Joe Rogan - You Can Be an Animal Lover and a Hunter

Overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways. Either you introduce predators or you manage them with hunting. There's a place in Maui where they are... Maui has no predators, you know, but they also have a bunch of wild game that was brought in for King Kamehameha. I think it was in the 1800s they brought it in. I'm not sure when, but there's tons of access deer on Maui and on Lanai and on Molokai, a couple of different islands. And one of the things they've started doing is they were trying to figure out how to eradicate them from this area. So a bunch of hunters got together and they're hunting these access deer and then giving the meat to poor people, like making it free for them. And it's a really cool program, but that's another sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt. Yeah. There's no other... Unless you're just going to poison them or you're going to somehow or another capture them all and neuter and spay a certain amount of them every month, there's really no other way to handle it. Yeah, and I think that's a big misconception. Like people that don't educate themselves about hunting, they're just like hunting is bad, killing animals is bad, and they get on this bandwagon, but they don't have enough information about it. Yeah. And I think people confuse trophy hunting with like they see Cecil the Lion and everyone goes after, okay, it's hunting is the problem. But trophy hunting is the problem, but hunters that hunt for food and that hunt to help the sort of environmental impacts that they're having. Like snow geese. I don't know if you know much about snow geese. Oh, I do. Yeah, I read that article that you retweeted actually. Yeah, like a Nat Geo article that I posted. You know these birds fly in flocks of like 20, 30,000 birds and they land in a farmer's field and they eat everything. Everything. And they destroy it and you know, like 10, 15 years ago, these populations of birds, they weren't like they are now. So well, large-scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom in the population of deer, right? You know deer in America, particularly like in the Midwest where all the farms are, what is it a fucking coincidence that there's all the deer where all the farms are? No, it's not. My good friend Doug Duran, he has a big-ass farm in Wisconsin, beautiful place in the driftless area. Do you know what that is? No. It's where the glaciers didn't pass through. So it's not flat. There's all these hills and it's very beautiful lakes. It's a phenomenal place. But essentially, he's got the deer that he hunts and that he and his friends hunt on his property. They're farm animals. They're eating corn. They're just eating greens. They mean he grows corn. He's a farmer. So he grows all this corn. The deer are eating all this corn and they're fucking delicious, man. They're huge. They're so huge and they're so good. But there's a reality to population control. Now in Wisconsin, they get it because they're around them every day. They're hitting them with their cars. They see them everywhere they look. This is not like the idealistic view of someone who lives in a city street in Toronto and is driving around their bike looking for signs that are criticizing kale or whatever the fuck they're doing. They're not in the real natural world that these animals exist in. They don't get it. They don't understand. They live in their bubble. And another thing they don't understand is hunters actually, we have to buy tags. We have to buy our licenses. There are rules and laws that we have to follow. And those fees actually pay for the wildlife conservation. And I'm pretty sure it's the same in the States as well from at least talking to my friends. It is. It's the Pickman-Robertson Act. And they don't understand. It's 11% of all the proceeds from hunting gear go to wildlife conservation. And that turns out to be billions and billions of dollars. It's far more than any other conservation group. Far more than any wildlife conservation group or animal activist group. No one contributes more to conservation than hunting. No one. Because we want it. We want it to be there for our kids and their kids. And it's nature. It's how the world is supposed to be. It's also this contradictory thing that seems like it doesn't make sense. But we love the wildlife. We love the animals. Just because you eat them doesn't mean you don't love them. But you recognize them as, this is a weird way to look at it, but it is a renewable resource. And it is also a magical, beautiful thing. Just because of that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it. I mean, this disconnect that people have with the wild I think is a real part of it. A real part of the problem. Good luck finding a vegan in Alaska. There's not a whole lot of them that live out in the bush that are vegans. They're eating salmon and they're eating... You can bring in vegetables. I'm sure there are some. I'm just talking shit. But the reality is if you're embedded in that world, you understand it and you appreciate it. It's very humbling. Killing an animal is very humbling. It sounds like just someone is an animal lover. That sounds fucking crazy. It's hard. It's also really hard. Like when I see a deer come out, I hunt with a bow, crossbow, and I see a deer come out. It's... I'm trembling. I have the hair on my back is standing up. They're these beautiful majestic creatures and I'm going to kill it. And it's really, really difficult. And I don't think that people understand that. That don't hunt and haven't killed an animal. They don't understand the respect and the amount of effort that goes into that.