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Transcription

Silvercore Podcast 103 Jeff Senger

[00:00:00] Travis Bader: I'm Travis Bader and this is the Silvercore Podcast. Silvercore has been providing its members with the skills and knowledge necessary to be confident and proficient in the outdoors for over 20 years, and we make it easier for people to deepen their connection to the natural world. If you enjoy the positive and educational content we provide, please let others know by sharing, commenting, and following so that you can join in on everything that Silvercore stands for.

[00:00:40] Travis Bader: If you'd like to learn more about becoming a member of the Silvercore Club and community, visit our website at Silvercore.ca

[00:00:52] Travis Bader: today. I'm excited to have a very interesting guest. This person left a fast-paced, high paying job in the world of accounting is a TED Talk alumni and now kills her money. Welcome to the Silvercore Podcast, Jeff Senger. Hey. Hi Travis. How are you doing? Really good. And what we should have done is we should have pressed record at the very beginning when we're talking here because the amount of gold that we have before and after a podcast is, is crazy.

[00:01:19] Travis Bader: I really wish there's a way to capture that, but you know, I guess that's just the nature of doing podcasts. I feel 

[00:01:27] Jeff Senger: that. Yeah, I think we did cover some good ground, but now we're able to share it. Yeah, now we were pals. We could just share and chat about anything, man. 

[00:01:33] Travis Bader: Totally. So I find it interesting you had I, you kind of followed a path that a lot of people dream about.

[00:01:41] Travis Bader: They are sitting in their cubicle, looking out the window or driving into work, stuck in rush hour traffic thinking, man, if I didn't have to do this, I'd be doing something else. And you said, Hey, I'm making a lot of money. I'm working as an accountant, but I want to do something different. Can you tell me about that?

[00:02:00] Travis Bader: Yeah. Story just to kind of get things rolling. 

[00:02:03] Jeff Senger: Well, we were in the right place at the right time. Uh, we owned a home in Calgary in the 2004 to 2006 times. So we were a hundred thousand heirs for doing nothing at all other than existing and qualifying for credit. Uh, so we became a hundred thousandaires by a fluke.

[00:02:18] Jeff Senger: Really? Um, and I said, wow, Heather, you know, we could own a piece of land. Heather. Heather became pregnant, right? Like in my, okay. Year two or year three in Calgary, year two and a half. A very repetitive monthly schedule that made me want to kill myself, and I was the guy. Yeah. Yeah. Dark humor. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:36] Jeff Senger: Looking out the window of the office tower down in Calgary, looking at the mountains and just wishing to be outside and, uh, So that was the calling. And we, we had this in a once in a lifetime fluke of having a bunch of wealth growing up. Uh, uh, down we, I joked, downwardly mobile, lower middle class was how our both, both of us lived.

[00:02:54] Jeff Senger: Like things weren't great. Yes. And the older I get, I realized, yeah. That that wasn't normal. Like pizza pops and uh, pizza pops were, dinner was. Anyway, uh, so Heather being pregnant and, and, and kind of, uh, uh, going through that. And Calgary, she's a teacher. I'm accounting, and uh, I said, we're a hundred thousandaires now we have equity.

[00:03:12] Jeff Senger: Yeah. And the normal thing to do was to refinance and just get on that hamster wheel, uh, refinance, buy a bigger house, refinance, use the down payment. Buy a bigger house. Buy a bigger house. And I said, well, we have enough money to, to move to a very poor third world country and own 10 or 20 acres. So I was looking at Nicaragua online, um, a lot.

[00:03:29] Jeff Senger: Yeah. And, uh, there were problems with Nicaragua because Canadian education didn't prepare us to speak, uh, hardly any languages, uh, other than rudimentary English. And, um, so, uh, I don't know, a few months of, uh, and worrying about not, so not speaking Spanish, uh, the worry of nationalization for like, so sort of moving to another culture would be hard.

[00:03:50] Jeff Senger: Spiders. I don't like spiders, so, so some stroke of, uh, some miracle flash of, uh, brilliance. I said I found the very poor third world country Heather, and that's rural Alberta. And she was like, uh, our parents are in Edmonton. I said, so we have this kid on the way, uh, we can move to Edmonton, or we moved to a, a rural area very close to Edmonton.

[00:04:09] Jeff Senger: Uh, within an hour of the city was probably about one eighth the price of a similar house in Calgary that was an hour from downtown, which was eight 86th, uh, avenue South. Yes. So it took an hour on the train to get to my office tower downtown. Uh, and I'd have to step over human feces on the platform to get to my job.

[00:04:28] Jeff Senger: And there were some of those poignant moments, uh, where I thought, this isn't for me. This isn't humanity. We weren't designed, or I wasn't designed mm-hmm. Uh, to pack into a little, a little vessel. Like it was the most efficient, uh, to not pay for parking, but just to get on the, on the seat, the light rail.

[00:04:42] Jeff Senger: Yeah. And I was like, this is just, uh, this is not for me. So, uh, we found 20 acres on the Pemina River, uh, I think circa oh oh six, I think. Mm-hmm. Or somewhere in there. And, uh, and we bought it with cash and I'm like, we're retired sister. So my wife and I was like, let's raise this baby. Let's see what raising a baby is like.

[00:05:00] Jeff Senger: So, um, we only had to work, uh, a couple days a week for utilities and, and groceries. So Heather started subbing a bit and she was flexible and, and like able to just pick up, uh, odd jobs. And I renovated, uh, the house from, from, from scratch. So it was, it was a shed, but I was like, I'd be willing to live in a shed if I could retire 26.

[00:05:20] Jeff Senger: And then, uh, that was like, kidding. That was 20 years ago. So lots has changed. We graduated to a full quarter section. I picked up some accounting work and, uh, did a little bit of economic development in the town closest to our, our quarter section farm that we live on now, uh, with this economic development group just on a voluntary basis.

[00:05:39] Jeff Senger: And they said, well, You know, we'd like to either, you know, attract new businesses and then the group said, well, before we go ahead and try to attract new businesses to this town of 300 San Gudo Alberta, an hour and a half northwest of Edmonton, how do we retain the businesses that are already here? And so we, we had a piece of paper and, um, the secretary and the treasurer and the, you know, president, and so they're writing down like, what business do we have?

[00:06:02] Jeff Senger: Uh, and one of them was a slaughterhouse, and I'm like, there's a slaughterhouse in Sangudo. And I was like, yeah, yeah. So that was 13 years ago. And, and, um, we, there was a, there's an old guy in his, uh, early seventies or late sixties, and, uh, he, it was down to just him and, and one helper. Running this place, it looked like an abandoned bottle depot.

[00:06:20] Jeff Senger: Uh, and I remember I was the guy who was sort of nominated to go in there and say, well, how much do you want for your slaughterhouse? And he said, why do you wanna buy it? And I said, maybe, maybe I do. Perhaps, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, uh, long story longer, we, uh, created, we, uh, conventional banks didn't wanna finance the slaughterhouse for an accountant to run with his, uh, I made a friend, a neighbor who, uh, who had a retail retail meat cutting.

[00:06:43] Jeff Senger: They, they had blackout lending policies on commercial properties in small towns because Right. I think that, uh, corporate finance said, Uh, small towns are the, it's, we're we're done with small towns. It's over. That lifestyle is over, so we're not gonna land. It's too much risk. So we ended up going through the steps of forming, uh, an investor cooperative in Sangudo, the first of its kind, a community, uh, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps and saying, can we borrow from local area ranchers to provide financing and then, and then keep the service in the community.

[00:07:11] Jeff Senger: So, uh, yeah, it was like, I remember day one, like, this is your slaughterhouse. Like, so honey, we bought a zoo and, and, uh, I, I had grown up hunting, of course, uh, even living in Edmonton. We did do hunting. I think that it was, it, it helped save, uh, on the feed bill for my brother and I. We ate, we ate moose growing up in north, growing up in North Edmonton.

[00:07:29] Jeff Senger: Dad was a big, uh, tri owning hunter. Yeah, so I really enjoyed the meat cutting and wrapping. Uh, once per year, you know, for a couple weeks he'd be in the bush and a couple of weekends you'd be cutting up meat and I thought it was really cool. So, Uh, seeing the slaughterhouse for the first time, I thought, this is insane.

[00:07:45] Jeff Senger: So I left my accounting job right and, uh, I remember the first kill day, I was so nervous. I walked into a pipe and it almost took out my eye. There was a, there's still a big, big scar there, but I was walking, uh, on my little speed walk, like going to move cattle from one pen to another to keep the surly old owner, uh, happy.

[00:08:03] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. And I was speed walking and didn't see this pipe in a, in a a two and three quarter inch pipe, or two and seven, eight inch piece of, uh, pipe hit, cut me in the eye and I kicked my shoes off. I hit it so hard. My shoes went out, like off my feet. I hit the ground. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a good, yeah.

[00:08:16] Jeff Senger: Yeah. That was the first of thousands of injuries at the slaughterhouse, learning the business and finding out how not to shoot yourself in those things. So funny. Yeah. That was 13 years ago now. 

[00:08:28] Travis Bader: So you'd never, aside from hunting, you'd never, uh, slaughtered an animal before, had to kill an animal. 

[00:08:35] Jeff Senger: That's not, no, not entirely true.

[00:08:37] Jeff Senger: So I think there was sort of this gateway livestock drug while I was working accounting in, in, in the town or the city of white court. Uh, after we transitioned to country living, uh, we bought a quarter section with a nice, a reasonable house, and it had all these outbuildings and we asked the neighbors like, what were, what are those old buildings for?

[00:08:53] Jeff Senger: Oh, that was a hog barn in the fifties. And that was the, the guy before you, the family, before you had some chickens over there. So, um, I was working at a company in white court and the, there was a nice, a kindly older lady there and she said, you guys should get some chickens. You know, if you're gonna do this farm homestead thing, you should get a couple laying hands.

[00:09:09] Jeff Senger: So we, that was the gateway drug. The gateway livestock was laying hands hens. Okay. That's right. And so we, we knew. We knew from our experiences in, in, uh, the Bora Forest that harvested animals, you could really control the quality of the meat that we were putting in your freezer, uh, by the way that you handled it, the animal that you selected.

[00:09:27] Jeff Senger: It's gender and species. All of those things mattered. Uh, how you shot it, how it died, how you bled it, how you hung it, how long you hung it. So I kind of, I was food adjacent. And then we kind of took the plunge into livestock and, and the eggs were better depending on what the, how the life that the hens ran.

