00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict 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 All. Right, before we even get to our guests, we need to do to show and tell pizzas Cran, do you want to do show and tell? First? Sure? Okay, explain what you made, um so from from a duck that was shot the other week. Um, I just decided to make a pair of earrings. So I it's very simple, very simple, very simple. So just these bright orange feet off the mallard and quick. Yeah. Sure. So it's a bright orange mallard foot hasn't even dried out yet. You can sew it back onto your duck and he'd walk away. And I just put some stainless steel steel wire around it to like kind of hold the ankle and made it like a little earring. Oh dude, that makes a statement, man, I don't know what statement it makes. It's beautiful. Krin was pointing out that people get upset did they feel like it's better just to throw out the garbage? Apparently? Yeah, right, I mean it's better to throw out the trash than to put it as earring, right, Like it feels disrespectful that you're you know, it's a detached foot. Whoever has that sentiment would have had a hell of a time with planes. Indians being their whole get up was made out of animals, extremely upsetting to them. So it's like, if you're going to save the feet for stock and boil them in a pot, you know, like in a pulse apocalyptic scenario, everybody's starving, death crens Like, right, she takes her earrings off, makes a little a bit of stock, and everybody's fine. So are you going to go into this? Do you think? Yeah? I mean I love I love making stuff, you know, I love using my hands, and I'm paint a lot. I haven't done that and while I used to do a lot of ceramic, so um yeah, um all, maybe we'll come up with a line of ear rings and rings and you can get around um you know, like you can't barter in trade for wild game meat, but you could even probably go on Etsy and sell your wares or like you for for any future we neither giveaways or fundraising. You know, there can be a pair of something, pair of earrings, or something in that collection of the gift items. Me and Seth to thinking about set doesn't know about this, but me and never thinking about raising a lot of money with beaver pelts, I got a path to raise a lot of money for our land Access initiative through beaver pelts. Extremely high priced beaver pelts. I was thinking about that too, extremely high priced bea repels. They come a little certificate signed, and a pair of flip flops, and a pair of flip flops comes with every repelled uh. And then now Seth through your show and tell um. This past week, I was at deer camp in eastern Montana, and Um, I stumbled upon a chunk of bone sticking out of a bank. It wasn't a cut bank. It was just like a little rolling shoulder that fell down into a little dried up creek bottom. And um, I don't fully understand that when you say that, well, you know most people like well, I shouldn't say most people. A lot of times people find bison skulls in cut banks, like sticking out of a cut bank. This was just like in the grass you know there it was fully vegetated where where I found this, and um, it was just so no erosion, nothing had fell away, no erosion at all. I just happened to see a chunk of bones sticking out of like the grass, and I just started started digging and uncovered The first one I found was not in a cut bank. It wasn't anything eroded, which I think, I don't know. I think it's cool and you got it's a youngster, um I was. I was in a hurry when I was digging it out because my girlfriend Kelsey had just shot a mule deer and I was, um I did. I had to walk like two miles back to the vehicle to go get the vehicle to bring it. There was like a another road that would ended up being way closer, So I went got the vehicle and brought it around and made the back out like it said, up two miles like five yards. So I was going to do that, and in in the process of doing that is when I found this skull. And I was trying to be quick digging it out of the bank and ended up breaking some pieces off of it. But it was very fragile. Um. I don't know what's going on, but something with the cosmos. Were a lot of you know right now in in Siberia and in in Arctic Alaska. There's all this stuff coming out of the perma frost right now because the exceedingly warm summers, like mammos and dogs and all manner jump. I know, I want to go over there and poke around. Um field trip. There's a lot of I feel like there's something in the cosmos. It's not climate related, but there's just a lot of buffalo skulls right now. Because I had found one in I don't know, man late nineties and it didn't find one for forever. And last year found two. One was full of crayfish, had been colonized by crayfish. Yeah. Um, then found a chunk like this chunk right here, and then my brother found a couple found one. Everyone's fine. Everybody's been fine. I know, multiple dudes have found him this year. I got there's so many coming out right now. If something isn't the cosmos. I got a friend over Missoula that found one and didn't even pick it up. He sent me a photo. It was level with it was in a gravel bar. It looked like it was on display in a gravel bar, Like it was like level, like you could have walked across it in a gravel bar, but just like there in the gravel bar. Oh, we found another one earlier. Um it was later in the summer that someone we were floating the river and someone had picked it up and said it like, made a little Karen. That's what I'm thinking of, made a little Karen and set it on top of Karen. What whatever you've been stearn Karen cairn cairn. It's hard to say that word. C A I r n made a cairn and set it on top I don't know if they knew what it was or didn't know what it was. Well, if they, yeah, I mean they did like a symbolic thing. I don't know. I just I just pictured a bunch of kids playing down by the river and they found this thing. And you didn't You didn't remember you thought that you felt that it had been corrupted and spoiled. Yes, by the touch of man. Yeah, it wasn't cool. It was cool, but it wasn't It wasn't like this one where I found it, dug it out of the earth that one had already been touched. Okay, now to our guests, Rick, Mattenee Mattenie Mannie spelled like mattenee. No, not like mattenee, not like a movie mattee Mattenee mattnee e n e. No, mate, I'm saying, that's a what's the when you go to a movie that mattee mattee. That's right, that's probably just tell us how you spell your name m A d n e Y m A t n e y and his father Mike, Yes, same last name. Yes, um, Rick, you were asking about my special anchor you made me. Yeah. Can you describe real quick how you make anchors. Well, I take a four inch steel pipe and fill it full of lead, and well bolts around the outside like a Mahler anchlor, except for the all steel ones clank reeloud. If you fill them with leadther a lot quieter. So I built any one, and I asked you about it when we came in here, and there's a story about Okay, so here's what happened. One. I love that anchor. Uh It. I had a compartment on one of my boats that wouldn't fit into so I took uh I took um bands off and shortened the bolts so that it would fit in a compartment down the little nubbins. Oh well, well, now I don't put in that compartment anymore. I could just left it as it was, so now you need another anchor. It works great, But like I just messed. It was just one of those stupid things that happens. Yeah, I feel terrible about it. It's okay, I got like eight more in the garage right now. When you're um, when you're melting all that lead, do you take precautions? No? Absolutely not. Just get a buzz and yeah, I just get the torch, grab that bush lighting uh rick. Tell people about the all the ways you kind of make ends meet. Um Well, I have an outfitting business here in the state of Montana. UM I run a Steelhead lodge out of Southeast Alaska, a guide for a private ranch down in Hawaii, as well as doing some bone fish guiding on Oahu and Hawaii. I do a little bit of cooking for you guys here at Meat Eater. UM. I also do some in home wild game cooking classes as well. On the side, UM I have rental properties in town. My job list is extreme, very outdoor focused irrigation company that I was part partner in and now I've actually got out of that finally, hopefully so that I can get a little bit more into the rest of the stuff. Can you. Uh so fish and bone fish in Hawaii is it? Oh? What what's the word? Yeah? Oh? I oh um. While in our neck of the woods, you know, they're not really regarded as not When I say our neck of the wood, I mean like in our atmosphere or whatever. Um, like when you go down to the Caribbean and stuff Ascension Bay. Yeah, they're not really regarded as people eat them, but they're not by most people of fish from there, not like regarded as a food fish. But why it's like they have a completely reception of them, right. Yeah. There's yeah, pounded fish cakes, uh, fish soup out of them. Yeah, that's uh, the locals really like eating them. Um. You know, I think America, United States is the only place you can left you can still kill a bone fish. They're protected everywhere else but Florida, Hawaii. You can still kill them there. Um. I don't advocate for that, you know, but my brother caught one in Hawaii one time. I think he said he's nine ft of water and caught a far bigger bone fish, and he'd ever caught fish and bone fish on purpose. Yeah, yeah, and they're we're they're a deep water bone fish. They come up onto the flats to feed. And there's so many pancake flats around um the islands of Hawaii that there's very little flat habitat form, so most of them are deep water fish. I mean you'll see videos of them schooling, you know, in sixty ft of water, and there's just schools, hundreds of them, and you know, you go up on the flat and there's four, but it's the same species, um, I think. So yeah. I mean there's guys that argue that the Hawaiian bone fish are in the Pacific uh Ocean bone fish are a little bit different than the Atlantic cousins. You know, they're kind of a deep water bone fish. There are what's called the sharp jaw bone fish, which I think they're gonna classify that one is a different species. And Hawaii has both the Pacific bone fish and the sharp sharp job bone fish, and so I think they do classify that one is a different one, but you know, you can noticeably tell the difference when you catch one of those versus the regular ones, who, um, what kind of people? Like? Who are your clients? Not Hawaiians? No? No, for the most part there and there's a couple of local guys that that I go out with quite a bit, but a lot of them are my clients that I roll over from either my Alaska operation or my Montana operation. And they're like, hey, you know, what are you doing in January? And I was like, well, funny you ask him downe in Hawaii guiding bone fish. It's like, oh, man, I'd really like to do that. They're really big, they're hard to edge. And it's like, yeah, well here you go. You guys go out and site fish form. Yeah, it's all site fishing form on the flats. Um. We do get out of the boat sometimes depending on the tides um when the tailing tides are right. We try to do it on foot as much as possible because that's the hunt, that's the fun one, that's more fun than doing it out of the boat. The problem with the boat is is most clients and most guys can't spot them far enough out to make an effective cast before we spook them. So it's it's a hard, so you're just stuck saying like eleven o'clock, eleven o'clock fifty feet, you know, and if your guy can do it perfectly, yeah, you'll catch a few of them doing it that way for sure. But we have a lot better luck doing it on foot, you know, low and slow. The slower you move. If you move your leg fast enough to where the water, the water makes a tiny bit of a ripple noise, fish will spook from a hundred feet away, so you have to go. So dudes, are they scared of sharks and stuff? They're scared of everything. Everything wants to kill them. I've seen fifty pound gt s turned sideways on the flats and chase ten pound bone fish try to eat them. You know, there's tiger sharks in the bay a hundred feet away. You know, it's everything wants to eat them. You know. On top of that, they get fished to every single day. When I first started guiding down there a little over twelve years ago, you never saw anyone bone fishing, And now every single day there's someone on every flat for the most part. So it took off in the amount of pressure they see is and their old fish, you know, they're a big bone fish will be twenty years old, and so you're gonna educate a fish like that that's been around the block. He's gonna know the drill. So you need to be better than the next guy to get them. And they're extremely hard to catch. Um, they're they're not that hard to get to eat as long as you can get to them without spooking. And they're neurotic. Sometimes they eat, you know, without no when you're there, they don't even care. And other times you can't buy a bite no matter what you do. Um, have you ever hunted sandhill cranes? Have? Yeah, we're hunting sand hill cranes a couple of years ago in the Texas Panhandle and they're like exceedingly decoy shy down there. They just see spreads all day every day and Discuyer hunting with skins all his sandhills and mates the zombie decoys where he makes a frame it actually puts an actual sandhill skin over it, and we're kind of like marveling at sort of like how wary they are. But then we had one that was wearing a band. It had been banded as an