Name: The Attempt to Ban the Hunting of Mountain Lions
Uploaded: 2024-02-09T18:42:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Attempt to Ban the Hunting of Mountain Lions' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Attempt to Ban the Hunting of Mountain Lions' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-09. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- It's a crazy time right now,
'cause they are, there is that measure out there.
I think it's a ballot measure.
- It is.
- Yeah, where they're trying to, they're calling,
they want to label lion hunting as trophy hunting.
And look, there's a guy there who's very passionate,
he's been doing a lot of good work,
his name's Dan Gates with Colorado
for Responsible Wildlife Management.
- For people listening who don't know what we're talking about,
we should say mountain lion.
- Mountain lion, yeah, right.
- Well, all good.
- They say mountain lion, bobcat, and then lynx.
- They throw in lynx, which you can't hunt for anyways.
- Yeah, it's not even.
- To create this idea that, yeah.
- It's not even legal,
but they love putting this trophy hunting moniker out there
because it's really easy to hate trophy hunting.
- Right.
- Which isn't even legal.
You can't even, they make it,
I read this article from Colorado Sun or something like that,
where it's like, they want to eliminate people
who kill mountain lions and just go cut their head off
and just take the, it's like.
- Who fucking does that?
- Nobody does that.
- But people who don't know think,
oh my God, that's despicable.
Let's outlaw this.
- We need to serve them some mountain lions.
- Yeah, what the aim here is that,
is the attempt to create a legal term,
the attempt to create trophy hunting as a legal term.
When you have a ballot measure,
both sides argue about the language.
Like when voters go in, what are they gonna read?
Obviously you could write any ballot.
If you could just write the ballot initiative
how you wanted it to, you'd win every time.
But people gotta debate the wording.
- That's what they did with the wolf thing.
- Yeah.
- Did you read the wolf thing?
- I never actually read it.
- I couldn't even tell what was for wolves and what wasn't.
- Oh yeah.
- It's like, what the, I don't even know which one I'm against.
It was like forcing, it was should the state,
does the state need to implement a reintroduction
or discovery effort or something like that?
And this is, they're trying to, the debate comes around to,
can you say trophy hunting?
- Yeah.
- In a ballot measure?
'Cause if they can, if you can-
- Set the precedent.
- If you can use that, what a great tool.
- 'Cause people are gonna say, oh, I don't agree with that.
You know, I don't agree with that kind of hunting.
- Right.
- Which would have widespread implications
because as demonstrated here with this deer here,
there's a lot of parts of it that I don't throw away
and I keep sitting around.
- Yeah.
- So is this a trophy or is it an emblem
or what the hell is it?
- Right.
- But if I kept it, does that mean
that I'm now captured under your definition?
- Right, right, yeah.
What is trophy hunting?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, and then the bringing in the wolves thing
is pretty wild because there's no precedent.
They really don't understand like-
- Oh, there's precedent.
- Well, obviously with Montana, with Yellowstone.
- Idaho's Frank Church, Yellowstone.
- But long-term, I mean, we've only been since the 1990s.
- Yeah.
- Like there's a reason why they eradicated wolves.
I don't agree with it, but when you have ranchers
and you have all these people that they're living,
based entirely on the stock that they have
and whether or not they make money enough
to keep their farm running or not
is depending upon how many animals they bring to market.
And then you have wolves and you just bring in wolves.
- Yeah, well, so there's a, if I got the tinfoil hat on,
they want to eliminate hunting.
I mean, they want to eliminate hunting and ranching.
So they don't care about ranchers losing their animals.
They would love people just to be 100% consumers,
relying on the government so they can control them.
They say, here's your food, here's what you're getting.
You're getting it from us.
You're not out there hunting it for yourself.
They hate hunters.
If I was thinking about, you know, the governor of Colorado,
which is Polis, his husband is anti-hunting.
- Yeah, he's an animal rights activist.
