This is Fair Chase

Seth Hall HXP Team member and Co-host of his own podcast, All Mixed Up, joins Chris in this continued discussion about fair chase, the importance of defining who we are as houndsmen and being able to rise to the occasion when challenged. 

In this episode listeners will pick up talking points to talk about:

• Why we hunt
• Why hunting with hounds is relevant
• Why hunting with sight hounds is a noble pursuit
• Why houndsmen must equip themselves for the hard conversations
• Why we can’t allow non houndsmen to define who we are

This is a deep dive into something very important. 

Chris Powell: [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 it 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.

On this episode of the Hounds Man XP podcast, we got a great show, Mr. Habra. Seth Hall joins me. He's in the studio, [00:03:00] and we dive deep into this topic of fair chase. It's something that we have to keep talking about. We gotta stay on top of this. We cannot let our lifestyle be defined by those who would say that.

H with dogs, H with hounds is not fair. Chase, Seth and I are gonna peel back the layers on this latest episode about fair chase, and we're gonna talk about side hounds. We're gonna define why that is fair Chase. Why are we spending so much time on this? For one thing, I think it is imperative that we not be complacent.

We not let other people define what is fair chase and what is not for us. If we don't have these discussions, if we don't talk about how to talk about who we are and what we do, then we're gonna find ourselves painted into a corner. When people challenge us on whether or not H with Hounds is fair. Chase, have you really thought about it?

While you're [00:04:00] out there, you're driving around looking for a track, waiting on that dog to strike a coon track or walking to a tree. Have you really thought about it? If someone challenges you today, right now, they walk up and they say, honey with hounds is unethical and does not comply to rules of fair chase, what are you gonna tell them?

We have to be intentional. We have to be intentional now to develop that narrative so that we do not get painted in the corners in wildlife commission meetings or in legislation, or even on social media. This conversation should help you develop your own narrative and define who you are and what you.

Long Live Freedom. Long Live Fair Chase and Long Live. The Hounds men, as my buddy Larry Anderson, used to say, we've got a box shaker here. Let's get the tailgate down. It's time to dump the box.[00:05:00]

Seth Hall: The cold You is no time getting

Chris Powell: down to business. It's cold roll, man. You just roll into it. You're not even gonna let me get hydrated.

Seth Hall: Geez.

Chris Powell: You've been hunting and working so hard that you've gotta hydrate during the podcast. . There's nothing wrong. Chad's Chad, every time I talk to him he's like eating.

He's junk. He's eating junk food too. You'd think he'd beaten like avocados and almonds or something like that. Being in that mountain lifestyle, but it's like Cheetos. And he's got kids though, so he's got those kid snacks in the house. What's

Seth Hall: my excuse? People are always like, you're a total health nut.

I'm like, dude, I just ate like a salami and Turkey sandwich. You know what I mean? On white bread, . Is that bad? That's not bad. Yeah. I don't think it's very [00:06:00] healthy. I'm sure there's healthier options. I could have a, like what Joe Rogan eats or something. mc t oil, coffee and elk with jalapenos or something.

Chris Powell: I think there's a little bit of a difference there. It's called Monday.

Seth Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And time . . Yeah. One time Chad called me for a business meeting and he was stuck in the snow on the side of the highway and I was like, are you gonna you can call another time. He's nah, that's fine.

I'll get out. What do you need to talk about? I was like . He's a beast, man. He's crazy,

Chris Powell: dude. Yeah. He is. He is. He's been posting those Instagram reels and stuff with Roxy, his daughter in there. I don't know if we should mention ki or Host Kids' names or not. What do you think? It's not up to me. . Yeah.

I don't know. I might bleep that out. I'm gonna go. It'll say with Bleep .

Seth Hall: Yeah. Who would name their daughter Bleep. Yeah, that's right. Terrible joke. [00:07:00]

Chris Powell: Anyway. Yeah. What's up man? I'll tell you what we've been we've been, we're working on this Fair Chase thing, a lot because it bothers me a lot.

, it bothers me a lot that other hunting groups and things might have an opinion that hunting with Hounds isn't fair. Chase that just. , I want to, part of what we do is control the narrative, or at least define the narrative and Right. And try to get other people on board with it to help us make some headway here.

But yeah I don't know. It's just it's wh why would another hunting group try to, try to cache on another ethical hunting group? Is it a question of ethics or, are we just that far gone on our ethics are views far?

Seth Hall: No, I just think it's, people don't, people always are quick to cache on what they don't know, right?

It is crazy how much shade is thrown at hound hunters and trappers by the wider hunting community. But even within any archery community, you have your long bow hunters that are like, oh, [00:08:00] anything over 25 yards and you're not a real hunter and blah, blah, blah. It's I just think, yeah, people are, Bored

Chris Powell: I just, I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example of something that, that just popped up this past week. There's another podcast, it's a Whitetailed hunting podcast and I'm just gonna call him out. His name is Don Higgins and he writes for several major publications and he was taught, he got a question about allowing Coyote Hounds to run on his property during the off season.

And he came out and he just said that is absolutely the worst thing that you can do, allowing dogs on your property, that dogs are even worse than ha letting people. And he calls it his sanctuary. And and then he even goes on to make a cloaked threat that if people don't know how to keep dogs off their property, to send 'em to him and he can show 'em how to keep dogs off their [00:09:00] property.

This is a major voice in the hunting community. I'm just tired. It's, I'm tired of it.

Seth Hall: Yeah. I just, people the horn porn kind of world has really taken extremely heavy

Chris Powell: route. That, and I, that hey, that, that term, by the way I originated it here on the podcast, but I got it from a coworker that while we were conservation officers he coined that term horn porn and.