adult seventeen years earlier. You imagine the amount of spreads that things looked AT's in seventeen years. What's the average life span those things? Those things get way older than I thought older and mallards. I mean, you know, a lot of birds can live a long time, but I think it's common to have sand hills. Uh, you know, make it to be over a decade and you imagine. Yeah, so you talked about a twenty year old bone fish, just like he's up on those flats every day eating. After a while, he knows your name, you know that dude. There there's one fish they called bones Zilla. Um, he's been caught three or four times now. She would say, it's probably last thing. I think it's thirteen point seven pounds last time I got caught. I think LG caught him last time. But it's in the same spot. She lives in the same spot during the same tide. You can go there like clockwork and find that fish. Really yeah, and it's it's unbelievable how how they pattern I mean, there might as well be a white tailed deer. They do the same thing every day, you know, unless they you don't often think of fish like that. Yeah. Hunting, especially like an open and like an ocean environment, you don't think of a fish as being like, here's what his deal is. Yeah, here's what he does or she Yeah, it's it's it's funny because and you know you'll have new fish come out of the flats and do this and that. But I mean there's definitely a pattern, and the older fish typically do the same thing. I mean they have a thing they want to do, and during the right tide and you know, the right conditions, they do that thing. You know, repeatedly. You can see him do that month in month out. All right, Mike, tell us what you do you guys that you guys are like, uh, you guys have interesting groove. Well, I've I'm retired at this point, and I've spent my entire life trapping in my off season of working, and the had an excavation business for twenty five years and freed up my winter time, so my kids didn't see much of me during the summertime. You know, it was just our winter times are off, so our winter times was trapping. What age you start trapping? I started about twelve years old, and I think Rick was younger than that. So, uh, do the math for me real quick. And explain what what year you would have started. I want to put a relationship to the big fur boom. You just started during the during boom, yeah, eight before the before sixty eight when I probably started trapping six northeastern Washington North spoken about eighty miles and uh, what like what drew you into it being a fur trapper? Well, just the outdoor experience. I guess I just love the outdo oars and so um. My father had trapped a little bit, but very little, and he helped me get me around. I mean my mother also drove me from place to place. Uh, for when I was trapping. I remember when I was a little kid, we used to make my mom drive around and like sit in the car while you run down into some cattail marsh and then drive to the next spot. You know, It's like it's like being a soccer mob but being a muskrat. Mom, what we make that famous? What did you like? What did you start out for back then? Mainly beaver At that time, beaver was probably the more valuable pelt. And were you um lay out the economics of it back then in the sixties, like was it good? It's a whole lot better than it is now. Um, you know, actually you could, you could make a decent UH living during the winter months trapping. At that time. You know, the average worker, just like the saw mill workers there were making thirty dollars a day, and so beaver was worth an average of thirty dollars I remember, no, probably about probably sixty nine somewhere in there. Um, I remember I caught nineteen beaver on opening day, which was basically a month's wage as of a working man. And here I'm twelve year thirteen years old, so kid man. So I actually when I turned sixteen, I bought a brand new I ordered a four wheel drive pickup. Of course I put my father ordered because I couldn't put it in my name at sixteen. But um, but I had the money that I made from trapping to buy a brand new UH for four wheel drive pickup at dead age. Yeah. So in comparison, and now, I mean, you couldn't trap enough beaver to buy a brand new Ford pickup. No, you can't trap enough to put gas in that Ford pick direct a bicycle. Well, the playing me and Seth they're hatched, And well I've explained for what I was gonna talk about. The rule. The law is gonna make the only a law that says only me and Seth can trap beavers, but they're worth a thousand dollars apiece a federal law. I don't know if you're gonna get Um, you could probably do that with sea otter. Yeah, I think you probably could. There's a limited hall on those. So oh yes, I want to talk about you. I do follow that, like the sea otter stuff a little bit, quite a bit, because I want to get to that later. Let me make a note of that. Um that, so I know, like Native Alaskans can hunt sea otters. No one traps sea otters, do they they hunt sea otters. They can sell them only under the condition that they make it into a handicraft has to be substantially altered. Altered is the word. But sea otters, as they come back so strong, some argue more than ever had ever been, are destroying the red urchin. They're destroying everything because it's all tied together. And so there's a push to make it to incentivize people to go after sea otters. There's a push correct to reduce the restrictions so that people could actually sell nonaltered sea otters correct, that's what the statement of uh. That's his last attempt that they actually failed at, but was to allow the natives to sell just sea otter hides. I was attempting to try to buy them in the round so I could personally skin them in that too. But sea otters their value is, you know, somewhere around with thousand dollars apiece. For me to make product out of it, that's to make product. But but you're not allowed. I can't, I can't physically touch it. The rules changed. If the rules changed, and the natives I think would harvest a lot more, but I still don't think they would harvest enough to make a substantial difference. You remember the carrying capacity in Southeast Alaska during the UM seventy three when they did the marine Marine Mamelak determined that twenty thousand was carrying capacity. We currently have over fifty thou so over two times the carrying capacity. So they've just they're basically eating themselves out of house and home. The interesting thing is that people that are trying to protect the sea otters are actually the ones that are killing all of them, you know, as they start basically destroy the habitat to where they'll completely die out. It's funny. This is such like a recurring theme I just saw. It's such a recurring theme around. This is a real rabbit hole. I want to get back to the sixties. Put all, we're gonna put all this hold, but I want to open up the rabbit hole real quick, or like peer into the rabbit hole. Whenever we're dealing with an imperiled species, it enters a mind space with Americans. Okay, like wolves in the seventies. It enters a mind space with Americans where you're like, this thing is imperiled. There aren't many left. And we get to a point where we're like, we will forever envisioned it that way. You know. It's like you get in your head that the rarity of something, and it doesn't you know, we don't allow culturally, we don't have the elasticity in our brains to picture that someday will reverse the trend. It always feels scarce. So when we were low on sea otters and we put protections in place to recover sea otters, it's like sea otters entered like a permanent status in our brains as being imperiled without opening up the idea that we would someday hit recovery. That's why when you hit these recovery thresholds, it's like it never happened with wolves too. We hit the recovery threshold with grizzy bears. In certain areas, we hit the recovery thresholds, and people are like, yeah, we hit the recovery thresholds, but screw that. We don't want anyone to ever touch them ever again, because they're used to not be that many. Oddly, it didn't happen with elk or turkeys or deer. You know, we bought ran out of elk. No one has a problem switching the mind frame. So I guess that's an exception to my own rule. But some things like sea otters, people are never going to get comfortable with the fact that there's a bunch of them. Well, the native tribes up in Alaska, we're not nomadic so much so some of the mittens, the dump sites, they have hundreds and hundreds of years, and my understanding is that when they've digged through these mittens, that there's a hundred years where they have clamshells and hundred years where they do not have clams So meaning the natural cycle to the seat. You know, like every other animal goes in cycles. You know, if they're left alone, they will populate up and then just eat themselves out of house and home and then start all over again. That's what we're seeing. And what we're seeing now is we've exceeded the carrying capacity and they will die off and then they will slowly go back the other direction. But it appears to be a hundred year cycles from how big is one of those things to three times the size of a river otter um sixty seventy pounds of our big ones. And when the Russians used to, you know, like the Russians used to come into Alaskan waters, like way back in the old days, they were after sea otters, buying seattters back then, like people didn't trap sea otters, they always just hunted them. Correct. Well, you gotta remember a sea otters born in the water and he never leaves the water, and because of that, their prime year real because they're in I didn't know that. Yeah, they're like most fur bearers you consider only harvest in the winter months. Doesn't make any difference to uh sea outter because they're in the same same environments very a little difference between a summer sea out and the winter uh in the quality of the fur. Yeah, all right, we'll get back into all that stuff. I want to get back into the sixties. My understanding of like the fur boom, Like I started trapping right when the fur boom ended. Okay, so we set our first muskrat traps in four It was so good, but it wasn't as good. Can you explain what happened with fur prices? And maybe you probably have a more detailed understanding of this. Can you explain what happened to wild fur prices in this this sort of like magic block And maybe my dates are wrong, but like from seventy eight to two, people were quitting factory jobs in order to trap in the long winter. I know that in the case of the coyotes, there were people that have bought airplanes in the high line up here in Montana, and they made more money during the evenings killing coyotes and they did in their job. Well, Like what was happening those years? Do you understand from a market perspective, like why did wild why did like all wild fur all of a sudden gets super valuable. I don't know that all wild furre did. I don't know if i'd agree with that. It's long, long haired fur became more popular, and beaver didn't greatly increase. It was the long furs and seventy three four or five in that area there when the coyotes really took off you, And that was just a fashion trend, I think, more than anything else. But for perspective, I remember, like around the time when I became exposed to it, it was very common for red fox to sell. Like in the late seventies early eighties, it was very common for red fox where I grew up to be where seventy five it was common for mink to be worth fifty bucks. Beavers you'd hear a beaver selling for an excessive a hundred dollars, muskrats selling for eight Is that not? Am I remembering this wrong? I don't ever remember beaver average in a hundred. No, no, not at all. Beavers never really changed a dramatic amount. It's a lot more difficult process to uh tan and take care of beaver, and I think that's held the price down a lot on beaver, when a lot of the other fir's a lot easier to process, and a lot of it's just fashion trends. As I said, when I first started, beaver or thirty dollars in a coyote was six dollars. A bobcat was probably maybe twenty. Uh But it wasn't too much into the early seventies that we were looking at, you know, two and three hundred dollar bobcats and you know, forty or fifty dollar coyotes at that time. And then it wasn't too much later than we saw a hundred dollar coyotes. You know, when you hear or the last it's not so much right now, but like even within the last few years, you'd hear rumors of people saying that they were selling a bobcat for you hear rumors that like eight hundred dollars a thousand dollars. That's still a case right now, but they they've got a lot more specific with what they're looking for. But those real wide black and white bellies which they used for making vests and things like that, is where those real wide black and white spot and what they're after is the spots. It's basically the only spotted fur that's available now. It's surprising me that they don't just um that they care about that. It's that there's a concern about that it's actual, because doesn't it seem like you could just like replicate it. You ever felt fake for? Yeah, it feels like fake for. Can't replicate that? Yeah, nature does it better. So on those like like who's buying, um, who's buying bob hats right now? Like what country do they go to? Italy? I think Italy. They're they're lining in the pockets of jeans on they're putting little top ends on girls jeans and lining it with bobcat fur and inside the