00:00:00 Speaker 1: All right, suckers, We've been talking all the time about our our live tour me Cal Yanni, A lot of special guests, live tour coming up. Everything's sold out. We've got two dates left. Got a lock at home April fifteen. In April sixteen, April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona. So it's like your Phoenix Market April sixteen, City National Grove, Anaheim, California. Again Me the Lavine Eagle O cal Special guests, Me Eater Live April fifteen, Masa Arts Center, Mace, Arizona, April sixteen, City National Grove, Anaheim, California. Get your tickets. Let's finish this thing up. This is me Eat. Your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, vot bitten and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't partake anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. I think listeners ought to know that that phild engineer has uh, he's gotta like he's not good at starting that timer. You might have to go back behind the curtain. You might have to go back into the might have to go back into the back into the resumes. We're just talking about mountainlins and calsambo. What a mountline does when it drops down into like a pen full alloments. If I was a mountainlined, I would be allowed with specialists. That big neck, hard hard to miss. You could be drunk, a drunk cap, get drunk, no matter what. You're gonna get it with the net with the neck like that, That's what I would be a I would be allowed with specialist mountainlin. Yeah, they really like to keep their heads high too. Would I would quickly depopulate the nation. Would be a lama uh and epidemic of a llama losses uh. A couple of things, do you I don't know if you guys. There's a couple of news things I want to talk about before we before we get into it. Um that's gotta be. I haven't like dug into this yet, but Disney's redoing they're doing I don't know, they're doing a live action Bambi remake. I was told about this yesterday. I believe man um live action, So it's gonna be like you know that that's that's stupid thing they did with the lions talking like people. Yes, they're lion king. Real showed me the intro to the lion King deal and then he explained that it is. They didn't variate or they didn't vary the story at all. It's the exact same story from the animated the full animated version. Yeah, but it's just like actual lions being like, what's up man? Phil called it derbank, So that's gonna be like a buck anna be like, well, it's tough, man, because you got these these lions, you know, voiced by humans, but with absolutely no human facial expressions. Just it's yeah, but I mean, deer is decidedly less. A deer is decidedly less, uh sort of facially active, So it's gonna be even worse than the lions. I hope there's a part of that movie where, um you ever see the trail camp footage of deer eating baby birds out of nest. I hope that's part of the movie. That would be a good part of the movie. Um, I would kill to be. I've helped out in in the movie world on on one script as far as like hunting accuracies and it's something you did some consulting. Yeah, the Last of the Mohicans. No, it was The Revenant, all the Walking Out, yeah, which I was all excited for me because I was if you didn't with any of old movies, I was gonna smack you VIP resumes. Uh yeah, but that was for for my buddy Collin helping him. And it's just like this dude like a horse dude. No, he's not a horse dude. It was up in Whitefish. Yeah, he's a white Fish Guy's not a horse dude. A little bit like a wrangler. He used to wrangle horses for movies. No, he just kind of looks like that type of person though you met him once anyway, Well, I met a dude one's named that who was a horse wrangler for movies. Oh no, I lived up in that neck of the woods. No. I always call this guy a young McConaughey because just because it was hair more than anyway. No different guys. Yeah, but the movie world just they fight so hard against reality. Oh yeah, Like it's just they'd want no part of it. You know. Did you see that thing I did that g Q breakdown? That was fantastic, So like GQ, Like GQ magazine, they have this thing they do the breakdown, so you can go watch like a Navy seal breaking down Navy seal scenes and movies. There's a chef breaking down cooking scenes and movies. There's no, no, no, no, there's many of them. Alex Donold the Climber breaks down climbing scenes and movies. I didn't want to breaking down tracking and hunting scenes and movies. And leading up to what I was talking to someone and I was like, man, why don't these movie people like, why don't they hire a guy to come in and be like no, no, no no, no, no, no, you know, you should make it like this. That'll seem more real. And he said, oh, they do. They just don't listen to him. They like to have him around just you know, just to be like, oh, man, I wouldn't do it like that. You know what, you know, you don't got a tape here with a machete. And they're like, in this movie, we do plus like we said, uh, the general uh way of doing things. That has changed quite a bit because you look at the reality of the Robert Redford, Jeremiah Johnson Elk shot like that Elk died, you pointed out, and they took some heat. They took some heat for it, and Robert Redford kind of like justified and explained it. And then in mcgwayn's movie Ranchodi looks grace film never made um. They you know, they shoot a steer with a sharp's rifle. Um. And he expressed to me that he was glad they don't do it that way anymore. They bought a steer and shot it. And when you watch the movie, if you're familiar with any kind of hunting or farming or anything, when you're watching the movie, there's no confusion. You watched Last and Mohicans, it's like when they shoot a Deer's like that, dear, I don't know what happened to that deer. It wasn't shot. That was just I don't know what it went from a live deer to a stuffed thing somersault Yeah, yeah, like stuffed like they threw a stuffed animal through the woods, somersaulting. Yeah. I imagine how for the amount of folks uh that are on a film set, how some could it could probably cast a shadow over production for a day. If if you're not un familiar with watching the light fade from something's eyes. Anyone with sensitivities might want to come to work late today. You know, I don't know. I'm about ready to quit talking about I don't know, Phil, Let me ask you. It just has an impartial observer. Do you think we should um cease covering severed finger stories or no? Well, what has the feedback been like? More? It's just we get flooded with severed finger stories and images. Have you gotten anybody that's saying you're you're making me gag while I listen to your podcast. They just send us more and more graphics. I have pictures of severed fingers that would curl your hair. Okay, well, I think I said. I sent one of my wife and she was genuinely mad at me for two days. I would be too. It was about midnight, I was in a different time zone and I sent her an image. No, no explanation. This is an audio medium, though, so I think you know, I think you're okay. I want to post them to Instagram, but I feel like i'd get banished. Oh yeah, for sure. You got sent the grinder one, right. That's that is haunting, especially if you grind your own meat, because the hand when it gets eventually cut out of the grinder is very familiar, very familiar. Tend to knee chunks. I might start a page, separate page on the dark web before I get anyways. A couple more finger stories. First, Jim halfl finger. That's the hell of a name actually, speaking of severed grandfather severed his finger at the railroad railhouse. Call them Granda half a finger from most of that's fantastic. Yeah, it's unusual. Last name you have tell tell people your job real quick. Swiss German. My lame name is Swiss German. I'm the wildfe Science coordinator for AS in the game Fish department. But you got your like, you're in there, man. You mix it up. You write articles, listen to stuff, monitor stuff, argue. It's all interesting. Um. I started being interest in Jim because he sends so many clarifications and corrections. I don't want to be that guy. No, No, not at all. No, you do it very respectfully. Like we'll get a lot of guys that like sending a cracktion or two and you can just see over the months, you'll see him just become very agitated. But they're not getting the level of attention they want and then they just turned and then they turned like they like hate you but still listen and you want to be like you could not listen. Um, it doesn't accrue to him. But here, okay, this guy is talking about Uh, this guy is talking about another great story. So this guy's um. This guy got married and his best man's dad had retired and started. I don't understand. Is he tired, retired and move to a golf course and he would kill time by mowing the lawn. I feel like it must have been a spare job, not volunteer. Would you move to a golf course and volunteer to mow the golf course? Listen to my grandpa would volunteer and mow lawns out of the golf course that he loved. I did not understand it. But my buddies who were working out at that golf course as like caddies. They loved it. They're like, yeah, I saw your grandpa came by on the more work today. I've been anti golf my whole life, but I'm huge. I'm super pro golf now. I don't want to tell people why. I don't want to tell people about what what happened with me in the flip flat flasher. But now we're like major golf supporters. At least it's green space. I'm not a golfer, but a major golf supporter. I support the golf industry. My dad always said, friends with the golf industry. Hit the bone chase. It hit the bone chase. It look at those simps out there, hit the bone chase. It. Oh no, listen. I'm a golf supporter, but I mean, and I love all golfers, and I support all golf courses, but uh, it's a moronic sport. Um. Anyways, this guy's ut moll on the golf course. You can just picture this. So he's he's in a more it's got a roll bar, and he's coming in and there's a there's a pole with a guideline a guy cable coming off of it. So he realizes that the roll bar in the cable are gonna make contact, so he he's got it. He breaks as he realizes, and he reaches up to put some up pressure on the guyline to clear it from the roll bar, but then his foot slips off of the brake. Phil, can you put in a good noise that sounds like this, but it's like a right I mean, is that the sound of flesh or the sound of like, what's what's happening here? With that noise? That's the cable cutting his finger off. Combination. I think the most disturbing part of all of these is there's rarely a scenario where I don't see myself having narrowly avoided that happening to me, or I can't be like, oh, I can see how I would do that. There's a great detail, he says that his the tendon. There's a tendons find their way into these stories. The tendon is someone sent us a picture of it. It's like a finger with like sixteen inches attendant. Like the tendant came off up at the elbow. But the tendon, he said, is wrapped around the cable. This is he's a good writer. He says. It's similar if you took a ribbon and run it along a pair of scissors to coil it up. That's how he's describing the coil of the tendon. And this man then getting up there and unwrapping his h unwrapping his finger from the cable. Another good figure story. It is the last one for today. There's two stories. One has nothing to do with fingers. Guy was saying, his h his old man's welder, and he had a big weald and glove on and his super hot chunk of slag got down as well and glove and lodged against his wedding ring. His wedding ring got so hot that it burned a scar circle around his finger. Now he doesn't wear a wedding rings. He's got a scar circle instead. He's got a scar as a wedding ring. And a story. Uh yeah, oh two more things, man, I just said one more, but two more? Yeah? Shoot, what do you think, Jim? You get bored? No? I like finger stories. It's not even a finger story. No, I'm not bored. All right, we're talking there to day we had an episode. We're talking all dropping stuff down ice holes, and this guy drops three fifty seven Smith and Weston down down the ice hole, which is easy to be like, why absolutely why? Like that is not a common part of my He said it was stainless, and so the real bummers. He couldn't get it with a magnet. He sends in a video of him in his ice house. He gets his ice house ripping hot with the heat and he's in his ice house but his swim trunks. He goes down the whole, can't find it, comes back up and he looks in like rough shape. Man. He gets warm back up again, his buddies filming, and it looks at like a totally rough shape. And he gets psyched up enough and dives back down here again and comes out pretty much. His buddy's like reeling back in with a rope tied around his ankle, and he's got that pistol. He says they were toting it around because they kept seeing wolves out on the ice. Oh my gosh, pretty funny. Uh that's good, all right, Uh, Jim halflefinger, let's start out with this. So you know, I guess first off, tell people like what your sort of scope is your your the scope of your life's work as a wildlife guy. So I spent twenty two years as a regional biologist and too sound for his on the game Fish Department, And in the last four years I moved to kind of a statewide position called Wilife Science Coordinator. And the gist of that job is to have someone kind of free floating that can do some of the deep dives into science and and make sure that we've got good science supporting the policies and the decisions we make as an agency. So that's pretty unusual. We'll have a state wilife agency too, to be I think forward thinking enough to have someone like that to make sure that we're providing a good scientific foundation and the things we do. And your work, uh, I know that just from talking about various issues around the country. Inherently your work spreads beyond Arizona because wildlife issues don't stop at state lines, right, Yeah. And one of the biggest reasons I'm involving a lot of westwide stuff is I'm mom. Also, there's an association of of twenty four Western state wildlife agency, state and provincial wilife agencies, and it's called the Western Association Official Wildlife Agencies, and they get together twice a year and they have some subcommittees and some working groups, and I've chaired I've been on the Milder Working Group UH for more than twenty years now, and I've char it for the last thirteen or fourteen years, and so as a as a chair that oversees a meal deer expert from each of those twenty four Western agencies. We as a group and and me as the chair, are real involved in all the Western migration stuff. You had Matt Kaufman here and and Kevin Monty talking about some of the stuff they're doing. I've been working with Matt and Kevin UM actually an awful lot on a lot of these things in the West. But that that position to the Western Association, sharing that group really puts me um involved and in the seat to do a lot of things throughout the West too. Uh. I know some of the bigger things you get involved in, like you know, all your big game and your charismatic megafauna. Um. How low down in the what's the smallest thing involved in? Well, my twenty two years as a regional biologist, I was in charge of three species of quail, Google's turkey restoration um in southeastern Arizona, mountain, lion's big horn, sheep, pronghorn, all of all of the hunted species is what I dealt with, from big game to small game. That was most of my career and it's really the last four years or so that I've been doing primarily a lot of big game, a lot of big game Western stuff. UM various miscellaneous science support for the agency, and then Mexican wolf recovery, which I've been involved in for the last ten years, oh for a decade now, we'll get to that a little bit. I know. That's a yeah, and it's a constantly changing landscape. It is in minefield. You might say, al right, first question, some quick hit or topics for you. Um, and a lot of this is inspired by feedback you've given us when questions emerge on other shows. One of the things we've emailed about was this, and we've we've touched on this, like news reports about this or confusion about this is uh, there's this. It seems to be this emerging idea that people are like, well, if