Antler. I just totally stole it from you. Antler Auto erotica. That's what he used to say. We used to stop these guys in the middle of the night out there shining for deer and doing all that stuff. And Steve would come back to the, get back to the car. Or we'd get back to the car and they, they'd be legal.

And he is we've been sitting out here for four hours trying to find a bad guy and some guy that can't control his antler, auto erotica thinks he's gotta come out here and spotlight everything and pull us out of our hiding spot. And we, he just go on a rant. He's probably got a bunch of horn porn [00:10:00] magazines by the toilet in his house.

Seth Hall: What would be the coon, the raccoon hunting.

Chris Powell: There is no, yeah, we're not auto eroica about that . That's true. It's only side hound guys and deer hunters. Oh, fish,

Seth Hall: Yeah. I just feel especially as the world's becoming more parcelized, where like people are having their smaller and smaller sections of land that they're running and monetizing, people are getting in their heads the craziest things to try to maximize their leases. And I'm saying this, fair quotes, everyone's success rate by trying to minimize like everything they can possibly think.

And they're like, oh, dog barking. We know why, right? But, and we also know that there's little to no, there, there is data that proves that there's little to no effect from coonhounds running around in there catching deer also. Don't you think it would be wise to desensitize your deer to vehicles, dogs noise?

So if you

Chris Powell: really wanna [00:11:00] do a, oh, that doesn't success rate count, but no, that doesn't count. It just, farmers have been doing that for, I know farmers have been doing that for 200 years. All you gotta do is get on a John Deere tractor and wear a pair of brown Carhartts and go fix some fence.

And Darrell walk up to you.

Seth Hall: In my world it's white trucks cuz all government rigs are white trucks. If you drive anything but a white truck, you'll never see wildlife. But if you just drive those white trucks around animals just stand on the side of the road and stare you at a coyote like nine feet away from my truck on the side of the de the two track road just staring at me like a week ago and didn't care at all.

And that's the, anytime you take a personal rig out there, you won't see a thing. They're hiding. But yeah, I, that's what I always thought. It's like you think you would wanna desensitize your lease to these things to make it even better. So you don't have to be. Sneaking around and

Chris Powell: stuff. , I've got, I don't know.

I've, I really think, and you did a podcast on the way animals see the way the eyeball works, and I've personally witnessed this. I can walk across a field [00:12:00] in a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt and horses, they don't react to it. They're, they know what I'm doing. But I can walk through that same field with camouflage on, and all of a sudden, the same horses that I feed every day when I put the camouflage on, just like what the, yeah.

They just they come unglued. They don't know what to do. They don't know how they're seeing it. And I feel like the deer are the same way. They start seeing these weird globs and blobs moving around and people moving like predators and all of a sudden it's, they freak out and and, you mentioned something that was key there. You mentioned the study the study on. , the use of hounds and deer movement. And for some reason, deer hunters don't want to accept that. They don't want to recognize that as an authority. So my new line is when people say, oh, that's an old study, it's like where my rebuttal is, where's your new science?

Yeah. [00:13:00] To say that it does, there is none.

Seth Hall: Yeah. That well, and it's they're like, or you're cherry picking data and it's . Yeah, I at least have a cherry tree. You know what I

Chris Powell: mean? That's not even cherry picking. That was a specific study to do, done fur for that reason.

Yeah.

Seth Hall: Yeah. And it's, how about the millions of pictures of dudes standing at coon trees with their dogs barking in a buck laying like 30 yards away and the bushes staring at 'em, laying down.

Chris Powell: All you've gotta do is make a post on Facebook and ask for those pictures and you'll get flooded with pictures Exactly.

Of. And video of walking right past a bet of deer, a buck a dough, whatever. And a, you can hear the hound treat, and you just walk right past it and then they videotape 'em, walking 'em back out.

Seth Hall: Also, and I hear this all the time, aren't coyotes like the worst thing that's ever existed for deer?

That's what I always hear all the time. So it's like you would think you'd want them to be driven out. Hunting them with dogs is not only a way to eliminate them directly, but also to passively drive them out [00:14:00] of an area. Yeah. Because traps don't elicit that evasion response like dogs do. Dogs physically drive them out of the area and keep them out instead of just, they get caught in a leg hole trap.

And Skippy, the coyotes jumping around and the other one is just I don't even know what that was. I don't really, he'll run off cuz it's got spooked, but he's not leaving

Chris Powell: well, he'll even come back and you'll catch a double in the sets, . So I've, we've had several coyote sets over the years where we caught doubles.

They come up and it's like, what are you doing? And then it's oh, what's that smell? Boom. And then you catch a double . Trapping is very effective. There's absolutely no doubt about it. But the real rub is having this idea that somehow hounds are hurting your hunting opportunity.

And I, but anyway, and then they start attacking us on the fair chase thing. And that's where I really want to go and talk about in this podcast is we still have, we still got a lot of work to do on defining that narrative and developing that [00:15:00] narrative and sharpening our skills as hounds men to be able to talk about it.

Because I can tell you, this is an example of something that I know several people have gone through. We were in condo, Montana. and we were at the Sleepy Bear Sleeping Bear Lodge, and we were in there eating lunch and a lady walked in, saw our hound rigs, we were lying hunting, came in and she engaged us in this conversation about how hunting with hounds was not fair chase, but she was a spot and stall hunter.

And she said that it was not fair. So I bring that story up and I tell that story because you've gotta be prepared to have the conversation without flying off the handle.

Seth Hall: That's right. First, control your anger, because I'm already rolling my eyes so bad it hurts, yeah. Because your binoculars are totally fair.

You're like, what? How do you, this is the thing about ethics that's a slippery slope, is that it's all opinion, and so you gotta be careful [00:16:00] about that. You have yours, they have theirs, but at the same time, when it's clear with like undeniable. I hate to say facts because it's the wrong word to used for opinions, but like, when you have undeniable evidence to support your claim, that's what we need to practice without going crazy.

