Ep. 882: Cyanide Bombs, New CWD Research, and F%ck Data Centers

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show Mother Lakers. This week, we’ve got some research about CWD that I really need to hear about the debate about bear spray versus pistols as bear defense rages on. Are the cyanide bombs you’ve been hearing all about actually bombs. Wolves in the Greater Yellowstone area are getting whittled away in numbers by hunters, no trappers. No, but don’t worry. We’ll tell you what it is later on in the show. The Alaskan Arctic might be getting itself a data center, which I generally kind of hate the idea of generally, and Spencer number one for a controversial subject has another softball, yet uplifting story about fishing records.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: But first, that’s good.

00:00:55
Speaker 1: Well, I’m not looking around for what I’m saying, like, but first you’re waiting for jump in first our news Yeah, Steve, Well, no, I’m up. Yeah.

00:01:02
Speaker 3: My daughter got her first black bear.

00:01:05
Speaker 1: Nice.

00:01:05
Speaker 3: She’s a very competitive hunter.

00:01:08
Speaker 1: Is not interested in uh, doesn’t like it’s not interested in any kind of duck hunting nothing. It’s gotta be a turkey or bigger. It’s gotta be where you set your mind on getting a thing. There’s gotta be a question of whether you’ll get it, like going duck hunt and be like, man, it’s gonna be a lot of ducks.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: Could doesn’t care, doesn’t care. She’s into the.

00:01:38
Speaker 4: Like.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: She’s into the like can it be done kind of hunting and you have to be cruising all around. She’s not gonna sit somewhere. Doesn’t want to sit nowhere. It lends itself well to you.

00:01:50
Speaker 4: Know, she wouldn’t. She won’t sit in glass during Oh no like that.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: But she’s if you said, hey, herd to go sit in the tree stand for a long time, that’s not what she wants to do. She likes to be mobile, well Shakespeare, looking around on the ground for rocks and whatnot. But got so we had four we had kind of like four full days to hunt bears, and then we had a day that we could kind of hunt a little bit if need be.

00:02:17
Speaker 3: And by the end of the third day, she was getting real antsy.

00:02:23
Speaker 5: Because you weren’t seeing bears, or you weren’t seeing like nice bears.

00:02:26
Speaker 1: Well, I mean she’s not listening. She’ll listen to the show a little slow to the trigger.

00:02:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, that happens.

00:02:32
Speaker 1: So it’s kind of a.

00:02:33
Speaker 4: Hard thing to get over when you’re a parent man.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: And yeah, real slow to not a little slow to the trigger because he can’t get mad at it. Bless her heart, no shoes, she’t mad at my boys. I’ll get mad at my daughter. I might get mad at her now and then, but I’m like way nicer to hurt than anybody else. Yeah, Like I would be my boys, I’d be smacking on the side of the head, back of my hand shoo. But no her. I’m like, God’s okay. So when you’re ready, when you’re ready, sweetie. So like one time we went after a bear and uh, and it’s just sitting there plain as day, you know, and it’s facing toward us, and you know you.

00:03:13
Speaker 5: Had gotten out of it, like you were in the process of trying to kill it.

00:03:16
Speaker 4: You were out of the boat.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: We got out of the boat way few hundred yards down. When worked up, I’m like, once we get to that there’s sort of a tree laying there. Like, once we get to that tree, we get to the tree, get her set up on the tripod, it’s just sitting there. Meanwhile, I would have put a box of shells into it. But it’s like, but you know what I mean, it’s just different. And then I talked all about like she likes to run through all weeks leading up to going hunting. She likes to run through all things that would go bad, and then before she shoots, she likes to do a final run through of all the things that could go back, Like what do I do if? Yeah, like what if the I’m like just at a point where there’s an element of this that is a roll of the dice. As much as we try to rule all that out, there’s an element to it that there’s a dice roll, right, and we try to weight the dice and all that, but like there’s a dice roll, and she doesn’t like the dice roll part. She wants to be when she touches that trigger. She wants it to be that it’s like God strikes it with a bullet that’s not up there. She wants it to go.

00:04:29
Speaker 5: Up there because like, if you wound one, you’re done up there, correct.

00:04:32
Speaker 1: That’s right, So and this reason will ask if you nick one, you scratch your tag, so that and if they get when they go into the rainforest, it’s difficult stick anyway. She likes to do a quick run through of all possible scenarios that could go wrong, and then we kept talking about like broadside, broadside, broadside, and it’s not broadside, and do I really want to like open up this whole can of worms and introduced the idea that one could feasibly, you know, and it’s just not the moment for it, not the moment to be like, you know, I hadn’t mentioned this, but in a scenario like this, I could see a pathway toward anyways, it went from facing us just walking into the woods. She was bummed bombed.

00:05:20
Speaker 3: But we persevered. Yeah, persevered.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: It was great.

00:05:23
Speaker 5: Competitive that rug put in her room.

00:05:26
Speaker 6: She will competitive bear hunter like competitive with the bears, competitive with her brothers, competitive with.

00:05:33
Speaker 1: Oh you know it. Competitive, yes, a little bit competitive with her brothers, but mostly it’s competitive.

00:05:39
Speaker 3: Maybe that’s not the right.

00:05:40
Speaker 1: Word, but it’s she has a a a challenge accepted.

00:05:49
Speaker 4: Yeah style, she’s got a tag. She wants to pill that.

00:05:52
Speaker 1: It’s it’s we’re doing this and it’s.

00:05:54
Speaker 4: Like, Okay, she’s motivated, let’s go.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: What was her on the on the ride home? Was she like I can’t wait to do that again?

00:06:03
Speaker 1: Or was she didn’t come up very happy? With very happy with the results, very happy with the results. And it’s this bear. Had we saw someones that were a little rubbed. This bear has almost like an electric blue. It’s not I wouldn’t call it a glacier bear, not that area, but has almost when it was just laying there, has almost like an electric blue black color to it. Gorgeous.

00:06:37
Speaker 3: We’re having John Hayes. John Hayes is.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: Gonna do it bear man rugging.

00:06:41
Speaker 4: He’s gonna rug it, make a bunch of sausage with it.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Hot Italian and sweet attack. And I kept the backstraps for regular eating, but mostly sausage.

00:06:52
Speaker 2: I’m gonna do the Clay nucum heavily salt and throw it in a wood stove for twenty five to thirty seconds treatment.

00:07:02
Speaker 1: No, not his not Clay’s raspy. The funniest thing we’ll move on. But the funniest thing that came out of that meal you’re referring to was Clay was telling us how he doesn’t like, oh, he doesn’t like fresh ground pepper. Yeah, oh, he says, I like pepper out of those tins. He says, I like it. So when you he says I like it to work like a windicat. He does not like a grainy, stale, old, stale, old, powdered and pepper. He does not like any kind of like fresh ground, crunchy pepper between your teeth.

00:07:44
Speaker 3: He likes those McCormick tins.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: And when you turn it upside down, like blows away like charcoal dust.

00:07:51
Speaker 4: The restaurant pepper, like the diner pepper.

00:07:54
Speaker 1: It’s so funny that he’s got like an opinion.

00:07:57
Speaker 6: It’s just the essence of pepper. Point you’re not actually getting pepper.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: Fe like I would.

00:08:02
Speaker 2: I wouldn’t blink twice if someone handed me his favorite pepper, you know, like it’s not like I’m just kind of it’s pepper, but he had his very strong, very strong paint on it.

00:08:18
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:08:18
Speaker 3: Broady been Walleye fishing, wally Dogs.

00:08:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, it’s late start for normally I’d had a boat out by now, but it was the first time this past weekend.

00:08:26
Speaker 1: Because of all this running bs yeah, jogging.

00:08:29
Speaker 5: Yep, that takes up a lot of time on the weekends. But yeah, we got out there on Saturday. We went to Canyon Ferry close by here, and normally this time of year at the south end of that lake, where the river dumpson would just be chocolate milk and mud. But there’s no run no snow run off this year, so it’s clear.

00:08:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, we tore up the little little walleye, little.

00:08:52
Speaker 5: Wileyes draggon crank baits around like eight or ten feet of water.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: But it’s like percha that lake right now, and that’s like that’s a dynamically it’s always changing, always changing right now. It’s like perch fishing for walleyes, yes, because it’s a bunch of walleyes the size of big person.

00:09:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, there’s not a good like forage base of of like minnows or whatever for those walleyes, so they they eat a lot of insects and so there’s a whole bunch of small ones and a few really big ones that eat other walleyes.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: But there’s a lot of age classes missing. Yep.

00:09:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, But they’ve they’ve changed the management strategy so people are keeping more of those small ones and there’s a cutoff you can only keep one over fifteen inches, I think, to get those those bigger age classes coming back. But we had we had a great you know, we caught enough for a fish fry.

00:09:43
Speaker 1: It was fun, you know, it’s a weird deal. It’s almost like some moriel’s got to get I don’t know.

00:09:48
Speaker 5: But dude, Like we put the boat in and it’s like, where do we go and when you look to the south Lake and there’s like a cluster of thirty boats like kind of in one corner.

00:09:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s like we’ll go check there.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: Sure enough, and they were all catching those twelve inchries. Yeah, yeah, huh yep, huh.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: So yeah, Dynamic Lake, m.

00:10:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, I like, it’s not my favorite one.

00:10:13
Speaker 5: We usually hit another lake in the summer, which when we’ll start hitting that one too, but it’s close.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: By, so it’s fun in my lifetime. Like I remember, I started fishing that lake in the mid nineties. Yeah, and at that time you could get a mountain.

00:10:32
Speaker 5: Well, I remember you’d say you and your brothers used to catch a couple hundred and one morning yellow perch.

00:10:39
Speaker 3: Now there’s a couple of perch.

00:10:41
Speaker 5: In there that are bigger than the walleyes, that are bigger than the walleyes.

00:10:44
Speaker 1: Yes, so it went for being that, you went for being swarms of eight nine ten inch perch, no walleye to speak of, except for like a normal walleye fishery to being that the small perch are gone. It’s giant perch and perch size walleyes. Yeah, but this is this is what happens in reservoirs, and this is what happens when you have a fishery dominated by non natives.

00:11:06
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just hard to control what happens.

00:11:09
Speaker 3: And yeah, there’s no equilibrium.

00:11:10
Speaker 5: The waley blew up, but they ate all the perch. So you know, that’s what it is there. That lake also has like in my eyes, it’s a problem, like the large percentage of the biomass in that lake seems to be carp Yeah.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: Right now, my boy and his buddy put on wet suits and took spear guns. Yeah, and he said without going under I gave him a couple of pins and I’m like, you want to dive down to the drop? He said, We never went under water. And he said, we laid on the surface and shot thirty four.

00:11:44
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, it’s crazy. I don’t know what you do about it.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: Like nothing, Ye, he thinks he’s helping you when you get up to thirty four and I’m like, he’s like, I have gonna go carp spearfishing.

00:11:58
Speaker 3: Wait, what do you do with all those carts on a flame, not my freezer.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: The lake. I’m like, okay, I’ll tell you. Let’s agree on this. It doesn’t hurt the lake. It doesn’t hurt the lake.

00:12:16
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, Spencer.

00:12:18
Speaker 4: Gardening gardening, but not garden.

00:12:20
Speaker 3: You’re an orchardist.

00:12:21
Speaker 1: Is that a word?

