#2213 - Diane K. Boyd

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience.

Speaker 2 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 1 What's up? How are you?

Speaker 2 I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Well, it's very nice to meet you.
And I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinnella's podcast. Oh, good.

Speaker 2 Oh, good. You got to watch it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Steve. Well, Steve made the introduction.
Yeah. 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.

Speaker 2 Thanks, and I'm excited too because I thought, well,

Speaker 2 we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you got an interest in wolves.

Speaker 1 It's all good. How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?

Speaker 2 Well, I grew up in Minnesota, and 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.

Speaker 2 Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa Royale, a couple here or there in Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 And so I was interested from the beginning with that. And then, when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meach, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus.

Speaker 2 So I just stopped by and kept bugging him.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't go away like a good parasite. Persist, persist, persist.

Speaker 1 Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you?

Speaker 2 You know, I'm just

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life growing up until I was about 15. So I had

Speaker 2 this passion for canines in general.

Speaker 1 I love dogs. I do too.
I love them. And I love wolves.
I'm so fascinated by them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Did you say Idaho?

Speaker 1 Is that was the only other place that had them?

Speaker 2 No, Isle Royal, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan.

Speaker 2 And they walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late 1949 50s, early, and they stayed and they got seeded there and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat.

Speaker 1 So they were in kind of a wolf paradise with that. And is it still like that there?

Speaker 2 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.
Right.

Speaker 2 And yeah they're doing there and then interestingly when they when they arrived they migrated on their own power.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the wolves that came and went didn't breed and eventually they became so inbred they started having physical anomalies.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed. close relatives generally.
So they just did a reintroduction to Isle Royal, too. That's been relatively new, just a handful of years.

Speaker 2 So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep them going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.

Speaker 1 So when they reintroduced them,

Speaker 1 this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction of Yellowstone.

Speaker 1 A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced a different size wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada. Yeah.
Is that true?

Speaker 1 Sort of?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 native, they're Canadian super wolves and they weigh 170 pounds and it goes on and on and on. But

Speaker 2 I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, Wolf 8551,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And seven months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry game warden called me. He says, we got one of your wolves killed.

Speaker 2 Do you want the collar? Yes, please. Where is it? Puscupe.

Speaker 1 I said, oh, where is that?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her. But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park.

Speaker 2 So clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So this little wolf, 80 pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon. Wow.
It's connected because it's a walkabout for a wolf. It's not a big deal.

Speaker 2 We just didn't

Speaker 2 back then we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Think about that, to Colorado.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Midwest like Wisconsin?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It just said the Great Lakes region.
It didn't identify because they're all kind of the same, but it was not, it was not a Western wolf.

Speaker 2 It was not from Wyoming or Montana. Really interesting.

Speaker 1 Is there any speculation as to why she went so far north?

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Speaker 1 She was originally from a northern population.

Speaker 2 The wolf that I'm talking about, 500 for 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.

Speaker 2 And then at about a year and a half of age, almost two, she dispersed that far. And she didn't have to go that far.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know what?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I just don't know. So is that common that they would travel that far?

Speaker 2 It's becoming more and more common. So now that we have satellite collars, we've been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them.

Speaker 2 In the old days, we just had VHF collars, and you had to physically be there within range like from an airplane or track them.

Speaker 2 But now that we got satellite collars, I mean my gosh, we 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

Speaker 2 with the satellite collar. It was tracked and then it turned around and started home and it got shot in Utah.

Speaker 1 So when they're doing this and you track them, how long do those collars batteries last?

Speaker 2 Well, sadly for the VHF collars, the wolves generally die before the collars do, because wolves don't live very long. And an average VHF collar lasts about four years.

Speaker 2 An average satellite collar, one to two years. And I don't understand why the technology is not

Speaker 2 better to prolong some kind of a new battery.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Probably too heavy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, they're pretty close to developing some pretty spectacular battery technology. I just was reading about that.
Yeah. Yeah, they're trying to implement it in automobiles.

Speaker 1 They're going to be able to do it. I believe Samsung is at the forefront of that.
Ah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, because obviously they make batteries for their phones and electronics and things along those lines.

Speaker 1 Isn't it a hydrogen battery or something crazy? I do not know.

Speaker 2 I was just reading. I'm sorry.
I don't don't remember.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they're wearing this heavy collar, and

Speaker 1 they're good for about two years. And a wolf in the wild lives how long on average?

Speaker 2 I always, when I do have a talk, I ask the audience,

Speaker 2 how long do you think the average wolf lives?

Speaker 2 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 at?

Speaker 1 I would be cheating because I listened to the Randall podcast. I think it was was 4.3 years.

Speaker 2 4.3 years.

Speaker 1 Dr. Randall got that.
I think it was. I was shocked.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, I shot one that was 11.

Speaker 2 You did. I bet the antlers were getting smaller by that time.
Yes,

Speaker 1 and the teeth were worn down, almost nothing.

Speaker 2 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 they die.

Speaker 2 But the wolves, I mean, in a zoo or a captive situation, they can live to be 15.

Speaker 1 Like a dog.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like a lot of, yeah. But that's extraordinary.

Speaker 2 I think the longest I had a wolf, a wild wolf, that I knew her age because I caught her as a pup and we I captured recaptured her and we tagged her. 12 years.
That's extremely long for an old wolf.

Speaker 1 Wow, 12 years in the wild.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a few in Yellowstone that I got that old. We had one of mine that dispersed to Idaho, and he

Speaker 2 kind of interesting. I caught him in 1990, and he dispersed about a year later on his own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of Norwich

Speaker 2 Wilderness. There were no other wolves at that time, and he just hung around.
We'd see him once in a while from an airplane by himself. He was a big male.
When I got him, he was 111 pounds.

Speaker 2 But this animal had to survive by killing animals alone. You think about

Speaker 2 trying to pull down an elk with your teeth. Is it

Speaker 1 because the old males don't get accepted into a new pack?

Speaker 2 He went to where there weren't any wolves, interestingly, but he had a success story because he just waited it out.

Speaker 2 And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in 95 and 96, a little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just hits the road as fast as she can go.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Wow. So he was just kind of chilling on his own for years.
Yeah. How many years?

Speaker 1 Four.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 And that was four years without seeing any other wolves.

Speaker 2 Without being having helped 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.

Speaker 1 Was there any understanding of what he was basically? Because they usually hunt in packs. Yeah.
So it's probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer.

Speaker 1 So what was he, what was he eating?

Speaker 2 I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawns, some deer.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But he did well. Whatever he did, we don't know.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they risk being killed every time they have to take a meal like that.

Speaker 1 Right. They risk being dismembered, too.
Like

Speaker 1 broken legs and broken jaws jaws and getting kicked.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw a video of a wolf from Yellowstone last year. It had been kicked in the jaw by an elk and it had a broken jaw that was hanging.

Speaker 2 And a month later, a month, a month and a half, it was healed enough and it was in the process of killing another elk.

Speaker 2 And wolves came along and killed the wolf. Other wolves.
Once in his own pack, obviously, but he survived that.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 his jaw healed up and he got enough food while his jaw was healing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's incredible. I imagine he was scavenging around, you know, picking up on kills and whatever.

Speaker 1 How is he even chewing? I don't know. Because

Speaker 1 no, he's got a fork. You know, like

Speaker 1 or a knife where you can cut up the pieces. He's got to bite pieces off with a broken jaw.

Speaker 2 It's mind-boggling to me. You know, people think, oh, wolves can just kill it.
Well, they can do whatever they want.

Speaker 1 They have a hard life.

Speaker 2 Yeah. They just they live in packs because they're not very efficient killers.
You know, mountain lions, bears,

Speaker 2 they're

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so it generally takes numerous wolves to successfully hunt an animal, especially something big like a moose or bison.

Speaker 1 What a friend said to me, so I want to run this by you to find out if this is true.

Speaker 1 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 them.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills.

Speaker 2 That does happen, and I saw some in Glacier Park, too, but

Speaker 2 to that end, I'll say there are three times more mountain lions than there are wolves in northwestern Montana. Really?

Speaker 2 Two and a half to three. It's been documented.
So

Speaker 1 if you think about that, I would have never imagined that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and mountain lions are, on average, a little bit bigger than wolves. I don't know if you've ever hunted them or not, but my God, they're really big.

Speaker 1 I've never hunted a mountain lion, but I saw one in

Speaker 1 on, yeah. I saw one in Utah a couple years back, and it was a big one, like 170-pound one.
Oh, my God. It was enormous.

Speaker 2 Did they tree it with hounds?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was under a tree, and it was just as dawn or just as dusk was happening, so you could see his eyes glowing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 They're beautiful animals. And I always think when I'm out in the woods, I got a little cabin way up northwest Montana.
I wonder how many times mountain lions have watched me.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's been a lot.

Speaker 2 I worry about mountain lions. They're stealthy.
I don't worry about wolves.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you should worry about mountain lions.

Speaker 1 You're out there by yourself, too, right? Yeah, a lot. Do you have like modern amenities up there? Do you have satellite, internet, and all that chest?

Speaker 2 My little cabin is 55 miles off the grid, and it's dry. I don't have any water.
I don't have electricity.

Speaker 1 No electricity.

Speaker 2 Mm-mm. It's way off the grid.
But I... I built it.
I took down an old historic homestead and I moved the logs up to where it sits. You come up to dinner.

Speaker 1 Did you do it all yourself?

Speaker 2 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.
Wow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, but I eventually got it done, and a lot of friends, very dear friends, helped. But I poured concrete and I cut logs and, you know, I did

Speaker 2 everything. But when I built the place, where was I going with this? Sorry.

Speaker 1 You were just talking about what it's like out there. No electricity, no water.

Speaker 2 So for years I've lived without, and I haul water from a spring. In the winter, I melt the snow because we get a lot of snow.
But

Speaker 2 three summers ago now, I was there alone, and I fell down the heart, the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot.

Speaker 2 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 to shutter because I'm not going to be back.

Speaker 2 I I got a broken foot. So I'm hobbling around and I said, okay,

Speaker 2 now I'm going to get Starlink.

Speaker 2 That was my motivator because if I had 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.

Speaker 2 They were still in the beta development, I think. And anyway, I got on.
So I have Starlink available to me at my cabin,

Speaker 2 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.
And when I choose to turn it on, I'd get the messages.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of the best of both worlds. But I don't live there full-time anymore.
I live in town.

Speaker 1 That is actually the best of both worlds. 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 the cigar box.

Speaker 2 The new one that's got the router with it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 For better or worse.

Speaker 1 For worse. Definitely for worse.
But it's, it allows me to call home and talk to people.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 I drilled a well.

Speaker 2 I didn't hit water.

Speaker 1 Oh, you only did one?

Speaker 2 I did two, and I didn't hit water twice.

Speaker 2 But I'm on a creek. I sit on a bluff above a creek.

Speaker 2 The water's about 90 to 100 feet straight below me. Oh.
And I drilled my wells 140 feet. But it's a really interesting limestone shale in the water.
I don't know how it works.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I didn't know.

Speaker 1 You say witch. Are you talking about with the sticks? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Divining rods. Is that what it is? Divining rods.

Speaker 2 Is that real?

Speaker 2 Like I said, I'm a scientist, but if it might help, why not?

Speaker 1 But I didn't hit water. It doesn't seem like it could be real.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know either.

Speaker 1 But people have been doing that for a long time, and it seems like a massive waste of time.

Speaker 1 Jamie, see if you can find a video of someone trying to find water with divining rods. If you haven't seen it, they use two sticks, right?

Speaker 2 Two sticks, sometimes metal, but usually wood, like a willow or something.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 How could it be be possible has anybody ever analyzed like what factors could be i don't know at play i i have to tell you i don't know and i'm kind of a skeptic on that stuff but i i had somebody do it and we didn't hit water so it's okay so here it is this guy's walking around with these it looks like he's got

Speaker 1 those are probably metal like coat hangers or something whoops

Speaker 1 right there coat hangers

Speaker 1 how is that possible I I don't know. So he just spins in his hands?

Speaker 2 That looks like they crossed. And then, of course, but then they're going to go sink and do really well.
It might be two feet. It might be 200 feet.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 So he's walking. He's not moving his hands.

Speaker 1 They did. Wow, it does really look like they move on their own.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I have been told that I can be a woman of science and superstition.

Speaker 1 At the same time. Yeah, but I'm not.

Speaker 2 Usually science wins.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I can think of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It was an old homestead with a lot of empty cabins. Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside

Speaker 1 twice. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you've ever had that happen. Do you want to have been out walking or hunting?

Speaker 1 I have not. Okay.
No, I've never had a moment where I was terrified, like something's out here.

Speaker 2 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 can smell it.

Speaker 1 Oh, you feel like if we get human out there? Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like if you, I always said that everything in the woods is scarier. Like, if you saw a naked baby in the woods, you'd be like, What's that baby doing here? Exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Baby just standing there looking at you.
You'd be like, What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah.
Like, there's something weird about the woods in general.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But if you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods and you see another person,

Speaker 1 there's this moment where you're like, what's this guy up to? Who is he? What's he doing? Is he dangerous?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think that's because we're all raised in an urban environment, more or less, nowadays.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And once I wrote this book, I had to bring up stories that are very personal to me. And I had an event one night that was terrifying.

Speaker 2 Probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my life. And it involved humans.
So, yeah, I totally get that. People in places where they shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 Do you want to read it? Do you want me to spoil it? Do you want me to do the spoiler thing?

Speaker 1 Well, we're talking about it.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'll just give you the elevator speech part of it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 So I was in my cabin at night and

Speaker 2 the dog started growling.

Speaker 2 I had very big dogs. I always have dogs.
And I looked out my window and it was winter and it was cold and I could see a couple of guys out there lurking around. And I was in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 2 And then it kind of digressed from there.

Speaker 2 So I am

Speaker 2 for the only first and only time in my life, I pulled a gun on these guys.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was in danger.

Speaker 1 What were they doing out there?

Speaker 2 Well they came to pay me a visit. They knew who you were? They called me by name, which was really freaky.
So you think somebody in the woods walking around scare you?

Speaker 2 Wait till you see somebody who you don't know who it is and they call you by your first name. That's freaky.

Speaker 1 And what did they want?

Speaker 2 I didn't find out because I pulled a gun on them.

Speaker 2 Wow. I drove them off.
And it was terrifying to me at the

Speaker 2 it was not terrifying at the moment because I was absolutely focused, like predator-focused, calm. But after they left, I started to shake.
And

Speaker 2 yeah, kind of after the adrenaline surge happened.