if hunters go out and they want to like hunters want to get big bucks, right, hunters want to shoot big box, they want to shoot big bighorn sheep, they want to shoot big moves. If you go out and selectively target big bucks, are you changing the evolutionary path of the species, Meaning you're putting on you know, you're putting a selective pressure against big antler dear, This is an argument against trophy hunting, right, and that by doing that, you're making them. You're driving them to become smaller, right, all right, you're buying it, not buying it. No, with with servants with a deer family there there's no evidence of that at all. But this all came to light. It's not even that new. It's just once in a while a reporter will learn about it and write an article about it and think they're the first one to write about it. But it really call That's a good way of expressing how things like this come up and they and they stay alive like that. Um, someone thinks that, hey, I just found out this new thing, but everybody's been discussing it for seventeen years, which has been about the case with this. In two thousand three, David Colton came out at we're talking about severed fingers. You don't feel that way, you know, we can keep doing that, keep doing that. These guys think they discovered severed fingers. So there was a there was a paper in two thousand three that really lit the world on fire on this whole topic. He didn't hear two thousand three, two thousand three, that's all long and that's really the genesis of all this recent kind of interests in that in that topic. But they there was a there's a population on the east side of the Alberta Rockies and it's separated from the main part of the Rockies Bigne. It's called Ram Mountain and it's a it's a really small little dot out away from the rest of the sheep populations. I gotta stop you. Okay, you mentioned with servants, but now we're talking about yep cheap. Yeah, right, to help people get through that, And I just I just mentioned servants right off the bat to to almost dismissed that because and we can talk about some of the reasons and tell me what servants are too, just because it's a deer family, so it's a moose and alcan deer and and um anything in the deer family with basically with antlers with a few exceptions. So so this whole idea of trophy hunters ruining the gene pool, degrading the gene pool. Some of the popular media called evolution in reverse that has really been focused on big horn cheap or why out cheap and and it all comes from this one isolated, unique population called Ram Mountain and Alberta. And they did some research on there and they reported in two thousand three in Nature that hunters selecting the largest rams were actually causing a genetic change in the population, so that there was smaller and smaller rams uh in that population. And then that same author even came out in two thousand and eight and said, well, my work in two thousand three really probably over exaggerated the genetic component of that. There's really more nutrition um than I originally said in that paper, but it was too late. The popular media took that and just ran with it, and you saw it. You saw it everywhere, and part of it was for people who don't like hunting and people who don't like trophy hunting. It was such an irresistible story. Trophy under something negative about trophy hunters, and some people just love that, and so trophy hunters are ruining the gene pool, and all the popular media picked up on that. And then there's even some scientists who don't like trophy hunting and don't like hunting, and so they started looking at other data set and and see if they could produce a paper that looked something similar, And all the subsequent papers that came out they would cite the Ram mountain information, which were later found out to be over exaggerated in the genetic component, and these and these other scientists would speculate um sighting Ram Mountain and then speculate that this may be happening in these other areas, and it may be happening with all big game, may be happening with all species worldwide that humans harvest, and so these other papers were just full of speculation. But every time someone published a paper to speculate, someone else could cite the speculative paper and the Ram Mountain paper, and these started to build this body of speculation. And and now we're starting to get back and apply some science to that and find out that it's it's it may happen in a few cases, but it's certainly not widespread. But it's too late. The public has has seen the popular message and aren't reading scientific papers. But the bottom line is if selection is intensive enough, it can affect the gene pool in the future. What you need to think about is in what cases is selection intensive enough to actually change the gene pool in cheap or or deer or any other species that we hunt. And the answer is it's a very rare case. And and the case on Ram Mountain was unique because it was isolated. The population swelled and bottlenecked a few times, which can affect the genetics. And also they had a hunting regime there where it was an unlimited number of hunters could hunt that little isolated mountain range the isolated mountain, but they had to be four fifths curl before they were legal to harvest. And so that's a situation where the rams that have faster growing horns, better genetics, faster growing horns are going to get truncated. They're gonna get taken out of the field as soon as they hit four fifths. And so that's the case where the rams that have faster growing horns are going to be removed at a higher proportion than rams of slower growing horns. So that was the basis of this Coldman and so there's it's so theoretically and in practice there it's not flawed that in certain situations that can happen. We did some more recent search with with Kevin Montiese Lab Taylor Lashar is a graduate student, where we took state big horn sheep records, and state records were important because we had horn measurements and we also had ages on those rams, which is something the Boone Crockett, Pope and Young Rocket books don't have ages. They just have measurements, and they don't they don't record the number annually on a horn um not not Buona Crockett. No, it's measurements, you know. They got their measurement system and then on the data sheet there they can put um age on some of the species. But I'm not sure if they even do it with big horn sheet on there. Yeah, and the problem too is you have to be like pretty well trained. Yeah, it's not it's not that easy. There's some there's some experience that goes into it. But state agencies do record age and record some measurements, sometimes full Boone Crockett, sometimes just basis plus the length of the horn. And so we went to the state records and got all the state records we could assembled into a database where we had age and we had the antler or the horn measurements, and then we were able to analyze these the sheep records and we were able to to accommodator neutralized the effective age because obviously the older the ramble, the bigger the horns. And so you got it in your analysis, you've you've got to be able to UM look at that and fair at that part of the analysis out. And then we're also able to look at some UM in d v I index, which is a greenness index of satellite imagery, and we were able to look at at nutrition and environment and how that affected horn size in these in these states and in these populations, and and in the end, we analyzed UM data from thirty five years from seventy two different hunt units around North America UM and and in the end we found that of those seventy two units UM, seventy eight percent of them were either stable or the horn size was increasing, so only even showed a decline. Now we don't even know yet what that decline is, but in those twenty two that declined, only half of those had a hunt regime that even even could possibly exert some kind of stuf the pressure. You know, sometimes you can just look at a hunt system and and like a complete permit system that Arizona has, where someone just takes just one rams monge, so you're not you don't have that kind of selective pressure like you have if you have unlimited number of hunters creaming that horn size at a certain level. And so even in the twenty two where they weren't stable or increasing in horn length, they were decreasing UM still about half of those could even have possibly been due to some selective pressure. And so the bottom line is, even in sheep, which is the only species that this has really been um found in a in a controlled setting, it's very unusual to have that kind of hunting regime that that would actually apply that selected pressure to cause kind of genetic changes. And all this is confounded terribly with with nutrition. More nutrition, and animal gets the bigger the horns and antlers. The older the animal gets, the bigger the horns and antlers, And and there's um all kinds of obstacles, which is a paper you saw that I wrote, all kinds of obstacles that get in the way of hunters actually affecting the gene pool. And when the hunter goes out and shoots, passes up a spike and shoots an eight point white tailed buck in Iowa, technically that's selection because they passed up one buck and they selected a bigger buck. But you have to look at the intensity of selection. Is that anywhere near um intensive enough to cause any genetic changes? And you think about all of the other things that are removing animals from the population that have nothing to do with horn or antlers size. You have, for example, a fawn crop, you lose half of the fonds every year before their first birthday UH in general, and those losses of half of that annual cohort have nothing to do with horn or antlers size. You've got mountain lions, you've got predators killing adults that have nothing to do with antler size. And the idea that hunters going out during daylight hours in the hunt unit they have a permit for only able to take males. The fact that the idea that they're affecting that entire gene pool, it's just ludicrous that you would apply that kind of pressure. That could happen in some cases and cheap, but it's pretty rare. Well, there's some so much conflicting data out there too as to how much we're actually even we I guess hunters in certain cases are actually even affecting behavior. Like you see all these white tail papers that come out and it's like, well the bucks have gone nocturnal. It's like, well, no, we tracked them and they do just as much walking around during the day as they do at night. I mean, honing effects behavior hugely. Oh of game animals, But like you look at these clubs situations right where it's like you got five guys hunting, you know, a thousand acres. They're out there, maybe twenty five days total between the five guys, and they all have the same story as Joe Dude going out on public land. It's like the deer are so educated. Yeah, but it's generational to the mean they're raised by. I mean, these are animals that spend a year with their mothers, spend a year with her mother, who's spent a year with her mother. There's a learned you know, there's learned response. I mean you just go look at landscapes where you always had hunting and then took it away. Oh that that spot that we hunted or Eric Siegfried from on acc and I hunted this year. It's this funky access deal where you kind of have to get up on this rock room and I swear to God or more of the mule deer dose just walked below staring at that rock room like they just were it locked on it and when you and your body sneak in and always hunt Yellowstone. I mean you always always act like you hunted somewhere else. But I mean you guys are really well in all right, you and your body well better than anybody else. Um. Do you get frustrated by the way stuffs covered in the media. It's gotta make you mad. Not not even a scientist, it does. But when you know the science, and the public is not reading scientific papers, when you know the science and you see something like that just catch fire and run away in the popular media and it's not true and it's exaggerated, and everything that you read is just full of errors, and and that's what everybody, that's what most of the general public readings. And there's like credible places that run with it too. Like National Geographic could cover the piss out of a story like that. They would never cover the like when it wanted, being that it wasn't accurate, they would have zero interest in it because they love anything that can be like a little bit like put a little taint down hunting. They love it. They go out of their way to find it. They would never be like, oh, you know what turns out that that wasn't actually true. Um, I mean like like the bias is so within the organization like that, Like the bias is so severe, and like you look at this thing that's going on with Donald Trump Jr. Right, he's doing a fundraiser. He's doing a fundraiser where they're gonna go hunt ducks and blacktail deer, and the media is covering it like a trophy animal hunt. That's a hunting ducks and blacktails. Is a trophy animal hunt? Now, well, it's like that's how, that's how it's described that you guys saw the UM so that i u c n UH is a body that I pay attention to for a lot of conservation up to date conservation facts and knowledge and UM A lot of stories came out earlier or late last year on how the i u c n has determined that trophy hunting is this terrible thing and it's killing these animal populations. And you start reading into it and you not not bush hunting, not bush me hunting. But the paper is they're like, well, this is a something that was being researched and it's not even the conclusion. Somebody just took it and ran this out. This is not our finding. But nobody covered that story. It was always here it is. That's a good pushback some letters. I think I sent you something recently with the conservation front Lines is a is an email um service you can subscribe to free and they have some really good information about some scientists have gotten together and some some people in Africa have gotten together and representing local African communities, and the African communities are saying, how dare western um people take away our livelihood? You know, this is sustainable conservation, it's funding conservations, funding our villages, and how how dare someone sitting there white house someplace in the US and and say this isn't a good thing. Yeah, it's like the it's like left wing imperialism. Man, the band's going on. It's like it's like it's like a softer, gentler imperialism. Do you think the UK bands are kind of a little long term guilt laden thing is from the days of British imperialism where it's like, yeah, that's fine all they're like they're like tacking a little like the old pendulum. Um Chaine Mahoney asked me to be on the u c N Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Committee, So that's one of the committees that he chairs and real active with and it's all about this. I like the i u c N ratings. Yeah, um, I tend to. I tend to um. I tend to eat a lot of things that are of least concern. Yeah, exactly. I was recently looking at the mountain lion um um they changed it. It says that it's decreasing. It says that the populations are decading. Yeah, I looked at that. I understand for the mountainline, I don't understand that either. In fact, one of the main paper they cite for that um is someone I worked with with Mexican Wolf Recovery. I sent him an email with a link to that, and since they were citing their work, I just asked him what what is that all about? And I haven't heard from him yet, but they get it. They I feel that the i u c N does a little bit play a predictive game. But but even that would not line predicting a decline when something's on an increase, How do you predict? Yeah, so that that's just apparently wrong. Yeah, we should say International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Yeah, if you go, you know, the Wikipedia gives a lot of ink to the i U c N. So if you type in any species, like if you're going the other day, we're looking at uh, we're looking at um the long tailed weasel, So the i U c N long tail weasel. It would have it like population of least concern, which is the which