00:00:14 Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukleman. This is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast. Presented by f h F Gear, American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place. As we explore. We got an incredible podcast lined up very We're gonna have a very interesting conversation. We're joined today by Travis Thompson from Florida and we are going to talk about Florida bears, I mean, one of our favor no willy nilly and around here like how was your week? What have you been doing, Josh, You've been fly fishing. Nobody cares about your fly fishing. We are we are getting into. 00:01:14 Speaker 2: There are a loyal few that email me and say Clay needs to lay off the fly fishing comments and that. 00:01:21 Speaker 3: That could be me. 00:01:23 Speaker 1: I could I have alienated half of our listenership by my by my my Adamacy talking about fly. 00:01:31 Speaker 2: And support fly fishing on the. 00:01:33 Speaker 1: Well baron newcom told me we should have Dwayne Hayda on this podcast. Wayne had would be an excellent well, I would like to extend the formal invitation to Dwayne Hayda on the podcast. 00:01:43 Speaker 3: If we can talk about fly Have you noticed there's a ven diagram that is a complete overlap of fly fishermen and then it just barely shifts in the turkey hunters. Is that they're almost I yeah, they're the same people that I'm telling you in Florida. They're the same people. 00:01:58 Speaker 1: That's interesting. 00:01:59 Speaker 3: Yeah, they're consumed with those two practices, and those two practices only. 00:02:03 Speaker 1: That is very interesting. I can't I can't, I don't. I can't describe it, but I understand it. 00:02:08 Speaker 3: It's like CrossFit, like you go somewhere and that's all they could talk about is fly fishing or turkey hunt depending on the time of year. Yeah. 00:02:14 Speaker 1: Interesting, So Josh saved the fly fishing small talk. My moment is here, man. There was just just to give a small introduction of what we're going to spend the next hour and a half talking about. Is that last week in Florida, the Game Commission approved a Florida bear hunt, which we're going to get into all the history, but that's what we're talking about. This is major, this is significant, and Travis was heavily involved in everything that went on around that. Now, Travis, tell me who you work for, what you do, kind of your history. 00:02:55 Speaker 3: Yeah, so I got kind of a three throng three prong. Who I work for? I run ironically for talking about bears. I run the largest waterfowl hunting operation in the state of Florida. Oh so I'm a big duck hunter. So you're an outfitter. Yeah, well, yeah, we'll call it that in Florida. I don't have a lodge or anything like that, but most of what we do is by the day stuff. And I used to be a fishing guide before I got into hunting. More so, I do ducks, alligators, snipe, and some hogs. I don't love hog hunting, but that's a different story anyway. And then I grew up. I'm fifth generation Florida and grew up there hunting fishing my whole life. My dad worked for a department environmental protection, so I kind of grew up with a dad that was carrying a gun around and was a tree hugger, so like, very heavy in the conservation space. I have a nonprofit in Florida. It's called All Florida where we work on issues like this. Anything Nick touches conservation, so ag ranching, timber, prescribe fire stuff, water quality, and consumpt of use. You know, I heard Ranella say years ago on The Stars in the Sky that a conservation is as an environmentalist with a gun. Yeah, I'm trying to reclaim that in Florida as a conservationists environmentalist with a gun. I like that. And then the other thing I do kind of my day jobs. I work for a group called the International Order Theodore Roosevelt, and we do constitutional rights to fish and hunt in states. So I got hooked up with those guys a couple of years back, and in the state of Florida, we did a constitutional right to fish in hunt, which like the bear hunt. Everybody said, well, you're never going to get a bear hunt again. Everybody said you're never going to get that passed. We passed it with sixty seven percent, with a huge grassroots movement in the state, and so that was a big deal. But that's that's who I am. That's kind of how I entered the conversation, is like, I'm passionate about keeping Florida wild. Yeah, and I believe hunting fishing are two of the most important tools on that landscape to do it. 00:04:46 Speaker 1: So Florida, let's start off by describing Florida. I've not spent a lot of time there, but but I'm aware of kind of culturally, what's what's going on in that Florida is one of the fastest growing states in the country. 00:05:02 Speaker 3: Yep, I don't. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: I don't know the exact stats, but but I've heard it said that, you know, there's there's a band around the coast of Florida of development, of massive development, massive cities, massive development. But the interior of Florida, essentially, I mean, I'm putting stop me and you take over this, But I mean, like the interior of Florida is like the rural rural America. 00:05:29 Speaker 3: Yeah. So the joke used to be the further south you go in Florida, the further north you get. That used to be kind of the joke because it was so developed, like in Miami or Fort Myers or these places. But in reality, Florida is deep south. Like I live in Polk County, which is the dead center of the state. It's I mean, it's a different terrain, but it's like driving out here, right, there's a lot of cattle a lot of Florida was the first state with cattle, right, so cattle ranching in the United States, originating cattle, and I think it's in the top ten now still. 00:05:58 Speaker 1: For huge cattle production. 00:06:00 Speaker 3: Cowboys, real cowboys. We call them cow hunters because Florida didn't have fences until the fifties. So cattle you branded them and just let them go and then you would go round them up and take them sell them. So we didn't have fences that so they called them cow hunters. You went into this really rough stuff and rooted out your cows. Florida's the only state you know, there's a conservation easement program called in rcs they have Eastman's Florida is the only state where you're allowed grazing on the easements because it's such an important tool for keeping our state wild. And about Man is probably ten years ago. A friend of mine, a gentleman named Carlton Ward. He's a National Geographic guy, real big in panther stuff. He did Path of the Panther. It's on National Geographic. I don't know if you'll ever seen that, but and Carlton is a hunter, was a hunter, but he's very much into environmental stuff. He kind of helped originate or codify this idea of a Florida Wildlife Corridor, which was the idea that if you took a panther and you stuck him in Flamingo at the south end of the state, he could walk to the Okefinoki Swamp in Georgia and never cross the road, you know, have prey along the way, and create this green infrastructure through our state. Florida's got the most public lands, I think east of the Mississippi River. We have seven million acres six point eight million acres of public lands. So we've got a lot of public land out there and a lot of that's available to hunt. So Carlton and a team and there's an organization called the Florida Wildlife Corridor. They went and passed a legislation to codify the Florida Wildlife Corridor and create this green infrastructure. And the animal they used was not the panther. The animal they used was a black bear. They wanted a black bear and to show that this black bear could go from Big Cypress National Preserve and wander two Okala National Forest or Appalachicola National Forest or Osciola National Forest and they use that and they kind of created that animal as at avatar. And there's days where I'm like, man, that's a game species, so we want to make sure we talk about it as a game species. But they did a really good job of kind of go into ranchers, go into private landowners, and then inter working those properties with public lands so that we had these corridors for animals to traverse. And it's not just bears, it's deer and turkeys and quail and go for towardous and everything else. And so the black bear has kind of become this avatar for protecting what's wild in in Florida, in the heartland of Florida, what we would call the heartland of Florida. And you talk about the coast being all developed out, and we want to grow, like there's there's places that need economic development in the state, good development, and there's good development and bad development. Right, there's some places that need some of that, but we want to grow in a way that allows species to thrive and work. A friend of mine, he's a new commissioner, but he, Josh Kellum said last week, we want to we want to make sure conservation and development are able to work together so that we have these wild places and wild things that are able to exist a long time. So that was a roundabout way of answering your question. But I think yes, Florida is still real wild. Yes, we got the oat trees with the moss growing on them. And for us, it's it's cabbage palms. I don't know if y'all have seen cabbage palms, but cabbage palms. They're critically important to black bears as a forest source. 00:09:11 Speaker 1: But they're eating the leaves of them, the berries they get berries and cabbage palms, they love them. 00:09:16 Speaker 3: And uh, we just got force of cabbage palms. You know, have thickets of cabbage palms, and it's just a unique landscape even to just see like silhouetted it's very different than an oak hamick or a pine thicket or something that you'd see someplace else. You see these cabbage palms with their like pointy leaves and everything. It's it's a really unique landscape. It's it's special, man, it's special. 00:09:37 Speaker 1: So this this corridor is it down to the granular understanding where they're actually mapping like they could show on a map. Oh, like like this property connects to this property, which connects to this So it's not just kind of like an arbitrary like there's like a like a bike not a bike trail, but it's exactly like a map. 00:09:59 Speaker 3: The idea, and so University Florida doctor Tom Hogger at University of Florida got involved in it, and the Corridor Foundation itself. They've sat down and mapped it all out. And so if you were to protect it all it would be eighteen million acres protected lands. That's not all public lands. That's private conservation easement sold or land put into less than fee acquisition or whatever. But today we have about ten million protected in it and the rest isn't developed yet. So we're trying to figure out ways that we can protect it. And Travis a guy that contends. You know, I talk about Aldo Leopold's plow cow ax match gun. Those are the five tools that are going to save wildlife. We don't talk about that gun nearly enough. And when we talk about a species like black bear or you know, in North Florida, we got timber, heavy timber. Those guys run qual hunting operations or turkey hunting operations, and that's another revenue stream that's helping off set the pressure because the developer is going to come in there and offer you x thousand dollars a year to turn this into a subdivision or a solar farm or whatever. If you can stack some revenue streams on top of an e has been and produced something like solar or cattle or cross man, we can keep Florida wild for a long time. 00:11:06 Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in and I'm gonna say something that you said some good but but I've I've kind of said the same thing, but I don't hear it enough. And that is and it's essentially encapsulating what you just said is that the cultural and economical value of hunting in North America will be the thing that a massive factor on saving wild places. So and in in today's world where where expansion of civilization, roads, concrete, urban sprawl, neighborhoods put you know, going out and being built, people wanting to have five acres in a house like all that sprawl a thing. And and and you know how much of the percentage of America's private land, like uh, like ninety five percent or something big at least ninety percent of America is private land. So if you think about wildlife conservation on this macro scale, it's actually the private land that's going to be the main thing. Like we think about public land and habitat conservation, but private land ninety percent of the country. We we when people are incentivized to keep their places unfragmented undeveloped because of the hunting value of that land, we win. In fifty years from now, should the earth persist, they'll be like, thank God that there was cultural value of hunting that kept some places wild. And I mean it's a it's a it's an incredible point that I don't hear enough people say, and it resonates with people when when you say it, it's like, you know what, hunting is incentivizing the keeping places wild because just like if I had forty acres right here at Arkansas and right up against town, and I could sell it to a developer, or I could keep it because my kids valued hunting, my family valued hunting, or sell it to a hunter who's going to put little food plots on it and cameras all over it. And I mean, like that is a win, massive win for there to be a blank spot on a map like Aldo Leopold would say. 00:13:18 Speaker 3: You know, it's funny. So I mentioned a minute ago I worked on the right deficient hunt. And what hooked me on that was not that I wanted to protect the right efficient hunt, although I do, like I'm a hunter angler, like, of course I want to protect the right defiicient hunt. But in that we looked at language in other states, and there's these magic words you use anyway. We looked at language in the state of North Carolina, and the Supreme Court in North Carolina determined that those rights can't exist in the abstract, which means you have to be able to exercise them, which means in a state that's feeling development pressure like Florida, putting that in place. And I think this is important to put in place everywhere before it becomes because I when I talk to guys in Montana, they're like, man, you never seen development like this. I'm like, dude, come to Floria to let me show how the big boys play. But the yeah, that right can't exist in the abstract, which means the state can't say you got the right to hunt, but we're going to eradicate white tailed deer. You have to be able to exercise the right, and I think that's an important thing. So it folds into the same thing your tastes. I think hunting is. I like to say hunting is the tool. Maybe not everywhere I know there's pockets where it may be timber, or it may be ranching, or it may be agriculture. But those tools are going to stave off development in this country. Those are the tools that are going to We didn't invent that Audo did one hundred years ago, and it's gone unchanged in that time period. So I'm really passionate about somebody's got to speak up and make sure this stuff's protected, because otherwise they think nothing about shaving off places where you had a hunting lease, or's places where you publicly. 00:14:51 Speaker 1: In this country my age, I'm forty five, that hasn't lost a property to development. 00:14:57 Speaker 3: It's exactly right. 