Ep. 923: Wild Horse (Mis)Management, Dr. Randall Hunts Austria, and Fishing as a Constitutional Right

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. Welcome to the news show. This week we've got Randall, goes to Austria and tears that place a new one. Me either live, the Christmas tour is even realer than Santa, rolled this rule updates, does banning drone use for shark fishing save swimmers from getting mulled by sharks. The wild horse situation is out of control in the American West. The Trump administration is taking steps to fix it and some people are of course pissed about that. Colorado voters will have a chance to help write the ship in November. An old dead dude got found in the woods a long time ago thanks to a forest fire, which kind of grabs you by the boo boo and more. Now onto our news, I'll tell you what our news is. One of the pieces of our news. He either live, the Christmas tour is coming your way. We are in a pre pre sales phase here. It's a pre pre sales phase. Meaning these tickets are not for sale. Soon there will be a pre sale and in the genius of marketers, that means they're for sale. Then they will become more for sale. So you can't buy them now. It's pre pre sale. Right. Okay. You can't buy them. But they will be for sale during the pre sale and the sale. They go on sale at the pre sale. They remain on sale at the sale. For pre pre sale, so there's nothing you can do. So there's a pre pre sale non-sale period. Correct. You want to get more confusing it gets? Yeah. No, no. I'm going to tell you about tickets that you cannot buy, but you can mark your calendar. On September 14, you can buy them. On some other date later, you can buy them even more. Monday, December 14th, we will be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I graduated from regular college. There's my third try, my third school, 20-man role live. That's the venue we're going to be at. Grand Rapids, Michigan. That's going to be a hoot. We will be joined by the last American Smelt Dipper, Matt Drolls. I've already got my special guest lined up for the night there. Tuesday, December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Turner Hall. These are guaranteed laugh nights. You are guaranteed. I challenge you to find someone that went to the Christmas show and would give it a thumbs down. December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin, bubbly Doug, special guest there, among others at the Barrymore. Thursday, December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa, Val, Val, Air, Ballroom, December 18th, Friday night, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pantages Theater, not contagious, Pantages, thank God. That'd be awesome. If the contagious change to the contagious theater, Saturday, December 19th, what's funny about contagious and Pantages, contagious and Pantages? We had to cancel the Pantages because of the great contagion of 2019, but we also did another Pantages, do we? There was a Pantages one in the Northwest that we did. That was that even mean. There's a big theater guy, Alexander Pantages, on 84 theaters. That's real. Are you just pulling out of your ass? No, Phil oughta know that. That's amazing. Peter guy. Peter guy. He shows you how big of a theater guy. That big theater guy. It's always one up in me. It's like a teeny theater guy. Last show of the trip, December 19th, for everybody has to get home to their families. Fargo, North Dakota at the Fargo Theater, cannot wait to see you guys there. Lot's of prizes, lots of laughs, lots of people drinking beer, some holiday cheer. Years ago, years ago, we did a show in Billings at the Alberta Bayer, and we broke the booze record that had been held. We broke the booze sales record, which had been held by Rob Schneider. It's a pretty good company. A body of mine, I don't know, this is weird. He's probably the only guy in there. A body of mine had been there for David Sederis a few nights before we went, and he pointed out. He said, man, the mask habits. The masking habits of the David Sederis crowd were extremely different than the masking habits of our crowd. And then I pointed out to him that we now broke the booze record. And he said, well, I think it's a lot easier in reference to Sederis. He said, it's a lot easier to carry two bush lights than two shard nays. So there that is. What's this now? My hunting. I'm hunting in Austria. Oh, but I want to go a little bit out of order here because I want to hit something real quick. Sure. No, go ahead. No, I want to go a little bit out of order. Yeah. Apologies, name. Sure. Just while I'm fired up. I have a Honda 7,000 EU generated that won't fire up. This is going to keep this very quick. Can you reset the shot clock, Phil invented this new thing. We can tell how long we're spending on a topic. Yeah. For reference, live tour is supposed to be two minutes. It went for five. One for a bottle of time. How long do I have for this? I'm going to borrow time from this for five minutes. I think a time. I have five for this. So you got two now. Oh, great. I have a Honda 7,000 EU generator. It has a mystery ailment that no mechanic can solve. I've taken it to town two times to have it fixed, both times it has come back not resolved. Don't give me. If you write in, don't give me the BS about fuel filters. Don't give me the BS about fuel pumps. This generator will run for hours under load and then inexplicably shut off. Then it'll run for hours and inexplicably shut off. No mechanic has the patience to fix it, start it, put it under load, and let it out, run out in the driveway or parking lot, and then go like, oh, wow, shut off, that they don't have the patience for it. I'm wondering if there isn't something like so pick, you know, you have a low oil shut off. What if that sensor went haywire or something? Don't send me easy, don't send me easy fixes. This is like it's haunted by a devil, an exorcist, a crystal. It needs, yeah, it needs like an exorcism. It's old. I don't know how old it is. It's not 10 years old. We have a fleet of generators. This is impossible to keep at least one running. A Honda EU 7,000 just inexplicably turns off. When you start it up, it's ready to rock. Don't be telling me about fuel pumps. Steve almost didn't bring this up because he said the audience is only going to tell him about fuel pumps. Don't fix. Yeah, easy fix. So you got to really like, sure, try to clean in the spark plugs. It's like, I don't want to hear about things that an idiot can fix because I've fixed all the idiot parts. Steve is challenging you. I need a guy that knows these things like his own mother. I'm surprised you can't find a mechanic that wants to charge you the hourly rate for a couple hours of just sitting there watching the machine vibrate. That's great. It's funny. They'll work on it. I'll ship it to town, which is hundreds of dollars. Ship it back. They'll work on it. But you go, can you do me a favor? You might just running it like for a cup, like run it for a day under a load, put a box fan on it. I don't care. Run it and see. That's not something we can do. Too busy. Meanwhile, I run it around the clock. So if you got an idea, the meter to podcast, not a complex idea, but like high level mechanic stuff. Subject line mechanic, no generator, exorcism, I own at the risk run over time. I own a Honda. I own trouble. No. I own a Honda old Honda EU 3000. I own a Honda 5000. I own a Honda EU 7000. They're all old. Someone might say, but it sounds like it's time for a new generator, but I'm not there yet. Donald's back from hunting in Austria. Yeah. Tell me about that. It was amazing. I was over in Austria for I think nine days, a hundred roadier up in Northern Upper Austria, near the German border. And then I went south and hunted Shamwa or Shammy. Yeah. Or they say Shamwa. So I got at least from the perspective of our host who they call it Gams there. Oh. I've never heard of. - Yeah, which if you think about like Shamwa and Gams, like you can imagine the transition between France and German, a lot of words sort of. - No. - Okay. - No. - But yeah, Gams is what, Gams is the German term. And then they said, Shamwa, I think is the appropriate pronunciation, but then they say if it's the Kiwis, call it Shammy. - Yeah. - And so a lot of people. - Well, my old man was a big fan of Shammy cloths. - Yeah. - And he called them a Shammy cloth. He didn't call it a Shamwa cloth. - I know, I know. - But they pronounce it Shamwa. - It's not Shamwa. - I like saying Gams. - Yeah. - And then a buck is a Gams buck. Like a Gams buck or a Gams buck? - No, it's Gams buck and a Shammy or not the same thing. - No, it's a word. It's Gams, a Gams buck. A Gams is a Shamwa and a buck is a buck. - God. - So it's a Gams buck. A Gams buck is a Gams that's a buck. - This is more confusing than the pre-sale pre-sale. - This is like, this could create problems 'cause picture that you're in a situation where you're like, you're with your kids. - Yeah. - And there's a Gams buck and a Gams buck together. But one is strictly forbidden. - Right. - And you're yelling, shoot the Gams buck. (laughing) - And they shoot the wrong one. - Yeah. - So anyway, the roadier hunting was very cool. They rut in the middle of the summer. So they have a delayed implantation of the fertilized egg. They start rutting, it's like 60 or 80 days after they give birth to their fauns. And they rut in the middle of the summer so that the theory goes that they aren't gonna stress themselves with all the rutting behavior and activity in the lead up to winter. So they can rut the egg gets fertilized. It doesn't implant in the uterus until December or so. - Okay. - So it's weird to be hunting bucks in the rut when it's 90 degrees out. But they're really active. - Is that hot there? - Yeah. - But you're in a high elevation. There we weren't so high. But I mean, Europe has had a pretty hot summer. A lot of wildfires, we didn't have any smoke. But it's kind of like coyote hunting. You go to a stand, you call for 45 minutes. - Really? - Then you go to another stand, you call for 45 minutes. And if there's deer there, they come in. They might come in stealthily. They might come ripping in. We didn't have any that came into like five feet or 10 feet, but they will do that. We had some that came into 20. - What percentage of stands where you haven't seen doles or hines or whatever they call them? - At least half. - What? - Yeah. - I mean, there's a lot of deer. The other cool thing is, the other cool thing is, when you're driving around in Upper Austria, you think it's like the most hunting is placed you've ever been. We were never out of sight of two like tower blinds. Like when you're driving down the road, if you just stopped and looked around in a circle, you're gonna see half dozen tower blinds in any given direction. - It's like driving around dogs, place and Wisconsin. - Yeah. - It sounds like Michigan too. And then we're sitting at one point, we're sitting by the lake at this cafe. I was talking with my host just about the hunting culture there and I was saying, this is the one place where we haven't seen a hunting blind. And then we look across this lake that has sailboats and people out and everything. And you can see, there's a little clearing up in the woods. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's a blind up there and it was. So we were never out of sight of a deer blind. - A homemade or they buy in American made blinds. So they're all homemade. A lot of them, it's like milled out of local timber. It's not like dimensional from the hardware store or anything. And a lot of them are old. I climbed up in one tree stand that was probably 30 or over 35 feet high. And the crotch board was grown in over the tree. Like more than halfway to the point that the two the two big trunks of the tree were almost touching. - Got it. - It's subsumed the whole crotch board. - Yeah. - So just it was really cool to see that hunting culture. Obviously there are fewer hunters over there and it's harder for someone to become a hunter because hunting is tied to land ownership. And the tag allocation is tied to the land ownership. They either have, if you have a big enough property you have sort of your own quota that you're required to fill by the state. If there's a bunch of smaller properties they make what's called a community hunt where they sort of have a hunting HOA that the state facilitates. And then off of those properties they have a quota they have to hit. - Got it. - What they do is they build exclosures and they, someone will come out from the state with the property manager and they'll look at what impact the wildlife are having on the area outside of the exclosure compared to inside the exclosure. - To make a determination. - To make a determination of what the load of the wildlife is. - That's how they do that. - Yeah and it's really interesting like especially with the road here. I mean they talk about it. - How big of an exclosure do they make? - Just like a sample patch. - They're like 20, the ones we looked at were probably like 20 yards by 20 yards. And they go and they count the species, they count the density of growth. And so you'll just be driving through this big estate and you'll see different exclosures. - Do not be in there fertilizing that little thing in life. - And what's really interesting is like they, when they talk about how they manage the road here they talk about it almost in the same 'cause there's a, the forester manages the wildlife as well. So each property will have like a forester and he'll tell you how many board feet are coming off that property and he'll tell you how many deer coming off that property. And he'll talk about managing for different age classes with the wildlife in the same way that they're talking about managed for different age classes within the forest. And they're like we don't talk about any of it on its own. It's all part of this holistic view of how they manage the property. It's wildlife and trees. - Do they name bucks? - No. He said some of the bucks, like some of the bucks people will know. They don't name them, but they'll know old split times. And no, they, I don't, I mean, we didn't encounter that but they said there will be guys that get to know certain bucks over the years. But it's not like they get reserved for anybody. It's just sort of the forester will know that this buck exists. They live in pretty small territories and they run through the woods like analope out on the prairie. Like we saw a buck chasing a doe and it looked like birds weaving through the trees. Just. - Oh, really? - Yeah. - Really active. I mean, we saw deer every day. We had deer come in. When they spook, when the buck spooks. If he wins you, they'll bark. - It's like what? - Like the first time I heard it, I thought it was a dog. - Really? - 'Cause people, that's his warning call. - Yeah, 'cause they also, the other thing is they have right to roam over there. So people, even though we're on private property, people from the community come out to walk their dogs or ride their bikes and stuff. - Scotland has that right to roam. - Yeah. - But you can't, it doesn't mean you can hunt. - Yeah, that's the same deal here. - You can roam, but you can't hunt. - Same deal here. And there's some restrictions on the roads. Like some roads you can bike on, some you can't. But when I shot my first buck, it was early in the morning and I'm glad we shot it when we did. 