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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 cal A sixty two year old fish pulled from Lake Superior is thought to be the oldest ever lake trout caught in the Great Lakes. The fish, which researchers dubbed Mary Catherine, was collected at Klondike Reef in Autumn twenty twenty three by researchers with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It’s not a giant at just under five pounds, but what it lacks in size, I’m sure it makes up for an experience. Lake trout live a pretty long time for fish, with average life spans measuring twenty five to thirty years, but Mary Catherine doubled the average and is believed to have hatched around the year nineteen sixty one. For the youngsters there, that was the year JFK became president, the Berlin Wall began construction, and the first man orbited the Earth. Researchers estimated Mary’s age by counting the number of rings visible on the fish’s odolith or earstone. That’s a fancy name for a calsum carbonate structure in the inner ear like bone. This structure grows through the years of a fish’s life and produces rings that look like the rings on a tree stump. After counting those rings under a microscope, biologists determined that Mary Catherine lived through the First Man on the Moon, the civil rights movement, all nine seasons of Seinfeld, and the dawn of the Internet. Was quite a life for that old fish, even if she was blissfully unaware of all the changes happening on the surface above her. Nice little reminder that it’s not all about length. Experience has something to do with it too. I was at a pool, I was this week. We’ve got agency politics, not so public land but new Land, Japanese bears, and so much more of it. First, I’m gonna tell you about my week, and my week, well, my head’s just spinning, staring at the calendar. I’m roughly a month behind where I should be. Heck, I should just be consumed with nothing but chasing grouse and partridge with old snort and chasing buglen bowls up a steep train with my bow and beer belly. But instead here I sit, And because sit sounds loud like shit, listen up people, bury your poop, flip a big rock over, do your business and cover it completely at the bare minimum. You know how many people use these areas. I know you do because you complain about it. So be courteous and cover up your feces. My girlfriend’s long haired border Collie is gorgeous, myrtle coloration boy, and he thinks he’s especially stunning covered in your effluent. I should and can go into detail, but it’s horrible. Old snort a dog who I admit occasionally slips me the tongue inside my mouth. Ate your poop. The other day, it was opening day of bird season, and we were out not carrying a shotgun, doing my nice boyfriend duty of spending quality time before I get real busy chasing critters. And you do me the discourtesy of surface pooping. That’s just a kick to the sack, bud. Here. I have an amazing bird dog and an arsenal of scattered guns, and we weren’t even out there quote unquote competing with you on opening day and you literally pooped in our mouths. Poop, shovel and move on, or shovel and then poop and move on. Whatever you do, be decent about it. Cripe’s almighty, And speaking of disgusting stuff, let’s talk about how our elected officials are treating our public lance. Yes, this is at so buckle up or fast forward. If any of you folks are wearing hats or glasses, best to remove them. Right now. Two things are going on in conjunction, and you need to be aware of this. You don’t have to agree on any of it, but you will recognize how darned, lazy and unbecoming of our shared natural resources. This is one roadless rule recision. Get to the federal register. You can find the link at USDA and at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and TRCP to comment on this one, and to the House. As in US House of Representatives have voted to use the Congressional Review Act to rescind resource management plans in Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming. Lots of acronyms. This is going to make a heck of a drinking game, but it’s hunting season. That type of bodily mistreatment will reserve for the doldrums, which are not hunting season. Listen up, I’ll tell you why this matters and put some of the bs to bed. Roadless areas fifty eight million acres, some of which overlaps with existing capital W wilderness protection about twenty million acres or so, some of which overlaps with areas that had previously been logged and roaded. Another nineteen percent, which we’ll call about twenty million acres. So there’s eighteen million acres left that has some kind of in the middle status or in this case we’ll just say it is protected currently by this roadless designation. It’s relatively untouched, and it’s spread in bits and pieces from coast to coast over about forty states, the majority of which, yes, is in the eleven Western states. All folks are talking about when we talk about the roadless rule is timber. We need to cut more wood for affordable housing, and we need to cut more underbrush and deadfall, and yet rid of this high heat fuel build up that could erupt into a catastrophic wildfire. Well, the roadless rule doesn’t really prevent that wildfire management in the urban interface anyway. That’s right. We don’t need to manage deep into wilderness areas because what the hell is it going to burn? That stuff’s been burning naturally or through human cause fire Long before us white folks ever got out here. So just leave it the hell alone. It’s good for wildlife on this premise alone. Rolling back the roadless rule is a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Now, green groups have been