Steven Rinella’s MeatEater redefines hunting as a conservation-driven, knowledge-rich pursuit, not just sport or trophy collection. His two-volume Complete Guide to Wild Game—Volume 1 (big game) already out, Volume 2 (small game) arriving December—challenges misconceptions like Cecil the Lion outrage, arguing $350K spent on culling a dangerous rhino funded anti-poaching better than industrial farming’s ethical blind spots. In Bolivia, he hunted with the Chimane, who eat rare Howler Monkeys (tasting like smoked turkey) and avoid invasive species threats like Florida’s pythons devouring alligators, proving hunting’s role in ecosystem balance. Yet even he admits modern baiting—like carrot-fed deer—undermines fair chase, while Verizon’s axing of Outdoor/Sportsman Channels reflects broader backlash against misunderstood practices. [Automatically generated summary]
When I started doing that book, I thought it'd take eight months, man.
We just got on this idea.
You know what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a book about field care and butchering and stuff, but then someone said it should be bigger, it should be like the complete guide.
We started using the word complete, and what I keep saying now is how I should...
For a long time, I really regretted including the word complete in the proposal, because as we sat down...
Initially, I would sit down with Dodie, who you know well, Dan Dodie, and we would just start mapping out We had like a board, you know, and sticky notes.
And we'd just start mapping out like what would complete look like.
And then it grew and grew and Doty, you know, he was working on the show and moved on to some other things and still was involved.
And other guys came in and Giannis, you know, we started working on it and just trying to manage the idea.
And pretty soon, I mean, a lot of people worked on that book.
But yeah, I mean, I was in there on the writing process, and it turned into several, it took several years to do them.
Then when I took it to my publisher, she had me in, it's published by Spiegel and Grau at Random House, and she had me into the office, and we had turned it in, it was going to be 700 and some pages long.
And she said, like, it's just books aren't, Like, you just don't really, you know, you gotta understand, like, that's a big book.
Sworn piece.
Yeah, you don't really do illustrated books that big.
So we were gonna hack a bunch out, but then we kind of hit on this idea just to publish it in two things, as Volume 1 and Volume 2. But it wasn't just as simple as splitting it down the middle.
So...
It took probably, I don't know, almost a year, maybe, to turn it into volume one, big game, volume two, small game.
I was down with my family, just vacation in Baja, and I remember sitting there, and we were fishing and stuff, and we had two babies with us, and I'm sitting there trying to, like, work on that book.
I just worked on it all the time.
But the thing is, I don't want to, like...
I did a lot of work on it, but everybody...
A lot of the guys you know worked on it a ton, too.
You know, like, all that recipe stuff...
Doty, we did a big shoot.
Doty kind of organized a shoot with some other folks.
We organized a week of just cooking and photographing.
But the other thing is, a lot of the stuff in there, too, the images you'd kind of look at, the images you'd be like, well, how would you go and get all these images?
You'd never be able to justify getting those images to make a book.
But we had...
Access to so many hours of hunting footage of all the stuff, so we're able to do something called screen grabs.
So in there's a lot of stuff where we're able to pull images to illustrate all these different procedures and stuff that you would just never go out and get those kind of photographs.
Well, you've expanded so much, you know, and when I first started talking to you, it was right after you got done doing The Wild Within, and then you were starting Meat Eater at the time.
And now, you know, I really think that the show has hit its stride in a crazy way.
Like, the first episode that I saw of this season was the one where you went hunting for coos deer, and you didn't even kill anything, and it was one of your best episodes.
Because it was so much involved.
It's not just a hunting show.
You were talking about your relationship with your father and how you would love to bring your father to this place.
Your father's dead.
You were talking about how you have this tumultuous relationship with him and how you'd want to bring him.
To this place to see what this is like because it's so beautiful.
And there's no music and you were just out there talking and it was like, man, this is some really deep, compelling shit.
What I think is important about your show, I think there's a lot of things important about you and what you represent in this world, but one of the things that I think is important in your show is there's a lot of these shows, these hunting shows, without mocking them or saying anything bad about them, but they They're very simple.
They appeal to simple people.
They have this simple ideology that goes through them.
And I think you get caught in that genre and everybody sort of starts thinking, well, this is what these shows are about.
These shows are all about...
Go sit in a tree stand, and when you shoot this animal that you named earlier in the spring, you got trail cam pictures of it.
I mean, a lot of those shows are the same goddamn show every week.
And you get in your head, oh, this is what a hunting show is.
This is what hunting is and I think that's a it's a problem with the stereotype that people have with hunting They connect hunting to sort of a like a low vibration of thinking You know that yeah, you know what I mean?
Well, I think a lot of that might have to do with your experience on your first show, too.
They were trying to let a fucking moose out of a cage and you shoot it with a musket.
I mean, they were trying to pressure you into a lot of really stupid fake shit because they were operating under the guidelines of, you know, quote-unquote reality TV. That's how they do it.
What's important to them is getting the shot, not whether or not the shot actually happened.
I remember one time being in a meeting early on when we were starting to work on that show, and a guy that I later became friends with, and he still does those kind of reality-type shows that come out of Alaska.
But we were talking about how much time, you know?
I was always like, we need more time, we need more time, because of finding animals.
And early on, the first time we ever met, he's like, well, that's why they have Wranglers.
You know?
And that was sort of like where we began with that.
I liked doing...
You know what I liked about doing Wild Within?
It was so many years ago now.
We did eight of them.
I liked...
I fell in love with the guys that I traveled with.
Bad.
I mean, like...
When we quit doing that show, the show didn't get renewed.
I mean, they knew...
We were still filming the last episode and we already knew it was...
Going downhill, right?
Just the viewership wasn't there, the wrong viewership and you know, or like the numbers weren't there and the numbers that were there weren't the right numbers.
Like not the demographic they were after, right?
And you weren't going to fix that.
But I had fallen in love so bad with the guys that I worked with that it was like getting broken up with by a girl.
That we weren't going to hang out together anymore and travel together anymore.
But at the time, now I try to wonder, when I look at that show, and there's some good stuff about it, and there's a lot of bad stuff about it, embarrassing stuff about it.
When I look at it now and I try to go, why did I so badly want that to continue?
And I did at the time.
I really wanted to keep doing it.
Not knowing that I would find such happiness doing what I'm doing now.
That I'd find such a sense of peace doing what I'm doing now.
I feel like I'm being constructive and working with good people and doing good work.
At the time, I was just devastated that we weren't going to go.
And now I'm like, why did I feel that way?
And I think in some ways, it's just because I like running around with those guys.
There's a fun bonding thing that goes with those shows that's different than any other show.
You film a normal show, say if you do, like, a television show.
Whether it's on a set or it's on location, you go, you film it, and then you go either to your hotel or you go, you know, back to your house.
Then you show up back on the set in the morning.
And there's a bonding involved in that.
But there's a totally different kind of bonding when you're in, say, like, when you took us to the Missouri Breaks, down the Missouri River, you know, in Montana.
You're in the wilderness together.
Your only source of entertainment is you're sitting around at a campfire at night, shooting the shit, laughing.
And there's this crazy bond that you have with people when you do something like that.
And when you're doing it over and over and over and over again like you're doing, the regular world of civilization seems so stupid.
The red lights and the fucking telephone poles.
You just want to...
You just want to go back.
You want to go back to the fun stuff when you're out there in the woods looking for a buck or trying to find a ram or whatever the fuck you're trying to do.
It's like there's this crazy heightened reality to that life that especially when you have a bunch of men together and you have the opportunity to just do it's almost like Playtime.
I'm a Klansman, and I don't mean that with a K. Klansman with a C. And I do feel like, like, all through growing up, I had...
I still hang out.
I still consider...
I still regard my two brothers like the main people that I... Hang out with.
In a time sense, that's not true.
Days per year, that's not true.
But they're the main thing.
Outside of my wife and kids, I think my two brothers are this main thing.
But we always had these guys that we hung out with growing up.
The same guys.
We still hang out Like, just this summer, we had people up to our shack, our fishing shack, and it's like mostly guys from Michigan that we've known a long time, you know?
And I do kind of feel that hunting and fishing, for me, do form those kind of relationships, you know, and traveling together forms those kind of relationships.
I always feel like I would have been good in the military, maybe, because you get to, like, have this little core of guys, you know?
And, yeah, traveling with those guys that I worked with and traveling with, you know, and now it's just, like, revolving cast of members, like, faces change, but it still feels the same as, yeah, it's like this little...
