00:00:00 Speaker 1: Ye were jack late rabbits, which is illegal, but never a dear. There was a code, there were laws you would not break. This episode of the Bear Grease podcast will be an expose on two men in the outdoor industry that you may have heard of. I don't like to air people's dirty laundry, but we gained access to these hunters and you may know them, maybe even respect them, and their stories will shock you. Who I'm talking about is me and Steve Rannella. We had a candid conversation about the way we were raised, our history with game laws, and a few of our regrets. The intent is to have some honest dialogue, giving us a data point to understand our cultural history as modern hunters that will allow us to dictate where we're going. We'll also tell to Austin Booth, he's a lawyer, a former marine, and now the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. I want to understand the philosophy of wildlife law enforcement in two and the status of poaching. Will also pick up two foundational components of the North American model of wildlife conservation that we all should know. And if you want the dirt on me and Ranella. I'm certain you're not gonna want to miss this one. That tipping point where you go from consumption to conservation necessitates you looking at poaching as a horrible thing that detracts from the resource. My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear. It's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I was raised around. Let me put to you this way. Any of the hunters and angers, any of the outdoors when I was raised around, and I was raised around many of them, any of them would have like and if an undercover agent had embedded with them for a week or two or a month, any of them would have racked up a bunch of violations that would sound really bad. I didn't grow up around anyone that didn't break game laws. I'm not kidding you, like anyone that was serious about hunting and fishing that didn't break game laws. Because there was the ones you paid attend mentioned too, And there's the one that no one paid attention to. And in fact, I now know there's a lot of them that we had no idea that was a law. That was Steve runnella of meat eater. He and I are about to give an expose of our lives, because if you're new to hunting, it might be hard to understand where we as a culture have come from. Let me restate that all this talk of breaking game laws isn't a celebration, a justification or a stunt, but rather a crisp look into reality for the purpose of getting it right in the future, in modern times, for us to protect this immensely valuable wildlife resource we have on this continent. It helps if we're just honest with ourselves. This next clip is from the Bear Grease Render, and it's my father Gary Nucom talking about his experience of stepping into the big game hunting world at the age of twenty six in the mid nineteen seventies. And so I was introduced to bow hunting and I immediately fell in love with it, and I got the watching people and I saw nobody. Now take this literal, I'm telling you, like I saw it. I knew nobody that wouldn't kill an illegal, dear, and I'm like, in a state of shock, I'm not gonna do that. I didn't have uncles that taught me that. I didn't have a dad that taught me that. Now, if you run up against Josh and he's a city boy out enjoying hunting, you know, two or three times a year, now, he's not gonna kill anything illegal. He read the regulations and just did what it said. Yeah, but the die hard hunters, I'm telling you from my perspective, you gotta keep that in mind. My perspective, they all killed illegal stuff. So where do you draw the line. I killed one person, I killed fifty people. I mean, you're killing stuff. It's illegal, And where is it bad. It's bad with one, it's bad with ten, it's bad with thirty. The prevalence of wanton violation of the law in the past is remarkable, But I feel like we've turned a corner of all the laws. Wildlife laws are tough to enforce because hunting is done in secluded places, often alone, and animals don't speak English. They can't tell on us. There are various gradients of poaching, and all are bad. There are serial poachers that leave the house with the intent to break the law. There are those who are typically law about him, but they make the odd exception to egregiously break the law. There are opportunistic law breakers who violate out of convenience or to take advantage of a unique situation. There are those who are simply ignorant of the law. And then there are people that flat out and make a mistake or misjudgment in the field. But if laws are broken, the intent or the context really doesn't matter. No one has an excuse. I'm still on the search for understanding our functional ideologies around game laws. In the last couple of episodes, we've talked with game wardens, undercover agents, and hunters trying to nail down our collective doctrine, and doctrine isn't what we say with our mouths, is what we actually do. Most people would tell you that their law abiding, but when you really dig in, you might find places where they don't always hold to the letter of the law, or more commonly, where in the past they didn't. And sometimes people just mess up. And the more time you spent in the woods, the greater chance that's would happened to you. We forget we didn't know, we justify it