Does bear taste good? Yeah, it's very beef like in texture. Um, it's phenomenal. At some levels, there's a cultural taboo around it. Um, as you'll see, like Florida right now is running a very controversial black bear hunt. Um, people get worked up about it. Uh, but yeah, it's an excellent food. It was a very prized food at the time. Another business that Daniel Boone was into was producing a product called bare bacon, which was consumed domestically. Oh. But um yes, smoked bacon. It would be plausible that Ben Franklin, he could have walked down to a market in Philadelphia and he would have been able to purchase bear bacon or smoked black bear hams. It was a very popular food item. Um bear can carry trickos. Most cases of tricknosis in the US today do not come from hogs. Mostly comes from black bear. You have to cook it. So for that reason, a lot of people have an idea that it should be avoided. Um, but we we my family, we eat prodigious amounts of it. Wow. I I want to can I come by sometime and uh have some bear bacon or bear steak or whatever.

[music] Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway and [clears throat] I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, I have a uh pop quiz on American history for [music] you. Oh god. Are you ready? Go on. Who was Daniel Boone? Did he have like a hat that was cool? He was like I just think it was like someone a a raccoon hat. Yes, a raccoon hat. And he was probably an outdoors guy who probably didn't hang out in cities very much. So that's what I think of that's besides the hat and imagining him out in the wilderness somewhere. I have no I don't know what year he lived in anything beyond that. Maybe 1800s. I don't know. So, the one fact that you know about um Daniel Boone is actually I think contested whether [laughter] or not he he actually wore the raccoon cap. Um but do you know what he was doing when he was outdoors? No. No, I he was hunting. Okay, I guess I could have guessed that. I would have guessed that. He was something called a long hunter. I don't know what that is. He went on really long expeditions to hunt. Do you know what he was hunting? Nope. Raccoons. No, apparently not. um deer, okay, white-tailed deer. And this is something that I think, you know, everyone has heard the name Daniel Boone, but almost no one can actually remember him what he was doing. And people also forget that, you know, a lot of American history is built not on manufacturing and farming necessarily, but on hunting. I don't have we ever done a hunting episode? We haven't. And I find I find this whole, you know, part of US history so fascinating and it actually really is intertwined with even how we think about money. So, do you know where the term a buck came from? Lend me a buck, give me a buck. Well, now I imagine it's probably from a deer or whatever, but had it not been for this intro in the context, I actually would have had no idea. Yeah. So, hunting is actually embedded in the way we talk about money. So, um, that's what we're going to be talking about today. I can't wait. A whole new avenue for us.

Uh, and I have to say, just on a personal note, um, something has happened to me recently, which is I have completely flipped on deer. I used to like them. I used to look out the window and be like, "Oh, these graceful animals. Aren't they beautiful?" But as of a week ago, they ate my entire newly planted garden, and I hate them. Yeah. I get the impression that a lot of people um their view of deer flips pretty quickly when they're actually living in a location where they're prevalent. Like it's like, "Oh, they're cute. Maybe you saw a movie about them or something like that." It's like, "Oh, who wants to hunt the deer?" And then you confront them and you're like, "Maybe we need a little bit of um population management, so to speak, um the deer community." So, uh my solution to this problem, I don't hunt personally. The only thing I hunt is like leftover Thanksgiving pumpkins on my property, which we target shoot. But, uh, we have a friend who loves to hunt. Yeah. And so, he's going to be on our property hunting deer for the next two months. And if you want some fresh venison, I do, then let me know. Have you have you arranged a deal with him where he can keep as much as you want? Like, do does he tithe you 20% or whatever it is? Uh, he pays us in meat. Yeah. Which is actually great at the moment because beef prices are so insane. You're so lucky. your coal and your meat, your Yeah. Anyway, I'm blessed in natural resources just like America. That's right. All right. Well, I'm happy to say we have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. Uh someone who I'm very excited to be talking to actually. We have Steven Reanella. He is the author and founder of Meat Eater and knows all about hunting and all about this particular aspect of US economic history. So, Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me on. I'm uh I'm dying to jump in and offer a few clarifications and corrections on our friend Daniel Boon. When you're ready, why don't we just start? Tell us everything we got wrong in the intro. Just go for it.