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Like a little clan, you know, like a little clique of fellas.
I was driving around LA and the sun was shining like it always is.
It was warm like it always is, but I appreciated it on a level that I had never appreciated it before.
Because being rain-soaked in that island, huddling up in that tent, and I remember turning on that little headlamp and seeing mist everywhere inside the tent.
I'm like, I thought in my stupid head that there was going to be a place that you would go to get dry.
Like, you would go inside the tent, and you would get dry.
Well, it's raining outside, but that's okay.
You get in the tent, you'll be...
No, there was no dry.
There was no dry.
The air was wet.
The actual air everywhere around you was filled with moisture.
So everything was wet, no matter what.
And so when I got back to L.A., I felt fucking fantastic.
I was like, this is amazing.
And it gave me an appreciation for LA that I wouldn't have had if I didn't go through that.
Oh yeah, to go home from something like that and then be in bed all warm with like your wife, oh my god.
You know, I've talked to you often about Rourke Denver.
You know, he was a Navy SEAL officer and ran that BUDS program, which is like this whole thing, like he'd basically go there to suffer.
And he was talking about how You think, like, you go into a SEAL's home, you think it's going to be all Spartan, you know, like he's sleeping on a stack of cardboard or something.
He goes, those guys have, like, you go in there, it's like the Egyptian cotton, the nicest, most comfortable homes, man, because you wind up...
After the suffering, you so badly want to go be comfortable that they go out of their way to have a comfortable house.
More than normal people.
Because you want to just soak up comfort when you get the chance.
I think having these conversations and what you're doing on your show, it's very important because it's giving people a different sense of hunting.
It's one of the things that I get all the time from tweets and Facebook messages and that people change their perspective because of your show.
And because of these conversations that you've had on my podcast and because of your podcast, people have changed their perceptions of it.
Because people who don't experience hunting personally and their ideas of it a lot of times are shaped by the portrayals of hunters in movies, which are almost always negative.
No, I mean, they learned some good wildlife stuff, but I'm like, I just don't want to, I'm not going to let them, no, I tell them that, I tried to explain to them why I didn't like it, they didn't understand, but now I don't like them watching that show.
Because I don't like the way, like, they're like, I just can't have a show where, like, the bad guy is, like, some guy that, like, a chef who is always out trying to hunt, like, he's always trying to hunt endangered species.
When I hear people don't let their kids watch certain shows because of whatever, I don't like them watching stuff that has a negative portrayal of hunters.
Well, I'm writing this thing right now that I'll put out probably tomorrow about all the people that got mad at me because I put up a picture of that elk last week that got mad at me and then I went to their Twitter pages or their Instagram pages and I saw pictures of their cats.
It's so easy to fall in the trap talking about stuff that annoys you, but that's one thing is like...
People that you can have this holier-than-thou attitude, like a lot of catch-and-release fishermen have it, you know?
They'll go out fishing, they'll let their trout go, and you know those sons of bitches go to a restaurant that night and order fish, and they're like, well, whose fish is that?
I had that guy on the podcast, and he discussed it, and we talked about it.
But what's interesting is they had on another guy who was in the Radiolab show that was a...
I forget his position, but he's...
Someone who works to help wildlife.
He was saying that the idea is ridiculous that you could kill these animals and that you would say that you're working as a conservationist but you still kill these animals and that you're trying to protect them and make more of them and let them breed and let them repopulate so that you can kill them.
That's preposterous.
The real problem with any of these arguments is, I always want to know, do you eat meat?
Do you wear leather?
If you're making this argument against the hunting of these animals, where do you get your protein from?
Are you getting your protein from all plant sources?
Because in that case, maybe we can have this conversation about that.
But if you're not, man, if you're choosing animals that you think are okay and not okay to kill and it's based on which ones are captive, that seems to me more fucked up.
It's way more cruel, in my opinion, to put an animal in a cage and make that animal earmarked for death, and you just stuff it and keep fattening it up until you kill it.
And to think that somehow that's a better moral decision than going out and killing something in the wild.
But then there's the trophy hunting thing, and that's where it gets weird.
When you say, well, these are animals that people aren't even eating.
Yeah.
Like the lion thing.
Which that guy was just cleared, apparently, of any wrongdoing.
You know, it's generally illegal to fence in wildlife in some way that it can't get away.
An animal can move across borders freely and its public ownership doesn't change when it moves around.
This is something I've tried to explain a thousand times, but if you have, let's take some iconic park like Yellowstone National Park.
If you have an elk in Yellowstone National Park and it jumps a border onto private land and then jumps a border onto federal national forest land, jumps a border onto state land, jumps a border into subdivision, jumps a border into a county park, throughout all of his little journey there, he's always been the property of the state.
When elk migrate out of Yellowstone National Park, they get hunted.
Many animals that get hunted in Wyoming and Montana are animals that, as part of the year, spend time in Yellowstone National Park.
My brother once drew a bighorn sheep tag For the upper Yellowstone Valley.
And there's this peak near the Gardner entrance to Yellowstone National Park called Electric Peak.
And a lot of bighorn sheep spend their summer on Electric Peak.
When he had that tag, this was in 2005, I think, it was quite a while ago.
When he had that tag, we were just waiting for snow to pile up.
On Electric Peak, and the sheep would begin migrating.
And they would migrate down and spend the winter down in some grass, some like rangeland up and down the Yellowstone.
So we would go there.
It was on our third trip to the area when we finally found sheep were migrating down out of the High Country, out of Yellowstone National Park.
We killed the sheep within a couple miles of Yellowstone National Park.
So when people were talking about, oh, like how the lion belonged in the park, Was of the park, was lured off the park.
If you condemn that in and of itself, then you're really talking about something that would have very revolutionary implications here in the U.S. that animals aren't able to freely move or that an animal becomes the possession of whatever land administration it happens to be.
It was all talking about his family members that were terrified, where these people would go outside, and they had a very real fear they were going to be killed by monsters.
Giant cats that would kill everything, anything.
Kill people all the time.
You know, Jim Shockey has this great show called Uncharted.
But I think if you got to the point where you were facing, where you might be looking at a genetic extinction of the crocodile, it would change.
My thing, my interest in the lion controversy that came out of Africa, my interest in that is provincial, in that I was concerned about and I'm interested in the way that that's going to impact things here.
You know?
I'm not that interested in...
Not that I have antipathy, I'm just not that vested in what might happen with African big game hunting.
Outside of how people's, how the American imagination, or the way the average American perceives hunting in his own country, here in the U.S., would be colored by the actions of people in Africa and the circumstances that go on in Africa.
That's my interest in that landscape.
As far as what you're saying about the crocodile thing, I think that one of the reasons that it's so complicated with the lions is on one hand we're talking about the threat of genetic extinction of a species.
And I'm sensitive to that here as well, because we right now have, we're engaged in our own thing, we're engaged in the wolf debate right now, that in some way mirrors the kind of language we're hearing out of Africa, where you have an animal, you have a species that's absent from much of its range, okay?
So there used to be wolves, Everywhere.
But let's just say in the most recent past, you had wolves in New Mexico and Colorado and Arizona.
They're all over the place.
Wolves here, California.
And then now they're gone from much of that landscape.
But there are some areas, like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, area around Glacier, in the U.S. that have what I would say is on the verge of too many wolves.
And so people could look and they'd be like, well, how can there be too many if they're extinct across 90-some percent of their range in the lower 48?
You know, I'd be like, well, yeah, it's very complicated.
They're overabundant here and missing from there.
And I see both sides of the debate because a lot of people who might come from my understanding about wildlife, Who like to hunt deer, like to hunt elk, like to hunt moose, do want to see the wolves all the way gone.
And what they would point to is the effect that wolves have on livestock, right?
People's way of making a living.
There's safety implications or not, but some people say that there are safety implications from wolves being around.
And when I look at that, I'm like, okay, I take all that, but I don't think that that means we don't want wolves.
I think we do want wolves.
How many do we want?
I agree that we want them around.
I just agree that there's a limit to how many we want.
Striving for, with wildlife issues, I think striving for a happy medium where you can have many different stakeholders at the table talking about it is more constructive.
And so I think as well, with the Cecil the Lion deal, I just think it really like clouded and confused tons of that shit here in the U.S. and made it harder for people to imagine the role of what I would call management, wildlife management, game management.
