This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Listeningcast, you can't predict anything.
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. I'm sitting in Phil's bed.
How's it feel?
I'm right where I'm right where Missus Taylor sits.
Huh, that's interesting. That's the first place your mind went.
Well, Phil, I asked Phil, what side of the Betty sleeps on? Sue's on the same side of the bed I sleep on. That's right, So I'm over in Missus Taylor's position in Phil's bed.
You know what I read once is that, uh, you like there's like protector instinct which is often like associated with males that they sleep closest to the door to suss out any threats coming in.
Not me neither.
Well, it depends what door, which door threats coming in?
Well, I guess I'm closer to Yeah, you're right, because I'm closer to the to the outdoor that goes out to our outside. So yeah, I'm there to absorb any threat. Yeah, and I and I got the Missus closer to the escape and to the inside of the house. So you're right, that's really good.
You think that's like what happened when you get.
Never consciously thought about that. No, but if we were, if I was with my wife in this hotel, you'd sleep on that side. I'd have missus well, you know what what should be Missus Vanella. I'd have Missus Vanilla right over here where Miss Taylor's spot is, and that would be over there by the door, ready to duet. Some drunk like chili comes in or something. Yeah, his ass. Yeah, we're out on Live too right now. And Spencer took advantage of the of the morning and he went out
rock counting. Spencer, can you share with people about your special rock?
Yeah, it's a piece of wonderstone. It's only found in a few states and then a handful of other places in the world. It's just very colorful, lots of stripes on.
It, beautiful purples and pinks.
Yeah, this came from a place that has rocks of all colors, greens, yellows, oranges, reds.
What caused the coloration? Do we know?
Almost? Like any cool rock that you find, you can assign it to, like volcanic activity and water. The specifics of it, I can't tell you, but like all the cool rocks, volcanoes and water.
So much money worth of cool rocks you think you have? Now?
I don't have anything that's like crazy valuable. Maybe if you were like interested in landscaping something, you could come into my garage and you'd pay me by the pound.
But what's this worth?
Nothing? Nothing, It's it's not worth enough for me, maybe like a dollar, right, but to me that's worth ten dollars.
Sure, it's worth about six to me, okay.
And I don't have any rocks from Nevada, so then it's yeah, you know, it's like a twenty dollars rock.
Now, Yeah, I got you. I found myself a minute ago in the awkward position of needing to explain to Spencer that there's only three kinds of rocks which you think of rock Hound would have know this? Yeah? Did you think it was? I did?
Yeah?
You did? You? Did you feel awkward? While I was? It was awkward?
I was trying to give him the second one without saying the whole word I was going to.
Here is I was talking about how he's like such a expert rock hounder and like real geologists and everything, and then winds up you know, yeah.
You know my favorite, my favorite subject, Like if you're riding down the road with me in Arkansas, I talk about the orogeny of the Ozark and Washington Mountains. I've done it on this podcast. I think the first time was on Meeting your podcast.
I talked about it.
The word orogeny means mountain building.
Yeah, it seems like it means something totally different.
Yeah, it kind of throws people off, but it's like the genesis of mountains.
Like I wouldn't use that word and feels bad. It's risky. Clay can you can you can? You? You've been mentioned lately you're hot on getting a new pet.
Yeah, man, I've I've always loved timber, rattlesnakes. My dad planted that love in me from a kid. If we found a rattlesnake while out in the woods, it was a big day and we didn't kill them.
We just liked them.
And recently on the bear grease podcast. We did a we did a series, or we did apie podcast called the Cobra Scare. So we were talking a lot about cobras and venomous snakes. And on the last week, I haven't listened to that yet, but I've been I was. I'm aware of but I haven't listened. Yeah, why is it about cobra? You know what I mean, Cobra's from another content? Well, is it because people refer to timber ratlers as cobra?
It hasn't.
It has nothing to do with timber ratlers. I'll give you the elevator Cobra's Scare podcast is about. It was the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three in the town of Springfield, Missouri, oh basically, mysteriously around on August fifteenth, nineteen fifty three, an Indian monocled cobra was killed in downtown Springfield and basically, over the course of six weeks they killed twelve Indian cobras.
And it became this big I keep seeing you have all these pictures of people's snakes, and I wasn't putting it together.
Well, it just yeah, where did the come from? Well, I mean, should should I tell I think to the podcast.
It was a It was.
A mystery for thirty five years until nineteen eighty eight. Li lies, venom and deception.
That's good fodder for Baker.
Did anybody get bit? Nobody got bit? But there's still there. There's one surviving cobra that's pickled in a jar at Drury University, which happened to also be where Bob Barker, the Price is Riot, went to college. And I went to Drew University and saw the cobra and the jar. It's been there for seventy years. Made national news, it was in Life magazine. It was called the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three.
Bob Barker was a big animal rights actor.
Yeah I know, yeah, and and he was.
He was the one that was always promoting the sexual mutilation of pets.
And that's how I would have ended trivia if he hadn't already taken that one. Otherwise I'd say, Spae and Newdy your pets and said him say, the only game show where conservation always wins.
So I took be a mean to catch that. I got you.
So so we just got We just got talking about cobra's or talking about venom of snakes and how is it a two parter? It's one partner man, just knock it out of the park and one. But what's cool is I interviewed my neighbor who happens to have been bit by a Egyptian banded cobra, and I interviewed him about being what it's like to be bit by cobra, which is pretty interesting, And yeah, it's a very fun episode.
How do you get bit?
It was his it was his pet and he he was reaching in cleaning the cage. He's been bit over twenty Venomas snakes and he's eighty two years old, Like.
Oh man, at this point, he's got to be just kind of asking for it.
Well, this was all in his his career was basically a side show at carnivals and he was bit bo over twenty Venomas snakes. He only took an a venom two times, got it.
So he's he's he never tried to get bit, but just that much exposure. Yeah, he just got bit. Years ago, we had on the show the entomologist Justin Schmidt, and he had subjected himself to being bit by all the insects bugs and you know everything. And he had developed this Schmidt Pain Index MM to scale the severity of insects, stings, bites, and stains, you know, and he had put the bullet
ant at the highest. This individual you're talking about would be well suited to develop a sort of yeah scale he when you're around, to rank the experiences when you're around mister Fred, like he he kind of feels like he's an amateur. And he refers to these guys that have been bitten like hundreds of times, like they're his heroes. Like he's like, do you know Bill Hass the Florida sar Entropia. There's a word for a place where there's serpents.
And I was like, no, I never heard of serpentarium. Serpentarium.
He's like, man, he's been bit one hundred and fifty times by Cobra's even got bit by a king kobra. Like he just kind of nerves out about people that have gotten bit a bunch, but he he has these wild stories. Man, he would get bit. And he he's kind of like an anti authoritarian guy, like he really doesn't want to submit to any kind of any any kind of like man made authority that this kind of way it feels.
And so he would go.
To a hospital and sit in the waiting room after he got bit, but not check himself in just in case he did start to close.
Yeah, And so he only.
Got bit, only got bit twice, all right, I mean he only took anavenum twice. But the story is not about mister Fred. He was just my cobra expert. And then the whole story was about the cobra scare. I interviewed a guy that was a kid when it happened, and I interviewed a guy that was that has a brewery in Springfield right now where they have a beer called Cobra Scare. So that so Springfield's kind of latching onto this identity cobra scare. So that in turn got
me just talking about venomus snakes. And had a guy from brad Birchfield, a guy I know from Arkansas that's a big He calls himself a herpa culturalist. He's not a herpetologist. He breeds snakes, doesn't breed him. He just has them just he's a snake expert. But he's not an academic and he doesn't do it for a living. Yeah, and he brought a big timber rattler, a big diamondback, and a big bucket.
Yeah, I had him in five gallon buckets. Man, there's got no worse smell. It's a sealed up five gallon bucket. When you open it up.
And there he is, it's they have they have a but I mean he does keep them in those buckets. Those are just the his totes. He interesting story. You like this, the diamondback that he has, he he it's it's legal to take him out of the wild. He took this one out of the wild fifteen years ago and it was already an adult, big snake.
He fed it like lab rats, or tried to.
Feed it lab rats for like six months after he caught it, and it wouldn't eat like wild game. He finally, kind of in desperation, threw a dead gray squirrel in there spam.
It only eats gray squirrels.
So I want to get a timber ratley all that to say, I think it would be a very very nice addition to the office of a big, beautiful terrarium with a big, giant timber rattler.
Just bored out of his mind.
Well, now that that's an interesting thing to say. They're sitting wait predators. Man, A rattlesnake would love to do nothing more than just to sit there his whole life and have squirrels running raped by him all day long.
Clay said, the last time that snake ate was in October.
Yeah, huh.
They very good, good pets, like feed him just I mean he tries. He offers him food all the time, but most of the time they don't even eat it.
Have you informed your wife of this plan?
We can't tell her. Yeah, okay, we got to keep this on the d L.
