00:00:11
Speaker 1: I’m in the Ozarks today and tomorrow is the opening day of the Arkansas Bear season. It’s like a holiday to me. We’re gonna be competing against the white oak acrens to kill these bears. But the day before season today, we’re gonna be making molasses with my friend Willard Belines. Hey, everybody, my name’s Klay nukemb And what you just watched was the intro to our newest film called Ozark Bear Camp with Klay Neukam. It’s the latest and Meat Eaters twelve and twenty six series brought to you by Moultrie and Onyx, And that little intro kind of warms my heart. I love the landscape odds. Willard Vilnes is kind of a legend around here, and it was a good film. So on on what we’re doing right here is our companion series podcast where we’re gonna go behind the scenes, answer viewer questions and talk to you about a bunch of stuff that we weren’t able to talk about in the episode. And in this film, we head to my Arkansas Bear camp with my family, friends and a bunch of other people, and well, I guess everybody’s family and friends. There were no non laws. Just a few people that came that just like completely, you know, are not my friends. That’s not true, But we’re gonna talk about that on this podcast. I’m joined today by my producer, Hero Mustache, icon Fly Fishing Sage, and best friend a guy could ever ask for, Josh Landbridge, Spillmaker.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: Very kind of you to write that. Wow, that was Yeah, that was touching. Speaking of warm and heart.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: You were at you were beyond this film. I was you showed up a couple of times in the film. Ye, So well, let’s we’re excited.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Man. This the the this film has tons of bear hunting in it. You know, it’s it’s kind of a.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: Iconic and a lot of bear hunt hunting exactly, not so not a lot of bear skinning or.
00:02:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the you know this, this region where we’re hunting is kind of iconic for bear grease especially. You know, this would be kind of your home, you know, the the the Ozarks and the Washatas are kind of where you’ve cut your teeth hunting. And so, without further ado, we want to just dive right in. Like I said, there’s lots of bear hunting in this film, but the film starts with a thing that happens to coincide with bear season, and that’s the harvest of the sorghum.
00:02:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was really cool for me because the previous year was the first time that I would have made sorghum with Willard Blines and the.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Whole you get into it. Let’s actually watch a clip. We’re gonna watch about a one about a one minute clip about the sorghum making. So my dad made Malaysious when I was a kid, so that’s been about said some years ago.
00:03:19
Speaker 1: And then the lines when they came into this valley brought with them sorghum seed, and some of that same seed is the seed that you grow today, right, Yeah, just been handed down from generation to generation. So that mister Dole is putting in there and squeezing all that liquid o.
00:03:37
Speaker 2: Right, then you got to boil it down and it goes in from the lasius.
00:03:40
Speaker 1: The history is pretty remarkable, and in modern times, the timing of the sorghum harvest is coincided with bear season. When you’re boiling something down like this, really you’re just removing the water and just concentrating the sugar. I mean, that’s really all it is. So with the molasses making finishing up, It’s time to get down to brass tacks. We’re hunting bears in less than twenty four hours, and we’re gonna take today’s skimmings to sweeten up my bait. Side.
00:04:24
Speaker 2: There you go. Just just a little clip, just a little clip from the sorghum making with it.
00:04:31
Speaker 1: Pretty It was pretty cool. The the year before was the first year that I’d ever made sorghum with Willard Villines, and it was it was right before bear season, and so I wanted to I’ll tell you exactly what happened is the year before I was there with them, just a scene just like what you saw. And I made a little video on my phone, yep, And I put that video my Instagram and really didn’t think that much about it. It was just a cool video showing the mule grasshopper, you know, you know, turning the mill. It showed the whole process in less than a minute. And that video got thirty million views on Instagram. Thirty point five million views on Instagram, and it just kind of cued me in that this is something that the world needs to see in more details. Right, This is a thirty second, maybe minute long clip, and so that’s when I talked to Willard and said, hey, we’re gonna bear hunt next year over here. Why and we’re gonna have a crew here. Why don’t we Why don’t we film the full sequence of you making molasses? And I mean it was no sweat off his back. It’s like, we’re gonna be doing it anyway. It was a little bit of coordination with when to harvest the sorghum.
00:05:58
Speaker 2: Is that the is that like the optimal time?
00:06:01
Speaker 1: So yes, they it’s they always harvest it in September and early October. Ok, So you couldn’t you wouldn’t have done it too much earlier. But but here anyway, mid to late September to early October.
00:06:20
Speaker 2: You know, it seems like in the harvest and production of the sorgum with the volons, like not a lot has changed. Is there anything that has changed since they started doing that a couple of generations back? I mean the way obviously they weren’t lifting it with a track.
00:06:35
Speaker 1: So if you go to the store and buy a jar of sorghum molasses, most likely that was made in a modern mill. You know, they weren’t using a mule to turn it. It was an electric mill somehow that you know, presses down the canes and makes the juice. The way that they’re doing it is identical to the way it would have been done hundred years ago because that that mill that he has, the press is has been in his family for many years. They actually have one of the other brothers. So what’s cool about the Blinds. Willard Blinds is one of ten children.
00:07:22
Speaker 2: And how old is Willard?
00:07:23
Speaker 1: Willard’s seventy eight, and I don’t get me talking about where he’s at, but I want to say he’s somewhere in the middle. So he he has some brothers that were older, and one of the brothers has the original mill that his father had had used the sorghum press. Am I saying the right word for that?
00:07:49
Speaker 2: I think mill seems right? So, but but that that might be a class it might be a press mill. Seems like it would be grinding, right. Yeah.
00:08:00
Speaker 1: So yeah, the way they’re doing it is just the same. And it’s really pretty simple, you know when you the first time I was there, I was like, man, this is a complicated process with a lot of stages. You just press the canes, get get the juice out, and then you just heat it and remove the water. Like there’s no recipe, right, there’s no, there’s not, Like, well, at this moment, you have to do this. However, that makes it sound simple. When that fire is burning, Willard and those guys are watching it like a hawk because you can ruin it.
00:08:33
Speaker 2: It seems like the critical things would be like timing when it’s done, you know, keeping it moving and making sure that fire doesn’t get too hot or too low exactly.
00:08:42
Speaker 1: And they can tell you the taste difference in where sorgum’s grown, even in their county, Like Willard’ll be like, now, this cane came from here, and it tastes a little bit sweeter than the cane that came from up on the mountain.
00:08:59
Speaker 2: So this is this something that happens regionally, Like are there other families in that area that.
00:09:03
Speaker 1: Are Yeah, I’d say there’s quite a few that, not quite a few. There are others that make sorghum just this same way, not a lot.
00:09:13
Speaker 2: I wonder if they have like a sorghum off, like whoever makes the best sort.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: Oh, it would be contest, highly highly contested.
