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I T E dot com. Probably ladies and gentlemen. We're joined by our our, our friend and colleague and uh, I don't know, beloved, uh ark and Arkinson? What is? How do you say that?
Ar Kanson?
Ar Kanson Clay Newcomb, who's recently back from a trip where he accompanied a wolf trapper in Alaska and made a uh made a video about hanging out with this Alaska wolf trapper and video has gotten quite a lot of views and generated a lot of conversation. And I wanted to check in with Clay about it. And first thing I want to know Clay is tell me what you wanted to name it and what they ended up naming it and why.
Well I wanted to I wanted to just come out and say what the film was about in the title, and I wanted to call it trapping wolves in Alaska or Alaskan or Alaskan wolf trapping, and we were we were advised not to do that because of the potential for YouTube to flag something that had the word trapping in the title, and so we ended up calling it Alaskan wolf management with Clay Nukem, and that that kind of opens up a can of worms from the very beginning.
Really sets you know, Yeah, I think it sets uh uh. It just sets an expectation and delivers a certain dialogue. Meaning if you made a squirrel hunting video, which you like to do and which I like to do, and then you had to call it squirrel management in Michigan, it feel kind of weird, right, Raccoon managed.
It feels a whole lot more like it's this mission driven experience, as if I felt like, by me going up there and trapping a couple of wolves, four wolves, actually that it was gonna, you know, change something, And no doubt that it's a statement in today's world if you go wolf trapping, But really I wanted to. I wanted to experience it. I've known David Bennett's for about ten years.
That's what I wanted to get into because well, I don't understand. I was a little hurt because I don't know why it didn't come. It's why the article wasn't beaver trapping with Steve.
Beaver Management with Steve Vanilla.
Yeah, so what what? What headed the whole thing off? Or what started?
So I met David Bennett's about ten years ago through Bear Hunting magazine. David's an outfitter. David's a professional crabber. That's his main livelihood is crabbing for three months during the summer.
For Dungeon Crab. Yeah.
Oh man, his stories and and and and his learning about that was incredible. But he's just like the classic Alaskan man.
He's he's whenever those guys come through our area, crab and gets bad on. Yeah. Yeah.
David is also an outfitter, so he guides for you know, Alaskan big game. I would say his primary thing is is black bear and goats. But then lastly in the wintertime he traps and he's traped since he was ten years old.
You know.
David's fifty seven or so. Just an incredible guy, you know, and he at times he's made a lot of money trapping back in the day and this, but to this day he still traps just as hard as he's ever trapped, just out of principle.
Yeah, if he's sixty seven and he started trapping when he was ten, he was cranking through the big fur boom. I mean he was young, but he was selling fur during like the the big fur boom with a capital FB. I think it's hard for the l late seventies, early eighties. You know, my friend Stu Miller said to me, every generation has its own fur boom, and uh his game early.
Man, I think those old guys have a hard time letting go of that. I mean, so much of what we do, I think is is fueled by more than just economics and the buzz that somebody would have gotten back in the day to have made a legitimate amount of money trapping furs. That association with sustenance for your family, you know, going out and taking first off the landscape would just almost be hard to erase. It feels to me like, you know, you keep doing it even when
the prices are cheap. But man, the beaver, the beaver markets back though, because of these dang felt hats.
Oh I know, Uh, it is cranky. I'm obsessed with I don't want to talk about fur prices, but I don't sell fur. I'm obsessed with the fur market. I follow the fur market more closely than I follow like the stock market.
Do you have one of those? Do you have like a graph on your phone that you just can of It doesn't work the clip on and see like that, ups and down, it's like a stock exchange.
No, it doesn't work that way. So you reached out to him, and I bet there's no way that he wasn't at first thinking to himself, Man, I don't want you and some camera dudes coming into this thing, which is just going to cause me hassle. Guys are going to know where I trap, Guys are going to know how I trap. I'm gonna have animal rights people coming after me. How did you ever get him to say, yeah, come on out trapping with a camera.
