Ep. 890: Mushroom Poisonings in California, Mule Deer in Alaska, and an Ex-NRA Chief in Trouble

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the news show.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
This week, we've got the NRA in continued legal trouble.
We've got does it really help to make fish drink pop?
What is beach access? And why do some wealthy folks
hate it so damn bad. Spencer reports on an outbreak
of mushroom poisonings and deaths in California and me Steve

(00:28):
is troubled by the word outbreak in that context, but
we will see. We've got Despite what you've read, there
is in fact no evidence of jaguar pups living right
now in Arizona. And it happened a hunter in Alaska
killed the first ever mule deer killed by a hunter

(00:49):
in Alaska.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Plus a whole lot more. But first, what is first? Oh?

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Walleyes?

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Oh, we're going Walleyes.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Well, I don't know what else is first?

Speaker 5 (01:01):
T RCP Hunt giveaway.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh yeah, because.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
This is something I've talked about all the time, I'm
gonna start talking about the interview show too. Right now,
go to if you want to win the annual Turkey
Hunt giveaway, go down to Uh, Phil, what camera is
it when I'm not talking to that thing?

Speaker 6 (01:19):
Well, that's that's your camera always. I'll switch it to
Spencer and Randall if they're talking, I'll spit switch it
to Brody if he's talking. But that one is me,
that one is you. Okay, I got confused because of
that thing we got sitting there.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
If you want to win this year's Turkey Hunt Giveaway,
where me and Janna's take you turkey hunting, we do
everything but wipe.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Your bottom like.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
We bring in a cook that cooks for you. We'll
help you get tie your boots. All your expenses are paid.
Jannis and I will cater to your every need and
desire when you win. And we have years worth of
winners to back us up on this. So you buy
raffle tickets. Go to TRCP dot org, go to the

(02:00):
Turkey Hunt Giveaway or the Spring Fundraiser Summer fundraisers they
call it.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
If you go to the head undergiving, it's like the
first thing blow your cursor.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Buy your tickets. Okay, someone wins every year. If you win,
you and a friend. You could take your husband, you
can take your wife, you can take your best friend.
Last year we had a couple of brother in law's, right,
whoever you want to pick. We cover your airfare, We
cover your tag. We cover your food, we cover your lodging.

(02:28):
You pay nothing.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
You leave your wallet at home.

Speaker 5 (02:30):
Did they bring a gun?

Speaker 2 (02:33):
We have in the past brought a gun out. We've
in the past. We've had in the past where we
brought a gun. We had a guy bring basically a
coach gun. He had a ten gage, single shot sawed
off gun. He missed with it, and then we had
him switch.

Speaker 5 (02:51):
Gun actional.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
I was cheering for that guy. Yeah, see anything like it,
une like it.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
I thought that turkey was gonna be not ave anymore
after the shot, the conclussive boom, but the turkey is unfazed.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
I'm not sure what happened.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
I think you ought to bring some of the last
tss ammo in the world for that hunt.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
We'll supply your ammo. We'll supply your ammo.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
All you do is you and your friends show up,
eat good food that you don't have to cook, eat
off dishes you don't have to clean, and have fun.

Speaker 5 (03:22):
Who's doing the calling on these hunts?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I hunt with one. We do a little deal. This
year we Drew Straws, so I had my guy, Yanni
had his guy. But we switch it up. But my
guy got his turkey in ten minutes.

Speaker 5 (03:36):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
And Yannie's guy got his turkey that afternoon. Our guys
this year got their birds first. We had two three nights,
two days to hunt. But in the past, if we've
had a bad couple of days, we always we work
it out. So you're calling though, yeah, got it, Well,
Yannie's calling, I'm calling. And then if and then when
our guy got a bird, then we started hunting for
the chef. The intention was the chef would get his

(03:59):
bird and then I'd start hunting too.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
But it's it's busy, it's packed in.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
If you get your bird right away, there's still plenty
of hunting to be done because we're gonna switch to
me hunting. It's a great time. Go buy your raffle tickets.
It goes to a good cause. All the money goes
to t RCP, like like we we take care of
the expenses. All the raffle money goes straight to TRCP,
whose slogan is guaranteeing Americans quality places the hunting fish.

Speaker 5 (04:29):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
That's it for that.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
Speaking of Teddy, I don't know the rest of that.
There's something with Teddy Roosevelt merchant here but I don't
know this talk about it.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
Oh okay, I'm sorry. Uh well, I was going to
talk about the roadless rule, which I don't know where
you are in the dock. Why did you say?

Speaker 7 (04:47):
Say?

Speaker 5 (04:48):
Oh, someone deleted it said TRCP Hunt Giveaways and Teddy Merch.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
He's going by memory. Yeah, if you're following the news.
Mike Lee is up to his old tricks. And he
introduced an amendment into the Wildfire Prevention Act of twenty
twenty five that would nullify the roadless Rule. And so
this and that dude loves him a road man. I mean,

(05:14):
it must be nice. He just loves the run. I
wish I had one thing in my life that I
was so single minded and passionate about as he has
what he has in doing bad things to public lands.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
What was the quote you heard from someone just recently.
It's not a resource if you can't research.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Or if you can't access it. Yeah. Yeah, So, in
any event, that got slipped into this bill as an amendment.
And so the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted
eleven to nine to adopt the amendment and advance it.
So it's now going to go to the Senate for
a full vote. So get out there, make your voice heard.

(05:55):
Let your senators know that you oppose the nullification of
the roadless rule. You can take action at I haven't
checked this, but I assume almost all major conservation groups
hook and bullet groups have action alerts on their websites
b H A, TRCP. Let your lawmakers know how you
feel about it, one way or the other. I'm not

(06:17):
going to tell you how to weigh in, but old
Mike Lee just constant, constantly turning to turn back the tide.
So that's good.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Walley spear in Michigan. This is a news This is
actually a Newsy item. Four years ago, Michigan opened up
its first spearfishing season for what had traditionally been regarded
as game fish. So you've always been able to spearfish
for non game fish rough fish. I don't use the
word trash fish, but people like that word, which included

(06:50):
some non native things like Eurasian carp asiatic cart and
some game thing and some native things like native sucker
speces both in all that, but a few years ago,
Michigan opened up a initially provisional spearfishing season for three
coveted game fish. Coveted game fish being Walleye Lake trout

(07:15):
Northern Pike, not salmon for some reason, but Walleye Lake
Trout Northern Pike. And they opened it up where they
took basically the Michigan shoreline of southern Lake Michigan and
the northern shoreline the northern shoreline of Michigan's stretch of
Lake Huron and did these test seasons and Angler's spearfishermen

(07:40):
could get a free stamp with their fishing license, and
they had to do monthly reporting to report on their activities.
What they found over that time, to sum it up,
and I talked about it before, what they found over
that time is the harvest is negligible, and effort instead
of going up as the new opportunity came in, effort

(08:02):
went down. So people were thinking they wanted to go
and then and then we're finding that they weren't going.
They were giving out about four thousand They were giving
out about four thousand spearfish stamps. Of those, a few
hundred people went once. Of those, I think one hundred

(08:26):
and eighteen people like got a fish, okay, and.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
Just but despite all that, there was a big pushback
from some hooking line.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
I know, Yeah, I don't know that you there was pushback.
I don't know that it would be big pushback, and
there's some continued pushback. Yeah, there was some pushback. For
context though, So Saganawba. Here's my Michigan map. Okay, I
was brought up right here, this is Saganawbe right for context.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Last year Roden reel anglers.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Caught five hundred thousand walleye out of Saginawba in the
entire state, in all open waters for spearfishing, so not
Saginaw Bay, but of all waters open to spearfishing. Last year,
spearfishermen killed four hundred and thirty.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Walleye, less than one percent, less than one percent.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
They killed zero point zero eight six percent of the walleye.
But keep in mind it's apples and oranges. Five hundred
thousand got caught out of Saginaw Bay. Four hundred and
thirty got caught out of here and here. Okay, negligible harps. However,

(09:47):
now there's this part. We went out to hit it.
I went, my buddy Greg fonz went who's been on
the show a bunch, and we were hosted by Jonathan Dirk,
who was instrumental in establishing the spear fishing season, and
we set up a little contest where we fished against
a couple of Roden real anglers, Chester the Divestor and

(10:11):
Seth and man did we just beat him real bad
every day? Beat him real bad.

Speaker 4 (10:26):
Came back to Montana with his tail touched.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
They were pouting from day one. Beat them bad.

Speaker 5 (10:34):
Give me an example of the pouting.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
It's just like body lighting.

Speaker 5 (10:38):
Say something to you.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Like trying out, like trying out a lot of ideas.
You know, Well, first it was the first day it
was real, Sonny and calm to Sonny and Tony too calm.
Next day was cloudy, was overcast and windy.

Speaker 5 (10:57):
To cloudy to windy.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
But then it was like whatever. Then it became this
big like local intel. You know, we had local intel.
They didn't have local intel. They had an opportunity for it,
but they didn't. They didn't want it. Then it became
just whatever.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
I want to know, Like what's a rough comparison to
doing the walleye thing compared to like whatever dive in
dive in a rig like as far.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
As well we dove wreck like saltwater fish?

Speaker 3 (11:26):
That are they more?

Speaker 4 (11:29):
Are they spookier? Are they more Chill'll.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Get into that. Yeah, that's a great question. First, I
want to touch on this so well. The first thing
we did is we went and drifted at a river mouth,
not a river mouth. If you get down to the
bottom of Lake Huron. Uh So, like Lake Superior flows
into Lake here On through what's called the Saint Mary's River.
It's like you almost think of like a narrow strait

(11:53):
right where the lake spills down some twenty feet well
at the bottom of Lake here On it flows down
into Lake Erie, and they call that overflow the Saint
Clair River.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
So they drew the spearfishing line kind of at the
mouth at the head of the Saint Clair River, but
the current is already picking up pretty good down there,
and the whole damn lake next down and forms like
a like a big river and it flows out into Erie.
So it's a river, but it's kind of like a
narrow spot in the lakes. There's a lighthouse that marks

(12:26):
the spearfishing border. Can't go past that lighthouse. But by
then there's a plenty of current. So we're doing drifts.
We're dropping in and doing drifts, So you drop in,
breathe up, dive down, twenty feet of water and just
ride the current. Big old sturgeon down there, but the
current's so strong you can't turn around. I blow past
the sturgeon. I blow past the sturgeon, and I try

(12:49):
to go back up and check it out. You can't
get back right, I'm blowing back tackle the mount of tackle.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
I blew past.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
There's three bottom bouncers snag down a log, laying like.
The bottom bouncers are laying together, touching like tackle like.
You wouldn't believe down there. You could open a tackle
shop with the tackle on those trees and tires and
whatnot laying down there in the bottom. But as you're blowing,
every time you dive down, you're just zipping down the bottom.

