00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening I'm Eating podcast, you can't predict anything. You guys really made me feel good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming out everyone. Yeah. I'm gonna start out with a couple of introductions and then we'll dig into some deeper stuff down. Then we have our our produce, Sir Janice, who tell us we'll have an eagle and uh. Also joining us is outdoor Calumnists in general, outdoor writer Pat Durkin. You can't you can't see it. You can't see it, but Pat. Uh But but Pat Durkin has new tattoos. And I was asking him, like why now, and he said that he's old enough now where he doesn't have time to come to regret him. Also, today we're looking. We're behind Pat's car and Pat has what we thought was a vanity plate because his license plate is to seventy deer. But he said it just happened to happen that way. It's like a modesty plate. It's not a vanity plate. It's like, you know you're a true hunter when they send you a two seventy deer license plate, it's my wife's car. And uh we have Mark Ordman from Vortex Optics. And I don't know about you, but I, uh, you know, I've worked with and been friends with the guys a Vortex for forever. And when you have a problem you call up. It won't be you, but like genuine people answer the phone and you can call and ask for Mark. Yeah. So when you have an optics question, call this guy out and talk to him. And then we have a frequent podcast guests. Probably the most frequent podcast guest is Old cal forty six or Ryan Callahan at be six four oh six, Okal four oh six, o Califour O six. Uh. Yeah, you know, I come like I come through here quite a bit because you guys are such a you know, like Minneapolis is such a hub and the thing I think about often, like when even when I knew we were gonna come here, because I think about this thing that happened to me years ago where I was flying into Minneapolis to go to a weird sound. Yeah, well I thought I was like, this is the end. Man. I was flying in Minneapolis to go to this this white buffalo's birthday party which was west here out in the Dakotas. But I mean me and my wife flew in we already married yet, and we flew into the airport and rented a car, started driving down the road and got on ninety four, and I saw like what I believed to be to this day. It was still velveted out, but what I still believed to be. I saw what I at the time believe to be the like still the biggest white tailed buck I've ever seen in my entire life standing. It was like there's a Walmart and there was a pond and a giant buck standing on the side of the road. And it was burned in my mind, you know, and when I when I fly over now, I still try to look down and make sense. I didn't think to, you know, put a label on him anything, but it seems always sticks in my mind. It was it was, uh the week. It was the week after fourth of July, and so we we had west out of Minneapolis. We start getting out, you know, you start transitioning out onto the prairie. And even though it's a week after fourth of July, people are still cooking off fireworks everywhere. At dusk, there's this big thunderheads coming in and against these thunderheads and all these small towns. You see all these fireworks going off, and it was kind of between that buck and then as as seeing that back in the evening that we went a little farther and seeing all that, it was sort of this combination of all things I like about America, which should be like great wildlife, this kind of infectious patriotism, right, a willingness to blow your fingers off in pursuit of a good time and natural beauty and the weirdness of it all, and also what the writer Ian Frasier kind of lovingly described as the trigger happiness of being an American. And uh so I think about that often coming through here. This time through we did two things like last night we we did a thing last night and I thing this morning. Last night we went out on Lake Minnetonka and tried for a little while to catch a muskie, which didn't work out for any of us. Joanna's called a large mouth bass that was as big as his plug. Um. They say it's the fish of ten thousand casts. Between us, we logged a thousand plus casts. So we have nine more trips to go and one of us to catch a big musky. But the thing I like, it's kind of weird because when you go somewhere and you you if you go from not knowing about something and then it quickly becomes your least favorite thing, it's disconcerting. But this thing of that you get a boat that you can fill the boat with water so that it sinks down and makes a gigantic wave, do you then surf on It's like the surfing version of shooting preserved pheasants, and and like, you know, God forbid that if this lake did have one stretch of natural show line where there was like some debris and reads and stuff, you can kiss Agobie with the whole lakes and you know, six ft waves. What's the problem. There wasn't a little park that we fished in front of. It'll be gone in a week. If this fad, it's just like making surfing waves fads. Thing goes. But then this morning we got up and did we visited the Federal Ammunition had World Headquarters plant. That was fascinating. I'm gonna run through a handful of things that I learned that I didn't know, and you guys can jump in and crack me where I might be wrong, but for starters, we were gonna ask this as a trivia question earlier. A belted magnum. The belt on a belted magnum serves no purpose, right, It used to, but it doesn't. Now it doesn't strengthen anything. It's just there for no reason. Um, it was just so everybody else a Originally it was there to measure headspace. The measure headspace, but now it's just there because people feel that it ought to be there does nothing. Um, Brass, why is it brass? Brass? Like that flash of heat right expands the metal, brass goes back when it cools, it goes back to the shape it was other metals. If you made a casing and it expanded, it would just conform to the contours of the thing. You never be able to jack the cartridge out. Hence brass. Uh. The color coding system with shotgun shells that it used to be all color coded out. Everyone got away from the different color coding systems, but the only one they stayed true on is the twenty gauge remains yellow. Everybody else kind of walked away from different ones, and in fact, Federal makes a pink twelve gage shell which is like breast cancer awareness, and some of the proceeds for that go to that. They make a box where you get it where it's all red, white and blue shot shells, which is the Patriot Box, and that goes to veterans things. But the rest we've just gotten rid of the whole thing, all of that lead. So all the lead in the shot, so everything, the lead bullets and all the shot pellets that all comes from recycled car batteries from near here. There's like Gopher what was it, I wrote it down, Gopher Resources. Car batteries China, Mexico, all over the world come here, and those lead batteries are what goes into So when you're out shooting federal shot, you're shooting recycled lead batteries, which I thought was pretty cool. Um trying to then you know, what are lessons am I missing? Here? He gets a drawn a blank. Oh, the plastic and the shot shells is all local from Imperial Plastics. Did you guys pick up anything you were on the tour? I fed you half that stuff that I was emailing myself during the tour of stuff that I didn't want it forgets. I wanted to remember they put clove and cinnamon in the ballistic gael yes, so it doesn't smell so bad when it starts to melt. I found that that was very interesting because clobe cinnamon has been used to take down the smell at DAFT for a thousand years, still in use today we're adding the federal ammunition. Yeah. The ballistic gel is like animal gellatson. I didn't know about that either. It's the most satisfying thing in the world to slap. It's just like wow, I loved it. Um. The biggest game changer, though, I thought, was this new tungsten combination steel and tungsten pellets. That was with a four ten shotgun. Now they're putting more kill shots into a turkey, more baby's in that turkey's neck area. I think we were like ten years ago with a twelve gauge. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. Your children will all hunt turkeys with four tens. Uh. But right now, like in most states, you can't because the laws are sort of lagging behind the efficacy of where they're at with the new materials. So we learned all about all that stuff. Um. First thing I want to get into outside of that is uh, a couple of clarifications that I want to run through from some other shows. Uh. We recently talked about our friend Doug during and how his deer and most of deer, like all the deer around here, like deer aren't organic, right because most crop fields today, like most agricultural as you go to the corn we lfel for this does not organic. And deer are free ranging, which is another thing we like about him and these free ranging deer, I want to walk all over and eat these crops. In fact, a lot of them feed on GMO crops, is certainly not organic crops. So most of the white tailed deer that we eat, we're not even organic deer. But Doug wanted to point out He's like, hey, man, my dear aren't organic, but my cattle are because they're not quite free ranging. So he's able to limit his cattle enough to keep him organic even though his deer aren't. Another guy wrote him, we're talking about road kill, and we were complaining about restrictive draconian roadkill laws here in America, and he says, man, the lunacy extends up to Canada. He does, Dear moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. One day's driving on the road and it hits the Hungarian partridge gets off his car, goes and grabs it. A police officer pulls up, thinking he's having car problems. The police officer, after while I was like, what's in the bag? He tells him what it is. The cop confiscates it, and the guy says, the Morald of the story, I keep my road kills secret. Another guy we're talking about, like, we're talking this thing that happens where let's see go out and you get a bad hit on a deer and you don't find the deer until later, and the meats not salvageable, but you find the deer and you want to keep the antlers. We're talking about, like what sort of happens. How does your relationship with those antlers change? Right? Because it wasn't like you got it got it. You kind of got it or not really got it. But now you have this thing, and so what are you do when you're looking at it? And this dude wrote in to say that he hit one. He hit a buck with his bowl and lost it and didn't find until the next spring hunting morrel's and by then a squirrel had gnawed off one of the main beams, and he was writing in about wondering if it would make sense for him to get a squirrel mounted chewing on his deer antlets. And I was saying that I think that it would better to ask me than to ask the squirrel this question. But I would say absolutely, I would go ahead and do it. Another clarification I think warrants some attention is we had a recent debate about like if you say, if you say I'm gonna thaw out a turkey breast, it opens up the question is do you mean both or does a breast refer to one? And someone says, like, if you say he gave me half a breast, does that mean he gave you half of the meat on a turkey or does that mean he took one side of a turkey and cut that in half and gave you, in fact, a quarter of the turkey. And this guy said, you can solve this whole thing by picking up the commercial poultry term of a lobe, and a chicken has two lobes, so if you were to give someone a loban you've give them half a turkey. If you were to cut a lobe and half that's a quarter of a turkey. And I'm gonna start adopting you will start hearing the term lobe all the time on this show. Um. Another thing on the subject of turkeys we talked about recently, talked about a bearded hen. Most states don't say male female wild turkey. They stipulate or specified that you're allowed to kill a bearded turkey. And it's like, you know, one in a hundred female turkeys have a beard. So it just so happens if you hunt turkeys long, if you're gonna wind up with a hen, have you you got one? I passed up, You've passed up to no negative negative. He was saying there's a hidden value in bearded hens is you can get the rare opportunity, which is otherwise illegal, to consume a wild turkey's egg. And he got a bearded hand and found an egg, and he reported the egg to be large, excellent in flavor, with an unusually thick shell. Uh. In response to nothing except maybe in response to my buddy Ronnie BAM's maximum that you should never wear a hat that has more personality than you do, a guy rolled in with the observation, it's a proven fact that a man's credibility is inversely proportional to the flatness of his hat brim. He I don't. I don't agree. I don't necessarily agree on his pointing out because Janni's for a while was running like kind of flat brim. Yanni almost went flat. He still kept his ears outside of the hat, but was he was like flirting with running flat. And I think you kind of pulled