← The Origins Foundation Podcast
The Origins Foundation Podcast
Episode 603 - Tony Schoonen || The Dark Numbers Of Poaching In The US
00:58:02
When one thinks of poaching, the mind often turns to Africa—snares, and people involved in the illegal bushmeat trade. Few would think of poaching occurring in the United States of America. Boone and Crockett Club President Tony Schoonen and researcher Jon Gassett join Robbie to talk about the Club’s new Poach and Pay program. This enormous undertaking to understand poaching in the U.S. revealed a massive “dark number” of poachers—and what that means for the landscapes and lifestyles we love. It’s an incredibly fascinating episode where you’ll learn the data and science behind the true impact of poaching in the U.S. today, what motivates it, and what steps can be taken to combat its staggering scale. This is the kind of podcast you’ll definitely be talking about with your colleagues around the water cooler—or the coffee pot—in the morning.
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A
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C
Tony Shunan, the executive director of Boone and Crockett Club and John Gasic, a researcher, joined me today to talk about a subject that was just super interesting. And so I wanted to have them on about their poachers pay program. And so what Boone and Crockett Club has decided to do is take on this enormous task. And when you, when I say enormous, I really mean it. You don't understand the, the, the level of sophistication that needed to go in to understand the poaching problem that is in the U.S. you think poaching is limited to Africa and snares and all that kind of stuff and you see us talking about that all the time. But when you listen to this podcast and you hear the dark number, I. E. The number that is not reported or not found from a poaching perspective, it's going to blow your mind. I'm not going to tell you now. You need to listen to the podcast. But enjoy this podcast, learn about it, go out and research it, understand it and keep your eyes open this this fall as you're going into the hunting season for for what this dark number looks like. Because it's out there. So en. So there's a reason why I started Blood Origins and that reason is simple, is that I wanted to convey the truth about hunting.
- [02:27]
D
It brings awareness to non hunters that it's more than just killing animals. How do I start it?
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C
Brittany? My name.
- [02:39]
D
Does my hair look okay?
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C
It's fantastic. My name is. Is my Axelrod. Start again. Yeah, I hated it too. Braxton, you said something in the car to me you said that you were living on borrowed time. There's a perception around who hunters are, what we're supposed to be. And a. A feminist that works for a nonprofit that is a hunter that has only eaten wild game for the last 20 years is likely not the thing that people think about when it comes to a hunter. All right, so we've been working on this for quite some time. Finally pinned, Tony. Finally got you pinned down to have a podcast with us. I did not mention when we were in the Prelude, Turkey hunter, obviously. You got a big turkey stuff mounted behind you.
- [03:33]
D
Yeah, yeah.
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E
Turkey hunter, deer hunter, elk hunter. Just a hunter. Hunter. I like to hunt anything.
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C
Well, I'll tell you a funny anecdote tied to that. When people ask my wife. My wife does not hunt. My wife exists. Like, I have to prove that my wife exists every year when she comes to our conservation fundraising event, because she is not an outdoorsman. She doesn't hunt. She's a horror writer. She got a PhD in 18th century Gothic literature, and she sits on the couch with her little wiener sausage dog and watches horror movies. And so I have to prove that my wife exists all the time. But when they. Friends of hers say, well, what does Robbie like to hunt? Her response is, robbie, if. If something's in season, Robbie will be hunting it. If babies were in season, Robbie would probably be hunting babies.
- [04:25]
E
Well, see?
- [04:27]
D
Pretty much.
- [04:28]
C
Good. I got another one in the. In the boat.
- [04:31]
D
My difference is, my wife took up hunting, and now she gets to hunt first before I get to hunt. So, yeah, it's a simple sword.
- [04:39]
C
So gentlemanly of you, John. That's so nice of you. Tony Shunam, welcome to the Blood Origins podcast. I say Blood Origins. We're not Blood Origins anymore with the Origins Foundation. We changed our name. And I'm still trying to get used to saying it, but. Welcome, Boone and Crockett. CEO. CEO, Executive director. Same sort of.
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E
Yeah, it's just a different name for the same thing, you know? But thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity, Robbie. And I'm really pleased that we were finally able to connect, because it's been an uphill, uphill push. I realize that, and that's.
- [05:16]
C
No, and I. Look, I saw what we're going to talk about today come across my Facebook feed, and I was like, damn, I want to learn more about this. Like, this is what I want. Like, and the topic about poaching, you know, I honestly think people think poaching is just an African problem, but there's no poaching in America, come on. There's no poaching here, right John?
- [05:38]
D
Oh yeah, right. There's poaching everywhere.
- [05:42]
C
John Gassett, Welcome. Wildlife Management Institute. You are a researcher working for Boone and Crockett Club, right?
- [05:50]
D
Yeah, I was the lead researcher. My wife and my, and I were on the poach and pay project and I'm the, in my day job, I'm the Southeastern field representative for wmi.
- [05:59]
C
Oh, based out of where?
- [06:01]
D
So I'm out of Georgetown, Kentucky.
- [06:03]
C
Oh, okay, cool.
- [06:04]
D
But I pretty much work all over the country and to some degree, you know, outside of the US when, when we have, we have jobs there. So. Yep.
- [06:12]
C
So Tony, Was this a WMI, Boone & Crockett sort of joint efforts or is it John, as an independent researcher contractor that came in with this idea? How does this work?
- [06:25]
E
Well, you know, just what happened was Robbie was several years back, I think you'll recall, talking about Africa, you know, the Cecil the Lion.
- [06:39]
C
Oh my God.
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E
Okay, so you know, Buddha Cry was sitting here and our, our media people.
- [06:46]
C
And you're getting blown up like how. What are you going to say about this travesty?
