Ep. 584: Are Governor’s Tags Un-American?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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(00:31):
out at first light dot com, f I R S
T L I t E dot com. Hey Steve, calling
in from Alaska. I'm here to announce that the latest
volume of me Eaters Campfire Stories is available now. This
volume is called Discoveries, Revelations and Near Misses. So the

(00:54):
volume is a little twist on our normal format, like
it includes all of those uh your death escapes in
the wild that really define our for other two volumes
of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories, but this includes something added
and special, which is a few stories about life changing
discoveries and revelations in the wild. The one you're gonna

(01:15):
hear at the end of this podcast involves a guy
whose friends refer to him as black Cloud Bob because
this guy has a cloud of bad luck that follows him.
And this story you're gonna hear is like a terrible
near death experience that kind of bleeds into another terrible

(01:37):
near death experience to make sort of like a duplex
of near death experiences. It's a horrendous story and it's
at the end of the podcast. You'll listen to that.
If you enjoy, you can go anywhere audio books are
sold and get your latest volume of Meat Eaters Campfire Stories.

(01:58):
I hope you enjoy. All right. We're recording from the
Meat Eater Flagship store in downtown bos Of, Montana, and
I am right below the Buffalo skull that now has
its sign stick finger here. People have been sticking their

(02:22):
finger in that hole mark have you I have not yet.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
You're worried it's gonna get all greasy and dirty there, No.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
What I would like to do is make like a
I'd like to well, I don't even want to tell
you what I'd like to do. I'd like to build
in a little surprise, but stick your finger in that hole.
People come by, they send pictures of themselves with their
finger in that hole. Uh. That and all kinds of
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Eater Flagship Store downtown bows Of Montana where we are

(02:51):
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we're so late on discussing well, first off, I'm joined

(03:57):
by Brody cal Mark Kenyon and doctor Randall Crinz here,
but she doesn't say much. We're so late on talking
about it because I meant to talk about it, that
we got to talk about it now for a minute.
That we're so late on talking about it. All the flurry,
the flurry of news about the Colorado deer hunters. Two

(04:22):
old timers that two old timers that died of Creussfield
Jacobs yes, and some researcher who it turns out, it
was not really pointed out that these two guys hunted

(04:47):
deer together were consumers of deer in Colorado, and then
happened to developed yak of kreutz Felt and he was saying, hey,
heads up, it's they deer hunted. There was the possibility
that they got this disease from eating deer. I want

(05:11):
to being that was quite irresponsible thing to pump out there.
You got how much you guys know about this. I'm
the only one knows about that about it?

Speaker 3 (05:20):
No, no, no, yeah, I think totally tracking. You're just on
a roll. You haven't messed anything up too bad.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Well, now I gotta jump into I gotta jump in
and find some stuff. Well, I'll say that the one
building the thing that happened here was that he made
this little bit of conjecture which then got picked up
as a sound bite across the media outlets.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Which turned into a headline to get a headline.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
And blew up into hysteria. And they looked past the
point that this was not stemming from some peer reviewed study,
but this was just a piece of again conjecture. There
was a question, yeah, yeah, it wasn't a study.

Speaker 5 (05:54):
And the implication is that they got chrotsfield Jacob from
or Yakub.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
From eating deer deer. Yes, from the.

Speaker 5 (06:04):
Implication is that CWD is crossing the species barrier.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah. Now, there was a version of this years ago,
equally irresponsible, where they had a guy that had Yakub
kreutz Felt and in his personal history had eaten a
squirrel brain. What was the headline everywhere? Man got it
from eating a squirrel brain, when in fact it was
simply that in his personal history he'd eat a squirrel brain.

(06:33):
Jim Heffelfinger when this came out, this is a long
time ago now, when this came out from Jim Heffelfinger,
he said, in talking about this little flurry of news activity,
he pointed out that he doesn't even want to post
a link because he doesn't want to perpetuate a spread,
the spread of this misinformation or information. He said, this

(06:55):
is not a study, and this is not a scientific paper.
The whole thing is three hundred and forty four words
and is simply a mention about two hunters that died
of CJD and both of them ate deer from the
same deer population. There is no evidence of CWD infecting hunters.

(07:16):
There are clusters of CJD throughout the country, some in
CWD areas and some outside CWD areas. With the spread
of CWD nationwide, it is not very noteworthy, meaning that
now I don't know thirty states thirty some states have CWD.

(07:37):
With the spread of CWD nationwide, it is not very
noteworthy that two CJD victims in the same rural area
may have both eaten venison. He points out, we have
to be vigilant about the possible jump of a pry
on disease from deer to hunter. I couldn't agree more.
This is the thing, much to Doug Durn's annoyance, This

(07:58):
is I don't want to say, the only thing, it's
the primary thing that worries me about CWD is the
possibility that it would jump the species barrier and go
to humans. If I knew, if God came down and said, Steve,
there is no chance CWD can jump to humans, I

(08:20):
would care. This is going to really piss off Doug
eighty five percent less about CWD.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
I think that like the human jump is like a
step too far. Really, I think people should be way
more concerned deer hunters should be way more concerned with
CWD jumping to any sort of domestic livestock.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah. That's what blows my mind, is why the USDA
isn't more worried. Yeah, I could weigh. I mean, like,
I don't know if you guys know, I'm no infectious
disease specialists, but I'm worried as a person. How are
they not worried about cattle?

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah, I mean he look a hell a lot more
like a deer than I do.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
The USDA response to domestic livestock with these types of
diseases is is severe and final. It's full eradication. So yeah,
which is what.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
Makes it so scary if ever, if ever does jump
to humans, it's going to be the end of our lifestyle,
or that beginning of that end.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah right now.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
But it's not going to be as simple as turning
a fan off in a chicken.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
House, because the fuel in the fire now drunkard to
boil out, boiled out. Now. Here is from a peer
reviewed paper. This is from a peer reviewed paper in Colorado.
I want to point out to people Colorado. I'm very
reluctant to get into this right now. Because I wanted
this to be mistake. I don't want this to be

(10:01):
taken wrong. I am an individual who is concerned about CWD.
I think that we should be testing robustly. I think
we should be investing a lot of money into researching CWD.
I think we should find out everything we can find
out about CWD, and I think we should be taking
reasonable steps to slow the spread of CWD. ME saying

(10:25):
me jumping on someone for claiming that CWD has jumped
into the human population is not because I'm trying to
think that CWD is gonna go away or I'm trying
to whitewash the risk of CWD. It's because I don't
think that you should go around saying crazy shit to
really upset people based off no evidence, like let's have
good clean material, good clean science around CWD, and not

(10:51):
hysterical hogwash around CWD. A problem is I'm still I'm
still ahead of what I'm going to read you next.
A problem I have found even within the CWD spectrum,
the CWD spectrum being CWD deniers, who once upon a time,

(11:12):
a CWD denier was someone who said there's no such
sing as CWD. The same way early on a COVID
denier was someone who said there's no such thing as COVID.
Eventually a COVID denier became someone who said, sure, there's COVID,
I just don't think it's that alarming, which puts me
in COVID denier, which COVID deniers have caught up to
where I'm at, where it's like, sure it's there, I

(11:34):
just don't think it's enough. I don't think it warrant
shutting people's businesses down. A cwd D denier at a
time said there's no such thing. It's all a lie.
Now they say, oh, yeah, it's real. I'm just not alarmed.
Well it's real. I'm alarmed, but don't go running around
saying crazy shit that's not.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
True, especially knowing what's going to happen in the media.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
As and they planned that. And there are people the
spectrum I was trying to get into the spectrum, on
the spectrum of CWD believers whatever, you have deniers who
at this current stage are like, yes, it's real, but
it doesn't matter. Two people saying if you so much
as put a piece of deer meat on a stainless

(12:18):
steel table, you could then drop a nuclear bomb on
that steel table, and that steel table is still gonna
give you jakub the kreutz Felt disease. Like there's this spectrum.
The people on the far end, the super alarmists, also
need to chill out. And I've told some of them

(12:39):
face to face, please chill out with the zombie deer disease.
The all that garbage from a peer reviewed paper. Okay,
here's this passage from a peer reviewed paper. And oh,
I also got a back up a lot of background here. People.

(13:00):
I'm sorry. Colorado was where CWD is first identified. Cwd's
first identified in Colorado at a deer and elt breeding facility,
a research facility that's ground zero for CWD in terms
of identification. That they identified it there does not mean

(13:22):
that it emerged there. It was identified there, all right.
The date they identified it in the seventies does not
mean it was born that day. The more you look
for it, the more you find it. As we're seeing,
meaning as more and more states find CWD, it's often
that more and more states are looking for CWD. We
don't know where it came from, we don't know when

(13:44):
it first emerged. It was the first identified in Colorado,
back to this peer review paper. In seven Colorado counties
with high CWD prevalence, seventy five percent of state hunting
licenses are issued locally, which suggests that residents consume most

(14:05):
regionally harvested game. So here, all they're trying to establish
is that if you're looking at CWD prevalence and who's
eating CWD infected meat, let's look locally. Okay, we'll go
to these counties in Colorado with a lot of CWD,
and we're going to look at locals, making the assumption

(14:26):
that locals are eating most of the local deer meat.
Goes on to say, we used Colorado death certificate data
from nineteen seventy nine through two thousand and one to
evaluate rates of death from the human prion disease. Kreutz

(14:48):
felt YAKUB disease. Am I saying that right, I'm gonna
say CJD so I don't have to feel like I'm
messing it up every time. The relative risk of CJD
for c WD endemic county residents was not significantly increased,

(15:11):
and the rate of CJD did not increase over time
in Colorado. Human prion disease resulting from CWD exposure is
rare or non existent. The reason they're saying is rare
non existent is because they haven't found it. Then it

(15:31):
goes down to say, however, there's a lot we don't know.
The other piece of this is even after this news
came out implying a correlation between consumption and in these
two cases, after this news came out, statistically, those two
cases happening to come from that area was not an outlier.
You have about a dozen cases a year that we found.

(15:54):
It was like a giant nothing and like everything, like
the guy that got it from eating squirrel brains. You
wind up being that when a news story like that
comes out, got so worked up, we gotta take my
glasses off. When a news story like that comes out,
the retraction never gets the retraction never gets the traction

(16:17):
you found. This repeated use of the retraction never gets
the traction. I wish I could keep it.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Going that the initial action.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
The retraction never gets the traction. That the initial action
that it just doesn't c WD scares the shit out
of me. So don't be doing stuff like that because
I'm already scared. Is it worth talking about the Oklahoma thing?

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Then?

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yes, would you like to.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
I know Steve wanted to leave that off or not.
Can we get into it in a minute. Yeah, I'm
here to talk about that that I think like that.
God bless them for trying to find a thing. You
listeners have no idea what we're talking about. God bless them.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
But come on, We've covered this heavily on the Week
in Review, because again, when I first saw it as
a as a little blurb, I was kind of like.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Ha ha, it can't be little. Did you know maybe we
don't even get into Randall Hoff? Well, damn it. I
want to get into it a couple of things real quick.

(17:43):
I put this in the notes, and everybody got mad.
I wrote in the notes Trump is right about voter fraud.
Hear me out hear me out here.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
I didn't hear a single person in this room get mad.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Not mad. We mostly no, not mad.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
I just wanted to tell you brief in general.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
I check them out there. I'm on date night. I'm
on date night, not on dateline. I'm on date night
with my wife, and I'm trying to listen to what
she's telling me.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
But there's something way more interesting.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Something way more interesting going on coming to a restaurant
and there's a big group of people, look like a
qu for funny looking people, look like a corporate function,
And I said, that's weird. What what are these guys
doing in town? Just didn't something didn't fit. Turns out,
I don't want to trivialize they're from World Wildlife Fund.
I don't want to trivialize World Wildlife Fund. But they

(18:36):
of the many things they do, one of the things
they do is they are a thorn in the side
of hunters, so that they do a lot of things
for wildlife, positive things for wildlife. But anytime, they're always
litigating against hunters in cases where I don't think it
has anything to do with preserving bio diversity. It's just
they got a is this my fair, totally overlyfair center

(18:59):
for biological diversity. World Wildlife Fund are always going to
litigate against hunters, and they're always going to sort of
even with stable wildlife populations, they're gonna kind of come
and act like hunting is somehow imperiling stable wildlife populations,
and it'll come out. I picked this up. I hear
a story about Corey Booker.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Here's a senator.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, and someone's telling the story as a way to
demonstrate how nice Corey Booker is. And I'll point out
Corey Booker's a vegan telling how nice Corey Booker is. Yeah,
by recounting an interaction to Corey Booker is having with
a flight attendant, I'm hearing it, and I'm like, that's
him scamming on a flight attendant. This is just my

(19:44):
like the story I hear, I'm like, that's not nice,
that's scamming. Not to say he scammed on a flight attendant,
but just that caught That's what caught my attention. Okay,
I'm not coming here and saying you did. I'm saying
individuals telling the story. And then the individual tells a
story about fixing to commit voter fraud.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
And the whole time, your dear, beautiful, telling sweet wife
is talking and you're going, uh huh.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Well, I'm with my left ear, I'm listening to her
with my right ear. I'm listening to this voter fraud plan.
There's an individual in Chicago, and you're pretty deaf in
that left ear. I'd love to hear Katie's perspective. I
should I cut all this off for legal reasons? How bad.
Is it that I that I overheard something in a restaurant?
Are you allowed to do this the right? Well, I

(20:35):
mean right. The individual's talking lives in Chicago. He lives
in Chicago. Now. He did not say who he's planning
on voting for this fall, but he's explaining to everyone
that he knows how Illinois is going to go on
this fall's presidential election. Okay, he owns a cabin in Michigan.