is like the best news the species can get. The thing you want is to be in the least concern and it's it's great at out over. I don't know how many designations, and it's six. It's a spectrum there and there's like a most concern and then a critical concern. There's extinct. I think we're just yeah, okay, next question we have before you've done some work with that. We talked about Vale guys all damn time. He's a good friend of mine, good friend twenty years. Uh. In fact, I brought Ben O'Brien val guys bone broth recipe. That's Vale for it. That's good Val guys. Okay, we talked. We've covered this before. Val guys had a he took at ab at what I don't know if I want to redo it. He took a stab on how the mule deer came to be. I presented this as some mule dear researchers, and they were they were not titillated by it. They didn't even want to take it on. It was like fanciful and like not understandable. But it was this idea that for I'm gonna do a short version, hold your thumb out and as you get bored, start going down. I was gonna start in the plio scene. So you're doing better, I'm not going okay, if you know you were here, what we could do. Let me try to do a crash course and what I had read he floored to this idea that three million years ago and the like what is now the southeastern US, There's always been white tailed deer Kelson, I'm still up. What you do? Bang your thumb of the hammer. Your kid asked me that too, and I gotta tell you the same thing. I don't know it n fifty right there? Uh what was I saying? Oh? Yeah, there's always been white tailed deer and was not the southeastern US. We had this big wet, you know, period of of of lush growth, and these deer colonized coast to coast, colonized the mid continent from the east coast of the US to the west coast. Then there was a big dry period and the empty in the middle emptied out, and these deer on the west that were remained on the west coast gradually evolved into black tails. Then there was another period where it was moist and conditions were good, and this population of black tails moved east. The white tails, which had retreated to the southeastern US, had moved back west. They met along the Rocky Front, the Rocky Mountain Front, had sex um and spawned hybridized, and then there was another great retraction. Blacktails went back to the coast, white tails went back down to the southeast, and this lingering population of these hybridized. I think it was black tailed bucks making love to white tail does um, that's your mule dere um? Yeah, And they said, uh, I presented to some mule deer people and and they had a response kind of like uh, let's move on. Well, there was some there was some There was a scientific basis for val coming up with that theory, which has been superseded by other genetic work that came along time for you to tell us, like what's up with all the deals? So that was that was basically I think it was it was glacier's advancing and receding rather than wet and dry. I think probably it was changing environment, changing habitats that were calling again split. But but regardless, that's basically the story that that Val came up with, and and he did that for a reason because when they start first started doing genetic work, they found out that blacktailed deer have completely different mitochondrial DNA than mule there yet their subspecies. So there's two kinds of DNA. There's there's DNA in the nucleus and you get this nuclear DNA and you get half of that from your mother, half from your father. There's another kind of DNA floating around in the sets outside the nucleus called mitochondrial DNA mighticondra DNA you only get from your mother, so it's like a clone. It comes from your mother and your grandmother and her mother. Yeah, that's how they like contract down sort of the you know, like all of Western Europe theoretically track all of Western Europe to like a female to an mitochondrial eve so so the mitochondria, so you can you want to analyze both types of DNA, and they yield different answers to different kinds of questions, But initial mitochondrial DNA analysis showed you think about, really, the two black tailed deer subspecies are just subspecies of mule deer. They're all oticoles Hemionus some subspecies, and then you have white tail, which for a different species Virginianus. And yet when they looked at the mitochondrial DNA, they found out that mule deer and white tailed deer have basically the same mitochondrial DNA, which is bizarre because they're different species and and both of them, including mule deer, have different mitochondrial DNA from black tail, so blacktails have this unique mitochondrial DNA. So Val took that just thinking about that, Val said, well, could probably occur if female if if black tailed deer bred with white tailed deer and in the offspring brought in that wet white tail deer might have condrial DNA. So if you had female white tailed deer breeding with black tail males and they spawned some kind of the hybrid mule deer, then all those mulder would have the same mitochondrial DNA as the white tail because because it comes to the female line, and so it was female white tail, then mulder would have that same mitochondrial DNA and black tails would be different. And so that just going on that that was a basis of that's what inspired that. That's what inspired it. So it made sense at the time, but later on more work, especially with nuclear DNA, that you get half from your mother, half from your father. You look at muled or nuclear DNA and and it's it's closely aligned with black tails. Blacktail and mule deer are all closely associated, and then white tails completely different. So if they really were hybrids, then the mule deer, when you look at the nuclear DNA, they would have about half for the white tailed genome and about half of the blacktail genome. But they don't. Mule deer and blacktailed deer evolved as one group and then black tailed deer split off during one of the advances of the ice ages over in the Pacific coast. So there, okay, So in this version of events, mule deer um predated black tails. Yes, yea in that version, but here sick of white tail looks or sick of blacktail looks so damn much like a white tail. I know that that under growth and everything, well, even like metatarsal glands. There's other things where the black tailed deer actually looks like a hybrid, which makes it is confusing as hell, because the black tailed deer looks almost like it's got some white tail like characteristics. But when you're at genetics, the blacktail can't be can't be a hybrid between those two, and so it's got to be convergent evolution where they they kind of acquire traits that are similar even though they're not um like dragon m We talked about this the other day. Dragonfly asanna hummingbirds both fly. That doesn't mean their cousins yep. So we did genetic analysis. We did some genetic analysis all up and down the coast in black tails from California up to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and then mid British Columbia. It starts you start getting into Sitka blacktails up into Alaska, and we had them all and analyze all of those and and found the highest concentration of genetic diversity was the coast of Oregon and Washington in blacktail deer both subspecies of blacktail deer and and geneticis population geneticis will tell you that where you have a focal point with high genetic diversity right there, and then lower genetic diversity rating out from that. That indicates that was the refugium, that's the that's ground zero for that species or that animal. And so likely the blacktail deer were isolated for a long time during one of the many glacial advances and receding over on that coast, and then gradually expanded out from there with the receding of the glaciers. And so so why does a sitka then look different than the Colombian And I don't know the answer to why he doesn't typically have a buy for hated antler like a forked antler. Well, the mature could, but like they mean that Washington, they tend to throw a rack a hell of a lot like a white tail. They look they're small, they're about the same side like that. The mature ones will have the G two s. But sitkas have a double white bib on their throat um. They're kind of a different tail. They look real different. And that nobody knows for sure what kind of separation there might have been in some glacial period between Columbian black tail and Sitka black tail. The sitka could just be a phenotypic or a physical adaptation to that marine environment. Swimming and living on islands in that kind of environment. It could be adaptation and they're physically changing not so much because of the separation. Nobody really knows that for sure. Do you what's the refuge of the white tail? Like, like how far back in time? Trying to think how to express this question. If you had a time machine and it said it like a random it just randomly throw you back to randomize dates, and you wanted to set a location on your time machine to maximize the chances that you would stumble into a white tail, what would you set Florida, Florida. Yeah, and there's a lot of white tail fossils in Florida, in fact that they've been hanging around there a long time. They have been. Yeah, they've been in the place of seeing there's a there's just a ton of of places seeing white tail fossils in Florida. And actually brought you one ship. It's an epicenter so that you can see that fossilized material and that's just the just handed me a fossilized the bone base from the skull so the pedicle, get the pedicle um, the antler about inch and a half antler about an inch of skull and it fields like stone and it is stone. Yea. You know. The word pedicle comes from George Bobin, famous antler researcher, George and and George and his his father, Anthony and Anthony. They wrote a book in nine called Horns Prong, Horns and Antlers and it's like the Bible for Antler kind of antler science speaking out um. But Anthony Bubinick Coin didn't coin the phrase pedicle, but he told us how to pronounce it pedical. He says it rhymes with medical. But Anthony Bubinick spoke about six languages and English was like his fifth language. And so I always think it's kind of funny that we're all taking our pronunciation of from this guy who nobody can understand when he spoke English. This is amazing, man. This is out of Florida. Yeah, Florida. So this deer was running around he bumped into masodons now and that's dated, that's dated. Pleist to scene. Yeah. Jim. Also Broad's show us a replica of a saber tooth tooth smile ad on fake tal us his canine and smile. Ad On is uh and this thing is leven inches long? Yeah, smile and was not because they had a big smile with those big tooth. The smile addon comes from. I think it's meetly. I don't have how to pronounce it, but it's Latin for double edged sword. I'd laugh. They just jumped out. It's grabbed Phil. It would make a bike ride to work a little bit eating, like you know, I just killed him. I'd be like that, can you believe that? Cow? That's what I would be. Moved real slow, real slow. So Florida had a lot of white tails, go ahead, caw. Florida also has the spring site where they got all the fossils out of, including the giant tortoise with not familiar with that giant tortoises that once roamed what is now the United States, But they found a tortoise shell in this spring in Florida that had a spear point in it. I need to talk to our I need to talk to our performer podcast guests. So then you start digging into the actual paper. It's like it was laying nearby. He was laying in the shell as they brought the thing out, and they're like, so it could be this, but very well would be this, But then it's clear evidence of ceremonial turtles. This exactly. It was a religious total. There was a paleontologist in New Mexico that was knocking one of the arrow points, knocking one of the little shoulders off and saying that was indicative of Sandia man and and he wrote papers and constructed this big because he always knocked the shoulder off. But he but they found out later he would knocking the shoulders off and saying it with diagnostic of this. There's some bad that's some bad stuff. But he wasn't doing it as a greater social experiment. Can I Can I tell people what you were musing before we started recording your observation about archaeology or is that just too hard? That's fine, that's tell him yourself the truth. Yeah, truth is hard. A friend of mine always call archaeology a soft science because they just so much of it is just made up. They'll find a toebone and then they'll write a paper about what the home range was and and what the color of the fur was. And unfortunately there's just a lot of a lot of garbage. I was looking into archaeological evidence of elk in Arizona, and we're doing some Miriam Delk stuff. And and there was a son who was a paleontologist and archaeologist and his dad was too at the university, and he had forty four thousand deer family bones out of this site in Arizona, and he had like fourteen or so elk. And so I was really interested in those elk specimens. And I couldn't get ahold of the sun. But I talked to the dad, and the dad says, all those were those are big out icolio. So those are big meal there. Those weren't elk. He didn't know what he was talking about talking about his own son in his paper. So there's a lot of that in there. And you just got to really be skeptical and be cautious. He can't read a paper and then just go, um, you know, repeating it without some skepticism of thinking thinking about it. When when I was when I was working on my Buffalo, but um, it came up like I was came up where I was reading about where there were accounts of them occurring. And there's a lot of versions of why Buffalo, New York became Buffalo New York. But you'll often read in old books that, like, Buffalo New York was Buffalo New York because someone had encountered Buffalo. I thought it was the wings. Well, you know there's a I get I think I get into it in the book hit or explain or not. A bunch of different theories about how it got the name, but it would not be in that that. Sometimes you'll see distribution maps for where buffalo roamed, bison bison bison roamed, and people have it going up in New York. The range map. We'll go up in New York and it comes from people included because two skulls came out of some campsite, some excavation of a campsite in New York, just the schools, and both of them, uh had cultural markings on them, and later people looked at it and thought were they living here or did someone get some from someone and bring them home? The same way copper that comes out of Michigan's Upper Peninsula can be found anywhere in the Midwest and trace back like people took stuff they thought stuff was cool and brought home with them. Arizona parrot feathers in Arizona and all kinds of things from Central Americas. There was these big trade routes. And if you look in the not the Last Elka North America book, I think it was a one before it, or maybe it was the last. No, it was the one before the last one. And they show elk distribution all the way down to Mexico City. And it's only because Montezuma had some elk. He had a menagerie, he had a menagerie, and he had some elk in the menagerie, and and the people doing the distribution map to include Mexico City, and in fact the elk really weren't in there. In in Mexico, Cortez his his like recorders describe the first the first bison ever witnessed by a European um was probably in Montezumas menagerie witnessed by cortez expedition. And I think that somehow and somehow they describe it as having come from the north. Yeah, probably having come from the north, and not that it lived there. The mealier was first described um from the journals of u Laray, and he first described what amelier looked like in the west, and it was found out later that there was no such person as Charles Lay, and that his journals were entirely fabricated by someone they don't even know who, but entirely fabricated the journals, taking pieces some of from Lewis and Clark, some from different journals from explorers, and put it together and and made up this story about Charles Lay, who was in the West. He was captured by Sue Indians. He was held captive for several years, um by the by the tribe, and during