00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now Here's Kel. The last couple of weeks have been busy in the art outside an art gallery desk, more specifically art found in places we think of as wild places defined by their apparent lack of human presence. You may have seen photos of the mysterious metal monolith that Bighorn sheep researchers recently stumbled across in the Red Rock Desert of southeast Utah. To my eye, the thing kind of looks like a ten foot tall piece of chewing gum in semi shiny foil that someone stood upright, or a long lost sculpture by the minimalist artist Donald Judd. No one knows who put it there or why. The Utah Department of Public Safety wanted to keep the mystery going by not telling anyone exactly where the monolith was for fear that people would get lost in the desert trying to find it. Of course, that didn't work, and people on the internet not only figured where the object was, but went back to review satellite imagery and found that the thing has been there since mid two thousand sixteen, just standing there all by itself. Year after year, the Utah Department of Public Safety put out a statement trying to deter future artisse and it contains this gem quote. It is illegal to install structures, including art, on public lands without permission, no matter what planet you're from. Could the monolith just be intergalactic litter? And you might ask, where do we draw the line on what people or aliens for that matter, can and cannot leave behind on public land. Our currents to mark a trail along stretch of bare rocks so bad? How about prayer flags at a campsite and the good vibes that might be spread on the wind across the landscape. Or that core's yellow belly tower you and your buddies built that inevitably turns up in the remote woods just after you wonder to yourself, if you are the only human being who has ever set foot in that place, who's to say that that beer can is not a work of art? Anyway? I know what you're thinking. What are the results of the Big Horn Sheep survey? This week? We've got this damn show Pheasants food Art. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as this podcast is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. Not only was I using the powerful sharp compact Steel P forty pruning shears to easily snip through pheasant parts this week, but I used a set of steel suspenders to keep my bridges up. I'm a bit of a suspender guy due to my lack of butt and apparent need for my butt to see the sunlight all the time. Uh, you know, suspenders come in handy. I traveled to South Dakota, Yes, South Dakota, to meet with a few folks to talk habitat pheasants food and get old snort some time in the field working on our pheasant skills. Now, trying to make life and work happen while being COVID responsible isn't the same to say the least quarantine time and testing or minor considerations. I work from home most of the time, but on my entire ten plus hour drive I did not enter a gas station or grocery store or anything else. Just pumped gas and consumed gas. I guess, throwing some hand sanitizer and and that really about covers all my travel. Matt Morlock of Pheasants Forever if you're not familiar with PF, they are a really fantastic habitat building nonprofit. Brad leone of It's Alive and Bone Appetite. Brian Merkel, butcher from Duluth. We're all other folks on this trip, and we all contributed foods from our homes, so there wasn't any real grocery shopping, which sounds good and responsible. But these businesses in rural America depend on hunter dollars. For example, Aberdeen, South Dakota, which is where we're based where this podcast is being recorded from right now, is one of the self proclaimed pheasant capitals of the world, and they depend on hunter dollars. Now, these numbers are loose, so bear with me. Aberdeen, South Dakota figured that main street businesses we're bringing in around nineteen million dollars per year based solely off of pheasant hunters. As hunter numbers changed in the area, the number went way down. They made a lot less. It hurt businesses and the families associated with those businesses. Pheasant numbers had to climb and a bit. There was also an increase of land that held pheasants but did not allow any access or it was leased and blocked off, so a lot of the pheasant hunters started skipping over Aberdeen, South Dakota. It just didn't pheasant hunt at all. In response to this, the City of Aberdeen, with help from Pheasants Forever, formed what is known as the Aberdeen Pheasant Coalition, which uses private dollars collectively to lease private land from farmers and ranchers in the area to provide public access to private ground all walking hunting. In their first year, they opened up over four thousand acres to pheasant hunters. The program has grown since then and it is an effective economic stimulant to the town of Aberdeen, South Dakota and the surrounding area. Provide access to good ground and the hunters will come. We walked a lot of miles, stomped through a lot of thick cat tails, worked hard, but we found birds, some of which we got shots at. It was great late season pheasant hunting, lots of pheasants if you're willing to work, which