EP 482. The Shotgun Conservationist

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. I know why I like to hunt, I bet you know why you like to hunt too, but why should environmentalists love hunting like we do? Boy, that’s a question and a half, isn’t it? Joining me today to explore this topic is Mr. Brant McDuff, author of the Shotgun Conservationist. Brant, how the heck are you?

Brant McDuff: Well aside from getting over a cold, you can hear I’m a little stuffy, but aside from that, I’m doing great.

Ramsey Russell: Good. I’m glad to hear it. I normally ask people where they’re from about their hunting origins, a lot of our guests have been hunting since they were knee high. So I’ll just ask you, where are you from and what do you do? Where are you from, where are you sitting right now?

Brant McDuff: Well, right now I’m in Brooklyn, so I apologize for any sirens or truck sounds, I got the windows closed, but it’s pretty noisy out there, so I’m in my apartment in Brooklyn, it’s my little miniature museum and my oasis from the rest of the city and I’ve been here for about 15 years, but I grew up all over the East Coast.

Ramsey Russell: You did? You grew up all over the – You did not grow up in New York City?

Brant McDuff: No, I was actually born on Long Island, but I was only there for maybe just a year while I was a baby.

Ramsey Russell: Like where you –

Brant McDuff: Like all over the East Coast.

Ramsey Russell: Like where are you living right now in Brooklyn. Is it like what a guy like me who has not been to Brooklyn but like we would see on TV, it’s like crowded streets and just like stairways going into little apartment, like that?

Brant McDuff: Not really where I live –

Ramsey Russell: Brownstones, they call it.

Brant McDuff: Yeah, I live in a little bit of a cuter neighborhood. There’s lots of trees, I’ve got trees in front of every one of my windows and it’s a neighborhood with older folks and with folks who have young kids. So it’s not cool or hip, there’s nothing going on, it’s more of a residential neighborhood. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to stay in New York so long, believe me, I couldn’t take it if I was living in a real busy part of the city. I like that, I can escape from it.

Ramsey Russell: I told you a little while ago about the time I visited New York City, which was kind of sort of completely by accident because a lot of towns you go up, I’m thinking Houston, Dallas, a lot of places you go, you’re driving around the United States that you’re going kind of through, you can go around. They got these big bypasses and I was going from, I know Connecticut one time, another time Delaware, heading down the Atlantic Coast and it plugged in my GPS and that GPS is pretty good about routing you around somewhere. There ain’t no way around New York City and so I’m sitting on the phone, I wish I could remember who I was talking to because I kind of looked up, I’m like, I got to go. He goes, what’s wrong? I said, I got to go now, click. I was freaking in New York City, 7 lanes wide and there ain’t no way around it. And when I saw the sign to the Bronx Zoo and I follow the freaking where she says go and I’m on the 7 lane George Washington Bridge, which is not just wide, it’s stacked on top of each other, crossing the river and man, my palms were sweating. And then I missed my turn because too many people in one lane to get over and ended up pulling off, going somewhere to find my way back around. And it looked like the stage set of the godfather soprano or something else. I’m like, dude, this is not my cup of tea, the most beautiful view of New York City I have ever seen is on the toll road, way across the bay, looking over the water and seeing the skyline. That’s why I started –

Brant McDuff: Yeah, it looks good when you’re far away from it.

Ramsey Russell: It looks real good when you’re far away from it. I know it is –

Brant McDuff: I know what you mean. I feel the same way most of, most of us do, which is pretty funny and it’s funny, I spend a lot of time with a lot of barrel chested, big, tough guy, western hunters and man, they can’t handle New York City and I’m like, yeah, it’s a whole different kind of tough out here.

A Hunter’s Education

Ramsey Russell: Well, it is. And in that moment and this happened to me 2 times, I did not miss my turn a couple of times, but that one time I missed my turn and ended up way off in the bushes, but I knew how – it was kind of a shoe on the other foot experience because, little known fact, I used to bicycle a whole lot and do tours and all that kind of stuff and I’d even go on some of these organized rides and you meet people from all over the country that are just out bicycling, having a good time. And one time we were in Virginia, very beautiful part of Virginia going up the river and through the countryside, saw George Washington’s house and all that could have stuff, but we – real beautiful stretch, I’m talking like stack stone fence type part of Virginia we’re riding along and it’s very wooded and just gorgeous and I was just streaming along, mind them on business, by this time, this lady come flying up behind me, old chatty Kathy, man. I mean, she was pedaling so fast, I could barely keep up with her, but she was trying to have a conversation and I’m out of breath trying to keep up with. I’m like, what? She was almost like, panicked, Brant. She was almost like in a panic mode. I’m like, finally I catch up, I’m like, why are you going so fast, what’s the problem, what’s your hurry? She was scared shitless because she’s from New York City and she’s used to the sirens and the people and the atmosphere and the street and all that noise and all of a sudden, she was way off here in the middle of a beautiful, scenic country setting and she was so far out of her real house, she was panicking. And I black out, I’m like, wow. And that’s exactly how I felt seeing the signs of the Bronx Zoo and doing I was way out of my element, so anyway, it’s just funny how we’re so comfortable with our settings like that. Did you just, what –

Brant McDuff: Well, I mean, I’ve been looking for a place out in the mountains for years, since COVID it’s been impossible to buy get, some good luck property, oh, it’s brutal, so I try to – The only reason I’m able to stay in New York for so long is because I’m lucky enough to be able to get out of New York very often. It’s not my favorite place, I don’t want to be here all the time, but it’s a good hub for me and it’s a good launching pad for a lot of what I do.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of that, what do you do? What does Brant McDuff do besides write a book every now and again?

Brant McDuff: Yeah. Well, right now, because I’m under a year with this book, my full time job is promoting the book.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, absolutely.

Brant McDuff: So it’s like I’m traveling around all the different shows and what’s been really fun is I just got back from Vermont where I was helping out their Fish and Wildlife department with some lectures and seminars for their hunters ed volunteers, a lot of the, when you think of the people who teach honors Ed, it’s a volunteer position, right? So you get a lot of older people who finally have the time to donate their time in that manner to volunteer and be a hunter ed instructor and so they haven’t changed the way they’ve taught hunters ed since they were kids and they took hunter ed. So I try to use the book as kind of a guideline as to different aspects of how you could be teaching hunter ed today, aside from all the safety, because most of hunters ed is just safety today, fair enough. But when you get into stuff that’s not safety related within hunters ed, how is it you present it today? What’s most effective, what’s most helpful, what answers the most questions that people have.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Brant McDuff: So trying to help them with that, talk to their natural resources department, because within the natural resources department, you’ve got your Fish and Wildlife, but then you’ve got other aspects of the natural resources department that don’t necessarily understand what Fish and Wildlife does. They think Fish and Wildlife is just rangers or officers so being kind of that third party who can come in and say, like, here’s what Fish and Wildlife does and here’s why it’s important and if you don’t know much about hunting or fishing or trapping, here’s what – Because people within the department don’t necessarily know or understand that and it can be tough to have someone within the department be the one doing the explaining, because then it just sounds like a snake oil salesman selling their own goods. So what I’m hoping to do is more of that for different Fish and Wildlife departments around the country and help them update their educational practices and help them communicate to other environmental services within the department so everyone kind of understands what goes on there.

