Show Notes
In this crazy world Houndsmen need all the friends they can get. With legislative assaults, whacko extremists, Karen complains about your tethered dog, fur mommies worried about your kennel and the anthropomorphic wildlife disillusionists the world seems like a pretty lonely place for Houndsmen.
On this episode of the Houndsman XP Podcast host Chris Powell is joined by the world renowned conservationist and widely accepted spokesman for true wildlife management, Ivan Carter. Ivan has hosted multiple television shows on multiple networks to tell the true story about wildlife, management of wildlife habitat and how hunting plays a valuable role in the process. Ivan has traveled the world showcasing efforts of wildlife experts. He recently traveled to Utah from his home in Zimbabwe to work on a project with the Utah Houndsmen Association and Brigham Young University to collect data on mountain lions. He has been a strong voice and supporter of the anti poaching K9 teams in Africa that have made a huge impact on Rhino poaching. He worked with the Wildlife College in Africa to develop the program.
Most importantly for our efforts as Houndsmen, he is willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with us, to tell our story and showcase our value to the entire world.
Show Transcript
[00:00:00] The Hounds XP podcast is fueled by joy Dog, food joy. Dog food has a rich tradition of supporting the Hounds man of America. Founded in 1945, joy is proud of its history and the relationship and has built with the American Hounds man. And in 76 years, there's never been a recall made with a hundred percent American made high quality ingredients.
Joy Dog Food has one of the highest calorie dense formulas on the market For 76 years, this Made In America product has kept hunting dogs in the field day after day, season after season. And when we say Made in America, joy has a long track record of fighting for American freedoms by being on the front lines against the animal rights movement and their extremist tactics.
Joy will fuel your hounds and fight for your freedoms fueled by joy.[00:01:00]
This is the Homan XP podcast.
Good.
The original podcast for the complete hound.
Justin,
we're gonna get, we're gonna get the podcast that represents our lifestyle of extreme performance.[00:02:00]
Yeah. Good boy, ranger Uniting Homan across the globe from east to west, north to south. If you're gonna catch a cat or a line, you have to have teamwork. We take you to the wildest places on earth. Yeah. So how many days a week can you spend on As much as I can, to be honest with you.
Anytime that I get I'm out there. Join us for every heartpounding adventure on Hounds Man xp. I'll tell you, like I tell everyone else, I'm gonna hunt whether you're here or not, so you might as well be here.
Welcome to the Houseman XP podcast. I'm your host, Chris Powell, and we've got a great show lined up for you. I've been chasing this guy for almost a year. He's a busy man. He's world renowned in [00:03:00] the wildlife world, wildlife conservation. He's a professional hunter. He's done all kinds of stuff in Africa. Mr.
Ivan Carter joins us on the Homan XP podcast to talk about his adventures, his experience. But most importantly, he has a deep affection for Hounds and Hounds men. And the way he uses his platform is he promotes hunting and the importance of hunters being on the landscape hounds and management plans.
He just got back from Utah where he worked with Cory Huntsman out there with Utah Hounds Man Association, where they were doing a mountain lion study with Brigham Young University. We're gonna talk about that a little bit, but we're just gonna talk about the importance of hounds and why they're so important to wildlife management.
I learned a lot during this conversation, and I think you will too. It'll give us some talking points when we're talking to those policy makers and when [00:04:00] we're facing the threat of taking our ability to be hounds men, those freedoms when people are trying to take our freedoms away, you need to know what to say.
I couldn't think of a better person that can help us with that than Ivan Carter. You can find all his information on social media. The guy's a, he's a giant in the outdoor industry and the world of wildlife conservation. Can't wait for you to hear this one. Make sure you're checking out our website@houndsmenxp.com.
We have links to all of our past shows there. We've got all of our sponsors there, and I'll just tell you who our sponsors are. I'm not gonna name 'em individually, I'm just gonna tell you what they're about. They believe in what we do here. We're gonna talk about the house bill that was passed through the House and Senate in Utah.
And that's what this podcast is all about. We wanna be the voice for Homan. We wanna make the rest of the [00:05:00] outdoor industry aware of what's going on in our world and how we are the favorite target of the anti-hunting crowd. And man it's important that you understand that all of the sponsors that are teamed up with us believe in the same mission to preserve, protect, and promote.
This lifestyle. So I'm asking you go to hounds man xp.com when you're looking for your supplies and look through our sponsors. Those people will stand with you and they stand for you. The Hounds Man XP website also has a shop and we've got a few items in there. You're gonna find some custom leather work in that shop.
You're gonna find our leather patch caps that are posted there. And coming soon is a full line of Hounds Man XP logo wear. And we really appreciate it when you guys rep our brand because Y your [00:06:00] dollars go to promoting and. And producing shows just like this with the biggest names in the industry, the people that are out there fighting every day.
Speaking of committed people, you can also join us on Patreon through the website. So when you click the support tab, you can join a bunch of other Hounds men that have committed to this fight and supported this show. You're gonna get a lot of cool benefits from that. You're gonna get a Sportsman's Alliance membership when you join us at the $12 level.
You're gonna get discount codes deeper than what we promote on social media and just a good deal when you join us on Patreon. So shag it on over there to hounds man xp.com. Find out what we're up to. Get all the information you need to help us keep this lifestyle rolling. We have got a great show. The [00:07:00] dog box is blowing up.
It's a box shaker. It's time to get the tailgate down. It's time to dump the box.
How's it man? It's good. How are you? Really good things. I hope. I'm sorry it took us so long to actually connect with each other. Busy people.
You are definitely a busy guy. Yeah, a little bit too busy at times, I'm afraid. I'll tell you what, I'm honored to have you on the podcast, Ivan. I've followed your work for a long time and it's just an honor to have a person on the worldwide stage that takes so much interest in hounds and hounds men and the valuable work we can do for wildlife management.
Absolutely. And yeah, a great pleasure to physically meet you face to face, so to speak. And yeah, I've always been a great proponent of what can be done with non-traditional [00:08:00] solutions. So yeah, looking forward to having a chat. Yeah. So what do you mean by the non-traditional solutions?
I think that'd be a good place for us to jump. Yeah, I think so too, Corey, non-traditional solutions. I think in today's world we are seeing so much use of technology. We are seeing, conservation solutions springing out of very unlikely spots. And, one of the things that we are definitely seeing and which is coming to the forefront is the true value of science and research.
And, then you start seeing things like let's jump straight into it and talk about the, the place for hounds and research. I think that's a pretty new concept is utilizing Hounds as a component of research. And, I think one of the things that a lot of people don't realize until you look closely is that in order to get good data from an animal, you've gotta be able to follow that animal.
