00:00:10 Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow's Week in Review with Ryan cow Klah Here's cal A new study is found that dogs can detect chronic wasting disease with nothing more than their legendary noses. The study, published in the Plus one Journal last month, describes how researchers trained six shelter dogs in a laboratory and field settings to sniff out the always fatal neurodegenerative disease. The researchers started by obtaining hundreds of fecal samples from both farmed white tail deer and deer killed by hunters in western Tennessee. The dogs were walked down a line of five boxes, only one of which contained poop from an infected deer. The dogs were able to detect CWD with ninety percent accuracy by scenting a metabolic change that occurs when deer get an infected with the preon disease. To a dog, CWD poop smells different, sort of like how you always know when your roommate in college head etn Taco bell, cheap beans and plastic cheese gives off a distinct aroma after passing through the digestive tract doesn't it anyway. Once the dogs were trained to detect CWD and deer poop, they were given intestinal samples to sample. In one portion of the study of the dogs correctly identified CWD in deer colons with ninety six percent accuracy. At this point, you might be wondering why anyone would bother training dogs to detect CWD. There isn't a cure for the disease, and it's not like the deer trying to smuggle misfolded preons through the airport. This research is important because we still don't have a reliable anti mortem CWD test for deer and other ungulates. In other words, it's hard for us to tell whether a deer has CWD without killing it first. Obviously, we can guess with a larger degree of certainty in areas where the disease has a high prevalence and those deer are showing the physical manifestations of the disease, which are super nasty. But that's still going to be a guess until you do the actual test, and that is a big problem for states like Texas where deer breeders want to ship their deer across the state to hunting properties or other breeding facilities. Right now, we don't really know whether those deer are infected and will spread the disease to areas that don't already have it. It's unclear whether dogs are the solution to this problem. Some would argue that deer breeders shouldn't really exist in the first place, and they certainly shouldn't be allowed to transport deer to other counties. But as we work out those debates, it would be great if we could know with certainty that we aren't making the problem worse. CWD sniffing dogs might be one piece of that puzzle. This week, we've got the great bear call or how other countries do it? Salmon, salamanders, lobsters and fish. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And right now, as you listen to this old dirt myth, Brad Brooks are golly outdoors, which you know, Brad makes a bunch of awesome stuff over there, so he's check that out, longtime hunting buddy of mine. We're kind of marching ourselves out of the woods, if I can envision this, and we're loaded to the hilt with elk meat and hopefully elk antlers so big it's going to be hard to find a wall to stick them on or a door frame to fit them through. And even though we're tired and beat up and stinky and dirty, we're going to ignore the beer cooler. Brad's gonna drive away Old Dirt and I are going to pick up some lamas from Old bull Baby, and we're going to head out and up to Parts unknown in pursuit of the elusive gigantic high Mountain Mule Deer. Body sore, but brain function increased substantially. Due to the lack of screen time and oppressive connection to the outside world, We've probably we experienced more than a couple of setbacks, hopefully all minor. But you know, part of living life in the outdoors is being able to think on your feet, keep your head on a swivel, and figure stuff out, improvise, adapt, and overcome. As they used to say, We're gonna film both of these hunts. That's what Dirt Myth's doing there. But if you would be interested in a podcast recap with these fellas, just rite in you know where to ride in and let me know and we'll try to do our best on that one might just record one for fun. Anyway, Outside of that, I hope everyone is starting to get some fall weather and thinking about that amazing outside time or getting out in the out of doors. Right now, if you are out doing the college football thing, look for the meat Eater tailgate tour and say hi to those great folks. For me, I can't say hi because I'm going to be in the woods, and I can't say I wish I was there because fall is for hunting. There is admittedly a part of me that's still truly football. It's a great opportunity to build skills and have fun. I wouldn't go back and change the great experiences I had playing the sport as a kid, But I also had anxiety standing on the field as leaves were falling, frost was in the grass, and geese were flying overhead, or like when that early season snowstorm had hit, and part of you was looking forward to playing in those conditions, but a bigger part of you was mentally carrying the old three hundred win meg looking for elk tracks, maybe even falling the old outfitter around, watching his hand rolled cigarette smoke show you how the wind was drifting after the storm broke. It's a great time of year and we just can't be two places at once. Moving on to the bear management desk. Police officers in Sweden were forced to accompany hunters during this year's brown bear hunt as protesters tried to interfere with the annual event. Officers have been patrolling the forests on foot and with drones to ensure the hunter's peaceful progress. Amid concerns that high license numbers could provoke unrest. Swedish wildlife officials issued four hundred and eighty six licenses this year, which animal rights activists complain is equal to about twenty percent of the