Ryan Callaghan and Kenton Carruth explain merino wool’s heat retention and odor prevention, contrasting it with synthetics like Primaloft, while Joe Rogan warns against HR 621 (selling 3.3M acres) and HR 622 (stripping federal oversight), citing threats to public lands and wildlife. They highlight hunting’s conservation funding—$B annually—and ecological benefits, like wolf reintroductions in Idaho/Montana and bison projects in Montana/Wyoming, while critiquing auction tags (e.g., $305K for a sheep tag) and Texas’s exotic animal laws. Rogan ties it to broader freedom vs. regulation debates, urging support for nonpartisan groups like BHA and TRCP before addressing oil/gas risks, including the Dakota Access pipeline’s impact on bison and migration routes. The episode underscores how public land access sustains both wildlife and human traditions, demanding vigilance against legislative rollbacks. [Automatically generated summary]
I wanted to have you guys on, first of all, because I love your company.
You guys have a great company.
First Light makes really cool hunting clothes, outdoor clothes.
You started out with merino wool, which I think...
Before I went with Ryan and Steve Rinella, I really had no idea about the properties of merino wool.
I didn't know that it keeps you from stinking, that it really retains heat while you're wet.
It's got so many awesome properties to it.
Like if you go out, for people that don't know, that don't go in the outdoors, but if you go out and you walk and it's cold out and you hike like a long distance and you get sweaty, if you're wearing cotton, you're kind of fucked.
If it's really cold out, once you start getting sweaty, your body starts shivering and you get in a real bad place.
Wool has this really weird quality, and maybe you can help me explain that, where when it gets wet, it somehow or another still retains heat.
Well, you know, it just naturally moves the sweat off of your skin and kind of tries to get it to the outermost layer, and at which point then it can evaporate fast.
But, you know, sheep have to live in crazy environments.
You know, it'll be hotter than shit in the summertime, and then...
You know, super cold in the winter.
So, you know, over the course of evolution, they've got, you know, a coat that will deal with a massive amount of variance, you know, and wool is pretty much the same.
It's like you can wear it when you're sweating bolts, it pulls the sweat off and then dries pretty quickly.
But even when it's wet, it retains 80% of its heat.
Well, every synthetic is trying to A, mimic down, or B, mimic merino wool, because those are the two most efficient, you know, temperature-regulating fabrics or materials out there.
And that's how you got into your pre-Milofs and all your military testing, and that's where you saw synthetics really take off.
Yeah, so like Primaloft for example or some of your fleeces, they basically combine something that loves water and something that hates water.
So the thing that loves water is going to pull moisture off and the thing that hates it is going to repel it and try to push it to the outside.
So it's like sort of a two-layer process where something's trying to keep you dry and something's trying to like literally suck up the wet like a sponge.
And then somehow or another your body heat then can regulate it because your body heat, you're staying warm because the dry is close to your skin and then the heat comes off your skin and can dry out that stuff better.
You know, it's funny, because we all kind of came from the traditional, like, ski, snowboard, snowmobile world, you know?
Grew up whatever skiing and so we've been You know involved in having super, you know technical clothes since I was I don't know eight years old right right all the underwear stuff for skiing Merino wool all the different polys when that kind of came out and replaced cotton when I was a kid and you know They were great, but it wasn't until we kind of started
Using Merino that we found something that, I mean, you know, if you go skiing or snowboarding or sledding, snowmobiling, right?
You're sweating bullets and if you get stinky, whatever.
It's just how it always was, you know.
But for hunting, it's really a big deal, you know.
If you can possibly kind of, you know, shrink your stink footprint just by a little bit, it can be the difference between succeeding that season or not, you know.
And so we also are wearing...
Marino for whatever, all of the other sports, like skiing and snowboarding and pedal biking and whatever.
And once we found out that it didn't stink, that was like, whoa, that was a big deal, because you could wear it for days and days.
And so that was kind of the impetus.
And at the same time, it started taking over, I would say, the traditional outdoor space.
Yeah, and your company is really popular with public land, do-it-yourself hunters, guys who go out backpacking for long periods of time, and that's one of the reasons why they like that Merino wool.
And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on is to talk about what's been going on lately with HR 621 and now HR 622, these two recent bills.
They pulled H.R. 621. Steve Rinello wrote a big article about it, but for the uninitiated, what these bills are about is they're about selling off our public land, giving the states the ability to do whatever they want with it.
Right now, these lands are federal.
They're owned by the people of the United States.
It's a very unusual situation that we have here.
It's an amazing situation.
And there's very few countries in the world that have anything even remotely close to it, where there's millions and millions and millions of acres that are available for anybody listening to this to go on.
Like, backcountry hunters and anglers have that great shirt that I wear all the time.
It says, Public Land Owner, and I've seen you on it.
And I'm going to tweet the picture of you and I from SHOT Show, where I was with you and you were wearing that shirt.
Yeah.
That's such an important point for people because I didn't know it at all until I went with you guys, until I went with Rinella and the crew.
We went to Montana, that first trip with Brian Callen, who's hopefully coming.
That's why that door's open, folks, if you're watching this.
We're leaving that door open because Callen is trying to make his way over here right now.
I didn't know that this public land system even existed and I think most people are unaware they just don't they don't understand how unique this is and how Incredible like the the our forefathers like their their their vision to make something so incredible that no one Can go in and just fucking put malls up in it is an amazing thing and I think this is like the easiest battle in the world if we can Somehow tell people,
Oh, I mean, we can walk straight north and cross two highways and one interstate and keep going across the Canadian border, cross two more highways and be in the Yukon, basically.
And, you know, it's an interesting issue because sometimes, you know, you'll get mountain bikers, you get after the equestrian people or the, you know, the hikers get after the motorbikers.
But it's an issue for every single person because no matter what sport you do or how you choose to enjoy the outdoors, that's your land.
Yeah, I mean, and there are regulations as far as where you can take motorbikes or where you can ride even bikes, right?
Even trail bikes.
But that set aside, man, there's some amazing country that you could just go get lost in, just go wander, pitch a tent, drink out of a stream, and you could stay there for long periods of time, and it's totally legal, it's totally yours, you're Tax dollars literally fund and support it.
And all the money that comes from buying hunting equipment, from buying tags, from all that stuff is what pays to keep fish and game employed, make sure that people are monitoring the health and the populations of the animals that live there, making sure that no one is breaking any of the laws.
So different forests have different regulations as far as like how long you can stay camped in one spot.
Typically, it's 10 to 15 days.
And then you have to move, again, depending on where you are, X amount of, you know, sometimes it's 100 feet, sometimes it's 20 miles.
And then you can set up camp again.
Just arbitrary rules?
It is not arbitrary.