She don't want to know about it. Yeah, I could see that. One of the best books about the Vietnam War, it's called Dispatches. Have you ever seen Stanley Kubrick's uh, Full Metal Jacket? Full Metal Jacket?
No.
Steve is always very disappointed in me anytime he says, never seen Full Metal Jacket.
I never have. I never have.
I haven't either.
I've seen like five movies in my life. I don't really understand. We had the same because that's what made that guy's whole yeah career. Yeah, anyways, if you were to watch Full Metal Jacket, most of the dialogue and Full Metal Jacket, like how do you shoot the women
and children? You just don't lead him as much. All the dialogue from Full Metal Jacket is from Dispatches, and Dispatches was written by a guy named Michael hare H E r R. He was like a college kid from Berkeley and during the Vietnam War, Rolling I think it was Rolling Stone or Esquire, I can't remember which. Spence Pob'll find out in Hurry sent him to cover the
Vietnam War. And most people that would go cover the Vietnam War would go and they'd want to talk to General Westmoreland and they'd talk about the strategy, and they'd talk about this many kia and you know this many pounds of munitions and right. But Michael Harritis went and hung out with the grunts and it kind of killed him. Like his book that he wrote about is called Dispatches. I mean it's like it's a masterpiece of war reporting. But he never really he didn't really do anything after that.
In the book Dispatches, he even talks about coming home and having a hard time getting He has a very hard time reintegrating into society. And he came from like very left wing circles and when he came home, people would want would expect him to talk about how how bad it was, but he would he was hung up on how beautiful it was, like it kind of ruined him anyways. In this book, he describes an odor as smelling like snakes left too long. I'm in a jar
and that's always stuck with me. Hm hmmm. So what that's when your buddy pulled that snake out of that bucket. It made me think of dispatches. Mhm.
Esquire. This conversation with Steve has now become so frequent about like have you seen this thing that he's now had to specifically categorize when it's a recommendation versus just like have you seen this thing?
Yeah?
Yeah, because he was being very clear, Yes you know this isn't a recommendation, but.
Uh, how will you find your timber ratler?
Well, so the legality of it is that there's I mean, first of all, I I love rattlesnakes.
I don't care.
I have not recreationally killed a snake in decades. If I find one, I don't kill it. I don't have you pegged as a snake.
Heade, Well, I just want to say that because it.
I talked to my buddy Brad Birchfield, who loves snakes more than anybody I've ever been around, and I said, what would the temperature be of the planet for me to take a timber rattler out of the wild and let it be my snake? I said, would you feel bad if I did that? And he was like no, he said, he said, you know people, you know, there's going to be some guys on sure that are going to give you grief about it. But he said, timber
rattlers in our region are doing well. They're everywhere there, So I would that's what would make it for me. Like I don't want to order one out of a magazine you want to, I want to. I want to
take it out of the wild. I do, and and I have a pretty good I have a philosophy that's based upon a book I read called evidence based Horsemanship about how we anthropomorphize all almost all animals, and like you would think that that a life of confinement for a snake would somehow be negative for the snake or affect tis psychology, and.
It's just that's just hogwash, Like that snake will have the.
Best life in the world. But minus you're talking right now. You're talking right now, minus breeding. What you're saying right now is as much nonsense as what I'm saying. This is unknowable.
Well, there are people trying to find a way to measure animal happiness.
Dude, you red space horsemanship? Is this.
You horse? And then act like dismayed that I haven't Yeah, yeah, well no, I would never come to you dismayed that you haven't read a specialty text when I'm talking about stuff that's part of the American cannon. Yeah, Like I'm not mad. I'm not mad that you didn't read Dispatches. I'm bewildered that you haven't seen full metal Jacket. Yeah, I'm bewildered. It's just like the American cannon. Like, you're not going to understand America, right, I can't wait to
understand America. So well, it's a hard job, you know, understanding America and watching the Italian Westerns.
The whole premise of Evidence based Horsemanship is written by a neurologist and a horse trainer. The neurologist was also a big horse guy, and basically they have done extensive testing and I won't be able to do the book Just Justice. It's been fifteen years since I read it. But basically, this idea that a horse likes you or doesn't like you is just not true. They don't have a space in their brain to like you or not like you.
You don't think you have mules that like you, None of them ever.
They speak one language when they walk up to you, that is who is in charge, dominance and submission. They speak one language. And they've done all this neurological testing and basically the biggest motor of the brain of an equine animal is geared hords towards controlling this.
Huge body that they have.
What makes a human a human, All the stuff that makes a human a human happens in this huge frontal lobe, like if you were just look at like animal brains, humans have this unusually large frontal lobe, and that's where all the stuff that makes us human happens, like empathy, Like you know, they can hook brain sensors up, and if I go buy chili a coffee, you know this altruistic moment, like that front part lights up and love, altruism, all you know, empathy, compassion, all these things horse just
doesn't have that they have a very small frontal lobe for how big they are. And so the idea that your horse likes you or doesn't like you is just is just blatantly not possible. And so that snake he does, he's just he'll be as happy as he can be in the global headquarters.
Anyway, I want to clarify a couple points. I'm not worried about I'm not like it's gonna be up at night worrying about how happy the snake is.
But I'm just saying, yeah, maybe I'm maybe I'm like up already a little defensive, defensive.
I'm worried about I'm not worried about population that you're you're keeping a that you pulling a timber ratler out of the reproductive pool of of northern Arkansas is going to have population level impact on the timber ratler. Get worried about that. I'm not worried about that. He's gonna be bored. I don't really know, but there.
Are ways talk about all the stuff he's gonna see out that glass case.
Sure, yeah he might be. He might just be enthralled.
I will have to get a venomous snake permit from the Arkansas game and fish.
To go collect it. Yeah, do you have a good place to go look for one? I mean yes, I do. I know where to find him.
Is there like a specific one that you're looking for, Like does it have to speak to you? Or like what what do you your first one you see? You're like, yep, that's mine.
No, I would like to find a bigger one. Last year, last October me and when I was riding my mule, I found the biggest wild snake that I've ever seen. But I wasn't in the market for a rattlesnake at the time. I wish I could catch that one. I actually talked to Brad say could I go back to that same ridge and find that snake again? About where he was? And he didn't think I could. Probably, Oh, like a specific snake.
Like your odds of success in capturing that one would be less. Yeah. Now, what if someone called you and said I got a big one. I got a big one in my yard.
I think I think what make would make it valuable to me is that I knew right where that snake lived and I picked him up brought him home.
I think that's what would make it valuable. Just like Brent Reeves trying to sell pool or something isn't of any interest to you.
No, I don't think so. I want to know where he lived. I mean, I want to get him from a specific place.
So you could know what he's meaning.
It's it's in the same vein of Brent Reeves trying to sell me a tree and walker coon dog all the time that I had nothing to do with, like a started dog.
It's like not interested, Brent.
We recently acquired a frog, and I have determined he's happy.
I think he's happy. I think he likes you.
Yeah, I think he enjoys his living arrangement.
I gotta offered correction. I'm moving on from this. We're moving news items.
Is this what a good correction or a bad direction?
Steve? Just where I'm wrong. It's just where I can routinely make mistakes. Gotcha, No, this is the one where the guy that wrote in is correct. I stand corrected. And it's just a common mistake I made because I know it's the pronunciation of Theodore Roosevelt. Well, now, how often do you go Roosevelt?
Never? You're the only one I know I know.
And it's like it's like I recognize it's I don't know why I say both. I just get lazy, and this guy's having a little connection about it.
I thought the Roosevelt was like you being pretentious though.
Yeah, it was as cows thing.
Well, it's like this. I I I just said if I could have done a test, that would have passed test. But I just know there's two ways, and one of them is wrong. I sometimes screw up. One is wrong. But there's a letter. This guy, this, this guy that wrote in sends a letter. It's from Theodore himself. I think, is it? Yeah, from Theodore himself right into a guy. As for my name, it is pronounced as if it was spelled, and he spells our r O S A
V E L T Roosevelt. That is in three syllables, the first syllable as if it was rose.
Are you gonna change.
I'm gonna try to never make that mistake again. Oh oh, Theodore Roosevelt guy wrote in hearkening back to episode five thirty eight, not a correction, but just a deeply annoyed in five thirty eight? What what like? What about episode? Do we on the count is all off? Yeah?
Because we have these bonus episodes that have been coming out. We're at this. This is gonna be around five point fifty oh around.
Not terribly long ago, we covered a Musky manifesto where a kid wrote in a Musky manifesto telling us a story about how he was robbed of his grandpa was robbed of the world rescored muskie and talking about this, I disparaged the musky community. Guy wrote in Steve. This is him talking Steve's knowledge of musky biology and most concerning his take on quote, the musky community is so underinformed that it's frightful. I thought it could be an April fool's joke.
You're scaring this person.
