Joe Rogan and Steven Rinella dive into Alaska’s untouched wilderness, where 6,000 acres of old-growth forest face clear-cutting despite ecological protests. They debate hunting ethics—from grizzly bear scarcity due to viral interest in The Hunt to baboon culls in Africa—and wildlife management’s paradoxes, like deer overpopulation and habitat preservation for apex predators. Rinella shares harrowing tales: trichinosis from undercooked black bear meat, Lyme disease misdiagnoses, and his brother’s near-fatal meningitis, while Rogan links DMT trips to psychological revelations, dismissing recreational use. The conversation critiques figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as "race pimps," but pivots back to hunting’s role in conservation, arguing it funds anti-poaching efforts and sustains ecosystems. Ultimately, they expose how perception clashes with reality in both nature and culture. [Automatically generated summary]
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When you get up into that, when I say that, when you get up into the alpine zone, like above Timberline in southeast Alaska, it really, like, you know...
It's cooler looking than the Ewok forest.
It's just amazing.
You go from old growth stuff where the three of us could all stand around It joined hand to hand, and you couldn't reach around these trees, you know?
Because you really had, we would have to get to one place and you'd have to get a boat and carry it through and go across to another place and then climb up.
Like you just, when you, if you fly over some of those mountaintops and you look around them, there's just no way...
I just know that no one's been there.
Unless you can land up there on a lake.
We'll land in a spot, and I want to just walk from there.
And I think we will walk up into stuff that people haven't walked there.
I mean, there's always some crazy thing you didn't know about, but we're going to walk into some stuff where people just have not walked.
You can stand around places there and say...
I feel very certain that I'm definitely the first guy to ever have his feet sitting right here.
I can't discount something that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but there's just some wild stuff in there.
Right now, I got mixed feelings about it too, but the Forest Service up there just announced they're going to be opening up a cut up there, 6,000 acres of old growth.
What's weird, too, is Tong has just said recently that over the next decade, they're looking to phase out old growth logging.
At the same time that they are announcing and pushing forward with plans to do a big 6,000 acre clear cut.
So they're sort of acknowledging on one hand that they want to get out of it or need to get out of it or can see into the future they need to get out of it.
And on the other hand being like, but we'll have one last hoorah, I guess.
We've talked about this before on the show, how things get so convoluted.
One of the big, just to bring it back to us going on a hunt for sick of black-tailed deer, those sick of black-tailed deer, when we're going to look for them, we're going to be looking for them up in the Alpine, which they'll be leaving.
They'll be leaving around the time we're going there.
That stuff still has snow.
Where we're going to be looking for deer will still have snow in June.
Then it melts off, and there's long days, and it turns beautiful, and it gets very vibrant and green, and there's all kinds of succulents, and deer come up out of the timber to feed around in there.
Then in October, it snows, so you have a couple snow-free months.
In October, it snows, and those deer will all split.
Traditionally, what those deer want to do is they want to go down and spend the winter down in old growth because the old growth canopy allows for kind of a snow-free, sheltered understory where they're down on the ground and they'll hang out in that old growth timber.
So an argument against...
The cut would be that we need it for deer.
And a further argument would be the reason we need to protect deer habitat is because we need to protect the wolves out there.
And some people right now are trying to make a push to say that the wolves in the Alexander Archipelago, of which Prince of Wales Island is a part, that those wolves are genetically extinct, and they therefore deserve a level of protection, like their own level of protection, that they would get Endangered like their own level of protection, that they would get Endangered Species Act protection out on these When other people are arguing, it's just the same wolf, man.
I mean, it's like you got wolves all over.
It doesn't, like that population doesn't deserve any specific thing.
So it winds up being that people who might be pushing against the timber sale might wind up also be angling for protecting wolves out there from hunting and trapping And then you're left to be like, well, I'm not really comfortable with the timber sale, but I'm not really comfortable with you using biological lumping and splitting in order to close down certain sorts of hunting season.
So it winds up being that...
The enemies of your enemies aren't necessarily your friends.
Yeah, but the thing about the bear is you'll see some bear droppings or bear scatter, bear shit here and there.
But those bears out there are so tuned in on the salmon runs that they really don't spend a lot of time feeding in those areas because they're down 2,000 feet.
Timberline there is like 1,800, 2,000 feet.
They're down 2,000 feet lower In the river miles feeding on salmon.
And we like to have that image of the bear grabbing a salmon out and he's all silver and shiny and healthy and floppy.
But long after the runs are kind of done, they're down there just feeding on rotten fish.
Laying around.
I've watched wolves there eating dead salmon.
I watched five wolves one time eating dead salmon that were the consistency of pudding.
You see some berries around, but I think that so many of the bears are focused on that stuff.
One thing you find, some people say, in those islands in southeast Alaska, they tend to be either a black bear island or a grizzly island.
And it changes.
So you'd be on one island and it's black bears.
Another island's grizzlies.
And it's sort of this weird phenomenon that they don't readily mix.
You get in interior areas on the mainland where you have grizzlies and black bears coexist.
Oftentimes, the grizzlies will dominate the salmon streams, and you'll have more black bears up high.
So you could be standing on a mountain a couple thousand feet above sea level, and it's just black bears everywhere on top of the mountain feeding on blueberries, and you're looking down at primo salmon streams, but just big brown bears, big grizzlies down there.
And they kind of hoard the spot and the black bears don't get in there.
And there's a very well-regarded hunting guy in Alaska who's written some good hunting books about Alaska named Tony Russ.
And I was reading his book on hunting Kodiak.
He's got a book on hunting brown bears and grizzlies in Alaska.
And a lot of his experiences are on Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula.
And he was saying he's never seen...
And just to back up for a minute, on Kodiak, if you map out a bear's diet, okay...
A bear, a boar bear, a male brown bear, grizzly, you know, brown bear, on Kodiak, if you map out his annual diet, what he's tuned into in the spring are brown bear cubs.
When we were up there, one of the bears, one of the boars, had attacked a sow, killed its cub, and left half the cub's body, and then the sow came back and finished it off.
She'll have her cubs in the den in February or March.
Okay?
They're just little hairless.
She don't even know if she had them probably.
Just these hairless little things.
And she'll take care of them.
She'll emerge from her den with these little fur balls.
She'll stay with them all summer long.
She'll den with them again.
She'll come out again and usually at some point that summer she might get rid of them.
And so she's going to be off.
Like she won't cycle again.
Potentially for two years.
so if a boar has in his area he hangs out he's got a half dozen females apparently it's worth the risk to him that he might be i'm talking in a genetic sense it's worth the risk to him that he might be killing his own offspring which probably has no idea whether it is or not kill his own offspring offspring in order to to have that female go back into estrus and then breeder.
Or whatever kind of calculation.
He's probably not Obviously he's not making that calculation.
He's probably just going like, I'm hungry.
But an added benefit of it is apparently he might double back around and make love to the woman whose children he consumed.
Well, dolphins actually have a strategy against that, because one of the things that a lot of people are not aware, we think of dolphins as being really sweet and kind, and they're nice to people, but dolphins, they eat their own babies.
Lily would take acid and set up a tank next to the dolphins.
And he would take acid, go in the isolation tank, and try to communicate with the dolphins.
So while the dolphins were like...
Make all these weird noises.
He would try to decipher those while he was on acid in his tank.
And he eventually went off the deep end with really getting heavily into ketamine and all these weird tranquilizers and drugs and became actually addicted to ketamine.
And that's when he lost all his funding.
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him when it came to this dolphin research anymore because they knew that he was doing that.
And one of the women that he had hired to live with a dolphin, they had an apartment set up where it was underwater.
It was essentially, to her, it was waist high in water.
And she had a dolphin that she lived with for, like, six months in this.
But the podcast sort of focuses on dolphin communication and the difficulty that they have.
Like, they know that the dolphins want to communicate with them, but they have that blowhole, and that's how they make their noise.
So it's really hard for them to make noises that mimic human noises, because they don't really have the ability to make M's and T's and all these different kinds of things.
When you get into animal communication, so much of it becomes semantical or an argument of semantics where you'd say, well, we're the only thing with language.
And people would be like, well, you know, actually, X, Y, and Z has something.
Okay, well, I mean, we're the only thing with complex language.