You know, I was very conscious of that when I reached out to him, And I honestly feel like David believes that the the authenticity and legitimacy of what he's doing is able to withstand any criticism that he's taken. And he also just isn't concerned about giving away secrets. I mean sometimes guys are like that. David is willing to help anybody can that's wanting to do it, but it's so difficult. I mean what the film didn't portray
and we tried to portray. And you know this because you do so like this all the time, Steve is that.
It.
You gotta have something driving you that's almost clinically insane to do what he does. I mean being out on the water, the distance of these the distance he's traveling, the amount of money that he spends on even just his trap sets. It's a very very few people are going to see that video and move to Alaska and be a wolf trapper. Yeah, and he knows that.
And uh.
And I told him that we were gonna handle it in a responsible way, and I think he just he just took us for our at our word for that.
You know. So, how did you guys pick the season you were going to go? Was he trying to line it up with with peak conditions, with when he doesn't have anything else going on with when he felt that it was the biggest chance of getting like real prime wolf else that weren't rubbed out right, what was he shooting for when you guys went so.
His his year is very regimented down to the week. You know, he can tell you what he's going to be doing any given week of the year. And that first week of December he was going to be trapping wolves, whether I was with him or not. That's what he told me. And yeah, it's it's peak for it's but it's also you know, tough travel conditions that time of year.
No daylight, you can oh, that was.
The biggest challenge of the whole trip, Steve, And you would know it as much as anybody is. It gets daylight at about seven thirty AM, maybe even closer to eight, and it's dark by four thirty. I mean it's like dark dark And so what was wild so dirt myth was my cameraman on this deal, you know, Garrett Smith and he we would get back to the boat four thirty and not be needing to be in the boat
till eight o'clock the next day. Setting in that little cabin on the on the Sandpiper, which we became very familiar with. We'd set around for six hours and I don't know what we did read, eat.
Pack a big old pack a big dip.
Probably right, dirt was running through some dip, buddy, you better believe it. I was like, man, what if we run out? And he was like, Clay, I got so much dip in my bag. He's like, I got enough for all of us. And I'm like, I don't dip. I'm out, but appreciate it.
So what are the days goal? Like? He runs a big like he's running a big well. First, I think, guess before we say what the day's goal like, you should explain this is a marine based deal. He's not running off snowmobiles, trucks. It's it's marine based.
It's boats completely two boats, water based, completely water based. Trap line.
Yeah.
So if you saw the film, you saw that he has a forty eight foot crabbing boat with a cab, a kitchen, you know, fully equipped. We we put that in a small narrow inlet to get it out of big water in waves, and then we took a skiff out to check the traps. And what is amazing to me what I would have thought if you would have just said, Clay, you're gonna have to go trap wolves in a in Alaska, how are you going to do it?
Coastal Alaska. I would have thought you couldn't trap these wolves on the beach just because they wouldn't have any reason to be there. But he's literally catching wolves on the beach in the sand a lot of times.
Yeah, you know, you only salmon. They like, it's a peculiar kind of wolf that like salmon dead. I've watched them eating rotten salmon off the beach. Yeah, well yeah there, so there.
He feels like they're actually attracted to these points, these sandy points. He feels like they just kind of loaf there, you know, like a Mallard duck and the timber in the midday, you know, just like loafing.
Huh okay.
But but what's what it was interesting to me is he said he learned how to catch wolves by watching
his Labrador retriever. He would pull up on a pull up on the bank and let his dog jump out of the boat, and he would watch what his dog would is a male dog, and he said that dog would pick the most prominent visual thing that it could see, whether it was a stump, whether it was a clump of grass that set out from the rest of the grass, whether it was a big rock, and he'd go over and he'd mark it, you know, lift his leg and
pee on it. And he just started watching that dog and he started setting traps where he saw his dog mark and started catching wolves and he so he started doing That's exactly that's what he called him. And we didn't have time, you know, the video wasn't like how to trap wolves, so we didn't really get into the technical side.