(13:21):
And there's there's when I say this, don't think I'm
like saying throwing out a number. There are thousands of
white suckers spawning on gravel.

Speaker 4 (13:33):
Did you shoot some of them?

Speaker 3 (13:35):
No? No?

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Well yes, because I missed the walleye and hit a
sucker on accident. Yeah, I mean thousands of white suckers.
With my hand, I'm showing you how that what they're doing.
They're in the current. The ones you know as there
mil team.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
They're like.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
You come down through those schools the suckers, and the
walleye are laying in with the suckers. So it's just
you just got suckers parting like you're like Moses, and
the suckers are the red sea dude. And in mixed
in with them are wally dogs. And we do a
bunch of drifts and gotta limit a walleye. But there's

(14:12):
rotten real dudes cleaning up two right, right, But there's
small walleyes.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
They're eaters.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Then, and that part of the lake it's like size
limited fourteen. I think it's a fourteen.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
Minimum something like that. Five a day.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
So we got three guys on guns. We're only fishing
two guys at a time because that's the tournament rule.
So one guy's operating the boat, two guys are drifting
and we get our fish. Then we go out to
a wreck somewhere else and dive a wreck and those
in forty feet of water, and got three berbot off
that wreck.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
Hiding in the wreck.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
M The next day we start just go to a
whole different area to start hunting for walleye. And I
always think of like, you know, when you're fishing walleye
and someone gets one, you get real excited. You think
you're gonna get another one in this area. You would go,
you would kick two hundred yards, say, and there'd be
oh walleye, I mean, ah walleye. Once you find him,

(15:13):
it is not hard to get him.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
You.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
When you find him, you are gonna get a shot.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
He's not gonna spook.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
There's a ninety chance when you find him you will
get a very good shot at him.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
In that area where they bigger, even though there's.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
A nice walls. Then we're in a nice wills, but
few and far between. That's day two. We don't get
that many, but we get some good ones. A bunch
of small mouths which you can't shoot. But you go
along and they'd be like, oh walleye by itself, no
other walleye anywhere around, separated by what seems to be
hundreds of yards of.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
No walleye, Oh walleye. And you find.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Them, there's a there's a nine and ten chance you're
gonna get a shot. You might miss. There's a nine
and ten chance he's gonna not spook bad like they
are not suspecting that you're gonna shoot at him Day three,
we're doing that and all of a sudden, we're just
into them, I mean lots of Biggins. Then the guy

(16:12):
we're with that was instrumental in bringing on this opportunity,
he started to get uneasy.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Because he's like, man, this.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
Is when you're trying to make the argument of negligible take.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
And but it was the ones It's like, we had
it all. We had clarity. It's it's very cold water.
We just had we had good water clarity, which never happened.
Just like everything came together perfectly. And man, did we
have a day that I will I will remember the
rest of my life.

Speaker 4 (16:51):
Did any party you feel bad about spearing those things?

Speaker 3 (16:54):
No?

Speaker 2 (16:56):
No, I'll remember that day for the rest of my life.
It's just one of those days. One of those days.

Speaker 5 (17:01):
I was texting with Max, who was there with you
guys on this shoot. And I don't know if it
was his joke or if it was a joke that
you guys were making to each other ten times a
day when you'd like punch each other in the shoulder.
But I had asked Max how the fishing was going.
He said they were biting really good on spring steel, horizontal,
very fast presentation. I thought that was fun. Kudos to

(17:22):
whoever came up with that. I enjoyed that bit you did.
That was a good joke.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
I was telling them to tell to text Seth because
they were struggling. I was saying, maybe tell them the
spring steel horizontal, very fast presentation seems to be.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
I like that.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
It seems to be working. I was amused.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Unbelievable, just like one of those days of fishing, the
likes of which you probably never see again.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
You're gonna do it again? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Ye if I lived there, you won't be able to
keep me out of the water. But I live there,
wouldn't be able to keep out of the water. A
downside I don't want to take too much time on this,
but a downside too it would.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Be this, see I'm from there.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
I guess if you're from there, you can hack on it.
There is a monotony. There's a monotony to the environment
when it comes to being underwater in a fresh water environment,
like in salt water, like a diving a reef or something.
You're down there and you're just.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Like, oh my god, oh my god. If it's like whatever,
you know, you're half scared shot. You're just like suckers. Yeah,
you know, and you're seeing stuff.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
You gotta go look it up, you don't, you know
what you know what I mean, it's just a lot
going on. There's always a right, there's just a lot
going on. It's a very dynamic environment. It's dangerous more
us there's it's just a it's an enthralling dynamic environment.
Some of those areas in some of those areas in
the Great Lakes are not I mean, let's just be frank.

(19:03):
There's some areas that are desert like. There's some areas
that are desert like out in the Great Lakes Proper
and the Great Lakes Popper, like the stretch of Lake
Michigan I grew up on. If you went out and
did big drifts out there, up and down the between
the sandbars, you could not go hundreds of yards about
seeing anything. You could go miles without encountering a fish.

(19:25):
It's a very places are very sterile. So you're hunting
a very sterile environment, right, and that it's just it's
just a little bit different.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
Did you come across either of the other two legal
game fish species?

Speaker 3 (19:43):
Never let it?

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, we went and dove one day for Lakers, and
and my what I gather is that they they're they're
not into the whole thing. Lakers do not want you
to shoot at them. So what these what these guys
are saying. And they've gotten a couple, they're saying, Lakers
are like, no, I'm out. So Jonathan saw a Laker
and all he saw of that Laker is that Laker

(20:05):
being like, I'm out. But walleye for whatever reason, in
a Walley's head, that's not what he's thinking. But a
Laker is like, yeah, I don't know what that is,
but I don't like it. And we didn't try for
northerns Yeah. Yeah, A weird thing with this whole deal.
When it started, they were using flashers for lake trout

(20:28):
and it seemed like that was effect like very effective,
and the state very quickly said no flashers, but you
can use a flasher rotten reel fishing.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
How would you use a flasher spearin?

Speaker 3 (20:42):
You just like.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Suspend it vertically, So you tie a big string of
flashers or a flasher on a booie and you just
drift and work the flasher and then dive down to
the flasher and you're just bringing fish up checking the
flash rout. So at first you could do that and
they had some good luck, like you could like lakers
that come from long ways and they'd interact with the flasher.

(21:05):
Then you could dive down get the blaker. But then
right away they're like, oh, never mind, no flashers. But
they didn't do that for rodden reel guys. You could
run flashers all day long m hm, and then put
a hook behind them. And why because flashers weren't really
good and they lure lake trout. And then the lake
trout gets lured and he bites your hook and you
catch them and that's cool. But if you're spearfishing, uh uh,

(21:26):
it's a weird, weird deal that you can flasher for
roden reel, but you cannot flasher for spearfishing. And you
know how, check this out. Guess how many of the
lakers the spearfishermen are killing annually. Take a guess a dozen? No, seven, No,

(21:49):
they are killing they into The four year average is
that the spearfishermen are killing five lake trout a year.
The spearfish are killing nineteen northerns a year on average.
But you can't use a flasher.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
Does Michigan have a like is there?

Speaker 3 (22:07):
It's insane?

Speaker 4 (22:08):
Is there a fishing season? Both spiros and rod and
real guys have to like, is there a walleye season?

Speaker 3 (22:14):
If it's open, it's open.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
You guys have seasons there, It's not like, yeah season.

Speaker 3 (22:19):
Yeah, when we were there, Northeast weren't open. I'd go
with spidos spirro. You're a spiro. It's a spirow.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
I picked that up along the way.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
I'm not one like it's a spiro. I'm sorry, it's
too late. It's like you can't like think of a
new word for like something that's yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
It's like, yeah, it's too late. They already got a
name for it's computer spiro.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
That's my report. That's my report. I would like to
see them open up salmon. I would like to see
it that you could chum and I'd like to see
it that you could use flashers. And I think it's
insanity that you can use a flasher for rod and
reel fishing, but you can't use a flasher for spearfish.

Speaker 4 (22:59):
Fish to open for all of the three native game
fish species, but the non native salmon is not.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, I think if you open it for salmon, I
think you'll find that the spearfishing harvest is about a
salmon a year.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah, it'll be about a salmony.

Speaker 4 (23:14):
Depends how close you can get to a river mouth
at certain times.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Of the year. It'd be great, man, Just like most
people aren't most people like I mean, let's be frank,
most people do not have the dedication in physical fitness
required to free dive in fifty degree water.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yep. It's just they just don't or interest.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
And you don't want amateurs trying that stuff.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
You can catch Walleye and I don't have a problem
with it. You can catch Walleye shit faced with the
TV on and you're not breaking a rule. No one
would be like, well, that's what's the challenge.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
Now you're ship face ship face, but.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
A dude, it's a climb in fifty degree water and
dive down to the bottom and thirty feet of water
where the water is now thirty two degrees because of
the thermal climb and beat himself up like that. It's like,
knock yourself out, bro.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
Well, if Seth had bested you in this feet, I
think we could have done a rematch where you're fishing.
It shit faced watching TV wileye anglers, but well.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
That's what they do because they got forward facing sonar
to hear. They also brought up an ethics thing. They
wanted to introduce an ethics conversation. It's like, Plummett, aren't
you the guy with forward like aren't you the guy
live scoping walleyes?

