Joe Rogan and Steven Rinella debate wildlife management, like Montana’s $400K bighorn sheep tag auctions or a $350K rhino hunt for conservation, clashing with PETA’s emotional opposition. Rinella explains invasive wild pigs’ ecological damage, contrasting it with fair-chase ethics, while Rogan praises MeatEater’s raw butchering education—even head cheese and pork rinds. They mock fringe theories (Neanderthals as gorilla-like prey) and critique power-corrupted leaders like Obama or Bloomberg, who removed Central Park’s carriages. Hunting’s thrill and meat’s natural variability, from 20-year-old moose to freezer-aged elk, underscore its role in sustainability and culture, leaving Rogan teasing "bringing home the bacon" with future guests. [Automatically generated summary]
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As much as there's difference, they recognize them all as one species.
There's some old world, like in Africa there's some other members of the pig family, and javelina or not, javelina are a peccary, so like when you hear javelina or people talk about pigs in Arizona, they're often talking about a peccary.
But I don't know, those boys in Russia that were taking silver foxes and just like selecting for behavior and stuff, they could move those things so fast.
At a point in time, because I've always kind of followed this a little bit, and I've written about, I learned a lot about dogs.
I probably mentioned this to you before.
I wrote a piece about eating dogs in Vietnam, and so I had this kind of little summation in this article about the history of dogs.
And it went through the fact-checking process at Outside Magazine, which is very rigorous.
Like, if you say, my mom is my mom, they'll call your mom.
And, like, make sure it's your mom.
And I had all these things that I kind of, like, assumed were just true, you know?
And this fact-checker's like, that's, in fact, not true.
So I had to relearn my understanding of dogs.
And at the time, they were saying, oh, you know, it seems that dogs originated in China.
And, you know, like the oldest trace of dogs is there.
Since then, I feel like I've read that, you know, they definitely, the first Americans definitely brought, were traveling with dogs, brought them down in the new world.
But here there seems to have been some intro aggression from the gray wolf.
So they picked up some other characteristics from other things along the way.
Even though the guys that came through the Bering Land Bridge were not packing with them a dog that looked wolf-like.
They were probably packing with them a dog that was decidedly domestic dog-like.
It had already gone through some transformations.
They weren't just traveling with wolf dogs.
They were traveling with a dog that had been under selective pressure for 15,000 years.
Because I remember one time saying, oh, the domestic dog seems to go back 30,000 years.
The domestic dog seems to go back 50,000 years.
But people arrived here, it was debated, but sometime between maybe 15,000-20,000 years ago.
And when they showed up, they had a dog that was not a wolf.
But then there was introgression from wolves.
But this seems to be a really hot topic and people are always digging into this because genetics is changing everything we understand.
Things that we used to think were related are not related.
Things we think were not related are in fact related.
The whole mule deer thing, that mule deer seem to be a very new species since the Pleistocene.
I like mule deer a lot too, and it seems like, I mean, despite a lot of people's best efforts to prevent it from happening, it seems like mule deer are vulnerable.
Yeah, and some things are hard to explain, you know.
But whitetails, they've always lived in the southeast.
And whitetails seem to periodically expand out and then for climatic reasons retract.
But they kind of keep that ancestral homeland.
I'm talking in very long term, that ancestral homeland in the southeast.
But at one time, whitetails made it all the way across the country.
And some climatic conditions or something happened and the population retracted, but it left this remnant population in California on the Pacific Coast.
And then there was a massive genetic barrier, you know, like if you took a bunch of dogs and separated them and put, you know, some dogs in South America and some dogs in North America and came back and checked on them in a long time, they're going to have gone in a little different direction.
And that became the black tail.
And then at a time, the blacktail seems to have extended its range eastward.
The white-tailed deer extended its range back westward, and there was a hybridization event where male blacktails were breeding with female whitetails and producing this hybrid mule deer.
There was a habitat retraction again, and blacktails retracted back to the coast, and whitetails retracted back the other way, and you had to spawn this thing we call mule deer.
Like, how do they know that this- There was all this guy, Valerius Geist, who's like the most interesting biologist- He's a guy out of Calgary.
And Valerius Geist has kind of like done so much work on Big Game.
He's kind of like the mule.
He's like, people are like, oh, he's the mule deer guy.
He's the elk guy.
He's the buffalo guy.
And he came up with a lot of interesting theories.
Like some stuff we talked about in the past where Valerius Geist came up with this idea that what happens to species when they colonize land that had been vacated by glaciers?
You know, and there's like certain things that go on.
And he was into founder effect, you know, where...
Imagine, like, one way we got different as people is imagine that just, like, four people struck off, you know, across the oceans in a homemade craft and landed there, and you had a male and a female, and they spawn a new, you know, they successfully breed and create a new population, but let's say they both just happen to be 6'7", you know, and 300 pounds, you have, like, this thing like the founder effect where...
A small little population can carry traits and characteristics that are maybe not totally, not a complete example of where they came from.
And so you have like a radical deviation when they spread out.
And it would be that, if you look, like take the extreme like whitetails, like the biggest, like guys dream of going to Alberta to hunt whitetails because whitetails are huge.
They say that mule deer don't do that quite as much.
You know, you get some really big mule deer in other areas.
They're not as tied to it, but just like a general principle.
And what they speculate it has to do with is heat retention.
So you have more, like, you weigh more than me.
I have more surface area per unit of mass than you have.
So if you're a really big deer, and if you're in the north, the thing you're trying to do is retain body heat.
And the animals, like people, shed body heat by just exposing parts.
Like when deer lay down, they lay down with their legs tucked in them.
Because you look on the inside of a deer's leg, very thin hair, very thin hair under the tail, right?
And when they're laying down, if it's cold, they're protecting those areas that have thin hair.
So a big animal has less surface area, so he's less capable of shedding heat and more capable of retaining heat.
A small, wiry animal has greater surface there and he's able to shed heat.
So one of the things you look at mule deer, like mule deer further south will have, tend to have bigger ears because a great way to shed heat is through your ears.
So they'll have thinner hair on their ears, bigger ears.
If you think about a radical version of it, just imagine...
Like the woolly mammoth.
The woolly mammoth is more closely related to the African elephant than he is to the Macedon.
In North America, at the tail end of the Pleistocene, you had Mammoths and mastodons.
And mammoths were not very close related to mastodons.
They're pretty close related to African elephants.
Mammoths live in the north.
They have essentially no ear.
They have just a very small ear.
You look at African elephants have those giant freaking ears because they can funnel a lot of blood through those ears and shed a lot of heat.
It's like you shed a lot of heat through your fingers and your ears, how they get so cold so fast because you push a lot of blood into those areas and it's cooling off in the air.
So that's one reason, that's like a theory of, if it is, I think it might be the Bergman principle.
Bergman's rule.
Bergman's rule.
Nice word.
Bergman's rule has one explanation for it.
I don't know if you'd ever really know the absolute truth, but an explanation for it is heat retention and heat dissipation.
So the stuff that's on the northern extreme of its range, where it's butting up against, like the thing that puts the throttle on its existence, is cold.
He will tend to get bigger.
In mammals, he'll tend to get bigger.
But then there's all these other deviations, like how you get these huge reptiles on islands.
And then on islands, you tend to have dwarfing, like that Wrangel Island off Siberia had these little mini mammoths.