You've gotta be able to see that animal and observe that animal. If you are researching planes, zebra, for [00:09:00] example, you can go out into the planes any single day and with a pair of binoculars or a spotting scope, you can observe behaviors. The same thing can happen with any kind of o of wildlife that lives out in the open.
As soon as you start getting to the secretive carnivores in, in, in other words, leopards or mountain lions or many of those species, you start to rely on technology to do the watching for you. Whether it's a series of camera traps and much la more recently the much heavier use of telemetry collars whether it's a telemetry collar that is, is being utilized on a hound.
Whether it's a satellite collar that's being utilized, to together movement data, whether it's collars that are going onto GSM networks Cell phone networks and delivering the data that way. There's all of this technology advance in the use of collars. And particularly when you're talking about a secretive animal, you can get very valuable data when you start to put a tracking collar on that animal [00:10:00] and can see what they're doing day and night.
Start to see their habits, start to see when they're moving, how they're moving, where they're moving, what their habitat uses. But step one of that, of course is, really when you look at it , how do you get a co, how do you track an animal with a collar unless you can go to the first step, Chris, which is to catch that animal in the first place, right?
To put the collar on. And so that you start to look at the different, solutions for that. I've seen leg hole traps used. I've seen cage traps used. , and certainly cage traps in the case of things like leopards they really beat themselves up pretty bad in a cage trap.
If you're not. Absolutely. I wanna talk about all this holding them carefully. Yeah, for sure. And so what that does is just by process of elimination, it leads us right to the hound solution where, contrary to a lot of popular belief, which we can dive into in a lot more detail, when a cat is being chased by [00:11:00] hounds.
Absolutely. When it's on the ground, there's an element of stress and pressure on that cat. , as soon as that cat gets out of the reach of the dogs and it's in the top of a tree, very often it'll go to sleep. It'll find a big branch and go to sleep. , it's been chased by wolves in its life.
It's been chased by other predators, certainly in an African absolutely scenario. So as soon as they get up a tree and they feel like they're out of harm's way, It's a completely non-stress situation for that cat. The stress happens when the humans arrive, when a vet arrives, when you dart them and things like that.
Which again, we are gonna get into that more deeply. But I think just to kick off the conversation, from what I've seen and experienced firsthand recently and historically, step one of any science, which is to determine movement statistics, is to get a collar on the animal. And, without homes, that becomes a very difficult [00:12:00] task that's left to chance.
Yeah, for sure. With hows it becomes a lot more selective and a lot more effective. We might be experiencing a little bit of lag here, Ivan. We'll deal with it How we can where does the world find you today for our audience? Just tell us where you're at right now. So right now I'm in my home in South Africa.
Yeah. We live about an hour off the east coast of South Africa. And and our further west would take us into the mountains. So we live in a little town called Hilton. And yeah, I'm right in my home. I work from home when I'm not in the field. And as I'm in the field about 200 days a year.
So I was gonna ask you how many days in the Yeah, I was gonna ask you that very question. How many days in the field do you spend? Cuz you just pump out the content and I'm always constantly seeing, your news feeds and different things on social media updating and tracking that around.
So that's 200 days in the field. A lot of people we've got a lot of hounds men that spend that much time in the field here, believe it or not. It's rough sometimes we're spending [00:13:00] the grocery money on hunting and hound dogs. But yeah we do spend a lot of time there. And that's good to hear.
I, I really wanted to talk. I'm. That you brought some of these topics up, you might be the easiest guest I've ever interviewed for this show, cuz you've already got your talking points down and that's wonderful . But I think it would be well served for our audience to understand a little bit about your background, tell our audience where you come from.
And I don't want to do, you've got a well-established history. All you gotta do is go on Google or YouTube or whatever and you can get all of that. But for time sake and for the convenience of our audience, maybe if you could just spend a couple minutes telling us where you got your start and how you ended up doing what you're doing now.
No, absolutely Chris. I was very fortunate. Grew up in a farming background in, in the then Rhodesia. Grew up actually in the middle of a civil war. And then right out of school I joined a wildlife orphanage. I'd always been very interested in all things to do with,[00:14:00] hunting and fishing and being in the field and just, everything from watching birds to collecting birds', eggs, to, anything else.
And that, that interest led to led me to work at a wildlife orphanage, rehabilitating injured and sick wild animals. , which in turn led me to, to guide, non-hunting trips, literally over time all over Africa, as well as hunting trips in many parts of Africa. And Chris, that, that kind of evolved for me to do, start doing some television shows.
In the early days was an outdoor channel. That evolved into a moment I had a really big moment, Chris, when my kids were first born, I realized, a as, as I started to really consider what that meant, I realized that there were landscapes that I had enjoyed wildlife and pursued wildlife and had these incredible experiences that were no longer viable wildlife landscapes.
And I realized very few of. on the ground, [00:15:00] making a, a real difference. There's a lot of people that wanna make a difference. There's a lot of people that try to make a difference, but I thought that one of the best ways to do that was to leverage my ability in front of the camera my access to many of the really good conservation stories.
My first step into proper, putting my Big Boy pants on in, in TV, so to speak, was with Carter's War, which stood for Wild Animal Response, where I partnered with Jim Shockey and his son Bran, and we created this series for Outdoor Channel that was an original series that has ended up going, doing the rounds on discovery and right and so on.
In fact, right now it's playing on Discovery India. And what it was a really interesting concept where we took a problem, we took a solution, we looked at the problem on film over the course of a 44 minute episode. We would look at the problem from the perspective of the wildlife, the perspective of the conservationist.
and the perspective of the problem itself, very often that was people or very often it was poaching or whatever it might be. [00:16:00] And that was really successful. And then someone said why don't you talk more about the kind of impact that sustainable ethical hunting has on on wildlife. So we did a series called Heroes which was the unsung heroes of conservation, which in a lot of cases is viable and sustainable, hunting methods, which in a lot of landscapes in Africa, they owe their bottom line and their viability to a hunting model.
And we did that and that was very successful. and that's evolved into what we do today, which is a show on EARTHx tv which is called Defenders of the Wild, where we don't really just focus in hunting areas, but we focus on absolutely all and any conservation issues that are happening, what their solutions are, which is how I happen to be with Corey Huntsman early this year.
Who's the chairman of the Utah Huntsman Association. And we were doing a show about [00:17:00] what Brigham University was doing with the mountain Lions, what their research was showing some of the very vital information that's been gathered. And so yeah, that's from inception till today what I've been up to.
And my daughter's now got a show as well. Hers is called Wild Wonders with Brooke. And again, I'm hoping to see that some explosive growth there because Chris. There aren't any kids on TV today educating other kids on what true conservation. And, obviously it's a kids show, it's a little bit more lighthearted than the blood and gone reality of the o of what goes on, on some of our shows.