Well, some animals are actually able to convey fairly complex things, like there's a predator above us.
And they're like, well, what I mean is they don't have syntax.
And you kind of wind up running out.
It's like the verdict's still out, man.
Animals do convey some complicated stuff.
My two brothers are ecologists, PhD scientists, and they kind of hate the conversation because...
Not resistant to, but they have a hard time with trying to use our terminology and use our language to describe what animals are up to.
For you to say that the dolphin doesn't want to eat the baby because it might be his baby, someone might argue that that animal probably has no comprehension of that.
Or even that they are not able to equate Sex with reproduction.
You know, I've been going through this with my kid, man.
He...
We just moved to the Pacific Northwest, and so I keep talking to my kid about everything's got a killer whale on it, you know, like stores, grocery stores, whatever, just like a common motif.
And I kept telling them it's a killer whale, it's a killer whale.
And I know that a lot of people like to call them orcas, you know.
And orca is some Greek word I think just means, cetitian just means whale.
It's a pretty generic term.
And some people say that killer whales used to be called whale killers.
And whale killer became killer whale.
So I'm always telling my kid, oh, it's a killer whale.
And one day my kid comes home, and he's just mad in hell because he learned that it's not a killer whale, it's an orca.
And I'm like, listen, man, I know what the person who told you that is trying to tell you, and I already know that, but I told you killer whale not because I wasn't aware, because I was trying to circumvent I was trying to come back around against what you would inevitably learn about its PC name.
I was just trying to fill you up with, just to open you to the idea that the animals get new names all the time, and it's just a PC. It's like a, what do you call it?
Yeah, but I mean, I should say they're eating it while it's alive.
They're biting chunks of its face off, and it's just so hard to watch.
Because we think of these whales as being these beautiful creatures, and we think of...
I don't know why we have this weird idea of killer whales as being these really noble creatures.
Because I always think of killer whales as being the friend of man, and that's why when one does freak out at SeaWorld, it makes SeaWorld look so horrible.
Because in the wild, there's almost no evidence whatsoever that whales have ever killed anybody.
The way I always equate it, one of the things I have a problem with zoos in general is that they don't allow animals to do their natural thing.
I really think that what zoos should be is get all those motherfuckers together.
You should have a giant piece of land if you're going to fence it in.
Let them in there and let them run wild.
And if people really want to see animals, what they should see is jaguars killing monkeys and the whole gamut.
And it sounds fucked up, but that's really what the wild is.
Because what we're doing by taking these animals and putting them in these weird cages, We're creating these closed-in ecosystems where these animals never have to compete, their food is given to them, and we're ruining their genetics.
I mean, those animals that are in zoos, they're completely incapable of ever being reintroduced into the wild, unless you take them, and it would have to be some really exhausting effort to try to reintroduce them to the idea of hunting their own food or gathering their own food.
But those fucking dummies that you have in the zoo, you've created these welfare monkeys.
Like, someone might see that you killed a big male bear and be upset by it, but you're really not impacting the bear population.
You know, you're impacting that individual bear, but you're not having any kind of real long-term deleterious effect on the bears of that island, which are very, you know, it's a very stable, well-regulated population of bears out there.
I put in for that tag, I think, as a non-guided, non-resident.
So, like, if you want to go with a guide, you can go to Kodiak and hunt, you know.
There's a very limited number of tags for non-guided non-resident, which means that I would have to go...
In lieu of a guide, because my brother's a resident of Alaska, I don't need to use a guide when hunting animals that you normally need to guide to hunt.
So I can go with him and hunt there.
And so every other year, they do a thing where you can apply for the spring hunt.
I always put in for that hunt.
And then when you told me about that show, I was bummed because I was like, now the odds of drawing that tag are probably going to for a long time go way, way, way down because there's probably going to be a ton of dudes putting in for the permit now.
If you put a lot of 1,000 pound bears on a scale, they're 800 pounds.
They're 750 pounds, 800 pounds.
Again, that Tony Russ guy that wrote those books I was talking about, he's had an immense amount of experience and he kind of has a passage in there where he talks about the 1,000 pound bear and there just aren't a lot of them out there.
As much as you read people getting 10 foot 1,000 pound bears.
You and I laughed about this before because everyone that sees a mountain lion in the wild always says, big fucking boar.
You know, 200 pound boar.
I remember like I laughed because you saw a lion and you said it looked like a small one.
I was like, you're the first guy I've ever met that saw a small lion.
If that's what happened to that bear, and I have no reason to think that it is, If someone came down and said, absolutely, that's what happened to that bear, I'd be like, then someone was doing an illegal trapping activity, because that's not something that would happen.
Because the trap has more of a function of, I mean, this is going to get all, you're going to probably hear from all kinds of your listeners, but It has a holding function.
So when I used to fur trap, I would check my traps every 24 hours, usually in the morning.
But anyways, what the trap largely serves to do is hold something.
And the way when you rig them...
If you do things right, you rig them with a lot of swivels and things, and so what you're trying to do is really limit any kind of damage to the animal.
And this isn't altruistic.
The reason you want to limit damage to the animal is the animal's less likely to fight the trap.
If you have a trap that causes nerve damage, bone damage, numbing, it's all the more chances that that thing is going to be working harder to get away.
In the ideal case, you're just trying to hold it with a foothold trap.
So it would try to chew its way out?
Yeah, people always say chew, but what they will do, and I've seen it happen, particularly with muskrats, which have very, very thin bones.
On Prince of Wales Island, I've seen bears that I'm fairly convinced had been shot just because of the sort of like wear on the shoulder it happened, you know?
So people say like a chew-out, but it's weird because people defending trapping will like to clarify that it's not actually a chew-off, it's a ring-off.
But again, like everything, there's good practices.
I don't trap anymore.
When I tell you what I'm telling you, I'm just telling you this from being a guy who likes to be clear about factual matters.
I don't have a real dog in the race on this, so to speak, right now.
But if you follow good practices on trapping, It's in your best interest to not have these sorts of things happen.
That you would set in a way that you don't have incidental catches.
Or bycatch.
You check your traps on a very tight schedule.
You rig them in such a way that you don't cause damage.
That if you did get something else into your trap, you would be able to release that thing unharmed.
But there are people who, for lack of caring, and there are people who, just for lack of technical expertise, screw these things up.
And oftentimes, you could get violations like what would be like a trapping-based violation from someone who wouldn't self-identify as a fur trapper, but who just got mad about some bear or whatever getting into his dumpster, and then he takes matters into his own hands completely outside of the law and decides to fix that bear and inexperately set a trap for it.
So there's a lot of guys that make reproductions of old bear traps.
No one's intending that they're going to go set it for a bear, but people want to have a lodge.
You've got your cabin and you want to have a big bear trap hanging up in it.
So there's a lot of bear traps...
And you'll see where a dude will think he has something awesome, you know, and he's trying to sell it for a thousand bucks, and you look at it and be like, you can go buy those all day long.
And I'm actively engaged right now in trying to move one of these slabs from Miles City out to Washington now so I can continue my now 12-year-long project of trying to turn me and the old man's tree.
So anyways, I'm a sentimentalist when it comes to wood, just like yourself.
I have a desk that I bought in 1993. It's a writing desk, and it's got two levels.
Like, one level, it's a very, it's old, it's oak, you know, but it's like, there was a place called the Writer's Store, and it was a store in Hollywood that was just all writing stuff.
It used to have, like, script programs for old-school Macs, like, you know, the oldest computer.
It means it's 1994 that I got this fucking thing.
And I've written everything I've ever written on this one desk.
One of the books I hold up is just like one of the, in my opinion, one of the finest books ever written is his book Great Plains, which is about the Great Plains.
But he's a stylist, you know?
He was a humor writer for The New Yorker for a long time.
I had great fortune to...
I don't know if he would use this term.
I think he mentored me in some way.
I read his stuff and had the opportunity to hang out with him a handful of times.
He was saying that when he was growing up and he wanted to be a writer, he pictured that writers would be that you're sitting at a desk kind of chuckling to yourself as you You know, have all these fantastic ideas.
But when I write, I get so few words written every day, and every sentence that I write takes...
I have to write it and rewrite it and rewrite it so many times that there's never a thing where I feel like...