- [06:51]
E
That. And then. But just watching the mainstream media, you know, interchange the word poacher and hunter caused a great deal of concern for us because we know that obviously hunting is legal and poaching is not legal. So that we kind of took this on as an image thing to begin with. And we thought, you know, how are we going to be able to conveyed to the general public that, you know, poaching, hunter, two very different things. Like I said, one's legal, one's not. So that's how we got started. And then when we started peeling that onion back, and it was a big onion, okay, we just started peeling layer after layer. We found that there are some real issues out there that, that we, and we had no idea what the magnitude of this problem was.
- [07:37]
C
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- [10:48]
E
Good luck and as I said, John's a professional member of the club, longtime friend of myself and, and been, you know, tremendous asset to Our conservation community, we didn't have the scientific background to really do, you know, on staff to really do the work that needed to be done to find out, you know, what's really going on out there on the landscape. So we partnered with John. He is an independent contractor. However, he is, you know, he's been on this, he's been on this thing for five years and it's been, it's been a, it's been a, an incredible journey just with finding out all these different things. You know, we started out like, let's try to figure out what the restitution and finds are across the country. And wow, you want to talk about a diverse and different landscape there. I mean, you know, you have some states, primarily the western states that, you know, really do have some significant fines and restitution. Some of the eastern states don't for whatever reason. And so, you know, one of our object objectives started out being, well, let's get everything consistent and let's get, you know, people aware that, you know, if they undertake this illegal activity, then they're going to pay. You know, they're going to pay. And so, so it wasn't just science.
- [12:12]
C
What you're saying is you were, you were after the data, after the information to then potentially make policy recommendations, correct? To ramp this up.
- [12:21]
D
Right.
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E
So as time went on, you know, we needed that science piece though, because we had to do research. We had to. And I'm going to, I'll let John get into that a little bit more, but I'll just cap capstone here briefly. And that is that in order for us to realize how deep the poaching problem was, we had to use theories and we had to do interviews of coaches and we had to figure out the mindsets and what motivated them to poach and we had to. But then we also had this other side, as I mentioned before. What are the fines, what are the restitutions in these different states? How can we get them up to where they should be and also make sure that that money that is, that is taken in by those fines and restitutions goes back to the wildlife agency to manage wildlife, build up law enforcement and do good conservation. And so I can let John do a little bit more on the research here. But I think that that's kind of a, in a nutshell, how we got going on this.
- [13:21]
C
And I think, John, I guess the question I had just to, to kick, to push the to towards you is why would you need science? Like, like we don't. Like what would you need science for hunting is legal, Poaching is illegal. Okay. What? Okay, so.
- [13:42]
D
So the science comes in helping to identify the specifics, the measurables about, you know, how much is happening and also how you might influence those behaviors so that they don't happen more often. So to give you kind of this collision course between Boone and Crockett and the Cecil Lion Issue and Wildlife Management Institute and myself, I'm actually a trained research or trained. I got a doctorate in deer behavior, so I'm a deer biologist.
- [14:14]
C
But where'd you get that degree from?
- [14:16]
D
University of Georgia.
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C
Okay. Should have got it from Mississippi State University. You know, they got a pretty good deer program there, but.
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D
Oh yeah, we'll forgive you that. Well, actually several of their recent, recently are currently retiring faculty. There were students of mine at Georgia, believe it or not. Wow. Bronson Strickland was one of my students there. One of my.
- [14:38]
C
You look younger than Bronson. So I don't know how this could work.
- [14:41]
D
So, so, so. But prior to working for wmi, I ran the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife. I was the director and we hired in a researcher to come in and look at a couple of things. One is she worked on job stress analysis for conservation officers. And the other was looking at changes in citation rates and types based on some policy changes I'd made within the agency. And we actually.
- [15:09]
C
What drove that, what drove those two questions?
- [15:11]
D
Well, so job stress. Job stress for conservation officers is typically extremely high. You imagine they're working in adverse conditions, remote locations, often by themselves. You know, all law enforcement jobs are stressful. But when you're, when you have no backup and you're in a remote location and people have guns, you can imagine the stress level that might occur from that. And we were doing it to figure out what types of people we needed to recruit to be officers, you know, that would fit that mold better. But the 10 year study that she did on citation rates was based on some changes to. We were, we were picking up more general law enforcement, law enforcement activities that we had to cover for the, for the state and where all, all of our officers were statewide police, you know, peace officers, so they could enforce any law. And it was starting to erode some time away from conservation. She wanted, we don't know how much. And anyway, long story short, we sort of hit it off. She's a criminal justice professor and we got together and ended up getting married.
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C
All right.
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D
Because she's always had this interest in, you know, she's, she's a, you know, criminal researcher and she's done a lot of research on the dark figure of different crimes like burglary and armed robbery and others where she goes into prisons and interviews people who committed these crimes. Figure out why you did it, what'd you look for, you know, what would it take to stop you from doing it? Those sorts of things. So this was all happening, and we were having those discussions the same time Tony and Boone and Crockett were working on the Cecil issue. And we sort of got together and said, what if we applied what she knows about criminology to poachers? How do we figure out what the dark figure or the undetected rate of poaching is? And, and that became poaching pay 2.0, which was the, the research project. And, you know, what we specifically wanted to do is figure out, you know, what types of people commit these crimes, what types of behaviors they, they exhibit, how much you know, what, how, how many crimes are committed. In other words, what the dark figure is. I'll use the dark figure a lot, but that's the unknown or undetected poaching events, the ones that only the perpetrator or his accomplices or accomplices may know about.
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C
So what is, what did, what, what was. What is that number like on average?