back, right. I just usually wear them how they come. I haven't been wearing hats as much of the last maybe ten years or so, only when I'm in the wood, so I'm not thinking too much about how they look, so when when I get them, they just go on my head. When I was a boy, uh, people, it was a fad for a while to take your hat and wrap the bill around a beer can and put a rubber band on to give it like a power curl. Yeah yeah, yeah, you guys aren't there, but you're you're running. Used I used to hunk mine in a in a pint glass. I just tramp it there and shove it down in the glassubber band just in a pint glass and curl it quite nicely. But you're you're you're flattening. It's evolved that as the Jersey Tunnel. Then another thing, uh, the journalist. I did an interview with the journalist Tony Jones, and afterward he rode into UH, He's wanted to send me this thing we talked about earlier today that UH, Minnesota has released its new management plan and they're figuring there's enough white tails on the ground where they have the goal of harvesting two hundred thousand white tails annually. And I remember seeing that and thinking like, man, if someone wasn't familiar with just how many deer there were and sort of where we're at and and deer recovery relative to where we were, you know, a hundred years ago, they would see that number and maybe have like a funny feeling about it. But then I thought it would I wanted to check and compare it to something. And if you think two hundred thousand deer is a lot, this country slaughters that many cattle every two days. So that kind of puts that deer harvest into perspective. Uh. Another thing to put into perspective, and this this is for Callahan here. Ryan, can you explain how you recently did some liaising like you did some liaising with are you comfortable talking about this? But I keep asking a thousand questions about yeah, okay, no, I mean there's when we set it up or do you want to go for it? Okay. Ryan Callahan had the audacity of hanging out with someone from the company Patagonia, who has had over the years some like the founder is a hunter, does some amount of hunting and fishing. The company itself has given voice to some individuals have decidedly anti hunting stance. And Ryan has been doing some hanging out in liaison liaising. That's a word, right, And we keep and people keep writing me to gripe about it, like how dare you know? How dare he do that? Right? And and and this is the last thing gonna say about the topic. I do not mind now the great I take. I'm starting to get kind of torked with that. Go ahead, Well, that was all I would say, Like if if I was gonna say, you know, you remember, like Nixon, that Nixon was so anti communist, right, his anti COMMI credentials were so solidly established that old he and only he could go and interact with Red China. Right, So I'm like if I'm gonna send a hunting dude to go talk to some non hunting dudes like you're my Nixon's know what I'm saying. So I don't know why it Also it's like, oh, he's selling hunters out. He's not a true hunter now because he talked to a non hunter. Please. Yeah. So I have this very firm belief that we are not we're not doing ourselves any justice by only speaking like I can come out here and talk to you guys every night, all night, no matter rain shines, no whatever, and tell you how great hunting is and how much we do for wildlife and conservation and how we're supporting everything. And by doing that, I am not, sadly not going to ensure that we will have hunting, wildlife public lands access for the future. I'm just not because our group just isn't going to grow that fast. So speaking to lots of people who enjoy that public land and that access, but they don't necessarily hunt, they don't necessarily dislike hunting. That is the way I believe that we are going to ensure hunting public lands access long into the future of America does not hunt. But how are we going to grow that hunting number and ensure hunting because we have some you do it be hiding behind your middle finger. That's what some people would like to see happen. So you're not This isn't a thing. You're not gonna sell us all out all of a sudden, I've been a mole. Turns out you're covering the hunting world for a long time. Yeah. I appreciate you taking the time to set it there because I haven't had the energy to reply to the to the criticism, but it's been annoying me. What the gripe just annoys me. It's like, how dare you talk to somebody who doesn't think the way we think? He got an email to day from the guy that wasn't gonna buy a first light anymore because Callahan talked to a nine hunter. It's like, dude, I like, I saw I sleep with one. I haven't sold y'all out. You just lost your podcast, so betrayed all right? Here? Here here's a here, here's a conversation. I think more some discussion. This is a good one. It's from a dude um in California, non hunter, and I curiously to get you guys perspective on this. So he he has a garden, right and lo and behold, all kinds of rabbits come and start consuming his vegetables in his garden, and he gets to reading about how he or an appointee can harvest rabbits that are doing damage to his garden where he lives. Gradually he comes to that he likes the rabbits more than the vegetables because he starts eating the rabbits. So then he gets to thinking, I'm just gonna plant a lot more stuff that they like in order I'm really He's like realized, I'm really in this for the rabbits. But then he listens to us talk about different issues around legality, issues around baiting, So he's just trying to get like, ethically and legally, where am I? Like? Is this is this the baiting that everyone's always debating? And in my perspective, like I can't speak, I can't speak to the legal situation in California. My perspective that would be it's like it doesn't matter in my mind, it doesn't matter that you've made a mental transition to perceiving it. It's like it is not the law would say, um, you could kill rabbits that are destroying your garden only if you're sad about it, like it would never like the law would never go there, you know. But on the on the legal end, I have no clue. Is it a game species California that yeah? And I think I think in California most states laws is doing damage to your personal property you can you can harvest it. Yeah, I read that. I thought this is a guy after my heart. That's the kind of stuff most of us grew up doing. I remember being stuck out in the horse barn where I lived a little bit shock basically with the one little win doll and sitting out there on the pellet rifle protecting the strawberry crop. Anything that flew in there, I shoot. I usually miss it, but that was your purpose for being out there, and you're encouraged to do that. Never rabbit came, so you definitely shot it. And the thing of baiting if it's something that the human would eat anyway, you'll never know what they're going to bother you about that. No, if you if it was migratory waterfowl would be an entirely different story. But it's not. So I think he's probably he's like cool, he's cool. Llegally, I think ethnically, it's not like a it's a pop. It's an ethical positive, you know, because he's gardening. He's raising me and vegetables. Yeah, I could thought it sounded like a really good dual purpose garden. Dual purpose gardening. That's what you got to do a book about that. And the fact the fact he's eating its. Most people that kill an animal doing damage, they bury it. This guy is eating the stuff I think is to be commended. He's feeling good. I feel good about it. Another guy, so a Texan rode in was something similar that that I like a lot. Uh. But he's misreading his regulations because he's saying, you know, you're not allowed to use a mechanical like you're not allowed to use electronic things on on archery equipment. Whatever. Well, he discovered he's a vapor like VP pens. Okay, it's like a thousand thoughts about VP pens. But he's he likes to have a man's he's running a mango flavored vape pen while he hunts. And the first observation that this guy has about it is that what an amazing wind indicator it is. He says, there's something about like the way that smoke hangs in the air that it's like it gives a very nuanced read of what the wind's doing. But then he starts to realize he's starting to think that deer are liking that smell, and so he's struggling with is like I'm sort of doing a sort of electronic baiting by vaping out in the woods. He's like, you might wonder why it started. He says, I like the party, and so trying to do anything to this and I'm missing, oh you know, I know what I was gonna say about that. I remember think besides anybody else's opinion about it. So he's wondering, like, am I crossing him moral ground here by vaping out in the woods and luring and deer with mangoes sent but um, the same thing he was already vaping in ways. It's like, you know, Doug Dern's piss is very attractive to deer. He wouldn't be like, yeah, buckman juice right right. You would never say like everyone could pee in the woods except dog because buckman juice draws in dear you know again, like it doesn't transfer over, Well, he wouldn't have you over. First, thanks for giving away my number one big buck secret. And second, seriously, I would think that if you are allowed to use sense and lures in your state, then that would just probably fall within that category. Yeah, I think he's worried for no reason. I wonder if he goes through a smoke shop. Seems they have alfalfa alfalfa infused. We uh, okay, that was on the subject of baiting. Now we're rolling back into I want to say, like on the subject of rabbits, even though we have we're a step removed from rabbits, but a good one. And this is the one that comes in all the time. And this is all part like we keep hearing about. Our three is the three R R retention of hunters, retention and reactivation. So you'd get people to hunt, keep them hunting. If they quit, you get him back hunting again, the R three. So I think all of these things falling the R three. Like to take this one. And this guy is like talking about suburban squirrels and rabbits and how people keep telling them, oh, you can't eat those because there's never an answer. But there's this like prejudice against suburban They live amongst dirty people. It's part it's like part of self. It's like self loading and stuff. I'm guessing right, that's what he's like. Do they eat stuff that that they eat stuff? Yeah, they eat the stuff. You know, nasty we are. I've looked into this endlessly, and the one the only one I ever heard. The thought was kind of interesting, like, let's start with the disease one. The disease ones, no, because like all these roads, um, it doesn't matter wild suburban. Even though the suburban ones are quite wild. Uh, there's some like some of them can have mites that could feasibly carry bubonic plague. You can get tularemia from a rabbit. I don't think that tularemia discriminates between ones that live kind of buy a house and ones of really far away from the house. So the disease one is no. But the one compelling argument I heard one time would be that what if the squirrel had eaten some rat poisoning And I've asked around to a couple of doctors and they just like they're just they don't but not seeing it. It would be that so it ate it and then you got it right after it ate it and then you ate its stomach contents or something. It just isn't a isn't a thing. They would have to stay alive long enough for that poison to be absorbed into the meat somehow, and even then it's like an anti there's an anti coagulant in it. It just I don't think it's a problem I have I don't have in a pretty suburban setting, but certainly by my standards very I mean, I'm I'm an urban I'm an urban night and uh in a very teeny towne. Yeah. And I have rabbits that live in my woodpile and I don't is Lee Malone. And there's this older fellow that comes and walks by my place every single day and the only thing he says to me is how are those rabbits doing? And at this point I kind of remind him that they were likely not the same rabbits because he has a sense of ownership. Um, and I have a couple of bulls. I don't have space on the insides. I have a couple of bull heads hanging outside the fish no like uh yeah, and uh so I think maybe saying it like, hey, don't kill those rabbits. And I have pondered killing the rabbits. And it's not this like, oh they're dirty rabbits thing that's keeping me from killing them. It's the Yeah, it's the old like outfitter adage, like you don't take the timber next to camp because get snowed into camp. You're gonna need that. Yeah, it's part of your like you're like a prepper. Yeah, like one day those rabbits could come in real handy. I'm not exaggerating. I've eat like over the course of my lifetime, I've probably eaten Yeah, definitely, definitely, way in excess, like into the hundreds of squirrels and rabbits from the rural suburban interface and some quite a number of squirrels from the epicenter of the nation's largest megalopolis, which I don't want to go into great detail about. And all you've ever come down