There's some smart folks out there that study the impact of man on the land and they want to try to keep, you know, that pristine experience that we all love to go find there for everybody.
And they have an incredibly tough job because their mandate, their federal mandate is to manage that land for everyone.
You know, we do, we see it from all angles, you know, all of us have, you know, in the summertime, like I said, we'll ride mountain bikes, and in the wintertime, backcountry skiing, and it's all of a sudden, you know, and then hunting, of course, it's huge, but you just see it from all angles, like places that, where you recreate 365 days a year, all of a sudden, you start to get sucked up, and it's just like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you know, like, if this wasn't, if we didn't have public lands, we wouldn't have a business, right?
Well, if you look at the United States being only founded in 1776, and you just look at the massive amount of land we occupy now, there's just the greater Los Angeles area where there's 30 million people, and you go up all through the Pacific Coast Highway and just see all the cities and see all the buildings and see all the stuff that you would encounter if you try to drive.
From California to New York.
The only thing that's stopping that whole fucking area from being covered with buildings and malls and gas stations and anything else they can stick in there...
Is the fact that it's public land.
That it's federally owned land and you can't build on it.
Kenton's a serious audiophile, so when we were driving up the road, You know, we opted to go over the Pacific Coast Highway and then come over that way out of LA. And Kenton's like, oh man, I bet Neil Young walked through that door a hundred times.
Which is really interesting, like, now, because of social media, because of guys like you guys, and, I mean, there was a million people, the Gritty Bowman, Ranella, I got involved, there's a lot of people involved, and there's a lot of different, you know, you look at all the, if you Calculate all our followers up, of all the different people that were making posts about this, it reaches a lot of people.
And then it gets people who might have been like me before I went with you guys to Montana, who just might have been curious, like, what is this all about?
Then you read into it, and then you start looking into this public land system that we have and how unique and beautiful it is, and you just go, wow, they want to sell that?
And Paul Ryan had proposed that as well, right?
Didn't he propose selling it off to pay some of the land off to pay for the debt?
You know, when you think about the possibility that this land could not be there for your children or your children's children, like it's been for us, and it's been for our grandparents.
And there's nothing against county law enforcement here.
The thing is, it's like, you know, you go grab your local sheriff or sheriff's deputy and say, hey, you know, how many mushrooms can I pull off of this burn on, you know, the Cibola National Forest?
I mean, that guy's going to look at you cross-eyed.
You know, ask him how many cords of wood you can go up and cut for your fireplace in the winter.
You know, the guy's not going to have a clue because it's not his job.
We were in Nevada, and we were on a mule deer hunt.
And, you know, you'd be stalking on a mule deer, and these fucking cows were everywhere.
I mean, everywhere.
I mean, if you were hunting cows, boy, you would be golden.
Like, dude, we're eating good tonight.
There's fucking cows everywhere.
But we were hunting deer, so you would have to get away from the fucking cows to get to the deer, and the cows would sometimes spook, and then the deer would realize that the cow saw something, and they would boing, boing.
So the, you know, we, the people, have these programs in place to where we lease that ground.
I would say more often than not, if not 100% of the time, far below market value to the rancher.
And it's right at first refusal.
So the first guy to say, hey, I want to graze my cattle on this property, his name is going to be on the lease until he doesn't want it anymore.
And it comes up for renewal.
And then, you know, there's rangeland biologists who go out and they say, this is how many days and how many, you know, animal cow-calf units can be grazed on this area for this long. animal cow-calf units can be grazed on this area for And doesn't that affect local wildlife as well?
Because I would assume if you're having your animals graze on this land, they're eating a lot of stuff that the deer would eat or maybe a lot of the other wildlife would eat.
Basically, our beef has replaced our bison, our buffalo.
There was a major grazer out there prior to the beef being out there.
Super dense grasslands are good for some things, but You know, oftentimes your upland birds need open areas for, you know, picking up scratch and it's better for the bugs and a number of reasons.
So when that system's respected and done well, it's good for everybody or can be good for everybody.
I'm sure you guys are aware of this whole American Serengeti project that they're trying to do in the Midwest of this country, in the middle of this country, which is really quite fascinating.
They're trying to buy up private land and turn it into what they think was essentially like what America was before people came here.
Where it used to be like giant herds of buffalo wandering through the land.
They want to recreate that.
And they're also going to open up block management on that, right?
So this is going to be an area like once it gets established and once there's populations of animals there, then people are going to be allowed to hunt those animals.
It's fascinating that they're doing this and buying up private land that's right now being used for whatever, and they're going to turn it into public land, and they're going to allow people to go there, and you're going to be able to see great herds of bison roaming through some of these states.
Yeah, I mean, they literally are trying to make more public land, which is kind of crazy.
What are they going to do about predators?
Are they going to bring in predators?
Are they going to bring in wolves?
Can you say that, Jamie?
Here we go.
Does the APR intend to reintroduce predators such as wolves, grizzly bears, which are historically present in the region?
As a private, non-profit organization, American Prairie Reserve does not have the authority to reintroduce species to the area, even if those species were historically present.
Species reintroduction falls under the jurisdiction of Montana Fish and Wildlife Parks and And or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and any decisions regarding the reintroduction of wolves or grizzlies in the region will need to be made by these agencies augmented by the will of the general public.
Every other year or so, they catch some loner, typically a young male grizz, way out in the prairie.
And it just looks like he's just kind of naturally getting funneled down to the Missouri Breaks.
Which, you know, is the historic range for them.
And somewhere along the way, he gets, you know, his hunger gets the best of them and he knocks over some sheep and that's kind of the end of them, but they're getting close.
This is a really controversial subject among sports people and also among wildlife people.
A lot of wildlife people completely support it.
They think it balances out the ecosystem and that the undulates like the elk and the deer were running rampant and they were destroying a lot of the grasses and the plants that would...
Like, provide homes for a lot of other animals, and this whole thing was kind of unbalanced.
Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did Supersize Me and a bunch of other documentaries, he created this.
Woo!
Rats, like, they're gross.
Everybody knows they're gross.
When they start pulling parasites, they catch a bunch of rats, start pulling parasites out, and they're like, well, this one will kill you if you have an open wound and this gets on you, you're fucked.
And they pulled a bot fly out of this one rat that was literally the size of its head.
It's just like this gigantic thing.
And then at the end of it, they kind of explain, like, one of the guys who's an exterminator explains how smart rats are and how much they adapt.
And what they'll do is if...
There's poison, or if there's traps, they literally, the smart rats, the older rats, will hang back, and they'll let a young, weaker rat go towards the food, and he gets his fucking head crushed by the trap, and they go, yep, I thought something was fucked up about that, let's get out of here.
And you never kill them all.
To be able to kill them all, the most effective method that they were using in this documentary was dogs.
