Corey Knowlton, a big-game hunter, defends his $350,000 Namibia rhino hunt—approved by IUCN and CITES—as necessary population control for the "vulnerable" subspecies, donating meat to locals. He contrasts hunting with industrialized killing, citing Namibia’s 2,000+ surplus rhinos and Botswana’s habitat destruction from overpopulated elephants, while Joe Rogan highlights conservation successes like North America’s deer and wolf recoveries. Knowlton criticizes emotional activism, noting activists’ hypocrisy (e.g., wearing leather) and lack of understanding in regions where hunting sustains wildlife, like Paraguay’s jaguars or Papua New Guinea’s extreme survival challenges. Ultimately, they argue that pragmatic conservation—rooted in economic necessity and ecological balance—often clashes with manufactured outrage, leaving hunters as both stewards and targets of global wildlife debates. [Automatically generated summary]
Corey, if you don't know, Nolton, the last one, right?
Correct.
You got it.
One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on this podcast is I'm a big fan of Jim Shockey.
Jim Shockey's show, The Uncharted Show.
Something's going on my nose.
And I'd seen you on that show.
So when the controversy broke, CNN covered the story.
For folks who don't know what we're talking about, Corey, you bid money to be one of the people that got a chance to kill a black rhino.
For people who are not aware of how conservation and hunting work, What they try to do, especially with endangered species, is they have to sometimes protect endangered species from their own.
And it seems very counterintuitive.
For people who are on the outside looking in, you say, well, this is an endangered animal.
Why are you killing one of these endangered animals and trying to call this conservation?
But with rhinos in particular, or a lot of aggressive animals, even giraffes, the older males, the older bulls, the older non-breeding members of these groups sometimes will attack the young males and kill them.
And it is just a natural part of being a wild animal when the numbers are strong and healthy It's like it happens in bears every day of the week.
It's just a part of being a bear But when it happens with something that's endangered like a black rhino they're forced into a very peculiar situation where they have to Most likely either kill or put this animal in captivity.
Absolutely, they need more money, and the value of that was greater than that amount of money.
That was the amount of money that I was able to claw together and make happen.
The anti-hunting community and the animal rights community came out so strongly against this situation for what I think either misunderstanding or they were trying to keep the contribution down, one or the other, or both.
And there's people who were much wealthier than I am and had a lot more money who really wanted to spend the money.
But at the time, I don't think that they...
Well, they had a better idea of what was to come than I did.
I guess I was a little bit naive about it.
But these people are...
A couple of them are very well-known people.
And I don't think they wanted to put their employees in their company.
And, you know, their life, their family, do the same things that I end up going through.
And they were...
Basically chased out by the anti-hunting community's rhetoric and their attacks.
What what was surprising to you about this whole experience because it had to be a pretty life-changing experience like you're a guy who's you know relatively famous in the hunting world you being on that Jim Chocke show and You decide that you want to be the guy so you you spend all this money What was your goal when you wanted to do this?
Did you want to bring awareness to this was it something that you felt strongly about from the very beginning?
Well, see, you've got to keep in mind they sell these over in Namibia.
They have auctions amongst themselves.
This is the first one that took place in the United States.
That's why it brought so much publicity.
This wasn't the first Rhino that was to be brought into the United States.
So this is something that happened before, just not on a public stage in the United States.
So they are able to get a certain amount of money already for them, and they wanted to get more over here.
That was the whole idea.
And so they brought it over here.
The permanent secretary of the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism, him, and basically one of the rhino experts of the country came over and took place.
They were there at the auction when it took place.
And it's not hard to get people to be willing to do this, but in order to get people to spend $350,000 to save the rhino, just to donate to save it without hunting...
I actually think that's more complicated because in this situation that I was in, the money had to be proved to go to the right places to benefit the rhino.
The path had to be proven to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife for them to grant the import permit.
So it went through the process, which was like the most vetted process possible.
On every level, it was the most vetted conservation hunt probably in history.
And they do these hunts like this here in the United States all the time.
They auction off special deer tags, special elk tags, special sheep tags.
This year I was in auction where a mule deer tag went for $385,000.
So they do these all the time to raise money.
So it's not like a new idea.
But in this case, it was the most vetted way for the money to get to the source.
And I believe in conservation.
I believe in hunting as a means, as a tool to help perpetuate it and keep these animals alive.
So I had a personal interest in the process.
So, and there's other people like me who feel the same way, and they are happy to donate to that.
Like you're saying, just to get somebody to do it, well, where do I give it to?
How do I know the money's going to the right place?
Everybody who had an agenda to it that was against the whole process of what I was doing, and this goes all the way from the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife to trying to make it look like CITES and IUCN aren't the world's foremost experts, especially IUCN. What are those companies?
Group that puts together the red list of endangered species.
Okay, they are the foremost experts on the subject and a guy named Michael Knight heads up that African rhino specialist group and he's the foremost expert in the world on rhinos.
Okay, so you've got you have the world's Foremost experts in this you had the WWF a guy named Chris Weaver in Namibia Who heads that up?
You had WWF behind it.
You had IUCN behind it.
You had CITES behind it.
You had U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which, you know, I've come down on two different sides with them.
Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't, okay?
But in this case, I absolutely agree with them.
So you had, like, the four most authorities in the world all agreeing with this.
And then you have a...
Large amount of people who type in 75 characters on Twitter and feel better about it.
And, you know, they're weighing in.
And in today's day and age, you look at that, and it's like a handful of people who are emotional about something outweigh public, you know, I mean, the experts of the world opinion.
Well, it becomes very controversial, first of all, because it went on at the same time as they were broadcasting another species of rhino that was going extinct.
There was three of them left, one male, two women, and the male wasn't breeding with them, and they were like, this is it.
And it also, part of the reason is it falls into this category that people call trophy hunting.
And it's very different than going to the supermarket and buying meat from an animal that was killed for meat.
The idea of trophy hunting bothers a lot of people because they think what you're doing is you're going over there and you're shooting something to prop up your ego.
You're shooting something because, you know, you want to be the master.
You want to go over there and blast this thing and take a picture, grip and grin and smile.
I'm sure throughout history that's existed, but I don't think that that's an accurate representation of people who...
You can call trophy hunting whatever you want.
I mean, you can put it on...
If you're out there looking for the biggest cow elk because you want the meat, all right?
You're being selective about which one you're picking, okay?
So, for what...
The truth about let's quote-unquote trophy hunting is you're going out there looking for the most mature male of the species that you can find.
Okay, and you're going through a selective process.
And I think there is, amongst hunters, there's definitely a movement going, you know, Jim and I used to talk about it all the time.
We would go out, we're looking for the oldest male of the species we can find.
Okay, because that's the best one to take out.
He's already breeded, he's going to go down, he's going to fall over dead on the mountain if it's a ram, and birds are going to pick his eyes out while he's alive.
Okay, he's going to go through a horrible death.
And we're going to spare that animal that.
And so there's a lot that goes into that.
And I understand people say, okay, that's what it is.
Joe, like, for instance, I just met you today, and my idea of who you are isn't who Joe Rogan is.
The only person that knows who Joe Rogan is is Joe.
I've seen that before with an elephant hunt on television.
It was a documentary on the controversy in these hunting camps in South Africa, and they shot this elephant and donated it to these villagers.
These people came with baskets and stuffed these baskets with elephant meat, and they cut that entire carcass down to bite-sized portions or meal-sized portions in just a matter of a few hours.
It was insane.
It was crazy to watch.
So, when people think of this being just a waste, just killing this animal...
So this is a separate video other than the one that I had watched, which was the title of that was Texas Hunter Bags His Rhino in Controversial Hunt in Namibia.
Yeah, the idea of meat wastage in Africa isn't that...
Look, in the United States, it's hard for us to comprehend it because we've got a system of such excess that the poorest among us are the most overweight.
You go to Africa, a poor person is skin and bones.
Now, this animal had been targeted because it had killed one young bull already, and it was an older, angry male with not a whole lot of time left, right?
I just laugh all the time when I see people talk about how, you know, like I'm some rich, over, you know, super, talk about my family and the oil business and whatnot.
I was already, before my brother, my father, their partner had any success in the oil business, man, I was in my 20s.
And even if you don't do it, you have a family member that does.
You got a buddy that work does.
And so people are, I mean, I'm telling you, people in Texas aren't that judgmental, really.
I mean, about this, at least.
And so, anyway, we're all growing up together as a family, and it's a part of our thing.
And my granddad, I mean, I grew up in poverty when I was real young.
And what we had to do was go hunting and fishing.
I don't think I shot my first deer until I was 15 or 16 years old.
So I did this bird hunting, and then I graduated high school, and I went and got a job working for a guy in Colorado guiding mountain lion hunts.
And then I, you know, got another, started another business up with floor tile and made money and I was saving my money up to go hunting and I met another guy, a guy named Aaron Nielsen and him and I started up a company together and we started taking people on hunts.
We'd say, we'd go on these different hunts on ourself.
We'd go there, find the area, check it out and go on these adventures and then come back and get people together and go on more of them.
And it's kind of snowball and snowball.
When I met Jim in 2001, Back then, you know, I was just getting into it and I already, you know, knew quite a bit.
I'd already hunted Africa.
I'd already gone through a lot of places in the world and just got into it and said, hey, Jim, you want to go to Africa?
And we went, and that was his first African trip.
And we went over there, had a great trip, filmed it for a video at the time.
He goes on and becomes more successful in his TV stuff.
I keep doing what I did.
And then a few years later, we came up with this idea to start this TV show about our lives as professionals in the hunting industry.
And we called it the professionals.
And because personally, Jim and I would talk about it.
And I'm not going to speak down about these people.
But at the time, in the outdoor television world, which is a different thing than most TV in a lot of ways.
I think you've talked about it on your podcast before.
We were like, well, a lot of these people are calling, they're saying they're professionals, but they're getting like a free bow.
You know, we're actually making our livings doing this, you know, taking people hunting and outfitting and guiding and whatnot.
So do you get frustrated when you watch, like, there's some reality, or not reality shows, there's some hunting shows that are on television that, you know, are essentially like cable access shows.
I mean, they're just really poorly made, bad editing, bad personalities.
