Jeremy McBride (Tiger king, Chimp Crazy) and Eric Good (chimp crazy) join me in this episode to talk about their new show "Chimp Crazy" and why animals should not be kept in cages. We also talk about PETA and why they should keep dogs and cats in cages, and why we should not have pets. And we talk about why PETA is a hypocrite and why you should keep a dog or cat in a kennel. We finish up the episode with some animal rights and animal rights issues, and then we answer a listener question about whether or not we should all have dogs or cats as pets. It's a wild ride! Check out the show on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Thanks for listening and Happy New Year! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise stated. We do not own the rights to any music used in this podcast. All credit given to any other works credited to their respective artists. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or other good listening platforms. Thank you for supporting our work, we really appreciate the support our efforts. -Jon Sorrentino, Eric Good, Jeremy Good, and Jeremy McBride. Thanks also for all the support we can't thank you enough, and we appreciate your support our cause enough, thank you so much, we appreciate you, so please spread the love and support you all of you're being kind and support us, so we can keep us all of the love, all of our hearts out there. Thank you, all the love you're so much out there with your support, we're gonna keep us out there, it's a big love, good vibes, we love you, we'll see you back, we see you, Thank you back and we'll hear you, good night, good day, bye, bye bye. XOXO, bye. Thankyou, bye! - Jon & Eric, Kristy, Sarah, Caitie, Sarah and Korte, Amy, EJ & Kelsy, Jack, etc etc etc, etc., etc. - Jon, AJ & Kaitlyn, AJ&A, etc, PETA, etc. etc. <3 -Jon, etc)
00:00:33.000Yeah, I met Eric kind of towards the tail end of filming Tiger King.
00:00:42.000Yeah, that was kind of the first experience I had.
00:00:44.000You guys, like, struck lightning with that because it came right at the pandemic where everyone's locked at home and everyone was like, what the fuck?
00:00:53.000What the fuck is going on with these guys?
00:01:17.000I would like to see a psychologist, a clinical psychologist do an examination of what type of personality wants to have these enormous wild animals captive in their homes.
00:01:40.000It's incredible, and of course that's what interests us, because I'm an animal guy, but you have to have interesting people to tell a good story.
00:02:56.000First of all, this is one of the rare times where I'm fully with PETA. You know, it's like when you side with PETA on things, it's like, you know, this has got to be an egregious example of something absolutely horrific.
00:03:13.000And, you know, the one situation where the woman who was so drunk kept the chimp and then attacked her daughter and the whole thing.
00:03:20.000At the end of the show, I was like, oh my god, I don't know if I could keep doing this.
00:03:25.000No, it's interesting you mentioned PETA because I'm not fully aligned with PETA on a number of things.
00:03:31.000But in this case, I am aligned with PETA. But just to touch on PETA, you know, I work with reptiles and I try to save...
00:03:42.000Turtles and tortoises, which actually are the most endangered group of animals along with primates.
00:03:49.000If you think about the percentage that are on the brink of extinction, over half of primates are on the brink of extinction and over half of turtles and tortoises.
00:03:59.000But where I am not aligned with PETA is when you have to make a choice between, you know, eradicating a rat that's killing off the last Galapagos tortoises.
00:04:10.000Or eradicate a mongoose that was introduced as killing off an iguana in the Caribbean.
00:06:33.000No, but the point was that a lot of docs, man, are great, and they are really informative, but they preach to the converted, people that already know the issue, you know, like the Cove, and they're great.
00:06:46.000And, you know, what we wanted to do is preach to people that don't know about the issue.
00:06:51.000So you had to cast – you had to get a lot of eyeballs on it to make a difference, right?
00:06:55.000So that was sort of the goal of both Tiger King and Chimp Crazy in the end.
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00:08:51.000Well, you know, there's also other animals that are in Texas that are exotics, like scimitar oryx, which is very rare in the wild and is endangered in the wild, but is so common in Texas that you can hunt them.
00:09:08.000And they have them on these enormous ranches, you know, 30,000, 50,000 acres, and they're wild.
00:09:16.000If they could figure out a way to actually ensure that tigers could be kept in a 60,000-acre preserve, and you had adequate funding to where the fences were completely monitored every day to make sure that they don't get out and kill people,
00:09:34.000you're talking about a different thing.
00:09:36.000But what you're mostly getting is small enclosures of tortured animals who are fed cold meat.
00:10:08.000You know, we were talking about giraffes, that they're the only animal that I don't have a problem with at the zoo, because they're so chill.
00:10:15.000When my daughters were young, we'd take them to the zoo, and you could hold a piece of lettuce, and the giraffe with his giant fucking head that's like as big as his table would come over and gently take the lettuce with their tongue, and we're so confident That they have no aggression towards people that we allow little babies to feed giraffes.
00:10:35.000Giraffes don't seem to have a problem at the zoo.
00:10:38.000They seem to be totally relaxed with it.
00:10:41.000But there's a lot of animals where it's nothing but torture.
00:10:46.000And I think it's incredible that in the day that we live in, 2024, that – and the consciousness of the – The culture that we still keep certain animals in zoos that really are miserable.
00:11:00.000Those are things like the whales and cetaceans and elephants are not happy in zoos.