00:09:21
Speaker 2: I wouldn’t want to judge it. I wouldn’t want to judge it.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: Yes, but if you haven’t had sorghum, it’s an interesting product. It’s it’s sweet. You could use it like syrup, yeah, but it’s uh, it’s kind of got. It’s got a very unique taste that if you didn’t grow up with it, you might be like, you know, it might kind of catch you off guard. I grew up eating sorghum glasses. My grandfather he treated it like it was like we got to go out and have ice cream. I mean it was like, hey, you want some sorghum, you know, I mean like it was really something special. And what he would do is he would pour. He would take a butter knife and pour it out of the jar, and he could very strategically. You know, it drips. It’s like thicker than syrup. It’s more like honey. It’s it’s like a thinner honey. And so when it’s poured out, if you just tip the jar back up, it gets all over the side of the jar. And so at just the right time when you’re tipping it back up, you zoom the knife across and keep the jar clean, and you’d have a little doll up about as big as a silver dollar, about a you know, less than a quarter inch high. Then he would take a piece of butter, a square of butter, and put it in there and mash it up with the sorghum and put that on biscuits. That’s what he did, and it was hungry man back in the day before the commercialization of sugar and candy. And how much access that the everyday American has to sugar, which is bizarre, and you should be very concerned with how much sugar you eat. I mean, wildly bizarre that of the people watching this video. I mean, what are the statistics of how much sugar the average American me eats. I mean it’s like like fifty pounds of sugar or something.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: Yeast at least if you drink so it’s insane. You should be very very which camera does. You should be very concerned about this. But back in the day, to have sorghum, which was sweet, was like a treat. It’s interesting, this olden sugar.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: In your every day in your everyday consumption.
00:11:29
Speaker 1: That’s right, And it’s it’s kind of interesting because when I would do this same thing with my kids, Hey, you want some sorghum? I mean, I’m ashamed to say that they were kind of kind of unimpressed. You know, yeah, but kids these now, my kids don’t eat that much sugar Bear Nukeum No, bar Nukem is like almost sugar free.
00:11:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker 1: And he’s also like a.
00:11:52
Speaker 2: Lean mean, he’s like two percent body fat.
00:11:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. So no, that kind of stuff is really special to me to be able to document it. And what is most special, and this is what you get behind the scenes, is I wanted to do that for Willard and his family, right because Willard’s his family’s been doing this, and I mean, all they would have would just be some cell phone videos in modern times and then some just you know, a handful of photographs from years ago. And so it was pretty cool to have the mediator crew there to document it so well. And you know, it’s about a ten minute clip, so it’s not like it was exhaustive.
00:12:34
Speaker 2: So that, you know, a couple of questions. First, you know that same seed has been passed down for the through the generations. Why does that matter? Clay good Sorgum good Sorgum, No.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: It’s just I think it’s just a connection to the past. Like the human life is deceptive. It feels like people from the eighteen hundreds, third and fourth great grandfathers were a long ways away, but they really weren’t. And you know, by Willard holding that seed and planting it in the ground and knowing that his ancestors, you know, you could track it back and grew that seed. I think it just connects you to the past and to the the just just the the heritage of the region, and it’s it’s just unique. I mean, there’s there’s nothing that I could that I have that I could touch that. I mean my great grandfather’s shotgun, which I’ve got over there like very little. And you know, when you think about history, which I talk a lot about history, and you might think that I was hyper nostalgic in the way that I think about even my life, and I’m not sure that I am. Because the past is interesting. There’s a lot of the past that we should forget and even reject and move past in our own personal lives and even in our family’s history. Like but it’s but the knowledge of some of this stuff is powerful. That’s more a statement of like general understanding of like why the history, because I think there’s there’s probably a can be an unhealthy attachment to the past yeah, and this is not that. This is a celebration of heritage and a connection to a family legacy and uh and over in this part of the world, in Newton County and kind of the central Ozarks, the name Vlins. There are hundreds of Voliines because the guys that brought that sorghum seed. I want to say, Willard told me that Abraham Beliines had eighteen children. Wow, and they’re all still over there and they’re they’re a wonderful family. There are a lot of lot I know, a lot of violins over there.
00:14:56
Speaker 2: One last question, and it’s kind of a philosophic question, would be, oh, another one, what what does Willard represent about the Ozarks that you wanted the viewers to appreciate m by starting? I mean, you started this film off with that. What what is what is it about him that you want to us see?
00:15:15
Speaker 1: He’s just there are people that are he just has such a connection to the Ozarks. He’s just a real deal Ozarky and like he’s not trying to be anything. He just is what he is.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: He didn’t put those overalls and had on because he was going to be on film.
00:15:35
Speaker 1: He may have just a little but but but he wears those all the time. I mean, you know, there’s actually a part of history in all these places that we we reflect back to our past and are influenced by me wearing these overalls right here. I mean it’s like, yeah, it’s a it’s a hat tip to the past, and I think people still do that today. But but Willard’s the real deal. He’s a he’s a mule man, he’s a hunter. He’s just a well respected guy over there.
00:16:06
Speaker 2: Love it, they yeah, yeah, great guy. Okay, let’s we got another another clip here. Let’s go ahead and watch it.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: Bears right now are going into what they call hyperphagia, which is a physiological state of incredible increase in metabolism. So a bear fell off five to eight thousand calories a day in the fall, they can eat twenty thousand calories a day. So when you’re baiting, you’re capitalizing on a natural process inside of a bear. We’re using pop tarts, corn sorghum, molasses, skimmons. We got in a little later than we wanted, so it was a quick drop over the bait. We filled up the bait barrels. The last thing we want to do is spook bears the night before the hunt. Everybody’s here for the season opener and we’re having a big time. Much of my hunting is primarily solo, but our bear camp is always full of people, and that’s something that I love. I always got to give like the State of the Union, the State of the Bear Union. I have pretty good news. Like I would say that the bear the bear situation is average to slightly below average.
00:17:34
Speaker 2: So tell us, uh, tell us a little bit about you know, you typically have a bear camp every year. Tell us what made this bear camp different than than bear camps in the past.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: Well, it was fun to have Lake Pickle Jordan Bliss it there. They were both new bear hunters, had never bear hunted before, so it was cool to get to introduce them to it. We were actually in a new spot that I hadn’t hunted for. We were in we were in a new spot and uhs and my buddy Justin House was there. James Lawrence came up, who’s in? Yes? And uh there was another interesting guest at our bear camp this year. Ted Copple was there as in the as in the real Copple that interviewed Richard Nixon. Ted Copple. You actually see Ted Copple in the last clip of the film sitting by our fire. He’s he’s wearing all black and he’s kind of sitting in the back and we’re playing music and it’s the lights are on and you actually can see Ted Copple.
00:18:50
Speaker 2: So he had come to do so.
