Chances are if you're living on this planet and have access to a television, you've probably been exposed to some Hollywood version of the survival genre that pits man against nature as though nature is some mean bastard that's best avoided, like fretting about mountain lions while you drink your own pee. The reality is most survival stuff is produced for entertainment, and that's about it. Maybe it's fun to watch, but much of it is nothing more than a good way to make a bad situation worse.

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You've seen this cook up some pretty wild stuff here at Meat Eater, like whether we're experimenting with deer heart, making our own sausage or rendering down some bear fat or in one case, even snake oil fat to make a bit of tallow. We are passionate about what we cook and how we cook it. And we know that not everyone has access to these odd cuts materials. So we decided to hook up with Port Road and give you a chance to join in the fun.

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You can't predict anything presented by Onex Hunt. Creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Know where you stand with Onex. When I was a kid, I took out a hit on a beaver.

The show started this. The show might as well be started. You guys cool if it's started already? Yeah, there was a drain in my home. Township. Do they have townships where you live? No, I was I was going to make a comment about that, that I'm not I don't understand townships.

Spencer, do you come from township? Country? I own many of plot books where by the time I was like 17 years old, I feel like I I knew every township I was in without looking at one.

Yeah. So a township is six by six miles. It's very common. Square miles. Yeah. Very common in the Midwest to have townships and then.

There's a small amount of government is run out of the township. So most townships you look at be like 30, so it's 36 square miles, one of those square miles, the state school trust land, you know.

Hmm, and that's how it works. So are we had our township had a drain commissioner. I understand now the drain commissioner there is very the drain commissioner in my home township, which is Dalton Township, is very controversial, sort of maybe the county commissioner either way.

You have a drain commissioner, the drain commissioner would. Hire me to. Get problem beavers out of the drain system. Hmm. One time I was working this beaver and it was in the summertime. And shot, it sank. And I went told them, I said, man, you know, I can't really present it to you because it sank and you paid me my 25 bucks anyways. You think about that. That's that's honorable, I'd say that's like a hat tip to the trapper, kind of honorable.

Mm hmm. I think that guy's name now.

Merle, his name is Merle. Not haggard. I was just going to say I think he'd do the same now, Haggard, do you think he'd give the money to you now or.

I'd be pretty shocked to hear he's alive right now. So. No, no, he just. No way. I do live still. Nice guy.

So I hope you guys are reading The New York Times recently. If you see a Wolf article in The New York Times, you can virtually guarantee that it'll be. Something about just how nice wolves are, you know, in The New York Times, there's an article in The New York Times.

It's kind of a collision of two things I'm super interested in, because the article, the name of the article is this using Wolds as first responders against a deadly brain disease.

And it's saying it's talking about how these researchers are in Yellowstone are taking a look at whether. Wolves. Because they have a magical ability, you know, everyone who's watched them never cry wolf knows that they have an uncanny, magical ability to sniff out disease and kill diseased animals, that wolves all it will take to stop Qud as wolves because they are going to eat all the cedarwood positive.

Dear, so they're studying this. In Yellowstone, article goes on and on. You know, I'll give them this, like I'll give them this, I think is interesting to watch. If you could ever read to ask my brother if you could do this, because this is kind of like he sort of specializes in, like designing studies and statistics and stuff like that, but. If you could ever see, like, does the spread of chronic wasting disease, which is a deer and elk, it's like a deer family version for you folks at home.

It's a deer. It's a service, so dear old news, Cariboo, you know, retail and yielder, right? It's the scrapie or mad cow disease version. It's a dear old version of that of scrappier mad cow disease. It's a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. And it's spreading very rapidly all around the country, its main spread, this is going to tell you a controversial statement right now. OK, after Darren's not listening. No, because no. It's the big spreads that have happened around as they come out, say this, the captive Servet industry, the captive deer industry has done a mighty lot, done a mighty lot to help get spread around.

Even a bunch of money that is now way off on the often the Wolf thing. Let me lay out the seedbeds deal a little bit. First, Cedarwood. There's no evidence that it passes to humans, I know humans gotten it. They even have this group of people. They have a group of like 100 some people that all eight would unknowingly etsi W.D. infected meat at some kind of fundraiser.

And then I don't remember the bulk of them all voluntarily submitted themselves for annual testing and none of them have gotten it.

Tens of thousands of American hunters have eaten seaweed.

Positive meat never jumps that don't even care.

Do you tell them tell them how little you care about eating it. I don't care at all. Let me ask you this, Seth. If I may, let's say I, I went to Doug's house, yeah, and I got a bunch of the I went to the wherever they. Do the testing. Mm hmm. And I said, I want a bunch of those positive deer brains. OK, and I made a burger in which I took 10 seaweed's positive deer, you know, in ground up their meat and put some of the brain in there and put some of the spinal column tissue in there.

And made a burger, would you eat that burger? Well, I don't I don't eat the brains and spinal column anyway. OK, let's say I leave and I'll eat the burger. Really? Yeah. See, that's how I test to see WD Denyer. I used to be Denyer. You just all think it's could jump to humans. No, I believe in Cedar Rapids 1000.

You said that it's a disease. Absolutely. And it's spreading around. Yep. But you take precautions to not spread it around. And, you know, I don't deny that shit at all.

But when it comes to human health, like, you're not worried that you're going to be the dude that gets it. No, no. There seems to be like a direct correlation between how many people you're feeding in your family and like, how serious you take seaweed. Oh, absolutely. I just. How big is your family?

I mean, me and my girlfriend that who's probably who is emerging as the best wildlife artist in America to tell her about her name, Kelsey Johnson. Tell him her handle, OK, Ray Jones is a better check to make sure that's, you know, emerging.

Did you hear what I'm saying, Clay? Emerging as probably America's greatest wildlife artist.

I've seen some of her stuff. It's cool. It's cool stuff.

I have a pronghorn picture of hers hanging up in my house is by himself.

Carry Artwork's dotcom. Spell it for everybody. Hey, Ari, artwork's dukkha yo, check it out, says girlfriend anyway.

That's exactly the burger. That's how I test whether someone that's like people who say seedbeds no big deal. I need to get a batch of these burgers. So when I when someone says, oh, well, not that worry about see, I can fry them up one of my cedarwood burgers.

If they eat it, then I'm like, dude, I believe everything you say or I believe that you believe everything you say, if they pause, then I'm like.

We got a problem. Yeah, I think I mean, go ahead. I want to go back. So we're such a great artist. We're in a seedbeds zone here in Arkansas. We're in one year. Yeah. And I was just going to say, I'm in some ways with Seth, like, I'm not that worried about it. And that is displayed to me because I have not had my dear tested, which I'm.

Then you're feeding your kids. I do. And I'm not necessarily proud of that. But we've been eating there from this region for 20 years. I mean, my kids have grown up with it. So my point is, is that if we if we start I mean, we've already had it pretesting. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. So I'm going to start making a habit of getting there tested.

But we never have, you know, Bubley doctor and. He gets irritated when people say that, like if you were to say toad to dog. I don't care about TWD because I'm not worried about catching Cedarwood Dog feels you're missing the point. Right, because as prevalence goes up, it's always fatal, like you don't know, deer survives IWD. As prevalence goes up, you're going to have population wide impacts and he feels some people can test this dog, feels it's beginning to happen, and you're going to see that in these areas that have 75, you know, and climbing.

Infection rates that you're going to get to, where you're going to see population crashes. Dying from Cedarwood, and also you're not going to have old mature box because deer don't live long enough. Because I killed a positive deer this year, you eat it, no good plan, man. Well, at the time I offered it up to anybody on the editorial team and nobody took it. I was even offering it to people for them to feed their dogs with.

And nobody took it to feed a dog.

Yeah, Afghani guy.

I offered it to Yenny and it was a hard no, he wouldn't feed it to his dog.

My dog Jani also brought up a good point that if he were to feed it, he was dog and ignored the potential health thing. His dog would then go shout it out in his yard and be spreading seedbeds all over his property, which I can respect that stance. That's a good point.

You know what's funny about this article back back to the article here, so it's like this article where it's, you know. You know, tomorrow there'll be an article like Wolves actually help bring more rainbows, you know, if we had more wolves, we have more rainbows there, never just like a large, wild canine in their eyes, a magical creature.

And so they're doing this thing. And I am interested to see, like like I'd be interested to see if she would spread Slowes in places that have high wolf densities.

This thing goes on and on.

