Ken Witt: I'm Kenneth Witt and welcome to Gun Dog Nation. Gun Dog Nation is much more than a podcast. It's a movement to build a community of people around the world that like to watch a well-trained dog do what it's bred to do. Also, we want to get our youth involved into the sport of gun dogs, whether it be hunting, sport or competition. We want to build a community of people united to preserve our gun dog heritage and be better gun dog owners. Tune into each weekly episode and learn about training, dog health, wellness. and nutrition. will also offer tips for hunting with dogs and for competition ⁓ hunt tests, field trials, and other dog sports that involve gundogs. Please go to our website gundognation.com and subscribe to our email list. We will keep you up for them weekly with podcasts that are coming out. We also will be providing newsletters with training tips and health tips for your dog. You can also go to patreon.com forward slash gundog nation and become a member. There's different levels of membership on there. Just go check that out. Also, we'd like to thank Sean Brock providing the music for this show, the introduction and the outro is Sean Brock. He played everything on there except the banjo by Scott Vestal and the bro by Jerry Douglas. Sean is a neighbor of mine from over in Harlan, Kentucky. I'm just crossing mountain in Highton, Kentucky and he's a super talented guy. But most of all, once you guys to check out the Kreekers. They are also from Highton, Kentucky and this is an up and coming bluegrass and country band and these guys are hot. They're all over TikTok and YouTube. You will hear these guys because in a year or so they will be on the radio. They are very talented. Their videos are going viral on the net. These boys are family. Two of the lead singers. One grew up with my daughters and the other one is my cousin's son. So he's family. Check them out, check out the Kreekers. Also, last but not least, if you want to buy a hat, koozie, t-shirt, or even gundog supplies, go to shopgundognation.com and you can purchase any of those items. Thank you so much for listening. It's a privilege to have people that want to put up with me talking about dogs all the time. I actually enjoy what I do and I'm so glad to have this opportunity and thank you. Hey everybody, it's Kenneth Whip, the Gun Dog Nation podcast coming to you this evening from Fort McCavitt, Texas. And I always try to diversify our show. I try to cover different hunting dogs, different breeds, and I don't wanna do the same old stuff over and over. A lot of times I'll have pro trainers on, but I had someone actually reach out to me on Instagram, and this happens a lot. People suggest, hey, check out this person, might be a great podcast. And I always follow up on it, especially if I think it's gonna be a. a good podcast, know, and so anyway, Joseph, I reached out to you. I don't know how I'm going to be in, but I'm going to just let you introduce yourself. We're going to get into this. This could be such an interesting topic. I'll save it for everybody to you kind of talk about what you do. I know you're known as the mink man, but tell everybody the whole story of who you are, what you do, and then we'll get into it. Sure. So yeah, like you said, I'm known as the mink man. I didn't coin the name or like give myself the names. People just started calling me that. And when I first created my, my YouTube channel, was back in 2008 and I saw it like a, like a Facebook page. You just put your name and you go. So I didn't think of like a channel name. I just put my name Joseph Carter. And so for years, my channel was just Joseph Carter. And then finally I was like, you know, it's kind of weird, like having my name for the channel, like It's especially because it's not about me. If I was like some public figure and the channel was about myself, like it would make sense. Like, ⁓ Michael Jordan's page, you know, but I'm like, dude, it's about me. It's not about me. Like, so I'm like, but I don't want to totally throw the original name out. People might not know like what channel it was. So I just left the first part of my channel name, Joseph Carter. And then I added what everybody called me, which is the mink man. And that basically became the channel name and Kind of my nickname, but like I said, the people called me the mink man. didn't like give myself. didn't name yourself. Yeah. Like these attorneys, the big hammer and all these attorneys on billboards, you know, and the shark, they all named themselves. It's kind of funny, but I know I'm a recovering lawyer. I just took what they called me and slapped it behind my name. it's suitable. So now they call you the mink man for a reason. Joseph, tell everybody what your business is. Cause this is interesting. So I, ⁓ I trained mink and dogs to do pest control. And then I also hunt recreationally with the mink and dogs, both. ⁓ but most of what I do and most of what I film ends up being pest control. So I really have a strange mixture of business and pleasure constantly going on to our, it's hard for me to judge when I'm actually working and when I'm playing, cause it's kind of one in the same. Well, this has got, you got me so intrigued because I, just for the listeners, I don't know anything about what you do. I don't. You're going to be completely educating me today and maybe everybody else that has an interest like I do. But Joseph, how do you? Well, first of all, let's start with this since we do talk about hunting on here a lot. How do you hunt with a mink? I I know I'd be doing the Falcons and dogs, but tell us. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot closer to falconry than dogs because it's a wild animal. They're not ⁓ bred to do what we want. They just do what they want. and you as a trainer, as a handler have to figure out how do I get this wild, stubborn, self-serving animal to work with me? And that can be extremely complicated and frustrating for anyone who's flown birds of prey. would, especially like the accipiter type, ⁓ the accipiter family, they would understand basically the struggle that I go through. But the difference is unlike falconers who have thousands and thousands and thousands of different people practicing the sport and thousands and thousands of years of history of the sport. I had to figure it all out by the seat of my pants because I didn't have anyone that I could ask questions like, hey, my mink's doing this, what should I try? There literally was nobody on the face of the planet who I was at least able to reach out to ⁓ and say, hey, my mink's not behaving the way I want. So I really had to just totally wing it and figure out. first off how to train it to do anything and keep control of it. And then what can the mink actually do? I couldn't even really ask that question. When you read ⁓ books on wild animals, they're typically very, very ⁓ inaccurate as far as what the actual animal can and does do. I mean, for example, ⁓ when you're studying like the diet of a fox, you're going to get heavily, heavily representations of prey items that have lots of roughage. Cause you're looking at it scat and you're like, ⁓ look at ate a bunny. ⁓ look at ate a mouse. But when he like gulps down, like let's say a little fish, you might not ever notice that in the droppings where he gulps down a frog. There's very little representation of that in the droppings or he eats a bunch of eggs. And maybe you got to get some eggshells, but you know, there's certain things that naturalists are convinced of. and they're just not really the case. ⁓ And then even when they are true, like, okay, so a mink eats a muskrat. Well, when do they eat muskrats? Is it when they find one running across the ground away from water? Do they actually catch and kill them in their den? Do they swim them down in the water? Just things like that. nobody could answer that. Even the naturalists who'd been studying mink their whole lives. You could, I could go to Paul Arrington, like the expert on muskrat and mink relations and ask him, so can a mink like actually catch a muskrat in open water? He got, I don't know. What do mean? You were studying this animal your whole life. Well, I've seen one mink kill one muskrat in the 50 whatever years of studying. No way. Are you serious? You've only seen it once. Yeah. So I couldn't, I couldn't answer that. I don't know how and when and where they kill them. I just know that they do. and it's usually the males. ⁓ well, cool. That's useful information. It's usually the males. But I mean, that's like the closest I could get to help is some guy who's never seen it done and notices the males seem to do it more than the females. And so I had to completely pioneer everything from the training methods to realistic expectations. What can the mink actually do? And in what situations can it do it? And it was a long... old road to figure it all out. I don't think I've got it even close to worked out. Because if you think about it, Falconers and dog trainers, they're still to this day, building upon the shoulders of men who came before them. Dog training today is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Dog training 20 years ago is nothing like it was 20 years before that. And we've had dogs since the beginning of time. ⁓ Same with falconry. We've been flying Falcons for thousands of years and thousands of people done it. People are still coming up with new ideas and adjusting their beliefs and opinions. Dude, me all by myself, I guarantee you, I don't have them close to figure it out. There's no way. said it right there. mean, that was well put Joseph. I'm 57 years old and I'm still learning how to train dogs and I'll never have it mastered. But I guess what's so interesting to me is that, you know, I've never even heard of anybody hunting with a meek. I've seen falconry stuff. How did you, what even give you the idea to do that? Well, I was told it was impossible and that's what inspired it. I'm so curious to know this. Do you have a training background? you have a psychology degree? I you're studying animal behavior and I mean, and you must be doing a good job, but what's your background or do you just self-taught? ⁓ a little both. So I was just obsessed with animals from day one. Like I was catching worms as soon as I could walk and bring in weird little things home. And I was just always like that. And I was always obsessed with wild animals for some reason. ⁓ Other than dogs, I was obsessed with dogs, but dogs were like the only domestic animal I was really into. ⁓ My grandpa was a horse trainer and I liked horses, but I was never really like super into horses. ⁓ I got really, really good at training them, ⁓ spent more time riding horses than most people driving cars, you know, in a year, unless they're a professional across the road truck hauler. mean, I literally, there were days where I'd spend 12 hours in the saddle, not