with is lime disease and tricks and yeah. And when I got trigger nosis, it was about as far away from a person as you can get, so no problems there um on the you see how I'm You see how I'm like the trans how good the transitions are. Check this one out on the subject of food safety. Dude's wondering, Uh, bon in neck rolls? So I like bon in neck rolls in c w D. Right, it's that used to like we used to just like cut up a deer, do you mind? I used to cut him right here at the jaw and I cut him right here and just take that whole thing and cook it. And and it's like as much as as much as there's no like there's no evidence, not no evidence that we know it hasn't happened. Like there's there's no one's no humans contracted c w D as far as we know, no Kayo has contracted CWD. No black bears contracted c w D. Um. That's probably just though, because it's a fake, uh that he's made up by the government. Then I learned, I'm glad you brought that up here because I wanted to touch about the new is it honestly new idea? Like the new idea that it's all that is. I've only heard about that new idea in the last couple of weeks. Yeah, that, in fact, it's not true. It's funny because one, I hope that those people are right. I would much rather have to deal with a large government conspiracy, then I would have to do with the potential contamination of my my preferred food source. So it's like I hope that it's I would love it to tomorrow realize it's all this big lie. But I also find it's funny that so much of the that that, like some of the people who don't believe that there's a disease called c w D happen to be involved in the captive servant industry. It's like, that's like too coincidental and sort of convenient to overlook. But to get back to the neck rols thing, it's like, even though there's no like it hasn't made, that hasn't jumped the barrier, right, so there's no predators that have gotten that, humans that have gotten it. Um. There's a lot of questions about how long it's been. There has certainly been there. Humans have absolutely certainly consumed thousands of pounds of c w D. In fact that venison absolutely um. But it's changed the way I look at it. It's changed like now I'm like still do it. But if I'm like, hone in Wisconsin, we had it's like a c w D area and you get free testing, so you get back to like negative. But I still can't help perceive it differently. Well, when they did a test, the first thing I tell you in your card you get back, it'll say to the something to the effect that we cannot find evidence of c w D in your sample. But that does not guarantee c w D is not present in that meat. You know, day I tell you that. Um, the thing that we're doing now the wing Wisconsin is the law changed now. If you're in a c w a c w D area and you kill a deer there, you cannot remove the bones from that deer in that area. It has to stay in that area. And then like dug her And wants to have a dumpster for the public to use right outside of his farm there and his driveways for people, and people can dump their dump their bones there be done with it and not discarded, not being started out in the landscape. You know, because right now, in the past, you could basically shoot a deer at Dougs farm or my uncle's farm ten miles down the road and go home with it, and no one ever got ticketed for bringing home a deer across out of the county. Even though it's putting against the law of for fifteen twenty years now. But to get back to the question, you know, personally, at sixty two years old, I'm not too worried about being the first human to come down with c w D. The same way you look at the tattoo, the same thing the tattoo, the same exact thing. Um, But I'll be damned from that. Make a neck roast and sear it's my grandkids. You know, I don't think, okay, if it comes to a c w D area or any deer um CWD area, I guess I'm just not getting that worked up about it when I go out to Idaho and shoot an elk out there Arizona or something. But I I guess if I were in the Midwest nol though, like right here in Minnesota too, and northern Wisconsin, northern Wisconsin, we phone to c D c w D deer on the Wisconsin River up by Ryan Lander, which is up in a northern forest, which they aren't They have been sampling, so we can't say where cw D is not anymore because we aren't haven't been checking for it. And if we're gonna complain about our states not doing their job. Our agencies, That's what I'd say, We're not doing our job. We aren't doing a good job of surveying. They have a big area periodically to just make sure real, kay, because we don't know right now. Well, you have you have, sorry, you have c w D within uh you know, a hundred air miles probably of where you hunt elk in Idaho, definitely, and and and definitely I'm not that far off of a lot of places where I hunt and Idaho, and certainly I have it m probably in the spots that I hunt in Montana. So I really want to know. How comfortable are you taking that whole altc roast? I well, there again, I'm not packing any meet my name, bones out is boning it out and taking taking just to meat. So I don't I don't worry about a whole lot. But there's something about leaving that bone in that neck neck roast. I think that had me a little bit more uneasy. Yeah, it just feels a little different, did you think. I don't know if you have folks follow all this, but the preons that they think caused c w D is in that's a lot of it's in the spinal column. That's where they find it in the heaviest concentrations, and so who, I don't know. I guess I wouldn't want to do it. I feel like also it's one of the few recommendations that they actually make, like if you're not gonna do anything, like, don't do this, like like you said, stay away from the spinal column, don't saw through it. But then a legitimate question that I have about CWD is the deer aren't contracting it from one another by eating each other's spinal column. So it's like fluids or this that the other. So is it not even is it not necessarily even a hunter issue or I consume deer issue. Is it just it's in the landscape issue? Yeah, well it's a good question. But the thing you return to all the time is like, no one's gotten it. As much as I was goofing on people who I think, there's this big spectrum, like like when people are great about the c WD and the deniers, right, I'm using I'm making a little quality uh symbols of my hands right now, that's a spectrum. It's a spectrum of attitudes, Okay. And I think the ones who say like there's no such thing. I think is is goofy and kind of laughable, right, but there's a reasonable position to say, um, it's it's there. I agree that this is a thing that happens to deer um. It may have been here a long time. We weren't aware of it. We just we know when we identified it. But there could be this long window of existence where it was just we've just been having it. It's this thing that occurs naturally, not too long. No, you don't know. No, that the history that at disease, they would think based on what was first discovering Wisconsin, they thought it probably showed up probably somewhere between ten twenty years before based on the epidemiology or that disease could go back to the sixties. Yeah, when when folks say this disease has been around forever, that's not true. And you know, you don't want to just calm b users, but you know, it's it's just not true. It's it's just a really recent disease, and I just think we have to deal with it now. But yeah, when I go deer hunting, though, I you know where I hunt. You've been the farm where I hunt. Your cousin or aunt. My it's my cousin's farm. Now it's my my laid uncle and an. So that's where I yeah, yeah, And she always wants you guys to come back because she likes you guys all the gates. But it's still it's still for me as much fun as it's ever bend. It's something you know, our family gets together, sorry, one time a year hun the weekend basically, and that's it. It's still fun. But but I'm more careful about now as far as boning things out and as why as a person boning out anyway. But now I thought the new law is going in, I think, well, that's one of those laws that makes sense. It's a little more inconvenient if it makes sense, and I think, you know, you know, it's good public policy. I think, yeah, that that's what what I'm talking about. That that that like spectrum thing. I'm just trying to identify the point of the spectrum where my annoyance goes away. And the thing that I find is like people like I think I found about human beings is we tend to like easy ideas that make us feel good. So when I am talking to someone who's like, I don't see the big deal. I'm just gonna continue eating it. I'm like hell yeah, man, right for a couple of minutes, and then some other guys like, bro, do you want to be the one? And I'm like, oh no, And I get that sinking feeling, you know, its part is. I mean, that's that's what I struggle with too, because when and you know this, and I think you've I've heard you describe it this way, but when you pull that necrosed out and you do it correctly, you can basically take that spinal column and remove it, and it is so clean, and it instantly like drives. You can put it in the Smithsonian it is. It is so clean. And that is so deeply satisfying to look at that whitening bone that has zero meat on it, because I feel like I've just done my job as an appreciator of that animal, and that's what I potentially have to throw away because that neck is so hard to debone properly, Like you will never get at that clean in the field. No, no, dude, I don't care how nice your boning knife, you will not. It's wasteful to bone out of neck. You need to cook that some bitch down and yeah, times are changing, man, But again, I don't know if I'm gonna give up yet. On the subject of food safety, um health advisories in fish, so here we know like c W D Okay, it's theoretical, not theoretical, Like the idea that it was that a person can catch it has never happened. People eating thousands of pounds health advisories and fish, we damn sure know that heavy metals are no good for you. I eat that stuff like I eat fish out of health advisory lakes all the time. We eat big hall a bit, you know, without I never think about it. I try to hide the existence of health advisories to my wife because it's a conversation I don't feel like having where I live, Like where I live right now, they suggest that where I live right now, in fish yellow perchs, they suggest that you do not eat more than two meals. What is it, then, two meals of yellow perch out of this lake every month, but only yellow perch that are twelve inches Because at that point I think it's that at that point, when the yellow perches twelve inches, he becomes pisciferous, He becomes a fish eater, and so then he becomes a bioaccumulator um. But I don't pay attention to it because I just know that when I die, that's not gonna be what I die from. Like I'm not gonna die. And then they're do an autopsy and some dudees like was he eating perch? You know, It's just like it's just no way, man, And then this dude, I this dude I grew up around one of one of my one of my young fishing mentors, was this guy named Ron Spring, and they were trying to start the effects of heavy metals on mercury and other things on people who would consume fish, and everyone anywhere, everyone in a hundred miles of Ron Spring knew that if you want to talk to guy that eats a lot of fish, talk to Ron Spring. This guy's job he was a commercial bait fish, so he fished leeches, wigglers, dog worms, sane mentos, and supplied live bait to all the bait shops. But he also was a fish eating machine. So he starts going to Michigan State University for these batteries or no you of m they start having him out to do these batteries of tests where they say to him like, okay, check it out. You need to go to a grocery store and you gotta buy in a name like thirteen things he's supposed to buy. Then you have to go sit in the room by himself in a while later and like what are you supposed to buy? Again? And he came home from it once and said, Steve, I don't care if I ever a fish in my life, I wouldn't be able to remember that list. So but yeah, it's like I can't get on. I recognize, sure, but I just like catching neat and fish more than I feared out. There was a case in Wisconsin where a guy got really sick from I think as he a mercury or his mercury from he he took can pickled Northern Pike NonStop and ate it for I think he ate it daily and he did get sick. Was his name, Brody Henderson. I don't think so, but you know my my situation, I do. Actually they think he got sick. He definitely definitely got sick for him, But but then he was eating it in such quantities that he probably gotten sick of something. That's just he really lived on that stuff so and and it does accumulate, and it made him sick. That's a lot of it's a lot of pike, but he's eating it daily, well sick. We had to go to hospital. Did he get better? I think he survived it, but I don't. I don't have the whole history is it's probably ten years ago now. But the thing I think I was coming to when he when he was catching all these pike, did