Steven Rinella joins Joe Rogan to dissect his Netflix hunting show’s raw, unfiltered style—32 episodes with no music or narration, like a 2016 episode shot entirely in ambient wind—while critiquing manipulative soundtracks in shows like Westworld. They pivot to U.S. public lands, where federal agencies manage wildlife as shared resources, but privatization efforts face backlash, exemplified by the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation and Trump’s 2016 stance on land transfers. Rinella’s "Yellowstone Syndrome" reveals how bison, unlike elk, are treated as livestock post-park boundaries, sparking annual roundups and ethical debates over hunting charisma versus ecological necessity, from Pleistocene extinctions to Hawaii’s non-native species conflicts. His personal journey—hunting bears in Vietnam while grappling with dog meat taboos—exposes the tension between tradition, sustainability, and modern conservation hypocrisy, where critics ignore store-bought meat’s hidden costs. Ultimately, the episode challenges how culture, media, and policy distort our relationship with wildlife and hunting ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
The 100th, yeah, we'll probably have a little party on the 100th episode.
But no, it's been great, man.
I mean, the Netflix thing is really just, I mean, it really, you know, Exposed to a lot of, you know, a lot of people.
And it was cool.
Instead of starting with season one, you know, they put up season five and six on Netflix, which is nice because it makes people real curious about the other ones.
That we use, but it's a searchable database of music, like a catalog of music.
The documentary we're doing, we're beginning now to work on, we're in the initial stages of having it scored, which is fun, because it's not something I've ever messed with.
Like, I think very rarely in a television show do you have a television show scored.
You know, you're usually using library music or licensed music, you know?
You know, there's a musician I like quite a bit named Micah P. Hinson, and he's out of Abilene, Texas.
And he has a song called The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea.
And a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, we always have joked about someday writing a movie so sad that you could play that song at the end and it would not feel manipulative.
Like, a movie so sad it could earn to have the day Texas sank to the bottom of the sea he played in the end of it.
Yeah, there's something about music in movies that we just totally accept it.
In television shows and music, when there's a scene and they want to manipulate you and they want to establish some sort of a feeling that you're supposed to invoke, they just shove it in there.
The Radiohead album OK Computer has a song called Exit Music for a Film because I think they just felt like they were trying to send a message to the licensors.
It's about a really curious, open-minded guy who loves to go to different cultures, and he goes there, you know, and the premise is he goes there to hunt.
But he's traveled to some really, really incredible places and filmed some amazing stuff.
Did you see the one where he went to, I forget what river it was in Africa, where these people have a significant problem with crocodiles eating people?
It's an intense phenomenon, you know, that is attributed to To North America more than anywhere.
I mean, you're starting to see a lot more mass shootings all across the world, but a lot of them are religious-related.
But it's a very confusing one to people because there's so many factors involved.
And it's one that gets lumped in with the gun culture.
This is a tweet that I put on my...
This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.
Yeah.
And I really, really believe that.
I just, I don't think you can attribute, there's so many guns in this country and so few mass shootings.
There's so many guns.
I mean, the number of guns exceeds the number of people.
And the amount of mass shootings in relative, obviously they're all horrific and terrible, but relatively to the amount of people that we have, it's relatively small.
And I think the kind of person that can engage in something like that, there's so many factors, and you can't blame it on guns.
We saw so much of this during the run-up to the presidential election, where to make a point really fast, you look at something that's terrifically complex.
And then it's not just that you want the magic solution, but people kind of go like, well, what possibly could be done?
And I think people move in the direction of the Second Amendment.
Yeah, I had friends that were so convinced that, like most people in the country, whether you liked it or not, were convinced that Clinton was going to win.
I got one friend in particular that went out and bought a bunch of stocks for firearm companies, and he said they took a little hit after the election.
It's like the stockpiling thing is self-perpetuating where...
When I was a little kid, in our Christmas stocking, we would get bricks of 22 shells.
We'd hunt a lot of squirrels and rabbits with 22s.
You always had 22 shells.
You could go anywhere and get 22 shells.
A buddy of mine, one of our camera guys, he grew up on a ranch.
At the ranch store, they had two items.
Chew, so tins of chew, and 22 shells.
You could get on credit at the ranch store.
The ranch store had a very limited inventory, but that's how pervasive.22 shells were.
Now, when Obama won, no one's going to use a.22.
A.22 is not a go-to caliber for inflicting harm on other human beings.
It's a very small, small game round.
But the hysteria about guns drove people to gobble up guns.
22 ammo.
So all of a sudden then it was, you couldn't find 22 ammo.
And not being able to find it, like I used to just buy these little boxes of 50, right?
You go like, oh, it's hard to buy it.
And then all of a sudden you got in the need where you wanted to buy all you could get because it was in your head that you couldn't get it.
So then you'd see a thousand of them and I'd be like, well, I'm going to buy it because everyone's buying it.
And I think it was self-perpetuating.
Now I got shitloaded to 22 shots.
But it's like, I had no need for them.
I felt in this thing, like, there's this thing that I've always had access to, and now I won't have access to it.
You know?
And it, I don't know where it came from.
And I think that now, all through the last eight years, there's been just this, there's been this, like, great arming of America, because I feel like so many people were worried about having their rights infringed.
There's, like, at least now, in that community, of which I'm a part, I suppose, there's a sigh of relief, you know?
Yeah, there's a great relaxation among sports when they think that Trump is going to come in and, you know, protect the Second Amendment rights, but a lot of people have to be worried about private land or public land.
Yeah, that's the thing that I'm really watching, and I'm curious about it.
You know, at this point, you know, the talk's over, right?
The rhetoric's over, so now I'm a...
Whether someone was for it or against it, for or against Trump's victory, I think now the responsible thing to do in my mind, or the realistic responsible thing to do in my mind, because there's so many unknowns, just to approach the administration with an open mind.
I mean, now I'm like, okay, talk's over.
Now what's going to happen?
What sorts of things are we going to see come out of it?
And I don't know if anyone really knows the answers to that.
And in my outward, public-facing way, I don't generally talk about politics outside of issues that relate to wildlife, issues that relate to hunters and fishermen.
I kind of focus in because politically I'm a mess.
I'm all over the place.
I have no use for, and I know you don't either, I have no use for, like, classic definitions of conservatives and liberals.
That shit makes no sense to me.
Like, I don't get, I don't draw my viewpoints from going and looking and finding out how I'm supposed to feel about it in order to be, like, a consistent partisan individual.
Last January, though, for people who aren't even, I'm sure there's probably a lot of people that aren't familiar with this.
Can I give a quick rundown on public lands?
Sure.
The federal government owns millions and millions of acres of land in the U.S., primarily in the western U.S., and there's a handful of different land-holding agencies.
The Bureau of Land Management manages lands.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages lands through the refuge system.
So when those boys in Oregon took over the wildlife refuge there, that was...
That was actually U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land.
It wasn't BLM land.
You got the National Forest Holds land, National Forest Service, which is under the USDA. I already said the BLM, right?
Yeah.
And then, of course, you have states own public land, but the federal land management agencies, of which there are several, hold deed to millions of acres of land.
And it's owned by the American people.
And it's represented through, you might think of it as represented through a trust, and the trust is administered by the federal government on your behalf.
That's our public lands, where people recreate.
Another large holder of public lands is the National Park Service.
I didn't mention that one.
In the lower 48, you don't hunt on national park land.
You fish on national park land, and you generally hunt national forest land, bureau land, management land, refuge land.
And there's a push right now that people feel that the federal government should be dumping a lot of federal land.
People get frustrated with dealing with the federal bureaucracy, and the reason that is, is generally the feds are pretty, I mean this is a gross generalization, but generally the feds are much slower on exploitation.
Of natural resources, less responsive to demand for exploitation of natural resources than state agencies are.
So federal lands, you know, they're...
In exercising the will of the American people, federal land agencies are...
Not as easy to deal with when it comes to mining and development and other issues as state agencies are.
So people who want to see a more readily exploitable system in place for developers, miners, loggers, others, they want to see people able to more readily make a buck off the land...