00:14:57 Speaker 1: There's not a single one of them that's spent, you know, a good chunk of their life being a hunter that hasn't lost a property literally to development. I mean, I'm thinking of it probably right now that is literally a subdivision that I used to hunt. 00:15:11 Speaker 3: And so instead of demonizing the developers, what we try to do is go sit down with them and figure out, like, how can we develop better, how can we do redevelopment, how can we grow up not out, how can we protect wild lands or corridors through developments so that animals. Then you got home owners that are able to see wildlife, they're able to connect it and care about it, and then you're able to continue to for me, touch it in a way like I want to touch it and need it, but there's people that just want to photograph it or whatever. 00:15:39 Speaker 1: So one thing about the philosophy that we're just talking about right here that I think we've got to bring up just because it's interesting, is that inside the hunting circle, people when they hear about cultural value and economic value of hunting, that does mean that my forty acres that I sell is going to have a higher value than it did before because of its that is hunting, And somebody's going to buy that, and somebody that can't afford to buy that is going to say, well, the rich guy's got it and they are are are pricing me out of hunting. I mean, it's kind of a because that's a narrative you hear inside the hunting circles. Oh, we're all being priced out of hunting because it's now becoming a rich man's sport. It's becoming like Europe. I think that those two worlds kind of you can't have one without the other. I mean, when I go down the Mississippi River, me and Brent Reeves took a boat ten or fifty miles down the Misissippi River a couple of years ago. Ninety nine percent of that land is owned and in hunting leases or specific properties made for hunting. They've kept the riperian zone of that river in pretty incredible shape. Really, that land is so valuable. There's no way that a common man is going to own that land. Incredibly valuable pretty much one hundred percent because of hunting. And there's people that would say that was bad. I would say, thank god, at least it's protected well. And maybe twice in my lifetime I'll get to go over there and hunt on the Mississippi River and it's still there. Do you understand what I'm saying? 00:17:23 Speaker 3: And I think there's another point off of that. And we hadn't even got a bears yet, but I think there's another point off that, and that is, you know, you can talk to the turkey doctors, Chamberlain or lastly or call your any of those guys. They'll tell you ninety five percent of turkeys are produced on private land. But then they spread out. So it's like you and I were talking off air where your bears came, they were re established narkosas and then they spread it Outright, I run a waterfowl hunting operational private land. We do a lot of work to that land. There's ducks. Don't all stay on that private land. They end up on the Cokeachobee, they end up on the coast, on public land where a lot of people. And so by increasing the habitat and ensuring we want the maximum return on this land from a from a wildlife value standpoint, whether it's white tailed deer, turkeys or ducks or whatever, squirrels, Yeah, that's going to spill out from there and hopefully spill out into areas where the average guy is going to be able to do. So. I'm always a big proponent of I've heard this around ducks unlimited before. Right, Oh, they're just locking up land and doing it for the Yeah, but at the end of the day, they're producing more ducks and more habitat for wildlife, which is going to benefit everybody in the grand scheme. This is not it's not just this local population. It's a it's a globe or an international or a flyway population or whatever the larger population's on is. 00:18:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all this is so so interesting. So let's let's go ahead and get into give me the biography of Florida bear hunting, if it just to the best of your knowledge. I mean, historically they were hunting bears. They're like crazy, yep. And then when did it end? 00:18:59 Speaker 3: It did when I was in high school. So ninety four is when they shut the hunt down completely, shut it completely, shut it down. And if you went back historically, and I'd encourage you, if you really wanted a deep dive, FWC has on their website you could do google FWC Bear Report. There's a two hundred page document that is really good. I mean, it's if you want a history of bears in Florida. I mean it goes into the way they used to do agriculture because Florida's big in turpentine, okay, and so they would burn forest, but they would burn them too aggressively sometimes, and it basically wiped out the understory, which hurt bears on forge. Now we understand burning science a lot better, and that's an important tool. So the bear population dropped into the fifties, but it seemed like it kind of stabilized from the fifties to like the eighties or so, and then it dropped again. And so in the early nineteen hundreds they guessed, I'm sorry, the early nineteen nineties, their speculation population was as low as five hundred bear. Okay, wow. So now in white history and settled history, prior to that, they guesstimated there were eleven thousand bears in the state of Florida, in the state of floor like pre European contre pre Hernando de Soto or whoever it was that came there first. So it was about eleven thousand bears in the state of Florida. 00:20:18 Speaker 1: So the sad vaka who it was, I got his book up there. First guy, first European guy had coming to Florida. Incredible book two years before Desta. A few years yeah, fews before Desota. 00:20:30 Speaker 3: So we closed it down. It stayed untouched until twenty fifteen when a hunt was brought back. There were a couple of rules made to bear existence, like you could shoot a bear to protect livestock. I think was a rule that was made arow twenty ten or eleven, but largely bears went untouched for whatever. That is twenty one years. 00:20:52 Speaker 1: Only twenty one years, right, and what do we think? The population had grown to about twenty fifteen, So. 00:20:58 Speaker 3: The state had science twenty fifteen, they believe the population was over four thousand. 00:21:11 Speaker 1: So in in bear management, they typically say that that an one hundred population will increase by ten percent per year. And so I've done the math and extrapolated out like if you have four hundred bears, and that this includes natural mortality and recruitment ten percent per year. So if you have four hundred bears year one, year two, help me with my math, You're gonna have four hundred and forty. The next year you're gonna have You're gonna have four hundred and eighty four, four hundred and eighty four, the next year you're gonna have. 00:21:48 Speaker 3: Oh, this guy's a math wizard. Impressive. 00:21:52 Speaker 1: By the time you get out into decades, like decades, you're talking about exponential growth, exponential growth, and typically populations that are recovering where a bear has like unlimited or the habitat is not limiting, like there's not stressed on the habitat because of other bears, where they'll increase by as much as eighteen percent per year. And so basically a nine hundred population in twenty years can triple in size. 00:22:23 Speaker 3: That's that's pretty much. I mean, So we went from a guestimate of five hundred to two thousand bears to four thousand, right, So yeah. 00:22:30 Speaker 1: It went up tenfold. Yeah, I mean about tenfold. Yeah, five hundred to four thousand, is that right? Yeah, about ten eight eight eightfold eightfold eightfold. 00:22:41 Speaker 3: So you got to this bear. We did a bear hunt in twenty fifteen. Depending on what side of the story you are about a bear hunt, it was either an unmitigated disaster or it was a wild success. Yeah, I'm sure you know the story. But the background on that was they issued a number of tags based off success what they believed a successful harvest would be. So I don't remember the right number tags, but they had a quota of three hundred and twenty bears I think that they wanted to take. So they issued let's say a thousand tags forty eight hours in they'd killed three hundred five bears. Wow. So I believe we could all sit here and say, well, that shows how many bears there were, yes, how quickly they were harvested, like a hunt needed to occur. There was so much anti hunting pressure Florida. Hunters in Florida, and conservation in Florida does not look like it does in other places. And I know it's different in every place from the state, and everybody'd say that, but man, I'm telling you all, it's the wild West. So there was so much public pressure, you know, the polling around acceptance of hunting. And you look at a bear versus a a white tail deer, like a bear's way lower on the list than a white tail deer. Yes, it seemed like every one of those people had a vocal voice that they were going to share in that pole. So they came, and the hunt was intended to come back to the next year, and it did not. 00:24:05 Speaker 1: So let's stop right there a little bit, because that twenty fifteen hunt was historic in nature. It was just it was well, it was different in that there was a lot of publicity about it before it happened, and a lot of us were talking about it before, and it was one of these deals where a new bear hunt was coming on the scene in this population that was clearly doing really well, and just a couple of little nerd out facts. I mean, if they were wanting to kill three hundred and twenty bears and they felt like the population was four thousand, that's less than ten percent. So typically in bear management, if you want to stabilize the population, which there's a many many, many many places would love to just stabilize. 00:24:51 Speaker 3: Their bear population. 00:24:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, zero growth, Just let's just keep it where it's at, because human conflict is tall tolerable, habitat for bears is tolerable. The bears are healthy, and that's what people and it's it's so, it's so it's such a human problem. But a population of bears that is not j curving in population that's stable is really healthy. I mean, because if I'm a mama black bear and I go any direction a half mile and I'm in some other bears region and there's conflict and there's there's big politian it's like it's better when there's a there's just the right amount point being Florida was that three to twenty was probably a conservative management number because it was less than ten percent that they were trying to take out, which probably they were like, we really ought to kill five hundred bears, but let's kill three twenty. So I mean it was a probably a wise move by them to just enter in and then the quota phils in two days and the optics. 00:25:58 Speaker 3: I mean, so we had check stations where he had to take the bears to get checked. The anti hunting community was out in mass with photographs. Yeah, so there were photos of a bear under a hundred pounds that was killed. There were photos of lactating females that were killed. Like the optics that they then used, and the grassroots storm that they created on the backside of that made it to where politically no one wanted to touch bears. Yes, it became such a third rail to grab. No one wanted to touch bears, and and in hallways everybody say, man, we need to have another bear hunt for years after that. And so it's a funny story. Clay and I we reconnected the to day, and our previous correspondence was in twenty nineteen in our text messages and he came on my podcast. I used to have a podcast in Florida, and we talked about the twenty nineteen bear plan on that podcast, and we kind of candidly said, I don't know if we'll ever see a bear hunt again. We don't know if we'll ever hunt. 00:26:58 Speaker 1: That was interesting. He told me that today. I wouldn't have remembered saying that, but that's that's what That's what I said the other day in a little video I did, I said I didn't think that it would ever come back, but I said that in twenty nineteen. 00:27:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it was the public sentiment was so bad that I look, man, I mean it really is, truly. People love to talk conservation, but when you talk about dead animals, Yeah, the charismatic megafauon of thing triggers and they do not want to talk about bears yep, and it becomes a major problem. And so that was a tactic. Now we got to spend the next decade getting through, right, Like we got to go from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five, and we didn't know when this would happen, but everything from gubernatorial offices to legislators to people that would fly out and hunt a bear somewhere else, but they wouldn't talk about it in Florida, and I was like, we've got to do something different here. And I say, I, I want to be clear. The hunting commune d in Florida got this done like that was that was this was a big push from a lot of different people and a lot of different groups. The dog hunting community showed up in mass Wow, that is now Florida. I grew up doll hunting for deer, right, that was my that was my back. I've never I've never heard a bear in my life, but dog hunting for deer was like, that's how we spent our saturdays at Sundays was deer camp and we were listening to the dogs run. There's a strong, uh a hog dog community community in Florida. So dog hunting in Florida is a part of the cultural, like it's part of the culture. 00:28:40 Speaker 1: Of long time history of Florida's hunting with dogs. 00:28:42 Speaker 3: We call people, there's not a connotation to it. We call people from Florida crackers. The background on that was they would crack whips. 00:28:49 Speaker 1: They were. 00:28:51 Speaker 3: The cow hunters. 00:28:52 Speaker 1: I was actually gonna say that the original crackers came from Florida because they cow drives. 00:29:00 Speaker 3: That was the term was a cracker Florida cracker because of the whip cracking and the palmettas and you couldn't see the cows and that's how you got them out. And that's still something that the cattleman like man to this day. You go to an event and they they'll sell whips, have crack whips like it's part of their part of their culture. As Similarly, dog hunting in Florida is part of the culture of if you identify as a as a Floridian that hunts, like you've got some kind of dogs. I don't dog hunt anymore, but I've got a soft spot for dog hunting because it belongs here, it belongs on this landscape. 00:29:29 Speaker 1: And so man, when you when you when you get into places as thick as Florida, like literally vegetatively thick as Florida, people that don't have never been around dogs and be like, why would you need a dog to shoot a deer? Why would you need a dog to shoot a bear? They've never been to Florida, they've never been to South Arkansas that you know. I mean, it's a it's a highly functional way to hunt because animals live in stuff that you literally can't see for the length of your arm in some places. 00:30:03 Speaker 3: Oh am, I right, it's nasty. 00:30:05 Speaker 1: It's so you send some dogs in there and you get that game moving, and I mean that's the way you hunt. 00:30:11 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's some stuff you don't want to go through. I mean, you, I'm in decent shape. You're three hundred yards in your watch is like are you working out? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And it's like, man, congratulations, Yeah, you just completed your exercise goal for the day and you've gone you can still see the truck. It's like, what is happening here? Like it's hard hunting. It's hard hunting in period. It's just a harsh environment. So we come out of twenty fifteen, the bear hunt gets or the bear plan gets released to twenty nineteen. That's when you and I first talked and constantly. And I'm gonna give credit to an old gentleman. He runs an organization called United Waterfowlers of Florida. There's this guy named Newton Earl Cook, and Newton is I think he's in his eighties. But every commission meeting we'd have a thing called items Not on the Agenda and our Commission moves around the state, so Florida to drive from one end to the others, like sixteen hours from like Pensacola to Key West, and our Commission meeting moves to make it more convenient for so it's not always where everybody has to drive. Right. Newton would show up at every single Commission meeting and then his items on on the agenda. He'd say he's got this old Tennessee voice. He says, it's time for us to bring back a bear hunt. And he would he would do this to the point where you almost rolled drys at some point, but he just stayed on it and stayed on and stayed on it. And we'd have conversations in the hallway, and there were a lot of folks in the Honey community having those conversations. But we have a conversations all the way of. 00:31:28 Speaker 1: Like, look, what was the guys the old guy's name Newton, Earl Cook. Newton Earl Cook. That's a great name, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Soon we're gonna make a bronze statue in him and being erected in Florida. 00:31:39 Speaker 3: When we just gave him an award at the Commission meeting, not the most reasonab one before that. But anyway, he'd bring it up in the public record over and over and over again. And I didn't want to go dial on that hill over and over again because you get death threats and everything else every time you bring it up. So but we'd start having these conversations off to the side of like, what's it gonna take to get a bear hunt back? What's it gonna take to get the bear hunt back? Can you talk in the hunting community, especially your guys that have feeders on their property. Man, it's a mess out there, Like the way that the ingenuity that's going on to protect your deer feeder from bears has gotten outlandish to where they're like they're put hard tops on their can ams and a ladder on top of that so that they can get to the winch so they can lower the feeder down to keep the bear out of it. And I mean, it's just this ongoing engineering battle between black bears and land. 00:32:29 Speaker 1: And corn feeders. 00:32:31 Speaker 3: I mean it's bad. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen it, but it's yes, it's. 00:32:35 Speaker 1: They're destructive on corn feeders, and you almost can't beat them unless you've got it, you know, on a wire and a pulley system. 00:32:45 Speaker 3: But then they had to move the pulleys up because that's there's one engineer start he figured out how to break the pulley and it was just like you'd walk out there and he's like, man, is that you know you got tree cover and you'd see these feet It's like, is that a radio tower? And then you walk out from under the trees and it's a feeder that's twenty five feet up in the air because they've they've just re engineered at these you. 00:33:02 Speaker 1: Know, I got I gotta interrupt you. This is such so interesting in some of the research I'm doing for my book that black bears have been academically documented as the most curious animal in North America. Really like in in in controlled tests where they've been able to test animal curiosity, the American black bear is the most curious. And they tested weasels and raccoons and we call smart yeah, polar bears. I don't know that they tested any ungulates or something, because they knew that they're not going to be curious like that. But the cats, uh more than bobcats. Like in the way they tested them, it was really interesting. They were they were confined animals, and they would put they would put objects all in the in the space and just turn an animal loose and observe them for hours and watch and document every single thing that they did with the little trinkets that were in the in the place, and the black bear like blew them all out. 00:34:17 Speaker 3: Of the water because you just examined everything. 00:34:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, black bear was like picking up chains and laying on its back and like playing the chains in the air. Point being a black bear will figure out how to get anything it wants if it's physically possible. Yas Boutell has told me, he described a scene of watching a bear get a beaver carcass that they had hung fifteen feet in the air and like ten or twelve feet out from any tree. Like basically, there's this hanging beaver carcass that's like, let's say it's twelve feet in the air, I mean just out of a black bear can't jump like a mountain lion son, and it's ten feet at least from any tree. And basically, he said, he watched this bear for an hour climb up every tree within reach, you know, within side just range of that deal the bear, did you know tried to climb out, and finally the bear realized that if it grabbed the pulley rope and walked back and dropped it, that that it would cause that beaver to move. And before long he had pulled it so many times and dropped it that the beaver carcass went to the ground. Took him an hour, and basically no other animal in the world would have got that beaver carcass. 00:35:42 Speaker 2: I mean, think about how many times they just tear came I mean he can't tear cameras off the trees. 00:35:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, well, and it's it's then the point of all that. People might be like, well, yeah, bears are notoriously curious, and it just kind of like glaze over it. Like they tear up your cameras, they to up your four wheeler seats, they get into your feeders. That's why bears are successful. 00:36:04 Speaker 2: And they're intelligent. They're not just curious. 00:36:06 Speaker 1: Well curiosity is it correlates with intelligence? I mean, that's what we would say. But that's why they're so successful. That's why they're thriving in Florida because they can eat anything, and they they are they are generalists. They're the world's greatest generalist omnivore and they will do anything to get food. Yeah, it's pretty it's brilliant. 00:36:29 Speaker 3: Really, it's funny because bears, and maybe you may know more about this than I do, but bears seem to exist in Florida, in the wild bear population and the urbanized bear population that very much like are different. I think we spent at the time of that bear report I've read we'd spent two and a half million dollars on bear proofing trash cans and municipalities trying to cop out of garbage because they just My photographer lives, my videographer photographer that we use a lot. He lives like I'll say, six streets from the woods, like cross streets, and it's in a neighborhood and bears are in his yard. I mean, he can go get a bear photo for me anytime he wants with the right, like you can distort the background and take a picture of a bear because they're always in the front yard eating his mom's plants. Wow, and yes, those are bears that go back into the Wikaiva forest, but they're not I mean they're they're not just coming into the yard on the edge. They're getting they're coming six. Yeah, they're actually taking an uber Yeah, like they're in the neighborhood and they're not like just on it. You know, it's not a common in the every lage you're on the edge of. They're swamp behind you in a panther walks through your backyard, but you don't see one five streets over unless you've got a cat that's outside. But the bears are just like they're happily existing there. 00:37:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, Like they have an incredible awareness about them, and a lot of wildlife does inside of these urban settings, you know, like deer know that they can they're okay in your yard. But typically the big predators don't. They get shine usually aware of I am perfectly safe right here. And they then they turned to anthropogenic foods big term from human foods. 00:38:19 Speaker 3: I guess in twenty twenty three is when we started having some serious conversations about, Okay, what would a hunt look like if it came back, Like what what do we need to change from the last time we did a hunt to get it right, And that was presented in May of this year. So in May that was brought back to the Commission and my opinion. They got it right. Now, I want to say something. FWC is one of the leading agencies Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, one of the leading agencies in the country on social science, and we as hunters, we love to say, man, I want biological science to drive everything, not social science. But the end of the day, that's a factor. Social science is playing, man, it's playing, and so to ignore it as a tool in the toolbox, I'm telling you this is a guy that's going out there and saying, Man, I don't want to use social science. Like I've said that on the record at podiums and stuff before. I'm like, science should drive this, and I'm talking about biology. Social science is gonna play. They did an incredible job of meeting with stakeholders and figuring out what the concerns were with the last hunt and addressing those with this hunt and so kind of one of the dominant things they heard was selectivity in sex in harvest. I think in the last hunt, sixty percent of the bears that were taking were soals. Okay, And as I mentioned earlier, that was a quota that was issued and then you went out if you didn't kill your bear like you checked in, Like, if you didn't kill your bear and they called the hunt off, you didn't get to fill your task. And that's things. Yes, So what they've brought back is a hunt that is one hundred and eighty seven hard tacks. It's either I think it's a hundred and eighty seven. It's either one eighty six or eighty seven. 00:40:05 Speaker 1: Can I stop you because I feel I think we're gonna go over it and I'm gonna forget to say it. Sure, these quota hunts where the hunt ends at a quota caught and you insinuated it, but we didn't say it, it causes people to be highly unselective. 00:40:21 Speaker 3: It is selectivity because it is if you kill the first bear. Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah. 00:40:26 Speaker 1: Oklahoma, Oklahoma. Well, I don't know the details on it. Oklahoma had a similar thing where they where they had a quota and the quota wasn't even being met, but the very nature of the quota caused people to be unselective. And I'm pretty sure they took the quota off and they never went over it and people were a lot more selective. Yeah, if you think the hunt's gonna end tomorrow, you're gonna shoot the first bearer that you see, and oftentimes that's the juvenile or female. 00:40:53 Speaker 3: Which could force and it's on the hunter, right, the hunter should be a better hunter. But oftentimes, you know, we've all done it with a deer or something. You're like, man, that deer was way bigger when I looked through the scope than he was when I got up to it. Right. The so things they addressed they addressed selectivity with that, that's good. They also address selectivity by allowing bait stations and and dogs, because you know as well as I do that both of those things are going to give you time to say, hey, is that a sal? Hey does she have cubs with her? How big are the cubs? Like you can look and study this situation. Yes, and you're gonna have camera set up on your bait station, yes, to where you're gonna know the bears that are coming in and out and be like, oh, that's a sal but I got a bore over here, like that's that's what I'm gonna And it allows people, all of us as hunters, we're in it for everything, right, the meat, the hide, the fat that like we want to but the end of the day, we'd like to take the biggest thing we can or the best thing we can, and in this case, removing that that urgency allows for us to have way more selectivity in this hunt. And to me, the agency got that exactly right. The anti hunters will tell you, and I don't. I live in a world where I have to deal with them. I will tell you I don't necessarily care what they say. I do I pay attention to it. The anti hangers will tell you, well, these are barbaric methods. This, that, and the other. These methods are because you guys wanted better selectivity in the hunt. Yes, it was nothing wrong with the first hunt, but we've changed it based off your feedback, and these are the methods that we've allowed to get into it. 00:42:28 Speaker 1: Right, man, that I can't believe you're saying this with such clarity, because I think ten years ago the articulation of that idea just wasn't widely known inside of bear hunting. These these these methods allow hunters to be selective. And you could say that that is just big talk and that actually doesn't happen in the field, but it does. I mean, hound hunters let way more bears go they than they harvest even in play is where they could. I mean they're being selective, not everyone. I mean sometimes you got a kid with you and it's their first bear, and you let them shoot a dry sow sometimes. I mean, I'm not saying juveniles and souths don't get harvested sometimes, but in general, hound hunters are trying to be selective for older age class males period baiting bears. The cameras, man, I am the most selective period when I'm baiting a bear, because I know every bear that's coming in there, and it's very difficult to kill that older age male, and it becomes a challenge, it becomes it's what makes it enjoyable and fun to try to kill a big bear over bait, which is actually quite difficult. 00:43:43 Speaker 2: And anybody who says that that hunting bears over bait is unethical and easy has never baited for bears. 00:43:52 Speaker 3: Talk to me about that for a minute. Sure, this is one of the things old explain fair chase and baiting. Yeah, like, can you can you do that? Can you just tell me that jump in. 00:44:00 Speaker 1: Like to me, when you describe fair chase, you know you're you're capitalizing on that. Bears natural tendency for hyperphagia in the fall. I mean you're you're capitalizing on a biological process inside of that animal to hyper fixate on a food source, just like they would an acorn flat or a cabbage palm flat, or berries in the summer, or a salmon stream in the Northwest. So you're capitalizing on something this animal is doing naturally. 00:44:31 Speaker 3: Number one. 00:44:33 Speaker 1: Number two, if if you have this North American idea of taking an older age class male, that animal is incredibly intelligent, intelligent acts completely different than juveniles and females. And it's very difficult to kill over bait because when you're hunting over bait, you have a stationary bait. A human has got to be within a bow shot distance of that if you're hunting with a bow, which most baiting six bears is archery hunting. And that big bear knows he is made a living with his nose, and he knows when you're there, and he knows when you leave, and you got to kill him while you're there. You can't not be there and kill him. And killing a large I'm talking like a ten plus year old boar bear over bait anywhere in the country is as hard as just about as hard as any big game hunt you would ever have. And so the hunter that's sitting there that kills a big bear, he has let go a bunch of animals that came in before it. And that's just what people wouldn't understand or see why I. 00:45:38 Speaker 3: Would to ask you. As a beer hunting expert, I can see this, but you. 00:45:41 Speaker 1: Well, you're so you've got to practice a high level of selection. And basically to me, when I think about fair chase and ethics and just kind of this big North American model, when you understand that baiting or and we can talk about hounds too, where baiting is a cool for selection, it's like that makes it ethical just in its own sense. If we could even just go in and extract a mail easily, that would make it worth it. 00:46:11 Speaker 3: But we can't. But we can't. 00:46:13 Speaker 1: Mails are very hard to get to come into a bait like that. And so to me, it it completely fits the idea of of of fair chase three components. You're you're capitalizing on an animal's natural tendency, just like it would in the wild. Your your you've got to be in very close proximity and you cannot hide from bear. Everybody in the planet, every white tail hunting of the planet that thinks that they can hide from a black bear over bait using all the different scent control products has never done it because you cannot. Period A thousand years from now, they're going to replay this and they're gonna say that old Hillbuilding was right because technology has never become good enough for us to eat a black bear's nose. It is supernatural. When you see a bear's nose flexing like this in the wind, he literally is talking to God. Not literally, that's a metaphor. 