00:18:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, what you wouldn’t have known from watching the film is that CBS Good Morning, Sunday Morning, Sunday, CBS Sunday came to our bear camp and we’re there for basically two of the five days. There were people there. I guess there were people there for parts of three of five days. They came in on the evening. Ted was there all day one of the days, but the guys were still there the next day for portion of the day, if I recall. Yeah, and they did a spot on CBS Sunday Morning, and so Ted interviewed many of us. We rendered bear fat. Aside from what you saw, we rendered bear fat for CBS Sunday Morning, and he just hung out with us.
00:19:41
Speaker 2: I have to say that compared to some of the bear camps of the past, which have been awesome, this one was a little boogie or two.
00:19:47
Speaker 1: We had a pretty stayed in a really nice cabin. We did that was unusual.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: It spoiled there.
00:19:51
Speaker 1: We kind of had to do that because we had so many people there and because we had Ted Coppola’s crew coming and so so we on the Bear Grease podcast spoke about when Ted Copple came. He was he was a he’s eighty five, eighty five years old, younger and you don’t wreckon anybody. I would say thirty five and older would know who Ted Copple was. Was one of the most famous, well known faces in America for probably twenty five years as a as a broadcast anchor for CBS.
00:20:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: So yeah, back in the day, kids, there were when there was just television. That’s you had television and books and radio. That’s all. You had no cell phones. People watched television.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: And Ted Copple was a household name.
00:20:46
Speaker 1: And there were there would have been like three or four major networks, and the anchors for the nightly news on those those stations were as famous as the president. And so Ted Copple was one of those guys.
00:21:02
Speaker 2: He was on Nightline for years.
00:21:04
Speaker 1: Yes, many years, and he was a delightful man.
00:21:07
Speaker 2: He was it honestly surprised me how endearing he I mean, just like personable.
00:21:13
Speaker 1: Humble, set with us and just talked. He singled out almost everyone in our camp and had fairly in depth conversations, personal conversation. When I realized what he was doing was Justin House, who can just kind of be a fly on the wall at times, was there and there was a little bit of a lult. We’re in a big group. This is after he’d been there for hours, and he looked at Justin and he said, Justin, tell me what you do. And it was clear that he was trying to connect with everybody there. And you know, one time I came around a corner and he and Brent were sitting over in a chair, just chatting away, no telling what Brent was telling him.
00:22:02
Speaker 2: When you guys were out hunting one afternoon, he sat down with with your mom and dad and Misty and I and I think just the four of us and just for hour and a half and just let us ask him questions about his career and his family and yeah, just really neat. Yeah, what is it about bear Camp that means so much to you?
00:22:23
Speaker 1: So most of my hunting, I said it in there, most most of My hunting is solo. Like most of my hunting, I wake up here at my house and you know, go deer hunting or go bear hunting. Then maybe somebody comes with me, but you know, I’m driving there and hunting for a day or two and coming back. Other times I’m leaving on the bigger hunts. To me, my hunting and probably most people’s hunting can be segregated into two things. You’re local hunting, but then you’re if you travel, if you’re so fortunate to get to travel to hunt, and many people do make one big trip hunting trip somewhere, right, you know, you travel. So when I travel, I’m usually with people, but it’s not home and it’s not with family. Bear camp is very communal, very focused on the camp. Very we’re not honestly, we’re not hunting that hard in terms of hunting. The work that goes into it is more than I do for anything else that I do, and that’s that’s hard to describe for some people. I mean it just you know, the work that goes into baiting bears is the most work that I do. Yeah, Like when I go to Alaska next month, I’m just going to like show up and I’ve never been there, and all of my energy will be dedicated during the time I’m there and then I leave. You know this, this takes a whole bunch of effort to get there.
00:23:53
Speaker 2: I mean, for for a month ahead of time.
00:23:55
Speaker 1: Yes, And and so when we’re there, though, we’re typically just hunting the evenings, maybe a little bit in the morning, and so we’re spending a lot of time at camp, a lot of time with people, and that’s fun to me. Man.
00:24:08
Speaker 2: We had a we had a great time just just having food and you know, in the evenings people would show up and you know, one night there were there were guys there playing some fantastic music. It was your birthday. We celebrated that it was. I mean, we had a we had a great time. I’ve got a couple of questions here from some Instagram from Instagram. First questions from Isaac Reynolds Isaac Underscore Reynolds thirty four. If you’re out there, what’s your recommended drawweight for bear and what’s your favorite bear bait to use?
00:24:39
Speaker 1: M you can use archery equipment on a black bear that you would use on a white tail deer. Okay that they’re they’re really they’re really I wouldn’t do anything different between my white tail set up and my bear set.
00:24:54
Speaker 2: Up broadheads as well.
00:24:55
Speaker 1: Now that I would do different, I typically I go back and forth between expandables with with white tails, I’d say seventy five percent of the time I’m using some expandable head For white tails, They’re thinner skinned, thinner boned, They’re they’re You’re more likely, I feel like with a white tail to get a compromised hit because of the way they can react to a shot and drop and move, And so I want a big cutting diameter. When I’m bear hunting, I prioritize an entry an exit hole. So I want the arrow that is going to penetrate the most.
00:25:37
Speaker 2: Use fixed blade I.
00:25:40
Speaker 1: Would I would not, you wouldn’t have to use a cut on impact necessarily, but I like to use a fixed blade broadhead for black bear. Now, yeah, we I mean, we could go into all the stuff about shot placement and and I’m.
00:25:59
Speaker 2: Sure that will come up later today. Later, well, we’ll talk about shot placement. Oh yeah on a bear. Oh yeah, forgot about that.
00:26:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, So favorite bear bait. Favorite bear bait is going to be carbony for here. Now, what is interesting about black bears is that they have such a wide geographic distribution, which black bears have the currently of the large mammals on this continent have the largest geographic distribution of them all. Okay, historically wolves would have had a wider geographic distribution than the black bear. Okay, Okay, think about this, Josh. This is going back to bear bait and why bears prefer different foods in different places. But the wolf essentially would have historically ranged from north of the Arctic circle all the way down into Old Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I mean, like without a gap in there. They would have been different subspecies of wolves, you know, based on the biology and all this. But the wolf would have done that, the black bear would do the exact same thing, except black bears historically were not in the great prairie regions of America. A black bear has to have trees to survive, and so there would have been pockets in the great Plains where black bears wouldn’t have been. They would have been in the riparian zones, but wolves would have been in those areas. And then the treeless areas of the southwestern desert and the Great Plains were the only places that there were not black bears. So imagine black bears range north of the Arctic Circle as well, probably not as high as wolves though, and the furthest south southerly. Documented black bears have been around Mexico City, which is deep into Mexico. And so, but are there wolves today in Arkansas and in Oklahoma and in Kansas, No, they’re not so historic range the wolf had the biggest. Today the black bear does. Because the black bear now exists in basically sixty five percent of of its historic range and in many regions one hundred percent of its historic range, if that makes sense. Yeah, like in Canada and Alaska, the black bears in one hundred percent of its historic range.