- That's where all this is coming from.
So, but if you look at the bigger picture,
hunters, they cannot stand,
hunters are usually capable, confident.
You know, they have a skill set.
You can't control people like that.
They want people, government wants people they can control.
They'll be afraid when they're supposed to be afraid.
Wear this mask when we tell you.
Get this shot when we tell you.
Here's you, you get your food from the store.
Here it is.
And I think there's certainly an element of that.
- Hunters are the opposite of that.
- Yeah, I think there's certainly an element of that,
but I think it really all boils down to people that love animals.
- Yeah, I think there's, I definitely detect
that there's a complete disinterest in what hunters think about it.
And they think that that for someone to come in and argue by doing this
wildlife measure,
you're impacting, like you would like this animal on the landscape for viewing
pleasure.
I like certain animals on the landscape for hunting, consumption, eating,
whatever.
And there's a conflict here where by doing this, you're going to lower my,
by increasing your likelihood of having viewer pleasure,
you're having a potentially really negative impact on my use of natural
resources.
I think that they would look at you as though you don't have a,
that you're ridiculous or evil or don't have a point in saying that you want to
control,
you want to limit predation on a resource you rely on.
And they, they don't accept that as a reality.
Uh, it's, it, I, I, I haven't encountered a lot of like really, really forceful
wolf advocates that are serious hunters.
There is a, there's a trend there, you know, the thing that, that, that
bothered me about the bothered me most about the Colorado reintroduction is
that while the ballot measure was going forward,
wolf showed up on their own, I would have imagined, even if I was on, and I'm
not anti-wolf, but, uh, when they showed up on their own, I don't even know if
it's legally possible.
I would have halted that whole thing because the social friction is so much
less if they walk in on their own.
Uh, Diane Boyd, who is the Montana wolf specialist for many years, um, she even
came to believe in hindsight that the, the Idaho, Montana reintroductions
ultimately would have been unnecessary and that you would have gradually
achieved the same thing with wolves walking in on their own and had a very
different societal perception of what was going on.
Like people would look at it as a natural, like a natural dispersal, a natural
occurrence and not a government action.
Right.
Yeah.
But I think they wanted that pomp and circumstance.
Like Polis was there, I think when they released the wolves.
Oh yeah.
With a big stupid smile on his face.
Yeah.
They, they want everybody else, all the biologists all had this, like, what are
we doing?
And he was like, yay.
Yeah.
They wanted, right.
They wanted that, you know, and if they knew the truth of how nature balances
itself, it doesn't really balance it over, you know, predators kill way too
many prey animals.
Cause there is no tag limits.
They're not like, for example, they talk about trophy hunting lions to mountain
lions to hunt in Colorado.
You have to take, it's very regulated.
You take this test.
So you learn how to identify a tom and a female, you learn how to age a little
bit, you know, based on the coloring you learned, you know, what size of track.
So there's, you have to go through this before you hunt.
And the whole quota system.
The quota, like, yeah.
So the quota where I was in the unit I was hunting was, uh, 34 lions every
night after five, you call in to see what the, where we're at.
When I got there, it was at 31.
I was there for six days.
It was up to, uh, it was 34 was a limit.
It was up to 33.
So one more lion could get killed and then it's done.
So it's not like what happens if like you kill the same, you're in the woods,
no signal.
Yeah.
And someone else kills too.
Yeah.
It's 36.
It could.
That's why you check in 24.
There's a window after five.
Yeah.
So I think, I think it'll usually click in like a 24 hour clock or maybe they
might've been immediate.
I don't know.
It was, they have, you have 48 hours to turn it in there.
And, um, but anyway, point is you're not over harvesting.
You know, the, the estimate goes up to as high as 7,000 mountain lions in
Colorado, probably
maybe, maybe 5,000, but in the whole state, hunters are allowed to kill 450 and
they've
been doing this.