But what he.
Uses is wolf here in a big, big bottle of wolf here, and he'll make an artificial scent post. So he'll go to a beat to a point that he wants to trap on, and he'll go gather up a couple of logs.
He's doing this above above the high tide marker, right in where it's getting submerged at high tide.
Now, most of it's above the high tide mark, even though that is a strategy, you know, to set it below the tide mark and it's it's like a drown set, you know. But most of these he's just catching above the.
The grass or be grass. Yeah, Okay, so he drags out whatever, drags out some object to make some visual appeal, I assume.
Yeah, and then he and then he puts sin all over it. You know, he puts his he he had multiple commercial wolf lures, but also this this wolf you'reine and uh, the biggest thing that I think is different for those guys in Southeast Alaska that are trapping is they don't have to worry about human scent. We were not worried about human scent at all.
Because everything gets wet, just everything gets washed out.
It rains. When you're setting a wolf trap, you're, yeah, you're it's gonna rain and it's gonna wash away the scent. And so when the guys in the lower forty eighth that do some trapping, that's a big concern is how do you pretty much keep the set scent free. So you know, they're wearing gloves, they're really concerned about what you're touching, and and up there he's not at all, which is makes it makes it convenient.
But his traps, his footholdser dyed and waxed. Correct. Yeah, okay, so go through making this like scent post set. So he drags out an object for some visual appeal and places it out on a point that's.
Right, how big of another? And so we showed it. We showed a set in the film. There was probably a stump that was eighteen inches long, or just a piece of log that was eighteen inches long, kind of had a big oblong rootball on one side that set up eighteen inches tall, and we set it out right out out from the grass in the sand where everything would see it, and maybe even put another little smaller four or five inch log on it. And then you know, you put that scent post in an area where you
can dig easily. That's not rocky, that's sandy. Yeah, And then we dig down and set just a standard trap set. I'm not an expert trapper. I've spent a little bit of time trap and I know how to make dirt hole sets and catch foxes and coyotes and all this, and I mean, you know, setting these big traps is just identical to that. You know, you're you're trying to well, he uses a drag for his equipment. He's he's using a.
Drag instead of trying trying.
Yeah, and so you have to dig a deep, a pretty deep hole to bury that big drag. And it is a big drag. And then you know you're setting that trap down into a bed where it doesn't wiggle around and the top of the trap has to be even almost even with the surface of the ground.
How many inches off the explain how it goes, like how many inches off the post, because you gotta you're trying to cut. One of the ways to describe it is you got the whole world. You know, the animal has the whole world, the whole am island whatever to walk around on, and you're trying to get it to put its foot on a well. In this case, you're trying to get it put its foot on a two
inch circle. Right, So if something walks up, if you picture that, Let's take something that people are more familiar with, like a coyote. Okay, a kyote's walking down a dirt lane, walking down a farm trail, whatever, and there's an object that it wants to piss on. Its feet are gonna fall in a specific spot. They're not gonna be two inches off the thing. They're not gonna be thirty inches off the thing. He's not gonna dance there, he's gonna
come through, raise his leg and leave. What are the odds that you've put that trappan where it's gonna put its foot. Yeah, so you're David, You're You're like, you're you're thinking about foot placement and anatomy when you place it, because if not you place it wrong, you could have eight wolves run by. None's gonna put their foot there.
Yeah, you know, I was kind of surprised at how non technical David's explanation to me of you know, where to put the trap.
So he's thinking, he's thinking it, but he's not saying it.
Probably well, I think he's just done it so many times it's just instinctive. But I was expecting them to have a tape measure and be like the average big Southeast Alaskan wolf has a stride that's, you know, fourteen inches long. So if he's sitting here and he's peeing on that log, he's going to be sixteen inches out and slightly back because you know he's peeing from the third, you know, the back third. Yeah, what you know, this
technical nothing. I mean, he's just but probably he was eighteen inches off of the trap, And I don't think he was targeting a specific foot. I think he's catching a lot of them in the front feet when they come up to sniff the post before they market. You know, just just an animal just walking up and putting his nose on that on that little scent log that we I don't think he's trying to catch it with a back leg, you know. So he is not as technical
as I thought it would be. And what you guys, before he came out, he went out and made a bunch of sets. Yeah, correct, So he has some sets out working and then you guys punched in some sets and did some remakes and stuff like that.