00:28:42
Speaker 2: Okay, So how does that tie to bear bait?
00:28:44
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. Bears prefer different things in different places.
00:28:50
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:28:51
Speaker 1: So, for instance, in the Spring and Canada, these outfitters are using oats with oil on it. I’m convinced that if you put oats with oil on bear bait in this part of the world, you would have not great results. And we can only hunt in a fall here. But my favorite bear bait, I would say, would be pastries. Doughnuts, pop tarts, and bread and grease that seems to be when we’re baiting them. And I want to emphasize for anybody that has not been around bear baiting, there’s a ton of research about baiting black bears, and we cover it in my book that’s coming out in February, American Bear It. We cover it all, but I can just summarize for you to say that all the research indicates that baiting bears does not habituate them to anthropomorphic foods, anthropogenic foods, like they’re not going to come raid your house because they’re being baited, you know, a half a mile away. Basically, it’s it’s not detrimental to they still have a preference for Oh they all natural, always going to have a preference for natural foods. Yeah, they just do. They would rather eat a white oak acorn, so things that make a bear fat, but up in Canada they would use like oil and oats.
00:30:19
Speaker 2: Okay. One of the questions I had when I watched it is you mentioned that during hyperphasia, when they’re trying to put on weight, that a bear will eat twenty thousand calories in a day in nature, What are they eaten that they’re able to get twenty thousand calories.
00:30:36
Speaker 1: In a day in the fall, hard mast has incredible chloric content, okay, and so like a white oak acorn has five to seven calories per acorn, right, And imagine I tell a story in the Book of Once when I actually watched and the only reason I knew the timestamp was because I videoed it. But I watched bear eat white oak acres for eighteen minutes straight without lifting its head.
00:31:06
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:31:06
Speaker 1: And just estimating that that bear was chomping one white oak acre in every five seconds, which probably would be about as fast as it would it would have consumed like eighteen hundred calories in like eighteen minutes. It may not have been that precise eighteen and eighteen makes me think my numbers are wrong, but it consumed an enormous like over a thousand calories in at eighteen minutes. And it’s like, how many times could it do that in a day? Twenty thousand fairly easily could. So yeah, they’re just cramming on the calories. They But what’s so cool about these bears is that they have to because our bears here are typically up and on their feet for ten to nine months a year, but in the highest portion of their range, way up in the north there the boy I don’t want to spill too much about the book, that the coolest fact in the book, the coolest fact in the whole book, is the longest documented denning that we’ve ever seen a bear stay in. It in like a collared bear. They knew when it went in, they knew when it came out, and let me just say, it was an unbelievable amount of time.
00:32:31
Speaker 2: And when they’re there, they’re not eating, they’re not drinking, they’re not defecating. That’surin eating.
00:32:38
Speaker 1: That’s right.
00:32:39
Speaker 2: That is unbelievable.
00:32:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that’s yes, it is. It’s a it’s a it’s a it’s an absolutely fascinating process. But that connects back to them eating, having to eat twenty thousand calories a day or being able to all is that they’re trying to make a year’s living in six to nine months, so they got to pack it all in. And that’s and a bear is just built to consume calories. I mean, it just has big intestines, big stomach, the ability, you know, a mouth that just can just consume and and process it quickly. I mean like every They’re just a They’re just an eating machine, is what they are. And the coolest thing about bears is there, they’re they’re they’re omnivores, and whatever’s happening ecologically on planet Earth, it is favoring omnivores. It is favoring generalists. Specialists are often the things that are struggling. And that’s why that we see the black bear thriving. Every research population of bears is stable or increasing.
00:33:50
Speaker 2: Right now, that’s awesome. One more, one more viewer question, the simple one. Do you have a favorite fresh kill camp meal? And that’s from mac fink Biner seven eleven.
00:34:05
Speaker 1: You know, I think I don’t have a fancy answer, but just to cook a backstrap over a fire, some seasoning on it, yeah, or just to just fright pan fright, battered, pan fried. This is the way to go.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we’ve got another clip here.
00:34:25
Speaker 1: Man. I’m excited for you.
00:34:27
Speaker 2: I’m just eager, man. I’m ready to get up there. I’m ready to see a bear from a stand. That’s just it’s gonna be something new.
00:34:34
Speaker 1: For me, Doctor Pickle. We’re starting our hunt in the early afternoon. Bears are crepuscular, so they move at dawn in dusk, but these baited bears move a lot at night, so we opt to go and start hunting in mid afternoon when the bears aren’t there, and just set up and wait for the last hour of daylight. Maybe Lake’s anticipation the seeing bears had something to do with it, but he actually doesn’t have to sit long until he actually sees a bear. Right here, I see now the bear coming on the right. Lake has some truly big bears that are coming into this bait. We know they’re coming in, and we also know that these aren’t them, so today they get a pass. But in this kind of hunt, your options can change by the day and even by the hour.
00:35:32
Speaker 2: So you’ve you’ve you’ve kind of addressed a lot of the a lot of the de baiting issues. I feel like the film does a good job showing just how difficult it is to bait, I mean, the work that goes into it. But just because you bait doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing. So there’s dissenters. Is there anything that you haven’t covered that you feel like you want to communicate about baiting? You know, there’s always the comments, you know, this is cheating this isn’t fair, you know.
00:36:07
Speaker 1: I would I would say that somebody that would say that, well, I would say to them, let’s look at the bigger picture of bear management. Wherever there is a season that allows it to be legal to hunt bears over bait or use hounds, the other methods of hunting, which basically would be spot in stock, would be inadequate to harvest the number of bears that needed to be taken out of that system. Let me give you an example. Arkansas currently has about six thousand bears in the state, which is not is really not that many, right. So many other places like don’t come here to hunt. It’s not that great, right, Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee. All these places have more more bears than us. But in twenty years Arkansas has Arkansas hunters have legally harvested over ten thousand bears.