Because it's not like this...
We no longer live in this Eden environment where you can act somehow like the hand of man is not at play.
Yeah, it's a semantics issue in some way, I see it as.
And this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about in recent years.
What trophy hunting means to someone who's unfamiliar with hunting, when they hear the term trophy hunting, I think what they see in their mind, they see the wanton slaughter of an animal.
Just in order to take a piece of the animal, its head or its hide, and have it as a bragging rights thing.
That it's like this callous slaughter of animals to take part of it and take possession of part of it and use it as an emblem or to prove your manhood.
Right.
That's what they're seeing.
It's so pervasive now, that meaning of the word.
I think that it might almost be time for people who do engage in trophy hunting to think about a new term.
If I go out and I hunt and get something, I do retain parts of the animal that would be a trophy, the same way you have that skull right there.
It was kind of one of the ways it was most upsetting to me when it was going on.
Thankfully, I was gone for a lot of it.
But, uh...
It just had this way of acting like a black hole, or like we envision a black hole being where it just sucks everything around it into this thing, where it became the dominant discussion about hunting.
And I think that one of the most telling things about it is the people who seemed to be most upset by it were the people who had the least nuanced understanding of wildlife management, wildlife politics, and wildlife in general.
I had a FBI, one time I had to have the FBI look into a guy who was messing me a little bit, and this agent came over my house, and he was like, I can tell you that guy's not a vegan, or he's not a vegetarian.
You're talking about how the guy had just ordered a pepperoni pizza.
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Which in my mind, I'm like, dude, why do you have such a problem with me?
And I see those green lights and I can just point my anger in that direction.
Instead of focusing inwardly, instead of looking at what aspects of my life that I should change, maybe I'd have a more harmonious existence, maybe I'd be happier, maybe I'd be more fulfilled.
Nope.
They just find someone like, this fucking guy, what are you fucking, you're a hunter?
You got your little dick?
You got your little dick?
You're gonna fix it with a rifle?
There's like these cliches that they always throw about.
And then they'll go eat a pepperoni pizza.
It's like, oh my god, do you know what's involved in making pepperoni?
Have you ever gone to a slaughterhouse?
Do you know what existence these animals have before they get snuffed out?
It's a horrific existence.
The existence of a wild animal's infinitely better.
And the distance between, or the time between the wild animal, even knowing that you're alive and being dead, is like that.
The difference between that and an animal that lives in captivity and gets turned into sausage or pepperoni or whatever the fuck it is, that's horrific.
And the idea that someone who buys cat food, someone who buys chicken cat food, can get mad at someone who goes out and hunts a grouse or hunts a duck.
It's madness.
It's just madness.
I wrote this thing about the hierarchy of dead animals on social media, and I showed what you can get away with and what you can't get away with.
I'm like, cut up fish.
Nobody really gives a fuck.
You could show a dead fish, and it's a little sketchier, but you could show a steak.
Another thing that really bummed me out about our dentist friend is that when I'm talking about hunting, one of the things I'd like to try to promote or try to explain is,
in a term I use a lot, is trying to form a context with the land where you hunt and establishing a context with the animals you hunt.
Meaning that you understand your place in the world and you understand the world that you're walking into.
Have you heard of the writer, Aldo Leopold, who wrote Sand County Almanac?
He was writing in the 40s, and he was kind of the...
He's like the grandpappy of hunter conservationists.
I recently had occasion to reread his book because I went to...
I gave a talk at the University of Wisconsin.
It was sponsored in part by the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
So I reread Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, and he was a hunter in the 40s.
And relative to the 40s, we live in the good old days.
We have phenomenal, phenomenal hunting and fishing here in this country.
In the 40s, it sucked.
In the 30s, It really sucked.
There was very few hunting seasons for anything.
Most things were just gone.
Habitat destruction was off the charts.
You could legally hunt turkeys almost nowhere.
Waterfowl was just about wiped out.
Deer were just about wiped out.
So now, if all the Leopold could be alive now, he'd see a lot that would make him very, very happy.
Because we've done such a good job on this continent with wildlife management.
But in this book, he pushes this idea.
He's talking about hunting, but he's using the metaphor of a forester.
Because he had been trained in forestry and worked in forestry.
And he talked about how a forester, or you might say a hunter, goes out on the land and with each stroke of his axe...
Is writing his signature on the land with each swing of an axe.
And when I say he's talking about hunting, because he's kind of talking about this in the conversation with hunting, meaning when you go out on the land, you are writing your signature out there.
You're building a legacy.
You're making decisions and having implications for the landscape.
Impacting it.
What it seemed to be with that guy, I think one of the things that upset me about that guy and that might have upset other people about that guy that shot the lion, was that he seemed to be claiming in some way that he just had no idea.
Didn't know where he was.
Didn't know what was up with the lion.
Didn't know the lion had a collar.
And be like, I just didn't know, you know.
I think that in some ways, obviously you're in another country, it's hard to follow what's going on, you rely on other people's judgment, but in some ways I think it was upsetting to people that he wasn't doing like, he wasn't following that thing that Leopold set out about writing your signature on the land, because it was sort of like he just had no idea where he was, what he was doing.
And I think that when you hunt, you do have an obligation to understand your role and your place.
And understand the context that you're working in.
What are the limits and the needs of the resource you're trying to exploit?
Can the resource withstand exploitation?
Are you generally behaving as a force that's ultimately for or ultimately against wildlife?
Like, you have an obligation to answer all these questions.
You can go in a situation like that and rely on the judgment of someone else But that judgment can get really confused, I think, when money enters the picture, you know?
But the money thing's funny, too, because people were very upset.
I was joking earlier about them being...
I was joking about the dentist thing.
It was just funny how often it was pointed out, his occupation was pointed out.
But what I'm not joking about is people were very, very upset about the amount of money that traded hands, which puzzled me because the old narrative...
From a century ago was that people of European descent go into Africa and take resources and pay for nothing.
That we go there and just rob the place of its resources and we take what we want and we leave and we don't pay a dime for it.
That was upsetting and is upsetting to me.
Now it's like he's being criticized for paying too much for a resource.
Expressed the value of the animal in some way is almost a compliment to the pursuit Rather than just going in there and robbing what you want never paying for anything that makes sense But I think a lot of people have an idea a real problem with the idea of putting a value on life at all like saying that it's three hundred fifty thousand dollars you can go kill an endangered animal instead of The real issue is that animal was killing...
They had a real problem with these older, non-viable rhinos because they were killing young rhinos.
This rhino had killed a female.
And in the NPR piece, the radio lab piece...
They actually found the dead bodies of this female and a male that this rhino had killed.
Like, he took them to these spots, the guy who was the professional hunter.
So, you know, in Africa, they have these things called professional hunters, where you would call them a guide in America.
But they took them to the spot where the bones were of this female.
I mean, this rhino really fucked this young female to death.
Like, he kept mounting her and fucking her and horning her, you know, hitting her with his horns and wound up killing her and killed a male who had, you know, gotten in the area and wanted to breed with the female, too.
So he had killed two other rhinos.
They had Targeted him anyway, because he was dangerous to the population, because he was killing breeding males.
The money that had come in from that $350,000 that that guy gave was going to stop poaching, was going to protect the environment that this animal lived in, was going to protect habitat.
So the argument is real weird, because on one hand, it does seem strange that we're talking about value for life, like that this life would be valuable.
But on another hand, The real value is like you've got to kill this thing anyway because it's a non-breeding male.
Either kill it or you have to capture it and take it somewhere and make it live in a cage.
But if you kill it, this guy's willing to pay you $350,000.
And he was saying that that was undervalued and that if there wasn't so much bad press, there would have probably been over half a million.
If they had had a park ranger go out or some kind of land manager go out and shoot it and act like, you know, just something that had to be done, you know...
No, I was reading this morning this article in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik.
He was writing about...
He was actually writing a piece about books about the Holocaust.
But in there he had this line that stuck with me, or at least it stuck with me for the last few hours, where he said that something to the effect of, the only way to simplify history is to make it complex.
You know, it's like any time...
Any real explanation of something, particularly with wildlife, you don't get any real aha moments until you get into the deep complexities surrounding the issue.
I think that's how we can sit here and all these whatever number of months after that, and I can sit here and still Hold in my hand, or hold in my hand simultaneously, a disdain for this guy and what he stood for.
We can talk about the line, like some kind of disdain for it.