- [17:19]
D
So, so. And that's one of the things we looked at and factored into our model is that there's a, there's an annual report produced by Department of justice in the U.S. that's the national Crime Victimization Study. And they go and interview a bunch of victims from different crimes. And what we found. It shocked me when she told me. But even violent person on person crimes like rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault are reported at less than 50% of the time to law enforcement. Sorry, we are.
- [17:47]
C
Okay, but. Okay, so this is reporting, right? Not actually it's happening.
- [17:51]
D
No, no, no. It's, it's the rate of reporting, the rate that law enforcement becomes aware of it. So even crimes where there's an identifiable victim that's physically injured half the time, they don't report. When we looked at crimes like larceny, which is sort of the lowest level crime, that's in that report, which is theft, you know, theft of property that's not in your home and where you're not present, if you're president, it's robbery. If you're, if it's in your home, it's burglary. If it's in your yard, somebody steals your lawnmower. When you're not home, it's larceny. And when we looked at larceny in that report, it's like 26, 27% get reported, get detected by law enforcement.
- [18:25]
C
What about poaching?
- [18:27]
D
We started bounding the poaching. It's like, okay, well, no poaching now. They're not stealing out of your yard. They're stealing, you know, on vast expanses of public land in the west where, you know, there may not be, you know, an officer within hundreds of miles of there. And, and that, that research showed us that, that, that rate. And I'm like, I'll give you the exact number. And It's. It's around 4%, but we use 5% as a good round number is the detected rate by law enforcement.
- [18:52]
C
So 95% of all poaching cases.
- [18:56]
D
Yes. For big game that are being.
- [18:58]
C
That are being. And I assume whitetail is a part of big game.
- [19:02]
D
Yes.
- [19:03]
C
So only 5%.
- [19:05]
D
We did include turkeys in that too, because they are big game in some states.
- [19:09]
C
Listen to me. Turkeys are big game in my. I'm. I'm afflicted in the disease of turkey hunting. So I called. I consider them big game. So 5% of all poaching incidences are actually happening are only being detected and being enforced or just detected. And then there's a separate sentence.
- [19:30]
D
Detected by law enforcement. Detected by law enforcement. And that's an important, that's an important distinction because obviously somebody shoots an elk and takes it home and doesn't get caught, their neighbor may see it, their wife or kids may see it, whatever. So that's, that's one level of detection, but detection we're talking about, how do they know.
- [19:46]
C
How do they know it's poached versus, well, person actually has a license or.
- [19:50]
D
People tend to talk too much, or the neighbor's a hunter also and realizes it's not elk season, or they realize they talked to their neighbor earlier and that guy didn't have a tag, but he went and brought an elcom. So there's the Internet. There's lots of ways that information gets out. But. But detection by law enforcement is, is less than 5%.
- [20:11]
C
Tony, when you got that statistic, did you have a preconceived notion of what the percentage was?
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E
Not at all. I actually was stunned when I saw that percentage. I thought, wow, this is a huge problem that we didn't even know about. And that's why we pursued it, because we thought, okay, this is an illegal activity. This is illegal taking a big game. And these are, these animals are a public resource. And they're stealing from the public. It's like stealing a police car. And when I, when it was less than 4%, it was, it was, it was shocking to us. And so again, we, you know, we, we engaged John and Christy and we said, you know, let's get to the bottom of what this dark number really is, because we need to know what the cost of conservation is. Because the other problem that we have besides the detection problem is the prosecution problem.
- [21:17]
C
That's what I was trying to get at. Like, okay, you've detected it. Yeah. How much of it, quote unquote, is enforced? Which is what you said.
- [21:24]
E
The prosecution, way too many judges view poaching as a victimless crime.
- [21:30]
C
So.
- [21:33]
E
Again, back to the onion. I mean, we peeled the layer and we found more and more information that just, that wasn't good news, Robbie. And to the world of conservation. And, you know, you asked what this dark number was. It was in the report. You know, the annual figure in terms of restitution and fines that are lost to poaching is $1.4 billion. Now, to put that in perspective, that's more than both the other means of revenue for state agencies, the Pittman Robertson.
- [22:06]
C
Act, on an annual basis, on an.
- [22:10]
E
Annual basis, the Pittman Robertson act generates about a billion dollars. The national sales of honey licenses across the 50 states generates about a billion dollars. So when you look at that and you say 1.4 billion is being lost now, also, you're never going to get 100% detection rate on any crime. But, but if you stop to think about this a little bit, or just.
- [22:36]
C
50%, 50%, 750 million.
- [22:40]
E
Even if we got poaching from less than 4% up to larceny or theft, which is 25%, the resulting dollar figure going back to the state wildlife agencies would be well over $400 million. And that's bigger than some of the budgets those state agencies have.
- [22:59]
D
So that 1.4 billion is minimal. Because what we did to calculate that is we took the average of replacement costs from the average minimum replacement cost for every state that has one by species. So in other words, in Kentucky, replacement costs for white tailed deer may be from 500 to $1500. So we took it at 500. Same thing with the penalties. We took the minimum penalty and we averaged Those for all 50 states by species, multiplied them by the most conservative number.
- [23:30]
C
You could.
- [23:30]
D
The most conservative number, it's, it's larger than. Yeah, it'll be larger than that because a lot of them don't get, they get More than the minimum.
- [23:38]
C
Okay. I have so many questions. So many questions. Okay. Of the 4% of all the big game species, which is the one that got poached, did you find out like what got poached the most or got reported the least?
- [23:54]
D
We, we didn't do that sort of analysis, but I can tell you from the data that I looked at, because what we wanted, what we want to be.
- [24:01]
C
Whitetails, got to be white.