Speaker 1 Were they menacing? Were they

Speaker 1 to me? But with the way they were communicating with you,

Speaker 2 They were drunk.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It wasn't good.

Speaker 1 And so how did they know who you were? Do you know? Oh, it's a long story. But

Speaker 2 I was working up there. I was kind of a novelty, a young blonde woman.
I was only about 25.

Speaker 2 Living alone, studying wolves. 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

Speaker 2 behind the customs station right on the Canadian border, and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the customs station.

Speaker 2 They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck, and then the Canadian trucks would go back.

Speaker 2 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 the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so I was around, so these loggers knew who I was, and I was, you know, I was cordial enough.

Speaker 2 But it was two of those guys.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I don't I never told the story until I wrote this book, and I just thought

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.
And he had seen a wolf. He'd taken a picture of it.
So anyway, we chat.

Speaker 2 And he says, so I hear you had some visitors last night. And I looked it up because he was up in his log truck.
I said, yeah. He says, you don't have to worry.
That won't happen again.

Speaker 2 He's kind of like watching out for me. Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, because we had kind of befriended each other because he'd spotted this wolf and he'd taken pictures of it. Anyway, he, yeah.

Speaker 1 So how did he find out that you had had visitors?

Speaker 2 The logger network, the CB radios. I don't know.
I didn't tell anybody.

Speaker 1 But he knew right away. Hmm.
Yeah, it's humans that you have to be scared of.

Speaker 2 Totally.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So anyway, you asked.

Speaker 1 There's no serial killer mountain lions,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 They just have a purpose in nature.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they just kill because they kill because they eat.

Speaker 1 That's what their job is.

Speaker 2 People are weird. People sign about there being weird.
I love that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, especially men.

Speaker 1 Men in the woods are scary. So when you were living out there, how many years did you live out there by yourself?

Speaker 2 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 our work. So, it was starting all that.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 for three years.

Speaker 2 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 weren't people there on the shoulder season.

Speaker 1 Did that get lonely?

Speaker 2 You know, it's interesting because

Speaker 2 it didn't. Really?

Speaker 1 Back when I was younger,

Speaker 2 I was a bit of a misanthrope, and I liked being alone. And when I was alone, being alone is different than being lonely.

Speaker 2 It just is. Now, as an older person,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, it's all amazing stuff, but I would be lonely.

Speaker 1 I like to be around people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You wouldn't have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago, let's put it that way.

Speaker 1 Really? Nah.

Speaker 1 I bet we would have worked out. It'd have been all right, but it would have worked out.

Speaker 2 I'm more conversational now.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, if I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that's like.

Speaker 1 Like, 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.

Speaker 1 It's very different than taking a jaunt, taking a weekend excursion, hiking, you know, even camping for a week.

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Speaker 1 yes and

Speaker 2 it's sort of like

Speaker 2 it's like when I go I go up to my cabin for a visit now I'm no longer live there full-time but I live there a couple of months a year maybe three maybe usually two 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 I can't call oh I can't go on the internet do I want to hook up this darling no 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.

Speaker 2 Go on a hike. But it takes me a few days now to get to that frame of mind.
It doesn't. It's not instant anymore.
So I've changed who I am for sure.

Speaker 1 And then once you get to that frame of mind, then you can just like, today we're going to go on a hike.

Speaker 1 Bring the dogs. Just go walk around.
Go fly tree.

Speaker 2 Enjoy yourself. Whatever.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And were you living off the land? Were you catching fish for food and hunting for food? Like, how are you getting your supplies?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So I would stock up and buy, you know, three, four hundred pounds of dog food and bulk supplies of flour and oats. And I canned.
Back then, I actually did some canning.

Speaker 2 Now I don't have time. I don't care about it.
I can buy canned peaches or whatever.

Speaker 2 And I never grew a food garden because of the bears.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 See, So I didn't want to attract grizzlies.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So I didn't grow food except lettuce.

Speaker 1 How often did you run into them up there?

Speaker 2 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 then.

Speaker 2 Now everybody's discovered Montana and there's people everywhere, right?

Speaker 1 It's so interesting because our senses are so dull compared to theirs. We move so slow and we're so loud and we're so clunky.
They see us a mile away, they smell us a mile away.

Speaker 1 They know exactly where you are, and most of the time they just avoid us.

Speaker 2 Totally true. And 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. And I was out bird hunting with friends.

Speaker 2 And I said, I told them, I said, so when I'm hunting with my pointers, I've got a Grafan and a wire hair. I said,

Speaker 1 don't talk.

Speaker 2 Don't call the dog's name. Don't holler about.

Speaker 2 Just watch and enjoy, and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs. If you see them getting birdie, get ready.

Speaker 2 Because so many times you hunt with people and they're hacking their dog, they're calling, they're hollering, and they're talking to you about something going on over here.

Speaker 2 And hey, did you watch the Vikings game? Well, nobody watches the Vikings game. Anyway, did you watch this?

Speaker 2 It's like, we're out there seeking a smart bird that has ears.

Speaker 2 Watch the dogs.

Speaker 2 So I feel that way when I'm out living in the wild too with out out hiking. I'm not going to see elk or bears or even fox if you're yammering away.
Right. That's why I like being alone.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is part of the problem with people. We do like to talk just to just be reassured.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. 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.

Speaker 2 They're so enthusiastic.

Speaker 1 But something's going on and you can't take a video because because everybody's yeah yep yep yeah yeah even if the wolves are howling you have to go shh i went to yellowstone a few years back with my family and i've i felt like it was very weird i've i've i've felt like I'm enjoying, my daughters are really young at the time.

Speaker 1 I'm enjoying that they're seeing bears and they're seeing, well, we didn't see bears. We did see, they had, there is this place in Montana that has this grizzly bear preserve.

Speaker 1 It's like a place where they take care of bears, so they would like feed them frozen watermelons, which is crazy to watch a bear chew through a frozen watermelon like it's a grape. Whoa.

Speaker 1 They just go right through it. It's a frozen watermelon.
Whoa. And they just

Speaker 1 like it's nothing.

Speaker 1 But we did see a lot of elk and a bunch of bison. And the elk was strange because I'm sure you know this, but for the people at home, elk

Speaker 1 understand that wolves don't come to these community centers, these areas where, you know, there's vending machines and buildings. So the elk are all over the place out there.
Yeah, on the lawns.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I was trying to tell my kids, I was like, this never happens. This is weird.

Speaker 1 It's weird that they've become so habitualized to being around cars and people. They just know the people.
It's safe when you're around these people, so they just hang out there.

Speaker 2 That's probably at Mammoth Gardener area. That happens all the time up there.

Speaker 1 Well, it happens in Colorado, too, like in Evergreen.

Speaker 1 You know, you see them, there's like these huge herds of elk that walk down the middle of the street in Evergreen because they know there's no mountain lines in the middle of the street.

Speaker 2 They're not predators.

Speaker 1 Right. 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.

Speaker 2 Sounds like banff.

Speaker 2 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 had exposure to livestock.

Speaker 2 They're very wild at first and then they can't get away from humans.

Speaker 2 So after a while they just start disregarding people and like 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that's passed on to the next generation, next. And then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 That's unfortunate.

Speaker 1 The habitualization is unfortunate because you just want to see them in the wild. You don't want to see them in an intersection.

Speaker 2 I know. And yeah, it's tough.
And the unfortunate thing is

Speaker 2 a couple of years ago there were twenty-five Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around.

Speaker 2 Anyway, that's like out of a hundred, so it's about a quarter of the population.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And this this just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because they were so special.

Speaker 2 And I make the point when I give talks and stuff, I said, you know, if you really feel that strongly,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, in my mind. Well, that was the case with Cecil the Lion.
You remember?

Speaker 2 Right, yeah, yeah, the dentist. Edina dentist killed him, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they named him. Yeah.
And so when they named, and I remember after Cecil got killed, another lion got killed, and they thought it was Jericho, who was Cecil's brother.

Speaker 1 And there was a story, like, oh my god, they killed Jericho, Cecil's brother. And then they realized that Jericho was not dead.
So, oh, it's fine. Jericho's still okay.
But that lion is just a lion.

Speaker 1 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.
Exactly. That's so bizarre.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we would give them names because it's easier. Like Phyllis was wolf 8550 and Mojave was wolf 8963.
They had both names and numbers.

Speaker 2 And so when we did our scientific papers and reports, we used a number.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But then when you go into the park, people would want to know what's going on. And you talk about these different wolf numbers, 86, 54, and they say, well, who is that? Oh, that's Aspen.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And they would know by the name.

Speaker 1 So whatever works. But then all of a sudden, they become like a pet.

Speaker 1 Or even more, like a majestic wild pet. Like, it's a different thing.
It's a pet that's this iconic North American, you know, apex predator.

Speaker 2 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. Right.
Even though it's still a number.

Speaker 1 But if you shoot 907, it's not as rude as if you shoot Jake. Right.
Jake the the wolf. Right.
You know, it's like, oh. Jericho, yeah.
Yeah, Michael. Michael.

Speaker 1 You know, you name a wolf a human name, and all of a sudden, you shouldn't shoot it anymore. I know.
Which is just a weird anthropomorphization thing, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, it's been interesting to me because I, 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.

Speaker 2 And I was hired, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help

Speaker 2 prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove, which meant trap and Holloway and they were euthanized. And when there weren't depredations, to go out and

Speaker 2 research, trap, and put collars on the other wolves.

Speaker 2 And it was, I mean, this was big, big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, diary-eyed, and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of North Home from the wolves, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh my God. It was such an important summer for me to learn professionally and personally.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So, when they captured the wolves and they removed them, why did they euthanize them? Why didn't they just relocate them?

Speaker 2 Well, they would be me because I was the one catching and trapping them.

Speaker 1 Well, obviously, someone's telling you what to do, though, right? Right.

Speaker 2 So, I had to bring them to

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so when they were threatened, then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them. And they didn't translocate them.

Speaker 2 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, that

Speaker 2 very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves. It comes back to depredate again.
It moves on to another farmer ranch. It does it again.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year until they die anyway. So

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Is it because they're habitualized to start preying on cattle?

Speaker 2 It's tough once they learn to take cattle or sheep. It's tough to

Speaker 2 break that pattern. Let's put it that way.

Speaker 1 Because it's so easy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It's just me.

Speaker 1 Of course. Of course.
And if they know the groceries are all penned up.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 early excitement about wolves has changed into a bitter battle.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's a really interesting, complex battle because there's a lot of hunters that do not like the reintroduction of wolves. Yes.

Speaker 1 Because they'll say that the elk populations are down and they're down dramatically in Montana because of the reintroduction. Which was the 1996?

Speaker 2 When did it? 95, 96, and then 96, 97. Those winters.

Speaker 1 But the reality is

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 And so kind of

Speaker 2 the die was cast when those wolves were removed. And basically, by the 1930s, there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore.

Speaker 2 There were wolves here or there and a pack here or there, but there weren't thousands. And they went inside the national parks.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So they even removed all the predators within national parks.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They were paying people to, people were being paid to come in and kill deer and elk.

Speaker 2 And then they started the late hunting seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend had a time had a tag.

Speaker 2 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 because it wasn't predators.

Speaker 2 So then when the wolves came back, two things happened. Number one, it was a new predator.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I've had hunters tell me, yeah, the population of elk went from 20,000 to 10,000 in two years.

Speaker 1 damn those wolves and it's like do you think 35 wolves killed 10 000 elk come on let's let's just do the math a minute yeah that is the problem with these 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 and i'm a hunter i get it yeah But the die-offs are huge.

Speaker 1 Like 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. From what? Snow.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so we're...

Speaker 1 Real bad winter. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And winter die-offs are a big thing. It's a big thing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Predators can keep that at a lower rate. They cannot affect it.

Speaker 2 I have to think back to the 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

Speaker 2 a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits.

Speaker 2 I just was reading, they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana's got basically in most of its management units, more elk than ever. And I just say there's more going on than wolves.

Speaker 2 And to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat. You need to look at access issues.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Including landlocked public land where you there is public land where you're allowed to hunt there, but you can't get there. Right.

Speaker 1 You'd have to fly in in a helicopter, and a lot of places that's illegal. Right.

Speaker 1 And so there's all this talk of, for people that don't know,

Speaker 1 there's what one of the things that happens is a thing called corner crossing.

Speaker 1 So there might be a piece of public land that you're allowed to hike into, and then there's a small area. It could be a very small area, just a few yards even,

Speaker 1 of private land that you are going to have to cross in order to get into the next piece of public land.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They don't want to give people the access at all to their private land.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's being battled in court right now. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a disaster. If I owned the land, I would carve out a big pathway

Speaker 1 and give it to the public. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 But you're not most landowners.

Speaker 1 It seems so simple. I know.
It's like the simplest of, you just make some sort of an easement.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that would be good.

Speaker 2 And some ranchers do, but many people have been in this business four or five generations on their family ranch, and they've had bad experiences of hunters that come in and cut their fences, shoot their cows, leave their gates open, and they just say, I'm done.

Speaker 2 I'm closed. And they get really angry.
I just hunted on a guy's ranch

Speaker 2 about a week ago up in north

Speaker 2 central Montana, and he owns 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.

Speaker 1 That's huge.

Speaker 2 It's huge. And he gave us permission, but he had to tell us all the challenges he's had and why he had a big sign, don't even ask, basically.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I know he was going to let us because some other friends of mine had hunted there.

Speaker 2 But he had all these heartburns over things that had happened to him. Hunters gave him a really bad taste in their mouth.
And

Speaker 2 I, as a single individual person, can't do a lot about it.

Speaker 2 And I'd like to see, you know, hunting organizations, many really good ones, help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter-landowner relationships.

Speaker 2 You would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement.

Speaker 1 Well, I would understand that if you've been burned a few times, if 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.

Speaker 1 Look, the elk are right there over the ridge, 400 yards away.

Speaker 1 Let's just go over there, shoot those elk. He won't even know.
We'll pack it out. That happens.
Yeah, and then they get caught.

Speaker 1 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 yep 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 it's just like any other group anything else exactly exactly and i know in my business with wolves i've always tried to be very transparent and very honest and if somebody asks me a question i'll give them the best information I have.

Speaker 2 If I don't own an answer, I'll say, I don't know, but you know, you could call so-and-so who's maybe had the experience with that.