So there's all these other factors.
I don't even know why it's like that with islands, but I know with latitude that you get that.
And I think I even read from, maybe it was Valerius Geist, I was writing about how mule deer seem to not be quite as...
They seem to defy Bergman's rule a little bit more than some other species do.
Yeah, those things get huge and other things get small.
You know another weird thing about mule deer, and this kind of fits here because we're in California.
Obviously, I-5.
So for...
Black-tailed deer are very, very similar to mule deer.
Columbia black-tailed.
So in California, you have Columbia black-tailed.
Washington, Oregon, you have Columbia black-tailed.
Eventually, you get up to the north of just north.
On the coast, you get to the B.C., Alaska border, and then you start calling them sick of black-tailed.
Sick of black-tails, man, you look at them, it's like they almost look like a white-tailed, but they're a black-tailed deer.
The Columbia black-tailed resembles much more a mule deer.
For record-keeping purposes, the divider between the range of the Columbia mule deer and I'm sorry, the divider between the range of the Colombian blacktail and the mule deer is I-5.
So if that sumbitch jumps the road, he is, for record-keeping purposes...
He goes from being a Columbia blacktail to a mule deer.
So you look like all the record book Columbia blacktails are shot along the left side of I-5 on a northward direction because they're much bigger than anywhere else.
But they've got to divide it somewhere, so they divide it like that.
So in one thing's life, he could jump back and forth.
They're not even recognized as distinct.
If you look at the Latin name for them, the scientific name for them, they're Taxonomists don't recognize the difference, but we all do.
You look at me like, that's not a freaking mule deer, man.
I can tell by looking, but it's just these morphological differences.
These things you see, but they're not really betrayed in the genetics.
I'm glad you're on this week because this is a week that's pretty controversial in the news, this story about this black rhino that they auctioned off a hunt for.
And what they're saying is that this rhino had to go anyway because this rhino was an old non-breeder and he was very aggressive and he was trying to kill the younger males.
And because it's an extinct or because it's an endangered species, this was an animal that they were going to have to do something about anyway.
Let's come back around that, but I want to talk for a minute about the...
The rhino thing...
There are versions of that here, and we can talk about...
I can talk in a much more educated way or in a much more knowledgeable fashion about versions of that that occur here in the U.S. But, like, I've never been to Africa.
I haven't hunted in Africa.
I have ill-informed opinions about what goes on in Africa, but I recognize when it comes to stuff like this, it's...
There are so many contradictions that are hard to deal with, and it's really difficult for people to get their heads wrapped around why a guy...
Not knowing the person, I can't say that the person is saying who's like, oh, I would just as happily give you the money to help save rhinos.
But if this one has to go anyways, I suppose I'll come and get it.
We abide by the basic notion, this is like generally true in the U.S., that wildlife belongs to people.
So, if you have, let's take an imaginary elk, and this imaginary elk is on Yellowstone National Park.
And one day, the elk jumps a fence and lands on National Forest in Montana.
And he jumps another fence and he's on State Forest in Montana.
And he jumps another fence and he's on a big ranch in Montana.
Throughout that animal's day, he's always belonged to the people.
When he's in Montana, he's belonged to the state of Montana who's in charge for his management.
So we have this idea.
In a rough sense, we have this idea that we maintain here that wildlife is held in the public trust.
An individual can control Access to his lands for hunting, but the animal belongs to the state.
You don't get to make decisions necessarily about the things that are on your property.
And that's been something that Americans, and particularly American hunters, have always been proud of.
We have this North American model of wildlife conservation we always talk about, which is this idea of public trust wildlife, and that we manage it in long-term things because people have a vested interest in having more and more animals around for whatever purpose, viewing, hunting, etc., One of the things they do, though, and so you take an animal like the bighorn sheep, and the bighorn sheep at a time was pretty nearly wiped out.
I mean, they were hurting.
They were never hurting as bad as black rhinos are, but they were hurting really bad.
And as we got them restored, we started having limited numbers of tags.
So you might have a mountain range, and every year they determine that we can kill one sheep out of that range.
And people will, and I do this every year, people will apply for a lottery that's conducted by the state.
And you put your name in the hat, you pay a fee, They, you know, put all the names in there, draw one out, and be like, Dave draws a tag.
And this generates a whole bunch of money, and they use it for tranquilizing sheep that you can helicopter them to new areas and restore the species.
And all the funding comes from this kind of stuff.
One thing they realized a great way to make money is if you can get that up, let's say you can kill five out of that mountain range, they might wind up going, we're going to do, you know, we'll do four through the lottery, which is for everyone, like the common man's pool, but we're going to take one and auction it off.
Every year the one, the Bighorn sheep tag they auctioned in Montana, it goes for $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 every year.
I think recently it went for $380,000 or $400,000.
I mean, it's always up there.
I don't think it's broken a half million, but it goes up because if you go out in Montana and you go hunt six, if you go hunt the Missouri Breaks, All the record book bighorns come out of there.
The biggest bighorns, the biggest Rocky Mountain bighorns come out of the break.
So guys will pay a ton for what they call the governor's tag in Montana.
And it raises a ton of money.
And it does a ton of good.
But some people feel...
I see both sides of this argument.
Some people feel like that bit of money is not worth the damage you're doing by upsetting...
This idea of democratically owned and administered wildlife.
Like, most guys will put in their entire life for a bighorn sheep tag, and they'll pay the fee every year, and they have no chance.
I've been putting in for that tag for 14 years.
I've accumulated...
They started a bonus point system 12 years ago, and a bonus point system means that every year you put in, the next year you get a...
Every year you put in without being successful, you get a point, and they square your points.
So next year, my name will go in the hat 144 times.
If you did it for your first year, your name will go in the hat one time.
Even with my name in the hat 144 times, I don't think I'm even up to having a 1% chance of drawing a bighorn sheep tag.
Meanwhile, a guy can come in and he makes a bunch of money.
One guy that buys it lately made a lot of money selling sandwiches.
He comes in and he's like, I'll be buying one of those and I'll buy it next year.
And people are like, oh, that money is so useful.
And it is.
Other people are like, dude, this is not the country we live in because we're still kind of hurting from the idea of where we came from in Europe, which is like the Robin Hood model.
And he used to, I mean, even at the time when our ancestors were like first coming over, you know, they could kill you for hunting.
They could kill you for hunting.
I'm like, you had to be rich to hunt.
So when guys like, you think of like the story of Daniel Boone, man, he came out and he's like, geez, this whole, you know, his relatives came from England.
He comes over here.
He's like, man, this whole freaking country, I go hunt wherever I want.
So people really fell in love with that idea of freedom and, you know, and that you could kind of roam around and the animals were there free for the taking.
And now we're a little bit upsetting this model, but other people who are on the other side of this say that, yeah, but the money is so helpful.
And if it wasn't for big chunks of money like that, we wouldn't have recovered the bighorn sheep as effectively as we've recovered the bighorn sheep.
I... And, man, I see, like, it tears me up because, like, everything in life, it's so complicated.
I see both sides of it.
Like, I love our system.
I love the idea that wildlife is public trust.
And I think that...
There's no other way to explain the success of the richness of animals and the richness of wilderness habitats we have in this country when you look at how many people live here, how wealthy we are, all the technology.