There's never a thing where I feel like, holy smokes, I nailed it.
Because it's so...
I almost look at it like if you're building a house.
Maybe when you get all done with the house, you can stand outside and be like, wow, there it is.
I did it.
But there's never a shocking moment because every nail and every board.
There's never a chance where something jumps ahead radically really quickly in a way that can startle you.
Now, the other night, I wrote...
My brother's getting married this weekend.
My older brother.
And I sat down to make some notes about my best man speech.
After I wrote my best man speech...
It's funny because this just happened to me last night.
After I did my best man speech...
I felt like, why can't I feel, like, I had it where I got, I was, like, talking about some funny stuff in my head and kind of writing down notes, and I thought of some way to actually, like, you're supposed to do in a best man speech, you're supposed to make it, like, hit right, like, hit the right note, right?
It's funny and you're dogging on them, and then all of a sudden you turn it, you know, and it's sweet and nice, okay?
And I found that turn, To make it sweet and nice.
And it just struck me as being perfect.
I was like, why can't the regular writing I do feel that way?
I mean, sure, I don't mean to in any way discount the role of an editor.
And I don't know if you do something similar with your stand-up if you show other comedians and stuff.
But you have a role of an editor.
So, I don't want to act like, oh, it's just all out of your head.
You know, my agent...
I work closely with, he influences things I do, my editor.
But in the end, it's like, kind of it's your thing, right?
TV's a whole bunch of people.
So you could go out and have a great thing, and then you turn it in, and the editor nails it.
So I can't go like, I made this amazing TV show, because it's like, there's the guy that produced it, the guys that shot it, the guys that edited it, right?
All that kind of stuff.
And so your sense of ownership becomes a little bit different.
Nobody works harder than people who work on your show.
Like those camera dudes, like Dodie and Moe and all those guys who have to fucking sleep in tents in the back of that fucking van where the llamas piss and...
I was shocked to hear like one time some guy was coming out with this and I knew it was going to be trouble because he's coming out and he's asking about what the hours are.
I don't think they go like, oh now I'm going to work.
I think that they think of their lives more, their lives don't seem to, I don't think they think of their lives as having like, it's like, now I'm at work, now I'm at home, now I'm at work, now I'm at home.
I think like at home they're thinking about work stuff.
Well, it was funny because Mo and I had a conversation once about another show that he was working on and one of the guys that was on the other show.
And he was taking great pride in describing what a coward this guy was.
And it was not even great pride, but he was enjoying it.
He's like, he's yellow.
He was talking about it, but it was like, here's a guy.
That's been working on your show for several seasons and he's fucking undergone some horrendous locations and climbing to the top of fucking mountains while carrying a 50 pound camera and the whole deal.
I mean, these fucking cameras are no joke.
And hiking, just carrying a gun hiking is difficult.
There's all this sliding of the ground underneath you, and you're constantly going up, up, up, and you're, you know, essentially, like, you're doing, like, little mini squats all day long, and it's exhausting, and these guys are doing it with one arm holding a fucking camera.
TV and outdoor TV. It was like a thing you would always hear is friends of mine, guys I respected, would kind of be sort of dismissing outdoor television as a genre.
But the thing was always like, but Shockey's legit.
Or some such thing.
I mean, he's been around for so long.
But he's a highly respected figure.
There's this annual thing called Shot Show, and I see him.
There's a guy I was talking to who makes the hunting show and one day we were talking and I was shocked to hear that he's a registered nurse who has a full-time job at a hospital.
Yeah, that's the thing we have a conversation about is I wanted to go back and film next spring and I have a black bear permit for this regulatory year, which extends into next spring, for Prince of Wales.
I wanted to go back, and Doty was saying, we did a show out there on Prince of Wales last spring.
And went and found a lot of bears.
And in the end, I could have shot a bear.
I didn't because I just have this strange feeling sometimes.
Not strange.
Sometimes I just want to watch bears rather than shoot at them.
So we did a show about that.
And I wanted to go back this spring.
And Doherty was like, I just feel like anything we could have done out there, we've done.
And on one hand, I'm like, yeah, that's right.
We probably shouldn't go and do a show, an episode in the same place doing the same thing.
But on the other hand, I'm like, Bahamut, because some shows all it is, they don't do anything but hunt some lease they have for white-tailed deer.
The whole show is looking at camera photos from camera traps and them talking about the different stands that they have set up and then them up in the stand with a bow and arrow waiting for a fucking deer to come by.
I mean, that is every goddamn show.
It's always whitetail.
It's always in a tree stand.
It's always in the same sort of farmland on the edges of these cornfields.
And it's the same show every goddamn week.
And I guess people just like watching people hunt deer.
You learn stuff about wind and placement and trails they walk and their behavior, like how they can kind of anticipate where they're coming through and how to pay attention to their trails.
One of them was interesting.
It was how to recognize the difference between the doe trails and the buck trails.
The doe trails were going straight across this riverbed area where there was a lot of mud.
You could see these does, large populations of animals going this way, and you see these animals that are crisscrossing.
Well, you focused on that on your show, too, though.
The difference.
Like, the one time that you went and you were elk hunting in Montana and, you know, you were on your way after an elk and you see another fucking hunter that's doing the same thing.
So you spend most of your time wondering about what other guys are doing and trying to capitalize on that or trying to anticipate the response of animals to that pressure, you know?
I so much rather...
Just be like in a one-on-one thing.
Next week we're going up to hunt moose up in the Brooks Range, you know, and it's one of the, you know, absolutely the most, one of the most remotest places, the most remote place in North America.
And up there it's like, there's really no, you don't have to factor in effects of other individuals.
You're just thinking about the animals, which is fun.
It's very rewarding, but it's just not what most people are up against.
When I was a kid and we were hunting whitetails, we really planned on people.
It was very important about where other guys were, what other guys' hunting schedules was like.
There's a guy we knew that would always say, if I see your guy's truck...
Coming down the driveway to the farm, I always go over to such and such place because I know that the way you guys move into your blinds, you're likely to bump a deer down such and such fence line.
So this guy's thinking about deer, sure, but he's thinking about it through the context of human activities.
Yeah, he's like, you guys got that blind down in that area, and I know every time you go in there, you don't realize it because you're a dumbass, but when you go in there, you're bumping deer and they're going down that fence line.
So if I see your truck coming, I'm going to run over there.
And like elk, when I lived in Montana, our opening day plan was generally find out where elk are, where they've been for a couple weeks, and so the people will know they're there.
How are they going to leave that area within three minutes of legal shooting light on opening day?
And what saddle are they going to use when they pass out of that valley?
And you would pretty much plan that would be your thing.
I know where they're at.
I know that they're going to get bumped probably before legal light.
And where are they going to go after that?
I got a friend who has for the last 20 years been killing elk by.
He knows the spot that elk move into when they get pressured.
And he knows that some people can find these elk with spotting scopes.
And they'll find these elk on this mountainside.
He knows that there's no way to approach these elk on this mountainside without spooking them.
When he sees the elk have moved into this area, he'll watch them with his spotting scope, waiting to see someone else try to climb up and put a move on these elk.
When they start climbing up, when that guy sees them, he's going to go try to put a move on them.
He'll go down and ambush those elk three miles away from there.
We went elk hunting in Kentucky because the situation is very unique in that they've reintroduced, successfully reintroduced elk into Kentucky and instead of like what you're looking at a western hunt where you look at these great wide open spaces and timber and you can see them in the distance, Instead, you're looking at incredibly dense, like, southeast sort of kind of forests where these elk are like, you were, like, kind of creeping up on them.
And, like, it was hard for the camera guy to get a good view of some of these elk, like the elk you shot.
A buddy of ours got married one time and his bride's Neighbors were out of town during the wedding ceremonies.
The bride's neighbor says, well, I'll open my house up if you got some out-of-town guests who need a place to stay because I'm on vacation anyways.
So they give this house where it's just for the groomsmen to hang out.
Me and my brothers were the groomsmen and some other guys, and so we get to stay in this house.
During our stay, he has occasion, my brother Matt, has occasion to peek in the guy's freezer and sees in his freezer that he's got an elk he killed four years ago.
It's dated from four years ago.