So what it is, is the wildlife biologists, and this is a really controversial topic, because when they reintroduced wolves, there was a target population that they wanted to reach.
And they felt like we could reintroduce these wolves, and what's interesting is, they got them from Canada.
And the guy that trapped them, that the legend holds, he just found the nastiest, biggest, like, oh, you guys want to bring wolves?
Because in Canada, like, where I got this moose in BC, they have so many wolves that That Mike Hawkridge, my buddy who lives up there, one of his neighbors, took out a cow.
And, you know, they'll just get these big packs and they'll just fucking attack things.
We should go back to the quota thing, because this is kind of a pet peeve of mine.
I try to encourage everybody at the office to go to our local fish and game meetings and the town hall meetings and things that happen there in Ketchum, Idaho.
One of the arguments that came up was just so backwards, but it came from a place of...
I can see the logical sequence here, but typically if there's a really, really long hunting season on something...
It means that hunters are doing a really bad job of filling their tags.
And then they had shot like an alpha wolf and rubbed his scent and his glands all over the meat so that the other wolves knew that he had been there, so they thought it was okay to eat that stuff.
And so they would eat it, they would get the strychnine, and they would die, and it was a mass kill-off.
And the thing is, like, one of the hottest topics in our area was in the winter, especially a heavy winter right now, all your game animals get congregated in lower elevations typically on these south-facing slopes that get a lot of sun.
Heavy winters like we're experiencing right now, these animals are basically pushed into that farm and ranch country.
And those operators down there are feeding their winter livestock.
And the wolves and the coyotes are right in on top of everybody in calving seasons right now.
So then you get typically a very large mortality rate.
Yeah, mortality rate spikes because you got animals that are in distress and there's, you know, afterbirth from the birthing process everywhere.
You got easy pickings on the calves and hunters aren't knocking these numbers down.
So the state and, you know, Cattlemen's Association will go together and fund helicopter Gunning, so aerial gunning to go out there and shoot those animals.
The people are being told, there was an article about it recently, where people are being told to not fear the wolves that are in the streets of fucking Paris.
Because they're only looking for four-legged prey.
Like, these fucking people don't remember the story from the 1400s, this historical story where the people of Paris had to gather together with fucking spears and corner these wolves and kill them in the town square.
It's an amazing story.
You know, how much of it, you know, obviously when you're dealing with something from 1400, there's no, like, film, so we don't know how much of this is accurate, but it's a historical story that they had to kill a ton of wolves.
And I'm sure you guys know about the story from World War I. Yes.
The Russians and the Germans had a ceasefire because so many of them were getting killed by wolves in Russia.
They decided, let's go kill these fucking wolves and then we'll go back to killing each other.
I think, I mean, the populace at large, what they, I think, what could benefit the most from is there's people on extreme lovers and extreme haters, but in the middle, there is somewhere in the middle, there's a right thing to do.
And I think that the government definitely puts their best foot forward via scientists and whatever to figure out that balance, you know?
And I think that to say that, you know, we need to have You know, 10,000 wolves in Idaho is naive, because that would happen, for instance, if they were just let, you know, procreate at will.
So, you know, these people are trying to be good, right?
That's why they're culling them.
That's why, you know, that's why they reintroduced them to create a balance, you know?
You can go to Yellowstone, and I went this summer, and you go and see a herd of buffalo just chilling on this field.
And I was there with my kids, and I was giving them the binos, and they're staring at these buffalo, and they're only like 100 yards away.
And I'm like, this is amazing!
Like and and my kids are like those are wild like those are wild they go wherever they want and like that's like in their head like that's a wild that there's just giant furry fucking Star Wars beast yeah it's a wild animal never forget it they'll never forget it yeah I mean it was sinking in their head too that this is wild you know because it's one thing if you see something behind a fence and you go oh that's a cow you know we're at a farm that's a cow and I'm like no honey those things live in the woods they go wherever they want there's no boss no one tells them what to do they just do whatever they want Totally.
And that's the other thing, like with the number of trail cams that exist today in the woods, people put up to scout to try to find out where the animals are.
And then on top of that, the number of phones that people have that have cameras on them has gone through the roof, but the Bigfoot sightings have shrunk.
Like, the people that are pros, they'll pound booze, and then they'll have a fucking jug of water.
A buddy of mine drank with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and he said, this is like way back when Jean-Claude Van Damme was a big movie star, doing all these big movies.
You would just, you'd fall dead and everything would go, it's just the humble...
The feeling of humility and the feeling of insignificance is so overwhelming and unavoidable that it's just this intense realization of your peace, like where you are as a person, where you fit in in this grand, gigantic mandala of life.
That's so important to post, too, because you didn't waste an ounce of that meat.
You cut every, in between the ribs, you know, you were, I mean, and people were, like, commenting on that photo, like, that is the respect that you give an animal when you hunt it and you shoot it.
The thing is, yeah, you should take every single thing, but there are little things that get wasted.
And the rib meat chunks, especially later in the season when there's not a lot of fat on these animals, if it's going to take you some time to get out, that's the stuff that's going to get super dried out before you can even make something out of it.
There was this guy that was living with wolves, and he had these wolves sort of convinced that he was a wolf.
And he was a wildlife biologist and a wolf expert.
I forget where this was that he was doing it, but it was a whole documentary on it.
It wasn't Never Cry Wolf, was it?
I don't remember the name of it.
Unfortunately, maybe Jamie can find it.
But one of the things that this guy did was he would put a liver in a downed animal.
Like they would kill an animal, place it, put a liver in it, and he would eat the liver in front of the other wolves so that he would be the dominant male.
And where he got fucked up is, he had to leave, because he's a wolf expert, there was a farmer that was being inundated by wolves, so they had set up this whole way to keep the wolves away from this guy's property without killing them.
And one of the things that they did was they set up all these speakers, and they projected the sounds of these alpha wolves with these giant speakers.
So like, look, bitch, this new fucking king just moved into town.
Everybody get the hell away from these sheep.
And they set up these big-ass speakers all over, and it worked, but It took a long time to keep these wolves away, like a couple of months.
And so when he came back, there was a new alpha that had taken his place and he wanted to kill him.
And it's a horrific scene where this guy is standing there whimpering in front of this wolf and this huge wolf is in front of him baring his teeth.
And you're just thinking at any minute this wolf is just going to tear this guy's fucking face off.
That he established a friendship with this wolf when he was the alpha, to the point where it's going to accept the changing of positions, and he has to show no resistance to this change.
So it's a really critical moment in his fucking life, man.
Yeah, I was reading this article about bears in this one region of Alaska, where there's this salmon run, and we had a video of it where there's a guy, I'm sure you've seen the video, because it's a famous video, where this guy's sitting there, he's got a little lawn chair, and they're taking photographs of the bears, and this fucking...
