Cameron Hanes and Joe Rogan clash with anti-hunting critics while defending bowhunting’s ethical rigor—like his 200-mph bear shot or controlled lion hunts in Tanzania. Hanes argues baiting can be justified (e.g., antelope near water) but warns of risks, like a nervous hunter missing a bull elk. Rogan contrasts factory-farmed meat with wild game, dismissing veganism’s athletic claims due to B12 and protein gaps. Both critique California’s restrictive hunting laws, fearing they worsen predator overpopulation, proving conservation often hinges on hunters’ expertise—not just activism. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, or it would have frozen to death, or it would have starved.
There's a lot of folks out there who just have this idealistic view of what nature is.
They have this view of nature being this...
Place of peace and harmony and it's a fucking brutal horrible environment where no one gets out alive All those animals die and they die they don't live past like seven or eight years if they're really really lucky exactly And the idea that there's something wrong with someone stepping in there and killing one of them and getting the meat off of it,
as opposed to going to a supermarket and getting some corralled up, penned up animal that's lived its life in hell, it just shows you how goofy we are today.
These are the animals where, when spring rolls around, the bears wake up and they go out looking for cubs.
That's what they do.
They go out looking to eat cubs.
I had Sue Aiken on the podcast yesterday from that pot the Life below zero show.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know if you ever seen that show she lives 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and And, you know, she was talking about just the bear population in her area and how she was attacked by a bear and, like, really fucked up bad.
I mean, I remember sitting out there in that plastic table with all of us and just eating this food bite after bite thinking, this is some of the best meat I've ever had.
Well, any meat, if you don't prepare it right, if you don't take care of it after you kill it, you can get cow meat that rots if you don't take care of it, if you don't prep it, if you don't properly cool it and put it on ice or whatever you have to do, but Jen knows how to cook it.
Yeah, like what you were talking about with those boars, they come out and they kill the cubs, you know, all a big male dominant boar cares about is his genetics being passed on.
So when he sees those cubs out there that aren't his, he's like, well, those aren't my genes, so he wants to kill them so that female comes back in heat, and then he can breed her, and that's the whole thing.
And then, as you said, once that cub, even that female's cub was dead, it went from being her cub When it was dead, then it was just, okay, it's just more food.
And they were going, this one male bear kept sneaking back in.
He kept wanting to get to where the bait was, and the female was trying to chase him off because her cubs were there.
Her cubs ran up a tree, and she chased him off, and he came back, and she chased him off, and he came back, and then she took off, and then she's like, fuck this, and she came back in again, and then they started duking it out.
Well, and you know, you mentioned the bait there, and that's another thing people don't really understand, because baiting gets a black eye sometimes for hunting.
But up there...
It's really the only way to control those bear numbers.
There's so many bear.
They kill so many moose.
The country is so thick.
If you're going to hunt them, you have to bring them to you somehow and be able to kill them.
If you didn't bait, you would probably never kill a bear up there.
And another key to baiting and seeing those bear up close is identifying what you're killing.
Because you want to take out those dominant males that have already bred...
That are older past their prime and that's what we're trying to kill up there.
We're not taking sows with cubs.
We're not taking young males that haven't reached John and Jen.
They like to kill seven foot plus black bear.
So to do that, people look at bear and all bear look the same to the uneducated eye.
Well, when you can see them up close, how we were hunting them on the ground, you get a real good idea of what you're shooting, what you're hunting, what you're going to pass up.
And that's a key, too.
So it's just wildlife management at its best, really.
I mean, that's one more draw for hunting, is when you're just driving through a country and you're just kind of in the cities and you're driving around maybe in a car, you don't get to experience what that country is.
I mean, to be out there, to live it, to, you know, when I go to all these places, Tanzania, Alberta, Australia...
And I live out there and sit on the ground and see the animals and hunt them one-on-one, that's when you really get to experience everything that country has to offer.
And that's so valuable.
I mean, people, that connection has made me who I am, whether I'm killing anything or not, just being there and just being part of the country.
Yeah, it's definitely something that we're completely disconnected to by standing in the 101 traffic over and over and over again and just grinding out every week sort of the same way.
This becomes life.
It becomes life.
This is life.
Life is you get up, your alarm clock goes off, you got an hour commute, and it really should be about a three-minute commute, but you're going to get stuck in traffic.
And when you go to a place like Alberta and you're out there and just this unbelievably beautiful, dense forest and you're out there and you're out there doing something that requires a tremendous amount of discipline too.
One of the things that I really enjoy about archery and about bow hunting is it's not as easy as like set up...
I'm not saying that rifle hunting is easy because none of it is easy.
But it's not, if you have a good rest for your rifle, you know, and the animal's no more than, you know, 100 yards away, it's a pretty good likelihood that you're going to shoot that animal.
100 yards away with a bow and arrow, good fucking luck.
No, that's, you know, because I rifle hunted for three years before I started bow hunting, and, uh, I started rifle hunting.
I loved it.
I loved the challenge.
I still love going out on rifle hunts.
I haven't rifle hunted for 26 years, but I just like the hunting atmosphere and environment and working together.
But what I noticed when I transitioned from rifle hunting to bow hunting is where the rifle hunt Ended, like as you said, 100 yards, 200 yards, where it ended, it was over.
If you made the shot, game over.
That's where the bow hunt really begins.
So you're 100 yards or 200 yards, and now you've got to be on your A game.
Getting from there to the red zone or bow range of an animal, that's where it's difficult.
And one of the things that I've talked about with some of my friends that have really gotten into archery is about how the world sort of goes away when you're focusing on that bullseye.
It's a weird zen state.
And it really, in that sense, the practice, for someone who has no interest in hunting, maybe you're a vegetarian, I totally respect that, if that's what you want to do.
But archery in and of itself is an amazing pursuit just like for the meditative aspects of it.
And also, It's beautiful having a friend like you who could talk me through all that stuff, who can talk me through the right way to prepare and all the right equipment, having the right bow.
