I don't know what that means.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  I know what it meant for me back in the day.

• 25:28Steven Rinella?

  And he'll get no, he'll get alerts. He'll get notifications alerting him to where he should go find a species or a bunch of species that I'm looking for. Okay.

• 25:42Steven Rinella?

  Alerts.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 25:43Steven Rinella?

  I could see setting like. Setting it to like strutting gobblers.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Jumping to the truck.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Hourly alerts.

• 25:52Speaker 06

  Big ass strutting gobblers.

• 25:53Steven Rinella?

  Big ass strutters, dude.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  Within a quarter mile of public land.

• 25:56Steven Rinella?

  If there's a drop down menu, it can be like, like wandering hens. You'd be like, no, I don't really care about that.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  This could.

• 26:01Steven Rinella?

  Big strutters. You'd be like, that's what I don't know about.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  This could set up some awkward moments. Cause like when a, when a hunter and a birder arrive at the same spot at the same time.

• 26:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, we'll get into that later.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  You're like.

• 26:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  But couldn't you also see hunters being like, oh, I'm gonna report strutting gobblers. Twenty minutes away from where I hunt and they. They are thick. Yeah.

• 26:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point. I wouldn't have thought you'd outsmarted me because you'd have been like, if you knew I was doing it, you'd have been like, just show, you'd have strutters everywhere but where there was a strutter.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 26:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 06

  Right. Then then each user would have to have their own sort of review rubric that so people could rate their sightings. Verified strutters.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  You'd have to pose as like an old lady burger.

• 26:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 26:47Steven Rinella?

  See, here's another piece of feedback that like is, this guy's getting kind of screwed up, a set of boots, but

• 26:55Steven Rinella?

  when we were talking about Neanderthals, I was talking about a book I was reading, and in the book I was reading, I was talking about how this anthropologist was looking at the suite of injuries they find on Neanderthal skeletons. And how at some point in time, a physician who worked on bull riders often in his community said, man, it seems like the sweets of injuries we see on Neanderthal skeletons reminds me of the kind of injuries I see on bull riders. And it led to this idea that they had this like confrontational hunting strategy, and they were getting wounded by their prey, like how bull riders get wounded by bulls.

• 27:36Steven Rinella?

  He says that that idea was an idea, but as people have done more and more research on it and looked into it, they're finding that it's really, it's really not, and it has fallen out of favor. The rodeo rider interpretation, he says, has largely fallen out of favor.

• 27:54Steven Rinella?

  More research has shown that the trauma patterns used to support the hypothesis, the hypothesis are not unique to dangerous hunting scenarios. It can also be explained by other factors, including interpersonal violence. As a result, many researchers, including one of the original proponents, now consider the confrontational hunting explanation to be under supported. Our colleague Alex Tilney wrote me, or told me over the phone, he was reading that same paper because he got interested in it.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Funny.

• 28:25Steven Rinella?

  And he said, you could also argue that they have a suite of injuries similar to people who have been in golf cart accidents.

• 28:33Steven Rinella?

  Which leads one to believe they were golfing.

• 28:41Steven Rinella?

  Here's a, this one's not even kind of a correction, but we'll get it. We gotta get moving on. We're gonna get into this. I didn't know about this. This guy's writing in, he's talking back to our Screw Room episode.

• 28:52Steven Rinella?

  So during World War I, I'm gonna try to make this as quick as possible. Back during World War I, America was supplying horses

• 29:01Steven Rinella?

  to the English. Okay? We were breeding horses instead of, because that was a war still fought on, you know, to some extent, fought on horseback.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Steven Rinella?

  The Krauts sent over an infectious disease spy to plant diseases

• 29:24Steven Rinella?

  in America to give anthrax and other disease. This guy got caught and ran, got away. He died in the Spanish flu epidemic. He came here and was swabbing American horses with anthrax, trying to kill the horses before they could join the World War I war effort.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Dang.

• 29:43Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  And he died, died of the flu. It's kind of fitting.

• 29:46Steven Rinella?

  He fled. They, they never caught him. He fled and wound up dying in the, from the Spanish flu. Sucker.

• 29:54Speaker 01

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• 30:24Steven Rinella?

  I travel quite a bit and when I'm home, it's very easy to stay on a rigid food routine and eat the right kinds of food at the right time. But when you're on the road, it's hard to stay in your routine and like diet can really start to fall apart. I've seen it and that's why I like Athletic Greens. Now AG1 is already the standard for daily foundational nutrition. AG1 Pro is what's next. It's built for people. Who don't want to stop there. Creatine, C A H M B, advanced gut lining support on top of everything AG1 Next Gen already delivers. You can get it in travel packs. One travel pack, 10 to 12 ounces of cold water every morning. If you're already taking creatine separately, AG1 Pro simplifies your stack.

• 31:09Steven Rinella?

  One thing in the morning covers more than your current routine might for less than a dollar more per serving. AG1 Pro supports protein synthesis, helps reduce protein breakdown, and supports muscle recovery and consistent training performance. Visit drinkag1.com/meateater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Again, that's drinkag1.com/meateater. Grab yours now. 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

• 31:52Steven Rinella?

  you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you'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. Over to Randall.

• 32:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. Now Phil's gonna play a little segment here in honor of March Madness. This was a interview I wanted to do on radio live, but as we all know, it's dead now. And it's been dead for several weeks. So we just pre-recorded this interview with Will Cheddar of the University of Michigan Basketball Team. Play the tape, Phil.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  Welcome to the Meat Eater News Sports Desk. I'm your host, Randall Williams. Joined today by Will Cheddar, power forward for the University of Michigan men's basketball team and winner of Meat Eater Trivia, episode 130. Will, congrats on a great season so far. 31-3 going into the tournament as a number one seed, 19-1 in the conference, Big Ten champs. And with two dominant wins last week, the Wolverines are in the Sweet 16, facing off against Alabama this Friday. When was the last time you went fishing and how was it?

• 33:18Speaker 03

  I was actually out last night. Went out to this little inland lake about 20 minutes from campus and got into the first smallmouth of the year. So it was pretty, uh, pretty good to be back out on the boat, back out on the lake, uh, after such a good weekend.

• 33:35Speaker 06

  And is Coach aware that you're fishing in between tournament games?

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. He's well aware. He, he knows, he, he knows that's my pressure release. So,

• 33:45Speaker 06

  Perfect.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we're all good there.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Will, I want to go back to late January, your 83-71 victory on the road against Michigan State. Huge win against the number 11 team in the country, your in-state rivals and a program with a lot of pedigree. Two days later, you posted a photo of you pulling a bluegill out of the ice. What were they biting on that day?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Oh, yeah. Okay. So that was, funny thing about that, I was supposed to go salmon fishing at this harbor up on Lake Huron and my spot had frozen over. I was so pissed. So we, on the way back, we hit Lake St. Clair, um, just went into the canals and just hammered bluegills. Um, I think we were just tipping jigs, like little tungsten jigs with, um, with waxes.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:37Speaker 06

  Now, you got a talented squad up there, some potential NBA draft picks. Uh, if you could only fish for one species for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Oh, my. Um, I'd probably have to say smallmouth.

• 34:54Speaker 06

  Uh, just, you know, with, um, you know, how hard they fight, they're, they're fun to catch. Uh, now you guys have had some big changes during your time in Ann Arbor. Uh, Coach Dusty May took over in March of 24. You've had a lot of roster turnover. Uh, now in Coach May's second season, you guys are on your way to the Sweet 16 for the second year in a row. Do you keep your own boat on campus?

• 35:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's in my garage at our house. Nice, nice. Uh, last question here, Will. You guys have a tough matchup on Friday against the number four seed Crimson Tide. They're a high tempo, offensive minded team with some of the nation's highest three point shooting volume and efficiency. When was the last time you ate a fish that you caught?

• 35:42Speaker 06

  Um, two weeks, uh, I didn't catch that one. Um, man, I'd probably say October was the last time. Mmm, preseason. I ate a fish. Yeah, that was preseason. That was Lake St. Clair Walleyes. I think that's probably the last time. My buddy caught some Walleyes when we went on, on the Detroit River a few weeks ago, but I can't lie, I, I didn't catch them. So, but I ate them. So. Very nice. Well, Will, thanks for taking the time during a busy week. Best of luck to you guys moving forward in the tournament. Appreciate it, man.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  That was a great segment, eh, guys? Would have killed on live.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  Uh, shout out to Will, though. He's a, uh, I know he's a fan of the show and, uh, he fishes probably harder than anybody in college sports. So, uh, it's great to.

• 36:32Steven Rinella?

  Hardest fisherman in college sports.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  I would, I, I feel very confident in saying that.

• 36:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay, uh, so someone sent us this. This is kind of a funny thing. I gotta laugh out of this. Tony's gonna explain it. I gotta laugh out of this. Phil, you got your little thing that makes the bleeps?

• 36:48Speaker 07

  Uh, I, I can do it in post. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:51Steven Rinella?

  So, well, first off, Tony, can you explain how, can you explain what's going? We'll read the letter, but can you explain, can you give the background on this? This, this, this is out of Wisconsin. So, Wisconsin's turkey tag system is they have a draw. The deadline's like December 10th every year. Get into it and as you can imagine, people are trying to draw early season tags. So, Wisconsin has six seasons, seven zones throughout the. State and the highest demand seasons are the first couple. Yeah. Everybody wants to hunt first, right? So people apply for those and generally those get soaked up in the lottery. Okay. But Wisconsin has a quota system per zone, per season that they will sell.