that time he kept a journal because and it was only because Western literature was really popular. This is some late eighteen hundreds. I think Western literature is really popular, and being held captive by Native American tribes was like a really hot story. So this guy just fabricated this whole thing. And so you'll read even some of my early writings we were talking about Charles Lay described the first meal. Dear, turns out it's just christated. Everybody keeps repeating it over and over again. Well, when we're talking ahead of this, um came right at some point in time, you'd mentioned that you wanted to discuss Elliott cous But let me tee that off with. Do you accept ioul, like, who's your kind of one of my favorite animals by far, definitely probably maybe first or second favorite thing to go hunting for it maybe third Turkey's mulder in white tail, I'm sorry, Turkey's mule deer. Who's dear? In my mind depends what time of year it is, which one of those is my favorite thing to hunt. But our cu'se dear, like, do you accept or what's the thinking? They're like a subspecies of the white tales. They're just white tails and it happened to be somewhere else. Yeah, there's no doubt there are subspecies that that really evolved differently because they were in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and so they were really geographically fairly isolated from the Sierra Madre. That's deer, okay, Yeah, I mean when you get down, you get about halfway down the Sierra Madre and they start getting all these other subspecies names. But nobody's really done science on that at all. We've got a small white tail throughout the highlands of Mexico and none of them are probably any different, probably basically Cole's dear all the way down through the Sera Money cows dear man. Yeah, didn't you didn't you hear? Didn't you hear? Yanni? A couple of weeks ago. You guys know that you were a cow's dear man. This is the first cow's dear man we've ever had in this room. I had my fifteen minutes of fame a couple of weeks ago, and Yanni said, there's like one guy that says Cole screw him. That's my fifteen minutes. They mentioned me mentioned, well, here's the deal, Elliot, cows. That's how you pronounce it. And that's not what I heard. You heard wrong. I already pronounced it cows. Yeah, that's you know where that comes from? Chris Denham, Probably Chris Denham. Chris Denham read um something Richard ockin Fells wrote, and Richard ockin Fell's rights In his annotated bibliography of Kyle's White Tail, he writes, it's it rhymes with house. And I asked, I'm friends with I've known Richard for twenty years. As Richard, where that come him? He said, well, I talked to Neil Carmeny and um, and I visit Neil Carmeny in the nursing home in Tucson every couple of months I've been I've known for twenty five years. I asked Neil, where does that come from? The cows and he says, I know, we knew somebody that um spoke some French. And he says, that's probably how it's pronounced. So that's where that's where that cows thing came from. Completely bogus. There's no question how to pronounce his name. There's a huge question on how people want to refer the deer. That's maybe different. Yeah, I think that those two subjects have their own evolutionary path they do. Okay, we go on, you calling whatever the hell you want, ladies, gentlemen. If our guest here says cow was dear, he's referring, of course, to you, cou's dear. It's really sad. I nowhere in I would say linguistical or dud logical history, do I know of a word where we're after learning how to pronounce it correctly of the public not only refuses to, but militantly refuses people. They I die, Yeah, they get you know, he has riled up the most cows your people. I would call him Cole, I called listen. I call him cause you for a simple reason. The people that introduced me to him and that I hung out with and hunted him with first, that's what they called him. I actually had Jay Scott's sake Cows on his podcast one time. When I was on it, I was like, did you just say what I thought you said? So there's also like, um, you know, there's a spirited debate around ska sitka, which confuses people because I think sick of black tails. Anyhow, Elliot Cows Elliott Cow now to put the name pronunciation to bed Elliot Cows. When he wrote the Checklist of Birds in North America, he added a footnote he was an ornithologist. He was mostly an ornithologist. He never killed a deer. Someone named the deer after him, so he wasn't really wasn't a dear guy. He was really good ecologist. But he wrote the Checklist of Birds in North America. And he has a footnote where he explains how to pronounce his name. No he does it says C and he says c O w Z house. That's a lie, not a lie in black and wh okay, here's a twitter. Hell makes a footnote in their book about how to pronounce their last name. It was a footnote on a bird species that was also Cowsy I species. So he was explaining where that where that name came from, and it was he was writing the book and he was explaining how his name was pronounced, but kind of pretentious. Okay, so you're right, you're right, it's Cole's right from Elliott cows Mouth. You're right, but we're talking about the deer. Yeah, we're talking about he's right. But so yeah, so say that there was someone who was who just had made huge contributions to outdoor education entertainment, had a podcast, had a TV show, and did so much for the industry that some dear biologists wanted to name a subspecies after him. Dear Odiocolius hemi owners for Nolla. And then so we go in the Cal's Deer. You and I go on the time machine and we go a hundred years in the future and we get out and we talked some deer hunters and they're talking about, yeah, we're all jack because we got tags for these rene a dear, you'd be like rene a dear French. The guy's name was Renella. The guy's name was Renella, and they trug and say, I'm gonna call it Renee I tell the day I die. He'd be like, it's kind of weird that, my dear, that's kind of weird. That was like named to honor me, and and the deer was named honor Elliot Cows. So no, you know what I'd say, I'd be like, no, dude, I totally understand. W you I don't think so, I don't think so. As a cous dear man, I understand. But but there's a twist to that story. So Elliot Cows and Elliet Cows father Samuel and his grandfather Peter, they pronounced it cows. He was an ornithologist, not a dear guy. But did he like muse on or like, like, uh, did he was he like, oh, there's this little ship and deer running around or I'm not sure if well he did. He wrote Quadrupeds of Our Kinds of Deer and Error Zone. I think he wrote this great written about it. I like that word kinds. We talked about sub species and races. And he wrote a paper of kinds of deer that we do, that whole series kinds of So he's written about all kinds of you know, all the mammals and deer too, but not in detail. He wasn't really a dear person um in detail. But there's a twist to the cows story. So he Elliott cows and and at least two generations back um pronounced at cows. But he says that back in France, I don't know how many generations that would be we're talking about. He's a Frenchman from the name is French, and so his family originally came from northern France moved to southern England. And he says in that same footnote when when they moved to southern England, the name was changed, was changed or bastardized in and they started pronouncing it cows. And in France it was two syllables kuai's. Dad's what I'm switching too for the deer kuai's. And so if people are going to argue that that's their basis for saying coup's, then I want to hear him saying kuaiz dear. That's what I'm switching to get around all of them, like hard hitting Arizona flat brim dudes and be like, wait, yeah, I'd like to inter rest in these ka I like how you held out until you found a reasonable out. I can't something contrary, and I need to find a way to get out of this. There's some people in Elliott Cows's family back before him that spelled their name CEO w e s instead of you in the middle. They put CEO w e s because they were tired of people misspronouncing it. Cou's probably. I have a newspaper article about uh an uncle of mine. No, my father's uncle hit a accidentally like crash his car into a policeman's car. An irishman named Philip to me, and Philip to me went home and got his pistol and back and shot and killed my dad's uncle. I have a newspaper article about it. But in that article my family is r I N E l l I uh huh so in the article or okay, and that's the only play. Yeah. My dad said he grew up with his grandma pulling that she kept the clothes in the box, and she pulled him down and show everybody the bloody shirt with a bullet hole in it. But the article about it describes him as with R I N yellow I. So he perhaps right, you know, just like people. I'm just I'm just coming on the way that names morph and change and yeah, and you're like, how like what like what pronounced you? What? I mean, how that dude pronounced his last name? I don't know, did you say ronella or do you have some the whole other way of doing it. My my family was originally from deeked in Switzerland in the seventeen hundreds and two miles from deek in Switzerland is helful thinking helful thinking Switzerland, and there's helful fingers back there now and they spell it the same way, which is kind of unique because names do change when they switch continents and things, but still spelt that way. Uh. Lasting on Elliott Cows, do you understand like I read like he was what was his what was his thing about levitation that I'd rather he was into levitation? Levitation? No, I just read that he was. He's probably on something stupid like his Wikipedia page, but read that he's like in into levitation. No, you can get the I bought that publication for likes Um online on Kindle. I don't know if it's available other places, probably other other places, but it's a short thing. It's more of a paper than a book, but they make it look like it's a book, and it's really entertaining because he as a scientist. He's talking about, well, okay, people don't believe in levitation, but basically, I we should hold out the idea that there's a lot of things in the natural world we don't understand and we can't explain. In future research will probably explain it. And he kind of felt that way about levitation, that we don't know what it is now he's been totally swindled by people who are levitating in front of him. But he said, you know, we don't understand it out, but future, in the future, science might might unravel what that's all about. Because people don't have any problem believing in in centrifugal force or gravity. Like if he took the Earth and you spun it wouldn't people levitate because the centrifugal force. He was talking about these forces as being understood and we just don't understand that one. He said. Everybody in the world, uh, it doesn't believe in levitation, except he says Christians, of course, I mean they have no problem believing that christiscended into Heaven through levitation, So so the Christians believe in levitation, so they're open to the idea. That's right, that was, says his tongue in cheek. But he talks in there about he he ends it kind of odd. He talks about how his wife, which he refers to a Mrs c in there, and and so those probably just gave up on that. So he talks about his wife and a friend and this big oak table, and they put their hands on the table and they tried to move it, and the table started bumping and moving by itself, and you totally convinced that they were doing this, And they pulled away from the table, and the table kept bumping and being agitated with nobody touching it. And then at the end of that kind of bizarre story, maybe he was getting seen out at the end of his career. The end of that story, he says, and therein lies my theory of telekinetic levitation. I'nnced. Now it's an interesting read, it's pretty entertaining, it's pretty short. Uh, this is a this is a question that cannot be answered to my satisfaction. Um, I'm gonna phrase it in an annoying way. Why do dear lose their antlers? Evolutionarily or how does it happen? When it happened? Why do they evolutionarily? Why why should then? Yeah, I say it's annoying because you can't go like, we don't know why you We could speculate about things that may have. Right, there's some good reasons to lose antlers. You break a time, you got a new set next year. That's a great horn. You don't get a new set, No, you don't. But they're not gonna break as much as times though. You know you'll broom the tips off and sinicize, and that would that really drive No, I'm not alone. I don't think, not alone, but you know, you think if you're over wintering and you're trying to make it through winter on harsh winter range and through deep snow, be nice not to have, especially a moose, those big bones on your head. I mean they're being an advantage to to losing those during the wintertime. But you can't beat the hell out of stuff trying to kill you. No, tell you what the answer is probably is let's go nutritional signaling. And you've heard about that work. It gives you and it gives the animal an annual expression of its physical condition and its fitness for females to select the animals they are able to acquire the most resources, grow the biggest antlers because they're they're luxury organs. They grow after the body has been satisfied the nutritions. Yeah, like the difference in driving a car or having a picture of a sweet car you used to have. It sounds like a personal story, okay, But but here you've got an annual expression of of how fit you are, and it's up to the minute and and getting bigger every year. You don't as a yearling, yearling moose, you don't want to grow this gigantic fifty um set of antlers. But here, annually, as your body grows and as you get no more nutrition and maybe become dominant, you can you can express that and say, look, ladies, look at look at I got. Yeah, but horned, here's the problem with that. Horned animals have the same luxury. They just keep growing, right. But there's sometimes where it's like a two year old big horn is gonna wind up having the biggest horns ever. It's like a big ass horned big horn is old. Mm hmm. They you know, servants, the dear Family evolved in Asia, bob is evolved don't know where, probably Europe someplace. And so the the animals get on these different evolutionary tracks and you get you get characteristics that just develop independently and and and now looking at them now, they may not make sense when you compare them, like what you're saying that they just had They just had different um pathways. There's a procolius in in Asia. Some fossils were Looking at a set of fossils, it looks like at least that was the conclusion. Some of them shed their antlers every year and some of them didn't in that form. And so that's thought of as maybe being the root of the servant family, of the deer family. That's right at the point where animals have these things on their heads and then they're dropping off every year or not dropping off every year. We had a really really neat kind of expression of the the you know, the health of the animal being represented in the antlers. Um sam baits producer here at meat Eater. She shout her first mule deer buck and it was a really neat buck and everything about it. From my look at the deer, it was like, boy, this is a mature deer. The antlers aren't that big big, and they're kind of an interesting formation, and uh, you could have laid uh, you know, two year old deer next to this, probably three or four year old deer, and the two year old deer would have bigger antlers um. But then when he started dressing the deer, the deer had been shot the year before. There's also leg injuries. Front leg injuries will produce a non typical point on the same side as the front leg injury. Rear leg injuries. You say that like opposite, No, not always, but oh you know, I knew. I thought it was always opposite. I didn't know his front leg front leg is the same side. It's called a contralateral effect. And and so the rear leg or left rear lego producer um messed up at around the on the right side the next year. So a lot of theories are like some kind of counterbalancing, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Some