Ramsey Russell: Your book is a springboard off of your hunting career, which started later than mine or later than a lot of people I know, talk about getting into hunting, so we’ll go to your hunting origins, getting into hunting and then tell the story about taking hunters ed in recent days, which I assume was just a few years ago for you.

Brant McDuff: Yeah, maybe about 7 years now.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Parlaying with Non-Hunters

There’s something that most of my job is talking to non hunters about hunting and about conservation, economics and how hunting fits into that, me telling that story from the perspective of someone who was a non hunter, from the perspective of someone who didn’t like hunting growing up, somehow that sales pitch becomes more trustworthy to people when they hear that.

Brant McDuff: 7 or 8, something like that. Yeah, it’s what I use a lot as sort of my own sales tactic is coming into hunting later in life because just like I was saying, being the snake oil salesman selling your own goods. There’s something that most of my job is talking to non hunters about hunting and about conservation, economics and how hunting fits into that, me telling that story from the perspective of someone who was a non hunter, from the perspective of someone who didn’t like hunting growing up, somehow that sales pitch becomes more trustworthy to people when they hear that. Now, I’m not saying that’s right or that’s good, in fact, I think it’s a huge problem. Why wouldn’t you listen to the people who have the most knowledge about this topic? Because they’ve been doing it forever. But the fact is, when they see someone who’s been a lifelong hunter, it’s hard for them to take their word for it because it’s just so ingrained in that person versus someone like myself who can come and say I was just like you, I was not a hunter, in fact, I didn’t even like hunting, I hated hunting. But then I made my life about animals and about conservation, about figuring out how do I keep animals around for the future? Because when you’re a little kid, I say this a lot, when you’re a little kid, you have a fascination with something, so could be like animals or space or dinosaurs and as you get older, you kind of lose that fascination and you move on with your life. But if you love animals and you stop learning about them, you still love animals, but you’re no longer involved in the conversation of, well, how do you keep them around for the future? What’s the bigger conversation around animals and how we keep them around? I never lost that, I wanted to keep learning about animals and at a certain point, the fun facts of like, well, what’s the biggest duck in the world? What’s the smallest duck in the world? I liked knowing those facts. But what became more important to me was how do I keep those ducks around for the future? What do those ducks need? What is the biggest duck, the smallest duck and every duck in between? What do those animals need to be around for the future? So, my love of animals evolved into looking at that aspect of their existence, not just what’s cool about them, why do I love them, but how do I keep them around? So I continued that education and a lot of people don’t. So when they have these knee jerk reactions to not liking hunting, it’s mostly because they don’t know anything about it. And to them, that’s just someone going out of their own free will and volition to go kill an animal, they enjoy it and they want to do it. And you can understand how that might be abhorrent to someone, just that idea, in my free time, I’m going to go kill animals. So, you have to take those steps back and figure out where are they coming from, why do they have those feelings? And how can you expand that thought process to make them see a little bit more about their own life and their own existence in the natural world as a part of it and what does that mean with how they interact with animals, how they interact with nature? And that’s why I always start with that sort of venison diplomacy idea of like, well, let’s look at our food system, let’s look at our recreational systems, that skiing versus biking versus hunting, so trying to expand those ideas of how do you interact with the natural world, because you do, whether you realize it or not –

Ramsey Russell: We all live – That’s a great answer. I think nature is genetically programmed into humanity. I mean, because for most of our existence as a species, we’ve been in nature and even in New York City, outside of New York City, millions of people around you, a concrete jungle, but you got trees, people want trees, people want central part, people want any toehold into nature they can get, it may scare the hell out of them, like that lady on the bicycle at time, but they still, they want it. They want to connect at their level of their ability into nature and also as contrast with growing up or living in Brooklyn, New York, versus born and raised in Mississippi a big flyover and forgotten about part of the world is you took hunting education later in life, in your 30s, because you had come to a conclusion about how a childhood love for animals had evolved into a greater understanding and wanting to connect to them at a different level. Whereas, I mean, as far back as I can remember, people in the family hunted, neighbors hunted, people hunted, I took hunter’s education, I was required, I graduated high school in 84, I’m officially old geezer, but I took it in 9th grade, we were required 16 high school credits to get a high school diploma and one of my favorite courses of all time was in 9th grade, where half the class was driver’s ed for half the – one semester and the other semester was hunters ed. Every single person in that 9th grade class, all 3 groups of us, well say 70 people, all 70 of us took hunters education taught by coach Royal Welsh, it didn’t matter if you were male, female, hunter or not. I mean, because in Mississippi at the time, in that school, that was part of our program, everybody took it, all those guys that hunted and fished, we loved it. Some of the girls just went through the course and got an easy A and I know to this day, they’ve never neither hunted nor fished, but I bet they know people, their kids, their husbands, somebody that does and that’s real different.

Hunter’s Ed in the Bronx?

Brant McDuff: I kind of wish people had to take it just so they knew a little bit more about it, how the system works and sort of under – guns are such a big topic and when people think about guns, they don’t think about hunters, they don’t think about the guns that hunters use and how much training and certification they have to go through to use them. And so, people get, when they think about guns, they just think about what ends up on the evening news and they kind of forget hunters even exist. So there’s part of me that kind of wishes everybody had to go through hunter’s ed to learn about hunting and safety and everything else that goes into that course.

Ramsey Russell: It’d be kind of hard to run a negative media campaign if everybody were educated into firearms. And because there may be guns behind every door in every corner of a lot of houses in my world when it’s like this, it’s like so many, quote, legitimate accidents, some of the stuff you do see in the evening news are just people handling a deadly object for which they have no familiarity and for a child, that leads to problems because if he’s not bored with it, familiar with it, he’s going to be curious. Curiosity kills the cat. So when my children were babies, I mean, 2, 3 years old I’d come home, open a gun safe, take out a gun, show them the parts, let them hold it, this is the trigger, this is the sight, this is the barrel, this is the lock, this is the stock, make them repeat it. Let them hold and then the rule was, now, what do you do if you go to your buddy’s house and there’s a gun? Do you look at daddy’s gun? No, you come home. Because, I mean, those guns are probably loaded if you’re in daddy’s dresser. If a handgun next to his bed’s loaded that little Johnny knows about, chances are that gun’s loaded and I don’t need him showing my kid a loaded gun until my kid’s old enough to know it. So, I mean, make them familiar with it. Talk about, okay, so you decide you grew up kind of, maybe even vegan for a period of time or certainly not a hunter. But then you became more interested in this topic and you decided you’re going to go hunting. So you go to hunter’s ed, tell me about going to hunter’s ed in the Bronx.