Like the saying, like this could be a reason why we should reintroduce more wolves around the country because they'll sniff out the seaweed and they finally give a fish and game guy.

They give a chief of the wildlife division of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. They give them like at the end of the article, they throw him a bone and give them a. Quote, He expresses doubts that walls would prevent chronic wasting disease. He says wolves help remove sick animals. But animals don't get visibly ill for about two years, so they are carriers and spreaders, but they don't get the symptoms. And to counter this, they go on and say that the Miss Brandle, who's involved with this research, goes on to say that that these magical walls just use magical, said that wolves may detect the disease long before it becomes apparent to people.

Hmm. Through smell like kibbie, like a cancer dog, be like those dogs, that deer smells like it's got Cedarwood. I'm going to go I'm automatically thinking about the welfare of the wolves, man, I mean, we won't we won't feed this stuff to our kids, but we will feed it to these majestic wolves.

You see what I'm saying? Like, no concern for the wolves here.

Yeah, but wolves always get like I listen, Marigot. I like wolves. I like seeing wolves. I've seen wolves tracks. I like wolves. I like to see wolves get restored. I like to also be, like, realistic about it. And not do all the the hyperbolic B.S. that people do to like to to proselytize wolves. And that's hard for people like they have a phenomenal marketing engine behind them. Now is as good a guide dog article, that article feels an awful lot like the one that The New York Times ran in like twenty eighteen about letting mountain lions eat the feral horses.

And that'll be the solution to the problem. Do you remember that?

Yeah. And did you ever hear Carl Malcolm, the terror that we try to get that right around the podcast? You wouldn't come on the podcast.

Carl wrote a Carl Rove, a scathing critique of that article, who's a professional biologist.

You know, he wrote a scathing critique of that article, but the Times didn't publish it because their rebuttals are generally very short. And Carl had all these statistics to point out areas where some of the highest mountain lion densities overlap with some of the highest Wildhorse densities and also laid out a lot about how mountain lions use the landscape.

In a way that wouldn't it all be beneficial to killing off horses like where they hunt, where they occupy, isn't where horses go.

It was just an asinine and asinine article in the rider. When you standby it to come on the show and talk about it, it was just it was a joke. Guy died of. Is the article floating around right now, this guy, they've had this body for a long time, so there's this dude that was alive one thousand to one thousand four hundred years ago. In the desert southwest. He died of constipation. Hmmm, Geets Hmm, that's terrible, yeah.

And it seems as though they're looking at is his diet. That. He had four months. Ben, someone had been for months feeding him. Grasshoppers with the legs torn off. He ate mainly grasshoppers and the painful months prior to his death. Now, why why do you say someone was feeding him?

Well, it goes on to say that he was in such bad shape, he was called a mega colon. A, he had a parasite. Trypanosoma cruzi, which I'd never heard of. Had blocked up the man's gastrointestinal system, so his colon swelled to six times normal size. It's a condition called mega colon.

So the guy can't digest food properly and he was becoming malnourished, they he would have been so bad by looking at his body that he probably couldn't even walk or eat on his own. He wasn't that bad a shape. And then for the last two or three months of his life. Someone was feeding him or he was feeding on legless grasshoppers. Like the squishy part, what I wonder why. I don't know. They say they found this guy back in 1937 in a rock shelter along the.

Real ground and Paco's rivers in south Texas, you can't say that, you can't say real ground a river. You know that no, because you're saying river ground a river. Oh, yeah, I got you, I just saw I just let me rephrase that, the real ground. I'm just going to say the Rio Grande and Pecos River. So this dude was was living was he like living in a town somewhere just out in the bush? I mean, a town somewhere?

Oh. We said like a pueblo or something. If they found them like. In a rock shelter, yeah. Mm hmm. So he was like a primitive fellow, two point six pounds of feces. Hmm. And a vast amount of food remains that were never processed.

That's not that much feces. No, I never go on a scale, but I'm not, like, blown away by that. You ever wait, Spencer? No, he's shaking his head, Jaster, no, no, no, I feel like I feel like wrestlers do that. I had a guy one time tell me that he said you'd be surprised what you eat when you're hungry. And he he said that statement after he told the story of riding a train from somewhere in New Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, in a boxcar that he jumped in.

He he rode the entire way for three days, the train didn't stop when he got to San Antonio, Texas, he was 16 years old. He'd run away from home and he jumped out of the boxcar and went and found in a dumpster, some molded biscuits and raw bacon, and he ate them. I worked with this guy. He was like in his 60s. This was 20 years ago. And at the time, he's in his 60s.

And he looked at me and he said, Clay, you'd be surprised what you eat if you're hungry.

And I believed him. Yeah, we could say some that. I don't think so. Dang, I take that back about. Seth said wrestlers probably know how much it weighs, and I guess when I was in high school wrestling, I wasn't eating a bunch. But before wains, if he'd go go to the bathroom, he could usually if he had a a nice, good crap, you could lose about a pound.

So that's a wrestlers do. Yeah, that's interesting. Just try and get get all everything out when you can before you hop on the scale they get a pound.

What's interesting about how it goes on to say like how much pressure this guy had going on, there's a thing, a phytoliths, which is a plant part and usually a phytoliths can pass through a human's digestive track unscathed.

But the phytoliths in this guy's digestive track or split open and crushed, which points to an incredible pressure. That was exerted on a microscopic level in this guy's intestinal system. This is going to be detailed in a forthcoming book called The Handbook of Mommy Studies and if you think I'll not be buying. The Handbook of Mommy Studies. You are wrong. It sounds very painful. Speaking of painful, did you guys hear about Seth almost getting attacked by a wild weasel this morning?

He's lucky to be alive. It was scary, tell him to tell them what happened. So we identified a culvert pipe that would be good for. Trappin Weasel's and I dumped down over the the bank. And in the dark, in the dark, I reached down in the culvert pipe and to put a trap box with a box with the trap in it and.

I heard something growled at me. And like you guys sound again, Seth, Seth won't make. OK to tell the story, I don't I do not think I can accurately mimic the sound.

Because it sounded bigger than a weasel, he was going to cover it, he cried, he cried like a little baby, that that's false.

What what types of weasel?

Zober, he says, like the long tail weasel.

Yeah, long tail is that there was in a culvert. So it like it was like it was like growling in a probably 14 and 16 inch culvert.

I mean that would make it sound really loud. Yeah. Here's the thing. He just keeps talking about this horrific growl. I knew I ran down there to flashlight. I thought we might have a bobcat. That's what I thought. I thought I was, by the way. So that's like eight.

And I went down there and shined a light in there and we went to the other end and it was just a little teeny weasel come out the other end. And then we spent an hour. Seth won't say what the sound sounded like because I can't even begin to.

And we've tried every like her. No, it's like a weasel growl, like, wow.

Well, I don't know how to mimic that.

He won't. He will not do the same. It wasn't like her, it wasn't like it was like or not. No, it's it was like.

To try to explain it, it was like a. Very like soft, quiet growl, but startled you, but, yeah, I can tell startled he was, because when I went down there, the weasel box just kind of thrown down into the pipe.

He didn't even properly place it.

There's a YouTube video that says sound of a weasel and it's a weasel in a cage making a growl.

Oh, he played it for us real quick. I'm trying here. We know what you heard, but that's not what I heard. It's not very loud, guys. Oh, there it is. There it is. It's like a chuckle.

OK, ok, ok, ok, ok, OK, though, you heard that part sounds a little familiar, that's what scared.

But it didn't it didn't sound like it was like it was like it was like two of those, OK, but it was in a damn culvert.

Like to bring up that that's was some good weasel trappin.

That's some damn good weasel trap. The sign reads a set of weasel trap.

Stick your hand in a hole and there's already a weasel there.

Yeah. The sign reading that went into this that we identified such a hot locale that he was actually in the culvert. And then we Shinshu we couldn't see all the way through. So I ran up and over the road and down the other embankment and couldn't find the exit track. Then I realized that Weasel was so scared of s that when he come out the other end of the culvert, he must include forty eight inches of snow before his feet hit the ground.

Here's a great question, though, Steve. Here's the trap and question. And this is going to show the heart of the trapper and I don't know which way it's going to go. Would you have killed the weasel in the culvert if he wasn't in a trap?

Oh, I thought we had a bobcat and that bobcat would have been in trouble. And the reason that the weasel. Oh, yeah, OK.

Because it's like when you're coon hunting with dogs, like we'll see a coon in a tree and not kill it because our dogs didn't try it. We'll walk past it.

