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Episode: #2213 - Diane K. Boyd

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:04:46

Episode Shownotes

Diane K. Boyd is a wildlife biologist who has devoted decades to studying wolves. She is the author of "A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery.

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www.dianekboyd.com https://greystonebooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/a-woman-among-wolves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_03
The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06 Speaker_01
Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night or day.

00:00:12 Speaker_04
What's up?

00:00:12 Speaker_01
How are you?

00:00:13 Speaker_04
I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great. Thank you.

00:00:16 Speaker_01
Well, it's very nice to meet you. And I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinello's podcast as well. Oh, good.

00:00:21 Speaker_04
Oh, good. You got to watch it.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Yeah. Steve, well, Steve made the introduction. He told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves. So I'm really excited to talk to you.

00:00:32 Speaker_04
Thanks, and I'm excited, too, because I thought, well, we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you got an interest in wolves, it's all good.

00:00:39 Speaker_01
How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?

00:00:43 Speaker_04
Well, I grew up in Minnesota, and you probably tell from the Fargo accent, but I grew up in Minnesota, and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in Wisconsin.

00:01:01 Speaker_04
And so I was interested from the beginning with that. And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meech, who is like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus. So I just stopped by and kept bugging him.

00:01:15 Speaker_04
I wouldn't go away like a good parasite. Persist, persist, persist.

00:01:19 Speaker_01
Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you?

00:01:22 Speaker_04
You know, I'm kind of a wildlife person. They're the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal. They're a carnivore. They're social like people. And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life growing up until I was about 15.

00:01:38 Speaker_04
So I had this passion for canines in general. I love dogs.

00:01:44 Speaker_01
I do too. I love them. And I love wolves. I'm so fascinated by them. And I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the Western states and the reintroduction of them.

00:02:00 Speaker_01
So you were there for all of it, right? So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out, except, as you said, in Minnesota, you said Idaho's that was the only other place that had them?

00:02:08 Speaker_04
No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan. And they walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late 1949, 50s, early. And they stayed. And they got seated there.

00:02:22 Speaker_04
And they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that.

00:02:29 Speaker_01
And is it still like that there?

00:02:31 Speaker_04
Yes, and the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because, you know, in nature, nothing is here. We always want it to be here, but it's always doing this. And yeah, they're doing there.

00:02:41 Speaker_04
And then, interestingly, when they arrived, they migrated on their own power. There was very little immigration. There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently genetically there was no influx of new genes.

00:02:55 Speaker_04
So the wolves that came and went didn't breed. And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
And eventually just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father-daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over. And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally.

00:03:17 Speaker_04
So they just did a reintroduction to Iowa oil, too, that's been relatively new, just a handful of years.

00:03:22 Speaker_04
So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.

00:03:33 Speaker_01
So, when they reintroduced them, this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction of Yellowstone. A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced a different size wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada.

00:03:48 Speaker_01
Is that true? Sort of?

00:03:51 Speaker_04
No. So in my book, I've got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf. And so people call these wolves super wolves, because they say that they're not native. They're Canadian super wolves, and they weigh 170 pounds, and it goes on and on and on.

00:04:05 Speaker_04
But I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, Wolf 8551. And we just had VHF collars. We didn't have satellite collars in those days. And she hung around for a while, and then she just disappeared.

00:04:19 Speaker_04
And seven months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry game warden called me, says, we got one of your wolves killed. Do you want to call her? Yes, please. Where is it? Puskupe. I said, oh, where is that?

00:04:33 Speaker_04
Well, it turns out that is 540 miles north of Glacier Park in seven months. So we didn't know if the guy, a farmer, shot it in July. If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her.

00:04:48 Speaker_04
But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park. So clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf

00:05:01 Speaker_04
is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia. And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were.

00:05:19 Speaker_04
So this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon. It's connected because it's a walkabout for a wolf. It's not a big deal.

00:05:32 Speaker_04
We just didn't back then, we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals.

00:05:38 Speaker_04
But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently, and it was from the Midwest. Think about that, to Colorado.

00:05:51 Speaker_01
Wow. Yeah. So Midwest like Wisconsin?

00:05:54 Speaker_04
Yeah. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It just said the Great Lakes region. It didn't just identify because they're all kind of the same. But it was not. It's not a Western wolf. It was not from Wyoming or Montana. Really interesting.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
Is there any speculation as to why she went so far north? No. So she was originally from a northern population.

00:06:16 Speaker_04
The wolf that I'm talking about, the 504? Yes. Yeah, she was born in Glacier Park. We caught her first as a pup, so we know where she was born. We know the den. And then at about a year and a half of age, almost two, she dispersed that far.

00:06:28 Speaker_04
And she didn't have to go that far. I mean, if she wanted to find other wolves and start a pack or join a pack, she could have gone any direction, 50 or 100 miles, and found other wolves.

00:06:39 Speaker_04
You know what, you tell me why wolves do what they do and I'll buy a lottery ticket. I mean, I don't know how these things work.

00:06:47 Speaker_01
I just don't know. So is that common that they would travel that far?

00:06:51 Speaker_04
It's becoming more and more common. So now that we have satellite callers, we've been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them.

00:07:01 Speaker_04
In the old days, we just had VHF callers and you had to physically be there within range, like from an airplane or track them. But now that we got Satellite collars.

00:07:09 Speaker_04
I mean my gosh, we've got wolves going from Washington to Montana and one of the wolves from Wyoming Went all the way down to Arizona to just north of the Grand Canyon Wow with the satellite collar was tracked and then it turned around and started home and it got shot in Utah So when they're doing this and you track them, how long do those collars batteries last?

00:07:32 Speaker_01
Oh

00:07:33 Speaker_04
Well, sadly, for the VHF collars, the wolves generally die before the collars do, because wolves don't live very long. An average VHF collar lasts about four years.

00:07:43 Speaker_04
An average satellite collar, one to two years, and I don't understand why the technology is not

00:07:51 Speaker_04
better to prolong some kind of a new battery, because once you put all the trauma of going through the wolf with a helicopter and catching it or whatever, you'd think they could get some kind of a super battery that would last a long time.

00:08:02 Speaker_04
Probably too heavy. Heavy, yeah, and they're, you know, wolves are on average 100 pounds, and the batteries are pretty big, but I'm waiting for Elon Musk to develop a super radio collar battery.

00:08:13 Speaker_01
Well, they're pretty close to developing some pretty spectacular battery technology. I just was reading about that. Yeah, they're trying to implement it in automobiles. They're going to be able to do it. I believe Samsung is at the forefront of that.

00:08:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, because obviously they make batteries for their phones and electronics and things along those lines.

00:08:30 Speaker_04
Isn't it a hydrogen battery or something crazy?

00:08:32 Speaker_01
I do not know.

00:08:33 Speaker_04
I was just reading. I'm sorry, I don't remember.

00:08:37 Speaker_01
So they're wearing this heavy collar and they They're good for about two years, and a wolf in the wild lives how long on average?

00:08:46 Speaker_04
That's a ... I always, when I do have a talk, I ask the audience, how long do you think the average wolf lives?

00:08:51 Speaker_04
So if you guess from the time they're visible from the den emergence, like you start to see them at four weeks, and a few die before that, until they die. Do you want to take a guess?

00:09:01 Speaker_01
I would be cheating because I listened to the Renella podcast. I think it was 4.3 years.

00:09:06 Speaker_04
Dr. Randall got that.

00:09:09 Speaker_01
I was shocked. I thought they would live older because, you know, an elk, you know, like a bull elk, like if you shoot a mature one, they're seven, eight years old. I mean, I shot one that was 11.

00:09:19 Speaker_04
You did. I bet the antlers were getting smaller by that time.

00:09:21 Speaker_01
Yes. And the teeth were worn down to almost nothing.

00:09:24 Speaker_04
They're not evolved to live that long. They just aren't. They usually die sooner because they burn up so much energy in years of mating and breeding that they get worn down and then, you know, they die.

00:09:34 Speaker_04
But the wolves, I mean, in a zoo or a captive situation, they can live to be 15. Like a dog. Yeah, but that's extraordinary.

00:09:45 Speaker_04
I think the longest I had a wolf, a wild wolf, that I knew her age because I caught her as a pup and I recaptured her and we tagged her, 12 years. That's extremely long for an old wolf.

00:09:56 Speaker_01
Wow, 12 years in the wild.

00:09:58 Speaker_04
Yeah, there's a few in Yellowstone that I got that old. We had one of mine that dispersed to Idaho. And he, kind of interesting, I caught him in 1990.

00:10:06 Speaker_04
And he dispersed about a year later on his own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of non-return wilderness. There were no other wolves at that time. And he just hung around. We'd see him once in a while. By himself? By himself.

00:10:21 Speaker_04
He was a big male. When I got him, he was 111 pounds. But this animal had to survive by killing animals alone. You think about trying to pull down an elk with your teeth.

00:10:31 Speaker_01
Is it because the old males don't get accepted into a new pack?

00:10:37 Speaker_04
He went to where there weren't any wolves, interestingly. But he had a success story because he just waited it out. And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in 95 and 96, a little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just

00:10:51 Speaker_04
hits the road as fast as she can go and she bumps into this wolf and they set up a territory in Kelly Creek and they became a breeding mating pair for years and years till he died of old age.

00:11:01 Speaker_01
Wow. So he was just kind of chilling on his own for years.

00:11:05 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:11:05 Speaker_01
How many years?

00:11:07 Speaker_04
Four.

00:11:08 Speaker_01
Wow. Four years without seeing any other wolves.

00:11:11 Speaker_04
Without having help to kill for your food item either. That's what amazes me because he could have gone to Montana and found other wolves but he didn't.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
Was there any understanding of what he was basically, because they usually hunt in packs. So it was probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer. So what was he eating?

00:11:32 Speaker_04
I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawn, some deer.

00:11:37 Speaker_04
And if he got lucky, if he had a really deep snow winter, it's the advantage of the wolves, because they got big snowshoe feet, and elk, you know, punch through, they got little sharp hooves. But he did well. Whatever he did, we don't know.

00:11:49 Speaker_04
We didn't follow him that long. We didn't pick up scats. It's just speculation. But that, I mean, they can kill a big elk, but it's, they risk being killed every time they have to take a meal like that.

00:11:59 Speaker_01
Right, they risk being dismembered too, like broken legs and broken jaws and getting kicked.

00:12:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, I saw a video of a wolf from Yellowstone last year had been kicked in the jaw by an elk and it had a broken jaw that was hanging. And a month later, A month, month and a half.

00:12:18 Speaker_04
It was healed enough and it was in the process of killing another elk and wolves came along and killed the wolf. Other wolves. It wasn't his own pack, obviously, but he survived that.

00:12:30 Speaker_01
Wow. They're tough. His jaw healed up and he got enough food while his jaw was healing.

00:12:35 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:12:36 Speaker_01
That's incredible.

00:12:36 Speaker_04
I imagine he was scavenging around, you know, picking up on kills and whatever.

00:12:40 Speaker_01
How was he even chewing? Because he's got a fork. Or a spork. Or a knife where you cut up the pieces. He's got to bite pieces off with a broken jaw.

00:12:52 Speaker_04
It's mind-boggling to me. People think, oh, wolves can just kill it. Well, they can do whatever they want. They have a hard life. They live in packs because they're not very efficient killers. Mount lions, bears.

00:13:06 Speaker_04
They're a more efficient predator, especially a mountain lion. And they got all the claws to hang on. But a wolf can only go with its teeth.

00:13:14 Speaker_04
And so it generally takes numerous wolves to successfully hunt an animal, especially something big like a moose or a bison.

00:13:20 Speaker_01
What a friend said to me, so I want to run this by you to find out if this is true.

00:13:24 Speaker_01
He said that mountain lions are killing more elk because of wolves, because what happens is the mountain lion will kill the elk, but then the wolf will scare the mountain lion off and steal it from him.

00:13:35 Speaker_01
And so the mountain lion then goes and finds a mule deer, finds another deer, and so the mountain lions are killing more animals because in the areas where mountain lions and wolves cohabitate, the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills.

00:13:49 Speaker_04
That does happen, and I saw it some in Glacier Park, too, but To that end, I'll say there are three times more mount lions than there are wolves in northwestern Montana.

00:13:59 Speaker_01
Really?

00:14:01 Speaker_04
Two and a half to three, it's been documented.

00:14:02 Speaker_01
Wow. If you think about that- I would have never imagined that. Yeah.

00:14:07 Speaker_04
And mount lions are on average a little bit bigger than wolves.

00:14:10 Speaker_01
I don't know if you've ever hunted them or not, but my God, they're really- I've never hunted a mount lion, but I saw one- You did? Yeah, I saw one in Utah a couple years back and it was a big one. Impressive. Like a 170 pound one.

00:14:20 Speaker_04
Oh my gosh.

00:14:21 Speaker_01
It was enormous.

00:14:22 Speaker_04
Did they tree it with hounds?

00:14:24 Speaker_01
No, no. We were driving and we were about 25, 30 yards from it. And my friend stopped the truck and he said, look at the size of that cat. It was under a tree. And it was just as dawn or just as dusk was happening. So you could see his eyes glowing.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
And so I'm in the front seat of the car looking at him through 10X binos and just getting a good look at his face. It was incredible.

00:14:49 Speaker_04
They're beautiful animals. And I always think when I'm out in the woods, I got a little cabin way up northwest of Montana. I wonder how many times mountain lions have watched me.

00:14:58 Speaker_01
Oh, I bet a lot.

00:15:00 Speaker_04
I worry about mountain lions. They're stealthy. I don't worry about wolves.

00:15:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, you should worry about mountain lions. You're out there by yourself, too, right?

00:15:08 Speaker_04
Yeah, a lot.

00:15:09 Speaker_01
Do you have, like, modern amenities up there? Do you have satellite, internet, and all that jazz?

00:15:15 Speaker_04
Well, my little cabin is 55 miles off the grid, and it's dry. I don't have any water. I don't have electricity.

00:15:22 Speaker_01
No electricity.

00:15:24 Speaker_04
It's way off the grid. But I built it. I took down an old historic homestead and I moved the logs up to where it sits.

00:15:32 Speaker_01
You did it all yourself?

00:15:34 Speaker_04
Well, no, no. I had help with a lot of friends helped me over the years. It took me seven years from the time I got the logs and had friends help me take it down until it was livable.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
Wow.

00:15:45 Speaker_04
Long time, because when I had money, I didn't have time, and when I had time, I didn't have money, right, for building it. But I eventually got it done, and a lot of friends, very dear friends helped.

00:15:55 Speaker_04
But I poured concrete, and I cut logs, and I did everything. But when I built the place, Where was I going with this? Sorry.

00:16:03 Speaker_01
You were just talking about what it's like out there, no electricity, no water.

00:16:07 Speaker_04
So for years I've lived without, and I haul water from the spring, and in the winter I melt the snow because we get a lot of snow.

00:16:13 Speaker_04
But three summers ago now, I was there alone and I fell down the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot.

00:16:23 Speaker_04
And I said, you know, this isn't going to be very fun for a while because I got to close up the cabin and I have a propane fridge and stove and I got to undo the propane and empty the fridge. And I got a lot shorter because I'm not going to be back.

00:16:34 Speaker_04
I got a broken foot. So I'm hobbling around. And I said, OK. Now I'm going to get Starlink. That was my motivator, because if I had a phone, I could have called somebody for help, but I didn't and I couldn't. So after that, then I got on the Starlink.

00:16:50 Speaker_04
They were still in the beta development, I think. Anyway, I got on. So I have Starlink available to me at my cabin. But only when I choose to turn it on. It's not like if you were to email me or call me up there, you wouldn't get me.

00:17:02 Speaker_04
And when I choose to turn it on, I'd get the messages. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. But I don't live there full time anymore. I live in town.

00:17:09 Speaker_01
That is actually the best of both worlds. Yeah. If you choose to turn it on. Yeah. Right. I brought a portable one up to Utah with me and it's like smaller than this cigar box.

00:17:18 Speaker_04
The new one that's got the router with it.

00:17:21 Speaker_01
It's incredible. It is incredible. It's just so light I couldn't believe this was it. Yeah. And it works amazing. Just point it at the sky and all of a sudden you're on YouTube.

00:17:31 Speaker_04
For better or worse?

00:17:32 Speaker_01
For worse, definitely for worse. But it allows me to call home and talk to people. There's good to it, but it sounds like living up there must have been amazing. But the water thing sounds like a real issue. There was no way you could build a well.

00:17:47 Speaker_04
I drilled a well. I didn't hit water.

00:17:50 Speaker_01
Oh, you only did one?

00:17:51 Speaker_04
I did two, and I didn't hit water twice. But I'm on a creek. I sit on a bluff above a creek, and the water's about 90 to 100 feet straight below me, and I drilled my wells 140 feet. but it's a really interesting limestone shale in the water.

00:18:09 Speaker_04
I don't know how it works. I even had a guy witch it for me, because I'm a scientist, but what the hell, it might work, right? So they witched the spot. I didn't hit water.

00:18:17 Speaker_01
So you say witch, are you talking about with the sticks? Yeah. Divining rods, is that what it is? Divining rods, yeah. Is that real?

00:18:24 Speaker_04
Like I said, I'm a scientist, but if it might help, why not? But I didn't hit water.

00:18:29 Speaker_01
It doesn't seem like it could be real. I don't know. I don't know either. But people have been doing that for a long time, and it seems like a massive waste of time. Jamie, see if you can find a video of someone trying to find water with divining rods.

00:18:46 Speaker_01
If you haven't seen it, they use two sticks, right?

00:18:49 Speaker_04
Two sticks, sometimes metal, but usually wood, like a willow or something.

00:18:53 Speaker_01
And they claim, as they're walking around, that the sticks move. They cross. They cross when you get to an area where there's water. You're a scientist. Tell me how that's possible. How could it be possible?

00:19:05 Speaker_01
Has anybody ever analyzed what factors could be at play? I don't know.

00:19:09 Speaker_04
I have to tell you, I don't know, and I'm kind of a skeptic on that stuff, but I had somebody do it and we didn't hit water, so it's okay.

00:19:17 Speaker_01
So here it is. This guy's walking around.

00:19:19 Speaker_04
It looks like he's got ... Those are probably metal, like coat hangers or something. Right there.

00:19:26 Speaker_01
Coat hangers. How is that possible?

00:19:30 Speaker_04
I don't know.

00:19:30 Speaker_01
So it just spins in his hands?

00:19:32 Speaker_04
That looks like voodoo. They crossed. But then they're going to go sink and derail a well. It might be two feet. It might be 200 feet.

00:19:40 Speaker_01
I don't know. So he's walking. He's not moving his hands. They did. Wow. It does really look like they move on their own.

00:19:49 Speaker_04
You know, there may be people in the world who have some kind of a gift. Their electrical lights are different. I don't know how it works. I have been told that I can be a woman of science and superstition.

00:19:59 Speaker_01
At the same time.

00:20:00 Speaker_04
Yeah, but I'm not. Usually science wins.

00:20:02 Speaker_01
Well, I bet you if you live in the woods a long time, you get a little bit of superstition, a little bit of intuition, a little bit of you feel the woods a little bit differently than you could measure on a scale.

00:20:12 Speaker_04
I can think of twice only in my life, before I built my little cabin, I lived up this very, even more remote outpost called Moose City, loosely Moose City, because it was not a city at all. It was an old homestead with a lot of empty cabins.

00:20:28 Speaker_04
Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside. Twice. And something just said to me, don't go outside. And I'm not afraid of anything. I mean, I spent my life dealing with wolves and grizzly bears and angry humans.

00:20:46 Speaker_04
But I listened to those feelings because I don't know any different. Why not? Why not listen to it? Like, I think we have some primordial part of our brains. I don't know if you ever had that happen. Do you want to have been out walking or hunting?

00:20:58 Speaker_01
I have not.

00:20:58 Speaker_04
Okay.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
No, I've never had a moment where I was terrified, like something's out here.

00:21:02 Speaker_04
Yeah, and I have no idea what it was. But I've never had that feeling around wildlife. I tend to think it was human. I don't know if we- Oh, you feel like there was a human out there?

00:21:12 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:21:13 Speaker_04
I don't know if we can smell and not register in our forebrain what we detect. Maybe it's really primitive. I don't know. I'm just saying I had it happen twice.

00:21:21 Speaker_01
If you're not around any people and then all of a sudden you feel a person, I bet that kind of person, like any person that you run into in the woods is scary. It's weird. Like if you, I always said that everything in the woods is scarier.

00:21:35 Speaker_01
Like if you saw a naked baby in the woods, you'd be like, what's that baby doing here? Baby just standing there looking at you. You'd be like, what the fuck? There's something weird about the woods in general.

00:21:46 Speaker_01
And if you, if you were walking through a mall and a man was walking your way, it's just another person like, hello. Hi. You know, you're at the park, see a guy, normal. But if you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods and you see another person,

00:22:01 Speaker_01
There's this moment where you're like, what's this guy up to? Who is he? What's he doing? Is he dangerous?

00:22:08 Speaker_04
Yeah, and I think that's because we're all raised in an urban environment, more or less, nowadays, and so having lots of people around is normal, but to have one person in a pretty remote area, we don't experience that very often anymore.

00:22:19 Speaker_01
But there's also no one that's going to help you there. Like, if you're at the mall, it's very difficult for someone to get away with attacking you.

00:22:25 Speaker_04
Right.

00:22:25 Speaker_01
If you're alone in the woods, there is this weird, like if you're some crazy serial killer guys out there, like, and you, you know, you're backpacking, you're like, uh-oh. Like, now I'm at the mercy of this person if they're crazy.

00:22:37 Speaker_04
I have a chapter in my book, early in the book, where I describe an event that I'm basically been a real private person all my life until this book came out. And once I wrote this book, I had to bring up stories that are very personal to me.

00:22:52 Speaker_04
And I had an event one night that was terrifying, probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my life. It involved humans. So yeah, I totally get that. People in places where they shouldn't be. Do you want to read it?