Brant McDuff: Well, I was never a vegan and I was also never really a vegetarian either. I told myself I was for one day after lunch, I decided I liked animals too much and maybe I shouldn’t eat them because I like them so much. And so I decided I was a vegetarian and then, of course, that night for dinner, we were having just a beautiful, big rotisserie chicken and there was no way I wasn’t eating that big, beautiful rotisserie chicken for dinner. So that’s about how long me being a vegetarian lasted was the period after dinner to before – period after lunch to before dinner. So that’s how long that lasted for me. And yeah, the time that went in between, it was sort of a combination of me continuing to learn about animals and conservation and also because I’m such a big history buff and the aspects of history that I enjoy most are those conservation related histories and they all start with hunters, it’s funny when I talk about me being into hunting as a hunting advocate and I live in New York City. New York City is really the birthplace of much of the modern day conservation movement, especially in America. New York City specifically at the American Museum of Natural History, where I give, like, a walking tour of the dioramas, that museum and this city is where Teddy Roosevelt got all his ideas for setting up all of our national wildland protections and setting up our wetland protections and refuges. Those all came from the ornithologist at the AMNH, from the earliest iterations of forest and stream before it became field and stream. And Grinnell and all of these folks who were involved in the – Boone and Crockett was born in New York City at the museum, basically. So all of these big conservation heavy hitters, historical players, they’re all coming out of this city. And it’s a funny thing now because we think of it as such a separate place, but it all kind of started here. And so that history really drew me into hunting because I’ve always been a big Teddy fan and he was a huge hunter, but he also recognized the issues of market hunting, which that was a lot of his father’s campaign, was to end market hunting and so kind of going through that evolution and seeing him learn through the other conservationists in his sphere, the birth of trophy hunting, which is a very positive birth coming from this era of market hunting, saying, no, we need to be a little bit more particular now, we can’t just go shoot everything that moves and we can’t shoot all of them. So how do we dial it in and become more choosy in a way that lets the species continue for generation after generation? So all of this, I’m learning all of this at the same time and then I’m thinking about the food that I’m eating. Well, if I was worried about eating meat, how do I eat better meat? And so then that became, all right, what are the nicer, fancier stickers on my meat that I can buy when I go to the grocery store? Humanely raised or grass fed or this or that? So you start buying that and that’s not cheap, so you start doing that and then it’s like, okay, well, what about the farmers market? So now I’m going to the farmer’s market and now I can get these local farmers who are near me right up the Hudson Valley and they’re doing regenerative agriculture, which is, this crazy idea of having plants and animals live together and regenerate the soil just like they do in the wild and so then going into regenerative agriculture and then wanting to be a part of that system, so getting a job at a butcher shop and saying, okay, how close can I be? And then realizing even at the butcher shop, I’m still kind of a middleman and then saying, if I really want to be a part of this, I got to do it at least once for myself. And then just seeing firsthand, after so much work, getting there, okay, when I buy a hunting license, that doesn’t guarantee me a deer, but I know exactly where the money is going to and I love where that money goes, if I buy a duck stamp, which I have to buy as a duck hunter, migratory birds, if I buy a duck stamp, I know 98 cents of every one of those $25, it’s going right into wildland, wetland protections, buying land, renewing land for the birds, that man, that’s a pretty awesome place for my dollars to be going, I am happy to pay that money. And then I get the opportunity to go hunting and maybe I bring something home, so if I bring home venison or if I bring home some duck, okay, where did my money go? And that’s the thing that I really wanted to start looking at and I just couldn’t think of, because even if I buy the best meat I can possibly buy at the farmer’s market, regenerative agriculture, really great stuff. Even if I’m just buying that, I’m still paying a farmer to farm. What I really wanted to do was pay mother nature to make more wild animals. And so if I could get food and do that at the same time, it was just a no brainer, it just took me forever to get there because I wasn’t a hunter and as a non hunter, where do you get that information? When is that information, when are those thought processes coming into your sphere? And the answer is, unless you are looking for them, they’re not, they just are not. I have friends who, they trust me, so when I tell them all this, they believe me and they’re really interested in it and they see the benefits immediately, I’ve never had a negative conversation with people that are often, they’re so interested in the topic and they see the merits of it immediately. The trick is, no one’s ever put it in front of them because if you’re not a hunter, why would you be seeking out information about hunting?

Ramsey Russell: That’s a very interesting question. I mean, wow, that’s very interesting, just your evolution from a city dweller that had no personal connection or upbringings with hunting to how you came to this point. While we’re there, let’s just talk about this, man, you made some great points about the nutritional value and environmental cost of store bought meat versus game. Can you go into that just a little bit?

The Nutritional and Textural Differences in Wild vs. Farmed Meat

So I am buying a lot of meat and I do the work to get the good stuff, I vote with my dollar to buy the good stuff, not everybody can do that.

Brant McDuff: Sure. I mean the fact is, if I couldn’t have, I am not keeping my freezer full from my hunting adventures. I got a lot of work to do before I get that good or have that much time. So unfortunately, my freezer is generally pretty barren when it comes to wild game, a lot more barren than I would like it to be. So I am buying a lot of meat and I do the work to get the good stuff, I vote with my dollar to buy the good stuff, not everybody can do that. And if you look at it, for me, nutritional value aside, for me, it is the money that is most important because I see that as the – that’s the thing that really kind of turns the wheel in all this, the market will bend to where the money is. So if I can spend my money in one place versus another, I try to make that my focus and especially if that is buying my food from the wild, I don’t get guaranteed anything, but if that’s where my money’s going, that’s where I want it to go and then when it comes to nutrition, I have had a wild turkey and I’ve had very nice, local regenerative, agriculture farmed turkey, not some butterball, you’ll taste the difference in, like, a cheap bird, cheap factory farm birds, you’ll taste the difference not so much in the flavor, I mean, you will in the flavor, but it’s more the texture, you had that really cheap bird, that has this weird, I mealy texture, it’s disgusting. So that’s where I find the difference the most, is in the texture. But I’ve had really nice turkey and I’ve had wild turkey and if you gave me the Pepsi challenge on the 2, I don’t know that I’d be able to pick out the wild bird, maybe you’d be able to. But for me, I think it’s part of that thing that an angler feels the same thing and a gardener feels the same thing, if you just throw together a salad and you serve it up for dinner, when your friends are over, your friends might say, this is a very nice salad, oh, thank you, what I do is I mix the oil with the – it becomes that part of the salad talk. But if you grew the components of your salad in your backyard, that salad won’t even touch their lips before you set it down on the table and you’re like, I grew all of this, these are my tomatoes and I grew these peppers and this greens came from that. It’ll be, they won’t be able to hear the end of it because it’ll be all you can talk about, I grew all this. So there is that sort of, you work for it and working for it, the story of it makes it taste so much better. And there’s a difference between venison and beef and the flavors and everything like that. But I think what gets people more is that effort and being a part of that cycle that really gets people excited and wanting to tell their friends.

First Hunts for Non-Hunters

So at that moment, even though I wasn’t in the blind, at that moment, I knew I could pull the trigger. 

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely, let’s fast forward, you went through a long about ways of deciding that you wanted to go on your first hunt. You had an aha moment, I’m guessing. I think I’m going to go shoot something and tell me about your first hunt, what was it like for you growing up in your environment, with your background and deriving and a long, circuitous route that culminated in your pulling the trigger and killing something? Tell me about that process of going into your first hunt and about your first hunt.

