Ep. 643: Should Yellowstone's Buffalo Roam Free?

Summary

Summary of The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 643: Should Yellowstone's Buffalo Roam Free?

Host and Guest Introduction

In episode 643 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steven Rinella delves into the complex and contentious issue of wild bison management in Yellowstone National Park. Joining him is Rick Wallen, the former senior bison biologist at Yellowstone who dedicated 17 years to monitoring and conserving the park's buffalo population. Their conversation navigates the intersection of wildlife conservation, ranching interests, and cultural hunting practices.

History of Yellowstone Bison Restoration

Rick Wallen provides a comprehensive overview of the historical decline and subsequent restoration of the bison population in Yellowstone. He recounts how, at the turn of the 20th century, Yellowstone's bison numbers dwindled to mere dozens due to overhunting and habitat loss. In a significant conservation effort, Buffalo Jones, a renowned rancher, was enlisted to spearhead the restoration by introducing a small herd from Texas and the Flathead Valley. Wallen states:

“Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population. [10:40]”

The Brucellosis Challenge

A central theme of the discussion is the impact of brucellosis, a bacterial infection, on bison and its repercussions for ranchers. Brucellosis can cause cattle to abort pregnancies, posing a significant threat to the livestock industry. Wallen explains the origins of the disease and its management:

“Brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa... [66:24]”

He further elaborates on how initial assumptions incorrectly placed bison as the primary vectors of the disease, leading to stringent management practices that confined bison within Yellowstone’s boundaries to protect cattle outside the park.

Hunting and Wildlife Management

The conversation shifts to the role of hunting in managing bison populations and addressing brucellosis. Wallen discusses how regulated hunting has been used as a tool to control bison numbers and prevent disease transmission. He highlights the delicate balance between conservation efforts and the economic interests of ranchers:

“Hunting is also a cultural activity... it's a way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your family were descendants of the long hunters... [21:12]”

Wallen emphasizes the importance of maintaining healthy hunter populations to ensure effective advocacy for bison conservation.

Cultural Significance and Tribal Rights

Wallen touches upon the cultural importance of bison to Native American tribes, noting that many tribes view the buffalo as integral to their heritage and traditions. He advocates for supporting tribal hunting rights as a means to both honor cultural practices and manage bison populations sustainably.

“Tribal members... have a lot of public buy-in because the hunts are cool... [123:14]”

Comparisons to Other Regions

Drawing parallels with other regions, Wallen references the successful establishment of wild bison herds in Alaska and the American Prairie Reserve. He contrasts these with the challenges faced in Yellowstone, where brucellosis and rancher opposition complicate bison management.

“Alaska now has five herds... [121:39]”

Potential Solutions and Future of Bison Management

In exploring solutions, Wallen suggests adopting models that balance conservation with ranching interests. He proposes creating designated conservation areas where bison can roam freely without impinging on cattle ranching operations. Additionally, he advocates for collaborative efforts between wildlife managers, ranchers, and hunters to develop sustainable management practices.

“There's a way to preserve wild bison on public lands... we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and find a solution... [119:20]”

Wallen also highlights the necessity of increased funding and support for conflict resolution teams to manage the interactions between bison and human activities effectively.

Conclusion

Episode 643 of The MeatEater Podcast offers an insightful exploration of the multifaceted issues surrounding Yellowstone's bison population. Through Rick Wallen's expertise and personal experiences, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the historical context, scientific challenges, and cultural dynamics that influence bison conservation efforts. The episode underscores the need for innovative, collaborative approaches to ensure the coexistence of wild bison, ranchers, and hunters in the Yellowstone ecosystem.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Rick Wallen on Buffalo Jones’ Restoration Efforts:

  “Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population. [10:40]”

• Rick Wallen on Brucellosis Origins:

  “Brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa... [66:24]”

• Rick Wallen on Cultural Significance of Hunting:

  “Tribal members... have a lot of public buy-in because the hunts are cool... [123:14]”

• Rick Wallen on Collaborative Solutions:

  “There's a way to preserve wild bison on public lands... we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and find a solution... [119:20]”

Final Thoughts

This episode is a must-listen for wildlife enthusiasts, hunters, and conservationists seeking to understand the intricate balance required to manage Yellowstone’s bison population effectively. Rick Wallen's insights shed light on the historical challenges and present-day efforts to ensure that wild bison continue to roam the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem sustainably.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

This show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks? Trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady, dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started and make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 five star reviews on the App Store go to get.stash.commee eater to see how you can receive $25 toward your first stock purchase when you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com meater paid non client endorsement.

[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Review Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions.

[Chili Palmer]

I'm sure a lot of you guys remember the old ceremonial hunting tradition of eating the heart out of the first animal you kill. Meat from those organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet. You can get those same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil. Find out more at heartandsoil. Co. And remember, use code me eater for 10% off your purchase. There's nothing like snook hook sets at dawn or catching a tarpon in the moonlight. Find your next fishing trip made easy on fishingbooker.com and experience the magic of the Sunshine State or any other destination on your fishing bucket list. Book a blue water adventure in search of sailfish or go snapper fishing with the kids. With over 6,000 captains and trips to choose from, planning your next one just got a whole lot easier. Download the Fishing Booker app on the Google Play or App Store or visit them [e-mail] to book your trip today. This is the Me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless, we hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com f I r s t l I t.

[Rick Wallen]

E.Com.

[Chili Palmer]

Before I even introduce today's guest, I'm just going to get something awkward out of the way. Cuz people might be able to feel the awkwardness in the room between me and Chili.

[Rick Wallen]

Cut it with a knife.

[Chili Palmer]

I just had to.

[Steve Rinella]

It wasn't awkward till you decided.

[Rick Wallen]

I didn't even know.

[Chili Palmer]

I just had to do an investigation on Chili. I had to subpoena his ONX record.

[Rick Wallen]

What?

[Chili Palmer]

Had to subpoena? No, you didn't subpoena nothing. I just gave it to you.

[Rick Wallen]

He could have subpoenaed you.

[Chili Palmer]

I subpoenaed his onx track. I was talking about a spot where I took Chili and Chili's like, oh, you know, a little over west of there.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm wait. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

And get to look. And he's like. He thought that. He thought that. He thinks if you take him to a spot, what, what becomes private is the route to get there, not the spot.

[Steve Rinella]

That's not true at all.

[Rick Wallen]

That is not what I said.

[Chili Palmer]

Meaning if there's a point on a map and you're like, well, we came in from the east. Chili be like, okay, so if I come back with my buddies, I'll just make sure to go there from the west. But my investigation found that he was sort of correct. He was sort of in the. Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

But then sort of not.

[Chili Palmer]

Unless he. Unless he said, at this point, I need to turn my tracker off if I had to.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. If I ever show this to Steve.

[Chili Palmer]

I need to pause this tracker for a minute. And then went about his day and then clicked it back on. There's. That's all. Just want to people be quiet if they can. They can feel at home. They might be able to feel the tension.

[Rick Wallen]

Chili, change the body language. Look in the camera, make eye contact. Because right now you're.

[Chili Palmer]

You're giving off a very guilty air about you.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. Cuz I'm on Steve's show.

[Chili Palmer]

He's ridiculing.

[Rick Wallen]

Look the man in the eyes.

[Steve Rinella]

I. I gave you some intel.

[Chili Palmer]

You did. I appreciate that. Intel. Yeah, but you got it through crooked means.

[Steve Rinella]

That's not.

[Rick Wallen]

No, that's subjective yourself.

[Steve Rinella]

Chili, I. So the intel is you were telling.

[Rick Wallen]

Steve about the deer that's in.

[Chili Palmer]

He was telling about some stuff from. No, he was telling me about some stuff that I'd never looked at.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh.

[Chili Palmer]

So that's why I'm not mad because now I'm glad that he Told me that.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, okay.

[Chili Palmer]

And what I might do is make you a little line, like, don't cross this line.

[Rick Wallen]

Don't cross.

[Steve Rinella]

Don't. You're going to make me a line on public land.

[Rick Wallen]

Which I can't.

[Steve Rinella]

Can't cross.

[Chili Palmer]

I'm not getting any. I'm not getting any, like, righteous indignation. I'm getting nothing from Cal. I'm watching Cal to see if he's got an opinion. They're about as high as they go.

[Steve Rinella]

I haven't heard enough from Chile to understand what the whole situation is. I mean, I'll tell you right now, I'm thinking about going into a spot for Thanksgiving that I know some people hunted in almost a decade ago and they haven't walked in there. And I was talking about that with a buddy of mine and he's like, well, let's just not bring that up.

[Chili Palmer]

I was thinking about explaining this. The other day I took my boy and this is gonna be a little. I took my boy and his buddy from high school to Seth's spot and we gave my boy's buddy a real talking to about it. Oh, good. Well, he respects.

[Rick Wallen]

Is this the first you're finding out about this?

[Chili Palmer]

No. He knows.

[Rick Wallen]

No, no.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, we gave him a real talking to and I almost went into. I was almost gonna tell him, like an added detail saying the situation you is, this might prevent you from discovering something in the future that you just know about on your own. So when you do that, you're sort of saying, well, I would have found out about that anyway, but now I can't.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, I appreciate it. When we hunted with Cal's buddy a couple weeks ago, I met him maybe five minutes prior to him just looking me in the eyes and saying, I better not catch you in any of these places ever again without you asking first.

[Chili Palmer]

I just get it out there anyway. I was given some very frank. I was given some very, very good Intel 11 years ago to the 10 year point. 11 years ago. And I would not dare do that unless I knew that those guys were dead.

[Rick Wallen]

So is all of this on public land? Oh, interesting.

[Steve Rinella]

Thank you very. But it's not like it's a whole thing.

[Rick Wallen]

Okay?

[Chili Palmer]

It's a whole thing. I do feel. I do feel a little guilty.

[Steve Rinella]

But one, we weren't hunting the same.

[Chili Palmer]

Drainage and two, you were looking over into my zone. You get on any top, you can see for miles on any ridgeline. Some dude at home's like, but.

[Rick Wallen]

And also, it's not like I brought.

[Steve Rinella]

More people in there. It's not like I brought anyone in there.

[Chili Palmer]

No, you brought the guy that I brought in there.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

So it's like twice as bad. How was that? Cuz you both are morally. You both are morally bankrupt. Or it could be half as bad.

[Rick Wallen]

Cuz they're both splitting. The sin.

[Chili Palmer]

They're split. The sin is divided amongst the two of us. They're like, if two of us go, it's like we're each being a little bad.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. Instead of one whole. Okay, so. So that brings into question whether onyx should post where all of the extremely high density hunting locations are to help people out. Because there are locations all around the national park where you'd be shocked at how many people show up to the same spot every day, you know, and hunt sometimes 50 yards from each other.

[Chili Palmer]

Outside the park.

[Rick Wallen]

Outside the park.

[Chili Palmer]

I saw some of that the other day.

[Rick Wallen]

And that's been going on for over 100 years. Yeah, because as they expanded the park, they just move that, you know, that firing line out to the new boundary.

[Steve Rinella]

So it's funny that you bring that up because a friend of mine was like, hey, I can't go in there. But he's like, I got a spot you should go check out.

[Chili Palmer]

And if someone talks to you. You never heard of me, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly. And I looked at it on the map and I was like, that looks like a spot where you go in and you're going to be within 100 yards of 10 other dudes on the same ridge. Because I'm like, I'm looking at it on the map.

[Chili Palmer]

One of them secret spots.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. The only place to go is right here. And he's like, that's where those guys killed those bulls. Weird.

[Chili Palmer]

A moment ago you heard the voice of today's special guest, Rick Wallen. Former. Former. That's the kind we like. Former Yellowstone national park senior bison biologist who did the role for 17 years of monitoring. Can we say buffalo? Yes. You cool with that? You don't correct people in the park.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[Chili Palmer]

Who perform that role for 17 years. And this is where, I mean, oftentimes on this show we like to explore where we like to explore what I will call what I tend to call wildlife politics.