They'd like to see these lands, our federal lands, they'd like to see them go into private hands or like to see them go into state hands.
Because they know that either way it goes, if they go into private hands or state lands, they're going to have a much easier time doing extractive industries and development on those lands.
So that's like under the surface what's going on.
And then, for instance, one of the reasons the guys that took over the refuge, the Malomir Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, one of their gripes was they run cattle on public property, right?
So they pay a fee that one of those families is heavily involved in running cattle on federal land, and they pay a fee far below the going rate.
To run cattle on public land.
So what you'd go pay a rancher if you wanted to run cattle on his land, they'd pay about 10% of that by some estimations to run it on public land.
And then when federal land managers don't want to renew those contracts because, again, because people are thinking about other uses for the land or whatever they want to do with it, it causes an intense amount of, like a serious amount of frustration with people.
So there's people that want to dump lands.
Now, I heard Donald Trump speak last January, so almost a year ago, in Las Vegas.
And he was standing 40 yards away from me and was talking about that he has no desire to see our public lands privatized.
However...
He's, you know, one might argue kind of by name only, he's Republican.
I mean, he definitely hasn't demonstrated any sense of being beholden to party orthodoxy.
I mean, he's like he takes an issue-by-issue stance on things and doesn't really care for how things are done at the party level.
However, his party is very much, you know, it's right in their, it's one of the planks of their platform.
It's right in their agenda to see us dump federal property.
To see us offload American public lands into state or private holdings.
So I hope he has luck in resisting that, if in fact he is still standing by that statement that he made.
But I'm saying I hung out on public lands and it wasn't for...
It wasn't until I was, you know, it took me 25 years to start being like, now how am I now?
What is this now?
This public lands you speak of.
Yeah, that you hold deed, like, as an American citizen, in most ways, as a global citizen, because our national, our public lands are open to anyone, American or not, right?
But as an American citizen, you hold deed to hundreds of millions of acres of land.
Now, there are conditions to your use, just things you can and cannot do, but you're free to roam, camp, hunt, fish, look at the stars, whatever.
You're extraordinarily wealthy.
And these things that came about, they came about in various ways.
Probably the most influential person in creating the public land system we have now is Theodore Roosevelt.
And he was controversial in his time for helping to create our public land system.
He had the same resistance when he was doing it from industry, from extractive industry.
He had the same resistance that we have now to public lands.
And then we went and chiseled his face on a mountain.
Because now everyone, every politician would like to liken himself to Roosevelt, right?
It was like this outlandish idea, like, you mean to tell me you're just going to take huge chunks of land that could earn some individuals an extraordinary amount of money right now and just set it aside for just Joe Blow future person to enjoy?
Yeah.
And he even made a point where he went on to say at one time that he was doing it for those in the womb of time.
But I'm saying all these big decisions, like, these decisions happen.
Did we create a public land system in America?
Like, the decision happens.
Generally, people look and go, wow, what foresight, you know?
It's kind of this insane idea that you would have a country as prosperous as ours.
With our GMP, 350 million citizens, right?
You'd have this thing as huge as us that would still have an intact suite of megafauna.
No one else pulls that off.
So...
We've accomplished a lot, but then now and then people just get pissed because they want to be able to do stuff.
There's like interests that want to make money.
And when they want to make money and then someone tells them no, they get a little bit pissy.
And then the smart ones of them, and I would never detract from their intelligence, the smart ones of them, rather than walking away, they go like, well, how is this law?
Why is the law this way?
And what can we do about it?
And right now, those folks have an idea that the solution to their problem is that we would begin undoing the great work of people like Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold and all these seminal American figures, that we would undo their work and go back to a system where these landscapes are privatized.
You go by the visitor center, there's a Coca-Cola machine, there's a vending machine, and right next to the vending machine, there's a fucking elk, just chilling, just laying down there.
I mean, they have zero fear of people.
And it's amazing how they become sort of acclimated.
It's funny, when you look at, there's a problem I've identified As much as I love Yellowstone, in my perspective as a fellow that does what I do for food and enjoyment, which is to hunt, I look at it from a grand wildlife thing, and I look at it as it serves the purpose of being this fantastic wildlife sanctuary.
And everyone, like our mutual friend Doug Dern, even on his farm, he has established Like a sanctuary area, like on his farm, a place where you don't go.
That it's always a spot where deer go and they don't get harassed in that area.
And it's like a self-imposed sanctuary.
And so you have, Yellowstone provides that.
But I've identified this sort of thing, an idea I've been working on called Yellowstone Syndrome, though.
It's where people, Americans, some of them, their only idea about wildlife and wildlife politics and wildlife management comes from the Yellowstone story.
That they wind up having a difficult time understanding wildlife and wildlife management in situations that are outside of a national park setting.
Which is to say, they don't have a very good grasp on the inevitable conflicts that are going to arise between wildlife and society.
And that's a large chunk of ground where you just do not have those sorts of conflicts.
A thing that's been very difficult and very vexing for wildlife managers is what happens to Buffalo when they leave Yellowstone National Park.
To back up on the Yellowstone issue, just to get a sense for how revolutionary that idea was, the Indian Wars weren't even over when they made Yellowstone Yellowstone.
We were still battling American Indians on the Great Plains when Yellowstone went into effect.
Matter of fact, Yellowstone was a park when the Nez Perce were chased through by the U.S. Army.
And they actually killed a couple tourists in Yellowstone right at some of the buildings that are still there.
It was like, they hadn't even, you know, the West hadn't even been, in some ways, the center West hadn't even been settled.
And they made the National Park.
And Roosevelt went there at the commemoration.
Went there to applaud it.
So, I just get a sense of, I mean, it was just an outlandish idea.
It was so far ahead of its time.
But with the buffalo situation, for instance, how it's colored the broader conversation would be Yellowstone is one of the few places where the animal buffalo or a bison, their Linnaean name is bison-bison.
Some people say it's bison-bison-bison, as opposed to bison-bison-athabacus.
Yellowstone is one of the few places where bison have always existed.
Now, at a time, the ones there were fenced and fed, but they've always been there.
And the other thing you have there is you have a genetically pure strain where there's been no cattle introgression into those animals.
There's only a handful of herds in the U.S. where there hasn't been some amount of cattle introgression.
You can't see it usually, but it's there oftentimes.
There's some in New Mexico that don't.
There's some of the Dakotas that do not, and the Yellowstone ones do not.
They've never interbred or been interbred with cattle.
So they're valuable in that way.
And at various times, there's a few thousand of them in the park, and the snows pile up.
And one of the things they like to do when the snow piles up is they like to leave the park.
And they go out at West Yellowstone, which is one of the primary entrance points into the park, and they'll go out at the Gardner entrance in the late winter.
That would be fine, probably.
Maybe it'd be kind of fun if it weren't for a couple issues.
There's a livestock disease called brucellosis, and it's a Eurasian disease.
We don't normally think of diseases as being native or non-native, but it's a non-native disease called brucellosis.
And brucellosis causes cattle to, it causes heifers.
Heifer is a cow that's With just one young.
So a heifer is a cow that's going to have her first calf.
It causes heifers to abort their fetus.
Now, they've gotten brucellosis eradicated from cattle herds.
Generally.
When a state is getting brucellosis cases, they have to pay for testing.
So it's expensive to get all your cows tested, but if you have brucellosis in your state, then the producers got to pay the testing to get them tested to make sure they're not brucellosis positive.
Well, cattle long ago passed brucellosis to the bison.
When the bison leave the park, they carry brucellosis with them and could reintroduce it into cattle herds, though there's no known case of that happening yet, I don't think.
Yeah, and like everything we're talking about, there's so many caveats and complications to this thing, such as elk have brucellosis, but elk come and go as they please.
Therefore, every year, there's a perennial story every year where a bunch of buffalo leave the park and get rounded up by the Department of Livestock and sent to quarantine or usually sent off to slaughter.
But, you know, that place cranks out a lot of animals, too.
So it's like they're always throwing out these humongous numbers of animals they've gotten, and then every year you wind up having quite a few animals in the park.