(21:00):
He wants to be able to vote in a battleground
state this November, so he went and got a Michigan
driver's license. When he asked about the legality of what
he's doing, he was told, you're supposed to spend a
majority of your time in the state where you're registered
to vote, but they said they only really care about

(21:22):
that with rich people, and since he works for an NG, oh,
he felt that this did not apply to him. Wow,
just overheard how many how do you do the right caveat?
Overheard in the restaurant? Yeah, I thought the overheard.

Speaker 5 (21:42):
I thought the whole crazy disquisition about the CWD Colorado
Hunters scare, but you need evidence.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
I thought that was all.

Speaker 5 (21:51):
A setup for this anecdote.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
No, No, it's just something I overheard. Yeah, Now, I
think if you, if you were to say, believe.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
That whole thing because overheard at a restaurant, right, like
we have been the town approached by a police officer
in my younger years, because during our late night dinner,
we thoroughly ran through all the ways we could have
dined and dashed right, eaten and eaten and left without man.

(22:23):
Right as just a fun way to have the time
where you're having dinner.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Right, So you're at dinner, you're discussing ways in which
you could get out of paying for said dinner, right, which.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
At that point in our lives was the perfect crime.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Right, that's how you would really stick it to the man.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Probably the first people to ever pull that off at an.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
I know why I brought this up because cow was
laying out for me, someone laying out for him away
in which you could get a non a way in
which you could get a resident hunting license that you
weren't allowed to get. Yes, they're sort of saying a
fella could, yeah, and Cal was saying, or a fella
could just buy the non resident hunting license, yes.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Instead of setting purchasing a piece of land getting a
po box setting up an LLC. I'm like, boy, that
sounds like.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Dude, we used to see like very well off second
homeowners in Colorado. Dude like try to bend over backwards
to get a resident fishing license instead of a non resident,
which is like.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, but you know what they're doing though, they're chasing
the high right.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Of sticking it to the man.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
Well, it's not necessarily sticking it to the man, right,
It's like, oh, I'm saving money and that's what really
gets them, get them going. Well, that's your heritage.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
We should start, you know, Krin. This is Kris like
this because Kritin doesn't like when we think of ways
in which Krink could get more email. But if you
want to send it in an email saying here's a
wild ass idea in the subject line, and you got
a wild ass idea, go ahead and throw it in
sent to Krin. Here's a guy wrote in a wild
ass idea and talking about live sonar and the controversy

(24:20):
surrounding live sonar. He's saying, well, think about Dingle Johnson,
some old timer who's digging worms out of his garden
and using the same bag of evil claw hooks. He
bought twenty years ago, fishing on a resident license. Yeah,

(24:40):
fishing on a resident lifetime license that he bought. They
bought sixty years ago, digging worms out of his garden.
Bought a bag, bought a bag of three hundred eagle
claw hooks at a sportsman show two decades ago out
of some old ass rowboat that he bought at the
yard sale. Right, what is he doing for Dingle Johnson?

Speaker 3 (25:03):
He's taken not give it.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
There's your enemy. That guy. He's saying a live sonar
guy is not the enemy because this guy. Think about
the amount of money this guy's pumping into conservation through
excise taxes on fishing equipment. Yeah, yes, I added all
the stuff about the old.

Speaker 5 (25:25):
To this guy's credit, he didn't call anyone the enemy.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, but he was kind of filling out. I was
filling out his argument.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
Growing up, Like how long you would have a box
of large caliber ammunition, right, I mean.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
Like the box would corrode.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yes and yellow.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yeah, the folds on the box would give out and
you'd have to tape them back together before it was gone, right.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
And there's all kinds of corrosion on the cart just
themselves exactly.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
When my dad died and I was able to raid
his Ammo ben I thought at that time that I
would never buy Ammo again. I was like, well, shit,
here's forty Remington Court. That's like, you know, twenty deer
and then twenty shots to make sure I'm still on. Yeah,
still good. Yeah. It would be.

Speaker 4 (26:25):
Really interesting though, to try to run the numbers on
the increased funds that we're getting in from, you know,
increased purchase and and you know, folks becoming more and
more fervent about this pursuit, right, if you were to
compare that to the negative pressure outcomes of it and
try to see, like, how does that.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
You know, yeah, is there a balance?

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Here's a four thousand dollars purchase with excise taxes at eleven.
That makes you feel bad for yelling at my kid
about buying worms.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Got a whole garden out there.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
He could have dug out, Oh, I'm not gonna do one,
because we haven't found out if people like him or not.
Play the drop fill.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
I liked the previous one. It just went on too long,
a little too long.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
I didn't get to happen.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
But I think I bet I kind of liked that
because it's awkwardly long.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
That was kind of what made it so great. Play
the drop fill ready for this.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
One, but I think this should be an alternating host
deal to Yeah, so you ain't got to okay.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
This is a teaser for a future installment. Alaska tracks
life stories from hunters, fishermen, and trappers of Alaska. This
is there's a Randy Zarnky Zarnk. He's a president of
Alaska Trappers Association. He's doing an oral history talking to
old timers. I was gonna share two quick ones for

(27:53):
you from the from my damn glasses back on. I'd
never started making a podcast, but I knew I was
gonna lose my reading vision. Listen to this very quick.
From the time I was about ten years old, I
had to make a living for the whole family, his dad.

(28:19):
His dad got to where he couldn't work anymore during
the Spanish flu pandemic of nineteen eighteen, which hit Alaska hard.
From the time I was about ten years old, I
had to make a living for the whole family. The
Smithsonian had been paying my brother forty five dollars a
piece for black bear skulls and seventy five dollars for grizzlies.

(28:44):
If I could get one bear a month, that was
pretty good money. I'd sell the feet to the Chinese.
You're listening to Krim. Yeah, I've perked right up.

Speaker 6 (28:53):
I still have never eaten a barefoot, though I'm looking
forward to the time I can.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
And I got seven dollars a piece for the galls,
so if you add it all up, one bear would
bring in quite a bit of money. Jumping ahead, this
is from a different fellow, Duke Short out of Cake, Alaska.
I hunted eagles for bounty. If you tell people that,

(29:19):
now they think you're a really bad person. We got
two bucks apiece for eagles. The biggest day I had
was doing a herring run. The eagles were eating the
herring and I killed thirty three cow. The only reason
I didn't get more was I ran out of bullets,
Ladies and gentlemen us Today's installment of Steve Reid's books.

(29:43):
So you ain't got to.

Speaker 4 (29:44):
Now something you didn't do in the first one. But
I wanted to know. It was just do you recommend
the book? Like is this something other folks should even.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Though they don't. It ain't got to read it, but
they could, well, let me put the to you this way. Mark,
guess how I had to read for those tidbits? Not
very far? Page fourteen is all. I didn't even read
all the good stuff.

Speaker 5 (30:08):
Steve reads the first fifteen pages of a book.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Well, no, no, I'm going to do a full report.
And Cal just announced that he's gonna do it full
for sure.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Tidbits.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, I think we might. We should buy a timer,
maybe krinn figure out that the section what what's the
reasonable length for Let's say Cal reads books that you
ain't got to I mean a couple of minutes, No,
a couple of minutes, and I think.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think it should with a couple of minutes, like
buy it or note, buy it or don't.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yeah, Like there's gotta be an assessment, but there should.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
We should work in bang for your bucks so we
can have a sound.

Speaker 5 (30:50):
I think of a solid twenty five minutes.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Past I was taking fifteen. We get a timer, and
when you present a great book, you got fifteen minutes.
I like it? Yeah, new pot. Can we get that
machine back out? Used to like stop to rate how
much you like something?

Speaker 6 (31:08):
Yeah, that's that's yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Need to so I don't know you tell me mark
fourteen pages and I found that. No, that seems like
a hell of in our And I fell asleep last
night perfect. I mean not because the book was no good.
You know, you get to a point where you're gonna
get a bet. Yeah, I'm shooting eagles three bucks apiece? Random?
Can you talk about the breeding mule here in Mexico?

(31:38):
We keep wanting to get into this. Did you get
boned up or not boned up? I mean I I've.

Speaker 5 (31:43):
I familiarized myself with the case a little.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
Bit, but then you know about it prior to this. No,
I didn't. I just knock off nikes because the thing's backwards.

Speaker 5 (31:51):
No, they're real nikes. These are oh there's limited. These
are the Yannis Antokumpo Immortality threes. Gotta met uh famous
footwear for forty nine ninety nine because I think they're
a few generations old.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
But sorry, it's got distracted. This seems so just unlike you.

Speaker 5 (32:12):
I mean, you put a pair of shoes in front
of me, a new pair of shoes for forty nine
ninety nine. I'm gonna have hard time walking away.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Okay, someone walked me through the breeding milder in Mexico
because I used to like to say, I think I
mentioned sport. I used to like to say the thing
I love about mulders you can't buy a big one,
which is not true.

Speaker 5 (32:33):
Yeah, and this I mean my understanding of the case
was that it's an American citizen and he's he's in
business with two Mexican citizens who own a ranch in Mexico,
and he'd been working with them to improve mule deer genetics.
And uh, he grew the business and then got the

(32:55):
first permit to bring those genetics across the border, and
then in and in the form of semen, in the
form of semens draws. There was a note in here
about how many semens fourteen hundred and sixty semens draws,
and those are coming from more than I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Those are coming from like a captive breeding facility.

Speaker 5 (33:16):
Yeah, and two hundred and sixty nine embryos. Mueled your embryos.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (33:23):
And essentially the case is that the guy, the guy's
partners in Mexico, he claims, became jealous of how successful
this guy had become as a result of their joint business,
and he says that they they started threatening his life

(33:44):
and tried to take some of this stuff back and
have engaged in defamation against him. And so he's he's
trying to get some of that genetic material back from
them because it's a partnership gone wrong.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Got it. Yeah? Uh, this I don't I don't really
care about all that. I didn't care about them fighting
about whatever. It's just what. Yeah, I don't mean to
be callous, no, but I guess this guy got What
was interesting to me was that this is going on
in the first and.

Speaker 5 (34:17):
Well, he got the first ever permit to move as
I understand, he got the first ever permit to move
meal deer DNA genetics embryos across the border in.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, and what's like, what's happened to that stuffs border?

Speaker 5 (34:35):
Yeah, it's in a it's I think it was in
a lab in in uh in Texas or at a
breeding facility in Texas, the facility that does both livestock
and apparently meal deer.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah. That was the part that was surprising me because
I have been noticing on social media accounts of these
some of these ranches in Mexico they're offering these really
high dollar mildeer hunts. The staggering numbers of two hundred

(35:08):
in just one year after the other after the other,
and I'm like, how could this be true? But it's
that they're getting really good. And I'm not saying that
I'm not pointing, I'm not saying that there's something like
nothing criminal. They're getting really good at producing giant mule
deer out in the desert by using tricks of the

(35:29):
trade developed through white tail management, meaning bringing in food,
water development, it's all that, and they're kind of like
creating a they're kind of creating a resource of giant
box that just wasn't there before by employing strategies developed
by you know, the Texas white tail community. So now

(35:49):
they've kind of created like the new mule deer. It's
like Utah and the seventies down there, What.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Is it happening behind fences?

Speaker 1 (35:58):
It's got it a lot of it. It's because when
you see one of these social media pages I follow,
when I've seen enough guys standing there with like a
beer in each hand in a golf cart. There you go,
in a two and twenty inch merely laying there and
sixteen other guys standing back behind him, I'm like, there's

(36:20):
something just like, yeah, there's something that does not make sense.
Worked our tails off.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
Well, Yet you can take the best areas in the
in the the the North. Yeah really, I mean really
in North America, and to have like a success rate
of like three weeks in a row, six people go
and all six get thirty inch wide bucks, Like it

(36:49):
just doesn't even it just doesn't happen. No, it just
does not happen.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
It's it's so weird looking. And part of the problem,
it's a minor problem, but part of the problem with
it is it's gotten to the point with white tails
where when you if you walk into someone's house and
you there's certain white tails you'll see and you'll just
know it's not a wild white tail. Yeah right, you

(37:15):
look and you don't even ask the guy, oh sweet,
where'd you get that? Because you just know, like that's
a high fense white tail. You just know the second
he walk in the door, and it why wasn't being
it like it kind of a little I don't want
to say ruins looking at deer, but it with meal
deer walked in and I've always been like, damn yeah, because.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
They were like they were unsullied by that.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
It was like holy.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
Yeah, so does this hurt a little bit more to
see this with your beloved mule deer and know that
Yeah yeah, I mean.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
White tail has been turnished for so long, right.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, because those big giants are now now knowing that
when you see a big giant now in the back
of your head, you gotta be war you gotta be
warm about that. The other thing you can just you
just know is when some guy comes back from New Zealand,
right and he's got a four hundred inch red stag. Yeah,
you're like, didn't shoot that? No, right? Right? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (38:15):
But with with mule deer, you're talking like, I don't
know what the numbers would be in in the United States,
but like it's almost like a handful of two hundred
inches get shot in the whole country every year.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, right, handful. I don't know what. It's not more
than fifty.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Right, so now when fifty are coming back every year,
it's not.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
More than twenty yeh shit, I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
It's not a lot. But now they're just like all
coming north from Mexico. It's like you got it.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Ruins really wrong. When the con when I'm more apt
to ask how was the chef right then about your hunt?