this one time, or we just flat ignore a law because we think breaking it won't hurt anyone or the resource. I think we've got to be honest with our worst selves if we'll ever live consistently in our best selves. I hope these stories will fortify a culture of putting the resource first. Breaking the law is an easy thing, and here is an example. Once during muzzleloader season, I was walking to my deer stand in the pre dawn darkness, and I planned to put on my hunter orange vest in the tree. You see, I got dressed at the tree, trying to do all the sink control stuff on the way in, I dropped my orange vest on the ground and didn't realize that until I was twenty five ft high. The orange was like way back towards the truck. I was on private land with no other hunters, and I was bow hunting during musloader season. I continued to hunt with just my orange hat, which didn't meet the square inch orange minimum, and that morning I proceeded to kill one of the largest bucks of my life with my bow. Technically, I was in violation of the law and my poacher. By the law, yes, but by every rational thanking human on planet Earth, I don't think so. It would have been more dangerous to all out of the tree and walk to get the orange at daylight than it would have been to stay in the tree and walk out midday. Have you ever left your tree stand up longer than you were supposed to on public land? Have you ever gone fishing for the first time of the spring, only to realize you didn't auto renew your fishing license. Have you ever dipped your toe across a fence boundary that you didn't have written permission to access. Have you ever party hunted as a water fowler, which is basically a group working to get the collective limit of everyone on the hunt. Have you ever wasted meat? My intent and asking these questions isn't to soften our ideas about the law, but rather to strengthen them, and ultimately I hope this conversation makes us be introspective about ourselves. That being said, and I'll stand by this statement. I don't have a history of intentionally breaking game laws. I've dedicated an incredible amount of energy to the point of paranoia to not break them even before I was in the outdoor industry. I've never had a wild streak, and I grew up in a very law abiding family, which I'm proud of. But by sheer volume of exposure running around with the odd ruffian, being a dumb kid and just being human, I've made some mistakes. Here's Steve Ronnella describing the culture of how he grew up, like I used to be reluctant to talk about some of this stuff because of h like a fear of getting in trouble, like elements of hypocrisy. Whatever. Sure, we broke laws all the time. Okay, I could sit I could sit here and and just give you dozens of occurrences. Let me give you a cup for instances. In the spring the rivers had come up, and sometimes the rivers had come up so high that it would flood out the muskrats out of their bank dens. It wasn't muskrat season. You were not allowed to shoot muskrats in Michigan. You had to trap them. But we couldn't resist the temptation. We go out of twenty two and go out in the flooded swamp and get my scratch and just add him into the furs we sold the next year, okay, because who's gonna notice, like some twenty two holes and some of them. I remember in high school my buddy Eric Kern, he's no longer with us. A buddy Eric Kern would dip and smelt. He caught a steel head, not allowed to do that with a net, stuck it in his waiters and carried around in his waiters in the boot of his waiters for the night. I'm talking like a ten pound fish. Never in a million years, and we had to let that fish go. But there's some stuff we would never do. Would no way, no how jack light a deer. We were jack late rabbits, which is illegal, but never a deer. Wouldn't go over a bang limit. But you had to be fourteen to hunt with a rifle. I started hunting with a rifle when I was thirteen. I shot a dough. My mom came out and put her tag on it. I would have gone down. I would have gone down and told that story in school. It just it wasn't like you're being secret e. It was just it was like the attitude was how many deer are we allowed as a family? Tell us that and then and then just leave the rest to us. Right, And that's functionally the way they that it was enforced too, am I right? It was like, I don't know, I don't like we weren't checked by people just I could. I could go on and on like stuff that I'm the stuff that I'm ashamed about. And I'll point out my dad was, Like I mentioned, my dad was a veteran. His friends were veterans. These are people who fought in World War two. These people love their country, right, the most upstanding members of the community. Okay, One of the guys down the road of a veteran. Uh, he was a car salesman, mentored me all through growing up. He fit, He lived with his wife, and his wife died, and he fished all the time. Couldn't eat that many fish, but he fished. I remember some days he'd fish two d seventy days a year because he kept the track of it a notepad. How many fish can you eat? Sold his fish? He would encourage me to go sell my fish to the illegal outfit that he sold his fish too in a restaurant. No, it's a fish dealer, fish a fish market. And he would even advise me on how to negotiate the deals. Do you understand these are not people that would have identified as poachers. I