Jace Elliott (0:00): Jace Elliott, Iowa's State Deer Biologist, and this is the Prairie Farm Podcast. I'm Mark.

Kent Boucher (0:05): I'm Dr. Julie Meechan. I'm Steve Hansen. I'm Jill Bebout. Chad Gravy. My name is Jeremy French. Laura Walter. Carol Hoxbergen, owner of Hoxie Native Seeds, and this is the Prairie Farm Podcast. This is Hal Herring, Backcountry Hudders and Anglers Podcast.

Nicolas Lirio (0:22): Skip Sly, Iowa, Whitetail, Ballon.

Jace Elliott (0:24): Van Coten, State Historical Society of Iowa. Doctor Matt Helmer's at Iowa State University.

Kent Boucher (0:29): My name's Kyle Native Habitat Project.

Nicolas Lirio (0:30): With the

Jace Elliott (0:32): I'm Jud McCullum. I appeared out of the wilderness and this is the Prairie Farm Podcast. Welcome to Prairie Farm Podcast.

Kent Boucher (0:38): The Purry Pond.

Nicolas Lirio (0:40): I want to tell you a little story about our team here at Hoxy Native Seeds. Years ago, years ago, my dad and I were talking. What is the point of this company? We knew that it was conservation. We knew that we were growing seed to help people, but we we didn't know where we were going, what we wanted to actually do. Did we want to mostly plant on other people's land? Did we want to mostly grow native seed with high high quality ecotypes? Did we want to mostly consult with people? We didn't quite know. So we we spent months, literally months. Boiling it down. And we came up with this goal: that we want to provide education and native seed for landowners and land managers who care about their neighbors, their investment, and the wildlife around them. Now, of course, with education, you can go to hoxynative seeds.com and we've got a huge native plant database. We've got a learning center, we've got tons of podcasts that you can listen to to learn some of the stuff from the foremost experts. But for the native seed, that's actually what pays the bills on everything else. So if you need native seed or guidance on your native seed journey, planting a prairie or a wetland or a savanna mix or even a shady mix, remember our goal is to help you not just with the native seed, but we want to educate you every step of the way. So we're not just gonna ship you seed and ghost you afterwards. We're gonna take care of you. We have people that call three, four, five years later with management questions, and we're here to answer them. That's what we want to do, but it's all paid for. Buy the native seed sale. So go to Hoxenative Seeds dot com and we'll talk to you soon.

Kent Boucher (2:10): Nick, what's the best smelling prairie flower? Cause I have one that is not the best smelling that you guys brought to me here. Nice little grape grape blue lobelia.

Nicolas Lirio (2:12): Best smelling?

Nicolas Lirio (2:21): Silky Wild Rye feels silky wild rye's cool cause like after we harvest it and mow it, like a bunch of other stuff comes up because it's so late in the year. what is the best smelling? I like common mountain mint before it flowers. After it flowers, the smell is so strong it like bothers my nose a little bit, but before it's a lot more faint. I like

Kent Boucher (2:41): I nearly killed one of our summer helpers with that really strong smell. Turns out he was allergic. I was like, Here, smell this and it didn't he say his eyes like swelled over that night or something like Ezra.

Nicolas Lirio (2:52): maybe yeah. Yeah he poor Ezra developed

Kent Boucher (2:58): Ezra allergies, he's aka Isabel. Long story. but that I've I'm still holding steady with rattlesnake master. That that to me is the the best smelling one.

Nicolas Lirio (3:05): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (3:11): I don't understand like so Judd's trying to make a anti deer mix. You think this would work? The he was like, Don't don't mind what it smells like. Just put the strongest smelling plants you can in a mix. You think that would keep deer from traversing through it? My thought is that there's so little life in certain areas that if you just like put a bunch of prairie and pollinator there, they'll be attracted to it no matter what. I don't know.

Jace Elliott (3:36): I don't know. I'm not prone to saying that that would make a big difference, but but maybe it would.

Nicolas Lirio (3:46): There's all these websites that say like, this is an anti D or I I don't yeah. I I've I feel like

Jace Elliott (3:49): Sure.

Kent Boucher (3:52): Deer in the right through America.

Jace Elliott (3:53): My understanding is that there's a lot of snake oil being sold in in terms of deer repellents. Just based on what I've heard from producers that have tried you know.

Nicolas Lirio (4:05): Hey, beat us up a little bit. What do you think? I I know you probably haven't like gone through species by species what's in our deer mixes, but in general, our deer food plot perennial food plot mix is very diverse, heavy on Yeah. I think that that's

Jace Elliott (4:19): Heavy on legooms, great. That two most important components I'd look for. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (4:26): Interesting. You're well I you're welcome to and then the habitat piece is just like diverse but taller grass.

Jace Elliott (4:32): Vertical structure for bedding. Yeah, perfect. I was just walking through a a brand new C R P planting over this last weekend. It was planted on some new public ground and the amount of deer beds I saw were crazy. I didn't kick any up, but it was evident that there were deer beds every five feet. and it it was really cool to see. Were you

Nicolas Lirio (4:35): Okay.

Nicolas Lirio (4:51): You hear that year that we were we were chasing a quite a buck on our farm in the I think it was a switchgrass field. We were literally like we

Kent Boucher (5:03): I almost killed that buck. We were killing I was five minutes too late. I shall I tell the story?

Nicolas Lirio (5:08): Yeah. Yeah, let me tell the story here real quick and and that so we were combining this field and this buck wanted to be in the switchgrass so bad that when we were coming up to his spot he would get up and he'd go somewhere else. It was like a thirty five acre field, it wasn't monstrous, and he would just go somewhere else in the field. And then we'd get to that point and he'd get up and go. Yeah. Apparently now it is it is tucked away. You can't see a road from in that spot. You really gotta drive into the farm. So but I You know, to me that's when I was like, Okay, we got something the deer hunters want, I just don't know what it is 'cause I don't hunt deer.

Kent Boucher (5:44): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I almost I almost killed that deer. I need to silence my phone here, sorry. check this picture out, guys, by the way. This is CRP. I got this trail camera picture this last spring, I think it says on the date. You can't they're not gonna be to you gotta look at it closely. It gets better and better and better. Wow. As you the closer you look at it, the more the longer secret spot.

Nicolas Lirio (6:09): Where is that? Is that burquettes or

Jace Elliott (6:12): Just a conveyor belt of deer coming through there.

Kent Boucher (6:15): That's just just start counting Nick. Uno, twice, quattro, cinco, six, si, epic.

Nicolas Lirio (6:25): There's at least eight.

Kent Boucher (6:27): I think I counted ten. Wow. I don't know that I've ever had a a trail camera picture that that I've had that I mean and it's on wide frame here it fills up the entire frame.

Nicolas Lirio (6:29): Yeah they

Jace Elliott (6:40): Yeah, this time of year for deer to be traveling in that big of a group is pretty special.

Kent Boucher (6:44): Well this this was let's see. This was this was January sixth.

Jace Elliott (6:50): Okay. That makes more sense. Yeah, the lack of snow threw me off. But yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's a

Kent Boucher (6:54): And it was someone go I've had thirty deer. This was a angled to you know, it was on like a little hillside looking down and these deer are within all ten of these deer are within ten yards, maybe fifteen yards of the camera. I mean, just packed into the frame. That's cool. That was pretty cool. And it was all in prairie there.

Nicolas Lirio (7:15): You guys understand trail cams better than I do. Judd swears to me that trail cam I wanna do this thing where we take a really good prairie and we take a picture of her every hour for like three straight months. And he's like, No, trail cameras are like high end ones are good enough where it wouldn't be like a, you know, beautiful H D professional photographer, but you'd have high quality pictures. Well they actually

Kent Boucher (7:40): Actually. I've never spent the money on that nice of a on that nice of a trail camera, but probably three hundred three hundred dollars maybe. I mean it'd probably like a Spartan or a

Nicolas Lirio (7:46): Money is that.

Nicolas Lirio (7:50): I feel like to have a really cool summer project

Jace Elliott (7:56): Reconics is pretty top of line. Yeah. yeah, I mean I feel like every year they come out with better cameras just like our cellphones do. Yeah. So it's all relative in terms of what's good.

Kent Boucher (8:05): Wilkerson, s you're a Spartan camera guy. Send us some send us some footage, buddy.

Nicolas Lirio (8:10): Yeah, I I wanna know because if it really does work, even on our farm, on individual fields, wouldn't it be so awesome to just like set one up on the edge of a field and just put it on a solar thing and have it

Kent Boucher (8:21): is something there is something about trail cameras that it's just fun to check them. You know what I mean? My my my brother, he bought a property in Illinois recently and he has a cell camera that he checks every morning. Whenever there's something cool, he sends it to us, Bobcats, you know, nice bucks, maybe a a donut or something, you know, some other I think he had one of a Like a raptor like swooping in towards his camera to like grab a squirrel off the tree or something, you know. Just just cool it's just it's just fun to check.

Nicolas Lirio (8:57): I d I do I do not understand them by my but they're getting kind of intense. It used to be you have to literally go to your trail cam and now they just send photos to your phone. and which actually interesting. I I didn't bring up the trail cam thing with Judd w we were talking about earlier today, but it is on our things to talk about. I do not know how big of a can of worms I'm about to open. I have asked some of my friends who are deer hunter on both public and private.

Kent Boucher (9:05): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (9:18): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (9:25): what they think of it. Mm-hmm. DNR. Banning trail camps on public ground.

Jace Elliott (9:29): Yep. Yeah, and it's a done deal. I think that, you know, had we talked about this a month ago, it would have been in the proposed category. But at this point in time, rules made it through the rulemaking process and to take place. The effective date is gonna be February first, twenty twenty seven. So anybody listening to this during the twenty twenty six deer season in Iowa, this will be the last year where trail cameras are allowed on public public land.

Kent Boucher (9:43): For next season though, right?

Kent Boucher (9:57): Technically you can bring one with you while you're hunting, but you have to bring it back with you when you're done hunting, right?

Jace Elliott (10:05): That's incorrect. So that's a misconception. Okay. and the the there is a basis for that misconception. and that's because years ago when we were looking into this topic, we thought that perhaps based on existing language, before making a formal rule change, there was already a a a basis for s because trail cameras weren't explicitly allowed for use, the assumption was that all equipment other than tree stands had to be removed with you, with your person off of public land. But because it wasn't explicitly stated there, we decided to kind of back off of that. and then spend honestly two or three years collecting feedback from hunters on the potential rule change. So that's a really important part of this is that pursuing a trail camera ban on public land was in large part a response to feedback we were hearing from public land hunters and public land users over years. On top of that In the early twenty twenties, which is a weird thing to say. there was a lot of states out west that began this road basically banning trail cameras in some fashion, sometimes on public, sometimes on public and private, sometimes during the hunting season, sometimes all year. states like I believe Utah, Arizona, and then other mountain states as well. So we kind of noticed that in our department. Okay, there's There's something happening west of us and I think it would be a good idea for us to understand the issue here in Iowa. And that required a a lot of surveys, meetings, and and just making sure that we had a good grasp on what our hunters wanted to see.

Nicolas Lirio (11:43): What did they want to see? Like like what was there a lot of hey, no, we want we want trail cameras or

Jace Elliott (11:48): That was always the minority opinion. So we collected that exact data point at least three different times throughout the last couple years. at in person meetings, at mailed surveys, online surveys, and all of the results always pointed to a majority of hunters, general hunters, even public land hunters. In fact, when you get into the public land hunter category, it becomes even stronger. That you see public land hunters saying, Yeah, we we would prefer to see no trail cameras on public land, even if a lot of those folks use them themselves. So that gave us a a good basis to move forward with it. I don't know that we would have if it was evident that a majority of people wanted them.

Nicolas Lirio (12:29): I feel like it would add like so much anxiety when you're if you're chasing a big buck on your camera because you know eighteen other people have it on their camera as well. But like I would rather just go in and and like have the handicap that everyone else has as opposed to like not exactly pay to win. But it almost feels that way. Like who's got the most money with the most cameras and the you know?

Jace Elliott (13:00): I think the the real reason, the the the main primary motivation behind going through with this, which again is predicated on what we were hearing from hunters, is that it's ruining the public land experience to see the proliferation of this specific equipment all over our public lands. Now in Iowa, three percent of our land is is public, right? We don't have a lot of it. And that means that we have a lot of public land users on very little space. And that's very evident when you can see sometimes a dozen or more trail cameras just walking to your stand, right? That is a detrimental it's a detriment to the public land experience as far as, you know, we heard from our hunters.

Nicolas Lirio (13:41): You're looking for trail cameras. Facebook marketplace in March twenty twenty seven.

Kent Boucher (13:45): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (13:47): Especially like

Jace Elliott (13:48): Iowa. You're probably right. And I shouldn't laugh because, you know, we don't take it lightly that this isn't the most popular to certain people. Now again, we know that there are a minority of people out there that are upset about this, but it's still not something we take lightly. I think it's important to understand that for a lot of people this was an important part of the whole hunting process. But at the end of the day, it's it's degrading the experience overall that folks can have on public land and And part of our responsibility is not just managing the resources, it's managing the experience around the resource.

Kent Boucher (14:19): Mm. So something that when I when this was brought up and this has been a a topic now for probably getting close to five years. Because Arizona did they lead the pack with Arizona did an outright ban, I think, period, right? On

Jace Elliott (14:29): I would say so. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (14:38): First.

Jace Elliott (14:39): I don't know who was first, but it originated, I believe, in the southwest.

Kent Boucher (14:42): I think I think Montana or Utah either had they had some law that was you could run them but not during the season or something. There there's like a there there's some kind of distinction like that. Yeah. And Arizona, I believe, was the first to do the outright no more trail cameras. I don't know if that includes private land or if it's just public land, but they just they just said no more trail cameras from from what I've heard and I talked to somebody, yeah, Steve Hansen. We talked to to Steve who's hunted he's hunted off down there and he talked about how yes, on a water hole, which is a very limited resource in the arid southwest, there'd be dozens of trail cameras around one little mud puddle, you know? And and

Nicolas Lirio (15:37): And people would come and check on their cameras. Well, if you have one person it's not a big deal, but if you have twenty five cameras now you've got someone there every other day and now the life the wildlife's scared away.

Kent Boucher (15:47): Yeah, they don't want to get a drink. And and then

Nicolas Lirio (15:50): Having a trail cam and you get thirty photos a month but they're all of a person checking a different trail cam at that

Kent Boucher (15:56): Well there there was even a business, you probably remember this, Jace. There was a business, I won't name them. and I don't I don't hold anything against them. I think it was they were just being opportunistic with what what cell cameras allowed for. They would plaster cameras all over I think it was mostly just in elk country and mule deer country. And you could buy

Nicolas Lirio (16:23): my goodness.

Kent Boucher (16:24): Pay to have access to these files and files you know, like, hey, I'm gonna go hunt unit whatever. Wow. And you know, you get a subscription to this company and they would okay, you're going to unit, you know, ninety five, here's here's what we have for all of these different areas. And so in a way you're almost like buying coordinates. Yes.

Jace Elliott (16:44): That's happened in Iowa. Yeah, yeah. What happened there? Well, you know, not to get into any specifics, but but the same concept where people are basically selling trail camera data to other folks.

Kent Boucher (16:46): yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (16:57): Is that legal?

Jace Elliott (17:00): Well, it's not anymore. On public land. Now you know, it's a different thing on private land, right? Because that's not a shared space. It's not subject to the same tragedy of the commons principles. and that's why it's a public land rule and not a overarching rule.

Nicolas Lirio (17:17): Because it's n less about the deer and more about

Jace Elliott (17:19): It's not about harvest management, right? And I think that's a misconception that I'm happy to clear up on here. a lot of folks say the DNR is trying to handicap deer hunters to make it more difficult, like nothing of the sort. I'm not convinced that it's actually easier to kill deer with a trail camera. I think it adds to some extent some enjoyment to the whole process when it's done independ you yourself, you know, but on public land that's a different story. But it's not about changing harvest rates, vulnerability, anything like that. It's about cultivating a better experience where you can walk into a piece of public land and not not get reminded every twenty yards that there are a lot of other people out here hunting the same property. it it fundamentally changes your relationship with that land. and and I certainly feel that personal

Kent Boucher (18:04): Tell you what else it changes with the land is peeing in the woods, man. You gotta be so you gotta be so careful.

Jace Elliott (18:09): Yeah, that's the last red that's the last red light you wanna see in the dark when you're answering your head. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (18:15): How many cameras are you on P and like w what's your guess?

Kent Boucher (18:18): I'm I'm hoping I'm still at zero. And I and I mostly hunt privately. I do hunt I do hunt a fair bit of public, but I mostly hunt private. But along well, let me ask this. You bring up a good little fun topic there. And and I heard a conversation on this was several years ago on the Meteor Podcast, and it was Tony Peterson, one of my most respected voices in deer hunting world. which do you think you would if you had to say what impacts harvest more? What modern tool? He was talking about a pile of corn versus a onyx subscription. But I would I would just say onyx versus trail camera or or Spartan Forge or you know what other mapping. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (19:08): Okay.

Kent Boucher (19:18): we'll name all here 'cause we don't have an official partnership with any

Nicolas Lirio (19:22): But we'd be willing to cut the rest of the

Kent Boucher (19:24): Which do you think is a greater advantage? Hmm. A trail camera? And we'll even say that can include a cell camera or or a a mapping app.

Nicolas Lirio (19:27): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (19:41): Okay. So from a harvest success standpoint, you know, that's something I haven't considered much, right? So this is kind of an off the cuff answer. But I would say

Kent Boucher (19:44): Yes, yep.

Jace Elliott (19:53): A mapping app that shows you where you stand and and lets you see terrain features that you're not visiting in mixed with a reasonable amount of woodsmanship is a far better package for harvesting deer than having trail cameras, in my opinion. And I think that actually in my experience now personally, this might not be true for everyone, but I've found that I have a more successful season and more fun when I'm not using trail cameras. And I'm a public land hunter and I've I spent my early years using trail cameras. I relied on them heavily for my decisions on where I was going to hunt. And since stopping using them, which I did on my own years ago, shortly after moving to Iowa, I have much more fun coming into an area that I scouted maybe, maybe not, but just observing sign, fresh sign, reading the woods and making decisions based off of that real data instead of just kind of being like, well, you know, I get pictures of deer every day on this camera, so I'm just gonna sit right above it. And it's it's a lot more fun for me. I don't know that everyone would have that same experience, but I've certainly enjoyed kind of leaving that technology out of the equation.

