November 18, 2025 • 36 mins
Steven Rinella has been a lifelong hunter, conservationist, author, podcast host and TV personality. Steven and Spencer share stories of the outdoors along with where the population numbers are now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Steve Branella is a podcaster, an author. He's generated cookbook.
He even created Meat Eater on Netflix. He's also severely
in love with the outdoors and wild game. I'm ecstatic
to have him onlines and times because he brings a
(00:26):
wealth of knowledge of not just what's happening with conservation
in America now, but what has happened in the past
and how far we've actually come. I want to find
out a little bit about your history. What got you
into the outdoors. I feel like I've walked a different
path than most people, and I wonder if there's other
(00:46):
people who are kind of like me.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
So, how did you get involved in the outdoors?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Ah? Man, my dad was. I was born into an
outdoor family. You know. It's kind of a little bit
interesting is people look at sort of the history and
demographics of hunting in America, they think of the modern
American sportsman was kind of born of the World War
(01:11):
two generation, you know, and my dad fought in the
war and came home and just was all in on hunting.
And there's this outdoor magazine editor at the time who said,
how could you train a whole generation of people to
camp and shoot guns? And not expect him to become hunters.
And when he got home, that's just what they did.
(01:32):
Like he hunted with other with other veterans and made
that a lifestyle. You know. He was interested in fishing
and hunting before. But by the time I came around,
he had me, and he was pretty old. By the
time I came around, I was like sort of like
being raised by my grandpa, but it was my dad.
He had me when he was fifty, you know, and
he just had at that point in time. You know,
(01:54):
he worked some, but not a ton. You know, by
the time I was getting in my teens, he's kind
of wrapping up work. He's retirement age, you know, And
so we just had a lot of time to be
out in the woods. And I learned a lot from that,
and I got into other stuff, you know, like got
into trapping, and he wasn't a trapper. Eventually moved out
west from Michigan. But it was just how I was
(02:18):
brought up. There was never a moment of there was
never like a moment of deciding to be a hunter.
It was almost like it was decided for me, you know.
And I never revisited that. I never revisited that question.
I just hunt and fish, and you know that's just
kind of has in some respects defined in my life.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
You said your dad was in the military. Are we
talking World War Two?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, so my old man. Yeah, my dad was like
my dad was born in nineteen twenty four. Yeah, he
had me and he was fifty years old. So you know,
my dad was the age of my buddy's grandpa, you
know what I mean. Yeah, he's a World War Two veteran.
So it was just I was brought up around and
(03:03):
he hung out with a lot of World War two veterans,
and those guys all fished in hundred all the time,
and that's just I was kind of brought up in
that circle.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So we know that at the turn of the nineteen hundreds,
it kind of got away from hunting as a means
of economy and more towards the conservation or the Western
model that I think we all know. What do you
think it was about veterans in World War Two where
(03:31):
they came back with this kind of resurgence of wanting
to be in the outdoors and wanting to hunt.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah, I think at that point you developed what was
kind of you develop a real body of recreational hunters
who are motivated by experience. You know, America has this
like incredibly rich history of hunting, and I've done a
bunch of you know, my work and books and things
dealing with these hunters like that. People know Daniel Boone
(03:59):
and Jim in these famous commercial hunters, market hunters, you know,
as fascinating as the lives, as those lives are, as
fascinating as Daniel Boone is, as fascinating as Jim Bridger is,
as these pioneering frontier figures. You know, they decimated American
wildlife and for most of American history, people would look
(04:21):
at wildlife as a commodity. It was like a thing
you could go get. There was very little regulation or
no regulation. You could go kill stuff and make money
selling it. And that drove all these crazy adventures. But
it also drove that we kind of were on the
verge of wiping wildlife out. And there came a point
when the birth of the conservation movement was really hunters saying,
(04:46):
if we're going to have hunting in the future, it
will need to be. It will be because we decide
to save wildlife. And for most of the country's histories,
like we had wild places, and we had wildlife because
we hadn't gotten around to killing it yet. Now we
have wildlife, and we have wild places because we sacrifice
(05:08):
things in order to have them, right, we make room
to accommodate them intentionally. And that was a huge shift,
and that like World War two generation was part of
that group of people that wanted to have experiences in
the outdoors, and they weren't necessarily motivated by like commodifying wildlife,
you know, killing ducks with punt guns in order to
(05:29):
sell them into the market. And it just shifted, you know,
and out of that came like guys like me, you
know who hunt for you know, I hunt for food
for my family. I hunt to be out. I hunt
as a way to like raise my kids in an
environment that I think is really beneficial to them, right.
And it's just a different set of motivations than what
(05:49):
motivated a hunter in say seventeen fifty.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
So are you and your family solely eating wild game
or do you actually supplement some of your food sources
with farmed animals?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
No, no man in our home. We're very strict about
wild game. You know. We'll go out and eat in
restaurants or whatever. But sometimes I'll be out of town
and I'll come home my kids will be like, Mom
doesn't want you to know, but she bought a chicken,
you know, because she knows. She knows i'll freak out.
But uh no, we eat a real strict wild game diet.
And it's not like, you know, it's not like we
(06:24):
don't need wild game in our house as a way
to like make a comment about what other people eat.
It's just like that's just what excites us. And every
time we eat, there's a conversation about where it came
from and what it is. And you know, we package
our deer so it's like Rosemary's Rosemary's mule deer, Jimmy's whitetail,
and then we get it out. The kids always want
to know who got it and what it is. And
(06:45):
it just it just it connects us with our food
and connects us as a family and and and and
it works for us, and it's good for us. And
you know, I would never make the claim that it's
the only way to you know, it's the only way
to be a real America or something. That's not where
my head's at. But that's what we like to do.
In our household.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
One of the reasons why I ask you so much
about your father being a World War Two veteran is
the reason I got into hunting. Was an uncle of mine,
and he was significantly older than my cousin who he
ended up marrying.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
But my uncle was I guess he was right after
World War Two.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
It was the conflict we had before Vietnam and it's
escaping me right now.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Korea.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yes, so he was in the Korean conflict and he
was an MP and he would escort Marilyn Monroe around
for her USOS and when he came back, you know,
she lived such an incredible life. And he passed away
when he was about eighty eight, a pancreatic cancer. But
the reason why he got me so interested in hunting,
(07:54):
and we actually never hunted together, was I would go
to his house and he had this den and I
would walk in. It's no bigger than a ten x
fifteen room, I mean, super tiny. But he had a
black bear, he had geese, he had ducks, he had
white tail, he had a turkey. He had all the
North American domestic animals that we have on the wall
(08:15):
and Steve, I would stand in there for hours on end,
and I would look at every feather.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
I would look at the guns that he had in
that gun.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Case with the glass and it was all etched, and
I would look at the bullets that were just laying around,
and I would just inspect everything. And I got so
interested that when my parents moved us to the middle
of nowhere, Virginia, my middle school offered hunter safety in school.
It was and replace a gym, so I took that.
(08:45):
And my parents were not outdoors people, but they always
saw that if I had a passion in something, they
were like, Hey, we want to get you tied in
with the right people, the experts in the field who
know what's going on, so at least what you're doing
is say but you can also kind of learn your way.
So I've never hunted with family members. I've always hunted
(09:06):
with other people. So it's interesting that you were basically
chosen you have to live this life, not that you
always had to live that life, but it was kind
of chosen for you a birth.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, it was. You know, I've explained to people before
it if I like, if I didn't go on outings,
you know, if I didn't go on the hunting outings,
or if I even thought about not going on like
hunting and fishing outings, I would get like a guilty
conscience like I imagine some people feel when they skip church, right.