straight because you'd wear your horse out, but rotating, get off, saddle another horse, get on, get off, saddle another horse, get on for 12, 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Working with my grandfather. So I had a lot of horse training background had a lot of Obsession absolute obsession with wild animals. So I guess a ten-year-old I trained in or I raised bottle raise the squirrel and then trained it to like come when I called I'd catch little chipmunks in live traps and turn them loose in our little screened-in porch and teach them to come back and Just just like I taught turtles believe it or not I had caught little painted turtles and snapping turtles and trained them to come just enough, you know aquarium like they were loose in a pond, but they'd be in their aquarium and I'd blow a whistle on that or I'd do my own little whistle and they'd come swim to the top and take a little mealworm from my fingers and stuff. It was just, it's an obsession of mine. All of that was self-taught, but then when I was 15 years old, I moved out with my grandfather who's a professional horse trainer. He trained cutting horses. If you're from Texas, you would know what cutting horses are. Most people don't, but being a Texas boy, you know exactly what cutting horses are. All I know is it's very most cutting horse people are really wealthy. Yeah, it's a very, very technical, technical, ⁓ probably my grandpa used to say it's it's what it's the most technical sport a horse can do because they physically and mentally have to be at such a high, high, high level compared to any other sport. I mean, almost any other sport roping, you're like, you can still kind of guide the horse and the horse is just rudimentally following a cow. with cutting, they've got to not just read the cow and follow it from behind, they have to cut it off. See, okay, if I get a little bit further, that cow will turn around. They have to learn and anticipate the movements of the cows. They have to have the physical ability to just cram their butt in the ground and spin back the other way and jump forward and catch that cow again and not go too far, but, and do it all with the, with the rider's hand down. He's not pulling on the bit or turning him or anything. The horse has to do it completely on his own. So between athletic ability and mental ability, it's just, it's the, my grandpa's opinion, the highest level of horsemanship on the planet. Everything else is extremely rudimentary, extremely like repeating the same dumb thing over and over again, no offense to other disciplines, but it really, a two-year-old cutting horse has already experienced more than a champion in some other discipline. ⁓ my horse jumps over a jump or ⁓ my horse ⁓ follows a cow in a straight line. Like all these things are very rudimentary compared to a cutting horse who has to really think, really read and anticipate the cow and then have the athletic ability to do some crazy jumps and turns and stops. So anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to go off on that, but my grandfather, he taught me to do the basics. never got like, I never polished a horse off. to where it could be competed with. But I took the green horses that hadn't been trained. Some of them literally were like Mustangs. I mean, they're very well bred, but raised on a mountain, never handled other than when they put a brand on their butt or a shot in their arm or in their shoulder, you know. So they were wild as wild could be. then I would, not all of them were like that, but many were. And I'd take them and I'd halter break them, teach them to put a saddle on, get on them, ride them around. and then get them following a cow, stopping correctly, turning correctly, stopping correctly, turning correctly, the basics. And then as soon as I had the real basics down, then my grandpa would take over and he would finish them off to make a finished cow cutting horse. And I did that from 15 to 19 all day, every day. My grandpa also for his own purposes, trained cattle dogs. And I started doing that on the side, like as a business, along with training cutting horses. And then I also had a business on the side just training whatever someone brought me. So someone spoiled mare that reared or bucked or bit or whatever, did something they couldn't handle. People would bring me their problem horses or just wasn't trained. You some young horse and know what it trained and they'd bring them to me and I trained them on the side. And then for my grandpa train his horses for him. And then my own horses on the side for cash. And then I also started doing cattle dogs. So that was all my background. Oh, then I became a falconer, my mid teens, like 15, 16, something like that. So I was learning to fly birds of prey along with the horse training, dog training stuff. I learned how to train and hunt with birds of prey. So I had, I would say a very healthy background in training. So when I heard it's impossible to train a mink, you can't tame them. You can't train them. They're the most vicious, horrible creature alive. I was a stubborn, cocky teenager who had a bunch of experience doing a bunch of different things. And so I said, well, maybe you can't, but I bet you I can. And so I basically got an escaped ranch mink. I tamed it and was like, see, I told you. And then I was like, well, what can I do with this little thing? He's a vicious little ball of hate. I should be able to channel that in some kind of useful direction and being a falconer and a horse trainer and things like that, it just kind of was natural to me to like, hey, let's find a value for this creature. I don't want to just tame it and stick it in a cage. Let's find something fun we could do with it. And so then I did some research on their natural history. Oh, turns out they can catch fish kind of like an otter. Turns out they can hunt, you know, mice and rats and rabbits and squirrels and stuff on land. And wow, they're this cool little jack of all trades. ⁓ They even hunt muskrats. And so I started then experimenting. Okay. Well, that's what they do in the wild. What can I get them to do ⁓ with me? And yeah, I just from there, it just kind of snowballed. I started documenting what I did in 2008. My very first mink was actually 2003, but there was no YouTube back then. And so, I mean, barely anyone had the internet let alone even if YouTube was around. So I didn't document anything for my first several Mink. But 2008 YouTube was there, they had digital cameras, you could actually film ⁓ in horrible, horrible quality, but you could film what you were doing and then upload it. And so I started doing that, I document, okay, this is my Mink, this is how I'm training it, this is what we're doing. And then I put it up on YouTube, basically because in my impression, I was the first one to ever do it. Now, Truth be told, I'm sure some dude somewhere did it, right? Some guy up in Canada or down in Arkansas got some baby mink by chance, raised it and was like, hey, let's go hunting with this thing. I guarantee you somebody's done it, right? The problem is that whoever that somebody or multiple somebody's were, they never documented what they did or at least not sufficiently that I could find it. And so the closest I've found anyone doing what I do is some very vague stories about someone who raised a mink. They let it go and it didn't run away because it was like bonded to it was like imprinted on them. And it like ran around like hunting stuff in the barnyard and then kind of came back and then eventually disappeared. Like that's the closest I ever heard of anyone doing it. So as far as I know, which is different what I do, I don't just like turn them loose like a a feral cat, know, or like a barn cat in me. Um, I actually like falconry have control of the situation. I have saying what they hunt and where they hunt and get them to bring it back. Like I have a recall, you know, it's, totally different. Um, so yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I'm the only guy who's ever done it, or at least the first guy who's ever done it. Um, but like I said, guarantee you someone else has. Joseph, I'm curious. I'm just trying to think this through and listen really close to you. This is, uh, it's, it's really good. I love it. I love what you're saying. Do you just take a mink and get something that it would kill and, you know, let it go after that thing and kill it and then try to give it a treat to take to get it to come back to you? Tell me how you I'm just so curious. How do you do it? I know you can't we don't have enough time for you to tell me the entire process, but just the 30,000 foot view of how you do that. Hello, this is Kenneth the Whip with the Gundog Nation podcast, and we're proud to announce that we are now partnered with Ducks Unlimited. 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She's also a lifelong hunter, a generational hunter. She owns hunting dogs. She doesn't just sell dog equipment. She backs it up. She's the real deal. And actually, I think she actually might own more dogs than I do. Whether you hunt coon, rabbit, hogs, predators, or your turkey hunter, you name it, they have supplies there for you. She has Sitka, Filson, hay bowl, outdoors, all kinds of clothing, boots, bolt boots, deck boots, hunting boots, you name it, they have it. It's dogandhunt.com. Check out Summer Rentals. They're on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. and we are so proud to be sponsored by them. So I mean, I had to figure out how to do it because I was like, ⁓ OK, I'll just take this mink and we'll catch stuff. Well, falconry, when they catch something, they come down to the ground and then they're sitting there and you go and like give them some food so they're not scared and try and fly away and you and then you take them and you've got them. But a mink, lot of times they kill something, they're down in a hole or under a bush or like in some crevice. And so my very first successful hunt ended with me like Well, crap, what do I do now? I didn't think this far. And so I realized, well, I got the mink back, but the squirrel that it had killed was left up under this barn. And I ended up having to pull up some boards and a bunch of different things to get squirrel back. And I was like, that was a ridiculous amount of effort. There's gotta be a better way. So then I thought, well, how could I teach my mink to bring it back? And so that became a multi-year experiment with multiple different minks. with me trying to teach them, when you catch something, bring it back to me and I'll give you this nice ground up easy to eat meat. So you don't have to chew into that animal, which people don't realize how much work it is for a normal animal to eat. They see dogs and they pour them a little dog food in the dish and the dog goes, and it's gone. And they're like, wow. Like that's not how a dog eats in the wild. They