Today we are going to talk once again about the topic that we discuss quite often on the podcast, which is conflict of conservation or some conservation practices with farming, in this particular case, ranching. And the reason why we're going to talk about this is that, folks, there is a film coming your way titled the Real Yellowstone. And to talk about this film, I have here your favorite filmmaker, Tom Opry, who was already on a podcast twice previously. We were talking about his film Killing the Shepherd in episode 111 and the Last Keeper 173. So you might go and check those episodes as well. But today, also with us, Tony Bynum, associate producer on the Real Yellowstone. And Tony worked with Tom on previous two films as well. And also Tony is a supporter of a podcast for a long time. So, gentlemen, it is absolute pleasure to have you both on the show today.

Yeah, Tommy, it's great, great to be here and glad that Tony and I have some time here in a wonderful, beautiful summer day in Montana where it's going to get hotter and blazes in eastern Montana, but up here in the mountains where I'm at, it's going to stay fairly temperate. But, yeah, no, it's great to be. Great to be here with your audience and talk about the outdoors and conservation, the wise use of natural resource and, and how important people are to that equation.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. It is. I'm coming. I'm in Montana as well. Tom and I live about 150 miles apart, but which is. It's. Which is neighbors by. By Montana standards. So the Rocky Mountains separate us. I live on the east side and he's on the west. But it's your pleasure. I. Your show is one of the best, I think, mainly because it deals with and policy, two things that are rich and dear to my heart and really what I think largely drive the work that we do, which is really trying to dig into those two issues. And I guess I would add something we both learned more about, and that's psychology, I think. So anyway, that's for more discussion later. But your podcast offers an opportunity not just for us to talk about these things, but for the world to listen to the realities that occur that we observe and that other people observe. So, Tommy, I can't thank you enough. I don't know how you keep it going. I also don't know how you manage to come up with the questions you do. But you're brilliant and I just appreciate you a lot.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I didn't expect that, but I appreciate it and it always makes my day having a good feedback folks, before we dive into the topics discussed in a film. This is your third film. The first was in Africa and I was killing the shepherd. Then the next one, the Last Keeper, was made in Scotland in the uk and the third film is in Montana in the United States. How did that fail to finally make a film on your, on your home soil? And why only the third film, not the first one?

Yeah, you know, Tommy, that, that's a great question. You know, we're, we're, you know, Tony and I are finally in our backyard. I mean literally our backyard. And of course, you know, Tony and I, a long, long time, we lived in Montana. I mean, both of us are probably pushing 30 years here and, and we've watched the progression of things and we're both sportsmen, you know, we love to hunt and fish. We love to be out there. And we know a lot of ranchers, we know a lot of farmers, we know a lot of the rural folks here in Montana. And when we, when we kicked off this series, this Killing the Shepherd series now is what it's become. You know, Tony and I, you know, we were coming out of Cecil The lion, right, 2015. The lion is shot in Zimbabwe. There's this huge outpouring of emotions on social media, mainstream media, and there was an awful lot of misinformation. There was an awful lot of people really weaponizing social media, mainstream media to raise money for so called conservation in order to save the wildlife, to save the planet. And you know, I really started delving into this and looking into, okay, well, why is this, why is this going on? Why is there such a disconnect? Because, you know, humans, you know, I think we all can agree a sense of, since humans have walked on two feet, you know, we basically have hunted, you know, we've, we've, you know, we've had a connection to the land that, that transcends the modern industrial age that we live in today or the technological age we have now. And so what I came to understand was that, you know, there's a huge disconnect in our urban society. You've got people that are, don't know where their food comes from, you know, they outsource their killing. Or we've got politicians and decision makers that are making policy and laws about say, bear management, whether it be grizzly bear, black bear or brown bear in Europe, that have never seen a bear track. And so it baffled me. You know, I'm a second generation journalist. You know, I followed my father's footsteps. Many people say I'm a kind of a chip off the old block. My dad was sometimes pretty, pretty, pretty vocal and certainly didn't shy away from telling the truth. But what I found as a journalist and a filmmaker, that there's a huge need out there for a large group of people within that urban interface to understand what conservation truly is. You know, conservation is the wise use of a natural resource. It's not a state of mind, it's not a motivation. Hunting is hunting. You can't call it trophy hunting or meat hunting or whatever you want to call it. Hunting is just the pursuit of an animal and with the intent of killing it. We've been doing this for a long time, folks. I mean, I like to say there's a reason why a campfire mesmerizes every human being in the world and it doesn't have anything, and I mean absolutely nothing to do with roasting marshmallows. So Tony and I, you know, I ended up having, you know, I spoke at an event in 2016 about kind of the perceptions around modern conservation and hunting. And it's not a pretty story. It looks terrible online and on social media. And I end up having a fellow come and talk to me from Zambia, that was Roland Norton and explained to me this story about this chief that came and knocked on his door. He had an import export business, but was also involved in the safari industry in Zambia. And the long and the short of it, Tony and I ended up going that may in 2017 to the lower Lil Wano Game Management Area outside of Lusaka, about five hours. And it was amazing what was going on. One, there was no wildlife, but two, there was this incredible habitat. It was like a, like a jewel in the rough. And there was a bunch of people that were barely hanging on. And so, you know, we walked out. I still remember this like it was yesterday, Tony and I, after about 10 or 15 days, they were walking out on the tarmac and to the plane because they don't have any gates there at the airport. You walk out and go up the stairs and. And he looked at me and he goes, dude, I think we got a story here. I think you need to come back and do this. But what is the story and why is it, you know, again we have this, this disconnect? We've got the vast majority of our, of our society lives in cities, lives in a suburban interface. They have this disconnect and these people are really open to ideas and so, well, hey, you know, we understand the power of Film. And if we could take this in a very neutral, balanced approach as a journalist and a filmmaker and tell the story of these rural people. Why rural people? Well, 8.1 billion humans on the planet. Wildlife doesn't live in cities. It doesn't live on the tops of mountains here in Montana because they're covered on snow and ice most of the time. It lives on fertile ground. It could be Africa, it could be Scotland, or here in Montana. It could be anywhere in the world. Because wildlife needs a certain thing, certain, you know, requirements to survive, just like we do. And so what we decided to do is start telling these stories of these rural people because they are the stewards of their land. They are the ones that are out there doing the hard work and conservation. They're having to live with the lions and the elephants or thousands, herds of thousands of elk eating their second cutting of hay on their haylands on a ranch in Montana. And so we've kind of found a pretty cool niche here, and it's really powerful. And, you know, and Tony has been really instrumental in helping me this, because Tony has got. And I'll let him talk about his background. Tony brings a really cool and unique perspective. And so we've been able to harness kind of our yin and yang on some of this stuff. And it's like, okay, well, what makes sense here? And taking it as journalist, you know, Tony does a ton of journalistic photography, you know, editorial photography. Of course. I'm a journalist myself, so, I mean, when you take that approach to it, we're not creating propaganda here, Tony. We're just letting people. We're giving them a voice where they never had a voice, or if they did have a voice, that's drowned out by the urban masses. And it's powerful because these are the people doing the hard work. And when these people see a benefit, whether an economic benefit or otherwise, what we see throughout human history, especially here in the modern age, like the North American conservation model, ranching for wildlife, even these community conservancies we're seeing pop up all over Asia where people see a value to having wildlife on the landscape because they're able to utilize it in a sustainable way. You end up seeing a whole lot more wildlife on landscape. And I have a little analogy I'll share with you and your viewers. What do you do if you have a rat in the house? You kill it, right? I mean, who wants a rat, you know, eating up everything in your house?

Some people will pet it.

Yeah, well, maybe that's. But what do you do now, if the rats were $50,000 US or £50,000.

Can I have few?

You're going to go raise a whole bunch of rats? Right. Again, it's oversimplification, but that is a, that is a reason why a lot of our iconic species are continue to be hunted. As long as we can have science behind all of this and we can ensure that whatever offtake is done in a sustainable way, we've got peer reviewed science where people are actually out there doing the right job figuring out how to do things properly. At the end of the day, why we do this is because we want to leave the planet better than we found it. I mean, you know, I want to make sure that we've got these healthy ecosystems, we've got, you know, vibrant wildlife populations and it's as simple as just clean drinking water. I mean, it's, it's that, it's that simple. But you know, Tony brings a perspective and I don't. I want to turn it over to Tony because, you know, Ton brings something that. We really brought it to a head in Scotland last year when we did the Last Keeper. We ended up screening about 20 different cities and in theaters all over the United Kingdom. Tony and I did the first five or six of them together and we did a panel discussion afterwards and you know, it was pretty cool because Tony, tell them about your background, where you come from, you know, your ancestral background and the perspectives you have that you bring to these projects about land use and management of the land, the conservation of it.