he have all the sinkers in his mouth? I did that for thirty years. I mean, you, okay, go on, But I should say though, that that is a freak a care and so I mean, when you eat that much fish where you actually make yourself sick from the build up of the heavy metals, that's such an unusual freak thing. I guess I just want I read that, but I thought I was just another freak story. Now that's where I write it off. I think for the average person to catch the kind of size pike and walleyes and and perch, whatever it might be, To catch enough of those those real heavy accumulated fish and then eat them on a regular basis enough to where you actually get sick is still take an awful lot of fish. So I guess I I read them, I pay attention to them. But then I started doing the math, and I think I'll never catch enough that fish to ever make a difference, you know. And so but but I think, for again though, that's for me, and when my wife was of a childbearing age, that we pay attention to that because I thought, well, again though, because I'm not the great of a fisherman, I look at how many wall as I caught three twenty inches long, that we're the ones you're supposed to avoid. To think what happens once a year? You know, where I catch your fish that big? And when that big, if you can keep tracking pretty easily and not feed it to her, and so so I think those kind of things that I think it's a good public information. I think we'd be bitching out our government if we weren't doing that. And so the fact, yeah, you can imagine, dude, if no one ever brought it up, and then someone some journalists unearthed these troves of research pieces about heavy metal contamination right Flint, Michigan on a fisherman level, and yeah, well not so it's a great analogy and that in the PCBs in fish on Lake Michigan. So I think it's a government's responsibility, you know, watching the public resource and publicly consumed fish has to do that, you know, it's I think it's a good responsibility. I think they should keep doing. And I'm always glad when it comes out. I I look it over and I got ah, I wanna affect me. I don't eat enough of them. I will say this. I grew up eating salmon about three days a week. You're from Pacific Northwest, and I'm still here to tell about it. I may not be I may not be the brightest, but I am sitting here right now. Uh. It's funny the way like people, oh yeah, go ahead, and you're still on the subject. Go ahead. I was gonna I was gonna move slightly off by something just occurred to me because I'm uh, for my tenth anniversary, my wife bought me one of these rubber rings instead of a metal ring ring. So you want to talk about like how we deal with risk, right, I've heard a couple isolated scenarios of dudes getting their ring hung up on something and sleeping their finger, and so for that it was enough for me to not wear my wedding game and switch to this. Okay, but I'll eat every contaminated fish that comes across my deep prior. We're all just like you're we're just like irrational. Yeah watch this. So you were worrying that when they're doing your autosic, they're like, fun of a bitch got sleeved and bled out. Yeah, like in some weird way enough to where I said to my wife, and I didn't ask for one, she didn't know what they were. But it's I've brought it up enough to the point where like at whatever point of spouse registers the idea for a gift, I've brought it up that number of times, like, man, you know, I sure hope I don't get sleeved by my ring. I think you need to describe sleeved. Well if if you ever want to see some terrible pictures if I happened to people who get sleeved, which is you know, uh, the ring catches like let's say you're screwing tree steps and you reach up and grab onto him and as you start stepping, you lose your you're footing, and it happens, and guys catch that wedding ring on the tip of that tree step. You want to see some gory. Just how many people start doing start? I wish, I wish. I remember the issue of Deer and Deer Hunting magazine when I was at Deer and Deer Running magazine back in the nineties. But we had a picture of a tree stand accident by Brad Herndon. He's a good writer and he's retired now down in Indiana, Indiana, and he had done one of those where he sleeped his his ring finger and we ran the picture in the magazine and I'll never get that image on my mind. Yeah, what turn. What would initially alarm me is I arked it on a boat battery and welded my finger to a boat battery. That's when I was like, how does However, I was holding the player and whatnot and messing with the boat battery and like leaning down, you know, and nothing like. Well then on there and I had to pop it off. And that's when I started my fear that I waited for. You here is the remedy with this here silicone, Well, I am convinced dangerous. Get this thing away from me. I'm gonna I'm gonna second follow up to that um because you're thinking about things that might get you in the end, Do you think about things that might get youander, like what the likely cause will be, what you'd like to be gotten by. I just go by, like I type in like what you know, like what kills American males. It's like the heart disease. So I just assume, like I picture dying from that, so you take comfort, You're just like, nopeart disease. Yeah. Yeah, So like when I think of death, I picture be being very old surrounded by loving children, right, extremely old, very loving children, And I just like, that's that's just how I That's just how I imagine it going down there. There's a lot of scenarios. Every time I make a decision, I'm just kind of end up with, yeah, i'd be okay with that, and I haven't there. But there's those like you're in gridlocked traffic. I'm like not not not today is in one of those times. But the final thought on the health advisory thing, which I keep kicking around, uh is how many h how many shots of alcohol are you supposed to do in one night? Like not many? There's one that no one pays attention to remember, like there's like legit health advisories about drinking booze, right, Like no one thinks booze is good, but people just drink booze, you know, And like I used to, we used to like to light bottle rockets and have them in between your teeth, like let it go at the right moment. What's the health advised me on that? So but it's on my mind man, you know. Um, speaking of fish, someone wants to know. We get a lot of questions like this, how do you guys freeze freshwater fish? Did you grow up freezing in buckets of water? I've seen it, yeah, I mean we didn't, but most of our fish was you know, either if I guess freshwire like river you know, salmon, steelhead or the saltwater. But um, pretty much when Vacuum series came out, I mean that's when we really started putting up a lot of fish and and being able to keep it for a long time. But growing up, man, growing up, I remember fishing up north and put them in milk curtains and then I'm yeah, getting it in their kind where they're just kind of floating in that real pack tip together and freezing that and taking it home, and later I remember my mom would always um, I never quite understood this when she soaked them in milk and then freeze them all right, didn't didn't ever question that. But yep, still taste okay. I just did that with pick the Dungeoness crab frolls at milk. Let us sit in my freezer. Year thought at all. I thought it was as good, not as good as fresh, but good. Interesting. But we always frolls fresh water fish in like we take gallon. My old man to like take gallon milk jugs or butter tubs or peanut butter buckets, anything like that. Man, you put the fish in there, pour water on it, and freeze it. But your whole freezer gets so yes, it is full of water. Yeah, you couldn't bring it anywhere. And these days we just vacuum seal everything. That's what's that's when I switched to Then I had like a love hate with vacuum selers because I think I was using like really bad bags because you vacuum seal your bags and you dopen your freezer up and they wouldn't be sealed anymore. And then I slowly realized that it was like you can't jostle them. People that rub them. You're like, you know, you're banging around your freeze trying to find something. You're you're jostle in the bags and banging them on the wires and your freezer bang them together, and you make small abrasions. So that's why when you vaccine something, you open it later, it's no good anymore. But I've now I've vac seal all fish, act seal all ah anything, birds, a vac seal turtles frog. The only thing I like wrap is red meat double wrap. Why why do you make a difference there? Because it's just like it just feels like a sole bulletproof man and it's just fast for me to do. I just wrap it in plastic wrap and wrap it and freezer paper. I like the way it looks in my freezer, just like it looks like Fort Knox in there. You know. Well, the way we decided is that um, I do all the knife work. If my wife volunteers to help and gets the vacuum sealer out, I don't complain. I just let her do what she wants. And and if it's me, I'd probably I find a paper less troublesome but she likes the vacuum steeler, and I can't tell a difference to me. That's another thing is wrapping meat the double wrap way. You can you can eat it two years later, three years later. If you wrap that, if you get that plastic wrap tight tight tight, like all air out tight like a condom, and then you wrap that wax freezer paper, it never goes bad then. So I just pulled that chunk elk out. And we've talked about this before, but I do as little cutting as possible, big chunks, no trimming. Wrap it in paper, no plastic, no plastic, no plastic. Uh god, I'm anti plastic as much as possible. Just you don't need to. You don't feel the need to just pump more plastic out into the planet. Correct. Yeah, you know it's like a freezer paper. I think technically, you know, it's got that little shiny there's only so much you can do. He's being inconvenience already. Yeah, but I'll figure it out one of these days. It's it's supposed to be used the way you're using it. I think when you when you look at the directions on the on that freezer paper, roll like right, there's a little diagram and they're like they have that weird roll that nobody I don't see every anybody ever. Do you know I'm talking about the roll Butcher's roll. No, I'm a corner to corner genuine Butcher's roll. I don't think that's how the Yeah, because there's like this weird like compressed air out of it where you roll up one end like you make a bag and roll it super tight. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that is. Yeah, I don't use it. But like I put this elk away stinky. I was experimenting, which I often do, and and it aged and it had like I started to produce moisture again along with it a bit of a smell, and so you know, I just kind of squinted my eyes and rolled it up and got it in the freezer. And uh, I took that out last week and it was fantastic, Like it had got it still had that ripe odor. No odor was gone, trimmed off the outside like some cultures they like high. Like if you read old French cookbooks, they'll say hang it until it's high, meaning smells off. Yeah, and I've read that. I don't know that term specifically, but I've read that that kind of shiny slimy is like ultra enzyme action on the outside. And there's things in old French cookbooks to hang foul. I can't remember it by that. You remember this the neck or the foot until it falls. Tell us in the neck till the body weight pulls it off to the bod, till it decays enough of the body weight pulls it down to the ground. And as mentioned the hunter times my day, I would talk about hanging dear until it had a quarter inch of mold on it. But we just ate he ate some uh meat. We discussed this. We ate some meat that had been hanging for eighteen months, eighteen months, aged in the fridge at eight degrees yeah something. It was controlled, tastes like cheese. Yeah. But Steve, before you before you move on, can be transition back to your the urban diseases, because I thought with your background, you'd you'd tell us about your days of hunting that um pigeons up in the up in the bridges. I mean, that's about as urban as you can get. The days Yeah, yeah, yeah, eating street pigeons out of like not you know, everybody streeting, not everybody. A lot of people eat street pigeons from out in the farm country, but eating street pigeons from cities, no problem. I've eaten streets pigeons off the streets of New York. I'm sitting here right now. There's your proof. But I've had a lot of ailments. Man, I've had a lot of weird ailments in my day, but not like not related to that weird ailment. But then you think too many. I had to like return around because I thought of this to day when we were touring the Federal plant. You're some about that that they have that lead. Okay, they get you take lead from They take lead from car batteries, and they brought these like ing gets, some recycled lead, but they add like these small percentages of antimony, which is a lead hardener. When I was a little kid, we'd go down to the Twin Light Gun Club, which was a mile