- [24:02]
D
It's whiteheads. Yeah. Because just because of abundant whitetails occur in, you know, 40 states, you know, they're, they're relatively abundant in those states. And, and you know, they're, they're, they're visible in the landscape. They're fairly, fairly easily poached. You know, they're not big poaches the most, they're not bighorn sheep where you have to get up into the mountains, up in rugged conditions, you can find them anywhere.
- [24:23]
C
Who poaches the most?
- [24:25]
D
Who poaches the most as far as.
- [24:28]
C
Well, what the western states, the eastern states.
- [24:32]
D
Oh, oh, yeah. Now once again, that's, that's sort of phase three of this study is can we bullet down, you know, regionally, can we get down to a state level? It's hard, as you might imagine. It gets hard to do that because every state has different suites of species. So you take a state that only has.
- [24:48]
C
We also got different suites of people.
- [24:50]
D
Yes, we do. But you take a very, you know, remote state that has few people but lots of public land and lots of, you know, typical western iconic big game species. They're going to get posted a different rate than a southeastern state where they may only have black bear, white tailed deer and turkeys, but they got millions of people living in those states, small land holdings, lots of private land. Yeah, we got a, that's a, that's a difficult number to tease out, but it's something we want to look at.
- [25:19]
C
I was just trying to figure out if you had come up with like a gradation of redneckness.
- [25:24]
D
Well, you know, we've actually, we've actually got a grant proposal out to look at hotspots for poaching to basically.
- [25:31]
C
Please tell me the title of that proposal was Deciding the gradation of redneckness between different States and Poaching.
- [25:37]
D
But we may informally call it that.
- [25:40]
C
Okay, okay.
- [25:42]
D
But yeah, we'd love to see, you know, where does poaching occur specifically, you know, georeference locations and where did the poachers come from? Which we could tell by nothing more than zip codes on the citation you know, where are they, Are they coming from cities poaching in on all the.
- [25:57]
C
Population census data from those. Yeah, yeah, right.
- [26:00]
D
Yeah, exactly. So as Tony says, it's a big onion and we've just started peeling it. But there's some, there's some interesting facts that are coming out of it. Yeah.
- [26:09]
E
On the other side that, that we looked at and that John or Christie studied was what motivated these people, you know, why did they coach in the first place? And so, you know, based on law enforcement surveys, you know, 57% are trophy poachers.
- [26:25]
D
Okay.
- [26:25]
E
You know, there's.
- [26:26]
C
Which is why the sting operations like that have the fake deer in the, in the field and spotlighting at night work. So.
- [26:33]
E
Well, then, you know, the next one down was opportunistic poaching, which kind of goes to your redneck to sink. I mean, you know, let's go out and have a few beers and we'll blow something up, you know, that type of a thing. But what was interesting is the least, the least motivator, the, the, the, the most, you know, at the bottom of that motivation, food was subsistence.
- [26:56]
D
Yeah.
- [26:57]
E
And you know, that's where a lot of these prosecutors go.
- [26:59]
C
Right.
- [27:00]
E
And the judges, they say, well, you know, the poor guy needed a deer in his freezer. Well, you know, I didn't. Oh, not really. And so, you know, the, the, the report has some pretty interesting findings in that they were surprising. You know, I think your average guy, like hunts like the three of us do, would have thought that subsistence would been way up that list, but it's not. It's at the bottom.
- [27:25]
C
Okay. Okay. So now let's go down a rabbit hole that I never knew was there. If poaching the least mo. The, the lowest on the totem pole motivator for poaching is subsistence. Would it be possible to bring back a wild venison market in the United States because of that data?
- [27:51]
E
Well, from the Bunna Kraga's perspective, that would be commercializing wildlife. So we would not, we would not be super excited about that, Robbie. You know, but I think.
- [28:04]
C
Actually, because what I've. What I've heard is if you did that, obviously there's the North American model of wildlife conservation, public resource. I get it. But I always thought the reason why we don't is because of what it used to be. Right. The commercial supply and demand, you know, poaching for the quote unquote, subsistence. But it wasn't really subsistence, but it was a commercial driven model. Maybe I just answered my own question.
- [28:33]
D
Well, there's. There's. There's more. There's more of a nuance to Anton that. Because there is. There is true commercial meat production. And the. The log jam there will. I hate to say it won't be the North American model or what Boone and Crockett or WMI thinks it'll be. Condition. How do you certify the condition of the meat?
- [28:51]
C
100%. Yeah. No, don't. No doubt the FDA, USDA hoops.
- [28:55]
D
Right. And with, you know, the various deer diseases that are out there and, you know, potential for contamination of the meat if it wasn't field dressed properly and all that, that. That'll be a bigger log jam because it's a public safety concern. The problem is, is anytime you talk about commercialization of wildlife products, it quickly goes to, well, I can I harvest bears for gallbladders. Why can't I harvest deer and sell the antlers? Why can't, you know, and you commercialize those products? And that. That gets back to Tony's comment on trophy poaching is more than half of these incidents, they, you know, there's a. There's a number of reasons people trophy post. They want them for themselves or they bleed over into another typology we. We described as commercial poachers. They want them for profit. They want to sell them. You know, a Boone and Crockett set of whitetail deer antlers may bring 30 or $40,000. So that's. That's what they're after. Yeah. So commercialization is sort of a slippery slope. Even if we could figure out the meat part. And in some places where whitetails are overpopulated, we admit there's something needs to be done. And in a lot of those places, you can't get enough hunters on the landscape to deal with them in urban suburban areas. But, you know, I don't think the commercial meat market is the place to go simply because, you know, the other things that follow with that.