Chris Powell: But shouldn't we? Shouldn't we be developing our opinions on facts? Yes. And not on a motion.

Seth Hall: Yeah. When I like break my leg, I want my doctor to have clear protocols on how to fix my broken leg. That's not based on his ideas and opinions, but based on facts that have worked for fixing broken legs and not getting infected and healing wrong.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And that's why we're here .

Chris Powell: Yeah. Yeah. Just diving into the narrative, I think one thing that we need to look at is this total. It's, it seems to me more of a trend. There's a real resistance to science in our community, especially among hunters.

And. . [00:17:00] I don't, I understand why, because science was weaponized you. I think you used that term last week when we were talking about it. Science was weaponized as a political weapon, just by all sides by, yeah, by everybody. Yeah. Just a couple years ago and it developed this huge distrust.

Up until then, everybody was like what does the science say? What does the science say? And one of the things that we have hung our hat on as a hunting community as a whole, not just townsman, not just, elk and deer hunters or whatever, is science-based wildlife management. So we have to embrace, we either have to embrace the science or we have to totally reject it.

And I don't see anybody doing that.

Seth Hall: I find it especially frustrating cuz in our realm, in this particular context, people have such hardened opinions about wildlife. and are 100% clueless for the most part about [00:18:00] real wildlife science. And I'm, this is literally both sides. I had a guy talking to me yesterday and I was just listening to him talking about how like, Bobcats will eat every Turkey, coyotes will eat every deer fan, and wolves lead every elk if they're not like actively hunted like down.

And I'm like, okay. They existed before humans were here. Obviously humans play an important part in the ecosystem, and we need to manage predators. There is no question, but come on, they're not gonna eat everything. That's great. They would die too. So it's and then I hear the other side that are like, actually wolves can cure cancer if you pet 'em.

You know what I mean?

Chris Powell: There's, they can change rivers, they can change rivers. They've done it in Yellowstone. So yeah. So it's just

Seth Hall: Anyway, so yeah, it's really frustrating. But that's where, like there are, I work with a big game hunter who thinks hunting with hounds is like quote super trashy and quote, so it's like, , obviously I can Well, let's just, it's important to Yeah.

What, how, let's break it down.

Chris Powell: Yeah, break that down. Because I want to know, since you've [00:19:00] engaged this guy, I want to know,

Seth Hall: and he's my friend. We're friends, so

Chris Powell: Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I've got friends as well that, that control large tracks of land that I hunt here on, and I respect their opinion because I don't own it.

Yeah. So they say, Hey, wait until after deer season, if you don't mind. Okay. That's your opinion. You control the property. And for the other nine months of the year, pretty much, I can hunt there. So I allow, I, I'm not gonna stand there. I'll give him the right information and I'll say, Hey, have you ever heard about this?

Yeah. I I'd rather you not be there. Hey, that's your right. As a landowner, I respect it and stuff like that, but, Let's hear what her hear, what your friend had to say and why he thinks that hunting with Hounds is super trashy. Because I think we have to start there and then work our way up.

So

Seth Hall: obviously I like to talk about running dogs, right? No way.[00:20:00] Yeah. Surprise. And I'm speaking specifically in the context of side hounds here because he already has hardened opinion about sin Hounds, I'm sure. But this is leaking over into my world. The first thing he says is he is it's so unfair to just run something to death.

And I'm like, okay so let me break down the two. I think there was two or three points. One, it's unfair to just run something down to death that's not cool. It's like unsporting to run an animal down. Two, you're not hunting. The dogs are it's not even fair if you're not hunting.

Why? Why? , what is the point of you going out and hunting if you don't even hunt? The dogs do. And in three it's, you're causing you're, and again, this is, comes from lack of clearly ignorance. The dogs themselves are disturbing the ecosystem when a si a still hunter is a very quiet, silent witness to nature and is not disturbing the land.

So those are the three things that I get mostly out of it. And so yeah, let's

Chris Powell: just run through three. [00:21:00] Let's break 'em down. Let's go right through

Seth Hall: the three. Yeah. So like the first one is obviously the worst one ever. And I'm speaking to my site hound hunters now you guys, so like what Chris, interject wherever you want and change it based on, the more cent hound oriented ideal there.

But like the first part of where it's like it's cruel to run something down. And I look around and I'm going, how every other animal ever except humans kills, it's like prey. . That's weird that you would think that also that's what we did for the majority of our species history.

So I don't see how that's unfair. And then also it's, and this is the core argument, you guys, this is like the core point that I always bring up. A jack rabbit or a coyote, primarily. Jack jackrabbits for me, does not care. It, it just exists on this landscape, right? And also it is fully aware what your dog is pursuing it so [00:22:00] that a firearm is shot at it.

How is a projectile traveling 1800 feet per second that is completely imperceptible to sound and sight before it impacts their flesh? How is that more fair than an animal running 40 miles an hour directly at it, that it can match in both speed, agility, and distance. That it has evolved for millions of years to defend itself against a land-based carnivore pursuing it across the desert.

That is, its home where it lives. It knows everywhere it needs to go. How is that less fair? Also, and I'm gonna take

Chris Powell: this directly from you. No. Don't, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I wanna get back to that. I want, yeah. So I think we can expand that, you can expand that to animals all over anywhere about the predator prey type thing.

Yeah. I you said a couple key things there. We have been, we have evolved our technology to make hunting easier, [00:23:00] whereas my dog out there pursuing is relying on instincts that are tens of thousands of years old that have been refined to do a specific job. Nobody cries about when a wolf runs a moose.