Yeah. Uh yeah, Boon Boon did not like skin caps. Uh was it that was a thing that was added on later through through Disney depictions. Boon wore a widebrimmed hat made from beaver wool felt which is still the material of choice for high-end cowboy hats. Raccoons uh there was a commodity for a long time in in in different tallows and greases. They used to hunt raccoons and possums and actually render the oil from them. Just as an example, I'm holding in my hand right now a one quart jar of rendered grease, which I made for a buddy of mine just as a What do you actually What do you do with that? Can you make candles? Well, I haven't done anything with it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You definitely make soap candles. You can cook with it. Um, in fact, when the English were first strategizing around establishing their first colony in the New World, and they had a sort of a list of of ways that they might monetize this colony, on that list was like animal oils, animal greases. So, yeah. Boon was a deer was in the deer skin trade, but he also was in the bare grease trade and the the the animal oil trade. um as was Dave Crockett who wore the skin cap but was kind of mocked by his contemporaries but he was a showboat and he wore it as a sort of [laughter] he he wore it like uh to sort of to to create this atmosphere of this every man's backwoodsman but it wasn't regarded as a practical hat draw attention to himself he was a showboat Crockett was a showboat Boon was a professional I love the idea of all these like manly pioneering hunters critiquing each other's outfits. I also like the idea I also like the idea of like oh when hunters get together they argue about are you a Daniel Boon man or a Davy Crock oh your guy was a total showboat he was a fraud no one would have ever worn that hat and the other like oh no he did this yeah my dear friend who I'm giving that one of my jars of grease to uh he is a Crockett man and I'm a boon man [laughter] we fight about this all the time I'm a boon the other thing is one one last comment just to get caught Keep going. You were Were you to formalize Were you to formalize the arrangement with your deer hunter? Mhm. If you were to formalize that arrangement where there was a expected quidd proquo around deer meat for access, you would be in violation of the law. You need to keep it nonformalized. Oh, okay. Gift him. You can gift him access. He can gift you meat. But the minute you formalize that transaction, you would be commodifying wild game meat, which is illegal in this country. Tracy just admitted to a crime. No, no. I She was I've already reported her. I specifically said, "We don't have a formal agreement. We're trading informally." This is I've already learned so much on this. I've like if we ended the episode right here, I would have like learned so many more things that I didn't know when I woke up this morning. You'd be looking for a new co-host because [laughter] you'd be locked up. Would you be literally imprisoned for accepting venison? Okay. Well, let's not stop here. Let's keep going. Um, Steve, you know, you mentioned that uh when England was colonizing the US, one of the big draws was animal grease and animal products. talk to us a little bit more because I think when people think about the colonization of the new world, a lot of people think about tobacco and farming and agriculture, but hunting and animal products were actually a really big part of it

in the early colonial period. Um, one of our biggest ports was, you know, coming out of Charleston, out of South Carolina. So at a time in the in the late colonial period, so prior to the Revolutionary War, deer skins in in in value and economic value, white-tailed deer skins were were the the second largest commodity coming out of the out of the colonies. The first one being rice. So the animal grease thing was a thing, but but it was dwarfed by the deer skin trade. If you look at these old paintings you see of of like, you know, the king of England around the time of the colonial period, you'll sometimes notice that they're wearing a white breach or a white pant, a seeming white pant. That's buckskin. Um, buckskin was used as work wear, but it was also something that the a that the that the affluent individuals wore, those white breaches, those white buckskin pants. It was it was preferred a preferred material for clothing making. Um there's a historian uh uh Mack Farraer and he wrote a piece about the early colonial period and he remarked that like among among colon colonial Americans so Euroamerican colonial Americans and Native Americans alike black bear meat was the food of choice. Deer deer skin was the material of choice. So they were hunting bears that was that was the good stuff to eat. deer were what you made your clothes from. I'm surprised about the bear meat. Does bear taste good? Yeah, it's very beef like in texture. Um it's phenomenal. It some levels there's a cultural taboo around it. Um as you'll see like Florida right now um is running a very controversial black bear hunt. Um people get worked up about it. Uh but yeah, it's an excellent food. It was a very prized food at the time. Another business that Daniel Boone was into was providing was producing a product called bare bacon which was consumed domestically. But um yes, smoked bacon. It would be plausible that Ben Franklin, he could have walked down to a market in Philadelphia and he would have been able to purchase bear bacon or smoked black bear hams. It was a very popular food item. Um bear can carry tricknosis. Most cases of tricknosis in the US today do not come from hogs. Mostly comes from black bear. You have to cook it. So for that reason, a lot of people have an idea that it should be avoided. Um but we we my family we eat prodigious amounts of it. Wow. I I want to can I come by sometime and uh have some bear bacon or bear steak or whatever? Anytime, man. Anytime. I would I will cook it. I will cook it for you and I can fry you some up in bare grease if you'd like. I think let's do a video series. Let's go. Let's go on the road.

Um before I I have I already have like a million questions. Can we just back up a second? Like for the listeners, can you tell us your story a little bit? Why are we why are we talking to you? What's your uh what's your background? Oh, so yeah, I g I grew up um in in Michigan. I was born into a hunting family. That was kind of our identity. U my father was a very avid hunter. He came home from World War II and uh just hunted and and I was brought up around it. Uh I pursued a career first in trapping throughout high school. I was convinced I was going to be a fur trapper. Um I became interested in writing. I went to graduate school for for writing. Um starting in in 2000 when I finished school, I became a professional long form magazine writer. started doing books and all my stuff has always been in the outdoor space. Um eventually got into television, started doing a show called Meeater and and we turn Meeater into a full-fledged business. We have a media arm where I spend the bulk of my time, but we also work in and we have a lot of consumer products. We have four outdoor gear companies which which live under the meat eater umbrella and and um and I've kind of I intended to make a living in the outdoors when I was a kid and I mostly succeeded at that. I spent a lot I get to spend a lot of time outdoors and I get to spend a lot of time thinking about um issues of how hunting plays into contemporary American culture and how hunting shaped our country and shaped our our national experience. Yeah, I got to plug um Steve's I think it's an audible series um on like the history of hunting in the US where there's a whole episode on long hunters that I've been listening to. Also one on like Buffalo in the 1800s. They're really good. Yeah, it's called Meate Eaters American History and it's a audio original through uh uh Random House Penguin. Um and we've done three so far on different different commodity trades in American history all around wildlife. So, one thing that I did learn from the um audible series on long hunters is the American hunting system in the sort of 1600s, 1700s when colonials started coming over to what would become the United States was very different to how hunting was done in Europe. Right? In in Europe, hunting was like the purview of land owners and rich people. But in America, I guess there were no no rules and everyone could hunt animals.