Kent Boucher (20:56): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (21:05): I got a question. I got a question. I got I got a friend, we've talked about him here on the podcast, a good friend of mine, his name's Nick. And his family have some ground in southern Iowa. They hunt there. And he told years ago, he said, My older brother is an incredible hunter. Well, what the heck does that mean? What he meant was that so Nick cannot sit still. His older brother can get up in a tree stand before the sun comes up and sit there until after the sun goes down and not move all day.

Kent Boucher (21:33): Could you do that? Could you physically do that?

Nicolas Lirio (21:35): You would it would take so much money for me to do that. Would you and I would have to go in having not eaten for twelve days. Like it would be very difficult.

Kent Boucher (21:45): So so if you if you it's the best Saturday of the year, your wife is going to an anime renaissance fair.

Nicolas Lirio (21:56): I don't wanna be watching the anime on the couch.

Kent Boucher (21:59): Whatever. Okay. The the most perfect Saturday ever. But you have to sit in a tree stand and it's thirty degrees. it's it's twenty degrees when you get in the tree stand, thirty d thirty two degrees that for the high that day and twenty five degrees by the time that and whatever gear I regular hunting gear. W you could do warm hunting gear, whatever, but you gotta sit in the tree stand, no cellphone for

Nicolas Lirio (22:22): But it has to be out in the open.

Kent Boucher (22:32): Of dark to dark sit. Would you do it for ten thousand dollars?

Nicolas Lirio (22:34): Okay.

Kent Boucher (22:39): Yeah, I do it for time. See, it's not that bad.

Nicolas Lirio (22:41): But it's it's one day, you know.

Kent Boucher (22:45): Be doing some funky stuff by the end of that day. Knowing you and you have to be quiet you have to be quiet enough that you gotta be quiet. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (22:50): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (22:55): Man

Nicolas Lirio (22:55): I I my concern is I would like start moving and whistling before I even realize it. You know what I mean? So but the point is Nick to Nick, that's an incredible hunter. Just someone who can patiently put the hours in, wait for a deer. From from the whitetail biologist of Iowa, what does an incredible deer hunter even mean?

Kent Boucher (23:02): You could not handle it. There's just no way you

Jace Elliott (23:18): Yeah, well, okay, so a lot of relative success in deer hunting comes from the place that you're hunting, right? Like if you're hunting in Iowa with the same skill set as somebody that's hunting in, let's say Alabama where I came from. not where I came from, but where I lived for a few years, I deer hunted there, right? And it's a very different level of quality just due to the landscape, the latitude, all kinds of different factors, genetic factors, nutritional factors.

Nicolas Lirio (23:46): Is it a management thing? Could they manage their deer to even get to a hundred and seventy to two hundred?

Jace Elliott (23:51): No, not like not like in Iowa. I remember like the stage is set here to to grow big bucks, and it is not set that way in most of the deep south. There's exceptions, and I've I've seen some boon and crockett deer taken down there, but very few. And I'm not even sure that they would act you know, we're talking about gross score here. So now it's a really fun place to hunt, but if you're coming down there with Iowa standards, you're not gonna get very excited at the quality of deer. I had a lot of fun hunting down there. But what I'm getting at is a lot of A lot of, you know, skill sometimes gets conflated with with where you are, maybe, right? So if you're again, if you have the same skill set, somebody's gonna look a lot better in in Iowa just because of where they're hunting and the the deer herd around them. But in terms of what skills actually translate to success, I would say adaptability and persistence and patience, insight into deer behavior, and that's like a really complicated subject because it changes with the season, it changes with the landscape, it changes with relative pressure, private versus public. simply owning big piece of land in certain places of this state can pretty much set you up to shoot slammer bucks every year without maybe a lot of skill and and I don't mean that as a slight, but there is just different opportunities in different parts of the world.

Nicolas Lirio (25:12): It feels like, and this is just my observation on Facebook and you know, hanging out with people that do a lot of hunting. Feels like there's a gradient, and on one very far end of the gradient, you're killing bucks in captivity that have the weird like antlers that's kind of gross. And then on the other side, it's like someone with no shirt and shoes going out there with a bow and like, you know, killing it. And then and and then but then like kind of in the middle, there's like Managing your farm well, you know, having good habitat, that kind of stuff. And it's like Is that hunting, you know, you're almost kinda

Kent Boucher (25:47): I think people find ways to to l level up to where they find their right amount of difficulty but attainability. You know what I mean? Like like I could right now say, you know what? There are states where you are allowed I think Nebraska, you're allowed to kill a deer with a s a spear. You know, you could I could be like, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna I'm gonna only I'm I'm gonna hunt until I get a boon and crocket buck with a spear. That's not attainable for me. I'm terrible at climbing trees.

Nicolas Lirio (26:23): Wait, you can't hunt deer with a spear in Iowa?

Jace Elliott (26:26): No, I know you can in Arkansas and a few other states.

Nicolas Lirio (26:29): Harder to do?

Kent Boucher (26:31): Unless you can throw out a bait pile then

Jace Elliott (26:35): Usually the spears are dropped from I'm not, you know, weighing in on that topic. We probably have enough hot, but

Kent Boucher (26:42): Right, right, right. But but the point or even say this instead of a spear, we'll say you know a traditional they call it trad bow, right? Recurve self-bow, something like that. I could say I'm gonna go and do that. here'd be a difficult one. I'm gonna go to northern Wisconsin, far northern Wisconsin, or the UP of Michigan, far northern Minnesota, very few deer, very, very dear.

Jace Elliott (26:45): They're not they're not thrown. Let's put it that way.

Kent Boucher (27:11): Dense adverse terrain and habitat to fight in or fighting, hunting and this isn't the revolutionary war here. and I'm gonna go and I'm not gonna rest till I I shoot a boon and crocket buck up there. That's not attainable for me. I'm not I'm not gonna do that. So I find some level. But it people who are like really into it, they find a level what that is it pushes them but is a attainable. I find. So there's some so I think there the there are the guys that do that. They do go up to these that are it's not like they're seeking it out necessarily, it's just where they live and that's where they hunt and they and they do incredibly difficult things. But at the same time, a lot of those guys are Yeah, he's he's one of the best deer hunters in the world in my opinion.

Nicolas Lirio (27:58): And I we interviewed.

Nicolas Lirio (28:03): Só voy a dizer

Jace Elliott (28:03): So I think I think what it means is if you can take someone and put in a new area that they've never stepped foot in and they have very little information on and they can find success there, that's a mark of skill. Right? Okay. Much more than finding consistent success in an area that is just providing a lot of opportunity.

Nicolas Lirio (28:20): Yeah, yeah. Can you go and get the best deer in an area?

Kent Boucher (28:24): Yeah, Andy Mae has tra traveled to to many different states, many different how would you say, ecosystems, biomes, and he consistently comes home heavy with a big animal too.

Nicolas Lirio (28:38): So so Andy May, he reached out, he got some s this was years ago. And I w I can't remember what but I was like, Yeah, I was on the phone with Andy or Andy May I gotta get some switchcrass and Kent lit up like a little He's like one of the best hunters and and he would say that I like, What does that mean? you know?

Kent Boucher (28:49): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (28:56): And I should and I should put a caveat on anybody that I I say that about. One of the best hunters that is known. Because there are guys who are incr I mean stone cold killers that nobody knows who they are. They they just they and they don't want to be known. They they they're not on social media, they're not so I mean there's there's guys I I always leave that door open for whoever I think is the best. There could be another guy out there who's just as good or even better.

Nicolas Lirio (29:23): Best hunter you know, white white tail hunter.

Jace Elliott (29:26): Man, so I think one of my best friends, his name is Alex Marg, okay, and he's not a public person, doesn't have any profiles, so you won't be able to find anything about him. But this guy spends a ton of time in the woods. Like, it's his life when this time of year comes around. And he's hunting in a very difficult part of the state in Wisconsin, where both of us just so happen to have had family land and became friends and found that out later and then did a lot of hunting together and and so on. but he spends a lot of time and he hasn't killed a ton of big deer, but he's killed he's gotten on a lot of big deer and that's a very impressive thing to do in that part of the state. And I would say that the the difficulty level of hunting that landscape is so much higher than practically anywhere in the state of Iowa that I know guys who kill big deer down here, but it's a different it's a different set of demands than what it takes to do

Nicolas Lirio (30:22): I like there should be like weighted scores. You how they have weighted GPS?

Kent Boucher (30:25): There was a guy I interviewed on first gen four years five years ago now. He has passed away since he died when he was thirty five years old. He had he had this incredibly rare bone cancer in his knee. It started in his knee. It was like a it was a actually like a juvenile type cancer usually for like kids get it while they're growing. And he was just very rare for someone of his age to get it. And he actually went elk hunting on oxygen w with 'cause the cancer was all throughout his bodies and his lungs and everything. dude was as hardcore as they come. He's from Douglas County, Wisconsin. That's pretty far north, right? And he consistently killed, you know, I don't know if they were they were quite they were definitely Pope and Young, but they were I don't think they were quite into the Boone and Crockett category of bucks in northern Wisconsin with archery tackle most of the time. And he he I don't know, he had probably ten, twelve bucks that were, you know, in that one forties up. Wow. Size and you know, i five and a half years of age or older probably. that you've met personally? definitely one of the best.

Nicolas Lirio (31:49): You think he's the best hunter you know?

Kent Boucher (31:58): I have a I have a friend who is an under the radar guy. I have interviewed him a few times on first gen, if you want to go check him out. His name is Chris Dyer. And no, you've told me about him. Nobody nobody knows who Chris is. And Chris moved here for deer hunting from Virginia, cut his teeth on on bow hunting in Virginia. So pretty pretty tall task. And that guy is an on on I mean he's just a stone cold killer. If he's got a tag in his pocket, it's it's getting filled on a mature deer ever every single time.

Nicolas Lirio (32:36): We had a guy call from Virginia 'cause he saw our skip interview and he started on the phone, I'm really glad I caught you started asking me all sorts of questions about deer in Virginia and I literally was like, sorry, I'm gonna have to stop ya. I'm gonna have to give you Judd's number for zero answers for you at all. Yeah.

Kent Boucher (32:49): Biggest. Yeah, I mean and w one of the things I've noticed about those guys is they're they don't get stressed out. Like their their like their base heart rate is like half that of a regular human. Like they

Nicolas Lirio (33:09): How much time they spend outside in the wood.

Kent Boucher (33:10): It's it's beyond that. It's it's it's they're just they're just different, right? Another person who I'd put at the very top is Jake from the hunting public. That that guy I love watching him yeah him hunt. It doesn't matter what ecosystem you put that guy in, he's getting he's getting a kill on a nice deer. I mean he he there's there's footage of him hunting prairies. In fact we've been we've been Trying to balance schedules to get him on for a few years and he's he's all about it. He wants to come on. so we just gotta we just gotta be make it happen. But he has fi he has cracked the code on killing big bucks in nothing but prairie. So it's from the ground. I mean there might be some like you know, some small scrubby trees or something that he can kind of tuck in by for an ambush or whatever. But already this year he's already harvested a nice a nice buck in I think it was in North Dakota on on some prairie. And so you can go and check out their videos on YouTube. But he's been doing that for several years now. It's just that to me is is one of the most challenging things. Anytime you're killing a deer from the ground is a is a tall task. Doing it with a bow is an even taller task and and doing it consistently and and one time he even did it on a farm that he's never been on ever before. He just knocked on the guy's door and said, Hey, can it was a ranch, big ranch. It's like, hey, can I hunt here? By that night he had, you know, probably a one one for he's he's very efficient, very, very s very skilled. So but you can tell like in that in fact he bumped that deer at least once or twice in the video I'm talking about that day and had him in his truck by that night.

Nicolas Lirio (34:46): Does sound.

Kent Boucher (35:02): with a bow on the ground. I mean that's just

Jace Elliott (35:06): Lotta guys would've given up once that once that's him.

Kent Boucher (35:08): They they would have thrown their range finder, they would have thrown their bow, they would have they they didn't they don't have that mental resilience that that these guys that all these guys that we're talking about

Jace Elliott (35:17): yeah. Yeah, you have to be resilient and adaptable. Like I I feel like if somebody hasn't really tested that on somewhere like public land, then it's it's really difficult to like that's where I think those skills get tested the most. it's it's hard to debate. I mean when an area is gonna be pressured and people are trying to kill the same deer you are, it's just a different game than if you have a very manicured situation with with exclusive access and deer that aren't pressured. It it's completely different animals that you're hunting.

Kent Boucher (35:45): My guess I would say that those people are the difficulty that they're put they're they are aiming towards is is the hard work of of man.

Jace Elliott (35:57): Yeah, land management. Yeah. Habitat management, creating the perfect situation. And that is hard and takes care of

Kent Boucher (36:01): And that's a lot and that's tons and tons of work.

Nicolas Lirio (36:03): It's like a it's it's just a totally different skill. Yes, you know, it should almost have a different name, you know but anyway I

Kent Boucher (36:10): Well that's right.

Nicolas Lirio (36:16): Like saying how good are you at farming? Farming at it's just totally different.

Kent Boucher (36:19): Yeah, for real game. And I don't want to leave out all those those guys up in New England either who are the big woods buckle. Yeah. I got a friend who does that in in New Hampshire and Maine and and Vermont. And it it is crazy. The endurance, mental toughness, and just the completely different

Jace Elliott (36:30): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (36:47): set of skills required to do that and I I have nothing but all the respect for those and I actually really want to try that sometime.

Nicolas Lirio (36:54): So so my guess is that it is not a your opinion there is not popular where it's like we should weight it by how that state's habitat creates deer like it does it's not totally fair that, you know, all these one eighties are being shot in Iowa and then you go to Wisconsin and they're like, Well look, I got a one forty five. I feel like that's

Jace Elliott (37:15): I mean Wisconsin grows really big deer too. But but I get your point. And I think no, I think if we have to look at that question honestly, like there is an advantage to hunting in Iowa for sure. Absolutely. I mean, just the I hunted my first almost ten years in Wisconsin and it took me about a decade to see a racked buck during the rifle season okay on private land. and I hunted public too and tried a lot of different spots. it's just a different deer herd. than we have in Iowa. And and I'm hunting I'm talking about a might as well say northern Wisconsin, okay? It's really more in the central part of the state, but landscape wise, it's more akin to the Northwoods than it is the southern farm ground. Mm-hmm. Southern Wisconsin it sets the stage for just as good, if not better, and almost certainly

Kent Boucher (37:58): It's

Kent Boucher (38:03): If you had to say what is the I what is the a picture of like where the white tailed deer would thrive, it's southern Wisconsin. Remember that time we were driving back from Doug's?

Jace Elliott (38:14): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (38:16): We passed easily one hundred deer in within within three miles.

Nicolas Lirio (38:23): Judd said that he thinks all all states having perfect habitat, Michigan would have the best deer. And and when I say Judd says that, he spent like ten minutes telling me that last night while I w I was like, Well what he's like Missouri I think would be second, but I think Wisconsin would be or Michigan would be the place. I d I don't know. You guys would know better than

Kent Boucher (38:42): And

Jace Elliott (38:45): I don't know. They're not pulling a lot of big bucks out of Michigan. Well, if regulations were the same.

Nicolas Lirio (38:48): I think the idea is like if the

Kent Boucher (38:53): if ev if ev if everything if everything was equal across the board I would I would choose I would go Missouri just because they have the warmer winters. It's it's easier on survivability to you know, to less adverse conditions to survive. And yeah, and there's tons there's and and the habitat, especially in northern Missouri, is very similar to that of southern Wisconsin. So I would say I would go Missouri, then I'd go Wisconsin. I don't know enough about Michigan. Maybe if I spent more time there I have spent some time in Michigan but not a ton. Yeah. Maybe I would maybe I would agree with Judd on that, but but I would it would it would take me seeing some some pretty impressive landscape to go over Missouri and and southern Wisconsin.

Nicolas Lirio (39:38): What about you? What do you think?

Jace Elliott (39:39): I think our driftless region in the Midwest is is almost as perfect as it gets for deer habitat. And j if nothing else, the rough landscape supports a high age structure of bucks because it it reduces harvest vulnerability inherently because it's really difficult to hunt. Like it's hard to hunt in bluff country. Yeah. and it's physically demanding and it's also just challenging in general, to to understand how deer move to terrain like that. and I just think that landscape is gonna support a better aid structure than Flatland in general.

Kent Boucher (40:13): Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Lirio (40:14): Can I can I talk about something that I see on

Kent Boucher (40:16): I don't want to get too far away from trail cameras though, because there's an important question I want to I wanna ask on Okay, we're already pretty far away. But also go back and listen to that Andy Mae episode. You'll understand what I'm talking about. People that just don't panic when it's he nearly died of dehydration on that. And it's a great it's a great story. But he yeah, he's he's as hardcore as I can. I don't know.

Nicolas Lirio (40:20): I'm about to go way off of it, yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (40:39): They should. I feel like Ken and I were at much lower parts of our life. You know, the quality

Kent Boucher (40:43): That was a great podcast. I was actually podcasting far more than than I am now. Actually, yeah, that's I was probably in better form than but anyways, the with the trail camera thing. Yeah. I am all I think I'm all on board with the new law, with the concern of

Nicolas Lirio (40:50): Kent was a pro.

Kent Boucher (41:11): Like one of the one of the I think pillars of what it means to be an American hunter is the the fact that it's technically status free. It's technically you know it's not you're you don't have to be a a lord instead of a serf if you want to go hunting. Yeah. And and so it's public land represents the greatest equalizer of that, right? You could be the biggest

Jace Elliott (41:25): I know what's going on with

Kent Boucher (41:39): billionaire in the world or you could be you could be well Nicholas, you know. And you can hunt the same ground and you can have access to the same animals. You can and and by making the trail camera rule only apply to public land instead of both public and private land if you're going to have the law. Are we not then Pipping hunting regulations to favor the haves instead of the have have nots.