00:47:10 Speaker 3: He is. 00:47:10 Speaker 1: It is a super it is it's so powerful, it's almost supernatural. 00:47:14 Speaker 3: That's my point, John Well. 00:47:15 Speaker 1: And and then and then the third prong of the fair chase component to me is that it's a powerful management tool to be selective period done over and out bear hunting with bait. 00:47:29 Speaker 2: Well and and what like what we experienced last year, you know you can have you can have great bears coming into your bait because that's what they want. And then you're playing this this match with nature and just because you've got all this high fat, delicious bait. As soon as those acrons start falling. 00:47:51 Speaker 1: And they would they would rather eat natural food than any I mean, they've been built for one point five million years off eating natural food, and here in the last you know, one hundred years, we would put out anthiprogenet food for them, that would that they would be attracted to. They want to go back to natural food anywhere in the country. 00:48:14 Speaker 3: So it's interesting you say that. So in Florida we're not allowed we're allowing basic I don't know why we're calling them bait stations. They're feeders. We're not allowing donuts or or like we're not allowing it's corn or sort like it can be like it's natural, it's what it's what we put in at feed Yeah, it's And so this conversation has gotten high. I think it's a bad marketing. I think the agency did a bad marketing job and the anti honey community grabbed onto it because we talked about bait and then they go get pictures of a grizzly bear eating donuts or something, and it's like, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about trying to get a bear to come to a corn feeder. Yeah, and especially in an okaymic, this's got just a huge mast. 00:48:58 Speaker 1: Here like well, and and the other thing too is that you can get a bear to come to corn and grain and all this stuff during the summer very easily in the fall, which I would assume the despair hound's going to be taking place in what's in December. 00:49:15 Speaker 3: So the first year is a three week in December. Okay, after that it'll extend out. 00:49:19 Speaker 1: But go ahead, well, just just like right now in Arkansas, you get every bear in the country to come to a pile of corn. A month from now, when the acorns start to trickle down, you will have a very difficult time getting a bear to come to a pilot corn at the point being in December. The effectiveness of using this kind of natural more natural food for a bear is probably not going to be great. 00:49:43 Speaker 3: And that's what That's a harder nuanced conversation to have, right That's why I wanted to have it with you. It's a nuanced conversation that gets missed yea by the general public. And I'm hoping a lot of them will watch this and say, oh, well, that makes way more sense. You're not putting a feeder out there and saying I'm gonna roll out here about eleven to shoot a bear by eleven thirty because he's going to be on that feeder eating. 00:50:04 Speaker 1: Well, right, that's what was going and that's probably why people here as they hear, well, they're tearing down corn feeders. You can't keep my bears off corn. You know, this is just gonna be so easy. But in December it's different. And now I've never been around bears in Florida, it's possible there's a slight different everywhere they're a little different, but in general, I guarantee you that getting them to come to that in December is going to be different than getting to come to that in August during a stress period in August, probably when they're mainly hurting people's feeders and whatnot. 00:50:37 Speaker 3: Yeah, let me just throw this out there for color has nothing to do with bears, but it talks about Florida. Our south is on Archery opens in July, does it really? Because the rut is so early and then we have zones No that you can't hunt the key here. But this is like Everglades, like Big Cyprus and south of seventy It opens in July. Archery opens like this year, I think it was July twenty eighth night. So you want to talk about fun sitting in that in a tree, like you'll strip down to your underwear. It's bad out here, Moisquita is just going, but you. 00:51:09 Speaker 2: Just put and then we have fan all over your whole body and set up their naked. 00:51:14 Speaker 3: I am an hour and a half north of that road and the wa closest to me their rut is in February. Wow. So so just the way that landscape is is so and we have different zones around this. I think we have five different zones for deer because they rud at different times and everything. So I think we will begin to figure that out with bear as well over time of when they do feed heavier when they don't. And I think that's I think our agency has probably already looked at that, but they'll continue to look at that and study it as we see hunter success. So hunter success is a thing when we're talking about the number of permits they're issue in one hundred and eighty seven. Have you ever done a sight tag like a like a like an alligator hunt, like we have to put a tag, a hard tag in the gator. You get those two tags if you don't harvest, you send them back. At the end of the year, you gotta return them. The bear hunt's gonna be the same. It's not Siety's tag, but it's it's gonna be the same kind of way where you're issued a hard tag and when you take that bear, you've got to report it immediately. It's no longer checkstations. So we're not gonna give the antis, you know, this place where you just set up their cameras and harass hunters and then you've got to put that tag into the bear, or if you don't harvest, you're gonna return it. So the agency set the threshold for harvest. If one hundred percent of those tags are females and one hundred percent of them are successful, the population will grow zero. It will not decline. It'll it'll be at least a zero percent growth zero or greater. Then, so that's not gonna hurt the popular There is no mortality that's gonna cause it to go down from hunting. Yes, So it's really interesting in the court of public opinion, people are like, well, they're doing this because we've got too many bears. This isn't really gonna change how many bears we have, it's gonna be at least the same number of bears. We have, probably a slow growth because you know as well as I do. What is the I'm putting you all on the spot. What's the average success rate for a bear hunter? Sixty forty percent? Like, I don't know than that. That would be my guest too. One hundred and eighty seven tags, we could do some math real quick. Fifty of them get filled, one hundred of them get filled would be. 00:53:18 Speaker 1: Well, right, if you're talking about in general, like in North America, I would say way less than that. In a hunt like this this news, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't fill ninety percent of them. 00:53:27 Speaker 3: It may be the first year. Yeah. The other side of that is we've put tools in place that are given a selectivity. So again that's based on new population growth. If you have harvest only soals and one hundred percent success, yeah, we know we're not gonna have one hundred percent success, and we know given selectivity, right. 00:53:43 Speaker 1: So like you're gonna choose the board worst possible scenario. It still doesn't hurt anything, does it change anything? 00:53:49 Speaker 3: Yeah? So I've heard so much pushback about it and They're like, how can you support this. I'm like, well, this is conservation man. Yeah, absolutely, I've got this sustainable resource that I can take. And I've said this for I've said this for a long time. In twenty sixteen, there were some number of bears we could take that did not matter five thirty seventy five. I don't know the number. I'm not a scientist, but there were some number of bears that would have fallen under compensatory mortality in the state. Yes, that could have been taken. Continually, we fell into a social science trap, a little bit of we should not hunt this charismatic megafauna. Now we are back to where we have turned on this hunt, and this hunt should stay on for forever as long as the population is say the population is not going to decline because of hunting, yes, but if a disease came in or whatever, and we could turn the hunt off. But the hunt is now on. We're not going to have to go through this iteration year after year after year. It'll be up to the agency to look at the population and say, well, we had this much success rate last year, we had this much harvest rate on boors versus south and we're going to issue three hundred tags this year instead of one hundred and eighty seven, or we're going to issue a hundred tags this year instead one hundred and eighty seven. Like the agency's going to be able to follow adaptive management is what we call it, going to use that to set the threshold for how many bears can be taken, and then they're gonna have a three month span in the fall. I think it's October, November, December that will be open for hunting. So this first year, no dogs in year one. I think actually dogs are on until twenty seven because it's kind of a staggered approach. I think you told me this a long time ago. I vaguely remember somebody telling me this long term, to hunt bears, you're gonna have to use dogs to have any measure of success, right, Like dogs are not sure I've said that, but I'm paraphrasing. Maybe, but like, dogs are one of the most effective ways to hunt bears. Yeah, but initially with this bear population, they haven't been hunted, so we'll probably have a higher success rate initially for a couple of years. Then we're going to need some other tools to move these bears around and run them out and have success because you're not going to be able to just pop one at your deer feeder. They're going to get conditioned pretty quickly. 00:55:55 Speaker 1: They will, they will, they'll they'll they'll learn, they'll adapt, and they'll they will get harder to hunt over time. 00:56:01 Speaker 3: And dogs are going to be critical to being able to hunt them. Yes, that's yes. So that's where we're at today. It's going to be five dollars for a tag to apply and then if you get issue only residents, no, it's resident and non resident are it's one hundred dollars for resident, three hundred dollars for a non resident if you get if you get drawn. 00:56:21 Speaker 1: Wow, So I could apply for attack. 00:56:23 Speaker 3: I hope you do. 00:56:24 Speaker 1: Don't tell them, Josh, edit this out. 00:56:28 Speaker 3: I love it. Man. And so the anti hunting community do. Their new movement is they're trying to get everyone to apply for as many tags as they can afford and buy a honey license. Oh. I am thrilled with this. Just stef Wire, I'm over the moon. 00:56:38 Speaker 1: Wow, they're going to contribute to this thing. 00:56:41 Speaker 3: They're contributing to conservation. 00:56:42 Speaker 1: I've had I had a thought, and I think I'm changing on this and it's not a conscious change, but it's my my attitudes towards towards anti hunters and some of the expressed truly ignorance. I don't mean that word drivetory, but in the truest nature sense of the nature that the ignorance oftentimes of anti hunting community, just in their lack of knowledge of conservation, why we do what we do, hunting culture, historic use practices, you know, has has caused my blood pressure to go up, and I would I would probably have been a little more like, I don't care what you think, this is who we are, kind of make it like a tribal identity thing in a way, like just personally, maybe me in the in the claw, you know, in a in private setting. I really feel like the wind is for us as a community to become a much much more understanding of people's ignorance, ignorance and be a little more merciful. Most people. There's probably three percent of the anti hunting community that are just jackwagons. Oh yeah, that are that are like not interested in changing, not interested in the facts, are just interested in causing trouble. 00:58:07 Speaker 2: They're probably and they're probably ugly too. 00:58:09 Speaker 1: They're probably ugly, yes, but most of them probably just have never set with somebody that they could make eye contact with and they could go, this is a real human I want to hear their story, and they hear about my life and eating bear and my family and me taking my kids and us literally preserving land for bear hunting, and when they hear about some of the deep history of bear hunting, and when they hear what me, you and I were talking about earlier about the eight bear species on planet Earth. They are twice as many American black bears as of all other species combined. This is a massive success story. I mean, if I sat with or you sat with, or anybody of us set with somebody, most of those anti hunters would go, you know what, I didn't know that. I mean, most people would probably be a little bit reasonable. And I think that's the play is not because right now in the country, the political the political atmosphere is to just like be vehemently opposed to your enemies, just smack them in the mouth with this is who we are. I mean, it's just all over from both sides and every side, and that just doesn't it just creates bigger enemies and I just feel like we need to and that the practical solutions and way to do this. It's hard to say, but just like a grassroots tenor change of us being like, hey, we're all on the same team. We want bears on the landscape. 00:59:44 Speaker 3: And and. 00:59:47 Speaker 1: It's okay. I understand why you might be concerned. 