00:12:22
Speaker 6: I don’t know if that’s probably a word. I think like the gardening version of an orchard though, is orchard y, orchard y something like that. It’s like orchard r y. So I’ve been orchard okay, yeah, or no, I be I think that’s like the gardening equivalent. It doesn’t matter. I’ve spent my spring digging holes. I’m trying to start an orchard where I live. I’m now up to sixty fruit bearing trees, dwarf trees and shrubs on my property from sixteen different types of fruit. Phil has a graphic forest there.

00:12:54
Speaker 1: I’ve got who made that? Actually, it’s personalized.

00:13:05
Speaker 4: No, I asked Data Center to make it for me.

00:13:07
Speaker 1: Right next to you.

00:13:08
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:13:11
Speaker 4: Five down bucket of water.

00:13:12
Speaker 6: Down to apples, blackberries, buffalo berries, chokeberries, choke cherries, currant crab apples, cherries, plums, pears, peaches, raspberries, rubarbs, saskatoons, thimbleberries.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: And honeybery.

00:13:23
Speaker 3: Why are you rolling rhubarb into that?

00:13:26
Speaker 4: I didn’t know where to put that at its perennial bearing.

00:13:30
Speaker 3: Sparagus and rubarb perennials.

00:13:32
Speaker 4: Okay, garden, you.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: Make a pie with it. Listen, you make a pie and a christ you.

00:13:38
Speaker 3: Might as well put spinach on there.

00:13:40
Speaker 6: Take take rubarb off, ignore rubar please, I have I have two rubarbis.

00:13:44
Speaker 1: Shooting a gall on the water by removing rhubarb.

00:13:47
Speaker 6: And then I’ve got a sixteen foot of sparagus trench that that I’ve got going as well.

00:13:51
Speaker 1: That didn’t make the list.

00:13:52
Speaker 6: That you know, that didn’t feel like make the list?

00:13:56
Speaker 4: Feel Yeah, that felt like a faring thing. What do you most excited to eat?

00:14:01
Speaker 1: On that list?

00:14:01
Speaker 4: Most exciting?

00:14:02
Speaker 1: Get to focus on the negative you yeah, okay?

00:14:06
Speaker 6: What the most self aware probably is anything producing?

00:14:10
Speaker 4: Yet are you still years away? Well, rubarb I made. I made a cake with my rubarb this last week, but that doesn’t count. Not a fruiting. No.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: No.

00:14:18
Speaker 6: The thing I’m probably most excited for was peaches, because that’s the one that they tell you not to grow here. They’re like peaches they didn’t grow, and really like, I can do it. I’m trying it. Well, if we had this winter we had this last winter, you could grow coconuts in the valley here. So the peaches I’m very bullish on. And I now have some peaches forming.

00:14:35
Speaker 2: Throw them on the grill with oversized pork chops.

00:14:38
Speaker 4: Those those I’m excited. Bring on that global warming.

00:14:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like what you got going for the most part.

00:14:45
Speaker 4: Okay, what what don’t we like?

00:14:47
Speaker 1: Besides the rubar your cur I think your currents are going to tear it the new one.

00:14:51
Speaker 4: They’re doing good. I only planted two of those.

00:14:54
Speaker 3: Cherries will tear it a new one.

00:14:55
Speaker 6: Crab apples well, one that they’re native, which I really like. Twelve of my sixteen things are native to North America. The other one is they are a phenomenal pollinator for your other apples. Apples are one of those trees that you need to have multiple varieties, and crab apples are one of the strongest for helping pollinate your apples. Oh, you know, you might enjoy wanted to have a crab apple.

00:15:14
Speaker 1: We have the author of a new book about Johnny appleseed.

00:15:18
Speaker 4: Oh, I would love that.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: He’s coming on.

00:15:21
Speaker 1: Not only is about Johnny Appleseed, but he he goes and does John Chese goes and does his route and talks to people.

00:15:30
Speaker 5: And Johnny Appleseed’s got any scandal in his life.

00:15:33
Speaker 1: I don’t know, we’ll find out.

00:15:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, Johnny Appleseed not wouldn’t be scandalous to us. To maybe his religion.

00:15:41
Speaker 6: He was like a very conservative like Quaker to yeah, anyway, he hid. The trees that he was planting were largely called spitters, which you don’t eat those fresh, you make them into hard cider. And so he’s sort of betraying his leigion by planting all these like cider brewing trees.

00:16:04
Speaker 3: It’s like if you went around throwing beers in people’s yard.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: Yes, it’s exactly. You’re gonna have to get canning spender. I plan to. Yeah, what else against the honeyberries? Honeyberries?

00:16:15
Speaker 3: Try something new?

00:16:15
Speaker 4: Are you familiar with honeyberries?

00:16:17
Speaker 1: Listen? I got some honeyberry bushes the likes of witch would stagger the mind.

00:16:21
Speaker 4: So why don’t you like them?

00:16:23
Speaker 1: Because kids don’t like them?

00:16:24
Speaker 4: They don’t, they don’t have any kids.

00:16:25
Speaker 1: They eat them, you know, no one likes them. I get them to my kids and they’re like, that’s not a berry here.

00:16:32
Speaker 6: I think your problem is with honeyberries. You don’t eat those until like the day they turn ripe. Anytime up until that moment, you have a very poor experience eating a honeyberry. So if you were eating ones that weren’t ripe, I understand why someone would spit them out and be like, I’m never having that.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Don’t come tell me that I was doing it wrong. I’m just saying I would yank your honeyberries out.

00:16:51
Speaker 4: Uh huh, it’s too late.

00:16:53
Speaker 1: I would yank your blackberries out.

00:16:54
Speaker 4: Saskatoons. Why would you take away blackberries?

00:16:57
Speaker 3: I think I would double down on raspberries. The blackberries.

00:17:01
Speaker 5: Uh have you dealt with saskatoons or service berries before?

00:17:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’ve already got I’ve had two of those.

00:17:06
Speaker 5: They’re real cd IM. They’re not like a pickoff the bush and.

00:17:12
Speaker 3: The crab out.

00:17:12
Speaker 6: I just explained to Brody those are a phenomenal pollinator. And I’m even I’m even gonna double down on that next year. I’ve got some aspirational things I want to add yet, an apricot tree. It was too late for me this year to get an apricot tree in the ground, so I’m gonna do that. I want to do an apple crab, which is a crab apple apple hybrid, so that it like makes.

00:17:31
Speaker 4: A cute little deep and it tastes.

00:17:34
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, I grow.

00:17:35
Speaker 3: I grow currants.

00:17:37
Speaker 1: So last year I took all my currents, spread them out on cookie sheets and set them out in the yard and made my own little current dried currents, right, missus. The missus was promising that she was gonna make me something with all those dried currants, and them sons of bitches are still in the pantry. I gotta remind she’s pretty reliable about bacon.

00:17:56
Speaker 6: I’m gonna be up to at some point here. I’m gonna have a harvest six months out of the year, from May to October. I’m going to constantly have my perennials pushing out fruit. And then I’m also going to grow enough that I don’t have to be mad at the bunnies and the birds and the bugs when they take them. I can just let them have it, because I’m like, look at look at all this delicious fruit I have.

00:18:15
Speaker 4: Take your take your share, But.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: Not like Randall.

00:18:18
Speaker 6: No, I’m not going to competea Randall’s out there, wakes up enraged about chickens. The other thing, Brody was worried about my time management that I’m just going to spend my time doing nothing but mowing around trees. Now, but I planned these inner no mozone so I have now converted forty percent of my yard to an area that so I’m just saving saving time there, saving water.

00:18:44
Speaker 4: I just foul of the homeowners associationd.

00:18:47
Speaker 1: You know I was. I was the other day. I was asked to Spencer, like Spencer doesn’t come to the office a lot of days, and he says, oh, I do my best work at home. Now I know what he’s talking about.

00:18:58
Speaker 4: He’s a farman. He’s a farmer. It’s in my blood farming.

00:19:05
Speaker 1: Okay, oh check this out. Mark Kenyons got a new podcast called Future Wild, launched yesterday May twenty seventh, drops every second Wednesday, every second Wednesday, like every other Wednesday. Yes, okay, so we’ve taken you’ll see like Cal’s Week, Cal’s Week in Review, that stuff. We had to do a little more shuffling on our on our feed, so you’ll find a feed called Meat Eater Conservation. Cal’s wee can review Lives, Media Conservation, Mark Kenyon’s Future Wild Lives meat eater Conservation. So if you when you’re when you’re listening to the show as you want. It was formerly the cal of the Wild podcast feed, but it’s now getting filled out with additional shows, so you’ll see the name switch there, Okay, audience emails Dirk and wrote in we were talking about how Michigan. Michigan has sort of three main game management areas, the Upper Peninsula, the Northern Lower Peninsula, the Southern Lower Peninsula. The Southern Lower Peninsula had always been ever since I was a child and probably before that, had always been shotgun only, and there was like what we call the shotgun line. Below the shotgun line, you can’t hunt with a rifle. Bless their hearts, they just undid that. It’s just rifle through and through whole state. Now, I was saying, how I think that’s a great idea, and really liked all that, and I was sort of this is not a word I use off, but I was poo poohing the idea that it would lead to an increased number of accidents. Pat Durkin, America’s last outdoor Calumnists, wrote in to say that he disagrees, and he thinks that he’s got data showing that he disagrees. Okay, So Wisconsin, right, Wisconsin, he says, they went through the same debate fifteen years ago. Okay, So in twenty thirteen, Wisconsin got rid of their shotgun zone the counties they had counties that were shotgun only. The thinking is primarily that the you know, a shotgun slug doesn’t go as far, so it’s safer.

00:21:24
Speaker 3: Less likely to hit a home, less likely to hit person.

00:21:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like areas of higher population density, the higher home density or whatever.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: Because when you touch off you know Grandpa’s old thirty oh six, right, it just can wind up somewhere you don’t anticipate. And when you touch off your shotgun, it’s going to burrow into the other side of the field. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point center fire. You know, tapered rifle cartridges fly farther. Wisconsin went through this. Dirkin made a chart that he compiled last fall for Weekly Outdoors column, and he looks into what happened in Wisconsin when they did this, And okay, he says this in brief. I almost hesitate to say this because it makes gun and seem like a not good idea. But I’m just gonna in all fairness and brief, Wisconsin had two hundred and three shooting accidents. We’re not talking about hitting someone’s storage shed accidents, human accidents. Wisconsin had two hundred and three shooting accidents during November’s main gun deer season from two thousand to twenty twenty five. So for a year, is my math right? No? Eighty year? Is that possibly true? Dirky would know.

00:22:54
Speaker 5: There’s a lot of hunters in Wisconsin and an accident, I mean, it doesn’t Diffe good.

00:23:00
Speaker 1: Is two one hundred and three shooting accidents in twenty five years.

00:23:05
Speaker 5: What I would want to know is how many of those were like self inflicted?

00:23:09
Speaker 4: Like you know what? There’s like, yeah, all encompassing.

00:23:12
Speaker 1: That’s when I start tearing Dirking down. That’s one of the things I’m going to use to tearing apart.

00:23:18
Speaker 6: Right there are eight hundred, eight hundred thousand deer tags in Wisconsin, so that’s you know, one accident per one hundred thousand tags.

00:23:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’ll take those ods.

00:23:30
Speaker 1: I don’t. I’ve just I almost want to abort right now because there’s parts of this I’m just.

00:23:36
Speaker 4: Not feeling I think you gotta keep going.

00:23:40
Speaker 1: I’ll keep going. But please, if you’re a Wisconsin knight who’s handy with numbers and good on the.

00:23:45
Speaker 3: Internet, feel free to write in.