00:13:20.000I drove limos for a while, and I had this gig once in New Hampshire, and I was on my way home, and I stopped just because I had to do this job where I dropped somebody off.
00:14:06.000There's another project we've been working on for equal time to Chimp Crazy, and you've been spending more time in over 10 years, which loosely covers the exotic animal wildlife trade, international wildlife trade.
00:14:20.000And through that interest, we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these moral truths about American zoos.
00:14:29.000For us, one thing that was deeply fascinating is something like 242 accredited zoos in this country.
00:14:37.000750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined.
00:15:29.000And they started putting into effect all these kind of new programs for animal welfare, and particularly for bears, like polar bears, like what you just mentioned.
00:15:38.000And they have a new word, it's not so new anymore, called enrichment, which means that you give a bear something to do, so it doesn't do what you were just saying.
00:15:46.000You put their food in ice, so they have to work to get it out.
00:15:49.000You put their food in a ball, you make them have to do things.
00:15:53.000But, you know, that was the big shake-up.
00:16:29.000Educating them on these kind of moral issues surrounding animals, the anthropomorphic characters that are created to describe the feelings and where they should live and how they should feel.
00:16:39.000And kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity, I believe.
00:16:45.000And you asked this fundamental question, when you go to the zoo, hey, where did all the animals come from?
00:16:52.000No one really begs to think that question.
00:16:54.000Well, where he's going right now is sort of a big part of our next documentary, which is about the illegal animal trade, but also zoos were complicit in that for a very long time, maybe still.
00:17:09.000But the zoo thing, you get emotional on this.
00:17:15.000What's really cool about this kind of medium that we're in, we have access to all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA and legislation and laws.
00:17:30.000I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, which is Yeah, when you go to a zoo, no one seems to ask where the animals come from.
00:17:39.000It is a very simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there.
00:17:45.000Now, I'm not anti-zoo totally either, and I have no real position or credibility to also suggest that.
00:17:51.000But I do think I'm interested in asking those questions of what we can do to make these institutions better.
00:17:58.000Yeah, I mean, for sure they should be bigger.
00:18:01.000I mean, there should be a size requirement.
00:18:03.000You should have to have a certain amount of acres for each individual species so that they don't, like we were talking about the chimp enclosure at the LA Zoo, they bite each other's fingers off.
00:18:57.000You're talking about something like the thylacine, right?
00:19:00.000Where they kept them in captivity and the last known survivors and you had this thing and like, wow, now we have video of this thing and now it doesn't exist anymore.
00:19:08.000So the zoos were like the last hope to try to keep this thing from going extinct.
00:20:49.000No, no, I mean, of course, zoos were originally created, just, it was like good civic planning, you know, 150, 200 years ago, like, you know, to have a park, a zoo, a library when you're building a city.
00:21:01.000So they were really just built as, you know, a good city needs to have a zoo, it's entertainment.
00:21:07.000And they weren't really designed to have anything to do with conservation or anything to do with animal welfare.
00:21:15.000But yeah, today, like you mentioned, the oryx here in Texas, there are species that have either gone what we call biologically extinct, which means that one animal can't find another, they're virtually extinct, or they are extinct in the wild in zoos.
00:21:31.000It may offer some hope for those animals where they can put them into what's called assurance colonies and try to maintain genetically diverse groups in a zoo for the day that one day you can return it to the wild.
00:21:46.000There may be a reason to have animals in captivity.
00:21:49.000How much success has there been in returning animals to the wild though?
00:21:54.000Well, you know, where we live in California.
00:21:56.000But you just did it with the eastern box turtle in New Jersey.
00:23:38.000You know, it doesn't make sense that it would be enough to kill off these animals, and there's probably some other factors that we are not considering.
00:23:47.000I believe that because a condor in a day, not to go off the charts on a condor, but a condor in a day can travel 400 miles in the thermals looking for, you know, a carcass.
00:24:38.000Well, if you don't like rats, you should like coyotes.
00:24:40.000Yeah, don't leave your dog outside because your dog's going to get, you know, and my daughter's puppy got killed by a coyote, and I've had chickens killed by coyotes.
00:24:49.000Ranchers hate coyotes more than anything.
00:25:21.000When I grew up in California, there were henchers next to us which were sheep ranchers because sheep are dumb and coyotes can get sheep easier than calves.
00:25:30.000They would trap the coyote with those horrible traps.
00:27:08.000And so, because the gray wolf, which lived in California and lived all over the West Coast, was the predominant predator, the coyotes had to develop a way of surviving.
00:27:19.000And the adaptation was, when they call out, when they yell out in the night and they're trying to do roll call and figure out how many guys are around, When one is missing, the female will have a change to a reproductive system where she will develop more pups,
00:27:35.000and then they will expand their territory.
00:27:37.000So because they were persecuted by wolves, they expanded their territory.
00:27:42.000So now when people came in and started killing off the wolves, which they did successfully, but they were never able to kill off coyotes because of this trait.
00:27:50.000So coyotes are now in every single city in the United States.
00:27:55.000This was not the case just 30 years ago.
00:27:58.000They're what we call, there's a word for that, it's called subsidized predators.
00:28:02.000And these are animals that do better around man.
