In this episode of the podcast, I interview the author of the new book, "Coyotes: An Animal of the American West: A Biography of a Wild Country's Most Disturbing Extinct Species" by Joe Kogan. In this episode, we discuss coyotes and their impact on our understanding of the wild animals, and how they have spread to every single state in the country. We also talk about the impact coyotes have had on our perception of them, and why we should be concerned about them. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed getting to know Joe and learn more about these amazing animals. Cheers, Joe! Check out the book and listen to the podcast to get a taste of what it's like to be a coyote. If you like the podcast and want to support it, please consider becoming a patron patron. Thanks to our patron Jamie. Don t forget to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you get your podcasts. It helps us spread the word to the rest of the world about the podcast. Thank you so much to our listeners. XOXO, Joe. xoxo -Jon Sorrentino "The Wild Ones" and "The Coyote Project" by Jon Rocha, "Mr. Rinello, "The Man in the Woods" by Steve Rinell "The Boy Who Couldn't See a Cat"? Thanks Jon, Joe, "Breeze" and Jamie, "Joe, I'm Not Yours Truly" - "What's a Coyote?" Joe, "A Coyote? , "The Cat Who Can't See It?" , "Hey Joe, I'll Tell You What It's a Coyote?" by Jamie, . "It's a Dog Who Can See It? " ? " , and "I'll Hear It?" - "I'm Not a Dog?" - & "You're Not a Bad Guy?" - "Can't I See It's A Coyote Talk About It??" - Jon, "Hey, I Can't Stop That's a Good One?" - by Jamie "A Coyotes Can't Get It? " - "Can I Hear It" - "Aye, It's Not A Dog?"
00:00:11.000Great to meet you, and thank you very much for doing this.
00:00:13.000I've learned more about coyotes over the last couple of months, reading your book and listening to your podcast with my good friend Steve Rinello, which was amazing.
00:00:25.000You know, I have coyotes all around my neighborhood, and it became very close to me when I saw one of my chickens get captured by a coyote.
00:00:35.000I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth.
00:00:38.000I'm like, God damn these motherfuckers.
00:00:42.000Especially, I live in a fairly rural area around here, about 40 minutes outside of LA, so the nights are quiet and you hear them screaming in the night.
00:00:53.000I didn't know much about them until I started reading your book, man.
00:00:58.000I mean, I think there's not really another mammal aside from us that has a biography like these animals do.
00:01:05.000And that's kind of one of the reasons I got fascinated with them.
00:01:10.000They were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana.
00:01:16.000And that's sort of the beginning of my getting captivated by these little small wolves because they were suddenly showing up in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana when I was 12, 13, 14 years old.
00:01:31.000And as far as I knew, this was an animal that was supposed to be in the deserts of the West.
00:01:37.000And so that seemed to be something that, you know, commanded one's attention that this critter is appearing in places where you would never expect it.
00:01:49.000And now, of course, everybody in the country is dealing with them.
00:01:52.000That is so fascinating that in our lifetime, they have spread from the American Southwest to every single state and literally every single city in the country.
00:02:03.000And I just got a, somebody sent me this yesterday that somewhere in Georgia, they have some sort of a bounty on these wolves, you know, coyotes.
00:02:14.000That's one thing a lot of people don't realize that a coyote is a wolf.
00:02:17.000Yeah, it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves, but it's out of the North American wolf line.
00:02:27.000I mean, coyotes are distinctively North American animals.
00:02:31.000They come out of canid evolution that began here 5.3 million years ago.
00:02:42.000Apparently they're offering some sort of bounty for each coyote killed.
00:02:47.000Now, what's fascinating about this, and one of the things that I learned from your book, is that when a coyote yells when they're doing their call in the night, they're essentially making roll call.
00:02:58.000And when one of them doesn't respond, the female generates more pups.
00:03:04.000Yeah, it's one of the many things that's probably happening when they're howling.
00:03:11.000I mean, they are taking a census, basically, of coyote populations in the area.
00:03:17.000And the result of that census can very well be.
00:03:23.000It produces some sort of chemical or metabolic change in the females, the breeding females, the alpha ones.
00:03:53.000They were arguing that, and they had some pretty good science, that coyotes are taking, in some areas, as many as 60% of the whitetail deer fawns.
00:04:05.000And so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to To take a whitetail.
00:04:14.000So South Carolina hasn't moved to the step that Georgia has of trying to impose some kind of bounty and encourage people to go out and shoot these animals, to take them in any way they can, but mostly shoot them.
00:04:30.000But, you know, I think these states in the South and in the East have a lot to learn by the Western or from the Western experience, because the truth is, we've been trying to eradicate, and I mean totally exterminate coyotes in the American West.
00:05:25.000And, you know, I mean, if they do, you can imagine those endangered naneys on the Big Island are totally done for.
00:05:31.000But they are not only in every single state in the Union except for Hawaii, but they are 7,000 miles now north and south in North America from above the Arctic Circle all the way down to Central America and beginning to colonize into South America.
00:05:50.000So the attempts to exterminate them, and I can explain why this happens, has to do with their evolution and the particular adaptations they have.
00:06:00.000But the attempts to exterminate them, or even to try to control their numbers, almost always produces exactly the opposite effect.
00:06:08.000So Georgia is going to end up with more coyotes than they've ever had before in their efforts to try to suppress their population.
00:06:19.000It's so contrary to logic, what you would think would be the solution for something like that.
00:06:24.000I mean, and when you go back to the American West, before the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in the 1990s, we had essentially extirpated them from a vast majority of the United States.
00:06:41.000Well, if you could please explain the relationship that the gray wolves had to the coyotes, which is one of the reasons that the coyotes became so adaptable.
00:07:12.000I mean, we've only been trying to wipe them out or control their populations for a little more than a century now, and that's too short a time for them to evolve these abilities to adapt and survive.
00:07:25.000They evolved those abilities because they were the small dog in a big dog's world.
00:07:33.000And, I mean, gray wolves have this very interesting story, too.
00:07:38.000Gray wolves come out of North American canid evolution, but they're one of the canid species that ended up leaving North America for a time and evolving for a couple of million years in Asia and in Europe.
00:07:52.000Gray wolves didn't start coming back to North America until about 25,000 or 30,000 years ago, during sort of the height of the late Pleistocene.
00:08:02.000Coyotes, of course, had been here and had evolved into their present species about 800,000 to a million years ago.
00:08:09.000And when gray wolves returned, I mean, they basically just started kicking the crap out of coyotes.
00:08:15.000And so coyotes evolved their ability to survive being harassed and persecuted as a result of being basically harassed by gray wolves.
00:08:28.000So this is why when you hear about the coy wolf that you hear on the East Coast, this is a coyote that bred with the red wolf and other Eastern wolves, correct?
00:08:39.000And that's, I mean, it's a very interesting story and it's kind of one of those instances where A modern event that we're all getting to witness, the emergence of the coy wolf, has its origins in the evolution of mammals in North America a million years or more.
00:09:01.000Because the reason, I mean, if you think about this, the reason coyotes, red wolves, and other eastern wolves like the Algonquin wolf We're good to go.
00:09:37.000But the reason they do that is because those animals, red wolves, eastern wolves of various kinds, and coyotes all seem to have come out of a group of animals that, unlike the gray wolf, never left North America.
00:10:08.000The result of coyotes spreading across the South has essentially kind of killed our hope that we were going to save the endangered red wolf as an independent species because red wolves so quickly and easily hybridize with coyotes that coyote genes swamp pure red wolf genes.
00:10:29.000So, I mean, that's something that, you know, is millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years old in evolution, but we're getting to see it play out right around us in our own time.
00:10:40.000And meanwhile, gray wolves and coyotes in the West aren't hybridizing at all.
00:10:45.000And so that's the explanation, is that gray wolves left and didn't come back until a while.
00:11:18.000So they had sort of separate migrations back to North America.
00:11:21.000So the Mexican gray wolf, the Western gray wolf, the Arctic wolf, these are all It's a gray wolf species, but they're separated at the subspecific level, and they all seem to have come back to North America at different times.
00:11:39.000But they had left North America like about three and a half million years ago, and so they became different animals in Asia and Europe.
00:11:47.000By the time they came back then, they were different enough from coyotes that they not only couldn't interbreed with them anymore, But they sort of are mortal enemies of one another.
00:12:00.000I mean, when we reintroduced great wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, coyotes had had 75 years in Yellowstone without any wolves.
00:12:09.000I mean, that served as a wonderful laboratory to study them, too, because it gave us a sense of what happens with coyotes when nobody is harassing them, when people aren't harassing them, which, of course, we didn't in Yellowstone Park.
00:13:50.000I mean, one of the things that has happened, obviously, in the last hundred years or so, the last 75 years at least, Is that as a result of persecuting them, we've sent them into this kind of colonization strategy where they have larger litters of pups.
00:14:09.000When their populations are suppressed, it's easier for them to get the pups that they do have to adulthood.
00:14:17.000I mean, in Yellowstone, for example, one of the things we saw in that period when they weren't being harassed in the 60s, 70s, 80s is that We're good to go.
00:14:54.000And then they have this marvelous ability.
00:14:58.000I mean, I talk about it a good bit in the book.
00:15:03.000They're one of the few species, and we happen to be one of the other mammal species around the world that does this, where they have the ability to exist as a social animal, in the case of coyotes, as a pack animal, of course.
00:15:18.000But whenever they're pressured, they tend to split apart into singles and pairs, and they scatter across the landscape.