Well, if you really like hunting and you go over there and you learn more about it, you know, and you have a passion for it, if that's what you want to do, you just go.
And be a part of the cycle of life in an intimate way everywhere I could go.
Like, people don't realize it, I don't think.
And it's hard, you know, like, and I'll get into it later with you, really interested in To hear your path that brought you to it.
I'm sure you've talked on it, and we don't have to talk on it because right now it doesn't bother, you know, if you've talked about it, your listeners get bored of it or whatever.
But I'd really like to know it, okay?
Because you probably understand, and I don't want to, like, speak for you, but when you're that close to an animal, when you're within bow range of an animal, it's a different experience than you have going to 7-Eleven or whatever you're going to have in a normal life.
And so, in a way, that would be the way I would translate it.
I just wanted to go everywhere I possibly could.
And I read everything I possibly could.
And I learned everything I possibly could.
Especially about I had a real passion for Asia.
I've hunted all over Asia.
Everywhere that I could go in Asia, I went.
You know, I could go down the list.
It astonished you.
And so I went over there, and Asian hunting is, by and large, brutally hard.
If I liked killing things, I'd work at the chicken plant and I'd get 11,000 chickens every day.
If I really got a thrill out of killing stuff.
I've gone on 12 hunts that I went on, unsuccessful sheep hunts, and those were some of the best hunts that I ever had.
And it wasn't anything about killing the animal or not killing the animal.
Yeah, it's a goal.
But that was kind of part of the reason that brought me to those places.
You're not going to go to these places, man, for no reason.
When people think about Africa, they're thinking about the Maasai Mara and a nice East African or Kruger Park type photo safari.
You're not going into darkest Africa on the border of the Congo or in the Congo or...
You know, these nasty places in the world to go take pictures.
Most people aren't going to do it.
Even the photo people, you're going to get to, like, the rawest of the raw.
They're going to go and do that stuff.
It's brutal on you.
It's not comfortable.
You go out and hang out with, you know, with pygmies who are very tough people, for instance, who've been to Cameroon, and they're waking up every morning, a lot of them, you know, their lives are hard, okay?
It's not a nice existence, and you go out there and exist with them.
So, you feel compelled to go to these places and compelled to hunt?
Absolutely.
See, people have, like, they've found out you're killing, you know, an antelope or something like that.
Seems normal.
You know, you're shooting that, you eat it.
But shooting an elephant to people, they have a hard time with it because they're intelligent and they're social creatures and they know each other for, they have insane memories.
Look, in an innate way to stay alive, they're much more intelligent about their environment than you and I ever would because that's their home and they live in it.
So, it's a different thing.
Elephants, are they intelligent?
Absolutely.
Do they have ethics and emotions?
No.
I mean, outside of rawest form, I've been around animals that I thought were angry.
And the thing that you have to understand, there's different reasons to hunt different things, okay?
You know, it's not like hunting is some giant, just broad thing.
And in the case of elephants, if you want people to have a positive benefit, local people who really determine the survival of any animal is local people.
You have to put a positive benefit on it for them.
If it's just living next door to an elephant, you don't want that.
If it's living next door to a lion, you don't want that.
Did you ever see Louis Thoreau's documentary on the hunting camps in Africa?
It's very interesting.
It's very good.
If you don't know who Louis Thoreau is, he's a documentarian from the UK and he really gets very very thorough on subjects and he spent a lot of time in this South African hunting camp but it got down to the end of it and you know he was Pastoring this guy who ran this camp to the point where the guy said, you don't get it.
Every guy is fucked.
He goes, it's fucked.
He goes, they destroy.
The only way you're going to keep these fucking animals is if there were something.
Do you think that part of the problem with people and their perceptions of hunting is just based on this really weird insulated world that we live in where you could just go to the store and buy meat and most people, the vast majority.
And a white rhino, which was brought back from 30 animals to over 20,000 because of incentivizing people to own them and them being able to sell them on a hunting market, okay, and for whatever other reasons.
I think another issue that Lewis Thoreau covered in his documentary and that a lot of people are not aware of is that a lot of the lions, or excuse me, a lot of the animals in Africa that are being hunted on a regular basis were on the verge of extinction just two decades ago.
Maybe three.
And when they started doing those hunting camps, now these animals are thriving.
And the reason why they're thriving is because they're worth money.
And that bothers people.
It bothers people the idea that the only way these animals are surviving and thriving is if somebody is willing to pay money to go over there and hunt them.
Well, it also doesn't cover the reality of the money that's involved in paying for those tags and going over there and flying over there and paying for these hunting camps to stay open has kept these animals in enormous populations where they were dying off just 20 years ago.
That's a reality.
And it's the only reality that we have documented in Africa right now as far as conservation of a lot of these game animals.
And sometimes they have to take those parks and they have to have either someone come in and minimize or control the population and kill some of the animals because they get too high, or they have to open them up for hunters.
Okay, then why shouldn't humans be complicit in saving them and keeping them around?
Okay, through a traditional method that has worked in conservation for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Look, the idea not to hunt wasn't a part of humanity for just recently, maybe the last couple hundred years and to the forefront, maybe the last 30 to 50 years.
