Joe Rogan & Steve Rinella on Hunting Regulations

Is it better for you that you're kind of, is it better to be sad about it somehow? Is it better to be regretful or just ignore the fact altogether? Or why is it not okay that I'm happy about what I eat? I know the story of it really well. Like, I understand the history of wildlife in this country. I don't want to say better than anybody, but damn sure better than most. Um, I know where we've been. I have a good sense of where we're going in terms of American wildlife. What the challenges are for American wildlife, right? I'm involved in this stuff on a daily basis. I can know all that and I can see my place in it, right? I can see what my actions are and whether my actions are helpful or hurtful for something that I care a great deal about. And if I can know that well and get a deer, a bear, whatever, and have it be food and find that I'm like really happy to be involved in that, that somehow is off-putting to people. But it's okay to be that I'm blind to it. I have this nagging sense of guilt about it that I haven't reckoned with. I don't really know about it, you know? And that's like an acceptable position for some people to have. It's really hard for me with people that are contributing to animal death who want to condemn those who are more willing to, or for whatever reason, willing to, excited about taking part in the process themselves. I got to find a way to engage with it though, and I need to get a better understanding of it because the debate isn't going away. I can't keep brushing it off as so ridiculous that it doesn't warrant my time because clearly it does warrant my time to understand that perspective. I just haven't had anybody really give it to me in a good way. I have people say like, oh, but they were raised to be eaten. That's a foolish perspective. That to me is way worse. So life condemned. I'd probably rather talk to Ricky. Google if Glenn Greenwald is a vegan. I'd probably rather talk to someone like Ricky Gervais about it because I assume that he's articulate about it. He's articulate. I don't think his position is nuanced. I think there's some willful ignorance that's a part of people that eat meat but condemn hunting. Willful in the fact that, like I said, they know that they're going to get a certain reaction out of people when they tweet about it on social media. One thing, if you're talking about someone who's out there shooting things and not eating it, okay, I get it. I'm with you. If some guy's just shooting an elephant because he wants his tusks, I'm on your side. I get it. But if someone chooses to hunt, you know, an animal, fill in the blank, that might be a goat, might be weird to you that they're eating this thing, but they're shooting this. It's an invasive species. It's actually very delicious. It's very edible. It's prized for its meat by some communities. You don't make any sense. You're doing this because you know that other people are ignorant about it as well. And either you're ignorant because you've never bothered to look into it or you've bothered to look into it and you're ignoring the nuance. Yeah. In the case of the goat thing, there's this little added thing. There's an added element that our government on the federal level is involved. There's a lot of state wildlife management agencies that are involved and trying to do wild goat eradication projects on islands. Yes. This is something that's ongoing all the time in Hawaii and many other places where we're like out helicopter gunning. Yeah. Helicopter gunning for invasive species. Explain to people how those goats got there in the first place because this is also very weird. A variety of ways, but a lot of things were a lot of island species. This is just one way it happens where invasive on islands would be introduced by seafarers, whalers who would want to establish food resources along trans-oceanic routes so that you could put something there and come back and get it later. Early whalers used to come out of the American Northeast, like all those famous whaling villages in New England. They would go down and stop in, and the Galapagos would gather up tortoises that they could flip over in the hold of a boat, and the tortoise would stay alive for months on its back. You'd have a fresh meat resource. As people came to understand scurvy and realizing that fresh meat gives you enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy that you can get from dried meat because the way the vitamin C behaves through the cooking and drying process, but fresh meat you can keep from having scurvy, meat became even more important then. But people would come in and cut some sheep loose, cut some goats loose on an island and know that they're going to breed and build up a big population, and that can be a place you stop in and get food. Other things get introduced in other ways, and of course animals move. So if you have one island that has close proximity to another island, they can... Swim across. They bump over, and then it destroys native vegetation. They trample birds' nests. And so you have in many cases where introductions of non-natives, particularly non-native grazing animals, non-native predators, will wind up causing like a lot of extinctions of endemic species on islands and creates all kinds of problems. And that's exactly what we're talking about with this goat in that picture. So this is an animal that must be killed. If you want healthy wildlife on that island, the native wildlife, and the native fauna, the flora, all this stuff that lives there, all this stuff that's supposed