You know, people give you a hard time because you shoot really powerful bows, and they're like, you don't need to shoot a bow that powerful.
I feel bad sometimes because sometimes I'll talk about my bow and then out of the blue somebody says, why do you need to shoot 80 or 90 pounds?
And I've heard it for years and Probably thousands of times and I just feel like lashing out at that one person who maybe that was the first time they've ever even been on my Facebook page or whatever.
That's what's happened the other day and I didn't lash out because I try to respect everybody.
I don't Whatever.
I just try to be respectful.
And so all I said to that guy was, you know, he says he's killed all these animals and got pastures of 62 pounds.
I said, all right, well, what about the guys who shoot 50 pounds?
They'd probably say to you, why do you shoot 62 pounds?
I shoot 50 and kill my animals.
So they would say you're doing too much.
And my whole thing is, I hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
And so, the worst is on a big bull elk, you catch a shoulder blade, or you drill a big heavy rib, or if I'm hunting Cape Buffalo, I hit a rib, which is like a 2x4.
So I'm preparing for the worst, I hope for the best.
You know, if you think...
Almost any bow with a razor-sharp broadhead, if it's just hitting soft flesh between the ribs, is going to kill it.
You could probably do that with 40 pounds, maybe even 30-some pounds.
Well, what's interesting is that you've got a whole group of people that are sort of following your philosophy now.
Like this whole, you know, your catchphrase, keep hammering.
I see all this hashtag, keep hammering people in the gym, preparing for bowhunts.
It's like people prepare for bowhunts now like they're preparing for an athletic event.
I see these dudes doing all these rows and lifts and chin-ups and pulling their back muscles and getting everything in order and then running up hills and all following your lead and treating this as like an athletic endeavor.
If you've ever seen it, actually, we didn't play your Under Armour commercial the first time, did we?
It's like it shows you preparing, you know, running up hills.
And that's also part of this bow hunting thing, is that you're preparing for an event.
As much of an event as a marathon, as much of an event, and maybe even more so, because it's this...
People don't like the term spiritual when it's connected to hunting, but there is something that's very spiritual about taking an animal, respecting its life, taking out that meat, and then eating it, and this feeling that you have of being connected to this cycle of life.
It's a very, very different thing than anything I've ever done before.
Anything I've ever done where, especially anything you've ever done where you've eaten meat.
There's an Under Armour commercial, but that one's cool to watch too.
But you could see the amount of preparation that's involved in this.
And so, you know, there's a lot of people out there that are really into CrossFit, and they're really into working out.
And you are, and I am.
And I had this dude who was on Fear Factor once, him and his girlfriend.
Nice folks.
They were CrossFit people.
And I was like, well, what do you do with all that...
Exercise.
You're just exercising for exercise.
It's good to be in shape and everything.
Why don't you take up jiu-jitsu or something like that?
Go put it to use.
See progress in an athletic endeavor.
Well, one of the best and ultimate ways is hunting because you're putting that progress, you're putting that athleticism and that training and all that hard work, you're putting it into this really primal situation where you're going uphill, especially like the elk hunting.
Yeah, I think the thing with elk, for me that's been, we've probably mentioned that before because if anybody who's going to talk to me about bow hunting, elk's going to come up.
That was always the biggest dream was killing a big bull elk with my bow.
And it's so hard.
It is so difficult.
I killed a bull elk my very first year of bow hunting.
I think I was 19. I killed a spike bull.
It took a long time to do it.
But when I said, okay, I want to kill now a mature, big bull, six by six, in the wilderness, by myself, that took eight years to do.
Eight years of bow hunting to ever...
I killed other bulls.
I killed some five points, a few five points, another spike, a six by five, but...
It took me eight years to get that, quote, dream bull.
And to anybody, I guess, a seasoned, I don't know, trophy hunter, they probably wouldn't even have shot it.
But it was a nice 6x6, scored about 275 inches, Pope and Young.
And it was a wilderness on my own, and that took eight years.
Well, with that bull, at that time I owned with my buddy Roy four llamas.
And so we would train these llamas.
And a llama isn't like a horse, but they can pack 60 pounds.
So four of them, you got 240 pounds of meat.
You can haul out or gear or whatever else.
So on that hunt, I had four llamas available.
The problem was, I killed that bull opening day of the season.
We had just walked in with those llamas with...
Me and these other guys, I was by myself about 10 miles away because I like to be by myself.
I mean, right now, I just kind of tolerate the cameraman if I'm with somebody, but really what I'm drawn to is solo hunting on my own just because I just like the test of that.
So anyway, I was by myself.
I killed those bulls.
Opening day, I skinned it out, got it hung up, and In that high country I killed it is probably about over 7,000 feet.
So even though it was September and it was warm, in the evenings at 7,000 feet or at night, it gets cool.
The air is dry.
So if you hang that meat up like in a north-facing timber where the sun stays off of it and it stays cooler in there, and you get up off the ground where the wind can move, you can get what hunters call the meat would glaze over.
So it basically cools, glazes over.
And I've had, even in early season like that, you could hang deer and elk for five days and the meat would be fine.
What I did with that is I broke that all down, and I'm like, well, I'll go see how the llamas are doing.
I packed all the way back.
The llamas, because we just came in the day before, were too tired.
They're only about 300 pounds, so it's not like they got a ton of muscle.
They'd walked 12 miles in with gear, and I knew they couldn't get that bull out, so I waited for these other guys who were hunting 10 miles away from me that night to come back to camp, and I'm like, guys, I said, I killed a bull.
If you guys help me get it out, We'll go down to Le Grand.
I'll get us a hotel room.
I'll buy us pizza.
Do this whole thing.
I was like, we'd do anything.
And so me and three other guys packed that whole bull out 12 miles.
Took it to the meat locker there and then packed back in.
Yeah, because like deer, you can get like a ruddy old buck that's like an eight, nine-year-old buck and it's like, oof, whoa, we might need to throw this one in the steam cooker in a crock pot or something, you know?
