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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow’s Week in Review with Ryan cow Calahan. Here’s cap. A four year old boy in Washington State was attacked by a mountain lion last month and saved by the quick actions of his father. The young boy and his parents were hiking a popular trail in Olympic National Park when the attack occurred. Officials haven’t released many details, so we don’t know whether the attack was unprompted or if the animal had been approached, but witnesses who spoke to local media say that the big cat grabbed the child and tried to take him away. His father, chased after the lion, was able to rescue his son from what would have been a pretty horrible death. The boy was flown to a trauma center for treatment but has since been released. The offending cat had been fitted with a tracking collar, so it wasn’t difficult to locate the animal and put it down. Mountain lion attacks are rare, but this is the second high profile attack on a child in less than a year. Last September, a five year old was seriously injured after being attacked by a cougar in Malibu Creek State Park. The kid was playing around his family’s picnic table when the cat pounced, apparently unprovoked. The animal dropped the child and ran up a nearby tree when confronted by an adult member of the child’s family, and the boy was treated for non life threatening injuries. What’s scary about these attacks is that they appear to be predatory. Grizzly bears kill people every year, but it’s usually a mother protecting cubs or a bear that’s been surprised or frightened. These mountain lions appear to be hunting their victims on purpose, which is quite a bit more unsettling for those of us who live in Cougar Country. I guess if there’s a takeaway here, it’s to fight like hell. If you find yourself or loved ones in the paws of a lion, hopefully they’ll decide you’re not worth the effort and go after some less feisty prey. This week the Crime Desk, Big Snake, Tech, Moose and maggots. But first I’m going to tell you about my week. In my week, well you know, it’s interesting. As always. I put my fly rod together, stood on a log on a lake and caught one rainbow in cold clear water. Then I put the rod away. The landlocked fresh water mountain lake equivalent to being perched on the bow of a flat’s boat in the moment, standing on the tumbled ponderosa log, staring through the reflective surface of this amazing mountain lake looking for that green back of a hunting trout would have been completely interchangeable for the turpin snaking along the turtle grass. Same but different. And if you only knew one of these experiences, not both, you’d be happy. Dare I say fulfilled that, Friends and neighbors is the first time I put the damn rod together all summer, which is hard to admit. The river and fishing and late evening bug hatches used to be a big part of my life. Cracked feet, permanent sunburn, big old calluses on my hands from rowing all day. Somehow all that has turned into another large consumer of time. Sound familiar. I’m telling myself that I am banking it all up for hunting season, gonna box out other distractions, make my days count. Now as a good time to tell you folks as any I’m going after brown bear in Alaska. Don’t believe I mentioned this yet fall Hunt go up the end of September, come back sometime in October. This particular trip kind of happened in a spur of the moment cancelation hunt sort of way. It’s a once in a lifetime serious spoiled kid type of trip. Not spoiled like for the comfort and fancy food sort of way, but in the fact that it’s really freaking expensive. So I’m going to milk every moment out of this and I have a goal to turn a big, amazing brown bear into fire roasted, crunchy Korean barbecue tacos with kimchi. That’s my best idea right now for turning fish flavored bear into a delicacy. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Then I’m hoping to get back just in time for the opening days of Pheasants, where I’ll say my sorries to old SNORTI kiss sorry for being gone, little girl. The boring big game is behind me for a while, and for right now, it’s all you do, what you love, what you’re built for, and I’ll do my best to keep up and not miss. If you friends and neighbors listeners out there have any big adventures that you’re gearing up for. Right in to askcl that’s Ascal at themedia dot Com. Let me know if I can help you in anyway if you’re struggling to answer any questions getting prepared. All of us do a fair amount of traveling and get ready for trips. Feel free to use me as a resource. Moving on to the crime desk, the host of a white tail hunting show has made himself famous, but for all the wrong reasons. Matt Jennings, the host of a show called The Game, pled guilty last week to poaching two bucks in Kansas in twenty twenty two. Local media reports that the thirty five year old killed a white tail buck in the eastern part of the state, but he didn’t have a tag for that unit, so he took the carcass over to Oklahoma and tried to register it in the Sooner state. Not being satisfied with violating federal law by transporting poast game over state lines, Jennings went back to Kansas eight days later and killed another buck in the northwestern part of the state. He had the proper tags for that animal, but since he’d already shot a buck the week