00:23:49
Speaker 1: Dirk goes on to say this, So then they got rid of the shotgun only counties, my rifle statewide from two thousand to twenty twelve. Oh, I’m given this wrong. I should never gotten into this.

00:24:08
Speaker 4: Okay, well we screwed like.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: You should have never gotten into this. Let me put my glasses on.

00:24:13
Speaker 4: Initially you said two thousands.

00:24:15
Speaker 5: The numbers we just quoted, you said were from two thousand to twenty twenty five. It was actually two thousand to twenty twelve.

00:24:22
Speaker 4: Those those well.

00:24:23
Speaker 1: Who put down twenty five.

00:24:25
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, this is may I never mind.

00:24:29
Speaker 1: May I’m pulling out May I big picture stories not ready so big picture.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: There’s a twenty five year span and halfway ready, halfway through that it goes to rifles only. So in the first half of this twenty five year span, there were one hundred and thirty nine of the two hundred and three shootings took place in the second in the second half of it, to make four.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: I respect that, Steve, I’m pulling out.

00:24:55
Speaker 4: You’re not falling into the sunt costs, fallacy.

00:24:57
Speaker 1: No heat. No, I’m just I’m pulling.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: He should have he should have just cut this sentence.

00:25:02
Speaker 6: There’s a fifty four percent decline when they switched over.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: I am not. I remember when CBS, when Berry was pretty straight.

00:25:11
Speaker 2: The numbers all add up.

00:25:12
Speaker 1: Remember Berry wife took over CBS News and they had that big story prepared about the l Salvadoran super Prison, and they pulled the story and everybody got all mad. And then she said, it’s not that we’re pulling it, because they were like, oh, you just you’re afraid to be critical of the administration. And she said, that’s not it. The reporting’s not ready, and then lo and behold the story came out.

00:25:36
Speaker 3: That’s us right now.

00:25:38
Speaker 2: I think this is pretty straight. Is not ready, Steve, just ignore, we ignore the sentence that says in brief and then just read the last two sentences of the paragraph. Yes, from twenty to twenty twelve, one hundred and thirty nine shootings. From twenty thirteen to twenty twenty five, sixty four shootings, a fifty four percent decline.

00:25:56
Speaker 1: But I’m still going to tear her down when I’m ready, because how many of these are self inflicted?

00:26:06
Speaker 6: Do you think that changes the rifle versus shotgun?

00:26:09
Speaker 3: Because I don’t know. I don’t what I need to parse this.

00:26:13
Speaker 1: Out, Like I don’t the fifty four.

00:26:17
Speaker 3: I don’t know that you could attribute it.

00:26:19
Speaker 1: It’s just not deep.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: No, But I think all it shows is that when you switch to rifles, you don’t necessarily see an increase in overall accidental shootings.

00:26:28
Speaker 1: No, he’s that’s that’s what he’s saying. You do see an increase.

00:26:32
Speaker 2: No, No, he’s saying, you see a decrease.

00:26:35
Speaker 4: I think the problem is you didn’t read this.

00:26:37
Speaker 3: I read it.

00:26:38
Speaker 4: Oh you didn’t comprehend it.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that they switched to rifles and in fact they’ve had a decline in accidental shootings. Yeah, so there’s something else that explains the decline. But clearly you don’t see an increase.

00:26:52
Speaker 6: The bucks got bigger, the sky got bluer, birds, music got sweeter, everything improved when they switched to rifles.

00:27:02
Speaker 1: Okay, Dirkin does make a good point. Maybe what he does make a good point about is he’s like, here’s the other deal. Yeah, I missing, So it’s like my fault a little bit.

00:27:16
Speaker 2: I was I didn’t know and said that Kakarry rise.

00:27:21
Speaker 3: I screwed up. I shouldn’t have pulled it. I was gonna tear Dirkin apart.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: But I don’t think yet. What Dirkin does point out is this, he’s doing a little bit of what I wanted him to do more of. He’s pointing out that deer drives are kind of going extinct, and he’s pointing out that people are using more elevated blinds, which is helping to reduce the accidents. But until you pluck out self inflicted shootings where a guy is like getting his gun out of his truck right shoots himself in the knee or whatever, I would need to like, I would need to parse it out to see what is the result of like bullets flying, and what is the result of of just malfeasance.

00:28:12
Speaker 3: H What are they say in the military.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: There is no.

00:28:22
Speaker 3: They don’t allow you to say accidental discharge.

00:28:24
Speaker 1: The military is negligent discharge. I would need to see negligent discharges pulled out of this for me to start having any idea about it. That’s all.

00:28:36
Speaker 4: I think. It shows a trend. Give them a little credit.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: Moving on, A lawyer wrote in, we covered some people. We covered some crazy North Carolina waterfowl people who have taken it upon themselves sort of migrate these little ducks and geese around a lake to put them where they feel they’re safe. And they’re sort of loading up wild waterfowl into dog crates and moving it where they want it to be. And this guy was asking is that even legal? And we were pointing out that’s definitely not legal. Well.

00:29:13
Speaker 3: A lawyer wrote in about a community.

00:29:17
Speaker 1: In Surfside Beach, South Carolina, and Spencer’s gonna share some insights about this community.

00:29:24
Speaker 6: This person says, those crazy North Carolina folks have nothing on this lady. She’s a few cans short of a twelve pack. She is suing Surfside Beach for infringing on her First Amendment rights by ticketing her for feeding geese. This lady will stop traffic on the highway to let geese walk across the road. Now, that doesn’t seem that damning to me, Like, what you’re gonna just drive through the flock of geese if they’re crossing the road.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: No, that doesn’t seem damning to me that you would get cited for feeding illegally feeding migratory waterfowl and then say that’s a violation of your First Amendment rights?

00:29:59
Speaker 6: Is goof The article that he links explains it a little more that this woman is a part of a group that’s called FIFO FAFO flock around find out.

00:30:10
Speaker 1: That’s the only reason this is in this script because I like flock around and find out a lot.

00:30:15
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:30:15
Speaker 6: And these these people, I don’t think they call themselves this, but the article did. It calls them geese influencers who are sort of speaking up on behalf.

00:30:23
Speaker 4: Of the geese.

00:30:23
Speaker 3: They have custom hoodies.

00:30:25
Speaker 6: And yeah and and T shirts and they show up in public wearing them. It sounds like this woman is is filming other residents and their treatment of the geese, which I assume is just like sort of hazing them to get them to move on. And then she is, then, you know, spreading those videos and people are saying you can’t do that, you can’t film these folks, and she’s saying, yes I can. And that’s where the First Amendment thing comes in.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: Takes like a lawyer that wrote in have gotten that wrong? Is this supposed to be law dogging? Yeah?

00:30:55
Speaker 6: I don’t know that he got it wrong. He just like skipped like four steps to say she’s protecting she’s pretty detecting geese.

00:31:01
Speaker 4: Uh. And she is now turned into a First Amendment thing.

00:31:05
Speaker 3: I said they had hoodies, They in fact have T shirts.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: You walk around find out I like so much.

00:31:11
Speaker 4: We should meet it or should do a collab with these guys.

00:31:15
Speaker 1: I like around find out goose instead. So this is this is then riled up in a town hall meeting.

00:31:22
Speaker 4: Apparently it appears that way.

00:31:23
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so now it’s now turned into a First Amendment thing.

00:31:27
Speaker 2: Her attorney says the witch hunt of Maria and the Canadian geese is over.

00:31:32
Speaker 6: We’ll put an end to this, and that the town is not in her favor. They say that feeding these things is causing issues for their public spaces and the residents.

00:31:42
Speaker 4: So it’s the the Foffo group versus the town.

00:31:46
Speaker 1: Mhmm. It’s a great story. Guy rode in. Oh, Brody’s gonna talk about a guy that rode in. I’ve been hearing this lately. I’ve been here in this.

00:31:56
Speaker 4: I’ve been hearing it for a while.

00:31:57
Speaker 5: This is near and dear to my heart, this conspiracy.

00:32:00
Speaker 1: It’s not a conspiracy.

00:32:01
Speaker 4: Listen, it is it is?

00:32:03
Speaker 1: I think it is.

00:32:05
Speaker 5: You don’t think it is anyway, Let’s let’s let me hear it. Uh we got We got an email from a listener. I listened to your last interview with Podcasts with Mike Bodenchuck.

00:32:16
Speaker 1: How you say it’s that’s correct?

00:32:17
Speaker 4: I predation.

00:32:18
Speaker 5: You never mentioned turkeys predating on grouse chicks and eggs. They planted turkeys in northern Wisconsin, where they are an invasive species.

00:32:26
Speaker 4: Okay, we’ll get to that.

00:32:28
Speaker 5: People have witnessed turkeys killing and eating grouse chicks. Thirty turkeys will go through the woods, making it look like pigs went through, scratching up and eating everything. Turkeys are everywhere now, and grouse populations are suffering. Every single person living in once fantastic grouse areas that have been taken over by turkeys say the same thing grouse are suffering. This seems to be a taboo subject.

00:32:50
Speaker 4: I would like to hear your thoughts. Go ahead, I got thoughts.

00:32:55
Speaker 1: I was just hunting in Oklahoma. Yeah, turkeys hunting Oklahoma, And like every time you go turkey hunting, there’s a lot of birds on the neighbor’s place, which is a common problem. So we went and spoke to the neighbor. Uh huh, he said, kill them all. They’re eating all my quail. Okay, And then we were talking amongst ourselves. Do we dispel him of that belief? Take the permission? Yes, we just decided to take the permission and resist. Every part of me, every part of me, wanted to say, well, yeah, I don’t know about that, right.

00:33:35
Speaker 6: But I’ve never corrected a landowner who said something, you know, tell me black his whine to be like, of course it is.

00:33:41
Speaker 5: Yes, this is a thing that’s been coming up for years, like in rough grouse country, and you know the whole like people have witnessed turkey’s killing and eating grouse chicks.

00:33:53
Speaker 4: Maybe I don’t know.

00:33:55
Speaker 1: I’d have to see where there’s got to be trailcam footage if this is such a problem.

00:33:59
Speaker 5: But like, he’s right that turkeys were introduced into northern Wisconsin in the nineteen seventies. Prior to that, they were not turkeys that far north. They planted them, they took off, they did well.

00:34:13
Speaker 4: I don’t think you can call them.

00:34:15
Speaker 5: An invasive species, that’s my opinion. During that same timeframe, like throughout Rough grouse country. Since the late seventies early eighties, rough grouse have been on a serious decline. The fact that these two things happened at the same time, like correlation, is not causation, right, Just because the turkeys are there doesn’t mean they’re the reason grouse are around are herding. We did a podcast with our buddy Carl Malcolm from the Rough Grouse Society and touched on this a little bit.

00:34:50
Speaker 4: Carl would tell you.

00:34:51
Speaker 5: It’s exclusively, not exclusively, it’s mostly a habitat problem where grouse are hurting. It’s because the habitat is an ideal for them. Like, I can’t say this guy is completely wrong and what he’s seeing didn’t happen, But yeah, I think it’s a it’s along the lines of.

00:35:11
Speaker 4: A conspiracy theory.

00:35:12
Speaker 5: It’s something I tell my buddy in Pennsylvania that’s a hardcore grouse hunter. I say it all the time as a joke, like turkeys ate all the grouse, but it’s a joke.

00:35:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I would invite this person, and I would never want to hack on a guy that’s just curious about what’s going on.