Speaker 4 (24:35):
Which is basically like looking at them, you know, the
same as you're doing them fishing.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
If you want to see a side profile what them
fishing looks like, here's what them fishing looks like. Can
you get me fill yep? This is what them fishing
looks like. Because they're watching, it's like you know what
I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
Yeah, they're going like.

Speaker 7 (24:56):
Oh oh oh, oh.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
There he is.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
That's that. That does seem harder to do a cross
that drunk. Anyhow, I'm done talking about that.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Did I include that we had a phenomenal time?

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (25:22):
I gotta tell you the funniest part of it. I'll
cut some news. I'll cut one of my new stories
out to make more time for this. Here's the funniest part.
There's a restaurant right where we're staying. They do that
deal where you can bring your fish and they cook it.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
So the night before they're.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Down and they brought their burbot down there and some
wally dogs down there, and they cook them all up. Well,
I get a big old so like a bourbon is
a true cod. Oh, while we were there, we made
a T shirt where it's already done. It's a Bourbot.
It's a Bourbot and it says load of loada which
is Lenayan name in italics, and it says a ka
and it has all the bourbot's names. Oh good, it's

(25:56):
a fish of a thousand names.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
Like, we can't do that a lot. I'm explaining to
the boys, mose are already sold out.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
I'm explaining to the boys how cod have huge livers
and the oil in that liver is like a buoyancy mechanism.
So if you're if you're pregnant and you're eating cod
liver oil, so your baby's real smart. CODs have big
livers and a Berba is the only fresh water cod.
So I pulled this big honk and liver out of

(26:24):
this thing, and I'm telling the boys, like, you can
actually eat this. It's not good, but it's interesting. So
it makes its way into the restaurant, and I'm thinking, well,
I'm going to go in and I'm gonna slice it
as you do your real thin You slice the reliver
real thin, and you put it on a hot cast
iron skillet and fry the oil out of it, and
you basically make like a cod.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Crack I can see where this is going. You make
a cod liver crackling.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, the fellas go into the cook and they're like, oh,
he he just wants you to fry this liver and
red in my hand.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
He batters it.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, he batters the liver like just the liver, and
it's basically like your deep frying oil.

Speaker 3 (27:08):
It's like if you took oil, it could bread oil.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
And the like, if you could somehow like get oil
cold enough to be solid and then bred it and
deep fry it. That's basically what he makes. And the
lady comes out. She's like, I don't know what the
hell you're gonna do with that?

Speaker 5 (27:22):
What did you do with that thing?

Speaker 2 (27:23):
We tried to eat spoonfuls of it. Yet to eat
it a spoon It was repugnant. But I was telling her,
I'm like, listen, man, I mean, it's not your fault,
but that's.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Not you know, yeah, I just you know, that's funny.
Then she fried our burber up and our wally dogs
get a hint of liver with that.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
That's what someone was saying. Someone's like, now we're eating
out of the same oil that had that damn god liver. God,
she was a lot of fun all the gall that
open to own that restaurant.

Speaker 5 (27:57):
Your news here, we got a nick from any email
from Nick in Pennsylvania. He says he was fishing at
a local state park, a group of anglers on shore.
He catches a largemouth bass. He was using a Texas
rigged worm, and in the hook set he makes, he
damages the large mouth's gills and the bass shows up

(28:18):
bleeding when he gets it to shore, and he says,
there's an old couple next to him fishing, and they
reach for their styrofoam cup of Coca cola and say, well,
here's what you do. You pour that on the gills
and that'll fix it up right. They'll swim away happy
and healthy.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
I'm familiar, Okay, not with his story.

Speaker 5 (28:33):
But Nick is. He is a little bit hesitant to
do it, but the old lady insists, and so he
like doesn't want to have a confrontation in front of
these kids and stuff, and so he just goes with it.
She pours a coke on the gills, he releases the
fish away, and he says he was so bothered by
the whole thing that he just left after that because
he was like, it was like kind of gross. I

(28:53):
don't really like how that all played out. I think
the social interaction and also what did I just do
to this fish? The woman insisted that she has seen
this work on muskies. It's how you fix a fish's
bleeding gills. So Nick writes in says, did I handle this? Okay,
what do you guys think I wrote about this?

Speaker 2 (29:11):
I'm not interested in that question, which question what he
ought to have done?

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Okay, I'm interested in what is that about?

Speaker 5 (29:20):
This started on Facebook about a decade ago. There was
a couple viral videos. One of them was from this
musky guide in Canada and he says, here's what you
do if you gill hook a fish and he pours
I think it was diet coke. Diet coke was like
his drink of choice.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
I don't understand how that happens the first time, Like,
how did someone like I had got an idea here.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Oh, yeah, that's what you're saying.

Speaker 5 (29:46):
Anyway, this guy figured out, he saw somebody figure it out.
He pours the diet coke on the muskies gills, musky
swims away, and he says, voila, that's how you save
a fish's life. Video got one point two million views.
I know that number because I wrote about this shortly
after to talk about this theory, and that that was
the number that I had at the time. It's probably
tripled that by now. But basically, these folks would say,

(30:09):
you have a fish with a gill injury, you pour
soda on it. It cauterizes the wound and allows the
fish to swim away. That's that's the science behind it,
like the acid.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
In the coke or something.

Speaker 5 (30:20):
Yes, I think you could. You could envision in your
head if you were to pour a soda across a fish,
it would just sizzle, right, and that's like doing the
cauterizing of the gills. This is what these proponents would
say of this. I was like, no, that that sounds
really dumb. So I interviewed some fish biologists, a fish doctor,
what do you think about this? Fish doctor of pouring

(30:41):
soda on a wounded fish's gills.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (30:45):
And basically they're all like, this is as dumb as
it sounds, you should not do this one. You're over
handling a stressed fish, particularly if it's like a northern
or a muskie, and they have that slime. That slime
is coming off on your hands. They need that to survive.
That fights off like because of the shallow warm water
they live in. That's fighting off different infections they might

(31:05):
encounter up there and make them faster. Musky and pike,
they need that to survive. That slime on them, So
you're over handling the fish. Not good for them. You're
introducing a foreign substance to a very sensitive part of
the fish's body, its gills, particularly one that's acidic, like
Brody pointed out, also not good for them. And finally,
if it was working out like what they say, you're

(31:25):
cauterizing the gills. Well, the fish's gills are doing gas exchange,
so you're just cauterizing their whole gas exchange system. They
kind of need that to breathe. So if that's what
you're witnessing happening, you're probably not improving.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
The fish's health.

Speaker 5 (31:41):
So I wrote about this after interviewing these biologists a
year later. Some biologists actually study this. What they do
is they take some fish. I think it was pike
that they worked on. This was in twenty twenty. They
took a player's and they wounded the fish's gills. They
then poured soda on it.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Oh, this is as bad as testa shampoo on little rabbits.

Speaker 5 (32:00):
Yes, they and then they release the wounded fish into
a tank and they observe it for a half hour
and watch what happens. Uh. They determined that it did nothing. Oh,
that there was no improvement to the fish's.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Health, but no detriment.

Speaker 5 (32:14):
I don't know that they knew that. I don't think
that was like a takeaway that they came away with.
But they were not helping. And again, if we go
back to things about like you're you're over handling the fish.
It's already stressed out. Just get it back in the water.
Fish their blood will naturally clot in water. And so
if you are witnessing what you think is something working,
when you're pouring soda on it, you're just like witnessing

(32:36):
the fish's body doing its own thing without your soda
being present.

Speaker 6 (32:42):
Just simply because pouring soda on it makes a similar
sound to a hot iron cotter, something like, oh, it
must be doing it.

Speaker 5 (32:49):
Yes, And so the one I talked about John and
Phil this per fill up John Anderson, Musky guide from Canada.
Even after this came out, he said, Uh, no, I
don't believe the biologists. Actually, and he started a campaign.
It's called Save a million Fish. And this is like
the main pillar of this campaign is you pour soda

(33:09):
on fishkills?

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Uh? But what so he is?

Speaker 5 (33:12):
He said? He said, he's purtisonally witnessed at work on
eighteen muskies, so he knows that it works, and he doesn't.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
He doesn't, but he would have to be living in
a place where he could run two realities at once.

Speaker 5 (33:24):
He must be doing that, yeah, only only saying that
the like just because the fish live, doesn't mean it
lived because he poured coke on it. No, and the
science or the like, your your witnessing event is about
two seconds after that fish. You have no idea what
it does after that. Save a million fish, Save a
million fish. John said that he still like has dyes
at coke with him so he can perform this diet coke.

(33:46):
Diet coke, I know, actually I think it was diet
coke is what he used to do. I think maybe
he transitioned to just a carbonated water. Now that's what Johnny.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
Cauterizes, just the bubbles. The bubbles are caught at.

Speaker 5 (34:01):
Phil, make the sizzle sound again.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
You're good at it. That was.

Speaker 4 (34:05):
But yeah, but this guy wants to know if he
should have ignored that lady and just let it go now.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
That I know what I know.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
Like, for instance, one time, my daughter got all bit
up by hornets and a lot of people had advice
about what she ought to do, and a lot of
it I knew wasn't gonna work, but I was just
like that, sure, you know, they're like, put motor oil
on them.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
I'm like, okay, Like, I know it's not gonna work,
but I don't want to be rude.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
But in this case, I feel like he he would have,
knowing what I now know, I would say. I think
he'd say, ma'am, I appreciate it. Having done a little
research into this, I know it's well intentioned. I don't
think that that's the best thing for this bass.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
I caught him.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
I kind of got the bass into this situation. This
is my this is my deal here, you know, this
is my program, and I'm gonna have to do what
makes sense to me, which is putting the fish back in.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
I love this guy's style. He had an unpleasant social interaction.

Speaker 5 (35:02):
He just left. Yeah, a strange detail. He does provide
about this couple who tries to save the fish with
the soda. They said they were fishing with children's fishing rods.
Genera know that I've witnessed this.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
My wife would call that avoidance.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
He has an avoidance problem, or if she was, if
that was if she was criticizing me for something, she'd
be like, you're having avoidance.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
That's where you get mad and walk off, or something
like that.