00:15:28.000And that's what sends them colonizing across the continent.
00:15:33.000The fact that they can do that is what separates them really from wolves, right?
00:15:36.000And that's why they weren't able to wipe them out in the West?
00:15:40.000I mean, if you think about what happened with gray wolves, I mean, we started this sort of decided effort to eliminate gray wolves from the American West in Russia.
00:15:53.000I mean, just ordinary people started putting out strychnine bait for them in the 1860s and 1870s.
00:16:01.000Was it ranchers at first that started that?
00:16:12.000Because they came out of Europe with a background with wolves.
00:16:16.000That's one of the things that distinguishes us Americans and coyotes, is that we didn't have coyotes in Europe.
00:16:23.000So we didn't arrive with this preloaded preconception about the role that coyotes played in the world.
00:16:30.000But we did with animals like bears and wolves.
00:16:33.000And so people just, from the very beginning, whenever the Atlantic seaboard was settled, There were wolf drives and wolf roundups and every kind of attempt to wipe out wolves as competitors with us for our stock.
00:16:55.000So in the West, people just threw strychnine bait out.
00:16:58.000I mean, strychnine was invented in Pennsylvania in 1848, and it was widely available in places like Missouri when you set out across the West, and people would just buy a bunch of baits.
00:17:09.000I mean, if they hung around long enough to get the animal, they would skin it and try to sell the pelt.
00:17:14.000But they just poisoned them like crazy.
00:17:17.000Then, starting in 1915, this government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which positions itself as the solution to predators, first decides that it's the wolf that we need to take out.
00:17:34.000And, I mean, they managed to take out the last probably quarter million wolves in We're good to go.
00:18:07.000But coyotes responded to that kind of pressure in a very different way.
00:18:11.000I mean, when you started pressuring them, their packs tended to break up.
00:18:17.000They tended to scatter and go into this fishing mode.
00:18:20.000And so, indeed, as you said a minute ago, that's exactly why we were able to take out wolves by the middle of the 1920s.
00:18:29.000We pretty much had resolved the wolf issue in the West.
00:18:32.000But Year after year after year, as wolf numbers decline, I mean, I'll offer an example in Montana, for instance.
00:18:40.0001899, the state of Montana bountied 23,000 wolves.
00:18:46.000That was 1899. 21 years later, by 1920, We're good to go.
00:19:09.000In Montana, they were bounding 30,000 coyotes in 1899. In 1910, 30,000 coyotes.
00:19:29.000It's so wonderfully counterintuitive in the whole kind of environmental story of America, because what you always expect is that any time we put our mind to taking on some creature and taking it out,
00:19:46.000I mean, you know, the only time this never really happened was in Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab is driven mad by his inability to control the great white whale and to control nature.
00:19:59.000And that, in a lot of places, that seems to be where we land when people realize that you can't do anything about coyotes.
00:20:09.000It kind of drives people out of their minds, because this is just not the American way.
00:20:56.000I'm basically an environmental writer and somebody who uses history a lot.
00:21:05.000And there is unresolved science out there, and what I mean by that is that there are a couple of different camps that have advanced positions about the relationship between all these different wolves that we have in North America and coyotes.
00:21:26.000So there is a guy at UCLA here in Los Angeles His name is Robert Wayne, and he has done genetic work on canids.
00:21:40.000One of his papers is called, the title includes the phrase, Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids.
00:21:48.000And he's done genetic analysis on coyotes, red wolves, gray wolves, and eastern wolves.
00:21:55.000And his argument is that Gray wolves, red wolves, and eastern wolves are all actually some version of gray wolves.
00:22:13.000So that's a different argument than the one that I made for you just a few minutes ago.
00:22:17.000I've been following, and I've followed in my book because I found it a more compelling argument, one advanced by a group of geneticists from Canada led by a guy named Paul Wilson.
00:22:29.000And that's the position that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its Endangered Species Division takes.
00:22:37.000And their argument is that the gray wolf It's a separate animal from the red wolf, the eastern wolf, and the coyote.
00:22:47.000They argue that coyotes, red wolves, and eastern wolves all come out of a clade.
00:22:54.000It's the biological term, C-L-A-D-E. A clade of animals that are purely North American in origin and that had probably a similar ancestor as recently as maybe 300,000 years to 500,000 years ago.
00:23:11.000So we've got two different arguments about the relationship of coyotes to wolves.
00:23:18.000And I don't know who's going to win it, but one of the reasons I tend to sort of favor the Paul Wilson line of argument and the one that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using is because they use evidence beyond just genetics.
00:23:34.000They also use morphology, and they use fossils.
00:23:39.000And Robert Wayne and the group of geneticists who work with him all seem to just rely specifically on genetics, and they don't ever try to verify their findings by looking at the fossil record, for example.
00:23:55.000So I don't know how it's going to play out between these two groups, but I find the argument, the Canadian geneticist that has informed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's strategy a little bit more compelling right now.
00:24:11.000But, I mean, it's something to pay attention to.
00:24:14.000Well, it seems like you need some sort of a really comprehensive way of looking at it because you're dealing with so many different factors, right?
00:24:21.000If you're trying to acquire evidence based on 25,000 years ago, it seems like there's got to be a lot of different...
00:24:28.000It's very odd to me that we know as much as we do know.
00:24:34.000I mean, and to try to figure it all out has got to be incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with so little evidence.
00:24:40.000And you're looking at the fossil record, I mean...
00:24:43.000A lot of the animals that died 25,000 years ago, there's zero evidence of them, right?
00:24:49.000I mean, 25,000 years ago, for example, in the late Pleistocene, the evidence from La Brea Tar Pit indicates that coyotes were a slightly different animal than they are now.
00:25:02.000At the time, we think gray wolves were coming back into North America, returning to their evolutionary homeland.
00:25:10.000Coyotes were much bigger, more strapping, had larger dentition, stronger jaws.
00:25:16.000And what looks like happened is when gray wolves arrived in the West and began competing with these larger, more strapping coyotes, coyotes sort of sought a different path.
00:25:29.000They sort of stepped back away from outright competition with an even bigger competition.
00:25:35.000Canid, and evolved into a smaller, more gracile animal that was not so much just a pure predator and scavenger, but more omnivorous, and so became our modern Canis latrans species.
00:25:51.000But yeah, and I will say, as you mentioned a minute ago, it's hard to know all this.
00:25:57.000Much of this information is fairly recent.
00:26:35.000I mean, the same thing is happening on my place in New Mexico, starting essentially about in August or September.
00:26:41.000All the coyote droppings that I've found on the place, and I've got a lot of coyotes on my place in New Mexico, has just been filled with juniper berries.
00:27:05.000So they'll, I mean, you know, people have posted photos on the Internet or YouTube videos that show them plucking apples and peaches and things off trees in their backyards.
00:27:18.000I mean, they really go for that sort of stuff.
00:27:24.000And so do we know if wolves do anything like that, or is it just a coyote characteristic?
00:27:29.000It's pretty much a coyote characteristic.
00:27:31.000I mean, you know, as we've been saying, the coyote in an evolutionary sense is a small wolf.
00:27:43.000But it is different, especially from gray wolves.
00:27:48.000And one of the ways it's different that the biologists, the behavioralists who have watched coyotes interact with one another and watched gray wolves interact with one another is an indication of how much more pack-oriented,
00:28:04.000hence sort of predatory carnivorous, wolves are.
00:28:09.000Wolves, because they exist mostly despite our cultural motif of the lone wolf, actually wolves are such pack animals that they have a much wider range of expressions that they convey to one another in their interactions with one another.
00:28:34.000Sort of engage with one another in a repertoire of grimaces and grins and showing their teeth or curling their lip, of course, all sorts of body language where they curl their tails under and they'll drop their heads and drop their ears.
00:28:53.000Coyotes have a similar repertoire, but it's a much more limited one, and the argument that the behavioralists make is that that's an indication of an animal that's not so pack-oriented.
00:29:05.000It's not living exclusively in a social group.
00:29:09.000It can go off on its own or as a pair, and therefore it doesn't really need all those facial expressions to convey emotion.
00:29:18.000So how do we know that all these animals, all these canids, evolved in North America and then spread out and went to Asia and Africa and all these different places?
00:29:41.000Go back to about 5.3 million years ago, and all the canids all around the world seem to have come out of this singular origin, much the way all the primates of the world came out of an origin in Africa.
00:29:57.000And so, you know, and the horses, for instance, same thing.
00:30:00.000Horses came out of an evolutionary origin in North America and then spread across the land bridges to become zebras in Africa, for instance.
00:30:51.000Somehow or another, the animal came from North America and made it all the way to Africa.
00:30:55.000And I want to bring something up that you talked about just now.
00:30:59.000Horses evolved in North America and became zebras.
00:31:03.000I mean, all that started here, but then they weren't here anymore.
00:31:07.000And then they were reintroduced to the Native Americans by the Europeans.
00:31:11.000Now, what happened to the horses that were here?
00:31:15.000Well, that's one of the great mysteries of North American evolution, actually.
00:31:22.000I mean, the frank answer is we don't really know what happened to them.
00:31:26.000So this is maybe somebody out there listening.
00:31:32.000Joe, in the next 10 or 15 years, we'll solve this problem, because here we have a group of animals whose evolutionary, in the case of the horse, their evolutionary origins go back 56 million years in North America.
00:31:51.000So 10 times greater depth in time than the canids do.