I would feel bad, you know, like I remember waking
(09:39):
up and kind of hoping that the weather would be
bad and we wouldn't need to go out in the morning,
you know, And I'd feel guilty for thinking that. I'd
feel guilty for feeling that way.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
But there has to be a switch where as you've
grown up and lived the hunting lifestyle and you eat,
breathe and sleep this stuff. People don't realize this when
they asked me, why do you want to wake up
before the crack of dawn and go sit in the woods?
And I tell him all the time, because you don't
witness God painting a beautiful picture until you actually see
(10:09):
it with your own two eyes.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Oh yeah, so yeah, you never. It's not the kind
of thing you ever regret. You know. The other day,
my little boy, but my wife does this local hike,
you know, in the evening, and she took my little
boy with him there day and her there day, and
he came back and he's talking about he's kind of
being like, why do you all feel so good after
you go on a hike, you know, and we're trying
to explain that to him. But no matter how early
(10:36):
you get up and get out in the woods, man,
no one ever at the end of the day said
would say, oh, I wish we hadn't done That's true.
No one. No one's like, oh, I was really bummed
that we got up early and went out in the
woods this morning. It's just not like a sentiment anyone has.
You know, you do all kinds of stuff in life
or later like I wish I hadn't done that. Here
(10:56):
you go out and drinking at the bar. You wake
up and be like, I wish I hadn't done that.
But no one, No one goes out in the woods
and comes home and they're bummed that they went. It's
just not how it goes. Everybody feels fulfilled, man, I
mean virtually everybody feels fulfilled by it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Well, I mean the fulfilling part is and I'm sure
you get this question too. When people are like, oh,
were you successful on your hunt? We all know what
that means. You know, did you come back with a
bull elk? Did you get the animal? That you were
looking for. Did you guys, have you know an eight
man limit in the duck blind? I always look at
it as the success that I had is that I
(11:29):
formed really good relationships with a couple key people that
I was with, or I got to see something so majestic,
or I got to see something that the majority of
people don't get to see. I mean, I think the
time when you're sitting in a deer stand and you
see two mature white tails fight each other, that's something
that ninety nine percent of Americans have never witnessed.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, so when they say were you successful, you might
be like, not the way you think, right, but yes, right.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I want to get back to the food side.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
You were mentioning that you guys live a wild game lifestyle.
I'm sure you have people who will say, well, I'm
okay with you hunting as.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Long as you eat everything.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And my answer back to them all the time is
have you ever thrown away a pack of chicken in
the freezer that you forgot about eight months ago? Because
it's tough to eat every single piece of wild game,
But until your cookbook came around.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I thought it was impossible.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Now with your cookbook, I was like, Man, this guy
is opening my eyes to actually looking at wild game
as a better way to create more fat free, hormone
free type of meats than I think most hunters have
ever looked at it.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Oh yeah, there's I mean there's some knacks to it
for sure. Man. And if I look at over my career,
you know, I guess where I feel like I've been
impactful in some ways? Is I feel like I've helped
a lot of Like I imagine a lot of my work right,
a lot of the work I do. I imagine I'm
like like talking to my fathers and sisters who want
(13:02):
you know what I mean, Like we're I'm having like
a dialogue with like minded people. And if I if
I think of a thing that I'm proud of that
I've done over with my work, is I'm proud of
having helped a lot of people come to realize, you know,
that that that diet, that a wild game diet is good.
(13:23):
It can be rewarding, it can be delicious, that it
shouldn't be a burden, you know, like like eating up
a deer shouldn't be a burden. It should be a
thing you're excited about. And that you're able to you know,
you're proud to share with your friends and have great meals,
and and that's you know, it's come to be that,
like far and away, that's our preferred food. Now, I'll
tell you that like my wife. My wife doesn't hunt.
(13:45):
My wife doesn't even Like this is gonna sound weird, now,
my wife doesn't like most domestic meats now because because
for we've been together almost twenty years. You know, between
dating and being married, she does ease game meat. So
when she eats something that's not game me, it just
turns her off because that's all she's eating for twenty years.
So if you give her like a big fatty beef steak,
she don't want nothing to do with it. And I
(14:07):
still get pretty excited about a big fatty beef steak
when I go to a restaurant. She just her boy,
She just switched in her head. She switched over to
like normal meat tastes like mule deer in her in
her mind.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Was that hard for you when you first started dating
to I guess convinces the wrong word, but to introduce
her into a lifestyle of wild game, because I'm sure
she was probably like I've.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Had wild game. It tastes gaming. I'm not a big fan.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
No, because she her perspective was this, if this dude
wants to cook, I'm not gonna say a word I heard.
It was like, listen, if someone cooks your dinner, don't
bet you know you're right.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I mean, I have a wild game party every spring.
So I asked all my buddies who were hunters to
bring something prepared that they killed in the woods over
the last seasons. And I'll never forget I watched a
woman eat elk for the very first time. And we
don't tell people what's on the plate until they ask,
and then we share it with him because I feel
(15:09):
like if you tell them it's elk, they immediately go
into it with the preconceived notion.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
They put like the yeah they put there in there,
and then they feel like they're smelling something they don't smell,
taste and something they.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Don't She took a bite of this elk and she
was like, oh my god, this is the best tasting
beef I've ever had in my life. And my buddy
who shot that elk said, well, it's elk, and she
was She was ecstatic that she tried it. It did
ruin her for a little bit because she was then
freaked out. You know, oh my god, I ate something
that you couldn't just buy at the store. But once
(15:42):
you get that second piece, it's like a game changer.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh yeah, I don't have Yeah, I just don't encounter
a lot of that resistance. You know. My wife's always
been super cool about it. You know, we'll try to
tell like deers big and one dar's you know how
big this deer is and she's like, I don't know,
man looks a lot like all the other deer to eat.
And she just views it like a way to a
way that someone makes food for her. And that's that's
(16:08):
how she used it, and that's why she's into it.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know, when you started making the cookbook and you
started introducing different ways to prepare wild game, where did
you pick all those things up from?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Man, I never had any training as a professional chef,
but I had a lot of friends or chefs, and
what I sort of my pathway into kind of like
what I brought to the wild game conversation. I think
over the years is that I would go and I
would find like I would go and find preparations you know,
(16:45):
from whoever around the world whatever. I would find preparations
that people make with normal farm animals, right, like pork preparations,
land preparations, beef preparations, and I would state to myself,
how do you how can I make that with wild game,
knowing that it won't be exactly the same, like you
won't be able to follow the same process because game
(17:07):
is different. And so over the years I just experimented
a lot with taking sort of like my favorite foods
and the best things I encounter in restaurants or whatever,
and saying how can I bring that into wild game?
And that has kind of, you know, a little bit,
been my specialty or an area where I've spent a
lot of where I've put a lot in my focus
(17:28):
is just learning those different Like there's this dish, you know,
one of the things I got really into for while
is a dish asubuco and it means like holding the
bone because it's it's Italian dish you see in different countries.
But they they take a shank so like the ankle
of a deer, right or for them a lamb or beef,
and they cut it up on a band sauce. So
(17:48):
you have these little discs and then they cook those down. Now,
the reason I bring up this dish is because in
the hunting world, people might discard deer shank so they
don't even touch them because they say there's no meat
on them, or they'll try to bone them out. And
by the time you get rid of all the silver
skin and sinew, you got enough meat to fill the
(18:09):
palm in your hand, like maybe enough for maybe enough
for a small hamburger, right, Or you learn how to
do this acid buco deal and cook the whole thing,
and it's, you know, one of my favorite dishes of
all time. When you're done eating it, you have a
bone that looks as clean as a museum specimen laying there,
(18:32):
and you realize that, like all the years you wasted
that stuff. When I was a kid, we didn't make
that dish. We would take those shanks and pick the
little meat apart and wind up with like a little
sausage patty in your hands. And now we make a
whole meal out of those things, and it's like kind
of a you know, kind of like a little bit
of a signature dish of mine. I serve it to people,
(18:53):
they're blown away they can't believe it's venison. It's a
super economical use of the resource, and it just feels good.