Yeah, well, that's more of a training thing. And I'm not worried about training, upset or training. I got you.

I'm not going to like, spoil south by by getting a reasonably heated tree up. So she has been she has been approved yet, but Biden made his selection of interior secretary. If he if you hunt and fish or if you like to, if you're just generally like to be outdoors, I don't care if you're a skier. Biker, hiker, definitely for Hunter and Angler, probably the most influential person in the country for you, particularly if you live in the western U.S..

Probably the most influential person in your life, whether you know it or not, is the interior secretary. So the secretary of the interior. Outside of like the ag secretary who under Trump was Sonny Perdue. Who oversees, like USDA, you know, Forest Service lands, the interior secretary is like BLM refuges, national parks, all these land management, you know, all of these land management agencies sit under this interior secretary and they kind of set the tone for what goes on in this country around land management, on public lands, federal public lands.

Highly influential when Trump came in, he initially appointed Zenk Ryan Zinke from Montana, who had been a Navy SEAL, he ran into a lot of ethics troubles. And left and was replaced by a guy named Bernat and Trump. So he Bernauer almost did four years from Trump. Bernard did a lot of great stuff, he did a lot of annoying speed, a lot of good stuff. And was very good on access. So very good on opening up lands, the hunting and fishing that previously weren't.

Was good on migration corridors, was good on some management issues, like overturning some Obama air rules that restricted Alaska's ability to use certain management practices on refuge lands.

That was a real slap in the face to the state of Alaska. They did a lot of good.

He did a lot of good stuff. He did a lot of bad stuff. They had this energy dominance. The Trump administration had this energy dominance plan.

Right. And they're their M.O. for the history of Trump's term was to really try to up energy extraction on public lands. I'm not a I'm not a big fan of. Just coming out saying that you just want to maximize output and not talk about how you want to do it in a responsible. Gradual way. But Biden just did his pick and I was really hoping he was going to pick Martin Heinrich. From New Mexico, and I know there's all kinds of reasons, all kinds of political stuff, but he was my he was my like I would have been very, very happy because here you would have had an avid hunter, avid angler.

Great conservation ethic, extremely knowledgeable about the landscape out there.

His head on straight. He, like, knows what stuff matters for hunters and anglers.

You couldn't have done better. Then Heinrich, who's a senator from New Mexico, and it was rumored that he was going to get the nod or, you know, there was a lot of people pushing for him to get the nod, but it went to. Subject to approval went to Deb Halland. From New Mexico, the first Native American. To. Get appointed as interior secretary, so that that's a big win for Native Americans here. I am like.

Trying to be optimistic here, I'm I'm worried about a couple of things that would happen. I'm worried that. Under Biden. And under Haylen, that we might do too much renewable energy stuff on public lands, these solar arrays and wind farms are.

We can't just turn the landscape into a solar farm. It's very destructive to the wildlife habitat, and so this kind of like I feel that there's going to be this like knee jerk push into doing creating like industrial landscapes out in our public lands of solar arrays.

It's. You know, that stuff can be catastrophic to wildlife, some little afraid of that. There's a couple of things I'm afraid of, but maybe I'll be pleased in the end. You guys got any thoughts on this? Hmm, Yata. I think they should just take that solar energy and make everyone get the Elon Musk's solar energy on the roofs of everyone's houses instead of out on the environment.

Yeah, there comes a complicated issue, but rather that. Yeah. Watching mass amounts of grassland and massive amounts, you know, open country converted into wind farms. The they're so noisy to where I grew up, we had a bunch of them and the only thing they were good for was obviously the energy they were creating. But you could check the wind really easy when you're going to go hunt and see which way they're pointed. No, that's a good point.

There's no see, that's I look at the bright side. Yeah. There's a there's a 3000 acre solar solar farm that's proposed to go in right next to my family's only property in Pennsylvania. Is that right? But not on public land.

It's not public, but it is like some of the best elk habitat there you'll find in the state. And it's there's a shitload of elk on it. Because the jobs I've seen, the big win, the big wind turbines out west, the solar farms, the less I know less about just because I haven't seen them. I mean, this is some massive like like him saying a three thousand acre solar farm. That's news to me. I didn't know we had him that big.

So that would effectively I mean, they would fence these things so it would impede movement of wildlife.

Oh, yeah. It's like it's an it's an industrial. It winds up being an industrial landscape. They basically they basically blanket the landscape.

Yeah. Yeah. Then you have all, you know, roads. I mean, it's just like it's like it's like it's an industrial development project. And so and I and a little bit I've got a little bit the fair bit of reading I've done on Halland is that that's like a high priority.

Other people speculate that a high priority. Could be. Trying to seed lands back to tribes, which is, you know, is an enormous minefield and I and.

Would be highly controversial. In May, distract like that conversation may distract from some of the things that. I would view as high priority that we're likely to get taken care of, but we'll see. Hopefully we'll all be real pleased. We had a conversation about castration bands, I found a coyote shit with the castration band and it was I tell you about the Spencer. You talked about on the podcast. Yeah, I found a coyote shit I was on and my kids have found a coyote shit with a cat with a castration band is you could take a lamb.

And I remember this kid named Paul Anderson doing it to his dog when I was growing up.

You take this little rubber band and wrap it around escrow, and that causes the scroll to fall off. You have that, don't you, yourself?

No, I try to avoid that kind of stuff.

A guy wrote in a rancher from southeast Montana. And he wrote in, he said, people use those castration bands to dock sheep tails.

So, you know, it's like. Now, then, you'll see lambs aren't supposed to like lambs are born with big, long damn tail, but everybody cuts the tail off them. And he was saying that if you cut limbs off tails, you prevent don't build up in maggot infestation on the lamb's backside, so that tail builds up and lamb. Feces flies laying on there. It's bad for the lambs, what they do is they. Put that castration band around the tail and it cuts off circulation, the tails falls off.

He's saying that he thinks this coyote shit, the head of castration, abandoned it. He said, quote, Odds are the lamb had lost his tail. In a pasture somewhere in the coyote found himself a little lamb tail jerky laying on the ground and everything, including the band we see in our ranch, dogs scat all the time. Seth Price still running a Hotmail address. Really think of that, I don't know the thing anymore. Tell us about this Canadian lynx that just did this this kind of cool thing.

Yeah, you know, Steve, this actually took place a while back. It just resurfaced in the media.

But, oh, there's me all the time. And yeah, there are still a great story there. I sent our producer a story about a guy who outfitter who'd gotten in so much wild, had so many wildlife violations that he had what's called a global he like a global forfeiture of hunting privileges.

And she wrote back, she's like, you know, this was 19 years ago, are you sure you want me to put this in the show? Oh, sorry. Well, hey, this is where they save this. This is the longest documented travel of a links in in biological history. And obviously, you know, how many links and the history of the planet have been have been monitored. But basically. So the big story is, is that in the early 2000s, there were 218 links.

One source says, another source said 90 Lynx transplanted from Canada into the high country of Colorado.

So basically, they were trying to restore the Lynx population in Colorado. So they were catching them up in Canada, where there's a bunch of links, bringing them down into Colorado, where there were no links.

Hey, you never know what year links got. Endangered Species Act protections.

Yes, Canadian links were listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as threatened in the contiguous U.S. and two thousand. So they're not on the endangered species list, as I understand it. They're on the threatened list.

Yeah, but they're still there on the EU list as threatened. That's right. So the only the only U.S. state that you can harvest at Hunt Links is Alaska. Yeah, but in Canada, they're thick.

You know, they're doing very well. And I read an interesting stat to state that you'll appreciate. So at the peak of the fur trade, the modern fur trade in the early 1980s, they were exporting about 35000 lynx pelts out of Alaska and Canada. And obviously today that's much less just because of supply demand, you know, but that's off that's off the topic here. This so this links and he's got this science name, you know, BC3 Šemeta.

They dropped him off in Colorado when he was two years old and he lived in Colorado for four years. And then he just just settled right in. He settled right in. The amount of surveillance they do on these cats is kind of creepy. Man.

They knew how many sires of kittens this cat had and how many sets of kittens this cat had sired it.

It sired two litters of kittens, one in 2005, one and two. So he was getting some play in Colorado.

He was and lived there for four years.

It must have been like a marital dispute that pushed him out. I don't know. But he left in 2007.