00:37:10
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:37:12
Speaker 1: I talked to a biologist who we did the math together, and if there was no hunting since the year two thousand, there would be between twenty and thirty thousand bears in the state. Like with the reproduction, like counting how many were taken out and basically the carrying capacity of the state, and the habitat that we have is a you know, it’s probably we’re reaching it. They’re actually trying to keep the population just stable. And there’s many factors that go into that. There’s actual habitat constraints. And six thousand. I kind of get bummed when I hear that number, because that at one time they believe this state had fifty thousand bears, and to say we have six thousand and us celebrate that today is kind of like, wow, that doesn’t sound that great. But the truth is is that this place is full of houses in roads and shopping malls and permuta grass fields that are no longer bear habitat that at one time were every square inch of basically, I mean, I’m just using Arkansas as an example, but you could extrapolate this out every direction. Every square inch of the state used to be bear habitat and would have been used by bears in some way. Okay, and so today actual habitat is a limitation. But then number two and even more important and most important, the reason that we couldn’t have thirty thousand bears in the state is the cultural tolerance, which is how many how many bears will a culture tolerate how often, how comfortable are you going to be with bears sleeping under your house? And in California and in New Jersey and a lot of these places, the cultural tolerance and the amount of bears there is in this big conflict. That’s a lot about what my book is about. And I do think I would have a high tolerance for more bears. But also last year in this state, two people were killed by bears, I mean wild this year there’s been more black bear human fatalities. It’s on the rise. I mean, it absolutely is on the rise. So to answer your question about baiting is that when we beta bear, we are playing a very significant role inside of bear management to keep the bear population stable. And you couldn’t do it any other way. You send out spot instack hunters, they will not able to harvest the same bears, and so you become a pawn inside of a system. And when you beat a bear, it’s less about like one on one and out smarten a bear. It’s more about I want to pick the specific bear I want to take, and I’m gonna eat this bear renders fat, tan is hide. I’m gonna use this animal to the highest degree, and I’m gonna be selective about the animal that I take based upon the opportunity that I have, which varies from year to year. My my judgment of what bear that I would take changes by the day. With a white tailed deer, I might have in my mind what I’m gonna take and what I’m not, like, maybe I’m gonna take a dough Maybe I’m gonna take a one hundred and fifteen inch plus buck. With a bear depended upon how much meat I need. If I need some grease, I might take the oldest best male that I really got a shot of taken, which might be a three year old male. Does that make sense, Yeah, absolutely, other on really good years, which it varies dramatically some years. Bear is a very responsive debate, and you can be highly selective. And I’ve taken some multiple five hundred plus pound just monster, beautiful stomper bears.
00:41:20
Speaker 2: That you might not have had an opportunity oh to harvest past year.
00:41:24
Speaker 1: But there was no chance we were going to kill any of those bears, though we had them on camera in the middle of the night sporadically, and so like Lake sitting there thinking he’s going to shoot a five hundred pound bear. I mean, by the time we actually got him in the stand, it was pretty much like, Hey, that’s not going to happen. That bear is long gone. He’s on some white oak ridge, devouring eighteen He’s just eating NonStop. He doesn’t want to be here, he’s not here, and so that really doesn’t answer the question. But baiting bears is critical for bear management.
00:42:04
Speaker 2: You mentioned the fifty thousand bears. At one time, there was fifty thousand bears in Arkansas. That would have been at a time when populations in Arkansas were very small, and the one of the main things that took that population way down was market hunting.
00:42:18
Speaker 1: Correct with that, more so landscape level logging than even market hunting. Okay, yeah, okay. Logging and the loss of habitat had had vastly more impact on black bear than market hunting. Wow, okay, yep.
00:42:37
Speaker 2: Interesting, Okay, well we would learn you’ll learn all this in American Bear coming out in February twenty twenty seven. I’ll be first in line. All right, here’s another clip.
00:42:52
Speaker 4: A bear is such a preclusive animal.
00:42:54
Speaker 1: They’re an animal the shadows.
00:42:57
Speaker 2: More biology here, folks.
00:42:58
Speaker 5: It’s black and mostly made for that is the girl’s bluffer is for camouflage, and it’s it.
00:43:09
Speaker 4: It shows you where they wanna live. The real reason that a bear is black is that the the early ancestors of black bears, like Deep Deep History, developed in the tropics. And there’s a thing called Glagger’s rule, which Glagger’s rule means if an animal, the closer they.
00:43:29
Speaker 1: Are to the equator.
00:43:30
Speaker 4: Oftentimes furred mammals are darker because it reduces the last potential for them to get like fungal infections. So modern geneticists have found that the ancestral color.
00:43:45
Speaker 5: Of the black bear, the du Ursus Americans American black bearry is black.
00:43:51
Speaker 4: So they can tell by DNA that a long time ago bears.
00:43:56
Speaker 2: Were black and color phase bears.
00:44:01
Speaker 4: A bunch of genetics that can tell developed in the southwest US about nine thousand years ago.
00:44:10
Speaker 1: So I never thought that was going to make the cut, and I cut a bunch out. Yeah, Yeah, it went on and on and on.
00:44:18
Speaker 2: When did you first become interested in you know, you’re writing this book. When did you first become interested in bear biology beyond just hunting bears?
00:44:27
Speaker 1: Well, when I when I killed my first bear in two thousand and one. That is what catalyzed me to really start studying about bears. And I was in college at the time and went back to the U of A and University of Arkansas and went up into the library and started looking for bear books and found at the time, what was all the research, academic research that had ever been done on our populations of bears. And it wasn’t that many things. I mean, it was like, you know, probably less than less than five like thesis projects that people have done and research that people had done. And I read it all. I read every word of it and just was fascinated by it and didn’t really have a conclusion of why I was interested in the area. It didn’t it didn’t really. It wasn’t like I was saying, oh, I’m going to talk about this one day. I was just interested in it. So taking that first bear was well, I tell the story. I’ve told it many times. Maybe I haven’t told it on the podcast before, but it’s definitely in the book.
00:45:45
Speaker 2: If you guys haven’t picked up on it. Clay wrote a book that’s coming on.
00:45:49
Speaker 1: February starts Saving your Pennies when I when I kill this bear, I walk up to it, my Dad’s with me, And this was what year, two thousand one October one, two thousand and one, at the crack of dawn. I shot this bear on the first day it was ever legal to hunt over bait, so I claim, And no one has disputed me in twenty years. So I’m no longer taking disputes because it’s so long ago. If you think you shot one before me, you probably just don’t remember. I say that I killed the first legal bear in the state of Arkansas over bait. Now I know people that killed him illegally before that.
00:46:28
Speaker 2: Have you turned them in?
00:46:29
Speaker 1: No that most there are, many of them are no longer with us. But so it’s a joke, but I actually think it’s probably it might be true. It was barely shooting, like when a bear. When I watched a bear glide, it was so dim, Josh, that I couldn’t really see the bear’s legs. I couldn’t quite make out his legs. It just looked like a floating black blob coming up from down the mountain. And he came right in and I was just like, there is Do.
00:47:03
Speaker 2: You have game pictures of him?
00:47:05
Speaker 1: No, we didn’t have game cameras. The game cameras didn’t really come out until later, okay two thousand and one. No, okay, we were, but we had I mean, we just knew there were bears there because they’re eating her bait.
00:47:16
Speaker 5: Oh.