country's brown bear population. Hunters know that an issued license does not always result in a dead animal, which is kind of what I was alluding to in last week's episode when we were talking about name and deer, having clients pick them out and then letting those deer come into big old piles of corn in Utah. But Swedish bear hunters appear to be unusually effective. Last year, hunters were issued six hundred and forty nine licenses, and that's how many bears they killed during the regular hunt. The quota has been significantly reduced this year, but it still represents a good chunk of the estimated twenty five hundred bears that reside in the country. In relation to its size, Sweden has a similar brown bear population as Montana. Montana is about fifteen percent smaller than the northern European country, and it has an estimated twenty one one hundred grizzlies shambling around within its borders. As in Montana, brown bears in Sweden were more or less wiped out by the beginning of the twentieth century, but protective policies allowed the population to grow to a peak of thirty three hundred in two thousand and eight. Allowing an annual hunt has stabilized that population to where it is now, but protectionist groups are warning that the state is allowing too many of the bruins to be taken each year, and they believe the hunt will permanently harm the population, even though quotas are set at the local level. They accused the Big government of unofficially aiming for the minimum population goal, which is fourteen hundred bears. They accuse hunters of only wanting to shoot bears because of quote a macho dimension and to protect the reindeer and moose populations. About one hundred and fifty bears were killed the first two days of the hunt, and thanks to police efforts, I haven't seen any reports of activists interfering with the proceedings. We'll keep an eye on this one. It's hard not to see parallels between how sweet and manages its brown bears and how states like Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming would like to manage theirs if the species is removed from the endangered species list. I can see annual hunts to keep the population at an acceptable level, with flexible hunt quotas to respond to changing circumstances. Seems like a sustainable plan to me. I know you're asking this question, so I'll just say it out loud. If these anti hunters really cared about animal populations, you think they'd protest people who build houses in sensitive habitat. The urban encroachment on wildlife kills way more animals than hunters do. But don't take my word for it. I'm just a hunter. Moving on to the hunting desk. In a related piece of news, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries announced last month that the states black bear hunting lottery will officially open to state hunters beginning August twenty ninth and ending September twenty fifth. Ten black bear hunting permits will be given out by a lottery, and it costs fifty dollars to apply. The hunt will be confined to Bear Management Area four, which includes Tensas Madison, East Carroll, and West Carroll Parishes in portions of Richland, Franklin, and Catahula parishes. The season will begin seven, twenty twenty four and run through December twenty two, twenty twenty four. We've covered this story before and it's gotten lot to play in the media. For that reason, the odds of being selected as one of the ten hunters probably aren't high, but sending fifty dollars to the Department of Wildlife is never a waste of money. Plus, if you're not selected this year, you'll be given an additional preference point for each subsequent year you apply. Each preference point serves as an additional lottery opportunity, though you'll lose your preference points if you fail to apply one year, and preference points are capped at five. The Louisiana black bear hunt is a great conservation success story, and it would be very cool to be one of the hunters who bags a bruin on this inaugural season. If you're one of those hunters I'd love to hear from. Can you send me an email at askcal at the Meat Eater dot com Let me know how it goes. Speaking of additional hunting opportunities, listener Rob Holland wrote in with exciting news from his neck of the woods. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing a new rule that would open up one hundred thousand acres of National Wildlife refuge land in North Dakota two elk hunting. These acres would be spread across four different refuges, the J. Clark Sailor Upper Souris, Lost Wood, and De Laxe. Rob is supporting this new rule because quote, there is a limited opportunity for a true backcountry style hunt in North Dakota as there is a lack of roadless areas in the state. Opening these wildlife refuges would greatly help increase those opportunities, and they are largely devoid of roads and motorized travel. As with most new hunting opportunities on National wildlife refuge land, hunters would be required to use non lead bullets, but I think that's a small price to pay for so much additional hunting opportunity. Rob says that he's seen some opposition to this new rule, largely from people who object to hunting on land supposedly reserved as wildlife refuges. I can see how someone learning about this topic for the first time might think that that's incongruous. Why would we hunt and kill animals on a refuge. First, it's worth noting that the National Refuge System was founded by Teddy Roosevelt, who's not exactly known as a vegan. Well, Teddy loved to hunt, which is partly what motivated him to fight to conserve wildlife habitat. Second, hunting and fishing are tightly regulated on refuge properties. Biologists closely monitor the populations of game animals, so there's no need to fear that those species are being hunted to extinction. In fact, much of our refuge land is home to non game species that are at risk of