FYI — the website for my new show, MeatEater is now up and running. Be sure to check out themeateater.com for schedule information, videos, some behind-the-scenes action, and more.

As some of you have probably figured out by now, Zero Point Zero Production and I are no longer making our show for The Travel Channel. While it was great experience to be working with that network, and while they gave us a lot of room to make the show we wanted to make, we had to part ways. Ultimately that’s turned out to be a very good thing, because for the past four or five months I’ve been working with the same crew to make a show that’s better than anything The Wild Within could have dreamed of being. This new show, Meat Eater, will premiere this coming January on Sportsman Channel. It has the same look and feel as The Wild Within, the same non-stop action, the same philosophical approach, but it’s even more authentic and gritty and gorgeous. During the creative process of putting the show together, we used the slogan “Killer Hunts, Killer Food” as our rallying cry. And that’s exactly what Meat Eater will deliver to you. If you don’t believe me, check out some of these choice new photos that were taken while we filmed.

And it gets even better. When you’re working with a network like Travel Channel, they end up owning all your footage. You might shoot 60 hours of tape on a hunt, which gets pared down to about forty-five minutes in the edit. The rest of that material ends up in a sort of video graveyard, doing no good for anyone. But now, with our new setup at Sportsman Channel, we own our own stuff. It’s ours to be greedy or generous with, whatever we choose. And we’ve chosen generosity. We’re in the process of building an on-line community where we pour out our hearts and souls (and our footage) for anyone who wants to see what’s up. At anytime. So if you’re sitting around in the middle of the night, 1) wondering what to do with the bullfrogs you just speared; 2) wondering how to properly grill a venison loin; 3) wondering which knives are worth the money and which knives aren’t; 4) wondering what next fall’s crop of presidential candidates might mean for hunting; 5) wondering what happened on past episodes or what might happen on future episodes; or 6) just wanting some wild and wooly entertainment, you can come visit the Meat Eater site and satisfy all your curiosities and desires. Or, if you just want a t-shirt with our sweet new logo on it, we might be able to help you with that as well.

Right now, though, before any of that happens, I need you to do me a big favor. I need you to go to the new Meat Eater page on Facebook and get joined up. Since there is no button that says “love it,” you’ll have to settle for the button that says “like it.” Please, do it now. If not, I’ll come to your house and skin you out and stuff you into a backpack. Well…not really. But you get the point.

Thank you, and good luck out there. –Steven Rinella.

P.S. If you don’t get Sportsman Channel, don’t worry. We’re going to help you with that as well.

“There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country.” -Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

Teddy was right, as anyone who knows and loves the outdoors can attest. Next month, I’ll be speaking at a media summit for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership at the High Lonesome Ranch out in Colorado. The TRCP is a coalition of hunting, fishing, and conservation organizations, labor unions, and individuals who represent the wide spectrum of America’s outdoor community. They are dedicated to the preservation of America’s landscape, helping to expand fish and wildlife habitat and increase public access to quality hunting and fishing. To learn more about the TRCP, click here.

Just went bowfishing in Western Michigan with two guys from my high school, Jesse Singleton and the outdoor writer Tracy Breen. I’m about the worst bowfisherman on the planet, which has long plagued me. That’s because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s impossible to be a total badass outdoorsman without being able to hit a fish with an arrow on a consistent basis. So I’ve been practicing lately and tampering with new gear in order to figure things out. After studying refraction and shooting at various leaves and busted clam shells on the bottom of lakes and ponds, I figured I was ready for some serious action. I suggested that we target gar pike. I had three reasons for this: one, I’d never gotten one with a bow; two, they’re good to eat (more on that later); and three, they’re so damn skinny that hitting a couple of them rules out luck in a way that hitting dog-sized carp does not. Here are some photos.

That’s a Mathews Genesis Pro. What makes the bow good for bowfishing, even though it’s not marketed as a bowfishing bow, is that you can shoot it at any stage in the draw cycle. It’s like a recurve in that way, except that it has the size and feel of a compound. Makes it perfect for snap shooting at quick moving fish when you don’t have time to come to full draw and find your anchor point. The draw weight if very light as well, as you don’t need a lot of poundage to puncture most fish. And a light draw weight is also good when you might be shooting a lot of arrows (which means of lot of pulling back), or shooting arrows into backdrops that include rocks and submerged logs that either damage or detain arrows.

 

Here’s my first gar. He was about 12 feet off the bow of the boat, a foot beneath the surface, and moving. I was pretty pleased with myself. That fish arrow is made by Cajun Archery.