catch a whatever a deer and they pull the fur out. for like 10, 15 minutes. And then they get us a vulnerable spot and they start chewing and they chew and then they pull and they chew. And the amount of effort a wild animal, whether it be a wild canine, bird of prey, mink, the amount of pre effort it takes before they can really break in and get feeding, depending on what they've caught and the species can be astronomical. Now, if it's a fox eating a mouse, it's obviously they just gulp and it's gone. But when it's something near their body size, I mean, it could be an hour endeavor just filling their belly in all the chewing through bones and hide and fur and feather and man, it's an ordeal. So I basically made sure the mink initially were catching something that would be an ordeal. I'm not taking them out, let them catch field mice where they could just go crunch, crunch, crunch, swallow. There it goes. Or a little minnow, crunch, crunch, swallow. There it goes before you even know it, it's gone. I wanted them to catch something like a bunny or a muskrat or a big rat that took a lot of work to eat and then said, hey, dude, rather than spend a lot of time and effort, look what I've got. It's a nicely ground up muskrat, brown rat mix or whatever I've, you know, ground up. It's easy to swallow. It's just like when you feed your dog, woof it down and it's gone. And they're like, Ooh, that's really nice. And I teach the mink to be lazy. Hey, let's don't chew into that. rabbit or whatever. It takes so much work. Look at this. I've got this nice, easy to eat meal and they learn it's easier to eat it what I have than it is to eat what they have. ⁓ Now, yeah, exactly. And the easiest thing to do is to teach them to go out. Well, they already going out and killing stuff is natural. That's not really teaching, but allowing them to go out, find some kind of prey like a rat or whatever, catch it and kill it. and then call them back and have them leave what they caught, come back and eat. That's really easy to teach. It takes maybe two, three weeks, sometimes less, sometimes it's two or three repetitions. And they're like, ⁓ cool. I go out, do the fun part, killin' And then I skip the hard part, trying to eat it, and I come back to this guy and get easy food. This is a sweet deal. And they oftentimes, when they kill stuff, get so excited, all they think about is killin' another one anyway. And if they're in a place where there's a lot of prey, pretty easy for them to just like, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, hunt, kill, kill. Okay, I'll be a little tired. I think I'd like to eat something. ⁓ hey, here's that guy. He feeds me a nice, easy, prepared meal. And then he goes back and you feed him. That's super simple to teach. What's extremely complicated and time consuming and frustrating to teach is, hey, you just killed that animal, but don't leave it. bring it back to me and then I'll give you that food. And if you don't bring it back to me, I'm not going to give you that food. And for some reason that is easily the most difficult thing I've ever trained any animal I've ever worked with to do. can take years and something just won't learn it. They just refuse. There are lucky few that pick it up really quick and easy. But see I compare that to a retriever. It's been genetically wired. over hundreds of years to retrieve, whereas they've been genetically wired to take off and not let anybody else have that, because this is my dinner and I can't share it with you know. So I can see where that is really hard to rewire into a week. I mean talk to a wolf trainer. The idea of teaching a wolf to go out, catch something and then bring it back to you is so foreign to them. And it's not just like strange to them, it goes against everything in their body. So it's kind of like I made this funny analogy and now it's really stuck in my head. ⁓ It's like if you've seen those cartoons with a little angel and a little devil on their shoulder, they will always have that little devil whispering in their ear, dude, dude, he's going to steal it. I know he's going to steal. I just know he will go down a hole, deep, dark hole, far away as you can. And it's just like screaming in their ear and It's really hard to get that angel, the little soft-spoken sweet angel to remind him, hey dude, he's never stole it from you before. Just trust him, he'll give you food. And the angel's not whispering, he's screaming and jabbing his little pitchfork into their neck saying, no, don't trust him. Like, cause that's all their instincts tell them is don't trust other predators and creatures and you know, they're not a social animal. ⁓ So they don't have like buddies in the wild that they go hunting with, you know? So let's take it to the next step that you've done. Once you've taken this time, you've learned how to actually train a mink, I know is extremely hard. And then you've learned, hey, you know, can make this a business. When did that take place? And tell me how that happened. That happened completely by accident. I'm actually very entrepreneurially minded, but that was never an entrepreneur endeavor. I had any desire to pursue with any real intent. ⁓ I was pushing various different things, but that was not one of them. basically what happened was people found out, hey, this guy can catch and kill rats. And so the word got out and they're like, hey, I got a rat. Can I pay you? And you'll come remove it. And I'm like, well, sure. And then that person when I solve their problem would tell their friends who told their friends and such and so forth. And the whole while I'm filming it, hey, this is my mink, not all the time. It wasn't very consistent in the beginning, but sometimes I would film it. Hey, there's my mink catching some rats. And then I put it up and then someone would see the video and say, hey, dude, I've got rats. Can you catch my rats or squirrels or whatever their problem was, you know? ⁓ And just little by little it snowballed. And the actual money wasn't very ever very serious on the pest control side though. mean, it became a part-time income. What it really became was people started watching the videos and the videos on YouTube got so big that YouTube, mean, I eventually figured out many years later, four years into it, hey, you can get paid on YouTube, which I didn't even know that was an option. I wasn't making videos to make money. I just was trying to document this supposedly first time ever someone hunting with a mink, you know. And so when all of a sudden I found out I can make money on YouTube and how to do it, I got my channel going. Then I was making a few hundred bucks a month and I was like, ⁓ cool. That's nice. And we were just filming with cheap digital cameras. And then eventually my wife got a nice, ⁓ I got married. My wife had a smartphone and we started filming with that. And then one month I had a fishing video where I caught a big old carp. And for whatever reason, people got a kick out of it. And the video kind of took off and it was shared probably on some big fishing platforms, my guess, because it really was an out of nowhere take off and then dive that back down again. So my guess is somebody, the right person shared it. Some like meat eater type guy that everyone knew. And I'm not in the fishing world or even really very much of the conventional hunting world. So I wouldn't even know who it was, but whoever it was, they were big enough name that my channel went and then it went. Like it just shot up and the shot back down again and all of a sudden I had a big chunk of money I had two grand out of nowhere and I'm like, wow That was pretty nice Maybe I should actually invest into this YouTube channel for the first time in my life because none of the equipment I was using was purchased for the sake of YouTube. It's just things I had anyway, like I said my wife's phone, you know, so I'm like, well Maybe I should take this $2,000 and invest it back into the channel And so I went and bought a nice camera and that was the first actual expense of the business years into it, if you want to even call it a business. yeah, just little by little things took off and I eventually incorporated dogs in with the mink because I found that when you had a very big rat infestation, ⁓ there's only so much a mink can do. And even if you're only after one rat, a lot of times the mink goes in one hole. The rat comes out the other and if you're just standing there looking stupid, the rat might get away. But if you have a dog there, he could snatch that rat up before it escapes. And even if it's the one and only rat you're after, hey, that rat didn't escape and leave you looking stupid. So. Well, can the mink and dogs work together or is that not possible? my dogs work with the mink. Yeah. Do you just raise the pups with the minks or how do you get that to happen? It doesn't matter. I've gotten dogs at two or three years old. Heck, I got a dog that was hunting me before I owned it. It was a little terrier from Louisiana. That dog had killed a couple of before it was my dog. It also killed some livestock. That's why it was available. It was killing sheep and, or not sheep, excuse me, goats and chickens. And ⁓ I have goats and I have sheep, excuse me. I have sheep. It was killing goats and I have chickens. And obviously I work around those types of animals. Even if I didn't own them myself, the dog would need to be broke to them. And the mink, the dog had killed wild mink. And I was like, man, this is going be a challenge. This is my first terrier ever. Um, but I think I could do it. And I took her home and within a couple of weeks she was hunting right along sides of mink. She could run through a flock of pheasants or chickens and a pen and just ignore them and kill a rat. You know, dogs are amazing creatures. They're not like me. They're amazing creatures. Well, what I looked at your side and I what all and I know this just for the listeners. Tell tell us what type of breeds that you use for of dogs along with your mink. So I've gone through a few different types and breeds over the years. Basically what it comes down to is for ratting. I want two different types of dogs. I want a small terrier like dog to fit into tight places. run under farm equipment or parked vehicles, squeeze in between hay bales, you know, that kind of job. Just the smaller, but quicker the better. I don't like the dachshunds or the other real stumpy kind of deformed dogs because anytime the rat runs, they're at a huge disadvantage. And then the shorter the dog is, any kind of obstacle, whether it's snow, mud, water, boards in the way, a hay bale. if the dog's small enough, a hay bale totally blocks his view, he can't see anything. But I want them as small as possible to get into those tight places. So basically what I end up wanting is an athletic type terrier rather than a kind of a short squatty terrier. And definitely, definitely