00:00:10
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 new study published in the journal Scientific Reports has found that dogs can become addicted to their toys in similar ways to people who are addicted to well, the kinds of things people get addicted to. Big thanks to listener Carl Kaufman for bringing this to my attention. It actually explains a lot. The study took one hundred and five dogs whose owners described them as motivated to play with toys. They placed the dog’s favorite toys in an inaccessible box alongside other things that dogs might want, such as treats or even their owner. Seventy two dogs appeared normal and well adjusted, but thirty three dogs were what you might call toy junkies. They showed a lot of interest in food or playing with their owner, and made persistent efforts to access their toy even when it wasn’t there. They also didn’t calm down. Within fifteen minutes of all toys being removed, two of these dogs actually managed to destroy the box and get to their toys. The study doesn’t break down the results by breed, but they do say that working breeds like labs in Belgian malinoa were over represented in the study. If you have a pooch that appears to have an unhealthy relationship with a tennis ball or plush duck, don’t worry too much. These addictive behaviors are more akin to our addiction to our smartphones, not like an addiction to hired drugs. It’s also true that having a dog that is very motivated to play with a certain toy can be a great training tool. If you’re working on a new skill, having playtime with that toy can be a great reward for a job well done. Please note that fuzzy toys like tennis balls can pick up a lot of sand and grit, which will wear down your pupp’s teeth. If that is what you’re doing has an obsession with, I’d suggest weaning them off onto something a little more healthy. It can be done. Maybe we’ll start a little canine version of AA. Hello. My name is snort Ah sort this week snort Report, Urban Critters, old school hunting, and so much more. But first I’m gonna tell you about my week. And my week has been great, which is why there is a snort Report as well as a super special announcement. Snort and I are communicating like I imagine a surgical unit, like a brain surgic coal unit, or the folks who like replace hearts, or maybe an elite military unit does We’re interpreting each other. There’s no shouting, very few whistles. It’s eye contact, head nods and hand motions. And boy do the old cockbirds pay for it. Despite a few misses, we flushed a lot of birds in nasty, thorny cover. Poor snorts snoop and that dark and bald ear. Not to mention, your eyes are thoroughly hamburger, despite a lot of doctoring on my part. That little girl works so hard for the birds. It is so damn much fun to be around, and it hurts so so much to miss an opportunity. Thankfully, I did have my poop and a pile. I shot from the balls of my feet, kept my cheek on the gun, followed through almost every time, only missed two birds in three days if I don’t count some houns. That really did surprise me. And I don’t think my cheek touched the stock on the first or second shot during that flush. Now I’m hacking up pheasant carcasses and antelope bones for stock and packaging meat for the long winter ahead, which gave me plenty of time to think about how to tell you this next part. I am the newly announced incoming President and CEO of back Country Hunters and Anglers, which is amazing, and it’s amazing thing to say. It’s taken a lot of discussions and thought to get here. Old Steven Ranella and I talked through this quite a bit and both agreed it’s neither an opportunity I should pass up, nor is it an opportunity I wasn’t kind of made for. In a lot of ways, I love our public lands, waters, wildlife. I cherish our ability to access them and steward them, and have reaped the benefits from shaping my life around spending time all across America on our public lands and waters, most often in the pursuit of wildlife, be it fish, big game, fowl. I feel more than ever a deep gratitude for my time on America’s public lands BLM, Bureau of Wreck, US Fish and Wildlife, US Forest Service WMA, is, refugees, national parks, you name it, and I feel a responsibility to not only ensure that they are here for the next generation, but that they are also managed better than ever before. As you’ve heard me say many times on this podcast, we can have our cake and eat it too. We do not ever have to choose between our guns or affordable housing and healthy ecosystems, wildlife connectivity, clean water, abundant wildlife habitat, healthy wildlife habitat, so long as we demand it. Hunters and Anglers are in the hot seat. We know this stuff better than anyone. We know the real value of time spent afield, the real value of the land that many are trying to discount. We are also every single one of us consumers. We like our stuff. We can responsibly have it all so long as we demand it of ourselves and our politicians from the county level through the White House. There are no political divides when it comes to this stuff. We need it, we are in the right to demand it. Proper management is hard work. Nothing comes easy. Hunters and Anglers know that if you aren’t a member already, I hope you’ll join me at backhuntry hunters dot org. And don’t you fret and Stephen Ranella himself once said, I just can’t quit. I’m going to continue to host this here podcast and contribute to both the continued conservation efforts and projects across Meat Eater and First Light. I think the willingness to continue this platform from the meat Eater side is a really amazing deal and a commitment to the Meat Eater brands, conservation ethos and alignment on hunter’s rights, public land, public access, wildlife, and just good old American freedom. There’s a lot more to come. For those of you who don’t