Like something about it, I just like, it's a visceral reaction about some of the things I know about what went on and what might have been in people's mind.
And at the same time, disdain for the general public.
For feeling the disdain that they felt.
It's like, I just see it as such a big thing that I haven't really made that much sense out of it.
And whenever I get that conflicted about an issue, I start to feel like I'm getting somewhere.
Well, it is one of those things where there are a bunch of different angles to look at.
And it is complex because this guy, whether or not the Zimbabwe government cleared him of any wrongdoing, which they did, he still tampered with the collar, which is illegal.
He still...
He was a poacher.
He had been convicted of poaching already.
He had killed a bear 40 miles outside the area that he claimed to kill it, tried to bribe the people that he was with to claim that he killed it in a legal area.
I saw that piece and I thought, well, maybe this guy is making some interesting points.
Until I listened to this TED podcast about him recently, where he's talking about reintroducing lions and even hippos to England.
Because he thinks that at one point in time, they found in London, they found ancient bones of lions, and he thinks bringing megafauna to areas of the UK would be beneficial.
I'm interested in the concept of rewilding, and I'm interested in the concept of rewilding in that if you can correct mistakes...
If you can correct extirpations, or let's say scientifically you had the ability to correct extinctions, but you can't, so we'll not talk about that for right now.
If you could correct extirpations, like regional extinctions of animals that were brought on by human causes, then I think we have a moral obligation to remedy those mistakes.
Elk, okay, the American elk.
Only occupies 10% of its native range.
Elk live in 10% of the land in the U.S. that they lived in at the time of European contact.
No one talks about elk being endangered or near extinction, even though they're absent from 90% of their range.
Why is that?
Because there are many areas where they abound.
So we've come able to go like, yes, elk are missing from areas, and there's a number of groups, many state agencies, and most notably the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, work to, where plausible, bring elk back.
To areas in the east that used to have them that no longer do.
In my lifetime, elk have come back to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and on and on and on through reintroduction efforts.
So we're working to repopulate elk.
The biggest piece of resistance you get on repopulating elk is public approval.
People don't want to be inconvenienced by big-ass animals that they're going to hit with their cars, and they don't want to be inconvenienced by animals that eat crops.
So that's the resistance.
The resistance is that it's just that we don't have the technology for it.
It's just that we gotta get public approval.
So we're trying to bring them back.
Meanwhile, we have hunting seasons for elk all over the place, right?
I mean, just down the line, you got elk seasons, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada, while they're gone from other places.
Why is it that we can't extend the same logic to the wolf and say, yeah, the wolf's absent from much of its range.
In some of its range, it's thriving.
We're going to manage the areas that are thriving, and we're going to work toward bringing wolves back to the areas where they're not the same way that hunters, by and large, not even by and large, solely Hunters are responsible for bringing elk back all over the place.
But I think the way the general public looks at things is very different from the way that you're looking at things.
You're looking at these animals as a renewable resource.
The general public looks at them as magical creatures that live in the forest that we need to bring back because we made them extinct because we're greedy and vicious.
The areas where I go to look, you know, anytime I've gone out with the intention of getting a grizzly bear, I go to areas where they don't have access to fish.
Unless it was for a legitimate wildlife conservation reason and I was going to eat it, I don't think I would be interested in hunting something like that.
Even if it was...
If I'm going to spend my time hunting something, I want to eat it.
I told you about this a handful of times, I feel like, but I'll say it again.
I grew up always hunting since before I can remember.
But for a long time I got interested in trapping.
And that's what I was going to do for a living.
I was going to be a fur trapper.
I caught my first muskrat when I was 10 years old.
And I trapped until I was 22. So I trapped for 12 years.
And the latter part of that I was trying to do it where I was going to be a professional trapper.
I eventually quit trapping because fur markets got so low.
And moved away from home.
Got more serious about college and started just feeding me and friends, my brothers.
By that point in time, we were feeding ourselves on wild game, buying no protein besides what we hunted for.
And at that point was when I really sort of found my place in the natural world.
That was like the relationship with animals and the relationship with the natural world and the relationship with hunting that Really spoke to me and made me feel very good about my decisions, very good about my lifestyle.
And I've lived that lifestyle now, you know, for 20 some odd years.
But I did at a time, yeah, I did trap, you know, and I would trap in order to sell the hides.
So when I now talk about Why I like to hunt.
And that I don't want to hunt for something I'm not going to eat.
Because that's what I like to hunt for.
I think that some hunters will look at that and act like you're being divisive.
That you're being...
That you have this holier-than-thou attitude that you're somehow condemning other practices.
I'm just talking about what I... My approach, what I like to do.
What to me is the value of an animal.
I think in many, many cases...
When it comes to predator management, I think there are many cases where you're going to have harvests of predators that are just not going to be a food-driven harvest.
You know, it's just not.
We're looking right now, like, in the same areas, in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem around Glacier National Park, you're looking at coming up on a thing where the same thing that happened with wolves is going to probably have to happen with grizzly bears.
In many of these areas, they're getting way above objective.
It's starting to have negative implications for prey animals.
It's having negative implications for people who use the land.
These bears have, they're just not afraid of anything.
You know, you go up in Alaska where grizzlies get hunted, you can generally get upwind of the thing, let it get a smell of you, it's going to take off.
Oftentimes, typically the case.
In these areas, they're drawn to the smell of humans.
No one can touch them.
They have ESA protection.
You know, we had drawn out decades ago what recovery would look like.
We far surpassed what recovery looks like.
It's going to happen.
It's going to be ugly, but they're going to delist bears.
They're going to delist grizzly bears.
They're going to put grizzly bears under state management.
It's inevitable.
They're going to put them under state management in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and people are going to be killing grizzly bears.
Some limited amount, and there probably is not going to be a meat salvage requirement on those bears.
And you can look at it that way, like it's sustainable, and if it is sustainable and these people use it to make money and they benefit from the resource of people coming over there and hunting them, I guess you could see a positive benefit of it.
You know, Did you ever see the Louis Thoreau documentary on those hunting camps, the high-fence hunting camps in South Africa?
So when they let them out of the cage, the lions are going to get out of that cage and they're going to go, where the fuck am I? I'm just going to sit down here.
Try to figure out where the hell they are, right?
So they're going to sit down, and then they send this hunter out, and the hunter finds the lion, shoots it, poses, does the whole picture with it.
That guy Pigman did that.
They had a whole episode.
And you can tell these lions have just been released.
The trappings of hunting, the appearance of hunting, the methods of hunting, the tools of hunting, the clothes of hunting, the photographs that come from hunting.
Why do they like that so much, but they just don't like hunting?
There was a time when they were harvesting, you'd go down there and you'd pull up under a grain hopper type thing and it'd fill your truck with carrots.
Like, I have carrots in my garden now, and you pull up the carrots, you expect that you're going to pull up a thing that looks like a carrot from the store?
So they had it down a little better than I do, and they had better carrots.
But anyway, we'd get all these rejected carrots.
We'd have a snow shovel, and we would go out to areas we hunted, and we would put down a canvas tarp, I can picture the tarp right now.
We'd lay down a canvas tarp and you'd snow shovel carrots out of the back of the truck onto the tarp or into what's known as a Duluth pack, a big canvas leather strap backpack.
And we would hike, either drag the carrots onto the tarp if possible, or load them in backpacks and hike them back into the intersections of deer trails typically, where two big deer trails would come together, and you'd dump the carrots out.
And then you do this a week before season, and then you'd hunt.
You'd sit in your tree stand with your bow.
You're picking an area that deer frequent anyways.
You're picking, like I said, usually typically like a confluence of a couple good deer trails, or an area where deer might stage up in the evening before going out into ag fields to feed.
You know, they kind of will mill around a little bit oftentimes before committing to a field at nighttime.
You'd set them up in these areas.
The problem is, as soon as you put down the carrots, you'd be creating problems for yourself because they would start to associate The carrots with hunters, like they knew trouble was brewing.
Your smell was around.
You got deer, you know, doe can be, I mean, they can get really old, but let's just be realistic.
And you got all kinds of deer, does around that are five, six, seven years old.
You accumulate a lot of knowledge in that time.
So you put the carrots down, you're kind of screwing yourself.
But you would get shots at young deer.
That would come in to hit the carrots.
So I grew up hunting bait.
Now I look at it and I go like, man, I would have learned a hell of a lot more about deer and a lot more about deer hunting early on if I hadn't gotten, if I hadn't been involved in that practice.