prior that second kill violated the state’s one buck limit. Federal prosecutors say that both animals were featured in episodes of his show. Jennings paid twenty five thousand dollars in fines and restitution for his crimes and will never be allowed to hunt in Kansas ever again. He is also banned from hunting in eight other states during his five year probation. Of course, the real penalty will be the end of his career as a hunting influencer. That’s a joke. Hard to say if being a hunting influencer is what forced this dude to cross the line so egregiously multiple times, literally and figuratively. Just like with any pursuit, you know, there’s folks that can do it as per the letter of the law, and there’s folks that can’t and don’t want to. In fact, Jerry’s kind of out on this feller anyway. Speaking Alasia Act violations, five Mississippi men were sentenced last month in a federal court for poaching over sixty white tail deer in Illinois. This poaching ring has likely been operating for many years, but they were convicted of poaching deer between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. Apparently, these five individuals would travel north from Mississippi through Tennessee and Kentucky and into southern Illinois. There they would identify a target buck and kill it at night with a spotlight and a rifle. They would then bring the deer back to Mississippi, where they would harvest the meat and mount the antler’s. Federal prosecutors hit them with laciac charges for transporting poach deer over state lines, and they paid nearly one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in fines and restitution. The biggest penalty was levied against fifty four year old Lee Johnson, the ring leader of the operation. He was forced to pay seventy five thousand dollars in restitution and a ten thousand dollars fine. Here in my neck of the Woods, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has just charged six people for poaching bull elk and mule deer bucks in the Bowl Mountains between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four. These six individuals were from Washington State and Montana, and they allegedly killed several large bull elk in Hunting District five ninety without the proper permets. While they were at it, they also killed several large mule deer bucks without any hunting licenses at all. Eleven mounts were seized during this investigation, and the six suspects were hit with thirty four toll charges and thirteen warnings. The names of these alleged poachers have not yet been released, which tells me more charges could be forthcoming. Usually when a law enforcement agency doesn’t release the names of the suspects, it means the investigation is ongoing and more poachers could be added to the case. In Idaho, man has been banned from hunting for life after illegally killing a bull moose and leaving it to waste. Prosecutors say Raymond Black shot the trophy class bowl without a moose tag near Wolf Lodge Saddle in Cootney County, but when he tried to load the animal into his truck, he got stuck in the snow. He met two legal hunters while hiking out to get help, which is when his real troubles began. These two hunters immediately sent something rotten in Denmark, and they reported their interaction to the Citizens Against Poaching hotline. They also recorded Black’s license plate number, so it was easy for law enforcement to track him down. Meanwhile, sensing the jig was up, Black high tailed it out of there as soon as he got his truck out of the snow. Ironically, this only added to his rap sheet. Now not only had he illegally killed a bull moose, he’d also left it to waste. Along with the lifetime hunting band, he was forced to pay twelve thousand dollars in fines and restitution and serve three years of supervised probation. In Idaho, all moose tags are once in a lifetime. They’re also difficult to get, even for residents. The latest data for twenty twenty four shows that indesirable units where more than one hundred people applied, the draw odds are always less than ten percent. The moose population is doing well in Idaho, with between ten and twelve thousand individuals, but Black’s actions still stole an animal from someone who may have been waiting their entire life to draw a tag and have that opportunity. Game wardens don’t always have help from other law abiding hunters. Sometimes they have to catch poachers all by themselves, and a new Dear decoy is helping them stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Big thanks to listener Bob Nielsen for bringing this to my attention. Thermal scopes have allowed poachers to hunt at night without a big flashlight, but they’ve also reduced the efficacy of deer decoys. We’ve talked about this tactic before. Game wardens set out a deer decoy along a road at night and wait for a would be poacher to take a shot. Problem is, these decoys don’t give off a heat signature. If the poacher has a thermal optic, they can spot the fraud right away and just keep on driving. That’s where Brian Wolfsligo comes in. Wolsligel is a Wisconsin taxidermist who specializes in crafting the most lifelike deer decoys for law enforcement use. According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, his decoys wiggle their ears, move their legs, and in some cases, poop. He uses small, remote controlled motors to allow game wardens to control