• 37:36Steven Rinella?

  One per day after a certain point in March. So this year was. Even if the pool. If there are tags left. Okay, so if, so if, if you apply for a season, season A. And then it gets all filled up. They don't then sell them online. No. It's only, it's only. So these are all leftovers. So, but, but people count on it because Wisconsin has, I mean, depending on the zone, right? Southern part of the state, tons of tags, you move farther north. Fewer tags, right? So one zone this year, zone six, didn't have any leftover tags. So you couldn't. For any season. Nope.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Is there a point system, Tony, or is it just lottery?

• 38:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So there is a point system, but you can kind of count on getting tags in a lot of places. Yeah. You know, it might not be the season you want. So what happens is every year in March, they'll have a date and they go, okay. Zone one licenses go on sale at 10 a.m. on March 16th. Okay. March 17th at 10 a.m. Zone two, right on down the line to whatever's left. And then once they've gone through this first phase where it's just. That day is dedicated to that zone. Got it. Then they're all first come, first served and you can buy one a day till they're gone. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of competition. For those takes, because people are trying to buy the earliest tags they can generally, or if.

• 38:58Steven Rinella?

  You know, the kids are going to be off of school and you want to hunt with them. You're trying to get that weekend or however that falls for you. Yeah. So this is a system where you can show up 15 minutes. For the 10 a.m. launch and get in line and you're waiting there in a virtual queue. And then at 10 o'clock, they assign you a spot. And so you might be fifth in line. And it's not how, it's not tied to how long you were on the phone. Nope, nope. So you can be there eight hours early and it doesn't matter. You can only get into the virtual queue 15 minutes early. Right, so uh in, and I know you're gonna go into this, but in, in the interest of journalistic integrity. Oh, do whatever you want. I have to say that I was involved in this.

• 39:42Steven Rinella?

  And so was Patrick Durkin, our mutual friend. So is Bubbly Doug. Right, uh, so I, it worked out in the end, but I went through this. What we're gonna get into, uh, but that is, that's the gist of the system. That's how it works. And I wanted just a little added color here, cause this has helped explain a thing to me is like, take, take Doug, where Doug lives. Right. Doug will usually say, and I'm understanding it better now, he usually say there will be D season, there's, he'd be like, there's always some D seasons. Right. Meaning whatever, by that means A, B, C get consumed in the draw. But then there's, but then there's some D, so you might be on the lottery, you're not hoping to score a A, you're in the queue waiting to get a D.

• 40:28Steven Rinella?

  Just trying to get something. Because that's what's there. That's what's there. Right, so you, you gotta imagine like a lot of midwestern states, you're talking a mid-April opener that goes through the end of May. And so if you look at where Doug lives, I would assume Doug is in zone one, which has a ton of tags. So the highest priority one will be the first season that's available after the lottery, which will often, you can count on D season. And if you wanted to hunt later than that, you can count on the seasons after that and you could end up having multiple tags if you want, uh, so it's. It's actually a really cool system because you can kind of, if you, if you have the opportunity, you can hunt a couple of different weeks or you know, I mean, you can, you can plan around that.

• 41:12Steven Rinella?

  But this style, their style of

• 41:17Steven Rinella?

  running a whole ton of turkey seasons that are all one week long or roughly one week long. That's an odd system.

• 41:27Steven Rinella?

  It, it is, it is. Yeah. So you like, instead of being like, oh, it's turkey season. I'm going to hunt for six weeks. It's like, no, you're gonna hunt a week.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  It's like Colorado big game season.

• 41:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Colorado's big game season. It's like, you're like the first season, second season, third season, fourth season. Right. And it's, so I'm, I'm less sensitive to it because Minnesota has gone through, we've, we've way liberalized at home, but when I started turkey hunting, you had to draw a season and you had five days and it was half days. So you could hunt till noon. Yep. And then they started expanding it and eventually we could hunt till three 30 and then we could hunt till sunset. And eventually they sold a season long archery license. You could get the six weeks. So this is, you know, I don't know where this originated from, but I would assume that this system is old and it comes from when they didn't have very many turkeys. Yeah. Cause that's where ours, you know, Yep.

• 42:19Steven Rinella?

  Came from. So.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Might be an aspect of spreading pressure out too there.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  It definitely is that. Sure, man. It definitely is. Cause not everybody is all gonna hunt the opener. Right. Or the bulk of people are gonna hunt the opener. And if you're a non-resident, you're just about never going to hunt those early seasons. So was this deal here that happened, was it really that different than normal? Well, do you want to get into that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get into it. Should I read the, should I read the thing? Yeah, you should. So someone read like a frustrated user.

• 42:50Steven Rinella?

  Your system sucks.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  Waited in line, was 3,800 in line. I live in zone two and you gave me a permit for zone seven. Then I waited for the bonus, waited all the way to my number and your thing bailed out on me. You inbred piece is a, I'm not even gonna say it.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Mother.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  There were no periods or commas in that comment.

• 43:23Steven Rinella?

  Not Donald, well, Donald not happy.

• 43:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  Not Donald Trump.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Nope.

• 43:29Steven Rinella?

  Same number.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Got a different president's last name.

• 43:33Speaker 06

  Can we pull up the DNR's response? I noticed the DNR replied to that.

• 43:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they replied to it?

• 43:38Speaker 04

  No, I can't. I can't bring it up on screen.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  Oh, that's right. Sorry. I didn't mean to.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  Thanks, Randall.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  I'm scrolling through the comments now. I can't find Don's post.

• 43:46Steven Rinella?

  So, Don. Don's miffed. Fired up. Ain't winning Don back. I can tell you that I was too. Oh, you were? Okay. So, I got into that virtual queue. And I have added pressure because I need to get myself a tag and I need to try to get in and get my daughter's tags. So, I have to log in, get in line, log in. And so, I'm stressing. I get in the line, or they assign me my spot. I have four people ahead of me. Which made me feel like when you get in really early boat draw in a tournament and you're like, nobody's gonna be on my starting spot. This is smooth sailing. So, I get in, go to buy my tag, simple, and then it won't process my payment. And you know you're on the ticking clock because they're funneling through a bunch of people.

• 44:29Steven Rinella?

  And this is before they had issued a, hey, we were having technical difficulty to stick around, you know, the spinning wheel of death or whatever. And so, I'm like, okay, they're gonna boot me out. I tried to buy it 5,000 times, but I'm like, I don't wanna refresh or go back because I'll lose my spot. Yeah, yeah. And I had, you know, four people ahead of me, you know? And you know thousands of people are in line. You feel the weight of all those people. I felt a lot of weight there. And so, then the system kicks me out. And so, I have a little dad anger temper tantrum that you get sometimes when you gotta build an exercise bike or something, you know? Fix the garage door.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  So, then I have to get back in. You know, they, they, they issue the statement that it's not working. They're running through a tech. Payment processing glitch.

• 45:20Steven Rinella?

  I get, I'm waiting to get back in. I'm waiting for them to start letting us queue up. And I checked my email just randomly. And it had a receipt for, from the Wisconsin DNR. Oh. And so I'm like.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 45:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay, did I get my license? And then I looked at my, like, see if there's anything pending on my credit card, and there was. So I'm like, my payment somehow must have gotten through, even though I didn't know it, and it didn't show me. I didn't have the receipt on the actual Go Wild site. But I gotta wait in line anyway, because my, I gotta get my daughters in there. They finally opened it up. I get back in. There are, I can't remember what place I was. Interesting that you put yourself in front of your daughters.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  I noticed that too.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, here, here's why.

• 46:10Steven Rinella?

  I hunt with a buddy of mine down there. Okay. And I knew that I would be able to probably get one of my daughter's tags, if not both of them. But I'm like, I gotta take one of them for sure. So we're gonna hunt together, kinda thing, and we're gonna hunt with him. So I'm like, I, I knew we would get the tags probably. Like, did that make any sense to you? I wasn't anticipating this. Okay. Like, I'm like, I'm gonna get in. But yeah, generally like, yeah. Right. Tony first. Right.

• 46:40Steven Rinella?

  So I get kicked back in. I got like 11,000 people in front of me. And I'm like, this has been like an hour and a half deal. It goes by fairly quick. Finally get in there, buy one of my daughter's tag, and I'm like, I wonder if this will let me just use this window. And I got back in, got the other one tags, so I'm. Yeah. A fairly good father, I guess. Not as good as I thought I was when I started this story. Anyway. People start losing their shit. Like, you start seeing this out there, right? And so Corinne asked me to look into this for this, because we knew this Donald fellow was pretty ticked off.

• 47:21Steven Rinella?

  And I know, even though I'm a Minnesota resident, I hunt Wisconsin all the time. I own land over there. I know the general vibe toward the DNR. Like there's, Wisconsin hunters are not shy about speaking out against the DNR. So I dig into this and I find an article by Pat in where, where he has, he had the same experience. He wrote about it. He did write about it. And in Pat's article, uh, he referred to this, this problem with their system as a thundering herd problem in the IT world, which I love as a name, right? Everybody runs to the same spot, the system crashes.

• 48:05Steven Rinella?

  And so in his reporting, Pat said that this thundering herd problem, which shuts down the system for a while, has happened in Wisconsin three times in 18 years. And when I read that, I was like, man, I kind of remember going through this at some other point. Uh, so it's, it has definitely happened before. Um, but this Donald fellow blaming the Wisconsin DNR and people getting super pissed. You know, we know because of what we do with this, with this company, sometimes you contract out services. Yeah. Right? So the Wisconsin DNR doesn't really run that service. Hmm. You know, it is, it is contracted. There's not like a game warden sitting there like building writing.