But how many during your time there? And explain the number of days you spent there? And uh, tell folks how many traps you checked? Okay? Over what? Over what distance?
We were there for six full days, and in that time, David was concerned that we might not catch a wolf. You know, that's how this trapping goes. You might be there for six days and not catch a wolf. So by him setting the traps, you know, the day before we got there, you know, we kind of got an extra day. And he has fifty five sets over a two hundred We mapped it out on on x a two hundred mile trap line boat by water. But each of those sets might have multiple traps. So he had
two kind of sets. He had p post sets and what he called bait sets which were set in tide pools, and basically he would have a chunk of beaver that was elevated above the low tideline covered in rocks, and then he would have four traps set under the water, just set on the ground, not buried even at under that low tide, there underwater, at low tide, there underwater, but at low tide or mid tide whatever, the meats out of the water, but the traps just buried in
a tide pool or submerged. Correct, that's correct. And so we had fifty five sets, but each of those sets, most sets had uh, well, if there were baits that they had four traps. So it would be easy to say he had one hundred traps out. Yep, I would say he had one hundred traps out.
How many had how many out ahead of your arrival?
He had all of them out. He had all of them out before we got there. And we actually caught four wolves on the trip. And you know, it's just showbiz stuff like we just couldn't we couldn't fit in the other two. But we caught We caught one jet black wolf, which was cool, and and caught another kind of juvenile gray wolf. So we caught four wolves in a week, which I think that's about what he expected. But you can go you can go a week and not even catch a single animal.
Yeah, you know. Now, A lot of states have checklaws twenty four hour check laws, forty eight hour checklaws. Some states have checklaws. I should clarify when I'm talking about a check law meanings like a maximum amount of time that you can go without visually inspecting a set, And some states just have a flat out check law twenty
four hours, forty eight hours. Some states have no mention of a check law, and some states have slightly more nuanced check laws where certain sets don't have a check law, meaning you might be able to set under the ice or underwater with kill sets and not have a check law.
But if you're making sets with footholds dry ground sets with footholds, then there is a check law, meaning that one, if something goes wrong at your set and you catch something that you're not supposed to catch, you're not leaving it there too long and you're able to release it. Two being that when you do make a target catch that you're not leaving it in the trap so long that it might be regarded by some as being inhumane to leave something caught in a trap for an extended
period of time. So to minimize stress, minimize suffering, you enforce this check limit. They don't have a check law, and he's making somecessities leaving for quite some time. What was his perspective on this, that he would leave a foothold set for a week and could potentially have a catch for a week, because there's two things. One there's a consideration of the animals well being, and two there's
a consideration of you might not hold it forever. It's gonna get out, right, the longer it has more, it's gonna get out. What was his thinking about this? Is it just is it a matter of logistically it's just impossible to do it any other way? How did he think about that?
That's a good question, and that was one of the first things we talked about. And he when he's trapping, that's all he does. Like when he starts trapping, he is a twenty four hour a day, seven day a week trapper, and in his mind, he had he believes he has an ethical responsibility to check those traps. Is absolutely as much as he can. But if you were there and saw what we were up against with weather, like there are days when you can't get on the water.
So that's primarily the reason in Alaska that they don't have the check laws is because you're setting you're setting traps in places that some times you just can't physically get to. And so and and he also, I think just believes his job is to to catch wolves and uh and and he's tracked. He's he's checking him as absolutely as much as he can, you know, avoid and we I mean, if he thinks he's not going to be able to get to traps, he won't reset him.
