Coyotes! with Lulu Miller

You know what, Mark Twain?

Maybe you're an allegory of one.

You ever look in the mirror and think about that?

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Coyotes, Exclamation Point, with Lulu Miller.

Lulu Miller is the host of Terrestrials.

she's the co-host of Radiolab, she's the former co-host of NPR's Invisibilia, and of course she's the author of the bestseller, Why Fish Don't Exist.

Lulu was last on a couple years ago for our Lesbian Seagulls episode.

I loved making that episode, and I loved making this one with her too.

This is also kind of a sassy sister piece to a new terrestrials episode called The Howler, The Dog Who Joined a Coyote Pack.

So if you like this episode, please check out that one too, and check out Terrestrials.

In this episode, we talked about some of the history of coyotes, that history being entwined with American history as a whole, what it takes to be a survivor, and how humans can identify with the animal world without just projecting ourselves onto what we see.

Lulu also wants us to tell you that during her research on coyotes, she learned quite a lot from the conservation scientist, carnivore ecologist, and urban ecologist ecologist Dr.

Christine E.

Wilkerson, and that a lot of what we got into in this episode comes through Dr.

Wilkerson's research.

And as a fun bonus, at the very end of this episode, we have a clip of Lulu Miller interviewing Dr.

Christine Welkerson.

If you want bonus episodes, we have plenty for you on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions, and our newest one is a fun jaunt through newspapers.com that I took with Kelsey Weber-Smith.

We gave each other a few words, we went out on a scavenger hunt, and we brought each other back what we found.

And shortly, we will be coming out with a new bonus with Miranda Zickler, producer of American Hysteria and woman of many talents, on Peg Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book and what it means to hate or perhaps tolerate housekeeping.

Thank you so much, as always, for joining us.

Thank you for being here with us.

Thank you for tumbling and fumbling into spring.

Thank you for surviving.

Here's your episode.

Welcome to You Wrong About, the show where we talk about maligned women and sometimes maligned animals.

And with me today is our maligned animal correspondent.

Lulu Miller.

That's her beat.

That really is my beat.

Last time we talked about often known as the rats of the sky.

Gulls.

Yep.

Seagulls.

Love it.

And today we're talking about what we could call the rats of the medium-sized carnivorous predators.

I'm so happy that we're talking about coyotes.

I don't know what direction you're going to take it in.

You just said the word coyotes to me and I was like, yes.

Perfect.

And I will tell you my personal fun fact about coyotes.

When I was growing up where there were coyotes, you know, I believe you're going to tell me something about there being like 40 coyotes per human in this country or something, whatever the statistic is.

Yeah, right.

But we would hear coyotes like having a party like they do when I was a kid.

And because we watched a lot of PBS nature shows for a while when I was little, I thought that they were hyenas.

Oh, I love that the hyenas of the Pacific Northwest.

The hyenas of Sobie Island, yeah.

I mean, they are when they party.

I, I've, the first time I heard them party in the wild was when I was in my early 20s and growing up in the Boston suburbs.

Like I had really never heard them.

And then I did and I truly thought it sounded like witches.

Like it was such a primal coveny,

electrifying sound.

Like that

like and tons of that.

I mean, there's something

so exciting about that sound.

There really is.

Yeah.

And it's, and I, I heard it the other day because I was out taking a walk and there's like, you know,

coyotes still in the Portland area, of course.

And, you know, and there's a

video I think that went viral a couple of years ago about a kid being chased by a coyote across their yard.

Oh, really?

In your area?

In Portland?

Yeah, and somewhere in Portland.

But like, yeah, I heard them the other night.

And it was that thing where you have your headphones in and you're like, oh, what's happening?

Is there a football game at the high school?

And then you're like, no.

But like, same vibe, same like blood-boiling vibe, excited, communal excitement, you know?

Yeah.

And I don't know what the circumstances of those party sounds are, but it just like, I don't know.

And it doesn't sound menacing to me.

It would sound menacing if it was closer.

But like many things, when you're far away, you're like, ah, nature.

Nature is sexy.

Yeah.

Nature is sexy.

So yeah, that is, that is what we're here to say.

You already brought one of our characters into this story called Social Media is going to have an effect on not just our perception of coyotes, but the lives, behavior, and migration of coyotes, which is pretty wild.

Wow, yeah.

To really start, I think we got to crack our knuckles.

And

can I hear your best coyote howl?

Oh, boy.

I can just do like a regular dog howl.

Can we start with that?

You do, yeah.

Okay.

That was so dainty, Sarah.

Thank you.

Okay, I'm going to give you my coyote howl.

Yeah.

Because it helps me get in the zone for this story.

All right.

You ready?

Yeah.

To go?

Okay.

I'm ready.

What are your associations, feelings?

Like, you said, yes, let's do coyotes.

And you said, let's call it coyotes with an exclamation mark.

Yeah.

Why was that your response?

And what, if anything, just rough?

What are your feelings about coyotes, your associations, your feelings?

Okay.

So I, yeah, to like free associate, my associations with coyotes are like, I like a scavenger animal which I don't even think that they are as much as just opportunistic but like I've always liked rats.

I had pet rats as a kid and as you mentioned before

oh yeah and like there's something about

and I respect you know the trauma people have with rats because like a rat when you're not expecting them or like you know a

loose basement rat in your house is not fun.

Yeah.

But a pet rat that you can feed banana chips to and like is so nice.

And so I've always been, and you know, the rats of NIM, I think, was like a big

thing for millennials.

Yeah, totally.

And so I think of coyotes in the same breath as like, you know, these sort of, and again, in a very non-scientific capacity, I think of them as like on the foxy end of the dog spectrum, you know, of like

that maybe we feel a little bit uncomfortable with just sort of the degree of a society that they've built within hours without asking us for permission to do it, similar to rats.

And then also, you know, I know that like they eat little dogs and it's hard to live in an area that's all mobbed up with coyotes if you're a small dog owner, especially.

And is this a public safety issue?

Because like I don't have little dogs or little kids, so I'm not personally worried about it, but I am curious about, as with most things, like

the line between superstition and rational concern and where that actually falls.

But I believe I'm going to, you know, be, I don't know.

I was once sitting in a coffee shop in Portland and I saw a coyote just like

ambling, you know, down a bike lane.

And that's a moment I treasure.

I like to see a coyote.

That's the kind of person I am.

And one more beat on why?

Just why do you treasure that moment?

I just, I like a trash animal, you know, and I think of, and I think that's a whole vibe, right?

That like people, there's like a lot of people, I'm sure, listening to this show right now who love a raccoon, who love a possum, who love a rat, who just like love to see an animal who's like maybe not looking the most photogenic, but is just like surviving and carrying her babies around and just living L-I-V-I-N.

Yeah, yeah, and thriving, probably.

Yeah, yeah, because they're animals.

And I think that that shimmer, that like prismatic shimmer of admiration, fear, uncertainty, like what are they-ness is so, I mean, that is so, it's so key, not just to our perception of them, but their animal nature.

And so the story I want to tell about them, like, I was thinking about, I was kind of outlining it all last night.

And I was like, this actually reminds me of,

to me, they're not just a story of like, behold the animal that is a mirror to our human feelings.

They're not just a mirror.

There's something even more strange.