I now look back, I'm like, man, did I miss a lot of chances to get educated about what deer need and how to actually find deer instead of trying to manipulate their movement patterns.
You know?
So now I don't hunt, like I don't hunt bait anymore.
I'm not even kind of interested in hunting bait.
And I was explaining this to you.
This is a long ass story.
I was explaining this to you because you were like, well, why is it okay to use bait when you're fishing?
People have, yeah, I'm just saying like if someone was posing that argument to me, I would point out how people that hunt for their food have always gravitated toward technology.
And if you look at our progression from rocks to hafted rocks to adalattles, To bow equipment.
To flint locks.
To percussion cap.
To paper cartridge.
To rifling.
On down the line.
I'm not doing anything that revolutionary by using what an effective means.
It's kind of a new idea.
It's a new idea.
Yeah, but it's not interesting to me.
I'm talking about interest.
I like knowing about animals.
I'm not interested in...
Let's take the area where I have to hunt bears.
I hunt bears in a coastal area, okay?
And it's at a northern latitude.
There's a lot of snow there.
But because of maritime influences, you know, it's warm enough down around the water where the snow's melted off in the water.
So when I go to hunt bears in the spring, 90% of the land mass is covered in snow and is of little use to a bear, okay?
When they come out of hibernation, they're going down to the waterfront.
Because on the waterfront, they're going to find beach rye and some other grasses they like to eat.
They're going to find blue mussels, and they like to eat crabs under rocks and logs.
So, I know about mussel beds and grass flats, where bears are going to go to all the time.
I can tell you when we go out at night, I can tell you, I'll be like, we'll see more than one, probably less than five.
And I'll tell you, and I know some muscle beds where some are gonna show up.
I like that.
I don't like, I've never done a baited bear hunt.
I have no desire to do a baited bear hunt.
Does that mean it's super hard to hunt bears where I hunt bears?
I can't tell you that it's super hard to hunt bears there.
Because once you learn the rhythms of the land, What they want, why they're coming there, what they're coming to get, it becomes easier and easier the more you understand bears and the more you understand why bears do what they do.
But I like having that knowledge.
But I can't say it's like super hard.
It's not super hard.
Once you know it, it's pretty easy.
So when I say I don't want to go hunt bears over bait, personally, I'm not saying, oh, because it's so easy.
I'm just saying because it's just not of interest to me.
It's not interesting to me, personally, as a hunter, that bears will come to donuts if you put them out in the woods.
It's not an interesting...
What's interesting to me is they like muscle beds.
Like, for whatever reason, I find that interesting.
When I lived in Michigan, my brothers each drew a black bear tag in Michigan.
You could live your whole life in Michigan, which has a lot of bears in the North, and never lay eyes on a bear because the landscape's flat and it's thick.
If you want to hunt a bear there, You're going to either have to use dogs or you're going to have to use bait because that's the way the landscape is.
So when they drew bear tags, I helped them run baits.
I helped them collect bait.
We shot carp and all kinds of stuff and froze bait and trapped beavers.
And there's no donuts, there's no cookies, there's no bullshit, no fucking big blue jugs that are set out for them to paw at and try to get their oats out of.
Yeah, there's something less cool about that.
Like elk hunting.
When elk hunting in Colorado or over here in Tohono Ranch, when you're out there, those animals would be there whether you existed or not.
Yeah, but the problem is that's why guys that hunt with Adaladles will tend to hunt wild pigs or other things like that because most places you can't use them.
In some areas you can use other means to kill them, but in most states they don't...
All states have somewhere they spell out legal method of take.
We looked into this once.
I think that in Alaska, I think for the most part, yeah, you could hunt caribou with an atlatl.
I could be wrong.
Don't know and go out and do it because of that.
But I remember looking at the way it's worded, and I think you could hunt caribou with an atlatl.
But states spell out legal method of take in exquisite detail.
For instance...
Hunting waterfowl, which is, waterfowl is federally regulated and state regulation because they're migratory.
They move across state lines.
So the feds step in to try to make sure the states aren't taking more than their equal share of their resource.
Now they'll spell out the diameter or bore of the shotgun you're allowed to use.
You can't use an 8 gauge And then they'll spell out you can't use anything bigger than a 10, and you can't use anything smaller than whatever, 410 or something less than that, or not allowed to use a 410. So they'll spell out in exquisite detail what you can and can't do for legal method to take.
So a lot of what I'm saying about if you want to go back, back, back, back in time to have things get more and more and more difficult, it's hypothetical.
Because the guy that is doing, as far as weapon choice, The most difficult thing you can legally do for general big game hunting in the U.S. for a weapon choice would be that you'd hunt with a longbow.
Because you're still legal.
It's still a legal method to take for most archery seasons to hunt with a longbow.
So if you want to cripple yourself or handicap...
I don't want to say cripple.
If you want to handicap yourself equipment-wise, the guy who uses a longbow is going way back.
Now, I recently looked at an ad where...
A guy is getting out of a helicopter in space-age dress with a longbow.
So we all, it's a hunting clothes ad, okay?
So we all find our little ways of mental masturbation.
And this isn't just something that happened.
This is like an image that they thought is cooler than hell.
They're like, it's so cool, it'll be the front of the catalog is climbing out of a helicopter with a longbow.
So we occupy the...
And in the U.S., for the most part, like in Alaska, for instance, you can't hunt with a helicopter.
You can't use a helicopter to supply a hunting camp.
You can't scout for animals from a helicopter.
We decided it's just not fair to use helicopters because you can land them anywhere you want.
And you can't hunt, for the most part, you can't hunt and fly on the same day.
Just not fair.
But here's like a longbow and a chopper.
So we all come up with our ways of finding comfort.
Our ways of finding that right mix.
Of challenge and not challenge.
I heard a guy say, people have really struggled to define fair chase, and I heard someone recently, I don't think it's a new thing, but I heard it recently, where he was saying that in fair chase, the animal has a better than 50% chance of escape or something to that effect.
My brother is a statistician.
He's an ecologist, but he does a, he specializes in like statistical modeling.
And I asked him what he thought of a statement like that and he couldn't even find the language to begin telling me how stupid that was.
That it has a 50% chance to escape.
Under what requirements?
It made smoke come out of his ears when he heard that.
But what the guy's trying to get at is this idea that there's an unknown element.
Yeah, so there's this bird called the blue grouse.
Now, blue grouse used to be...
People used to know blue grouse as dusky grouse and sooty grouse.
And it's...
Then for a long time they lumped them together as blue grouse.
And then in a decade ago or sometime maybe 97 or sometime around there, no no I'm sorry 2007, the ornithological society realized that there is a difference between the different species, the different types of blue grouse and they re-split them or they suggested that they be re-split into sooties and duskies.
So you have dusky grouse in the interior mountain ranges and sooty grouse from the coastal ranges.
And there's a normal bird.
People call them fool's hens and they call them like dumb birds and all this kind of stuff because they don't, when they think of the things that they're afraid of, They're just not afraid of people.
They don't have much exposure to people.
They live in places where most people don't go.
So when a predator approaches, when a human approaches, what they typically want to do is jump into a tree.
They want to get off the ground so they can't get nabbed by a bobcat or a fox or a coyote.
And they get under some limbs in a tree so the avian predators can't smack them.
And then people walk up and there's this bird sitting in the tree and they shoot the bird and they're like, oh, that bird's stupid.
When in fact, the bird's not.
The bird has his way of surviving his typical threats.
And they just haven't adjusted to human predation because there's just so little of it on them.
Um...
We used to hunt black bears in the spring on avalanche slides.
When the mountains are all snowy, you get avalanche slides that are swept clean of snow.
And those areas are the first to green up because the snow slid off and it doesn't need to melt off.
And so when bears come out of hibernation, they'll come and find those avalanche shoots and feed on them.
And we used to sit just at the base of an avalanche slide all day waiting for bears to come out.
And doing this now and then, in the spring, you'd hear this noise that would go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
And I could never figure out what the hell it was.
Because I was brought up in Michigan where these grouse don't live.
Eventually realized that it's a blue grouse.
And that's their mating call in the spring, is that hoot.
It's haunting.
What's haunting about it is you can't tell what direction it really came from.
A couple years ago, I was out on Revilla Island or Revilla Gigado Island in southeast Alaska, and we were messing around there one day.
