EP79 Moving the Needle for Wild Sheep – Charlie Kelly & Kyle Stelter
Sheep Fever
Fresh on the heels of a record July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025 fiscal year for the Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), record convention proceeds to WSF ($4+ Million), record contributions to the Wild Sheep Legacy Foundation Endowment Fund ($2.2 Million), and a record directed to wild sheep conservation and other WSF Mission Programs (a staggering $11.53 Million), Sheep Fever co-host and WSF President & CEO, Gray N. Thornton sits down with WSF Board of Directors Chair, Charlie Kelly and Vice Chair Kyle Stelter to look to the future. Chair Kelly’s mantra for the year is “Moving the Needle...
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EP78 Quiet Excellence – Silencer Central’s 20 Years of Saving Hearing, One Suppressor at a time
Sheep Fever
Celebrating 20 years of suppressor/silencer sales and manufacturing, and most notably making the once onerous BATF application process simple, painless, and seamless, Silencer Central is an award-winning partner of the Wild Sheep Foundation. Sheep Fever co-hosts Gray Thornton and Keith Balfourd visit with Founder and CEO Brandon Maddox to celebrate Silencer Central’s successes and discuss changes to National Firearm Act (NFA) laws signed into effect by President Trump and the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill. If you have been waiting to buy a suppressor for your next hunt or trip to the...
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EP77 Save The Hunt – A conversation with Dan Gates of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management
Sheep Fever
EP77 Save The Hunt – A conversation with Dan Gates of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management Of the Rocky Mountain states, Colorado has been ground zero for animal rights and anti-hunting, trapping, and science-based wildlife management extremists bent on challenging more than 100 years of successful and sportsmen funded wildlife restoration and management. After a stingingly narrow victory of a ballot box biology initiative to introduce grey wolves into the state, conservation minded Coloradans formed Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management (CRWM) led by Dan Gates to...
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EP76 North American Pronghorn Foundation
Sheep Fever
This week on Sheep Fever we visit with Eric Dippold, Secretary for the newly formed North American Pronghorn Foundation. A uniquely North American goat species often referred to as being in the antelope family, the pronghorn is a cherished big game species by sportsmen from around the world and an out-the-window wildlife viewing favorite of travelers indicating they are now “out west.” As celebrated as they are, there has never been an organization dedicated to their future, until now, and their timing couldn’t be better. Every year in one area or another where pronghorn range, we hear...
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EP75 Arizona Rocky Mountain Bighorn Raffle Tag
Sheep Fever
Sheep Fever co-hosts Keith and Gray visit with WSF Chairman, Charlie Kelly (AZ) and COO Corey Mason (TX) about the Foundation’s raffling of the 2025-26 Arizona Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Raffle tag, auctions tags, conservation funding, and where the money goes. Sometimes celebrated, sometimes hated on, auction tags do get a lot of attention. Some cry for more raffle opportunities to be “fair”, while others want to see max dollars raised for wild sheep, which translates to more wild sheep on the mountain and more opportunity for all forms of tags. Regardless, WSF has a mission committed...
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EP74 Wild Harvest Initiative with Shane Mahoney
Sheep Fever
Launched in 2015 with financial support from WSF and others, the Wild Harvest Initiative sought to calculate, for the first time, the total amount in pounds or tons of healthy, wild protein humanely harvested by sportsmen every year in the US and Canada. Keith caught up with Conservation Visions President and CEO Shane Mahoney to go over the numbers documented thus far and most importantly, how this data is being used to generate a broader public understanding and appreciation for sustainable use hunting. The sheer tonnage of wild protein consumed as meals and shared by hunters every year is...
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EP73 A Conversation with Jason Matzinger – Part I
Sheep Fever
Artist, film producer, television host, outdoor communicator, ambassador, hunter, conservationist, father are just a few descriptives of Montana native Jason Matzinger. In this episode Jason and Gray cover a broad range of topics from Jason’s roots, what makes him tick, outdoor media, where it came from, where it is going, and its benefits and burdens. Jason is the real deal and this episode covers topics coast to coast including the status of the outdoor industry. We also learn there is one descriptive that Jason does not consider himself to be…an “influencer.” Find out why. We’re...
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EP72 Best of Sheep Fever 2024
Sheep Fever
Tough to choose, but here is a Best of Sheep Fever 2024 special episode. Actually, our listeners choose for us by most popular downloads. A lot of ground covered by some pretty seasoned folks in sheep hunting, conservation’s history and future, wild sheep biology, predator management, shooting technology and marksmanship, to name a few. · Episode 40: Wild Sheep & Predators - Kevin Hurley, Kurt Alt, Tom Lohuis, and Eric Rominger (02:00) · Episode 46: Shooting Tech and the Era of Marksmanship - John Snow (28:19) · Episode 50: WSF Ambassador Talk...
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EP71 Whiskey and Wild Sheep – Rob Gerstner of Full Curl Brands
Sheep Fever
Often consumed to celebrate victory, sometimes even survival, but just as often to mourn defeat, whiskey and wild sheep do go together. Such was the vision of founder Robert Gertsner when he conceived of wild sheep inspired distilled adult beverages now known as Full Curl Brand’s. Rob is a successful entrepreneur and a passionate and equally successful sheep hunter. A bowhunter, his coveted offerings of bourbon, rye, gin, and vodka match his pension for doing it the right way even if that is not the easy one. Sheep Fever co-host Gray Thornton and Rob discuss how...
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EP70 Montana Knife Company– Josh Smith
Sheep Fever
Admittedly, hunters are gear junkies. When it comes to our knives, as we learned from MKC founder and CEO Josh Smith, it runs deeper than that. Grandpa’s knife can be Dad’s knife; can then be our knife as a rite of passage. Sheep Fever sat down with Josh and a true American brand success story to discuss his humble beginning as a Montana boy knifemaker at age 15 to becoming the youngest Master Knifemaker in the country as certified by the Knifemaker’s Guild, onto becoming one of the most successful startup knife companies in a very crowded field. His story and his philosophy about...
info_outlineIn our previous episode, we discussed that conservation is at a crossroads. More people are turning to nature and the outdoors for health and fulfillment, yet far too many are demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the differences between conservation and preservation and the benefits of both. As a result, emotion is trumping science, sound conservation actions are being pulled in all directions or tied up in court, and harmful measures are showing up on ballot initiatives.
In this episode, we drill deeper into this topic with Shane Mahoney, president and CEO of Conservation Visions. We begin by reflecting on a quote from Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949.
“There must be some force behind conservation— more universal than profit, less awkward than government, less ephemeral than sport; something that reaches into all times and places, where men live on the land, something that brackets everything from rivers to raindrops, from whales to hummingbirds, from land estates to window-boxes. I can see only one such force: a respect for land as an organism; a voluntary decency in land-use exercised by every citizen and every landowner out of a sense of a love for and obligation to that great biota we call America. This is the meaning of conservation, and this is the task of conservation education.”
We end up with the need to create an overarching conservation policy, a conservation template that puts wildlife, the environment, and more people all on the same page. How we get there is the challenge.