Some of the other countries that would be sitting where we're at have destroyed their wildlife.
But we have...
A very, in place, like a very intact system.
And we've done a fantastic job.
And I think that one of the ways to explain the fantastic job we've done is that we've really held true to this idea that wildlife belongs to us.
And when you do damage to it, you're doing damage to this idea of, you know, an American treasure.
You're damaging other people's interests, you know.
Um...
So yeah, man, it's complicated.
So that's my long way of answering the rhino thing.
I bet you anything it is extremely complicated and that there's emotion battling logic.
I went the other day, I mean, just like three days ago, I saw the act I went to see the current head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service speak about some issues that we'll be facing this year.
And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting really involved in the rhino trade.
When they talk about all the money they're spending, they're spending money on enforcement, they're spending money on trying to battle the source, that you might somehow convince people that they don't want it.
All the things you would do.
I remember thinking about the millions and millions of dollars they're talking about throwing around.
I remember being like, Too bad you can't just go find any guy who wants to go get one.
You'd give him more money than he's ever going to make hunting him.
No, I know, but I remember just thinking, if those guys could only know the amount of...
Because you know they're not.
No matter what, that business, the guys that are actually out there with firearms, you can imagine, the guy that's out on the ground, Hunting rhinos, being chased by people who have pretty much a license to, in some cases, kill them.
Like, I don't think that guy is a rich man.
He's making someone wealthy, but there's no way that guy is rich.
When you look at a rhino, to me, I mean, it's one of the closest things when you look like a Triceratops or a Stegosaurus or something like that, and you look at a rhino, it's like one of the closest things to that ancient time.
You look at this big, fucking, giant, armored animal.
It's a strange, strange animal.
You know, and the idea that people are killing it to make their dick hard is just so bizarre and...
Isn't it amazing in that way that there's stuff now that I'd be like, no, dude, this really does work to the point where it could cause trouble for you.
That the aphrodisiac market for men would, you know...
The dick-hardening market for men would evaporate now that there are pharmaceuticals that are specifically tailored for that and are clinically proven to work.
The part I do not see, though, for me, is I don't...
I would never...
I don't have that desire.
To hunt one of those.
But so much of that kind of thing is, and it's hard for people that don't hunt to understand, so much of that kind of stuff comes from context.
You develop over time a deep context with an animal, and for me that familiarity and the hours you spend, the hours you log watching it, understanding it, reading about it, studying it, for me develops into something that produces a great desire to hunt the animal once I get to know it.
An animal that I don't know well I don't have that much desire to hunt for it.
But when I watch them and watch them and watch them, like bighorn sheep, when I moved to Montana, when I was born in Michigan, I didn't go out there being like, man, I cannot wait to hunt bighorn sheep.
But after spending years and years and years out glassing for deer, glassing for elk, glassing for bears, I'm like, bighorn, bighorn, bighorn.
And I really got to where I loved to watch bighorns.
I liked everything about bighorns.
And in time, I was like, man, I would someday love to have an opportunity to go hunt a bighorn.
And it was born from that.
So when I say that I have no desire to hunt a rhino, it would be to me like...
Hunting Martians.
I just don't have any familiarity with it.
Culturally, I haven't read about it my whole life.
When I go and look at calendars, hunters love wildlife calendars, and it's all the stuff we like to hunt.
You don't grow up looking at the rhino page on a hunting calendar.
I just have no context with it.
And this gentleman that bought this thing, I don't know.
And he's got a private security detail following around all the time now.
He's giving this interview with CNN. He's talking about the people who have threatened his kids because he has people threatening to kill him right now that I have to talk to the FBI and have my private security details.
Keep my children from being skinned alive and shot at.
A little hyperbole.
A lot of people are just talking shit.
I'm not going to kill your fucking kids, man.
They're not murderers.
But people get angry when they hear about someone hunting something as a trophy.
For me to go hunt something, I also have to know that it's sound, that it's in a safe position.
And one nice thing about living in the U.S., I mean, there's some exceptions to this, but generally in the U.S., if you want to be ethical about your hunting practices in the U.S., you can generally look to the guidance of your state fish and game agency.
I mean, a state fish and game agency can't get away with, I mean, theoretically can't get away with and Practically can't get away with running a species into the ground.
It would be big trouble for them.
So generally, if you're looking and you realize that there's a population of bighorns and there's a hunting season for them right now, it's...
It's okay.
I mean, it really is okay.
If they're finding a decline in that thing, they're going to curb it or cut it out all together and wait until it's growing again.
And then you can also look at their long-term goal of where they want animals, how many animals they think the area can support.
So it's easy in the U.S. because this stuff is watched so much.
Obviously, again, coming from a guy who doesn't spend any time in Africa, I know that in Africa, money talks in a way that it doesn't necessarily hear when it comes to small issues like wildlife.
You can buy your way into things that maybe you don't have any real ethical business.
Doing, you know.
In the U.S., it's just easier to kind of, there's a lot more information at our fingertips.
So for me, when I go hunting, I can really kind of read up and understand a lot about what I'm going after, where it's at, what the management goals are, what risks the animal has.
Is hunting it, you know, productive and helpful right now?
Well, there's a state, so you have U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a federal thing, and so they have a hand in managing migratory waterfowl, but most things are managed by, so every state has a, you know, you kind of like, just in general terms, you'd call them fishing game, but it's like, in Michigan, it's the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
In Montana, it's Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.
But just as a euphemism versus fishing game.
So, you know, every state, the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York, so every state has a different name, but it's a state department that sets hunting and fishing regulations.
And on these state departments would be big boards, and the people that set it will be biologists, various figures, different stakeholders.
So you'd have, like, representatives from the hunting community, representatives who are outside of the hunting community, We'll all come together and come to some level of cohesion and some level of, you know, they'll find a happy middle ground when they set their quotas.
And they often, I mean, they meet every year to determine what can be done and not done.
And they can control harvest a number of ways by issuing tags, shortening seasons, lengthening seasons.
You can, if you want to slow down a harvest, you might move the season away from the rut.
You know, if you want to pick up a harvest, kill females.
You know, if you want to bring a population down because of various factors like agricultural interests, auto insurers, you know, generally want deer numbers lower.
Agricultural interests generally want deer numbers lower.
Landscape people often want deer numbers lower.
So to kind of factor like their concerns and you got the concerns of people who want, hunters want more deer.
They want to see more deer around.
And you figure all this out and there's all these management tools to try to find a way, you know, to tweak things.
Another thing is predator control.
If you have a population that's really hurting, you go in there and do predator control in that area, and sometimes you can bring some animals back from the brink.
It's possible to lose isolated populations.
It's possible to have a mountain range, and you spend a few hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, whatever, moving some bighorns in there, and you find that you're just getting hammered by lions, and you're going to lose all the sheep and lose your whole investment.
You might go in there and hit those lions a little bit, save them, so...
There's so many tools at their disposal.
In general, there are exceptions.
In general, I think that...
I'm always amazed at how well the state fish and game agencies do.
The other thing about them is they don't get a lot of hard funding.
There's not many agencies that get so much of their funding...
From license sales.
So firearms taxes.
That's why there's a lot of conservation money out there right now because the gun businesses have been blowing up.
As people feel that their gun rights are under attack, they've been buying so many firearms, it puts money in the Pittman Robertson, I think it's called.
