Ep. 877: Does Predator Management Actually Work?

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast - Episode 877: "Does Predator Management Actually Work?"

Release Date: May 18, 2026
Host: Steven Rinella (MeatEater)
Guest: Mike Bowden-Chuck, Wildlife Biologist, Predator Prey Expert

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the complex, often controversial world of predator management. Host Steven Rinella welcomes renowned wildlife biologist Mike Bowden-Chuck, whose 45-year career has spanned federal, state, and private wildlife work—much of it deep in predator-prey research and hands-on management. The discussion unpacks whether predator management is effective, how it works (or doesn’t), real-world case studies from across North America (and beyond), and the layered social and ecological challenges these efforts face.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Meet the Expert: Mike Bowden-Chuck

• Background:
  • 34 years with USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service), plus extensive private and state experience.
  • Specialized in predator-prey dynamics, predator management, and invasive species.
  • Started trapping and hunting as a child in New Mexico and Texas (04:00).
  • "I've been trapping for a long time." - Mike (04:11)
• Career highlights:
  • Managed large predator projects for deer, pronghorn, bighorn, and domestic livestock across the U.S. and Mexico.

2. Predator Management: What Is It & Does It Work?

• Types of predator impact:
  • Primary impacts: Directly eating prey (11:03).
  • Secondary impacts: Causing behavioral changes in prey, often just as significant (11:54).
• "Shooting a coyote in the fall—is that going to help anything? If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down, then maybe very small, maybe. If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever. Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a species..." – Mike (12:16)
• Coyotes in particular:
  • Removing up to 65% can result in full population recovery in a single breeding season (12:31).
  • Important to differentiate between targeting random individuals and removing experienced territory holders.

3. Timeliness and Scale: The Keys to Effective Control

• Timing:
  • Control efforts often fail if done at the wrong time or only target the “wrong” animals.
• "You got to get the reproduction. The time to get those is before she has the pup. And if you can remove her, another coyote will take her place. But they won't have pups in that territory that year. That'll be a safe zone for pronghorns to fawn." – Mike (42:54)
• Intensity and area:
  • Small-scale removals rarely affect populations. Effective management must be intensive and landscape-wide.
  • "If my buddy Yanni is doing raccoon work on 40 acres, he might help one nest." – Steven (59:51)
  • "You got to be at some relationship to carrying capacity... Agencies have to decide every year where are we going to spend our money... You do predator management if you have unused habitat today." – Mike (45:49)

4. Case Studies: Predator Control in the Real World

• Alaska Caribou/Bear/Wolf Example (06:14)
  • Bear removals at calving are increasing calf survival, with some caribou populations rebounding by 25% (07:14).
• Deer, Lions, and Coyotes: Utah (Parts starting ~17:00)
  • Coyotes depress fawn numbers, which can lead lions to start targeting adult breeding does, risking population decline.
• Waterfowl, Pheasants, & Turkey:
  • Linear habitats (dikes, beaches) make nests vulnerable even if most predators are removed; sometimes only intensive, large-scale work makes a difference (19:16, 58:30).
  • Duck and pheasant case studies show nest success can double, but only when control covers broad enough territory.

5. Predator Behavior and Ecology

• Behavioral changes:
  • Coyotes: Only territorial adults do most wildlife predation (20:50).
  • Prey: Alter nesting/calving sites based on presence of predators (11:54, 62:58).
• Wildlife adaptivity:
  • Prey and predator success shaped reciprocally by pressure–classic "yin and yang" (14:38).
• "Predators can put prey in a predator pit when the prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't drop off, that's when we have a predator pit." – Mike (06:14)

6. Social Factors and Public Acceptance

• Cultural attitudes:
  • Some landowners don’t want pigs gone—there’s recreational or economic interest (76:20).
  • Public support fluctuates: Sea turtle/pig removal widely accepted compared to "removing coyotes for more deer" (96:03-98:00).
• "If public opinion was all that mattered, California would have nothing but predators and North Dakota wouldn't have any." – Mike (97:16)

7. Hogs/Pigs: A Special Challenge

• Expansion and control:
  • Pigs can't be eliminated from parts of Texas, but can be eradicated from areas where public will exists and terrain is suitable (70:35, 75:19).
  • “If it was up to the pig, the whole country’s pig territory. But in a lot of areas, we’re just able to get them.” – Steven (74:36)
• Pig hunting doesn’t work for population control—outpaces any removals through hunting (81:42, 82:04).
• Pig movement often incentivized by open hunting seasons (80:44-81:27).

8. Myths and Misconceptions

• Individual "problem animals":
  • Mythic lone predator may exist—often a solitary, older male—but much livestock loss blamed on a series of individuals (87:17–91:19).
• Cattle mutilations:
  • Most cases are normal predation or scavenging; rarely “inexplicable” (92:29).

9. Pragmatic, Data-Driven Approach

• Predator management must be based on long-term trends, specific objectives, and clear exit strategies (46:48, 98:54).
• Habitat comes first:
  • “You do habitat work all the time. You do predator management if you have unused habitat today.” – Mike (45:49)
• **If fawn recruitment or population is low, and other factors are ruled out, targeted, time-limited predator removal may help.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the resilience of coyotes:
  • "Up to 65% removal and you'll have them back in a single breeding season." – Mike (12:31)
• On behavioral impacts:
  • "That secondary impact is probably as important as the primary impact." – Mike (12:16)
• On public intention:
  • "They've built an economy around the cropping them." – Mike on Texas hog hunting (77:31)
• On management philosophy:
  • "You have to have an exit strategy... We'll do this for this long or until we see these results." – Mike (99:33)
• On turkeys and raccoon control:
  • "If they do it on a big enough scale... we doubled pheasant abundance in those areas." – Mike (57:14, 58:25)
• "Coyotes don't breed till their second year. Territorial coyotes are the ones doing most of the killing of wildlife." – Mike (20:50)
• On what makes predator management justified:
  • "If you're below carrying capacity... and have a three-year stable or declining trend, then that would be a unit that we would consider for predator management." – Mike (46:48)

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Important Timestamps

• 05:37 – Alaska caribou/bear control
• 11:03 – How predators impact prey: direct vs. behavioral
• 17:10 – How lions killing breeding does can crash deer populations
• 19:15 – Linear habitat and predation efficiency (beaches, dikes, etc.)
• 29:31 – Coyote predation differences north vs. south
• 42:46 – Timing and precision in coyote removal for pronghorn
• 57:14 – Raccoon removal for turkey and pheasant – scale required
• 70:13 – Hog management and eradication limits
• 81:42 – Pig hunting cannot control wild populations
• 87:17-91:19 – Mythic problem animals: truth and legend
• 92:29 – Cattle mutilations: natural causes and investigations
• 96:03-98:00 – The role of ethics and public perspective in predator management

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Special Insights

• Predation often doesn't "cause" prey declines, but can prevent recoveries when populations are low, especially when alternate prey exist.
• Culling an occasional coyote or raccoon rarely impacts populations or prey survival—timing, method, and area size matter most.
• Individual territory-holding adult predators are usually the key targets in effective management.
• Large scale, cooperative, and sustained efforts are needed for predator control to boost prey for restoration, hunting, or conservation.
• Much of the predator/prey balance, especially with adaptable species like coyotes and pigs, is ultimately dictated by habitat, food, and landscape-wide conditions—not simply by direct human removals.

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Final Takeaway

Predator management is highly situational—effective only when it’s precisely targeted, based on clear evidence, and combined with solid habitat work and clearly defined objectives. Public values and culture shape what’s possible just as much as wildlife biology.
“What you do is critical.” – Mike Bowden-Chuck (102:41)

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For further information or to reach Mike Bowden-Chuck for consulting: Search his name—he is widely referenced in wildlife management circles, and occasionally a target for animal rights activists (102:19).

Transcript

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

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[Podcast Host]

all right. Joined today by Mike Boden. Chuck, professional wildlife biologist. 45 years professional experience in private, state and federal government services. Now, you recently retired from aphis.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's correct.

[Podcast Host]

Animal, Plant and Health Inspection Services.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's right, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You spent how many years doing that?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I spent 34 years with APHIS. I've spent about 10 in the private sector and four with state government before that.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. And currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's correct.

[Podcast Host]

But your area of expertise, and this is how you were recommended to us by many people. Not only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in predator prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You bet. APHIS does a lot of predator control around the state, or predator predation control. Actually, we don't control numbers as much as we do the ones that are actually killing.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But I've done that really, my whole career, you know.

[Podcast Host]

But besides, when you were a dj?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, no, that was a long time ago.

[Podcast Host]

What was up with that?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, I. In high school, I had a. I had a job. I think they just needed somebody who could read and talk, and I could do both, so.

[Podcast Host]

So you were a dj?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I was a DJ for a couple of years, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What stage?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You grew up in New Mexico? I lived in New Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country after that.

[Podcast Host]

So as a kid, you cut your teeth like hunting and trapping?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, I did, actually, growing up, I got to hunt deer back when we had a lot of deer. Right. In New Mexico in the 70s, there was a lot of deer, and I got to do that. I started trapping when I was 11 years old.

[Podcast Host]

So what year would that have been?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, man, 68.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So, yeah, so I've been trapping for a long time.