00:35:26
Speaker 3: I would invite him.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: To reach out to places that do turkey research. Okay, reach out to n WTF, reach out to Carlo and start looking into something called crop surveys. There have been in a lot of areas extensive crop surveys where they hunters submit in some cases thousands of samples of turkey crops and you can see you can research about what turns up in turkey crops.

00:35:56
Speaker 4: They eat some odd things.

00:35:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I can’t rule out that it never happened, right, because you can throw a mouse to a backyard chicken. Yes, it’ll eat the mouse.

00:36:06
Speaker 4: Now we’re talking.

00:36:07
Speaker 1: There is there is trailcam footage of a white tailed deer yep going up to a robin nest, pulling a hatchling out of the nest and eating it. Things happen, they do, But is it having a population level impact? Yeah, And like I can’t tell you that no turkey has never eaten a grouse.

00:36:32
Speaker 4: Sure, I’m sure it happened.

00:36:34
Speaker 5: But I would think if this was a major problem, that an organization like the Rough Grouse Society might have like addressed this.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: At this point.

00:36:48
Speaker 4: And it does not seem to be a bit of a concern.

00:36:52
Speaker 6: Is the idea that they enjoy eating those eggs or Are they just trying to eliminate competition from the way, Oh.

00:36:57
Speaker 4: No, I think it’s just keep whatever they can. I’m not familiar with this theory. Yeah, I think it’s.

00:37:04
Speaker 1: Just a yeah, the turkeys aren’t doing like they’re not doing what a wolf does when it kills at kyo. Right, I mean I don’t. I mean I’ve never interviewed a turkey, but I don’t buy that’s just as my guess on it.

00:37:16
Speaker 4: So yeah, sorry, man, I can’t I’m not buying it. But good luck.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: In the news, we have a special guest coming on right now from the National Institute of Health.

00:37:28
Speaker 3: Let me give you a little background.

00:37:32
Speaker 1: A guy I used to be buddies with. We didn’t have a fallen out. We just don’t talk as much as he once did. The journalist Jim Robbins did a piece in The New York Times about chronic wasting disease and what’s worked, what’s not worked. Just just kind of your like typical piece that comes up every few years, where there’s a survey of what’s going on in chronic wasting disease research, chronic wasting disease management, and attitudes towards chronic wasting disease. It was a well reported piece, and Jim Robbins is pretty great at his when he does wildlife work, He’s pretty great at really getting a disparate collection of voices together on an issue. I always like reading Jim Robbins journalism, and he does a lot of great pieces in the Times and brings a very level headed look to complex wildlife issues. In this piece, I read about the work of Catherine Catherine, can you help me with your how you pronounced your last name? He In the work, Jim mentioned Catherine Haig from the National Institute of Health and that they were she’ll do much better job explain it to me.

00:38:46
Speaker 3: But they were looking into.

00:38:50
Speaker 1: The likelihood or the probability or what would need to happen for chronic wasting disease to do a species jump. Just as a quick background, chronic waste and disease is a is a servid disease moose, deer, white tailed deer, mule deer, elk, caribou, members of the deer family. It’s a preon disease that afflicts members of the deer family. And there’s this fear that I’m speaking of me personally. I’ve eaten accidentally, I’ve eaten CWD positive meat. Ah, I worry. My primary concern around CWD remains that a person would get it, and I and I it would be devastating for that individual. It would be devastating for the culture of deer hunting. It would be terrible that you would look at a deer not as this great source of renewable resource of and source of nutrition and all these family value baked up around hunting and eating wild game and sharing that experience, and you’d look at a deer and think, man, that thing’s now safe to eat.

00:40:07
Speaker 3: It would just be devastating.

00:40:10
Speaker 1: So with all that said, Catherine, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at work and what you did at work around your CWD project.

00:40:22
Speaker 7: Thank you very much for inviting me on. Yeah, I am a pre on biologist. My work has generally focused on the human forms of these diseases. So in humans, most of the diseases they’re a bit more like Alzheimer’s. They arise for no known reason. They’re not all by any means due to infection. That’s a very very small amount. Oh yeah, there are a very small numbers that are genetic as well. So in the focus on human diseases. What we developed was what we call a huge human’s cerebral organoid model of disease. And so what that is is we take a little sniff of skin cells from a consenting DONU, We reprogram them like you would a computer, to make them stem cells. And from those stem cells, we then tell them to grow into brain cells and we create these little bowls of brain cells. Once we’ve done that, we can expose them to those infectious prions from a human that died of these diseases, and we can have them infected to model the development of disease in a petri dish.

00:41:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to ask a question, a clarifying question on that. When you say a human that died from those diseases, give me an example of one of the diseases that that might because you know, like we said, like no human has as far as we know, no human has ever contracted CWD. So what what human disease that you would you use in your work?

00:42:01
Speaker 7: Can we use kloisveloped yapp of disease? So that’s the most common form of human disease, It’s still really rare. It’s an incidence of about one to three per million, so not common by any stretch. But the people who die of it, the prions that are within their brain are infectious to other human tissue. So that’s what we use.

00:42:23
Speaker 1: And you’ve been and you with the technology you’re describing, you have been able to take these preons from a donor and you’ve been able to infect the cells in your petri dish like you can you can successfully infect the cells, yes, okay, okay, Yeah, and.

00:42:47
Speaker 7: We’ve monitored them for the disease progression, what’s changing in them and the deposition of the misfolded protein that is that causative preon, so we see all of that within the human organoids.

00:43:01
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So then walk me through what happened when you start looking at CWD, or give me any other relevant steps along the way here.

00:43:09
Speaker 7: Well, like you said, the big question what worries everyone is the potential for a jump from we have servants to humans of this disease. And that’s a really legitimate worry. I don’t know if you have covered mad cow disease on this show, that these diseases are in that same group, that same family. So mad cow disease did jump from cattle to humans. It was thought to be through eating contaminative meat. So it’s a real genuine concern. So for us, we now have a model of human infection and we thought we could use this to try and test that species barrier. Our model is somewhat artificial, to be fair. We literally put the mini brains into a deer brain homogenet, so those little mini brain organoid cultures swim in the CWD infectious prions. It’s a massive exposure and it’s a prolonged exposure, so it’s far more than we would ever expect any human to really meet, and certainly no human brain would be expected to be in that environment. So we give them this massive dose of infectious prions and then we monitor them over time to see if they develop disease. Because the CWD the deer prions are just a little bit different to the human we can detect the difference between what was the original deer preon and if a human preon starts to emerge. And the good news for that study was that we did not find any evidence of infection of the human organoids.

00:45:00
Speaker 1: Have you been able to run the same experiment using let’s say, run it with cattle okay, or run it with horse or have you done that?

00:45:15
Speaker 7: We have been doing that. Our difficulty with the BC has been getting hold of good quality tissues to use. We’ve had tissues with very low titus that really would be too low for infection anyway. So we are doing that. We are trying to do that. We have an abundance of CWD tissues.

00:45:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got my I was my question was confusing. I’m sorry. What I meant was, so the livestock industry right is, rightfully has been rightfully concerned about CWD. That we have CWD infected deer and elk grazing with coming into contact with cattle or she right, and so imagine from imagine from our America’s beef producing industry the impacts, right, Yes, that would happen should we find that CWD had somehow infected the nation’s beef herds. So would you be able to, like, would your experiment work to bathe cattle brain cells in CWD to see if that’s a possible jump.

00:46:43
Speaker 7: Yes, it would. So. I am aware that the CDC has tissues of CWD that has transmitted to cattle, and we do actually want to look and see if that would be infectious to organize.

00:47:00
Speaker 8: Difficulties with these experiments because I think people worry that they bought the line on gain a function which obviously you don’t want to cross into that area.

00:47:11
Speaker 1: Oka.

00:47:12
Speaker 7: Really we just want to screen is this infectious to the human brain? Organized? Yep, But I personally think that’s a really critical experiment. I think it’s far more likely that a CWD that’s gone into how could be a problem, and I think we do need to know that.

00:47:33
Speaker 1: God, I’m going to ask you a question that we didn’t tee up with you. It’s not like a controversial question. Don’t feel uncomfortable. But a lot of times when I’m talking about CWD, you know, with other deer hunters and people that eat a lot of deer elk, and we have CWD in what’s thirty some states now, so most people live in a CWD state.

00:47:59
Speaker 3: It’s better onunderstood on the county level.

00:48:01
Speaker 1: But you know, millions of Americans hunt deer in areas where CWD is in their county. And a question that comes up, or an idea that comes up, is maybe we don’t have known instances of humans contracting CWD because these things take so much time, right, and maybe it’s just a myth. But you hear people say, well, I don’t know in ten years, in twenty years, maybe there will be many. We just don’t know yet. How as a professional, what are your thoughts on this idea that it would that you would eat infected meat in twenty years it would emerge. Is this based on anything realistic or is this just kind of an urban like a not an urban but a rural legend.

00:48:54
Speaker 7: It’s not impossible. These UH diseases with very long incubation periods. So one comparison you can draws with the BC epidemic now that emerged in the mid nineteen eighties, and we were seeing the first cases in the mid nineteen nineties. I think it transpired that it’s about an eight year median incubation. So what we might expect, you know, CWD we’ve known about since I think it’s been published.

00:49:22
Speaker 4: Since the sixties, that’s correct.

00:49:23
Speaker 7: Yeah, So what we might expect is that if that really was the case, that we’d start seeing a tickup in the number of cases of CJD. And that just hasn’t happened. So I think that is very unlikely. I mean, if the incubation period is so long that it’s longer than a human lifespan. That would be irrelevant to anyway, but we would be on the lookout for a tickup in cases or more likely like BC. The form of CJD that it caused was completely different to the forms that we see through natural sporadic disease. The biochemical signature of the protein was distinct, so we were able to tell whether someone died of the variant CJD from eating BSc versus of an unfortunate case of the normal disease.

00:50:17
Speaker 1: I understand.

00:50:19
Speaker 7: So while it’s not impossible at this point, I don’t believe there’s any evidence to support a tick up in cases or a different disease emerging.

00:50:28
Speaker 1: Yep. Now you’re welcome to just take a wild guess here, but I’m going to ask you another question. When CWD was identified, it was identified in a I believe it was a captive mild. You’re in Colorado on the late sixties. Where do you think that came from. I mean, if we had done the amount of testing, let’s say, the amount of testing we’re doing now across the country, if we were doing that amount of testing in nineteen hundred, would we have found CWD if we’re doing that amount of testing in nineteen hundred, or do you think it spontaneously generated somehow in the North American servid population.

00:51:19
Speaker 7: It’s hard to tell. It may have been around for much much longer than we know. I believe that there is an isolated herd in one of the northern European countries where it spontaneously appeared. So it seems most likely that it could have been a spontaneous disease that maybe if the deer weren’t in such close proximity, maybe that one deer would have died and it wouldn’t have been a particular problem. But I don’t know. It could have been just the odd case here and there for a very long time.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: And there’s no you know how you can go look at ice. You can look go look at an organism and you could tell from mitochondrial DNA that it went through a bottleneck, or you can get some idea of I don’t know the longevity of it, like how by the rate of mutations, whatever the hell you can tell how long something had been around. But these things you can’t really look at that way, right, I mean, you can’t look at them and sort of date, or look at how they morphed over time, or where populations emerged and spread to. Because it’s a it’s a protein and not not a cell. I mean, am I you know it’s what I’m saying making any sense, Like you can’t track its history or am I wrong?