know, you know. I started working with the boys Kent and Scott over at First Light and Like the Winner at two thousand and seven and came on board full time Winner at twenty eleven. It was just the three of us and that brand. We grew it as organically as any brand has ever been built. People would call say, why would I pay so much for Marino wool, and by the way, what the heck is Marino wool? And we would just tell them our stories of working really hard, sometimes being successful, a lot of times not being successfu on public land, chase an elk during archery season and public lands were just an integral part of the creation story of that business. And it was very, very clear that public lands and access to them were the only thing that allowed many, many, many of our customers, our consumers to get out a field at all. Without public lands and access to them, this business doesn’t exist. So there’s a business side to it, and there’s a public freedom health side to it that we just can’t let go. Like I said, more to come, super exciting time. I don’t start officially till January one, so I’m incoming until then, And as always, you can write in call let me know what you think about all that. Let’s jump on over to the city Slicker desk. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation is asking Long Islanders to help them control the deer population as it grows out of control in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. The growing deer population is causing car accidents, eating flowers and vegetables, and spreading limes disease. The number of hunters is decreasing as the number of deer are increasing, so the State Wildlife Agency is offering bonus permits to allow hunters to take more than two deer antlerless deer. The deadline to apply this year has passed, but if you live on Long Island and want to really fill the freezer next year, keep an eye out for a similar program. Hunters took more deer last year than the year before, but even with solid participation, it will likely take several years to reduce or even stabilize that population. Of course, not all New Yorkers thanks shooting and eating deer is the best solution. Animal rights activists told the New York Posts that they want to see the state adopt non lethal methods like birth control, fences, end quote naturally evolved vegetation they won’t eat, to which I say, why don’t we do all of the above except for control that’s never worked and mostly just wasted a bunch of taxpayer money. Because the fact is, if New Yorkers won’t let hunters harvest these deer and turn them into venison, the state is going to send in sharpshooters. That’s a solution nobody wants, so I say, let the Orange Army on Long Island have at it. Turning to Wyoming, the Cowboys, state is trying to figure out how to handle the so called suburban elk problem in and around the town of Jackson. These elk are attracted to the feeding grounds in the area, but then they stick around for much of the year, eating hay from fields, pooping on the heated driveways of the well to do, and just generally causing a problem. They still migrate during the summer, but often much later in the year than their compatriots not so far away do. So wildlife managers have hit on a solution, Judas elk. They planned to radio collar some of these suburban servants so they can differentiate them from other elk that do what they’re supposed to do and migrate all the way up to Yellowstone National Park. Then they can point hunters in the direction of the quote Judas elk during hunting season and hopefully thin them from the herd before they make it down to Jackson. Might be a short term solution, but I’m not sure what will keep other elk from taking their place and enjoying all the high dollar comforts that Jackson has to offer. I guess we’ll see in the coming years, but if you live in Wyoming, be sure to keep an eye out for some extra elk hunting opportunities. So obviously, Judas in the biblical story is the person who turned on Jesus Christ. Judas has been a term in the biological community for a very very long time, not as long as the story of Christ, of course, But there is an idea that continuing to use this term is not good for the Jewish community, because there are some out there that you condemn the Jews for the act of Judas. I’m not opposed to using it myself in the biological because as it is purely from my POV about the role of the elk in this case, or the snake in the case of pythons and the Florida swamps, and the list goes on and on right in let me know what you think about that. It’s an interesting one, as you might tell by my stumbling, it’s a little out of my depth. But moving on to the accident desk, it’s a great time a year to be outdoors. But that also means we’ve seen an unfortunate uptick in hunting and fishing accidents. In Iowa, a seventeen year old high school senior was shot and killed after another member of his hunting party mistook him for a squirrel. The Iowa d NR reports that Carson Ryan was with a group of hunters when he got up to move positions. Another hunter mistook that movement for a squirrel and fired, striking Ryan in the back of the head. Officials haven’t released the name of the person responsible or indicated whether that person will face charges. Ryan was an avid hunter and angler, according to his obituary, along with being a basketball player, football player, and track athlete. His classmates named him Homecoming King just a week after his death, and to go fundme was set up that has so far generated nearly sixty thousand dollars. Accidents happen. Hunting is like the ultimate responsibility sport because when an accident happens, something horrific like this can happen. Somebody can lose their life. There’s no going back and erasing this, and I’m sure the person responsible will truly never get over it. This is a life