So those are the kinds of things I'm usually looking for.
Is I like to try to find, you know, exciting
novel sometimes just approachable things that are going to please
your family. That again, you take wild game and you
(19:14):
turn it into something that people are excited to eat,
and that your friends and in laws, you know, spend
the next week talking about how cool it was and
what a great experience it was to have that preparation.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I like that the cookbook is more than just duck
poppers and you know, meat wrapped in bacon, because there's
so many good uses.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Of wild game that are out there.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I want to jump back to a point that you
made earlier about the market hunters that we had, the
Davy Crocketts of the world and the Boons and all
those guys. When we saw the decimation in the domestic
animals that we had, primarily whitetail deer, but also elk
and bison and buffalo and all these different things. Where
do you feel that we've gotten to now in conservation
(19:59):
and is it the right place?
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah? I mean far far and away. We're in the
right place. Now. We're still in recovery mode though a
little bit. You know, if you look at black bears prints,
like blackbirds used to drive a tremendous economy. You mentioned
Davy Crockett. Crockett did a lot of market hunting, and
he did a lot of market hunting for bear meat.
(20:22):
Was in the bear grease business. Like Boone used to
sell bear grease, the you know, rendered bear oil. He
would sell black bear hams. There was a time like
picture this. There was a day this is on the
Big Sandy River and today's West Virginia. Boone killed thirteen
bears in a day. Okay, that's where bears in the
(20:46):
modern hunter is going to you know, kill in a lifetime.
But I mean they eliminated bears across huge pieces of
their range. With our system. Now we're recovering BlackBerry populations.
We have more black bears now than any time in
the last century, and we're gonna have more tomorrow. Black
bears are still spreading out and recovering ground in places
where they were absent, so we're able to have at
(21:08):
the same time we're able to have black bear hunting.
I don't even know what it is. Now over twenty
like close to twentyve states have a black bear season,
and at the same time that we're doing that, we're
seeing expanding black bear numbers. We deer. It's so hard
to picture now. There was a time when, like I
got friends in Wisconsin. I got a friend Doug Durham, Wisconsin.
(21:29):
When he was a little kid. If you saw a
deer track. He grew up in Wisconsin farm country, southwest Wisconsin.
If you saw a deer track, you'd run home and
tell your dad. They got forty deer per square mile
now and they got a farm where they're able to
harvest twenty some deer off that farm every year. And
now it's the same farm that if you saw a
(21:50):
deer track, you ran home to tell your dad, and
they didn't even hunt their own farm. They had to
go up north to hunt because there was no deer around.
So we've made incredible progress. We'recovering wildlife and we're still
and it's still happening. We're still recovering wildlife at the
same time that we have regulated hunting.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
In the state of Alabama. It's maybe one of the
weirdest rout maps I've ever seen because it's a tear
drop rot map because we have so many deer from
different states. We have deer from Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois, New York, Maine,
and they imported them here in the nineteen teens. And
(22:29):
when you see a rout map here, it's literally droplets
of water. So you could have a rut happening two
minutes away from your house, but the next closest rut
that's going to happen in a week or so, it
could be two hundred miles away.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, isn't that the credible to think that it got
so bad we were shipping deer around? Yeah, and now
and now, when you hear a conversation, like in wildlife politics,
when you hear a conversation about whitetail deer, it's people
trying to grapple with having too many deer, right, That's
the whole other conversation. Because the solution would be well,
less open these areas up to hunting, and a lot
(23:02):
of people were like, well, no, I'd rather pay the
government to deal with my problem than have hunters pay
to get a license and hunt. That's the whole other
issue about about thecidal you know, just having a society
that gets a little backwards on some issues. But yeah, true,
I mean had an incredible system.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Man, If you're talking about the society is getting backwards
on some things, I'll go back to that bear hunt.
You know, you've got a place like New Jersey where
they have problems with black bears. You know, black bears
are going through trash cans and they're getting close to people,
and they attack pets, and they've gone after humans every
once in a while. And the argument was, well, we
don't want a black bear hunt because we want to
(23:42):
see more black bears, but it's not like we have
the room to have the population booms that we all
wish we saw and keeping everybody safe for the amount
of populations that have now infiltrated where these bears used
to live.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah, this is one of my favorite story because New
Jersey's Governor Murphy at the time when when when they're
their their past governor was was coming up in New Jersey.
He campaigned on ending the black bear hunt. So the
state had after a long absence, they'd recovered their bears,
they initiated a limited black bear hunt. Governor Murphy comes
(24:22):
in and campaigns on ending the black bear hunt, and
when he comes in, he does end the black bear hunt.
Then a couple of years later he's he's put in
a situation where he's forced to go and publicly say
I was wrong because black bear complaints, depredations, everything shot
up so severely that he had to come out and
(24:43):
say I made a mistake, I was wrong, and they
brought the black bear hunt back. But but think about
this too, New Jersey. That's the highest black bear density
of any state. Okay, the high black bear density, but
also one of the highest human dentis. And so you
have bears and people coexisting. There's no reason that you
(25:06):
can't have a very stable, thriving population of black bears
with limited human hunting. And that's like kind of become
the key of the American conservation model to our regulatory structures.
We're able to have both things at once. We're able
to have limited harvest by humans, limited regulated harvest by humans,
(25:27):
at the same time that we have healthy, stable, where appropriate,
expanding populations of wildlife. And it's amazing of our history.
It didn't go that way for most of our history.
We just ran things into the ground.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
It's amazing to see how many states are getting reintroduction
of animals that were there in the eighteen hundreds of
seventeen hundreds and way before man came around, Like the
reintroduction of the Rocky Mountain elk.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I believe that's the species.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, Well Tennis putting out back in Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, yeah, those those.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Elkin Kentucky spreading into other states. You know, that's been
flowed down a little bit because of some some disease
transmission issues. It's like from the regulatory perspective, it's a
little harder to move ungulates right now. But yeah, I
mean the recovery program. You know, Arkansas did a bear recovery.
Now Arkansas has a has a great bear population and
(26:22):
a bear hunt and they had to come in and
recover bears by bringing bears in. Florida had to recover
mountain lions by bringing mountain lions in. So it's a
you know, it's part of our playbook when need, when
necessary to move wildlife from stable populations into areas where
it needs to get rehabilitated. And what usually winds up happened,
(26:43):
and when that's successful, it presents hunting opportunities and that
gives you a ton of public buy in, and it
generates a bunch of revenue to help regulate those species
and fun state game agencies. So it's it's a really
it's a really efficient effect active system that I wish
more Americans understood because if they understood it better, they
(27:05):
would I'm not saying they're going to go out and
become a hunter, but they'd at least look at hunters
and say, I choose not to hunt, but I look
at what hunters do, and they bring They bring a
lot of benefits to America old life. I would like
that to become more clear to people.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I mean the financial benefit just with the Pittman Robertson
Act that we have had with you gun sales and
then you have all your purchases of tags and being
able to get your license in different states. Financially, hunters
do more for the conservation of animals than any other group.