00:52:42
Speaker 7: It’s a little a little bit you can. So if a millennire of evolution, that gene has persisted in the most mammalian species and ab and species I think even in totals, and you can track how the gene evolved by the differences between each species. So one of the things we do when we’re looking at sort of the risk of transmission is where those changes have occurred in the sequence. We can look at whether that would prohibit the two preon’s binding. So if a sequence has changed too much, you know, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, it’s just not going to fit. So we can look at that a little bit. And there is quite a lot of work going on in the field to try and look at those structures to determine whether there is a risk of particularly a given strain maybe moving across.

00:53:46
Speaker 4: Rather than understood.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, in all honesty, I mostly understand what you’re saying, but I get the gist of what you’re saying. Can I ask you one last question? Of course, have you followed? And apologies but we’re getting into we didn’t like pre hit you with these, so if you don’t want to answer, don’t answer it. Have you followed this conversation and some action being taken place around this idea that there’s some deer that seemed to be less less susceptible to c w D or CWD behaves in them differently and it’s it lingers longer or whatever. But they’re like they’re being billed as a resistant, a CWD resistant deer. Do you do you have any do you have any professional awareness of this, of of this idea.

00:54:50
Speaker 7: Yes, it’s not, it’s not crazy. This mostly comes from the genetics. Again, so within our own genes, you can have of what’s called a polymorphism, which can just be a single change in the gene. It doesn’t cause disease, it’s there, it’s normal for everyone. It’s you know, just inherited. But those little changes can change your susceptibility to disease. In the world of scrapy, they found that there’s a specific, specific set of these polymorphisms, like I think it’s three for the scrapy resistance. But when they have those polymorphisms, they are very unlikely to contract disease, so that becomes protected. And this is a huge interest for CWD as well, because if you could breed a herd that simply can’t get the disease, then it is no longer a problem.

00:55:50
Speaker 3: I a little bit beg to differ because.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: I guess I don’t beg the different on what you’re saying where I want up having a hard time. And this is for this is a different conversation because this is like population modeling and population dynamics. Is how I mean when you have tens of millions of deer out on the landscape and we have servants in fifty states, you know, how would you, let’s say you found it, how would you ever have meaningful genetic input into a population without starting basically from zero all over again.

00:56:33
Speaker 7: It’ll take a long time eating population. So this has also happened naturally.

00:56:39
Speaker 1: Okay, I don’t know if.

00:56:40
Speaker 7: You’ve heard of CRU It was a disease. Try it for a tribe of Papa, New Guinea. So they actually they they were accounibals. They were eating the corps is part of funeral right, and of course becoming infected. But they actually evolved a new polymorphis in too prote them against disease. And I think at the point that they were persuaded to change their funeral rights, it was about fifty percent of the population that may have this new polymorphism. Okay, so it happened naturally that they were evolving this effectively to survive. So with a few deal with those polymorphisms out there, they may simply outcompete the moms that get disease.

00:57:30
Speaker 1: Got may over time. I got a question like, yeah, she’s great, if you ever you should come do a residency here.

00:57:40
Speaker 5: Catherine, What what would you say to a hunter who sees the result of your test? And it’s like, see, there was nothing to worry about, Like I can eat the CWD positive meat and it’s not like I have no nothing to worry about as far as getting infected.

00:58:01
Speaker 4: Like what would you say to that?

00:58:02
Speaker 1: Now you’re putting her in a tough spot.

00:58:04
Speaker 4: Don’t But I think there’s an answer.

00:58:06
Speaker 5: I think like because I’m guessing, like there’s no such thing as a negative result, right.

00:58:14
Speaker 3: You want to see a scientist choose her words carefully.

00:58:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, get rid.

00:58:19
Speaker 4: Because they are going to be hunters who are.

00:58:20
Speaker 1: Like see, oh I feel that way.

00:58:23
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.

00:58:26
Speaker 7: Every model is flawed, so that’s the first thing to bear in mind is science nothing is perfect, so we have to always take our results with a grain of salt. In our model, we have tested the human polymorphisms that represent only ninety ish percent of the population, so there’s still a subset of people we haven’t been able to test whether they would be vulnerable. We are working on that now and keeping fingers crossed. So I don’t think I would be blast say and say yeah, you’ll be fine. Eat as much as you want. I think I would still recommend the people that they get them eat tested if they can. I also feel a bit like this isn’t something to be losing sleepover.

00:59:14
Speaker 3: M this is the kind of CWD research.

00:59:17
Speaker 1: I like, Man, don’t lose any sleep over No, No, just dispassionate that she’s dispassionate. Do you know what I mean?

00:59:25
Speaker 7: No?

00:59:25
Speaker 5: I like that answer. Keep it in mind, but don’t lose any sleep over it.

00:59:31
Speaker 1: Catherine, you come on the show anytime. Man, This is great.

00:59:34
Speaker 3: This is my favorite guest of all time. Thank you very much.

00:59:40
Speaker 7: Well, thank you for the invite.

00:59:41
Speaker 1: You come any time. We’ll get you gonna have Brodie.

00:59:45
Speaker 4: We’ll get you some of our deer meat teat.

00:59:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ll cook you some deer meat.

00:59:51
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:59:52
Speaker 3: Oh you know, I gotta tell you one last thing.

00:59:56
Speaker 1: I’m just telling you this just to enter, just to be entertaining, to give you a little concept to think about. When I used to have an idea that like, I love to talk about CWD to a fault. It’s my favorite subject. And I’m open to people’s opinions about who I’m very open to people who want to say, don’t worry about CWD, or they’re like cwd’s a hoax, or CWD doesn’t matter, it’s a conspiracy theory. And my thing is I used to want to make a burger. I wanted to get a bunch of CWD infected deer, like a dozen of them, and make a batch of burger with all that meat. And then when someone was coming to tell me that it was a hoax and didn’t matter, I would cook them that a patty of that burger, and if they ate the burger, then I would listen to everything they said. If they declined the burger, then I would say, you see, it’s concerning, But I would.

01:01:02
Speaker 3: Only believe the hoaxers after they ate my burger.

01:01:06
Speaker 1: But I haven’t made it because I feel like I would be criticized for having.

01:01:09
Speaker 3: That burger around.

01:01:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, i’d write like, don’t eat on the pack.

01:01:16
Speaker 7: It was the famous clip in the UK of the politician giving his little daughter a burger right in the hearts of the BSc epidemic says.

01:01:27
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, wow, that’s my guy right there. Yeah, and you where your money is in as much as I recently ate CWD infected meat without knowing it and then had like an uncomfortable text message for my friend telling me, and then I had to text my body who was with me at his house. Right if someone made me the burger I’m talking about still today, after hearing your news still today, I would be like, man, I don’t want it. I just don’t want that burger. Huh, all right, thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate the work you’re doing. Uh. I’m sure you have all kinds of motivations to do your work. But but on behalf of hunters and on behalf of consumers of deer meat. Thank you for looking into this. This is just the kind of information we need to make responsible decisions. So I appreciate it.

01:02:21
Speaker 7: Thank you for having me great.

01:02:23
Speaker 1: Thanks Catherine, thank you.

01:02:25
Speaker 3: Play the clip.

01:02:26
Speaker 4: Phil Oh goodness, I feel like I need to sit with that.

01:02:31
Speaker 1: Listen. I’ve been sitting with it. I read Jim Robbins article.

01:02:33
Speaker 2: There’s a lot of there’s a lot of subjects where you you you know, they pop up in the news every now and then and you’re like, I’ve I’ve seen this before, I’ve seen this before. And then you get that and it’s like a it’s like a drug, it’s like a new a new information.

01:02:50
Speaker 4: Well that’s truly the new.

01:02:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, you don’t get new information on c W d E. And we just got something that’s.

01:02:57
Speaker 1: Like the least full of shit lady on the planet to best the vibe that was electric.

01:03:03
Speaker 4: Clipped on.

01:03:04
Speaker 1: Like if you put me like if I was going to rate people full of shit, like I would be like, oh there, you know, I mean she’s like down there, man. Yeah, play a clip this guy. Now, this just watched this guy for his hosting abilities.

01:03:20
Speaker 3: I’m not joking.

01:03:21
Speaker 1: This guy is mesmerizing to me.

01:03:22
Speaker 9: Play a clip phill haunting aspect of the recent bear killing of Anthony Polio in Glacier National Park is that he did deploy bear spray, but.

01:03:35
Speaker 1: It still killed him.

01:03:37
Speaker 9: I’ve heard that yesterday from a customer who read an article, and today a member of that actually works for Glacier National Park.

01:03:46
Speaker 1: Came by and said the same thing.

01:03:48
Speaker 9: Now I have made on James Wellow’s YouTube and I released it here on Facebook five times when bear spray won’t help you, and it would be helpful if you viewed that video. The guy who worked for the park service came in today and said that when they were searching for Anthony Polio, even though it was a two or three days later, part of the way that they found him is that they smelled the bear spray and went over to where the incident occurred and found his body.

01:04:28
Speaker 1: Great so, as promised, the pistol v. Bear spray debate rages on a little more background. As you know, we got that gentleman covered it pretty well. But a young man named Anthony Polio from Florida. He lives in Central Florida. Now I think he’s from South Florida. Originally I was reading he works as a church Deacon. He was killed on this spring. He was killed on the way up to the Mount Brown Fire lookout in Glacier National Park. Right before he killed, he left his dad a phone message. It’s kind of haunting, idea. He just killed two point five miles from the trailhead. A couple little tidbits here that are worth pointing out before I get into the bare spray idea. When that happened first, it is just an axe to grind. When that happened, it was pointed out the first in the park in twenty five years. Like it’s like, it’s so rare. It hasn’t happened in the park in twenty five years. But that is a demonstration of what I think of as national park syndrome, which is thinking like taking Yellowstone, Glacier or whatever, Yosemite and drawing it off as though that this is a world unto itself, and what happens within these arbitrary borders somehow is different than what happens outside of these borders. So when you’re pointing out first in the park in twenty five years, okay, but not the first in a while, so you have, you know, a bear killed someone in Montana in twenty three, a bear killed someone in Montana.

01:06:11
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty two.

01:06:13
Speaker 1: Bears grizzy bears killed two people in Montana in twenty twenty one. Just last year, August of twenty five, a guy was killed in British Columbia, forty eight miles from the border. So by pointing out these things like in the park as though the park is something that does that exists in and of itself, is a little like just misleading and goofy. I would much rather speak about these things out of ecosystem, like yeah, like and I hate the word. I hate the fact that Yellowstone is in this, but it’s the best servable op serviceable words like the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which is a chunk of ground the size of Indiana.

01:06:54
Speaker 5: There’s definitely probably tourists out there that like, feel much different about walking around in Yellowstone then a solo elk hunter might feel about walking around solo in Paradise Valley, you.

01:07:07
Speaker 4: Know what I mean. They’re like, oh, it could never happen to.

01:07:09
Speaker 1: Me, because they create this idea, They create this idea that that somehow is a distinct place, right, this gentleman that was killed his father even suggested, like just to kind of give you like if you think of national park syndrome. And I don’t mean this would be critical him. He just lost his son, but he suggested, and speaking to a journalist from the New York Times, he suggested that all of the grizzlies in Glacier should be fitted with a GPS chip. And had they done that, this would have never happened because they would have been able to notify people where the bear was and like that someone would have the idea that that was even possible. Comes from this idea of that these parks are these distinct things with hard edges, rather than the fact that the animals have no idea. They moved in an out.

01:08:02
Speaker 4: I’m not that soft.

01:08:04
Speaker 1: This is a big park guy.