The controversy about African animals is, I mean, you get what I call Facebook controversy, which is very sort of cursory controversy.
Controversy.
It's not people that are really investigating it and trying to figure out what is going on here.
They just see a picture of a pretty girl from Texas with an animal on the ground and they go, oh, that bitch.
And Ranella wrote this article, which is really interesting, where he was saying that a lot of what you're dealing with is just straight up sexism.
You're dealing with people that don't want to see a pretty girl in that environment, and for whatever reason they either decide it's not her place, or especially because she's pretty, they have some certain amount of resentment about her anyway because she carries around a certain amount of privilege and easy access to life because she's so pretty.
The doors just open up for her, which is true, right?
But what people, what they fail to do is really sort of investigate what's going on in Africa in that these people that live in these communities, if it wasn't for these high fence hunting operations, their resources would be severely diminished.
Poverty on an intense scale that I think us as Americans, we, you know, you dip your toes in, you go visit for a little bit, and you're still not really grasping the idea of being born there.
I don't see how you ever could, you know, but what's weird, and so I was wrestling with this whole time, because when I go to these places, I love the culture, I love the people, um, Even there I was trying to learn Swahili with some of the trackers that were working with me.
Rashidi, awesome guy, speaks only Swahili.
So I really invest myself into the culture and I just want to learn.
I want to see things through their eyes.
I saw these grass shacks and all these people and you know every grass shack had six little kids running around it and it's just like I'm thinking this is awful I mean it's no hope for six kids at every grass shack that seems I don't know it just seemed very sad to me but we were there getting ready to cross this river in the truck and the river was high so we were kind of out Ryan Shalom, he owns Greenleaf Tanzania.
And so we're there and we're kind of seeing what's going on and There was a village about a quarter mile away.
And as we're looking at the river and trying to make a game plan, there was music and just people singing.
And I'm like, is it happy hour over here?
What is going on?
And that really just hit home.
It's like, you know, I see them and I think there's no hope and they must be miserable.
And when people grow up in an environment, that's just what they're used to.
You get used to it, and that's how you live.
If that's all you know, you don't know what it's like to stay at the Four Seasons and eat at the buffet in the morning and have the valet pull your car around.
All the shit that some people think is the good life.
But those people that are living like that...
At the Four Seasons, you know, checking their Rolex, where is this goddamn valet?
You know, those people might be on fucking antidepressants.
The people in Africa are singing and playing the bongo drums and having a great old time.
I mean, look, life is about friendship, experience, having fun, and staying healthy.
And whatever those people can do to make that happen, and whatever is in their environment that they can take advantage of as far as nutrition and being able to...
Take care of their family.
They do what they can with what they've got.
And that's also something where the hunters help out.
And this has often been criticized as just like, oh, people are just using that as an excuse.
And that a lot of the meat goes to these families and these villages.
And it is a huge, huge benefit to them to get fresh protein.
Like Brian Stevens that we were talking to when we were on that hunt was talking to me about an elephant kill that they had.
They killed an elephant.
And you talk about killing an elephant and everybody goes, oh my god, you killed an elephant.
How the fuck could you kill an elephant?
I don't have any desire to kill an elephant.
But...
I wanted to listen to his perspective and see what he had to say about it.
One of the things that he was saying was that when you kill an elephant, the village, they all pile in to get a piece of that elephant.
It's so welcome.
There's these photos of these people.
With these just great baskets filled with elephant meat.
And there's dozens and dozens of people taking this meat away.
And this is protein that they wouldn't ordinarily not have been able to get.
Then you're dealing with the money that this guy had to pay to harvest this elephant, which is a substantial amount of money.
I was thinking maybe they're going to get thousands of dollars.
$250.
Whereas, you know, you mentioned Brian Stevens and the elephant hunt that Americans would go on or, you know, a hunter that would pay for it and they're paying upward maybe $50,000.
So you're trading the life of an animal if it's poached for $250 or if a hunter goes over there to hunt it and the meat is utilized by the whole village, $50,000.
Yeah, that's, you know, lion hunting is, I mean, a lot of people look at lions and judge the hunting for them, saying, and there might be a time when there is no more lion hunting, just because of public outcry, basically.
But as it is now, Ryan Shlom, where I was hunting with the green leaf, I had the opportunity, we could have killed, we had in it bait, Four-year-old lions.
Male, legal, big manes, by themself, definitely could kill them.
He wants to let those four-year-olds age to six or greater.
He only wants to kill six-year-old lions or greater because then they're past their breeding prime.
They've done their job for the population, so to speak, and that's when he'll take them out.
Not before, even though it's legal.
But just to build that pride up.
And then another thing that he does is if a male lion is with a pride, meaning there's females there and there's cubs there, if he's there with them, they're his cubs.
Otherwise, he'd kill them, just like the bear.
Same type of deal.
But he would never kill a male lion that had a pride or was even close to a pride.
Because what that would do If you killed a male, even though it's legal, what that would do is another male would come in.
So the male you killed is dead.
Another male would come in.
Those wouldn't be his cubs.
So he would kill them.
So you'd have two generations of lions gone.
Part of his management practice there is only old lions, only old lone lions, male lions, and that's it.
Do you try to look at it from their point of view ever?
Do you ever see the anti-hunting people?
Anti-hunting people fall into a bunch of different categories.
There's people who don't think you should eat any meat at all.
That's the super extreme.
Then there's people who can respect you eating animals that were raised in an ethical way.
Free range cows, free range chickens is the only way I would do it.
That's some group.
And then there's people that say, well I really respect people who go out and hunt their own meat.
But as you get deeper and deeper into the categories of people that have problems with hunting, at the very top of that list, which is the most hated, is people that hunt only for the trophy.
And that's what a lot of people think of when they think of elephant.
A lot of people think of when they think of lion.
And I have no desire to shoot anything I'm not going to eat.
I never will.
My goal with getting into hunting was to connect with the food that I eat, to try to figure out...