But it is something that I believe very important. So yeah we spent a lot of time in front of and behind cameras these days and every you ask, I'm gonna slow down next year, and it never seems to work out for me. , , you brought up a lot of good points there. I definitely want to spend some time during this conversation and talk about you, Utah, the work you did there and the issues that [00:18:00] they're facing currently in Utah.
I think it's very important. Before we get there one of the things we do with this podcast, and one of the things that I have targeted in my efforts with Hounds Man XP, is I. With 30 years in the wildlife profession, I saw a hounds man being either underrepresented, misrepresented, or the narrative had been stolen from them, and it was stolen by the people who want to stop hunting, and they made it their own.
And so I know that in the work that you've done, I've, I know that you've come under scrutiny at times for the positions that you take. What have you found to be the most effective way to get the messages out there about the values of hunting, about why it's valuable in the broad scale wildlife management?
What have you found there, Ivan and how have you been [00:19:00] so effective in your career of getting that message out there? Because you're not only speaking to hunters, you're speaking to the non-hunting public as well. Chris, I think first and foremost, I think we can all agree our community as the hunting community is very bad at telling their own story and utilizing TV to do showing the true perspective of what really happens on the front line. But I think also hopefully what's the word for it? Hopefully we can inspire more people who are on the front line and are in pursuit of wildlife to tell their story. And I'm not saying tell their story, I'm saying tell their story.
Yes. So a picture of a bunch of hounds and a dead cat is telling the story badly. A very well thought out post with pictures of the landscape protected by Pitman Robertson. Money is telling our story well. And it's often shocking to me. [00:20:00] I'll often say to, to hunters, do you know how much money Putman Robertson funding puts on the front line of conservation every day?
And they don't know that, and we should all know that it's two and a half million dollars. Every single day of, and, that's at a minimum. Knowing those statistics, being ready to tell that story, I think is very important, Chris, cuz if we amplify it, when you rarely start to look at numbers and you start looking at the tens of thousands of tags that are sold state to state across America, and a lot of cases, hundreds of thousands of tags, that's hundreds of thousands of people that potentially could be telling a better story as they sit in the queue at the supermarket or as they interact with someone who might not like what they're doing.
And so rarely, when you look at it the billions and billions of dollars take Michigan alone, Michigan alone. , at 20 bucks a tag that, that's $8 million of tag fees alone. That go right back into fish and [00:21:00] game. And that has to be that way. And so if you eliminate hunting, you eliminate all of that money, then you eliminate the purchase of firearms and ammunition, which is the Pitman Robertson tax, which a lot of people don't realize is actually the only tax in history where the people have gone to the American government to ask to be taxed.
Exactly. Tax, the government's dictated . And so now you take that Pitman Robertson money, take that out of the mix because, hunting goes firearms purchase. An ammunition goes, who is gonna write the check? I, my question is, who will write the check for conservation? So people say what do you mean the check?
Conservation requires management. . It requires research. It requires constant and consistent oversight just because across the planet there's 8 billion of us on the planet today, Chris, which means that, wildlife is under wild areas under more pressure than ever before. So if you love the pursuit of wildlife and you want to see the pursuit [00:22:00] of wildlife endure to your next generation so that your kids can enjoy training hounds, following hounds chasing things.
The realities are, we've gotta get better at telling our story. It's not about marching, it's not about writing letters. It's about simply being better at telling our story. And if we better at telling our story and we can flood social media with really good stories and control our own destiny through the good telling of stories.
I, I think there's real hope. I really do. And if you look at what's happened in Utah just recently in the last week, a lot of that is a result of not telling our story. There's all of this really ready, good stuff going on, but nobody knows about it. And it takes something like this for us to suddenly start telling our stories.
Why have we waited till Liz a disaster before we tell our stories? We're always reactive. We're very good at being reactive. I just returned from Michigan. It's funny that you would bring that up. I just returned from Michigan for the Michigan Bear [00:23:00] Hunters Association and I was asked to give a presentation there about the very things we're talking about right now.
And what you said is one of the things that I included you, we've got to be better at know. The data to be able to tell our story. Do you know how rules, processes differ from legislative actions? Do you know where the funding comes from? Do you know how much funding we provide? Do you know how much money the anti-hunting organizations are bringing in to, to use that against us in the fight?
And I can tell you that the Michigan Bear Hunters Association, we sat in a convention for their evening dinner, very high class. The president, Keith Schaffer, was running around in a camouflage sweatshirt all day and came back to dinner that night in a suit or a tie in a jacket, to present and give that, tell that story that we're not gonna allow other people to.
Stereotype us or tell a [00:24:00] story for us anymore, a room full of legislator and policy makers and all of that stuff. So it was a great honor to go up there and speak on all that stuff and. So another tie in that I have is Brad Letrell and his crew at Go Wild. I don't know if you're familiar with that social media platform or not, but go Wild has set out to do that as well.
And Brad constantly is talking about we have to be better at telling our story and we're embracing that here. We try to talk about, as Hounds, when we try to talk about the development stages of puppies to nutrition, to caring for the hound, to developing the hound, to developing yourself as a hunter and putting all of this stuff in there and not just showing on social media the success or the grip and grin, if you will.
Because then people take that and they don't get the full story. So that is very interesting. No, I think that's true, but I [00:25:00] also think that something that's very hard to argue is when you see Hounds used in a conservation solution. Every single leopard that I've ever put a collar on in my life has been treated by a hound.
And I'm not saying I've done hundreds and hundreds of them, but I've done a substantial amount of them. And without the first component, which is getting the leopard in sight. , you'll never find that thing. And trapping the leopard is not a good way to do it.
It's something that, they beat themselves up, no matter what. It's a very, it's a very highly strung animal that doesn't take kindly to that. And a as again one thing I really would like to point out is that, when a cat is being chased by a hound.
Yes. It's stressful. The moment that cat gets out of reach of the dogs and is now sitting in a tree, it's incredible. When you watch them from a distance with a pair of binoculars, they'll literally get on a big branch and fall asleep. , they don't, that hound is no longer stressful. It's no longer threatening.
They know that's not the [00:26:00] first time they've been chased by something. They know that they're out of reach and they feel completely safe. And I, to peel back the layers on this and take it down to the mo most basic level of what you're saying I wanna make sure this is accurate, but what you're saying is they've been chased by packs of hyena so they know when they go up the tree, they're safe and they're reacting to the hound pursuit the same as they would any wild canine or any other per any other predator on the landscape.