00:28:06.000And crows are one of those animals, raccoons are one of them, coyotes, and they're weirdly can do, thrive and do better around You know, human activity than a lot of other animals.
00:28:42.000Yeah, but you know, I'm sure you've seen that video from Woodland Hills where this man was unloading his car and a coyote came and snatched his toddler, like right in front of him.
00:29:39.000Most people in the United States that live in urban areas have no idea that they're in an ecosystem because we've essentially done some very bizarre stuff and isolated ourselves from nature, which is one of the reasons why we have this strange idea that we are not animals and that we are not a part of nature.
00:30:11.000That was one of the things that I just couldn't ever connect with.
00:30:20.000This woman, Tanya, that kept this chimp and tried to explain to her, you know, that we are chimps, you know, effectively.
00:30:27.000And, you know, and she just, you know, took the page out of, you know, Genesis where she just said, you know, I'm not, you know, we're not animals.
00:30:36.000This is an animal and I can own it like property.
00:30:40.000Anyway, that was just one of the things that she just never really fully understood.
00:32:07.000But there was a moment when we were filming this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this pardon, the presidential pardon.
00:32:18.000There was a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like a...
00:35:39.000I mean, I think that's part of the problem.
00:35:41.000I don't think this lady understands the consequences of what she's doing, just like she doesn't understand how crazy her eyelashes look.
00:35:47.000You know, like all of it is just, there's some fuses that are missing, some wires that aren't connected, and then because of the fact that, at one point in time at least, it was illegal for her to do what she was doing, and they become accustomed to being able to have,
00:36:04.000and then their identity revolves around they're the person that has all the monkeys and all the chimpanzees.
00:37:10.000These women that dress up their monkeys like dolls, like Joan Bonet Ramsey, like a little pageant doll, and they want them to be kids.
00:37:19.000And they seem to have the same pathology over and over and over.
00:37:22.000There's a lot of monkey moms out there that we did not film, and they have annually something called a monkey ball, where they all come together with their monkeys.
00:37:31.000Anyway, we discovered them in the course of making Tiger King.
00:37:36.000Yeah, well, my grandmother had a monkey.
00:39:47.000This thing is trapped in this, like, regular apartment with regular glass.
00:39:52.000Like, at any moment, the only thing keeping that thing out is it doesn't know that it could just smash that and get on that fire escape and just go run through the streets.
00:42:11.000Hunting in the United States for elk or deer...
00:42:15.000You know, there's a lot of things people don't know about hunting, which is, you know, one just obvious statistic is that more wild lands are protected because of hunting.
00:42:25.000So, yeah, you're killing a deer, but you're protecting all the other stuff.
00:42:29.000Well, the amount of money, because of the Pittman-Robertson Act, the amount of money that gets, I think it's 10% of all sales of outdoor activities gets donated towards wildlife preservation.
00:42:41.000And this is the reason why we can have these enormous national forests.
00:42:45.000Where you have wildlife biologists establish what the healthy numbers of these animals are and how many people can go hunt them.
00:42:54.000And they also know because you have to...
00:42:56.000Say if you shoot a deer, you have to register that you shot the deer.
00:44:18.000Because when they chop down the corn, they don't chop it all down.
00:44:21.000And these deer, they go there after fresh feedings.
00:44:24.000They go there, you see them eating corn.
00:44:26.000They eat grass, there's grass everywhere, there's plenty and plenty of food, and a very low number of predators.
00:44:32.000Like, Iowa does not have a lot of, they don't have wolves, they don't have a lot of animals that would sort of balance out the population of these animals, and so you have insane amounts of car accidents.
00:44:44.000Like, when I was in, I went to visit my buddy there, and just driving from the airport to his house, we saw like 50 fucking deer.
00:44:51.000And if you're going there around November, which is the rut, the men lose their mind.
00:44:56.000So the male deer, they're horny as hell, they're crazy, and the female are breeding, and the female are running from the males, and they're running right into traffic, and the males are running after them, and they're running right into traffic.
00:45:14.000So if, like, California has this bizarre model, and what California would like I mean, California is, I think, the only state that doesn't have a fish and game department.
00:45:29.000And so they treat it very differently.
00:45:31.000Instead of treating it as a renewable resource where people can go and get their own food and hunt animals in the wild, they treat it like we should have the animals take care of themselves.
00:45:40.000And so that's why it's illegal to kill a mountain lion in California, and they have a large number of mountain lions.
00:45:58.000It's not often, but, you know, if you're on a bike, the problem with being on a bike is you're moving a little too quick and their instincts take over.
00:46:05.000They think you're trying to run from them and they can't even help themselves.
00:46:07.000It's like a kitten with a ball of yarn and their instincts clip in and they just go chasing after it.
00:46:12.000But I've seen mountain lions in the wild and it is a sobering Sobering moment when you stare into the eyes of one of those things, you're like, whoa!
00:47:00.000It's not like a tiger that, you know, has all its prey, you know, get trapped by, you know, the local people in India and they have to go out and try to find prey and it's people oftentimes.
00:47:11.000And jaguars have to, at this point in time, have realized that people have bows and arrows and spears and every now and then if you go after a person you can get jumped.