and a half from our house. We go down there, check to make sure no one was actively shooting, go far down to the other end without putting any kind of flag or notification out, and take a screen that our old man made us. He made us like an archaeologist screens like a box of the screen in the bottom, and we would sift the burn to get all the bullets out of it, take those home and take a torch, and we had like you know those pots you melt lead in, and we would take a torch and melt all that lead and get all the impurities off, and the lead would rise up, and we had a sinker mold to pour our own split shot. And I never and it wasn't until the day that I understood, like when you would tooth tightened that split shot, you'd always hear your tooth crunch in a way that you wouldn't hear was store bought split shot. And I realized now it's like the minute they said to them, like so that's what that was, because it always had like a disconcerting like a disconcerting like crunch noise. Man, those antimony in there, I can't see out of that. I had a slight touch of tooth. And I had to laugh at the Federal Plant today because we were walking through the shot area. Um about the time you probably had your same realization. But they had this huge, you know, uh barrel full of probably number seven shot, really fine shot and it's just it's brand new, and it's just kind of glistening there, and I think every single one of us kind of staring at it for a second, and then just like a bunch of little kids, you're just like hands in this big thing. A lad, yeah, you can't not do it. I just got to get in there. And but my my brother, he would like collect mercury out of old He'd collect mercury out of thermometers until he had like a big ball of it that he kept the thirty five millimeter film candister, and we get that mercury on this roll around. It's which I think was stupid even then. It was like, you know, thirty five years ago, still stupid, are already stupid. Um legal and ethical conundrums of bartering or trade being fishing game. It's illegal, right, it's illegal to formally it's illegal to barter fishing game. Like just way in the nineteen thirties and and earlier, we started to set up laws in this country though, to de commodify game, um to to destroy the economic incentive for market hunters to go out and kill North American game and sell it. And I was like the first most important step we had to take to recover American wildlife. Um and they came into and said, you can't barter it. But who it's kinda it's kind of funny. And I got a buddy who one time was down on a dock and he and a guy he was coming back from lincot fishing, another guy was coming back from uh fishing spots shrimp. They didn't know each other, and they struck up a conversation and struck up a deal by which they would do a swap and an undercover game. Warden right there really doing if they were doing a formal you know what formal barter, what they bartying? What was he buttering for link cod for shrimp, shrimp lin cod for sport called shrimp. Because they didn't know each other and it was a formal, they were making a formal arrangement. They were like applying sort of mentally applying value in trading. But like my brother who lives in Alaska, when he comes down, he brings me king salmon and I trade him contaminated perch fils, right, but we don't it's not. But he'll even say, like hey, man um or whatever else, say, you know, bring a cooler down when he come because he's from the Midwest and he misses perch. Do you know that they that that those guys challenge it, they go to court and challenge it. Any idea, No, because I would think it's illegal. It's but it's illegal. But it's one of those things where you talked to a sensible person and go, I don't think that's the intent of that law. That but your judgment agree with you that typically when people get busted that kind of stuff, they're doing something they're getting real value for it. You know, there's usual money at some point and they exchange you know, like he's going to do. Would be let's say, like I give my my auto mechanic some elk of a year as a thank you gift, you know, like some people might take flowers. I take him a roast. Okay, well, if he wrote you an invoice and exactly exactly if if you were if I were to say, hey, if I give you half an elk, but you fixed my transmission next week, that'd be illegal. You know, that's cut and dried. But you know, fish shrimp for fish. I would think any any reasonable person to say that's that's not right. But what if you were to say, Hey, I have this real nice lind cod play here. How about you give me ten pounds of spots, And then Rude said he said, yeah, I think it's only worth five pounds, and he goes, all right, how about we settle somewhere in seven a half pounds. I still think that, right, No, if he's like, dude, these spots shrimp tails are thirty bucks a pound, give me the whole damn link, right that you agree that there's a point at which but but I agree to in the in the spirit of the law thing, the spirit laws, the spirit of the law. I agree that my brother is saying, hey, I'm gonna bring down the king Sam Flay, and I'm like, that's great. Regardless I was gonna give you some yellow perch. No one's ever gonna I mean, yeah, like I see why that's in place and think it should be in place. But then also like on like a very basic human level, that's kind of like you do as a human being, like from the beginning of time, Right, it's hard to like toy. Yeah, like you said, there's tears of it. It's like all of a sudden you're here and it's like, Okay, this seems like super meto normal like and then all of a sudden, you know, escalates pretty quickly. I say, amongst friends, I've never been like, whoa, whoa, nah, give me some of that back you can only have. Oh, that's because I've never taken it to the like you never say to a guy where your body's gonna bring you, say, gonna bring you some some white tail meat, and you're gonna swap mouth some wallee. I've never seen someone take it to be like well how much? How much you bring it down? So I'm trying to figure out when I go into my freezer, how many my milk jugs full of calfish phlats. Yes, I guess I've never seen it get abusive, you know, in all the years that i've I never have kind of engaged in it, you know, honest I think, I mean, oh, you've seen it get abusive? Well no, I used to make sure laban smirk, You're like, you're like an illegal barter. I used to be go on, go on. That's when I was living in Colorado and in a ski town, you know, and I was whatever, making fifteen bucks an hour and um, I'd always have a lot of elp meat. So some of the main things that I constantly for I don't know, a half dozen years, I would barter forward the ski tunes ski passes because I had seasons you were buying ski passes with elk meat. Well, so anybody that works for the mountain gets like, well, you used to be this. It's not that way anymore. But back in the day used to get to say, I don't know, ten or twenty three ski passes, which if you're skiing at Vail or be Creek, those were like eighty or a hundred dollars value of peace. So if I had friends coming into town, I didn't have any of those if I wasn't working for them out and how you're gonna get them to ski, you know, like get them up on the mountain. So yeah, so I was very much calculating exactly how much that I around was worth because you're you know, you're writing it out on little re seats, you know. Um. And then I got a few oil changes too, so I don't remember time. It's are you now like repentant or are you like or? And I would do the same thing again. I wouldn't do it again. I mean, now I know better fact, and I didn't know. I don't think. I don't think any less of you hearing this. They probably I'm guessing that they're private a good hunter man like playing me for myself and plenty to barter with. You know, did you know at the time, did you know that it was that you were you were potentially crossing a while no idea. And I think too if you were like coming back from them, if you're going to the back door of a butcher's shop and meeting something in the back lot saying here, now give me your ski passes, that gets to be I think a little more questionable just because you know you're on site where you know that's their business and cutting up meat. Is this something about the um it's a term for that where you're in the context the context of it where I think when you go back to your apartment and it's now buddy the buddy, it's I don't know, it's hard to have to get you judge bent from for me on that. So especially college kids, you know, I can see that you get a citation right, and then you're like digging in your freeze. You're like, how much does that ticket? Again, you just happen to have a couple of tender loins, um, I guess to your point, we were having a dinner over at my house the other night and uh, you know, get you have buffalo skull up there and stuff and which came off a private land and I was explaining how, yeah, you know the rule is and and uh and we're talking away and I was like, yeah, one one. I have this regret where I was guiding in New Mexico and uh, I had found this rock that was, you know, the size of like a big medicine ball, and it's probably a seventy pound rock, but it had uh three uh fossilized centipedes in it. It was just incredibly cool. And uh, I was like, well, I'm gonna come back and grab that. And I had told these folks that I was cooking, uh cooking with that. I regretted not grabbing that and said, well, yeah, but you just told us that was illegal, and so well yeah, but then I didn't know, so it would have been fine. Now I can't go back down there and pick it up. Yeah, Like I wish I was the I wish I was the me that didn't know, but see that rock would be sitting next year woodpile and you'd look at it every day. Angle, man, I gotta get that rock back to where it rightfully belongs. Yeah, you'd get caught by dude and you'd have to explain that you're actually returning. I know it sounds weird, but hey, Sonny, be like, well, I'm actually bringing this rock back to your property under the cover of darkness. Should a should a single species hunter be taken seriously? It's a good question. It's not an apparent question. I never thought of it myself, But is there really such a thing. There's definitely that kind of a single species hunter, single species nobody. It's not a real way. Okay, we're a single species a hunter or a single species fisherman, say yo, but we fished with the guy last night who is very definitely a single species fisherman. Okay. Someone wrote in to be like I just can't take them seriously, like something must be wrong with him. I just think it's kind of cute. It's like the dude loves muskies. He's never eaten one. He just likes to catch him, and he'll try. He'll catch him anywhere they can be found. It's like, I don't I like him better than someone that doesn't fish at all? No, certainly. So it's like, and that's that's the guy that you talk like, you know, I would consider like when it comes to like hunting or fishing, like like you say, a big in generalist, right, like do a lot of different things. But by that I should probably wear that t shirt that says like, world's okayst hunter, because like, I'm okay at a lot of things. But I mean those dudes that specialize like that, man, they're great at it, you know. I mean those are the guys that you look to from not like when you're really trying to sort something out, you know, those are the guys you want to talk to. Yeah, you're trying to figure out wait till they don't call a guys like now and nin hunts a white tail. Yeah, so I get it. I get what he's saying by thinking that it's goofy, but I disagree with them. I fished with a dude who's a really good guy in uh, South Dakota, and we were fishing for walleyes, and uh, you know, and I am not a walleye. Fisherman at all. On Uh, you know, there's some subtlety to it that I wasn't really picking up on the fact that they they they sort of think about biting rather than biting. Yeah, and then you like gingerly pull them up. And he just ridiculed me every time I had would either bring in a fish that wasn't within the slot limit, or I would mention the fact that I liked to fish for anything else, and he would go as far as to say, that is not a fish, pike, Oh, that's not a fish. And I find it very hard to believe that there's in this area of the country that there's nobody that answered you from the fishing perspective, because he made it seem that he was not alone in his specificity. For Wally, I'd be I wish we could do it somehow where you could say how close to that single species are you? Are you like a deer hunter and ten percent duck hunter, that kind of things. I'd a lot of people in that category, myself included where I probably hunt deer when if I were to break on my hunting down and put a percentage basis on, I think that's probably deer and ten percent elk and earlier in life is pricing a five percent deer and percent goose or then then that's not counting spring turkey. I was thinking about when you have to make decisions in the fall, and I saw a