Well, thank you, Tom. Yeah, I appreciate it. We've spent a long time together doing a lot of things around the world and this project is really no different. But if I can, we should talk about it a little more broadly, but I can. Maybe I should introduce what I know or not. My background is in resource management, but my historical sort of where I come from, my mother's Native American and my father's European. And so from the time I was born, certainly there were aspects of both that helped influence how I think today. And I think the most important part of that was just the interest that I was sort of either I created or that someone helped create in me to look at humans in the landscape and to look at science also where there must be a way to combine some of this information that we're collecting in this sort of more modern Western thinking versus some more traditional Native North American views about how we were created and how to manage the environment and how to go forward. I've worked in that arena most of my Professional life. Well, if not all of it. My education is in resource management as well. So land use, resource management, culture combined together and then traveling with Tom immensely, we've gone all over the place. It just made a good fit for looking at not just science, for example, and not just how people behave, but how do we actually tear apart some of these things so that we can analyze them and at some level come up with some solutions, or at least what we think are solutions. And I'm careful about that part of it because largely the details are really, really critical when it comes to solutions. Right. And also they're very anthropocentric in a sense that they're really based on how a human might look at something versus how the environment might sort of approach it if it had a, if it had its own thought process. But in any event, the human element is extremely important and I feel like I bring some of that from the standpoint of just looking at it, listening, paying attention, and then being able to have some dialogue about what's happening. As it turns out, Tom is quite good at listening as well. I mean, he does pay attention and he's also very analytical from the standpoint of being able to sort of take the information that he has and then sift through it at least and figure out like, you know, what's real and what's not and, and that's important. But I'd like to move on in the show a little bit. It'll give you a chance to ask some more questions because I think some of this stuff really from my perspective has some important principles. It has what I consider to be some fundamental decision making criteria about how to analyze these things and break them down and largely my observations as well. So I'll turn it over to you guys and we can roll.

I just want to say like when I was watching the film and once again, thanks Tom, for sending a screener. This is always great to like see like a full blown version of the film because probably like with the, with the previous films you will produce like a number of cut down versions for various audiences. You know, what struck me was that the number of people who I know, like, not personally, but I just know from the things. For example, Randy Newberg, I saw him in the films like, whoa, wow, Randy Newberg in this film. And actually something I gotta share with you and with the viewers, like Randy Newberg and his YouTube videos, fresh tracks, is directly responsible for me getting into hunting. I was watching them and I was like, yeah, you know, I can deal with this hunting thing, I'm an angler and like, so Randy Newberg was like instrumental his work to me getting into hunting. Matt Skogland North Bridger BISON I heard this as well. I thought it was a great idea and I could see, you know, how the things works and something. I want to just move on now into American Prairie Reserve. And we talk about rewilding quite often on this podcast. And actually years ago, when I was listening to the podcast, it was hunting podcast. I heard about American Prairie Reserve, and that was the first time I really heard the term rewilding. And so it was like sort of like a circle for me. Everything went back to a circle. It's like, oh, now I spoke about rewilding so many times and we had all those discussion, what is rewilding? What it is, and la da da. And now it comes around is that here it is, American Prairie Reserve, obviously now they're way more advanced with what they're doing than it was before. Many years ago, the conclusion on the podcast, this 10 or however many years ago, it was like, how would anyone not like this, especially hunters, because in theory they're doing something great. They want to make the biggest, I think, in the world Wildlife Reserve and open up access to people to hunting and so on and so forth. And you folks talk with, I think his name was Bill Hilf, who I heard also heard talking before. And so again, like, how would anyone not like this? They want to get all this land open up for hunting, open it up for people. They're talking or telling all the right things, like, oh, we need to get people involved, and so on and so forth. Now your folks dig deeper into what they're doing and how does it look on the ground. And yeah, I'm curious of what you found out and how that situation looks like right at the moment. What are the goods, what are the bads? What are the uglies with American Prairie Reserve and Rewilding?

Well, there was a lot there to unpack to start off with, but just just to kind of hit on the. On the American Prairie foundation, which is they've changed their name now. Just a little history on these guys, you know, back, you know, probably 24, 25 years ago, gentlemen had an idea about protecting prairie ecosystems. We don't have any, say, wilderness or government lands that have been set aside specifically for protection of that ecosystem. He was able to build some relationships with some very, very wealthy people, primarily the Mars Candy Fortune and Forest Mars, along with some of their friends. And they were able to basically Concept, this idea of buying up deeded land in an area that was surrounded by lots of federal, we call Bureau of Land Management lands, which is old land that had reverted back to government ownership after the Great Depression. These are our lands that were set aside for homesteading. And the way it worked in homesteading coming out of the 1800s, mostly early 1900s, was if you could prove to the government, if you could make a go of it on the land, you could receive a certain amount of that land. 160 acres, sometimes more than that. Unfortunately, this area is not very fertile. It's very difficult to make a living on it as a farmer or a rancher. So a lot of that land reverted back to the government. So there's a part, an area in north central Montana, south of the town of Malta and pretty much north and all around Fort Peck Reservoir, where the Missouri river runs east and west throughout the central part of Montana that is littered with millions of acres of blm. And around this reservoir that they built in the late 40s, early 50s, called Fort Peck Reservoir, the government annexed all the shoreline, you know, in some cases several miles from the shoreline, and created the Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge. So the idea behind it was, you know, is that there's a bunch of ground there. American Prairie said, wow, there's some deeded land. Now, the deeded land was that lowland, those, those areas where those creeks are, what we say in Scotland, the burns, you know, the waterways that were down there that were fertile enough for people to make a go on it. And so those people ended up with these small ranches. Most of them, I say small. Most of them were in the low thousands of acres. But they also came, they were able to tie them to what we call an allotment, a grazing allotment with the federal blm, where they were able to basically, if they had a deeded 2 or 3, 4 or 5,000 acres, they may have 5, 10, 30, 40,000 acres of government land that is tied to that piece of land. So if you were to sell it, then you would get the lease or that allotment to graze on it. Now, you don't own the federal land, but you get to utilize it for grazing that comes from the Taylor Act. And so in the long and the short of it is, what American Prairie had this concept is to go and buy that deeded land, get control of the. Of the allotments. And if you look at the total acreage there, there's about a million acres of deeded land. We're talking about in this area and there's about 2 million acres of federal lands. So their goal was to create a 3 million acre approximately wildlife reserve or refuge. Not refuge, but reserve or nature, you know, reserve and in, in the case to give you a reader or reviewers a perspective on this, if they're able to pull out together, it would be larger in land mass than both Yellowstone and and Glacier national parks combined. So we're talking about a massive area here. Now also part of this idea was that, you know, we're trying to protect this prairie ecosystem and what historically was on that prairie, bison. So if we go back 200, 300 years, there were herds of tens of thousands of thousands, some people say millions of bison working across this landscape. Of course there was Native Americans that were on it, utilizing it, burning it and so forth. But now you have a scenario where their concept was let's get 30,000 bison out here in this 3 million acres and then that's have wolves and bears manage them. No, no talk of having humans do it. That's rewild it and that's let nature take care of this. Now mind you, there's still all kinds of little towns and cities all around this and within this area and other ranchers so that are running cattle. So 20 some years ago when they had this concept, they literally thought a lot, this is a great thing. So they all show up and what the ranchers tell me is that literally they see a cloud of dust coming down their long drives to their house, their ranch houses on the dirt roads and boy, we get big dust of clouds coming along and these black suburbans with people jumping out of them wearing three piece suits telling them they're going to save the prairie. Well, you can imagine that threw up some big red flags for these ranchers because most of these ranchers been on this ground. Some of these people we've talked to have been on the ground for 100, 150 years continuously. Their family, generation after generation after generation. And of course, you know, if you look at the American prairie paperwork and what they were trying to do, they have a real issue with people that have run a plow on the ground trying to put in a crop or maybe they're trying to improve hay grounds that down in these low areas. So their goal is about 10% of all this land has actually been underneath the plow. So they want to, you know, revert it back to wildland prairie. Noble cause, great idea. But the implementation with the locals probably didn't come across. It wasn't probably the Best way to approach it. So there's been a lot of pushback on that. So let's go fast forward to today and we started doing some research and talking to people. You know, American Prairie seems to be on a. There seems to be a lot of discourse as far as negative discourse between locals and American Prairie over the last probably 10 to 20 years. And there was an outfit, some ranchers banded together to create a movement. It's not a legal organization, but it's called Save the Cowboy. And their goal there was to fight back against this nonprofit. Now, remember, American Prairie is a charity, and they receive money here in America, where our tax system is. You can give money to them and write it off in your taxes, which you can't do in a lot of the European countries. And they can use that money for whatever their mission is in the case American Prairies, to buy land and to manage it and recover that wildland ecosystem for prairies. So a lot of angst. And so we were able to talk with those people and involve them in the film to Save the Cowboy folks that were behind this and their biggest bitch, the business, biggest complaint was that the American Prairie wasn't a quote, unquote producer like they are, and that these lands that are federal lands that are part of these grazing allotments, that they're not producing livestock. And so there's a lot of issues that are, that go with all that and the American Prairie. In the last Biden administration, presidential administration, they were able to get permission on two of the ranches that have allotments to use that federal land year round for grazing, which historically that land had been set aside for just seasonal grazing, not year round, but if you've got bison living on it. The concept is that they want to have bison basically being wild and which that's another whole issue because bison in, in Montana are not wild. They're considered livestock by law. Now there are wild, you know, wild herds in Yellowstone, over in the Blackfeet reservation where Tony's been at, he's photographed a lot of bison that are up now in. Up along Glacier National Park. But even the Indian reservations in Montana, most of the herds they have there are livestock oriented. They mean they're as in their move, they're controlled, they're monitored. And that's the other thing, disease. So a lot of the ranchers are concerned about brucellosis. Well, we know that bison can carry it, but we also know that elk are probably the biggest proponents of transfer of brucellosis to cattle because they carry it too. And so American prairie, they've been, you know, from what we documented they're doing, they're really trying to do what's right. And they're every year doing multiple roundups and bringing in veterinarians and bringing these bison into these specially designed shoots and these specially designed corrals. It's pretty fascinating. You probably saw some of the aerial shots where the cloverleaf corrals and stuff they have there. And they're monitoring these animals for disease. A whole bunch of different cattle diseases besides brucellosis. So you know, there's a lot to unpack there. But I do see you brought up Bill Hilf. Bill Hilf has been the chairman, I think for about a year and a half, two years now. Again, it's a non profit. They have a board, he's the chairman. And Bill's background's pretty interesting. He spent the last seven years before he semi retired being the CEO of Vulcan, which is Paul Allen's company. Paul Allen, I. E. Bill Gates, Microsoft and ran that company. So we're dealing with literally billions of dollars ton of philanthropy and all over the world. And, and Bill's a fascinating guy and he's got some interesting ideas about where he'd like to see American prairie go. So you know, after talking to him, his idea is that to see more wildlife on the landscape, create more access for hunters like you were talking about with what Randy Newberg kind of introduced you to do here, you know, because here in America we're very, very blessed. We have a lot of public land, we have a lot of opportunities for access. But wildlife don't, as you'll find in the film, wildlife don't stay in one place. And if you go out and put a whole bunch of people on the landscape, they have a tendency to move. Whether it's a subdivision or a hundred hunters, Wildlife isn't going to sit around for it. And so we end up having some other conflicts that come from that. But with Bill's case, he's really, you know, they've now put 80,000 acres of their land, their, their deeded land which they had, I think there's somewhere around just shy of 500,000 acres of deeded land. They, well, maybe it's not that much. About 300,000 acres of deeded land. And they are put it in what we call block management through the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which is an opportunity where they take hunter license dollars from non resident hunters to lease land or give a payment to landowners to open up their land, their private land to Public hunters. And so, you know, in some cases, we've had anywhere from between 5 and 8 million acres enrolled in this program in Montana over the last 20 years. And right now American Prairie is the largest participant in, in that. Now, there's a couple things that a couple caveats here. About half of that acreage is in what they call category one. You can drive up to a post on the side of the road, there'll be a sign in sheet, you fill it in, you take a little tab with you that has your name on it and says that, you know, you got permission there and you can go across the gate or go across the fence and go hunt. Go hunt birds or deer or whatever you want to do, whatever's in season legally. Then they have about half of its category two, which is a reservation system which, you know, again, we talked about, you know, opportunity. If you really want to have a successful hunt, in many cases, you know, you want to be someplace where there's limited opportunity in so much as that just as less pressure on the resource. And so the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks actually handles that reservation system for them. They're not involved, American Prairie is not involved in deciding who can and can't go out there. But there's a website you go to, you sign up and then you get notified from the go, you know, from the state of Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks about whether or not you have permission and what days and what areas that you can go into. So, you know, there's some pretty interesting stuff. But Bill's plan is, I mean, he, the first time I talked to him was like, hey, how would you like to see if we had four times the amount of elk on this land? What if you didn't have to wait 25 years to draw a wild sheep tag? Which is. Wild sheep are very much coveted. They're under huge, huge pressure because of, of, of domestic sheep diseases.