Speaker 2 I got nothing to hide by being dishonest

Speaker 2 or trying to sell somebody. It's like hunting, impacts of wolves on hunting.

Speaker 2 You look at populations and they go like this all the time. And sometimes wolves cause it, sometimes not.
Sometimes it's winter, sometimes it's accumulation of lions and bears and wolves.

Speaker 2 But it's like the stock market.

Speaker 2 People want to see it do this.

Speaker 1 Well, it's like the climate.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Nobody wants to admit to that either. They hate looking at long-term data.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 And when people want to talk about the sky is falling, well, it's actually not.

Speaker 1 You

Speaker 1 look at it over a long period of time and you see this trend has always existed. And in fact, this is one of the cooler times in history.

Speaker 2 We're facing interesting times.

Speaker 1 Bizarrely ideological. I think the...

Speaker 2 The hardest thing is so much social media, everything goes on instantly. And whether it's true or not.

Speaker 1 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 and they don't have a nuanced perspective of the ecosystem of what biology is and like what these animals they there's a whole world that they live in and this world is like interdependent there's so many things going on, 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.

Speaker 1 And it's like, no, not really. No, there's a lot going on all the time.
And to like to single out this one aspect of this ecosystem and say this is the cause of this.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of different causes. There's a lot going on.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But in terms of the impacts, no.

Speaker 2 And it's been shown since that video came out, the movie, that... That might be true in a short time.
time period in small places, but it's not the global picture for Yellowstone Park.

Speaker 2 Wolves have not saved the planet. They just haven't.

Speaker 1 It's just not that simple. Well, what they have done, though, is brought some balance, right?

Speaker 2 I think, yes.

Speaker 2 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, well,

Speaker 2 it's a rosy story, and pieces of it may be true in certain places for a temporal or spatial time period.

Speaker 2 But then there's the guy in, where was it, Daniels, Wyoming, who roared over that wolf in the snowmobile and crippled it. You heard about this, didn't you? Oh, that's a terrible thing.

Speaker 2 And then he brought it back

Speaker 1 to the bar

Speaker 2 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 mount lion or not.

Speaker 2 Anyone horrible. Any animal.

Speaker 2 But that horrific act got a lot of people in the middle fired up to become more strong conservationists.

Speaker 2 So I'm sorry that that that happened, 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.

Speaker 1 And evil. And it's not a good idea.
That's evil. When I saw the photos of the wolf, I'm like, that is an evil act.
Right. Like, that thing is incredible.
That's an incredible animal.

Speaker 1 And you have no right to do that. 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Shoot it or call someone ever shooting, but to drag it to a bar is just sick.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, he ran it over intentionally and he had a gun.

Speaker 1 Oh, he did it. Oh, yeah, and he had a gun.

Speaker 2 No, he was all for show.

Speaker 1 Well, that's 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.

Speaker 1 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. No.
It's weird, right?

Speaker 2 I thought about this a lot. So, why wolves?

Speaker 2 What's the deal with wolves? Why does it create that?

Speaker 2 If you look at the facts, I mean, elk,

Speaker 2 coyotes, lions, bears, all coke machines, whatever, kill people, lightning, every year. Lots of people.

Speaker 2 Wolves, it would be a very rare experience. It occasionally happens, but it's so much rarer than everything else.
And yet, people don't hate lions or grizzly bears.

Speaker 1 I have a theory. Okay, let's hear your theory.
I think it's a historical thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Are you aware of the World War I story?

Speaker 2 About them eating corpses?

Speaker 1 Well, not just that, about the Germans and the Russians having a ceasefire because so many people were getting eaten by wolves.

Speaker 1 They actually, I talked to Steve Rennell 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 Meteor about it.

Speaker 2 No way. So I haven't seen it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You shoot them and hurt them and wound them.

Speaker 1 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 were so many instances of people getting dragged out of the trenches by packs of wolves 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 like oh boy an animal's gotten them and so they decided to have a ceasefire between the russians and the germans to just to get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other i'll have to look that up because i i haven't actually heard it.

Speaker 1 See if you can find that article. I believe it's on meateater.com.

Speaker 2 I'd like to know where the references are.

Speaker 1 Thanks. Was there a ceasefire during World War I to hunt wolves?

Speaker 2 But I want to know what the references for the story were.

Speaker 1 I think it's the New York Times. Okay.
Multiple newspapers in 1917 report this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times, and New York Times.

Speaker 1 Since then, it's become a favorite bit of barroom banter among amateur historians, like me, Joe Rogan.

Speaker 1 February 19th, it says it there.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Volhynia? How would you say that word?

Speaker 2 Close enough.

Speaker 1 Locals hypothesized the war effort displaced the wolves, so the canines started seeking out new hunting grounds.

Speaker 1 The hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages, attacking calves, sheep, goats, and in two cases, children.

Speaker 1 They also showed up in the front lines, feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters.

Speaker 1 Parties of Russians and German scouts met 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.

Speaker 1 Hostilities were at once suspended, and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about 50 wolves.

Speaker 1 So these are, one of the things that happens in Russia is you get these super packs. I'm sure you've heard about those, where they've had problems with them descending on

Speaker 1 whether it's a cattle ranch or horses. They've taken out horses.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The wolves, nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia, were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm reading it too. I just would say...

Speaker 1 Are you a little skeptical?

Speaker 2 I'm very skeptical.

Speaker 2 Number one, there weren't.

Speaker 1 It says, though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 2 But we're looking at news stories from 110 years ago.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Look at that.
1917. Right.

Speaker 1 Wild. I'm just saying.
A little skeptical. Well, no, I'm not a little skeptical.

Speaker 2 I'm very skeptical.

Speaker 1 Well, they lie in the news now.

Speaker 1 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 PACs of wolves? No.

Speaker 2 No? Okay. No, and I read the literature.

Speaker 1 But this is recently. Okay.

Speaker 1 Within a few years ago, there was a problem with these super PACs 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.

Speaker 2 So my question about this story, and I'm not, I'm just

Speaker 2 skeptical.

Speaker 1 2010, 2011, a super pack of wolves numbering up to 400 reportedly terrorized the Russian town of, boy, good luck with that one.

Speaker 2 Sounds like a vodka.

Speaker 1 Verkoy

Speaker 1 Voikoyansk.

Speaker 1 Population 1,300.

Speaker 1 Guinnessburger World Records. Northern.

Speaker 2 It's like Wikipedia?

Speaker 1 No, they're a little better than that.

Speaker 1 Wikipedia'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 2002.

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And

Speaker 1 it said,

Speaker 1 according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on site.

Speaker 1 Animal experts suspicious of the claim say that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals, although the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves' usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals.

Speaker 1 This was multiple sources had this story, and I remember it about a decade or so ago.

Speaker 2 Well, I'd love to look up more detail, but

Speaker 2 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. But if it's true, it's true.
I don't happen to believe it's true.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's oftentimes one or two that aren't related. 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.

Speaker 2 The The largest pack I've ever heard of was in Yellowstone. I think it was 34 because three females had pups.

Speaker 1 So to have 400 wolves move together isn't it?

Speaker 2 Why would they do that? What's the benefit to them?

Speaker 2 They're gathering, collaborating with animals that aren't related to them, that have no genetic benefit to see them each survive. And normally,

Speaker 2 packs that are not related kill each other. It's the biggest cause of mortality in Yellowstone Park is wolves killing non-pack members.

Speaker 1 Wolves are very, very intelligent, though. Oh, I know.
Extremely intelligent.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It's like 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.

Speaker 2 I get you're saying, but you ask, would I believe it?

Speaker 1 And I have to tell you, no, I wouldn't believe it. Well, this is based on your real life lived experience.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't believe it. But things do vary according to very

Speaker 1 unusual circumstances in terms of the environment, right? So

Speaker 2 if there were 400 wolves that were starving, they would starve.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 they knew that there were horses.

Speaker 2 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 afraid. I'm not calling you a liar.

Speaker 1 No, it's not a story. I'm just saying I don't.

Speaker 2 I'd have to investigate that. But I'm 100% skeptical on it.
Just because of everything

Speaker 2 that I'm familiar with. But it doesn't, you know, stuff happens.

Speaker 1 I have no pun intended, no dog in the race.

Speaker 1 No dog in the fight. But

Speaker 1 my thought is that in perhaps unusual circumstances like Siberia, where it's so incredibly harsh, 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, and 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.

Speaker 2 You asked me, I just said I don't believe it.

Speaker 1 I hear you.

Speaker 2 Beth, I don't have anything to contribute further on that.

Speaker 1 I guess you're just a science denier. That's okay, Don.

Speaker 1 I'm a science denier. There you go.
I like that. Is that a fun thing to call people? That's great.
It's such a horrible thing to say to people. Like, what are you saying?

Speaker 1 When you, so what is the largest that you've observed, the largest pack that you observed?

Speaker 2 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 of one year that get up to 34. And I think

Speaker 2 probably the largest I've ever heard of being recorded that I know is factual. It might be 40, but that's extremely unusual.

Speaker 1 And is that Yellowstone as well?

Speaker 2 Might be Canada. I'm trying to remember my source.
I can't remember. But 34 in Yellowstone, that's unusual.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Yes. 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So for one winter, they were a huge pack, and then mortality happens.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 average pack might be somewhere between 10 and 15.

Speaker 2 And every year, you gotta remember, every year they have six to seven pups, and by the next spring, they're back down. That's six or seven through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 stuff happens.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a hard life it is a hard life another thing I've heard lots of people well I've heard several people and people I know quite well tell me stories about

Speaker 2 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 are interested in the dog like little Carl there or something and and the wolves were circling around and these people were terrified and when they told me this there two people

Speaker 2 they told me this story and they said yeah they could have killed me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 my response is, yeah,

Speaker 2 easily.

Speaker 2 But you're here telling me this story.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So it's not very common for wolves to attack people.

Speaker 1 That's just what I'm saying. Not anymore.

Speaker 2 Not anymore. And I don't know how good the reporting was way back when.

Speaker 1 But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns

Speaker 1 or at the very least muskets and you're dealing with people that are completely isolated and you're dealing with harsh climates. Like the homesteaders.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there might be a time where the food source for the wolves is diminished.

Speaker 1 The homesteaders didn't really have a problem with wolves, though, attacking people, right?

Speaker 2 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Right. When we had time.

Speaker 2 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. In this country,

Speaker 2 with probably a,

Speaker 2 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 set up. Remote living,

Speaker 2 no protection, harsh winters like the winner of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle are starving. You didn't have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing everyone.
I'm just saying.

Speaker 1 Right, but isn't that a different environment than Siberia? Siberia is awesome. Oh, you asked those homesteaders.

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen Word and Herzog's documentary, Happy People, Life in the Taiga? Yeah. Isn't it amazing? It's beautiful.
Incredible.

Speaker 2 It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 I just actually watched it within the last few years.

Speaker 1 I thought about that when I was thinking about you living alone by yourself. Like, that's how those people did.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and just live out there amongst wild. And they loved it.
They all loved it. They all couldn't wait to get out there.

Speaker 2 And how many were killed by wolves?

Speaker 1 None. None.
But again,

Speaker 1 tigers.

Speaker 1 They have

Speaker 2 tigers are very awesome predators on people.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Well, Siberian tigers, are they known to kill people? I know that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Are they? I'm trying to remember the name of the book I read.
It might just be called Tiger.

Speaker 2 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. It's terrifying story.
In Siberia?

Speaker 2 It's a true story. Yeah.
And it's modern times.

Speaker 1 There's nothing super scary about a tiger in the story. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 A cat that's 600 pounds stalking you in the snow.

Speaker 1 No, no, thank you. No, thank you.
No, no. Yeah, it's just a matter of whether or not you zig when you should have zagged and you're in the wrong spot on land where he's at.

Speaker 2 Yes. And I think that tiger had an injury that was caused by humans.
And that's often the case.

Speaker 2 It wasn't able to hunt real proficiently. Or in the according, I mean, when you're reading the book, you get the

Speaker 2 drift that it had a vengeance against humans because it was injured.

Speaker 1 I would imagine that's probably the case, too.

Speaker 2 It could be.

Speaker 1 Just as they're scared if they survive a situation.

Speaker 1 The similar story of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly end

Speaker 1 in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill. The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah, there's no doubt that animal, according to the story here, definitely had vengeance on its mind.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him to the bush, and ate him. The eating may have been secondary, Valiant explained.

Speaker 1 I think he killed him just because he had a bone to pick.

Speaker 2 The book is called The Tiger.

Speaker 1 See, I had the title right. Wow.

Speaker 2 It's a fascinating story.

Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because with

Speaker 1 a footprint. Oh, my God.
Look at the size of that. Look at the guy's hand next to the footprint.

Speaker 1 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 one that's a small one oh my goodness yeah wow fascinating story and a tie and then there's this the tiger is just trying to be a tiger is that a photograph of those guys it looks like a drawing 1885

Speaker 1 yeah different so is that different time era is that a photo though yeah like what a shitty photo i wouldn't buy it if somebody said that's a photo i go get out of here it's 140 years old come on who drew that bro

Speaker 2 But some of the interesting things looking at that is like in Glacier Park or anywhere I play where wolves overlap with mountain lions, which we call lions, mountain lions and grizzly bears and coyotes and whatever.

Speaker 2 When they kill one of their other competing predators, just like that tiger, they don't usually eat it. It's secondary.
It's to kill off a competitor.

Speaker 1 So wolves don't get eaten by mountain lions? They do get killed by mountain lions occasionally, right?

Speaker 2 Occasionally. Matter of fact, one of the Colorado wolves that was just introduced was killed by a mountain lion.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah, one of the ten that was just introduced.

Speaker 1 So they kill them because they are a competitor.

Speaker 2 And one-on-one, a 120-pound cat and a 100-pound wolf, one-on-one, the cat's going to win.

Speaker 1 But when you have a pack of wolves,

Speaker 2 I mean, we've watched them tree the cat, and they'll wait until they can get it.

Speaker 1 They'll wait.

Speaker 2 But one-on-one, the cat doesn't have a chance.

Speaker 1 But no, I mean, we don't have to. Well, the wolf doesn't have a chance one-on-one, you mean?

Speaker 2 Right. I mean when the cat's one and you got a pack of eight weights.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 But we've we documented a case where the wolves treat a cat and when it couldn't stay up with the tree any longer, it was on a skinny lodge pole and it was sliding down.