• 48:46Speaker 07

  Sweat pouring down his face.

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  What I, what it reminded me of, uh, you know, back in the day of being, being primarily an outdoor writer, which was my gig for a long time and a lot of people in here have done that. You know how it is where you send something in and maybe it's supposed to be 2,000 words and you send it in at 2,200 or so, you know, they get, they sell an ad and they got to cut it down by 300 words. And that's where a lot of typos in the magazines came from was, you know, that last minute edit where you're like, we gotta get this down to 1,500 words to fit. And you'd see some continuity issue in there somewhere. And then people would call you out as the writer and be like, you suck, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, I didn't have. You don't even know grammar. Right, right. So I feel like the Wisconsin DNR has, has been blamed in a way that maybe they shouldn't be.

• 49:33Steven Rinella?

  Uh, and so I dug into that a little more because I, I understand why people were so pissed off because I was, uh, having gone.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  On through it, but we have had all kinds of thundering herd problems in the outdoor space. So I don't know if anybody had to buy or tried to buy Idaho.

• 49:50Steven Rinella?

  Idaho.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Idaho tag.

• 49:51Steven Rinella?

  That's famous for it.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  That was, I think, twenty twenty two Idaho had a day long system crash. Uh, Pennsylvania had this happen with antlerless tags in twenty twenty three. And so it's not, this is just a thing that happens with technology. And then I, so then I, I was like, well, where else does this happen? Uh, Ariana Grande in twenty twenty five had six million people try to buy a pre-sale ticket event.

• 50:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Crash the whole thing. Oasis reunion tour. Oh. Same deal.

• 50:21Steven Rinella?

  Really, the reunion tour?

• 50:23Speaker 04

  It, oh, right, right, right. Uh, ACDC in twenty twenty four had thirty five thousand people rush the digital door.

• 50:30Steven Rinella?

  Thunderstruck.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Those aren't the kind of fans you want to get mad.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  Right. Super, recent Super Bowls, NBA Finals, video game releases, Comic Con events. Harvard University commencement access. What? Had it, apparently. Uh, and.

• 50:48Steven Rinella?

  They can keep that.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  House of the Mouse, Walt Disney World has had this happen too. So.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Great recording. Thank you. This is a, uh, problem that just happens. Now, the one thing that I didn't encounter in any of the twenty two minutes I did researching this. Was.

• 51:08Steven Rinella?

  You did an phenomenal job.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Was the situation where.

• 51:11Steven Rinella?

  Hope you're. No, it's good.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Where Donald said that he had tried to get a, I think he said zone two tag and ended up with zone seven or something.

• 51:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  I didn't see that anywhere and I even went to like.

• 51:22Steven Rinella?

  I almost wonder if Donald didn't maybe make a mistake.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Well, so you would think that, but in the system, you really shouldn't be able to, because when you, when you get in on the specific day, there's a drop down. Uh, you know, it's like zone one tag and then a drop down for the season.

• 51:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  And it doesn't let you go.

• 51:38Steven Rinella?

  So it wasn't his fault.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  But, and so I went to like, uh, this, the state page, the Wisconsin state page on Bo site. You know, I went to some forums to just see if there were other.

• 51:48Steven Rinella?

  People bitching about that kind of thing. And I didn't find it anywhere else. So that one is like a little bit of a mystery on what happened there. Got it.

• 51:57Speaker 07

  I found the Wisconsin DNR's response on Facebook to Donald. And then Donald replied to them again.

• 52:04Steven Rinella?

  Did they make amends?

• 52:05Speaker 07

  Well, Randall and I will do some role playing for you here. I will be the Wisconsin DNR. Randall is going to be Donald. So Wisconsin DNR says, hi, Donald, we are aware of the issue and are working with our technology provider to resolve it.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  You.

• 52:20Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 52:22Speaker 07

  Yes. A just simple.

• 52:24Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that dude needs to just have his license yanked, man. Really?

• 52:28Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. He's got his full name on Facebook.

• 52:30Steven Rinella?

  That's what he said?

• 52:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, I'm looking at it right here.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Maybe yes.

• 52:35Steven Rinella?

  God loves to hug turkeys. Yeah, really quick, this episode airs tomorrow, so I don't have a lot of time to go through and bleep stuff out. So we can just try to keep this to a minimum.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  He might be the kind of guy who's gonna go get a turkey with a license or not.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Sorry, Phil.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  With the full context, I regret doing what I just did.

• 52:51Steven Rinella?

  Thank you, Tony.

• 52:53Speaker 01

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• 53:24Steven Rinella?

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• 54:03Steven Rinella?

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• 54:44Steven Rinella?

  flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today.

• 55:23Steven Rinella?

  That's MKC.com. Over to Brody. tungsten, like, speaking of turkeys.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  Did you interview Max Barton's party reporter?

• 55:34Speaker 03

  I did. I'll get to that.

• 55:35Steven Rinella?

  This is a big deal.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Um, so if you're not aware of your turkey hunter and you're not aware, um, that TSS ammo is extremely expensive if you can even get your hands on it these days. Um, and some people might not be aware of why that is. And there's a global tungsten shortage, um, mostly driven by China's dominance and kind of like owning the tungsten mining field. Um, but there's also like export restrictions, tariffs and rising military, like global geopolitical conflicts, wars, if you will. So in the last year or so, the price of like raw tungsten is up 500%.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  Darn.

• 56:22Steven Rinella?

  In one year.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  That's a really good return on investment.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Nearly depleted. It's likely a multi-year supply deficit. Um, supplies are nearly exhausted, I said, and, and, and like, production, so the, production can't like, recover or ramp up. There's just no way. And competition for the resources increasing, um.

• 56:44Steven Rinella?

  And then this stuff has a self-perpetuating quality, because the minute I learned about this, what did I do?

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Well, same thing I did.

• 56:51Steven Rinella?

  Same thing I did.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Same exact thing.

• 56:54Steven Rinella?

  It was like the 22 ammo crisis.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 56:56Steven Rinella?

  All my life, I'd always bought like a little box of 22 shells. The minute there was an ammo crisis, I'm like, I need three bricks.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. No, I went out of the garage. I was like, how many of these things do I got? How many do I need to buy? Um, the reason tungsten is, is like a highly coveted material is it's very dense, very hard, very heat resistant. And it's like, beyond turkey ammo, it's used in defense and military systems, aerospace, electronics, industrial applications. Um, and so the main drivers of the, the supply problem are, are, is China, who kind of controls 80% of the global supply.

• 57:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Um, and tariffs on Chinese tungsten are up 200 to 300% in the last year or so. And so exports have dropped to nearly zero in the last year. And, and on top of the China thing, we got wars going on in Ukraine, now a new one in Iran, and tungsten's used in armor. What's that? Iran, Iran, Iran?

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Popping.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Tungsten's used in armor piercing rounds, missiles.

• 58:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  And other.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  High-performance munitions.

• 58:08Steven Rinella?

  Just got to go back to shooting turkeys the old way.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. We'll get to that, man. Um, and the thing, I, I, this is something I didn't consider is tungsten that's used in warfare is permanently removed from the global supply. Right? So it can't be like, once you shoot it, it's gone.

• 58:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Um, and supply chains are shifting towards mil- military allocation first, like industry, turkey hunting, that's all like way down the line.

• 58:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, turkey hunting's way down the line.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Sadly.

• 58:43Steven Rinella?

  Like the Department of Treasury is like, well, let's get the turkey hunters taken care of. And then we'll then we'll move on to munitions.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And it's kind of tungsten's been defined as a critically strategic mineral.

• 58:52Speaker 07

  Really?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Yep. So now we get to the TSS stuff. So most everyone probably knows what it is, but if you're not familiar tungsten super shot, which is mostly used by turkers, turkey hunters and like really rich waterfowlers will use it too. You ever use that stuff?

• 59:09Steven Rinella?

  I use bismuth for tur- for waterfowl. But that's a rich guy anyway, though.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  I, yeah, yeah. Uh, so TSS is 95% tungsten. Tungsten's twice as dense as lead, about little, little less. Um, but what that means is a tiny number nine TSS pellet weighs the same as a number five lead pellet. So in a shell, a shotgun shell, you get way more shot pellets per shell, carrying way more energy over longer distances. And it's like, like it's made a huge difference in turkey hunting. Like I personally can say it's like the biggest change in turkey hunting that I've seen in my life has been TSS ammo as far as like killing turkeys.

• 59:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're killing turkeys with pellets the size of coarse ground black pepper.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude. And, and even at 60 yards, like if you're steady and you're drawing a bead on a gobbler, like he's already, you know, he's already dead. Like he ain't walking away.

• 1:00:04Speaker 05

  What, what would the, how does it change the effective range compared to?

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  I, like, I mean, you might get lucky shooting lead number fives and kill one at 60 yards because you get one pellet in his head.

• 1:00:16Steven Rinella?

  Well, you have a dense pattern.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:00:18Speaker 07

  Right. Well, you have twice as many pellets.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Like, I'm not uncomfortable shooting at a gobbler at 60 yards.

• 1:00:24Steven Rinella?

  Really? But listen, dude, if I like, I'll go back to the old, I don't care.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  We're going to get to that, man. Um, so last year, 40 to 60 bucks for a box of 12 or 20 gauge TSS. This year you're looking at 80 to 100, in some cases up to 200.