And this is an idea I i got from many conversations with the scientist christine wilkinson who i just like i interviewed her i think three times about coyotes she go follow her so much of this comes from her so she is scrappy naturalist uh.com and she you know she studies scrappy she studies just like you you know scrappy creatures yeah hyenas coyotes and she's incredible and she painted this idea of like this almost suddenly felt to me like an invisibilia story where we talk about how invisible emotions and things like that influence human behavior.

But this is like how feelings influence animal migration, behavior, aggression.

I mean, it is a wild, in that sense, almost ghost story.

Like you can watch these, our feelings, our judgments having

really real life.

like profound and surprising effects on populations of coyotes.

And she is, Christine is someone who studies this.

She's a migration ecologist.

So she studies like how things move.

And in the way that she kind of was always trained to look at things like climate change or, you know, how highways affect migration, these concrete things, she's come to really see how like feelings, human feelings affect.

And I kind of think of it as like, you know, there's a water cycle, there's a Krebs cycle.

There's also like a cycle of emotions, like an emo cycle.

And it has impact like on the soil and our, which the flavor of them affects things.

So that's kind of the story I'm going to tell for you today.

And coyotes are just, man, they are really influenced by our feelings.

So excited for that.

Okay.

So we begin our wild tale.

And like coyotes tell us so much about the American experiment.

Two words slowed.

Such as it was.

Yeah.

Okay.

So chapter one, we are going, we're going wild west.

It's spaghetti western time.

We are going to the American West.

And, you know, coyotes, before European settlers showed up were really only found west of the Mississippi.

But they were, you know, they were all over.

There are likely hundreds of thousands of them roaming around.

In terms of what do they eat, they can be scavengers.

Like they will totally scavenge.

They're what's called a mesopredator.

So they're, they're not the apex.

You know, those would be the gray wolves at the time.

Okay.

They're in between.

They're like, They're getting hunted by wolves, but then they're also hunting gophers and bunnies and birds.

But they're generalists.

They will also totally, they'll eat berries, they'll eat uh insects, they will eat human refuse, they will eat trash, like they are trash pandas in that way.

I'm remembering too, yeah, I've got like a fondness for omnivores, I think.

There's just something very charming about an animal.

Well, and you know, it can be dangerous for them, but generally charming about an animal who's like, Yeah, I'll eat that, I'll have that, whatever.

And coyotes are truly like the omnivores of not just eating, but everything.

So, scientists call this amazingly like trashy generalist power.

They just call it, it has such a boring name.

I want to rebrand, but they call it behavioral flexibility.

Well, once again, we're getting into our theme of, you know, seagulls and bisexuality and just like living how you gotta.

Living how you gotta.

And so they will, I mean, okay, so they do it with eating, as we kind of just ran through.

They'll totally hunt.

They can be great hunters, but they'll also, are they nocturnal?

Are they awake during the day?

Are they crepuscular the dusk they're anything sarah they will do they'll like if they need to become nocturnal they'll become nocturnal now do they hunt in packs or do they hunt alone either they'll do either um they'll do pairs like to fuck with naturalists they do and like they just well okay very quickly this is

so dorky but um to so wolves really like to like they need to hunt in their packs and they they become they're amazing pack hunters coyotes can pull it off but they can also do it in pairs, or they could go alone and just scavenge, or they can hunt a solo.

And this is that like ability to either be a pack or a solo.

That's called, scientists call it fission fusion.

Oh.

Yeah.

And it is actually in the animal world, it's pretty rare.

Like there's only a few animals that will basically swing both ways and in terms of being lonely or kind of social.

And humans is one of the only other ones.

And it does kind of like extend our adaptability.

Like, because then you could, like, in a social distancing thing, you can thrive by being alone, but you can also thrive if you're all sort of kind of, you can try.

We made it, we scraped through to an extent.

So, coyotes are one of the very rare, like, non-primates who do this.

Dolphins do it, elephants, bats, so interesting.

Very like limited amount of mammals will do this.

So, coyotes do that.

They also,

and I love this so much.

They also will hunt with other species.

And I don't know if you, did you happen across the kind of viral

badger-coyote friendship?

No.

How did this happen?

So there's, this was, you know, went viral.

It was caught on film of this badger and a coyote just like.

ambling through a through a tunnel together and both of them looked relaxed they were not in a like aggression kind of state like they were buddies and scientists have looked at it and what happens is like the badger is really good at digging the the coyote can run up to 40 miles per hour so they'll the coyote can like chase let's say a gopher and then if it goes under the burrow the badger can flush it out and then they've been documented to share the spoils and their kill rate goes up even though the coyote probably kill the badger it's like

so this is what we did our terrestrials episode about is the friendships because there's a story of a domestic dog that joined a coyote pack for almost a year and it was documented on trail camps and um so they'll do this interspecies friendship.

They've also had friendships with like ravens because the ravens will, they've learned to like follow them toward carrion, which they will eat because they're scavengers.

But then usually the raven hangs out to get the like shredded up bites.

They've been like shown to be friendly with the mortal enemy of canines, which is bobcats, at least in a rescue setting, so a puppy and a kitten.

So they're all, so anyway, they're just like, they are omnivores of behavior, of night and day, of food, of hunting.

And they just like, they're not the best at anything, but they're okay at living things.

They're not afraid to adapt.

Yeah.

And scientists are now, everyone's kind of freaking out about all these kind of cool interspecies friendships because things have been caught on film.

But like indigenous traditions going back thousands, they likely think thousands of years.

Paulette Steves is an indigenous scholar who like kind of looks at deep time and the coyote myth.

But the coyote has always been seen as this kind of shapeshifter that will befriend other animals so like it's there and coyote is actually a it is an indigenous word originally from the nahuatl people so anyway we're in the american west the european settlers haven't come over lewis and clark like cross the mississippi and are like document like what's this strange little like scrappy mini wolf thing

i gotta read those lewis and clark journals they've gotta be over the top yeah and uh and that's that's where they used to be just kind of living among hiding from the the wolves, eating their birds and berries and, you know, coexisting with indigenous people.

Like they were just kind of down with all different types of habitats.

And that was kind of their wild life.

Like estimates of about like half a million of them maybe out there.

Enter the European settlers.

Okay.

So they come out, you know, or mid to late 1800s.

They're setting up their farms with these juicy cows and pigs and and

sheep.

It's a buffet.

It's a buffet.

And so, you know, by the 18th, you know, just wolves and coyotes are like preying on the livestock.

And so they are very quickly reviled.

And they kind of go from this more ambiguous, in some indigenous groups, like the coyote is actually a deity,

there's a creation myth.

There's all kinds of different reputations, but it quickly, the sort of European settler reputation becomes very negative.

And I don't know if you've ever heard of a fellow named Mark Twain.

I've heard of him, yeah.

It is right around this time that he kind of like really cements the new reputation of the coyote as this villain.

And so let's...

Why did you do that, Mark Twain?

I thought we were, you know, I thought we had an understanding here.

Oh, no.

So he, so Roughing It comes out in 1872.

And this is like so coinciding with this moment where

European settlers are kind of like villainizing the coyote.

They're convincing sort of local livestock associations are convincing the local states to put bounties on coyotes and wolves and to

make it fine to kill them.

And so Mark Twain describes the coyote this way.

The coyote is a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it.

I love that.

Like,

it's like a sheep in wolves clothes.

It's like a, I don't even know.

It's just just like a skeleton in wolves' clothes.

It's a wolf and wolf.

A tolerably bushy tail.