Brant McDuff: Well, it did, I was working at the butcher shop and I was thinking, all right, this is all good, I like being a part of those pigs coming off the truck, I see it, it’s a half pig split long ways. You carry those pigs on your shoulder into the butcher shop and you get a real understanding of, like, this was once a whole animal walking around and then disassembling it, taking it down from a half pig to cuts because most people, that’s all they ever see, right? They see the cuts.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Brant McDuff: They see a piece of pork. they do not see part of an animal. So working at the butcher shop, I was reminded of that how big is a primal of beef, it’s real big and so being a part of that was definitely a stepping stone and then realizing, okay, but there’s something beyond this. This is me taking a primal of beef down to a cut, what is it when it still looks like an animal? And so that’s what made me think about going hunting finally and what is it to see a deer in the woods and end up with a piece of venison on my plate? So just wanting to be part of that from start to finish, I knew I had to do that at least once and if I was just so distraught afterwards that I could never do it again, okay, fine. But I knew I had to and wanted to do it at least once. So my first time, I had probably 7 unsuccessful hunts for various species before I finally had success. So my first hunt was for wild hogs in Texas and I’m probably the, maybe the only Texas hunter who’s never seen a wild Texas hog in the flesh. I saw so many of them on the trail camera, more than I could count, more that could fit inside the trail camera. But in my morning and evening sits, they never came by, so I remember distinctly and I write about this a bit in the book, I remember distinctly sitting with my friend who was taking me hunting on his property and sitting with him the day before and I had just flown into Texas. So, of course, we’re having a big plate of ribs and oh, man, I love ribs.

Ramsey Russell: Me too.

Brant McDuff: So I’m here. Yeah, just chowing down on these delicious Texas pork ribs and I’m thinking to myself what if I get into a position where I’ve got my rifle trained on a hog and I just can’t pull the trigger? Okay, so don’t pull the trigger, fine, don’t do it, no one’s making you, my buddy is not going to be mad at me. It’s my decision, I don’t have to pull the trigger if I don’t want to. But there I was, sitting with my face full of pork ribs and I thought, okay, well, that’s just a little too hypocritical for me to handle. So at that moment, even though I wasn’t in the blind, at that moment, I knew I could pull the trigger. So fast forward through a series of unsuccessful hunts for pigs, deer, turkey. Man, I’ve been hunting turkey for 7 years, I’ve still never shot one.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Brant McDuff: And so through all these unsuccessful hunts, I’m on this hunt with a fella named Fisher Neil. It’s funny because he’s Fisher like a fisher cat and I’m Brant like a brant goose and it’s funny when I meet people, I tell people, yeah, Brant like the goose and I say that because I know they have no idea what a brant goose is. Now, you and everyone listening to this podcast probably know what a brant goose is.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, yep.

Brant McDuff: No one knows what a brant goose is, they know a Canada goose and that’s about it. So I noticed you’ve got 2 other very handsome brants up there –

Ramsey Russell: I do.

Brant McDuff: Black brant, Atlantic there. So, anyway, I always say Brant like the goose, but no one knows what that means. So his name is Fisher Neil and he is an actor. He went to the Yale School of Drama. I believe he has a specialty in opera, so he’s done a lot of opera work.

Ramsey Russell: And he’s a hunting guide.

Brant McDuff: But he is a southern boy hunter and he would tell his friends a little sheepishly, oh, well I’m a hunter, I’m going to go hunting and to his surprise, the people, backstage in the green room of the opera house, they’d be like, you’re a hunter? Wow, would you take me sometime? And that was the majority of what people said to him. They were excited about it, they were interested in it and they wanted him to take them out. Now, some of them followed through, some of them didn’t. But eventually, he heard so many times, wow, that’s cool, would you take me out? That he said, maybe I can make this a little side business and he started his website, you can go onto it. It’s called Learn to Hunt NYC, it’s a very smart name and that’s where most of his customers come from, they are people in the New York City area who are curious about hunting but have no way to sort of follow through with that, learn about it, so he will, if you can get on the train and get out to Jersey City, he’ll pick you up and he’ll take you out and you can go duck hunting, you can go deer hunting, you can go forage for mushrooms, you can go bear hunting and he’ll take you out in New Jersey and New Jersey has an apprentice license. My God, I wish every state had an apprentice license, because it is invaluable. It’s just like a driving permit lets a licensed hunter take out someone before they have taken hunter’s ed. So you’re sort of responsible for them and you show them what’s what and then you have someone who can tag along and see what it’s like before they go ahead and invest all of this time in hunter’s ED that can be daunting if you’re really starting from zero. And he’s allowed to use crossbows, which crossbows are always a hot topic in the hunting community, but also, from what I’ve seen, they are invaluable as a teaching tool. I’m at the point where I’m a hunting mentor for backcountry hunters and anglers and hunters of color and we take out people who have never hunted before and we use crossbows and they are just the perfect intro because they’re not as difficult to use as a vertical bow and they’re not as intimidating as a gun. If you’re not used to firearms, a slug gun or rifle, that’s an intimidating piece of equipment.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good point, that guide you’re talking about, tell me, how would you characterize the people that he caters to? Who are these people? Why do they become interested? What are the reasons they become interested in hunting all of a sudden? I’ve heard your story, but how would you characterize it? Man’s got a thriving business catering to people that want to learn to hunt in New York City. Who are those people and what are some of the reasons they suddenly become interested in going and taking an animal life?

Brant McDuff: I think a lot of it is a very similar story to mine. Perhaps not as deep in the reeds, but very similar, like, well, I’m going to eat it. And maybe this is just something I want to try and maybe it’s just once, but just something they want to do one time to see if they can do it, to see what it’s like and to be really responsible for the meat on their plate at the end of the day, I think there are people who, they’re not looking at it too much differently than they would, oh, yeah, I’m going to visit friends, we’re going to go fishing, we’re going to get a fishing guide and we’re going to go fishing one day. Maybe they’re not people you would classify as an angler, but it’s not an unheard of thing for someone to say, oh, yeah, we went fishing, it’s just sort of a one off. And we see that as much more of a, it’s a bizarre thing when it comes to hunting, people don’t just kind of, oh, yeah, I’m going to go hunting this one time or one time every now and then, but if you have that available to you, I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be and I think especially within New York, where people understand they have access to almost anything in the world, I like to say, if you can think of it, New York has at least 2.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

The Benefit of Guided Hunts: Scouting and Equipment Provided

And a lot of people today, they just don’t have that, they don’t have the time, they don’t have the money.

Brant McDuff: And so for people to have the access to just sort of walk in and walk out without a lot of effort, it’s appealing that, okay, well, this guy, he’s done all the scouting, he’s got all the equipment, he’s going to tell me what to do and I can kind of go along for the ride. And for a lot of people, that’s really what they need as like a toe in the water, a first time step, I mean especially with waterfowl, man, there is a lot of know how, there is a lot of equipment, there is a lot of investment in your education, your time, your money, it’s a lot. And a lot of people today, they just don’t have that, they don’t have the time, they don’t have the money. If they can invest in this – it’s not cheap to go out with him, but like I said, he’s already done all the scouting, he’s got all your equipment, you didn’t have to pay for a brand new crossbow, you didn’t have to scout all these lands. So if people can go out, what if they’re going out once a year, every fall and they’re able to put a deer in the freezer for that year, however long it lasts, that’s kind of a cool thing for people to be able to do, is just go out, he’s done all the work and you can just tag along and maybe you’re successful, maybe you’re not, but to have that experience where, especially if you’re living in New York City and you do not have the space to put a bunch of hunting equipment, let alone what it takes to keep hunting, weapons, firearms, crossbows, archery equipment, stuff like that, in your New York City apartment. So if he’s got it all teed up for you, there are a lot of people who are willing to say, yeah, I’d like to try this, I’d like to do this. And he has a lot of repeat clients, too, who will do just that. They’ll come out within just once a year to see if they can put some venison in the freezer and that’s it. They’re not big time hunters, they’re not invested in the lifestyle, but the same way they could go to the farmer’s market and pick up some food, hey, why not go hunt for it yourself right across the river? Kind of a cool thing.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of conversation that seems to be growing sentiment around sourcing your food source, where does my meat come from? And I was in a conversation recently with Stuart Ranch out in Southern Oklahoma and they’ve got a 3rd, 4th generation working ranch, kind of like Yellowstone without all the Hollywood drama and they’re now in the beef business and think about this, we pay way too much for beef now, whether you buy it from Walmart or wherever you buy your meat, it’s extremely expensive.