The bighorns was.

Yeah, bighorn, yeah, this is the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, one of these iconic animals. And because of that, and I think it's great, but there's all kinds of other issues that come with it. But, but I think that American Prairie is evolving. I don't think what they thought about 20, 25 years ago is, is really what's dictating what they're going forward. But yeah, there are some issues there. Whether or not that land will, you know, will be always be available, will people be able to access it? Will it be an opportunity to have, you know, modern conservation.

Honeybees, I'M surprisingly like, you know, you're. Your view on American Prairie is much more positive than I thought you'll have and much more positive than it came from the film itself. Tony, do you have any comments on the American Prairie?

Sure. To start, I guess my experience with American prairies goes back from when they started and also having met with some of the folks early on to talk about what they were doing and actually go out and look at the land and. And some few years. So that would have been all 20 years ago, I suppose. And then some years later, actually was hired to inventory what is today most of their holdings. And when I say that, I don't mean the property, the private property, but the public property, this land that Tom was referring to, called BLM land, Bureau of Lands Management, Federal lands. I actually inventoried all of the areas of public land that American Prairie now manages, and I inventory those lands for their wilderness character. So this is a little bit connected to sort of the rewilding concept, in a sense. So in the United States, when I say wilderness in this context, it's big wilderness, like this is federally designated. Congress says we're going to set aside these lands and we're going to manage them for their wilderness character. I bring that up because I think one of the most interesting parts of the whole eastern Montana issue, there's really two things. One was the apprehension of most of the people who lived there. When it came to other people from outside, most had already felt the impact of the federal government sort of taking land from them, or at least from their ancestors, their parents, or their grandparents to create Fort Peck Reservoir. So in some of these areas, these families were moved out of what is now a huge lake. And so they're skeptical of anything happening from the federal government. And so approaching them to talk about, you guys are leasing all of this land. I need to have a look at it, because we're doing an inventory, which is to look at wilderness character. And of course, you know, they don't want anything to do with that. Interestingly enough, on the other hand, a lot of this land is wild. I mean, it may as well be wilderness because they're really the only ones that use it. And they might drive in and out, but their cattle are on it. I mean, there's little things happening. But what I learned is in, let's say, I. Let's somewhere in the 50s, 40s, 50s and 60s, the land was utilized. This public land was used a lot more than what I learned when I was actually out there surveying it. In other Words, you could see the history in the land where there were old roads or there might have been certain camps in certain places out on the prairie that basically over the course of time have been rewilded. People aren't utilizing it as much. And so where you one time had a trail through a certain prairie landscape, you can see old, maybe the remnant of an old tire track or a wagon track. But the people have largely sort of migrated away from these areas because of. There's a whole host of reasons for that. But it was sort of the concept of rewilding was going on, in a sense, even though it was still being utilized. Right. So it's interesting to go out and. And you look at these places and say, well, this, you know, 10,000 hectare area has all of the characteristics of wilderness, but four, it gets utilized as grazing, grazing land. And maybe occasionally a vehicle drives through it. And in the United States, our wilderness excludes motor vehicles. And so you have this weird like, okay, it's kind of rewilding on its own because there aren't any people using it very much. And yet somebody drives through and they're grazing some cattle here. And, you know, this isn't a defense. This is an observation of what was really taking place on the landscape. And so American Prairie's view, or at least their idea, was prioritizing these landscapes to try and purchase these in holdings or these ranches, private, deeded land. And they prioritized existing, unplowed ground. That was the priority because they were less interested in buying previously farmed ground because it's really hard to restore that, to go and restore land that's been cultivated for, let's say, 25 to 50 years, very intensive. And so they prioritize these sort of more wild areas, purchase these ranches. And from the very beginning, my view of it was basically that here's a situation where you have willing sellers and willing buyers doing something for conservation that the government could never do, that no individual was ever going to do. And yet the conflicts rose when local ranchers and sheep herders and the people who are living on the land, who are farming it, who are grazing it, who are leasing it, are threatened by what they feel is an encroachment on their way of life. And so that is a reality like that's still happening today. There's no doubt about it. The folks in that part of the world, and including American prairie, are, American prairie, sensitive to it. But the conflict really sort of, I think, comes when in the United States you can own land. And if you Want to sell it? You can sell it. And here is a private person, and this is a nonprofit at this point. So a 501C3 or a nonprofit organization collecting private dollars to purchase these large ranches. And it sort of turns the thing on its side because here in the United States, private ownership is like, it's as high as the Constitution or God for that matter. And so you have people coming in with large amounts of money that is brought in from other places. That's sort of a nonprofit's goal is to buy all this land and sort of let it go back to nature in a sense. Run bison around on it and sort of grizzly bears, possibly, who knows, maybe wolves. All this stuff is happening. And, you know, honestly, I have mixed feelings about it. I. I don't think it is a public relations issue at all. I don't think you could. I mean, from the American prairie standpoint, I'm not them, but I don't know how much public relations you could actually do. And this might be why they've built a strategy they have, which is you're not going to convince 9/10 of the people out there that it's good for them to sell their rant, their neighbor, to sell the ranch to you, so they can not, you know, manage it the way it's been managed for the last, you know, hundred years. So there is a definite conflict here. And I don't think it's public relations as much as it's just you have two different views of culture, two different views of how we're going to manage the landscape. Is one right over the other? Not necessarily. But here's what I do believe. This is my belief. I believe they can both exist. And so this is where the challenge is, and this is what the future holds for us, which is. And other people, which is how do we combine a lifestyle of ranching and cattle grazing and large open space with people who also want to have wild areas. And, you know, and I. I honestly believe we can do both. I think American prairie's learned a lot. I think they're. I think they're accepting more of that concept. I think probably some of the locals are. Maybe they're willing to taste it on the end of a spoon. But largely I think they're not interested in. And their main argument seems to be that it's going to destroy the rural fabric of that part of the country altogether, basically rewild it, sent all the people away, and their whole history is dissolved with it. So. So I'll just summarize by saying, I believe that the American prairie has a really interesting and important niche to fill here in that they're, they're utilizing our, our public and private system in a way that I don't think very many people ever thought about. But at the same time there are consequences to the local people. And more listening is important, more understanding. And I believe that is what we're seeing now. But there's still, don't get me wrong, there are people who will have to die before minds are changed. And I'm not saying they should be killed. I'm saying they're going to age out or their families are going to move away or this is 100 year process, not you know, 10 years. We're going to buy it all and, and you know, turn it over to, to bison.