00:23:06 Speaker_04
Do you want me to spoil it? You want me to do the spoiler thing?

00:23:08 Speaker_01
Well, we're talking about it.

00:23:10 Speaker_04
OK. I'll just give you the elevator speech part of it. OK. So I was in my cabin at night. And the dogs started growling. I had very big dogs. I always have dogs. And I looked out my window, and it was winter, and it was cold.

00:23:28 Speaker_04
And I could see a couple of guys out there lurking around. And it was in the middle of nowhere. And then it kind of digressed from there. So for the only first and only time in my life, I pulled a gun on these guys.

00:23:44 Speaker_01
Really?

00:23:45 Speaker_04
Yeah. I was in danger.

00:23:47 Speaker_01
What were they doing out there?

00:23:48 Speaker_04
Well, they came to pay me a visit.

00:23:51 Speaker_01
They knew who you were?

00:23:52 Speaker_04
They called me by name, which was really freaky. So you think somebody in the woods walking around scare you? Wait till you see somebody who you don't know who it is and they call you by your first name. That's freaky.

00:24:02 Speaker_01
And what did they want?

00:24:04 Speaker_04
I didn't find out because I pulled a gun on them. I drove them off. And it was terrifying to me at the... It was not terrifying at the moment, because I was absolutely focused, like predator-focused calm.

00:24:20 Speaker_04
But after they left, I started to shake and... Yeah. Yeah. Kind of after the adrenaline surge happened.

00:24:27 Speaker_01
Were they menacing? Were they... Yeah. Yeah? To me. But the way they were communicating with you?

00:24:35 Speaker_04
They were drunk.

00:24:36 Speaker_01
Oh.

00:24:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, it wasn't good. And so how did they know who you were? Do you know? Oh, it's a long story. But I was working up there. I was kind of a novelty, a young, blonde woman. I was only about 25. Living alone, studying wolves.

00:24:54 Speaker_04
And at the time, there were other people coming and going, studying wolves. But at that winter, I was alone. And I had been working. It's a long story.

00:25:03 Speaker_04
I was working behind the custom station right on the Canadian border and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the custom station. They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck and then the Canadian trucks would go back.

00:25:16 Speaker_04
And I temporarily took a job as the knot bumper at the log deck landing, which means my job was to run a chainsaw, trim off the branches. trim the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed.

00:25:29 Speaker_04
Anyway, so I was around, so these loggers knew who I was and I was, you know, I was cordial enough. But it was two of those guys. Yeah. And I don't, I never told the story till I wrote this book and I just thought,

00:25:45 Speaker_04
It's a part of me that's very personal. It's a part of me that I learned from. It's never happened again. And I had one old logger, old Bob, he saw me on the road the next day. I was pretty shook up. And he stopped. We chatted often.

00:26:02 Speaker_04
And he had seen a wolf. He'd taken a picture of it. So anyway, we chat. And he says, so I hear he had some visitors last night. And I looked it up, because he's up in his log truck. I said, yeah. He says, you don't have to worry. That won't happen again.

00:26:16 Speaker_04
He's kind of like watching out for me.

00:26:18 Speaker_01
Oh, that's nice.

00:26:19 Speaker_04
Yeah, because we had kind of befriended each other because he'd spotted this wolf and he'd taken pictures of it anyway. Yeah.

00:26:25 Speaker_01
So how did he find out that you had had visitors?

00:26:27 Speaker_04
The Lagerd network, the CB radios. I don't know. I didn't tell anybody. But he knew right away.

00:26:34 Speaker_01
Hmm. Yeah, it's humans that you have to be scared of.

00:26:37 Speaker_04
Totally.

00:26:37 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:26:38 Speaker_04
Yeah. So anyway, you asked.

00:26:40 Speaker_01
There's no serial killer mountain lions, right? They just have a purpose in nature.

00:26:45 Speaker_04
Yeah. They just kill because they kill because they eat.

00:26:47 Speaker_01
That's what their job is.

00:26:49 Speaker_04
People are weird.

00:26:50 Speaker_01
People are creepy.

00:26:50 Speaker_04
A little sign about their being weird. I love that.

00:26:53 Speaker_01
Yeah. Especially men. Men in the woods are scary. So when you were living out there, how many years did you live out there by yourself?

00:27:01 Speaker_04
Well, off and on. So when I arrived there, I joined a team of young researchers. We were studying wolves and grizzly bears, and we helped each other with their work. So we were studying all that.

00:27:13 Speaker_04
And then when we ran out of funding, then I was up there alone for about three years. But other than that, there were people coming.

00:27:19 Speaker_01
By yourself for three years?

00:27:20 Speaker_04
Well, I had two dogs. I wasn't totally alone. And people were coming and going seasonally. I had summer help, and I had winter help. But generally, there wasn't people there on the shoulder season.

00:27:29 Speaker_01
Did that get lonely?

00:27:31 Speaker_04
You know, it's interesting because it didn't. Really? Back when I was younger, I was a bit of a misanthrope and I liked being alone. And when I was alone, being alone is different than being lonely. It just is.

00:27:48 Speaker_04
Now as an older person, I feel different about people. I'm more engaged with people. I enjoy people. So yeah, I get lonely now, but I didn't back then. I mean, how could you be lonely?

00:27:58 Speaker_04
You're living in the majestic mountains and wilderness of Glacier National Park, and everything is new, and there's tracks to find, and on and on and on.

00:28:06 Speaker_01
Well, it's all amazing stuff, but I would be lonely. I like to be around people.

00:28:11 Speaker_04
Well, that's why you're really good at what you do, because you're a social person. You like to engage in conversation. But I didn't used to be that way. You wouldn't have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago, let's put it that way. Really? Nah.

00:28:23 Speaker_01
I bet we would have worked out.

00:28:24 Speaker_04
It would have been all right, but I'm more conversational now.

00:28:28 Speaker_01
I mean, it's just, I would have been fascinated by who you were then because I'd be fascinated by a person who doesn't want to talk to people. Like if I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that's like,

00:28:42 Speaker_01
Because I would imagine there's a very different relationship with nature when it's just you and nature alone by yourself for prolonged periods of time.

00:28:54 Speaker_01
It's very different than taking a jaunt, taking a weekend excursion, hiking, even camping for a week. There's a big difference between that and living there for years.

00:29:05 Speaker_04
Yes. It's like when I go up to my cabin for a visit now. I no longer live there full time, but I live there a couple of months a year, maybe three, maybe usually two.

00:29:16 Speaker_04
When I go up, it takes me like three to four days to decompress and get back into the mode of, oh, I can't call. Oh, I can't go on the internet. Do I want to hook up to Starlink? No.

00:29:29 Speaker_04
go out and just sit outside and have a cup of tea and listen to the crick, and then think about what you're going to do for the day. Go on a hike. But it takes me a few days now to get to that frame of mind. It's not instant anymore.

00:29:40 Speaker_04
So I've changed who I am, for sure.

00:29:42 Speaker_01
And then once you get to that frame of mind, then you can just like, today we're going to go on a hike. is bring the dogs, just go walk around and enjoy yourself. Go fly fish, whatever. Wow.

00:29:52 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:29:53 Speaker_01
And were you living off the land? Were you catching fish for food and hunting for food? How were you getting your supplies?

00:30:01 Speaker_04
I did that, but I bought stuff in town and I would buy a lot in November while I could still drive in, because sometimes in the winter you couldn't drive in anymore. So I would stock up and buy 300, 400 pounds of dog food.

00:30:13 Speaker_04
bulk supplies of flour and oats, and I can. Back then, I actually did some canning. I don't have time. I don't care about it. I can buy canned peaches or whatever. And I never grew a food garden because of the bears.

00:30:30 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah.

00:30:31 Speaker_04
See, I didn't want to attract grizzlies.

00:30:33 Speaker_01
Right.

00:30:34 Speaker_04
So I didn't grow food except lettuce.

00:30:36 Speaker_01
How often did you run into them up there?

00:30:39 Speaker_04
They're always there, but you don't see them very often. So it's sort of like all the wild things that are up there are pretty wild, and there weren't a lot of people up there. Now everybody's discovered Montana, and there's people everywhere, right?

00:30:52 Speaker_01
It's so interesting because our senses are so dull compared to theirs.

00:30:56 Speaker_01
We move so slow, and we're so loud, and we're so clunky, and they see us a mile away, they smell us a mile away, they know exactly where you are, and most of the time they just avoid us. Totally true.

00:31:09 Speaker_04
I mean, I've just come back from bird hunting. I just was 31 days on the road and I just got home three days ago and now I'm here.

00:31:15 Speaker_04
And I was out bird hunting with friends and I said, I told them, I said, so when I hunt with my pointers, I got a griffon and a wire hare, I said, don't talk. Don't call the dog's name. Don't holler about.

00:31:29 Speaker_04
Just watch and enjoy and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs. If you see them getting birdie, get ready.

00:31:36 Speaker_04
Because so many times you hunt with people and they're hacking their dog, they're calling, they're hollering, they're talking to you about something going on over here. Hey, did you watch the Vikings game? Well, nobody watches the Vikings game.

00:31:47 Speaker_04
Anyway, did you watch this or that? It's like we are out there seeking a smart bird that has ears. Watch the dogs. So I feel that way when I'm out living in the wild, too, or hiking.

00:32:01 Speaker_04
I'm not going to see elk or bears or even fox if you're yammering away. That's why I like being alone.

00:32:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, that is part of the problem with people. We do like to talk just to just be reassured. Exactly.

00:32:17 Speaker_04
Yeah, you know, and it's fun to interact. I mean, but even when I go to Yellowstone, I go to Yellowstone at least a couple times a year to watch wolves. I love the wolf watchers. They're so enthusiastic.

00:32:28 Speaker_04
But something's going on and you can't take a video because everybody's talking.

00:32:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:34 Speaker_04
Even if the wolves are howling, you have to go, shh.

00:32:37 Speaker_01
I went to Yellowstone a few years back with my family and I felt like it was very weird.

00:32:43 Speaker_01
I felt like I'm enjoying, my daughters were really young at the time, I'm enjoying that they're seeing bears and they're seeing, well we didn't see bears, we did see, they had, there was this place in Montana that has this grizzly bear preserve, it's like a place where they take care of bears so they would like feed them frozen watermelons, which is,

00:33:03 Speaker_01
crazy to watch a bear chew through a frozen watermelon like it's a grape. They just go right through it. It's a frozen watermelon. And they just, like it's nothing. But we did see a lot of elk and a bunch of bison.

00:33:18 Speaker_01
And the elk was strange because I'm sure you know this, but for the people at home, elk understand that wolves don't come to these community centers, these areas where You know, there's vending machines and buildings.

00:33:33 Speaker_01
So the elk are all over the place out there on the lawn Yeah, so I don't know if I put it on Instagram I think I did I took a selfie with a cow elk that was like 40 feet from me Just lying there and she wasn't worried about me at all.

00:33:47 Speaker_01
And I was trying to tell my kids I was like this never happens. This is weird and It's weird that they've become so habitualized to being around cars and people. It's safe when you're around these people, so they just hang out there.

00:34:02 Speaker_04
That's probably at Mammoth, Gardner area. That happens all the time up there.

00:34:07 Speaker_01
Well, it happens in Colorado too, like in Evergreen. You see these huge herds of elk that walk down the middle of the street. in Evergreen because they know there's no mountain lions in the middle of the street. No predators. Right.

00:34:20 Speaker_01
And so they just like in the rut, they're walking down the street and there's like 30, 40 elk and they stop traffic and they're sitting on people's lawns and it's wild. Sounds like Banff.

00:34:31 Speaker_04
The same things happened to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where they don't see people and they had never exposure to livestock. They're very wild at first. And then they can't get away from humans.

00:34:43 Speaker_04
So after a while, they just start disregarding people. And if they have to cross the road, there's a wolf jam, and everybody's crowding with their cars, and they're trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot.

00:34:55 Speaker_04
And they can't even get through because of everybody. So they get kind of laissez-faire about it, and they get used to people, conditioned or habituated. And that's passed on to the next generation next.

00:35:06 Speaker_04
And then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down some open public land spot where there's a hunter with a rifle, they don't think anything about it. So they're pretty easy targets.

00:35:18 Speaker_01
That's unfortunate. Habitualization is unfortunate because you just want to see them in the wild. You don't want to see them in an intersection.

00:35:26 Speaker_04
I know. And yeah, it's tough. And the unfortunate thing is a couple of years ago, there were 25 Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around.

00:35:39 Speaker_04
Anyway, that's like out of 100, so it's about a quarter of the population. And there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and loved by the wolf masses and photographed and they got killed.

00:35:55 Speaker_04
And this just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because they were so special. And I make the point when I give talks and stuff, I said, you know, if you really feel that strongly,

00:36:11 Speaker_04
You should really be concerned because every year there's about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana, but you don't know them. They're not famous. They have just as important of lives.

00:36:21 Speaker_04
They live, die, eat, breathe, get injured, heal up, the same as these movie star wolves in Yellowstone. And you should feel that way about all wolves in my mind, in my mind.

00:36:31 Speaker_01
Well, that was the case with Cecil the lion. You remember Cecil the lion? Right. Yeah, yeah.

00:36:34 Speaker_04
The dentist. He died and a dentist killed him, right?

00:36:36 Speaker_01
Yeah. They named him. Yeah. And so when they named... I remember after Cecil got killed, another lion got killed. And they thought it was Jericho, who was Cecil's brother. And there was a story like, oh, my God, they killed Jericho, Cecil's brother.

00:36:52 Speaker_01
And then they realized that Jericho was not dead. So, oh, it's fine. Jericho is still OK. But that lion is just a lion. You didn't name him. But that's still another lion, but because it's not this named lion's brother who also has a name, no one cared.

00:37:10 Speaker_01
Exactly. That's so bizarre.

00:37:12 Speaker_04
It is bizarre. Thank you for understanding that. I forgot about Cecil. But like when we were first monitoring the wolves in Glacier. There was just a handful and we would catch them. And we would give them names because it's easier.

00:37:25 Speaker_04
Like Phyllis was wolf 8550 and Mojave was wolf 8963. They had both names and numbers. And so when we did our scientific papers and reports, we used a number.

00:37:35 Speaker_04
because we were told by the officials that we don't want you to name the animals, because what happens when Phyllis kills a cow, if that happens?

00:37:43 Speaker_02
Right.

00:37:43 Speaker_04
Then you can't manage Phyllis. So we went along with it, but we used the names, and we did the scientific stuff with numbers. But then when you go into the park, people would want to know what's going on.

00:37:53 Speaker_04
You need to talk about these different wolf numbers, 86, 54. And they say, well, who is that? Oh, that's Aspen. Oh, yeah. And they would know by the name. So whatever works.

00:38:02 Speaker_01
Well, then all of a sudden, they become like a pet. Even more, like a majestic wild pet. Like it's a different thing. It's a pet that's this iconic North American apex predator.

00:38:15 Speaker_04
Yes, and I know the wolves in Yellowstone, they don't have names, they have numbers, but they're so identifiable by 907 or whatever that it becomes like a name.

00:38:23 Speaker_01
Right.

00:38:24 Speaker_04
Even though it's still a number.

00:38:25 Speaker_01
But if you shoot 907, it's not as rude as if you shoot Jake. Right. Jake the wolf. Right. It's like, oh. Jericho, yeah. Yeah, or Michael. Michael. You name a wolf a human name, and all of a sudden you shouldn't shoot it anymore. I know.

00:38:38 Speaker_01
Which is just a weird anthropomorphization thing, right?

00:38:43 Speaker_04
It's been interesting to me because for my career, I've done everything. My first year, my first job, I worked up in northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300-person farming community, and I was hired, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help.

00:38:59 Speaker_04
prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove, which meant trap and haul away and they were euthanized. And when there weren't depredations, to go out and research trap and put collars on the other wolves.

00:39:15 Speaker_04
And it was, I mean, this was big, big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, starry-eyed and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of North Holm from the wolves, you know? Oh my God.

00:39:25 Speaker_04
It was such an important summer for me to learn professionally and personally. And I wrote about that. But I learned a lot. And it was interesting work. But I realized, yeah, wolves can cause conflicts for people. And it was a new concept for me.

00:39:44 Speaker_01
So when they captured the wolves and they removed them, why did they euthanize them? Why didn't they just relocate them?

00:39:49 Speaker_04
Well, they would be me because I was the one catching and trapping me.

00:39:52 Speaker_01
Well, obviously someone was telling you what to do though, right?

00:39:55 Speaker_04
Right. So I had to bring them to the main office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were euthanized. So prior to that, in 1978, you couldn't euthanize wolves. They changed the status from endangered to threatened. And so when they were threatened,

00:40:12 Speaker_04
then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them. And they didn't translocate them.

00:40:17 Speaker_04
This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana too, that when you translocate or move a wolf who's causing a problem,

00:40:30 Speaker_04
That wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves. It comes back to depredate again. It moves onto another farm or ranch and does it again.

00:40:41 Speaker_04
They don't generally survive, and so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them, and it's a good facade for the public to believe in, but sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year until they die anyway.

00:40:57 Speaker_04
So, yeah.

00:40:59 Speaker_01
Is it because they're habitualized to start preying on cattle?

00:41:05 Speaker_04
It's tough once they learn to take cattle or sheep. It's tough to break that pattern. Let's put it that way.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
Because it's so easy?

00:41:13 Speaker_04
Well, yeah. I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that's going to kick me in the teeth or taking the cow, I'd pick the slow, dumb groceries every time.

00:41:22 Speaker_01
It's just me. Of course. Of course. And if they know the groceries are all penned up. Exactly. Yeah.

00:41:29 Speaker_04
So it's a difficult challenge and wolves are continuing to expand everywhere in the West, the Midwest, Europe. And so there's more and more challenges and a lot of the early excitement about wolves has changed into a bitter battle.

00:41:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting complex battle because there's a lot of hunters that do not like the reintroduction of wolves yes, because and they'll say that the the elk populations are down and they're down dramatically in Montana because the reintroduction which is the 1996 95 96 and then 96 97 those winters so but the reality is

00:42:14 Speaker_01
It's not natural to not have those predators there, and you're going to get an overpopulation of elk, and that's going to lead to starvation and disease.

00:42:24 Speaker_04
Yes. And so kind of the die was cast when those wolves were removed, and basically by the 1930s, there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore. There are wolves here, there, and a pack here, there, but there weren't thousands.

00:42:39 Speaker_04
And they went inside the national parks, and they have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are like seven, eight weeks old, and they took the pictures. This was in 1926, and then they killed them all.

00:42:52 Speaker_04
So they even removed all the predators within national parks. So people, historic memory, you know, we have really short memories. Historic memory of, say, for example, the northern range, northern herd range of elk out of Gardner.

00:43:06 Speaker_04
It was about 20,000 before the wolves were introduced. Way over carrying capacity. Elk were starving. The browse lines as high up as they could reach, they ate everything they could eat.

00:43:17 Speaker_04
They were paying people, people were being paid to come in and kill deer and elk. And then they started the late hunting seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend at the time had a tag.

00:43:28 Speaker_04
And they just have a shooting line in February and kill all these elk because they aren't going to make it anyway. And so you shoot a starving cow in February.

00:43:36 Speaker_02
Wow.

00:43:36 Speaker_04
Because it wasn't predators.

00:43:37 Speaker_02
Right.

00:43:38 Speaker_04
Then when the wolves came back, two things happened. Number one, it was a new predator. But number two, in the winter of 96, 97, we had some of the deepest snows ever recorded in the mountains, ever. And so many of the herd died from snowfall.

00:43:55 Speaker_04
And I've had hunters tell me, yeah, the population elk went from 20,000 to 10,000 in two years. Damn those wolves. And it's like, do you think 35 wolves killed 10,000 elk? Come on, let's just do the math a minute.

00:44:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, that is the problem with people that don't have a nuanced perspective on what's happening because they have a vested interest in it being a problem that the wolves are keeping them from being able to be successful on an elk hunt. Right.

00:44:21 Speaker_04
And I'm a hunter. I get it.

00:44:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. But the die-offs are huge. The place that I was just telling you about before the podcast that I was in in Utah, they lost 80% of their mule deer population a year ago.

00:44:33 Speaker_04
from what?

00:44:35 Speaker_01
It's real bad winter. Winter die-offs are a big thing. It's a big thing.

00:44:41 Speaker_04
I would say, to the best of my knowledge as a biologist, that winter die-off is the limiting factor for ungulate herds. It's not lions and bears and wolves and humans and cars.

00:44:51 Speaker_04
Every so often, every 20 years or whatever, you get a massive winter die off. And it takes quite a while for those populations to build back up. Predators can keep that at a lower rate. They can not affect it.

00:45:04 Speaker_04
You know, I have to think back to what people say about wolves killing all the deer and elk. I think if you look to statistics at Montana and Wyoming, which both have had a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits.

00:45:19 Speaker_04
I was just reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana's got basically, in most of its management units, more elk than ever.

00:45:27 Speaker_04
I just say there's more going on than wolves, and to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat, and you need to look at access issues.

00:45:35 Speaker_04
You know, there's a lot of places where hunters want to go shoot these elk, but they're on large private ranches, and you can't get on them.

00:45:41 Speaker_01
Including landlocked public land, where there is public land where you're allowed to hunt there, but you can't get there. Right. You'd have to fly in in a helicopter, and in a lot of places that's illegal. Right.

00:45:51 Speaker_01
And so there's all this talk of, for people that don't know, There's what one one of the things that happens is a thing called corner crossing. So there might be a piece of public land that you're allowed to hike into. And then there's a small area.

00:46:09 Speaker_01
It could be a very small area just a few yards even. of private land that you are going to have to cross in order to get into the next piece of public land.

00:46:18 Speaker_01
But people block access to that because these people that have these ranches, and most of them probably don't even live there, and a bunch of wealthy people, they're terrified that someone's going to go through that and then go into their private land.

00:46:31 Speaker_01
They don't want to give people the access at all to their private land.