to be there, you've got to kill the goats. Otherwise they'll eat everything. But I think people look, people look and they look and they're like, I don't buy that that was the motivation of that person. What I care about is motivations of individuals. I think you're right. Because when California got rid of mountain lion hunting, they're still killing several hundred mountain lions here a year. People are comfortable with, like the total lion kill didn't change much. People are comfortable with a state agent or someone being paid to go out and kill lions. They're not comfortable with someone paying who wants to go do it. I don't think they realize, I don't think they realize that state agencies are killing as many mountain lions in California as they are. I don't think people understand that. I think people do understand if something gets put on the ballot, would you like to reintroduce mountain lion hunting? People would go crazy. Like, why would you do that? Mountain lions are beautiful. They're exciting. I want to see them. But these are people in Santa Monica. You know what I'm saying? They're not people that are living an hour outside of Bakersfield. They've got 16 mountain lions in their backyard in a year. This is a different kind of world. If they're in the Tatchee Mountains out there, you see mountain lions all the time. They have a lot of mountain lions. Yeah, and there's a problem too that I view, and this is coming from, there's a problem where I think a lot of people have a very hard time empathizing with people who might be negatively impacted by wildlife as well in the question of the lion issue. Right. Where it's kind of like this idea like, well, you better suck it up. Yeah. So if you're a rancher and you're running cattle in an area where you're losing a lot of cattle, the wolves and grizzlies, people will look and be like, you better suck it up, buddy. Like, I can't really picture your problem, but your complaints are not legitimate. If someone were to cut a grizzly loose in Golden Gate State Park, right? I don't know. I think that people would have, would come to have a different perspective. On that. To put it mildly. Yeah, but it winds up being that you look and people are, they don't really want to hear about other people's problems if it doesn't, if it doesn't jive with their understanding of what problems are. Yeah. And that's the area where the issue around grizzly bears and the delisting. So, you know, they were delisted. They were removed from Endangered Species Act protection temporarily because they had met all recovery goals. So when we looked, what's the recovered population look like? They mapped out what it would look like, and we've exceeded that for many years now, and they were delisted. But then Wyoming and Idaho moved to have a very limited hunt on them. And then they were, a federal judge blocked the delisting, and they went back and delisted. What's the federal judge's motivation? Well, you want to hope that they didn't have one. You want to think that they were just looking at the details of it, but I think there's a suspicion that that person went into that knowing damn sure what they were going to do, you know? But you don't really know. I mean, a lot of these arguments around, they come down to technicalities, right? No one's arguing that the population's recovered. Well, there's also the argument that the judge is probably trying to protect his own reputation because the amount of blowback that a judge would receive for allowing a hunt to go through is vastly different than blocking a hunt. Blocking a hunt, you're not going to get that much blowback. You'll get a few people that are upset, but it hadn't been an established resource. It's not like you're taking something away from people. But if he allowed it for the wildlife, people would go, fucking bananas on this guy. Yeah, they tend to, like, and I don't even call them, like, I don't call them environmentalists, like people who sued a block, the delisting of recovered species. They'll masquerade as, you know, ecologically conscious environmentalists, but they're just people who it's untenable to them. You know, they can't, they're never going to accept the idea that you're going to have human exploitation of this resource, right? They masquerade as they have an environmental motivation, but it's not. It's like it's an animal rights motivation. There's a very, there's a, they have a sensitive ear in a certain federal court, you know, in Missoula. And so you'll see a lot of these cases around wolves and grizzlies, they'll get that, they'll want it done through that court. They know that they're probably going to have a friendly take on it. I think it was a real, it was watching that happen. And that's been happening recently. I think it was a real, a real travesty because there's a couple of things that happen like culturally in areas where you'll, you create a lot of tension with people where there's people that are living amongst these things and they're looking for some level of, some level of relief and they want to see it go to state management and they might want to see the state exercise some control over where certain populations of large predators are spreading into. And when it winds up being that they're like their voices are not heard, you know, and they feel that people from far away are really heavily influencing decisions that affect them on a daily basis. It winds up creating like a lot of animosity toward the species too, where, I mean, like think about what happened with the spotted owl, right? The spotted