And it's not like they're out there killing mountain lions, cutting their heads
off, no
regard for the numbers, wiping them out.
It's so regulated.
You know, you don't have to call and, and, uh, report your deer and elk, but
lions are
like a whole nother level as far as control.
And think about that quota system.
If you have a horrific snowstorm that pushes all kinds of deer and elk out of
high country
and like everybody and his brother, like a perfectly timed snowstorm and
everybody, his brother
is just piling up deer and elk.
They don't go, Oh, shut it down.
Yeah.
They sit back and they'll go like, wow.
Yeah.
Mother load.
What a harvest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But with lions, they would, they would come in and go, Oh, done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they got a, it's a, it's a perpetual motion machine where they've had these,
they've
had a really healthy, stable population, uh, minimum harvest.
Yeah.
That just goes on.
It's under 10% harvest.
That's the thing that we should talk about when, when it comes to these, uh, reintroduction
to predators, which listen, I, I, I fucking love wolves.
I mean, if you look out here, I have all these photos of wolves, it's a long
distance
photos of wolves.
I'm happy that they exist.
I think they're fucking amazing.
I got, I got a big one.
They're probably my favorite on my wall in my living room.
They're probably my favorite animal.
I just think they're the fucking coolest animal of all time.
I really do.
I just look in their eyes, photos of them.
If I come across photos on my Instagram, I'm always like, Holy shit.
Look at that thing.
They're majestic.
Um, but their numbers have to be managed and as uncomfortable as that sounds
for people,
wildlife biologists, they have an understanding of the carrying capacity and
the resources of
the land.
They understand how many hunters there are.
They understand how many, that's how tags are allocated.
It's not a guessing game.
Yeah.
It's the way people need to understand this.
It's like they've, they've done this for a long time.
These people have, you know, painstakingly researched these numbers.
They know exactly what they're doing.
But when it comes to this game of reintroduction of animals, the first step is
they say there's
a carrying capacity for the amount of wolves.
This is the number.
When it gets to that, we will agree to open up a season on wolf hunting.
But every time that happens, there's lawsuits and there's lawsuits to try to
stop that hunt.
And then the wolves get larger and larger.
Yeah.
And then you have larger and larger populations.
I was looking at a graph the other day where they showed reintroduction of
wolves to the
Yellowstone, the amount of elk that existed.
And now the amount of wolves versus the amount of elk.
And it's pretty shocking.
It's a giant drop.
And they're so good at hunting.
They're, they're fucking amazing.
But hunting wolves is insanely difficult.
It's really hard to do.
They're really fucking smart.
They're really aware.
Their senses are light years beyond what we can even physically imagine an
animal to be
capable of doing.
In our minds, like we, we know that deer could, I remember I was watching an
episode of your,
your show where a bear winded you guys like fucking 500 yards or something like
it's incredible.
Their, their noses are fucking amazing.
Their senses are amazing.
I don't think we really, it's almost like looking at the size of the universe.
Like, you know, it's 13 point, whatever, a billion light years across it.
You don't fucking, that's, that's just going in your head.
You know, the amount, the kind of power that the senses of a wolf have, I don't
think we
could even really fathom it.
So our, our thought is people are just going to go in there and wipe out the
wolves like
they did before.
That's just ignorance.
The way they wiped out.
Well, at this point, you can go and say that it's just, that that's not the
reality because
after the, after the delisting in the, in the Northern Rockies, after the delisting,
that didn't happen.
Right.
Right.
Did they ever reach their quotas?
Yeah, they reached quotas.
They, every night, not every night, uh, many nights I'll check and y'all get
notifications.
Like the other night, I got a notification, whatever the hell, 313, whatever it
was, unit
had hit its quota.
Region five, it hit its quota.
I'm talking about in Montana, whatever region hit its quota.
At this point, it's, at this point we've hit at, it is a stable, there's a
stable population
of wolves across a big chunk of range that are managed as a renewable natural
resources,
that are managed as a big game species.