Yeah. Uh, you know, a good way to think about it, I often remind people to think back to certain details of the Robin Hood story where you have the king's deer. Okay. And and part of Robin Hood's gig, right, is he'll go hunt on the king's estate to get venison, which he would then distribute to the poor. It's part of the Robin Hood narrative. So yeah, in in England and in Western Europe by that point, um things were heavily developed. Most the the woods, the wilderness was gone. Having access to wild landscapes was something that was relegated only to the most wealthy. Um you could be have your eyes gouged out. You could be executed for hunting animals that were the the that belong to the aristocracy. So when American colonists started showing up like Boone's family came from England, they did not arrive here as hunters. They did not arrive with a hunting background. They adopted it. Uh the colonists like Boon's family for instance, they they were Quakers. His his people were. But the American colonists were as impacted by Native Americans as Native Americans were impacted by American colonists. You could see it in Boone's dress. He would plate his hair. He would braid his hair. He would grease his hair with bear grease. He would wear buckskin. He would hunt the animals that Native Americans taught him to hunt. He would cook them in that way. He would make his clothes in that way. So they adopted hunting as a way to make a living on the American landscape. Some of them were farmers through and through. Some became hunters through and through. Uh and they were they were at odds. The the these hunting people, these kind of wild men like Boone in the colonial period would always be hovering at the western edge of colonial expansion. The that England would try to re in these American colonists. they would feel that they were kind of drifting too far out of colonial influence. And these American colonists like Boone who were hunting for a living would cause a lot of tension with Native Americans. And so the colonial powers didn't like these guys living this this frontier wild existence because again they were drifting away from the crown and they were causing animosity with Native Americans who had then blamed the English for these incursions onto their landscape. So, it was it was it was like a rich kind of area of of of of adoption of a wilderness aesthetic while still trying to live, you know, under colonial rule in the in Boone's early days.

I recently You are you watching the um the new Ken Burns documentary at all? No, but everyone else is. It seems like I'm going to I started uh I've watched the first episode so far and it's just interesting because obviously um you know the version of independence that we learned about in school was just incredibly simplified and this idea that there really were all different kinds of tensions between the colonists and the sort of norms and the laws and the rules of the old country are really striking. I hadn't really appreciated this dimension before about the hunting, but I think it, you know, it really shows how I guess from day one there was a certain democratic element of colonial society that sounds very distinctly different from where they were coming from. Yeah. And there's an interesting passage where Washington, George Washington, criticizes folks like Boon, he criticizes these frontier individuals that are making that are living off the land out on the frontier and market hunting. He criticizes them because he feels like a a tip of the hat would push them over to the Spanish or whoever like whatever col whatever other colonial entity was out there. he did not feel that they were adequately American. And then and then as much as Boone has been adopted, there's one one guy joke that Boon has become an honorary founding father. Um, as much as Boone has been adopted as this American icon, Boon and his contemporaries, so again speaking of these long hunters, these colonial white skit white tail deer skin hunters, um, they would not have identified as American uh, loosely, but but they would identified in family clans and they were not what you would call if you look at around the revolutionary period, you would not refer to these guys as patriots. They were opportunists and they were mostly beholden to small villages made up of people they were related to these networks. That was their allegiance. Didn't Boone actually end up striking a deal with the Spanish for land? That's one thing I learned from the series. Yeah. Again, like the same way like he's an honorary founding father. Boon was fed up with So Boon in some ways is the father of Kentucky. He was not the first, but one of the first people to go through this thing called the Cumberland Gap and and start hunting in in what is now Kentucky. Uh he got fed up with the government there. He got fed up with America. Um before, you know, when Spain had the Louisiana territory, Spain was trying to fill the place up. He struck a deal with Boone and his people where they would become subjects of the Spanish crown in exchange for money. And so Boon moved out and he moved west of the Missouri River and became a Spanish subject. Uh he swore that he would never step foot back in Kentucky again when Boone died. So Boon lived through the Louisiana Purchase and became again an American just through the fact that that America bought the Louisiana Purchase. He died and was buried in Missouri and was later exumed and brought back to Kentucky. Even though in his lifetime he said, "I'll never step foot back there." So people like to say Missouri has his heart, meaning his soft tissues, Kentucky has his bones. And there's like this little ongoing dispute about whether or not they really dug up the right guy and rearied him. But yeah, Boon willfully left American rule to go live under a different crown. Um he again he was married to the hunt and he was married to his family clan. That was how he identified.