You know, like what is fascinating to me is that I see and maybe that is a question like what similarities you guys see compared to when you, when you last film in Scotland there was like a similar dynamics going on when there was like a John Meyer Trust or other worry wilding organization. Is there sort of like the same thing? People who live on the land, they have a history being screwed over by the government or by other, you know, historical events and then someone outsider coming in and they have a different idea and they feel threatened and they don't have trust. Right. And there's like oh like you know, like you telling all those great things. But you know, like I spoke with the farmer here in Ireland and, and you know, I try to have this conversation like okay, like how, like what do you say that rewilding is anti rural fundamentally because they do this, this, you know, like the whole deal of farming and ranching. What you talking about in your film as well is like in general it's a hard piece of bread. It's. It's like debt is like not a lot of money, a lot of assets, not a lot of money. The constant cycle of being in debt and all those things. Right. And is it not the solution? And his answer was like look, this land supports community. If you do something else with it, then it's something else. It's not supporting community. So maybe it's a little bit round way of going into, you know, question like how. What similarities and what differences do you see with what was going on in Scotland? Is it like one to one almost or are there any important differences? Is.

Let me just back up for a second here. You know. Yeah, there's a ton of similarities but before I get into that, let me Just make it out. You know, Tony used the word observation, you know, and it's really important. That's what we do. As, you know, as a journalist. And I want to just say, I. I'm not pro or con American Prairie. What I'm trying to do is explain to people what the realities are in the ground. You know, is there a bias? Do we have a bias? You know, in Scotland, I had these rewilders saying, well, you're biased towards this or that. Yeah, I'm biased. I'm biased towards the wildlife, I'm biased towards healthy ecosystems, and I'm biased towards rural communities seeing a benefit from taking care of their lands, being good stewards. So I think it's a pretty good bias to have. But that's just. Just want to hit on a couple things that Tony was talking about just to give people a little more perspective. Originally, American Prairie was talking about creating a private national park. Well, private national park to me is an oxymoron. It just doesn't exist. So, again, it's an issue there. But what is the reality on the ground now? They've bought up a lot of land. Now they tell me that 9 out of 10 people that they buy a ranch willingly sold to them for a, you know, a reasonable price, whatever the market value is, leases back the cattle grazing rights. So on these lands Today, there's about 900 bison between two ranches, about 4, 450 on each ranch. You have 9,000 to 10,000 cattle on these grazing allotments that the original owners lease back the grazing rights, because that's how the whole grazing allotment system works, is that if you don't utilize that grazing allotment, you lose it. So if American prairie wants to keep control of those allotments, they have to graze them. So that's what they're doing on that. There's this other entity Tony was talking about, people having to age out, whatnot. You've got a group of ranchers there that very much about community. This is what this is all about. This is not about wildlife. It's not about. It's really about making sure that there are families with kids going to school, that they're going to see each other in church, that they're going to be having a store there that buy their groceries, that there's going to be a gas station. And since the 1930s, since the great Depression, we have seen people move in exodus from the rural landscapes of America and all over the world. And so that's this urbanization that comes Back to why we're doing what we're doing. And so you know, you're in a situation where, you know, I, I think you've got this end result. Where is this all going to go? 20 years. You know, Tony said 100 years. You know, I mean this non profit, it's not, it's not a flash in the pan. They've already been around for 25 years basically and there are people on the landscape going well, what is going to be the end result? Are they going to have, continue to have donors that are going to pay them money to manage these lands or are they going to run out of money? Are they going to have to give the land to the government? And now is the government going to run this? Well, I can tell you on the Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which is smack dab in the middle of all this, it is the worst run wildlife conservation land that I've seen in Montana. You can go to a rancher on the border of it, north of that guy named Dale Viseth who's got about 60, 70,000 acres years and he practices forms of regenerative ranching. He moves his cattle about 175 times a year and he's mimicking what bison did. On that landscape you can drive around for a day and see 60, 70, 80 different species of wildlife. And we can go next door onto this Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge and we'll be lucky to find 10 because they don't allow any grazing, they don't do any prescribed burning. They want nature to be free. That is Scotland. And the rewilding concept that guys like David Balhari from the John Muir Trust, their CEO explained to me, he wants the trees to be free. He wants the land and nature to be free. Well, I got news for you folks. With 8.1 billion humans on the planet, nature isn't free. Now can we work with nature? Can we facilitate these, these systems and, and yeah, absolutely. You know, as Tony mentioned, these areas, they weren't rewilded in the concept that your viewers in, in Europe are going to understand. They've just literally just been left alone. I mean what happened after Covid, we didn't have boats and ships and planes going everywhere. Next thing you know we start seeing sea life in our, in our harbors in New York and Puget Sound. And you know, you know, coming up to Thames, I mean, you know, it's just the reality there is that nature is very vibrant and it can do a lot on its own, especially when humans aren't mucking things Up. So, so that's, that's. I just want to touch on that now, getting back to Scotland and that, that commonality on there. Yeah, I mean after we did the Scotland project and I've been working on this project concurrently for about two and a half years before we came out with the film. A lot of echoes, ton of echoes. Echoes on land use, land ownership, haves versus have nots. I mean in Scotland, Tony and I, we pretty much came to after driving around 5 or 6,000 miles in the Highlands in a car, the two of us, we pretty much figured out this has nothing to do with wildlife. It doesn't have anything to do with culture or, you know, the Scottish language. Language or any of that kind of stuff. Doesn't have to do what's best for wildlife or the land or ecosystems and healthiness. It has everything to do with. I don't like you because you have something I don't have or your ancestor oppressed. My ancestor. Has nothing to do with conservation, has nothing to do with science, has nothing to do with cultures in regards to, you know, making sure that things are, you know, have good, positive outcomes. You know, I mean, you know, you look at Scottish Highlands and the Heather Moreland and you know, the UN92 biodiversity conference in Rio said that upper heather moorland is an ecosystem of concern. You know, it's limited and most of it exists in the United Kingdom. Well, today they're planting trees, Sitkus, Bruce Douglas fir and larch, all from North America with 45 ton track hose. And they're breaking through thousands and thousands of years of soil history if you tried to do that. And that. And that is the, the habitat of the native wild red grouse. Now the people over there hate the wild grouse because it's seen as a symbolic animal that's utilized by the, by the landowners. Right, we're back to that thing. And so we. Yeah, toss, I'll let you use that word. But you know, we, we see the same thing in some regards here in Montana. Access wildlife. You know, wildlife is, is, is part of the public trust and it is legally that way you don't own it as a landowner in the United States. The people own it, the government manages it. We pay the government to manage it. We have hunting seasons, we have bag limits. You don't have commercialization of wildlife. We have wildlife that's utilized in a way so that we can have a small offtake so that we can utilize it for food and recreation and, and being connected to the land. So yes, there's A ton of echoes between, say, Scotland and what we're seeing in Montana. And Tony, you probably got a few ideas there too, that I probably even missed on.

I think the echo, one of the common echoes, and I'm glad you brought it up, is where you have. Again, I'll go back to two different camps in a sense, and there's probably three or four, but two main ones right where you have people. And I'll say, I think there are people who are interested in this rewilding concept also in the UK who I think are genuinely interested in the ecology. I think there are people who believe that climate change is important enough that they invest themselves and their time in really analyzing the environment in the UK and saying, are we doing what we can? So there are people who are just as much wed to the idea of rewilding and of doing their duty for the globe as there are people who are saying, this is ridiculous, like, we're not participating. So this draws me to a similarity, which is these two camps that are 80 to 85% probably in agreement on things. The camp of the farmer and the rancher, and then the camp of the sort of rewilders, but because of our politics and because of the history of our nations, tend to, you know, not appreciate other people, like putting them down all the time and talking dirty about them and saying terrible things about them and being all tough about it. Where you find common ground is where you can actually go to the ground, meet people who have talked to their neighbors, who have started building relationships. And at these sort of micro levels, you find that there's less conflict. That doesn't necessarily change policy over the long run. It can, but there's hope in a sense. For me, in the way I see it, the hope is that this can precipitate a little bit more, that people will listen more to each other and be able to have this dialogue and find ways to be together. Another important aspect, I think, between the two is the freedom that exists in the United States is unlike the what. What Europeans would consider freedom. And this is my observation. I. I'm not a European, I'm not from the uk like, it. It took me a while to even begin to sort of understand how people think there. And so I got a. I mean, I might know this much, but what I learned was that almost their. Their idea of freedom is based on either something that's hypothetical, something that may have existed a long time ago, or. But they're not US freedom people. Like, it's a different thinking going on Right. And so when you're in the United States, freedom is like, okay, I can go and come and choose. In the uk, what I felt like freedom was, is if I can walk across your land, I'm free. People are gaining freedom in a sense, right? They're like, okay, in the UK it's all private mostly, and yet now we have these rules. And some people would even call this the democratization of the uk, right, where people get to vote or people the mass or the most of the people who get a vote get to change the way land is managed. And for in the United States, that applies to federal land, but private land is private land. Like, you don't get to effect per se. There are exceptions. But I'm just saying generally the fact that we have private lands and we have an enormous tapestry of public land, we have less of this sort of freedom issue that I felt over there, where you, while you have people who want to be outside and want to go and want to travel around and be free, in the United States, they have access to that. The third part of that is when it comes to hunting, we can hunt like it's just the way it is. We can own guns and we can go hunting anytime we want. We follow the rules. But basically in the United States there are certain species you can hunt year round. And so we have big game hunting, we have small game, we have all birds, all this unique cultural history of hunting. And you don't need permission, you follow the rules and you pay for your tags. Whereas back to the uk, people don't think like that. They're not used to seeing somebody driving around with a rifle in the back of their window because they're going hunting. In fact, I'll just make one comment about this and then I'll sort of pass it back. And that is. It occurred to me on my very first trip to the uk, we went to Scotland. And rather than talk about why we were there, we met with a man whose first question was gun rights and why are you allowing all these kids to be killed with rifles? So I bring that up because this is a major difference between what happens in the UK and what happens in the United States. It's mental in some ways. Mental meaning a lot of this has to do with how you see the world and how you were raised. Right. And some of it's legal. So I thought it was very telling though, that that like I had, that was not something I had ever thought about considering until. Until he brought it up. And then I had to start thinking A little bit differently because at that point I'm like, wait a minute, there is something else here. Otherwise we would be talking about conservation, we would be talking about land use, we would be talking about rural people and rewilding. But we're going to start with American politics. And that tipped me off to a bigger issue. So I do appreciate you allowing me to talk about this.