[00:09:42] Jeff Senger: So I encourage anyone who's curious about how big an impact the way that the animal is treated and, and the food is handled, like the qu affects the quality of the food. Well, I think, uh, gateway hens, uh, sort of blew our minds. Uh, and then really, oh man, yeah. Um, you, you just, it's not something kind of when food is served to you on a styrofoam tray or if you're, you eat out a lot because you have the income to do that, uh, which we didn't.

[00:10:05] Jeff Senger: Um, then you don't think twice about it. It's just sort of this, it's monotonous and it's something you have to do three times a day or what, whatever. Mm-hmm. More of a social thing than really invested. But because we had this land and we had limited entertainment options, the chickens were great, and then we led to goats and milk goats.

[00:10:22] Jeff Senger: Uh, we had a milk cow that we ended up having three more kids. Four. So four daughters grew up, have grown up here on the farm. Uh, and we had a milk cow for probably eight, eight of the last 13 years that, uh, my wife was milking twice a day, uh, to have raw, fresh dairy. Then we had a few pigs that I killed on farm.

[00:10:40] Jeff Senger: We had, uh, we experimented with a few beef, uh, we killed some, a bull on farm. We had, I had a bull escape that ran through three fences and then turned up on the neighbors six miles away, and I had to, had to hunt. I hunted that bull and I killed them. And then we cut 'em into four pieces to get 'em into the back of the stock trailer to, to bring them to the plant.

[00:10:58] Jeff Senger: So that, so 

[00:10:59] Travis Bader: those, those bulls have, uh, thicker skulls too. They don't, I found, uh, 22 doesn't work like. Correct. It does On a cow, on a bull. Yeah. Yeah. I learned in an interesting way. That's right. 

[00:11:09] Jeff Senger: Yeah. That's, that's the story of my life on the kill floor. Yeah. So, right. Uh, so, so yeah, so I kind of knew about, you know, butchering our own.

[00:11:16] Jeff Senger: And we had, we had brought some animals to the provincial slaughterhouse at Barrhead a couple times to try and like, promote meat that we were growing on our farm and getting rid of excess to, to, to folks, friends in the city. So we really didn't know what we were doing, but, uh, but we knew that we liked it.

[00:11:30] Jeff Senger: We felt passionate about people, uh, you know, eating better because we had discovered this secret. And that was that, uh, the way an animal handled killed, uh, the sort of life that it has can make for more flavorful, richer, more nutritious, nutritionally dense foods. So, um, so yeah, I've got a que 

[00:11:46] Travis Bader: question on that one because I, I can see how it's handled and how it's raised and what it's fed.

[00:11:52] Travis Bader: It's gonna have a long term impact on the flavor and the quality of the meat that you're gonna be producing. And of course, we hear about a nice quick humane death, and so you're not releasing. Uh, hormones and adrenaline and the rest into, into the body. Is there a marked difference between a quick death and one that doesn't go as planned?

[00:12:15] Jeff Senger: Uh, yeah, it's appalling. It's actually kind of like, really, so, yeah. Yeah, we're very interested, uh, because we're like, we weren't, we didn't grow up in the industry, so everything was this miracle. Like, oh, you gotta come and look at this. Uh, we had a guy bring in a bison that he had shot, and it ran into a swamp.

[00:12:32] Jeff Senger: Uh, uh, so an on-farm kill. So this is a domestic bison that a feller raises lots of bison, but he had a big old bull. He didn't want to, he didn't want to, uh, load into the trailer. So, uh, he shot it in the head probably with the, you know, he misjudged the car, the, the, the skull plate over the sinuses. Yeah.

[00:12:47] Jeff Senger: Uh, or, or, you know, was slightly off. So he shot it, it didn't die, it ran into a swamp and there it struggled in the swamp all night. And this guy tried to get around it with a machine. So it struggled all night. And then eventually he caught up to it and killed it, like at four in the morning. And then he hauled it to us and he said, cut this up and make it burger.

[00:13:01] Jeff Senger: It's going in my freezer. Cause he, he couldn't have it go to waste. But there was this, uh, a disgusting, like a bruise slime between all of the major muscle groups. So we seen butcher, that's pretty standard. And we couldn't believe the darkness in the meat, the, the smell of the meat, not from a rot perspective, but just from those that that hormone release of this thing had a horrible struggling death.

[00:13:24] Jeff Senger: And that affected it, like right through every major muscle. So it wasn't an injury, it was just like a, a muscle, like a Yeah, just a cl a clear liquid and a separation of the muscle. Uh, mu the main muscle groups were separated with a slimy goop and it smelled, it had a sticky, tacky, uh, snot to it because that animal's really, really worked up.

[00:13:45] Jeff Senger: And the only thing that's been similar is like animals that have come in with, um, like severe pneumonia or colds. Okay. I mean, not colds, but severe pneumonia or bronchitis. Yeah. Uh, they're flemmi. And sometimes you can get something like that in the, in the meat where, um, I mean, it's not snot in the meat, it's just that the, the muscles are unwell.

[00:14:03] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. They're not as oxygenated as they should be. The animal's been hy hy, you know, uh, it was low. Oxygen levels have created hypoxia, and you can have muscle hypoxia. It's, it's evident inside the, inside the carcass. But all of that being said, very, very rare. Like we had a couple animals that didn't die well in the knock box.

[00:14:21] Jeff Senger: Uh, good intentions. Absolutely. The knock box. Yeah, the knock box. That's, that's where they, they get shot. So there's an animal handling and leverage, like an area that's a barn that's indoors. Um, and actually one of the first, uh, things we renovated about the slaughterhouse, it was kind of a 1950s style.

[00:14:35] Jeff Senger: And Kevin and I had our asses handed to us every kill day, uh, because of square corners. Um, horse, horse panels, uh, patches and chains, uh, deep mud in, in the outdoors. Mm-hmm. So, uh, we said, man, if we're going to stay alive long enough to, to make a go of this business, we need to invest in the animal handling and the, and the, and the kill box.

[00:14:55] Jeff Senger: Um, so we got a couple of grants. At the time, there were federal grant money, uh, available to grant matching. So if you wanted to upgrade your animal handling, you could go nuts. And so we 50, 50, 50 matching. So we built a covered barn, a heated cement floor, and we looked at designs to, I, I read some books about, uh, animal design and handling.

[00:15:16] Jeff Senger: There was a, a gal in the United States that was on Oprah called Temple Grandon. She was an autistic lady who walked through different federal, uh, commodity beef handling plants and pointed out the things that irritated her because she kind of saw the world like an animal and, or, I mean, you know, she said, and, uh, I said, uh, jokingly that I wanted to build a plant.

[00:15:36] Jeff Senger: That Temple Grand, that Temple Grande could be humanely know, like, so Yeah, yeah, yeah. We wanted to make a, a plant so humane that she would blow her mind. And so we went to a genius in the area called, uh, Don Bamber, who is a big, uh, elk velvet specialist. Uh, okay. 5, 5, 10 miles south of San Gudo. And he says, if you, if I heard you're looking at building this plant, uh, I heard that you want to handle different species, different sizes, all the things come and look at my elk handling system.

[00:16:02] Jeff Senger: And he had designed it because he was some sort of artistic genius in, uh, better than Temple Grand. Now I'm like, this is better than what Temple says in, in all of her stuff. I think that there may have been a, a, a desire to not make the multi-billion dollar livestock industry change much so Right.

[00:16:17] Jeff Senger: Temple Temple's like, they'll like this if I say how to be more humane, but not so expensive. Uh, this was a. This guy in the elk, uh, is handling, I mean handling, uh, monthly his herd of bull elk to saw their antlers off to make elk velvet tablets. So that, that, that's the elk, the domestic elk velvet business in Canada.

[00:16:36] Jeff Senger: Um, okay. His grow bulls out to grow great big antlers and then cut their antlers while they're still in velvet and grind them up for nutraceutical benefits. And 

[00:16:44] Travis Bader: what, what are the benefits you get from that? Or is, is that, 

[00:16:47] Jeff Senger: Uh, mic. Mic. Yeah. Are they gas station boner pills, right? No, absolutely not. They're legitimate sources of phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, uh, increases blood flow, uh, which is just snicker snicker, but Right, right.

[00:17:02] Jeff Senger: So many, many medicinal and traditional medicinal benefits. So that's all fine. And I get it. Like, and uh, I don's like, you should get on these, they just improve your overall health. So like, I, I, yeah, 

[00:17:12] Travis Bader: so that's a real thing. I always, I always thought it was okay. Increases blood flow, cuz you know, you always hear the, the jokes about that and yeah, different cultures, cardiovascular, 

[00:17:21] Jeff Senger: et cetera.

[00:17:21] Jeff Senger: So there's a lot of export market. So, So he was figuring out, Don and his family were figuring out a way to build an agricultural product in Alberta that hadn't been commodified by big money or big multinational money. And that wasn't growing beef. And it remains growing. Beef is is a difficult business, um, because there's a couple of big players that kind of monopolize and push everyone's small, medium, and large around.

[00:17:44] Jeff Senger: Um, so, so anyway, it, yeah. So he figured out a, a unique, uh, product, but he had to handle a unique animal. And the most recently domesticated North American animal are these elk. And so they can jump straight into 10 feet, straight up. That's the thing, you know, uh, from a standstill because they're powerful, amazing wild animals, and they, they haven't been bred for hundreds or even thousands of years, like cattle have to grow quick.

[00:18:07] Jeff Senger: So they still have a brain between their ears, uh, cattle. It's imagine if you br if you br just, uh, low iq, low iq, uh, bodybuilders to more low IQ bodybuilders. So passive and complacent bodybuilders that are mm-hmm. Uh, to for a thousand years. Right. Uh, cow cows aren't, don't have an awareness the way that definitely elk do after having killed, uh, thousands of animals at the slaughterhouse over 13 years of owning it.

[00:18:37] Jeff Senger: Um, some animals. Yeah. Oh yeah. Uh, Razorback boars, uh, recently imported from Siberia for hunting ranches and for, uh, novelty meat or exotic meat markets, uh, in Alberta. And, and, and, you know, um, have escaped into the wild and then have created this bounty have hunt. I've hunted them on bounty and collected bounty on wild bores.

[00:18:55] Jeff Senger: Uh, but they will look you right in the eye. Domestic pigs don't look you in the eye. Uh, but wild bores will look you right in the eye and they'll challenge you. They'll square off and face. They'll face off cuz they've been. They've been, uh, prey recently enough in their evolutionary history that they have a memory about to be afraid and to think about what's going on.