Speaker 5 (35:29):
Don't pour soda on fish gills.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
There you go.

Speaker 4 (35:34):
Eating bears that eat rotten bait. This is a quick one,
I think, pretty easy. One guy writes in I just
got my first archery bear in Saskatchewan. I've tried bear
me a sketchewan try. I've tried bear meat and I
enjoy it. I was looking forward to filling my freezer
with something other than venison for.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
A little variety.

Speaker 4 (35:53):
However, the outfitter baits with meat scraps from the butcher.
They're not kept in a freezer at camp, so they
get a little rotten. He highly recommended I do not
eat the meat from bears because of this. I was
a little disappointed. Do you think that bear meat would
be okay and just and just make sure that it's
thoroughly cooked. Do I need to find an outfit or

(36:14):
that has a better baiting process that is more conducive
to better bear, to better bear meat for the freezer.
Bears eat rotten meat all the time, whether it's that
a bait station or not. Yes, deer carcasses, elk carcasses,
road killed raccoon, whatever they can find other dead bears,

(36:34):
So that's not going to have an effect on whether
the meat is safe or not.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Now most of that is probably rotten.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah, that is a persistent idea though, Yes, there's two.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
There's two things go on. I got to final, not final.
I have go ahead.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
You can say what you're gonna say.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
This idea that like, if it ate something that you're
then eating what it ate, right, you are, but you're not. Yeah,
if you shoot ducks that were running around on a
cattle where they're graining cattle your winter. Those ducks are
eating cattle where I recommend that you eat cowshit. No,
can you eat a duck that might have ate some Yes,

(37:12):
if if there's all kinds of things to eat, all
kinds of things, it's not the same as you eating it.
If a wild pig eats a rattlesnake and they will,
or a havelina eats a rattlesnake, you're like, can't eat him.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
I'll be poisoned by the rattlesnake. It's just like you're not.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's going through a whole it's going through a whole
digestive process and then through complex chemistry that I can't explain,
is later converted into muscle and.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
You're eating it. It's not like a direct fac simile
of what it ate. Yeah. I go through this all
the time because my dogs go out and eat shit
and then they come in and give me kisses. I
tell people, it's not like I ate shit.

Speaker 4 (37:50):
That is, I just can't. Can't dogs that eat ship.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
Some of them suffered from it.

Speaker 4 (38:08):
I have some like kind of experience in this area.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
I got one big, last final point. You're ready for
you move on.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
I don't want to throw shade at this outfitter. But
I hunted with an outfitter in Idaho on a It
was like a group like industry hunt thing where it
was hounds and bait bait, a bear hunt and there's like,
I don't know, six or seven hunters at that camp.
I was the only one that kept the meat from

(38:37):
the bear I killed. Everyone killed bears. The outfitter same
thing like, ah, the meat is no good, it'll make
you sick, blah blah blah. I am thoroughly convinced that
in that case that outfitter was looking to get out
of doing the work of dealing without meat.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
It is I've never hunted there and can I've nerd
done the Canada bare thing. But report after report from
people I know well, people that I know and trust,
I've heard report after report of outfitters telling clients that

(39:20):
they'll try out you can't bring it back.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
What do you mean, I can't bring it back? Well,
you shouldn't bring it back. It's not good.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
It's like there is a culture, not ubiquitous, but there
is a culture of trying to talk people out, and
it's because it's just to ditgch it and they come
up with all these reasons why you can't use it.
I have friends that have been where they're like, I
don't understand, Like I just want it. You can't have it, No,
I looked, I can't have it. Well you can, but

(39:50):
you don't, right.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:52):
And when I when I, it was like a surprise
to these people that I like shocking that I would
want to keep this thing. So I would tell, like,
if you're going to book another hunt up there with
a different outfit, or like, be clear up front that
you're very interested in keeping the meat and get that
sorted out from the start.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
But to get more specifically into his question, like sure
it it's not. If it's eating rotten meat, it's not
a safety issue for her. It could be a palatability issue.
Like I got a buddy that killed a I got
a buddy that killed a black bear here, killed a
black bear off a rotten cow, all full of maggots
and stuff. He was feeding on it, and he said, man,

(40:30):
you could always smell it on that meat, and there's
real off pudding. It's not a safety issue. It's a
palatability issue. If I was baiting bears, I would want
to bait bears. I would bait bears or something where
I'm like, if I'm gonna do this and feed them,
I'm going to feed them something that kind of adds
to the quality the same way, the same way, you know,

(40:54):
the same way you do in cattle production, or the
same way you doing wagu production or whatever. Like, there's
certain that give you a certain result. Big grain fat
and Coyle's tastes pretty damn good. They got good fat
on them. Some people like it, some people don't. But
it's like a result from what you feed it. H
And so sure I could picture that I was gonna

(41:14):
feed it all stuff that I thought was gonna yield
like a good flavorful fat, Like if I could feed
it grain and molasses, I'd probably feed it grain and molasses.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
Yep, you got this next one, Steve, Oh.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
This is a note. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
He says he was listening to the last week's news
show and we were talking about dying from pea fast,
chemicals and fish. He was thinking about time he about died.
He says that our show intro is more dangerous than
pea fast. So he says, I was standing at the
top of the ladder listening to the Meat Eater podcast

(41:56):
one after another. I was under a bunch of willow
oak trees that were the inevitable cause of clogged clogged gutters.
There was the long pause between episodes per usual, and
he's talking about like the show intro. Well, he's up there,
and here's in the show intro. There's the tree falling.
We've gotten multiple reports from people about this yep that

(42:19):
the tree falling noise led him to believe that the
willow was breaking and he about stumbled and fell off
his ladder. We had a guy sitting in his tree
stambo hunting one time and the same thing happened to him.
He was just kind of waiting for things to mellow out,
listening to the show and heard that tree crack and

(42:40):
thought it scary.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
This tree was coming down.

Speaker 5 (42:43):
I have a buddy who swears his dog is triggered
by it. I don't know if the dog thinks the
tree is falling, but whatever that specific noise is, he's
just not into it.

Speaker 3 (42:51):
Doesn't like that sound doesn't bode well.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
So out of the news. Now here's kind of a
perennial news story that keeps popping up. With it's popped
up again and it's about legal trouble for the NRA.
So let's kind a little bit of a long I'm
gonna try to do a simplified version of a long
story the New York Attorney General. There's an attorney general
in New York named Letitia James. Latitia James is kind

(43:17):
of I mean, she's famous for a handful of things,
but one of the things she's famous.

Speaker 3 (43:20):
For is.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
She went after the Trump business very heavily for a
claim that they had falsified real estate values in order
to apply for loans.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
So basically.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Overstating the value of collateral in order to get loans.
And so after Trump's first term, when everybody was trying
to prosecute him for all this kind of stuff. Everybody's
looking for any reason to prosecute him, she was one
of the people trying to prosecute him. And then the
tip then it got turned because during Trump too, they're like, hey,

(43:58):
we're gonna go use the legal system to target her
the way she used the legal system to target Oh,
so then they're going after her about I can't remember
what the hell they're going after her about, but anyhow,
that little saga, So if you recognize the name Latissa James.
That has to do with this kind.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Of law fair.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Retribution, counter retribution between her office and Trump administration, Trump
business empire. She really wanted to go after the National
Rifle Association, So how do you go after a nonprofit?
So what she wanted to do she wanted to attack

(44:37):
the NRA, and she comes up with this idea of
looking at how they're utilizing money.

Speaker 4 (44:44):
And like, an important detail is NRA was headquartered in
New York, right.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
So it was her business because it was a nonprofit
stationed or certified in New York. So the nonprofit is
under New law, you can form a nonprofit and establish
it in all kinds of different places, but they happen
to be certified or basically chartered, incorporated whatever under New

(45:15):
York law. So she she's not really interested in I mean,
in all honesty, she's not interested in how the NRA
is governed. She is interested in tearing down the NRA.
And doing this, she uncovers a bunch of bad spending
practices and makes this case that the NRA is defrauding

(45:39):
its membership by blowing money on things they should be
blown on.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Okay, And so Susan, what she wants.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
She wants to say the malfeasans is so bad, the
NRA is defrauding their membership so bad that they should
be basically killed as an organization. She doesn't get that.
She gets is that the long time president is it president?
Is it called president or CEO?

Speaker 3 (46:06):
And you're at the NRA. I believe president CEO. Okay,
Wayne LaPier.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
Everyone you've seen Wayne LaPier your whole life. The guy
ran the n RA for thirty some years.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
What comes out of this is that Wayne Lapierre owes
the organization four point three million dollars. Okay, So the
claim is Wayne LaPier misspent four point three million dollars
and owes it back to the organization. He appealed it.
So when you're seeing it pop up in the news again,
now is the appeal failed. Some other things got thrown out,

(46:40):
but the appeal failed, and it still is like Lapierre
owes the.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
Org back four point three million dollars. The spending.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
So some examples of the spending here be like this.
This generated a ton of headlines. Wayne LaPier spent two
hundred and seven seventy five thousand dollars. So again, two
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars on wardrobe okay, at
a Beverly.