No, exactly. And I think Chris, when you start looking at it, in order for there to be an apex predator that is in viable numbers in the landscape, you've gotta have, the entire ecosystem has gotta be intact. , your prey base has gotta be intact. Everybody else has gotta be intact. And there's no doubt, certainly from an African scenario, that a leopard that gets chased up a tree, he's been chased by hyenas, he's been chased by wild dogs.
He may even have been chased by lions at some point in his life. And his method of escape is to climb a [00:27:00] tree. . And he gets out of range and he chills there until the threat is gone. And it's no different when you chase them with hounds. And I think even if they haven't been chased, their instinct puts them out of reach, and the moment they realize they're out of reach, they feel completely safe.
And the reason I say that, Chris, it's hard for people to understand, but I've got footage of these cats asleep on a branch. And to be honest, the most disturbing thing is when a human approaches , and that's when, if they're gonna be a jumper, that's when they're gonna jump. Is when a human approaches.
And rarely what that tells you is that they're not scared of the dogs, they're scared of the people. But that's an inbuilt thing from many of the world are scared of people because, humans have been their core predator for, as long as time began. And I really think that from a conservation and a research perspective, they are an incredible tool when it comes to the capture of a cat in order to color it.
And what I always say, and what we spoke about a lot, ar around many [00:28:00] dinnertime conversations when I was last in Utah, is there's three distinct layers to great research. Number one is Catch the Cat. . Without that, nothing else can happen. So once that cat is caught, you've got a whole nother team of vets and scientists and biologists that will physically call the cat.
They'll take all kinds of measurements, biopsy samples, blood samples, and they'll do a huge amount of research on those samples. Which leads comes back to, D n a profiling and health profiling and disease profiling, and all of these different things that can be today gathered from a hair sample or a skin sample or red sample.
, you've then got the data that is gonna be gathered by this collar that is somewhat automated, that data's just gonna tick in there, but all of a sudden you've got, thousands and thousands of data points, you now need your next level of research, which is somebody sitting behind a computer who may never have seen the cat, and they're gonna analyze that data and they're [00:29:00] gonna look that data over and say, okay.
Here is the habitat preference of this animal. Here is the praise prey preference of this animal. Here is where their kill sites are. And a lot of the time the kill sites, for example, you'll get this cluster of data points, which will tell you that a mountain lion has been living in an area for a certain amount of time.
And there's only one thing that's gonna keep it there is that's a kill site. Yeah. And so as soon as the snow is gone, you can go and have a look and here we go. Here is a bone from a mule deer. They can then take that bone back to the lab, they can analyze the fat content of the marrow inside that bone and tell you, was the deer in good shape?
Was it in bad shape? Was it mature? Was it immature? Was it a buck, was it a dough? And so all of a sudden, just because of the collar, each kill site starts being able to be monitored, you can monitor the scat from the cat. and see all of the kills of the little things like the squirrels and the rabbits.
[00:30:00] And so in modern times, Chris, when well utilized, we can find out more about an animal than ever before in history. And the more we know about an animal, the more we understand about an animal, the better and more most proficient, the conservation action plan can become around that animal. And so really, when you start looking at it, how do you conserve an organism that you don't understand?
You can't, right? So the more you learn, the better your conservation action can become, and the better your conservation action becomes, the brighter the future is for that animal. But if you can't catch it in the first place, because you're not allowed to use hounds, or the solution that you've got for catching it is not allowed, how are you gonna get all of this valuable data, which in ti in turn, Leads to the conservation and the thriving of whatever particular organism it is that you are looking at.
And Chris, I think people underestimated, I think it's [00:31:00] really simple thing, but as I've just said, learning about these animals is one of the most exciting things in modern times that you could possibly do. And looking at there's one group of people that puts their hands on more animals than anyone else, and that's hunters.
And so take the vast amount of data that can be gathered just from animals going through a taxidermy shop, the vast amount of data that can be gathered just from watching where hounds, where their collar data shows you, that the cats have run. Where you found the track, where you end up treating the cat.
What happened between those two points? , that's important Data. , and so as you start to look at it, you say, okay, who else can gather that data? There's no one on the planet that could gather that much data. That's exactly right. You brought something up there that I think is a key component that we often time miss.
You talked about visiting these kill sites and taking the bones of a mule deer back to the lab, and then [00:32:00] measuring all the different data points that you can get there so that data doesn't just die in the lab. Mule deer biologists are looking that at that as well. So it's all interlinked. What a impact does this Mount Lion in this area have on, the rodent population?
One of our guys on this team is a rodent biologist. So he definitely looks at all of those data points, and that is where we as Hounds men need to help develop. We need to look at that and develop our narrative. Okay, you take us off the landscape. Who's gonna, who's gonna. catch the cat. That's the first question.
If you take Hounds man out, if you outlaw this and you say, we can't do it anymore this is a skillset that has developed over multiple years and years to be effective and be able to do it every time. And if you take hunting out of the management plan with hounds, where are you gonna find those people to do it?
That's always my first talking point about it. But then you look at the data that can be collected [00:33:00] that is good for other wildlife species besides what we're chasing. That's profound. No, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I always bring to light, Chris, is you can't have a cat if you don't have a viable habitat for that cat.
. And so what is a viable habitat? A viable habitat is a landscape that's got a fully balanced ecosystem. where all the ecology is intact. So right from the ground level, is there the right vegetation to support the small animals which support the bigger animals which support the predators.
And everything, when you start to look at it, has gotta work very closely and very well together. And so really as I look at it, it's very alarming when people who've got access to such important data are not using that data to make their decisions. And so I, you could [00:34:00] say to me Ivan, what is the importance of a porcupine in the landscape?
We should kill them all. . If we rarely research it, we are gonna find that porcupine has got a certain impact on certain trees and certain vegetation, which has an impact on an important prey species, which has an impact on the apex predator. And so really when you start looking at it, not only are the re researchers co-joined.
but the research is leading to a very complex knowledge of just how this web coexist. And you can't have one thing without the other. And so because we want to pursue cats with hounds, which is how we've gotta say it, we can't pretend it's for any other reason. We wanna have hounds in the landscape forever.
We want to have cats in the landscape to chase forever, right? And in order for that to happen, there's gotta be quotas, there's gotta be sustainable, ethical accountability. There's gotta be a healthy ecosystem. And for all of that to happen, [00:35:00] there's gotta be good research. So how do you do good research if you don't start with a hound in the beginning?
So it's this kind of concentric circles where we can go round and round and look at this from many different ways. But really what it comes down to is it is, it's just one of those things that the antis hate it, but without us. , there is no research because you don't have a way of putting the collar on the cat.
You see me smiling in this video because it's I found the guy, I found the guy that can help us lay this out and explain it in a way and show the importance of it. And I love it. And you talked about you made a point there a minute ago about keeping hounds on the landscape and how we make policies.