Volkswagen bus with fur walks up to him and just hangs out.
And there's no danger.
There's no fear.
Because this bear is fat.
And there's salmon everywhere.
And as the guy pans away, he goes, get out of here, bear.
And that is one of the things that's sort of important to bring up when people are talking about wolves and predators and populations.
Like, you can't ensure that these things are going to have an adequate food supply, especially as their numbers grow higher and higher.
It's a really controversial subject.
I think the one thing that people don't understand from the outside, that really don't understand the whole idea of hunting predators, I feel like you really kind of have to be there.
I feel like you kind of have to like almost be Just really involved in that whole ecosystem.
It was earlier than that, all the way to, because I think, God, I think Roosevelt gave them Canada geese and the mallard duck in like 1905 or something like that.
How, you know, I feel like you should, I mean, this is totally ignorant on my part and very biased, but I feel like you should have to be in shape to kill something that lives up there.
When I see a fat guy that just figures out a way how to do it, I'm like, all right, fatso.
Yeah, that was one thing that I noticed when I did live up there for, it was only like for four months, but when I'd go down to sea level, I felt like I could fucking run through walls.
Yeah, I think they say that the best way to do it is actually to train at low altitude, but to live at high altitude.
Because you can put in more work.
So, like, you go down for the training.
Like, say, if you were next to Big Bear, you would drive down...
And then train at like, you know, wherever down there and then bust your ass in San Bernardino or whatever and then go back up the hill and sleep and eat and do all your stuff at high altitude.
So where your high workload is, like for the maximum efficiency of your training.
No, you drop your hands, you develop shitty skills, you start making errors in your technique, and those errors in your technique will manifest themselves under pressure.
So it's like, one of the things about fighting is it's super important that you do everything in training exactly how you would do it if your fucking life depended on it.
And if you don't, you're gonna pay a price.
Like, guys who slack off in training, They almost never become champions.
Unless you're some physical freak who can get away with it.
The reality is, in order to compete against like-minded people that are also phenomenally fit and motivated and understand the consequences of not being fit and motivated and well-trained, you have to do everything right.
And especially now, like MMA, you can get away with a lot.
When I started doing commentary in 1997, you could get away with a lot.
Because it wasn't...
Not a lot.
I mean, just the level of competition just was not the same as it is now.
But now the people are so good that the margin of error is so small.
The difference between victory and defeat is so small that it's just so much high-level activity going on in MMA fights that you can't fuck around in anywhere.
With your nutrition, with your recovery, with all the different things you're doing outside of training, like cryotherapy or floating or all these different things that people do.
Sauna.
That's another thing a lot of guys do.
All those different things are like hugely important because these little tiny edges, but also technique.
Like your technique has to be efficient and has to be correct so that in the heat of the moment, you never think of doing things wrong because you've never done anything wrong.
Every time you're training, you're doing things correctly and that might not even save you.
When you're dealing with world championship level, a division like the UFC's 170-pound division, a very competitive division, so competitive that the last title fight resulted in a draw.
And one of the first draws, there's only three draws in the history of the UFC in title fights.
So this fight lines up in a draw, and then there's a bunch of other guys fucking just straight killers waiting in the wings to have their shot at the title.
So on any given day, one of these guys might be able to beat one of those guys.
Like one of these guys comes in a little bit sick, has a little bit of a cold from training, or maybe they're breaking up with their girlfriend, their head's a little fucked up, which happens a lot.
It's just, I mean, it certainly would lower your testosterone a little bit.
But I mean, if you're fit and prepared, it might relax you where you get a good night's sleep.
You know, because that's one of the things about these guys is like anxiety, staying up late, you know, just trying to get your shit together, making sure you get a good night's sleep so you don't get sick.
Don't let the, don't be overwhelmed by the pressure of the moment.
Now, think about the anxiety of releasing a perfect arrow on a beautiful animal.
You know, there's a lot of anxiety involved in that.
And it's something that people on the outside...
I've heard people say ridiculous things when it comes to hunting, but one of the most ridiculous things that people have to say is, you know, there's no skill involved in that.
All you're doing is, you know, you're shooting a defenseless animal.
Like, do you...
You have no idea.
You don't know what you're talking about.
It's insanely difficult.
It's so difficult to keep your shit together in that moment.
And if you're a person who is compassionate and who understands the consequences of wounding an animal and what's at stake here, and the responsibility of making a perfect shot and a clean kill, it's a very anxiety-filled moment.
And I'll tell you right now, I've been around a lot of death.
Not necessarily by my hands, but doing the Gaiden gig and stuff like that.
I did not ever think I was susceptible to that anxiety of being behind the trigger because I'd been around it so, so much.
So what I'm trying to say is once you get that skill to be calm behind the trigger or on the string if you're releasing an arrow, it's not necessarily something that's going to stay with you.
But for people, for the uninitiated, which a lot of people listening to this are, the meat buck, you would think of like a young fork buck where it doesn't have big antlers.
So you're talking about, you're looking for a big, mature animal.
For sure with archery, like, the more you do it, the better you are.
Like, the way you take your arrow out of the quiver, the way you put it on the string, like, you want that to be to where if you are just gripped, right, it just happens.
Dealing with anxiety and having this pattern that you've carved so deeply into your mind and your body, your neurons, that your body just knows automatically.
When I was competing, there was moments where I did something where I didn't even know I did it, and it was over already.
I mean, you shoot one, like, maybe once a six months, you know, once a year if you're a busy person, if you're lucky.
Maybe you go a year and you don't even get a shot at one because maybe you get this one trip a year and, like, you know, you go somewhere and, like you were saying, you didn't see anything until you saw that fawn.
For those of you who don't know, this is like stepping into a place that you have never been before, you're not sure what's going on, and you whistle, and a six to eight hundred pound animal with Big chunks of sharp bone coming out of its head, and its dick slapping against its belly, spraying piss all over the place, wants to come in and either mount you from behind or beat the piss out of you.
Because he hasn't been unsuccessful on an archery hunt since 2009. And the guy goes many times a year.
Many times a year.
He pounds it.
But all the ultra-marathon running and all the weightlifting, all the crazy shit he does and constant practice with archery, he just, like, when the moments come, he's so dialed in.
He's so ready to go.
It's really, really impressive.
You know, I mean, I don't think people understand.
So when I see people on, like, his Instagram page going, it takes no skill.
You're looking at the one-tenth of one percent of all the hunters.
That's what that guy is.
He's the one-tenth of one percent of the hunters and he's out there being way more successful than anybody else doing something that's insanely difficult.
But to the uninitiated or the people that just have never experienced it, it looks like he's an animal-hating monster who's out there shooting God's beautiful creations.
