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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Safari and Big Game, with Joshua Mahnke
With guest Joshua Makey, we unpack safaris, extending beyond Africa to places like northern Australia, and discuss how this mindset can revolutionize hunting experiences across America into epic adventures.
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So let's talk about that for a second, because that's an interesting thing that we're seeing.
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Speaker 2:The word safari comes from the Swahili word safiri, meaning to journey or to travel. Swahili itself borrowed this term from the Arabic safar, which means journey or travel. In the 19th century, european explorers adopted the term safari to describe journeys through East Africa, particularly for hunting expeditions. Today, safari broadly refers to overland journeys, often for observing and photographing and hunting wildlife, especially in African regions. Often for observing and photographing and hunting wildlife, especially in African regions.
Speaker 1:But, joshua Makey, I'm curious what the word safari means to you. So I went to Africa when I was 20 for the first time and it was on a hunting trip, and so safari for me was definitely just about African big game hunting and the difference I saw, the most striking thing there, was the amount of animals we were hunting at one given time, because we were in a place where there was probably, as far as different species, sure, yeah, well, not only that, but just the amount of every species, right, um. So growing up hunting public land, colorado, for elk, you were lucky to see, you know, elk in the season and you got your your one second chance at it, to judge it, to figure it out there, um, you're hunting, uh. So I grew up hunting on on King mountain in Colorado, um, it's about uh, 16,000 acres.
Speaker 1:When I was 20 and went to Zimbabwe, the, the plot of land we were on was 16,000 acres. When I was 20 and went to Zimbabwe, the, the plot of land we were on was 16,000 acres and there was four of us hunting for nine days. And so if you look at the, just that ratio of, um, the amount of animals in the property, the type of species there, but they had more zebra than we had elk right, they had more Impala than we had deer, you know, and so the and then there's another dozen, two dozen species that are huntable there, and that was the. That was the striking thing for me. So the safari was definitely at 20 years old. That was an African hunting trip, and that's that's kind of the definition that stuck with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is interesting to kind of think about what it means, cause I think that that's what it generates for most people. If you say I'm going on safari, uh which isn't also a funny way of saying something you don't necessarily say I'm going on a safari. You say I'm going on safari, most people are going to think that you're going to Africa. If, as we get into historic hunting, uh, that oftentimes meant India, right, sure, uh. And today, if you look at the, the large hunting concessions that are in, say, northern Australia, they're called safaris. Concessions that are in, say, northern Australia, they're called safaris. I have no reason to think that there can't be a safari mindset applied to hunting in America, and the mindset is different from what out West we would call a hunting trip, or maybe in the, in the Midwest or the South, like going to a hunting camp, right. But I think that the, the movement, the physical movement and the travel portion of it is is critical for it to be considered a safari.
Speaker 1:Sure, I think it's an adventure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is for sure an adventure.
Speaker 1:I, um, I would have a hard time, uh, in my own mind, thinking of a safari if I didn't get on a train, a boat, a plane. There is a travel component to it, and if you go to the family cabin or hunt out of your house, it doesn't have the same feel.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's not to criticize one or the other, but there are different things. I do think that it's possible in America to take that mindset of expedition-style travel and have an American safari. Recently got back from Australia and that was very much a safari there and I was thinking about the travel, travel which was the the largest portion of it. Right, the hunting the actual hunting was a minority of this trip, of this adventure. But all these miles on airplanes and vehicles and and the speed kind of starting out with with big airplanes getting down to smaller airplanes, and then speed of a land cruiser that is then getting from hardball onto dirt road, onto no roads, and then, before you know it, we're walking and then, not long after that, we're taking our shoes off and going through, going through water to, to, you know, hopefully avoid crocodiles and get into into these water Buffalo it. That's quite a scale, right, that's quite a scale to move from, from jets that are crossing the Pacific ocean to walking barefoot in the mud.
Speaker 1:Uh, and that's the type of thing that I think a Safari can offer you barefoot in the mud, uh, and that's the type of thing that I think a safari can offer you Absolutely. There's also a component people, uh, want to always condense things down to the easiest thing to think about. That's a number. And so, um, when you're getting to know someone, you, you throw out the numbers that, uh, the part of the world you live in, that, your age, your, uh, you know the money you make, whether that's stated or not, that's one of those things that people figure out. And so these numbers are there.
Speaker 1:And for a hunting trip, for importance, listen to people talk about it, and they will often say, um, that's a $20,000 hunt, right, that's a. You know, that's a good, cheap hunt. And so there's, um, I think the mentality of the safari, that kind of changes, is when you're going on safari, you're going to spend money, and you know it. And it's not, um, when you're, when you're hunting your local state, you're trying to conserve money, like it's a meat hunt or something along those lines. And I think that that, for me, is one of those components. And if I'm, if I'm, spending this much money, you're looking to maybe avoid some hardship. You know, have a, have a more pleasant hunt, maybe not, but the adventure has to be turned up, it has to be something outside the ordinary, and I think that there's a money component of that, and that's an important component, because hunting is going away Like it's on the decline.
Speaker 1:There's more and more people and there's less and less opportunity. In order to preserve that, and in order to preserve wildlife in general and wild lands, there has to be a value on those lands. As humans, we get back to that number. What does this land produce? Does it produce more money as a cattle ranch? That's in Africa. That's the competing thing right now is cattle and wild animals, and so if you can value those wild animals at, or greater than, cattle, they stay wild, and the places that they're not doing that and the value has gone down, we're losing those lands.
Speaker 2:And a wild animal left alone, when it is around people at all, is never a neutral value, and I think that that's a mistake that people often think is like, well, can't it just be left alone and and it it's just neutral? Do we have to have a positive or a negative value on it? And that the the honest answer to that is that it's absolutely never neutral. So if you're not placing a value on that animal for hunting or for photography or for research, then it's going to be a negative for what it's competing with in terms of domestic livestock, fencing, infrastructure, gardening, agriculture, stuff like that. So you need to offset that with a positive value for something else, usually around hunting and recreation.
Speaker 2:That's the most successful model in the world, Sure. Otherwise, that negative means that people are going to try to retaliate against that, to try to recover their losses, and they're going to do so in a way that is probably their losses and they're going to do so in a way that is probably unregulated, harmful and oftentimes illegal and detrimental to um to a lot of animals that end up on the side. And that's that's why the hunting model works so well is because it places that value there in a significant way.