And he has a moral crisis where he's like, is it worse to steal or is it worse to allow such a beautiful animal's flesh to go to waste when this guy inevitably...
We'll declare this freezer burned and throw it away.
Like if he was going to eat it, he would have ate it.
So when we left, he had a bunch of that in his duffel bag and went home and ate it because he couldn't stomach the thought of that animal going to waste.
Like his reverence for it is so high that he can't allow someone else to trifle with it.
Okay, lean stuff like hooved animals, hooved game animals.
If you trim away the fat, which we don't call fat, we call tallow, it's waxy.
If you trim that stuff away and you either seal it with a vacuum sealer and then don't mess with the bag, like don't poke any holes in the bag so that the seal stays good and treat it very gently so that the seal stays intact.
Or you wrap it in saran wrap and then wrap it in wax freezer paper.
You could not Pepsi challenge that stuff if it was a year old against stuff that was a month old.
I took a guy hunting who you should have on this show at some point.
A guy named Rourke Denver.
He's a He's just leaving the service now.
He's a Navy SEAL commander.
He wrote a book called Damn Few, Making the Modern SEAL Warrior.
You remember a few years ago when that movie Active Valor came out and it was all active duty SEALs?
He's one of the stars in that movie.
Took him out bear hunting.
He grew up fishing and liked to fish a lot.
Hadn't done any hunting, but definitely grew up in the out of doors.
Obviously, over the last 13-14 years, they've been just...
He's been just consumed by training and being deployed again and again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan.
So he hasn't messed around outside, even though it was very important to him growing up.
He just, like I say, he's leaving the service now.
I took him out on a hunt, and we went up black bear hunting.
And in the end, we got on this big black bear and called him with a predator call, and he killed the bear, and we walked him.
It's a big boar.
It's like a six and a half foot boar.
And I said, and we're cutting it up, and I'm saying to him on camera, I'm like, I'm telling you what, man, if a bear is going to have trichinosis, it's going to be him.
And what I'm talking about was, Montana used to do free, they used to do free testing for trichinosis.
So you could send in a, they asked for specifically a golf ball sized piece of the tongue.
And you could send it into the MSU, and an MSU would send you the results on your bear.
The first bear I ever sent in for testing was from a 17-year-old black bear.
Besides steaks and roasts, I had 83 pounds of ground meat off that black bear.
It was a big bear.
So I send the thing and it comes back and it's positive.
And once it's positive, you are excused from wanton waste laws.
So it's illegal to waste game meat.
They spell out in great detail what you're obligated to retain on an animal and use.
There's some areas in Alaska, for instance, where if you kill a moose, you have to bring the liver home.
It's specified.
Legally, you're obligated to salvage the liver.
So they sent a thing saying, we're not going to give you a new bear tag, but you're excusing if you want to discard the meat, you can discard the meat.
And I was like, there's no way I'm going to do that.
The only thing worse to me than getting trigonosis was throwing away this bear meat.
So I just got a meat thermometer, a nice one, and ate the whole bear.
I never got another bear tested.
And they told me, I read this thing, they did this study in Montana where these two counties in northwest Montana that have really high bear populations.
It's Lincoln County and Sanders County.
And they said that they've never tested a bear from those counties that was over six years of age that didn't have trichinosis.
So trichinosis is just something like you're not born with it, right?
You eat infected meat and...
You can track the disease, and then you wind up having those little cysts, the larvae in your muscle tissue, and it just is passed along through consumption.
It's the reason you're supposed to cook pork to well done, and now it's not really that way anymore because they've gotten it out of domestic pork so much because when they stop feeding pigs restaurant slop, they really cut trichinosis out because what they realize is when they're feeding pigs restaurant slop, slop you're inadvertently giving them rats and mice that are sort of caught up in the cycle of restaurant slop right and rats and mice are big carriers so once they got rid of then once they made it illegal
and they had like only the the usda inspected pigs are feeding on controlled sources not stuff from you know garbage pails i used to wash dishes at the summer camp when i was kid and every day a pig farmer came and got all the food scraps and he fed them and he was selling inspected pork so you can't do that now so now 90 some percent of the black bear cases or so 90 some percent of the trichinosis cases in the u.s come from bear meat i'm explaining all this to rourke
And the next day...
I'm explaining another interesting thing about black bear meat, how there's a lot of variability in black bear meat.
Some are great, some are not so great.
So I'm talking about when I kill a bear, I'm always really interested to get a taste of it to see if we're dealing with, if we got gold or bronze, right?
And we start a fire and it's raining.
And we start a little fire and skewer up just some pieces just to sample it.
And it's raining and we're feeding it the firewood and everything's wet and it's just a pain in the ass trying to get it cooked.
And eventually I kind of peel this piece apart in my hands.
I'm like, yeah, you know, we're cool.
We're cool.
So there's six of us.
We eat it.
I never think another thing about it, right?
So, the next day we cook some shanks, but we cook the piss out of these shanks.
Like, we make asabuco braised shanks and cook them for five or six hours, right?
We eat a whole bunch of that, eat some grayling, eat some rainbow trout, go home, a month goes by, and I get, the shit's real bad.
So, and it's like a weird kind of the shits.
So I sent a text message to the guys I work with saying, does anybody have like a weird kind of the shits?
Because I'm worried that we got Giardi or something or Cryptosporidia from water contamination.
And one of the guys writes back and he says, no, but man, do I got some bizarre muscle aches, you know?
Now, yeah, well, never mind that.
I'm worried about my shits.
You know, I'm not worried about your problem.
So a couple of days later, I remember I'm like crossing the street and I'm like, God, that's a weird feeling in my back, you know, and it just got worse and worse and worse.
And I eventually texted this guy and I'm like, what were you saying about muscle aches, dude?
And it wound up four of us.
All had it.
And when we started putting it together, it was like, we all have the same weird thing.
Intense muscle pain in our calves.
Intense muscle pain in our necks.
Fevers.
And we haven't seen each other for a month.
And we all got sick on July 5. So it was like, this isn't the common cold.
So out of the four of us that get sick, I go down and they say in severe cases, if it attacks your pulmonary system, if the larva attack your heart, there's a medication you take.
I say, well, I'm just going to take the medication.
And they're like, well, you know, you might not need to.
I said, well, I want to go take it.
I go down, and that medication is $2,400.
Even with health insurance, it's $1,100 to buy the medication.
So the other guys are like, well, I'll just wait and see what happens to you.
We all get better at the same time.
And that medication only kills them in your stomach, right?
So for 6 to 10 years, depending on your source, if you were to eat me, So I don't know if that means I have 868 larvae per gram.
Yeah, it was so tender and delicious, but I've cooked a bunch of it, just put it on the grill, just seasoned it and put it on the grill, and it's amazing how tough it is.
There's a guy, you know, it's funny, I've never had it, but I've been arranging to have some because I drew a muskox tag for Nunavac Island this winter.
And when you hunt Nunavac Island, if you draw that tag, you have to hire what's called a transporter.
Because the only place to land is a Mikoruk on Nunavac, and it's a native village.
It's an Inuit or Eskimo village.
And your transporter can't do guide services.
He can't tell you where an animal is, but he provides transportation.
So you rent snow machines.
Or however you're getting around.
And he'll give you a place to stay when you're on the island.
It's called a transporter.
The transporter that I'm using is a walrus hunter.
So they're protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
So white guys don't go hunt walrus.
But natives who aren't administered by the Marine Manal Protection Act have their own self-governing body called the Walrus Commission.
And I think the Walrus Commission, I can't remember, meets in Nome or Kotzebue.
And the Walrus Commission will make decisions about what walrus harvest different coastal villages are allowed to have.
And out there on Nunavac, those hunters out there will periodically go and hunt walrus.
And the guy I'm using as my transporter goes on the walrus hunts.
So I've been encouraging him to make sure to have some, because I'd like to eat it when I come out, and I'd like to do a thing about that and hang out with this guy and eat walrus meat.
And he says he's going to make sure to have some on hand.
I don't know enough about what kind of sea animals have that stuff.
I mean, was he eating a chunk of polar bear that he found frozen?
I have no idea.
I would love to know.
When I had Lyme disease, I did tons of...
I could have gotten an honorary PhD in Lyme disease after having Lyme disease, and then when I got trigonosis, I started reading everything I could find about trigonosis, but that just got better one day.