is what it should be like in my opinion. Then we went over to Eric Johansson's farm, which is your typical farm ranch situation, but they really embrace the quote responsible agriculture model. They do a ton of stuff here, and I'm only scratching the surface. But they restore deep rooted native grasses on their range land, which allows them to hold more water. They selectively spray noxious weeds and riparian zones, those famous prairie potholes. Then they leave those potholes alone instead of trying to farm them when they go dry. They keep records to prove that wildlife and agriculture can thrive together, and there are plenty of state and federal programs that will help farmers work this way. There were an unbelievable amount of birds in what Eric and his buddy Corey describe as a slow day. The cover on the coalition ground, the public access ground is cover you would kill for as a pheasant hunter. But this place, your hands in the ground had cover plus food, plus you know, relatively little hunting pressure, very thought out hunting pressure, and there's an undeniable difference. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't the case. Then on the third day we went to a property pheasants Forever is looking to acquire and put into a conservation easeman or possibly something a little bit more. It was very different terrain, rolling hills, lots of walking, less cover, but the cover that was there was really dense, thick cover, and eventually we found a lot of birds. Not a lot of shooting, but a lot of birds, which now we can get into what you really want to know. The snort report. Well, Snort a Kiss ran about half speed the first walk of the first day, a little unsure of our intentions, I think. Then she increased her intensity. We got some shots at birds, and she worked even harder. She ran all day and was beat the next day when we hit the Johansen farm. We had an overwhelming amount of pheasants scent to deal with, plus walking through rows of corn and sorghum, which was brand new to her. I think, like little highway lanes take some practice for those dogs to work back and forth and cross the lanes versus just running, you know, vertically. She got a little wild, but stood her ground pretty darn well on some competitive retrieves with big male dogs that do this stuff for a living every day. Birds weren't too worse for the wear in those slight tug a war situations. Lots of shooting, lots of birds, people, dogs, deer busting out of the corn, It was a wild scene for a seven month old puppy. She didn't just follow other dogs around. She hunted by herself. She worked her areas. She did really phenomenally well for such a young dog and a brand spanking new, crazy situation. And you know, there's some pretty fancy shooting out there. I have to say, although skeptical at first, those Carlson's choked tubes designed around the Federal Prairie Storm bismuth loads are legitimate. I feel like we were spanking those roosters. We did have a couple of crippled birds, one of which Snort actually took out of the air as it was attempting to fly, which was very cool to see. But then I think she caught a spur to the face, as those roosters do from time to time. I despise a flogging rooster. And she dropped that bird and it was gone. I couldn't find it, which is not fun at all. We always like to think of these old wise birds, but the average lifespan of a pheasant is fifteen months. They're a short lived bird. But that doesn't matter. Losing them sucks. I want I eat. I'm not the coyotes then that third day, when the cat tail cover was really thick and the birds were slim, that little girl dog worked so hard she tore it up. She was in the super thick stuff that she was kind of hesitant in the first day, and it was extremely cool to see. She did retrieve a rooster, which I was very happy of because I thought that spur to the face may leave a lasting mark. She did look slightly hesitant, I'll be honest, but she did pick it up and bring them back to me, and then flushed sharp tail grouse immediately after and spanked that grouse and she brought it back to me too. It was really great, and these three different experiences all stacked up together made for an absolutely phenomenal trip. I gotta tell you, I'm very happy that this dog has had more tough no bird days than days when it's all birds all the time, like out at the Johnson Place. That was an absolutely phenomenal experience. We covered a lot of ground, We did a lot of hiking. Those birds are still late season birds who have been hunting, and they're they're wild, but there's just a lot more of them, so increases your opportunity for sure. Incredibly cool onto ducks and geese. I believe we'll see what happens with a little snort. Keep you posted for sure. Moving on quick hitter from the Alternative Foods Desk. So recently I read an article on Everybody's Savior, the lab grown meat product soon to be released in supermarkets near you. Now. The idea behind this protein, this lab grown protein, is that this is going to be the golden goose that frees us all from the global warming causing green house gas emissions associated with commercial meat production. Everybody knows my thoughts on this. We've