pockets too. Yeah, you'll see a little white you know, bobcat belly for just on the top of like a set of levies on the top edge of the pocket leading into it. And I know that's pretty popular right now. And again it's it's Europe. It's not much in the United States. Uh, France, Italy, those are two of the bigger ones. I remember reading a thing on town of something about the sort of the weirdness and unpredictability of fur prices. This analyst was talking about at times that northern raccoons so like genelly, northern furs are heavier, like better furd, heavier leather crack Is that a fair Southern furs, a thinner lever, thinner leather, thinner fur just because of climate. One thing I'd like to bring up right now is the fact that you gotta remember whild or is just a reaction. It's basically the tail on the dog. Ranch for makes up of the fur market only five percent. It's actually wild fur. So the fur prices it only follows the ranch market. So like like right now they've got a huge surplus of ranch raised mink, which in turn drives down the price of muskrat and and wild mink. And it's just wild fur market just follows wherever the ranch market goes, is where the wild firm market goes. Yeah. I read a piece recently a big auction house that used to deal in wild for had just stopped wild for all together and now only deals in ranch for. I don't know about that. Like some furrier North American fur No, no, no, it's like some furrier head abandon its wild fur practice because of the Because the predictability of the predictability and consistency of ranch for, it's more consistent in the quality of the fur. You know, One first is nearly exactly the same as the other. So it's really a lot easier on a soelding aspect wild furst because wild for varies real widely on the quality, texture and color. And got you So this thing, uh, this thing I was reading about just talking about the sort of idiosyncrasies oft the fur market. Was explaining that I guess there's been times when southern raccoons have been more valuable than northern raccoons, and it was pointing to the weight of a finished product, meaning it's very hard, and it was saying outside of Italy, it's very hard to sell a fur coat that weighs more than nine pounds. Generally in Asia, if you have a fur coat that weighs more than seven pounds, people will think it's too heavy and won't want to buy it. But an Italian a where a heavier fur coat than anybody else. And it was talking about so if you had a situation where um Italy was buying a lot of furs, that could affect fur markets because they're more tolerant of heavier, longer coats, Whereas when furs are popular in some other country, like if China is buying a lot of fur um, it could tend to be that that would be maybe driving up muskrat prices more because it's a lower bottom end price to buy the thing. And it was I think that when you're looking at in the US, you're trying to understand like where fur goes and what drives for prices, you tend to look around you and it doesn't really make sense because you just don't see the habits of what's going on in Italy, China, Russia, these other places, and all this stuff gets exported. What's what are the impacts of covid on for pretty poor right now? You know what I've done is I've started my own little fur shop and cut out about three middle men, and so I make all my own stuff and sell it in my live in Wrangle, Alaska, and we have a little first store there, and so I everything I catch, I cut out the auction yard houses, I cut out the you know, shipping up. More than one time, I basically shipped my fur to the tannery and it ships back. It isn't shipping to the to the auction yard and then shipping from the auction yard to the tanner and then from the tanner eat back to the furrier, and it just cuts out a whole bunch of middlemen. And and I make fur products and sell them to the tourists there. What's your shop called, It's called the Trading Post and and wrangle. We have a website to now, it's furs Alaska dot com. And so being's COVID come around. We finally decided we better start selling stuff online. And so when you if you if you've achieved a place or like a chief, a position where you're now able to be a fur trapper and for hunter and make a market for and sell all your own stuff off, has all this chit chat about fur price has become irrelevant to you completely? Yeah? You know, I I view trapping as an excuse to run around in the woods and being in a place that I love to be. And so it really wouldn't make any difference if the prices were zero, I'd still be there. Uh. And I think I feel like I'm doing a steward of the land of maintaining the animals, you know, somewhere close to carr and capacity and a healthy population so they don't get to that point where they become overpopulated and it stresses the animals, and then the diseases come in, and all animals have controlling diseases, so you know, if they're completely left alone, they will reach that point. What all species do you go after? Now? I trapped basically in southeast Alaska. Probably Pine Martin is most desirable, but I trapped Pine Martin and otter wolves and wolverine beaver. Did you do any Did you do muskrats anymore? There's no muskrats up there where I'm at, but you don't trap muskrats anywhere else? Uh? I have before come down uh the state of Washington and trapped some areas that I used to trap when I was younger, but I haven't price right now is about three dollars for muskrats when they're ten. I can make pretty good money at it, make a thousand dollars a day when they're ten dollars, But making three dollars a day doesn't excite me much. Explain his contraption you made, though, this is your invention? Yeah, I developed. Well. You gotta remember in the state of Washington in the year two thousand, they banned trapping as we knew it. They decided that it would be best if they didn't have any traps that were body gripping devices, so they banned all body gripping devices. They they banned the Connterby trap, which undoubted at least probably the most humane trap every every developed. But in the interest of humanity, they decided to ban the most humane trap made and so they said we could no longer use anybody gripping devices. So that kind of forced me into a situation where I said, well, I still want to trap, So how can I trap muskrats without gripping them in any way? So I developed a floating colony trap that the animal goes into and it never grips the animal. He drives down through two opposing fingers and drowns, and then the trap resets itself when that muskrat goes in. And that was that was more palatable to the voters of Washington. Yeah, you know, it was more palatable to do that. So so it forced me into a situation where instead of averaging sixty muskrats a day, I have now averaged twenty muskrats a day. Uh in the same amount. Oh yeah, what I'm looking at, say, it's kind of hard to explain. Man's what like twenty they're twenty four inches long, and then they'd be six twelve twelve inches wide. It looks like a small cage, a small cage with one inch or three quarter inch square wire twenty four inches long, uh maybe twelve inches deep, six inches of brass six inches across, with floats up towards the top, so that cage sits underwater and it floats. And there's a little trap door like kind of like a door reminiscent of like I have a heart trap door that's just not a swing, so you can just push your way in there and crawl your way in there, right And when they go in, what happens is is they bump this bump bar. The door lays down these right here adjustable so you can get it to where it's almost balanced. But once the mushgrat goes in, as you see, he canal can't get out. And this is the invert verded door model, which allows the smallest and the kits to escape, which is something trappers have never had before. So if you can imagine, now we leave all the smalls and kits which are not very valuable in relation to the adults. This one only catches adult sized muskrats. All the others escaped unharmed, and by spring the next year then they're mature rats and then you can catch them when they're worth two or three times more than what that kit was. But that's not that's for fur trappers. That's not like a guy that wants all the muskrats dad because they're destroying his landscaping. Okay, that's this one down here. This has got Basically, it's a treadle. It's a teeter totter. Uh As the muskrat goes in, the teeter totter closes the door behind it, and once the muskrats in there, he can't physically get out. It's uh just one direction in and eventually he decides he can't get out the way he came in, so then he dives down. The bottom compartment holds about eight muskrats. Although I've had a lot of customers, I sell them all over the United States, mostly to the animal damage control people. What do you call this thing? It's a voting colony trap. You have, you don't have a fancier name. And that the Lisa Watney two thousand. Lisa Wattney got to explain that Lisa Watney was the person that drove the ban on trapping in the state of Washington. So I name one time, I called it the Lisa Watney two thousand because she all she, in her attempts to make make us not catch the animals, we doubled our production and trapping the animals. What do you sell one of those things for? Do you still make? Yeah? I still make them, just hand make them all. Yeah, and make them all. I come down about two weeks every year and make a couple of hundred of them. And then yeah, so it takes me a couple of weeks to make a couple of hundred of them, and and uh. Then so in your year when I saw about you've always had an interesting lifestyle. Within your year, you account for spending a couple of weeks making muskrat colony traps and you'll sell all those throughout the year. That pretty much from one five dollars plus shipping. Wow, But you know, how how do you bait it? Okay, if you paid the back part with carrots and I usually put a couple of appetizers up here in front, they muskrat will come by and grab the carrot and you'll take it off, and he really likes carrots. It's like candy to a muskrat, and so he comes back and looks for more. But there seems to be some. I don't know whether they're bringing other muskrats back with them, because once they start hitting it, you'll just fill it up with muskrats. What's the most you've ever caught one? I've only caught eight is the most. I've got several times. But I have a lot of customers that lay claimed to ten. I had one guy that he uh was kind of funny. He had he had ordered a couple of traps from me. He's an animal damage control guy and he had a golf course pawd. He said that he called up and said, I'm not catching anything in my traps, and I said, okay, well, trice uh seed in the bank with uh. You know. I had him describe it to introduce them to carroty. Yeah, to introduce him to seed the banks with carrots and see what happens. They called me back about three days later and he said, yeah, he couldn't have got another one in it without vasiline. He had ten of a minute he had to educate the muskrats on carrot. Yeah, they just didn't even they were. He said that that particular pond was grass all the way down to it, and the muskrats were just eating grass is all they were eating. And so they had no idea what a carrot was. But once they figured it out, it was phenomenal for him. Do you use any commercial lure? I yeah, I'd use uh just a cherry oil and and uh, petroleum jelly is what I use in it. You can use fancy lures and that wouldn't make any difference. When I was a kid, we used to use mint toothpaste. So homet what's your what's your mix? Just petroleum jelly and uh, cherry oil, vasoline and cheerio cheerio like an extract. Extra. When a person gets the trap, they get a DVD with it and a little bottle of jewry all, which it's just not a name to it's just an instructional video for it that that comes with it, so they can because most you know, this is entirely different than any trap that you ever see. But do you anchor it? You just tie it off to where it doesn't float away? You know? Can I borrow that thing? Yeah, we have lots of them. So but I don't know, man, because it's like takes all the romance out of muskrat trapping. Well, you know the neat thing about they don't you don't know. You don't need to know how to read sign no correct. Yeah, that's what you don't have to because that's in a pond and walk away. Yeah. But when I take my kids, we set muskrat traps last night. It was opening day yesterday. When I take my kids out set muskrat traps, you're looking for the runs or about this. This is a push up a large bank den. Here's where they've been doing this. This. Just go throw that something biting off the edge of the pond and start stacking them up. But I bet the manager of that property would be very happy if we use that. I don't want him to even know. I hope he doesn't listen to I don't know if he listens to this show or not, but it's gonna change his whole life. He thinks I have some kind of magic. He thinks I got some kind of magic capabilities. Maybe I don't know. If I said I am going I went to tuck it into the cattail. So he doesn't know about it. I went into a pond here that a guy had had a trapper pay to come in and kill muskrats, and he killed seven muskrats, and the landowner was still seeing muskrats everywhere, and so he got ahold of me and said, well, the trapper before he got seven, do you think you can beat that? And I threw my six colony traps out and I had fifty three muskrats the next the next day. Seriously, yeah, So