Speaker 1:When you look at Africa, there's, there's another component. There too, there's the danger to the population, and so, um, um, where they have crops and elephants, there's conflict, yeah, and where there's crops and buffalo, there's conflict. And so if you can, uh, if you can bring a hunter in that is going to value that buffalo in the thousands of dollars and or an elephant in the tens of thousands of dollars, and they were to uh to that animal they kept. They can put that barrier to the crops, support the local people there and they can have that money going back to the local community. And there's a lot of places that are doing that.
Speaker 1:I think that that's the, that's a misunderstanding by the non-hunting community, that they just don't see the value that it brings. And so if this isn't taking place, in that that animal does not have that value, they're going to attempt, uh, to kill those animals or to, and they usually end up wounding them. And so there is, um, there is like throughout the ages, there has been stories of, of a poacher, wounded animal that then goes and stomps the next person that sees.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and that stuff happens here as well, right, and oftentimes when we see predators and not all the time, but it happens often enough that it's worth noting when we see predators that have lived most of their life eating wild animals and then they come in and start preying on uh, on domestic livestock. A lot of times it's because they they're not able to kill elk anymore, right, they've got some type of injury um, they broke their teeth off, something like that happened. And these, uh, these leopards, tigers, lions that racked up huge body counts throughout history, all of them had some kind of injury, and whether that happened because of their conflict with people or whether that happened first and then caused them to start hunting people is a great question. That's something that none of us can answer. But it is certainly true that most of these, like career man-killing predators, had some kind of problem that was preventing them from living the way that they probably would have preferred to.
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Speaker 1:Sure, the next layer down from that is what was it? The 1950s that Yellowstone had a bear feeding area and they would put out garbage and they had stands where people could come and watch this, and so you habituate the bears, and now they're associating food with that. Jim Corbett shooting his um, his man-eaters in India. The commonality was there is that they would have um a plague or or a virus go through. There'd be so many people dying at one time that not all of them got buried.
Speaker 1:Well, and then the years after that, after you taught uh these predators to recognize humans as food, then you started running into that, and so I think we don't think in the terms of of food and animals, do you know?
Speaker 1:And so it seems like these conflicts, uh are always wrapped around uh, around food and what we train them to do. So, if we can, if we can grow crops that are um high density, you know, and so you don't have to walk far between meal to meal to meal, there, as they're, as they're eating, they're going to seek those things out, and so we're going to teach them that this is a, this is a fantastic place to be fed. And when we can't, uh, when we can't do that. That's where conflicts come in, and I think that that's that point where the animal goes down in value. And so if we don't mitigate those things or if we don't bring that, that value up and it's funny, the um, I think, to the local population most animals have a detrimental value until they get hunted and you have to bring people from other regions, you have to bring money into that region to have those animals be valued.
Speaker 1:Um and so it's about the. It's an economic solution to value animals and I think it's more complex than most people give. A. Give that top down, look to you.
Speaker 2:For sure. A criticism that you'll often hear is people say well, that money isn't actually getting back down to the local population, and my counter argument there is that if it wasn't, then they would go out and they would be continuing to to poach and wound these animals, snare them. And that doesn't happen in these areas where the hunting is regulated and controlled, because that value is actually getting back down to the communities. So it that that is a that is is an argument that I just I don't think it's very well thought out for people, for people, um, and they just haven't been there so that they don't know.
Speaker 1:Sure, I'm one of those guys, uh, I seek everything out, I want to know. I always got to look behind the curtain. And so I became friends with uh, with a pH in Africa, on a couple of these trips. I went on and I asked him about, you know, talk to me about the economics of this. And so he went through and our little safari there ended up employing about 32 local people, so outside of his family, and it was local people that did um, the cleaning, the laundry, the uh, the cooking, the taxidermy work. You know there's, there's a lot there. Just go in having a delivery guy for groceries and everything getting those uh from town. But then beyond that, and I asked him you know, the trophy fee does not include the meat. You don't get to bring the meat home with you, uh, you can't get it through us customs. And so, uh, I know that they sell the meat and then that lowers the cost of your, of your hunt. And so I asked him that and he was kind of sheepish about it and he wouldn't tell me at first and so continued to probe about it and what he was doing. He wasn't selling the meat.
Speaker 1:There was an elderly neighbor that he would um sell to him and he produced. Uh would do biltong, which is like an African jerky, and he would sell that. Well, he would sell it to him about a 10th the normal cost, and so it was something where he was doing that and he would have given it to him. But out of pride, he wants to pay. He also was supporting three orphanages and two schools with this, and so he didn't want to reveal to me that he wasn't selling it because he didn't want me to think that he was overcharging. I was happy to hear that it's all being donated and so they run. They have an operation there where they do their own taxidermy and they have other ways of making money on these things, and so for that he was able to support the local community and he paid his guys.
Speaker 1:Well, we see that. I've gone over there and hunted with him several times. We see the same people time and time again and they're they're well taken care of, uh, they um. There's a minimum wage program in in South Africa similar to what we have here, and he's basically uh doubled the minimum wage that they get and uh and so he keeps his same employees all the time and we see so the the fact that he was being a good steward with his land.
Speaker 1:It's his family's land, and he's uh, he's been on it three generations now, and so he cares about the land. That land is being better taken care of than anyone else would value it, the and and so the only way he can do that, though, is if people go over there and they hunt with him. They have to bring those dollars there, and that's what supports these things from being a cattle ranch with no more acacia trees, and it would go back to a more agricultural setting, and I think that everyone has this aesthetic value on wild lands, and those wild lands go away when we don't, when we don't value them in that way yeah, there's been programs in uh in at least.
Speaker 2:I'm sure they're everywhere, but at least in in botswana, kenya, uh, tanzania. Um, there's more that I'm forgetting about right now that have been going on since the 70s to improve grazing practices, and lots of people continue to go over there and work on grazing practices, because there are ways to to graze cattle very similar to the way wild animals move, move through an area. But when your margins get cut down to a really narrow slice and then you start losing cattle to lions and then you've got competition from other wild animals, it becomes really hard not to look at that tree and say, well, if I cut that down, I could get more grass, right, if I cut that down, I could sell that wood for a little bit, and that that might be what gets me through. So I think that there's there's a right, right and wrong way to do it, but there's definitely, there's definitely a need for value to be placed in the right way so that it, so that it comes off well, you can you can feed a community better with um.
Speaker 1:this is in africa. You can feed a community better with wild animals than you can with cattle there, because the cattle eat a specific um amount of vegetation and it's grasses. But then you have uh, you have giraffe, and not a lot of people think about giraffe as a food source, but that's probably the food source in Africa. They're 3,500 pounds. They're big animals and they eat a lot of giraffe over there, and so the giraffe are not ever eating grass. They're going to eat acacias and they're going to eat the tops of acacias. You have impalas eating a different thing, you have duikers eating a different thing, and so, if you have, you can get more pounds of protein off of that same amount of land if it's in wild animals, because they're going to eat the vegetation in a different way than cattle would.