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Uh yeah, though I have been looking see I gotta
admit though, man, looking at those Mexico nil deer, I
was licking my lips.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Mm hmmm, Oh for sure, because you don't see those
wide ones.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
You know, I was licking my lips. I still kind
of am.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
The other thing to think about rad is like through
all the conversations we've had, right, like that desert environment
for big animals, there's just not a.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Lot of them mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
But somehow there's a lot of them, right.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
Okay, I'm just gonna sit back in my chair and
someone's gonna explain everyone but besides me, and then I'm
gonna tell you what I think. It's gonna talk about
the that this idea that you're gonna breed you're gonna
breed c w D resistance into wild deer. I could

(40:05):
take a first step at it, Okay, can I can
I give you my comment now and you can weave
that in or give you my comment later.

Speaker 4 (40:13):
I want to see you squirm in your chair for
a while, wanting to say it it happened to wait,
you should.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Just interject naturally, sit back I'm to take my watch,
I'm taking my mouth talker.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Okay, oh, this is the type of juicy stuff people
can see up the new YouTube channel.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Mediator podcast network does off.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
So so the cliff notes here is that a peer
review peer review study came out in twenty twenty or
twenty one out of Texas A and M where they
had identified genetic markers that can point to the susceptibility
of a deer to CWD. I basically say, hey, these two,
we'll tell you whether I think it was eighty one

(40:59):
percent rate of accuracy, how susceptible this individual whitetail will
be to contracting chronic wasting disease. So, with that information
until then, the next thought that some folks had was, well,
if we can identify if a deer is susceptible or not,
that means we should be able to selectively breed for
those more resistant traits.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
So Oklahoma.

Speaker 4 (41:24):
Propose a law recently in which they would develop a
program to do just that. So this proposal came out
that first said, all right, we want to start this
program which will involve number one, establishing a genetic baseline
of what the wild deer population looks like. As far
as this resistance. Number two, they would then start a

(41:46):
captive breeding, selective breeding program in which they would try
to breed for this. And then number three and number
three is the real big, really big concern, is that
starting in twenty twenty six, they may create and open
up the ability for private individuals to purchase these supposedly

(42:09):
CWD resistant deer and release them, and not just on
high fence ranches, but low fence.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
So any Tom.

Speaker 4 (42:18):
Dick or Harry could hypothetically purchase start buying these captive
red deer and start releasing them into the wild.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
But only in Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Only in Oklahoma. But to my knowledge, there's no other
state in which you had to put my thing back
just to say, and those deer will know they got
to stay in Oklahoma, right yeahs. And so this is
like a Pandora's box.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
There's all sorts of ways this could go wrong that
we can get into.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
They're trying. What they're trying to do, right, is uh
like speed up natural selection if it even exists.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
I got it? Could I do my thing now? I
put my thing back? Sure? My talkers back in position
presumably if it's in captive deer there's no reason to
think that this disposition, this resistance, this natural resistance is

(43:10):
also in wild deer. Just believe that it is. Why
would it just be there when you have millions of
wild deer. How in the world do you think that
turning out some small handful of deer with a certain

(43:30):
genetic characteristic that already exists in wild deer is going
to accelerate the natural selection that, if you're right, is
already occurring right now. Like, if you're right that there's
a resistance and that that resistance is going to win
out through natural selection, then it already is you putting

(43:54):
one loose? Yeah, I mean, like, I'm not even I'm
not even against the like, I'm not even going down
the path of being against the idea because let's say
there's a version like this, let's say you had some
way well.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
Sorry, the version that this idea is based off of,
right is, uh, the near eradication of scrapie and in chigia.
So that's kind of like what they point to.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
But that's all domestic, yes, where you control all breeding.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Well, here's the thing, We've already basically tested this idea
in wild populations of deer and that is through the
act of trying to cull for genetics. Right, So, there's
been all sorts of people in Texas and other parts
of the country where they have, you know, very fervently
studied the idea of whether or not you can influence
genetics within a deer population through culling.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
You know, yeah, he's got a wonky right side. Kill him.
For a long time, that was that was yeah, he
looked at me. Funny.

Speaker 4 (45:01):
Yeah, So long story short on that, a slew of
studies have come out over recent years that have completely
disproven that as an effective approach at all. You just
can't do it because of the very things you're saying.
In a wild population, it's just impossible to actually influence
it enough with our degree of effect. So if that

(45:21):
can't work in impacting genetics of white tail deer antler quality,
same thing's gonna.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Be the truth the case of this. But I don't
Here's why I don't want to come out and just
say I condemned the whole idea of Pandora's box and
all that, because think about this scenario. Let's say, for
some somehow I don't understand how, but somehow you're able
to sample a deer. You're be able to shoot it
with one of those darts out of a pneumatic gun

(45:49):
that they use to shoot tranquisers. You're able to shoot
a deer and pull a genetic sample from it. A
little plug right hits, the deer falls off, It's got
a little chunk of hair on it, and you're able
to determ and Okay, that deer has a genetic resistance
to CWD. Maybe it's you know, maybe you realize that
that deer is eleven years old in a area that

(46:12):
has high prevalence of CWD. So you're like, Wow, that deer,
for whatever reason, survived. You test it. It doesn't have CWD,
even though you got to test them now dead. Let's
just say scientifically, you know that you can test a
deer alive see that it does not have CWD. Also,

(46:35):
you can make the determination that it carries this gene
that gives it a level of CWD resistance. And then
someone proposed, well, let's catch that deer and let's pull
all of her eggs and go make twenty more and

(46:57):
then turn that group of twenty deer back out on
the same landscape where the dough came from. Are you
do you oppose that much less? So okay, So I'm
saying I'm not all the way thinking that this is
the worst idea in the world, because there's different ways
that it might be approached. I just think it sounds

(47:17):
silly because there's no reason to think that this resistance
is only in captive deer. All captive deer came from
wild deer. They're not from another continent. The captive deer
industry its birth was just catching wild deer from North America.
So whatever you're seeing represented in that genetic pool of

(47:40):
captive deer is going to be represented in the wild.
I would just guess that the same percentage of resistance
is out there in the wild if this whole thing
would work, that it's already working or not, and you
putting a couple more out there ain't gonna make shit
for deerfs.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Gonna cost a lot of money.

Speaker 5 (48:01):
I mean, well, and it's gonna make someone a lot
of money. That was the other part of that article
is that captive deer interests are involved in this plan.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
In the in the in the legislature, and on the
Fishing Game Commission. There are interests that.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, it almost seems like an underhanded way of being
able to move.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Deer around exactly.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
And that's where you get into some real sticky worries
here is that Number one, you can't like, a CWD
can lie dormant. It can be positive in a deer
for several years before we might ever be able to
identify that. So you can get many false negatives. So
they're gonna let's type of hypothetically say that a deer
tests negative. There are live tests, but they're not terribly accurate.

(48:45):
But you could do a test and say, okay, well
this deer supposedly is resistant, and we tested it before
release and it came back negative. Two years later, that
deer could then end up testing positive and it was
positive at that moment, but now we've already released it
and transported across the state all over the place.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
But I have to assume they're only going to cut
these loose in areas of high prevalence anyway. Maybe, So
if someone was going to do it prophylactically, I think
that that would be hugely problematic, right. I think the
propylactics are always.

Speaker 5 (49:19):
Oh, my Robberts, my father, my father in law, or
not my father in law prophilactically, number of content toothbrush
is a prophylactic.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
To do it prophylactically. No one is going to get
into that. No one is gonna before that.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Well right now, I think a huge thing to keep
in mind is there's no consensus on what resistance is.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Mmmm.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
So is the deer that dies a day after the
other group of deer more resistant?

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Oh? Like yeah, some people lived a year longer.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Yeah. So that's another huge question mark as to why
people who are conservatively approaching this topic are like, well,
this step is putting the cart way before the horse
because we don't even know what resistance is at this
release program.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
But give me, give me the Pandora's box. I'm failing
to see it. I can see it as a waste
of effort because of because like I said, it's like
you're trying to go into a population is that have
tens of thousands of animals and you're trying You're thinking
you're going to influence it with some small number of
released animals. But give me the Pandora's box, because these

(50:43):
aren't GMOs. These are just deer that you've just These
are just white tail deer.

Speaker 5 (50:49):
Are Virginia oticle Leonis Virginia virginianus.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
They're white tail deer from the continent. They're not genetically modified.
You're not doing gene insertion. They're not robo deer. They
are a deer that you have identified having some disease
potential disease resistance.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
I'll give you mind and you.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
Let it run out, like give me the negative.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
Yeah, I mean the simple one right now is I
know we we covered like the first known w CWD hotspot,
but we have a lot of other known CWD hotspots.
They for the most part, all tend to be at
or very near close proximity to captive servid facilities. Correct,

(51:40):
So haven't we already seen the Pandora's box, Like we
have captive servant facilities. Just so happens like a new
K shows up and five miles away. So now we're
thinking we're gonna throw it back into the court of
the captive service facility. Let's see what you guys come
up with next. I'm sure it's got to be better,

(52:02):
right then current CWD.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
And then one of the chances something like that it
happened again. Right, Yes, hey, I got you, And we're
creating a.

Speaker 4 (52:10):
This hypothetically would create a private market for individuals to
purchase captively bred deer and release them into the wild,
which we've never done before. And I just can't I
can't imagine the future in which, Okay, if we start,
if captive breeding facilities can start breeding these animals and
marketing them to the general public, right, trying to convince

(52:31):
folks to buy, right, buy these deer and release the
CWD resistant deer. You can't tell me that ten twenty
years down the road, not only will they market them
as CWD resistant, but also this came from one hundred
eighty inch genetics. So you can start releasing your selectively
bred mega antler deer.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
All of a sudden.

Speaker 4 (52:48):
Now that's not just a high fence thing, but any
guy could go and start releasing these on their Yeah,
that's pandorian.

Speaker 5 (52:53):
And it's not the it's not the same as like introduced.
I mean, obviously it's it's the same species. It's a
native species, but it has like this bucket biology kind
of feel to it.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Yeah, it's like.

Speaker 5 (53:09):
It's just a very slippery slope moving moving wild animals around.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
It's just I like what I think that you you, Yeah,
that that was very pandorian of Hey, now that I
can start buying deer and cutting them loose. H, I
want that CWD thing you're talking about, But like, can
you send a picture of the buck? Yeah? Yeah, exactly
for sure. Well, but you just pointed out that that's

(53:35):
not actually true. What do you mean?

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (53:38):
Well, right, but that doesn't mean people will try Yeah,
I get it, I get it.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
Here's the biggest thing I can see, uh, not the
big I shouldn't say that. Here's the thing I think
that's that's noteworthy about this issue. Here you have the
captive servid industry has been has been villainized for years
around CWD. And imagine how and how uh, when you're

(54:05):
looking at this as a pr problem, that you'd be
able to come back around and turn this whole thing
on its head and emerge as the savior. That's got
to be an intriguing that's exactly what's happening. That's got
to feel good.

Speaker 5 (54:21):
Well, I think too. One of the issues with the
law that just passed, at least from what I've seen
pointed out, is that it's not just like looking at
this idea, but it's laying out it's not only putting
the cart before the horse. It's like paving that road.
And there's like a timeline for this to happen, and
and before it's it's like determine whether or not this

(54:44):
is really feasible.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
There's like a target a target date.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
Yeah, like a year and a half out. And we
didn't we didn't mention at the beginning when I led
this off, I said, this law was proposed. This isn't
just a proposed law. Now, this is a past and
sign in the law.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah, happening. Do you think they could work up with
skunk that don't smell and cut him loose.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
He wouldn't be a skunk anymore. Yeah, but yeah they could,
like when they're marketing their their big giant bucks, they
can be like disease free two hundred and fifty incher
you know, selt that way all right?

Speaker 3 (55:22):
Sk that just shoots out fabreeze?

Speaker 6 (55:28):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (55:31):
All right? You want to hear a guy's suggestion to
the Michigan DNR while run the subject deer?

Speaker 4 (55:37):
Sure do I've heard a few of my day.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
My family owns a farm, and this is not me.
We don't know a farman southern Michigan. This is someone
that wrote in My family owns a farm in southern Michigan.
Every year, we require everyone who hunts with us to
kill does on our property. For at least the last decade,
there have been multiple processors in our area that would
accept cleaned deer as donations free of charge. I would

(56:08):
regularly drop off donations throughout the season. I have always
made it a habit of regularly calling processors. I should
preface this by saying this. The head of Michigan's DNR
was it last year. Last fall the year before, basically
wrote a public letter the Dear Biologist of Michiganists Michigan

(56:29):
saying we need to kill more does and we can't
get people to kill does. We reported on that, and
I got a call from Doug Duran reminding me that
I have often said, when someone tells you there's too
many blank, there's too many deer, there's too many whatever,
there's too many bears, always ask by whose measure? Because

(56:53):
I like to point out I don't know elk hunters.
I never hear an elk hunter telling me there's too
many elk. Right, people go out, they want to see elk.
People go out deer hunt and they want to see deer,
so when they hear there's too many deer, it puzzles them.
They didn't feel like they saw too many deer. They
want to see more deer, but they feel they have

(57:15):
too many deer and they can't get people to kill
does And Chad did it.