00:47:16
Speaker 1: It was the one of the most exciting things in my life was that year when it became legal debate bears. We started bating bears and they started showing up, and we would go out there and we would occasionally see a bear and it was just so exciting. And then I shoot this bear and when I walk up to it, I have I was twenty one years old, and I had an incredibly hollow feeling that I knew nothing about this animal, and it was just this majestic, awesome animal. And you know, I deer hunted and turkey hunted and small game hunted up until this point, and you know, I knew what deer eight, where they lived, when they bred, I knew how to call turkey. I knew about these animals, and so when I took one, there was a sense of connection to this thing. When I killed this bear, I realized I didn’t know a thing about it, and this was an incredible animal. And honestly, many people of the generation before mine and even my generation at the time view a bear as just kind of like a big raccoon, you know, just kind of like, yeah, shoot, all of them, you know. And man, when I walked up to it, that is not the sense that I had at all. It was just like, Wow, what a beast. I cannot believe.
00:48:38
Speaker 2: It was a good bear too.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: I mean it was. It was a nice bear, and that just set me on a track to kind of.
00:48:48
Speaker 2: I remember when you got the rug back and I was like, wow, like it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever ever seen.
00:48:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:58
Speaker 2: Recto already at j M sixty three has a question of the many bears you’ve harvested, which one of them stand out in high quality flavor? Flavor? Can you tell the difference from bears that you’ve killed in different regions.
00:49:12
Speaker 1: No, I wish I could, and maybe somebody that paid more attention to their palette could. I will say that there’s a lot of press about how bears in Southeast Alaska taste fishy, and man, I’ve just I’ve eaten two and I have not found them to really I have not bear. Nukomb killed one on the shore of the Alaskan coast this year that was eating mussels when he when he shot it. And I can’t tell the difference between that bear and one here in Arkansas, Okay, but I think it probably maybe was luck of the draw, because it’s kind of indisputable that some of these bears that are eating a lot of fish in ocean typs food, you know, have a kind of a fishy tape. But but in the two that I have had, I have not I have not had that.
00:50:08
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, we’ve got another clip here. This one’s a little bit longer. When Lake has his first interaction with uh with shooting a bear.
00:50:19
Speaker 1: Based on the pictures, there are about ten different bears that have been come into this spake. A lot of them look the same. Two bears showed up on the first day that Lake saw that he chose to pass. I don’t want to shoot that back one.
00:50:45
Speaker 2: I think we got him, buddy.
00:50:53
Speaker 4: I just got worried that Lake shot a bear.
00:50:58
Speaker 5: I don’t really know anything.
00:51:02
Speaker 1: Lake gives the bear an hour before climbing down to assess the situation spare row. He finds his arrow, which clearly passed through the bear, but it hardly has any blood at all. On it, which is not a good sign. And there’s hardly any blood on the ground. The whole gang comes down from their stands to help look for Lake’s bear. When there’s barely a blood trail like this, it takes the whole camp. Luckily, we’ve got some guys with some experience. If we’re gonna find this bear, these are the guys I’d want helping me across it. All right, we got blood right.
00:51:44
Speaker 2: Here, guys, bear coming in clutch.
00:51:47
Speaker 1: It’s the head, not much, and there is not much blood, and it’s that dark red, not great blood.
00:51:57
Speaker 2: What are you saying, honesty? Where it’s hitting the bear. I want to see it blown out.
00:52:06
Speaker 1: Deal with that.
00:52:07
Speaker 2: And then Leaves does look a little high on it. I think I shot him too high.
00:52:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t want to admit that, but I I think that’s what happened, and it’s easy to do. It’s a it’s a bummer. I hate it for you, man. The truth of it is that is that bear is going to live and he’s gonna be fine.
00:52:31
Speaker 2: So we kind of see the arc of emotion of Lake from his first shot, you know, feels pretty good about it, and then all of a sudden it comes to the realization that the shot placement was not not optimal. Why wasn’t important to leave that whole sequence in the in the film.
00:52:51
Speaker 1: Well, we’ve we’ve always at meat or just kind of showed things the way it happened, you know. And so yeah, it was a as you can see, I mean, it wasn’t a compromise situation. When Lake shot, I mean the bear was broadside probably nineteen yards, I mean, which is a chip shot, and he just hit a little high and in it it boy that there there really is a big hollow spot high on those bears.
00:53:27
Speaker 2: And bears are difficult because they’ve got so much fur. It’s hard to see what’s.
00:53:33
Speaker 1: I always say that a short haired, light colored animal, like a white tailed deer, you can see the contour of its body. You can see where the shoulder comes up, you can see where the neck comes down and the shoulder boulgers. You can see where the rib cage ends. A lot of times, you know, you can see the you can you can really see and you can really aim where you want to. On a black bear, it’s almost like you are shooting at an inflated blash black trash bag and so and when you draw back and you’re looking through a peep oftentimes all you see is black, especially if it’s close. Several bears that I’ve shot close, I’ve drawn back and all you see in your peep side is black. And now lake, being at twenty nineteen yards would have would have had more aperture than that. But I mean, he just said hi. He did. And you know, the film doesn’t show the extent to which we went to look for that bear.
00:54:36
Speaker 2: There were comments of, well, you should have looked for it longer. You guys looked for that bear for hours and hours.
00:54:42
Speaker 1: We did. We we exhausted our efforts and used all the data points that we had, and I mean, I will I am fully confident that that bear still alive today. And I mean you.
00:55:00
Speaker 2: With collectively inside anything vital.
00:55:03
Speaker 1: That’s right. It just it it. It was high passed through the backstraps. I mean, we could we could see that and uh and you know, lakes and elevated stand and you know, it’s it’s kind of dumb to try to justify to the world that we did what we should have done. But I mean, I grew up my dad, Gary Believernukom was he he was absolutely the biggest stickler I’ve ever been around in my life, for given the fullest extent towards tracking an animal that you made any contact with with an arrow, you know. And so that’s that’s been built deep inside of me for a long time. And uh, those those periphery hits on an animal, if you hit one too high or too low, like that animal is not going to die. Now if the shot had been far back, like if he had hit that shot that bear far back and hit it in the guts, totally different story because that bear, that’s a mortal wound. That bear is gonna die, And it’s a completely different scenario. But we knew based upon the blood on the air, you know, we knew that there there there was not a chance of finding this animal. But we did exhaust We spent. Yeah, we got back to camp way after midnight.
00:56:31
Speaker 2: And I mean, with multiple people.
00:56:34
Speaker 1: What if our to to help those people, What if our whole film was just us tracking the bear and it was a six hour film. Yeah No, I mean, of course we showed this like condensed version, and it’s a bummer, And you know, I hated it for Lake and I hated Ted Copple. Was there that was probably the the most difficult part of it is you know, when when the America is watching, you’re hoping that as a hunter, you’re going to put your best foot forward, and we did in that.
00:57:09
Speaker 2: Just and Lake wasn’t being careless or a bad shot. It was just I mean, yeah, it just happened.