That's a big deal, he says. He goes on. By all accounts, I'm a fervent member of the muskie community for twenty five years in counting, and I'm nothing like what he described. Huh. There are definitely bad apples, like with any group. But for goodness sake, please don't condemn a whole group based on the vocal absurd minority. As for the claimed and now disqualified IGF a record seventy two pound musky, no I read that sentence. I put the emphasis on the wrong salable it should have been.
Did he just say salabil? It is my dad's favorite Joel? Gotcha? Gotcha? I put the emphasis on the wrong salable.
You don't get it?
I do? I do? Is that good? I had to just reat it. This gentleman has a sense. It's not quite a sentence typical message. He says it. I don't know how to end. I don't know how to you know, how you use vocal intonation. As for the claimed and now disqualified IGF a record seventy two pound muskie, it's period. I don't know how to read the sentence. I go into the sentence like I'm going to encounter a comma.
But it's more like he's saying like, as for the claimed in disqualified, I g f a record setting two pound muskie. Comma. Well, no, it's period, right. I don't think I have left. I get to the end. I get to the end of the sentence, and I'm and I feel like the carp has been pulled out from the rug has been pulled out from under me. Do you know what I'm saying? Because I end on a m hmm, kind of like a little cliffhanger, But there's
nothing there yeah, Jesus got a period. There's not another sentence after that.
Well, and there's no sense sense and he's a double space, he double.
Spaces at why are you giving this guy at the time, Well, because he's got a valid point, but to set im going to set the record that he double spaces, which leads to an extra like as a reader, I'm not only coming up against the period, right mm hmm, which is a hard stop. This a little too accentuated by a double space. Which no, no, no.
That this guy's a slacker who was just used to filling out his college papers by double spacing after periods.
I thought that was like for folks who used typewriters, because double space made a period.
Yeah, and we don't use typewriters anymore.
Space. As for the claim to now disqualified IGFA record seventy two pound muskies. So here's what happened. A kid wrote us in wrote into us his grandfather caught a giant musky. Now he had all this documentation that he presented to us, and this little manifesto is a thick packet of printed out materials. But in the end they released the muskie, and according to IGFA rules, a muskie must be weighed on dry land, right, they could be wet. You gotta weigh on land. You can't weigh in the boat,
does it. Let's say you're on a large ship. Mm hmm, what are they I mean, I'm though, like expert in weights and measures, but what on a boat makes a Yeah? Makes a weight not work like you're on a buoyant. Let's say you're on a buoyant. This is a question for people who are good at physics.
Would it not be the bounce? Like imagine if the boat was bouncing and then the and the fish was pulling hard and you just pulled the greatest way, but it was you know, at the trough of a wave where the fish kind of the momentum of.
The fish pulled down.
That's probably what they're calculating for.
A I know this something that floats. If it floats, that means it weighs less than the amount of water it displaces. That's the definition of floating. Did you learn
that in full metal jacket? No, I'm just throwing that in there to make it seem like what I'm gonna say next is like well informed, that has nothing to do what I'm gonna say next, But it's the interesting idea like this is a question for any physicists out there and thinking of the principles of a scale, Like the fish is already in the boat before you put it on the scale, so presumably like you've dropped. Just when you take a fish on board, you're now displacing
more water, right, you have to be. You take a fish on board, you've now you're displacing more water. You've dropped, However, imperceptibly the vessel has yeah, okay, gone lower, but it's already on board, So when you put it on a scale, the damage is done, so to speak with the buoyancy. But I'm wondering if there's any world in which you can't get an accurate weight on something while floating because the weight is somehow being the This is high level physics.
I'm not sure that it is. I want I say it's not. You don't think it's high level. It's low level, easy to understand.
You can't even if you can't use your words to describe it. We all know what you're getting at.
Well. No, no, I think there's like black holes, black holes, and then above that incomplexity would be this issue I'm trying to talk about interesting. You know, it's a little bit more than yeah, yeah, a little bit more complicated than a black hole. So it all just has to do that.
The boat would never be completely still, and there would be there the boat would be riding the waves up and down.
That could throw off a scale.
Okay, if you took it to an extreme scale, like imagine that bowl was just constantly going back and forth, you'd never get an accurate.
Like hold something heavy in your hands and then jump up in the air. It immediately you feel lightness and when you come back down, you know, yeah, it's easy to grasp.
Okay, so fills on the side of the IGFA clear. But that's not this guy's problem. Okay, this guy says, no, this is this is harsh, but okay. He says, the fish actually had zero documentation of its actual weight or length. They put it on a scale and they later had the scale calibrated, but it was on a boat. Here's where his real bone to pick happens. No photos are here's another thing, no photos or independent witnesses verifying its size.
Haters gonna hate man. Probably that's problematic. Here's the one thing he says, it really does really impact me. Okay, theoretically, I accept the water thing weighing on the water. I accept there's no impartial observers. It's only their party. Okay. He kind of justified the photography and all that, And they did take a number of pictures of the fish to scale with certain objects that could be checked later, beer cans and other things.
The boat, Right, that was just a guess. I don't.
The guy says this though. Here's where his thing hangs up. The biggest muskie ever recorded to sixty one pounds, So he's like seventy two huh, right, that is a big it is They realized that a seventy two pound muskie would be the equivalent of a five hundred and twenty one inch typical bull elk, eighteen percent bigger than anything that has ever been legitimately measured and documented. Fish records like go like hundreds of years, and they advanced by
with the they advanced by ounces. Mm hmm. Right. I only recently learned that the biggest bass ever caught was recently tied by a bass in Japan. And the IGFA accepts the tie, but right down to the right down to the ounce right, that's how like slowly this thing advances. And also this guy, this, this guy and his grandpa blow it out of the water by eleven pounds. That sticks with me. That's interesting. Yeah, that sticks with me.
You know, it seems more plausible though, that a fish would be able to break that kind of record, though, Like, yeah, if all of a sudden, there's never been a five hundred inch free range bull elk ever killed, and then all of a sudden there is one, and it would be it's kind of like the top end of the species in the wild, you see it. I know it's the exact same thing, but it feels like there could be a fish that just was way bigger than anything we never caught it.
Yeah, a little more believable. And Frank Mundas's disqualified world largest, world's largest fish ever caught on rod and reel, would have stopped the past record.
What it was fish, Well, it was a couple just to.
Give you a sense of how big this could move. He won time harpooned a great white there was four thousand some pounds, Okay, then later went out and caught a giant not as big as the one he harpooned but he could just likely caught that. Everybody's like, wow, you harpooned it, so don't count. He's like, okay, I'll catch on rod and reel went out and caught up and then caught of thousands of pounds weight great white.
But they handed the rod off. Oh he hooked it, gave the rod to his body so he could go take the wheel, or vice versa. I can't remember which igfa threw it out. It would be the biggest fish ever caught on roden reel, by a way bigger bracket than what this individual right here is pointing out. Now,
the real problem here is that Krin's not here. Because this person goes on to say, Steve really needs to take just a few to brush up on his musky biology, and the history of faked musky records is actually fascinating. He should read a compendium Musky angling history by Larry ram Sell. You really should do a musky podcast with a musky expert. Actually, Larry Ramsell might make a good
podcast guest. He's probably forgotten more about muskies than most musky experts ever knew, but he's still a wealth of knowledge. Meaning even though he's think about the claim, take the second greatest musky expert ever and measure his knowledge and in bits of information. Larry has forgotten more bits about muskies than that individual ever knew. Yet, in spite of having forgotten that vast body of material, he still knows more than number two.
Are you buying that? I mean, are you making fun of that claim?
No, it's just a It seems an extremely knowledgeable individual with that information.
Now you, I mean, why don't you Why don't you have this kid and his grandpa on and this musky biologist on the same head to head like family feud episode of Meat Eater.
That's what I would like to do. That's why you're here, Claire. Yeah, can you make a note of that film?
Yeah, Family Mouskie Podcast.
Well I would. This is this is what we'll do. This is ant like a game show. This is no, it's just a conversation. This is an invitation too, And this is not dependent on both like either one of these things like that. Well, No, this is an imitation for Larry Ramsell to come on and talk about We'll talk about muskies, muskie records, the history of fraudulent muskies, the musky community. Yeah, muskies and I'll point out that my maternal grandfather was an avid Musky angler, So you
got some skin in the game. Skin in the game.
You know when I run across stuff like this that there's really no way to know for sure. I want to look the guy in the eyes and have him tell me the story. Like that's my go to. It's like, come here, tell me that story. Me just just give them and then then I can. It's like just reading something deep.
Did you ditch on? Yeah, of course I did. You never made that face at me?
Well, I was making that face in the back.
It's like for real. So yeah, if we can get Larry Ramsell to come on the show, and it'd be great to have Larry come on along with the kid who wrote the Musky.
Manifesto, Yeah, that would be great. He'd do it, that kid, he's passionate.
