Cameron Hanes and Steven Rinella on Bowhunting Pressure, Predator Politics and Hunting's Future

High-Level Overview

Joe Rogan hosts two of the people he credits with bringing him into hunting: Steven Rinella, the outdoorsman, writer and host of MeatEater, and Cameron Hanes, the ultra-fit bowhunter and host of the Keep Hammering podcast. After a playful opening about Hanes's gold brown bear claw necklace, George Washington's teeth and cadaver ACL grafts, the three settle into a long, relaxed conversation about the realities of hunting: the psychology of taking a shot under pressure, archery gear and the logic of hunting regulations, the politics of wolves and mountain lions in Colorado, the cost of jealousy and infighting among hunters, and how hunting should be shown on social media.

The tone is funny, profane and affectionate, with Rogan riffing, Hanes speaking from decades of competitive bowhunting, and Rinella supplying careful, nuanced context on wildlife management and the law. The conversation drifts between storytelling, technical archery talk, conservation policy and life lessons that reach well beyond hunting.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why red meat gets blamed in epidemiology studies, and whether plants are more sentient than we think
• Rogan's first hunt with Rinella and why so few people who try hunting keep doing it
• Managing panic at the moment of the shot, including Joel Turner's open- and closed-loop idea
• Releases, sights, whisker biscuits and why states regulate new technology cautiously
• Mountain lion quotas, Colorado's ballot fight over "trophy hunting" and wolf reintroduction
• Jealousy among hunters versus the collaborative culture of stand-up comedy
• Public versus private land, high fences, and the ethics of competition in the field
• Showing hunting responsibly online, including cooking the meat

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Meat, Studies and Thinking Plants

A riff about vegan cadaver ligaments turns into a serious point. Rogan argues that studies linking red meat to cancer rarely separate the meat from what comes with it: a fast-food bun, fries cooked in seed oil, soda, smoking and drinking. "Why are you blaming meat?" Hanes, who says he eats wild game five times a day and just got excellent blood work, recalls his old McDonald's order to make the same point. Rinella adds a fair-minded caution: with so much conflicting dietary information, everyone, himself included, tends to embrace studies that fit their existing aesthetic or politics.

Rogan also raises emerging research on plant signaling: acacias that make their leaves bitter when giraffes browse nearby, and plants that produce defensive chemicals when played recordings of insects chewing. Rinella, a former tree surgeon, admits he could kill a bear and be happy about it, yet could not put a chainsaw to a 500-year-old tree on his land in Southeast Alaska; everyone, he says, finds their own lines.

The First Hunt and the Barrier to Entry

Rogan says hunting's spiritual side was something he never expected. Eating his first mule deer over a fire with Rinella in Montana, 12 years ago, he felt more connected to that meal than any in his life, and immediately began planning hunts, cardio and gear: "I'm doing this forever." Rinella says he has taken dozens of people on first hunts and none regretted it, but most did not make it part of their lives, largely because experience accumulates slowly and requires time, discipline and a mentor. He even canceled a bowhunt with his own son because the boy did not practice every day as agreed.

Later they return to the theme. Hanes notes he once got only a week a year for elk and had to learn body language through years of photos and observation. Rinella admires people who stumble through bad decisions as new hunters, since that is how everyone learns, and praises hunters who take lessons from one place into totally new challenges. Rogan recommends Jesse Griffiths's New School of Traditional Cooking, which teaches shooting, hunting, butchering and cooking.

Keeping It Together at the Shot

Rogan calls drawing on an elk the most intense experience of his life, beyond fighting and stand-up. He describes Joel Turner's insight from SWAT work: most people treat a shot as an open-loop system like a baseball swing, but you can make it a closed loop by talking yourself through each step so you can stop at any point, because sometimes "the best shot is a shot you don't take." Rogan uses Hanes's cue, "keep the pin on him," and Rinella's cue is to remember his elbow; Hanes explains that the elbow cue probably works because it makes you pull hard into the back wall rather than creeping.

Hanes admits he missed a giant bull by six feet on his first bowhunt and shot wildly at his first big buck, then killed a spike the next day: you are simply not ready for the giant at first. Rogan compares it to fighters who had already lost before facing Mike Tyson, and Rinella shares Derrick Wolfe's point that young players can get starstruck by legends like Tom Brady. He also mentions a Bear Grease episode about a man whose excitement over a giant buck led him to poach it on a military base, unraveling his life. Rogan's takeaway is that practice, a pre-shot routine and repeated real opportunities are what finally make you calm.

Gear and the Logic of Regulation

The three talk releases, rests and anchors: Rogan's shift to pulling hard into the back wall and locking out his front arm, Hanes's unorthodox thumb-behind-the-neck anchor, and an elite competitive archer's view that target panic is a mental weakness. Rogan loves the Garmin rangefinding bow sight, a clear lens with a single LED pin, but stopped using it after ranging glitches and after learning Utah had made it illegal just before he hunted there.