- [30:08]
C
I appreciate both of you shutting the door on my rabbit hole. I shut it on myself, too.
- [30:12]
D
So an interesting thing on typologies that concerned me, and it's. The more I've thought about it since we put the report out is the. The sort of the. The traditional. What we call the traditional or cultural poachers. And that's the ones that they were raised that way. You know, their grandfathers taught them that way. It's a. Their. Their community accepts it. It's sort of a folk crime, you know, and I've. It's. It's Moonshining, Okay. Moonshining is perfectly acceptable, although federally illegal in a lot of places because the communities, they did, they like it. That's all what they've all. That's what they've evolved around. And we, we've heard that people say, well, there's, you know, there's two types of law. There's man's law and God's law. God's law is never wrong. Man's law frequently is. So that's the sort of the, you know, the approach they take to taking an animal illegally is you're breaking man's law. That doesn't matter.
- [31:03]
C
Did the, did the research show. Tony, you can start the research show the sort of opposite of the motivator, which was in my brain. Like, I would poach. Yes, I'm going for the trophy, but I feel like I'm not going to get caught. I like, for instance, as the motivator. Right, right.
- [31:25]
E
I mean, when you look, when you look at that, there's three primary motivators. Opportunity, okay. Is the biggest one. And, and then you have the target. Right. Which could be a trophy or. And then the third one is lack of guardianship. Okay. So we don't have enough law enforcement officers on the ground, and the ones that are on the ground are getting wore out. And it's, you know, there's a whole piece of this, Robby, this whole, this research that John and Christy did that is, that talks about deterrence. You know, what would deter you from poaching and.
- [32:03]
C
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [32:04]
E
And, and so, and there's a list of those. There's what, eight of them, John?
- [32:08]
D
Yeah, eight or nine. And so I'll tell you the top tier three felony conviction.
- [32:13]
E
Yeah.
- [32:16]
C
Yeah, that would, that would make you think twice.
- [32:19]
D
And there are a few states where if, if you shoot certain animals, if you can be charged with a felony.
- [32:24]
C
Yeah, I thought, like, I. Honestly, when you, when we started this conversation, you're like, yeah, we're trying to get everybody on the same level, level playing field. I always heard, like, you know, shoot one of those trophy mannequins and you lose your truck, you lose your gun, you lose everything. Like, holy smokes. How would you even do that?
- [32:49]
D
Second largest deterrent after a felony conviction is confiscation of equipment. They really don't care about fines. They really don't care about, you know, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's felony conviction, which we think we should push for, especially for these animals, where the replacement value is higher than the the felony theft level for any other crime in the state. So if I go steal a police car, for example, that's felony theft because the value of the car in Kentucky is over a thousand dollars and our trigger is $1,000. Well, if I go shoot an elk in Kentucky illegally, the replacement cost is $2,500, the minimum. And. But it's a misdemeanor. Why? Stealing something from the public that's worth more than $1,000. In one case, a misdemeanor, in the other case, it's a felony.
- [33:37]
C
Well, you could argue I don't even know. I've never seen the data. John, you'd probably be best positioned to answer this. How much money is generated by the $10 Lottery Elk tag every year in Kentucky?
- [33:51]
D
Well, when I was there, we peaked the number of applicants at about 73, 74,000. So that's a quarter of three quarters of a million dollars a year.
- [34:00]
C
Three quarters million. How many tags?
- [34:01]
D
Yeah, well, back then it was a very small number of tags. I mean, we started with 10 tags, and when I, when I left, we were at a thousand tags per year. They're back down to 500 now.
- [34:12]
C
So quick math. Let's just, we'll just obviously not. Not perfect science, not perfect data. Right. 750,000 divided by 500. 1500 just from the tag. Just the value based on the tag submissions of that elk.
- [34:35]
D
Right.
- [34:35]
C
Just the chance, not the replacement costs, Just the chance value is 1500 bucks at 500.
- [34:42]
D
Yeah.
- [34:43]
C
So there's no reason cost. That's no, nothing.
- [34:45]
D
Yeah, yeah, there's no reason for it not to be a felony theft of a public resource other than it's just never. We historically we didn't approach it that way.
- [34:54]
C
And still in Kentucky. Right. Go ahead, John. Go ahead, Tony.
- [34:57]
E
Well, I was going to say almost 50% of the prosecutors that we interviewed felt that it should be a felony. And, and, and so one of the goals that we have is to try to raise those, you know, you'll get, get some kind of a felony threshold across the country that, you know, is, you know, you shoot an animal, it's worth this, and it is a felon. And, you know, the prosecutors thought that would be a great opportunity for, you know, another deterrent.
- [35:26]
C
Where are we in that process right now, Tony?
- [35:30]
E
Well, I mean, so this is, as John mentioned, it is a step by step process. Now we've got the research component, not all done, but enough to get a plan off the ground. And there's really four things that we're focused on. Right now, one is legislative action in the state houses across the country. And so we are working on template legislation to provide to the state.
- [35:54]
C
Are you targeting that? Or it's just blankets?
- [35:57]
E
It's. We'll have to target it because each state house is different. But so rather than actually drafting a bill, what we're going to do is draft a brief that says, here's what your bill needs to contain. And we'll go through our. Our partners, Congressional Sportsman's foundation, have their regional setup, and we'll go through perfect, perfect national association of Sportsman's Caucuses to get this brief into the hands of the state houses. So that's number one. Number two is educating our prosecutors. And we're going to do that either through a continuing education curriculum or webinars. We haven't quite figured that out yet, but we know that's got to be a big target because once that thing. Once one of these. Once one of these detection, poaching people land in a courtroom, the prosecutor needs to know that this isn't a victim's crime. I got to pay attention to this. This is serious. And so that's the second thing. The third thing that we would need to do is we need to start educating the public at large. You know, hunters. And I've seen a lot of blogs already just since our press release came out. You know, meat eater, we have a big one on our Heritage of the Hunt dialogue going on now. You know, when. When hunters found out that these guys were doing this, they were pretty upset about it.