You should uh before that, though, go read Pat Dirkins articles called Mobsters, Arson and Photogrammetry, the World Record Musky conspiracy theories, and he talks about Larry in that article on the Meat Eater dot com.
I'm dying to him on and now the guy I hadn't gotten this far in his letter, he ends letter real nice. I feel bad about all.
I was gonna say something mean, what is saying?
He said? I look forward to hopefully odd syntax. I look forward to hopefully a correction or recantation, or maybe even an actual representative of the muskie community as a podcast guest. I think that I duke. This individual's name is Duke. Duke, I hear you. I will pursue having Larry Ramsell come on the show. Thank you, Duke to talk about it all. Joke inside. I appreciate your note.
In Dirkin's article, he says Larry Ramsell of Hayward is the premiere historian of musky lore.
Dude, So there's how old is he? I don't know. You try to find out that's too old to come on? Is he?
He wrote a highly detailed book in nineteen eighty four, so that ten.
He probably he was fifty.
I bet he was in his mid late thirties when he wrote that. That's when most ambitious writers take off.
Are seth or musky chet, you know, interested in this kind of stuff?
Or do they just like yeah, they they can't come on the show as like a musky community expert.
Well, I wouldn't say expert, but representatives yeah.
Oh, they could come and listen. Even Seth even what are you finding?
He appears to be old but ill old. Well, that looks like an old photo of him, and he looks like an old man in that old photo.
Mmmm, damn it.
I'd taken in two thousand and four. The guy's still alive, got a little spark left in him.
Larry, we will fly you out. We will listen, Larry, this is this is like, this is. You're gonna get great service. We will fly you out, all expense paid trip to Bozeman, will put you up, we'll feed you. You'll come on the show and we'll talk musky lower. Speaking of muskies, let's move on to sturgeon. There's like a number of big news items going on right now with fish. Yeah, with fish. So we covered pretty heavily that.
There was a lot of angst when the there was a push to list the Who could set this up for me? It's a complicated setup. Not me. The US Fish and Wildlife Service was doing a twelve month finding okay on whether or not the Lake sturgeon warranted listing under the Endangered Species Act okay, which was problematic to
recovery efforts in Wisconsin. Now, if you are a sturgeon, an aspiring sturgeon fisherman, all your attention lies in Wisconsin where there's another there's a there's a number of uh waterways in Wisconsin where you can spear sturgeon through the ice.
There's some that's governed on a quota where's there's like a general season opener and there's an opening day and there's a sturgeon quota, and the quota gets hit and it closes, and then there are some draw units in these in these other lakes there are draw units where can draw tag, and me and Yanni always put in every year we're building our bonus points for our sturgeon tags and the good lakes. So I'm acknowledging that I have a bias here. I have a conflict of interest
as a reporter. Now, Wisconsin, while doing sturgeon very limited sturgeon harvest, has been very, very successful at sturgeon recovery. They're making a lot of good progress on putting sturgeon back in waters where they have been, where they were extirpated, and they're building this kind of like beautiful culture of locals and people who are very invested in the resource right very interested in sturgeon recovery, very bought into sturgeon.
There's a culture around sturgeon spearing. It's a very celebrated fishery. It's a celebrated fish, okay. And they were worried about the ESA listing because if it got the ESA list, this system by which Wisconsin has been managing sturgeon very successfully with a great proven track record, would be upended, and the Feds would need to come in and say, hey, thanks for all the great work, but your whole cute
little sturgeon season thing is done, okay. And in a case like that, what I fear happens when you in a case like that, what I fear happens is you take public goodwill and public sentiment and people rallying around a cause, and you turn it into something that is besides the fishery. It becomes like anger and frustration with federal overreach. And it doesn't always need to be federal
because we're in we're We just left California yesterday. I spent a bunch of time with divers in California and they had a problem where the whole state had a closure on abalony. They went from having you know, they went from issuing whatever the hell was thirty thousand the abalony tags a year to zero. And people brought up, well, why don't we try two thousand abalony tags a year. Why don't we keep the harp, keep the fishery alive,
keep the culture alive. Keep all these people who are like big a baloney advocates, right, keep them engaged just as a social play. Keep the culture of abalony diving alive because these are like big proponents for the resource. Gives the people incentive. There's people that celebrate, there's like a baloney festivals and all this stuff, right, like like pursue recovery, but maintain the culture. And they chose in this case to just like done.
Abalony is a big muscle or clam, big mullusk.
Yeah, it's a big edible mullusk. So there was a lot of handwringing. There's a lot of anxiety in Wisconsin that they what they view to be the winning approach on sturgeon recovery would have been threatened. But and we reported on that a whole bunch, talked about that a whole bunch, and this just out. We at the US Fish and Wildlife Service are announcing our twelve month finding that Lake Sturgeon does not warrant listing under the Endangered
Species Act. Our agency brought together a team of biologists to compile and examine the best available data and research into a species status assessment. We solicited data from Native nations and state agencies from across the species range and invited them to provide information necessary for the development of the SSA and to review the draft SSA report. Using the best available science to aform to inform our delisting determination, we found that the species is not at risk of
extinction now or in the foreseeable future. We did not find any populations of Lake Surgeon that met the criteria for a distinct population segment. Our decision is a testament to the great collaborative conservation work being done with our partners from states, tribal nations, non governmental organizations, universities, and other federal agencies across the species range. Hi's great news.
In comments Larry is eighty two years old.
Exactly what I thought was.
Hayward, Wisconsin.
We want to shoot him A note. No started out say something like, hey, I heard your big hot shot muskie community.
I think he does have a website, though.
You think he's still checking his emails.
You know, I think I think one of the biggest plays in the success of the North American made of wildlife conservation has been incentivizing people through limited access to the resource, even if it's even if it's a little bit, that's powerful.
I think I think you need to maintain it at all costs. Yeah, just well, let's take let's take a look at a couple examples.
I feel like we're in a class. When he said that, it felt like he was a teacher. Well, that'll just start writing notes.
Have only been recovered across I think twenty four maybe not even fourteen percent of their historic range. Okay, so we look and be like, Okay, if we're going to take a national perspective, elk should be an esa species. They're absent from their historic range Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. No, no, no, no, I'm sure you have little pockets in some of those states, very small pockets
in some of those states. But by any examination, LKSHB and eesa species, they're regionally extirpated across the majority of their range. But lo and behold, we hunt them where they're abundant, right, bighorn sheep. Now, there are states that issue small handfuls of big horn sheep tags. They're extinct
across tons of their native range. But where you have a harvestable of small harvestable surplus, we still carry on the tradition of sheep hunting, which gives us like the Wild Sheep Society, like, which gives us sheep conservation groups because hunters that will never ever have a chance to hunt a sheep are sheep conservationists because they view it as this like part of the menagerie of big game animals in America that they might aspire to one day
hunt for. If you strip that, you lose that. Yeah, and it becomes emblematic of something different. Yeah, pretty brilliant. Really. Oh it's a great system. Yeah. But I wrote in with a Johnny Cash album cover that I was unaware of. I saw that you need to put that on your social media. Well here's the deal, I keep say. I'm not going to bring it up anymore, but last I saw a couple fresh set eyes will find more Beans T shirts.
Oh did you in Sacramento.
At Sacramento show. I saw three people wearing fresh set eyes will Find More Beans t shirts. Now, there's a Johnny Cash album called.
Look at Them Beans.
I wonder at what point in his career that he had that now, but let's take a look. Could have been Probably was in the struggling years. Yeah, I want to explain what I'm seeing on the cover. Now, I'm gonna put this. I'll put this on social media. Basically, Johnny Cash is corroborating or stealing my saying. On this album cover, Johnny Cash is wearing a blue denim shirt. He has reclined on his back, using as a pillow a mountain of beans. He's reclining on a pile of
pole beans. A young boy, maybe eight, wearing a plaid shirt, is laying on Johnny Cash's chest, his elbows resting on Johnny Cash's sternum upper abdomen, and the child is holding two more fistfuls of beans. Right, what I'm getting from the image is that Johnny Cash has found all these beans that he's laying on. But here's this young child representing a fresh set of eyes.
I see it, by the way, I just looked it up.
Here's the sun representing a fresh set of eyes, and what does the sun? And what does he have? Beans? More beans? Beans in his hand?
Nineteen seventy five, The.
Fresh set of eyes found more beans. I was one years old. What's the happening?
You listened to song?
No phill you mind playing a clip?
You for copyright reasons?
I do, No, you can play a clip. We're having a discussion about it.
Oh that's true. Yeah, but you know YouTube doesn't care that we're having a discussion about can't you tell him? Now?
Hey, look at that beans, and look at that corn, and I bet them watermelons must be three feet long. Man, look at them tomatoes, and look at them peas well. I know if Papa was here right now, he'd sure be pleased.
I apologize to the YouTube audience. You're not gonna hear this.
It's a nice full sound.
This time last year, the show was a lot of sad faces.
Around this old house.