• 1:00:43Steven Rinella?

  I've gotten it before that happened.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Stuff. Um, so now manufacturers are questioning like is a hunter, the average hunter gonna pay twenty to thirty bucks a shell? And the thing is, is like prices are gonna stay high or they're gonna keep going up. Inventory's shrinking and it's just, the price is just gonna keep climbing. So like the, the days of like semi affordable TSS loads that like might be a thing of the past.

• 1:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Like this is not a blip. You're not feeling like this is a blip. It's new reality.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  No, because it's like the supply is years behind. Like one, I saw a quote from one custom turkey manufact- turkey ammo manufacturer, Salt Creek Custom Ammo.

• 1:01:24Steven Rinella?

  I've, I've bought from them before.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Says, TSS is dead.

• 1:01:27Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so if this happens, man, it's like not only the ammo thing, but like I hunt turkeys with a twenty gauge. My kids have killed them with a four ten. Guys are hunting them with twenty eight gauges now. So like these small bore shotguns.

• 1:01:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the four ten as a turkey gun became a turkey gun because of TSS.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  And it could just be like useless now.

• 1:01:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, my kids killed their first turkey shooting four tens.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:55Steven Rinella?

  With TSS.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  But even twelve gauge hunters, like you said, are probably gonna have to switch back to some kind of lead shot and just get better at bringing turkeys in close, uh, if this is the case.

• 1:02:09Steven Rinella?

  Better at ditch crawling.

• 1:02:10Speaker 05

  When was TSS introduced to the turkey world? Like how long has it lasted?

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  I started hunting with tungsten probably like in two thousand twelve to fourteen, but that wasn't this TSS stuff. They were using like, I remember having like a blend of five, six, seven.

• 1:02:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like third degrees had some tungsten in them. Yeah. That's, I still got a little stash of that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Full on tungsten, I don't know, like eight years ago, six, eight years.

• 1:02:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, when you started being able to just like buy, you know, when, when all the guys I hang out with started shooting number nine tungsten, it wasn't that many years ago.

• 1:02:45Speaker 07

  So Brody, as a, as a fan of tungsten, like I am too. When I started using it, my daughters killed turkeys with a four ten. Game changer. My daughters actually shot nine times of, with TSS in one hour of turkey hunting.

• 1:03:01Speaker 07

  And I had to strangle the only bird we got.

• 1:03:03Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  Now I know you only want to buy one of them turkey tag.

• 1:03:06Speaker 07

  I can tell you one thing.

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  Uh, in that blind, I was swearing worse than Donald was when he couldn't get his tag.

• 1:03:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  Is that right? Oh, my God.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  When you, it is a problem. When your ammo, when your turkey ammo, the shell, not the box, the shell costs more than a turkey tag.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:03:24Steven Rinella?

  That's a problem.

• 1:03:25Speaker 06

  Well, right. And when you're digging in your backpack for another box of ammo in, in the first hour of a hunt? And there's tears in the blind, rough stuff.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  And for people that aren't familiar, a box of TSF ammo is five shots.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  It's not like a bar.

• 1:03:42Steven Rinella?

  But, and, and Matt, tell the Max Barde part of this.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Max hit the jackpot.

• 1:03:46Steven Rinella?

  Me and him were down in Nevada and Fallon, Nevada.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  No one hunts, that's, I am convinced that's why he got.

• 1:03:51Steven Rinella?

  They got turds, but.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  They, yeah, they got a few.

• 1:03:53Steven Rinella?

  We were in Fallon, Nevada. I was in the hotel room. Max wanders into some sporting goods store and walks out of there with.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Five, no, eight boxes of four ten TSS. He paid thirty bucks a piece for it. So that would have been, that would have been half off last year.

• 1:04:08Steven Rinella?

  That was half, that, at that time, I go, that's half off. And I look at him like, that's more than half off at that moment. And then tungsten exploded and he said he's gonna sell me back a box.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  But Max is like, I don't even need this stuff. I'm just buying it because.

• 1:04:22Steven Rinella?

  He's hoarding. Well, that contributes to the problem.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  So, th- does this change the calculus? Cause when people look at expensive turkey shells, like you mentioned, if you're gonna go waterfall hunting, you're like, it's a different thing, you know, bismuth, whatever, you're gonna just burn through some money, right? But the justification for those super expensive shells was they performed so well.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Well, I never minded it for turkeys. Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're only gonna shoot a couple of times.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  Whatever in people's head, dude. Someone tells you, it's like, you know, and you, I don't know, you just kinda, you get like used to stuff. I'm going back to shooting as well. I'm going, I still have some of my dad's turkey ammo.

• 1:04:57Speaker 06

  Right. I mean, we killed.

• 1:04:59Speaker 07

  Tons of turkey.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you forget so quickly, man. Like, it's just.

• 1:05:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go shoot them with like number five copper plated.

• 1:05:07Speaker 07

  You ever have, uh, with those little nines, you ever have somebody shoot like the breast?

• 1:05:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, you can.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta, yeah, you gotta make sure.

• 1:05:14Steven Rinella?

  You brush your teeth all the hell?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:05:16Steven Rinella?

  Thank you, Brody. You get?

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Well, I got one little thing. It's an add on to this.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  About, about Trump's tariffs. It's, this is not just a TSS thing. Um. The prices of other ammunition are also on the rise because ammo production kinda is also like a global thing. Nitrocellulose, a gunpowder ingredient is sourced internationally. Um, and US tariffs on imports are increasing the cost of raw materials and finished ammo. Um, as an example. Uh, ammo companies, it's like a thin margin, so they can't absorb these tariffs. So, uh, ammo manufacturers are reporting a 15% price increase over since 2024.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  And an example is bulk nine millimeter has gone from 23 cents around in mid 2025, so less than a year. To 35 cents around right now. So, yeah, that's almost like a third. Yeah. There's actually a 50% increase.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  It's a war on shooters.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  So there you go.

• 1:06:20Speaker 07

  The top 12 gauge TSS round at Bass Pro right now is $19 a shell. And the 410 ammo is all about half price of the 12 gauge.

• 1:06:29Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that'll make, you know what it's gonna lead to is people not shooting his mate Jake's, man.

• 1:06:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'd be like, I don't know, dude, like 20 bucks?

• 1:06:37Speaker 07

  Be back in the glory days.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  It's not gonna affect me. I'll still shoot them.

• 1:06:40Steven Rinella?

  Right. Me too. All right, over to Bear Newcomb for some Oklahoma Bear News. Yeah, um, did I earlier say Arkansas Bear News? I believe I did.

• 1:06:48Speaker 07

  You did say.

• 1:06:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna, you know what? I'm gonna redo the whole beginning.

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  People listening now won't know what I'm talking about.

• 1:06:56Speaker 05

  Wow. Well, uh, so House Bill 4128 is a new bill proposition in Oklahoma. And basically what they're proposing is an extension of the Oklahoma bear season by two weeks earlier.

• 1:07:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:11Speaker 05

  So if you, if you bait bears in the southeast, you know, that is a huge difference. Cause baiting success is entirely dependent on when the acorns drop.

• 1:07:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  It's historic. Acorns.

• 1:07:24Steven Rinella?

  I'm following.

• 1:07:24Speaker 05

  It's a, the season has historically started on October 1st. They're wanting to bump it up to September 15th. So usually it starts after the acorn drop. They're wanting to bump it a full two weeks to before the acorn drop.

• 1:07:36Steven Rinella?

  When they're more susceptible to bait.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:07:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cause your father has told me, he's like, it doesn't matter what you're using for bait. Once they can get acorns.

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  They're out of there.

• 1:07:47Steven Rinella?

  They want acorns.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Steven Rinella?

  More than donuts.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, and then they want to bump the bear quota up by 300%.

• 1:07:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:56Speaker 05

  And the, the truth is, is that Oklahoma could afford to take a few more bears. The bear population is doing really well, but it is just super abrupt and super aggressive. And what's happening is, uh, the House Representative Scott Fetgatter, he, he's the one pushing the bill. And if you, if you watch some of the, the meetings and the hearings, he's talking, he, he brings his own evidence for how much, how many bears can be taken out. All his evidence is from Kentucky, the state of Kentucky, which has four different, three or four different states pouring bear populations.

• 1:08:31Steven Rinella?

  That's where he's pulling his management data from.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  Right, whereas Oklahoma has one, and that's Arkansas. And so it's, if you, in the meetings, I watched a clip right before this where he was talking about all of his evidence that he's gathered for why they should push the season up. And the issue is, is this, there's a whole, there's a whole, uh, this guy shouldn't be the one who's doing the science to manage the bear population.

• 1:08:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  It needs to be the, the game and fish commissions and the wildlife department. Um, and so it's just, like, like the bill itself isn't a massive deal. Like, I think if the bill goes through, a bunch of bears get killed. Like, we just won't kill as many bears and they'll have to adjust from there. But what it's doing is it's setting the precedent for legislators to be able to, to, to make laws based on self-interest and.

• 1:09:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like, the agency is like, our research, our modeling shows that this is, and, and I should clarify this. If you have an agency that's a good steward and a good pro hunting agency, and the agency is like, this is what we're comfortable with, and then a lawmaker goes, we should be killing a bunch more.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:09:47Steven Rinella?

  Based on my own home research job, so I'm gonna usurp you, you eggheads at the agency and, and, and here's my proposal.