'Cause 15 minutes later, there's some old ladies walking their dog on the road right past us and guys riding their bikes past us. So it's really interesting to see that how interwoven the hunting is with just people getting outside like it's on public land, but it is private. - Is there any public opportunity out there? - No, if there is, it's very, very, very limited. It's all private land from my understanding. And to become a hunter over there, you have to go through a very serious hunter ed course that involves, like you have to learn about tracking dogs, you have to learn about all kinds of stuff. You have to learn how to analyze the organs of the deer for signs of disease. Because when you harvest a deer, it's going to go to market. So that's the other side of it. Is the deer, once it's killed, it doesn't become the property of the hunter, it becomes the property of the state. And so. Back up. - Huh. - Like buy, that's just, you have no right to have a bite of that thing. - No, I mean, from what I understand, like the hunter could buy it back from the estate, but it's the property of the estate. - Oh, as I said, the state. - No, no, sorry, the estate. - Yeah. - It makes total sense. - Yeah, so I thought it meant like Austria. - Right. - No, no, it's property of the estate. - And they talk about it. - So you probably stayed the same thing technically. No, I guess you couldn't, no, no, I get what you're saying. - Because like when you buy a tag here and you put your tag on that animal, that animal is now your property. - Yeah, but the estate could be like, hey, let's party and cook the whole thing up. - Absolutely, absolutely. And we did one of the animals, when we went chamois hunting, we were going to take this chamois to the butcher who processes them. - Just get one? - Yeah. - Was he up in the mountains? - Yeah. - Yeah, we're in steep, we're in steep, steep, high country. I shot two yearlings. So it's very much like a coal program. - Yeah. - The big bucks, you only can hunt them in the rut 'cause they live very solitary lives in the timber, but I shot two, the most memorable part of that is the angle that you're shooting and then the recovery. So we got into some sketchy stuff on the recovery. Chris Gill compared it to the mountain goat hunt. - Oh, rich pounders with you, yeah. - And he got stuck a couple times in our host had to come up with his big Austrian trekking staff and jam it in the side of the mountain under his feet so he could have a foot away. I also fell, when we were coming down with the Shamu, I passed it off to, I was dragging it. 'Cause it's all big. Oh, they're like, it's like a dog. They're like 60 pounds maybe. You know, people use that all the time, but dogs are such different sizes. That's a great point. I don't think it's that. It's like a 60 pound dog. It's like a whale. If that kind of whale. I think the one of the rodeo that we weighed, it weighed, gutted, it weighed like 15 or 16 kilos, so like 30, mid 30 pounds. Got it. Easily carried out. And the Shamu, the Shamu all were smaller than that. Yeah. Actually with the rodeo one of them, we gutted it and then cut the, you know how Heather does the backpack thing? Yeah. They have a thing where they make a little suitcase. So you cut the tendon, you put the leg through and then he fold it and then you just walk out with a little suitcase. Sure. But yeah, I fell coming off one of the Shamu recoveries and had one of the Austrian mountain staffs with me that uses like a self-rest. And I slid down this grass. They were actually filming at the time, but I slid out of the frame of the camera because I went down so far. It's gonna look good. I slid in the film. I slid between the rocks faster than they could move the camera. I had enough time in my mind. I was like, shit, I, you know, maybe I should push harder on this thing to stop. And then I did that and then I had time to think, I guess I need to push harder than that. And I had several conversations with myself about whether I was applying the appropriate amount of pressure. So, but we were bringing one of those Shamu out to the butcher who, who butchers them for market. And we went to this little house. But what, at what point does the estate transact? Do they transact at the counter selling finished cuts? Do they transact at the butcher? So they, I don't know exactly how the money changes hands, but they, like, where we hunted road deer, they have one butcher pretty much that does everything for them. And we went to him and his daughter was there and she spoke English, so she explained it. But they both showed us how they, how they, like, what you'd see in the package. So they'd laid it out, you know, two back straps and two tenderloins that do the rear, like the big rear muscle group, everything's attached and just gets wrapped up like that. So you can cut it how you want to. They make stew meat, they make burgers, they do all the sausage products, I ate all, I did actually eat all of the sausage products, they make it's a lot. But then it's, when it's marketed, you can see on the packaging, the forest that it comes from. - Okay. - And the name of the estate. But you're seeing it for sale where? - At the butcher, or he's passing along to the grocer. - You can buy him at the grocer. You can buy him at the butcher. The butcher has a vending machine actually out on the road that only sells wild game. And so you can go up and there's, you know, like a pack of steaks, there's a, you know, there's a tenderloin. There's a bunch of summer sausage. There's fresh broth. - You just churns hot dogs into that thing. - Yes, I swipe the meat eater business card in it. Probably a dozen times. - Because we had to get all the different angles for the film. - I know I'm sitting there. I'm sitting there. - I was like, I'm turning this card off. - It was almost like we could have recorded the noise 'cause I would swipe it and it would go beep and then the thing would go thunk and then my phone would go ding with the, like, please explain this expense. And you just did that over and over and over. - What were the prices like? - It's like a pack of, a pack of frankfurters. So like just a pack of roadier hot dogs. I think it was like six or seven euros. Something like that, like probably eight, nine, 10 dollars. - Hey everyone, big huge announcement. Meat eater live, the Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026. This time we're hitting the Midwest. Meat eater live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, DeMoyne, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself, Yannis Putellis, Clay New, congruent Reeves, and Randall Williams. For a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news, and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation, and wild foods. Also we're already stacking up some great special guests. I got my buddy, Bubbly Doug, making the appearance in Madison. Meat eater live is the best Christmas gift for any outdoorsman or woman in your life. Tickets go on sale September 25th, but sign up at the meateater.com/tour and you'll get pre-sale access to buy tickets on September 14th, days before they go on sale to the public. We can't wait to see you there. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the meat eater live events, and they will tell you, we laugh our asses off, we give away great prizes, we put on a solid show that I'm proud to be part of. - Yeah, it's really interesting. It's obviously like a self-contained system that works. It's so foreign to us in terms of how the opportunity is allocated and what happens to the meat afterwards. But they, even though it would seem very transactional, and again, it's a lot of it's calling in management and you should think of that as like not very romantic, like there's still this very serious tradition and culture and romanticism around hunting these animals. - But it's like, it's regarded as a thing of enjoyment. - Oh yeah, absolutely. It's a thing of enjoyment, and like there's still that same passion, even though it's very different from what we do. You know, when I think of guys that are calling 200 deer off of an estate or off of a property, I sort of think of that as like whack 'em and stack 'em. And this was like, you know, we could have sat on a field edge and shot, shot bucks, you know, at Don and Dusk, whatever. But we were, you know, the only way Phil hunts them who was my host on the deer hunt. It's like, you go into the woods and you call 'em. - Boy, she bad when all the way to Austria and there's a guy named Phil. - Yeah, he didn't have a, but more Austrian, I'd want to go out of the crazy name. And it was his cousin is Matthias. - Yeah, that's good. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And then, and then Shammy Hunting, I went with Paul. - It's like Phil. - Right. - Already know a ton of bills. - Yeah, I know. I got a lot of bills inside. - I got Phil. But yeah, super, super cool experience. And like the amount of hospit, like the first five days, I don't think we ate outside of someone's dinner table every night. They were cooking. - Is that right? - Yeah, and we pretty much only ate wild game. 'Cause they, you know, they sell it, but they also eat it, right? So when they bring a bunch of deer to the butcher for them to sell, it's like we're gonna take this one. And the butcher sent us home with a big thing a sausage to cook out that night. But it's totally different. But that was like being at like the camps in Africa. - Yeah. - There is no domestic meat option. - Yeah. - I mean, it's like it's just every meal, it's always wild game. - Yeah, you know. - And we had, I mean, I think the last night when we had this big dinner with all the families and the kids and everything, we probably had 20 people there. We had road deer backstraps. We had road deer stakes from the rear quarter that had been marinated. We had road deer brats. We had road deer francs. They do another thing where they wrap the franc in bacon and do that. I mean, it's kinda feel like you're in Texas. - Sure. - At some points. But we probably had road deer five different ways. Is that the favorite of the Chamois and the road deer is road deer the good one, or do they like the Chamois too? - I can't say. I don't think there's a Chamois harvest that's as just in the numbers. Like I don't think it's the same. So road deer, like when you buy dog food there, when they go to the butcher all that trim, like everything that you put in your scrap pile or maybe give this to the dog, that goes to a dog food processor. So you can buy a can of dog food that says in German road deer. And then the dogs eat basically burger. - God's gonna be some good dogs. - Yeah, yeah. And that was the other fun thing is we hunted, we hunted deer and Chamois with dogs the whole time. Like we'd tie, we had the Bino was the dog that came with us road deer hunting. - What's his job? - You'd climb up in the stand, you'd tie her to the ladder and she'd just sit there silently. And then once you shoot, she's just fired up and you take her to the blood trail and let her loose. - Oh, her job is fine. - Yeah, so they trail everything with dogs. Even if you saw like lay dead out in the field. - Yeah, just good practice, just good practice. Bino was like a fox terrier. She was like a tiny little, she was 13 and pretty deaf, except for the gunshots. And then the dog we took Chamois hunting, not gonna remember, I can't remember the breed of X-E, but she was, she was a bigger dog. Almost like, yeah, she was kind of a hound, like a short hound, but not like a, what you'd think of like not like Mingus, like a shorter kind of hound dog. - What was her general attitude? Do they hang out with a lot of Americans or do they hip to what Americans are all about? - Yeah, so they have a business selling American hunting brands over in Europe. So they're, they're a retailer for first light and FH. and they travel the U.S. a lot and they're familiar with this. So one of the funny things was, Phil, when I went to go hunt Sham on with Pauli, other Phil, Philip. When I went to go hunt Sham on in Southern Austria with Pauli, I was like, Phil, you're gonna come down and he goes, it's like, you know, what you're asking me to do, he's like, this is the first week of