people some tell you, well, the deer is probably back there licking his injury and he's damaging that opposite side antler. But I think it's more neurological. I think it's the way the right rain um manages the left side of the body and vice versa. I think it's something with that damage to the left side of your leg is neurologically affecting the other side. Um okay, so tell me why they how they lose their antlers? What's going on? One minute're kicking ass, You've got some antlers. You're fighting? Yeah, I mean you can pick up you can pick up the animal by the and then and then the the after the breeding season, to stosterone levels, mostly to stoster and a lot of other hormones. There's this big orchestra of hormones rising and falling throughout the year in a in a deer, but really to stosterone is a driver. And after the breeding season to stosterone levels plummet. And it's that that plummeting of testosterone. There's this this certain layer of bone cells between the temporary antler material and the top of the pedicle. It's called osteo class, and they're real sensitive to hormonal changes and then dropping to stosterone erodes those osteo class and antlers just fall off. They must be strong sons of bitches though. Yeah, right, Like you've seen deer, like you could hit a deer on the antler sometimes break the skull and it busts the skull in half. M Yeah, but then a dropping testosterone, a hormonal shift will cause whatever that glue is off and that doesn't take that long. I mean he's kicking as November, then a couple months later his antler falls off. Yelping and growing new ones in a couple of months prior to November. You could squeeze the tip of those antlers off your hands, get blood on your hands. I've talked to a number of guys have gone up, remember the circumstances going up and grabbed the deer to dragon, had the antler come off in her hand. It was happening. Shed antlers quicker if they're nutritionally depraved or if they get sick or something. I don't really cause that, it messes. It just kind of messes with their hormone system and may lose their the sauceron may go down quicker just because they're kind of sick. What do you think it takes um? You know, people talk about areas of big Bucks, and you know what, when I was like coming up as a young man, everybody was excited about the genetics that place got great genetics, right, And then we talked to some guys. You've done some work with Matt Coffin and and his colleague Kevin. Kevin looks at nutrition, and they've done studies have taken deer from supposedly shitty genetic areas or supposedly stupendous genetic areas, changing changing their diet to match diet of deer from areas that are contradictory to that, meaning like you take a deer from an area that supposed he has shitty genetics and put it on the same diet as a deer from an area that suppose he has great genetics, and lone behold, they went looking exactly the same. And he got into and we discussed like, not only is it that animal is nutrition, but it's the nutrition of its mother when she becomes pregnant, right, and his aunt, Like whether he's going to be a stomp or buck could be decided by the condition of his mother when she becomes pregnant. It could, Yeah, it can be decided condition of his mother right before she becomes pregnant, the condition she's in when she becomes pregnant. Epigenetics that probably epigenetic it's a maternal effect, is what Kevin research and talked about. Probably there's a thing called epigenetics that is kind of a new field or finding someone. Not we but there's some amazing things where an animal has genetics and passes on the genetic code. And we always thought of it, like Gregor Mendel, Mendelian genetics was just like whatever genes you had, that's what got expressed in the young. We're finding out that environmental influences like nutrition can actually switch genes on and off. So so the genetic code doesn't change because it can't change, but which genes get expressed and turned on and off can change depending on if if you've got good nutrition or poor nutrition, And so really amazing things where it looks like it's actually genetic effects, but it's the genes are the same, there's just more different ones are active. It's really amazing, amazing stuff, certainly not my expertise, but cool stuff. And that's probably what's behind this maternal effect where the condition of the female can can actually affect the antlers of her male offspring when they're mature, because it's certain, yeah, it's got enough enough gas for certain things to kick in or it turns on. It's the methylation process. And I only sund that to to sound smart because I don't know anything about the methylation process. But that's the vehicle um in in the DNA transcription that turned genes on and off. And that's what's at the heart of that. If you took what's your theory on this? And why hasn't someone done yet? Get yourself a couple cuz dear bring them up to Iowa. What happens to him? Do they just die because they don't like it? Because it's they get bigger, They would get bigger. Nobody's done it UM that I know of, because c w D don't want to be moving animals around, you can't, you know. We had a we had a conversation with someone at UM, someone who does some work with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, was talking about with c w D just like the whole thing of like moving out. It's just done, man, Yeah, but do we need to move much? I mean we're still really now. It's unfinished work man. Yeah, but that's a that's a concern to move the the habituated Elk out of the state. And they had to that that lucky elk that somebody chose to feed is now at the Veterinary Research Station, full full life. So they get bigger, they would get bigger. Yeah, I don't you know there would they stop being the gray ghost. I don't good question what their pellege would do, whether you get like a rusty red coat in the summer, which we normally don't get. But I don't there. They're they've been so separated, and they're good legitimate subspecies. They're smaller. We did some genetic work. Bunda Crockett and Pope and Young paid for some genetic work that I orchestrated with some real geneticist where we found a genetic marker that will identify a cow's white tailed deer from the other white tailed deer. So you could bring me a rack of skull plate and we could test that and tell whether it's Cole's white til or not. And Buona Crowt and Pope and Young are using that to keep their record books clean. Now someone enters the new world record cow's white tail, and it's a skullplate that Grandpa had in the attic and Grandpa sett he shot it south of Tucson back and this has happened, and we do a genetic test and yeah, family stories sometimes get twisted and chains, and so we've done that and we've found some of these animals they're not cow's white tail, and so they're not they can't be included. That's a bomber man. Someone gets confused about the butt grampa shot in Alberta and the bucket shot in Arizona. That's what it is. Uh, we had the thing where we were You wanted to bring up something about Neanderthals. Why, yeah, I didn't. I've sent you a bunch of the Ndfel papers just because you are you interested. I think it's just you and I are in the same boat, were interested spectators and what the scientists are doing. But the reason why, be the reason I'm when Neanderthal man is uh into him is because in my life, they have gone from these crude right and these crude like you know, you know, like beating their lady over there on the rock and dragging her home kind of thing, to being just increasingly complex and sophisticated. And it's oh, they were free divers. They built a raft and I was like, yeah, they were having free divers. They had art. They like to carve things. I was so I was trying to get cal that put a thing in Cal's weekend review where um, I had a whole joke crafted up for Calvity, wouldn't use it. I was waiting for the story. I wasn't even the story to come out where it was review old that Neanderthals had laptops. They don't happen, because every story about in Airthals now is like, oh, they were just great, nice people, nice smart people. Doing start testing this out by every time you see somebody eating oysters, you stare at him and you go, you neander Well, they're two percent of VIRGINO. Well, I'm a little bit Well do you have you done twenty three? No? I did the other one. I'm a little less than less than average on Neanderthal Rogan. I had a good laugh. Joe Rogan, he's like running ahead. He's running heavy. That's not surprising. It's a sanginal crest and the eyebrows. I think it's rather real heavy. He was saying, But you know that that miniature hominid that they found in Flores Island, Yeah, Florences. I think I'm missing a syllable. But three ft tall at maturity. They're running on almost all all Neanderthal and Denisovan jeans or genetics. I mean they come from that Neanderthal stock, not from modern human stock. Yeah. At once upon a time, you could have walked. You could have wandered around Southern Europe Mediterranean area, and just like you can wander around um here and be like, oh, there's a black tail deer. Oh there's mild deer. There's a white tail, there's a couzier. How did these all fit together? You could have roamed the land and run into like different kinds of different folks. Yeah, different kind of folks did some amount of love making multiple time. But paper just came out with the Neanderthal showing that wasn't just one kind of unique population where they interbred and it spread out from there. But it was a real complex over a long period of time, thousands and thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, well at least tens of thousands of years, a whole bunch of different interbreeding events between and that and really messing with people or not into it people. Would you coming from one spot, would you like trying to pick up other species? You're saying could as if it's past tense. I feel like you're trying to call me out here. Probably like back in the day you would have been like, I'm gonna go check out that other camp. What are those anyway? Yeah? I think so, I'm gonna bring a some cookies over there. And we're speaking past tense hypothetically. Back then, people with all the oysters and muscles and doing the free diving a pretty good crew. Kind of small? Was it the was it the unattractive modern humans though, that were more likely to breed with Andrew? I would love to know man, and I'd like know like when they sat around talking or they talking about how you know, like, was it like if you were krol Magnet or you know, and you hooked up with the Neanderthal? Was it like did you try to like keep quiet about it right, We're like wow, know? Or did you brag it up? I would load? No, I got along with the time activities. I'll be engaging in some day. Um. Yeah. Did you have any burning observation about him? No? I just just like them. I like that the h is back in the name, you know, it was Neanderthal. And then for a period of time someone said neander tall because because it's it's the cow's dealing because damn valley in Germany. I don't give what they call their value. But but not all the papers have the H back in though. That was good because it was kind of awkward to say. I never know what to do in those circumstances, man, like how I went to switch. I've switched to pronghorn, trying to switch. I even labeled my meat pronghorn. No, it confuses people. Yeah, you don't believe me, you go look hell yeah, And I've given it to people and they've registered confusion. Really, that's so funny. You don't label your packages prong horn. I do not. They don't antilo capra on my go. You know, there was eighteen eighteen different types of primitive antilo capra pronghorn families in North America eighteen million years ago. For eighteen million years, we had eighteen different types of prong worns. Some had corkscrew horn corps, some had three horn cores on both sides, six total horn cores. A lot of them had two on each side. I wrote a field guide it's called a Bestieri of Ancestral antilocaporates and it's illustration, wrote that, yeah, with another machine man. Well that's interesting stuff. Eighteen different kinds of prong worn and they all went extinct except for the American pronghorn that we have. And so we had illustrations that Randy bab did illustrations of each one of those skulls. And then I wrote a paragraph which was anything we knew about it. And we had a map of where the fossils have been found, so it was like a little field guide. How far are you, Florida. There's different kinds always over there. If you would have named it kinds of a kind of you would have been on the same shelf. You know. Whenever I started getting depressed about all the animals aren't around anymore, I always to help not be depressed, I remind myself that the largest animal to ever exist larger than the biggest of Brontosaurus or argent two soaurus, the biggest animal to ever have ever existed on Earth. Right now, it's still here, right, We're in the good old days. The biggest animal ever is here right now, the good old days of megafono. We've got them now. Yeah, Because you get looking at my kids like dinosaur books and I need to look at that. I'm like man kind of little jealous about that. Oh so jealous. I just to lay eyes and get your brain wrapped around the scale. I want, I want it. We talked a lot about whether they have been a good eating or not. One of my kids thinks they would have been on one of the things. They wouldn't have been very good eating. Yeah, I don't know. Reptile Like, Okay, moving on, this is a little bit I want to talk about, like you really mixed up in the wolf world. I am. Yeah. I would put on the Mexican wolf Recovery team in December and was on it for two years. Resigned in December of UM and with my resignation letter added ah about a fourteen page report sighting all of the scientific process flaws that were that I saw in the writing of what was supposed to be the draft recovery plan at that time. That's what we were put together for a couple of months later, the remainder of the team UM went had and submitted a report had so many flaws. As I pointed out, Fish and Wilad Servis couldn't do anything with it. They couldn't they couldn't make that their their draft plan. Um. They just stakeholders weren't involved. State agencies were just seen as, uh, maybe stakeholders will we'll talk to you later. Um. And it went nowhere. So back away up They're like, what's the problem, Like what happened we used to have? I mean, the wolves were like continue they had them in Alaska. There was no like place without them. They just ran all right down into Mexico. And people mistakenly just think about the Mexican wolf as um just the southern part of a blending of different wolf sizes and wolf subspecies throughout the continent. We used to have a twenty four wolf subspecies in North America and Rohn no Wack boiled that down to five that seemed ecologically different in different areas. Um Arctic, well, there was a um occide and Talus, which is a big Canadian wolf, and in Alaska and then New Bliss, which is mid continent most of the United States, and then Bailey I, which is the Mexican wolf, and then there was the Arctic wolf and I can't remember what the other one one. In the Arctic wolves they run white a fair bit, yea, yea. And so the Canadian down in the Canadian High Arctic, Elsmere Island and that sort of thing. And so so these are kind of groups of wolves that it kind of makes sense. The Mexican wolf is not just the southern tip of a big wolf distribution that blended um freely with New Bliss, the other wolf to the north. The Mexican wolf evolved in the Sierra Madre, like we're talking about white tails. And that's another reason Mexican wolves are physically different. They're genetically different. They're the most genetically different wolf subspecies when they look at genetics. But they weren't just in Mexico, and they were only in Mexico and the Sky Islands in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. That was the historical range of the Mexican wolf. Some of those almost overlaps with Cosier and and Got and Got Turkey and so and and evolutionary ecologists will talk about subspecies just have more support when