survey one time. It was actually real scientific survey where they asked deer hunters if is there anything else out there that could replaced deer hunting if you could no longer do it? And it was like about overall, about forty nine percent of those deer hunting, About half the deer hunters said there's nothing else in my life that could replace deer hunting, like for that extent. And then they asked goose hunters if you could if is there something else out there that could replace goose hunting if you were cut off from it forever, And then thene of it dropped down to like, I think ten percent or something. They also is not a dedicated you know, there's something about I would go back to my expression, dear dear make people stupid. It's just something that it makes up so much a part of you that you just cut off all reason and just go with it. I might start a T shirt that says, dear make people stupid. Uh. Pat made me aware of another good quote their day. It was about leadership where he said every ship needs a captain and there's no such thing as a co captain, which is good. Um, you guys cool on that subject. Okay, there's a guy that wants to he's having a kid and he wants to know what to name it to make extra sure that it's a hunter. And I'll tell you what it's not. Hunter. I think a lot of people are just thinking it's as easy as calling them hunter and that's gonna get it taken care of. But I've been a boatload of hunters that don't hunt the name hunter, and I see people go the Mountain Man route. Dude likes the hunt a lot, and he's got a kid Jedediah or he's got a kid Boom. I don't know if that works or not. I name my kid, my newest kid. I named him after my brother Matt, who likes the hunt more than anybody on the planet. Um, no one knows that that that's my game. If you hear Matt, you think the dude from the New Testament, right, So I don't I don't have a good answer for him. All I can say is that when when when we were having kids, we picked out the boy's boy's name and girl's name, and I, for one kid, I picked up the name Bridger. If it's gonna be a son, because you wanted the person to be the kid to be. Always had this idea that you bring up your kids and the culture and teaching them about the Mountain men, that the famous Hunters real people, not fictional care to real people. Then, um, just saying, although I had three daughters, so anyway to use the boy's name, did you? But did you name any of them after the goddess of the hunt? Nope, nope, I M smart, but we didn't name um Diana, the goddess of the hunt. We did name my my third kid Carson. And if it had been a boy, if it'd been spelled c A R s o N, but she was a girl swinging spelled a k A R s y n, and presumably kick Carson, kick Carson. And just because I like history, I like all the all that kind of stuff. But um, you don't know though names are important. I really I'm big on names, and I evaluate people by what name their kids. But yeah, man, I don't take your kid's names. Well, the touch basically, it takes a little while for you need to figure it out. You can't be like all the people. Okay, go ahead. No, you don't want to put them on the spot. No, put him on the spot. I mean because what if he has to judge people out here in the audience. Oh, because they might have the same name and my daughter jump me afterward? Yeah, beat pass ass or some name is alright? Sorry, bad idea? Go ahead, I don't care on this doesn't matter. I'm not doing it. Pat, blood will be on my hand. Let's give it. I will tell you you may want to avoid naming your kid Cal. I've had a couple of friends go down that route and turns out there a little too much outlaw on that name. Is that right? Spins them off in a wild direction, on themselves on the wrong saddle off you too many times? Maybe already h question for you, though, Pat, You've got three daughters. One likes to hunt more than the other ones. Right, definitely was it Carson? No, it is Leah, Leah, my very first daughter. Um, this is this is one thing if you ever want to get insights into how kids think and who will be the hunter I took. I took all three of my daughters. I started them hunting at about age three. Take them along. I used to have a well we still have their wagon, their little red wagon. I was called the a t V. I'd put them in the red wagon and pull them out goose hunting. And Leah not kidney. By age three, she she understood the goose music when she get her geese coming, and her little head to just turn and start tracking. And I watched because she had really good hearing, and I watched her um. And then when the when the geese started to come in, and you know how they come in to setting their wings and tilting back and forth, she just watched like a like a like a retriever, watched those beasts until I shot. And then I'm gonna be happy if and if I missed, you know, she's just gonna stare at me. But then what what But it was really what was really instructive, you guys, is um as still as the other girls came along. Then behind her, I take all three of mouth goose hunting, and oh, garden is a coming in and all those all that honking, all that noise, and they're you know they're gonna set and setting your decoys. You finally come up and you raise a gun and I look over and Lee is watching the geese. There two are like this. They got their heads heads down and ears covered up. And all I could think was before I shot, they aren't going to be hunters, you know, And they weren't. No, no, no, no. That that that's the That's the fun thing about parenting. You really learn each one of those charms. I love it. I it's fun now as a as a grandparent to see, Um, what's it's sad to them because as a girls started having kids, you can't spend the kind of time hunting and fishing them as you did. Because like as time went on, Um Leah and Leah always hunted and fished Ellie where they would not want to get out of bed to go fishing. But once she's on the lake after breakfast, she fished. All data is fine, our youngest one. We're sitting the back of the boat, read cut up the worms. She'd do anything besides fish. And then now as an adult though, she just finished her master's degree, and I found it very interesting. Her master's degree in English was all based around the outdoors and getting back into the outdoors as an adult. And so now I think, as she's not having kids and go fishing with me, I find that really cool. You can she's the one named Carson, where I think, yeah, yeah, thank you. It takes great the name Carson takes gradual effect. Um. The thing I've been thinking about with kids lately, like kind of like with with the way exposing them to the outdoors as helping as I've been having this debate now that my wife about like teaching them use a hatchet right to cut kindling. If you come out the yard and there's a five year old with a hatchet, one might question what's going on here. So but a way that I want up selling it my wife and I've used as a couple of times now as I'm like, I'm trying to introduce them too, sort of in arena of consequence, and I find that that these sorts of activities are a way to bring people in. We're to bring people in a fun way, but we're decisions matter right where there's right ways and wrong ways to do things, and there's difficult questions to wrestle with, like why do we eat dear? But not unicorns, right, And it winds up being that it's like, it's just this thing of you. You're introducing this world where, yes, you can, this is a world in which one can be gravely injured if one doesn't learn how to master certain skills, where you will come up empty handed if things aren't done this way, where there's this morality at play in life and death is struggling out, it just winds up being really helpful. I think that it could be that you could raise you can. You can start off like trying to raise outdoor kids with outdoor sensibility and have them go off and not be interested at all, And you'd be tempted to look and be like, oh, I wasted my time. But perhaps not, because when you color with your kid and your kid doesn't wind up being a professional colorer, you're not bummed that you like, you're not bummed that you colored with them all the time, waste all the time color and sunshines, you know, it's like no one ever looks at that that way, so I do. But but yeah, I feel like I'm like setting them up to be cool people to hang out with, when maybe it's just there's value in nothing else, if nothing else, they will grow up into adults. And my kids all still like getting elk from me, dear from me, fish from me. They want they want that to be brought into the house and then they share it with us. I mean we share it with them, and to me that that's what's important to get them into that culture, but at least understand it. And when they can interact with their coal workers and they get talking about these things, there's someone in the office who can talk real intelligently about the hunting lifestyle. And they grew up in a house where that's where we ate the most part, and so I think that has great value. And because my kids didn't grow up out of the house and then go, oh dumb with that dumb son of a bitch, he's out of here. You know, they grew up in the they embraced the way they grew up, you know. So I think that's just great. Anything you can do with your kids that get small indoors eating the fish, learning how to prepare itish well. You know, like we were talking earlier today about the things that kids see, you know that could you know, make the hair snap the back of your neck, and they handle it this fine. I think so often we baby kids and make make they think you were telling each other that, oh, you can expose into that. And people worry about seeing a dead dur in the back of a car, and I think, well, there's somebody just went by with a full load of hogs. Where do you think they're going. You're talking to your kids about those kind of things, and make them understand that, yeah, a lot there is dead, but tomorrow all those hogs they won't be here anymore either, and make them I think those are opportunities for people to talk to kids and explain things to them. That's my thought. Marfa. You uh, Mart, do you feel like you guys are throwing some outdoors some outdoors women or no? Yeah, I think so. I mean, we didn't put any thought into their names, but I do put some thought. I mean put the thought in their names, but not in that regard. You know. I figured, you know, hopefully we'll introd do them to the outdoors and yeah, expose them, expose them those things. Actually, one of my daughters, Mara, which is kind of a unique name, is has the same name as your sister, which is kind of cool. But but yeah, I mean you talk about an arena of consequence um our oldest Yuh, it's pretty much a darribed devil. So she pretty much puts herself in arena of consequence constantly. Yeah. But and that's one thing that I had to learn, was like I just kind of let her do it. Now. It's like you want to climb to the top, all right sorted out? You know, if you fall down, you fall down, you know. And like what Pat said, I mean, I think we don't give kids credit for what they're capable of doing or oftentimes understanding or comprehending or you know you And I've thought about this myself as far as like exposing them to the hunting or death and are they ready for it? And we're even chatting but a little bit about that earlier and then. And the fact of the matter is those those are normal things. I mean, that is that is that is happens all day every day. And I think the sooner you realize that and accept it, you know, the better if you're gonna be so. But yeah, but anyway to answer, I'll go further than that to answer your questions. So we have been doing some uh some nature walks, so uh, the girls like to find find the deer walks. They like to look for rubs. Been picking some mulberries, been catching a lot of blue gills lately. The kids absolutely lose their mind when they have a fish on there. I think it's just it's it's one of the most amazing things to watch. It's like watching electricity shoot through their body. And I love its speaking electricity. You guys can answer this. My kids when they're small, most fascinated them and go scouting. Was was dear dear turds, bear bear coop Anthony came out of an animal. They had to go and check it out and ask questions about we're walking through the woods. Uh. I was out and we were looking for squirrels with their uncle Matt, and I turned around and my daughter was four, she was three or four, and she had a mouthful of deer droppings because we had apparently picked them up and talked about it, and she got the wrong like picked out the wrong detail about what we were saying about it. And she's like, and I realized that she hadn't shoot up a deer dropping but yeah, one of my favorite But you know what it's like, this whole reflection of yourself thing right, and and so I think that you could get The risk would be that you get overly invested in the idea that you're gonna make them, that they're gonna be a version like this version of yourself that you wish was the one that was true somehow. Like I have a picture