That goes to conservation stuff.
There's excise taxes on firearms, excise taxes on ammunition, excise taxes on sporting goods, all your license fees.
Every guy who ever hunts ducks or migratory birds has to buy a federal waterfowl stamp, state waterfowl stamp.
All this money plows in and creates money for conservation work, research.
And so these agencies are, in large measure, some more than others, are self-sustaining.
That's one of the funny things.
I know that you get annoyed by PETA as much as I do.
It's like, they're not spending the money on doing the stuff that hunters are.
Like, hunters are bankrolling so much of wildlife research and wildlife conservation.
And it's not just stuff that benefits the animals we're after, you know?
My problem with groups like PETA or the Animal Liberation Organization, the people that want to fucking save lobsters and rescue them from restaurants and throw them back into the ocean...
There's a lot of knee-jerk reactionary nonsense that's not based on the actual science of understanding the population of these animals.
That's what drives me crazy.
When people start getting angry at people hunting wolves, like this is a perfect example.
They've opened up wolf season now in a bunch of different places.
And the reason being is that people's livestock are getting decimated.
Elk populations are getting destroyed.
I mean, they have to move in to control it, but to a lot of animal rights people, all they see is bloodthirsty maniacs that want to kill beautiful wolves.
And they don't understand that, first of all, A, these wolves have been reintroduced to a lot of these areas, and then B, like, we're supposed to be the stewards of the land.
We're supposed to be the intelligent people that understand the numbers, and something has to be done about it.
This isn't something that people have decided, I'd like to kill a wolf, yeah, let's make it legal.
They're going, hey, we've got an issue.
What are you going to do?
Let's all meet.
Let's compare data.
Let's see what we got and see what we're going to do here.
Yeah, you get this idea like, oh, they've just one day decided to go and do it.
And I'm sure you have, on one level, you have individuals who are absolutely like, a guy opens up his regulation book.
He's like, well, I can buy a wolf tag this year.
That individual does not really need here.
That individual does not really need to understand.
It's nice if he does, but he doesn't need to understand the full picture because that individual is a tool.
Being used by managing agencies.
They're like, we need to get rid of some wolves.
We could bring back the days where we have like, you know, government agents going out and gunning for them, or we could open it up and have people actually pay money to go out and have the opportunity to try to do what we need to do anyways, you know.
So the guy that goes out, I can't always speak to every guy that goes out and hunts wolves.
I can't speak to his motivations.
I don't know.
But they're servicing a greater good in that they're being used as a tool that winds up being an economic driver, which kind of like points to the efficiency of wildlife management.
It's like you could hire the job out, which in some cases it does because there are, you know, we do have government trappers to do some wolf control.
But it's kind of nice that you can wind up turning like rather than you're paying someone to go out and do it, you can have people pay for the opportunity to go out and do what we know needs to be done.
And in these cases, we're going to have to lower wolf numbers.
Not that no one is.
No one's arguing for a new extirpation of the wolf.
That would be in the worst interest of the managing agencies.
The last thing Wyoming would want now, they get the wolf delisted.
People are suing to stop the delisting.
Wyoming gets the wolf delisted.
They go under control.
No one in Wyoming in the government Would like to see wolves wiped out and put back on the endangered species list.
It'd be the worst thing that could possibly happen for them.
There's no interest to extirpate them.
No one's arguing for extirpation.
It's just bringing them into control because we are puppeteers.
There's a lot of people living here and you're really balancing a lot of interests.
Again, it's like Like, so much in life, you really have to take, before jumping into the stuff, the emotional stuff, you really have to take the time to look at the stuff.
Well, it's all to prevent the harrowing experience that might happen to someone should they wake up in the morning and realize and see a deer run into their yard and tip over because it had a arrow in it.
And as upsetting as that would be, it's so much better to go out and just at night, quietly, snipe them off, you know, clean it all up.
Well, it's also, if you want to, you know, if you have like some sort of a bowel issue and you want to clean out the old pipes, a little bit of, take some Epsom salts and some water, just a couple of tablespoons, gargle it and shove it down the pipe and it'll be like a broken fire.
By three days in, I realized, like, this is fucking dangerous.
You have to keep your eyes open in the middle of the night because it was dark as shit.
And kids were getting up in the middle of the night and tying kids to their beds and then leaving them in the woods, like dragging them out while they were sleeping.
They would wake up screaming alone in the dark, like in the woods.
There's no predators or anything in New Hampshire, but it was fucking...
I'm on the mass edit outside of the magazine and they're telling me that the most letter-generating article they ever ran was an article that was deemed to be critical of the Boy Scouts because there had been a number of catastrophes that had happened to Boy Scouts at scout camp.
Like a handful of things.
There was a lightning strike.
There was a drowning incident.
There's more things in there.
It kind of ran this article like Is your kid safe at Boy Scout camp?
And it really riled the organization up.
I think they were telling me I want to be the number one letter generating thing ever.
When I was in high school, I don't remember the kid's name, but someone wrote a really cool article, one of the kids in my school, about Boy Scouts, about the problem with the code of the Boy Scouts, because one of them was keeping your thoughts clean.
I mean, do you want, like, the show business story about how I did...
What made you decide to be on TV? I would periodically, as a writer, I would periodically get called by producers and developers about stuff I had written.
Or they would kind of summon you.
You might get a phone call or you get an email, not a phone call, an email through a magazine or whatever and realize that some guy at History Channel wants you to come down and what they do is they're desk-bound individuals and they're obligated to Going to these meetings, you know, and have, like, some ideas.
And so when they're putting together their portfolio of ideas, they would like to go contact writers or people who are out doing interesting stuff in the hinterlands, you know, and come in and kind of report about what's exciting at the time.
And I'd gone to a number of these meetings over the years about stories I had written, and every time you get the email, you're like, oh, my God, I'm going to be on TV, and it would never work out.
But eventually I signed a development agreement after I wrote my first book.
Scavenger's Guide to Oat Cuisine, which I just got the rights back to.
There's so few of those books out there, they sell on Amazon for like $130.
Really?
Miramax, their wine scene company, just gave me my rights back.
But it's so complex, and there's so many layers to it, and the timeline switched around.
I mean, it's, it's a genius work of film.
And then this fucking dummy came along and decided to make this shoot-em-up, and there's gonna be, why, fuck you, fucking, fucking, fuck, fuck, fucking, bang, bang, bang.
And it's just an assault on your intelligence.
It's shit.
And I just thought it was a piece of shit.
And then I watched this documentary on the guy who made it, and I was like, oh.
The way I describe it is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
It's actually probably worse than that because there's somewhere out there, there's someone that would like to suck a thousand dicks in front of his mother.
Nobody wants to bomb on stage.
It's just a horrible, crushing...
But along the way, one of the things that you learn is to be really good at comedy, you have to lose all of your sense of self-importance.
You have to lose all of that pretending you're something special.
Like, you're not something special.
You're just a person.
And the best way to do comedy is almost to be non-existent.
When you write and when you perform, there's almost no you in there.
Unless it's a self-deprecating aspect of it, like you're pointing out things that are silly about you, or pointing out ridiculous ideas that you might have had in your head at one point in time.
But other than that, when you're performing, you're never thinking, man, I'm up here and I'm killing.