Yeah. Yeah nobody cries when a bobcat, catches a rabbit. Maybe some beagle guys do. I know that bobcats have been getting a lot of hate because of turkeys and deer populations, things like that. But predator prey is what that is. The ultimate fair chase. Even the most pardoned, animal loving anti-hunt doesn't, they look at that as the natural order of things.

So how is it different when our dogs do it

Seth Hall: well? So he countered me by saying okay, it's more quote unquote natural, but it does that make it more humane, where you could just run up and club a pig to death with a, with an oak club, or you could just shoot it in the head [00:24:00] with a 22. He's arguing that it's less humane to run one down with dogs than it is to shoot one.

Oh. And so Uhhuh . . Oh yeah. So I counter by saying, okay, the humane aspect is a moot point because what if you make a bad shot, right? You're just, you're completely basing your entire crux of your argument that you head shoot everything. Which I've been big game hunting with firearms my entire life.

I've never head headshot anything intentionally, cuz that is not the most humane way to kill an animal, first of all. And he's also a big time hunter. He should know better. And two, the humane aspect. When a dog catches a hair, do you think it's this like crazy drawn out, saw torture scene? No. It's a six pound animal being caught by a 50 pound Greyhound with knives in its mouth.

It's dead in seconds. Also, Again, I agree with you. Even, it's so funny that it's typically the hunter, the people that are hunters that are the most [00:25:00] opposed to this, to that they say it's inhumane to hunt with dogs. It is not the quote unquote libtard because they're the ones that are like, yeah it's how they would've died in the wild.

Like a coyote catches 'em. That's exactly how they die,

Chris Powell: I don't know about that.

Seth Hall: At least in my experience It is. Yeah. And the people I work with, that's how,

Chris Powell: The hunting crowd isn't directly going out there and trying to. Eliminate hunting with dogs, though they're not.

No, but they may be indirectly and they may be sitting back silently and thinking, okay, if they're paying attention to them right now, then they can't come after me, so we'll go ahead. We'll make them our sacrificial lamb so that we can hunt a few more years.

Seth Hall: I'm just speaking in my direct experience because I agree in a broad spectrum, of course. You're right. And I agree with you on that very much like I'm talking about in my specific I typically get more outspoken criticism of hound hunting from other hunters because they're comfortable talking to me about it because we're all hunters here.

And also because yeah, some people are just really vocal about their terrible opinions. , but yeah. And so that's what I always say is [00:26:00] like the humanity aspect of the humane aspect of it is completely a moot point. There's a, it is all swift and it can all be done un inhumanely as well.

That's just not it's just a moot point. Like it doesn't. It's just, it's cherry picking to try to prop up a bad point. And then so the two, the second thing where it's like you're not doing any of the work, the dogs are for cent hound guys especially. That's bs And we all know that every person that goes hunting with you is for the first time is wow, this is way harder than I thought.

And the side hound guys, we do have a little bit less of that pedestal stand on for sure. Because these dogs really are more of a complete hunting style. They will find the game, run it down, catch it, retrieve it all on their own. But even still, it's a team effort. I'm out there with them.

And even if it's not, even if you do have these dogs that can find it all on their own. Okay. What about any, what if you like watching a nature documentary where a [00:27:00] cheetah can catch a gazelle, it's cool to watch, it doesn't make you any less like noble or validated. To shoot something than it does to watch a predator prey interaction.

Except those predators are your buddies. It's just a, I don't know.

Chris Powell: This is where it gets tough at ethics. Said. You said something that I liked. You said noble, you used the term noble and somewhere we lost that because the nobles in the old class system were the only ones that could hunt.

Seth Hall: Yeah.

Cuz hunting with dogs is super

Chris Powell: expensive. Yes. Yeah. And but not only that, but they were, they the peasants, the low underlings weren't even allowed to own dogs or hunt. So if you go back to the side hound, that's where literatures came from. Yeah. The royalty, the in the Middle East are the ones who could afford to do that.

Yeah. So how did we lose, how did that shift? How did that

Seth Hall: change? Here's my hypothesis. I think modern [00:28:00] veterinary care really changed that. I think the mass production of dog food really changed that. . I think by us being able, look, imagine everyone, imagine how hard it would be to keep a pack of good, healthy dogs going If you didn't have parvo, vaccinations.

Distemper, vaccinations, dog food, just in a bag that you just go buy a complete dog food. Do you feed your dogs the same kibble their whole lives and they could live and hunt for you. . And back in those days you didn't have any of that. Now the food aspect may not be as tough, feed 'em meat, feed 'em, corn, feed 'em, scraps, whatever.

But the disease aspect, the cleanliness of the kennels, managing a hound pack would be so much tougher. . And I think that shift has helped anyone keep a great pack of hounds now. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my hypothesis at least. Yeah. And then culturally, this is just a fact of the world, not even America, but the population is becoming more [00:29:00] urbanized and as bad as it is for this particular narrative.

I think overall that's a good thing because if the 8 billion people in this world lived in a rural fashion, we'd have no space. So it's in the end, probably better that we're compacting everyone into these mega cities. But it sure sucks for, I don't know about that. The cultural

Chris Powell: changes. Yeah. Yeah, we, that's a whole different, that's a whole different topic, I think.

But hey, have you checked out our website, hounds man xp.com? We've got a lot of cool stuff over there. There's links over to our Patreon. All of our bonus material is there on Patreon. You get a link right to that. You can also check out all of our awesome sponsors there. And a lot of those links have built-in discount codes.

So when you click on that link, it takes you to the website of our sponsor and it's got a built-in discount code. You can find companies like Cajun Lights, dogs are [00:30:00] treat, you can even go there and support Freedom Hunters. All right, from our website, we're also getting ready to launch our online store.