(27:39):
If we're talking about some of the reintroduction of some
of these animals in the West, we've had the wolf
being reintroduced to places like Colorado. There's been a lot
of opposition from farmers and from different groups, but then
there's been a lot of people who have really dove
in and said that that's what they want and that's
what they want to see. Where do we kind of
(28:00):
see the numbers? Is it beneficial or was that a
failed mission?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Man, it's a real controversial mission. I'm like, I'm a press.
Let me sorry about just giving my biases here. I'm
I take a pretty pragmatic approach on it. It's undeniable.
Wolves are native wildlife, Okay. I don't think that humans
should be in the business of wiping out native wildlife species.
(28:29):
It's it's bad. We just had a big conversation about
conservation efforts in America. It's a negative. I don't think wolves,
you know, I don't wolves eat meat like a mature
wolf is gonna eat seven pounds of meat to day. Okay.
They're gonna have an impact on deer populations. They're gonna
(28:50):
have an impact on elk populations. It's gonna be a
negative impact, all right. At the same time, I don't
think that people need to go out and bring their
babies and children in the house and lock them up
in the house because they're gonna get killed meat and
by a wolf. That's just not true. But you have
these two sides coming at you, where one side's telling you, oh,
wolves will have no negative impact on wildlife populations. You
(29:12):
got another side saying wolves are gonna kill all the
deer and elk, They're gonna kill all the children to
get rid of them right now. And it's like the
truth is very much in the middle. I'm not opposed
to the wolves being on the ground. If I had
been in charge of the wolf plan in the American West,
I would not have done the reintroductions. I would have
(29:34):
taken the approach of letting them come in on their own,
which they were doing, which they are doing moving in
from Canada, the same way we see black bear populations
expanding around naturally. I would have taken a slow approach
let them come in. I think that I would have
had better public acceptance, and I think in the end,
(29:55):
in ten years, twenty years, we would be landing in
the exact same place. There were all ready wolves walking
into Colorado on their own fore feet. That was already
happening when they decided to bring him in, when they
brought him in from Canada, when they brought him in
from the Pacific Northwest. They turned it into just a
giant controversy. The whole narrative got hijacked by the controversy.
(30:19):
Just let him walk in on their own. Yeah, and
that you would have It would have been so much
better to let him walk in on their own.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
That's one of the biggest problems in politics, though, is
you let man get involved. He immediately wants to put
his fingerprint on something, almost like a badge of honor,
like I helped do this, But they don't think about
like what happens when you were talking about Governor Murphy
in New Jersey. What happens when you have to stand
up publicly and go, Okay, I was wrong, and I
agree with you. I think that the conversation about reintroduction
(30:47):
of species or even allowing animals in the populations to
flourish in an area, it needs to be more of
this could happen, and this could happen. Let's kind of
meet in the middle rather than the everyone's gonna die
or all the animals will not exist.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Yeah, it's that's what kind of the wolf question you
see me like stuttering and having a hard time finding
the right words. The wolf question puts me in this
position as someone who kind of deals in wildlife politics
and deals in wildlife News. The wolf issue puts me
in this perspective of I'm always arguing with the both
(31:27):
sides of it. You know, I like, I'm once said,
I'm saying, like you're underrepresenting the impact this is gonna have.
This is going to have an impact. On the other side,
I'm saying, you're kind of overplaying the impact this is
going to have, because it's like it's just that there's
a there's a middle that isn't that isn't widely articulated
(31:48):
on the issue. But one thing I do have certainty
of is on the wolf question, man I would have
take I would have been patient and let it play
out naturally, and I think that would have manage some
of the heated rhetoric we're seeing.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Agreed.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I just I like your take in your position to
that kind of stuff because I think time, I mean,
we hear it all the time, time heals all wounds,
that kind of thing. I do want to switch gears.
I'm going on an elk hunt to Chama, New Mexico,
and I'm doing this in December. In fact, I'm gonna
miss Meat Eater Live in Birmingham because I fly out
(32:25):
December seventeenth, and you guys are coming in to do
that show at the Lyric Theater Airport. Yeah, it would
be on the bus. Would It would be great? But
and I really want to come to the show. So
maybe I'll make it up to one of the Nashville
shows when when I get back.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
But this is a rifle hunt.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
The first elk hunt that I went on was in
your home state now of Montana, and it was maybe
the most exciting hunt I've ever been on. When I
hear a bull elk bugle in the wild for the
very first time, it said, chills up my body. Do
you see you feel that way when you are among
(33:04):
wild game? Uh, in the hunting world where you hear
them and you immediately get pumped.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Oh yeah, that doesn't go away, man, that doesn't go away.
They have a bowl especially close here, you know, ripping
that ripping that bugle in your face and you see
one of those things coming. Man, they come during the rut.
When they're coming, they look like something that's gonna eats
deer meat. I mean, they don't look like a grass
fat animal, man. They look like they look like that
(33:36):
thing's gonna eat me. Now they're they're they're they're so cool,
and uh, that never goes away. It never goes away.
I still get excited. And now I hold my kids
all the time, so I see everything through their eyes,
you know what I mean, Which has been really that's
just been that's kind of to be honest with you.
Having kids that hunt with has really refreshed a lot
of my perspective because now even things that I've seen
(33:59):
a bunch of times, I'm so excited for them to
see it. But I get as excited as they are
because I'm like anticipating them having the experience. And that's
really you know, I don't want to say reawaken because
that would imply that somehow I lost the fire. But
it's just like it's just reignited or put yeah, yeah, dude,
(34:22):
to have my kids out there and have them get excited,
you know. And and uh, you know when we take
we go a hunter, there's a lot of emotion, man,
Like tears get shed, you know, people get frustrated, you know,
missshots or you know, a little gloomy for a few hours.
But man, it's it's so much fun to have kids
out there.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Well, and that's probably how your dad felt when he
witnessed you getting so involved in hunting as as much
as you have any words of wisdom when it comes
to an elk hunt in New Mexico. When I share
with people that I'm going on an elk hunt in
New Mexico, they go, wait, there's elk in New Mexico.
They always think.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That that's like an ex Actually.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, it's a funny perception. But I know that that
New Mexico has all that high country covered in timber. Uh.
They got down you know, they got downhill skiing, they
got elk, they got crystal clear trout streams. I know. Yeah,
people get this idea that from the desert flat, so
that's what it looks like. Yeah, you'll be there. You
probably notice, I mean, you know, the rut is way over.
(35:23):
Bulls are gonna be split off from cows. They're gonna
be wanting to hide out, They're gonna be wanting to
put calories on, and and probably turned into a game
of rather than listening for bugles, it's gonna become a
binocular game of trying to find bulls, you know, and
if you find bowls, they're probably gonna be more or
less chilled out and more or less kind of standing
(35:43):
in the same little hidie hole and not moving around,
so you'll probably be a lot of looking and then
you know, try to find one and start figuring out
how you're gonna get how you're gonna get in the
range on it. But I'm jealous of that Stuff's fun, dude.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It looks it looks like it's gonna be a great time,
and I'm excited. I'm going with a buddy of mine
from Saint Louis Us who I did a lot of
duck hunting with when I lived there, and he'd always
wanted to do an l hunt. This one kind of
just landed in my lap and I said, well, if
you want to go do this, then let's go do it.
So I should be I should be full of stories
when I come back and see you. But if you
guys want to see Steven Ranella and the crew meet
(36:18):
Eater Live on their Christmas tour. It kicks off Birmingham, Alabama,
December seventeenth, but then they'll go to Nashville, Memphis, Arkansas, Dallas, Texas,
and Austin to wrap it up right before the holidays. Steve,
thanks so much for jumping on.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Hey, thanks man, and I hope I hope your listeners
come out for the show. We got a lot of
prizes we give away. We keep things very up up tempo,
kind of like a little bit of a variety show,
a lot of laugh you'll have to good time to
come out thanking them.