[00:19:13] Jeff Senger: Think about their mortality of smidge interesting, uh, domestic pigs and domestic cattle, not so much. Pigs are definitely smarter. Uh, but ca an opportu. I've, I've seen that. Yeah. And opp opportunistic and a and a bit like appalling, like orks from Toks Lord of the Rings. Like they, they really got it. If they could characterize hu like humanoid characteristics and u using Anyway, uh, well 

[00:19:34] Travis Bader: I got, so I, I got a question about the, um, I, I don't know if I should tell this story, but I'm gonna tell it anyways.

[00:19:43] Travis Bader: Uh, I started doing the basic firearm safety course in Canada while I was in high school. I was about 1994 when I started that. Graduated in 96. And somewhere in my late teens, maybe early twenties, got a fellow who says, Hey, I'd like to. I'd like to take the course. I said, well, we've got a course coming up this weekend.

[00:20:04] Travis Bader: You're in luck. He says, perfect. Cause I need a gun for the following weekend. I said, well, it doesn't work like that. Mandatory minimum waiting periods and all the rest, right. Anyways, he says, okay, let me figure this out. Calls back, says, I got it. I'll take the course, I'll bring a few of my friends through so you can see what I'm like.

[00:20:21] Travis Bader: You can see my associates and you see I'm a good person and you can lend me one of your firearms for the next weekend. I'm like, no, sorry. It doesn't work like that. I said, what do you need a firearm for so badly? He says, well, my brother's coming in town. Okay, this doesn't sound good. Right? Yeah. Well, turns out, uh, they had started a small farm and his brother was coming in town and previously they just had goats and they could slaughter them themselves, but they had just purchased two cows and they wanted to be able to humanly slaughter these cows and.

[00:20:54] Travis Bader: He says, well, can you come on my farm and shoot my cows for me? I said, well, I've never shot a cow before. Right. You know, I've, but sure. I guess. Okay. You know, out of all the options here, this is gonna be one that can assist you and help you out and the least illegal, right? Yes. Yep. Least illegal. That's a good way of putting it.

[00:21:15] Travis Bader: That's good. Yeah. Um, so I go onto his property and it was a small property. It was a small farm. Probably shouldn't say where it was. Mm-hmm. It's not around anymore. And, uh, Filipino community, I was six foot, six white guy towering over everybody else, and they'd already butchered a goat. They had it on the ground and I thought they were cooking the hair off of it with a, uh, roofing torch.

[00:21:37] Travis Bader: But yeah. Uh, they said they're, they're cooking it. They're just gonna cook it like that. And it was so, okay. Interesting. Right. Never eaten goat like that before. And I said, okay, well, let's see if we can get these cows. And I got a little, uh, martini action, uh, BSA cadet 22. It's aperture sites. And, and, uh, these cows still had their horns.

[00:21:59] Travis Bader: They weren't chopped and lied off and, and, uh, kind of wildish animals and kept running after these fellows. And, and so finally said, okay. Okay. If we can't get them to be still, let's just calm 'em down and I'll, I, I think I know where to shoot it. I mean, at, at my cabin we had a cow skull hanging on the wall that had been shot by some rancher years and years ago and I, I knew where that 22 hole was, but the skull is very different from the cow's head.

[00:22:30] Travis Bader: Yeah. When it's 

[00:22:30] Jeff Senger: got hair on it. Yeah. 

[00:22:31] Travis Bader: Yeah. Anyways, so I get it lined up in Snap Merr thing goes running off, ah, I'm feeling kind of bad right and get back up to it and mo closest I could get to it is about 50 yards or so. Snap merr running off. Did this a few times till I finally figured out where that sweet spot was.

[00:22:50] Travis Bader: Second cow went down, like it was on roller skate, so it was dead before it hit the ground because I knew where to shoot it. But I mean, the first one I was feeling really bad for this thing because I was expecting a quick humane death and I thought I knew where I was shooting it. I guess my question is gonna be twofold, number one.

[00:23:05] Travis Bader: Um, how much different. Would that cow taste the meat on that one? That took a while to find the sweet spot to the one that went down, like was on roller skates. And if we were to apply that to, let's say, the hunting world, how much different is a quick humane harvest of a, uh, of an ungulate, let's say, gonna taste than maybe one that's been gut shot?

[00:23:28] Travis Bader: Shot and he had to track it down for maybe it ends up dying an hour later, let's say. 

[00:23:33] Jeff Senger: Yeah. Oh, that's a great, uh, that's a great scenario and a really good, uh, buildup and question and a fun story. Uh, not a fun story for the cow, but a learning story about a young man figuring out how to, so you have your morals intact and you have your, you know, your ethics intact, and sometimes things don't go the way that you plant.

[00:23:51] Jeff Senger: And that happens to experi me with 13 years on the kill floor. Um, sometimes I guess wrong or at the last moment, even with a knock box. Um, they'll, they'll turn their head suddenly and you know, like, everything's going fine. Mm-hmm. We really worked hard in building a calm. Serene environment for them to move up into the knock box.

[00:24:07] Jeff Senger: But, um, you have some, some animals that, uh, they were just born to hate and there's some that, that are, are man hunters and are, and really want to fight everything. So it, it gets 'em hard to hard, you know, hard to, to hold them, have them hold still. Uh, they're huge animals. So, uh, the correct caliber is important in the correct placement is very important also.

[00:24:25] Jeff Senger: Um, and my answer is kind of uninteresting in that, uh, not a huge difference, uh, not a huge difference from, from the one to like, you know, if it, if it runs around and it's 10 minutes later and you finally hit the, like, press the button and then powers down, um, that makes less of a difference. So, I don't know that your palate could discern a difference in taste between the two.

[00:24:44] Jeff Senger: There might be a little more toughness in the animal that ran. The more it runs the, the more toughness that you'll have. Lactic, lactic acid and, and, and adrenaline in, in the meat. But it wouldn't be like, oh man, this is, this is totally off where you would have meat that was totally off. And this like, it's kind of more surprising.

[00:25:01] Jeff Senger: Kevin and I talked about this, uh, in from the wild episodes with our wild game harvesting a lot. Mm-hmm. Um, would be how quickly after it's dead that it gets bled and how completely you bleed the animal. Really. So, yeah, absolutely. So this even applies to fish, which is, which it was a huge, uh, I mean, for us, you know, for us it was a huge big deal.

[00:25:22] Jeff Senger: People that, that are obsessive compulsive about the, the handling of their meat. Uh, we sat around a ice fishing tent saying, well, why wouldn't, like, did your dad bleed fish? No. Did your dad dad bleed fish? We talked to some people on the West coast and they're like, yeah, for commercial salmon fishery, they always bleed the fish.

[00:25:39] Jeff Senger: Uh, right, or they're flash frozen and, but, but, uh, but I think they're, anyway, certain, certain boats bleed them and certain don't. But, uh, we started bleeding our jack, our pike, our northern pike here that are sometimes, uh, not great tasting fish, uh, and slew tasting and definitely dumping the blott of them, uh, just like you would with cattle or pigs or whatever.

[00:25:58] Jeff Senger: It makes a, a significant improvement in shelf life. Uh, it takes the funkiness or a dan out of the meat, uh, improved shelf life and, and, and is an overall better quality product. Less, less minerally taste, less both. Bull taste. So a male animal, uh, a male animal in Rotch, uh, whether it's a deer or a bovine, uh, has, is way more heavily built, uh, more connective tissue in its muscle, in its hide in its guts, pulling at the guts out of an old bull.

[00:26:29] Jeff Senger: Um, I have to hang from its kidneys to, to, to yank the, the kidneys out, whereas a young heifer or a steer, so a young female animal or a steer would be a, a male animal born with its testicles clipped, uh, mm-hmm two days after birth. Uh, those animals are built very, they're, they're really easy to pull apart.

[00:26:45] Jeff Senger: They're tender all the way through light hides, uh, less connective tissue and light, but something in the field that all hunters should do is to, to bleed the animal. And it was funny because I'd, you know, doing two kill days a week, I'm on the kill floor all the time, and then Kevin and I zip away, uh, hunting buddy, and I zip away and do a hunting adventure, uh, this time with archery tackle.

[00:27:04] Jeff Senger: Is this Costo any you're talking about? This is Kevin, Kevin Coston from the Wild creator, filmmaker extraordinaire. 

[00:27:09] Travis Bader: I love Kevin. He's amazing. 

[00:27:11] Jeff Senger: Yeah. We spent way too much time together over eight years of filming. We went on 10 or 12 hunting trips for three days every year for eight years. Um, so it was my second home.

[00:27:21] Jeff Senger: My second, uh, spouse was, is Kevin Cowan. Yeah. I took a step back a little bit building the, the retail, uh, meat shop in Edmonton. And he's got just an amazing, he's continuing. He, he hasn't missed a beat, uh, 10 episodes a year. Um, so amazing outdoors man. But, but we talked about bleeding fish and, um, we're on this hunt and we get an arrow into a mule deer, and it doesn't die immediately.

[00:27:42] Jeff Senger: And we track it down, chase it down, and then get another air into it and it's dead. And by, like I was in a auto mode, I ran up to the animal and grabbed it and then, and bled it. The, the quick way, which was like from, you know, from ear to ear. Yeah. And then I, I bled it the business way. Uh, that's reaching your knife along the trachea, down into the collarbones and snrp righting the, uh, cardiac aorta.

[00:28:02] Jeff Senger: Uh, and he had no more blood pressure. The blood had left through the wound, you know, but Kev, Kevin's dad, who's in his sixties, he's like, what the hell is that? What is your friend doing to that poor deer? And then I was like, oh, I was just bleeding it like I, I lapsed into kill floor mode. Like we have to bleed this animal.

[00:28:18] Jeff Senger: Um, right. Kevin laughed because it's become practice for us. Uh, if the wound, if you shoot in the heart and lungs, it's gonna bleed, uh, with a rifle, they tend to bleed out. They're filled with, uh, red jelly. Um, so they do bleed out in the cavity and it's a, it's a really quick death, but, uh mm-hmm. If for any reason, uh, you don't open a humongous wound channel, uh, if you want to maintain the integrity of the meat, then bleed the animal as soon as ideally while the heart is still beating.

[00:28:41] Jeff Senger: And that sounds vulgar to even hunters. Generally, that's tough to get up to an animal that you've shot. Um, you're usually at some kind of range or you have to mitigate some sorts of obstacles and get through trees or, or rough terrain to get to an animal. But ideally on the kill floor, and this isn't, I'm didn't invent this, this is very much part of the craft and the art of butcher.

[00:29:00] Jeff Senger: That's that use, uh, the, the heart's beating for two to two to five minutes after, uh, it's brain dead. And that's the pump that, that, that the grand mal seizures and the, and the heart pumping is what dumps all the blood out onto the floor. And it, it, it just makes a better quality 

[00:29:14] Travis Bader: meat. So somebody has, let's say a neck shot or now I'm never been a fan of head shots, but let's say somebody did a headshot on an animal, um, and they're able to get over to quickly.