I Mean, it's kind of one of these deals where you know your own conscience is your god, you know, and it works good for it works good for him. I don't think he sees any kind of pushback from that, you know. And that's just the way it is in Alaska. That I heard something. I don't know any trappers who love the checklaws.
I can tell you that.
Yeah, yeah, well man, it's uh, that's definitely something that some people didn't understand that that watched the film. And if you're up there and you're in that boat and you met David, you you'd get it.
You know, what was your feeling when when when all of a sudden, like there's a wolf. You know, when I asked us, I'm asking from the perspective of there's certain creatures that occupy a lot of mind space, you know, like you think about them a lot, but you don't get to look at them as much as you think about them. And I remember, after always catching glimpses of mountain lions, you know, out out in the wild, I remember the first time I came up on a treed
mountain lion. Where there it is you could actually like really look at it as long as you wanted, you know, those stunning to be just to have it be like right there, dogs blow it. It's in the tree. And this thing that you just you only get glimpses of also is just there in its larger than life kind of way. When you come around the bend or whatever and there's one standing there, what are your you know,
what were your thoughts about it? Were you like, man, I hope he gets away, or that guy we got one, or you know, what are the different things you're feeling?
You know, I haven't I haven't interacted with wolves a whole lot being from Arkansas. You know, when you and I were in Alaska two years ago, we saw a pack of I think fourteen wolves that we watched a couple of evenings. Once in Idaho, I saw one across the road. I haven't I haven't spent a ton or time around wolves. This was definitely the closest I've ever been to one, and it was I. If I didn't say it was slightly conflicted, I'd probably be lying.
I think.
It was just a magnificent beast. I mean, yeah, to be able to walk up to it look at it. But what I said in the film I'm is that my confliction was completely fabricated by the confusing messaging of planet Earth and humans about wolves. I mean I was aware of that, like if I was, you know, I said that, you know, to sacrelize something really is a man made feature. It's not in the natural realm. I
mean that that wolf. I've killed a lot of deer, a lot of white tailed deer, and on the ethical spectrum of human existence, me shooting a white tailed deer is no less different than us dispatching that wolf on the end of a trap. I believe that. But at the same time, this is a very unique animal in a unique place, a unique predator. You know, they're less predators than there are prey animals. I mean, so, I
mean I was just fascinated by it. I'm always fascinated by predators, probably in just a generic sense like anybody else would have been just kind of like a little kid. I mean when after we dispatched it, shot it with a twenty two mag I mean, I just walked up to it. The dang thing smelled like a dirty, wet German shepherd, and I looked at his claws and just inspected every part of him. Man, And you know you can't.
You got to have respect for him, I mean, just absolute respect for them and their job what they do making a living out on that landscape. But at the same time, and I said this in the film, honestly, there was little ecological consequence to us taking those two wolves out of that bay. I mean. The one thing that David says he and he has, you know, thirty five years a wolf traffing experience to say to know
it is that you can trap. You can trap half the pack, you can trap three quarters of a pack out of a bay, and within two years that pack will be back up to the same numbers, Like you just can't stomp them down that hard, especially on this coastal trapping. And what he said to me made a lot of sense. And the reason I'm saying all this is it didn't really help the deer that much and
it didn't really hurt the wolves that much. It was just a unique experience where we could extract resource from the land and kind of nobody loses and everybody wins. That's the way I look at it. Yeah, and it undoubtedly did it save a couple of deer moose calves in that cove this year, yep. Because those two wolves, they were probably ninety pound males. They're going to eat something, and they would have been eating five to seven pounds of meat since that day that we took them out.
And because you know, going back to our original conversation about what we titled this wolf management, as if I'm trying to make some ecological statement, man, my biggest statement is just let us manage them as a as a natural renewable resource. And you know, like David said, man, you can't overtrap these wolves on the coast because a lot.
Of that because you're touching the edge.
Oh man, you're not laying a finger on on the on the wolf population now, but it but it makes some sense. There's some pragmatism in it for these guys that are sick of black tail deer hunting and moose hunting because they're only hunting the coasts, Like when they go in there to deer hunt, they're just hunting the edges. And so if they can thin wolf populations out along the edges, it helps on a very micro scale. They truly believe that.