[Rick Wallen]

Very cool.

[Chili Palmer]

Meaning where wildlife issues take on almost political tonality. Where wildlife issues become a partisan issue or wildlife issues become something to fight about.

[Rick Wallen]

Or you get billboards about wildlife issues.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, wildlife politics. There's like wildlife management and then wildlife management's very close cousin. That's not even the right analogy.

[Rick Wallen]

It's like, wildlife management is really driven by politics, and it's been that way for decades.

[Chili Palmer]

There you go.

[Rick Wallen]

And conservation, on the other hand, is a little less partisan because you see people very supportive of conservation of wildlife.

[Chili Palmer]

They like the idea. They like the idea of it.

[Rick Wallen]

They like the idea of it. They may not like the methods to get there.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. I brought up on that point, I brought up a bunch about, in observations over the years, is there's not a politician in America who would not like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Chili Palmer]

And they are probably not aware of how controversial the actions that he took were, and that if someone took those actions today, they would call them a communist and they would threaten them and they would have to have security people outside of their home.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

Theodore Roosevelt did what he did then, today.

[Rick Wallen]

Yep.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

And then, you know, during my time trying to stand up for wild bison and Yellowstone and allowing them to, you know, move across public land, we talked about that often, whether after particular public meetings, could we be seen going to the bar for a beer? Because we were a little nervous about, you know, the heated discussions that go on in those. Those debates about what you can and can't do to preserve wild bison on public land.

[Chili Palmer]

Speaking of heated discussions, you're going to have real problem with Chili.

[Rick Wallen]

Cool.

[Chili Palmer]

Not only is he in trouble for what this now, but I'm just curious. I want to set the tone. Okay, Chili. So when you hear that, Chili and Seth, thank you. Are our. And have current and former tag holders for the gardener hunt. Oh, do you look at them and think, you sons of. Or do you think, like, oh, that's cool.

[Rick Wallen]

You know, hunting has been a tool for wildlife management for 100 years. And when we debated about, you know, opening up, you know, bison hunting on the north boundary, we thought that hunting was going to be a really good thing for, you know, allowing the animals to go a little bit farther and wider than just the park boundary.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

And that we'd get a great deal of support by the hunters to come out and, you know, and argue with the landowners, argue with the state game agency to come up with creative ways to manage the hunt so that they could expand the population boundaries or the distribution of the animals so that there could be hunting, like what I heard you guys talk about 10 minutes ago on a larger landscape. And it seems like it's much more like competitive hunting to see who can be the first one to shoot the first one that steps across the park boundary. And the hunting that I envisioned back in 2009. When we were very supportive of hunting wild bison. Never exist. Never came about.

[Chili Palmer]

Understood. So we're going to. We're going to get into that. That's the story I want to get into. And I don't mean to cut you off. We got to hit on a couple of quick bits of listener feedback. But that's the story I'd like to mainly dive into with you. Is that. That. That.

[Rick Wallen]

That grand.

[Chili Palmer]

That grand bargain. Did not.

[Rick Wallen]

Did it never have panned out as yet.

[Steve Rinella]

It would have been a great clip right there.

[Chili Palmer]

It's not Chili's fault.

[Steve Rinella]

A little heavier editing on Phil's part. Like a murder podcast.

[Chili Palmer]

We had. We had the kids on that. We had a bunch of kids on the show recently. And we did a podcast called Our girls are here to kick your ass. And my. My daughter Yanni's daughters. Pottery Pat's daughter. Who else? We have. That was it for daughters.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

And we were laughing about my daughter. One time we were walking through the woods, squirrel hunting. I hear behind me. Go. Because she'd eaten a piece of deer thinking it was some kind of chocolate. This guy wrote in. He had a hell of a time with his kid. He said he had a kid from 12 months to 3 who wouldn't stop picking up to eat elk poop. Like, they became, like, a specialist.

[Rick Wallen]

I had a dog like that.

[Chili Palmer]

But he said that nothing bad ever happened to the kid.

[Rick Wallen]

It said he specifically selected for elk.

[Chili Palmer]

Nothing bad ever happened. So there you have it. Oh, I keep saying he. Anna Anderson. Oh, I guess she wrote her name down.

[Rick Wallen]

Yep. But the kid was a.

[Chili Palmer]

The kid was a he. Yeah. The. The person that wrote in was his mother. And he. This kid liked liver. Big baby, real healthy. No nutritional deficiencies. Weaned on wild game like liver, and had a taste for elk. We should offer that guy a job. Yeah. Especially after the problems we had with Max earlier today down here.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

He wants Max's job. Brutal. Nobody can do anything right around here today. This. This is. Here's a really surprise. I had. This is like. I kind of don't understand how this. Maybe. Maybe Cal knows more about sort of like the. The evolution of this. But I know Cal's reported on it, that Australia is south. Okay. South Australia is just flat out banning archery hunting. Private, public, whatever, like, banning archery hunting. And someone's asking the question is not so much like, what do you do about something like this? And I have, like, the. How the wheels of law turn in Australia. I have zero idea. But he was saying I had made A comment one time when we were talking about the, the proposition 127 in, in Colorado and we were talking to some houndsmen who would have been affected. Proposition 127, to remind folks for the 8,000th time, was a push from a push to ban bobcat and lion hunting in Colorado. It was that that proposition was, was defeated. After, after it was defeated, we had interviewed a houndsman and we had asked like, what would you really have done if it. After your whole life spent with this discipline, what would you have really done if it became illegal? And he said how, he commented, you know, half joking that a law like that is a good way to make an honest man dishonest. And this person's bringing up like, if something like this happens, what is your take on how, like how would you react to it? Sort of meaning would you just bow hunt Anyway, currently, prior to this ban, here's how fine tuned it was. Bow hunting was allowed on private property for non native species, of which they have a great quantity in Australia. Non native species, rabbits, hares, foxes, goats, deer, red deer. However, this upcoming ban, bowhunting will be illegal.

[Rick Wallen]

It seems.

[Chili Palmer]

So. You know, I remember a move, remember we had that guy who's that kind of. He's kind of a controversial figure in the bra. If you can be controversial in the broadhead world, he is Dr. Ed.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, Dr. Ed Ashby.

[Chili Palmer]

Do you remember when there was a country in Africa that did not allow bow hunting and he was doing a bunch of efficacy.

[Rick Wallen]

The area I think he was in was Kwazulu Natalie, if that makes sense.

[Chili Palmer]

And they were doing these efficacy programs to bring in bow hunting. Right now this is the first example I've heard of. I'm familiar with people bringing in archery seasons. This is the first example I've heard of, of eliminating bow hunting because it's especially funny because so many people would be like, well, that's ethical.

[Rick Wallen]

Eliminating bow hunting for non native species on private land. Like it was already a very narrow.

[Steve Rinella]

Opportunity and that's right. So like the context does matter. I mean, I. My perspective on this is, is it's just clearly another step in eliminating hunting altogether. But you know, it's like you're like, oh, really? The animal welfare people who always advocate for the elimination of hunting are all of a sudden concerned about ethical hunting. That's right. It's like that's not really what they're concerned about, but their argument is like, well, is hunting a wildlife management tool? If so, let's treat it as an effective, efficient wildlife management Tool. And you're in a country where you can hire, you know, people who professionally eradicate game at night using all sorts of manners and means. But you know, rifles with suppressors and taking only headshots. And it's like, well, if you want to eliminate the game or manage the game, do it in the most efficient way possible.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and, or the most humane way possible, which is, you know, I think we've discussed that a gajillion times. Just a asinine word to use on things like this, in my opinion.

[Chili Palmer]

So, so that, that's the argument is there's a, like the argument would coming from the people that want to see it gone and be like, we agree that there's some control that needs to occur with non natives, but we'd like to eliminate any sort of like sporting flavor and do it in a more systematic, procedural fashion with trained professionals.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And so like in this guy's example, he's like, I have small acreage property that I have permission to hunt, but firing a high caliber rifle would be displeasing to the neighbors. Right. And it'd be like, well, use a smaller caliber rifle with subsonic ammunition and shoot them in the, in the ear. Right. Problem solved. Why do you need bow hunting? And the argument would go on and on. Right?

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

So hunting is also a cultural activity that people have an opportunity to engage in in a manner that would be similar to our ancestors. And so it's, it's kind of both a management tool for game agencies to manage abundance and distribution. But from society's perspective, it's a way to engage in a cultural activity that maybe your family were descendants of the long hunters or you know, someone like that, so that, you know, it's a pride kind of a thing.

[Chili Palmer]

I think that, that, that perspective, I've never even been to Australia, but we get a lot of emails from Australia and that perspective about hunting seems to be absent from discussions in Australia.

[Rick Wallen]

That's what I hear.

[Chili Palmer]

It's like you, you see a lot of things about, in Australia is about, it's like issues of, a lot of the conversations are like issues of control, controlling non natives. Controlling non natives and even like controversial things like if kangaroos are shot. You see, there's, I hesitate to use example because there, there's examples like this in the US but an example like if you're shooting kangaroos for depredation, you can, you, you can't utilize any resource from the kangaroo, but we have versions of that. Meaning if you kill a bear for getting in your garage out of season. You don't, that's not your bear. Like, you don't send it off to the taxidermist. It becomes the property of the state.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Chili Palmer]

So, so we have, you know, we have versions of that. But that, that sentiment seems to be more widespread and, and more kind of leading the discussion in Australia than perhaps here. And there's like, doesn't seem to be a lot of the hunters we hear from express a lack of any kind of acknowledgment of, of the culture of hunting and with wildlife managers and feral managers in Australia.

[Steve Rinella]

But so that we should answer the question, like what? Because it's kind of an advocacy question, right? It's like, how do you stick up for yourself if you want to maintain bow hunting in the state or region that they're in? One super interesting case is the waterfowl. Like maintaining a waterfowl season was recently under attack in Australia and there weren't just on paper, there were not enough waterfowl hunters to really effectively advocate for themselves. Right. It's like what we talk about here in America is like, well, we need to maintain healthy hunter populations if we're going to maintain hunting, because if we dip below a certain set of percentage points, like, it's just not going to be valuable enough to listen to hunters in a political sense. And in Australia they were, they were in a very real sense going to lose their, their ability to waterfowl hunt. And they were able to. And again, hunters, firearm owners were not a large enough political group on their own to effectively advocate for themselves. But they were able to get support from the labor unions and trade unions because a large percentage of the labor and trade folks were younger disposable income like to go out and do stuff outside.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh, so they found representation from, from.

[Steve Rinella]

A broader, big enough political group where people were like, oh wait, all the electricians and plumbers and those guys?

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, there aren't many, but a lot of them are here. Yeah, there aren't many, but I'm friends with a lot of them.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. This show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started and make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 five star reviews on the App Store. Go to get.stash.commee eater to see how you can receive $25 toward your first stock purchase when you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com meater paid non client endorsement.

[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. View Important [e-mail] Meater offer a subject to terms and conditions Now a lot.

[Chili Palmer]

Of you guys are familiar with the old hunting tradition of eating, you know, some organ, the heart or a chunk of liver off the first animal you kill. I had that when I was a little kid and it was a big deal. Organ meats were always prized by frontier people who knew the importance of getting a lot of different minerals and nutrients. And as often is the case, those guys were onto something because organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet and you can get the same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil made exclusively from regeneratively raised, grass fed and finished cattle heart and soils. Unique freeze drying process means all those important nutrients are trapped in, ensuring you experience every one of the benefits of nature's superfood in a clean, convenient taste free capsule. Find out more at heartandsoil.co and make sure to use Code me Eater for 10 off your purchase. That's heartandsoil co. Use the Code Me Eater. Hey guys, earlier this year we launched Meat Eater Kids Podcast and we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were gonna make more. And you did. And we did. And we're dropping a bunch. New five new Meat E Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again, it's a kid's show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to Kids Focused Conservation Organization. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back, round two, Meat Eater Kids.