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the crazy thing is, is that the, uh, the bear commissioner or the, the bear coordinator just got approved to do a two-year study, uh, on the bear population, and in two years will have really scientifically based numbers on what the harvest can be.

• 1:10:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  You mentioned earlier, like, they could probably afford to shoot a few more, but it's not a big population. It's,

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  No, and they, they can't afford to shoot three hundred percent more. That's for sure.

• 1:10:25Steven Rinella?

  Are you saying the season would go from two weeks long to, to how long?

• 1:10:30Speaker 05

  It would open two weeks earlier.

• 1:10:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  So, and that's when all the, the bears are killed, is in that first week, usually. And, uh, yeah, so it's just, it's just lack of science.

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  What is his motivation? Like, here's, here's a quote from him, th- this representative. What's his name, Fat Gatter?

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  Gatter, yeah.

• 1:10:49Steven Rinella?

  Here's a quote from him. "We look at bears as cute cuddly little animals that we can sleep at night with. But the reality of it is, they're very dangerous." This really is what, but is that like, but what is his motivation?

• 1:11:04Speaker 05

  That, that's the-

• 1:11:05Steven Rinella?

  Is he a big hunter?

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  Question. He's a deer breeder. And so, that, this is where it kinda gets interesting is, he's a deer breeder.

• 1:11:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:13Speaker 05

  And I think a lot of people would be familiar with the CWD bill that is about to get pushed where essentially private landowners can, can buy deer that are captive bred deer that are perceivably immune to CWD.

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  And then release them into the wild. Um, which, that's a whole nother conversation, but, so he's a deer breeder and there's, here's word on the street. This is kinda some speculation, so I don't, I don't wanna say this is fact, but this is word on the street.

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  There's a, there's another-

• 1:11:43Steven Rinella?

  Dispensing, you're, you're a rumor. This is a rumor.

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  This is a rumor.

• 1:11:46Steven Rinella?

  Just say it's a rumor.

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  It's a rumor. There's another deer breeder there in Oklahoma. And he is the one who originally, or not originally, but he's, he's pushing really hard for the bear bill.

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  And for the CWD bill. But Fet Gatter, I mean, it would make no sense for Fet Gatter to put his name on the CWD bill because he's a deer breeder.

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Um, but, this other guy, rumor is they're really good friends. And this other guy hates bears because they're eating his fawns and they're, they're getting on his property.

• 1:12:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  He has a property that is surrounded on three or four sized national forest, which, if you, if you got a property surrounded by national forest in southeast Oklahoma, there's gonna be a bunch of bears.

• 1:12:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  And, so, he's pushing for the CWD bill and the bear bill, really hard. And so, the, my question too is also like, what's, what's the motivation behind it?

• 1:12:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  And I've not gotten a concrete answer, but, the, my, my personal speculation would, would be to think that he's just a deer hunter, who doesn't like the bears killing the deer, or, or is under that impression that bears are just wiping out the deer population.

• 1:12:55Steven Rinella?

  Or he's a bear hunter, and he realizes that if he had two weeks earlier hunting, he'd have a better bear season.

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's true. That's, that's another, another thought, but- He also, like the, you know, he would have, it would benefit him massively to be able to sell captive deer as well.

• 1:13:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 05

  And I wonder if he's not just like a deer hunter who wants the Oklahoma genetics, maybe to, to be influence, to, to have better genetics in Oklahoma, or, you know, it's, it seems like his mind is only on the deer.

• 1:13:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  Not the bear.

• 1:13:28Steven Rinella?

  So what's your, like, what's your take on the bear deal? You think it's, you think it's too, too much harvest?

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  I think it's too much harvest, and I think, I think it just needs to be slower. I mean, like, the season might could afford to be bumped two weeks up. But to do that all in one year and then to bump the quota up by 300%.

• 1:13:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 05

  Is, uh, is just way too fast to be doing something like that. And I just don't think that the, a House representative needs to be doing the research.

• 1:13:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  And needs to be pushing for, for a bill like that. That needs to be done inside of the Wildlife Department.

• 1:14:00Steven Rinella?

  You'd advocate for a more incremental approach coming from the biologists?

• 1:14:04Speaker 05

  And a more scientific approach. And, and what this bill is, is it's just a broader representation of what's happening all across the country. Just lack of science-based management, and there's just a lot of, a lot of politics and opinions getting mixed in with wildlife regulations.

• 1:14:20Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's a theme. It's a theme. People get frustrated with the state agencies and they, and they find workarounds, ballot initiatives, whatever.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Steven Rinella?

  You know. Uh, Randall's gonna touch on a few bear hunting issues too. Thank you.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, quick update from Washington. Uh, they released a game management plan, um, which is like a doc, it's a long, very long document that provides recommendations to Game and Fish Commission, and we know in Washington that there have been issues with individuals associated with the commission being antagonistic towards hunting and fishing. Um, but one of, so there's no like concrete changes yet as far as I'm aware, but as part of this game management plan, there's a, a sentence in it where it describes like the other sort of wildlife values associated with bears, and it, it makes mention of

• 1:15:14Speaker 06

  potentially delaying the fall bear season until after Labor Day. Because as we all know, Labor Day is a good weekend for wildlife viewers to go out and look at bears, and so they want to avoid uh, folks, you know, out there with their binoculars and their picnic baskets.

• 1:15:29Steven Rinella?

  Watching bears.

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Watching bears get, get shot. Um.

• 1:15:34Speaker 06

  Like it's it's I guess this came up in some sort of earlier policy debate and it had gone away and then it's sort of mysteriously this language mysteriously resurfaced in the game management plan and and it seems to have caught the attention of sportsmen's groups after this game management plan was published but I know there's a lot of folks worked up about it and not only just like out of self-interest but it it sort of poses hunters as antagonistic towards other public land users you know and I was

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  And anyone who's familiar with that era at sorry with that area like like bear hunting in that state um this is this is make believe land that there's conflict between these like wildlife viewers and bear hunters is make believe.

• 1:16:29Speaker 06

  Right and so most units I guess open currently August 1st or August 15th and so if you were to push that back after Labor Day that's basically cutting a month off the season and

• 1:16:41Steven Rinella?

  It is early season.

• 1:16:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:16:43Steven Rinella?

  It's early.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  But also I think like the context of them losing the spring bear hunt not all that long ago is is still there are fresh wounds about that and

• 1:16:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm not when I when I bring up that it's early season.

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:57Steven Rinella?

  I'm not saying that like I'm not saying they should change it I'm just saying if if it was otherwise if it was if it was always otherwise always a month later people would never look and be like what gives why is your bear season so late because that's kind of like bear season like they have a very early fall bear season.

• 1:17:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I I was reading some commentary on this and there was a guy who made a great point and he said he said I'm like a total backpacker public land user what you would call like a REI type.

• 1:17:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Speaker 06

  And he said I'm also hunter and he said when I'm a hiker and I run into hunters on the trail we engage and have a positive like discussion and sort of like build that bridge and he said when I'm hunting I run into other hikers on the trail and it's a good opportunity for us to like build that again build the bridge between those two communities and so he's like Just the idea that we would try to separate out hunters from other public land users, even if that's not the intention. He's like, I just think in the long run. So I thought that was a great point. Um, but yeah, just something to keep an eye on. I don't know when their season setting takes place or when if uh there will be like action taken

• 1:18:20Speaker 06

  on this suggestion, but um it's out there now.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  There's a lot of similarities here between like the Wildlife Commission in Colorado and the Wildlife Commission in Washington.

• 1:18:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, right. And it stings having lost the spring bear season and then you're going to lose a month on fall. I mean, that's a real, that's a kick to the nut.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so that's some, obviously like something to keep your eye on, some disheartening news. And then at the same time, uh, in Arizona, there's a bill to redefine uh, mountain lions and bears as predatory animals. So they would get lumped in with foxes, skunks, coyotes, and bobcats.

• 1:19:00Steven Rinella?

  Mountain lions and bears?

• 1:19:02Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:19:03Steven Rinella?

  But these are game animals.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  Right, right. And um, I mean, I don't really understand. I guess there was a version of the bill earlier that that included wolves in that as well. Um, but cur- currently like it just means that they would be like non-game animals, right?

• 1:19:26Steven Rinella?

  But they got ESA protection right now.

• 1:19:29Speaker 06

  Well, that's so that that's I think why it was cut out, like the the wolves were cut out of the bill.

• 1:19:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the Mexican gray wolf in Arizona has ESA protection.

• 1:19:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I should have reached out to Heffelfinger because he'll probably have a lot of thoughts to to clear up my.

• 1:19:42Steven Rinella?

  So this is coming from, this is definitely coming from people who are who are.

• 1:19:49Steven Rinella?

  Who are concerned about predation.

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Steven Rinella?

  On deer and elk.

• 1:19:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, that's.

• 1:19:54Steven Rinella?

  And they want fewer predators on the landscape and they think the pathway to get there is just to deregulate mountain lions and black bears into like coyotes.

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:20:04Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 1:20:05Speaker 06

  Treat them like Berman.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I mean, that like in a lot of states, that's what they were up until the mid 20th century, early 20th century, and they're reclassified as game animals. And that's done well for all these species, right? Like it's been key to their recovery in a lot of places. So.

• 1:20:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't like, you know, that what's funny about all this stuff, man, all the stuff we're getting into is like, um,

• 1:20:31Steven Rinella?

  you know, bear talking about, well, they want to make a bear season bigger, right? And you look at that, you're like, ah, that's kind of problematic. So then someone is like, hey, we want to make a bear season shorter and you're left going like, well, that seems kind of problematic. Because what you're always trying to weigh out when you look at this is you're trying to lay out like, what are the motivations?