don't know why. Oh, moving fish around, dumping them into all their lakes and stuff like you name it, man like, it was just everywhere. But there's certain lines you there was, like lines you didn't cross. I remember. I don't want to name the guy's names. I'm friendly with his kid. The guy shot way more wood ducks than he was allowed one time and did a very sloppy job of cleaning them and just breasted some wood ducks and dumped him out in the woods. And we found them and told our old man about these wood ducks that weren't cleaned. And my old man went over there and confronted the guy that, well, something you you not do, waste the game, don't do that. But he would do all my only way. I would do all manners, stuff you weren't supposed to do. Yeah, but it was like a spirit of the law leader the law. I really appreciate Steve opening up about his past. It takes some guts to do that, and his intent is just to be honest. He nor I have nothing to hide. I have no doubt that people who have been involved in hunting and fishing their entire lives, and if they've seen a few winters can relate. I know I can. And at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you my darkest secret. It's really not a secret. But here's Steve on ethics. It's a relationship with the game laws. It's hard to understand. I'll point out to people. Now, people we have all these conversations about hunting ethics. I'm like, man, here's a here's a good way to get of the way. There follow laws. We've codified our ethics in this country to large measure, they changed their time at any given time. Are ethics are mostly codified by law. If you want to be be an ethical hunter, that typically means don't break the laws. But my God, really loose with the laws growing up, and I was two because I was brought up that way, I had to later realize out of getting on board with the program, okay, getting on board with the game management program that we're on in this country, the journey we're on with conservation, the journey around with game management, like getting on board with that, and also, quite simply and frankly, when I was in my twenties out of fear of being in trouble. Yeah, then will I'll be in trouble. Cleaned up our act. I got the scared out of me by game word one time, who I knew was on to me about something, and that scared me pretty straight. You don't want to tell that story, Well, I really don't tell what he asked me. Let me tell you what he asked me. You weren't allowed to use airs where I lived on land for land animals. He asked me if I had been setting snares. I told him no. He then went through over a hundred traps in the back of my truck looking for one that didn't have a tag on it. He didn't like check one. He was like, I'm gonna looked at his bundle and I'm gonna find a not tag trap and I'm gonna give you a citation. And you didn't find a not tag trap, to my surprise and his because they just fall off sometimes. But I knew that guy knew something I've done. Uh, you know that kind of scared straight on that stuff. I had a fur buyer who would push snares on you catch more game license fur buyer. He's like, hey, why don't you take some of these bringing stuff in right, just pervasive, And there's no way you wouldn't. There's no way you don't like knowing where you grew up and how you grew up. There's no way you didn't have all those same experiences. Yeah, you know, I had an interesting, interesting experience in that my dad was Gary Nucom who he he did? He He always says he didn't grow up in a hunting family, and I don't like it when he says that, because he did. My grandfather was a big quail hunter and bird dog trainer. What he means to say is he didn't grow up in a big game hunting family, which he didn't, and so he was kind of a first He he learned how to bow hunt on his own and did all this stuff, and man, he was pretty straight laced and kind of came into the hunting space and realized that he was the only guy around that was actually trying to obey game laws. And he just had just kind of the right mix of following the rules and he was he was a banker. He was in the community that he felt like he needed to be an upstanding citizen in which was good and man, we came out of the shoot with a very I mean, I wasn't afraid the game warden. I was afraid of my dad. So it's kind of a different story. And so I never wantingly bro game loss, even though I did just because I was a dumb kid. You know, a couple of times in coon hunting while we were coon hunting, twice deer were killed on coon hunts. M M. Steve said, well, here's the full story. I've never in my life set out to kill a deer illegally. Ever, but one night deep in the winter when I was seventeen, we were on a coon hunt. I saw the glowing eyes of an erect eared critter that hovered about twenty inches off the ground. I immediately whispered to my buddy with the twenty two rifle Kyo, shoot that thing. Within seconds, a shot was fired and the glowing eyes went out. Upon retrieval, it wasn't a coyote at all. It turns out it was a bedded doe deer, and it wasn't even legal to shoot a cowde at night, but I didn't know that. Rather than calling the game warden, which would have been the right thing, to do, calling old Jimmy Martin. We stuffed the deer in our dog box and went home and skinned it. A second time, I was hunting with someone older than me on his land, and