There is no problem.
It still gets litigated all the time, but the whole idea that they're going to
be pushed
back onto the, onto the ESA, on the endangered species list, the state doesn't
want that.
That'd be the worst thing that could happen to the state.
Right.
They're not going to shoot them into oblivion.
Right.
It's like, we have wolves on the landscape and you could have the extremes of
people that
want to live in a world where there aren't any, that's not realistic.
Like you lost that fight.
You have extremes where people want to live in a world where there's as many as
possible
and there's no regulation on them, which isn't extreme because we could live in
that
landscape.
But right now we're living in a landscape where there are wolves on the ground,
there's a
healthy population, there's hunting for them.
There's a, a, a equilibrium emerging and it's very livable, but in Colorado, it's
like you
got hunters that are, if hunters saw that there was a pathway to finding the
extent of
it, they would probably feel a lot better.
But right now they're like, we're going to lose 50% of elk.
We're going to lose 75% of elk.
This is going to get litigated.
It could be a hundred years from now.
We could have 90 years of full recovery objective.
There's still no regulated harvest on wolves and they're apprehensive.

The Attempt to Ban the Hunting of Mountain Lions

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- It's a crazy time right now,
'cause they are, there is that measure out there.
I think it's a ballot measure.
- It is.
- Yeah, where they're trying to, they're calling,
they want to label lion hunting as trophy hunting.
And look, there's a guy there who's very passionate,
he's been doing a lot of good work,
his name's Dan Gates with Colorado
for Responsible Wildlife Management.
- For people listening who don't know what we're talking about,
we should say mountain lion.
- Mountain lion, yeah, right.
- Well, all good.
- They say mountain lion, bobcat, and then lynx.
- They throw in lynx, which you can't hunt for anyways.
- Yeah, it's not even.
- To create this idea that, yeah.
- It's not even legal,
but they love putting this trophy hunting moniker out there
because it's really easy to hate trophy hunting.
- Right.
- Which isn't even legal.
You can't even, they make it,
I read this article from Colorado Sun or something like that,
where it's like, they want to eliminate people
who kill mountain lions and just go cut their head off
and just take the, it's like.
- Who fucking does that?
- Nobody does that.
- But people who don't know think,
oh my God, that's despicable.
Let's outlaw this.
- We need to serve them some mountain lions.
- Yeah, what the aim here is that,
is the attempt to create a legal term,
the attempt to create trophy hunting as a legal term.
When you have a ballot measure,
both sides argue about the language.
Like when voters go in, what are they gonna read?
Obviously you could write any ballot.
If you could just write the ballot initiative
how you wanted it to, you'd win every time.
But people gotta debate the wording.
- That's what they did with the wolf thing.
- Yeah.
- Did you read the wolf thing?
- I never actually read it.
- I couldn't even tell what was for wolves and what wasn't.
- Oh yeah.
- It's like, what the, I don't even know which one I'm against.
It was like forcing, it was should the state,
does the state need to implement a reintroduction
or discovery effort or something like that?
And this is, they're trying to, the debate comes around to,
can you say trophy hunting?
- Yeah.
- In a ballot measure?
'Cause if they can, if you can-
- Set the precedent.
- If you can use that, what a great tool.
- 'Cause people are gonna say, oh, I don't agree with that.
You know, I don't agree with that kind of hunting.
- Right.
- Which would have widespread implications
because as demonstrated here with this deer here,
there's a lot of parts of it that I don't throw away
and I keep sitting around.
- Yeah.
- So is this a trophy or is it an emblem
or what the hell is it?
- Right.
- But if I kept it, does that mean
that I'm now captured under your definition?
- Right, right, yeah.
What is trophy hunting?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, and then the bringing in the wolves thing
is pretty wild because there's no precedent.
They really don't understand like-
- Oh, there's precedent.
- Well, obviously with Montana, with Yellowstone.