I came back, I said him that night. I came back the next day and I had between alright, it had it was two checks that I had fifty three, but I ended up getting fifty three and two checks. Um would just six traps and everyone of them was just completely loaded. And then I literally couldn't catch another muskrat out of that pond. It's just all of a sudden, there's no muskrats in them. Let me tell you where it is left. Let me tell you this thing's vulnerability. And you probably realized this in Michigan. We used you know, I didn't travel out, but like I think, like a good year when I was like probably the most I ever caught muskrats. One year when I was not a kid, but like community college age um, and you could trap for weeks before freeze up. But hereabouts, like in the Northern Rockies, higher elevation, by the time the season opens, you're in freeze up. So have you made us? Have you made an under ice? You know this this is strictly for open water. Why have you not done any invented for an under a thing that you chop a hole? Because then that son of a bit down and they find it when they're cruising around under the ice because it's Martin trapping season. The next This hasn't This hasn't bothered you know that's inventored me a bit. You know. I I'm liking to do all kinds of things, and muskrat season is muskrat Season's time to go and tell might appreciate an under ice solution. If I say you ought right now to trap a muskrat through the ice, what would be your what's your go to? You set? You just look for the runs. One tan Connabar in the run, you just look for the runs the bubbles probably, but his clientele mostly is nuisance trappers right there trying to they can trap. They're trapping your runevera up and yeah, they're not gonna be trapping during the ice up. I don't want to infringe on your business. But here's the thing, uh Me and Seth here you might not have heard of us, but we're small scale free nuisance trappers meaning volunteer. We're volunteering, but we're volunteer newsance travers. But you gotta our customers all work on our schedule. Like I'll have you know, people who within a couple of hours driving here, if they have beaver problems or muskrat problems, Um, I'll be you know, they'll say like, oh my god, we gotta blank beaver problem, you know, And I'll say, well, we'll come out in the middle of the winter when it suits our likings. So not doing any kind of damage stuff. But it's a free service. But it's hard to really um and those at that time of year, it's hard to give them what they're after, which is eradication. M hm. You know, like I don't know, like through the ice I don't know that you can really totally clean them out. Probably not unless you just keep going and going and going and going and going. You know, the people that are doing the animal damage control or charging fifty bucks of muskrat or you know, a hundred and fifty dollars of beaver to remove it, or you know, whatever their prices getting that amount of money. You know, it depends on where what I know, volunteers, we need to make a website. You know, these guys are making a living doing it. You're not going to make a living trap and beaver for their fur. What a website be called free nuisance trapping? I don't know. I'd have to think about it work on that. I feel like a lot of or a fair amount of our audience as hunters may also have qualms about trapping. You find that to be the case. Yeah, right, So I'm just kind of curious to hear from everyone, not like it's necessary to make an indefensive but to just kind of go into a little bit of you're kind of thinking your thought process about it, you know, and why hunters would think that trapping is is different. I'll go first, Yeah, are you asking me? Yeah, I'm asking all of you. I could ask this question fair bit. And uh, I think that as a harvester of of anything, um like, it does a matter if you fish or hunter trap, you are beholden to a regulatory structure. Okay, there are rules that there are rules of engagement UM, and the rules that you live by when you're hunting fish and trap are generally meant to ensure that they're generally meant to limit efficacy UM, so that people don't have the tools at their disposal to like annihilate species, so that they're meant to make it UM that the means of harvest aren't so effective that everybody is putting themselves out of business. They also are very informed by historical use and common practice. Meaning if we devise some new thing and we realized that all of our fishing harvest goals could be met with these very precise specific poisons, say, regulators or people that set wildlife laws wouldn't necessarily just jump to that because that's not a historic use. It's not a common use pattern to use poisons. So you kind of prefer ways things have always been done in terms of like cultural longevity and how we go about our practices UM. Due to the regulatory thing, and because beavers have commercial value, say, or fur bears have commercial value, oftentimes fur bears are the only allowable harvest is by trapping. Take Michigan, for instance, where I grew up, you could not The only legal method of take for muskrat, mink, beaver, otter, the only legal method of take was by licensed for harvesters using trapping technology at a time, and it still will come back. It just ebbs and flows. Those things are of commercial value and support a commercial industry, and it was protecting those fur bears from want and slaughtered by people with firearms year round. So they said, like, these things have value, We're going to protect the people that participate in this protected industry and make it that they are fur bears are meant for fur harvesters. Point being is you're operating usually within an pre existing regulatory structure. So with beavers, for instance here, um, you can't hunt them, right, you trapped them. If you think it's okay to use a renewable resource beavers as a renewable resource, and you accept that people who are in agriculture, irrigation, um, people who are trying to protect timber, trying to check landscaping, fruit trees, streamside vegetation, aspen groves, what have you, that these people at times have a legitimate reason to want to get rid of some beavers. That's how it's done. So you're not making a decision like do I want to hunt beavers or trap beavers? It's that's how beavers are caught, is through trapping. So I don't view it as it would be. I don't. I wouldn't get into a situation where I'm like, because I can't shoot it with my gun, therefore I think that they should not be harvested. Do you feel like that's the argument you get or or there's a there's some kind of conceptual traps are me but and stuff, so okay running an arrow through it? And then you get into this weird, weird ship with people who think that like, hunting with a bow is more ethical than hunting with a rifle. It might be like, it's harder. It's definitely harder to be consistent with the bow takes a greater skill set. But for the animal, you think you're doing the animal of favor by killing it one way and not another, Like I don't you either. Are you either at a position where you think that that it's that we have it's okay to harvest renewable resources or not right? That's probably if you get to where it's not okay, cool, it's not, but if it is, then that's how we do it. It's the most effective, most humane way to get it done, and historically that's how people going about it. So I just don't like, you know, every time I have a converse, like, I don't feel like I need to predicate every conversation about harvesting beavers or muskrats or whatever with a big thing explaining why I think it's okay. The same way every time you go through the drive through and order chicken nuggets? Is there someone waiting there to like question your ethics? Why do trappers have to face it all the time? You know why? Like I'm not, I'm not like why why does it do you have to justify it every time you turn around? But people that eat chicken never have to. So for our listeners, I think we are we take out this bit of the podcast and play it on repeat, so Steve never has to be again. You know what I'm saying. I want to make a sign of McDonald's and protest chicken nuggets. Yeah, it's like, well, how do you like, how do you feel about how they kill those chickens? You know what? The answer you to get I have, dude, I have no idea how they kill those chickens. Yeah, nor do they care. I one time did some work at a place called it was called um it was like Bill Mar, but not like Bill Mar, but like Bill like a turkey processing plant. Turkeys would show up weird. They're working on some equipment. They'd bring in all these turkeys in trucks. Okay, the turkeys are on these little boxes in the truck. So they were raised somewhere. I mean, if you've ever gone And I'm not even hacking on him, I'm just saying that's how it goes. Like they're raising these like warehouses, thousands of turkeys packed into a warehouse. Then they pull up a truck and you take all the turkeys and load them into a little box on the truck and drive that down the highway. Uh. I'm not a turkey. But being loaded down after spending my life in a warehouse, never seeing the sun, to be loaded down a semi in a little box and hauled down an interstate system for X number of hours, I don't know what that experience is like. And then it gets to the parking lot and it waits there in the parking lot, and eventually it's that truck's turn, and they go and pull it in, and a guy grabs the turkey out and hooks its feet into a little hook and suspends it upside down, and then it goes down the conveyor and its head gets dragged across an electrified plate, which gives it a good zap, and then it gets caught in this little v thing and it passes through that and a little spinning blade cuts his throat. But trapping, that's mean as ship. It's like, I just you know what I'm saying, like why is it turkeys? Folks? But like you, you find a muskrat den instead of body grip and trapping there the musgrat goes into then body grit trap grips around the back of the neck or over the lungs. He's underwater, can't move, he's dead and seconds and that is so upsetting. I'd like to address that because I have my little Okay, I have this little first shop here, and I get a lot of people coming into the shop, you know, and a lot of them are posed to trapping in that, you know, and you ask talk to him a little bit, and you know, you know, what do you dislike about you? I don't they can consider it inhumane, And I said, well, you know, we probably got some things we could agree on here. You know, we can probably all agree that all animals, wild animals die and you know, you usually get an agreement out of that. And so you know, next question is, well do you agree that you know, out of all wild animals, almost none of them die of old age, and they sometimes you'll get some squawk of that. So you pull out your smartphone, you google what percentage of wild animals die of old age? And most all researches none or a non negligible amount. Okay, so you know we're talking about the human and treatment of an animal and trapping is in humane. Well, now we've decided that the animal basically has four ways that that animal can die. He can die from a conno bear that relatively kills him instantly. He can die of starvation, he can die of a disease, or he can die from consumed by another predator. Out of those four deaths, which one do you consider the most humane? And when in fact, trapping is the most humane death that that animal could possibly receive. You know, if you think of it in human terms, would you rather be hit by a train traveling sixty mile or die of a disease over three weeks or a month period, or die from being consumed by a bear, or die from um starving to death or starve to death or starving to death. So of the four possibilities that that animal is going to die, the actual most humane death is being trapped. We had a wolf freeze to dry one time. We asked her what kills wolves and she said wolves, Yeah, smart all the study subjects. And the other thing is is, you know most people can they figure trappers are out there to catch everything they can, and when in fact that's the direct opposite. The trapper wants to be able to maintain a healthy population, to be able to go out next year. What would be the benefit of a for example, a cattle farmer that has a pasture that supports a hundred cattle, You know he's gonna want a hundred cattle out there producing for him so he can harvest the surplus every year. So the trappers are no different. We want to go out next year, we want to trap as many as we can. We want a healthy population. As stewarts of the land. We want to maintain that healthy animal. So you know, in the case where the people that don't want any any animals killed, the animals make natural cycles where they'll popular laid up over years, disease out, and they just go from peak and crash, peak and crash. As stewards of the land. As a trapper, I'm able to maintain healthy populations right straight through. Any time you have, for example, kyotes getting overpopulated and getting manes or distemper, then you have the potential of that spreading into the dogs of the pomesticated canine populations, yeah, getting into the the population of of domestic animals, where if you maintain a healthy population of the kyo, you don't have that problem. I've found that people are comfortable with the cycles um like it doesn't upset them because people have this idea that like, oh, that's natural. So like wolves