[00:29:25] Travis Bader: They better be bleeding that, that wild game if they want to have the integrity of the meat intact. Abs. Yeah. 

[00:29:32] Jeff Senger: That was the, the condition there is. Yeah. A lot of hunters give zero shits about the integrity of the meat or it's all gonna be turned into pepperoni. I, I ain't never done that before anyway. And it's so spice, it's so sugared and, and salted and spiced.

[00:29:44] Jeff Senger: Uh, you don't really get any essence of the game animal any, or mixed with so much pork that it doesn't really matter. But for, for, for people that want to eat, say a, a whitetail steak and you want to reduce gaminess, you want to reduce any kind of, Uh, readiness or reduce readiness or reduce anything that's foul or unpleasant and definitely bleeding it.

[00:30:03] Jeff Senger: I mean, obviously shooting it in a quick kill is everyone's goal. Mm-hmm. But I think that matters, that matters, makes less difference to meet quality than if you, uh, if you remember to bleed it or if just the nature of the wound channel and through heart and lungs, that's a, pretty much every drop of blood is out of the animal before you get to it, even especially a pastor.

[00:30:20] Travis Bader: So, so just, you mentioned there about Gaminess and that's been the ongoing debate with hunters for, for eons of what causes gaminess. Do you have an idea, given your profession and the amount of time that you've spent with meat, that you'd probably have a decent idea of where that gaminess comes 

[00:30:38] Jeff Senger: from?

[00:30:39] Jeff Senger: Yeah. I really, really know exactly where Gaminess comes from. Listen to this commercial just after this commercial break, you know, that's a little sizzle reel there. But yeah, the scissor reel is man. Um, so, uh, hunters. Overage wild game meat. Uh, they're doing the right thing kind of for the wrong reasons.

[00:31:01] Jeff Senger: So they, okay. They have an inkling that they go to a steakhouse that they love and they pay a hundred dollars for a delicious, uh, beef steak. And they say, wow, that was 28 aged, or something like that. And so they say, well, I killed my dad's. Like, I killed the bull moose. I'm gonna hang it in my garage. It's reasonably cool in there.

[00:31:15] Jeff Senger: And this is, that's a, uh, yeah, yeah. Spoiler alert. Yeah. Uh, it's reasonably cool in my garage. I'm gonna hang it for a month and then that bowl will be tender. Mm-hmm. Now, dry aging is a com It's, it's a nuancey thing. It's not that complex. There's two or three things to remember. One is that if the animal has sufficient fat cover, then the animal hanging, uh, enzymatic activity makes the muscles more tender through enzymatic rotting.

[00:31:41] Jeff Senger: And that's a vulgar term. Yeah. But it's enzymatic, enzymatic breakdown of the, uh, fibrous muscle fiber inside the animal. Uh, it breaks down with time when it hangs on the rail at two to four degrees Celsius. Um, Now if that animal is covered in fat, that is, it's in a wetsuit, like a seal. Mm-hmm. Or a person, a diving suit.

[00:32:01] Jeff Senger: It has fat on every covered surface. Like we talk about 95 to 98% coverage on a full finished fat beef. Uh, whereas a bull moose would have two to 6% fat coverage. Mm-hmm. Um, the, the, the, the animal without fat coverage like it's, is losing moisture kind of at a faster rate, depending on temperature and the, and the humidity inside your cooler.

[00:32:23] Jeff Senger: It's losing moisture at a rate that is stripping the meat quality characteristics away from, it's getting more tender, but it's getting drier. Right. It's, it's concentrating that flavor by losing water out of your moose hip. Uh, it's losing water concentrating flavor of a bull moose, which is often the gaminess.

[00:32:41] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. And it's getting more tender, but it's losing water. So you're trading one for the other. You should just cut it as soon as it's rigor mortis and cold. So cut it. Game animal that's not covered in fat once immediately. Once it's cold. Uh, that's a way to reduce gaminess. So bleed it. Interesting. And then hang it for, uh, I mean overnight at the, at, you know, in the negative temperatures here in Alberta, uh, pretty easy to get.

[00:33:02] Jeff Senger: And I would, I would cut it once it's cold, uh, through to the bone. So in a day or two, you're not getting anything. Awesome. If you're hanging it for two weeks, you're, you're getting, except for gaminess. So again, you're trading tenderness for juiciness. So if I have a big old fat pig, they, in the traditional way, we would scald pigs.

[00:33:17] Jeff Senger: That's, you just deha them and they keep their hide on. And then a pig has a jacket of fat under every on. Oh, covering every joint is now fat and skin. When you, when you just scald and scrape them. Um, we've aged some pigs. It's a great success because it's maintaining every speck of water inside that waxy jacket that he's wearing.

[00:33:36] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. And then, then, then enzymatic activity is making it more tender. So if you want an an in, this is another tip for an insane meat experience. Uh, go to a traditional artisanal butcher that is able to bring inside the pork and see if you can get some dry-aged pork, uh, because they can go an extremely long time on the rail, uh, drying in a cooler, not drying in a cooler, they're staying wet on the inside, but they're enzymatically breaking down so they're more tender.

[00:33:58] Jeff Senger: And then, then that, that also applies to very, very fat beef. And we kill everything from lean, lean, beef and wild game on, on the wind end, end of the spectrum, or elk or bi domestic elk, domestic bison, um, all the way to Wagyu cross beef that have sometimes three or four inches of back fat, rib fat, and a hundred percent coverage of, of maybe three quarters to one inch of fat over their entire hip section.

[00:34:20] Jeff Senger: They're shanks are fat. They're so fat that they have fat in their eyelids. If they're, if you sh yeah. You know it's fat. You know it's fat when it hits the ground. You and Obama, so fat, when that beef hits, it hits the ground and its shoulders so fat that it heads its head, doesn't touch the floor. Then you're like, this one's gonna, this one's gonna grade prime.

[00:34:37] Jeff Senger: We can guess this. Yeah. Anyway, so those guys have, so those, those units, those animals have so much fat on them that they're not losing any water. So we can put a hundred days on the cooler in them and they'll still be just as ju or not just as juicy, but they'll be, uh, maybe three or 4% water loss.

[00:34:54] Jeff Senger: Because you're in that waxy jacket of fat. If you wanted to age your bull, your fricking 48 inch bull moose, 12 year old bull moose, uh, uh, to get some of that, uh, tenderizing, I would primal the muscle group. So I would butcher the animal, pull the, the muscle group that you want to age off and then cover it in a dry age bag.

[00:35:12] Jeff Senger: They sell those commercial, I don't think they're cheap. Uh, so it's kind of like a semi-permeable membrane that you can buy it. They're, they're promoted in, in hunting stores. Um, so it's kind of like a, a breathable bladder and you wet it down and you, you stick that joint in that bag, uh, that reduces the total of water loss.

[00:35:29] Jeff Senger: So kind of acts as a semi-permeable membrane, just like fat does. But the poor man's version of that is go to your butcher shop and buy a bunch of pork ld or rendered beef towel, right, and then, then you can take that joint and dip it into the fat and let it cool and dip it into the fat and let it cool and dip it into the fat and let it cool.

[00:35:44] Jeff Senger: So you build up a wax candle. On the outside of your moose tenderloin. And then you can let it hang out for your, your 28 days or your 50 days. And it's not gonna lose water, but it will increase in tenderness. So you're not gonna get more and more concentrated flavor by it dumping water. Um, but you, it is gonna become more tender.

[00:36:01] Jeff Senger: So that is a way of taking like a, a really tough old bowl and, and making the joints more useful for grilling a bull moose. I've never met that animal. Yeah, there's no animal that you can't eat when you're hungry enough. But also if you have a couple tools in the tool shed and learn the definition of the word, if you're a hunter, Uh, learn the definition of the word braze, and I just solved years of horrible meals.

[00:36:24] Jeff Senger: If you just learn, you can solve the years of, of your family hating your hunting addiction. Right. Uh, if you learned how to properly braze. So it's a technique of cooking. I mean, everybody does it in the slow cooker, so mm-hmm. A can of Campbell soup and the slow cooker is like over your roasting joint is kind of a poor man's braze, so mm-hmm.

[00:36:43] Jeff Senger: Your mom was doing it, or, you know, someone, someone in your family was doing that mm-hmm. Since you were a little kid. Yeah. But that braze can make a crappy joint, a less desirable, tougher joint, like a hip, a hip, uh, inside or outside round an eye of, round off a game animal into something that just s smushes apart with your thumbs.

[00:36:59] Jeff Senger: And you can, you can make tacos off it. You can make it really, really nice. And then one advanced concept, uh, from the braze in a slow cooker is replace the braze liquid with just fat, like animal fat. And that's conf right. Right, right. C o n f i t. It's a French term. It's a French method, but if you can get a bunch of lard from a butcher, and I wouldn't use game fat because it has different qualities, it's quite a bit more waxy.

[00:37:20] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. But pork fat would be the number one. And, and, and second best fat would probably be beef tall from Oh Jesus. Yeah. If you had poultry fat, you're in your business. But yeah. Any kind of rendered fat, not, not seed oil barf, but animal fat and it's heated to like 170 f like it's a hot bath and you put a joint and submerge it.

[00:37:39] Jeff Senger: You can salt it, you can rub it and then put your joint in that, in that confi bath. Um, so it just slow cooking over low heat, but in fat. And that just keeps all the moisture inside that roast. And you can get it after four to six hours. You can, you can tame the most wild and rugged wild animal. Beast.

[00:37:55] Jeff Senger: Like a male bear was probably the toughest and rubies. Mm-hmm. Meat that I ever had. An old black bear. Yeah. Uh, and you can make it something that will pull apart or break apart and you can eat it like on a sandwich without pulling all your teeth out. 

[00:38:05] Travis Bader: So my wife's a chef by trade, uh, worked under Hawksworth Uhto for over a year and then, uh, got a Red seal through Fairmont, um, hotel Vancouver.

[00:38:16] Travis Bader: And she was extremely jealous that I was getting to be able to speak to you on this podcast. Oh wow. So, uh, I'll make sure to have to, uh, get her to listen to a few of these points here. Oh, for sure. But, um, you know, you brought something up and he basically answered the question, which I knew I had to ask anyways, cuz it's been an ongoing debate that I've had with a friend of mine.

[00:38:36] Travis Bader: And he talks about aging beef or aging meat, is what he's talking about. And certain animals, he says, you don't age 'em because they're too small. And the aging and the softness, the breakdown comes from, uh, the weight of the animal kind of tearing apart. And I've always said it's an enzyme thing. Is there much truth to, can I turn around after this podcast and tell my friend that I was right and he was wrong?