We're gonna change that up a little bit. And we're gonna have some cool stuff in there. We're gonna have belt knife, sheaths, custom made. We're gonna have some cool Tumblrs there, our hats, t-shirt designs, all that's gonna be on our online store@houndsmanxp.com. Check it out,

In the United States we opened up, we broke down those barriers, or constitutional republic that broke down the class barriers in different things. So now the people in the frontier needed dogs to, to do a wide variety of things. And but it just breaks my heart to see us lose that narrative.

And that's really what motivates me every day [00:31:00] to work on this podcast is to help. Restore that. Restore the, restore a credibility in the wildlife management circles to restore a credibility with other hunters and things like that. I think we'd be mistaken not to address some of the problems that have come along with that and how people continue to damage us and fight against us in that.

And one thing that, that Brad Letrell with Go Wild. I talked to him about this at length and he's convinced that hunters don't do a good enough job of telling the whole story. We've talked about this for promoting this podcast. We like to talk about the hunt. We like to talk about the success of the hunt, but we don't show the backstory.

We don't show, enough of us raising those puppies and. Being engaged in the whole story, the whole lifestyle[00:32:00] the training aspect of it and the time aspect and all that stuff. It's just, you get bogged down. It's cumbersome to try to tell all that. And, but everybody wants the shot of the grip and grin at the end.

So we've painted ourselves as people that are only concerned about the end result. We're not a, we're not, we don't do a good enough job of showing the process to get there. .

Seth Hall: Yeah. And when you watch a YouTube video, you fast forward to the tree lion, the tree bear. I think that's the entire world's culture metaphor, right?

, you're right. That's, and there are content creators out there that are doing that work hard to show the dr the absolute drags We're doing better hunting in

Chris Powell: general. We're doing better than we did five years ago. Seth I believe that.

Seth Hall: I definitely do. I see some content creators in the Hounds sphere that show a lot of failed hunts, failed trees, following a lion for four days and never even seeing it.

I think that's really important.

Chris Powell: Josh McKayla has never shown any videos like that.[00:33:00]

Seth Hall: The Fail. Did you know I never get Outrun ? Oh yeah. . Yeah, totally. So yeah, I think I agree with you fully on that, and I guess I'm gonna take this from you cuz I really like it. I'm gonna expand on it slightly, but if hunting with dogs is the most like unfair form of hunting, why did we invent firearms archery equipment?

Alas, javelins, I'm going in reverse , technologically speaking, but hunting with dogs is the least effective way to hunt. Overall, it's by far the most expensive and it's by far the least successful, especially in my world. . If I wanted to go out there and shoot a hundred rabbits a day, I could easy as many rabbits as I could find with a Coors light in my hand.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's, or it's one , maybe and so that's just silly. That's just so silly. How can the most primitive form of hunting, aside from scavenging be the most [00:34:00] unfair advantage? You know what I mean? Exactly. It's just crazy. Exactly. Yeah. That's the best defense. I think that's the first one that can make any person be like, oh yeah, I guess you're right.

Chris Powell: Yeah. Obviously the at laterals and those things were developed as a weapon that were adopted into the hunting culture. They weren't developed for hunting. They were developed. We've tracked this in our own lifetimes to see how military weapons have become, , that technology has been used by ammunition manufacturers to be marketed to hunting.

, with some limitations. Almost every state has certain limitations on calibers and ammunition and things like that. So we're not saying you can hunt with an R P G, that's not what we're saying. We're saying that, like the bullet design that you're shooting was developed through military technology adopted to law enforcement and was found acceptable for hunting applications.

[00:35:00] Just a, I wanted to clarify that so it didn't sound like we were, totally ignorant to why these things were developed. Archery was the first artillery. in, in armies, so Yeah. Yeah. But dialing it all the way back. Hunters have adopted that technology over time, and the first types of hunting that are documented are a man and a dog, Jason, a beast with

Seth Hall: a club or a sharps stick.

Yeah. And hey, this, I don't wanna sound anti-technology, you guys, that's ridiculous. That's not the point we're trying to make. It's that when people, because I'm not out there barefoot sometimes I'm not out there like in, in like animal skins grunting at my friends. You know what I mean? It's what we're trying to say is when someone tries to use these weaponized statements against you to understand that, hey, This is the most primitive form of hunting.

It can't be the most unfair.

Chris Powell: Don't tell me that. Don't tell, come on social media on one of my posts and tell me [00:36:00] that hunting with hounds is unethical and it's not fair. Chase. And it gives me an unfair advantage. And then I see on your feed, you thermalize in coyotes, with a thermal scope.

It's come on. Yeah. What? Yeah.

Seth Hall: Are you serious? And okay, look, I can't stand an unbalanced conversation. That's just who I am. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna put out my own hypocrisy here. I hate long-range hunting. I really don't like it at all. It does nothing for me. I find no interest in it.

I, but I, but here's the thing. I don't go around bashing long distance hunters and I don't go around trying to get it shut down. That's the difference, right? It's not for me. I don't like it. But you can also just not be an, a-hole about it and respect our fellow hunters and, yeah. Not go around thrashing people and stand by them.

You know what I mean? If you're capable of making an ethical shot at those ranges, that's your, that just gets your goat. Okay. That's cool. That's for you, man. It's just not for me. And that's where we're at with my buddy at work, by the way. That's where we've gotten to where I've convinced him that it's not trashy, [00:37:00] but he is just it's just not for me.

And I'm like, that's cool man. I don't like yellow cars. But, not trying to get 'em banned. So

Chris Powell: that's, yeah, that's the, a key statement right there is we don't have to crucify each other or throw each other under the bus if we Yeah, if we don't like it. When you talk about long-range hunting, 200 years ago, anything over a hundred yard shot was long range honey.