00:57:15
Speaker 1: Just happened. It could have could have happened to me just as easy as it happened to him. And uh, and so we had to go talk with Ted Copple about this. Yeah, he didn’t seem that worked up about it.
00:57:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, Lake Lake just felt sick about it because y’all had to come back to film with Ted Copple here after he’s been looking for this this bear. Yeah, and uh, then it was the only thing on his mind while we’re trying to do the interview. Yeah, and then he went back out looking for it even more so. Yeah, Lake chose not to continue hunting, yep, after he drew blood. What do you think about that decision?
00:57:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s a great decision. In some places that’s the legal requirement, but not here. Not in most places, it’s not. There’s probably just a few places in the country where if you draw blood, you legally have to not your tag, so he kind of he chose to do that, and I thought it was a good move.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. We talked about this a little bit on the Last On the Last Companion podcast when you were in Alaska hunting bears. But what are some of the pros and cons of hunting with a bow and what kind of hunter do to mitigate the opportunity to have a failed harvest?
00:58:33
Speaker 1: Well, shooting a bear is they’re a difficult animal. Really, well, I take that back. A well placed arrow is very efficient to take me right. People that are used to shooting white tailed deer can have trouble shooting a bear, right, Okay. The structure of a bear is different than a white tail deer, and you aim low on a white tail. These are all the bullet points. I always say when you’re shooting a white tail deer with a bow, you aim low because that animal is going to react to the sound of the shot and duck. A bear is not a prey animal. He does not have the same flight response as a prey animal like a white tail deer, so they’re not going to jump the strings, so you don’t need to aim low. Of one time I took a veteran white tail hunter out a guy that had killed three inund of white tails with a bow, and he he shot a bear right through the brisket that we didn’t find, and it was because he was aiming low and tight anticipating the bear dropping into that. So don’t do that. And then the other thing that’s slightly uncomfortable for whitetail hunters about bears is that you need to aim further back, like you need to aim probably four to six inches back from the shoulder. And it’s because, Josh, if we had a picture of a white tailed deer and a bear, a white tailed deer’s legs are further back on its body compared to where its neck and brisket come down. Okay, Like, imagine the head of a bear and there’s just his neck and then there’s his shoulder. His front legs are up further. Does that make sense, Yeah, a white tail deer is back and you can actually see his chest stick out like And so it’s not that their anatomy is different. I mean, in a wild way, all mammals are about the same heart, lungs and testines, liver, all this stuff is the same, but the positioning of the legs on a bear is further forward, so it means you have to aim further back from the leg.
01:00:47
Speaker 2: That makes sense, Yeah, yeah, it does.
01:00:49
Speaker 1: So middle of the middle is what some people have said. I go, not quite middle of the middle, almost middle of the middle, but then back a little bit towards the shoulder, even further.
01:01:00
Speaker 2: Than No, no, I see back going back toward the head, towards the shoulder. Okay, excellent, Okay, we’ve got another clip here.
01:01:11
Speaker 1: Man. That’s some beautiful bear grease or bear fat right there.
01:01:15
Speaker 2: Here we go.
01:01:18
Speaker 1: We’re a little optimistic. Even I would say this was a well.
01:01:24
Speaker 2: Let’s go back here. I think it started a little late. There we go.
01:01:31
Speaker 1: I would say my predictions were a little optimistic. Even I would say this was a below average. But we had somebody give us some bear fat. This is fresh bear fat, and we’re gonna render it down. I’m gonna put about a quarter inch of water in there so that when it hits the pan it doesn’t scald and burned. We’re just gonna put it right in that water.
01:02:01
Speaker 2: And good looking bear fat it.
01:02:06
Speaker 1: Is sitting there. Look at that oil like, boy, you want it to be that like light colored. See how that’s like like the color like chicken broth. That’s what you want it to stay the whole time. We’re almost done. I mean you can see these like little pieces like they’re almost rendered down, like as much as they’re gonna render down.
01:02:29
Speaker 2: Gotcha.
01:02:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, with our bear fat rendered, we’re ready to put it in the jars. The lower and slower you cook it, the lighter the oil will be. My preference is to cook around two hundred and twenty five degrees for forty five minutes and tell it’s the color of chicken bron.
01:02:56
Speaker 2: All right, well, why great? I think a great way to end the film with rendering the bear grease. Why has rendering bear grease become something that you’re so passionate about.
01:03:09
Speaker 1: Well, let me address a little more functional question. First, is that, okay, absolutely the best case scenario when you’re rendering bear fat is to grind it.
01:03:21
Speaker 2: So we have a question from Kevin Klin eighteen to fifteen one. I’ve got a question rendering bearfat with grinding the fat prior to rendering yield more oil? And does it does cutting or does cutting it in small cubes?
01:03:32
Speaker 1: Yeah? So in the field like that, you can cut it up into cubes just like we did in the smaller the cubes, the better, and you can render it down and you get a pretty good yield. You probably get eighty twenty eighty percent oil twenty percent solid crack ones, right, and that’s a decent yield. You will get probably close to ninety percent yield when you grind it.
01:04:02
Speaker 2: So what you find grind yeah, ideal?
01:04:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And what you would do is you would you would you would get your bear fat, the chunks of it cold or even put it in a freezer and just like almost get it frozen and then cube it up and then put it in a grinder and then render that. And you know, there is no it’s kind of like making sorghum. You’re just heating the fat like there’s no recipe, and you get the water that.
01:04:32
Speaker 2: You put in there just evaporate out.
01:04:34
Speaker 1: That’s right. That’s just uh, that’s just to keep it from burning and scalding at first. It’s just something that we do. Just put a little water down there. But you can render bear fat with any heat source. You know. I’ve done it in a fried daddy, I’ve done it over fire and cast iron like a Dutch oven, done it into jet boil. I’ve done it in these like turkey cookers with propane. I’ve done it on the on an elect stove with just a like a saucepan.
01:05:03
Speaker 2: And you’re using like medium heat.
01:05:06
Speaker 1: Well, so that’s that’s the only variable inside the whole process. You could just barely turn it up, you know, to one eighty and let it cook down for longer periods of time.
01:05:20
Speaker 2: I’ve retically you could do it in a crock pot.
01:05:22
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, people do. That’s what that was my next time my list was a crockpot. There’s people that really love cooking it in a cruck pot. What you can do and it doesn’t completely ruin it, but it’s not ideal is that you can burn it like if it gets to like three hundred degrees, it’s going to be dark, and it’s not unusable. It’s still usable, but it does have a stronger odor and it’s uh, it just kind of has a little bit of a burnt taste. But much of the barrel oil that I have rendered has had a little bit of a burnt taste because it’s easy for it to get too hot and so low slow. The two twenty five for forty five minutes is just a generalization. Probably, I say that because it’s just easy to cite those numbers. Probably it would be more like two ten, two fifteen for a little under an hour. It would probably be ideal. But you just don’t ever want it to get like really dark and really hot.