00:46:34 Speaker_01
So they stop these corner crossings and it's a giant disaster because then you have these areas that are public land that should be available to all of us and no one can get in there.

00:46:46 Speaker_04
I mean, if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard and you're trying to get from one black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square to get there, right? It's being battled in court right now.

00:47:01 Speaker_01
It's a disaster. If I owned the land, I would carve out a big pathway. and give it to the public. If you have 50,000 acres out there, whatever the hell you have, why is it so hard to take a few acres and just make a path? But you're not most landowners.

00:47:19 Speaker_01
But it seems so simple. I know. It's like the simplest of, you just make some sort of an easement.

00:47:25 Speaker_04
Well, that would be good. And some ranchers do. But many people in this business, four or five generations on their family ranch,

00:47:35 Speaker_04
and they've had bad experiences with hunters that come in and cut their fences, shoot their cows, leave their gates open, and they just say, I'm done, I'm closed, and they get really angry.

00:47:45 Speaker_04
I just hunted on a guy's ranch about a week ago up in north central Montana, and he owned 60 sections. That's 60 square miles of land, which may not be a big place in Texas, but for most of the rest of the world. That's huge.

00:48:00 Speaker_04
It's huge, and he gave us permission, He had to tell us all the challenges he's had and why he had a big sign, don't even ask, basically. But I know he was going to let us, because some other friends of mine had hunted there.

00:48:16 Speaker_04
But he had all these heartburns over things that had happened to him. Hunters gave him a really bad taste in their mouth.

00:48:24 Speaker_04
I, as a single individual person, can't do a lot about it, and I'd like to see hunting organizations, many really good ones, help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter-landowner relationships.

00:48:35 Speaker_04
You would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement.

00:48:39 Speaker_01
Well, I would understand that if you've been burned a few times, people have poached on your land, and there's this attitude that people who don't have anything, and they see someone who has so much, and they're like, screw this guy, I'm just going to go on his property.

00:48:51 Speaker_01
Look, the elk are right there over the ridge, 400 yards away. Let's just go over there, shoot those elk. He won't even know. We'll pack it out.

00:48:58 Speaker_04
That happens.

00:48:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, and then they get caught. And then this guy's like, God damn it, they're poaching on my land. And then he hates hunters. Hunters are like everybody else.

00:49:08 Speaker_01
There's people that are amazing plumbers, and they're real honest, and they work hard, and they're sweethearts, and you're happy to hire them and call them. And there's people that are just liars, and they're crooks.

00:49:18 Speaker_04
It's just like any other group of people.

00:49:19 Speaker_01
Like anything else. Exactly.

00:49:21 Speaker_04
Exactly. And I know in my business with the wolves, I've always tried to be very transparent. I'm very honest. And if somebody asks me a question, I'll give them the best information I have.

00:49:31 Speaker_04
If I don't know an answer, I'll say, I don't know, but you know, you could call Sloan. So who's maybe had the experience with that. I got nothing to hide by being dishonest or, or trying to sell somebody.

00:49:42 Speaker_04
It's like hunting impacts of wolves on hunting it. You look at populations and they go like this all the time. And sometimes wolves cause this, sometimes not. Sometimes it's winter, sometimes it's accumulation of lions and bears and wolves.

00:49:55 Speaker_04
But it's like the stock market. People want to see it do this.

00:49:59 Speaker_01
Well, it's like the climate.

00:50:01 Speaker_04
Exactly.

00:50:02 Speaker_01
Nobody wants to admit to that, either. They hate looking at long-term data. I know. When people want to talk about the sky is falling, well, it's actually not. Look at it over a long period of time, and you see this trend has always existed.

00:50:16 Speaker_01
In fact, this is one of the cooler times in history.

00:50:19 Speaker_04
We're we're facing interesting times. It's bizarrely ideological I think the the hardest thing is so much social media everything goes on instantly and whether it's true or not Mm-hmm.

00:50:32 Speaker_01
Everything goes on instantly and everything is ideologically connected You know, there's people that just don't want any animals ever killed, ever. And there's people that want no predators and the easiest hunts possible.

00:50:46 Speaker_01
And they don't have a nuanced perspective of the ecosystem, of what biology is and what these animals, there's a whole world that they live in. And this world is interdependent. There's so many things going on.

00:51:02 Speaker_01
And so people like I remember there was a documentary that came out how wolves changed rivers in Yellowstone and they made this incredibly rosy picture of wolves coming in and it brought in beavers and they changed the rivers and the lakes and everything was better.

00:51:20 Speaker_01
And it's like, no, not really. No, there's a lot going on all the time. And to single out this one aspect of this ecosystem and say, this is the cause of this. There's a lot of different causes. There's a lot going on.

00:51:36 Speaker_04
Yes, and that film or the video ran viral big time. But there's no one species that's going to make or break the world, except maybe people. But in terms of the impacts, no.

00:51:50 Speaker_04
And it's been shown since that video came out, the movie, that that might be true in a short time period in small places, but it's not the global picture for Yellowstone Park. Wolves have not saved the planet. They just haven't.

00:52:03 Speaker_04
It's just not that simple.

00:52:05 Speaker_01
Well, what they have done, though, is brought some balance, right?

00:52:08 Speaker_04
I think, yes. So you can go either way. And I think people who are out on either extreme can actually make people in the middle more involved with conservation efforts, like that guy with the movie.

00:52:21 Speaker_04
Well, it's a rosy story, and pieces of it may be true in certain places for a temporal or spatial time period. But then there's the guy in, where was it, Daniels, Wyoming, who roared over that wolf in the snowmobile and crippled it.

00:52:37 Speaker_04
You heard about this, didn't you? And then he brought it back. Crippled.

00:52:41 Speaker_01
To a bar. To the bar. Taped its mouth up.

00:52:43 Speaker_04
And had it in the bar so people could be entertained for an hour before they took it out back and shot it. Now, that's a pretty horrific thing, whether it's a deer or a malt lion or an owl. Well, any animal. It's horrible. Any animal.

00:52:54 Speaker_04
But that horrific act got a lot of people in the middle fired up to become more strong conservationists. So I'm sorry that that happened.

00:53:02 Speaker_04
But on the other hand, it brings a lot of awareness to people who are not aware of the level of capacity of people to be stupid.

00:53:09 Speaker_01
And evil. That's evil. When I saw the photos of the wolf, I'm like, that is an evil act. That's an incredible animal. And you have no right to do that.

00:53:20 Speaker_01
And if you crippled it, if you crippled it with a snowmobile, the right thing to do is to call someone or have it euthanized. Shoot it. Yeah, shoot it or call someone, but to drag it to a bar is just sick.

00:53:31 Speaker_04
Well, I mean, he ran it over intentionally and he had a gun.

00:53:33 Speaker_01
Oh, he did it intentionally.

00:53:34 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah. And he had a gun. No, it was all for show.

00:53:38 Speaker_01
Well, the level of vitriol that people have towards wolves is very strange. And I think it goes back to, like, Little Red Riding Hood and, you know, the Big Bad Wolf.

00:53:48 Speaker_01
And there's just like this thing that we have in our mind that we don't have for other predators. We don't have it for bears. We don't have it for cats.

00:53:57 Speaker_04
No.

00:53:57 Speaker_01
It's weird, right? I've thought about this a lot.

00:54:00 Speaker_04
So why wolves? What's the deal with wolves? Why does it create that? If you look at the facts, I mean, elk, coyotes, lions, bears, coke machines, whatever, kill people, lightning, every year, lots of people. Wolves, it would be a very rare experience.

00:54:22 Speaker_04
It occasionally happens, but it's so much rarer than everything else, and yet people don't hate lions or grizzly bears.

00:54:28 Speaker_01
I have a theory.

00:54:29 Speaker_04
Okay, let's hear it.

00:54:29 Speaker_01
I think it's a historical thing. I think wolves are not a problem when you deal with civilization, when you deal with agriculture and people have guns and people have land and they have property.

00:54:41 Speaker_01
But I think at one point in time, it was a much bigger deal when there were larger populations of them, and they would hunt people, they would attack people. Are you aware of the World War I story? About them eating corpses?

00:54:53 Speaker_01
Well, not just that, about the Germans and the Russians having a ceasefire, because so many people were getting eaten by wolves.

00:55:01 Speaker_01
I talked to Steve Rinell about it once, and he wasn't even sure if it was true, so they actually researched it and found out it was true, and they wrote an article on Meat Eater about it.

00:55:10 Speaker_04
No way. So I haven't seen it.

00:55:12 Speaker_01
So the story, I don't remember where I heard it from, but the story was, you know, the thing about war, especially trench warfare, the horrific nature of it is that you don't necessarily always kill people. You shoot them and hurt them and wound them.

00:55:26 Speaker_01
And these wolves were aware that these people were living in these trenches and that they were wounded. And so they smelled blood and they came in. And there was so many instances of people getting dragged out of the trenches by packs of wolves.

00:55:39 Speaker_01
And there were so many instances of parties going out, like two or three men, and then they just find a boot with a foot in it, and they realize, oh boy, an animal's gotten them.

00:55:50 Speaker_01
And so they decided to have a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans to just get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other.

00:55:59 Speaker_04
I'll have to look that up, because I haven't actually heard of it.

00:56:01 Speaker_01
See if you can find that article. I believe it's on meateater.com.

00:56:04 Speaker_04
I'd like to know where the references are, thanks.

00:56:06 Speaker_01
Was there a ceasefire during World War I to hunt wolves? But I want to know what the references for this story were. I think it's the New York Times. OK.

00:56:13 Speaker_01
Multiple newspapers in 1917 report this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times, New York Times. Since then, it's become a favorite. bit of barroom banter among amateur historians." Oh, like me, Joe Rogan.

00:56:26 Speaker_01
February 19th, it says it there. February 1917, a dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire in the forests of Lithuania and I don't know how to say that word, Volhynia? Volhynia?

00:56:37 Speaker_01
How would you say that word?

00:56:39 Speaker_01
Close enough locals hypothesized the war effort displaced the wolves So the canines started seeking out new hunting grounds the hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages attacking calves sheep goats and in two cases children They also showed up on the front lines feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters parties of russians and german scouts met

00:56:59 Speaker_01
Recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article Hostilities were at once suspended and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack killing about 50 wolves So these are one of the things that happens in Russia's you get these super packs I'm sure you've heard about those where they've had problems with them descending on Whether it's a cattle ranch or horses.

00:57:27 Speaker_01
They've taken out horses Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successfully tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance, according to a 1917 New York Times article. But all to no avail.

00:57:39 Speaker_01
The wolves, nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia, were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger.

00:57:45 Speaker_04
Yeah, I'm reading it too. I just would say... You a little skeptical? I'm very skeptical.

00:57:51 Speaker_01
Number one, there weren't... It says, though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate.

00:57:57 Speaker_01
Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war and that the surviving wolves fled to escape a carnage the like of which they had never encountered. Click on that link. What is that?

00:58:09 Speaker_04
But we're looking at news stories from 110 years ago. I know.

00:58:11 Speaker_01
Look at that, 1917. Right. Wild.

00:58:15 Speaker_04
I'm just saying.

00:58:16 Speaker_01
You a little skeptical?

00:58:18 Speaker_04
No, I'm not a little skeptical. I'm very skeptical.

00:58:20 Speaker_01
Well, they lie in the news now. I know. But it seems like something happened. I don't think they made up the fact that they all got together and shot wolves. And have you read about Russian super packs of wolves? No. No? OK.

00:58:33 Speaker_04
No, and I read the literature.

00:58:35 Speaker_01
But this is recently.

00:58:36 Speaker_04
Okay.

00:58:37 Speaker_01
Within a few years ago, there was a problem with these super packs where they ... I don't remember what the theory was as to why they had formed such large packs, but there was large packs of up to 100 wolves that were going into farms.

00:58:56 Speaker_04
So my question about this story, and I'm not ... I'm just saying I'm skeptical. Largest wolf pack.

00:59:01 Speaker_01
2010-2011, a super pack of wolves numbering up to 400 reportedly terrorized the Russian town of, boy, good luck with that word. Sounds like a vodka. Vorkoyansk, population 1,300. So what's the source? Guinness Book of World Records. It's like Wikipedia?

00:59:22 Speaker_01
No, they're a little better than that. Look at Beatty's sketch. One of the remotest inhabited areas of the northern hemisphere, more than 30 horses were killed in just four days. And I remember reading about this in 2010.

00:59:35 Speaker_01
It said, according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on site. Animal experts suspicious of the claims say that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals.

00:59:48 Speaker_01
although the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves' usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals." This was multiple sources had this story, and I remember it about a decade or so ago.

01:00:00 Speaker_04
I'd love to look up more detail, but I can't tell you about the news source, and I'm not familiar with that, and I don't read that kind of stuff usually. If it's true, it's true. I don't happen to believe it's true.

01:00:12 Speaker_04
But what I can tell you about the true about wolf biology is wolves live in packs that are generally a family group. They have a genetic investment in their pack members. There's oftentimes one or two that aren't related.

01:00:24 Speaker_04
And they defend that territory to the death, whether there's five of them or 25 of them. And that would be a large pack. The largest pack I've ever heard of was in Yellowstone. I think it was 34 because three females had pups.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
So to have 400 wolves move together is- Why would they do that?

01:00:39 Speaker_04
What's the benefit to them? They're gathering, collaborating with animals that aren't related to them, that have no genetic benefit to see them each survive. packs that are not related kill each other.

01:00:52 Speaker_04
It's the biggest cause of mortality in Yellowstone Park is wolves killing non-pack members.

01:00:57 Speaker_01
Wolves are very, very intelligent though. Oh, I know. Extremely intelligent.

01:01:02 Speaker_01
And could you imagine a scenario where resources were so diminished that wolves recognized that killing each other had no benefit and that moving together as a group they could do something to these farms

01:01:16 Speaker_01
So if you are a pack of 400 wolves and you choose to attack horses, that seems to me a lot more success than three wolves or five wolves trying to do that.

01:01:25 Speaker_04
I get what you're saying, but you ask would I believe it, and I have to tell you no, I wouldn't believe it.

01:01:29 Speaker_01
Well, this is based on your real life lived experience. I wouldn't believe it. But things do vary according to very unusual circumstances in terms of the environment, right?

01:01:40 Speaker_04
So if there were 400 wolves that were starving, they would starve.

01:01:45 Speaker_01
I mean, they wouldn't pack.

01:01:49 Speaker_04
You're giving them some human reasoning skills. They don't think like humans do. They just don't. And I'm sorry, I'm not, don't be if I'm not calling you a liar.

01:01:58 Speaker_01
You're reading the story.

01:01:59 Speaker_04
I'm just saying, I don't, I'd have to investigate that, but I'm 100% skeptical on it. Just because of everything that I'm familiar with, but it stuff happens.

01:02:10 Speaker_01
I have, no pun intended, no dog in the race or dog in the fight, but my thought is that in perhaps unusual circumstances like Siberia, where it's so incredibly harsh,

01:02:23 Speaker_01
that if you do find a population that had been surviving because there was a sufficient amount of wildlife for them to kill, and then all of a sudden there wasn't, but there was farms, they all might kind of like descend on these farms and perhaps not even fight for resources because they realized there was no benefit in that.

01:02:41 Speaker_04
You asked me, I just said, I don't believe it. So I hear you. Beth, I don't have anything to contribute further on that.

01:02:46 Speaker_01
I guess you're just a science denier. That's OK, Diane.

01:02:49 Speaker_04
I'm a science denier. There you go. I like that.

01:02:52 Speaker_01
Isn't that a fun thing to call people?

01:02:54 Speaker_04
That's great.

01:02:54 Speaker_01
It's such a horrible thing to say to people. What are you saying? So what is the largest that you've observed, the largest pact you observed?

01:03:03 Speaker_04
I have only observed probably 15, but that's not Yellowstone. That's in my history. And I know in Yellowstone, like I said, I know one year they get up to 34.

01:03:11 Speaker_04
And I think that probably the largest I've ever heard of being recorded that I know is factual. It might be 40, but that's extremely unusual.

01:03:20 Speaker_01
And is that Yellowstone as well?

01:03:22 Speaker_04
Might be Canada. I'm trying to remember my source. I can't remember. But 34 in Yellowstone, that's unusual.

01:03:27 Speaker_01
Do you think the large number in Yellowstone was because of the unusual circumstances of the reintroduction and a bunch of animals that weren't used to having wolves around? Yes.

01:03:35 Speaker_04
I think, well, three things happened. Three different females had pups. On average, they have six pups, seven pups. So there's recruiting right there, 18, 20 pups right there.

01:03:45 Speaker_04
In addition to the adults that were there, they had a good year, they had lots of prey, and so all those pups presumably made it to their first year. So for one winter, They were a huge pack and then mortality happens.

01:03:59 Speaker_04
Wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. I mean, packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and the wolves are smaller, they live in smaller packs. In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho. average pack might be somewhere between 10 and 15.

01:04:14 Speaker_04
And every year, you gotta remember, every year they have six to seven pups, and by the next spring, they're back down, that six or seven through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting, yeah. So, stuff happens.

01:04:30 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a hard life.

01:04:32 Speaker_04
It is a hard life.

01:04:33 Speaker_04
Another thing, I've heard lots of people, well, I've heard several people, and people I know quite well, tell me stories about they encountered a wolf, or they encountered a wolf pack, and they were really frightened, because they were, they had their dog with them, and the wolves were interested in the dog, like little Carl there, or something, and the wolves were circling around, and these people were terrified.

01:04:56 Speaker_04
And when they told me this, there were two people, they told me this story, and they said, yeah, they could have killed me. And my response is, yeah, easily. But you're here telling me this story. So it's not very common for wolves to attack people.

01:05:13 Speaker_04
That's just what it is.

01:05:14 Speaker_01
Not anymore.

01:05:16 Speaker_04
Not anymore, and I don't know how good the reporting was way back when.

01:05:20 Speaker_01
But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns, or at the very least muskets, and you're dealing with people that are completely isolated, and you're dealing with harsh climates.

01:05:34 Speaker_04
Like the homesteaders.

01:05:35 Speaker_01
Yeah, and there might be a time where the food source for the wolves is diminished. The homesteaders didn't really have a problem with wolves, though, attacking people, right? That's what I'm saying.

01:05:46 Speaker_04
When we had time... But they had guns. They had guns, they had poisons, they had traps, they had livestock, they had children. That's just what I'm saying.

01:05:53 Speaker_04
In this country, with probably a, I don't mean to be offensive, but a better base of information, with all the opportunity in the world for all those things you just said, remote living, no protection, harsh winters like the winter of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle were starving.

01:06:11 Speaker_04
You didn't have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing everybody.

01:06:14 Speaker_01
I'm just saying. Right. But isn't that a different environment than Siberia? Siberia is unbelievably brutal. Oh, you ask those homesteaders. Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People, Life in the Taiga?

01:06:25 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:06:26 Speaker_01
Isn't it amazing? It's beautiful.

01:06:28 Speaker_04
Incredible. It's beautiful. I just actually watched it within the last year.

01:06:31 Speaker_01
I thought about that when I was thinking about you living alone by yourself. Like that's how those people did.

01:06:36 Speaker_01
They would go out there and they would just go with a dog and they would go live by themselves in these cabins that they had fortified for the entire winter and just live out there amongst the wild. And they loved it. They all loved it.

01:06:50 Speaker_01
They all couldn't wait to get out there.

01:06:51 Speaker_04
How many were killed by wolves?

01:06:53 Speaker_01
None. None. But, again, those guys. Tigers?

01:06:57 Speaker_04
Tigers are awesome predators on people.

01:07:00 Speaker_01
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, Siberian tigers, are they known to kill people? Oh, yeah. Yeah? Are they?

01:07:04 Speaker_04
I'm trying to remember the name of the book I read. It might just be called Tiger. I'm trying to remember the name, but it's a story of a predatory tiger and these guys, a story of the tiger's life and how they go to finally try and kill it.

01:07:16 Speaker_04
It's a terrifying story.

01:07:17 Speaker_01
Wow. In Siberia?

01:07:18 Speaker_04
Yeah, and it's modern times.

01:07:20 Speaker_01
There's something super scary about a tiger in the snow.

01:07:22 Speaker_04
Oh my god, a cat that's 600 pounds stalking you?

01:07:25 Speaker_01
In the snow.

01:07:25 Speaker_04
I know, no thank you.

01:07:27 Speaker_01
No thank you. Yeah, it's just a matter of whether or not you zig when you should have zagged and you're in the wrong spot of land where he's at.

01:07:36 Speaker_04
Yes. And I think that tiger had an injury that was caused by humans. And that's often the case. It wasn't able to hunt real proficiently. Or when you're reading the book, you get the drift that it had a vengeance against humans because it was injured.

01:07:52 Speaker_01
I would imagine that's probably the case, too. It could be. Just as they're scared if they survive a situation.

01:07:58 Speaker_01
The second story of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill.

01:08:09 Speaker_01
The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger stalked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.

01:08:23 Speaker_01
Wow. Yeah.

01:08:24 Speaker_04
There's no doubt that animal, according to the story here, definitely had vengeance on its mind.

01:08:29 Speaker_01
Wow. It was an impulsive response, Valiant says. The tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of time. The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking. When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him in the bush, and ate him.

01:08:44 Speaker_01
The eating may have been secondary, Valiant explained. I think he killed him just because he had a bone to pick.

01:08:49 Speaker_04
The book is called The Tiger. See, I had the title right.

01:08:52 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:08:53 Speaker_04
It's a fascinating story. Wow. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because with- Look at the footprint.

01:08:58 Speaker_01
Oh my God. Look at the size of that. Look at the guy's hand next to the footprint. Oh my God. It's amazing. Oh, that's the author with the size of a female's paw print. So that's a female. That's a small one. That's a small one. Oh my goodness.

01:09:09 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:09:11 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:09:11 Speaker_04
Fascinating story. And then there's this, the tiger is just trying to be a tiger.

01:09:16 Speaker_01
Is that a photograph of those guys?