covered this many times. I feel like anything that furthers the gap between meat and the land is a bad thing. Eventually, folks are gonna not know that meat came from the land and therefore not care about the land. And I care a great deal about the land. You may have picked that up from previous episodes, but you guys don't need to hear about that. So I brought in two special guests, Brad Leone who will introduce himself in a much more appropriate way than I can, and Brian Merkel, who will also introduce himself. Hey guys, I'm Brad Leoni from Bone appetite and uh, really excited to be here chatting with Ryan Callahan about lab grown meat. For me, there's a lot of topics that come up off of it. One of them that you know, that came to my mind in conversation with Ryan up here where we're up here bird hunting in in South Dakota, which is awesome and one of the things that came up to my mind when we were chatting about it, amongst many topics was the idea of a market where it all all of a sudden, there is a product and it becomes very lucrative and there's a monetary incentive to create this product. One of the many ideas that excites me about lab grown meat is the accountability for it. Right. So it's like a lab there's certain ingredients, are the best ingredients, is the best whatever you name it making this new product, which is a lab grown meat, and that that can be theoretically, to me in my mind, a beautiful thing. But if history has shown us anything, it is in that opportunity, in this new rise of a star, of a new potential society, changing product becomes a new opportunity for people to make knockoffs. Right, So like a great comparison that I I brought up with that to me, it helps me understand it is the legal marijuana category. Right, So it's like I enjoy marijuana, and I enjoy the idea of reputable grower and facility and knowing that I'm going to get from seed to plant to bud whatever, an accountable, beautiful, trust and clean product. And if I can get that in beef, whether it's on a land or grown in a lab, that's something that that that interests me. Now what scares me is just like the metal, just like the marijuana category or field of department, is the idea that a lot of people see that and see that for an opportunity for cheap imitations, for knockoffs. So and I'm no doubt in my mind other than the hurdles of it being probably expensive. If there's one thing you know people are brilliant at is it's it's innovation on the fly, especially when there's money involved. So my point to get to it is, I'm scared of people coming out with dirty lab meats where it's grown in a subpar laboratory with subpar scientists, with subpar chemical components, and you're gonna get what in a package looks just like what we all want from this new thing, But we're getting a flooded market with something that is potentially dangerous and not what this vision is all about. And just like anything, that is something that I think hopefully that doesn't happen. But being a consumer and being a citizen and a person, I think that of the world it is our duty to also call that out and keep an eye on it. So hopefully lab grown meat can become a nice addition to take a little bit of pressure off of ranchers and traditional beef methods. And to Calahan's point, you know, I don't think it is a race at all, you know, I I think there's a beauty in the middle. Let's, you know, let's let's take some pressure off it. Let's get rid of some of the old systems that are in place around beef that are ugly, and use this tool to help alleviate and and release some of that pressure. But like anything, I'm excited about it, and um I see a lot of positive potential in it. Up with that comes a lot of responsibility and and trust. So hopefully, uh, hopefully we do the right thing. Hi, my name is Brian Merkele. I'm a butcher up into Minnesota. I work for business called Wiker Acres and we raise heritage breed pigs and grass fed grass finished beef, and we have a business where we are the farmers, butchers and the chefs and like to deliver boxes with all of these delicious items direct to people's homes as well as some regional wholesale business. And I've followed the lab grown meat now for a while and to me, it's very concerning because I believe that there is a lot of momentum building UH and consumer culture where people are willing to pay more for meat and are very environmentally conscious with the way that they're shopping for food. And what scares me is that people are going to stop supporting small farm arms and start buying lab grown meat from some big corporation. And if lab grown meat was just cutting into the segment of factory, industrial farmed meat, that to me would be a good thing. But you know, my goal is to continue growing business that's supporting small farms that are farming sustainably. To continue with that, I think that there's a lot of flavors of the week as far as environmental sustainability focused food items go and lab grown meat. To me, it's posing as solving this problem, but really it's just another way for people to make a lot of money in the grocery store, and that scares me. I guess I'm also curious because, Okay, how how successful is lab grown