And he's got this whole system that he's put together, and I actually paid for it and watched it.
Very good stuff, very well thought out, very interesting stuff, but a lot of it is on the mindset because he was training police officers.
He's training SWAT team members and how to keep it together in the middle of a firefight.
And he actually was talking in one of the interviews that I saw him in about...
A conversation that he had with a police officer that was in a firefight with a bad guy and heard his words and his instructions going through and executed correctly and did the right thing while this guy's shooting in his car window and glass is flying and bullets are flying at him and he stayed calm and killed this guy who was shooting at him.
This process of having a thing, like a mantra that you relay in your head that relates to a physical action and that you drill it in yourself so it's unavoidable.
You gotta, there's gotta be a thing in your brain that you can, like, press play on.
You know, and then once you do that, you could, like, there was an article that I read recently about, uh, it was about choking in sports.
And it was essentially, the article was essentially saying that what you have to do is figure out a process that removes your conscious mind from the equation.
Like, figure out a process of training where you know what to do.
Like, you have a basketball, someone's coming at you, you juke left, you go right.
You know how to do this.
You've done it so many times that this is just a natural reaction.
And get it to the point where you don't have to think about it, so you're not...
Overwhelmed by this moment and the anticipation of what if I fuck this up?
Oh my god, so many people are watching.
What happens here?
What if I do that?
And you'll see those moments where people just lock up and they panic.
They would have a bone ring that they would wear around their thumb.
And that's what would fit on the groove of the string.
So they'd hook the string with their thumb and then close their index finger over it.
And they would draw back like this.
And according to Dan Carlin, if you've never heard this before, if you've heard me rant about this before, I'm sorry, just ignore me for a moment.
There's an amazing podcast series called Hardcore History.
It's by this guy who's a friend of mine.
His name is Dan Carlin.
He's this genius historian who's so good at relaying this.
He'll say he's not a historian.
He definitely is.
He's a super humble guy.
But he's so good at relaying Information in an entertaining and dramatic fashion and he has a series called The Wrath of the Khan.
And it's a five-part series.
You have to pay for it now, but it's like a dollar an episode.
It's so worth it.
It's worth a hundred times more than that.
But it's a five-part episode on the Mongols.
And he said that their bows were like a 160-pound draw.
They were just these sinewy fucking savages that were incredible archers.
They had developed this ability to release the arrow as the horse was in its gallop.
So when the horse was in the air, when there wasn't a disturbance, so they would time the release of the arrow to when the horse was actually in the air.
They had it, like, down.
And they had a thumb ring, and that's how they would draw back.
So not with your fingers like most people do.
They would draw back with the thumb, loop the index finger over the thumb, and for some reason...
And then you throw your finger over the top of that thumb ring, and your thumb pushes back on it, and your index finger closes over the top of your thumb.
You know, the idea is you don't ever pull the trigger.
You lock in, you pull in place, you put your thumb over the trigger.
Then once you're in place, you concentrate on the muscles that are in the center of your back and you pull those and the release goes off and you get a surprise shot.
So the idea behind that is there's never a moment when you're like, now!
And you punch it and then you move the arrow or you move the bow.
Did I get it?
All that shit is out of your head.
Because all you're doing in the shot process is pulling and concentrating on those muscles in the center of your back and your scapula and contracting those.
And as you do that, the release just goes off because your thumb is pressing against that trigger.
But you have to resist that urge that everybody has.
So that's the difference between John Dudley's approach versus Joel Turner's approach.
Joel Turner has the same approach and even talks about it when it comes to compound bows of using a thumb trigger of pulling and letting the shot go off But Dudley, he thinks that you should start off using a tension-based release, which the way that works is you actually hold the safety, you hold the trigger until you lock in place.
Then once you're ready to execute, you release the safety and all it takes is like a couple extra pounds of pulling and it goes off.
Yeah, so it's like a Carter Evolution, or he has one that he makes called the Silverback, that is a two-finger version of the Carter Evolution, so he feels like the least amount of fingers that you have on it, the least amount of tension.
I mean, this is the point to try to, people are like, what the fuck are you rambling about?
What I'm trying to rambling about is this thing is insanely complicated.
So to the people that look at this and say, oh, there's no skill involved, and oh, you're just killing this defenseless animal, it is the most difficult way to get your food.
But frankly, the simplicity of it is so appealing, you know what I mean?
It's fantastic, right?
Versus setting everything up and Plus, you know, you get to a point where a modern compound bow, if you practice a lot, meaning for years, right, you'll get to 90 yards, to where you are proficient all day.
It's not really that ethical for most people to shoot at 90 yards, but it is for a guy like John Dudley, or, you know, a guy like Cameron Haynes, because they do it all day, every day.
But the thing is, is that after a while you get to the point where...
I don't want to shoot something at 50 yards.
I want to shoot my next elk at 15 yards.
You know what I mean?
So I think that's largely it.
And I think, without a doubt, in the past three years, I've become way better at hunting.
I mean, Cal's killed a bull both years with his trad.
I missed a nice bull two years ago.
But it's just hard.
And if nothing else, you're going to get way better at hunting in the sense that you're going to hunt more because you're not going to kill shit.
At first, right?
But, you know, having to go from, let's just say, 80 is a max yard, and I don't want to get into the argument about distance, but let's just say that was, you know, your max, max on a perfect situation.
Even people that have no desire whatsoever to hunt, even if you're a lifelong vegetarian, you're never going to eat meat, just go shoot a bow and arrow at a target.
It's like you're not necessarily I don't you have to concentrate but at the same time It's like taking a nap or something you go shoot for 20 minutes 30 minutes and you're done.
You're like, okay What was I thinking about before?
Oh, I love to do it when I've got like a business issue I'm dealing with or Something I'm trying to like sort out in my mind.
I just go out my yard I got a big rubber elk out there at 85 yards and I'll just start shooting that sucker and And you don't think about nothing but that shot.
You just center that pin, try to stay calm, relax your hand, let the bow go off.
It was crazy, but to Cal's point, the beauty was that it was hanging up out at 50 yards for five minutes, and that would have been the end of that experience, right?
I would have not had that same experience.
And then it comes up, and to Cal, it licked you, basically, right?
I've tried to talk to people who have never done anything.
Like, what's it like?
You see things?
You see pretty colors?
Is it really worth it?
You can see God.
You just got to take enough.
Like, yeah, you can definitely see colors.
But, I mean, just saying those words to people.
And then, you know, you talk to somebody about it.
And then, like, a year later, they go, dude, I did it.
Whoa.
Like a buddy of mine recently just did DMT and he had talked about it for a long time and then he finally did it and then he just sent me a text message.