Our papa died without fulfilling his life's dream of producing one of the best crops in Grimes counting m No. Papa died with a dream still in his head. I desire in his heart, a promise on his lips. Call us is on both hands.
And two dollars in his pocket.
Papa didn't live long enough to see his dream come true, so he died from too much work, a broken spirit, I guess. But I promised to our mama that if it was the last thing he'd ever do, he had lived long enough to see just one good crop.
Controversial. If I suggest that Johnny Cash actually as bad as Rapp, we don't know.
I don't. I don't think it is at all.
Man.
Hey, when I hear these little preambles to these songs, it's it's I feel like I need that for my ballads, like a little like a little forty fifty second like Johnny Cash, the father.
Of rap, that would father? I like that? Did you get first wrapper, Clay?
Did you get some inspiration for a new ballad listening to that?
Yeah?
I did, Like just a just a preamble, like a smokeing preamble.
I used to do that a lot.
Yeah you got code? Did that tone for it? You should start doing that?
Yeah? Two our things we got we got a hand with those handful of the things we got hit. But here's two our things. Oh so if you go back, I don't know what what what episode was what episode was our hog hunting podcast episode?
Phil oh Man, I don't know the number, but it's yeah, you don't have it allread in Texas. No, I don't.
I'm sorry.
It's been a thousand podcastings I've been working here, yep. But it's it's easy to find the Texas Hog Hunt.
Not too long ago there was a podcast epical episode with Cam Haynes called the Texas Hog Hunt. Well, we also down there shot some video and you can go find that that video of hunting some hogs with Cam Haynes on YouTube. So not only did the podcast episode, but there's some hunting some hunting action.
Well, there were a couple. There's the one we wear Korean shoots the hog and there's a separate one with Cam Haynes.
The Hammering Hogs with Cam Haynes was episode five twenty two.
Got it. Also a duck hunting video with Clay Matthews is out where we did a podcast with Clay Matthews, a famous football player, and film some stuff there. That video is out. Both those are out on YouTube.
That was episode five twenty Also.
Folks need to go to we had so some episodes back. We had a guest on from Cypress Cove Marina down Louisiana and we talked about I talked with him Renee Cross is his name, about My experience is going down to Cypress Coved Marina spearfishing, becoming friends with Renee at Cypress Cove Marina, and we kicked off where we're doing like a takeover at Cypress Coved Marina and doing a
big fishing trip party. So that is meat eat If you want to join and go down for inshore, offshore fishing, fish cleaning, local food, the great trip for a few days. Go check out Meat Eater Experiences. You can go to our website and go to Media Experiences and find details on those trips coming up for fishing in October and then for waterfoul in December January. Just go check that out.
Are you going to one of those clay Yeah? Which one?
Venice?
Brent's gonna be in Venice and also Kansas Waterfowl.
I'm gonna be down there in Venice.
With Clean Steve.
Uh well, Chili's going to be there.
I'll be there on the second half. Y y, he's gonna be there, yeah.
Cal Oh and doctor Randall. Yeah, he won the one won a trip doctor Randall won a trip won the company through the company basketball thing I made.
I made Randall feel real bad about winning actually, because well I just told him. I'm like, Randall, like you seem to win everything. You win trivia, you win all these trips, you get to go on bear hunts, like you know, there's some someone else at the office that maybe really wanted to go.
That is true. Yeah, well it's Randall.
And he like looked at me with all this worry because Brie was Bree, our coworker, really wanted to go. I was like, you do you just stole that trip from her? And uh, he kind of felt bad.
And I bet he looked like he was worried.
I got a problem with Randall. Well, he likes to think he's running with the big dogs on wildlife. I've got two things he's got. He's got a line on a badger that I've been looking to get. Did he send you the video? Yeah, still hasn't gotten me my permission. And my kids are in the pigeon selling business, and Randall's got a line on some pigeons and he hasn't sealed the deal on that either. Wow, It's like two things. You could you come to and hey, I could sure
use some help on that badger. I could show you some help on those pigeons. Months go by, not a bit of progress.
Well, I think with the badger we made a deal.
Too busy winning winning stuff, not busy enough working.
Well, we made the deal that I got to go try to catch that badger with my bare hands, which you don't think I can do.
I can catch it with your brands. I can not gonna let you try. And if you did get a try and it's not gonna work, it's gonna work. Did you see mercer ings arms at other night from trying to catch a bob cat? Well, that's a bobcat.
A lot a lot of those animals, like like raccoons and beavers, when you grab them, they just they don't have the flexibility to get you if you get them right behind on the nape of the neck. Now I wouldn't I don't. I don't think i'd want to be catching it back.
But no, you know those animals like that with short legs and a lot of muscle you don't want to tussle with.
Well, what what do you think about hand catching a raccoon.
I have a I have a method. Well, because we have pet raccoons. You just pick him up by the scruff. Well you can.
You can also if you see a raccoon that's just out in the big field, like at night. Yeah, it's very easy to catch him. Run up to them, tap them in the rear end. They'll spin around and then you kind of just kind of juic with them a little bit, and then when they turned to run, you grab them by the tail and they cannot get you.
Yeah. My mom used to throw them out of the house by the tail because they'd get into the house and throw them back out of the house by the tail.
I'm gonna in defensive Randall. I don't think he admitted this to you. Something tells me he was probably embarrassed to but that quote that that I lost quote unquote about the pharaohs and the babies that you had framed in the off Randall spent hours days looking for that quote. I don't know if he told you how.
He told me. When his wife was watching something that wasn't that couldn't hold his interest, he would try to find that.
He read complete books on the off chance that a quote that The quote might be in the book. You'll have to ask him exactly which ones, but it was. It was an embarrassing amount of time.
And you feel that.
I feel like you should. You should be grateful Randall cares about you that much.
No, I am, but I just feel like he's kind of burning me on this badger pigeon situation.
Well, you know, nobody's perfect.
I'm glad that you won all that stuff, and I'm glad he wins all the trivia. Here. Here's one last thing I want to discuss. There's a couple things I wanted to discuss. There's two Chettikot questions, even though Chester's not here. And then there's this some hot news coming out of Arizona. Well, how do you guys feel about the fact that the Arizona Fish and Game the Arizona Game, Game and Fish Commission just voted four to one to
eliminate governor's tags, the governor's auction tags. Mhmm, Well, I think.
If they can prove that like a raffle will come close to raising the same amount of money, then that's great. But if not, they're just like saying goodbye to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Well over the course of years.
Yeah, so did they do it just because like people were disputed as like this rich guy's game where it's just totally kind of like public and.
Some way it had gotten too big. I think it was two years ago they broke the record in back to back days, once for the animalop Island tag and then again for Arizona the next day. And maybe like if that didn't happen, maybe if the dollar amounts are smaller, like this wouldn't be the case.
I'm gonna do a quick deep dive for folks. This debate in some way centers around interpretations of what we call the North American model a big game. Uh, what's it called? North American model America wild big game wildless sorry, wildlife conservation where one of the tenants I think there's seven tenants in the model that we use. This is not a formal, codified model. It's it's like it's like a sort of a living document. One of the tenants
is that you have democratic allocation of wildlife. Okay, some argue that doing a governor's tag or tag auction is not democratic allocation of wildlife and a little out of order in this expimation. I'll point out what that is. So here you're taking a you can the state of Arizona might go out and give out dozens of big horn cheap tags, okay to people who drew, to people who drew, but they take one of those tags. They'll take one of those tags, and they'll usually create special
parameters around it. They'll take a big horn tag and they'll say, Okay, this big horn tag is not just good for the season. This big horn tag is good for three hundred and sixty five days. Here's a big horn tag that's good for the entire calendar year, and it's good for any unit that's open to sheep hunting. So you're making like a mega tag, right, and then
you auction it to the highest bidder. Now, since this highest bidder is gonna get first cracks at any sheet, in the longest crack at any sheet, they can be very valuable. So if you have a scout group, like an outfitter who's got an eye on a big big horn, big desert big horn, whatever, you're gonna get it. You already got enough money to buy the damn thing. You're definitely have enough money to get it. And you're they're gonna put you on it, okay, And these tags sell
for lots of money. So it used to be that you'd hear of governor's tags being two hundred grand, two hundred and fifty grand, and then it's crept up into the like.
Seven hundred thousand I think was the Arizona record that was set.
Yeah, and so here you have a person paying upwards of three quarters of a million dollars.
Is that what we saw auctioned off at the Western Hunt Western Hunt Expo?
I don't know what, I don't remember what I.
Mean, it went for like five hundred thousand dollars.