00:32:35.000Enamel on its teeth in order to resist having its teeth being eroded down by sand.
00:32:40.000It becomes ultimately, by 15,000, 20,000 years ago, an animal that we would not be able to tell humans.
00:32:53.000I mean, I've seen skeletons of some of the horses that were in North America down to about 11,000 years ago, and even the paleontologists would have a hard time telling which was the skeleton of a North American horse and which was the skeleton of a modern domestic horse.
00:33:12.000But these animals had We're good to go.
00:33:40.000We Europeans returned them to North America 500 years ago.
00:33:44.000One of the reasons they become such a success and just spread across the western part of the continent and multiply into the millions is because they're already pre-adapted to the landscape.
00:33:58.000And so they've already got the hooves, they've got the teeth, they've got the running ability, they've got the ability to buck off predators.
00:34:36.000You know, and they became, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to kind of imagine, because the West, 10, 15, 25,000 years ago, had been a place where horses had made up in some parts of the West as much as a third of the biomass of all the grazing animals.
00:35:00.000And in the 1700s and 1800s, they were doing the same thing again.
00:35:07.000They were multiplying into the hundreds of thousands, the millions, gradually spreading.
00:35:13.000New Mexico is where the domestic European horse first got loose and began to spread.
00:35:19.000And they had reached all the way up into Montana, to Wyoming, into California.
00:35:23.000And to the edges of Canada by 1850, 1860 or so, and there probably were at least two to three million of them at that point.
00:35:32.000So they were just re-inhabiting their old landscape and fitting themselves into an ecology now that had been dominated by bison for a long time, and now horses are back in the mix.
00:35:44.000And horses today are a very controversial animal.
00:36:06.000Yeah, and so, you know, there are plenty of people out there who...
00:36:10.000Who argue that the domestic horse, the feral horse in the West, which is the rootstock of most of our population of wild horses in the West, essentially it's a European animal that has become an invader.
00:36:29.000I mean, I always, and I've had, you know, arguments on stage with people who express this position, I always say, well, what you have to say about the horse, first of all, is that it's an American animal with an asterisk.
00:36:46.000It's gone for about 8,000 or 9,000 years.
00:36:50.000That's actually not a huge amount of time in evolutionary terms.
00:36:57.000And even though we did domesticate them and began to produce some breeds, horses left to their own devices pretty quickly breed back to the wild look and the wild state.
00:37:09.000I mean, they'll acquire those dorsal stripes down their backs and zebra striping on their legs.
00:37:39.000But yeah, they will fairly readily go back to this early wild horse look, which is probably what horses looked like in North America 10,000 years ago.
00:37:51.000James, see if you can find some pictures of wild horses with zebra stripes.
00:37:55.000I don't think I've ever seen that before.
00:37:57.000Yeah, look in the Pryor Mountains wild horse range in Montana, and you'll see a whole population of animals that come out of that That background.
00:38:07.000They have a very interesting history because it was a group of animals that Lewis and Clark acquired from the Indians, and they were going to take back and trade in the Mandan villages.
00:38:19.000And a guy named Pryor, who was responsible for the herd, was driving them through the Wow.
00:38:51.000So whatever the mass extinction event that took place somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago that claimed the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, all these different animals, the horse was amongst that as well?
00:39:02.000The horse was one of the ones that disappeared, yeah.
00:39:07.000So, I mean, we've got some pretty good explanations for what happened to the mammoths.
00:39:12.000The mammoths probably were taken out by human hunters, because this was a version of the American West that basically had emerged in the absence of people.
00:39:29.000You mentioned a minute ago you were amazed at the fact that the wolves were able to spread around the world and the horses were able to spread around the world.
00:39:37.000We started in Africa and we spread around the world, getting to Europe about 45,000 years ago.
00:39:44.000Didn't get to North America, which was one of the last places except for the islands out in the Pacific, that humans got to until about 15,000 years ago.
00:39:53.000And so when we arrived, we confronted a landscape that was full of animals like mammoths.
00:40:03.000That had no experience with human hunters at all.
00:40:07.000And what we think is that these early arrivals from Siberia were probably really accomplished big game hunters.
00:40:15.000And I mean, like all elephants, mammoths had really long gestation periods.
00:40:21.000It took them, once they were impregnated, it took them two years to have a calf.
00:40:28.000And so they have a really low population recovery ability.
00:40:33.000And biologists call this case species that have a kind of a low reproductive rate.
00:40:40.000And so whenever humans arrive and, you know, and we take a look at the situation and, I mean, cow mammoths evidently were a lot easier to deal with in a hunt than the big bulls were.
00:40:53.000And so these hunters seem to have concentrated on cows.
00:40:57.000I mean, that's, of course, obviously going to be detrimental to the demographics of the population.
00:41:04.000And so probably in the case of mammoths, it was human hunting of an animal that had no prior experience with human hunters and not very many defenses against us that took them out.
00:41:16.000The other animals, though, a lot of them, I mean, some of the predators, we think, they went because their prey species disappeared.
00:41:23.000But I mean, the amazing thing with the horses is just hard to fathom because we haven't found very many sites.
00:41:31.000There was one recently discovered near Boulder, Colorado, of what appeared to be an early Indian kill of horses.
00:41:40.000But, you know, if you tried to argue that the same thing happened with horses that happened with the mammoths, you'd think you'd be finding kill sites all over the place.
00:42:07.000And they have this black stripe down the back.
00:42:11.000The dorsal stripe is coming, so, yeah.
00:42:14.000Well, I read something about zebras that it makes it very hard for predators to differentiate between individual zebras, and that they had put an ear collar or clip on one of the zebras, and immediately that zebra was taken out.
00:42:42.000From these North American horses that the zebra striping trait originated here and then ended up being taken by the animals that migrated into Africa and perhaps elaborated on over time where they're dealing with lions and cheetahs and leopards and things like that.
00:43:07.000And they had a lion in North America at one point that was even bigger than the African lion.
00:43:12.000Panthera, the step lion, was a lion that was one and a half times the size of the African lion.
00:43:19.000And we had a short-faced bear that was probably even more ferocious than modern-day grizzlies.
00:43:27.000For one thing, it seems to have been this really gracile animal.
00:43:31.000It looked far more nimble and Yeah, we've talked about that thing many times since I heard you talk about it and we pulled up pictures of it and the size of the things and the length of the legs.
00:43:50.000I mean, it's bigger than a polar bear, right?
00:43:52.000There's a Canadian biologist named Valerius Geist who has argued for a long time that he thinks until short-faced bears became extinct, Wow.
00:44:49.000Yeah, I think probably about 14,000, 15,000 years ago.
00:44:54.000And as I said, at least one biologist argues that it's no coincidence that that's about the time that humans began showing up, is that once this bear is gone, then it makes it possible for people to...
00:45:08.000Is there a hypothesis as to why that went extinct?
00:46:04.000Well, it's called the Milankovitch Cycles, a European...
00:46:08.000I can't remember if he was a geographer or probably a geographer...
00:46:14.000I was the first to speculate that this is why we have this climate history of a procession between ice ages and pluvials in between, is because the earth wobbles, and as it wobbles, it will at certain times Position the northern hemisphere farther away from the sun for a period of 30,000,
00:47:46.000I would love to get you together with him, because he's got some compelling evidence.
00:47:49.000He believes that the woolly mammoths and, what was it, 60-something percent of the large mammals that died off during that very distinct time period, he says that directly corresponds to physical evidence of this tritonite stuff and all these diamonds that they find,
00:48:05.000micro-diamonds that come from these impacts.
00:48:08.000Is it a possibility that you've ever considered?
00:48:11.000Well, I mean, I've read about it, and I think, you know, as in so many questions out there, you know, we haven't figured out the answers to things in a lot of instances.
00:48:23.000I mean, what I was sort of leading to by tracking that Milankovitch cycle procession through time is that That sort of change tends to produce among animal species and plants,
00:48:42.000In other words, it generates a lot of new, because you're often isolating populations, and when populations get isolated from their parent populations, they'll Evolve some new traits and maybe even become a new species.
00:48:57.000It's kind of a cycle where you end up with a lot of different new animals.
00:49:02.000But when change comes, you often lose a good many of them.
00:49:07.000And so these extinction scenarios that are associated with the ice ages and the pluvials in between, the interglacials, Do tend to produce quite a number of extinctions.
00:49:24.000And the short-faced bear, I mean, I wish I was more of an expert so I could directly address exactly what happened to it.
00:49:32.000But all I can tell you from my limited knowledge of it is that it seems to have disappeared in North America around 15,000 years ago.
00:49:41.000And that's at a time when the Wisconsin Ice Age is beginning to wind down.
00:49:47.000And so, you know, we still haven't – I mean, there are a lot of scholars out there, a lot of people out there who are arguing climate is the primary explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions.
00:50:00.000Most people sort of concede that, okay, in the case of the mammoths, our evidence tends to point more towards human hunting.
00:50:09.000But we don't know about all these other animals.
00:50:12.000I mean, the predators, as I said, they seem to disappear because the prey disappears.
00:50:17.000But, I mean, why do the camels disappear?
00:50:20.000Why do these giant ground sloths disappear?
00:50:24.000When the things that they ate, the globe mallows that are still in the West are still out there, but the animal that fed on them isn't there anymore.
00:50:36.000It's something, you know, that people have been sort of hammering around over beers in laboratories for actually more than a century now, and we still haven't answered all the questions.