But it just depends on what that particular, I'll use the term, what that particular healthcare provider has run into.
And you go in and say, like, oh, I'm not feeling so hot, you know, and this and that.
I think I got Lyme disease.
It's just like not, you know, yeah, I think if you're in Hudson Valley, New York, you're going to walk in, they're going to be like, hell yeah, you got Lyme disease.
But in some places, they're going to be like, eh, I don't know.
That's what I ran into, and I've told this story a thousand times, but when my boy...
Thank God he didn't get trichinosis.
He got Lyme disease.
He and I got Lyme disease at the same time fishing bluegills.
I was at my mom's in Michigan.
My mom comes up.
She was swimming with the boy.
My mom lives on the same lake I grew up on.
She was swimming with the boy down on the lake.
She comes up and says, why is his belly button all red like this?
I can't tell what happened there.
It turned into one of those bullseye rashes.
My wife, I send my wife a text image, like a text message picture of this thing.
And my wife right away is like, I wonder if he's got Lyme disease.
It looks like one of those bullseye rashes.
They talk about Lyme disease.
So she tells me to send it to his pediatrician.
Because I had him at my mom's.
You know, she wasn't there.
She's like, send it to his pediatrician.
I sent it to his pediatrician and be like, we're worried about what he's got Lyme.
She's like, well, just keep an eye on it.
But you don't keep an eye on those things because those things just go away.
They don't last forever.
So all of a sudden, then it's gone.
But clearly, he had it.
And so then we wind up going down there because then he gets another one somewhere else.
And we go down and we're like, we're really concerned he's got Lyme because he gets this bullseye rash.
And they're like, well, where is it?
I'm like, well, it's not there now, but it was there.
And he keeps talking about this and that and the other thing, different symptoms he's having.
We take him in three times, each time bringing up, I fear that this is what's going on with him.
When we pull him out of the bathtub for whatever reason in the hot water, he's got these damn circles all over him, but they kind of go away.
Eventually he's got Bell's palsy.
He'd take a sip of milk and his milk would run out the corner of his mouth.
And we'd go in there like, holy shit, he's got Lyme disease.
At this point, it's been going on for weeks, you know?
And what's funny is, this place, his pediatrician has a newsletter, and they had a newsletter article that was about Lyme hysteria, about how everyone's so hysterical about Lyme, being like, don't really need to worry about it, you know, everybody's getting hysterical about Lyme, like it's the new bogeyman, you know?
So in this altercation we have with the pediatrician, I'm like, I feel that your Lyme hysteria thinking and your Lyme hysteria article kind of colored your impression of what I'm telling you when we're coming and you're telling you, and we had to self-diagnose our child.
At which point they said, I want to have someone else in the room during this discussion.
The established scholarly consensus on Lyme, I think, is still this.
That there's no such thing as chronic Lyme, is what they'll say.
When I say they, I mean the medical establishment will say that Chronic Lyme doesn't exist.
There's Lyme disease.
When you go through treatment, like when I did the 28-day intravenous deal, they put a line that goes in your arm, up to your heart, and you inject these syringes in it.
When you get done with that, you do not have those bacteria in your body anymore.
If you go to a Lyme specialist and you tell a Lyme specialist, I have chronic Lyme, I met one.
I tried to get in to see one of these Lyme specialists, and she said, I don't see chronic Lyme patients.
I see acute Lyme patients.
And I had already done one round of antibiotics and I got worse during the round of oral.
And she's like, oh, you're chronic Lyme, meaning like, oh, it's all in your head.
I was talking to them and they said, well, it's like, it just seems kind of, it's an urban, chronic Lyme's an urban legend.
My finding wound up in some way burying out what she said would happen where I finished the stuff.
I think I got done with it sometime in September.
And by November, my symptoms were gone.
That's me.
My boy got better.
But I've since then met other people who are very credible individuals, who are not hysterical people, who've been through various rounds of treatment, and they're not getting better.
They used to have a vaccination against Lyme disease.
But the problem with it, a small percentage of people that got that vaccination would have some genetic marker that would make them predisposed to getting fucking Lyme disease from this vaccine.
So this guy was terrified of getting Lyme disease, gets a vaccination against Lyme disease, got Lyme disease from the vaccination, and then they stopped making the Lyme disease vaccination.
So this poor guy has fucking Lyme disease.
And he's still fucked up.
He's an old guy.
It's her dad.
And he's, you know, he's jacked from this fucking vaccination.
Some people say that because it's like in that thing's lifespan, you know, it gets on deer.
But I've heard other things that even just like rodents, you know, so like smaller furred animals.
I'm not really clear on that, man.
I don't really know.
I know that when you look at places that have it, you look at places that have a lot of deer, but I don't know if you had a third as many deer if you'd have higher or lower, if you'd have necessarily lower infection rates.
I can't answer that.
But Doug Duren, who you know, I think last summer, twice he got put on the immediate antibiotics.
Because now, when you find one of those ticks buried in you, if you go into a doctor, and if you're not weird about medication, the doctor's just going to give you a super heavy dose of antibiotics that kills it before it gets a hold of you.
If you wait like I did, it gets into your nervous system.
I knew I had to write about a subject because I knew that before the amnesia kicked out.
I lost the whole day.
I lost like eight hours of time.
And I knew that I was supposed to write about a subject.
And here was a thing on my computer about that subject.
I started taking sentences...
First, I took a big block, like a paragraph of text, and put it into Google to try to find how I cut and paste, how I managed to cut and paste an article on the subject I was supposed to be writing about into a Word document.
But there's no match.
Then I just started taking little blocks of words in quotes, and there's no match.
I'm like, this is not from online.
Then I start thinking that one of the guys I work with, I thought this guy, Jared Andrew Kanis, who was near there, who works at ZPZ. I start thinking that he somehow is playing some joke on me where he came and wrote about what I was supposed to write about.
On my desk, I also have a book, one of my favorite hunting books, called Hunt High by Duncan Gilchrist.
And on it, I had written Mark Boardman, Vortex Optics.
I look at the book, I know the book.
I know who Mark Borman is, but I can't imagine why Mark Borman's name would be on a sticky note on that book.
And I look at my other hand, and on my hand I have LOP written.
And LOP is a term length of pull.
It's a firearm term.
And a guy wanted a length of pull off a firearm.
And I wrote LOP on my hand.
I looked at my hand like I didn't know who put that there, how long it had been there, what it meant.
I got on the wrong train, got off at the wrong spot.
We were living in Brooklyn.
Got off at the wrong spot.
Came up, recognized a sport, recognized like a sporting goods, like a sports place called, I can't remember, it doesn't matter what it's called, like a sporting goods place.
And called my wife and told her that's where I was.
And then all of a sudden things started making more and more and more and more sense.
We did an episode of that Joe Rogan Questions Everything show on Morgellons.
Morgellons is this disease that most doctors dismiss.
They think that the people that are saying they have this, that there's something wrong with them psychologically, that they have some sort of a psychosomatic issue, and that what they're really doing is scratching themselves until they create these abscesses.
And then sometimes even putting things in their skin and then claiming that these things have been growing out of their skin because they found like carpet fibers and stuff in their skin that these people sent in.
But then when we went to these conferences where these people would meet that have this Morgellons issue, you realize you're also talking about some seriously educated people and some of them that are doctors.
And one of the doctors that we talked to said there is a direct correlation between Morgellons disease and people who have Lyme disease.
So when these doctors are examining these people and they say, oh, they're crazy, they think that carpet fibers are growing out of their skin.
No, they have Lyme disease, and the Lyme disease, along with all this other shit, is causing this neurotoxic effect, and that is what's making them think that there's something wrong out of their skin.
So it's not that they're just crazy, it's that they have a disease that's making them go crazy.
And that was pretty illuminating, because this guy was talking about seeing things, seeing worms underneath his skin of his eyes when he was looking in the mirror, and he goes, and I knew it wasn't there, but I'm seeing it anyway.
And he goes, I could feel it moving across my eye, but then there was nothing there.
And he's like, and it was pretty clear to me as a doctor that there was something going on with my mind that had a direct correlation between this disease.
So all these people that have this Morgellons, they also have this Lyme disease.