Well, they had a night where they set a record and the record only lasted like a hour, and they broke the record again that night. So here you have where you're taking granted, you're taking a sheep tag out of the pool and giving it to the highest bidder, so it's not democratically allocated, it's it's to the richest man in the room. However, all of that fund goes
to habitat work. Okay, So these governor tags that they just got rid of, I think since two thousand, since the mid two thousands, they've raised eleven million dollars for habitat. All that money goes into the Department's Habitat part Partnership Committee. Okay, so it's it's a huge pile of conservation money. This it's one of those issues that I look at and it's like I can't even make up my mind, Like both sides are so clear to me, Like both sides of the argument are so clear to me that it
winds up being one of the rare things. It's just like hard for me, Like if I had to make the decision unilaterally, I would lose tremendous amounts of sleep and would never be able to decide because I get it the appearance of taking a resource it's supposed to be democratically allocated and auctioning it off to the highest bidder. Like I get how that frustrates people, but I also get how it brings in huge amounts of money for wildlife habitat. Yeah, in exchange for one animal, in exchange
for one animal. Yeah, Now here's a little like Colorado is opening up. Colorado's taking a new unit that hasn't been open for hunting. Okay, this is this is kind of like something that's going on right now, Colorado's got a new unit. It's gonna open up for big horns. There's a pretty well known big horn in that unit. The potentially is gonna be the new world record big.
Horn right now.
Yep, people all know about it. They just are creating a new unit. His unit is getting opened. Everybody knows about him. All of a sudden. That Governor's tag this year is very valuable. Why because you're gonna get there's one tag. Maybe it's gonna be a one tag unit, but the Governor's tag is good for any unit that
has hunting. You're you're you're buying the animal. And a lot of the Governor's tags go like that, Like someone will go to a bitterer and be like, here's what we have, here's our like here's a dossier on the available animals, Like we got a stud meal 're on Anilo Island. Do you want in? Because the minute you buy this tag, we're gonna get it. We're gonna put you there and you're gonna make the shot. Mm hmm.
So people don't like it, but it's just a ton of money for habitat and like it doesn't it make sense that all of those millions of dollars have way more than like, way more than made up and producing wildlife to make up for the one animal that that that one animal year that all that money costs, like eleven million bucks probably buys you a lot about horns from habitat work. Yeah, you know, even if you regard I'm not using this is not my term, but even if you looked at it totally like a deal with
the devil, it's not a bad deal. Yeah. I don't view it as a deal with the devil at all. I'm saying, like, even if you have that perspective, it's not a bad deal. Yeah, but it stings people. There's people that like, man, I've been applying to play the game and apply for a big horn tag for thirty years, never drew one, never will and then you you're just selling them off to some guy that can buy a new one every year. Why not?
But I feel like, I like, i'd like, I don't want to advance any further beyond what it was. But you already see it in some other states with like it's not the same, but it feels like it in some ways, Like in Wyoming, you can apply special or regular for a tag right, yea, and regular irregular deer tag might cost you three hundred and fifty dollars. But if you apply special, you're applying for like a thousand dollars, so you can get a more limited pool.
You pay more money to get in a more limited pool.
Yeah, yep, So that's like happening on a smaller scale. But in this case, I'm I'm okay with the governor's tags. There's a lot of money.
There are many, many cases, I mean to be easy to explain them all. There are many cases where this gets subverted a little bit like and it's always where the democratic allocation thing gets skewed, and it often is in service of the goal of while they have habitat. For instance, some states do these things called transferable landowner tags, where if a landowner has certain acreage of ground that
provides habitat for a species, the landowner gets tags. Now, it was historically like, hey, you own all this land, the animals live on your place, here's a tag. You should be able to hunt regardless of whether you draw a tag or not. But then they make them transferable, and they make them sell and they make them unit wide. So let's say I could have one thousand acres in
New Mexico that doesn't even have a prong horn on it. Okay, but I get my transferable land unit wide landowner pronghorn tag, which I can sell on the open market because it's good for the whole unit, not just my property. So I'm being rewarded for my property with the tag that I then sell to Chili for six thousand bucks. U. Chili doesn't even hunt my place. Chili goes and hunts BLM or whatever, never steps foot on my place. Some people go like, what is this that seems different? What
is this? How is this the North American model?
Yeah, a lot of people were talking about that with like the New Mexico calan Jason Felks, and they were like, how did you guys pull text? How did you guys pull text? Like, no, that there's other avenues that you take. Yeah, and they're like how to like without getting into the numbers of it, like how do you guys know about that? It's like it's pretty common, but a lot of people just don't know, So no.
They don't. And it winds up that it winds up that you're acknowledging to landowners that like owning land, providing wildlife habitat. In some states it's actually measured by certain things you do to create to increase and create habitat. But it's like owning land is expensive, private land is vital to wildlife conservation. We're incentivizing landowners to be good stewards of the land by rewarding them for providing this habitat to a state resource. It all had like, you know,
there's no case. You can't go to any case of any kind of tag allocation and point to it as being like completely self serving, counterproductive. Right, It's all things meant to lubricate, facilitate wildlife management in the country and find funding for wildlife resources and a problem with what's happening in Arizona. And again it blows my mind that they voted four to one to get rid of auction tags because the hope is that they're going to use
it in raffles. So here's another tag thing. I always joined state raffles a bunch of them. You can put in for a tag, as everybody does, or you can buy raffle tickets. I just looked at one today. There's a raffle in Alaska right now. It's one hundred bucks per ticket and it's a full, all expense paid. It's a caribou tag that comes with guide, and so you get like caribou tags, guides and all that trip for two I didn't buy a ticket, but it's a hundred
bucks for a ticket. Okay, it's gonna raise a ton of money for Alaska. But it's not an auction. It's a raffle. Meaning they're looking and saying I think people can that really want to get involved. I don't think a hundred bucks is prohibitive. There's other things where for five bucks a ticket you can try to get raffle tags, so in addition to the normal tag draw.
So they think they can compensate for the loss of funds with a raffle that would raise as much money as that raise half a million dollars potentially for that one like bighorn tag or elk tag in Arizona.
Well, let me this isn't apples and apples, but I'll give you an example of the power of raffles. So every year Jannis and I do that Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership right Turkey Hunt giveaway. Yep, So we volunteer our time, a landowner volunteers their place, and we do a hunt with winners. So we used to do that hunt as an auction, okay, and it would be that the highest bidder would get a hunt for him and his buddy. Yeah.
People were like disappointed in this because how can they compete?
Yeah, they don't have ten twenty thousand, five thousand more.
Okay, the people would pay, so like we kind of felt that right. It was like, yeah, maybe there's another way and it's more complicated, but we instituted a raffle hunt. And the thing about doing a raffle hunt by law, for that kind of raffle hunt, you don't you have to have a way for people to enter for free sweepstake's law, Like you can't do like those nonprofit giveaways about having a free option. Okay, Even despite that, when we went to when we went to a raffle, ten
bucks gets you a ticket, we tripled the money. Really for TRCP, we tripled the money when we went from auction to raffle.
How did you figure out the free way?
He's got to go on some website and write some letter and send it in. We've never had a free entry win. It's a random draw, and as far as I know, we've never had a free entry win. I don't think anybody does it.
Yeah, it's like ten bucks.
I don't think anyone's really out there working that hard to try to avoid it, you know what.
Like talking about the big auction tags, I would love to hear someone get like the most extreme but also
intelligent case for why those auction tags are detrimental. I'd really like to hear that argument, because it's possible that stuff like this is shortsighted and it's like, yeah, we can get seven hundred thousand dollars for this tag today, But this is building this mechanism into the model that fifty years from now is going to turn into something crazy where all the big horn tags and wherever our our auction tags all of a sudden. That's that's because you know, I see both sides of it too, and
at first I don't have any problem with it. I'm like one tag, one tag, let that one tag go to do this and.
Build this culture.
It also builds this sense of you know, hunting value, which is good for an animal like a big horn sheep that needs a lot of money, needs a lot of special care needs, a lot of hypercent sensitive management, transport and animals working on habitat depredation, all this stuff. But I would like to hear a guy that wasn't just mad about not getting to play because he didn't
have the money. There's plenty. I mean, so you know the guy that's like just mad because some rich guy got it, I'd like to hear ineligion argument.
I think it's the perception that you've pulled and Governor's takes are more than just big horns. It was like, yeah, tags, Yeah, there's Governor's tags for most of we to big game animals. I think it's that you've pulled an animal out of the public pool, or you've created a tag. You've created a tag in addition to the public pool. And if that's the case, you're like, well where did that come from? If we can kill that big horn in addition to the ones we're doing before, was it just arbitrary the
number of tags that were available before. Yeah, so you're saying there's another tag, we can get another big horn, but that one's not available to working class people who are applying all their life and will never draw it. You're you're sort of out of the blue creating one for rich people to be able to go and kill me. Why to kill a dos a big horn? Why was it there before? Well, why can't I have a shot
at it? And and and and again. It's just very surprising to me that this went four to one, especially the fact that it comes on a number of, like very coming on the on the tail of a bunch of very high profile auction record setting big game auctions. Right if it was in decline and you're seeing that the tags are devalued and pretty soon guys are buying the auction tag for one hundred thousand dollars, and you might go, like, you know what, man, it's not raising
any money anymore. It's kind of lost, it's luster. It creates a lot of social tension. Why not get rid of it. It's weird that it like starts going up, up, up, up into insane amounts of conservation dollars and then they're like, then get.