01:08:05
Speaker 6: Yeah, But like there, the Glacier has over three million visitors a year because people aren’t messing around out on national forests for the most part, maybe a few of them, but like those three million go to Glacier and they recreat in Glacier. This is just like a statistic that they’re keeping. And be like, we had a shooting in Bozeman recently, you wouldn’t like assign that to Belgrade. You know the town a few miles away, even though you’re like it’s all the same community or whatever.

01:08:33
Speaker 1: Okay, so does the guy that got killed by a grizzly just north of Yellowstone Park. So then when someone gets attacked in the park, they’re like, no one’s been attacked this park for blinkeny blank years. You’re like, well, guy has got killed six miles in the park.

01:08:47
Speaker 6: Yeah, but that’s just like the statistic for Yellowstone. Like I’m not I’m not that bothered by it, Like no, no, no, no again.

01:08:54
Speaker 1: Three million people national park syndrome, three.

01:08:56
Speaker 6: Million people visit. I think you have national park syndrome.

01:09:00
Speaker 4: Oh it’s national park arrangements.

01:09:07
Speaker 1: Yes, I think they should be wilderness areas. Guilty, I have to arrangement. I had some kind of analogy I thought of this morning, but I can’t remember what it was. Okay, allow me to think about it for a minute.

01:09:19
Speaker 6: I’m just had that bothered by like the step being like it’s the first fatal grizzly attack in Glacier and.

01:09:24
Speaker 1: Thirty I would say the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. When you say, like it has been happening a glacier, Okay, but a grizzly killed someone in Ovando.

01:09:32
Speaker 3: Oh, here’s my analogy. A woman was killed a bike.

01:09:36
Speaker 1: A bicyclist on a long bicycle track journey stopped and set up a tent near the post office in Ovando. A grizzly dragged her out and killed her.

01:09:49
Speaker 4: So what I say in the last few years?

01:09:52
Speaker 1: Would I go and say, this is the first ever grizzly bear attack in Ovando, which is like a couple miles wide, Sure? Or would I say a northern Continental divide ecosystem attack. I don’t because, of course in Ovando next to the post office. Sure, it’s the first one in a long time. In fact, I don’t know when the last person got killed at the post office Novando was.

01:10:17
Speaker 4: But who are you specifically mad about?

01:10:19
Speaker 6: Because, like I’m looking at an article right now in the world, they give you all that context. They talk about the Ovando thing in here, they talk about like other attacks that have happened in Canada.

01:10:29
Speaker 4: So just like, who is the person.

01:10:31
Speaker 1: I believe we should talk about grizzly attacks? This is relevant to a very few small number of people. I would say going forward, if I was the emperor of the world on wildlife issues, a role I would like. I would say, from now on, we will speak of these bears in their DPS terminology distinct population segment terminology, which would be the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem, the Cabinet Yack ecosystem, Northern Cascade ecosystem, et cetera. That is how I would catalog attacks, that is how I would speak about it. That’s not the point I’m trying to get to, Okay. The point I’m trying to get to is now it has relivened. Like even a friend of mine, a friend of mine text me, I will never trust bear spray ever, because this guy discharged the spray. If you look this kid that was killed polio, there were accounts that his spray was found nearby, and there were accounts that his spray was found still clutched in his hand, his pepper spray. He definitely discharged the spray. His father, who might have additional information that hasn’t been released in the public because the person from Montana Fishwild for Parks who’s investigating this incident isn’t talking yet. The kid’s father might have more information. The kid’s father said to a journalist. He thinks his kid hose the bear and then ran and the bear caught up with him. I don’t know where he’s getting that, but the idea so people like it doesn’t work. But here’s the point. Part of the point. The guy that was killed forty eight miles from the USBC board, forty eight miles north of the USBC border, shot the bear that killed him. Yeah, shot in the hip. It killed the bear. It killed the bear, but the bear killed him.

01:12:47
Speaker 4: There’s nothing on it can and the.

01:12:48
Speaker 1: Words of hatchet Jack, it killed the bar that killed me.

01:12:53
Speaker 5: There’s nothing on a can of bear spray that says guaranteed to stop a grizzly from killing him.

01:12:58
Speaker 1: That’s the way people are treating they know. I’m like, I have I carry a sig ten millimeter when I think there’s high likelihood of grizzly action and I carry spray. This is my own little stupid math problem. I don’t know. I don’t know why I can’t defend it. I carry spray, whether there’s a casual chance of bear action. I don’t know why. It’s just dumb. This is what I do. It just works in my mind.

01:13:21
Speaker 4: Do you remember when that.

01:13:22
Speaker 5: Bear was walking up the hill towards us on the moose hunt, and Cook was holding the rifle in one hand in bear spray, and I said, you better pick.

01:13:31
Speaker 4: One or the other.

01:13:33
Speaker 1: This is so funny. We’re sitting on a hill, We’re looking out and there’s this grizzly coming across this flat and it gets into the wheels right below us, and I’m like, that bear is gonna be here in a second in our laps. I’m sure it was. So this this thing that comes out where it’s like reinforcing this idea, but this cuts both ways. Neither of these things are perfect. There was a case a couple that there was just a few years ago. There’s a guy that two guys are bear hunt black bear hunting. They miss, They misidentify a grizzly bear. A guy shoots the grizzly bear, thinking it’s a black bear. The bear runs into the butt brush they go in there after it. The wounded grizzly now attacks one of the hunters. The other hunter goes to kill the grizzly off his buddy, but instead mortally wounds the buddy. The buddy dies of a gunshot wound, not a bear attack. That’s why if you go look at bear attack fatalities, he’s not on the list. So do you then go, ha.

01:14:43
Speaker 3: Guns don’t work.

01:14:45
Speaker 1: No, Because it’s like everything, none of this is perfect. None of this is perfect. But the fact that this guy discharged spray does it. You can’t draw a conclusion from this because you go even to other attack. There was another attack in Montana in Yellstone Park, well the Greater Yellstone Ecosystem. The woman was scratched up by a bear. Well, why why did the mauling stop because her buddy hose the bear. We’ve had two people on this show who were mauled by grizzly bears and the mauling stopped when when they hosed it. One holsed it on purpose. It was maul in the back of her neck, and she stuck it in her face over her shoulder without even looking at it and hosed it over her shoulder and it ran off. Another person that sat right in the studio. He didn’t hose it the bear. It was in his hand. The bear went to bite his hand, bit through the can and blew it up in its face and the attack stopped. Yeah, all these things are imperfect.

01:15:50
Speaker 5: They’re saying that he deployed it. It doesn’t mean he hit the bear.

01:15:53
Speaker 1: Doesn’t It doesn’t mean he hit in the face. Yeah. Yeah, he could have deployed it with the wind in his face, right.

01:15:59
Speaker 4: He could been rolling around on the ground with bear.

01:16:02
Speaker 1: Spray shooting over the place. Or he’s sitting there in ten mile an hour wind and pH and the window sends it right back to him. It could be I don’t know. It could be that he hosed himself. Yeah, we’ll probably know later. I don’t know. But to to draw big conclusions from this about the efficacy of spray, or to draw big conclusions about the efficacy of guns from other instances, they’re all imperfect.

01:16:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you show me someone who’s a very strong opinion, airtight opinion one way or the other. I could find a one example to support that, and I could find another example that would disprove your strategy.

01:16:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:16:48
Speaker 6: The dismissiveness from the video we watch would be like if someone died in a horrific car accident, You’re like, well, seat belts and air bags yep.

01:16:57
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, they’re not cutting it, yep, And that happen And.

01:17:00
Speaker 1: Last time I trust those things yeah, or oh, you can go on all day. You could run all day with these.

01:17:08
Speaker 2: Now that there’s people that, I mean, I have people every now and then ask me do you carry a gun or do you carry bear spray? And I say both, and I’ll say both at all times, and they say no. Sometimes they carry one. Sometimes they can’t sell. I can’t really explain one way or the other. But I don’t feel I’m worse off for having a cannabar spray and my gun. I you know, like I don’t always want to carry my gun. And if I’m in a place where I don’t think it’s going to be you know, we’re gonna have a shootout, I’m not going to bring it. But and it’s not full.

01:17:44
Speaker 1: I mean, if I’m a Griz country and I got an elk or a moose or something half butchered, yeah, and I’m going back in the next day. Oh yeah, spooky pistol drawn, buddy pistol drawn, not spray. If I only had spray, I had the spray. But again, I can’t tell you it’s all like it’s all there’s a big monumental masturbation in all this. It just makes me feel better.

01:18:11
Speaker 4: The only one who knows what happens to bear right.

01:18:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can’t interview them.

01:18:17
Speaker 2: If we could get a if we could get a some sort of a powder, pistol powder that also made a big cloud of.

01:18:26
Speaker 1: Oh when you shoot it, yeah, it shoots a bullet and a bunch of spray in both worlds. Yeah, let’s go down and work on that and then get reside. Never invented anything, I’m going to try to invent that. I’ve got a notebook full of of inventions. I’m done.

01:18:42
Speaker 3: That’s all I wanted to say.

01:18:44
Speaker 2: Well, uh, there’s a lot of data centers in the news, and that’s.

01:18:52
Speaker 1: Never a truer statement was spoken. And it’s not.

01:18:55
Speaker 2: It’s not because they’re you know, like there’s all this hysteria about it, like there’s just a lot of data centers and a huge rush of data centers being constructed. So two headlines that are pertinent at the moment to our audience. One is that the Potomac River was named the number one most endangered river of twenty twenty six. There was a big sewage spell sewage spill, but American rivers said it would have been number one anyway because of how.

01:19:26
Speaker 1: Intensely.

01:19:27
Speaker 2: Data centers are operating and being constructed in the Potomac Watershed. There are three hundred data centers in the Potomac Watershed nine They use nine percent of the water annually, including twelve percent of like water used twelve percent in the summer. Loudin County. I’m probably butchering the pronunciation has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, one hundred and ninety nine currently operating and thirteen percent of the global data center capacity in just one county in Virginia. So the Potomac being the number one most endangered river is one headline. The other headline is folks have probably seen the state of Alaska’s moving forward with a fifty year lease for a proposed AI data center on Alaska’s north slope. And this would be I think twenty some miles south of a lot of the oil infrastructure, so it’s it’s very far north in Alaska. It’s a five hundred million dollar development, and it will consume twice as much natural gas as is used for electricity and heating across Alaska’s entire urban grid. What they haven’t so one one thing to note about that the gas they don’t pump natural gas in large quantities or you know, in any amount off the north slope, so a lot of that gas wouldn’t be used if this thing didn’t go in up there and burn the game.

01:20:59
Speaker 1: It’s a byproduct. Yeah, so that’s that’s part that bothers me.

01:21:03
Speaker 2: This is a huge I mean basically like this is the north slope. One is sort of an interesting case because given the latitude, it’s going to use a lot less water than the industry standard. There’s some estimate saying ninety percent less because just cold, because it’s cold. And so the three concerns that you know, if you’re reading about data centers, the three interrelated concerns are water usage, electricity consumption, and the actual footprint of the facility. The electricity consumption is huge because they’re powering all these machines. Then they need to cool those machines because there’s using so much energy, and that’s where the water comes in. And then the footprint just for efficiency’s sake, like they have to cite all of this stuff in a condensed area.

01:21:51
Speaker 4: But there’s also like industrial pollution concerns.

01:21:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s there’s also that there’s also that.

01:21:59
Speaker 1: So big picture.

01:22:01
Speaker 2: I guess I read something recently and it’s you know, there have there have been data centers for a long time that store like the videos you’re watching or your Google Drive documents and all that stuff. But AI is uh requires exponentially more computer power. And all of these companies, the you know, the Metas of the world, the Googles of the world, they’re dumping all of their chips in the the AI game.