Okay, so that's like that the tail gets a little love, but it forever sags down

with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery.

Its eyes are described as a furtive and evil eye.

So we're just like, boom.

You know, this is not a majestic beast.

It has a long, sharp face with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth.

He has a general sinking expression all over.

He is a living, breathing allegory of want.

He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless.

We know that is very inaccurate.

You know what, Mark Twain?

Maybe you're an allegory of want.

You ever look in the mirror and think about that?

He goes on.

The meanest creatures despise him, and even fleas wouldn't desert him for a velocipede.

He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.

And he's so homely, so scrawny and ribby and coarse-haired and pitiful.

I feel like this is like how we've historically written about gay people, where it's like, they're so scary, but they're not scary, but they kind of are.

Yeah, they're so scary, but not in a strong or admirable way.

Yeah, so like...

They're scary because I don't want to be like them.

And it's like, aren't we all opportunistic, bushy-tailed guys who will eat whatever we can get and be friends with a badger?

I mean, ideally, right?

Yeah.

So anyway, that's kind of like the vibe is shifted.

It's just like, screw you, Coyote.

You're not, you're, you're wild and you're eating, but you're not even like, we're not going to even admire you like a wolf.

Like, you're just

saying.

Yeah, because I feel like there's like still so much drama around wolves.

And that's a whole other conversation, but like, yeah, that sort of in the American West still, there's this thing of like hating the wolf, but also respecting the wolf.

And in this case, it's there's like

the fear is like grudging.

It's like, I don't even want to be afraid of something this.

It's fear without respect.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a totally different vibe than the wolf, even though they are like, you know, coyote is only a little bit smaller, like super similar, wild canines eating the same things.

But it would be very hard to describe to an alien how they're so different.

And yet you would never get Farley Mowet's Never Cry Coyote.

I don't think.

Although I would like it.

I know.

I know.

What would that story be?

You know, like, let's think about our most famous coyote.

Who's our most famous pop culture coyote?

Meet, meet.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, and you know what?

There is one where he did finally catch the Roadrunner, but the trick was that the Roadrunner had been made giant.

And so he like holds up a sign that's like, now what?

Oh my gosh, I didn't know that.

But yeah, like he's just, he can't catch this bird.

And he wakes up every day and he fails.

And like, you know, it's such a not noble creature.

So, okay, so it's so cementing, cementing their place in our imagination as to be feared but not respected.

And, you know, the decades go by.

And then by the early 1920s, the kind of...

ranchers and livestock associations have actually convinced a federal bureau,

the biological survey bureau, to basically like wage a war of extermination against coyotes and wolves and mountain lions.

They're like, eradicating a species probably won't cause any issues.

So.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

Basically, there's this, you know, federally funded extermination campaign.

And

the story of the gray wolves, you probably know.

And, you know, they're like, it's like shooting.

poisons, trapping, all kinds of stuff.

Wolves, the gray wolves are famously wiped out, you know, within just a few decades after that, the sort of that that starts.

Yeah, this is this is reminding me.

I like went on a trip with our friend of the show, Candice Opera, last year, and we went through Cain, Pennsylvania.

Have you encountered this town in your research?

I have not.

It was, I think it was like the, it might have been the gray wolf or like the timber wolf or something, but some kind of wolf that was being systematically eradicated by the U.S.

government.

I don't know how many wolf species that happened to.

And there was this rogue doctor in like rural Pennsylvania and I think the 20s who was like, no, instead of killing the wolves, give some to me.

And the government, I guess, was like, okay.

And so, yeah.

And so it's this, you like, drive through this town and there's all, there's like a wolf statue and a little wolf museum.

And you're like, all right, something,

there's some history here.

And it turns out that this doctor had this big like wolf sanctuary where he was taking care of these wolves, you know, whose

species mates, I guess, were all being eradicated by the government at at the time.

And that population eventually made it, I think, to Montana or something.

And so the descendants of those wolves are like some of, if not the only wolves of that species that are still around.

Wait, that is so rad, right?

This guy just kind of protected them in a little part of Pennsylvania.

Kane PA.

I need to go.

Shout out to rural Pennsylvania.

I feel like they like, it's like the reverse version of the children of the corn, right?

When you like end up in a small town with like like a really great secret.

That is so reverse.

Children of the corn.

Children of the wolves.

There was no one, there was not a cane, Pennsylvania of the West, unfortunately, for the gray wolves.

So

by about this, you know, the 1960s, like the gray wolf population, I mean, those, those howls, the wolves from like the howls in the forest

are gone.

It is, they are just gone.

There is a tiny pocket of them up near Canada and Minnesota, like north, north, north, but like totally gone.

Now, coyotes, they are being attacked with the same volume of bullets, poison, money.

And guess what happens?

They survive, I guess bet.

Not only do they survive,

they expand.

The more you try to kill them, fuck you, Mark Twain.

The more they come back.

They are like the hydra is like you chop off a head and two more grow like mint and it re like so uh they were described by some people as unkillable

and and this is real this wasn't a perception thing scientists a bunch of scientists have studied this and there isn't as far as i know like a term for it but there are these adaptations that basically when they are killed and when there is sort of less population density in a certain area, these evolutionary adaptations kick in, which allow them to have larger litter sizes.

Yeah.

Isn't that awesome and wild?

I'm just, yeah, and I'm just such a like a non-thought, very visceral response of like, fuck yeah, coyotes, have as many puppies as you can.

But that's this kind of like the first moment I'm seeing Christine Wilkinson's idea of like the cycle of emotions.

It's like the more we hated them,

the more we persecuted them, attacked them, called them evil, the more they thrived, throve, thrived.

Yeah.

And our fear of them just makes them have more babies.

Yes.

And that, you know, it's, I just think that's so fascinating.

And like, we're not totally sure the mechanism, but they probably think it's because when there's one or two gone in a given area, then the ones who are around are able to have more food, which then is like more caloric content to create more babies.

And for those babies to survive, it's just beautiful.

Another reason they were probably able to survive.

So there's kind of like three reasons they're probably unkillable.

Number one is that magic, the more you kill me, the more babies I have.

Number two is that thing we talked about, the generalists anthem, the behavioral flexibility.

You know, wolves, if their pack is taken out, their hunting goes way down.

Coyotes, if they're someone from their pack is taken out, they'll turn to scavenging.

They'll turn to, you know, they'll hunt at night.

They'll, they'll learn.

And so that behavioral flexibility just like, it gave them other options for how to hunt, what to eat, when to hunt, who to hunt with.

Befriend a badger.

As they famously say, no more livestock, befriend a badger.

And then the third thing is going back to this idea that they're mesopredators.

And so, in a way, that wolves were apex predators, they weren't used to being hunted.

Coyotes were.

And I guess I have this like totally unfair.

Now I'm going to step out of the role of like dutiful animal reporter and just be projecty woman.

Yeah, put on your projecty woman hat.

But like, it's a power of being prey.

Yeah.

And I think there's a way in which, um,

you know, I remember someone once talking about horses and how like they know, they know when they're being watched.

Like they, they have to be a little bit better at that than a predator because, you know, the predator needs to watch, but it doesn't have to have eyes behind its back, you know?

Or giant eyeballs on the sides of its face.

On the sides, right and there's just something to me about like

the wolves started getting hunted by humans and then they were just like toast because they hadn't evolved to learn to be scared of something you know well yeah and just the idea of like identity is something that holds us back and especially you know in this moment of like

american sort of like white scary masculinity having what feels like a big Charlie horse ideologically of just like, we have to force women to have more babies, but only white babies.