Well it kind of it's kind of the same trend that we see in society at all levels, that there's this scrutiny on the ultra wealthy.
Yeah, but I think in this case there's like very specific examples too that feel kind of vicky. When it's like the Jimmy Johns founder, like he's had some bad hunting pr in the past, and you know it's him buying the tag and it's gonna like go on his wall of one hundred and fifty other animals, and I think for the folks that's just like a kind of gross. But if it was like a no named fella from Nevada, like I think one of those record breaking tags was that maybe doesn't sting as much to folks.
And there's a hunting there's a hunting style that goes with the Governor tags that winds up being off putting the people.
Where people all over the mountains, there's certain I don't want to get into names on this, but there's certain outfitting players that have really there's certain outfitting players that have played really heavy in the.
Governor's Tag world. And they'll find animals, Okay, they'll put guys on them, monitor them around the clock, bring a guy in. The guy comes in, shows up, makes the shot, and it's kind of like there's a perception that they're not even hunting, yeah, like other people are doing it. It leads to you know, they're like there's a case where like, oh, they're blocking off row to try to impede access. They're harassing other hunters who are in the area.
They're putting a guy on every hilltop to watch the animal to make sure no one else gets it. They're gonna spook it out of the way if someone else comes, blah blah blah. All this all this hysteria and they didn't even hunt it anyway, and so then it creates it kind of sours the whole thing. But it's like, do the big do the does the sheep habitat that the money helps? Does that sheep habitat care? How that guy conducted the hunt. They didn't break the law.
That's Clay's uh journal about horse happiness.
Mm hmm.
Will hate the player, No, don't hate the don't hate the player hate.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. And in this case, don't hate the player, hate the game. They hated the game and they got rid of the game. Well, I'm actually I'm I'm.
Kind of pleased to see that it went towards like the vote was towards sure something that was more conservative you'd rather. I mean, like, what if they had voted to make six of the tags governor tags.
That would be bad. We'd all be like, now, come well, I don't know that would be six times. That would be that there was sixty six million dollars going into WILDI I think that.
Would tip the scales of public sentiment towards Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand. I mean, like, twenty years from now, it's gonna be they're all gonna be paid for it, you know. But but the one and that's where I would like to hear an intelligent argument of people that had insight, maybe even from other realms of society where there's like a slippery slope or something like twenty years from now, your kids are going to be you know, this is gonna happen.
I was talking to a guy the other night, and I'd like to get him on the show. I'm not going to say who said this opinion to me, but I'm gonna articulated guy's opinion that I was talking to the other night. I'd like him to come on the show. He works in policy. He was viewing this as a sort of anti hunting movement, and he had an interesting fact. If he said anytime wildlife managers, commissions, whoever. Politicians are presented with a split and hunting, and there are some hunters.
They're presented with two sides of an argument, and there are some hunters on each side. They will go with the anti hunting side, meaning let's say you're looking at a trap band, a public land trap band, and they're like, man, I don't want to piss off hunters and trappers. But then you get some hunters who are going to come and say, oh, I like that band because it's safer
for my bird dog. That gives them cover. Yeah, and he says invariably, Invariably, the minute some hunters give cover to an anti hunting position, the politicians are going to go anti hunting because it places more people well, because that's the way they want to go, and they need to justify it. And the minute they can have all hunter to point to, they can tip that way and
feel that they're not anti hunting. And he felt, and I don't even I don't like, I don't agree with him, but I want to have him on to talk about it. He feels that going away from governor's tags is a anti hunting sentiment, and I don't really know that I don't. I've been wrestling with that since he sat it to me, and I don't know that I agree with that. Hmmm.
I don't think I agree with it, but I could be swayed, especially in like a kind of a famously purple state like Arizona, that maybe that is the case for some things.
Mm hmm. I'd like to hear that argument. I want to have Mon. I want to have Mon to talk about that argument. Uh, you guys are right for two cheticos, they're gonna wrap it up.
Are you gonna ask Phil about Disney? You think or not?
I thought about asking the Disney, but I didn't know that Phil. I don't know that Phil could tell our listen theres anything about Disney they didn't already know.
That's absolutely not true.
Yeah, Phil took a day off on a live tour on the live too. We had a day off and Phil, was it even a day off? Phil? No, it wasn't.
We had a show that night. Phil got up sort of like how Spencer woke up at five thirty to go rock counting this morning, I woke up at five thirty to go to a theme part.
Phil spent set his alarm Okay, he set his alarm and woke up early to go by himself to Disney. And we had a lot of jokes about how they're probably gonna monitor Phil all day long with security, wondering why a single mail of his age would be at Disney. But he went. And what did you find out? Phil? You'd been there before?
Yeah, probably around nine or ten times.
How much does it cost to get in? Well, man, it is more more or less than a governor's day.
Uh this, I mean, how much does it cost to get in? This is part this is part of the whole like corp corporate monopolistic stuff that comes in. It was a lot of money Clay for like one day at a theme park I think after like taxis shoes, it was like one hundred and fifty dollars.
That corporate monopoly. What how do they have a monopoly? Of course there's theme park. Well, well it's not even just like Disney. Disney owns everything they've got, like like TV stations and networks and cruise ships and everything. But I'm just saying they find every way to milk as much money as they can, which is their right.
As when he gets done talking about Disney, you feel like the government should take over Disney like the Russian Revolution.
Absolutely not, I'm saying over the over the ten or fifteen years, Disney has been transforming their theme party experience to be anti consumer and anti guest by letting you pay more money to cut in lines, which they didn't.
We did when my family went. We did the we did the rich people bought. We bought a thing to let us cut.
And I think about you differently now. I was in my element. I had the time of my life.
The long run.
They're there, the two bummers, clay splash, Mountain, haunted mansion to to al Teimers shut down for renovation. That's that was. That was a bads.
But Phil, did you buy the thing to let you cut?
No?
I did not.
Can I tell you sometimes I want to tell you about why I bought the cut thing? Okay. I think if I talked to you about it and give you a little background, I think that you'll you won't dislike me as much.
It wasn't like that you want me to respect you.
It wasn't about I'll tell Phil about it in private later and I think he'll say, like, I think you did the right thing.
Okay, I want to tell you about the Warner the Disney film that Warner Glenn start in.
Can I just fill one last?
Disney don't talk about I know when I just wanted to like put it in before we change subject.
And I can't go into all the details we had discussed.
I feel like since the last time you had been there, Phil, they had started allowing their characters to like, uh, look more like themselves in the real world, where they can have tattoos.
Kind of like characters like you're not gonna see Aladdin with his full sleeve, but like their employees, like you can have piercing And.
Did you did you witness that? Did it change the experience?
I did didn't pay a whole lot of attention, But I would anybody care about that? Disney's hold over from a different era, Like Walt Disney was a very uptight sort of traditionalist, And they still don't even sell alcohol in the theme park, Like there's only one place you can get alcohol and that's at a bar in the Star Wars area.
And and you found you feel that Disney is is gotten too big, and he's like they need to be like a mon like a like a Trustbuster, like they need to break Disney up. Kinda Yeah, but don't you realize that they that they they invented all that stuff.
Yeah, Like I feel I feel there's a part of me that feels really gross going there. But like they're just masters of production design and putting on a show and like like transporting you somewhere else through sounds and smells and sight and stuff.
It's like it's like our lives.
It's just like our live show. Apologies to the woman who had a conversation with me after I stuffed my mouthful of sushi last night. That was that was a century experience for her.
I'm sure.
Anyway, Yeah, I had a blast.
You had a blast. Fair to say that you hate. Yeah.
I wouldn't consider myself a Disney adult because they're they're sort of like Disney can do no wrong. They're very apologetic, and they're kind of creepy. I I I I like to keep my arm's length away from those people. But I just I like I like the show. I like the like the theatricality of.
The whole film. You're a critic, You're a critical.
I'm a critic one hundred percent.
Yeah, good for you.
Phil Thanks, Spencer, Yeah, yeah, no, I got to go on a bunch of rides. No kids, no, no people like like Spencer and Clay to drag around. And even though I would have loved for you guys to come, I really wanted Clay to come to Frontierland with me and ride the Daivy Crocket can use to Tom Sawyer Island. But I thought he might say something like, oh, my culture is not your costume and then like punch me in the throat or something. I didn't want to deal.
With that my culture is not Can you tell us the thing? What was the thing that most two questions? Yeah, most delighted you on your your mourning at Disney and what most irked you at your your morning at Disney.
This is like, this is not good podcasting material because it's just like very deep, I disagree stuff, but.
This is like this turned into therapy figure.