altering and hopefully not life ruining event. But you have to look at these and learn from them. One thing I know about myself self admission here is I am way more likely to pull that trigger if I have a round in the chamber and my face is on the scope. So if I am looking at a buck or a bowl or a pig or what have you through my scope, and I’m like questionable of whether or not I really want to take that animal. It is way easier to do because I’ve never put around in the chamber, right, So I’m like one of those people that never has around in the chamber. I have rounds in the magazine, the gun is loaded. There is just not around in the chamber. And it gives me another action, or I should say three actions to take to run the mental process of identifying my target, being absolutely sure, also identifying what is beyond my target in case I miss or the bullet passes through before I squeeze that trigger. And if this is new to you, the actions I’m talking about is I’m looking through the animal, seeing what’s beyond it. I’m making sure that is the animal the proper sex or age, or it’s in the proper position to take a shot. Then I have to load around into the chamber, which is a fast movement. If in that split second the situation has changed, I’m putting the safety on, which then I have to take that safety off in order to squeeze the trigger. And it just gives me more time to process. I’ll tell you, like if I was running around and all I had to do was squeeze the trigger or flip the safety off. I see it in my shotgun shooting all the time. In the case of the huns that I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I knew. I knew I was not going to hit those birds. I knew it. My barrel was behind him and lo my head was high following the birds, and I still squeezed off two shots. Just an example, take it or leave it. A Massachusetts man fell to his death and Alaska last month after he slipped off a cliff while goat hunting. Official say a sixty seven year old John de Luca was trying to traverse a hillside with his hunting partner when he stumbled. His friend tried to grab him and they both fell about one hundred feet, but Lucas slid another three hundred to four four hundred feet and was unresponsive by the time EMS personnel arrived. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. His friend suffered serious injuries but is expected to survive. In Idaho, two hunters were killed within two days of each other, both due to accidents with firearms. Twenty one year old kaylawnie Or suffered a gunshot wounded the chest while on a hunting trip in a remote area of Fremont County, Idaho. Details are still scarce at this time, but local news reports that Or was hit when a relative’s firearm quote accidentally discharged. It’s unclear what kind of firearm it was or what the circumstances of the accident were. Then, just a few days later, forty eight year old Nathan Thomas Coss was shot in the leg while his hunting partner was trying to pull his rifle from the back seat of a truck. The bullet from the two seventy win struck costs Or cass Kaas in the upper thigh, and he died from blood loss at the scene. No charges will be filed against the hunting companion, but we haven’t heard what will happen in Kailanie Orr’s case. Another I’m not saying it it would have saved the day here, but it very well could have. And everybody handles traumatic experiences in different ways, but always always have a tourniquit with you. I mean, the chances of dragon a bowl or a buck downhill and getting an antler through the leg are very high. Or somewhere else I’ve seen that happen. Let alone, a gunshot, wound, stop the bleed courses highly recommend it, very short course, gruff rough. Anybody can understand them. Carry a tourniquit with you, practice with it, know how to use it. They’re very inexpensive. On this last hunt out on the Alaska Peninsula, my brown bear hunt, which Gosh, I gotta get around to telling you guys all about. We had multiple tourniquits all over. We had a paramedic as one of the guides, Old Brando. In addition to that, my producer Jason Rerigg, who is on the hunt. He is is way fresher on his wilderness first responder course than I am. An old Joe dirt. Garrett Smith, the international man of mystery. He can handle just about anything. So know who you’re with, communicate where that life saving gear is, and make sure people know how to use it. Last one for him. A father of four drowned in the Mississippi River last month after his boat capsized. Twenty eight year old Tyler Tash was fishing with his grandfather and younger brother when their boat got too close to a waterfall in Monticello, Minnesota. He tried to turn the boat around, but it flipped in the current, sending everyone into the water. Sixty six year old Mark Tash was wearing a life vest, so he managed to make it to shore. Meanwhile, the younger brother, eighteen year old Tristan Tash, thought Tyler was trapped underneath the boat, so he worked to write it. But Tyler wasn’t under the boat. He’d been swept down river, and when he was finally found by the staff the nearby Excel Energy power plant, life saving measures were ineffective. Tash was married and served as a stay at home dad to four kids five to ten. Tyler’s black Pomeranian, Bonnie, also died in the accident. Hunting and fishing are generally safe activities, so long as you make them so and you demand it out of your hunting and fishing partners. These stories are a good reminder that things can change in an instant. Sometimes there isn’t anything you can do. But if you are ever tempted to take an unnecessary risk in the back country, just remember that you aren’t the only one who will suffer if something happens to you. Whether you have kids, a girlfriend, a dog, or a solid group of friends, keep those folks in mind while you’re out there, quick trip to the state