the animal’s various body parts, and he substitutes deer pellets with brown m and m’s. Most recently, he has included heating pads and coils within the deer’s body to replicate the animal’s heat signature. His next models will emit vapor to look like a deer breathing on cold mornings or nights. Wolfslegel is doing important work for law enforcement, but if he keeps going down this road, he may one day have to ask himself when do his deer cross the line and become more than just robots. I’m not saying his deer become sentient and try to take over the world I robot style, but I wouldn’t want to see any kind of joint chat GPTAI situation here, although it would make a heck of a new Terminator series. Poachers aren’t the only ones being seduced by warm, frisky decoys these days. Pythons down in the Florida Everglades are also being targeted with the same approach. Thanks to John Sebarse for sending this one in. We have covered a whole bunch of efforts to control the catastrophic spread of Burmese pythons in Florida. Train sniffing dogs an annual hunting competition with a ten thousand dollars grand prize, even unlucky pos wearing GPS collars, but not much seems to be making a dent. However, scientists at the University of Florida showed promising progress over the past decade by using live rabbits as python bait. Unfortunately, keeping those rabbits alive took significant time and effort, and so you of F Professor Robert McCleary went and developed the next best thing, a solar power to robot bunny decoy. McCleary and his colleagues hollowed out forty toy stuffed bunnies and outfitted them with motors that create realistic movements, as well as heating elements that stimulate body warmth. Using warmth to fool these snakes is especially important. Pythons have several heat sensing divots around their noses. These pits are densely packed with blood vessels that conduct the heat of a thermal stimulus away from the area’s nerve endings, returning them to their ready state almost instantly. Impulses from those nerves are then fed directly into the visual system of the snake’s brain, allowing it to construct a real time map of the warm bodies around it. Yikes. Not for the first time, I feel grateful to not be a floridian possum with a fifteen foot long heat seeking snake missile on my tail. But back to the decoys. After the motors and heat coils are installed, the robot bunnies are waterproofed and set out in front of cameras that use AI to discern python movement from all others slithering that goes on in the everglades. Once the camera detection system senses a python, it then alerts a local snake hunter to come make the arrest. Seems pretty neat. These forty decoys are just an initial test run. If they are successful, then they’ll be replicated throughout the everglades. However, if they don’t bring in the desired number of pythons, the U of F scientists plan on adding rabbits scent to the decoys as well. Seems a lot more cost effective to use live rabbits, but you know, I get it. Smell does not seem to have been the major motivating factor for some of our early ancestors. Scientists at Purdue University have recently proposed a new and challenging explanation for a long standing question about early hominid diets. Tests of the bone tissue of ancient Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have consistently turned up extremely high levels of nitrogen, an element that builds up in the tissue of carnivores. The nitrogen levels in these early people are so high that they often beat out so called hyper carnivorous animals, the wolves and big cats that eat nothing but meat in enormous quantities. But humans and neanderthals almost definitely didn’t eat that much meat. Not only do we know they depended on plant foods, but hominid livers also just can’t process such large amounts of protein. So what exactly is going on here? Well, you likely enjoy your cheese and beer and coffee, right, Those are all the product of fermentation, letting your food spoil in a controlled way, and the produced Scientists theorize that our early ancestors took it one step further from fermentation to intentional putrification, eating meat after it rots. More specifically, they were likely eating the nitrogen rich maggots that developed on the rotting meat. The study observed human cadavers undergoing up to two years of putrification at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center. They tested the rotting flesh for its nitrogen content, and then gathered the fly larvae that appeared on the flesh and tested those larvae as well. Sure enough, the maggots contained sky high levels of nitrogen. If those larvae were a regular part of early diets, it would easily explain the amount of nitrogen in excavated Neanderthal and Homo sapien bone. Now you might be saying to yourself, col there’s a bunch of nitrogen in the miracle grow I put on my lawn, but you don’t see me eating handfuls of that. It’s impossible that people would be eating spoiled meat, let alone maggots. For pete’s sake, you might say, well, you might be surprised by what is possible. The Purdue team got the idea to test the maggot nitrogen levels after reading about the dozens of traditional cultures that regularly ate intentionally putrefying meat and the resulting insect larvae. Early anthropological accounts are full of references to this practice, especially in far