Rinella explains why states often seem erratic about technology. Regulators try to anticipate where a technology is going before a large user group forms and resists limits, as with drones, cellular trail cameras and two-way radios. Archery seasons are kept long and generous because harvest rates are low, around 10% for elk; if technology doubled or tripled success, "you're going to pay for it somehow" through less opportunity. He also notes sensible corrections, like allowing tracking dogs to recover wounded deer, and that states have never tried to regulate long-range rifle gear the way they regulate muzzleloaders. Hanes describes hitting steel at 990 yards on his first shot with a modern rifle setup, and the group agrees long-range rifles have changed hunting more than archery gadgets.

Mountain Lions and Colorado's Ballot Fight

Hanes describes hunting mountain lions in Colorado, where hunters must pass a test on identifying sex and age and call in nightly to check a unit's quota; his unit's quota was 34, and he saw it reach 33. He says the state may have 5,000 to 7,000 lions with about 450 allowed to be killed, and hounds let hunters choose an old male rather than any cat. He did not kill one because he never saw the right lion. Where Oregon banned hunting lions with dogs, he says lion numbers rose and deer numbers fell.

Rinella explains that the Colorado ballot measure seeks to establish "trophy hunting" as a legal term, which he sees as a powerful tool because voters instinctively oppose it, even though no one hunts lions just to cut off their heads. He argues the definition would have sweeping implications for anyone who keeps antlers or hides. Hanes praises Dan Gates and Colorado for Responsible Wildlife Management, and HOWL, for organizing hunters.

Wolves: Recovery, Management and Trust

Rogan says wolves are probably his favorite animals, with photos of them on his walls, but insists their numbers must be managed by wildlife biologists who understand carrying capacity; each time a hunting season is promised at a recovery target, lawsuits follow. Hanes cites figures for Idaho's Lolo region: 12 wolves introduced in 1995, about 800 by 2011, and elk falling from roughly 16,000 to about 1,000. He voices a suspicion that some advocates want to end hunting, ranching and eventually the need for guns.

Rinella, describing himself as pro-recovery and pro-management, says Montana, Idaho and Wyoming now have stable, hunted wolf populations managed like big game. His frustration with Colorado is that wolves had already begun walking in on their own while the ballot measure advanced; he cites Montana wolf specialist Diane Boyd's later view that natural dispersal would have achieved the same result with far less social friction. Colorado hunters, he says, fear decades of litigation without a clear path to regulated harvest.

Jealousy, Infighting and What Comedy Teaches

Hanes asks what might end hunting and worries about infighting among hunters compared with the unity of anti-hunting groups. Rogan responds with one of the episode's strongest passages: jealousy is natural, but it is a poison that ruins the vessel that carries it. Everyone can see when a man tears down someone more successful, and the better response is to use envy as fuel: "You don't reach your full potential if you're the king and everybody else is" weak. He describes the green room at his club, the Mothership, where comics share writing methods and workshop each other's bits, and says he took Joey Diaz on the road precisely because he was so hard to follow.

Rinella turns this back to Colorado: if hunters lose, the post-mortem will likely show they failed to stand up for practices they do not personally engage in, not realizing "this will get around to impacting you," perhaps next as an argument that bowhunting is cruel. Rogan notes one real difference from comedy: a hunter who kills a rare giant bull on a limited public unit does remove it for everyone else, which fuels competition. They also talk through the tension of hunters who care only about antler scores, and female hunters criticized as popular only for their looks.

Public Land, High Fences and Fair Chase

Rogan draws a line at small high-fenced properties and hunting over feeders, which Rinella describes as a collision of hunting and animal husbandry, while noting that a fence around a 270,000-acre ranch changes little. Hanes clarifies that the elk he and Rogan hunt are fair chase with lions and bears around, and that success is far from guaranteed: of the hunters at one ranch in the week after theirs, seven did not kill. Rogan says heavily pressured public-land animals behave unnaturally, while Rinella admits his mule deer taken on public land mean something special to him. Rogan's story of a barefoot, hour-and-a-half stalk that ended with a perfect bow shot shows why archery feels different.

Sharing Hunting Honestly

All three agree that social media has made the old sporting-goods-store brag board global, so hunters must think about how non-hunters see their posts. Hanes shows the country, the tracks and the story first, sometimes skips grip-and-grin photos, and does not monetize hunting videos. They discuss YouTube restrictions on gore and appeals that restored age-restricted videos, and Rogan argues that visible blood from a well-placed shot is a sign of an ethical kill. Rinella recalls networks once banning raw meat on screen, which made it seem as if nothing happened to the animal afterward. Hanes calls cooking the meat on MeatEater brilliant, remembering a school newspaper piece he wrote at 15 about getting 37 pounds of hamburger from his first deer. Rinella says the most elevated experiences now are watching his kids hunt, and Hanes says the highlight of his year was guiding a friend to her first buck.

Conclusion

This long, easygoing episode captures three friends at the center of modern hunting culture talking about what it really involves: nerves, discipline and years of experience; regulations that try to balance opportunity and technology; and predator politics that often pit urban voters against the people who live with the consequences. Running underneath is a message that applies beyond the woods: learn from people better than you, turn envy into effort, defend others' practices before your own are threatened, and show your passion honestly, from the stalk to the dinner table. Rogan closes by crediting both guests with changing his life by taking him on that first hunt.

This is a summary of "#2100 - Cameron Hanes & Steven Rinella" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.