meat can become? And is it capable of completely wiping out like industrial beef production and opening up all of that land and resources for other use. And maybe if that's the case, then small sustainable farms that are are working with environmentally stable practices or you know a lot of these cases actually like a carbon negative operation. Does that give them more room where they're they're like only real meat that's available. I guess that seems like kind of a dream, but I mean convinced me that that's a possibility, and maybe I'll buy some stuck in this tube meat stuff. I don't know. We got a meat producer and meet educator having uh, some questions and some thoughts and you know, and then just me somebody likes to eat and truthfully likes to acquire meat. The interesting point that both of these characters brought up is what is this actually going to replace what is lab grown meat actually going to replace? And if it does replace something, what happens to the void that it creates? Again, to tie this back to the land and my strong opinion the hat if folks like to eat, they know that that food that they're eating has come from the land, and therefore they should support protect and preserve land. If that goes away, what happens to that land, If that's no longer land that is in food production, does it then go into a bunch of little cookie cutter type of home productions. Because I'm not for that. We need more pollinators, more ungulates, even if you don't eat them, they're fun to look at. We're gonna chock this up in the opinion desk at Col's weaken review. Moving on to the damn desk, There's been some good news coming out of the Klamath River basin in California and Oregon, but when it comes to water in the American West, all news is complicated news. First, let's get to the good. All the groups who need to agree on the terms of removing for were dams across the Klamath River have finally done so this would be the biggest dam removal project in American history and removing these dams as a huge wind. They were built between ninetelve and nineteen sixty four to generate electricity and to help control flooding, both of which are good things. Unfortunately, the dams have also caused huge problems, including almost completely blocking salmon and other fish from swimming up river to spawn. Even when the fish can manage to get up and down the river, they often get packed together in big groups behind the dams, which allows parasites to spread easily and have caused massive die offs. That's bad news for the fish, bad news for US anglers, bad news for all the other organisms that depend on those fish making their way inland, and bad news for the Native American tribes whose way of life revolves in large part around this migration. And in recent decades, the benefits of these particular dams have been shrinking. They're getting old, they don't produce as much power as they used to, and they're expensive to maintain. So you might ask, if the problems are so clear in the benefits so few, shouldn't it be easy to get rid of them? Sure, Growing a boat loaded with TNT to the base of each of these damns and letting her rip would be simple, probably cost effective, and you could sell tickets for the show. I'd probably be first in line. But removing them responsibly is slow and extremely expensive, and deciding who pays for that is a major sticking point. And if you built the beautiful house thread on the water above one of these dams, once the damns go away, your waterfront property would not be so waterfront property. All this is meant that the fight around removing these dams has lasted for more than twenty years. But now the states of California and Oregon, and the owner of the dams, Pacific Corps, the Native American tribes in the area, the nonprofit entity created to oversee the removal, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, have all signed an agreement green lighting the project. Demolition could begin by Similar dam removals have been happening all across the country in recent years, and fish recovery has been observed with many of them almost immediately. That's the good news, but still not everyone is happy. Imagine that even though the four dams in question don't provide agricultural irrigation, farmers have been watching this agreement with concern. In recent decisions about when and where to release water from other dams in the Klamath Basin, the benefits for fish populations have been put ahead of the needs of farmers, and they've been caught without water when they've needed it most. If fish recovery is so high on the list of priorities, will people want to take down the other dams in the area that create a consistent water supply for agriculture. Just as we all value eating fish, we can't forget the farms that gave us so many other things to eat. And this is just scratching the surface of the complexity and conflict of managing water all over the West. It's no mistake that one of the best movies ever made, Chinatown, is about water rights. In California, people kill each other over this stuff, As with well basically everything in life. There is no perfectly good or perfectly bad. Hydro Electric dams produce clean