01:09:17 Speaker_04
It looks like a drawing. Different time era.

01:09:22 Speaker_01
Is that a photo of them?

01:09:23 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:09:24 Speaker_01
Boy, what a shitty photo. I wouldn't buy it. If somebody said that's a photo, I'd go, get out of here, you drew that.

01:09:28 Speaker_04
It's 140 years old, come on.

01:09:29 Speaker_01
You drew that, bro.

01:09:31 Speaker_04
But some of the interesting things looking at that is like in Glacier Park or anywhere I play where wolves overlap with mount lions, which we call lions, mount lions and grizzly bears and coyotes and whatever.

01:09:45 Speaker_04
When they kill one of their other competing predators, just like that tiger, they don't usually eat it. It's secondary.

01:09:52 Speaker_01
It's to kill off a competitor. So wolves don't get eaten by mount lions? They do get killed by mount lions occasionally, right?

01:09:59 Speaker_04
Occasionally. Matter of fact, one of the Colorado wolves that was just introduced was killed by a mount lion.

01:10:04 Speaker_01
Really? Yeah. One of the 10 that was just introduced. So they kill them because they are a competitor.

01:10:09 Speaker_04
And one-on-one, a 120-pound cat and a 100-pound wolf, one-on-one, the cat's going to win. But when you have a pack of wolves, I mean, we've watched them treat the cat. And they'll wait till they can get it. They'll wait.

01:10:25 Speaker_04
But one-on-one, the cat doesn't have a chance.

01:10:27 Speaker_01
But no one, I mean, we've talked- Or the wolf doesn't have a chance one-on-one, you mean?

01:10:31 Speaker_04
Right. I mean, when the cats won, and you got a pack of eight waiting. Right, right, right. But we documented a case where the wolves treed a cat, and it couldn't stay up in the tree any longer. It was on a skinny lodge pole, and it was sliding down.

01:10:43 Speaker_04
And as soon as it got to the ground, they killed it, and they just ripped it apart, and they didn't eat any of it.

01:10:48 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:10:50 Speaker_04
It's strictly to vanquish a competitor, just like the tiger.

01:10:53 Speaker_01
It's interesting, because wouldn't you think that food is scarce, and that meat is precious, and that if they did kill the mountain lion, they'd realize, why don't we eat this thing?

01:11:02 Speaker_04
Well, they had better options. Have you ever eaten mouth line?

01:11:05 Speaker_01
I have. It's good. Yeah. I had it once. That's why it's weird. Actually, you know what? Wait a minute. Did I eat it? I don't know what I have. I feel like someone gave me something. I don't think I ate it. I think it's in my freezer.

01:11:20 Speaker_01
I think somebody might have served it to me somewhere.

01:11:22 Speaker_04
Like the backstrap of a lion.

01:11:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, the loin.

01:11:25 Speaker_04
It looks like a pork tenderloin. It's very light colored. I've only eaten it once.

01:11:29 Speaker_01
Well, Steve killed one and cooked it. He said it was tremendous. It is. He called it superb. He said it was like a superior pork.

01:11:38 Speaker_04
Without the fat.

01:11:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, he said it was really good, which is like most people would not think you even eat mountain lion.

01:11:44 Speaker_04
Wolves apparently either, huh?

01:11:45 Speaker_01
Well, that was I was reading about one of the trappers, one of the original people that was traveling across the country in the 1700s. His favorite meal was wolf. Oh, you're kidding me. No, this guy was eating like wolf meat.

01:12:00 Speaker_04
I don't think it'd be very good. They're skinny and stringy and sinewy.

01:12:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't know why. I mean, I don't know why that would be anyone's favorite. Then maybe that's like a cool thing to tell people. I like eating wolves. You know, you find some guys, you know, he wants you to be scared of him. What does he eat?

01:12:17 Speaker_01
He's up there alone. He's eating wolves. That's his favorite. He lives by himself and he just eats wolves. Doesn't that sound like something a man would say?

01:12:26 Speaker_04
Or, worse yet, wolverines.

01:12:28 Speaker_01
Oh, right. Imagine eating wolverines?

01:12:30 Speaker_04
No. Anyway, no. I'm glad you showed me that stuff because it's nice to know the stuff is still out there and alive and well. I hear it all the time. I hear about the Canadian super wolves.

01:12:42 Speaker_01
Well, there is a thing about mammals, right? That mammals, as they get into a colder range, they are larger mammals. Like if you see, let's say, a northern Alberta whitetail deer versus an Arizona whitetail deer.

01:12:58 Speaker_04
to a certain point, and then when you get to where it's so cold in Arctic that the resources, the availability to get food is diminished.

01:13:05 Speaker_01
Right.

01:13:05 Speaker_04
Like Arctic wolves on Ellesmere Island are pretty small, and they're white.

01:13:09 Speaker_01
Because they're tiny. They don't have any food.

01:13:11 Speaker_04
They're smaller. Right. The Piris caribou up there are smaller than, say, the caribou in Alaska. Because it's hard to make a living.

01:13:20 Speaker_03
Right.

01:13:21 Speaker_04
But yeah, northern climate, like the wolves from Canada, most of them are pretty big, and same with the ...

01:13:27 Speaker_01
Well, it's a resource issue, right? This is the reason why most people think, when they think of grizzly bears, grizzly bears have a very similar size, but then you get to coastal brown bears.

01:13:39 Speaker_01
They're much larger, and it's really just access to protein, right?

01:13:42 Speaker_04
Salmon. Yeah, you got it. I've been up to McNeil to watch the bears, and yeah, my God, they're just enormously fat. They're almost obscene waddling around with their

01:13:52 Speaker_01
Having a good old time hibernating.

01:13:55 Speaker_04
They're so content because they have endless food resources. That's why you can have tourists go out and sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you sometimes, eating salmon and you're under no danger.

01:14:10 Speaker_04
Why would they bother you when they have the thousands of pounds of salmon in the river.

01:14:15 Speaker_01
There's a fantastic video, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's a photographer and he's got like a little lawn chair set up and he's photographing all these enormous brown bears that are feeding off salmon and this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jamie is to us.

01:14:32 Speaker_01
Oh wow. And it's huge and it just sits next to him. Oh my God. Sits next to him and looks down. Watch it. This is it. Oh, that's a big bear. Look at that little folding chair. Oh my God. I mean, just imagine that. That is literally where Jamie is. Oh my God.

01:14:50 Speaker_01
And it doesn't care at all about these people. It's not thinking of them as a food source.

01:14:54 Speaker_04
No, my question is, why did the bear bother?

01:14:56 Speaker_01
Because he's looking at the river. He doesn't even care that the people are there. He's just like looking at the river going, hmm, let me take a nap here. So he just chills out. Oh my God. I mean, any other time.

01:15:08 Speaker_01
So if you were in the middle of the forest and you saw, first of all, they wouldn't be that big in the middle of the forest. But if you saw a bear like that in the middle of the forest, it'd be absolutely terrifying. He'd be scared of you.

01:15:18 Speaker_01
You'd be scared of him. You'd have your bear spray out. Yeah. Look at this guy. He's so close. And the bear just sort of walks off like, see ya, bye, because he's got so much food.

01:15:29 Speaker_04
I kind of had a similar experience, McNeil, not that close, but close enough that I was uncomfortable.

01:15:34 Speaker_04
I live with bears because I'm used to bears that have skinny resources and they're voracious and they're pretty aggressive in the fall, they can be, because they're getting into hyperphagia where they got a good enough calories to hibernate.

01:15:49 Speaker_04
And if you keep them from getting their calories, It's you or the huckleberry patch, maybe, or you or the elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get.

01:15:58 Speaker_04
That happens, people hang their game in the woods and then go back the next day and a grizzly bear's found it.

01:16:02 Speaker_01
Have you ever heard Steve's story of that? No, no, tell me. Oh my God, they were on a Fognac Island. Where's that? It's in Alaska.

01:16:09 Speaker_01
It's connected to, it's like one of the island chains that's right near, what is the big one where they find all the big brown bears? Kodiak? Yeah. So it's right off of Kodiak. So they were elk hunting. And they shot an elk.

01:16:26 Speaker_01
And you're talking about... Elk hunting on that island? Yes. Elk hunting on the Fognak, yeah. It's a very hard hunt.

01:16:32 Speaker_04
Wow.

01:16:32 Speaker_01
Incredibly difficult hunt because of the terrain. It's almost impossible to traverse. So to get a few miles takes hours and hours and hours. So they go through this. They're basically bushwhacking through this incredibly dense terrain. They find an elk.

01:16:48 Speaker_01
They shoot the elk.

01:16:49 Speaker_01
then they're very far from camp so they take some of the meat and then they hang the meat in the trees and you know they set up they didn't know that when they came back the next day that a bear had claimed that elk so of course there's a gut pile there's all sorts of stuff there for the bear obviously the smell of the meat and so they

01:17:12 Speaker_01
It took a long time to get where the bear was, and they all sat down. There was a large group of them because they were filming for this television show.

01:17:19 Speaker_01
My friend Remy Warren, my friend Yanis Poutelis, and then Steve and a few other people working on the crew. And they sit down to have lunch, and little do they know that there is an enormous, like, 11-foot bear that had claimed that.

01:17:34 Speaker_01
and he comes running through the camp.

01:17:37 Speaker_04
Oh my gosh.

01:17:38 Speaker_01
And one guy, our friend Dirtmouth, was actually on his back. The bear plowed through the camp and through the people and just, I don't think it recognized how many people were there, so it didn't know exactly what to do.

01:17:49 Speaker_01
So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for like 10 to 15 yards before he fell off of it. So then the bear goes in the woods and starts woofing. None of them had their guns out. None of them were ready. They were just eating lunch.

01:18:04 Speaker_01
They really fucked up. They made a huge tactical error. They also ignored scat.

01:18:11 Speaker_01
which they weren't sure like whether or not that was a bear that had recently been you know so they were there for quite a while guns drawn like trying to fend off this bear until they eventually got out of there but both Steve Ranella and Remy Warren have told the story on my podcast and it's wow bone-chilling

01:18:32 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah. I hadn't heard that when I saw Steve.

01:18:34 Speaker_01
Steve said that this thing was literally feet from his head gnashing its teeth as it's running through the camp. And it's enormous. He said, you have all these thoughts in your mind of what you would do and how you would feel.

01:18:50 Speaker_01
And he said, it's just reptilian. Like, your brain goes to the most base survival. There's a recognition of this enormous predator. unbelievably sobering experience.

01:19:03 Speaker_04
Yes. And what I would point out with that is that that bear had every chance in the world to kill every one of those guys.

01:19:10 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:19:11 Speaker_04
It didn't hurt any of them.

01:19:12 Speaker_01
Well, it was just trying to protect its kill, what it thought was its. But his theory was that the bear didn't realize how many people were there.

01:19:21 Speaker_04
It wouldn't matter.

01:19:22 Speaker_01
They were armed. And as it ran through the group, it didn't know who to hit. Right, right. Giannis hit it in the face with trekking poles.

01:19:28 Speaker_04
Hit the bear in the face?

01:19:29 Speaker_01
Janice, oh my gosh. Hit the bear in the face with trekking poles. Like that close to him. Imagine a head that big, that close, and you hit it with trekking poles. Ah, and it just ran past them, probably not knowing which one to target or what to do.

01:19:45 Speaker_01
And then they got their guns out, and then I don't know exactly how they eventually got to a point where they felt confident enough that they could walk, and then walk with meat on their back. Right? So they went there to pack out.

01:20:00 Speaker_01
And they have all these guys so they can make the pack out a little bit easier. It's terrifying. So now you're walking even slower because you've got 50 pounds on your back.

01:20:07 Speaker_04
Maybe they left a little behind.

01:20:09 Speaker_01
They should have.

01:20:10 Speaker_04
That's a good move. I mean, yeah, I probably would have. Leave the shoulders and the neck.

01:20:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, leave something. Yeah, leave something to fill them up.

01:20:17 Speaker_04
But my point is that bear could have run through and killed one of them or all of them in a moment of anger. It didn't. It did a bluff charge. It turned around. It woofed and gnashed its teeth.

01:20:27 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:20:28 Speaker_04
It could have killed them, seriously.

01:20:30 Speaker_01
Sure. Even if they had their guns, it would have killed one or two of them.

01:20:32 Speaker_04
Right. And then we have this happen a lot in Montana. Every year, at least one person is killed by a bear, or many can be injured. And the thing that's common is they say the bear charged them, and before that, it was woofing.

01:20:46 Speaker_04
And a lot of times, they do what's called a bluff charge. People don't want to wait until a bear is 15 feet away to figure out if it's a bluff charge or not, so they shoot them.

01:20:56 Speaker_04
Bear spray is very, very effective because you can do a longer distance and it's accurate, but I personally don't... The science shows, and many of your listeners won't believe this, the science shows that average hunter is better off with a bear spray than a firearm.

01:21:16 Speaker_04
In a moment of panic, you can't say what you would do.

01:21:19 Speaker_01
Better off to survive?

01:21:21 Speaker_04
To survive with less injury, or at least less fatal. And people have sprayed a bear that's attacking somebody, and the bear breaks off and leaves. Of course, you've got to deal with the after. Have you ever been around bear spray, pepper spray?

01:21:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, I have.

01:21:34 Speaker_04
Oh, my God.

01:21:34 Speaker_01
Maybe you did it in the— We pepper sprayed a bunch of people on Fear Factor once. Oh, it's awful.

01:21:41 Speaker_04
How did you get—did everybody go off camera and get—

01:21:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, you run away because the breathe actually was it was tear gas. Oh, now that I'm remembering. Okay, so what we did we put these people in this like, this cement structure. It was like, how long can you tolerate it?

01:21:55 Speaker_01
I forget exactly what the stunt was. But the wind took a lot of it and blew it through the crew and we were all running away and it was in your eyes. And I'm sure tear gas is probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray.

01:22:10 Speaker_04
I think pepper spray, yeah, it might even be worse, otherwise they'd have tear gas for bare repellent and they don't, they have pepper spray.

01:22:16 Speaker_02
I'm sure.

01:22:17 Speaker_04
It's bad. But I'm just saying, and people can argue this and it all depends on the situation, but in general,

01:22:24 Speaker_04
Bear spray is a more effective tool, because you can spray it three times past where he's sitting, and the bear hits that spray and they run away.

01:22:31 Speaker_04
And I guess I've heard the bear biologists say to me, try shooting a rolling tire at 40 miles an hour and see how accurate your shots are, because that's what you're shooting at if a bear's charging you.

01:22:41 Speaker_01
Right.

01:22:42 Speaker_04
And it's difficult to keep your act together.

01:22:44 Speaker_01
That's the big problem, is panic.

01:22:47 Speaker_04
Right. It's not necessarily the killing factor. It's just that you're not going to hit very well.

01:22:53 Speaker_01
Whereas if you have bear spray, it's just this cloud you're spraying out.

01:22:56 Speaker_04
It's more effective.

01:22:58 Speaker_01
It's like you had a flamethrower.

01:23:00 Speaker_04
I always carry bear spray when I'm hiking.

01:23:02 Speaker_01
You don't carry a gun?

01:23:03 Speaker_04
No.

01:23:04 Speaker_01
Really?

01:23:04 Speaker_04
Unless I'm bird hunting.

01:23:05 Speaker_01
Does bear spray work on cats?

01:23:08 Speaker_04
I've heard it, and I have never heard about it being used on wolves, because generally wolves aren't sneaking around. But if I had a cat stalking me, lying, boy, you bet I'd have my bear spray out.

01:23:18 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:23:19 Speaker_04
Absolutely.

01:23:21 Speaker_01
You've never been in a situation where you had a cat stalking you or close to you?

01:23:24 Speaker_04
Not that I saw.

01:23:26 Speaker_01
Ooh, that's what's scary, right? Exactly. Have you? No, not really. I had one kill my dog in Colorado. Little dog, little tiny.

01:23:36 Speaker_04
Sorry.

01:23:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was a bummer. But there's a big difference, I think, between what you see and what's there.

01:23:43 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, I think if you had infrared vision for the heat detector and you could see what's out in the woods, you'd never go outside to take a leak when you're at your cabin.

01:23:51 Speaker_01
You probably wouldn't. No. Because they are so aware of you.

01:23:55 Speaker_04
And everything's out there.

01:23:56 Speaker_01
We're basically almost blind.

01:23:58 Speaker_04
Yes.

01:23:58 Speaker_01
And especially at nighttime, we're almost blind. And they have senses that are beyond our wildest imagination. We were talking earlier today where someone brought up that stuff that hunters use to spray on them to kill their scent. I go, listen to me.

01:24:16 Speaker_01
This shit is nonsense. First of all, whatever that stuff is, they're going to smell that stuff. Exactly. And it's not going to hide your scent. I don't know the science behind it.

01:24:25 Speaker_01
I don't want to kill anybody's business, but as you were with the wolf thing, I'm super skeptical that a deer or an elk is not going to smell you if you spray some junk that you bought from Cabela's on you.

01:24:39 Speaker_04
I don't want to kill anybody's business either, but I can tell you from traps too, I do the same thing. I'm incredibly careful about scent. but they can still smell it. Just be as careful as you can be.

01:24:49 Speaker_01
I just don't think we can even imagine the kind of sense that they have, the kind of ability to smell and hear with those enormous ears and those noses and those eyes they can see at night. I think we're just guessing.

01:25:07 Speaker_01
It's almost like when you try to imagine the size of the universe and someone says, oh, it's 13.7 billion years old. It's like light years. Okay, how big's that?

01:25:17 Speaker_01
Like, you know, your head just... Someone tried to explain it to me in a way that actually resonated, that it's similar to how you can smell skunk, except much more directional.

01:25:29 Speaker_01
You know, like a skunk can die a mile away and you can smell it, which is really weird, because there's no other scent like that.

01:25:36 Speaker_01
in the nature, that you can pick up one animal, sprays one thing a mile away, and you're driving in your car, and you're like, oh, you smell that? There's skunk around here, which is crazy.

01:25:50 Speaker_01
Now, what this guy was saying to me is that now imagine that, but directional and better, and that's what a bear can do.

01:25:58 Speaker_04
Or a wolf. I've read studies and if the wind is right, I've read several miles so you can smell something. It is unbelievable. Incredible. I think the whole scent thing, it's way beyond our ability to detect.

01:26:13 Speaker_04
And we've been burying these traps after being so careful with everything. It's kind of voodoo and science mix. It's art and science, and you bury everything. You bury the trap, the hook, the grapple cable. I mean, just everything.

01:26:26 Speaker_04
And then you cover it up, and it's been in the ground two weeks. Nothing's disturbed it.

01:26:30 Speaker_04
And then one day, you see where a wolf has come by, taken its paw, and dug at the backside of the trap, and lifted it out by the spring, and pulled it up onto the trail, not snapped. And then there'd be a scat two feet away.

01:26:46 Speaker_01
Wow like fuck you.

01:26:48 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:26:49 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:26:51 Speaker_04
Why do they do that.

01:26:54 Speaker_01
Well maybe because they know it's there and they probably have had some experience in their life with traps.

01:27:00 Speaker_04
But why mess with it at all if they know it's dangerous.

01:27:02 Speaker_01
Right. I mean yeah. What do you think it's they're trying to like tell people. I'm not that stupid.

01:27:09 Speaker_04
My imagination and my theory is that maybe this is a wolf that's already caught, been caught, and it's got other pack members that are naive. And it stops because it smells. It's like, oh man, I know what this is.

01:27:22 Speaker_04
Maybe it's time to show Junior what's going on here and maybe they pull it out. I don't know.

01:27:27 Speaker_01
Have you ever seen the video of they caught a rat and the rat takes a stick and blows the mouse trap so it can get the food. No kidding. The rat actually brought over a tool to spring the trap and purposely springs it.

01:27:42 Speaker_04
I haven't seen the video, but I watched it with the crows.

01:27:44 Speaker_01
The problem I have with the video is I don't know the source. So I don't know if they trained this rat. They may have. Right.

01:27:51 Speaker_01
So they maybe done that just to make a viral video, but it's still pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out it could take a stick and it moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap. The rat trap springs.

01:28:02 Speaker_01
And then it goes over to, and by the way, it doesn't even flinch when the rat trap springs. You're kidding. No. See if you can find it, Jamie. It's really weird. Yeah, this is it. So he smells it. Yeah. He smells it. It's a big rat trap. Yeah.

01:28:16 Speaker_01
So he goes away, and I'll check this. Now, the thing about him not flinching is the craziest. So he gets the stick. He's had experience. He lifts it up. and drops it. He didn't flinch. He didn't flinch at all. Isn't that insane?

01:28:30 Speaker_01
I mean, imagine you're a wild animal. He may have been trained. It seems like it. Something. Maybe he's done it before. But there was something weird about it where he must have known that that's going to happen.

01:28:42 Speaker_04
And the camera with the full eye reflection sitting indoors in the room, that doesn't smack of wildness to me. That's something.

01:28:49 Speaker_01
Well, it's rats. It's not really wild, right? They're domesticated in some sort of a way. Well, you know, there's as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City.

01:28:59 Speaker_01
And by weird estimations, which I'm sure they don't have a good, accurate account of how many rats there are, but there's so many of them. And there's an amazing documentary called Rats that's on Netflix, and it's really good.

01:29:10 Speaker_01
And it shows you how intelligent they are. Brash rats and they let them go try the food out first see if it's poison because they've been poisoned so many times So look at this young dummy.

01:29:21 Speaker_01
It's like I'll eat it send Sam Sam's a dumbass So Sam the rat runs over and and eats the poison and gets sick and like let's get out of here and they take off But they have some very bizarre survival instincts that's highly tuned to this recognition that they're being at least

01:29:40 Speaker_01
tried, not preyed upon necessarily, but something's trying to kill them. They're not eating them, but it's some weird situation where it's poison. So they figured out what poison is. They're really smart. Crazy.

01:29:54 Speaker_01
So they'll send a dummy, a young guy, to go out and eat the poison.