00:50:48.000It is so fascinating, but it's so amazing that you could even formulate that much information based on something that was 25, 15,000 years ago.
00:50:57.000I mean, this whole country that we live in today...
00:51:02.000As far as Europeans are concerned, we've only been here a few hundred years, which is really kind of amazing.
00:51:07.000We've only been here for a few hundred years, you know.
00:51:09.000And, I mean, as you know from the other recent book of mine, American Serengeti, One of the animals that you can observe today that gives us maybe our best sense of what the Pleistocene is like is the pronghorn antelope,
00:51:28.000which is still out on the plains and, of course, across a lot of the West.
00:51:32.000They nearly disappeared at the turn of the 20th century.
00:51:36.000We've managed to bring them back in a lot of Western states.
00:51:39.000But that's an animal that Is essentially a holdover from the Pleistocene and is kind of still fighting Pleistocene ghosts.
00:51:51.000I mean, it's an animal, as everybody knows, that can run 65 miles an hour, and yet for the last 10,000 years, the fastest animal that can chase it, the gray wolf, only runs 45 miles an hour.
00:52:05.000And so that leads to the obvious question, why the overkill in terms of speed?
00:52:11.000What you would think is all you need to do is run 47 miles an hour and you got it covered.
00:52:18.000But here are these animals still among us that run 65 miles an hour, that can't jump over fences.
00:52:24.000That still congregate in what people call the selfish herd, where they'll group up as a herd of adults, and the dominant animals will end up in the middle, so that if there are any predators, they get the ones on the edges, and the dominant ones survive.
00:52:42.000And yet, they don't have any predators except as fawns.
00:52:49.000And so what we think is happening is that in the pronghorn, we've got an animal that has survived into our own time that preserves how evolution shaped it.
00:53:24.000And all those animals have disappeared.
00:53:27.000They're all ghosts and have been for 10,000 years.
00:53:30.000And yet pronghorns still preserve the ability to run away from a cheetah and to group up as a selfish herd and preserve the dominant animals in the middle against a hyena attack.
00:53:42.000I had no idea they could run that fast.
00:57:19.000A, they're not on the Great Plains anymore, which was the primary horse range during the 1700s and 1800s.
00:57:30.000They're in the deserts of places like Nevada, so they're in a much more arid country, not in a lushly grassed plain setting, but in a desert setting.
00:57:42.000And We don't have their predators around anymore.
00:57:46.000I mean, we've taken out gray wolves, which certainly did prey on cults.
00:57:52.000We've almost wiped out mountain lions.
00:57:55.000Their mountain lions are coming back, and that was always one of the major predators of cults.
00:58:01.000But horses don't have the sort of predators anymore that they had during the Pleistocene, or even in the 1700s and 1800s.
00:58:11.000And so without their predators on the landscape, and also being out in a desert setting rather than out in the much lusher Great Plains, they've become an issue in terms of We're good to go.
00:58:37.000In the 19th century, in the 1800s, I mean, where they were were out on the Great Plains.
00:58:44.000They were in eastern Montana and eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico in this much more lushly grassed setting.
00:58:52.000And there, of course, still were wolves and still were mountain lions to take out the cults and sort of keep their population and suppress them.
00:59:00.000It seems, you know, I mean, I'm incredulous that human beings that didn't even have bows and arrows could kill off the woolly mammoth.
00:59:06.000But then you stop and think about what people are able to do in the few hundred years that we've been here.
00:59:11.000When we arrived in North America, when Europeans arrived in North America and just essentially swept through the country and almost extirpated everything we found, like white-tailed deer, antelopes, buffalo.
00:59:24.000I mean, we almost wiped the whole thing out.
00:59:49.000destruction of wildlife that I've been able to discover in world history.
00:59:55.000When Europeans came to North America and proceeded, as you just described, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific and essentially wiped out Just dozens of animal species,
01:00:11.000in most instances, not completely exterminating them, but dropping them to numbers that were so low that, you know, you worried that this animal was going to survive.
01:00:25.000And, I mean, some animals we did go extinct.
01:00:28.000The Carolina parakeet, for example, was this beautiful animal.
01:00:33.000A gaudy, green and yellow, large crow-sized parrot that was in North America all the way up to the Great Lakes, and they became extinct by the 1930s.
01:00:47.000They were regarded as agricultural pests, and so farmers basically...
01:00:53.000Killed them and enlisted government agents, as had happened with wolves and coyotes, to wipe them out.
01:01:01.000It's fascinating, and I guess it makes sense, but it's just fascinating that just a few hundred years ago they lacked the foresight to understand that any sort of intrusion into the ecosystem, any sort of, you know, eliminating one predator or taking out one thing, causes a cascade of events that can be disastrous.
01:01:18.000No, people didn't know anything about ecology.
01:01:20.000I mean, you know, we don't have ecology emerge as a science until the 1860s.
01:02:27.000Don't know a damn thing about it, but...
01:02:30.000We're going to make sure that this thing does not survive through the 20th century.
01:02:34.000It's fascinating in your book the accounts of the early explorers who are trying to figure out what the hell a coyote was.
01:02:40.000They thought maybe it was a jackal, they didn't know what it was, and then they finally decided it was some sort of a small wolf, and then the initial description of it.
01:02:52.000Yeah, a lot of people don't know this.
01:02:53.000For most of the 19th century, I mean, I've seen references to this name as late as, like, 1915. Americans called coyotes prairie wolves.
01:03:05.000That was the name Lewis and Clark gave them, and so that's what everybody called them.
01:03:09.000And it wasn't until we started getting out into the southwest In the 1840s and 1850s, especially around Santa Fe, where there were Indian people who had come up with the Spanish colonization of the Southwest who spoke the language of the Aztecs.
01:03:34.000The word coyote comes from the Aztec language.
01:03:39.000So when Americans were first getting into New Mexico in the 1840s, they began encountering people who were using a different name for the animal.
01:03:52.000And over the next 30 or 40 years, that name sort of overtook the term prairie wolf and finally completely replaced it.
01:04:03.000So the original name was an Aztec name?
01:04:08.000And it's pronounced in the Noot language.
01:04:11.000It's spelled in their language C-O-Y-O-T-L. But the L on the end is silent.
01:04:20.000And so the way they pronounced it was Coyote.
01:04:25.000And, I mean, the Aztec language, because they, you know, they were an empire, and they defeated a lot of peoples, and they imposed their language and their customs on a lot of people.
01:04:36.000There were all sorts of Indians who weren't necessarily Aztec who spoke that language.
01:04:41.000And there were evidently enough of them in places like Santa Fe and Tucson that when Anglo-Americans got out there, they were encountering not only Native people who were using that word, but the Spanish people.
01:04:57.000Not being privy to the American use of the term prairie wolf, the Spanish had just adopted the Indian name for the animal, and they had Hispanicized it, and they gave it an extra syllable, so they called the animal a coyote.
01:05:14.000And that's what these early Americans were hearing.
01:05:18.000They were largely hearing the Spanish pronunciation, the three-syllable version coyote.
01:05:24.000And Mark Twain comes along in the 1870s and writes a very famous book about the West, Roughing It.
01:05:30.000Of course, he's America's most famous writer at the time.
01:07:12.000And as I argue in this book, I mean, what I try to do with Coyote America is to tell the biography of the animal from its evolutionary origins through its history up until the present time when,
01:07:28.000of course, it's in everybody's backyard all over the country.
01:07:30.000And so we're all dealing with it and having to figure out what it is and how you coexist with it.
01:07:40.000I mean, it goes, you know, for a million years of its evolution, confronting at certain times the return of gray wolves to North America, which clearly don't like coyotes and beat the crap out of them,
01:07:55.000and even probably influenced their evolutionary direction into a smaller, more jackal-like animal.
01:08:03.000But then, also, it has this story that's associated with us.
01:08:08.000When humans arrive in North America, I mean, coyotes get this wonderful period that lasts like 14,500 years or something, where native people look at them and say,
01:08:25.000that's the most intriguing animal on the continent.
01:08:31.000It's, for one thing, Mammoths, camels, horses, all these big charismatic animals are dying out around us in the Pleistocene Extinctions.
01:08:43.000Somehow, these little guys don't seem to be perturbed by it.
01:08:48.000They're surviving while all these big creatures, these big impressive creatures are going away.
01:08:54.000And I think they also, at least this is what I argue in the book, they had this sense that Coyotes live by their wits.
01:09:05.000And I think that provided them with a model that they thought was valuable.
01:09:10.000Because I think living successfully because you're smart...
01:09:16.000You know, that's a trait that humans in any age, including ours right now, could very well follow and find to be an effective way to go about facing your future.
01:09:33.000So they see this animal as being particularly smart, particularly adaptable, a survivor.
01:10:03.000At some point in time, and who knows when it was, I mean, it could have been 10,000 years ago, they convert it into Indian people in the West, everywhere coyotes range, convert this animal into one of their principal gods, their principal deities, and make it this sacred creature.
01:10:22.000I mean, they have no reason to kill them or harass them or anything.
01:10:26.000And so instead, they look at it as this Avatar, this stand-in for humans in the world, study it really closely, and they proceed to create this body of literature.
01:10:40.000It's our oldest literature from North America in the form of oral stories that have coyote...
01:10:49.000As the central character, but it's not the little coyote that's trotting through your camp.
01:11:13.000It's so weird that, you know, the way we look at coyotes today is this nuisance and this pest, and that's directly attributed to agriculture, right?
01:11:21.000Directly attributed to us having livestock anywhere near them, deciding we'd want them out.