Speaker 2 And as soon as it got the ground, they killed it and they just ripped it apart and they didn't eat any of it.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 It's strictly to vanquish a competitor, just like the tiger.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Well, they had better options.

Speaker 2 Have you ever eaten mountain lion?

Speaker 1 I have. It's good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I had it once in a while.

Speaker 1 That's why it's weird.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Actually, you know what? Wait a minute.
Did I eat it? I don't know if I have. Why do I feel like someone gave me something?

Speaker 1 I don't think I ate it. I think it's in my freezer.

Speaker 1 I think somebody might have served it to me somewhere.

Speaker 2 Like the backstrack of a lion.

Speaker 1 The loin. Yeah.
It looks like a pork tenderline.

Speaker 2 And you can, it's very light colored. I've only eaten it once in a while.

Speaker 1 Well, Steve killed one and cooked it and he said it was tremendous it is he called it superb he said it was like a superior pork without the fat yeah he said it was really good which is like most people would not think you even eat mountain lion wolves apparently either huh 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

Speaker 2 Oh, you're kidding me.

Speaker 1 No, this guy was eating like wolf meat.

Speaker 2 I don't think it'd be very good. They're skinny and stringy and sinewy.

Speaker 1 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. That's

Speaker 1 eating wolves. That's true.
You know, you find some guys,

Speaker 1 you know, he wants you to be scared of him. What is he eating? He's up there alone.
He's eating wolves.

Speaker 1 That's his favorite. He lives by himself and he just eats wolves.

Speaker 1 Doesn't that sound like something a man would say? Or, worse yet, wolverines. Oh, right.
Imagine eating wolverines. No.

Speaker 2 Anyway, no, it's it's 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.
And I hear about the Canadian super wolves.

Speaker 1 Well, we're the Canadian. There is a thing about mammals, right? That mammals, as they get into a colder range, they are larger mammals.
Like if you see,

Speaker 1 let's say, northern Alberta white-tailed deer versus an Arizona white-tailed deer.

Speaker 2 To a certain point, and then when you get to where it's so cold and Arctic that the resources, the availability to get food is diminished.

Speaker 2 Like Arctic wolves on Ellesmere Island are pretty small and they're white.

Speaker 1 Because they're tiny.

Speaker 2 They don't have any food.

Speaker 1 They're smaller.

Speaker 2 The Pears caribou up there are smaller than, say, the caribou in Alaska.

Speaker 2 Because it's hard to make a living.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 But, yeah, northern climate, like the wolves from Canada, most of them are pretty big. And same with the doll, everything.

Speaker 1 What's the 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.

Speaker 1 They're much larger. And it's really just access to protein, right? Salmon.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, you got it.
I've been up to the McNeil to watch the bears, and yeah, my God, they're just enormously fat.

Speaker 1 They're almost obscene, waddling around with the rolls, you know? Because they live in salmon. Good old time hibernating.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're so content because they have endless food resources.

Speaker 2 That's why you can have tourists go up and sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you sometimes, eating salmon and you're under no danger. Why would they bother you when they have the

Speaker 2 thousands of mouths of salmon in the river?

Speaker 1 There's a fantastic video.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jamie is to us. 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, look at that. That's a big bear.
Look at the little folding chair.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I mean, just imagine that. That is literally where Jamie is.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't care at all about these people. It's not thinking of them as a food source.

Speaker 2 No, my question is, why did the bear bother?

Speaker 1 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, I'm going to take a nap here. So he just chills out.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I mean, any other time. So if you were in the middle of the forest and you saw that, first of all, they wouldn't be that big in the middle of the forest.

Speaker 1 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.
You'd be scared of him.

Speaker 2 You'd have your bear spray on.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
You'd be careful. Look at this guy.

Speaker 2 He's so close.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And the bear just sort of walks off like, see ya.
Bye. Nice.
Because he's got so much food.

Speaker 2 I kind of had a similar experience, McNeil, not that close, but close enough that I was uncomfortable. And I live with bears because I'm used to bears that have skinny resources, and

Speaker 2 they're voracious, and they're pretty aggressive in the fall because they can be because they're getting into hyperphagia where they got a good enough calories to hibernate.

Speaker 2 And if you keep them from getting their calories, it's you or the Huckleberry Badger, maybe, or you or the elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get. That happens.

Speaker 2 People hang their game in the woods and they go back the next day and a grizzly bears found it.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard Steve's story of that? No, no, tell me.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. They were on a Fognac Island.
Where's that? It's in Alaska. It's connected to, it's like

Speaker 1 one of the island chains that's right near, what is the big one where they find all the big brown bears? Kodak. Kodak, yeah.
Yeah, so it's Kodak. Right off of Kodiak.
So they were elk hunting.

Speaker 1 And they shot an elk. And you're talking about...
Elk hunting on that island? Yes. Elk hunting on a Fognac, yeah.
It's a very hard hunt. Wow.
Incredibly difficult hunt because of the terrain.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They find an elk, they shoot the elk, and 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.

Speaker 1 They didn't know that when they came back the next day that a bear had claimed that elk. So

Speaker 1 there was a gut pile. There's all sorts of stuff there for the bear.
Obviously, the smell of the meat. And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 My friend Remy Warren, my friend Giannis Putelis,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he comes running through the camp. Oh, my gosh.
And one guy, our friend Dertmuth, was actually on his back. The bear plowed through the camp and through the people.

Speaker 1 And just, I don't think it recognized how many people were there. So it didn't know exactly what to do.
So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for like 10 to 15 yards. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 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. They really fucked up.

Speaker 1 They made a huge tactical error. They also ignored Scat,

Speaker 1 which they weren't sure whether or not that was a bear that had recently

Speaker 1 been, you know, so they were there for quite a while, guns drawn, like trying to fend off this bear. So they eventually got out of there.

Speaker 1 Both Steve Renella and Remy Warren have told a story on my podcast, and it's

Speaker 1 bone-chilling. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 I hadn't heard that when I saw that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He said...

Speaker 1 You have all these thoughts in your mind of what you would do and how you would feel. And he said, it's just reptilian.
Like, your brain goes to the most base survival.

Speaker 1 There's a recognition of this enormous predator, unbelievably sobering experience.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It didn't hurt any of them. Well, it was just trying to protect its kill, what it thought was its, but

Speaker 1 his theory was that the bear didn't realize how many people were there. It didn't matter.

Speaker 1 Because it ran through the group. It didn't know who to hit.
Giannis hit in the face with trekking poles.

Speaker 2 Hit the bear in the face?

Speaker 2 Giannis.

Speaker 1 In in the face with trekking poles. Like that close to him.

Speaker 1 Imagine a head that big, that close. And you hit it with trekking poles.

Speaker 1 Ah, and it just ran past them, probably not knowing which one to target or what to do. Right.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and then walk with meat on their back. Right.
Right. So

Speaker 1 they went there to pack out.

Speaker 1 And they have all these guys so they can make the pack out a little bit easier. Terrifying.
So now you're walking even slower because you've got 50 pounds in your back.

Speaker 2 Maybe they left a little behind.

Speaker 1 They should have. Yeah, to move.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah, I probably would have. Leave the shoulders and the neck.

Speaker 1 Yeah, at least something. Yeah.
At least something to fill them up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it could have killed them, seriously.

Speaker 1 Sure, even if they they had their guns, it would have killed one or two of them.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the thing that's common is they say the bear charged them, and you know, before that, it was woofing.

Speaker 2 And a lot of times they do what's called a bluff charge, but 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.

Speaker 2 And bear sprays is very, very effective

Speaker 2 because you can do a longer distance and it's accurate, but I personally don't.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But in a moment of panic, you can't say what you would do.

Speaker 1 Better off to survive?

Speaker 2 To survive with less injury, or at least less fatal. And people have sprayed a bear

Speaker 2 that's in attacking somebody, and the bear breaks off and leaves.

Speaker 1 Of course, you got to to deal with the after have you ever been around bear spray pepper spray yeah i have oh my god and maybe you did it in the we we pepper sprayed a bunch of people on fear factor once oh it's

Speaker 2 it's awful how did you get everybody go off camera and get yeah you run away because the the breathe actually was

Speaker 1 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 and it was like how long can you tolerate it

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure tear gas is probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray.

Speaker 2 I think pepper spray, yeah, it might even be worse. Otherwise, they'd have tear gas for bear repellent, and they don't.
They have pepper spray.

Speaker 1 I'm sure. It's bad.

Speaker 2 But I'm just saying, and people can argue this, and it all depends on the situation, but in general,

Speaker 2 bear spray is a more effective tool because you can spray it three times past where you're sitting,

Speaker 2 and the bear hits that spray and they run away.

Speaker 2 And I guess I've heard the bear biologist 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 is charging you.

Speaker 2 Right. And it's difficult to keep your act together.

Speaker 1 That's the big problem, is panic. Right.

Speaker 2 It's not necessarily the killing pactor, it's just that you're not going to hit very well.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you have a bear spray, it's just this cloud you're spraying out.

Speaker 2 It's more effective.

Speaker 1 It's like you had a flamethrower.

Speaker 2 I always carry bear spray when i'm hiking you don't carry a gun no really not unless i'm bird hunting do you ever does bear spray work on cats i've heard it and i have never heard about it being used on wolves because generally wolves aren't sneaking around but i if i had a cat stalking me lying on boy you bet i'd have my bear spray out yeah absolutely

Speaker 1 you've never been in a situation where you had a cat stalking you or close to you not that i saw oh that's what's scary right

Speaker 1 you probably had a few no no not really. No.
I had one kill my dog in Colorado. Oh.

Speaker 1 Little dog, little tiny. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a bummer. But there's a big difference, I think, between what you see and what's there.

Speaker 2 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 had your cabin.

Speaker 1 We probably wouldn't. No.
Because they are so aware of you. And everything's out there.
We're basically almost blind. Yes.
You know, and especially at nighttime, we're almost blind.

Speaker 1 And they have senses that are beyond our wildest imagination.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 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.
This shit is nonsense.

Speaker 1 First of all, whatever that stuff is, they're going to smell that stuff. Exactly.
And it's not going to hide your scent.

Speaker 1 Look, I don't know the science behind it. I don't want to kill anybody's business.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 but they can still smell it. Just be more careful, be as careful as you can be.

Speaker 1 But I, yeah, I just don't think we can even imagine the kind of scents that they have, the kind of ability to smell and hear with those enormous ears and those noses and those eyes that can see at night.

Speaker 1 I think we're just guessing. And we're trying.
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. And it's like light years.
And like,

Speaker 1 okay, how big's that? Like, you know, your head just.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 in the nature no that you can pick up at one animal sprays one thing a mile away and you're driving in your car right and you're like oh you smell that right there's skunk around here which is crazy but now what this guy was saying to me is now imagine that but directional and better yeah and that's like what a bear can do or a wolf yeah and i've read studies and if the wind is right, I've read s several miles so you can smell something.

Speaker 2 Unbelievable. It is unbelievable.
And yeah, I incredible. Yeah, I think, yeah, the whole scent thing.
We just, it's way beyond our ability to detect.

Speaker 2 And when I've been burying these traps after being so careful with everything, and

Speaker 2 I have 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.

Speaker 2 And then you cover it up, and it's been in the ground two weeks. Nothing's disturbed it.
And then one day you see where a wolf has come by,

Speaker 2 taken its paw, and dug at the back side 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.

Speaker 1 Wow, like fuck you.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Why do they do that?

Speaker 1 Well, maybe because they know it's there and they probably have had some experience in their life with traps.

Speaker 2 But why mess with it at all if they know it's dangerous? Right. I mean,

Speaker 1 do you think it's a, they're trying to like tell people?

Speaker 1 I'm not that stupid.

Speaker 2 My imagination and my theory is that maybe this is a wolf they've already caught, been caught, and it's got other pack members that are naive.

Speaker 2 And it stops because it smells. It's like, oh, man, I know what this is.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's time to show Junior what's going on here. And maybe they pull it up.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen the video of they caught a rat and the rat takes a stick and blows the mousetrap so it can get the food? No, kidding.

Speaker 1 The rat actually brought over a tool to spring the trap and purposely springs it. I haven't seen the video, but I've watched it from the crook.

Speaker 1 The problem I have with the video is I don't know the source, so I don't know if they train this rat. I don't know if they...
They may have. Right.

Speaker 1 So they maybe done that just to make a viral video, but it's still... Pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out it can take a stick and it like moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap.

Speaker 1 The rat trap springs and then it goes over to it. And by the way, it doesn't even flinch when the rat trap springs.

Speaker 1 No, we'll see if we can find it, Jamie.

Speaker 1 It's really weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is it. So he smells it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He smells it. It's a big rat trap.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 He didn't flinch at all.

Speaker 1 Isn't that insane? I mean, imagine you're a wild animal.

Speaker 1 It seems like it. Something.
Something. Maybe he's done it before.
But there was something weird about it where

Speaker 1 he must have known that that's going to happen.

Speaker 2 And the camera with the full eye reflection sitting indoors in a room,

Speaker 2 that doesn't smack of wildness to me. That's something.

Speaker 1 Well, it's rats. It's not really wild, right? They're domesticated in some sort of a weird way.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, there's

Speaker 1 as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City 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.

Speaker 1 And there's an amazing documentary called Rats that's on Netflix, and it's really good, and it shows you how intelligent they are.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that they do is they take the young, brash rats, and they let them go try the food out first to see if it's poor. This episode is brought to you by Gold Belly.

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Poison.

Speaker 1 Because they've been poisoned so many times. So they look at this young dummy.
It's like, I'll eat it.

Speaker 1 Send Sam.

Speaker 1 Sam's a dumbass. So Sam the rat runs over and eats the poison and gets sick and they're like, let's get out of here.
And they take off.

Speaker 1 But they have some very bizarre survival instincts that's highly tuned to this recognition that they're being at least tried, not preyed upon necessarily, but something's trying to kill them. Right.

Speaker 1 They're not eating them, but it's some weird situation where it's poison. So they've figured out what poison is.

Speaker 1 So they're like,

Speaker 2 really smart.

Speaker 1 Crazy. So they'll send a dummy to go out, a young guy to go out and eat the poison.

Speaker 2 Give it to Mikey. Mikey likes everything.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, what kind of natural adaptation is that? And, like, what is that from?

Speaker 1 Is this like, there's a, I'm sure you're aware of this, but there's a very bizarre study that they've done where there's a thing, there's a concept called morphic resonance.