extinction. Allowing recreational use on these properties helps promote buy in from the general public. Hunters and anglers fight to protect these areas because they want to keep hunting and fishing. In turn, those protected acres provide permanent habitat for all their critters that would otherwise be trampled under the endless march of new condos and subdivisions. Hunters have been among the most vocal supporters of the refuge system, so it makes sense to expand hunting opportunities on those properties wherever we can. Moving on to the amphibian desk, here's a trivia question for you. A recent study found that this amphibian has a biomass in northeastern North America equal to or greater than white tailed deer. If you said frogs, you're wrong. The answer is red backed salamanders. According to this study, conducted by the US Geological Survey, there are an estimated fifty three hundred red backed salamanders living in every patch of forest the size of a football field in the northeast. This means that they also have some of the highest biomass estimated for animals other than insects, similar to or greater than America's favorite big game animal. In other words, if you get gathered up all the white tailed deer and all the salamanders in the northeastern parts of North America, you'd have about the same amount of matter. If that's not surprising. I don't know what is. This matters because it highlights the importance of salamanders to these ecosystems. Salamanders are in the middle of the food chain. They live mostly underground, which is why you don't step on any of those fifty three hundred critters when you walk through the forest and Maine in that damp undergrowth through at the top of the food chain, the worms, snails, larvae, and insects and aid in the decomposition of matter and contribute to the health of the soil. But they're also a prey species for things like birds, rodents, raccoons, and skunks. If salamanders were to disappear, it would leave a massive hole in the ecosystem network in that area of the world. No one knows exactly what would happen, but it probably wouldn't be good. This is concerning in the light of a fungal disease discovered in the Netherlands in twenty thirteen, Battrack Coquittrium salamandrivorans or b sal for short, has decimated salamander pop relations in Central Europe and continues to spread across that continent. According to a recent report in fizz dot org, it hasn't been detected in the US yet, but in our global world, it seems like it's only a matter of time. That's why scientists are working to implement protective measures that can help protect our salamander populations before the disease arrives on our shores. These proactive measures can include making it harder for amphibians to spread the disease by installing barriers or increasing habitat complexity, reducing B cell fungal spores in aquatic habitats by temporarily raising the water temperatures, increasing the salinity, or increasing the abundance of zooplankton, And helping amphibians fight off the disease by improving their health through supplemental feeding. Whether wildlife managers will be able to secure the funding to implement any of these measures is anyone's guess, but knowing how prevalent these little amphibians are is a great first step. If biologists can prove that red back salamanders almost literally carpet the forest floor, it will be much easier to invents policy bankers that they're important and that protecting them is worth the cost. One more thing you got to point out when you talk about amphibian salamanders in particular, is that they have porous skin, making them the first canary in the coal mine to tell us what we did wrong. Moving on to the salmon desk, the controversy over Alaska king salmon came to a head last month when the National Marine Fishery Service agreed to investigate whether the species deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act. The decision comes in response to a petition filed by the Wildfish Conservancy, which argued that the king salmon's numbers have dropped so precipitously that the specie warrants federal protection. The sixty seven page petition was submitted in January, and the Marine Fishery Service as well as the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration just came to a decision. They decided that there was a substantial basis to warrant a more in depth review of Gulf of Alaska at kings. Now, the federal agencies have one year, starting when the petition was submitted so January, to conduct a detailed assessment. This will include breaking down kings into geographically and genetically distinct subpopulations to determine which ones might be at risk of extinction. The State of Alaska, however, is not happy with the petition or with Noah's decision to look into the issue more closely. In a press release, Commissioner Doug Vincent Lang wrote a scathing critique, quote, the petition is rife with significant factual errors, omits important data that are widely available, and does not accurately describe the status of Chinook salmon and Alaska. It is mind boggling that NMFS could make a positive finding based on cherry pick data to support a predetermined viewpoint. I am concerned that this decision will encourage more frivolous petitions in the future. Amazingly, Noah agreed that the document contained a plethora of errors, but they still determine that allow usk and kings are in dire enough condition to potentially warrant action. They said, quote, we found that the information present in the petition contained numerous factual errors, omissions, incomplete references, and unsupported assertions and conclusions. Still, we concluded that the petition contained enough information for a reasonable person to conclude that the petitioned action ESA listing may be warranted. Other objections have come from the commercial fishing industry, which worries that