It's 100% hypocritical, but it's also wild that the hypocritical is the most common.
It's more common to be hypocritical about meat than it is to not, because of this system that we've set up that's very effective, that allows you to go to any store, anywhere you want, and just buy meat instantly.
When you try to explain your point of view, you try to explain that this is an aggressive older male that's not breeding anymore, that it had killed at least one young bull, was a danger to the breeding population of an endangered species?
And so he comes out and says things, and he said a bunch of inflammatory things towards me and towards anybody else, right?
And it's about his emotion about it.
It's not about if the facts are helping the black rhino survive.
These people would rather there not be an interaction with humans and animals They think the second of freedom of you releasing your pet, okay, some of them, and if it got hit by a car right over there, that minute of freedom is better than a lifetime than being Joe Ragoon's pet.
They try to make that they're bigger because they get these animal welfare people, and a lot of those animal welfare people hate that.
They don't want to be lumped in with them.
You know, because they know that, you know, like Michael J. Fox said, that he didn't look at the life of an ant any more or less valuable than the life of his son.
Okay, so I talked with him at length last week and a half ago.
90 minute conversation.
And what I found is the more intelligent the person you have this debate with, the much easier the debate is to have.
And so I talked to him about it.
He didn't get it.
He didn't get, like, you know, what drives you or me to go hunting.
But he told me I had one of the best hard arguments, if not the best, that he'd ever gone up against.
That this placing value on them is going to keep them around.
At the end of it, at the very end of the conversation, he was like, Corey, you know, you have a really great sense of honor for this, and I really respect it.
It's refreshing, and I think you're right.
And so, but it took 90 minutes of going through, like I said, that ethereal mist of all the BS that's out here about this subject.
Once they get there, and that's the reality of the situation.
I mean, I had some conversations with people about this when this thing went down, and I said, look, I'm not going over there to shoot any rhinos.
I have no desire to shoot a rhino, but...
You've got to pay attention to what you're talking about because you can't just talk shit and say this guy's an asshole and this rhino didn't need to be killed.
You have to look at it from a balanced perspective, objectively, with no ideology attached to it.
And when you do that, you realize that there's a lot of people, a lot of conservationists, a lot of biologists who are pro-culling of certain animals in any population to keep that population healthy.
Again, it seems counterintuitive, but it's important.
It went into the Namibian Game Products Trust Fund, and it has a list of these things.
You could pull that up, too, I'm sure, if you wanted to.
But it's a list of things.
You're going through it.
Okay.
So, you know, basically, it had, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife to allow the importation of it, they had to find a non-detriment finding, meaning that the taking of this animal is not detriment to the species, and it had to have a positive finding as well, positive benefit, okay, to the species.
Well, I mean, like I said, I've said this a lot of times.
I have to look through what the permit actually allows me to do as my personal property.
I can't ever sell it.
I can't do stuff like that.
But what I want to do, and I'm going to talk to them about this once it gets here, is can I loan it to different museums, put it on display at different places to keep the awareness alive about it?
I never was in this because I was like, oh, I can't wait to have a black rhino.
For everybody to see, everybody to join in, everybody to take the moral high ground, and very few people to take a nuanced, objective look at it and realize, wow, there's a lot of gray area, like many things in life.
No, they asked me not to do it, and they did this letter, okay?
And I did this interview with these kids.
I had, like, this guy was doing a documentary about them or whatever came down and asked me if I would talk to them.
And they're kids, which, you know, I understood that.
I was very nice and very calm and cool with them.
I have been with everybody, really.
And...
They asked me a lot of questions that were really, you know, to me, I considered, you know, most like common knowledge type questions.
But then I asked them this.
And I said, if there's three black rhinos left, okay, and let's say it's one male or two males and a cow or whatever, and one's killing the other two, can you shoot that black rhino?
Okay, when you're dealing with these wildlife experts that put this together, that's kind of the question they're going through.
Okay, that's part of the question.
But it's very complicated when you start putting value on things and trying to figure out which rhinos, which way, which method, which place, which community with all these things.
That's the big question.
What are we going to do?
To keep these animals alive, and unfortunately for these animals, they cannot afford the morality of the average person and the average person's thought process on this.
They can't afford it.
They need experts, they need money, and they need a value.
Anytime you put a hunting license on something, you put a value on it.
Okay, one time, I don't know, man, the second season of Professionals, we went down to Paraguay, and we went and darted jaguars.
Now, if you put a value of it three times the weight of gold on an illegal market, and you have no value on it in a legal market, what's going to happen?
Okay, let's talk about, you know, I mean, I don't know how far I'm going with this and if it's even the right direction, but if you just put a blanket no, okay, how well would that work like in something like keeping people from doing drugs?
But, I mean, you're not walking down the streets of L.A. thinking, this mountain lion's gonna frickin' rip my head off today.
Okay, if you're in, like, Zambia, and you're rolling down in the evening time in rural Zambia, okay, and you're on a bike, you're thinking lion might be around here.
Okay, and you know people have been killed by lion.
It's a different thing.
Okay.
Now, let's say you live out there, Joe.
This lion's worth nothing to you, alive, okay?
Now you go out there, it's killed some of your livestock, your property's damaged.