Speaker 1 And the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier. And that this is scientifically proven.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The exact same maze. See if you can find that.

Speaker 1 So they don't know what this is. Like, you know, I think we have a very naive

Speaker 1 belief that the senses that we have recognized, all of them, whether they're sight, sound, touch, taste, whatever they are, this is it. This is all that's available.

Speaker 1 And that the concept might the idea is that there might be something that we're missing or something that we really,

Speaker 1 we as dumb, blind human beings in in terms of our ability to see things we don't have the ability to tune in to what these animals can tune into

Speaker 2 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 yeah maybe smarter is not the right word maybe not there's something rat learning and morphinic morphic resonance yeah So according to the hypothesis,

Speaker 1 formative causation, there's no difference in kind between innate and learned behavior. Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Lamarckian theory and from inheritance through

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times.

Speaker 1 X hypothesi, the new behavioral field, which will be reinforced by morphic resonance, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is pretty wild stuff.

Speaker 2 It's pretty wild, yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's it just speaks to this.

Speaker 1 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 between animals that allows them to hunt in packs, right?

Speaker 1 Particularly wolves. Like they have strategies.
Yes. They do things.
Like they know how to corner animals. They know how to funnel them into pinch points.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's not like a singular individual event that you can 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then they have wolves that follow behind them.

Speaker 2 The Yellowstone's been a great place to observe hunting. I mean, when I was working up northwest Montana, it's heavily forested.

Speaker 2 We never, almost never got got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we were in the airplane. But in the Lamar, you got scopes and everybody's watching it.
And I've seen some pretty incredible chases.

Speaker 2 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. They go in for the kill after the animal's been tired.

Speaker 2 And I guess there was some older animals that are too valuable potentially to risk being injured early on. But they jump, join in the chase, and they know how to kill an animal.

Speaker 2 So, and one thing I've always wondered, I don't know if this is with the Morphic residents, but

Speaker 2 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, how do they know where to go?

Speaker 2 For example, there is a wolf pack in the nine-mile, it's a river drainage, outside of Missoula, and pair this pair of wolves had formed a mating system and they had a litter of pups 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

Speaker 2 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 may be they're just being weaned and blah blah blah well two weeks 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?

Speaker 2 I said, Yeah, I'm missing several that I don't know where they went. He says, Cause I just had a collared wolf show up here and joined the nine-mile mail.
I said, Really?

Speaker 2 I said, Well, here's my list of frequencies of the missing wolves that had been missing. And

Speaker 2 he put ran through the receiver and listened. And one of those wolves was one that I'd caught in Glacier and disappeared six, seven months earlier.

Speaker 2 So, like, so she wandered around in not cyberspace, but mountain space, trying to look for a place to fit in. And all of a sudden, when this female gets shot, boom, she's there to fill in the slot.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 How does that happen?

Speaker 2 And that happens in Yellowstone, too, where one of the breeding animals will be killed. And very soon after,

Speaker 2 a wolf of unknown, well, there they know a lot of the wolves, but a wolf will just show up the right gender, the right age, and potentially bond and start a new pack.

Speaker 2 How do they know? And I guess all I can say is with that, there's scent, the wolves smelling the urine and the scat can detect all kinds of things hormonally and

Speaker 2 the dominance of an animal. 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.

Speaker 2 But geographically, how do they know to migrate 200 miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears?

Speaker 1 Well, they've been trying to figure out forever what's going on with birds and how birds, like Sandhill cranes, for example. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, Canadian geese. Like, what's going on?

Speaker 1 Like, how are these these birds figuring out these incredible migration patterns? Right.

Speaker 2 It's amazing to me. So, have you ever heard of the book called World on the Wing by Paul? I think the last name is Whedon.
Now it's something.

Speaker 2 It's about the world of migration. It is mind-boggling.
If you like to read nature stuff and science, it's written so anybody can enjoy it. You don't have to be a scientist.

Speaker 2 But it's fascinating and full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And certainly, where do they go?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But yet they're able to use something. Like, there's a theory that it's the magnetic poles.

Speaker 2 Right, or the stars or whatever.

Speaker 1 The stars, really? I never heard that one.

Speaker 2 I just heard a lot of stuff. I've had, I remember, yeah, one winter.

Speaker 2 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, and I went outside to use the outhouse, and I heard this calling, and it was dark and stormy, and I...

Speaker 2 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. I never seen snow geese up there, never.

Speaker 2 And they were circling around and they were lost in the storm.

Speaker 2 And there's no lights up there except for my house light and my flashlight and they were circling around the meadow and I

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Are they going to crash land in the meadow for the night? Anyway, I got to thinking about them. I thought, why are, how did they get here? They got blown off course.

Speaker 2 I just shut my light off, and I don't know what happened to them.

Speaker 1 Never saw them again.

Speaker 2 Wow. But I think about these birds.
A lot of them die migrating.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 They don't have a good ending.

Speaker 1 You know, those birds that fly across the entire ocean? It's mind-boggling. Mind-boggling.
They sleep while they're flying.

Speaker 2 I know. I wished I could do that when I was driving.
I try sometimes.

Speaker 1 There's one. One of them is a very big bird.
Albatross. That's right.
Albatross. And they literally sleep while they're soaring across the sky.

Speaker 2 Just put out those big old wings.

Speaker 1 Just ride the wave.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for months or years. Yeah.
I mean, it's crazy, right?

Speaker 1 Like, what are you doing? So, why are you doing that? There you go. Here, albatross can fly non-stop for over 16,000 kilometers.
Wow. That is so crazy.

Speaker 1 For example, a gray-headed albatross flew 13,670 miles around the world in 46 days in 2005. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Lason albatross can travel 1,600 miles on foraging trips to feed their chicks.

Speaker 1 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.
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I got to see albatross one time when I was down. I think

Speaker 2 where was I? I was down, I think it was New Zealand, but they were amazing. I like the.

Speaker 1 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 none of their own.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 2 So it would be interesting to me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, I think

Speaker 1 there's a narrative in this country, right? Yeah. And I think the narrative is, first of all, they were killed.
off a long time ago by poison, by ranchers and by settlers.

Speaker 1 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 and bring, and I wanted to ask you about that too,

Speaker 1 what your feeling is on biology that's done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote?

Speaker 1 How emotional is this, and how much of this, these decisions that people are making. Like, one of them being that I think was particularly egregious was the delisting of grizzly bears in PC.

Speaker 1 Because I have a good friend who lives up there, and he's like, there's a lot of grizzly bears up there.

Speaker 1 They still allow black bear hunting, but they're not controlling the grizzly bear population because of the people in Vancouver.

Speaker 1 That's the large population. They have the most votes.
They decided we've got to outlaw what they call trophy hunting. Right.
And so biology by vote.

Speaker 1 by people that probably don't know anything about what's going on and they don't have to other than have this remote emotional response.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, people are bringing back wolves. What are they doing? We want to kill those damn wolves.

Speaker 1 And so there's a good percentage of the population that lacks this nuanced perspective of the complexity of the ecosystem and how amazing, first of all, how amazing it is to be able to see wolves.

Speaker 1 Like, if you're a person, I've never seen them in the wild. I saw one once in

Speaker 1 Alberta, but it was so brief. It was dusk.

Speaker 1 It was actually after last light. So it was running across this dirt road.
And I was like, is that a wolf?

Speaker 1 There's a lot of wolves up there. Yeah, yeah.
Plenty of camera trap photos of these wolves. So that's most likely what it was.
And they give out wolf tags.

Speaker 1 You can get as many wolf tags as you want up there. But good luck finding one.

Speaker 1 They're a lot smarter than you or a lot better at living in the woods than you are. Yes.

Speaker 1 But we have 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.

Speaker 2 Well, you sum that up pretty well.

Speaker 1 Isn't that how people feel about it?

Speaker 2 Yes. So a couple of things.

Speaker 2 I, as a wolf conservationist, I guess I'd say, and researcher.

Speaker 1 And manager, well. Don't you love them?

Speaker 2 I love wolves. I love dogs.
I love foxes.

Speaker 2 I love white-tailed wolves. I love wildlife.
I love wildlife. That's better.
And I'm...

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying they're going to live in Iowa and Texas. 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.

Speaker 2 But I am not in favor of reintroductions, and I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the central Idaho reintroductions, which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation.

Speaker 2 But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada, and before those wolves were ever reintroduced, by 1995, we had like eight packs of wolves in the state of Montana, 70, 75 wolves.

Speaker 2 And you can Google that with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service early reports.
They were making it.

Speaker 2 And I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening because of ballot box initiatives, like Colorado, wolves were already starting to get to Colorado.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, a few of them have, and they even made pups in 19, I think it was 2020 or 2021.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 But it did. So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp.
of natural recovery. If it's going to be one year or 10 years or 50 years, it's a time issue.

Speaker 2 And I think the same was true for Yellowstone and central Idaho. They were already getting to those places.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to Idaho. It's just a slower wave.
And people want to jump-start this with reintroducing wolves.

Speaker 2 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. I don't don't like having things forced on me.

Speaker 2 No one.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So when you force wolves on somebody, it's going to meet with human resistance.
If they walk there on their own, I believe they will get there. Our science has shown that they do.

Speaker 2 It just takes longer. The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf-loving hippies

Speaker 2 pushed to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho. I'll just say Yellowstone, but it's the same.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 to some point, it is that faction, but the reason it happened was because two conservative

Speaker 2 senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Wyoming, Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base, promoted to Congress

Speaker 2 to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, if we reintroduce them, they get a different classification called non-essential experimental population.

Speaker 2 Meaning, because humans put them there, you can manipulate them and kill them if they're taking livestock. It's just more flexible management.

Speaker 2 So the senators thought, well, they're getting there anyway. Let's just put them in there.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Want to see a crazy video of a wolf that was in Bakersfield?

Speaker 2 Yeah, in California.

Speaker 1 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.
I've sent you this, right, Jamie? I have a video.

Speaker 1 We played it before. I'm trying to see.
Yeah, do you think you still have it?

Speaker 1 I know Cody sent it to me. I can find it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 it's in California. I mean, we're talking about an hour 40 from Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And

Speaker 1 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? I'm looking the one.

Speaker 1 I know I saved it. I can find it, but this might be a little bit of a pain in the ass.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's here.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this wolf is very cool looking, like this very big black wolf, and he's like wandering around these cows. And then someone comes and shoes him away, and he runs off.

Speaker 2 Damn, I don't know. Does he have a collar on?

Speaker 1 No, he does not.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think it was probably that wolf that it was seen.

Speaker 1 Oh, probably. I mean, there's not that many people.
And a lot of people are super skeptical. Like, how would a wolf wind up there?

Speaker 1 But if you do, what you're saying in terms of the amount of land that they can travel on is

Speaker 2 insane. And so hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Historically,

Speaker 2 back in eons of time, wolves had the largest global distribution of any mammal in the world except people.

Speaker 2 I mean, wolves live from the Arctic to the prairies to the temperate forests to the Gaza Strip still. And they live.

Speaker 1 There's wolves in the Gaza Strip?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, there were wolves on Staten Island, I'm sure, historically.

Speaker 2 Now we have different wolves there.

Speaker 1 Different goats.

Speaker 1 But I'm thinking, yeah, anyway, Stockwolves.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm going.

Speaker 2 But they live anywhere because they can eat anything, but mostly what they need is four-legged hoofed mammals, usually deer out, caribou, moose, whatever, occasionally livestock.

Speaker 2 They need a place where they can secure that they can whelp and raise pups.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think I might have saved it under wolf. If I look, there's like video

Speaker 1 thing that you can do now with your iPhone where you can just search for wolves.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah, you can search for stuff.

Speaker 1 It's showing me the werewolf in the lobby. It's showing me all the pictures I have of Carl and Marshall.
It's not showing you that one wolf. No.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 2 But you saw one or your friend did.

Speaker 1 No, our friend did. He filmed it.
I know I had the video.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You can hire a wolf tour guide or you can go on your own to stay at a hotel, but you've got to get up before dark.

Speaker 1 What was that, Jamie? This is those mountain lions crying. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If you go in the fall, they got bigger pack because the pups are all still alive.

Speaker 1 You go in the winter, they got...

Speaker 2 breeding behavior and stuff going on. It's just, there's always something to see.

Speaker 2 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, and they might be a mile away and they might be 400 yards away.

Speaker 2 But bring a scope and I'd suggest you just hire a guide. You'll see wolves.

Speaker 1 Just be able to hear them. It'd be cool.

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, it's amazing to hear them howling.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it was really interesting because they had stripped it down to the bone. And what was wild was all the hair.
It was hair everywhere. I'm like, I didn't even think of that.

Speaker 1 Like, I didn't think there'd be hair everywhere for some stupid reason.

Speaker 2 How long ago were they killed? It was there anything left or it was pretty recent.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was real recent, like within the day. Yeah.
Really? And you sure? I know that's on my Instagram. Wasn't a bear kill or a lion kill? Oh, no, it was a wolf kill.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 My friend who was up there.

Speaker 2 I just asked because bears and lions both pluck and strip hair off.

Speaker 1 Well, that area had a lot of wolves. Okay.
And

Speaker 1 he was very accustomed to finding calves that have been killed by wolves. We found it because of birds.
Sure. The birds were circling.
It's like, let's go see what's over there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, magpies and ravens are my best friends when I'm out looking for kills.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that's interesting. Like, that's how you find things.
Yes, you find the birds. It is.
Yeah, and how do they find it?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 They're so smart.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Incredible, right?

Speaker 2 Next Life, I Want to Come Back as a Raven.

Speaker 1 Not only do they solve puzzles, but they figure out how to raise water levels so they can get the food in a jar.

Speaker 2 Think about that.

Speaker 1 They drop rocks into the jar until the water level raises so they can get the food that's floating.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The raven guy's name is Berndt Heinz.
He's German. Berndt is in Bernie with Berndt, Bernd, and Heinz.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Anyway, it's cool stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is, I mean, you and I are both obviously very interested in animals. We hunt our own food, but just when I'm out hunting, I feel a little bit like a predator.

Speaker 2 Not a lot because I got a gun, but I watch the dogs who are basically predators. Yeah.
And I watched animals on the landscape, and it just, you see so much when you're out hunting. I'm sure.

Speaker 2 I mean, what's the coolest animal you've ever seen when you've been out on the landscape, hiking or hunting or anything?