owl, no one can see, no one perceives the spotted owl as owl anymore. The spotted owl has become like a symbol of federal overreach. And you'll find that like, you know, wolves for a while, they become like a symbol of a dispute and people stop like liking the animals much and it becomes like this like contentious creature. And I think that we're going to head that way if we keep, if we keep stepping in on wildlife issues with the mentality that we've been approaching, the wolf and grizzly issue in the Northern Great Lakes, the Northern Rockies soon to be in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem now. I think you're dealing with local and then you're dealing with national, right? So the local people are going to have an issue with it because they're going to be impacted by it. It's going to be directly impacting their life. Dogs are going to be killed while, you know, they're going to take domestic cattle and all sorts of different things. You're going to have real issues with the people that like to go elk hunting. The populations have diminished rapidly, but the rest of the country doesn't give a shit. No. People in San Francisco, they don't give a fuck about it. People in Chicago aren't impacted by it. Especially if they don't have anyone in their family that hunts or anyone that has a background in hunting and they don't have a background in it themselves, they don't care. No, people really don't. And it's, I point out all the time, but that I care about the availability and abundance of deer, elk, moose, caribou, right? Like I care about the resource. There's a lot of people who rely on the resource, use the resource. They're major economic drivers. I'm definitely, I'm anything but. I'm like, I'm, I'm regarding myself as a pro wolf person. I regard myself as a pro grizzly person. I cherish every interaction I have with those animals. Do you think it's a problem calling them a resource? I don't have a problem with calling them a resource, but people do have a problem with calling them a resource. And, and, and yeah, I'm like pro, I like the insuitable habitat. I like to see them present. I also like to see that, that I also like to see them manage in the way that allows for abundant wild game resources. What's going on? House passed a bill to drop legal protections for gray wolves. It's passed today. Whoa. Or, yeah, well this is two hours ago. Well, roll down a little bit. Republican controlled house passed a bill on Friday to drop legal protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states, reopening a lengthy battle over the predator species. Long despised by farmers and ranchers, wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned out of existence in most of the U.S. in the mid 20th century. By the mid 20th century, since securing protection in the 1970s, wolves have bounced back. Well, that's not really exactly what happened. Great lakes of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as well, and the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, that's sort of, but they're not talking about the reintroduction. The reintroduction is the big issue, right? Well, that's what people have great issue with. Well, yeah, but the reintroduction is only in one area. The Great Lake, the Northern Great Lakes, that was not a reintroduction. There was, you know, a sizable population. Yeah, well movements of wolves coming down from Canada and coming back. And the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem, not a reintroduction. The places where they have a real issue. Yeah, well, you had the famous case of the famous reintroduction in Yellso National Park. So Montana. And it's widely viewed now, it's widely viewed now that if you wouldn't have done that, you would have had, had you not done that reintroduction, you would have had a natural flow anyway. A natural flow from Canada. You would have got it. You would have eventually, you would have eventually have gotten there anyway. Interesting. But would they have gotten to the exact same levels? No. No. At this particular point right now, I think that would be like laughable to act as though they'd be there now. But people, there's no realization that you would have, that without the reintroduction, you would have through natural movement have eventually gotten, you know. Do you think that that's, that supports the idea of the reintroduction? Do you think the reintroduction was well thought out? I don't want to, you know, I'm not going to debate the merits of the reintroduction. Like I said, my perspective on it is- They should be in a place where it supports them. Yeah, my perspective on it is I don't, the idea of extinction and regional extirpation sickens me. I do not believe in, I do not believe that like as a people, as a culture, we can justify or afford to remove species of wildlife from the landscape. Native species of wildlife from the landscape. Like I said, the idea sickens me. I like to, you know, I like to have all native wildlife present on the landscape. So I don't oppose it. What I oppose is, a thing that's happened now is getting, where we have populations that we agree like, what will recovery look like? And at what point, how will we manage all the different viewpoints that are coming in, all the different like interests of all these varied stakeholders? And at what point will we get in there and manipulate the situation that we're creating? I just would move that in a different direction. Where I think that recovered species, right, in this case, we're talking about wolves and grizzlies. I think that you should