again I think I was seventeen. We saw a pair of eyes on the hill and I said, there's one of your cows. He said, that's not a cow, that's a deer. I said, no, you're wrong, that's one of your cows. He proceeded to pull out his twenty two pistol, take aim, and dropped the animal from over seventy five yards away. We walked up there and he was right, it was a deer. He loaded the deer in the truck, drove to some dude's house that needed some meat, and no questions were ever asked. He dropped the deer off. Since that time, I become more adept at identifying animals by glowing eyes. I'm ashamed of these things and learned a lot from them. Here's Steve Man. It's hard to explain. Yeah, yeah, but there were there was a code. There were alas you would not break. I like, I don't know any of all the violating I've talked about. I don't know anyone in my family's social circle that ever shot a deer of the spotlight, or that ever shot a deer out of season, that would have been break. You would not do that. I don't know why. I want to introduce you to the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. He's been on the Bear Grease podcast before. His name is Austin Booth. He's a former marine, a lawyer, a pilot, and at the ripe age of thirty five, he's one of the youngest directors in the agency's history, and he's making some good waves in our state. Austin is also a lifelong hunter. Over the next twenty minutes, I'm gonna ask him about the agency's philosophy of law enforcement, the status of poaching in the state, and the foundational ideology that regulates wildlife law. Here's Austin Booth, So what is the philosophy of law enforcement these days? And and how are we how are we going after people that are breaking the law. So there's a whole lot of people out there that wrongly believe that the Arkansas Gamon Fish Commission is just out there to write tickets. That's not true. It is written into Arkansas law that all the revenue that we generate from tickets goes into the county schools in which we write that ticket in, so we never see a single penny of that money. So there's no quota on apt to write a ticket. There's not Would you say that's common for state agencies outside of Arkansas? I know of a handful of other states. There's probably more, but it's intuitive to see that a government agency having a monetary incentive to write tickets is probably a bad thing. So we don't see any of that money. All right, Well, Austin, if y'all aren't there to self funder selves through regulations enforcement, how to y'all approach this? We enforce regulations for compliance at the Cadet graduation for the Cadeta of Wildlife Officers we graduated last year are Colonel Colonel Brad Young, outstanding American said, y'all are not here to write granny a ticket for being one day expired on her fishing license. Make sure she gets a new license. We're not focused on minor violations. We want to educate people and we want to enforce for compliance. Where we do get aggressive is on serious game violations. We issue more than thirty five hundred citations per year on average. We issue well over five thousand warnings per year on average. So we really try to focus the lion's share of our enforcement work on major violators because they do materially take away from the resource. We had a case this year where a gentleman had what he called a deer garden in his yard where he had harvested over forty bucks and and had the heads out there in the sun cleaning them. We had a case this year young man in his early twenties who acquired over thirteen hundred points. Now, to provide some context for that, you only have to have eighteen points to have your hunting license revoked. Uh. And so he accumulated an unimaginable amount of violations. And you can't tell me that that's not a taking from the polit resource. Thirty five hundred citations and five thousand warnings a year, those are big numbers. It's interesting to me that wardens aren't incentivized right tickets. I think that most of us wouldn't have guessed that. It kind of goes back to some of our past discussion about a fundamental mistrust of power. This helps us view law enforcement differently and realize that this misperception is probably coming from our side. I want to get Austin's opinion on the threat of poaching in the big picture. In the big scheme of threats to North American wildlife, are poachers at the top of that list. And it's not really apples to apples to compare like habitat loss, so it's not entirely apples to apples. But I guess I'm trying to understand how big a threat it is because I think sometimes we can live in a bubble, some of us, especially inside the guys that are real enthusiast inside the outdoor space. Like I said it before, the cool kids obey the laws, Like that's what that's the culture we're building, is that we want to obey laws. We want we're all on the same team. We want to see more wildlife. I don't want to kill thirty turkeys. But because sometimes in this space we're sur rounded by the by the good guys, in a sense, you don't see what's I don't I don't always see what's happening on the outside. And is poaching a major threat to wildlife? It is? And to bring us back to the last time we were on a podcast together. We were talking about ducks and g trs, and you said, and in closing one of the podcasts, you said that when an animal