00:47:19.000And, you know, so they probably, like, grizzly bears behave very differently in places where grizzly bears are hunted.
00:47:26.000So in the lower 48, it's illegal to hunt grizzly bears.
00:47:29.000So if they see you, you know, if you run into them in the wrong, they're not going to run away, they might run towards you.
00:47:35.000Especially if you surprise them, it's very dangerous.
00:47:37.000And that's why, and they will treat you as food if they're really hungry.
00:47:41.000You know, in the course of making Tiger King, I would interview people about tigers and what it's like keeping 100 tigers.
00:47:50.000And people would always say to me, I'd rather have 100 tigers than one chimp.
00:47:56.000And that's because chimps, you know, and everyone thinks, oh, a tiger is so dangerous, but chimps can figure shit out.
00:48:04.000And one of the chronic problems keeping chimps is that they can figure out how to escape.
00:48:08.000And so you can never use a combination lock because they'll sit there all day and figure it out.
00:48:13.000And you've got to use oftentimes like three layers of locks.
00:48:16.000And I'm just bringing it back to chimps because...
00:48:19.000You know, people think, oh, it's a chimp, it's so cute, it's in the circus.
00:48:23.000Trust me, it's a lot easier to have a tiger act than a chimp act.
00:48:28.000And also, when I was watching this lady's enclosure, I was looking at the steel that's drilled into wood, and I'm like, I could get out of that.
00:52:09.000It's so good because it is a rare documentary that had this established Element in that these scientists had been embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years.
00:52:21.000And so these scientists had very specific rules.
00:54:26.000Crazy Tanya, you know, and Joe Exotic.
00:54:28.000You need someone who's like the figurehead, like with the photo that you guys have on the promo of her laying down in the chimp behind her.
00:54:39.000I mean, you need that nutty person to compel you because there's part of all of us that recognizes that that thought Thought would come into our minds, but then rational thought would go into play like, you can't do this, they're dangerous, they're big,
00:54:54.000they get older, you can't control them, what happens to them, it's not fair for them to be...
00:54:58.000And then you go, I don't want a chimp.
00:55:57.000I mean, talk about sobering experience.
00:56:00.000I'm, you know, me and Carl distanced with Chance the chimpanzee, 15 years old, pounding a, basically, a modified trailer home, the floor echoing.
00:56:11.000The loudness of that sound on the floor was so loud I'd have taken my headset off.
00:56:17.000Yeah, it was a lot scarier, and you were there, it was a lot scarier to film chimps than tigers.
00:56:22.000The crew didn't have a problem going into a tiger enclosure, because the thing about tigers is, as long as they're about under the age four, even though it looks like a full-grown tiger...
00:56:33.000They, you know, they haven't gone through puberty yet.
00:56:36.000They haven't gotten the tiger, you know, mentality of killing you.
00:56:39.000But a chimp, anyway, the chimp filming was much more difficult.
00:56:44.000Well, they're also like human characters and wiry and you don't know what's going to happen.
00:57:36.000I'm a reptile guy, and in the range of those chimps in the wild, there's a tortoise.
00:57:42.000And this tortoise, it's like our box turtles, but it's much bigger, but it's called a hingeback tortoise, and it literally closes up like a rock.
00:59:58.000You'd think, knowing all this about chimps later, and remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be like reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks, and we couldn't find any.
01:00:16.000But in the US, there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee.
01:00:20.000Now, what was fascinating, and you haven't watched this yet, but in episode four, we kind of go, it comes like from delusion to reality, and it's heavy.
01:00:42.000It was so, the kind of juxtaposition of this celebration of life and these attacks in this context of a situation they shouldn't have ever been in, it was kind of remarkable.
01:00:55.000And animal attacks in general across the board in roadside zoos and private sector.
01:01:01.000Are completely underreported because people don't want their animals taken away.
01:01:05.000So if a tiger attacks someone and they have a huge laceration, they'll go to the hospital saying it was a chainsaw.
01:01:11.000Because the second they say it was my tiger or my chimp, they run the risk of losing that animal.
01:01:17.000You also have the problem with less than extraordinary people being addicted to extraordinary circumstances.
01:01:25.000So if you have a boring ass fucking life in some middle of nowhere town, but you also have a lion.
01:02:16.000I think we like experiences, for sure.
01:02:18.000First of all, there's a part of evolution where human beings, part of our lust for innovation and for constant improvement of our environment and circumstances is we like extraordinary experiences.
01:02:31.000I think it's what made people successful.
01:02:34.000I think the more daring and the more addicted you were to extraordinary experiences, the more likely you were to find new hunting grounds, the more likely you were to conquer neighboring tribes, the more likely you were to survive an attack.
01:02:48.000I think human beings like extraordinary experiences.
01:02:52.000We like comfort, but not as much as we like extraordinary experiences.
01:02:56.000But having some of these animals is like chick bait.
01:02:59.000It's like a little pooch gets you a lot of cooch, like a guy that's walking a dog.
01:03:16.000Come on, if you have a chimp, a baby chimp, you're walking around Austin, Texas, people come up to you and go, Oh, Joe, I will love your little chimp.