there's a whole bunch of other unrelated animals that have that same distribution. It just makes sense that there are some ecological forces that allowed those animals of different types to to evolve a little bit differently. As a subspecies, and in that same range you have this like very different type of turkey, very different type of deer, very different type of quail. And if you look at ecological zones plants in the plant community, that that whole Um Madri and oak woodland, they call it that the Sierra Madre is is typical of is different than the Muggian rim in northern Arizona northern New Mexico. So it all makes sense that and and all of the about twenty different mammalogists and ecologists subscribe abscribe the Mexican wolf historical range like that southern Arizona, southern New Mexico and all of the Sierra Madre. Now, some of the Mexican wolves skull measurements have shown that some of the Mexican wolves would disperse up into the Muggian rim like you would expect to the Muggian rims central Arizona and the Healand National Forest in central New Mexico. So some of the Mexican wolves dispersed up there. Those wolves in northern Arizona northern New Mexico were measurably larger. The skull measurements everything were larger, and they some of those would dispersed down the Muggian rim. If you look at the like Google Earth and you just zoom out, you see the Sierra Madrea, this big green patch where the Mexican wolf was, and then the southern Rockies is another huge green patch. And in between there there's this healand national force Muggian rim with non wolf habitat to the north of it, non wolf habitat to the south of it. So Mexican wolves dispersed up, bigger wolves, neubialists dispersed south, and those wolves from skull measurements, those wolves in the central Arizona, New Mexico are intermediate in size. Actually, the males group better with Mexican wolves down there, and the females group with the northern wolves. Con indication that they were intermediate between those two forms. So we did have some geographic separation which accounts for the genetic differences of physical differences in Mexican wolves. They're not just um some subspecies that's blending in with all the other subspecies. There's some reasons why they're geographically and and all those other reasons why they're different. Uh, give me the pros and cons as much as you're comfortable, Like, what are the pros and cons with trying to bring them back? I think they I mean, Mexican wolves were a native wildlife species um in the Southwest, and I think if if we as hunters are going to thump our chest and talk about out bringing elk back and bringing turkeys back and all these species that we call unendangered, we can't stop at the predators. I mean, I just think it makes sense. We just need to they have a place in the in the Southwest, and and we need to be working to bring them back. Most of the public thinks bowls are pretty cool. They want to see wolves back, and so as hunters do we really want to position ourselves on the other side of the table from them and say, no, we don't want to bring wolves back because um, they eat elk and we want to hunt out might impact our elk counting. So there's some real challenges with bringing wolves back, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. We we need to have programs to work with lifetock industry to to make sure those operators and it's usually only a few operators that are uh impacted heavily, but those that are impact heavily. We should have programs that help them out. We can't just say, well, you're a grazing on public land and we're gonna bring wols back and we don't care about what happens to you. We need to work with them where it's not gonna work at all. And as far as the big game populations, you when where we have wolves, we have some hotspots where wolves have impact elk populations and we need to have management flexibility to do something about that when that happens. Predators have to be managed just like we managed prey. But in a lot of areas, wolves are back on the landscape and they're not heavily impacting elk populations, and so I just think we need to make room for for wolves on the on the landscape. They belong here. You know, you've been involved in state wildlife for your career. There's a lot of tension between it seizes, a lot of not seems. I mean there there is. There's a lot of tension between federal wildlife management decisions and state wildlife management decisions. Um, do you think it's fair to say, just look back at at American history, it's fair to say that if there was no federal oversight of endangered species, and there was no federal wildlife involvement. It would be fair to say that it wouldn't have happened there were We wouldn't have done any real we wouldn't have done any active reintroduction efforts that would have been at to this point in time that would have been spawned by the states. And talking about wolves specifically, yeah, yeah, I think I think it's something that's been, like for better or worse, the state's top now And when I talked poorly about the when I was on the Mexican wolf recovery team and that effort, we reinitiated that in two thousand fifteen and in December, and Fishing Wild Services did it completely different. Fishing Wild Service invited state agency people to the table in a series of workshops to develop um a recovery plan that they would they would then right. And that was a whole different process because we had a neutral facilitator who was in charge of a population viability analysis instead of in past efforts, it's been some some academics that are very advocacy oriented, very protectionists oriented, and they were in charge of writing the recovery plan which didn't work repeatedly. This The recovery team that I was on was the fourth recovery team to try to write a revision of the Mexic wolf recovery Plan. There was one written in eighty two. It wasn't adequate, it didn't have recovery criteria, and everybody agreed it need to be rewritten. They kept failing because you can't get a handful of academics with a real protectionist kind of attitude together and have them right a Mexican wolf recovery plan. Explain to protectionist attitude, not ever wanting a wolf to die at the hands of man, no matter what I mean, Just like we want to craft some recovery criteria that will make it nearly impossible for them to ever be delisted and leave the protection of the federal government, which is not what the Endangered Species Act is. Danger Species Act is is that we're supposed to. It's like an emergency room. Someone just ready to are almost close to dying. You bring in an emergency room and you just get them well enough so that they're not going to die, and then you hand them over to um. You put them in a hospital bed, You put them in the hospital and then you monitor them and then you improve their health. Endangered Species Act is supposed to be like that with species, where we're just ready to lose them, we do everything we can to save them. We get them up to a certain level where we're comfortable that they're not no longer in danger of extinction, and then we pass them off to the state agencies and they manage them like all the other carnivores. They manage. Yeah. I've often joked in in some with some species. It's become the my favorite animal protection Act. It is, it absolutely is, and that's does such a disservice to the two thousand other species that are listed on the Endangered Species Act. We've got species that legitimately are going to blink out and we're gonna lose. And we've got four thousand wolves in the in the western Great Lakes, and we've got people writing scientific papers and filing lawsuits saying they're still in danger of extinction. And we've got fifteen hundred in the Northern Rockies that are delisted, got sixty five thousand in Alaska and Canada, hundred ten thousand wolves worldwide, and and we can't delist the wolves in the four thousand wolves in the Great Lakes region when the recovery criteria was about fifteen hundred wolves, and we four thousand and wolves and we've got four thousand, and people are still suing saying they're still in danger of extinction and we can't do that. We need to we need to work together on the other two thousand species that need our help where they're legitimately going to disappear from the earth. Jim, what do you say to And I'm sure you've heard this argument, because I have many times as well. There's a value in having this animal on the endangered species list because it brings attention to the endangered species. I tell you it's gonna bring that. Is that provision written into the Endangered Species Act? The last time says oh, and but you've heard of this. I'm not that familiar with this argument. But I mean, at some point, doesn't it kind of matter about the access Oh god, yeah, absolutely absolutely. But it's like, well, you know, nobody's gonna care about the whatever snail or butter or fly if we don't have the grizzly bear. Yeah, it's gonna That doesn't even kind of surprise me. But I haven't heard that this, if, if, this is the kind of thing that's gonna gonna ruin the Endangered Species Act is going to destroy the Endangered Species at some of these people pushing and pushing and pushing at these ridiculous notions that we need to still have federal protection on a species like wolf is just gonna fuel the fire and we'll have the Endangered Species Act completely renovated. Oh, it's already happening. People get like some state agencies get so frustrated and certain you know, live style groups whatever, get so frustrated with the conversations around grizzly bears and wolves that when they hear it's like what happened Like it's like kind of like the level of damage that happened to the e s a around the spot at owl. It's like you turn these animals into something where the animal becomes symbolic of a kind of foot dragging, and then the Act becomes that it's just like a thing used to wield power about grizzly bear management, and people just get piste. Yep, that's not gonna end well, not gonna end well. We need to get these species up so they're no longer in danger of extinction, which is what the Act is, and then pass them off to the state agencies and and ed bangs lad the wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies, he's fishing wallead service of quote unquote FED. He told everybody the entire time. He says, our goal is to get these up above the recovery criteria that everybody agreed on and pass it off to the states. They do a great job managing wildlife, and that's what my goal is to recover in the in the Rockies. That that's the thing too that happens that that is troublesome. Is this this thing that it's the feeds. Listen, it's the FEDS. They keep proposing wolves get delisted in the Great Lakes. It's the FEDS that proposed the grizzly bears. But people were like, oh, the Feds. Yeah, the Feds are the ones saying they want to deal it. They're the ones that put them up for delisting, and they get sued and they're not allowed to because the lawsuits. Yeah, it's like a handful of like you know, it's anti money groups that kind of masquerade as environmental groups or that that do both, that serve both functions. What what is the most hurtful when you go to some of these UH fish and wildlife meetings and you have you see this argument being played out before you. Is is they're trying to kill them all and state agencies will just kill them all and they'll be on the endangered species and and it's you know, they don't believe in like, well, listen, we have this mandate that says this is what we are supposed to do, and we just spend a shipload of money and get them off the list. And I just I want to say, how familiar are you with how we got rid of wolves in the first place and that time frame. I'm like, if people were trying to kill wolves now, they would be gone. They would be gone gone because we did it very very well in a time without satellites, without GPS, without two way communication, Like we just use a little bit of poison. Yeah, And what what a lot of pro wolf groups and it sounds funny because I'm pro wolf too, but but a lot a lot of the protections groups won't acknowledge is that the contributions of sportsmen through the decades have brought back the prey base in in huge numbers that allows us to recover wolves, not just a better kind of conservation ethic that the population has, which is true, it's the prey base. We couldn't do it if if we didn't have all of this prey Jim talked a little bit about your article were you the article you wrote where you talk about the public's enthusiasm for like trophic cascades, that trophic cascades also becomes like everybody's favorite word. Yeah, favorite phrase. That's that's another thing like trophy hunting, that that far outpaced the science behind it. So you're always playing trophic cascades. We need to do that and then talk about the you know whatever. He's like all hopped up on the idea that all it takes is a couple of wolves and their their rivers run clear again. And yeah, so tropic cascades just basically a trophic level in in ecology is like the vegetations one trophic level, and then you may have elk representing the second trophic level above that helk eating the vegetation, and then you have a third trophic level, which might be wolves which eat the elk, and so you have these three trophic levels, and the idea of trophic cascades is that if you've got a situation where you've got elk really impacting, overpopulated elk impacting the vegetation, and you've got too many elk, you bring in wolves on that third trophic level. Wolves impact the elk in such a way that that it relaxed, It relaxes the grazing pressure on the vegetation, and you have more vegetation and you have this recovery of vegetation. So the idea is adding wolves to that system cascades this effect through the trophic levels and where you have actually the addition of wolves affecting how much vegetation there is. So that's basically trophic cascades. So in Yellowstone they put wolves in a ninety five. They put fourteen wolves one year and seventeen the next, and that wolf population grew. But that was Can I interrupt you to use a quote from that era? Yeah? Um, it was in your article. Where's that quote around? Someone described Yellowstone as three thousand, four hundred square miles of paradise surrounded by reality. That was that was that he's the leader of the wolf recovery. In the Rocky Mountain. Very pragmatic. Um, awesome guy. And and so everybody's talking about what's happening in Yellowstone and getting all excited about whatever's happening Yellowstone. That's what's gonna happen everywhere when we put wolves everywhere. But Yellowstone is a whole different deal. And and so that's where he said, that's paradise pause surrounded by reality. And that's so true because what happened in Yellowstone, no matter what happened to Yellowstone, it can't be replicated on on a working landscape with people trying to make a living and working on that landscape that's not Yellowstone everywhere. So so the trophic cascades and in Yellowstone released the World of nine already five years later, some scientists went in there and they measured aspen growth in the northern range, and they concluded that aspen growth was responding. And since the wolves really had an impact of the number of elk yet that they surmised or they theorized that wolves were just chasing elk out of areas where wolf were wolves were chasing elk where the elk would camp out and feed in riparian areas in places. So this scaring elk around by the wolves was distributing the grazing pressure and causing uh A response in the aspen. And that that just kind of speculative paper um was just like the trophy hunting thing. It lit a fuse on on the um popular media and everybody started talking about how the wolf was the savior of the environment. All we did was add wolves. And now we have vegetation responding. We have butterflies coming back, we have bees coming back, we have songbirds, we have beavers coming back to Yellowstone, we have vegetation responding. And and created this narrative based on just a little it of measurement of of aspen in some riperion areas, and the popular media went crazy. They captured the imagination. They love that