[00:39:01] Travis Bader: Or is there some truth to the weight of the animal actually being a, yeah. A part of the, uh, the aging process. 

[00:39:06] Jeff Senger: Yeah. The, and this is, that's actually getting really nuancey, but it's, it's, it's so exciting to hear that people in the world outside of, uh, proper butchery outside of these channels or I, I love that Silvercore and the projects that you guys are working on are bringing in people from maybe, you know, it's a Venn diagram where the circles intersect.

[00:39:26] Jeff Senger: So there's what you talk about, your wife is beautiful, like a chef in the kitchen or chef at home. Mm-hmm. Uh, kind of coalescing with you and, and your, your hunting hobby, uh, can mean that you've had some of the best, uh, food experiences from animals that you've harvested yourself. Not just the memory of the animal, but also the treatment of it.

[00:39:42] Jeff Senger: And you control kind of all the steps. So those are Michelin star, like Michelin star doesn't even come close to touching the, the meals that I'm sure you've had. Um, and then your, your, like the butcher, butcher curious and butcher adjacency is Yes. There, there. So, When an animal is hung, uh, in the, in the side, the, the weight of the animal is stretching.

[00:39:59] Jeff Senger: All the fibers, Riga, morta sets in, so they become stiff. And now you can no long, no longer pliable joints, and people would argue that there is stretching of the fiber while the animal is still stretchy. And then Riga morta stiffens it up. So it's hard like a rock. So you can swing a side of beef round, if you were immensely strong, you'd swing it around and it, it's, it's, it's rigid like a lollipop kind of.

[00:40:17] Jeff Senger: Yeah. Um, but that initial stretching in Riga mortis is, is part of the lengthening and, and eh, to some extent softening of those muscle fibers. So that's part of the process, but, okay. I did read some super nerds talk about hanging lambs by the HB bone instead of by the heel or the back of the, the back of the knees.

[00:40:36] Jeff Senger: So all animals are on a spreader bar between the backs of the knees and the whole way to the animal hanging basically off the knee joints, and then they're hanging head down knee joints split. Mm-hmm. Um, but some super nerds and new theories in hanging lambs. And it, it's, it should work for beef too, is that if you hang the animal, let it riga mortis with a hook in its HB bone.

[00:40:55] Jeff Senger: Then the front leg is just lulled forward. Mm-hmm. And it, it's, it's no longer under stretch cuz you're picking it up by a, by the joint in the hip that's, uh, that's lower than that hip. So all of your rounds are able to not stretch. And then, and then Riga mortis happens with the am the, the fiber knot at, at sort of this maximum stretch.

[00:41:12] Jeff Senger: And that's supposed to, scientifically papers have proven it. Um, that lamb, uh, hip muscles, the hip, the hip, uh, meat cuts are more tender when you hang 'em by the H bone. There are problems in our, yeah, our cooler isn't designed to, like, there's a little bit of geometry problems to do that with pigs or with lambs.

[00:41:31] Jeff Senger: Uh, it's, it's easier because that leg hanging down kind of eats up too much cooler space to, to do it with beef. And with beef you're dealing with maybe 500 pounds aside. So generally, if the HB bone is cut exactly down the middle of the HB bone can hold it. But we didn't want to gamble with beef. Um, uh, the, the hook coming through the HB bone or the HB bone breaking under the way to the beef and then having it kills kill somebody.

[00:41:54] Jeff Senger: So we haven't done it with beef. Um, we did a trial with lamb and the, it looked funny, and there's the lake and the, the, the lamb was butter tender, but I, I don't eat enough lamb. And we didn't do it with enough samples to say. Uh, what do you call it? Um, not measurable objectively, or si we couldn't say that it was more tender than this other lamb.

[00:42:15] Jeff Senger: There's just too many other variables that you would have to control. But if you had two identical lambs or two identical fawns, uh, whitetail, fawns that you shot out of the same, uh, batch, you, you might be able to hang one one way and hang one of the, and there, there should be a difference because science says there is interesting.

[00:42:29] Jeff Senger: So the cord is still out for my lived experience in that. And I don't think Kevin or I, Kevin Kowan, or I, or any of my hunting group has actually hung a deer by the H bone yet to see if that relaxed leg during the process of rigor mortis would mean that the muscle fibers aren't as, aren't as stretched and aren't as.

[00:42:46] Jeff Senger: So enzymatic activity is what leads to your softening and, and breakdown of, of tenderness of the muscle, um, and the weight of the animal does affect it. But, but this new study is saying that, um, having it stretched to the max, like a lot of weight vertical on every muscle fiber in the, in the thing, uh, long longitudinally along the length from the knee to the.

[00:43:06] Jeff Senger: The knee to the neck, probably not the most, the best way to hang it to be tender. 

[00:43:10] Travis Bader: Interesting. The, the other thing I've seen, so I did my first hunt out of country. I was in, uh, Molokai, did a access deer hunt with my, my wife and my son, and, excuse me, my, my daughter stayed behind. She was, uh, in voca but wasn't, didn't want to come on the hunt.

[00:43:27] Travis Bader: Um, and in these warmer climates, I'm told they'll get the meat and they'll immediately put it on, on ice in like a, uh, a cooler with a bunch of crust crushed ice, which I've never done here in, in British Columbia. And I've always figured if I throw it into water and crushed ice like that, it's going to, uh, uh, adversely ef affect the flavor of it.

[00:43:53] Travis Bader: But apparently it's a, I was told anyways, in the warmer weather climates is a very common thing that they'll bleed it like that. Um, what are your thoughts on, on 

[00:44:02] Jeff Senger: that? Um, in our, in North American food systems all, uh, poultry, or 99% of poultry are, uh, ice water bath. So, okay. It's not, it's not something strange and not something you haven't eaten before.

[00:44:15] Jeff Senger: It would be, uh, poultry is gutted, uh, plucked, uh, gutted, and then, uh, uh, cold water bath. So, okay. Um, it immediately brings that high risk food temperature down, uh, because of the, any contamination of poultry, uh, would be salmonella, which is dangerous. So they want to get the temperature down really quickly.

[00:44:35] Jeff Senger: They wanna wash the birds. Um, there could, it can be a mild, uh, saltwater brine, uh, saltwater brine on birds. Uh, the birds will pick up water. They will absorb water, and so you're adding, you're adding weight to the finished bird. And, uh, giant commodity agriculture producers love that. Um, you can get birds in North America that are air dried or air air chilled, and that would be, you need way more cooler space and spacing between the birds.

[00:44:59] Jeff Senger: You can't pack 'em as dense as you could just into an ice bath. So it's a little bit economy of scale. Like it's, it's cheaper for a gigantic bird processor to put 'em in ice water rather than hang them on any kind of a rail, so, right. Um, now it is interesting. It does have an effect on, uh, uh, you know, food, uh, quality characteristics that, uh, you have a flabbier skin on a bird that's been in water, and so the same would apply to your deer, uh, or Yeah.

[00:45:25] Jeff Senger: To a fallow deer or, or a wild game of any kind. Mm-hmm. Um, we like the, the, the scab that forms on a, on an animal that's hung in air. Right. Uh, that becomes kind of a, a, a barrier from things getting in, like insects or, uh, mold, uh, bacteria. Mm-hmm. And that scab usually comes off the animal when you're butchering it.

[00:45:45] Jeff Senger: So there's a real clear delineation. A millimeter or two of bark or scab comes off the wild game animal, and then you're just into beautiful red or burgundy meat. Um, if something's been, uh, in a cold water bath, like I, I'm not knocking the culture, I think it, that works just fine. And probably they're used to eating an animal, like it's way better that it's chilled down.

[00:46:03] Jeff Senger: Uh, even if it's not chilled down, hanging it in a, in, you know, on a, on a gambler or something, it's chilled down quickly. And I think that is the most important thing, um, to preserve food, uh, from being rotted or from, from going to waste. So that's great. Um, but it would offer a bit of a weird texture because it could, it could be drinking, it could be soaking up water instead of losing water and making that hard husk on the outside.

[00:46:24] Jeff Senger: So you might approach it a little bit differently. Butchering. You wouldn't have to take off a scab and you'd, you, you'd probably have lovely red meat, uh, on the outside still. Uh, or you may choose to remove this, the, the, the outer layer, the outer two or three millimeters, um, because it was in contact with, with that water.

[00:46:39] Jeff Senger: And if you had concerns about contamination in the water, like a tiny fleck of something in the water leaves or, uh, pine needles or dirt or, or, uh, contamination viscera or whatever could, could be then on spread out throughout the carcass instead of just on the spot. So, so there's pros and cons, but I think the main thing is the spirit is right and that's just getting that thing cold as quickly as you can.

[00:47:00] Jeff Senger: Uh, because heat can cause, uh, bone ro right in the, in the heaviest muscle groups, particularly for big animals, uh, they can take a really long time and ambient temperatures to cool down, uh, especially around the spine in the heavy, in the shoulders of heavy, big game like moose, uh, around the hip and hip bones.

[00:47:15] Jeff Senger: Um, that's probably the most likely way to lose meat or make yourself really sick is that green bone ro uh, right around the hip joints and in the should of big game if they haven't cooled down properly or quickly enough. Um, uh, that's why there's a bit of an obsession about saw alls in camp for moose or deer to split 'em down the spine, just like at the ABA avatar.

[00:47:37] Jeff Senger: Um, that that's not easy to do either. The hand sawing sucks. Uh, we've seen chain chainsaw. Uh, no, everything's moving 

[00:47:43] Travis Bader: up and down as you're using it. 

[00:47:44] Jeff Senger: It's a mess. Yeah. Um, but it, that, that's the whole point. A similar, I did, uh, a couple of game butchery workshops where I had some alpacas from a neighbor stand in and I killed, I killed three alpacas, one at a time in the middle of February and an Alberta winter.

[00:47:58] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. In front of six or eight hunters. And I showed them several different, uh, field dressing and, and, and butchering techniques that they could do in the field from, um, from just gutting it, leaving the hide on and hauling it on a sledge, um, down to quartering it. And then the third one was actually pulling all the primal muscle groups off and leaving the ribs in the spine, in the field.

[00:48:18] Jeff Senger: So in different, different scenarios, like how far back you are, whether you're backpacking or have access to, uh, um, quad strikes and, uh, and trucks, like how close you're to a road mm-hmm. Would determine what and the temperature. Right. So we had all these, it was a great conversation and it was really a fun course to teach.