That's very interesting.

And if I can add in there, in this particular individual, I'm not quite sure that the inference to the question there had 100% to do with actually what his real concerns were. I do think there's that mindset as Tony, I agree 100% with that. But I think this particular individual was more interested in trying to off, you know, kind of put us off more of that Scottish. We kind of know what we're doing. What the heck are you doing here? Because one of the questions he says is what is your out? What is your outcome here? I mean, why are you here? You're just going to make a film as a bunch of American filmmakers and tell us what you think we're doing right or wrong. And I said hell yeah.

I remember, I remember we had that exchange in the, in the, in the 173 episode. 173. You know, like just to wrap this, this part up and when you talk about the community, local communities and when you actually go and talk to people in person, you see that the differences are much, much smaller but also like understanding of the community element. You know. Like I remember I was invited to the farm to one of the Irish farmers who is like a quite high in the Irish Farming Association. Bill o' Keefe is his name, lovely guy. And he invited me to his farm and we talked about it and you know, I step out of the car, he invites me and he proceeds to talk like how his family farm in this area for 300 years. And like when he sees someone, you know, someone moving in, they, they, he straight away thinks like all other kids gonna be playing in the, you know, Hurley or whatever else. And I'm thinking like me being, being like a city boy and, and I always say that and other people who don't like it's impossible to wrap your head around like how is must feel when your family is around in this place for 300 years, right? And this is not people who are just like a close minded because he was in Australia, he was in the United States farming and doing so he saw the world. But still he comes back to this place with his families for 300 years. And it is quite remarkable when you talk to those people then you better understand while they're getting upset when there is someone you know from London or from Dublin and goes like oh, you're in fact should rewind all those things because you know like it's, it's just you gotta go in and. And it was like quite remarkable because that, that particular individual, you know his answer to all the you know, like attacks on farming. He was like come on the farm. Like come on the farm. I see, we'll talk about. And I think just to wrap this part up, like more people should take farmer up on the opportunity, on the invitation to go to their farm and talk to them and then they, that may, may open, open up their minds. Okay folks, I want to switch gears now and talk about livestock and the wildlife interface or maybe like a conflict with, with wildlife. Once again, specificity of the United States is that you have a lot of predators living as a wild animals and there's a lot of conflict with that. And obviously when you try to rewild and get more wilderness, like you mentioned Tom earlier that the idea was like let's have a grizzly bears and wolves to manage bison and how would that work? That's a different story. We can talk about that. But I just want to ask you about one specific thing from the film where you were talking with farmer who was just like all like oh yeah, grizzly bears. We just have to accept like you know, like we are, we're here, we accept the losses. It's, it's their land as well, like yada yada, yada. And then as it happened, one of their cattle got killed by a bear. I am very curious because you were like these are things that might not come across in a, in a film, but while you were there, how did that feel? Really? Did they, did they really were okay with the loss and like. Or was this moment like oh shit. Right. We, we talked about all those nice things but now you know, so I'm just curious like what was the energy, what was the, the emotions in the air when you went out and saw. And they, and they saw that young bull I think was a yearling bull killed by a bear.

Yeah. No. So they run two year olds. You're talking about Andrew Anderson, his wife Hillary, who. It's unique because Hillary is a wolf biologist. She grew up in the Midwest, ended up at Yellowstone working on wolf programs after being graduated from University of Montana Missoula and then ended up in not Alberta, but British Columbia studying wolf Management. And so it's a great question, Tommy. You know, it's the first, you know, I, this first time I was with these people, we're in their, their remote cow camp. It's a really rough 4x4 road to get to it. And they've got a little camp there. They're raising their family out in this. It's a 50,000 acre allotment of federal land that they're, they're running 2 year olds all because they figured they couldn't run cow calves because they couldn't move those cattle around like they needed to, to keep them out of harm's way. So what they do is a, there's a concept called outriding. And so they constantly, they, they load up their kids on their own horses. They're riding around and what they're trying to do is be on the lookout for predators mainly. This is one of the largest concentrations in the lower 48 the United States of grizzly bears. And so this is an area also that's known for having an abundant population of a plant called larkspur. And historically the grazing that go with that occurred prior to them taking over the allotment was a rancher would put the cattle out there and when, as soon as the snow melted and the cattle would roam all over willy nilly with somebody checking on them once in a while. But when larkspur flowers, cattle eat it and it's really poisonous and kills them. So we had a whole bunch of dead cattle on the landscape. And so then you had this all, you know, I mean, a grizzly bear, you know, their sense of smell is, I mean it can smell raw meat five miles away. And so you had huge numbers of grizzly bear descending on this area to feed on these dead cattle. So they, they bought the allotment from the previous rancher and they've been doing a much better job of doing again, that kind of regenerative ranching. They're using electric poly wire. They're wrapping it around in areas using the topography of the land, using the wire to kind of herd the animals into a specific area and keep them feeding in that area and then moving them. So it makes a lot easier to do that range range riding to keep track of things. But that first day I'm there, Andrew came rolling in on his horse and he says, hey, we, we lost, we lost. You know, we lost a cow today and I think it's been dead since last night. And he says, we're gonna go out there. So we jumped on ATVs at 9 o', clock, 8, 9 o' clock at night, it's dark. We drive for about an hour and 45 minutes. We get way up in the mountains. We get to this spot, and here's this cow that's obviously been just hammered by a, by a grizzly bear. And Hillary brought a couple of trail cameras, remote, you know, camera traps, and she's setting them up all around there. And I said, well, what's going on here? And she said, well, we just want to see if we can identify this bear in case there is an issue down the road, you know, and, and I was like, oh, okay, it's cool. Now, they didn't tell me this, but I found out later that that particular bear had been ID'd as killing five cattle at another rancher's allotment not too far from there, another part of the, of the, of the valley. And so, you know, I'm trying to document it, and one of the most poignant things there is, as they're sitting there looking at it, of course I've got a camera light on, so I'm lighting up the whole thing on my camera. And I asked him, I said, so how does this make you feel? And it was dead silence for like 20, 30 seconds. It was almost uncomfortable. And then Andrew says, you know, and this is what you hear in the film, he says, you know, we know we need to learn to coexist, basically. You know, we've got 11. It's one of 1100. We didn't have a relationship with it. It's not like we named it or anything. This is just a fact of life. If we're going to do business here, I. E. Then we're gonna have to accept that there's outcomes here and we're now competing with. I mean, it's like having a fish farm and not having ospreys or eagles land in it. Right? I mean, you're going to have a certain amount of, of fish that, you know, you're going to lose through, through natural predation or natural diseases or whatever it is. And so, you know, it's pretty poignant, you know, that they're like, hey, you know, their story was, hey, how can we sit here and tell everybody else or make a decision what should be on the landscape? And Hillary talks at great length in the film about just that, that, that, that dichotomy of ranching, relationship with land, historic economics and what's working, what's not working. And so it's a pretty, it's a really great strong point in the film. And, and at that. And prior to that point, they'd only lost one cow in the previous two years. And like I said, they're running 1100 cattle in one of the most highest concentrations of, of. Of grizzly bears in lower 48. So, you know, it's pretty, pretty amazing what they're doing now. They've also, they're not showing up when the larkspur flowers, they don't move into that area until early to mid August when it's already gone to September seed. And it's not poisonous. And then they're run until, you know, about mid, early mid October. And then they're running everything back down, down low into the valley, the Centennial Valley, where they get ready to do their shipping, you know, and so that's a lot of the footage came from the shipping in there too. But that's, that's a, that's a great question. Very poignant moment. And it just. Again, we're trying to. Part of what I want to do is I, I need to have a lot of different viewpoints, in many cases, opposing viewpoints, because I'm not interested in creating propaganda, guys. I'm just interested in telling the truth and giving people voices so that they can tell their story. And of course, you, you have that. You juxtapose that with the Andersons, with Trina Jo Bradley, who lives on the Rocky Mountain front. She's got a small operation, her and her son, I mean, her and her husband and, you know, they've got a young teenage daughter. And if they lose four or five cattle, you know, calves to, to grizzly bear predation, I mean, today the market's pushing probably $2,000 a calf, you know, by the time you get to the fall. So if you lose five of those, there's $10,000 out the door. If you lose 10, there's $20,000. And people don't understand these cow calf operators, they're selling, you know, that, that, that, that calf that was born in the spring or in the winter, depending on where you. Who you're dealing with, and there. And that's the only time they get paid all year round. So when they ship those cattle out, they get weighed when they get to the stockyard, whoever's buying them and whatever that value is, whatever the market's going for, whatever the weight is, and they lose weight on the way there on shipping, that's what they get paid, and that's what they have to live off the rest of the year. So when you're a small operator like Trina Drill Bradley. You know, I mean, that's, I mean, just put it, just put it in our perspective. I mean, heck, you know, I mean, if you bought Starbucks coffee every morning and you pay your six or eight bucks or whatever it is, and you do do that seven days a week, you can do that. 50 bucks goes out the door. Well, you know, at the end of the end of the month, you got 200 you spend on coffee. Well, okay, well, now you can't have coffee, so. And you can't get that 200. And so what are you going to do? Where are you going to get your fix? You know, I think people just have to understand that's like you were saying earlier, just about going to that farm in Ireland, seeing what that perspective. Don't make a decision, don't make a judgment. You know, we talk about Africa and people like, well, it's just we shouldn't have these evil trophy hunters. You know, again, I, you know, the reality there is if the wildlife is providing value to those people, you know, these people can survive in the landscape. And I've been in Westminster talking in the House of lords and MPs about hunting trophy import bands and I'm like, okay, so you guys are into childbike creation, are you? Well, what do you mean childbreaking? Oh, simple. These are subsistence farmers. They got eight or nine mouse meat, just like my ancestors and your ancestors did. Over time, you know, crops fail, they don't have crop insurance, they don't have a government that has the resources to help them. There is no UN, there is no UNICEF, there are no NGOs in these remote places helping them. And so at the end of the day, they utilize the wildlife. Well, wildlife's a finite resource. We figured out, my ancestors did in this country, just like they've been all over the world. And eventually when that's gone, what do you do? You still got eight or nine mouths to feed. Well, if you have a daughter who's reached puberty 12, 13 years of age, you can easily sell her. It's perfectly acceptable in those remote villages in Africa to sell her for 30 bags of corn as a second or third wife. So that's what the policy, what, what these laws do when you don't think about what the unintended outcomes are. And policy is a really important part of this. And I know Tony can add some really great stuff about this, but these films, we produced a feature film, we do a 55 minute version for PBS and then we do a 30 minute version specifically for the Corporate boardroom, classroom settings and political screenings. And we screen these films in Westminster, the US Capitol, state capitals, with state legislatures all over the United States, albeit CITES in Uzbekistan. We were in Panama three years ago for the CITES conference there. We're just trying to educate and give these decision makers enough information so that when they do create policy, it's not done adversely towards the people and the wildlife on the landscape. And so Tony has got a long history. I mean, Tony worked at the Environmental Protection agency in Washington, D.C. and Tony, I mean, talk to. I mean, you got all kinds of stuff you can tell us about policy.