01:11:25.000But if you look at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, when I was there, I took a photo of it because it was so weird.
01:14:25.000Because if you don't like rats, you should thank the coyotes.
01:14:27.000The reason why we're not infested with rats, I mean, we're in the hills.
01:14:31.000When you're in the hills out here in California, there's rats and rodents everywhere, but they're not.
01:14:36.000And the reason why is because these coyotes, like...
01:14:39.000We make that mistake so often where we think that we're smart and we're going to eliminate one thing in this system and it's going to be fine now.
01:14:49.000All we have to do is take out this coyote and everything will be great.
01:14:52.000But no, you're going to have a rat infestation.
01:14:54.000And that's one of the things that you talked about in your book about farmers who had chased off the coyotes and they had rabbit infestations.
01:15:05.000I mean, this happens just over and over and over again.
01:15:08.000I think one of the reasons that we tend to endlessly make the same mistake with animals like this is because we don't try to spend any effort to understand the ecological world around us and to understand their role in it in particular.
01:15:28.000I mean, I've been going around the country a lot over the last eight months talking about this book, because obviously everybody is dealing with them, and some people are brand new in dealing with them, and they're alarmed, first of all, that there's this small wolf trotting down the street or through their yard,
01:15:45.000and then, of course, they immediately hear, well, it's going to get your cat, it's going to get your small dog, it's liable to grab your three-year-old.
01:15:56.000Through kind of urban legend, make the rounds at an accelerated rate, and Sort of basic good information about the animal doesn't make the round very effectively at all.
01:16:14.000But what you have to grapple with, first of all, is you've got to start with a position, which I'll admit, this is not the American position to take.
01:16:23.000It's the position that, in this instance, we have confronted a part of the natural world that we are not able to control.
01:16:39.000They're going to be among us no matter what we do.
01:16:42.000I mean, you can certainly take out, you know, coyotes are individuals, and so if there's a bad actor in the neighborhood, and very few of them, by the way, in the studies of coyotes in urban settings are bad actors, but occasionally there's one that starts catching cats or starts chasing dogs or something.
01:17:00.000I mean, you can take that one out and perhaps improve the situation.
01:17:08.000Any coyote, because you're afraid of something like your cat might disappear, is going to boomerang in every instance because attempts to persecute them, as I try to point out over and over in Coyote America, result in Every case in more coyotes and and excuse the populations so that what you end up with are often youngsters teenagers that like human teenagers get in more trouble than adults do so
01:17:38.000the thing that I mean, I keep trying to do, and of course there's a group in California, in San Francisco, called Project Coyote that's been at this, trying to help people understand how to coexist with coyotes for the last seven or eight years.
01:19:21.000And I've told people for most of this year, I mean, this is from my own experience, because I've lived in the urban wildlands interface for almost all my adult life, out in the countryside, away from town.
01:19:34.000Whenever you find your cat, that's probably a coyote, and it's attacked the cat because it thinks it's a competitor, and it attacks it, kills it, leaves it.
01:19:46.000If the animal disappears, if your cat disappears and you never see it again, Either that's happened in the time when they're provisioning pups, or if it happens in the fall or the winter or the early spring and your cat totally disappears,
01:20:02.000that probably was a great horned owl that got your cat.
01:20:05.000I mean, owls pluck cats and take them to their roost and devour them, and so your cat disappears and you never see it again.
01:20:14.000But what almost everybody does now that we know we've got coyotes is you hear coyotes howling in the hills.
01:21:26.000It's so funny that we think of that thing as, oh, the wise old owl, give a hoot, don't pollute.
01:21:31.000Meanwhile, those motherfuckers are as evil as it gets.
01:21:34.000Well, they are definitely major predators, and they, you know, I mean, there's the stories about them in New Mexico.
01:21:39.000I mean, I've got friends who were sitting out at an outdoor bar a couple of years ago with a railing on it.
01:21:46.000It was a late afternoon, and a cat was walking along the railing while they're sitting there with their drinks, shooting the shit, and all of a sudden, an owl comes in, and in a Flash plucks that cat off the railing and the next thing they see is the owl flying off through the cottonwood trees over the creek with this cat dangling from its calves.
01:23:04.000There's a wildlife sanctuary near here, and we visited a couple of times, and they have owls there, and you get to see them and check them out up close, like animals that have been injured and things like that, and you just see the talons on those suckers, and you just...
01:23:18.000Yeah, it's fascinating how we anthropomorphize some of these animals and turn them into these cutie pies.
01:23:24.000You know, like polar bears are selling Coca-Cola and Klondike bars, and owls are selling Tootsie Roll pops.
01:23:30.000Meanwhile, they're out there jacking cats, you know?
01:23:34.000There's a video in Los Angeles, and one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about this is because I'd heard you say before, I think on Rinella's podcast, What you just said about cats and dogs, essentially the coyotes think of them as competitive predators.
01:23:50.000But there's a video in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, of a coyote eating a cat on a lawn.
01:23:59.000And these people are in the car watching, and they're filming it, and they're freaking out like, oh my god, oh my god!
01:24:06.000Coyote's just sitting there eating that cat.
01:24:08.000So you think that the reason why it's eating that cat, I mean, is it just hungry maybe, or is it an occasional meal that they think of them as prey, or is it primarily because, is there a bunch of different factors, or is it primarily because they're competitive predators?
01:24:23.000Well, I think it's primarily because of that.
01:24:51.000How does it figure out how to make it across the street?
01:24:54.000You know, there's a biologist in Chicago who argues that in rush hour traffic on the interstates of Chicago, nine million people there, that he's seen coyotes cross four lanes of the interstate and stop in the median and sit there and wait until the traffic lightens up.
01:25:14.000For the other four lanes and then cross that way.
01:25:16.000So this is, uh, the coyote goes and gets this cat that apparently it had already killed before and he starts eating it.
01:25:39.000You know, so two things I would observe about this particular video is, first of all, you know, everybody is making the assumption that the coyote killed the cat.
01:25:50.000That cat may have been hit by a car, and the coyote found it and is scavenging it.
01:25:56.000How about that other stupid cat behind him going, uh, that's my friend!
01:26:20.000There was a coyote pack in Seattle and also one in Tucson that basically did this very thing.
01:26:28.000They decided that cats were, you know, going to be their target.
01:26:33.000Now, most coyotes, you know, that's not how they react to cats.
01:26:37.000Well, cats do kill an unbelievable amount of rodents and birds.
01:26:42.000Yeah, and people don't want to hear this, of course, but the truth is that in all cities where coyotes have spread, which is literally everywhere now, we have, from the ornithologist, a decided record of numbers of nesting songbirds going up dramatically as a result of the appearance of coyotes.
01:27:02.000Yeah, there was a statistic that we quoted on the podcast, and it's something insane, like 3 billion birds a year in North America alone are killed by cats, by house cats.
01:27:16.000B. With a B. When you tell that to people, they're like, there's no way.
01:28:36.000One of the things that I found hilarious is we were talking on Rinella's podcast about a group that approached you and they were doing a documentary on saving the coyote.
01:29:46.000As one of the people who blurbed my book, in fact, it was Bill McKibben, the nature writer, now that I think about it, one of the things he said was that in his blurb was that a biologist once told him that when the last human dies on Earth,
01:30:03.000a coyote will be sitting on that human's grave howling at the moon.
01:30:11.000I've always loved that thought because, of course, it's an indication of what great survivors they are.
01:30:18.000Well, you are starting to see a resurgence of wolves in Europe and there was actually an article recently published in Paris about it where I guess the mayor of Paris was telling people not to be alarmed because they only look for four-legged prey and people shouldn't be worried about these wolves.
01:30:36.000But the idea of these animals intermingling with our civilization.
01:30:41.000We have decided, we put some hardscape down, put up some houses, and we go, this is our stuff.
01:30:58.000Well, you know, I think when we moved into cities 5,000 years ago, one of the things we thought we were getting away from by living in cities was predators.
01:31:19.000I, you know, I'm intrigued by one of the stories I uncovered in the book, which is an argument that I make.
01:31:26.000It's based on the work of a graduate student I knew at the University of Montana.
01:31:31.000His name is John Hall, and he was doing a A dissertation in history on what he was calling the Great Dog War in the 19th century and what it was all about.
01:31:41.000And the more I dug into it, I realized this is one of the explanations for why you don't see accounts of coyotes in cities much, even in L.A. I mean, the first accounts I've seen of coyotes in L.A., for instance, are in the 1920s.
01:31:57.000But it's because in the 19th century, until about the 1870s, we let dogs, our own pets and packs of feral dogs, roam through American cities at will.
01:32:14.000And so every city in the United States had a large population of feral and sort of loosely owned dogs roaming around cities.
01:32:30.000I mean, they were just basically stray dogs that would roam the city.
01:32:35.000They would find things to scavenge behind restaurants and behind houses, and they would knock over people's garbage.
01:32:44.000But this happened, I think, in the late 1840s.
01:32:49.000Boston had An epidemic one year of rabies attacks from these kinds of wild dogs in the city.
01:32:59.000And so Boston began to institute what became our modern system of dog catchers, dog pounds, leash laws, dog control.
01:33:11.000And It was at the moment when the Boston model began to spread to Philadelphia, to New York, eventually to New Orleans, eventually to the cities in California.
01:33:23.000And we sort of instituted this new model of, okay, a dog is properly meant to be in an enclosed yard, on a leash when it's with its owner.