story. Can you imagine now not only do we do we just want to put wolves back on the landscape, but now we have to put wolves on the landscape to renovate all of this degraded ecosystems. And it's all we need is to add wolves. So can you imagine if they had opened up UM hunting and Yellowstone would have done and they saw corresponding growth and aspens in the news cycle of do you think the news would be champion of cascade? Right, anything can can can precipitate a trophic cascade like that, and so so this firestorm of popular media and then a YouTube video just about everybody has seen. It's got forty million views. That's some British producer um with kind of a David Attenborough kind of that's all it takes, man, You put it, you put it, You put an old brit like, you know, because where they kind of like guy rid of nature to one of those guys at the helm of a nature video and people are like, and that's what happened. He starts out the video saying in the deer and they show these elk running, he says, and the deer gets scared out of And so it's full of errors. But it's got forty million views. And you talk to anyone on the street. Thousand people sent me that video. Oh I bet, I bet, and anybody on the street will when you ask him about Yellowstone and wolves say oh that In the title of the the video was when wolves changed rivers, and it was about them having such a strong ecological effect in the Yellowstone ecosystem that river courses were changing and vegetation was coming back. The problem with that whole story is that it's not just wolves. They released the wolves in shortly after that, they had a hundred year drought, the worst drought in a hundred years. They had a couple of years in that next decade with with heavy snows at that time that that knocked elk recruitment back. Grizzly bear populations increased so much that they documented three times the elk the calf elk predation by grizzly bears than than before we had wolves. There was hydrological changes in Yellowstone. We had the fires in huge changes. Their moose populations were dropping, Cougar population for coming up all the beaver reintroductions right see you here very nearby, Yes, in the Galton. Yeah, so you hear that. The bee they made that whole upper Madison and Gallant and beaver recovery areas. So the wolves didn't bring the beavers back biologistic and crates um and released them and the beaver's coming coming upstream and damning is part of the hydrological changes um in that in that ecosystem, that that was really caused by the beavers. But the beavers don't have a paparazzi following them and and champion everything that they do, and so the beavers didn't get any credit for that's right. That's so funny though, because you're like, well, yeah, just add wolves, just add wolves and read what we're talking about, whether it's a beaver or a wolf, is heavy heavy handed management. And also we were killing cow elk off of the park in the wintertime and hunts as a way to try to trim the herds. That's what we do. We killed females and those uh cow tags were probably held a little longer than we thought as the elk population was going down. So there's a storm of things that caused the elk population to go from nineteen thousand down to less than four thousand, and some people wanted to pin all that on the wolf, and the wolf did all that, and it's just such a simplistic thing that happened. But but a lot of research has come on now. Matt Kaufman, who you had on the show, published a paper in two where he did a more robust, more widespread, more scientific analysis of of aspen in that same area in the Northern Range and and showed that Aspen wasn't recovering actually even despite a sixty in decline in the elk population, So at that point it wasn't just a behavioral thing. We've got six decline in the elk and it's still can't document an aspen recovery. And so it's a really complicated thing with a whole bunch of factors feeding into it. And to sit back and say wolves changed Yellowstone and renovated the whole ecosystem is is a fallacy. But but what do you want? What everybody knows. But when someone wants to come in, and they want to come in and be like, let's have a normal, reasonable conversation about this, you get accused of being like anti wolf. You have a quote one of your things, you wrote, I came here. It was you were someone else who said, we don't have to make the wolf out to be a hero to justify recovery. That why can't we just talk about it in a way that's I'm asking you, Why can't it just be talked about in a matter of fact way, like is this the right thing to do? How do we do it correctly? But not have it be that we need to like spend these wild yachts. It's too polarized. We've got everybody at the poles and nobody in the middle when it comes to wolves, and and I think that evolved because of of wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies and wolves are getting and they crossed two thousand two. I think they they exceeded recovery criteria and weren't the listed by Congress unfortunately until they were five times the original recovery criteria. And do you have these these these groups suing to keep wolves protected on an Endangered Species Act even as that population grows and grows and grows. I think that creates so much pull to one pole that you had an equal and opposite reaction the opposite way, with people pulling equally hard and equally unrealistic things that they were saying on the other side. And and it just got so violent. Everybody is still in their corners instead of meeting in the middle and just talking NEUTRALI about it. The opposite of your trophic cascade person, the equally ridiculous opposite, is your person who is just in love with the idea of surplus killing. Yeah, they love it, they love it, right, it's like the other extreme extreme. It's the it's the MSNBC, Fox News split is trophic, cascade, surplus killing. What is the middle like? If you, I know it's not your business, but what is the middle ground like layout for me? Like not only it has it doesn't need to be your opinion, articulate an opinion that based on all of your exposure to people a different opinions about wolves. Imagine if you will, the most sort of like moderate, kind of level headed, consensus minded sentence about collection of sentences about wolves. There's there's not many people there, but I feel like I'm close and I feel like I'm close to that because the wolves to me are not on a pedestal as some religious deity that's going to save the world. And I certainly don't hate wolves. Wolves are just the largest member of the carnivore family, and and agencies manage foxes, we manage coyotes. We couldn't manage wolves the same way. They're just another native um species. And if we just look at them that way and say, let's bring it back onto the landscape, and when they're causing some unacceptable losses to livestock or an accept the losses to native other native species like el ker deer, then were going to manage them. We bring that population down in that focal area, solve that problem, and in other areas where they're not causing any problems and they're just restored to the landscape for good. Um. I don't know why more people can't look at it that way, but but they don't. It's very appealing and I know, I mean, they're just they're just big dogs. They're just another canaid out there. I don't know why they have to be so special. If you imagine looking into a crystal ball, UM, take the Northern Great Lakes. Will we get um? Will they be delisted to stay? Eventually? Yes? I think pretty soon. I mean I don't I don't know how you can justify leaving him on the list. I do think maybe this year they'll be delisted. Does it? Does it? Um? I know you don't do politics, but I don't know. If you need to answer this, you probably can't answer this. Does will that happen independent whatever happens with the next administration, Like does that have its own life course? Or does there need to be some like very top down pressure on that There isn't a lot of top down um pressure because I think there's safeguards against you know, like directives like that. There's there's influence there. There's no way you can take politics out of endangered species management, and certainly not wolf management. So there's always gonna be some political pressures and political um considerations. That's just part of wildlife management. It's not it's not pure science, for sure. It's it's an application of science and social science to manage wildlife. So I think in the future they'll be delisted. They certainly will be what what we can't do, And I've heard people say this is okay. I agree with delisting the Northern Rockies. I agree with the listing the Great Lakes, but we we need wolves in more places, and so we need to keep them listed in all of the other places until they recovered. That's not what the s A does. If they're not in danger of extinction anymore in too big popular nations, then we don't. We don't just move those polygons around the country until we get wolves everywhere we want wolves. Yeah, I know, I a little bit disagree with you because those ideas weren't around at the time they were delisted. But it makes it um It makes it better and easier to work being there. If you look at grizzly bears, it makes sense to me that we would just we would gradually, as it's acceptable, d list some some idea of population groups rather than saying that, you know, rather than like undoing the whole protection across the entirety of the lower forty eight, we would be like, Okay, this region is cool. That region is cool, but that region is cool. That region is not cool. What you're talking about is those are subpopulations that were all part of the recovery, and so one subpopulation is doing really good, then definitely we want to take that one off off the table. We want to delist that, and we do want to keep those other ones because they're right from the start part of the whole recovery plant. Whereas in in gray Wolves, the whole recovery plan was three populations of a hundred, and then it was increased of three populations of a hundred fifty in the northern Great Lakes area there and and we reached that and exceeded that by five times, and then the western Great Lakes it was um like four hundred. In Minnesota where they're just threatened. And then it was a hundred more in Wisconsin and the up and they exceeded that a long time ago. And so those are too independent recovery processes and they've both been satisfied. There was a grizzly bear example. That one that they're delisting is just part of the overall recovery plan. Um, I'm gonna do another crystal ball one for you. What let's say pick a comfortable number twenty years, twenty five years. What are some states that um might have population of wolves that don't. Now if you just kind of look at the trick question, no, no, the biological aspects and the political aspects. If you'd asked this question twenty years ago, there's been some real surprises. Yeah, right right. Some of the Washington you'd have been like California people like bullshit, right, But here we are so um, you know, is Nebraska right, Like, is Nebraska gonna be like wow? Who the thought? Now Nebraska has a wolf pack? And you'd have to say Utah in Colorado because we've got wolves going into those naturally going into those areas as it is, and I think and Mexican wolf recovery we've since two thousand nine, the Mexican wolf population has been increased in average at twelve percent per year, so that the mixing wolf population is going up and up and increasing towards a recovery goal. And yet I still get emails that say the Mexican wolf is spiraling towards extinction. Press the click the button here to donate to help us save the wolves against the evil state and federal agencies. And I think maybe they have my ground pinned sideways in their office or something and they think it's going wrong. I think they hung it up wrong because the graph is going up and up. So I I do feel that Mexican wolves are gonna be I don't know when recovery will happen, because we're still in the early stages recovery, but that situation is gonna look a lot better. We're gonna have more wolves in in Mexico, and we've got two recovery areas in the US and Mexico because it has been a true binational um process. And then we're gonna have some of the rocky mountain states really gonna expand into those rocky mountain states. And and really I think a lot of this angst and polarity is going to relax once people have wolves around and realize they're not that bad and if we have management ability to take care of problems where they where they happen. I think in cases where wolves have been here a while, like for example, Alaska and Canada, they're not that big a deal because they've had them for a while, and I think all this stuff will will settle down twenty years or so. That's a really funny thing about friends of mine that just really don't like wolves. I got friends as hate wolves and um because what they what they what their belief of what they'll do to the game populations. But the Sun's bitches all want to hunt in Alaska, right, I'm like, yeah, you would like it. Another thing I mentioned David Meach. David Meach has been working on wolves for sixty years, which sounds those are, but he has. He's been working Elsmere Island every year on Archtally Worlds for sixty years, and and he he's very pragmatic about wolves. You would think some of the devoted your entire their entire life to wolves and wolf biology, but he's very pragmatic. He's the one that says um. Wolves are neither st nor sinners, except by those who try to make themselves so they're not. They're just they're just um canaans there. And the public perception I find is so skewed as to what a healthy population is. And people like to have this very unrealistic idea of how animals spread out on a landscape. So if there's a healthy population, it means I see them where I go. And like, we're looking at this big picture of Hell's Canyon that is chock full elk, but there's no elk in the picture, and people are like, something is wrong. And I've been at these public meetings. I had so many really cool wolf encounters in the UH Catcham area Catching Ranger District, and UH go to public meetings and it's like doom and gloom and the wolf population is going down and the hunters are killing them all and the damn Cattle Owners Association is killing them all. Shut up, And it's because people aren't seeing wolves when they're I mean, some of these people were obviously not walking on trails, but they said they were right. Um, but they're not seeing them when they're walking their dogs, and they're not seeing when they're driving their cars and he's seeing long tail weasels. Either, that's not that's not charismatic enough, Paul Jazz, I think they're very charismatic. I was with a lot of non game biologists last night, and uh, they're big fans of the weasel family. Are we gonna be arguing about jaguars and ten years No, I don't think so argue about jaguars. Do you want to restore jaguars? I was involved in one workshop recently um talking about jaguars and jaguars don't want to restore them. I just want them to wander back in and be cool. Well I do, I think everybody. Most everybody does. They don't know that I'm arguing yet that we put them in crates and turn them out. But the one workshop I was at where there's uh three advocacy groups that got together and wrote a big manuscript advocating translocating from Mexico into the muggy on Rim and the Healing Esgtional. This is pondrosa pine um forest and was never um, never habitat where they stayed. The southwest Arizona, New Mexico has always been places where transient animals came up. We haven't documented a female with young jaguar in the US in Arizona and New Mexico anyway for a hundred and twenty years. There hasn't been a female since since nineteen sixty three, and then a bunch of been a bunch of been killed in photographs since then. No females. Yeah, well, what about if you went back into you know, like man right, Yeah, we don't know that. And and there were there were jaguars, and there were some females in some reproduction. But but this was a marginary. If you look at the Native American tribes, they have like no jaguar motif, not part of any of their stories. That