Dodie, I keep bringing up Dodie, but Dodie's like, you need to go to a shaman.
Because he thinks that there's some thing, like, I need to have, like, there's some sin I committed against the universe or something, and it's like, he thinks I need to go to a shaman to get right.
You know, the whole going to the jungle and taking that medication and having these spiritual experiences, it'll get you convinced that everything's all tied together and that somehow or another you've committed some sort of a sin against the universe.
DMT is dimethyltryptamine and it exists in thousands of different plants.
And the reason why you don't get it, like you don't get high when you eat it, is because your stomach produces monoamine oxidase.
So monoamine oxidase, what you need to do is take an inhibitor so that you could get it in an orally active form.
So most of the time, when most people get DMT, what they're getting is a synthesized version where they've taken Cochia viridis or all these different plants, they've extracted it down to the DMT and then you smoke it.
If you had Phalaris grass growing in your front lawn, you essentially have a schedule-run drug growing on your lawn in massive quantities.
So it can't be enforced.
But if they find the powder, if they find it synthesized and turned into a powder that you could smoke and freebase, then it's illegal, and then it's a Schedule I drug.
The Amazon shaman have figured out a way to take the vine of one plant and the leaves of another, and they boil them together.
So essentially, they use harming, which is a natural MAO inhibitor, and they combine it with this plant, and they boil it into this potion, and that's what ayahuasca is.
So it's DMT and an MAO inhibitor together in this elixir.
You drink it, and you have...
What's close to the smoked DMT experience as you can get, but not quite as potent.
I think you can, but the precursors of it are very tightly controlled by the DEA. Yeah.
Like if they found out that you were buying a certain amount of this chemical that you would use to make the synthetic version of it, they would flag you.
There was a guy that got arrested and they took all of his money and locked him up in jail.
I think it was called Happy Frog or something like that.
The name of his company.
I don't remember the name of his company, but he sold all these legal plants.
But the plants were all totally legal, but he sold them with the pretense that you could take these plants and extract DMT from them, and then he was arrested for that.
But even though what he was selling was legal, I think he got off.
I'm kind of speaking out of school here, because it was a few years back, and I didn't totally pay too much attention to it, but it is in so many different sources.
Well, it's a human neurotransmitter and an incredibly potent drug that's also the most transient drug ever exists or one of the most transient drugs ever observed.
So if you get, like if say if you smoke DMT, like I did it, like I said last week, you're blasted to the center of the universe for about 15 minutes and then you're back to baseline.
Like you're completely sober in 15 minutes.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Your body knows exactly what to do with it because it's such a normal part of your chemistry that your body can bring it back to baseline within minutes.
It's weird.
It's the weirdest shit ever.
And the weirdest aspect of it is while you're blown out, like blown out in this intense psychedelic state, you immediately think, I'm here all the time.
I've been here before.
I know what this is.
It's not unfamiliar.
It's completely alien but yet familiar at the same time.
So Doty, in all those ayahuasca experiences that he had when he was talking about all these flashbacks, all this craziness, what happens is you open up this...
It's a weird effect where if you do DMT and you have these powerful experiences, you open up this door.
And I don't know what the chemical effect of it is or what the mechanism is, but something happens when you open up that door where you can open up that door again, even in a dream.
And so the speculation is that what happens when people have, like, near-death experiences, when people have alien abduction experiences, when people have these crazy things they say happen to them, most likely what it is is some sort of a weird endogenous dump of DMT. Like, you know how something can happen to you when you get this crazy adrenaline rush?
They believe it's possible that something can happen to you when you get a crazy DMT rush.
That it's very difficult to access, but that it's a function of the brain.
The mandala of all the different psychedelic experiences, the center of it, literally the fucking point zero, the event horizon of that is DMT. So do you feel like...
This movie's only 10 minutes in and I know it's only got an hour and 50 minutes to go.
Shit, I wish it could go on forever.
That's a wasted thought.
Like, why not just be in the moment and enjoy it?
So it's, you know, that expression, be in the moment, is like so overdone and hippie and fucking yoga.
Like, so many people say things like that and it just makes you moan.
Like, oh, you shut the fuck up.
Because it's like...
It's so cliched and annoying when they say it, but there's wisdom in it, unfortunately.
There's just so many of these fucking fake spiritual people that clog up all these words and they ruin some of these definitions because, you know, oh, just be in the moment, find your center.
Oh, fuck you.
Okay, I'm not listening to your...
Like, I used to take yoga from this guy that was a total bullshit artist.
He was a good yoga instructor but he was intoxicated by the fact that he was teaching yoga and that all these people came to him and his ego would feed off of this yoga class to the point where he would say all these things and you would see people roll their eyes like my wife used to hate him because he was so cheesy.
And he would kind of hit on the ladies that would be there, and he wound up fucking some dude's wife, and it was like a disaster.
Left his wife, and she left her husband, and now they're miserable together.
He was like a fake spiritual guy.
And these fake spiritual people, they have this way of ruining a lot of really wise notions.
Or they're claiming to be enlightened when really they're just a student on the path and maybe they have some good ideas along the way to enlightenment, but they're not quite there.
There's a lot of people searching, like these new age type people that are searching for some sort of a meaning.
And if you find the wrong shaman, you find the wrong yogi, you find the wrong guru, you could go down a bad path.
I mean, the guy who's the head of Bikram Yoga...
He's got all these rape allegations and sexual assault allegations.
He drives a fucking Bentley everywhere.
He's loaded.
He's got fucking gold-crusted Rolexes.
He's clearly not a spiritual, enlightened guy, but he's the head of this whole Bikram movement, which is filled with all these pseudo-spiritual people.
There was a guy once that was on this radio show that I was listening to that was the head of a corporation that was approached by Jesse Jackson.
Because something had gone on, something where racial insensitivity, they had been accused of something that was racially insensitive.
So Jesse Jackson came on, and essentially the pitch was, you are going to hire my company to give seminars on racial sensitivity, and it's going to cost you a quarter million dollars a year, and if you do not, we are going to protest you, we're going to make it miserable, we're going to cost you far more than you would spend to have my company come in, the Rainbow Coalition, or whatever the fuck it was.
An out-of-court settlement that they profit from in an incredible way.
But he had all these crazy demands.
Like, he wanted to have shrimp cocktail.
Like, Jesse Jackson had all these very specific demands as far as the kind of food, the amount of food that he was to be given, what was supposed to go on, what kind of car he was supposed to be picked up in.
And, you know, you look at Reverend Jesse Jackson.
He's a religious man.
Well, where's he getting all this fucking money?
He is a wealthy, wealthy guy.
And he's wealthy by being what they call a race pimp.
And that's how this guy was describing it.
He's like, he's a race pimp.
This guy finds these scenarios where something goes wrong, moves in, and then extracts money from the situation.
There's one really good chapter in that book where he talks about how people's positions on things evolve over the years.
And I thought that was good.
Then there's a really horrible chapter where he talks about how his role in comforting Michael Jackson's family upon Michael Jackson's death, where he sort of presents himself as the great hero.
He's a fool.
I think my agent was like, you're the last guy in the world I would expect to read a Sharpton book.
But I told myself, well, here's the thing.
That's probably why I'm reading it.
Because all my life I've heard about this guy, I really don't understand who he is or what he does.
I mean, he represented a woman who made up a fake allegation of being raped by white people and wrote things on her body, and it turns out none of it happened.
She just made it all up, and he was demanding...
You know, justice and all this crazy shit.
And he was, you know, on every television show and all throughout, you know, the news cases and all this different shit.
And it turned out that what he was doing was just based on nothing.
It was based on all lies.
It was based...
The entire scenario jetted him into the public eye.
Yeah, I can't tell you whether I read that in this book or whether one of the many people who saw me reading the book and had to come up and give me their two cents on the subject told me that.
Well, it's amazing that the guy became famous for demanding justice for something that never took place.
But it's a perfect analogy.
Where it's a perfect representation of who he is.
And also how bizarre our sensitivities are to race.
That this fucking clown is on MSNBC or CNBC or whatever the fuck he is giving his opinions on all these different things and his opinions are brutally dumb.
When he has to communicate, when he has to debate people who are intelligent or have nuanced opinions on these subjects, his clear and obvious bias and his cookie-cutter idea of racism in America.