Without getting too deep into that. I appreciate that. But as it relates specifically, I mean, this is another unique aspect of this that is different from what we see in other parts of the world, starting with policy in the United States as it relates to predators. We now have laws that protect some of these animals. In fact, not just protect them, but require governments to sort of bring them back to restore their populations.

Right.

And this relates to the grizzly bear and to the wolf directly, like in the eel. Yeah, yeah. So this is, you know, dating back to the 60s and then on up to current day where we're trying to recover populations. American bald eagles, one of the best examples of that, which, you know, they're everywhere now. Not everywhere, but, like, I mean, I think people are comfortable with their recovery. You can see them in the west anywhere. But. But as it relates to predators, this is an, I think, an important aspect of this, which is Congress in the United States created these laws and it created this particular Endangered Species act in order to. To protect and recover habitat and therefore wildlife. So you need habitat to recover and a place for these wildlife to live, individual species like the grizzly bear. And the outcome or the. The result of that, I think, is it was. It's well intended. I think most people look at that and they say, wow, like, you know, there's an important. There's something important about having all these species that exist, exist across the landscape where they traditionally were. Most people can at least accept that there's a benefit to that. They may not agree in the details, but they can swallow the fact that, yeah, we probably need wildlife because we like them. And it's important, I think, where we've made our biggest mistakes in that when I say our, I mean the United States, the federal government. I'm using air quotes again, because all of this stuff is really dependent on who you are. And I'm looking at this broadly and through my experience of observing and participating, being on ranches, cowboy and myself living with grizzly bears, like the whole thing. And I honestly feel like what has happened in the United States is we've done, it's almost like we've done in some cases a really good job of recovering predators in the United States, particularly the grizzly bear. Now they're not back to their former range, but in some cases what's happened is the government has moved swifter, the state and federal governments have moved faster, and we know this by the results. The grizzly bears come back quicker than what people had anticipated. There's been some major successes along the way and yet the public is sort of left to live with it. And so there's been this really like poor connection between the responsibility that. I'm going to say it this way, I'm saying as a matter of my own views on policy that the United States government has somewhat US and state locals, for a while they failed at anticipating the success. And in doing so, when I say this, I mean it's not as though we're recovering bluebirds. Like they fly around and they're, you know, they're not going to land on your lunch and eat you. I mean this is a little bit extreme of an example, but where you have large predators moving back into systems where for at least 100 or more years no one alive has seen one, much less had to live around them. I think as much as I don't support sort of this nanny state idea of where we coddle and take care of everybody, I think because we have this US based federal law that says you have to recover these species. Along with that must come the responsibility of dealing with the consequences of the success of that program. And in fairness, there have been some programs now that they've sort of recognized this. They're like, holy crap, we need to be out in front of this because we have to educate people about what it's like and how to live with grizzly bears, for example, how to live with, you know, mountain lions and how to live with wolves. And again, I think there's some give and take that needs to happen here. Some people will never accept grizzly bears and wolves on their place. It just isn't going to happen. No matter how much you try to convince them or provide assets to them to try to offset potential losses. The fact that grizzly bears and wolves are around livestock, people say, is enough to cut my, cut my cut into my growth of those species. In other words, your cow's not putting three and a half pounds a day on it's putting one and a half pounds a day on. So just the fact that they're round is an issue. So, but I want to, I want to wrap this back by saying I think we as a, as a, as a, for a matter of policy, state, federal, I think kind of dropped the ball in some ways on, on and trying to help people understand and provide resources for people who had never really thought much about living with grizzly bears. And here they are already knocking on their door and eating dog food out of, out of the dog food dish on their back porch. And somebody from the city or some wildlife person might say, well, yeah, that's what's going to happen when you live out in the prairie, when you live up in the mountains. And you know, that's just part of life. And to some extent that is part of life. But at the same time, you know, I didn't sign up for this. It showed up in my backyard. And I honestly think that there is some responsibility, there's liability, I would think, if nothing else, with not providing a, building a program to help educate, to help bring people on board to talk about the issues, to deal with. What's going to happen when you have a grizzly bear on your back porch? And this is not going away like, this is where we stand today. Grizzly bears are moving out farther. Predators are moving out farther. We're doing this rewilding without even a plan. This is not a rewilding plan. This is happening on its own. So subtract anything you hear about, you know, supplementing species. Like that's happening. But without that, our species are coming back and wildlife and predators are growing and number and in location and distribution and in. I mean, all of these things are happening right now. And so we ought to be, rather than what's happening now, cutting back the resources available to people who didn't necessarily vote for this on both sides, we're cutting, the federal government's cutting back on that. And it's like, no, if we're going to have a healthy balance, we've got to put more effort into making sure that everybody is at the table understanding where we're headed. They may not always agree on where we're going, but if they want to change how we do business at the legal level, that is something they need to do. But for now, we need to sit down and talk to each other and work this out. And the government needs to provide resources to help facilitate those discussions and to make sure that people have a place to go to have that dialogue. And fairness to listen to people and to understand their issues. And, and I think if we could do this, it's sort of the same thing. It goes back to, oh well, I can't just roll into some little town where there's a grizzly bear chewing on somebody's sheep and say, sucks to be you, buddy. You should have figured that out before you moved here. So it's a dynamic problem. It's, it's. But yet I think there are solutions and I think the government is responsible for making sure that people are involved and providing a way for people to feel unthreatened to do it.

If I could just jump in from one side.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Human wildlife conflict. It's not only with, with having a grizzly bear show up in your backyard when you haven't seen one for 100 years, which you're seeing in Hungary now with a brown bear conflict with people. We're seeing it in India where In the Romania 10,000 people are killed and eaten every year by wildlife. But here in America, our North American conservation, we call modern conservation wildlife. And the value of that wildlife pays for the science. It pays for the conservation officers to protect the resource. It's, it's a huge multi billion dollar industry. But you have a conflict now because you've got more predators. So every, you know, science tells us that everything is programmed to overpopulate the carrying capacity of the land. I mean look at humans, right? 8.1 human, humans, billion. Same thing with predators. You know, when the predator population expands because we've got lots of prey species. We're now seeing grizzly bears hundreds of miles where they were pushed by, you know, colonial expansion, you know, up until into the Rocky Mountains where that was the only place that they could go to get away from people. Because in the case of grizzly bears, they're historically a prairie animal because that's where all the prey species were, the bison, the antelope, the deer, the elk, all that. So, so now we have this conflict because we have this business model and this scientific and legal protection that's based on being paid for by a hundred dollars, license fees, permits, all that. And when you don't manage entire ecosystem, including the predators, because of say the Endangered Species act, we can't manage grizzly bears through sustainable use. They're protected right now. So if you go and shoot one, you're breaking federal law. It's a big deal.