don't have any interest in the dachshund types that are just real deformed and overly close to the ground. ⁓ So basically, but it doesn't really have to be a terrier. It just ends up usually being a terrier fits that description. They gotta be really gritty too, because at that size, they cannot afford to re-grip and let the rat go because they're not fast enough to re-catch it. Some of these bigger, faster dogs, they could be kind of wussy and flip the rat in the air and then re-grab it before it even touches the ground. I don't like it, but they can get away with it. A little dog does that, they re-grip and the rat's gone. It's escaped. So they need to be real. Real greedy, I've ever seen Joseph. The grittiest dog I've ever seen is the, the Yawg or the Jag terrier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yawg's I haven't actually owned a Yawg. I've really wanted to, I just haven't found the right one yet. They tend to be bigger than what I'm looking for usually. ⁓ I've had lot of Terriers. Yeah. I've also really wanted to try a good working Russell, but they're hard to find. I've got, I've got a connection. just everything falls apart every time he's trying to get one from him. So I haven't got one yet. And I'm very familiar with Pratterdale's. actually love those dogs. I've never owned one. I've had some Jags, some Yawgs and had a few of them. I've had a Hunt Terrier, which are used a lot in Africa. I got one out of Louisiana, which, but the Pratterdale's are real neat. Tell everybody, explain what a Pratterdale is to the listeners. So most people, if they picture a Jack Russell Terrier, but just color it black and make it crazier than crazy. That's a pattern now. They have a lot higher pain tolerance, really, really gritty dogs. Typically, mean, obviously there's everything in that breed, but generally speaking, very, very hard. They'll go in and take a lot of bites without re-gripping is a good one. ⁓ Very, very driven, driven dog. ⁓ But yeah. they end up being, if I can get the right one that's got the right athletic ability combined with the size and then the drive to shove into tight places, they work really good. Often they'll have a good useful nose for finding and telling you where the rat is. But the disadvantage with those little dogs, the advantage is obviously any kind of tight quarters, tight places. The disadvantage is ⁓ when the rat runs across the open, just the fact that they're short and small, they're not going to be very fast compared to pretty much anything with legs, right? You look at even just a Labrador or not even a particularly fast breed, just a big full-sized dog. They're going to outrun the terrier just due to the fact they have a longer stride. So then the second type that I want to have is something really quick and taller, able to look around, know, look over a hay bale instead of being blocked, their view blocked by a hay bale, able to run through, you know, puddles and mud and... snow and jump over objects and stuff like that. ⁓ And so I started out with terriers and what are called lurchers. A lurcher is basically a sight hound crossed with some other working breed. So it could be like a collie lurcher, which would be a collie crossed with like a greyhound, for example. Or it could be a bull lurcher, a pit bull crossed with a whippet, let's say. ⁓ It doesn't really matter. It's basically some working breed cross with some sight hound is a lurcher. See, I've only heard that term used in the United Kingdom. I've never heard anybody in the States use that term. Yeah. There aren't too many lurcher guys here, which is, think, silly. They're a nice versatile dog. I think more people should use them. Hog guys would love a good lurcher. mean, cross a bulldog with a gray hound or a stag hound or something, and ⁓ you got a lot more speed and leg. You know, you've got ⁓ rabbit guys who maybe their dog's a little dumb or a little, a little too fragile. You cross in some collie in the right percentages. It doesn't have to be a half and half. It could be like one eighth collie, but, that little bit of collie blood will add some brains, some bitability, some endurance and you know, so yeah, there's a lot of uses for them. ⁓ just depends on how you're hunting. So what, what is it? Do you have any lurcher type dogs now? I don't right now. So my last lurcher, I had one that didn't work out. She just didn't like rats. Well, she liked rats, but she spent too much time flipping around and being scared of the teeth. That's just no good for me. And then another one that just didn't like rats at all. She wasn't actually a lurcher. She was a whippet. So she was a straight sight hound, just wasn't into rats. So I went through a couple that just didn't work out. And the last one that I had that did work out, he was a bull archer. was one quarter pit bull, three eights whippet, three eights staghound. He was an awesome, awesome, awesome dog, but sadly he got a hereditary cancer. Same one as mom did. Died at the same age, same cancer. Five and a half years old. He wasn't old at all, but just got ate up with cancer. Same thing as mom had. So it was clearly hereditary. ⁓ So anyway, right now, ⁓ For my fast dog, you want to laugh. It's a pit bull. I've got a game bred pit bull actually out from by you. ⁓ Not right by you, but I mean, state wise. Obviously your state's enormous, but got her from Fort Worth area and brought her back and really nice athletic dog. Unfortunately, the term pit bull has really been tainted by some really stupid, ugly dogs that don't look anything like a pit bull and don't act anything like a pit bull. So when the general public hears pit bull, what they really picture is like a mastiff and they're nothing like what an actual pit bull is. Being from Texas, you probably know what a pit bull is, but I guarantee you 90 % of people, they're picturing a totally different dog. Well, I'll take it back even further. So I was born and raised in Southeast Kentucky, Appalachia. In the eighties, know, pits were really popular and the and I actually owned pit bulls for a long time. So. The there. The old pits that we were used to that come out of the South, especially sees these stuff down in Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky. You see, we call them all red nose pits. It's an old line of and those pits were very athletic, very lean, tall, lanky. Not what we see today, not like you see on television. And you'll see that type of dog, the people in Texas that have hog dogs that I've hunted with, they'll have an athletic pit. It's not, you know, now they've turned them into bully breeds. You know, I may offend people, but they've ruined the breed. ⁓ They can't tolerate heat. The old pit bulls, they never got sick. They, know, they, they were just hearty dogs. Never got diseases. There were no hip trouble, elbow trouble. You'd have to have a C-section to have puppies, you know? But it's, anyway, I'll get off my soap box, but you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, they're totally different dogs. So unless you're some good old boy from the South, you probably don't know what we're talking about. And you're picturing some mastiff mutt that some thug down the street has. it's totally different dog. They typically aren't big. A very, very big one is like 60 pounds. Like that's a giant really for the ⁓ And they, mean, there are ones that get bigger than that, but they're so incredibly rare. You'd have to go through hundreds and hundreds of dogs to find one, even 60 pounds. They consider anything above 50 as big. Most of them are down in the like lower forties to like mid 30 pounds. Maybe I should say mid 40s to mid 40s to mid 30s. That's the average. there, it's not that hard to find one that's even below 30. I've seen 24 pound pit bulls. I've seen 29 pound pit bulls. I've seen 28 pound pit bulls. mean, they can get small. I've heard of ones even under 20 pounds down the size of a Patterdale. And you know what? That's a of that old Staffordshire Terrier. ⁓ that was some of that was bred into them. Cause the Staffordshire from England is a 30 pound dog max and they're a small pocket sized dog. But that's where a lot of that came from. Your dog that you have on your Instagram page is a beautiful red. I knew that was old school pit. Hey, it's Kenneth Whip with the Gundog Nation podcast. And I'm very proud to have as a new sponsor, Cable Gangs. That's spelled G-A-N-G-Z. Brendan Landry at Cable Gangs has developed, in my opinion, and I have, and I'm a customer, the best tie-out systems on the market. They're easy to pack, easy to store, they can call up just like an extension cord. They use premium galvanized steel cable, coated with durable UV resistant PVC coating. The branding can make custom products, anything you want that's related to a dog tie-out system or a cable system or a way to safely secure your dog. They've even made a system that works with a bicycle so you can go and exercise your bicycles. and have your dog running along with you. It would be impossible for me to describe to you all the different custom applications they have, so just go to their website at CableGangs.com and check it out. But also, they make dog tie-outs, a way to safely secure your dog if you're at a field trial, a hunt test, a coon hound competition, whatever that might be, ⁓ beagles, these guys make the best product on the market. Check it out for yourself, CableGangs.com. Hey, it's Kenneth Witt with the Gundog Nation podcast and we are so proud to be partnered with the National Shoot to Retrieve Association, also known as NASTRA. NASTRA has a common love for producing the best bird dogs possible. It's a great community that builds and bonds everlasting friendships. I've actually got to meet a lot of the NASTRA members and who's taken me hunting and some other grouse hunting and stuff in different places. So I can honestly say I'm a member. and I'm proud to be partnered with them. Nassar hosts national and regional field trials that emphasize the working ability of bird dogs. They have been around for over 50 years. There's a reason that Nassar has been around that long. Please check them out at www.nstra.org and belong and support your local Nassar club. They do have national and regional events and it's a good place to help learn to be a better dog trainer, a better dog owner, and to compete with your bird dog. Thank you. Yep, she's from the original real deal pit bull. None of this bully crap, none of this pet crap. She's straight out of, ready to do what pit bulls do and nothing else. And then I, course, kind of like ⁓ I'm trying to get those mink to bring something back to me when it's totally unnatural, I'm taking her and saying, okay, we're not going to fight dogs. You're going to fight rats, we're going to fight raccoons, but we're not going to fight dogs. We're not going to attack horses. We're not going to... mess with cattle or sheep or