litigating efforts to use the roadless Rule as intended, and it’s led to some of this consternation. They sue and sue and screw up the intention of the rule. Some of the crap has gotten us to where we are right now. However, that’s something we can fix without removing protections for fifty eight million acres if folks were willing to sit down and actually do the work. I’ve already told you that this fifty eight million acres is not all the same. You can’t look at one acre in California and say that is exactly like this one acre in North Carolina. It is diverse ecosystems we’re talking about. It needs to be managed as such. This is, after all, our public lands. They’re not making any more of them. They’re highly, highly valuable. Why are they not treating them as such? On top of that, y’all remember Doze right and the big chainsaw, And we’re saving money blah blah blah. Well, guess what that tinderbox understory the fuels management. We hear about all that stuff, the mechanical thinning, The humans are going to get in there and hut away the fire danger. Well, in order to make that happen, we the taxpayer have got to pay people to remove that stuff. We don’t have the markets for that stuff to be profitable, such as maybe paper pulp or woodpell at mills. Those economies do not exist in close enough proximity to where this work needs to be done. And right now, nobody is saying, hey, the federal government is going to come in and pay for this wildfire mitigation. In fact, the opposite is happening right now where they’re saying, we are going to immediately, to the best of our ability, put out wildfire as soon as it starts. Even when those fires are started naturally and in areas that do not pose risk to humans or structures. That type of management causes the build up of catastrophic fire fuel. That’s just the truth. I’m gonna hammer this again. In the case of profitable timber, marketable timber, which they’re telling us we need to have for affordable housing, even though if you look at the housing market right now, what we’re seeing is drop in demand and an increase in supply. There are some areas where there’s some really choice timber, marketable timber close enough to road systems that people do want to go get it, such as in the Tongas up in Alaska. Stuff would make some real pretty tubai force and people would make some money. That is an area that is synonymous with the roadless rule fight, and it always has been. So if that’s what you’re talking about, that’s what we need to talk about. There are concessions that can be made all over the place, but we need to talk about those concessions specifically. A lot of this other stuff, like that eighteen million acre donut hole in the middle of this conversation I talked about in the very beginning, It is too far away from roads and too far away from mills to be marketable. The folks who love running chainsaws, and I know a lot of these folks, they have no interest in that stuff because it does not pay for their fuel, it does not pay for the damage to equipment, it does not pay for their time. When we used to cut way deep into the forest, it was often subsidized by you guessed it, the US government, we the people. The US government. We the people built the roads and the loggers followed. So what is this currently about. What is rolling back the road to this rule currently about? It’s about gaining access to minerals. Possibly. If that’s the case, let’s talk about that specifically. What are the requirements and what is the need for those mineral deposits? How many acres do you need. Let’s quit swinging the pendulum one way all the way over to the other side, and then the next administration comes in and swings it back all the way over to the other side. The roadless rule is great. We need it. It’s working hard and doing what it’s supposed to do for a hell of a lot of Americans who really really appreciate it. It provides a little buffer from the crowds for US hunters and anglers, and anyone, especially in these eleven western states, can attest that we need a little buffer. This stuff is getting so busy again. Their surface poop everywhere, long haired border collie, shell act and yesterday’s corn, the grossness type of busy. Okay, we need some places where we can get away that stuff. Is increasingly scarce and increasingly valuable. But if we really need the mineral deposit or stand of timber, let’s do the seemingly impossible thing and talk about it. Come to the conclusion that you may need a thousand acres here or there. Okay, let’s figure it out, but it’s not fifty eight million. And if you’re really concerned about fire, we can’t skip over the fact that fire coincides with roads. The California megafires, scary, nasty wall of death, heat that roars and flies like a freight train going uphill, that type of scary it overlaps with road access. Pull up your on AX motorized maps. You can do it yourself. See how those things align. Fire starts and road access go together. And I’m sorry to say, boys and girls, this fuel’s reduction talk has been going on my entire life and for my whole life. Nobody is willing to pay for mechanical thinning and underbrush removal. So I just don’t think we’re having a real conversation now. The Congressional Review Act, which is being used to rescind management Plans Regional management Plans MPs CRA to our MP, we talked about this earlier. You can rewrite a management plan just like you can reform a roadless rule. A regional management plan takes into account and consideration the stakeholders at large and dissects the landscape into appropriate levels of use for those stakeholders based off of that public feedback. The stakeholders are you and me and every