He texted me after it was over because he had been thinking about doing it forever.
And then it's one of those things like unless you do it, whatever I say, the words that I'm using to describe, they're just not going to work.
I think that's the case with so many experiences in life.
Like try to describe being in love to someone who's never been in a relationship.
There's no way.
You could never do it.
You can never explain the love of your children to someone who doesn't have kids.
What is this, like the way I love my dog?
Oh, man.
Figure it out.
It's like, you know, and I think certain intense experiences in life, like hunting, or just even forget the hunting.
I mean, just being in the woods, like attempting to hunt an animal is an insane, almost psychedelic experience.
It's one of the things that I describe to people the first trip that we went to the Missouri Breaks when I shot that deer.
When I locked eyes with that animal, For the first time, and I was sitting on a pack looking down the scope of this rifle, and I was looking at this animal, and then I look at this animal through this rifle scope, and he's looking at me.
I was like, this is a weird life form that's living in this very barren and desolate place where there's no people for miles.
And I'm locking eyes with this thing and it was oddly psychedelic.
It was oddly like paradigm shifting.
Like the moment was so intense and weird.
I was like, wow, I didn't expect this.
Like this is, this is like, I mean, I'm feeling like, cause this thing is looking at us.
I'm feeling that this thing is thinking like, what are you?
And because you do look at things in a much different way.
And, you know, kind of the point of talking about all this public land stuff is that I do feel like people who hunt and fish carry a big load of this burden, right, through the taxes that we pay.
That are taxes that if you don't hunt or fish, you don't pay them.
And we've highlighted that on the show, the actual amount of it.
We've showed, like, from the Rocky Mountain Elf Foundation, their Instagram page.
They have a really good Instagram page that has a bunch of different examples of different states of the sheer volume of money that comes in because, directly because, of hunting and fishing.
And it's staggering.
It's in the billions.
And it is by far above and beyond anything else, by far, The largest amount of conservation money that comes into this country.
In that sense, this system that we have here with public land and with using these tax dollars to pay for all the wildlife biologists, to pay for the fish and game, to pay for the population management.
But, you know, you are taking a trail, an established trail, and you're covering miles and you're getting to your goal, and maybe you're snapping a picture or spending a night, and then you're coming back on that trail, or maybe it's a different trail.
Whereas, you know, a hunter is...
As soon as you step away from the truck and are out the trailhead, you are plotting your own course.
You're making your own moves, and it is a totally different experience.
Now, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on is to really sort of discuss this public land issue and also to allow people to understand what's at stake and to give them options to look into and different resources that they can check in on, like backcountry hunters and anglers.
Yeah, back country hunters and anglers.
I can't say it.
My mouth starts shutting down after two hours these days.
But what they're doing is amazing, highlighting what this is and how important this is.
What are the other things that people can do if they want to look into this stuff?
Yeah, so BHA is Big Loud Voice, and I think they're one of the best groups out there right now to really just raise awareness on public lands and access issues.
Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership does a phenomenal job.
But, man, if you're buying beef or lamb off the grocery store shelf, those grazing permits that we talked about, a lot of that happens on federally managed lands, whether it's BLM or Forest Service ground.
And the thing is, this is nonpartisan, again.
And one of the things that ticked me off about old Jason Chavez on HR 621 is he said, hey, you know, this started under Obama.
And use social media, because social media is an amazing tool, and that's what killed HR 621. It was directly killed by social media, and it was killed quick.
It was killed in a couple of weeks.
You know, the pressure that they faced from guys like me posting it to 1.8 million people on Instagram, 1.5 million people on Facebook.
3 million or whatever the fuck it is on Twitter like all those people add up and then those people to find out about it they jump in and they realize that this is a this is a This it's a really important issue.
It's a giant issue and Rinello always points out that he's and by the way Rinello wrote a great article about all this and about how Killing HR 621 is just one battle in the overall war and we're not there's no not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination and that articles available right now if you go to His Twitter it's on I think it's on meat eater.com Is that where it is?
Yeah, but no, that's not that's one but there's one that I tweeted today and This is the one from January 20th.
There's one that I tweeted today that he just recently wrote.
And he calls himself a political eunuch because he's like, look, he goes, the Republicans want to sell off the land and the Democrats want to take away your guns.
He's like, I don't know where the fuck to go, you know, in that sense.
I mean, so if you look at the state land example, right, these state lands are there to make money for the states, and like we said, state gets in trouble, they sell those lands.
Oh, he had just panic, fear of God put into him because he had this realization that he's like, oh my God, the entire reason I am who I am today is because I had this opportunity to go out and chase animals.
And if I saw a horizon line, I could go over the top of it because nobody owned it.
Well, a lot of people don't understand that in many countries that's not really possible, and that's actually the story of Robin Hood.
The story of Robin Hood wasn't really about stealing from the rich and stealing their money and giving it to the poor.
It was about hunting lands.
Stealing food.
Yeah, it was about the king did not let anyone hunt.
In the kingdom's hunting lands.
And Robin Hood was like, fuck you.
And he went out there and he was shooting deer and getting people food because people were starving.
And that is something that we can do here in America.
It's one of the reasons why you get so much hate mail from Europe.
You got a lot of hate mail from places where they don't have recreational hunting.
To them, they don't even understand.
And they're eating steak.
They're eating steak.
My wife got in an argument with one of her friend's husbands where she was saying that I was on a hunting trip.
And this guy was eating a steak.
Carving a steak.
Literally, they're at dinner.
And he's like, well, that's deplorable.
That's deplorable.
He hunts animals?
You don't have to do that.
And she's like, you're eating a steak.
She's like, well, these animals are farmed animals.
She goes, well, don't you think that that animal lived a horrific existence and then finally was killed?
You think that's better than someone just out of nowhere, you're hiding behind a bush making cow calls and you blast an arrow through the heart of some wild beast and then take that thing down off the mountain.
You have the experience, you have the food, you also have this wild encounter.
With this magnificent beast that you have this connection to that every time you eat, like every time I eat a steak off of that elk, I think about the experience of hunting that thing.
I think about seeing it.
I think about cutting it up and carrying it out of there.
The whole thing about it is all connected.
Loading it into the truck, hoisting it up.
The whole thing is in my mind every time I cut into the meat.
I mean, that's the other experience on public lands.
There is...
It's just...
We talk about this at length all the time, and Kenton's got this, like, knicker analogy, and we're walking around SHOT Show, and there's this European hunting company down the road, and he stops me, and he's like, Hey, Cal.
It's like, we lose all this land, this is what we're gonna be making.
Private lands where they release pheasants out of the back of a truck.
And that does happen, folks.
There's a thing called pheasant shoots, European pheasant shoots, and they literally release these birds, and the birds fly away, and guys stand there with guns, waiting for them to release from their cage and shoot them.