Speaker 1 That mountain lion that we saw might have been the coolest. That was the coolest.
But I saw a badger once. I got a film of that.
I actually got out of the truck and got next to him, got close to him.

Speaker 1 Then he started coming towards me, and I ran. I'm like,

Speaker 1 what's wrong with me? Like, what am I stupid?

Speaker 2 They're blonde wolverines. That's really what they are.

Speaker 1 He looked fucking terrified and not very big, but like ferocious.

Speaker 2 I've caught a couple in wolf traps.

Speaker 1 He's such a cool-looking animal. They're so cool-looking.
I know. I just couldn't imagine that I was seeing one.
Like, it was in Utah.

Speaker 1 Seeing one in the wild. I've seen, I saw one grizzly.

Speaker 1 You did? It looked at me so much different than any bear I've ever looked at. I've hunted black bear before, and I've been around black bear many, many times.
And

Speaker 1 this is the first grizzly, and it was so different the way it looked at me.

Speaker 2 Where was it?

Speaker 1 This was in BC. No, excuse me.
This was in Alberta. And this one was not a big one.
He was about six feet tall, but he looked through me. It looked different.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 They're a little sketched out because they're not the top of the food chain. The grizzlies are.

Speaker 1 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. And my friend Jen, she

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They look at you like this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Those grizzlies are out there like trying to survive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, our grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains are quite small compared to the coastal brown bears and the same species. Yeah.
But

Speaker 2 they're very different and they have to 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.

Speaker 2 And they have to they have to put on a lot of weight.

Speaker 1 Well that to me is so fascinating how animals come

Speaker 1 they change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available and

Speaker 1 whether or not they're safe, like the Yellowstone elk that are habitualized, that are just around people hanging out with them.

Speaker 2 And Banff. You ever been to Banff in the fall?

Speaker 1 No, I haven't, but I've seen photos.

Speaker 2 They're buggling and mating on the post office lawn, literally.

Speaker 1 It's smart for them, though. That's right.
No hunters. Right.
And people just pull over to pull their phones out and film them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the wolves, I think I've heard of occasionally wolves find out and they sneak into town at night.

Speaker 1 Well, weren't you telling a story on Steve Rinnell's podcast about a very nice neighborhood of like these nice homes and these wolves that decided to set up shop?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's unlimited green space and undeveloped forests because people have McMansions and they have a huge acreage and it's just quiet time.

Speaker 2 There there's not a a safer place and the people there like them because they don't have livestock, they're usually not hunters, and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right, that's a problem because then you're like a wolf growing up in a gated community, literally, right?

Speaker 2 And you've learned that people are okay.

Speaker 1 You learn that people are okay, and there's deer everywhere, right? Because the deer know that people are okay, and the deer are not used to wolves being there, right?

Speaker 2 It's really interesting. Yeah, that pack didn't make it.

Speaker 1 I'm not surprised, right?

Speaker 2 But it was just so interesting to me how adaptable wolves are.

Speaker 2 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 anyplace else, they got killed off.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They will live wherever we'll tolerate them. And that could be,

Speaker 2 I mean, there were wolves in Texas not that long ago, red wolves. So they were here, but

Speaker 2 they're just not tolerated.

Speaker 1 How much of a problem is it where they kill pets? It's a giant mountain lion issue, especially in Northern California.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 But of course, it's a biased survey because it's by San Francisco. So it's not.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But it's just fascinating that they had actively chosen to hunt pets.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Nobody's going to shoot you in California. It's illegal.

Speaker 2 It's a charmed life until you get run over in the freeway.

Speaker 1 Well, it's probably one of the reasons why you don't hear about that in Texas, because in Texas, they're like vermin.

Speaker 1 You can shoot as many mountain lions as you want. If you see a mountain lion, you shoot them just like a coyote.

Speaker 2 It's just, that's interesting. I didn't know that in Texas.

Speaker 1 You don't need a tag. You don't need anything.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yep. It's amazing they're still hanging on.

Speaker 1 There's the wolf. Oh, it's yeah.
How'd you find it, Jamie? Wow. I found out that it was on the Adam Greentry episode, 2015.
Ah, you see the white triangle? Jamie, you're the best.

Speaker 2 You see the white triangle on the chest?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 That indicates to me it's a younger wolf because the pups can be born. Yeah, can you wind that back again? Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1 So, this is my friend Cody filmed this off the highway. Awesome.
So, he had a scope, you know, like a

Speaker 1 spotting scope. Yeah, yeah.
And And he put

Speaker 1 a phone. Look at that, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 So the white chevron, pups, younger wolves have that, and as they get older, like the rest of us, they get gray, and that doesn't stand out so much.

Speaker 2 So it would probably be a yearling, maybe a two-year-old wolf.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So, what their speculation is, you know, he works on a ranch.
Wow. Their speculation is that someone released that.
And they think these rogue wildlife lovers are really

Speaker 1 wildlife lovers are releasing wolves to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into Central California.

Speaker 2 I know for a fact that there was a wild wolf that was tracked going down through central into Bakersfield. I don't know if it's black or gray, but I know there was one.

Speaker 1 So it's not unprecedented.

Speaker 2 No. No.
It's not. My friend Kent Loudon does the wolf work in California.
He's a biologist, used to be in Montana and Idaho. And no, they're making a comeback.

Speaker 2 I think there's six packs now, and they're doing really well.

Speaker 1 Mostly Northern California.

Speaker 2 Northern Northern California.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's set up for a conflict, kind of like in California.

Speaker 2 They're having some management flexibility in California. I mean, in Colorado.
But so far, I mean, they just now,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I believe both of those wolves came from Oregon and they both had livestock killing experience before they chose them to release, which is really unfortunate.

Speaker 2 So the dilemma was, okay, they did okay until people started calving.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 they're killing livestock. So what do you do? You've got a male and a female and a litter of pups, and they have started a history of killing livestock.
What do you do with them?

Speaker 2 The slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff,

Speaker 2 want to see all the wars protected and a slight minority, it's like 49 and a half to 50 and a half or something, want them removed.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 1 you still have a problem because they still are habitualized.

Speaker 2 They will probably will probably likely continue killing livestock.

Speaker 1 It's hard to find. Are the ranchers reimbursed? Like, is there a fund for that?

Speaker 2 In Montana, there is. I presume, yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 I don't care. I don't want the money.
I just don't want the wolves here.

Speaker 2 And sometimes when you're working with a rancher community, 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.

Speaker 2 They don't want their cows killed because they raised them for all these generations. They have a genetic,

Speaker 2 a good pool genetically, they're invested. 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.

Speaker 2 You know how it is.

Speaker 2 There's always a common denominator.

Speaker 1 Always.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was really stupid. Sorry.
Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1 I'm with you. Anyway, this gentleman who is a wolf expert was then recruited to try to help a sheepherder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 to whimper and he had to be.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Sounds a bit like Timothy Treadwell.

Speaker 1 Very similar. This is the same Timothy.
Very, very, very similar.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, I think that that's from the movie The Werner Herzog, another Werner Herzog film, Grizzly Man.

Speaker 2 Oh, that was amazing.

Speaker 1 Amazing movie. And 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.

Speaker 1 And I think that was Suicide by Bear.

Speaker 2 Yeah. That's what I think.
And the girlfriend, too.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He had to know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 2 that guy doing this thing would never happen with wild wolves.

Speaker 1 Right. Impossible.
No.

Speaker 1 They would never tolerate that. Yeah.
No, it's it's it's it's a weird bastardization of reality.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and many, many people, I did part of my career earlier helping to try and keep wolves out of livestock. And we put out we put out sirens and we put out blinking lights and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's a great idea for how your human brain works. It didn't, they just ate every bait we put out and there's piles of puke everywhere.

Speaker 2 They don't think like we think.

Speaker 1 Right, of course not. Right.

Speaker 2 And that one guy rancher I was working with, we were putting out the baits, whatever.

Speaker 2 I did the sirens and I did what's called fladry, and fladry is, and they used it in Europe and places like Poland to hunt wolves where you hang streamers down from fences 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.

Speaker 2 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. Wow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it works pretty well.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he was so kind. 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, you had a lot, you had a loss.

Speaker 2 I got a calf. I said, Have any of the wolves been back?

Speaker 1 And he looked at me and he says, Well, no, hon, they haven't been back.

Speaker 2 He says, 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.

Speaker 1 It's just, I broke up laughing.

Speaker 2 He broke up laughing. It was just like, yeah, it was a tough job.
Let's just have some fun here.

Speaker 1 That's hilarious.

Speaker 2 But again, he didn't like wolves. I didn't want him killing us cows, and that was our common factor to try and keep them apart.

Speaker 1 What are the cons when there's pros and cons for reintroduction of wolves? What do you think the cons are? Of

Speaker 1 like the reintroduction in Colorado, the reintroduction in Yellowstone.

Speaker 2 I believe potentially a decreased human tolerance. And the wolves don't have a learning curve.
They're taken from one place and then, boom, they're popped there.

Speaker 2 Versus if they kind of migrate their word 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.

Speaker 2 They have to learn and stay a little more secretive. So that's just my belief that

Speaker 2 when they make it on their own, they've been smart enough to get there. Whereas when you just put them there, you're going to forever people believing they don't belong there, they're not native.

Speaker 1 So the problem is in the perceptions of the people that are encountering the wolves or they're impacted by the wolves being there.

Speaker 2 I believe so, yeah. And so for example, now we've got wolves in the they were put into Wa uh a total of 66 wolves was put into Idaho and Wyoming and another 10 were added to Wyoming for Montana.

Speaker 2 But it's a very small number of wolves. 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.

Speaker 2 A few have been shot there. And all those wolves came from this introduced population, some from Montana, but they'll never be considered native.

Speaker 1 Which is crazy, because they used to be native.

Speaker 2 And the wolves that were taken for the sources,

Speaker 2 like I explained earlier, they're taken from an area that wolves from Glacier Park walk to.

Speaker 2 They are one population, but there's a belief socially because they were put there, they're not native, they're Canadian super wolves.

Speaker 2 And I 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 it's like oh my god no no 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

Speaker 1 predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction wolves.

Speaker 1 So 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?

Speaker 2 And I don't think, I don't think it was an F you to the ranchers. I think what happened was because of the ballot box initiative,

Speaker 2 the state of Colorado was required by law by December 31st of 2023 to get 10 wolves. or so on the ground.

Speaker 1 And it took them what if they weren't successful?

Speaker 1 Like if they're required by law, does someone go to jail if you're not successful in capturing the wolves to put there? I don't know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the only place they could get source wolves, they got them from Oregon. And that point, Oregon gave them 10 wolves.

Speaker 2 Half of them, roughly half of them, happened to have some livestock experience.

Speaker 2 So this time right now, they're already gearing up for the next reintroduction this winter probably.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I really believe because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline,

Speaker 2 that the people who are really pro-wolf, it was forced that they were had to take the wolves that they got. That's what I believe.
I don't think it was an FU.

Speaker 2 I think it was unintentional, but it's like, these are the wolves. These are the wolves you're going to get, and they took them.

Speaker 1 That sounds so short-sighted.

Speaker 2 Well, 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.

Speaker 2 Oregon was the only state that offered up their wolves. Wyoming said no.
Montana said no. Everybody said no.
Aregon says, you can have 10 of ours. Here's the 10 you're going to get.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 could see why they did it that way but boy that seems like you're just adding to the problems it really does in hindsight it does yeah and it

Speaker 1 yeah so what are the positives about the reintroduction of wolves

Speaker 2 so because it has been successful in Colorado or in general in general because the Colorado one is just this year right it's time frame see all this stuff has to do with the time frame the mistakes and the rewards so the positive most positive pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame.

Speaker 2 So like if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone,

Speaker 2 it may have taken 10 years, it may have taken 50.

Speaker 2 I mean it happened in Montana pretty quickly once they hit critical mass, but it took them a few years to get there and then they just started, you know, the curve.

Speaker 2 But people didn't want the time window and we had presidential administration that was in favor of it. We had conservative congressmen that were in favor of it.

Speaker 2 You had the wolf groupies in favor of it. And

Speaker 2 it's just like all came together in the time frame and the window of opportunity opened about four inches and they shoved them through.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 The timeline was short. 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.

Speaker 2 We do have depredating wolves. But they kind of got down to the wire and everybody denied them except for Oregon.
So that's what happened.

Speaker 1 Well, the problem with that, of course, is what we're talking about with epidemiology.

Speaker 1 If these animals do have a learned behavior pattern that's going to be imparted on their offspring as well and the surrounding community, they're going to favor that because it's a very simple way to get food.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they've learned now in Yellowstone, a lot of the animals to kill are bison.

Speaker 1 No kidding. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's really, 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.

Speaker 1 There's an amazing painting that I'm pretty sure Rinello told me about. He might even have a copy of it.

Speaker 1 Or was it Remy? It might have been Remy. No, it was Remy because Remy actually, he reproduced this on his television show.
He had a show called Apex Predator.

Speaker 1 And the show, Apex Predator, was all like examining the behavior characteristics of apex predators and seeing what they did.

Speaker 1 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 on, put it on their head, and they would crawl on two legs or on four legs, you know, hands and knees up into bison.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yeah.
That one. So that one.

Speaker 2 I've used that in my own slideshows, too.

Speaker 1 Isn't that amazing, that painting? Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. That's so incredible.
And so they would wander up towards bison because bison, full-grown bison, are not afraid of a couple of wolves.

Speaker 1 And they would use that as a way to get close enough, like a decoy,

Speaker 1 and sneak up and arrow these bison and kill them. Yep.
Oh, there's a lot of paintings of that. That's cool.
So that must have been a very common thing.

Speaker 1 Well, so Remy actually reproduced this on his television show. Oh, nice.
He actually wore a wolf skin and crawled up to these bison.

Speaker 2 He did. Yeah, he did.
Wild bison? Not the television. Yeah, wild bison.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Where? I don't know.
I don't know where it was. I'm not sure.
See if we can find Remy Warren, Apex Predator, bison episode.

Speaker 2 There's bison in Utah, too.

Speaker 1 Sure. Yeah.
Wow, I didn't know that. And how did he do? He shot one.
Yeah. With an arrow? Yeah, with an arrow.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well, 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.

Speaker 1 So 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 we're shooting, I was shooting super accurate up to 60 yards.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 So if you're, you know, a guy as good as Remy is, who's literally a professional hunter, and you crawl close enough to bison to get him. Yeah.
So he shot a bison and harvested it. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But I mean, Indians did that all the time. I shouldn't say Indians, Native Americans.
Well, there's, yeah.