Speaker 2:Thank God they don't have the regulations that we do, Otherwise they could never move that meat back to the community.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, both of us are super, super passionate about hunting Africa, and hunting internationally as well as hunting domestically. You own G9 Defense and this year you finally brought to the world your Safari line of ammunition. I want to talk about this a little bit. If you get into these, these older books about hunting in Africa, a lot of the focus wasn't on the projectile type so much as the cartridge that they're shooting, and you saw ridiculous things like like quarter boars, um, which were shooting a quarter pound lead ball. And as we moved farther into you know more, more modern cartridges, it kind of boiled down to either soft points or solids, sure, and there was a binary choice for what you were going to shoot and it wasn't much more complicated than that. From from that point, how did history sort of lead African, you know dangerous game ammunition forward to where it is today?
Speaker 1:So again it comes down to just how I see it, how I think about these things. And I believe there was a golden era of firearms for Africa and that was about from 1900 to 1915. And so all of your, you have a 7x57, which was made in 1892. But other than that, most of these calibers that we talk about for Africa were all in this short little time span 1912 on a 375 H&H probably king of all calibers on, if you're thinking about African hunting, 375 is the obvious choice. You have 1911 on the 416 Rigby and a 404 Jeffrey.
Speaker 1:I don't remember the time period there.
Speaker 1:Those three calibers make up all of our elk hunting calibers, and so the 404 gave birth to the Winchester short magnums, to the Remington ultra magnums, to the PRC line, and so that base there, everything that is a belted magnum, from the 300 H&H to the Weatherby's, to the Winchester magnums, that all came out of that 375. And the 416, it gives us the 338 Lapua and then the Norma mags. And so it's kind of funny that that one little time period produced all the calibers that we're kind of working with right now. But those three calibers were kind of, and then you have your double barrel rifles as well. But that time period right there, when I think about what we're going to do in Africa currently in calibers, that's what I go to, and so I'm a little bit limited when I design these things, because we have guns that have fired these things since, uh, since 1912, and they have um express sites on there that are are filed and and so I have to have the same weight bullet go on the same speed basically.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that a little bit. I, you know, most people who have hunted at some point have seen a double rifle, whether it's in in a movie or in a magazine or something like that. And we all know that double rifles are expensive and for some reason, even though, um, you know it's, it's one gun with two barrels, it's a heck of a lot more than twice as expensive. Oh yeah, well, one of the reasons is that those barrels have to get regulated and that means that both barrels need to be pointing at the same thing, and that is a really tricky thing to do. And you know, there's going to be a point where those bullets cross, right. So that's going to be your point blank range, and I think a lot of the double rifles are regulated for 50 yards. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Sure, and I got a chance to talk to some of the guys from Heim and it's a little more complicated than that even, and so that's the theory and that's the understanding on it. But the master gun makers are going to point those barrels slightly differently, because under recoil projectiles are spin stabilized. So you have rifling in a barrel and it is going to corkscrew that bullet out the end of the barrel. What that does is it produces torque in there, and so we have very thin barrels and they are hooked together. When they hook together, they're going to recoil differently, because that thin barrel that now has a flat side to it is hooked to another barrel, which stiffens it up, and so they actually have to point a little bit wrong. He explained what it was, but they're going to be slightly off and you can see it with your eye when you put it in a vice, and so when they recoil, that barrel is going to twist, and so that's why they're expensive.
Speaker 1:Is there is a? Um? There's a lot of science in the world of making guns. That is 100% art and it is gorgeous, like the, what they have to do to regulate those things, and there's so many things in this world that are dying arts. Um, double barrel rifles is really one of them. Heim is now making them. It's a I think they claim to be something like a English made double rifle, produced in Germany. You know, they look like it and everything. But then you have that German precision, and so I enjoy the conversation. But we're talking that they're going to point at 50 yards, maybe two or three inches off. But we're talking that they're going to point at 50 yards, maybe two or three inches off. But that's the art of that. That recoil will straighten those barrels in a different way because they're actually hooked to the other one.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they're pointing two or three inches off, but the impacts are going to be together, right, yeah, so yeah to do that, and so we got onto a tangent there the uh, they will those, those uh bullets should. If they're well regulated, they're going to cross at a certain range yeah, and that introduces a problem for you?
Speaker 2:um, a little bit, because you have 110 year old guns that are are built for specific pressures and velocities and, and, honestly, a different bullet material, right, sure, and you still want your bullets to do the same thing that their bullets were doing. As far as the external ballistics and and internal bliss, because ballistics are concerned, where you're stepping out and offering something different from what the classic offerings of, like a soft point or a solid like, now your projectiles are able to do a different thing once they impact that animal.
Speaker 1:Sure, and so we still want to follow those lines, because there's so much tradition around these safaris. And I have to admit one of the things I like I like the leather boots, I like the, um, the cartridge belt, you know, and, and you look at these things that probably were the way to do it a hundred years ago, you kind of want to go do it in that same way and, um, I don't really want to use, um, uh, gpss, I don't want to make everything modern on these, these safaris. Part of the experience is being able to step back and do something that's timeless and so, and that that includes these calibers. I want to, um, there are new calibers out there and you can make your own and you can wildcat a new caliber and everything else. Um, my own personal desire is to go use those things that are 120 years old and and do it in the same way that it was. And so I've I've stuck to the, the nominal weights in all the calibers, and because they work well with the guns, and that's an expectation Traditions die hard. Um, if I was to produce the absolute best thing, um, with what we know now, we'd do them a little bit differently.
Speaker 1:And so in the 375, we're talking uh, the mainstay there is a 300 grain bullet. In the four, sixteens we're in 400 grain bullets and then, um, the, and we have a soft point and a solid um, the difference being is that our soft point has actually a a piece of brass inserted down, um, basically a hollow point. A piece of brass inserted down, basically a hollow point. That brass has some flutes in it, which creates three different hollow points in there. That will all pressure the round to come open, but the piece of brass in there allows it to never collapse in.