industry that you can think of, from cattle grazers to conco phillips and everything in between. This type of input makes sense, correct, there are public lands. But right now our representatives want to use the Congressional Review Act CRA, which is a hammer, a bludgeon, not a fine tipped pencil, to destroy these publicly facilitated management plans, which were put together not only with public input, but with the best post possible available science. And what you need to know is, by law, all the good things in that RMP and the bad things cannot be used again. That language can legally not be used again. So even though let’s put together right now with the best input and the best science, if the RMP, the Regional Management Plan is destroyed through use of the Congressional Review Act, whenever this stuff settles down, we cannot revert back to any of the good parts in that RMP, even if it’s in the best interest of extractive use, cattle, grazers, hunters, anglers, you name it. This is lazy, lazy stuff, lazy management for a very complicated landscape. We just cannot be okay or absent from this conversation. If we won’t care, who will. This is America, after all, you can have your cake and eat it too. Didn’t we just come out of this stuff with those gang weren’t we screaming about waste and fraud and abuse and government overreach. Well, let’s not stop. Let’s talk about the laziness and absenteeism and lack of stewardship. This is all we got. And through the decision of the roadless Rule and the use of the Congressional Review Act to beat to death our regional management plans, we as the people, are losing, not winning. We are literally telling our elected officials, hey, why don’t you take some personal days? You’ve earned it. Vague and broad and sloppy is good enough with us. We’re happy with broad strokes and no actual management or care for our very complicated public estate. I know you’re not that type of person because you’re listening to this here podcast. Go to the Federal Register dot gov. Leave a comment on the recision of the roadless rule. Call up the Capital Square Board and tell your representatives and senators that this is just not good enough. Do better. You wouldn’t be happy with this approach to your non native, water sucking green suburban lawn, so why would you roll over and say it’s okay for a great and finite American public lands. Get involved. If you’re not advocating for yourself, somebody else will. Moving on to the Texas Desk, great things are happening down in Texas where the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund has started to acquire and develop land to turn into new state parks. Back in twenty twenty three, public lands in Texas took a hit when the state says lost but sold off eighteen hundred acre Fairfield Lake State Park, which was cited on least land private power company that owned the parcel sold to a developer and once you know what, that developer turned the park into a golf course and luxury community, which God knows we need more of. Losing Fairfield Lake woke Texans up to the fact that seventeen in the state’s eighty eight parks also sit on leased land that could be sold out from under them at any time. That little fire for voters to approve Prop. Fourteen, which allocated one billion dollars of budget surplus to a fund that buys private land and develops it into publicly accessible state parks. Already, the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund has purchased three properties for a total of sixty two hundred new acres. Two of those parcels will become the new Post Oak Ridge State Park northwest of Austin, and the third will add three thousand acres to the existing Enchanted Rock State Natural Area about an hour’s drive to the south. The Centennial Parks Conservation Fund also allocates money to developing the park’s studying which animal species live on the parcels, figuring out where to put the trails, and building the roads, visitors centers, bathrooms, and maintenance areas. All the la less sexy stuff that allows people to do the hiking, fishing, bird watching, stargazing, and fresh air inhaling that are the main attractions. Texas can definitely use all the parks you can get. The state comes in thirty fifth in the nation for state park acres per capita, and only around one percent of its land is publicly accessible federal land. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more acres open up down there. And hey, I know a lot of Texans who own land. Listen to this show, so listen up. If you have a few thousand acres in Texas you’re looking to unload, get in touch with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and see if you can make a deal. We’ll still get a hangout on the land, and your neighbors will too. On top of that, the meat eater land access Initiative is about to ride again. We’d be happy to help with securing public access through easement, purchase, or any other type of agreement as long as we get more huntble acres or fishaboll acres ideally both for the public. Moving on to the fawn desk, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife is dealing with blowback after agency officials euthanized twenty two white tail fawnds that had been illegally housed at a wildlife rescue facility. The animals had been rescued from counties designated as CWD surveillance zones. Kentucky law states that deer cannot be rehabilitated if found in these zones, but the Broadbent Wildlife Refuge had taken them in anyway. It’s unclear whether they did so knowingly or this was an honest mistake, but whatever the reason, the Kentucky Wildlife Agency determined that these animals would need to be euthanized to prevent the spread of CWD. It’s