August, what you're asking me to do is to ask like a Texas white tail nut to leave his white tail spot in the middle of the rut. - Oh, he had that analogy up his sleeve. So like, they're very conversant. So they're giving you, like I was in Italy this summer and all the Italians have to come up and tell you how much they hate Trump but they don't hold it against you. Did you find like that kind of thing going on there? Was everything like political? - No, we didn't talk politics. I mean, the other, the one political thing that came up is in Southern Austria, the wolves. - Oh. - Wolves and actually while we were there, there was a grizzly, a brown bear spotted in the same valley that we were in. And we found out two days later, but they have wolves coming in and it's a very hot button topic. So it was interesting to have those conversations sort of in parallel, what's what going on. - Was the flavor the same? - Very much so. - I'm the wolf question, flavors the same. - Yeah, just a super, I mean. - Can you see the video, man? - Yeah. - How much video minutes you're gonna get? What is this? The two pack? Is it a one pack? Like what is it? That's yet to be determined. I think it's definitely a two-parter. Garrett, this morning said maybe it's a two-hour thing. - Oh, film. - I don't know about that. - I just, I'm not throwing that out there. He gave a number of terabytes. - I mean, if you didn't like me, but. - Well, what I would do, just, I would make it a two or three parter. - Yeah, that's sort of how I imagine. - But I'd give people a rest. - We also went to a gun maker in a town where they've been making guns for more than 500 years. We went to a gun maker that produces 12 rifles a year. They're all hand engraved and given those away. - No. - No, but they're beautiful, like old world double rifles and drillings and fearlings, which is a four-barrel rifle. - Yeah. - And we just got to hang out with those guys and film them as they, as they did stock work. - Yeah, so this is like a cultural emerge. - It was a very, it felt very lucky to be able to do this and our hosts just like rolled out the red carpet. - Talk about a four-barrel rifle. And it was like, surely he doesn't literally mean four barrels on a rifle. - A fearling, okay, but I'm seeing a four-barrel rifle here. - Yeah. - And the thing that you'd realize, you know, if you talk double rifles, the big thing is regulating the barrels so they hit the same point of aim. And he's like, think about a fearling because then when you have four barrels and you mess with this one, it messes with all the other ones. - Yeah. - He's like, you just drive yourself insane trying to regulate four barrels. - Yeah, I was talking about that. Yeah, I had never occurred to me. That whole process of putting that thing together and ever getting to the two barrels around the same program. - Yeah, yeah. - 'Cause you gotta do a lot of tweaking 'cause the harmonics are different now. - Then you double the number of barrels and you quadruple the number of connections between barrels. 'Cause the two barrels, they're just connecting in one place, it's a great point. I assume one trigger on a four barrel gun. - I don't know. - You know, I don't think they're four triggers. - You know, our saying, give 'em both barrels. - Yeah. I've never heard that. Give 'em both barrels. - How was you not have never heard that? - Give 'em all four. Give 'em all fear. - Yeah, give 'em all four barrels, I don't sound good. - That hurt. - But yeah, I mean, it was like a full on cultural immersion and just super lucky, super grateful to do that. And our hosts were just the best. - You didn't grow up with like old men talking about giving 'em both barrels? - That one that's escaped me. - Oh, give 'em both barrels. - I like that thing. - You might say something like that. - You mean business if you say both barrels. - Oh yeah. - No one wants to get shot even by one shock on barrel, but imagine that they give you both. It's terrible. - One last thing for me. - Oh, you gonna hit the deer call? - Oh, I can, yeah. - Yeah, look at that thing. - This is a little-- - We can told it around. It's like, who's that playwright that if you produce a gun, it better go off. Is that him, not a playwright? - Check off. - Check off. - Big theater guy over here. (crickets chirping) (crickets chirping) - That's the noise they make? - It sounds great. - That's the dough. It's like the little kids were laughing at. The little kids over there, the kids of our hosts gave this to me and one of them has a call made out of the other antler from the same deer call. - And they thought you sucked at it? - Yeah, they thought I sucked at it. - And then I got some lessons and I sucked less at it, but you just hit there and call, call, just like that. - Constantly. - Not loud. - Constantly? - Constantly. - That can't be how they behave in nature. - You might pause for a minute or two here and there, but you start calling with a fond call, which is like a squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak. - And then you'd hit the dough call. And yeah, it was very different from the deer honing that I'm used to. - Yeah. - One last thing. Oh, there's a picture right there. Look at that soccer, man. - Yeah. - So we watched like all that stuff down there is hand engraved and then inlaid with the goal. - We're looking at one of these guns and I didn't realize this. He's got like a shotgun, a 20 gauge shotgun. It's like the breech is open on the bottom at the six o'clock position since a 20 gauge shotgun. At three and nine you've got some kind of center fire rifle, like a larger caliber. - So like an eight by 57. - It's a eight by two eight by 57s, a 20 gauge and one 22 hornet. - And so then at the 12 o'clock position says the 20, dude, you're ready for action. - That's great. - Yeah, yeah. So he's like, I don't give a shit. What comes out of them? - Yeah. - And this is, so typically when you have two barrel, when you have two rifle barrels in a shotgun barrel, like I've always known that as a drilling. And as a term you've heard. And I didn't realize this because he then he says it. So four barrels of fearling. And I realized a drilling is a dryling 'cause dry is three and we just bastardize it to drilling. But that's where that term comes from. I never understood what drilling was. - That's good. - Yeah. So anyway, you know, you got like, Frank of files and what's the guy weigh into Austria? - I don't know, it might be a Germanophile. - No. - Yeah, I'm getting there. Get in there. Saturday, October 20th. - Oh, did you drink all kind of beer? Where are you at on beer drinking right now? What do you mean, where am I at? 'Cause everybody knows always quittin' this and quittin' it. Are you like a beer drinker right now? Big time. - Okay. - So were you drinking all kind of beer? - Yeah, and the problem was, the real problem was you go to Germany and Austria and you can drink all this beer because it's four or five percent. It's all very light loggers. And then you go to Sydney and I went to Belgium for a couple days and you go up there and it's all nine percent. - Oh, thank you. - And so like, you can take your five beer, man. - You have to re-regulate, pull all the levers and re-regulate your intake. You have to turn on the choke. But anyway, that was great. - Yeah, a lot of beers, a lot of sausages, a lot of schnitzels. I'll take them schnitzels, man, that's for sure. - Yeah. - All right, out of the punt gun. - Oh, oh, sorry. - Sorry, one more thing. We keep saying that. - Tailgate tour. - Oh, that's totally different. - It's totally different, but it also falls into this. So tailgate tour, we're kicking that off again. We've got four stops coming up in the next month. This Saturday, August 29th in Missoula, Montana, I will be there, Clay Nukem will be there for the Grizz taking on the Southern Utah Thunderbirds. So kickoff is at 7 p.m. this Saturday, August 29th. We will be out there from five to seven in the fan zone, which is one of the official tailgating areas near the stadium. Come say hi, we've got games, we've got free stuff, and Clay Nukem will listen to every single one of your hunting stories hold in its fullest detail. - Here's the problem. - He even wants to see the pictures. - He'll want to look at all the pictures. - Even the ones that are just slightly different angles. - Right, and all the problem here is that you guys are only there for two hours, the next weekend, I'm gonna be at the tailgate tour at North Dakota State, and we are doing that from nine to 230 or so. - Wow. - So way more stories and a lot more beer drinking. - Well, this is, yeah, so this is the official tailgating hours because we're part of the university tailgating area. It's open from five to seven. So we have that bookend built in, but yeah. - That's great. That'll be great. - Come find those guys at Washington, Grizzly Stadium, the Grizz Thunderbird game. - Come on, August 29th this Saturday. - Mm-hmm. - On the punk gun. - Punk gun. - You're not gonna talk about the other stops? - No. - No, I actually asked Jen. - Yeah, there's more stops. You can go to the website and check them out. - They'll meet you at your dot com slash events. - Yep. - All right, the punk gun. We bought a punk gun back in 2022. We bought this thing so long ago that the people who approved the budget for me to spend $20,000, they just don't work here anymore. - They died of old age. - Yeah, yep. - The punk gun, not saying it killed them. - Or they were fired for reckless spending. - Maybe, the punk gun may have played a role in this in some way. We don't know. - I know, like even internally, I gotta go, do you remember that punk gun? People are like, no, no. That's how long ago. - When they call me out for spending all the money on the vending machine meets, that's exactly what I'm gonna say. - Remember the punk gun, so pay off someday. - 2022, we bought that. We shot the punk gun. We made a video in 2026. You can watch the video. It's called the firing a 140 year old punk gun on our YouTube channel. We then decided to turn around and sell it through the same folks that we bought it from, which is Rock Island Auction. They're the world's biggest dealer of like fine and collectible and historic firearms. That auction happened this last weekend. There's. estimate publicly on their website was $20 to $30,000, which we paid $20,000 for it. Privately, quietly, they were like, you know, maybe $40,000 if like the right barrier gets in there. The bidding started. It shot past 50,000 very fast. There were a lot of bidders involved up to that point. Beyond 50,000, it dropped down to just two people. It got up to 100,000. I was told that in the room, the folks were giddy. There were some laughter involved, which is a good thing at a gun auction. They told me if people are laughing, because it's kind of like a laugh, like you got to be kidding. Oh, okay. All right. Now the people bidding, this is like their business is an online auction. It is happening in person in Bedford, Texas, but you can participate online, you can participate on the phone. When I bought it originally, I was just bidding from my house in Bozeman, and I was on the phone with somebody who was there in person at the auction. That is, you know, on your behalf raising their hand and then placing the bid. Gets up to 100,000. Bidding ends at 117,500, yes. So almost 100,000 more than what we paid for it. All of that money is going to the Land Access Initiative. Rock Island is waving our fees to make sure that your new money goes to conservation. It's great. It's huge. I also have, I've heard from the person who won the, the pont gun. Rock Island is waving their shipping fees involved. Cool. Which is a tremendous thing to ship across the country because it weighs 40 pounds. It weighs a lot. It goes on more than 40 pounds. Yeah. What do we weigh that? I never got to point it around. 75 pounds. 