chickens. And one of the interesting things I found, which was a bit of a surprise, I actually find it's easier to do that than to even just take a terrier and say, Hey, we're not going to fight dogs. the reason is, is pit bulls, at least all of the ones I've seen, I guarantee you there's exceptions that aren't like this, but out of all the ones I've seen and I've been through, I don't know, over half a dozen different dogs that I've worked with, they tend to be Kind of like if you, their mind is kind of like if you cross the mind of a, a Patterdale and like a golden retriever or a border collier or something like that. They've got that high, high, high, high drive or a Yogg terrier, it doesn't have to be a Patterdale, a terrier, working terrier crossed with like some high bid ability breed, like a Labrador, like I said, a German Shepherd or something like that. So high, high, high, high pain tolerance, high, high, high, high prey drive. but also they've got a good solid desire to please and intelligence. They don't all have the intelligence though. There are some real dumb ones, but I say on average, they tend to be quite smart. And even if they're not smart, even if you end up with a real dumb one, they still have that bit ability there, at least the ones I've seen, even the ones that are dumb as rocks, they want to please you. Whereas terriers are very, very self-serving. They're gonna do what a terrier does and you can just shove whatever you want. you know, ⁓ out the window, because I don't care. I do what I want as a terrier. Pit bulls are very concerned. Most of them, I should say, are very concerned with what you want, sometimes to the point of being a flaw. And you have to be careful not to give them too much direction or they might start looking to you too much instead of working on their own. know, two things I'll add to you just. Suggestions so one dog you might try and I did a lot of blood tracking here. I've got a high fence hunting ranch and a blue lacy Research that it's a texas breed. It was originally I've never seen one but I've heard of them and researched them very athletic Very hearty health wise. No, no really known health problems. They're true working breed grit I mean i've never seen one that have grit that they can do anything. They're an all-purpose dog But they're very fast. had one I named Storm. She looked like a lot. I mean, she was just a blur. Athletic can jump, works. They're biddable. They can be a little dog aggressive, you know? That's like most of those gamey dogs can be. But really, it'd be something good. But yeah, I was going to ask you one other question on that line. Oh yeah, so I found that your yaw terriers or those types of the little terriers, some of them are almost feral. They don't want to be in your lap. They don't want to be petted. They don't want affection. Do you find that in those paddardells or in some of those dogs? You can. You can definitely. There's some that are very social and very affectionate, but almost none of them are that way while they're working. When they're working, they're working. They're just focused. Even if they're a very affectionate, sweet dog at home, when they're working, that's all they want to do and that's all they think about. And so they do have a very selfish mindset where you could teach them a concept and they understand the concept, but they're going to kind of test the boundaries and find ways around it and do what they kind of want to do in the end. Whereas a lot of pit bulls, when they learn what you want to do, a good one will just do what you want them to do, even if you're not looking. Like they're not like, oh, hey, he's not looking. I'm going to do it anyway. That's kind of what the terriers like. You teach them, Hey, we don't eat the rat. Don't eat the rat. Don't eat the rat. Don't eat the rat. Don't eat the rat. Like, dude, I've had you for a year. Well, you quit eating the rat. And a pit bull, a good pit bull is like, Hey, don't eat the rat. And they're like, okay. Yeah. That's my experience too. just the first or second repetition. They're good for the rest of their life. I trained my puppy. My pit bull at a puppy. Hey. We don't eat the rats. She's a, okay. She's never tried to the rat. I have two terriers right now that I've owned for a year and they still, if you're not looking, they've learned now, don't they? found a boss, but when boss isn't here. Yeah. So Joseph, take us, take us on a job. You got called out. You're grabbing your meat and your dogs, one or two. What do you take with you and take us through what that's like. ⁓ My most common jobs are backyard chicken coop type scenarios where, hey, we've got a chicken coop in the backyard and the rats have come in and we've got neighbors on each side of us. We're living in ⁓ a little ⁓ just typical suburban neighborhood, but here in Utah, suburban neighborhood means people have chickens, people might even have horses. ⁓ We're not like in the Midwest where they're like, hey, We know you back an endless cornfield, but you live in the city. So you will not have a chicken. You will not have a cow. You will, but dude, my backyard backs an endless cornfield. I don't care. You are in town. Like that's a very Midwestern mentality from when I was living there, even in the middle of the teeniest town. Nope. You can have a chicken here. You're like surrounded by city and they're like, yeah, he's got chickens. I got chickens. That guy's got pigs. So it's a very different and I don't know what it's like in Texas. have no idea. I've visited many times, but I haven't been there long enough to know what the culture is like. The suburbs are not going to be like that, but you get outside of the city limits and even like Midland, for example, outside of the city limits, people have horses, you know, and stuff like that. But you don't, you won't see it inside the city. So you guys, it sounds like you guys are like the Midwest here. Literally, you could be crammed in the middle of suburbia and they have chickens in the backyard. And it's very normal. And they might have a limit. Maybe they can't have a, like, obviously if you're going to have bigger livestock, you've got to have some land to go with it. Like quarter acre isn't going to cut it. You need like a half acre to have a horse, for example. If you have a quarter acre, you can have chickens. If you have a 10th of an acre, you can have chickens. mean, they don't care. Like horses, you need a little bit of land to go with it. So I'm seeing where you're going. So those types of neighborhoods, you're gonna have more rodents, you're have more pests. So you're gonna have a big need for guys like you. Yeah, so you'll be right in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. They've got chickens, the rats have come in and they don't know how to get rid of them. They've tried poison, they have six cats, they shoot at them with BB guns. I mean, most people, I'm like the very last guy they call. It's actually a surprise to me. When I say, okay, so what have you tried yet? And they're like, ⁓ nothing. We just looked up your number. And I'm like, what? Like, I'm the first guy to come? This is cool. usually I'm like a tenth number, 10,000 to get rid of these things. And they've just as a last resort found this goofy dude on the internet or whose friend knew this guy on the internet or whatever. And they call me. And so usually, like I said, they've been through every method you can think of. They've hired multiple pest control guys. or they've done a do it yourself poisoning trapping methods. Anyway, so if they've used any kind of toxins, I have to tell them, well, sorry, clean it all up. I can't come for a while. We need to get all the rats who've died from the poison to rot into oblivion. We need any poison that's sitting out that you don't know that the rats have carried under a burrow. We need that to be, you know, over time degraded. And then I can come out. So sorry, we're gonna have to wait a few months. Sometimes I'm lucky and they're like, no, we didn't dare put poison down. We didn't want to kill our cats, for example. We have all these cats that are supposed to kill the rats. We don't want them to die too. Like, okay, great. So I'll come in and in my truck, I've got a menagerie of different weird stuff. I've got jacks, multiple different roller jacks. So I can jack up sheds or other big heavy things the rats could be under. I've got pry bars and crowbars and sawzalls and hammers and. screw guns and all kinds of stuff like that. And I bring my mink, I bring my dogs, and then we first I'll get out and I walk around and I check out what's this, what are the risks, what are the dangers for my animals? Hey look, there's a trap, you should put that away. Remember I told you, you know, whatever it is. ⁓ man, if I let a mink go here, he can easily get into the neighbor's yard who has a dog. keep the dog away, go talk to the neighbor, let's see if we can get that dog away. Basically figure out the hazards and then I'll bring out the dogs first usually and say, hey, where's the problem areas? And they run around and sniff and say, hey, usually it's obvious. Rats aren't necessarily the most discreet animals. They dig big obvious holes and poop everywhere. But sometimes there's somewhere you didn't expect. Even the most obvious of animals are really good at surprising you and you think they're right here and they're really over there. and the dogs will run over there and be like, hey, they're over here boss. Okay, so where they're at, we can't put a mink down or it's not advantageous to put a mink down for some reason. Okay, so how else do we get to it? And we start flooding things with hoses or jacking up sheds with my jacks or digging them up with shovels or hey, this is a place where we can utilize the mink. Great, let's get the mink, turn the mink down that hole. in under that shed, whatever, into that wood pile, whatever the situation is. Sometimes we're dismantling wood piles and it can be really tedious. And it's like the rats in there and the problem with wood piles is there's the crevices aren't uniform. You you get under a shed, it's usually relatively uniform. You get down a hole, it's relatively uniform and the mink can just travel and follow the mink or follow the rat, excuse me. The problem with wood piles is there are no uniformity. You've got a hole big enough for the dog and then a hole big enough for a mouse and then a hole big enough for a mink and then a hole big enough for a rat. like, so the mink can't follow the rat everywhere it goes. They're just not small enough. They can follow them into a lot of places, but they can't follow them everywhere. So that mink will squeeze in and the rat will just quickly squeeze to another section and avoid the mink. And then the mink has to work his way over. And if he can, he shoots over to another section and it's like, dude, this is... that could do