[00:48:35] Jeff Senger: Um, but Cub Bank a good one. Yeah. It's, there's something to think about. About, oh, so a quick way anyway to get, to get to, to, to prevent green rod. Here's some more value for your sweet, sweet listeners. My, my family of outdoor enthusiasts and, and, uh, is that, um, if you go behind the, the shoulder blade on, on even a, a buck deer, you can, you can cut under the shoulder blade and kind of drop the, the front arms.

[00:48:59] Jeff Senger: Um, to get cold air circulating under the shoulder blades and cool that front quarter a lot quicker without splitting it down the, down the scent or down the spine. Like you would, if you were, like, you didn't have a battery operated, saw all. If you didn't have a hand saw and someone with, you know, 45 minutes to kill, um, you can just drop those shoulder blades.

[00:49:18] Jeff Senger: Yeah. And they kind of hang down like chicken wings, but it allows cold air. Yeah. So you're just kind of breaking up that huge muscle mass so that cold air can get it around it and, and chill the animal. Um, so it's something to think about. And we've do done that in the field as well when we're in a pinch or the weather's a bit too warm, uh, we know we've gotta spend the night and it's gonna be plus 10 overnight or something.

[00:49:35] Jeff Senger: Um, we'll, we'll, we'll just find the, find the, the seam under the shoulder blade, drop those chicken wings open and make sure that the HB bones split so that the hip, the hips got lots of air to circulate around, like through the, through the colon cavity, like through the HB bone. Uh, there's lots of air movement.

[00:49:51] Jeff Senger: Yeah. So 

[00:49:53] Travis Bader: I've got a Garmin watch and they make this little thing called the Garmin temp to E M P E and I put that on my back. So on my pack, sorry. So I can get a hopefully accurate temperature reading that's not as, uh, right on my wrist here. What would I be looking at as sort of a danger zone for temperature if, let's say I'm on a early season hunt and it's a bit warmer out.

[00:50:15] Jeff Senger: Oh man. Like, uh, over six degrees Celsius, you're in the day, like over four degrees Celsius. You have two hours, the food should be exposed no more than two hours to anything warmer than four degrees Celsius. And so for hunting, that is a challenge, you know? So, and, and like Kevin and I have been manic. Yeah, we've been manic.

[00:50:34] Jeff Senger: Like that's where the pressure, the pressure to get that animal, uh, field dressed skinned. Uh, whacked into smaller pieces, carried out, hauled out. You, you really want to minimize the total amount of temperature that that meat spends at, uh, at, at greater than four degrees Celsius. So, so I, yeah, I mean, we get panicky, you know, if it's four to six and, and it doesn't call for an over overnight low below zero, um, then you're like, geez, I should, mm-hmm.

[00:50:57] Jeff Senger: Someone's, someone's driving out tonight. When an animal goes down, if you care about. Uh, the, the, the meat quality. Uh, and you want your family to enjoy it and eat it and have the best quality experience they can from that animal. So, uh, you know, an older mm-hmm. Male animal is gonna be gaming to begin with, and then you shoot it way back in the brush, and then it's a six hour extract mm-hmm.

[00:51:18] Jeff Senger: Uh, of a 700 pound animal. Mm-hmm. And it's gonna be an unpleasant eating experience all the way through. And then definitely the, the way to mitigate that hunters, since time immemorial has been to cook the shit out of, like, literally you're cooking the bacteria out of it right in, in the meat. So, um, overcooking it is desirable because, I mean, I, growing up, I think I got an iron gut from eating moose that had.

[00:51:40] Jeff Senger: Had taken too long to re recover at two. Like we had, we had chronic irritable, we thought we had irritable bowel syndrome, but it was just through eating meat that was probably very close to, very close to the boundary of spoiled. Right. As a consistent, two big boys eating a lot of big steaks. And the steaks were like, this one tastes a little like gar, like the garbage dump.

[00:51:59] Jeff Senger: And dad's like, shut, shut up. You know? Uh, if it tastes like a garbage dump, you gotta try in farming, fermenting and, and, um, kimchi and, um, sauerkraut at the farm. Yeah. Uh, there's some great books written on fermenting and it says, trust your nose and trust your palate. If it tastes like it's bad, it's bad.

[00:52:20] Jeff Senger: Okay. 

[00:52:21] Travis Bader: Yeah. Yeah. Who's that guy who does all that fermenting in, uh, not in the Nordic country. It's not Noma, uh, Zepi. Yeah, Zepi. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Is, is he still deep into that whole fermenting business? 

[00:52:36] Jeff Senger: Uh, yeah. Yeah. I think the, the chefs that go deep go really deep and they stay there.

[00:52:41] Jeff Senger: So there's a lot. Ofpi. All right. Renny. Rozee. Yeah. Um, yeah, those who love it. Love it a lot. I mean, you discover, I think when you're tired of coloring with the eight crown crayons that mm-hmm. I think that fermentation and exploring traditional cultural food traditions, uh, and deep traditions, cheese making, uh, dry cured fermented meats, uh, and, and, and fermented fruits and vegetables.

[00:53:04] Jeff Senger: You can go, you're now you're calling with the Lorenn 36 pack or whatever back in the eighties. You're like, wow, they have gold. They have gold in here. This looks like, yeah, I remember. 

[00:53:14] Travis Bader: Yeah, I remember that. That was always the, uh, yeah. Yeah. The cool kit on the block if you had 

[00:53:19] Jeff Senger: those. Well, fermentation is the, is the, you know, the, the pencil crown kit that we would all kill for back in the, in the 19 and eighties or whatever.

[00:53:27] Jeff Senger: Uh, as, as is the cooking techniques mentioned earlier that if you can get just one technique under your belt that isn't grilling. Hmm. Even really get, really get keen on pan Fry. I went through a whole pan frying stage. I just wanted to sort of make an excellent steak, uh, in pan Fry, splashing with butter.

[00:53:45] Jeff Senger: And it's way easier than you think, but it's not something you can really read a book about or set a watch to. It's kind of something that's an intuitive, kind of like barbecuing, like there is the science and there are all of those, uh, temperature, um, 

[00:53:59] Travis Bader: senses. Yeah. And the finger 

[00:53:59] Jeff Senger: thing and Yeah. Yeah. And the finger thing on your th Yeah.

[00:54:02] Jeff Senger: Yeah. That, that, the, John Schneider told me about that, and, uh, I thought it was funny and he's, it's not wrong. Uh, probably the probes are pretty decent for a new cook to not screw it up and overcook particularly wild game because it's lean. You want to keep, you want to, it's rare to medium, rare is, is best served probably all game.

[00:54:18] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. Uh, on the rare side, not on the well done side, or else it's a little bit like shoe leather because of a lack of marbling, a lack of fat. Because these animals work. Yeah. They work for a living. They have to stay, they're not generally really, really fat. 

[00:54:31] Travis Bader: What are some of the most common mistakes you're seeing hunters make when they're out in the field with their meat?

[00:54:36] Travis Bader: Is that not bleeding it? If it's, uh, if it's not a heart and lung shot. No. Just getting dirt and 

[00:54:43] Jeff Senger: everything. No. Travis Bader, uh, poor shot placement is appalling. Just, ah, dude. It's, it's nauseating. I think this scenario is something like Nude Hunter goes to Cabela's, uh, Cabela's has the new Whizbang Magnum.

[00:55:01] Jeff Senger: Uh, they're all written about, like that's what's on the magazine covers. Yep. That's, that's what's on every freaking, uh, podcast they're talking about. Do you know, does the super extra, super huge magnum, like, does it deliver three feet per second more of velocity? Yeah. Like what's the killing power and don't go into the field ill-equipped, but so many new hunters are going into the field with calibers that they cannot shoot effectively.

[00:55:24] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. And an old man called Chuck Hawks, uh, wrote a whole bunch of weird Yes. Ancient on the internet. He was early to the internet probably in the nineties. He started writing [email protected] and. He's kind of a minimalist and I kind of built some of my Jedi philosophy around hunting and that was that Chuck Hawks is the Yoda that sort of helped keep me on the path of what Canadian hunting, non militaristic hunting mm-hmm.

[00:55:51] Jeff Senger: Is about. Mm-hmm. So there's an American style hunting where it's militar gi Jeff with the face paint and Gilly suit, uh, the, uh, assault rifle style rifles that are shaped like man killing rifles. Sure. And then there's, there's the Chuck Hawks philosophy that's like, uh, indigenous subsistence hunters that wear red plaid jackets or their street clothes and they learn the techniques to hunt where you don't have to dress up in a goofy, uh, outfit that I just shake my head at almost a lot of the costume.

[00:56:20] Jeff Senger: Yeah. If you need a costume to go hunting, Uh, you probably haven't spent enough time learning how to hunt or reading, read books about hunting, and you can spend your money on books and ammo practice with your gun, uh, rather than buying the silly, uh, the silly camouflage because you can find out if you like it before you invest in that stuff.

[00:56:38] Jeff Senger: And that's, that's beautiful. Yeah. It, it has a time and a place the time, and a place when, when you're the black belt level hunter and you need to, you need to creep, you know, that make that final 10, 10 yard approach, then probably the, the Gilly suit is gonna do better than the, than the, um, standard Cabela's, uh, cam camouflage.

[00:56:59] Jeff Senger: But for almost the, the, the first 90% of all hunting you can get done. By taking a 1970s rifle, uh, practicing with it and going out in your street close to find a deer and, and, and ping a deer. And then see, did I like that experience? Mm-hmm. Uh, was I able to like, uh, achieve my goals with meat recovery? Uh, how did it make me feel?

[00:57:20] Jeff Senger: And like this is something gonna do more of. But, but I think that, uh, the salesman at the gun desk wants to make a sale. He's well served if he sells a junior hunter the wrong gun because there's no return east, no take backies. Mm-hmm. So if I, if I sell you, if I'm a gun guy and I a gun counter a person, and I sell a new hunter, uh, 3 38 win mag, and he, and say, oh yeah.

[00:57:42] Jeff Senger: Oh, the kid doesn't know what to ask, and they're like, oh, I wanna shoot everything under the sun. Well, it's true. Th through 3 38 win, meg would kill a moose. But even me as an avid hunter, I'm still only hunting moose one 10th of the ti of the, the number of times I'm shooting deer. Mm-hmm. That's right. And so, so if you're only buying one rifle, that's one question that I would ask.

[00:58:04] Jeff Senger: If you only have a one gun cabinet, what's the ideal, uh, caliber in Alberta to hunt with? And that would be different from in British Columbia. If you can kind of afford to swing a two or three gun cabinet, you can have a small, medium, and large caliber, but the more you invest in your gun cabinet, The more time you need to spend at a fricking range, and the more you need to spend on ammunition to know what the gun likes, what to feed it.