And you talked about quotas and different things. And I think that's a really good segue into you. You recently were spent time in Utah with the Utah Hounds Man Association and assisted them in doing some of this research. And I want [00:36:00] to talk about what that looked like for you. What the current issue is there with Utah.
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Check 'em out. They got a lot of stuff to offer over at Cajun Lights. So again, Chris, those are some really deep issues. So one of the things that I'm very fortunate to get to do is arrive on site with a very small crew of just two camera guys and get to be part of the solution for a given number of days.
, as we make an episode that. That really legitimizes what's going on, that [00:38:00] we have enough time on the ground. We spent some time at Brigham University. We spent some time, chasing hounds. We spent some time walking and looking for tracks. We spent a huge amount of windshield time with Corey Huntsman and with many of the guys that, that he surrounds himself with you.
We spend time with him. We spend time with the biologist. So by the time we put an episode together, we really know what's going on, whether it is Lemmas and Madagascar, whether it's, Eagles in Africa, whether it's mountain lions in Utah. And so what I saw there was this great disparity, the disparity between the public image of a mountain lion and the reality of that.
So you talk to the little old lady and she may say, oh, I love them. No one must touch them equally, she may say, oh, they eat the meal. Dear forms, we should kill them all. , but both of those statements are not based on any science whatsoever. They based on an emotional reaction, depending on how she looks at the [00:39:00] species.
, unfortunately, in today's world, Chris, with everybody having a voice on social media, even the people who know nothing have a voice and they shouldn't have a voice. The only people who had should have a voice, to be honest, are the biologists, not the hounds men, not the hunter, but the biologist whose job is to find out as much as they can about that animal and then dictate the management of that animal through good science and biology and working ecology, not just through an emotional connection to a beautiful animal.
It's an apex predator or an emotional connection to a mule dear form that may have eaten out of your bird bath outta your bird feeder. And so you feel sorry for it cause a mountain line ate it. And so what I saw firsthand was this group of, I hate to say it, but actually fairly private individuals really tough.
Some of the toughest people I've ever been around. You climb up and down those mountains all day from four [00:40:00] o'clock in the morning looking for tracks and chasing hounds. That's a tough guy, way tougher than ever be. Then the biologist that will come in there with backpacks full of measuring and weighing equipment and taking samples and doing all of this, in these frigid temperatures with snow up to your waist, running up and down these mountains.
And the thing that struck me is that from the hansman perspective, they all volunteers. No one's paid to do it. They do it for the joy of doing something meaningful for a species that they love. From the biologist perspective it's a calling. It is no other way to say it. These are, the ladies that we saw there, tough as nails.
and just, willing to do whatever it takes to get their collars on, to get their samples taken, to make sure the animal's safe and so on. All for the welfare of the animal, and then in time the welfare of the species. And so it was this profound intrusion into this very cohesive, tight-knit team of [00:41:00] incredibly tough individuals that were doing everything in their power to make sure that mountain lines are gonna be on that mountain forever.
And that sums it up, right? And so the sad thing is currently to see them out politic. And there's no other word to say that. And somebody slips a bill in there that takes away, protection that's existed for 65 years or 68 years. You've got a protection of these animals that's just at the stroke of a pen being removed to the degree that a mountain lion, if this bill is passed.
is gonna have no better protection than a rabbit. Yeah. How in 2023, can politics override science to that degree? That's the most shocking thing to me. Take away the passion and take away the emotion and take away the tough people and the hours of work and the millions of dollars that have been spent on the project.
How can politics not look at science when it comes to [00:42:00] dictating wildlife policy? That's the thing that's shocking to me, to be honest, Chris? Yeah. The the House bill is House Bill 4 69, that's going through Utah right now. It's actually past the house and the Senate. It's on the governor's desk for either a sign, a signature, or a veto at this point.
. Before we get there I want to spend some time and talk about that a little more in depth, but some questions. So you're spending time with these people in the field, you're getting a look and you're being objective about this. You don't have a hand on the landscape. You're not you're there to tell the story.
So for, did you ever see anybody that was handling a hound that, that set, you got the impression from them that, man, I wish we could go ahead and kill that cat instead of collar it. I'm trying to tell the story from the Hounds perspective and the value that they have. You talk about them being volunteers and we're talking about [00:43:00] them using their.
Their resources in fuel the wear and tear on their hounds, on their equipment. You, for a week long, somebody, these guys are spending a couple thousand dollars a piece at least to, to be able to be a part of this study. Did you ever feel like they were disappointed that they were doing the conservation work versus out there being hunters?
I really didn't because I think that so I've been fortunate to be around Hounds man for many years. I've seen Hounds used very effectively in anti poaching scenarios. I've brought Tax of Hounds from Texas and put them into national parks in this part of the world and use them to, to chase people.
. And, one of the things I'll tell you about Hansman is it is absolutely never about the kill. It's all about the effective pursuit and the love of. This kind of man and an animal [00:44:00] connection in pursuit of a common goal. And really it's never about killing the animal. It's always about getting the animal in a tree.
And after that, I, I would, when you see the guys that do it professionally for people that have paid money to come and hunt a cat they don't rarely care about the killing side of it at all. For them, the excitement and the drive, when you see somebody that's prepared to wake up at three 30 in the morning, in the dead of winter and walk canyons for six hours straight to look for a track guy's driven a lot more by, by something a lot deeper than just pulling a trigger. And yeah, for sure. I'm sure there are people out there, Chris, there's all walks of people and like every profession in the world, There's people you and I want to hang out with, and there's people, you and I never want to be around and everything in between.
And so I'm sure there are people that just thrive on the killing and, but I think there's a whole lot more. Certainly everybody that I came across were people that thrive on the, [00:45:00] what's the word? It's a very hard thing to explain, but the connection that they have with their particular hounds and this landscape, and it's almost the harder it became, the more they loved it because it was this challenge to, to control their hounds and in the pursuit of the apex predator.
And it takes you, any pursuit which again is very hard to explain this to a non-hunting individual. But when a pursuit of a particular species takes you to a landscape that you would never otherwise see. That's a big, no rational person would ever go in that area for one thing.
But I absolutely understand what you're saying. And I think our audience, it resonates very well with them, Ivan, because when you have, maybe you looked at the genetics of this dog and you chose this puppy and you raise it from birth and you gave it the care and the training and the nutrition and the time investment into this thing, the first animal that they go [00:46:00] out and they successfully tree or bring to bay, I don't know anybody that's oh, I wish they would've called a bigger one.