So...
But it's a thing.
Now, people point out this, because elk have brucellosis, and elk are calving in proximity to cattle.
And as far as we know, there's not like ironclad cases of cattle, of elk transmitting brucellosis to cattle.
People wonder, like, well, why are bison picked on?
You know, why them?
And one thing might be to say that we got, and this is generally true of wildlife in America, I think There was a brief period around 1900 when we had, you know, maybe about 75 of them left in the U.S. People got very used to there sort of like not being buffalo, bison.
And now it's becoming like a player again.
The animals are becoming a player again.
We were down to 75. We've got 500,000 in the U.S. now.
94% of them are privately owned, but we have a population of a half million buffalo in this country.
So, but we got really used to them not being around, and so it was this thing that was like this additive thing.
Like, I think if there had been a long period when there were no elk, and then all of a sudden someone said, hey, guess what?
We're bringing these big-ass ungulates back that eat tons of stuff.
And they're huge, and they might have a disease, and we're just going to let tens of thousands of them cut loose across the landscape.
People have been up in arms, but they were used to elk, because elk were always on the ground.
So that's why buffalo recovery has been so hard, because it's kind of like you're trying to sell people on this new thing.
Even though historically it's hardly new, they've been around, but there was a period of...
You know, a century, not quite a century, when it wasn't an issue.
So it's really hard to get livestock interests and private landowners around these areas to unanimously get on board with the idea that we're going to have animals roaming out of the park that has been proven to happen that will get into your corral and kill your horse.
Or, you know, take out a school bus if it hits them.
Or...
Possibly transmit disease.
And the big thing that people don't really talk about, which is a huge issue, is impact grazing rights.
Yeah, they rut in the summer and the bulls get very, they get real fired up.
And then, you know, the funny thing there too with the Yellowstone ones is you're dealing with animals that are habituated.
So it's only been like, you know, it's been a hundred years that you can't, you haven't been able to hunt in the park, but animals have gotten habituated to humans.
We like to look at Yellowstone and think you're seeing something kind of natural, but you're actually seeing something pretty unnatural because that landscape was hunted for 12,000 years.
Well, that was one of the more fascinating things about Dan Flores on your podcast, where he was talking about buffalo and that at one point in time...
The Indians, or the Native Americans, when they had guns and they had horses, they were on their way to extirpating the buffalo on their own before the market hunters came into place.
Yeah, that was a controversial idea, and that was put, again, in my book that I wrote, and I have a book, American Buffalo, about the history of the animal.
And my own personal experience is hunting for the animal and finding a skull of one that I found and sort of a journey that led me down.
But in working on that book, I spent quite a time reading the work of Dan Flores, and he was a mentor of mine in graduate school.
And he wrote this very interesting piece called Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy.
And what he looked at was, he was trying to find, was there a period when...
When Plains tribes...
Was there a period when Native Americans had actually reached equilibrium with the bison herds?
And he argues that they had not achieved equilibrium.
That even if...
One of the points, he makes many points in this thing.
I don't want to sell his piece short.
It's a very large piece of scholarly work.
But one of the things he talks about is just the introduction of the horse.
Had humongous impacts on the animals, on buffalo, for a handful of reasons.
Grazing competition.
Okay, so enormous herds of wild horses.
And the horse was distributed, so you trace, and Flores explains all this as well, you can trace horses to Native American tribes on the Great Plains and elsewhere.
They go back to the Pueblo Revolt.
So, you know, the Spanish conquistadors lost a lot of their animals and the animals are traded up the eastern face and up the western face of the Rockies and then were distributed all around.
And so you're when you get this idea in your head of a of a Plains warrior, right, mounted on horseback hunting for buffalo, that was a very distinct phenomenon that didn't last nearly it didn't last as long as the that was a very distinct phenomenon that didn't last nearly it didn't last as long Like, it did not last long.
between the introduction of the horse and the Indian Wars.
They wound up largely removing free-roaming autonomous tribes off the Great Plains.
It just didn't last that long, even though it became the iconic image of the Mounted Plains hunter.
And what he argues is the advent of the horse changed hunting practices so much.
Up until that point, you had tribes that were partially or largely agrarian coming out of the Mississippi River Valley, out of the Missouri River Valley, that would grow crops.
And they would, during the summer when the buffalo herds were gathered into tremendous gatherings during the breeding season, they would do trips.
They would do buffalo hunting trips.
Once they had the horse, you had all these cultures turned into nomadic cultures that could have a travoy and a horse and just follow the herds.
And it was a tremendous amount of pressure put on these animals to support that amount.
You had tribes migrating out onto the Great Plains and fighting over those resources.
And I believe it was one of his graduate students that later looked at this piece, where when Lewis and Clark did their big westward journey in the early 1800s, the places where they talked about seeing the greatest amounts, where they were just blown away by how many buffalo they were seeing, generally fell upon sort of a no-man's-lands areas between warring tribes.
So the buffers of traditional hunting zones, like where the Blackfeet and the Sioux met up The edge habitat there was where you had a lot of animals that weren't getting exploited by people.
So you started to see these regional extirpations of the animal.
And then firearms was another big blow.
Where even outside of white hide hunters just showing up, but just those European technologies of horse...
Gone.
You were seeing a steady depletion that would have not, and it seems like the resource would not have lasted.
What was interesting about his paper was that he was saying that the early settlers, or the early explorers of the United States in the 1500s and 1600s, they didn't talk about Buffalo.
So when the Spanish, the Spanish would go through places.
And they would name wildlife.
Now, some of the Spanish came through, they go through into Florida, some of the first guys to step foot in Florida.
They talk about everything they see, right down to possums.
They're not describing buffalo.
They're describing everything else.
The English go in there 200 years later and they're talking about buffalo.
So there's sightings in what's now New Orleans.
Cabeza de Vaca ran into Buffalo around what's now Houston.
There's sightings of Buffalo in what is now Washington, D.C. Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, figures like that, were hunting them around the site of Nashville and Memphis.
They were all the way to the East Coast.
It seems there were only a handful of states that at some point in time didn't have any.
My home state of Michigan doesn't seem like there were any.
For a long time, people thought that there had been buffalo in New York.
But it turns out the evidence for them in the paleontological and archaeological record is two skulls.
Both the skulls have cultural markings on them.
And it seems that they were the same way that me and Joe here will hunt an animal and bring the head home, that they might have been just things someone had, trophies that were traded or whatever, because there's no other faunal remains from the animals in New York.
But most places had them.
Now, the mound builders, so you have all these, like, Mississippian cultures along the Mississippi River and Ohio River Valley.
It's called the mound builders.
They made these giant effigy mounds that people didn't even realize they were there until we had airplanes to get above and see the snakes and, like, serpents and deer and all these creatures they were building out of earth mounds that were so big that guys would, like, live around the mound and never recognize it for what it was until they could look at it from above.
You can see these things with satellite imagery.
They never built buffalo mounds.
But, once we emptied...
And this is one argument.
It's kind of a two-pack argument.
Once, smallpox and other diseases carried off 90% of Native Americans.
So that's why when the Spanish would go into places, this is a theory now.
The Spanish would go into places, first contact, like first people's traipse through an area.
They would go into places and they would describe village after village after village after village.
And they never talk about Buffalo.
The English, a while later, they'll go down, some guy will go down the Mississippi River, he don't see shit for people, but there's Buffalo crawling everywhere.
So, and another issue, another thing people talk about is changing agricultural practices that slash-and-burn agriculture was becoming used.
And slash-and-burn agriculture was conducive to spreading, it was conducive to buffalo because it created open spaces for them.
That's another thing people look at as slash-and-burn agriculture.
But either way, it's proposed that the apex of that species...
It was at the moment we found it.
The fashionable number used to be 60 million and that was put forth by a guy named Dodge City.
Dodge City, Kansas.
It got its name from a guy named Colonel Dodge.
Colonel Dodge, if you're interested, I could explain how he came up with it, but Colonel Dodge is the one that floated the idea that there were 60 million buffalo.