When I first hunted with Rinella, I was wondering, I was like, what if I shoot this deer and say, fuck it, I'm a vegetarian now.
I'm never doing this again.
It was the exact opposite.
I felt an immediate incredible connection to it.
It was very exciting and thrilling.
People don't want to hear you say that.
They want to hear a very somber moment.
Yeah.
I mean, look, HBO Real Sports aired it the other night.
There's this thing where they did this whole piece on hunting and this whole eat what you kill movement, what they called it, and they had the clip of me shooting my first deer, and I kind of forgot how I was pretty emotional when it happened.
So there's definitely a sense of loss when something like that happens, but it's not sad.
That's an animal that I wanted to eat.
But there's a difference between that and just going after some animal just to shoot it.
I need to get this on my list.
I have a basketball court in my house filled with dead animals, and this is my next one.
We even got judged when you killed your bear because we had a picture of us smiling with a dead bear.
I have a hard time...
The people on the fence who need to be convinced or could go either way, those are the people I can appeal to and maybe make an argument that how hard I work and how much hunting means to me and how much I respect these animals.
Those people, the extreme people...
I don't think you're ever going to win those guys over.
But the other ones, that's why, you know, and I've posted this before, when I kill an animal, I don't want a bunch of blood.
And hunters have said, blood's part of it.
Why are you worried about showing blood?
Well, because I don't want to offend the people who might be in the middle.
You know what I mean?
But when you get judged, we got judged for smiling with your dead bear.
The reason why I'm, you know, yeah, when animals, I guess it's not, I don't feel sad, but I respect when an animal dies.
But the smiling part is I'm proud of everything that went into how much work is involved and how much sacrifice, you know, when you killed yours, you made.
And that's just, it's a celebration.
You killed an animal.
We're going to eat it.
All that months and months of work paid off.
That should feel good.
There's nothing wrong with, hey, we're celebrating this moment.
Well, the weirdness of modern civilization is that no one has a problem with you smiling when you're eating a cheeseburger.
If you look at any Burger King ad, any McDonald's ad, when someone's eating, a big smile on their face, I mean, you're eating a fucking animal that lived its life in torture.
Right.
I mean there's very little possibility that that animal was a free-range animal that animal most likely Was corralled up was fed an unnatural diet to fatten it up with stuff full of antibiotics to deal with the fact that it was fed This unnatural diet because it would otherwise get sick all sorts of indigestion problems stomach problems and That's what you're eating with a big stupid smile on your face and no one bats an eye, right?
the I had a I wrote a blog post that I still haven't put up yet because I dealt with so many fucking idiots getting mad at me after I shot that bear.
But one of them was this guy at the airport who had seen a picture of us.
You were being very, very friendly to him in an I am not gay way.
But let's be honest.
We look like we could be a couple like brutish gay guys.
I mean, there's a lot of those...
If you go to West Hollywood, and I presume you don't when you're in town, but if you go down Santa Monica Boulevard, there's several clubs that have a lot of men that are built very similar to us.
you you retweeted it or did something to it anyway you got hammered so you're like he goes so joe he's like he goes when we go on this bear hunt he goes i don't want any pictures i I don't want any video.
I can't deal with this negativity and this hate.
That's all I've been dealing with for two or three days.
15 seconds we heard and you know John and you so that's it you got it it was perfect and it was done yeah within 30 seconds of that arrow hitting it that animals dead yeah lived its entire life how many years it was alive and then one moment and it's dead and then we're skinning it and then we ate it that night and the idea that someone can come up to you and be wearing leather shoes And in some way,
judge you for killing and eating an animal.
And I'm having the hide tanned, or the skin is being treated, so I'm going to have a rug made out of it.
I'm still eating the animal.
I feed it to my family.
I'm taking advantage of every single aspect of this animal.
When you pass by a restaurant, when you pass by a supermarket, every road you drive down in America, pretty much, when you go by a gas station and you see a fucking package of Slim Jims, every animal that has been involved in making those products lived a life A horrifying existence that is of unimaginable suffering in comparison to an animal that you hunt.
And then, I guess on the polar opposite of that, or I don't even know, this whole trying to figure out what the heck these people think.
I get people, when you killed your bear and I had that up there, people were posting messages on my Facebook saying they were going to kill my daughter and put her head on the wall.
They get there, well, there's a lot of people involved in what's called the animal liberation movement, and it's so intense that there are folks that break into restaurants and steal lobsters and let them lose back in the ocean.
These motherfuckers don't understand that the reason why people are here today is because your ancestors ate animals.
If we were all just eating grass and fucking berries, we would still be jumping out of trees because leopards are attacking us.
We literally wouldn't be here.
Human beings, one of the main contributing factors to the growth and development of the human brain was the fact that we changed our diet from a plant-based diet to a meat-based diet.
So the human intestines changed.
Our whole...
Digestive process changed, and it freed up resources that allowed the brain to grow and develop.
This is like accepted scientific fact.
Obviously, I'm a fucking idiot, so when I'm telling you this, it's not based on anything I truly understand.
I'm basically repeating things that smart people have figured out.
But that is what they figured out.
I mean, that's a main scientific point when it comes to the development of the human brain.
So that's why we're here, dummy.
We're not here for tofu.
And by the way, they've also been proving over the last decade or so that plants have much more understanding of their environment than we ever gave them credit for.
And just because they don't have the ability to communicate with us, they don't scream when you pull them out of the ground, or they don't try to get away when you go reaching for a turnip, Doesn't mean that they're not a life form that reacts to its environment the same way an animal does.
When an animal, you know, turns its ears up and looks around because it thinks a predator is coming, that's a natural reaction.
Plants have natural reactions too.
Plants develop toxins in order to discourage predation.
They have literally things that they develop over time to keep things from eating them.
They don't want to be fucking eaten, okay?
unidentified
When you're eating cauliflower, I have to feel sorry for plants now?