Speaker 4 (57:19):
He did a good job in that email and that
note articulating the why. I do think he did a
good job of trying to explain to the general hunting
public of Michigan that you addressing that question like, hey,
I understand you want to see a lot of deer,
but here are the possible negative outcomes of this the situation.

Speaker 1 (57:38):
He goes on to say, this year, none of our
processors accept the donations at all. It was explained to
me by the processors that the state of Michigan now
requires that each donation must be CWD screened, which takes
two to three weeks. Then a random meat sample from
every donated deer needed to be state evaluated for metal

(58:02):
from bullet fragments. That translates into deer hanging in processors
or being stored in their freezers for weeks. Therefore, because
of that storage problem, they're not willing or able to
participate in the program. He said, I can kill twenty

(58:23):
to twenty five dos a year, but without being able
to donate the meat, it's almost impossible for him to
kill that many does. He also goes on to say,
why are they charging twenty bucks for an antler this
deer tag? You should price them to sell and sell
them at five dollars. He also says Michigan ends their

(58:47):
deer season in January. Why don't they let it run
into the spring. If they really want to get killed those,
I'll say, too bad, you can't donate your deer. Have
you tried this? Have you tried putting up a sign
just like how normal people put up no trespassing signs?

(59:09):
Have you put up tried putting up signs that say
please do you hunt my place? You will get a
lot of does killed? Or say put up signs that say,
if you're interested in harvesting whitetail, does, contact me at blank.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Put an add the local paper, add the local paper.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
If you're looking for a place to hunt does with
your kids, please contact me at blank. I think you
will get a lot of does killed.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
Even at twenty bucks apiece.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
Although I know that Sorry, it's a problem where he's
writing in about it.

Speaker 4 (59:53):
I think what we found though, is that you almost
I can't remember who if I spoke to, if this
was Russ Mason with the DNR at one point or
fist Chad, But someone I spoke to basically said, no
matter how they liberalize the regulations with dill harvest, no
matter how many tags they give out, no lever they
can push has been able to significantly increase dill harvest.

Speaker 6 (01:00:13):
Me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Okay, let's let's keep it up until early February. Yeah,
you know I could kill any more dogs. There's just yeah,
people have a certain number they're willing to and but
if this guy wants to kill does, and now he
can't shoot them because they don't want to accept them
at the donation place. I have a feeling in Michigan
hunters would be really helpful, good old hunters.

Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
I don't think that it's a bad idea though, to
consider new ideas, like like having a free done tag
with every buck hunters come.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
If he if he opened up dog durn wants to shoot.
Does you know how Doug Duran gets forty does removed
off his place.

Speaker 3 (01:00:53):
I had a back, got a line out the door.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Come shoot the dose please, and what happens people show
start shooting those forty a year.

Speaker 6 (01:01:02):
I had an exchange with this gentleman because the first
thing I did was recommend checking out Doug's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Organization sharing the land.

Speaker 6 (01:01:15):
I was gonna say, saving the land, and that's not
sharing sharing the land, and he he he's going to
look into that. But in the past he shared with
me that he has opened up the land to hunters
and uh, it's just caused some problems.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
Well, not with Dougs program that Doug vets all the
That's exactly you have to go through the application process
to participate that what I.

Speaker 6 (01:01:37):
Said, I thought that the bar would maybe be much higher.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
So one of the funniest conversations I had around this
issue is Cal and I. This is Cal's I'm gonna
steal Cal's joke. Cal and I were hunting on a
place in Hawaii, a coffee plantation Hawaii where they have
a lot of problem with pigs rooting everything up. I saw,
I'll tell you one way to get rid of these pigs.
Put up a sign that says come hunt picks. And

(01:02:02):
he said, do you know what kind of people we
would get if we put up a sign like that,
Cal said barbecuers.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
I am so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
I can see the problem this guys have and becoming
more common though with donation programs.

Speaker 5 (01:02:21):
Oh yeah, well, and then I mean, I guess the
to the point made by the Michigan dn R, if
he opens up his place net, there's probably no increased
dough harvest in that county.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:02:35):
It's like the people that are going to come shoot
a dough and his place aren't going to go shoot
one somewhere else. I'm just basing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Okay, there's a person I was just talking with at
my mom's where I grew up. Okay, this individual his
grandfather hunted, His father hunted. He just didn't get into it.
Now he has a boy, and it skipped the generation
with him, just it was never interested in it. His

(01:03:04):
boy is dying to go deer hunting. But here he's
sort of missed this whole thing, of like he doesn't
know how the whole thing works. That guy and that
kid go shoot a shitload of those doughs. In his mind,
he's like, the more I think about it, I would
just eat that deer meat.

Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
Yeah, I'm just saying the macro I don't know if
it would have the sort of macro effect, then.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Are you thinking like local huntered local hunters equate to
doe harvest versus the further away you get from the
hunting spot, people are less interested in traveling to shoot
a dough.

Speaker 5 (01:03:43):
No, I'm just thinking about the I mean the idea
that liberalizing doe harvest or liberalizing hunting seasons doesn't seem
to generate more dead does.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
I think if you give, if you people who will
shoot dose more places to shoot dose, more will get
if you.

Speaker 5 (01:04:03):
Went, if you went, if you went to make I
didn't say this is like I'm fully convinced of it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
I just threw that out as like a as a Michigander. Yeah,
Mark's a Michigander. I'm telling you this. If everyone in
Michigan that wanted to shoot a doe this year had
a place to shoot a dough, there wouldn't be no
does so so just there would Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:30):
I gotta I gotta tell you about a pretty cool idea.
An interesting example of this problem.

Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:04:35):
I've been pretty involved with the field to Ford program
in Michigan and on the back forty and UH, a
couple of the new hunters that have gone through that program. Uh,
are are similar to the type of person you're describing,
somebody who wants more meat.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
They're getting into hunting.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
They're trying to find ways to you know, fill the freezer,
and the biggest problem they've had is found finding places
to do it. And so at first, you know, they
started trying to hunt public land, and then they've tried
to get private access and they continue to struggle, like
go to a lot of places and there's guys that
are already hunting it, or there's people that will let
them hunt, but they're really just focused on bucks that

(01:05:10):
they don't want them in there hunting for does when
they're guys that there hunting for bucks. But they bumped
into a farmer, and this farmer brought the fact that
he gets these depredation permits and he has twenty five
or fifty dough tags a year and can never get
enough people to use them really m hm, And he
would love these deer get shot, but can't get anyone
to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
Really.

Speaker 4 (01:05:29):
So my two friends said, well, hey, that's all we want.
We want to shoot does, and hey we don't mind
doing it in the summer. That's great, We'll do it,
and so they have started and I'm jumping the gun
for them here, but they are going to pilot a
program this year in which they try to connect new
hunters looking for access, trying to find ways to kill
deer with farmers with depredation permits who want does killed.

(01:05:53):
So get a bunch of new hunters who want to
have an opportunity to do this out there in the
summer when nobody else wants to do it. But they
don't care they can't shoot bucks because they don't know
about shooting a buck.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
They just want to shooting dose.

Speaker 4 (01:06:03):
So this year they're going to be doing that and uh,
we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
Heck, yeah, the summer.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
How low do they want? Dear? Like I always get,
I get a little as soon as people come up
with like great deer extermination ideas, I always get like
a little nervous. Sure, we've been through this before. Remember
I just read a minute ago, I killed thirty three
bald eagles in one day.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Right, all of a sudden, you're like, boy, there's not
a lot of bald eagles.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
And then they got to a point where they had
to put him on the ESA, right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:35):
So what Uh, Doug always brings up earn a buck,
but it's everybody got pissed. Everybody it was that was
it effective though? Yeah, well other than making people pissed.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
I don't know he he had. I wish Doug was
here to explain it. But I'm sure this wasn't so
widespread in the gate of the program, but it spawned
this whole industry of can I borrow your dough? But
what I do not follow your dough?

Speaker 4 (01:07:08):
As I understand it, though, the rate of CWD spread
during that time period was significantly lower as compared to
when they removed that. It's like this kind of trend
dramatically increased because they were able to slow down. They
were able to increase harvest and slow that spread. And
when they removed that tool from the toolbox, it changed things.

(01:07:29):
And it also from the folks that I know in
Wisconsin who were interested in having a more natural deer
herd and balanced age structure, balanced buck todal ratio, things
were a lot better.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
During that time period. On that book. We should clarify
just in case someone's new to wildlife politics and all that.
When we're talking about wanting to reduce deer numbers, want
of the lower deer numbers. There's historically been a single driver.
The single driver's been agricultu damage.

Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Right, yep, Well you're saying white people would want to historically,
and insurance company.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
Just heard it. That's kind of like I used to
cite that, and then I've read in places where people
have tried to go in and search like sort of
the powerful car insurance lobby moving to lower deer numbers.
I think it's kind of a thing that's not I
could be wrong. Someone could write in if they found otherwise.
That's been kind of proven as a thing that's like
not true.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
Yeah, the farm lobby has a lot of.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
Pool with that. The I always thought that the auto insurres.
Someone's like, that's that's like an urban legend. The auto
insurers were leaning on state game agencies to lower deer
populations to lower claims. If someone can contradict that, I
don't really know. I always cited that, and then I
can't even remember who told me that. It's kind of horseshit.

(01:08:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Just on the on the dough harvest side of things,
you know, I got to go hang out with Doug
for opening weekend and days after. I was shocked at
the just general buck activity despite what to my you know,
tender Montana ears sounded like an absolute battle going on

(01:09:17):
for three days straight. More shots opening morning that I
would hear walking around in Western Hills in a whole season, and.

Speaker 1 (01:09:30):
That's the big hunt for you, Oh dude, it's still
seeing bucks run around.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
And still seeing bucks running around. I shot a really cool,
bigger buck and went to drag it out to the
closest like four wheeler track road and kind of came
into this opening where one of Doug's buddies had been
shooting all morning. Shooting would be the accurate, accurate description,

(01:09:57):
And there's it looked like a scene from like The
Walking Dead. There were dose legs up everywhere you looked
in this field, to the degree that I was like,
you know what, I'm just gonna fade back into the
canopy and wait until it's dark dark before I go
walking out into this field.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
And but the proximity kind of going back to this
guy right and end to a processor is really close.
You know, you start stacking up all those does it's
a lot of work. But like there's a big part
of me that wants to go back, just shoot dose,
take them to that processor because the broughtwurst was so good, unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
Cal's Brod's holy shit.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
It's nuts. And I liked making sausage. But that's a
lot of work too.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
Uh. Back to this thought for a second. Historically, too
many deer meant too much agricultural damage. That's still is.
I'm just trying to explain that where are people getting
the idea of too many deer? Where's it coming from? Now?
It's that that remains constant agricultural damage. And there's this

(01:11:09):
other idea laid on that that too many deer two
dens of populations of deer facilitates an accelerated disease transmission.

Speaker 4 (01:11:24):
And two other things. Oh please, you've got herd health things,
and you have habitat health as well. So when you have,
like you know in Dug's area, so many deer, here's
a really hard time, you know, seeing okra generation. There's
many many states across the country where you have these
browse lines where it's nothing five feet down, and then
you see leaf structure again, So we see all sorts

(01:11:45):
of cascading biodiversity effects by these exorbitantly high white tailed
deer populations, which then and this is I think where
the standard deer hunter becomes interested. When you have a
unnaturally high deer population, your deer hunting experience this might
be different than you would imagine, but it's not going
to be as great because you're going to see a

(01:12:06):
whole lot of deer, but you're not going to see
a lot of natural deer behavior that you would in
a more balanced, healthy deer herd. When you have a
relatively balanced dough to buck ratio, you are going to
see a much more exciting rut. Bucks are actually going
to do running things. They're going to be chasing, they're
gonna be fighting, they're gonna be doing all that kind
of stuff you're going to have. When you have way

(01:12:28):
too many doughs compared to bucks, it's going to stagger
and mess up. The breeding and the fawn drop and
things like that all get out of whack, and so
you have this kind of cascade of different effects when
you do not have the natural balance that you achieve
when you have some level of you know, it's like
thirty dos to one buck is just not natural. We

(01:12:48):
get that in some of these states and these very
very very high deer populations. It messes a lot of
stuff up that impacts not only the habitat but our
experience as hunters too.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
Okay, so egg disease and Mark Kenyon, Man, we're gonna
get all into Governor's Tags. Sh'd save that krin, you
think so?

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
I mean saving that one for a while.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
Yeah, I think if we do it, it's gonna risk
we're gonna generate a longer format conversation in the future.
So I'd say we just talk about it because we
can do it quick.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
What's that? Okay? Tell me? Uh, let me tee it up.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Are we gonna give our own like thumbs up thumbs
down on our thoughts?

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
How many times have I told the story about the
GMO guy that came on?

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Four?