[Podcast Host]

And then you eventually got into that kind of work, professional?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. You know, when I went to college, that's all I wanted to do was. Was become a wildlife biologist. I wanted to work outdoors, and. And that's when I graduated college. Jobs with game department were on. On a hiring freeze, and a job came open with the predator control program in New Me. So I started with that outfit after four years. I was guiding hunters on the side and went into the private sector, guiding and managing ranches in Texas, doing some consulting work down in Old Mexico and Sonora, so.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, you did?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah. There was a center for desert ecology. We built a zoo down there in Hermosillo and moved some animals into it. Captured pronghorn in San Luis Potosi. Did a lot of. Lot of work in Mexico over the years. After my kids were born, I decided maybe I needed a job that had health insurance.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I came back to government work in Mississippi as a beaver trapper, and then South Dakota. Spent 13 years in Utah, mostly predator management. The deer herds crashed there in 1992, 93, and I moved in there just after that. So we started doing predator control for domestic sheep protection, but also for mule deer pronghorn. Protection, bighorn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep into it. Studying predator prey relationships. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Let me hit you with one that wasn't expecting to ask you about, but I was just reading about it yesterday. Have you spent much time working in Alaska?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I've been up to Alaska several times, but never, never, you know, a month at a time. Just a couple weeks here and there.

[Podcast Host]

There's a little, there's a, you know. But it was a. Constantly a brujan Alaska about predator management around coyote stuff. But I was reading about some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bear control to try to reestablish a caribou herd that had gone through like a 94% decline.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, that it is a worldwide phenomenon. I was invited speaker at the first European trapping conference and they were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer. What do we do with that? Yeah, I'm working with a group in Alberta that's trying to standardize predation management to protect wildlife. That deal in Alaska is a long brewing controversy going way back. But predators can put prey in a predator pit when the prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't drop off, that's when we have a predator pit. And that's what they're trying to reverse in Alaska. It's interesting because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually support subsistence use. And so it's a real tussle between our. Well, are you eating caribou or can you eat a bear?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I got it. Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But in those areas they are doing bear removals and some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time. The bears are hard on them and it's working. Right. We've seen some of those caribou herds, the Machattan herds up about 25%.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about. That was one that had the 94% decline and now it's kind of coming out of it. And there's a naturally cyclical element to it. But I think you can probably take. You can probably take the bottoms. You can probably round the bottoms off with.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

With control or, or decrease the. The timeline. Right. In Wyoming, pronghorn will die in a severe winter. We know that that's the limiting factor is winter. But do we want to wait seven years for them to come back up or do we want to bump them up in two or three years? You know, that's when we're talking about predation management on wildlife.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. What predator have you Spent the most

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

time on in your career, without a doubt, coyotes. Right. I actually trapped coyotes and hunted coyotes for fur when I was in college, back when college was cheap and fur was valuable and spent most of my time around coyote management and all the rest. But I spent a lot of time with mountain lions. I did postgraduate work on mountain lions in New Mexico and had hounds for 30 years. So I've, I spent a lot of time on line work.

[Podcast Host]

You know, you just mentioned college being when college was different amounts of money. I always tell people this, this is no joke, man. When I, I got out of high school, I didn't think I was going to go to college. I got kicked around going in the army and then like decided to go to college. And I remember we had a community college. We called it 13th grade. And I went down there and I'm. I'm not kidding you, man. I went down there and wrote a check for $600 at like a cashier window.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

To pay my tuition.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

My tuition was 600 for a semester and I like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all talking about, put our kids going to college knowing how expensive it is. I'm like 600 bucks.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

A semester.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I sold a Bob Gad in the spring of 79 for 300 bucks and walked across campus with that check and paid off the last of that semester's bill. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's. Those days are gone now.

[Podcast Host]

You know, on Kyle's man, here's a conversation I have people all the time is you get a guy, you know, you get a well meaning landowner, right? Farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself, the ranch manager himself, the ranch himself, whatever. And they have the idea that like, they want to help their deer population out, they want to increase their turkey population or whatever, and they'll occasionally in November shoot a coyote. Right. Because they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to help that help.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Or you'll say to a farmer, you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there, we saw a couple coyotes. You didn't shoot him, you know?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And you have this conversation where you're like, like, listen, man, I don't have any problem with you doing whatever you want to do, but that doesn't matter. Right. Like, like this kind of stuff is so it's, it's like timing and intensity dependent.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Can you explain that a little bit from a professional perspective of when? Like, how do people kind of view predator control and what does Predator control look like when it's done in a professional sense?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure. And it's, it is very, very complicated. I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but it's a deep rabbit hole.

[Podcast Host]

Sure, man. That's why I'm asking about it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Predators impact prey in one of two different ways. The first one is how many get eaten. Right. And that's what we'd studied for 50 years.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

How many deer fawns get eaten by coyotes? How many deer, adult deer get eaten by mountain lions? And no kidding. Decades of research. The very first wildlife monograph is about the PN's basin. And they follow deer, radio collar deer followed them around. Where is this pence basin? Northwest Colorado.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And if a deer starved to death, they said, see, it's habitat related. And if a deer was killed by coyotes, they said, see, it's, it's predation.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And that's what we understood about predator management or predators impacts for a long time. Really. When we started putting wolves in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts. And, and the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those prey animals to avoid predation.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So wolves didn't eat elk on the northern deer herd or northern elk herd near as much as they changed their behavior. Instead of them being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want, they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation, but they're starving to death in what we used to consider a mild winter.

[Podcast Host]

I got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And that secondary impact is probably as important as the primary impact. Okay, so shooting a coyote in the fall, is that going to help anything? If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down, then maybe very small, maybe. If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever. Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a species, and they can, they can come back from, from any kind of pressure up to 65% removal. You'll have them back within a single 65%, 65% removal. Yeah. They bounce back in a single breeding season. Yeah. And this is, this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic systems to look at predation because they can't leave, right? Fish can't get up.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And so there's been a couple of studies where they had, you know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it, and the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring. And they put in just a couple of predatory fish in that system. And all the Algae eaters go to the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have any algae eaters in it. And you have algae bloom and think about that. If you understand food pyramids and all the rest, that's the basis of life being directed by a predator species.

[Podcast Host]

But because they can't do what they

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

want no more, they can't safely go out there. They change their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment, I love this one, they had snails in an aquarium with, with growing plants. And the snails will feed up and down the stalk of that plant, including the terminal bud at the tip of the plant. They eat it and they keep the plants crop back.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They didn't introduce snail predators. They introduced the smell of snail predators. They had snail predators, another aquarium, they circulated that water over.

[Podcast Host]

Really? What's a snail predator?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Some other kind of fish that'll crunch the shells. And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the plant and the plants grew up and choked out the system.

[Podcast Host]

Because they could smell those sons of

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

bitches, they can smell them. I may not be giving snails enough credit for their thought process, but that's an evolutionary thing, right? It's.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, because they didn't watch their body get munched by no fish.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That was it. That's, that's evolution. That's the, that's the yin and yang of predation. Right. It shapes the predator, it shapes the prey.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

When things get out of whack, when people interfere, then, then predators can have an impact on them. Yeah. Another fascinating deal. When I was in Utah, they asked me to, to identify why predators have an impact and what would we do to manage that impact. And, and I started looking at mountain lions and deer, and mountains kill deer. That's their job. That's how they evolve. Deer evolved feeding mountain lions, that, that's, that's the relationship. But mountain lions kill bucks in greater percentage than the percentage in the population. If bucks are 20% of a population, it might be 30%, 35% of what lions kill. And the reasons for that are multiple. But bucks are solitary. Bucks move more, so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups. So it's, you know, they don't have a. Defensive of a lot of eyes. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Because you would think on that, just on that point. I've seen that before.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And heard that before. But you would think in some ways, the fact that it's. For much of the year, it's armed with antlers, you would think in some ways that would offset that and maybe it does. Maybe it'd be. Maybe if they didn't have, if they didn't have antlers, it'd be even worse. But you'd see in some ways I feel like I'm surprised it doesn't turn a cat off.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, it doesn't turn a cat off. They don't care. They're. They're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders and, and biting where they need to bite.

[Podcast Host]

You know, you'll need the antlers or.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No. I've seen them kill adult bull elk. Yeah. You know, with antlers. Yeah. So mountains though will kill does and fawns in relative abundance to each other. And, and so if there's a hundred.

[Podcast Host]

Explain it again.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They killed does and fawns in relative abundance. So you take the buck mortality out of it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If you got 100 fawns per 100 does, which we never have, half of what a lion kills is going to be fong, half will be dose.

[Podcast Host]

Is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If, if you had that ratio, they don't care. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Because you don't know what's in his head. But that's what you see.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's. It's just availability.

[Podcast Host]

It's.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They're equally vulnerable to predation. So it's just whatever, whatever he comes on the closest one to the bushes, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

What we found out though is that when predator or when, when fawn numbers are down, lion mortality is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age does and that can drive a population down.

[Podcast Host]

Explain that to me again. I got confused there.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

The, the model that I had.

[Podcast Host]

When deer numbers are down, when, when

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

fawn numbers are down, when you get below 50 fawns per 100 does. I see what a lion's killing is. Two thirds of what the non bucks are adult breeding age does. Only one third is fawns. If they're killing fawns, it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still got some that are coming up to be breeding age.

[Podcast Host]

I got you.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If they're killing, breeding age does. You can see the whole population depressed because they're the ones that are, that are feeding, you know, young into the system.

