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The MeatEater Podcast

Ep. 730: Dispatches from Africa - So You Wanna Be A Professional Hunter?

The MeatEater Podcast

MeatEater

Sports, Wilderness

4.937.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Steven Rinella talks with Apprentice Professional Hunter George Dodds.

Topics Discussed: Ginormous termite mounds; growing up on a ranch in Kenya; how elephants hate bees; the resident lions and leopards; Kenya's 1977 ban on hunting; 250-pound Nile Perch; the misery that tsetse flies unleash; the fashion combo of shorts and cute gaiters; what it takes to become a Professional Hunter in Tanzania; harvesting honey on the Luganzo Tongwe Game Reserve; eating Steve's Cape Buffalo; and more.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is an IHeart podcast.

0:04.4

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0:08.0

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0:10.4

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0:12.9

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0:17.3

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0:22.3

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0:26.5

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0:30.6

Lenovo, Lenovo. Bravo. The Welcome to Africa Dispatch FOP3.

1:07.0

And first, before we even introduce who we're talking to right now, we got to address

1:11.9

the elephant in the room, which is this. Tell my mount. Yeah. This is a, for you people

1:18.8

watching and not listening, this is one of the most, this is like a major feature of the landscape

1:24.2

is this is a termite hill um they're everywhere yeah and they got a little bit of an

1:32.5

iceberg kind of thing going on what you see above ground is much less than what's underground so

1:38.3

that's maybe a third of what's actually going on yeah and this thing is it's a mound looks like a mound

1:43.2

of dirt probably nine maybe nine high, eight or nine feet high, riddled with holes. But they're all over out here. And there's even a fancy term for this, because we're in a big, we're near a big lake shore. And so we're in a big, like, big open grass flat. It's kind of reminiscent of, um, it'd be reminiscent of like oak Savannah in the U.S. or in Florida, you get that grassland with the, I'm not trying to think of Seth, the, yeah, the grassland with the oak hammocksocks but these hammocks are often based around these

2:21.4

giant termite mounds which have a name it's a Morgan say again the the little territory made

2:29.7

by the termite mound termitalia termitalia yeah it's the termite mound and then the all

2:35.9

these trees have what's called termitalia association so they like the got a bit of

2:41.5

a symbiotic in the soil relationship that's created by the the kind of moisture and

2:46.3

humidity that's going on inside that termite mound yeah so if you were here scanning

2:50.2

around it's all grass.

...

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