Speaker 1:And I was shocked with Buffalo's hide, just how tough they are. I watched him cut through it and could not believe how thick it was and how the knife just didn't get through it Like it. I've never seen a hide that tough. And so I learned right then that the um and their bones their bones were huge, uh, and they're strong Like these are, um, they're, they're very fibrous, uh, animals, more so than I was I was expecting uh, rhino as well, and uh, and elephant, they're known to have these really tough, thick hides.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not just for the obvious things, which are the predators that are really toothy and clawy and trying to kill them. They're living in some thorny stuff, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:So you cannot drive a thorn into a Buffalo's hide. It just doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'll for sure drive into my hide though Multiple occasions, yeah, so they've got to be resilient enough to be able to go through thorns. That would just absolutely shred you and not incur any damage from that. So from the outside in, they're a really, really tough, tough animal. Something that I'm starting to think about more and more with archery is that there is a huge amount of force that gets put on the shaft of an arrow as it's going into an animal just by the muscle twitch which, in slow motion, you can see that muscle twitch occurring long before that fletching has ever made it, you know, up against the skin. So you think about the power of all that muscle moving and the force that it's putting on that shaft. I think a lot of the shaft breaks that we're seeing, especially in shoulder shots that we historically had just chalked up to like, oh, it went through a bone and the shoulder moved and it broke it. I think we're probably breaking that arrow shaft just with muscle twitch when it's on its way in.
Speaker 1:I would agree with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so tough through and through. Are you going to put a soft in for your first shot and follow up with solids?
Speaker 1:You know, two years ago I probably would do that and that was kind of conventional wisdom, maybe from uh, at least the nineties on that's. You know, that's what I was told on on uh, my first safari, and what was the thinking behind that Cause?
Speaker 2:that's what I was taught too.
Speaker 1:So I think most people are hunting Buffalo. If you're, if you're after elephant, it's solids every time. Hippo rhino would be solids every time. If you're talking lion and leopard, you want soft points, and maybe more expansive soft points than normal. So that's the thinking, but it's really buffalo that we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:And so you hunt buffalo and there will be herds and you want a massive wound.
Speaker 1:You want a wide wound for a quick, clean kill, and then, as the buffalo runs away, it may be standing in front of something for that first shot, and you want to be able to take it if it's on the front side of the herd and without fear of it passing through and being lethal. When it runs straight away from you, though, with that 416 or 375, you want to be able to send one at the tailpipe and hope that we're going to get to vitals, which is really hard to do. So you can imagine I showed up on my safari in South Africa with a gun that I had owned for a couple of weeks and ammunition that I started making less than three weeks before the trip, and we would design everything it was. It was new. The ph learns this and he wants nothing to do with me shooting a buffalo with experimental ammo when he's got to back me up and so we had some, we had some convincing to do on that, and we get a buffalo uh on the ground.
Speaker 1:so this is it's, it's dead. And I, I tell my ph, I'm going to take this, this 416, I'm going to shoot it in the rear hip here and I'm going to aim for the far shoulder and we're going to see, I'm going to try to get it in the ball joint. And so we kind of poke around on the on the hip of this and find out exactly where the ball joint is. I get down behind the Buffalo and shoot and it goes through through the hide into the ball joint, through the ball joint, and then travels on. And we actually got the projectile was stuck in front of the shoulder, on the skin at the neck, and so it didn't end to end.
Speaker 1:And that's what you're wanting with that solid, the um, uh and it's not every solid can do that Um. And so we use, we use monolithic, we. We looked at everything there. Lead based ones tend to, even with steel jackets, you still, you still have more deformation that takes place. What does monolithic mean? So it's going to be made out of. Ours is made out of a specific type of brass, so it'll be constructed of one piece and monolithics are usually turned on a lathe. Okay.
Speaker 2:Are yours turned on a?
Speaker 1:lathe. Yep, we lathe turn, so it's a Swiss turn, but same difference. And so with that, we want to keep that buffalo running away. We want to have the follow-up shots. Be good there, if you have one and it's going to charge. The thinking is that if its head comes down and you hit it in the head, you miss the brain it's not lethal or something, and you might go low on it. You still have a chance of going back and hitting the spine or into the heart or being lethal. And so you're looking at the solids, you're valuing penetration.
Speaker 1:The problem with these solids is that you get sub caliber wounding, meaning the size of the bullet, the wound that it leaves, is going to be below caliber. And you're talking about historic solids. Sure, yeah, and, and so what? Um, then those salt the soft points, though. You want a soft point to open up, and, and so maybe this three 75 gets to, uh, um, a 70 caliber, and so now you're pushing a much bigger hole through them. It doesn't go as deep there's no free lunches really in ballistics. You get, uh, you have the same kind of wound volume typically, and so you had a long, straight, skinny one, or you would get a wider one, but it went shallow and so and that was the thinking on the, and pH is typically on Buffalo will stack solid on top of solid. And that's what they're going to do, because if they're shooting they don't have the luxury of that first shot. That's the clients. And then if they're going to, if they're going to solve one of the problems that their client creates, then they're going to do it with a solid.
Speaker 2:Yep. So pHs don't need to be, they don't need to be good shots at long range, they need. They need to be good shots at close range. Sure, and they need a bullet that can go all the way through from the front to the back of an animal and maybe break that ball joint on the way out, um, or, you know, ideally interrupt its nervous system and and stop them right there, but they need it to go the maximum distance.
Speaker 2:Another thing about africa and I I tell everybody this who is an American hunter and who's heading there is we in hunter safety get taught that we never shoot through brush. You don't shoot through brush unless you can perfectly see the animal and what's behind it and what's in front of it. You're not ever taking that shot. If you shoot through a single blade of grass, it's going to ruin everything. That's what we get taught here. Through a single blade of grass, it's going to ruin everything. That's what we get taught here. I did not get told that, uh, in Africa, that you were going to shoot through brush most of the time.
Speaker 1:For me, it was every time.
Speaker 2:I never got to take a shot where I saw like an animal in its entirety in the open. That just never, ever happened, and some of the brush that you might be shooting through could be trees that are the size of your forearm. You need a bullet that can do that and still be ready to do the rest of its job in the end in that animal on the other side, and it's just a very counter to what americans are often taught well, sir, and that's, um, maybe that's my fourth a in in bullets, is that, uh, making them very.
Speaker 1:What we're talking about there is barriers, so we're going to strike an object before, uh it it hits its, its final target. And in the barrier world, uh, monolithics, a solid piece reigns supreme. And so if you have a soft point and you do strike that piece of hardwood, um, you're going to rip a jacket off where you're going to start that initial opening process or something. And so now, when that bullet leaves, it's going to be on its same trajectory. They usually don't really get blown off course by the barrier itself. It's the bullet now is shaped something other than a bullet coming out the other side. And so what we see is that most of the time, you have enough energy and everything that you're transferring it, and so, but with a jacketed piece and a soft piece of lead and if that's what you're counting on for your expansion you get a very different looking bullet, and that's where it veers off a lot. And so it was an intentional thing to go with go with monolithics to do that. The problem with monolithics is that lead is very dense, and so you can have a relatively short bullet if it's going to weigh the same as it would in solid copper. And so now the rub on the barrel and the friction in the barrel is going to be increased because you increase the length of that bearing surface that rubs on the barrel.