Brant McDuff: It’s expensive.

Ramsey Russell: And as I was talking to them, it just occurred to me as many rib eyes and New York’s and porterhouses and steaks I eat in the course of year, going to hunting camps all over, I don’t know where they come from. If I go buy mine at the local grocery store, it costs the same, whether it’s tough as a nickel or tender. Same market, same price, where did that steak even come from? It’s really no telling whatsoever where it came from. Whereas when you buy steak from somebody like him, he can tell you what pasture that piece of beef grazed in because it went from there, finished out for a few weeks in a feedlot, boom, to the slaughterhouse that I’ve driven by a million times to your front door. And I talked to a lot of non hunters, anti hunters, via usually pretty irate comments on social media and which I love, I mean, I don’t know who they, it don’t bother me a bit because usually I save them for when I’m in an airport and have absolutely, positively nothing else to do but entertain myself. And that comes in handy, but it’s funny how a lot of people on earth, especially in the United States, especially as you get off into urban centers, can’t make the connection between that piece of meat in a grocery store and a whitetail deer or an elk or a moose or a duck. They just can’t make the connection and they tend to remove themselves from it.

Brant McDuff: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: And then begin to wield because of their public experience or through the filter of their own experiences wielded almost as an arrogance, I’m better than you, I’m better for the environment, I’m better for nature, I’m better for this, I’m better for that because I choose to buy my meat neatly wrapped under cellophane, have no effing idea where it came from, versus a savage that goes out and kills Bambi and I’m like, whoa, that’s not at all reality. And we’re going to get a little bit further into this topic, but tell me first about, here’s the one question I’ve got, you go out with this guy, you all go to New Jersey, you climb a deer stand, you pull the trigger, you kill a deer. What was that moment like for you to literally pull the trigger, knew that you had killed a wild animal yourself and then walk up and lay hands on that animal?

Brant McDuff: Yeah, I thought, well, first of all, I was looking for any excuse not to do it. I was sitting there and where I was hunting in New Jersey, they have kind of a earn a buck program because they’re really trying to decrease the deer population there. So you have to kill 2, not one, 2 antlerless deer before you get your buck tag. Now where I was hunting antlerless also included button bucks, so I had to pass up a few deer because I just have that –

Ramsey Russell: Are button buck in New Jersey considered antlerless because they’re considered antlerless everywhere, I’m aware.

Brant McDuff: Oh, interesting. Yeah, they were considered antlerless in this particular area where I was hunting.

Ramsey Russell: We try not to shoot them, but they are considered antlerless unless it’s broken to scan up to an inch.

Brant McDuff: Well and I think that’s more for in case you accidentally shoot a button buck versus a – Yeah. So I think they just do that to give people the benefit of the doubt in case there’s some kind of accident. But they’re also very much trying to reduce the population in that area, so they’re fine with reducing some button bucks as well. So I was looking for an excuse not to take the shot, there were 2 deer coming towards the stand, one of them had a little bit too much antler growth, so he wasn’t legal for me and the other one was getting closer and closer and I just realized the shot was just getting better and better. And so, I just knew that was the moment and I didn’t hesitate a second, once it was right, I just squeezed the trigger and he ran off, disappeared in the brush and I was just so adrenalined up and shocked, that was all I could feel. When I finally walked up to him, I was still just in shock, I thought I would just start crying and turn into a blubbering mess, I was fully ready for that and I was kind of surprised when it didn’t come. And again, I think a lot of that was shock that it had finally happened. But I wasn’t, I don’t know how to put it, I didn’t feel guilty, but I was a little sad for him, he wasn’t expecting that to happen to him that day. He’s just walking along minding his own business. So there is a part of you, I mean, I think it’d be kind of crazy not to, but there is a part of you that’s like I’m sorry for that particular one, I don’t regret it. I am overwhelmed by my participation in this cycle, being a part of the natural cycle of things. And people can get upset when you even suggest that, that’s you being a part of a natural cycle, because they think, well, no, you just did that as an extra. You could have gone to the grocery store and bought your food, but going to the grocery store and buying your food, no matter what that food is, whether it’s a piece of beef, a piece of chicken or some vegetarian faux meat patty or veggie burger or whatever, there is no part that is not connected to the natural world.

Ramsey Russell: You make me think about this fake meat, I can’t remember what they call it now, this fake meat –

Brant McDuff: Don’t get me started.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. I can almost tolerate the fact that you don’t want to eat meat. I mean, I don’t understand it, but hey, that’s your business. But then you make it look like meat, what’s all that about, with the red food coloring and everything else? What the heck? That’s where you lose meat.

Brant McDuff: Yeah, that’s trying to get the people who are meat eaters into not eating meat. That’s their way of trying to get those people.

Ramsey Russell: Ain’t gonna happen, I don’t want to eat something come out of a factory.

Brant McDuff: Absolutely. No, it’s all ultra processed sludge and its origin ingredients are absolutely no better for the environment. In many cases, they’re worse, you’re creating all this monocropping, systematic monocropping, that’s absolutely detrimental to the soil. And so when you – But it’s that idea of zooming out that a lot of the non hunters aren’t doing. So what they see is my personal one on one interaction with that deer. I, me, Brant killed that one particular deer and that’s a level of connection that people are so separated from that it’s scary for them.

Ramsey Russell: When you walked up and you all cleaned that deer and all that good stuff, did he put blood on your face?

Brant McDuff: He didn’t and I would have been fine. Yeah, I would have been happy to have it, but he didn’t do that. Perhaps that’s just because he doesn’t know how his clients are going to react to such a thing. So maybe he’s trying to confirm it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s to write a passage. I wore mine to the next morning and I am sure of it I am so proud. I’m going to swap gears on you, because you’ve come –

Brant McDuff: I’ll do that for my turkey that’s still in due from 7 years.

Ramsey Russell: Not that I’ve heard of that part, but yeah. Hunting is conservation. We all say it. We all believe it. What have you learned about hunting is conservation and your process? Because now you’re a hunter and you wrote a book preaching not to hunters, but to the agnostics, the people that don’t hunt, that don’t understand hunting, that don’t understand sourcing their meat. And you spent quite a bit of time talking about the factory food, the nutrition and the true environmental cost of wool versus synthetics boy, what a great story that is about meat versus whatever this new wonder meat is, it’s not meat. But then you spent a lot of time also dedicated to and man, what a great review of all the different ways conservation funding or crowdsourced funding like a North American model is. The different organizations spent a lot of time and really talked about that wale built a great case. And we’re kind of in the hunting versus non-hunting as conservation. We’ve got this conflict and I think you can speak better than me to both sides of the equation, this lifestyle conflict on how we, a hunting minority, interact with nature versus how the non-hunting majority interacts with nature and especially as it relates to habitat, wildlife disturbances, rewilding projects and stuff like that. Let’s talk a little bit about that, Brant.