[00:58:24] Jeff Senger: Yeah. And then what shoots accurately and what is a pleasure for you to shoot because the, I mean, in the butcher trade, so I'm rounding out the answer to your question by, yeah. 25 

[00:58:35] Travis Bader: minutes. You're bringing up so many great points. Yeah, 

[00:58:37] Jeff Senger: I love this. Um, but, but Chuck Hawk said it, and like other great minds in hunting have said it also that the most lethal thing in determining lethality is shot placement.

[00:58:47] Jeff Senger: So if you can get a 22 shell into a moose's up his snout and into his brain, that is a, a way better outcome than shooting a a a 3 38 lap, uh, through his ass. And he pronounce it right too. Good for you. Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, I've been looking at such a rifle. Yeah. I've been looking at such a long, long rage rifle, so yeah.

[00:59:06] Jeff Senger: I'm like, Mr. Hypocrite here. But no, I, I, I, I like it for precision shooting. I, I think that also making a delineation between. Hey, young folks, there's precision shooting and there's also mm-hmm. Hunting and subsistence hunting. There's trophy hunting and then subsistence hunting. So those little nuancey things our brains aren't particularly good at.

[00:59:24] Jeff Senger: As chi, as hairless. Chimpanzees, we kind of like to, to bend things into black and white, so Yes. Uh, and questions like, what's the best cut of meat on the, on the animal is like, that's too black and white. It depends on what you like. Yeah. What's the best caliber? You see those on, uh, web searches all, all the time.

[00:59:39] Jeff Senger: It's like, there is no best caliber, it's the best caliber for you. But I find because I'm a fire hose of butchery knowledge and, and a bit of hunting knowledge, people kind of zone out the attention span of average youngsters is lo like I have kids and, uh, they, you're like, oh God, he's on another rant.

[00:59:56] Jeff Senger: Like, give it a break then. But, uh, but there's a lot to think about and, and, and, and, and I think that to make the most sales in the shortest period of time at the gun counter, at this, at the mega store, uh, they don't really want to, they don't care about what you weigh. What your flinch resistance is and what your experience planking might have been.

[01:00:13] Jeff Senger: And they don't want, they don't need to be that patient. They just wanna make a sale. Uh, and they'll have, so we've, we've handled deer that have been shot, you know, 12 times with an Uber Magnum, and then we've gotta charge $145 or something, is our flat rate for whitetail. And the hunter comes in, in inevitably the hunter that emptied a magazine on this poor thing.

[01:00:33] Jeff Senger: And he, he comes or he comes in and he, and we, we hand them a, a a 10 pound box. And he's like, what'd you do with my deer? And, and you'll say, $145 for this. 10 pounds. And he's like, what did you do with the rest of my dear? And you're like, dude, that was Shrapnel broken bone lead. It was gravel, gravel tree branches were stuck at like, what were you shooting through to kill this poor thing?

[01:00:52] Jeff Senger: Like, my God, spend some time at the range. I'm not paying you. And then he storms out. Like, we could make a really, oh, we could make cartoons. Yeah, you stole my deer. And you're like, buddy, come on. This is, we do not steal, but we would definitely not steal this piece of garbage because it was mostly, it had more weight by lead and copper than it had any, any real, uh, food value.

[01:01:13] Jeff Senger: So it's tough and that happens a lot. I think just people not putting in the time to practice, they think that they can, like a set of golf clubs on the go, it's way easier to buy the Wizbang Club. Yeah. Oh, I spent more on this club or, or car drivers in, yeah, in, in the pothole, uh, center of, of Canada. Oh look, a Lamborghini, my kid says, and I'm like, why would you buy Lamborghini to drive on Edmonton's?

[01:01:34] Jeff Senger: Pothole roads like, anyway, it's kind of like that. Can I buy myself a cool thing to make me a better hunter? And the answer, man, you can't. Yeah, you cannot. And I've tried, like, I've tried, like there's, there's gotta be some sort of a, some sort of a gadget that I need. And I would say almost all the time gadgets disappoint me and just working wind, like working on your technique and practicing is, is what, uh, achieves more successful hunts and less bad experiences.

[01:02:00] Jeff Senger: Like it was traumatizing as a young guy to watch a deer get wounded with in your hunting party and then get, you know, get the call or whatever. Yet we got one that's, it didn't go down and we've gotta spend the next 24 hours looking like blood tracking this thing. Yeah. So shot placement is everything, uh, and prac.

[01:02:16] Jeff Senger: And that becomes make your rifle an extension of your arm and now you're a hunter. Uh, and that, that comes right, right up your alley. Like take another course. Totally. When you've done taking a course. Yeah. If you don't know how to approach it, ask the internet. Ask the internet for qualified, uh, teachers, instructors, take a course and spend more, more money on your courses and more money in your ammo than on your gun because you can buy a 1950s.

[01:02:41] Jeff Senger: A fricking World War II gun can shoot more accurately and be more deadly, uh, than most hunters will ever in their career. Be able to shoot like so the gun can out shoot me a 3 0 3 Brit can out shoot me and can be made to be made more a accurate than my, my shaky, uh, hands will ever shoot. See, it's a super lethal tax driver.

[01:03:01] Jeff Senger: Yes. If you practice with it, 

[01:03:03] Travis Bader: you've nailed it on the head man. You brought Yeah. Love it. A a lot of really great points up in there. And you know the old saying, beware the man with one gun. Right. Which is now probably beware the person with one gun. Correct. Yep. Right. Um, because they know how to use it.

[01:03:20] Travis Bader: And you're, you're talking about camouflage now. I had Guy Kramer on here. He does camouflage design for hundreds of different armies around the world. And you know, we talking about, uh, plaid with the, the original disbursement pattern. I was always raised that the best camouflage you can wear is be still.

[01:03:40] Travis Bader: Yep. So it's, uh, movement's gonna be the number one thing that gives you away as well. Animals, all of a sudden you'll hear something, you'll see something move, and that's bang, that's what's gonna give 'em away. It's not their coloring or how well camouflage they are. It's gonna be that movement that gives 'em away.

[01:03:56] Travis Bader: Man, 

[01:03:57] Jeff Senger: I love that topic too, the nuances in that, that, you're right. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a co there are companies designing camouflage for humans, hunting other humans. Right. And don't make the mistake of thinking that when you're hunting a sheep, it's got a brain like a human. It's like our, our visual acuity is pathetic compared to a big horn sheet.

[01:04:18] Jeff Senger: Right. So the big horn sheep, by the time you, if, if your barrier to entry was the $1,300, uh, I don't want to pick a brand. I don't really care. I don't even know the brands. Sure. But sure. A $1,300 outfit or costume that you think that you, you're told by the salesman that you need to have this costume to sneak up on sheep.

[01:04:36] Jeff Senger: Don't do that. And, and so, oh, I can't do it this year. You know what? Life is short? You put on your golf shirt or put on your frigging khaki pants from the ga and, and get your thrift store t-shirt or your hunter conservationist t-shirt that they sent you in the mail. Yeah, sure. And just get on your shoes and go out.

[01:04:51] Jeff Senger: You don't need the, a solo $589 hunting boots. That's probably where I would spend my money if I was spending 'em on clothes. Yeah. The interface between you and the nature, the terrain are your feet. If, if you're doing it any other way, you're probably doing it wrong. And then oftentimes, I mean, kawan uh, read some was inspired by some indigenous techniques while we were bow hunting and he would kick his shoes off.

[01:05:12] Jeff Senger: So that's really funny too. The quietest you can walk in nature Cool. Is in, is an effing muck. Yeah. Or so sock feet. And you get a lot of thistles in a short period of time in your feet. But yes. Yes. If he was pulling up, he's pulling up on a, on a feeding black bear on a cut line. Yeah. And, uh, he didn't wanna snap any twigs and his, he had some really nice, really nice boots, but they would snap, you couldn't feel anything through the bottom, through the soles of your feet.

[01:05:34] Jeff Senger: So if you wanna shorten that distance, then probably barefoot or, uh, you know, like, like hide or leather, mlux mucks. Yeah. Or socks, heavy socks. He, he burned through the socks, uh, in no time. I would say they were, they're garbage socks. But yeah, the final stock is often done for bow hunters in sock sock footed.

[01:05:52] Jeff Senger: So the $589 shoes that I I, that I invested in once I really liked on the, on the hard scrabble in mountain hunting, um, but, but weren't even applicable, applicable across most of the hunting that I do, which is white tails and, and black bears. Mm-hmm. Uh, because you get a tag for three to five deer every year.

[01:06:08] Jeff Senger: And, and two, two bears with, with a, with a two season hunt in Alberta Spring and, and, and in the fall. So. So, um, 

[01:06:16] Travis Bader: Yeah, I know. You know, the, the big heavy calibers, you're gonna have more noise, you're gonna have more recoil. And that's the two most offensive things that a firearm's gonna produce. And second, you start flinching, watch out, and then you got the adrenaline Russian when you're hunting and you've been waiting forever and all of a sudden all this money and time and effort that you put in to find your animal, and there it is.

[01:06:36] Travis Bader: And it's only gonna be here for a little bit. And the mind games that come up with it, if you could eliminate the concern about where that round is gonna land because you've practiced enough and you are comfortable with the firearm, you're much more likely to have a successful harvest and hunt. Yeah.

[01:06:52] Jeff Senger: Rather than the alternative, which is an absolute heartbreak. Like I, uh, wounded a moose when I was 17 years old with a 3 0 8 on a shot that I shouldn't have taken way too far. Uh, I misjudged the range. It was a snowy trail and it was like, How nature can sometimes do that you like, that was way further than I thought.

[01:07:12] Jeff Senger: So Uhhuh, I was reaching too far with an inadequate rifle because I hadn't read enough about terminal, uh, ballistics. Mm-hmm. And I, I lost sleep for not just the, not just that night, uh, but the, you know, and then I, and I sweat my nuts off the whole next day in waist deep snow trying to, trying to pick up, pick up blood.

[01:07:31] Jeff Senger: Like it was a miserable amount of work to do honor to this majestic king of the forest that I wounded. Uh, he, he laid down and made a little ice bed, a little ice, uh, bed where he slept and then he healed up and walked off. He wasn't gonna have a fun next couple of months when the wolves No, uh, tore 'em apart.

[01:07:47] Jeff Senger: And I felt so guilty that it w that I wish I could go back and undo that. And I had, I carry that guilt around for your whole life just by not being prepared and sort of, Uh, but this was a 3 0 8 though, was, it was a hand-me-down gun, so the gun was capable of killing a moose. But my inadequacy in estimating range is something I have to carry around forever.