[Steve Rinella]

Find Meat Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chili Palmer]

I remember that was one of the first times I had really seen it, RT or not, that in. In the state of Washington was one of the first times I've seen the lack of participation get weaponized. And it was around some trapping bands and they were just making a lot of noise about, well, look how few people do it, you know. And I'd never seen someone like actually use that as the argument to not be able to do it, meaning no one's really doing it, so why should you be allowed to do it? It feels that important. People would be doing it and it'd be like, so you'd be more comfortable with it if there's a lot of people doing it.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

Here's a story out of Mississippi, and this one's. This one's interesting because you see this so many times in different ways. I remember they did. Has to do with mislabeling fish in restaurants. And I remember some years ago, quite a few years ago, this piece came out that they went and they went and sampled red snapper. Some organization sampled red snapper. And it was. I'm not exaggerating, I think it was 78 of red snapper. Wasn't red snapper because it's mangrove snapper. It's. I don't know, name a bunch of snappers.

[Steve Rinella]

Kubera. That's a cool one.

[Chili Palmer]

Sure. Like a bunch of snappers.

[Rick Wallen]

Non red snappers.

[Chili Palmer]

You can't tell them apart. I mean, like, like I'm saying if I made you like a fried up some snapper, and I had a. A blue line, a mangrove, a mutton right on down the line and a red snapper. And I said like, okay, sort them all out by taste. That's a tough task to do. So I think that all these different snappers in the marketplace, at some point, someone was just being like, yeah, it's red, red snapper. It's all red snapper. Here's an egregious example of mislabeling, and this ain't even close. Mary Mahoney's old French house in Biloxi, Mississippi, been in business since 1962. And a building that dates to 1737 was passing tilapia as grouper. Come on, that's like deer as deer meat. I've eaten a lot tilapia, not a lot. I've eaten enough to know That's a.

[Rick Wallen]

Good.

[Chili Palmer]

Five years of probation in order to pay $1.5 million in fines.

[Rick Wallen]

They got whopped, so that's deserving.

[Chili Palmer]

Geez. So what they came after, they. Okay, they had a criminal fine of what? Makes sense. So you go like, well, how do you arrive at that number? A criminal fine of only 100. Not only a criminal fine of 150,000 bucks, but what they came after him about is like, I guess like a cost discrepancy thing. A forfeiture of. Forfeiture. That's a hard word to say.

[Rick Wallen]

Forfeiture.

[Chili Palmer]

Forfeiture of $1.3 million for fraudulent sales. So not even fine, but basically saying you have been bilking people out of.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

You know, buying this for like $0.70 a pound or whatever the hell tilapia goes for when buying groupers, probably, I'm guessing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So I wonder if on the menu, you know, it said like, market price. You know how those seafood restaurants do that.

[Rick Wallen]

I'm really curious how this got started. If it was a disgruntled employee or a patron with a really refined palate.

[Chili Palmer]

It's just like, I don't wanna get anybody in trouble. One time we were in a very remote Alaska town that is not on the road system, and we were stuck at an airstrip. And there's like a little place you could stay and eat there. And like, a lot of nights they don't have any customers. And I remember he had. It was chicken Alfredo. He's like, I'm have chicken Alfredo. And we all sat down here to eat. Like, that ain't chicken. Like, I've eaten enough spruce grouse. No spruce grouse. Not see one. But I. I appreciated that.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I mean, we. We just. Right before flying out of Wichita, Kansas two days ago, well, Peter Kung and I were at a restaurant and Mexican restaurant, and they had skirt steak on the menu. And I was like, skirt steak, awesome. And the guy's like, how do you want that cooked? And I was like, well, there's only one way to cook a diaphragm. And he's like, medium rare is how most people get it. And I was like, well, that's. I'm like, what cut is it? And he's like, well, it comes back here off the end of the. I'm like, oh, that's a flank steak. I'm like, okay, sounds good.

[Chili Palmer]

So a little more color on this. 6. They did it for six years. They sold 58, 750 pounds of tilapia imported from Africa, India and South America at what they're calling premium. At premium prices. Geez, there's another article I was going to get into, but I'm not going to get into. But the long and short of it is it's out of India, northern India. So from the. From. From far away, not Indiana. For you people that just heard Indiana India Wildlife, this is a thorny one. And you could picture this pissing people off in America. Wildlife researchers in India who are looking at relations with, like, Asian elephants, Asiatic tigers. Is there any other kind of tiger? Tigers have trail cams out. And part of the purpose of the trail cams is to see how their women do a lot of gathering in this community. In India, women spend a lot of time gathering natural resources in the wild. So the camera program is meant to monitor not just predator prey relations, but to monitor how area women use resources. And the women are very intimidated and don't like it and have changed a lot of their habits. Like, they traditionally sing while they're gathering resources because there's a risk of predation from tigers. They traditionally sing, but women reporting that they don't feel comfortable doing that now because they have to be out doing their resource extraction on camera. And it's changed their.

[Rick Wallen]

I don't like singing on camera either.

[Chili Palmer]

It's. It's changed their desire to be out. It's changed. It's impacted how long they like to be in the woods, what they do in the woods. And they're reporting that, like the surveillance. And they're like, well, it's important for us to understand how people utilize the resources picture in the US if they said we're gonna. We want. We're curious how hunter. What hunters are doing. So we're gonna go and put out tons of trail cameras to watch how hunters are going about their business.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I mean, that's already changed a lot of. I'm always looking for cameras. There's so many stinking cameras around these days.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, I sneak around, I always catch them, and I, like, go around back.

[Rick Wallen]

You know, I probably peed in front of trail.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, I did that a couple weeks ago. Pointed right at me. Everyone's. Yeah, that's part of this article, surveillance. And they put it up online. They caught a woman. They caught one of these women peeing in the woods, and it wound up on WhatsApp.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, no. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

And humiliated her.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. When we were hunting Phelps and I and Rick Smith and Max, when we were filming in Washington last year, we all stopped. And you know how one guy starts peeing and everyone. It's a good time to pee too, and look around and. Yeah, Trail camera right there. Got all of us. I don't think that's wound up online.

[Rick Wallen]

Maybe the next calendar.

[Chili Palmer]

We were on a meteor shoot one time. I think it was Florida. And I get a message on Instagram.

[Rick Wallen]

I see you guys are hunting y area. What?

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. Yeah. He. He. Because he had a cellular camera and he's like, look, it's Steve.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

Recognize the.

[Rick Wallen]

And put it on. He just.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. Mess.

[Rick Wallen]

I don't.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't think he put it online. Well, maybe he did, but if I could just add like a blanket regulation there would any sort of remote roadless wilderness designation, all of that come hunting season would just get up like a blanket dropped over the top of it. With zero cell phone reception for hunting season.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. I saw they're trying to take a bunch of federal money recently. You'll appreciate this. Our guest here to increase cell phone service in national parks. Whatever.

[Rick Wallen]

I believe on that, Rick, that means we're getting a different kind of visitor to national parks.

[Chili Palmer]

And the kind that wants to build Check.

[Rick Wallen]

Exactly. The kind that doesn't really want to go there for the resources. They want to be able to take pictures and send them to someone to say, look where I'm at. I'm at this location and I found this animal things of that nature.

[Chili Palmer]

Got it.

[Rick Wallen]

I mean, they've been doing foolish things like that for a decade or more, trying to get as close as they could to the elk with the large antler and do the selfie and then they get butted in the rear from the antler kind of a thing. So what.

[Chili Palmer]

What drew you to working at the park? Like, what was your professional path to land. To land at Yellowstone National Park?

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, you know, that's a very good question. I should have thought about that and knew you might ask that, but I think it was more just fate than anything else. I grew up in Colorado. I moved to Jackson Hole in the early 1980s. The Be A Trail hand on the trail crew because I love to be out in the wilderness. And I started to see that my undergraduate degree in biology wasn't quite enough and I needed to find a way to go to graduate school. And I picked U of M and Montana State to look for graduate school projects. And I landed here at MSU studying Harlequin ducks.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh, really?

[Rick Wallen]

I did. I did. It was a beautiful project. My professor wanted me to study rabbits at the national engineering lab in Idaho. And he said, no, I'm going to do my own project. I'm going to make this as hard as possible. And I'M going to do something cool in the wilderness. And he helped me raise money, and I just fell in love with the national parks by, you know, as a trail hand and then decided that ecology was sort of my calling because I loved nature. And I went to graduate school in fish and wildlife management here. My first job was back at Grand Teton as a biologist at Grand Teton. And I did a big circle around the national parks and ended up back in Yellowstone. And I think it was fate as well. I came to do a backpack trip from the south end of Yellowstone Lake to the Buffalo Valley on Togaty Pass. Big wilderness, the most remote places in the. In the country. And I stumbled into a friend of mine that told me, pretty soon we're going to be hiring a biologist to do bison work around here. You should apply. And so I kept in touch and applied, and by golly, I got the job. So I knew what I was getting into.

[Chili Palmer]

Because you knew it'd be hot.

[Rick Wallen]

I knew it'd be hot because as a graduate student here in the mid-80s, there was animals starting to leave the park. They were being harvested by fish, Wildlife and Parks, auctioned off at the Fishwell park regional office around here. It was big business, big news all over the place. And so I've been. I followed it in newspapers most of my career. And I thought, oh, you know, I want to be somewhere where biology is interesting. And, boy, did I fall into an interesting spot at Yellowstone trying to conserve wild bison.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. So can you give a real high. Can you give a real high level snapshot, being as fair as possible to all interested parties of sort of the. The landscape around the. The wild bison conversations that are happening in the west and how the park fits into that.

[Rick Wallen]

So I've heard stories from everybody and I think even on this podcast in the past, once upon a time, 30 million wild bison, you know, across, you know, America. And there was a military strategy to conquer the west. And the military strategy was to eliminate bison. And that would be our way to battle that all of the various native cultures that lived all over the West. And it was successful. And the 30 million wild bison that was 300 years ago became a couple dozen animals at yellowstone and maybe 100 or 200 up in the far north of Canada before, you know, someone decided to try and turn it all around. And at Yellowstone, it was the army, because the army ran Yellowstone at the turn of the last century. So the army hired a bison tender, and he just happened to be one of the five ranchers around the West. That went out and gathered a few calves.

[Chili Palmer]

And was that Buffalo Jones?

[Rick Wallen]

Buffalo Jones, yep, out of town. And so Buffalo Jones came to Yellowstone and started restoring the population. And they got a small group of animals from Texas, I think it was three bulls from Colonel Goodnight and then he had some connections up in the Flathead Valley, got 18 females from the Flathead Valley and they're from the population that's now the national bison range in that area of the state. And there was 21 animals brought to Mammoth, sort of a display herd. They reproduced well, there was the couple of dozen animals in the interior of Yellowstone. And this whole restoration project, you know, got on the the board by Congress saying, you know, we got to save wild bison. We can't just let them, you know, go extinct. And conservation of bison was part of the enabling legislation in Yellowstone, conservation of most of the wildlife as well, because it was all being hunted out. And I don't think anyone ever dreamed that they would recover to the level that they have. And in the 1940s, Yellowstone had an abundance of bison. Well, at that point in time, an abundance of bison was a thousand of them. So they were seeing that in order to make this conservation of this animal on a broader scale, they started giving away bison to farmers and ranchers and preserves all over the place. And the conservation of wild bison kind of went down a different path than elk and deer and sheep. Because as we took animals from Yellowstone, like we took deer and sheep and pronghorn from Yellowstone, spread them all over the country, but we didn't put them in fences.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, they all got moved as wild.

[Rick Wallen]

As wild animals, free roaming for as far. And let the animals make the decision on, you know, where they want to migrate to, who lives, because they make good decisions, all of that kind of stuff. But for some reason, the country decided that in order to save wild bison, they all had to be within fences. So I think the bottom line is humans forgot how to live with wild bison and forgot how to respect the nature of wild bison on the landscape. And it was easy to just put them in fences. So for 100 years now, we've been saving wild bison from the Great Plains and even as far east as the East Coast. There's preserves in Pennsylvania and Virginia and places like that.