I've never heard this moment described as a Charlie horse, but man is that just like, ow!

And then your leg kicks out.

Right.

They're just like, something's wrong, but I'm going to make it worse.

Yeah.

And just like,

you know, the sort of like wild spasming in every direction, except for the ones that help you and like trying to make every other category of person do stuff or, you know, deporting just anyone

and people know and if it's not 2025 when you're listening to this you remember yeah sort of white american masculinity having a crisis at this moment it seems because there's a lot of stressed and emotionally pliant men out there who are kind of easy pickings for ideologues who can come along and be like do you feel like you should be making more money and having more sex than you are well it's everyone else's fault and it's also the fault of social justice warriors and also concentration camps will help you go on more dates and it's like i don't think they will but that the sort of like panic that feels to be coming from

you know i mean not to get too politically complicated but like a like a very reasonable panic coming from the fact that like industries are being destroyed and like you know desiccated and that that is is happening but it's being carried out by the people in office right now for reasons of varying stupidity.

But B, this idea of like, men can't be men anymore because we can't survive under the very specific code of behavior and sort of, you know, masculinity and patriarchy that was handed to us and that we believed was the only way to be.

And this idea of like, I'm not thriving in this metric where I can't express my feelings to anybody and where I have to be a provider for a family but not be provided for in any way except by demanding that I be fed three meals a day, but nothing emotional, no emotional nurture ever.

And just this thing of, I don't know, there being, A, the appeal of like

people who know what it's like to be prey, know how to survive, and therefore will endure the situation.

And B, that like if you're not thriving under the conditions of what you think your identity has to be, then like,

maybe that's not your identity.

Maybe you can eat garbage.

Yeah, right, right.

Okay, so yeah, like you're saying in that thing, that sort of like

the white males are the wolves.

And it's, is that really?

Yeah, yeah.

They get hunted and they're like, we're not used to this.

And it's like, why don't you adapt?

And they're like, I simply, no, I would rather die.

There's only one way.

Like, I want to be a pack.

This is how we've always done it.

Totally.

And I think there's something for me about like.

Nothing against wolves.

I love wolves.

Nothing against wolves.

You know, it's like when Susan Sontag famously compared white European colonial imperialism to cancer, and then people got upset and she was like, I'm sorry.

That was offensive to people who have cancer.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

Nothing against wolves.

But yeah, I think there's something.

And again, I'm still in, we're still in projection sidebar.

Yep.

But yeah, there's something like,

there's just something so beautiful to me about.

in this story seeing the coyotes be unkillable because like

when you're a mesopredator you know you have to hunt you have to be a prey you're you're not just like always hiding.

You got to go out and risk, but you also have to kind of hide and be on alert.

And like that, it is an anxious state to be mesoprey.

Like you're always wondering, like if you're under attack, but that maybe there's some benefit to all this anxiety.

Like maybe there's some benefit to the fact that my nails are chewed down and I'm always kind of modulating my tone of certain rooms and worrying about X or Y thing I don't want to step on.

And, but that like under duress, like we have been honing and honing and like to see them just thrive.

And it's like they already know how to bob and weave and there's a point to all that.

And they're like, this is what I was made for.

Yeah.

And the toll it may take and the literal energy lost on that alertness.

Under duress may give us a leg up.

And that

I feel like

matters to think about right now, at least for me.

Oh, yeah.

Well, and also to like, I don't know, put a button on projection corner.

I also get annoyed, as I bet you might, when, A, when we use, you know, when we call like criminals predators, you know, even in like to catch a predator context, it's like, this guy is a Jimmy John's manager from Muncie.

Like, I don't really think that we need to call him a predator.

You know, it's not like he's an alligator who can wait for hours and hours until a tourist pokes him or something.

And really, like, when I think of the male Charlie horse freakouts that are sort of dictating our policy in this country at the moment.

I'm like, you are not a predator.

You are that video of a deer that crashed into the window of a Quiznos or something.

Have you seen this?

There's a video.

No, but it's so funny you're bringing up Quiznos because Quiznos is coming up in our story.

I'm with coyotes, but I have not heard about the deer in the Quiznos.

I do know about the coyote in the Quiznos.

It might have been, you know, it could have been a pot belly, who knows?

But like some normal franchise restaurant where you're just like, it has been a long day.

We are going to have a sandwich and we're going to go home.

And there's video of like a deer just like crashing through this plate glass window and just like skittering.

skittering straight into this family that are like trying to have dinner and absolutely bodying this teenage girl and then like just clattering off like on the tile you know and i think like and this is another just sort of like specious conclusion that I have based on pop culture, but my understanding is that, like,

you don't want to get attacked by a wolf, but also you probably won't.

And a wolf probably will look at a human and be like, I'm not dealing with that, right?

Like, things would have to be pretty weird.

But if you corner a deer, they will use everything they have to survive, and they will probably like slice you up with their little hooves.

So, like, men who are freaking out are not predators, they're just confused deer.

There we go.

Okay, animal facts from Projection Corner.

Okay, we are hoping.

Well, okay, one last thing before we hop out of the sidebar bar.

Okay.

I just would like, since we were bringing up Quiznos, I would like to do the

requisite shout out to my brilliant wife.

The other day we were talking about sub shops and subs, and she said, there should be.

a sandwich shop called Sublime.

Like they're shudd, right?

Do we need to quit everything?

And like started, I just was like, oh, because subs are so sublime.

When they're good, they're sublime.

Anyway, yeah, okay.

Whatever them being mesopredators means to us in this moment, accurately what it meant is it they evolved alongside wolves and they learned to be scared of big predators.

So when they weren't wolves and they were humans with guns, they did a bit of a better job at evading them.

And they they completely survived this eradication campaign.

And as we discussed, they even thrived.

Their populations expanded.

Their territories expanded.

And so come the 1940s.

We

just tried to kill them harder.

So the 3031, Congress passes the Animal Damage Control Act, $10 million

of 1930s money to exterminate coyotes.

Oh, Lord.

They develop all kinds of new poisons

and spread them across the countryside.

I'm sure it'll be fine.

One of the big ones is is called Compound 1080,

which wasn't developed there, but

it was already developed, but they started figuring out to use it as kind of a coyote control thing.

And it's a really gnarly, the way it works.

It's like a slow, painful death.

It's horrible.

There's like a whole side note.

I was just like, I wonder about other stories about like how has Compound 1080 like...

just like this thing that like because of our fear of coyotes kind of came into human usage.

And there's this whole thing in New Zealand where there was like a famous case.

So they were using compound 1080 all over and this environmentalist, you know, and animals were dying and, and, and he, he slipped the poison into baby formula and held the whole country hostage and caused this like food crisis because he was like, I'm not going to tell you where it is until you guys stop using 1080.

And like, there's a whole like

New Zealand.

Anyway, so compound 1080 appears, blah, blah, blah.

In America, we get to have crises because people can't afford a formula and no one cares.

so don't know which is worse okay but so anyway they they they you know they're just like stepping up the coyote can there's bounties there's this woman janet kessler who who studies uh coyotes kind of a citizen scientist in in san francisco and she remembers people telling her about you would get paid four dollars like kids could be paid four dollars if they showed up with two coyote ears so they were like literal bounties on their literal heads there were killing competitions poison blah blah it's still really not working out there but it it is finally kind of working in the cities.