You don't think of that at all.
In fact, you're almost like a passenger in this weird ride that you've put together.
And all you know is that you kind of know how to do it, and all you know is that you kind of have to keep at it in order to continue doing it, and that it's really fun to do.
But the moment you start taking it serious or attributing all of the success of it to you being super special and amazing and unique, you fucking suck.
After I saw you last time, When I went to see you in New Jersey, we were driving home and my wife was saying to me, she's like, my face hurts from laughing at heart.
And I wanted to write a thing.
I wanted to write a thing like...
I envisioned writing something called The Only Happy Comedian.
I don't understand comedy at all, but you come at it from a position of strength in some way.
So much stuff is funny because it's from a place of self-loathing.
So many comedians do a self-loathing thing.
It might not be real, but it's kind of like...
It's just where it spawns from.
It's like self-hatred and I'm so pathetic.
It's funny that you build a whole act.
You can build a whole act and you're at a position of strength.
I don't know if you ever think of it that way.
But, like, you're up there, like, you seem, like, when you're up there, you seem somehow, like, in control and, you know, like a word you like, in control and powerful, but still funny.
And it's a weird contradiction, because we get from stand-up, we get to thinking, like, it's just like, yo, my wife don't like me, no one likes me, I'm awful, I can't do anything, you know?
The punishment that your self-esteem takes when you bomb on stage is almost overwhelming.
For some people, I've seen guys bomb and never recover.
I've seen them, like, their act diminishes, like they had some potential, there was something there, and then I've seen, like, one night where the fucking wheels come off, and then they never recover.
If you go on stage and say if you're a Republican and you're on stage and you start going off about gay marriage or this or that and you just give a speech.
If I'm in the audience and I have an opposing point of view...
I go, well, fuck you.
I don't like your opinion.
I think that's wrong and I think people should be able to do this.
But if you go on stage and say something that makes me laugh, even if I don't agree with you, even if I don't agree with you, if you make me laugh, I have to at least consider your idea.
I have to at least...
You've introduced...
Here's a perfect example.
I had a guy who came up to me who was a Christian, and I used to do this bit about Noah's Ark, that if you told Noah and the Ark to an eight-year-old retarded boy, he's going to have some questions.
So I had this whole bit about someone sitting down with this young retarded boy telling him the story of Noah's Ark.
Well, why would anybody assume that that boat would make any connection in history to a crazy story about a dude who got all the animals to come on his boat because God talked to him, told him it was going to rain, and he was going to drown everybody because everybody wasn't paying attention.
Yeah, well, I think, seriously, I think what the story of Noah's Ark is, what it really is all about, is that at one point in time, I think there was a huge disaster, and I think it's probably happened more than once, where, like, meteors hit, or, you know, a shifting in the core, ice caps, or something huge, where it's just, like, it kills, like, 90% of the people.
And the people that are remaining, they have a story.
A story of a great disaster.
And some people got away.
And those stories, the story of the great disaster and some person got away.
Over time, that person becomes the great hero, the savior.
And they talk about it around the campfire.
And his legend grows.
And when you have a story that's told in oral tradition for over a thousand years before it's ever written in ancient Hebrew.
And to this day, they only know three out of four words in ancient Hebrew.
To this day, 25% of all the words, they have no idea what it means.
And in ancient Hebrew, there was no numbers, so letters also doubled as numbers.
So you lose all the numeric value that's important in the text, like the word God and the word love.
They have the same numeric value, and that's very important for sentencing.
And when that was translated into Latin, it was translated into Greek, they lost all of that shit.
And that's all these stories that are distorted.
Thousands of years of people bullshitting around a campfire to the original text being indecipherable to what they have today.
How could anybody think that's real?
You would have to be fucking crazy to think that that really happened.
That God talked to one guy and got all the animals from all over the world and put them on a boat.
That makes zero sense.
When you know people are liars, you know people are weak, you know even most religious people are completely full of shit.
And if, after all that, you think that that story's real, that's insane.
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When you actually see the evidence about a boat...
But I remember, like, when you were doing part of your act, you were talking about when people get really mad at comedians for saying something controversial.
And you kind of, you mentioned, like, How come no one's mad at Johnny Cash for shooting a man just to watch him die?
For people that are looking to be offended, which is a lot of bloggers and people looking to find something to be outraged about, They'll point to comedy because comedy is a soft target.
Yeah, it's like the soft target of comedy is the idea that there's like this real subtlety to language.
And there's a subtlety to sarcasm and being facetious.
And you know when someone's being sarcastic.
But if you just see it written down on paper, you can, for purposes of being morally outraged, you can pretend that you don't know that it's sarcastic.
But there's like this PC police thing going on now where a bunch of people who...
And most of the time, when you pay attention to those people, because I find it fascinating, and I'm...
I try to consider myself to be a student of human nature.
And one of the things that I find about these people that complain so much about all these different things, and they find this moral outrage or find one thing to harp on over and over again, is they're usually extremely troubled personally.
They usually have overwhelming issues, like they're morbidly obese, or they're socially inept.
There's something wrong with them that's causing them to find this soft target and then lash out constantly at this soft target.
And then also if you look at what they do, a lot of people, what they're trying to do is stop someone from hurting someone's feelings.
And they're trying to say that what you're doing is mean and you're hurting someone's feelings.
So what I'm going to do is hurt your feelings.
In the most vicious and cruel way possible, you know, with these blogs and the writing, and I'm going to do to you what you're somehow or another doing.
So I'm going to be a complete, total hypocrite.
But I have a license.
I have this license of moral outrage.
I have this moral high ground that I'm going to stand on, so I'm going to attack.
And I'm going to, you know, to write this vicious, snarky column about a comedian.
And the idea is that they're trying to right the wrongs and trying to be the savior of what's good in the world.
But that's not the case.
What they're doing is just being an asshole because they feel like they have a license to be an asshole because they can take what you said and put it on paper and say, look, in quotes, Tracy Morgan said if his son was gay, he'd stab him.
Well, sometimes people are mad about something and it's just a perspective issue.
They just lack perspective.
Or they lack...
A lot of...
There's a lack of social intelligence.
And there's also a lack of...
Having nuanced friends.
Having friends that have good senses of humor, people that joke around about things, or say mean things.
Some of my favorite people, like Jim Norton is one of my favorite comedians, and he's my favorite guy on the radio, because he says ridiculous, evil, mean shit all the time, but he doesn't mean it.
He'll laugh after he says it.
But he's really smart about how he does it.
And he takes a tremendous amount of grief because of it.
Because people will try to point out some of the things that he says and then, you know, and accuse him of being, you know, homophobic or this.
One of the least homophobic guys you'll ever meet.
In fact, he will talk openly about how many experiences he's had with trannies.
He's one of my favorite guys to talk about controversial points, because he always had a unique way of looking at it.
But his point was always that, like, when someone says something, and they're trying to be funny, and it misses, and it's fucked up, that comes from the same place as someone trying to say something funny, and it hits, and it's really funny, and you laugh.
Like, just because they miss, you know, with this attempt, doesn't mean they're like an evil, mean person.
They just failed.
Yeah, that's a good point.
They're not trying to hurt someone's feelings, they're trying to get a laugh.
Let's say someone makes a crack about gays and it flops.