That's super interesting. What Tell me about a long hunt. What are the logistics? Sounds difficult. What are the logistics of a long hunt? Yeah, the logistics of a long hunt. It was very decentralized. Um unlike if we if we have time and we get into the beaverkin trade of these American icons like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, John Coulter, these guys that were engaged in the Rocky Mountain beaver trade which was very formalized, very top down. The long hunter area, so this colonial deer skin hunting area was very decentralized. A group of long hunters were probably, you know, mostly family networks. Um, so it' be maybe a patriarch, his kids, his sons-in-law, okay, his cousins, and they would embark on these very long trips. Um, they would leave these frontier colonial establishments, let's say, the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina. A ton of long hunters came out of the Yadken Valley in North Carolina. They would travel over the Appalachin range and they would drop down into uh Kentucky, portions of Tennessee, and they would hunt deer skins. They might be gone six months. I think Boon's longest long hunt was two years. It was all based off pack trains. So, they would everything was based off of um using horses to carry stuff. and they would build up a year's worth of deer skins. Um, in the winter the deer skins weren't as valuable, so they'd switch their efforts to beaver and otter trapping. They would transport all those deer skins back ac across the Appalachian Divide and sell them. Um, a good price, a way to think about it again is they were worth about a dollar, which was a lot of money back then. Um, and they would they would be some would go to tanneries in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, but the bulk would be shipped to tanneries in England to be turned into leather for making breaches and gloves and and other high-end items. And that was the economy. And they had these were farming people, but this was their only access to cash. Much of what they did was was was black market, to be honest with you. um in in two ways. When they would cross the Appalachins to go hunt, they were doing it against the wishes of the crown, which again did not want to antagonize Native Americans because it caused warfare and trouble. They were also doing it in violation of Native American claims to the land. So when they would go into Kentucky, they were hunting on say Shaune land. So they were sort of doubly trespassing, but that's how they that's how they made their living and it allowed them to live very isolated existences and it gave them a cash economy so they could buy guns and other things that they couldn't trade corn for.

Wait, I'm going to take the bait on the beaver trade that you just mentioned. So talk to us how is that formalized and how does it contrast with the long hunters? Yeah, the beaver skin trade had been going for a long long time. So, you know, when the Dutch first came to Manhattan, one of the primary things they were after is beaver skins. Uh, beavers, it's it's surprisingly easy to wipe them out. So, if you look at American history from the colonial period on, we kind of have a we had a way because of unregulated trapping. We had a way that we would that ahead of civilization would mark a a depopulation of beavers. So, if we fast forward up to the Louiswis and Clark expedition, here we do the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas Jefferson dispatches the Louiswis and Clark expedition to go find a to hopefully find a a mostly water route to the Pacific and also to look at natural resource, you know, abundance, right? Lewis and Clark come back and they report mindboggling numbers of beavers in the in the inner mountain west. All right. Right away, right on their heels goes a bunch of American trappers out to explore this land and trade in beavers. A beaver pelt was, you know, going for maybe three bucks. That's more than you'd make in a day as a laborer. It was real money.

But guys got onto it and they formalized it and people would go out and get investors. Okay, a a group would go out and get investors. Well, for instance, Aster, if you go to Aster Place in New York, Aster was America's first homemade millionaire. Aster's first business was the Beaver Trade. All right? So, guys would get investors. They would run advertisements to hire trappers. If you look at these really famous mountain men like like for instance Jim Bridger, these guys answered an ad in a newspaper. They ran an ad that was says looking for 100 enterprising young men. And these young guys, some of them escaped indentured servants, people running away from apprentice ships would go hire on as a fur brigade. and they would hire on as a day rate and they would be backed by financial backers and they would send these young men out to the inner mountain west to trap Beaver as a day laborer right in time some of these guys would spin off and do their own thing and go independent but it was a very formalized structure that was sending these young men out to catch beaver in order to bring them back and they would be exported and turned into wool felt. If you look back to like Abe Lincoln's hat, okay, that Abe Lincoln didn't wear a beaverwolf felt hat. He wore a silk hat, which we'll get to. But that style of hat was the rage in Europe. All sophisticated men. Many, many poor people who aspired to look more affluent would wear one of these top hats. They were made from beaver wool felt. So that was a huge export industry coming out of it. And again, it was it was it became formalized. And what killed it is they were too effective. Um, they were too effective and they ran two things killed the trade. One, they were running out of beaver anyway. And then a fashion change crashed the industry. And it was probably a good thing that it did because they may have pretty much exterminated the animals from the landscape. I probably got a little ahead of you there, but