00:59:51 Speaker 3: You said it earlier in your statement. I think you said the word tribal. Yeah, it's demystifying the badge that you wear, right, Like it's easy for me to go outside and say man, meat eater man. But then you sit down and talk to Clay or you talk to another you talk to like you get to know these people and it's like, well, wait a second, they're all really good guy, you know, like I'm using it as as an avatar for this conversation, but that we see that a lot. We hate the Wildlife Agency, but you sit down and talk to this scientist or that scientist or whatever, and it's like, man, they really are looking out for our best interest, the wildlife's best interest, to making decisions that are looking at everybody broadly. I have gotten personally docked multiple times over this issue, like address name, phone number put on the internet, we pray nothing bad happens to this guy, and then my picture Remember the that actually happened to you? Oh, it's happened multiple Remember the would you rather encounter a man or a bear in the wild thing that was kind of going out on the internet. There was like this whole thing where women were like, we'd rather encounter a bear in the wild than a man in the woods. They actually took my picture and put it next to a bear and like plastered it everywhere, And there were people coming and say, well, if we're going to open a season, we want to open them on this guy, and like they were, it's easy for me to just get defensive over that, right, It's easy for me to there's a handful of people five seven nine that are responsible for that. The vast majority of the people even commenting on it don't understand, don't know the nuance. And if they walked in this room, first off, they wouldn't be that aggressive. And second off, if they sat here and talked to me for a minute, they'd realize I care. Just as the presupposition is that I don't want wild Florida to exist, Dude, I want wild Florida exists. Way more than you do. I want black bears everywhere. I want ducks everywhere. I want turkeys to wear our trip over them like I want. I want cabbage palms at oak trees and cows. That's what I want. I don't want concrete jungles. And the way I'm going to do it, I've got a solution to do it that I'm working on right here. I don't know what your plan is other than demonizing me, Like I'm on your team trying to fix this thing. And I don't say that in a defense way. I like, I'm pretty cavalier about I'll just sit down with anybody'd have that conversation, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like, let's get to it, man, Yeah, get to us the way through it. 01:02:18 Speaker 1: People are capitalizing on our desire to strike an enemy, and we're letting the five percent get it so riled up that we become we become radicals. Oh yeah, you know, I mean and and and. 01:02:36 Speaker 3: There's a game theory If you ever get a free time, there's a you can read about game theory stuff. And there's the thing called an Overton window in the middle of like a number line, and you're trying to shift that overton window your way. And so if you looked at the I'm backwards to the camera. But this is the far right, this is the far left, and and you try to fire up your base, and it pulls people this way because the people in the middle don't have a choice. They're like, well, I've got to v this way or I got to vote that way. And so you don't go to the middle, you go to the edges, okay, and you create this thing called an over the window that you're trying to shift your way on this number line. 01:03:10 Speaker 1: That's what touches people to be radical. 01:03:12 Speaker 3: It pushes people to be radical because that's where you're going to raise money, that's where you're gonna raise support, and that's where you're gonna fire up your base. 01:03:18 Speaker 1: But what if radical was just reasonable? 01:03:21 Speaker 3: And I think that's the conversation that I try to change every day, is like, what if radical didn't exist? What if we just took a common sense approach to conversation, to conservation. You know, what if we I'll go back to development in Florida, people say all the time, I'm anti development. You gotta stop, dude. Do you know how many people in Florida make their living off building houses or and then and then you're a fishing guide or a hunting guy, like do you check W two's for people when they get on your boat, like that they work for a fertilizer company, or they work for the like they're all connected to it somehow. Like economic growth is economic growth. I'm not anti development. I'm pro smart growth, Like, let's sit down and figure out ways forward that take care of my natural resources in your financial needs or economic needs, your tax base is what's going to grow your economy. I just think we get into these binaries. You have to stop growing, you have to grow at all costs. Dude, most of us are right here at some game. Most it's not binary, right, It's most of us sit somewhere here in the middle. And I think there's a whole lot of good conservation that is missed because we spend time in this fight and in this fight, and that's not the fight. The conversations right here in the middle where we can move it forward. And I think this whole thing, I think bears perfect example of that. Because I said earlier, the agency went and addressed these concerns over here were we never want to hunt. But their reasons were because you killed too many sous and he killed them. It was a blood bath. It was too fast, and the hunters could have been over here said well, we did it right the first time. And I could make the argument that quote a hunt was handled right the first time. The hunters could get over here and in turn and say, well, we're going to do it this way. By golly, we're not changing with the agency did a really good job, and the sportsman's community did a really good job was coming up with a solution that really did address their concerns. Yes, now they don't want any hunting to take place, we're not going to move there, but they did address their concerns with selectivity, with season and everything else. Man, that's what conservation is supposed to look like. I believe that in my heart that's what conservation is supposed to look like. And now we have the sustainable renewable resource that is a game species. By the way, you you're the best bear guy that I know. Why are bears considered a game species? Can you can you talk about that for me? Because that's a question I get all the time. 01:05:37 Speaker 1: What Lets let me put a pause right there on that question, because I want to say one thing and then I want to go to that right there. If the reason bears are so important is if we can win on bears, we can win on anything. 01:05:53 Speaker 3: Guard the gate. 01:05:54 Speaker 1: Is what you've said so to me, and we've said this for a decade, is that when you look at the whole of North American hunting, if we can protect the thing that's the gate for you know, the lowest hanging fruit, which is always going to be predators, I mean everything above it is safe essentially, you know, deer. I mean people, people aren't as going to be as concerned about if we're talking about actually legislatively hunting opportunities being taken away. I mean, when I think about bears in Florida, it's almost it's almost like the bear being the keystone species biologically, Like if you have bears, then you probably got good turkey habitat, and good deer habitat, and good habitat and good gopher gopher shorts habitat. In a way, if you've got a bear hunt in your state, you probably got a lot of things in order to even legislatively And that's why I've always said that I feel like bear hunting is probably as critical a topic of discussion and interest for us to understand and be able to articulate and talk through. Because if you can explain bear hunting to somebody that's starting from zero and get them to go, you know what, I kind of understand why you'd hunt a bear now, man, you have one, You're the hero, And I just think bears are really important. It's critically important. 01:07:22 Speaker 3: I'm a guy that's never hunted a bear spending a lot of time with bears because of because I think it is. I think it's crucial to saving what matters in my state, yes, And I think it's crucial to saving this tool that matters in my state, yes, right, Like it's critical to keeping the wild places wild, but it's also critical to saving hunting, which is going to help keep the wild police as wild. Man. 01:07:44 Speaker 1: I think it's so cool that you're such an advocate for it, and I love it that you say you've never hunted a bear. I mean, we don't need everybody to go hunt a bear. I mean they can that there's plenty of opportunity to, but it's like people getting involved in something bigger than them themselves. Is important right now in this time, is. 01:08:05 Speaker 3: It matters a great deal? Your question? Let me ask you again because this is and I'm asking you. I know how to answer this, but I'm asking you. Is the bear hunting experted guy, Yeah, he's the guy. Sister. I get asked all the time, why do we consider bear game species? 01:08:27 Speaker 2: Now? 01:08:27 Speaker 3: This is being asked by Florida environmentalist primary and I was like, let me ask Clay. 01:08:31 Speaker 1: Like, well, I think I think that there's two might be two ways to view that. Like in the past, a lot of game agencies managed bears as as a as a vermin, essentially managed them from a as a nuisance species as a nuisance species because they wanted them off the landscape. I mean that's that's actually I mean, just in the last thirty years, I think have all the states now made bear black bears a game species, which game species meaning that what that translates to, it's gonna have a lot more protection, it's gonna have science based studies going into how many are there, how many are taken? Like when an animal comes a game species all of a sudden, it's getting a lot more attention, a lot more regulation, And it's good now I think what an anti hunter and Florida might The tunnel that their question is coming from is why are we even hunting them? This shouldn't be an animal that we even hunt, so like they're not saying, let's manage it as a vermin or a nuisance animal. Am I right? 01:09:40 Speaker 3: You know you're exactly right, But I want you to talk about the well bears are the species we do the most with, right. 01:09:45 Speaker 1: The historic historic practice on this continent is humans on this place have been hunting bears since the since the time they set their feet on this continent, long deep, deep history. Utilization of BlackBerry in this continent. I mean we talk about utilization of wild game, like we kill a deer and we want to eat all the meat and you know, save the horns for a memory. 01:10:13 Speaker 3: Man. 01:10:14 Speaker 1: Black bears. We use more of a black bear than any other big game species that we harvest. How many deer hides do you have hanging in your house? Okay, bear hides on a black bear? You eat the meat. I would say eighty percent of blackberries. Their hides are tanned when people harvest them, and we render the fat, which is something that's revival. There's a bear fat revival in this country, and guys are starting to harvest fat from their animals and rendered into bear grease, so historic use. Native Americans use bear like crazy. They're incredible table fare. I mean, in the frontier days, people killed deer for their skins and bear for the meat. I mean, it was crazy to think about eating deer. Guys were the the long hunters were shooting deer and leaving the carcasses on the ground and killing bears for food. So essentially, the answer to your question would be they're an incredible animal for eating and for for utilizing for bear fat. I mean, you could go into all the things you do with bear fat. But uh, I mean does that does that answer your question? 01:11:20 Speaker 3: I think that is the That's what I have said to people, But I'm not a bear hunter, so it rings hollow when I say it. I'm asking you the bear expert, like, this is the animal right I. 01:11:29 Speaker 1: Mean, is if a white tailed deer is a game animal, manages a game animal because we eat it. A bear is managed as a game animal because it's better than a white tailed. 01:11:38 Speaker 3: Deer, that's the answer. 01:11:41 Speaker 1: I mean, it's just true. And and uh, and we've got that that deep historical data that that that says that you know, I love it. 01:11:52 Speaker 2: Well, I'd eat a bear burger any day over just about any other meat. 01:11:56 Speaker 1: What did you say. You've had two bear burgers in my house in the last month. 01:11:59 Speaker 2: They are the best that you can eat. 01:12:02 Speaker 1: Anybody that I don't know. Three out of ten guys I talked to, go man, I don't like bear meat. I had at once and it was tasted to a man. I have no idea what people are doing if they have any meat that tastes bad delicious. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what to tell them. It's it's really great meat. 01:12:21 Speaker 3: I've never had a bear burger. I've had a I've had roast. I've had a bunch of roast, but never had a burger. 01:12:27 Speaker 1: I wish I would have cooked you one if you were here long. 01:12:30 Speaker 3: Well, we'll have to do Florida. Come to Florida Harvest Bear and then we. 01:12:34 Speaker 1: Can if I draw one of those tags. But we're not going to tell them that no non residents can't. 01:12:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's no way that a non resident could ever get a Florida bear tag. 01:12:46 Speaker 3: Really neat, that was a joke. Really neat thing they're doing too, is they wanted to make sure private lands were in corporated, because obviously you can't have a feeder on public land. We can use dogs on a lot of public land. We have a lot of National Force billowed, but not in this season, in this this first year, right, but not the second one. It'd be twenty seven before dogs were used. Okay, dogs would utilize but we'll see. Oh, so the private landowner will be able to apply for tags and those tags would come out of the whole quota, which you could argue, well, that's less opportunities for me, But I think it's a really good management tool, and. 01:13:25 Speaker 1: I think landowner isn't it has a better chance of getting the tag. 01:13:31 Speaker 3: Is that what you're saying? No, But if they apply, they could get those tags taken out of the one hundred and eighty seven. So if you have three thousand acres in North Florida and you got bears all over it, you can apply for the private landowner tags now. 01:13:42 Speaker 1: But they wouldn't go in the draw. 01:13:44 Speaker 3: They would have to is it their own draw? 01:13:48 Speaker 1: No? 01:13:48 Speaker 3: I think they still have to go through the draw process. But if they got drawn, it would come out of that. 01:13:52 Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm not understanding. I feel like there's something else you're saying. Because if me and a landowner with ten thousand acres put in, I would have the same odds as drawn as him. 01:14:03 Speaker 3: That's the way I understand it work. But I can get you a clarification on that. 01:14:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I thought maybe you were saying there with those guys were given a preference. 01:14:10 Speaker 3: No, they're not giving a preference. They're not giving a preference. But I think what will happen is we'll see that program grow out over the time and so this first year we may see someone in a private landowners take some of those on hundred and eighty seven tacks as through an application process. I would think arguably they're going to have a higher success rate because they got feeders and they've got private land. This man is different. You don't have the romping stamp of people like driving their cheeks and riding horses. But then long term, I think we'll see a private land program. 01:14:39 Speaker 1: Man, I'm all for it. See anybody that is like man, the private land guys getting any kind of a preference over non private land, I'm not for it. And I don't own big properties. 01:14:51 Speaker 3: I don't. 01:14:53 Speaker 1: But if I owned four thousand acres in Florida and I got bear, it's just crawling with bears. Give me an incentive exactly to not gut shoot those bears with a twenty two rifle, which that's very crass and I don't even. 01:15:07 Speaker 3: Like to say, but it's a shut up, right, Like, Oh. 01:15:10 Speaker 1: It happens all the time in places where there's no season and there's no outlet for. 01:15:15 Speaker 3: Management of that species. That's right. And oh, you've got an animal that's destructive. You said he's curious. He's destructive to I don't know that they would take a cap, but I know they take goats and cheap and things like that. Like they will opportunistically take livestock. They'll destroy fences and sheds and barns and like they just we had our first fatality from a bear. 01:15:35 Speaker 1: I was going to bring that up. Do you think that was part of the what helped push this hunt over? You don't think you had anything they had anything to do with it. Tell me about that fatality. 