Yeah, the conversation around wolf hunting, wolf trapping, any kind of predator stuff, it gets it gets really confused because a lot of people start throwing away their own realities and then putting in these things they half know or suspect to be true, or things they've picked up from social media or media in general. For a while, everybody fell in love with this idea that one up not
being true. But this the trophic cascade, right, this this ted talk level idea that by you know, wolves being on the landscape, they caused the Riparian areas to bloom and paradise returned to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and the landscape of fear, which drove the elk, you know, which were inflated numbers of elk, and it pushed them into the mountains. And so the willows came back and Eden returned, and that idea was proven to not be true in
the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. But the refuting that idea didn't get nearly the press as advancing that idea did. Another thing that you know that everyone on the planet feels like or like, you know, everyone in Montana seems to be a born grizzly expert. You know, half of Alaska seems to be born a wolf expert. And they all know this idea of disrupting herd dynamic or disrupting pack dynamics. They don't know it from living, they just know it from having heard about it, and so it becomes this
idea they put forth. On the other side of it, people that like to hunt lions or people that trap wolves or hunt wolves will lay in a lot of things like, oh, if I don't do this, they'll be
coming to get your pets. Or if I don't do this, there will be no big game left, which begs the obvious question, if there's no big game, left, How would there be predators anyways, because they rely on big game being so I don't believe that they would be able to completely eliminate their food source because that would lead to their own destruction. Then you'll have people in the Rockies who are just so upset about wolves being on the landscape because of course that means there's no game.
But then they like to go hunt in Alaska, where wolves occupy about one hundred percent of their historic range. And so if you hate wolves so much and wolves mean there's no game, why would you go to Alaska? They must not have any game because they have wolves. So everyone winds up being on all sides of it. You hear so many people being just intellectually dishonest because they're like I someone's saying, I hate to see a predator get killed because I view them as being special.
But I don't want to say that, so I'm gonna try to throw you some bogus ecological stuff that I don't really understand. Conversely, someone would say I believe that if there's a renewable resource, a renewable sustainable resource on the landscape, and that we can extract some harvestable surplus off that renewable resource without damaging the resource. I believe
that we should have the right to do that. But instead I'm gonna frame it around ideas of the safety of my neighbor's pets, or I'm gonna frame it around ideas of saving big game from extirpation. It invites all this intellectual dishonesty. Yeah, I'm ardently, ardently, unapologetically pro trapping and pro hunting of sustainable resources because they're on the landscape. If we protect the habitat, we'll have surpluses of animals, and we can harvest animals responsibly and not have a
long term negative impact. Yeah, that's a long way of setting up The question is why do you feel people always need to dress this up, to dress this dialogue up and things where they wind up us, they wind up role playing, Yeah, with what their actual motivations are. Yeah, man, you say that so well.
You probably say that better than anybody I've ever heard say it, you know, with kind of an intellectual dishonesty. And I tried to. I hope this film portrayed that. I don't know if I was fully effective at that or not, because I didn't go interview a biologist. Like some people criticized the film and said, well, it was just this backyard biology by David Bennett's, you know, just saying well, there's more deer when we trap out wolves. And so you know, I did not go interview biologist.
We didn't get into the deep technical, technical research of wolves in that area. And I did that on purpose. I wanted to present it like what like what what you said? That we ought to just be able to go and extract a resource and not be hurt by it. And honestly, golly, if anybody knows wolves up there, it's David and he can tell you they're not hurting the wolf population. What was your original question, Steve, I gotta I got the I got sidetracked on my thought there.
Oh, wasn't so much a question as an observation about people's need to on both sides of this issue, people's need to be a little bit or be a little bit like assume rhetoric that they don't maybe feel. And I'm and I'm pointing to both sides. It's like I've I've laid I've laid back, like I've really laid out my personal perspective on it, which I said is unwavering, right.