01:29:59 Speaker_04
Give it to Mikey. Mikey likes everything.

01:30:04 Speaker_01
What kind of natural adaptation is that? And what is that from? I'm sure you're aware of this, but there's a very bizarre study that they've done where there's a concept called morphic resonance.

01:30:17 Speaker_01
And the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier.

01:30:25 Speaker_01
And that this is scientifically proven, and that the idea is that there's some sort of a sharing of information that is not local, and that we don't totally understand.

01:30:35 Speaker_01
So the concept is, the way it's been proven, is that rats on one side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country will go through the maze quicker. The exact same maze. See if you can find that.

01:30:49 Speaker_01
So they don't know what what this is like, you know, I think we have a very naive Belief that the senses that we have recognized all of them whether they're sight sound touch taste whatever they are This is it is all it's available and that the concept might the idea is that there might be something that we're missing or something that we really yeah, we as

01:31:15 Speaker_01
dumb, blind human beings in terms of our ability to see things. We don't have the ability to tune in to what these animals can tune into.

01:31:22 Speaker_04
I think there's a huge portion of our brain that we never, never touch. And I think animals are more tuned in. I think in many ways, many species are smarter than us, just because they can sense their environment more acutely.

01:31:34 Speaker_04
Yeah, maybe smart is not the right word. Maybe not.

01:31:36 Speaker_01
But there's something. Rat learning and morphic resonance. Yeah. So according to the hypothesis, formative causation, there's no difference in time between innate and learned behavior. Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance.

01:31:51 Speaker_01
The hypothesis, therefore, admits a possible transmission of learned behavior from one animal to another and leads to a testable prediction, which differs, or to testable predictions, which differ not only from those of the orthodox theory of inheritance, but also from those of the Lamarck

01:32:08 Speaker_01
Lamarckian theory and from inheritance through epigenetic modifications of gene expression. So animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in a characteristic way.

01:32:23 Speaker_01
They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times. X hypothesize the new behavioral field, which will be reinforced by morphic resonance,

01:32:32 Speaker_01
will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, though less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus.

01:32:43 Speaker_01
The larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for the subsequent similar animals to learn it.

01:32:51 Speaker_01
Therefore, in an experiment of this type, it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in the animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.

01:33:05 Speaker_01
This is pretty wild stuff. It's pretty wild. Yeah. So it just speaks to this. I think we naively look at our senses as being the only ones that are available. There's obviously some kind of communication that transpires.

01:33:21 Speaker_01
between animals that allows them to hunt in packs. Particularly wolves. They have strategies. They do things. They know how to corner animals. They know how to funnel them into pinch points.

01:33:33 Speaker_01
They do it on purpose and they seem to be aware of what they're doing through, whether it's gestures or pheromones or something that we're just guessing on. But they're accomplished at it.

01:33:47 Speaker_01
It's not like a singular individual event that you could point to, like maybe that was just dumb luck. They ran the deer through this area and the other wolves just happened to be there. No.

01:33:56 Speaker_01
No, they have specific tasks where they have wolves that'll get on the top of the ridges and let themselves be known so they get these animals running. And then the other wolves are ahead of them. And then they have wolves that follow behind them.

01:34:08 Speaker_04
The Yellowstone's been a great place to observe hunting. I mean, when I was working up northwest Montana, it's heavily forested. almost never got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we were in the airplane.

01:34:19 Speaker_04
But in the Lamar, you got scopes and everybody's watching it. And I've seen some pretty incredible chases. And there's certain, in some packs, certain individuals are the chasers, the younger animals, and some of the Individuals are the coup de grace.

01:34:34 Speaker_04
They go in for the kill after the animal's been tired. And I guess there was some older animals that are too valuable, potentially, to risk being injured early on. But they join in the chase, and they know how to kill an animal.

01:34:47 Speaker_04
So one thing I've always wondered, I don't know if this is with the Morphic residents, but that's something different maybe, but I've always wondered when wolves were first walking down from Canada and dispersing from Glacier before wolves were reintroduced and there was a very thin population of wolves out there.

01:35:07 Speaker_04
How do they know where to go? For example, there is a wolf pack in the Nine Mile, it's a river, drainage, outside of Missoula, and this pair of wolves had formed a mating system and they had a litter of pups.

01:35:21 Speaker_04
The female was poached on Memorial Day, which is, those pups are born in middle April, so they were pretty young. They were five, six weeks old. They were still dependent on mom.

01:35:30 Speaker_04
And the concern was that the dad wouldn't be able to raise those pups because he's got to go out and hunt and they're just being weaned and blah, blah, blah.

01:35:39 Speaker_04
Well, two weeks after the female was dead, my colleague Mike who was working down there says, Hey, Diane, are you missing any collared wolves from Glacier? I said, Yeah, I'm missing several that I don't know where they went. He says,

01:35:53 Speaker_04
I just had a collared wolf show up here and join the Nine Mile Mail." I said, really? I said, well, here's my list of frequencies of the missing wolves that had been missing. And he put, ran through the receiver and listened.

01:36:05 Speaker_04
And one of those wolves was one that I had caught in Glacier and disappeared six, seven months earlier. So like, so she wandered around in not cyberspace, but mountain space, trying to look for a place to fit in.

01:36:18 Speaker_04
And all of a sudden, when this female gets shot, boom, she's there to fill in the slot. How does that happen?

01:36:25 Speaker_04
And that happens in Yellowstone, too, where one of the breeding animals will be killed, and very soon after, a wolf of unknown... Well, there they know a lot of the wolves, but a wolf would just show up, the right gender, the right age, and potentially bond and start a new pack.

01:36:42 Speaker_04
How do they know? And I guess all I can say is with that, there's scent, the wolf smelling the urine and the scat can detect all kinds of things hormonally and the dominance of an animal.

01:36:52 Speaker_04
If the female went missing, all of a sudden they won't smell it anymore and maybe it's a female coming in and she knows it. But geographically, how do they know to migrate? 200 miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears.

01:37:05 Speaker_01
Well, they've been trying to figure out forever what's going on with birds and how birds, like sandhill cranes, for example.

01:37:12 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:37:13 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, Canadian geese. What's going on? How are these birds figuring out these incredible migration paths?

01:37:19 Speaker_04
Right. It's amazing to me. Have you ever heard of the book called World on the Wing by Paul, I think last name is Weedon, It's about the world of migration, and it is mind-boggling.

01:37:32 Speaker_04
If you like to read nature stuff and science, it's written so anybody can enjoy. You don't have to be a scientist.

01:37:37 Speaker_04
But it's fascinating and full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places, and like a particular important flat in China that was critical habitat for a group of birds suddenly gets developed, and it's like the wintering ground for half a million of these birds, or whatever it was.

01:37:56 Speaker_04
And certainly, where do they go?

01:37:58 Speaker_01
Right. I don't know. Migratory birds are very fascinating. Oh, I know. Like, what are they following? And what GPS do they have in their little tiny brains? They have little tiny brains. I know. But yet they're able to use something.

01:38:11 Speaker_01
Like, there's a theory that it's the magnetic poles. Right, or the stars or whatever. The stars, really? I've never heard that one.

01:38:19 Speaker_04
I just heard a lot of stuff. I remember, yeah, one winter night I was at my little remote cabin, and it was at Moose City, and it was stormy, and it was like November, and it was stormy.

01:38:31 Speaker_04
I went outside to UC Outhouse, and I heard this calling, and it was dark and stormy. It was calling and calling, and it got closer and closer, and I put my bright flashlight straight up, And there was a flock of snow geese.

01:38:46 Speaker_04
I'd never seen snow geese up there, never. And they were circling around, and they were lost in the storm. And there's no lights up there except for my house light and my flashlight, and they were circling around the meadow.

01:38:59 Speaker_04
And I listened to that haunting call, and I thought, how are they going to survive it? This is the valley bottom. Are they going to try and go up over the mountaintops? In the storm? Are they going to crash land in the meadow for the night?

01:39:13 Speaker_04
Anyway, I got to thinking about them. I thought, how did they get here? They got blown off course. I just shut my light off and I don't know what happened to them. Never saw them again.

01:39:21 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:39:22 Speaker_04
But I think about these birds. A lot of them die migrating.

01:39:25 Speaker_01
Yeah. They don't have a good ending. You know those birds that fly across the entire ocean? It's mind boggling. Mind boggling. They sleep while they're flying.

01:39:32 Speaker_04
I know. I wished I could do that when I was driving. I try sometimes.

01:39:36 Speaker_01
One of them is a very big bird. Albatross. That's right. Albatross. And they literally sleep while they're soaring across the sky.

01:39:43 Speaker_04
Just put out those big old wings.

01:39:45 Speaker_01
Just ride the wave.

01:39:46 Speaker_04
Yeah, for months or years.

01:39:48 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:39:49 Speaker_04
I mean, it's crazy, right?

01:39:50 Speaker_01
Like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that?

01:39:54 Speaker_04
There you go.

01:39:54 Speaker_01
Here, albatross can fly nonstop for over 16,000 kilometers. Wow. That is so crazy. For example, a gray-headed albatross flew 13,670 miles around the world in 46 days in 2005. Oh my gosh. Oh my God. That's crazy.

01:40:13 Speaker_01
Laysan albatross can travel 1,600 miles on foraging trips to feed their chicks. Large albatross species can spend up to five years at sea. Albatross can go up to six years before returning to the island where they were born to mate and lay eggs.

01:40:28 Speaker_01
Unbelievable.

01:40:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, I got to see albatross one time when I was down, I think, where was I? I was down, I think it was New Zealand, but they were amazing. I like the comments.

01:40:38 Speaker_01
It's crazy here where it's talking about how they can fly over vast areas without flapping their wings. They just use the wind, expending almost none of their own.

01:40:48 Speaker_04
So it would be interesting to me, I would hope the day would come with wolves and other large carnivores where people learn about the science and they get just as excited as this instead of the wolves have killed all the deer now.

01:41:03 Speaker_01
Well, I think there's a narrative in this country, right? Yeah. I think the narrative is, first of all, they were killed off a long time ago by poison, by ranchers and by settlers.

01:41:15 Speaker_01
And because of that, we grew up with this narrative that they had to kill off the wolves. So then these damn hippies come and vote.

01:41:23 Speaker_01
And I wanted to ask you about that, too, what your feeling is on biology that's done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote? How emotional is this? And how much of these decisions that people are making?

01:41:38 Speaker_01
One of them being, that I think was particularly egregious, was the delisting of grizzly bears in BC. Because I have a good friend who lives up there, and he's like, there's a lot of grizzly bears up there.

01:41:49 Speaker_01
They still allow black bear hunting, but they're not controlling the grizzly bear population because of the people in Vancouver. That's the large population, they have the most votes. They decided to outlaw what they call trophy hunting. Right.

01:42:03 Speaker_01
And so biology, by vote, by people that probably don't know anything about what's going on, they don't have to, other than have this emotional response.

01:42:13 Speaker_01
But I think, going back to what we're talking about, is that we have this narrative that the wolves were bad, the wolves were killed off for a good reason. We don't want wolves. Oh my God, people are bringing back wolves. What are they doing?

01:42:25 Speaker_01
We want to kill those damn wolves. And so there's a good percentage of the population that lacks this nuanced perspective of the complexity of the ecosystem and how a mate first of all how Amazing it is to be able to see wolves. Mm-hmm.

01:42:40 Speaker_01
Like if you're I've never seen them in the wild I saw one once in yeah in Alberta, but it was so brief. It was dusk It was like it was actually after last light. So it was running across this dirt road There's a lot of wolves up there. Yeah

01:42:56 Speaker_01
Plenty of camera trap photos of these wolves.

01:42:58 Speaker_01
So that's most likely what it was and they give out wolf tags You can get as many wolf tags you want up there, but good luck finding one, you know They're a lot smarter than you or a lot better at living in the woods than you are yes, but we have these these ideas that are ingrained in us that the wolves were killed off for a good reason and They're only being brought back because of morons You summed that up pretty well

01:43:22 Speaker_01
Isn't that how people feel about it?

01:43:24 Speaker_04
Yes, so a couple of things I as a wolf Conservationist, I guess I'd say and researcher and a wolf lover and manager. Well, don't you love them? I love wolves. I love dogs. I love foxes. I love white tail. I love wildlife. That's better and I'm

01:43:40 Speaker_04
kind of in the middle, but obviously I'm passionate about wolves. And I lean towards whatever we need to do to ensure that they continue as a species. I'm not saying they're going to live in Iowa and Texas.

01:43:49 Speaker_04
I'm just saying there's places that they can live where they more likely belong. I'm just going to put it that way. But I am not in favor of reintroductions.

01:44:01 Speaker_04
And I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the Central Idaho reintroductions, which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation. But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada.

01:44:14 Speaker_04
And before those wolves were ever reintroduced by 1995, we had like eight packs of wolves in the state of Montana, 70, 75 wolves. And you can Google that with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service early reports. They were making it.

01:44:26 Speaker_04
And I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening because of ballot box initiatives, like Colorado, wolves are already starting to get to Colorado.

01:44:37 Speaker_04
And the people who are wolf proponents say, we want them reintroduced because they'll never make the great desert across Wyoming. They'll all be killed. They can't make it. Well, a few of them have.

01:44:48 Speaker_04
And they even made pups in 19, I think it was 2020 or 2021. And then this wolf was, did I tell you about the wolf from Michigan? Yeah, the wolf that was killed, trapped in Colorado this year that came from the Great Lakes. My God, how did it get there?

01:45:03 Speaker_04
But it did. So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp of natural recovery. If it's gonna be one year or 10 years or 50 years, it's a time issue. And I think the same was true for Yellowstone and Central Idaho.

01:45:16 Speaker_04
They were already getting to those places. Wolves had already been seen, two of them confirmed, in and around Yellowstone Park in 1991 or two before they were reintroduced and my wolves going to Idaho.

01:45:30 Speaker_04
It's just a slower wave and people want to jumpstart this with reintroducing wolves. Well, in my humble opinion, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that Social tolerance of humans for anything is better when it isn't forced on them.

01:45:46 Speaker_04
I don't like having things forced on me. Of course. Yeah. So when you force wolves on somebody, it's risking to meet with human resistance. If they walk, they're on their own, I believe. They will get there. Our science has shown that they do.

01:46:00 Speaker_04
It just takes longer. The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf-loving hippies pushed to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho. I'll just say Yellowstone, but it's the same.

01:46:17 Speaker_04
To some point, it is that faction, but the reason it happened was because two conservative senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Wyoming, Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base, promoted to Congress to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced.

01:46:39 Speaker_04
because they could see the writing on the wall that the wolves are coming anyway. And if they walk down there on their own, they're going to be fully endangered.

01:46:47 Speaker_04
Well, if we reintroduce them, they get a different classification called non-essential experimental population, meaning because humans put them there, you can manipulate them and kill them if they're taking livestock.

01:46:58 Speaker_04
It's just more flexible management. So the senators thought, well, they're getting there anyway. Let's just put them in there.

01:47:05 Speaker_02
Really?

01:47:05 Speaker_04
So yeah, that's a little bit of the interesting background that people aren't aware of with the reintroductions, that it was really people way on the right and way on the left coming towards a common goal for different reasons.

01:47:19 Speaker_01
Want to see a crazy video of a wolf that was in Bakersfield? Yeah, in California. Yeah, my friend filmed this. So this wolf, he was driving down the freeway in Bakersfield, California. And they looked off and there was this wolf.

01:47:35 Speaker_01
I've sent you this, right, Jamie? Yeah, do you think you still have it? I know Cody sent it to me. I can find it. So my friend who was out there filmed this wolf off the highway. And this is like five miles from an In-N-Out burger.

01:47:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, and it's in California. I mean, we're talking about an hour 40 from Los Angeles. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and he was speculating that perhaps this wolf was brought there by someone. Damn, it might be on my other phone. Did I send it to you, Jamie?

01:48:14 Speaker_01
I know I saved it. I can find it, but this might be a little bit of a pain in the ass. Maybe it's here.

01:48:22 Speaker_01
So this wolf was very cool looking, like this very big black wolf, and he's like wandering around these cows, and then someone comes and shoos him away, and he runs off.

01:48:35 Speaker_04
Damn, I told that. Does he have a collar on?

01:48:36 Speaker_01
No, he does not.

01:48:37 Speaker_04
I think I read about this wolf. There's a wolf that went down through the central California valley and ended up going down through the vineyard country. I think it was probably that wolf that it was seen.

01:48:47 Speaker_01
Oh, probably. I mean, a lot of people are super skeptical, like how would a wolf wind up there? But what you're saying in terms of the amount of land that they can travel on is insane. Hundreds and hundreds of miles.

01:49:03 Speaker_04
Back in the aeons of time, wolves had the largest global distribution of any mammal in the world except people. I mean, wolves live from the Arctic to the prairies to the temperate forest to the Gaza Strip still. And they live... Really?

01:49:18 Speaker_01
There's wolves in the Gaza Strip?

01:49:19 Speaker_04
There's wolves in the Netherlands right now. Wolves have expanded. They will live anywhere that we don't kill them off because they did historically. I mean, there were wolves on Staten Island, I'm sure, historically. Now we have different wolves there.

01:49:34 Speaker_02
Coyotes.

01:49:36 Speaker_04
But I'm thinking, yeah, anyway, stock market.

01:49:38 Speaker_02
Wolves of Wall Street. Yeah, exactly.

01:49:39 Speaker_04
That's where I'm going. But they live anywhere because they can eat anything, but mostly what they need is four-legged hoofed mammals, usually deer elk, caribou, moose, whatever, occasionally livestock.

01:49:51 Speaker_04
They need a place where they can secure that they can whelp and raise pups. And then they need a freedom of persecution from humans, being it traps, poison shooting, whatever. If you have enough of those three factors, they will be there.

01:50:04 Speaker_04
I mean, they've been showing up in Iowa and Missouri and the Dakotas for years and years now, but they don't make it because they get killed. But they're trying.

01:50:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think I might have saved it under wolf if I look. There's like videos. I'd love to see that video. There's a thing that you can do now with your iPhone where you can just search for wolves.

01:50:25 Speaker_04
Really? Yeah, you can search for stuff.

01:50:27 Speaker_00
It's showing me the werewolf in the lobby. It's showing me all the pictures I have of Carl and Marshall.

01:50:31 Speaker_01
It's not showing you that one wolf? No. Sorry. It's not showing me either.

01:50:35 Speaker_04
But you saw one or your friend did.

01:50:37 Speaker_01
No, our friend did. He filmed it. I know I had the video.

01:50:40 Speaker_04
So if you get a chance, Joe, if you're really interested in seeing wolves, just take a trip to Yellowstone and go, I would suggest not in the summer because it's just crazy. I'd go in the winter.

01:50:49 Speaker_04
You can hire a wolf tour guide or you can go on your own, just stay at a hotel, but you got to get up before dark.

01:50:56 Speaker_00
What was that, Jamie? Those mountain lions crying. Oh, wow.

01:50:59 Speaker_04
And you got to go out dawn and dusk. In the wintertime, they're easier to see because of the snow. And it's really fun, depending on the season. If you go in the fall, they got bigger pack because the pups are all still alive.

01:51:09 Speaker_04
You go in the winter, they get breeding behavior and stuff going on. There's always something to see. I go there myself, but I know a lot of the wolf watchers. I just drive the roads until I see people pulled over, and I get out and watch.

01:51:22 Speaker_04
And they might be a mile away. They might be 400 yards away. But bring a scope, and I'd suggest you just hire a guide.

01:51:29 Speaker_01
You'll see wolves, guarantee it. Just to be able to hear them would be cool.

01:51:31 Speaker_04
Yes. I mean, it's amazing to hear them howling.

01:51:35 Speaker_01
One thing we did come across when I was hunting in BC, we were moose hunting about 10 years ago or so, and we found a calf that had been killed.

01:51:43 Speaker_01
And it was really interesting because they had stripped it down to the bone, and what was wild was all the hair. There was hair everywhere, and I'm like, I didn't even think of that. I didn't think there'd be hair everywhere for some stupid reason.

01:51:58 Speaker_04
How long ago are they kill that was there anything left?

01:52:00 Speaker_01
It was pretty recent. Oh, I'll recent like within the day Yeah, really? I know that's on my Instagram wasn't a bear killer. Oh, no, it's wolf kill Yeah, okay, my friend who was up there.

01:52:12 Speaker_04
I just asked his bear bears and lions both plucking. Oh

01:52:15 Speaker_01
strip hair off. Yeah, well, that area had a lot of wolves. Okay. And he was very accustomed to finding calves that had been killed by wolves. We found it because of birds. Sure. The birds were circling. Right. It was like, let's go see what's over there.

01:52:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, magpies and ravens are my best friends when I'm out looking for kills.

01:52:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, isn't that interesting? Like, that's how you find things. Yes. You find the birds. It is. Yeah, and how do they find it?

01:52:40 Speaker_04
So there's been stories written, and there's a guy who does a lot of raven studies. Oh, his name escapes me right now.

01:52:46 Speaker_02
They're so smart.

01:52:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, he's done some really interesting studies of the ravens, and if you ever watch the videos of crows solving puzzles and ravens, oh my God. Incredible, right? Next life I want to come back as a raven.

01:52:57 Speaker_01
Not only do they solve puzzles, but they figure out how to raise water levels so they can get to food in a jar.

01:53:03 Speaker_04
Think about that.

01:53:03 Speaker_01
They drop rocks into the jar until the water level raises so they can get the food that's floating.

01:53:08 Speaker_04
The raven guy's name is Berndt Heinz. He's German. Berndt as in Bernie with Berndt. Berndt and Heinz. Yeah. Anyway, it's cool stuff. I mean, this is, I mean, you and I are both obviously very interested in animals. We hunt our own food, but just,

01:53:24 Speaker_04
When I'm out hunting, I feel a little bit like a predator. Not a lot, because I got a gun. But I watch the dogs, who are basically predators. And I watch animals in the landscape, and you see so much when you're out hunting.