So as the technology has gotten better, again, it's become less of some kind of hunting feat to take 150 yard shot when you were shooting a flint lock. and you're loading it through the muzzle. Yeah. And yeah, 150 yards. There are documentations, the historical documents show people could do that, but it was not something that was normal.

Yeah. It

Seth Hall: was an exceptional creature that could hit a man off a horse at 150 yards, which, yeah, that's a really good shot.

Chris Powell: Sideway, we called Thosenot. Those were the long riflemen. The snipers, yeah. From the Revolutionary War. And they were noted. [00:38:00] They were called rifleman.

But yeah. Getting back to the topic here, what's the second point that you had? It was

Seth Hall: that I'd already covered it. It was that, it's that it's that it's trashy to hunt with dogs cuz they do all the hunting. Okay. And it's that's, we know that the hunt, the Hounds men guys just know that you guys are already ready for that.

It's, that's insane. , what was the third point? Third point. Yeah. And the third point was that just like it, it's a way. Man, I got so lost in the weeds. Where was I? Sorry. It was first off that it's Hounds do all the hunting. Oh it's inhumane to run something to death. Th two that it's trashy.

Man, I gotta come back to it. . All right. I should have wrote it

Chris Powell: down. Let's let's rewind the tape. .

Seth Hall: Yeah, we'll rewind the tape. .

Chris Powell: I think you, you're going to something there. So let's, since we touched on technology, I think that's something that, that we battle as a hound hunting community a lot.

And even on the legislative end of it, where it's being [00:39:00] weaponized against our ability to hunt. And I just say this to start off, nobody, the anti-hunting crowd, and they have learned that they can't just come straight on for hunting. For the most part they've. , they've been unsuccessful.

They spend a lot of money. They don't get necessarily what they want. So what I see more and more is taking away somebody's ability to hunt. And that's challenging. The methods and inside the methods of hound hunting, that also includes technology and that includes things like gps, and I haven't seen one in a couple years, but every year it's every so many years they revisit that and say look, they're using GPS technology on these hounds.

Their main goal is to stop us from h with hounds. And then they use the tool that we use to try to undermine us to keep us from doing that.

Seth Hall: . . And again, that just stems completely from, yeah, from [00:40:00] ignorance and just trying to weaponize an idea that hasn't been looked past.

Even the tiniest curtain. , that's just too easy I think. Our 24 hour news cycle like mentality has permeated our culture and really made it quite venomous against everybody. When we were talking last week, you were starting to come at me and grill me a little bit in some of these questions and

Chris Powell: I really liked that.

I'm still planning on it. Yeah. I really liked that. Yeah. I just wanna lay some groundwork here, for the conversation. But I, the technology thing I think is something that, that Hounds men need to be prepared to answer. You need to be prepared to un to be able to tell people why you put a g p s collar on your dog.

The g p s collar does nothing other than allow you to keep. Of your dog that you have got a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of [00:41:00] investment in, a lot of emotional investment in that hound. I've seen bear hunters sit down and cry over dogs that are, that have been, that have been injured or killed either by roadway or by beast or whatever it was, I've seen that. And so to think that there's not an emotional connection there is ridiculous, but we have to be prepared to give an answer for that challenge. And we just have to, we just have to deny and continually fight that, that GPS collar on that dog does not make it easier for us to harvest game.

It simply doesn't. The only thing that thing does for us is tell us where those dogs are. We've still gotta put in the footwork to get there. We've,

Seth Hall: yeah. It's the same thing as using one of these, like you and Chad said, oh

Chris Powell: The cell phone. The OnX,

Seth Hall: yeah. Big game hunters can just pop this up and go straight toward where the elk [00:42:00] down.

You can use your digital maps to get to a place. Yeah. The same way

Chris Powell: you Yeah. That's exactly what's happening with this hound stuff. I even on a smaller scale, I'm talking, vast wildernesses of Idaho or New Mexico. If I'm coon hunting in Indiana and my dogs are over a ridge and I'm not familiar with it with where they're at, you know exactly where they're at.

I'm gonna pull up my Garmin and look and see where they're at, and then plan my route to them. Once I'm there, that is the time that I make the moral decision whether or not I'm going to harvest the animal or not. .

Seth Hall: And yeah, that's just, that just comes from not knowing or trying to appease that argument.

Also, like trying to appease other sections of the hunting community that are anti hound hunting cuz it's just so easy to dispel, so easy to demolish . And yeah, I'm glad that a lot of our listeners are engaged to this, these points and are, helping form this narrative. I think that's really good [00:43:00] and we got a long way to go.

Chris Powell: That takes us to the point that you were speaking of just a second ago and that's, that is a question I put to you. Sin hound hunters can say that hunting with hounds is a catch and release opportunity for the side hound guy. Catch and release is not an option. My concern in the conversation that we had was, how can we say that you turn the prairie missiles loose to run a rabbit down and it's gonna die every time they catch it.

How is that fair, chase?

Seth Hall: Anytime I put a scope on a mule deer, it's gonna die. How is that fair chase? The end result isn't what makes the chase fair. It is the chase the pursuit the harvesting of this [00:44:00] animal. So it doesn't matter if the dogs put teeth on this game, it was the pursuit. And I would, I'd be willing to say that site hound coursing has as low as percentage rate as other difficult forms of hound hunting.

As dry ground lion hunting or whatever other really hard, that's the only thing I know that's really hard that I've seen with my own eyes. And it's also extremely raw and primitive. There's no and I mean that technologically it is. Do the dogs catch it or not in view right there, right now. So yes, I have no option of release. And I guess some people do. I will say, this is an extreme example, but there are people that have dogs that will bring them back alive.