[Chili Palmer]

But let's narrow in on that. Okay, question for a second, because this is something, I don't know the answer to this. This is something that baffles me. And it'd be, I think it'd be a great project for a really like a great project For a serious historian. Like, like, I get it in a broad sense, but I'll lay out the question be like, we recovered grizzly bears as a wild animal. Yep. We recovered bighorn sheep as a wild animal. We recovered elk as a wild animal. I'll point out there were no elk in New Mexico.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Chili Palmer]

Right. There was a time when there was zero elk in New Mexico. Yep. Right. We recover elk as a wild animal. Wolves get recovered as a wild animal. I would love, like to really know the, the discussions and decisions were made. How did they arrive at like everything this like great Noah's ark of creatures will all be politically wild except you.

[Rick Wallen]

I don't have an answer for that either, Randall. I mean, I think like the, I don't. I couldn't find this in, in a document, but I think the answer that most people would arrive at is that the ecological niche of the buffalo was filled in by cattle. Right. I mean, at the same time that the plains are being emptied of, of buffalo, cattle are coming in. And I, I can't really think like, obviously domestic sheep and wild sheep share the same niche. I guess I wonder if it's a question of the power of the lobby. But like, that would be. My guess is. Is the ranching industry would have not particularly appreciated releasing giant bovine graves. Editors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it.

[Chili Palmer]

But you're.

[Rick Wallen]

That's just a gut.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, I think that that's, that's a huge part of it. But even if you look at like isolated inner mountain valleys that aren't even great cattle country, and at the time, probably my guess is there was not a big cattle presence, for instance, in the upper Yellowstone Valley. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Early 1900s, was there a big cattle presence in the upper Yellowstone, I think right here?

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. I mean, in the Paradise Valley, definitely. Nelson's story brought cattle in there like in the 18. Yep.

[Chili Palmer]

Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

1870S.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. I was going to point out. And you already shot down my, you know, shot down part of it. I was going to point out that like, that, that even in areas where that conflict wouldn't have been. Is acute. But you're right, if people were, if, if people were running cattle by that, by at the time when we had them all bottled up, you know, I've even, I've even mentioned before that like there was a moment when we knew where they all were. Right.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Chili Palmer]

Somewhere between like 1882, between 1882 and 19, whatever, there was a moment when someone could say, like, I know where they're all at.

[Rick Wallen]

Yep.

[Chili Palmer]

I know where everyone is. And in that instant we became really comfortable with them as something that we know where they're all at.

[Rick Wallen]

That's exactly right.

[Chili Palmer]

And since then we don't have any that we don't know where they're at.

[Rick Wallen]

And I think, I mean, I look.

[Steve Rinella]

At Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, all of them have elk hunts. Right. RMEF has put elk out there and all of those states have a geographical area where if those elk step out of that geographical area, it's an over the counter thing for landowners.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because there was an agreement made based on agriculture. This is where the elk are going to be and we're all okay with that.

[Chili Palmer]

Is that true? No, I didn't know that.

[Rick Wallen]

I mean, I do, I do agree with you that I have not seen like a history of the debates, like the actual, like I would love to read letters and debates within agencies about how it was that bison became not wild or unwilded, recovered, but not. I know there's some congressional record that would be valuable to get a hold of in the late 1800s because that was part of George Catlin's perspective that we needed to save, you know, some great national park where we could save, you know, all these wildlife species that would be hunted for subsistence at that point in time.

[Steve Rinella]

This show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks? Trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady, dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started and make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 thousand five star reviews on the App Store. Go to get.stash.commee eater to see how you can receive $25 toward your first stock purchase when you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com meater paid non client endorsement.

[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. View Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions.

[Chili Palmer]

Now a lot of you guys are familiar with the old hunting tradition of eating, you know, some organ, the heart or a chunk of liver off the first animal you kill. I had that when I was a little kid and it was a big deal. Organ meats were always prized by frontier people who knew the importance of getting a lot of different minerals and nutrients. And as often is the case, those guys were onto something because organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet. And you can get the same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil made exclusively from regeneratively raised, grass fed and finished cattle. Heart and soils unique freeze drying process means all those important nutrients are trapped in ensuring you experience every one of the benefits of nature's superfood in a clean, convenient taste free capsule. Find out more at heartandsoil.co. and make sure to use Code me Eater for 10 off your purchase. That's heartandsoil.co. use the Code Me Eater. Go ahead and continue your story. I just wanted to ask a little about that because that's the thing like of of all the interesting parts of what you're telling us, like that decision that we as a culture, as a society made. Yes, it's never been adequately explained to.

[Rick Wallen]

Me and I don't think it ever could be. And I think competition for grass is probably a key component of it and that there's been a probably unrealistic perspective that you could restore 30 million again and still have the same level of, you know, human occupancy on the landscape. But there's no reason that you couldn't at least restore a couple of populations like Cal pointed out, you know, we'd done it with elk and a few places where they disappeared many years ago. And in fact there was a hunting club in Utah and early 1940s that got a group bison from Yellowstone and took them to the Henry Mountains of Utah, turned them loose and they wanted to have a wild population. And I'm sure they felt like, well, you know, this is a remote location, they'll probably just stay here. And I think the first thing they did is, you know, move 50 or 60 miles, is that right? So they have, they have a new location, but Utah's figured out how to do it, you know, and it's not been easy. You know, there's been a lot of conflict with the local ranchers, but they've learned how to do it and they have a very Sporting bison, elk hunt for managing abundance and distribution. And bison really are sort of an indicator of where the most productive habitats are in that area with that they occupy.

[Chili Palmer]

You mean they'll find it?

[Rick Wallen]

They'll find it. Yeah, they'll definitely find it. So I think that you could do that in a few other places, but you'll never be able to have. Because of the ecology of wild bison, they do compete with habitat, with cattle, with humans, with agriculture. And in order to do our national mammal right, you know, it would be valuable to do just like what you described, Designate an area that's legitimate for wild bison to distribute around the Greater Yellowstone area and allow the culture of, you know, tribal hunting and, you know, subsistence hunting by the rest of us, you know, that like to go out and do something that our ancestors did. But I really think that the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming felt like they had their eye on the Yellowstone restoration of wild bison from the very beginning and have always assumed that they would just be kept within the national park, just like we've done at all other national parks where wild bison are. But all those other national parks have fences, so Wind Cave, Badlands, all those places have fences for keeping their bodies. Teddy Roosevelt has fences around it.

[Chili Palmer]

So at Yellowstone, those parks have taken the responsibility of fencing those creatures in.

[Rick Wallen]

Well, that depends on what whose responsibility is. I don't know whether those are fence out or fence in. Yeah, got it. You know, in Montana, it's a fence out. And if you don't want the wildlife or you don't want your neighbor's cattle on your property, you're supposed to fence your own property to keep that kind of stuff off of it. So, yeah, so Yellowstone's one of the few national parks that's large enough in the lower 48 states that can allow ecology to play its role on the landscape. And we don't prohibit bighorn sheep from staying in the national park, and we don't prohibit elk or deer or pronghorn or any of the other, you know, native species from leaving the national park. But we do have, you know, laws in Montana that say as soon as they leave the national park. It's an agriculture department that manages wild bison on Montana lands. So that was done primarily because of a cattle disease that was brought to the area, a bacteria that affects the reproductive track of mammal, large mammals, brucellosis. And that's kind of been the arguing point as to why bison can't be restored as wildlife like the other animals. And I think that it was. I mean, it was Somewhat legitimate, because you think it was initially the farmers and ranchers, you know, they want to make a profit. And so if you're in business for yourself and you want to make a profit, you don't want things to come to your ranch that would have caused mortality, you know, to your, your profit making machine.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, it causes heifers to abort.

[Rick Wallen]

Abort pregnancies.

[Chili Palmer]

They'll abort their first. They'll abort their first calf.

[Rick Wallen]

Right. It's. Yeah. By and large, that's what it is. It's a little more complicated than that. But, you know, it's not every one of them, but then there's a few that just never recover from the disease. I see. But by and large, animal gets infected, gets pregnant, aborts pregnancy, gets immune to the disease. Any other future pregnancy, they're gonna have their calf, it's going to be fine. But a farmer is going to, you know, that's a, that's money in the bank for him if he loses.

[Steve Rinella]

A couple years ago, I did a ride along with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and it was during the most successful bison harvest hunting season. Two years ago. Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

The year before there was.

[Steve Rinella]

And there was nothing. Right. So if you go by the numbers, it was like an unbelievable amount of bison taken out. Buffalo killed comparatively, but it was still an over. You know, buffalo remained over objective for like that carrying capacity number that was agreed to.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. The social carrying capacity was a court negotiated number in a court case between 1995 and 2000.

[Steve Rinella]

There's like a starting line and a finish line.

[Rick Wallen]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

On that gardener zone and at the finish line. So the starting line would be the, the park boundary.

[Chili Palmer]

Yep. You pay attention, Chili. Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And the finish line is the, the end of the negotiated outside of the park bison range.

[Rick Wallen]

Right, right. And state calls it a tolerance zone. Most people call it a conservation area.

[Chili Palmer]

So.

[Steve Rinella]

And at the finish line was. And I. This is something I had never heard or seen before, but at the finish line was the state brand inspector.

[Chili Palmer]

What?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And his job is to be the guy on the finish line and make sure. No, no bison cross the. The tolerance zone. Yeah. Which I was just like, I.

[Chili Palmer]

Was he having any action?

[Steve Rinella]

I think he, he's a pretty hands on participant down there as far as like, you know, he's, he's rounding up people and making sure that they know where the buffalo are.

[Chili Palmer]

But was he, was he getting. That year, was he getting stuff that was making it through the zone?

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I didn't Get a talk with him.

[Rick Wallen]

I believe a few animals went beyond that line in the sand, if you will.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

But not many. There's so many hunters now. And I would say that the state offers, like, 44 permits or something like that. I haven't checked lately, but, yeah, 40, 40. Okay. Somewhere in that neighborhood. But the tri.

[Chili Palmer]

The tribal number is much, much larger.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, the tribal numbers are much, much larger. There's no limit, really. Each tribe issues a tag to anyone that wants one, and some tribes issue four or five tags to various families if they want to gather multiple bison.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Because they can still provide meat for everybody.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

For their whole family, their whole neighborhood.

[Steve Rinella]

Harvest type method. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

Let's hit on this Bruce's thing for a little bit, because there's a lot of questions about this that I have that I've heard others voice, guys like me who are buffalo advocates and who would like to see a much bigger tolerance zone. Okay. A bigger tolerance zone and more of them. Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

A lot of people would like to see that.

[Chili Palmer]

Now, I will say to people, don't give me the whole brucellosis thing, because elk have brucellosis.

[Rick Wallen]

You nailed it.

[Chili Palmer]

So, okay. Did I nail it? Is there something I'm not seeing? Can you speak to this for a minute?

[Rick Wallen]

I can speak to that, and it's a really question. So in 1995, when the governor of Montana sued the federal agencies to not let any bison leave the national park because some were infected with brucellosis, the assumptions were. Because we didn't have good science on it. All the assumptions were that bison were the primary vector for infecting the system and that elk were infected because buffalo were infecting the elk. And if we could eliminate brucelosis from the buffalo population that lived in Yellowstone, brucellosis would just disappear. In the elk, they were the super spreaders. Exactly. The super spreaders. Exactly. That's a good term for it.

[Chili Palmer]

They were the Gavin Newsoms.

[Rick Wallen]

Sure, sure. Anyway, you know, that was the assumption of the time, and it was a bad assumption, you know, to begin with. And the Park Service argued with the US Department of Agriculture about. About that assumption.

[Chili Palmer]

Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

Because in Jackson Hole.

[Chili Palmer]

Can you give the background on that assumption? Like, how is that? Like, how was that arrived at?