A way that it can flop is if they're so transparent that you see in them for a minute and you're like, wow, that really comes from a place of deep hatred.
It's not only not supported by history, but the point is, like, when I talk about that on stage, I make a big point out of the fact that I want to make sure that, like, I don't want anybody to think that I have any problem with gay people.
But I also don't want any gay people to just take random jabs at the giant mass of straight people and say, we're responsible for all the wars.
Gay guys would roofie you just like a straight guy would roofie you.
The idea that someone is really super cool just because they're gay is ridiculous.
It's just like the idea of someone being super cool because they're black.
Marginalized groups have a little bit of leeway with a lot of knee-jerk, reactionary, bleeding-heart liberals, which is why a guy like Al Sharpton is allowed to be on television.
Al Sharpton is a con man and an idiot, but yet he represents black people on television.
Because no one wants to say anything about him because he's black.
Because if you pick on Al Sharpton, you're picking on marginalized people and you are therefore a racist because he represents brown people.
Look at his skin.
He's a brown guy.
He's allowed to say...
But meanwhile, if you follow his career, I mean, the guy made his living off of, like, the Tawana Brawley thing where there was a fake rape where he, you know, he came out and had this gigantic protest and it turns out that this woman, Tawana Brawley, was never really raped in the first place.
Jesse Jackson has made a lucrative business out of going to businesses and saying, you don't have enough diversity in your businesses.
Hire me as a consultant.
He steps in as a consultant and gets an exorbitant amount of money to try to teach them how to hire black people in their businesses.
If they don't do it, he's going to protest them.
And that's the insinuation behind all of it.
And the only reason why it exists is because there has been racism.
The only reason why it exists is because black people have been marginalized.
That evil things have taken place and then 200 years ago black people were slaves.
All those things are absolutely true.
So there's this reality to what they're saying.
That there is racism.
There is inequality.
So someone who's coming along is capitalizing on that problem.
But it's not...
There's no Martin Luther King's life.
I was like...
At my house the other day, my wife was playing a Martin Luther King speech because Martin Luther King Day is Monday, and my daughter was like, who's Martin Luther King?
So my wife is playing this speech for our five-year-old.
Well, not just incredibly written, incredibly performed.
And while we were watching it, I was like, there's no one like this anymore.
Where's this guy?
Where's this guy that represents the black community?
A guy who is making these incredible points and is saying something that's so moving.
And then you look in the audience and it's so mixed.
There's white people next to black people.
And such an incredible time in our culture where people realized that there was these inequalities and there was this groundswell of movement to try to make the world equal and behind it or the figurehead of it is this incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent guy.
Who's probably one of the greatest public speakers of all time.
We have a serious lack of these powerful, inspirational characters, these people that go on TV or give speeches that really have vision to them.
I mean, Obama had some of that as a candidate, but as a president, it's almost like he looks so tired.
When I see him on TV, he looks so goddamn tired.
And I remember when he was running, we had Bush and Cheney, and we were in war, and we were in a war that most people didn't support, and it was very confusing, and it was...
Coming out that the pretense of this war was incorrect and there wasn't really any weapons of mass destruction and all these lives and devastation and people were looking into Halliburton and the connection to Cheney.
It felt evil.
It felt like we were trapped with these evil old white dudes.
And here comes along this guy who's, you know, a single mother.
He comes from a single mother and he's half black and he's so intelligent, so well-read and so well-spoken.
Jimmy Carter is one of the few guys that was president that I would really love to sit down with and have a private conversation.
Because he seems to be like a true humanitarian.
And he seems to be, out of all the people that were ever president, the guy who caused probably the least amount of loss of lives and the least amount of War and heartbreak seems to be Jimmy Carter.
He seemed truly like a kind man who wound up in this weird situation where he was the President of the United States.
If you look at the wild vacillations that some countries go through, okay?
Venezuela, I mean, you rattle them off all day long.
People get frustrated with how slowly things happen in the U.S. That's the story.
The gridlock, nothing gets done, it's all idiots.
If you look at the gradual way, one might argue...
That all that gridlock and all that mayhem and things being so stagnant somehow works to our benefit from preventing wild swings.
Oh, we're this, oh, we're that.
We get a really serious communist, then we go from that to a real serious anarchist, then we realize that doesn't work, so we go to some wild-ass dictator.
I feel that kind of like these mild undulations, when you view it from a historic perspective, I think these mild undulations that we go through in politics are to our benefit.
Like, balancing all these, like, ethnic groups and tensions.
And the one thing that's on your mind when you come in is that horses are pulling carriages in Central Park and it's mean.
How could that possibly?
It has to be that some dude wrote that guy a check.
You know?
And he's like, here's the deal.
I'm going to give you this check, but I don't want them damn horses in that park.
Because there's no other way to explain it.
And it shows kind of this weird ignorance and arrogance where if you talk to anyone who's involved in livestock theft and livestock issues, we don't have a horse theft.
We don't have a not enough horse problem.
There's too many horses.
Since the closure of horse slaughter plants, people are dumping horses.
Farmers will wake up and be like, wow, there's a bunch of horses out in that place.
Because there's just no way to get rid of excess horses.
You have all these horses that are unwanted, horses that are starving, horses that aren't being treated properly.
And you got these gainfully employed horses that are fed, stabled, cared for, veterinarian treatment.
And the guy would be like, the one thing we need is unemployed horses.
I remember one of those comedians, some comedian was doing something, he was doing like a thing where he was like, you're supposed to complete the sentence, like, it's so hot, you know?
And one of them was, it's so hot, Bloomberg had to go over to Jersey to get a Big Gulp or something like that.
But then I'd say, like, you gotta be, like, a big enough person in some weird way to be like, okay, you go ahead and push on, and I'm gonna try to not want to, like, control your life.
What I did was so stupid that you'd want on one hand...
It was so dumb what I did, and I'll tell what I did in a minute, but what I did was so stupid That you'd want to then hide how stupid you were and not have it be on TV. Right.
But on the other hand, like, but it's compelling TV. Like, a guy getting run over by a moose is interesting, you know?
And moose calling is effective right before the rut, right before the breeding season, because bulls know what's going to happen.
Like, the cows are going to want to be bred, and I'm going to breed them.
But the cows haven't really got rolling yet, so it's just all anticipation.
If they were actually all doing it, and the cows are really in estrus, and the bull's with a cow that's in estrus, he's going to be less likely to come to one calling.
And we heard that and then we debated for a long time whether we'd heard it or not.
We're like, no, I know I heard a bull, I heard a bull.
Then it actually started to thunder a little bit off in the distance, which made it even more confusing because it was like, was it thunder or was it that, you know, noise?
So Ryan starts trying to lure the bull to us.
This is up in British Columbia.
He starts trying to lure the bull to us by roaming around making cow calls.
And he goes away from the bull.
And I stay put, hoping that the bull...
We'll come and he's going to want to see her before he gets too close.
So by Ryan staying about 75 yards further away, the bull might hang up in the vicinity where I'm at, you know, while he's trying to get a visual lock on the cow to make sure everything looks safe.
And we keep calling and calling.
And then I'm starting to think I was going crazy.
I never heard the bull in the first place.
So we start going in the direction.
Eventually we start moving in the direction where we think the bull is.
And sure enough, I see some brush clashing and he's in there rubbing his antlers on some brush.