Now, the fashionable number is, you know, 32, you hear 32 million, you hear 40 million, and people say that that was an extraordinary amount of those animals, and we witnessed it at its apex.
And that other times in the history of the continent and other times of the natural history of our continent, there weren't nearly that many of the animals.
That's such a fascinating concept, and I never had heard it before.
I'd only heard that there was giant numbers of them and that the Europeans came over and Americans wiped them out because we wanted the skulls and the fur.
So if you get to the end of the Civil War, At that point, there's maybe $15 million, and that's when it was in 1871 and 1872 that what you might call the commercial-scale harvest of the animals happened.
And it happened in the south, what was called the southern herd, around 1871, 1872, in the areas surrounding Dodge City, where there was a large population of them.
And then it took 10 years.
By 1882, you couldn't find one.
So the last big slaughter happened around Miles City, Montana.
And it happened when the railroad made it to Miles City.
The Northern Pacific made it to Miles City and provided a way to get hides to market.
And they did the last big kill there and killed about a million of them up there.
And then a year later, Roosevelt came out.
To Medora, North Dakota, thereabouts, hired a guide and scoured the countryside, hunting through the carcasses of rotting animals, trying to find one last one.
And then went on to do all these kind of amazing things.
But that was the big slaughter.
What's cool about that, the time that worked out, is photography was just coming out.
People were starting to have portable cameras.
And there was a photographer named L.A. Huffman who'd been sent out to Miles City, and he actually took a lot of images.
Of those hide hunters working the last big hurt, the last big shoot.
And then shortly after that, there was some number of animals left, and they allowed a bunch of Plains Indians to leave one of the reservations, and they went and did a little bit of a mop-up.
But yeah, then shortly thereafter, there was a guy named Hornaday who was kind of writing letters around, trying to find out who had one of these things laying around, because it had all fallen into private hands.
You know, those guys like buffalo hunters would kill them and they'd be like, holy shit.
There's like none left.
And some of these guys actually went out and caught a couple.
There was a guy named Buffalo Jones down in Texas that went out and lassoed a couple calves, raised them on cow's milk.
And that's why we even have some now.
Now, it turns out no one knew this.
But it turns out there were several hundred in Canada that no one knew about.
Do you support if there is evidence of human-caused extinction, if there is the opportunity to bring something back through scientific methods, through, like, some sort of cloning?
Man, I'm on the fence about it, and my understanding of the technology is probably too limited for me to really speak to it with any authority, but the most interesting aspect of that is when you get into the Pleistocene extinctions, where,
you'll notice, just to kind of bring people up to speed on what that means, if you just look globally at Where and when we lost pachyderms, so elephants, including the woolly mammoth mastodon on our own continent.
If you look around where we lost pachyderms, we always lose pachyderms right around the time humans show up.
We lost them.
Humans arrived in the New World.
It's a hotly debated number, 14,000-15,000 years ago, and kind of contemporaneous with the extinction of woolly mammoths.
We know that to some degree, humans were preying on woolly mammoths and preying on mastodons.
There's context of hunting equipment in context with woolly mammoth remains.
There's butchering sites.
There's all kinds of stuff, and they vanished right around then.
Yet, we didn't reach an island out in the Bering Sea until 4,000 years ago, and there was a woolly mammoth on that island until 4,000 years ago.
And then dudes show up, it's gone.
So some people look, there's a thing called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, which holds that all these large mammals, nine genera of large mammals that went extinct when humans arrived in the New World, that they were somehow human-caused extinctions.
I went with a guy, there's a famous Paleo-Indian site north of Denver called the Lindenmeyer site.
And the Lindenmeyer site was one of the few, not one of the few, the only place that we now know were large gatherings of the Folsom culture.
Large gatherings of the Folsom culture where you had perhaps hundreds of Folsom hunters in one place at one time.
And the site is marked by a large, like an easily recognizable escarpment.
And it's presumed it was just a place you could describe and people could meet up.
But the Lindenmeyer site has been studied extensively, and tons of radiocarbon dating has happened at the Lindenmeyer site.
And I was with a guy there who was working on that theory, the theory with the asteroid impact and the nanodiamonds, because he was able to go draw samples from strata that had been tested and studied so much Which is an expensive, laborious process to get datelines, you know, and he was there drawing those things out.
And then I had other people who work professionally in this space talking about how, sort of ridiculing the idea and saying it's just like one of these ideas that never dies and never quite lives but never quite dies.
But, you know, when you look at it, it's just so hard to believe they hunted them to extinction so quickly.
Like, you know, there were interglacial periods, like if you look at the Ice Ages or the Pleistocene, right, there were interglacial periods where the water was much higher than it is now.
There were interglacial periods when the water would have been up over the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
But the idea that the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is just like a...
It's just a point we divided in our heads.
There was many glaciations.
Time will only tell if we ever see another glaciation again.
But I don't know...
And that's one of the things that emboldens people who contradict...
One of the things that emboldens people who contradict human-caused climate change is that we've been through so many cycles, they'll often point out and say, well, how do we know this isn't just another warming trend between Ice Age periods?
And then a lot of people point out and go, because there's no evidence that they ever happened this quickly.
This is like radically fast.
These are things that played out over 10,000 years.
These aren't things that played out over human lifetimes.
You know, an interglacial period being a 10,000 year thing.
Interestingly, interglacial periods Are really important to understanding all these issues because interglacial periods and glacial periods mark moments when wildlife could have come into the New World, when wildlife such as, you know, buffalo and then later elk and other things, when they would have had the opportunity to come from Asia and cross the Bering Land Bridge and come down onto our continent, and when they could have not done that.
So when you look at, like, when did humans show up?
When did these other things show up?
Like, when did horses disappear?
When could they have come down?
When could buffalo have come down?
How did elk get here?
You're sort of always looking at, assuming they didn't come down when the entire north was swathed in 40 feet of snow and ice.
Presumably they came down when it was an ice-free corridor.
And so you can kind of fine-tune all these comings and goings by looking at moments when there was an ice-free corridor to come down in.
The paleontologist found it and literally found it in five minutes.
He said he started walking around the property.
He found a tooth or some sort of chip, a piece of bone.
He recognized it immediately as being a dinosaur, made some phone calls, called some people, and next thing you know, like within weeks, they had started excavations.
I think there's a dumbass reason, and there's a taxonomical reason.
And I know dear friends of mine on both sides of that spectrum, where if I put it to my brother, who on occasion calls them goats, he'll talk about how taxonomically they're distinct, like they're the only thing in their...
They're the only thing in their family, right?
They don't have any close relatives.
But they're a horned animal that sheds its horn.
Now, antlers shed.
Elk, moose, deer, all the cervids.
Antlers shed.
Horns don't shed.
Animals carry their horns for their whole life, like a crat in a sheath.
But antelope shed their horn.
But it turns out that some people like to point out that they're close to a goat.
The goat is close.
Other people say it just because they kind of look like goats.
The first people, the first humans to colonize the Hawaiian Islands.
Polynesians who carried with them rats, dogs, pigs, right?
We have native Hawaiians.
Right?
Like Hawaiians, indigenous Hawaiians people carry native rights, they regard themselves as native Hawaiians, yet people are always telling them that the wildlife is non-native.
So you've got people that showed up with pigs, and now the Nature Conservancy will get chunks of land in Hawaii and eradicate the non-natives.
And the native Hawaiians will be like, but we're contemporaneous with these animals.
I don't mean to say they like it's a unanimously held viewpoint, but people who hold the viewpoint that they hunt pigs, their father hunt pigs, their grandfather hunt pigs, their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hunted pigs.
No, it's from people who are worried about losing yet more.
And we've already lost a dozen, you know, speaking of regional extinctions or extirpations, and in some cases, extinction extinctions, we've lost dozens of species of Hawaiian flora and fauna to, considering a wide range of ground-nesting birds, have been lost to rats and pigs.
So now it's not so much focused on the animals, but flora.
So there are people who would like to, and I get where they're coming from, who would like to restore large areas of native plant communities in the Hawaiian Islands.
Because when you go there, all the fruit you see, the coconuts are not native.