Speaker 1:What we did is we've removed a bunch of the material that touches the barrel. What we did is, um, you can, uh, we've removed a bunch of the material that touches the barrel. It's called driving bands and and we have a way to do that where it's very smooth in there. So we're keeping those pressure curves very similar. We were talking about that earlier with, uh, with trying to to basically um, time that recoil and into on on regulated rifles or rifles that are are at the same point of aim, and really that's an important thing as well, because you're talking about in the magazine, you're not putting all the same ammo in there and then you're going to go shoot animals with it. Well, you want to be as accurate as possible with a multitude of different solutions to these problems, and so having everything shoot to the same point of aim, it's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't remember who the manufacturer of the ammo I had was. I was shooting swift a frames when this happened, but that cartridge that had been living in the bottom of my magazine it never get got to get shot for a long time, you know, because I was just shooting whatever was on top and feeding it down, but with the recoil it was stacking that bullet back into the cartridge with every shot because it wasn't crimped well enough. And fortunately I was able to see that unloading one day and I just happened to notice that this thing was shoved way back in there. But that's a real problem. That can happen and I think those driving bands solve that to an extent as well.
Speaker 1:Sure, and what we did was we actually tried a bunch of different crimps, and so we have a little bit of trade secret in how we crimp our 9mm versus the .308. And so we look at those things. On this one, here, we use the same style crimp as we use in our revolver calibers, and so a revolver is actually going to push the bullet out forward, because the recoil, you know, inertia, pushes the bullets forward, and so you have to have a really good grip on them. And they use what's called a roll crimp, and that's basically what we're doing on
Speaker 1:ours. We also, we waterproof our, our ammo, and so the waterproofing depending on the type you're using, you can pretty well glue it in place, and so we're using two fold there that we, uh, we get a good crimp on it, and the way that we, uh, we design our crimp is that the front of the crimp is a squared off 90 degree shoulder, and so when that piece of brass goes in there, um, you really have a hard time pushing past that, and so we get uh, we also use a um, a call it style dye that will crush the crimp in there. So we we look at um I'm into the minutia on stuff on on ammo and and looking at that. But that's a real thing. There's been a lot of hunters, uh, especially on culling operations, where they'll they'll shoot and, shoot and shoot and then that bottom one does go off and it goes high order, yeah. And so, out of curiosity, when you were over there, what caliber did you take and how did you select it?
Speaker 2:375 H&H and I selected it because it was mandated that I use 375 H&H because I was hunting dangerous game. The rifle was loaned to me by a rancher that I worked for. It was a Saco, um or Saco or gorgeous rifle Saco.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh, yeah, it was a great gun.
Speaker 2:It was a great gun and it was just a tremendous privilege and responsibility to to uh to get to shoot somebody else's gun, to uh to get to shoot somebody else's gun, and I I always feel that I feel that, um, that extra I don't even know if it's if it's pressure or if it's lift but it's to shoot better when you're shooting somebody else's rifle and if that's a generational rifles, um, like shooting a dead man's gun, uh is something that that I've done quite a bit of.
Speaker 2:And there there's a feeling that I cannot quite describe about shooting a rifle that you know somebody held deer and and his is since gone and now it's your gun and now you're hunting with it in the same way that he did, or or or that she did, or similar way. Um, there is, there is something about that that is incredibly special and I definitely felt that on that hunt Um, even though you know, lloyd was just back there in Montana and uh, yeah, very grateful to him for that, because I I couldn't afford to uh to buy my own rifle for that hunt Um, and I didn't know anybody else who had a 375 H and H.
Speaker 1:So when you said you were mandated to, that's the uh, it's one everyone understands. That's the minimum caliber that you're allowed to hunt dangerous game with, is that? Uh, 375. Some countries they call it a nine, three, but that's a three, six, six and that's what they've determined you need for I believe. Leopard is outside of that. You can shoot leopards with smaller things but a buffalo, elephant and lion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hippo, yep, and we have the same thing here, right? So, and it's going to vary a little bit state to state, but I'll take oregon, for example, because I know that one you can hunt uh deer with a 223, but you have to have at least a 243 or 6 mm caliber to hunt elk. And I would love to see a regulation like that for archery equipment, because I see a lot of people using the same stuff that sort of hits the bare minimum for deer and they want to use it for elk and it doesn't work. Yeah, we acknowledge it for rifles, but for some reason, when it comes to archery, we're like oh, whatever, we have some draw weight regulations, but nothing when it comes down to the actual projectile itself, which matters a hell of a lot. Sure, I think we could all agree on uh is, is buffalo, the the best animal to hunt in Africa? Is that? You know there's that. Is that what makes your heartbeat?
Speaker 1:Oh sure, yeah, Like the um and it kind of. If I'm being totally honest, uh, buffalo hunting took a little bit away from everything else for me and, uh, we were, um, I was just last weekend hunting with my brother and my dad in uh Montana for whitetail and elk and it did not have the same level of excitement at may of 10 years ago and it was, um, the the fact that there's something about dangerous game, um, it is. Um, you are required to pay attention because you're not hunting these alone and so the don't do stupid things jumps way up when you do that. And there's a level of professionalism in your shooting, in how you sneak in, how you think about these things, where your eyes are out, all the the time that is required in doing that, and I really like that, I really appreciate that, and you can get away with things.
Speaker 1:And if you, if you screw up a deer hunt, you may wound an animal, you may lose an animal, you may not get that animal, something like that, but no one's going to die over it. And with Buffalo, um, I feel a real onus to to make good shots and be all about it and get everything done, because I don't want to. I don't want to put that pH in a situation where he has to go into tight quarters Like this. Last Buffalo shot was was right at just after sunset and they were. They were 40 yards from the nastiest, most thick thorn bush on the entire property.