We got up on this big high ridge, and I could hear five or six of these things going off.
And I just thought, man, we'd come back here and pound them.
Because Alaska is the only place you can hunt these birds in the spring.
They call it the spring hooter season.
I thought it would just be a matter of going up there and hearing it and walking down and getting it.
So, we even talked about doing an episode that was 22 minutes long with no cuts.
It would just play straight time.
From the time you heard one to the time you shot it.
Time it out so we would just run a continuous loop of film.
Now, we went out and started looking for the first bird, and about like 10 hours into trying to find the first bird, we realized you were not going to do that.
Can't find them.
But you can.
I learned how eventually.
Very difficult to find them because it's just a ventriloquist sound.
It's just like you can't locate the sound.
I had a guy, there's a game call company where I knew some guys called Down and Dirty Game Calls.
And I sent them a bunch of sound recordings that are on the Cornell University website.
They have this Macaulay Library of Bird sounds.
I sent them some of the sounds that the females make.
And the females make a noise that sounds like, it's almost like...
And they made me a call that sounds like that.
And I played the other, the male sound, the whoop whoop sound, to musician friends and people.
And I've been like, what in the world would make that sound?
And people talked about this Australian instrument that might...
Could never make a satisfactory sound, but I got to where I was making a female sound.
And then this guy I know in Utah named Shad Brunson got me a female Blue Grouse.
And I had to go to a Taxidermist named Colton in Montana, and he stuffed that blue grouse for me.
Just a real rudimentary stuff job.
And I took that thing out, and I would hear where I could hear a bird, but I couldn't tell where I was hearing it from, but I'd get where I kind of knew I was in the area he was in, and set that decoy out, the hen, and then make the call, like a tending call that they make to their young.
And then I wound up Finding, I was so pissed about how this was going and so baffled that I couldn't find these birds, I called my brother who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who put me in touch with a buddy of his, who knew a guy, who knew a lady, who was very, very good at finding blue grouse.
And she's out of Juneau, Alaska.
And I went hunting with her.
And we were standing under a grouse in a tree by 9.30 in the morning the first day.
If you're going out with a guy who only hunts mule deer in Utah...
This guy just patterns mule deer every year.
He knows all the trails.
He spends time in the spring searching for them.
He spots them.
He keeps an eye on them.
He's watching them.
He's getting ready for the season to open up.
That guy is obviously going to have a greater database of information about mule deer than a guy like you who just got back from Bolivia eating a monkey.
That was a fascinating episode, too, because you're talking about ancient stuff and ancient methods and the difference between people that are eating or existing primarily just their subsisting hunting.
I mean, there's no sport involved in what they're doing at all.
We went down there to go up a river, the Casare River, and travel with the Chimane, which is an autonomous indigenous group in Bolivia.
A way to approach thinking about it would be to think about the reservation system that we have here in the U.S. where there's a fair bit of autonomy on reservations.
They might be able to have a casino, other stuff that violates state law because they're sort of a nation within a nation.
And Bolivia had these huge areas of jungle that are autonomous zones, and we were in the Chamane area.
So they're self-governing.
We went and traveled up a river, just doing like a basic river trip.
At the surface level, we were going down there to fish a type of fish called dorado, but the main thing I was interested in was just traveling with and hunting with these guys.
And they hunt with bows for the most part.
Firearms are starting to come into their area, but they hunt fish with bows, homemade bows.
And they hunt Birds with bows, and they do some big game hunting with bows.
But 90% of their protein comes out of the river in the form of fish, and they poison fish with a plant.
So we went out, we went into a village, and they were cultivating one of these plants.
There's a handful of plants down there.
We use a fish poison here in the U.S. when we're trying to get rid of invasives or whatever, called rotenon.
Rotenon is a root, is derived from a root of a South American plant.
And these guys had leaf...
They had a tree that bore just like a green waxy leaf, and you'd pound that into a pulp, and they'd go out into a river, and they'd try to find a little channel, like an isolated channel of a river or a pool that doesn't have a lot of current coming into it, and they'll pulp that plant and put it into a woven bag and just go out in the water and stir the Pulped up leaves in there and pretty soon all the fish come up and the fish are suffocating.
It somehow affects a fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.
So the fish come up and they're gasping for air at the surface and then they just shoot the fish with their bows.
They do some netting for fish but most of it's bow hunting and I fell in with a couple older guys there and we did some hunting and one of these guys had only ever hunted with a bow but a year earlier He'd gone into some town and somehow got a Russian-made 16-gauge single-shot shotgun that was held together with wire.
I was nervous about being around him when this gun went off.
And they like to hunt at night because now they have flashlights.
So they got flashlights and they got a shotgun and they got their bows.
And they would wait till dusk, and then we would head off into the jungle, and these guys only speak their native language.
They know a teeny bit of Spanish, but they speak Chimane.
I would go out with them, and I would have no idea.
What they're talking about.
And we would leave at dusk and just go into the jungle and the noise of the jungle at night is just deafening if you've never experienced.
I mean, it's like, it's to the point where, I mean, have you ever been like out in a windy area for a long time where you start to feel like it's like affecting your sanity or affecting your ability to think clearly, you know?
Or when you're on like small aircraft, the engine noise, you don't realize how agitated it's making you until you get away from it and all of a sudden it feels like...
Relaxing in some way.
The noise of the jungle is so loud, it's almost like that at night with the bugs and stuff going off.
And we go out into the jungle, and I knew from going into it that their favorite food, even though they drive 90% of their protein from the river, their favorite food is spider monkey.
Their second favorite food is howler monkey.
And before it even gets dark out, we go down this trail for a while through the jungle.
And they come to a date tree, and dates will fruit periodically throughout the year.
And, you know, you're getting closer to the equator now, so you don't have seasonality as much, so plants will fruit all the time rather than just in the summertime.
And they get to this date tree, and this date tree's fruiting.
And he's looking at these dates on the ground, and he finds some shit that I now realize must have been monkey shit, and they got real interested in what was going on up above us.
And pretty soon, he sees this howler monkey starts going through the treetops, and he shoots it down out of the tree with that shotgun he had with him.
And the first thing he does is he takes the tail and cuts the tail off the monkey, the tip of the monkey's tail, and buries it in the ground.
I couldn't even ask him why he was doing this, but later I learned you do that so that the next monkey you kill, he doesn't get hung up in the tree by his tail.
Then, just like a belief, you know.
Then he cuts some bark off a tree and makes a little harness so he can carry the monkey across his chest.
So he's just got the monkey slung on him like a baby carrier.
And we just head off in the jungle and hunt for several hours that night.
And then the next day, we got back and they gutted the monkey out and kept all the intestines and everything out of that monkey.
And eventually they burned the hair off it.
And trust it.
Like how you'd trust a turkey.
And smoked it over a fire.
And I did not want to eat a monkey.
Like I did not want to eat a primate.
You know.
But at that point I'd been out with them and you know, I was going to eat it but it was very difficult for me to enjoy.
Psychologically.
I had the same problem being in Vietnam and being served domestic dog where I ate domestic dog seven nights in a row and just was never people go like what did it taste like I was like I can't even tell you there's like something I would get so hot like my body would feel so hot eating that just like it's like just this like wrongness Well, it's like because of nerves?
And I'm like, surely they're going to go after this monkey.
No interest in that monkey.
Not a good one.
The same night they got the red howler monkey.
We go down the trail, and it's just getting dark, and I see a possum.
Same marsupial, same possum we have here.
And I'm like, surely these guys are going to want that.
If they'll eat a damn monkey, they're going to want a possum.
People in the U.S. eat possums.
They look at that thing and just walk by like it doesn't even exist.
And later, I was able to ask them through, like, by asking them, by asking someone who speaks some Spanish, he was able to, so it was like a three-way translation.
I was like, why didn't you guys want the possum?
And he explained to me that you'd only eat a possum if you were real hungry.
And the thing I say in the show, we did a whole three-part series about Bolivia and the Chimane, but the thing I say in the show when we're talking about this is think of the...
There's only two things I know about that...
That get the kind of enthusiasm from a culinary perspective in the U.S. to get the kind of enthusiasm these guys had from monkeys.
It'd be someone who has homegrown tomatoes and morel mushrooms are the only things I know about that people have that level of love for.
They were more excited about eating that red holler monkey than you've ever been about eating anything you ever ate, I promise you.