electricity. If we're ever going to generate all the energy we need without runaway climate change, we're going to be faced with tough decisions. Consider nuclear power. It's dependable, carbon free, doesn't depend on foreign countries to supply or run and disposal of the waste is getting better and better. But when things go wrong, they go very wrong, as the people of Russia and Japan can tell you. And don't forget three Mile Island. And if you think an aging dam is expensive to take down, you should see the costs of demolishing hanging out of date nuclear power plant. But what are the alternatives? So in the here and now, let's cheer the removal of these four dams along the klam With. It's gonna be great for fish and for people. It's gonna supply some jobs. But we're never going to find a silver bullet for these kinds of problems. As we keep going with balancing conservation and the needs of people, we have to keep our wits about us and our pro nuance ANTIBS detectors turned all the way up. Forget Jake, it's China Town. If you don't give a damn about that one. Here's the next, and it's a hot Tamali from the Southwest. Courtesy the National Park Service, Brown trout hunters Sharpen your hooks. Bounties on browns from Lee's Ferry through Grand Canyon National Park are being set in place and open for the taking, you know, bounties on brown trout because they're non native. Let's say you're taking the whole clan cross country on the Great American road Trip. Clerk. Well, even the last true family man knows that while getting there is half the fun, it's expensive, which is why you should add a little angling to the family itinerary. The National Park Service is paying twenty five dollars per brown trout head on any brown trout over six inches. And here's where we get to play the popular game of So you want to be a conservationist, do you? And what exactly does that mean in this situation, Well, it's as murky as the Colorado if you want to start from the beginning. According to the National Park Service, this desert river held no trout of any kind, suckers pike minto carp chubs where the native inhabitants. From its headwaters in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, the river drops more than two miles on a sevent hundred mile journey to the Gulf of California. This is from the National Park Service website. The water becomes thick with sediment as it passes through the Red Rock canyons, of the Colorado Plateau, and seasonal flow varies greatly. Before dams were built, flows ranged from a few thousand cubic feet per second to nearly four hundred thousand cubic feet per second. That's a big fluctuation. Historically, only fourteen species of fish inhabited the Upper Colorado River basin, but over forty non native species have been added since the late eighteen hundreds. The native fish species and canyon lands are primarily carpet minnows and suckers, and many are not found anywhere else. These include the Colorado pike, minnow, razorback, and flannel mouth sucker, as well as the humpback and bonytail chub. One study at the confluence and canyon lands found nine of the fish found were non native. Carpet and channel catfish are the most commonly seen the invasive carper native to Asia, and we're hailed as the greatest food fish ever by the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries at the time. Catfish are known to eat the young of several native species and have played a significant role in the decline of native fish populations in the past few decades. The Colorado pike, mentow razorback, sucker, humpback, and bony tailed chub have all been listed as endangered species. Which, if this doesn't sound exciting to you, let's just talk about this Colorado pike minnow a k the Colorado salmon for a minute. Prior to the damns, this was the kingfish in the river. Pike minnow everywhere are voracious eaters and in my opinion, make darned fine savicha. If you are a sport fisher person one who likes a good fight, the pike mento will put a serious bend in a seven weight fly rod and smash streamers when they are on their spawning beds in the spring. If you have ever tied in to a sizeable pike minnow, you know what I'm talking about. Now, imagine you tie into one that is six ft long and over one hundred pounds. Not a fish I want to tangle with on the fly Again. Prior to the damning of the Colorado one of the means of take the methods for catching this fish. The Colorado pike minnow during their annual spawning run, which could have been as long as two hundred miles through the famous Colorado Whitewater was attaching a baited hook to a rope, the other end of the rope to the pickup truck, and when that pike mentow latched on, you drove the truck away from the river. Sounds like an exciting and unique technique, right, something out of that show River Monsters. But instead of traveling like all the way to the Amazon and fighting bugs and malaria, you could have gone to the Arizona Desert and just pack sunscreen. We traded this fish, which is currently on the endangered species list, for a rainbow trout, which, as we've covered many times here on the Weekend Review, you can literally go anywhere on the planet and find a rainbow trout