tells you. That tells you something about how common it was in the Southwest and interesting and so we we definitely want to um make sure they can come back up and go back to Mexico they want. There was. Alan Rabinowitz is probably the most famous jaguar person. He started Panthera, which is a wild cat group worldwide. He's established jaguar conservation areas and refuges in South American Central America. Devoted his whole life to jaguars and and when he talked about well the fish Wallet's Ofervice was being pressured by some environmental groups to designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico. And when he heard that, he wrote not fed in in New York Times and said, this is ridiculous, is a ridiculous waste of money. That we've got a hundred seventy hundred seventy three thousand jaguars estimated from Sonora down to southern South America, and and some groups are saying this little dry arid land on the northern end of their distribution where they really just kind of moved in and moved out. Historically that is should be designated critical habitat and critical habitat as part of the ESA Endangered Species Act, and and habits had to be designated as critical habitat has to be critical to the conservation of the species. And the Fishing Wildad Service did population viability analyses where they included Arizona, New Mexico, and then they excluded them. And and as you would expect with a hundred and seventy three thousand jaguars elsewhere, that didn't change the probability of extinction um at all. And in Mexico itself has four thousand, eight hundred jaguars estimate, didn't that increased in the last decade. And so there's Arizona patriot man, I want American jaguars. Well, the groups that are asking for translocation up into Ariza into Central Arizona, New Mexico. At that meeting were some people that were involved in the conservation of jaguars in central Mexico where they are, and those people said, you're at you want to transplicate how many that's more than we estimate are in this northernmost population of jaguars. You can't you can't be taking our jaguars. I mean, we're trying to conserve that there so so, and then that got a lot of people looking at the carpet and scratching their heads like, oh, we didn't think of that. We're just gonna go get some jaguars and bring them up here. I didn't, you know, I never knew It's something I should research more or read up on. Mores like how oft and how many? Right? Like how many were? Really? I'd like to know. I'll send you a book, like what is the sort of you know I've seen it? I read a book um not too long ago, and it was it was just an exhaustive catalog of everything that could have possibly have been a reference of grizzly bears in the Southwest. So it's Mexico. It got up into Collar, yet it covered basically Colorado South. It was sort of like it was just a thing efter thing like from back the Spanish you know, early you know, Frontier day ranchers archaeological record, like everything that pointed to where were they? What was it like? I'd like to see that on jaguars if it was if it was in fact that this is always fringe and theyate straight up and this is just like the natural edge of their habitat, and just like you might you know, you know, Mountain Lion might kind of like flirt with the Alaska border now and then, but you'd hardly call Alaska like Mountain Lion country. But now and then one might turn up and they do. If that was the case, then I guess my ask would be that we take the necessary steps to let that contin new happening. Definitely, Yeah, I agree with just not jaguars and crates up into the Ponderous Pine. That seems really weird that that, but from from a from a like from a armchair expert, not not even that an armchair curious person. That strikes me as being a little bit much. That Ellen Robin wits I mentioned when when Fishing Wild Service was trying to designate which they did designate critical habitat in Arizona, New Mexico for the jaguar, like the third third attempt, Ellen rabin Witz did his New York Times uh article or op ed saying that was the most ridiculous thing in the world that you're wasting money talking about critical habitat and and all the effects of critical habitat and Arizona. So here's a guy that devoted his whole life and he's like at bangs with wolves. He's just pragmatic. He said, that's not critical to the conservation of the species. But there's no doubt everybody wants to make sure that um, they're able to still come up and use that habit that come back. Because I've been in in mountain ranges where I know there's a jaguar in that mountain Rangil Mountain Island, and it's pretty cool just to know that my son and I want time carried to have Elena that he shot off a tall mountain in the Coyote Mountains and in the dark through the thick brush, and we had a bloody have Alina on our shoulders. And I knew that the jaguar, the jaguar that we knew about, was in that part of the mountain range at that time. So that has a little element of interest when when you're out there awes lots. The same way when right when we left Sonora this year, you know, the article came out on the camera traps catching down there group. Yeah, well they got them in that you know that King Ranch area down there in South Texas. Yeah there, Well, and it's what's funny there is they're spending all this uh a version of things, is it? What's funny there is there like doing a lot of awes lot recovery work. And then it turns out that's sort of the strongest um. You know, the strongest populations are coming off these large cattle ranches. Yeah, there's two populations. Ones on a National Wilife Refuge and another one is on the Uturi Ranch, and I think the neighboring ranches and that's that's private lands and you've got that the old mandatory who I think passed away recently. I've permitted, have you just committed to us a lot conservation? And very much Yeah, it's very much private lands. You've you've got to be managing on private lands. It's Mike Twis and and there's a graduate student that, um did I know from Arizona that's down there working on osla's right now. But I knowing Mike Twois who's run that program since I did my master's agreed down there. But obviously that that species has a little bit northerly range than than the jaguars. It's kind of well, it's kind of the same in Arizona. It's kind of the same. There's historical records that come up through central Arizona or so, but not not a breeding population in Arizona like there is in Texas. South Texas are breeding if sixty some Austles that they know I'm out there there, But Arizona it's the same thing. It's one here and one there. And we have so many cameras in in those mountain ranges now that we're capturing what's sneaking around in there. I checked, are there any in Arizona right now, Oh jaguars, uh yes, right now as well as of September, and I know there was one around then. It turned up. It's high turned up on social media, got shot shot in Mexico. Back to Mexico and got shot. Yeah, there's there's a different one that. When I was down by Douglas in September, someone told me about one that was down there. I don't know if I can say where. I probably won't say where, but in the US and it got picked up by a trail camera. Houndsmen founded No, a lot of trail cams I had. I had checking out a lion that a hunter killed, because all the mountain lions get checked out at the game at Fish office, and he was he got it out of the Santa Ritos and he said they had a bunch of cameras in the Santa Rita mountains. This was several years ago. And I said, oh, you got a bunch of cameras, said you ever get one of them spotted cats. He goes yeah all the time, that's cool, and like wow, I mean hunters have trail cams out and they're getting jaguars on their trail camp. We've talked about this. There's a book called Candid Creatures, and it's like trail cam images and there's a jaguar standing in the snow. The only images like the only image I think maybe like the only image in existence or something of the jaguars. There's you're talking about the historical record of jaguars. We have that list that the Game Fish Department maintained of jaguar records going all the way back, but a lot of those, even in more recent times are like like some of the jaguar records that some of these groups for using for their modeling was some high school teachers saw black jaguar across the road, and black jaguars the color phase. It's a jungle phase. It's an Amazon thing. You never have black jaguars in Mexico and to the north. Never. So someone says they see a black jaguar, we know right away, well it wasn't a jaguar. I'm not sure what it was. Yeah, it's hard to start. I mean there's a there's a thing of like measuring the validity right right, and so we've got like three classes class one, Class two, Class three. I forgot what the criteria are, but it's to rank them for for veracity, for um, how reliable they are. But some of those, some of those are are just sightings, and some groups will want to include those as reliable and not. So you have to be careful. And that's why a table like that's a important. But there's a book called Borderland Jaguars. You have not seen that one, Okay, I'll send it to you. Carlos Lopos Gonzales and and Dave Brown and and in there they have probably not as complete as our list, but they have an account of the historical records of jaguars. I'd like to see it. I need to get my opinion straight. I know I like them, all right, everybody's I'd like to get pounced and scratched, kind of scratched by one, kind of just to leave a scar. You have to. It's cool to know that there's jaguars out there right across the packs. Man. One nice scratch, rub some dirt in there to get it infected through. Yeah, got your final thoughts questions? Yeah, I dude, I got I got a question for you. I was talking with a buddy of mine, uh this morning on my drive back over here, and and he's I was checking in with him because he's well for a service dude, and he's getting getting grant money and he's getting a lot of in kine cash for habitat work on his place, and this is kind of his retirement job, as he calls it, learning to be a farmer, and he's uh planting a bunch of plant species and and setting his place up for muleteer winning habitat and upland game Big loves loves the pheasants and quail. And he is kind of running me through his list of what he's got coming up and some of his successes and failures. And uh, I said, well, yeah, a lot of work right now, but hopefully you'll figure out how to strike a balance. He's like, yeah, I don't think so. He's like, to be honest with you, I'm not sure any of the ship is supposed to be here. And I mean, he is working with ecologists and he's got a litany of really good contacts from his past life. But that did just make me think of this question, like do you find yourself ever get kind of bogged down in the management of things, Like we've been manipulating landscapes and species for so long do you ever kind of get to these points where you're like, sure, I guess screw it, because it's not we're so far away from what it was or what we think it was. I don't think so. I mean, I don't. I don't think I get get that discouraged. There's there's things like in the wolf Recovery world where I just wish it wasn't a constant stream of litigation and litigation and litigation. Wish we could just get on with the business of conserving um carnivores and managing them as um as species. But but uh, I don't. I think I'm optimistic. I think there's just a lot of really good work going on right now throughout the West, habitat wise and and movement wise and everything that's great. Phil Someoney's addressed the elephant in the room that like, basically Janice has nothing to do with the show anymore. He's moved on to bigger he's he's out of honest once to get us out on assignments content I was assuming I was coming, and he's all busy with we got a lot of we've got a lot of irons in the fire and and he's tending to a couple. Got well, yeah, he's out ice fishing. But you don't have any you don't have your thing with That makes the honest sounds anymore, do you? I was thinking about bringing it to uh to Nashville next week, so you know he won't be there either. No, you got he's changing his damn thing. He's not even like a co host. Know, he's abandoned, he's moved on. He's he's left the nest. He's just busy. Yeah. Yeah, if you weren't cracking the whip, it's not true outdoors, Yeah, too much skin. He's missing some good skiing though, isn't he? I just said him to know what about out that it's puke in the nar man he's in final Like, I went to high school about forty minutes south of there, in college about an hour northwest of there, so familiar with that country. The only uh, all everything skiers say is annoying, But uh, I just hear one good one the other day is someone's talking about the powder and he said, um, that nar isn't gonna shred itself. I love it. I love it. Blower all right, Jeff Helen fingering what what's your favorite of all the pamphlets and books you read? I think you you say that your masterpieces the jack Book, Hunts and Recipes. Yep. And that's even available as a pdf on my website deer nut dot com. Um, just the doughy r nut dot com. Um. I've got a whole bunch of PDFs that are magazine articles that I've written and you can. I've got Deer of the Southwest. I brought you a copy which is Cow's white Tail and Desert Meal Deer in the Southwest Northern Mexico. Um. That's available on the website and um my Instagram Jim Deer and and deer has an E after the end, like John Deere. Fact, it's a little John Deer logo that photoshop to look like a meal there. Do you want wanna come down and do a jack rabbit hunt with you, man? Yeah, definitely, definitely. I'd like to you guarantee me that we'll get tons of them right without trying very hard? Well, no, you you drive around if you want tons, you drive around and shoot him out of the window. And we don't do that. We walk, I mean walk the land, so we don't walk back with tons, but it's a fun hunt. You get bit up by Mike's quite a bit with those. No they're not no mighty, No, they've got they've got a couple of internal parasites like the the butt fly larva, a big thumb size cute. When they get under the skin, it doesn't affect the meat. But we in our junior jack camp that I developed for kids ten years ago, we bring kids together and we we show them how to jack rabbit hunt, show them how to um clean and cook the jack rabbits. We find some of those big, ugly but fly larva under the skin and and we turned a liability into a positive. When we we still did we brought a little scale, no, we started weighing them and we gave out an award for the largest buttfly large that s the kids are going, Do I have one? Do I have one? Does mine have one? Can you start on? So when you grab them, see I thought, because you guys are down where it doesn't get cold and winter enough, when you grab him your arms, don't just get them by min now. And we hunt them there open ye around but we hunt them October to March, just a season so we can keep the meat, and there is less ectoparasites on them, yep, as opposed to the endo inside were outside like like the like the insects on the outside. But it's not not bad at all. I mean, you just don't when you grab them, they're nice and clean, and you skin them and you've got some really nice clean meat that cooks up like beeft. Wow, how much did you learn, Phil? Like on one to ten, we're paying attention. It was a solid eight. You guys, You guys ran the gamut. He was so many things were talked about. Yeah, yeah, you're soaking it up. Soaking it up. Mostly I was fantasizing about my Neanderthal mingling in this hypothet nicole situation. I feel had to go back. He went back behind that curtain for a while. That's right. It's imagining like a Romeo and Juliet's situation forbidden love. Phil search history is that sounds like a movie. I know tonight, I'm gonna want it tomorrow. I try to tap into Phil's incognito search that you don't want to, all right, Jim Halflefinger outdoorsman biologists, man in the man in the arena, A man in the arena when it comes to wildlife and wildlife management and UM and a great advocate for hunters and wildlife. Thank you for joining us. Thanks it would great be here. Comp