is treasured by people, it thrives. And so if you take that that sentiment, the appreciation of wildlife and their role that they play in the ecosystem and in people's lives, that appreciation is front and center with the loss of habitat, and it's front and center with poaching too, because the question, as hunters shouldn't be do we appreciate this resource enough to hunt it? It's to be do we appreciate do we treasure? Do we adore this resource enough to conserve it? And that tipping point where you go from consumption to conservation necessitates you looking at poaching as a horrible thing that detracts from from the resource. So are we losing more ducks, more turkey two, loss of habitat, absolutely than we are compared to say, poachers. But it's a common foundation of lack of appreciation for the resource. Right, how do you think we remedy that inside the culture, Because it's clear, it's a clear world view to me in a in a compelling lifestyle to live a life that is in accordance with the game laws. It's easy for me to say that too, because I have a pretty privileged life when it comes to hunting. But there's also you know, I spoke about how there was real skin side of me telling the stories that I've told the last couple of podcasts, the risk of it glamorizing essentially rebellion against authority. So there is some of that. How do we like projecting forward twenty five years? Because you go back twenty five years from two and it was a pretty different world in this state, for sure. You go back another twenty five and it was like a different planet. And today it's just different than that, I think, and I think we've improved, but there's still some of this culture that values that. I don't know, what do we do? How do we build the culture to continue to progress? Well, I think there's lots of complex contributions to that that are this isn't a complex conversation, awesome, that are well outside what you and I can control. We need more stable households that have a deep commitment to not only making sure that young boys and girls make good grades, but that there are men and women of character. I think kids, uh and even adults need to have a better understanding of ecology and the importance of conserving not just individual species, but also conserving the ecosystem as a whole. But I think the number one thing that we can do, in addition to exposing more young people to the outdoors is doing exactly what you're doing on this podcast. And let's talk about the nexus of wild things, wild places, and people and how these resources don't just exist to exist, but they exist for us to for us to steward them and to enjoy them, and the only way to do that in perpetuity is to take care of them the best we can. I want to get to the foundation of why we have game laws. This is the language that we should all be familiar with and be able to wield in intelligent ways as we continue to carve out a stable position in modern society. Remember this the public trust doctrine. So, the public trust doctrine is one of the foundational pillars of the North American model of wildlife conservation, and it is a repudiation of the European model, which is essentially that if you owned a tract of land that you also owned the wildlife though that that rana. So you can go back hundreds of years ago, if there was a peasant that lived adjacent to royalty or some other aristocrat, and there was some way to prove that the peasant killed a deer that that came from the rich person's land, then they could be convicted for it. So private ownership, private ownership life of wildlife. Yes, yeah, The public trust doctrine repudiates that and says that there is such a universal interests in wildlife and seeing them flourish and the opportunity to enjoy wildlife that wildlife are universally owned by the public in the present and in the future. Now, that would have been radical doctrine that was unique to North America. Is that right? From a global perspective, Yes, that's correct. So this was something that was was part of what Shane Mahoney called American genius inside of the North American Mile of wildlife conservation that we It's so counterintuitive too, because you would think if you wanted to protect something that you would sent it down to centralized control and not let everybody else in on it. But we're saying everybody owns wildlife, So dear on my property, even though they're on my property, are not mine. That's there owned by my neighbor and by you and by people in Nebraska. That's correct. And the context for the public trust doctrine, I think is very important because a lot of it, the broad public support for it was born out of the early nineteen hundreds when we had exhausted wildlife to extra pation throughout the country and so from a conservation sportsman perspective, as a country, we were picking up the pieces and saying, how do we make this better? How do we not only increase wildlife on the landscape but also ensure that this doesn't happen to the next generation. So there was a big appeal at that time. There was like it made a ton of sense that that's what we needed to do. Are you saying that now there's voices that are saying that is not as relevant. Yeah. It has some challenges. Uh, It's met some resistance in other states, fortunately not Arkansas, but people are often tempted to think more about wildlife