Speaker 5 (47:11):
Hills boutique custom made designer suits.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
The argument on his part is, Hey, I play a role,
I'm on TV, I need to look a certain way,
and that these are basically costumes that I must wear.
People being like that is insane. Two hundred and seventy
five thousand dollars for some suits for wardrobe is excessive.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
Okay. There was a there.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Was a some restaurant tabs at an Italian restaurant, like
a five three hundred and ninety eight dollars restaurant tab
a place they had a cigar bar. There was some
gifts like Wayne Lapierre bought gifts for people or friends
of the organization, Like he bought I'm on a twelve

(48:00):
hundred dollars handbag and build it back to the NRA.
He bought someone a pair of eight hundred and sixty
dollars candlesticks, build it back to the NRA. Some of
these things seem kind of nitpicky, and I don't really
get the problem. At his home, he has security people
at his home. The security guys were getting bid up

(48:24):
real bad by Skeeters. So he spends eight hundred and
ten bucks on a Skeeter control package, saying, Hey, the
Skeeters are tearing up the security guards. It's eight hundred bucks.
I don't know that.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Feels you know, I don't know. But he also like
took his family on a vacation rights like private.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Here's the one that got Here's the one that feels
a little a little nutty. So after the Sandy Hook shooting,
there was two mass shootings that kind of came close together,
and Wayne LaPier, who has a security detail and the organization,

(49:07):
did say to Wayne LaPier, like, it's not safe for
you to fly commercial as the head of the organization
when there's so much animosity toward the organization around the
gun rights debate. It was agreed to for security purposes
he should.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Not fly commercial.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Well, after those shootings, he had said, well, I'm gonna
skip what he said. He went on a very expensive
trip to the Bahamas, Okay, and stayed on a super
yacht owned by a contractor who has done one hundred
million dollars in contract work for the NRA. Builds some

(49:49):
airfare to the NRA and goes to the Bahamas and
does a lengthy vacation, which it's a it's a vacation
that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in total. When
pressed on it, La Pierre said it was a safety,
a security vacation that after the Sandy Hook shooting, things

(50:10):
were so hot, I had to get somewhere to protect
my safety, and I knew I could protect my safety
if I went into the Bahamas and stayed on this
super yacht. But then it's like, but how is it
that you were also at a family member's wedding while
you were there?

Speaker 3 (50:30):
That was pre planned?

Speaker 2 (50:33):
So for that reason, some of this caused like a
lot of internal upheaval and internal strife within the NRA
and some people. Even though Latista James is in no
way trying to help the NRA, She's not like, oh
I feel bad, this is really terrible that they're misusing
their funds. She's going like, I want to kill the NRA.
How could I kill them? Well, I'll kill them over this,

(50:57):
pretending like I'm trying to help me and protect member money.
But it brings up all this embarrassing stuff. It's caused
a ton of trouble for the NRA, and then within
this fight. There's this other fight. They use a main
PR firm, so that so here's the NRA is a
nonprofit organization, but much of their work is done by

(51:17):
a PR firm, which is a for profit organization. So
what you have in nonprofit land is you wind up
going like, Okay, we'll take tons of money and hand
it to our PR firm, I mean hundreds of millions
of dollars and hand it to the PR firm, and
then the PR firm Ackerman McQueen, Yeah, Ackerman McQueen. The
PR firm because their for profit will then do a

(51:41):
bunch of the weird things m hm, because hey, we're
just paying them all this retainer money and then they
do the things, and so it gives you like these
ways to get around stuff.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
All this has been quite scandalous. Yeah, there's and then
they they also tried to hide a lot of this.
There's a quote from someone in the NRA say we
have to be careful because Wayne wants to get through
the whole year, saying he hasn't used private aircraft. Ye,
so it's just like real bad. They knew it was bad.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
Certain people, like longtime staff people within the organization start
there starts to be a lot of turning on each
other within the organization, and then the organization has a foundation,
and there's tons of bickering within the foundation. But the
thing here, since twenty nineteen, the NRA's revenue is down

(52:36):
forty six percent since twenty nineteen. Member dues member dues
at the NRA since twenty nineteen have dropped fifty seven
point five percent. Before the MIRA became like a really
a gun rights organization, it was a safety and training organization.

(52:57):
Their safety and training spend twenty seven and a half
percent decline since twenty nineteen. Part of what made well,
let me so, their legislative spending, Okay, money they spend
on lobbying, lobbying campaigns.

Speaker 4 (53:13):
Spending time when they're an extremely powerful lobby.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
In DC they were.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
That's what I was going to kind of close on
here is well, let me say this at first, their
legislative spending, so the core money spent to like influence
legislation is down by over fifty percent from twenty nineteen.
But twenty so twenty nineteen was an AWF election year,

(53:37):
but down by or fifty percent, so like core mission
spending down, I mean they are in a tough spot
to the point where they're liquidating investment assets in order
to cover expenses right now. But they were probably and
maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong. I think
that they were at the height of their powers, probably
the most effective nonprofit organization in American history. I cannot

(54:03):
think of a rival in terms of just how effectively
and tenaciously they defended Second Amendment rights. Can you imagine if,
like the wildlife conservation movement had a organization of that power.

Speaker 4 (54:20):
Yeah, I mean the NRA like had the advantage of
just having to focus on a very narrow single issue.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Yeah, and never having anything that doesn't like.

Speaker 4 (54:31):
The track from what they you know, what they were
able to accomplish.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Part of the current split within the NRA is between
it's like the split within the Iranian regime. It's a
split between like the old Garden hardliners, right, And so
there's a there's there's like Wayne Lop people that came
up with Wayne Lapierre and and like his vision, like
his mandate. I'm not saying they like the spending the

(54:57):
spending issues, but like that vision. It's like a like
rigid take no prisoners, like non negotiable defense, Second Amendment
rights to all offense right that want that, And there's
a version that wants a there's a faction that wants
a softer version more well of general public opinion.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
And they're and they're duking it out.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
But yeah, they were, I mean, bar none like I
challenge someone to think of a of a nonprofit that
that defended its core mission as effectively as the enter
like I used to have. This is the crazy part.
Back in these days, they would come after. They would
come not just enemies, they come after you for not
being friendly enough. I used to have people within this

(55:46):
come after me because that wasn't like I'm like, I
make a show where we run around with guns, but
I somehow wasn't like pro gun. That's all I ever
do is play with guns. But I wasn't pro gun.
Yet they had so much money they were going attacking
the pro gun people.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
Do you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
They'd be like, dude, we've we've gotten all the anti
gun people. Now we're gonna go get to some of
the gun We're gonna have to the gun guys.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
And now it's just different.

Speaker 4 (56:14):
And your research did what did it attribute that that
you know just fall off and membership and dollars.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
I'm glad you brought that up. I don't know I have.
It's two things. One, there was just a lot of
I mean this, the infighting, the financial stuff made.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
A lot of people hesitant.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
I think that people have alternatives now in defending their
secondment rights, more local organizations, whatever, people.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
Have alternative gun owners of America.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Politically, it's it's tricky politically. You like, what happens is
if you had if you had someone come into so
in two years, let's say in two years you have
a very hard core or gun legislation candidate emerge on
the Democratic ticket.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Okay, someone that's.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Going to campaign gun Sorry, you get the Democrats put
forward a guy and he's campaigning on gun control. Of
course you're going to see a spike. Yeah, in the
gun business. There's a thing in the gun business called
the Trump slump. And people don't feel with Trump in office,
people don't feel that their gun rights are at risk.

(57:28):
So gun spending goes down, Ammunition spending goes down because
people feel secure and having the rights they have. But
what's weird is this huge decline since twenty nineteen included
four years of Biden a gun control president. So I
could see if I was looking at some chart that
showed over the last eighteen months since Trump won that

(57:54):
there's been a decline, but this decline was through a
gun control administration.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
I think the I mean, I think the financial improprieties
had to heaven well they I think they came out
for the first time in nineteen Like I think this
is like a five year running story. Yes, the first
big wave. And I mean I think like there's a
lot of people that died in the wool guard carrying
members who saw the NRA suits thing at fifteen hundred

(58:22):
dollars a night hotels, yeah, and pulled their bucks. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:26):
And I just wondered if it was like an aging
aging out of membership. This is changing demographics.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
You know.

Speaker 5 (58:35):
According to federal election filings, fifty six percent of NRA
donors reported their occupation as retired. So I think they're
probably just dying out. Is like one of the one
of the elements of this toom.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
So most of the James case, most of the James
to sum up, most of Latsia James's case has not
gone the way she won, but there's still this obligation
that La Pierre owes this money back to the organization.
Not only that, as it stands right now, he can't

(59:10):
have a position. He cannot have a formal leadership position
within the NRA for ten years. He can do fundraising,
he can volunteer, he can write op eds, but he
can't have a formal leadership position within the organization for
a decade after thirty years of being at the HELM.
But he resigned right when the thing, when this corruption
case came up. I'm gonna skip the Lake Michigan Beach dispute.

Speaker 4 (59:33):
Yeah, let's hear about some mushroom deaths.

Speaker 5 (59:36):
Forgers in California can't stop eating poisonous mushrooms. We'll talk
about it. From November November twenty twenty five to May
twenty twenty six, that's a seven month span, there were
forty nine reported cases of wild mushroom poisonings in the state.
Officials are saying it's the largest outbreak of mushroom associated

(59:57):
poisonings in California history, the largest outbreak in American history,
in one of the largest outbreaks in modern global history.
It's not an outbreak. This is go ahead. I'll tell
you the verbiage I'll tell I'll take it up there.
Here's here's the verbiage that California you uses. This is
from their California Department of Public Health outbreak of severe

(01:00:20):
illness and death linked to ingestion of poisonous wild mushrooms.
The CDC says the California Poison Control System has responded
to an outbreak of thirty nine cases of amatox and
mushroom poisoning. That's the verbiage they use. I don't think
it's because, like if there was a salmonila outbreak, you
would call it a salmonil outbreak from lettuce at Costco

(01:00:44):
or whatever. But I think that's the language that they're
applying the same thing here.

Speaker 4 (01:00:48):
I think this goes back to zombie deer in Turkey's
ambushing people. Just like using the wrong word.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
I would call it a bunch of dudes messing up.
I would say California is growing mushroom poisoning. Streak of
dudes messing up is the biggest ever in the US.

Speaker 5 (01:01:05):
The largest in American history. Of those forty nine cases,
four have resulted in death in another four have required
a liver transplant. Victims in this lash of poisonings range
from age nineteen months to eighty four nineteen months nineteen
months babies. Most of the poisonings are from counties on

(01:01:27):
California Central Coast and San Francisco Bay. The mushrooms were
picked in urban parks, wreck areas, nature preserves, national forests,
state lands, and at least one case a National park.
So coming from urban and very much wilderness areas. The
two primary culprits are the Western Destroying Angel and the

(01:01:48):
death cap, both of which are species of Amanita mushrooms.
We're looking at those two mushrooms here, death cap on
the left. That is an invasive mushroom that showed up
I think in thenineteen thirties, likely on some lumber from Europe.
And then the Western Destroying Angel, which is native.

Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
Now are they mistaken those for something else?

Speaker 5 (01:02:09):
Spencer, We'll get to the reasons why.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
Or are they thinking, oh, that's a Western destroying angel.
Why don't I try it?

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
So you know, honey, can you go grab the baby,
give it some Western destroying Some.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
People might if they don't know, they'll just be like mushrooms,
I want.

Speaker 5 (01:02:24):
To eat it to some of the reasons. And second,
if you're not familiar amanita mushrooms are they are mushroom classic.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
They are. You know.

Speaker 5 (01:02:32):
They have a straight stock with a big cap. It's
got very defined gills underneath. The most well known of
the amanita species is a fly a garrick, which is
a red cap with white warts. This would be like
if you told the cartoonists to make a mushroom for
a kid's book. This is what they super Mario mushroom
is a fly a garrick mushroom.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
Oh, that thing is used widely in art.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
And I'll point out that you should mention the nice
little gift I got you.

Speaker 5 (01:02:55):
Oh, Steve got me a gift where you were in
State of Washington, d C. And he brought me home
a nice little serving tray that has an amanita musquerra
or a flying garrick on it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
It's the best kind of gift when you see someone
and you just you see something and just yeah, kindness
of your heart.

Speaker 5 (01:03:13):
It was a kind gift.

Speaker 7 (01:03:14):
I was.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
I was.

Speaker 5 (01:03:15):
I think both of our wives were actually probably more
moved by it than we were.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Because my wife was astounded.

Speaker 5 (01:03:22):
She was, and then my wife when I told her
the story, she was like, Oh, that that's so nice
and that she also liked. Hearing that, Katie was like,
you know, amused by please Steve, yes do it? Uh?
And my wife hearing that that interaction happened. Friend, Yeah, no,
it was. It made an impact beyond just Steven.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
I was like, I got half mind to do a
nice thing for Spencer.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:03:45):
Uh, this this is mushroom classic that is the most
famous Amanita.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (01:03:51):
It's it's like the one that shows up all over
pop culture. It's what Mario eats to level up. It's
the mushroom that Toad's head is based off of. It's
what Alice in Wonderland eat to grow bigger or smaller.
It's feature in the Elder Scrolls as a magical item.
It's what the Smurfs live inside of. That that is
pop culture's mushroom, and it allows Steve to tell his
favorite antidote about the fly garrick about the Reindeers.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah, so it's it's got hallucinogenic characteristics. And these guys
in Siberia figured out you could feed it to a
reindeer and then drink that reindeer's piss and you trip.

Speaker 5 (01:04:27):
Yeah, this is truth and if Santa Claus is of
course real. But folks who say he isn't, they say
that those shepherds came up with Santa Claus after drinking
the tainted urine while they were tripping off of the
fly Garrick urine.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
That's why he's red and white.

Speaker 5 (01:04:45):
Yes, exactly, and like the reindeer were flying that they
were tending to.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
So oh, it's definitely true.

Speaker 5 (01:04:52):
Well, yeah, Santa is real, but of course if he wasn't,
they would say this is where it was created with these.

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
Why you're telling me is true? I just know it's yes.
I'm thinking we ditched this year's Family Feud Trivia and
we film a special episode of Well.

Speaker 5 (01:05:07):
To Steve's credit, I was. I was also, I'm surprised
by this. When we were doing part of My Plate
a few years ago, I found some fly Garrick's in
Montana prior to us filming, and I said, Steve, if
I find more, can we eat them for the show?
Is that okay? Fully expecting you to say no, And
then I could be a martyr and be like if
and Steve would let me eat the hallucingenic mushrooms. Steve said,

(01:05:28):
go for it. I excited. I was again. I was
moved that Steve would let me make a YouTube video
eating the fly garret mushrooms. Now, if you want to
do that, we're not you don't do it. But if
you want to do it, you have to boil them.
You toss out that water, you boil them a second time,
and then you can ingest small amounts of the fly.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Again, don't do.

Speaker 4 (01:05:47):
It, Yeah, don't do this.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
But a question, Yeah, I want to wedge your question
in here. This is fascinating, you know how like we
just girls out of the ground. Yeah, but they used
to have laws about even though it's a plant, like
most plants out in the woods, you can just eat them.
But then they make but you can't eat that plant, right,
and then certain other drugs come out of the ground

(01:06:08):
and they say you can't eat that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Sure, or you could take right during prohibition.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
You could leave an apple land around and it turns
into booze. They'd be like, you can't drink that, yeah,
and you'd be like, it's just growing out in the woods.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Why not.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
If you were run around eating those, you're not breaking
a law.

Speaker 5 (01:06:25):
Probably not, I bet if you were to like sell
them at a park on the bench you'd be breaking
the law. Then that's where like the line gets drawn.
But I think if you were, just if I gave
them to Brody, I don't think the law gets broken
in that instance.

Speaker 4 (01:06:38):
Unless you would you could prove you're trying to kill me.

Speaker 5 (01:06:40):
Sure, So again, that is a fly garrick. That is
a type of amanita mushroom that we're discussing closely related
to the death cap and the destroying angel. Amanita mushrooms
are what are causing all these poisons. To put this
into perspective, the United States has about fifty cases of
amanita poisonings each year. California hit that number itself in

(01:07:02):
seven months. So why the surge of poisonings Brody. There
seems to be two contributing factors. One is that the
area has simply had more amanita mushrooms this year. Typically
in central and northern California, amanita are around in December
and January, and they're kind of limited to that short window.
This year due to some unusual rains, they were showing
up early and staying late. I talked to one forger

(01:07:25):
I know in Yuba County. Her name is Ellen. She
said that this last foraging season had the most amanita
she's ever seen in her life that goes for the
edible varieties and the poisonous varieties. She said her local
forging friends are seeing the same thing this year. Ellen
also said that typically she doesn't see a lot of
death camps at higher l elevations. Death camps are the

(01:07:47):
invasive ones. So maybe this is how long it's taken
for them to spread to some higher elevations in the
Sierra Nevadas, or maybe it was just the weather this
year that allowed them to grow so prevalent. So reasonumber one,
there are a lot more amanita is out this year.
Reason number two. Most of the victims are foreigners. California

(01:08:08):
has reported that forty nine victims speak seven different languages,
so many of them are relying on foraging knowledge from
Central America or Eastern Europe, not realizing that they're picking
a mushroom that has the word death in it. The
state is taking some action to spread awareness. Napa County
is now running radio ads and three languages to warn

(01:08:29):
of poisonous mushrooms. California has updated flyers that warn about
amanita poisonings to include nine different languages now, and they
are making that signage more prevalent. Here three examples English, Ukrainian,
and Vietnamese. So you'll start now seeing these around some
national parks and city parks other places common for foraging.

(01:08:53):
So this is what California is trying to do to
stop this. Just talk about it a lot. Tips to
avoid mush poisonings if your a new forager, stick to
the fool proof form morals, Chantrell's Chicken of the woods. Puffballs,
as the name implies, those are the easy to identify
ones that are found across the continent. Once you've mastered those,

(01:09:13):
you can you can learn a few more oysters, bullets,
pheasant backs, headed the woods. If you know the fool
proof fur and those four I just mentioned that will
get you through ninety percent of scenarios when you're wondering
if I should eat this when you're looking at a mushroom.
And then last tip is when looking at puffballs, do
a cross section on them. That simply means you cut

(01:09:35):
in and have vertically going from what would be like
the head of the mushroom down to its toes. Some
poisonous mushrooms from the Amanita family or vomitters, they will
look like a puffball when they're a juvenile mushroom. We're
looking at one here. This you can see is a
small mushroom that from the outside would look just like
a junior puffball.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
Now this I did not know.

Speaker 5 (01:09:58):
You cut this and happen cut it in half. You
do the cross section. If you see any gaps in there,
or if you see what appears to be like someone
took a stamp and they put a different mushroom in there,
that is a juvenile amanita or a juvenile vomitter. That
is one you don't mess with. But from the outside
it looks just like a puffball.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
I'm seeing something vaguely sexual.

Speaker 5 (01:10:18):
Yeah, it was a puffball.

Speaker 3 (01:10:20):
Just be white.

Speaker 4 (01:10:20):
There's nothing.

Speaker 5 (01:10:21):
The next picture, phill, this is what a puffball will
look like. It is just solid white flesh from one
side to the other. Yeah, it's total fish.

Speaker 4 (01:10:29):
Steve and I'm are on a turkey hunt with the kids.
A few years back. We found some of those giant
ass puffballs. Very underwhelming, man.

Speaker 5 (01:10:38):
So do the cross section thing. I saved a co
worker at worker who texted me one day. They're like,
this is certainly a puffball, right, and so it looks
like it cut in half and send me a picture
of that, and they did and it was an amanita.
So I'm like, yeah, don't eat that one. So it's
easy to have.

Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
That's a good bit of information right there.

Speaker 5 (01:10:55):
And remember, there's old mushroom hunters, there's bold mushroom huns.
There are no old bold mushroom hunters.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
My only thought here is, uh, I'm all for putting
your kids in all kinds of situations that that, and
I don't want to blame the victim that something just
strikes me as unusual.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
There nineteen month old, nineteen months old.

Speaker 5 (01:11:15):
There was also some of the folks involved in these
poisonings I had were labeled as unhoused. So just like
grabbing what was accessible in a park. I don't know
that that was the case with the toddler in this story,
but it but it played a role among the forty
nine victims.

Speaker 4 (01:11:34):
Case you haven't heard, the first ever mule deer was
killed by a hunter in Alaska. This happened in mid April,
so just like six six eight weeks ago.

Speaker 3 (01:11:45):
Spring hunt.

Speaker 4 (01:11:46):
Yep, I assume he must. I didn't really figure this
part out. He must have been bear hunting.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
I'm assuming no man him they've been seeing him around.
They just hadn't gotten a chance. I got it out
of his yard.