this all day long. And so we end up dismantling the whole stupid wood pile piece by piece. And then as the rats pop out, the dogs snatch them. ⁓ So yeah, it's some cases, honestly, we don't even get the mink out. It's like, dude, we don't need to mink or we don't want the mink out. There's some kind of hazard of losing the mink or something. And it's just like, it's not worth it. And then other cases, it's like, man, if I didn't have a mink, we never would have got this job done. ⁓ Or Some cases are right in between. Well, we didn't need the mink because we have the jacks and we could lift up the shed but if we lift the shed up immediately the rats are gonna scatter all at once and the dogs are gonna catch two or three or four of them and the other 20 are gonna escape and now we have to track them down and figure out where they're at and they're in a neighbor's yard and all that's all this complication. So you want to get them every single one as they're coming out. So sometimes sticking the mink down, even though you could have lifted it up, you don't want to, because there's going be too many rats. So you put the mink down, the mink kills two or three or four or five or whatever he kills. And then the rats are coming out two or three at a time or one at a time as they're frightened out by the mink. Instead of all piling out at once when you lift the darn thing, they come out one or two or three at a time. And the dogs have a chance to catch one, kill it, wait for the next, catch one, kill it, wait for the next. and you're just so much more efficient, even though you didn't technically need the mink, it was a way more efficient way of doing things. And we ended up getting all of the rats or missing one rat, but getting the rest. Whereas if we would have lifted the object, we would have got two of the rats and the other 20 would have ended up in the neighbor's yard and the neighbor after that's yard and the neighbor after that's yard. And eventually they would just escaped. Yeah, there's situations where you have to have a mink, situations where you don't need the mink, but it's sure helpful. And then there's situations like, dude, I'm not getting the mink out either because it's not useful or it's just, there's some kind of risk that I'm willing to take. Well, know, Joseph, if you, I was looking at your YouTube videos. So now I've just got to ask you, what's the craziest, most infested job you've ever been on? Some of them look crazy. I don't know if it's from one job. If it's from several jobs, I saw some big numbers. Yeah. So I had a job where in five days we caught just under 1500 rats and the biggest day of those five, we caught 512. And the crazy part was they were all in a little shed. Like we're talking a shed about the size of like a child's bedroom, like not a big shed, not a barn, just like a typical, small child's bedroom was the entire square footage of the shed. But what had happened was we'd been ratting. This is my belief. Obviously, I don't know what really happened. But my assumption is we caught like 200 rats the first day and then 250 the next day. then, know, 150 the next day, whatever the numbers were. But as we were doing that, we were tearing down sheds, digging up burrows, flooding under cement. And so little by little, we'd catch 90, 95 % of the rats here, 5 % would end up over here. We catch 90, 95 % of the rats here, 5 % would up here. And the escapees in my belief just accumulated into this one last hiding place. I do not believe they were in those numbers when we came. I think they just slowly filtered into that because it was the last haven for them to hide in. That's my belief anyway. ⁓ So when we got to the shed, It was filled up to the rafters with old tires, parked lawn mowers that didn't work, some kind of weird sifting machine that was like from the 1800s for seeds or something. Just stuff like that. But literally to the rafters, like it was tolerant of man in this kind of debris. And then to make it worse, it was all sitting on a wood floor that was a good, you know, four inches, two inches, whatever, off the ground. So the rats could be under the floor itself. But we're talking an old rickety, like this shed was probably built before my grandfather, like 1800s shed. So they were all under the floor boards and in the tires. And I just went and hauled every tire by myself, one at a time, because I got a cameraman and that's it. He's filming and I'm lifted. I unloaded this entire shed full of scrap iron and tires and all kinds of junk until there were just mounds of stuff all in front of the shed and the shed was empty. And then all the rats, we'd only caught like four rats, maybe 10 rats, like they were all under that floor. So now I had to take a crowbar. and pry up the floorboards and it was all rotten and old. So it was easy to do. It wasn't like it was a freshly built sturdy floor. mean, it's just real easy degrading old wood. And I just, and just rats were everywhere. And it took us probably two hours of prep with maybe 10 or 20 rats at the most. And then the next two hours was just mayhem of rat slaughter. after rat slaughter, after rat slaughter. I think we had five dogs. So we're averaging about a hundred rats a dog when it was all said and done. And they were just be just because this wasn't day one. This was like day four for them, I believe. And so they'd have, they had a day of 120 rats and a day of 250 rats and a day of 212 rats, know, before this. So this is day four with no rest. And they were just. exhausted at the end of it. Man, I bet on you too. ⁓ yeah. Cause I'm hauling the stupid tires and pulling up the stuff and. So hell if I don't want to get too much in your business, but man, that's hard work. ⁓ do you charge by the hour by the rad, by the size of the place? How do you do that? Yeah, just by the day. Okay. Yeah. So I just charged by the day and then. If I'm traveling, then I include every day I'm traveling as a day. So if it takes me two days to get your place, you're going to have four days of work you're being charged for that. don't even do anything when it comes to actual catching rats. I don't charge Sundays. I just take that day off. So if I get there on a Tuesday and I work till Sunday, well, by then the dogs are beat. So let's say I get there on a Thursday, right? So we'll work Thursday, Friday, Saturday. and then we'll take Sunday off just for religious reasons. I won't work on Sundays and I won't charge them. But then the next Monday we'll get back to work. And sometimes I'll strategically do that so the dogs do get a day off. We had one job out in the middle of nowhere and it took us like, I think it was like two hours to drive to church. Cause we were looking for my specific faith, you know? And like. We purposely went there because we knew it was going to be a big job. We got there on like a. On like a. think it was a Thursday. So we didn't start work till Friday. So we worked Friday, Saturday, let them all rest Sunday and then worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And then we were done. You know, it was a five day trip ⁓ with a day in between for the dogs to rest. The one that I just described with 1500 rats though, we didn't think ahead and do that. We got there on like a Monday or a Tuesday. And so the dogs just worked straight until they were done. And Joe went like a Saturday or whatever day it was, you know. So how long have you been in business? I mean, how long this been your full-time business? Purina Pro Plan. Here at Gun Dog Nation, we use Purina Pro Plan for our dogs. We actually use the sport performance addition, which is 30 % protein and 20 % fat, the beef and bison. It contains glucosamine, omega-3s for their joints. It also contains amino acids for muscles and antioxidants. It also has probiotics. It's guaranteed to have live probiotics in each service. 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We're proud to have Migra ammunition as a sponsor for Gun Dog Nation. Hello, this is Kenneth Witt with Gun Dog Nation and I've got to tell you guys about something that I've gotten hooked on lately. It's Fauxlicious. These are gourmet instant faux and ramen bowls that actually taste like the real deal. When I'm out in the field all day and the last thing I want is to settle for bland camp food, Fauxlicious is what I go to. It's authentic, the flavor, it's real ingredients, it's ready in just minutes, it's perfect for hunters, fishermen, or anyone on the go. and can get them over 1900 Walmarts nationwide, your local HEB here in Texas, or you can just go online at folicious.com. Trust me, once you try it, you'll keep a few stocked in, in your bag, in your pack pack, or for your next adventure. I just want to say this, I'm going to add this to this commercial, because I know the owners of this company, they've hunted on my ranch, ⁓ Joseph, He and I actually met in Colorado on a hunting trip that was a real adventure. They are true hunters. They've hunted at the ranch, know, and I've hunted with them. And Ana, she is just amazing. She is the one that came up with this idea. They were both on Shark Tank. They are amazing people. So I love seeing people like this have a business. And I just had to say that in addition to the commercial because I really believe in the product and I believe in the people that made the product. Be sure and go to Fauxlicious.com or go to Walmart or HEB and try their product. I promise you, you will like it. So it's been full time since Eleanor was born and she's gonna turn eight. So it'll be, it's eight years now. So yeah, eight years, it's been right on eight years and a month. like exactly eight years full time. Now in that part of Utah or that part of the world, you have a snake problem? mean, like to me, we had that many rats, you'd have black snakes everywhere or, know, the rats would draw snakes. don't know what it is. I have never seen, and I've been in multiple states, so it's not just me locally. I think those, this is a pure assumption. I have zero data. evidence anything. This is just my assumption. I think when you get that many rats in an area they eat the snakes. Because if you think about it anyone's had a, and I'm no snake expert, I don't keep them as pets, but I know guys who do and I know from them and maybe there's some snake expert on here that's gonna be like, dude you're way off, but my understanding is if you stick a rat in with a full snake that snake's gonna get chewed up most of the time. The snake needs to be hungry, ⁓ eat the rat, and then it's fine. But if that snake's not hungry, maybe he's cold or sick or overweight, and so he's just not hungry yet or full from eating another rat or whatever. If there's something wrong with that snake and he's not ready to eat that rat, that rat is a danger to your snake. And maybe it's only certain species of snakes too. I don't know, but I know big full-sized pythons and stuff that have horrible