01:06:23
Speaker 2: Right, So, what are some of your favorite modern uses for bear grease?
01:06:31
Speaker 1: Well, I’ve got We’ve got bear grease on my face right now. Oh really, I’ve I’ve for several years have been putting bear grease on my face after after we had bear grease chemically analyzed by one of the top lipid labs in the country that we report in our book what we find. But what we found made me want to put it on my face every day. Okay, so but we cook with it. Frying with it is the best thing that I do.
01:07:03
Speaker 2: I mean, you use it to to oil your saddles, use it?
01:07:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could use it, I mean to soften leather. But the to me, the premium use is for pan frying either fish or meat. You can use barre oil and substitution for anything that calls for oil. So any cake recipe, any biscuit recipe that calls for crisco or oil you can substitute in barrel crust and it if you if you cook it too long, it does it can’t have a burnt flavor. If you cook it just right, it really doesn’t have a flat You can make you can make barre oil chocolate chip cookies that just it’s like it’s like using shortening. Basically before before these processed oils and shortening, animal fat oils were used for all this stuff. And uh and so historically, oh man, I could go, I could go on and on. But the first time the word bear grease shows up in the literature in the Record of America was in fifteen forty one July fifth, Hernando de Soto, his scribe, a guy named Elva, wrote when they encountered Native Americans in East Tennessee. He writes, they have what they call bear grease stored in gourds, which is like olive oil and butter. And that’s the way he described it, like olive oil and butter. And what we foundally did the chemical analysis of black bear fat, was that it actually is very similar to olive oil and chemical composition.
01:08:50
Speaker 2: That’s really would they not have been doing this like in Europe and Bavaria and that kind of thing.
01:08:55
Speaker 1: Black bears are only in North America.
01:08:57
Speaker 2: Oh really, yeah, I don’t think I realized that what bears did they have in Europe Us americanas baby I guess americanas now.
01:09:05
Speaker 1: They would have been rendering asiatic black bear fat in Asia in the places, but Ursus americans is the only I mean, it’s only here. It’s endemic to North America and only on the North American continent. An asiatic black bear is looks similar to a black bear, but they’re not completely different species.
01:09:27
Speaker 2: I’m gonna have to read the book.
01:09:28
Speaker 1: Black bears are actually genetically more kin to grizzly bears and polar bears than asiatic black bears.
01:09:36
Speaker 2: Fascinating, isn’t that wild? It is wild?
01:09:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely wild. But the black bear was the premium bear on planet Earth for fat because of their diet. So in Europe they would have had some bear fat, but it would have been brown bear fat. And so when these Europeans came over here and in the Roanoke, some of the first correspondents that they had with England, I mean, like the first guys that came over and set up a colony, and they were doing it to make money to like export stuff back to Britain. Bear grease was in their list of stuff that hey, there’s some pretty wild bear grease over here, different than anything that we have that became a commodity stuff. In the mid seventeen hundreds, fourteen percent of the exports coming out of New Orleans was American black bear grease. Going to Europe. Fourteen percent all the exports out of New Orleans was black bear fat, much of it stored in skin hides and what they called a deer of oil. When oh, wait till you read the book when they killed a deer. There’s this historical accounts of when these guys would kill a deer and they would describe what would happen, what Native Americans would do. If you killed a bear, you immediately went and tried to kill a deer. Oh, you would skin it and skin tube, skin it and basically tie off the legs and the neck. The neck would be the spout of this bag, this deer skin bag, and you would completely fill it with oil and then seal it off and that would be what you what you called a deer of oil.
01:11:23
Speaker 2: Deer.
01:11:24
Speaker 1: Some of the first travel riders that ever came to the Ozarks described that he described what he thought was bizarre, but a deer of oil hanging on someone’s house that he he was like, they had a I mean he described that, so wild wild history of bear grease in this country. Bizarre and wild history. And we we documented it in a really thorough fashion.
01:11:54
Speaker 2: So no bears killed, No bears were killed, quoted the baits go cold. But still this film was like satisfying in your opinion? Can you have a successful hunt without harvesting an animal?
01:12:11
Speaker 1: No, it’s all Did you write these questions? Wait? Did my hero producer Mustache Icon wrote best friend of guy? Could ever have? Josh filmmaker write that? I don’t know who wrote that question.
01:12:25
Speaker 2: I don’t know who wrote that.
01:12:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s like that, I mean, I think kind of like click bait social media question of the ages.
01:12:34
Speaker 2: You know, what does a successful hunt look like to you?
01:12:36
Speaker 1: Then when you kill something? No, you know, I’m kidding, you know, you just you’re just not always going to kill? Now where we disappointed massively? Was that surprised? Yes? Was I pretty confident we’re going to get a bear?
01:12:51
Speaker 2: Yes?
01:12:51
Speaker 1: I was, And we did have an opportunity, right, you know, and and I passed a bear that was legal to have killed. Yeah, I only saw one bear in five days. That first after noon had about one hundred pound bore come in, And I mean technically that would have been a legal animal to take.
01:13:05
Speaker 2: Brent was hunting on some property that he had secured and heat his arrow deflected on a little tiny branch of.
01:13:11
Speaker 1: The shot up. Yeah, Brent actually had a pretty nice bore come in the first day that he missed. Yeah, and we didn’t, you know, just limitations of making a film. We we didn’t have a cameraman with Brent, which we should have. We should have, We should have learned that. Always have a cameraman with Brent.
01:13:27
Speaker 2: Right, if someone has who’s who’s never hunted, watches this film, what do you want to be their takeaway?
01:13:37
Speaker 1: Just to see the the history, the culture, the bigger picture of hunting. It’s it’s not just about harvesting an animal, but it’s it’s a lifestyle, a regional lifestyle. Great, So thank you so much for joining us on this companion podcast. Meat Eaters twelve and twenty six film. If you haven’t seen our Arkansas Bear Camp film, go to the meat Eater YouTube channel. And check it out. You can leave your questions and comments there. Hey, it’s not lost on us that all of you watch this content and it’s really great. It’s one of the one of the joys inside of my life is to be able to make content. And man, I recognize what a privilege it is to get to document this stuff because I know so many of these people out there are doing stuff cooler, better, faster, stronger, and more compelling than what we’re doing. I mean, that’s the truth. I think there’s a inside of society, there’s sometimes this idea that the guys that are on TV are the best. We are not. Is that elevant to me? It’s relevant. I’m just I just want to say thank you, and and so many of you are the people that I look up to. Uh and and our our teach me so much about hunting. I mean, we’re we’re not the best. We just love it. I do think I do think I love it as much as anybody not the best. So it’s a it’s a privilege to just document them, you know, So thanks, everybody watching really appreciate it.
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