But when I hear someone, if someone gets a mountain lion and an ay and then they get called out on it, and they want to put position that they were doing it out of the best interest of unknown strangers pets. I don't know. I don't think that they were out there because of their neighbor's pets. Yeah. Yeah. Likewise, the thing I've observed in the past, people like to hunt prairie dogs or ground squirrels, and they'll be like, well,
I do it for the rancher. And I'll be like, if you wanted to help that rancher, if you went to that rancher's house and you said, man, I'm here to help. What is the number one most effective thing I can do to help you as a rancher. I don't think it's gonna be prairie dogs. I think it's gonna be fixing fence.
Mm hmm.
Look at what he does when he wakes up in the morning.
He didn't go grab his two twenty three.
He's like, by god, I gotta get up early tomorrow for prairie dogs. No, it's like I gotta get up, I gotta feed Coyle's check Kyle's fixed fence, do chores, and that's like the thing most top of mind. So yeah, I just I get a little I just end up getting a little tired of I end up getting a little tired of the bs. But but on management though,
it's the eight seven pounds of me to day. Right, something's dying if they're living, sure, And it's been proven time again that that predator management, if done in a way that's precise spatially and precise temporarily, it's effective. As you're pointing out, you were involved in a kind of non event, right, No doubt during the following weeks, some fewer number of deer and moose died because they're going to make a kill it, you know, a killer two a week, whatever it is up there, No doubt some
fewer prey animals died. No doubt those wolves will be replaced by the wolves who fill in the vacancy and the habitat. And you participated in you participated in an ecological non event, right, yeah, you know, I think, go ahead, go ahead, No, no, that's all.
I said something that probably confused some people at the end, because I think, really, what on one side of the story, we're talking about making something sacred. And our society since the reintroduction into Yellowstone, and you know, we have sacralized wolves as this animal that is above other animals. And in some ways that's a positive thing. That's a celebration of this great beast, which humans love to do. That
every culture that's ever lived has sacralized some animal. And I said in my closing statements on this film, I said, I said, I think as a society we can sacralize the wolf, but we also need to responsibly be able to trap them and hunt them. I think we can have our cake and eat it too, And I think that's what hunters can do that. It's hard for someone to understand. It's like, well, shoot, if you think a wolf's sacred, you don't need to be abut trapping them.
And man, I think we can do it all. I mean, I like to see a wolf and have a sense of awe and have a sense of wow, this is a special moment, this is a special beast. Like I think that, Like I don't walk up to it and think this is a non just a another day of my life, just gonna dispatch this wolf.
I don't know.
I think we can kind of have our cake and eat it too. I really do.
Oh, well, that's at this point, that's proven. It's empirically true. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska have wolves on the ground, and they have hunting and trapping seasons for wolves, and they're going to continue to have wolves on the ground. I do some I do some kyote hunting. I do some kyote trapping. In fact, I'm sitting by a little stringer of kyote pelts hanging on the wall of our studio. I get excited and happy when I see a kyot track. I like running
into them. I set out trail cameras specific defeckly to catch images of coyotes. I also like to get some Those two things are not incompatible. Yeah, and having recovered populations of wolves on the ground and having some extraction of the resource, these are not incompatible ideas. We do it all of the time.
Yeah. Let me can I ask you a question, how do you do you think us talking about and showing this is beneficial for our cause?