He went missing. And so the the biologists just felt like it was just a loss, you know, like all these radio collared animals that they're tracking all over the place. Bears, lions, like collars just go dead. You know, that is just the way it happens. It happens here in Arkansas with our bears a lot. Just randomly something goes wrong, collar goes dead, animal disappears off the data points of these biologists. And but in 2010, Steve, a trapper in northern Alberta, catches a big links with a with a collar on it.

And the cat was already dead in the trap.

Or he would have. He would have. He would have released it, he said. But anyway, he he gets the number off, the caller calls the number and the people are just amazed. And the cat had traveled about twelve hundred miles and the cat was nine years old at the time and went back to Elberta. OK, it was caught in British Columbia. Oh sorry. It went to Alberta.

So it didn't, it didn't quite make it home but it, it just went north for and there's no you know these things are so mysterious because we just don't know why they did it.

We don't know why. But the the travel was, you know, obviously this cat's crossing major interstate highways. I mean, there's all kinds of hazards that this cat, what had gone through so traveled north through the bulk of because he started out in southern Colorado.

Right. San Juan mountains. Yeah. Traveled all through Colorado. Presumably, like, I don't know, swung through Utah. Western Wyoming traveled through Idaho or Montana. And then made his way west into Canada. Collins Yeah, these so these cats, Steve, typically have a home range of 12 to 83 miles is what the the the the the website, the website of the Fed website. It was really specific. But so, you know, the males have bigger home ranges.

The females are going to have smaller home ranges. So, you know, they're known to travel, you know, links most of his diet and snowshoe hares. They're highly specific. I did a little research on how are they different than Bobcat's?

You know, they look a lot like a bobcat.

And it it mainly has they can be slightly larger than Bobcat, but they're super specialized. That's pretty much what makes them different. You know, bobcats live all across the U.S. I mean, they're very widely distributed. Lynx are highly specialized for hunting snowshoe hares and snow. And then the boar, typically the well, now they're in the boreal forest. But at one time they were in all the highlands of North America, as I understand it.

So and have a big and have a big ass foot and bigger toff's.

I was talking about this on the show a handful of times, but I've only laid eyes on one Lynx man. And it was just and they have a face that kind of looks like a human baby in a weird way, man.

They're wild looking, guess if you want to preorder the handbook of mommy studies, guess what that bad boys coming in at. It's free delivery on prime. Twenty four, 1990 hardcover is four hundred and forty nine dollars, ninety nine cents. Oddly, the paperback is six hundred ninety nine dollars and 99 cents to preorder. Why would it be that expensive? I don't know, but I hope these good people are listening and send me one of these damn books.

That's crazy, and then is the mountain lion that recently made a long trip that was more recent?

Yeah, that was so. There was a young lion collared in New Mexico February the 12th and kind of like northwest New Mexico. And he he was documented to have traveled five hundred and fifty eight miles and settled in the Mesa Verde National Park.

So that's that's like it's not standard mountain lion protocol, but that's like not terribly uncommon. I mean, pretty cool, no doubt. Oh, yeah, but just like amazed that they can move around and avoid trouble. Hmm. You know, all those highways. Passing through towns, crossing highways. And not starving to death. Steve, we have so to three years ago, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission changed the title of one of our biologists, from the bear biologist to the large carnivore biologists, because we had enough legitimate mountain lion sightings in the state that it deemed a biologist to be over mountain lions in Arkansas.

Super fascinating. And I talked to the guy the other day for a podcast. And basically he thinks we're getting mountain lions on these big treks, these big journeys, like they're they're coming down the Missouri River, coming into Arkansas. And they will have just like a spasm of lion sightings that span like all of you know. I mean, like counties, you know, like there's a lion there, there's a lion there. There's a lot in there.

And it's the same lion and he's on this big walk about, you know, and they leave, though there's they have yet to document a lion that is a breeding populations of lions here. But every year we have lions. And so he speculates that it's this it's this age of lion habitat where the males are dispersing deep. And he said as soon as a female decides to live here, then we'll start getting, you know, males that come and stay because they're basically looking for mates and looking for territory.

They're males not going to come in and inhabit a place that doesn't have a female. Was this point.

Historically, it was the most widely distributed. Large mammal in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah, down to the southern tip of Patagonia. Right. All through South America, Central America, up into Canada, coast to coast, here in the U.S., it was everywhere.

It's where they had this little population hang out and in Florida. Hmm. And then just get wiped out in the eastern U.S. and then just very slowly but gradually coming back and you think you know how they like, they seem to be doing fairly well in like California, where it's heavily populated. Yeah, they're eating house cats and dogs and shit like that, you know. Do you think eventually the they'll slowly start populating? Like the eastern states, oh, where it's where it's like.

Like, they've cut they're going to like kind of learn to live amongst humans. Oh, yeah. I mean, you're definitely I don't know how many generations it'll take, but I think that you'll have I mean, at this moment, like we're having, like, expanding. You know, mountain lions are expanding range. Black bears are actively right now expanding range. So I think definitely I don't know what it would be.

I don't know if, like, my kids kids will be surprised to hear that. Once upon a time, it was unusual to have a mountain lion like in Ohio.

Yeah, because it's just like it's one thing to pass through, but like, they got to have enough room to not get in that much trouble. But the fact that they're able to.

Do well, not do well, but to live in huge population centers in California, but then you have like a lot of topography, steep braschi country, you know, they can still hide or deer who are still there.

They've got to have a ton of deer. They've got, you know, elk. They've got to have some top ungulate. You know, cultural tolerance will be the main thing, I think, in the east, just like how many how how many lions will people put up with which I think the tolerance would be left in the eastern part of the US would be less than the cultural tolerance in the West for large predators.

Yeah, I mean, there's celebrities around California, man. I mean, like around the population hubs in California, population centers.

They're one of the one of the I think probably an outstanding question on it is how well they can do in our agricultural landscape to. Where so much of the ground is still open? I don't know, man, but they're definitely expanding out. You know, years ago now, California band Motlana Hunting first they went after hounds men. Then they disbanded all together. It's kind of the playbook there, as you like, like it's the death by a thousand cuts playbook.

They were looking at this dispersal study. They thought that because California. Had no lion hunting there, expecting to see lions like sort of flowing out of California and they did this, they were looking at this study of like dispersal. And it was funny because Nevada, which still has like a thriving lion hunting culture, Nevada actually has lions that they're producing that are dispersing westward into California.

Like they're still creating them. And kicking them out. That's wild, yeah, it's good stuff, man.

In the early 20s, I was trying to do a magazine story for Alice that I could never get him to assign me the story, but I kept wanting to do a story about these guys and like, you know, anywhere like North Carolina, Tennessee, like the local crazy guy that would see a mountain lion. Yeah. And it was like, you're crazy, you don't know what you're talking about, and that's kind of and I was a little bit ahead of my time because this guy even started this thing called like the Eastern Puma Research Center or something like that, because he had run into one on a road hunt Turkey's, I think, and it haunted him every thought.

He is a nut job. And then ten years later, they're getting hit. One gets hit on the road in Connecticut. Yeah, a wild born one in Pennsylvania, I mean.

Like I always heard, like everyone knew someone that either seen one or like had a track that they found in like Kastor. It was just like. You know, it was it was there was always stories of people seeing mountain lions and people having like I haven't seen them, but I heard of people who had like has pictures of Matt lines that they had killed because they were like killing the chickens or something, you know, that kind of shit.

You know, this dude in my home state wrote this book, Beasts of Never category. I think it was what the book was called, but it was about him getting all obsessed with mountain lions. Michigan, which wound up not being bullshit.

No. They just move forward. I mean, look, this dude right here, inaudible, it's not even like that big of a deal is dude. Five hundred eighty six miles, man you.

Yeah, a frickin lynx. How far that links. There was twelve hundred miles.

There was a documented lion that went from the Dakotas to Connecticut in the last ten years.

Yeah. I think they think he swung around up through. I think they think that that dude swung around up through Michigan's Upper Peninsula and dropped down from Canada into the east. That's like one guess of how he might have gone. I heard he got on a FedEx cargo plane chasing chickens and got out on the other side.

OK, so, Spencer, you were right. Spencer sent me a thing or he's like, I bet you a hundred people sent you this. And they had to talk about what it was that this hundred people had sent me, Spencer. Recently this week out of Kentucky and elk antler turned up that looks very old and carved into it, says D. Boon. And then it has the year seventeen seventy eight and the story goes this. This antler was found in the late eighteen hundreds and was passed through some generations and has now wound up with a R.M. EAF.