Hair, you can take it outta their mouth and it'll run off. So that's extremely rare though, that doesn't happen in my world. But the argument for that is gonna have to go deeper and I'm more than happy to like peel back some of those layers [00:45:00] because that we're not catching and releasing is not that big a deal.

For what we're doing.

Chris Powell: Yeah. But yeah, so I get, I'm stu stuttering around here. The thing that confuses me at times, Seth, is I will see you or hear you say that your jackrabbit numbers are very low and so you go out and common sense, or maybe ignorance it, not even common sense ignorance would lead me to say, okay, you say your jackrabbit numbers are low and you're cry, but crying your jackrabbit population.

And yet here's Seth again on Saturday with the prayer missiles out there trying to find a jackrabbit to run down and kill that can't turn loose. Yeah. So explain that and tell me how that can be an ethical decision when you already know your jackrabbit numbers are low, but I'm gonna hunt [00:46:00] anyway.

here's how I'd

Seth Hall: respond to this. So Sighthounds are a super specialized weapon where we can hunt with them. Very small percentage of the area that is Southern New Mexico. Less than 5% maybe.

Chris Powell: Are you pulling those numbers outta air or is that your estimation? That's my

Seth Hall: estimation. Okay. Okay. They are small remnant grasslands, and when I say small, they're enormous.

But Southern New Mexico's enormous. So it's all relative here. These remnant grassland patches where hair populations are already lower than the surrounding areas that are more suitable habitat. So the first point I make is this one. There's a simple statement I heard from an old timer. He's been hunting rabbits for 70 years.

He says this, and it's the best way to put it. This is the most point blank thing. No rabbits, no fun. So if you kill all the rabbits in an area, you're not gonna have a good time because there's no rabbits. . So we are already extremely self-limiting where we go. How long we spend on the ground and how many hairs we [00:47:00] chase now, how many hairs we catch, how many char hairs we catch or chase.

So we limit, we're limiting ourselves to one catch a weekend and we have been since 2020 and we only limit ourselves to two chases. So if we get outrun by the first hair, we'll go chase another one. We do that just to limit our time out on the landscape, stressing out wildlife, stressing out hairs, nothing else cares really.

That's the first thing. That's the most baser response, that's the easiest to justify in any way. If I kill all the jack rabbits that live in this area, it's not gonna be very fun for us. That's the first thing to say. So we already go, there is no laws about how many rabbits you can hunt, how many coyotes you can catch.

It's strictly hunter honor, and it really sucks to spend six hours looking for a jackrabbit. So if you spend six hours, you say you find one in 45 minutes. , which can happen, and you catch him, you're like, man, I just drove three hours. One way to hunt. I found him in 45 minutes. Had a three minute race is awesome.

I really don't wanna go home [00:48:00] yet. Now go home because now you just extended the amount of time to find a rabbit by the next time. So , the, that's the first one. The second one is, you just got No,

Chris Powell: go ahead. Go ahead. Put out lot of information there. I gotta ask questions. No, go ahead. Please said, you said that the places you're hunting, I wanna make sure I've got this right, is not the most suitable habitat for jack rabbits.

No. So if they're not where you're common sense says if you're gonna catch rabbits, go where the rabbits are. So why are you spending time out there in these grasslands to begin with?

Seth Hall: Sighthounds are predators of the wide open. They need wide open grassland where brush covers less than 15% of the landscape.

, you need prairie. Straight up real prairie rabbits. Don't hairs, I'm speaking. You'll never find rabbits out there. Hairs do like open land, but they prefer shrub invaded grassland even more. Where

Chris Powell: you can't, where you can't hunt, you would not run your side hound.

Seth Hall: Bingo. Okay, so where we live in [00:49:00] Southern New Mexico, these mega gra, imagine a bowl, imagine a huge shallow walk.

Like what you'd cook Chinese food in the very bottom of the walk. The flat part, that's the grassland that's between two to 12,000 acres of just grassland. But the rim of the walk is all well draining. Shrub land, that's where most rabbits are. And when you jump, Ja, I'm sorry, hairs. When you jump and rabbits to when you jump hairs on the edges of the walk, the flat part, they're inevitably gonna go for the walls of the walk, always.

They're always going for the cover. And the majority of the hairs and rabbits live in the walls of the walk. So they're living in the 50,000 acres that surround. The 10,000 acre grass line in the middle hairs obviously go down into that grassland because this is just gonna, I'm gonna give this in a huge nutshell.

If there's a hundred people living in the great spot and everyone has to walk out at night to go [00:50:00] eat in the mediocre spot, fortune favors the bold who live down in the flat spot so they don't have to spend half the night creeping out into the food place. They're already there. So they get a four hour head start on the competition.

So the bolder hairs are the ones that live out in the grassland. The data's extremely scanned on what percentage lives out there, but it's a lot less than in the brush country. Yeah, a lot

Chris Powell: less. Okay. Yeah so basically you going out and catching a hair in the grassland, Your breeding populations are still up in the shrubs and the places that you cannot hunt.

Seth Hall: Yeah so in biology, that would be called a source sink population dynamic. So you have an area that's what you'd consider a source. That's where the multiplication of their real numbers is happening. We don't, and then you have what's called

Chris Powell: a Go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say, we don't want to educate people that much.

Seth Hall: And then you'd have a sink, which is a place where net, so you have your gross [00:51:00] profit and you have your net profit. Net profit is after all your expenses, right? So a sink is yet your net, you're in the loss. You may have had a lot of a rabbits or hairs go down into the grasslands, but most died off because of predation and whatever.

So this is specifically speaking for my area, Southern New Mexico, Southeastern New Mexico. Places that are strictly prairie obviously have different pop population dynamics. But I can easily. talk about that as well. So that's the point I'm trying to make is that like where I'm hunting, that's where the least rabbits and hairs are.