Steve Branella is a podcaster, an author. He's generated cookbook.
He even created Meat Eater on Netflix. He's also severely
in love with the outdoors and wild game. I'm ecstatic
to have him onlines and times because he brings a
(00:26):
wealth of knowledge of not just what's happening with conservation
in America now, but what has happened in the past
and how far we've actually come. I want to find
out a little bit about your history. What got you
into the outdoors. I feel like I've walked a different
path than most people, and I wonder if there's other
(00:46):
people who are kind of like me.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
So, how did you get involved in the outdoors?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Ah? Man, my dad was. I was born into an
outdoor family. You know. It's kind of a little bit
interesting is people look at sort of the history and
demographics of hunting in America, they think of the modern
American sportsman was kind of born of the World War
(01:11):
two generation, you know, and my dad fought in the
war and came home and just was all in on hunting.
And there's this outdoor magazine editor at the time who said,
how could you train a whole generation of people to
camp and shoot guns? And not expect him to become hunters.
And when he got home, that's just what they did.
(01:32):
Like he hunted with other with other veterans and made
that a lifestyle. You know. He was interested in fishing
and hunting before. But by the time I came around,
he had me, and he was pretty old. By the
time I came around, I was like sort of like
being raised by my grandpa, but it was my dad.
He had me when he was fifty, you know, and
he just had at that point in time. You know,
(01:54):
he worked some, but not a ton. You know, by
the time I was getting in my teens, he's kind
of wrapping up work. He's retirement age, you know, And
so we just had a lot of time to be
out in the woods. And I learned a lot from that,
and I got into other stuff, you know, like got
into trapping, and he wasn't a trapper. Eventually moved out
west from Michigan. But it was just how I was
(02:18):
brought up. There was never a moment of there was
never like a moment of deciding to be a hunter.
It was almost like it was decided for me, you know.
And I never revisited that. I never revisited that question.
I just hunt and fish, and you know that's just
kind of has in some respects defined in my life.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
You said your dad was in the military. Are we
talking World War Two?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, so my old man. Yeah, my dad was like
my dad was born in nineteen twenty four. Yeah, he
had me and he was fifty years old. So you know,
my dad was the age of my buddy's grandpa, you
know what I mean. Yeah, he's a World War Two veteran.
So it was just I was brought up around and
(03:03):
he hung out with a lot of World War two veterans,
and those guys all fished in hundred all the time,
and that's just I was kind of brought up in
that circle.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So we know that at the turn of the nineteen hundreds,
it kind of got away from hunting as a means
of economy and more towards the conservation or the Western
model that I think we all know. What do you
think it was about veterans in World War Two where
(03:31):
they came back with this kind of resurgence of wanting
to be in the outdoors and wanting to hunt.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yeah, I think at that point you developed what was
kind of you develop a real body of recreational hunters
who are motivated by experience. You know, America has this
like incredibly rich history of hunting, and I've done a
bunch of you know, my work and books and things
dealing with these hunters like that. People know Daniel Boone
(03:59):
and Jim in these famous commercial hunters, market hunters, you know,
as fascinating as the lives, as those lives are, as
fascinating as Daniel Boone is, as fascinating as Jim Bridger is,
as these pioneering frontier figures. You know, they decimated American
wildlife and for most of American history, people would look
(04:21):
at wildlife as a commodity. It was like a thing
you could go get. There was very little regulation or
no regulation. You could go kill stuff and make money
selling it. And that drove all these crazy adventures. But
it also drove that we kind of were on the
verge of wiping wildlife out. And there came a point
when the birth of the conservation movement was really hunters saying,
(04:46):
if we're going to have hunting in the future, it
will need to be. It will be because we decide
to save wildlife. And for most of the country's histories,
like we had wild places, and we had wildlife because
we hadn't gotten around to killing it yet. Now we
have wildlife, and we have wild places because we sacrifice
(05:08):
things in order to have them, right, we make room
to accommodate them intentionally. And that was a huge shift,
and that like World War two generation was part of
that group of people that wanted to have experiences in
the outdoors, and they weren't necessarily motivated by like commodifying wildlife,
you know, killing ducks with punt guns in order to
(05:29):
sell them into the market. And it just shifted, you know,
and out of that came like guys like me, you
know who hunt for you know, I hunt for food
for my family. I hunt to be out. I hunt
as a way to like raise my kids in an
environment that I think is really beneficial to them, right.
And it's just a different set of motivations than what
(05:49):
motivated a hunter in say seventeen fifty.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
So are you and your family solely eating wild game
or do you actually supplement some of your food sources
with farmed animals?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
No, no man in our home. We're very strict about
wild game. You know. We'll go out and eat in
restaurants or whatever. But sometimes I'll be out of town
and I'll come home my kids will be like, Mom
doesn't want you to know, but she bought a chicken,
you know, because she knows. She knows i'll freak out.
But uh no, we eat a real strict wild game diet.
And it's not like, you know, it's not like we
(06:24):
don't need wild game in our house as a way
to like make a comment about what other people eat.
It's just like that's just what excites us. And every
time we eat, there's a conversation about where it came
from and what it is. And you know, we package
our deer so it's like Rosemary's Rosemary's mule deer, Jimmy's whitetail,
and then we get it out. The kids always want
to know who got it and what it is. And
(06:45):
it just it just it connects us with our food
and connects us as a family and and and and
it works for us, and it's good for us. And
you know, I would never make the claim that it's
the only way to you know, it's the only way
to be a real America or something. That's not where
my head's at. But that's what we like to do.
In our household.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
One of the reasons why I ask you so much
about your father being a World War Two veteran is
the reason I got into hunting. Was an uncle of mine,
and he was significantly older than my cousin who he
ended up marrying.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
But my uncle was I guess he was right after
World War Two.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
It was the conflict we had before Vietnam and it's
escaping me right now.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Korea.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yes, so he was in the Korean conflict and he
was an MP and he would escort Marilyn Monroe around
for her USOS and when he came back, you know,
she lived such an incredible life. And he passed away
when he was about eighty eight, a pancreatic cancer. But
the reason why he got me so interested in hunting,
(07:54):
and we actually never hunted together, was I would go
to his house and he had this den and I
would walk in. It's no bigger than a ten x
fifteen room, I mean, super tiny. But he had a
black bear, he had geese, he had ducks, he had
white tail, he had a turkey. He had all the
North American domestic animals that we have on the wall
(08:15):
and Steve, I would stand in there for hours on end,
and I would look at every feather.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
I would look at the guns that he had in
that gun.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Case with the glass and it was all etched, and
I would look at the bullets that were just laying around,
and I would just inspect everything. And I got so
interested that when my parents moved us to the middle
of nowhere, Virginia, my middle school offered hunter safety in school.
It was and replace a gym, so I took that.
(08:45):
And my parents were not outdoors people, but they always
saw that if I had a passion in something, they
were like, Hey, we want to get you tied in
with the right people, the experts in the field who
know what's going on, so at least what you're doing
is say but you can also kind of learn your way.
So I've never hunted with family members. I've always hunted
(09:06):
with other people. So it's interesting that you were basically
chosen you have to live this life, not that you
always had to live that life, but it was kind
of chosen for you a birth.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah, it was. You know, I've explained to people before
it if I like, if I didn't go on outings,
you know, if I didn't go on the hunting outings,
or if I even thought about not going on like
hunting and fishing outings, I would get like a guilty
conscience like I imagine some people feel when they skip church, right.