No, that's great. That's great. Actually, the thing about the fashion change reminds me of one of my all-time favorite bubbles, market bubbles, which was the ostrich feather bubble in the 1800s where women would want ostrich feathers for their hats and they became really really expensive and then the bubble burst and all these ostrich farmers uh mostly in Africa I think went bust. They called the plener the plenery trade and all kinds of shorebirds and and um yeah it was a it's hard to picture now that you could just without regulation in coastal areas of the country go hunt herand egrets to sell the feathers to adorn hats. Hm. Well, you know, it's funny when you think about like conservation efforts or you think about endangered species, all these ideas feel very modern to me. Like, you know, maybe they started thinking about these things in the 19 like in my mind it's like people always started thinking about this stuff in the 1970s or whatever. But obviously that's not the case. How early on in the process of the hunting or hunting history did people start becoming aware of the fact that without some sort of regulation or laws or curbs that this natural resources could could be irreversibly depleted surprisingly early and I I and I'll get to some of the earliest examples but I want to clarify what I think motivations might have been. Some of the earliest examples we see of a conservation effort would even be in the colonial period and that was trying to put some parameters around deer hunting because again these were valuable animals for people to use for material. So when we see people trying to get to put in hunting seasons like not to kill them when they're fawning when they're dropping their fawns or put in restrictions about outsiders coming in to hunt, they probably weren't motivated by some sort of environmental ethic. They were motivated by guarding and protecting a resource. When you start to see an emergence of a real uh more emotional, spiritual, environmental movement is in the late 1800s. And it is it its birth is this. Its birth is is people gentleman hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt. Okay? You have these gentleman hunters that want to connect to this piece of American history or American culture, but they're recognizing that unregulated hunting, this unregulated market hunting that we've been discussing is going to make hunting impossible because these unregulated commodity hunters are going to drive everything to extinction. So in order to save hunting, all right, in order to save wildlife and save hunting, which they recognized as a very important piece of American culture, they needed to sort of bifurcate American hunting efforts into sport hunting, which was regulated and had an environmental ethic or a conservation ethic, and unregulated market hunting, which is what we've been discussing. One of the great ironies is this is one of the earliest conservation organizations that that that that Roosevelt was involved in, involved in founding, involved in running is called the Boone and Crockett Club. And they're still a major player in American conservation today. What's ironic is the names Boon and Crockett, which Americans today hear and they think of hunting. But these were just the kind of individuals that the Boon and Crockett Club needed to stop in order to save American hunting was these market hunters who were out there doing nothing to compensate the American people for the wildlife they were taking. And they would kill it all and once they killed it all, they'd move a little bit west and kill all of that. Um, and they about undid American wildlife.

Yeah. So there's there's a tragedy of the commons dynamic going on here where you have this public resource which is animals and if too many people tap into it the public resource ceases to exist. Can you talk a little bit about the buffalo trade because I think this is probably the biggest example of that dynamic actually happening. Yeah, it's the biggest most regrettable example. And when I say it's regrettable, it's because by this point we knew, we meaning not you and me of course, but we meaning um newsreading engaged, educated Americans knew where this was headed. Okay? And and I'll back up a little bit. So if we get to the time of European contact in the new world, there were maybe the fashionable number today is somewhere around 30 to 40 million American bison or buffalo is those words are the same thing. Uh 40 million to 30 million buffalo on the American landscape. By the end of the Civil War, they've been removed from the eastern part of the country. Um so you know at a time there would have been Buffalo and New Orleans. There would have been buffalo in present day Washington DC. There would have been buffalo in present day Nashville. All those had been wiped out by hunters. At the end of the Civil War, there's probably about 15 million of them on the Great Plains, which has always been the nexus of the population. That was always the the that's where the bulk of the animals were. The country really turned westward after the Civil War. Um once the civil once the south, you know, the the the union was saved, we sent our army out to pacify hostile tribes in the west and to protect economic interests in the west. And with that shift westward, we started looking for leather resources out west. And they identified this 15 million buffalo. There was nothing special about buffalo leather. There was just we had an insatiable appetite for leather. What became is we needed it to produce industrial belting. Okay. Um leather prices shot up. We were producing industrial belting to drive the industrial revolution and the animals were just yet another source of leather. But they could be gotten for no investment. Okay. A buffalo hide, let's say it's worth $3.50, 50 cents, $4. Where the foreman at a tannery would make $3.50 a day, but a buffalo hide hunter could kill 20 or 30 buffalo a day and sell the hides at $3.50 a piece. And he didn't have to put any money into it. You're not raising them. You're not feeding them. It's totally different than cattle. They're just out there.