01:03:47.000Yeah, but we got two different kinds of things, you know, like one of them is like a little bulldog, it's a little psychopath, and the other one is a golden retriever, it's like a love sponge, like all he wants to do is be your friend.
01:03:59.000He wants to be your friend, unless you're a squirrel.
01:05:05.000Cats are, they've killed so many fucking birds.
01:05:09.000It's something like a billion, it's multiple billions of mammals and birds are killed every year by outside cats.
01:05:16.000The first thing that kills songbirds is glass windows, skyscrapers are glass windows.
01:05:22.000Second is domestic cats, and they are killing machines, and they really do take a toll on wild birds.
01:05:27.000I went, because I'm getting ready for this podcast, I went down a dirty road last night, a wormhole of cats, predatory cats, and there's compilations of cats just jacking pigeons, jacking squirrels,
01:06:48.000And you bring it back, give him a treat, and they understand, you know, you praise him.
01:06:52.000And then eventually, they understand commands, and they have this, like, pathway that you've carved into their system of chasing the ball, bringing it back.
01:07:06.000Which is so much of what we found so interesting about the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me.
01:07:28.000I feel what we've realized is this kind of imbalance of this mutuality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our subjects that we cover, but also some of the chimpanzees.
01:07:42.000It's very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs.
01:08:09.000Like, Tanya, this chimp does not love you the way you love it.
01:08:13.000Well, I think it does, but it also doesn't have a choice.
01:08:16.000So if Tanya lived in the jungle, if she had a shack in the jungle and the chimp lived in the jungle wild and free, how much would the chimp visit her?
01:08:24.000First of all, it wouldn't be eating chicken nuggets and drinking Coca-Cola, which is weird too, that she's feeding this thing.
01:08:30.000And she said it has congestive heart failure.
01:08:48.000You know, one of the saddest things for me was when she was showing it Instagram Reels and just scrolling through Reels and the chimp's just staring at the screen.
01:12:44.000It doesn't seem to serve any purpose evolutionarily for them to be monogamous.
01:12:51.000It seems contrary to the idea of natural selection.
01:12:53.000If you have potent genes, you should want to spread those genes as much as possible.
01:12:58.000So that means we shouldn't be monogamous.
01:13:00.000Well, human beings, we've fallen into this weird thing where we're more than an animal in that we are an animal, but we're an animal that expresses our thoughts and feelings to each other, and we are evolving.
01:13:12.000We are clearly different in that we are animals, but we can manipulate our environment like no animal that's ever existed.
01:13:21.000We can travel to any place in the world, which no animal could ever do on its own.
01:13:25.000We can do all kinds of things that other animals can't do, but more importantly, we communicate.
01:13:33.000And we recognize things in other people, even heinous people, even people that you don't like, like whether it's Joe Exotic or Tanya, you recognize like, I see, she's not, I get it.
01:13:43.000You know, she's just a person who's all fucked up.
01:13:45.000Even that crazy drunk lady who had the one that attacked her daughter.
01:14:13.000I think, you know, when that lady from the liquor store was talking about how much that lady drinks, like, who knows what she's even responsible for anymore.
01:14:21.000Like, she's got to be out of her fucking mind all the time if she's drinking that much booze.
01:14:27.000I think she wanted out with the chimp.
01:14:29.000I think she was as caged, as depressed as the chimp, possibly, in that house after 15 years living with this chimp that she thought...
01:14:39.000You know, was her son and then later was dressing, you know, the chimp up with the same clothing as her deceased husband.
01:18:23.000But he was, you know, this classic story was this kind of gothic fairy tale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan.
01:18:31.000You know, everyone thought this was in the south or wherever.
01:18:33.000It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut.
01:18:37.000Sandy had this kind of void in her life.
01:18:39.000She buys Travis and raises her part of the family.
01:18:43.000And you see the story, the same arc as every other chimp story in a family setting.
01:18:47.000They get too mature and they have to, you know...
01:18:49.000The thing that I thought you'd appreciate in terms of our kind of this idea that we show in the story really well, I think, is this...
01:18:58.000This chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free.
01:20:03.000So this chimp is out in space for a majority of his life and then built to confinement for the majority of his life.
01:20:11.000And so fast forward, and I'll spare you kind of the other stuff that we learned, but, you know, what everyone kind of talks about in Revisiting Media at the time is he—it was annexed.
01:21:14.000And when you see that, you know that's a really desperately depressed chimp.
01:21:19.000But we love this, you know, I'm sorry, love.
01:21:22.000But we're interested in this tension because we think we can control things.
01:21:27.000I mean, that's what, if you've seen the movie Nope, this great footage with this chimp Gordy, which he covers and is a through line in the show, it's inspired based on this whole idea.
01:21:35.000Of spectacle and humans that can control things.
01:21:38.000And that scene with Gordy the chimp is probably one of the most beautiful displays cinematically that I've seen.
01:21:59.000I mean, she's 77 years old, Pam Roser.
01:22:02.000When she was 7 years old, she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family, and she says, I want to train chimps.
01:23:07.000I should say there's a lot of dark parts of our story that we didn't go into.
01:23:11.000One of the things we learned was that so many of the monkeys that are being sold by Tanya and others are coming across the border from Mexico, just along with probably drugs.