 

Now for cleaning. Step one is to have a dead gar lying on the ground. (From here on out, the photo quality really starts to plummet because we’re going from Tracy’s very nice photos to my trashy cell phone pictures.)

 

The gar’s usable meat occurs as two loins, or backstraps, along each side of the spine. To begin removing them, use heavy duty kitchen shears or sheet metal shears to cut through the gar’s armor plating of thick scales and skin. Start at the dorsal fine and, following the backbone, move all the way up to the base of the head.

 

Once the main incision is made up the spine, extend the cut down each side of the fish and begin peeling back the skin. Then remove the strip by making a second incision through the armor along the fish’s flank. It’s like removing a peel from a banana, if bananas were made from sheet metal. The goal is to remove enough armor to expose the delicate flesh beneath, which can be removed like peeling the backstrap off a deer.

 

Here’s the gar with the two peels of armor removed and one loin removed. Once the other loin is stripped out, it’s time to get cooking. Now get off your ass and get fishing!

In an hour, I’m headed into one of the remotest and least populated corners of South America. There, I might be lucky enough to see my first jaguar. These are the biggest cats in the Americas, and they have the strongest bite force of any feline in the world. Pretty damn exciting.

The prospect of seeing a jaguar has me thinking about the first times that I’ve saw other species of wild cats. I encountered my first mountain lion, or cougar, well over a decade ago. I was driving down a two-track road after fishing cutthroat trout until dark in a high mountain lake. I came around a corner just in time to interrupt a mountain lion that was approaching a small herd of mule deer from behind. The deer bolted in my headlights but the lion stared at me rather lazily before loping off into the timber. He was about five feet long.

Oddly, my first bobcat was on that same road. It was carrying a dead ground squirrel in its mouth.

My first lynx was on yet another road, this time the Dalton Highway (actually a dirt road) that parallels the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Its oversized puffy paws were purely animal but it’s flat face had a unsettling human quality. The lynx looked at me with complete incomprehension, as I was almost undoubtedly the first person it had ever laid eyes on. In that area of Alaska, the only road to the east is several hundred miles away in Canada; the only road to the west is in Eastern Europe.

Looking back on all these cats, I’m struck by the fact that all three were encountered along man-made roads. It’s as though they had to emerge from the primitive wilderness and meet me halfway into civilization in order to make my acquaintance. I thank them for going through the hassle of it.
But no matter the turf, running into a big cat is a blessing for a human hunter. Unlike bears, which are highly omnivorous (meaning they eat just about anything) cats are true hunters. They live on meat, and meat alone. So, when I see a big cat I feel as though I’m looking into a special sort of mirror that reflects my primal self back to me. I see a cat and I say to myself, “that’s a good life, right there.” While I can’t say I understand cats in a full way, I can say that I envy them completely.

Thankfully, the place I’m headed now has no roads. We’ll be traveling by river and then on foot. So if I meet my jaguar, it’ll be on his terms.

A common claim of anti-hunters is that modern-day hunters do not hunt for reasons of food, cultural continuity, and a love for the outdoors. Instead, they say, hunters kill animals in order to get their jollies.

The argument about how we don’t rely on the meat baffles me, because it makes me wonder what exactly my wife and I have been eating for dinner every night. The argument about killing animals to get our jollies is even stranger, and it brings up some practical issues: if hunters really did get their jollies by killing animals, why would we go through the hassle of trying to find wild and unpredictable game animals under sometimes exceedingly difficult environmental circumstances when we could just volunteer at the Humane Society and kill a few dozen dogs and cats in an afternoon, or else get a job at an Iowa slaughterhouse and kill a couple hundred cattle a day in air-conditioned comfort?

If you put this argument to an anti-hunter, they’d point out that we no longer need to hunt; instead, we should be just like them and eat whatever’s available in stores — usually crops raised by farmers who eat meat. (This perspective has always struck me as being very adversarial to the notion of multiculturalism, as it harkens back to the days when missionaries, Indian agents, railroad magnates, and mining companies implored Native Americans to give up their brutal lifestyles in order to come to the reservation and eat the rations that were put out for them.)

That anti-hunters express frustration about our reluctance to adopt their lifestyle says a lot about their weak intellectual grasp of anthropology. Estimates vary, but most researchers agree that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans have been around for perhaps 100,000 years. In other words, if you took a person from 100,000 years ago and transported them to present time, they could learn to master a computer and fly a jetliner. For the vast majority of that time (and still today, in many places), human beings have engaged themselves in the practice of hunting for food. It is as much a part of our biological makeup as is our desire to sleep in shelters, wear clothes, and create art. What’s more, there was never a time when humans, or our human ancestors, did not hunt. In fact, there is archaeological evidence of hunting related activities going back over 3 million years. So when people express frustration about hunting, that it’s somehow barbaric or psychopathic and needs to go away, they should really consider what these remarks might say about their own humanity. And they should keep in mind that old habits die slow – or, more likely, they don’t die at all.