01:15:44 Speaker 3: When was it? This was in May so so the commission meeting, I don't remember the dates. May was kind of a blurb. But the commission meeting, it was like two weeks before the FBC Commission meeting, we had we had a guy. He lives in the Everglades and the bear. The details have not been released fully so so the report's not out there yet. But the agency calls it a predatory attack. Wow. So it's a really sad situation. 01:16:08 Speaker 1: And was it was it in his neighborhood or was it out in the wild. 01:16:11 Speaker 3: It was he kind of lived remotely, so uh, he lived in like a like a for lack of a better term, I called an in holding, like like he lived in the woods. It killed his dog and it killed him. They and the agency ended up killing three bears in reaction to that, to that attack, and it was it was there. I have heard it is some of the grizzliest stuff that people have ever seen. Wow, like really yeah, unsettling. The photos and the I haven't seen them, but it was unsettling. 01:16:43 Speaker 1: So black bear, it's pretty it's pretty interesting. On average, like one American gets killed a year by black bear. 01:16:53 Speaker 3: Really on average, I. 01:16:57 Speaker 1: Want to say three or four on average get killed by grizzlies, which is super interesting because the grizzly home the range of grizzlies is three percent of what the range of black bears is. On average, reported black bear attacks over the last like sixty years, there's like thirteen documented black bear what they would consider an attack on humans. So and this is general data. One death, thirteen attacks. Wow, a lot of stuff doesn't go reported. Like my friend Moe Shepherd who got charged by salve black bear and punched it in the face with his bow and kicked it in the teeth, and like it didn't hurt him, Like that wasn't considered an attack. 01:17:48 Speaker 3: It wasn't. 01:17:49 Speaker 1: It didn't counted like if it's if there's contact, Well there was contact in that one, but point bing. There's a lot more skirmishes that happen, but actual attacks where somebody gets malled. Statistically, the people that get attacked are people that have dogs because they go for the dog. Well, the dog goes for the bear. If you've got a leash dog, it's actually better. But if you have an unleashed dog, like I don't want to say the percentage, but a vast a lot of those thirteen attacks that are going to happen by a dog is running loose. You're just walking down a trail. Your dog sees the bear before you goes in barks at the bear. The bear turns on the dog, and the dog goes, oh crap. The dog runs back to you. The bear follows the dog right back to you and attacks you. Yep, So the the consistent theme inside of attacks is dogs, which people actually usually would think a dog would be protecting them from the bear. Right, But that's why people are getting attacked. And then, but the most deaths are from predatory attacks, usually juvenile males, and they literally are when a bear is stalking people. You know, there's a way that they categorize a predatory attack. It's not like a surprise. It's not a salad defending her cubs. Salad defending her cubs is not gonna kill you. She's just gonna eradicate those you're sure in the threat, in the threat, and as soon as she can get away from it, she's going to So you're gonna get whooped on a little bit, but you very unlikely she's gonna kill you. The one that's gonna kill you is a three year old male that you're walking down a trail and all of a sudden you look back thirty yards and he's following you, just like walking, looking at you, making an eye contact, lowered head, and you start walking faster and he starts walking faster, and I mean that that's a bear that will kill you. And what happens. It's happened several times, uh, where basically a bear starts coming around somebody's house, like an inn holding where they're you know, just like this lone house out in the woods somewhere, and a bear just starts coming around, coming around, getting more more familiar with who's there, what's going on, and pretty soon that bear has killed somebody. There was a story, uh believe in California a couple of years ago, I mean in modern times, in the last decade, where a bear was just coming around this lady's house. She she called it the she she actually called it the big old B A S T A R D. That's what she called it. I don't want to say the word. Uh did I spell it right? 01:20:42 Speaker 3: Yeah? 01:20:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, y'all looking at you. 01:20:45 Speaker 2: We're gonna have a caption on the bottom. 01:20:48 Speaker 1: She called she called 's what she called it. All her family knew, you know, he's here, the big B word. That's like her broken her window ate that woman in her house. Oh my, yeah, yeah, and. 01:21:03 Speaker 3: Very rare. 01:21:04 Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you've got a much You shouldn't be afraid of black bears. You really shouldn't, but it does happen. Right anyway, I was going to ask you about that. 01:21:15 Speaker 2: You give them a name like that, If you give it a name like that, just expect to get attacked. 01:21:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, be more respectful of your names. Right, that's right. 01:21:32 Speaker 1: Another dynamic of the black bear situation in America, and it's happening in Florida, is never before in history has there been so much overlap with black bears and humans. Never in history. We've got more black bears today that we've had in the last two hundred years. And what was the American population two hundred years ago, I mean probably like ten million, twenty million, maybe today we've got three in a thirty million. And it's like j curving, you know, the so never before in history. So this idea that you'd think, like the American bear story is kind of this old like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett deal, you know, those are the guys that you know, had these overlaps with bears. They didn't have nothing compared to what we got today. 01:22:19 Speaker 3: You know, it's funny you say that too. I want to not to hijack where you're going there, but going back to like the conservation success, like you said, when when vodka got there, De Soto got there, there were probably eleven thousand bears prior to that. Then we went into this massive slump. And now we have twenty two and a half million people in this state, and we got over four thousand bears. 01:22:42 Speaker 1: You got almost a third of them. 01:22:44 Speaker 3: We have not half of We're almost back to where like and we've grown and I mean none of what's in Florida existed when they set foot there, right, And we've the species and so we talk about what's wrong in conservation all the time. Leopold talked about the world of wounds that we live in. You see all the problems in reality, that's pretty good, man, Like the species has been restored to such a place that we could take some of them as a sustainable, renewable, yeah resource, and they likely are continuing to grow. We're continuing to study them. Like that's yes. 01:23:14 Speaker 1: If one hundred years ago you you you said, okay, one day there's gonna be twenty two million people in Florida. All these people are gonna have a place to live, All these resources are gonna be extracted. There's gonna be roads. You don't know much about roads two hundred years ago, but there's gonna be pavement on them. Let's pavement, right. 01:23:28 Speaker 3: Uh. 01:23:29 Speaker 1: And you would have said, what's gonna happen to the bears. 01:23:33 Speaker 3: They're gonna be gone. 01:23:34 Speaker 1: You would think they're gonna be completely gone. And it is still a little bit of a mystery how bears have done so well. I mean, we do know that the magic that populations, I mean, it's it's like white tailed deer, like disturbed landscapes produce more more vegetation, more feed, potentially more cover even at times than undisturbed landscapes. So just like white tailed deer, there there are twice as many white tailed deer today in America as there was pre European settlement. I mean, they say, and I don't know what the new numbers. 01:24:13 Speaker 3: Are, because they thrive with disturbance ecology. 01:24:15 Speaker 1: One hundred percent. And they're they're they're animals of the edges, and so we've created exponential amounts of edges compared to what would have been here pre European settlements, so white tailed deer have gone. Bear kind of fit into that same category. They're not quite like deer. They don't cone in on the ecological niches. But disturbance to the landscape has has produced success. And the thing that a bear can do that a deer can't is bears have learned how to use anthrogenic foods to their advantage. So in these urban centers and and even even in rural places like Arkansas, bears are capitalizing on some man made food and agricultural areas. Their man made food is skyrocketing and so it but it's still kind of a history. It's still like, wait a minute, why are bears doing so well? And this is a stat that's in the academic literature and has been for a decade plus, is that every research population of bears in North America is increasing or stable period. I mean, what other population of hunted animals, big game animals could you say that about. I mean, there's plenty of things that are doing well. I'm not but every population study, and the reason they say studied population is because they haven't really studied every population to the extent of others. Because if you have a limited amount of resources in your game agency. And there are bears everywhere, and you got you know, the bob black quail that's about to struggling kick the bucket, like you're putting a lot of energy towards here. They're kind of like this is particularly what I There is a lot of bear research that goes on in Canada, but it's almost like, hey, the bears are fine, let's study caribou. Do you kind of see what I'm saying. 01:26:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, So like I gotta put your money where you think it's gonna. 01:26:11 Speaker 1: And and and bears are one of the most research big game animals in North America, if not the most researched animal in North America. I mean, like incredible amount of research. But all that to say they're thriving. 01:26:24 Speaker 3: You said something else a minute ago too that as you're talking now, reminded me you talked about them being a game species when I asked you that question, and that we fund research. We I've run through this. In Florida a few years back, they wanted to close a fishing pier over pelicans on it, and I said, well, what's our what's our mortality rate on pelicans? What's compenstory. What's additive, Like I'm I'm I'm a I'm a hunter, Like we should know these well, we don't have the money to study them like that because they're not a game species. They're not they're not regulated in that way, they're not managed that way. We're versus game species. We know those details inside and out. Like I can go down the list of ducks and turkeys and yeah, I mean we can get into it on what really is happening with those species. Bear fit into that, and that's where hunters fit into this conversation. Right. We've been paying for that for a long long time and we're going to continue to pay for it. Yeah. 01:27:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, So Walk may ride up to last week when this is hot off the press, Walk may ride up to the commission meeting and tell me what happened. 01:27:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, so we The commission meeting was in a little town called Havana, Florida. You ever heard of Havana. I've heard of Havana, Cuba. It's not near that. It's about twenty minutes outside of Tallahassee. It is where the one thing f to BC does I've alluded to this early they moved around the state, so that it's not it's not always in Orlando, and you got to go there. It's not always in Tallhassee and you got to go there. Havana. The facility didn't cost taxpayer much because it's the law enforcement training facility, so we had a kind of a cheap facility to use there. We coordinated in advance. A lot of the hunting groups ordated in advance of Hey, we need to make sure we packed this room. I don't love that game because I don't think that should matter. How many people are in attendance in their area should not matter. Science should drive wild like Paulic. But there's a social science game a foot there. And so we showed up in mass Like I mentioned earlier, the dog hunting community. That's obviously a dog hunting stronghold the North Florida world, but we had folks drive from South Florida. I mean there were guys there from around the state. The dog hunters largely wore orange. So when you looked at the room, like, I can send you some pictures, but when you look at the room like, it's just a sea of orange in that room. Wow, Sierra Club bust people in. They had three bus locations around the state. One I think in Daytona, one in Tampa, and one somewhere south, and they bust people to the event to speak in opposition to the to the hunt and staff came up there, gave presentation. It was the same presentation they had in May. And because they bring it, they bring it to May for approval as a draft, and then they give some time for people to kind of and we had one no vote in May who flipped devoted just this time. One commister voted no in May and he flipped and voted yes this time. He didn't understand think it was dogs was one of his concerned dogs in bait. So we got to we got to you know, the staff did the presentation. Then they allow public comment and bye. By rule they say they're going to allow two hours for public comments and you typically get three minutes per person. Well, we had one hundred and seventy people sign up, so what are you gonna do. What they did is they gave every person a minute. See, I mean it's hard, you got to consolidate your three minutes down to a minute, but you get to go up there say your piece. And they made sure every person got to speak in that room. Really. Oh yeah, and I get that recorded. It is, it is, it'd be an interesting thing. It is because I learned some things one minute to speak man. I learned some things there. That you could kill bears just by staring at him. I did not know that that was. That was what one of the anti hunters said. And I was like, in DDE, now don't look at me, like that's dangerous what you doing right now? Like they a lady walked up there and she was determined that you could kill bears. She could scare them to death just by staring at them. We had another woman proposed that we that we hunt white tail deer granted coon out of a tree, right, so who knows? I'm interested in digging into that. Would another person say that we could we should look at a honety white tail deer. We've checked that box already. Another woman offered to give money to the Wildlife Commission directly if they would instead of a bear hunt, fund a python hunt, which you can hunt pythons anytime in Florida. 