northern cultures that stored hunted meat for weeks, months, in even entire seasons. Using the digestion of the larvae is a form of food preparation. For example, when an early anthropologists expressed the disgust they had about the Netslect people of Northern Canada eating the maggots on a cariboo carcass, a Netslect hunter said, quote, you yourself like caribou meat, and what are these maggots but live cariboo meat. They taste just the same as the meat and are refreshing to the mouth. There you have. When another anthropologist complained about the smell of the rotting meat being eaten by the Yupik of Alaska, one of the native diners responded simply, well, we don’t eat the smell. Another true statement. Even today, you can go to the Italian island of Sardinia and enjoy the delicacy known as kassu mars, a local cheese which is consumed with the larvae of cheese flies living in it. So if modern humans do it, why wouldn’t the Neanderthals. Although the study calls for further experiments with the kinds of meat that early hominids would have been eating to confirm these findings, early indications seem promising. So next time there’s a power outage and all that venison goes bad in your freezer. Turn lemons into lemonade, you know what I mean. Your bones will be stronger for it. Speaking of game meat, that might mess you up if you handle it wrong. An official report has concluded that the twenty twenty three plane crash that killed the husband of an Alaskan US Congress representative was caused by an overloaded cargo of moose meat along with a set of antlers that were attached to the outside of the plane. The National Transit Safety Board recently issued its review of the crash, which took place after the pilot, Eugene Peltola, had dropped off two hunters in Yukon Delta National Wildlfe Refuge in southwest Alaska and was taking off with over five hundred pounds of moose that put the plane fully one hundred and seventeen pounds over its takeoff weight. The report went on to calculate that even once the plane had burned off all the fuel on the way to its destination, it still would have been a whopping one hundred and eighty pounds over its max landing weight. To make matters worse, the moose’s antlers had been attached to the right wingstrut, compromising the aircraft’s aerodynamics. Although I have seen many properly loaded bush planes that have antler’s last the fuselage, you need official Federal Aviation Administration approval to do so, which the owners of the plane had not obtained. Weather conditions at the takeoff location were also especially rough. Summing up the factors of the overload, the antlers, and the weather, Clint Johnson, Alaska Region chief for the NTSB, told local station KTUU, quote, if you would have been able to take one of those items out, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. But those things, all in combination, led to this tragic accident. The report also found that the piper cub involved in the crash was more than seventy years old, which is not uncommon, and many of the repairs made to it over the years took place before the FAA issued guideline stating how those repairs should be done. The pilot, Eugene Peltola, certainly knew his way around the area. He was the former manager of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge and former Alaska director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was husband to former US Representative Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native to be elected to Congress. This finding by the NTSB will add ammunition to the lawsuit filed by Mary Peltola against the owner of the transportation company that owned the plane. The suit alleges that the company allowed Eugene Quote to fly excessive hours, to fly without adequate sleep or rest, to fly under unreasonably dangerous conditions, and to carry an external load without the required permit. Now, I have had my fair share of bush plane landings and takeoffs and the part in between where you’re flying and thinking how freaking cool this is. Occasionally I’ve had to kind of close my eyes and pucker my sphincter because my fate is not in my own hands. But the operators of those planes got me through every time. Most of these individuals are extremely by the book. Accidents like this one are a reminder why the scale next to the plane is an important part of the aircraft. But I want to push back a little bit here on the fact that this is all on the pilot. Ultimately, it’s the pilot’s responsibility for sure, it is, and they are going off of years of experience when they make decisions like this, but more than once I have seen a passenger on a plane say I want to get out of here right now. I’ll make it worth your while if we can do this in one trip instead of going back for the rack later, or the meat later, or whatever the deal is. Heart goes out to these people, but it takes two to tango, you know what I mean. Anyway, that’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Get outside and go do something, do better than I have. This summer season’s right around the corner. Kids stoked. Thanks a ton. I’ll talk to you next week. Remember to write in ask c A L. That’s askcal at themeeteater dot com. Let us know what’s going on in your neck of the woods because we sure appreciate it. Thanks again, talk to you soon.
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