Jace Elliott (42:14): I see what you're saying. Yeah, great question. that's a really important dynamic that you laid out there. And it's something that we're really sensitive to in the DNR because in general, we want to avoid creating different restrictions for people on public land than private, but I obviously that's exactly what we've done here. The reason being is because it is so important that folks can go out and have a good experience on public land. Yeah. And from what we understood about the situation based on what we heard from folks. in the public hunters and specifically public land hunters, the proliferation of trail cameras was a detriment to their experience on that land, which we're trying to preserve to provide a good experience. So I I get what you're saying, but Yeah, in a lot of ways we don't want to treat public and private land differently, but in a lot of ways they just are different. For instance, would you say it would be acceptable for somebody to start feeding deer on public land, right? Like just putting out hundreds of pounds of corn well not, right? But but you could do that on the season outside the season. It would just be like most people would be offended by that. You know, like what what's that guy doing? that's not his right. And I think that some folks could say that

Kent Boucher (43:14): Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah. You're talking you're talking outside the season.

Kent Boucher (43:29): Or putting in a food plot or something like that.

Jace Elliott (43:31): Or building a house on public land, right? Like like it's it's different and it's subject to different rules because it's shared area. It's a really and and this is something that unfortunately we had to pull back. And a lot of times in government we're in that position where like, okay, people have gotten used to doing a certain thing now for a long time. There's been pup trail cameras on public land for probably decades in Iowa, to some extent. Not cell cams necessarily, not as many as there are today. But there's a long history of that. There's people that since their first deer season they've been able to put trail cameras on public land. And so now this issue feels a little bit different than some of those examples I brought up, but really I think five, ten years from now, I don't know that it will feel all that different. Where we have to protect the integrity of the public land experience first and foremost, more than we have to protect maybe an individual's ability to use certain equipment or do certain things on that land in a way that negatively impacts other users. Mm-hmm. Does that make sense? so yeah, it's it's something for sure that we thought about. I've been in a lot of conversations with leadership and other folks in the department, and and that's always a value where we're not trying to create this dichotomy of have and have nots. and it's a public shared resource in terms of the deer population. and so is our public land, you know. So now there's a lot of other reasons why folks can use and should be able to use cameras on public land or on private land, right? Like s for s property security and surveillance and things like that. And it's just it doesn't have the potential to negatively impact the public. Mm-hmm. and so it's just different. Again, it's not a harvest management rule. It's a public land experience rule. And so I think for all those reasons and values that you laid out, that's exactly why we pursued what we did.

Kent Boucher (45:21): Sure, sure. Yeah, that that makes sense to me. And and you know, I you you just you made a great argument there with the the supplemental feeding and and I think even a a stronger argument because I think it happens more often is the building permanent stands or or food plotting is probably the the strong the strongest argument. because so many people on private land utilize those two tools. yeah, I inherently you're just gonna have some of that disc you know, that disparity. And and yeah, I mean I I would say your your reasoning was was good enough to like bring me back down to like, you know, twenty-five percent concerned or something from 75% concerned on that factor. But but yeah, I think, you know, any time when we when we put another marble from the middle to one side. Yep. You know, then then it you know, it it it is somewhat like worrisome to me.

Jace Elliott (46:30): For sure. And you're right. I mean fundamentally you're you're correct.

Kent Boucher (46:33): And I have access to a lot of private land that I get to hunt. So maybe if I was only able to hunt public land I'd be even more concerned. But I you know, I follow your reasoning for sure.

Jace Elliott (46:41): Or maybe you'd be more supportive because now you can go on that property and not feel not feel the impact of Yeah. And I think like the whole idea is to create a low impact environment on this public land in order to make it the best it can be for for people experience wise. So, you know, are we through through the process here, is there more advantage, relative advantage to private land hunters than public land hunters from a trail camera standpoint? Sure.

Kent Boucher (46:46): Yeah, that's a great felt I have definitely felt that impact before.

Jace Elliott (47:10): but there's a lot of other things that private landowners can do that you can't do on public and this is just one of them now. So

Kent Boucher (47:16): Any data on how so much surveillance, let's just call it what it is. Yeah, yeah. how that helped with wildlife violation prosecution, like is that going to be a big loss for conservation officers to no longer have you know, these public land areas blanketed in cameras so that when somebody's up to no good they they aren't is there any has was that a part of the study at all as far as If that was it if that was an important tool that these COs were were relying on much or is it like basically negligible?

Jace Elliott (47:54): So I've never been under the impression that the public using trail cameras on public land aids in law enforcement officers ability to enforce laws. Sure. there's probably cases where it has. Mm-hmm. and maybe now there wouldn't be such a potential for that. But I don't think that that negative potential compares to

Kent Boucher (48:12): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (48:19): the positive impacts that I think we're we're gonna be able to deliver now. So but that's a good point. I think it's a you know it's a cool outside of the box way to think about it. because yeah, frankly there's gonna be a lot more unknown on that

Kent Boucher (48:31): Yeah. Honest. I mean that fear of there being a camera watching what I'm doing. Because I mean there's a reason every retail store is blanketed over things, right? For sure.

Nicolas Lirio (48:37): That would be.

Jace Elliott (48:46): Yeah, we're living in a surveillance world now. And and it's nice to maybe think about there being just three percent of our landscape that isn't.

Kent Boucher (48:52): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (48:55): That's true. I mean think about like the rings, the the like on on the door and so like all of suburban roads are now surveyed. They're they're all and and I had a friend and he's like, Yeah, the cops came up and said, Hey, can we see your security?

Jace Elliott (49:04): yeah.

Kent Boucher (49:10): Yeah, honestly, and maybe it's because crimes don't happen there very often. There was an interesting series that Meteor was running for a while. I don't know, maybe maybe they still do. It was called Blood Trick. Yeah, yeah. And it'd be inter I noticed it was in Wisconsin a lot of times, James. There was like public national forests or state forests or whatever, they'd find a body there or whatever. I wonder if it's ever been a tactic to be like, Hey, whoever hunts in whatever state forest and if you run trail cameras, can you

Jace Elliott (49:18): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (49:38): Check and let us know if you find anything suspicious. You know, I it'd be interesting to to to know that. But yeah, that's I think, you know, overall I I'm I'm in agreement with with the new policy. I think it'll it d it doesn't impact me as much because I I don't hunt a ton of public. Yep. I do hunt some, so it does impact me a little bit. but I I do th and I think the fact that you have you're armed with the data where Iowa deer hunters, Iowa public land deer hun asking for this. I think that's good. And I don't want to leave I I always feel a little guilty about this. And before you make fun of me for it, I think it's just an important part of being a reasonable person to consider all viewpoints. So if you're listening anything, I'm like I I'm being dumb by thinking of what other people are worried about. I do worry a little bit about it's public land. It's not just hunting land. Yeah. And I I worry that sometimes just like somebody marks their territory with a trail camera on every best pinch point in a in a WMA across the state. I do worry that sometimes hunters can just dominate a piece of public ground that somebody who has zero interest in hunting and wants to go get a you know, pileated woodpecker

Jace Elliott (51:04): Or walk their door.

Kent Boucher (51:04): Yeah, or yeah, or or walk their dog or or go fishing or you know, butterfly catching, whatever. Right. The it's all it's it public land an important part of public land surviving is that you have far more than just hunters interested in its survival and its utility. And so that to me actually was a thing. that spoke to me the most when this was being considered was there's tons of people who have nothing to do with hunting, who who have every right to be on that public land that have to worry about when their their hot coffee hits at on their dog walk but they gotta if they go to squat behind a tree, they're gonna be on camera. Or the if they're just out there with their kids now their kids are on some stranger's camera. Or they're you know, like you name all the things and and so I from that standpoint, I I also am in favor of it.

Jace Elliott (52:02): And let's remember too like these cameras aren't just being used for wildlife monitoring. More recently they've been used for hunter monitoring. Yep. And that's been popularized It's icky. Yeah. And it's been done in Iowa on

Kent Boucher (52:12): And that is icky to me. I've heard people on podcast brag about it. So this is one of my strategies. Whenever I whenever I set up at a public piece, I always put a cell camera right at the entrance. So I know when another guy comes in here, if he's you know, who who's gonna be hunting here while I'm hunting here and all that. So they're basically they're not they're not getting deer on they're not setting it up to get they're setting it up on a human pinch point, not a deer pinch.

Jace Elliott (52:36): So a and look, does it give a

Nicolas Lirio (52:37): At best it's over competitive and at worst it's entitled.

Kent Boucher (52:40): Maybe.

Jace Elliott (52:41): Yes, in entitled is a good way to put it. I would also say icky is a good way to put it too. Like if is it effective maybe for understanding hunter behavior? Sure, but I don't like it. And I think a lot of people feel that way. Like there's just a general negative feeling towards that type of behavior and it's gotten to the point where yeah, it's it's being done to a noticeable extent on Iowa's public land, being popularized. on places like YouTube and I think it's just time to stop that and and just get back to the integrity that the public land can offer without just trying to strategize and tactic your way into an edge over someone else. and yeah, does anybody wanna be faced with a a somebody random from the public's camera staring at when they're taking their dog for a walk? Like certainly not. Yeah. so it's good to consider other users than just hunters because frankly there's a lot of them and and It varies at different times of year, but yeah, everybody is a public landowner at the end of the day and it's it's not just about hunters, but it's good to know that even hunters who are benefiting from this technology in general would still like to see it go.

Kent Boucher (53:54): Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point.

Nicolas Lirio (53:56): So I speaking of surveillance, I know like we talked about this with Steve a little bit. Trail cameras there is now in writing. The now new trail cameras conversation is drones. From from my understanding. use. There's a pretty good use and there's gray area. Bad is using drones to hunt. Right. So you can say you're not using drones to hunt, but you fly over a property, you land your drone, and you can go right in there and figure out where even though they're up while you were in your stand or you could use your drone for twelve straight days in a row before you get up. Now you got enough data, you know where they're gonna be hanging out. So so that's like what we would consider bad. I think most hunters that aren't entitled and s and and making poor decisions

Jace Elliott (54:37): For sure.

Kent Boucher (54:44): It's like

Nicolas Lirio (54:54): Are probably on board with that. Like they think that that is bad and they don't want to do that.

Jace Elliott (54:58): Yeah, it's a violation of fair chase for most people's sense of the phrase. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (55:02): The good kind of gray area is recovery. Yeah. And maybe Steve someone someone was telling me like, what happens if you shoot a buck and it runs off? It's been an hour. You you have chased it yourself. You've done your best to to look for it. So you decide to bring in a drone and that thing's still alive. Like what do you do then?

Jace Elliott (55:08): Absolutely.

Nicolas Lirio (55:26): And so that's kind of like a gray area is like, I mean, obviously you probably just need to go home with that like you're done hunting for the day. Like, sorry, you screwed up, you should have waited longer, whatever. But in the DNR level, the state level, or I'm sure you've got like some some text thread with the DNRs of all the states that touch Iowa. You know, I I bet you guys are all chat. Yeah what are people saying? What's the temperature? What are what are we gonna do with drones?

Jace Elliott (55:47): So there are certain states where deer recovery is allowed with drones. Iowa is not currently one of them. there's been legislation introduced to try to create some guardrails around allowing it. and of course that's nothing I can comment on in my position, but but it's worth mentioning that there is some legislative effort to look into it. But currently, it's not allowed to be used in any aspect of the hunt. Mm-hmm. And the way that we define that in Iowa is that the hunt starts with scouting and it ends with deer recovery. so So that i you know, if you take it at face value, that's pretty cut and dry. but there's actually a lot of gray area to that because what constitutes a scouting, that could be up to interpretation. Can you technically be scouting in June or January after the season? You know, that's a gray area for sure. So I think it might benefit somewhere in the future to have a little bit more firm language around what's allowed because frankly it's an emerging technology that again in government we find ourselves reacting to something that exists rather than being in front of it, right, to begin with, because that's just

Nicolas Lirio (56:55): Have you proposed a recommendation to the legislation on what you think?

Jace Elliott (56:59): No, we haven't. no, there's there's certain like sportsmen's groups that are working on doing that and and they might ask, you know, for for help and stuff like that, but officially not. I think that, you know, we have to be careful. Here's what I'll say, and I can talk about this because there's no proposed legislation on it and and I'm not endorsing any certain stance, but I think we have to be really careful about how we how we design the language in order to at all costs reduce abuse. potential for abuse because there's a really high potential for abuse with drones when it comes to deer hunting and that should be preserved first and foremost. Like you mentioned, if we can if we can find a piece of technology that allows for better recovery of game, that's that's only a good thing. But there's a lot more to it than that. And there's a lot of ways that that technology can be used in a way that violates the average hunter's sense of fair chase. And it doesn't take much thinking to consider those scenarios, right? So yeah. hopefully that's not a non-answer, but I just I just think that it's something that we should really think critically on. and and in general, I like to kind of defer to the if there's a high potential for abuse and we haven't quite considered exactly how we can minimize that, let's just not allow it. Right. Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (58:16): I think we eliminated fair use when Casey's became the fourth biggest pizza chain. I don't know, listen fair chase, I don't know how much fair chase is you know, on a true fair like

Kent Boucher (58:26): And I think just like with the the cameras on public land, I you know, I I see there again where it could end up being a distinction drawn between, you know, drone recovery on public versus private land. I know the last thing I wanna hear if I'm on public land is three drones going on November, you know, eighth because three different guys got you know foul hits on on bucks and they're you know, people get into a weird mode when they gotta when they have when they've drawn blood. It's a I and and and it's a good thing, honestly. Yeah, yeah. I will leave no stone unturned till I find this thing. And I think that's admirable and I think it's even in a way legal because you're you're required to Yeah you know, not engage in want and waste, which is to to leave a an animal that's unrecovered. Right. And I mean it still happens. the and so I get the mentality behind it. However, I also understand the guy who blows up in a tirade because we also have a right to track here in Iowa, which I I would not give that away for anything. I think that's a wonderful wonderful law. If your animal goes and dies on someone else's private land, you have the right to go and recover that. Without permission. Without permission. Yeah. You can't bring a weapon. And I think if you're bringing a dog over there, you have to have permission to have the dog on their land. But otherwise though, you you if you you know you can hop the fence and go grab your deer or pheasant. Yeah, it's it's a wonderful

Jace Elliott (1:00:04): That's correct.

Jace Elliott (1:00:13): And that's an awesome in Wisconsin it's not that way. And people in my hunting party a lot of states and you run into that where it's like, you know, you could talk to your neighbor before the season, like, hey man, you know, we've got a forty acre chunk. That means there's no area where we're more than a quarter mile away from fence line, so there's a reasonable chance a wounded deer's gonna run on your place. Can I just give you a call if that happens? No chance. You're not allowed to look for a deer here. It's a answer that you get frequently. Yeah. and that's not ethical. Right. And that's that's I think a a very selfish

Kent Boucher (1:00:47): But on but on the same s same same situation, I understand the guy who's who's been waiting to hunt this spot or whatever. He's done his his week off from work. He's out there and you know it's ten AM and here comes some some guy traipsing through his you know his honey hole or whatever. Yeah. Looking for you know, following a blood trail. And I I understand that frustration that that guy has in that circumstance. I I I I think it's best for everyone to try and remain calm and be like, hey, you know, next time, could you like give me a heads up? I'm you know all about it, you know, but let's just try and do this at a time when it's not prime time or whatever, you know, five PM or something. The the you know five PM being prime time, let's do it at seven PM, you know. So I understand that frustration and I also under I also think that we view an unrecovered animal as a complete tragedy. And I just don't think that nature cares. That n the buck doesn't care who gets him. He just cares that he's dead now. Now if he's you know, he's suffering and in a in a finishing shot is needed or something, that's a different case, of course. But But I think that's not where most people's feelings are. Most people's feelings are I really want that and I don't get it. And and it's a tragedy that I don't get what I want. And and to and I think that's why a lot of drones go up in the air, and I think that's why a lot of dogs are on the ground. It's because people really want something. Okay, that's legal and it's fine. I think it is best if someone recovers the animal that they that they they shot. but I don't know that it's at a at no cost spared type of thing. I think I think that again, it's reasonable for someone who's hunting public land to not want three drones humming around right s you know, looking for a thermal signal of of a recently deceased animal while they're trying to have some peace and quiet in a and their own chance at releasing an arrow.

Kent Boucher (1:03:16): and so I while I understand the benefits of it, I understand the efficacy of it and the the happy endings that come from it. I just don't know that like I I don't think that logically I can follow that trail down to whatever it takes to get you know, Jim his his buck at the end of the day. I I just don't I think there's a limit somewhere along that pathway. It's good. Yeah, where we say, you know what, I bet you if we burned the whole forest down, we could find your deer. Sure. I think that we shouldn't get to that point. And obviously that would you know that's a gross exaggeration, but but somewhere it I think it's closer to the start of, you know, I'm gonna look with my own two eyes and and maybe a flashlight and Do my do my absolute best to find this deer. That's that's step one and step ten is burning the forest down until you find the the the fire licked bones. I think I think we are getting technology now and and the use of dogs to the point where we're edging closer to burning the woods down to get the deer than than we are, you know, what's the most basic primitive way of recovering an animal.

Jace Elliott (1:04:42): And I think there's something to be said about not relying on recovery technology, right? There's a certain point where, hey, if I just get an arrow in this deer, we'll find him with the drone. And I'm not saying that most hunters would feel that way or make those decisions, but some would. And there's there's a line there where if you're depending on I gotta make this shot and I gotta put that deer down and I gotta be able to find it, yeah. That's different than

Kent Boucher (1:04:55): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:05:12): We'll put an arrow in and figure it out later. Yeah. I again I don't necessarily think that that's what most hunters how they'd look at it, but there is a case to be made, I think.

Kent Boucher (1:05:21): Yeah, going back to what Nicholas was asking about what makes a great hunter, that to me is one of the most admirable traits is somebody who's a clean killer. Yeah. it is it is it is so impressive to watch people who just time after time again that you know, deer's piled up in fifty yards, deer's piled up maybe in a hundred yards, but they you know probability shots. Not taking low probability shots and and that they're just a clean, efficient killer and

Jace Elliott (1:05:42): Taking low probability.

Kent Boucher (1:05:50): And I think that that's what we should strive to be so that we shouldn't need the thermal drone.

Jace Elliott (1:05:55): Right. And again, i if if you could tell me that if we allowed thermal drones there'd be a zero percent rate of abuse and you know, you can't use them on someone else's land or on public land or whatever in a way that would really negatively impact

Kent Boucher (1:06:03): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (1:06:11): As Jeremiah Johnson says, molest their hunt.