Like San Francisco is a very interesting one to look at because coyotes were always there and then they weren't there.

So then they kind of disappeared.

And then, you know, finally, Reagan is actually like, you know what?

1080 doesn't sound like a good, like there's all the birds are, you know, dying.

So they put a ban on 1080.

And that's kind of where we are.

But basically, from the time they started this campaign to about 1972, they guessed that about 8.5 million coyotes were killed

and yet didn't really put a dent in the population, which is pretty incredible.

So then we kind of enter this

next phase

where like now we're kind of getting into the 80s.

I think Sarah Marshall's born, Lulu Miller's born, we pop out into the world.

Big decade.

Who framed Roger Rabbit came out?

I don't know.

The world I came into, I didn't have any direct contact with coyotes.

And so they kind of existed in my imagination a little bit more like a wolf.

Like I'd see them, I'd picture that.

They felt like the West howling at a moon.

Maybe they'd be like stitched onto like a motorcycle jacket or like in the rough of a parka.

Yeah, exactly.

And to me, they were like a symbol of like wildness or innocence.

So when I first heard them howling in the woods of Cape Cod,

I was shocked.

And I was in my my late teens and I was ecstatic because I'd been going to Cape Cod my whole life.

And suddenly it was around then that I started hearing them.

And it turned out that at some point, coyotes probably crossed one of the bridges over the Cape Cod Canal and just showed their little silhouettes like marching in a line and then started running, wreaking havoc on the Cape because they had no predators there.

So there's just like all these things.

Like coyotes on the Cape, as they say.

Like coyotes on the Cape.

And I remember hearing, like, as we said earlier, like, I would hear those howls in the woods.

And as a kid growing up in like the Boston suburbs where I felt very cut off from wildness, I felt oppressed by kind of polite social norms.

And like, I don't know, it just was never the place for me.

Where the lols talk only to cabots and the cabots talk only to God.

Exactly.

And Lulu talks only to the squirrel outside of the window.

But anyway, then I heard coyotes and I was like, oh my God.

And I would just listen to them at night.

And if I I heard them, it was like an owl.

It was like, an owl, a coyote.

You know, it was like the treasure of it.

Because where I grew up, we were just like next to like, just like a field, just like empty space.

Like it was like kind of a sheep farm for a while or for a long time, but it was mostly just like space and

would get rained on and a little bit flooded.

And so swans would come and, you know, Canada geese up there when they're migrating north and south, or you can hear the frogs in the spring.

And just just like is there any better sound no yeah and just the feeling of like falling asleep with the window open listening to frogs it's like i never want people to not have that yeah it's it stills the blood yeah yeah and so i i think it was hearing it it was just like oh there is still wildness out there even right cape cod you know like yeah they made it lee yeah like we haven't completely paved paradise you know well there of course there was like a big moment that we all made fun of at the very start of the pandemic: of like, we are the virus, nature is healing.

And that was like kind of insane, I think, given the context, because it was like, I don't know, I don't think it's going to heal that much in four days.

But, like, I was so swept up in that in the moment and just the desire to be like, surely there has to be some benefit to

all of this.

The ants, yeah, yeah.

Ecologists called it the anthropause and just this like pause on kind of like infiltrating ecosystems.

There was a, I listened to this really cool podcast about like the acoustics of the ocean and how it shit without boats and without people, like literally there, they're, oh, this is so beautiful.

This blew my mind.

There is a dawn and dusk of the under,

not underworld, of the underwater.

And literally at dawn and dusk, like different little

shrimp and like things kind of wake up around the reef.

And they, it allowed them to get these like incredible acoustic recordings of what these kind of circadian rhythms actually sound like underwater without

humans messing it.

And it's like, there was a real effect on nature.

There was.

Yeah.

Tiny sidebar.

Tiny, tiny, tiny sidebar.

Let's go.

Okay.

I was thinking, I don't know, this past week about Star Trek.

And because I remember my parents watching TNG when I was like too little to understand what was going on, but I could like, sort of, the visuals sort of convey some amount.

So I think of it as like the the show that the grown-ups are watching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I don't know.

I've been watching a little bit of TNG lately.

Nice.

Anyone who loves Star Trek already knows this, but like so much kind of current sci-fi and like.

fantasy dystopian stuff is just like, what if we took everything that's happening now and re-skinned it for a slightly new world?

And I feel like that's what a lot of the new Star Wars media has been like.

And it's like,

yeah, you know, I mean, that's like, there's certainly like a lot of value to dystopian storytelling.

It like serves to show us sort of like Children of Men is one of my favorite movies, and that certainly is in that vein.

Yeah.

The world of Star Trek

is like, you know, what if the future is about, you know, we, we work in these really diverse workplaces and it's about like communication and teamwork and there's like misunderstandings between people because we're different from each other and we're trying to achieve a common goal and it's like there's like I don't know so much metaphorical autism um in star trek and like yeah but that's really i don't know like thinking about it lately i've been like you know i don't fucking want to go to mars i do not give a shit about mars i might have liked it more in the past when it was a less politicized idea but like there's nothing for us on mars you know there's just like and the and it's easy to take a dim view of humanity because we certainly do get out to a lot of awful stuff.

But when you think about, even if we're not alone in the universe, we're like

very far away from anyone else that we could talk to or from any other kind of a planet that can support this amount of life, you know, and like the sort of

incredible rareness and incredible specialness of the Earth, the fact that it's not disposable and also that people are really precious and that we don't have, I don't, in my opinion, we don't have a universe, certainly not a galaxy that's like jam-packed with other sentient creatures that we can like have diplomacy with.

You know, I think like the secret of Star Trek is that it's like, it's just about Earth.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Make it work with the people you're cooped up with.

Yeah, right.

And like, it's like, is space the final frontier?

Or is the final frontier just like learning how to get along with people with different communication styles, you know?

Yeah.

Ugh, I love that.

And that the final frontier you're not going to go find elsewhere where there's, where there's nothing around.

Yeah.

It's just like data and wharf learning about human weddings.

I love that.

And how do you get there from hearing coyotes in the wolves?

How did that or in the woods?

Well, just this thing of, yeah, the early pandemic days of like, oh, nature is healing.

Humans are staying home and we can hear the shrimp again.

And it's like, yeah, I want to hear the shrimp waking up.

And I want, like, we, we understand that things are out of balance, you know, and that this amount of human intervention is bad.

And not just for, you know, for like the part of nature that is us, because we've we've created an environment that is really hard to thrive in you know especially you know just looking at the United States like it is a utopian dream for most people approximately our age to be able to have you know grocery shopping schools playgrounds and like a nice bar within walking distance you know like most people don't have that and that's really all a lot of people are asking for.

So I guess this thing of like,

it's like easy to look at humans and be like, I don't like any of this right now.

But also, I don't know.

I want to be able to find moments to treasure the fact that like we behave against nature in a lot of ways.

But I think at the end of the day, like we are nature and we are part of this precious world that we're trying to protect and that is the only one that we get to have.

So we have to protect humanity and foster the best in it as much as we take care of anything else.

Yeah, of course, that line, that divide that we keep searching for is not there.

Like I, there, there was this beautiful book maybe 10 or 15 years ago called The Gap, not about the gap, not about the clothes of the gap, but about all the ways scientists over the years have tried to define the gap between humans and animals.