I was going to ask about that.

So now you're in a scenario where if you're not managing so the state of Montana, the wildlife is all managed by the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. And at the end of the day it's their job to make sure that we have healthy populations of animals to hunt. And if we don't have that, well then they don't have any resources coming in because of all of a sudden, I mean, case in point, say the waterfall populations in America drastically dwindling, a certain flyway, well then the guys don't go out duck hunting. So all of a sudden the economics just dive off the end, right, right off the end of the, the dock. And so the same thing happens here in Montana where if you've got a lot of predators on the landscape, then that affects not only the numbers of animals that hunters can have. Say in Yellowstone you had the northern Rocky Mountain herd of, of elk there that was in numbers over 20,000, 20, 20, 30 years ago before the gray wolf was, was brought down there from Alberta. And now that population is, is been, you know, between serious predation by wolves and grizzly bears, that population sitting somewhere in the 5 to 7,000 range. Now prior to that, Gardner, Montana, in the very bottom of the Paradise Valley, you know, kind of like where Yellowstone is kind of set. That particular area was known as the elk hunting capital of the world because all these elk would come out of the park in the, in the late fall and early winter to, into the spring or into their winter, you know, grazing areas and they would head in that winter ground and they would be hunted. Now, you know, I'm not going to get into all the insects of that, but the reality is, is that that model, that economic model, and it doesn't even have to be, you know, the dollars that are spent, you get people that if they don't have a good experience to start talking about, well, yeah, there's all I saw with grizzly bears and all I saw were wolves. They may tell their buddies that like if you want to go to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is the largest untrained track wilderness in lower 48, between Tony and I were using Great Falls over here in Whitefish. It's a huge area, you know, millions of acres. And if you want to go hunting there, you know, I have a lot of hunting outfitters that say, well, you know, it's kind of, you know, underneath their breath they tell you it's kind of a glorified, you know, five day, eight day horseback ride because there is hardly any game, you know, but there's a lot of factors that go into this, you know, weather, you know, you know, issues with, with disease, all kinds of stuff that go into it. But predation is also. So, you know, our wildlife managers don't have all the tools that they need in their pallet in order to manage these ecosystems in their entirety. And that's a real issue here. That has an impact and that now that's why we have this kind of. There's a, there's a real mindset out there by a lot of hunters in the American West. You'll see bumper stickers that say smoke a pack a day, a pack of wolves, not cigarettes. You know, you hear the, you know, the, the shoot shovel and shut up. You hear that terminology where they're taking it into their own hands. And there are grizzly bears that die under suspicious circumstances. I mean, I think Tony can talk about the numbers of grizzlies that die annually here in, in the Rocky Mountain west. But, you know, we do have a lot of grizzly bears and that population's expanding, as it naturally should do, and they're moving into landscapes where they historically quickly were. But we also have on the endangered species list and the grizzly bear DNA is exactly the same grizzly bear that's across the border in Alberta and British Columbia. And it's not on the endangered species list there. It's same exact bear we have in Yukon and Alaska. And it's not in the endangered. I mean, we have over a hundred thousand grizzly bears in North America. I'm not really sure why they're endangered species list. And you know, I mean, so at the end of the day, we're, we're removing, moving a tool, sustainable use on how to manage those ecosystems. And if we don't manage them their entirety, we're not going to have Ethiopia because you'll end up with what a lot of scientists call predator pit. You know, we have them right now in this, in, in Russia. You have areas where there is no active hunting going on. There's not very many people. And the only thing that survives on the landscape over a period of time with heavy predation are bears, because they're omnivores. You know, the wolf, they outlaw the wolves and everything. And then you get little populations of maybe prey species that survive, but that's it. You don't have this Valhalla of wildlife that you see. I mean, you know, here, where I live in Montana, I can walk down to the mailbox, you know, three quarters a mile from here, and I'll see dozens of whitetail deer, I'll see hawks, I'll See pheasant, I'll see all kinds of animals. And, and so, but we, we also don't have a whole bunch of predators right where I live now. We have foxes and we have coyotes and we see the odd grizzly bear come through my backyard once in a while. But these are all things that we have to learn to live with. And that's all part of that conflict, that very complex conflict matrix that's out there.

Folks, listen, we could. We touch only about two or three interesting items and topics that are in a, in a film. And people should really, really watch the real Yellowstone. And we're going to talk about like, when they can watch the film and what are your plans then with the festival circuit and all that. But before we go there, before we go there, because you guys were being around the world and saw those things and like, to me, they're all there about the same. The conflict, the rewilding, the movement. And I, in general, I see this sort of like a tide turning where a lot of people are seeing this, like, oh, we actually need to take care of a wildlife. We want to rewild, we want to do these things. What are your predictions for the future in general? Farming, ranching? Is it going to, do we going to find a balance or is it going just one way? And more and more people will be moving into the urban areas and rewilders will have their way eventually.

Well, we live in representative democracies. I assume everybody listening to this podcast like we are here in the United States and elections have, you know, have, have, you know, have results that can have positive or negative impacts on, on what we're talking about here. That's why we're making the films. Tommy, we know that there's this huge disconnect in our urban society. They don't understand what, you know, really the realities are on the ground when it comes to conservation, when it comes to nature. I mean, even just understanding where their food comes from. And, and I think though we've, we do a lot of focus group research and we cross the United States, we're doing stuff right now in the United Kingdom, just trying to measure what people understand, what they don't understand, you know, who do they want to listen to, all that kind of stuff. It's really important for us as storytellers and messengers. And what we've come to find is that, you know, the people that we're targeting that are, that are, that are voters that affect policy, are very open to the ideas that we bring, bring out those, those real Voices. And at the end of the day, you know, our goal is, is, is, you know, and these people aren't stupid, they're just, they're just ignorant of the issues. And when you give them this information and you give it to them in an unpropagandized way, they're very open to it. And we've actually seen focus group research where nine out of 10 people, when you explain to them what conservation is and, and well, regulated hunting, legal hunting as a form of conservation, and whether that can provide which this is the real most important part of what we're doing is those stewards of those rural lands, they can realize their most basic human rights, which is a good paying job. It could be access to health care, an opportunity for their children to get an education. And we know Africa is very easy to see that here in Montana it could be the difference, difference, you know, with utilizing the wildlife for rancher, that maybe he opens up to the block management we talked about and the state pays him some money or maybe he has a hunting outfit or leases land or he becomes an outfitter himself. That money that they make off of utilizing that, that small offtake of wildlife on their land may be the difference between being in the black and the red for the ranch operation. It may be just as simple as being able to take mama on vacation to, to Cancun or, or someplace where they can keep alive and not get divorced because it's a tough, tough, tough life being a rancher. And so, and that's the biggest problem we see when it comes to this real Yellowstone. This is not Hollywood, this is raw, it's real. And really the biggest problem we see right now is the cost of land in Montana. Ever since COVID we have seen a political migration of people moving from say, California, California on the west Coast. Our population prior to Covid was about a million people. We're sitting in between a million two and a million three now. And most of those people have moved here in the last four years and they've come from these other places. They are, they are not your typical west coasters. They are center right politically. And they've completely changed the politics of places like Montana, which has always been a kind of a middle of the road to the left hand side of things politically. And those ramifications is supply and demand. So real estate, you only have so many houses, you only got so much land. They're not making any more land in our valleys here. So where I live in the Flathead Valley, we've seen our values Go up hundreds and hundreds of percent for our property values. And it makes it difficult. So now we're at a point now when it comes to ranching. We've got out of state people buying ranches. They don't have to get them to pencil, I. E. They don't need to make the ranch pay for itself. So, you know, it could be some billionaire or millionaire or somebody who's got an oil well in Texas that's buying up this ranch and they're paying in some cases, 10, 15, even $25,000 an acre for large spreads. 5, 10,000 acres or more, which is crazy. You can't make a cattle ranch work today for less than about. You've got to be less than $1,000 an acre in most places. Now I'm talking about the western US not the central part of the United States or east coast or anything like that. But at the end of the day, ranchers tell me that if you're a young person who wants to get into ranching as a cow calf operator, you must have four to five million dollars before you can even say go. I don't know, a lot of young kids coming out of school, high school or college, they got four or five million dollars laying around. So that's the reality. And so I said that this is a very difficult lifestyle. It's a difficult profession, it's a difficult way of life. But these people are passionate about it. They love the connectivity they have to the land and they're willing to fight. And they may. One of the, one of the ranchers told me that the poorest set of multimillionaires in the world. And the reality there is, is that these people, they love the land, they love the wildlife, they love being able to be connected to it. Like why, I think, I mean, why is rewilding? So why do people want to go walk around in the hills of Scotland? Because they like to be connected to the land. We are all that way. We are human beings and we are a part of this planet. We're a part of the earth. And I think that these ranchers, you, they got a tough go of it. And so what is the biggest problem? The price of land. Because now you've got the next generation that may have been there for 100 plus years, and they've got this type of life where they're working seven days a week, 80 hours a week, 24 hours a day, sometimes trying to take care of things, and somebody walks through the door with a check for 5 million, 10 million, $50 million $100 million. What are you going to do, folks, if somebody's waving $100 million in front of you saying, here, take my money, I want to run your ranch? You know, a lot of these ranchers, a lot of these next generation guys and gals are taking the money and running and you can't blame them, right? And then what do you do? You got a ranch that's being run by somebody for, as a trophy, as a hobby. It's not being run by a family that's trying to make ends meet so they're not utilizing the ranch maybe in the best way they could. You lose that generational institutional knowledge of conservation and stewardship of the land and they, you know, you end up with all, all kinds of conflict maybe, you know, with elk populations because they may not want any hunting on their land or they may want to do their own hunting on the land, but they want to look out their window when they're having all their buddies from, from the Hamptons having dinner. Look out in the big, big, big picture window and see a herd of elk out there. Well, that herd of elk during hunting season because it's not being hunted or being pushed off the ranch and being populations not being kept at a sustainable level so it doesn't create conflict. As soon as the hunting season's over, those cow elk are pretty smart. They head over to the neighbor's ranch, hang out, and then when the second cutting of, of hay happens in July, end of July, which is the most valuable cutting of hay, the next door, next door neighbors got 500, 1000, 2000 head of elk eating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hay and basically in some cases putting people out of business. So it's a complex issue. But you know, I really think that price of land is, is the biggest issue we have today and it's not going to go away and it's here to stay. And I think the more we know, especially our urban public knows about the trials and tribulations of our urban, our rural people and what they're doing to stay on the land and supporting them. A lot of these ranchers now are diversifying their business. They're selling direct to consumer, the Wickens Cattle Company, the old salt co op that are featured in the film. You know, even north Northbridge or bison, you know, being able to, to be connected to that, you know, where your meat's coming from. It's healthy, it's gmo, steroid free. It's the ultimate. You know, this food is, you know, free range and so at the end of the day, you're also supporting these people. Yeah, it costs a little bit more money, but you're also supporting a way of life and a way of life that as humans we've had for a very long time.