01:23:24.000And more recently, in recent time, we've seen a lot of Central American and Mexican species coming into the U.S. So there's a pipeline.
01:23:36.000So, yes, we didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it because we were so close to it and the reaction by people, it's very heavy.
01:23:46.000So we're all desensitized from seeing this.
01:23:50.000There's some really interesting stuff that happens in Fort Joe.
01:23:52.000I hope you finish it, including another attack, but this time with a person.
01:24:26.000So is that lady in with the 15 year old champ is that the only one that you know of that keeps a Full-grown adult and has it just wander around with everybody we've learned more To be clear Pam doesn't live in the chimp doesn't live in her house like like it's in there sometimes Yeah,
01:24:44.000there's sometimes but it's not much of the cast rating it changes its behavior I think significantly.
01:25:51.000Which we learned, there really only is about 1,300 remaining in captivity, which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the U.S. About half of that 1,300.
01:26:03.000Big zoos have about 250 of them still.
01:26:05.000So in terms of the kind of roadside zoo, private home environment, it's between, you know, less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity.
01:26:13.000So to answer your question, there might be more.
01:26:46.000But, you know, through that, we had to zoom out.
01:26:49.000And I think that what we've learned, what I've learned personally about organizations that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees, there's a lot of great ones out there.
01:27:00.000So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, 10,000 chimpanzees.
01:27:27.000I don't know if you like any of these other movies that were done about these scientific experiments people have in their homes in the 70s and 80s bringing chimps and reintroducing them into the wild.
01:27:39.000Well, there's a place in Africa, there's a sort of an island in a, you know, there's a, it's like a freshwater river where they have released chimps, but, you know, chimps that are just placed in Africa.
01:27:51.000But yeah, to release them actually back into a population of wild chimps hasn't been done successfully, for sure.
01:28:01.000That's a good, you know, there's that famous, you know, image of Putin releasing a tiger in Russia that was captive and They have done it with cats, actually.
01:28:12.000I work with an organization that's been releasing jaguars back into northern Argentina, where jaguars have now disappeared.
01:28:19.000But the jaguar program, they do it very carefully, and they put the jaguar in these enormous enclosures and let them capture wild prey before they release them.
01:28:49.000They all have instincts to kill and eat things.
01:28:51.000So I would imagine cats would probably be one of the easiest ones to reintroduce to the wild.
01:28:56.000But then you have things that are accustomed, like bears.
01:28:59.000One of the problems with people that live in rural communities is when bears start attacking your dumpsters and your garbage cans, they know food is there and you can't get rid of them.
01:29:09.000They will come back to that, no matter what.
01:29:14.000Where we live in California, we have bears, black bears, not grizzly bears, and we have mountain lions.
01:29:19.000And almost every night, you'll see on our streets, there's a certain night of the week when the garbage comes out, all the garbage cans are tipped over because of the bears.
01:29:51.000All these people that want to reintroduce animals, like, okay, it's just, you have to understand, you're playing God.
01:29:57.000And there's a reason it went extinct, because the last grizzly bear in California was shot about 100 years ago, and it's because they eat people.
01:30:04.000Levesque, California is named after the last guy who died from a grizzly bear attack.
01:30:08.000Yeah, I think his name is Steven Levesque.
01:31:06.000Like, they did have an overpopulation problem of ungulates because bears can only eat so many of them and wolves are much more clever and they act together.
01:31:14.000And it's kind of balanced things out for now.
01:31:17.000We work with Turner Endangered Species, Ted Turner, and we work very closely with this guy, Mike Phillips, in Montana, who's been probably the key guy to bring back gray wolves into this part of, you know, the western part of the United States.
01:31:32.000But yeah, it's been without, I mean, I know, because we do this, that even gray wolves, there's a lot of controversy from ranchers.
01:31:40.000Imagine bringing back big grizzlies, brown bears to California.
01:36:10.000And if that guy is not armed and he can't protect himself, then what do you have?
01:36:14.000You have a person that gets torn apart by a chimpanzee.
01:36:17.000The idea that you can't protect yourself from someone's crazy fucking idea of harboring an animal, an enormous animal that's insanely strong and hyper-aggressive and intelligent and uncontrollable.
01:36:33.000It's really hard making these films because so many good stories fall on the cutting room floor and so many great subjects, and that was one of them.
01:36:42.000Well, you have to have some discretion in the process of casting subjects.
01:37:00.000But is it also harder to get people to be natural on camera and to not be performative?
01:37:05.000It's harder—I mean, what is harder now, and it was hard in the very beginning also, is that these people that keep—I'm generalizing a little bit, but for the most part, they're very guarded about letting you in because, one, they don't know if you're a spy for animal rights groups.
01:39:07.000It was also a welcome escape from the craziness that we were all experiencing.
01:39:13.000We're experiencing everyone's wearing a mask, you're keeping away from people, and then at least when you're home with your family, you're like, oh my god, we're not these fucking idiots.
01:39:21.000We're crazy, but we're not this crazy.
01:39:24.000This world is so much more insane than this new insane world that it became sort of a little bit of a panacea for us.