as an agricultural resource. There are some states where all animals and high fence farms, including native wildlife, are completely under private management and ownership. This is a new idea. Basically, high fences and privately owned native wildlife can threaten the public trust doctrine on which we've had so much success. Here's Austin on the impact of poaching on the system and a personal story. So when you think about the public trust doctrine and the success of the North American model of wildlife conservation writing on the back of this idea of public trust giving incentive for the common man to want wildlife to thrive on a macro scale, that's really what's happened. But someone that would infringe on those game laws would essentially be violating the public trust doctrine or stealing from it. And just saying I can take as much wildlife as I want, I can take more than I want. They're violating not just the wildlife but everyone else. And so I mean, that's the whole story of poaching. That's hurting the whole system. And when someone violates a game law in the form of poaching, essentially what they're saying is that they believe they have a higher claim to that, to that critter than than anyone else does. If we had that on at broad scale, our wildlife as we know it would wither and die. Just to illustrate that, I'll tell you a personal story. Uh Hantaalis in Arkansas. Uh and put some work into it in the off season last year. And it was a thing for my eight year old daughter and I to go out there and work. And then when deer season got closer, you know, morning time before school or church, she would crawl up in my lap and I've been drinking a cup of coffee and she wanted to look at trail camp pictures. So we had a good number of bucks out there, a lot of them were young. We're super excited getting ready for a season, and uh, then the rut comes around. There's no deer and I I just kind of chalked it up to you know, mother nature, the rut being off, it being warm. And then uh, the farmer that was there cut his beans. Uh he was late getting him in that he was like getting him out. And when he cut his beans, we found eleven dead bucks. There were no tire tracks leading up to him. All the horns are still on them. And so somebody's shooting these deer just to shoot him and my coach to the highway. Yes, very close to highway and my eight year old daughter asked me where did all the deer go? Dad? I said, well, somebody killed him? What did you kill him? No, honey, who killed him? I don't know? Well why don't you know? Well they did this thing called poaching. And I explained to her what poaching was, and she said, are they going to get caught? And I said, I hope so, but probably not. And she kind of thought about it for a little bit and she thought, well, if they're not going to get caught, can we or anybody else do the same thing? And to me, that's one sad to not only shows the amount of investment that people put into wildlife, and when somebody poaches, they're taking not necessarily the wildlife from them, but that investment from them. And then thirdly, just the secondary effects of poaching on on how people, even my eight year old daughter, views institutions and how they should behave if they don't think that they're going to get caught. In my opinion, this is the most egregious form of poaching, killing for killing sake. It's not hunters that do this. These people would fit into another category and don't deserve the label hunter. I want to ask Austin about the other types of poaching that are going on today. Food scarcity is a real thing in Arkansas. But the poachers that we catch, the narrative of I'm poaching because I have to that is non existent. The people that the Arkansas Game of Fish apprehends for poaching, they oftentimes have night vision technology, thermal scopes, infra red spotlights, and there is a high level of investment and work in time that often goes into their hardened decision to violate the law. A hardened decision to violate the law, that's the place you don't want to find yourself. Austin is now going to explain the open fields doctrine, which governs wildlife law enforcement. This is another thing that would be good to keep in your repertoire. I bet y'all didn't know that I could speak French. So the open fields doctrine is the notion that if you have a wildlife officer out there trying to enforce game law US, then they can freely cross from public land on private land. This is not just something that the Arkansas Game Fish came up with. This actually comes from the United States Sprent Court. It was a case in nineteen Hester versus the United States that said, uh, special protection a quartered by the Fourth Amendment in their persons, Houses and Effects, which is in the Constitution, does not extend to open fields. And the reasoning they're being from the Supreme Court which open fields describe that terminology to me, I don't understand that that's where I was going with it, is that the Fourth Amendment protections generally revolve around thinks that you have an expectation of privacy, and that comes from the Cat's case. The reasoning behind open fields is if you have a broad expanse of land, your expectation of privacy does not go to every single corner of the land that that it's insulated around your dwelling and what the court calls curtilage like tense