[Podcast Host]

Like, that's when it's having like sort of a greater population level impact.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official lion population was about 3,000. Based on densities and all the rest, the official deer population was 300,000 or about one line for every hundred deer. When fawn ratios got below 50 fawns per hundred does the population Was declining because lions were killing does.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Lions aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The reason the fawn ratios were low was because coyotes were eating the fawns.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So when we started doing predator management in the book Cliffs in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after the coyotes. We tried to get our fawn numbers up above 50 fawns per hundred does. We get about 60, 70 fawns per hundred does. The lions can eat whatever they want to eat and you don't notice the difference.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So you got two predators working on the same population, but they're hitting different levels of, of the population. One's eating fawns and the other's eating adult does. It can depress that population as well. So there's, there's all kinds of Factors. We identified 18 factors that affect predation rates. Give me some more linear habitat.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can find every duck nest if they have to nest on the edge, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I'm glad you brought this up because this is in our notes. This, this linear. I'd never heard this concept before.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. So what's more linear than a beach? Yeah, a beach. Sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that beach can find 100% of the nest.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Which also gets to, what do you do about it? You can remove 90% of the coyotes, but one still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat, it's, you got to be really, really intensive. Other factors like herd size and age. Right. When wolves were killing elk in Yellowstone, the average age of the elk that were being shot by hunters, cow elk, was about 5. But the average age that the wolves were eating was like 11. That's because they're at the back of the herd. The 11 year olds are the slower ones at the back of the herds. That's the one the wolves. Oh, you're targeting and pulling down. So they're not equally distributing that predation effort over the whole population. You know, you can lose some 11 year olds. You start losing your 5 year olds and your population is going to decline because that's the reproductive capacity of that herd right there.

[Podcast Host]

Got it. Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

It's a fascinating, fascinating picture. Some of the, some of the factors involve the predators. Coyotes, you probably know this, but coyotes don't breed till their second year.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So right out on the landscape you've got the current year's pups which are like 50% of the population numerically.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You've got the last year's coyotes, the yearlings that are out there, transient coyotes between territories, trying to stay out of everybody's way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial coyotes are like 20% of the population, 2 year olds and up. Those coyotes are the ones that are doing most of the killing of wildlife. Those are the coyotes. Yeah. You got a four year old pair that's been on that territory for three breeding seasons, they're going to know where to go hunt. Fawns, they're the ones that are the most active at killing.

[Podcast Host]

Just they got the most experience.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They've got the most experience and they're feeding pups.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In experiments with livestock predation when, when you remove the pups from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

It's provisioning those pups. And when you think about it, coyote pups are born right around April 15th. Deer fawns hit the ground the end of June, 1st of July. Those pups got to eat meat. Those coyotes are killing as fast as they can to provision their pups.

[Podcast Host]

You know, I gotta just keep your train of thought.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But the other day a buddy of mine who's a songwriter, he says, hey, I got a coyote question for you. And I don't know where he's. I don't even know. He didn't even, I didn't even ask him if this has to do with something he's writing. But he, he happens to be a songwriter and he happens to have called me and asked me this question with no explanation of why he was asking. But he said, do you ever see. And I didn't really, I didn't have great answer for him. I could just tell him anecdotally or I could just tell my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said, do you ever see a coyote take a step to dispatch something or do they just kind of like grab it and start eating it? She's talking about, why do you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still looking around? You know, I mean like some things, if you think like a terrier, Right. When, if a terrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

A lion, like a terrier sinks his teeth into the neck. You actually see him seed his teeth into the neck.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And shake it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Right. A lion is like, a lion is thinking, I'm going to kill this thing.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

And I know how to kill it. And I know where, you know, like I know what I'm going to do in top priority is it's going to die. But a coyote just seems to not be interested in, in dispatching something. And for his sake, what's the answer?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Coyotes. Coyotes do kill them. They're. They're a coursing predator mostly. And this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're coursing predator. They chase down their game. And when they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They don't have thumb thumbs that they're not like a lion that's got claws. So they grab it with their mouth. Once they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done. They don't have to kill it right away.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In fact, they're not going to kill it till they're ready to eat it sometimes.

[Podcast Host]

So. So it is like it's not their instinct to just right away make it dead.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No, they, they're. They're gonna grab it, they're gonna pack it off, you know, with, with baby lambs. They'll, they'll shake them once, maybe bite the top of the head. But they're, they're moving food is what they're doing. Food still alive. If they're taking it back to a, to a den, the pups will kill it.

[Podcast Host]

He'll get around to killing it later. Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Red foxes can't do that. Right. Everything that a red fox eats is small. And so when they grab it, it dies and they take it back. And red foxes will cache their food around a den. Coyotes don't. They just go back and either puke it up if, if that's if they ate meat, or just drop it and the pups will tear it into it.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But it's, it's, it's a difference just in size and in what they're trying to do at the time. Got it. In the wintertime when they grab something, they'll eat it right away. Yeah. In the summertime, they may be packing it back to the den site, and that's what they're trying to do.

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[Podcast Host]

What do you guys see when you look at with coyotes with fawn predation versus adult? Let's just stick to whitetail deer for a minute. Yeah, like, like what do you see when you look at. And maybe I'm wrong, but it seem if I had to take a guess at it just One I've picked up. And there's so much false information about this floating around out there and so much myth and legend. But like in the north they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer. In the south they don't, they don't seem to kill adult deer as much. Like what, what of that is true and not true?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So we talked about the 18 factors and one of those other factors is alternative prey.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I lived in Mississippi for two years and trapped beavers down there and, and worked on some coyote problems when I was there. And I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a rabbit call. I could howl them up and they'd come out, but I never called one with a rabbit call. And I think the answer is they don't know what rabbits are. They're living in such a food rich environment in Mississippi, in Mississippi Delta they can eat grapes, they can eat persimmons, they can eat all this other food that they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that grows in the South. I talked about than being a coursing predator. Not in Mississippi, not in south Texas. I wondered for my whole career until I moved back to Texas how you can have six coyotes per square mile and still have white tailed deer in south Texas.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you sure come to a rabbit in south Texas.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh yeah, they do. But coyotes in south Texas are more of like a, ecologically more like a fox. They're a pounce predator. They go up and down the senderos and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it. Cotton rat, they'll pounce on that. And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote, all he has to do is turn left and go out through the, through the brush and the coyote can't seem anymore.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So we've got whitetails in south Texas, but The coyotes are 20 pound coyotes and they pounce. We've got all that other alternative prey.

[Podcast Host]

I see.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So at your issue, you know what else is going on out there? Are the packs larger because they have to hunt? Because they have to hunt deer?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Whereas elsewhere the packs are kind of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating jackrabbits and, and that's only a meal for one.

[Podcast Host]

And you feel that that's true? Yeah, we, they don't need like if they have tons of stuff, they don't need to pack up.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They don't need to pack up. Their territories get smaller, they tolerate more overlap in territory. Huh. The, the, we've got territories in south Texas where we've got radio collars on coyotes. 300 acres, is that right?

[Podcast Host]

300 acres, yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's fascinating. And other coyotes right on top of them because everything they need is on that 300 acres.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So they.

[Podcast Host]

And they don't. They're more lenient about other ones coming in because there's enough food.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

There's enough food.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Another coyote territory thing, but I'm going down different.

[Podcast Host]

This is great.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In the 60s, there was a coyote study with VHF collars. And they. They mapped out where the coyote territories were based on all the locations. And. And they had had a picture of what that looked like in the, whatever the decade we're calling it after 2000, 40 years later, they went in there with GPS collars and did the same study. And the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me, they had the same boundaries.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. They didn't shift over. When one coyote pair disappeared, another coyote pair would pick it up. And whatever they were seeing out there on the landscape, they maintained the same boundaries. 40 years. That's 20 coyote generations.

[Podcast Host]

Now, I wonder, like, there's no way to answer this probably. But picture that you had somehow magically were able to pull them all out. Okay. Like the shake of a wand and they're all out. And then you replace them with totally different ones. Then I wonder, would they find those same. Jimmy.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like, is the territory thing inherited or is there some logic to it that a coyote understands that we don't understand?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Coyote sees it, the landscape different.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And.

[Podcast Host]

And because we tend to think of like fence lines.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Fence lines and roads.

[Podcast Host]

Because he came off the neighbor's place. As though the deer has some comprehension. I mean, like, as though, like he's like, yeah, I'm going over to the neighbor's place now. You know, it's just like the way we, like, view, you know, isn't how they see it, isn't how they experience it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We talk some about not only the pack size, but individual animal size. Right. They get larger as they go north, you know, away from the equator or south away from the equator. But their prey also decides their individual size. Some I've been working with wolves in. In Michigan, Minnesota, and. And wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that eat white tail deer.

[Podcast Host]

In the same place.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In the same place. What, just a few miles apart? 15 miles apart.

[Podcast Host]

You're kidding me.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No. No.

[Podcast Host]

Huh. So what are you doing with wolves up there?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Radio collars. We're handling wolves, Putting radio collars on them. How you Catching them foothold traps.

[Podcast Host]

Well, what trap do you use?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I'm using MB750.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

On, on wolves. The Alaskan with a bigger, bigger offset.

[Podcast Host]

We had another wolf researcher on and I asked her that question, she said MB752.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a good stout Travis, kind of I use for beaters. Yeah, yeah. Back foot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh.

[Podcast Host]

But, and you just, and you're out like you just. They walk me through going out and catching a wolf in Michigan. Like what are you doing?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Well, we're working in a wilderness area.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So we're doing this out of a backpack.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You don't pack 12 of those traps on your back and go for a walk. You know, take four or five of them out there. And there are traditional places where they walk. But if I'm, if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting a trap. You're just wasting a lot of time setting, hoping that something's going to come by here because we're putting radio collars on. We're running those traps every day.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So you can only have so many traps out in a day and still get to that wolf before noon and getting processed and out of the trap.