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Four times? Here's the fifth. I'm not gonna do it. It's
my favorite quote of all time. Actually, my favorite quote
of all time was from Ike Turner. But I'm not
going to tell that quote Governor's Tags. All right, sure,

(01:14:20):
picture you have a wildlife resource. Don't really have to
do this. Picture. You have a wildlife resource where the
demand exceeds the supply wildly exceeds, where the demand wildly
exceeds the supply. In this case, we'll talk about bighorn sheep.
You have thousands and thousands of people in every western

(01:14:42):
state want to draw a bighorn sheep tag, but there's
only one hundred or two hundred or fifty available, or
in the case of Texas, one available. How do you
allocate those tags? Generally, historically in this country we have

(01:15:02):
given them out in a democratic fashion, which is consistent
with our wildlife management values, where we have lotteries. You
send in a few bucks, your name, you know, as
we say, your name goes into a hat, and there
is a lottery drawing and you pull them out. At
some point in time, I was hoping to get a

(01:15:24):
governor's tag expert on to talk about the inception of
governor's tags. At some point in time, I don't know
when someone had the bright idea to say, man, why
don't we do that, like give them out to all
the little people through lottery. But let's just sell one

(01:15:45):
and see how much it goes for, and then we'll
take all that money. Because that's gonna look horrible, but
we'll take all that money and use it for sheep habitat.
And they said let's just see what happen. Well, it
turns out that what happens is this, people are willing
to pay one hundred thousand dollars, two hundred thousand dollars,

(01:16:08):
three hundred thousand dollars, four hundred thousand dollars, and now
close to five hundred thousand dollars to jump in line
a line that you might not ever get to the
front of if you're a Joe blow most people will
never get They'll never get to the front of the line.
And it turns out that getting to the front of

(01:16:28):
the line on a big horn sheep tag is worth
regularly hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
And the idea is so successful in raising money that
it spread out to a bunch of other species too.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):
Yep. Then they're like, well, shit, let's try that with deer.
Let's try it out, try anelo anything where the demand
exceeds the supply. With that said, take it away.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
Well, there's only a finite number of tags, right, I
just said that. So when when someone with the money
can go in there and win that auction, that tag
is coming from a pool of tags.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
I don't agree with that that I don't think it
comes from the pool. I think they made an extra okay,
because you just said there's like I have laugh. Well,
because think of how they did it. Think of how
Arizona did Arizona spawned this whole conversation because I'll point
out just a spoiler alert, Arizona's Game Commission voted to

(01:17:41):
get rid of governor tags in Arizona. When you get
a governor's tag, your tag, Like if you draw a
big horn tag in Arizona, you have a season in
a unit when you buy the governor's tag. To sweeten
the deal, this is insane. Seeming to sweeten the deal,
they said, oh, in your season, Bud, three hundred and

(01:18:03):
sixty five days is your hunting season, and you can
hunt any unit that is open to sheep hunting. That
tag did not come out of the pool.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Even if it didn't, that guy goes let's say you're
the one dude who draws the big horn tag and
a unit. Yep, the governor's guy goes in there and
shoots the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
Big ram in there. Oh yeah, and he's got months right,
he can do it. When you find out if your
season opens like September fifteenth, that's some bitch as all
summer to hunt.

Speaker 3 (01:18:38):
So I will I will say, like in the state
of Idaho, there's a Governor's tag for the the numbers increased,
but Hell's Canyon, the Hell's Canyon tag, arguably the best
big horn sheep tag in the state of Idaho, is
at one. There's one tag. This is I get. I

(01:19:00):
don't know what it's at right now, but at the time,
one tag. And they factored in that there's a ninety
chance that if the Governor's tag or whoever gets the
Governor's tag is gonna hunt that unit, gonna hunt that unit,
which is why there's one tag.

Speaker 1 (01:19:22):
Oh, because it would have been too because it would
have been okay, So there's one extra.

Speaker 5 (01:19:25):
Yes, there's it's not necessarily taking a tag out of
the pool, but there's gonna be one more dead ram.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Yep. Now, I gotta before what we even get into
some listener feedback on this, I gotta say I am
so torn on the issue that is the It is
one of the very few areas of wildlife politics where
I do not have an opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
Bullshit.

Speaker 1 (01:19:48):
Yeah, you can think of a lot of stuff that
I don't have an opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:19:50):
Done this is the one area. One of the area
Stephen Ranella tattooed on his gravestone.

Speaker 2 (01:20:01):
I can't think anything good or bad to say about it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
No, no, I can think of all kinds of good and bad.
I think, no, not that I don't know. I didn't
mean that. I have conflicting opinions, meaning okay, you're right,
cal I'll phrase it differently. If I was emperor of
the country and they said, oh, yeah, one last thing,
what about governor's tags, I'd be like, I still haven't decided, Okay,

(01:20:24):
I got to think about it longer. Yeah, that's what I.

Speaker 4 (01:20:28):
Just when I think about it, I go back to what, Yeah,
what's better for the resource in the end, and in
then the government a million dollars in habitat respiration the resource.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
It's better for the resource. What's better for us emotionally.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
Better for the resource.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
But it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
It doesn't American mode.

Speaker 5 (01:20:51):
If you have ten governors tags, right, if it's simply
about maximizing the slippers of the market value for the
economic value of those wildlife resources, you'd auction all the tags.

Speaker 1 (01:21:05):
I think there is.

Speaker 5 (01:21:08):
I was gonna say that the Arizona the guy the
email from the guy in Arizona, I think, pointed out
something that's relevant to us here in Montana, and that
is that there are other ways of of allocating these
special opportunities, in one of which is because he I
believe he pointed out that in Arizona they're not doing
away with.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
Well, i'll tell you what he said, unless you'd like
to read it.

Speaker 5 (01:21:31):
No, no, go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
It was so well worded, I think it. Yeah. This
this gentleman describes himself as someone who has been intimately
involved in the commission appointments and Arizona wildlife policy. He
wrote in a bullet pointed email. He goes on to
say the rhetoric that Arizona votes to eliminate governor's tags

(01:21:56):
is wrong. Okay, how are that'd be true? Well, he
says this, Arizona has quote special big game tags which
are administered by the Game and Fish Department along with
other tags, rather than the more political administration of governor's
tags and other states. Okay, so he's saying they don't

(01:22:18):
actually have a thing. They don't have a pool called
governor's tags. They have special big game tags. He's getting
a little bit into semantics here, but that's fine. The
Arizona Game and Fish Commission did not eliminate special big
game tags. They voted to phase out the practice of

(01:22:39):
allocating these tags through an auction process in order to
rely more on raffles. So he is making a semantic argument.
They don't call them governor's tags, but in defense of
our language, they are functional Colloquially, they are colloquially functionally

(01:22:59):
govern tags. Well, it's not the governor.

Speaker 5 (01:23:02):
When you think of a governor's tag, that's what it
looks like.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
It's an auction.

Speaker 4 (01:23:04):
Now is the will the raffle? Do they believe the
raffle will bring in equivalent funds?

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
What did the Montana to be determined?

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
I don't think so, But let me go on, since
two thousand and nine. This is the same individual since
two thousand and nine. Auction tags. Okay, so what we've
been calling governor's tags. Auction tags have accounted for seventy
percent of the thirty two point four million dollars raised

(01:23:34):
by special tags, with raffle tags raising thirty percent, or
nearly ten million dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
What my question would be how many tags were auctioned
and how many were raffled?

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
I was wondering the same thing. I wish this email
got into that, But he gives information where you would
go find it, because he sends in a whole slide
presentation on the subject. Now he goes on to say,
while the sheep and meal deer tags have generated eye
popping headlines, the department's data shows that for other species,
including turkey, bison, coosier, black bear, mountain lion, have Alina

(01:24:16):
pronghorn raffle tags generate more than auction tags. Okay, so
it's species dependent. He has another thing, the notion that
Arizona and now I don't think he got this from us,
but the notion that Arizona is becoming purple and therefore

(01:24:43):
the Commission's being influenced by anti hunting interests is flat
out wrong. Oh I know where this came from. There's
a guy that's coming on the podcast, and I'm gonna
let him put this in his own phrasing. We have
a guest in the future coming on the podcast who
felt that the move against governor's tags was a anti

(01:25:04):
hunting thing. Okay, and I might have quoted him on
that anti like that. It's anti hunters arguing against governor's tags.
How dare they auction off the life of an animal.
Oh but this individual who will be coming on the

(01:25:26):
podcast expressed to me, I don't want to say his
name because it was a private conversation and I don't
want to quote him on it, expressed to me that
he felt like it was a loss to the anti hunters. Hmmm, interesting,
this guy says that's flat out wrong. The commissioners very
very clearly articulated their reasons for taking this step. Retired

(01:25:49):
US Army Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan said he understood the
argument that the ends justify the means, meaning he understands
the argument that, hey, it's a lot of money, but
it's not democratic. And he says, we cannot compromise our

(01:26:09):
values to make money, meaning it might be ugly to
auction off hunting opportunities when you have people that in
ways in which it excludes the general population. Sure, but
that's true, but it's a compromise of our values. Therefore
the money shouldn't matter. He also cited founding principles of

(01:26:32):
this nation and inserting that we should not be setting
aside a special privilege for the rich and elite. He
spent thirty seven years in the military. That's not what
he was there defending. Okay, he was not there to
defend special privileges for the rich and elite. He was

(01:26:52):
there to defend all Americans, which influenced his decision that
governor tags are on American Former chair James Sorry, I'm
gonna mutilate this name. James Goner was cited, among other concerns,

(01:27:17):
the concentration of these tags in just a few hands,
meaning check this out. Thirty six governor's tags have fallen
into the hands of three individuals. Wow, which is also

(01:27:38):
in the slide. He goes on to say these individuals
are not sympathetic to anti hunting advocates. Should I keep
going about this guy? This guy's good.

Speaker 3 (01:27:53):
Yeah, no, I mean it's all I'll get info.

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
I served as a policy advisor to the previous Arizona
governor and was personally involved in the selection of several
of these commissioners. I am intimately familiar with the process
for the appointment of the others and can state confidently confident. Yeah,
I can state confidently. Why am I saying I can
say confident, But he's saying he can state with confidence.

(01:28:20):
There you go that the wishes of anti hunters played
no role in these appointments. I was similarly, similarly, very
closely involved in the banning of trail cameras in the
state for taking of wildlife. As we're a number of
these commissioners, I can tell you personally that the decision

(01:28:41):
was driven by hunters for the benefit of hunters and
our model of wildlife conservation. To see either of these
actions as being motivated by anti hunting forces is just
flat out wrong. Yeah shuck, I like that guy. Yep,

(01:29:03):
it's good. Email Okay, who wants to do? Email number two?

Speaker 3 (01:29:09):
I can read it. I haven't read it before.

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
Who I'm looking forward to? Email number three?

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
This is from Mark, not the guy that's sitting next
to me, but he describes himself as a spare time
economist and a spare time hunter. The idea that governor's
tags or any other market mechanisms to manage scarce wildlife
resources counter the democratic allocation pillar of the North American
model of wildlife conservation is a misconception held by many

(01:29:37):
conservationists and hunters. When discussing a scarce resource like a
big horn, cheap tag, a random draw isn't democratic in
the same way electing a president is everyone doesn't vote
for who gets the tag. John Stikovich of Cleveland, Ohio
isn't the favorite to win because he saved an eleven
month old baby from a burning building and deserves that

(01:30:00):
the most parentheses. True stories, random draws are just one
imperfect way to allocate resources when demand exceed supply. It
just so happens that that it is an indisputably suboptimal
way to do so.

Speaker 1 (01:30:16):
No, he's contradicting himself. A merit based system is not
democratic in this case. That's merit based. Does he ever
think we're going to hold an election to see who
gets the governor's day.

Speaker 3 (01:30:30):
Everybody's essays need to be to do it now. The
debate's going to be held halfway through.

Speaker 5 (01:30:37):
It's democratic in the sense of everyone's equal before the law,
like democratic culture voting one.

Speaker 1 (01:30:45):
If the governor was given the tag and the governor
could honor a person who deserved it on merit, it
would open up big problems with cronyism.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
Wouldn't raise money either.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
But get.

Speaker 3 (01:31:04):
He's saying the market will decide who's right or wrong.
You shouldn't take seriously state game agencies complaining about managing
white tailed dough populations while still charging for licenses to
hunt them. If they were really felt that there were

(01:31:25):
too many deer on the landscape, they would reimburse hunters
for shooting. Does not charge them?

Speaker 1 (01:31:30):
All right, I'm done. In general, there was zeno state agency.

Speaker 3 (01:31:39):
In general, game agencies unwillingness to manage.