Like just a giant, you know, different, like raging wall of emotion.
You know, like I'm angry, I'm upset, you know, things like that.
But you realize that what made me feel a lot better was a lot of the people that would just say, you know, karma type threats, you know, wish you'd die, hope you get cancer, whatever.
I would respond to them when they'd send me those messages.
Nine out of ten, maybe even more than that, said it was just a knee-jerk reaction and apologized.
They realized there was a human on the other side of it.
So you think when they see you on CNN, or they see you on a website, or they see your face, a photograph, they don't necessarily think of you as a person?
Do you think that there's like a certain social currency to standing up for animals, certain social currency to taking that photo, putting it online and going, how dare you?
I think people do certain things not just because they believe it, but also they put it out there because they want everyone to know they believe it, because it jazzes them up.
Have the opportunity to do that or take the opportunity to do that I don't think a lot of people do I think you're probably right and I think there's also the reality that we're all under the influence of the momentum of culture and when cultures when cultures accepts certain types of behavior and Certain types of behavior are not prevalent like hunting that those types of behavior that aren't prevalent get mocked or minimalized or misunderstood And I think when you deal with the system that we all operate under,
there's a few people that are really aware of what the system really truly is.
And those are the people that work in the slaughterhouses.
Those are the people that breed the cattle.
Those are the people that work in these insane, confined chicken factories where they just stuff all these fucking animals.
Where they've made laws where you're not allowed to take photos.
You can go to jail if you work in one of those plants or if you sneak into one of those plants and take photos of the ridiculously inhumane conditions that these chickens and these pigs.
Different states have made laws because it's inconvenient for people to know the truth.
It's, like, no different than the outrage that people had when you couldn't show coffins, when you couldn't show American flag-draped coffins.
They were putting a ban on them in the media after the Gulf War started, and people were freaking out.
They were like, look...
This is my fucking family dying over there.
You're telling me you can't take a picture of the coffin that my family's on because you don't want people to know the reality of people dying?
Well, that's insane.
It's information.
It's all it is.
And when they're trying to keep information from you in any way, shape, or form, that's always bad.
Make your own fucking opinions.
Devise your own opinion or come up with your own opinions on things.
But you have to be able to have access to information to have a really informed opinion.
Well, and there's not been a day and age that I think we've had more access to information, and it seems like people would rather get outraged than informed.
They don't have a personal relationship when they bite into a quarter pounder with the cow in the way that my grandmother, my great-grandmother who ran a dairy, would.
You know, just being around you seem pretty open-minded about things.
I don't see, as you looking across here, the person that's going to judge me for whatever, okay?
The people who are judging us about this, by and large, are doing it while eating a hamburger and having a Louis Vuitton purse, okay?
They need to look within themselves.
And say, is the enjoyment that I get from having this Louis Vuitton purse or eating this hamburger, what is different about that enjoyment than Joe Blow gets from shooting a duck?
It is a good point that you will get people that are absolutely outraged about hunting or absolutely outraged about the death of any animal, and yet they're driving down the street and there's just murdered animal skins everywhere you look.
On people's shoes, on people's bodies, in their cars, in their briefcases.
Their briefcase is covered in animal skins.
Every convenience store you stop at has meat sticks and those fucking ground-up things that they turn into burritos.
And every restaurant, everywhere you look is filled with animals.
Okay, now if you're a 100% real, legit, true D vegan, okay, who makes sure that on the level of growing in his backyard, he's not affecting any animal's life other than his house took up a place that an animal could live, okay?
So, if you're that guy, I kind of, alright, you know, I get you.
If you're not that guy...
Then where are you at with this?
If you're not going to go over to Africa or you're not going to go to Asia, you're not going to go to the third world and either help fund or personally put your butt on the ground and live to save these things and protect these things and care about these things and be intimately involved with their life, then what are you doing?
Thinking and very, you know, I would say lots of, you know, probably the majority of hunters have absolutely, at least in the very minimal, a certain degree of reverence for the animal.
And like someone like Jim, who, you know, I have never met anybody that had more reverence for an animal.
Okay?
And like, so, and I learned a ton from being around him.
When you you see them tested and like especially a mountain hunt when you go hiking on these mountains and you see people pushed you see people that are willing to pussy out you see people that get get too tired too quick to get mentally weak and you you see people who don't and you see you see what You see what their character is about when they're pushed.
When you're in a dangerous situation, when you're forced to be quiet, you're forced to be patient, you're forced to be disciplined, you find out what someone's made of.
Because a lot of people are fucked up.
A lot of people are all ADD'd up.
They can't pay attention and they don't know how to stay focused and be a contributing factor in a successful hunt and that's one of the reasons why I think men in general we have an aversion to people who are Loud but aren't saying anything, call too much attention to themselves, have a distorted perception of their own abilities.
I think a lot of that boils down to that would make a very unsuccessful hunter.
And I think these things are ingrained in our DNA. I think there's a part of what makes a man a man, or makes a man...
What makes a man, what people value in human beings, what people value in masculine traits, is ability to hold your own mud, ability to stay calm under pressure, ability to come through when the chips are on the line.
And I think you learn a lot about someone when you hunt with them.