Papayas, mangoes, breadfruit, none of that stuff's native.
Do you know about Darwin visiting the Galapagos Islands, and that's one of the ways that he sort of formulated his theories about evolution and all the various variety of wildlife through visiting the Galapagos Islands?
And unintentionally, people have had seeds that they brought with them on the bottom of their shoes.
Yeah, some people brought goats over there, like some sailors brought goats over there as a food source, left them on the island, figuring, hey, we'll stop back when we need food, and now they've got goat problems.
So they're trying to figure out how to eradicate the goats, and there's a great radio.
Well, they take one goat and they sterilize that goat, and so that goat can't breed, but that goat will find all the other goats and hang out with that goat, and they put a radio collar on the little fucker, and then he lets them know where the other goats are, and then they gun down those goats and let this one goat live.
And he goes, well, I gotta go find some other goats.
And he goes and finds the other one, and they're like, oh, we found them.
They have a huge feral cat problem in Australia to the point where their hunting magazines are really bizarre.
Because people hunt cats?
Holding up cats.
Like, what?
Like, my friend Adam Greentree lives in Australia, and, you know, it's a crazy place, because it's similar, in a lot of ways, to Hawaii, is that a lot of the animals they hunt are non-native, but their hunting magazines are filled with fucking dogs and cats and shit.
So people that think about, like, oh, I'm eating vegetables, I'm eating natural, I'm not a part of this whole factory farm system.
What the fuck?
You're not.
You're part of factory agriculture system.
You're eating corn.
If you're buying corn, you're eating corn on a cob, thinking you're all healthy.
That shit is coming from a really unnatural place.
It's coming from this ground that has been filled up with all this nitrogen that's been sucked out of the air through the Haber method.
They've dumped it into the earth because the earth's been depleted with minerals to the point where it no longer supports growth of plants unless you add stuff to it.
And then you have these large-scale machines that you need to tend to this stuff.
And there's nothing natural about large-scale agriculture.
Factory farming when it comes to living animals as being horrific, whether it's pigs or cows or chickens, that disturbs almost anybody with a conscience.
But we don't think twice about the consequences of large-scale agriculture on actual wildlife and the wild ground.
Yeah, there's a book, I can't remember the name of the book that gets into it, but just trying to like track down sort of the history of corn and how it came to be.
You know, they oftentimes point to a domestication of animals and plants.
Sometimes it was sort of an accidental domestication.
You know, like you go out and gather something, right?
And you bring it home, you process it near your home, you're scattering seed, right?
Yeah, but he doesn't hold out ideas that he's pure.
Because of what we're talking about.
He's educated enough about agriculture and educated enough about the inherent struggle, the inherent life and death through all food production, that he doesn't think, oh, I have all the answers.
He knows you're violently churning the land with equipment.
Things are dying when you grow vegetables.
We're enmeshed in a cycle of life and death that is inescapable.
His point, and I don't want to totally steal the guy's point, he'd do a better job of explaining himself, but his point is that if we agree that we should minimize suffering, There are steps we can take to minimize suffering.
Not saying that I've got it answered and I've got it figured out, but if we want to minimize the suffering of sentient beings, then that's a conversation we should have.
The best thing that he said in explaining the animal rights movement, which I've always been a little bit baffled by, is he gets into this idea of...
And we are, he would argue, I think he would say we're on the cusp of tackling our problem of speciesism.
And he would say, like, if you went to someone, like, you know, if you went to the Mississippi Delta, you know, in the late 1700s and said to someone, like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about the fact that, You know, you kind of like own and abuse these people.
Have you ever thought about how they're like people too?
You know, they're like you and me.
He was saying like the guy wouldn't be able to cope with what you were saying.
You know, I asked him about that, and that was one of the things.
At the end of our conversation, I even said to him, I'm like, you got a couple things you need to work on.
Because he didn't have a great one for that.
Another one that he didn't have a great one for is he had...
Not that he had a great one, not that I was trying to stump him, because he's a very intelligent, well-thought person, very respectful to people he's talking to, even people that disagree with him.
I have nothing but admiration for the guy.
But we had a conversation that I was not totally satisfied with, where he has a deal of reverence, it seems, and again, at the risk of putting words in his mouth, he has a reverence for indigenous hunting cultures, that they had this sort of respect.
They had a respect for animals that we don't have, and somehow that made it okay for them.
Like, they had a spiritual connection, and so that made that okay.
And we don't have that, so we're not okay.
And I asked them about, are you able to identify the point in human development, in cultural development?
What is the point when you're supposed to give up the chase?
Like, at what point do you have a responsibility to stop hunting?
Because you're saying that it is okay for some people.
It's absolutely not okay for us now.
When should we have made the jump?
Because earlier we were talking about the Spanish.
There's a situation where the Spanish had gone into the American Southwest and were trying to, as they called it, civilize Southwestern tribes.
And they were building homes for them, trying to instruct them in religion, trying to create schools for them, trying to provide them with the tools of the agrarian lifestyle.
And they would write letters back to the king complaining about how these people refused to stop go hunting.
Like, you give them a chance and these sons of bitches take off to go hunt.
And here we are giving them everything they need to be sedentary.
And they just won't get with the program.
So there is this struggle where people are like, you're supposed to be like, I think some people expect you, like, if you're a human, they think that the end result of humanness...
Is that you wind up not hunting.
That it's sort of the goal of civilization is to make you not a hunter.
And I think he's a little bit guilty of that.
Because he thinks it is okay for some people.
And where he runs into trouble is he talks about that I asked him about ethics.
He says, but the animal doesn't care about your ethics.
To him, he's dying.
If he dies and you have a good feeling in your heart, or if he dies and you have a bad feeling in your heart, he's dead.
It doesn't matter.
They don't know what trip you're on.
They suffer the same, regardless of your motivations.
Which leads me to want to point out, okay, but the indigenous cultures that you say it's okay for them to hunt, their animals are suffering too.
The animals they kill don't know that they're being killed by indigenous peoples, and therefore it makes the suffering more palatable for them.
They're dying.
So there are some traps there that to me weren't answered in a satisfactory way.
You're taking this cat and you're putting this cat above the animals that it eats.
You're deciding that these chickens and the fish and all the different things that you need to grind up to make cat food, that's okay, because you love this cat.
You have a hierarchy of animal life, and we all have a hierarchy of life.
I've seen vegans slap mosquitoes.
I've seen it.
I've seen that.
I've seen them kill ants.
There was a lady, I used to live near an ashram.
The lady that ran the ashram was spraying bug spray.
She's like, well, we don't like to, but they get into our food.
I'm like, holy shit.
Like, you're a vegetarian who's committed to a Buddhist life of do no harm, but yet there's no way around this.
You have to poison these fucking ants with death from the sky that comes out of these containers, these metal containers, these aerosol containers of death.
But as long as I am taking the liberty of putting myself in Robert Jones' position, I think that he would have some interesting stuff to say about this conversation we're having where we're like, because some harm happens, Then, let's just say fuck it and we'll open up the gates.
Well, my problem is they never turn that force on themselves.
They never turn that high-powered...
Vision of you know the consequences of their actions on themselves if someone's talking about like if this guy's a vegan and he's a vegetarian He's talking about how many animals you've killed how many animals are you responsible for for your fucking your Whole-wheat pasta.
unidentified
He wasn't even he wasn't even he was so he was a meat-eater.
No, no, that's Ricky Gervais It's Ricky Gervais constantly talks about hunters and hunting the guy eats meat.
Yeah Like, there's so many weird laws, and I get it that he doesn't think people should hunt animals just for trophies, and I agree, but it's very rarely do these animals get hunted just for trophies.
Like, if you shoot a fucking elephant, the village eats the elephant.
I should point out that your article that you wrote was one of my favorite on that subject and it was right around the time that the Cease of the Lion thing was going down.
And it also referenced that Kendall Jones girl who got a lot of hate online because she was a Texas cheerleader and she was really cute.
I was going to talk about the hierarchy because we spend a lot of time at work.
When we're out filming Meat Eater, we spend a lot of time talking about the hierarchy.