You just celebrate, you celebrate the fact that you've been successful. You've partnered with this other living being, in your hound to go out and be able to be successful. That is the measure of success. It's not about pulling the trigger, like you say, and most of us that have been doing it long enough, realize that once you pull the trigger, then that's where the work really starts and there's no more pursuit for the day a lot of times cuz you're worried about bringing those animals out of the field and bringing 'em back to the truck.
Great observation there. Let's talk about House Bill 4 69 a bit and just go through and lay out a 30,000 foot view of what this thing is gonna mean to Utah and the mountain lion population in Utah. So Chris, I think, you can speak a lot more deeply to the [00:47:00] actual politics of how something like that happens.
Let me try and draw a picture of what the effects would be. So what that means is no quotas kill as many as you want and no seasons. , kill them whenever you want. , no regard for kittens. Adults, sub-adults kill anything that you want. So basically they become vermin. No different to a coyote. And I spoke about a small percentage of guys that are go out there just to try and kill cats. And most rules in the world are designed around the people that are not rule keepers. And so there's a speed limit on a road. There's people that are always getting tickets and there's people who are never getting tickets.
The kind of people that we pursue mountain lion for research with would never get a ticket. [00:48:00] The kind of people that are built like this, that endangers a species when a bill like this has passed are the people that are always getting tickets. . And it's that simple. And so you've got these guys who.
Have, don't have a wisp of ethics in them. They are, blood thirsty killers for want of a better way of putting it and run the very real risk of making this animal go extinct in that landscape because it's not getting, institutional protection and we're losing out on all those data points that you laid out so well for us in the research side of it.
It, when you eliminate the quotas and the check-in process and you treat 'em like vermin, then you lose the ability to manage that species, but you're also losing the data on. Your mule deer, your habitat, lions hunt in habitat enriched areas because that's where the prey is. So now you can find those areas and ask [00:49:00] questions like, why is there prey here?
What kind of plant species are here? What's the soil composition? It's so intricate in everything that you can tie into this thing. Whereas if you just kick it off to the side and say we're gonna treat 'em like coyotes and vermin, then you're gonna lose out on all that. But the other thing is, I think we should talk about is why can't they be looked at in the same light as coyotes?
Because coyotes are prolific. You can't, you cannot eliminate that species from an area. Do you have any, do you have any thoughts on that or any talking points? . I think that what you've gotta look at there, there's a few things you've gotta look at. You've gotta look at the density of a particular animal.
, you've gotta look at the viability of their breeding. You've gotta look at the, their prey species and their habitat preferences. And I think we can all agree that coyotes are far more numerous than mountain [00:50:00] lions. Yes. And they can exist far better, even when persecuted than a mountain lion.
Exactly. . So if we are looking at the character and personality of certain animals, some of them can withstand very heavy pressure and others simply can't. And mountain lion, one of those species that simply can't. And one of the dangers, Chris, and it's something we see in African landscapes all the time, if your population of a particular species goes below a certain threshold, it's not recoverable.
it can't recover without the help of man. As we stand today, there's a very healthy population of mountain lions in Utah. It wouldn't take very long under a bill like this for that to be reversed and for you to have a non-viable population where perhaps , you've got inadequate number of females in a particular landscape, and the one or two that are left there are so heavily persecuted they can never get us a litter through.
You've gotta have an undisturbed female be [00:51:00] safe for a solid nine months for her to be able to bring a litter to the point of them being independent. . And unless she can be completely safe for nine months, she's never gonna rear a litter. And so with a bill like this, she's never gonna be safe cuz you're gonna have people pursuing that cat.
And where in today's world, they would leave her because she's got kittens or whatever under that bill. Somebody's gonna shoot her. And so really let's take it to its most. What's the word for it? Most graphic example. So all of a sudden you've got somebody without a whisper of ethics that's in, one fall when there's a bunch of thorns around, finds the track of a female with two cubs and pursues them.
His hounds kill the cubs on the pathway. He continues on and kills the mother himself. At the end of the day you haven't just killed a female cougar and two cubs, you've killed all of the eggs. , all of the future generations die with that female. Yeah. And [00:52:00] so rarely is that acceptable to the general public.
If you walked up to somebody in, in Walmart right now, today that knows nothing about it, and you say, is that acceptable? It would be a resounding no. But the way that it's been couched is not that graphic and it's not that way and. Again, as hunters, we have to tell the right story in the right way, and I hope that, podcasts like this and social media and various posts are able to be shared so that, step one to voting correctly is education.
And it doesn't matter whether you're voting for a president or whether you're voting for a bill. You've gotta, you've gotta be responsible enough if you are responsible enough to cast a. be responsible enough to understand what you're voting for. . And I think in this case, what one has gotta do is you've got gotta backfill the gap.
And again, I come back to what I said earlier, it's astounding to me that a bill like this could be passed when [00:53:00] there's easy access to fantastic science. But the bullets passed without any regard of that science. And, millions of dollars have been spent gathering that science and thousands of man hours have been not just on the side of the mountain, but behind computers and, university graduates and smart people designing conservation models.
And it's been completely overlooked in for some political agenda where some particular individual wants to see mountain lion disappear. One, one of the things that I look at on this whole thing it defeats the narrative of the unaware of the ignorant person who feels like the Hounds man is.
all about killing animals or, that's the favorite tactic is, hunters don't care. We've got people who are highly invested in this mountain lion that are totally against this bill. It, and one would think the person who you would ask at Walmart would think that the hunters would be all for this.
Oh, they can [00:54:00] go out and they can hunt anytime and they're gonna kill all the lions. Lions off the landscape. But if you tell them, We are against this. That's a valuable message and helps tell that story. We've got the most invested in it. We care about it deeply. We don't want to see it mismanaged.
We don't want to see it abused. And no, if you're a person with no ethics, we don't even want you out there. So that's a such a great opportunity for us as Hounds to be able to jump in this fight and say we care more about this wildlife with our money, our time, our resources, than any other group out there.
And it's important to us. We're not willing to just kick it off to the side and let people have their way with it. No, I agree with you, Chris, and I think that people need to realize that, in today's modern world, without protection, nothing's gotta hope, there are 350 million people in United States alone, and unless we protect our [00:55:00] wild places and wildlife within those wild places, It's all gonna go away.
It really is right within, I hate to say this, within the body of hunters, there are enough unethical individuals that will high five and whoop and holler and chug a beer and out they'll go and try and kill as many as they can. And that's that the reality of those are the kind of people that this legislation up until now has protected the cats against.
For sure. You brought up something while we were talking there, which is another point that I really want to speak on and what we're running out of some time here, but I wanna spend a little bit of time on the wildlife college and the anti-poaching canine teams that you've done so much work, a lot of promotion and research and the work that you've done with these anti-poaching canine teams.