You learn a lot about whether or not someone can keep it together when they have the shot lined up, whether they can draw back on a seven-foot black bear and make the right shot.
It ain't a successful hunt if somebody breaks their leg or dies.
Okay?
And we know a lot of people who are dead.
Okay.
And we would talk about this extensively.
And we'd talk about, you know, situations that we'd be in when people, we'd see people go, you know, that would go bad and compounded human error.
You learn a lot about who you are.
And I've taken tons of people, Joe, that had never hunted before.
People who are against it, whatever.
I've taken them from all walks of life.
From the The wealthiest people that exist on the planet to the poorest people that exist on the planet.
And once you get out and you go on that hunt and you're next to it, it doesn't matter if you're a mega famous star.
It doesn't matter what you are.
You're all on the ground level.
You're all on the same level.
If you all have packs on, you're all equal and it's about what we're doing.
And the emotion of that, that happens in the bonding, you know, like for instance, Joe, if you and I were on the side of the mountain in Pakistan or Mongolia, or we'd be with these people and we're sitting here, we have these bonds with them.
We're caring about them.
You think about their lives.
You think about how you can help them financially.
You think about all these things, you know, I mean, you're bringing a lot of money over there.
You're bringing a lot of just items like pocket knives and packs and stuff that mean a lot to them.
You become personally involved with these people, and you and I become more personally involved.
We learn about our lives, learn about things about our family.
We talk about these things.
We have the time to do it when we're out there, okay?
And then you find if there's a situation where, you know, like, you know, you've been in when people can die.
Okay, I've been in those situations numerous times, and I've seen people get hurt.
I've seen all sorts of things.
It's like a real it's you're you're you're tied into who we are as human beings that in a sense to where a lot of times people don't Understand what that is until maybe they're in a car accident, right?
They had like a traumatic event or something Okay, that's in most people probably haven't seen something die, you know And so it's you know in real life, you know outside maybe they hit a dog or a squirrel or something, you know Or especially your actions that cause the death of this animal you become Closer to who you are and what life really is.
And life, I promise you, becomes more meaningful, I believe, because of this.
I think you put more value on life when you've been in these situations.
I personally saw the way that I changed as a human throughout it.
Yeah, I think for each person it's different, but I can tell like when you're talking right now and when you're looking at me as you're talking about it, like you're very in touch with who you are as a person.
You're very in touch with how these things have affected you as Joe Rogan or whoever you, you know, the person you are.
I think that's one of the best things about hunting is that when you're out there, if it's your family, if it's your friends, you know, hunting is largely a social thing, okay?
Now, like, in instances, like, you know, the extreme cases where people who, like, you look throughout history, Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, okay, exploring type things, a different type of person.
Even Jim is a different type of person.
You know, I'm a totally different type of person, okay, when you're drawn to these things.
It becomes a real fabric of who you are.
What you're talking about, just eating the animal and everything, it's a fabric thing of who you are as a person and you're in touch with what you understand that the actions you took resulted in the death of a very real thing.
And the death of that real thing is sustaining your life at that point.
And that's the cycle of life.
And you're talking about the emotions you feel in it.
You know, there's a lot of hunters that wouldn't even...
Get it the way that you've got it, because you've thought about it.
It's such a complex thing.
And that's why when people ask me, well, how do you feel when you kill it?
How are you going to feel when you kill this black rhino?
It's so important about it.
The two things that were most important to people was how I was going to feel about it and the money aspects of it.
It's almost like a crime to have money anymore, I think.
People look at money as a negative thing, but everybody wants it.
I'm lost with that.
And some things I just give up on trying to understand, I guess.
I mean, we were hunting in very rural areas, okay?
We're hunting with people who outside of The advent of the tractor and the cell phone live like biblical times.
They could not grasp a lot of the things about our world.
A lot of them think that we blew up our own towers.
They get media in a different way.
They get information in a different way.
Their attitude was just very, very different.
There was a lot of people that were very, I think it struck a lot of fear in people.
And so, it was just a totally different thing.
And so, regards to the show, not going over there on that hunt, I'd already been there twice.
I felt like, and Brantlin, you know, Jim's son.
I don't think Jim wanted Brantlin to go either.
Okay?
And, you know, we had a very real show, meaning like, We did our very, very best not to contrive too much.
There's obviously things like, just like you and I sitting here.
I get here, you're like, hey, I want to talk about that tour on the show.
Those type of things.
We're going to wait until we're filming and talk about this.
Anyway, it was a hard decision because I love Jim and I personally didn't have an aversion to going there.
Okay, but at this point, I put my family through hell so much I couldn't even tell you.
I mean, I've been everywhere on this planet.
There are a lot of the deepest, darkest, horrible hell holes you can ever imagine.
And I just felt like, you know, it's not...
Yeah, I personally thought I put them through enough.
Okay, and Branlon, talking to him, somebody I love, is probably my closest friend in a lot of ways.
And...
to death he you know him and I had talks about it too okay and he it was really you know we did all these shows together and it was a really big difference because Brantlin didn't have a girlfriend or anything most of the shows and then he gets a girlfriend he's getting married to now dude his attitude changed sure He couldn't get a lot of ways until you have somebody you're in love with, truly in love with.