And it's like, tool use, nope.

Language, nope.

Clothes, nope.

Orcas put, what is like orcas are putting like fish on their head or something?

And like the ways that humans behave.

I I mean, I think one of the cool things coyotes show us is like coyotes like use a lot of our similar tricks.

Like the things we do, coyotes do a lot of that stuff.

And so yes, it's a beautiful reminder also for someone like me who like tends to romanticize nature and only view humans as parasites.

And I need to like get over that just to be like, no, we are, we maybe even belong to.

Yeah.

And also that it's, I don't know, that we hold ourselves to unreasonable standards and then get disappointed.

And it's like, no, like we don't have to be noble.

We don't have to behave in these certain ways that we invented or someone else invented and imposed on us, you know, but just like, I think part of the human hatred of rats comes from the, similarly, like, they're unkillable and they're opportunistic and they can survive anywhere and they will survive anywhere and they will have lots of babies and eat whatever and figure it out.

And I think that like we want to think that we're these,

you know, we, we are the masters of our domain because we are the best and we are the apex predators.

And it's like, no, we're not.

We're something better.

We're street rats who just want to live.

And that's pretty great.

Behavioral flexibility, man.

Yeah.

So, okay, so we're in this romantic period of the, now we're into the late 90s, early 2000s.

I'm, you know, in the Cape Cod hearing howls and low-rise chains are in, etc.

So, and

now I have to tell you a very sad part of the story, which is that my dog, Charlie, my family dog, a West Highland Terrier, a little Westie.

Yeah,

he was eaten by coyotes in front of all of us.

And we did not see it, but I say in front because we heard it.

And it was like right at dusk.

It was like we had never, we hadn't known to keep him inside because for his whole life, he'd sat outside on the deck and it was fine.

But coyotes had like suddenly filled up the woods and had made it further and further out of the cape.

And they got him.

And then it was, it was horrible.

He was 13, so he'd like had a good life.

That's the one consolation that he didn't like go out in a vet.

But, you know, and people told us it was probably like very quick.

But the next morning, we were all very sad and just like rearranging the chairs.

Like, where is he?

He, where's his spot on the floor?

Like, it just was this, we were all like looking at our feet and noticing the emptiness of the floor, the quietness of the floor.

It was very sad.

And then my mom, as a joke, was like, well, maybe he didn't get eaten by the pack.

Maybe he went and joined the pack.

And that was like our family joke.

And like my sister painted this little painting of like a Westie leading these coyotes.

But then I learned about the interspecies friendship.

And I was like, it is very unlikely, but it is not

zero percent.

Yeah.

Well, that's how I feel about, you know, the escape at Alcatraz.

It's like, did they drown?

Probably, but we don't know.

We never found bodies.

They could have made it.

Yeah.

And there was a case just a few years ago in uh upstate new york or maybe it's connected where there was a there was a dog who who was with the coyotes and there was a case in nevada even more recently of a dog who like ran with coyotes for almost a year so it has happened those were bigger dogs but still well and i feel like that is like part of the human story with nature right where it's like i feel like a lot of stories are about people who have certain ideas and then

are personally victimized by nature and are like, never mind, I'm against that now.

So, I mean, what I'm curious about how you metabolize that.

Unless, you know, he's out there still riding the rails.

But when he's like 40.

You never know.

You know, but like that, the feeling of connecting sort of the thing that thrills you when you hear it in the distance with the thing that can come up on your porch.

If his end, he was getting to be old.

And if he had to be in a vet on an IV or some like sad, like two months where we couldn't accept and he he was hurting like he went out healthy he went out likely in 30 seconds and he got to maybe have a moment where he was like thought he was a wild dog like he went out like a wild creature and so I think probably that's my own projection as a kid who felt confined by the suburbs but like there there was something about like he got to go out like a wild dog he got to commune with that former self he got to like for a moment leap toward a pack that maybe he thought was beckoning him and maybe they were tricking him and eating him but like he got this moment.

And so, I actually like think that's kind of like badass for little Charlie that he got to go out that way.

Yeah.

So, okay.

We've got like our third act to hit.

Oh, boy.

It's right around this time.

And I'm a little blurry on exactly.

I think everyone's a little blurry on exactly when this happens because coyotes are truly so wily and sneaky and hard to pin down.

But they start early 2000s, like

they start showing up in American cities.

And again, maybe they in certain cities they already were, but they they they start getting cited more and more.

And to just focus on San Francisco for a second again, because like that holds that whole like the bounties and they were there originally, but then the bounties and then the the around two thousand two was like one was sighted in the Presidio.

And so they like re-enter these American cities.

The population is continuing to explode.

Now, people don't know exactly, but before the extermination campaigns, they guessed there was about half a million coyotes in the wild.

Now they think there's like somewhere between one and 10 million.

So there's just like so many more.

The campaign did not work.

It had the opposite effect.

They are so good at thriving in cities as this kind of, you know, they are like really an apex predator of the city now.

You know, all kinds of things, that flexibility.

They can, they can go out at night and roam solo through the alleyways and eat trash and open trash cans.

But they could also like hunt in a pack in a cemetery, say, and you know, get a rabbit or whatever.

They can eat berries and they can eat,

you know, candy bars and they can eat like, there's tons of food.

There's tons of different ways to get it.

And that mesopredator that like be wary, they're also really, mostly really good at hiding from us.

Like,

these days, the estimates are that in Chicago, where I am, there's like like two to four thousand coyotes just like that kind of emerge at night after like downtown has kind of cleared out.

And man, that makes me happy.

I'm just

feel so much better knowing that there are that many coyotes probably in Chicago.

And they think they're in Manhattan.

They think they're in Philly.

They're definitely in San Francisco.

They're definitely where you know where you are, they're in Portland.

I think in Philly, they're like running student housing for pets.

Yeah, they're they're in LA, they're in San Francisco, they're in a lot of

American cities, and in some of them there's like a lot of them.

There was a photo that went around like 10 years ago of a coyote that very confidently got on the MAX train at the Portland airport and took a seat.

Oh, I have not heard about that.

Yeah, and they've learned the one thing that can be really dangerous to coyotes in the city, obviously, is humans and cars.

You know, cars going fast, that can get a coyote.

They have been observed to obey traffic lights.

So they wait for a green light or, you know, a walk sign basically to cross.

Well, and then I've heard of like feral dogs in like Russia doing that and or like taking the bus or the subway and like people theorizing that it's like even if they can't tell the light is changing, they like can follow people or like, I don't know, figure out the pattern, which humans do too, right?

I do so many things that I don't know why I'm doing, but I know that it works and I know that someone told me to.

Yeah.

So they just like, they're all these, you know, the train, the traffic lights, the sub shop, the grocery store, the skylight, like they're just all these stories of coyotes thriving in the city.

You know, in Chicago, they'll also hunt, like they, they'll hunt in the Chicago River.

And so I had heard that Graceland Cemetery, which is a big cemetery right near Wrigley Field in Chicago, had a bunch, like it was a really good place to see coyotes.

And so I went.

right after dawn one morning with this guy, Robert Lorizel, who who just has an incredible account where he takes pictures, he snaps pictures of wildlife in the city city and he gets like hawks, foxes, coyotes.

And I went to see them with him and we walked around and he took me up to this statue, which is called like Eternal Silence.

And it's this very scary grave that is for some of the first like European settlers in Chicago.

It's like nine feet tall.