70 or 80. It goes on multiple pallets. It gets like, you know, special shipping involved. Rock Island is waving the buyers fees because they were so thrilled about the price. The buyer is branded from North Carolina. He did reach out. He said he came into the day with his top dollar at 50,000. He wasn't going to go anywhere. He got carried away. He got carried away. He said he really doesn't like. He was drinking them. He was drinking them German beers or something. Yeah. I like beer. Branded told me he really doesn't like to lose. So it got up to 50 and then he just keep going and the auction just unraveled and he wanted it. But it was the first time that they've ever sold a pont gun. This is an important detail. Yes, it is. It doesn't account for the price. But the first, this is the first time they were ever able to sell a pont gun where they could say this is a functioning, usable, pont gun, confirmed that it works. We had a shell for them that the buyer could then make their own shells. They've seen it work on a YouTube video. Brand didn't say this is why he spent the money. But Rock Island also, they do a tremendous job of making every auction feel like a really big deal. And if you like, watch sports, this is something that sports fans will criticize or complement networks on. They're like ESPN does a really great job of making this Sunday night football game or Saturday night football game feel like the biggest deal in the world. Rock Island does it every time. They like really hype it up. They do a great job. And I could see how someone like Brandon comes in, we're like, 50,000, they end up spending 117,500. You know, you know, we're working on for the show. What? We're bringing in for the interview show. We're bringing in an auctioneer. Oh, okay. Who auctions off? What? We're bringing in a livestock guy. But my main quite, it'll be a short interview, I'm going to be like, why do you guys talk like that? Yeah. That's the main thing. I look forward to that explanation. I hope he explains it. Nate already knows. Nate already knows from the pre interviews. It's going to be great because we're going to learn how to auction. We're going to do it in here and everybody can come and we're going to learn how to do that whole little deal. Yeah. If you want to learn to auction, I think you go to like a one week seminar and you leave there. No, we're bringing in world. We're bringing in world champion. You go to auction. Here's school. Yeah. But we're not bringing in school kids. Potentially the triple crown auctioneer, we're courting the triple crown world champion. If that is not some school kid, you know, it's a big deal. Yeah. Here's like the coolest thing. You don't know this yet, Steve. Our punt gun sale is a new world record. This is now the most money anyone has ever paid for a punt gun making it the most valuable punt gun on earth. Really? Yeah. That's pretty cool. It's like Rembrandt or something. Nobody has ever bought or sold a punt gun for more than $170,500. What? You're telling me we sold the most valuable punt gun? It's not our punt gun anymore, Spencer. Do I wish people kept up on Wikipedia pages like he used to be the best thing in a Wikipedia page? Brand in the buyer, he's not aware of this yet either. So like he now owns the world record, the most expensive punt gun in the world. Which like with collectibles, something is only worth what someone's willing to pay. Yeah. And so he set the price and now he owns the world's most valuable punt gun. Oh, damn. Rock Island. They set some other world records during this. It was the first sale ever that had two guns fetch over $1 million. One of them was the Bonnie and Clyde shotgun. That sold for a million dollars. It's now the most expensive shotgun ever. Wow. They also sold a German military tank. Yeah. And the most expensive shotgun and the most expensive punt gun. You know what I'd pay a lot for what I'd pay a lot for the shotgun that was used to kill the man that killed, the killed Robert Ford, the gun that killed Robert Ford who killed Jesse James. You want that one? I want that shotgun. They might track down my understanding nearly cut Bob Ford and half. Wow. Other witnesses say it cut his head and half. Okay. He was a slight man. The Bonnie and Clyde shotgun, it's the one that she's holding in a photo where she's got the barrel shoved into I think Clyde's guts. They're just like posing for a photo, but that is the shotgun. My understanding is they didn't know that existed until like a year ago, it kind of just showed up. And they're like, oh my gosh. We're satisfied with the provenance. They I guess they track down that like this is official. It's actually Bonnie and Clyde's gun. Now the most expensive shotgun in the world. Again, thanks to Brandon for setting that world record, Rock Island for helping us create more money for conservation and meat eater for funding this big dumb idea of having a punt gun. Love it. What a happy ending. That's the end man. No one's ever going to bring that up again on this show. I can tell you that. Now whenever I buy a new gun, I mean like Sydney, you got to think this could be worth $120,000 some day. No, that's if I was her, I would say that. Hey, everyone, big huge announcement. This time we're hitting the Midwest meat eater live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself. Yannis Putellis Claynew, Combrant Reeves and Randall Williams for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation and wild foods. Also, we're already stacking up some great special guests. Tickets go on sale September 25th, but sign up at the meateater.com/tour and you'll get pre-sale access to buy tickets on September 14th days before they go on sale to the public. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the meat eater live events and they will tell you, we laugh our asses off. We give away great prizes. We put on a solid show that I'm proud to be part of. Okay. AMA solicitations. In September, we're doing an Ask Me Anything episode of Steve, which will be the news show, which will be the news show for that week. For obvious reasons, everyone is gone in September. And so this is what we're going to do. It's going to be great. It's going to be the best episode we've done. I'm excited. Steve, Steve, here's the deal. You need to send in good questions that are brief. I will not read long questions, send them to the meateater podcast at the meateater.com. If you put them in the YouTube comments, I'm probably not going to see them. And so email me the window closes September 3rd. And we'll see if they make the cut. Great. Good blog. On the corrections, we have a nitpicky correction to clarification and a helpful critique of trail cam usage. The winner gets a mulchy edge sale cam with, and this is the important part, one year subscription. You get a camera in the subscription. One is from the Great Writer, Tennis Writer, Outdoor Writer, Hunting Writer, Peter Bodo, New York Times contributor. Are we using the interest old meters right now? Yeah, we're not using it for this one, I'll talk to the guys who sent it in, I'm interested out. We're going to pick the favorite though. You're interested already? Yeah. I'm in. Didn't hurt the impression. Peter Bodo, Austrian born. Yes, all that. Not American. I just read it as not American, but yeah, Austrian born. Hey, fellas, I don't want to be mean, speared it. But as a raggedy ass old journalist, I have a few grammatical quibbles to share. They're not super current, but they recur across different episodes. As first, morality. In a recent news show, Episode 866, Boundy Waters tragedy, the gang discussed the morals morality of the old coup trying to prevent others from accessing public hunting land for turkey hunting. You debated the morality of this, but you should have been debating the ethics of it. As per the Oxford dictionary, morals are your own internal rules about right and wrong. Ethics are the shared rules of a group, job, or society. So clearly, the gents behavior was an ethical rather than a moral issue. If it helps, this is a very common error made by all kinds of folks. A bank robber is not immoral. He's unethical. Learning curve. Spence around the trivia shows talked about the learning curve, making a common mistake. Something that is easy to learn has a steep learning curve. You get from point 8 to point z very quickly. Something difficult to learn. Expert marksmanship, spare casting, has a flat learning curve. I can't point to specific episodes as it was take too much research, but it always struck me. The reality is something, the reality is something easy has a steep learning curve. I didn't know that. I don't think anybody knows that. That's good. Finally. And lastly, especially on the trivia show, many contestants consistently confuse less and fewer. Dude, I didn't know this either. This is amazing. Less is for things you cannot count. Well, I'm going to put it right back in his face on this one because he says the well has less water. You damn sure count the water well. But only if you refer to acres. If you're referring to the units of water, you just say water is like a general concept. It has less water. You said it has fewer cubic feet of water. Fewer is for things you can. Yannis has only six TSS shotgun shells left. The first two, I like that third one, I got real questions. I before move on correction too. Oh, if I may, I just got to throw a plug up for Pete's book, White Tale Nation. It isn't under the radar White Tale Gym. Nobody talks about this. Yeah, it's worth living. Very fun read. It talks about his kind of journey as a deer hunter from New York and kind of wants to explore this wild deer hunting culture across the rest of the country. And so he goes on this kind of year long pursuit of traveling to different states, diving into Texas, Montana, the Midwest, and you know, doesn't a very interesting unique way given his perspective, his writing, pedigree, very well done and a fun read for really any deer hunter. Great. Sounds like a mildly steep learning curve. Mildly. He didn't get into mildly steep. Oh, it's a new one. Number two, recent alpha gal podcast, they had a brief tangent about chiggers. Well, hey, friends, he says, he's about cheers. He says, just an FYI, chiggers live and lay eggs in the soil. They latch onto you and secrete digestive enzymes into your skin. Then they use sort of a fancy mouth straw to suck up your broken down proteins. None of this is new. The part that itches are those digestive enzymes. The spots are just, excuse me, the spots are just an inflammatory response to the tissue breakdown. This is none of this is new. It's just clarification. There are no chiggers under the skin or anything like that. Okay, not new. Best way to treat the bites, this is new, is just with a topical anti-inflammatory or anti-itch cream of some sort. Same sort of thing you'd use to get your dog to stop scratching a sore spot. This is not going to be the winner. Love him to death. Love him to death. Sure, he loves his family. I'm sure he's a great American. Not the winner. But it says he designs anti-inflammatory and anti-itch products. The reason he wrote in is because he's got a horse in the race. In your conversation, you talked about various remedies like rub and oil. No, no, we talked about various myths. But then you never said what actually worked. He was just saying this is actually works. But he's also, he's in the pocket of big anti-itch. I love you guys. I wish to send him a care package regardless because I like him so much, but that's just not the man. Okay, episode 915, Dan Moultry lost camera story. I was explaining that I have lost a camera. It cranks out great photos every day. We cannot find it. Oh, interesting. Well, not so much interesting anymore. Okay, because the lat lawn is in the camera. Hmm. Hey, Steve, listening to the podcast this week and you're questioned about how to find the trail cam with Dan Moultry. Just a little more background in this. We were putting a trail cam where we knew there had been a lot of ocelot. From an ocelot coloring project, we knew there's a lot of ocelot pings in the area. And so we're like, let's go put our own camera there and try to make a sweet ocelot video in one state. Texas. Okay. So we make a pin and we get there and we make a pin on a map, but we get there and we don't like the area. Like it doesn't live up to its promise. The E scouting didn't ground check. So let me wander off into the bush and then we find like the queen mother of all trail cam setups. No one ever thinks to repend the actual place. I said, Yani, Yani's down there. I say, hey, go find our camera. Yani wanders all over hell and I never even get a picture of him looking for it. I was like, it's bio bush. What do you get on this trail camera? Yeah, did you get the ocelot? Everything but a while, I'm trying to go hogs, have leaners, Neil guy, water, buck, big box, regular bucks. You name it, coyotes and those kalsba wazoo orics. So isn't that a gem's box? Orics. But we can't find it. Okay. Literally everything. And the guy, the corrector says, I was a little surprised at neither you thought about the camera's GPS location. My mulchry edge 2 pro has GPS data under device info. The gal. Steph. Steph Maddle. Mm-hmm. Could be a guy. Steph Curry, Steph Curry. As opposed to Tim Curry. Oh, yes. The minute we talked about this, it became we, someone else in the room pointed out, you could just go in there and into your app and find your lat long. So the camera's now no longer lost. Okay. I got pictures this morning. Great photos. Yep. I'm going with the camera. Same. Are we going to vote? That's my vote. Okay, uh, let's back up. Knit picky grammatical stuff. Great Nate likes it. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Feel like I learned something. Yep. He put a lot of thought. The learning curve thing I, I, I realized I've been doing that wrong. That's a four vote. But that just makes me not want to say learning curve ever again. Because you're gonna mix it up. Well, if you don't mix it up, though, then you're like, I think you're confusing. Correcting. Yeah. Somebody and that's just one. That's just one. Can I see his show hands again? No, I'm going to change my vote. Oh, no, I can't say learning curve. You can. I'm just saying it right. You can. You just have to correct. Are you guys changing your vote? I'm changing my vote. Only because you get out of here. Yep. I'm floppin. Okay. So three. Yeah. There's a potential. There's seven votes hanging over here. Anyone on using an eye, whatever's when you get a sugar bite, using this guy's personal products. No one. The one Steve Declare. Okay, you winner. That your camera is not in fact lost. I'm going with that one. Wow, four. Okay. Wow. Besides, sorry, Bodo. Peter Bodo. Love you to death. Love you to death. You just had tough competition. Yeah, you just got fewer votes than the other one. Yeah. That's all I have. It's Nate's fault. You know, we, sorry, Pete. Still a good book. All right. This takes us to the first harvest success sent into the meteor meteor podcast inbox. From Rodney Kid sends in a report three squirrels. He says a little report from Indiana early squirrel season. They are not moving much. It's hot. They are speaking to each other in soft tones. You must really listen for them and then sneak. And he's got a nice photo. He's got his double barrel scatter done. He's got a stringer or three. Is that a brace or is a brace two? He's got a brace and a half, but he's got a brace and a half a brace. squirrels hanging from a cord. He's got a backpack. He's got a bear grease hat and a real tree. No. And Maasio, a brace is a pair for exactly two. Great. And he's got some the kind of woods in the end. It looks like I just get itchy looking at that. Yeah. That is poison ivy country. I would be washing my hands after I skinned those squirrels. People don't know this date squirrels harvest that soft fuzz off the vines and line their nests with it. Yeah, you can get tore up from squirrels and poison ivy country. I was sharing that the Michigan growing up September 15th, Open Day of Squirrels. I could always take Open Day a deer rifle off, Open Day a trap and off. I could take Open Day a bow off. We could kind of take like a half day off for Open Day of Squirrel season. But the first weekend that would happen of squirrel season, if it didn't, if, you know, whatever, first weekend. I just love going down into the beach woods, the beach trees and sitting there at daylight and listening to the beach nuts raining down. And you just sneak in under where you're like, peep, peep, peep, hitting the forest floor and the canopy be still thick. The squirrels wouldn't even know you were down below them. Oh, such a good time. And then shooting on up in there with a shotgun. Not even tall like sure. What you were aiming at. That's how, at least that's how I remember happening. You're like, I feel like that noise is coming from right there about. Then the squirrels did know you were there. Nope. Then they knew you were there. But man, that first trip, you were going to get your limit of five, man. Such a good time. In the news. Well, that's great. In the news, I read the news. I skimmed. So just to keep my head balanced in life, I read a bunch of different news sources. So when I wake up in the morning, I lay in bed, the misses will still be sleeping. And I'll go into, um, take talk. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Four Chan. No, I go into I'll peruse the Wall Street Journal. I'll, I'll just just a headline run just to be like, what happened overnight? Right? Like who, what a major, the major things that shape global event kind of stuff while I'll skim Wall Street Journal, I'll skim The New York Times, I'll skim The Economist, I'll skim Free Press. And I might get onto some other stuff too, but that way you're hearing it, you're hearing it from both sides, right? Because all these places have their own biases. So that way you, you kind of levels your head out a little bit. Big, I love New York Times. I like this part of my peruse, but they have the wrong guy. They have the wrong guy on the wild horse beat. He's the wrong man for the job. Sure, he's a nice guy. She loves his family, great American, Dave Phillips. I got turned off by the journalist Dave Phillips years ago and he wrote a piece, you know, those pieces where those pieces where it's not journalism, it's politics, like this thing that came out the other day, this new thing, it gets picked up all over the place and this new thing to like, Hey, mountain lions, reduce vehicle collisions. Because through some like cock-a-mainly like analysis, they've determined that if you have like, it's sort of the argument is the more mountain lions we have, mean the less mountain lions anybody shoots, the more they'll scare deer away from roads. And I'm like, but when you just change the headline to road hunters, like road hunters reduce deer car collisions? Because if you look at like, how many deer get killed by mountain lions, that number is dwarfed by the number of deer to get killed by humans. Why wouldn't it be a big study about how humans reduce deer car collisions? But it's like, it's politics. They knew where they wanted to land. Right. They knew they wanted to land at. Look at the bright side. All these people are anti predators, but it reduces, it's hogwash. It's just like, it's politics, which is cool. It's fine. That's what I traffic in. I traffic in manipulating shit to get what I want. Like, do you know I'm saying? But at least I admit it. Yeah. This guy doesn't. This guy did this piece while back where he's like, "Hey, good thing about mountain lions is they'll reduce the wild horse over population." And you talk to anybody that has anything to do with wild horses or anyone that has anything to do with mountain lions and everybody like, "No, cute, but no." Anyways, they've uncovered, so the New York Times ran as kind of investigative piece where they've uncovered that the Trump administration has found this loophole by which they are shipping, they're selling protected wild horses to slaughter through a loophole, meaning if you, well, let me give you a little background. In the mid-70s, how long did I tell you I needed for this? 10 minutes. Okay. In the mid-70s, this country passed a very, very bad, short-sighted piece of legislation, which was known as, I can't remember the exact term, but the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act. Terrible piece of legislation did not contemplate the complexities of the future. At the time, there was maybe 25,000 wild horses and burrows out on the landscape of the American West. It defined what a wild horse and burrow was and it protected them and really tied the hands of future managers and how to deal with the situation should get out of control. We are now there. It was 1971. It was called the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burrows Act. Okay. Short-sighted, it happens. Like, it happens. You make short-sighted things because you can't contemplate the future. People always point this up with the Constitution. Critics of the American Constitution will say, "They never contemplated crypto. They never contemplated," whatever, you know what I mean? They wrote the document not contemplating things and so now sometimes we're in this spot where we're trying to figure out what people meant. This did not contemplate the present. We now have three times as many wild horses and burrows out in the landscape. We have more wild horses and burrows sitting and holding facilities than there were at the time they impacted this legislation. We've got 73,000 wild horses and burrows out in the landscape which is a drier landscape now than it was then. We have 60,000 of these things in storage where we're paying money to store them because the act that was meant to protect them made it that you couldn't send them to slaughter. It made there's virtually no outlet for these animals. They have a budget to man they have a budget to manage wild horses. The whole budget gets burned up paying farmers and ranchers and Kansas and Oklahoma $1,000 a year apiece to hold these wild horses in perpetuity. The government spends $3,000 up to $3,000 to catch a wild horse where they're overpopulated. They then sell them for about $25 and they have all this convoluted crap where like first you have to offer it for adoption and no one comes and gets them or three people come in adoption. I'm being I'm being ridiculous with my numbers but it's like not nearly enough people come forth to adopt them. Then the next step there's like this sales process and you have to do that and then if you try that and try this and try that and try this you can then sell it under a certain caveat and then the person that buys it is sort of less beholden to the law and they can then move it to another person and that person can send it up for slaughter. So there's this big cry fest in the New York Times about the fact that some of these wild horses are getting sent to slaughter which if it's illegal it's illegal they shouldn't be doing illegal stuff but this is a problem that is not going away and it is hit maximum absurdity. The only solution here, the only solution here is to not restrict but lubricate the path to slaughter because these are not this is not American wildlife. This is a non-native domestic animal. People that people that cry about ranchers have grazing rights out on public land like this is tax this is this is grazing rights for for livestock where they it costs the government tens of millions of dollars. These are not wild animals. They're out competing deer they're out competing big horn sheep all the mountain lions like if they all switched their diet to horses which they don't want they don't like horses that it's not their preferred thing they like deer they like big horns they don't want horses they don't overlap with horses in the proper way it's like nothing's going to take care of this problem nothing will take care of the problem you go back to 2013 the National Academy of Science reports here's a quote from the National Academy of Science report from 2013 continuation of business as usual practices will be expensive and unproductive for BLM because compelling evidence exists that there are more Horses on public range lands then reported at the national level and that horse population growth rates are high. Unmanaged populations would probably double in about four years. That has happened. If populations were not actively managed for even a short time, the abundance of horses on public range lands would increase until animals became food limited. Limited to horse populations would affect forage and water resources for all other animals on shared range land and potentially conflict with the multiple use policy of public range lands and the legislative mandate to maintain a thriving natural ecological balance. 2019, the BLM estimated that there are 88,090 wild horses and burles on range lands. That is not counting these 47,000 that were paying a thousand dollars a piece to put on otherwise productive farm and ranch land. So we've tied our hands with ridiculous legislation. It's like they got the wrong guy on the job. This guy has talked about this old dumb thing where people are supposed to go out and shoot him with contraceptives. He's still on that. They were going to pay all these guys to go out and shoot contraceptives into 80, let's say half of these are females, I don't know what the ratios are. Let's say half of these are females that you're going to hire guys to go out and shoot contraceptives into 44,000 wild horses. It's like wrong man on the job. If the Trump administration is in fact like doing a thing that's naughty, I'm a law and order guy. But the sentiment of that something that they have created an unlivable situation and I would expect at this point that as Americans get a more sophisticated understanding of ecology, that we would be putting true native North American wildlife way ahead, way ahead in priority of livestock and these things are livestock. I have heard, right? There's all sorts of different levels of animal rights or animal lovers who go really hard on their species of choice. I've heard that the horse lovers are a whole nother level, dude, they're the Gestapo of animal rights people. It feels like a group that probably has money too. What's that Iranian group? Soleimani ran it through the cubs, they are the cubs force of the animal rights movement. When we see that film unbranded, I know about introduction to this whole thing. They go and they adapt a couple of these broncos and explore this. It was interesting. People, but here's the thing, go read the piece yourself. It's called, whereas it's called under Trump protected wild horses are going to slaughter. Dave Phillips. I used to have great luck with guys named Dave. We should make his head's guy in the show. Just to be like, too. Come on. You should start an interview show where you can talk to people like this that you're interested in. We already have an interview show. I'm going to make a whole new one now, but I should have him talk to Arthur Lawson at the Wind River fishing game. Remember, I mean, that was a great conversation for wrapping your head around the impact that they have. I have better luck with Dave's than any other name. Really? Absolutely. The sample size on Randall, just too small. I don't have bad luck on Randall. I don't want to tell you the names I got bad luck on because it make people feel bad with those names. You in his room? Anybody in this room? As well. Much as I love you, Nate. Nate was a problem for me. Yeah, that was one of the first things you said to me. But dude, Dave's, dude, me and Dave's do great together. Then you got the tag line or whatever they call it. I forgot about, I've been out of the, it's been a long time since I took journalism 101. There's the thing. There's a word for this. It's like the sort of other title, a legal loophole. Yeah. You tell it. This is headed. A legal loophole allows the government to sell Mustangs on the cheap, stripping them of protections and clearing their path to destruction. You don't really get this guy worked up if he somehow found out that they're killing all these cattle from stakes and burgers. He'd be like, they're what? Yeah. He must not know this. He must not know that this is happening that people are eating chickens and cattle and stuff. People like Randall are eating horses. Uh-huh. And my horse's steak guy now. Oh yeah, New Yorkie. Or sorry, in Italy, you can get horse sandows. Yeah, I got a horse. I got a horse steak in Belgium. I was that. It's delicious. Yeah. Dave would be like, if I was like, Dave's, dude, I got to tell you man, they're killing all kinds of cattle. Eat them. I'm selling them. I'm selling them. It also sounds like a legal loophole allows them to do this. It sounds like, yeah, legal. It sounds like it's legal. They got the wrong. I'm sure. I know. I know he's a, I'm sure he's a great guy. They got the wrong. They need to hand the wild horse beat over. I'll tell you who to hand it to Jim Roberts. Is that his name? Jim Roberts. Yeah, I think. Yeah, he's guy you like. Yeah. Does peace for the New York Times? He's from Montana. He needs to fire, give Dave more stuff on veterans, fire him off the wild horse beat, bring Jim Robbins in to rewrite all that stuff. Here's a great one that Randall found. This one tickles the hell. I mean, this is an old news story. Listen to this. You want to talk about a headline. Forest fire explodes gun of trapper, Skeleton is found Lewis and Clark forest. We're gonna start a segment called old ass news. Here's the piece. Great Falls, Montana August 29th. What year was it, though, in this 1928, that's right, 1928, the skeleton of a trapper, which has lain undisturbed for years, perhaps half a century, has been uncovered by a forest fire in the Lewis Clark forest. The skeleton was found when bullets from the trappers old gun exploded from the heat of the flames. The firefighting crews heard the explosion and then found the skeleton. The man had apparently been killed by an animal on the spot where he had made his camp. The rifle was beside the skeleton with a date of 1873 upon it. There was an old iron skillet of the type long off the market. That's my favorite part. Yeah. I'm just going back as I want people to really save the true journalism here. This is my favorite part. There was an old iron skillet of the type long off the market, a salt shaker and two bottles of trappers poison. And then he wraps it up, that's, you need to find this guy. Just the facts, ma'am. Drag him out of the dead and have him take up the wild horse bee for the New York Times. This guy gave it to you straight. That's journalism. Yeah. That's journalism. God, there's got to be a few more of those laying out there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I never considered that a forest fire would like send unsentful. It's off into the atmosphere and they'd be laying by an old trap with the iron skillet of the type not currently for sale. Hey, everyone, big, huge announcement. Meet either live. The Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026 this time we're hitting the Midwest. Meet either live. The Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We got grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself. Yannis Putellis Claynew, Combrant Reaves, and Randall Williams for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation, wild foods. Meet either live is the best Christmas gift for any outdoorsman or woman in your life. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the meateater live events and they will tell you we laugh our asses off. Marcus? Roll this rule. Alright, I'll keep it kind of short since this has been something I know you guys have talked about over the months in the last year or so, but we can dive as far as you want into this. The news came out last week that the USDA has officially proposed their ruling on the roadless rule. So last summer, a lot of people start talking about this because the administration kind of released there. They're floating of this idea of rolling back the roadless rule. They started a comment period. 600,000 or so comments were put into the federal record. Many, many, many folks spoke out in defense of this place of this ruling. Fast forward now, back in August 20th, I guess it was. The federal government showcase the fact that they want to officially rescind the roadless rule in its entirety. Soon after that, they released the mandated draft environmental impact statement. And then a 30 day public comment period was opened after that. Can I back you up to one thing? Yeah. The the comment period is the thing they have to do. No one pays attention to that. Sadly, I'm curious who how many comments were there in favor of revoking the roadless, of opening all this up? Did you see the, was the split, what was the split? About 99% were in favor of keeping it. And that was more than 600,000 comments applied. Back when the roadless rule was created back in 2001, they went through like a year and a half process. And there was 1.6 million comments submitted. And more than 90% of those were in support of this of the roadless rule. So yeah, so the public comment period some people will say doesn't really matter. But it does a couple of things. Number one, it does establish a record of the public's perspective. Sure. That ostensibly the government should be looking at and considering when making the decision. But also down the line when it comes to litigation, when it comes to how this might play out for the next administration too. All of that will be reviewed and looked at. Got it. So I say like this is overwhelmingly, this is an overwhelmingly unpopular move with the American public. Yes. And I kind of was messing up my words there earlier. But about 44 million acres of public land fall underneath this ruling. There are also separate roadless rules for Idaho and Colorado. So this would not impact those two states. But the high level thing here is that the roadless rule keeps these forests lands from having most new roads and most forms of industrial scale logging. So the idea that the administration of the USDA has placed around their preferred alternative, which would be to roll back in its entirety, is that this should help with wildfire mitigation, that this should help with, right? This should help with active management. It's a lie. That's a red hair. Yes, that's true, a teeny bit. But that is not where this is coming from. Yes. They use that. They use that. They way overemphasize how much they care about that. True. But it sounds really good. And if you look at what you want everybody's house to burn down. Well, gosh, I don't want that. If you let us log the shit out of everything that's unlogged, you know? There's 193 million acres or so of national forest lands, right? Almost 100 million acres of those are wide open to whatever kind of active management of forests would like, whatever kind of wildfire prescriptions. Then you have the 44 million. It's 58 million if you include Colorado and Idaho. 58 million acres of national forest lands, which do fall underneath some kind of a rollless rule protection. But they did include exceptions for wildfire treatment. You can build new roads to battle a wildfire if the exceptions are needed. There are exceptions for wildlife habitat treatments to make sure to count for some form of active management needed. So there's ways around this. There's flexibility built into the rollless rule to account for these different things. And then there's 37 million or so that are protected by the Wilderness Act, which truly are off limits to those things. So the point being is that there is a lot of room for management of our forests. There's other challenges to getting that management, right? There's litigation. There's forest planning processes. But the rollless rule is not some kind of de facto wilderness that is keeping people out of these places. It is not keeping mining or development of that kind out. It is not keeping grazing off of these landscapes. There are even off-road vehicle use. Off-road vehicles are allowed in these places. Existing roads can exist in these places. So it's kind of a nice middle ground public land designation that for 25 years has kept these rollless cores intact. And I think a lot of people now really appreciate that. And that's why there's so many hundreds of thousands of people that have spoken out about it. And I expect now that the official ruling is out there. The draft environmental impact statement is out there. The public comment period is now officially open that we're going to see something similar again this time around. What that means then for the actual changes on the ground is that the forest service will have to review all the comments that come in over this 30-day period. They will have to assess the sentiment. They'll go through all these different things. And then some number of months down the road, they will release the final environmental impact statement and decision. Like I mentioned, they've said they fully intend to roll back in its entirety. And then what happens after that will be up to the next administration or whoever's appointing the forest director in the future. Besides all the stuff that they say they want, that they maybe want a teeny bit, what in your mind is the main thing they want? This is coming from someone, this is coming from some group. I know that the appetite to do rare earth and old growth in Tonga's national forest, our biggest national forest, is enormous, right? There's an enormous appetite for those things and those things are held back by the role of this rule. Like what other things do you feel are the ones that the people that are spending money on this and that are pushing this and that are coming up with these little fire mitigation schemes? What do they want? So the funny thing is that when you look at the timber value and the resource value in many of these places, it's actually not economically feasible to make a profit from going in there and extracting timber from a lot of these locations. They're high elevation, they're hard to get to, just building the roads in many cases and maintaining them would cost more than any kind of profit from the timber. So it's not really that. I just spoke with someone today. What is it? So the people I've spoken to really think it comes down to more, almost, I've heard it referred to as a religious thing, like ideological, ideologically opposed to this kind of regulation. They want to come in and move things back to state level, remove roadblocks to any kind of potential development or resource extraction opportunities. So that's what it comes down to. I've heard like the timber industry, supposedly, from what I've heard, the timber industry isn't asking for this. God, this is something that is coming, top down. It's philosophical. It's like ideological, yes. How would a country, like why would a country tie its hands behind its back when it comes to industrial might? You know, we might all be dead tomorrow. You know, I'll use everything up now. This, I think, I think the roadless rules, one of those sweet spots where they took into account the fact that you needed to have flexibility. And maybe, you know, in all honesty, they're likely our ways this rule could be improved. Still, right? Things are different now than they were 25 years ago when this was written. But this full-scale rollback seems like a short-sighted way of doing it. Yeah. It does-- yeah. When I sit and ask myself, if I was like, what do you fear most? Running out of roads or running out of places with no roads? Yeah. I'm like, man, I thought it threw long and hard. I just don't think we're going to run out of roads. 300 and-- I don't think sometimes down the road, I'm going to be like, man, whatever happened all of them roads. There's nowhere to drive. It's just, I don't foresee this issue. Yeah. Our unfragmented, you know, wild cores are just becoming increasingly more rare. And this is the kind of thing that they're not making any more of. So there's some valid keeping around. You know, you talk about when TR was doing all his stuff at the time, it was very radical. And now we look back and it's great. I looked back at the public comment when Clinton enacted this. And they loved it. At the time, it broke records for public comment. Like one and 1/2 million comments. And 95% of those were positive. It's just like, the through line is this is great. So if we start it-- oh, yeah. I mentioned the TR thing all the time. He was controversial at the time. He'd be regarded as a tree hug and lunatic now. And now everybody's like, TR, TR, go to the library. While simultaneously trying to dismantle his legacy. So yeah, if you have interest in sharing your perspective on this, the comment period is open till September 21st, around midnight. So going over to the federal register, that's where you can leave your comment. Back country 100s and anglers and other organizations have an easy action. You can go to their take action center. You can sign onto the form letter. But truly, if you want your voice to be heard, sharing an actually unique comment is going to get you the most traction. And not just doing the action email that sends to your elected officials, but actually going to the federal register, where the Forest Service is mandated to review every unique comment. So if you go and actually share a unique comment that shows, you know, not only that you understand the issue, but that you have a personal experience or connection or perspective on it, that's going to get a little bit more credence with those folks too. And again, maybe this administration is going to do what they wanna do from the get-go, and it doesn't matter when you say it all. Yeah. But down the line, this stuff will be useful for whatever's next. No, I'll go down there. All right, hit me with the tin wall, since this is puzzling to me. Yeah, so you guys are all familiar with the boundary waters. Fiasco this spring, they use the congressional review act to roll back that mineral withdrawal. Now just recently, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walls, signed this executive order. Keep put that in like idiot terms, please. Yeah, yeah. So there was a set of protections placed around the watershed around the boundary waters a few years ago that would keep certain types of mining from happening right around this incredibly popular, important wilderness area. So on the headwaters of the rivers that create the boundary waters area. It all came from this mine that's been proposed right on the upstream border of the boundary waters. The twin metals mine, like you said, just upstream of this watershed that flow through the boundary waters. So that's kind of what led to everything. And it's been years and years and years of back and forth and back and forth on this thing. So in 2023, I think it is the Biden administration put this mineral withdrawal in place which basically said you can't do this kind of mining in this place. And then this spring, there was this whole legislative battle that we're all familiar with that effectively removed that, opening the potential road for these types of mines to happen there again. So that's what led us to last week when the governor of Minnesota said not so