Jace Elliott (1:06:15): That's funny. Well then I wouldn't have a huge problem with it, I don't think. I mean it th it's generally a good thing if we can recover the deer we shoot. and to some extent, I do see what you're saying. you could make another argument that we owe it to the animal to to utilize it if we're gonna kill it. And to that same extent we owe it to the animal to make sure we put the odds in the favor of a quick, clean kill, which leads to an easy recovery.

Kent Boucher (1:06:39): Yeah, see I'm more on the lines of that because again, I don't think the buck cares who eats it. 'Cause you know, a coyote whether it's coyoter or a possum crawling through the rib cage. Right.

Jace Elliott (1:06:43): I get what you're saying.

Jace Elliott (1:06:49): Nothing goes to waste in nature, I get what you're saying. Right.

Kent Boucher (1:06:51): Yep. Yep. And and but absolutely for the sake of a quick and efficient death. Because that's one of the biggest argu arguing points in favor of hunting is that it is far I w if I had my choice, you know, a thirty five caliber bullet through you know, through my aorta or tooth and claw from a a pack of coyotes chasing me till my tongue's hanging out of my mouth and I barely breathe and then they rip my hindquarters apart and Yeah. Start eating me while I'm still alive. You know, I I think I'll take the thirty five caliber bullet, you know.

Jace Elliott (1:07:26): There's not a lot of deer that fall over dead on a pile of roses in the wild. It's usually a little more yeah, it's a little different than that. And I would agree that I think you know, hunter mortality when done ethically is is almost the best case scenario for sure.

Kent Boucher (1:07:43): Yeah. Yeah. And so I think yeah, I think we should we should strive for that. And I do I do think an argument could be constructed to say that having all these technology these recovery technologies in our arsenal could get us to be a little bit sloppy.

Jace Elliott (1:07:59): A little looser. Yeah. I think so. now that ar argument was made I think with with allowing dogs because at a certain point we didn't do that in Iowa and that's changed over the last few years and Me too. Yeah, me too. And and I probably wouldn't have found the buck I shot without it, and I was only off by a couple inches to where that would have been a double lung and you know, happens. I'm very thankful for that dog and the the dog owner that didn't charge me a dime

Kent Boucher (1:08:11): And I have used a don't I have used a

Kent Boucher (1:08:27): Yeah, that's the craziest thing is they like never charge it in. Right.

Jace Elliott (1:08:29): And

Nicolas Lirio (1:08:30): Love doing it?

Kent Boucher (1:08:31): Yeah, I know Nick would be charging me.

Jace Elliott (1:08:34): Well, they sure could. I mean they sure could, but a lot of don't.

Kent Boucher (1:08:38): Didn't I tell you about my five thousand dollar an hour fee? sorry. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:08:42): Yeah, so but the difference is there's not the same potential for abuse with a hound a thermal drone. It's a totally different totally different implications for for how deer can be harvested. and I think yeah, we don't even need to get into that. It's pretty self evident how somebody could abuse something like a drone and and harvest deer they normally wouldn't.

Nicolas Lirio (1:08:49): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (1:08:50): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (1:09:05): Ever you ever get on those Facebook pages and start commenting?

Jace Elliott (1:09:08): I don't at all. I completely

Nicolas Lirio (1:09:11): I just think yeah, you should you should it should be like Jace Elliott, Iowa Whitetail Biolog DNR biology, you know, like write in your title and then when you comment it would just end the conversation.

Jace Elliott (1:09:24): I don't know if it would, but I don't do a lot of commenting in general as as a practice, but I do read

Nicolas Lirio (1:09:31): Dude, the comment sections for losers. The dude, it's real. It's real. But so a big thing that I see on I'm not on hunting groups, but I am on native habitat manager groups and outdoor wildlife groups. And people hate Iowa. They think that we're we're so posh for not letting any of hunters come in. I don't hunt. Yeah. I think it is like so short sighted. I it feels so foolish for people to be like, Well, we totally degraded our state. I don't understand. You could come to our state and hunt and we're like, We don't want to go to your state hunt. Well, we'll just trade states. No, we don't want that. You're being unreasonable. Why wouldn't you let me in your state? It's like just if you regulated well, what what's a dear lifespan? Like eight years at the absolute ma max. So if you regulated well for sixteen years, your herd would be like in much better shape. You know, two full generations. I I've they don't wanna they don't wanna give up a few hunting seasons to to have like better regulation. They just rather come destroy ours. But anyway, I see it all over Facebook and I wanna comment, but I I don't hunt. So I d like Do you guys get hammered for that, DNR?

Jace Elliott (1:10:44): So Yeah, a little bit. Well, from non residents, of course. I wouldn't say there's very many residents that are unhappy with our deer management framework. That should probably be the mark of success, right? Yeah. the people who are outside of the gates might be throwing tomatoes until they draw a tag. Yeah. And then they're very happy that we do things the way we do it. it's funny I just had a conversation with someone who drew a Well, it depends on the zone. There's places you can hunt every year.

Kent Boucher (1:11:03): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (1:11:08): Point six years to get a

Kent Boucher (1:11:12): We're in zone five right here. I believe I drive across the border on my way into to work. yeah, I'm not sure if we are in seven.

Jace Elliott (1:11:15): In zone five.

Jace Elliott (1:11:24): Might be seven. I don't know. Okay. But in any rate, five's the highest demand zone. and yeah.

Kent Boucher (1:11:32): What is it for five right now? Seven years for an R

Jace Elliott (1:11:35): Seven years because of course it takes one year to get your first and then you know if you count applying seven years as a guarantee, that would be six points. Yeah. I can give you a a fun fact. There's over a hundred thousand non residents in the US that have at least one point. Really? Wow and we allow six thousand a year.

Kent Boucher (1:11:43): Okay.

Kent Boucher (1:11:53): Are those points are those do those points cost money to buy?

Jace Elliott (1:11:56): Yeah, they're about sixty bucks a year. Now we don't make people buy a hunting license like other states do, and I wouldn't Yeah, and we don't have a cheap deer tag either. I mean

Kent Boucher (1:12:07): No. Yeah, once you draw one, it's six hundred fifty bucks.

Jace Elliott (1:12:10): Yeah, I'd say it's worth No

Nicolas Lirio (1:12:11): Residents. Is that same for residents?

Kent Boucher (1:12:13): No, that's not your hunting license. Then you got a hundred and no, ninety two dollars.

Jace Elliott (1:12:18): Is including so it's just under seven hundred dollars to get everything you need to hunt. habitat, hunting, yeah, and and a deer license for for a non resident. It's a lot cheaper for residents as it should be, because that's their natural heritage. It's not necessarily the same natural heritage for somebody that doesn't live here. and that's that's always the stance we've taken. We prioritize residents first, in my opinion, better than any other state does in in the Midwest.

Nicolas Lirio (1:12:45): Good argument from them as to why we should be allowing more I I to me it's like it's their argument sounds so stupid I can't even believe they spent time typing it. I'm like reading And I'm not trying to like criticize their character. I'm just trying to say like how are they getting

Kent Boucher (1:12:59): view they view it as selfishness or as right but but apply that logic to to anything you're you didn't let me drive your your Lambo to work yet this week, you know I mean like

Nicolas Lirio (1:13:02): Why we're being selfish.

Jace Elliott (1:13:14): So let me put it this way. I like to bird hunt in South Dakota. Okay. I like to take my bird dog out there. I just did a few weeks ago and shot some prairie chickens and and had an amazing time. When you are a non resident and you want to hunt small game hunt in South Dakota, you have to buy you you can't hunt the whole season like a resident can. You get two five day periods that you can specify throughout the several months of the season. And when I get faced with that, I don't say, Well, that's that's a load of You know, I I should be able to I'm entitled to hunt that. It's like, well, thank you for letting me experience your natural heritage as an non resident. And and I don't get bent out of shape about so but the fact is that we're sort of unique in how we manage non resident demand. But it's very intentional and it makes sense why we do it in Iowa and why, like, let's say Wisconsin doesn't, right? Because Wisconsin has like ten times more timber. in their state than we do. That means they have a lot more habitat. They have a stronger deer population that's not vulnerable to exploitation to the same extent that Iowa is. And we've built something really special in our deer population. Nobody can deny that. I mean we're as far as I can tell regarded as the trophy whitetail state. And a big reason is because we control non resident buck harvest. Because people don't come to Iowa to shoot dough is you know, that'd be a very expensive dough. Yeah. Most people can do that in their home state.

Kent Boucher (1:14:31): No.

Jace Elliott (1:14:36): And so I think that it's a really important thing that we don't lose sight of why it's exactly like this. Like explicitly, we are prioritizing our residents. It's a resident first framework. And frankly, that's how every state should be to some extent, although it might look different in other states than it looks in Iowa. But I think, you know, from the outside looking in, if you're somebody that's being kept outside of the gate in a certain year, you're going to be

Kent Boucher (1:14:53): Yeah, that's well said.

Jace Elliott (1:15:02): Maybe a little spiteful about that, but again, once you draw that tag, I don't think you're gonna have too many concerns. I think you're gonna be very pleasantly surprised at the low public land pressure and the few non resident license plates you see at your parking lots.

Kent Boucher (1:15:14): Man. Yeah. Yeah. speaking of non resident license plates at parking lots, I was I was a non resident hunter out in Colorado a few years ago hunt hunting elk and there was another not Iowa, another state fishing and game employee truck sitting there all week. Like a thousand

Jace Elliott (1:15:36): In the park. funny. Yeah. Collaborating on a research project

Kent Boucher (1:15:41): I might have even sent you the picture just to think it was funny, but yeah, I'm sure they were doing lots of extensive elk in the you know, elk elk just post rut research.

Jace Elliott (1:15:53): Interstate collaboration, yeah, for sure. During off season.

Kent Boucher (1:15:57): But but yeah, I'll I'll show you the picture sometime. yeah, so wait where where were we? I I got lost on my

Nicolas Lirio (1:16:07): He was telling us the the unbelievably good argument that they have.

Kent Boucher (1:16:11): yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I think the part, and you mentioned this, you know, the difference in habitat. You know, we've lost our deer in the past here in Iowa. not that long ago. And I mean, we've really only had a huntable population for what sixty years maybe, fifty, sixty years, something like that.

Kent Boucher (1:16:39): I believe Riley's grandfather hunted the first deer season in in Iowa.

Jace Elliott (1:16:44): It's like nineteen fifty four or nineteen fifty six or something, but ninety not very many deer killed that season. I mean there wasn't a huge population. Well everyone had smooth board shotguns, so that's

Kent Boucher (1:16:47): Yeah, this is nice.

Nicolas Lirio (1:16:52): Sure everyone was terrible at it. Yeah. Really?

Kent Boucher (1:16:54): Yeah, that's true. Yeah and I think and I think and I think that the reason I personally have celebrated I was deer hunting on here as much as I have it's kind of our only thing going. I mean not that we don't have each other. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:17:13): Well

Nicolas Lirio (1:17:16): Ken family lives here and he goes out.

Kent Boucher (1:17:20): From a recreational standpoint, something that lures people in. Yeah. It kind of is our only thing. Hey. Nobody's Who's coming who's coming to Iowa to go swimming? Even if you did, the beach is closed. Yeah, yeah. because of because of the coli. who's Yeah, who's who's who's coming here for for I mean, I guess Ragbry, you know, a man made event.

Nicolas Lirio (1:17:26): Sprint cars. Sprint cars in Knoxville.

Kent Boucher (1:17:45): you could come here I I suppose you could argue like the driftless area is

Nicolas Lirio (1:17:50): If you're Omaha you go to the Less Hills.

Kent Boucher (1:17:53): Y Yeah, yeah. we so we do have some scenic things like like Los Hills, Driftless Area, but

Nicolas Lirio (1:18:00): Nothing you put on a billboard in South.

Kent Boucher (1:18:02): Well we have no national parks. We have one national monument, maybe two national monuments, is Sergeant's Bluff Ferry where the the the only casualty on the Lewis and Clark expedition, the only member of the that core discovery who died is buried in Iowa. That might be a national monument. I could be I could be wrong on that. But we have we have Effigy Mounds National Monument. Yep. But we have no national parks.

Jace Elliott (1:18:28): We've got no mountains to ski.

Kent Boucher (1:18:30): Yeah, and it and and the closest thing we have to mountains, which are very beautiful the in driftless area, the places that have mountains are way bigger and and actual mountains, you know, instead of bluffs.

Jace Elliott (1:18:41): They're not built around the same level of recreation that like Colorado. Right.

Kent Boucher (1:18:44): Right. And so it is and I have come across people who travel to Iowa for pheasant hunting. Yep. so that's that's that that is something, but it's nowhere near the scale it once was no and nowhere near the scale of desirability as our as our whitetail hunting is. And furthermore, if we lost not just

Nicolas Lirio (1:18:45): Driftless is a dry day driveway.

Nicolas Lirio (1:19:07): Northeast trout trout. Right? That's like a thing. Northeast Iowa trout? Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:19:11): That's a special reason.

Kent Boucher (1:19:12): But it's no I would I would say that our fishing opportunities here are not significantly different from those at least in Wisconsin for trout. Right. We do have a year round season which is unique and and is great. I think we have a more maybe not, but I think we have a more robust stocking program. I just

Nicolas Lirio (1:19:38): D and R listens to this and they're gonna be like, what about my section of

Jace Elliott (1:19:42): So let's put it this way, maybe.

Kent Boucher (1:19:44): Well and and in our turkey hunting is is pretty good too. For sure. And and and probably the top definitely the top half of states probably the top probably the top twenty percent of states of turkey states we we are we are we are right there. So you're telling me where

Nicolas Lirio (1:19:59): Good sportsman experience.

Kent Boucher (1:20:03): Well, yeah, but it's d like th as good as those things are at their very best, they still to to widespread interest level of recreating in Iowa, they are non-existent to the average dude in Kentucky. The he he's he's not coming here to go trout fishing. He's not he's probably not coming here to go pheasant or turkey hunting. If he's coming here to recreate, he's coming to chase deer. And that's that's just a fact. And And and I think that if we were to let that go, there's there's other states out there that nobody I think they're they have un you know, they have hidden gems there. Like I I would I would argue that Nebraska is a good example of this. Nebraska is a much more biologically diverse state than people realize, but that's the point than people realize, right? They they have no very few people are are drawing points to go hunt deer in Nebraska. Now now they are drawing points to do it now because there was a a little boost in in interest in especially their mule deer hunting. but that would be an example of a state who nobody thinks of anything when it comes to recreation. And I'm here to tell you it's one of my favorite states. It's so ecologically diverse. It's ge geologically diverse very very interesting place, but the reputation is is not there. And and it would be very easy for Iowa to to go into that that realm if we lost our our our the allure of the white tailed deer here.

Jace Elliott (1:21:44): I think it's the crown jewel of our natural resources. And I think another way to say what you're what you're getting at, Kent, is that we have a lot of really great natural resources. Yeah. From a sportsman's perspective in Iowa. But if you're moving somewhere to be in the best whatever species state, you can find somewhere else to go until it comes to deer. And then that's Iowa. In my opinion, and you could make some arguments that places like Kansas or Indiana are up there too, and I'd agree for sure.

Kent Boucher (1:21:47): Absolutely.

Jace Elliott (1:22:15): fantastic management. Yep. but I do think that Iowa's reputation kind of precedes itself. And and I think like if you're moving somewhere to be in the best trout state, you're not gonna pick Iowa. Right. And if you're moving somewhere to be in the best turkey state, you're not gonna pick Iowa. I don't know. Maybe maybe you would because the turkey hunting is phenomenal here. But at the end of the day, I've met personally and I'm biased, right? Yeah. In in this regard, but I've met personally well over a dozen people that have moved to Iowa for its deer, myself included. Right. Yeah. Now I have a professional angle, but a lot of people have moved here that I haven't met as well. And I don't know a lot of other people that are moving from

Kent Boucher (1:22:56): Chris Dyer that I talked about. He moved here probably over twenty years ago. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:23:00): And a lot of people when they retire, if if their thing is deer hunting, they're coming and buying a farm in Iowa. So they can live here and experience it as a resident, be treated as a resident, get to hunt their farm every year. And that's the reason why we don't treat non resident landowners the same as resident landowners. It's very intentional. We're trying to cultivate a good natural heritage for local communities, not for people who have the money to buy land and live elsewhere.

Kent Boucher (1:23:27): And we're in a state that is completely dominated. You don't have to back me up on this. I'll I'll go out there on my own and say this. We are completely dominated by the ag industrial complex. It is it has it has gotten to nearly every arable acre, right? And one of the things that has kept it from getting to every arable acre, in a huge way. And even not just it from a buying acres and setting up shop on it with deer habitat or wildlife habitat, but from being active at the Capitol against legislation that is ecologically bad for Iowa in a place that has almost no ground to give. our water quality has has become you know, you know, a national shameful thing. Right, a nationally shameful thing of of how our water quality is has been managed in our state and affected in our state. And one of the few things that holds on to that last little handful of acres that haven't been completely dominated by man are deer hunters. And and so we if we see if we see that resource become just viewed the same way that we view you know, any other you know, we'll say a a European starling or something, then I I think things could get worse. And and so I am appreciative to what deer have protected in our state because because of their the the quality of the experience people can have enjoying deer here.

Jace Elliott (1:25:16): I would go so far as saying that there's more habitat put on private ground in the name of deer than any other yeah any other altruistic priority.

Kent Boucher (1:25:26): Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a that's a really good point.

Jace Elliott (1:25:29): I in in where there's not money involved and things like that. Like we have some really great incentive programs, but that takes you out of maybe the altruistic category anyway. I just think that completely agree with what you're saying in terms of the the role that deer play in our n natural resources overall. one of my predecessors from decades back hi kind of coined the phrase that whitetail deer are Iowa's lightning rod of conservation because the money generated through the license sales of deer tags fund so much more beyond deer management and and habitat management for deer. it touches every aspect of our natural resources management for the most part. And I think that that's why that's why we're so firm on ma maintaining the quality we have because we can lose it quickly. we do in in elsewhere in the Midwest, it's not hard to find the narrative that, you know, we're overrun with deer. We have overabundance. We can't shoot enough, we're losing hunters. we're gonna throw out incentives to shoot more deer. in other words, kind of devaluing the whole resource to some extent, although I think there is a real crisis in certain parts of the country that we just don't have in Iowa, to the benefit of our fragmented landscape, right? We're in a different situation where our deer herd is very easy to over harvest. And that's why we don't allow unscrupulous dough harvest That's why we're not throwing tags out at every single person that wants like maybe some states need to, east of us. So, yeah, I think that there's a reason why we do things like we do here and and we're in such a different situation landscape wise in Iowa that we don't need to borrow those messages, those narratives from states further east that are just dealing with different problems than we are. We drastically altered our deer population. and not we as in humans, but hemorrhagic disease, EHD and blue tongue really did a number on our deer population in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty-four. A lot of people did. I'd say at least half the state could in general notice a decline in deer numbers. In some parts of the state, that's led to a precipitous decline in deer hunters. I just crunched these numbers a week or two ago. basically I categorized hunters that bought a deer license in twenty twenty three.