• 1:20:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:20:55Steven Rinella?

  What are the motivations of what people are driving at? And, and what happens when you take things to extreme? So like, the juxtaposition between the Washington move, hey, we're going to shorten bear season. You look like, well, you're motivated because you want to kill the whole thing. Like the person that wants to do that doesn't want anyone to hunt any bears.

• 1:21:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:21:16Steven Rinella?

  Right? And then you go down to Arizona, like, well, what's motivating that? The person that wants to do that doesn't want any bears.

• 1:21:24Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  And so you're trying to like, look at like, who's got pure intentions aligned with like long-term wildlife management and long-term interest, the hunters. And so you can wind up being.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  The agencies are those people.

• 1:21:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Steven Rinella?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  Like.

• 1:21:39Steven Rinella?

  And so you're looking to be like, well, it's just, but I'm saying like someone dropping in from another planet, it might be like, well, huh, but why is it a problem that they're like, making a season bigger, but it's also a problem that someone else is making a season shorter, like wh- which is right? And it's like, which is right? Is who has in mind, what goal are they pursuing?

• 1:21:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think like, I was up at the Capitol is last January. When there was a mule deer bill in the, in the committee being heard about, uh, basically making it so that FWP couldn't shut down mule deer buck hunting during the rut, if there were units that had low populations and the bill never went anywhere. But one of the committee members kind of stood up and grand standing and said, um, you know, how am I supposed to go back home to my district and tell these people that unelected bureaucrats are making decisions about their fish and wildlife? And I was just like, that's how it's supposed to work. It's like, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. Um, so I don't know,

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  like, I, I kind of wish in some instances that like-

• 1:22:45Steven Rinella?

  These unelected bureaucrats running the Supreme Court.

• 1:22:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, like state legislators, I feel like are particularly susceptible to doing this and like stepping in front of the agency and trying to make season setting decisions or quoted decisions.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  With your constituents pretty quick on a like a much tighter level than-

• 1:23:05Speaker 06

  But in the big picture health of like this whole system that we benefit from, it's not a, it's not a good thing.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

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• 1:23:41Steven 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. 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.

• 1:24:20Steven Rinella?

  I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with

• 1:25:01Steven Rinella?

  flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. Here's one. This is one, I've been wanting to talk about this because this is a

• 1:25:46Steven Rinella?

  major issue. I want to spend more time on in the future. This is a way of tipping it off and I'd like to find a great guest for the interview show just to come in and do a podcast interview about the issue of bottom trawling. Okay, I gotta explain this whole thing, but a bottom, the bottom trawling industry, particularly in international waters in Alaska, which has become like the subject of trawling has become a very contentious issue in recent years as we're seeing collapses and declines in certain fish stocks. Okay. When we say, when someone says bottom trawling and our term they use for it is like a dragger, dragging, okay. These bottom trawlers or draggers are usually

• 1:26:30Steven Rinella?

  targeting large schools of high volume, low quality fish like pollock, for instance.

• 1:26:38Steven Rinella?

  They got nets that they got nets the size of football fields. And the nets are weighted. So when you call them draggers, it's because they literally, this net system is heavily weighted and is literally dragged along the bottom to where it like scrapes up crabs and stuff.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  You can do a real quick search on YouTube, just type in bottom trawling video and you'll see what these things do. It's pretty like eye opening.

• 1:27:00Steven Rinella?

  It it like if you've been out raking your garden or something, it rakes the ocean floor. So people have long looked at what are the detriments of all that of like habitat destruction from dragging these nets? And also the bycatch in this industry hits some, some pretty crazy levels. So

• 1:27:24Steven Rinella?

  annually, it's estimated that annually draggers are discarding about 141 million pounds of bycatch. Okay. King salmon, chum salmon, halibut.

• 1:27:37Steven Rinella?

  Even killer whales. Okay. On the Yukon right now. So, so think about like this, like let's, let's talk about king salmon and halibut. King salmon are in bad, bad shape. Okay. There's been a king salmon, like indigenous people have been fishing king salmon on the Yukon River for 10,000 years. Right now, you can't keep a king salmon on the Yukon.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  You haven't been able to for a while.

• 1:28:01Steven Rinella?

  You cannot keep a king salmon on the Yukon. The draggers. And this, they have observers on board counting bycatch. These are not guesses. The draggers are killing more kings as bycatch than, than make it to the upper Yukon.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  There's a site you can go on. I was on the site earlier today. There's a site you can go on and you can track by date, the bycatch from the, from the dragging industry, the traw, the bottom trawling industry. Okay.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  This year, so 2026, as of, if you go on to the same, they got data up to March 7. Up to March 7, 2026, the draggers in, off Alaska's shorelines. They've killed 1.3 million pounds of halibut. Most years they're scratching off 3.5 to 4.5 million pounds of halibut.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  I got a question.

• 1:28:57Steven Rinella?

  And they, well, let me finish this point on that. And that's not counting the ones that are what's called deck sordid. Where halibut are removed and thrown back in. And some people estimate that 50% of those die, so that number isn't even totally there. They'll hit, in a year, they're gonna hit 35,000 kings, okay? So far this year, just in 2026, 10,800 kings as of, as of a month ago. 10,800 kings, and you can't keep a king on the Yukon, go ahead.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Those bottom trawlers are not set up to keep and use that bycatch. Like, like, they can't pull a king out and say, we're gonna send this to market, or a big halibut.

• 1:29:44Steven Rinella?

  No, this stuff, this stuff gets, now, I one time had burger and a beer with a bottom trawler.

• 1:29:51Steven Rinella?

  In Seattle, Washington, where the bottom trawling industry is like, like, he's like a friend of a friend. He's probably pissed at me right at this very second.

• 1:29:59Steven Rinella?

  He was talking about, he, he was making a point to me, talking about the guys that work on the boat. That when they come off the boat, they have pallets

• 1:30:11Steven Rinella?

  of fish to bring home.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  Per, per personal use, yeah.

• 1:30:14Steven Rinella?

  And I don't even know if that's loud or not. Pallets of fish, sable fish. But this stuff is getting kicked off, okay? Now, there's a poll that's out.

• 1:30:28Steven Rinella?

  It was, I don't know who conducted the poll. I haven't looked at the poll. There was a poll of a thousand people and it could, I didn't read the wording on the poll and you can heavily influence a poll by how you word a poll, right? And a really good pollster builds questions that aren't leading. I don't know what the questions are. I don't know how valid the polling data is, but there's some polling data suggesting that 74% of Alaskans oppose bottom trawling.

• 1:30:55Steven Rinella?

  What, what happened recently, there's this open letter where 5,000 Alaskans wrote an open letter to Representative Nick Begich, who apparently had campaigned on reining in the bottom trawlers. But since the election hasn't, in their mind, I don't know about the extent of this, in this letter's mind, hasn't, hasn't made good on the promise to rein in bottom trawlers.

• 1:31:23Steven Rinella?

  I was reading a quote from a guy, like, the part of the reluctance of regulating bottom trawling or outright banning bottom trawling is people are like, yes, these fisheries are imperiled and collapsing, but we don't know all the causes. And since we don't know all the causes, we shouldn't address any of the causes. And I was reading this guy's comment. He's like, let's say you got a little kid and he's got five McNuggets and all of a sudden he's got no McNuggets left. He gets five a day, but there's none. He learns that someone's throwing two in the garbage. He doesn't know where the other three are going, but there's two going in the garbage. Should he be like, well, I'm going to hold off on talking to the guy that's throwing two in the trash while I figure out what's happening to the other three?

• 1:32:05Steven Rinella?

  Or do you go like, okay, immediately, let's, let's stop the two in the trash and then we'll find out more about these other three. But that's, that's, that's the logic. They have, so if you read about this online, you'll find these like pro bottom trawling op-eds, which are from the industry. They have their own lobbying wing and they do the classic thing where they're like, it's out of state billionaires. Out of state billionaires pushing to ban bottom trawling. But the bottom trawling industry is by and large from Seattle. The, the 5,000 letters that went into Nick Baggots were, were Alaskans. The people that bitched to me about it, I don't know out of staters that know about this.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  The people that, that, that come to me and talk to me about the bottom trolling problem are commercial fishermen, long liners, charter captains in Alaska, talking to me about the bottom trolling problem. I'm not hearing it from out of state billionaires.

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  Yep. American Seafoods is one of the biggest bottom trolling companies. They're out of Seattle.

• 1:33:08Steven Rinella?

  But it's this classic, oh yeah, these out of touch billionaires. It's like, are you telling me there's a bunch of out of touch billionaires talking about bottom trolling? Well, yeah, what would be their game? They wouldn't know. Right. They'll, I'm sure they talk about pandas and stuff, but they're not talking about this.

• 1:33:26Steven Rinella?

  Anyhow.

• 1:33:27Speaker 06

  That's a great update, Steve. Thank you.

• 1:33:30Steven Rinella?

  I do think if I had to crystal ball this, if I had to, and, and, and it's like, it, it, it's like, I respect it. The, the people that want to keep that fishery going, they're defending their jobs, they're defending their livelihoods, they're defending their industry, they're defending their family. I understand it, but you are just, we are seeing culturally, we are seeing that these fisheries are in decline. They're going down. It doesn't look good. If I crystal ball it, I think that this is going to wind up being, when I crystal ball it, I think in years coming, this is going to wind up being more regulated and, and, and potentially phased out.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause I mean, right now it's just like, it's not even, they're killing other commercial fishermen. It's not like a sport fisherman.