getting killed by wolves, They're like, oh, yeah, that's fine, that's natural. UM disease is fine, that's natural. I think a lot of the discord and um acrimony the trapping rings about is because people this is a phenomenon. I guess at the last two hundred years, people have gotten to the point where, um, nothing we do that they like us. They like our species to sit entirely outside of nature. Are you being a steward of the land by doing that? Well, no, but it's comfortable for people to imagine that we're we're tainted. Um, we do all the things we do, but we're tainted, and like any role we play in nature is very upsetting to them, Like they want everyone to live divorced from nature, so that all the ways the muskrat dies, all the uses of the muskrat goes toward to feed things, Like the minute it enters into the human sphere, something's wrong, something is something has occurred that was bad. You know that, like of all the predation that drives things that a human predator would get, it feels like naughty to them. Um, I think that's kind of hang up. It's hard to address. That's really interesting. It's like, I guess we're not animals. I guess we're not part of the uh natural world. You know, we've brought technology to the place where it is so we can just be like robots that sit in the sidelines, and like we live in apartment buildings, we don't live in the woods. I guess so. Yeah. People, a lot of people I think regard themselves as kind of ikey. They think they're like ikey and evil in that context. But I don't, like, I don't feel that way, Like I don't like to be an agent out in nature. Um, like a person who does things and consumes things and supports things and and you know, uh, you know, a well intentioned predator like that doesn't make me feel nasty and icky. It's interesting, but it's a sentiment that people have. My wife had struggles with trapping. What's her She struggles with electric reels because because you know what it is when I inquire about it, because you're not there. Oh, I see, so you're not bearing witness to it. It's like a mechanical you're not. Actually, it's not active. It's because you set it. You set a trap and you don't need to be there. And electric reels because your hand doesn't need to like going circles. So she feels like it's most of the most of the time, the definition of trapping is hunting with mechanical devices. Most places, most states. I think that's how they define trapping, is hunting with mechanical devices. Maybe that's upsetting to people. But what's a firearm mechanical device? Is that far more sophisticated. That's why hunting and trapping a lot of times follow the same regulatory guidelines too as well. You'll find a lot of hunting and trapping laws that coincide with each other. But I can see that. It's like you're I can see where she's coming from. I don't. I mean, I don't know how I feel either way, but like you're in the moment confronting an animal, and your action in that moment, that engagement with that creature in that moment is like an active choice that you're making right, and if you're setting something out that's going to do its job by yourself in your absence, I can I can see where she is sitting waiting out a deer to in her mind is like that's great, yeah, waiting it out. But you go out in the warm part of the day instead of beaver trap, and then you go back to bed and some point during the night your ass isn't even sitting there freezing, and what you got him? It just strikes her as you're cheating. She might have an arguable point there to completely disagree. It's also just more variables that you have less control over, right, you know, yeah, I think that's in my defense of what I always when I'm having this argument with her, I tell her, like the electrical real for the electric real friends. When she thinks is like she was offended by electric reels deep dropping because you don't see the fish and all this stuff, I said to her. And I said the same thing to her about beaver trapping, as I said, I could lay a gun out for someone and say I want you to kill a deer. Okay, So let's say I'm one pile, I put a gun, and I say, I why it's you to kill it? Here? In one pile, I put all the ship that it requires a deep drop of black cod in the pile. Or I put all the ship that's required to trap a beaver in a pile. Which pile are you gonna grab? Figure it out? Yeah? And I said, okay, crant, here's the choice. You can take this and shoot catch a deer. You can take all this ship and catch a black cod, or you can take all this ship and catch a beaver. What are you gonna go for? What's gonna strike you? As the easiest thing the action, of course, because it takes the skill set require draped myself in options. Yeah, the bits of information, the bits of information required to catch a beaver are greater than the bits of information required to shoot it here, Okay, they just are. It takes more know how to like, it just takes more know how to get up and running. Yep, got it, Like trying to set that thing up. One of my limbs might be in there. Not just that, but to read the sign, to understand even where to begin. It's like not an easy thing. And so that whole like how that whole like challenge aspect, which is different than ethics. It's still substantive. There is a huge challenge aspect, but people don't see it because they don't experience and they don't go out and see what it requires. It is. They have this idea of how easy it is, like how easy it is to criticize people that run mountain lines of dogs until you go and see what goes into it hard. Could it be shooting line out of a tree that I don't think, I don't know any houndsman to think that's hard. Maybe the concept is like setting out traps is like setting out like a mouse trap. Well, it's like this muskrant thing we're looking at that looks a lot more complicated than a mouse In the case of a kyote trap, where you've got a two inch circle that out of a square mile, you're trying to get a coyote to step on a two inch circle. I don't know how many two inch circles there are in a square mile, but you know, that's kind of amazing in itself. That's something I've I've heard that express and it's a it's a very valid point that you are not only that you're trying to get him a step on a two inch man made circle. Yeah, it smells bad, It's incredible. Yeah, how affective people are figuring that stuff out? What else you got, kran No, that's that's it. I just wanted to touch on that because I think that comes up a lot here and I just I mean, I don't know either way. You know, Hey, this is this is all new to me, so I kind of just appreciate the information in the in the perspective, I think that, but in all fairness of the subject, I think that, um, when trappers are defending trapping, they often want to go to. They often jump to conna bears, which are body gripping traps, because it's sort of like very they're like demonstrably effective, like they kill things very quickly. Very few trappers go to defend trapping and jump to footholds that restrain an animal for a day or two alive. Oh that so now now I want to show up. And then you show up and yeah, like when we used to like trapping fox, red fox, you would dispass like you'd catch the file. You check every morning. It was it just made more sense to check in the morning, but you didn't have to um. Some states have check laws twenty four hours, forty eight hours, whatever. You go there, it is, he's on, he's in the trap, he's been there all night. And you go up and take a trowel and smack him across the bridge of the nose and stun him and then take your heel and and crush his rib cage with your heel. Is how trappers dispatch red foxes. That's upsetting to people, But trappers always want to talk about connor bears. I do too. It's a bad habit of mine. Then it gets a little, then it gets like then it's different. It's a different conversation. Maybe if I was arguing with the trapper, that's what I would talk about. I'd be like, no, no no, don't want to talk about converse. Well, recognize just a lot of snares with the development of a stench or kill spring in that well. I don't know how many coyotes we have that the cable stretch out where you out a skiff of snow and you can see exactly what took place. You can see where the kayok goes into the snare, he takes a lunge and he's laying dead at the end of it, and his foot has made maybe a couple of swipes of his foot where it's killed him extremely quickly. Just so, I don't really use traps all that much anymore because of the efficiency of the the snares that are available to us now. It cuts off that card artery and I mean they're dead at the end of the cable. I've got a number of wolves that the cable is stretched out and the wolf is laying dead at the end of it. Zero disruption to the to the you can reset your set and needed the grass didn't even get beat down or anything like literally it goes to the end of the rope, they drop. That's it, you know. Sometimes their leg doesn't even move. There's I mean, it's you couldn't stone an anim all that quickly, couldn't shoot it, You couldn't show in the forehead and have it die as quickly as they do with it. When they cut off that blood to the brain, they basically just die instantly. So when you do you not like, do you know guys that don't use let me, let me, let me back up from it and just explain something listeners. You'll often hear like dry dry land dry ground sets being differentiated from water sets because water sets theres a hundred ways, not a hunter ways. There's a handful of ways with water sets to kill stuff real quick, drowner wires and all kinds of things like you get stuff underwater and drown it or it's just killed by the trap. So dry land sets, dry land leg hold or foothold sets um oftentimes are just restraining the animals you get there. I'll point out that wolf researchers often catch the wolves they're doing for coloring projects. They catch the wolves use the exact same technology that people are talking about being crueling inhumane. Wolf researchers use. I know, there's a lot of wolf researchers to use an MB seven fifty, which is what a foothold trap. So when they want to put a collar on a wolf or do damage work, they're using the thing that everyone agrees is so nasty. So it's important to keep that in mind. Can we can we picture it as like you know, your foot, you know, is grabbed hold of by something and and you're just maybe you're, you know, trying to struggle and get away, but there it is. It's like it's a thing that pinches your foot. Predator with canines. It usually gets them around the pad. It's usually like held in around the pad with a couple of toes, same stuff researchers use. You do not want a trap that breaks the bone on them. The trap that is just restraining the animal. That's the goal, because anything more than that you have more of a chance of losing them. So the whole idea of a foothold trap is to just restrain the animal with doing his men them amount of damage as you can. Okay, one of the points when I wanted to set that up to one of the points I wanted to get at was um, there are there, there are perfect scenarios in setting traps and like best practices and humane practices. But things happen all the time that caused the systems to go awry. And I think the people that have a hard time with trapping are probably deeply informed by the situations where something goes awry for whatever reason. The kyot pulls out, pulls a steak out, breaks the chain, I don't know, and then it's run around neighborhood the tramp on its leg or I have even in like beaver sets where the drowner cable I use, something gets kinked up, some stuff drifts down, it gets the cable gets a curl q in it, a drift log comes down and messes it up. Something messes it up, and you do like just like, I'll admit it flat out. You'll come down and have a beaver's front foot in a trap. It can happen. They twist out that your equipment fails and there you have, you've like tore the foot off of beaver. So somehow trappers like need to account for that more than other people who might have something go wrong now and then well, what about how many deer get killed by combines harvesting wheat? Sure, or how many how many deer and elk um are wounded and survived from bullet and arrow strikes. But I think that trappers are held more to the mistakes, yeah, than hunters and farmers and everyone else has held to They're held more to the mistakes. I think it's a smaller community. It's easier to target them. I mean, you're not gonna go fight all the farmers in the United States of America for killing rabbits, you know, the trappers, they're so small and rare now that it makes a very easy target to hone in on one group. You know, if you look at the total number of named animals by any user group out there, you're gonna have a hard time convincing me anyways, that trappers many more animals than any other user group, you know, or in general them, you know, to the point where they aren't dispatched. So I think it's because of the population. And this, I mean, how many trappers do you know? You know, ask that to someone on the street. Yeah, it's not going to be a big number, you know, And so it's a small number, and I don't think it's I think trappers got an unfair targeting because of that, because of their eliteness isn't the word, but because of their fraternity and how tight they are with each other and how small of a group it is. Um, they do get picked on more. It's a minority, you know, it's a minority. It's of um people who are opposed the animal