I have to ask, is it true that like the buffalo just stood there while the hunters shot at them? Like they didn't really understand? No. Okay. that that's that's a way it it's not true. They were just so good at what they did, they knew how to make that happen. This is a this is a complicated thing you get into where you want to look at what they did and you want to look at the atrocity of what they did. And what it causes people to miss is this is going to sound weird. It causes people to miss the the professionalism and skill set that goes into this. Like a big part of my career is reconciling the skill set, the dedication, the bravery against the atrocity, right? But no, they wouldn't just stand there. These guys were masters. They were experts at what they did. And they knew how to get that outcome. You would not go out and get that same outcome. You would go out and not get any. I don't mean to hack on you. I I have no doubt I would be unable to shoot a buffalo. That's fine. Not even I don't even mean you wouldn't be able to get one because of emotional or constraints. It's just like they were so good. They were trained their whole life to do this. They were too good. And this is one of the most astounding things is when they start really getting after them around 1872. The market really opens up in eastern in American tanneries. The appetite for these buffalo hides really opens up to where they're like, "We'll take as many as we can get." that hits in 1872 and it coincides not coincides it's it's subject to the fact that the railroad hits Dodge City Kansas okay the southern railroad hits Dodge city Kansas so now you can load these things on a train and send them to tanneries by 187 by 1883 11 years later that 15 million animals is gone it's it compressed everything took forever ever to almost wipe out beaver. It took for hundreds of years to almost wipe out whitetail deer. With the buffalo, they were so good at it. And the and the country was so primed industrially, if that's a word, industrially. We were so primed with railroads, with big tanneries that were the tannery buildings that were, you know, a thousand yards long that we could just bam burn through a resource with astonishing quickness. And the crazy part about it is once they shot them out, it didn't even affect leather prices. You like a buffalo hide at the peak could be worth five bucks. So you would think once they kill them all, the market should spike, right? They're like there's scarcity. The last ones were selling at the same price as the first ones because in the end it didn't matter. They could buy cattle in South America. They could get leather from anywhere. So we killed them all. And it wasn't like we it wasn't like we needed them. It was a drop in the bucket for leather production. There was no market mechanism because there was just so much abundant leather from multiple sources. There was no market mechanism curbing the hunters. No, it was just that's interesting. They were worth what they were worth. They were worth what a cowhide was worth. It was just that they could get them for free and when they got them, it didn't affect anything. The industrial revolution and leather belting was still produced and still produced and still produced. So it almost makes it seem more shameful in the end that it would be like we would have acco like the country would have accomplished what we accomplished with the industrial revolution had we never even exploited that resource as f also I never really thought about I never thought about any of this. I certainly never thought about the connection between the industrial revolution. I just imagine these, you know, sort of a ancient uh factories with a bunch of wheels and that and these belts that are pulling the wheels and how that is connected to I guess something had to be turning the wheels. I just never really thought about I never really thought about what it was. There's a great photo. It was later, you know, it was later, but there's a great photo and it's in a Ford manufacturing plant and it's these lathing machines and the photo explains that overhead is 50 miles overhead of the workers are 50 miles of leather belting and these are 16inch belts.

Wow. What why why do we we still what happened such that ultimately we still have bison? Um because the population eventually, right? They didn't quite kill them all and now we have we've rebuilt the bison stock in the country. What happened such that we didn't quite go all the way and for completely make this animal extinct? I'm a little bit hesitant to say this because it's when it comes to the conservation history of America, it's a little bit of an anomaly, but what happened to save them is private ownership. Um, we shot them all down to the point where there was just a couple scattered animals here and there. Um, even at one time a guy named William T. Hornadyay who was a who was a taxiderermist and and a mammal expert, he wrote letters around the country trying to see who had a few. And there was a handful of of eccentrics around the country that had managed to go out and rope some and save them, maybe even feed them off domestic cows when they were calves. And these kind of slowly got brought into little herds. Uh, interestingly, some got brought brought to the Bronx Zoo when they started trying to repopulate little protected populations in the West. Another great irony is they were moving animals from the Bronx Zoo out to Oklahoma to turn them loose. Like that's how bad it got. Uh and even today, like we we really haven't recovered the we've saved them from genetic extinction. So there's about, you know, there's about a half million in existence. 94% of them are privately owned. What we haven't saved them from is ecological extinction. Um, of all American wildlife, of all Native American wildlife, grizzly bears, black bears, elk, big horn sheep, on and on and on, the buffalo, the bison, is the only animal that does not have the rights of a wild animal. If a buffalo walks off of national park and comes into Montana, he becomes livestock. He becomes the author under the authority of the Department of Livestock. They we do not accept them as wild animals anymore, which in in my view is a great sin.

This is one of those episodes where Joe and I are just looking at each other going wow and interesting over and over again. Also, like we could go for like three or four hours on this conversation. Easy. But we can't. Uh so I'm going to take us up to I guess modern times. So when we were talking earlier about the Long Hunters, we discussed there's clearly this element of democracy and independence embedded in that particular system. And if you look at the way the modern hunting world, I guess, or system is structured, it feels like we're trying to, you know, we're trying to solve that tension between people's rights to hunt animals and the conservation public resource aspect. Is that right? Yeah, that that's a good way of putting it. We we live under now when I say we in this case I mean American hunters, American fishermen. We live under uh a very complex regulatory structure which is which is self-made. Um our community, you know, modern American sportsmen have built the system that we live under a very very tight tightly regulated pursuit. um we've come up with this this system. Earlier we talked about how things were in Europe in colonial period. We now refer to that with some disdain as the European model where um a land owner owns the wildlife on their land. They control the wildlife on their land. We came up with a system where American wildlife is owned by the American people. Um, administered on your behalf by fish and game agencies and and and by governmental entities. But a a wild American wildlife is American property. It doesn't matter whose land it's on. That has allowed us the ability to have a governing structure to control harvest for sustainability because the state and in some cases the federal government has authority over the animals. Meaning you could have a big property and it has deer on it but those deer are not yours to decide what you want to do with the deer belong to the people. You own the land.