scars. not from killing the rat, but from a rat that didn't get killed. And he just started eating the snake next to him. And so I have a belief without any real evidence, other than the fact I've never seen a snake once on a big rat infestation. My belief is if a snake moved into an infestation that big, they gulped down a rat or two or three, however big they are to consume, which a three rats is a really big snake. But let's say it's a really big snake. Gulps down three rats or maybe they're little rats. He gulps down three little rats, whatever. He's full. Now what's he going to do? He's going to sit around and digest that. And that's going to take several days and the rats are going to just come eat him to death or at least make him feel very unwelcome and he's going to leave. That's just the belief. I don't know if that's true. I just know that I've never once ever found a snake in a rat infestation, which doesn't make sense. But I knew what the first thing I thought about was like, know, here, ⁓ hogs, you know, we have wild hog problem. I don't know if y'all have that, uh, there are, you know, Texas, the whole state of Texas, to my knowledge is that way, the hogs eat the snakes and lots of cases, a lot of people, a lot of ranchers told me that, you know, the rattlesnakes won't rattle because all it does is alarm the hogs. know, hogs are smart. And know, maybe venomous snakes, everything I just said is a bunch of hogwash. Maybe a venomous snake will sit and strike at rats. Yeah. don't know. you said, because the first thing I thought about, you know, when you see a lot of rats like that around here, or even in Kentucky, where I'm from, it usually means there's snakes there too, like in a barn, right? Like I had a barn, I had horses and, you know, and feed and which is a rat, you know, haven, but I'd also have snakes that come in there to get the rats. ⁓ The thing is too though, you have a different species of rats. I've been writing down in Texas and I've never seen a brown rat and I'm not saying that they're the, they're the roof rats and roof rats are a different creature. aren't as aggressive. aren't as big. So maybe snakes can live just fine in a roof rat infestation. I've literally done like two roof rat jobs, three in my whole life. So I don't know a lot about them. So I'm guessing as bad on these roof rats as I am with the the snake thing. Maybe I've just never been in a snake area. Well, it's to say like, how could I go? Like I've been I've ratted in multiple states. Like how is I've never run into it? I don't know. That's interesting. Well, I do know when I watched, looked at your videos and your pictures that those rats, I've never seen rats like that. And here on like at my range, I was, I see field mice. I've never seen a big rat. I've just seen little field mice inside and out. So That makes sense. Yeah, it could be just a different species of rodent, because I know those black rats are very different from the brown rats, or excuse me, the roof rats, which black rat, roof rat, same thing. They all have dumb names that don't have anything to do with their color, but roof rats or brown rats are very different creatures. And in fact, the brown rats will, to my knowledge, kill and drive out roof rats. So maybe they're just aggressive enough, because like I said, I've done a whole whopping three roof rat jobs in my whole life. One was in Texas. One was ⁓ in a neighboring state. One was clear out in California and none of those jobs. ⁓ I would say give me enough experience for me to even begin to talk like I know what I'm talking about. You another question. So I just assume Joseph that you worked locally. So you're telling me what's the farthest you've gone. Pennsylvania. What is that like 20 hours? Eight states across. Oh, 20 hours. That's a quick drive. Uh, I think it's like 36 hours. I don't know. I'd have to, I'd have to do the math. It's 22 hours to my parents' house who live in Illinois and you still have three more states to drive through. So I think it's like 36 hours, but I didn't do it in one go. So I don't remember. I stopped at my parents' house, which they're, they're like two thirds of the way there. So I stopped and saw them. and then went on the rest of way. So I don't really stack drive length. What percentage of your work is out of state? Very little. ⁓ I try and travel out of state maybe once or twice a year, three times a year, because I'm a family guy. I've got little girls and I don't want to be leaving them. And I've got an oldest, my oldest now, she's been on one big trip with me. She went out with me to the Midwest and She's nine now. So she's been able to come out with me and she loved that. She's out on the farm feeding cows and driving the little farm vehicles around and stuff. She thinks that's a blast. And I let her learn as best I can, but I am in a more ⁓ suburban area. So like, I can't just let her go take the truck and drive anywhere, you know? So when we get out on those farms, like, hey, I remember we went down to the ⁓ Nevada out out on this farm they had these little golf carts that they they took of it just disappeared my wife's like you just let them go by themselves i mean sweetheart that's what i did growing up i grew up in Idaho driving a truck an actual truck and my grandpa wasn't around you know she was she's weirded out by that lifestyle but that's how i grew up ⁓ none of my brothers grew up like that but i left moved out at 15 and lived with my grandpa I was driving at like age, maybe not nine, but I was 12 driving the truck all by myself, you know? So anyway, I'm sorry, I'm going off on a tangent. So my eldest is old enough to come with me on trips like that now. And there are occasions where we'll take the whole family. There's been trips where my wife and all my kids come with me on jobs. But as you can imagine, that could be quite challenging. Little kids start fighting or... misbehaving or if there's any kind of dangers around like like farm equipment or something like that. It can be a little bit of a headache, but in certain situations that I really cherry pick and I'm like, you know what? This one seems safe and reasonable to bring a child to let's bring them if we if there's doubt, I'm not doing it. But if I could feel like, know what? This seems like a safe place. And I talked to obviously the person, hey, by the way, I'm thinking of bringing my kids. Is there any dangers? ⁓ no, we'll be fine. So, yeah. But A lot of the times I'm not bringing the fam and I'm off on my own and I like to, I don't want to make a habit of doing that. So like two to four times a year. Well, again, I'm not trying to be nosy, but I would think you traveling to Pennsylvania and back that's you'd be pretty expensive to be, to get you to come that far and work that hard and go all the way back. yeah. But that's interesting. I guess it's people that saw you on YouTube or something. Yeah. Well, that particular one, ⁓ was, it was a multi-layer contact, but yeah, that's usually, usually how those go is they've seen me, they reach out and they say, I've got a big problem. And, and a lot of times I just have to turn them down. The other thing is too, I want to feel really confident that I can make a difference. And if I have any question about being able to do the job, I'll just tell them like, I don't want to gamble that you're Because I'm going to charge you the same whether I catch a rat or not. I had one job I drove clear out to the Midwest to Illinois and we caught one rat. One rat. That one wasn't my fault. A wild mink moved in and killed all the rats and the only one left was this big old monster rat. But like, you know how stupid I feel driving all the way across the country charging them like eight days worth of work or whatever? ⁓ and catching one rat. I do not like those scenarios. ⁓ yeah, I try and do my best to qualify the job. Is this a job I can do? Is this a job I want to do? Is this a job that I think I'm going to make a difference in? And if I have any doubts on any of those things, I'll start trying to get out of it. Hey, man, I don't know that I could fix this problem because of XYZ. I don't know that I'm the right guy for you. And if they're really pushy, I'm like, okay, well, look, here's the thing. I'll come, but I don't know that I can do it. So if you're willing to risk your money and I don't have, I'll do it. But I'll tell you right now, you're gambling your money. Cause I don't know that I could fix the problem. And sometimes I'll come out and I fix it just fine. was like, geez, I don't know what I was worried about. But I just, I really hate, hate, hate taking people's money and not making a difference. don't. I'm not in it for the money. I want to make a difference and I want to feel like even if I made a ton of money and made zero difference, I feel like crap. Even though yeah, my bank accounts bigger. I don't feel good about it. I don't feel good about myself. I just feel like a piece of garbage at the end of the job, you know? Well, tell everybody, cause you know, I know you don't need publicity. You probably get more than you need, but tell her by this listing to us how they can get a hold of you. If they have a problem, uh, Where can they find you and where can they see examples of your work? So, ⁓ get on YouTube and just look up mink and my videos are going to come flooding in. There isn't really anyone else doing much on mink. So you might have some trapper with a mink or, or someone with a pet maybe. But I mean, other than that, just look up mink and you'll find me. ⁓ I have, I do have a, an exclusive club, ⁓ where I. I put all the videos I can't put on YouTube or I choose not to put on YouTube. So at the bottom of every even remotely recent video, you'll see a link for my exclusive club. And in that club, like I said, I'm posting, so some of the stuff I do, like I'll do ⁓ beaver pest control. I'll put like a little terrier down a beaver hole. The beaver comes shooting out and I'm in the city. So I can't just like shoot it. I'll stab it with a spear and drag it up on the shore. YouTube is not going to be letting me put that up. ⁓ And then I do a lot of raccoon pest control. So we've got, ⁓ you know, a pit bull killing a raccoon. That's not going to go over very well. And to be frank, I don't even want to show it even if they'd let me. There's too many crazies out there trying to, you know, shut down dog hunting and stuff like that. So I put all of that behind a paint wall and that pretty much kills the crazies. They love to bash on your free stuff. and to share and watch and hate on your free stuff. But the minute they have to pay a little money to see it, they all magically disappear. And so I've got all that stuff behind a paywall. So if you want to see my pit bull tree or go down a hole like a terrier and fight a raccoon or me spear and beavers. ⁓ And then a lot of my training methods I'll put in there too. ⁓ You know, people