- [37:21]
C
But we.
- [37:21]
E
What we want to do is Shane. Oh, gee. In other words, if you look at 50 years. Yeah. So 50 years ago, drunk driving was a lot more socially acceptable than it is today. Why? It took a motiv, a motivated public to change that perception of what drunk driving was. Now it's an embarrassment. That's where we need to get poaching to. And the only people that can help us do that are the.
- [37:46]
C
Are the hunters and the hunters community. Right.
- [37:49]
E
Yeah.
- [37:49]
C
That's not us. Right. That is not us. I've used that all the time. That's not hunters. No, those are poachers. Totally different people.
- [37:56]
E
Right. And, you know, to that end, we were looking at developing an app, you know, for your phone, so that if you see a poaching incident happening, you can drop a pin, take a picture of a license plate or an individual, and it'll go straight to the law enforcement agency and that leads to the last. And it's not by any means the least importance, but we need to increase law enforcement. We need to get our state agencies the help. They need to put more boots on the ground. And then like I said, our hunters to be more eyes and ears out there to help them out.
- [38:33]
C
Well, as you said in the beginning, the restitution alone could fund positions.
- [38:38]
D
Could fund them. Absolutely. For sure.
- [38:42]
C
John, what would as. As a former commissioner or former director, how would that be received? Because I could see somebody going like I'm turning people in and increasing law enforcement, which means more people out there, which you know.
- [39:00]
D
So I think it would perceive. Perceived by whom would be my first question. By the public and especially by the, the outdoor recreationist out there would be perceived very positively. They, I, we think in many cases they may, they see these events but don't know how to report them. They don't know how to get the word to the officer. They don't even know who the officer or they may even know who the agency is. So there's a huge learning curve just to figure out how to communicate what you saw back to law enforcement. The app that Tony mentioned would, would shortcut all that. It would directly go from the field site to the officer's email inbox that responsible for that area. So you get. It's not real time, but it's close to real time data.
- [39:43]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:44]
D
And they're much better chance of making a case if that happens versus wait till the end of your hunt, a week later, you drive home, then you try to look up who the officer is. Of course, most agencies, you can't find the officer's names and numbers. Yeah.
- [39:58]
C
No, I guess my question was more like obviously the hunting community.
- [40:01]
D
Right.
- [40:02]
C
Which if you're doing everything by the book, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. Right. But there's always. Regardless of if you've done it by the book or you haven't, whether purposely or not, there's always anxiety associated with conservation, law enforcement. Okay, Even me. Like maybe you guys too. But I like if I see a, you know, if I'm duck hunting and I see a game warden, immediately I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm in trouble. Which you're not. If you've got all your ducks in a row. And sometimes you, you obviously do, sometimes you might not. Right. And it's, that's where my question is.
- [40:44]
D
So here, so here's, here's a, A counter question. That's it. Yeah, I agree that feeling. I've had that feeling the very few times I've been checked. But I've come Across many, many more hunters who complain that they've never even seen a game warden. I think on the balance, on the balance they'll accept getting checked when they're legal. And, and I've made the comment that, that you know, with the app you, you may be a, a mountain biker that has it on their, you know, their Onx map or something. They don't know where that animal's post or not, so they file a report. Cause they think it might be. Well, there's never anything bad that's come from an officer checking someone who has legally taken an animal. It's a good PR move. At least the hunter sees that somebody's out there watching over the resources they care about. So I think there's benefits to both cases, either, either the bad actors or checking the good ones from time to time. Because we, we don't, you know, I consistently hear from, from hunters. We don't get, we don't see officers in the field. Well, they're there. But in our study we had one officer that covered her coverage area was 7,000 square miles. How often do you go see her in the field? You know, so, yeah, it's a, it's a tough, it's a challenge. But I, I think the bigger pushback for law enforcement will be at the state House level. It's, it's more. Employ more state employees when they're trying to downsize government in a lot of places it's more law enforcement, which can always be contentious, but it's, but if.
- [42:11]
C
You can show in a financial model that they're self sustaining.
- [42:16]
E
Right.
- [42:16]
C
They're not a drain on the budget of the state, Tony.
- [42:21]
E
Absolutely. I mean that's the whole thing. When we saw the one reason we wanted to go after the dark number in the first place was we thought, okay, if this is a big enough number, you know, we're going to get people's attention. And it was darn sure a big enough number. And we've been. A lot of people worked and I think.
- [42:37]
C
What did you think the dark number was? Maybe also Christianity. But what did you think it was?
- [42:41]
E
You know, I was just as stunned as I was when I found out what the detection rate was under 4%. You know, I thought, are we serious here? And the thing about it is, is John o' Christie went about this as, as he said earlier, very conservatively that $1.4 billion annually is actually a low number.
- [42:58]
D
It could be.
- [42:59]
E
You know, it's, it's higher than that, but it's scientifically sound. We Know it's there. It took us five years to get to that point to find that dark number. But that when it's when this. So if you looked at that per state, Robbie, that's $6.1 million in fines and $22 million.7 million in replacement costs per state per year. When you talk about that type of data in a, you know, in a financially starving state house, you know they're going to say whole, you know, we're, we're passing up the golden goose here. We, we need to do something about this and get this money in our coppers.