And we, somehow or another, want to disconnect ourselves from that or disconnect ourselves from the concept of things that are sentient, things that are aware of their environment, things they can see and hear.
But, you know, not everybody wants to be disconnected because after the last podcast I was on with you, Do you know how many new bow hunters listened to what we talked about, listened to the connection we talked about, and never had thought about bow hunting, never had shot a bow, and all of a sudden they were at their pro shop, or they wanted to learn more.
I mean, I've had guys who said, I think it was yesterday, this guy sent me some messages, he goes, I hadn't heard of you before Joe's podcast.
He goes, and I sat one night and watched every one of your videos.
Yeah, and I think that this disconnection that people have in society is a main cause of people just feeling like shit all the time.
They don't feel rewarded by life.
When your day-to-day existence is just doing something that you don't enjoy and then coming home and resting, getting ready to do it again, it sucks.
When you have something that you enjoy, whether it's bow hunting or any sort of hobby, any sort of existence, any sort of discipline or practice, you work towards something and you get a reward for that work.
Release all your preconceived notions of what a hunter is, these rednecks just out there torturing animals, these psychopaths.
Release all those preconceived notions and take in the concept of wild, of what wild is.
Just to be out in nature and watch all these things run around, watch animals chase after each other, watch Watch this natural process that gives zero fucks if you're there or not there.
And then realize that this can be your source of sustenance.
You can live in that world for brief moments in time, train for it, prepare for it, bring back that protein, and live.
I think that fact right there, what you just explained, affects every minute of my life.
Every day.
I mean, because that's basically...
I'm known as a bowhunter, the bowhunter, whoever, this guy who does whatever.
So that's had such a powerful impact on me.
That's...
I mean, it's not all I am, but it's a big part of what I am.
And that's what I always say.
I always say, well, bowhunting's changed my life.
And I see these people who message me because of your podcast, and they want that same...
Could it impact my life that same way?
Could it give my life that type of meaning?
I do want to address one thing.
People talk about hunters being rednecks or barbarians or heartless or this or that.
My buddy Rick Carone is battling cancer right now.
When I do...
I'm going to sell something like I've sold bows, highest bidder type thing.
Hunters are the most generous, heartfelt people.
I mean, that's basically all my followers are hunters.
And they are so giving and so caring and loving of somebody they've never met.
They've just learned about maybe, you know...
From my website or from whatever else and I don't know I just I have a heart I mean it's just amazing to me just the heart hunters have and people are so far so wrong on I guess what what moves us what's important to us because I see people giving thousands of dollars to help somebody they've never met.
Well, the amount of negativity that you get from non-hunters in comparison to the amount of negativity and hate you get from hunters, it's hugely disproportionate.
What you talked about, about being respectful, about how when you disagree with someone on Twitter, you don't say, fuck off, you fucking dummy, and you don't get involved in any of these negative exchanges.
Because of that you attract this very positive following and I've been to your Facebook page and I've read the comments when you put something up on Instagram and it's an incredibly positive group of people.
Incredibly positive and also people that recognize the rewards of this lifestyle and recognize the negative impact or the negative opinion that a lot of people who don't understand it have and so they feel connected with each other in sort of solidarity Against what they perceive to be these ignorant people that judge them.
Because that guy will fly into somewhere at 4 o'clock in the morning, and he's at the gym at 5. And he takes pictures, and he's fucking killing it every day.
You don't get that way by taking the day off because you have a hangnail.
You get to look like that, possibly because of some artificial enhanced supplements.
I'm not saying.
But there's also a lot of hard work involved.
No doubt of fucking about it.
You could take all the steroids in the world.
Your body doesn't grow like that.
It grows like that from hard work, period.
Inalienable steroids.
and hard work is a magical ingredient if you can if you could apply that magical ingredient to almost everything in life and hard work also comes with hard thinking hard work everybody likes to think of as being like oh you just grunt and put in the effort no hard work is also preparation thought process understanding and that is a big part of hunting as well It's not just about,
you know, oh, it's really hard to get up that hill, get to that 7,000 feet elevation where those elk are.
No, you've got to understand the wind.
You've got to understand the behavior of these animals.
You've got to understand what's going on in the rut.
What does this bull elk attract to?
Are you going to attract a bull by pretending to be a cow, which he wants to have sex with, or are you going to be a bull, which he wants to challenge?
And you've got to know what to do what and what to do when.
I'm amazed at how much knowledge is involved in hunting and how much information.
But he's really opened my eyes to how much information is involved in hunting.
I mean, how much knowledge, how much you have to know, especially, you know, he's doing it all year round, so he's constantly aware of the cycles, the breeding, mating, food patterns, all the different things that you have to pay attention to about each individual animal.
I mean, I get that with the UFC. You know, people are like, oh yeah, UFC, great.
What are you doing, man?
You're fucking hanging around with a bunch of assholes, beating the shit out of each other.
Look, come to jiu-jitsu class with me.
You'll meet some of the nicest, friendliest people, and a lot of them are nerds, okay?
A lot of my friends from jiu-jitsu, if you looked at them, you would say, oh, that guy's like a nerd.
He's like a nerdy guy.
That nerd will fucking strangle you with his legs, you know?
Like, it's...
What it is, is people that really get into something that is ultimately very rewarding.
And I think it's ultimately very rewarding to accomplish something that's difficult to do.
And it's something that's missing from a lot of people's lives.
A lot of people are doing something that's easy to do, and they're looking to take coffee breaks, and they're looking to take a nice long lunch break, and they're looking to take a newspaper into the john when they take a shit because nobody can say anything.
Hey, so this is one thing I forgot to ask last time.
So my kids are big, typical, regular sports fans, like NFL. Of course, I like MMA. I like UFC. So they're like, Dad, do you think a UFC fighter, say somebody like Chad Mendes, who's fighting tomorrow for the title, Love Chad.
The idea that size doesn't mean anything, that's ridiculous.
Size means a lot.
It just doesn't mean as much as technique.
Technique means the most.