are also very, very averse to any kind of training. They're like, ⁓ that's not fair. That rat, you know, couldn't escape. And it's like, come on you guys, but I don't want to show that stuff to the general public. So I'll put all that kind of stuff that either shouldn't be shown in my opinion, or I just don't feel comfortable showing or can't show YouTube would straight up shut my channel down. If I showed it, all that stuff goes behind a paywall and you can, like I said, any even remotely recent video on YouTube will have a link at the bottom that says Mink Man's exclusive club. Go join that, there's a lot of really interesting videos. These coon hound guys would be shocked to see a pit bull track a coon for a mile and a half and then sit under a tree and bay under a tree. Obviously totally different sound. It doesn't sound any like a hound, but she'll sit under a tree. She has treed the same raccoon. Oh man, I need to write this down so I keep forgetting the number. I think it's five times, five or six times. Raccoons normally where we live, when they get up a tree, they'll sit there and you can climb up in the tree with them. And they're like, dude, I ain't getting down. There's a dog down there. ⁓ you literally reach down, pull on their tail before they'll jump. They do not want to jump out to that dog. There was a coon though, that was the exception. And, and, and anytime you approached the tree, it was like a bobcat. You know, bobcats, you got all these dogs barking at the tree and they see you come in, jump out and run. He was just like that. This coon, he would see me coming. I wasn't even close. And he'd jump out. And he'd jump out smart, not so the dog can grab it. He'd like click on a limb and jump into this big pile of brush and the dog would hear it go over there and the coon would be gone. And so I'd be waiting and waiting and waiting and follow her. I got a GPS to follow her because she doesn't make a sound unless she's on a tree. She's quiet. So I'm following her, following her, following her. Ooh, treat another coon. Okay, great. I wonder if it's the same one. Get up there, coon sees me again, gone. She's following, I was like, wow, that was the same coon. Cause there's no way I'm going to find two coons like that, the bail before you even get close. Yeah. ⁓ and her following her father. ⁓ she's treated again. Start this one. This time you let me get up to the tree. All I didn't jump yet. Maybe it's a different coon. I start pulling out the pole because I use a big long extension pole to knock them out of the tree for the dog. Cause like you said, we're in city limits. I can't shoot. And to be honest, I wouldn't want to shoot if I did it. So I, in my opinion, it's more sporting, the, dog work it. So anyway, I pulled the pull out and start just, I'm not even close to it. He just sees me extending this pole, he jumps out again. This coon, no joke, it was a minimum of five trees and she tracked it till it treed again, tracked it till it treed again, tracked it till it treed again, tracked it till it treed again. And then finally it didn't get it to a tree in time and she got it on the ground. never. never got caught from bailing once. He got caught, just didn't get to a tree in time. And she killed him. He wore her out, got her tired. Yeah. It was a minimum of five, maybe six. I'd have to go back to the video and count it. Like I said, I should write it down because I tell the story all the time. I know a lot of guys who they're hounds, if that coon bails, they struggle to pick up that scent again. And I've seen that in other dogs where for some reason they could trail that coon all day long. But him being in the tree and then coming down, it can be really hard for some reason. I don't understand it. And I'm not saying this is for all dogs, because it's clearly not for this little pit bull that's sleeping at my feet right now. That sucker could bail over and over and over again. Don't matter. She's going to find it. And she has zero, she's not part catahoula or part kerr or part blue tick. She's a hundred percent game bred pit bull. And she will track that sucker into the dust. She had a coon, no joke. It was in a pile of reeds that was like maybe a quarter acre. A quarter acre of reeds. How long do you think a coon could run around in a quarter acre of reeds without being caught? Five minutes, 10 minutes? It's thick old reeds. He ran around. He ran around in the same clump of reeds where I timed it. an hour and 15 minutes. And my buddy's like, dude, when are you gonna call her back? I'm like, I'm not calling her back. He's like, I don't think she's chasing a coon. I'm like, I agree. I don't think that coon could still be in there. But like, if she thinks it's in there and she's wrong, she needs to learn her lesson not to follow the same stupid track in a circle. But if that coon is in there, well, she'll show us she's the one who's right. So either she's just gonna get tired and quit. or she's going to catch a coon and I'm just going to sit and wait. And he's like, okay, whatever. And he's like, dude, come on, this is boring. I'm like, home then. I'm going to see what she does. And we sat there for an hour and 15 minutes in a quarter acre, circling and circling and circling and circling. And a dog walking through the reeds isn't quiet. It makes a lot of crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. So there's no way some outside raccoon decided, hey, I see these people sitting here talking not very quietly right next to this pile of brush where there's a dog in there going circles. Let's go in the pile and get killed. I guarantee you that was that same coon. And he just kept going in circles and going in circles and going in circles. And then finally he got tired and the dog caught him. And how she caught him, I don't know. Like most dogs would give up, move on, decide maybe, there's no coon in here. I know says there is, but there's not. And she circled that thing for an hour and 15 minutes in the same stupid quarter of a mile and she caught it and killed it. She, she, you know, can't train that kind of drive. That's, that's DNA. Yeah. She's a cool dog. I don't, I'm trying to say she could do what a coon hound could do. No, I'm not trying to say that at all, but she could do a heck of a lot more than 99.9 % of people think a pit bull can do. Um, and Get on that exclusive club and see it. She'll go down a hole like a terrier, obviously a big hole that she could fit in, right? She's not a little dog. She's 35 pounds, big broad shoulder, 35 pound dog. And she'll squeeze down a hole you never expect a dog that size to fit. Grab a coon by the snout, draw it out and then switch to the throat and kill it. She is a cool little dog. Cool little dog. She's a good looking dog. I was checking her out. Like I I grew up with some of those. I had a few when I was growing up. ⁓ Well Joseph, know you're probably busy man, you got a family of 10 too and working hard. I want to again let you tell everybody your web address and how to find you one more time and maybe we can talk again sometime. I'm going to have to go watch Russell's videos because I've only seen probably eight or nine. Yeah, yeah, dive into it. I've got hundreds of videos on YouTube, all kinds of mink. Stuff all kinds of dog stuff. I shouldn't say all kinds of dog stuff. Most of my dog stuff is in my exclusive club, but there's all kinds of mink stuff. There's ⁓ well I don't show the rabbits because people cry and I don't show most of the squirrels So that's not on there with the the mink catching rabbits and squirrels There's a couple squirrel videos, but most of them are on the the exclusive club. But yeah dive into it There's a whole bunch to see on my on my youtube and then If you're curious, go join the club. The club, if you could get in for just a month, binge and get out. you don't. Yeah. Yeah. So check it out. I've had, I've had now probably gone over 70 plus episodes I've recorded. This has definitely been most interesting and I've learned a lot from you today. And then I bet you'd be one heck of a dog trainer. ⁓ so you got plenty of options. If you, if you want to seek a different. a way to make a living. You could be a pro trainer. If you can train what you train, you can train anything. Yeah, yeah. I've done a little bit of dog training for other people, but the people frustrate me too much. You could train a dog to do anything, but there's only so much you could train a person. People just do things the way they want, ⁓ and you can't be there to feed them ⁓ &Ms or put a shot collar on them and make them. You can't do any of that stuff that you could do to a dog. People just, oh, well, and they end up doing whatever they want to anyway. They don't listen to anything he says. So that's what keeps me from the professional training world. I did that enough with horses too. Someone bring you their horse and their horse is bucking. Why is your horse bucking? He's not scared. He's bucking because you get off when he bucks. Stop getting off. Stick him in the belly with your spurs. Give him an over and under with your reins. Tell him, you do that, I'll make it uncomfortable. And quits bucking. ⁓ but I can't do that. That's mean. Okay. Well, then you'll have a horse that bucks whenever he doesn't want you off. So. They train the owner. You can't trade the owner. That's so yeah. You're right though. If times got hard, I could go that route, but I sure, I sure have enjoyed being able to just train for my own uses and not have to not have to mess with silly people and their silly opinions and, and lack of willing to learn or ability to learn. Sometimes people seem very willing, but man, they just struggled. understand the concept. You know? Yes. Yeah. Well, hey, you, uh, it's been a big pleasure having you on here, man. I've had a great time. This is a, that I've, you've broadened my horizons big time in the animal and dog world, which is part of my life, you know? And, uh, I hope we can stay in touch because I got a feeling I may call you for training issues. I don't know how much help I'll be, but I'll try. All right. Well, everybody Joseph Carter, ⁓ the Mink Man, check him out on YouTube. Believe me, you're gonna enjoy it. He's got an Instagram page too. ⁓ We've all learned something new today. Thank you so much for taking time to come on my show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello, this is Kenneth Witt with Gun Dog Nation. I'd like to encourage all you listeners and viewers on our YouTube channel to check out patreon.com forward slash gun dog nation. For $10 a month, you can become a member of our community and we'll have access to lots of stuff. Mainly we'll do a monthly forum, an open forum where you can ask me anything gun dog related and we'll learn from each other in community. Should be a lot of fun each month. We will do that. So check it out, patreon.com forward slash gun dog nation.