[Rick Wallen]

I don't know. I can only suspect, and I suspect that it had to do with, you know, like a capitalistic perspective that, you know, buffalo compete with our cattle and we got to get rid of buffalo. So we got to find some sort of legal way to show that, you know, we have Backing to get rid of it. And an analogy is that the people that really argue to preserve wilderness, use the Wilderness act, you know, things like that, they. And they use the Endangered Species act, you know, as a sort of a political tool.

[Chili Palmer]

Sure.

[Rick Wallen]

To try and win, you know, in court kind of a thing. And, you know, brucellosis came to North America when we brought cattle from Europe and Africa and places like that. So it's ironic that we colonized the Great Plains with cattle and we brought this disease with many some of those cattle. And that disease is something that is a problem for profits. And the USDA started in the 1930s to eliminate brucellosis because back then there were a lot of people that milked their cows and they had brucellosis and they would create infection in humans. So because it was a factor to humans undulate fever. And so it creates sort of a, you know, by light in the day, you feel lethargic and you have a fever. It creates, I think, other infection within the lymph system of the human being.

[Chili Palmer]

Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

To basically drain energy from you. So you recover at nighttime, you get up in the morning and feel good, but by, you know, sometime during the day, you're starting to feel tired again.

[Chili Palmer]

I see, Randall, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, I got that problem. There was a lot of humans got that problem bad.

[Rick Wallen]

And, and the, the infection actually caused problems to the military all the way back when there was Mediterranean wars. And it was called Malta fever originally when it was first discovered, because an army over in the little tiny island of Malta, all the soldiers were getting infected because they'd been drinking milk from the cows and stuff, couldn't fight in the afternoons. You can't fight period, if you're trying.

[Chili Palmer]

To hit them hard in the morning. That's right.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right. So brucellosis is a worldwide issue, especially in developed countries. But pasteurization made it a bit of a non issue. And as we pasteurized milk, over time, you know, we eliminated the bacteria from milk products. And the USDA was very strategic and going around the country from 1930 to they started getting states, Bruce loses free in the 1960s and 70s. But what they would do is go to the farm, test the farm animals. If an animal had brucellosis, they'd make the farmer get rid of all their cows and they'd pay them, you know, some price.

[Chili Palmer]

And that's how they tackled it.

[Rick Wallen]

That's how they tackled it. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

And so can you talk about transmission from one animal to the next?

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, the bacteria manifests itself and in pretty concentrated forms in the amniotic fluid of the reproductive tract. So whenever there's a stillbirth or even a natural birth, you know, an animal infected has a full term calf, the calf is born, the amniotic sac is spilled out, all that fluid becomes a transmission vector and.

[Chili Palmer]

And they got a desire to lick it for some reason.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely. Yep. Absolutely. Almost all of the, you know, the mammals of that nature that are herding, you know, grouping type animals, you know, they're in groups, so when they see that first calf born, they all want to go see it and, you know, see what's going on. And as the first 10 or 15% of them are born, they're super curious. And then, you know, the fascination wanes. And by your time, you're halfway through the breeding or calving season, they're not as interested in, in that because it's not new anymore.

[Steve Rinella]

So they do they eat that afterbirth?

[Rick Wallen]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's we like to call it.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, absolutely. That's a survival mechanism for deer now and pronghorn because it cleans up the site, you know, and predators don't smell the, the offspring, the newborn fawns and calves, they don't have any odor for a short while. So, you know, mom cleans up the birth site, stashes the calf. There's no smell. And the predators, you know, have to more visually identify their prey than to do it through smell. So.

[Chili Palmer]

So and there's no reason just to like, you know, go back into this, this point again. There's no reason that there's no thing about transmission to a cow, like cattle, cow. There's no reason that, that it. Getting the amniotic fluid or getting the bacteria from a bison's afterbirth is sort of like more concentrated or more likely to transmit to a cow than if a cow were to interact with the elk's afterbirth.

[Rick Wallen]

It's all. At all. The biology is all the same.

[Chili Palmer]

Okay.

[Rick Wallen]

All the same. And so, so if an elk was.

[Chili Palmer]

Infected and a cow licked that afterbirth, it's just as likely to transmit, it's just as likely to pick up that bacteria as if it came off a bison.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Chili Palmer]

It's like a super bacteria in a bison.

[Rick Wallen]

And there's some small concentrated areas of the Paradise Valley where the elk down there test positive at like almost 50%. Right. And then other places in the system, it's lower than that. And then the argument in the 1990s, after, you know, the state of Montana became brucellosis free was that we can't afford to let our cattle ranchers have, you know, any new brucellosis infection because of that. You know that policy I told you about? If they get caught and one of their cows has brucellosis, the policy was, well, the USDA comes in and makes you get rid of all your cows, and I don't think they give them the fair market value, at least not considering what the future value would have been in those animals as well.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

So it's not as profitable for ranchers to just, you know, live on the landscape and learn how to live with. With brucellosis in the system.

[Chili Palmer]

My understanding, too, on the brucellosis issue from a rancher's perspective, is that when you have free status, you're. There's some testing, alleviation, but when you're in a. When you, when you're not operating in brucellosis free status, you're. There's. There's a testing requirement.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like your region is designated as a brucellosis zone or a brucellosis free zone, depending on where you are.

[Chili Palmer]

That's.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what you're saying, right?

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

So the, the debate in Montana was that, you know, a rancher in Gallatin county and park county, you know, probably had a much higher probability. Oh, definitely has a much higher probability of that as a threat to his livestock than a rancher from Kalispell, because there isn't any brucellosis affected herds anywhere near Kalispell.

[Chili Palmer]

Got it.

[Rick Wallen]

So when USDA would come in and, you know, find brucellosis in the cattle herd, they would shut down sales by the state, you know, statewide.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh.

[Rick Wallen]

And so that's why it was a problem, you know, some. Economically. For the state of Montana.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. Some guy out in Webo, Montana. What?

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, exactly. And so he would not.

[Chili Palmer]

I would see the elk or buffalo and. Years.

[Rick Wallen]

Exactly. Century, maybe. Right. So the USDA realized that that was an undue burden on the livestock industry. And in 2010, they kind of changed all of the rules. Most of the rest of the country had become brucellosis free. Industry was humming along brilliantly. And in 2010, USDA drew a line around basically the Greater Yellowstone system. In fact, the line coincided exactly with where they thought brucellosis infected elk occurred throughout the Yellowstone system and said, all right, here's where the threat is. Let's just apply this policy only in this area where ranchers are likely to encounter that issue. And so it greatly relieved, you know, ranchers from. Away from Yellowstone and the Three states surrounding this region. So it changed the game completely in 2010. And so the court case between the governor of Montana and the federal agencies in 1995, was that.

[Chili Palmer]

Was that Governor Roscoe?

[Rick Wallen]

It was Governor Roscoe, yes. And so the, the complaint against the feds was that, you know, if the state were to lose their brucellosis free status, it's going to affect a huge number of businessmen throughout the whole state. And so we can't let any bison leave the national park. Well, now that zone, you know, of acceptance anyway for brucellosis, and then new conservation measures put in place, you know, to protect the industry of farmers and ranchers within that zone. You know, change the name or change that game to the point where, you know, elk are still a threat to them and they won't lose their brucellosis status, but that farmer and rancher has to do that more intensive testing like you were talking about. And so they have to go in and test about every five or six months, and they have to have three tests in a row where none of the animals in their herd test positive.

[Chili Palmer]

Got it.

[Rick Wallen]

And then they clear that brucellosis affected herd. So it's a very burdensome, it's very burdensome for a rancher to have to go do that, I believe, at least at one point. And I think it's still the case that USDA covers the cost of all that testing. And I'm pretty sure that ranchers round their cows up at least once a year to go through vaccinations and, you know, weaning and what else? Branding, all kinds of things. So at least one of those three roundups could be done at sort of the routine time of year, you know, when they do that kind of stuff. But having to do it three times in a row, and if they miss a time, you know, then it becomes four or five or six until they get to that three times in a row. So you can see that there is some economic impact to the cattle industry within this zone. So in 2017, the National Academy of Sciences came to the region and brought scientists that have been studying brucellosis all around the, you know, the area and in their careers. And they looked at the issue and the, the questions that they were facing was, you know, is elk really a significant impact? You know, and that assumption that I talked about earlier, that it would just go away if we got rid of brucelosis and bison, they disproved that. And the way they disproved that was to show that, you know, the elk in areas like Idaho where there's no bison interaction. And the Green River Valley of Wyoming, there's no buffalo interaction. There's a few places around where elk are infected with brucellosis and they were infecting cattle of the area. And there was enough information on how elk move about the system. I heard you guys talking to Matt Kaufman not long ago and Matt did a lot of studies with his students at the University of Wyoming, you know, with putting radio collars on and showing animal movements. And there are radio collar studies that show elk moving out of places like Jackson Hole into Idaho into Montana, never even migrating through Yellowstone national park or anywhere where there's buffalo involved and cattle are getting infected with brucellosis. So it pretty much resolved the debate that elk are a maintenance reservoir of the disease. And you can't, you can't just assume that solving the problem with buffalo will solve it with elk. And there's no way we're going to go around and round up every elk in the greater Yellowstone system.

[Chili Palmer]

That. Would that be political suicide?

[Rick Wallen]

That would be absolutely. That is, we just came through an.

[Chili Palmer]

Election and no one involved in that election would have proposed that all the elk need to go away.

[Rick Wallen]

And that's the only way that you could do that. Like they did it in the livestock industry and they wouldn't have to do it once, they'd have to do it multiple times.

[Steve Rinella]

This show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks? Trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started to make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla. Or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 five star reviews on the App Store. Go to get stash.commeater to see how you can receive $25 toward your first stock purchase when you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com meater paid non client endorsement.

[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. View Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions.

[Chili Palmer]

Now a lot of you guys are familiar with the old hunting tradition of eating, you know, some org in the heart or a chunk of liver off the first animal you kill. I had that when I was a little kid and it was a big deal. Organ meats were always prized by frontier people who knew the importance of getting a lot of different minerals and nutrients. And as often as the case, those guys were onto something because organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet. And you can get the same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil made exclusively from regeneratively raised, grass fed and finished cattle heart and soils. Unique freeze drying process means all those important nutrients are trapped in ensuring you experience every one of the benefits of nature's superfood in a clean, convenient taste free capsule. Find out more at heartandsoil Co. And make sure to use code meat eater for 10 off your purchase. That's heartandsoil. Co. Use the Code Me Eater.

[Rick Wallen]

I think that the industry is starting to realize that, well, until there's some sort of technology for learning how to, you know, inoculate livestock that is 100%, you know, foolproof that their animals won't become infected if they're in, you know, encounter a, a brucelosis affected birth site, then we're going to be living with brucellosis in the Greater Yellowstone area. And so there's a great deal of debate among the staunch conservationists that, well now if elk are allowed to move along that, around the system like that, why can't bison, you know, why do we have to have the conservation zone, you know, the Gardner Basin and the West Yellowstone Valley? And why can't it be that same zone that brucellosis infected elk have opportunity to roam around? And it'll take citizen debate, you know, to try and change the state of Montana perspective to do something like that. Because it won't just happen because Montana thinks that that's the right thing to do.

[Steve Rinella]

Even though elk destroy a lot of fences. They do, they can still go over them.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

Whereas the bison.

[Rick Wallen]

Well, you know, I'll argue with you on that one Cal, because, because I lived in the Gardner Basin for a long time and I lived, you know, 13 miles from the park boundary and we periodically had 25, 30 animals roll through our property of, you know, four or five acres. And if you don't chase them, they'll figure out where the gate is and they'll walk to the gate, and if you go out and tell them you don't want them tearing up your new landscaping, they'll walk back over to the gate and leave. And so I think it's a matter of humans learning how to live with wild bison. And it's inconvenient. It's more inconvenient to live with wild bison than it is to live with wild pronghorn and wild deer and things of that nature. And I think that bison, as fence destroyers, gets a bad name. You're right. You get to run in them and all. They see the fence there, they don't even bother. They just blow right through it.