been a tough pill to swallow for employees and volunteers at the rescue facility, who have told local media that the animals did not show symptoms of the disease. These fonds had been bottle fed by staffers, and I can understand why those folks would be upset. To those unfamiliar with the CWD issues, it seems like wildlife officials could have found another way to deal with this situation. I don’t know if that’s true, but the conversation on social media has developed in exactly the ways you’d expect. Listener Ethan Pugh wrote in to tell me that people have been using ted nugent as a source to claim that state wildlife agencies invented CWD, as a pretext for killing deer. I’ve listened to Uncle Ted speculate that CWD is a government conspiracy meant to reduce the food supply in the United States, and it seems like that particular theory has made its way to Kentuck. Others have compared the situation to Peanut, the squirrel squirrel in New York that was euthanized after someone illegally captured him and was keeping him as a pet. Peanut also happened to be a social media star, so I’m sure his owners weren’t at all motivated by money, but just by a love of squirrels. Anyway. The reason wildlife officials have such strict rules around deer movement is because CWD is an always fatal neurological disease. The problem is, there isn’t a good anti mortem test, meaning a test that can tell you whether an animal has while it’s still alive and not killing it. The only reliable way to determine whether that critter has CWD and how much is to kill the animal and test its brain or spinal material, including the lymphnotes. That’s why wildlife officials in many states, not just Kentucky, call it entire herds of deer rather than risk one of those deer being infected and spreading the disease to other parts of the state. It’s a tough dilemma, but until there’s a reliable anti mortem test, we don’t have any good options in situations like these. As a side note, put as much hurt on those white tails as you can, especially in areas where they start competing with the noble mule deer, which is very much hurting this day and age. Moving on to the Wildlife commission desk, the Washington and New Mexico Wildlife Commissions have been mired in turmoil in recent weeks, and I’m here to give you all the gory details. First. In Washington, governor has ordered an investigation into the conduct of Wildlife Commission members after the Sportsmen’s Alliance revealed potential evidence of wrongdoing. The hunting rights organization got their hands on emails and other messages between members of the Commission ahead of a controversial vote in twenty twenty two to end the spring bear hunt. The messages appeared to show the commissioners violating the Open Public Meetings Act by agreeing amongst themselves on a decision about the bear hunt before having an official public meeting. According to a petition filed by the Sportsmen’s Alliance, the commissioners would meet in groups of three or four, then send one or two representatives to lobby other commissioners. This created a wall of support while skirting Washington’s legal requirement that a majority of members be present to constitute a meeting. The petition reads quote, this is the very definition of a political cabal flouting the public strong interest in transparent government. When you read these thousands of pages as we have, it is beyond obvious that this practice was a well honed routine among Baker, lemcool Rowland, Smith, and former Commissioner Reagan. We see often don’t reply here and other devices deployed to encourage daisy chaining as the preferred method to avoid the Open Public Meetings Act. The result, unfortunately, is that the actual commission meetings are clearly nothing more than a sham, with a preordained decision well in hand before the public is invited or allowed to participate in any meaningful way. The current commissioners named in the petition are Barbara Baker, Lorna Smith, Melanie Rowland, and John Lemcool In light of these allegations, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly suswind requested Governor Bob Ferguson to launch an independent investigation. Sus Winn said in a letter that he cannot operate his department with a quote cloud of uncertainty created by the current controversy. The governor agreed to investigate, but it’s unclear what changes, if any, will result. A similar situation is playing out down in New Mechs, but the sides are reversed. Their Governor, Michelle Luhan Grisham, removed District two Game Commissioner Sabrina Pack from her seat last month, citing a conflict of interest. The decision came just one day after The Western Watershed Project published emails between Pack and the president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. In these emails, Pack, who was also a media professional, was advising the cattleman about a public relations campaign aimed at shifting public sentiment around wolves. This campaign was meant to quote elevate the voices of rural New Mexicans and others living with the consequences of federal wolf management, shifting public awareness and driving more balanced policy conversations across state and national audiences. That doesn’t sound so bad, but Governor Grisham apparently thinks that a disqualified Pack from helping craft wildlife policies in the state. I should note here that the Cattleman’s Association did not ultimately choose packs agency to help them with their campaign. It’s also true that wolves in New Mexico are managed by the federal government, not by the state Game Commission, so it’s unlikely that Pack actually broke any laws or had any actual conflict of interest on any of the decisions that she