01:53:37 Speaker_04
I mean, what's the coolest animal you've ever seen when you've been out on the landscape, hiking or hunting or anything?

01:53:44 Speaker_01
That mountain line that we saw might have been the coolest. That was the coolest, but I saw a badger once. I got film of that. I actually got out of the truck and got next to him, got close to him. Then he started coming towards me and I ran.

01:53:54 Speaker_04
I was like, what's wrong with me?

01:53:57 Speaker_01
Like, what am I, stupid?

01:53:58 Speaker_04
They're blonde wolverines. That's really what they are.

01:54:00 Speaker_01
He looked fucking terrifying and not very big, but like ferocious.

01:54:04 Speaker_04
I've caught a couple in wolf traps.

01:54:06 Speaker_01
cool looking animal. They're so cool looking. I just couldn't imagine that I was seeing one like, it was in Utah, seeing one in the wild. I've seen, I saw one grizzly and it looked at me so much different than any bear I've ever looked at.

01:54:22 Speaker_01
I've hunted black bear before and I've been around black bear many, many times and this is the first grizzly and it was so different the way it looked at me. Where was it? This is in BC. No, excuse me. This is in Alberta. And this one was not a big one.

01:54:36 Speaker_01
He was about six feet tall, but he looked through me. It looked different. Like a black bear looks like, who are you? What's this? What are you doing over there? Are you food? Are you going to kill me? What are we doing?

01:54:49 Speaker_01
They're a little sketched out because they're not the top of the food chain. The grizzlies are. And so the grizzly looked at me like this. Like, right at me. We had shotguns. We screamed at him. He wasn't scared. Yeah.

01:55:00 Speaker_01
And my friend Jen, she slammed a stick against a tree like, get out of here, bear, and cocked the shotgun. The bear took off. But it was the difference in looking in their face. They just have a totally different look. They look at you like this.

01:55:15 Speaker_01
Like, am I going to get you right now? It's just a grizzly has a hard life. It's not like that brown bear that has all those salmon that's sitting by the river. Those grizzlies are out there like trying to survive.

01:55:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, our grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains are quite small compared to the coastal brown bears and the same species.

01:55:32 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:55:32 Speaker_04
But they're very different and they have to make a living. I mean, if you had to make your living picking huckleberries and eating gut piles in the fall, it'd be skinny and they have to put on a lot of weight.

01:55:44 Speaker_01
Well, that to me is so fascinating how animals, they change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available and whether or not they're safe.

01:55:53 Speaker_01
Like the Yellowstone elk that are habitualized, that are just around people hanging out with them.

01:55:58 Speaker_04
And Banff. You ever been to Banff in the fall?

01:56:00 Speaker_01
No, I haven't, but I've seen photos.

01:56:01 Speaker_04
They're bugling and mating on the post office lawn.

01:56:05 Speaker_01
It's smart for them, though. Absolutely. No hunters. Right. And people just pull over to pull their phones out and film them.

01:56:12 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think I've heard of occasionally wolves find out and they sneak into town at night.

01:56:17 Speaker_01
Well, weren't you telling a story on Steve Rinello's podcast about a very nice neighborhood of like these nice homes and these wolves that decide to set up shop?

01:56:25 Speaker_04
Yes, it was a closed gated community between Whitefish and Kalispell and they had their pups in this closed gated community because there's no hunting.

01:56:35 Speaker_04
It's unlimited green space and undeveloped forest because people have McMansions and they have a huge acreage and it's just quiet time. There's not a safer place and the people there like them because they don't have livestock.

01:56:47 Speaker_04
They're usually not hunters. It's great except then they grow up and they have to leave the wolves. You know, so then they get out in the real world and then they get their asses kicked.

01:56:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, right. That's a problem because then you're like a wolf growing up in a gated community, literally. Right.

01:57:03 Speaker_04
And you've learned that people are OK.

01:57:04 Speaker_01
You learn that people are OK and there's deer everywhere. Right. Because the deer know that people are OK and the deer are not used to wolves being there. Right.

01:57:12 Speaker_04
It's really interesting. Yeah, that pack didn't make it. I'm not surprised.

01:57:16 Speaker_03
Right.

01:57:16 Speaker_04
But it was just so interesting to me how adaptable wolves are.

01:57:20 Speaker_04
You know, when I first started this business, I come from Minnesota, and the wolves lived only in the northern third or quarter of the state, where it was boundary water, canoe area, and really wild, because any place else, they got killed off.

01:57:31 Speaker_04
So I always thought these wolves were denizens of the wilderness, and they would only live where it was incredibly wild. And they've come to show us that's not true. They will live wherever will tolerate them. And that could be it.

01:57:46 Speaker_04
I mean, there were wolves in Texas not that long ago. Red wolves. So they were here, but, you know, they're just not tolerated.

01:57:54 Speaker_01
How much of a problem is it where they kill pets? It's a giant mountain lion issue, especially in Northern California. One place outside of San Francisco, they did an analysis of the diet of mountain lions that they had captured, and it was 50% pets.

01:58:09 Speaker_04
But of course it's a biased survey because it's by San Francisco, so it's not.

01:58:14 Speaker_01
But it's just fascinating that they had actively chosen to hunt pets.

01:58:18 Speaker_04
If I was a mountain lion living near San Francisco, I'd be eating poodles and chihuahuas and cats. Absolutely. Easy prey. There are a lot of them. Nobody's going to shoot you in California. It's illegal.

01:58:29 Speaker_04
It's a charmed life until you get run over on the freeway.

01:58:31 Speaker_01
Well, it's probably one of the reasons why you don't hear about that in Texas. Because in Texas, they're like vermin. You can shoot as many mountain lions as you want. If you see a mountain lion, you shoot them just like a coyote.

01:58:41 Speaker_04
It's just, that's interesting. I didn't know that in Texas.

01:58:44 Speaker_01
You don't need a tag. You don't need anything.

01:58:46 Speaker_04
Really?

01:58:46 Speaker_01
Yep.

01:58:47 Speaker_04
It's amazing they're still hanging on.

01:58:49 Speaker_00
There's the wolf.

01:58:50 Speaker_04
Oh.

01:58:50 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:58:51 Speaker_01
How'd you find it, Jamie?

01:58:52 Speaker_00
Wow. I found out that it was on the Adam Greentree episode, 2059. You see the white triangle? Thank you, Jamie. You're the best.

01:58:58 Speaker_04
You see the white triangle on the chest? Yeah, yes. That indicates to me it's a younger wolf because the pups can be born. Yeah, can you wind that back again? Yeah, thanks.

01:59:07 Speaker_01
So this is my friend Cody filmed this off the highway.

01:59:10 Speaker_04
Awesome.

01:59:11 Speaker_01
So he had a scope, you know, like a, you know, a spotting scope. Yeah, yeah. And he put- Awesome. Look at that, it's amazing.

01:59:19 Speaker_04
So the white chevron, pups, younger wolves have it, and as they get older, like the rest of us, they get gray, and that doesn't stand out so much. So it would probably be a yearling, maybe a two-year-old wolf.

01:59:30 Speaker_01
Interesting. So what their speculation is, you know, he works on a ranch.

01:59:35 Speaker_01
Their speculation is that someone released that and they think these rogue wildlife lovers are really, look, cows right there, that these rogue wildlife lovers are releasing wolves to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into central California.

01:59:54 Speaker_04
I know for a fact that there was a wild wolf that was tracked going down through central and to Bakersfield. I don't know if it was black or gray, but I know there was one.

02:00:02 Speaker_01
So it's not unprecedented.

02:00:04 Speaker_04
No, it's not. My friend Kent Loudon does the wolf work in California. He's a biologist, used to being in Montana and Idaho. And no, they're making a comeback. I think there's six packs now and they're doing really well.

02:00:15 Speaker_01
Mostly Northern California?

02:00:16 Speaker_04
Northern California, and yeah. And there's lots of conflict because they can't, they can't, I'm pretty darn sure, they cannot kill the wolves that are killing livestock. So it's set up for a conflict, kind of like in California.

02:00:29 Speaker_04
They're having some management flexibility in California, I mean in Colorado.

02:00:33 Speaker_04
But so far, I mean, they just now, so a pair of wolves that they reintroduced found each other and made a pack and they had the only litter of pups known to be in Colorado this year. I believe both of those wolves

02:00:49 Speaker_04
came from Oregon, and they both had livestock killing experience before they chose them to release, which is really unfortunate.

02:00:59 Speaker_04
So the dilemma was, okay, they did okay until people started calving, and now there's little calves on the ground, and now the wolves are coming in, and they're starting to kill calves, and then they might kill a heifer or something, and anyway,

02:01:14 Speaker_04
they're killing livestock. So what do you do? You've got a male and a female in a litter of pups and they have started a history of killing livestock.

02:01:22 Speaker_04
What do you do with them when the slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff, want to see all the wolves protected and a slight minority, it's like 49 and a half to 50 and a half or something, want them removed.

02:01:38 Speaker_04
And the people in the middle are trying to figure out what to do. So they went and captured them and put them in a holding facility for a while. Then they're going to release them later. Well, you still have a problem.

02:01:49 Speaker_01
Because they still are habitualized.

02:01:51 Speaker_04
They will probably likely to continue killing livestock.

02:01:56 Speaker_01
It's hard to find- Are the ranchers reimbursed? Is there a fund for that?

02:02:00 Speaker_04
In Montana there is, I presume there is in Colorado, yeah. They're reimbursed, but as I've worked with ranchers and they said, I didn't raise my cows for your damn wolves to kill them. I don't care. I don't want the money.

02:02:11 Speaker_04
I just don't want the wolves here. And sometimes when you're working with a rancher community, that's the only common denominator you have is you're out there because you don't want their cows killed because then wolves have to get killed.

02:02:23 Speaker_04
They don't want their cows killed because they didn't, they raised them for all these generations. They have a genetic, a good pool genetically. They're invested.

02:02:32 Speaker_04
So you have the same, that's the same common goal and you might have different reasons to come to that goal, but that's how you work with people. You know how it is. There's always a common denominator.

02:02:42 Speaker_01
I was watching a documentary about this guy who lived with wolves, like lived with wolves in some contained environment and he would like set up a fake kill where he would eat the liver so he could be like the dominant male and he would growl at them.

02:02:54 Speaker_01
It was really stupid. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. I'm with you. Anyway, this gentleman who was a wolf expert was then recruited to try to help a sheep herder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock.

02:03:08 Speaker_01
And one of the strategies they used is giant speakers. So they took speakers and they played sounds of wolves to scare off these other wolves.

02:03:17 Speaker_01
And so then he goes back to the pack and tries to be the alpha again and they corner him and snarl at him and he had a whimper and

02:03:25 Speaker_01
And it's a very weird documentary, because this is some sort of a strange, fenced-in environment that they've created where these wolves are living.

02:03:33 Speaker_04
Sounds a bit like Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly man.

02:03:35 Speaker_01
Very similar. It's the same deal. Very, very, very similar. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah. Well, I think that's from the movie, the Werner Herzog, another Werner Herzog film, Grizzly Man.

02:03:45 Speaker_04
Oh, that was amazing.

02:03:46 Speaker_01
Amazing movie. An unintentional comedy. Maybe intentional. I think it was a little bit intentional. Because there's a few cuts in there where you're like, he had to know that was funny. And I think that was suicide by bear.

02:03:59 Speaker_04
Yeah.

02:04:00 Speaker_01
That's what I think.

02:04:01 Speaker_04
And the girlfriend.

02:04:02 Speaker_01
Yeah. I think that guy and the girlfriend, unfortunately. But I think that guy wanted to die. And I think he wanted to die that way. He had to know.

02:04:10 Speaker_04
But what I'll say is captive wolf facilities, and I know many people who love their captive wolves, but captive animal behavior and wild wolf behavior have some parallels, but they're not the same.

02:04:22 Speaker_04
And that guy doing this thing would never happen with wild wolves.

02:04:26 Speaker_01
Right. Impossible. No. They would never tolerate that. Yeah. No, it's a weird bastardization of reality.

02:04:36 Speaker_04
Yeah. And many people, I did part of my career earlier helping to try and keep wolves out of livestock and we put out sirens and we put out blinking lights and

02:04:49 Speaker_04
bought raw cow hide patches and raw hamburger and laced it with lithium chloride, which is a toxin that makes you violently ill right away. It's not going to kill you.

02:04:59 Speaker_04
The idea being that these wolves would eat this baits wrapped with string and taste all this wonderful beef burger and taste the hide and then associate that bad experience of vomiting your guts out for 24 hours or whatever to the animal on the hoof out there.

02:05:14 Speaker_04
That's a great idea for how your human brain works. They just ate every bait we put out, and there's piles of puke everywhere. They don't think like we think.

02:05:23 Speaker_01
Right. Of course not. Right.

02:05:25 Speaker_04
One guy rancher I was working with, we were putting out the baits, whatever. I did the sirens, and I did what's called fladry. Fladry, they used it in Europe in places like Poland to hunt wolves where you hang streamers down from fences.

02:05:38 Speaker_04
And you start out with a really wide funnel in the woods. And the hunters used to drive the wolves through the forest with people at the end with guns. And they would see the fladry. And it would be quite a ways apart, like a mile or two or something.

02:05:50 Speaker_04
And they wouldn't cross the fladry because it scared them. And they get to the end, and it's like shooting pheasants at the end of a cornfield.

02:05:56 Speaker_02
Wow.

02:05:57 Speaker_04
So people have taken that idea. to try and keep wolves out of like calving pens in specific areas where the livestock are confined. It doesn't work well when they're out in free range. And it works pretty well.

02:06:10 Speaker_04
So I was out working with this pasture guy in northern Minnesota and he had a long skinny pasture and I had out, got highway blinking lights that came on at night and the fladry and he was so kind.

02:06:20 Speaker_04
He let me, this is a lot of years ago, it's just this young starry-eyed thing. So I stopped in to visit him and I said, Well, I know you had a loss, you got a calf. I said, have the wolves been back?

02:06:30 Speaker_04
And he looked at me, and he says, well, no, hon, they haven't been back. I said, do you think the blinking lights are working on your pasture? He says, well, I don't know, but I damn near had a plane land here last night.

02:06:46 Speaker_04
I broke up laughing, he broke up laughing, and was just like, yeah, this is a tough job, let's just have some fun here.

02:06:53 Speaker_01
That's hilarious.

02:06:54 Speaker_04
But again, he didn't like wolves, I didn't want him killing those cows, and that wasn't a common factor to try and keep them apart.

02:07:01 Speaker_01
What are the cons, when there's pros and cons for reintroduction of wolves, what do you think the cons are? Like the reintroduction in Colorado, the reintroduction in Yellowstone?

02:07:13 Speaker_04
I believe potentially a decreased human tolerance. And the wolves don't have a learning curve. They're taken from one place and then, boop, they're plopped there.

02:07:22 Speaker_04
Versus if they kind of migrate their way down, they run this gauntlet, they kind of have to learn on the way to be successful to get there. They have to learn to avoid livestock pens or whatever they have to learn and stay a little more secretive.

02:07:36 Speaker_04
So that's just my belief that when they're making it on their own, they've been smart enough to get there. Whereas when you just put them there, you're going to forever have people believing they don't belong there, they're not Native.

02:07:50 Speaker_01
So the problem is in the perceptions of the people that are encountering the wolves, or they're impacted by the wolves being there.

02:07:55 Speaker_04
I believe so, yeah. And so, for example, now we've got wolves, they were put into, a total of 66 wolves were put into Idaho and Wyoming, and another 10 were added to Wyoming from Montana. But it's a very small number of wolves.

02:08:09 Speaker_04
But now wolves have taken over Washington, Oregon, California, They've made a few, made it to Colorado. They're trying to get into Utah, a few have been shot there. And all those wolves came from this introduced population, some from Montana.

02:08:23 Speaker_04
But they'll never be considered Native.

02:08:27 Speaker_01
Which is crazy, because they used to be Native.

02:08:30 Speaker_04
And the wolves that were taken for the sources, like I explained earlier, they're taken from an area that wolves from Glacier Park walk to.

02:08:37 Speaker_04
They are one population, but there's a belief socially, because they were put there, they're not native, they're Canadian super wolves.

02:08:44 Speaker_04
I've heard the crazy stories, like these wolves weigh 175 pounds, and they were selected out of all the wolves captured. They took the ones that were the most aggressive, so that when they put them on the ground, they would survive everything.

02:08:57 Speaker_04
It's like, oh my God, no.

02:08:59 Speaker_01
Well, that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of crazy to me that if you wanted a wolf reintroduction to be successful, why would you take animals that have a history of predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction wolves?

02:09:12 Speaker_01
I think that kind of mindset or that ignorance, whether it's willful ignorance or whether it's on purpose, whether it's a fuck you to the ranchers, whatever it is, that is why people have this negative perception I think you're alluding to, right?

02:09:26 Speaker_04
I don't think it was an FU to the renters. I think what happened was because of the ballot box initiative. The state of Colorado was required by law by December 31st of 2023 to get 10 wolves or so on the ground.

02:09:42 Speaker_04
And it took them- But what if they weren't successful?

02:09:45 Speaker_01
Like if they were required by law, does someone go to jail if you're not successful in capturing the wolves to put there?

02:09:50 Speaker_04
I don't know. But what I'm saying is they had a pretty limited time. They spent a lot of time trying to prep people and doing committees and working with people to get them prepared.

02:09:58 Speaker_04
And by the time they were able to get everything in place, they were running against a wall. They introduced these wolves very late in the year. I think it was December. And the only place they could get source wolves, they got them from Oregon.

02:10:10 Speaker_04
And that point, Oregon gave them 10 wolves. Half of them, roughly half of them, happened to have some livestock experience. So this time, right now, they're already gearing up for the next reintroduction this winter, probably.

02:10:23 Speaker_04
They're working with British Columbia, I believe, and they're going to take wolves, presumably that have not had livestock experience, and let them go, like they did with the original introductions into Yellowstone and Idaho.

02:10:35 Speaker_04
And I really believe, because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline, that the people who are really pro-wolf, it was forced that they had to take the wolves that they got. That's what I believe.

02:10:48 Speaker_04
I don't think it was an FU, I think it was unintentional, but it's like, these are the wolves you're gonna get, and they took them.

02:10:54 Speaker_01
That sounds so short-sighted.

02:10:57 Speaker_04
I know, but I'm not there, and I'm not trying to badmouth their effort. They were under a lot of pressure. Half the state wants wolves, half doesn't. They're under a short timeline. Oregon was the only state that offered up their wolves. Wyoming said no.

02:11:09 Speaker_04
Montana said no. Everybody said no. Oregon says, you can have 10 of ours. Here's the 10 you're going to get.

02:11:15 Speaker_01
Yeah. I could see why they did it that way, but boy, that seems like you're just adding to the problems. It really does.

02:11:23 Speaker_04
In hindsight, it does.

02:11:26 Speaker_01
Yeah. So what are the positives about the reintroduction of wolves? Because it has been successful.

02:11:34 Speaker_04
In Colorado or in general?

02:11:36 Speaker_01
In general, because the Colorado one is just this year, right?

02:11:38 Speaker_04
It's time frame. See, all this stuff has to do with the time frame, the mistakes and the rewards. So the most positive pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame.

02:11:48 Speaker_04
So like if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone, It may have taken 10 years, it may have taken 50. I mean, it happened in Montana pretty quickly, once they hit critical mass.

02:12:02 Speaker_04
But it took them a few years to get there, and then they just started, you know, the curve.

02:12:07 Speaker_04
But people didn't want the time window, and we had a presidential administration that was in favor of it, we had conservative congressmen that were in favor of it, you had the Wolf Groupies in favor of it.

02:12:18 Speaker_04
It's just like all came together in the timeframe and the window of opportunity opened about four inches and they shoved them through.

02:12:24 Speaker_04
In Colorado, mandated by citizens ballot initiatives, which is not a really great way to, I don't think to do business on any bill. I mean, we have bills in Montana coming up now for voting, but the timeline was short.

02:12:38 Speaker_04
And I think if they had more options, they would have taken wolves. They would have taken wolves from Wyoming or Montana, for sure, because they're more wild, whatever. We do have depredating wolves.

02:12:47 Speaker_04
But they kind of got down to the wire, and everybody denied them, except for Oregon.

02:12:52 Speaker_01
So that's what happened. Well, the problem with that, of course, is what we were talking about with epidemiology, that if these animals do have a learned behavior pattern, that's going to be imparted on their offspring as well.

02:13:03 Speaker_01
And the surrounding community, they're going to favor that, because it's a very simple way to get food.

02:13:10 Speaker_04
Pretty simple. On the other hand, they can learn new behavior, like the wolves that were taken for their introductions to Yellowstone, they had never seen a bison, most of them.

02:13:18 Speaker_04
And they've learned now in Yellowstone, a lot of the animals that kill are bison. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. It's mind-boggling to me to see a herd surround a bison and eventually wear it down or kill it or find one that's injured.

02:13:32 Speaker_01
There's an amazing painting that I'm pretty sure Ronello told me about. He might even have a copy of it. Or was it Remy? It might have been Remy. No, it was Remy. Because Remy actually reproduced this on his television show.

02:13:44 Speaker_01
He had a show called Apex Predator. And the show Apex Predator was all examining the behavior characteristics of apex predators and seeing what they did.

02:13:52 Speaker_01
And one of the things that some of the Native American tribes used to do, they would take a wolf skin and they would wear it, put it on their head, and they would crawl on four legs, hands and knees, up into bison. Yeah, so that one.

02:14:10 Speaker_01
I've used that in my own slideshows, too. Isn't that amazing, that painting? Yeah, it's a beautiful painting. It's so incredible. And so they would wander up towards bison, because full-grown bison are not afraid of a couple of wolves.

02:14:21 Speaker_01
And they would use that as a way to get close enough, like a decoy, and sneak up and arrow these bison and kill them. Oh, there's a lot of paintings of that. That's cool. So that must have been a very common thing.

02:14:34 Speaker_01
Well, so Remy actually reproduced this on his television show.