[Steve Rinella]

I was. I was, like, very shocked that day that I went up, you know, admittedly one day, but there's this line of cows walking back towards the park.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh.

[Steve Rinella]

And, you know, they'd lost a few members along the way.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But they were still just. Just walking.

[Rick Wallen]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

And eventually the. The people who must have harassed them closer to the finish line than the start line came back home. And that lead cow started trotting and just picked up steam and. And she crossed the road, blew through a fence, went right through the ranch yard there, blew through the next fence. And, I mean, in a way that you're like, nothing would have diverted those.

[Chili Palmer]

Change your mind.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

Nothing.

[Rick Wallen]

That's exactly right.

[Steve Rinella]

I was amazed.

[Rick Wallen]

That was due to them learning the landscape. And they recognize the hunters. You know, their level of stress goes up because they lost 25% of their group, you know, 10 miles behind them, and they knew where they were going. And if the hunters hadn't caught up with them and created that vision that they had just faced two hours ago, you know, they'd have probably just kept walking.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

And just walked. And they'd have. They'd have gone to the gate. I'm positive they would have gone to the gate.

[Steve Rinella]

I was pretty blown away, though, because I was like, oh, that's a different way for. For animals to act. Different way for bison.

[Rick Wallen]

So, I mean, that brings up a good question that you guys discussed earlier about sort of the ethics of hunting.

[Chili Palmer]

I want to ask a different question.

[Rick Wallen]

Okay. Okay, go.

[Chili Palmer]

Can you. Can you walk me through that time period? I. I think of the. The mid-90s, but maybe it was earlier that time period when the park hit a certain population of the animals.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, okay.

[Chili Palmer]

Where they needed to expand range. Right. Or do I. Do I understand?

[Rick Wallen]

No, you got that right. If you look back on over time, we brought all those animals I talked about in the 1902 was the first year they came to Mammoth. 1907, they took the, you know, they filled up their capacity of the pen around Mammoth and they moved them out to the Lamar Valley. And they didn't put any fences up, they just let them roam. Well, they kind of stayed around there for a while. And the early park rangers and the old buffalo tenders used to get out on horseback and they'd chase them up into the hills, hoping that they could introduce the introduced herd to the native herd. Because the native herd summered on the high plateau south of Lamar Valley up along the east boundary. And the native herd would migrate to Pelican Valley down by Yellowstone Lake in the winter. And so the early teens into maybe 1920, was sort of this, you know, meeting of the two herds. And from there the Park Service thought that they really needed to, you know, ranch bison, the prevailing thought of how you restore wildlife populations. So they took plows to the Lamar Valley. If you go out, you can find old irrigation ditch lines. The Lamar Valley truly was a big ranch back in the 1920s.

[Chili Palmer]

But they're raising grass.

[Rick Wallen]

They were raising grass. They were pushing it up with the beaver slides and stacking it all up. And then they would bring it into, you know, the area that the bison could get to it. And they were helping the bison. You know, they might have even still been killing wolves and stuff, you know, in the, the early part of that century. Well, that was great for long term survival. And then the brucellosis issue came along. There was a bunch of up and down of population abundance because we tried to eliminate brucellosis. But in 1960s, 1966, the park said, we're not going to do any of this ranching business anymore. We're going to follow this, sort of let ecological processes play out. You know, people call it natural regulation, people call it all kinds of, of things. But ecology became sort of the, the leading edge of policy for the National Park Service. And the bison knew what to do, you know, that it was all about survival of the fittest. They knew where to go to find those old hay fields. And there are records that in the 1940s there were some big winters, like maybe a couple years ago, and some pretty good size groups went to Gardner Basin. A group of 40 some animals in 1943 migrated almost to immigrant.

[Chili Palmer]

No kidding?

[Rick Wallen]

No kidding.

[Chili Palmer]

They let them.

[Rick Wallen]

Well, I think there was some sympathy because of how difficult the winter was.

[Chili Palmer]

I had no idea they were leaving the park at that back that long ago.

[Rick Wallen]

And so about that time is when you started seeing in the historic record observations of at least the sort of older males leaving the winter range up in the Lamar Valley and around Gardner, you could find a few nearly every year at that point.

[Chili Palmer]

What's the farthest you know of a park buffalo ever making it out of the park?

[Rick Wallen]

Let's see. I'm guessing that's about it. The winter of 96, 97 was another really big winter, if anyone was around here.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh, that was. That's when this killer. That's when the issue just blew up. Totally blew up, because it was Department of Livestock guys on snow machines just dumping hundreds of them.

[Rick Wallen]

That's when the buffalo field campaign. That's right. They started up about that time. And animals were on in little nooks and crannies again. As far south or east? No, north. No, it's north, isn't it? As an immigrant, some of the farms around here. How far? How many miles north? I used to live in immigrants, so I should know this. So immigrant to the Lamar Valley is the audience. Can get us 80 miles, probably so. And bison migrate differently. It's sort of a combination of nomadism and migration, because when you see them in the fall, they're a little bit more nomadic early in the fall because they kind of. They. They reach out and walk to where they think they might go three or four months from now. Oh, and then they walk back.

[Chili Palmer]

Like a scouting mission.

[Rick Wallen]

Exactly. And so bison will leave, like, the Hayden Valley, and they'll go over the top of the Mary Mountain and down into the Old Faithful area. And they might mill around Old Faithful for three or four months. And then the next time they want to move, they'll move down to Madison Junction, and there they have two avenues. They either go west or go north, you know, from that. And some of those migrations are a little over 100 miles. So animals that you could find near the mud pots of Hayden Valley could end up in the gardener hunt just outside the park. And that's a little over 100 miles if you follow the route that they take. And we've seen animals move from the Hayden Valley out west. They end up out at West Yellowstone. They would get harassed and pushed back to the park. And they knew they needed to go somewhere because they're looking for that green up then the low elevated. Matt talked about, you know, several podcasts.

[Chili Palmer]

What's his term?

[Rick Wallen]

The green wave. Yeah, they're going down to surf, and when they can't get to it going west at West Yellowstone, all of that pressure to push them Back into the park, I think, generated more exploratory behavior. And they push north and Gardner basins like the first place to green up, unless you're at one of the hot springs all around. But it's that low elevation area. You know, it has the least amount of. Of snowpack. It's got the earliest amount of or earliest temperature of 32 degrees and warmer. You know, you get the green up. And once they find the green up, they'll just camp on it and follow the green up back through the elevational gradient until they get to some of the bigger grasslands in the park. And then they'll kind of let the green up, go on higher and they'll camp and make lawns. Is it snowpack that pushes those bison? Yes, it's a combination of abundance and snowpack. And in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there was a thought that it was abundance of about 2,000 animals that would really create that social competition for bites of grass underneath the snow and that some would leave and some would keep working the snowpack. And I think because of all of the pressure in the last 20 or 30 years of pushing them back into the park, what we've really done is we've made them search farther and wider. And now there's more that are the, you know, diggers that dig the big pits to find the grass under the snow. And they, it. There's an ecology behind that in that the larger animals move those big heads and make little craters for feeding in. And the younger animals with the smaller heads wait till they abandon the craters and they go over and they eat the residual. And so groups of animals have learned how to, you know, carry young animals through the winter by digging all those feeding craters and tromping down all those ski trails or, you know, trails for walking around. Like we make ski trails, they make buffalo trails and pack it down and you can take your skis off and jump in those trails and. And walk just like they do in them. So. So there's two or three different strategies now for wild bison to survive. You know, there's the stay in the park and avoid the hunt. And there's the migrate to lower elevation hunt, looking for the early spring green up and, you know, not wanting to plow through the snow. But then you run the risk of the harvest.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

You know, once you leave the national.

[Chili Palmer]

Park, if you had to take a wild ass guess on a bad winter, if no one messed with them, do you think animals would leave the park and then not even come back?

[Rick Wallen]

No, you Think they'd go back? I think they'd go back. I think you'd see. I mean, there's always the exception, right?

[Chili Palmer]

Sure.

[Rick Wallen]

So you might see a few. But the way animals expand their range, and I didn't finish that story earlier, is that the bulls are the pioneers. And the bulls wander farther because, you know, they're bigger animals. You know, they can't compete with the big crowds of bison that hang out in the big groups. So bulls are going to go out and look for small little pockets of high productivity and just camp on that pocket. You know, they might live in a one acre patch in the forest of trees, but if it's a, you know, a marsh, you know, and super productive, you know, they'll do fine feeding themselves for a long period of time if they don't have to compete with anybody else.

[Chili Palmer]

Got it.

[Rick Wallen]

And so bulls are the much more expected pioneers on how bison would expand their range. And the females are the trackers. You know, they follow, follow footprints, they follow cow pat or, you know, buffalo patties. The whole works. Follow the trails that are left behind. And in the 1980s, when the population in the Hayden Valley area grew to, I think it was a little over 2,000 at that point, just in that part of the park, you know, the Firehoe Geyser basin wasn't big enough for them in the wintertime. And so they started pioneering down to the, the west boundary. And we started seeing these rare bull occurrences in West Yellowstone and Horse Butte and places like that. And then there was some. There was a couple of big snow years in that decade, too. And so it was those big snow years that create, you know, deeper snowpack. And in later years, during those years of deep snowpack, as you start to get longer days, a little bit more warmth, you get a little melting of that snow. Nighttime, it gets cold. Bison can't do their thing. You know, their heads don't dig ice. They only move like fluffy snow out of the way. In fact, you can see, you know, herds of buffalo walking on top of the snow in February and March sometimes with, you know, significant melt and refreezing. And that's when they simply bail and they walk long distances and they follow those trails that the bulls laid down. And they go, okay, the bulls know where they're going. Let's go find those guys. And maybe there's something better at lower elevations. So in the mid-1980s, Montana instituted Buffalo hunts, you know, and a few animals were harvested by hunters. And it was, you know, it was a good thing for hunters you know, there was something new to go out and try and harvest. But in the winter following the big fires of 1988, you know, two things happened. The fires burned up a lot of that summer forage production. So the animals would dig down through the snow and find black. And it wasn't, wasn't what they expected. And so there was pretty good sized migrations both to West Yellowstone and to Gardner. And the hunters couldn't keep up with the harvest. So the game wardens were down there, the Department of Livestock guys were down there enforcing, you know, we don't want any bison out of the park. And I think that year it was like 800 animals were killed by hunters, game wardens, DOL agents and the park service rangers even pitched in and helped out.

[Chili Palmer]

How many? What was the total population? If they killed 800, how many were there?

[Rick Wallen]

That's a good question. I have to think in 1988, I think it was 2500 or something.

[Chili Palmer]

Oh, so not a huge.

[Rick Wallen]

It wasn't huge because now it'll get.

[Chili Palmer]

To three or four.

[Rick Wallen]

Right, right. And that's where I was telling you that we thought that 2000 was the sort of number that they'd get to, that would sort of drive social capacity of the system to, you know, dig the feeding craters and migrate to the boundary. Well now, because of 40 years of this aggressive management on the boundary, I think that number is now more like, you know, 3,000 or so on sort of average to slightly above average years. Two years ago was not even close to that. It was like the storm of the last three or four decades, I think. And so I would bet that 80% of the population leaves when you have one of those storms of the half century or greater. So that's where society has to decide, well, what is the right number to try and manage for? Because it's easy to think that you could do it when you have below average average, maybe even slightly above average years where a bunch of animals are leaving. You use hunters to manage distribution. You know, if things got really bad, you'd put some traps in place and catch some animals. Much like the park does it at Stevens Creek there in the Gardiner Basin. The state has a trap they can set up over by West Yellowstone and they used to, you know, use it a lot when there was more migration that way. So for the last 20 years or 30 years, I think we've tried so many different things that I think we've learned to live with wild bison. And I think that we have the technology, we have the communication Skills to get hunters in the right places to harvest animals. And it seems like there's interest by more and more tribes to want to go and harvest bison from the Yellowstone population because they're the remnants of the last wild herds that never were gone from this particular Latin skate. And so their cultural significance is way above the cultural significance of other herds of bison all across the country. So if a tribal member of the, you know, you name it different tribe, that buffalo are a part of their culture, you know, were to go harvest an animal going to Yellowstone and doing it is at the top of their list. Going to Fort Peck to do it like you did once upon a time as high on their list as going to Yellowstone, you know, to harvest an animal. Sure. So there's a great deal of national significance to preserve, you know, this population because of its, you know, sole remaining wild herd that never evaporated from the system. In the, in the history.