fast, he signed this executive order that essentially put substantial roadblocks in the way for a mine. So it's not necessarily a 100% know it can't happen but there's a certain amount of like state and federal cooperation that typically has to occur for a mining project or any kind of - It would require a lot of state land permits too. - Yeah. So this EO that walled signs, it requires the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to not undertake any kind of environmental review or permit work associated with proposals like this kind of mining until litigation is completed. There's a whole set of litigation related to this going on right now. It would direct the DNR not to participate as a cooperating agency in any federal environmental review. It would not offer any new state leases for this kind of mining. It would require the DNR not to offer any new state surface leases for this kind of mining. It would also require them to start drafting legislative language prohibiting this kind of mining in this watershed as well. So spoke to some folks on the ground there in Minnesota about this basically asking you know, does this thing have legs? Will this actually stop this or is this kind of window dressing? And the cliff notes of what he shared was that this is a roadblock. This would expire 90 days after the new government governor takes office. So if a new governor comes into Minnesota here that has a different view on this, it would expire and this stuff would be gone. Yeah, that's like any executive order executive orders are generally much weaker than legislative action because they just get the next time a different person comes in with the same job title, they undo executive orders with other executive orders, yeah, which is how we wind up with some of these perpetual issues. Yes, like these issues that never die. I think the thinking or the hope though is that it's likely that the next governor there in Minnesota will be on board with this or close to it. And so this sets this sets it up easily for whoever's next to continue this and again, they can't stop federal leasing. They can't stop that from being from happening, but this certainly will prevent it from moving slow or quickly. This is going to be the opposite of lubricating the rails. This is going to slow down the process and hopefully there'll be other ways and other forms of protection that can make this more permanent down the line. So it's positive news if you care about the boundary waters, but it's not a permanent fix. This ain't going nowhere. Not going anywhere. We'll keep you posted though North Carolina. You want to talk to men in 84 first? Oh yeah, I'll do it real quick. We had a guest on some time ago Dan Gates came in and talked about the signature collecting phase of putting a codified right to hunt and fish vote to Colorado voters as November. Meaning on your ballot and they're trying to collect enough signatures to put on the ballot. Well, I'm doing a terrible job of this. There's a ballot initiative in Colorado called the men in 84. It would codify the right to hunt and fish in Colorado. In order to get it on the ballot, they needed a bunch of signatures. Dan Gates came up from Colorado and did the news show and talked about the signature gathering process. And we alerted Colorado voters where to go to sign to get it on the ballot. Gates has updated me that they're looking good. They're sitting pretty on signatures. This thing is headed to the ballot. We'll remind you before, but when you go down the vote, if you're in Colorado and you go down the vote this November, skip all the stuff. I don't care. Skip all the other stuff, like president, whatever. That won't be on there, but skip all the other stuff. Find Amendment 84 in vote in favor of Amendment 84's passage. This will be helpful to you. Like, these are widespread. I can't remember how many states now. 30 states, 20 some states have right to hunt and fish things. We're sitting in a state weirdly that does not. We should remedy that. But a problem I have with right to hunt to fish legislation is it's sometimes hard to see where the rubber meets the road. Meaning, you have this. What are those occasions when you're able to effectively sue the government for violating one's right to hunt and fish? It's like, I have yet to meet anyone that can come to me with an interesting list of ways in which the right to hunt and fish was weaponized against assaults on hunting and fishing rights. But here's an interesting one. Enter North Carolina. Here's an interesting case study on where a right to hunt and fish is actually proves to be useful. This story comes to us from Mike L. of North Carolina. And what he's calling attention to is a lawsuit filed in 2020 by the CCA of North Carolina, the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina. And through six years of litigation, a whole bunch of plaintiffs, including five former members of North Carolina's Marine Fisheries Commission, they were able to prove that by allowing the commission, by allowing North Carolina's coastal fisheries to degrade and deteriorate the state of North Carolina, violated the legal rights of North Carolinians to fish and harvest fish in the Atlantic. These rights that they infringed on are guaranteed to them by a constitutional right to hunt and fish. Fish and harvest wildlife. Exactly. You know, to be like, if you kill the wildlife off, you have taken away my right to harvest. Yep. Good Lord, they're finally here at long last after fighting and yelling and fighting some more. Clay Newcombe and First Light have done it. They have built a pair of work bibs together. Not just any work bibs. We're talking the bare grease bibs from Clay. Now I've watched Clay work long enough to know that he wasn't gonna put his name on a pair of hunting pants pretending to be work bibs and boy he did not. These are Clay's invention for things like breaking mules, rendering grease, kneeling in the dirt. I'm gonna use them all the time, trap and work and fix and stuff. It doesn't matter. If you want good, durable, comfortable bibs, these are your bibs made from toughstretch.cotton. They got brighter proof chaps that run from cuff to thigh. They got pockets damn near everywhere. Again, comfortable and durable. Put them on. You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck and they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meateaterstore.com. - And so ultimately what this comes down to is this tension between sound management, the public trust of marine and estuary resources and protecting that not only for the current but future generations as well, which is what this thing kind of stipulates. And they found at trial, including tons of expert testimony, previous current fisheries, the commission members as well as other states commission members, the state had failed to meet any of the standards set by themselves. The court cited undisputed evidence that none of North Carolina's 13 state managed coastal fish stocks is currently viable. So like they're over 13. And so the situation is it's really a critique of the commission structure, not necessarily the biologists or the fisherman attempting to steward the resource. And the way that This commission is structured and the results of the regulation they push down is there's this tension between commercial trawling and gill netting in the estuaries where these unhealthy fish populations typically spawn. The three legal grounds that this was litigated on is public trust doctrine and two provisions in the North Carolina Constitution, the right hunting fish and the duty to conserve lands and waters. This was the thing. They pointed to pretty regularly is that the state is violating the right and hunt to fish by removing all the fish that people that constituents could go on pursue. There's of those 13 we won't go into every single one but southern for lound or river herring blue crab spotted sea trout, red drum, hard clam. These are those 13 and none meets the state's definition of viability. Yes, the state's own definition of viability and there's kind of three buckets here. There's one red drum that has tight commercial, they have slot limits. There's no real commercial fishing for them and they're somewhat on the upswing. There's four that have no stock assessment at all. If they just don't, there's nothing to compare it to, you know, we took out a million whatever but out of how many out of a million out of two million out of five. And so because there's no data, the court pointed to the fact that you're not managing the fish at all, the lack of data points to a failure on your part to manage this resource. Sure. And those three, those four fish happen to be the preponderance of bycatch in these commercial fisheries. Got it. When a shrimp troller pulls up his net, they found typically anywhere between 20 and 30% of that catch is shrimp and the other 80 to 70% are yearling fish. That includes the, sorry, the sheep's head, the spotted sea trout and river herring. Okay. Can I tell you a metaphor? Yeah, please. I was in Belize one time and I was watching these guys check fish traps and they pull the fish trap up and they pull out of it, whatever snappers and grunts are big enough to market. You know, they do with everything that's in that trap. They carry a weed burn in torch on the boat with a propane tank. It's a wire mesh trap. They hold that trap up and bake every fish in it with a weed burn in torch because that's bait. And they throw it back overboard. Man. Yeah. I don't think that's happening here. No, no. I said, I said, it's a metaphor. Agreed. It's a metaphor. It's a bycatch metaphor. And so there's a lot of, a lot of nuance here between commercial and recreational fishing, but the crux of the issue is these commission structures. And what's interesting is in North Carolina, they have two commission structures. There's the WRC Wildlife Resource Commission that's inland game and fish. And then there's the DMF, the Division of Marine Fisheries. And basically WRC's crushing it. Like they're out there maintaining and stewarding the wildlife resources. They have 21 appointed members, half by the governor, half by legislature. They don't have certain industry or like requirements on who they are. They're just by statute. They say an experienced hunter, fisherman, farmer, biologist, who shall generally be informed on wildlife conservation restoration programs. You compare that to the, I'm sorry, the Marine Fisheries Commission. Those governor, all governor appointed three year terms, no limits, no confirmation. Two are active or retired commercial fresh fishermen. One is a seafood industry person, two are wrecked sport fishermen. One's a sport fishing industry person. One is a fishery scientist and two are general. They vote on the rules presented by the Division of Marine Fisheries, which are the biologists and whatnot. And basically, they get into blocks, they vote for whatever is good for their block. And there's no care for the resource. They just care about who's getting the fish this year. That seems to be the voting trend that this court case bore out. And so the courts recommendation are restructuring this commission, adding some sort of legislative oversight, adding a third party commission that's independent, and streamlining the process to align incentives for those commissioners and then allowing the DMF to do their job. When I reached out to the CCA, the people who brought this, they're currently, they won. They're in the remedy stage, but that's where they're at is deciding what the remedy is from the state for these plaintiffs. And everyone's kind of tight-lipped at this point, they don't want to impact the process. They don't want to muddy the water, but hopefully we'll get some sort of solid remedy for the resources a whole and we'll be able to talk to them about that. Is this going to end with the state like cutting a big check to somebody? I don't know. I think it's going to end with a restructuring of the commission. And just like, sorry, this is the new way we're going to try it. That's what I imagine. But, you know, we asked a question earlier, it's like it's a remedy play, not a money play. I think so. Because they didn't want to be in a class action lawsuit, I guess, between all people that hold, oh, I'm on the hook right now to make it to get money from coast to Del Marr, the sunglass company. I'm part of a class action lawsuit without even knowing it. I just got charged. I was charged for repair. Next time you see me in Randall, we have a gold tee. I just got paid in a class action lawsuit. My first one. How much is it? Four digits. $2.71. There's a big anti-trust lawsuit against a bunch of colleges and universities and how they administered and offered financial aid. So there's a big lawsuit against like, individually, Chicago, Colombia, all these. And it was like a four year thing every six months. I go, oh, yeah, what's happening with that and I Google what's happening with it? Nothing. And then one day I just saw my phone, ding, something's getting in there. I'm going to be, I'm probably going to make three, four bucks on this coast of deal. Unless I choose to withdraw my name, which is very complicated. They're like, you're in it. And if you want out of it, it's a bitch. But the one I'm excited about where it is, a big deal is I'm in a class action lawsuit against the AI company andthropic for many of my book titles. So there's this whole class action lawsuit where they were stealing from writers to train AI models. And you can go into this big database and my name's in there like eight times for books. Nice. Nice. And it's like real money. It's real money. I'm also in a class action lawsuit against NBA league pass. I get emails about that one almost every day, like the last, I'm a big class action guy now. I'm a lot