Okay. So by default we're not, you're just a drop in the bucket on the population as a whole. Cuz we're already in a place where it's extremely risky for them to be anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So these are important. I don't want anyone to be like yawning. This is super important because when, if someone's really aggressively attacking you, it's really important to know your, know what you're doing.

So you can definitely win

Chris Powell: that argument. The reason I brought it up, okay, the reason I brought it up and I want to do a podcast and [00:52:00] focus on the side hound side of it, is because from my position I, and because of my exposure to Sin Hounds, I can easily def defend that. . But our culture and our society of Hounds men include side hound guys.

And I need to be able to defend that too. I need to be able to talk about that, especially, producing this podcast. and having you on the podcast. I get asked about it routinely, so are

Seth Hall: they questions similar to what you just asked me? Sure. Yeah. Good. I want you to ask me the tough questions.

I love to ask tough questions when I'm interviewing someone .

There's also go ahead. Go ahead. You were about to move into another point.

Chris Powell: No, I wasn't. I was gonna give you the opportunity to move on. There

Seth Hall: is one other point that I need, and this is the most important one.

So here's the thing. What we're hunting matters, you guys, because how many offspring does a bear have a year? Do you know?

Chris Powell: Three to

Seth Hall: four. Three to four. Now, how

Chris Powell: many offspring in a good year? Yeah. [00:53:00] Usually two in a two in a bumper crop. We're looking at, we're looking at three to four,

Seth Hall: and now how many offspring does a hair have?

I have no idea. Exactly. A lot. They're literally a metaphor for reproduction, right? I chased hairs last year in the low population year. I chased 26, I caught 22. The elements, natural predation cars, running them over kills infinitely more than me out there hunting. And they want a female hair can produce an, they're only pregnant for three weeks and she can be pregnant twice at the same time.

I don't even,

Chris Powell: I don't even get that, man. How's that?

Seth Hall: So she mates with a male, duh. She mates she gets pregnant. She's

Chris Powell: not, it's not to deliver, it's not a jack rabbit that identifies as a male. It's actually a real

Seth Hall: male. You know what, as long as they run good. I don't care. , . Okay. So yeah, she MAs, she's about to deliver.

She ovulates while she's still pregnant. [00:54:00] Finds a male initiates their crazy cool, crazy badass mating ritual that's like absolutely superior lifeform status. And then she gets pregnant again. Delivers only nurses, her offspring for up to 11 days, and they're on their own. Oh yeah, she's already pregnant again, and she's gonna repeat that cycle in another three and a half weeks.

So yeah, it matters what you're hunting. It doesn't really matter if you're Yeah you, they can replace themselves extremely quickly. Same for coyotes. They have a extremely legendary reproductive rate, so it's not like a bear or a mountain lion that has a super shallow reproductive rate. So that's the point I'm trying to make.

What's your hunting matters a lot. Yeah,

Chris Powell: Yeah, I, that's part of understanding and that's part of the experts, experts on fixing my truck, know how the truck works, more than I do. That's why I pay somebody else to do it. . So if you're gonna if you're [00:55:00] going to live the lifestyle, then you know, need to know how all of these things work.

And I think that's part, that, that's the part that we have to stress is have some basic knowledge of wildlife management. Don't just drive down the road in the field that you see a bunch of turkeys in every day. Say, oh, we got a lot of turkeys. Because that's the only place you look at every day.

Same way with bears and all of it. We have to understand the dynamics of wildlife management if we're going to truly be credible when we stand in front of policy makers and try to justify who we are and what we do, or defend who we are and what we do. Yeah. Which is

Seth Hall: to me, the most important part.

. Yeah.

Chris Powell: Yeah. Fair chase is one of those things that, that we're gonna keep beating the drum on here because I don't think that we have, I don't think Hounds men have championed the cause that it is. I think at one time it was [00:56:00] viewed as something that was very noble and something that was something to celebrate.

But somehow we've lost that and we just need to keep talking about it. I

Seth Hall: agree. Preserve, protect, promote. That's been our slogan since the beginning.

Chris Powell: Yep. . Yep, for sure. For sure.

Seth Hall: And keep running folks. That's all I got to say. Keep running .

Chris Powell: Keep running. Seth, you got any closing thoughts other than keep running?

Seth Hall: No, I think I covered Everyth. Maybe too much .

Chris Powell: We're gonna, we're gonna start closing our podcast the Monday show. Anyway, with this, thanks for listening to the Hounds XP podcast, the original Fair Chase method. Love it. Yep. Yep. Hey, till next time, Seth, thanks for your time, buddy. Hey, thanks everybody.

Hey, one, one thing I'd add, one thing I'd add, make sure you're tuning in on [00:57:00] to the all mixed up podcast that Seth and Chad are producing, because there's a lot of information. There's gonna be so much cool stuff. Off the wall, that's what it was all about. All stuff.

Seth Hall: Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to focus on all the stuff hunting with dogs.

That's not just like your mainstream, what you. My, my rat dudes, my side hound guys, my weird BirdDog people. We got a lot of crazy stuff coming. Me and Chad are gonna be in a lot of airplanes this year, so stay tuned, you guys . It's gonna

Chris Powell: be cool. It is gonna be cool. And it's entertaining. It's something that it's, it reminds me of micro's dirty jobs.

He doesn't go and just talk to the ordinary guy. He's looking for that ultra off the wall guy that's doing some crazy job. And that's what all mixed up is about.

Seth Hall: Exactly. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Chris Powell: Yep. Yep. All right. Now thanks for listening to the Hounds Men Xee podcast, [00:58:00] the original

Seth Hall: Fair Chase method.

See you everybody.

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