01:22:30
Speaker 1: And so.

01:22:32
Speaker 3: He gave up on his metaverse.

01:22:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, but there, but it was so cool.

01:22:36
Speaker 2: It was so cool that the dory world and the growth of these things is just crazy. They’re they’re they’re saying that this is the largest growth in power demand since post World War two era in terms of demand on the grid. AI data centers can use as much power as one hundred thousand homes or more metas building one in Louisiana that will draw twice the power of the entire city of New Orleans.

01:23:06
Speaker 1: My god.

01:23:07
Speaker 2: Another meta facility in Wyoming will draw more power than every residential property in the state combined. And we’re expected to double or triple energy use in the very near future. So so like there’s even if you get beyond the facilities themselves, like the demand that they’re putting on for new power plants to come online. Nuclear reactors seem to be sort of the what folks are hoping will solve this problem. But in the meantime, a lot of its natural gas China is it’s obviously a race with China. Their advantage is in power they have. They have a lot more power than us and our you know, we see all these headlines, like basically every headline that you’ve seen in the past few years about our grid being outdated or route all this stuff, like it all ties into this question of data centers and it can exacerbate drought obviously. Like there’s a huge one going up in Utah that mister wonderful Kevan O’Leary is behind. It’s going to occupy speaking of that footprint, it’s going to occupy forty thousand acres and Mike will release the equivalent of twenty three atomic bombs worth of thermal energy in a single day. A physics professor at Utah State estimates it all warm daytime temperatures by two to five degrees and nighttime temperatures between eight to twelve degrees. Some estimates think within what it’s putting off so.

01:24:43
Speaker 4: Much energy that making a microclimate.

01:24:45
Speaker 2: It’s making a microclimate in the area around there, so daytime, I mean like a pretty expansive area.

01:24:52
Speaker 1: Not just like so, I guess, like.

01:24:55
Speaker 3: You know the term nimby.

01:24:56
Speaker 1: Not in the backyard. I’m a nimp. I just invented that. A nimp not in my country. It’s like, I just don’t. I just wanted to go away. Yeah, I was fine. I was fine. I hate the stuff. I hate all the environmental destruction for this.

01:25:17
Speaker 2: I said about looking into these two headlines, and it’s like an onion. The more layers you peel back, there’s more, there’s even more stuff to untangle, right, Not that you untangle parts of an onion, you just an environmental nationalist. But yeah, there’s so. There’s another story. In Georgia, residents in a subdivision complained about low water pressure. The county revealed that two industrial scale water hookups had been connected to the power to the water supply connected to a data center. One had been installed without informing the water utility, and the other one hadn’t been builled. So collectively that drained thirty million gallons in less than a year out of this water supply without paying for it.

01:25:58
Speaker 1: Here’s why.

01:25:59
Speaker 2: It’s just this unbelievably sprawling concern that that like will affect habitat and water and all these things.

01:26:08
Speaker 3: But I got a question that maybe you can answer this.

01:26:11
Speaker 1: But this is why I want to get a really good, like a really good you know that CWD scientists, I want to get hurt. Sure on data centers. Sure, we talk about using water, but see if you’re just using water for cooling, you have a discharge. This is one of the problems with like coal fire generator plants or nuclear plants. You’re using tons of water for cooling, and then the problem, often the environmental problem is you’re putting it right back where it came from, right, But you’re putting it back where it came from hot right, So you have a hot water discharge or a warm water discharge, which can lead to all kinds of problems.

01:26:50
Speaker 3: Rough fish like it.

01:26:51
Speaker 1: Sometimes good fish like it, but it can lead to problems because you’re you’re changing water temperatures, so the water’s not vanishing.

01:26:59
Speaker 4: But it could be polluted.

01:27:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could be I mean anybody, but is that true?

01:27:03
Speaker 1: Well? Is it polluted?

01:27:06
Speaker 2: There are cases, I mean any sort of concern that you have. I guarantee you can find a headline in the past two months where there’s some instance of this, just because of the scale of change that’s.

01:27:16
Speaker 4: Happening right now.

01:27:17
Speaker 2: But some of them have closed systems, like they’re circulating water through a closed system. I believe the one that they’re talking about doing in the North Slope would be a closed system, but not all of them.

01:27:31
Speaker 1: But why are you not And I’m not asking you to answer this for me, but picture that you’re drawing from an aquifer. Do we have the technical capabilities to pull it up, cool and put it back in the aquifer?

01:27:50
Speaker 2: I can’t answer that. I mean, I know there’s concerns about contaminating the water that’s going through all this piping leaching.

01:27:58
Speaker 1: But the water that you drink when through your pipes, that’s true. So I don’t know. I’m not trying to make a point. I would love to have someone explain this better to me, because I just need to understand.

01:28:11
Speaker 2: I also think like one of the concerns with them is that the same time that they need to be cooled the most intensively is during the summer, and that’s also a time when water levels are low and rivers, and there’s also just you know, irrigation demands and all this stuff, so they sort of have this compounding effects on existing water shortages.

01:28:33
Speaker 1: And when you’re using water to cool, what’s happening is you’re putting the heat into the water. Yeah, how if water’s coming in into a data center, it’s coming in at I’ll pull a number. I can picture it’s coming in at fifty degrees. Is it leaving at fifty two? Is it leaving at one hundred and two? I couldn’t tell you that this is I know, I’m not trying to cost your balls. No, this is one of the things I wonder about. Yes, this is why I want to get I need to get someone on the show, on the interview show. I need to get someone that’s real solid on this ship.

01:29:09
Speaker 5: Well, the nimby thing that you talked about, well, I’m saying nimby with these things like you mentioned in Georgia where there was like low water pressure, Like that’s kind of what scares me because when people get sick of these things being in their backyard, like a logical step could be with the right like people behind it in Washington saying like well, let’s put these things on public land right ohay away from where people are going to be pissed about it.

01:29:37
Speaker 1: You feel like Zccerberg bought that island in Hawaii and he goes out there surfs around and those goofy glasses and stuff. Do you I bet he’s not putting one on that island. No, No, It’ll be like these are the dudes. These are the dudes that they will never even see one of these things, right, It’s not going to be in their backyard.

01:29:59
Speaker 2: I mean with something like this too. Ideally, Like the problem is the best place to put massive facilities like this from a habitat standpoint is on landscapes that are already developed or already disturbed. You know, Like the best place to do any sort of development is where development has already occurred. So you’re not chewing up farmland, and you’re not chewing up for us.

01:30:21
Speaker 3: It’s like whatever neighborhood in the Bay Area all these.

01:30:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

01:30:25
Speaker 2: So I like walking away from my limited research on this. It’s one of those things when I see it in the news, I kind of roll my eyes and I’m like, God, I’m sick of hearing about data centers.

01:30:38
Speaker 1: But I’m not.

01:30:39
Speaker 2: The more you the more you read about them, you sort of come to the realization that it’s not stopping. So we just need to be clear out about the potential risks for habitat and wildlife, you know, because it’s just going to be an ongoing conversation that’s probably going to get bigger and bigger in the year’s ahead.

01:30:58
Speaker 3: We got to do too quick hits.

01:31:00
Speaker 1: Yep, uh, We’re gonna do two quick hits because then we we got to get into fishing records, which is what we’re all here to hear about.

01:31:07
Speaker 6: My computer died, so we should just punt that segment to next week.

01:31:11
Speaker 1: They they took all his power the data center.

01:31:14
Speaker 4: They did first case.

01:31:16
Speaker 1: This is when it gets real. This is when it gets real.

01:31:21
Speaker 3: Can’t plug it in.

01:31:22
Speaker 4: I don’t see a charger in this room.

01:31:24
Speaker 1: You’re really gonna quit because your computer died.

01:31:26
Speaker 6: Also, I before my computer even died, I wrote in the script that I think we should Oh that was you, that was me, Well, I said my parenthesis.

01:31:33
Speaker 4: He’s just hoping there’s another record next week.

01:31:36
Speaker 1: But you’re a delman not somewhat quick. If you’re a fellow that reads the news and you’re always seeing like data centers, blah blah blah. Lately you’ve been seeing nothing but cyanide bombs. They’re putting cyanide bombs out on the public LANDIL is gonna pull up a picture. Spencer’s guilty. This I am they If you’re seeing stuff about the Trump administration is putting cyanide bombs on public land, it’s like hold on a minute, Hold on a minute. A cyanide bomb. It’s it’s the same mentality is calling CWD the zombie dear disease. It’s the same mentality. You’re taking a term in a p okay. It’s like, let’s say you oppose the inheritance tax. What do you go, what do you do? I’ll tell what you do death. You say a death tax. They’re even going to tax you when you’re dead because you want to rebrand it. Cyanide bombs are not cyanide bombs. They are canine past ejectors, rolls off the tongue. It’s just let’s just at least be honest about what we’re talking about. There’s a there’s a very fine debate to be had about whether they should they’re called M forty fours, whether you should use it, whether they should be using M forty four devices out on public land. I got a lot to say about it, but please stop with the cyanide bomb thing.

01:33:15
Speaker 6: Yeah, there’s there’s two like parts of the language you should avoid we’re talking about. One is calling them a bomb. There’s no explosion. It’s it’s a spring loaded ejector that sends the cyanide into whatever it’s it’s.

01:33:30
Speaker 1: Hitting crystallized, crystallized form. Yeah.

01:33:32
Speaker 6: The other one is calling it a cloud of cyanide. That’s another thing you don’t do. There’s no cloud of gas. It’s not just like spreading this across the landscape. It is a solid capsule that is then ejecting the the I assume it’s like a powder form, like if you.

01:33:50
Speaker 1: A granular, granular form that mixes with saliva.

01:33:53
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that that goes directly into the kyote’s mouth. There is no like haphazard green fumes coming from one of these things. So you don’t call it a bomb, and you don’t say it’s a cloud of gas.

01:34:04
Speaker 2: Our diagram does show gas, no crystals. It’s cyanide gas.

01:34:10
Speaker 1: That’s what it makes when it mixes with saliva powder. M hmm it’s like what it makes when it mixes with saliva.

01:34:17
Speaker 2: Did I say say anything wrong? Gas in the diagram.

01:34:23
Speaker 1: When it mixes. If I put powdered sugar in your mouth, what’s gonna happen to that powdered sugar? Is it going to turn into ciani? Is going to form a liquid? Right? So do you go that’s not powdered sugar. That’s a liquid. No, it’s powdered sugar. Once it’s in your mouth, it’s a liquid. Once it comes in contact with your saliva, it liquefies. Sure, you could, you could dislike M forty Four’s all you want, but let’s just be clear about what they are and stop talking about them in some bullshit way.

01:34:52
Speaker 2: I didn’t say anything other than there is cyanide gas at some point in this process, because it’s.

01:34:57
Speaker 3: As in our diagram.

01:34:59
Speaker 1: Yes, once the crystals come in contact with a liquid, there’s a gas produced that is inhaled by the animal and it kills it. You’re not trying to sugarcoat back to powdered sugar. I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything. It’s just stop calling it that because when you’re calling people America, because when they’re calling it that they’re trying to vilify something in a way that that’s dishonest.

01:35:23
Speaker 5: These things are also those things are also not new, right, They’ve been around forever ever, not ever, but they were they’re banned during late in the Biden administration, so they’re whatever a couple of years they’ve been banned, but but they’ve been to use for years.