That's how Dick Cheney shot his friend.
Remember that?
People don't remember that story.
He shot his friend in the fucking face.
And that was a canned hunt, where they just open, they literally open a can, the birds fly out, and they wait, and boom, and shoot them.
On our side, we are constantly, like, analyzing our clothing and analyzing our days, and we're getting, to be totally truthful, man, life at First Light's pretty freaking good, man.
We get to spend a lot of days in the woods, way more than your average Joe gets to, and...
Yeah, and it's a real trial and error thing where you're taking these super experienced guys.
And when you said some guys are public, some guys are not, what you mean is some guys have public profiles and some guys, they just stay under the radar and just...
And I mean, everything gets thoroughly tested, and that's the fun part.
But the amazing thing about us, and one of the things that I love, is we get interns and people from all across the country that have sometimes very little experience.
And sometimes their input is the most valuable experience.
You know, you get to take stuff from all different sports, whether you're, you know, riding your bike or whether you're backcountry skiing.
Like, a lot of that stuff crosses over, you know, and I think that allows us to round things out nicely.
Yeah.
Hunting is quite different than hiking, right?
Hiking, people want to build the lightest thing they can build that can do whatever.
Hunting is totally different.
You're off the trail.
You're going through bushes.
You kind of have to throw that lightest thing out the window.
You more have to approach it of like, how heavy can I actually build this and have it still work well?
Because it's going to get thrashed.
You know what I mean?
So you've got to approach it from kind of a different shift and how, you know, when you build stuff, it needs to be versatile, right?
Like you can't have, you know, I don't know, the equivalent would be like having a guy that was a construction worker and he's got an eight-penny nail and he's got a 16-penny nail.
Does he have an eight-penny hammer and a 16-penny hammer?
It's like, no, you need to be able to do everything with You know, a certain amount of stuff because you're going out in the woods and, you know, you might be walking slow.
You might be stopping.
You might be going uphill.
You might be going downhill, you know, and it just allows...
Texas is a great example of what could possibly happen if we lost public lands.
Because Texas is weird.
I love Texas.
Don't get me wrong.
I love the state.
I love the people.
It's one of my favorite places on Earth.
But Texas hunting is very strange.
There's a lot of it that's high fence and a lot of it is like over feeders.
They have like these feed machines and these animals come to the feed machines and they're overrun with wild pigs and then they have these fucking weird African animals that you can hunt anytime you want.
I mean, there's a bit from my last special, but it's true.
There's more tigers in captivity in Texas than there are in all of the wild of the world.
20,000 privately owned big cats, including tigers, lions, and cougars, currently living in captivity in the U.S. The exact number is unknown due to insufficient record keeping.
See, Texas has completely different laws when it comes to wildlife.
Wildlife in Texas is not—it's private property.
It's a whole different situation.
I mean, they have tags when it comes to, like, white-tailed deer and indigenous species, but when it comes, and who knows if even the white-tails are indigenous there.
I mean, they're bringing them in from farms, so they have bigger racks.
Texas is a very odd place, but what I wanted to highlight is, man, you don't want that to be the only way you can get a hunting experience, because Texas is fucking weird.
It's like a clicky little weird thing where they're on teams.
Like, hey, there's no goddamn teams.
I had a conversation with one of the Sitka, Harrison, Jason Harrison, who found Nakuyu, started out with Sitka, and then they pushed him out and they bought it out, and now the Sitka guys and the Nakuyu guys don't get along.
It's a cool system in that, you know, generally speaking, you go to a few different shows, like the Outdoor Retailer and whatever, and you get to see all the best stuff, right?
Like, whether it be from, you know, Patagonia.
Fabrics, zippers.
Yeah, everything.
And, you know, you get to build the best thing you can build.
And there's, like, you know, a couple few companies...
That literally, like us, that cost is kind of no object.
I mean, it's way down the list.
And I wish we're making things as cheap as we can, and that's still expensive.
But it's a fun thing to be able to make the best you can make, right?
And some people might, you know, say, oh, our stuff's better because we, I don't know, whatever.
Yeah, no, but they're, you know, they're into their extreme sport, you know, they're skiers and mountain bikers, and, you know, inevitably, it's like, you know, there's a jump built or something, and first thing that gets called is, you know...
But it was funny because they'll heckle each other.
You know, they're boys.
They, you know, want to get after, you know, some nasty, gnarly-ass, you know, jump or whatever on their bikes, and somebody's got to guinea pig it, and sure enough, it's probably the one that got called a pussy first, right?
Well, for me, when Donald Trump, that whole story came out, it was great, because then all of a sudden everybody, so many people are saying pussy.
And it seems like this country is, like, backing...
We had gotten to some weird politically correct phase just in the last couple years where people are so mad...
That so many different groups are so mad at the way our culture is that there was all these words that you weren't allowed to say anymore.
And there was all these new things like, you're not allowed to wear sombreros because it's cultural appropriation.
They were getting mad at people for cooking other cultures dishes.
Like, people got so politically correct that, like, the good thing about Donald Trump being in office is that I said that political correctness just took a missile to the dick.
Because, like, that guy as the fucking commander-in-chief, man, that political correctness shit, it's like, it doesn't seem very effective.
It didn't work here.
Like, you can't, you can't, and people are fighting it, of course, and rallying and protesting and all that jazz.
But the good thing about it, it's like, you realize, like, oh, that's just a word.
Pussy is just a word.
And that guy was saying pussy.
Now he's the president.
It's not really this taboo word that summons demons.
It's just a word.
And it's intent that's important.
It's not demonizing words and making these words impossible to say because we've made them...
There's certain words now that you just can't say in our culture.
Or people get upset at you.
That were real common, like retard.
You call someone a retard.
You're not saying someone has a disease.
You're saying someone's a fucking knucklehead.
Oh, that guy's retarded.
You know the intent of that word.
But people are saying, no, don't say that anymore.
That's offensive.
Well, the more you create offensive words, and the more you create words that you're not allowed to say them, the more you're going to give those words power.
Competition is not a bad thing, and there's no more primal competition than you trying to go out and get your own food that's running around trying to stay alive.
And what do you have?
You've got a pointy stick you're trying to shoot through.
Yeah, I took them when they were just so little that they just pizza'd down the, like when they had the little connector with the two skis and they just slide.
Yeah, kids are, you know, it's an amazing thing to have a little person that you're raising and you get to see them learning things for the first time, which will never happen again.
You know, everything they learned for the first time, like the first time they went skiing, I remember this look on their face, like, they got the mittens on, like, this is crazy!
I got a helmet on, whoa!
They're so happy and excited, like, there's never gonna be a first like that again.