I would feel bad, you know, like I remember waking
(09:39):
up and kind of hoping that the weather would be
bad and we wouldn't need to go out in the morning,
you know, And I'd feel guilty for thinking that. I'd
feel guilty for feeling that way.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
But there has to be a switch where as you've
grown up and lived the hunting lifestyle and you eat,
breathe and sleep this stuff. People don't realize this when
they asked me, why do you want to wake up
before the crack of dawn and go sit in the woods?
And I tell him all the time, because you don't
witness God painting a beautiful picture until you actually see
(10:09):
it with your own two eyes.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Oh yeah, so yeah, you never. It's not the kind
of thing you ever regret. You know. The other day,
my little boy, but my wife does this local hike,
you know, in the evening, and she took my little
boy with him there day and her there day, and
he came back and he's talking about he's kind of
being like, why do you all feel so good after
you go on a hike, you know, and we're trying
to explain that to him. But no matter how early
(10:36):
you get up and get out in the woods, man,
no one ever at the end of the day said
would say, oh, I wish we hadn't done That's true.
No one. No one's like, oh, I was really bummed
that we got up early and went out in the
woods this morning. It's just not like a sentiment anyone has.
You know, you do all kinds of stuff in life
or later like I wish I hadn't done that. Here
(10:56):
you go out and drinking at the bar. You wake
up and be like, I wish I hadn't done that.
But no one, No one goes out in the woods
and comes home and they're bummed that they went. It's
just not how it goes. Everybody feels fulfilled, man, I
mean virtually everybody feels fulfilled by it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Well, I mean the fulfilling part is and I'm sure
you get this question too. When people are like, oh,
were you successful on your hunt? We all know what
that means. You know, did you come back with a
bull elk? Did you get the animal? That you were
looking for. Did you guys, have you know an eight
man limit in the duck blind? I always look at
it as the success that I had is that I
(11:29):
formed really good relationships with a couple key people that
I was with, or I got to see something so majestic,
or I got to see something that the majority of
people don't get to see. I mean, I think the
time when you're sitting in a deer stand and you
see two mature white tails fight each other, that's something
that ninety nine percent of Americans have never witnessed.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, so when they say were you successful, you might
be like, not the way you think, right, but yes, right.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I want to get back to the food side.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
You were mentioning that you guys live a wild game lifestyle.
I'm sure you have people who will say, well, I'm
okay with you hunting as.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Long as you eat everything.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
And my answer back to them all the time is
have you ever thrown away a pack of chicken in
the freezer that you forgot about eight months ago? Because
it's tough to eat every single piece of wild game,
But until your cookbook came around.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I thought it was impossible.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Now with your cookbook, I was like, Man, this guy
is opening my eyes to actually looking at wild game
as a better way to create more fat free, hormone
free type of meats than I think most hunters have
ever looked at it.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Oh yeah, there's I mean there's some knacks to it
for sure. Man. And if I look at over my career,
you know, I guess where I feel like I've been
impactful in some ways? Is I feel like I've helped
a lot of Like I imagine a lot of my work right,
a lot of the work I do. I imagine I'm
like like talking to my fathers and sisters who want
(13:02):
you know what I mean, Like we're I'm having like
a dialogue with like minded people. And if I if
I think of a thing that I'm proud of that
I've done over with my work, is I'm proud of
having helped a lot of people come to realize, you know,
that that that diet, that a wild game diet is good.
(13:23):
It can be rewarding, it can be delicious, that it
shouldn't be a burden, you know, like like eating up
a deer shouldn't be a burden. It should be a
thing you're excited about. And that you're able to you know,
you're proud to share with your friends and have great meals,
and and that's you know, it's come to be that,
like far and away, that's our preferred food. Now, I'll
tell you that like my wife. My wife doesn't hunt.
(13:45):
My wife doesn't even Like this is gonna sound weird, now,
my wife doesn't like most domestic meats now because because
for we've been together almost twenty years. You know, between
dating and being married, she does ease game meat. So
when she eats something that's not game me, it just
turns her off because that's all she's eating for twenty years.
So if you give her like a big fatty beef steak,
she don't want nothing to do with it. And I
(14:07):
still get pretty excited about a big fatty beef steak
when I go to a restaurant. She just her boy,
She just switched in her head. She switched over to
like normal meat tastes like mule deer in her in
her mind.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Was that hard for you when you first started dating
to I guess convinces the wrong word, but to introduce
her into a lifestyle of wild game, because I'm sure
she was probably like I've.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Had wild game. It tastes gaming. I'm not a big fan.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
No, because she her perspective was this, if this dude
wants to cook, I'm not gonna say a word I heard.
It was like, listen, if someone cooks your dinner, don't
bet you know you're right.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I mean, I have a wild game party every spring.
So I asked all my buddies who were hunters to
bring something prepared that they killed in the woods over
the last seasons. And I'll never forget I watched a
woman eat elk for the very first time. And we
don't tell people what's on the plate until they ask,
and then we share it with him because I feel
(15:09):
like if you tell them it's elk, they immediately go
into it with the preconceived notion.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
They put like the yeah they put there in there,
and then they feel like they're smelling something they don't smell,
taste and something they.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Don't She took a bite of this elk and she
was like, oh my god, this is the best tasting
beef I've ever had in my life. And my buddy
who shot that elk said, well, it's elk, and she
was She was ecstatic that she tried it. It did
ruin her for a little bit because she was then
freaked out. You know, oh my god, I ate something
that you couldn't just buy at the store. But once
(15:42):
you get that second piece, it's like a game changer.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh yeah, I don't have Yeah, I just don't encounter
a lot of that resistance. You know. My wife's always
been super cool about it. You know, we'll try to
tell like deers big and one dar's you know how
big this deer is and she's like, I don't know,
man looks a lot like all the other deer to eat.
And she just views it like a way to a
way that someone makes food for her. And that's that's
(16:08):
how she used it, and that's why she's into it.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know, when you started making the cookbook and you
started introducing different ways to prepare wild game, where did
you pick all those things up from?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Man, I never had any training as a professional chef,
but I had a lot of friends or chefs, and
what I sort of my pathway into kind of like
what I brought to the wild game conversation. I think
over the years is that I would go and I
would find like I would go and find preparations you know,
(16:45):
from whoever around the world whatever. I would find preparations
that people make with normal farm animals, right, like pork preparations,
land preparations, beef preparations, and I would state to myself,
how do you how can I make that with wild game,
knowing that it won't be exactly the same, like you
won't be able to follow the same process because game
(17:07):
is different. And so over the years I just experimented
a lot with taking sort of like my favorite foods
and the best things I encounter in restaurants or whatever,
and saying how can I bring that into wild game?
And that has kind of, you know, a little bit,
been my specialty or an area where I've spent a
lot of where I've put a lot in my focus
(17:28):
is just learning those different Like there's this dish, you know,
one of the things I got really into for while
is a dish asubuco and it means like holding the
bone because it's it's Italian dish you see in different countries.
But they they take a shank so like the ankle
of a deer, right or for them a lamb or beef,
and they cut it up on a band sauce. So
(17:48):
you have these little discs and then they cook those down. Now,
the reason I bring up this dish is because in
the hunting world, people might discard deer shank so they
don't even touch them because they say there's no meat
on them, or they'll try to bone them out. And
by the time you get rid of all the silver
skin and sinew, you got enough meat to fill the
(18:09):
palm in your hand, like maybe enough for maybe enough
for a small hamburger, right, Or you learn how to
do this acid buco deal and cook the whole thing,
and it's, you know, one of my favorite dishes of
all time. When you're done eating it, you have a
bone that looks as clean as a museum specimen laying there,
(18:32):
and you realize that, like all the years you wasted
that stuff. When I was a kid, we didn't make
that dish. We would take those shanks and pick the
little meat apart and wind up with like a little
sausage patty in your hands. And now we make a
whole meal out of those things, and it's like kind
of a you know, kind of like a little bit
of a signature dish of mine. I serve it to people,
(18:53):
they're blown away they can't believe it's venison. It's a
super economical use of the resource, and it just feels good.