Speaker 2:Now I got to break in here because a lot of people are going to hear this and be like yeah, it's hunting in the evening, it's the best time of day to hunt, right, Right at sunset, like that's when the magic happens. From a guide's perspective, I'm like, oh man, I wish we could have done this in the morning, because if it goes bad, which it sometimes does, I don't have the advantage of daylight to sort it out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and that one I have that on video. I did not shoot. Well, I made an exceptional shot if it was an elk or a whitetail or something like that. But buffalo are crazy and they say keep it up on that shoulder and push it. And until I saw one taken apart, I did not appreciate it, because you look at these things and they should have gigantic lungs and their lungs should go well beyond their shoulder. They don't really protrude much past the shoulder and um, and I put one in that was just um, right in the pocket, where every North American hunter wants to put it. That was my first shot.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to get North America to quit doing that yeah we need to push it forward.
Speaker 1:You got to put it straight from the leg bone If they're perfectly broadside, straight from the leg bone up third of the way up. That's ideal. Even if you go farther forward than that, it's all good stuff. Shoot a caliber that will break a bone if you need, and there will be dramatic kills if you go forward from that and you and you hit that bone. You're still going to do it, provided you're.
Speaker 2:you've got uh, you've got got to look at actual anatomy and physiology to understand that there is not a bone in your way If you go straight up the leg, a third of the way up their body, and uh, yeah, I, I don't fully understand where that came from, that the other countries around the world knew, and have continued to know, to shoot animals there, and we wanted to push it farther back.
Speaker 2:My thinking, joshua, is that it's left over from the great depression. I think that we were more willing to lose an animal than we were to lose a pound of meat, sure. So those guys wanted to get every possible ounce of meat off that critter. So they're pushing their shots back and really flirting with that liver diaphragm, very back of the lungs area, so that they could get as much shoulder meat as possible. We continued to tell each other that that's where we needed to shoot, but in terms of lethality, which is inextractable from ethics for me, you've got to go farther forward. You've just got to go farther forward. So, anyways, sure you, you, you shot it like you were going to shoot a white tail in the great depression.
Speaker 1:Yeah and uh, and, and I knew that I I thought the first one was going to be better, and so I'd come up with a solid, and our solids are a little different. They, um, typical solid is going to have a flat front, a me plat to the bullet, or it's going to be rounded over. What's a me plat? Just the forward most piece of a bullet, the front piece of it, and the uh. And ours has, um, has these three sharp ridges that are created when flutes are cut into the bullet. And these flutes think about it this way on our solids it looks like three blades of a boat propeller bent backwards. And so we have up front, the sharp looks like archery equipment, it looks like these blades coming off. We have these sharp things, and so those sharp things go through hard stuff really well, high pressure per square inch. It cuts fibers, it cuts through hides and then as soon as the whatever media you're running through hits those, those flutes, it kicks it out sideways and expands that wound. And so we're one of the few on the market that has something in a solid, a non-deforming, non-expanding bullet that will create gigantic wounds.
Speaker 1:And so I lucked out in that I had all solids in the gun and I had purpose to shoot them with just solids and so my first shot. It actually went right through, created a lot of damage. I was lucky I clipped just the back of the lungs, but on the autopsy there we had purple lungs for about half of it. So it did a really good job and a noteworthy job. The buffalo then actually turned in a and it took off running, turned in a little tight semicircle and was face on to me and so, as it was running, I tried to send another one uh straight down the middle and I was a little bit off and this one uh got more um, like one lung than than heart was shooting for there. And as it turned to go, the uh so happens that my dad shot uh, I was there for this too the day before he shot a Buffalo and we had just come up with this design and he was the first one to shoot it with a 375.
Speaker 1:And so he shoots this Buffalo and I had at one point in the day I was carrying his gun. I had a gun. I was carrying his and it was. It was rubbed on my on my belt and I get down and look at it and he's got his windage knob is turned to six and I'm like, oh, this is a problem, and so I set it back to zero for him and, um, and he should have had a capped windage knob on there. So I set it back to zero, um, and give him the gun. Well, it was on six for a reason and I didn't know it. Yeah, and so he shoots and and that's such an engineer thing to do.
Speaker 1:I thought I figured it was my fault. I thought that I'd screwed this up and I was going to fix it. Little did I know. So he gets a shot at about a hundred yards and he's, and he's, he's shooting really in the right spot there he's, he's getting that, that place we talked about. Well, it was far enough off that it actually hit it in the neck in front of the joint. And so and we're talking about those joints, a good way to do this If you have horses, just go feel a horse and see where it, see how far that that ball joint is, and it's way out of your way.
Speaker 1:Well, he had shot in front of this and we thought it hit spine because this thing flopped to the ground and was done. We walked up to it, we paid the insurance. When we by pay the insurance, I mean we shot it, I think, twice more. And I get very few opportunities to shoot buffalo with our experimental rounds, so I'm always going to ask if we can. You know, once it's dead we'll shoot it a couple more times just to find out. And so the PH said I've never seen anything like that. And he said it was a bad shot Like this is not where I'd pick to shoot it and the thing went straight down. And so we, we decided it had to hit spine, cut that one apart, and it wasn't, uh, on the spine, it was about five inches off of the spine and it had stunned it. And so we saw something going on with these solids. And the other thing was is that you could fit um a finger easily in the entrance wound, and with a solid, it should never be like that. And the exit was the same way, um, and so we, uh, we saw that there was something there.
Speaker 1:And so, looking at that, I see this Buffalo and he's turned. Now I've got my first shot when he was going um to the right. He turns on me and face on and I get another hit into the chest and he continues turning and he's, he's headed towards, towards this thorn bush we were talking about. And as I see him running, um, I I see just the musculature of him and I decide I don't know, I don't know why we're not getting some some better effect here. I'm going to spine him, and so, the place I could, I knew where his spine was, because in the front shoulders they have front shoulders. Their spine is actually really low in their body and their neck is. Actually the spine goes below the 50% mark, which most people they see like a horse or something, and they're going to say that the spine is towards the top.
Speaker 1:Well, these buffalo have really low spines in them and I had no idea where that spine was, but in the middle of the body. I knew right where it was, so between the legs, shooting like almost where we had assumed diaphragm, maybe even farther back, I decided I'm going to break the spine and get him right there, and so I do, and he flops to the ground and and I thought I hit him. Um, I missed the spine as well, like five inches below. And so we had it. Uh, we had both these Buffalo shot near the spine and stunned and we saw wounds. We had both these buffalo shot near the spine and stunned and we saw wounds we had never seen.