[Podcast Host]

How many sets do you guys run when you're doing that?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

A dozen? Fifteen.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. You know, then you get it. We get the wolf, you call the biologist or whoever. Are you working it up yourself?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We're working it up ourselves. It's a team effort. I mean just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work the wolf up. It's, it's usually a two, three person team.

[Podcast Host]

What month are you doing this in?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

May, usually. We will be doing some late this month.

[Podcast Host]

And you'll be up there this month?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah. The end of this month and first part of June still.

[Podcast Host]

And what are you finding with those collars? Are you analyzing the data too or you just collecting it?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I get to see it, but, but we've got other biologists that are analyzing the data. They've got territories, they make some pretty good extraterritorial movements. They'll go over here and try and poach a girlfriend or come back. We caught a pair of wolves one night. It was a male and a female, three year old male and two year old female. And I felt like they were pack mates. We put collars on both of them and as soon as we turned them loose, they split. And one went back to another pack's territory. He was a member of that pack and he was over there trying to poach a girlfriend.

[Podcast Host]

You're kidding me. Really?

[Ad Voice 1]

She just happened.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We just happened to catch him on date night. Yeah. Really? Yeah. That was fascinating. I'd never guessed that if we didn't put the collars on. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What are you seeing nowadays with. I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Long time ago. Yeah, but what are they seeing nowadays with those populations there?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I think they're kind of stable. I mean they, they, they filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers are kind of low, so there's not a lot of groceries left. You don't see, I think every breeding pair still having a litter, but you don't see a lot of young wolves coming up.

[Podcast Host]

They're like. They filled in.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, they filled in.

[Podcast Host]

You know, here's the thing I'd like to talk with you about, about predator prey relationships. So you might, you may be familiar with this story where you're familiar with the Hudson Bay Company.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. So Hudson Bay Company, I think was like the oldest corporation, you know, dissolved now. Right. But you know, for a while, like the oldest corporation out there. Just for, for listener sake, what used to happen is like, like in Canada and this would happen in the, in, in a minor way in the US but in Canada they would give these sort of charters or commissions to company, basically. Corporate charters.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

And they would say you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company and it had all these different names over time, but Hudson Bay Company was, was, they had the, they had a monopoly to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in Hudson Bay. And they kept meticulous records. So you're familiar with like that snowshoe hares follow this up, down cycle of seven to 10 years, seven years. There's all these different debates about what drives it. Like it seems to be like. I think the consensus nowadays what drives it is plant toxins that, that as plants get over consumed, they produce more toxins. They produce more toxins. The rabbits lay off. And so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go back through time and track the link cycle and see that the link cycle follows the snowshoe hare cycle.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

And you see like how many links are coming through their trading posts.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right, right.

[Podcast Host]

And they look and it's like it spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down. Kind of in line with rabbits.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

But. Or hairs. But here's my question. How long is the delay? I think A lot of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't. They would look. Predator, man management doesn't matter because if all the deer are dead.

[Ad Voice 1]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

If there's no deer left, then the predators will die.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's what I was taught when I went to college in the 70s.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So prey drives the predator numbers. And, and, and we were shown those very graphs, those very data. There's another famous study Paul Arrington did with muskrats and mink.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

When, when muskrats make numbers go up. When muskrats crash, mink numbers crash.

[Ad Voice 1]

Yeah, but they can't be.

[Podcast Host]

Those lines aren't traveling like this.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They're about a year behind.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, that's what I said. There has to be a delay and

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

it has to do with kitten survival for lynx.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and kitten numbers don't survive in the downswing. They just starve to death and dispersal. If you look at non target lynx, take in Idaho, for example, they're catching lynx out in the deserts where there aren't any links in bobcat sets. When you have a snowshoe hair crash and the links have to disperse, they leave.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So it's not always dying.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And that's what we were all taught. And that, that actually works in a single predator, single prey system.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I don't get to work in those systems. I've got coyotes, I got mountain lions, I got all kinds of predators.

[Podcast Host]

So single predator, single prey. Let's take like, just to help you understand what we're saying. We've, we've talked about this on past shows like Isle Royal.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

In, in Lake Superiors is kind of famous example of.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

It's like you. Basically there's moose and there's wolves and beaver. Okay. Oh, okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You got beaver, but only half the year. Right. They're under ice the rest of the year.

[Podcast Host]

So that's not even single predator.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They whack the heck out of the beavers too.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Okay, so beavers are a favorite food of wolves.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So. So continue that thought though. Like that, that the situations where you don't have single prey, single predator.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So, so in the, the famous lion study that Hornocker did in Idaho, the, the, the lions didn't kill elk.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Because there weren't many elk back then. There were hundreds and hundreds of deer and almost no elk. Now that in total, total systems change. There's very few deer and a lot of elk. And the elk are buffering the lions to where the lions can still find something to eat and keep the deer numbers low.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In a study on the Spider ranch in northern Arizona, lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought. The lions didn't cause the crash.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But a couple of years of no foam survival and the deer herds way down. Lions just switched over to cattle.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

All the lions on the study area that weren't killing cattle when there were a lot of deer switched to cattle. Every. Every single one. And so the line numbers didn't go down.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So that's, that's the actual system. Right. That we're worried about is, is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick on the one that's depressed enough to keep them in that predator pit. That's when we have to get. Step in and remove them. And, and it's, it's got to be very specific. Right. You go out there and kill a bunch of yearling coyotes and not deal with the, the pair that's raising those pups. You haven't done a darn thing. I'll go one further. We do a lot of predator management around pronghorn.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Very well documented. If you got pronghorn herd that might have 25 fawns per hundred does. If you do predator coyote removal, effective coyote removal, you can get up to about 50 fawns. You could about double that fawn survival if you do it. Well, one state insisted that we do that work at the first of May because that's when the fawns start dropping in May. So they only wanted coyotes removed in May. Well, if you go out there with an airplane, you go out there with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes in May, you're going to find male coyotes that are provisioning pups. The females right there tied to the den.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If you get. She's in the hole with those pups and you're out there killing males, you have no impact whatsoever.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You got to get the reproduction. The time to get those is before she has the pup. And if you can remove her, another coyote will take her place. But they won't have pups in that territory that year. That'll be a safe zone for pronghorns to fawn.

[Podcast Host]

My buddy does that work for an imperiled pronghorn population. And he goes down to his camp. I feel like he's in his camps. There's, there's like the peak day when they drop fawns.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I feel like he's in his camp six Weeks?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Ad Voice 1]

Prior, six weeks post.

[Podcast Host]

Something like that. Some schedule like that.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Like, well, in advance, you know?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. No, you. That's. That's a time I. I'd like to see it. We did aerial removals on deer fawning range between January and March and removing it, especially here in the mountains. Coyotes that live above 7,000 foot in January are the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down with the groceries. But you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain that time of year.

[Podcast Host]

But why are they up there, though?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They can't afford to leave. If they leave, somebody else is going to take their place.

[Podcast Host]

You think so?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, I've seen it so much where

[Ad Voice 1]

you be up so high and, like, the snow's crusted.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And you're like, why, what are they doing?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They're digging down to old kills. They're. They're. I don't know. Eating juniper. I have no idea. But about 7,000 foot and above, it's all territorial coyotes. So you go up there in January, February, March, territory bonds are established. The pair bonds are there. You get fresh snow. You can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes. And livestock losses that year, cut in half, really. Fawn losses are cut way down. Other coyotes will take their place. But those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any pups born in that territory that year. And you're. You're golden. If you did it in November, there'd be another pair of coyotes in there by, by January, and you'd still have pups. So the timing is critical to when you get that. The coyotes you remove are critical. It's. It's literally got to be the adult female. If you can get her out of there before she whelps, you've got a pretty clear sailing all. All through fawning season. But if you kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's going to kill just as bad as if they were both.

[Podcast Host]

Is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What do you see? Do you ever see a situation where, let's say you have, like, good, high deer numbers?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. So if you have a long historical trend and you kind of know, like what, what. You have data over decades and you know, like, what low looks like for deer, Elk numbers, say, whitetail deer. You know what low looks like, you know what high looks like, and you're plugging along in good, stable country in those cases, do you generally feel like there's no, there's no point in doing predator removal?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some relationship to carrying capacity. And carrying capacity changes over the years. Right. I mean, things dry out, you get a fire and you have to reshuffle the whole deck because you don't know what the carrying, the right carrying capacity is. And this is an aside, but agencies have to decide every year where are we going to spend our money? Are we going to spend it on habitat work? We got to spend it on predator control and the world according to Mike. You do habitat work all the time. You do habitat work for next year, for five years down the road. If you're pushing junipers to create more browse for deer, you still got to do that. You do predator management if you have unused habitat today.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah, we had a three step process to decide if a predator plan was necessary.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If we were 50% of our herd objective or less and had 50 fawns per hundred does or fewer and had a three year stable to declining trend, then that would be a unit that we would consider for predator management.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

If you had an increasing trend but you still met the first two, you could let it go. You could see if they'd get there on their own. You would put your resources someplace else. But if it met all three of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management.

[Podcast Host]

What cases in your career have you seen where, like I mentioned earlier, a buddy of mine is working on a pronghorn deal. I mean, they have like he's working. I don't want to. Yeah, I don't want. I just didn't ask him if I could talk about, you know, I don't know how much he wants yapping about this, but he's an area where the numbers are exceptionally low.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, right.