harvests. It's in the playbook to go after and the death by thousand cuts routine. The smaller user groups are always where you're going to go after. Yeah, early houndsman, trappers, whatever, It's just like an easier victory. It seems very other two people. Yeah, for sure, it's more acceptable to go after them because not a lot is known about them. You know, there are a group that most people don't have any firsthand contact with. You know, I'd say a lot of hunters probably have never talked to a trapper. I used to point out that fishermen fishermen fish, and they might not do anything else. Correct, hunters, most hunters fish, trappers hunting fish. You got it. There's a hierarchy there. Walk through height even like let's let's say you're explained to someone, Um, you run your trap line basically gotta wrangle. Yes, I've got to have a cabin and permit that's forty two miles from town. Uh. That's the same type of permit as a is uh the interior of Alaska where you're allowed to build a cabin on state ground. Permit cost a hundred dollars and it is a ten year permit and you can put yourself up a cabin and then at the end of the ten years it's either renewable or any time during that period you can tear it down and it's better does have to be removed. You have to put up a bond that for removal. Explain to someone how they would like. Let's say you were trying to explain to someone you gotta go catch a wolverine. Here's what I would tell you if I had a couple of seconds, a couple minutes to explain to you that you need to go catch one, Like, how do you even begin to think about how it's even begin to think about what would go into catching a wolverine. Okay, first of all, you're gonna have to go to some place that wolverianes live. So at that point, then you know, try to find bottlenecks or funnels. For example, as I go up the rivers, where a river comes in against a high steep embankment or something like that, that's going to crowd the crowd the wolverine into that spot. So you're trapping when the rivers are clean. Yeah, well they're they're still open most of the time. When I'm going up the rivers, they're still staying open up there. I think you need to elaborate how you get up the river. Oh, I have an airboat with a O forty like combing on it that I get up the rivers with. That's what you trap out of. Yeah, what do you like to bat them with? Um? Beavers will go to bait for almost everything. I found. The duck works really well for pine martin and duck. Yeah, duck works, and carcasses work really well for pine martin better than beaver meat. You mean, it's like that when you clean a duck, like whatever is left over, Cassy says, bones basically bones and feathers. Yeah, after once the duck has been breasted, Um, you can use it for bait at that point. In the case of geese, you also have to take the legs, but then whatever is left over after you've breasted and taking the legs, and you can use that for bait. Yeah, it's like how you can bait a crab trap with a salmon head, but you can't say a crab trap with I mean most sport caught sam and you can't stick the whole damn for the edible parts have been removed. Yeah. What time of year do you like to start? The season starts December one and runs through February short. Yeah, so you can still in the middle of the winter and that country have enough open water to run your whole to run the sea. The thing about the airboat is because it's in that particular environment. It's not like the interior where everything is completely froze over. You can run snowmobiles up the river. I wouldn't think it would take very long, and you'd break a snowmobile through someplace on these rivers because it's fluctuating between freezing and not freezing all the time. And so with the airboat, which it'll go on snow ice water that just basically goes over almost a gravel bars. Gravel bars does not like mud. Mud is basically airboat epoxy is there right, Yeah? Yeah, you stick it in the mud and it's stuck. Got you just too much friction. Yeah. A pretty major travel barrier for a lot of the rivers in southeast is that the bays will ice up. There's enough fresh water in them that's not moving very much. You'll end up with these ice barriers. We used to trap out a little john boats, and you can only go so far up into them before you basically the rivers at ice up, and once you get above the ice dams in the bottom, then the river is moving enough to where it opens back up again. So the logistics of trying to figure out how to get up one of these rivers very far was was one that was fairly challenging. So, I mean, my dad took it upon himself to figure out one way to get up above there. He knew the wolverines were further up the river. They weren't coming all the way down as far. There's a lot of the natural funnels where the points come out where these these wolverines would have to travel were further up than we could get with a little illuminum boat. How many miles up river are you trapping about? Eight miles up, each one up, So you got multiple rivers, all right, and wolverines roam all around, and you try to find someplace where they'll their movements will be constricted, like down to a bottleneck of sorts, and that might be bank configurations, river bank of steepness, so that you know if they're saddles. Yeah, just any place that's a funnel. The same way as you trap anything, you go to where they're gonna be traveling. How many, just like just like a human being, I mean, how many times have you went to a hunting in a certain spot, You go back three year years later, you find yourself walking in the exact same space place that you walked three years earlier. Yeah, how many do you take? Each year? I have I have caught, not caught that many wolverine. I caught one year last year and and that, and so this is something new for me. I've never been able to trap wolverine before until, like Rick said, I spent about thirty thou dollars to catch my first wolverine. So I could have I think that I could. I could have bought built an air or built a cabin, got an air about but lots of years of trial and error. I mean, how much how many trials and errors do we do before finally figuring out, No, I'm not a big wolverine trapper. However, it's like I said, it's an excuse to run around the woods. So the great white buffalo, how do you catch Pine Martin? Pine Martin is generally in a box as well too. Although one thing that I did take from my trapping experience in Washington when they banned all body gripping devices, we went to box trapping Pine Martin and I found up in the live trapping them. Yeah, live trapping, Okay, And then you know, I mean that type of trap, Yeah, that type of trap, just a cage trap. And so I started doing up that up there as well, in the fact that I could turn loose the females and maintain a higher population, uh for the closer to the carrying capacity, and have more producing females. Uh not no different than a cattle. Female pine Martin worth more than male Pine Martin. No, male worth much more. So that's just that's always that way. Yeah, I got males are much bigger, and they're they're much more desirable price wise females. Females are just smaller. So much of furs is based on square inches. Yeah, I got you. Like if it's twice as big as probably twice as m exactly with you. So how do you catch them? Well, with either one of two ways, either con of trap, which is far more humane than a cage trap. But the cage trap does allow you the ability to be able to be more selective in your harvest where I'm just harvesting just males, retort, letting the females go, and uh being able to maintain a higher number of productivity out of the area. Pine Martin are extremely easy to overtrap. Yeah, I hear that all the time. Why is that, Well, they're slow, they're delayed implantation, meaning that they're they're basically pregnant when you when you catch them. And so when I turn a female loose, I'm probably turning loose two or three Martin in reality, because they normally only have one or two kit or pups whatever you want to call them. But so they don't have you know, like the main cap five or six in a litter or pine Martin only has one or two. Yeah, it's funny that make like make have a reputation is being hard to catch. But pine Martin's have a reputation is being easy, extremely easy to catch. Like what makes it that way? Mank are afraid of their own shadow. I've done a lot of videotaping on my sets and stuff like that, trying to find out, you know, some difference. Pine Martin will just plow right into a trap, but he's not smelling. He's not worried about the smell of steel, the smell of humans. Well, yeah, they just plow right into things. They don't really care if it's food there after it. And the mink they're they're pretty skittish. I wonder if it's um that the mink just lives in a he lives in a more food rich environment and can afford to be a little particular. But a Pine Martin in the winter has just got to be balls out all the time. I think Martin most of his life is on the verge of starvation. I think they just they work hard to make a living where a mink has got a pretty easy life, and then you make a little box like a cubby, put bait in the back guard the front of the trap. Connor Bear, what do you how do you deal with all the snow, like all the snow, bearing all yourself all time. Well, you can put it on the side of a tree, just nail boxes side of a tree. Well, wolverine run up a tree though, Yeah, yeah, so you can get this that up out of the snow. Yeah. Actually, I've got a set I'm working with this year. That's uh what I I've actually got this from another individual up and uh, I believe it's Northwest Territories where he's at. But he used a tip up, which is basically a long pole attached to your trap. So when the trap is sprung, it falls away and the tip up brings the animal up in the air and suspends him. He's already caught and killed in the trap. But one in real big advantage of that is in the case of Pine Martin, he's suspended so the voles and shrews don't chew up the first start eating them. Yeah, And so he's suspended up out of the way. And so I'm experimenting with that and making a set that's designed to catch links wolverine, fisher, Pine Martin. We have very few of all of those items, and there's a fair number of wolverine, but uh, mainly just pine martin is what I'm after, but it eliminates the problem. Last year I had about six pine martin eating by wolverine. Had a wolf that I had caught that got eaten by a wolverine as well. So the wolverine ate the wolf. Yeah, so he found a wolf that I had caughten a snare and he ate it. So. Uh, Wolverines used to have like a real bad rip. Not used to in the North, Like I don't have any experience trapping like in the far North, you know, but wolverines, you know, they got the name like whatever, like the devil and all this kind of stuff. For how much trouble they gave the trappers. They just kind of get your number. Uh yeah, Well they basically figure out that wherever you're going, there's food. So I mean that's just like any other predator. They eat and they sleep, and they don't sleep very damn much. So I mean they just go to what's available for him for food, and that's just a turns out to be a food source for him. A friend of mine in Alaska who used to trap wolverines, I was asking about how he found the wolverine and how he looked for him, and he just said, they just found me. They just follow my snowshoe trail. He would make his sets in his snowshoe tracks. She's like, as soon as they hit my snowshy tracks, A're gonna follow. It's an easy way to travel to once they hit that, and they can run. It's like gravy running and somehow there's always food. Oh yeah, it's like always follow the snowshoe trail around. Oh look, Pine Martin delicious links, love links. What time of year do you trap beavers? I try to trap beaver up there. I'll start off by trapping beaver in order to get some bait for my Pine Martin or wolverine and other sets. So I'll start with beaver right off the get go, so I've got bait as much as anything. And then most of the beaver I'll catch for my store is gonna be beaver. In the springtime, the fur qualities a lot better in the spring. When does the fur get primed? Like, do they do do the do the regulators you know who set the seasons, do they good job? Do they do a good job of matching the opening and closing day with for quality? Yeah, I think most states do. Yeah, I think they do a real good job of that. But you like, the beaver is better in the spring, Yeah, better quality for in the spring, particularly if you're plucking and cheering the beaver. Really it's not good in the fall, not as good. But you know, they what they call silkies are normally a fall beaver. They're a lot they're a little bit thinner furred, but they're a lot silkier or if they've been all all through the winter and yeah, yeah, they're thicker, you know, under fur, thicker in that which makes the better plucking and cheering. Got you? How do you catch those the beaver? I use a lot of floats, a frame type floats and I'm follow um can show you pictures on my phone, right, you might be new to this, so he might be new to this. Yeah, I can used to take Like when I was growing up, they never worked that well. We just take two pieces of firewood and make a loss piece and nail two pieces of firewood together and then notch it out with a hatchet. So you can set a couple set a couple of stop loss on it and stable to stop lost trap chain down to the bottom of the float and stick a couple of dollars, drill