Working Wild U

This show really digs into how wildlife management works on the ground, without getting too one-sided. Highly recommend!

The entire series presents a broad view of the situation and then focuses on the may important parts which then make up the whole…a complex whole with many interrelated parts. Each viewpoint is presented with real examples from the people and organizations involved so the listener gets the scoop on why people feel the way they do. At the end Alex and Jared show how consensus may provide the most viable path forward. The entire series is professionally assembled and presented (good use of technologies) and will help anyone sincerely interested on learning about the ‘whole’ of the situation and thinking of next steps.

This podcast is exceptionally well done, revealing the intertwined complexity and beauty that is the shared working landscapes of the American West. Really great scripts, sound quality, pacing, great history and notes. Thanks for putting out real and meaningful stories and voices of the American West to the world.

I’ll admit I began listening to this skeptical and concerned about the direction it would go (I’ve re-written my review 3 times now as the season progressed). What I didn’t realize at the beginning was the strategy behind why the episodes (and each’s content) are arranged the way they are - and now I gotta say it’s a 5 star for me. Particularly the time spent explaining societal wildlife values and how instrumental those are to helping you understand why we as people can seem to be on such different pages when it comes to the value of wolves. Really looking forward to how this series continues and very hopeful it will be successful at inspiring rural and urban populations in the west to do a better job of understanding one another, and hopefully helping one another.

That this is presented as some sort of balanced look at the issue of wolves in the West is disingenuous at best. The worldview of the insular community from which our hunter/rancher podcasters come is presented as immutable fact when actually most of the “truisms” presented in infomercial style are at best debatable and in fact largely debunked. The episode on hunting is particularly egregious. Apparently, we are now canceling Bambi while portraying hunters as the heroic souls single-handedly responsible for maintaining the health of all ecosystems in the West, which somehow grafts over to trophy hunting as well. Without mentioning the economic contributions of non-consumptive communities to local economies (non-resident spending of $1.1 billion in Yellowstone country alone in 2020, and those aren’t trophy hunters folks) and curiously glossing over what happened last year on the Yellowstone border and currently in state legislatures in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. “You mean the wolf population in Montana is so big they can’t even count them?” Come on. Go read the FWP literature and the public commentary with the team there. The quite-controversial population modeling is used because of logistics and the sheer impossibility of putting eyes on wolves in the Montana backcountry. Not because the population is “so big.” Just one of a hundred examples in this episode alone. The lecture on the North American model is clumsy to say the least and interviewing someone from the state agency in Wyoming about wolves is just laughable. Where’s the interview with Doug Smith or Pat Byorth? Or anyone, really, who doesn’t fetishize ranching and hunting. How about some discussion of how the best regulators of wolf populations are wolves themselves. CWD concerns? You know, some science. Or some balance at least. And then leaving out the rest of the Aldo Leopold story really pulls back the curtain on these two. As someone else pointed out, these folks are entitled to make the podcast they want to make, but the tropes are tired. Lastly, putting this out under the MSU umbrella is a little disappointing. This is not scholarship or even journalism. This is just redneck propaganda. No different from tuning into a Tucker Carlson episode.

None of your hosts have any social science expertise and it shows - lots of topics are poorly covered (some simply backwards/wrong - like value shifts) while others are treated tangentially and amateurishly despite rich scholarship. Appreciate the effort here but there’s so much science you’re missing. Instead of speaking as if you have expertise in these areas, I’d suggest you take a more journalistic approach and interview some real social scientists who actually study the things of which you speak. Also, despite platitudes toward balance, these first episodes seem quite biased toward landowners and ranchers. You’re entitled to make whatever podcast you want but the “balanced” label is disingenuous and obviously so.