But there's a lot of factors involved in who would win in a fight.
The most important factor is knowledge and technique.
There was a dude...
That I used to roll with at 10th Planet.
It was a really nice guy who was a former football player.
He was 250 pounds.
And whenever I used to roll with him, I used to call it riding the bull.
Because I'm like, alright, gotta go ride the bull.
Because every time I'd get on top of him, well, any time we'd scramble, I would have to initially let him get on top, because he's just too goddamn big for me to take him down.
So I'd let him get on top, and then I'd have to sweep him, and then I'd eventually ride him, and then I'd eventually catch him.
But it would take me a while.
I'd have to wear his big ass out.
But...
I was just better than him.
I'd been doing jujitsu for 15 years, and he had only been doing jujitsu for like six months.
So it was just a matter of riding the bull.
I would just hang on to him, but god damn, he was fucking strong as shit.
And I always think, if this motherfucker knew half of what I knew, I'd be doomed.
I'd just be...
There's a huge advantage of being bigger and stronger.
It's just not as much of an...
Excuse me.
Not as much as an advantage as being technical and understanding what's going on inside a fight.
That's what guys say to me because, you know, I run, basically I do The same thing every single day, my training.
And they say, you know, what are you going to do in 40 years when you still want to hunt but you won't be able to hunt because you've been running every day and wearing out your joints?
I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be alive tomorrow, let alone 40 years from now.
I'm going to worry about tomorrow, tomorrow, and today I'm going to get my best.
And that was another thing that I had to learn that I thought was really interesting.
The spine of the arrow, how stiff the arrow is, how many grains the arrow weighs in relationship to the bow, in relationship to the speed of the arrow.
Then you have to calculate all that and put out a sight tape.
And that's how you figure out...
The guys at the bow rack...
Made me a sight tape for the carbon spider and it's fucking amazing.
It's so dead on because mine was all goofy.
The last one that I printed up myself.
It's like a lot involved in learning how to do this right.
We have such an advantage having bows set up by professionals.
Guys who do it every single day.
There's a lot of guys in small towns throughout We're good to go.
Can buy the same bow, buy the same arrows, buy the same everything.
The bow is not set up correctly.
It's not tuned.
And it's just not going to perform.
So we know when we go out, especially because I'm at the bow rack, I paper tune my bows.
We put it in the hooter shooter, which is a machine that shoots your bow for you to tell you whether the bow is set up correctly or there's some human error involved.
So basically at the end of the day, when we go hunting, we know the bow is at...
The top of its capability and any error is us.
So then, if I can control my errors, the error is going to go right where it's supposed to go.
And there's a giant difference between that and what you think of as a bow and arrow that, like from the Boy Scout days, you know, when you would shoot those little shitty recurve bows, like 20-pound pull or whatever it was.
They just don't have the kind of impact that these bows have with the cams and the technology and the way they engineer these risers.
I mean, these things are incredible pieces of work and engineering.
And when I go, I just, like I said, I like the positive atmosphere.
I like the camaraderie.
I like to see people working, so I'll say, hey, I went to Alaska, you know, and I said, I did the Bass Pro Shop Grand Opening in Anchorage, and I said, let's go run some mountains up there.
So I met up with a couple guys, did two different runs, and we hammered out some tough mountain runs, and it's just...
It was soaking wet, freezing, and never felt more alive.
I don't know what type of group of people you could bring together in that short of time and have that type of connection.
I don't know.
Hunting just seems to do that to people.
I mean, I don't know about you, but when I'm somewhere, I don't care where, here, whatever town I'm in, when I see somebody in camo, I'm like looking at them, wondering if, you know, hey, do you want to talk about hunting?
I had a Hoyt hat on, and I was at the airport, and this old dude sat next to me, and he just plopped down right next to me, and he goes, how long you been bow hunting?
He's an old dude from Texas.
He had a Lone Star belt buckle on, and he started just telling me stories about hunting for elk and hunting for this and that and bow hunting.
He does all kinds of hunting, but he does a lot of bow hunting, too.
But that was the green light.
He just plopped down next to me and just started talking, and we had like a half an hour conversation.
Well, nowadays, that old school dude, that's awesome.
Nowadays, the young guys or the guys that seem, I don't know, I'm in communication with, They're so passionate about new bows and technology, like you mentioned.
The unveiling of a new bow...
So if you have a Hoyt, people are like, what year is it?
It's like, 2014?
Oh, yeah.
So you don't have a 2015 Nitrum Turbo yet, huh?
It's just like, it's crazy.
And so Hoyt and all these other companies, Bowtech, they have this...
It's going to come out on the 15th, and they'll give teasers, and people are just on all these forums trying to guess what's going to be different, what the new technology is going to be.
And it's just so fun, and people are so passionate about it.
The cable roller, how that's set up is it's going to help you tune your bow because there's no torque in that one.
Normally when you pull your string back and that cable, there's a lot of tension, a lot of torque right there typically.
Back in the old school days, that would just kind of slide on a bar.
Hoyt has come up with this system, the anti-torquing technology, where there's no torque on that.
And how they've designed the riser, it just helps all the tuning issues, the performance of the bow, the anti-torquing is one part of it, the riser design is another part of it.
All the little tweaks they make, it's just making a...
It's a sweeter, smoother shooting bow that tunes up quicker.
And what that does is, you talked about your bear, how that arrow flew straight, blew right through there.
For that to happen, that arrow has to be just flying perfect.
All that plays into that.
And that's how you get those clean, quick kills.
And if you're shooting targets, that's how you get every arrow in the X. And so it's all those little things.
People will say, actually, I shot the bow, and speed-wise, it was a little bit slower than the Carbon Spider Turbo.
It was three feet per second slower.
But...
You look at the brace height, which is a big part of why a bow is fast and why it's not.
So the taller that is, the quicker the arrow is off the string.
So that means you as a shooter have less impact on it being imperfect.