Speaker 4 (01:11:57):
Oh yeah, okay, so Skagway resident, and can you pull up?

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:12:03):
There you go there it is just the dough mule
deer there. Can you pull up that map?

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):
Phil?

Speaker 6 (01:12:10):
I don't think I sent him, but I'll find it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:13):
I sent it to you.

Speaker 4 (01:12:14):
If not, I'll find this guy. This guy's name is
West and Nelson. He killed this deer neared Skagway, which
is kind of sits at the top of the arm
of Southeast Alaska like that, that coastal stretch of southeast Alasta.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
And I think, like any true Southeast Alaska, looks like
he went for the old headshot.

Speaker 4 (01:12:37):
Oh yeah, neck er, had you yep?

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
Yep. That's that's proof that he's a he's a low
He's in a grey hooded sweatshirt.

Speaker 4 (01:12:44):
And so got he got the first one ever in
Alaska that they know of that hunter has killed. This
dough had previously raised a fawn, but it was not
pregnant at the time of harvest. According to Alaska Fishing
Game uh Nelson gave gave fish a game biological samples,
had hired all that stuff they wanted to to kind

(01:13:05):
of dissect and look at. He also kept the meat.
In Alaska, mule deer are classic classified as a non
native species with no established historical range there. They're not
native to the state of Alaska. Therefore, there's no close season,
no bag limit. Hunters are encouraged to shoot them if
they see them. Wildlife officials kind of are classifying this

(01:13:31):
this event as like a management like a milestone occurrence
of a new species showing up, and also a management
opportunity because it helps like see what's going on with
the species and what those deer might be carrying into Alaska.
If you're wondering, this isn't the first deer mule deer

(01:13:52):
that showed up in Alaska. They've been there before.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
One got hit on the road.

Speaker 4 (01:13:58):
Yeah, they one got hit in twenty seventeen. One got
hit on the highway near North Pole, Alaska. Occasional sightings
go back to at least the seventies. Three mule deer
reported north of Delta Junction in twenty thirteen, So it's
just like something that's kind of happening more and more.
We've talked about this with with mountain lions, just.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
A little while back coming down the Stakeen River yep, yep.

Speaker 4 (01:14:24):
But the most recent sightings have kind of clustered around
that the Skagway Haines Eagle area. They've been seen as
far north as Fairbanks, So they're kind of like all
along that western border of the Yukon territory.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
Yes, points of entry, like the south ones are probably
coming down the Staqin, yeah, and the North ones are
coming in along. I think the northern ones are coming
in along the Alaska Highway yep.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:14:54):
And that's that's one of the reasons they give, like
for why they're they're coming into Alaska's human development, like
building roads and giving them avenues for easy avenues for travel.
All these deer, again are coming from the Yukons. The
mule deer date back almost one hundred years than late
nineteen thirties in the Yukon territory. They're not native, they

(01:15:17):
kind of moved in there on their own. And they
believe that there's about a thousand mule deer in the
Yukon Territory right now, so this is probably going to
keep happening. Biologists pointed a few different factors for why
they're coming in. Warmer winters reduce snow depths. Agricultural expansion

(01:15:39):
is a big one, so like they're able to move
into these area and the areas and fine food sources
on farms. Then again we talked about road construction gives
them travel avenues and then just natural dispersal. This this
kind of surprised me when I looked into it, like
why Alaska would not want mule deer to become established.

(01:16:03):
The main reason I thought would be CWD. It's actually
winter ticks is what they're worried about the most, because
winter ticks have devastated moose populations in New England and
the northern tier of the United United States Minnesota and
then into Canada as well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
I had that completely wrong as well. In fact, I've
even said to people, yeah, that as you see more
and more and they made that rule, you can shoot
them whenever you see one. I've told people because they're
concerned about disease coming in, and they are. But what
I was reading from there, like you're saying, yeah, primary
concern is THEI like tipload.

Speaker 4 (01:16:42):
Yep, So they're worried about them carrying both parasites and
pathogens into the state. Some other concerns are mule deer
didn't involve in Alaska, so biologists don't really know what
impact they might have on an ecosystem like with brow
species and things like that, at how they might interact
with moose, caribou, the native, uh Native black tail deer.

(01:17:07):
So it's a story to follow. We'll see what happens.
I think it's not going to be the first. It's
not gonna be the last mule deer that hunters kill
in Alaska.

Speaker 5 (01:17:16):
What a white tail might be next. They are the
same fear over them walking in. I think it.

Speaker 4 (01:17:22):
I mean, it could happen, but I think, you know,
the mule deer thing is something they're going to have
to deal with for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:17:29):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
I I totally support what they're doing, Like I get it.
It's it's like I think they're doing the right thing.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
Just a thought. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:17:42):
The non native is like if something's walking in, if
something's yeah, if something's walking in on its feet, not
to question the decision they made. I think it's the
right decision, but it's it's kind of like I wouldn't
say non native.

Speaker 4 (01:17:55):
Not at this point, it's natural. It would just be
like historically they weren't present.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
Historically, not present, but now I'd be like, well, they're
native now.

Speaker 4 (01:18:05):
Nobody dropped them off the native now.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
But I totally get why they're doing what they're doing,
and that you could also argue that it is human caused,
if it's agriculture, road construction, whatever, that you'd be like,
it is human cause it's not. It's not as weird,
it's not as direct as if you put them in.

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
A box and turn them loose.

Speaker 4 (01:18:30):
Yeah, you're not going to find a state that like
manages game resources like better than Alaska as far as
like providing food resources for their.

Speaker 3 (01:18:43):
Residents and things.

Speaker 4 (01:18:43):
And then like that's I think a big concern here.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
Is yeah, they have challenges.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
Nobody's perfect, but I am generally a big fan of
Alaska's approach to fish game.

Speaker 4 (01:18:56):
And it's tough for me. Like with mule deer, they're
like my favorite animal. They're they're struggling and a lot
of their range, so to see him kind of be
painted that's a bad guy here is tough, but it's
what Alaska has to do.

Speaker 5 (01:19:09):
Here was an article from quite a while ago from Alaska.
It says they had reputable reports of white tails near
Hyder and Haines.

Speaker 3 (01:19:17):
Oh, that was wrong. Haines is one of their reputable reports.

Speaker 5 (01:19:21):
Reputable reports, they said they have not had one confirmed.

Speaker 3 (01:19:24):
Okay, yeah, so I was maybe wrong.

Speaker 5 (01:19:27):
This direct quote is they are basically without spitting distance
of the border, so probably.

Speaker 4 (01:19:32):
The same area there.

Speaker 5 (01:19:33):
The mule there are coming from roy church Well area
biologists for Juno.

Speaker 3 (01:19:38):
Oh. Okay, so that's mostly wrong, but unconfirmed. Unconfirmed.

Speaker 5 (01:19:45):
That was from twenty nineteen.

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):
It's unconfirmed that I was mostly wrong. Yeah, let's let's
make sure of that. Reputable reports still fall into the
category of unconfirmed.

Speaker 4 (01:19:55):
Sure you got h you got more mule deer stuff
for us?

Speaker 3 (01:19:59):
Randall he do you want me to do it? Or
should we? Should we keep our powder dry? Man, It's
up to you, buddy, you've been sitting there. I don't know.
Let's do it. Let's do it. Because I've fulfilled a
lifelong dream, well not a lifelong dream, maybe five years now.
I've wanted to introduce my wife to Kevin Monteeth and
I finally did it this weekend. Wow, and please take

(01:20:20):
her over his house sometime. Well, Laramie is a good,
good little drive. But we went down to the Wyoming Range.
Kevin Monteeth is a biologist at the University of Wyoming
and a taxidermist and a wonderful human being and multiple
podcast guests, multiple podcast guests, brilliant guy. It's always just
like you walk away from many times bet with him

(01:20:40):
having learned something like substantive about something that you thought
you knew about and that you really care about. So, Kevin.
One of the projects that's that falls into the umbrel
of Kevin's big operation, there is a collaring dear study
in the Wyoming Range of Montana, and Rebecca Rafferty is
running that program. She's a PhD student there, and so

(01:21:02):
they captured deer and collar them multiple times a year.
In March, they captured some of these collar deer and
the dose they ultrasound and to check them for pregnancy.

Speaker 4 (01:21:16):
Yeah, are they collaring them for that migration study or
just general.

Speaker 3 (01:21:21):
A bunch of different studies. They're looking at migration. I
mean the main thing that they're interested in is how
the animals use the landscape and the relationship between what's
interesting about this has been going on for ten years
and so they have like multi generational data of dose,
their health, their offspring, the success of their offspring and

(01:21:44):
all that. And so one key moment in the annual
cycle of that study is when these dos in March,
when they check them for pregnancy. The ones that are pregnant,
they fit with what they call VIT, which is evaginally
implanted transmitter kind of looks like a giant iud and
it has a thermometer in it, and when a pregnant

(01:22:06):
dough begins to give birth, it's like right, it's right
outside of the cervix. And when a pregnant dough begins
to give birth, it drops that transmitter, and as that
transmitter cools down, as it's no longer being warmed by
the internal temperature of her body, it starts giving off
a signal. And so these guys, Rebecca basically lives down there.

(01:22:27):
Kevin kind of drops in and out because he has
all kinds of other stuff going on. But they're chasing
down birth sites as they happen within hours and going
and checking on the fawns, putting collars on the fawns.
And so I've always wanted to get down there and
do this. We drove down on Friday, and we timed

(01:22:49):
it so that this is usually the peak of the
fawning season. It's been super early this year and they
don't really have a clear explanation of why. But the
hypothesis is that it has to do with a.

Speaker 5 (01:23:01):
Full moon during the run.

Speaker 3 (01:23:04):
Well, no, that was a joke. Yeah, I mean, well,
the interesting thing is they know so when they when
they ulter sound them in March, they know when they
were fertilized based on the size of the eye that
they can measure in the ultrasounds. So like they know
when these when these deer were conceived, and then they
can draw that out and say they'll be born this date.