Speaker 1:So the pHs when we're cutting these apart. They both remarked that it wasn't typical and I think it's the shape of the bullet that we're seeing, and so the takeaways were even though we want to make bullets in traditional weights if I could rule the world for a day and change some things, I think having a rather lightweight, solid bullet moving a little bit faster. So for buffalo, for elephant, you want to keep the heavy rounds, but for buffalo, if you lighten them up a little bit so you're not shooting a herd every time, you could go to a single bullet and get that, that deep penetration, and you could get that wide wound channel with a single bullet. And so for me, um, I'll probably produce that, whether we can, we can convince the world of that and and make it uh, economically viable to to produce that. I don't know. But, uh, on my next trip to Africa I'm going to take a four 16 and I think the correct weight for me in that will be a 340 grain solid with the shape on the front.
Speaker 2:So what grain would you be thinking about for 375?
Speaker 1:For that. I think something in the 240 grain to maybe 255 in there. Those are testing well for us. So traditional in Africa, like the 375 came out and the the oldest literature I ever found on it recommended that you had a 300 grain solid and that was for elephant and backup on buffalo you had a um a 270 grain pointed soft point, so the bc is a little bit higher and that one was for buffalo and eland and heavier stuff. And then you had a 235 rather um fast soft point. That um that had rapid expansion and you use that on your leopard and your smaller plains game okay, I mean for the, for the bolt gun guys.
Speaker 1:I don't think that they should feel restricted by what is expected by the double, double rifle guys yeah, not at all I would, and in that, um, the, uh, the, the bolt gun is is most of them are going to be scoped anymore, and so we're not even held to that. Where we have sites that are regulated from the from holland and holland or rigby or something, to where, um, it's an easy adjustment on there, and so having something that is a lot faster inside of 300 yards speed is king, and so if we can get a little bit faster bullet, we'll have better trajectories too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would have no issue at all shooting a 250-grain bullet. That was cooking along a little bit faster. So how fast? I know we're getting getting into hypotheticals here, but how fast do you think a 250 grain, 375 H and H bullet would be going if you built it the way you wanted to?
Speaker 1:Sure, and so we're going to put a little bit of magic sauce on this one. Um, they'll do about 3000 feet per second. And so this the side geometry we were talking about earlier we're going to make it out of brass. Brass has a very high lubricity in the barrel. They come out a little bit fast anyway, and then we would, we're going to put our side geometry on there, which is going to help that even more, and we'll for that to keep that. You know, at that, at that optimum pressure, we can do about 3000 feet per second with it. That's cooking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's plenty fast. But you're starting to get back into the zone of hydrostatic shock, which currently, 375 H&H, just doesn't do a heck of a lot of. It does with the shape of this bullet because you're increasing the speed of the fluid as it's moving off of that shape.
Speaker 1:But hmm. So let's talk about that for a second Cause. That's an interesting thing that we're seeing. I always get a little too esoteric on on wounding, but it's something to understand. I've shot, um, I've shot elk with a three 75 and we've we were always able to uh to save all the meat. Then we shoot it with a 300 wind mag and you can sometimes lose a shoulder on an elk through that. And so what we're looking at is a lead-based bullet.
Speaker 1:Lead will fracture and deform at anything over 1,600 feet per second or so. That's the rough number where it opens up. When it starts coming apart, these fragmented pieces of lead go off and they turn, they go from these sharp pieces as they break apart and they and they get smoothed out as they go through tissue and they, they go back to a? Um, a ball, and so they're smooth the? Um, it will crush things as it goes and as it goes past a blood vessel, it will actually tear the blood vessel apart, and when it tears like that, uh, you pinch off, um, the. The blood vessels will actually crush down, and so we see these wounds where there's all this blood left inside the meat and it kind of ruins the meat, and so that's what people are talking about when they talk about the hydrostatic shock. You never see that with an archery wound, and so with an archery wound it makes a nice clean cut. These blood vessels bleed like a garden hose and there's nothing to pinch them off, and so then that blood evacuates from the muscle and we don't see that.
Speaker 1:We're seeing more of an archery type wound from these solids, and I can't say from all of them, but we see that more on our monolithics. When we get fragments, especially fragments of brass, they stay very sharp and so when they cut they do very little tearing of these blood vessels and they'll cut them, and so the meat is edible closer to the wound than it would be with others. I won't say that it's always that way, and then bones get involved and it changes. But on these solids in particular we did not see meat damage, and you don't typically see that on a solid. It's just that what we did see was gigantic holds, and so the facets on the front of this bullet will redirect fluids and it cuts like a water jet cutting through steel, and so a couple different things here. It's the Venturi effect that works, that we have these, these tubes that are cast off and the angle that they cast off. There's a little bit of science that goes in there.
Speaker 2:What's the Venturi effect?
Speaker 1:So, um, what we have is you have, um, a tube and the. The fluid is going to move through this tube at a constant pressure until there's a restriction, and when there's a restriction in it, the pressure to stay the same, the speed of that has to speed up, and so, during these restrictions, we increase the speed of the fluid in order to keep it at a static pressure, because fluids are incompressible. And so what we have is we have basically three tubes on the front of these bullets. Well, it's only half the tube. The rest of the tube is created by the body it's shooting into, and and the other part of it.
Speaker 1:If you've ever taken a marble and you roll it down a ramp, and then you roll the same same marble, same time, at a uh, on a parabolic curve. That parabolic curve is going to cast off, and so we've done a lot of study on this. Our our most efficient ones in in. What we've seen is that we get about a 37% faster cast off the side of the bullet, and what we're trying to do is we create that cast off going sideways, and that's what, uh, that's what makes these wounds.
Speaker 2:So it's it's making the fluids that it's impacting move 37% faster than the actual bullet is traveling.
Speaker 1:Sure, and so if we can get that, um, if we can get that, and the compressible, uh, the incompressible fluids will shoot out of these. And so think of, um, the front of the bullet, think of it like a? Um, a slide at a water park. How it will will direct the fluid, uh down, and so we've created these things that kind of look like the the bottom of a? Uh, of a water slide and it's kicking it out.
Speaker 1:You can also a visual for this is if you have a, um, a spoon, and you're you're doing dishes, you run the spoon underneath, uh, the faucet, is the water going to go everywhere? Is it going to go around the spoon? So well, is the spoon face up or face down? And so traditional bullets, the spoon was always face down and it kind of just slid around it. With what we're doing, we turn the spoon over and it shoots out, and so that's an easy visual of what it's doing. And that's how we get these, these larger than uh, than I won't say larger than soft points we're, we're in the soft point category and maybe even larger than most soft points out there in the wounds that we see, uh, but then we get depth as well out of them. So this is where, uh, we changed that technology a little bit and and you, you're in new territory.
Speaker 2:So you're getting soft point style wounding with solid style penetration, yeah, and I think that's the line that I want hunters to hear who are thinking about going to hunt dangerous game when they're considering what type of ammunition to buy. That was what I wanted to get at here today. Okay, most slept on animal in Africa.