A human being you are before you have kids and after you have kids is a two different thing if you're a true father or a true parent.
It fundamentally changes you.
So my decisions were getting changed by this.
And that's a big reason why I didn't continue to do the show.
You know, it's like I'd done everything I wanted to do with it.
I felt like I ran through the finish line, you know?
And you run the marathon, you finish, you just gonna keep running?
The idea of Uncharted wasn't to do a hunting show in traditional methods that we just went out and hunted stuff.
The idea of Uncharted was to show the way these wild places work and the people who live in them and live off these animals and their value they put on the animal.
Okay?
And our value for the whole situation.
And so at that point You know, that show was more about a culture in a lot of ways that is going away.
I mean, the reason why I'm asking a lot of these questions, a lot of it is just because I want to cover all the bases and take it from a bunch of different angles, play devil's advocate as much as possible.
One time we sat down, we'd walked like, I don't know, I mean, we walked over 20 miles after the Rhino, and this day we had walked about 10 at this point.
And, like, the CNN guy was a big dude, bro.
Okay, he was a 280, 300-pound man, you know.
And he hung in there the first day he threw up, and after seven miles, he started barfing everywhere.
But he really wanted to be involved with it, and he got it.
And...
We were sitting down next to that rhino, 40 yards away.
That rhino got up, ran off, and we never heard it.
But the reason I asked you about the brown bear was because I believe in the United States a brown bear is like similar to the situation with the lion or some of these different animals, you know, whatever you're talking about, you know, certain animals that, you know, strike things.
North America is probably the closest thing we got, you know, to that would be the brown bear.
This show was interesting, that show The Hunt, because it was one of the few shows that I've ever seen on television that, you know, you have a lot of these subsistence living shows, you know, like Alaska, The Last Frontier, or Life Below Zero, but this wasn't about subsistence at all.
It was about hunting to control the populations and trophy hunting.
I mean, that's what these people were doing.
I mean, they did cook up some backstraps on one episode, some people sliced up some...
Well, and that's what the locals were eating, and he thought, well, if I'm going to eat a part of it, I'm going to eat their favorite part, and it was the lungs.
If you don't know his show, just, I mean, even if you're not into hunting at all, like you said, that show's not really necessarily about hunting that much.
I mean, it is, but it isn't.
A lot of it is an in-depth discovery of the cultures that he's visiting.
And the emotions that we would go through on the hunt.
I mean, I've cried on the show twice, man.
I cried previously on The Professionals when I shot a blue sheep because we had a real ordeal and it was just like a relief and an emotional thing and then I cried talking about my granddad one time.
I mean, you'd have to talk to him about it, and I don't even know if he would...
You know, I love the guy.
I've been with him a lot.
And, you know, a lot of our life was connected for over a decade, still is in a way.
And he's just...
He has a different attitude about it, almost like I would say some of the explorers might have had.
In his mind, I'm not saying that he has any delusions of grandeur that that's what he's doing, but he has a different attitude about it.
You know, we both wanted to see what's left.
Like, I mean, when you're going to Papua New Guinea, you're going to the edge.
When you're going to the rural, I mean, we're dealing with people who are, you know, cannibals and believed in witchcraft and all sorts of stuff, you know.
When you think about this, think about this war we have going on versus ISIS, right?
And we're sitting over here, and I've been close back to Al-Qaeda and stuff like that when I would go to that part of the world, okay?
I've been...
You know, on the border of Afghanistan and probably in it and didn't know it, okay?
For sure.
And it's just, it's a huge disconnect.
If you were over there and you see them selling 12 year old girls naked in a bazaar and having an auction in Syria where they're just selling them as property for sexual abuse, whatever, sex slave.
And it's just they've kidnapped them.
That's what they're doing.
If you saw that going down, who isn't going to immediately want this stopped?
It's gone.
You're going to do it.
The different mindset that we have, I'm not saying that people want that to continue in any way, shape, or form, but if you saw it, you'd feel differently about it.
Well, there's definitely different ways of living in this age, in 2015, and there's some ways that people are living every day just to get by that would horrify most people.
I would say every single person that I met that was like, you know, local people on the hunt, I think they were high on weed from the moment they woke up to when they went to sleep.
And so I was looking down at 2,000 feet, and then going off, sliding straight down 2,000 feet, then going off a cliff of a few hundred feet, then going down the bottom.
When you when you do travel to these places and you you do go over there and you experience their life does it give you this feeling of Like almost like helplessness like you can't you can't do enough to help these people the system that they're involved in the life that they live there Yeah, the community and that they're sort of entangled in I can tell you hunts I've gone on with my dad and he brought 20 full giant Cabela's bags just worth of gifts for him Just giving stuff at the very end.
The reason I felt comfortable with those guys, everybody in the world wanted to come.
Look, they all wanted to come.
The reason I felt comfortable with Jason Morris and Ed Lavendera Is I sat down with them and I said, you're going to have to come to this with an open mind.
You're just going to have to come and throw away whatever you got.
And when you come on a hunting trip, you're complicit in it.
I told them, I said, you're going to be there.