[Chili Palmer]

Is it the history of life, is it plausible that there's like a. Does the tolerance zone have to include major valleys?

[Rick Wallen]

You know you're asking, you're asking me.

[Chili Palmer]

Well no, I think from the animal, I'm saying from the animals perspective pointless. If it doesn't include the upper Madison, if it doesn't include the upper Yellowstone, is it pointless?

[Rick Wallen]

I think you're right.

[Chili Palmer]

You know, so to say like okay, anything that's designated wilderness area is now a tolerant zone. They're not going to go there anyway.

[Rick Wallen]

In the summer they might but they won't stay there.

[Chili Palmer]

They can't survive.

[Rick Wallen]

They'll need to go somewhere else. And I mean yeah, a few of them, the hardy bulls, the tough guys of the population, they'll figure out how to find a wind blown ridge.

[Chili Palmer]

But to open up more of the, to open up more of the landscape. Yep. You have to open up the big.

[Rick Wallen]

You're going to have to open up like Tom Miner Basin, you know in the upper part of Paradise Valley or even you know, even down to immigrant or something like that. You need some grassland kind of areas that have lower elevation have something else.

[Chili Palmer]

You just whistling Dixie because.

[Rick Wallen]

Exactly.

[Chili Palmer]

You're giving them ground that doesn't matter to them.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, they're going to go somewhere where there's six inches of snow. They're not going to migrate to somewhere where, where there's three feet of snow. I'm kind of.

[Chili Palmer]

They're not like let's go up to the high country.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. Unless you got hot springs. And that's why the central interior part of Yellowstone saved so many animals. Is The Firehole Geyser Basin has a bunch of hot springs. Even Hayden Valley has a couple of really cool geyser basins that create a melting phenomena that can they can find sedges. They're green. They're green year round and that's good stuff for them. And so you'd need places like in Wyoming you'd want to preserve or identify. Trying to think of the name of it. It's called Sun Sun Something. Just outside the northeast corner of the of the park there's a couple high elevation grasslands that might work, you know, and I'll bet historically prehistorically bison out of Wyoming would venture all the way up to the high country from that east side and would utilize some of that area as well.

[Steve Rinella]

So this show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady, dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started to make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 five star reviews on the App Store. Go to get.stash.commeater to see how you can receive 25 toward your first stock purchase when you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com me eater paid non client.

[Steve Rinella]

Endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. View Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions Now a lot.

[Chili Palmer]

Of you guys are familiar with the old hunting tradition of eating, you know, some org in the heart or a chunk of liver off the first animal you kill. I had that when I was a little kid and it was a big deal. Organ meats were always prized by frontier people who knew the importance of getting a lot of different minerals and nutrients. And as often is the case, those guys were on to something because organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet and you can get the same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil Made exclusively from regeneratively raised, grass fed and finished cattle heart and soils unique freeze drying process means all those important nutrients are trapped in. Ensuring you experience every one of the benefits of nature's superfood in a clean, convenient taste free capsule. Find out more at heartandsoil Co. And make sure to use Code me Eater for 10% off your purchase. That's Heart and Soil Co. Use the Code Me Eater. Do you know about the skull I found?

[Rick Wallen]

No.

[Chili Palmer]

I found a skull over 9,000ft in the Madison's.

[Rick Wallen]

See that? I bet that's a. Probably was a bull, huh?

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, it was a bull. I had it radiocarbon dated.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh cool. And it probably was going up there in the summertime because I can picture followed the group Green Wave the whole way. Yeah, to where the Green Wave went way up there. And there's some lush, productive, you know, places to graze in that high country area. And there's some places like that in the park where there's some archaeological sites of single animal kills, you know, up around Yellowstone Lake. And I think there's one on the Buffalo Plateau too. I don't remember the archaeological record very well. I used to rely on my colleagues at the park to tell me all those stories of all those cool places that yeah, there's evidence that bison have been in the system for basically the time they migrated to around here from the Siberia. So I think there's room for wild bison on public lands outside the national park. I think society's going to have to make a few concessions, learn how to live with wild bison. I think that it's going to be harder for Fish, Wildlife and Parks to manage wild bison than it is for them to manage pronghorn and deer. So they're going to have to have a source of funding to maybe hire, you know, a couple problem solver types, fence crews. The fence crews or you know, my thought is you made a great point earlier when you said we restored grizzly bears and we've restored wolves on the landscape, but we haven't restored wild bison. And the way Fish, Wildlife and Parks manages grizzly bears and wolves is they have conflict resolution teams. And there's folks out of Livingston and Bozeman that work in this area all in region one and two. They have a couple different teams over there. A model like that for bison could help Fish, Wildlife and Parks deal with conflict resolutions where conflicts occur and not just trying to draw what they call a tolerance zone, develop like a true conservation area that they manage bison within and the staunch conservationists that want 30 million are going to have to recognize that that's an impossible dream. No, that is an impossible.

[Chili Palmer]

That's a way. That's a waste of time.

[Rick Wallen]

Talking about that few hundred would be something that the state of Montana could pride themselves in and say, yeah, there's not very many places in the world where wild bison can roam on public land and be managed by a state game agency where, you know, hunters could experience, you know, the same experience that their forefathers four or five generations ago got to experience by going out and harvesting wild bison. And I think that if you've driven around Montana very much, you'll see these signs that say Save the Cowboy, Eliminate the American Prairie.

[Chili Palmer]

Or something like Cowboy Stop American Prairie.

[Rick Wallen]

That's it. That's it.

[Chili Palmer]

Which even the guy that runs the American Prairie Prairie Reserve has acknowledged that it's just a genius campaign.

[Rick Wallen]

It's.

[Chili Palmer]

Well, it's actually, he's like, ah, that's good.

[Rick Wallen]

It's somewhat foolish by my perspective because the skills that defined the cowboy, that the romantic cowboy of the historic past is being able to ride and herd and rope and, you know, deal with wild cattle, you know, they could preserve those skills by preserving wild bison. So that in reality there should be sort of a counter campaign to say, well, you can preserve the cowboy by preserving wild bison and then you have preserved the skills that, you know, are the more high end cowboys than the cowboys that ride four wheelers to manage their, their cattle herds.

[Chili Palmer]

Can you find what episode number we had? The. We had a guest, Sean Garrity, who runs American Prairie Reserve.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, yes, CEO.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, he was on the podcast. If you also if you can find the Matt Kaufman stuff about migrations.

[Steve Rinella]

I was on a flight yesterday coming.

[Rick Wallen]

In episode 148 titled the American Prairie Reserve. That's one with Sean Garrity, number 148.

[Chili Palmer]

And what was the other one we had? Kaufman and Kevin Monteith. We recorded it down Lander.

[Rick Wallen]

Landscape of Fear.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah, landscape. So American Prairie Reserve and Landscape of Fear gets into a lot of these same issues, but. Cal, I'm sorry.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I just. My flight yesterday was full of cowboys.

[Chili Palmer]

Full of cowboys.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, man. Little kids with hats, people in tracksuits with hats. All. All converging on the cowboy capital of the world, Big Sky, Montana. We're not running out of cowboys, boys and boys.

[Chili Palmer]

Stolen valor.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Chili Palmer]

I had some thought about the. Oh, what I was going to say about the. And the America Prairie Reserve is not without its Own controversies. That's right. As I recommend that people listen to the episode. There's so much going on there. It's a whole other conversation. But at one hand, it's, you know, it's an organization that buys land on the open market. Yep. And what they choose to do with land they buy on the open market is try to restore the Great Plains and try to restore bison. Okay. So there's like, there's that end of it. There's another end of it, of people looking at a real threat of reduced area to hunt on because a fear that the APR's ultimate objective is to create a national park which would, you know, eliminate a lot of hunting opportunity. It's a really rich subject. But Garrity had an interesting point is, you know, they're talking about having like three or four thousand buffalo. And he was talking about the friction between the APR and the cattle industry in Montana.

[Rick Wallen]

Right.

[Chili Palmer]

And he was putting it in numbers. He said, there are 2 million cows in Montana. Wow. I'm talking about 3,000 buffalo.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. You know, there's a couple.

[Chili Palmer]

There's a couple of. This has gotten really lopsided.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a couple of things that I really like about APR that have some applicability to the Greater Yellowstone area. And one of them is that they've. They've developed a sort of a subsidiary connection to a cattle raising paradigm where they're generating money to pay ranchers to be more tolerant of wildlife on their lands and potentially pay them more for the cost of each pound of beef that they raise. So that the conscious American citizen that really wants to preserve wildlife and doesn't buy guns and doesn't buy ammunition and doesn't contribute to conservation dollars anywhere else could contribute to conservation dollars by buying beef from those farmers and ranchers that are wildlife friendly. And if there was someone willing to develop a franchise around here, I bet there's enough, you know, committed conservationists that would do the same thing and buy products from a company that's paying farmers and ranchers to live in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and learn to build bigger fences. You know, build a way that during the infection period of Bruce Losis, they move all their cattle to the high fence area and then preserve, you know, a place for wild animals to move across, you know, 25 or 30% of their property that the cattle don't go to during that sort of critical time period for infection spread. And the other thing about American Prairie is by turning it into some sort of national park, they could generate the kind of rules and regulations. See, national parks are enabled by Congress, and each are unique in their, you know, commitment to what they do for the landscape where they're at. And like Grand Teton national park, when they established that national park and there's a handful of them around the system, they preserve hunting in a proportion of the national park and American prairie could do the same thing.

[Chili Palmer]

I don't think they will.

[Rick Wallen]

You don't think they will?

[Chili Palmer]

No.

[Rick Wallen]

Interesting.

[Chili Palmer]

No, interesting. I think that they have somewhat of a begrudging relationship with it. That's a personal opinion.

[Rick Wallen]

Okay.

[Chili Palmer]

I think they have a begrudging relationship.

[Rick Wallen]

All right.

[Steve Rinella]

I, I, my, We kind of touched a little bit on, like, the societal tolerance of, of the hunting and, and being up there. And kind of watching the, the gardener scene when it was really going off. Right, right. There's buffalo crap all over the high school football field. You know, I was just like, well, why not allow a certain amount of tribal hunting within the park boundary, Expand the, the hunt that way to, you know, a very specific group of people that have the longest relationship with. They're already, you know, highly regulated. They're each tribe, each hunting group has their own game warden with them.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. I was talking about this with my kid the other day, and I was saying to him, and I'm not sure on the, the, I'm not sure on all the treaty regulations, but I, I don't know that a lot of the people that signed under the Stevens treaty that those tribes wouldn't even be able to make the claim that they could hunt the park if they wanted to.

[Steve Rinella]

It came too late for the treaty or just.

[Chili Palmer]

I'm saying that people that were under that treaty. There's language in that treaty that I think there's an argument argument that tribes could make in the argument that I have every right to hunt the park.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but, and then there's a handful that would not under the same language. Right, right. Because they weren't historically in that specific area.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. I think that the thing that prohibits them from going into the national park is that their treaties have a language. And I don't remember it specifically, but it has something to do with claimed versus uncle. Open claimed and unclaimed. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

Which if you, which there's nothing now that's open and unclaimed. So there's like, well, what does that exactly mean?

[Steve Rinella]

And we've. It determined that it's federally managed land, not state land, not Montana state land specifically.

[Chili Palmer]

And somehow not the park.

[Steve Rinella]

And somehow not the park.