Speaker 1 (01:31:42):
That they had to run out of deficit. Not that
state agencies can get revenue to fund biologists. How about
the state agency with now that we've stripped its funding
source anyways, now needs to pay people to hunt? Does yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:32:06):
Oh, I am as Steve put it a way ass
pro governor's tag person who wants to read that one
I can jump the brod well.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
It may be true that people used to have a
we're all in it together attitude, and that years ago
one was not able to pay extra to skip lines
at Disneyland or bored an airplane faster. This tear system
is most certainly not new. An argument could be made
that the average American today is is today more aware

(01:32:41):
of the financial tier systems that inherently exists in a
capital society than they were thirty, forty or fifty years ago.
But the fact that rich people are able to buy
things that are either coveted or rare and thus expensive,
while poor middle class people are unable to buy such things.
Is in no way a surprise to anyone, nor has
it ever been a surprise to anyone. The foundation of

(01:33:04):
this argument is what exact is exactly equal opportunity means,
and where it exists in our North American model of
wildlife conservation. I'm not following that regarding the draw system,
which is integral to our conservation model, equal opportunity means

(01:33:25):
that every American has an equal right to apply. It
does not mean that every American has an equal ability
to apply. Someone who asks the financial means to apply
across multiple states of which they are not a resident
stands a much greater chance of being successful in a
draw by virtue of having entered more draws. In the opposite,
someone who does not have the financial means has a

(01:33:48):
significantly lower probability of successfully drawing a tag. There's inherent
inequality in this, but it is in financial ability, not
opportunity to apply. In the very same vein he's gonna.

Speaker 1 (01:34:02):
Get to this, he's gonna get to And since anyone
can bid on a governor's.

Speaker 2 (01:34:06):
Sag right in the very same vein. Everyone has afforded
the equal opportunity to write of bidding on a governor's tag.
Yet not everyone is afforded an equal financial ability. The
person with a greater financial means will be more successful
in terms of attaining a tag. The buck stops here there.

Speaker 1 (01:34:26):
I think you know what? Can you read his last sentence?

Speaker 3 (01:34:28):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:34:29):
There's a litany of other pro governor's tag arguments, but
I believe this to be the most compelling. Sincerely, Sexton.

Speaker 1 (01:34:36):
Now when I hear a name like Saxton, you're immediately suspicious.
He's got grease, he's got jingle. Of course, Saxton name
Saxons because rich people know how to name their kids
to sound rich.

Speaker 3 (01:34:53):
Right, you don't get that like this is this is
a better argument.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
It is a better argument, but the whole like where
it exists in our North American model, Like, you know,
it's not the King's deer, so I'm not sure what
he's getting.

Speaker 3 (01:35:10):
Well, yeah, I mean this, right, is an argument that
you could apply to anything. Right, It's like, well, the
systems messed up, Yeah, so why pick on this part
of the system, cherry pick this when this is our
messed up over here too. If you're really invested in
making it equitable and democratic, then you need to tear

(01:35:33):
down this part of the system.

Speaker 1 (01:35:35):
I'm gonna sum up email for yep. I was gonna
sum it up. Y'all's jealous. People jealous about all kinds
of stuff. They don't realize they're jealous. Y'all's jealous of
people who can buy governor's tags. That's what this is
all about, yep.

Speaker 5 (01:35:51):
I mean, I think the one of the things that
the argument about, if you can't afford it, you're just
why is that we own the wildlife right, and so
it's not the same as like going to Disneyland and
paying to cut in line. It's a public resource and
everybody has a right to say how they think it

(01:36:13):
should be managed.

Speaker 1 (01:36:16):
This guy goes on here's email number five. He's like, hey, man,
I'm torn. Here's a couple of questions. Why is there
only one tag? If one tag is worth six hundred,
then why not sell two tags for one point two million? Two?
His second question is the amount raised? Truly the thing

(01:36:38):
that allows this to be considered If the tag went
for twenty thousand dollars one year rather than six hundred
dollars six hundred thousand, would it still be worth violating
the North American conservation model or is it the amount
of money?

Speaker 3 (01:36:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:36:59):
What what?

Speaker 3 (01:37:00):
There's definitely a threshold. Yeah, definitely threshold. All good questions,
he believed.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
Here's another question he's got. I believe asking our governor's
tag's good hides behind words the truth. The true question, then,
is are our ethical beliefs for sale? In pointing out
this threshold. We'll do it for six, we'll do it
lest it, not do extremes. We'll do it for two hundred,

(01:37:28):
not gonna do that for ten? Okay, uh yeah, At
what point do we go, like, well, for that amount
of money? I think there's a movie about this one.
Oh yeah, Demi Moore, some guy. Yeah, they're like a
loyal couple, but she could get a bunch of grease,
which is slang for jingle, which is slang for night

(01:37:55):
with everyone has a price.

Speaker 3 (01:37:56):
Leaving Las Vegas. Not leaving Las Vegas was the.

Speaker 5 (01:38:00):
You know that one movie that Nick Cage did, Raising Arizona.

Speaker 2 (01:38:05):
I think you can just the opposite though. If it
was only twenty thousand, people be like, oh that's cool,
But it would they wouldn't get so pissed.

Speaker 1 (01:38:13):
Because of because of email number four, because y'all's jealous
and you're and you're more jealous of a dude with
massive grease.

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
Totally, because you're like, I know that seven hundred thousand
for that antelope island mule deer tag, Like it's like
a drop in the bucket for that guy. He didn't
give a shit.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
What if it went the opposite way though?

Speaker 4 (01:38:35):
What if what if I told you that such and
such a Saxon guy was going to put in thirty
million dollars enough to pay double the entire Saxon bombuler
the seven Yeah, what if it was such an astronomical
amount that it could change everything that state was able
to do? Is there is there a tier where it's
like undeniably useful we have right?

Speaker 1 (01:38:56):
I mean, if someone said, hey, man, I'm going to
give you a billion dollar and you can take that
billion dollars and spend it on wildlife habitat. But here's
the rub, I'm gonna shoot one of them.

Speaker 5 (01:39:06):
She's and that she would have died that winter anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:39:11):
Yeah, we're giving musks and my das here.

Speaker 7 (01:39:15):
Would you just said no, no, no, no, we should
introduce into evidence the Montana Bha experiment this year.

Speaker 1 (01:39:26):
Yeah, then we're gonna finish Krinn wrote end.

Speaker 3 (01:39:30):
Which is which is raffle the auction, right, And and
I think there's a bunch of ways that I find
to be like irrefutable that this should If we're gonna
do fundraising this way, it should be through raffle, not
through auction.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):
And like.

Speaker 3 (01:39:56):
The wild cheap situation is the best example that we have, right, Like,
there's no data out there that says, you know, a
hell of a lot more people would be invested in
big horn cheap conservation if they had some way to

(01:40:18):
access bighorn sheep or even the opportunity at big horns.

Speaker 1 (01:40:23):
There's no data supporting that.

Speaker 3 (01:40:25):
Right, But you're like, Okay, you could have your name
in the hat for a big horn sheep tag for
five bucks, but that chance doesn't really exist, right. But
at the same time, like once a year, we all
gather in a room and we pat each other on

(01:40:46):
the backs by being like that dude is getting his
third World Slam of sheep. What a conservationist, right, And
he'd I mean six hundred and fifty thousand dollars ah
what a conservationist. Right, That same conservationist can buy six

(01:41:10):
hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of raffle tickets, right
and be like, what a great conservationist. He's just not
guaranteed the sheep hunt to go with it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:19):
Yeah. Well, here's the thing though, My wife recently bid
on a thing where you get to go get donuts
with the school resource officer and a fundraiser for the school. Yep,
it's like donuts with Tom the cop. Uh. She could

(01:41:39):
have just given that money, not gone to donuts with
that cop.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
But he's super good looking, but he listens to her
dropping on the neighboring tables one thousand attention.

Speaker 1 (01:41:56):
It was actually, Uh, the intention was that our kids
would get to go get donuts with the cops. I
don't like this. I don't like this.

Speaker 3 (01:42:04):
It seems like.

Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
Is to go to donuts with the cops in order
to be heard.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
Okay. So the Montana example that that Randall brought up,
Montana BHA gets the statewide mule deer tag this year
and and typically the state will give it to different
conservation groups as that fundraising mechanism the very typical way

(01:42:34):
of fundraising with the tag, right, the conservation group doesn't
get the money from the tag. The conservation group gets
to use that tag as kind of like the carrot
to bait folks into a fancy banquet where that tag
gets auctioned off.

Speaker 1 (01:42:52):
Oh that's how that works.

Speaker 3 (01:42:54):
Yeah, and then they's like.

Speaker 4 (01:42:56):
Raff off a bunch of other things, and then they
raffle off a bunch of other things.

Speaker 1 (01:42:59):
To make their money.

Speaker 3 (01:43:00):
But this it's a decoy, yes, really, yeah, yep, because
you know, I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:43:06):
Know how I thought it worked, but I didn't know
that well.

Speaker 3 (01:43:08):
Because arguments like this, right, these states that have those
those tags, that money has got to go back to
the conservation of that species, for the habitat of that species,
for the benefit of bighorn cheap or moose or goats
or mule.

Speaker 1 (01:43:24):
Yeah right, yeah, everything you're saying makes sense as their thought.

Speaker 5 (01:43:28):
I think they get a cut, or they can take
a cut.

Speaker 3 (01:43:32):
I think, yeah, there's like the but it's outlined in here, right, you're.

Speaker 1 (01:43:37):
Right, it doesn't go into their general fund, right, the.

Speaker 3 (01:43:40):
Handling fee, so you know, yep, it's twenty bucks a chance,
but your card gets danged for twenty two fifty type
of thing. So anyway, what was interesting here is like
we talked about like you put in six hundred thousand
dollars at auction, but you could put six hundred thousand

(01:44:01):
dollars into the raffle if you really wanted to do that.
Nobody did that. So historically the highest price the Montanas,
the statewide Montana mule deer tag has ever gone for,
was forty one thousand dollars. A lot of money for
mule deer tag. Nowhere nearer the amount of money that
mule deer tags and other states go for it to.

Speaker 1 (01:44:23):
We don't have that kind of mild are yeah, because
we get to hunt them all through the front.

Speaker 3 (01:44:32):
Well, the raffle version raised fifty six swenty dollars, a
thirty eight percent increase from the all time high. And
what's interesting is the the mean purchase price was forty
three dollars, so kind of on average, two chances to

(01:44:59):
name in the hat per participant, yep, right, so you know,
very equitable. It was spread really evenly amongst the people
who chose to participate.

Speaker 1 (01:45:12):
Tank of gas ranging to two tanks of gas, and
the guys, the guy.

Speaker 5 (01:45:15):
Who actually won, The guy who actually won spent like
under one hundred dollars or something. He spent one hundred
bucks on tickets.

Speaker 3 (01:45:24):
Yeah, he spent one hundred bucks through the winner.

Speaker 1 (01:45:26):
I think that that could be the start of the arms, right,
I think that in that case, you made more off
a mule around raffle in Montana. I don't think that
you would that that's that's not going to hold true
in big horns.

Speaker 3 (01:45:37):
Yeah, but like I would love to see that. So
if the marketing mechanism were to change from curating individual
donors with super deep pockets, right, like you don't hold
a raffle or an auction like that and being like,

(01:45:58):
oh my god, a totally random person off the street
walked in here and bought that thing. Can you believe that?

Speaker 1 (01:46:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:46:03):
Is not done right?

Speaker 1 (01:46:05):
You know the.

Speaker 3 (01:46:08):
Person or the top two people who are going to
end up with.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
They're in communication with the people that are going to
buy it.

Speaker 3 (01:46:15):
Yes, yep. So if you took that level of effort
and did a nationwide.

Speaker 2 (01:46:28):
Ideally what's five hundred thousand at fifty bucks an entry.

Speaker 1 (01:46:33):
Yeah, that's just a matter of removing some number of zeros.

Speaker 2 (01:46:37):
And like, would you get that many people to do it?
I bet you would.

Speaker 3 (01:46:41):
Well, but and you advertise to these areas that are like,
I am so detached from big horn sheep, I don't
even participate, right, And I'm just saying, like, anecdotally, in
the state of Montana, as we increased the bar price
wise for these speed that are very very limited, right,

(01:47:03):
the supply demand that we already talked about. I had
people within my personal circle that there was never ever
a question, nor would there ever be a question of
how serious a hunter they are. But they were just
like unpriced out of the game, and they just made
that decision early on. I can't float two hundred and
fifty bucks out there for a chance. I'm just going

(01:47:26):
to concentrate on other things. So I mean, whether you
think that's a significant number or not, that is happening.
So I want to know if we said, here's the
places that don't participate in the conservation of this species,
and we put our efforts into saying like, okay, here's
a way, would that then lead to greater participation in

(01:47:50):
the conservation of that species in general?

Speaker 1 (01:47:53):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:47:54):
Because well, I had threw five dollars in and then
I read some stuff on big horn sheep, and boy,
I like that idea. Now I'm just a little more
invested than I was.

Speaker 1 (01:48:04):
You know that.

Speaker 4 (01:48:05):
You know that sheep day we went to at the
Hunt Expo where we put in our raffle tickets and
sat there. I've never thought about and cared about sheep
so much as I did for that hour.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
I think it's safe to say this on the raffle front,
even if you do a big horned sheep, it's not
a question of It's definitely not a question of do
we want four hundred thousand dollars or zero? Yeah, it's
probably some question of do we want four hundred or

(01:48:37):
two fifty or four hundred or two or whatever the
hell it is. It's not like you're giving to move
to a raffle or you're not giving up the whole thing.
You're giving up probably something, but you're not losing the
whole thing. Well, I mean, you're gaining a public participation.

Speaker 5 (01:48:54):
I believe that Idaho Wild Sheep Foundation for that state
wide tag they switch every other year. I believe so
they one year they auction it, than the next year
they raffle it.