[Podcast Host]

So he's doing work, timed removals in hopes of lifting them up. How often in your career have you seen where you had. Where nothing was working? Okay. And you're seeing like a desert bighorn population collapsing. You're seeing a mule deer population collapsing, whatever. And you come in and do the work and then you see immediate benefits from, from predator removal immediately. Do you ever do it where you come in and you do predator removal and you realize it was something different? Like doesn't move the needle.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. It can be something different. And, and predators aren't the only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor like it's a single issue, but everything else is working on them at the same time. When we start predator management for let's say pronghorn or mule deer, whitetail. I told the agencies I'm not going to do it for less than three years. The fawns I save in year one won't contribute their own fawns until year three.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They get bred as yearlings and they drop it the beginning of, on their second birthday, if you will.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So, so we've got to, to, to see any kind of moving the needle. It takes at least three years with a species like that.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We see it a little bit quicker in waterfowl. You know, the, the Bear river refuge in, in Utah used to produce 80,000 ducklings.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Most of the flyways, cinnamon, teal came out of that particular system. And they had a flood in the 80s that completely put the refuge underwater. When they came back, when the floodwaters receded, they built dikes again, that linear habitat to control the water to prevent the refuge from flooding. But all the nesting habitat became dikes at the same time. Raccoons and red foxes came in. Neither of those were native predators in that system.

[Podcast Host]

What caused those to come in like, like that?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People brought them in to chase them with hounds.

[Podcast Host]

Is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

The red fox.

[Podcast Host]

I know that happens with pigs, but I know, I didn't know that happens.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Well, that's how we got rabies in the Northeast. Was Florida coons being moved up there. The, the red fox, you could actually watch their march across, across the landscape.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In fact, there's a. Aldo Leopold wrote a book called Game Survey. He dedicates several pages in that book to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got maps and years and all the rest. So it's been going on since the 40s, but red foxes just naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems, but they produced nothing. For two decades after that, they were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance. We radio collared stuff and watched them. And when we started removing the predators, the duck numbers came up. But ducks have like an 80% fidelity to the site they were born at.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So we were 20 years without producing any ducks. What are the chances we're going to go from 0 to 80,000 in one year? None got. We had to have some ducks that were raised there come back and start raising their own ducks. And so it's, it's a long term process. If you're saving sea turtles, what are you doing, man? It might take 50 years before you actually see the sea turtle population rebound because. Because they got to be 20 years old to breed in the first place.

[Podcast Host]

Have you ever worked on sea turtles?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, yeah, yeah. We did feral hog removals for sea turtles and what that look like again. Sea turtles nest in May. You kill hogs, they'll still swim out to the islands or get to the beaches. We would go in there at the end of April and aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could on that had access to those beaches. And it's kind of easy in a saltwater ecosystem because the pigs have to drink fresh water. You know, where the freshwater is. You can go get all the pigs around that. Yeah, but. But hogs would reinfest the island by the next year. But all we had to do was give it 45 days worth of protection.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And those, those little eggs would hatch and make their way out to the sea.

[Podcast Host]

That seems to me like the one predator control project you can work on where you're not going to get sued by like center for Biological Diversity or something because they're all going to agree that sea turtles are cute and hogs are. And they're probably going to agree that hogs are bad. Yeah, but any other thing, they're like, no, no, no.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes down there and they said, you know, their controversies aren't should we do it? Their controversies are how do we do it humanely? You know, they're, they're. Red foxes are invasive and they're impacting the native. Hares are invasive. Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody talks about should we. Yeah, it's just the arguments over do we use poison?

[Podcast Host]

Well, they had that little problem where they had school kids out getting house cats and that caused like a little bit of a stir image.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But yeah, the cat people are a little crazy.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they are.

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[Podcast Host]

Sea turtle work.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So what was the sea turtle?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

There's a Kemp's ridley sea turtle that's being restored, stored in Texas. Okay. And so, but there's work done in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's again, raccoons, it's coyotes, it's, it's feral hogs.

[Podcast Host]

Now, I know what I was going to ask you about. It seems, I, I hesitate to use the word fashion.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But it seems fashionable right now. Like, I wish my buddy Yanni was here because he's in, he's all up in this right now. There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that want turkeys on the ground more turkeys are real hip to like, reducing raccoon numbers.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And I've paid attention to this because if you look at when fur prices are high. Okay, so let's say you go back to 78 to 82.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Right. There is just, there is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance. Like, if I go back to the county, the counties where I grew up, raccoon abundance in like 84, 1984, 1986. I mean, you'd get excited if you found a raccoon dentry because everybody is running raccoons because they were valuable. Everybody's running with dogs and everybody's trapping them because you're trapping in those days, dollars, like $20 raccoons, $30 raccoons, $40 raccoons. There were no raccoons. Yeah. And you go, I shouldn't say there were. No. But it was like, competitive to get them you go there now, man, I mean, it's nothing but raccoons.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

It's just like the roads are littered with raccoons. There's raccoons all over because those fur prices, people aren't out getting them. And so it seems like more and more guys now are interested in trying to go out and put all kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down to help their wild turkeys. That's what they feel like they're doing. Are they being impactful?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure they are. If they. If they do it on a big enough scale.

[Podcast Host]

So.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So we looked at. Not to. Not to leave turkeys. We'll come back to it. But we looked at pheasants.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

In Utah. And pheasants are farm field birds. Right. They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas. One in northern Utah, one in southern Utah and southern Utah. We went from sagebrush on the east to sagebrush on the west and just picked the valley floor.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Had some natural choke points where roads or rivers came in, where we could kind of say, this area is a study unit. 16, 17 square miles.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Where you can sort of block it off with some kind of natural feature.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And after the first year, we mapped where we caught all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest. And after the first year, we would get red foxes still back in the center of the area. But raccoons and skunks were all on the edges. They were coming in from the boundaries. And so we made a difference. We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas. In those treatment areas compared to the no treatment areas, we had four sites.

[Podcast Host]

By going after foxes,

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

raccoons, and skunks. Those were our three nest predators. And foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the same study in northern Utah, but our. Our study areas were on section lines. Four square miles.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And we had six. Three. No treatments. Three treatments. We kind of staggered them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four square miles, it's two by two. The center of that unit's only one mile from the edge.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And we did not change the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per hundred trap nights. It was the same at the end of the project as it was at the beginning. We would kill a raccoon and another one show up for the funeral. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's. It's good. Coon Habitat. Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in an area as you've got groceries.

[Podcast Host]

Okay?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Skunks aren't territorial. So if it's good habitat we had, you have to work bigger than that. When the fur was valuable, trappers were all over the place. There was competition, like you say, not just for, for the animals, but for the space to go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made a difference.

[Podcast Host]

So if my body Yanni is doing raccoon work on 40 acres,

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

he might help one nest.

[Podcast Host]

He's not because just, it's just they're coming from everywhere, they're finding from everywhere.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And he'll probably remove as much at the end as he does at the beginning.

[Podcast Host]

So, so tell me again, like, what is the center of the circle? Like what, what, what is the, what is the radius of the circle need to look like? Meaning if you're trying to like restore turkeys in, in the, the, okay, there's a 40 acre area. You had a 40 acre area of great turkey habitat. You got roost trees, you got nesting cover, you got food. What does the radius need to look like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure at the center of the circle?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So if we're talking about Rio Grande turkeys and they're in the valley, okay, I, I would do the valley and I would have, I want to have 7, 10 miles of valley that you would be working up and down because the turkeys are going to pick their

[Podcast Host]

own seven, ten miles.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah, that might be a meaningful management area. 40 acres isn't going to get it, huh? And this, this is, I mean, to me again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory may impact a few deer, but the deer also select where they're going to go. Fawn. The turkeys select where they're going to go nest based on the abundance of predators or that secondary risk. We had one of the PhD studies that was done on, on ducks at Bear River Refuge. They built predator exclosure, 40 acre exclosures.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And outside the exclosure, where the predators were going, they had no nesting. Inside the exclosure, they had a nest for every two acres. The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing was it's fenced. It's, it's a fenced exclosure. They would still try to dig underneath the fence. So we had to kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed more predators per acre. Protected there than we did out on the outside. We're still, we're still thinning the outside predators really. But the cost in predators was higher simply because it attracted the animals. They picked their nesting site. And that's what might be working for Yanni. We, we biologists do studies like dummy nests, right? You put out, not familiar, a bunch of eggs. You put out, you make a fake nest and then monitor it with a camera or go back and see if it gets attacked. And you know, did, did ravens get

[Podcast Host]

it or did, oh, see, like who, who's doing what?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it. A turkey lays an egg today and walks away. And tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it and she walks away. And she comes back a third day. And if a predator got those two eggs, she's got to go find a new place to nest. She doesn't just keep putting them in the same place.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And so her body's going to tell her when she's had enough, but she may do that four or five times. If nest predators are getting those eggs while she, before she even starts incubating.