Because, for instance, we have a camera guy we work with, Rick Smith, has a long professional history in working with wildlife and filming wildlife and didn't grow up hunting.
He's coming around.
He's curious about it, but he asks a lot of good questions.
And we were looking.
We had killed a moose.
And the next day, we were up in Alaska, and we killed a moose.
And the next day, we rolled out of our camp and happened to go near there, and there was a wolverine dragging off moose parts.
It's a hollow hair, but I don't know what it is about it that it resists frost.
So anyways...
We're kicking around.
I'll tell the end first and say we didn't shoot the Wolverine, but we were just talking about, you know, we legally could have gone and take a crack at it.
No, but he had obvious injuries in his front section.
So would walk...
Yeah, definitely not uncommon.
And probably, you know, it could be a lot of the things we have about hominids, you know, like large, mysterious hominids could come from, you know, obviously bears walking around on their back feet.
But, you know, New Jersey had...
I don't want to have this mean too many, but they have an exploding population of black bears.
I'm always reluctant to say something's overpopulated because you always got to ask according to whose definition.
Is it like the automobile insurance industry?
Because they'll say everything's overpopulated that you might run over with your car.
Agricultural interests have a different definition of overpopulated.
So they have a shitload of bears.
That's a fair statement.
They had a hunting season.
Turns out some guy comes into a check station and he had shot this bear that walks around on his back feet and they'd given him the name Pedals because he'd taken two scavenging bird feeders and stuff around the neighborhood.
And so I can't remember the magazine, one of those dipshitty New York online magazines that just basically steals shit out of the New York Times and writes its own interpretations of New York Times articles.
Oh, the people, yeah, the charismatic megafauna thing.
Because another thing we talked about on our podcast recently, we had a biologist on who works for the Kalispell tribe, an Indian tribe that historically were in Idaho, portions of Washington,
portions of Montana, and they're very involved in mountain caribou recovery in the U.S. So most people do not know that Traditionally, we had a caribou population that drifted from Canada down into northern Washington, northern Idaho, northwest Montana.
At this moment that we're talking right now, there are a couple miles from the U.S. border inside Canada.
But there used to be...
The last legal one to be killed...
It was back in the 1920s.
What happened to them was just disturbances to habitat.
There was always a small, like, not a large number of them, and we had a lot of things that messed with their travel corridors, development, road construction, logging activities, and now they rarely ever drift down into the U.S. But it was an active recovery area there,
so we got about a dozen No one gives a shit about mountain caribou.
The amount of, like, energy, the amount of mental energy that goes into people's favorite animals.
At the expense of other good wildlife projects we could be working on, it kind of boggles my mind.
Black bears, we have enough black bears that we have black bear hunting seasons in I think 36 states.
I do create a hierarchy, but I also try to question where the hierarchy comes from and to suss out contradiction.
But the only problem to me, where it gets problematic for me, is the way in which it seems that you can get some Americans so excited about...
Preventing any kind of exploitation of a handful of species, yet they remain completely uninvolved with the issues in politics and recovery efforts of other things that need it right now.
The fact that with wolves and certain populations of grizzly bears, certain populations of wolves have reached recovery objective, yet we still cover them under the Endangered Species Act.
Because people want to use the Endangered Species Act to save things from any threat of exploitation at all.
Like, nothing to do with what the legislation was meant for.
It's become the Favorite Animal Act.
And if you want to initiate something called the Favorite Animal Act and try to get it passed by Congress, feel free.
But don't steal the ESA and take it away from its intended purpose.
No, dude, it's like, it's the greatest book, man, how frustrated it gets.
But one of the cool things he describes is, he describes how they would kill, you know, when they killed a polar bear, they would bring the head back and put it in their lodge.
I don't want to push this too far, but much in the same way you might bring a head home and hang it on your wall.
They'll bring it home and put it in their lodge.
And the thinking, as explained to Stephenson, was that I'm bringing him home so that he can observe me and my family and see that we're good people.
And when he goes to the afterlife, he will tell other bears...
If you gotta get killed by somebody, not a bad guy to have it happen.
That guy's okay.
And I often point out about the animal skulls and hides in my own home that I feel like, you know, I don't want to make myself seem too spiritual in some ways.
I think of that.
I think of that with the animals I have in my home.
Now, conversely, in Natrang, I went out to a farm.
Or a guy has a small plot of land.
Basically, there's a system there where you have very poor farmers who don't own the land, but it's state-owned land, government-owned land, but they have subsistence farms.
And this guy raised sugar cane.
He had an air gun.
He can't have a regular gun, but he had an air gun and he would hunt various arboreal marsupials and things to eat.
And he had some water, a river flowing through his place.
And he had a small amount of livestock and raised some crops and peppers and various things.
And he had a bunch of dogs running around on his place.
Just pet dogs.
He was explaining to me that now and then, when the dogs are bred up To a number that's hard to support them.
The dog buyer comes.
And the dog buyer will give you some cash for your excess dog population.
And those are the dogs that go into the markets of Vietnam.
Other countries actually have places where they're like breeding and rearing dogs for slaughter.
But that was the Vietnamese system.
So, it wound up being like, of many interesting things about this whole thing, it wound up being like, comparing this guy's pet To this guy's livestock.
You sort of got into this thing, which is the more enviable position?
And I went to visit a guy, actually a wholesaler, who buys the dogs from farmers out in the countryside.
And he comes back and they would fatten the dogs on beef stomach, beef trim.
Basically the stuff that in the U.S. we send to rendering plants.
Like when they slaughter cattle, most everything, you know, once the meat's gone, everything goes to a rendering plant.
He would buy basically what U.S. production facilities send to a rendering plant, and that's what he would fatten dog on.
And you'd go to the markets and they'd have dogs stacked, like just dog parts stacked up in pyramids at the market.
It was bizarre to see, man.
And I tell you, I went out in different places and with different people and different things.
I went out for seven nights in a row.
And I could never get beyond my own biases.
About what's food and what's not food.
It was just very difficult for me to eat it and fake my way through.
And it was hard.
So I do understand.
When people come to me and they're looking, they're like, hey man, a bear?
I'm a hunter.
I've hunted and eaten hundreds and hundreds of pounds of black bear meat.
When people come in, they're like, dude, I just...
I don't want to act like they're coming...
When people come to me and express disapproval, I don't want to act like I can't understand where they're coming from, because I had the same thing I felt there.
I remember making the argument, and I never fact-checked it, but I feel like there are more people in this world who live in a country where it's socially acceptable to eat dog meat than not.
I haven't formally fact-checked that, but I remember looking at some basic figures and thinking that that was true.
But it still doesn't seem the same to me as a deer.
Like, if you gave me a choice, hey, would you rather go hunt axis deer, which I've never hunted, seems so much more natural to me than go hunt black bear.
You know, I have such a complicated sets of feelings about black bears.
And as a hunter, strangely I've gotten to the thing where, maybe, before I even say that, I'm going to say why it's not quite strange.
I have found...
That a lot of big game hunters will do some amount of bear hunting, get a couple bears, and then drift away from bear hunting.
They still respect how difficult it is and how much you can learn about bears, but I find that a lot of people who've gotten some bears are always excited to go on a bear hunt if it's someone's first bear hunt.
Well, no, because what I was doing for a long time was saving up my bear hides, and I wanted to cut them into like 9 or 10 inch squares and have a very large comforter made out of many different bears cut into squares.
Stitched.
I haven't given up on that idea.
But I give a lot of my bear hides away to people who really like them.
Anyway, when you get a bear, it's like no one in their right mind gets rid of a bear hide.
So, you get one, and you get it tanned, and then you got a bear hide.
And once you got a bear hide, and it's like on the floor, and then you got a bear hide over the back of the couch, and you got a bear hide hanging on the wall, you get to a point where you don't need any more bear hides.
You eat the meat and you have the hides, but you don't need more bear hides.
And when you get a bear, there's an expense to getting the hide prepared, but you feel wasteful not using the hide.
So now, like one day Danny was like, the last bear he got...