The shorter it is, it's going to be on that string longer, longer, longer, and then it finally comes off right when it gets close to your hand and that riser there.
And so because it's propelled for longer, it's going to be faster.
But you also have more time to drop your bow arm.
or do or flinch or do whatever wrist torque this or that and so it's generally a less accurate arrow so my my new bow is a little slower but it's got a taller brace height so meaning it's more forgiving Three feet is pretty nominal.
Not that big a deal.
But it's so sweet shooting.
I mean, I went down there and tuning a bow used to be this whole elongated process.
And it would take sometimes days to get that thing shooting through paper right and get that arrow flying right.
And it's like, is the arrow underspined?
Am I... Am I torquing my wrist?
Is having my thumb behind my neck affecting all this stuff?
Now, I go down there, it was like two shots, perfect.
Yeah, what I've noticed, even those old bows, those would kill.
Those would probably get the job done probably 90% of the time, but it's those little things.
It's that 10% that's going to Make the difference.
You know, is it going to be a lethal shot or is it going to be just a wound, a flesh wound?
And so those little things.
So yeah, before, I've killed for 26 years.
And the bows that I started with are night and day different than the bows now.
But still, it's a primitive sport.
Still, it's very difficult.
still, there's a lot of human influence on that arrow and whether it's going to fly where it's supposed to.
So you can still mess it up.
One thing that I've noticed that I've, that's helped me more than anything is that long distance shooting.
I shoot out a hundred yards all the time and we shot long distance up in Alberta, actually.
The guys want to do that because that's sort of what I'm known for.
And what that does is I'm not going to be out there shooting at animals at 140 yards or anything like that.
But man, at that slam dunk range of what I would consider slam dunk 30, 40 yards, I'm going to be able to make that shot because technique wise, I know I'm dialed in.
I know my Hoyt's shooting money because it's tuned perfectly, and so that's what's happened.
I mean, I killed those bulls this year.
One arrow...
They were down in seconds, those big 800 pound animals, and it's just perfect.
I watch videos online now of archery competitions where guys are just shooting at a piece of paper 40 yards away, and when it goes in that bullseye, everybody cheers, and there's something really satisfying about it.
You know what was shooting a bow like we talked about just that the fascination behind it is when I was in Tanzania those guys You know, the natives, they had who knows what type of bows they've seen.
So we're setting up a lion bait there and had like half a buffalo hanging.
And I'd put a little yellow leaf there and I'd get back 40 yards.
I want to see, you know, if a lion was here, where would my arrow hit?
So they'd be standing there.
I'd be standing back.
We'd have the bait there with the leaf on it.
And I'd stand, everybody ready?
Yeah, everybody's ready.
So I'd draw back, shoot, You know, hit the leaf, and they would just be like, big smiles on their face, just watching that arrow, just like, couldn't believe that arrow, just whack!
And it just, it was, they just wanted to look at it, and I'd give them the arrow and the bow, and they'd just be holding it, thinking, like it was some, like, witchcraft.
Some of them are, like Rashidi, who I mentioned, he's what they call a tracker.
And so what they do is they look at the tracks of the animals, and they can look at them, and they can tell you whether that track was from a few hours ago, this morning, last night, or two days ago.
we're in trouble but the bait thing is the the big controversy and you explained very clearly like why it's important because you have to really identify the sex of the animal and how old the animal is but the weird thing is that people don't have any problem with using bait for fish now and people don't have any problem with people going trophy fish hunting I caught a marlin.
Yeah, you know, that's a thing with archery as opposed to guns.
And I had a little video the other day on my website.
Or, I mean, on YouTube.
And it was just, you know, an arrow kills by hemorrhage, just by cutting flesh and organs.
And a rifle kills by shock, generally.
And generally, if you hit them good with the rifle and break them down, you hit bone or whatever else.
It's a pretty grisly type thing, but it's effective.
They're down.
An arrow going through is more like...
They're not sure what happened.
Blood pressure dropping.
They don't necessarily feel that pain, so to speak.
And they're dead quickly.
But two totally different things.
And what that was is I had shot a bull elk in Utah.
And I wasn't 100% certain of the shot.
I was hoping it was in the heart.
It was a little lower than I had wanted.
I wanted to shoot for the lungs, which is a little higher up on the body.
I hit low.
I made an error, hit a little lower than I wanted, and I was hoping for the heart, and it was just kind of that process.
But in that video, I explained the difference between bow and rifle, and you see it right there.
One thing, when I was hunting Cape Buffalo in Tanzania, I shot the biggest bull in the herd that other animals did nothing.
He did nothing.
You couldn't tell anything happened other than he was dead pretty soon.
Nobody ran.
Nobody...
No excitement.
And Ryan, who was with me at that time, he's like, I like bowling a lot better because a rifle goes off and you got a stampede.
And then that bull that you had just shot, it's just like, it's...
It knows something serious is going on.
And those bulls are...
You know, they call them black death.
They're very dangerous.
So once they're injured...
Even with rifles, they shoot them multiple times.
I mean, those things are so tough and so full of testosterone.
1,800 pounds of just solid muscle.
But what they do is they go in what they call the tall grass, which is about 10 foot high grass.
And so you're on blood, and those buffalo will go in there, do a little button hook, and as you're blood trailing them, if they're not mortally wounded, like dead-dead, You'll be trailing that blood trail, and because they did that button hook, they're sitting there waiting, they'll just pound you.
And so they kill people every year in Africa, Cape Buffalo do.
And it's tough animals, but with the bow, I'm not saying it was an easy kill because they're very tough, but it was way less dramatic, way...
Everything was calm.
It was just, I don't know, much different than a rifle.
The setup wasn't conducive to hunting a 5,000-pound animal.
I would need a cutting-tip broadhead.
Like on the Muzzy Trocar, it has a chiseled tip.
And so that has to push through until you get to the blades.
And you need a 1,000-grain arrow with...
With a two-blade broadhead that doesn't have to open that hole before it gets in.