Kent Boucher (1:27:34): I saw it firsthand. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:27:55): Now not everybody hunts deer in their zip code, but a lot of folks do, and it's the cleanest way to do it, right?

Nicolas Lirio (1:28:05): there was more EHD there was less sales as a correlation.

Jace Elliott (1:28:08): Western Iowa has lost a lot of deer hunters in two years. Wow. The same two years that we had bad hemorrhagic disease.

Nicolas Lirio (1:28:16): 'Cause I spent two years sitting in a stand, didn't see anything.

Jace Elliott (1:28:19): If they don't see any deer, why buy a license? And that's that's something we need to take seriously. Okay. Like the whole R three thing, it's important. I think that sometimes, to be honest, commercial industry can take their own pr for profit angle on R three and and as a state agent on recruitment, retention, and reactivation. Basically an effort to build hunters, which by all means is a good thing. Like we want more hunters. We don't want to lose hunters. The fact is we're going to, just by the simple demographics In terms of generation, generational demographics in our country. Baby boomers were the biggest generation in terms of the subsequent generations. And so as they age out of hunting, we're gonna lose hunters. It's a simple reality. That's not a failure on agencies or or industries or anything like that. What's very encouraging in Iowa is that we're r retaining a very strong participation rate at the young age demographics. For instance, Iowans aged fourteen to seventeen. have among the highest participation rates for deer hunting than any other generation. Doesn't that surprise because all I hear is our kids don't hunt anymore. They're so busy with these tournament teams, with these traveling sports, with these clubs and and everything else going on. And and well apparently not. I mean they're the highest participation besides the cohort of twenty five to forty four. They're the highest. And the lowest of course is sixty five plus that's to be expected. But that's a lot of people

Kent Boucher (1:29:23): Yeah, that's cool.

Jace Elliott (1:29:47): in that age range in Iowa and as they age out and and it's we're gonna see a decline. And and we have, certainly. And that doesn't make anyone excited. It definitely has implications for natural resource funding. It has implications for deer management if we don't have enough deer hunters to manage political

Kent Boucher (1:30:06): You know who I you know who I credit a lot with that? I credit primarily two two places with that. I credit the hunting public and shoot, I just went blank. Midwest Whitetail. They're they're the characters involved there are just such likable people. Yeah. And such low ego and they're young.

Jace Elliott (1:30:24): yeah. Yeah, both great groups.

Kent Boucher (1:30:36): You know what I mean? Yeah and when we were kids hunting media, great personalities and all, but they were old dudes. They're they're they're forties and on up. Yep, yep. And and so it was like something your dad did, you know? And and maybe if I'm lucky my dad will take me, you know, whereas I you know, it just

Jace Elliott (1:30:37): It appeals to them.

Jace Elliott (1:30:46): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (1:31:00): The way they added adventure back to deer hunting, you know, kayaking at other places. yeah. Going buying tags in other states so they can hunt more. And of course social media is i right there with that. But but yeah, I think that is encouraging.

Jace Elliott (1:31:08): Absolutely.

Jace Elliott (1:31:14): The thing is other states aren't seeing that same I mean, other states are hitting the crisis button. They're saying we're losing like there's some state

Kent Boucher (1:31:20): Even more even more than for Midwest Whitetail, you know, Iowa and and really the hunting public.

Jace Elliott (1:31:26): Yeah, both both I think Iowa based groups for the most part, in general. So there's I I've been part of meetings where other states are saying that our average hunter age is increasing by one year every year. Okay. That basically means that you're seeing the same cohort shift and that's a bad that's bad news. No one's that's bad news. Yeah. But that's not the case here. And and I can tell you that first hand looking at the data from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five, okay, about ten, eleven years there. Would you guys wager to guess how the

Nicolas Lirio (1:31:43): Jumping in.

Jace Elliott (1:31:55): Average hunter age changed in ten years? Add less than one. Wow. Yeah. You can round up and both numbers are forty years of age. The average age in Iowa of Iowa citizens is 39. That means we have a very healthy representative high participation rate group of hunters. And so so that's why it's again important to contextualize Iowa's situation and not get dragged by some national narrative that we're losing hunters. There's been attempts made to

Nicolas Lirio (1:31:59): Four years.

Jace Elliott (1:32:23): Put crossbows in the archery season to gain hunters. What a terrible argument. Seriously. Seriously. That's not gonna add any new hunters. It's gonna sell more crossbows. Right. Certainly. For a little bit. Yeah. From a natural resource management standpoint, there's nothing to gain there. You're gonna degrade the resource. You're gonna add folks into a season they didn't previously participate in. You're probably not adding new hunters, you're just putting rifle hunters in the archery season because they want to pull a trigger. Nothing wrong with that. But from a state that's making those decisions, maybe there is.

Nicolas Lirio (1:32:32): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:32:53): No, we're the last frontier for keeping crossbows art of the archery season in the Midwest, and I really proud of that. Like really proud of that. Everyone else everyone else in the Midwest. Every other state. Wow. Now maybe not the Dakotas. They're kind of borderline Midwest. Core whitetail deer states, we are the last frontier for a vertical bow season during the rut. Wow. And we're gonna stay that way.

Kent Boucher (1:33:14): I don't know that I would've gotten that trivia. I would have thought there was maybe one more. But yeah, now that I think about it, Wisconsin

Jace Elliott (1:33:19): Minnesota was one of the last to allow it. Okay. Well within the first year, over fifty percent of their archery harvest was with crossbows. So it changed things dramatically. Now I don't think that there's very many compound bow hunters that are gonna put down that compound bow and go buy a thousand dollar crossbow.

Kent Boucher (1:33:38): I think there's more than you think.

Jace Elliott (1:33:40): Maybe. But I don't think that's the majority of people using crossbows. I think they're people that are entering the season who primarily hunted with guns because they're very analogous, which is why we don't all which is why we don't allow them in the fix.

Kent Boucher (1:33:55): I'll tell you what'll fix that. Shooting one of those crossbows and leaving your thumb up. That's what'll fix that.

Nicolas Lirio (1:34:00): No no you

Kent Boucher (1:34:03): I I have a friend who did that that that splintered his thumbnail. Yikes. I don't don't

Nicolas Lirio (1:34:08): Don't ever say that again. Do not ever tell me that again. So what would fix that is you go to let's say it ends up getting legalized aga against our will and have a bunch of deer harvest. Well, you go to the Iowa Deer Classic and you say, Hey yeah, you can they can win the award, but anybody did crossbow, just put an asterisk by it so everyone knows it was crossbow. That would fix it. 'Cause it's such if you're going for a big rack on a buck for an award.

Kent Boucher (1:34:34): For a

Nicolas Lirio (1:34:35): about the ego, you care about the status, and if there's a little asterisk there that's gonna drive you freak nuts.

Jace Elliott (1:34:40): And very nuts. In a lot of states, the way they've done it is that they call it a crossbow season and it just so happens to be concurrent with their archery season, and that's kind of a way to to distinguish them. And of course, then you know, you get better resolution in the data in terms of weapon used and things. But it's just it wouldn't be a good thing in Iowa. And our hunters know that. Okay. So we did a survey in twenty twenty three and we asked the question are you satisfied or unsatisfied with the current methods of take during the archery season? Five percent of respondents were unsatisfied. Okay, you can infer that maybe five percent of respondents wanted to see more weapons. First weapon that comes to mind would be a crossbow, of course. most wouldn't probably expect firearms to be included. So again, I think you can

Kent Boucher (1:35:16): That's really impressive.

Kent Boucher (1:35:25): That's like the best survey ever for like w you know, when you're at like the register or whatever and you buy something's like, How would you rate your experience or whatever? I mean five percent. Yeah

Jace Elliott (1:35:34): That's that's great. But Iowa hunters get it. You know, they get it, and that's in large part due to really great advocacy that we have from hunting groups in the state that that know what there is to lose, if we changed things so fundamentally. So I think that's a big feather in the cap, and I think that that's a big reason why we have the quality we do. and I think we could change that in a hurry.

Kent Boucher (1:35:57): All right, before we go to C W D I gotta pee.

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Jace Elliott (1:37:11): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (1:37:25): Specifically Doug Dern, yeah. Yep. And then

Nicolas Lirio (1:37:28): Last night I was in the car with Judd. he stays with us when he's here working on the farm and and he talked about CWD. I didn't under he said something about we were over prescribing CWD, but I did not understand past that. What do you know is that like a conversation people have on what does that mean?

Kent Boucher (1:37:34): And

Jace Elliott (1:37:51): I'll try to get to that. Okay. But I but it is a conversation in in deer hunting in general. I would say Kent, you can chime in here. Do you think that there's any more controversial topic in wildlife management than CWD? I can't think of it.

Kent Boucher (1:38:07): Yeah, in in honest is you know, just a quick I don't think so.

Nicolas Lirio (1:38:10): Nitrogen and water. I don't or nitrates and water.

Kent Boucher (1:38:13): Yeah, yeah. I mean as far as wild hunting goes, yeah. I mean other than maybe like hunting maybe you'd say high fence debates or or you know, hunting Africa and stuff like that.

Nicolas Lirio (1:38:23): So it's worse than crossbows? I don't know.

Jace Elliott (1:38:26): Huh.

Kent Boucher (1:38:27): yeah, that's a good that's a good that's a good common petitor then.

Jace Elliott (1:38:31): I think that okay, and I think the reason why it's so controversial is because there's a cost to certain strategies, right? And that there's a lot at stake when it comes to the disease in general and how it can impact it to your population. Well

Nicolas Lirio (1:38:48): Can we start right at the beginning? Do most hunters agree that it is a thing?

Jace Elliott (1:38:52): I would say so.

Kent Boucher (1:38:53): That's part that's part of the controversy.

Nicolas Lirio (1:38:55): So people literally are like, nah, that's not even real.

Jace Elliott (1:38:58): Sure.

Kent Boucher (1:38:59): But I think a I think a lot of those people and I was so Meat Eater just had a great podcast on this last week. Yes, from Missouri. And and the title is So what happens if we just let C W D Rip? Mm-hmm. Meaning let it go unmanaged. And

Jace Elliott (1:39:09): Summers.

Nicolas Lirio (1:39:19): Hey, it's not as big of a deal. That's what these people are saying.

Kent Boucher (1:39:22): I have not finished the podcast yet. I got interrupted by fixing a combine today. But one of the things that I thought was pretty accurate that he, the biologist on their Sumner's, mentioned was there used to be a lot of people that would say that. They'd say it doesn't exist, not real. And he mentioned I I don't want to put words in his mouth. I was working on a combine while I was listening, so I could be wrong. I believe he said a lot of those people have probably changed more to it's always been here. So so okay, fine it exists, but it's always existed. And so that's kind of I would say more people fall into that camp now. On not not the majority of all people talking about C B fall into that camp. But a lot of those so a lot of the that

Nicolas Lirio (1:40:17): Camp, let me sum it up from what I'm understanding you saying is hey, it's always been here, so it's not that big of a deal, so don't take away my hunting. Is that what they're saying?

Kent Boucher (1:40:27): Yeah, well it's like what's the point in trying to manage something that's always been a problem? Okay. So if it's always been a problem, how much of a problem is it really? Yeah, yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:40:34): Yeah, that is that is a fairly prevalent argument. Now I think it's it's actually like really simple and easy to debunk that, because in Iowa in particular, we have data that sets us up really well to just kind of end that in its tracks, which is that we've been we've been sampling about five thousand deer per year for CWD since two thousand two. Okay. and we didn't detect the first case of CWD until twenty thirteen. And since we've seen an basically an exponential increase in the disease in terms of geographic spread and prevalence rate in terms of number of animals infected in a population, proportion of animals infected, over time. So data like that doesn't come about if something's existing in the background at a constant level.

Nicolas Lirio (1:41:23): You guys aren't just getting better at testing.

Jace Elliott (1:41:25): No the methods haven't really changed.

Nicolas Lirio (1:41:28): Yeah. That seems pretty debunking if I'm ever

Jace Elliott (1:41:30): So so yeah, we don't have to spend a lot of time talking about that because I think like there's always people at the margins of of the conversation. But I do think that there's a really I think it's really healthy to to talk about the topic in general, right? And how different states have approached responding to the disease. and I'm happy to talk about Iowa's perspective and and strategies because I think they're a bit different in a way that's intentional and scientifically valid. than than some of our neighbors.

Nicolas Lirio (1:42:01): So I do wanna well yeah, we should just get into that. First of all, what states are doing it well, what states are not doing it well, and then what what what is Iowa doing? Iowa you

Kent Boucher (1:42:10): What's controversial?

Jace Elliott (1:42:14): Are you allowed to do that question?

Kent Boucher (1:42:16): If Dick was running through the woods in like the eighteen thirties right now, he'd be like all these bear traps would just be like after every one of the steps that he was taking.

Nicolas Lirio (1:42:27): It's all two light on my thing.

Jace Elliott (1:42:29): I really don't like that it's such a hot topic because I don't think it should be, and I think that like the topic in general has gotten to a pretty unhealthy point in general. and that's that's everybody

Kent Boucher (1:42:37): absolutely has. Yeah. It's it's mirrored it's mirrored the direction that which we fought a civil war once in this country, so I imagine the negative political dialogue has has been around for quite some time. But I would say that in my lifetime it has followed that same trend where extremes have been extreme boundaries have been established and There's been a lot of grenades hucked in between those two extreme points of view.

Jace Elliott (1:43:11): Yeah, and I'll even say that it's a topic that from my perspective is not being handled with the level of scientific integrity that I would like to see. and I'll get into that. But to answer your question directly, I'm I don't think it's really fair to like say who's doing it right or wrong or anything like that. But what we can say, definitively, is that in every situation where a state has detected CWD and either decided to intervene or not, over time we've seen that disease Increase in prevalence and spread geographically.

Nicolas Lirio (1:43:43): Whether they intervene or not. So why intervene?

Jace Elliott (1:43:46): Well, th that's a good question. And it's a question that now here's the thing.

Kent Boucher (1:43:52): Before we move on from that, was there a time where Illinois bucked that trend? W no pun intended where they where they actually saw like a cleaning up of C W D prevalence or maybe like just halted it yeah so that it wasn't growing anymore?

Jace Elliott (1:44:08): Right. So the best case scenario that you can establish through surveillance data, and let me preface it by saying like every state samples their dear surveill you know, their C W D surveillance programs are not comparable directly, meaning that making the comparisons from Wisconsin to Illinois, which is often done or any other state to any other state, is a little problematic, but it's the best data we have. So we can still infer And use that data, but but I do think it's important to ca make a caveat there that like if we compared our surveillance data to like Nebraska that does a rotational surveillance, like it's just gonna look different. And you can make all kinds of inferences on who's doing right or wrong and it I don't think that's fair. It is true that Illinois very likely, I'm I'm perfectly happy to concede that that due to their intense targeted removal, their sharpshooting efforts that lasted, I believe, over twenty years. They likely reduced the rate of increase that they saw with CWD in their state. But not talking about I gotta be a little careful here because I again I I mentioned scientific integrity and so I think it's important to uphold that. But I think one way to say this is that what what we're doing is we're managing when we're talking about the the far end of the spectrum in terms of CWD intervention, which typically involves density reduction strategies. Targeting older age class males. Okay? These are generally the the common threads through these strategies. What we're the objectives are reducing the rate of increase, but not eliminating the rate of increase. So I think it's really important to lay that out. And I don't think that that always gets talked about as honestly, as genuinely as it should.

Nicolas Lirio (1:45:55): Rate didn't even go down. It's just in fact increase didn't even go down. It just increased by less.

Jace Elliott (1:46:01): Yeah, I mean the geographic area that's

Kent Boucher (1:46:04): Never before never turn the trend around.

Nicolas Lirio (1:46:08): If they kept going with how intense they were doing it.

Jace Elliott (1:46:10): No. Well I mean I mean, n f doesn't seem like it, 'cause they they kept doing it for over two decades and then they stopped. And why they stopped, in my understanding, and this is all public data, anybody can see it, the prevalence rate in the state of Illinois has basically doubled, okay, in the last five to ten years, as s has the geographic area impacted by CWD. Which is intense

Nicolas Lirio (1:46:39): Per capita it's increasing in the area that it's affecting and the area that's affecting is growing lower. Wow. Wow.

Jace Elliott (1:46:46): Yes. So so here's what I would say. If you pulled someone off the street and said, Would you call that conventional success in disease management? I don't think you'd get very many yeses. Now that's not to say that that wasn't a worthwhile effort. And I think all CWD related efforts are done with the right intentions. And I'm not trying to not trying to like cast any judgment. I I'm just trying to defend Iowa's stance on.

Nicolas Lirio (1:47:12): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:47:16): And and they were dealt a hand where like it was Wisconsin and Illinois in terms of whitale states that found it first, i in a large way. And and at the time it seemed like the best strategy was to do intense targeted removal.

Kent Boucher (1:47:29): Missouri was also very early on in the d how did but they were significantly ahead of Iowa, right? Or were they Or did our first cases appear on the Missouri border, like Davis County or something?

Jace Elliott (1:47:32): It was about ten years after.

Jace Elliott (1:47:37): Three years. I think they found it in twenty ten.

Jace Elliott (1:47:44): Yep, so the very northeast corner of the state.

Nicolas Lirio (1:47:48): You basically got Wisconsin.