Private vs. Public Land for Hunting and Conservation

So the hunting is conservation, that’s twofold in that, number one, you have just that raw monetary economic input, output, where in the US I pay with my license dollars, my duck stamp and my equipment costs going into Pittman Robertson or Dingell Johnson or whatever.

Brant McDuff: Yeah, so this all ties into what I get into about the visibility versus the invisibility of actions or lifestyles, especially as it relates to hunting. So the hunting is conservation, that’s twofold in that, number one, you have just that raw monetary economic input, output, where in the US I pay with my license dollars, my duck stamp and my equipment costs going into Pittman Robertson or Dingell Johnson or whatever. So there’s just that raw money right there, then there’s some more money that’s less on the books related to conservation, where I’ll think of now, private land, you can get into all kinds of arguments with hunters about private versus public land and the monetization of private land and that’s its own topic. But what I will say for it is there is incentive, positive incentive from private landowners who make income from hunting. So I went on a cow elk hunt in Colorado and I had a guide and we were hunting some private property and the guy who owns the property, he’s got a little cattle ranch, it’s a small cattle ranch, he’s got a lot of land, though and the cattle don’t pay his whole bills. So if you can have some hunters come hunt, pay to hunt his property every now and then, well, that incentivizes him to keep those elk happy and healthy on his land, make it a viable habitat for those wild animals versus his cattle or the idea that, well this area of Colorado is getting pretty popular, maybe I’ll just sell off tracts of my land.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what we need on the outskirts of Denver is more McMansion neighborhoods.

Brant McDuff: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly what the world needs. You talk about the value of private land and the incentivization of conservation on private land, it just keeps coming up. But 75% of waterfowl habitat expressed as kilocalories on the landscape is on private lands in North America. And ducks, so what if somebody within your flyway has a really nice private duck hole, those ducks don’t just stay on that one piece of property, they fly around, they cover 100,000 acres jumping around for different life. So it’s just beneficial to wildlife to have that private land there. When I think of, you mentioned Colorado and I think talking about these McMansion neighborhoods, this urban sprawl going on in around Denver, Colorado and wow –

Brant McDuff: All over

Ramsey Russell: I mean Boulder, Colorado, what a liberal mindset. And it’s been a long time since I was up above treeline, backpacking and hiking, but where all elk hunters are going up above treeline up in the mountains out west and you get up there and it’s not just elk trails and sheep trails and horse trails, it’s freaking bicycle trails and ATV trails and but bicycle, camping. And I was on a podcast not too long ago and they got in a conversation about the etiquette of shitting on a mountain covered up, if you ain’t going to pack it out, at least cover it up with a rock. I’m thinking, man, how many rocks might you lift right now and see somebody’s been there, right. It creates its illusion. But so you see all these mountain bikers, all these granolas, these Colorado granolas, these folks out there living this lifestyle above nature and above me, the lowly hunter out here utilizing these wild lands. And I was hunting somewhere south of Denver one time on the fork of the South Platte River and it smelled bad, I mean, it just smelled bad. I’m like, it smelled like a waste pond. And we’re out there hunting wild ducks and geese and I just googled while I’m sitting there, I just google, literally, I google fecal content or fecal matter in south Platte River and freaking hazards south of Denver. So all this healthy, hippie, holistic, health food, I don’t hunt, I interact with nature better than you do, it’s freaking fouling the river. Talk about an invisible, I mean, once they flush it, it ain’t their problem. It’s everybody else’s problem, it’s crazy. That mindset. I can’t get my mind wrapped around it. And it’s almost like when I think of that mindset, I’m trying to describe and trust you me, I’ve got a lot of good friends that are avid hunters and tremendous conservation advocates and everything else out in Colorado, but they’re the outliers.

Brant McDuff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Kind of like maybe Brooklyn, okay. They’re the outliers to this whole equation. And I just sense among this hunter versus non hunter, this consumptive versus non consumptive parts of society, I sense this virtue signaling.

Brant McDuff: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Coming at me, based on false information, I mean, you’re talking about – a lot of people don’t know. Well, hell, ignorance is bliss.

Do Outdoor Sports & Hunting Have the Same Impact on Nature?

…hunters invest their time to ensure that the habitat is there and healthy and ready for those animals to help them continue successfully year after year. If you’re a skier or a mountain biker, well, you just want the trail to get better, you just want the ski lodge to get better, have better food maybe next year.

Brant McDuff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And sometimes they don’t want to know because ignorance is bliss.

Brant McDuff: Yep. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. The people, they’re not confronted with the other side. Good like that invisibility they see, if you have a photograph of someone with their friends on the ski slope and they’re taking a picture at the top of the mountain in their ski gear and then you’ve got another picture of a group of friends on the mountain bike trail before they go down the trail. And then you’ve got another picture of a group of duck hunters with their ducks, people will look at those 3 pictures and they see, here are these people who killed these ducks, that’s what you see in the picture. And then in the other pictures, you see people having a nice time on the ski slope, having a nice time before they go mountain biking. So that’s the immediate image that people get and then what is invisible, what is not seen, those are arguably the most important aspects. And so, what I see is, well, here’s a mountain range that is now off limits to wild animals year round because you’ve got skiers coming down it in the winter and you’ve got mountain bikers coming down it in summer and that’s an entire range of habitat that is not usable to the animals because they’re trying to avoid all those people. Whereas if I’m hunting, my whole purpose is to get in and out of the woods without being noticed at all, I don’t want to leave a mark, I’m not leaving anything. I am trying to get in and out without being noticed, I don’t want to be on the trail, I don’t want to make a trail, so people don’t see that. And then when you look at that grip and grin, they don’t see what did it take to get there and how obsessed you must be with this lifestyle to spend all this free time going out and taking down barbed wire fences or putting out wood duck boxes or – hunters invest their time to ensure that the habitat is there and healthy and ready for those animals to help them continue successfully year after year. If you’re a skier or a mountain biker, well, you just want the trail to get better, you just want the ski lodge to get better, have better food maybe next year.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Brant McDuff: And so they don’t see the impact of their activities because they see them as separate, which is shocking. And like I say, most people, they can hear that argument, they just rarely are in a position to hear it.

Ramsey Russell: How do you think we went as a society that just 2 and a half generations ago, mama and papa went behind a barn and chopped a head off a chicken for dinner, went and scalded a hog in the fall to this far removed. I mean, when we start getting into trophy hunter and the stigmatization of a trophy, what an open word that is. I mean, the movie depictions versus reality. I mean, what’s driving that? What happened there, Brant?