[Podcast Host]

I got it. I didn't know this about them. Totally makes sense. And I know that that habit of, that they don't incubate until they get their whole, until they get the whole clutch. I never knew that she would abandon,

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

she, she'll abandon that site. And so nest site selection is important. Quail are a big thing in Texas, right? South Texas bobwhite quail have to have their nest within 10ft of bare ground because those chicks are an inch tall when they're born, they can't walk through the thick grass. They, they, they lead them out into the open where they, they grab grasshoppers as baby chicks that they don't feed them. They, they have to feed themselves. Well, if that hen gets bumped by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quail to make a difference at all. But she gets bumped by coyotes. If her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to, to build that clutch, then she's going to select less attractive sites for nest success just because of that secondary predator impact. And so when we talk about coyote control for quail, it's. They don't need enough to make it worthwhile. Well, maybe if the nest site selection is being affected in the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got to do raccoon control. You got to do gray fox control. Because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators may start showing Up. So, so you do total predation management if you're trying to do quail nest protection In Texas

[Podcast Host]

some time ago, over a year ago, we had a researcher on about quail.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

About just, just the general,

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I don't

[Podcast Host]

know, shittiness of the nation's quail population right now.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

I mean there are bright spots, but there's far more, there's far more dark spots than bright spots. You got states that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states that used to be good at quail hunting, now it's not. You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting, now there's no quail. Right. This story is just all over the Bob White quail's territory. We had a researcher on from Texas and he'd been working on. He'd been working on a. FDA approved, Failing to think of the right word, man. Like, what would you call like a, a treatment for a parasite.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right? Eye worms.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. I. Worm. That's right.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. So he was working on a medicated feed and there was some superlative around it. If I remember right, it was the first time the FDA had approved a medicated feed you could put out for parasites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An anti parasite. And he had found in some areas that this was, you could have a positive impact. Okay. Now this upset, this upset all kinds of quail people because in, in their mind it's like habitat, habitat, habitat. Remember you said like Mike's rule, always habitat.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And they were insulted or put off, but by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Because anything else is a band aid, Right, Right. So on the quail question, if you look across the bobwhite quails territory,

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

do

[Podcast Host]

you feel that predation is. If it's death by a thousand cuts. Is predation one of those cuts on Bob White quail?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I think nest predation in, in many cases and the secondary predation impacts.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in the private sector for quail, okay. And we removed all the nest predators, we removed house cats, we removed bobcats, everything. And we got quail to 1 to 2 acres wild bobwhites. You could flush 20 cubbies in a morning. It was a good deal.

[Podcast Host]

Were you doing the parasite treatment too?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No, no, we didn't. I don't think we had them at that time. I never noticed I worms in any of the birds that we harvested. But we had good habitat too, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

It was the empty.

[Podcast Host]

You had empty, good habitat.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Empty, good habitat. I don't know that I could have got them any higher than one to two acres.

[Podcast Host]

When you say one to two acres, what do you mean?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

One bird to every two acres of habitat.

[Podcast Host]

So what's that come out to, like covey per acre?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Acre. A covey of birds might use 10 acres.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And we had some places where we had overlap in coveys.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And there's. There's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We had birds that would leave this covey and go join this one and back and forth. Oh, yeah. No, they're not all the same all

[Podcast Host]

the time, but they'd get sick of their bodies and go join a new covey.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. If you look at some of the research that's done on that, it looks like a wiring dust diagram for an old Toyota radio. You know, wires going everywhere. This kid went over here for three days and then came over here and.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, yeah. You picture it being like.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You don't picture an intact cruising around. No, no. If they're. If they're dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that shuffling that goes on.

[Podcast Host]

I see.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But yeah, that. That's you. I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And what we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what we used to consider shitty habitat. Just, they would start going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage, and do just fine out there in the absence of mammalian predators. But what we know about sage grouse is in the presence of predators, they have to have this tall sage, and they have to have this and that. And. And. And of course, we got a huge number of ravens in the west. Right. That's a. That's a changing factor. But. But when you do that, that work, they'll start picking their own nest sites based on what's good. Yeah, we see that with turkeys, too. Wanted to come back to turkeys. Turkeys will pick their nest site based on the presence or absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study, but we did it the way a turkey does. We went and put cameras out, let the wildlife get used to the cameras. They went out and put one egg in front of it.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And came back the next day and put a second. And we even went so far as to use a golf ball retriever to place the egg so we weren't leaving tracks in and out to this nest.

[Podcast Host]

I'm with you. Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We had 15 nests. We studied him for 15 days, putting the eggs in one day, one at a time. And we only had one nest survive that without getting predated.

[Podcast Host]

Really.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

One of the 15, the rest of them got whacked. Some of them got whacked multiple days, you know. Yeah. So the turkey would quit and go somewhere else and then quit that place somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest site selection. And that doesn't always favor the chick survival.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You've done a lot of work on wild hogs.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. I was considered a predator expert for a long time. Now I'm a hog expert. And that's not a promotion. I'm going the wrong direction.

[Podcast Host]

You're a hog expert?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, let me ask you a super, like, wide general question. Are we at a point in this country where hogs have gotten. Where they're going to get?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

You think so?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I mean, there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them in a truck. Yeah. They could set up shop. But. But we've eliminated hogs. The government has eliminated hogs in a number of states where they had new populations. We've got got some resolve to keep them out of those places. And we're never going to eliminate them in some states. Texas is one of those.

[Podcast Host]

Never going to eliminate it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We're never going to eliminate them there.

[Podcast Host]

What did you make of in the north? And they're talking about. Did you follow this story in the north? Like this whole. Like this whole Canadian super hog deal?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, I, I knew the guy who, who coined that term.

[Podcast Host]

What do you. What. Tell everybody what that was? Well, sound like to me.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

There are hogs that can winter in Canada and I. I can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me. So I don't know how they do.

[Podcast Host]

But here's the deal about that. Like, just, Just for. I mean, I'm gonna tell you something you already know. I mean, if you go look at. If you go just Google up images of hogs in Siberia, there's endless images of hogs walking around in deep snow.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian wild boar as a farm animal to be raised in that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs.

[Podcast Host]

So that's what they were doing. They're trying to expand agricultural.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They were production.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But the market collapsed on that.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And so a lot of those pigs are just releases from the farm, they're highly genetically linked to Eurasian pigs. And, and that's the super pig part. Right. They can survive in that environment. They'll make snow caves and stuff like that. And, and they, they do. Well, Eurasian pigs only breed once a year.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Eurasian pigs have smaller litters.

[Podcast Host]

So you Eurasian like the Eurasian pigs on native habitat. So when you're talking about a pig in Europe in his endemic range.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

He breeds once a year.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Like a deer.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right. Huh. And, and that's probably, you know, again, evolutionary. Right.

[Podcast Host]

They don't want to, they don't want to drop young in the middle of the winter.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's right. If they did, they didn't survive. And so those pigs didn't breed, so

[Podcast Host]

they learned to drop the, drop them when food was abundant.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right. The, the wild hog that we have in, in the US is, is a mixture of Eurasian blood and domestic strains and, and what we call heritage breeds. Back, back when Hatfields and McCoys were, were feuding with each other, that was over actually a pig. And they turned them loose. They ear notched and they'd turn them loose and then they'd gather them in the fall when they could smoke the meat, smoke the bacon and preserve it.

[Podcast Host]

You hear the war of the pig, I think it's called the war of the pig out on San Juan Island.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No, no, no, same thing. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I can't remember the details.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Shot somebody else.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. People had pigs running around.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And it kind of, there's an understanding who owned what or whatever. And yeah, some American shot some Brits pig or a Brit shot an American's pig. Now big fuss broke out.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Well, and so our pigs we see in the wild, in Texas at least, we see three litters every two years, about a seven month interval between litters. And we see upwards of six pigs per litter in those litters. So you could see the difference between Canada's pig problem and our pig problem just mathematically. That's why they haven't caught up to us yet. But Canada has learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and meetings with Canadians and they say we, we don't want to be Texas, we want to get on top of our pigs early on.

[Podcast Host]

So one of your former colleagues, some. We both know, Parker Hall.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. I remember I was putting a similar question to Parker hall about pigs and pig management and he had an interesting perspective. He, he told me, and tell him if you disagree or disagree with this. But the way he put it to me is he said if it was

[Ad Voice 1]

up to the pig.

[Podcast Host]

Right. The whole country's pig territory.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But he said, but in, in a lot of areas, we're just able to get them.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

You know, a lot of. It's like, if they were there, they would be vulnerable to people getting them to finding them. Right. Like, meaning in open. Like in more open country without certain attributes. And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas where it's possible to, To. To go and take care of an outbreak. And that could be messing up some of his perspective. And he said in some places, the terrain, vegetation is such that you just can't get them.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And there's. There's public resolve. Right. I mean, you've got to actually have the will to get them.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

When the government had the. What we called the Farm Bill program, there's a feral. A wild pig eradication control pilot project that was created by the last Farm Bill. They said, show us some demonstration areas where we, we can really make a difference.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And in Texas, we said, yeah, we think we could do this. We had one area right up on the Oklahoma border, and Oklahoma had a site on the other side. So we're working on them from both sides of the Red River. And even with a free program, even with. With all the, the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about 30% of the land was signed up.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So there are landowners who want to keep their hogs. Oh. And. And if. Unless we're going to say there's a foreign animal disease and we're going to come on your land whether you like it or not, we're never going to eradicate pigs in those areas.

[Podcast Host]

This a hobby of mine. A hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I know that complain about pigs or that let us hunt pigs or whatever.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I'm always like, if you could again, if you could wave a magic wand and have all the pigs be gone forever, would you do it? And I don't think I've met anyone who has yet said to me, I would wave it.

[Ad Voice 1]

The thing is, usually I just wish

[Podcast Host]

there weren't as many.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, no, that's it. And I worked in Texas the first time when I was in the private sector. There are about a million pigs in Texas. When I, When I came back, there was about 3 million pigs in Texas. And the difference is remarkable. You know, if we could get them back to a million, we could, we could tolerate the damage that they do. We could manage those numbers at 3 million. The pig bomb has gone off. It's. It's a critical mass yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But something weird culturally has happened. There's. There, I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in Texas around pigs. Meaning there's an industry now. There's, there's like a hog hunting industry.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure.