of those how much you're staying to make there? I don't know, but I have I'm on a roll right now. That was inspiring. I'm one you've got four digits. That's inspiring low, low, low for this, this is a, this is a drop of deal. This could wind up being like, like, I think it could wind up being like 10, 12 grand. They're. Yeah. You going to give that to land access initiative? No, man. A lot of it. So a lot of it is a lot of it's mediator books, but some of my personal stuff is in there too. So stay tuned. Anyway, is that, are you wrapping around? Yeah, it's just like what kind of door does this open, you know, I could see. I could see it getting real squarely, real fast as people compete. Like, you know, you took, I don't have any deer here now and it's because of the commission. They screwed me. And it'll just be really interesting. I think it's generally positive. You should go vote for your constitutional right to hunt and fish. And who knows where to go? Is it, I wonder if it's going to make it more difficult to get that, you know, passed together in the future in other states because now there's a constitutional right has teeth. Now will a state like Montana be more worried or somewhere else about the possible ramifications? Yeah, I don't want to get into details on it, but when they tried my understanding, which is like fresh, new, I didn't ever heard this. It was tried in the past in Montana. You know the term like strange bedfellows? What's the opposite? A husband and a wife, a man have strange enemies. I was, it was pointed out to me that there was some strange enemies to the right to hunt and fish, not who you'd think would oppose it. And it could be because stuff like this where people are like, man, this is going to turn into a big old head ache for me, right? How do you think it could be? Like these commissioners could be like, or whatever, they could be like, oh, damn, I knew this was going to happen. This is going to come around and bite me in the ass. And here they are. I mean, it'll be interesting. Tough titties. That's what I say. Drones. Yeah. Body. Drones continue to hit the show. Save the best for last. Drones continue to hit the new Jersey headlines. That's a great head like that. Not for more nighttime creepy light flights, you may remember back in 2024, which led to thousands of tips to law enforcement and temporary flight bands by the FAA. Jersey coastal town officials are reminded anglers that it is illegal to knowingly or intentionally use an unmanned aircraft system or a drone to take or assist in the taking of wildlife. Her recent new Jersey statute of, well, sorry, what are you reading from right now? I typed this up last night. You're reading, this is your own thing. Yeah, I'm trying not to read the headline that has the word headline. Yeah, you could put this in a newspaper dude, you could find a newspaper, I'd be running it already. I wouldn't even read the rest of it. But go on. We should start a website. It's called like the Mediter.com where we could publish just a new story. Yeah, all right. Yeah, first time are here. I've got to figure out how many of this is phenomenal. Go on. You're good. Per the recent New Jersey statute offenders could be slapped with up to six months in jail and up to a thousand dollar fine vomit for what for intentionally Trying to catch fish with a drone Specifically sharks in this case Six months in jail. Mm-hmm. What are you in for? Drones fishing. Drones fishing. Yeah ocean county towns of Manteloking and Bayhead have recently been cracking down on anglers who are using drones to carry and drop baited hooks lines or chum off public beaches into the surf Specifically for shark fishing In the last decade drone fishing for sharks has become very popular on summer night because every cast is right where you want it Every cast is perfect and way out there way out. Yeah, there's a Montana sheltered Montana boy fly fisherman. This is very new to me drone fish. I knew it was a thing, but I really looked into it You're not going to have a drone drop your fly here and there I can cast better than a drone I think Where am I It's very popular and for good reason this new techy tactic allows anglers to fly or cast their baited lines hundreds of yards out to see Drop their baits beyond the break fly their drones back then wait for a strike. It's highly effective. Mm-hmm as we were just And as shark sightings have increased in recent years Especially this summer the draw from anglers to hit the shores to fish for sharks has also increased But many beach goers have expressed their opinions that the practice may be creating a jaws-like situation that puts swimmers at risk Well, it just bands swimming Good luck. I also think if you can get the baits out further With your drones. That's probably better Is like you're getting the bait out yonder. Mm-hmm. Okay. Fine. I'll throw my bait like right there Not on the bait, but supposedly there's been some chum in action going. That's maybe that feels a little crazy Yeah, that might drift some that feels a little out in there 30 pounds of chum. That feels a little nutty. I like it Most common. Yeah, the most common species target in area are brown sharks sand bar sharks sand tiger sharks and spinner sharks But the concerns coming from law enforcement and beach goers are the large apex predator like Apex predators like tiger sharks and bull sharks that are being lured in by anglers They're worried that people could be mistaken for chum. Mm-hmm Especially small children. I Would say if I'd written I'd be like the chumps Chump can be mistaken for chump Try that masterclass on headlamps. Yeah, goodness according to the University of Florida International Shark Attack file Dating back to the 1800s. There have been 15 recorded attacks along the Jersey shore including the 1916 attack in the model on creek That was said to be the inspiration for the movie jobs. Was he drone fishing? I doubt it. No There have been many attacks and they're excuse me there have not been any attacks in 2026 The last known attack in the area was May 2023 So these concerns of luring sharks closer to the shoreline are just out of precaution Yeah, it's a solution looking for a problem. Mm-hmm Just just plenty of there's plenty of gripes you could have the drone fishing and I do think that dropping chum on a swim beach is Potentially of poor taste. Yeah, and they're doing it at night when folks aren't typically swimming Yeah, unless you're but the big Our new would be if you're getting it out hundreds of yards and you say they hey Don't use a drone doesn't that same guy then go down with the same bait and complicate 50 yards out any Wades out to his waist and dumps a bucket of chum and then wades back Yeah, I mean like like I just confused about Is this coming from hysterical beach goers who don't really know what they're talking about or is this coming from an informed perspective? A little bit of both I believe a lot of concern beach goers and I think there's some science behind it too, you know It's extra sharks are real shark anglers wanting to do this though Like a good guy that actually wants to cast and do some real fishing. This isn't gonna appeal to that No, I think it's a big thing. Yeah, there's a dude who wants drag bagel horse about yeah Yeah, I saw one shark shark earlier this year I think from Florida that was just a giant and what they'd done was Take a huge bait out deep with a drone drop it and then you're sitting on shore waiting for them. Mm-hmm long-drop boys And then there's also the drone thing just using drones to find bait balls. Yeah Drones dude I like I hate them. I'm like them for the military. I hate them They're getting to the point in the white tail world that people are installing drone detectors on their properties good Because they're worried about people snooping on their property with drones because the drone uses become so you think what it's not I'm the hire some Ukrainians man to come down take care of that drone business man I'm with you. Wait. I'm not sure It's not like drone jammers and stuff that anybody could buy. I had a drone hovering over my house there I talked about this over my house my wife ran the house is drone right over the house I was gonna shoot it but it's already gone and some guys like you technically not allowed to shoot it Yeah, a guy wrote in like a correction many I would love to go to a judge and be like Guilty I shot a drone 50 feet over my house. What are you gonna shoot it shotgun T.S. Well, that's one of the that's one of the In the guilty is charged in the corner crossing stuff that was happening in Montana a couple months ago with the state coming out and Making a case for corner crossing being illegal one of the things that they mentioned was That that sort of the the sanctity of one's air space Is is tied to this drone issue, right? There's some precedent, right? Yeah, they determine some Airspace and so they're saying like yeah, well if corner crossings legal then anybody could fly their drone into your backyard And super yeah, but I'm like I'm not always that concerned with being consistent. I tell it's my kids all time. Oh, yeah What's not fair? Okay I dove into the local New Jersey red at hole and there've been many There's not a bar. It's sticky. There've been many concerns from recreational anglers who are worried about the growing popularity of shark fishing in the area From those who are not practicing ethical catch and release habits As stated in the New Jersey Fish and Wildlife Marine Digest if a shark is caught but not kept it must be released immediately But unfortunately a few bad apples have chosen fame over ethics and are dragging sharks too far onto the beach to pose for photos before releasing the sharks and Dangering the sharks hell of course It's a drone swamp. Well, making it easier. Mm-hmm. It's not just drone anglers doing this Anglers should know how to catch handle and release fish in an ethical manner and have the right equipment to quickly release sharks back in the water Using a drone to assist in fishing has been explicitly banned in Hawaii, Texas, Michigan Kentucky, North Carolina, Alaska and of course New Jersey. What? Yeah, Texas was kind of surprised Many of these state regulations don't that Texas man. They don't like that word one bit bam Many of these states include Texas are out on bands. They referenced the 1971 Federal Airborne Hunting Act That banned shooting killing or harassing animals or birds from an aircraft But as with many written and unwritten drone laws The evolution of regulating this new technology is slowly catching up But you should always check with your local state wildlife agencies to get the most up-to-date local regulations before fishing with drones over any body of water Do you know that song his name is Rick? He's got the itch Sounds like a commercial. No, it's Rick our camera guy likes flying his drone Oh, and he's like he's like he's like tries to make up reasons to fly it Sure, and then we'll sing the song. His name is Rick. He's got the itch. He's a drone enthusiast. Mm-hmm. It looks fun as hell There's an old man in my neighborhood who fishing with a drone flies a model airplane to round that brings me joy When I see him at the park with model airplane a drone doesn't bring me joy in the end of the sound You just hear that sounding. You know what's coming your way. I hate him. I hate him. It's like I just hate him Yeah, those people are lucky. I'm not like the Emperor For many reasons I would give chain lightning. I would take everyone's drone and give it to the military I think the military should have more drones. They know what to do with I got a buddy who fishes drone fishes, but he's got a little boat Yeah, I remember seeing those like that. That's cute and the old like the old Caballus catalog or the old Bass Pro catalog I've ever seen a little boat with the pincher on the back for your line, and I always thought Man catch some bigger catfish if I had that back. Yeah, there's something cute about that. Yeah, so boat drones good Flying drone. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying I just And and that's that's a great report. You're not done. Are you? Yeah, that's it. Oh No, it takes it to finish just on time. It's got like it's got the we it's got the wheels turned a big time, but Like outside of any individual issue is someone say well, what about recovering? You wound a deer in the drone helps you recover I'm like, that's really great, man, because no one like no one wants to lose deer No one wants to do it to go away. He's no one wants a hundred to have to live with not be able to find deer, but just So there I like, okay, I have some sympathy there. Well, what about this or what about that? I'm like, okay, I have some sympathy there but it's mean generally my general attitude toward them is I just hate them except for the military. I think they should have a boatload of them. Yeah, I think restrictions are going to get tighter and tighter as the years go on. Well, they're just becoming more and more popular cheaper, easier to use. It's so invasive. Yeah. It's like having an anal probe. But in the air, but in the air, over you, but my body registers it the same. Yes, it can relate to that. Not a laugh, man. All right. Thanks for listening to the news. So that's great report. This come talent right here. Yeah. I'd be careful. So tell us. What's coming unavailable? You should have bombed. If you come on and just bombed. Right. And you're like, well, I guess I'm out for September. Let's try again. Yeah, January. Let me try again. I might be able to do a good new story in January, but I need some time to reflect on how bad I bombed with September coming on. All right. Thanks for listening to the new show. Uh, find us next week. This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human.