Kent Boucher (1:47:49): Well yeah, probably yeah. I I I'm aware that it w showed up there early on, but I but I know that one of the weird things about all of it was the Missouri relationship too. Those there was those border counties with Missouri that pretty early on

Jace Elliott (1:48:02): Yeah. Well Wayne County. I mean that's probably our highest prevalence county in the state right now, which is adjacent to Missouri and and yeah, I think northern Missouri is where they found it first. I'm not an expert on those other states' histories like I am Iowa's, but

Kent Boucher (1:48:16): Wha so so I guess just to add in the trifecta here, what was Missouri's what was so so Wisconsin used a more and this I learned or you know recently heard on on Meteor, the more generalized it statewide ish Yeah, Urabuck, things like that. Illinois did more of the sharpshooting. What did Missouri what did they do anything to when they were first getting

Jace Elliott (1:48:33): Burn a buck.

Jace Elliott (1:48:42): My understanding is that until last year, they've been doing sharpshooting to some extent.

Kent Boucher (1:48:48): So they followed more of the Illinois method. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:48:50): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Intense targeted removals basically is I think like kind of the the phrase that gets used.

Nicolas Lirio (1:48:55): It w did Ernabuck was that better?

Jace Elliott (1:48:59): It was a short lived effort.

Nicolas Lirio (1:49:01): Well I know I and and I've I've heard many conversations about it. You know, but but while it was an effort, is there enough data to point like

Jace Elliott (1:49:08): Reduce their densities and and I guess my understanding of Wisconsin's situation at the time, first of all, Ernabuck was not popular among hunters. In general in general, I think efforts should be made to not take measures that a vast majority of the user group doesn't support because the outcome of all of that in Wisconsin was basically a legislative mandate to not do that anymore. And and so in some way that's not what a state agency wants to encounter, right? And again, this is new territory at the time for these states and I'm not trying to cast judgment, but I think at this point we have hindsight to talk about these things, right? Put in context.

Nicolas Lirio (1:49:49): Wait, wait, but but let's go back. Earn a buck. Was it effective?

Jace Elliott (1:49:51): did it did it effective? Well nothing's been effective in terms of reducing the level of CWD over an appreciable amount of time and space. Did it

Nicolas Lirio (1:50:01): Was it as effective as Illinois?

Jace Elliott (1:50:03): Illinois seem to have had a a more a more stable disease trajectory for about a decade where they they they measured lower prevalence rates over time than Wisconsin did, but there also is probably a difference in terms of disease history in Wisconsin and Illinois. I think this is fairly well understood. Like Wisconsin and Illinois they found the disease at roughly the same time, but that doesn't mean that the disease was there at the same time. It could have been in Wisconsin longer and I think that the

Kent Boucher (1:50:34): So two thousand two was basically when it showed up in Wisconsin. I mean that that's when they were getting positive tests. The first positive tests were showing up in two thousand two. But was that the first they were really testing for it?

Jace Elliott (1:50:37): Well that's when they found it in Wisconsin. I think

Jace Elliott (1:50:46): I don't think that there was very robust surveillance before that. Okay I think that this deer was dispatched because it was clinical. it

Kent Boucher (1:50:55): And they were like, shoot, we got all here. We better start checking on this. Okay.

Jace Elliott (1:50:58): It got screened for diseases. Right. And then I think a very robust surveillance model resulted and and that's when we started looking for it in Iowa, right? Before that we weren't really looking for it. I don't think we had it before that because we looked for ten years and so was Ernabuck effective in reducing deer densities, it seemed like it was. It wasn't though in the long term because hunters didn't support it to the extent that the the measure got taken off the table permanently.

Kent Boucher (1:51:14): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (1:51:30): And so I wouldn't really count that as a long term successful management strategy. Sure, just like any policy does, right? And and but but then again, you know, I'm coming at this with an Iowa perspective where we're not really in my career dealing with the overabundance that maybe they were in Wisconsin at the time and and maybe that was what had to be done to to draw those numbers down. Clearly though, it was a short lived effort.

Nicolas Lirio (1:51:32): You're saying it's culturally just as much as it is

Jace Elliott (1:51:58): that didn't result in long term abatement because it was so unpopular that it got canned, basically, right? And so I think there's a lesson there, right, that you have to work with hunters in order to work towards these solutions.

Nicolas Lirio (1:52:10): So that's a perfect backdrop, but what are we doing now?

Kent Boucher (1:52:13): Well well before we move on from that point, this is something that's always bugged me a little bit about this. And it's hard to not say this in some way that's kind of almost virtue signaling or s you know, it's some kind of

Nicolas Lirio (1:52:26): Know you. We we know what you're like.

Kent Boucher (1:52:29): or we talk we talk about when we whenever it's like, well, we gotta get the public behind this, whether it's a hunting issue, whether it's any other kind of legislation, it's treated like it's a you know, this this

Kent Boucher (1:52:54): unchangeable or or we're we're at the mercy of of people's wants and desires right and to me earn a buck there's there's the the the data shows right that there was a decrease in density right and the answer is It got taken away. The result of it was it got taken away, taken off the table. And I agree with you. That is it's not great when a game and a game management agency gets one more tool permanently pulled out of the toolbox. Like that's that's that's that's not good. but the argument of you know, well see, nobody likes it, so we can't have it, even though it was an effective tool. The reason it's not there is because people didn't like it. And to me, when we preach conservation happens one mind at a time, that is what we're trying to get to. Because I think people I I think a lot of conservation issues come down to two ways of viewing time. My time and nature's time. And It's normal and understandable to say that I only get one time and it's right now. And I want it to be what I want it to be right now. But I just don't see and and like it or not, that's a selfish way of looking at things. The definition of selfishness is what I want. Right. And when we look at anything. Whenever selfishness is the motivation for it, in the end comes degradation, destruction, loss, death, whatever you want to call it, right? And so to me, when when we say we take this thing or or we look at this thing or we look we view it hunters or whoever the public is that we're we're trying to make policy with that affects them.

Kent Boucher (1:55:18): When we view them as, well, what are they gonna like or not? I get it. That's a very pragmatic way of looking at it. And you have to you have to you have to work with what you got. I understand that side of it. But sometimes the right thing is just the right thing and it sucks that it's the right thing. And yeah. And I just it bothers me when and I took advantage of there not being an earn a buck program in Wisconsin last year. I hunted I hunted Driftless Wisconsin for about 20 hours and I came home with a nice buck. Yep. And I didn't have to shoot a doe, even though I shut I I saw multiple does that morning. the first the first deer that I think I had in range was was this buck with some does around it. So I could have I could have said, nope, not gonna shoot the buck. I'm gonna shoot the doe and it's gonna be better for nature. Yeah. I could have done that, and I didn't. I shot the buck.

Nicolas Lirio (1:56:09): So you're saying that you're frustrated that altruism it still has to bow to selfishness.

Kent Boucher (1:56:15): Yeah, yeah, just like the the we have to appeal to the fact that people aren't really interested in doing the right thing. Unless it fits within their selfish desires. Do I get a hundred good habitat no more? Yeah, I mean and so it's like when we when we say that it's like they're this they're this totally formidable child, right? This this moldable mind, you know, of of

Nicolas Lirio (1:56:26): We if I put in that hab that

Kent Boucher (1:56:44): Well, you know, we really don't you know it we there there are they are a unknown quantity there or something that that we are stuck to their whims. And whatever those whims may be, we gotta live with them in order to gain whatever inch we can. And I understand that's a very pragmatic way of looking at it. I'm not saying that the DNR should should act in any other way. My I guess my beef is not with the DNR here or anyone's DNR. It's just with human nature. Can we never have the right can we we if we came up with the best plan but it gets in the way of somebody's selfish wants for the here and now, can we just not can we simply not have it because too many people are all about themselves and what they what they want.

Nicolas Lirio (1:57:15): There it is.

Jace Elliott (1:57:35): Trust me, I I get where you're coming from for sure. And I'm not trying to make some sort of like value judgment at all on on that that program.

Kent Boucher (1:57:43): I didn't think I didn't think I want to be very clear. I'm not I'm not criticizing you or the D and R of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, or Wisconsin. Same. I'm just saying that

Kent Boucher (1:57:59): Earnabuck got made illegal even though it was working to some degree, whether it would have made a difference in the long the in the if we were still doing Earnabuck every year until this very year right now and and on for another fifty years. Mm-hmm. Maybe it wouldn't have solved the problem. But it sure as heck seemed like it it was helping.

Jace Elliott (1:58:16): It seemed like it was helping balance the deer population. From my understanding, I mean, I was like a toddler during those years, you know. I wasn't very in tune with what was going on. But from what I've learned through conversations with my peers in other states, it did seem like a very effective population management tool in a seemingly overabundant population. I think what I'm trying to get across is that at the end of the day, the effect, the long term effect is probably what should be weighed in. And I commend the Wisconsin DNR for for trying something that was a difficult decision to make. And that goes for any department that's that's tried to tackle these difficult issues. and so the last thing I'm trying to do is is make some value judgment.

Kent Boucher (1:59:02): Yeah, and I'm not I I was not trying to imply that you were. No, no, no, I didn't think or feel that you were at all.

Jace Elliott (1:59:07): but I think you use pragmatic a lot. and I think that that's a pretty good lens for government to use at the end of the day. Now, absolutely it would be great if if every deer hunter was first and foremost primarily concerned with herd health and balancing population. I do think a lot of hunters are, and I do think that that's just implicit in being a deer hunter.

Kent Boucher (1:59:28): Time.

Jace Elliott (1:59:34): Is that now now that's a subjective thing, right? What's a balanced and quality population? That's that's something we write in our deer management objective, but it is relatively subjective and it's probably variable across even a state's landscape. Like that looks different in northwest Iowa than it does southeast Iowa. I kind of digressed there, but what I'm getting at is is I was just trying to talk about sort of the outcome of of that and and and basically that was the hindsight that we had available to us in twenty thirteen when we were faced with our for CWD positive. there was all these other models to look at and and kind of see how they performed over time in terms of disease abatement, in terms of and and that's a biological lens, right? And that's an important lens. But there's also other lenses to look at these complicated issues with social lenses. Very important. Stakeholder relationships, hunter support, public trust, those are huge in our ability to manage deer, which has to exist independently of disease management, right? Because at the end of the day we still have to manage our populations. We still need hunters that want to hunt. and and that's an an important thing. from an economic lens, right? Earn a buck might have been a a relatively cost effective program because, you know, it's it's a hunter mandate you know, you're not paying anybody to shoot those does, but sharpshooting is

Nicolas Lirio (2:00:57): Basically you're getting paid. Did they get paid for the dough tag before they got the

Jace Elliott (2:01:00): You know, I don't know.

Nicolas Lirio (2:01:03): No, it if for Earnabuck, I wonder if they got paid like they had to buy the tag for the dough and

Kent Boucher (2:01:09): I should.

Jace Elliott (2:01:09): It might have just been a package deal. I'm not sure. I will say that some of the other approaches to CWD intervention are not low cost, right? And in from an economic standpoint or from a social standpoint, there's a cost.

Nicolas Lirio (2:01:12): What is a text? Well I don't know.

Kent Boucher (2:01:26): Yeah. Very exciting.

Jace Elliott (2:01:28): folks not agree with your direction you're going and then needing to depend on those folks to continue to manage your population.

Kent Boucher (2:01:34): Yeah, yeah, my my my criticism is not in in these agencies. I guess it's just in the fatalism of can't expect we can't expect people to just behave better or or to mi or to do the right thing for the sake of the right.

Jace Elliott (2:01:41): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (2:01:48): Sure, sure. I think like sometimes I've heard arguments made that like, you know, deer hunters have failed this or they've, you know, failed to step up and and it bothers me a little bit because at the end of the day, chronic waste and disease is a disease that humans did not create as far as I know, right? I I don't believe so anyway.

Kent Boucher (2:02:08): that another bear trap just snapped.

Jace Elliott (2:02:11): anyway, I joke about that. But the the fact is it's not Hunter's fault that d CWD exists. It's not Hunter's fault that CWD continues to exist. There's no amount of dough harvest that would theoretically stop the disease. There there's no theoretical basis for stopping this disease through harvest. It's just it there isn't. Now you can minimize the impacts. That that seems to be pretty clear, in the short term. I wouldn't really consider that a long term strategy. So because you're inevitably gonna reach the same point, you're just maybe buying yourself some time at a great cost.

Nicolas Lirio (2:02:44): Two things you said reach the same point. One, what does that mean? What's the end product? We're watching this graph go up in every single state. What is it when it goes all the way up? What it happens? And two, what is Iowa doing?

Kent Boucher (2:02:54): Well and and on and on top of that, from a disease standpoint

Kent Boucher (2:03:03): And unfortunately, C W D and Covid get linked together so so tightly now for sure because that's what people can wrap their their minds around. And yeah, compared to other con compared to other global pandemics throughout history, COVID was was very, very minor. There another bear trap just snapped. compared to, you know, Spanish influenza, compared to the black plague is no, no. that that's just plague.

Nicolas Lirio (2:03:28): That wasn't like

Kent Boucher (2:03:32): the Yeah, bubonic plague. the plague is like a I believe it's a like a necrotic. It's like almost similar to like flesh eating bacteria type disease. I think. I think. Smallpox is probably the the worst that we know of. Yeah. Especially here in the new world, right? When

Nicolas Lirio (2:03:33): The name of the disease is Plague.

Nicolas Lirio (2:03:49): Smallpox you were saying?

Kent Boucher (2:03:56): when when brought over from Africa, highest estimates are nine out of ten indigenous people in in North America were were killed. And so when you look at how disease where we don't have vaccines, we don't another bear trap just snapped, where we don't have modern medical interventions like ventilators and and and whole staffs of doctors and nurses there to get give the absolute best s you know, symptom mitigating care. the way disease works is you have this steady build up, build, build, build, build, build, and then boom, you hit this this population crash event and and you have a remnant that survives, right? And is that when Nick when Nick asks Where you know, as as prevalence goes up and and it's is it it is an always fatal disease, right? As as best as the science shows you get it, you die. Yeah, right, yeah. If something else doesn't kill you for a short because of your weakened state, usually of having a disease, right? You're you're you you might be a little weaker or whatever, so you're easier prey or

Jace Elliott (2:05:15): Potentially, yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:05:16): But I guess it can go kind of like unseen symptom wise, right? Too for like you're kinda like dormant or something in the inter But but given some other some other mortality event, it it'll kill you. You you will if you if you were kept in a box with the food and water and you have C W D, you're dying of C W D. The So with an always fatal disease

Jace Elliott (2:05:23): Yeah, incubation period, we call it.

Jace Elliott (2:05:30): You don't survive the

Kent Boucher (2:05:45): As the prevalence goes up, do eventually we just have this, there's just so many animals that the population in these areas is just bottoms out. And I mean, the way nature works is usually, you know, especially when it comes to disease, there is a remnant that is saved who has some kind of tolerance or and I don't even know how that works here because it's not a virus, it's not a it's a prion. It's a it's a physical problem with your nervous tissue. So it's not it's not like there's memory of infection and things like that. But maybe there is some kind of resistance to maybe there's you have extra mucus in your nose. Sneeze out the the prion before it gets to your brain or something. I don't know.

Jace Elliott (2:06:25): Well we can put a pin on the resistance because

Jace Elliott (2:06:30): No, there's there's something to talk about there, but we can get to that, I think.

Kent Boucher (2:06:33): But I mean is that the ultimate end game is

Jace Elliott (2:06:36): Just okay. So so I mean, one thing we can expect, and this sounds really fatalistic, but I also think that we need to handle this topic with honesty and rose tinted lenses don't help anyone. w you know, we're gonna continue to see prevalence increase probably in every area that CWD exists in the wild. that has happened so far in the last twenty-five years in the Midwest. It's happened out west. Now I hate comparing elk and mule deer population disease dynamics to whitetailed deer because there's a lot of differences that we don't have to get into. But let's just keep it on whitetail deer for now. That that's been the case in every state that's experienced this disease at an appreciable level. New York's kind of a weird outlier where they probably actually found the spark of the disease by dispatching a deer that was directly adjacent to a infected captive facility. Completely different scenario than any other subsequent state that's dealt with the disease has has encouraged.

Kent Boucher (2:07:45): So in other words, they killed one and they haven't had any p test positives?

Jace Elliott (2:07:49): As far as I know, yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:07:51): Make that man mayor or whoever it was that shot that down

Jace Elliott (2:07:56): Right. Although it's probably inevitable because that's the that's the way that this disease works, you know, there's no cure for it. you can pull the trigger all you want and you can maybe slow the spread, but that's the best you can hope for. Okay. So I'm not trying to paint this doom and gloom because I do think that there's a little more optimism on this topic maybe than if a year ago we would have had this conversation. so so here's the thing. I'm not gonna tell you that I know exactly what's gonna happen to our deer populations. And I don't think anybody really should. I think that that is an area where we again we need to maintain scientific integrity. Now there are statistical models that show that once prevalence reaches a certain point, this was some really good research that came out of Wisconsin. Once prevalence reaches a certain point in the female deer population, adult female population, I believe it's about twenty nine percent, then population decline results. Okay. now I have no issues with with saying that that's that's feasible or or even likely. But we do have to remember that modeling tends to simplify complicated systems. That doesn't mean that you can see into the future by building a statistical model. That does it's not to discredit modeling or statisticians or any of that really important work that's helped us understand our world better and make decisions accordingly. But it is disingenuous to say that we know what's gonna happen in the long term because there are genetic factors to this disease. That these models do not account for, and we're learning more and more about that every year. in fact, we can talk a little bit about that, but but first I want to finish the thought. It does seem likely that population decline is is fairly inevitable once prevalence reaches a certain level. So I don't want to minimize the impacts of this disease. I do think that it poses a great threat on the quality of deer we have in Iowa. I don't think that it stands a chance of wiping deer off the landscape simply due to the fact that Once deer become infected, they have approximately a year and a half to three years on average, before those symptoms start to exhibit. And that means that they're gonna have time to replace themselves, through reproduction before they would die from the disease. And that's why we're not seeing big, steep declines in deer numbers in terms of white tail deer, in areas where we've had it for quite some time, right? In Wisconsin.

Nicolas Lirio (2:10:15): It just means you'll never see a five year old deer.