Hanging out with people who like that, you have all these weird hang-ups, or at least I do, like all this colonial-type guilt or something where you don't want to...
Like, for instance, there's these guys down there, there's these Bolivians who are from the urban area down there, like, of mixed European indigenous ancestry, and they're very...
Like, in Bolivia, the ruling class, the urban people, are very different than the indigenous people, okay?
There is...
They have a...
I don't want to say categorically, but there's a view of the indigenous people that would have seemed more like the 1870s here in the U.S. in some circles, the way they view the backwardness of the indigenous people and trying to bring out missionaries to, you know, help them find religion and get them to settle down and stop being nomadic.
And, you know, there's all this kind of stuff that we were having that conversation 150 years ago here.
There's these guys that are doing these trips, who we orchestrated our trip through, who are trying to get these guys hip to the idea of not eating one of their favorite fish, which is the Dorado, because rich white guys will pay a lot of money to come down and catch Dorado.
That was kind of our in to go down here, was to go up to this area where they catch Dorado.
So they're trying to sell these dudes on not messing with Dorado.
I was bummed out about that.
Like, I hated seeing that.
Because, like, that's their favorite fish, man.
You're trying to tell them that, like, now we want to tell them to not eat their favorite fish because guys like me might want to come down and catch the thing.
And it's not even going to have a negative implication, a ramification.
Anyways, you're not going to, like, over-harvest them with bows and arrows, you know?
Yeah, those super long arrows, and they would carry three kinds of tips.
They'd carry a big game tip, a bird tip, and a fish tip, so every guy's got three arrows with his bow.
But they loved that bow, but I wound up being, I just really wanted to be able to hang out with them and have them not, like, stop.
Like, when I would walk up into them, they'd be standing around eating some fish around their fire, and I would walk up and they'd all quit eating.
And I eventually got where we were comfortable together.
Like, they would kind of show me stuff, and they kind of, you know, I don't want to say they liked me, but they sort of accepted me, and I eventually got explained to them through actions and otherwise that I was very interested in their food.
I was very interested in how they hunted.
I would go out into the jungle at night with them.
You know, I got stung by a bullet ant, and, you know, that's excruciating, and they watched me kind of, like, suffer through that and come out of that.
And eventually we became...
Friendly, you know?
And I had the bow just so, because I wanted to go out and hunt with them.
And because I had the bow, they were impressed by the bow, and it was just better.
Yeah, they wound up kind of liking, like, you know, and the guys that we were traveling with, I was down there with, uh...
Giannis was there, Dan was there, and a guy named Phil was down there.
A camera operator named Phil was down there.
And we all wound up being cool with these guys.
We got along well.
But it took a long time to get in with them and have them start showing you their world a little bit.
Because you realize that they're used to being viewed...
They had enough exposure to the outside world to realize that the outside world usually carried a certain amount of disapproval for their food and dress and other things.
I gathered.
That was my impression.
But after a while, they were like, oh, this guy's cool.
These guys are trying to develop a recreational fishery in this area, but they're going into places no one goes into.
And they're trying to establish, they were in the process of trying to establish a thing where they would have paying clients come down, and the paying clients would go on these river trips up to fish in these areas.
The only way you can do it, because it's Chimane land, the only way you can do it is by going through the Chimane.
And the only people you're going to hire to get the boats up the rivers and paddle the boats and run the boats and run the engines and get them stuck out of the rapids and all the...
Difficult traveling that involves you to hire Chimane guys to do it.
So we hired the guys that hired the Chimane with the sole goal of I was just interested in traveling with the Chimane.
And the guys in Ghana, they were still actively hunting with bows.
In some ways, they were more modernized people, but they were still avid bow fishermen, hunted with bows.
I took my bow down there and hunted.
I remember I shot a big game bird, a big turkey-like game bird out of a tree with my bow from about 40 yards, and they were blown away, man.
It's like fun.
I learned more about...
Hunting and about looking at the landscape and about indigenous food paths in those weeks that I've been fortunate to do that kind of trip, then I would learn in years of hunting with American hunters.
Because you've got to understand, let's say you're with someone who's 35 years old, 40 years old.
He's hunted...
Probably five, six days a week for his entire life within a hundred mile radius of his home.
The level of understanding that you get, but it's raw jungle.
It's like undeveloped jungle.
The level of understanding you get about What's going on around you is just different than what we're able to achieve today.
Especially someone like me, I travel around a lot and experience a lot of different things, but what I lack, what I miss out on from the way I do things is I miss out on that level of detailed local understanding that I had as a kid.
For instance, for the lake where I grew up.
The lake I grew up on, I knew it well, better than anybody, or as good as anybody.
They have that about the jungle.
So to go out with guys like that and just watch how they interact and what noises make sense to them, You know, it's really informative, and it just helps you kind of understand humanity better.
I remember going out in the jungle with them one night, and Meryl was talking about how loud it is.
You can't even believe how loud it is.
And all these noises, you're like, what is all this stuff?
It must be whatever.
And then one time I hear a noise that sounds like this.
Off in the jungle.
Everything, they just stopped.
I was like, oh, so that noise, of the thousands of noises going on, this...
Like, something made that noise, and they're like, of all the sticks snapping and things dropping and birds going off and insects, you know, getting bit by bullet ants, they hear what sounds like a stick way the hell off, and it just means something to them.
It feels at first like you got zapped by a wasp or hornet.
And maybe 10 minutes into it, A minute into it, it becomes something very different than that.
Ten minutes into it, you feel like something's really wrong.
Like arthritic pain.
Throbbing, throbbing pain that goes way away from the source.
And we couldn't speak, and we're out in the jungle at night.
And first they'd go and find a vine and pulp up some of the vine and put the vine where I got hit.
I don't know what the vine was.
I couldn't tell that it had any difference.
It didn't mean anything different.
But it always bit on my ankle.
And the camera guy, Phil Baraboo, was bit on his hand at the same time.
And he kept pointing to Phil's hand, but then running his finger, the Chimane guys, pointing to Phil's hand and running his finger up his arm, like, to his heart.
He keeps doing that to Phil.
And he keeps taking to me and pointing his finger to his ankle and then running his finger up the inside of his leg to his groin.
And I thought that means that the poison or toxin or somehow is going to travel up and get you.
I couldn't tell what he was talking about.
And all I knew was it was bad to get bit by a bullet ant.
Pretty soon it was so bad I couldn't even, we weren't even able to walk.
For me, now they do a thing where they take some kind of mitt and fill it full of them, and you put the mitt on, it's like an initiation, and you get bit a lot, and then it's a whole other world.
But for me, I think it was, I could be wrong.
No, I don't think I am, man.
I think that it was, the peak was 30, 40 minutes into it.
And then it just tapered, tapered, tapered, and gone.
Now, if I got hit by one now, knowing what I know now, I don't want to say that I would enjoy it, but I would be more interested.
I would be interested in what was going on and watching the progression.
But I was so scared because I didn't know what it meant.
I didn't know if it was like getting hit by a rattlesnake, where you need to go and figure shit out, or what.
And they weren't able to tell me.
What was happening?
What I later learned, what they were saying, was make sure you don't have any in your sleeves, and make sure you don't have any, because they'll come up and get you on the chest, which might be bad, or they'll get you on the balls, which is bad.
It was so itchy, like I had to do everything I could to keep from clawing my arm apart, where I would go under the shower and I'd turn the shower up really hot to the point where it would be painful with any other part of my body and just shove that arm underneath the super hot water like I was scratching it with the insanely hot water.
Oh, so what we would do is when you get a lionfish, we'd take the lionfish and leave it on the spear and then open the cooler up.
And stick the spear and the lionfish into the cooler and shut the lid and pull so that your spear would come out and the lionfish would fall into the cooler.
Now lionfish, just for your listeners, it's a non-native that has been introduced.
Into the Caribbean is wreaking much havoc from Florida southward, and they're doing a lot to try to get rid of them.
You see why?
Because they're so viciously territorial.
And out there in the Bahamas, you have these small little coral heads, and a couple lionfish would move in there, and they would just move out all their fish.
Maybe your internet whiz over here, Jamie, will tell you the answer to that.
But how they got in the first place.
But anyhow, then later we'd take poultry shears and just get big rubber gloves, once the fish is dead, and take poultry shears and cut all the thorns off it.
Now, I ran out of breath and left my spear stuck in a lionfish down on the bottom.