Speaker 1 Some of them prefer to be called Indians.

Speaker 2 I know. In Montana.
Yeah, it's tricky.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You got to kind of like ask them.
You have to know.

Speaker 1 What are your pronouns, sir? Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I know that there's wild bison that live in Mexico. And

Speaker 1 I know that from Steve. Steve Rinnell actually hunted them in Mexico.
And yeah, and this traditional ranch, they have this incredible way of taking care of it because

Speaker 1 they've never had electricity in this area. And it's like this whole, they have this long history of hundreds of years of hunting in this way.

Speaker 1 So they do all these different things to dry out the meat and they make these like thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and

Speaker 1 and smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat really interesting, but

Speaker 1 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. Hmm.
So

Speaker 1 Remy's bison on the Sonora desert of Mexico. Oh, so he did it in Mexico.
It says coyotes. Oh, interesting.
Oh, it was a coyote. Okay.
So, but it was in Mexico.

Speaker 1 So he put the pelt on and did the whole deal.

Speaker 2 Making him a costume. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is it. Sewed it into his camo.
Huh. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a big coyote, but it's definitely a coyote.

Speaker 1 Isn't that interesting, though? Oh, yeah. Wow.
It's crazy that it worked. Yeah.
Well,

Speaker 2 the Native Americans knew it for.

Speaker 1 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, oh, they know what they are.

Speaker 2 And wolves, too, for that matter. I mean, mean, there were millions of bison on the prairies with tens of thousands of wolves.
And

Speaker 2 if you were healthy or you protect your calf, you're fine.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.
Have you ever read Coyote America? No. Dan Flores, who was.

Speaker 1 Great historian. Yeah, and he was one of Renella's professors.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's how you met him.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 But Dan has a very interesting theory about the population of bison and why there were so many.

Speaker 1 And he thinks it's tied into the plague and to when Europeans came across the country and 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of disease. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the paper is called Bison Diplomacy, Bison Ecology. Is that what it's called? I'm going to have to look that up.
Dan Flores is awesome. He is so, so interesting.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And the book, Coyote America, is crazy.

Speaker 2 I'm going to have to go. It's so good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there it is. Okay.
It's Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy, the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850.

Speaker 1 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 native settlers,

Speaker 1 excuse me, the early European settlers did not see enormous herds of bison is because the bison were in enormous herds back then because bisons have a long gestation period they're fairly easy to hunt because they're very large animals and you know if you're special

Speaker 1 yeah 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 of bison and they were right here 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 they're dirty diseases.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's all European settlers and they're dirty diseases.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, what do you think was like the correct number when there was 20,000 elk there?

Speaker 2 What's the correct number of elk?

Speaker 1 What would be like a healthy population with the food sources could support?

Speaker 2 I would say right now there's about 6,500, I think, elk in the northern herd. We're not talking all of Yellowstone, it's just this herd that's been studied where the wolves are.

Speaker 2 That's where it's at now. It's stabilized.
There's lions and people outside the park and wolves and bears, all these things, and that's where it's at.

Speaker 2 And that's with everything, and it hasn't changed because the number of wolves, too, went from zero to

Speaker 2 31 to 160, one hundred and sixty five in the last ten years it's been right about a hundred wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending the resource so they're stable right now the wolves are not increasing anymore is that one of the main reasons how they die or the main ways they die is killing each other

Speaker 2 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 husband like those loggers you almost had to shoot to defend your home right yourself your family.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think it's like 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, not pack members.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Whereas if they were struggling, they'd go, this is a real problem having this wolf around.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And if there's abundant food, they'd be more likely to probably not kill it. I think it's a combination of the two.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 The coyotes or the wolves?

Speaker 1 The coyotes. Okay, because the wolves.
So the wolves are killing the coyotes.

Speaker 1 This is why there's coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now where there wasn't 100 years ago.

Speaker 1 Right. Because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Because they don't breed with wolves but they do breed with red wolves so where you get your ki wolf or your koi wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the east coast right

Speaker 2 do they do with mexican wolves the animal up in the northeastern part of the u.s is called a koi 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 the original wolf up there was more like the red wolf then you get down here and down in louisiana texas florida there's truly red, there were red wolves and now they're just at the alligator refuge in North Carolina.

Speaker 2 But those are being bred out of almost out of existence because they're hybridizing with coyotes. Right.

Speaker 1 So interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, different story.

Speaker 1 But the gray wolves do not hybridize with coyotes, was his point. And that this

Speaker 1 hardly ever.

Speaker 2 Oh, sometimes they do.

Speaker 2 Well, up in the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that's where he 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.

Speaker 2 When a a wolf encounters a coyote, they kill it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's interesting, you were talking about Rinella's show that they don't kill foxes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Right. It's not going to compete with you.
It's not going to take out a bison.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 I love coyotes too, but I shouldn't say love them. I really respect them.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And like where I work in the North Fork, all those early winters, we had people out all winter on skis tracking wolves. We never saw

Speaker 2 fox tracks. Never.
And I never caught one in a wolf trap. 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.

Speaker 2 All of a sudden, there's foxes. I got fox denning on my property now.

Speaker 1 So will coyotes target foxes? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Big time. Interesting.
Big time.

Speaker 1 So they consider them competitors.

Speaker 2 Sure. I mean, in place of them.

Speaker 1 But do they eat them?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I would guess it's a strict eliminating a competitor situation. I've seen, I mean, you can look at the data in Yellowstone.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 And I don't think they usually eat them.

Speaker 2 I could be wrong in that, but I don't think so.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because that's one of the theories about why

Speaker 1 it was originally one of the theories why coyotes kill dogs and coyotes kill cats, is that they're competitors, but then they started eating them.

Speaker 1 So I think maybe originally that was the case because, again, the expansion into urban areas is fairly recent.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and urban coyotes are not real wild. Right.
They'll eat whatever they eat. They habitualize, right?

Speaker 1 Just like we were talking about.

Speaker 1 Their behavior changes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's really interesting to me

Speaker 2 amazingly versatile coyotes are because I am starting to see wolves being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily.

Speaker 2 Like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision. It's crazy.
It is crazy.

Speaker 1 That would be so cool, though.

Speaker 1 Imagine if you live there. I know.

Speaker 1 As long as you don't have a poodle. Right.
Because they do eat dogs.

Speaker 2 They do eat dogs.

Speaker 2 When every time I go up to my little cabin, I am very conscientious about not leaving my dogs outside without me there.

Speaker 2 I did have a big malamute killed by Mount Lane about 35 years ago.

Speaker 2 It's a big dog.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the biggest one killed.

Speaker 1 They don't care. They can get it pretty easily.
Mountline, yeah.

Speaker 1 You know what's interesting to me is the propensity that foxes have to befriend humans. Yes.
Very strange.

Speaker 2 So this is interesting. I mean, you know what? You're a voracious reader, obviously.
Have you ever heard of the study in Russia?

Speaker 2 Now, this is, I mean, we're gonna i know what you're going to with the fox yes yes yes yes go ahead explain it book title is how to tame a fox yeah and create a dog one of the most interesting books i've ever read but this this is true i'm not saying that the 400 wolves is not true but i doubt it but 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 and by selecting the tamest male female 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.

Speaker 2 So he went to fur farms and he was picking just for tameness. 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.

Speaker 2 And they'd say, oh, this one over here in the corner, she rubs against the fence. When you go to the feeder, you take that one.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they start to have, you know, tipped over ears. Yeah.
And they got pictures of the guys in the pens.

Speaker 2 One person's bent over, and there's a fox standing on their back while they're putting out the food bowl. And the other fox, I mean.

Speaker 1 Crazy.

Speaker 2 Yes. And so that was in a very short time that they changed the behavior, the picture.

Speaker 1 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 exhibited any kind of aggression, they shot them. Right.

Speaker 1 So they only allowed the very docile, submissive foxes to

Speaker 1 friendly. But then their eyes started getting larger, their snouts started getting shorter, and their ears started dropping really quick.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you've read it because I suggested it to friends because I'm passionate about all canids, well, all things wild. And it was one of the most amazing pieces I've read.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in king's castles and and doing riding the bicycles and the circus and whatever.

Speaker 2 But in terms of North America, of course, we've been here anywhere in the world, nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog. Nobody's domesticated European lynx.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A lot of people have. Or coyotes.

Speaker 2 You keep coyotes, and after 15 generations, they still look like coyotes. And they still behave like coyotes.
They do. And this little thing with the fur fox, it was extraordinary.

Speaker 2 artificial selection pressure to see that. Yes.
And they did change a bit.

Speaker 1 Well, the fox has a very strange relationship to humans where that was part of the Timothy Treadbone movie. Ah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, give me my hat back!

Speaker 1 And he's like chasing him. But it's an adorable relationship that this fox has with people,

Speaker 1 with him, in fact, climbing on his tent and hanging out with him. And he could touch it.
He could pet its head.

Speaker 2 I'm sure he probably can, he or somebody before him had probably food conditioned it to be accepting it.

Speaker 1 Maybe, but you're talking about he's up in the grizzly maze in Alaska.

Speaker 2 Maybe just never seen a human.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, he's not giving it anything. Like, just him being around, and it would lie down in front of him and sun itself and play around him.
Right.

Speaker 1 There was a weird relationship that humans have had with foxes. Of course, Mr.

Speaker 2 Tradwell was not really in the bell curve on the big high point in the normal range either of normal behavior.

Speaker 1 Right, but I've had friends that have had encountered with foxes.

Speaker 2 They're really unique. And they're also, they really adapt well to people.
They live in agricultural areas. I've got them done.
I mean, we see them all the time now.

Speaker 2 They're a different animal than a coyote or a wolf.

Speaker 1 It's just such a strange little fella. Yeah.
That wants to be your friend. You know, very interesting.

Speaker 2 You don't see that a lot with wolves.

Speaker 1 No, you don't. I have a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens and we have to shoe them out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise.

Speaker 2 They do.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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, ah! Yeah, crazy.

Speaker 2 I've heard it.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of interesting to think about the early relation of people with wolves.

Speaker 2 I talk about that in A Woman Among Wolves, 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

Speaker 2 they speculated that when people were still living in caves and having spears and adults, that they would watch, so people were living in a family group in a pack.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And eventually, getting one tired enough, or maybe it was a cripple, had a bad leg, they would surround it and eventually kill it.

Speaker 2 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, a primitive horse. And let's drive those wolves away.

Speaker 2 We got tools. We can kill the wolves if we have to.
So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken.

Speaker 2 And that this is their theory, that there was this relationship

Speaker 2 just because it's a brutal world, not synergy and not altruistic and not, oh, are this cute? It's just like, hey, people, look at those wolves got

Speaker 2 an animal, a camel cornered over there, let's go kill it, take what we need, wolves would come in. And that sort of began potentially the process of wolves and people beginning to interact.

Speaker 2 I hate to hesitate to use the word collaborate, but

Speaker 2 this is an idea.

Speaker 1 It's an interesting idea. Also, and the interesting idea, it sort of coincides with the idea of the introduction of agriculture.

Speaker 1 So you have the introduction of agriculture, so you have resources that are more abundant, and you have more animals.

Speaker 1 And so if these people lived in a resource-rich environment where 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.

Speaker 2 There's many ideas about how dogs. At the time.
Right. The ones who were least afraid hung around.
No, I there's a lot of people.

Speaker 1 That's what they did with the foxes over just the course of a few generations. Yes.
This took a few thousand years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then people would grab one of those wolves or let them hang around and then, you know, around, they would clean up the

Speaker 2 offal around the camp and whatever. There's many ideas.
Of course, nobody knows. But what is kind of known is the dates from

Speaker 2 DNA and carbon dating. The dates at which humans were able to domesticate livestock and the dates at which humans were able to domesticate dogs from wolves.
And domesticating dogs preceded livestock.

Speaker 2 Livestock was like 11,000 years ago, roughly, of all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, sheep.

Speaker 1 So was it possible that the the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a very game-rich environment where they didn't have fight-over resources?

Speaker 2 And no livestock.

Speaker 1 No livestock. Exactly, because it hadn't happened yet.
Right.

Speaker 2 So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals.

Speaker 2 Again, I'm not saying it was to help each other so much, but they took advantage of each other's strengths and weaknesses. The wolf's strength was being able to run something down.

Speaker 2 It's also tired that people didn't do that. And then people would say, oh, yeah, that thing's crippled over there.
Let's go kill it. And we'll get our meat.

Speaker 2 And the wolves can have have the rest of what we're doing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you had to continue to hunt and gather. So if you had an abundance,

Speaker 1 you didn't think, oh, I'll stockpile this for the next few months. That was never even an afterthought.

Speaker 2 Probably not, unless it was in the tundra. It was winter time.
They could freeze it.

Speaker 2 But the relationship of, I mean, there's many dates that said about when people domesticated dogs, and it varies a lot.

Speaker 2 But I think there's some consensus 30,000, 35 000 years ago wow was that long ago long ago long i didn't know that and you can you can google it jamie but 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 there wasn't protection of our livestock there wasn't this and that and eventually people took when livestock became a thing, then eventually people would take a wolf-like canid, a dog that we had domesticated, and then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins, away from the livestock.

Speaker 2 Talk about,

Speaker 2 wow. Crazy.
Yeah. Humans are so creative with what they can do, and dogs are so plastic.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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. That's just my theory.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, it seems to be uniquely adaptive. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 Are you aware of the baboons that raise dogs? No.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's baboons that take puppies and they use the puppies as guards. So they keep the puppies near them and they keep these dogs near them.
They don't kill them.

Speaker 1 And the dogs allow them to sleep so that they could be alerted to any intruders. The dogs bark.

Speaker 2 It sounds no different than us.

Speaker 1 It's bizarre to watch this film footage of these.

Speaker 1 See if you can find it. Yeah, these baboons with these dogs.
Like, drag the dogs, like, what am I doing?

Speaker 2 The baboons, like, get over here. They don't kill it.

Speaker 1 No, they use them. I mean, I'm sure they probably kill a few of them.
They kill babies. Like, baboons are pretty damn ruthless.

Speaker 2 I've been to Africa and I don't like baboons.

Speaker 1 Scary animal because it seems like a dog monkey. Like, it's got a face like a dog.
It's a weird animal, right?