01:39:33.000I think, I was telling Eric this, you know, it's so, we get asked this question a lot about, you know, the state of, you know, non-scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries, and this dramatization that you're seeing is a trend, people making very cinematic, real stories,
01:39:51.000And Eric and I, we're talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up or recreate.
01:40:02.000And that's what's so surreal about our process and also just the stuff we capture.
01:41:21.000Yeah, and we also have, you know, Eric, we're also fortunate to have an incredibly talented team that can help, you know, create these experiences in a way on screen that make it authentic.
01:41:34.000Well, and it's also the editing process.
01:42:47.000You know, like, there's all these sort of formulaic styles of documentaries, like a biopic, a famous person, or a takedown documentary, or a true crime.
01:42:55.000What we do, and I think we've just been really lucky, is we just start filming somebody, never knowing, of course, where this is going to go, you know?
01:43:04.000And that is not a good, smart way to make, probably, documentaries, because what if it goes nowhere?
01:44:44.000Well, you know, what's so interesting, Joe, and I want to come back to this about, you know, I saw you get a little emotional with the Buck story because I... It was really a hard one for us to tell, but an important one to make sure we got that in.
01:45:03.000We were going to go, Eric and I were going to go to Pendleton to cover what was happening with Buck because we knew there was a violation that occurred from the state of Oregon that basically said, Tamara, you have to do these improvements.
01:45:15.000Otherwise, we're taking the animal away from you.
01:45:24.000And we said to ourselves, and I remember this so vividly, we have to trust our instincts.
01:45:30.000When we are into something, let's cover it, film it, send someone out and cover it if we need to.
01:45:36.000So we decided to film everything, everything including our conversations and process, very meta, which ended up becoming part of the story too, as you'll see more in 4, where we have to turn her in, basically.
01:45:48.000So, the point with Bean is that the Buck story happened.
01:45:53.000We thought we'd just send this guy, Dwayne, who we recruited to kind of join the team into Festus to cover this confiscation, thinking nothing was going to happen.
01:46:04.000Day happens, take the animals out, one is missing.
01:46:07.000And then the guy that we had sent there became friends with her and we just had to keep following it.
01:46:12.000So this guy became essential to the story with no intended reasoning for that.
01:46:19.000So yeah, the making of became more interesting than the actual subject matter in a way to us.
01:46:28.000And kind of weaving that together came much, much later.
01:46:31.000It's not a good formula if you want to make money in documentaries.
01:46:53.000It was people that were involved in scripted shows, and then scripted shows somewhere around the early 2000s got decimated by reality shows.
01:47:02.000And so these people who were already respected television producers, they made their way into reality television.
01:47:10.000And then they realized some of these people were pretty fucking boring most of the time.
01:47:13.000We don't have enough time to spend 250 days to film one episode of a show, right?
01:48:54.000But I even thought, I don't watch any of those shows, I even thought some of these nature shows, like Steve Irwin, and I know you know Forrest Gallant, but I always kind of wonder, is he walking through the jungle and there he suddenly finds the snake?
01:49:10.000It's got to be set up a lot of the time.
01:49:57.000I was going to the Nile crocodiles in the Everglades.
01:49:59.000I can tell you a lot about Nile crocodiles.
01:50:02.000Tell me about Nile crocodiles in the Everglades, though.
01:50:05.000Because what they were saying is they found a few and the ones that they identified that they've captured that were definitely Nile crocodiles came from the same gene line.
01:50:14.000So they think they came from the same genetic source.
01:50:17.000But then there was another guy that I was watching this documentary last night or this YouTube video rather last night where he was saying that there's like huge crocodiles that take out cattle on the west side of Florida.
01:53:06.000They just keep getting older and bigger.
01:53:08.000And when you introduce human beings and guns into the equation, what are the people going to shoot?
01:53:14.000Well, they're going to shoot the biggest ones.
01:53:15.000So you have guns being introduced in the 1800s, and now in 2024, you can't find the really big ones.
01:53:23.000Well, one of the reasons for that is a really big one would take hundreds of years to get that big.
01:53:27.000So an alligator like that big fucker that they had, the cattle-eating 15-foot alligator, that guy might be 90 years old.
01:53:36.000You know, so a crocodile that gets to 30 feet long, which is, you know, there was reports of ones that were longer than a 38-foot boat that these guys were on.
01:56:10.000So if they want to do something like have a place where they can retrieve water safely, what they do is they put giant poles in the ground all around.
01:56:37.000And they're watching you underwater for hours without breathing.
01:56:40.000I work a lot in Madagascar, and we have not crocodiles in Madagascar, but they're not as big as mainland Nile crocs, but I know that in Madagascar, it's when people go to wash their clothing around the edge of these lakes that they get, you know...
01:56:54.000That's their instincts, because that's how they get deer, like these little animal species.
01:56:58.000Every year, people die washing their clothing in Madagascar from Nile crocs.
01:57:25.000I always wondered why there were not anacondas in the making of this reptile documentary we're doing.
01:57:32.000The reason we've been told that they're not anacondas in the Everglades is that they didn't import anacondas in the way they did Burmese pythons.
01:57:40.000Burmese pythons, from what we understand, the python-skinned people in Thailand and Malaysia, they would collect the eggs and breed, you know, have the babies and send thousands of baby Burmese pythons to the U.S. And that never happened with anacondas.