I have one last (rather lengthy) thought to share: hunters should realize that anti-hunters will never go away. The division between us runs way too deep to ever be healed. In fact, the tensions began, as the Good Book says, “In the beginning…” Starting with those first three words, the Book of Genesis captures many of the greatest of human themes. It takes us through the creation of good and evil; it takes us through the curse of labor for men and the curse of labor pains for women; it takes us through murder and rape and incest; it takes us through floods and famines and droughts and plagues; it takes us through jealousy and lust, love and hatred, and devotion and betrayal. That this litany of perennial human themes should include a nod to the tension between hunters and non-hunters is, to my mind, a great compliment to the debate.

The tensions are established in Genesis 25:25, when Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, gives birth to twin boys. The first to emerge is Esau, a man covered in thick fur, “like an hairy garment.” Clinging to his heel is his brother Jacob. “And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.”

These boys get on each other’s nerves right off. Esau the Hunter was loved by his father, Isaac, “who did eat of his venison,” whereas Jacob, the smooth-skinned and stay-at-home farmer, was more of a mama’s boy. One day, Esau goes out hunting with his bow but he doesn’t get anything. When he comes wandering home, he’s so hungry that he’s about to faint. He runs into Jacob and begs his twin brother for some lentils. Jacob refuses to give him any, unless Esau agrees to surrender to him his rights as the first-born son. It’s unclear whether Esau doesn’t take the deal seriously, or doesn’t care that much about his birthright, or really is that hungry, but either way he makes the trade and eats the lentils.

Years go by. Eventually, the father of the two brothers grows old and blind, and one day he calls his eldest son to his side and makes a request. He tells Esau to gather his weapons, “thy quiver and thy bow,” and to “go out to the field, and take me some venison.” If Esau does this, Isaac promises that he’ll give him his blessing as the first-born before he dies. So Esau gathers up his gear and heads out hunting.

Esau is gone so long that his mother and brother have time to execute an elaborate betrayal. The mother sends Jacob out to kill one of his domestic sheep. She tells him to dress himself in the sheep’s fleece, and to prepare the animal’s meat in the style of venison. Jacob does this, and then approaches his blind father. Isaac feels the sheep’s wool on Jacob’s back and mistakes it for the hair of first-born son. He also mistakes the sheep’s meat for his beloved venison. Thus deceived, Isaac bestows his blessing upon the wrong son.

We, the hunters and non-hunters, are still fighting it out.

Anyone who doesn’t like hunting and eating rabbits shouldn’t be allowed to live in the United States of America. Well, maybe that’s a tad extreme, but I refuse to back down on the following claim: I love to hunt and eat rabbits. I cut my teeth on mid-winter rabbit hunts in Michigan and Illinois, something I’ve come to miss in recent years. This past weekend, however, I got my fix out at the beautiful Duren Family Farm in the famed “Driftless Area” of south-central Wisconsin.

I became buddies with Doug, an ardent conservationist and land manager, a couple years ago after he sent me a cold-call email asking me to join him on a January whitetail hunt. That was a miserable and cold endeavor, and we figured that we’d follow up the good times with an end-of-February hunt for the elusive cottontail rabbit. And, if we were lucky, a barn-busting pigeon shoot.

As it turned out, we weren’t lucky with regards to pigeons. Doug got up bright and early on the last day of the month and walked out to his hay barn on a scouting trip for pigeons. The thirteen birds that had been in the barn’s cupola the day before had been replaced by a sleeping raccoon who’d likely cleaned up on pigeon eggs and/or hatchlings (they’ll breed year round, if they’ve got food and water) and was now sleeping off the meal.
We then headed off on foot from Doug’s farmhouse. We had a whole big crew of local guys: Karl Malcolm, a hunter and trapper from Traverse City, Michigan, who’s completing his PhD in wildlife biology at The University of Wisconsin; Pat Durkin, a controversial and rabble-rousing outdoor columnist who covers the politics and lifestyle of Wisconsin hunting; Tyson Hall, a former military reservist who just back from the Persian Gulf; and Paul Neess and Mark Boardman, two Madison-area hunters who work for the scope and binocular company, Vortex Optics.