have that if you can do it in a sustainable way that doesn't have long term deleterious impacts on the population, that they should be managed as a renewable resource. See, this is where people are going to have issues that don't have anything. Just even the term, manage them as a renewable resource. You mean shoot them and kill them and use their fur. Sure. I think that recovered species, I think that if you put something on the Endangered Species Act and it goes under federal protection, and then when it reaches recovery and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says, it's recovered, it's time to hand it back to state management. If a state then decides that they're going to do some limited harvest, particularly, let's say, even if they're focusing on areas where there's like very high prevalence of human animal conflict, and the state decides to do that in some like minor way as a way to service the needs of certain segments of their population that want something to happen. I don't think that then some like an activist judge or environmental groups or animal rights groups should come in and be like, well, never mind. We're going to pretend that they're not recovered now because we want to prevent the state from doing something that we think is unsavory. Well, the thought process behind the people that support blocking the hunt is that if you leave these animals alone, naturally, they're going to find balance. And that the wolves will kill the elk until there's not enough elk for them to sustain their populations and the numbers of their offspring will dwindle and they'll get to some sort of a sustainable level. Yeah, but we already, I mean, we live in a heavily manipulated kind of land, kind of manmade environment now. The idea that things are going to, that we would just let things run their course and watch what happens isn't going to happen. You're still going to have a lot of grizzlies every year are still going to get in trouble. They're still going to get killed. You're still going to have mortality. You're going to have tons of grizzly mortality in tough areas. But the grizzlies aren't acting in packs. No, but they kill cattle and they come up, they butt up against humans. It's just like it's inevitable that you're going to have some of that. You're not going to let it run. As a hunter, I also don't have a problem with and actually support as a hunter that we would, while allowing wolves to be present on the landscape, that we would mitigate their impact on big game. I don't mind saying, I don't mind just coming out and saying that I like to have high populations of big game animals that are available to hunters. And also at the same time, sharing some of that resource there, having wolves on the ground doing it. Don't want to see them gone. Not anti-wolf, not anti-grizzly. It's just one of those, it's because a wolf is so much like a dog and because there's not a great history of people eating. I remember you telling me about one mountain man where his favorite food was wolf. Phil Jollmer Steffensen, who's an Arctic explorer. What a crazy fucker that guy must have been, huh? Love wolf meat. You ever tried it? No. But you've eaten coyote. You've eaten coyote. So you've eaten all that species of wolf. I've never killed a wolf, never killed a grizzly bear. Just haven't eaten either of them. I ate one coyote. Didn't like it, didn't like it. Haven't messed with one since. Yeah, you said that was similar to Diver Duck too, right? That was Remy. Remy felt it tasted like bad Diver Duck. I eat Diver Ducks and still eat Diver Ducks. But no, I haven't done that anymore and haven't included any coyote recipes. There's no coyote recipes in the wild game cookbook either. Wolf might be the ultimate one that people are going to have a problem with. That might be where the rubber hits the road. Well, you know, in some places it's become a moot point because Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, all have state management of wolves. All of the things that were, all these horrible things that were going to happen when the states resume management of wolves didn't materialize. Right. But those places also have a rich history of hunting. Yeah, but it was going to be the end of wolves, right? It hasn't been. In the first few years, in the first few years of the wolf seasons, you actually saw the populations go up. Well, it's so hard to hunt them, right? Well, it winds up being that putting that, with that little bit of hunting pressure on them, really changed their movements and changed the way they perceive human threats. And they adjust to it pretty quickly. But it hasn't led to, you know, I think a lot of people look in those cases where it was pretty effective. It was very effective to bring in limited regulated hunting had the desired effect on how wolves were using the landscape and ways in which they were interacting and avoiding humans. I have no doubt too. I have no doubt too. Like, the situation will probably, in the northern Great Lakes, they had state management, lost state management, like it bounces back and forth. You're going to eventually, I mean, it kind of depends on how the political winds blow, but you're eventually going to wind up with it there. You're not going to see wolves vanish from the landscape. You know, you just not. If grizzly bears wind up doing it, you're still going to see, you're going to see gradually expanding populations of grizzly bears, despite the fact that they're using limited harvest to achieve certain management objectives. It's not going to be the end of the world.