So, the point is, neither one was conducive to killing a hippo, but I measured penetration, and the carbon spider with the smaller diameter injection shaft that we shoot from Easton penetrated as much as the heavier full metal jacket dangerous game shaft.
And so, I decided, well, I'm just going to go with the carbon spider because I had more confidence in it Longer range.
And those animals were so difficult to get up on because they're living amongst hyenas and lions and they're hunted every single day.
And lots of lions there.
I mean, we saw, we probably saw, I'm trying to think, at least 10 lions, I would think.
And so it was like those, and you don't see all the lions.
So I mean, they're hunting a lot.
So I was having a hard time getting close.
So I ended up killing that, my buffalo at 62 yards with the carbon spiders, 80 pound bow.
I mean, California's just so goofy with some of their laws.
And again, this is not like a rational approach that's based on Real fish and game people that have been doing this and calculating numbers and taking accurate assessments and audits of the area.
This is all done by people who really don't want anybody hunting at all.
Well, they always say the blacktail deer back home in Oregon, those are because a lot of the country, you know, blacktail are only in western Oregon, western Washington up in British Columbia a little bit, and then down, they're down here in California.
But in Oregon, it's like more rainforest, so it's very dense, very dark.
Those big bucks, basically they're nocturnal all year, except for when they start breeding, and even during the rut, still very tough to, They don't pattern like a whitetail, so to speak.
A lot of guys kill them because they see these bucks on trail cameras, and they know they're coming, and they wait for the wind to be right, the prevailing winds, and then they set in their tree stand, and then that buck hopefully comes by, and it's patternable.
With blacktail, the legend is they're not as patternable, and I would buy into that.
And so killing a big blacktail isn't on top of anybody's bucket list really or very many people, but it's a very difficult, very tough trophy.
You know, all this hunting talk that we've had in the two podcasts, it always leads to people getting excited about it, but beginning the hunting process is extremely difficult.
Yeah, I think that that's something, that's a gap that we would really, a lot of people would be really well served if we could figure out how to bridge it.
And I've talked to Ranella about this, and we've talked about possibly setting up a first-timers camp where you would take people to a game-rich environment, like maybe, say, a white-tailed deer place where you know there's a lot of white...
He won't have anything to do with high fence hunting, which is very admirable.
So it wouldn't be that, but...
Something along those lines where you're going to a very game-rich environment and he'll set it up for you, bring it to a range first, really get you to understand rifle safety, gun safety, make sure you really truly understand how to squeeze a trigger, how to stay down on a shot, and then get you to an animal, have you shoot an animal, and then teach you how to butcher it and make a couple of preparations with the meat.
And to do something like this, start camps like that, think about this bear hunting thing that we did in Alberta.
All those guys were pretty much seasoned hunters, but a lot of them were drawn there because of you, pretty much all of them.
We should consider doing something like that, like a camp.
For a first-timer camp.
Figuring out some way to set something up.
Because I've had so many people email me.
I've had a lot of people tweet me and send me Facebook messages saying that they got into hunting because of our podcast, because of the podcast with Rinella, which is great.
I don't know how they did it, though.
I don't know how they got into it.
I got into it because of Rinella.
If it wasn't for him taking me and Brian Callen out into Montana, I don't know how I would have started.
I don't know how to start.
And I think that that is the really difficult thing for people.
Like you said, as a seasoned hunter, what you really like to do is go out by yourself.
But you're a guy with years and years, decades of experience hunting.
For a person just starting out, going off by themselves, they're going to make so many mistakes.
So I would love to take some first-time hunter and sit there with them just like with you and just, you know, I know, you know, I'm not saying I have all the answers or whatever.
Another thing I remember sharing with you was the bear you killed, we needed to get a good look at it.
So it had been in.
We wanted to make sure it was a boar, a big boar like we wanted to kill.
and so we had it had been in and been in and i said i go and you didn't shoot it but then once we got to look at it and we were like okay that is the bear we want to kill because it can take a while to see if it's a boar they're not like you know doesn't have antlers so you have to look at you know basically it's the the hair off the penis sheath is what it is but uh and that's with binoculars so
So once, I said, once we decide, or once you decide that's going to be a bear you're going to shoot, your emotions are probably going to get going.
Because it'd been from just being, just kind of enjoying it, being close, or just kind of that moment, to all of a sudden, now I'm going to kill an animal.
And so that's, yeah, just that type of thing, having somebody there, or Having that conversation...
It allows people to process it on their own.
In my book, Backcountry Bowhunting, that was one of the most popular chapters that I've had.
I wrote a chapter on fear.
No guy ever wants to talk about being afraid or being afraid of the dark or scared of being attacked by whatever.
So I talked about that and I said, hey, when I was first in the mountains by myself, I was afraid.
And so when people read that and they think about it and then they're in that position, they're just like, this is normal.
This is normal.
And so when we can talk about things like the experience of, okay, now I'm going to kill the bear, now it's time to get it done, and you can kind of anticipate what that's going to feel like, you're just going to be that much more deadly, more lethal.
One thing is, I was in the gym the other day, and this guy was telling me, he's like, he has one of my old bows, just from years ago.
And he's like, he goes, Cam, he goes, I almost got a bull.
And I'm like, what happened, buddy?
He's like, 35 yards, he come in, he's bugling, and I had your bow, and I'm standing there watching him, he's 35 yards, and he's right there, and he goes, and I was shaking so bad, he goes, I don't even know how I could have shot it.
And I'm like...
That's normal.
That's how everybody is.
So that's where it is, is in that moment, shaking, but still, okay, I need to be in control and I need to do everything that I practice and make that shot.
A lot of people get that shaking and then they never get to the other part.
Well, controlling emotions is very difficult, and almost anything you do that's important to you is going to come with a surge of adrenaline or a surge of nerves, of anxiety.
And it's just about maintaining your breathing and staying calm.
And there was definitely, for me, a big difference between, like, that's the bear.
Like, okay, woo!
But it helped that you had already prepared me for that.