Brant McDuff: Yeah, there used to be, even if you lived in a city, there was a little bit more of a rural connection because people had more access or they would go away for the summer, maybe they had a summer house and that’s where they could do their fishing and hunting used to be just more of a common activity among people and then people get more and more urban and suburban and then it just becomes more difficult. Oh, it’s time consuming, who has time to do that anymore? And we just get further and further. And it doesn’t just have to be hunting related, I mean, you think of any rural, anything farming people are so disconnected from where their food comes from, period. Doesn’t have to be hunting related, kids don’t know where carrots come from. If you told them a carrot came dangling out of a tree versus growing up out of the ground, I think they’d believe you either way, they wouldn’t know. A friend of mine works in urban farming education in Chicago and she’ll have kids say carrots come from the grocery store. Like, that’s the answer of where carrots come from, so we’ve just become so disassociated and it is a tragedy and at the same time, you don’t want to be too hard of them because you just kind of see how it happens. No one can choose where they’re born, how they grow up, what they have access to and were just such a complicated urban suburban world now, that people just have less access and are confronted with, they don’t get to be confronted with the outdoors. There’s also sort of the idea of parents being so afraid to let their kids go outside. I was lucky, I’m sort of that elder millennial where I had that very last generation of being able to go out of my house and just leave. My mom didn’t know where I was going, no one know where I was going, I just left. And maybe I’d be riding my bike around the neighborhood or like, I grew up in Southern Florida, so I’d be just running around the swamps trying to catch turtles and lizards and I could just leave and do that. A lot of parents, they’re afraid to let their kid do that. And so we just end up getting further and further disconnected, that we start to see natural materials, natural lifestyles, as somehow those being worse for the environment, which that’s the greatest, like, crazy tricks, you’re talking about the bit where I talk about wool versus synthetic and that could be goose down, could be fur from like a trapper hat or mittens, stuff that we get from furbearers. So people will look at that and think of that as the environmentally unfriendly choice, which is shocking, because in one of the lectures that I give, I have these great slides that say, okay, if you want, let’s say, I don’t know, a coat that has a coyote hide brim on the hood, well, what do you need for that? Well, you need a coyote. Okay, well, so where does the coyote come from, how do you make a coyote? Well, the only thing you need to make a coyote is the woods, mother nature will take care of the rest. She’ll be making coyotes all day long, that’s all you need to make a coyote is some woods. And then I show this other jacket and it’s like a fake fur jacket.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Brant McDuff: It’s made of this, like synthetic, fake fur. It’s like, okay, well, here’s Walmart making a fake fur jacket. Let’s look at that synthetic material, what is that? What do you need to make that? And I’ll tell you what you need is you need plastic that came from an oil refinery.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Brant McDuff: So when you see next to each other, here’s a picture of some woods and a coyote. And then next to it, here’s a picture of an oil refinery and some plastic. What do you think is more environmentally friendly? And it’s not a trick question and people get that right away. But again, the problem is they have never done that next step in the thought process because the thought process begins and ends with, but isn’t it terrible that they killed that coyote?

Ramsey Russell: Good point.

Brant McDuff: It’s tough to manage those visuals.

How to Represent Hunters Better

In order to be successful, I have to know so much about this animal. I know more about this animal than you know about any animal or you ever will. And I want them to continue into the future because I’m obsessed with them and I love them and I want to connect with them in their habitat and yeah, I’m going to eat them, too. 

Ramsey Russell: So, Brant, how can we hunters better represent hunting to the majority of US citizens that don’t hunt? I mean, we do live in a social media age I’m saying and I do want to share my pictures, I do want to share my lifestyle, but how can I, what are your suggestions for doing it better?

Brant McDuff: It’s not, as well, first of all, it’s not easy. People are always going to see what they want to see from those pictures. I do see a lot of success with the series of photos that, hey, maybe they start with your jalapeno poppers and then they go backwards to the hunt because people, that’s that venison diplomacy. But I also don’t want, I feel and it’s not like everyone’s going to take my advice in the world who’s sharing their hunting pictures. And I understand that and I think that’s fine, I also want to share my pictures and honestly, I don’t very often, but it is so much of a visual game that is hard to fight. The food aspect is huge, if you can make that connection, even if it’s not your first picture, even if it’s your last picture, here I was on this hunt and here are these incredible, Oh, man, I know a lot about animals just because I love animals, not because I’m a hunter, just because I love animals and on some of those hunts you were doing in Australia, I was like, man, these are birds, I’ve never even heard of in my life. That like, pink eared duck. I was like, I never heard of that bird in my entire life. But so to see that bird, I was like, I’ve never come across this bird ever and you have got to be, man, what a wildlife nerd have you got to be to know about all of these different species all over the world and that is something that hunters have and I wish they were sharing more. It’s not just the story of this hunt, that hunt, zoom in on that species, show off how nerdy you are about it and that’s your job and you do a good job of it. But I wish other hunters would do that, too, like, wow, did you know about. I mean, I tell people about how elk grow their antlers and they lose their minds, they just don’t know that stuff. So it’s an opportunity, it’s an educational opportunity to be like, yes, I am connecting with the habitat where this animal lives, I’m connecting with the animal itself. In order to be successful, I have to know so much about this animal. I know more about this animal than you know about any animal or you ever will. And I want them to continue into the future because I’m obsessed with them and I love them and I want to connect with them in their habitat and yeah, I’m going to eat them, too. And here’s how that meal came out, once you make it more of that complete top to bottom picture versus just, here’s my grip and grin from that hunt, end of story. Then you start creating that big picture that connects you to the landscape, to the animal and showing people. You only get this obsessed about something if you want it around forever and you love it. Hunters don’t hunt because they hate animals, they hunt because they love them.

What Are the Barriers to Hunting?

 We’re not allowed to sell them, but I can share for free and I can do a little education on, hey, why you should take up hunting and how this is just the most environmentally beneficial lifestyle you can have for the way you get food, the way you pay into the system. Ramsey Russell: That’s great. That is such a terrific point. Such a terrific point. I was, back last fall, I was giving a presentation to Mississippi State University Wildlife and Forestry and it was a great turnout and I was humbled that so many professors that I hadn’t seen in decades showed up. And I got up and I talked about Duck Season Somewhere and what we do and some of my thoughts on the North American model of conservation versus other models, if there’s any. And just some of these sticky topics through my filter and later, over beer at a bar, one of the professors whom I’ve known since, I’ve known him over half my life and he imparted a little bit of fatherly and professional wisdom to me, said it’s a great presentation, it was really nice. He said, but just a suggestion, he said we really don’t say the word kill anymore. I think you should use the word harvest, to which I replied, with all due respect, I don’t harvest animals, I harvest crops, you harvest crops. When Mama chopped the head off a chicken, she was killing a chicken, she wasn’t harvesting a chicken, she harvested her vegetables, out of her garden. And I think it, as a hunter, I need, it is my responsibility and obligation to conserve that wildlife, to demonstrate to the public at large my relationship with this, but I’ve got to own the fact that I’m killing that animal to sustain my cultural identity and my traditions and the wildlife itself. But I am, no mistake about it, I’m killing that animals and hunting comes up with a lot of different words, harvest and take and I can’t even think of them all of words we substitute for the word kill, but we are killing that animal, no differently than we’re killing that cow or that pig or that chicken or something that ends up in the supermarket counter or for that matter, all the gazillions of wildlife mortality that’s represented by owning house cats or row crop agriculture in an industrialized society. I mean, it’s just we humans leave a footprint no matter how we choose to lose our – despite how we choose to interact with nature, we leave a footprint and it’s inescapable, it’s a part of the human condition. Last question, we’ve got to wrap this up, but I am curious as to yourself, who started hunting late and adult who has gone through a really great adventure into the benefits of hunting and why people should hunt, why environmentalists should love hunting as much as we do. But the world ain’t getting no bigger. We live in a shrinking landscape, a highly fractionalized landscape with a lot of people. Let’s use Western Colorado again, competing for that resource, for whatever recreation, skiing, mountain biking, hiking, hunting. What do you see as, so on the one hand, to support crowdfunding, conservation, hunters participating and doing this for whatever reason, there are increasing barriers to hunting, what do you think are some of the most pressing barriers to new hunters getting into this sport and it becoming a part of their lifestyle?