legislation desk. Over in Tennessee, the Fish and Wildlife Commission is open for public comment on rule making for a new law set to go into effect for the twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven season, which legalizes hunting for deer over bait. Although biologists from the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency have argued against baiting in the past, the bill passed in the state legend after a similar law passed in nearby Alabama and enjoyed wide public support. The rulemaking process will now determine the implementation of the law, details like what kind of bait has allowed, how much, limitations in special circumstances, and so on. The law allows baiting on privately owned and leased land in the state, but a dear baiting Privileged license is required fifty dollars per residents and one hundred dollars for non residents. Notably, even landowners who in Tennessee do not need a hunting license to hunt on their own property will need to pay for this new baiting permit. This is going to bring in a big chunk of change for the volunteer state. I mentioned the similar law that Alabama passed recently. Well fully, sixty eight percent of deer hunters in Alabama paid for a baiting permit this year. If that many people buy a baiting permit in Tennessee next season, it would bring in six and a half million dollars to the TWRA. Of Course, as always with baiting, the big worried is the spread of diseases, most notably nic wasting disease. Deer congregate unnaturally around feeding stations, rubnoses together, swap saliva. Those nasty little prewonns have an easy time spreading. CWD has been found in seventeen of Tennessee’s ninety five counties where baiting will remain illegal, But if it spreads further and knocks back the state’s deer population, that means fewer hunters in the field and less conservation funding in the long term. However, supplemental feeding of wildlife in general has also been long legal in Tennessee, so the new deer baiting bill is intended to define best practices to reduce problems like spreading fungus through certain kinds of bait or unintentionally feeding meso predators like raccoons that then impact turkey numbers and oliver eppland bird populations, and can also spread diseases of their own. As far as baiting bills go, this one has been thoroughly and thoughtfully designed, and the law does include a provision allowing TWRA to suspend baiting in the case of disease outbreak. Of course, when’s an outbreak happens, you can’t put it back in the bottle, and cwdpreons remain on the landscape indefinitely, so the way this one is implemented really matters. We spoke to Mike Butler and Horace Tipton of the Tennessee Wildlife Foundation who helped shape this bill, and they stressed that hunters should keep an eye out for education campaigns about the implementation of the law and other upcoming issues related to supplemental feeding in the coming year. So Tennesseeans go read up on the proposed rules on the TWRA website and make your voices heard. Will include all the details on the cal to action page of the Meat Eater website, but listen up. The TFWC will host in person hearings at its next meeting on December four and five at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. The online comment period on this extends through November fourteen, and the email for that is TWRA dot Rules comments at tn dot gov. Be sure to include the words dearbaiting rule in the subject line of your email. This is going to be a social science effort as to if baiting can be done responsibly. Another responsible use experiment. Moving on to the true grit desk. We’re getting into the thick hunting season and sometimes it feels like a hassle to get outside while still negotiating all the regular job, family and life demands. If you can relate to that, and sometimes I can, this next story will change your attitude. There’s no doubt about it. Randy Swalina is an instructor of auto mechanics at Wyoming Technical Institute, specializing in hot rods, which is almost definitely the coolest job a person could have. In two thousand and two, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which led to a series of bone implants over the next several years, as well as near total hearing loss. Sfeleina beat the cancer, but after life threatening infection late last year, doctors amputated Selena’s right leg above the knee. But even with the pain of recovery and despite having to learn to walk again, Spelena still accompanied his wife into the back country near Laramie this season as she attempted to fill her antelope tag. Their first outing wasn’t successful when his crutches made too much noise, so he left them behind the next time out and his wife got her antelope s Feleina decided to go out by himself the following day, crawling much of the way and collecting dozens of prairie cactus spikes in his legs as a result. After missing his first shot, Speleina bagged a buck on the second. In his pictures of the kill, his two crutches are laid across the animal along with his rifle. Speaking to Cowboy State Daily, he described dressing the antelope with a new prosthetic leg as quote a wrestling match with knives with rain and lightning coming in. Seleina lifted the buck into his truck by himself and got underwag just before the storm. But Spealina’s resourcefulness and grit doesn’t stop there. After joking with his doctor that he was going to make his prosthetic leg into a rifle rest. He started experimenting with bending the knee joint of the prosthetic the opposite way, so that the soul of the foot formed a horizontal shelf to support the gun’s for stock. With a little more tweaking, he and his doctor think they might actually have a pretty good prototype that right there is not just turning lemons into lemonade, but turning lemons into like a lemon soux fle and