Jace Elliott (2:10:18): Well, means you might see less of them, right? If you get a lot of fawns that become infected, which is reasonable to assume in a high prevalence population, there are some serious potential implications for age structure that that trouble me, right? In a state like Iowa, that's kind of our thing. And and CWD poses, I think, the biggest risk to that, maybe more than crossbows. That was joke, but but anyway, so so all of that is true. but there there's still a lot We we can't act like this is settled science. We can't act like we know exactly what's what's going to happen, and that's not to say that we should just be paralyzed with uncertainty, but it's that we should be open to the fact that there are factors that we never considered, myself included, and I'm I'm the first one to admit that I was a hundred percent wrong as far as I can tell on one issue of CWD, which is the ability for a population to like you said, create some sort of resistance to the disease over time through selective you thought there should no I didn't think there would be. well because right because even an infected deer can pass on their genetics through reproduction one, two, three times minimally before they before they die from the disease. So I've been on podcasts as recently as a couple years ago saying that I don't see any potential f framework for selective genetics to occur in wild populations in a way that would buffer CWD impacts. And that's been the popular narrative in my field. That needs to change, perhaps, based on some preliminary data that we're finding in some long standing disease areas, which is showing that despite all of our assumptions, which I think were well founded, and I would say that because I had them, right? despite those assumptions, we're seeing certain genetic factors that prolong the life of infected deer. Two or threefold. Huh. Increasing in wild deer populations, right? We're not talking about introducing some captive genetic deer. We're talking about this is happening in nature due to selective pressures. as far as we can tell, and as far as the data that's been shared to me, the the proportion of deer in a wild population, and I can think of one example at least, that has seemingly changed from single digit.

Jace Elliott (2:12:42): Proportion of these deer who had and I hate to use the word resistant because these deer still get the disease and it's still a hundred percent fatal. They live a lot longer, and that's very important. That shouldn't be minimized. Because on average, these resistant deer, and I'm using air quotes for anybody who's not watching, because that'll generate some some feedback. these quote unquote resistant deer.

Kent Boucher (2:12:49): They just live longer.

Kent Boucher (2:13:02): Yeah.

Jace Elliott (2:13:07): On average their incubation period, remember I said a year and a half to three years, it's it's now four and a half years. Now that's huge. That that's huge for for a white tailed deer population demographics. That means that on average, what that what that literally means is that if all of that is correct, deer with these genetic factors are going to more likely than not outlive the disease because the average lifespan of a white tailed deer in the Midwest is shorter than that.

Kent Boucher (2:13:12): wow.

Jace Elliott (2:13:35): interesting. It means the disease is not going to be the mortality f factor that we thought it was that we're modeling it as. And I think that's what we need to maintain integrity about, right? Because like it or not, this is just a really dogmatic topic, any way you look at it. And and that that just sucks as as a scientist to see because I think that we're doing a disservice to the to the field by by

Kent Boucher (2:13:51): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:13:59): Yeah, you get you get hemmed in, yeah.

Jace Elliott (2:14:01): You get hemmed in, you get entrenched in a certain maybe even use the phrase ideology, right? And I think like we need to be open minded and not push agendas and rhetoric and things like that. So hopefully I'm not coming across as doing that. What I'm trying to do instead is show that there might be some optimism. I'm not saying that this is settled by any means, but there is some really promising data that I think I'll be able to talk about a little more clearly maybe in the next year or two, once that data gets published, because at this point it's not mine to discuss in specifics. but it is happening. And you can find that information. the proportion of deer that are twenty years ago, the proportion of deer that had that resistant factor in their genome has increased tenfold in a wild population over twenty years. It's in the Midwest. And and I don't maybe want to get into more specifics just because again, this isn't my research. People are somebody else, you know.

Kent Boucher (2:14:46): Just in Oklahoma where this is happening.

Jace Elliott (2:14:58): Getting the cat out of the bag before I could get a paper out. So

Kent Boucher (2:15:01): Sure. I will sell that information. I'm kidding. that's that's that's very

Jace Elliott (2:15:03): No,

Jace Elliott (2:15:09): Probab could probably find it online too because a lot of this data's been collected.

Nicolas Lirio (2:15:12): That is encouraging and it is encouraging in a way that I thought impossible with CW talked about we were like gr I was literally in the camp with Kent where I was like, Well I guess in seventy years they're gonna ban hunting deer 'cause there won't be enough of them and then they'll have to go through another hundred years of rebuilding up.

Jace Elliott (2:15:18): Me too?

Kent Boucher (2:15:19): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:15:30): A another thing, you know what's interesting about that two things. I had a human anatomy and physiology prof in college who said that if every man lived long enough he'd die of prostate cancer. And so this is kind of that's beautiful. It's kind of and Yeah. and and you know I've I've known multiple people who

Jace Elliott (2:15:46): Could be a t shirt, yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:15:57): who have died of prostate cancer before normal life expectancy for their for their demographic, right? but I've known far more people who didn't. And so maybe that's kind of a similar thing that happens here. But the other side of it is that's good for the deer. Yep. And what I think is a valid concern is the human and deer interact or where that interface is.

Jace Elliott (2:16:26): Yep.

Kent Boucher (2:16:27): How do how do people end up viewing deer? And how do people get affected by infected deer? Is there a is there a you know a typhoid Mary for CWD where where you and and there's reason to be afraid of that because we know that with mad cow disease back when Judd and I were little Little little guys. I In fact, Judd is in the room right now. But I remember when it hit the news and maybe Judd does too, when Mad Cow had infected a couple of people over in the UK, I believe is where or was it

Nicolas Lirio (2:16:59): Yeah.

Nicolas Lirio (2:17:11): You actually were talking about when you were a little kid. I thought you were because they think that King George had mad cow disease. I thought that's what you were talking about.

Kent Boucher (2:17:18): Do they really George or Henry the Eighth, maybe?

Nicolas Lirio (2:17:21): No, who is the what during the Revolutionary War? I thought it was they because he started out like a really sane, reasonable king and he died crazy. And so they think he got the syphilis. I don't know. Jud thinks it might be syphilis. I don't know I know. Anyway.

Kent Boucher (2:17:24): George, yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:17:33): Sorry. But but Yeah, yeah. So and it so there was a jump, there was a species barrier where where mad cow disease became Kruxfeld Jakob or however you say it, and which is the human version of CWD. so bad human prion spongif spongiform and cephalite or whatever, right? And the the

Jace Elliott (2:17:34): Yeah, it was the nineties, early two thousands.

Jace Elliott (2:17:47): Yeah, after Doug told me it's a previous So a sepalopathy.

Kent Boucher (2:18:02): idea that this could happen with chronic wasting disease and cervids, jump the the species barrier again and and enter humans is a is a legitimate concern. And I did was there a species jump from CWD to was it macaw or macax?

Jace Elliott (2:18:25): Yeah, so my understanding of that research that's been done is they were extremely manipulated trials where in a lot of cases these primates monkeys maybe they're not primates, I don't know exactly probably. In any case

Kent Boucher (2:18:40): Judd, can you look it up? Jud Judd already looked it up.

Jace Elliott (2:18:47): In any case, a lot of a lot of these trials involved like inoculating these animals in their central nervous system with

Kent Boucher (2:18:56): So they took a syringe, shot some some C W D prions directly into the brain. Yeah.

Jace Elliott (2:19:02): Yeah, so grain of salt. that's to me not strong. Well, there's not even strong evidence that that worked. Okay, okay. Now some so okay, here's the big breaking news, which I think was maybe a little over stated in certain circles, was that there's new evidence that, you know, this disease can make the jump. Well, not really. there were s a couple animals that I think showed

Nicolas Lirio (2:19:08): Technically could happen.

Kent Boucher (2:19:11): That has

Jace Elliott (2:19:32): symptoms, potential symptoms of a TSE after being again inoculated in their central nervous system, which is not really r in my opinion, very relevant to like humans consuming CWD positive meat, very different method of intake, right, for those disease agents. I'll I'll answer that in a second. I'll be some suspense there, but I'm not trying to like minimize the risk, but I'm trying to put it in its proper place. We have no reason to believe that that ever has happened. And there's been estimated like there's been studies on this and and this study happened years ago and it estimated over a hundred thousand people and likely a lot more have consumed CWD positive meat in their lifetime. And there's not one single case that we can show where The disease has jumped the species barrier. And in all fairness, it might be fairly difficult to ever come to that determination. But I do think that that's an important point to make that sometimes gets overshadowed. Instead, I think the risk gets pushed a lot, and I'm not saying that that's wrong, but I'm saying that there has to be a counter to it, to be fair, which is that there has no never it's never happened. We don't really have a reason to believe that that species barrier. can be jumped. Now, is there a non-zero risk? Absolutely. I could walk out of this studio and have a piano fall on my head as well. I can't say that that's a non-zero risk. And that's not that wasn't said in again to minimize. It's just sometimes these phrases get used maybe a little disingenuously. Like nothing in life is a nonzero risk. Life itself is a hundred percent fatal. Yeah. Right? So sometimes by using these phrases or terms You can kind of like strong arm a certain conclusion that I don't know is always fair. Now I'm not gonna say that there's no risk with consuming CWD positive meat. And the fact is that the CDC still recommends taking a cautious approach to consuming known CWD positive meat. That body is far more of health human health experts than I am. I I have no expertise in human health, and so I'm not comfortable giving any sort of advice there. but I

Jace Elliott (2:21:55): I am an expert to some extent in this topic and can talk about the fact that yeah, there there is no evidence that that that can occur. And I think that we should just have our eyes and ears open to how that narrative is used. That's all

Kent Boucher (2:22:07): Okay, so my second one off of that is maybe the fear isn't so much the risk to human health because the risk seem as of now seems to be very close

Jace Elliott (2:22:18): It's ostensibly

Kent Boucher (2:22:20): Very close to zero. As close to zero as you can get, right? Exactly. Based on what evidence we have. Yep. I we'll get into that. so the the other concern is that people could start i if if prevalency and and this later on symptom onset

Jace Elliott (2:22:24): What do you

Nicolas Lirio (2:22:28): answering me for the record I would eat it.

Kent Boucher (2:22:50): selected deer ends up emerging out of out of the ashes of C W D. But even though they they can carry the disease longer without have suffering from its effects. If the if the understanding is, yeah, odds are every deer you're looking at, kind of like how we view black bears and trichonosis, right? Yeah. Every deer you look at for sure, that thing's infected. Yeah. You know, and

Jace Elliott (2:23:16): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:23:18): And does that then change the public's sentiment of like, do we start looking at deer like we look at rats? Sure. Where it's like, ew deer, you know.

Jace Elliott (2:23:29): Yeah. Now yeah, valid valid question. and I sure hope not, you know, like it's a really difficult thing because like I don't think that we have any long term solutions to this stopping this disease. I I think that's a pretty uncontroversial statement. I think that there's there's grounds to be made if if a agency decides it's worth the cost to temporarily minimize the rate of increase, though it will probably be a rate of increase nonetheless. but that's not to say that I don't see this as a a serious threat to a very valuable resource that I've spent a lot of time talking about as such today, right? So yeah, I hope not. You know, I think the black bear analogy's excellent because like that's a pretty good assumption, or like wild hogs, it's a pretty good assumption to make that a lot of those animals have trichinosis. Of course the difference is we know that trichinosis can infect humans. Yeah. We know that to be true.

Kent Boucher (2:24:26): But it's also not always fatal and

Nicolas Lirio (2:24:29): Is if you cook your pork to one ten to have

Jace Elliott (2:24:31): Yeah, but

Kent Boucher (2:24:33): One two.

Jace Elliott (2:24:37): Don't eat your wild pork.

Kent Boucher (2:24:38): Nick likes a little ice.

Jace Elliott (2:24:45): I don't think it's a big deal for domestic

Kent Boucher (2:24:47): Well yeah, I think they've pretty well eradicated from the confinement.

Jace Elliott (2:24:50): Okay. But in any case, th there's a good point to be made there though. Like we know what to do to to to basically cancel out that disease risk. Yeah. so yeah, I hope not anyway. I don't wanna ever see deer devalued. and although I think that we can do that by certain C W D intervention strategies, to be honest. It would

Nicolas Lirio (2:25:14): Take a confirmed jump, I think, to for the public, the general public, to be like, my goodness, do not touch.

Kent Boucher (2:25:23): Well, but but I mean there there is something in your brain where well let me put it in these terms. I once went I was fishing in this this pond. They call them ponds in New Hampshire, they'd be lakes in Iowa. I was fishing in this pond in New Hampshire. I mean, beautiful you know, crystal clear water, you could see to the bottom. And I I caught a stringer full of yellow perch. And I wanted to eat And when I was filleting them, every last one of had grubs. Every one of And I instantly lost my appetite for perch. Yeah. And I have zero interest in going back to that lake to fish for perch. Because there is and I think technically it's safe to eat a grubby fish just like if you shoot a rice breast duck. Yeah. It's safe to it's just extra.

Jace Elliott (2:26:18): I've heard that too. Protein actually.

Kent Boucher (2:26:22): It's safe to eat. But that having the idea that all these animals are infected, I don't think that's gonna be a nothing bird.

Nicolas Lirio (2:26:32): You saw a thing. You like saw experienced it. Versus if you're pointing at a beautiful deer with her fawn and you know that would mean nothing. Like to my mom, that would be a big nothing burger. She saw the deer dragging along on the ground, that would be

Jace Elliott (2:26:32): No.

Kent Boucher (2:26:40): Yeah, and so yeah, it's got C W D.

Kent Boucher (2:26:45): I know.

Jace Elliott (2:26:50): And you know what? Like we're

Kent Boucher (2:26:52): You will see that. Because when you see a symptomatic chronically or a s symptomatic CWD deer, it is disgusting to look at. Their ribs are showing. They're it kind of got that blank, you know, my brain's got physical holes in it. Right. Look to And when people start drawing that link, I don't think it's gonna be nothing. I do agree that you you have species jump. Yeah, that then then it's

Jace Elliott (2:27:21): Yeah. Story a lot.

Kent Boucher (2:27:21): Get out the meatball but but I I think it's a it's a realistic but it also we can't nature is never static. It never has been, never will be. And we we can't expect to to permanently dwell in this era of nature, which is deer are really awesome. Everybody likes deer. And And that relationship between humans and deer is always gonna be that way. It may change. I hope it stays that way. Yeah but it may it it may change.

Jace Elliott (2:28:00): We should try to make it stay that way. And I think like

Kent Boucher (2:28:03): It wasn't that way for Daniel Boone. Yeah. Daniel Boone didn't like didn't like eating deer very much. They viewed deer as that's a that is a leather resource. Sure.

Nicolas Lirio (2:28:13): Like a last resort 'cause I'm bad at hunting everything else.

Kent Boucher (2:28:15): Yeah, I you know, I'm gonna shoot f you know, twenty deer this week, but they're all gonna be leather they're all gonna be there for leather and then I'll shoot a bear because I'm hungry. huh. And and so like we've had in not so distant in in not a great amount of time, the way we view deer has already changed. Think of how much the view of deer has changed since Boone and Crocker became a big deal. You know what I mean?

Jace Elliott (2:28:39): View of deer is like just for Iowa's population, you can find a huge spectrum of appreciation to the inverse, right? Depending on what your perspective is and

Kent Boucher (2:28:52): So I guess I'm arguing against myself. Maybe what maybe my fear is just

Jace Elliott (2:28:56): Well I don't think no, I don't think I don't think that that's a bad point to make. And I think that it's like a potential consequence of of this disease inevitably spreading, which I think we can kind of safely say is the reality as far as we know. but again, I think that there there's a lot that we don't understand. there's a lot that we'll learn in the future that's going to totally throw out a lot of these assumptions that we've been making, that we've been operating on. It's not to say that anyone's doing anything wrong. What I'm trying to get at is that this subject can be a lot more complicated than it's sometimes talked about as being this settled thing. We decidedly have to use intense targeted removal if we want to manage this disease. And it's like, well, what do you mean manage? Mm-hmm. That's that's what I'm trying. What do you mean by manage? That's good point. I mean, you can cling to a certain anecdote where, you know, a lot of times I think we miss

Kent Boucher (2:29:44): What do mean by minute?

Jace Elliott (2:29:54): The forest for the trees. And we can say, Well, look, we're holding prevalence pretty steady in this township. Meanwhile, the rest of the state it's spreading, you know.

Kent Boucher (2:30:02): Judd is over there like my son trying to raise his hand. Yeah. Step up to a microphone, Judd.

Jace Elliott (2:30:13): I missed most of the con I missed most of the conversation, so I'm not sure what you talked about. But just the

Kent Boucher (2:30:18): Like was it your main question that you had earlier? Yeah well I think Nick already brought it up. Okay.

Jace Elliott (2:30:22): No. Okay. No, it's not. So TSEs, transmissible sponge form encephalopathies, everywhere they pop up arise because of basically cannibalism. Some level of cannibalism. Yeah, that's been that's been a pretty common pattern with other T S E's. I don't think that it's yeah, go ahead. Well I don't know. So

Kent Boucher (2:30:42): I know what he's gonna. Well you ate that one guy and he didn't bother you at all, Judge. That was for you, Nicholas.

Jace Elliott (2:30:49): Yeah, I was I he tastes cut that up next. As as people, as hunters, as you know, land managers, we want solutions that we can enact, that we can take part in. when you have something like that, a disease that arises from I I hate to use the word cannibalism 'cause it's such an intense word, but it isn't at the at the root, you know, what we're talking about here with these.

Kent Boucher (2:31:17): What'd the cannibal do when he rode on the r when he took a ride on the roller coaster? What? Threw up his hands. Okay.

Jace Elliott (2:31:28): Say we're on an island and it gets so bad that the population has to resort to cannibalism, whether that any any animal, I'm not necessarily talking about humans. This is seems to me to be a natural process to clear that off the docket and just make that so it's not possible anymore. So it might be and I'm not saying this is isn't backed by any kind of science or anything, this might be a mechanism, since it has arisen, you know, the the the mechanism jumps into action because, you know, this circumstance has been met and there might not be a clock on it. You know what I mean? It might be trying to clear the population that was affected by this the worst case scenario and sort of reset things so that something else with enough time could could fill that niche again. Does that make sense? I haven't thought about it like that very much, but yeah, I think like you're right that a lot of other TSEs arise because of consuming same species material, especially like spinal cord and brain and stuff like that. there's human examples like Kuru that that are a direct result of human cannibalism. And I think the way that CWD likely arose, it is far like we don't really know that either, but I think that the best theory Is that it made a species jump from scrapies in in sheep that were held in a captive facility in which mule deer were then brought in and then r as a result had were like confined on that same area. On that same area and then it it jumped into them and took the form of chronic wasting disease. Yeah, I'd have to think about that a little bit. I think it's it's an interesting way to put it. And a lot of times diseases get talked about as like nature's way of solving things like overabundance. And sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. Like hemorrhagic disease, it's not exactly density dependent, right? Right. i in a conventional sense. You will find more carcasses where there's more concentrated right. But it's not a result of overabundance by any stretch. so yeah, I think like I think we have a lot to continue to learn about C W D. And one of the points I've been trying to make is just that like this is not as settled as it's sometimes talked about.