- Idaho's Frank Church, Yellowstone.
- But long-term, I mean, we've only been since the 1990s.
- Yeah.
- Like there's a reason why they eradicated wolves.
I don't agree with it, but when you have ranchers
and you have all these people that they're living,
based entirely on the stock that they have
and whether or not they make money enough
to keep their farm running or not
is depending upon how many animals they bring to market.
And then you have wolves and you just bring in wolves.
- Yeah, well, so there's a, if I got the tinfoil hat on,
they want to eliminate hunting.
I mean, they want to eliminate hunting and ranching.
So they don't care about ranchers losing their animals.
They would love people just to be 100% consumers,
relying on the government so they can control them.
They say, here's your food, here's what you're getting.
You're getting it from us.
You're not out there hunting it for yourself.
They hate hunters.
If I was thinking about, you know, the governor of Colorado,
which is Polis, his husband is anti-hunting.
- Yeah, he's an animal rights activist.
- That's where all this is coming from.
So, but if you look at the bigger picture,
hunters, they cannot stand,
hunters are usually capable, confident.
You know, they have a skill set.
You can't control people like that.
They want people, government wants people they can control.
They'll be afraid when they're supposed to be afraid.
Wear this mask when we tell you.
Get this shot when we tell you.
Here's you, you get your food from the store.
Here it is.
And I think there's certainly an element of that.
- Hunters are the opposite of that.
- Yeah, I think there's certainly an element of that,
but I think it really all boils down to people that love animals.
- Yeah, I think there's, I definitely detect
that there's a complete disinterest in what hunters think about it.
And they think that that for someone to come in and argue by doing this
wildlife measure,
you're impacting, like you would like this animal on the landscape for viewing
pleasure.
I like certain animals on the landscape for hunting, consumption, eating,
whatever.
And there's a conflict here where by doing this, you're going to lower my,
by increasing your likelihood of having viewer pleasure,
you're having a potentially really negative impact on my use of natural
resources.
I think that they would look at you as though you don't have a,
that you're ridiculous or evil or don't have a point in saying that you want to
control,
you want to limit predation on a resource you rely on.
And they, they don't accept that as a reality.
Uh, it's, it, I, I, I haven't encountered a lot of like really, really forceful
wolf advocates that are serious hunters.
There is a, there's a trend there, you know, the thing that, that, that
bothered me about the bothered me most about the Colorado reintroduction is
that while the ballot measure was going forward,
wolf showed up on their own, I would have imagined, even if I was on, and I'm
not anti-wolf, but, uh, when they showed up on their own, I don't even know if
it's legally possible.
I would have halted that whole thing because the social friction is so much
less if they walk in on their own.
Uh, Diane Boyd, who is the Montana wolf specialist for many years, um, she even
came to believe in hindsight that the, the Idaho, Montana reintroductions
ultimately would have been unnecessary and that you would have gradually
achieved the same thing with wolves walking in on their own and had a very
different societal perception of what was going on.
Like people would look at it as a natural, like a natural dispersal, a natural
occurrence and not a government action.
Right.
Yeah.
But I think they wanted that pomp and circumstance.
Like Polis was there, I think when they released the wolves.
Oh yeah.
With a big stupid smile on his face.
Yeah.
They, they want everybody else, all the biologists all had this, like, what are
we doing?
And he was like, yay.
Yeah.
They wanted, right.
They wanted that, you know, and if they knew the truth of how nature balances
itself, it doesn't really balance it over, you know, predators kill way too
many prey animals.
Cause there is no tag limits.
They're not like, for example, they talk about trophy hunting lions to mountain
lions to hunt in Colorado.
You have to take, it's very regulated.
You take this test.
So you learn how to identify a tom and a female, you learn how to age a little
bit, you know, based on the coloring you learned, you know, what size of track.
So there's, you have to go through this before you hunt.
And the whole quota system.