I don’t know, lemon crem fresh or something. So stories like this should inspire you that all those little things staying up all night last night, not getting enough sleep, cutting up an antelope in that big of a deal for the prices that we pay to do the things that we like to do. Drop those kids off at school, get those expense reports done, fold all the laundry late into the night, with a smile on your face, get out in the cold, wet, difficult woods, and enjoy the fact that it’s not coming easy to get your chosen quarry. If Felina can do it, you better believe you can too. Moving on to the ancient hunting desk, Satellite images from the Andean Highlands of Chile recently revealed seventy six ancient stone hunting traps, demonstrating that people in the region depended on hunting much later than previously thought. The V shaped traps, known as chakas, have two long stone walls called antennae that form a funnel running downhill. Hunters chase animals into the wide end of the funnel, then move them farther down the chute until a drop of several feet deposits them into a circular corral where hunters can collect and kill them. Before this discovery, chakas were thought to be very rare in this region and in the Americas in general. However, similar game traps called kites were once very common in North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia in what’s now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Until the advent of satellite photography, outsiders couldn’t even tell the traps were there, but from several miles above, they’re as clear as day. There’s even a website that collects all the research and images of these traps called Global Kites dot fr. Do yourself favor and go check out these photos. They look like crop circles from the nineties, but with a very no nonsense purpose anyway, The Andians who built these stone traps were mostly going after the vicuna, a camelid species. It’s a wild relative of the alpaca. Bakuna are no doubt good eating, but their wool is also some of the most sought after in the world, making your cashmir sweater feel like chainmail. During the Incan Empire, only the most elite upper classes were permitted to wear it. Vacuna are also known as very capable jumpers, and the Andean chaku traps were built with walls as high as six feet, often with natural rock features forming one side of the funnel so they didn’t have to haul all the rocks. Until recently, anthropologists believed that settled agriculture had replaced dependence on hunting in the Andes by the year six fifty eighty or so, but the age and number of these hunting traps suggest that native people were still getting a major chunk of their calories from hunting through the late seventeen hundreds. Evidence like this all over the world is challenging the thesis that human societies had a linear history, beginning as hunter gatherers and quote unquot quote progressing into agriculture and livestock herding and animal husbandry gaining more and more sophistication along the way. In many places, people farmed when conditions were right, then stopped when they weren’t. They tended loose herds while still hunting. They remained in place for a while, then moved on. Over the course of millennium, and many of those cultures who didn’t farm extensively still developed extremely sophisticated societies, like the Paleolithic people who built massive circular structures of mammoth tuss and bones on the Russian steps, or the ancient Hopewell culture that left behind enormous earthworks and what’s now Ohio. And you know this fall when a lot of us are freezing our butts off in a tree stand for hours on end waiting for a singular deer to walk by, even if it’s not the one we want, just to break up the doldrums, those Andeans with their funnel traps catching dozens of wild alpaca at once are going to seem very very sophisticated. Indeed, for those of you who have ever run through dou Boys Wyoming, be sure to check into the sheep music there and you can see some funnel traps that folks made here the sheep eater people utilized to get some galleries here in North America. Super cool. Moving on to the correction desk. A few weeks ago, I told you about a controversy in Tennessee about funding the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. I recommended that the volunteer state imitate Missouri, which uses a portion of its sales tax to fund their wildlife agency. But listener Zach wrote in to point out that the fund I mentioned, the park, soils, and Water sales tax, actually funds the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Unlike other states, the Missouri DNR doesn’t deal with game management. That’s the Missouri Department of Conservation, which is partially funded by the design for Conservation Tax, which is one eighth of one percent of the state sales tax. That’s an important distinction, but it also goes to prove my point. Taking a small portion of a state’s sales tax and putting it towards water, soil, habitat and wildlife issues is totally doable. Missouri has two separate funds that both pull from the sales tax, and they’ve been popular and successful for decades, despite ever since the very beginning. Uh, knuckleheads, you don’t understand that funding mechanism. Try to steal that money for other things. If other states want to make funding wildlife conservation in an effective and sustainable way, they might look to the show me State for a model. That’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write in to ask Al that’s Askcal at the meeteater dot com, or as you hopefully know by now, you can call me four oh six two two oh six four four one and leave a message let me know what’s going on in your neck of the woods. You know, we appreciate it and we depend on you lots. That’s happening. Thanks again, we’ll talk to you next week.
Read the full article here