Well, yes, somewhat. Rise of the Resistance a very state of the art and new Star Wars themed ride. Some of the special effects weren't working when the when the whole ride is based around these kind of like cool special effects, when two of them aren't working, I was disappointed. I was disappointed in that Kylo Ren's lightsaber didn't come through the ceiling. The cannons were moving back and forth. Real ones, write me, let me know what that that
You understand what I'm saying, Indiana Jones. They made some some upgrades that the riders getting a little in there. Oh yeah, big cobra, that hiss is right at your face. Oh yeah, it was good, but they added some projections. That was the one line. I waited forty five minutes far as the longest I had to wait in line because I had to. I did single rider lines.
Did like the working man's ticket.
Yeah that's right. I waited forty five minutes in line. Nothing rich, you know, didn't have a VIP guide getting food for me and showing where the bathrooms were. I defined it myself like a real uh hard work, like a real American, like a pioneer, like Daniel Boone.
Your Star Wars experience was like Yanni wanted for us to ask for some money back from our last hotel. Is they their hot water wasn't working, so he thought we were we were owed something.
Yeah for that. I didn't. I didn't ask George because for money, my money back though my wife.
Was recently in the hotel and they had messed up the bleach in the pool so bad that it bleached her swimsuit. And when she went up to notify him that it like, I mean, it bleached her swimsuit. What well, that's what she was curious about. And she went up there treating her like a big diva. It's just like, listen, look at my slipsuit. It bleached.
Anyway, Thanks thanks for asking, Steve.
Yeah, here's two chettikots ready for this. I am a law enforcement officer. This is a juicy one. That's not that's not the right word. It's juicy. I'm a law enforcement officer on a state forest which is open to hunting and fishing. A benefit to this job is I get to I get a take home truck which is marked. I also hunt the same areas I work. My boss has given me the okay to hunt before and after work out of the state truck. Hunting out of the
state truck seems like an all around wind. I am much more able to respond to emergencies after hours when most of them occur, and I have more time to hunt because I don't have to go home and switch trucks. Seeing a law enforcement truck parked in the woods may deter illegal activity. Despite all this, I can't help but feel dirty about hunting out of the state truck, since some hunters may think I am targeting them specifically because they are hunting in quote my spot, or I am
taking quote their spot. I am very careful to not hunt the same place as I have recently checked other hunters. It may also blow my spots out because other hunters often think I know all the best spots.
What are your thoughts, he says, seeing a law enforcement truck parked in the woods made deter illegal activity. I think it would just deter activity in general. Even of like a law abiding fella. If you were like coming down you saw a law enforcement vehicle a trailhead, you could imagine all sorts of things are like taking place there.
They're like, body, yeah, I.
Think I'll just go hunt somewhere else. So I think, not just illegal activity, activity in general, folks are going to avoid you.
I think it's kind of the same story of an outfitter not hunting in their outfitting concession.
It's kind of it's.
Kind of double dipping, even though the guy probably has pure motives. The guy's probably legit. It really wouldn't do any harm, but there's just too many, too many over I wouldn't do it because I feel like it would expose me to more scrutiny than I would want.
Hmm.
I just feel like I feel like in his community, it'd be hard to justify. I mean, because it's like you're having to explain to people, well, it's okay for me to use the company truck on my private time because that's part of my contract and that may not be a part of some I mean, there's just all these little fine details. I think it's I don't think it's the highest I don't think it's taken.
The highest road.
But you hate to hate to fault the guy for having to go to like a different county to hunt either. Like, I think he's a good guy. I don't think he's trying to cheat the system. But I don't I think it's a it's it's there's a little little drama in.
There, maybe down on public land.
What you take, Chili, Well, I mean he's on public land, right, No.
I mean, if you if you're of the mindset where you don't feel like you have to explain yourself to everyone, like if you got the clearance, like whose business? Like it's it's not, it's like who am I to go up to him and be like, well can you do this? You know?
I don't.
I think I'd be totally fine with it if I was a game warden FWP.
But what if you were hunting then you saw this game warden coming out hunting all these spots, I'd.
Be like, good for him.
Yeah, I mean again, like it's not.
It's just one of those things that like I wouldn't personally ask questions about it. Yeah, I mean, like I'd see him and I'd probably just do see his truck and be like, Okay, well he's hunting, so I'm gonna
go to the next spot. And then but like to your point, which you when you capped off everything, you know, the only reservation I do have about it, Like if it were me, would be like, okay, well, if I'm a game war everyone probably thinks I know where the game's at, and they probably have a better idea than most people where game's at. So I would be a little bit conservative about going out where a lot of people have access to you, because if that's like my
honey hoole. I'd be concerned about other people want to hunt there, ye, But anything outside of that, I'd say, go for it.
Yeah, personally, mhmm. For the next one, what's Here's what I do. I'd take your regular rig and park it out at the entrance. Just leave it there, drive the take home truck whatever. When you hunt, pull out, park the work rig out of the entrance to the forest, at the office or whatever, hop in your take hop in your regular rig and hunt. You don't need to go all the way home. Leave the regular rig out there.
You got a rig sitting somewhere anyway. Yeah, if you're going home and you need to go do something, it's not your take home responsibility, park that truck and jump in the other truck. But as far as you hunting, now, I'm like, listen, man, I'm off in a whole other area. And I know I'm not telling them whether it's right or wrong. I'm telling him how just to make it a non issue.
But then he's still using his own personal gas to go drive. When you know that that's the thing. He gets a take home truck, it means he can drive that truck wherever that's pretty big perk.
Okay, but if you're worried about it, yeah, park a quad runner. His wife is like, drive the state park, your can Am park, whatever the hell, park your regular rig, park your whatever, your normal rig, I don't know, park something at that thing. And then when you when you switch the hunt mode, go grab your rig. In terms of hunting where you work, dude, it's like, come on, you can't you know not the It's like, you work there, that's great, it's public land, Go hunt it. Yeah you
can't be like, well, I'm not. It's not right for me to hunt around where I work. I mean, come on, if you worry about the truck, if you worry about the perceptions of the truck, just leave a different rig out there. Yeah. I haven't been there, so I'd have to go over there and look for him and show them where I think I choose your park. I'm just making the assumption that works right for this one.
This next one doesn't even seem like a moral question. It seems like a legallant read it first, Yeah.
You're right, he's thinking he's thinking morals when he should be thinking about getting himself in a lot of trouble.
Yeah, okay, good.
Dear meat eater. I have lived in southern Utah for the last few years. I previously lived in Idaho and have a valid Idaho driver's license. I just moved to the Utah side of the Utah Idaho border, and in doing so renewed my combination license in Idaho, using my Idaho driver's license to purchase it as a resident. I also have a current resident combination license in Utah. My question for you is would it be unethical to listen? Buddy,
sincerely A concern hunter. Okay, you have on you have on your hands, Just a simple black and white issue of call fishing game. I don't care which state you want to call it in Idaho or Utah and say, hey, how many states can I hunt as a resident in anyone given time and see what they say. The answer you will get is one.
And states don't mess around to that. It's like tag draw season right now. When you go to log in to apply for a tag somewhere, the first question from every state asks you, like, are you a resident?
You swear on your first or child? Yeah, yeah, you got that, And it's like and here's their thing. If you get into the fine print. They spell out what a resident is in very clear detail, and it will be in a level of detail that exceeds that of which it requires to have a driver's license. There is no room if you look at what they mean when they say you're a resident. There is no room for
you to even plausibly suggest you're of both states. A driver's being in possession of a driver's license that hasn't been punched or devalidated does not make you a legal resident of a state. It just means that you have a driver's license in your pocket. Mm hmm. It's like emblematic of residency, but that does not make a resident.
He didn't leave his name.
Listen, buddy, I'm not mad at you. You did the right thing by asking, but yeah, just be careful. I wouldn't even be walking. I wouldn't if I was you, I would figure out what is what and go back and and and clear it up and give that tag back and clarify that you shouldn't be in possession of it. Yeah, because you don't even want to be holding resident tags from two states. Whether or not you validate him on an animal or not. Thanks everybody.
Getting colder on the water, weather man, since it's gone raining, pier up the men.
Cooda, I'm a trap. My rider never trust his word.
Anyway.
Hit the bast pro shop on my way through town, Rousters and panthers. It's going down, hamme down that boat rounch.
Water up to my sin, fish hop biting.
Real man.
Able work week gets a sin?
Where is my live?
Begame?
Locket praying for the wind? The fish shyp bidon.
Real Amen, showing.
This line here for hours.
My realis shit and my rig won't spend. Got the Blue Mountains two devours the fish sharp bidon.
Real man.
Ffty five hour work week gets a scent?
Where is my.
Live big game?
Lorna, keep praying for a wind?
It's all bod real?
Many five hour work weeks a sin?
Where's my life begain?
Lorna, keep praying for a wind? The fist at bat.
Real?
Where's abod this?
Aboy?
W's somebody fish allbody.
Real?
Amazing a song