And Ryan starts calling.
And now we're in his zone enough where he's coming to investigate and he's coming in and he kind of comes at me and I do like a really stupid thing where I take what you call a brisket shot.
And a brisket shot on a deer or a wild pig is devastating.
You know, you're coming in like the sternum and it is devastating to the animal, a small animal.
But a moose is just so much.
It's like layers of bricks and stuff.
Basically, the front of them made them.
And he goes down, and I go running over there.
And sure enough, he gets up and starts running.
And I'm worried.
The last thing I want to do is chase a moose.
But I'm worried that maybe he's not bleeding enough.
So I start running after him.
And I get up there, and I catch up to him, and he's laying down again.
And I go to shoot him in the neck.
And click.
Like I had...
I messed up my rifle and hadn't chambered around.
So it clicks and that bull got up and just turned and like came and boom, knocked me over.
Like coming at you like, you know, head down, horns down like a bull, you know, head down, horns.
And he punched me in the ass with one of his antler tines.
And I thought it punctured me.
So I ran away and Callahan shoots the moose down.
And I keep reaching around to feel where he had popped me so hard in the ass and knocked me over.
And my hand keeps coming back bloody.
So I'm trying to feel where he put a hole in me, and I'm thinking he'd punch the hole through my waders and into my ass tissue.
But then I realized that I got blood all over, because I'd hit him in the brisket, so when he ran me over, he smeared a lot of that blood on the back of my clothes.
So that was the blood I was feeling.
Scared the hell out of me.
And you saw that it wasn't a few days before that I got charged by a grizzly bear.
You fantasize about bad stuff happening to you from big animals.
You're going to get mauled by a bear or whatever.
And what really gets you is little teeny things.
My hospital stuff has been...
Serious issues have been giardia, so drinking bad water, and Lyme disease by getting bit by little teeny bugs that are infected with bacteria.
And that's like...
My real source of trouble.
But when I'm laying in bed and I'm not thinking about microbes, I'm thinking about big giant animals coming to get me, you know, and that one came and knocked me.
In the minute, like, it's mixed emotions.
As soon as it happens, I'm like, that was the stupidest thing I ever did.
I can't believe that.
I'm so dumb.
And then concurrent with that is a thought of like, I am so happy that that happened.
Yeah, so I don't think Chris Stringer floats this idea, but he talks about a guy who floats this idea that they had a confrontational hunting style that Neanderthals did.
That they were in there, you know, tearing it up.
And Cro-Magnons had a little bit more of a, let's stay back, you know, we'll stay back and get them at a better time.
Yeah, they weren't, like, just structurally the females were similar.
And so having that little run in with that moose was kind of, I felt like a little bit, in a positive way, I felt a little bit like, maybe like, it was like a Neanderthal experience.
But the Neanderthal thing is weird, man, because they find out all these things that we used to think they didn't do.
There's evidence that once they came into contact with Cro-Magnon, it was like they started picking up some of the things that they were into.
There's evidence that suggests that they had been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and all of a sudden dudes show up, like we show up, and all of a sudden they kind of got interested in decoration a little bit, got interested in art a little bit.
I mean, it's a theory that they were somehow interacting with us and were kind of like stealing our...
On one hand, they're coming into Congress because they despise them, but like dudes, conquering dudes will often find themselves, you know, like history's full of those examples, like a conquering army that's coming out to get like the worst people on the planet and all they want to do is annihilate them, but they also kind of want to have sex with them.
Did you ever see, there's one, I think he was an Australian anthropologist, very fringe guy, but he had this really funny take on Neanderthals that they were these super predators and that we hunted them into extinction.
No, but I don't know if I've seen that guy's ideas, but I've seen the idea that that's the case, and what people point to is that they always find butcher marks, not always, but it's very common to find butcher marks on those bones, and also find where they crack the heads open, presumably to get the brain out.
Well, there was that one misinterpreted idea that I think a Harvard geneticist was saying that one day it could be possible and there may be an ethical consideration that we would have to ask a woman if she'd be willing to give birth to a Neanderthal baby.
And then it became, you know, distributed.
Harvard geneticist wants women to give birth to a Neanderthal.
Looking for volunteers!
And, like, they're going to place a Neanderthal baby in your body.
You know, the more I think about it, I'm going to try to tell it real quick because it's not that great of a story, but I had this girlfriend who had this fellowship she got in San Jose, California.
And so I was back and forth between Montana and San Jose all the time.
And there's always this marquee above this comedy house.
Yeah, the guys I know the best at hunting, you go out and it has to be that you know you're going to Because if things get hard and things get bad and things aren't going your way, if you've already been going into it like you didn't know it was going to happen, it allows you to more quickly jump into that it didn't happen.
If you go into it like it has to happen, it will happen, it has to happen, then when things are sucky, you've You're still pursuing that narrative, you know?
I feel like what we're doing this weekend isn't going to be, you know...
Hunting wild pigs, I think there's going to be a lot of pigs.
This place, Teehan, Teejan, Teejan Ranch, I gather they have quite a bit of a pig population, enough to the point where people go out there and enough to the point where people go out there and do a guided pig hunt, and they do this throughout the year.
If there was none there, it wouldn't be that way.
Oftentimes, when I've hunted pigs, I've found that there's so much more fecund, you know?
If they're, I mean, they're really, they're really something, I mean, they've gotten, they've through our, you know, through, I'm trying to put together an idea that's not actually that complicated.
Thanks to us, and in spite of us, at the same time, they've managed to get everywhere.
You know?
Like, oftentimes we just do it, like we thought it was a good idea for a long time to go put pigs everywhere.
Now we're like, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to put pigs everywhere.
And, you know, there's not a lot we're doing to stop them.
That's not the case here.
Like, in California, they're treated more like a game animal.
You know?
The number, like, when people travel, more people travel to California to hunt wild pigs than to hunt anything else.
And they just don't seem to really cause the level of damage and hysteria that they do in some other areas, like in certain areas in the southeast and the Gulf Coast area.
I mean, there's pigs to the point where it's just really hard on agricultural interests, and it's kind of inexplicable.
How they seem to be there for so long and then explode into some level.
But in California, there's some pigs around and people generally appreciate them.
I used to hunt pigs at, not used to, I still do, but I have a friend who's got some, her family has some cattle ranches up around Sacramento.
And he's kind of got this little bit like, yeah, you know, sometimes I get too many and I need to get rid of some, but then we'll get a dry year and they'll all go away anyway.
And I'd like it if you went out and shot some.
If you see one, shoot one for me.
And they kind of are causing me a little bit of problems.
And you can tell he has this conflicted relationship about them.
But I put it to him one day.
I said, Glenn, if you could shake a magic wand and all the wild pigs would be gone, would you shake it?
Yeah, they shoot, for folks who are just listening and don't know what we're talking about, they have, Pigman has a couple of episodes called Aporkalypse, where they shoot pigs at a helicopter's.
There's multiple subspecies of the American turkey.
It's all one species, but there's subspecies or varieties.
You have the eastern wild turkey and most of the east.
The Osceola turkey, which lives in the south half of the Florida peninsula.
Then you have the Rio Grande turkey, the Miriam's turkey, the Gould's turkey in northern Mexico, southern Arizona.
If you're a turkey geek, You might want to try to eventually have the experience of hunting all turkey subspecies.