Speaker 1:You know, I think for me, like, the thing that will bring me back is a bush buck. Yeah, you know, and I know that they're. They're pretty, oh, they are, and I think they're a good hunt too. You get to sneak in and around the rivers there's usually crocodiles or something. You know you're seeing something. Uh, these rivers will have um, uh, lots of, uh, monkeys and baboons and a lot of eyes, so you have to be stealthy. They're a lot like a whitetail. Uh, they're a little smaller than a whitetail, but they're, um, they're very watchful and they're they're also they can be dangerous If you, if you wound one, they're going to run into the, into the taller grasses and they're going to hide. If you're coming along, you have to be mindful, because those they have these two like parallel, very sharp horns and they have, they've stuck, you know, a multitude of hunters that, that we're getting in there and they're small and so it's hard to see. How about for you, warthog?
Speaker 2:really yeah, I can't get enough of them. That's awesome I think they're so cool. Yeah, I mean the, the attitude they have and how they walk around everything's trying to get them yeah um, they can go underground. Uh, they're. They're just cool and're delicious, like, as far as wild pigs go, warthog is at the top of the list.
Speaker 1:I am, I'm really impressed with the table fare over there. Uh, for me, um, I really like Eland, like I always, I always try to convince someone on the on the hunt to shoot an Eland early, because that's um, I think that's just a fantastic meat and kudu is really good.
Speaker 1:I was a little bit less impressed, uh, with sable. Uh, we got a kudu and a sable on the same day and so we had those uh back to back and, uh, the the sable has almost a really really dark kind of bluish tinge to the meat and it was easy to distinguish it. But, um, and Buffalo wasn't great. Uh, you know it was cause you're shooting older Buffalo and and but the there's a lot of um, just great protein over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cape Buffalo oxtail soup is fantastic, though, really, yeah, wonderful. That was one of the most memorable dishes that I had while I was in Africa, and actually, when we walked up to my bowl, the first thing that the Masai did was go and see if he still had a tail, cause the lions rip their tails off so often. Um, and they're. They're in it for the oxtail soup as well, wow, yeah. And then the next thing they did was, uh, um, squirt bile on the raw kidneys and eat it, which I, which I, tried. It wasn't great, um, but you're there, you got, you got to absolutely.
Speaker 1:That's part of it. You got to get involved. That adventure and that experiencing new things. That's what you're, what's your, the choice you made that brought you there.
Speaker 2:Where can people learn, learn more or take a look at this ammunition that we're talking about, if they're thinking about what they want to be shooting when they go on a safari, whether that's for water buffalo in Australia, uh. Whether that's for, say, uh, you know brown bear in Alaska? Um, you know something big in Africa? Like these, these big animals, where your ammunition matters very much and the consequences for you and your guide or pH are pretty significant If you get it wrong. Where can people go to look at this stuff?
Speaker 1:Sure, our website has a lot of information on it. We're going to be coming out with more and more on our YouTube channel on the Safari stuff, but the reality is we're a small company and there are those that go through the effort to contact us directly. You'll get really good data and I believe we're small enough as a company. We can still offer great customer service, and so I would encourage people if there's something that you're working on we've made custom ammo for people before that wanted something like that and so reaching out to the company directly if there's questions like that, the phone numbers on the website we'll. We'll return emails and so that's and I, frankly, I like the customer interaction. It's it's good stuff.
Speaker 2:Something kind of funny happened earlier this year that I don't know if you know about or not you probably do, but I was getting blown up by people which I do at the beginning of every hunting season about 10 mil ammunition. And they know that I shoot a very specific 10 mil, that I'm an advocate for that cartridge, that I've killed charging bears with it, I've killed bull elk with it, and they forget. So I get all these messages of people who are like, hey, what's that ammo you shoot? And it's like oh, it's, it's G9, woodsman, um, send them to the website. And you know I was having all these folks write back and uh, they're like, oh, it's out of stock. I was like, okay, let me try and figure this out for you, um, so I called, I just called the shop and Weston picked up.
Speaker 2:Weston, one of your employees, one of my best friends, and uh, I said, uh, hey, man, uh, you know when? When are you going to be back in stock with? Uh, with Woodsman? And he just talked to me like he would normally talk to me, like we're friends. It goes on for a minute and uh, and that then the, the, the conversation just had like some, some ticks in it that I felt like wasn't quite right. And uh, I realized that he didn't, like I hadn't introduced myself, my color ID obviously hadn't come up, um, and uh, he was talking to me like we were friends, even though in his mind he was just talking to a random person. That was like calling because you're out of stock of something that is in extremely high demand. Um, and I thought that was such a testament, um, you know, not only to to him as an individual, but to you as a company that uh, that that type of confusion could even occur.
Speaker 1:Sure we're. Uh, we'll probably look at this as the golden age of G9 when it's small, like good old days, yeah, when we can, we can do these things.
Speaker 1:I um, I enjoy the the r&d side of it and I enjoy the uh, the customer side and those interactions. Um, I love it when, um, we get a lot of phone calls. There's been a few phone calls that stick out to me. We've had, um an officer contact the company the day that he was in a shooting and he was uh feeding his uh six month old daughter a bottle while he's on the phone and say, and he flat out told us, you know, um, part of the reason I'm here right now is is your stuff was effective. And here here's what happened. We're pointing guns at each other and it, uh, it took place in an instant and there was one shot and it worked and and so it was uh, things like that, uh, that goes a long way with this crew to to do those things. When people call and say I had a successful hunt and this was what happened, um had a conversation with you about, uh, one of those elk and those things stand out. We kind of live for those times.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you make ammunition for the most important moments in people's lives, and that's a special thing, yeah, special thing.
Speaker 1:We as a company, we just don't produce target ammo. You know and I wish we did we could relax a little bit and you could have your three failures per 20,000 rounds, whatever you know, and it'd be okay. Everything that we do has consequences associated to it, and maybe more so on the safari line than anything else. If you think about a 20-round box of ammo, you take that to Africa with you. You may get in in four or five situations in that 20 round box that you have to have at work and there's not uh, there's not a lot of boxes of ammo doing that outside of Safari.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, I agree. Well, sir, thank you for your time.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Um, I look forward to the day that you and I can be using this stuff together on another continent or on our own.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, we've got some more personal catching up to do. But, as always, I very much appreciate it and I encourage folks who are heading out for dangerous critters to give this ammo a look. Bye, everybody. I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible, and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show, and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.