01:30:36 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's been massive mass so like there was just like people just didn't know. 01:30:41 Speaker 3: It was just a detachment from reality. That was fostered in and it's it's the people we were talking about a minute ago. I don't think those people, Like I'm kind of poking fun out, but I don't think those people are probably bad people. If you could sit down and have a conversation and be like the eye lady, I'm not sure how to even start that one, But like the other ones, I'm like, man, we hunt white tail deer. That's a game species that we've hunted for since we've been hunting. Yeah, it's just like a detachment. And so they're picking up on a narrative. And I sat next to a girl. It was from Sierra Club and she said, can I ask you some questions? I said sure, And she said, this is a trophy hunt, right, And I'm like, well, no, it's not a trophy hunt. I said, trophy hunting is like a missed omer. Secondly, no one trophy hunts anything in Florida. Like we have wanting waste balls and everything else. Like, you're not coming here to trophy hunt a deer. You know you're coming here because you want to hunt, you taking the meat and everything else. I was like, this is not a trophy hunt. You could just tell she'd kind of been misled. She had a tender heart for bears. She probably is never going to go hunt. But you know, I don't know if I changed her mind or anything else, but it was it was the conversation you're talking about, right, And I looked around the room and you see people around the room having those conversations where people are sitting next to you. 01:31:50 Speaker 1: You feel like the guys in Orange did a good job of interacting with the Sierra, and I realized that there was some that didn't didn't Probably. 01:31:59 Speaker 3: I'm gonna say that this is a Polk County redneck. There is the Pole County redneck, and then the probably the conservationist hunter. That's a little more some of the Pole County redneck types maybe not so much. But I was really proud of how the hunting community showed up and conducted themselves. When you got one minute on a subject, that spend this teased out for this long. Like those commissioners are briefed like they are in Florida. The commissioners are appointed by the governor. They oversee the they vote on the rules. The scientists present the rules, so the science are saying, here, here's what we think the hunt can be. The commission asked questions and dig into it a little bit, but they vote on whether or not we approve this recommendation. So seven of them man to stay engaged that long for three hours, listening to person after person is tough. 01:32:48 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:32:49 Speaker 3: What we did as a honey community is we went to it and everybody did this. We went to our people and said, look, if you're here and you're representing meat eater, you're here and you represent BHA or whatever, sure go up there and fly the flag. But if you got fifteen people here, have the other fourteen of them just stand up and say I wave and support. There's no reason to labor this. Yes. Yes, So the one hundred and seventy comments probably became one hundred and twenty people going to a microphone, which also it did force that number that time limit down. That wasn't intentional, but it did force that time limit down because those people all waved in support of this hunt. Really proud of how that was handled, and it was handled in a very organic I don't know everybody in the hunting community. You know, you go to the girls were there from American Daughters Conservations, this group we have down there of women, hunters, fishermen. They showed up in mass They made sure that everybody they talked to they went and said, hey, make sure you wave and support if you don't want to go to the microphone, and so you just stand up where you worry. You didn't even go to the mic and record, like your name's already up there, literally your hands, Hey, I wave and support, sit back down. And that was really well received I think by the Commission because it was respectful of their time. We had a long day. We had a lot of stuff to work on. I mean, there were other conservation issues we had to tackle besides bears. And that the next day, you and I played fone tag because I was I was in and out working on oysters and shrimp and bonefish and stuff that day. The hunting community, that was a high point. I mean, it was a really proud moment for me. Yeah, And it was a really proud moment for me because I look at I look at the broader hunting conservation world. And in the last year, we beat back Prop one twenty seven in Colorado, we beat back this Mike Lee public land sale. We passed the right to fish and hunting in Florida, which no one thought we would do. We just re established a bear hunt in Florida. What was it two years ago? They re established a bear hunt. Louisian like. It's easy for us to sit back and say, man, we are getting our butts whooked, but in fact we're drawing some pretty strong lines in the sand and saying we're reclaiming some of this ground for conservation, not just hunting. I don't talk about hunting as much as I talk about conservation. That's the verb that I use, or the now that I used to describe it, because that's the that's the activity that I care the most about, is conserving wildlife and conserving these things. I just happen to want to do it with shotgun. So really a high water moment. The commissioners, I think they asked good questions about they'll call staff back up at the end and they'll dig in, you know, clarify what dogs mean, clarify and sometimes it's something that maybe even somedd they've heard from an anti hunter and they're like, she doesn't understand it or he doesn't understand it. I want to ask a question to clarify it so that it's on the record as weird. People say, these dogs are going to go in there and attack the bears and kill them. That's not how this works. That's not the intention of dog hunting. People say, because you if you get a permit and you want a dog hunt, you're allowed to bring nine people with you. They believe that all nine people are going to or all ten people are going to shoot at the same time. That's not how it's going to work. Like you heard that over and over again in comments. It's like, this is going to be a firing squad on this bear. No, you guys know this, but like that's and so the commissioners will tease out those questions and asks like so what does this mean? What does that mean? And some of it they really were asking, and some of it they were asking to clarify for the other side. Get done, and Commissioner Gary Lester called for a vote. I think Commissioner Josh Kellum, who's our new commissioner, he seconded it, and they said let's vote, and it passed unanimously. All five of them went for it. 01:36:22 Speaker 2: That's awesome. 01:36:22 Speaker 1: So and man, I command the courage of all five of those commissioners in Florida for doing that. 01:36:29 Speaker 3: You know, it's sad to me that we've gotten to a societal place where these groups, these anti hunting groups have targeted their businesses because this is not their job. They're by vocational right. They don't get paid at all, they get reimbursed for travel. It's a huge job to be are and so ten days a year, eight days a year, they have to sit there and listen to again, not just bears, not the sexy stuff. We spent two hours on oysters the next day at how many we could harvest in a bucket or something like. It's not all the fun sexy stuff I love to eat ois. But they sit there and they participate and they engage well on it, and then we go and demonize them. And there's two sides of that too, right, Like that's another thing out of coming out of this is we left that meeting and I heard people in the honey community say, well, it was only one hundred and eighty seven and it was only these zones, and we need more and there's ten thousand bears, and say, guys, there's a way that this works. And we're working really hard to get as many bear permits as we can in a sustainable way, like just check yourself where you wreck yourself a little bit here, because we really are trying to navigate these things that are hard to get them done so that we can go out there and enjoy the resources that we love and experience. For me, it's never about killing an animal. It's about sitting in a stand and watching the world wake up, or being with my daughter, my son, or whoever you know. It's about the camaraderie. And yeah, I love to hang stuff on the wall and I love to eat the meat, but it's really about the time that I get to spend outdoors, and that's how I enter and exit it. It's carrying a rifle or carrying a shotgun or carrying a fishing ball. That's how I get in and out of it. So it was a watermark moment. I was really proud of those guys for standing strong. But there's people who have targeted their businesses. They are protesting. There's one who owns a car a lot in Tampa, So if you need a car, go to buy one from him, because he owns a car a lot in Tampa and he there's people protesting in front of his business targeting him specifically. And this is a guy that cares deeply about wildlife. Man, did they are. 01:38:23 Speaker 1: There any other species that people are doing that in Florida? I mean like protesting in the street. They're not worried about oysters, They're not worried about white tailed they're. 01:38:31 Speaker 3: Just bear bears. We get a lot of protests about developments. People don't have a real good understanding of private property rights and how that works in Florida, So we get a lot of protests about developments. And then we see a lot of protests around manatees. 01:38:46 Speaker 1: But I mean, nobody's you can't hunt. 01:38:48 Speaker 3: Manatees, it's not a thing, but it's a water quality manatees. That's a whole other thing. But manatees are a large grazing animal, Like there's a probably a carrying capacity for how many of them can exist in this state. And then we create more water discharges and we feed them let us and we kind of artificially inflate it. And you can get into some ecology of that. But there's a lot of protests about manatees when they die off and stuff like that, But bears are pretty much yet and the same anti honey community. What we've seen them move on now is archery. They've determined that archery is is inhumane and so we should not be allowed to archery hunt anymore. That's their next kind of ill to die on. There's no traction there. We're talking about a very small but very noisy, but very small group of people. And then they've also started dabbling into coyote honeting. They don't want. They don't want coyote honey. I don't know why. Coyote's pretty sustainable resource. We got plenty of them, and I'm not huge coyote hunter, but I've killed plenty of them. From a predator management standpoint for turkeys or whatever. It was a win. 01:39:57 Speaker 1: Should we expect more turbulence? Was there any thing legally about this hunt that sets it in perpetuity for a period of time. 01:40:04 Speaker 3: Nope, So it does not need to come back to the commission. 01:40:06 Speaker 1: But I mean, are they gonna last time in fifteen when we had a hunt, it was shut down the next year because of public opinion and all the stuff that happened after the hunt. Do you I don't think that to happen again. Are we kind of over it? 01:40:20 Speaker 3: You're asking Travis's opinion, I'd say I think we're going to be fine moving forward. Okay, I do think. Okay, so they do, and you know more about this than I do, but they do bear Den studies on a on a generational cycle, right something to this effect, so that every ten years they'll have new updated data. So twenty twenty nine is when they'll have the latest real population estimate for the state. We know that there's at least four thousand bears in Florida, and we also know that no matter what, this hunt's not going to change that population, right right, Like this goes back to what I said real early it could be five, could be twenty five, or you remember when they re established ELK in Tennessee, or they allowed seven to be taken, like it could be like that. The one hundred and eighty seven is such a it's a rounding error like it is nothing. So we're gonna see bear populations continue to thrive, and over time we're going to get better and better data to go with that because we don't not have data. We've got hair corral data and things like that. We know in different they call them BMus Bear Management units. In different BMus we know like some level of how many bears are using a particular fence line or whatever, so we know that that population is going to continue to grow. We know that the hunt is going to be very different from how it was last time, just from the removal of check stations, doing digital check in, doing the hard tag, allowing for selectivity, not forcing everybody to hunt all at once. We know that those factors, there's so many have changed. It's going to look very different coming out of it. And then we do know too that a lawsuit has already been filed by the anti honeting world, but it got dismissed out right in twenty fifteen, like they were sued at twenty fifteen for the hunt and the case was dismissed. So I don't want to be flipping about anything because you never know what's going to happen on any given day. But I just don't see any merit to that suit. Like FBC is a not to get too far in the policy weeds, but in most states you have a legislatively created body, a statutorily created body, where I think Arkansas is actually constitutionally as well. In Florida, FWBC was created by the constitution, so they're almost like a de facto fourth You got the executive, legislative, judicial, and a conservation branch. Now is the crossover with the governor appointees and stuff. Sure there is, And the legislature controls their budget, so they can force them budgetarily to do certain things. But the end of the day, FBC is an isolated body that's able to kind of make their own determinations on this stuff. I don't see how you win a lawsuit because they're constitutionally in powered to manage fish and wildlife. Like if you sue and say they breach their duty, well, their constitutional duties to manage fish and wildlife, and it's a pretty broad purview it's given to them. I just don't I don't see that. 01:43:10 Speaker 2: Holy merit. 