So those are the kinds of things I'm usually looking for.
Is I like to try to find, you know, exciting
novel sometimes just approachable things that are going to please
your family. That again, you take wild game and you
(19:14):
turn it into something that people are excited to eat,
and that your friends and in laws, you know, spend
the next week talking about how cool it was and
what a great experience it was to have that preparation.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I like that the cookbook is more than just duck
poppers and you know, meat wrapped in bacon, because there's
so many good uses.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Of wild game that are out there.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I want to jump back to a point that you
made earlier about the market hunters that we had, the
Davy Crocketts of the world and the Boons and all
those guys. When we saw the decimation in the domestic
animals that we had, primarily whitetail deer, but also elk
and bison and buffalo and all these different things. Where
do you feel that we've gotten to now in conservation
(19:59):
and is it the right place?
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah? I mean far far and away. We're in the
right place. Now. We're still in recovery mode though a
little bit. You know, if you look at black bears prints,
like blackbirds used to drive a tremendous economy. You mentioned
Davy Crockett. Crockett did a lot of market hunting, and
he did a lot of market hunting for bear meat.
(20:22):
Was in the bear grease business. Like Boone used to
sell bear grease, the you know, rendered bear oil. He
would sell black bear hams. There was a time like
picture this. There was a day this is on the
Big Sandy River and today's West Virginia. Boone killed thirteen
bears in a day. Okay, that's where bears in the
(20:46):
modern hunter is going to you know, kill in a lifetime.
But I mean they eliminated bears across huge pieces of
their range. With our system. Now we're recovering BlackBerry populations.
We have more black bears now than any time in
the last century, and we're gonna have more tomorrow. Black
bears are still spreading out and recovering ground in places
where they were absent, so we're able to have at
(21:08):
the same time we're able to have black bear hunting.
I don't even know what it is. Now over twenty
like close to twentyve states have a black bear season,
and at the same time that we're doing that, we're
seeing expanding black bear numbers. We deer. It's so hard
to picture now. There was a time when, like I
got friends in Wisconsin. I got a friend Doug Durham, Wisconsin.
(21:29):
When he was a little kid. If you saw a
deer track. He grew up in Wisconsin farm country, southwest Wisconsin.
If you saw a deer track, you'd run home and
tell your dad. They got forty deer per square mile
now and they got a farm where they're able to
harvest twenty some deer off that farm every year. And
now it's the same farm that if you saw a
(21:50):
deer track, you ran home to tell your dad, and
they didn't even hunt their own farm. They had to
go up north to hunt because there was no deer around.
So we've made incredible progress. We'recovering wildlife and we're still
and it's still happening. We're still recovering wildlife at the
same time that we have regulated hunting.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
In the state of Alabama. It's maybe one of the
weirdest rout maps I've ever seen because it's a tear
drop rot map because we have so many deer from
different states. We have deer from Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois, New York, Maine,
and they imported them here in the nineteen teens. And
(22:29):
when you see a rout map here, it's literally droplets
of water. So you could have a rut happening two
minutes away from your house, but the next closest rut
that's going to happen in a week or so, it
could be two hundred miles away.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, isn't that the credible to think that it got
so bad we were shipping deer around? Yeah, and now
and now, when you hear a conversation, like in wildlife politics,
when you hear a conversation about whitetail deer, it's people
trying to grapple with having too many deer, right, That's
the whole other conversation. Because the solution would be well,
less open these areas up to hunting, and a lot
(23:02):
of people were like, well, no, I'd rather pay the
government to deal with my problem than have hunters pay
to get a license and hunt. That's the whole other
issue about about thecidal you know, just having a society
that gets a little backwards on some issues. But yeah, true,
I mean had an incredible system.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Man, If you're talking about the society is getting backwards
on some things, I'll go back to that bear hunt.
You know, you've got a place like New Jersey where
they have problems with black bears. You know, black bears
are going through trash cans and they're getting close to people,
and they attack pets, and they've gone after humans every
once in a while. And the argument was, well, we
don't want a black bear hunt because we want to
(23:42):
see more black bears, but it's not like we have
the room to have the population booms that we all
wish we saw and keeping everybody safe for the amount
of populations that have now infiltrated where these bears used
to live.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah, this is one of my favorite story because New
Jersey's Governor Murphy at the time when when when they're
their their past governor was was coming up in New Jersey.
He campaigned on ending the black bear hunt. So the
state had after a long absence, they'd recovered their bears,
they initiated a limited black bear hunt. Governor Murphy comes
(24:22):
in and campaigns on ending the black bear hunt, and
when he comes in, he does end the black bear hunt.
Then a couple of years later he's he's put in
a situation where he's forced to go and publicly say
I was wrong because black bear complaints, depredations, everything shot
up so severely that he had to come out and
(24:43):
say I made a mistake, I was wrong, and they
brought the black bear hunt back. But but think about
this too, New Jersey. That's the highest black bear density
of any state. Okay, the high black bear density, but
also one of the highest human dentis. And so you
have bears and people coexisting. There's no reason that you
(25:06):
can't have a very stable, thriving population of black bears
with limited human hunting. And that's like kind of become
the key of the American conservation model to our regulatory structures.
We're able to have both things at once. We're able
to have limited harvest by humans, limited regulated harvest by humans,
(25:27):
at the same time that we have healthy, stable, where appropriate,
expanding populations of wildlife. And it's amazing of our history.
It didn't go that way for most of our history.
We just ran things into the ground.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
It's amazing to see how many states are getting reintroduction
of animals that were there in the eighteen hundreds of
seventeen hundreds and way before man came around, Like the
reintroduction of the Rocky Mountain elk.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I believe that's the species.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, Well Tennis putting out back in Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, yeah, those those.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Elkin Kentucky spreading into other states. You know, that's been
flowed down a little bit because of some some disease
transmission issues. It's like from the regulatory perspective, it's a
little harder to move ungulates right now. But yeah, I
mean the recovery program. You know, Arkansas did a bear recovery.
Now Arkansas has a has a great bear population and
(26:22):
a bear hunt and they had to come in and
recover bears by bringing bears in. Florida had to recover
mountain lions by bringing mountain lions in. So it's a
you know, it's part of our playbook when need, when
necessary to move wildlife from stable populations into areas where
it needs to get rehabilitated. And what usually winds up happened,
(26:43):
and when that's successful, it presents hunting opportunities and that
gives you a ton of public buy in, and it
generates a bunch of revenue to help regulate those species
and fun state game agencies. So it's it's a really
it's a really efficient effect active system that I wish
more Americans understood because if they understood it better, they
(27:05):
would I'm not saying they're going to go out and
become a hunter, but they'd at least look at hunters
and say, I choose not to hunt, but I look
at what hunters do, and they bring They bring a
lot of benefits to America old life. I would like
that to become more clear to people.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I mean the financial benefit just with the Pittman Robertson
Act that we have had with you gun sales and
then you have all your purchases of tags and being
able to get your license in different states. Financially, hunters
do more for the conservation of animals than any other group.
(27:39):
If we're talking about some of the reintroduction of some
of these animals in the West, we've had the wolf
being reintroduced to places like Colorado. There's been a lot
of opposition from farmers and from different groups, but then
there's been a lot of people who have really dove
in and said that that's what they want and that's
what they want to see. Where do we kind of
(28:00):
see the numbers? Is it beneficial or was that a
failed mission?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Man, it's a real controversial mission. I'm like, I'm a press.