01:33:35.000It's not supposed to be running through the streets with packs of other dogs scavenging garbage and stuff.
01:33:42.000When we did that, what that, in effect, did was to open up the niche in American cities for wild canids.
01:33:52.000And the wild canid that was able to take advantage of it was the coyote.
01:33:59.000That hadn't been there before because a coyote wandering into a city in the 1860s or 1830s would end up being, of course, assaulted by coyotes.
01:34:10.000Suddenly, all the dogs were put up, and that opened up the cities to the arrival of coyotes in our midst.
01:34:23.000The interface between human beings and the wild, and our interaction with the wild, and then just our ability or inability to manipulate it, it's just so fascinating to me.
01:34:34.000And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is what they're trying to do right now in, I guess it's Wyoming and parts of Montana, this American Serengeti project that they're doing.
01:34:47.000Well, so this other book that we've talked about some of mine that has been out now just about a year, it came out last March of 2016. That's a book.
01:35:04.000American Serengeti is a book that's about the story of the Great Plains and the fact that we had, up until about 125 or 130 years ago, in North America, what was widely regarded around the globe as one of the great wildlife spectacles of the world.
01:35:27.000These enormous herds of bison, of re-emerging wild horse bands, of pronghorns, maybe 15, 18 million pronghorns, not quite as many as bison, but almost as many.
01:35:44.000Half a million gray wolves that were their predators, and of course coyotes playing the role of jackals.
01:35:50.000Grizzly bears that roamed, I mean the original range of the grizzly bear was actually out on the plains.
01:37:07.000But we destroyed ours and We ended up not ever successfully creating any kind of wildlife preserve to sort of save at least a part of it.
01:37:21.000I mean, we got Yellowstone, but of course Yellowstone is set in the Rocky Mountains.
01:37:26.000And so what this American Prairie Reserve is about now, it's based in Bozeman, Montana.
01:37:33.000It's only about a dozen years old, but it's been pretty wildly successful in trying to do this.
01:37:42.000It's had the imagination, this group of people has had the imagination to try to recreate this American Serengeti that our government and our statecraft never did preserve for us.
01:37:56.000And so what they've got in mind in central Montana is taking a couple of large pieces of existing public lands.
01:38:06.000One is the Missouri River Breaks National Monument that Bill Clinton created along the Missouri River.
01:38:14.000And then just downstream of it, still along the Missouri River, is the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
01:38:21.000And together, those two public lands that are along the Missouri River and mostly on the south bank of the Missouri River in central Montana...
01:39:33.000And hoping and letting wolves come out of the nearby Rockies and grizzlies, which every spring now, are coming out of the Rocky Mountain front in Montana and getting out sometimes as much as 100 miles out of the plains.
01:39:50.000What the American Prayer Reserve wants to happen is for these animals to get all the way out to this preserve, find this recreated American Serengeti with all the animals that were there, and give us, in our own time in the 21st century,
01:40:06.000this chance to not just read about this in history or maybe see some version of it on a late-night old Western movie, but actually to experience it ourselves.
01:40:19.000Now, how are they going to reintroduce these animals, and where are they going to get them from?
01:40:22.000Well, I mean, getting the bison is not too difficult, because they're surplus bison pretty much around most of the West.
01:40:30.000I mean, we've got a larger bison population in North America right now than we've had since the 1890s, more than 300,000 of them.
01:40:39.000So it's fairly easy to come up with bison.
01:40:43.000Pronghorns are already there, and so all you have to do is just sort of make conditions beneficial for their herds to grow.
01:40:57.000With bighorns, they'll have to reintroduce bighorns, but that was an original range.
01:41:01.000There were bighorns out in the badlands of the Great Plains.
01:41:05.000And then, as I said, they can't deliberately, on their own, reintroduce gray wolves or grizzly bears, but their idea is that if wolves and grizzlies get there, then they're welcome.
01:41:19.000And the idea is they probably, once this preserve exists with all these grazing animals, that the wolves and the bears will find it.
01:41:31.000And do they have a timeline they're trying to accomplish this in?
01:41:34.000You know, as I said, they've been around for about 10 or 12 years now.
01:41:39.000I mean, they've raised more than $130 million.
01:41:44.000And they've got major donors on both the coasts, along with lots of, you know, just people like you and me who give them $10 and $15 or $25 dollars.
01:41:54.000I've got lots of friends who, once I sort of alerted them to this, who have joined American Prairie Reserve and are donors, small donors.
01:42:04.000The timeline is basically whenever they can make it happen.
01:42:08.000I mean, there's some considerable resistance from the ranching community, not only in Montana, but kind of across the West, because ranchers don't want to see bison, and especially bison and predators,
01:43:24.000Basically, it comes through largely from afterbirth.
01:43:29.000Whenever a bison cow, for example, that has brucellosis gives birth, if cattle come through the area, say, within a few days and graze the same grass where afterbirth has been dropped from a brucellosis-infected bison,
01:43:48.000then the theory is that A cow could get the disease.
01:43:53.000It's been made to happen that way in laboratories.
01:43:58.000We have no record of it ever having happened in the wild.
01:44:02.000When they made it happen in laboratories, did they force feed the cows?
01:44:34.000Well, I mean, part of it, it seems to me, almost dates back to the 19th century when we destroyed...
01:44:40.000The original American Serengeti and killed all these bison and converted the Great Plains into largely a ranching country with cattle.
01:44:50.000I mean, the idea has been from the ranching community ever since that bison are a direct threat to the existing ranching community.
01:44:59.000That if you get too many people enamored of bison, You know, and I'm not sure I can track the logic of their arguments, but it somehow seems to lead in that direction.
01:45:13.000They don't like people introducing bison into the middle of a ranching setting.
01:45:22.000Particularly what they don't seem to like is someone with an old Montana ranch of 40,000 or 50,000 acres and We're good to go.
01:48:11.000Because you're not allowed to reintroduce grizzly bears.
01:48:14.000They are not allowed to as a private organization.
01:48:17.000No, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to do this, and the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't actually, even the public lands that are there are not managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
01:48:27.000And good luck getting cooperation from people in Montana.
01:48:29.000They're still stinging from the wolves being introduced into Yellowstone and the The decimation of the elk population and all the other livestock issues that they've had there.
01:49:00.000The hunters in Montana were up in arms, sort of the way these white-tailed hunters in South Carolina now are up in arms over coyotes.
01:49:09.000The hunters in Montana were up in arms because it wasn't so easy to get an elk anymore, and they blamed it all on wolves.
01:49:16.000And someone from the University of Montana did a study of a particular herd that had been singled out as one that was just being harassed by wolves, and it was impossible to kill a bull there anymore.
01:49:26.000And concluded that actually most of the production that was taking place on that elk herd was from mountain lions and not the wolves that had been reintroduced.
01:49:35.000But it's become for the hunting community, the sport hunting community, which has had, of course, a century now of getting to hunt elk.
01:49:45.000Elk and whitetails and mule deer and everything else, without competition from predators, this has become kind of the new excuse, you know, of why I didn't get my elk this year.
01:49:58.000And also, I think it's super important that the hunting community step back and understand that these animals are supposed to be preyed upon by wolves, and that without them, you're going to get to these enormous overpopulation situations.
01:50:19.000I was there this summer, and we drove by this house, and we had to pull over, and luckily I had binoculars in my car, and I gave them to my kids.
01:50:26.000And the first time they saw elk, there was a hundred elk on this lawn.
01:50:32.000And one of the women who lives there was explaining to us that they had wolves come through just a couple nights before, and it was really exciting, and everybody's looking out the window.
01:50:42.000If you're a person who's an elk hunter, especially if you're a lazy one, I get where you could see that that would be something you would complain about.
01:51:21.000And mountain lions have been part of the ecological equation here with all of these animals that we like to hunt, with pronghorns, with elk, with mule deer.
01:51:31.000I mean, they've been co-evolving with one another for hundreds of thousands of years.
01:51:37.000I mean, pronghorns, I talk about this in the American Serengeti book.
01:51:42.000Pronghorn females always have two fawns.
01:51:46.000They basically have little litters of two.
01:51:50.000And the reason they have two is because coyotes prey on pronghorn fawns.
01:51:55.000And so you basically have an heir and a spare.
01:51:58.000And the spare is the one that you assume the coyotes are going to get.
01:52:03.000And they evolved this ability hundreds of thousands of years ago.
01:52:07.000So I think part of it is just coming to terms with the fact that We're brand new here, and it's going to take a while for us to actually truly become Americans in an ecological sense.
01:52:22.000And one way to do it is to think in terms of these long patterns that extend back through time.
01:52:27.000I want to talk to you about your paper on bison.
01:52:30.000Is it called Bison Diplomacy and Bison Ecology?
01:52:35.000Bison ecology and Bison diplomacy, yeah.
01:52:38.000And what you were saying was, and this is what I found incredibly fascinating, was that when we came along, when the, I say we, obviously, my grandparents were immigrants, it wasn't me, but when Europeans, when, you know,
01:52:53.000people that we consider Americans now came Along a few hundred years ago and then when they started doing the market hunting and killing off all the bison, what we had done was something that the Native Americans were already on their way to doing.
01:53:08.000Well, I mean, so let me sort of offer a revision of that.
01:53:15.000Native people and bison had coexisted, and that hunt had been going on for 8,000 or 9,000 years with the modern bison.
01:54:06.000I'm sure you're aware of the scrub bulls, like particularly in Australia where these animals get free and they become feral and then domestic cows change their characteristics.