02:14:38 Speaker_04
Oh, nice.

02:14:38 Speaker_01
He actually wore a wolfskin and crawled up to these bison.

02:14:42 Speaker_04
He did? Yeah, he did.

02:14:43 Speaker_01
Wild bison, not cat? Yeah, wild bison, yeah.

02:14:46 Speaker_04
Where? I don't know where he was.

02:14:49 Speaker_01
Canada? I'm not sure. See if you can find Remy Warren, Apex Predator, bison episode.

02:14:55 Speaker_04
There's bison in Utah, too.

02:14:56 Speaker_01
Sure, yeah.

02:14:58 Speaker_04
Wow, I didn't know that. How did he do?

02:15:00 Speaker_01
He shot one.

02:15:01 Speaker_04
With an arrow?

02:15:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, with an arrow.

02:15:03 Speaker_04
Really?

02:15:04 Speaker_01
Yeah. Wow. Well, do you imagine, especially if you have a compound bow. Sure. You know, I was just shooting today. Very accurate. I just got a new Hoyt bow. It's amazing.

02:15:15 Speaker_01
I don't know how they do it, but they keep making these compound bows better every year. But this new one's incredible. And I was shooting super accurate, up to 60 yards.

02:15:23 Speaker_04
Oh my gosh.

02:15:24 Speaker_01
So if you're a guy as good as Remy is, who's literally a professional hunter, and you crawl close enough to bison to get him.

02:15:32 Speaker_03
Yeah.

02:15:32 Speaker_01
So he shot a bison and harvested it. Wow. Yeah.

02:15:36 Speaker_04
But I mean, Indians did that all the time. I shouldn't say Indians, Native Americans.

02:15:40 Speaker_01
Well, there's Yeah, they some of them prefer to be called Indians.

02:15:42 Speaker_04
I know in Montana.

02:15:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's tricky. If Yeah, you got to kind of like, ask them you have to know what are what are your pronouns are? Right? Yeah. So, um, I know that there's wild bison that live in Mexico, and I know that from Steve.

02:15:59 Speaker_01
Steve Rinell actually hunted them in Mexico, and this traditional ranch, they have this incredible way of taking care of it because they've never had electricity in this area.

02:16:11 Speaker_01
There's this long history of hundreds of years of hunting them this way, so they do all these different things to dry out the meat, and they make these thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat.

02:16:26 Speaker_01
Really interesting. This was one of the last, when they were all wiped out from, or almost wiped out from North America, a few of them survived in Mexico. So here, Remy's bison on the Sonora Desert in Mexico. Oh, so he did it in Mexico. Oh, interesting.

02:16:44 Speaker_01
Oh, it was a coyote. Okay. So, but it was in Mexico. So he put the pelt on and did the whole deal.

02:16:51 Speaker_04
Making him a costume.

02:16:52 Speaker_01
Yeah. Sewed it into his camo. Yeah.

02:16:57 Speaker_04
It's a big coyote. It's definitely a coyote.

02:17:00 Speaker_01
Isn't that interesting, though?

02:17:01 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah.

02:17:02 Speaker_01
Wow. It's crazy that it worked. Yeah. Well, Native Americans knew it. Well, for sure, a buffalo or a bison is not going to be scared of a coyote. No. Yeah, not at all. So if they see that, they're like, I don't know.

02:17:15 Speaker_04
And wolves, too, for that matter. I mean, there were millions of bison on the prairies with tens of thousands of wolves. And if you were healthy or you protect your calf, you're fine.

02:17:25 Speaker_01
Yes. Yeah. Have you ever read Coyote America? No. Dan Flores, who was- Oh, great historian. Yeah. And he was one of Ronell's professors. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's how he met him.

02:17:38 Speaker_01
But Dan has a very interesting theory about the population of bison and why there were so many. And he thinks it's tied into the plague, into when Europeans came across the country and 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of disease.

02:17:54 Speaker_01
And he thinks that's why there was millions of bison in the field, this overpopulation of bison, because the predators had gone away. Really? Yeah, I think the paper is called Bison Diplomacy, Bison Ecology. Is that what it's called?

02:18:09 Speaker_04
I'm going to have to look that up.

02:18:10 Speaker_01
Dan Flores is awesome. He's so, so interesting. Yes. And the book, Coyote America, is crazy.

02:18:18 Speaker_04
I'm going to have to Google it.

02:18:19 Speaker_01
It's so good. Yeah, there it is. Okay, it's Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy, the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850.

02:18:27 Speaker_01
So, his theory, which I think is a very valid one, and it should be researched, it should be at least considered, that the reason why the early European settlers did not see enormous herds of bison

02:18:45 Speaker_01
is because the bison weren't enormous herds back then, because bisons have a long gestation period, they're fairly easy to hunt, because they're very large animals. And they're not afraid. Yeah.

02:18:55 Speaker_01
And if you have horseback, you can get pretty close to them, shoot them with arrows, and they were very effective at hunting them. And particularly the Comanche lived entirely off a bison, and they were right here.

02:19:06 Speaker_01
So right here in this area, they're just nothing but bison, eating bison constantly. And so they probably did a really good job of keeping the population in check. Then along come Europeans and their dirty diseases.

02:19:18 Speaker_01
And you know, this is what the primary theory is what wiped out the Maya, wiped out the Aztec, wiped out the people that lived in the Amazon jungle. It's all European settlers and their dirty diseases.

02:19:29 Speaker_01
And so that when that happened, then you have what's similar to no wolves in Montana and you have 20,000 elk in a place that really has a carrying capacity for like, what, six?

02:19:39 Speaker_01
What do you think was like the correct number when there was 20,000 elk there?

02:19:43 Speaker_04
What's the correct number?

02:19:45 Speaker_01
What would be like a healthy population, the food sources?

02:19:49 Speaker_04
I would say right now there's about 6,500, I think, elk in the northern herd. We're not talking all of Yellowstone, just this herd that's been studied where the wolves are. That's where it's at now. It's stabilized.

02:20:01 Speaker_04
There's lions and people outside the park and wolves and bears, all these things, and that's where it's at. And that's with everything, and it hasn't changed because the number of wolves, too, from zero to 31 to 160, 165.

02:20:16 Speaker_04
In the last 10 years, it's been right about 100 wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending their resource. So they're stable right now. The wolves are not increasing anymore.

02:20:28 Speaker_01
Is that one of the main reasons how they die, or the main ways they die, is killing each other?

02:20:31 Speaker_04
Wolves killing each other and trespassing. People go, oh, that's awful. I said, not really. I mean, if you had somebody coming into your home to steal your goods, wouldn't you shoot them if you had the chance? Or wouldn't you defend your home?

02:20:42 Speaker_01
Like those loggers, you almost had to shoot.

02:20:44 Speaker_04
You defend your home, right? Yourself, your family. The wolves do the same thing. It's sort of like what's going on with the wars everywhere in the world. The wolves do the same, and they don't always kill the trespassers.

02:20:55 Speaker_04
If they can catch them, they beat them up pretty bad. Sometimes they kill them. Sometimes you may have a benevolent pack leader that just kind of has the wolves chase it off.

02:21:03 Speaker_04
But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think it's like 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, non-pack members.

02:21:12 Speaker_01
Is their action dependent upon the amount of resources that are available? Like, would they be more reluctant to kill a wolf if there was plenty of food for everybody? Just get out of here.

02:21:20 Speaker_01
Whereas if they were struggling, they'd go, this is a real problem having this wolf around.

02:21:25 Speaker_04
So you'd have to go to the Yellowstone researchers to look at it, but I would say genetic relations, if it's closely related, they're more likely to not kill it. And if there's abundant food, they'd be more likely to probably not kill it.

02:21:39 Speaker_04
I think it's a combination of the two.

02:21:41 Speaker_01
One of the things that Dan Flores talks about in Coyote America is the expansion of coyotes and that the reason this took place is that coyotes were targeted by gray wolves. Yes.

02:21:52 Speaker_01
So they had developed this ability to recognize when one of the pack had been killed, they would expand their territory and the females would have more pups. The coyotes or the wolves? The coyotes. So the wolves are killing the coyotes.

02:22:06 Speaker_01
This is why there's coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now, where there wasn't 100 years ago, is that because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves, because they don't breed with wolves, but they do breed with red wolves.

02:22:20 Speaker_01
So where you get your coy wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the East Coast, right? Do they do it with Mexican wolves?

02:22:29 Speaker_04
No. The animal up in the northeastern part of the US is called a coy wolf, and it's a coyote mixed with a wolf of unknown origin mixed with dogs. And there's lots of theories out there, and I'm not up on the most current theory.

02:22:40 Speaker_04
The original wolf up there was more like the red wolf. Then you get down here and down in Louisiana, Texas, Florida. There were red wolves, and now they're just at the alligator refuge in North Carolina.

02:22:51 Speaker_04
But those are being bred almost out of existence because they're hybridizing with coyotes.

02:22:56 Speaker_01
Interesting. Yeah, different story. But the gray wolves do not hybridize with coyotes was his point.

02:23:02 Speaker_04
Yeah, not hardly ever.

02:23:04 Speaker_01
Oh, sometimes they do?

02:23:05 Speaker_04
Well, up in the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that's where I started doing wolf stuff, they look a little bit like coyote, and the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote, but it's very uncommon.

02:23:16 Speaker_04
When a wolf encounters a coyote, they kill it.

02:23:18 Speaker_01
Yeah. It was interesting, you were talking about on Ranella's show, that they don't kill foxes.

02:23:23 Speaker_04
So they were, I mean, so you get a fox, it's like 10 pounds. You get a coyote, it's like 30 pounds. You get a wolf, it's 90 to 100 pounds. It's about three times between each step.

02:23:33 Speaker_04
So the ones that are closest, so for coyotes, the foxes are a threat, they kill them. For the wolves, the coyotes are a threat and they kill them.

02:23:42 Speaker_04
But a 100 pound wolf and a 10 pound fox, it might be a nuisance and you let it scavenge, but it's not a threat to you.

02:23:49 Speaker_01
it's not going to compete with you. It's not going to take out a bison.

02:23:52 Speaker_04
Exactly. So when wolves come back on the landscape, it happened up where we are, happened at Yellowstone, where it's just been a coyote economy since the wolves were taken out. Coyotes rule, right? I love coyotes too, but I shouldn't say love.

02:24:05 Speaker_04
I really respect them. But when you have the wolves coming back and they start displacing and killing and hammering on the coyotes, well, surprise, all of a sudden red fox are coming back. Like where I work in the North Fork,

02:24:18 Speaker_04
All those early winters, we had people out all winter on skis tracking wolves. We never saw fox tracks, never. And I never caught one in a wolf trap.

02:24:30 Speaker_04
And then as time went on and the wolves took a foothold, so to speak, a toehold in the country, and they started hammering the coyotes, all of a sudden there's fox. I got fox denning on my property now.

02:24:40 Speaker_01
So will coyotes target foxes?

02:24:42 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, big time.

02:24:44 Speaker_01
Interesting.

02:24:44 Speaker_04
Big time.

02:24:45 Speaker_01
So they consider them competitors? Sure, I mean in places- Or do they eat them?

02:24:48 Speaker_04
I don't, you know what, I haven't followed that, I don't track that that closely, but I would guess most of the time not, unless they're incredibly hungry. I would guess it's a strict eliminating a competitor situation.

02:25:00 Speaker_04
I've seen, I mean you can look at the data in Yellowstone, they have witnessed tons of times of wolves going up to coyote dens and digging out on killing all the pups and trying to kill the parents. Wow. I don't think they usually eat them.

02:25:14 Speaker_01
Mmm, I could be wrong in that but I don't think so It's interesting because that's one of the theories about why it was originally one of the theories why coyotes killed dogs And and coyotes kill cats is that they're competitors, but then they started eating them.

02:25:28 Speaker_01
So I think maybe originally that was the case because again the expansion to urban areas is fairly recent and

02:25:35 Speaker_04
Yeah, and urban coyotes are not real wild. They'll eat whatever they get.

02:25:39 Speaker_01
They habitualize, right? Totally. Just like we were talking about. Totally. Their behavior changes.

02:25:44 Speaker_04
Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how amazingly versatile coyotes are, because I am starting to see wolves.

02:25:52 Speaker_04
being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily, like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision.

02:26:02 Speaker_01
Crazy. It is crazy. That would be so cool, though. Imagine if you lived there. I know. As long as you don't have a poodle.

02:26:10 Speaker_04
Right.

02:26:10 Speaker_01
Because they do eat dogs.

02:26:12 Speaker_04
They do eat dogs. But every time I go up to my little cabin, I am very conscientious about not leaving my dogs outside without me there.

02:26:20 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:26:20 Speaker_04
I did have a big Malamute killed by Mottline about 35 years ago. It's a big dog.

02:26:26 Speaker_01
Yeah. Mottline killed it. They don't care. They don't care. They can get it pretty easy. Mottline, yeah. Yeah. You know what's interesting to me is the propensity that foxes have to befriend humans.

02:26:36 Speaker_04
Yes.

02:26:38 Speaker_01
Very strange.

02:26:39 Speaker_04
So this is interesting. I mean, you know, you're a voracious reader, obviously. Have you ever heard of the study in Russia? Now this is, I mean, we're going to... Yes, I know what you're going with.

02:26:47 Speaker_01
With the fox. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Go ahead, explain it.

02:26:50 Speaker_04
The book title is How to Tame a Fox and Create a Dog. One of the most interesting books I've ever read, but this is true. I'm not saying that the 400 wolves is not true, but I doubt it.

02:27:00 Speaker_04
This is true science, supported by photos, that in the 50s or so this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes and he wanted to select simply for tameness.

02:27:14 Speaker_04
And by selecting the tamest male and female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with, that he would see if their morphology or their physical appearance changed. So he went to fur farms, and he was picking just for tameness.

02:27:27 Speaker_04
And eventually, after many years, he'd go to the fur farm, and this fox would lunge at him and snarl. He'd leave it. And they'd say, oh, this one over here in the corner, she rubs against the fence. When you go to a feeder, you take that one.

02:27:37 Speaker_04
But over years, they have photographs of these foxes, and they start changing. They were silver fox, a lot of them, instead of red. And they're black and white. They kind of look like border collies. And they start to have tipped over ears.

02:27:50 Speaker_04
And they got pictures of the guys in the pens. One person's bent over, and there's a fox standing on their back while they're putting out the food bowl. Crazy. Yes. And so that was in a very short time that they changed the behavior, the picture.

02:28:04 Speaker_01
Well, you're leaving out a little bit of it. Go ahead. One of the things that they did was whenever any of the foxes exhibit any kind of aggression, they shot them. Right. So they only allowed the very docile, submissive foxes to exhibit. Friendly.

02:28:18 Speaker_01
But then their eyes started getting larger, their snouts started getting shorter, and their ears started dropping really quick.

02:28:23 Speaker_04
I'm glad you read it because I suggested it to friends because I'm passionate about all canids, well, all things wild.

02:28:29 Speaker_04
And it was one of the most amazing pieces I wrote because if you think about humans domesticating animals, we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep and we got our breeds now.

02:28:41 Speaker_04
For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in king's castles and riding the bicycles in the circus and whatever.

02:28:49 Speaker_04
But in terms of North America, of course, we've been anywhere in the world, nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog. Nobody's domesticated European lynx.

02:29:00 Speaker_04
Nobody has successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren't friendly, and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.

02:29:16 Speaker_01
That is really fascinating. It's really fascinating. Because that's never been done to tigers or mountain lions. Think about how many people have tried to keep mountain lions as pets. I know.

02:29:23 Speaker_04
A lot of people have. Or coyotes. You keep coyotes, and after 15 generations, they still look like coyotes.

02:29:29 Speaker_01
And they still behave like coyotes.

02:29:30 Speaker_04
They do. And this little thing with the fur fox, it was extraordinary artificial selection pressure to see them.

02:29:37 Speaker_01
Yes.

02:29:38 Speaker_04
And they did change a bit.

02:29:39 Speaker_01
Well, the fox has a very strange relationship to humans, where that was part of the Timothy Treadwell movie. In the movie, he had this fox that was his friend, and the fox stole his hat one day and ran into the den with his hat.

02:29:52 Speaker_01
He's like, give me my hat back. And he's like chasing him. But it's an adorable relationship that this fox has with people, with him, in fact, climbing on his tent and hanging out with him. And he could touch it. He could pet its head.

02:30:06 Speaker_04
I'm sure he probably, he or somebody before him had probably food conditioned it to be accepting.

02:30:12 Speaker_01
Maybe, but you're talking about he's up in the grizzly maze in Alaska.

02:30:16 Speaker_04
Maybe he's just never seen a human.

02:30:18 Speaker_01
Maybe that's more it seems but there seems to be some sort of a strange History of comfort where this animal that's a 10-pound animal is comfortable around 150 pound man for no real reason Like he's not giving it anything like just him being around and it would lie down in front of him and and sun itself and and play around him right is a there was a weird relationship that humans have had with foxes

02:30:45 Speaker_04
Mr. Treadwell was not really in the bell curve on the big high point in the normal range either of normal behavior.

02:30:51 Speaker_01
Right, but I've had friends that have had encounters with foxes.

02:30:54 Speaker_04
Yeah, they're really unique. And they're also, they really adapt well to people. They live in agricultural areas. I've got them down. I mean, we see them all the time now. They're a different animal than a coyote or a wolf.

02:31:04 Speaker_01
It's just such a strange little fella. Yeah, like wants to be your friend. You know, very interesting.

02:31:10 Speaker_04
You don't see that a lot with wolves.

02:31:12 Speaker_01
No, you don't. I have a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens and we have to shoo him out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise. They do?

02:31:23 Speaker_01
Like, I didn't know about the noise until my friend Jim Brewer, who has foxes near his house in New Jersey, they make this crazy scream and I was like, what? What does it sound like?

02:31:32 Speaker_01
And then this little guy that lives in my neighborhood does it in my yard. I got a video of him in my yard going, Yeah, they crazy.

02:31:40 Speaker_04
I've heard it. It's any so what it's kind of interesting to think about the early relation of people With wolves. Yeah, I talked about that in a woman among wolves.

02:31:49 Speaker_04
My book is there was a couple of paleontologists or sociologists that speculated and I can't say if their theory is correct or not, but they speculated that when people were still living in caves and having spears and atlatls, that they would watch.

02:32:05 Speaker_04
So people were living in a family group in a pack. The wolves were living in a family group or a pack. They would watch the wolves chasing through a herd of whatever animal they were at that time, depending on where they lived. And eventually,

02:32:19 Speaker_04
getting one tired enough or maybe it was a cripple had a badling and they would surround it and eventually kill it.

02:32:24 Speaker_04
And then they speculate that the humans would learn that, you know what, we can go up to that killed oryx or whatever they had just killed, the primitive horse. at least drive those wolves away. We got tools, we can kill the wolves if we have to.

02:32:39 Speaker_04
So then it changed to where maybe those wolves had come around when the animal was cornered, but not dead, and the humans would come in and do the final blows and drive the wolves away and take what meat they wanted and then leave, and the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken.

02:33:01 Speaker_04
And this is their theory, that there was this relationship just because it's a brutal world, not synergy, and not altruistic, and not, oh, aren't these cute?

02:33:10 Speaker_04
Just like, hey, people, look at those wolves got an animal, a cram or cornered over there, let's go kill it, take what we need, wolves would come in. And that that sort of began potentially the process of wolves and people beginning to interact.

02:33:26 Speaker_04
I hate to hesitate to use the word collaborate,

02:33:28 Speaker_01
Right.

02:33:29 Speaker_04
This is an idea.

02:33:30 Speaker_01
It's an interesting idea also. And the interesting idea sort of coincides with the idea of the introduction of agriculture. Yes. So you have the introduction of agriculture. So you have resources that are more abundant and you have more animals.

02:33:43 Speaker_01
And so if these people lived in a resource rich environment where there was plenty of meat And they didn't have to worry. You could see how maybe they would throw some scraps at a cute little wolf that's near the fire.

02:33:55 Speaker_04
There's many ideas about how dogs... Right, the ones who were least afraid hung around.

02:34:01 Speaker_01
What they did with the foxes over just the course of a few generations. This took a few thousand years.

02:34:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, and then people would grab one of those wolves or let them hang around and then, you know, they would clean up the awful oafle around the camp and whatever.

02:34:17 Speaker_04
There's many ideas, of course nobody knows, but what is kind of known is the dates from DNA and carbon dating. The dates at which humans were able to domesticate livestock and the dates at which humans were able to domesticate

02:34:34 Speaker_04
dogs from wolves, and domesticating dogs preceded livestock. Livestock was like 11,000 years ago, roughly, of all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, sheep.

02:34:44 Speaker_01
So was it possible that the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a very game-rich environment where they didn't have fight over resources?

02:34:54 Speaker_04
And no livestock.

02:34:55 Speaker_01
No livestock.

02:34:56 Speaker_04
Exactly, because it hadn't happened yet.

02:34:58 Speaker_01
Right.

02:34:58 Speaker_04
So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals Again, I'm not saying it was to help each other so much, but they took advantage of each other's strengths and weaknesses.

02:35:07 Speaker_04
The wolf's strength was being able to hunt, run something down. It's also tired that people didn't do that. And then people say, oh yeah, that thing's crippled over there.

02:35:14 Speaker_04
Let's go kill it and we'll get our meat and the wolves can have the rest or whatever.

02:35:17 Speaker_01
Was there also a consideration that during these times, this was a hunter gathering time where they really didn't have a preservation of meat. There was no way to store it. So you had to continue to hunt and gather. So you had an abundance. Yes.

02:35:30 Speaker_01
You didn't think, oh, I'll stockpile this for the next few months. That was never even an afterthought.

02:35:34 Speaker_04
Probably not, unless it was in the tundra. And it was wintertime. They could freeze it. But the relationship of, I mean, there's many dates that said about when people domesticated dogs. And it varies a lot.

02:35:44 Speaker_04
But I think there's some consensus 30,000, 35,000 years ago.