trailers, cars that you have that kind of stuff. Uh. And so Arkansas and nearly every other state. If a game warden is is trying to get after a poacher and they believe that there's a poacher on private land, then under the open field doctrine, they can go apprehend that poacher without a search warrant. They couldn't search the house without a warrant. They couldn't search a mobile home next to the house. They couldn't search a car next to the house unless they witness the crime happen and the individual rain that's completely different. But for for warrant purposes, if they have evidence or reason to believe that there's poaching going on on private lands again out you know, outside the home or or the curtilage of a dwelling place, then they can go hop offense and try to apprehend that poacher without a search one. That's right, And the reason that's important is because the deer can cross defense too. If our natural resources, especially wildlife, can traverse private property and public property freely, then it's important for wildlife officers to be able to do the same to enforce the game laws. That's even more important going forward because if you look at the landscape, we're suffering from loss of habitat right and so as public land and private land become increasingly intermingled, it's a big deal to Americans that that game laws be enforced equally, that public land hunters are not more susceptible to game laws than say, private land hunters are, simply because of where they choose to hunt, and is that in jeopardy. Uh, not in Arkansas, but just in that it's been undermined and other just actions. How has that happen? They believe that the rights of rights of privacy in private property are more compelling than equal protection of the laws for private land hunters and public lean hunters. That's a tricky one, isn't it, Because we like, we all respect the rights of private land owners and we want that right. But in the macro picture of protecting wildlife, that's a that's a right that you know, we kind of choose to give away in a sense that we didn't choose it, but but we're okay with it. I mean, I want a game warden to be able to go on this guy's land and enforced game laws and in the same way you can do it on my land. I hope this conversation is giving us some more robust understanding of wildlife law enforcement, and I hope it's making us evaluate our own relationship with the law. This next story is extremely personal and meaningful to me. At the time. It shaped my life and it continues to do so. Here's me telling old Steve Ronnella about it. How humiliating I was bow hunting public land and had been walking for miles and miles and miles with a bow in hand, scouting, and I see a squirrel and I mean, I'm I'm not joking when I say this is maybe. I maybe shot a squirrel with a bow two other times in my life, and I mean, you know, kept the squirrel because it is not something I make a practice of. But just on that day, at the right time, the squirrel set there for long enough, and I said, man, I'm gonna shoot that squirrel. And I shoot that squirrel just at long shot, like I didn't think i'd hit him, you know, thirty yards and just nail him and the air goes through his hips and I go up and I actually set there looking at that squirrel, just thinking, doc Hunt, Why did I do this? And this ended up being a pretty formative moment in my young adult life for real, because I made a conscious decision that was like, man, the meats run, you know, broad head through the hams of this squirrel, and I just decided that I wasn't gonna take it, which I mean, only I know if this is true when I say it, but it's like highly out of character for me to or do something like that. And I walk out and on a I'm on a lonely stretch of public land. No, I mean, you still see cars out here, very much much less a game warden. And I'm walking to the road and I can see the road and I see a car coming. Now the car can't see me, and it's a dead end road, Steve so that this truck is going towards the dead end. My trucks at the end of the dead end. And I see that it's a game boarding truck. And when I saw that truck, I knew that I was gonna be held accountable for what I did. And and to be honest with you, I knew that God was gonna hold me to account of it because I could have just sat there. I could have just like hidden the woods until he turned around, because it is there's only one way for him to come out. And I knew that if I did that that I would be in big trouble with somebody that I was more worried about. And I walked right out to the road, and I didn't know how it was gonna come up, Like I wasn't gonna bring it up that I had shot a squirrel and left it in the woods. But I walked and start walking down the road, and sure enough, the the guy is coming back and he sees me. I could have stepped off the road and he'd have passed right by me, and there was nothing. I didn't have anything on me that would have given away. And there's no really no noticeable blood on the arrow. And he gets out and he's like, hey, what youre doing? And we talked and he's real nice guy. Since this time, me and this guy become friends, communicate with him. Every couple of years, I'll call him and man, that sucker spotted a speck of blood on my shoe about as big as a tic tac, you know. I mean, just a tiny speck of blood on my shoe that I