[Podcast Host]

You know.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I think that there are a lot of people in Texas that are sort of, that are justifying behaviors, motivating behaviors around pig removal. But they're rooting for the pigs.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure.

[Podcast Host]

Because they've built an economy around the cropping them.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Those helicopter operators will come in there and tell the landowner, we're, we're helping you. But they're selling the seed at fifteen hundred dollars an hour. They got to have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat. So they're not coming back there next week to shoot them again. They're going somewhere else.

[Podcast Host]

And so, but, but it's so, but the narrative to the, to the would be hog hunter going down to Texas is, oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But then you look at the guys running the outfits. I'm like, this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. This is, he's built a whole business around pigs.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So the guy with the cornfield wants the pigs.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs are living, the habitats over here on his neighbor. And they're coming out of a canyon or they're coming out of a swamp and hitting the corn and then going back.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That guy is selling hunts. Yeah. This guy has the damage.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

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[Podcast Host]

Another thing I remember learning about pigs and maybe you know if this is still happening or not, is you'd see now and then a state would, would seemingly counterintuitively.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

A state would come in and say, no pig hunting. Pig hunting is not allowed.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Right. No one's allowed to hunt pigs. And you'd be like, well, why would they not want them to hunt the pigs? If there's. Because wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the pigs because you don't want the pigs? But what they're finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home. They have such a hell of a good time in Texas that when they go back to Missouri, they like throw a couple hogs in the truck. And that was the area of spread.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains. But when they opened it up, statewide populations start, started popping up everywhere.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

When they closed it on the western side of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving cogs for that. I got a preface, my next statement with this. I'm a hunter.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

First and foremost, that's at the core of who I am.

[Podcast Host]

Good to meet you.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's. I'm a hunter. My wife was a taxidermist. Her whole. She, she made a living that way. I was an outfitter for 10 years full time. My firstborn child is named Hunter.

[Podcast Host]

That can backfire.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Hunting has never capped a wild pig population anywhere in the world.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They can outproduce bullets.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I understand.

[Ad Voice 1]

So.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine. But if you get to the kind of damage that we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck, one thing hitting another, hitting another, there's got to be some level of control, like

[Podcast Host]

recreational hunting is not going to dig you out of that.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No. And we can't barbecue our way out of the problem. Right. We've got, we've got a big problem down there. It takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple landowners and work at the same time. They can make a difference. But it's, it's the problem gets big.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Banning hunting. Kansas has done it. Missouri went through quite a bit even in banning. Hog hunting.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Is to reduce the incentive to go move pigs. That's what they're trying to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs but Alberta's got a bounty on pigs and they're using it as a way to gather data on where they are. God, if there wasn't a bounty then nobody report the pigs and they'd start to get up. So somebody's going to shoot one of those hundred dollar pigs. And now we know where that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. A little pocket maybe.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. So there's, there's all kinds of approaches whether you're a high density state or a low density state. And we've killed all the pigs in Washington like three different times.

[Podcast Host]

Is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

We killed them all. Somebody went and got them again and brought them back and they went to the same source because the genetics match those genetic.

[Podcast Host]

Those maps that show source areas.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That the area. I think the area around. I can't remember if it was around Dallas or around Austin.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Seems to land a lot of pigs in certain places around the country. And there's a couple other little hotspots where you can tell like where guys are sourcing them.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure.

[Podcast Host]

And bumping them out of state.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Both genetics and disease wise too. Right. Oh, you've got pseudo rabies. And we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona, being moved to Colorado because

[Podcast Host]

they carry that rabies with them.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Pseudo rabies. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I don't understand.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Pseudo rabies is the technical name. It's. Or the common name use case disease. It's a virus. It's a herpes virus that pigs have.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So once they get it, they've always got it. The rest of their life got it. They got antibodies to it. But they shed that virus for like a 10 to 15 day period after they contract it, build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three weeks of age. It's. It'll cause abortions in sows.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But adult pigs, even, even little pigs will get over it. It's fatal to dogs. We have hunting dogs that, that encounter pigs that are shedding the virus that die from the disease. It's, it can be fatal to wildlife.

[Podcast Host]

You want to talk about public will start killing off people's dogs? There'll be public will.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, yeah, no, there's some dog owners, even hog dog owners who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog.

[Podcast Host]

I got a friend in, in Los Angeles. She lives in like la. La?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And she's always sending me. Like the other day she sends me a picture where she's got her shoes outside her door, you know, but she sends me pictures. Just one shoe outside her door and out in her yard is a chewed up shoe.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I'm like, are you sure?

[Ad Voice 1]

A coyote?

[Podcast Host]

She sends me pictures. I mean, she's no, dude, these coyotes are all over. She says, you should come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man, I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed. Trapped coyotes in la. And she goes, no, because people like their pets.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

More than they like. She says, it's flipped, it's flipped. We're not there. They feel the threat to their pets.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So she said all that goodwill to coyotes is kind of going out the window.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Well, and I worked a case with the Salt Lake Police Department. They were working with the Denver Police Department. They thought there were some serial cat mutilators that were cutting cats in half. And the skin was cut with a sharp deal. And it was a year long investigation. And they finally came and asked me, what do you think? And I said, well, they showed me a picture. What killed this? I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or lungs and it's been fed on by a bird. I said, how do you know? We'll see where the fur's removed. They took me to a veterinarian's office where we thawed out a cat. And I said, it's going to be crunched on the brisket, not on the back. Why? When a cat gets attacked by a coyote, they roll over on their back and try to scratch the face. Sure enough, had puncture marks. They over a year they were looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes doing it the whole time.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. Yeah, I got three areas, three more areas I want to ask you about.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah,

[Podcast Host]

Cattle mutilations. Yeah, you don't have to spend much time on it. I want to ask you about sort of the. What maybe is a myth, but like sort of the old, like the old kind of westerns and stuff where there was a specific wolf, a specific grizzly, a specific lion that's wreaking havoc through the county.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

And then lastly, a little bit, a philosophical question. But let's start with. Let's start with the. The. The. The myth or not, of the individual animal.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

Right. How often do you see that?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Not often anymore.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

But when we were in the business of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard to get.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And they became somewhat mythical. They, you know, they brought in multiple people after I went to Australia in 2003 and worked on dingoes down there. And they took me to one place, and they said, this dingo's been killing sheep for two years.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And the way they trap is they. They bring their dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure, and so the dog would go over and pee on a rock and scratch at it.

[Podcast Host]

They make the set, and they put

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

a set right there. And they said this. Every time we set traps, the thing moves out and goes somewhere else.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And so. And I looked at him and said, yeah, this is an old male. They said, He's 80 km from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence, you know, and he's 80 kilometers from the next known dingo, but we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's an old male, and your dog's coming in here and peeing on that rock is a territorial challenge. He's leaving because of that. Oh. They said, okay, wise guy, what is going on? What would you do? And I couldn't think of it right off. I don't know what you feed a dingo in Australia. Grind up a kangaroo, give him food, something. But it came to me at night. All canines, like horse hoof. If you're around a ferrier, get some horse hoof and take it home to your dog. They go crazy. So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make a little paste out of it, and put it in a dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by. Oh, really? Instead of using a territorial marker they were using, they used something else, and they caught him right away. And he was an old male.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Those old legendary animals are kind of like that, right? An old wolf that's just traveling the country looking for females. And if you go in there and you give them a cow to eat, they're not going to eat the cow. They're. They're looking for another female or they've been kicked out of a territory they're 100 miles away from another wolf pack.

[Podcast Host]

Got it.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And they're afraid of their own shadow. So They're. They're particularly hard to catch.

[Podcast Host]

Do you ever see a situation where when you have those, like the mythic animal and he's got a name or whatever, you know, know, and no one can catch him and everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do you see. Do you ever see those real differences in behavior? Meaning that let's say you're working a debt. There's a desert bighorn recovery project going on somewhere, and you're. You're losing desert bighorns. Does it ever wind up being that it's like a cat without a question, Like a lion is doing that without question. Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Individual behavior is. Is the hardest thing to account for. We put California bighorns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah, and there weren't many lions there. They'd had a pretty aggressive season. But we knew there was a tom up there, that we knew there was a female up there looking at the tracks. Put radios on every bighorn and we had kind of a three strike and you're out rule or two strikes in 30 days and you're out. And the tom killed almost immediately. Within the first week, he killed a ewe. And we could tell it was him where the sheep died. He was gone for about five days. He came back and killed another one. That's two strikes in 30 days. We started after him. He actually got a third sheep before we could catch him. And the day we caught him with the hounds, he was traveling with a female side by side. I think he bred her that day because she had a litter afterwards. But that line we removed. After three kills in like 14 days. She lived in the middle of those sheep. And for the rest of the collar life, she never killed a big one.

[Podcast Host]

Is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And she's raising kittens. She's got high nutritional.

[Podcast Host]

And she had the physical capability.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Physical capability because she killed a cow

[Podcast Host]

elk if she wanted to.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. It just the individual behavior that tomorrow knew where to go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd go get a line or go get a bighorn. But we also see the opposite, right? For the. In those lone wolf deals. You know, this wolf's been killing here for 20 years. I bet he hadn't. Oh, they don't live that long. Right.