It looks like a Grim Reaper.

And the urban legend is that if you look into its eyes, you'll see how you're going to die.

Oh, man.

And so he was doing that one.

He had heard that.

He went over to do it.

And he he didn't see that, but he saw it was his first coyote in the city.

And a coyote popped out.

And he snapped this awesome photo of it.

It's so metal.

And then, anyway, so we walked around and we weren't seeing it.

And he was showing me all the spots where we see them.

And then we started to, we sat down and started to talk.

And then

suddenly a literal gravedigger comes up to us and is like,

you guys were looking for coyotes, right?

Look behind you.

And we were being watched.

We were being watched by three

coyotes.

Isn't that wild?

And they're like, we were looking for them for two hours.

We couldn't see them, but they were totally watching us and they have learned, like, they have mostly learned to stay out of our way because like if they bother us, we get scared and then we often kill them.

I don't know.

So they, I feel like they're in this moment now where they're coming back.

to our spaces more and more because they because of their ability they can thrive there and like cities are actually like great environments for them because don't peregrine falcons also like cities do they I don't know yeah I think there's like a lot of peregrine falcons in like Minneapolis and it's they've like

adapted well or it like suits their needs because it's like they really like skyscrapers I think because they can you know interesting because it's like a perch yeah yeah exactly so right and the the the few species that can you know like survive in a an urban graveyard like some geese some ducks maybe some rabbits some

rats

all delicious prey for kayak plus whatever picnic you left behind in the trash you know yeah i guess that like if humans are leaving food all over the place which we do everywhere we go then like we also that attracts animals that are like

if you don't want the trash that's on offer you can eat the animals eating the trash i love it it's a circle of life and it moves us all

And so now that like we're kind of coming into contact with them again, but not as ranchers as much.

Obviously there are ranchers who have their feelings about them.

But, you know, yes, some of us are small pet owners, but like it's this, I feel like it's this, it's another sort of prismatic moment where, and this is another thing Christine Wilkinson studies in the Bay Area was kind of like.

complaints over the last 20 years since coyotes reappeared in San Francisco.

And she says there's this whole range where you get some people being like, oh, they're back.

It's beautiful.

And then they'll say things like, I don't want to be a snitch, but I am seeing this one near the park and I'm a little worried about toddlers and pets.

Or you'll see other ones being like really angry that are like, you know, I pay taxes.

Coyotes don't.

Get them out of here.

And there's like even a politician who's a city councilman in Torrance, California, where coyotes were kind of becoming a problem.

And he ran a campaign.

He like started this grassroots organization called called Evict Coyotes, which was suddenly this like counterpoint to the Humane Society and Greenpeace and that, where it was all about like, let's, you know, he, he campaigned on basically coyotes being a nuisance and he won.

And they started this, like, they started back up a kind of lethal injection program where they kill a coyote a week, which again, as we know, probably isn't going to help the problem.

Right.

It almost feels like a kind, like actually

similar to what executing human beings offers you as a politician, which is to perform a kind of passion play and prove that you're doing something that feels effective, even though, you know, logically and also from a statistics perspective, it probably doesn't matter.

Aaron Powell, so this idea of like our emotions, you know, like that our like vilification of them could like help this guy, what was his name, Arolio Mattucci, win city council in Torrance.

But also that that hatred of them, like we slather that vilification all over them and our fear of them, our want to hunt them just makes them come back more.

But then also in another way, like are this, this part like absolutely destroys me, this kind of last thought.

So our yearning, our love of them, like are like I kind of feel still in the camp of even though they ate my dog, I still like.

admire and like them for all that, you know, like this, that they're still wild.

And they, I mean, if you love a wild animal and understand that it'll be wild, then like that's true love.

And that they can survive us, like that there is still wildness in these places we have contaminated, like that, the wildness finds a way.

And that's beautiful.

That's exciting to me.

Mostly coyotes in cities, you know, we do need to worry about small pets.

That's a real thing.

And like, if we want to coexist with them, we just probably shouldn't leave our pets outside.

That's like a great fix, or just make sure you walk with them on a leash.

You know, that's a way to coexist.

But another thing is that, like, they will learn that we are dangerous to them.

They will mostly avoid us.

They will, in the graveyard, be watching us.

And even when we're trying to find them, hide, unless we start feeding them.

Yeah.

There are signs around Portland and maybe around Chicago too that are like a fed coyote is a dead coyote.

Don't feed the coyotes.

Yeah.

And I, and, and there's this story that Christine told me about in San Francisco where there was this one coyote got aggressive.

And you talked before about a coyote that was like following a toddler, right?

Across a or like a actually just like took like just chased a kid across a yard briefly and then gave up very fast, I believe, when an adult came out.

Yeah, and these are the ones that go viral.

Robert, who I walked around with in Chicago, like feels really tortured about like he posted this video of a coyote that was kind of walking back and forth across a little footbridge in the cemetery toward a woman reading who must have been reading a really good book because she didn't notice.

And then Christine, similarly, also, there was a video that went viral of like this coyote kind of like really basically stalking a toddler in the Bay Area.

And there have been attacks, like very scary attacks.

But

really, of these thousands of coyotes living among us, these are the outliers, but then they become the celebrity, they become the fear.

And in the Bay Area, there was this, it was truly one coyote who they named Carl, who was his kind of territory was Buena Vista Park.

And there was this one unhoused woman who was hand-feeding him.

And he got used to the idea that like there would be food.

And

it was basically when she passed away that

he moved to another park and he started attacking.

And because biopic of Carl.

Yeah, I know.

But it's heartbreaking because you think about that woman and like

she has been so screwed over by humanity.

You know, she has like fallen through the cracks and not been.

cared for and humanity has failed her.

Of course she's going to want connection, a literal hand feeding.

Well, let's be honest.

Like what human being, maybe there are people who don't and God bless them, but like what human being doesn't secretly want a special connection with a wild animal?

You know, like even if you know all about how dangerous that is and how it, you know, it's going to be harmful to them in the end.

Like I say, I think that it's because there's something in us that, or at least a lot of us, that just wants that.

Totally.

And like, and then it's this painful thing where I kind of talked about this, the cycle of emotions or how this is an invisibilia where like the emotion, like her yearning

for some kind of connection,

then

it's like the opposite of trying to kill just makes them come back.

Trying to connect in the end

made this creature more aggressive, start to attack, and then made us attack and then have to kill Carl.

And then Carl got killed.

No.

Coyotes are both caught in the crosshairs of like our perception of them changes their reality so much.

We invent these stories that we want animals to be inside of, and then they suffer because of it.

And I think one of the things that bothers me most and like keeps me up at night is like when people

create little like photo shoots or and maybe AI will actually reduce the need for this.

But like, you know, videos of an animal that's allegedly doing something cute, but is if you know the behavior of that animal, like clearly distressed and it's being read as cuteness or like they've got props or something, or like the remember the Slow Loris video.

No, oh my God.

There was like this whole thing where, like, there's this, I don't know, it's not a marsupial, but it's, I don't know, it's like, it's like a bush baby, or it's bush baby adjacent.

Okay.

But this like cute little guy with big eyes called the Slow Loris.

And there was like this super viral video like 15 years ago that I think has actually pretty much been wiped from the internet because of how much exotic animal trafficking it encouraged.

Yeah.

And it's like this animal that shouldn't be a pet, like has needs that like a human being can't meet, and certainly not just like a regular old human with an apartment and a cage.