some holes so you had a couple of dollars and put apples on the top for muscratch never work where the ship not as good as feed beds and bank dens. Yeah. Correct, But in the springtime that set will be a lot more effective than it will be in the fall when they're hungry. Not when they're hungry, they're actually breeding and they're just traveling a lot more, and then they're just running hilter skelter and running all over the place. They just travel a lot more and that makes them more a lot easier to catch. And that's one of the things like the mink up there, you know, most mink trappers, you know, they consider a time frame for mink to come by. Might be a week before they come back through in the lower forty eight. But up where I'm out in southeast Alaska, those mink can only travel a hundred yards from their din. I mean, the tide goes out and their breck for stair, the supper tables set and they go down in fift twenty minutes or a half an hour. They get a full belly and go back up and go back to sleep. So yeah, I uh, it's funny you mentioned that, because growing up catching mank is like very difficult to catch mink, and people do always be surprised to hear that there's mink living around. At our shock in southeast Alaska, we had a mink a few years ago. Something got hold of it and tore its tail off, most of its tail off, and gave it a big wound right at the base of his tail. And this wound was about like the size of like two of your fingers put together your middle finger and pointer finger. Um, like a wound like that up it's back on the back of its tail, at the base of its tail. And this moon festered and for a while this mink got lost all fear of people, and it would run across your shoes and it just looks sickly, and a bunch of times I thought, man, I should shoot that poor mink. UM just put it off. It's misery or it was acting so weird. I was worried about it biting my kids. That The next year, the mink is totally back to normal, except has a large scar in discoloration where it had healed up. And we have since and that mank is now, um I now know like lives there. We know a hole it lives in. And we've seen that mak now for four years hanging out in one little spot and you'll see it every day. And meanwhile, where I grew up and we caught mank and people trapped making there's a lot of we had mink longliners. You would go your most people will go their entire lives and be unaware that they lived there. But these like Southeast Alaska, mank are like squirrels. Yeah, middle of the day on the porch in the house. Just a way different man yeah, way different mank. I've I've had a different time to kill. Yeah, I've had difficult time catching them because of that, I think, And just I I'm used to that mink that makes week long cycles in that and it Uh, it's been a learning learning curve for me. They say that if you move a hundred miles, you gotta learn how to trap all over again. And with truly the case, what do you um, what's the main thing Like like you're saying you catch a lot of pine martins, what's the main thing you use pine martins for? Oh, I'm making hats out of him. I make different things. Uh, I don't think I've made any cuzies with them. One of one of my big sellers is beer cuzies, and I really enjoy making those, and I enjoy the Californians that come up to Alaska, and I explained to them that, you know, these are the perfect bear cuzie for a Californian, for you know, a an environmentalist, if you want to call him an environmentalist. Yeah, it's biodegradable, it's ourgan think, it's a renewable resource. It's everything a Californian should like. What do you get for a beer couzy? Bucks? Twenty bucks, twenty five for a bottled, twenty for a beer cam So pine Martin beer coozies are a good seller. Well, actually I make most of them out of beaver and otter pine Martin headbands and hats. Probably mostly the pine Martin get made into the earwarmer's head bands hats. Yeah, it's the thing about well, basically, a pine Martin is the same thing as a sable. It's type of sable. And when you think of pine martin, once it becomes into a fur product, it's a sable and how that. I just thought they called him sable in Eurasia, that's where you know the Russian sable is for that. But it's the same animal. It's the same animal. We just called a pine martin. We called a pine martin when it's made into sable. So if you caught a bunch of pine martins in America and made a coat, it's still a stable cable ship. No, I didn't know that, Seth wants. I've had a top lot Manke. He used to put up for for a living. They had a top lot maker went for eighteen dollars. That's not bad. I've had lots of top lot Morris. Uh, Mike, you've brought up I noticed you brought up like the idea of plastics and things um that fors biodegradable, organic renewable Are you just being cynical, like are you anti plastic? Not particularly just rubbing in their nose. Yeah, Well, it's just that they may trying to make a point that you know that for is a bad thing, and when in reality it's exactly what those people desire, renewable, organic renewable resource. That's why would they not want that? But yet they're completely opposed to fur. You know, so I'm thinking, you know, this doesn't make sense. Do you understand why people aren't offended by leather? Like why once you pep fur away from something, is it so easy? Why is not? If that's acceptable, but you leave the fur on it pisces people off. It's all leather head hair on it, all leather head fur on it. It should come with a reminder it just used to be haired. I think he scraped it away. It speaks to the detachment that we as a society have from nature, and I think that's the biggest problem. It's why people have problems and want to put humans in a separate category from animals. I think it also comes back to what you were talking about with Crin's earrings. How you said no one would have an issue if it were a feather, But something about that foot, it's it's a more tangible reminder of this living, this thing that once was living. Like fur is to leather, Like leather doesn't really remind you just looking at it on the coat or whatever. But if you see something covered in fur, I don't know, it kind of just triggers that like, oh that was that was an animal? You know that law. I wanted to make the only me and Seth could catch beavers, but they had to be with a thousand dollars apiece. I think there should be another law that one day out of the year, everything that's leather has to still have its fur on. Yeah, that would be a hell of a day. People would be like, my god, my god, the amount of fur running around is out of control. Those ostrich boots would look real weird. Yeah, feathered boots be like Liberaci's boots. That's the text time I mentioned Liberaci. Do you know what? You know? Who? That is? It? You don't know who I mentioned it. I should probably get rid of that reference because I think right piano player type in Liberaci is a musician, American pianist. Go to images. Oh, very fla boyant, very flat. I'm gonna stop using that reference. So except he's got to be dead or dead? Uh? So, have you quit using footholds because the hemane like pretty much? Really because of personal feeling about humane Yeah, I think I'm being a better steward and better respect to the animal by killing him instant. I don't hardly use footholds at all. I can't think of any place. I actually use foot holds occasionally on a mink set, but predominantly all conivers. Did you look down on people to use foolds? No, not at all. Just put you personally, me personally. I just I prefer to use connivers myself. I feel I'm being a better, better stewart to the You know when you look at the Canadians where they have the best management practices. You know, they require their economers to kill an animal as a certain time frame and if it doesn't meet that requirement, it's not a legal trap. Ye speaking of the word Canada. Uh, what's the parker company can a Goose? Yeah? So they had a hit park of everybody else on wanted one. I'm guessing they started out being cool with like sled doggers, and then they just got cool city people New York. I mean everyone in New York, cana want to just go to Soho and it's like everyone's got the same coat, looks the same. And this company is in Canada, not in Canada, Canada. So Canada Goose is a parker company and they were trimming all their parks with kyote. Right. My understanding is one of the board members is anti fur and he was the one that kind of spearheaded to the elimination of the coyotes, but their kyote trimm parting. Historically, parkers were trimmed with wolverine and kyote. Um the high or super high end park is with wolverine because it doesn't freeze up and frost up. But they were buying this Canada Goose company was buying enough kyotes to actually impact the kyote market. Yeah, yeah, totally. I'd like to thank them, Thank you, Canada Goose. And then they came out and said we're gonna stop using for do a book report on this stuff, sort of sort of sort of New York Times article says Canna Goose will stop buying for sort of um, Cana Goose announced that's starting in the company will no longer buy new fur from trappers. By then, can in a couple of years, By then, can the Goose will start using reclaim for Oh that's what for fur that already exists in supply chain. So just between now and then, they're gonna buy up every okayot coat they can find. Yeah, but it's not fake for that they're replacing it with. And does it talk about why public pressure uh no, no, um it says the shift is an eco friendly measure. Year. This is this the CEO. This is his uh his comment the shift is an eco friendly measure and not related to public pressure from activists. I would also like to point out that what fills their jacket is not like some shaved fuzz off a bird birds feathers, and in a quick note to people at home, you can shear a sheep and then turn that sheep back out and get another harvest the wool off it. You can do that a few times. In fact, when you fill a coat with a goose's feathers, that's some bitch, and goose is not alive anymore unless it's ethically harvested down, which you kill the goose as opposed to the practice of life plucking. Yes, a lot of companies I was reading this, like Eddie Bau or a bunch of other companies. They find live plucking to be so abhorrent that they're trying to remove live plucked down where you just grab the burden rip its feathers out. They're trying to remove live plucked down from their supply chain, or arguing about whether they have live plucked down in their supply chain, because it's better to kill the damn goose and get its feathers than to rip them off alive. Hile for now, that's mean. It's just it's one of those things that just makes you sound like an old man complaining about it. So it's hard to complain about. But come on, man, yea, if people don't see it, they don't care about it. So you'll buy a coat filled with down from I don't know how many damn geese. But then you trim it it just it's trimmed with Kyle like that's bad. It's because like people can't handle like reality laid out in front of them. It's learned later. Because my kid's best friend, his daddy raises uh turkeys, and they had an extra one for us to have for Thanksgiving turkey. So I took my kid over there stay the twenty two to get the turkey. Uh. They'd cut the feet off the day before, so it wasn't fed, so it's crop was empty, his digestive track was emptied out. Just gave it water. It's in a little barn. My kid walked out in there and shot that turkey. Didn't even occur to him. To think that there was something wrong with it. He is very, very aware of the processes of life. But the fact that some people have to have all this ship shielded from them and any little visual reminder of this pisces him off. It's like, just like people are just becoming too like weak brained. Sure, it's very easy, I think not to think a little step further of you know, how the meats in front of them, or if they have a nice plush uh pillow on their on their sofa, how it got there is full of dead stuff? But the trim, now that that's the that's what tops it off. I'm not like a book burner, but if I have one of those coats, I'd go burn that some of a bitch and coat. I'm still really shocked about the live plucking there you go. I didn't know that. I assumed that the animal would be dead. So if they line it with or they put the caller on with fake for, then that would be acceptable. But yet it's a non renewable resource. No, it's recycled for. Yeah, they're using recycled for just go buy old for coats, I guess, yeah, But I don't see where they're going to be able to find enough of that to even come close to their market. So they'll have to turn to fake fur at some point or back to real fur or back to real fur is the only two directions because they're not going to find enough. And besides that, when you is your leathers get older, they get less and less. They know, the leather itself does deteriorate because you know, leather is biodegradable, where fake fur is not really biodegradable. So what they were into New York prior to this was I remember when like north Face puffies. Then they got into the Canada goose down. Everyone had a north Face black north Face puffy all gave away to Kyo hide. So you got a month and you gotta go up and start trapping in Alaska? What do you do the month before that? I'm going up to hunt coyotes for a month. You're going to Kyo hunting now snaring too? How many? How many when you go out? Like how many hours you putting in a day? Whatever? Whatever