[Podcast Host]

That's what's funny. But that's kind of what I was getting at with the mythical animal too, is you see these be my me, my buddy Brody. We've looked at some of these narratives, you know, where there's like this old bear, you Know, e frame or whatever.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And it be that, that for 40 years he terrorized this valley, you know, and he's like, I, I don't feel that that's the same bear.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

No, I don't think so.

[Podcast Host]

You know, he, he'd been. That might be his grandson.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. I wanted to ask you about that. Oh, cattle mutilations. You were talk. Reason I brought that up is you were talking about having people come to you with dead animals.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And, and they're like, hey, what happened here?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

And there's some forensics. You know, it'd be like a lot. Was it drug up under a bush and buried and what was eaten? How did the animal, you know, where did the predator enter the animal? What did it go after first? All that kind of stuff.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Can tell a tale.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Do you, when, when people come up with these, these inexplicable carcasses where they, they're like, you know, you get a rancher and he's like, I never seen anything like this, you know, and it was cut this way or whatever. Have you ever seen, have you ever seen carcasses where. And I don't want to get, I don't want to get in. Like, I'm not in any way inviting if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation. I'm generally annoyed by the paranormal world. But have you ever seen carcasses where you're just like, I have no idea what would have done that.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, I, the, the ones that I have been called to, we could explain.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And, and it's usually a multi pronged explanation. Right. This cow was killed by lightning and fed on by a bear.

[Podcast Host]

I see.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

And so there's two different things going on and you're not getting the same signal that, you know, there's. Yeah, there's that. But there are things in cattle mutilations that I read about that I've not seen. Like the tongue missing. Yeah, just the tongue missing. You know, rigor mortis sets in pretty fast. Oh, that jaw, hard to get in that. How did that happen? I, I don't know that I can explain that, but that's not what I've seen.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I investigated a suspected wolf kill right on the Utah, Wyoming border. And a cow, and that cow had hemorrhaging right above her hocks. Yearling heifer come off the mountain and big hole in it. And when we skinned the cow, that's the only bruising that we found. I think the darn thing was killed by Team Ropers.

[Ad Voice 1]

Oh, you're kidding.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

You know, and some cowboy was out there practicing and, oh, jerked her down too hard or something. But there was, there was just no other bruising.

[Podcast Host]

When you were saying like hemorrhaging there, I didn't know if you meant like bit up. You mean just under skin bleeding.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Skin bleeding. Oh. But it, it was in a straight line on both legs at the same point.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, man.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Hell, man, somebody's going, oh, that wasn't me, me.

[Podcast Host]

But someone having some fun and got a little rough. Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That. So there's, there's, you know, everything I've seen I've been able to explain is, is multiple. Most cases, multiple explanations. You know, carrying fed on is carrying but killed by something else. And lightning kills are the hardest ones to explain because there'll be four of them dead under a tree.

[Podcast Host]

Sure. You know, earlier I mentioned you something I made a joke about. If you're doing wild hog work for sea turtles.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You're going to have, you're going to have high level of buy in.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Public buy in.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Sure.

[Podcast Host]

You know, because people, I don't want to use the word fetishize. I'm not thinking the right word. But, but there's, you know, there's strong public sentiment about turtles. Sea turtles. Right. Like people being like, I don't want to use a drink and straw because of it might get a sea turtle. People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog removal to save endangered sea turtles, you're going to find like high public acceptance. Not universal, but high public acceptance. I would say in other cases where you have, you know, an imperiled or an ESA protected species and you're doing predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle work, but you're still gonna have high level of acceptance. You know, for me personally,

[Ad Voice 1]

people will

[Podcast Host]

say, well, you're just killing coyotes so you can have more antelope to hunt. And I'm like, my response to that is, yes, there's more to it. But yes, I'm, I'm okay with that. Right. I'm okay with that. Yeah, I'm okay with the idea that if we have a big game species that people like to hunt, rely on, it has cultural value and if it's going down and you can do predator work to help recover it and bring the numbers back up because there's a strong social interest in having high numbers and you're not having long term negative population impacts on the predator, in my mind, I'm like, yes, guilty as charged. Like, I. I don't think that that is bad.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

A negative thing to do. What has been your view on that, like, through your career? If you're doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work, you know, than you would in. In helping a guy out that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked at it throughout your career?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Somebody was famously said, if public opinion was all that mattered, California would have nothing but predators and North Dakota wouldn't have any.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Public opinion is just part of the equation. You got to have the social license to do what you do.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context of habitat. So if there is available habitat and if we as a group, through our game department, said we want 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline, then we should work towards getting 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline. That's an objective. That's set through a public process and all the rest.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

I've had people in Texas ask me to protect their deer, and their ranch is overgrazed and they're feeding deer to keep them alive. And that's not the problem. Right, Got it. Protecting their deer might be the reason it's so overgrazed, or they got a browse line. And so if it's in the context of the habitat and if we have the social license, our game department has said, we want this, or we have a landowner who's conscientious about meeting their objectives. Absolutely. We should be deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal. We had a internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in West Texas. They had to do transplants to bring them back in. And the first couple years of transplants were horrible because the predators were eating all the fawns. We went in there and started removing those fawns, removing those predators. Bobcats actually were a big predator on

[Podcast Host]

pronghorns, is that right?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

That's hard to picture out in the flats, but they're pretty good at it. And once we did that, we got the herds back up. We talked about, when do you start predator management? You got to have a exit strategy, too. When do you stop? If we do it for five years and we haven't moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else. If we've done it and we get to where we're 80% of carrying capacity or 80% of our objective, then maybe we can leave that herd alone and go somewhere else. So you Got to have an exit strategy for this too. And that's should be done in the planning process. We'll do this for this long or until we see these results.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And you're, you're, you work in the private sector now?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah. Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Who are your clients?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So I'm working on a research project with Safari Club Foundation. Right now we're putting radio collars onlines and putting cameras out in West Texas. Trying South Texas as well, trying to get a handle on online populations.

[Podcast Host]

You know, the research descriptive, like what's out there?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah, distribution and abundance. Basically. Lions in South Texas are fascinating. They just use the riverine corridors.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

So I'm gonna pick a number and I guarantee it's wrong. But we might only have 100 lions in South Texas. But we may only have habitat for 100 lions in South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution and habitat fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else. Oil fields and power lines, everything tends to disrupt some of that. Landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches, that's a problem. I'm working with the outfitters association in Canadian province to try and get some of the predator management back into their wildlife management scheme. Whether it's stuff that the, the outfitters themselves are doing is individual outfitters. You know, they've got, they've got regulated territories. Not everybody can go to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey look, I want, I want more elk. I want to reduce my wolves. Well, what does that look like? Just again, shoot one in November. Are you actually going to go out there and target the pack? So, so we're building some, some strategies there. I'm working for some individual landowners in Texas that, that have got mostly high fence properties and the predators are impacting their genetic selection. These guys are farming deer e essentially.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, they're farming deer.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

They're outside, they're inside the fence, but they're, they're, they're free roaming inside the fence. But they've invested in the genetics and that's, that's a little different than just the capacity. We still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got 80, 90 fawns per hundred does. You better be shooting a lot of does this fall because we can't feed that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the genetics and letting them decide rather than the coyotes decide which phones to, to get.

[Podcast Host]

So how do people find you?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Word of mouth a lot. I mean, I, I had a pretty good following when I was with usda. A lot of landowners Know who I am. So I work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers on, on some of that. So some of those landowners already know me.

[Podcast Host]

So if there was some dude, some landowner somewhere and he wanted to talk to you about a problem he had, or if you trying to figure out if he has a problem, he'd just type in Mike Bowden Chuck and he'd find you.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

He probably would. Yeah. There's. There's a lot there on the. Not all of those flattering either. The animal rights activists know how to find the guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Well, man, I sure appreciate you coming on top of all this stuff.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Oh, yeah, no. Predators are my life's work and, and understanding how it works is probably important. You know, a lot of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do is, is critical.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I think it's all fascinating.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I'd like to have you back on in the future.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Good.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, just you got to keep a little running tab of stuff to talk about when you get up to six or seven and let me know.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Okay. All right.

[Podcast Host]

All right. Mike Bowden. Chuck. Michael Bowden Chuck. What do you go by?

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Mike. Mike.

[Podcast Host]

Mike. Mike Bowden Chuck. Thanks, man.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

Yep, great.

[Ad Voice 1]

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[Podcast Host]

in all of our vehicles.

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[Gronk]

Hi, this is Gronk from Dudes on Dudes and talk about a perfect partnership. I'm here to tell you about protecting your end zone with dude wipes. If you're still wiping with toilet paper, you need to listen up. Dude wipes are a wet, extra large flushable wipe wipe that leave nothing behind in your behind because they are wet and we all know wetter cleans better. Unlike dry wiping with toilet paper, dude wipes clear instead of smear. Goodbye dingleberries. Goodbye itch and irritation. Plus if you take gronk sized grumpies, or as I like to call them, gronkies baby wipes won't do. You need extra big dude wipes to handle the job. And they come in different scents and pack sizes, including a single use on the go pack that you can take wherever you go for that home field advantage. So don't fumble the ball with toilet paper, Stop being an A hole to your B hole and start using Dude Wipes. Available on Amazon and major retailers nationwide. Dude Wipes Best clean. Pants down.

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[Podcast Host]

Land.com it is where the adventure begins.

[Mike Bowden Chuck]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Podcast Host]

Guaranteed human.