• 1:34:18Steven Rinella?

  That's why I'm crystal balling it the way I am.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Steven Rinella?

  I'm crystal balling it the way I am because this has become divisive within the commercial industry. So it's not the commercial industry coalescing.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:34:29Steven Rinella?

  Right. And like, and defending their own. It's other, other people.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Steven Rinella?

  The pot industry, not pot like weed, but like pot fishery.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:34:37Steven Rinella?

  Industry, long lining industry. They're like, dude, you're making a problem.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:34:44Steven Rinella?

  Or do you Spencer?

• 1:34:46Speaker 07

  Uh, the Masters Golf Tournament. Tease off very soon. It'll be in Augusta, Georgia on April 9th. It's the most prestigious golf tournament in the world. Uh, on the line is a $4.2 million prize.

• 1:34:59Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:35:00Speaker 07

  The green jacket, an honorary membership at Augusta National Golf Club, and the winner gets to pick the menu for the Masters Champions Dinner the following year.

• 1:35:10Steven Rinella?

  Keep back up.

• 1:35:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Steven Rinella?

  They win a membership?

• 1:35:14Speaker 07

  An honorary membership. It's the hardest golf course to be a member at in the world.

• 1:35:19Steven Rinella?

  But I would think those dudes would all be members.

• 1:35:20Speaker 07

  No, that's, it's not good enough to just be rich and good at golf to be a member.

• 1:35:25Steven Rinella?

  It takes more than that.

• 1:35:26Speaker 07

  More than that even, yeah.

• 1:35:27Steven Rinella?

  It's one of the rare things in life to take more than that.

• 1:35:30Speaker 04

  This is like the second major time we're ever gonna be covering golf on this show.

• 1:35:34Steven Rinella?

  I hope Brian Harmon wins this year, but go on.

• 1:35:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, uh, so that, that happens April 9th. And the winner gets to pick the menu for the Masters Champions Dinner the following year. Uh, the Masters Champions Dinner, it's an exclusive meal for past winners. And the club chairman, yeah, it's the oldest whitest group you've ever seen.

• 1:35:53Steven Rinella?

  No, we're, but, but why is Tiger Woods not in there?

• 1:35:55Speaker 04

  Those of you watching on YouTube get the pleasure of this very stunning image.

• 1:36:00Speaker 07

  This photo was from a year when Tiger did not attend, uh, because of one of his injuries. Uh, so it's, it's for past winners and the club chairman. About 30 some people attend this.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  Do you remember the dude that made the really racist comment about Tiger Woods when Tiger Woods won the Masters?

• 1:36:14Speaker 07

  I, I think there were many dudes who made comments.

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  About this, it was about the dinner.

• 1:36:18Speaker 07

  Oh, we'll, we'll get to that, uh, later on here. Uh, about 30 people attend this dinner each year. Uh, not only does the previous winner set the menu, but he also pays for it. So you're, you're footing the bill for what you pick. Rory McElroy, he won the Masters in 2025 and his menu for this year was just announced. For the main course, you get to choose between a filet mignon and the seared salmon. Uh, the first course is yellowfin tuna carpaccio with foie gras. Uh, and for appetizers, he has peach and ricotta flatbread. Bacon wrapped dates, which were inspired by his mom's recipe, rock shrimp. tempura and grilled elk sliders. Uh, those grilled elk sliders will have caramelized onion jam with roasted garlic aioli.

• 1:37:02Speaker 07

  Uh, and, and although that last choice.

• 1:37:04Steven Rinella?

  You like, you like this whole thing.

• 1:37:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, this, it surprised people. This has been covered by the Today Show. It's been covered by BBC.

• 1:37:10Steven Rinella?

  It's not elk.

• 1:37:11Speaker 07

  Every year leading up to the Masters, there's like a handful of storylines that emerge. Um, and this, this is one of them.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  You mean, when you say it's been covered, it's like they're picking the elk thing out of.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  It's like.

• 1:37:20Speaker 07

  Yes, they're like, you won't believe what Rory McElroy is serving at this year's Masters dinner.

• 1:37:26Steven Rinella?

  But I heard that you think it's cool.

• 1:37:28Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's of interest to us.

• 1:37:30Steven Rinella?

  I heard you thought it was cool.

• 1:37:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it's cool. I think the Masters are cool. I think Rory is cool. I think it's cool that he picked wild game.

• 1:37:36Steven Rinella?

  But it's not wild game.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:37:38Speaker 07

  That, that he picked venison. I shouldn't say wild game, that he picked venison.

• 1:37:43Steven Rinella?

  It's a farm animal.

• 1:37:44Speaker 07

  I understand that.

• 1:37:45Steven Rinella?

  I heard he said that wild game propelled him to victory.

• 1:37:48Speaker 07

  He is, yeah, so.

• 1:37:49Steven Rinella?

  Like if I hung out in brothels, if I hung out in cat houses. And I've won the championship, would I be like, love?

• 1:37:57Speaker 04

  You might.

• 1:37:57Steven Rinella?

  Love delivered me to this championship.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  You might be.

• 1:38:00Speaker 07

  Review his quotes.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  Like, wait, wait, but like thousands of hunters.

• 1:38:04Speaker 07

  Let's, let's, let the man finish.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Eat thousands of pounds of wild game.

• 1:38:08Steven Rinella?

  I've only heard, all, all this whole show, I've only been here to share my viewpoint on this.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  All the people eating real wild game and this guy is like, wild game fueled my run to the Masters.

• 1:38:18Steven Rinella?

  It's farm animals.

• 1:38:19Speaker 07

  Of course it's farm animals.

• 1:38:20Speaker 04

  Maybe he's been eating wild game.

• 1:38:22Speaker 07

  If one of the biggest sporting events in the world has headlines dealing with venison, that's not of interest to you.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  That's not making.

• 1:38:27Steven Rinella?

  No, it's of interest, but I don't like it.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  That's not making wild elk or the places wild elk live more valuable.

• 1:38:33Steven Rinella?

  It's farm animals.

• 1:38:34Speaker 07

  It, it's still a headline. I don't, I don't understand.

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  Wait, how do we know?

• 1:38:38Steven Rinella?

  Two different things. I heard that you thought it was cool.

• 1:38:40Speaker 07

  I think Rory's cool. I think the Masters are cool. I, I think it's cool that he picked venison.

• 1:38:44Steven Rinella?

  It'd still be news that you thought it was dumb.

• 1:38:47Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:38:48Steven Rinella?

  Do you got more news?

• 1:38:48Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, I got, I got a lot of it.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Randall, how do I feel not having the heat on you this week?

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  I wonder what Brian Harmon thinks about it.

• 1:38:53Speaker 07

  I just said it was interesting.

• 1:38:56Speaker 07

  Rory said he knew that he was putting venison on the menu as soon as he won. Last May, he did an interview with the Today Show. They asked him what he thought he would be serving at the 2026 dinner. This was his quote that you guys have been referring to. Quote, "I've been into wild game recently." So venison, elk, stuff like that, that sort of stuff fueled this run, is what he said.

• 1:39:13Steven Rinella?

  Sort of, that's about the right word choice.

• 1:39:15Speaker 07

  Helped him make the champion. Now, fast forward to this year, he did put venison on the menu. He said he considered making it the main course, but decided to make it an appetizer instead because he worried that not everyone loves venison as much as him.

• 1:39:28Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Where's he from? Is he American?

• 1:39:31Speaker 04

  He's Northern Irish.

• 1:39:32Speaker 07

  He's from Ireland.

• 1:39:33Steven Rinella?

  Is he maybe gonna be serving up their red deer from over there?

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  I was gonna say. I wonder, I wonder why there's elk.

• 1:39:38Speaker 07

  I would assume it's like New Zealand, you know, venison that was raised behind him.

• 1:39:42Steven Rinella?

  Well, why'd you write down elk?

• 1:39:44Speaker 07

  Because it says elk.

• 1:39:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you didn't write that menu?

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:39:47Speaker 07

  No, I didn't. I didn't make that graphic. It's not the first time elk meat is been on the menu.

• 1:39:52Speaker 06

  Spencer used AI to create this.

• 1:39:56Speaker 07

  In 2004, Mike Weir, the only Canadian to ever win the Masters, got to pick the dinner. He served elk, wild boar, sockeye salmon, and Arctic char. And while Rory has a big list of handpicked wines on the menu this year, Mike Weir only did Canadian beers with his wild game.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  That guy might have been using the real stuff.

• 1:40:16Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:17Steven Rinella?

  Sounds like it.

• 1:40:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, because he was cleaning out his freezer.

• 1:40:20Steven Rinella?

  How many guys is it eating there? Thirty?

• 1:40:22Speaker 07

  Thirty some, yeah.

• 1:40:22Steven Rinella?

  If you're just making sliders, dude, he could get some real.

• 1:40:25Speaker 06

  You know what?

• 1:40:26Speaker 07

  We'll send it to him.

• 1:40:27Steven Rinella?

  If he's listening, I'll send you the elk meat.

• 1:40:30Speaker 07

  We'll give you the wild game for the next Masters.

• 1:40:31Steven Rinella?

  I'll give you enough for thirty sliders.

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  Brian Harmon, just send us Rory.

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  Brian Harmon. We'll talk to Brian Harmon. Brian Harmon will give you all the venison you want. Real meat. Real outdoor wild meat.