01:43:11 Speaker 3: Maybe you get the right judge and the right jurisdiction, but I just don't see that. 01:43:14 Speaker 1: You know, when you when we talk about I think I think the the narrative, the way that we speak about hunting is important, and oftentimes you hear like there's a bear population in Florida, there's a new bear hunt. There's an expanding population, we're hunting them to control the population. Like that's what people will say, But that's that's actually not true because because the amount of bears that we're taking out of Florida is basically going to be ecologically inconsequential, it's insignificant. So what it comes down to really the what people like us that love wildlife and love wild places and love to eat wild game, what we believe is that, I mean, the philosophy is that a hunter should be able to take from the surplus of a of a healthy population of animals and use that resource from traditional use practice. I'm an American, I'm a eighth ninth generation American. My family has been hunting for a long time. I mean that, you know, there's all these reasons why it's like you ought to be able to hunt if it's not hurting anything. I mean, that's kind of the philosophy. And that is absolutely the doctrine is like, hey, if I can go out in my backyard and kill a couple of deer and feed my family and it's actually not hurting the population, I have the right to do that. And and and that's what we're saying. Even with bears, they're a game animal, they're they're an animal that we eat. Animal that we utilize heavily a animal that we have all this historic documentation on this continent. Since we got here, we've been hunting bears. They're still here. They're they're they're they're able to withstand human honting when it's done in the right way, which clearly this is a way that that is being done. So so could could the volume be turned up, Could the throttle be turned up to where the hunt actually did manage population numbers? It could, and in many states it does. 01:45:21 Speaker 3: Yep. 01:45:22 Speaker 1: I mean there's there's lots of states where thousands of bears are being killed and they're they're they're they're taken them out of the population because that populations are that big that you can't take a token one hundred and eighty seven bearers out of Wisconsin and expect the population to remain stable. I mean they're killing I want to say, in some of those those those states, they're killing four thousand bears a year. In Arkansas we're taking about five hundred bears, uh, which is not very many. Really a lot of a lot of Appalachian states they harvest a lot of bears. But point being, I think it's important that we be honest. I hear Rannelli's say this, and it's I like it. He's like, we shouldn't say things that aren't true, that make us that created a false narrative. I mean, could we make the Florida bear hunt actually affect the population? You absolutely could, you know, But this is not that. 01:46:23 Speaker 3: This is not even that, And it's not to say that they never because if you look at the BMU distribution, there are BMus that have way more bears and BMus that have way less bears. You want those BMus with way less bears to continue to grow their population, while you want to manage it in some of these others. But I also think over time, we will begin to apply more data to this and say, hey, we've got more human bear conflicts in this BMU, or we're seeing more interactions negatively in that BMU, Like we'll begin to distribute the hunt differently to maybe address this. Maybe we do want this this BMU to always be at a thousand bears or whatever the thing is. And the other thing that I heard you say that kind of stuck would be something I say all the time. This is truly and I can't stress this enough. I've said it a couple of times, but this is truly conservation. Like I say, conservation is seeking the proper use of a resource. It's utilizing a resource correctly. We are about to utilize a resource correctly that we haven't tapped into for a long time for various reasons. And now I like to say preservation is for delicious JEMs and jellies. That's nothing to do with conservation. Give me a tool that we use in certain situations, but by and large, conservation is seeking how to use it correctly. That's everything we've talked about here today, and that's everything we're talking about in general. That's everything you talk about on every episode. You do right ultimately, like you can get into the weeds, the nuts and bolts of Turkey Juton or duck hunt or whatever, but the end of the day, I want to make sure that this resource is long term, sustainably able to be used. And I'm really proud of wear Florida landed on this, and I'm really proud of everybody that worked on it because it is a I don't think people outside the bear world understand how big of a movement this was to get this done. 01:48:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man, that's so cool. You said something there we hadn't talked about. And I've got a data point on bear human conflict. I remember in the last year reading that there was and I'm going to say a number and at for about six months. I could quote the exact number. I've forgotten the exact number, but I'm going to quote a number. Five thousand, nine hundred and sixty six bear calls the state of Florida received in baar nuisance complaints in a single year. Wow, like in twenty three, yeah, or twenty two back, but it was somewhere in the fifty nine hundred range. 01:48:52 Speaker 3: Wow. 01:48:53 Speaker 1: And I did the math on it, and that's one bear call for every fifteen minutes of a working day. 01:49:02 Speaker 3: Wow. 01:49:03 Speaker 1: And basically the state of Florida. And I don't I don't know that all those calls go into the same place, but theoretically they would, they would, They could hire one person that as a full time All they did every day for a forty hour work week, from the time they got there to the time they left, was field calls of people saying, A bears in my trash can, A bears eating my flowers, A bear killed chase my dog, A bear did this or that. I mean in Arkansas, I want to say we're getting like under two hundred conuisance bear calls a year. Wow, Florida pushing six thousand. Yeah, it has to do with the population. There's twenty two million people there. Yeah, people, right, and there's that much, that many roads, that many people, A burgeoning bear population. I bet there's I bet they're right on there's more than four thousand bears if you were waging I bet it's more. 01:50:08 Speaker 3: I read. I read in the twenty nineteen report we euthanize forty a year. Okay, so one percent of the population we kill a year, just as nuisance bears. And that's on average. 01:50:21 Speaker 1: I bet, I bet there's I bet there's a lot more than that. And what I learned I've just seen this with bear bare numbers is that the agencies are usually pretty conservative on bearers, conservative very so they're there if they say there's four thousand, there's probably more than that, but if they don't have the actual data, Like so, the way that they're doing bear population studies today is yeah, they're using bear bears, hair snares Josh to put up a bait station, put barbed wire up about twenty inches or however long, put it around so a bear has either step over it or crawl under it, and there's barbed wire and it catches hair. And basically they do they'll take like a grid of habitat let's say ten square miles, and they'll put five bear hair snare traps in that ten square miles. They will take all the hair samples genetically analyze it to understand exactly how many individual bears came to those traps in that ten square miles. Then they will analyze the habitat in that ten square miles. This is a generalization of how they do this. And they'll say, well, we have a thousand other ten square mile blocks that the habitat is similar, and we know there's bears there. We're going to extrapolate it. And they do this like checkerboarded across the bear habitat and they go, well, in this ten square block ten square miles, we've got seventeen bears, We've got this many soals and this many cubs. And then the block twenty seven miles away has the same numbers, and they go every block in between there probably has the same. Basically, they get a really good. 01:52:13 Speaker 3: Look at. 01:52:15 Speaker 1: How bad you know, population dynamics of bears. Yes, that's how they do it now. Used two they were doing like they were using hunter harvest, not necessarily in Florida, but another place they were using hunter harvest numbers. I told the story, Well they covered it on the Medior podcast, but in California for years they used hunter harvest numbers to decide the population. Basically, they were like, whatever the hunters kill, we've probably got x number more bears than that, and so as long as we're killing two thousand bears a year, we probably got twenty thousand bears and we're okay. Well then they they gutted the management practices of Californias bait. 01:53:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, and so all you could do is like. 01:53:02 Speaker 1: Spotting stock bears, which is very difficult. And so they started killing like a thousand bears a year in California. And then the anti hunting community, god bless them, they were like, the bears are in crisis because we tell our numbers of bears about how many bears are killing, they're not killing very many. Oh, we got to shut the whole hunt down. Yeah, this is not a joke. This happened and then the game and fish is like, oh my gosh, this is not true. This is crazy. We got to do a real study. They do a hair they do a modern hair, simple study, and they find out that there's between sixty and eighty thousand bears in California. I mean, it's a wild story, but uh but yeah, just it'll be interesting to see the numbers in Florida. 01:53:49 Speaker 3: It'll be really interesting to see the numbers in Florida. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm a Florida boy through and through. So I think, Man, I think our wildlife agency is top notch and I really trust them implicitly. Like bears weren't under We have a we have an HGM Hunting and Game Management Division, and then we have Habitat and Species Conservation, which is not honting. That's all non game and lands. Bears were under HSC and now it's becoming a it's going back under hunting. So but that HSC division, like that team has just they're incredible, Like I trust them implicitly with the science that they produced and the science that will continue to produce, They're going to get it right. And there's nobody in Florida that's affiliated with this, that that wants to see bear numbers decline at this point, like we want to see them survive and thrive. This is a win, dude, this is where we want to be. Yeah, so I'm I'm over the moon where we're at. 01:54:50 Speaker 1: I think it's the longest burgers we were had. 01:54:52 Speaker 3: I think. 01:54:53 Speaker 1: So we've been talking for two hours. No, that's been I've loved Memphis. 01:54:58 Speaker 2: Everything about this is moment. 01:55:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, no, this this is really really great. Well, man, is there anything we've not covered you want to cover? 01:55:08 Speaker 3: No? I think I think we can we How can we help you? 01:55:10 Speaker 1: Guys? 01:55:10 Speaker 3: Like? 01:55:10 Speaker 1: Who should we? What? Is there a call to action for for us outside of Florida? 01:55:15 Speaker 3: Not not right now, there's not. 01:55:17 Speaker 2: I mean we send anybody a thank you card. 01:55:19 Speaker 3: The Honey community writ large like whoever, whoever it is you love in the Honey community that I don't I don't care what group it is. They all like showed up and showed out on this. 01:55:30 Speaker 1: I would I would like to when I think about a hunt and in these hunters who I considered my brothers, going out and going to harvest one hundred and eighty seven bears. 01:55:41 Speaker 3: This fall. 01:55:42 Speaker 1: Man, I I just want I just hope everybody's just like the culture is just on their best behavior. 01:55:50 Speaker 3: Do your best yea, yeah, you know your best. 01:55:52 Speaker 1: And and I think I think that as as a hunting culture and as a as a as kind of a tribe, that we can we can ask that of people, and and I and and you know specifics would be like, you know, be tasteful and respectful on social media when you're posting these pictures. And in in somebody listened to this podcast, maybe maybe they learned something. I learned something. But man, for for for us to be able to for a hunter to kill a bear and him to actually understand bear management, understand a little bit about bears, understand some of the things we've talked about today goes a long ways. Like even in a social media post, to be like, man, I got this bear, and and and I love posting pictures on social media. 01:56:39 Speaker 2: I do. 01:56:40 Speaker 1: There's been times when we'd be like, don't put any gripping grins on man, I still do. No, we own what we do, and but but to to be able to to have the words, to be able to articulate the philosophy of why we do what we do with the tenor of respect to that animal, to wild places to conserve, and even inside in a set in a tone that would be sympathetic to someone who wouldn't understand. Now, And I'm not saying you know, change who you are. It's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, we can't be mad at somebody for not knowing. We can't be mad at somebody. And I'm speaking to myself, Yeah, I can't. I can't be upset with that person because they just don't know. 01:57:26 Speaker 3: It is critical how we handle this. Florida hunters, how they handle this, or out of state hunters if they come, how we how we present this will determine what future rhetoric looks like. Right, and hunting is not the mainstream thing it once was. You guys immediator have talked about this for a long time, but it's not the mainstream. I mean again, I'll refer back to stars in the Sky. I think Riddella said that in the fifties, like four percent of America hunted, or it was, it was a high number. In Florida, we got twenty two andred million people in two hundred and fifty thousand Honting mices. I mean, that's a fingernail on that state, which is why the right to fish and hunt was so important to us to protect that. But that's just a backstop, like how we conduct ourselves, how we behave in this world. And again I'm not saying I'm saying the same thing you are. I'm not saying you don't post a dead animal. I'm not saying you don't. But the way you talk about it and the way you post it, the way you present it, I'll say, selfishly makes my job way harder to go into rooms and try to move needles on getting things like this reopened. Man, it could be a tremendous help. And and again the honey community has handled themselves beautifully through this entire process, Like they've done it. If I'd have asked for them to do it, if I could have just gone to everyone, I'm gon said hit this out, wants you to do it, this is how they would have done it. So I'm really proud of where we are. We continue that going. There's no telling what else we can get done, and not just in Florida, but but Nashally. I think there's a whole lot of stuff we can get done. That is hunting, pro hunting, but pro concert. That's gonna it's gonna help keep this stuff that we care about. 01:59:02 Speaker 1: While Yeah, well Travis, thank you so much for coming. Travis had like three when do we talk Friday? 01:59:09 Speaker 3: Uh yeah, Thursday, Friday, Thursday, it was it was maybe Thursday afternoon. 01:59:13 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Travis came here and just like super short notice. So thanks a ton man, Thanks for all your work. 01:59:18 Speaker 3: For real. 01:59:19 Speaker 1: I know you guys probably don't get a lot of pats on the back, but you should. I mean, often the thank yous goes to people that didn't have anything to do with it, like people that you know are are I just think about I had nothing to do with this. 01:59:34 Speaker 3: Well this this has something to do with it, and we appreciate it. But there, like I said, there was nobody that didn't. It's like you look at a football team. I'll watch sports football team. He pay praise a wide receiver, the quarterback, running back, whatever. That guy's not snapping the ball in the middle, or that right guards not holding the blindman off like nothing's happening. The defense didn't come out there and play special team like it takes a complete team to get this stuff done. Everything that we get done, it takes a complete team, so every everybody gets to play a part, and it's it's just an honor to be on that team. 02:00:04 Speaker 1: What's the name of your your organization all Florida. So it's A L L F L A dot O. That's your that's just your organization US. 02:00:13 Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And but then you work for International Order of Theodore Roosevelt. Okay, so that's t DASH Roosevelt dot org. I believe, is there, Carol. So those are great organizations that that I'm really proud of. And in Florida, there's not a room that we're not in when it comes to hunting, fishing, conservation stuff like like we are. We have somebody in just about every room that's that's incredible. So we're we're really proud of that and we love we love that place. So hopefully you guys will come down here. Man, I bear Turkey, really dear to my heart, come hunted duck. But we can figure it out. 02:00:46 Speaker 1: Yeah, we appreciated, man, Josh, come down there, fly fishing brother. Ah Well, I'm in thank you all for having me keep the wild place as wild because that's where the bears Living. We need a big corridor right through floor. 02:01:00 Speaker 3: That's right