Speaker 4 (01:23:23):
But it's interesting though that the rut fell a couple
of weeks later than than normal.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
Yeah, but but it was a weird winner. Yeah. So,
so what they're seeing and a lot of this I
might just be mistranslating from the scientists speak, but what
they're seeing is that these deer this year got to
their their summer ground super earlier, their fawning ground super early,
and some of them are just giving birth when they
get there rather than waiting until their their fawns are

(01:23:50):
fully developed. So yeah, so they had this was supposed
to be the peak weekend and they had already collared
ninety one fawns, so they had less than ten fawns
to go. Like, they had really good rates of pregnancy,
especially among younger does this year, but they're all the
fawns are just dropping pretty early and they are seeing

(01:24:11):
It's not like they're all underdeveloped, but they He was
saying that sort of as a percentage of the overall,
there's probably more premature fawns this year. So we drove
down Friday and they said, we think we have one
for tomorrow morning, Phil, if you can pull up that
first map. So so the green dot there is where

(01:24:36):
the transmitter dropped.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
So we those are at nine thousand feet.

Speaker 3 (01:24:42):
The top of that is ten ten hundred feet. So
this deer. I knew we were in trouble because they
said this is this is a deer they call sheep
deer because every year she drops her fawns up in
the cliffs and before the head is she's trying to
get down the cliffs to get to the fawns. But
we hiked in and we sat that blue waypoint there.

(01:25:05):
We kind of sat there waiting for another transmission. So
once the vit drops, they wait for collar day to
upload to see if she's hanging out around there or
if she moved, and kind of she she missed her
nine am data upload, just depending on how she could
link up with the satellite. So we sat around until
one and then all of a sudden we had this
waypoint way over there. If you look on the map,

(01:25:29):
we were kind of sitting on top across this little
draw from where the VT dropped. And then we realized
we had to go over the top and drop down
this avalanche choot and then side hill across this really
nasty stuff. And like we we had a dot on
the map where she had been milling around at one o'clock,

(01:25:50):
and we went over there and sure enough, I mean,
this is like steep, brushy stuff. I fell a few times,
it was. It was like very vertical. And we get
over to that spot and Phil, you can go to
the next slide there, so that that yellow dot is
where she had been milling around, and that red dot

(01:26:13):
is actually where the where the fawns were. Next next
photo these faunsh So so this was tough. So you
can see this is like the perfect deer bed. I
mean you if you walk like ten feet in any
direction of that, you're going to be hanging on to branches.
It was just a little bench in this like you

(01:26:33):
could have laid a sleeping bag down and covered the
whole thing, but this this little bench on the side
of this face. One fawn was stillborn. And then this
guy was small, I think he was. He was right
around two kilos, so he's going to have a rough
a rough go like that was pretty disheartening after that

(01:26:53):
long day. But we you know, when they when they
get him, they take some sand, apples, blood hair for
genetic analysis and nutritional profiles. They measure them. They measure
like the size of the fawn. They measure the hoof
growth so they have a better sense of like how
long they've been on the ground. This one was definitely

(01:27:13):
on the ground for less than eight hours when we
walked up on it.

Speaker 4 (01:27:16):
And that does nowhere around like blowing at your een.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
We never saw her. We never saw her. We never
saw sheep dear, which is a good thing, because I
been rather upset with her because she just, like he
was saying that some of these does when they dropped
that transmitter, like a lot of them will stay there
and give birth. But she dropped her transmitter and then
just took off across this mountain side from like this
great little bench at the top to just this hell hole.

(01:27:42):
So that was a long day. We got back after dark,
hiked like three thousand feet and probably nine miles or
something like that to get to her, and then and
then the next day go to the next one. Phil Okay,
So the next day we had another transmitter that got dropped,
and this one was gonna be in a much more

(01:28:04):
As you can see, this is a great place to
give birth. But so this one we hiked up there
and we thought she was still around. So we actually
he pulled out the telemetry wand you know, to identify
where the dough actually was. It was kind of in
this this big curve in a closed road, and so

(01:28:31):
we circled the road around and eventually we saw her.
She stood up with her collar on, kind of right
where Sydney's sitting there, and she bounded off about fifty yards.
We walked down and then Kevin and I were looking
for the fawn, and we walked right through that little
gap that's lit up in the trees and Sydney Sidney's

(01:28:52):
like you got. We walked within two feet of this thing.
It's right at her feet there, Phil. If you go
to the next picture, that's so that's actually another one.
That's we had to walk around and find the second one.
This was about like twenty yards away, but the dough
stayed close. We could still hear her circling around us
and all that. So next picture, Phil, there's the first

(01:29:16):
fawn we found, just tucked in the tucked in the brush.
And when you walk up on them, they they're like
main defense is I forget the name something breaking cardia,
which means like when they when you walk up on them,
their heart rate drops like sixty percent, and they they
don't even blink their eyes. They're almost like in this

(01:29:38):
state of suspended animation. And so we got these two.
They're nice and healthy. They're they're like almost twice as
heavy as that other one.

Speaker 4 (01:29:46):
What do they do when you're handling them?

Speaker 3 (01:29:48):
Do they nothing? Nothing? What's interesting is he said that
these and this is what we observed. The ones that
are like little and maybe not gonna make it. Those
ones will move a leg here and there, but the big,
healthy ones just do nothing. See, you know, we picked
them up, moved them to a safe spot to measure

(01:30:10):
them and everything like that, and then Phil, if you
go to the next one, Yeah, there's the two fawns
and we're fitting them with collars there. So they'll fit
these with collars. Then they'll recapture them, put different collars
on them, and uh, next one.

Speaker 5 (01:30:26):
Those things just have like eternal handling at some point
if they're always getting captured. Yeah, collared captured.

Speaker 2 (01:30:32):
That's that's the interesting thing is you know, like when
you have a piece of information but you shouldn't tell
people the truth.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
Yeah, well I have one of those.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
They tell you that, oh, don't touch it because the
mom will never come back.

Speaker 3 (01:30:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
They tell you that because you shouldn't be touching it, right,
But it's not true. No, yeah, we these they do
all this, yeah, and put a collar on it, and
the mom comes right back and we.

Speaker 3 (01:30:59):
So before touching, you know, you pick up dirt and
you rub it all over your hands. You grab grass,
you rub it all over your hands to try to
mask your scent. Oh, for sure, she was watching us.
She was watching us. The other really crazy thing is
that you think where I mean, and this is all
stuff that you know sort of theoretically, but you think like, oh, yeah,

(01:31:20):
of course, deer clean up the birth site, like you've
heard about them eating the afterbirth and all that stuff,
Like that earlier photo where that little deer is just
laying in that bed, things bone dry. She's consumed all
of the after birth. There's no fluids anywhere, there's no
hair anywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
I was wondering about why they look so clean. It
don't look all slimy. She cleans them totally to avoid scent.
And so you walk up on these things and it's
like just the hand of God drop them on the
side of the mountain. There's no like evidence of birth,
so I don't know if there's more. Yeah, this is
measuring the measuring the hoofs and then is there anything else?

(01:32:01):
Phil Yeah, I mean just just unbelievable, like they're and
like the first day was a little challenging because there's
the stillborn and the one that was pretty like but
super cool, and just the amount of information that they
have about these animals and and how mom behaves around them,

(01:32:22):
how they rear them up. You know, like he has
data on the grandmothers and great grandmothers of these animals
and where they give birth and all that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:32:30):
But it's kind of funny they have. They have such
an intimate knowledge of these deer that they can tell
you all about how they use this, how they use that.
Cheap deer obviously has a reputation for just giving birth
and and uh, just really just a pretty incredible weekend.
If you love deer like it was. You walk in

(01:32:51):
there and at first, there's this part in the back
of your mind it's like I shouldn't be here, like
I'm intruding, and like it is sensitive stuff, right, like
you you don't want people to go out and handle
these things, like you should never go out and handle
these fawns. You should let them alone. But once you
get to measuring them and thinking about what all this means,

(01:33:12):
it it was just a really powerful experience. So I
don't know if I have another photo I feel last.
But the other disheartening thing is we uh to get
to those deer. We hiked up this closed OHB route
and we when we put that second one back, we
started walking around to see if we could find the

(01:33:33):
transmitter at the birth site, which is about one hundred
yards away, and that little fawn got up and started
walking and we said, all right, we're just going to
back out. We don't want to pressure him or anything.
So we turned around and walked out, and we got
like two hundred yards down the trail and I hear
something and there's five side by sides playing loud music,

(01:33:54):
drinking beers like Walleye Fishermen. Yeah, and we you know,
and is very clearly close. So we go back down
to the truck and then they come bombing back down.
There's the big gate that says no OHV behind this line.
They they drive over the vegetation to get around the gate,
and four of them peel off, and the one guy

(01:34:15):
stops right in the road, like you could see a
half mile road in either direction. He stops right in
the road, right next to us, as close as he
could get to us without pulling off the road over
to our vehicles. Just comes out, lights a cigarette, takes
a piss right in front of us, cranks his music up,
and then throws gravel and fuck takes off down the road.
And I just thought, yeah, like it was just the

(01:34:36):
most blatant like disrespect and violation A photo of them.
It was. It was too late at that point, but
it was just like one of these things is like
you you realize the rules exist for a reason, because
like I felt like we were kind of you know,
we were in her space, right and then hear these
guys are just wrecking shit. So that was kind of

(01:34:57):
a sour note at the end of it. But man,
very cool stuff. Big thanks to Kevin and Rebecca.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Yeah, you want to listen to a podcast, go listen
to the episodes when Oh man, Kevin Monte's been on
the show.

Speaker 3 (01:35:09):
Yeah, he has got some more stuff that I talked
to him this weekend about that would be a good episode. Yeah,
podcast so good. We'll curl your hair.

Speaker 5 (01:35:17):
My observation on those photos is they don't grow into
their ears ever, Like they're just born with giant and
then they just have giants silly years in their whole life.

Speaker 3 (01:35:28):
Everybody, thanks tuning in listening.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
Man, We're gonna bump a couple of these stories till
next week's episode and we'll have some fresh He's in
there as well.

Speaker 3 (01:35:36):
Thanks and talk to you soon.

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