made. Still, the optics aren’t great, and there’s nothing she can do to challenge the governor’s decision. Now, jumping over to another topic that’s near and dear to my heart, charismatic gallinacious birds. That’s right, we’re back to the prairie chicken. Seems like every week brings another Endangered Species Act controversy, and this week is no exception. A Texas District judge recently vacated the ESA listing of the lesser prairie chicken, which had been protected under the Act since twenty twenty two. This species has been in political football for quite a while now, It was first settled in twenty fourteen, before losing protections after a twenty fifteen lawsuit. The lesser prairie chicken ruffles so many feathers because its habitat covers much of the Permian Basin, the highest producing oil field in the US, as well as prime grassland that ranchers graze their cattle on. The lawsuits challenging the listing were led by energy groups, rancher organizations, and the states of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, all of whom worry that ESA protections for the lesser prairie chicken would cripple extraction and cattle operations. Remember the cattle operations part. We’ve covered this before. We’re going to get back to it. Lesser prairie chickens definitely face long odds no matter what. They won’t nest around any tall structures that remind them too much of the trees that hold their natural predators like hawks and eagles. And this goes for both windmills and oil derricks and high tension power lines. Although industry groups and landowners say they’ve been pursuing conservation strategies like shorter oil extraction equipment, conservation organizations say it’s not nearly enough. Ironically, the listing was struck down due to part of the twenty twenty two decision that actually protected fewer prairie chickens US Fish and wildlife under the Biden administration divided the species into two populations. It designated the northern group, living in central and western Kansas, central Oklahoma, and Northeast Texas as just quote threatened a lower level of protection. The southern group in New Mexico and Southwest Texas had the higher endangered protections. Once the Trump administration took over Fish and Wildlife, the agency said that the decision to split the population into two parts was so flawed that it invalidates the whole listing, and David Counts, the judge in Western District of Texas who issued the ruling, was appointed by Trump in twenty seventeen. Now, of course, if I could have a magic wand, I’d wave it all over the place and change the essay in a few ways, as well as a lot of people’s opinions about how it could work. I’d make things easier on land owners, including better recognition of private conservation efforts. But the division of the species into two parts was clearly a technicality used by one side of the fight. Here. We’ll see what happens to the issue when and if there’s another change in administration. But with the total number of lesser prairie chickens sitting at around thirty four thousand individuals and falling, these charismatic little dance and birds need a break soon. Now. Lesser could be derogatory sounding to some people, but that label is only there because it closely is related to the greater prairie chicken. Both birds are in the genus Timpanicus, which comes from the word timpani, or kettle drum, because both birds stop their feet into the ground over fifteen times a second to make a drumming noise as part of their elaborate mating dance. The lesser prairie chickens full species name is Tympanicus palidycinctus, meaning pale around the edges. So another less insulting way to refer to the lesser prairie chicken would be light bordered kettle drum bird. I don’t imagine this name is going to catch on anytime soon, but we can at least try to win these little guys a little more dignity with everything else they have going on now. As for grazing in the chicken, it is often, very often in my circles, stated that ranchers can’t ranch because there’s an endangered species on the ground. Cattle can’t graze because somebody found a lesser prairie chicken. I nor any of my sources have been able to tell me where, when, and who this has happened to. So I’m not calling total bs because it very well could exist. But this often sighted thing, this example of government overreach where a rancher on his own private land or her own private land was said, you can’t let those cattle out of the gate. There’s prairie chickens out here. I cannot find that specific example, nor has anyone I have ever spoken to been able to say, oh, yeah, here it is, here’s the case, here’s the person, here’s the ranch. I want to have that conversation. So if anybody knows the where, the when, and the who, please let’s get him on this here podcast. Ask c Al. That’s ask Cal at the Meat eater dot com. Hey, that’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. You know, I appreciate it. Remember, go to the Federal Register dot gov and leave a comment on the roadless rule. Call your representatives, call your senators and tell them what you think about this just ham fisted management of the most precious resource that we have, which is our America’s public liance. Then right in and uh tell me what you think. Ask c Al. That’s Askcal at the meat eater dot com. If you just can’t open the email machine, let’s say you’re driving. Remember as of last episode, you can call four oh six two two o six four four one. That’s four oh six two two zero six four four one. That’s the voice version of a s K C. A. L at the meeater dot com. Thanks again, we’ll talk to you next week.
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