He got up to the bear and found himself just kind of, he goes, I just don't, I don't need, you know, like I look at it and I'm like, I have like a set of obligations to this animal now and I'm not excited about it anymore.
I don't want another bear hide.
It's an expense and he just, he never killed another bear.
One of my favorite episodes of yours was on the Prince of Wales Island where you had a bear in your sight and you just decided, I don't want to shoot this bear.
When I say I'm out-glass-up, I mean if I'm sitting on a big glass and tit or a glass and knob up some high where I have a commanding view of the landscape.
The way I generally hunt, I hunt a lot of open country in the American West and in Alaska and things where you have good visibility.
The bulk of the time I spend hunting, I spend on a good lookout point.
A high point where you can see a good 180 degree view or maybe not always 180, sometimes 360, whatever, a commanding view of the surrounding landscape.
And we generally hunt by sitting there and observing with binoculars and just watching, watching, watching to the point where sometimes we'll spend days doing nothing but watching.
Animals, through binoculars.
And when you get good at this, you find animals that people would never in a million years find, that other people would never in a million years locate.
When I'm doing that, and I find a bear, and I'm observing a bear, I would never leave that bear to go do some other thing.
When you find a bear, like when I find a bear, I watch him until he's gone.
You can't turn away from him because I always feel like at any point he's gonna do some amazing thing that would blow your mind.
He saw a grizzly smash a moose on the back and break its back, literally hit it so hard that it snapped the moose's back, and then he tackled it once it was down and started eating it.
I haven't seen that, but that's what I'm looking for.
So you watch them, and there's a sort of anticipation with seeing them.
Deer, they're very interesting, and the more you watch them, the more you learn about them.
And the thing that I've always been fascinated by and was talking about with some friends of mine recently was how interested I've become in interpersonal relationships among mule deer, like the body language they use.
And how you can locate deer that you can't see just based on body language of deer that you can see.
That you watch them and you become aware of things they're aware of and you learn where other things are that are out of your view just by how, just by what it's doing.
Yeah, and then once you see it, you go like, oh, he knows about it.
There's a deer somewhere that's not in that group and that deer is aware of the fact that the deer is not in the group and it's like wondering about it.
And you just see that.
So I'm interested in that kind of stuff.
But I can walk away from deer.
There's some deer and I can just go look in another direction.
I even said right then and there, I said, I'm not going to shoot the first one of something I saw.
That's why I feel like, when I was talking earlier about the black hole of Africa, I always imagine guys going to Africa and being like, no shit, that's what one of those shoot looked like.
Yeah, so I just didn't, I hadn't built up a context about it.
So then we were talking about it.
So if you see another one, yeah, I'd reconsider.
But no, I didn't want to shoot the first Wolverine I ever laid eyes on.
That's why I was trying to get, you know, Giannis has seen, You know, he's been out caribou hunting and watched wolverines scavenging caribou carcasses.
And so I was like, you know, he's not the first one you saw.
Yeah, we talked about it before the podcast started, but I was hunting with my friend John Dudley, and we were in the tree stand, and we were supposed to get down at 1.30, and at 1.25, I'm like, what do you want?
You want to call it?
You want to go eat lunch?
He's like, yeah.
So I climbed down first, and at 1.25, like five fucking minutes before we said it, and this big, mature whitetail walks through, and John signals to me, does the bowwinkle thing, putting his thumbs on his head, and he starts pointing, and then I realize there's a deer coming down the path, and so I kind of hide behind the tree, but there was all these branches in front of me.
Anyway, you've already heard the story, but for the people listening, the deer locked eyes with me.
And there was this intensity, like immediate intensity in his eyes that I'd never experienced an animal looking at me like.
It was very tuned in.
He knew exactly that I shouldn't be there, and I just froze.
I have very vivid memories of when I was 12 and had just hit legal hunting age in Michigan, and I was sitting on the ground hunting squirrels on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot.
And leaning against a tree and having a four-corn whitetail coming through the woods...
And, you know, a buck like that, this isn't always true, but generally a four-crumbed whitetail is a year and a half old.
Even at that time, you start hunting squirrels September 15 in Michigan.
So, I mean, that deer was, you know, he could have been as little as 15, 16 months old.
He locked onto me, saw me.
And looked in my eyes, but didn't know what the hell I was.
I remember him coming at me and coming at me and coming at me and getting so scared.
And I had always known there's a thing, you don't yell in the woods.
You don't make noise in the woods.
You try to be quiet in the woods.
I remember grabbing sticks and trying to snap them.
To make a noise to make that deer spook off, you know?
But being, like, conflicted between just being scared shitless and doing the thing you don't do, like, as a hunter, you just learn, like, don't make loud noises in the woods.
When people make loud noises in the woods, it makes me cringe, man.
What's interesting about this mature deer that saw me and freaked out when he saw me is that literally a minute before that, because when I was down, that deer came through with two other deer, and one of them looked to be like maybe a two-year-old deer, and one of them was a baby.
One of them was like one-year-old, and the one-year-old got within 15 feet of me.
I just pinned up against the tree, and the one-year-old walked right by me, had no idea I was alive.
The other one that was a younger deer...
Walked by me, didn't look my direction at all.
The old one looked right at me.
He's like, fuck this.
He knew right away.
He'd seen people before.
They're in Iowa, and Iowa's really different because Iowa's a great state for bow hunting because they have a very short gun season.
You know, I think that culturally in this country, we're kind of getting where it's almost like this accepted idea that you're supposed to hate trophy hunters, right?
But I eat everything I kill.
And I will even talk about, there's like meat bucks and shooter bucks, right?
I mean, there's like big, huge bucks that are cool and meat bucks that you eat, but I always eat my shooter bucks.
It's not like you shoot big bucks.
One, it's illegal.
Two, I love them.
You can Pepsi challenge them.
I can Pepsi challenge a five-year-old deer and a two-year-old deer, and you can't...
You can have big bucks in areas that have very low predation and low hunter pressure, and he could get big and still make some mistakes, because he doesn't have as many mistakes that could be made.
But a really big buck in an area that has a lot of lions, a lot of coyotes, wolves, human hunters, he's big because he hasn't messed up.
He hasn't fucked up.
Doesn't fuck up.
He remembers stuff.
We had an occasion to watch, we were hunting in Colorado hunting mule deer this year, and we watched, I glassed up a pretty nice buck and they went up and do an aspen grove.
He was traveling with a bunch of does, and they all go into an Aspen Grove.
Later, Giannis was looking above there, and he said there's some coyotes rolling down into that Aspen Grove where all the deer went.
It's now the middle of the day, and it's rifle season.
It's been rifle season on and off through a couple of weeks of hunting season.
The coyotes go into the aspen grove.
All those deer come pouring out of that aspen grove.
I, at the time, commented how it seemed like someone was squeezing a tube of toothpaste the way the deer came shooting out of that aspen grove and ran out across a large sage flat, exposing themselves.
The one deer out of the group that didn't walk out of that sage, that didn't walk out of that aspen grove, was the big buck.
Never budged.
Because he ran a calculation in his head Where he's like, I get it.
Y'all scared of those coyotes?
I'm afraid of the unknown.
I would rather stay in here in my little thicket.
And he stood up.
We could see him stand up in there.
That son of a bitch would not move.
And that was during the rut.
So everything in his body is saying chase those does and breed those does.
That's all he's thinking about is breeding does.
A dumb buck would have chased those does.
If not for fear of the coyote, he would have chased the does just for fear that another buck was going to go breed them.
But he resisted that.
Right?
He resisted the fear of the coyotes.
But he's like, I know that there is trouble when you run out in the open.
Well, it's a very difficult quarry, and when you're eating that animal, I mean, there's a completely different sense of not just accomplishment, but connection to that animal than...
Buying some steak in a store or shooting some button buck.
You're telling me that somehow, if you eat meat, that somehow the system by which you go about getting meat through farms and stores and shit like that is somehow morally or aesthetically or ethically or somehow superior To me eating an animal that I've hunted myself from a sustainable population that's well-managed and that I've decorated my home with its parts
that will be there until I die and then will decorate the homes of my children.