an ESA listing will shut down some fisheries altogether. Representatives from the Wildfish Conservancy who spoke with meat eaters Eli Fournier, acknowledge these concerns, but say that some of them are overblown. They say that listing the fish as endangered in some areas won't shut down fishing throughout the Gulf of Alaska. That's small comfort to those fishermen who live in areas where it will be limited. Right now, nothing has been determined. This is the very first step in deciding whether or not to put King Sam on the ESA, and Noah might very well decide that it's not warranted. Whatever happens, you can be sure we'll stay on top of it. Weigh in on this one. I know there's a lot of commercial folks that listen to this year podcast. I'd love to hear from you, especially those of you who keep their logs tight year over year. It'd be great to get your data as far as like something measurable like fuel used per pound of fish would be a good one. Something like that. How hard you got to work to get your quota King's type of deal anyway, Moving on to the mafia desk, the fisheries minister in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia's sounding alarm about what he says is an organized crime ring taking advantage of the area's lucrative lobster fishery. Minister Kent Smith sent a letter to his counterpart in the federal government claiming that the illegal fishery has entrenched itself in coastal areas of the province. He said in an interview with the CBC that criminal elements are quote causing havoc in the community and causing a lot of fear and anxiety. He says he's spoken to fishermen that have been threatened, have had their property damaged, and live in constant fear of repercussions for speaking out. Is true that the historically peaceful area has seen a string of violent crimes, including the burning of a police vehicle, two arsons and shooting. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is Canada's equivalent of the FBI, admits that these crimes are acts of intimidation. However, they do not believe these attacks are related to illegal lobster fishing. Whether the lobster mafia is breaking kneecaps in Nova Scotia is unclear, but one thing is certain. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans has come under fire for failing to enforce the stated commercial lobster fishing season. It's supposed to run from the end of November until the end of May, but out of season fishing is rampant. Minister Smith says there is zero enforcement on the water, so lobster poachers can harvest as much as they want. He said he's not just concerned about violence, but about unreport income through cash transactions, and that out of season fishing risks destroying lobster stocks and the fishery. Canada's reputation internationally is also at stake, he said, particularly if undersized lobsters or females bearing eggs are being caught and sold moving on to the fishy fish desk. Speaking of fish related crime, a Mississippi seafood distributor and two of its managers pled guilty last month to mislabeling foreign fish as premium local filets. Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc. QPS, the largest seafood wholesaler on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, has agreed to pay the United States one million dollars in forfeitures and a criminal fine of one hundred and fifty thousand. In addition, to the company's managers, Todd A. Rosetti and James W. Gunkel, pled guilty to misbranding seafood to facilitate the company's fraud. According to a DOJ press release, the fish substitution scheme started all the way back into two thousand and two and ran until twenty nineteen. Over those years, the company recommended and sold to its restaurant customers foreign sourced fish that could serve as convincing substitutes for the local species the restaurants advertised on their menus. Sometimes those restaurants were in the know. A well known Mississippi Gulf Coast restaurant has also pled guilty. In this case, Mary Mahoney's Old French House in Biloxie admitted to selling a whopping twenty nine tons of fraudulently labeled seafood between twenty thirteen and twenty nineteen. For example, restaurant goers were told they were ordering snapper and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico, when in fact they were eating other species from abroad. DNA tests conducted by the FDA confirmed that some of these filets were actually Lake Victoria perch from Africa, tripletail from Surinam, and unicorm filefish from India. That's not great for paying customers, it's not great for the fish industry's carbon footprint, and it's especially important to prosecute these crimes to protect local fishermen. If a supply and a restaurant conspire to mislabeled seafood, they can undercut all the other local suppliers and restaurants, which means honest fishermen have a hard time making a profit. If you don't mind eating frozen fish from overseas, that's fine, but lots of folks would prefer eating local, freshly caught fish, and that won't be possible if all those commercial operations are forced out of business. Quality poultry and seafood has already been sentenced, but the individual managers who made these decisions won't be until later this year. Hopefully they'll throw the book at them. That's all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write in to askcl that's Ascal at the meat eater dot com. We'll let you know what's going on in our neck of the woods, but you know you do first. Had a lot of coffee today. Kids. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. Get out in the woods. Be kind and courteous to those you encounter out there, and you know, spread your love of the outdoors. November's coming up quick. Got a big vote in Colorado, and every vote matters. We've got to engage the non hunting public. Our access to wildlife is at stake. Thanks again, We'll talk to you next week.