[Chili Palmer]

But it's the national forest.

[Rick Wallen]

I think they've determined that the National Forest fits that category.

[Chili Palmer]

I know. And I would argue, based on no evidence that so does the park.

[Rick Wallen]

Well, it's claimed by Congress as a pleasure and ground for humans. You know, if you look at the enabling legislation of national parks.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah. And it was Designated, what year? 77 or something like that.

[Rick Wallen]

No. 18. 72.

[Chili Palmer]

Was it? 72?

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. So, yeah. You know, I think you don't like that idea. I don't like that idea.

[Chili Palmer]

I can tell.

[Rick Wallen]

I don't like that idea. Because the issue really is if we did it in the Boundary Lands area, there are some concessions that I think you could figure out how to do it. But what my argument is, if you do it in the national park without qualifying it, then what's to say it's not justified in Lamar Valley or in Hayden Valley? And I think that hunting disrupts sort of this natural ecology of the system, that it could. It could create chaos, you know, and if you went there to hunt, then they might just scatter to the wind.

[Chili Palmer]

I'm only looking. I'm only bringing that subject up. And it's like, to me, it's like a. It's a legal question.

[Rick Wallen]

Right.

[Chili Palmer]

And I'm not advocating one way or the other. I'm just saying it's an interesting legal question that at some point in time in the future, a tribe wouldn't say, we're gonna go exercise what we understand to be our treaty rights.

[Rick Wallen]

Right.

[Chili Palmer]

We're gonna go exercise them. And if you'd like to arrest us, this is where we'll be on Monday.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah. The Crow Nation probably has the, you know, most opportunity to be successful, then.

[Chili Palmer]

They would be in the situation of like, are we really gonna go arrest a bunch of Crow.

[Rick Wallen]

Right.

[Chili Palmer]

For hunting?

[Rick Wallen]

Right. Well, they've been known to push other, you know, tribal treaty rights kinds of issues. So I think it'd be a heck.

[Steve Rinella]

Of an educational program within the park.

[Chili Palmer]

I'd go down there just to watch.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

It'd be like when people used to go to watch the Civil War battles. Like you'd watch on the sidelines. I'd go down there to watch.

[Rick Wallen]

Well, the garden, the Gardner Basin was an extension, so it's not actually part of the original national park. And I want to say the original national park boundary was, gosh, really close to the. Where the arches. Gardner got it. And at some point in time, there was this program to pay farmers market value for their land because they weren't very productive.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

And I Don't remember. I think it was in the 1920s or 1930s or something like that.

[Chili Palmer]

Again. Yeah, I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating is for this because we're running out of time. I, I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find. I don't know how to do it. I think we need to find a way to have buffalo on our federally managed public lands.

[Rick Wallen]

Public lands.

[Chili Palmer]

I don't think it should cost the ranchers money.

[Rick Wallen]

I agree. I agree.

[Chili Palmer]

Like, I don't think it should cost them money. I don't think it should cost them business. I think that we should find a way to do it.

[Rick Wallen]

I agree.

[Chili Palmer]

And it's like, I just cannot accept that there's not a way to sort this out.

[Rick Wallen]

I think there is, but the money will follow.

[Chili Palmer]

And I think that sportsmen, like, I think that sportsmen need to. The same way sportsmen demanded bringing back bighorn sheep, the same way sportsman demanded and funded bringing back elk, in some cases black bears. I mean, all around the country.

[Rick Wallen]

Absolutely.

[Chili Palmer]

Sportsman demanded it, paid for it, worked for it. I just don't see why hunters are not saying, let's take a look at this and let's make it be that it doesn't, it doesn't need to cripple the livestock industry there. I mean, there has to be a way, but I don't know what it is.

[Rick Wallen]

I think we need some creative minds from all industries and perspectives to get together and, and give them a directive that you have to find a solution. You can't argue, you know, your, your heartfelt perspective.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

So I agree completely. And I don't think it needs to go all the way to Interstate 90 even if that designated Bruce Los zone does, because then the level of difficulty is dramatically greater.

[Chili Palmer]

And maybe the, maybe the park, maybe the Yellowstone area is not the place to do it.

[Rick Wallen]

That's a possibility.

[Chili Palmer]

Maybe the place to do it is the somewhere in the break. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

[Rick Wallen]

I think American prayer, my word.

[Chili Palmer]

Maybe it's somewhere to do it in the breaks, like. But the American Prairie Reserve thing doesn't scratch my itch. That's a problem. It's a private enterprise.

[Rick Wallen]

It is a private enterprise right now. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But yeah, long term vision for landscapes, Right. It's like if we're talking about federally managed lands and we're talking about either voluntary or some sort of large incentive program to buy out grazing leases, right. That are active and, and then the other Thing is like landscape fragmentation. Like there's just so many obstacles around the federally managed lands that we have here in, in western Montana which with guarantee, if you talk to all the people that were coming off the plane yesterday is like the wild West. Like there's, it's wide open out here. Right. And it's just not right. So if we're going to do it, we got to do it fast.

[Chili Palmer]

Alaska now has five. Alaska now has I think five herds.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh. Huh. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

They got the Copper herd. Yep. The Farewell Burn herd. The Delta Junction Heard, the Yukon Flats herd.

[Rick Wallen]

And at least one or two of them are the actual northern buffalo. One. One. Okay. Is hunting allowed?

[Chili Palmer]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

Okay.

[Chili Palmer]

You can't hunt the, you can't hunt the wood buffalo one that they just got going. But the intention is to. The intention is that you will be able to. And that's how they got local buy in with native Alaskans. But all their herds, Their source herd was. Their source herd was National Bison range in Montana.

[Rick Wallen]

Okay.

[Chili Palmer]

And they turned them, they brought a bunch of Delta Junction and let them trickle out here and there. And now they have these four. I think it's four. They have four managed hunts and then they have a wood buffalo population. And whether or not wood buffalo are actually different is this whole conversation for geneticists to argue about. But they have this other herd they're establishing there that has the potential to be. That has the potential to be 3,4000 animals.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, wow.

[Chili Palmer]

And again, why is that possible? It's possible. Like, you know, there's a. I don't want to insult anyone that has livestock in Alaska. There's effectively not a livestock industry in much of Alaska. They run them as managed hunts. People are very enthusiastic. Like every, you know, at draw time everybody fills out their thing to win a chance to hunt. I've done it. My, my brother Danny just through his social circle has gone like six or seven times on bison hunts. Not just him holding the tag, buddies of his holding the tag. It's just a part of.

[Rick Wallen]

Right. Yes.

[Chili Palmer]

It was brought in as like they're here. They're not necessarily from here. They don't have. They don't have an adversary. They don't have a human adversary.

[Rick Wallen]

That's right.

[Chili Palmer]

And they have a lot of public buy in because the hunts are cool.

[Rick Wallen]

Has anyone at this table got harvested a bison other than you? Because I know Randall's wife Sydney has a. We're gonna go up to apr. We're gonna go up to the APR in January and. Very cool. My Wife's got a management tag for that herd. And then, Seth, you've had it. I drew Gardner and West Yellowstone, but you haven't harvested.

[Chili Palmer]

He didn't have what it takes.

[Rick Wallen]

And then Chili's got this.

[Steve Rinella]

Didn't have the snow.

[Rick Wallen]

We'll see if Chili has it.

[Chili Palmer]

It takes.

[Rick Wallen]

Do you have gardener or Wesley? I have gardener.

[Chili Palmer]

Yeah.

[Rick Wallen]

You've got gardener right now. This winter. This winter. All right, let's talk. All right.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's why I've been pretty quiet.

[Chili Palmer]

Because I was like, I've already met one guy. Don't show him. Don't show him your secret spot. Wait, we should all go along, hear from the other direction.

[Rick Wallen]

No, I've. I've been really quiet because I'm like, ah, there's so much I want to know.

[Steve Rinella]

Just like.

[Rick Wallen]

Because you're very familiar with the area. I'm not, but I also. I've met a guy in Bozeman that's.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, yeah, I got the same tag.

[Chili Palmer]

And I don't want to put it on podcast. So that little guy Chili's a veteran, too, so give him get special treatment.

[Rick Wallen]

Oh, I'm a veteran, too, so we're going to get along famously. Perfect.

[Chili Palmer]

What branch?

[Rick Wallen]

U.S. army. I'm an artilleryman.

[Chili Palmer]

So, okay, you guys can have that little army.

[Rick Wallen]

The connection stuff. Marine Corps. Seth and I talk about cowardice a lot. Our shared connection.

[Chili Palmer]

You know, you didn't commit to defend your country either.

[Rick Wallen]

Yeah, because you guys. War Dodgers and. Yeah, well, harvesting a wild bison. They're harvesting any kind kind of bison. Gives you the opportunity to teach the next generation a lot of lessons. Yeah, a lot of lessons. So, I mean, I took my son out to the Green Ranch out on the Madison to harvest a buffalo 20 years ago. We had a grand time. Took us a long time. Yeah.

[Chili Palmer]

That's why I'm super excited about this.

[Rick Wallen]

Hunt because, like, I grew up in South Dakota, and there's a lot. Lot of buffalo history there, too. And my dad never did it, but he always talked about, like, buffalo hunts and old timers that he knew going on them. And so I think this is probably.

[Steve Rinella]

The closest thing I'd ever get to.

[Rick Wallen]

Doing something like that, you know, and so that's why I'm kind of. I. I don't discredit places like the Custer State park because, you know, it's. It's sort of canned, but again, it provides the. It's a large enough landscape that it provides the opportunity to experience what our ancestors could have experienced. When Sydney drew her tag I texted Dan Flores and I just told him, you know, we're going to be buffalo hunting in January. And his response was like, that's fantastic, Randall. I can't think of a single more historical act that you could do on the Great Plains. Yep, that's right, Jed. That was like a really funny way of putting it, but I mean, it's hard to argue, argue with it.

[Chili Palmer]

Yep.

[Rick Wallen]

Yep.

[Chili Palmer]

Rick Wallen, thanks for joining, man. I appreciate it, all your insights.

[Rick Wallen]

I admire all you guys. Keep up the good work and thanks for the invite. Thank you, thank you. This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via.

[Chili Palmer]

Video phone or chat.

[Rick Wallen]

Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations Hes u Joe discussing who can benefit from therapy I think a lot of people.

[Steve Rinella]

Think that you're supposed to be going.

[Rick Wallen]

To therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing.

[Steve Rinella]

That you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody. There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we.

[Rick Wallen]

Are and how we behave with other people.

[Steve Rinella]

So if you're human, that's like a.

[Rick Wallen]

Good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody.

[Chili Palmer]

Find out if therapy is right for you.

[Rick Wallen]

Visit betterhelp.com today.

[Chili Palmer]

That's better.

[Rick Wallen]

H E L p dot com this.

[Steve Rinella]

Show is brought to you in part by Stash Financial.

[Chili Palmer]

Ever felt burned out after chasing hot stocks trying to time market trading only to watch your gains vanish? Imagine investing with less headache and guesswork. Stash is an investing platform that helps you reach your financial goals faster by harnessing the power of steady, dependable investing strategies instead of high risk gambles. How does Stash work? Stash makes it easy to get started and make consistent progress with as little as a dollar per day. You can use Stash's personalized investing recommendations to buy fractional shares of the stocks you know and love like Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, or invest in Stash's award winning expert managed portfolio. Over a million Americans have already grown their portfolios to more than $500, which is one of the many reasons why Stash has more than 250,000 five star reviews on the App Store. Go to get.stash.commeater to see how you can receive 25 toward your first stock purchase. When you open an account with stash. That's get.stash.com meater paid non client endorsement.

[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. View Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions.

[Chili Palmer]

I'm sure a lot of you guys remember the old ceremonial hunting tradition of eating the heart out of the first animal you kill. Meat from those organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet. You can get those same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil. Find out more at heartandsoil. Co. And remember, use Code me Eater for 10% off your purchase.