And there's all this excitement around it on Facebook, for example, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation on Facebook, for example, it's been liked 4000 times, commented on 700 times and shared 5000 times because people are excited that this antler, which came from the species of elk that is now extinct. Turned up in Kentucky, not a not a species of expensive subspecies, if not, no, no, OK, a variety or a variety I don't buy.

OK, go on. Here's the thing I said.

Do you see them like I'm sure this has crossed your inbox 100 times.

I don't want to you so I don't want to get into the subspecies thing. But I'll point this out. At the time you had elk just from one end of the country to the other there was it like unique population groups.

They probably all intermingled. But sure, that's fine. A geneticist would not agree with that. Well, I'm going to tell you what the Facebook post said and why I said that. It says Resource private land biologist Joe Lakefield, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation funded the Carbon 14 dating of the year, and it was traced back to the extinct subspecies of eastern elk. The Carbon 14 test dated the elk to have died in the range of the years between 1730 and 18 06.

I would like here's the other thing, I would like to see that report. Because having done some C14 submissions. They usually give you these things and like Sigma's OK, they give you these things where it's like percentage. Like these, like percentage likelihoods. And it'll go like 33 percent, 66 percent, 99 percent likelihood I would like to see, is the report included there? No, no, the that's that's the best evidence they give and then they end the thing by saying there's no way to prove that Boonen inscribed the antler, but the evidence says it is likely.

OK is not a legitimate I mean, like we're saying that this is a legitimate news report.

Yes. Well, we're saying that they there is an elk antler that's undisputed, it has dbu and written on it, that's undisputed. They submitted it for C14 dating, radiocarbon dating. That's undisputed. It came back with that date range, but I would just be curious to see what probability they ascribe to the accuracy of that date range.

Can I can I jump in here a minute, Tobolowsky, radiocarbon? Yes. OK. That's pretty fascinating, man. Yeah, no, no, no, it is, it is. And I'm not even saying it's not D. Boon's Daniel Boone.

Boone would have been during that time from 18, six, 18, 30. He didn't. He died 19, 20. Steve in Missouri, someone could pull that up.

Teens pull it up so fast. You know what I would type in Seth?

I would type in Daniel Boone. Where and when did Daniel Boone die or he died in Missouri.

It's burial. Lewen first arrived in Kentucky in 1769 and settled with his family at Boonsboro in 1775. And again, this and stay there through the revolution. This answer was dated between 1730 and 1886.

The Earth Boys and girls is bombarded by cosmic rays from the sun. OK. Hmm. A thing that is produced by the bombardment of these cosmic rays is a radioactive substance called C14.

You track and Spencer. In fact, checking. It's taken up by plants. Anything that is alive, that eats plants or eats things that have eaten plants. Accumulates c14. C14 stops accumulating in these organisms when they die, so you stop consuming plants, you stop consuming things that consume plants and you stop your intake of C14. That is building up in your bones, C14 has a known halflife. So if you take a bone and you can look at the rate of decay of the C14 in it, you can tell how long ago the things stop being alive.

Now, once they started testing atomic weapons, so from anything that was alive, like C14 won't work, like you can't radiocarbon anything, those alive from the 1950s on because then like atmosphere. Radioactive substances are so prevalent that our our systems are all out of whack, like if you checked us, you wouldn't be able to do you would be able to radiocarbon dating remains in the future because we were alive for all that. Radioactive material that's in the atmosphere now.

From a testing atomic bombs, detonating atomic bombs and whatnot, so it doesn't work anymore, then as it comes into this thing called dendrochronology, where.

The rate at which these cosmic rays bombard the atmosphere fluctuates through time, it's not constant. So what they're able to do is take, for instance, tree rings from old trees. And they're able to count back, like if you cut a tree down right now and I can count back, let's say I find some 300 year old tree, I can be like, OK, I just cut the tree down and I can look and I like this ring was laid down, I know, three hundred years ago because I've counted from the core.

Right now to get to where this ring was laid out and then you can look in that ring at the C14 that was laid down in that ring that year, and you can get an idea of the relative bombardment of of these re's.

And that's what helps you calibrate it out, but it's like imprecise. When I had my Buffalo school done, I came in with a 66 percent probability that it died within a couple decades of 1770. So I would just like to look at the report we're going on, Spencer. Well, maybe like the best reason to be skeptical is because there have been trees in like Kentucky and Tennessee that were these landmarks at one point where Daniel Boone supposedly carved his name in there and left a cute little note like one of them was like D.

Boon killed a bar on three year, seven year, 1760 on a number of these like trees exist in that area. There's a lot disputing like, well, actually, he spelled his name correctly, but in this tree, it was spelled incorrectly. There are other receipts of him writing bear correctly. But in this tree, again, like this is extra. See how he spelled his name wrong, spelled Barong, et cetera. So there's just like it seems like some pride in that area of having Daniel Boone artifacts and, you know, going all the way back to like the eighteen hundreds when these trees were were, you know, cut down and like put on display and stuff like that.

And it feels a lot like I'm from South Dakota, but I consider myself like an honorary Minnesotan and they have the Kensington Runestone there. Are you guys familiar with that, like the the giant piece of rock laid in the earth that came up in the roots of a tree where some Vikings had inscribed in this rock that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Like through the Great Lakes and stuff.

But I know that story. 99 percent of historians say, no, that's that's a lie. But this popped up, you know, hundreds of years ago because they have like this. Great. Like, they take a lot of pride in Daniel Boone or people in Minnesota take a lot of pride in Vikings beating Christopher Columbus to America. That's what it feels like, I can't remember if it was in Robert Morgan's Boone biography or the Farragher biography, one of these Boone biographies.

In the end, he talks about. All of the alleged artifacts, there was a cottage industry of writing Boonen stuff and that you could fill 10 houses. With all the stuff that supposedly came out of Boone's house. And guns that have Boonen on them and hatchets to have it was like because he was a celebrity in his own era. You know, he was like he was like famous while he was alive. And so I don't know, man, it's like modern social media, like people write and stuff and trees, like back in the eighteen hundreds, it's like making a Facebook post.

Yeah, I'll try this again or go. Albert Morgan, who you were referring to you is going to be a guest on Kentucky Outdoors Media to talk about the supposed boon antler. What's his take on the aylor? We don't know.

He hasn't been on yet, but he's done some, although he hasn't done any other interviews about the ZANLA. The handler came up on December 15th, three days ago. Um, so this is all fresh. I'll put it to you this way.

If God came down. Let's say, Chester. Let's say Chester came over and Chester said, I know because somehow I've had contact with an omniscient being. I know the answer, this is Bunz Antler, not like I know. Through magical abilities, I know the true answer, and he said to me, I'm going to give you you have to take a guess. Broun's atler, not Spoon's antler. If you get it wrong, I'm going to shoot you in the head.

OK, so here I am, I have to get it right, is it Broun's antler or not? I'll be shot dead if I get the answer wrong. You know what I would say? And they are not Broun's a'la. Put in that situation. The boon artifact thing is funny that you bring up we're publishing an article on the meat eater dotcom today called The Guns of Wyatt Earp, looking at like what guns did the cinematic Wyatt Earp carry, what guns did the dime novel Wyatt Earp carry and wagons did the real life while Wyatt Earp carry.

The reality is that nobody really knows, and there's been gone so many times at auction that claim to be white, but everyone would dispute it and nobody really knows. So that that feels very much like this Daniel Boone thing.

So you don't actually know if he carried to call peacemaker. You're going to have to read the read the article to get an idea of what what people think he actually carried and the history of the cinematic and the novel version of Wyatt Earp.

It's good stuff. Spencer, what would you do if Chester held the gun to your head? No, you say not, Boosler, I'd say, Nabbous, that, you know, you're going to be living to tell another tale, to tell the tale. What are the odds that would be Bunz and not just like Newcomen there or Rinella or some or Morriss, anything like that. How did this one antler from an extinct, not subspecies of alchemic Daniel Boon's?

Subscription, your signature on it, you think it's the old I think it was a phony from a long time ago, if I had to guess, I don't really know. I mean, who the hell am I?

I don't know. Does it look like it's been Dremel in there? No, I think it's as though yeah, that was what I thought. And surely they they tested this. But I mean that you could find that it wouldn't be that big a deal to find an elk antler from the early 1980s and then dremiel into it and maybe leave it in the mud for five years and then pull it out. No, I'll be clear. I think a dude scratch that in their long ass time ago.