hadn't even seen. And he was all funning games, and then he was like, what's that And I looked down I see that blood and he just turned stone cold, and I said, I shot a squirrel and I left in the woods. I just straight up just told him what had happened. And he said, why did you do that? And and I just I mean, I told the story. I just told you, and he thought I was lying. Uh, he thought I'd killed something bigger and it was hiding it or something, and he said, well, put your bow in the truck. We're gonna go find that squirrel. And I just went, man, I don't know if I can find that squirrel. That that that country down there is thick pine plantations, I mean like thickets, and it was way back. I've been walking for hours, and so I started saying, man, I don't know if I can find it, and he thinks I'm lying, and I'm just tell him the truth. I was so naive that actually said, well, you stay here and I'll go get the squirrel. You don't have to come with me. I'll bring it back to you. And he was like, no, sir. You know, he thought I was gonna and I didn't. I was like, why would you want to follow me? This is gonna be torture. And then I realized, you know, later that he thought I was gonna go hide something, you know, which was dumb for me. I wasn't a very good criminal. And anyway, luckily I was able to go back to the squirrel and found it just like he said. And he goes back to the truck and we have a long talk and while I skinned that squirrel on his tail gate. I didn't know the tail method or anything back then. I was just like pecking on it with a puggy knife. You know. It was at this point that the game warden issued me a citation for wanting waste. I was devastated, and I deserved it. But if there's one thing I believe, it's this. Everything happens for a purpose, and if you look yourself to that purpose, as painful as it can be, sometimes ten years later you'll be glad that you did. At that time, I had I had just started diving into doing some stuff in outdoor media, and Man I told him that. I said, man, I write articles about hunting. And I was just I wasn't trying to defend myself. The ticket was already written, but I was just like this, you busted me as something that is not typical for me, and uh, and he said you need to write about it. He immediately said, just come out with it, Clay. I mean, we became buddies in that moment. And I talked to him for probably forty five minutes after that, and he said that what you should do is just come out with it. And so I went home and wrote an article that was published in a regional magazine. The article was centered around what I learned through the event. It revolved around a very unique section of the Book of Proverb about hunting and diligence. So there's a verse and proverbs in the Bible. It's uh, it's probably probably twelve seven says lazy people don't even cook the game that they catch, but the diligent make use of everything they find. And man, what really it was a major turning point when I realized that I had lost some diligence. And since that time, I've been diligent with everything that I've done to the best of my ability, inside of following game laws and doing everything right. And uh, yeah, I was ashamed of that for years. Well, I mean that's still in ashamed of it, but it was, you know, I'm I'm sparing my own kids what I went through. I'm just from the get go being that we just follow the rules. You might make a stake right, you might misunderstand something to make mistake, for get something I don't know, but we follow the rules. We talked about what they are celebrated. Um, that's like a new generation. Yeah, I don't like to tell I don't like to tell. Oh, I don't like to tell the stories of growing up in a way that that's made to like celebrate it. You know, I'm just that happened. Nothing good comes from that. It's arrogant. It's arrogant. You know. I'm glad there was a I'm glad there was a sort of governor on it, meaning that that there was a there was a real limit to what people would do. But it's, uh, it's just baffling and like a little embarrassing. The degree to which just like this, like you know better m in two is wildlife and wild places continue to be jeopardized by shifting cultural value systems and the encroachment of civilization. Are widespread. Adherence to getting with the program AM, as Steve said, will be key to the continued success of the North American model of wildlife conservation. We gotta turn in poachers, we gotta watch our own selves, we gotta love the resource enough to sacrifice for it. Listening to the stories of my dad and hearing about Steve's upbringing, I truly think that we've come a long way in the last thirty years. It's my hope that the stuff I've done in media has carried with it a strong values, integrity and character based message, but I never wanted to paint the picture that I'm in Ivory Tower. A good dose of transparency is healthy, and I hope it tightens us down into positions of respect for the law, and one of my most valued practices is becoming deeply introspective and learning from mistakes. I can't thank you folks enough for listening to Bear Grease. Be sure to check out the Bear Grease merchandise on the meat eater dot com um, and please share our podcast with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. Oh oh, that wasn't as good as russ arts right off, Bros. Right on