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LT: Um-hum… <br /> <br />MP: ….everyone says well so and so’s not doing their job – so and so’s messing this up – so and so’s <br />messing that up – and it goes in all directions and so that’s where we had these different <br />projects from different perspectives to try to help the different communities – one better to <br />communicate but also to provide information that folks can use so and try to hopefully, at the <br />end of the day, avoid our information being used as a weapon but being used for good <br />decisions. So as far as, I mean, there are two parts to your question. That’s kind of an underlying <br />value for me is that at the end of the day I want to improve land management to help different <br />communities achieve their goals, right, and hopefully get people talking and working together – <br />collaboration is a driving value for me. But the other part to your question was, on counting <br />animals and I want to go with the answer that respectfully in that there’s many different <br />methods we could use to actually count animals that’s important to us. We could use density <br />based methods with fly over data like you saw in those videos and we could use that for <br />counting – we could use capture market capture – which would involve capturing animals, <br />putting tags on them and then if the formula based off of how many recaptures you get over <br />time so you go do sequential captures, there’s a number of methods you could use to determine <br />numbers but at the end of the day who’s to say which number is correct. At the end of the day <br />what matters is are the hunters happy, is the land happy, are the fisheries happy, and I don’t <br />know that, it’s the exact number that matters so much as the impact, so when the numbers of <br />animals are getting too high where you’re seeing impacts on fisheries, sedimentation, and <br />hunters are happy they’ve got enough animals to pull from the land, then OK, we need to adjust <br />down. When the numbers are too low, ah, you know, hunters aren’t getting what they need. <br />The land seems to be pretty happy you’re not having sedimentation issues and species impacts <br />to plants and things like that. <br /> <br />LT: Can I add one thing? <br /> <br />MP: Go for it… <br /> <br />LT: I agree that we cannot count on numbers and we gotta depend on the impact so how do we, I <br />guess, from your point of view as an educator and a data researcher how do we convince the <br />politicians to make the policies to see things not in the, you know, because they’re so numbered <br />– how many acres are we managing? How many animals are there? And the politicians who <br />make all of the rules that kinda confine us – that’s how they – cause that’s why I care about <br />numbers cause we gotta take the report and you know I am a scientist as well and so I care <br />about numbers and so when I take it to the politicians they look at numbers so how can we – <br />from your point of view – how can we switch the narrative that the politicians care about <br />impact? Cause that’s really what I’m trying to do – change their minds. <br /> <br />MP: Yeah, that’s fantastic. The short answer is I think we have to put numbers to that impact. So one <br />of the things we’re trying to do in the parallel project working with ranchers is we have an <br />economic survey – it actually, I think it’s getting mailed up today – going to all the ranchers so <br />that we can actually quantify the economic impact that they believe the wild ungulates are <br />having on their lands that in parallel with these other efforts to actually we’ll have field studies <br />quantifying the amount of forest lost due to the number correlating that with the number of <br />Axis deer on the lands and so forth so, and the we’re also working with them to identify well <br />20 <br /> <br /> <br />