Man, I would say I would say yes, and I'll position it. I'll explain the two perspectives on this stuff. One perspective is that hunters and trappers ought to try to hide in plain sight, the idea being that if you carry on your activities and you just hide and keep it secret, the broader world will not realize you're
there and they will never mess with you. Also, this kind of notion that if you don't, if you're off of So if hunters and trappers stay off social media, the broader world won't know you're there and they won't come mess with you. But I invite that perspective, but I would invite them to look at a timeline and look at the timeline of the loss of hunting and trapping rights and pace that over a timeline of the
introduction of social media. There's no correlation Colorado lost trap Like, look at places losing spring, bear hunts, places losing lion hunting, places losing trapping. That's pre social media. It's pre Internet for the most part. Colorado lost trapping back in the late eighties, early nineties. Yeah, pre Internet. There's no like. You can't look and say that the ability to discuss hunting and trapping has somehow is somehow correlated to a
loss of rights. But that's this idea that you should go hide and if you go hide, no one will ever notice you're there. But you know what, you'll get noticed. You'll get noticed because you have animal rights people that are going to find out about it. You know how I know that because they find out about it, and they found out about it way before the Internet, and they're gonna come after you.
Hey, before you say your second thing to me, we have to be the people that tell our story. Yes, that's my body. That's the bottom line. If somebody's gonna talk and talk about trapping wolves in Alaska, I want it to be one of us that's doing it. You know, not necessarily me, but I want it to be. I want the narrative to be not a spun narrative, but
the narrative the way we see it. When I first got into the national bear scene about ten years ago, I was confronted by some of the baarhound guys that were like, hey, we should You're making a mistake by talking about this, and basically I was like, I think you're wrong. I think we have to be the ones
that tell the story. And I think in a world of social media, it's all the more impetus for us to be the storytellers because if we just went silent, radio, silent, media silent, like some people are saying we should do these days.
Then not.
We don't have this governing body that can tell all hunters to never post something on the internet, you know, or or somebody's going to do it, and so the worst of us are going to be the storytellers of why something's going to happen. So in a world that now communicates through social media, I mean, I feel like it's all the more important for us to stand up and tell our story in a reasonable way.
Yeah, I think it's kind of an absurd request. I mean, I'm a writer and a creator, and I'm going to talk about the things I care about. The oldest representational art in the world is people drawing pictures of their hunts. That's not good. I've never heard that said before.
That's good.
The the idea that that somehow these act that somehow hunting and trapping should be removed from any sort of artistic expression or any sort of expository expression to to to to tell people how you view things, what you think about them, because it somehow sits outside of what's polite to discuss. It's absurd. Yeah, Like I'm going to talk about the things that I love. I'm gonna advance my perspective on things. I'm gonna defend the things that matter to me. How and like, how do I imagine
defending the things that matter to me? Do I do it by obfuscating them or do I do it by elucidating them by bringing them to lie. I'm like, there's nothing I'm gonna take that I'm gonna love and I'm gonna like, ob fuse, skate it out of my love for it, right, I'm going to illuminate it out of my love for it.
And you know, by us not talking about this stuff, it might work for a generation, but the very nature of it, I mean, today the world communicates with social media, bicyclist, guitarist, sports athletes, like this is the medium of the world to communicate with our generation. And so if we were exempt from that, it would work for one generation, but the second generation it would it would fail. Like it's not a long term strategy, Like we have to be relevant.
The way for hunters to be less relevant to planet Earth would be for us to be less relevant in the communication of the times.
Yeah, I mean, well, like I said, you've already seen it happen. I mean, there was a dramatic erosion of the rights of outdoorsmen in the eighties and nineties. This is not a it's not an Internet phenomena. Yeah. Yeah, well, Clay, I'm glad you joined us for a talk about wolf trapping in Alaska Wolf.
Management, Wolf management, Alaska wolf Management.
What's next? Beaver's no doubt, it's beaver trapping with Steve Beaver trap man. Okay, here's what we do, and we do Mark Beaver Martin longlining in the mountains.
Man, Well, we could do that on mules or we beaver trap and follow followed the fur all the way to making a sweet cowboy hat for both of us, a Paris sweet cowboy hats.
No, I'm not going I'm going to floppy brim Daniel Boone hat man. Yeah, well he.
Wore beaver felt. Sure, that's what I'm saying. I mean, I just mean like a beaver felt.
Yeah, all right, Well thanks for coming me go.
Ahead, Yeah, man, thanks to appreciate it.
I appreciate you coming on. Quai. Thanks a lot, man,