of my little boy when he was so my eight year old, when he was five. It's like a picture of him nothing on but his underwear, cocked back with a sling shot and there's a black bear standing right in front of him up at our fish sh act And like I like that picture, probably because you're you're doing some game where you're like, you know, you're sort of saying like this it's this representative it's this literal representation of you where it's like half of your you know, genetic input. But you wind up like trying to isolate these moments and find these moments where this thing that you wish was true about you. And I think it could set kids up for failure in a way in your mind if you have these huge expectations, like people will ask me, like, what are you gonna do if your kids don't like to hunt like you do? Probably like him, probably won't hang out that much on the subject of families. Dude from Michigan, he's an engineer by training, and he's going out to Idaho. All people should go hunt Idaho, right count he's going out. He's going out to Idaho, and he's wanting to know what can I tell my wife? And he's going out by himself. So he's doing a solo wilderness hunt. What can I tell my wife that will make her stop worrying? You can rest assured he's got the smallest details worked out. Yeah, the little bit, the little engineering bits worked out. I think the thing he could tell her is he could say I've arrived, because it's more dangerous to drive to your hunting location than it is the hunt I've done. I've done solo hunts like that, and I I think just makes sense. Anywhere. I carry one of those personal located beacons that you know you can Basically you have flip one switch hut and it sends a beam up to the satellite and next thing you know, but they always tell you that when you hit that switch, you better be in trouble because they are sending help. And it also you can also do pre program texts every day say everything you just said it, So it just does that no matter what. Yeah, three years later, she's still getting Yeah, some bits still okay. But you know, in these days too, it's often the case, even where I hunt out west, um, where you get up on the mountaintop once a day or whatever might be. I'm not on the phone in everyday people as I have to be though. I just my wife and I just don't need that constant reassurance. But I think it is good to have cell phone communication if you can, if you can arrange it to where she knows you're there every day. But I'm like you, I always think the odds of getting hurt on that one week or two weeks out there out west, compared to the daily risk of routine risk you run by driving to work, all those kind of things falling down the back stairs, all the crazy things that happen to people in life. One are the odds that the bad things that happened to you during that one time out there. Now I could see I'd be a lot more worried if if this is the guy who is going out off the coast of Alaska in a boat every day for two weeks to himself. But on land, yeah, I I feel like you should do some safeguards over she'll never stop worrying completely, and she'll never stop worrying until you're back home. But I I found like last year, I had a guy bell on me. I was hunting up in Arizona. Right before I was leaving from my hunt, my buddy billed on me. So I was gonna be going out there by myself. But luckily Randy Newberg happened to be hunting the same area. So I email Randy and said, hey, I'm gonna be hunting this you know nine I hear you know. I knew you're gonna be there too. Could just be my emergency backup in case Penny has to reach me and you can't reach me. I'll tell you where I'm parked, you know, give him a GPS. You know, I worked out fine. There's always things you can do to at least to maintain a link somehow, And that the link, though, is important, just that satisfaction or knowledge that they know where you are, that you're okay. I think that that where I'm gonna be, where I'm parking my vehicle, and I think another thing that's helpful is if I'm not back by this day, something's definitely not right. It's helpful for people. And then the beacons. I bought one of those beacons for an Alaska hunt. But now like I packed when I go tree stand hunting by myself, like until I keep that in my pack every time too, because I'm like getting though out of the stand you might not have self reception. Well yeah, fall stand, you got an arrow through your gut, hopefully not like you're sleeved. That's not a problem anymore. I'm clear. I want to hit one more, two more, say the same. Dude is always wondering, Um, when is it? When should you bring a spotting scope? When you factor in or weight issue? First off, you need seven spotting scopes maybe eight? Um. I think it just depends. It depends on the right mark. I mean, well actually, I mean, yeah, fifteens or twelves. It depends on the hunt though, like open landscape hunt, or if you are going to be doing a lot of vehicle scouting. I mean then you're not really packing anyway. But you know, if you're talking about packing it, I think it depends on the hunt. It depends on you know, how you know what a what a person is looking to find. You know, if you're just looking to find a deer or locate something, then you know, maybe your vinal will get you through. But if you're you know, trying to be a little bit more discerning, or you're on a sheep hunt where you know, maybe you are really really trying to pick apart. Is this a full coral ram? You know, I think I'd let the hunt dictate it. But they're definitely handy, you know, and I wouldn't. I wouldn't rule him out for the Midwest either, because you can do a lot of really good long distance scouting around here without being intrusive on you know, an area that you want to hunt. Yeah. Yeah. Are you so honest? Have you ever you when you get a call at Bortex? Are you so honest that you've ever said talk someone out of buying a product? Like means you're honest? No? Yeah, I would. I definitely had point a person that I mean, you need to set a binos and absolutely, yeah. I mean that's just like I'll never I'll never say that you don't need to set a binos. But you know, if your rifle hunting, you know, seeing it a rifle scope too, But I mean I think this was binoculars. I mean I just bring binoculars around with me all the time, you know, when I will I do anything outside, Like I get if I forget my binoculars, which happens occasionally or actually oftentimes I drive to work and sometimes I don't have in my truck and I see you on the way to work. Then I get, I get super annoyed because I'm like my first my first instincts like, yeah, you know, I did it to myself. I want to get like on the spotting scope thing. Um you know there, what's like what's the razor sixty five way? Do people know what we're talking about? Approximately about three pounds? So when you when you got like when you got people and I used to do this where you're actually cutting your toothbrush handle in half in the interest of reducing pack weight. Three pounds is a big deal. But if it's if it's any kind of hunting where there's any sort of legal antler restriction, so will be like identifying growth rings on a sheet because he's got to have a minimum age, or whether or not it describes the sixty degree circle that for sure, Like with moose, it needs to have if it you're in a unit that where the thing has to have four brow times that level of detail, or it's that you have a personal goal of like identifying a X, like a big, huge, giant one. Um. I find that it's helpful, but also I just like to have I like to look at stuff, so I'll cut the handle off a toothbrush safe, but then also just stick the three pound tripod or the three pound spotting scope and then a tripod because I just like to look around. Like when I factor in, like the comfort of having a light pack juxtapoles with the comfort of you know, look really carefully at things in the natural world that are far away, I'm just gonna lean in that direction well totally, and then you gotta look at what it's what it could be saving you too, right Like it's like, okay, I've tott it this three pounds or you know, give or take up the mountain, and yeah, it took some space in my pack, but it could also be saving you several miles of walking per day. So you know, you're kind of like weighing those two things. And I mean, my opinions huge asset. So this feller, the idahole feller, should um uh tell his wife the do or die day. He's gonna be back and probably bring a spot scope. That's it. One last one. I think we got time for one last one. Um guy rode in. He's out turkey hunting, and lo and behold he's turkey hunting another guy and he's a new hunter, and our guy's a season hunter, and lo and behold they're calling in and here comes two times coming at him and his hunting partners like, we're gonna do the old one too. Three okay, I'll count, and he says that things are coming. They get close and he goes one, two and and then the other bird flies away. And later the guy is like, what's up? He says, well, everyone knows you don't say three, you shoot on him three, but I feel that you shoot down three just after three, right, you'd be like, that's what I'm saying without playing it out. How do you make it work? I remember, like I remember some of my my late friend Eric Kern, and we're laying down calling us. Some turkeys kind of bosted us, but Kains didn't, and we're calling and he wants to do the old one to three, like the old double up, which usually means no one gets anything. And so we're lined up and I'm waiting for him to do the count, and pretty soon we got hands past us, you know, and he never does the count, and we realized we never clarified the rule even who was it just haven't fast. We missed a chance. But I feel like you'd say, um, one, two, three on what would have been the four? Does that make any sense? I would? I think I would agree with I think that is what I would anticipate eight in the heat of battle of trying to coordinate. Yeah, I think that this dude he was hunting with intentionally screwed There's no doubt in my mind that that dude intentionally screwed him over. He got the counting, and then he's like, you know, what if he goes what if he his read on this is he's gonna blouch before I blouch. And he made a judgment called the last second just to shoot game hog and then later tried to cover his tracks. It had better long I've only done it in a couple of times, but it seems it worked where we just both said yes, we have the animal in our site you shoot for, so you sort of can let the animal you're about it. Whoever's gonna shoot second, can let the animal react to that shot, whatever it might be. And you're not gonna be startled by the shot of your body and then take a shot. Yeah, because the most animals, I don't think in that like split second that's gonna take for you to you know, reacquire the target by slightly moving your gun. It's not like they're just gone. I also feel like it's difficult to get a good trigger squeeze when you're trying to like you know that that's that's the solution. We've hit on it, like a version. What you're saying is like no, no, no, no, just do your thing. I'm ready if it works out afterward, it works out afterwards. But hunting elk with Remy recently where he was really eager to try to do the old three and I was like, let's just you just get your situation squared away here and we'll see if I can pick up some sloppy seconds right which didn't work out. But have we tried to do the one too, threes wouldn't happen. Communication is is the the main takeaway here right right? This buddy mine read Dixon, and I just bumped into and Denver earlier in the week. He uh, we were out for his very first turkey hunt. It was actually on his ranch in Oregon. And I still take a little bit heat for this, But the communication was very clear for the first half of things, not so clear for the second half of things. They were calling birds and these two Jake's are coming in and I'm like, okay, you take the one on the left, I'll take the one on the right. I'm gonna shoot as soon as you shoot, So no one to three right, and so it's gonna be like bus bout yes, when in fact it was bud bunch bouch. Point of contention comes in on that third one, whereas these birds were so close and I was so positive that he obviously hit the first bird and rolled it, but now it was up on its feet running away that I was just doing the good guy thing and taking it care, taking care of it before it runs off. Now, years later, there's some question as to whether or not he shot the burden for a shell. He's like, you remember my turkey, right, cal He's like, yeah, you remember when you felt my turkey tag for me? Uh? Anyone last final thoughts. I think when you try to coordinate a shot based on counting, So this isn't your concluder. Oh no, I'm not gonna not waste have a completing thought though. Yeah you can final thought. You can final thought and then concluding could rip a concluder on the one to three. We'll jump over to Yanni for a concluder and then we'll come back to your regular concluder. Okay, yeah, my father my first