Came up, got a breath, went down, and as I'm trying to get my lionfish out of this area he was in without pulling them off the spearhead, I noticed a grouper in a hole.
So I went up and I got a lionfish on my spear, and I'm waving to my brother.
To come over because I can't take the lionfish off my spear.
I'm waving him to come over about the grouper.
And he comes over and he's got a snapper on the end of his spear.
So I take the snapper off his spear and I'm holding the damn snapper in my right hand and I have a lionfish on my spear in my left hand and I'm going underwater trying to point to the hole that has the grouper in it and somehow swung that lionfish into my hand.
And it got all weird and puffy and I crawled up into the boat and was just kind of like writhing in the bottom of the boat.
And I started getting really scared because my hands started to feel hot and all bloated.
And, uh...
Eventually waved my brother and our buddy Eric over and we went in.
We were 45 minutes from the shore and went in and by then I was really scared.
My buddy Ronnie Bain was there and he's like saying I should put it under cold water and I went and typed in the internet and it's like do not put it in cold water.
I was reading a whole article how they have just a kill on site for Nile crocs.
They're just terrified these fucking giant crocs are going to grow to be these 28-foot-long killers like they have in Mozambique or wherever the fuck it is.
Because as we move species around with reckless abandon, intentionally, unintentionally, and we eliminate biodiversity in some areas through habitat destruction,
And if current trends continue and the Earth continues to get hotter and we lose a lot of the climatic diversity, different climates that we have, different places, if that continues, I think that you will have,
we'll continue to see like the great mixing, you know, and we'll just wind up with a situation where there are certain Every animal is going to get a shot at every biome, and you're just going to have it be that certain ones that can thrive are going to thrive, and you're not going to have the levels of indemnism that we have now.
And I think that, yeah, in the future, you know, just look at what the wild pig has managed to do here in the U.S. You know?
It's the dominant large animal on some landscapes.
It's a non-native.
In my lifetime in the Great Lakes, the round gobies, zebra mussels.
If you go now and drop a baited hook down in places that I grew up fishing, the first thing you would pull up is a goby.
They were not there.
It's just certain things are winners and certain things are losers.
Not all the winners are going to be non-natives because...
White-tailed deer do well around people.
Crows seem to do well around people.
Canada geese do very well around people.
It's just going to be more and more and more aquarium-like.
That is a crazy image, a 20-foot-long python that ate a fucking alligator.
I mean, there's a crazy system going on down there where these non-indigenous animals are just crushing all these other animals and surviving and thriving in an environment that's pretty compatible for them.
You know, as far as, you know, tropical, hot climate, moist, plenty of things to eat, plenty of life out there for them to snuff out.
In some areas they're finding, a friend of mine, Robert Abernathy, who's a biologist and conservationist, big hunter, he...
He was working with some guys that are going down there, and there's a whole class of mid-sized animal that's just missing from those python areas now.
Basically, like, possum raccoon-sized critters are just gone.
You know?
You will see it, like...
That's why...
To bring this full circle back to some things we were talking about, a lot of the conservation groups that I get involved in...
Things like, you know, National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
They pick, you know, they're powered by hunters and powered by hunter money in the effort to preserve habitat for certain species, but like native animals.
That wind up, by helping those, you know, you're helping all other creatures.
Because you can't fix elk.
Like, if you fix elk habitat, you're fixing everyone's habitat.
You know, it's like a keystone thing.
If you help elk...
By salvaging riparian areas, you're helping all critters across the board.
You're enhancing wildlife.
And a big risk that you have, if you look at native wildlife and you cherish native wildlife, and I do, one of the big risks we have coming down the line is just the non-native stuff.
I mean, as far as even just vegetation, we have a lot of areas that we're seeing those high-quality plants being displaced by You know, plants that make native wildlife sick that they can't live on.
It's a big, big problem.
And in some ways, you want to look at Florida and it's almost like the wildlife situation in Florida has almost kind of become a joke where it's so outlandish.
And now, in other parts of the country, people are like, you went where?
I'm like, yeah, man, Florida.
Why?
I'm like, because it's Florida, man.
It's amazing.
It's great fishing.
But yeah, it's just like we associated so strongly.
With Florida and the fishing in Florida that I do.
I have a soft spot and I was down there and I was talking to this kid who likes to hunt down there not long ago and he was telling me this is the hunting and fishing capital of the world.
Yeah, and they would be out there with a mouth packed full of coca leaves, sticking bacon soda in there, drinking that stuff out of a water bottle, and they wouldn't drink water all night.
But here's the thing, when you want to get into that, if you took those boys, because they've never experienced a temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, if you took those boys and I was like, hey man, we're going to go hunt in the Arctic for caribou and there's going to be snow on the ground, you know, they would go home and talk about how we are some kind of Superman heroes.
Remember how everybody always likes to make that big deal about how in the Inuit language they have like 24 words for snow?
I just don't think that we have a difficult time describing people who like to ski.
Have many ways of describing snow.
It's kind of a...
It's like a little bit...
It's almost dishonest because we have like...
Yeah, we have like light powder, heavy powder, slushy snow.
You know, on and on and on.
Like we have ways of describing snow.
And it's easy to sort of mythologize...
People, or you go down, you get the feeling that there's like these super, I do, these super human beings, but then, you know, I look at it, it's just like, they're just used to a landscape that's baffling to me.
You know?
Like, look, there's four of us out, two of us got hit by bullet ants.
Because they walk through, they just know the risks.
The same way if I took them and we were walking around somewhere in some urban environment, they might not know when it's a good time to cross the street and walk off the other side of the other one.
I'd be like, what, are you dumb?
But no, he just doesn't know.
I don't know.
I wasn't tuned into the threat of bullet ants.
They would notice snakes that I didn't, you know, they would see a snake and they would notice that I didn't notice.
They would always, when they got to a log, they would inspect the log very carefully.
If it had a bullet on it, they would kill it very delicately with the tip of a bow.
They just had a way that they'd like to, like...
press and kill the bullet ant like it's very like dainty fashion um why is that i don't know i could never figure it out man they just had like a little way that they would crush bullet ants it was interesting would bullet ants go in these large groups or maybe they didn't want to disturb it because of pheromones would get all their bullet ants excited you know i'm saying like if you got a bunch of hornets around you start flailing wildly i don't know i just noticed that they would do it they just walked through in a new their area and yeah i was tempted to be like man these are like gods They're so aware.
But then I feel like had I been brought up there hanging out, I might have not got hit by a bullet.
I've never seen anything like it quite as much as I was in the Philippines in the Highlands.
And...
The guys there, they're in the mountains, like in serious mountains, barefoot, you know, growing up hunting their whole lives in the mountains, barefoot, on just bad rock and everything all the time.
And their feet, you wouldn't have been able to put that foot in the shoe, no way now.
You can find pictures of that stuff online, which is kind of like a famous sort of thing that happens to those guys in the Central Highlands and Luzon Island.
Their feet are just incredible.
Makes sense.
Your toes are held inside your shoes.
Your toes are held in the way that if you're walking on a rock and in mountainous landscapes all the time, your feet just fan out.
Because after, you know, when they took the Philippines, some of the Japanese went up And just hit out, you know, and they would make a big sport out of finding them.
He would just stand on a rock and stick them in there, the same way when you're electrofishing for anything doing a survey.
And he would shock them up, then run down the river with a net and net up all the stuff that he shocked, and he'd get a log burning and roll the log over and lay the shrimp and crabs on the log until they turn red and eat them.
And got done shocking fish for a fish survey, was walking back from having shocked fish, and he had the fish in a gunny sack, and a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, hit the ground next to him, and a shot of that electricity shot up into the sack of fish and shocked him.
It'd be like, that's like, so, if you have Verizon, if you use Verizon in any way, shape, or form, Do me a favor and just do people a favor and make sure to go and complain about that.
The reason I do wonder if there's something like that is it could be that it definitely came about It seems to have definitely come about at the time of the Cecil the Lion deal.
For sure.
And they also said, oh, it's lower viewership.
But they carry networks that are lower viewership.
Al Jazeera.
They carry a lot of networks that are lower.
I think with some pressure, it'll get...
Just pressure from viewers who want to explain that they want the show, what the shows mean.
I think that if someone, if they are making some kind of stand and it is like, oh, we don't approve of hunting, I would say look at my show and ask yourself, is my show a negative or a positive for wildlife and conservation?
I think the answer is pretty clear.
I would like to see them really change their mind about that.