Yep. Talk to us a little bit about the contemporary market. I I my my my guess is it's booming. I don't mean literally the volume of hunting that's going on, although I bet that's but like in your industry, in your world, outdoorsman media, people buying gear for all this stuff. I my gut says that this is a hot area of the economy. Oh, it's Yeah. I mean, we have a huge economic impact. I mean, you know, you have 14 million uh, you know, in any given year, 13 or 14 million Americans will will buy a hunting license to go hunt. Over twice as many people will buy a fishing license to go fish. It generates billions of dollars in economic activity, but most of that economic activity is around gear and experiences, right? It's not economic activity about trading in trading deer. And it's also it's also growing really fast, I take it. Or like what kind of growth have you seen? It really spiked. No, it's remarkably stable. It really spiked during the pandemic, you know, obviously as people turn to, you know, making sourdough bread and cooking venison. Back to the lab. There was spikes. It's it's remarkably stable. There are two types of Americans. There are sour sourdome Americans and they live in cities and then venison Americans. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, that reminds me. So, one of the things that I took from the Long Hunter series is that gear is really important because you guys talk so much about the gear that the colonists and pioneers actually had. So, you know, there is I I feel like there's an element of consumerism in the hunting community where people just collect guns and knives and things. Oh, for sure. Like me and my buddies, I mean to be honest with you, when we're sitting around, you know, and I hang a lot I hang out with a lot of people involved in the conservation movement. Um me and my buddies when we're sitting around, we mostly argue about gear. Um I came up with media, but our company, we have an we have a hunting apparel brand, we have a game call brand, we have a hunting decoy brand, um we have a hunting accessory brand. So yeah, I mean like gear is it can't be separated out in the same way Boon was adamant about what kind of hat he wore, I'm pretty adamant about what hat I wear and and that is like the economic activity today, you know, is in large measure equipment and gear. And what's beautiful about it, and I want to throw this in, what's beautiful about it is that's how we fund conservation. So we have our industry in the 30s, we put ourselves under a 13% excise tax. So when you buy guns or ammunition, all guns, it doesn't care any gun purchase, guns, ammunition, sporting equipment, there's a anywhere from 11 to 13% excise tax, which goes right into conservation spending. You go find me another industry that has anything comparable to that. It does not exist. And then our agencies that manage wildlife in America, all 50 states have a fish and wildlife agency. Their funding comes from licenses, permits, and stamps paid by hunters and anglers. We're a self-funded group of Americans. It makes sense, right? Most industries don't voluntarily want to be taxed on everything. But when you think about the fact that there needs to be some resources to sustain the possibility of hunting for generations to come, it is sort of makes sense that this would be an industry in which you want there to be some sort of price of entry. If I became a hunter this winter, would you make fun of me? Like would I be one of like those guys who it's like, "Okay, it's my first season hunting. I'm gonna buy the most expensive rifle. I'm gonna buy the most expensive hat. I'm gonna buy the uh most expensive shoes. You must have a name like those types. And they like show up on the hunt with you and it's clear they like went through all the lists and just like bought the top. Yeah. Like the sort of like wannabes. It's like their first thing and the they just go down the line and buy them the they deck themselves out in the top of the line gear. The name I have for those people is my buddies. Um, not I'm telling you, not a year goes by, man. Not a year goes by that I don't take um out friends, family, whoever, people that are interested in hunting, curious about hunting, even sometimes uneasy with hunting that I don't take them out and kind of explain the world. I have three young kids. Um, I I've been lucky to turn them all into in into, you know, avid hunters and we share that. So, no, I like I like sharing this world. It's a world I care a lot about. Um, I care about how it's perceived. Most Americans don't hunt. Um, in some states like California and New Jersey, you know, 1% of the population hunts. So, in some ways, we live and exist um with the blessing of the American public in general. So, it's important to me for people to understand what we're up to, how we think, and and and that we're willing to recognize the sins of our forefathers, and and have gone out of our way to correct those sins. This is a slight tangent, but since we're on the subject of conservation, I'd be curious to get your thoughts, but what do you think about commercial hunting of endangered animals? So things like lions or I don't know bison um buffalo of some sort in Africa because one argument I've heard is that these animals at the moment basically have negative value, right? Because they're living on land that you can't use for anything else because you have to conserve it because you need to protect the animals. But if you allow commercial hunting in a controlled way, you basically put an economic value on that animal such that you know it becomes something that people want to maintain and preserve and stick around. Yeah. I I would first want to just clarify I don't mean to be a difficult guess but um you know be careful using the word endangered because it can be you know well I when I say that like in the US we have the endangered species act we have a way that we formally declare things to be endangered I think in the American imagination Africa's far away we look we hear the word endangered and it's not really open to certain levels of nuance about where and What for instance elk right here in the United States um we have robust populations of elk across the American West. We have hunting seasons for elk. We have open hunting seasons for elk. But elk have only been restored across about 20% of their native range. Michigan was elk country. Wisconsin was elk country. Virginia was elk country. Elk have been wiped out of those places and not restored. So you might say, "Well, elk are endangered because they're not in Michigan and Wisconsin in appreciable numbers. Yet in the American West, in some places we have a problem with too many elk. So you got to be careful with words like that. But to get to the core of your question, yes, uh it is possible. There are places in Africa um and I'm not a subject matter expert on Africa. um like I am I'm a subject matter expert on these issues in in the United States but in Africa there are situations where money like value to hunters is able to put so much value on wildlife that the wildlife becomes worth protecting. Meaning people that are on the landscape will recognize the presence of wildlife generates so much economic activity that it's best not to kill it all off um for use as bush meat or or other applications or because it's a or because it's a crop pest or because it's dangerous to livestock. They'll recognize that hey that lion that thing's worth 60,000 bucks. Half that money is coming to our village. Don't mess with that lion. I mean, that just happens. Whether you, however you feel emotionally about the killing of lion, lions, that's an economic reality in some places. I feel like don't mess with lions is just good advice, right? Yeah.