concluder. Then um to do the timed thing where you go one to three. It has to be something you practice. You read about these idea that the sniper teams, if you if you read that the account of these um pirates that were shot off the back end of when these a navy, they did one three, yeah, and it's something they practice. And I think it's a silent thing though they going then pop, So it's it's all it's it's something that eliminate the count. You go one, yeah, once the stook the count. I think I can't say that's exactly how it goes, but there is something where it's sync with these guys work together so much or when they get down to doing it, most people are done and it's not something that was invented on that. In that case, it was you know, this is sniper work that's been going on for five decades and you know longer. Anyway, that was my other thought. That's a good one, really good. So many things talk about like like big high level concluders or you mean about the one too three and no not I'm over that. Um it's not really high level either. But I was gonna bring up we were gonna talk about possibly what we've been eating lately while a game abo use that from my concluder, like what you're hot on right now? Yeah, you know, I canned a whole bunch of elk in the last couple of years, and we really haven't been eaten that much. And then your car broke down. That was a bartering joke that went over my head. M But my house is actually kind of broke him down right now. It only has three walls one walls VisQueen as we're doing a little remodel work and uh, I'd like to do a shout out to camp Chef and Trigger because without them, I wouldn't be doing any kind of cooking because I don't have a kitchen right now. Camps at his house now, man, Yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool. I'm gonna actually miss there's a bird and I'm sorry I don't. I haven't. It's been on my list of things to do to identify the species. He's got a beautiful morning song. And our houses uh it's a cabin and he's been actually kind of coming. He's about two feet in the house in the morning and just like we've got a high ceiling that going and goes to this loft where we sleep, and um, I mean his song stills the whole house every morning, and I'm gonna miss that because it's all it's like you're camping, right, I mean, the trees are right there that you're just flying back and forth. Woman. It's been great anyways, going off on a tangent here, but the canned elk has been really coming in handy, right, because I come home and you're like looking at how many dishes you gotta do? Again, no kitchen at all, so we're just doing bust up dishes in the backyard. And when you look at Candell, it's not the most advertising thing. No at all. But I just want to say that if you haven't tried it yet, try it and don't go through the hassle of browning it, seizing it, anything like that. Do what they call raw pack, which you just cube it up, packing into the can. Can it. Some people have like a teaspoon of salt. I think maybe for a whole quart something like that. It might just be a half a teaspoon. Can you put it up? And then we've been just doing barbecue sandwiches with it. Uh sloppy Joe's style sandwiches. Uh tacos um. Oh yeah, making a stew, just like quickly blowing some carrots and potatoes, dumping it in there. And it's been a it's been awesome and it's been a savior. So now I don't want to look at him. Not I'm not quite so like I don't detest the books of it so much because I see the value in it. Though. Is the thinking on raw packing um is the thinking that one you can pack more in because it hasn't gotten rigid, so you get a higher you just get higher meat the liquid. But is there something too abount the way it expels water doesn't expel water is this ringing a bell at all? It's hard to say. I just feel like when you cook it first in the pan, you're losing a lot of moisture, probably fat, you know, and you put that back in the jar, right, yeah. Put. I feel like when you if you you're just saving yourself a step because when you brought back and cook it, it's all just just there in the in the jar. When I was a kid man, in hunting season was coming on, my old man would uh take a milk crate and he would like rig a milk crate out so we could just have lunches out tailgate lunches out in the woods, you know, are out of farms where we hunted. And if he would buy I remember he'd buy coffee drops, like the coffee candy, and he'd buy bags of prunes, and you put mustard in there, and you put a bunch of those jars of canned venison, jarred venison, and then we'd have uh and you'd have rye bread or whatever to spread it on. And it was like an early connection I made to be It's like always the last thing left from last year's deer will be the jars. And then you're eating the last bit of last year's deer while trying to get this year's one. And there's sort of a continuity to it that couldn't be missed even to a kid. And I still kind of have that like feeling of it. You know. My brother bought one of those things to make steel cans. We can make your own steel cans, not glass, and he started putting whole ducks in there, and then the duck would fit the can and then can the whole damn duck. But if you drove around it within your car for a while, by the time you pulled out, it was just like bones laying in the bottom there and duck meat floating on top. Remember being out one time my brother's neighbor had died and he cleaned out his house for some reason. He had a ton of slim Fast they'll slim fast cans. Remember being out hunting and um, we're just all we're doing is drinking slim Fast and eating those canned dogs. And my buddy Pooter was my Boddy Pooter was with us, and he says, man, I just feel like we're gonna be skinning bones. But this pat you got a concluder yeah. I um, I have to say it's I can't see you folks real well because the lights, but it's to me, it's really cool to think that this many people could come in here, listen to five people just talking about hunting and fishing. And I really want you to think about something Carl Malcolm brought up in the tempee Um podcast about making a conservation effort not just between the hunting community, but outside the hunting community. Build this big effort, just big coming together at a moment basically, and you know it's not gonna happen big, some big campaign, some big public relations effort. These kind of things happen slow but sure, and they happened around these kind of venues where you folks can kind of come in here. And the reason you hear I have no thought about this, it's because of Steve Ronnella. It's because of the way he can express great thoughts about hunting, not in a defensive way, but in an explanatory way that makes people have fun and think about things in a fun way, entertaining way. And so, like I mentioned earlier about the idea I need your parents I mentioned earlier, you know, the idea driving on the highway and seeing, uh, you know, the whole comparison between a dead deer in the back of the truck and load full of pork or college, whatever it might be. And the thing I wanted to think about is you guys becoming the face of hunting. Where are your blaze orange? Where are your camouflage? And when people talk to you, be polite, explain things, don't be defensive. Just reach out the folks in a fun way, in a in a friendly way. Because I found a number of times over the years, people see a dead deer in the back of my truck or something and they'll come over and just want to talk, and they don't know about this and that in the case I can think of as fishing out of Milwaukee one time, and is in McKinley Park in Milwaukee, catching sam. We brought in some salmon, and people walking by people have never seen a fish brought off a lake before in your lives. This is not something they do every day. And they were so fascinated that you could go out in this lake and catch a fish that big, bring it back, cut it up, and take up home and eat it. And I think that's kind of the image you should have some time and people you come across the mountain, out at a gas station, at a convenience store, lob don't know what they're really looking at here, So be patient with them and take those opportunities to just open up a little bit about what a great thing that we're doing. Because this is we're not doing it for um. I don't do it to keep populations in control or control disease, all these bullshit excuses people give for hunting. I do because it's fun and it's something I loved. I loved bringing meat home, processing that stuff, getting in the freezer, bringing out later. My wife's a great crook, My daughters are getting gonna be great crooks. I just find that aspect of it just so enriching and so to me exciting that I think that's hard to miss when when you're sincere about So just keep that in mind. Be the face of hunting. It was an altruistic population control hunting specialists. Um, It's like, I hate hunting, but if I didn't do it, we're just all gonna die from deer. But no, Pat, I was just gonna say a lot of the same things you said, mostly because I've been going off your notes the whole time. But um, but no, I just wanted to say thanks, thanks for everybody that's showed up here tonight. And and I guess the one of the big reasons I say that is because just the fact that you're here, you know, shows me that you care about hunting and care about fishing and care about our wild places on on a very deep level. And um, like like Pat said, you know, I mean it's on us to be a voice for that, um and and to and to communicate with people that maybe are outside our circle and and help them understand and and hopefully bring them into the fold. And uh. And also thanks to Steve and meeting her crew for having me here tonight and letting me sit with you guys and and being the voice that you guys are because I mean, I truly believe this, man, when when we are all long gone, people are gonna be sitting around campfires telling stories about you guys. So appreciate you guys. UM a little hurt, I guess I didn't ask my opinion on if you're gonna be away from lady for a long time. Oh okay, what would you do well? Not from personal reference, say you were in a situation, say you're in a situation where you love someone. Um M, I do listen to a lot of old country music when I'm working on the house. Charlie Pryett said, Uh, you know, tell her that you'll love her even when you're gone. I love her like a devil when you get back home. That seems it seems to make sense to me. And uh switch gears. Yeah. I think we all have to recognize that that we all have a platform and we can use it, uh in a lot of different ways. We know from looking at YouTube and uh, my grandma and my mom said always says, you know, you're not gonna be around that long. So if you get a shot at you know, talking to somebody that you want to talk to, it doesn't matter who it is, if they're the President of the United States and are right there, don't regret it, but utilize your time and and talk to him and let him know what you're thinking, because that may be the only shot you get. And Uh, I think we got to realize that. And when we have, you know, these interactions we had uh, you know, in person or socially, we needed uh. And I'm absolutely guilty of this as well, but we need to uh take take advantage of that time and make the best impression possible. And uh and make sure that hunting and fishing that we love is around for a really long time. And uh, I really got to thank everybody in here's uh you know, wearing those public landowner shirts and b h A shirts and the TRCP shirts and um, and thank you very much. But you know that's not enough. You gotta you gotta go a little bit further. You gotta get a public water t shirt, which doesn't exist yet. But uh, and if issues come up, not only in your state but in others, you know, take advantage and and uh pick up pick up the phone and call your duly elected officials and let them know that you appreciate what you do and the places that you can go and and enjoy those things. All right, my my concluder, are you cool? Uh? First, you uh wish a happy anniversary to our friend Mitch Petrie from Sports Channel is here with his wife Kristen, and presumably it's probably a large package of experiences that he's lavishing upon her this week. He chose to make this one of them, so happy anniversary, and also Uh, there's an active duty Air Force serviceman here named Craig Quinnett. Flew here to be here tonight and probably not in the Air Force jet. Are you here, Craig? Great? You made it all right, guys, Thank you very much. Oh. A couple quick announcements. Uh, we got our steam breathing, our steam breathing anthem turkey posters for sale out front. You saw those blouert shirts, Metior podcast shirts. Until we get kicked out, which happens when eleven. Yeah, so until we get kicked out of the leven will mosey up that that a way there, and we'll be there to take pictures and sign stuff and hang out until they tell us that we can't anymore. Thank you very much for coming out tonight. It is great and I love you all. Thank you. Let's try and hate a fre