I wanna talk about that a little bit. Yeah. It's a very interesting thing, Chris, and it's. , it's not as politically correct as people would like it to be, it really came around where,[00:56:00] what we found was that a line tracking dog I a dog on a line most of that dog's energy is being used pulling against its leash.
. And so at the end of five or six hours, the handler is exhausted and in much danger because you're pursuing an armed individual. And the dog is blown. And so we looked at this and we said you know what, if we were to run a pack of hounds free, like you would chase a mountain line.
And, as we started to look at it I spent a little bit of time in Texas with an individual by the name of Joe Braman and an and spent a bit of time with him, and he's an avid Bobcat hunter. . And he said in principal, it's his brother Dan was just on the podcast on Friday.
Oh, wow. You know that family and their , they're incredible hounds men. And so I literally, sustainability and taking, taking pioneering steps carefully is very important. So step one, instead of just diving into this potential [00:57:00] solution, I brought a game ranger from South Africa, someone who was in the middle of Kruger National Park in the middle of what we call a rhino war, where these rhinos were being poached for their horns.
And it's a park there that's four and a half million acres, which is quite hard for a lot of people to comprehend. It's a size of a small state and, the, these people were coming in and spending multiple days in there and shooting rhinos. And so I brought him to Texas cuz I wanted him to see firsthand as somebody in the fight, what these hounds could do.
That worked. He liked it. So the next thing we did is we took Joe Braman to Africa and had him spend a month watching and looking and understanding what was really going on in Africa. And then Joe said, look, we can solve this. Let me get to work. So Joe went through hundreds and hundreds of hounds to look for specific individuals that he thought had the character and personality of puppies that would pursue humans.
And yeah we built a pack [00:58:00] of man tracking dogs that, that, to this day free run. And we deploy them five at a time from a helicopter. We follow them with a helicopter and yeah, they, they'll track for, you're a hounds man. You know how far a hound can go. And they'll track these individuals for long distances.
And there's been so many benefits. We've caught over 200 people that way. No longer with the game ranges. Two, 200 people. You've had 200 apprehensions. We've had over 200 apprehensions. Wow, that's great. The game rangers are no longer in danger because the hounds are running without humans, and so no individual is gonna get shot.
The interventions have been a lot calmer because, people are scared of dogs, particularly fugitives are scared of dogs. And at the end of the day, it's become this incredibly viable solution that has completely disrupted the way that poachers poach. Absolutely. They will come up with a different way and they will find ways around [00:59:00] the hounds, which we won't talk about publicly, but the realities are, it's worked incredibly well.
And so we are expanding that solution, across to other parts of the world. We've actually started breathing into the Hounds about a quarter Doberman. to give them a little bit more aggression. Because as you and I both know, a hound is a very mild individual, right? He doesn't look for a fight at all.
And so if you're pursuing humans with hounds, you need a bit of blood in there that's gonna give them just a little bit more nerve, right? And yeah so you don't want too much, you don't want the individual to be injured because it's very easy to sit in your arm chair, say, oh no, will poaches all bad people, they all need to die.
That, that sounds great on paper. But in reality and politically, it's a very bad thing. So all you want is a tool the, that helps you with apprehensions and then allow the legal, viable, ethical court system to take over from there. And what the hound is an independent, it's a deal closer, really.
A bunch of people with a bunch of techniques [01:00:00] get to the point where they call the hounds, the hound comes, closes the deal, and the hounds when then hands over to law enforcement. and it's out of his hands again and he goes back to training his hounds. So an incredible solution, Chris.
Something that is really a, once again shown the true value of hounds when deployed correctly. And, I think that one of the things we can all agree on is training any canine effectively is very difficult. Training how effectively is very difficult and there's no solution that can happen without a huge amount of learning by doing.
But with the right people that are taking heed of the techniques, the tactics, and the procedures what they would call in the mill TTPs and learning with every deployment. And so you get to know in certain weather conditions, the hounds are gonna run in a certain. in, in adverse conditions, they're gonna need some help over the hard ground.
They, they, the milder mannered ones need to be paired up with the [01:01:00] more aggressive ones because then they're gonna slow down the aggressive ones and the aggressive ones are gonna speed them up and Right. Right there's a hundred things you can learn. You could be a hansman for a hundred years, you're still only gonna know 20% of your dog.
We learn something every day. We get out there with the hounds and I think that, that's what makes Homesman so different is they out there with this very special bond with an animal and trying to learn how to communicate better and be better at a common goal. And that's what makes it such a.
Such a unique solution, both for hunting and for researcher anti poaching, and then many other ways that, that hunters are deployed. So in the United States, I was a canine handler. Heath Hyatt, who does our Wednesday show, is a master trainer of police canines is there. So we're familiar with working dogs and certifications that they need to be able to meet in order to be deployed and things like that.
I is there a program, a similar program in place for these canine units in [01:02:00] Africa? Yes. And the reason for that, Chris, is because of clever lawyers. Because Yes, they, you, the first thing guys do is we'll drop their bags and then you carry on tracking them and you find these guys. , if you don't have an accredited hound and you don't have a gps mark and track of where that hound ran.
A clever lawyer will say those guys happen to be walking through and those bags don't belong to them. And if your hound is accredited, you can say here is the track. Here is where the bags were found. Here is what the hound behavior was. Here is where the people were found, so therefore these people dropped the bag on their way.
And it's an accredited hound that followed that track and connected the two. It's not an unrelated incident. And yes, those accreditations are important, especially when it gets into court. Again, I think that the effect of deployment of any canine, there's a lot of misconception everybody thinks in Africa that Belgian Meno is the [01:03:00] So war now Belgian Meno.
I, I jokingly call it, I have huge respect for it, which I wanna make that clear before I make this next. But they somewhat circus dogs. They can learn a hundred commands and do amazing things. Yeah. They're amazing and they're an incredible short distance attack dog. That will do amazing stuff.
A hound is like a thug. You put 'em in a group of five, they're gonna come, they're not gonna stay and sit and roll over and fetch a ball and do all of that. They are, they're an incredible tool. Their noses are 10 times as good as a manuel's nose, but don't ask them to do tricks. And so if you understand the difference and you deploy them within their capabilities, both of them are incredibly effective tools for law enforcement, for science, for research, and a thousand other things.
But you've gotta understand the capability of the breed that you're dealing. , understand the different levels of training and what the outcomes can be. , and then understand that [01:04:00] you've gotta deploy your hound or your malua or whatever. If you deploy your canine where the a the odds are stacked in their favor, they will always succeed.