filet to consume. Anywhere inhabited by people on the planet, you can find a rainbow trout to fish for in some fashion. Minus you know, Antarctica, the Colorado was a wild, disrespectful river that didn't allow people to irrigate or habitate next to her easily. So we damned it over and over again. Hundreds of dams on the tributaries and fifteen on her main stem. And yeah, I said her. We apply the feminine to water often, don't you know. Anyway, the point is, how do we justify endangering multiple species putting a bounty that one could argue as arbitrary on a brown trout only over six inches to enhance a fishery that shouldn't exist for a species benefit, that is the trout equivalent of these white bread Well, because we wanted to their fun. Anglers demand them because they're catchable, and we anglers have proven that's what we want, I guess. Moving on to the anthropology desk, and this one from a rock art site that researchers have known about for years, the Pinwheel Cave in southern California, which gets its name from an ancient spiral design drawn in red ochre on the cave ceiling. After further expiration in the cave, a team of archaeologists recently found four hundred year old bundles of flowers from the native to toura plant packed into crevices in the rock. To Toura is known as an extremely strong hallucinogen, and tooth marks were found under a microscope on these particular bundles, providing very strong evidence for the idea that the native chew Mash people use the cave for spiritual practice, involving to toura fueled visions. The find of the plant bundles is even more interesting because the spiral structure of the tour of flower almost precisely matches the design painted on the cave itself, leading archaeologists to theorize that the painting not only depicts the hallucinogenic plant, but also that the spiral may resemble the visual experience of a person under the influence of the plant. The archaeological finds in the rest of the cave make this vision questing seem, if anything, less mysterious evidence of cooking and habitation. It seems that the visions experienced in the cave weren't removed or hidden from the rest of life, but rather an integrated part of society. Interesting how history comes around, isn't. Hallucinogens are now, of course, starting to pop up on state initiatives and open for voting, Colorado, I'm looking at you in a kind of slightly spiralized way. Moving on down to the Colombian Amazon rainforest, where last year archaeologists and covered what may be one of those most important ancient art sites in the world. Tens of thousands of elaborate paintings so many that the site has been nicknamed the Sistine Chapel of the Ancients. The find was just made public in the last few weeks. The paintings were made at least twelve thousand, five hundred years ago. The reason we know this isn't because of carbon dating. All of these paintings were also made from red ochre, a mineral that contains no carbon, which you know makes it hard to carbon date. But we still know when the paintings were made because they depict animals that are now extinct. We know roughly when those animals went extinct, and so we know that these paintings must have been made before then. Some of the creatures on these walls mastodon's, paleo lama's type of ancient camel giant slaws just don't exist anymore. These particular animals don't just tell us how old the paintings are, they also tell us how the environment in the Amazon region has changed over time. Neither a mastodon, nor a paleolama, nor many of the kinds of horses shown in the art could have lived in a jungle, and so scientists are theorizing that at the time this art was made. The surrounding country may have been grasslands. How wild is that not that only twelve thousand years ago the Amazon could have looked like the American Great Plains. Some of the paintings are so high above the ground that they can only be studied with a drone camera, and certain images seem to depict wooden scaffolds that the artists may have used to get up so high, just like Michelangelo on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So these prehistoric people may have climbed hundreds of feet in the air to make their marks. They just happened to beat old Michelangelo to a bunch by about eleven thousand, five hundred years. Don't feel bad, Mike. I'm a slow guy too, buddy. It's nice to see you. Nice to see you. Two. One last update as of November that Utah Monolith was broken down by an unidentified group of men. Just as mysteriously as it came, it disappeared, and not a moment too soon. Dozens of people have already gone to visit the monolith, disturbing the fragile surrounding landscape. I for one, salute the folks that packed that sucker out of there. Pack it in, pack it out should be everyone's monitor in these wild places. Now, let's start working on all those backwoods beer can pieces of art. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you're loving what you're hearing on the weekend review, please tell a friend, and more importantly, tell me what's going on in your neck the woods by writing in to a SK A C A L that's asked Cal at the Meat eater dot com. I'll talk to you next week.