And the more firsts you can have in this life, I think the better and more rich your life will be.
The more first experiences, the more times you can learn things.
And people Get locked into these patterns in their life and I don't know why it happens and I don't know what causes it but We get a job and we get a career and we get a path in a neighborhood and that's boom and then the first stop There's no more firsts and then it becomes the same shit over and over again life becomes mundane and life becomes tired and It's how you grow old, right?
In a lot of ways, other than aging.
But the other thing that happens is you realize that this is what's going on, and then you seek novelty.
You seek new experiences.
And hopefully, that's what happens to more people more when they listen to podcasts like this, and they hear you guys talk about your experiences, and they say, God damn it, I need some of that in my life.
You know, I need to just go fucking camp.
I need to just go out there.
I need to wake up and hear...
Bulls bugling.
You know, I need to, like, wake up and hear birds that I don't recognize chirping and squawking and look over the ridge and see a bear.
I'm like, whoa, what the fuck is it?
That's a wild bear.
He's just hanging out, chilling, doing bear stuff.
Like, all that stuff is, like, having new experiences like that, it's just giant for your life.
And again, if you're not into hunting, you don't even want to go, just try archery.
Jamie, cue up some elk bugle, because for people who've never heard it before, they don't know what the fuck we're talking about, you live in a city somewhere, you poor bastard, it sounds like an animal from the Lord of the Rings.
Man, every time I've been elk hunting, and I've been elk hunting a few times now, you see one, and you hear it, and just your whole body, like, tingles.
It's like, whoa, what a magical experience just to be around those things.
Most people didn't even know that that was a real thing.
They know that we killed off all the buffalo, but they don't really understand that back in the day before refrigerators, you know, you got to get meat, like, pretty much then.
There's a great description on market hunting in the Chesapeake Bay.
guys going out with low-profile boats with cannons on them, stuffing them full of shards of nails and stuff.
And they'd go up to these big rafts.
When ducks and geese sleep in the middle of the night on big bodies of water, they all get huddled up together.
This is in the Chesapeake Bay, but it happened in the Great Lakes also.
Big rafts of birds.
And you would push off in the middle of the night, sneak up really slowly on these big rafts of sleeping birds and touch this cannon off, shoot this cannon.
And that's how the Chesapeake Bay Retriever was basically bred into existence, was they needed a big hardy dog that could withstand cold water.
This dog would spend hours never getting back in the boat, but just constantly retrieving for hours.
And people would try to keep them cool, and then people would try to buy them as quick as they could before they spoiled, and then they'd have to go right back out and do it again.
And that process resulted in just a devastation on the wildlife in this country.
And that's one of the major issues that, you know, we're seeing in Idaho is they want to, and with some of this auction tag stuff, is we're starting to put a dollar amount on our game.
So like right now, let's say in the state of Idaho, we could all put in, you know, a thousand people put in for four elk tags in a prime unit, the unit that grows the biggest bulls.
Well, in order to raise more funds, they've started to remove one of those tags and auction them off.
So that's putting whatever we could all put in for $30 for the remaining three elk, But if we choose to, we can all try to bid on each other for that fourth tag.
So if there's a limited amount of tags, people have to realize that your chances of drawing that tag are probably pretty slim unless you build up points.
Every year you build up a certain amount of points and that makes it more likely that you're going to draw a tag.
So people that don't understand the process.
So one person, they'll take one tag and they'll put it off and they'll allow it to be auctioned off.
And sometimes they'll go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One school of thought is, look how much money is going to conservation because this one rich asshole that wants to spend $400,000 to kill a bighorn sheep.
Well, that might help, but is it really going to get you the hundreds of thousands of dollars for that one tag?
I mean, it seems like without burdening the regular sportsman who doesn't want to spend, like, didn't Montana, like, significantly raise their tags, the price of their tags recently?
And these sheep are suffering from diseases that are coming from domestic sheep, so they're trying to figure out a way to breed a domestic sheep that doesn't catch this disease so that they can reintroduce healthy sheep into these areas and not have them be infected by these different diseases that they get from.
Do you remember Kit Fisher was on that hunt with us in the breaks?
He was rowing one of the boats.
He works for National Wildlife Federation, and that's what he does, is he does conflict mitigation, basically.
So he identifies those grazing allotments.
And most of them are on public land.
And he identifies the conflict of grazing allotments mostly for bighorn sheep that could put domestic sheep that could potentially be carrying diseases in contact with these wild sheep herds.
So he's looking to, you know, typically pay the rancher that has that grazing allotment.
Fair market value for that grazing allotment, and he just turns it back over to the U.S. Forest Service.
And that's a real issue with buffalo, right, with wild bison, because there's two schools of thought, and there's one school, it's about brucellosis, and that brucellosis will somehow or another be transmitted from the bison to cattle.
But apparently a lot of people say that that's kind of a bullshit argument because it's really about the bison eating up all the grazing land and forcing out the domestic cattle so they're using the brucellosis as an excuse to say that this is the reason why we need to kill off the bison and get them out of the way.
Like, I would much rather have bison out there than, like, let's raise funds through sportsmen or recreationists than digging a big pit in a beautiful spot.
Yeah, I don't know if that's going to cover it though.
It's not.
The Dakota pipeline, like what they're talking about there, it's just like, I mean, the amount of money that's going to come from that is just staggering.
And so the amount of pressure that's involved in making something like that go through is also pretty staggering.
It is.
But it's dangerous, you know, and what the disaster that could take place is, you can't put a price on it.
Because what could be done, if they ruin a river system, if somehow or another this gas line breaks and you have oil flooding a river system the same way they had that BP oil rig disaster out in the Gulf, God, could you imagine?
Yeah, you know, and nobody wants to be able to light your toilet water on fire either.
You ever see this fucking Gasland documentary where it's coming right out of the tap and the guy sticks a lighter to it and his fucking water's on fire and people are like, well, they've always been able to do that.
That's always been the case.
Not with these fucking people!
With these fucking people, it's directly related to fracking.
There's all these apologists for that stuff.
It's like, how many fucking earthquakes do they need to have in Oklahoma before you go, hey, um, is this okay?
You guys have a thousand earthquakes a year now.
Is that cool?
Like, yeah, as long as it's under a thousand.
We're looking at, you know, as long as we only pollute like three or four wells a year.
Do you know, they did a study that showed there's a direct correlation between the amount of footsteps people take per minute and the population that they're in.
And also, the faster they talk, if the population is higher, they will say their syllables faster.
I hope we illuminated a lot of these issues with people and fuck HR 622. Yes, sir.
And any bills like it.
And we need to do the same thing we did to 621. We need to do that to 622 and contact that guy and start the whole campaign all over again because you just can't remove the resources that are going to protect those lands.