Let me sorry about just giving my biases here. I'm
I take a pretty pragmatic approach on it. It's undeniable.
Wolves are native wildlife, Okay. I don't think that humans
should be in the business of wiping out native wildlife species.
(28:29):
It's it's bad. We just had a big conversation about
conservation efforts in America. It's a negative. I don't think wolves,
you know, I don't wolves eat meat like a mature
wolf is gonna eat seven pounds of meat to day. Okay.
They're gonna have an impact on deer populations. They're gonna
(28:50):
have an impact on elk populations. It's gonna be a
negative impact, all right. At the same time, I don't
think that people need to go out and bring their
babies and children in the house and lock them up
in the house because they're gonna get killed meat and
by a wolf. That's just not true. But you have
these two sides coming at you, where one side's telling you, oh,
wolves will have no negative impact on wildlife populations. You
(29:12):
got another side saying wolves are gonna kill all the
deer and elk, They're gonna kill all the children to
get rid of them right now. And it's like the
truth is very much in the middle. I'm not opposed
to the wolves being on the ground. If I had
been in charge of the wolf plan in the American West,
I would not have done the reintroductions. I would have
(29:34):
taken the approach of letting them come in on their own,
which they were doing, which they are doing moving in
from Canada, the same way we see black bear populations
expanding around naturally. I would have taken a slow approach
let them come in. I think that I would have
had better public acceptance, and I think in the end,
(29:55):
in ten years, twenty years, we would be landing in
the exact same place. There were all ready wolves walking
into Colorado on their own fore feet. That was already
happening when they decided to bring him in, when they
brought him in from Canada, when they brought him in
from the Pacific Northwest. They turned it into just a
giant controversy. The whole narrative got hijacked by the controversy.
(30:19):
Just let him walk in on their own. Yeah, and
that you would have It would have been so much
better to let him walk in on their own.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
That's one of the biggest problems in politics, though, is
you let man get involved. He immediately wants to put
his fingerprint on something, almost like a badge of honor,
like I helped do this, But they don't think about
like what happens when you were talking about Governor Murphy
in New Jersey. What happens when you have to stand
up publicly and go, Okay, I was wrong, and I
agree with you. I think that the conversation about reintroduction
(30:47):
of species or even allowing animals in the populations to
flourish in an area, it needs to be more of
this could happen, and this could happen. Let's kind of
meet in the middle rather than the everyone's gonna die
or all the animals will not exist.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Yeah, it's that's what kind of the wolf question you
see me like stuttering and having a hard time finding
the right words. The wolf question puts me in this
position as someone who kind of deals in wildlife politics
and deals in wildlife News. The wolf issue puts me
in this perspective of I'm always arguing with the both
(31:27):
sides of it. You know, I like, I'm once said,
I'm saying, like you're underrepresenting the impact this is gonna have.
This is going to have an impact. On the other side,
I'm saying, you're kind of overplaying the impact this is
going to have, because it's like it's just that there's
a there's a middle that isn't that isn't widely articulated
(31:48):
on the issue. But one thing I do have certainty
of is on the wolf question, man I would have
take I would have been patient and let it play
out naturally, and I think that would have manage some
of the heated rhetoric we're seeing.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Agreed.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I just I like your take in your position to
that kind of stuff because I think time, I mean,
we hear it all the time, time heals all wounds,
that kind of thing. I do want to switch gears.
I'm going on an elk hunt to Chama, New Mexico,
and I'm doing this in December. In fact, I'm gonna
miss Meat Eater Live in Birmingham because I fly out
(32:25):
December seventeenth, and you guys are coming in to do
that show at the Lyric Theater Airport. Yeah, it would
be on the bus. Would It would be great? But
and I really want to come to the show. So
maybe I'll make it up to one of the Nashville
shows when when I get back.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
But this is a rifle hunt.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
The first elk hunt that I went on was in
your home state now of Montana, and it was maybe
the most exciting hunt I've ever been on. When I
hear a bull elk bugle in the wild for the
very first time, it said, chills up my body. Do
you see you feel that way when you are among
(33:04):
wild game? Uh, in the hunting world where you hear
them and you immediately get pumped.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Oh yeah, that doesn't go away, man, that doesn't go away.
They have a bowl especially close here, you know, ripping
that ripping that bugle in your face and you see
one of those things coming. Man, they come during the rut.
When they're coming, they look like something that's gonna eats
deer meat. I mean, they don't look like a grass
fat animal, man. They look like they look like that
(33:36):
thing's gonna eat me. Now they're they're they're they're so cool,
and uh, that never goes away. It never goes away.
I still get excited. And now I hold my kids
all the time, so I see everything through their eyes,
you know what I mean, Which has been really that's
just been that's kind of to be honest with you.
Having kids that hunt with has really refreshed a lot
of my perspective because now even things that I've seen
(33:59):
a bunch of times, I'm so excited for them to
see it. But I get as excited as they are
because I'm like anticipating them having the experience. And that's
really you know, I don't want to say reawaken because
that would imply that somehow I lost the fire. But
it's just like it's just reignited or put yeah, yeah, dude,
(34:22):
to have my kids out there and have them get excited,
you know. And and uh, you know when we take
we go a hunter, there's a lot of emotion, man,
Like tears get shed, you know, people get frustrated, you know,
missshots or you know, a little gloomy for a few hours.
But man, it's it's so much fun to have kids
out there.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Well, and that's probably how your dad felt when he
witnessed you getting so involved in hunting as as much
as you have any words of wisdom when it comes
to an elk hunt in New Mexico. When I share
with people that I'm going on an elk hunt in
New Mexico, they go, wait, there's elk in New Mexico.
They always think.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That that's like an ex Actually.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, it's a funny perception. But I know that that
New Mexico has all that high country covered in timber. Uh.
They got down you know, they got downhill skiing, they
got elk, they got crystal clear trout streams. I know. Yeah,
people get this idea that from the desert flat, so
that's what it looks like. Yeah, you'll be there. You
probably notice, I mean, you know, the rut is way over.
(35:23):
Bulls are gonna be split off from cows. They're gonna
be wanting to hide out, They're gonna be wanting to
put calories on, and and probably turned into a game
of rather than listening for bugles, it's gonna become a
binocular game of trying to find bulls, you know, and
if you find bowls, they're probably gonna be more or
less chilled out and more or less kind of standing
(35:43):
in the same little hidie hole and not moving around,
so you'll probably be a lot of looking and then
you know, try to find one and start figuring out
how you're gonna get how you're gonna get in the
range on it. But I'm jealous of that Stuff's fun, dude.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It looks it looks like it's gonna be a great time,
and I'm excited. I'm going with a buddy of mine
from Saint Louis Us who I did a lot of
duck hunting with when I lived there, and he'd always
wanted to do an l hunt. This one kind of
just landed in my lap and I said, well, if
you want to go do this, then let's go do it.
So I should be I should be full of stories
when I come back and see you. But if you
guys want to see Steven Ranella and the crew meet
(36:18):
Eater Live on their Christmas tour. It kicks off Birmingham, Alabama,
December seventeenth, but then they'll go to Nashville, Memphis, Arkansas, Dallas, Texas,
and Austin to wrap it up right before the holidays. Steve,
thanks so much for jumping on.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Hey, thanks man, and I hope I hope your listeners
come out for the show. We got a lot of
prizes we give away. We keep things very up up tempo,
kind of like a little bit of a variety show,
a lot of laugh you'll have to good time to
come out thanking them.
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