The quota, like, yeah.
So the quota where I was in the unit I was hunting was, uh, 34 lions every
night after five, you call in to see what the, where we're at.
When I got there, it was at 31.
I was there for six days.
It was up to, uh, it was 34 was a limit.
It was up to 33.
So one more lion could get killed and then it's done.
So it's not like what happens if like you kill the same, you're in the woods,
no signal.
Yeah.
And someone else kills too.
Yeah.
It's 36.
It could.
That's why you check in 24.
There's a window after five.
Yeah.
So I think, I think it'll usually click in like a 24 hour clock or maybe they
might've been immediate.
I don't know.
It was, they have, you have 48 hours to turn it in there.
And, um, but anyway, point is you're not over harvesting.
You know, the, the estimate goes up to as high as 7,000 mountain lions in
Colorado, probably
maybe, maybe 5,000, but in the whole state, hunters are allowed to kill 450 and
they've
been doing this.
And it's not like they're out there killing mountain lions, cutting their heads
off, no
regard for the numbers, wiping them out.
It's so regulated.
You know, you don't have to call and, and, uh, report your deer and elk, but
lions are
like a whole nother level as far as control.
And think about that quota system.
If you have a horrific snowstorm that pushes all kinds of deer and elk out of
high country
and like everybody and his brother, like a perfectly timed snowstorm and
everybody, his brother
is just piling up deer and elk.
They don't go, Oh, shut it down.
Yeah.
They sit back and they'll go like, wow.
Yeah.
Mother load.
What a harvest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But with lions, they would, they would come in and go, Oh, done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they got a, it's a, it's a perpetual motion machine where they've had these,
they've
had a really healthy, stable population, uh, minimum harvest.
Yeah.
That just goes on.
It's under 10% harvest.
That's the thing that we should talk about when, when it comes to these, uh, reintroduction
to predators, which listen, I, I, I fucking love wolves.
I mean, if you look out here, I have all these photos of wolves, it's a long
distance
photos of wolves.
I'm happy that they exist.
I think they're fucking amazing.
I got, I got a big one.
They're probably my favorite on my wall in my living room.
They're probably my favorite animal.
I just think they're the fucking coolest animal of all time.
I really do.
I just look in their eyes, photos of them.
If I come across photos on my Instagram, I'm always like, Holy shit.
Look at that thing.
They're majestic.
Um, but their numbers have to be managed and as uncomfortable as that sounds
for people,
wildlife biologists, they have an understanding of the carrying capacity and
the resources of
the land.
They understand how many hunters there are.
They understand how many, that's how tags are allocated.
It's not a guessing game.
Yeah.
It's the way people need to understand this.
It's like they've, they've done this for a long time.
These people have, you know, painstakingly researched these numbers.
They know exactly what they're doing.
But when it comes to this game of reintroduction of animals, the first step is
they say there's
a carrying capacity for the amount of wolves.
This is the number.
When it gets to that, we will agree to open up a season on wolf hunting.
But every time that happens, there's lawsuits and there's lawsuits to try to
stop that hunt.
And then the wolves get larger and larger.
Yeah.
And then you have larger and larger populations.
I was looking at a graph the other day where they showed reintroduction of
wolves to the
Yellowstone, the amount of elk that existed.
And now the amount of wolves versus the amount of elk.
And it's pretty shocking.
It's a giant drop.
And they're so good at hunting.
They're, they're fucking amazing.
But hunting wolves is insanely difficult.
It's really hard to do.
They're really fucking smart.
They're really aware.
Their senses are light years beyond what we can even physically imagine an
animal to be
capable of doing.
In our minds, like we, we know that deer could, I remember I was watching an
episode of your,
your show where a bear winded you guys like fucking 500 yards or something like
it's incredible.
Their, their noses are fucking amazing.
Their senses are amazing.
I don't think we really, it's almost like looking at the size of the universe.
Like, you