02:35:48 Speaker_01
Wow, was that long ago?

02:35:49 Speaker_04
Long ago.

02:35:49 Speaker_01
I didn't know that.

02:35:51 Speaker_04
And you can Google it, Jamie. I thought it was like 10,000. No, because it happened significantly before we began domesticating livestock. So what I'm saying is there wasn't a conflict base. Resources were abundant.

02:36:04 Speaker_04
There wasn't protection of our livestock. There wasn't this and that.

02:36:08 Speaker_04
And eventually people took, when livestock became a thing, that eventually people would take a wolf-like canine, a dog that we domesticated, and then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins, away from the livestock.

02:36:22 Speaker_04
Talk about Wow. Crazy.

02:36:25 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:36:26 Speaker_04
Humans are so creative with what they can do and dogs are so plastic.

02:36:31 Speaker_04
I mean you take a wolf and you put a lot of pressure on it and eventually you come up with a golden retriever and a griffon and a poodle because they have a lot of domestic, they have a lot of plasticity genetically, morphologically, behaviorally that I don't think a lot of the other species have or would show up when we try to domesticate them.

02:36:49 Speaker_04
That's just my theory.

02:36:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, it seems to be uniquely adaptive. Yeah, totally. Are you aware of the baboons that raise dogs? No. Yeah, there's baboons that take puppies and they use the puppies as guards.

02:37:06 Speaker_01
So they keep the puppies near them and they keep these dogs near them. They don't kill them. And the dogs like allow them to sleep so they could be alerted to any intruders. The dogs bark.

02:37:17 Speaker_04
It sounds no different than us.

02:37:19 Speaker_01
It's bizarre to watch. I mean, I haven't heard of it. See if you can find it. Yeah, that's awesome. These baboons with these dogs. The dog's like, what am I doing? The baboon's like, get over here. They don't kill it. No, they use them.

02:37:31 Speaker_01
I mean, I'm sure they probably kill a few of them. They kill babies. Baboons are pretty damn ruthless.

02:37:35 Speaker_04
I've been to Africa and I don't like baboons.

02:37:37 Speaker_01
scary animal because it seems like a dog monkey. It's got a face like a dog. It's a weird animal, right? Because unlike any other primate, they have a completely different jaw structure. Their teeth, oh my gosh. They look like a dog.

02:37:52 Speaker_01
It's like an extended snout. Very strange animal. Yes, I find colorful and beautiful and creepy and all the things I agree So here we go. So these are these are dogs that are being raised. They raise these feral doggies dragging the dog I get over here.

02:38:10 Speaker_01
Oh my god Like they're not very kind

02:38:14 Speaker_00
So I was trying to read on what was going on. So some people think that they might not be being raised, that it's some sort of play. But I think this is taken from a trash pit.

02:38:24 Speaker_01
But did you see that other larger dog that was over there?

02:38:26 Speaker_04
That was a parent dog. It looked like a wolf. Oh, gee, he's really wailing on that puppy.

02:38:28 Speaker_01
He's controlling it. He's trying to control it.

02:38:31 Speaker_04
Sniffing his butt, processing data.

02:38:33 Speaker_01
Processing data.

02:38:34 Speaker_04
Data just like our dogs.

02:38:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, and they hold on to him by the tail It's kind of crazy and they drag around if you back it up. There was a larger dog.

02:38:42 Speaker_01
It was in the background Yeah, that dog's barking so I think the theory that I remember reading was that they had figured out that if they keep these dogs around the dogs are good watchdogs and

02:38:53 Speaker_04
Well, I'm going to have to Google that and look up the... See, this is my first thing. I'm a researcher, so I want to know the source. I want to know where it came from.

02:38:59 Speaker_00
It says there's a debate over it. I was trying to dig into the debate.

02:39:01 Speaker_01
Viral video of baboons in Saudi Arabia garbage dump led to speculation baboons kidnap puppies and keep them as pets.

02:39:06 Speaker_01
However, some say the baboons were likely just playing with the puppies, that the relationship is not analogous to pet owner relationship. Maybe. There's a lot of weird studies on garbage dumps and baboons. Have you ever read Sapolsky's work?

02:39:20 Speaker_04
No, I haven't.

02:39:21 Speaker_01
Robert Sapolsky did this study on a particularly vicious primate.

02:39:27 Speaker_04
What was the book he wrote like 20 years ago? Something primate. Yeah, I've read a long ago book. I haven't read currently.

02:39:33 Speaker_01
I don't remember. But the study that was fascinating was that they found that there was one contaminated pile of garbage. And of course, the most vicious alphas were the ones to eat first. So they died and they got sick. That's the one I've read.

02:39:48 Speaker_01
A Primate's Memoir. It's old. It's 2002.

02:39:50 Speaker_04
They said 20 years ago.

02:39:51 Speaker_01
Not too far off. He's amazing. I've had him on the podcast as well.

02:39:54 Speaker_04
That was a fascinating book.

02:39:55 Speaker_01
You have! I'll have to look for it. Super interesting guy. Especially the Toxoplasmosis-Gandhi discussion. Right now with the lions and the wolves?

02:40:04 Speaker_04
Do you know about lions and wolves and Toxoplasmosis?

02:40:06 Speaker_01
What's going on?

02:40:07 Speaker_04
So in Yellowstone, it's basically a dog-eat-cat world down there, for the most part, because of packs of wolves and the lions.

02:40:14 Speaker_04
But they have found that because the dogs are coexisting with the lions and sometimes ingest or scatter their guts or anyway, they eat some part of it, they get exposed. They have found with now the wolves have toxoplasmosis.

02:40:28 Speaker_04
And what happens is there is something like 11 times, it's a huge amount, I wished I can't, maybe Jamie can Google it, more likely to be extra bold and leaders of a pack than a dog, than a wolf that does not have toxoplasmosis.

02:40:42 Speaker_04
And these wolves that have the parasite take extraordinary risks and are more likely to die and lead the pack to death. So in the long run, it's sort of a cat's revenge on the wolves.

02:40:54 Speaker_01
Well, one of the things Sapolsky, 46 more times likely to become PAC leaders. Incredible.

02:40:59 Speaker_04
Isn't that wild?

02:41:00 Speaker_01
They're 11 times more likely to leave their birth PACs and do so at a younger age.

02:41:04 Speaker_04
And when they do that, they're not very well set up to survive.

02:41:07 Speaker_01
Sapolsky found out when he was doing his residence that there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims. that test positive for Toxo. So they test them and they find that this is one of the reasons why these guys are taking these crazy risks.

02:41:21 Speaker_01
Risk takers because of Toxo.

02:41:23 Speaker_04
It's a parasite from cats. Another book you'd like to read is called Spillover. Have you read that by David Quammen?

02:41:31 Speaker_01
No, I haven't.

02:41:31 Speaker_04
So he wrote it in, I think, 2017. It's an older book, maybe 2012. And he wrote, it's a spillover from wild animals, just Q-U-A-M-M-I-N-I-O-N, wild animals to human populations.

02:41:44 Speaker_04
And it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes some extremely viral, terrible disease in humans. and he actually traces back the origins of HIV. And all this happened before COVID.

02:41:56 Speaker_04
And it just was so set up, because COVID is the same kind of a deal. But it's a fascinating book, and because you've got an inquisitive mind, I think you'd really enjoy it.

02:42:05 Speaker_01
Well, COVID's not really, because COVID was a part of a lab experiment.

02:42:10 Speaker_04
Well, some people don't know.

02:42:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, they're 99% sure now, at this point, that it was all gain-of-function research that was done.

02:42:19 Speaker_01
The obscuring of the data was done purposely to try to absolve guilt from the people that funded the project, because the project was funded and canceled during the Obama administration, and then when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos, apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it through another

02:42:36 Speaker_01
the EcoHealth Alliance, there was a very sneaky about it, and when grilled, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain-of-function research they were doing in the first place.

02:42:44 Speaker_01
There's a lot of very, and there's emails back and forth, but that's beside the point.

02:42:49 Speaker_04
Well, I'm not gonna go there, but natural spillover is clearly real. But spillover documents many, many species, and actually, it's fascinating. Mad cow disease, it's the same thing.

02:43:00 Speaker_01
Mad cow disease is the craziest one, right? CWD, oh my goodness. They forced cows to eat cows. Surprise. You dumbass. And then the prions, the fact that they can exist under thousands of degrees. Thousands of degrees. You can't kill them.

02:43:15 Speaker_04
So do you have CWD here yet in Texas?

02:43:17 Speaker_01
I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. It's not ubiquitous, but I think there have been, there's been cases of CWD and I want to get to this before I forget. So the point of the Sapolsky thing was,

02:43:28 Speaker_01
that was what Sapolsky observed when these super aggressive baboons ate all of the garbage, that the garbage was contaminated, they died. So all the aggressive ones died and they turned into this utopian society.

02:43:41 Speaker_01
So, yes, and so they started grooming each other more, the males weren't aggressive anymore, the females didn't suffer the wrath of the males, and they were like hippie baboons. And it lasted for a long time.

02:43:54 Speaker_01
And I think they eventually reverted back to the same sort of typical aggressive alpha male behavior as being the primary leaders of the groups.

02:44:03 Speaker_01
But for a long time, they existed in this very strange, atypical environment where kind baboons were taking care of each other.

02:44:13 Speaker_04
Well, it'll be really interesting with the resources of the Yellowstone researchers, who do amazing stuff, to see what the long-range outcome is from this realization that there are 46 more times, likely more times, to be a leader of the pack.

02:44:28 Speaker_04
And what do these risk-taking behaviors entail? I'm really excited to follow this.

02:44:32 Speaker_01
And how many of them, unfortunately, are going to get hit by cars because of this? And wasn't the first ever released mountain lion, or wolf, rather, that got killed, killed by a car?

02:44:42 Speaker_04
The first one, my understanding, the first one in Yellowstone that released Wolf, the first mortality of a wolf was getting hit by a UPS truck.

02:44:50 Speaker_01
Crazy.

02:44:52 Speaker_04
I just feel kind of bad for the driver. I shouldn't laugh. I mean, there's a dead wolf, but can you imagine?

02:44:55 Speaker_01
Imagine you're that poor driver. You're the first guy. Oh my God, I just killed a national icon. What, you couldn't hit the brakes?

02:45:00 Speaker_04
I know, I know.

02:45:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's horrible.

02:45:02 Speaker_04
Anyway, sorry.

02:45:04 Speaker_01
It's so fascinating that this toxoplasmosis can implode the population. Who knows? They might make terrible decisions.

02:45:13 Speaker_04
How prevalent is it in humans?

02:45:15 Speaker_01
Oh, it's hugely prevalent. In France, at one point in time, there was 50% of the population had toxo. Yeah, in large populations of people in both Latin America, South America, places where there's a lot of feral cats. It's a huge instance of it.

02:45:31 Speaker_01
Not only that, there's a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis or in countries that have toxoplasmosis that have successful soccer teams.

02:45:40 Speaker_01
They don't know if it's just because a lot of poor people that's the best way out become really good at soccer soccer is really Common because everybody plays it. Yeah, you know, they don't know but it might be that it makes you more aggressive.

02:45:54 Speaker_01
It makes you more You're more interested in taking risks, huh? And a little reckless. Yeah, and if you're a soccer player, I can I It'd probably help you to be like, just go for it and get crazy. Be more aggressive and less tentative.

02:46:08 Speaker_04
Right, right. It's crazy. The whole interface between humans and wildlife is becoming a more and more popular field. If I was young and could do my career over, I wouldn't go into that because it's really crazy.

02:46:21 Speaker_04
So when wolves first encountered parvovirus and distemper came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping. And the disease came into being in the 80s. But we started documenting it in Glacier.

02:46:37 Speaker_04
And the first year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, they're off the chart in their immune response antibodies to that particular disease. And we had most of our pups all die that year. Boom, like that.

02:46:52 Speaker_04
And people don't think about, yeah, I got my little dachshund up at McDonald Lake and he pooped and you don't pick it up, no, we'll get it.

02:46:58 Speaker_04
But the same thing happened in Yellowstone and they have certain years where they have horrible pup survival, it's called recruitment, and they don't make it into the fall.

02:47:08 Speaker_04
But the other thing of interest, so they've been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in Yellowstone, that genetically, the ones who carry the gene for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolves.

02:47:24 Speaker_04
And it's certain, maybe Jamie could look that up, but certain times when the disease prevalence is higher, the wolves will select a mate of a certain color because their genetics prove to be an asset to the survival of those pups.

02:47:39 Speaker_01
It's crazy. Do the ones with the darker coats, do they originate from denser forests?

02:47:46 Speaker_04
So they've also been looking at that. So when I first came to Montana, many of the wolves were black, and now it's probably 50-50 or less. In Minnesota, the original Midwestern wolves

02:47:55 Speaker_04
were gray, and now they've got black color genes, and there are changes with the population density.

02:48:00 Speaker_04
But what I learned, to my best knowledge, it's a K locus gene, and they think that when people domesticated dogs from wolves, and we took the wolves into captivity, and we mutated their mutations that we helped survive, that gene for black color coat was from dogs, and then dogs got bred a little bit into the wolves occasionally, and that coat is from a dog.

02:48:25 Speaker_01
Interesting.

02:48:26 Speaker_04
Doesn't mean that the animals out there that are black are hybrids. I'm just saying it goes back thousands of years.

02:48:32 Speaker_01
So the earliest descriptions of wolves, did they describe them? What is the earliest known written human history of wolves? Did they describe them in a particular color?

02:48:44 Speaker_04
Oh boy, you know what, I haven't gone there. I mean, if you look at Romulus and Remus, those are gray wolves in Rome.

02:48:50 Speaker_01
Right.

02:48:51 Speaker_04
I don't know. You know, I'm not a paleontologist.

02:48:53 Speaker_01
I was just getting to, like, if you're thinking about a place like the Pacific Northwest, for example, where you have dense rainforest, it would probably be a benefit to be darker. You could hide a little bit better, sneak around.

02:49:06 Speaker_04
That's the idea, like having Arctic wolves being white.

02:49:07 Speaker_01
Yes, exactly.

02:49:09 Speaker_04
But it's the K locus for the black collar gene, and it depends on if they're homozygous or heterozygous, and one is, here you go.

02:49:15 Speaker_01
One of the earliest written references to black wolves occurs in the Babylonian epic, oh, it's in Gilgamesh. So that's 6,000 years ago.

02:49:25 Speaker_01
The titular character rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her that she had transformed a previous lover, a shepherd, into a wolf, thus turning him into the very animal that his flocks must be protected against. Whoa. Wow. Heavy.

02:49:42 Speaker_01
It is heavy. I would love to know what the root of that story is. Huh. Yeah. So that's so fascinating. Here you go. Yeah, this would be... Disease outbreak select for mate choice and coat color in wolves. So all dogs come from wolves, so you have wolves.

02:50:00 Speaker_01
Wolves get domesticated into dogs, then some dogs reintroduce their genes into interbreeding with wolves, and somehow or another this black coat color comes into play. Yes. Wild.

02:50:11 Speaker_04
It is, literally. And I suspect from people living in northern latitudes, the Inuits and the Native Americans throughout Russia and across the North, you know, they kept dogs, too, and they bred them to wolves and made better sled dogs.

02:50:24 Speaker_04
But an early reference told me that the dog native to North America was brought over here. The Native Americans didn't have dogs here thousands and thousands of years ago. That's what I've been reading.

02:50:38 Speaker_01
Well, one of the things that I learned from- Part by Europeans. Yeah. That's so crazy. One of the things that Dan Flores was talking about was that horses came from here, but then they all died off. Yes.

02:50:56 Speaker_01
They don't know exactly why, but probably during that mass extinction event where 65% of all the megafauna died, and then the Europeans reintroduced horses.

02:51:05 Speaker_01
And so the Native Americans initially didn't have horses, and then some were really good at it, and those are the ones that thrive, like the Comanche.

02:51:11 Speaker_04
The Spaniards brought horses up in the 1500s, and that's how they got their horses.

02:51:15 Speaker_01
But before that- But the horses came from here originally, even the horses in Africa, even zebras, originated, genetically originated in the North American continent. I didn't know that. I was like, what the hell? I didn't know that. No, it's crazy.

02:51:29 Speaker_01
Zebras, too? Yeah, zebras. How nuts. That is nuts. Well, we also have an animal, the pronghorn antelope, that is a prehistoric animal. It's only here.

02:51:41 Speaker_01
It should not be here, and the only reason why it's here, and the reason why it's so fast- This article says something about the- I don't know.

02:51:48 Speaker_00
It gets really deep into genetics. The dark, the codes, the K locus and codes has something to do with them having canine distemper virus.

02:51:54 Speaker_04
That they're immune, more immune to respiratory infections. So anyway, yeah.

02:51:59 Speaker_01
And then the other thing is- Which they probably got from dogs. Yes, probably. Distemper. Yeah.

02:52:04 Speaker_04
Well, I don't know how long distemper goes back. The other thing with the pronghorn, I mean, I just came from hunting wolves. I mean, hunting birds. We were seeing pronghorn everywhere. Antelope.

02:52:13 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:52:14 Speaker_04
I love them, but they're really prehistoric. Weird. And do you know why they run at 60 miles an hour?

02:52:19 Speaker_01
Because we used to have a North American cheetah.

02:52:21 Speaker_04
Exactly.

02:52:22 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:52:22 Speaker_04
The cheetahs whittled the limbs of the antelope. What was that?

02:52:27 Speaker_01
That's why they're so fast. They're so much faster than any predator in North America.

02:52:32 Speaker_04
They've got to be 60 miles an hour to outrun a cheetah. Not wolves, not bears.

02:52:36 Speaker_01
And they're still here, and the cheetahs are gone. But they're one of the very few of those weird animals, like the North American lion. There was a North American lion that was way bigger than the African lion.

02:52:47 Speaker_04
I've read that. I mean, I would love to be a paleontologist. There's so many things I would like to do again and do over.

02:52:53 Speaker_01
There's a lot of interesting things in this world, and we're still just learning.

02:52:58 Speaker_04
We still have to listen to people, experts, and do a lot of reading and think for ourselves.

02:53:02 Speaker_01
Well, thanks to you, we know a lot more about wolves. Well, thanks. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you. The book is A Woman Amongst Wolves, My Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery. Diane Boyd.

02:53:14 Speaker_04
Can I read you just a 30-second introductory paragraph? Sure. Then I'll give you and your readers a flavor of what it's about. So it's a memoir. It's all real. It's not a forward introduction. There we go. OK. Let's see if I can see it. Do you need glasses?

02:53:35 Speaker_04
I got glasses.

02:53:35 Speaker_01
OK.

02:53:37 Speaker_04
Sorry, should have had them ready.

02:53:38 Speaker_01
No worries, no worries.

02:53:40 Speaker_04
Hang on.

02:53:41 Speaker_01
Can I ask you before you do that? Yes, yes. Are you going to read the audiobook?

02:53:46 Speaker_04
No.

02:53:47 Speaker_01
No?

02:53:47 Speaker_04
No, there's a story there too.

02:53:49 Speaker_01
Damn.

02:53:50 Speaker_04
We can talk about that after. Let's just be 30 seconds.

02:53:52 Speaker_03
Okay.

02:53:54 Speaker_04
My pickup banged and rattled along the pothole inside road in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf traps and jars of bait slid across the truck bed. I was in a hurry.

02:54:05 Speaker_04
My mind focused on the wolf caught in a trap somewhere ahead in the lodgepole pine forest. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in my rearview mirror.

02:54:15 Speaker_04
I looked up to catch the glassy reflection of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf's black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat. How did I get here?

02:54:24 Speaker_03
That's the opening for my book.

02:54:28 Speaker_01
It's not a tiger.

02:54:30 Speaker_04
So you asked me about?

02:54:33 Speaker_01
What did I ask you about? Oh, the audio book.

02:54:35 Speaker_04
So the audio book. So when I signed my contract, this is my debut book, A Woman Among Wolves. I've not written a book. I've published scores of scientific articles, but not a book. I signed the contract, and I love working with Greystone.

02:54:47 Speaker_04
They're a fantastic publisher. It's just a standard contract. I signed away the rights for movie, audio, et cetera, et cetera. But I get a share of the royalties and stuff.

02:55:00 Speaker_04
Somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced. And I didn't hear about it for a while. And by the time I'd heard about it, they had just started producing it.

02:55:13 Speaker_04
And I said, well, I'd like to read for it. I sent off an audio tape of my voice. And looks like they would need to do a bunch of polishing. And it was almost September. And I would be recording for weeks.

02:55:25 Speaker_01
It takes like- What kind of polishing?

02:55:28 Speaker_04
Annunciation, and I don't know.

02:55:31 Speaker_01
Oh, they have to teach you how to say it differently?

02:55:32 Speaker_04
I mean, I think I'm a pretty fair speaker, but just anyway, it would take some training, and then it would, more important, it would take up so much time. It takes like 80 hours to produce an eight-hour audiobook.

02:55:43 Speaker_01
I know, but the thing is, it's like the authentic version of this book is going to be in your voice. Maybe when the rights expire, but I... Maybe they would just listen to this podcast and just try it. I would love that.

02:55:58 Speaker_01
It's not that expensive to get you in a booth for a couple of weeks.

02:56:01 Speaker_04
They hired a professional actress. The other thing was, this happened just before bird hunting season opened in Montana. It's like, sorry.

02:56:09 Speaker_01
I get it. Sorry. I get it. I really do. Time's precious.

02:56:13 Speaker_04
Steve Rinello said the same thing. You made a big mistake, Diane. It's like, I kind of didn't have options.

02:56:18 Speaker_01
It's okay. Either way, I'm sure it's awesome. Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. It was a lot of fun. Thanks. I really enjoyed it.

02:56:23 Speaker_04
It's been a blast, Joe. Thank you so much for having me as a gaff. Thank you. You just treated me royally. This has been wonderful.

02:56:28 Speaker_01
I'm glad you had fun. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.

02:56:31 Speaker_03
Bye.