01:54:19.000Yeah, so what that graphic shows is...
01:54:24.000The contemporary, our bison, over on the right side of the graphic, and you can see how much smaller it is than the animals that were here during the Pleistocene.
01:54:36.000Bison latifrons is the animal over on the far left, and bison antiquus is one of these in the middle.
01:54:44.000It's probably the very middle one right there.
01:54:46.000These animals were hunted by early human hunters here, too, because they arrived before the Pleistocene produced that extinction scenario.
01:54:55.000So they hunted these large forms of bison.
01:55:00.000But about 8,000 years ago, bison, the large ones having become extinct, bison sort of evolved into the smaller...
01:55:10.000I mean, some people actually refer to the modern bison as a dwarf compared to these older ones.
01:55:16.000And so what I argue, and I've got a chapter on this in American Serengeti, too, sort of my most recent take on this bison ecology, bison diplomacy piece, which came out in a very fancy journal, academic journal, about 25 years ago now.
01:55:33.000But what I argue is that that hunt had been going on for 8,000 years.
01:55:41.000And Probably the reason that bison never, that Indians never hunted them to extinction is because bison were actually better adapted to the grasslands than people were.
01:55:55.000So they were more successful as a grassland species than humans were until we get the introduction from the European arrival of a couple of things that changed the equation.
01:56:10.000One is The reintroduction of the horse to North America, which Native people in the West quickly take up, and gives them an ability to hunt bison far more efficiently and to become just as well adapted to life on the grasslands as the bison was.
01:56:29.000But the other thing that changes the equation is the market, the introduction of the market economy.
01:56:34.000And so what that article actually argued and what my chapter in American Serengeti argues, too, I haven't changed my mind over the last 25 years about this, is that The market became a force for Native people,
01:56:55.000just as it did for people all around the world in Africa and India and everywhere else, that they found difficult to resist.
01:57:04.000And one of the primary reasons they found it difficult to resist was because If you were hunting with flint arrowheads, your best arrowhead maker could maybe produce 15 of them through hard labor in a day.
01:57:20.000But you could go out and kill a bison and have your wife tan its pelt and make a robe, a softly tanned robe out of it.
01:57:35.000And you could trade that to a white trader.
01:57:39.000From the Hudson's Bay Company or the American Fur Company, and they would give you 150 steel arrowheads that were far better than the Flint ones that took your best arrow maker a day to produce,
01:57:54.000and you could get 150 of them for the work of 30 minutes going out and shooting a bison, and of course your wife had to spend a week working on the pelt.
01:58:08.000Basically, the European market had so many labor-saving technologies, steel arrowheads, steel knives, steel hatchets, firearms,
01:58:26.000that it became almost impossible for Indian people to resist trading for those things.
01:58:36.000I mean, if you didn't trade for them and the tribe down the river did, then they suddenly had guns and you didn't.
01:58:43.000And so you were going to be out-competed by your neighbors.
01:58:47.000And so, in effect, what happened was that the lure of the goods of the industrial world and the market economy drew Indian people into the market hunt.
01:58:58.000So that by the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, they were still killing buffalo in order to Provide meat for the family and to provide, you know, hides to make a teepee and all that.
01:59:11.000But they were killing an additional percentage of animals to trade to the European market.
01:59:18.000And so they became actors in the market economy that was basically wiping all these animals out.
01:59:26.000So it also was the reintroduction of the horse as well, right?
01:59:30.000Because before that, they were hunting these animals on foot and they were far less effective.
01:59:36.000And their beast of burden was the dog.
01:59:40.000And so you couldn't travel nearly as far, obviously, by using dog-propelled locomotion as you could horses.
01:59:49.000And you couldn't carry the kind of burdens, the kind of goods that you could carry on dogs that you could with horses.
01:59:57.000And so the transformation from being a dog-propelled people to being a horse-propelled people was a revolution in their lives.
02:00:07.000I mean, one of the things that happened as a result of it was that there were people all around the borders of the plains, many of whom were agriculturalists who were farmers, Who ended up, especially their young men,
02:00:23.000ended up abandoning farming Because they realized that the potential for rising in status and for creating a better life was much higher if you mounted up on a horse and rode out of the plains and hunted buffalo.
02:00:40.000And so, I mean, there were entire groups, like the crows had been relatives of the Mandans and the Adatsas and had been agriculturalists, and that entire group of people I mean,
02:00:59.000during the period from basically about 1720, when a lot of the people in the West began to acquire horses, and what spread horses, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, was basically in 1680. The Pueblo Indians down in New Mexico rose up against the Spanish colonists and drove them out of New Mexico.
02:01:24.000And in the process, they captured all their herds of livestock.
02:01:29.000They captured their goats, their sheep, and their horse herds.
02:01:33.000And some animals, some of the horses, got loose.
02:01:36.000And that's sort of the origin, at least one of the origins, of the wild horses that spread across the West.
02:01:42.000But the Pueblo Indians trade the sheep and the goats to the people who become the Navajos, who become the herders of goats and sheep.
02:01:49.000And they start trading the horses, which they have now in great surplus that they've liberated from the Spaniards, up the mountains from one tribe to another, to the Utes, to the Shoshones, to the Nez Perce, to the Blackfeet, to the Assiniboines.
02:02:05.000And so from 1680 through about 1720 or 1730, just about everybody in the West ends up getting horses.
02:02:13.000And you have to have the culture with it, too.
02:02:16.000I mean, you can't just hand the animal over to somebody.
02:02:19.000I mean, there's a famous story where the first horse that the Blackfeet see, they offer it buffalo meat to eat.
02:02:27.000And somebody has to say, as a Kalispell Indian who's riding the horses, no, no, not buffalo meat.
02:02:37.000And they have to be shown how to take care of horses and how to gale stallions and how to ride them and how to break them and the whole bit.
02:02:46.000So there's a culture that goes with it.
02:02:49.000But once they acquire them, and this period that only lasts for about 200 years of the famous horse-mounted buffalo hunting plains Indian emerges, that lifestyle becomes, which is kind of a backward step, really, in anthropological terms.
02:03:05.000You assume that, you know, you go from hunting to being a farmer, and you go from farmer to being a city dweller.
02:03:11.000This is a step going back the other way, but it proved to be so...
02:03:43.000And it became kind of something that Native people almost couldn't escape.
02:03:48.000You couldn't get away from it because, I mean, there were some groups that said, okay, we're not going to participate in this, you know.
02:03:54.000But that immediately disadvantaged them compared to the group right down the river.
02:04:01.000And so people who didn't participate were pretty quickly overrun by the people who became fully engaged in the horse hunt and the market hunt.
02:04:12.000And, I mean, there are instances where, I mean, like the Siouxan people, you know, in the movies, the Lakotas, I mean, they basically march across the northern west like Pac-Man.
02:04:24.000Once they acquire horses, they come out of Minnesota and out of the woodlands and march across the west, gobbling up one tribe after another and taking away their buffalo hunting territory.
02:04:34.000I mean, and they're still doing it down to the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
02:04:38.000That's why the crows fight on the side of the United States at the Battle of the Little Bighorn is because...
02:04:45.000The Lakotas are seizing their countryside.
02:04:49.000The Lakota is what they call themselves, and the other Native Americans call them the Sioux, which means enemy.
02:04:54.000And the word that we've used in history is the Sioux.
02:04:58.000But, I mean, on the Southern Plains, the Comanches did basically the same thing.
02:05:05.000That was really on a par and able to compete with the Spanish Empire, with the Republic of Texas, and even for a while against the United States.
02:05:15.000And they created it around this horse-propelled bison hunt that provided goods for the market economy.
02:05:26.000Now, you were talking about steel arrowheads.
02:05:30.000Did they, or when did they, start using firearms?
02:05:36.000I mean, that was an early trade item, and it was usually in the very beginning of contact between Europeans and Native people.
02:05:45.000A firearm was, you know, maybe a couple of them were given to the head men, to the leaders of a particular tribe, as a status item.
02:05:53.000One time I was an editor for an anthropological journal called Ethnohistory.
02:06:01.000And my task as an editor, I was an assistant editor or associate editor or something, but my task was to read the incoming manuscripts that were submitted for publication.
02:06:12.000And one of the ones I read, I've never forgotten this, was an account by a trader in South America Who was turning his trading post over to a newly arriving trader.
02:06:31.000And so this trader who had experience in the area was queried by the new guy.
02:06:37.000He said, so how do I get the Indians to trade with me?
02:06:41.000And the guy who had been on the scene for a while said, nothing to it.
02:06:47.000Ride out 15 or 20 miles into the wilderness and take a steel axe and suspend it from a rope from the branch of a tree and then leave.
02:07:02.000And then two weeks, three weeks later, go back.
02:07:08.000And this guy, this new trader, did exactly that.
02:07:11.000And he went back two weeks later to this spot, this clearing in the forest, in the Amazonian forest, where he had tied this double-bladed steel axe.
02:07:20.000And there were hundreds of Native people gathered around the spot wanting more.
02:07:28.000Of these objects, more of these axes, because steel, I mean, there's a famous story when Captain Cook first puts off the coast, off the Waimea Coast of Kauai, and the Hawaiian people paddle their outriggers out and climb on board his ships and immediately start pulling all the nails out of the planking on the ship and diving off into the water with the nails because they want metal.
02:07:58.000They realize this is such an advantage over the technology that they have.
02:08:05.000And so, I mean, they're willing to trade what do you want for an axe?