Jace Elliott (2:33:44): and as scientists we have to always realize that, keep that in the front of our minds.

Kent Boucher (2:33:50): While we're on it hit Jace with your rendering truck

Jace Elliott (2:33:55): So I I like that the mule deer being confined well I was working my way there but my let get there real quick. so the the deer being confined on areas that had scrapies, yeah, prions present. The other thing that I thought of and it it it could be solved with a paper trail going back to that facility in Colorado or where wherever that was, was improperly rendered high protein feed. Mm. So sheep and goats getting thrown into the hammer mill.

Kent Boucher (2:33:58): This is where thought you were going.

Jace Elliott (2:34:24): And then not being cooked down properly, not hitting the temperature it needs to to kill the prions, that getting pelletized and fed to deer. Yeah. Well I know scrapies has been around for hundreds of years, you know, like there's at least documented cases back to the seventeen hundreds. And I would say that that is should give us some good assurance. Because certainly a lot of scrapies infected assumed. We've we've bumped up against that disease.

Kent Boucher (2:34:47): And sheep have been.

Jace Elliott (2:34:53): for quite some time and I I don't think that we've ever really established a human jump with that one. It did obviously Mad Cow is a different story. But I don't think that we can make generalizations about any prion disease just because another jumps. Like that would be just as ridiculous as saying like, well just because one virus is zoonotic, every virus must be. And so again I'm not saying there's no risk. I I just I think sometimes it gets over

Kent Boucher (2:35:22): That's a that's a really good point there with the the scrapies and it being around so long. Yeah. So there's no known jump of scrapies to humans.

Jace Elliott (2:35:30): No. Not as far as I know, it's never caused Kreutzfeld Jacobs in a in a established fashion. Now I don't know that there's great documentation in the seventeen hundreds and feudal England, you know, to to maybe they would have just called that like Yeah. But regardless, I mean I think

Nicolas Lirio (2:35:45): Right.

Kent Boucher (2:35:48): yeah, that's Tim.

Jace Elliott (2:35:53): But yeah, again, I think it's it's at least a little more support for for, you know, maybe this isn't a serious human risk. I hope it's not. We shouldn't hope it is. At any case, you know, we shouldn't be trying to demonstrate it and and sometimes some of these studies make me a little nervous with some of the ways that they're going about really trying to establish a species jump. Yeah. I don't know. I I'm again, this is not my area of research, but I think we've maybe learned our lesson on that a couple of times and I don't know. I maybe I'm talking out of

Kent Boucher (2:36:22): No, I I think this is I think that's that that's that's you know that I'm glad you brought up your questions because what we're trying to do is explore all these avenues, right, as as we work towards and we've been going for a long time, but I have one more related to this. That was in the news within the last couple years. feline guts. yeah. Guts. I believe it was Bobcats.

Jace Elliott (2:36:49): And mountain lions.

Kent Boucher (2:36:50): Yeah, but bobcats like the best, right? Weren't they like ninety-six percent effective at denaturing preon? Yes. And there's just something going on with cat guts because that's also the only place where toxoplasmosis can sexually reproduce is in feline guts. That's why when it's why whenever

Jace Elliott (2:36:57): Yeah, through the digestive system. Yeah. Pretty cool.

Jace Elliott (2:37:12): Okay.

Kent Boucher (2:37:15): Apparently whenever your wife is pregnant, you she can't change the cat litter. I'm telling you four times I said I would never have another cat after the first baby. Somehow we had a cat in the house, every single child.

Jace Elliott (2:37:31): Did she buy a motorcycle? 'Cause I've heard that that's a symptom of toxic.

Kent Boucher (2:37:35): There there's there's there's some some yeah emergency room anic anecdotal evidence that people who seem to be doing wheelies or risk risk taking behavior when the when they're they got your brains in the bucket that came with you on the way into the emergency room, they find a lot of those toxo cysts. But that

Jace Elliott (2:37:47): Take it

Kent Boucher (2:38:00): Heck of a way to put it, yeah. But wow, would you look at that? anyways. the so cat guts crazy effective at denaturing these these prions. Yeah. There's and I don't expect you to necessarily have a answer for any of this, but but you know there's been conjecture like, well, you look at

Jace Elliott (2:38:09): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:38:29): Where, you know, the abundance that we would have had large cats on the landscape, especially if you go back to the like Pleistocene, you Amer North America had cheetahs and and the American lion and cave lions and I'm I'm forgetting. saber toothed cats, duh. we had a lot more predatory cats that would have easily fed on animals that carry CWD. Now we have mountain lions and bobcats, basically. You could say I don't think an oslot's taking down a deer, I'm sorry. Jaguars, you know, but w how many did we ever really have anyways, you know? And they certainly don't seem to have ever been present in Iowa. do I mean, is there I don't I don't think we can practically, you know, sick cats on the landscape to big cats on the landscape to to take down infected deer. But is there something that ki that could be Yeah I don't know how and and again, pr these prions exist for at least ten years in soil.

Jace Elliott (2:39:29): Wouldn't be my strategy.

Jace Elliott (2:39:41): It's indefinite. I think that's a better way to put it, because every time we reassess that time frame, it's just whatever the maximum year is of the study. So we should just say indefinitely. You know, I mean they there's no evidence that they get denatured at a certain point in time.

Kent Boucher (2:39:54): So so does that does knowing that does knowing that cat guts have that capability is that just a huh, that's interesting? Or is there some kind of practical application that can come from that?

Jace Elliott (2:40:09): Man, well, I'll say it's really cool. At this point, it's probably kind of a fun fact. But a lot of the ways that we find solutions to these complex issues is it starts with a fun fact, right? not not to compare this to like GLP ones, but I'm pretty sure that that that originated from like the the venom of some sort of reptile or something like that, right? Totally Yeah, yeah. It's the

Kent Boucher (2:40:35): Really? I did not know that. Is that where yours came from now?

Jace Elliott (2:40:39): I think a Hila monster, maybe. Anyway. Yeah, so it was like a that's not exactly what the research set up.

Kent Boucher (2:40:47): Are they like so bad the bacteria are so bad or something? Toxic.

Jace Elliott (2:40:51): So anyway, I mean this is how a lot of things start. man, it is hard for me to imagine finding like even if we had a vaccine for CWD, which isn't at this point feasible. Like we've never created a vaccine for any sort of preon related disease. But let's say we add the silver bullet That's not really a solution to the disease because we can't exactly administer vaccines to wild deer populations at a meaningful scale without

Kent Boucher (2:41:24): Like some and you might vac well I guess if the vaccine was permanent and it kept them from ever getting it, I was just gonna say like yeah, suit they can just go back to the same dirt pile and pick it up again, you know. And that's their memory of infection is gone or whatever.

Jace Elliott (2:41:36): To me that's where like the whole waiting for science to catch up, buy buy time so science can catch up narrative falls apart because even if we have the silver bullet solution, we still can't administer it in a meaningful scale to a wild wildlife population like deer across its whole range. so there's no science to catch up, as far as I can tell in that regard now. Now that I could be wrong and and that and and I hope I am and I hope

Kent Boucher (2:42:01): What if we did something like what we do with rabies?

Jace Elliott (2:42:03): Yeah, well we're not eliminating rabies. We're just again it's

Kent Boucher (2:42:07): But haven't we significantly declined?

Jace Elliott (2:42:09): My understanding is that like the emerging edge of of high prevalence rabies has been halted due to like dropping the

Kent Boucher (2:42:17): Yeah, the marshmallows or whatever they are Don't eat those, Nick. Find a marshmallow in the woods, do not eat it. Get rabbits.

Jace Elliott (2:42:24): And so you know, maybe something like that could could work, but I I wouldn't call that a long term solution.

Kent Boucher (2:42:32): Either

Jace Elliott (2:42:33): You decentralize like the the points of of infection and contact by like treating captive servant industries sites? Could you start there? Because it seems like a lot of this flares up around there. And that's where I think like if we come up with a vaccine, that's where it can be applied with success because they're they're captive animals. But once you get into the wild realm, I think it's it kind of falls apart there. And so so again, I think that basis is why. I can be sometimes critical of that, like, well, what we're trying to do with the sharpshooting is buy time for science to catch up. That was a very popular message. I I think it's kind of fallen out of favor for the reasons I'm mentioning, because like what's science and what does that even look like? And if we could even we can't even conceive of a possible scenario where we can create some man-made solution. However, the fact that we've learned that there's just something that exists in the world that destroys a C W D prion is a step in the right direction. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's it's very encouraging, but I think we're a long way from practical application.

Kent Boucher (2:43:35): Yeah. So with all that said, do you got any more on the what's Iowa's plan moving forward? This is a quick one.

Jace Elliott (2:43:42): Yeah. One and I don't want to take a lot of time with it because it's it's pretty simple. We're gonna continue to manage balanced quality deer populations as long as we can. We're not gonna bring densities down below the management objective just because of the presence of CWD, because that's not gonna stop the disease.

Kent Boucher (2:44:00): So so does that mean the C W D seasons for counties those county specific C W D seasons are those

Jace Elliott (2:44:07): So we still have okay, so we still have like deer management zones, a few of them. not that they're v well utilized, and I don't necessarily think that's a big problem. but we do allow some additional take in areas that that have CWD that could benefit from additional deer harvest for a population management standpoint. To me, I don't even know that we need to call those C W D tags. I think like first of all, the quotas are in general about a hundred. And they're in places like southern Iowa where the county quotas are in the thousands. So like we're adding additional opportunity and th they were higher when the populations were higher because again we're trying to balance a quality population, but we're not trying to reduce density to the point that you know, we we impact the recreation.

Kent Boucher (2:44:56): So it's not it's not so much aimed at CWD as just aimed at the an overabundance of D.

Jace Elliott (2:45:02): That's what we're moving towards every year. And I think we used to have CWD incentive hunts as recently as a few years ago. And we've stopped that as a practice just because well a few reasons. The areas that we had these hunts were pretty dramatically impacted by hemorrhagic disease. and and so we didn't need to add any more additional harvest there because that well wouldn't have been very popular with our hunters, and I don't think it would have been very responsible for trying to manage Mm-hmm with our objectives anyway, right? and we heard from the public, like for instance the Wayne County incentive hunt, and again, this is a totally voluntary program, although the incentive nature does make it a little bit different, right? Mm-hmm. in Wayne County, where five, ten years ago we had a lot more deer than we have today, there was a lot of interest in that in that program. And there was a lot of Not a lot, but there was there was some additional deer harvest taking place as a result of that effort. And then that changed after the EHD outbreak of twenty twenty three. And we had a dramatic decrease in landowner participation, in hunter interest, and in harvest. And that was all we needed to say, okay, we're gonna back off. Now I'm not sure if that's ever gonna come back, but what I think I can say is that we're gonna continue to manage balanced quality populations with or without CWD because I think that that's the most responsible solution, right? Because we don't have a long term strategy to control this disease. Mm-hmm. So

Kent Boucher (2:46:35): Yeah. testing and and tracking, you know, you know, cases, is that gonna continue?

Jace Elliott (2:46:42): Yeah, absolutely. Because it's really important to understand the disease dynamics in our wild population. So, you know, a lot of people will say, well, surveillance isn't management, and that's true. but it helps understand an important aspect of the population, right? To understand what's happening and how it's changing over time. I think we have some level of obligation to be able to communicate that to our public, whether it's hunters or just anyone, right? We can kind of speak to where the disease is and how much of it there is. I don't think we're gonna be ramping up our surveillance because again, we have to weigh the costs. Like the more money we spend on this is the less money we can spend on other very important things like acquiring public land, managing public land, wildlife research and and things like that, enforcing our laws and all of that. So so there's always a opportunity cost, right? And so I think that's why you know, we benefited in Iowa from the hindsight of over a decade watching other Midwestern states go through this really difficult challenge. And and I hope that nothing I said came across as as critical, in so much as i somebody should have done something different at the time. But I do wanna be very clear that the direction and path we're taking in Iowa is deliberate and we believe it's scientifically valid just as much as it you know, a a different strategy. So

Kent Boucher (2:48:05): Yeah. Yeah. Well thank you very much, Jace. I I

Jace Elliott (2:48:09): We gotta answer Nicholas's question about if we're gonna eat a C W D positive And I was actually met with this decision in in my life about ten years ago. The first buck I shot in Wisconsin had C W D. it turned out yeah, I shot it not far from Madison, so it's not very surprising. adult male prevalence rate at the time was about fifty percent and it still is. Wow approximately, which is another thing that's pretty high. Yep, yep. although it is encouraging to see maybe some like

Kent Boucher (2:48:12): That's right.

Kent Boucher (2:48:33): Cot, yeah.

Jace Elliott (2:48:38): biological maximum of of prevalence, right? That we didn't exactly account for in the early years. Our models converged at about a hundred or so, right? So it's again, there's a lot of things we can't account for and we're constantly surprised by how things actually turn out. although it is a bad situation to have fifty percent. There's no no mincing my words there. well, long story short, I I decided to throw the meat out because at the time I felt like it wasn't worth the risk. And I'd probably make the same decision this year if I was met with it and I do test my deer. The thing is if I was told retroactively that a deer that I consumed had CWD, I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep. So that's that's I guess my take. I wouldn't take a note I I wouldn't knowingly take a risk because I can just shoot another deer. But if I was told that I did it unknowingly I'd say okay.

Kent Boucher (2:49:22): Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:49:27): Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:49:31): Yeah. I shot a buck in Wisconsin last year. I sent off sample for testing and something happened. Either the sample got lost or I didn't do a good enough job collecting the sample. Whatever they didn't have a result for me. And I said, Well what do you I what do I do? I said, you know, I got I have all the meat. I'd I'd like to eat it, you know. yeah, I was like, Yeah, well we we do not recommend that you eat this deer. not saying it's wrong to or by any means. I said, Well, I got four kids. He's Yeah, I wouldn't feed it to my kids if I were you. And so thankfully I have a JED. It's in my freezer. Yeah But I have I have I have regret I have regretted on multiple times that I didn't keep one of the back straps. But That's funny. I and I'm basically out of deer now. So but thankfully my son Jonas just restocked us last Or a couple weeks ago. Awesome. Yeah. And I and that and that to say if it was just me, I probably would have eaten that deer. That's where I'm at. I'm not gonna ask my wife to eat anything. If it was just me, because I didn't know if it had it or not. Right. But if I was given we know this is a CWD positive deer, like your first deer that you I would not eat that.

Jace Elliott (2:50:30): You know, I think like

Jace Elliott (2:50:40): Yeah, but Yep, yep.

Jace Elliott (2:50:54): Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Kent Boucher (2:50:58): Maybe if I'm maybe if I'm if I was like in my seventies or something, you know, then I'd probably eat it. Yeah. You know, like that's one of my retirement gigs is I wanna go and do asbestos testing and removal when I'm like seventy. Because a lot of times, you know, it's like a latency of forty years or whatever, you know. It's like I could be rolling in this stuff. I like it. And it's lucrative. But no, I'm thankful that you're you're overseeing our deer herd here in I'm very jealous. Yeah, I think you're doing a a a bang up job and I hope you keep doing it for a very long time. And I you know, I I I do put a lot of trust in you and that comes not just from from having the social pressure of being across the table from you. It comes from being your friend for a while and it comes from hunting with you and spending a lot of time with you. So I appreciate that and and you know, just seeing the results, just seeing Seeing some pretty big things that you have actually already in your short tenure at this point, less than five years, right? Right around that time. you've made some not huge changes to to Iowa's deer program, I guess we could say, but you have made some changes and that have been in real time response to to issues that we have hit. A lot of the stuff going on in western Iowa that I think has been beneficial for the state's deer herd and even things like the EHD monitoring, you know, when people find you know, s you know kill sites of a lot of deer, it gives the state more real time data on what's going on with the deer herd. I I'm a big fan of that. Big fan I don't know if this one's used specifically, but the the new deal with if you find a deadhead you can take pictures under it on the app or whatever, right? Yep for and so you can collect. Nice. you know, so

Jace Elliott (2:52:50): Yeah, and that that that mostly came from law enforcement because on EHD years, boy with and and I just because I have a minute here, it always takes a team. So I appreciate your words here, but you know, I work with a really great team and I think we have a incredible wildlife bureau with with folks that really care about the resource, that look at issues pragmatically and and that that really value our relationship with our hunters.

Kent Boucher (2:52:56): yeah I can only

Kent Boucher (2:53:16): Yeah, yeah. I I think that's that's that's fair to say that, yeah, for sure. That's that's

Jace Elliott (2:53:20): Huge because I know you have people in Illinois that do the same thing you do and you know them and you think highly of them. I do, yeah, they're great. Unfortunately, and this is coming from me, not Jace, they don't have the same agency and they are not regarded by w whatever their higher ups are in Illinois, the the same way that you and everybody else doing the work in Iowa is. The needle moving at all is f phenomenal. In Illinois it just doesn't.

Kent Boucher (2:53:48): Well well and I mean when when you're talking about Illinois too, it's a very populous state. It's what, like three times the population of Iowa, something like that.

Jace Elliott (2:53:56): Different pressures, different systems.

Kent Boucher (2:53:58): Yep. So it's you know, it's turns more like a battleship when you got that many stakeholders involved. Yeah. Yeah. But no, just just appreciate Nick's getting nervous because the camera's about ready to die here. I have one last like good summary question that I want to ask. Do you want me to ask it, Nick? What what do you want? For the sake of production. Well this phone's running too, so we got technically got two cameras, right? Okay. So weird Nick not saying things. I know. It's like when he's gaming.

Jace Elliott (2:54:30): The nervousness is palpable also.

Kent Boucher (2:54:57): is true about the Iowa deer herd when the when you turn your office light switch off for the last time.

Jace Elliott (2:55:03): I hope that Iowa's whitetail deer population is better and stronger than it is today. And I don't mean necessarily more deer, but I mean better deer, better quality. yeah, I think I think we'll get there.

Kent Boucher (2:55:19): Yeah. Love it. All right, just like we hit on earlier while I was virtue signaling on everyone just getting with the program, conservation happens one mind at a time.