- [43:42]
C
Well, the other thing that we haven't talked about is the numbers side, the wildlife numbers side. So if you've got only a 4% detection rate, and let's just use elk in Montana as an example, maybe that's a terrible place to start. But if you're seeing. I'm thinking at it from a tag perspective. Right. A tag chance. Those things are getting more and more hard to get in the West. People are starting to complain. Hey, hey, hey, if, if something is done on the counter, I. E. The poaching, which 96% here wiggle room to change that. Well, you're going to drive revenues that way too, for sure.
- [44:27]
E
Absolutely.
- [44:27]
D
Yep, yep. And, and that that demand once again differs by species. You know, if you're talking about poachers for bighorn sheep or mountain goats, you know, or grizzly bears, that's one thing versus white tail deer. You know, all, all of the biologists out there that manage big game populations typically factor in a poaching ill. An illegal take rate into their models to estimate populations. But you know, and for white tailed deer, in many cases, they're, they're super abundant in most of their, throughout their range. So, you know, it's hard to argue that you're having a population impact or a tag impact for whitetail deer in the Southeast. Because they're over the counter.
- [45:08]
C
Yeah, no, no, in Kentucky.
- [45:10]
D
Shoot all the. Tag all the deer you want, you buy the tags for them.
- [45:13]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I was thinking more like antelope and elk and mule deer and the things.
- [45:17]
D
That are the most prized, more iconic species are. Yes, they're. In some cases, I think they could be driving population impact. The poaching could. Yeah, absolutely.
- [45:28]
C
So fascinating because you think about like all the work that we're doing on habitat, connectivity, migration corridors, and don't get me wrong, it's all great work, but there is this crazy 96% dark number that you actually have no Idea. The. Maybe we have an idea. I, I would argue we don't. On the actual impact on wildlife population numbers.
- [45:56]
D
Yeah.
- [45:56]
C
And as a result of it.
- [45:58]
D
And the other factor that, you know, there's lots of complex factors associated with this, this issue. But the other one is that when we talked about those deterrence, money is one of the lowest forms of deterrent, depending on the situation. But in many cases, for example, we had a case where a person who was a producer of an outdoor show, a hunting show, got caught and it shot one too many. Elk was on camera doing it and was on camera covering it up and was. And with witnesses, and they begged to. They said, you know, we'll pay any amount of money. Tell us how much you want. Don't suspend our license in 50 states because the wildlife violator Compact does that. If you're suspended in one state, you're suspended in every state. But we'll pay any amount of money because their livelihood depended on them producing that show. Well, so money's not a deterrent for them. License loss, license suspension was a deterrent. Felony conviction would have been a deterrent. So for each typology of poacher, there are different deterrents that work better than others.
- [47:03]
C
Here's a very pertinent and relevant question tied to the digital media age marketing commercialization of hunting. What about the idea of heavier fines for those that are in that digital media, social media, TV production space that are, are essentially commercializing wildlife?
- [47:33]
D
Wouldn't, wouldn't pass most state constitutions. You're singling out a particular group because of their occupation or their station in life or whatever. You can't do that. A crime's a crime and everybody should be treated equally. So what you have to do is go, That's.
- [47:49]
C
Well, I, that's why I hate having people who know this on here. Excuse my language. You're supposed to, like, instead of being like this criminologist. I'm, I'm sort of channeling my wife right now. And like, this is criminal law. Ah, John.
- [48:05]
D
Yeah, it's, it's, it's complicated. But, you know, that's the reason we looked at, at, you know, this, you know, the single most effective deterrent felony conviction. Because anybody who's out there hunting or poaching either way is an owner of a firearm, most likely. And when you lose that right, that's a huge blow.
- [48:25]
C
Talk about that. So if you get, if you get firmly convicted, what are the implications for firearm use and firearm ownership?
- [48:32]
D
You lose a number of your rights in The US you lose right down. And possess a firearm, you lose the right to vote. In most states, you can't get that back for certain felony convictions, but the right to participate in elections there. There are a number of things that you lose, but the big one for us is the. The firearm loss. You take the firearm away from the poachers, they have a hard time poaching.
- [48:51]
C
True that. How many states currently have wildlife crime as a felony?
- [48:58]
D
Very few.
- [48:59]
E
Yeah, not enough.
- [49:00]
D
Yeah, very few.
- [49:02]
C
And are they mainly in the big game states, I would assume?
- [49:06]
D
Well, the big game states, where. Where big game are, are where they had the. The big game species that are more limited. So it's mostly western states.
- [49:17]
C
Wow. Well, so in terms of, like, timing of next steps, Tony, you know, you've said, look, you've done all this research, which is amazing, and I love podcasts like this because I'm learning and asking questions and learning at the same time and becoming this expert in criminology, thanks to John. And felony law.
- [49:41]
D
I'm just a dear.
- [49:46]
C
You're married to a criminologist like me. I'm a restoration ecologist married to a horror writer. So she says. You don't have to worry about going missing, Robbie, because I. I'm going to be the one that they look at because I'm searching how to kill people every.
- [50:00]
D
Where they hide the bodies. Yeah, yeah. Inside the medians of interstates, preferably in a water body. She goes. Nobody ever goes in between the two interstates going north and southbound.
- [50:10]
C
Oh, I'm telling my wife that exactly when we get off this podcast. Thank you for that little tidbit. Appreciate that. Done the research. Really at a good spot. Now what, like, what is this, 18 months now? The. This, this brief, Is this going into the legislative caucus now? In January or February? Tony, what's the timeline?