02:08:27.000So that's how Native people kind of all over the world who hadn't progressed to the Iron Revolution, to the Iron Age, were seduced into the market economy, is that they were offered items that were so compelling.
02:08:46.000And as I've said a couple of times now, if you didn't participate in it, you kind of, within a decade, you were disadvantaged because everybody around you was going to end up doing it.
02:09:01.000And so that's what I was arguing in bison ecology and bison diplomacy.
02:09:07.000And the argument is slightly revised in American Serengeti, but it's the same argument.
02:09:13.000And it's become the prevailing argument about what happened to bison in the 19th century.
02:09:19.000We used to think that, okay, there were still 100 million of them by the end of the Civil War, and then guys go out with rifles in the space of 20 years, they shoot them all down, and that's the end for their tongues and for their hides.
02:09:31.000But what the story actually is is a much more believable and real story that it has to do with The introduction of horses which drink water and graze grass, and so that reduces the carrying capacity for bison.
02:09:46.000Once there are two or three million horses out on the plains, there can't be as many bison anymore.
02:09:52.000It happens because there is a Climate downturn in the 1840s, for about 15 years there's a drought and that reduces the carrying capacity for bison, so climate plays a role.
02:10:05.000We know that diseases like anthrax and ultimately brucellosis get among the buffalo herds, and those diseases probably got among the buffalo herds because oxen and other animals on the overland trails took these European exotic diseases out among the bison herds and infected them with disease.
02:10:26.000And then there's no question that the way the market worked, it was...
02:10:32.000And there's, of course, no regulation of it.
02:10:35.000This is before we ever regulate, you know, we have any environmental regulations.
02:10:39.000It's just a free-for-all capitalist world.
02:10:59.000So, you know, I mean, the no refrigeration thing really plays a role in the famous buffalo jumps that happen in the West because, you know, you couldn't control how many animals were going to go off those jumps.
02:11:12.000And so if you wanted to run 10 off in order to provide you with buffalo for the next month and a half, your tribe of 125 with buffalo.
02:11:21.000When you say buffalo jumps, you mean running them off cliffs?
02:11:37.000I mean, we know about these buffalo jumps that Indian people regarded this as a stratagem that you don't want to let surviving buffalo...
02:11:48.000Go out onto the planes and inform other buffalo that there's this thing called a jump that you want to avoid.
02:11:56.000And so they end up wanting to make sure that they get every single animal that you're driving so that you don't have buffalo go off and tell other buffalo how this works.
02:12:08.000This is going to sound crazy, but it makes you wonder if it was ignorance on their part that these animals could communicate like that, or if they had some sort of an intuition about how instincts and how certain fears that animals had were developed.
02:12:26.000Well, I think, you know, and I spent some time talking about this in the Buffalo chapter in American Serengeti.
02:12:36.000It has to do with what we would call native science, what you mentioned at the last there, that they do understand and they've probably seen examples of an animal learning very quickly how to avoid a trap.
02:12:54.000But it also has to do with the cause-effect explanation that they have for how the world works.
02:13:02.000And they don't have this kind of, you know, Western explanation for this is a cause and this is an effect.
02:13:12.000They have a cause-effect relationship, to be sure, but it explains the world in a different way.
02:13:18.000And Indian people pretty generally believe that bison were a people.
02:13:27.000That they were a family of animals, and they had families that were very similar to the families that Indian people had.
02:13:34.000And they had a controlling master animal, sort of a buffalo master, who you had to appeal to to get the animals to give themselves up to humans for the good of humanity.
02:14:11.000People and animals interacted with one another.
02:14:14.000But it was informed a little bit by kind of native scientific observation, too.
02:14:19.000And I think, in particular, this one where the argument was, and from what I've read, it was pretty widespread, that if you did a buffalo jump, you needed to kill all the animals that went off the jump.
02:14:32.000You couldn't let any of them get away.
02:14:34.000I think that probably was more in the line of kind of native science.
02:14:39.000Because they maybe had observed there being instances where an animal that had gone off a jump and had survived, the next time you encountered that animal, it might be particularly marked with a white patch on a hip or something,
02:14:54.000and a few months later you saw that particular animal in another group of bison, and when you try to do a jump, it led that herd off in a different direction.
02:15:03.000And so I think there was kind of native science in that.
02:15:06.000But, you know, where we got to in talking about this was no refrigeration.
02:15:11.000So if you ran 1,300 of them off and it's August, then all you're going to get to do, and you've got a group of 125 people, all you're going to get to do is to basically take the best pieces off about 25 or 30 animals,
02:15:27.000and you're going to lose the rest of it because you can't preserve the meat of all those animals.
02:15:33.000So would they find these sites where they'd just be mass carcasses or mass bones?
02:15:43.000And the reason it's called that, anthropologists gave it, or archaeologists gave it this name, is because there was a bison jump that was so big there, we think about 10,000 years ago during the Folsom period, And so many animals went off that jump,
02:15:59.000and only a few of them could be harvested by the people who did the jump, that that big mass of animals sat there and basically, over two or three weeks of time, We're good to go.
02:16:36.000Realized about it when they began investigating it was that it had been a huge mass of bison driven off a cliff that had burst in hot weather into spontaneous combustion and probably burned for four or five days.
02:16:53.000Well, I mean, in hot weather, with that much decay and fermentation of all the juices that are in intestines and stomachs, you basically create a condition where you've got flammable chemistry that lights.
02:17:29.000You know, it's interesting what you're talking about with explaining this idea that if one of them survived, that they would inform the other ones.
02:17:37.000There was a study that was done recently on mice, and this is a direct genetic study, so it might not be Totally related, but it might be in some ways.
02:17:46.000They took these mice and they sprayed a citrus smell in their cage, and then when they smelled the citrus smell, they shocked them.
02:17:57.000The bottom floor of the cage was electrically charged.
02:18:01.000And every time they sprayed that citrus smell, they would give them a zap.
02:18:05.000Then their ancestors, who had never experienced this before, they did the same thing to them, just sprayed the citrus smell, and they had a physical reaction, a heightened sense of danger, fear.
02:18:20.000They realized that a shock was coming just by the smell of that citrus.
02:18:25.000It makes sense that instincts are passed on.
02:18:29.000Well, you know, we've sort of concluded from studies that have been done primarily in Italy over studying families through the generations in Italy that Descendants of a particular group of people will preserve evidence in their genes,
02:18:54.000sometimes four, five, six generations down a timeline, of an ancestor who went through a famine or a starving time.
02:19:05.000And so that famine would produce a physiological effect on the body, and that would be passed down so that geneticists could discover effects of it several generations down the timeline.
02:19:21.000So it's sort of similar to what you're describing with mice.
02:19:29.000You know, we haven't studied, at least I'm not aware, that there have been a lot of studies of this kind of thing.
02:19:34.000But what it really kind of means is that we're the products, you know, in our modern world of things that happened to our ancestors maybe two or three hundred years ago.
02:19:47.000And maybe even the fears, like they think that arachnophobia and aphidiophobia and a lot of the, you know, fears of snakes and bugs and things that people have might be directly attributed to ancestors being bitten or poisoned by those things or us seeing someone getting bitten or poisoned by them.
02:20:02.000I mean, speaking of that sort of thing, you know, there's a section I do when I'm talking about the development of poisons to try to eradicate coyotes in the Coyote America book where The reason during World War II we decided,
02:20:18.000or the government, what is now called Wildlife Services, this agency that was trying to solve the predator problem by exterminating coyotes, the reason they used our new chemical insights during World War II to come up with new poisons Yeah.
02:20:52.000And coyotes are really smart about cause and effect, and so a coyote that was in the presence of an animal that ate a bait cube and then suddenly went into convulsions, and strychnine produced these really sort of bizarre and grotesque deaths.
02:21:12.000That those animals would not take a strychnine bait after they saw that happen to one of their pack members.
02:21:21.000And so in the 1940s, we came up with three new poisons.
02:21:28.000One of them was called sodium, let's see...
02:21:36.000Sodium fluoracetate, which is the one we now call 1080. And it was called 1080 and it was used for the next 19...
02:21:45.000In fact, it's still used in limited application today.
02:21:48.000But it was a poison that was developed after 1,080 tries by this laboratory that since 1920 had specialized in developing poisons to kill wolves and coyotes.
02:22:01.000It's called the Eradication Methods Laboratory.
02:22:05.000So, 1080. Another one, sodium thalmium, was a poison that killed coyotes so slowly that they would often survive for a week after they ate the poison.
02:22:23.000And in that week, their pads would fall off, their hair would fall off, the Peelage would come off their bodies.
02:22:34.000There's one story where a farmer in Colorado found during the winter of about 1947 or 1948, he found seven or eight coyotes in his barn with no pads on their feet,
02:22:51.000no hair on their bodies, all huddled together trying to stay warm.
02:23:00.000But the reason we introduced these poisons, and there was a third one, too, which was a cyanide, basically the one that we call M44s now, that are little cartridges that fire cyanide mist into their mouths, is because these poisons killed them slowly enough that other coyotes witnessing the victim taking the bite of the poison bait didn't put two and two together.
02:23:31.000I mean, so we even had these kind of insights about how animals will observe something and preserve a memory of what they've seen and then try to actually come up with a poison that plays against that.
02:23:59.000I would love to have you get together with him and compare notes, because he has some really interesting observations about these asteroidal impacts, and I think...
02:24:07.000The two of you together would have a fascinating conversation.