And it was like this moment that went viral that caused them to,

you know, that caused a lot of animals to suffer simply for being too cute for us to be able to resist projecting our ideas onto.

And the idea on the video is that like this, it's so cute because it keeps raising its arms when this woman is like scratching him and then he'll like lower his arms and then raise them again because he wants more scratches but he doesn't because that animal has like glands underneath their arms that they use to like create a self-defensive spray oh that's heartbreaking it's like just our misinterpretation like our objection just slathers it so fully you don't see that it's in distress and like something that really bothers me because generally is like animal behavior being read as something other than it is so that humans can complete an agenda that involves like sentimentalizing the animal, but really just treating it as an object in our own fantasy and in a way that makes it disposable.

Yeah, and you're right.

It's like the

sentimentalization is as dangerous as the vilification, I think.

Ooh, that's really good.

Yeah, I think so.

And I think we really see that on the coyote.

And I think also because it is so, as like Indigenous people have said for thousands of years, it is so shape-shifty.

Right.

And it is this interesting refraction of us because, like, they were here.

They coexisted with indigenous people in nice populations.

We settled.

We brought our livestock.

We tried to kill them.

There were more and more of them.

We tried even harder to kill them.

We developed poisons that rock havoc on the whole world, you know, the whole ecology.

We finally dialed back that poisons.

They stayed.

They eventually learned how to thrive in our cities, which is not actually the Aldi thing.

And then those of us who loved them, like, there's problems with people who feed them, who leave, you know, meat out for them or like who hand feed them.

And then that makes them aggressive, makes us

attack, and makes us kill them.

And they're just like, they're both locked in a tangle with us, but they're also not.

They're thriving.

They're in the shadows.

And I think they're this, this, you know, good-sized predator that has figured out how to thrive in the kind of rough and tumble extreme environment that very few animals can, which is our cities and our worlds.

And that excites me.

That excites me about them.

Yeah.

That sort of survival part of them that we admire.

I think, I don't know, I find it hard in anything that we, we, when we admire it, we are admiring something in ourselves that we deserve to embrace, which is just our ability to adapt and to figure it out and to.

go on living and to love life, not because we get to fit into a certain identity or because we get to be pack hunters or we get to do whatever, but just because like it's really nice to live.

It's nice to like wake up another day and figure out what you're going to do this time to make it through.

It would be nice to not, you know, be poisoned, but

most of the time, you know, ideally most of the time that won't be happening.

And it's just like the daily figuring out how to be a coyote, having it all in Chicago.

Yeah.

And I think that, okay, I mean, again, don't project, see the animal.

But if we want to project, I do think like in a moment of duress, like

follow the coyote, be flexible, lean into your mesopredator, like let your anxiety serve you

and, you know, bob and weave and slither around the threats and get creative.

Eat an avocado.

Yeah.

Pair up with an unexpected friend.

Make friends with a badger.

Get on the max.

Whatever.

Yeah.

And there's like a joy in figuring out what actually works for you.

And also through survival, maybe finding conditions that you thrive more under than you did with whatever you were doing last.

I think there's like a big human attachment to the idea of having a plan.

And it's like, you don't have to have a plan.

To quote Phoebe Buffet, I don't even have a pla.

I don't even have a pla.

But thank you.

I just, I love listening to you.

And it's such a treat to come and get to gab with you.

I love listening to you too.

And well, tell us where else we can find you.

And what are you doing lately?

Have you written any fun children's book or anything?

I have written a children's book called Truckee Rhodes.

Best title.

Come try out Radiolab.

If you used to listen but left, come back.

We are, I'm so proud of the stuff we're doing there.

And some of it is very, you're wrong about it, Jason.

We have, oh, yeah.

We actually just did a rethink of Stockholm, which I know you've covered, but we did a different take where Sar Kari, our reporter, interviewed a bunch of people involved and actually just

won an award for it.

And I'm forgetting which award, but an award.

I just won a big award for it.

And then also, I would love if

you come listen to Terrestrials.

It is a show about about nature.

It is family friendly but it and it's on the Radiolab for Kids feed, which might sound like a deterrent, but we don't talk down.

It's really for all ages.

The dream is that we kind of engineered it to try to feel like a Pixar film in that it's fun for all ages.

There's little winks to adults.

And really, it's just like, if you're interested in nature, every episode is about something that is true, that really happened and kind of like this, but with less swear words, and, you know, shows you that this planet is still wilder than you think.

There are more possibilities than you think and it's really my creative baby at the moment.

So come along and listen.

I would love it if people checked it out.

And Lilicas, thank you for everything and I know that when we talk next you will have done more just I don't know more questioning and exploring and I can't wait to talk with you about whatever we talk about next.

And I'll see you soon.

Yay!

Bye!

The deeper thing was about how our relationships with these animals and how we interact with them can trickle down into things that eventually get those animals killed.

Looking at where the attractants are around the city feeds into the One Health thing because there are so many neighborhoods that have been systemically disadvantaged through things like redlining that have fewer municipal services, more pollutants and

quote-unquote pest species, and might be attracting coyotes because of these attractants, but then those coyotes also might be more exposed to things like pollutants and like kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of the spatial ecology of an urban coyote and where it thrives versus where it doesn't and where it gets bolder versus where it doesn't, et cetera, is sort of the next component, as well as with hyenas and the other species that I study.

And then I guess like last question for now.

I mean, when you've, when that cycle of kind of chain reactions, these linkages, when it, when you eventually learned about the woman who was hand-feeding the coyote, was there a like, ah, like

a sense of like, even if you didn't know her story, like an imagined sense of why someone unhoused and screwed over by human, the human world, like why she would want to connect with a coyote in that way?

Like, was there a sense of recognition?

Yeah, I mean, we all want to connect, right?

And, and so that's, that, that need for connection is going to be even more when you are someone who doesn't have other connections or, and, or who has been systemically disadvantaged by society.

Um, you know, San Francisco has a huge inequality problem because of all the gentrification and the tech boom and all of that.

And there are a lot of people suffering from homelessness that are constantly

both villainized and also, you know, ticketed and all these things and dealing with a lot of issues that are very much based in like societal ills and societal systemic problems that go back many, many, many years.

So in my mind, Carl, to some degree, is not just a product of the need for human connection in nature.

It's also a product of all of these systemic issues that you see in places, you see more starkly in places like cities.

I don't know.

I just think about the kid, the 11-year-old you, who's still so shy,

who's trying to catch a squirrel, who's trying to touch a squirrel and not quite succeeding.

But man, if she did would probably be feeding them from her hand.

Like

who it maybe wasn't being failed in the same way, who wasn't unhoused, but

wasn't loving the human world and was finding something in these cicadas or these squirrels.

Like, do you see yourself in that gesture?

And is it so easy to just say, like,

hurting humans, don't

take comfort in that?

Like,

I don't know.

I do see myself in it.

And honestly, like, any wildlife biologist will tell you that there is still, even though they're doing science and they're permitted and they're doing it ethically when they handle animals, there is still something that is achieved in connecting with that animal to do the science, like with your hands.

And that's our episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you to Lulu Miller.

And once again, the clip that you just heard is Lulu Miller interviewing Dr.

Christine E.

Wilkerson.

And thank you, Dr.

Wilkerson, so much for your work too.

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing.

And thank you to the four or five coyotes who are probably looking at me right now.