I can, most I can. And then you use all these coyotes for your Yeah, I'll be using them in the store. Most of the coyotes I want to make blankets out of okay so or quilts or throws you ever sell them into the fur markets. In the past, I always have uh is predominantly where all the fur went. But here just four years ago I started started cutting out all the middlemen and just making products myself. And then Rick, are you participating? Yeah, I'll be up there for a little bit. Um. We used to do it yearly and snare a whole pile of coyotes. Um and Uh, I've been so busy with other projects too. We haven't been making a living, making a living instead of losing money trapping. UM, So I've kind of had to back off a little bit on how much I used to trap. For a lot of years. We ran around and trapped almost all winter for several years, and we have quite the quite the pile at the end of the year. And that was when fur prices were a little bit better, and we did make a little money doing that. Um. Dad was getting his muskrat trap. UM kind of dialed in and we went and trapped for two weeks and I think we ended up with seven nine muskrats. We were just shy of a thousand. Oh that's right. But then in two weeks. I think we got seven dollars in two weeks, so when we sold the fur it was it was actually lucrative then UM and then since the fur prices have gone down, I've kind of backed off a little and switched gears into a UM guiding down Hawaiian doing some mother stuff with ten dollar muskrats. This trap will pay for itself in about four to five days, you know, on a hundred and eighty five dollars, and then after that it's all all profit. Do you think you're in? That movie The Mountain Men with Charlton Heston is my favorite movie all time. Great, it's not nearly as good as Jeremiah Johnson, it's better. It's actually got a lot of real problems. Listen that movie. What in the world, Like they didn't bring in a trapper to give him any insight? Like what those guys are doing when they're supposed trap and beaver makes zero sense? Absolutely correct. He's standing out in the middle of a pond up to his chest and like pulls up an empty trap and it's it's like they had no idea, like how and then the beaver they have looks like a stuffed animal. Oh yeah, horrible. Yeah, it's a romanticism of it though it's really it's a real slap. I guess like they had zero They had no idea what they were showing. They could have done a hell of a lot better and demonstrated something there. Parts of it they were good, but it's bad. I gotta tell you why the Indians are all idiots? Um like the Traps. It's just I used to love that movie and I was a kid, but I can't watch it now. Well, here's why I love that movie. When I was growing up, my dad had the winners off and we had a cabin in the Selkirk Mountains that would go in backcountry skiing, and we had a full trap line from where we do unload the snowball bills all the way up to the cabin and all around the cabin, and it ran off of twelve batteries that we had an alternator from a truck that powered the thing and charged the batteries, and then we had a haunted generator, and we had a TV with a VCR. And the only movie we had the cabin was The Mountain Man. And so I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've seen it. I could. I probably know every word in it, but it was a major part of my life growing up. I'd be trapping on the way up to the cabin. The only movie I had to watch was The Mountain Men up there. And so, you know, from when I was when we built the cabin, I must have been seven or eight years I suppose something like eight years old, maybe ish. You know, I had my own trap line all the way to the cabin to wash the mountain Men in the middle of nowhere in northeastern Washington. I washed again a week or two ago. Oh yeah, that and Jeremiah Johnson. I've seen far more in another movie. But Jeremiah Johnson gets better and better, and I think Mountain, in my mind gets worse worse. And I'm offended by the lack of Uh. I'm offended by the lack of detail. Yeah, I mean the accuracy is definitely not there. But I mean, have you ever been lost before? I fear some confused for a month or two, but never lost. I mean, there's enough one liners in it are more classic than I think than Jeremiah Johnson that stick with you longer. I'm trying to get at one of those one liners, Yeah fur is going to shine again. So here was the end of the rendezvous era eighteen forties. The fur market completely collapses. In the fur market collapse and they are despondent. It's done forever, okay. And as we know, it has been up and down a lot since then. During the Roaring twenties, prior to the Great Depression, for prices shot up and we're great. Um they got good. Thirty forty years later they got really good again. Um, they've had various spikes and things like some things that go up and down. Right now, it's just like fur prices commercial for son again. Yeah, yeah, will fur shine again? Like, is is there a way in which all of a sudden someday kids will be starting out, going out making a bunch of money trapping? I'm not seeing it. You don't need it. All happen are trapping? Are the numbers of trappers? I heard a great statistic in Michigan. This is years ago. At a point in Michigan, I heard that the average age of a fur trapper went up exactly one year every year pointing to zero. Makes sense new folk coming in. But that was during a period of very low fur prices. I got into it and still dabble with the discipline today because of the influence of the fur boom of the late seventies and early eighties. That grabbed me that you could make more money. You can catch two muskrats and sell them for more money than you'd get from mowing a big gass lawn, And it created a mystique in my head that still sits there today. That's an early memory, yeah, because people were people were selling five, six, seven dollar muskrats then, and it's still is stuck in my head, like I can't shake the idea when I see it. I can't when I see a muskrat. It still appears to me as a thing of value and ali out of scenario that it could be again is China's economy and fashion right, things could switch Korea, China um and all of a sudden, they don't care, They're onto it and they want it. Well, there's some studies right now about the fibers from the the polyesters and different things are end and up in the ocean and that and I can see at some point people are going to realize that fur is biodegreable and organic and some of the things we're currently using are not as desirable. So potentially there could be you know, at least some group of people that are going to see fur as a better alternative to what we're using now. That might be where it's at, like you know, the farm to table hunt to table to table. I think than we think. I mean, I don't think we're far away from that. Well, we're there right now. Because you know what I'm saving up muskrats for. It makes yourself a fur blanket. I need, no, I need sixty for. My wife wants a fur bomber jacket. Perfect. Now her friend this wants a fur bomber jacket. And then me and Seth are getting two giant blankets. Do you guys needed trap some muskrats? Well, we're doing our giant blankets out of our beavers, and we're gonna raise a ton of money for our land access initiative through a plan that the Seth doesn't know about yet. I like it. I like the sounds of it, and we made it. How many pounds of beaver sauceage you make last year? Forty? I think, yeah, I still have a couple best for ever made. I know we're gonna make more so, how do people go find your special traps? Uh? Non grip traps dot com? What's it called non grip traps? So you just sell them directly yourself? Two year? About that? Not quite that many? But and how do people find your fur products? You make beaver wallets, what to tell people for for Alaska dot com? And you make all manner of where you make all kinds of things. I make coasters out of the beaver ales, and that was all kinds of things that pretty much use the entire beaver. I sell the beaver teeth, sell the meat. Sled doggers. No, we don't have any sled doggers where I'm at. Yeah. And then Rick, how do people find all your how did how do they go hunting and fishing with you? Oh? Man, that's UM chrome Chasers dot com. Chrome Chasers dot that's for Steelhead. And then we actually just started a fall foraging week long trip to where we go and basically immerse ourselves in southeast Alaska. UM. We do some fishing, We do clamming, shrimp, crab, catch some salmon, and then we go back and do almost preparation preservation cooking type classes and we pick a lot of wild mushrooms. Um. And you basically go out and get everything you make for a meal that night, and then we go over some can canning technique, smoking techniques for fish, all of that. So that's something new, we're we're we've just adapted last year. That's not a wrangle and it's not a goo. Yeah, And that'll be late summer fall, So the foraging trips are late summer fall and then spring steel head fishing is in the springtime. And what if they want to go catch bone fish in Hawaii. If they want to go catch a bone fish in Hawaii, it's Hawaii on the Fly. Um. I work for a getting Mike Kennessey, Um. Captain Kenny Carrs is the other guy down there. Um, he can get you set up if I'm not there. Um. And that's a bone fish down there. Um. The ranch I work for is a private ranch which is a whole private deal on Molakai. Um. So unfortunately you can't go do that. That's an invite only. But the Oahu bone fish program is Hawaii on the Fly. And then Rick Mattney Outdoors is uh is my outfitting business here and I've been doing it long enough now to where my clientele list um is the same guys every year. And I don't even have a website even Yeah, you have to know one of my clients before you get in kind of deal from yeah and for better for worse. That's the position I am. I haven't put any energy into even a website or advertising. Um. I I feel like it's almost a disservice to my current clients to do that. UM. I don't want to grow and be huge in Montana and have do a ton of trips. I don't think the resource in Montana and the fishing outfitting business is sustainable at the growth rate that it is now. So I'm not going to try to grow my business to become part of you don't see you don't want to add. I don't want to add to the insanity. Yeah, I see it being a problem. So I'm gonna just personally limit the number of days I do. I'm gonna take the guys that I like, UM and just limit my impact about loving It's death. Man Hooly smokes that that's bad. Some of the some of the summertime fly fishing rivers here, it's just on believable. It's changed, it's different. You know, but the fish it's like the Maze's Day parade. Oh yeah, but the fish are fine, you know, the biologists the fish aren't even native most part. Yeah, a lot of them are. Yeah. And and so are we hurting the resource by doing it? Probably not. Are we hurting the quality of the experience probably Yes. That'll catch up to itself, for it will and people will start to look for other things. So um but yeah. So anyways, I don't have a website for my Montana alf any business. Um Rick Mattney Outdoors is what I call my business. Um So yeah. Other than that, you know, I kind of run around. I do the cooking stuff for you guys obviously here and there. Um And wild game chef dot Com is my wild cooking business, and I'm starting to do in home wild game cooking classes as well as some cooking classes out at Ross Creek Cabins, which is locally here in town. And so I'm going to start working on some stuff there too as well. Man. Any uh, you have a fair bit of time and website management. Yeah, I don't have any time into it. I don't know what even what a web website is. I'm I got guys that helped me out. You know, I help people. You know, I'm a big fan of the barter system. You know, it's it costs a lot of money to hire someone to do a website. But you know, some guys like to want to have a hunting experience in Montana, and it's like, okay, well you come out to Montana, you and I will go tromp around the woods and you help me with a website. There's there's a lot of trading to be done in the outdoor world. For sure. It doesn't include monetary stuff, and especially since you know the way the government and taxes and everything else are going these days, I like to keep as much of that out of their uh, their site as possible, reduced the amount of cash flowing around. Big fan of the barter system. Alright, guys, well thanks for coming on. Um. There's a couple of things I like. Is that method of not playing by the rules. I don't mean with hunting fishing rules, but I mean like assembling lives out of just the stuff that interests you. Yeah, and not being like beholden to the man, but it's going out and like crafting a way to live where you're like like working with what's there and like building an outdoor life. Yeah, sometimes you have to figure out how to make money on your way to making money. Yeah. So you know, if you got to go over here to do something, it's not a lot of work to stop and check a trap. If you're doing that same path every day, there's an extra twenty buck. So you know, if you catch a beaver nextra hundred dollars, you catch a guy out on the way. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, man, like assembling, assembling livelihoods at all these outdoor interests and being a living life where you're out and doing your own thing and working for yourself. It's cool. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, thank you,