Brant McDuff: Yeah, well, a lot of the barriers do continue to be that, those big 2 of time and money and it doesn’t have to cost you both, but it’s going to cost you a lot of one of them, it can cost you a little bit of both or it can cost you a lot of one, your choice, time or money. I think that’s tough these days, people are expected to be working all the time and during COVID we saw that little bump in hunter ed registrations because people were interested in getting out there and being self sufficient, being responsible for their food source, connecting with nature more. So I think there is actually a desire for that. The barrier to entry is less practical, I think and it’s more that sort of marketing issue, getting in front of people who are non hunters and saying, hey, did you know that this was an option for you no matter where you live? If I live in New York City and I can do it, I guarantee you can do it from wherever else you’re living. And I think that’s a real tricky, that’s the trickiest business, because if you’re inside the hunting bubble, we’re all just having this conversation within this little echo chamber.

Ramsey Russell: Preaching to the choir.

Brant McDuff: Preaching to the choir. And the toughest part is getting out there and how do you convince hunters to give up their time and say, why don’t we set up a pint night at this local brewery and we can talk about it. Maybe I’ll bring some venison sausage. I’ll bring some duck poppers. We’re not allowed to sell them, but I can share for free and I can do a little education on, hey, why you should take up hunting and how this is just the most environmentally beneficial lifestyle you can have for the way you get food, the way you pay into the system. Do you know about the North American model? Most people don’t, unless you’re a hunter. I can almost guarantee people have absolutely no idea what the North American model is. And they love it, they love the information, they find it fascinating, do find it enviable. They like the idea of being out there in the woods and frolicking around nature and being responsible for their own food sources and getting to know the woods and understanding how the animals move through it. Like I said, I have never had real negative response to any of the lectures or seminars I’ve ever done. People are fascinated and they’re interested in it, the hardest part is getting that to them in a 3rd space, some kind of environment where they feel comfortable. You’re not going to have them out to the rod and gun club, you’re not going to have them out to the – it’s got to be in their space to set up a pint night at the local brewery, set up an event at the local library, pick out, doesn’t have to be my book, but pick out a book about hunting at the local library and say you want to do an event on this book and have people come and have a conversation about it. But setting up places to reach that 80% to reach those people who are not anti hunting, but they’re not pro hunting either, they’re just kind of in the middle, they don’t think about it. Why would you ever think about hunting if you’re not a hunter? So how do you get that information to them in front of them? And that’s, I think, the hardest part. But the information is all there and people are receptive to the facts and figures and the lifestyle, the benefits that it brings, they’re very receptive to it. It’s just really hard for us to find spaces to have that conversation with them.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Tell everybody about your book and how they connect with you real quick, Brant.

Brant McDuff: My book is called The Shotgun Conservationist: Why Environmentalist Should Love Hunting. My name is Brant MacDuff, that’s Brant, like the goose and you can, I mean, you can buy that anywhere online. It doesn’t do me any better or worse regardless what venue you buy the book through and you can go to my website. My website is immortalanimals.com and if you’re interested in having me come out as a speaker, do a lecture series, a seminar or if you’re ever coming to New York City and you want a tour of the American Museum of Natural History, it’s like a 3 hour walking tour and it’s just about the habitat dioramas and all the crazy history of the museum and conservation history, it’s some pretty good stuff there, too. Yeah, I apologize for my raspy voice, I appreciate everyone sticking around if they did for it. But yeah, check out the book, buy it and give it to a non hunter. That’s what it’s for. Anyone listening to this podcast, you are probably pretty deep in the reads and you know what’s up and you don’t need someone like me telling you about the North American model, but it is a guideline for how to talk to people who are non hunters, so you can use it as a textbook. How do I speak to someone who’s a non hunter? My book will show you how to do that and you can just give it to someone who doesn’t hunt and that’s it.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Brant. Thank you very much, I’ve enjoyed the day, I’ve enjoyed your conversation. And as a longtime hunter, a wildlife professional, I enjoyed reading your book, I really did. I enjoyed getting into it, it opened up my eyes, I learned a lot. And I greatly appreciate you coming and sharing your perspectives on this episode. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We appreciate you a lot, we truly do. And I think the reason, I’ll tell you why I wanted to have Brant on today to talk about this from the outside looking in is because we’re losing a lot of habitat, plain and simple. The landscape is shrinking and becoming fragmented and the opportunities we have today may not always be there, but how do we get if hunting is conservation? In my time and my money, there’s only 4% of us in America doing this thing anymore is going into conservation. How do we pull the so called environmentalists into the fray? It’s almost, in my opinion, getting to the point, it’s kind of like we need to grab our friends, our non hunting friends and take them to a church revival of sorts and get them to get some skin in the game to hold the fort of conservation so that our kids and grandkids in future generations will get to do what we do and enjoy this resource as we do.

The Dangers of Habitat Loss

Brant McDuff: You have time for one short story, one more story.

Ramsey Russell: Let me hear it, let’s go, yes sir.

Brant McDuff: All right, well, look, so the thing that that reminded me of is there’s this anti hunting group up in British Columbia and they raised about a million dollars just under, but about a million dollars. And what they did with that money was they bought up the rights to hunt in a certain area. So that’s how the hunting concession worked in that area of British Columbia, is the hunting lodge would buy rights to be able to hunt. Well, this anti hunting group, they bought up the rights instead. That way they could bring people there to hunt, but no one would hunt and therefore no tags would get filled on that landscape. Now I see what they were doing with that little tactic and it was quite the little media nugget to just buying away the hunting rights from this hunting concession. But the first thing I thought of and what steamed me so bad was they could have taken that million dollars and instead they could have bought up land and they could have protected it. You don’t have to have hunting on that land, just buy up land and protect it from development and just give it back to the animals. That’s all they had to do a million dollars worth of land.

Ramsey Russell: Or they could have put that million dollars into science based management. They could have done a million, but it was almost spiteful.

Brant McDuff: They could have done a million things. It is spiteful and it is that image. They didn’t want to see the picture of the hunter with a dead bear and it doesn’t matter to the invisibles, it doesn’t matter what they could have done that truly would have been more impactful for the wildlife of that area, they weren’t thinking about it. So it’s our job to make the invisible issue of habitat loss very visible, because just like you say, habitat loss is the number one issue for any wildlife species on earth and that’s got to be our focus right now.

Ramsey Russell: Good note to end on. See you all next time.