It's only the humans that mess it up. . But if you deploy too early, or the track's too old, or the wind is too wrong, or the conditions are unfavorable that hound you, setting them up to. , you're not setting them up to succeed. So the human element has also gotta be very good. There's a valuable lesson in there just for hunters.
It's very much the same when you locate a bear track or a lion track, setting them up for success. When the odds are in their favor, you're setting 'em up for success. So are you deploying these anti-poaching canines? Do you have a you've got one specific use with the hounds for the tracking, that's part of it.
Are you also incorporating the malam wall for the apprehension type work? Is there, is it a combination or are you just using hounds only? So yes and no. So a lot depends on the particular scenario. So actually what normally happens, you locate a track and a [01:05:00] lion tracker goes out there, usually with a blood hound, a cold nose dog that can track a very old track, but he's slow and he's on a leash.
. And he gets to the point where you believe, you find a sleeping spot, you find a place where they've peed or whatever, where you believe. We try not to deploy on a track older than four hours. So you believe that you're on a track that's four hours old, but then the free running pack hounds come in at the point that they are deployed, you try and have an uncontaminated track that no one's walked on.
You deploy them and then you get in a helicopter and you follow them from the air. And in a perfect scenario, you have a small fixed wing flying figure of eights an estimated correct distance ahead of the direction of the hounds. Yeah. Because it's very hard. to run away with someone flying over you that doesn't spot you.
And so basically what the fixed wing is to hold the people still while the hounds catch up. And so very seldom is their need for a meinir because the hounds catch up. And you can imagine, I don't care who you [01:06:00] are when five banging hounds come out of the brush at you at 40 miles an hour, whatever it is, 20 miles an hour, used to kilometers, they go at 40 kilometers an hour.
If they're coming out of the brush at 30 miles an hour, five of them, and you're already a little bit frightened of dogs and you've got a helicopter hovering over your head, you don't need a melanoma at that point you run into the helicopter, not . That's so interesting cuz that's one of the things I, I saw here in law enforcement is without contain, , it's as much a psychological game to catch a person as it is the physical part of actually catching them.
Psychology is so important and I was envisioning, like we used to talk about, setting up perimeters. If you can make a person a right-handed person, make enough left turn, left turns, psychologically they feel defeated and so they'll go to ground and they'll stay there. And you have a better chance of finding that person out there where you're at.
I can just imagine, you hear the hounds [01:07:00] behind you, the aircraft is overhead, and sooner or later people are just like, this is of no use. I am not going anywhere. I'm done expending my energy and I'm not gonna get chewed up by hound, so I'm gonna climb this tree and wait for the helicopter. I'm more than happy to take a ride.
Let's do it. That's exactly right. And so again, it makes the life of a game ranger that much safer. Yeah. If you're tracking a guy on foot, quietly and carefully with a dog on a line, No matter what, he feels a lot more confident in his position. , you've got five dogs running out of the woods at you at 30 miles an hour, all baying.
And you are not a tree climber like a mountain lion. You just wave at the helicopter with your hands up. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. That is really interesting. And are you at a point in the wildlife college there, are they at the point where they're breeding their own stock of hounds?
Or are they still importing hounds? Is there a breeding program set up and what does that look like if they are No, very much they did [01:08:00] import the first 2020 animals. A lot of that blood remains in the system. A lot of those animals were brought in as adults and they've run their course.
A, a fully working hound does not have a long lifespan. And so they're old ladies and men now. They're living in the lap of luxury. Their bloodlines are still being used to breed great. And they're doing it very successfully. And I think that the time that it's taken with the learning by doing in training, the training has come a long way.
, there's nothing similar about the way they train today compared to that first, version one, which was several years ago. And, the college is a learning by doing institution where there's a huge amount of after action reporting, even within the training. And so every day the goal is to do it a little bit better, a little bit different.
And I think it will continue to be successful. It's a solution that's gonna end up all over Africa. And, breeding a hound is easy. reading the right hound is hard. Training the right hound is really hard. . And so if you [01:09:00] invest the right amount of time in your people that are behind the training, I think that's the greatest thing that, that's the most important thing for a homan to grasp.
You can go to a Homan banquet and you can bet on the most expensive dog on auction. And unless you really know your way around a training, the best dog in the world is not going to, is not gonna do anything. I, if you are a really good trainer, you can take a mediocre hound and have him doing amazing things.
And it all comes down to connection and patience and understanding that every single animal is an individual and there's certain animals that are gonna respond to a certain thing and others to a different thing. But, you and I both know that, if you've got a hound with a drive for food that's got stamina.
You've got a winning dog no matter where it came from. . Yeah, for sure. You've summed up about three and a half years of podcast that we've been trying to do there in about five minutes right there, Ivan . We've had those same conversations, having the pup right pups in the right hands will increase your success by far.
[01:10:00] So where can people find more information about the program that's going on there at the Wildlife College and, just get more information about who you are. But it, that, and specifically this program going on at the Wildlife College. So I think the very best way is on social media.
I'm fairly prolific on Instagram. I'm at Ivan dot. and you can just scroll through a bunch of stuff there. The Wildlife College has mentioned frequently there with links to all of their stuff. Yeah. They've also got a website that you'll be able to find through social media, but rather than overload everybody with a lot of different information, I think as I said, the very best is just go on to my Instagram, scroll through a few pages, look at some of the hound stuff that's there, and yeah, wonderful.
Some of those, some really cool stuff there. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Ivan, I appreciate your time. I'm gonna give you an opportunity if you've got any final thoughts. If not, then I'll go ahead and wrap it up. I appreciate the opportunity as well, Chris. And I just want to give a huge [01:11:00] shout out to the hansman out there that do it right.
And it's a rare breed of people that are, that. and that driven and that motivated, and as long as he got them in the forefront of conservation, there's a really bright future. So yeah, I just wanna shout out to those guys and just say, thank you so much. And, when I come across and make friends with people like Corey Huntsman, it's really an honor and a privilege to work with him and his crew out there.
And I'm sure a lot of guys like that. And yeah, just a huge shout out to them for their participation and conservation and basically in the ethical pursuit of, wild things and wild places, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. That what's that was my message at in Michigan this past weekend was, is there any hope?
Yeah, there is hope. As long as we do things the right way, we come at it strategically and so I really appreciate that message. Folks, it's Miss Ivan Carter and you can find him at Ivan dot Carter on Instagram and Ivan Carter on Facebook. Make sure that you're sharing this podcast with your [01:12:00] friends.
We've got to continue to develop this narrative. We're doing such great, valuable and wonderful work. We're very thankful for people like Ivan that are helping us tell this story on a worldwide scale. I think that is so valuable that we keep that in mind. And yeah, appreciate everybody listening to the Houseman XP podcast.
This is fair Chase.