So I think, Spencer, you had provided a. You had provided a recommendation of a transition Segway. To another topic of conversation, I don't want to steal your transition, so do you want to do your own transition? No, you do it. You'll probably do it better. You're such a fan of.

You know how Spencer was just talking about Daniel Boone? Well, we're going to talk about Boonen Crack Club for a minute, how is that? That was great.

Yeah, our podcast guest, Jim Heffelfinger, sent us in this article, and I think that he might have been kind of responding to when we had him on and we were talking about when we had the Boone and Crockett Club people from The Nutcracker Club on. And we talk about like how things like Boone and Crockett Club and see when people talk about like a deer having a shot at 160 Whitetail, right. You talk about like a measurement system, there's a way to measure better schools the way you measure deer antlers.

And there's like record books.

So if you shoot a big buck, you measure it, you go, wow, this box of 190 inch whitetail and you send it off and they put it in the record books.

And there's this article that Heffelfinger sent us that Spencer will break down a little bit about criticisms of that system.

Like, is it really helpful? Because it's kind of become like like Boone and Crockett Club, the score has become like so it's a social thing, it's like a way to brag up whatever but they like. But they point out that it had like a scientific foundation. And this Heffelfinger Syntheses article that kind of lays into this a little bit and the criticism would be that if you are trying to track a population of critters, how is it helpful to only look at the biggest ones if there's a minimum size to get in?

What are you really learning that minimum size being for? Like, I think a typical whitetail is 160 in a non typical is, I don't know, 170 or 180. Are you really actually like learning trends about the health of populations? Not so if you're only interested in the big ones. Yes. Well, because the big ones are the indicators of a healthy population of animals.

Did you know I'm a boomer unofficial Boomer Crockett score?

No, I didn't know that. No, no, no.

So this is the I love this topic because on the surface, it does seem.

It's easy to buy what this guy is saying, but it's a little bit deeper than that to understand it in that you've got to go back to originally when this system was built, it was built before much of our modern science and the way to understand the health of systems, an indicator was the number of older, mature males.

So basically they quantified the a number that that said this is a mature, healthy species. And so typical BOONEN across Iraq. The reason Bhuto Crocket Awards and gives preference to symmetry is because symmetry typically indicates health that such that I know that argument with that is B.S..

Well, I but it's it's actually not the come back in the day. Back in the day. If a big book that was passed throws a little sticker out is right antler, you know, you don't look it and be like, oh, something must be wrong with them.

Well now now it's not talking about that though. And again, you got to think this was this system was designed in the, you know, 100 hundred years ago.

What it's talking about is when you have an animal that's stressed, you get massive amounts of dis symmetry. Yes. I mean, like, you know, the back right leg is messed up. The the right antlers are going to be messed up. No, no. Left aylor. It's the other left opposite.

Yeah, yeah. You know, with the front leg, if the front right leg is messed up in the front. Right. And messed up with the leg. It's the opposite. Yes. Huh.

You sure. And hey, the other thing I love is that this came up and just stop me because I could take the next hour and talk about this and I'm not a big score guy.

Like, I'm not going to go like I have no goals to, like, kill bookmarking animals.

Why not?

But I mean, like, I would just assume kill a hundred and forty inch deer on the mountain over here that I love is go to Canada one.

I you know, I'm saying I mean, like, I don't I'm not a guy, but I think there's relevance to it because of its historical precedents.

And it at the time actually trophy hunting quote unquote like that, meaning targeting an animal because the size of its headgear is actually what helped save North American honey, because the brown is down philosophy was the way it went.

We were coming out of an era of market hunting, going into an era when all these guys were saying, nah, don't you know, we got to leave the females and young, we got to leave the juvenile males.

I'll tell you what I'll do. Let's make let's let's make a no. Let's make a scoring system that rewards killing an older, mature male and let's make that culturally cool to kill an older, mature male. And it totally took the pressure off of females and young and juvenile males and put it on older, mature species which have already contributed to the gene pool and which are the best animals from a conservation standpoint to take out, especially in a vulnerable herd.

So, like, you got to think about it that way.

And now, you know, one hundred and twenty five years later, the Boonchu Crockett Club is due.

The main focus of the organization is not their record keeping. They still keep records. But the main focus of their their thrust is conservation efforts and dissemination of information. And they're funding a whole bunch of stuff. You know, they just have this niche that they work in. And so, man, when people give back a bad rap, I got to listen, man, I'm not.

I'll kick your ass. I'm not giving B.S. a bad rap. No, no, no. Not you, Steve. I know you. I know you're not really.

I'm not saying you. I'm just saying people. But this people do. And it's because they don't know.

They couldn't tell you what I just told, you know, in super embarrassing to me, Clay. I spent my whole life saying my old man was a score. Because he was like, dude. I know he scored for Pope and young, but I always said he was a scorer for commemorative box of Michigan, Boone and Crockett, pope and young brother, the Dusit Boone Crockett told me your old man wasn't a score because he went and looked in the database and his name wasn't in there.

So he was lying or I didn't remember right.

But he was a scorer because they're all three grown up. He would bring their deer over to have him score.

Yeah, and originally the scoring of diaries was like very rudimentary. It was like spread and length of time and that was it. But then in 1950s, we got the model that we now know today we're on like a five by five book. You would have 20 measurements or something like that.

So, you know, I think the main thing to think about, to like to just say this is like solid, rational thinking that takes into account the last 100 years of what's happened in American North American conservation is that a scoring system turned the hunting culture from a market hunting culture into a conservation hunting culture by putting emphasis on older, mature males.

I think it's that simple.

And that's why we had to to it today. That's why we say, oh, man, he killed a bunch of cracker but got say that. And I have no idea what they're saying. I mean, people say it all the time. And it's like, heck, yeah, I'm glad somebody stepped up to the plate and changed us from a bunch of market Hutten fools.

So the criticism that they're claiming would be like in 2020 and he's not hacking on ABC. That's right.

I understand the criticism would would be like in 2020. It's not useful. Like there are other ways that we could measure the health of a population of critters. And so we do. That's right. And so Heffelfinger and Taylor Lasha, who has written for the Meat Eater Dotcom, very recently, they looked at pulping young Dallas Safari Club and Boone and Crockett and tracked the trends over time. And they wanted to see if they all basically agreed with each other on like the trend of the score of deer.

And if they did agree with each other, then you could see why this is relevant and why this information would be helpful if they didn't agree with with each other. Say you had the you know, Boone and Crockett Club was really high in the 50s and now it's really low for like the score of critter's and pulping young was really low in the 50s. Now it's really high. Then then you could argue that these criticisms like are legit. What they notice, though, is that all three clubs agree with each other on the trend of the score of antlers from like the 50s up until now, meaning that this is relevant.

You can like assess something based off of only looking at the top one percent of critter's only because they all agree.

That that was my understanding from the time, is that a criticism, that's a criticism? No, no. He is saying that because pulping young has the same trend as DCI and because DCI has the same trend as Boone Crocket, that you could actually look at these numbers and like make some informed decisions by only looking at the biggest things that have the biggest and the biggest ones.

I wish I had to read this thing myself, because I'm telling you, that's what it says. Oh, my God.

But OK, think about places where where there are not big deer. Let's just take whitetail that we're all familiar with. Like, there's not a lot of deer coming out of Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas.

And it's it's because our populations of deer for the habitat are are sometimes overpopulated, you know, like big deer coming out of the Midwest. Or we probably have some of the healthiest deer herds in the country minus S.W..

Yeah, but you hear that. Here's why Spencer didn't read the article. Right. Think about it like this.

Let's say I said I'm going to find a way to measure the health of humans by measuring their thumbs.

And I'm like, what I do is I measure the length of their thumb.

Then I measure around the big knuckle and that thumb gets a score and it's how I'm going to track how well humans are doing. Are they making? Big people with big thumbs at the same time, Chester here says, you know, I'm going to track how well humans are doing by measuring thumbs. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure the length of the thumb and then the circumference of the thickest part of that thumb, regardless of where it sits.

And Sefton says you are going to check the well-being of humans by measuring Thoms. I'm going to measure. The length of the thumb plus longer take for circumferences off the thumb and the thickness of the nail and the thickness of the nail, he's going to measure the thickness of the nail to, oh, he's one of those.

So here we have Boonah Crocombe Bureaucratic Club, Chester Safari Club. Seth is Popenoe. OK, we're all measuring thumbs. A little different, but we're all measuring thumbs.