I had kind of accidentally got four of them, and I realized that I wanted to go to South Florida and have a chance to hunt Osceola.
So I went down to hunt Osceola down in the swamps down there, and we're down there, we run into these guys who hunt pigs with hounds.
What their setup is, this guy has a big cattle ranch, and it borders a rare bird preserve.
The preserve, you can't even walk around.
Most of the preserve is closed to any human visitation at all.
You can't even take a walk to there.
But they have a guy who's a full-time pig hunter in there.
He goes around and kills pigs as a way to try to protect these rare bird species and give them nesting opportunities.
The rancher who likes to hunt wild hogs He goes and he usually kind of hunts along his border with the preserve because the pigs will come out of the swamps in the preserve and come up and hunt and root around on his land in the cover of night and then retreat back into the preserve where they're relatively safe and hide out.
So what he realized is he went through and put this fence in and put trap doors, one-way doors in his fence so that pigs could leave the preserve and enter his fence and But then they couldn't get back out.
It was like a fish trap door.
So now and then if he gets itching to go pig hunting, he'll go out at four in the morning and make sure all the doors are shut, like closes the doors up so the pigs can't get back through the other way.
And then he knows they're probably somewhere on his ranch, and when he starts chasing one of his hounds, they won't be able to make it back into their safety in the preserve.
And when he goes out, if he gets a boar, like an old boar, It's got his nuts intact.
He knows it's not going to be a great eating boar.
Because they just, they run themselves, you know, they're not like, they don't have a lot of fat.
They're full of hormones.
They're not, they're certainly edible, but not as good at eating.
So what he'll do is he'll do something that benefits everyone.
He will castrate that hog and turn it out.
Because now that hog cannot contribute to the population.
He's not a viable breeding member of the population.
And if he catches them again, he'll have what's called a barred hog.
Barred hog, which is a castrated hog.
So like a steer is a castrated male, cow, castrated bull, and a barred hog is castrated.
So we went out one night and caught a big boar with his nuts intact.
We castrated him and turned him out so that he could, as this guy put it, it would take his mind off ass and put it on the grass.
And then we stayed out, caught another pig, and this one had at some point in time, they didn't even know if they had it or another guy had done it, this one had been castrated.
You wouldn't even have known.
It was totally healed up.
But he had been castrated and those guys were like, that'll be a good one to eat.
So we killed that hog and kept it for food.
And we ate that thing, from honest to God, we ate its skin as pork rinds, took its intestines out and flushed the intestines and stripped them, made our own sausage casings, liver, heart, ate his nose and head cheese, ate his feet, like, ate every part of that hog.
I made head cheese with the first wild pig I ever killed was in California.
I went out to hunt wild pigs, and I had never laid eyes on a wild pig, and I didn't want to shoot the first wild pig I saw.
So I went out one day without my rifle just to see some wild pigs, and the next day I went out and got one, and I wound up making head cheese with it, where it doesn't make a cheese, but it's like gelatinous.
So a lot of the cuts, like when you butcher an animal, a lot of the cuts that are chewier, that don't really make great steak, they're not that way because they have a lot of connective tissue and Fatty deposits, whatever.
They have stuff that like turns into collagen when you cook it.
Like turns into like a gelatin when you cook it.
So a head's full of that stuff.
And the bones have it.
And so you simmer that head for a long, long time.
And eventually you can pick off all the meat.
And a lot of the gristle and connective tissue and stuff turns into like a gelatin-like substance.
You can make real gelatin that way.
And now we just have a packet where you pour a powder out and mix it with water and mix gelatin.
But old-style gelatin and natural gelatin would be just derived as an animal byproduct.
So you take all the meat that you pluck off, the same way, you know, like hog jowl, if you ever had that.
You take the tongue out and chop the tongue up.
And there's all this other, when it's warm, it's liquid, but it sets up as gelatin.
And it's just all bound together with natural gelatin that you've derived by slow cooking the pig's head.
So it's like little bits of pig meat bound up in an Asperger bound up.
And then, of course, you season it and flavor it with all kinds of good stuff to eat.
And then when it sets up, when it's chilled, you can pour it out like a...
It looks almost like a fruitcake.
You know, it pours out in a mold, and then you slice it, and it's not cheese.
Elk's widely regarded as, like, if you went and surveyed people who've tasted a wide variety of meats, elk is the one that people would be like, it's the best one.
Where we're going, Teehan, has elk on it, tule elk.
You know, you got, like, Roosevelt elk, Rocky Mountain, these different subspecies of elk.
There's a very rare one in California.
Not rare, but, yeah, rare and a very small range.
That was almost wiped out.
It's back now because you have big chunks of property like that where they can find some refuge and people are working to maintain them and provide habitat for them.
So it's kind of a cool spot.
You'll go there and see an elk that most people haven't seen.
I hope we run into one because it's like the Thule elk.
We were eating the most tender part of the rear leg.
It was just a great animal.
There's so much variability.
That's one thing about being a wild game chef.
I'm a wild game cook.
I think chef sounds a little more formal, but I'm a wild game cook.
One thing about being a wild game cook that's more challenging...
than being a regular cook is you're dealing with so much variability.
Like you get some great chef and he can do some amazing thing because he's got a purveyor, you know, and when he buys a pig, it's like the pig ate this for 72 days and then we ate this for 14 days and then we killed it on this day and chilled it at this temperature for these many days and, you know, and every time he buys a pig, the pig comes in his kitchen or his restaurant and he knows, he just knows what it's going to be like, you know.
Animals, you don't know what kind of There's age issues and what kind of trip they've been on.
There's all kinds of variability.
So you learn how to kind of control that and sort of bring the ingredients into line because some animals are good and some animals aren't.
I shot a mule deer one time that was just disgusting to eat things.
And then you get another mule deer and it's like, that is so good.
One of my goals, not a goal, but a thing I'd like to see happen is...
Rather than, I mean, we could definitely have more hunters.
I think we need more just to have political clout to defend our lifestyle.
But I also would like to see the people who have no interest in hunting come to, like, through understanding kind of the mechanics of wildlife, start to recognize it as that hunting is legitimate.
No, I think anyone who looks at wildlife politics in a way that's, like, immersive and you have to come to understand it, you go ask someone who runs a wildlife agency, like a state wildlife agency or federal wildlife agency, and ask them what their job would be like without having hunting as a tool, and, you know, it would make them shudder.
Because you just, you know, it's going to be very difficult to maintain...
The portfolio of different species we have at the levels we have.
You'd have to be open to having really wild fluctuations, having cycles of disease, and things that aren't as pretty.
And also, why?
Why deny ourselves access to a renewable resource that generates so much revenue?
Volume 4. Use the code word ROGEN. Get them all, though.
It's a great fucking show.
It's not just a great hunting show.
It's a great show.
I was saying it to my wife the other day while I was watching.
I was like, this show, it's almost like I want more people to see it.
I wish more people would see it because it would open their eyes as to...
Your approach, it's a more intelligent philosophy behind it.
You see all these hunting shows like, well I'll tell you what, there's a big buck came out, I'll tell you what, we shot him with that gun, I'll tell you what.
You don't have any of that stupid shit in it.
It's interesting, it's fascinating, you're a well-read, introspective guy, and I love the narration on it too.