Racism is a real issue, without a doubt.
But having a guy like that represent the black community almost fosters racism.
It's almost like if I was a racist and I wanted to make sure that people had a negative opinion of black people, I would take the most clownish cartoon versions of black leaders and feature them prominently on television in order to reinforce...
Reinforce these ideas of these cartoonish figures being, this is what represents the black community.
Isn't the black community silly?
And that's what happens.
Instead of getting a Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Cornel West, instead of getting these super intelligent, very articulate people with broad perspectives, you get this goofball with fucking conked hair and a stapled stomach.
He also made an animation form, which you'd be interested in, showing how wolves became dogs.
And over the course of human civilization evolving, how these wolves who had become friendly with people had eventually gotten to the point where the people were feeding them and the wolves stayed close and then those wolves had slowly but surely morphed into dogs.
I mean, all you need to do is look at what they've done with dogs.
You know, the time that human beings have been, I mean, what is, the established timeline for agricultural civilization is, what is it, 10,000 years or something like that?
There's probably, like, I'm sure there's great stuff written about it.
But, you know, like, they had, so when the first Americans migrated into North America, they were traveling with a domestic version, you know, something that had been domesticated for quite some time, a domestic version of the Eurasian wolf.
And then they came down and here you had a number of wild canines, you know, wolves, which the animal they were traveling with could breed with wolves.
you now find that in certain cases wolves and coyotes they don't they don't i don't think they always put off viable young but they do think that there are hybridization events between wolves and coyotes so at some point these guys came down with this eurasian wolf there was probably almost certainly there had been some in you know some inbreeding of wolves and then out of that stock created lord knows what all you Because by the time Lewis and Clark...
When Lewis and Clark were out and they were eating dogs with Plains tribes, those dogs weren't showing...
There hadn't been dogs that came from Europe, from colonists, hadn't put dog blood into the dog blood, and they came and they had a dog that looked like...
There was a recent thing where they've done a genetic study on certain hybrids where they've found a hybrid that's part coyote, part wolf, and part domestic dog.
That kind of is surprising because one of the things people look at is why are...
Coyotes in the East are just different.
They're bigger.
They feel that there was hybridization events of wolves and coyotes that gave you a bigger coyote in the East and you have smaller coyotes in the West.
I'll tell you right now, because it's a totally new thing that they've proven.
It's from where they've established it.
The wolf's controversy will return to California.
It's on Popular Science Magazine.
Popular opinion is divided on how to manage the gray wolf.
So it's a gray wolf.
2011 a male gray wolf called or seven left his pack in oregon and traversed 1200 miles to california where the sword travel isn't atypical for gray wolves the terrain or seven covered set him apart from the pack he became the first confirmed wolf in california in almost a century no kid yeah Yeah.
I'm telling you, I don't mean to say I was on this story long ago, but my entire life...
This debate about where mountain lions that turn up in the east, or where wolves that turn up in weird places, my entire life has been this battle between people who be like, oh, it's escape pets.
It's escape pets.
And now it's becoming clear in so many of these cases.
It's not.
Things just leave now and then, and they have a very clear sense of purpose, and they travel tremendous distances.
To account for all the lions, the guys would be like, it was a damn lion.
Like, I found where something had killed a deer.
I went back the next day, and there was a lion sitting there.
I'd be like, it's an escape pet.
This is pretty proficient.
My whole life has been going on, and now, finally, I mean, the guys that have been pushing for this forever finally got to feel a lot better.
Now that through tracking devices, we're able to go like, yeah, a wolf decided one day, You know, to leave there and go down.
There's a grizzly that one day decided to mosey out of the Rockies and made it out into eastern Montana.
You know, there's an elk that did a...
Usually it's, you know, usually these wide-ranging predators.
They got wolverines that...
I was just reading a thing about...
They had a wolverine.
Back up a little bit because this one's being interesting.
They were doing a radio collar study in Alaska about a road.
Think about putting a road in into the Juneau area.
So they've been doing a study on animal movements in that area to try to anticipate how this road might impact wildlife.
Just to see about their migration patterns and movement patterns, they went in and collared a bunch of stuff.
They had a radio collared Moose, fall into a crevasse in a glacier, and then a radio-collared bear tried to go in there and get him out, and fell in and died.
And I think that was then scavenged by a radio-collared wolverine.
They also had a wolverine-collared bear get caught by a trapper 250 miles away in B.C., 250 miles it walked.
My brother Danny was hunting spring bears one time and saw wolverines digging through the debris field at the base of an avalanche looking for critters that got swept up in the avalanche.
Dude, I was driving down the Hall Road, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Road.
you know you're up if you go if you're on that road like the pipe the road that parallels the alaska pipeline dalton highway if you're on that road and you go west you're not gonna you know you depending on your line of travel you won't hit another road till you're in europe you know in russia and then you go the other direction you're gonna get way into canada before you hit a road i mean you're out in the middle of nowhere i'm not in the middle of nowhere but it's very remote relative to anything we can comprehend down here driving on that road
one time um all out steps the links okay and it looks like It's like a cat with a baby's face on it, like a human baby's face on it, man.
Cameron Haynes was telling me about bears that come out of hibernation.
And as they come out of hibernation, it's the same time where the moose are stuck in the snow.
Oh, that wet, sloppy snow.
And so the moose are like...
Plotting and these bears come out and they haven't eaten anything in months because they've just been hibernating but they see these moose and they can't help but kill them.
So they just go on these rampages killing every moose they find and just leaving their carcasses because they can't really handle meat yet.
Because when they do come out, they'll come out and eat grass for a while, eat vegetation, but they do spend a lot of time following that.
They spend a lot of time looking for what we call winter kill, just scavenging carcasses they can find.
And then they hammer, hammer fawns.
And that's something people used to not realize about Black bears is the high rates of fawn mortality you get from black bears on elk, moose, deer.
It doesn't seem like they really go after the healthy adults under normal circumstances, but they really find out that black bears just turn up and hit animals.
Calves and fawns in a way that no one ever thought before.
When we were bear hunting, I got to watch bears fight.
We watched a fucking no-holds-barred brawl between this female bear with her two cubs and this male who had come into the bait.
She fucking went to war, man.
The babies climbed up the trees.
They were way the fuck up the trees, to the point where we were worried.
One of them got real squirrely.
He was kind of upside down on the tree.
He was way up there.
And they're really young.
And the adults can't climb because they get too heavy.
And this big male had come in.
And it was a big female.
And first, the babies ran up the tree.
And the female took off.
She left.
And then she just thought about it.
So, you know what?
Fuck that.
And she turned around and attacked him.
Turned around and challenged him.
And they both went up on their back legs.
And they were just going at it.
Just...
And we were sitting there on the ground, because Cameron's fucking nuts.
He likes to hunt on the ground.
He likes to bow hunt.
No tree stand.
So we're just, there's like a tree that's fallen, and we're set up behind this tree, and we're watching these fucking, you know, six, seven-foot brown bears going to war right in front of us.
I remember being such a little kid, one of my earliest memories, not earliest memories, but I remember being a little kid, and my dad got a phone call one night.
One of his hunting buddies was sitting on a bear bait with his bow.
And a sow came in with cubs and smelled them and shooed her cubs up a tree, but they went up past him in the tree, and then they started squealing and balling up there, and she came up and mauled his legs.
She went up a tree, the one that we saw, she went up a tree a little bit, but only maybe 5 or 6 feet where her kids went like, shit, they were 50 feet up.
I was calling turkeys one time and had a bear come behind me.
You know, like predators, when you're calling turkeys in the spring, you're making hen noises to track males, track the toms, but predators will come to that noise.
And I had a bear come in behind me that I never heard until I heard it breathe.
You know, it's funny, we're talking about like bears climbing trees, black bears and grizzly bears.
I wrote about this at some point, but...
My brother and I were laying on this ridge one time hunting elk, and during the midday when it's warm, nothing happens.
We'll just go sleep somewhere and wait for the elk to come back out, because they go into black timber just to bed down.
So there's really no sense, and there's nothing you can do.
You just sleep.
And at one point I wake up, because I hear a noise, and I wake up and there's a black bear standing there, and he goes off down this ridge line.