We killed eight rabbits using a classic rabbit-hunting strategy: First we’d identify pockets of thick cover, some no larger than a house or two, that had a lot of rabbit tracks coming and going in the fresh snow; then we’d have a few of us sneak around to the far end and position ourselves near likely escape routes; then the rest of us would go into that thick stuff, kicking around and making a ruckus. We flushed rabbits from brush piles, tangles of cockleburs, old mounds of junked cars, nearly impenetrable patches of nasty briars and vines, and beneath beautiful old apple trees that seemed kind of dignified in the way there were falling down but still alive.

We ate rabbits that night. I parted each into five pieces—four legs and one back—and dusted them with a box of prepackaged seasoning called Shore Lunch. Then I browned them really good in Crisco and popped them into the oven for about forty-five minutes at 325 degrees. Rabbits don’t necessarily taste like chicken; if anything, they taste like what chicken ought to taste like. It really is the perfect white meat: firm, flavorful, complex. Doug served a quart-sized jar of pickled beets from his wife’s garden to go with the rabbit, along with a big loaf of bread. Along with our meal we drank beer, wine, and whiskey, and talked about women, the business of muskrat trapping, parenting, our dads, international travel, the military, the business of making rifle scopes, hunting for big bucks, the business of managing a farm, hunting for meat, going into bear dens to tranquilize and tag the inhabitants, good recipes, the films of David Lynch, calling turkeys with box calls versus diaphragm calls, how gorgeous Naomi Watts is, and other stuff like that. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time, and one of the best hunts.

I’ve fielded a lot of questions and comments about a shot that I took at a moose during the Alberta episode of The Wild Within. The comments and questions have been accusatory in nature, suggesting that I did not have an accurate sight picture on the moose when I fired my shot. I appreciate these inquiries, because they bring up a valuable lesson about the act of watching television.
Through behind-the-scenes photos, editing booth interviews, and occasional on-screen cameos by crew members, The Wild Within has made a deliberate effort to bring truth to the genre of adventure TV. Namely, that we’re a group of guys and gals who are actively making a TV show. I think this point gets lost on some folks. I recently had a friend comment that he would never go moose hunting on his own the way I did in Alberta. I had to point out that I was not alone, and that, in fact, I was at times with as many as four crew members: our medic and pack mule, Dan Doty; our director, Nick Brigden; our director of photography, Mo Fallon; and our producer, Jared “A Story” Andrukanis. That such misunderstandings of perception occur is understandable, because we go through great pains to capture the essence of what a hunt is like when there’s not a crew there to film it. Put another way, this a hunting show and not a documentary about making a hunting show.
What’s this have to do with the shot I took at the moose? Well, it has to do with perception. Viewers were looking through a camera operated by a true master, Mo Fallon, who understands the excitement and adrenaline rush of hunting. Mo takes moments that really are heart-pounding, and he translates them into great film to make great TV. But viewers need to remember that Mo and I are not necessarily seeing the same thing, and that my view through my rifle scope is not Mo’s view through the camera. What was actually happening on my end in those rushed moments was this: I was waiting for the moose to turn its head so I could get a clear, limb-free view of its head and neck. When that happened, I centered my crosshairs just above the base of the moose’s neck, in area of the skull just behind and a little below the ear. I adjusted my aim for short range (my rifle, a .300 Win Mag, is zeroed at 200 yards and the moose was only about thirty yards away) and then squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered where I wanted and the moose was dead before it hit the ground.
When we come back to the studio after filming an episode of The Wild Within, we have between 50 or 70 hours of footage to go through. That get’s whittled down to about 45 minutes. We want to give you the best stuff, but please keep in mind that you’re never getting the full story.

Alaska’s big game draw results were announced on February 25 and I got lucky by pulling a mountain goat tag for the Mills Creek area on the Kenai Peninsula. It’s a rare road-access goat hunt, and I’m terribly stoked. The last goat tag I drew, some years back, ended horribly. I had a goat take a plunge over a 1200 foot cliff after I shot it. Here’s a picture of where that goat ended up; my finger is pointing to where it fell from. The best we could do was salvage the hide and a couple game bags full of pre-ground burger. Hopefully my 2011 goat hunt will turn out better.

Here’s a collection of photos from stuff that’s currently hanging out in my chest freezer.

Bone-In Cut: I’ll slow-cook this javelina (also known as a collared peccary) shoulder and then pick the meat for barbecue sandwiches. It’s pork-like but gamey, and benefits from a spicy sauce. Read More »