01:35:41
Speaker 1: But that’s a that’s a that’s that’s part of the problem with headline writing in America. They’ve they were legal for decades. They had a directive on to the Biden administration that they wouldn’t be able to use them. And these aren’t public These aren’t like Joe Blower don’t use these like right like wildlife services or apist is able to use these. They’re not like, you know, it’s buying with thump. You know, you don’t go to the hardware store and buy an M forty four. It’s a professional tool for protecting livestock from predators, which you could be four or against. Let’s just be honest about what it is. It’s a tool like that. There was always legal, and then under the Biden administration they put a moratorium on it, and the MORATORI has been lifted. So whenever this happens, what happens is you then report Trump. Once the Bayan night bombs.

01:36:29
Speaker 5: There was and there was an incident I think that kind of spurred the banning, Like there was a kid in Idaho is out with his dog. Somehow they were both inspecting this thing or looking at it.

01:36:42
Speaker 4: The dog and the kid did not The dog killed the dog.

01:36:46
Speaker 1: Yes, he got a settlement of one hundred and fifty one thousand dollars.

01:36:49
Speaker 4: So like, sure, there’s a possibility that’s something bad.

01:36:52
Speaker 1: Okay, But here’s the deal on this, here’s the deal on this. What kills more dogs? This is like another case of intellectual dishonesty. What kills more dogs? Kyotes? Or M forty fours? Sure, so all of these, all of these organizations, Project Coyote, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, all these organizations that petition against M forty four’s and they always like to go to the dead dog. But when dogs kill kyotes, where are they if they are so interested in dead dogs, where are they? Yeah, they don’t have a thing to say about that because they don’t actually care about that dog. They just don’t care about the dog, they leverage it. They leverage it because they care about predator control. So just be more honest.

01:37:44
Speaker 5: What’s pretty interesting is there there’s I’ve got an article here from the Casper newspaper Wyoming and a woman from the Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, which I’m assuming is is not a pro four group. They’re indiscriminate. They kill anything that comes across them. There’s no way that anybody needs that to protect their livestock. There are other ways to do it. It’s cyanide. That’s a tool of war, not something that needs to be used to protect livestock. And here’s the interesting part, because she’s trying to get hunters on her side. They’re just asking for sporting dogs to get killed, like you know, hitting up the guys that are out there with bird dogs.

01:38:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, now, by yeah, this this directive the interior departments being a little koi because they’re sort of saying no, no, no, no, we’re not saying go use them. Yeah, there still has to be NEPA and all their steps, but they’re basically undoing the restriction. They’re not mandating that they be used. They’re eliminating a barrier to using them. So it’s safe to assume that on a case by case basis they may start using M forty four’s on BLM to protect property. There’s supposed to be somewhat canine specific because there’s like a biton poll there’s a Biden pole function that needs to happen to trigger them.

01:39:16
Speaker 6: Another detail you when you’re talking about Biden outlawing them or Trump allowing them that specific to federal land, Like, there’s still states that throughout the ban, we’re using these things that I don’t think we’re impacted by on state outlaw or being.

01:39:32
Speaker 1: Allowed, and there are states that have state laws that they can’t be used in the state. Yeah, exactly. So it’s and again, man, I think you know not that I’m the arbiter of what should be an allowable debate. There’s a lot to debate here. It’s just the bullshit gets piled down so thick around this subject that people can’t even see clearly anymore. Yep, Like the rhetoric gets so ridiculous and the posturing gets so ridiculous, the people aren’t having insane conversation about it. Yeah.

01:40:05
Speaker 6: I’ve also heard that in some of these instances where a human deploys one accidentally that they’re like some missing context there about the person was trespassing, or they are required by certain laws to have two signs within fifteen feet.

01:40:23
Speaker 1: Of feet now it’s fifteen ft and.

01:40:26
Speaker 6: They have to be bilingual. And when you hear about these going off accidentally in something that’s not a coyotes mouth, like the signs weren’t there, or someone was walking in a place that they weren’t allowed to be. That’s that’s like a common element in this story.

01:40:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you see the setup, I mean it’s it’s they’re marked with a big sign.

01:40:47
Speaker 2: They’re bilingual in German for the attack dogs.

01:40:53
Speaker 1: Their thing you gotta look at is you wind up in this kind of stuff. You always look and you say, like is it a popular is it a population level impact? So when you build let’s say you build a data center and you’re putting up a ton of you’re putting a bunch of concrete on the ground. You are absolutely killing wildlife and you’re destroying wildlife habitat the question would be is it a population level impact? When you put up wind turbans, so wind power generating turbines, they kill birds, but that industry will say, but it’s not a population level impact. Cars kill raccoons, but it’s not a population level impact. So from a from a wildlife management view, you would say, yes, it’s killing some, but it’s not a population level impact. And when you’re looking at the M forty four stuff, you’ll see, oh, wolves could get it or whatever could get it. They’re not having population level impacts. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. And I keep paying one side of the story, but I’ll play the other side for a story. We have a terrible legacy of poisoning wildlife, and we poison wildlife for over a century and wiped out a lot of species and extirpated a lot of species across native range through poisoning. So pun intended at leaves a bad taste in people’s mouth. Poisoning there’s a reasonable there’s reason to recoil at the idea of poisoning predators because our legacy of poisoning predators is bad. We did a lot of damage with indiscriminate use of poisons, and so even when it’s a discriminate use of poisons, it can rile folks up.

01:42:58
Speaker 2: I don’t know, especially if they’re not getting the full story from the news coverage.

01:43:06
Speaker 4: We’re moving on.

01:43:07
Speaker 1: I’m done.

01:43:08
Speaker 4: Here’s the headline.

01:43:12
Speaker 5: I thought i’d never hear Wyoming reducing wolf quotas for twenty four. If you’re familiar with Wyoming and their relationship with wolves, that might seem surprising.

01:43:24
Speaker 2: Is it to preserve the age class?

01:43:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, the trophy.

01:43:30
Speaker 5: Wyoming Wildlife managers are proposing major reductions to the states twenty twenty six wolf hunting quotas. A widespread canine distemper outbreak caused one of the sharpest wolf population declines in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystems since they were introduced there in the mid nineteen nineties. If you’re not familiar canine distemper, it’s a viral disease affecting all kinds of canine species, wolves, coyotes, foxes, themes, domestic dogs, and it’s especially lethal to puppies. Highly contagious, incurable affects the respiratory, gastro intestinal, and nervous systems. Most like if a dog’s infected with it, it’s going to die within two to four weeks. Dogs can survive it, but they generally will suffer from permanent neurological damage like Caesar’s paralysis. Canine December is not new in the Yellowstone area. There’s been several distemper outbreaks in the region in the past twenty years, but they’re smaller flare ups that didn’t cause like major mortality events like this. This past winter and according to state and federal monitoring of Wyoming’s wolf population, it declined from roughly three hundred and thirty wolves in twenty twenty four to two hundred and fifty three entering twenty twenty six. Breeding pairs drop from twenty four to fourteen.

01:45:03
Speaker 7: And the.

01:45:05
Speaker 5: Wyoming has two different like wolf hunting zones. One’s called the Troll I’ll explain this more, but can you pull up that map, Phil, There’s what they call the Trophy Area in northwestern Wyoming that declined to one hundred and thirty wolves, and that area in the northwest part of the state is where they have to maintain a target of approximately one hundred and sixty wolves or they get in trouble with the Feds and wolves going back on the ESA. So that’s why this is very concerning to Wyoming’s wildlife managers. It’s not necessarily that they’re worried about this wolf decline in general, it’s that if there’s not.

01:45:46
Speaker 4: Enough wolves in that area around.

01:45:50
Speaker 5: Yellowstone, which you’ll also hear that called the recovery area back when the wolves were managed federally rather than by the state of Wyoming. So right now it’s below that target of one hundred and sixty wolves. Distemper exposure was detected in sixty four sixty four percent of wolves captured during moderning work. Wolf pup survival dropped dramatically, which affected recruitment into the adult population and estimated thirty one to thirty four pups out of eighty seven documented pups statewide survive so less.

01:46:31
Speaker 4: Wow.

01:46:33
Speaker 1: Man, you’d think that the people that are so hysterical all the time about a wolf getting killed by a hunter, they got shit in their pants.

01:46:43
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, And this is the first time they’ve seen like a population event, like level event like this.

01:46:50
Speaker 1: What it bes like really with all the consternation about managed wolf hunting somehow putting wolves back on the e s A list, as much as that was like pushed and pushed and pushed, Yep, it’d really be something if it wound up being a naturally occurring wildlife disease. Yeah, put them back on.

01:47:12
Speaker 5: The way exactly, and the like they in the research I was doing, they make a point to say that like hunting is not causing population level declines, like it’s in that they’re highly managed in that that trophy zone.

01:47:27
Speaker 4: How many get killed there each year?

01:47:29
Speaker 5: Well, it was the quota was twenty was forty four, and they didn’t even They only killed thirty one out of forty four last year, so they didn’t even meet the quota. They’re proposing to drop that quota to twenty two, so they want to cut it in half.

01:47:44
Speaker 1: Are they fixing to keep the rest of the state as basically like a vermin kyote.

01:47:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, they don’t, like they don’t need to manage them for a minimum in the rest, it’s only that that recovery area of trophy game management.

01:47:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if you’re not will be able to look at the graphic pill has pulled up here.

01:48:02
Speaker 3: Basically the top eighth, so the top left.

01:48:10
Speaker 1: Or northwest corner of the state, comprising about an eighth of the state of Wyoming, which is pre Damn Rectangler, is wolf trophy game management area, and the rest of the state is just predatory management area or the predator zone where the wolves are open all the time. They’re managed like a coyote in seven eighths of Wyoming, roughly seven eighths of Wyoming excluding the corner of the state which touches on Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teeton National Park.

01:48:45
Speaker 5: YEP, and the State of Wyoming has an agreement with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain those minimum number of wolves and minimum number of breeding pairs inside that trophy zone. Yeah, they took pretty drastic action to make sure that wolves don’t end up becoming federally managed and in the state of Wyoming, which which might seem like counterintuitive for a state like Wyoming. It might seem like they don’t want any wolves, but they’re doing what they need to do to maintain them as a managed state managed game animal, which is pretty cool.

01:49:27
Speaker 6: Yeah, everybody’s fulfilling their role there. Yea, Like the state is doing their part and the FEDS are like doing their thing about saying we expect this many animals. All the numbers you said, though, are like half as big as I thought they would be. A total number, the total number of that are killed, the total number that live there, what the quota is I assumed I would have put two X on all loans.

01:49:46
Speaker 1: I was just guessing.

01:49:48
Speaker 4: Yep. So there you go.

01:49:50
Speaker 5: If you’re looking to kill a wolf in the Trophy Zone and Wyoming this year, it’s gonna be a little harder.

01:49:58
Speaker 3: Okay, everybody day.

01:50:00
Speaker 1: Tune next next week for Spencer’s fishing records.

01:50:03
Speaker 4: Report and a charge computer.

01:50:05
Speaker 3: He’s gonna charge up, He’s gonna be ready.

01:50:07
Speaker 4: They might get another record between now and then.

01:50:11
Speaker 1: Uh, do me a favorite. As you’re wrapping up listening, Uh go go subscribe to the Meat Eater podcast YouTube channel. Please or wherever you listen, go follow wherever you listen so you can stay up on the news with the news show me Eater’s news show. So subscribe on the podcast YouTube channel and follow wherever you listen, and stay tuned for more on Spencer’s breaking fishing records coming soon.

01:51:00
Speaker 6: Y