But I don't measure differently. They do. They do have different. What is the difference? Very minute different. That's why I'm trying to make these measurements minutely different. Oh, so if later someone said, oh, here's Rinella, this thing about measuring these stupid thumbs to see how well people are doing. Let's test whether it's appropriate to see what Chester and Sesto measurements are like in Chester and stuff like, oh yeah, bro, I've noticed the same thing with my thumb measurements, but does it tell you anything?

Well, I mean, there's a lot this this analogy. I'm not sure it flies because. Oh no, it's actually it's actually a perfect analogy.

We don't know that human thumb length has any correlation to human health. We do know as you point antler development, we do know that antler development, which is directly related to animal health, is is massively correlated here.

I think this could help solve some of this debate.

So I was I want to make a quick bet with you, Clay. OK, I'll bet you five dollars that is not doing a good job of telling us what the articles about.

Can I read you a few sentences from the article? Let me make my bet first. OK. I mean, who's deciding if he's done this, I will. I'll bet you a dollar then. Oh, you're right, Spencer. Prove that you're reading the article, right? This is from the article. If trends in Hawthorne and antler size were being influenced by a minimum entry score bias than we would expect that different record, different records, programs with different minimum size records.

Well, you didn't like that part of story about the direction and the strength of trends. For example, the strength of trends in the horns and antlers recorded by the Boone and Crockett Club with a higher minimum should be less than the trends in the pope and young records with a lower requirement. Well, you didn't tell me that part. What part did I leave out about the minimum's and all that? Yes, I said that the minimum's that there's like check or cash.

No, because here's the thing. Here's the thing. Just because he understood it doesn't mean that he delivered it properly. I've been working with this guy for a little while, and I'll tell you if there's one thing that Spencer Neuharth is, it is it is like correct in, you know, OK, he's on his game.

So he was. Yes, I'm changing my complaint. He understood it well. But in explaining it to me now, he left out the part that would have made me understand.

Now, here's here's mine that now it's making total sense, OK? And they saw all the trends were the exact same. Oh, no, no.

See, I knew of Heffelfinger sent it over. It had to have been reasonable. That's why that's why I thought you were messing it up.

My gripe. With the Boot and cry club, it's not the club's fault, it is when people hold up states like Wisconsin and say that they are the big buck king because they have more Boone and Crockett and Popenoe on record as anybody. But I am sure that they do not kill two or three times as many giant deer as a state like Texas. It's just that the culture prioritizes entering them in places like Wisconsin.

Yeah, and in in Texas, you got to remember, if it's high fence, they won't know. They'll still accept that. And some other. Not Boone and Crockett.

Well, no, they do, but they also don't. They keep track of road kills and stuff and some other sort of thing.

Well, so Boone Crockett Club keeps track of all animals despite method of kill. And they even keep records of pickups because, again, it's a biological record.

So it doesn't matter if one hunter killed it or not. Spencer, I.

But you can't get in the like you can't sort of be honored if it's a high fence deer takes.

It doesn't have to be Texas in this argument either. It can be any state. Wisconsin does not kill twice as many big giant bucks as Kansas, despite them having twice as many entries in the books.

Yeah, you think so? Dudes in Wisconsin have a higher proclivity or have there's a greater chance that some dog in Wisconsin is going to register his buck through B and C? Exactly.

I think that's because all the buck pools at the bars could be all squaller, deer to win the stuff, to win the money. You know, by that, I think you're I think you're sort of on to something there, but you're also talking about Hunter numbers when you're talking about Wisconsin and Kansas, I mean, like incredibly more hunters in Wisconsin than Kansas. But I think your point is well taken. And I don't think the Boone Crockett Boone Crockett Club is trying to say that this is an infallible biological record.

You know, at the time it was created, it was the best we had. It was innovative in it. It worked to turn a market hunting culture into a conservation culture where we said we're going to we're going to give value to older, mature males in the species.

So that's a good thing. But what you're saying, Spenser's is right, there could be holes inside of it. But that doesn't mean that it's totally invalid.

You know, in it's not saying that, you know, certainly every deer that net Boonen Nets, Boone and Crockett is not being scored, that's for sure.

But but. I think I think it has I think it has good historical precedents. One thing I will say is that the net score is what people get tripped up on, as they say. That's not relevant. And that's where you take the symmetrical difference from one side and deduct it from the other. And the animal is penalized in the scoring system. And people are like, that's not relevant. And, you know, I think I think Boone and Crockett, they can't change the way they score animals because they've been scoring animals for 120 years.

Do you understand that? It's like when they told us about that when they were out here. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think all those guys would say, yeah, there may be a better way to actually evaluate the size of a white tailed Iraq, but we're not going to do it because we can't because they would invalidate all the scores behind it.

You know, so I think when you look at it like the idea that the Boone and Crockett Club is just a bunch of ego driven guys wanting to see who has the biggest book, is this not true? I mean, it's just really not. I mean.

Yeah, and we know these guys, Steve, you know a lot of these guys and I mean, they're they're conservation minded hunters just like us that, you know, very few, very few guys are chasing scores.

That's my thoughts. That's fine, that's good. Well, you know, debate me on oh, I don't know, we I don't know, I just kind of feel like I feel like it's like leading to something, man, like it's going to lead to us going toe to toe on something.

Oh. I don't know. OK, OK. You didn't have it. I thought you had a specific time. Oh, no, no, no.

Oh, I'm now disappointed. No, I just want to square off on something, man. Oh, that is so real quick.

Speaking of watches, Segway Spencer. Speaking of. Do you have a big antlers? Uh. Imagine if they had big old tusks. Take it away, Seth. And they used to ha, that was good. No good, they don't anymore, but some deer, it's rare. Some deer still have fangs or canines. And the Munchak. Yeah, there's a little there's still a species of deer out there that have him, yeah, his name, one of them is the RIMSHOT one.

Where are they from? Keep talking. Anyway, there's a South Asia, there's out Asia, you've got a little tusks. Yeah, great big tuskers. There's a podcast listener that. That wrote in and sent a picture of a deer he shot in south Texas. That had. Canine's. And so I started looking in to the deer with canines and found article written by Kip Adams back in 2016. Where? He cited a lot of people in here.

But basically, a canine is like an evolutionary throwback to ancestral deer that had big canines, big fangs. And it's like an elk ivory, yeah, like a vestigial tusk, like it used to have a task. Now it doesn't. Yeah. Which you think you think like. Thousand years from now, they'll eventually just be gone. You think they'll evolve away from that? I don't think a thousand years is ten thousand. Yeah, a million.

I don't know. I think it's headed toward the going away. Yeah, they just don't need them now. It's headed toward the going away. But there was interesting studies done, you know, across the US and it kind of seems as if like, like depending on the region it's more prevalent than other places. For instance, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, there was they they looked at one hundred and sixty six deer and found that four of those deer, which is two point four percent.

Had canine's. They look deer in the lower peninsula. They say they looked at one hundred thirty four, which one of them? Had canines, which is zero point zero seven percent. In Florida, they looked at 95 deer for those. Had canines, four point two percent. So I don't know. Could be that deer in certain areas are still holding on to that ancient ancestral trait.

Yeah, we had a guy right in I remember this dude right now, but another dude wrote in recently and he had shot a fanged.

A tusked book, I think it was in Florida that had this crazy facial. Matt marking like it had like this mask on its face, black, and they were saying that that was sort of like this, this. You know, this like this recessive gene that had been triggered in that deer, for whatever reason, Louisiana, was it Louisiana, a crazy looking like face mask similar to other. Dear Farms. It had a black wire on its face that the top of the Y started it like it's pedals and then it met like like where its eyes are and then that y the bottom of it continued all the way down to its nose.

And that was the marking. Jim Heffelfinger was quoted in an article about that dear, saying, yeah, that's just like a throwback piece of genetics that made it into this deer in 2016. He also talked about the black markings on their face. If you look at a white males, lower jaw. Can you picture White Hills lower jaw where it has that black ring right behind its nose, that is where the fangs would have stuck out in a white tail and it'd be black there to make them show better, all other teeth and show them how big an impressive their fangs are.

So that's what makes sense. You see that black ring along the bottom jaw? I like that man. One last thing I want to touch on real quick.

Another dude wrote in. To tell this story set you up, so there's another dude that wrote in, he's from southeast New Hampshire and he wrote in about a buck.