- [50:31]
E
Our goal is January or February. We just, in fact, yesterday I just reread the. The initial brief from our policy people and made some edits, sent it back. They're going to go back to the policy team to make some more tweaks. But, yeah, we want to. We want to get the legislative piece in action this, this legislative session in terms of making hunters aware, you know, people like you, Robbie, are helping us out a bunch on that front. You know, just getting the word out to the listeners so that as we go into the fall season, you know, and these guys are out in the field, they're aware of. Maybe I ought to be a little bit more observant about what the heck's going on around me. And so that's a huge help. So that goes to that one point I mentioned about getting the hunters aware that this is a problem and getting them to be help out our law enforcement people by being eyes and ear. So that's already in play, thanks to folks like you. We have got to figure out the judicial piece yet. I mean, we have a few concepts, like I said, we have continuing education curriculum, which we do have people that could do that. We're in initial conversations with those people. That probably is not going to happen for a while because any time you develop curriculum, it takes time. It has to go through approval processes and, you know, depending on how it's applied with the university systems, you know, it, it, it, it depends. But, but I'll tell you, the public awareness piece and the legislative piece go be, are, are, are we're going to get that, that done here. We're in the process of moving forward with those pieces of it.
- [52:07]
C
And the app, the app sounds great. Obviously apps are expensive.
- [52:13]
D
We're working on that.
- [52:15]
C
Yeah. Okay.
- [52:16]
E
We've applied for a grant to get, to help us get the money to develop an app.
- [52:21]
C
Amazing.
- [52:23]
D
Amazing.
- [52:24]
C
Well, please let us know how else we can do it. I can definitely, we definitely would love to talk about it more. We'll definitely do a talking head video about the things that I had no idea about.
- [52:34]
D
John, believe it or not, talking about it is one of the main things we can do and to vilify the people who commit these acts. Tony, you know, there's nothing more motivating than, you know, the opinion of your friends and family and neighbors. And if, and if we, if we turn, and I'll use an extreme example, but, you know, if you're, if you commit a sex crime, you go on a sex offender registry and it's public and you can look on our website and see where they live, you know, you know, what house they live in and nobody wants to live next to them. How do we, how do we get that mentality integrated into illegal take of wildlife? I don't want to live next to a known convicted poacher. Yeah, I'm not going to tolerate them in, you know, around me. I'm not going to tolerate them in places where I frequent. And, and we got to get people, we got to get the public with that same sort of a mentality.
- [53:24]
C
Yeah, that's funny. I was on a big WhatsApp group of scientists and that comes up a lot on like hunters calling out other quote unquote hunters or poachers. And the thing that came up was the wolf situation with the snowmobile in Wyoming. And I said, no, we came out against it. They're like, we didn't see it. And I went in and I said. I said, here's the press release. Like, there were 25 organizations, 25 companies. They all signed off and said, this isn't acceptable. This isn't us. Yep. So we need to do more of it. You know, and the. Here's the tricky thing about. Because obviously I live and breathe this stuff. The tricky thing is saying something without knowing everything. Because if you don't know everything and you say something and something, you know, potentially comes back and bites you in the ass. And once it's on out, it's out, right?
- [54:19]
E
Well, you know, Robbie, that's one reason it took five years to get this research done. I mean, we went back and combed through those numbers and combed through those numbers and combed through those interviews, you know, because we knew, once we saw that initial dark number, we knew that this could go one of two ways. You know, this could be like it is today.
- [54:39]
C
Right?
- [54:39]
E
We're talking about a problem, and. And we're talking about how to solve that problem. And, And. But, you know, the other thing it could have done if we hadn't had the science rock solid to back us, you know, it could have gone the other way. It could say, well, you know, look at all these hunters, their cost in conservation. 1.4 billion a year. I mean, you're. You're exactly right.
- [55:00]
C
Very true, very true.
- [55:03]
D
One of the things we. We think we know from the study, or we. We assume, and I think there's some. There'll be some data to back it up, is that most of the people that commit these acts in many cases have at least they have purchased licenses or they're a license holder. Now, they might have the right tag, they might have the license at that time. But think about it. To go in the field, even with the intent to poach your reason for be, you gotta have a reason to be there, usually. So if you've got a hunting license in your pocket, you're hunting coyotes. Until an elk steps out. If you have no hunting license and you're, you know, out there tromping around and camouflage with your rifle on your shoulder, an officer, he's gonna check you. He's gonna. If he sees you, he's gonna check you and wonder why you're there. But if you got a hunting license, it says you can hunt small game or hunt varmints. Until you pull the trigger, you've not broken a law. Oh, yeah. So the, the, the, you know, we could. Hunters could have gotten painted in a bad light with this, but I think we did our due diligence. I don't think there's a research paper. I pulled this research paper on poaching in the US That I don't have in my file cabinet right now today. If there is, it's so dang obscure that we just couldn't find it because we spent the better part of a year just finding research papers.
- [56:12]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll definitely talk about it more when the brief comes out, Tony. Please feel free to share it with us. We'll talk about it again on a roundup podcast between myself and Ashley, the policy director. And again, just keep us in the loop of anything that comes from it. If something comes up, like, you know, maybe next year, like the May time frame, if one of the, you know what, you have a victory at a state level, like we, we, we managed to get it to a felony level. Let's have you back on. Let's talk about it.
- [56:45]
E
Okay. We'd be happy to give you guys an update.
- [56:49]
C
Appreciate you guys. I appreciate you allowing me to ask all the tough questions, John. Not a problem. And you're having all the answers and sometimes just letting me, you know, ask a question and then answer it myself and realize that I don't need to answer that. Ask that question. So I appreciate you guys enjoyed it.
- [57:09]
E
Thank you for having me the opportunity, Robbie. Appreciate it.
- [57:13]
C
Well, that's it for today. I appreciate you listening. As always, leave a review, share it with your friends, and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth around hunting.
- [57:32]
F
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