If you're telling me somehow that I'm like depraved For that, I have a hard time engaging in the conversation.
How much time do you have to actually immerse yourself in wildlife and understand the politics of it, understand what's really going on out there in the world?
How many people have actually...
I've seen an overhead view of the Pacific Northwest and looked down at all the forest and just done the calculations in their head about these animals and how many of them there are and how much of the Wild West is filled with animals.
It didn't occur to me until I was coming down here today, but I've been railing a lot on the echo chamber that we all live in.
And I think if anyone goes and you look at your Facebook feed or any number of things, we surround ourselves with people who tell us what we think.
And it's kind of become very obvious.
And I think that this presidential election cycle really brought it out where you had just two vastly different narratives.
Playing out.
And people on each side of it feeling so absolutely certain that not only were they right, but that everyone felt the way they felt.
And it's just been a big part of the national conversation, like the echo chamber thing.
What I have found with people that listen to your show, who come up to me and be like, oh, I heard you on Joe's show the times I've been on there, is that you've somehow managed to defy that Where you have the right-wing nutjobs and the left-wing nutjobs all listening to you at the same time.
In the middle of the rotors.
But when someone comes up and says, I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast, I'm always thinking, what does that make you?
It doesn't mean anything.
It's like, I don't know.
Just the fact that you listen to it, I don't know.
That doesn't tell me anything about you, other than that you'd like to wrestle with ideas.
Because this is one of the few places where people are talking about shit, and you talk about stuff and bring it up, where it's like, people are willing, because of you and the way you handle it, they're willing to subject themselves to disparate views for a minute.
And I don't know what it is, the formula, if you've even thought about it.
I have my rigid lines that I won't cross, where I think something is evil or something is ethically wrong, but I'm willing to entertain ideas, and I'm not rigid.
If someone comes to me and they tell me that I'm wrong about something, I'll go, really?
Like, how am I wrong?
If they tell me I'm wrong, I'm like, oh, I'm fucking wrong.
I didn't know I was wrong.
Like, I'm not married to my ideas.
And I think that's a real problem that people have where they define themselves by their knowledge.
They think they're smart or they think they're valuable.
Because they have a certain amount of information in their head.
And I think that's crazy.
Especially as you start getting into more things or exploring new subjects and new topics, you realize it is impossible to know everything.
It's not possible.
So for you to define yourself by the knowledge that you know or the knowledge you don't know, it seems kind of crazy.
I think you're far better off defining yourself, not even defining yourself, but far better off approaching the world By searching for the truth, you know, and not being connected or married to any ideas, it's far too often people get into these discussions with people and it becomes a game of trying to win, you know, trying to one-up the person with information or data and then coming off of that with a victory.
Yeah, I mean, that's what you're seeing on all these news shows, man.
One of the things that I did during the election was while the debates were going on and post-debate, I would bounce back and forth and spend an hour on Fox News and an hour on CNN. And I was like, what is the world?
This is so baffling because these are just enforced narratives from one side and the other.
And I think the country suffers because of that.
People suffer because of that.
It's a tribal inclination that I think we have.
To support one side or the other or to adopt these predetermined patterns of behavior or predetermined belief systems.
I mean, you can't be right all the time and you can have preconceived notions that turn out to be incorrect and you have to be able to recognize those.
But I think, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that perspective that you have, too, that you are willing to say, like, I don't have an opinion on Obamacare because I really don't know enough about it.
That's really healthy and really important and, for some reason, really rare, especially with a well-read person like yourself.
Now, as a student of American history and someone whose favorite era is the Mountain Man era, which ran...
A way to define the Mountain Man era would be it began...
Kind of like the moment Lewis and Clark made it back to St. Louis after their expedition, and a man named John Coulter turned around and went back out west to trap Beaver.
The Mountain Man era began, one could argue, that day.
And it ended when the last rendezvous was held for the Free Trappers, which was in the 1840s.
Very short period in time.
That's my favorite time period in American history, is the Mountain Man era.
And it was the great escapades and discoveries and adventures of the Mountain Men played out in the arid west.
In the willow-lined riparian zones of the American Great Plains and intermontane valleys.
By taking the most famous story from the Mountain Man era, which was the mauling by bear of...
Why is his name not Colt?
What's his name?
Glass.
Hugh Glass.
By taking that story and setting it in B.C. along the edges of the boreal forest in a sopping, dripping landscape of conifers...
Was just a distortion of everything.
It'd be like if you were making a movie about the people who came when Washington and Franklin and everyone came together to draw up the American Constitution, and you said it like in the jungles of Thailand.
Okay?
It's like, instead of Philadelphia.
It just struck me to the core.
Hugh Glass did not have a child.
He did not have a son who he was avenging.
Hugh Glass got mauled by a bear, and they left him in the protection of Jim Bridger, a very young Jim Bridger who was a teenager, and another guy.
And Hugh Glass, through much struggle, crawled his way back to a fort, and he later confronted Bridger and said, just so you know, buddy, next time someone leaves you to watch a guy die in the woods, don't leave him laying around by himself.
When I saw your first show, and then I spoke with you about it, and you were telling me they were trying to let a moose loose, and then you would shoot it.
Well, it was an early conversation I had where I was trying to explain, and I'm like, you know what?
It's pretty hard.
Like, a lot of times stuff doesn't show up, and a guy who I later became friends with and have a lot of respect for, but he was new to hunting and was not new to television, was new to hunting, and he was saying, well, that's why they have animal wranglers.
And that was just one of the early conversations we had.
I wound up liking him quite a bit, but yeah, it was...
I think that one of the things that gets reality television in trouble...
There's a fake anecdote I often tell about two kinds of producers, right?
Like a...
There's a producer who would say to you, how would you do that, whatever you're doing?
And you'd say, well, I'd take this really small little knife and I'd very carefully make a really delicate little incision right here.
And they would say, great, I'm going to film that.
And then there are ones that would go, but could you use a machete?
And I think that, you know, and those are two types of And luckily in my career, now I'm able to surround myself with people who like that little small knife.
You definitely honor that trust, and I think that's one of the reasons why your show is the first show of its kind to be on Netflix.
I think it's educating a lot of people.
It's not just a show that's...
A show preaching to the choir.
It's not just a show for enthusiasts.
It's a show that gives you an insight and a perspective into it.
I think you're the guy to do it, too, because I think the ethics that you carry...
Here's an important distinction.
Even though it's legal to use walkie-talkies and certain things in some places, you don't want to use them.
I had this thought the other day because I was listening to this podcast And these guys were discussing different lenses for optics, they were comparing spotting scopes, and they started talking about walkie-talkies, and it became this combination of things that guys love.
Guys love gadgets and tech things.
It became tech talk and gadget talk mixed with hunting.
The states where it matters because of having, like, open country, it is or is becoming, and it's not, you're not going to be, it's just not going to happen.
Two-way communications is something where a lot of, you know, some states, and I'm not talking, like, liberal softy states, man, Montana, Alaska, you can't use two-way communications to hunt.
Yeah, because they might not even discuss an ethics thing, but it's something that goes back to the great conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold, where he had said, we spent a lot of energy improving the pump, but not the well.
So we have a resource.
We have a resource of wild animals.
And if you just work on improving ways to pump them out, Without also working on ways of Improving the well and having there be a stable population of them, you're going to drain the damn well.
So when we're looking at as emerging technologies come out, you have to constantly ask yourself, with increased efficacy, like if we get it where technology means that every hunter is always successful, what will that wind up meaning for wildlife populations?
It's not going to mean a diminishment of wildlife populations.
It'll mean a tremendous diminishment of hunter opportunity.
You have a lot of over-the-counter public land elk hunts in the American West are about 10 or 20% success rates.
So you give out 100 licenses, you're going to kill about 15 elk.
This is a generalization, but it's generally true.
You're giving 100 guys an opportunity.
If you have success rates at 100%, how many tags are you giving out?
And you know that nine of them were up on glass and tits with radios, radioing the guy in, but they sure as shit aren't wearing the headsets and the pictures.
So they kind of get, too, that they're not proud of it.