He thought it was a buck buck that he killed in southeast New Hampshire. He said it was in an area that has very high hunter density, a lot of pressure. He shot at November 9th, 20, 19, and it was with three other Docx was four deer all together, and he thought it was weird when the deer came through that the book was the first of the four. So the buck was leading the dose, which it wasn't a buck.

It wasn't a no. You would think November 9th that the buck would be in the back, but it wasn't a buck, he shoots his deer. All I got was saying it was unusual because, yeah, the buck would always be following the dose.

Yeah, I got you. Yeah.

Let me plug an article real quick. Pat Durkin is publishing an article in the Media Jochim in January that talks about why the bucks and bulls are always last when they're walking out at night and you're waiting to kill them. Why are they always the last ones I already know?

I've read that one. I'm Di I don't really know. Anyway, so this guy, he shoots his deer and it goes a short distance and falls and he calls a body to have him help him and was waiting for his body goes down, looks like for first blood. And while he's doing that, he noticed a. A spike comes running by a and no hot and bothered. Can you do that grunt even though you can't do the squeal of the roar of a weasel?

Yeah. Or rather good anyway, he comes all he comes by all hot and bothered to close distance, finally sees them, spooks off. And the guy whose body shows up, they start tracking the deer and the same bug comes through. Again, Granton. And sees them again, spooks off, so, you know. One of these, dear, I think they assumed that it was the one that he shot was in astronaut asters, even though it was carrying around antlers.

Yeah. So they they. Took they took this deer to get aged and biologist just recently got back to him and said it was 17 years old.

That is unbelievable. Can transgender deer go into Ashtar? So I don't know.

I mean, it had all the female organs. Hey, I'm sure that's what that's what I was going to say. I'm I'm not sold on the idea that antlered doe would be fertile.

I don't know. I mean, maybe only maybe it didn't throw antlers every year.

And the guy that wrote it wrote transgender, but spelled it DCR like a little transgender, transgender, I wonder and I see wanted this.

Does the if she comes into heat, she comes in estrus in the in a bucholz, the breeder does the bucket thrown off.

Is there does the buck register like something's not right? When it sees the antlers or does it just like he he smells or he needs to smell and that's all he cares about? I think from like a deer behavior standpoint, a buck would see the visual cue of antlers from a long distance and he might come in to investigate, thinking he's about to get in a fight. Once he got closer and actually engaged the attention of the dog that had antlers, that dough would begin to send body signals that she wasn't a buck.

And he would then that would then override the visual cue that this is a bug because of antlers.

Yeah, I don't care what you got on your head. Yeah, I'm here for I think I think that smell just.

Just trumps everything now, that time of year, that's all they're thinking about. No judgment, just curious, man. Yeah. Just curious, someone's going to fill up our inbox with, like a trail cam photo of a buck mounting another buck. It's happened for sure. Now, we're going to start getting pictures of that. Yeah.

And then when you're separating cows and their calves and when they're coming into, you know.

Never mind the situations where there's situations where cows, milk, cows, steers, jumping on each other all the time.

Yeah, so the stuff goes on. Now, Clay, I'm going to see you in a. Very soon. We're going to go deer hunting. You can't decide if you're going to bring your bow or your gun. You don't need to decide right now. I want to tell you something. I do not believe. And bring in both. I think it's wrong. I don't believe in bringing both if you're a bow hunter. Then be a damn bow hunter.

Don't come and be like, I'm going to try with my bow and then switch to my gun because I'm a bow hunter, only up to the point where I might get afraid that I won't be successful. OK, can I play it for you? It's immoral. I would like to refer to my lawyer, Spencer Malath, and I would also like to say that I am not like fighting for this position.

But you've been hinting that you hinted to me.

Oh, I've been very candid about bringing both in. I will not. Hunt with you? Well, what I'm going to let Spencer talk first, he's itching to go.

I was fighting for Clay to bring bear with me, like take your bow for a few days, third day maybe rival. No, I think one of the worst things in hunting and it's something that I heard on the outdoor channel when I was probably like 12 or 13 years old. And it it like ruined me for a period time. And it was this outdoor show that I was watching where the woman was at some big buck outfit.

What was the show?

I don't recall. Take a guess so I could take a guess, but it wouldn't be fair to them if I was wrong. Yeah, they were like some outfitter in Iowa or Kansas, and it was the last day of the hunt in like one hundred and twenty inch, probably three and a half year old white tailback walks by and they choose to pass. And then they cut to the interview and the woman says, now you never shoot something on the last day that you wouldn't shoot on the first.

And that I was like, oh, like, that's that's good advice, right? Like, that's good advice. No, that's all that. She stole that from Jani and messed it all up.

So so I take a lot of issue with that saying, and you're saying a version of that, that like I you're saying that like you cannot go into a haunted move the goalposts. You can't go in and be like, I'm going to kill 150 inch book. And then on the second to last day, you're like, well, oh, of course you do. Of course you do. Then a hundred and thirty inch block walks. But that's totally fine.

Kill that instead does. How is that OK. How is that different than what you're telling Klay.

I just think showing up with all kind of weapons that you have like in your head, sort of teared out as like best case, you know, if you like, or really trying to get all my bone now feeling that I'm going to try to get of my rifle. Failing that, I will try to get on with my truck.

It's just like I just like just make up your mind. Massen here's here's the make up your mind. When you when you say that what you are prioritizing in your hedgeman of ideas is that the method of kill is most important. No.

And I used to know you are, but I used to be I, I Steve, this is touching on some deep rooted issues inside of me because I grew up with such a strict bow hunting in such a strict bow hunting world that like I mean, we didn't have guns. We, we, we both hunted.

And as I became an adult film and I still loved Bowmont, that's like my default thing to do. But I kind of just became OK with using a gun. And so I kind of. And obviously, I still love to bowl hunt, but so I look at it more from a the macro hunt picture, like I would like to go where we're going and take a good whitetail deer. I would prefer to do it with a bow.

I don't know what I'm up against. I don't I don't know what I'm up against. But Steve, I want to say to I'm on your team on this. I like what you said that I was like, yeah, I like that. I mean, I like the idea of not switching. I don't like to switch.

I've switched before and I've brought a bow and I've brought a rifle or a bow and a shotgun and just never seems to work out for me that well, because I'm not I like the commitment at least one for me, it's just it hasn't worked out that well.

It's like bring the bow, stick with it or bring the situation to is we have a very short time period. You know, we don't have a lot of time to get this done. But so I'm on your team, Steve, but it's like a hard never do that philosophy.

You know, I think we give I think we've got to give some grace. I to me, that's like some version of what that woman said on the outdoor channel, and that was a mantra that I would buy for a while, but I would like to go back and retroactively kick my own ass for, like, passing on dear, because I was like, you know what? You never shoot a deer in the last day that you wouldn't shoot on the first.

No, I'm not saying it's Yoni's saying it goes both ways. Are you kind of like the first date ever pass up on the first day?

What you'd be happy to have on the last I'm telling you what this woman said on the outdoor channel that caused me to pass on many deer in the future, that I wish I could go back and shoot those deer because I would have been happier in the moment shooting that younger buck than not shooting it. And then just like having that macho rolling around in my head, like you don't shoot a buck on the last day, you wouldn't shoot in the first.

That's not good deer management.

Well, I'll have the last word. No. That's different. That's all, Clay. I don't care what in the world you bring down there, you just bring one of them. Got you know, I actually have your rifle, I'm bringing it so you either decide either way, I'm bringing you the rifle. Yeah, yeah.

I like the archery idea, though. Oh, yeah. I think that's what you should do, man. We'll have a hell of a lot of fun. Let's do it.

The cool part about that, this one is going to be Pycroft.

Rattlin is going to be very effective, yeah, and the interaction you're going to have at close distances by rattling boxing is going to be pretty sweet.

And we're I'd like private land in Texas that barely no one gets the hona. Could be really good. Could be really good. I think it's going to be if it was anything like last year when we were there when Steve was the guy last year. Yeah, but oh, look, a zebra.

It was it was insanely good. And we were on white tails. Well, I've got a decoy.

I picked up a decoy today, a real mobile decoy that we can just pop out real quick. It's a pop up decoy, double-sided pop up decoy, Montana decoy. So we'll pop that thing out.

We'll just have to be pretty strategic with our setup because you're going to be rattlin for Misty, right?

Yeah, I was arguing a fair bit about too much rattlin and not enough random fogeys all sorted out.

I don't know if our friendship is going to hold up, but we'll get it sorted out. Oh, man. All right, guys. See you. See you guys. You see.