Speaker 1 (01:49:07):
Yep. I how you put that Wall Street Main Street?

Speaker 3 (01:49:13):
There you go brand, but there's no there's just like
I feel like, by I mean, look at look at
the state of skiing in the United States right these
major veil Oh, there's only.

Speaker 2 (01:49:31):
Two ski companies left in the whole country.

Speaker 3 (01:49:34):
And they have made a very public decision to raise
prices cater to fewer customers year over year, at at
a higher price to that customer. And that's just the
way skiing is going to be, right, I mean, I
think that that is a very good example of where hunting,
at least right now for certain species already is. And

(01:49:56):
it went that way a long time ago. Right, It's
like I always remind people when I'm in that cheap auction,
I'm like, what's fun here is the percentage of people
who have ever actually had a sheep tag that are
in this room right now? This whole industry is here,

(01:50:16):
but relative like the amount of actual sheep hunters very very.

Speaker 1 (01:50:22):
Few, yep. But see that guy back there, he got
six yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:50:28):
Yeah, And we're like and you know, and it's this
thing that we're expected to celebrate, and like, are we
just so far down the road that we can't go
back and be like, man, we got to try something else,
because it turns out relatively very few people actually give
a shit about sheep because they just will never get one.

(01:50:51):
And we talk about so I have a lifetime license
in Idaho, which gives me the privilege of having my
name in the sheep draw as a resident, which is
I believe. Still, if you're applying as a resident in
the state of Idaho for bighorn sheep, that is the

(01:51:11):
best odds of drawing bighorn sheep in the US. Still,
I think, depending on your unit. Every year I talk
about how stupid I am. I should be applying for
badass mule deer tags in Idaho every year because mathematically
I will not draw that tag. But I know people

(01:51:31):
who have right and they're at this point like huge
chip on my shoulder. I'd much rather draw or a
bighorn sheep tag than buy one, because it's like that's
where the hunt is.

Speaker 1 (01:51:47):
It's more fun.

Speaker 3 (01:51:48):
Oh, it's more fun. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:51:51):
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:51:54):
This is a legitimate issue with the hunting system in America,
Like we've already made the decision to just reserve elite
opportunities for folks with elite bank accounts, and I don't
believe that's right. In any way, shape or form, and
we're not exploring ways to change that system. And I

(01:52:19):
think it's going to be at the detriment of hunting
because it's like, well, why would I give a shit
about that. It's like I'm not I lost that game
a long time ago. Ladies, Joan Ryan Kell and Amen
Cal thank you for joining.

Speaker 1 (01:52:36):
We'll find you out to the uh the hell's it called?
Mediator podcast network, YouTube, good Night uncompahgre or the other
Robert W service by Bob Servis. This next story came

(01:53:03):
to us through Keith and Spot, the manager of the
First Light store in Haley, Idaho. Keith received a call
from a customer one day who phoned in to tell
him about an experience he'd had while wearing a piece
of First Light gear, the Uncompagreate Puffy. While I'd argue

(01:53:26):
that the jacket is certainly not the star of the story,
this gentleman had gotten into a very sticky situation in
the mountains of northwest Montana. He felt that his survival
was due in part to the quality of the jacket
he was wearing. As you'll hear, there are a few
other pieces of gear that would have served him well,

(01:53:48):
and he readily admits that he should have been carrying them.
To be honest, though, what caught my eye about this
story wasn't the coat, which is a damn good puffy,
but rather the narrator's name, Robert W. Service. As everyone knows,
or at least they better know, Robert Service is the

(01:54:11):
name of the greatest poet of all time, if he
asks me, better than Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman
all put together, known as the Bard of the Yukon,
Service was born in eighteen seventy four and is the
author of the greatest poem ever written, The Cremation of

(01:54:31):
Sam McGee. It's the story of a pair of gold
miners during the Yukon gold Rush, one of whom Sam McGee,
is from Tennessee. He hates the cold of the North,
hates it severely, and it's not until his death that
he finally gets so much needed relief. The poem begins,

(01:54:53):
there are strange things done in the midnight sun by
the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trail have
their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.
The northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest
they ever did see was that night on the marge
of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. You'll have to

(01:55:17):
read it to see how it ends, and then you
might want to follow up by reading the second greatest
poem of all time, also written by Service, called the
Shooting of Dan McGrew. Now what binds these two Robert W. Services,
one a dead Scottish Canadian poet and the other living

(01:55:38):
commercial fishermen from Oregon. Isn't just their name or the
fact that they are actually related. They are bound also
by experiences with extreme cold. Only one of them, however,
lived through two experiences so harrowing that they would earn

(01:55:58):
him the nickname black Cloud Bob.

Speaker 8 (01:56:06):
My name's Bob Service. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. I
live in a small coastal town in Oregon. The story
I'm going to tell you took place on November fifteenth,
twenty twenty three, in Sanders County, Montana. I've lived here
in Astoi, Oregon, my whole entire life to make a
living a commercial fish and also a member of an

(01:56:30):
operating engineer's trade. It's a pretty economically depressed place, so
growing up in a small coastal community. Even though my
parents weren't really hardcore, we spent a lot of time
outside and we ate a lot of the fish, crab, deer, elk.
It just became a way of life. We lived off
the land here and it just kind of morphed into

(01:56:51):
my adulthood and it became what I'm all about. I
started hunting when I was twelve. I've had horrible luck
at it, but it's part of who I am and
I love it. People approached me and you're like, man,
if you didn't have bad luck, you wouldn't have any luck.
I've been labeled black cloud, bob or I've also been
told I'm lucky. I don't know what it is to

(01:57:14):
be honest with you, but I mean I was on
a crab boat one time that was sinking and we
got rescued off that. I've been hit by an Amtrak train.
I've had some pretty impressive things happen to me. So
I'm still here and there must be some kind of
a reason for the story that I'm about to tell you,
which took place in November of twenty twenty three. I

(01:57:35):
need to go back to twenty ten. I had been
in a relationship for four or five years. I met
this gal and she was like twenty and I was
thirty three, and she came over to my house and
she never left. She had mentioned that, you know, she
had an interest in wanting to go deer hunting, and
I'm like, well, let's fulfill your interest.

Speaker 3 (01:57:55):
Let's go.

Speaker 8 (01:57:56):
So I bought her a deer tag. I took her
out to a gun. I let her handle a rifle.
Everything in my mind that you would do to fulfill
somebody that hadn't spent much time around guns. You showed
them how it works, let him handle the firearm, you
let him shoot. So I did all these things, and
I take my ex girlfriend hunting about five hours south

(01:58:19):
of where I live, so it was a camping hunting
destination trip. Took her out hunting and I found a
buck and I said, hey, would you like to shoot
this buck? She said yes. And when I first spotted
this thing, it was probably like almost a thousand yards away,
so we closed the distance to about three hundred yards.
I set her up and I'm like, well, here's the deer,
find it in the scope, and when you're ready, shoot it.

(01:58:42):
The funny thing about this story is I don't normally
bring a dog with me hunting, but I had this
little spring or Spaniel. She was about a thirty five
pound dog, and she went with me everywhere. She was
in the back seat right when all this stuff happened,
she started barking and freaking out. Looking back, I still
think that that dog was trying to tell me that
she just had maybe like a premonition that something was

(01:59:04):
gonna go wrong that day. And I scolded her for it,
and I feel horrible about that because I think that
dog just had maybe had a hunch. She shoots this deer,
the deer falls down. I rig her up and I
put the firearm on her back on a sling. I
empty it. I put a pack frame on bags on

(01:59:26):
my back, and I'm going to bone this deer out.
We're going to hike down to it. And I'm side hill.
I'm trying to find it, and we make our way
over to the animal. The deer was about twenty five
feet to my immediate right. The animal is mortally wounded,
but it's still alive. She was up on the hill
from the steep bank and I'm directly across from this animal,

(01:59:46):
and I said, why don't you go ahead and chamber
around up and dispatch this deer. So she started to
cycle around with this rifle. It was my rifle, and
it had a detachable magazine. The spring had a little
bit of slack, so when you put a round into
the magazine and you went to chamber it, to get

(02:00:06):
that bullet to feed into the chamber, sometimes you kind
of had to put your hand on the bottom of
the clip to raise that spring up. In that action,
she was trying to fight it. It was foreign to
her and she didn't know her way around it. Unknowingly,
that muzzle was coming towards my direction to my right,
and about the time I'm like, oh, that muzzle's way

(02:00:30):
in the danger zone and my safe. The gun went
off and I felt the bullet go through my thigh,
and immediately I remember saying to her, Oh my god,
you just shot me in the leg. And it wasn't
like the movies where you fly or fall. I just
I stood there and I'm like, oh my god. I'm like, oh,

(02:00:52):
I got to get out of here, and I took
a step and down I went. Just by the pain
and the shock and everything that I was going into,
I pretty much figured that was time I was going
to say goodbye right there. She called nine one one,
and for about an hour and a half or two hours,
she had first responders, firefighters EMTs searching this mountain for us.

(02:01:15):
I had told secondhand, you know, the dispatcher that we're
on this road. We're at the three and a half
mile marker. It was a one ton dodged diesel crew
cab truck. And it's super crazy because the dispatcher at
the time had enough common sense to reach out to
a local there, and this man was like eighty years

(02:01:37):
old at the time. She called him up and she said, hey,
I think there's a hunter behind your house. He's been shot,
he's wounded. And this old timer got in his pickup
just based off the description and drove up there and
found me. I'm sitting there, I'm laying on my back,
and I'm things are starting to get slowed down, and
I'm actually playing like highlight reels of my life. I

(02:02:00):
had all this real, super vivid memories of things that
happened forty years ago that were as vivid as something
that happened ten minutes ago. That's when I knew I
was probably getting ready to say goodbye. But shortly after
that old man found me. He had a bunch of
EMTs right directly behind him, and they packed me down

(02:02:21):
to a landing and I was life flighted to Eugene, Oregon.
I woke up two weeks later and my dad was
there and he's like, do you know what day it is?
And I'm like no, and he's like, you've been asleep
for ten days. I spent almost fifty consecutive days in
the hospital and almost a year of recovery before I

(02:02:46):
was able to walk. But that hunting accident, what I
had to go through has been over the last fourteen
years as a result of that event, quite an experience.
What I bow and what I went through trying to
rehabilitate myself and get myself back to work. Like I said,

(02:03:06):
I work as a commercial fisherman and being a guy
in a trade, I worked on a lot of heavy
duty construction that required pile driving, dredging, dock wharf construction,
that kind of stuff that having some debilitating injury creates
a little bit of resentment. We stayed together for five
or six years, but I just couldn't get over the

(02:03:26):
fact that she shot me, even though it was an accident.
I tried to put myself in her shoes, think about
what she was going through and the trauma that she
went through shooting me. But I just couldn't. I just
couldn't get over it. I had times where I'd get
these staff infections and it would make me just horribly sick.
I got osteo melitis, which is a bone infection. I

(02:03:49):
had to have my metatarsal bone cut off, and the
second toe I think they called the second gist all.
They had to clip that one off because I wore
the end of it off. I learned a lot about
it infect and how sick it can make you. I
was sitting there stressing, and I was watching the money
leave my bank account. I'd go for a couple months
where I'd be able to work, and then I was

(02:04:09):
plagued with an infection. I wouldn't be able to work
for months, even though it was debilitating. Once I was upright,
there was no slowing me down. I pedaled in ten
miles to kill a bull elk on a logging road
on a bicycle the next year, so I definitely got
right back on the bike and ripped the training wheels off,

(02:04:31):
and I tried to be as headstrong as I could be.
I actually think it made me work harder than most
people because I had this weight of this debilitating leg
or this slowed down leg. November of twenty twenty three,

(02:04:54):
I had just spent several months fishing every day on
a commercial fishing boat out of Astoria, so I was
really looking forward to the fall. And the year prior
I didn't really get much hunting time in, so after
going for a couple of years, I wanted to set
myself up where I had some time. Our Oregon elk season,

(02:05:15):
which takes place in Middle Oregon, is a big part
of my life. Elk season is traditional to us as
Christmas Morning is for some people. There's a lot of
families involved, and we rely heavily on eating elk meat.
I wanted to go hunting in Montana before our elk
season started, and I had this idea in my head

(02:05:38):
that I wanted to go and try and hunt for
mule deer. Oregon has horrible mule deer hunting, and I
wanted to shoot a nice mature mule deer bug. And
I cut some corners, and that's probably another reason why
I got in the trouble. I got into. It was
a Sunday, and I had told my wife, I'm like, dear,

(02:05:59):
I'm gonna go hunting. Wanted to utilize some hunting tags
in Montana. The person that I was supposed to go
with didn't draw. She's a busy woman, hard working gal,
and she's like, well, I can't go, I can't leave.
And I'm like, I'll just go over for a couple
days and I'll come back. So that's what I did.
I threw my stuff in my pickup. I was just

(02:06:20):
gonna kind of cruise around and go hunting. It wasn't
my first time hunting in Montana. I've probably been there
five or six times prior. I went to the area
that I knew first, and I spent half a morning
there kind of cruising around and decided that I wanted
to actually go out and just hunt and explore, spend
a couple of days messing around in country that I

(02:06:43):
hadn't really been to before. I went south, about two
and a half hours from where i'd normally go hunting,
and I drove up this ridge and I had got
up to this point where I was overlooking this reservoir
and mountains. It was beautiful vast, big country, and I'm like, oh,
put a rifle on my shoulder and my little daypack

(02:07:04):
on and I'll just go for a little drawn up
this ridge. It's awful weather, raining, sideways, nasty. I'm going
up this ridge. And I guess it was probably around
one or two in the afternoon over there in that
time of the year. I think it gets dark around
four thirty or a quarter after four. It was starting

(02:07:25):
to be that time where the lights were starting to
go out, and I'm like, well, I better turn around
and make my way back down to the pickup and
have some dinner and call my wife and figure out
where I'm at to stay tonight. As I did that,
I was coming back down the hill and everything just
went black. I don't know what happened. I know I fell.