• 1:40:40Speaker 07

  Wouldn't take that much.

• 1:40:41Steven Rinella?

  I hope Brian Harmon beats this guy's butt. Is Brian Harmon in this golf tournament?

• 1:40:46Speaker 07

  He'll be there. That's right.

• 1:40:47Steven Rinella?

  I hope he wins.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  I'll text him now.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  And then next year, when they come out the menu, it's gonna say, "Real."

• 1:40:53Speaker 07

  This dinner has been a tradition since the 1950s. Here's some of the most notable things ever put on the menu. 1998, a 21-year-old Tiger Woods was setting the menu after his first Masters win. He was the youngest champion ever. He served cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, french fries, and milkshakes. He was ridiculed for his choice, and the next time he won in 2002, he instead served a porterhouse steak and sushi. When reflecting on his 1998 menu, Tiger said, "I just went with what I like. I wasn't trying to be fancy or anything like that." 1989, Scottish golfer Sandy Lyle was setting the menu. He horrified his peers by choosing haggis.

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  If you're not familiar, that's a savory pudding made of sheep organs that's then cooked inside of a sheep's stomach. It was reportedly one of the most rejected items ever served at the Masters.

• 1:41:49Steven Rinella?

  I don't think he would have been allowed to do real haggis because that was served in August, and so you wouldn't be able to have the lung.

• 1:41:57Speaker 07

  And then 2022, Hideki Matsuyama puts together the most expensive Masters Champions dinner ever. It was made to resemble a Michelin dining experience in Tokyo. The menu featured a full spread of sushi and sashimi for appetizers, miso-glazed black cod for the first course, a wagyu ribeye for the main course, and Japanese strawberry shortcake for dessert. The meal was estimated to cost $220 per person, which is $40 more than the next most expensive menu.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  At that dinner? That's it?

• 1:42:31Steven Rinella?

  I would think it'd be a lot more now. Dude, that's what I'd want to go to right there, man. If I'm the winner, sucker, I'm having...

• 1:42:37Speaker 06

  We're thinking in 2026 menu prices. In 2022, $220 would not...

• 1:42:43Speaker 07

  They're just sourcing the ingredients at that point. They're not paying the waitstaff and the chefs.

• 1:42:49Steven Rinella?

  I hope Brian Harmon wins, dude.

• 1:42:52Speaker 07

  I went to the Masters a few years ago, and Brian was walking, and I had said, I was explaining to the people I was with how he's a big turkey hunter. And I'm like, "I'm gonna do a turkey call and see if he notices." He must have been 100 yards away.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Did he use a real turkey call?

• 1:43:09Speaker 07

  No, just with my mouth.

• 1:43:10Steven Rinella?

  That was pretty good.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  Did he turn around?

• 1:43:15Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:43:16Speaker 07

  He snapped his head around and looked and he never identified, I don't think where that turkey call was coming from. But it was like, it was a moment in his day, walking around and he heard a turkey.

• 1:43:25Steven Rinella?

  Was that before or after he came on the podcast?

• 1:43:27Speaker 07

  That was afterwards.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

  All right, I'm gonna text him and tell him to listen to this tomorrow.

• 1:43:31Speaker 03

  I could see there being some big gobblers around, all around that golf course.

• 1:43:35Speaker 07

  The Masters has some lore around like, there's not even birds there. You know, you won't even see a squirrel.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Pesticides and herbicides and stuff.

• 1:43:42Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, it's just like that manicure. Every blade of grass is thought of.

• 1:43:45Steven Rinella?

  Do you remember when there was that little scandal that they were?

• 1:43:48Speaker 07

  Pumping bird noises.

• 1:43:49Steven Rinella?

  They were pumping in bird noises and then some birder was like, homie, that bird doesn't live around there. And they got busted for pumping fake bird noises.

• 1:43:57Speaker 07

  He was watching on TV and he heard a bird that's not present in Kentucky or wherever they're golfing at.

• 1:44:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that was right. He's like, dude, that bird is not there. That's a fake bird noise.

• 1:44:05Speaker 04

  Another good use for Cornell's Merlin.

• 1:44:08Speaker 07

  We have a Masters-inspired recipe on themeater.com.

• 1:44:12Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:44:12Speaker 07

  It's Chef Lucas leaves fish sliders with pimento cheese. Pimento cheese sandwiches have been famously served at the Masters since the 1940s. So this is Lucas's take on that, which includes crappie and a slaw.

• 1:44:26Steven Rinella?

  That was a hell of a report, man.

• 1:44:27Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:44:28Steven Rinella?

  God, that was a doozy.

• 1:44:29Speaker 07

  Impassionate.

• 1:44:30Steven Rinella?

  I really liked the last.

• 1:44:31Speaker 06

  And he had to fight for it, too.

• 1:44:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:44:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was fighting for my life.

• 1:44:37Steven Rinella?

  That's what makes a good report, man, is it gets, there's, there's channels that have mastered this thing, you know? Like, the news is all meant to make you mad.

• 1:44:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Steven Rinella?

  And that's Spencer's style, you know? He has news that makes you mad.

• 1:44:52Speaker 07

  Same thing.

• 1:44:54Speaker 06

  I don't think that was his goal. Just because you're really discerning consumer.

• 1:44:58Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that was a great news segment.

• 1:45:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Steven Rinella?

  Golly. Sliders.

• 1:45:06Steven Rinella?

  Elk and crappie sliders. Put them both in. Alright, everybody, thanks for joining. See you next week. No way. Oh, sorry. We can, Karen, we can do that. You just, you just ruined everything. Don't hang up just yet. We've been talking, we, I, hopefully you've heard about, we've talked about our, our 12 and 26 video program. So 12, we're doing like, every month, we got a big, you know, almost hour long premiere video coming out, it's called 12 and 26. So if you're not too sharp, I'll help you explain it. There are 12 months in 2026. Each of those months will be allocated a premier, long-form video project. This month's

• 1:45:50Steven Rinella?

  is Clay Newcomb's Utah mountain lion hunt. Also, Bear, tell them about Bear Grease YouTube.

• 1:45:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, we started, uh, well, we, we jump-started a YouTube channel, it's now the Bear Grease YouTube channel. Um, I've been running it for about a month now, a little over a month, and we've got a little bit of a different style of content than what you're seeing.

• 1:46:14Steven Rinella?

  Hillbilly stuff.

• 1:46:14Speaker 05

  From Meat Eater. Yeah, you could call it that. You know what's funny?

• 1:46:18Steven Rinella?

  It's real lowbrows.

• 1:46:20Speaker 05

  I did a, I did a video on, on falconry and the falconers that I went with, they were like, when is Steve gonna cover falconry? Because.

• 1:46:29Steven Rinella?

  Did you know about this?

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know all about this. So anyway, that's what I mean, different style content coming out of the Bear Grease.

• 1:46:35Steven Rinella?

  Hillbilly, that's, that's Dungeons and Dragons.

• 1:46:39Speaker 05

  I, I, I've spent a little bit of time around falconers last year and I 100% see what you mean.

• 1:46:44Steven Rinella?

  Were the, were the ones you were with D and D types? Or are they like?

• 1:46:48Speaker 05

  They were legit.

• 1:46:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Well, no, you, I'm not saying you're illegitimate if you're D and D, it's just different pathways into the same thing.

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  Well, they were, they're, they're like woodsman, I'll put it like that.

• 1:46:58Steven Rinella?

  They're woodsman.

• 1:46:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I see what you mean.

• 1:47:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like RFK Junior, he's not like a D and D guy.

• 1:47:02Speaker 05

  Right, right. 60% of, of falconers are.

• 1:47:06Speaker 05

  I would say are exactly like that.

• 1:47:08Steven Rinella?

  Did you measure that scientifically?

• 1:47:09Speaker 05

  No, just kind of observing. But anyway, uh, we've got.

• 1:47:14Steven Rinella?

  So that's not hillbilly.

• 1:47:15Speaker 05

  That's not hillbilly.

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  It's just good content.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  It's just cool, yeah. And, uh, yeah, so we've, we've got the YouTube channel going. We've got a video coming on Friday, so by the time this airs, that'll be tomorrow. There's a video coming tomorrow where we hog hunt with Dale Brisbee and Evan Felker.

• 1:47:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, great.

• 1:47:33Speaker 05

  On mules and horses.

• 1:47:34Steven Rinella?

  Did you go on that?

• 1:47:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35Steven Rinella?

  Did you have fun?

• 1:47:36Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:36Steven Rinella?

  Evan's a good guy.

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, he is.

• 1:47:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Speaker 05

  He is, but anyway, Bear Grease YouTube channel, go check it out.

• 1:47:43Steven Rinella?

  All right. Thanks, guys. See you next week.

• 1:47:47Steven Rinella?

  When you flew out the window and into the sunset, I thought I would never stop screaming.

• 1:48:03Steven Rinella?

  I thought I would never stop screaming your name.

• 1:48:18Steven Rinella?

  But I ran out of breath, so I took in some more and I started to scream even louder. Screaming goes on for hours and days.

• 1:48:47Steven Rinella?

  So if you and I love us forever, then I'll probably be screaming that loud.

• 1:49:02Steven Rinella?

  I'm trying to be cool here, but inside I'm screaming this song.

• 1:50:44Steven 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 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. 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 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.

• 1:51:27Steven Rinella?

  OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map. So you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do

• 1:52:11Steven Rinella?

  you start building credit? It's easy. With OnePay's Builder Card, there's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters. OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 1:52:47Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.