I'm sorry, it just goes down off the ridge down toward the valley floor.
That night, we headed out to go hunt elk, and we happened to go in the direction that the bear went.
And my brother still had a bear tag.
I had filled my bear tag, but he still had a bear tag.
And as we're walking, I hear the noise of its claws on the bark.
Like a real loud, you know, like barks falling and scratching.
You can imagine what a cat would sound like or something, scratching up something.
I'm like, that must be that black bear.
So we go hauling ass up the tree thinking that we'll maybe get the bear up the tree and be able to check it out.
But we run up there and it's not a black bear.
It's a sow grizzly standing there and she's got two cubs that are about four or five feet up this tree and she's standing there at the base of the tree and she woofs at us like a dog.
Like a woof.
Barking.
And those cubs come down the tree and we're just standing right there, man.
You can never say it was close to getting scratched unless you got scratched because you don't know what's in the animal's head.
But reviewing it in my head, that was a very sketchy moment.
The last thing you're supposed to do is mess with their cubs.
And here we are just running up on there.
And when she got those cubs down out of the tree and they started going up the hill away from us, she was taking her paw and moving the cubs with her paw.
The same way when you're trying to get your kids to go where you want, your eyes have got your hand on their head or you're somehow trying to guide them.
I just read that not a single bowhunter has been killed by a grizzly bear You know, while bowhunting, even though bowhunters get scratched up all the time, like every year there's some guy getting scratched up.
Not a single bowhunter's been killed by a grizzly bear in at least 20 years.
Now, in that show, when they're doing that, this happens a lot, but I know that shows don't show it, and outdoor writers don't write about it.
But oftentimes, very often, I can't say it's the majority of the time, but a very common practice when a guy's bowhunting brown bears is the minute that arrow makes contact with that bear, the guy's lighting it up with a 375 H&H. So they'll shoot it with a gun right after the- The minute that arrow hits.
I mean, I saw that on a show, it was a bow hunting show, where this guy shot a fucking elephant with a bow, and the elephant turned, and he was like, fuck you, and the elephant starts running him, and boom, they shot him in the head with a rifle.
And he's going to call that, I hunted an elephant with a bow.
Like, the fuck you did?
All you did was piss an elephant off, and it charged you, and these guides shot the elephant in the head.
I really didn't like watching them shoot the elephant.
There's something to me about shooting some animals where it's like, I don't get it.
Like, I don't know why you would travel all the way to Africa to shoot an elephant with a bow while these people behind you rifle it, and you're calling that bow hunting.
I remember reading one time, and this explained this to my brother the other day when I was talking about this conundrum I'm in, where I was reading about a guy who was describing the hunt for monkeys.
And a dude hit a...
He was observing South American tribal hunters or Amerindians.
He was observing them hunting monkeys.
And a monkey got shot in the back.
And the monkey with a dart.
And the monkey reached around and grabbed the dart.
What I couldn't see is going there with a purpose to go shoot a monkey.
I guess if I was there experiencing what it is like for them, and also if they offered me a monkey, like if it was part of like, you're taken into their home and they're cooking you a meal and they ask you, you know, they serve you what they eat, maybe then I would eat it.
And by saying that, I don't think that one shouldn't be allowed and whatever, you know, it just depends on the consensus of biologists in whatever area, whether they can warrant it or not, but no, I wouldn't.
Dude, in Africa, it's just like, I guess, I can't get it, but in Africa, you get the sense that people view baboons almost like how you might, like, I hate to say it, but you might look at raccoons and opossums that are getting into your dumpster.
If I lived in some areas, there's some areas of western Massachusetts that are so flooded with deer, I would definitely have one of those crazy bumpers on my truck.
You know, they have those crazy big steel bumpers.
Yeah, there was one of them that we were pulling up photos of the other day of 18-wheelers that they have these giant ones they put over the front of their trucks because deer are so common in a lot of these areas where they're transporting stuff, and they had one where this deer had just...
It hit it, and the guard did its job, but the fucking entire truck was just painted with blood, you know, because it was going 65 miles an hour, and you hit an animal.
I recently wrote a thing about this on the meat-eater show.
Show website where I was talking about these recent controversies where someone will go and kill an African animal, kill a lion, pull a picture of a lion.
By the way, tell people where they can get that because I loved your perspective on it and I loved one of the things you pointed out about you've seen all these things where people are getting pissed off, these pretty girls that are going over there and shooting these animals.
Like, one point I tried to make in that thing that I wrote...
You could find it if you just go...
You could probably even type in, like...
Stephen Rinella, African hunting controversy.
Go to themeater.com, you'll find the article.
But the point I make is, when people look at someone posing with an African animal, like a lion, I think people look at it and they feel like they see a dead movie star.
Because they don't know...
Like, all you know of that animal is sort of wildlife documentaries and then cartoon versions and The Lion King.
It's like, you feel like you're looking at that.
But in America, we drive down the road and we see just like contorted...
And I think that's one, as far as conservation goes, I think that's one thing that conservation organizations that are based off of specific animals will always tell you is that they're looking at, like, apex or keystone, cornerstone species.
So, like, a group like the National Wild Turkey Federation or the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, they'll point out, they'll be like, yeah, this is about elk.
We have elk on our symbol.
You might think that we fetishize elk, but I can tell you this, what's good for elk is good for everybody.
Yeah.
It's one of the most demanding, least tolerant things.
And so if you preserve elk wintering habitat, you're also, at the same time, preserving the habitats of so many other species.
And you might not say the same thing about if you went and preserved the habitat of some animal with a more restricted home range or something.
It might not blossom outward to offer protection for all these other things.
And earlier I made a term about something being like a semantics thing.
Because if you go and hunt and you keep something, like you have right here in your studio, you have a deer antler.
You got like a deer skull, right?
By really any definition, you'd be like, well, that's a hunting trophy.
Does that make you then a trophy hunter?
Even though you ate the deer.
To be a non-trophy hunter, would that mean that you should have thrown that deer head in the garbage in order to be more pure?
Or is it more pure that you'd maintain that emblem and pay respect to the animal in perpetuity by having its head here?
It's like you kept a trophy.
You kept the meat and kept the trophy.
But when people hear trophy hunter, I think what that means in our culture is that someone just hunts for that purpose.
He just wants to go kill that thing.
And this is coming from a guy who's never hunted in Africa.
But so much of the controversy about Africa is that people are going there and killing animals just for the head and bringing them home.
In that way, you're probably trivializing the experience, but you're also not really looking at the broad picture of how game gets managed there and the importance that the commodification of wildlife plays in Africa, where here we have publicly owned wildlife.
And we have a really stringent system where we can legally protect stuff.
But in Africa, there's a great argument to be made for if it wasn't for the value of those animals to Westerners, if it wasn't for the hunting industry, those animals wouldn't be in those places where they are.
There's way too many forces and factors that would have led to those being ravaged ecosystems, hunting from people who are starving or who are wanting to graze livestock in those areas.
And the fact that you bring in a currency...
And you monetize them, enables people to preserve these large tracts of land and have animals on there.
So you can look at, like, what is Joe Blow's motivation?
Joe Blow's motivation might be he thinks it'd be sweet to have a zebra hide on his floor.
And you can condemn Joe Blow for thinking that.
But you really, to be fair, you have to look at the impact of That money that he spent to get it has on the broader economy and on the wildlife politics of that place.
So it's way more complicated than what any one individual's motivations were.
And it's just...
I just caution people...
And I'll tell you what, I've had my share of looking at...
Pictures of guys hunting in Africa and being like, dude, you just went out and paid someone and he showed you that.
And you're like, well, that's what one of those is and shot it.
I've felt that a thousand times looking at those pictures.
But it's one of those things that the more I've learned about it and spoke to people who've gone there and read about it, the more I've come to admit that, you know what, what's going on in Africa is vastly more complicated than what you're going to get From reading about internet controversies, people posting pictures.
You really need to study up on that stuff before you condemn it, because I think you'll be kind of shocked by some of the stuff you learn.
If anybody's interested in it further, we're just about out of time, but Louis Theroux has a documentary.
Theroux?
How do you say his name?
Theroux.
Louis Theroux has a documentary about African hunting camps where he kind of goes into great detail with these guys that run these camps about how these animals...