Speaker 1 Because unlike any other primate, they they have a completely different jaw structure their teeth oh my gosh they look like a dog it's like an extended snout very strange animal

Speaker 1 yes i find colorful and beautiful and creepy and all of the things all the things i agree i've i've i'm uh so uh here we go so these are these are dogs that are being raised they raise these feral dogs dragging the dog i get over here oh my god poor dog like they're not really kind of scrum that's i was trying to read on what was going on so some people think that

Speaker 1 they might not be being raised, that it's some sort of play, but they're in. I think this is taken from a trash pit.
But did you see that other larger dog that was over there? There's a parent dog.

Speaker 1 It looked like a wolf. Oh, dude, he's really wailing.
He's controlling it. He's trying to control it.

Speaker 2 So I don't know. Sniffing his butt, processing data.

Speaker 1 Processing data.

Speaker 2 Just like our dogs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they hold on to him by the tail. It's kind of crazy, and they drag him around.

Speaker 1 If you back it up, there was a larger dog that was in the background. Yeah, like there.
That dog's barking.

Speaker 1 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 well i'm gonna 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

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 viral video of baboons in saudi arabia garbage dump led to speculation baboons kidnap puppies and keep them as pets however some say the baboons were likely just playing with the puppies that the relationship is not analogous to pet owner relationship maybe um there have been a lot there's a lot of weird studies on garbage dumps and battles.

Speaker 1 Have you ever read Sapolsky's work?

Speaker 2 No, I haven't.

Speaker 1 Robert Sapolsky

Speaker 1 did this study on a particularly vicious.

Speaker 2 Primate, what was the book he wrote like 20 years ago?

Speaker 1 Something primate.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've read a long-ago book. I haven't read currently.

Speaker 1 I don't remember, but the study that was fascinating was they found that there was one contaminated pile of garbage, and of course the most vicious alphas were the ones to eat first.

Speaker 2 So they died and they got sick that's the one i've read primates memoir it's old 2002 says 20 years ago not too far off he's amazing i've had him on the podcast that was a fascinating book you have i'll have to look for it super interesting guy oh yeah especially the toxoplasmosis gandhi uh discussion like the talk right now with the lions and the wolves parasites do you know about lions and wolves and toxoplasmosis what's going on so in yellowstone it's it's basically a dog eat cat world down there for the most part because of packs of wolves and the lions but they have found that because the dogs are coexisting with the lions and sometimes ingest or scatter, they're gods or anyway.

Speaker 2 They eat some part of it, they get exposed. They have found with now the wolves have toxoplasmosis.
And what happens is they are something like 11 times, it's a huge amount.

Speaker 2 I wish 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, one of the things, Sapolsky, 46 more times likely to become pack leaders. Incredible.

Speaker 2 Isn't that wild?

Speaker 1 They're 11 times more likely to leave their birth packs and do so at a younger age.

Speaker 2 And when they do that, they're not very well set up to survive.

Speaker 1 Sapolsky found out when he was doing his residence that

Speaker 1 there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims that test positive for Toxo. So they test them and they find out this is one of the reasons why these guys are taking these crazy risks.

Speaker 2 Risk takers, because they have toxo. See, it's and it's really parasite from cats.
You know, another book you'd like to read is called Spillover. Have you read that by David Kwaman?

Speaker 1 No, I haven't.

Speaker 2 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, wild animals to human populations.

Speaker 2 And it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes becomes some extremely viral, terrible disease in humans. And he actually traces back the origins of HIV.

Speaker 2 And all this happened before COVID. Wow.
And it just was so set up because COVID is the

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Well, COVID is not really, because COVID was

Speaker 1 part of like a lab experiment.

Speaker 1 Some people don't know. Yeah, they're 99% sure now at this point that it was

Speaker 1 all gain of function research that was done.

Speaker 1 There's 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.

Speaker 1 And then when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos, apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it through another EcoHealth Alliance.

Speaker 1 It was very sneaky about it, and when grilled, they you know, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain of function research they were doing in the first place.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of very sca there's emails back and forth. But that's beside the point.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm not going to go there because we have to do that.

Speaker 1 But natural spillover is clearly real.

Speaker 2 Spillover, it documents many, many species. And actually,

Speaker 2 it's fascinating. Mad cow disease, it's the same thing.

Speaker 1 Mad cow disease is the craziest one, right?

Speaker 2 CWD

Speaker 1 forced cows to eat cows.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Surprise.

Speaker 1 You dumbass.

Speaker 1 And then the prions, the fact that they can exist under thousands of years.

Speaker 1 Thousands of degrees.

Speaker 2 You can't kill them. So do you have CWD here yet in Texas?

Speaker 1 I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do.
It's not ubiquitous, but I think there have been. See if there's been cases of CWD.
And I want to get to this before I forget.

Speaker 1 So the point of the Sapolsky thing was that what Sapolsky observed when these super aggressive baboons ate all of the garbage, that the garbage was contaminated, they died.

Speaker 1 So all the aggressive ones died, and they turned into this utopian society. So, yes.
And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think they eventually reverted back to the same sort of typical aggressive alpha male behavior as being the the primary leaders of the groups.

Speaker 1 But for a long time, they existed in this very strange,

Speaker 1 atypical environment where kind baboons were like taking care of each other.

Speaker 2 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 they're 46

Speaker 2 likely more times to be a leader of the pack. And what do these risk-taking behaviors entail? I'm really excited to follow this.

Speaker 1 And how many of them, unfortunately, are going to get hit by cars because of this?

Speaker 1 Wasn't the first ever released mountain lion, or a wolf rather, that got killed, killed by a car?

Speaker 2 The first one, my understanding, the first one in Yellowstone, that released wolf, the the first mortality of a wolf was getting hit by a ups truck crazy

Speaker 1 it's poor i just feel kind of bad for the driver shouldn't laugh i mean there's a dead wolf imagine you're that poor driver you're the first guy oh my god you couldn't hit a brake

Speaker 1 i know i know yeah it's horrible anyway but it's just it's so fascinating that this toxoplasmosis it could comp I mean it can implode the population yeah who knows they might make terrible decisions how prevalent is it in humans

Speaker 1 oh it's hugely prevalent In France at one point in time, there was 50% of the population that had toxo. Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and large populations of people in both Latin America, South America, places where there's a lot of feral cats. Yeah.
It's a huge instance of it.

Speaker 1 Not only that, there's a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis or in countries that have toxoplasmosis that have successful soccer teams.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 You know, they don't know. But it might be that it makes you more aggressive.
It makes you more,

Speaker 1 you're more interested in taking risks

Speaker 1 and a little reckless. And if you're a soccer player, I can probably help you to be like, really,

Speaker 1 just go for it and get crazy. You're more aggressive and less tentative.
Right, right.

Speaker 2 It's crazy.

Speaker 2 The whole interface between humans and wildlife is becoming a more and more popular field. And if I was young and could do do my career over, I wouldn't go into that because it's really crazy.

Speaker 2 The CWD, the so that when wolves encountered, first encountered parvovirus and distemper from, came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping.

Speaker 2 And the disease came into being in the 80s. We started documenting it in Glacier.
And the first year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, that

Speaker 2 they're off the chart in their immune response, the antibodies, to that particular disease and we had most of our pups all die that year wow boom like that and people don't think about yeah i got my little dachshund up at you know mcdonald lake and he pooped and you don't pick it up and the wolves get it but the same thing happened in yellowstone and they have certain um years where they have horrible pup survival it's called recruitment and they don't make it into the fall but the other thing of interest so uh

Speaker 2 they've been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in yellowstone that genetically the ones ones who carry the gene for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolves.

Speaker 1 Ah, interesting.

Speaker 2 And it's certain, maybe Jamie could look that up, at 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.

Speaker 2 to the survival of those pups. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 Do the ones with the darker coats,

Speaker 1 do they originate from denser forests?

Speaker 2 So this is, 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.

Speaker 2 In Minnesota, the original Midwestern wolves were gray, and now they've got black color genes, and there are changes with the population density. But what I learned, to my best knowledge, it's

Speaker 2 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 the 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.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Doesn't mean that the animals out there that are black are hybrids.
I'm just saying it goes back thousands of years.

Speaker 1 So the earliest descriptions of wolves, did they describe them? Like, what is the earliest known like written human history of wolves? Did they describe them in a particular color?

Speaker 2 Oh, boy. You know what? I haven't gone there.
I mean, if you look at Romulus and Remus, those were gray wolves in Rome.

Speaker 2 Right. I don't know.
You know,

Speaker 2 I'm not a paleontologist.

Speaker 1 The thought would, 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.

Speaker 2 You could hide a little bit of that. It's the same idea.
I like having Arctic wolves being white.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 But it's the K locus for the black color gene, and it depends on if they're homozygous or heterozygous, and one is, here you go.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Whoa. Wow.

Speaker 2 Heavy. It is heavy.

Speaker 1 I would love to know what the root of that story is. Huh.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's so fascinating. Here you go.

Speaker 2 This is the article about that. Yeah, this would be

Speaker 1 disease outbreaks select for maid choice and coat color in wolves. So all dogs come from wolves.
So you have wolves.

Speaker 1 Wolves get domesticated into dogs, and then some dogs reintroduce their genes into interbreeding with wolves, and somehow or another this black coat col color comes into play. Yes.
Wild.

Speaker 2 It is, literally.

Speaker 2 And I literally expect 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.

Speaker 2 But an early reference told me that the native, the dog native to North America was brought over here. There wasn't the Native Americans didn't have dogs here thousands and thousands of years ago.

Speaker 2 That's what I've been reading.

Speaker 1 Well, one of the things that I learned from

Speaker 2 Propa Europeans.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's so crazy.

Speaker 1 One of the things things

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 Dan Flores was talking about was that horses came from here, but then they were all they all died off. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And they don't know exactly why, but probably during that mass extinction event where 65% of all the megafauna died.

Speaker 1 And then the Europeans reintroduced horses. And so the Native Americans initially didn't have horses, and then some were really good at it, and those are the ones that thrived, like the Comanche.

Speaker 2 The Spaniards brought horses in the 1500s, and that's how they got their horses. But before that.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I didn't know that. No, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 Zebras, too?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Zebras.

Speaker 1 How nuts.

Speaker 2 That is nuts.

Speaker 1 Well, we also have an animal, the pronghorned antelope. Yes.
That is a prehistoric animal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's only here.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 dark codes, the K-locus encodes, have something to do with them having canine distemper viruses.

Speaker 2 That they're immune, more immune to respiratory infections. So,

Speaker 2 anyway, yeah. And then the other thing with...

Speaker 1 Which they probably got from dogs. Yes, probably.
Distemper.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I don't know how long distemper goes back.

Speaker 2 The other thing with the pronghorn, I mean, I just came from hunting, well, we were seeing, I mean, hunting birds, we were seeing pronghorn everywhere.

Speaker 1 Antelope. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love them, but they're really pre-historic. And

Speaker 2 do you know why they run at 60 miles an hour?

Speaker 1 Because we used to have a North American cheetah. Exactly.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 The cheetahs whittled the limbs of the antelope.

Speaker 1 That's why they're so fast. That's why they're fast.
They're so much faster than any predator in North America.

Speaker 2 They got to be 60 miles an hour. Don't run a cheetah.
Not wolves, not bears.

Speaker 1 And they're still here, and the cheetahs are gone.

Speaker 1 But they're one of the very few of those weird animals, like the North American lion, like all these different, like, there was a North American lion that is way bigger than the African lion.

Speaker 2 I've read that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would love to be a paleontologist. There's so many things I would like to do again and do over.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of interesting things in this world, and we're still just learning.

Speaker 2 We still have to listen to people, experts, and do a lot of reading and think for ourselves. Well, thanks to you.

Speaker 1 We know a lot more about wolves.

Speaker 1 Thanks. I really appreciate you being here.
The book is A Woman Amongst Wolves: My Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery. Yep.

Speaker 1 Diane Boyd.

Speaker 2 Can I read you just a 30-second introductory paragraph?

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 2 That'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

Speaker 2 forward introduction.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 2 Okay. Let's see if I can see it.

Speaker 2 Do you need glasses? I got glasses. Okay.

Speaker 1 Sorry, should have had a word. No worries.
No worries. Hang on.

Speaker 1 Can I ask you before you do that? Yes, yes. Are you going to read the audiobook?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 No. No, there's a story there, too.

Speaker 1 Diane.

Speaker 2 We can talk about that after. Let's just be 30 seconds.
Okay.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I was in a hurry, 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.

Speaker 2 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? Wow.
That's the opening for my book.

Speaker 2 It's not a tiger.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but still. So you asked me about.

Speaker 1 What did I ask you about? Oh, the audiobook.

Speaker 2 So the audiobook. 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.

Speaker 2 I signed the contract, and I love working with Greystone. They're a fantastic publisher.
It's just a standard contract.

Speaker 2 I signed away the rights for movie, audio, etc., etc., but I get a share of the royalties and stuff. So when

Speaker 2 somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced,

Speaker 2 and I didn't hear about it for a while, and by the time I'd heard about it,

Speaker 2 They had just started producing it. And I said, well, I'd like to read for it.
I sent off an audio tape of my voice. And

Speaker 2 looks like they would need to do a bunch of polishing. And it was almost September.
And I would be recording for weeks. It takes like...

Speaker 1 What kind of polishing?

Speaker 2 Annunciation. And I don't know.

Speaker 1 Oh, they have to teach you how to say it differently.

Speaker 2 Maybe 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.

Speaker 2 It takes like 80 hours to produce an eight-hour audiobook.

Speaker 1 I know, but the thing is, it's like the authentic version of this book is going to be in your voice.

Speaker 2 Maybe when the rights expire, but I.

Speaker 1 Maybe they would just listen to this podcast and just try it. I would love to try it.
It's not that expensive to get you in a booth for a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 They hired a professional actress. The other thing was this happened just before bird hunting season opened in Montana.
It's like, sorry.

Speaker 1 I get it.

Speaker 1 I get it. I really do.

Speaker 2 Time is precious. Steve Ranella said the same thing.
Like, you made a big mistake, Diane. It's like, I I kind of didn't have options.

Speaker 1 It's okay. Either way, I'm sure it's awesome.
And I really appreciate you being here. It was a lot of fun.
I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 It's been a blast, Joe. Thank you so much for having me as a gift.
You just treated me royally. This has been wonderful.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you had fun. Thank you very much.
Thank you. All right.
Bye, everybody. Bye.