Look, Ed, if the rhino gets somebody and knocks both the dudes down with guns, you may have to grab it to save somebody's life and kill the thing.
Boy, it was an eye-opening experience to all those guys.
I honestly felt like One of them really was, he wasn't on, I mean, he was kind of real ambivalent, but he wasn't like some guy who thought it was the best thing in the world, for sure.
And was really pretty open-minded about it.
He just wanted to go over there and report what was going down, true journalist stuff, okay?
They were really pretty hardcore journalistic about it.
But I think there, when we delivered the meat, I think he kind of got teary-eyed.
I mean, he kind of got, at that point, he kind of got it.
And the fact that, man, this is real.
You know, he got a big experience out of it because the rhino went for him.
He got the fear of an animal trying to kill him.
So he had a pretty unique experience about it.
I think he talked about it on there.
I can't remember.
But he didn't talk about the rhino charging him.
But for somebody who wasn't involved in hunting, he made one of the smartest moves I've ever seen anybody do, where he ran where he ran.
If he ran a different way, he'd probably be dead right now.
Yeah, so anyway, it's CNN's mad at Ed Yeah, so anyways, like, he comes flying underneath me, the animal's charging him, and when it, you know, they don't have good eyesight, okay?
So when he came low, I think that it was so thick that the rhino lost him, like, you know, lost where he went, and it kind of just veered a little bit to the left, and when he comes underneath me, I just see it coming and turning, like, just turning, veering, and it's like less than 18 yards, you know, it's right there, 45 feet, and I boom, boom.
I don't say that about a lot of people, but that guy was involved in some really shady shit in England with the tabloids, where the tabloids had hacked into victims' cell phones.
Do you know that whole story behind it?
A family of a woman who turned up missing, they got hope because they found that she had checked her voicemail on her cell phone.
Well, it turns out she didn't.
The company that he worked for had hacked into her phone, and they were checking her voicemail.
You know, and that's a lot of what he did was tabloid sensationalism shit, where even if he had an opinion on something, you know, there's a lot of what they do that, like we were talking about before, they're trying to get social brownie points.
I mean, look, Ted Nugent is a funny character to have on when you're discussing that, but at the end of the day, he's very fucking informed when it comes to that stuff.
Very informed.
And Pierce wasn't prepared for that, and he looked stupid.
He really did.
He didn't understand, like, a lot of those shooting deaths are cops shooting people in the act of crimes like murder and domestic violence and robbery and...
Every time I talk to like a big, I talk to him, talk to Aaron Burnett on there, talk to, they may have come at me a little bit.
They didn't have the facts, right?
And the problem is, if you don't have the facts on your side, and especially in this situation, if you don't have the facts on your side, and you're left with, I'm going to cuss this guy out and threaten his kids, you've already lost, bro.
I hope, agree with you or disagree with you, if people are listening to this, that they get at the end of the day that this is a very complex situation that is not black and white.
There's no good guys and bad guys.
And when you're looking at something like hunting, you're looking at something that has existed literally since the beginning of human beings.
It's been a part of what created civilization in the first place.
What led to us surviving.
And that's been somehow or another co-opted by factory farming and fast food and restaurant chains, and that has become our reality.
And our existence is entirely unnatural and disconnected because of it.
Our relationship with the very food we eat is delusional.
What you're doing by being a part of conservation, whether or not it makes sense to people, or whether or not they agree with it or disagree with it, once they look at the actual facts behind it, they'll see that this is not...
You're not doing an evil thing.
Not only are you not doing an evil thing, you're not doing a thing that even can be logically criticized from the standpoint of conservation.
You might feel uncomfortable that someone's gonna go over there and shoot a rhino.
You might feel uncomfortable about it, but That's your right.
When you start looking at the facts behind it, though, it's very difficult to argue against the idea of hunting as conservation, whether you want to do it or not.
Like I said, I don't want to do it.
I don't want to hunt a rhino.
I don't want to hunt a brown bear.
I don't want to, but I understand it.
I understand it completely and totally from the point of view of conservation.
And I think that it's cool that you're open-minded enough to get something that, hey, maybe you don't want to do.
Because I think that's kind of the issue is like, look, I don't want to do a lot of things, but I don't judge people who do.
And I definitely don't judge people who actually have a stake in the game when it comes to keeping something around or keeping something good around, you know?
The uncomfortable reality of attaching monetary value to life, whether it's the Plains games, animals that were on the verge of extinction just a few decades ago in Africa that are thriving now because they're valuable, or whether it's because of white-tailed deer, which there's more white-tailed deer in America now than there were when Columbus came.
And so, I mean, I honestly think that I don't know.
The average person, especially when it comes to a lot of these wild animals, really needs to look within their self and think, is their emotion going to help it?
And do I hate this guy enough that he gets cancer and dies just because he does something I don't agree upon?
And then go over to Namibia and take a picture of black rhinos that this situation helped stay alive.
Period.
Okay.
I get so sick of the people saying, well, just because you get money in Africa, it's going to corrupt.
Not every situation.
Give me a break.
Give me a break.
You know, my dream is for these children that live there to have a heritage that we have with deer, that we have with bear.
They can go out to a wild place, lay down at night, hear a lion roar a hundred years from now.