I'm just going to say looking at spatial and temporal, how long and where are, is incredibly important, important in this discussion. Like at the end of the day we've got to be looking at time frames and, and space and place. I think if I just look at the, if I step back a little bit, I, I feel like the Earth doesn't need or really care about humans. I mean, at the end of the day it, that's. That that is ultimately out of our control at some level. Although you could argue we could change climate and this sort of thing, this is true. But at the end of the day, the Earth is going to do what the Earth's going to do. It doesn't care about humans. We could perish. And I think the planet goes on. One way or another, it goes on. If we narrow this down to looking around the world, I think that I'm not very optimistic in the long run. In the short run, I think we have some wins and some losses, some successes right now. In the near term in the United States, I feel like we're going to take some steps back. I think we've learned some things. I think in local areas we're going to see some wins, but I think generally speaking we are going to see, I think we're going to see pain, more pain. I think private property is incredibly important to the future of wildlife in the United States. It has been for a long time, but I think it will become more important and how those relationships are built and managed, at least in the western states, critically important time for that. I think that information and knowledge are key to all of this. And I believe that we are entering a new era where artificial intelligence, where storytelling, where the ability to create doubt and mistrust in other people is at an all time high and will only get higher. There is no question in my mind about that. And I think therefore we have to be careful about who we talk to and how we talk and who we believe and how we build trust among one another. Within the next five years, you could put out a film about conservation that has nothing to do with reality. There would be no facts behind it. It's going to be purely based on digital platforms. There's going to be people telling whatever the hell story they want to tell. And so this doesn't bode well if you don't have experience on the land, which sort of comes back to this education component. People need to be connected to soil. People need to understand more about where their food comes from and how we produce goods and where they come from. 4 inches of soil, 6 inches of soil is the only thing that's keeping us alive around the world. We need to better manage those resources and make sure that we're protecting them for the future. These are the things. Sort of like you can't do one thing. It's not enough to just say, well, we're going to go out and protect the grizzly bear and we're going to go out. You need to look at these systems a little more in a larger piece and sit down with one another. This is my recommendation to sort of back to dialogue, back to discussing these things, back to getting together and having a real conversation. But I think I'm less optimistic in the long run based on the conflict between supply and demand and the humans who have never, at least never in modern time, not understood or at least accepted limits to the resources and to the environment. Right. Most people don't respect gravity, they don't respect solar radiation, and they certainly don't have any concept of limits. And I think until we sort of start to tackle those issues in a real way, we stand a chance of losing ground at the current pace and maybe faster. And I mean that literally losing ground, we're losing, what, a million acres a year of prairie lands in the United States. We're losing countless acres of habitat. And we're not just talking about local people. I mean, the guy that coming from California to buy the ranch in Montana is probably less my concern than other nations who have different ideas about how they're going to feed their population. I mean, this is a global issue. This is not just about one spot. Montana happens to be where the story's being told right now. But Montana does not function independent of the rest of the world. Those days are over. The Internet has changed it. Communication is different. The ability to get on an airplane and fly around the world and create mass chaos with one little bacteria or some bug. I mean, I'm telling you this because this is. You ask the question about what does the future look like? And I think there are some limited wins. I think we're going to bump along a little bit. I think we got to remain friendly, and I think we need to work towards solutions. But the bigger picture is we better figure out the United States government can lead. And if it doesn't get off her ass and take this responsibility seriously. AI is going to change this. And I truly believe that we will no longer be able to talk to one another in a way that people trust. And I think that's the biggest breakdown, trust in what we're doing and, and without touching the soil. You know, if people are going to be further and further and further away from dirt and rain and mud and cow shit for that big matter, then I think that it's going to be easier to sort of allow it to slip away or even watch it slip away. So that's my, that's my terrible story. In a way. I have, I have local confidence that we will make some improvements. But in the bigger picture, we in the United States need to do something, and we need to do it quickly. Otherwise the, you know, maybe the cat's out of the bag. But I have confidence that this government in the United States has the power to make some of this happen if we're going to lead.

Thanks for that. And, you know, that's probably the material for entire different episode of the podcast what you, what you mentioned in there, guys. What is like, where people are just itching now to view the, to, to watch the film, where they can watch the film, what is the timeline? What is the story, where they can watch it, and what are your plans? Because I know that you're always hitting like a festival circuit. You already had some successes, of course. So please lay it out to us. Where to view the. The film and what's, what's, what's the future for the film?

Yeah, no, that's great, Great question, Tommy. And we want to, just want to say thanks to all the people listening to this, guys, because, you know, without you guys watching our films and supporting us, we can't do this. I mean, it's, we're a little small nonprofit, the Shepherds of Wildlife Society. So if you ever want to support us, just go to shepherdswildlife.org Tony's one of our fellow photographers, along with a whole host of other great photographers we have and filmmakers. But as you mentioned, we've embarked on submitting the film to about 30 some film festivals. I think of the nine that have announced and selected, six of them have selected the film. We've already won some awards and are going to be in con, one of the film festivals in Cannes here next winter. So we definitely have got some. We're getting some street creds, you know, from the festival world. So. And that's great to have you Know, it just validates within the film industry what we're doing is right. And so then the other thing is, is we're just getting ready to launch the world premiere in the theater in Bozeman, the Emerson Theater. So anybody's listening that's in the United States, if you want to come to Bozeman. Tickets are selling fast. We're going to be taking it on tour, literally going from night to night from different towns and cities all over the American West. That'll take us through August and into September. And then we have a digital cinema event, which this is where your audience can get involved come August. You know, I don't have the exact date on there. We're still formulating either the 1st or 15th of August. We're going to have the film available through our ShepherdsofWildlife.org website. You'll be able to watch the film, get a digital cinema ticket online. You'll get a link, and you'll be able to watch it on your own device or project it on a screen, or watch it on a flat screen in your house and in all its glory. And then also we'll have some opportunities to help us out in different ways. So we'll have a panel discussion that we're going to be recording this this Friday. We've got some noted experts in the conservation, environmental and ranching fields that'll be talking about kind of like we did in Killing a Shepherd Shepard with Adam Hart and Amy Dickman. And then also what we did in Scotland last year in Edinburgh with that celebrity panel. And then also we'll have opportunities to help out. And then we've got a kind of an ultimate package. You can be part of our executive producer package, and that includes a whole bunch of stuff, including the hardcover book I'm writing about the film. It's called the Real Yellowstone Framing the Future. And basically, at the end of the day, you'll have an opportunity to have a zoom Q and A with me that we'll have later on this fall for folks that want to support us at that level. So, you know, we just, we really want to implore my people that we do this because we're not getting rich doing it. We're doing it because we care. We want to have an impact on the world. We want to educate people. We want people to understand what the realities are on the ground. And we want to give a voice to these rural people, you know, the stewards of the land, the good stewards of the land, and all the support you can give us, you know, watching the films, buying a ticket, all that. We we need it. We love it. Please share our post on social media. We're on Instagram, Facebook, you know, X, all that stuff. So you can find it either Shepherds of Wildlife, or you can find it in my name, Tom Opry, Opre. But, you know, and Tony, the same thing. We're both on all those, on all those platforms. And so please check us out, like our stuff, share it, comment, and then watch the film when it comes out on on the Digital cinema event. And we really appreciate all the support that we get from your viewers. And thank you, Tommy, for having us here.

Guys, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it's been awesome.

Thank you.