(02:07:46):
All I remember is my legs being above my head
and then everything went black. I wake up and it's dark,
and I kind of panicked because it's pitch black, and
I don't know how long I'd been out, and my

(02:08:08):
leg is really really messed up, I mean messed up, bad,
hurt and bad, and I could tell my ankle was
all cocked over, and I thought I would expedite things,
and I would go down this ridge and get down
to the road that I had driven my truck up
to where I was well. When I bailed off the ridge,

(02:08:32):
I kept on taking it down, thinking I was going
to cut this road, and I never cut it. I
was wearing a Boa type ratcheting hunting boot. This particular
hunting boot had a sole on it that was super
hard and slick. I'd walk over the blowdown limbs and
it was like walking on a sheet of ice. Everything
was just slick and slimy and wet and saturated. And

(02:08:53):
if it wasn't rain and sideways, it was snowing. I
would just be walking along and all of a sudden,
I'd be right on my back smack. And I don't
know how many times I fell because of that. With
my experience in twenty ten, you'd think I'd be pretty
set up as far as having some kind of GPS
or some kind of transponder type apparatus. My phone battery

(02:09:16):
was dead. I couldn't access any maps, ONYX maps or anything,
and I just completely put myself into a situation where
I got bit. I had taken compass readings, and I
knew before I had left where I needed to go
to get back to my pickup. However, I just couldn't
achieve that it was very humbling to be a mile

(02:09:39):
or two away from your vehicle and have a broken
leg that you can barely stand on, and some injuries
that you knew that you might not walk away from.
I kept taking this ridge down, and I got down
in this creek bottom and I'm like, well, I can
take a crick to somewhere. The very first night I

(02:10:00):
went through this country where it was hands and knees
crawling through and over, and I remember getting to this point.
The whole night had been up trying to get out,
and I was so freaking exhausted. I remember reaching in
my pocket, I pulled out my keys, and I hit
my teeth off to see if I was close to

(02:10:21):
my truck. I remember hearing my horn and I'm like,
I'm okay, I can just fall asleep. I was so exhausted.
I just fell asleep on this hillside. And I wake
up to this mule deer dough blowing and hissing at
me and stomping at me, and it's sunny. I'm looking

(02:10:42):
at her, and this deer is just completely agitated that
I'm around. She's hissing, and then finally I kind of
shoot her away. And I had this little rim rock
thing that I was laying next to on this hillside
and the sun was beaten on me, and I was
warming up, drying out and kind of trying to wake up,
and I could hear that dough, that mule deer dough

(02:11:02):
up there, still blowing, and I could hear hooves hitting
the ground, and the next thing I know, she kicked
up this boulder directly above me. In this rock that
was the size of a basketball or a cantalope comes
hurling down over this hillside, and I felt the wind
of that rock go by my head, and I'm thinking
to myself, I'm like, geez, the deer even trying to

(02:11:25):
get me well her tracks, I kind of noticed that
was kind of the direction I needed to go.

Speaker 2 (02:11:32):
Well.

Speaker 8 (02:11:32):
I ended up running into this deer a couple more times.
It was really strange because when I caught up to her,
she had a nice, mature mule deer with her, like
a four point that was just a beautiful buck. At
that point, hunting was the last thing on my agenda.
There could have been a world record deer there, and

(02:11:53):
I wouldn't have shot it. I needed to get out
of there. I didn't even know if my gun was
operable because it had fallen twenty feet and taken a
pretty hard hit and a whole muzzle was fouled, so
I couldn't even shoot the gun safely. And I end
up running into these deer, and now there's four. There's

(02:12:17):
a mule deer dough, a mule deer buck, and a
white tail buck and a white tail dough and they're
all hanging out together, and I'm like, man, that is
really weird. That is really bizarre. Well, they ended up
taking off, and I ended up making my way down
to this road and I'm like, oh, this must be
the road where I drove up with my truck. And

(02:12:39):
so I'm down there all night, piecing around looking for
my tracks on this road and I literally am just
going over the same country over and over again. And
I look up this road and I see three kids.
And I look over to my right and there's a gate,
a farmer gate type thing, and behind is this massive

(02:13:01):
white tail buck. I still can't believe how big it was.
But I saw these what I thought were three kids
trying to yell at them and get their attention, and
they're not yelling back at me. Well the whole time,
what I'm thinking are kids is a hallucination. I'm hallucinating.

(02:13:21):
I spent four whole nights out in the woods with
no food, and the only water I was drinking was
drinking from you know, springs in the ground. I was weak,
I was tired, I was hurt, havn't eaten, haven't drank,
and I was so freaking exhausted. I'd be walking along
and I would just pass out and fall down on
the ground. I was in trouble. All I could think

(02:13:47):
about in my head was God, I missed the check
in last night. But what is my wife thinking? What
is my poor wife going through right now?

Speaker 2 (02:13:55):
You know?

Speaker 8 (02:13:56):
And I'm just trying to beat my way back. Every
step I took was like taking five back. Nothing was
working out. I was just terrified and worried about my daughter.
I knew my wife would be okay, but I just
couldn't stomach my daughter not having a dad. So it
was it was a hell the time. I mean, just

(02:14:20):
the fear and being hurt and the helplessness. I don't
have any idea how much country I traversed when your
legs broke, trying to use your gun as a crutch,
and just trying to transit through that country with all
the elevation and it being covered in snow and slick

(02:14:41):
and overblowdown trees. You can only get around so much.
But I just never would stop. I just kept on
trying to beat my way ahead and through and trying
to get out of this situation. This ridge that I
was on, it was open on the east facing slope,

(02:15:02):
and then on the west facing slope it was timbered
terrain and country. I got into these bluffs and I
could see a trail below me, and it was so
steep and it was so sketchy. It was like being
placed on a rock wall where you're looking down where

(02:15:23):
you have twelve or fourteen feet where you're going to
hit bottom. The very last night, it would have been
like the fourth night I was out there. I'm laying
under this fir tree on the side of this mountain
and I found myself over into these bluffs and I'm
kind of covered up, and I'm soaking wet, I'm cold,

(02:15:46):
and I've got one of the first light puffy coats
on the down coats, and I couldn't believe how tough
that was, because I thought I would absolutely shred it.
I tore it in one spot. But the amount of
brutality that I put on that coat was incredible. There
was one night where it rained almost two inches. I

(02:16:08):
encountered snow, rain, sleet, just about everything you can encounter.
But it kept me warm and kept me dry. But
I was wearing like danhim jeans. At my bottom half
was soaked and it was just a miserable time to
never really warm up or dry out. But I had
a space blanket, and if I would say to have

(02:16:30):
anything in a hunting pack, have a space blanket, because
if you can insulate yourself even after getting wet, it'll
be all right. People ask me if you build a fire,
and I'm like, how do you build a fire in
country and ground that's completely saturated. You're so critical that
you're now thinking about yourself like your cell phone. It's

(02:16:53):
like I only have thirty six percent life left. I
need to protect that thirty six percent. That's kind of
how I viewed my leg and my body in that situation.
So I was warm enough with the space blanket, and
I didn't see where I was going to benefit from
having a fire that I couldn't even hardly start to

(02:17:14):
begin with. Everything was just wet, saturated. It was more
important to keep the energy. And that last night, I'm
curled up in a ball under that tree and I
hear a siren middle of the night. I have no
idea what time it is. I hear this just siren,
and I'm looking down this ridge and I see what

(02:17:38):
I think is somebody who shining the spotlight. But they're
probably over a mile away, and I'm like, well, that's
where my pickup is, but I can't get there. I
was blowing on a whistle trying to get their attention.
I had a headlamp on. This guy that found me
later on told me he saw my sos strobe. So
they had me located and they knew where I was
at because they were at my pickup, and because I

(02:18:02):
was in such a rough spot, they were going to
go up there and extract me with a helicopter. The
weather had changed and it was just pea soup fog
and they couldn't fly. They figured that I obviously was injured,
and that's why I was hung up where I was
hung up, but they didn't know how they were going
to get me out of there, and I don't think
they were expecting what I did. I'm up on this

(02:18:25):
cliff and I'm looking at the shale, and it's probably
a quarter mile down to this trail head, and I'm
thinking I can't climb thirty feet up a vertical rock
face to get over these bluffs, so I guess at
this point my only option is to slide down this mountain.

(02:18:45):
I just got on my butt and I slid.

Speaker 3 (02:18:47):
Down the hill.

Speaker 8 (02:18:48):
There wasn't really much left in my jeans, but at
that point I didn't care. I just took it slow
and rode her all the way to the bottom of
the trail, and I got down to this trail head
and pretty much drugged myself out. I didn't know where
the trail was going to pop out at, but I
ended up encountering this kiosk where this fire had occurred

(02:19:12):
in four or five wild land firefighters had lost their
life at this particular spot, and I'm like, well, I
must be getting close to some kind of parking lot
or something. I went maybe one hundred or two hundred
yards further, and I heard people talking and that's when Mason,
who was head of the search and rescue where I

(02:19:33):
was at, He's like, we've been looking for you for
a couple of days. They actually had an ambulance there,
and I got up and crawled me back to the
ambulance and they started evaluating me, and they're like, you're
going to the hospital. Your bitals are pretty dangerous, my
kidney functions that things were getting ready to shut down.
So I was one more day and I probably wouldn't

(02:19:54):
be here anymore telling you his story, but it was
kind of comical. He just couldn't over the fact that
I just went there by myself. He was certain that
somebody had dropped me some info or a coordinance or
a pan or something, and I'm like, nope, I just
came here on my own. One of the things that

(02:20:15):
is just everlasting in my head is when my wife
got to the hospital. Obviously it was a little bit
of an emotional thing. So heard my father in law,
are there living in a small town when you know everybody.
When we got married was a big event. We had
a lot of people there and stuff, and she said
something to me that will always stick. She goes, I

(02:20:38):
didn't know if it would be morbid to have your
funeral the same place we got married. I didn't know.

Speaker 3 (02:20:49):
What to say.

Speaker 8 (02:20:51):
Pretty emotional. My whole ankle was cocked ninety degrees off
my right leg. It was completely dislocated from where it
was supposed to be. I also had frostbite, hypothermia, and
all the emotion being in a hospital, the hospital visits,

(02:21:14):
even getting home and transitioning to home. My leg was
already damaged before from the bullet going through my thigh,
but when I got out of the woods in Montana,
I had just worn my right leg down to a
there was just nothing left. I mean, I was down
to bones, just trying to beat my way out of there,

(02:21:36):
and I just did irreplaceable damage to it and finished
it off. I had this horrible infection in my leg,
and I went to multiple doctor visits, vascular physicians and whatnot,
and they did all this stuff, and they're like, we
can preserve your leg, that it'll be a fused joint.
You'll have a very noticeable limp the rest of your life.

Speaker 3 (02:21:59):
That just did.

Speaker 8 (02:22:00):
I didn't really fit into my schedule when they told
me that I was going to be close to fourteen
months with non weight bearing and pins. I just elected
to have my leg amputated. So I had a below
the knee amputation done on February fourteenth, and I'm going
to be receiving a prosthetic on the seventeenth of April.

(02:22:23):
Losing this leg is actually a good thing. It's a
positive thing. Because my leg was so damaged from my
hunting accident, my leg would swell up and sometimes it
would be near impossible to get a shoe on or
a boot on or anything because my ankle was so swollen.
I don't have to deal with that anymore, so I'm

(02:22:44):
actually just grateful to not live in chronic pain anymore.
I can go down to the beach and dig a
limited razor clams, or drive out to the creek and
drift a little salmon egg through a hole hitch steel head.
I mean, I did that the other day on crutches.
It's just it's part of who I am. But it's

(02:23:05):
still a big wild place, and we just don't want
to lose touch of how quick things can go bad.
And that's why I wanted to tell this story. What
happened to me shouldn't have happened. I should have had
everything on me that I needed. That's what I can't
stress enough is if you leave the road, you better

(02:23:26):
be prepared to leave the road. What happened to me
is just due to my personality and my ignorance and
trying to be in a hurry and cutting corners and
just trying to fit too much into one small bag,
got me hurt and could have got me killed, and

(02:23:47):
has now put a real big skew in my life
at this age. Last night, it was my daughter's birth
and we're singing her Happy Birthday, and I'm looking in
that little girl's eyes and i just glad to be here.

(02:24:08):
You know, you just don't know when you're gonna meet
your maker, So maybe just kind of give everything a
second thought. Go Is that a good idea? You can
go out there and have a good time, but make
sure you have your keys crossed and your eyes dotted.

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Steven Rinella

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