[01:08:05] Jeff Senger: And I wouldn't wish that on any young hunter because it could turn you off the sport entirely and actually put a stink on, on the sport. Your perception of the sport. Well, that, that's what must what everyone must do because everyone just go, goes out and later on today, I want to have a dead moose. And it's like, man time at the range.

[01:08:22] Jeff Senger: Uh, time on courses and time reading about, uh, ballistics is, is is better spent than than time like, um, uh, shopping for the, for, you know, time spent shopping. But I think that, yeah, funding has kind of, it's kind of been degraded to a, a little bit too much shopping and not a, not enough time spent with knowledgeable, not knowledgeable folks that either are part of your family or, or building that community.

[01:08:43] Jeff Senger: And that's why I think that I was drawn to you and to Silvercore because man, we, we talked about it, uh, before, uh, we'd gone live or, or live recording. That, that is so cool that you in, in your niche and your community and your province, you decided I can really add value if we can help educate, hunter, curious or like outdoor curious folks.

[01:09:05] Jeff Senger: Sure. Yeah. Uh, that didn't have the privilege of having someone, a member of the family, uh, that, that, that had built that tradition as, as part of a family tradition. Yeah. Um, so you, your Silver Corps has, I would argue, has, has avoided wounding more animals than, than, than any Cabelas or, uh, or BassPro ever has.

[01:09:23] Travis Bader: Well, and even just by having these conversations right now, people are learning from your experience and what you've been carrying with yourself from that, uh, incorrect distance estimation and the shot placement and, and they're logging these things in the back of their mind thinking, okay, hold on a second.

[01:09:39] Travis Bader: Here's some tips I can use to get on out. And it's absolutely free. So this level of accessible mentorship, which is something that we really pride ourself on is, is so invaluable to building our community. 

[01:09:51] Jeff Senger: Yeah, I love it. I wrote that down. The accessible, uh, mentorship like catchphrase. And I think it's just, it's just genius.

[01:09:57] Jeff Senger: And thank, thank you for technology. Thank you for learning the technology to be, to be able to deliver this, but it's inexpensive to do. And you get to sit around a campfire with a sober at this point, Jeff Singer, not a, not a drunken hunter. Um, sometimes there's some, there's some whiskey. Sometimes.

[01:10:13] Jeff Senger: Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes it's been known to happen. Yeah. And I like whiskey out of camp, just to be clear. Yeah. Like, it's, it's not, it's not the funnest. And we watched people, uh, in, in, in the family, in the community, go down to alcohol. And alcoholism isn't, it doesn't mix very well, but if you're having a social beverage, th these conversations I'm saying are only accessible a lot of times around the dinner table or around the campfire, uh, where you start BSing.

[01:10:36] Jeff Senger: And I think thanks to the technology and, and, and the investment into, into Silvercore and just the investment of your time really to build the podcast and making that accessible, then, uh, I, I really do think that you're saving. Uh, untold tortures, the anguish of the soul of the young person who goes out and wounds a deer and can't find it and, and, and just, and wants to rethink their entire life.

[01:10:58] Jeff Senger: Uh, and they, they, they, they, they go, you know, into deep veganism after that horrible event or whatever. Mm-hmm. And then also, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, for the person and then also the horrific end, not laughing, the horrific end for the animal. Right. Like with his, with his jaw shot off because, uh, because the guy didn't, or the, the, the shooter didn't know where to, where to place the crossers, how to adjust for wind or, or couldn't get 10 yards closer because they, they just never heard Travis badder talk about kicking his shoes off in the last 10 yards or something like that.

[01:11:27] Jeff Senger: So, sure. Yeah. Shared experience is so, so important. 

[01:11:31] Travis Bader: So, is there anything else we should be? I, I've got, honestly, I've, I, I can hold 'em up. I got so many different notes and questions, but I'm also conscious of the time and I'm thinking maybe, uh, maybe we should continue a conversation in the future and involve the community as well.

[01:11:47] Travis Bader: See if there's other questions and things that come up. But is there anything else that we should be talking about before we kinda look at wrapping this up? 

[01:11:55] Jeff Senger: No, I mean, I, I think that's a great idea, a multi-form. I, I watched some of your podcasts before and I think they're great where you have, uh, uh, um, questions come in, uh, you know, you know, a viewer, I guess we call 'em viewer or listener.

[01:12:08] Jeff Senger: Sure, yeah. Calls in with call, calls in with questions or, or they, they, they ask their questions, uh, uh, uh, prior to taping, and then we just answer some questions like, yeah, I would love to know what is, uh, what the average, you know, new hunter, your average viewer, uh, what's their burning question? They want to ask kind of an old crusty guy, but that, that has harvested quite a few, quite a few animals.

[01:12:29] Jeff Senger: Um, so. And then to put to, I think that's unimportant, that's important too, is like, know who you're getting advice from. Mm-hmm. I think there are a lot of people that would offer advice that actually haven't done a lot of hunting, but they're kind of, they're basing their lives on being, um, there's an, there's the influencer class folks that love to influence, but so they, they talk the talk and they sound real salesy, but they haven't done a lot.

[01:12:50] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. Uh, so, and so just to put it, this isn't a brag, I think probably 10 or 12 moose I've killed probably 60 to 95 deer in mm-hmm. Since hunting since I was five. Uh, probably 15 or 20 black bears. And then, I don't know, uh, geese and ducks. Countless geese. Ducks and gross, I guess like in the hundreds. But, but so, so like, that's great.

[01:13:14] Jeff Senger: I'm not a guide, not an outfitter. Uh, nothing significantly of, uh, like trophy size animals. Mm-hmm. Um, so I'm not a trophy hunter, but I did mount a big deer. Um, uh, that was like 170 a meal. Deer 170 inch class year. Mm-hmm. So not a trophy hunter, but I've worked, worked with and gone hunting with guys that pass animals steady because they're looking for the next biggest.

[01:13:37] Jeff Senger: So like I know that weird fancy, that sort of new, that little subset segment of, of hunters that'll say only if it's bigger than the one I already have. And I think that's amazing discipline actually. I, I like to pull the trigger, I like to pull the trigger and do the butchery, uh, to put meat in the freezer.

[01:13:51] Jeff Senger: So we have a variety of proteins to eat, uh, and more than, uh, antlers on the wall because I, we, we just couldn't afford to taxidermy, you know, everything. Uh, and it's a more patient person than me to, to shoot something that's just on, on bigness. Um, so anyway, that, that's just, we're kind of putting it out there that people who have hunted are useful to get information on hunting.

[01:14:12] Jeff Senger: People have won. Uh, gong Bang competitions that is precision shooters that are, they're a award-winning Chuck Norris's out there. Yeah. That are so good and knowledgeable about, uh, about precision shooting that I love to listen to those folks, uh, if they've sort, not just their, not just because they're influencers or, or their, their, their verbal fire hoses, the, like myself.

[01:14:34] Jeff Senger: Um, but, but guys that really think a lot about get, you know, like about closing those, closing those distances on the paper at 400 yard or at competition yards thousand yards. That's fascinating to me. Um, even if I don't, uh, even if it's not a, uh, a pursuit that I wish to, to, to, to, to chase, uh, their tips and tricks can make you a better short distance hunter.

[01:14:56] Jeff Senger: Uh, and also the archery world, man, us, us flirting with or dipping our little pinky pose in, into compound archery. Mm-hmm. Ha When the sea, the arch, when rifles opened up, uh, Kevin and I could just. We could just walk into a, a cut block and pick an animal and then walk up to it and shoot it. Because we had spent so much time trying to get, trying to get within like a lethal range of 40 yards of bull moose and, and or, and or deer.

[01:15:22] Jeff Senger: Yeah. Uh, and, and then so, so the techniques and the skills that we picked up, sort of just from the archery craft, we got really keen during rifle season and had a lot of, uh, short distance humane kills. And that was like we achieved some success. Uh, we felt really good about ourselves. So, you know, interested in knowing, 

[01:15:37] Travis Bader: sorry, go ahead.

[01:15:38] Travis Bader: You, you bring up a good point and one thing that you talked about, let's say, let's say trophy hunting and there's negative connotations that can be associated with, I'm doing my air brackets, trophy hunting, or maybe a better way to call that is selective hunting, because you're still using the animal, you're using every part of it.

[01:15:55] Travis Bader: Um, for peop, for some people there's an ego side of it. They gotta have the biggest and the best or whatever it might be. But what I've seen in people, which I think is kind of a neat phenomena, Is they see an animal on day one. They don't want to take that animal on day one because they enjoy the process of hunting and everything.

[01:16:16] Travis Bader: They enjoy being outside the camaraderie, the sitting around the campfire, the all the learning you do in nature. And maybe they go home skunk cuz that's the only animal they see for the entire time. They're, that they're out there, but they're willing to pass up on that animal because it's not just about the kill or the, let's say the meat.

[01:16:34] Travis Bader: It's more about the holistic experience that they're, they're getting outta this and they want to see that extended. So that's, yeah, it's just sort of another side to that. And I'm gonna do the air bracket's, maybe selective hunting. 

[01:16:46] Jeff Senger: Yeah, no, I agree totally with, with the, our experience also. Yeah. That, that, that, um, I think that's a clear point or an important point to drive home is that, uh, our enjoyment doesn't come from the kill.

[01:16:58] Jeff Senger: I mean, you can be proud of a harvest and you can be pr like pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Mm-hmm. And also supplying your food and or providing for your, your, your protein for the next, uh, month or the next year, whatever. That's all good. But yeah, I think the greatest feeling of success coming is from hanging out with really great friends.

[01:17:16] Jeff Senger: Um, immersing in nature, the sorts of things that happen only on, on, on hunting trips. Like watching the sun come up and the sun go down, or the forest, the forest go quiet when it accepts you. Yes. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's a, it's a, all these little miracles, the little, the, the, the minor miracles that you get to experience by just being in nature and sort of becoming one with it as, as a predator or predator curious.

[01:17:40] Jeff Senger: Mm-hmm. If you just pass, if you pass up opportunities. Um, but yeah, that's, that's a ton of fun. So, Yeah, I look forward to, uh, more chats and I look forward to sort of connecting with, uh, younger, younger hunters or, or, or hunters with more experience, but different experiences, uh, through this platform and others through social media and things, uh, to try and, uh, you know, share experiences to increase success and just increase that feeling of camaraderie, uh, electronically as, as well as in the field.

[01:18:10] Travis Bader: Jeff, I absolutely love the conversation. Thank you so much for being on the Silvercore Podcast. 

[01:18:16] Jeff Senger: Thank you for including me, Travis. This is a great thing you're doing here.