One last question. You mentioned bear meat. Um, I haven't had that much wild game in my life. I've had or game meat. I've had um, you know, sausage with venison and pork and like when I was out in Jackson Hole, I went to some restaurant and you know, tried a few different like mini steaks of Yeah, but that wasn't even wild game. That's just farm raised that's farmraised animals. What's uh what should I try that I've probably never tried before. What I like meat a lot. So what would I like out out there? Some of my favorites um really uh you know malor duck. So, if you're in a park, you see that duck where the male has the the the iridescent green head. When you get those that have been in one place a while and haven't migrated lately and they're getting on crops, they're getting in grain fields. One of my all-time favorite things. This is going to sound weird, but true. Um, squirrel properly done would kind of blow your mind. And it's partly the fun of it. like because you have a preconceived notion of what it would be like and then when you taste it you'd think I cannot believe that's that would kind of blow you away. Um and I think that you would be very very surprised if you had a bare pot roast in a classic fashion with root vegetables, you know, um and a good broth. I think you would also say like I I'm I I refuse to accept that that's what it is and I wouldn't accept it had I not seen it happen. I'd love I I I want a bear pot roast right now. I'll bring you some venison ragu. That's what I've been making so far. Although, one thing I learned is that the fat content of venison is actually really low. So, it's not very good for making things like burgers and Yeah. You got to mix it with something. It's very waxy. Yeah. It has uh it's it it melts differently than beef fat. So, it sets up in the inside of your mouth and it doesn't freeze well. So, if you want to freeze when you get your venison from your hunter and you want to enjoy it for the next year, trim the fat away. Trim the tallow away. And if you do that, it's basically archival once you put it in your freezer. If you leave that tallow on it, it's not that tallow will turn even in your freezer. Interesting. Okay. My last question is, what would you recommend I make with venison? I would start out by making the things that you like the most that are easiest to make. Like you mentioned, um, uh, a ragu, uh, making hamburgers, ma making things that you're comfortable making that, uh, aren't aren't overly complex and don't have too many steps, just so you can go and and find these kind of like points of comparison. If you if you and your family, if in the summer you like to grill burgers, like you like to grill up beef burgers, grill up a venison burger. um follow the same basic steps and just kind of get comfortable with the way it's a little different. And when you do that enough, you'll come to prefer it. My wife, like my wife doesn't hunt, man. My wife doesn't like domestic meat. Um she doesn't like the taste of domestic meat because for the last 20 years, she's eaten nothing but game meat. She's gotten where she don't like it. She doesn't want to eat it.

We're going to have to wrap this conversation up even though, as we mentioned before, we could go on for hours. Steve Reinella, thank you so much for coming on OddLots. That was a blast. That was really fun. A blast. Hey, thank you for having us. Good one, Joe. That was so fun. That was so fun. I don't know anything about that, but like I could have we could have talked for three hours. There's so many things I'm curious about now. Uh it is underappreciated. I think the role of hunting in America's economic development and it's intertwining. I didn't even know this about with the industrial revolution. I didn't know about that either. It's exactly what I was going to say. I would have had no idea. And it's always sort of fascinating to think like you can't run a big factory if you don't have belts. Now granted, according to Stephen, there were other sources of leather, but it's so interesting to think about like here is this thing that if you don't have an access to like one commodity or whatever, you know, there's a new book, by the way, out about rope that I want to have. And it's like a similar story about how crucial rope was. Anyway, it was so it was so fascinating. Uh, you know, he mentioned squirrel meat at the end. So again, I'm I'm just throwing out tidbits that I learned from his series, but you know, you can't really shoot a squirrel if you're going to eat it because they're so small. The bullet like rips off all the meat. So the way the pioneers used to do it apparently is they would shoot at the tree that the squirrel was on and sort of like shock the squirrel to death and it would fall out of the tree and then you can eat it. Wait, Tracy, can I ask you is a question is sort of non-politically correct. Um, is it true that Germans can't pronounce the word squirrel? Yes. Yes. Okay. I've heard this before. My personal experience when I was a kid, I used to ask my uncle to say squirrel all the time just for laughs. And the way he says it is squirrel. And yeah, he struggles with it. I just want an excuse to could you see if this was confirmed or denied? Okay, now that we're talking about squirrels, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy Aloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Steven Reanella. He's at Steven Reanella. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kellbrooks at Kellbrooks. And you should definitely check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at bloomberg.com/odlotss. And you can chat about all of these topics 247 in our Discord, discord.gg/odlotss. And if you enjoyed this episode, this video, please leave a comment or like, or better yet, subscribe. Thanks for watching. [music] [singing]