01:57:56.000But you think about anacondas because they would live in the Everglades.
01:58:00.000You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.
01:58:03.000It's unclear if Nile crocodiles are breeding.
01:59:22.000What took pressure off of crocs just globally, not so much alligators, but crocs in general, was when the farming happened, it took pressure off of hunting them, obviously, for skins, right?
01:59:34.000And the farming of crocodiles has been a really, you know, it's controversial, but it's really been a success story for wild crocodilians.
01:59:59.000I mean, they still breed them for skins and hunt them for skins, but now they have an overpopulation problem.
02:00:04.000So I was just curious, like, how would crocodile farming make that happen?
02:00:09.000I think it's probably just a natural reaction to the fact they weren't hunted anymore, and then they just blossomed, and it just took a few decades, and then you have enormous populations.
02:00:38.000When we're talking about deer, one of the things that was established through Teddy Roosevelt and when they set up the national parks and wildlife services in this country, they had market hunting before that.
02:01:14.000Which is really crazy, because bison meat is thought to be like some of the best meat, but they were pickling their tongues and sending them back east.
02:01:21.000You're now making me think about something, and I don't know the facts, but the Migratory Bird Act is something that we used to shoot birds all the time, and obviously the most common bird, or one of the most common birds, was passenger potions.
02:02:31.000You know, you have people that are very dug in with the animal liberation idea, they're very dug in with PETA and veganism, and dug in with anti-hunting, and then there's people that are ranchers, and then there's people that are very dug in to animals or our property.
02:02:47.000It's quite complicated and it's just one of those things about being a human being is there's nuance to most things that are important to all of us.
02:02:57.000And the success of wildlife is important to all of us.
02:03:00.000It's so true and one of the things we've tried to do a little bit is bring the animal rights groups Closer together with the conservation biologist groups so that they can kind of work together because you're right.
02:03:14.000Well, there's also the problem is like we were talking about with BC. I didn't really finish my thought, but the reason why they outlawed bear hunting in BC is because the high population centers are all urban.
02:03:25.000So people don't have any experience with grizzly bears trying to eat their dogs or grizzly bears killing hikers.
02:03:33.000It's a giant predator, and you have no chance if it catches you out in the wild.
02:03:38.000I don't think we should ever kill off all the grizzly bears, but they should control the populations.
02:03:44.000And the way to control the populations ethically is you do it through hunting.
02:03:48.000As much as this seems counterintuitive to people that love wildlife, The right way to do it is you have informed, well-schooled biologists that really do a great job of managing the numbers that are in the area, and then you have people that spend enormous amounts of money to hunt those things,
02:04:07.000and then that money goes into maintaining the population and making sure that it's at a healthy balance.
02:04:12.000If there's too many bears, Well, genocide – I mean, infanticide in bears is common.
02:04:24.000And if they don't have enough food or if the males come out of the – if they're hibernating and they come out before the female does with their cubs, they'll actively seek out those cubs for food.
02:04:59.000And enjoy it, but the problem is it leaks over into this strange world that we've created.
02:05:04.000And this is the reality if you want to be able to go to Starbucks, if you want to be able to go outside and have a cheeseburger in an outdoor patio, you can't have fucking wolves everywhere, okay?
02:05:15.000This is just reality and we're accustomed to this artificial enclosure that we've created to keep human beings safe, and we've lost our perspective of what it means to be an animal in the world.
02:05:30.000If you don't manage elephants, they'll denude everything, and then they'll all die.
02:05:35.000Well, there's that, but there's also they don't give a fuck who planted that food.
02:05:40.000If you're in a village and your whole family survival is dependent upon you getting these vegetables that you've planted, And then elephants come in and eat all your vegetables.
02:05:50.000You could very easily starve to death.
02:06:45.000Okay, if you want to have a guy who grows cows so you can eat steak, you're going to have to be able to protect this guy's crop or it's not going to be profitable for him to do this.
02:06:52.000You're going to have to be able to protect his animals.
02:07:49.000One thing, this federal law called Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, largely because of Tiger King.
02:07:55.000But the other thing we did, just sort of privately, is we donated a million dollars to tiger conservation in India, one of the countries where tigers are still doing quite well.
02:08:08.000And so we went to visit the program last September in India.
02:08:12.000And, you know, it just was so interesting because you were talking about bears attacking people.
02:08:17.000In India, they do live with tigers and they do have, obviously, a certain amount of people that get killed every year.
02:08:26.000Within the area where these tigers are, it's when the local people, I guess, out-hunt or compete with the prey that the tigers start going into more human, basically start looking at humans as something to eat.
02:08:39.000But anyway, I just bring that up because it was a byproduct of Tiger King that was something that we did just quietly as the people that I did Tiger King with, including you, donated that money not so quietly now.
02:09:15.000Yeah, there's this one story of this group of men that are in a boat, and they're rowing this boat in the water, and I don't know if they're rowing it, but they're trying to get away from this tiger.
02:09:25.000This tiger jumps into the water, swims up to the boat, kills a guy, drags him to shore, jumps back in the water, swims out to the boat again, kills another guy.
02:09:34.000It drags him to shore and one guy gets away to safety.
02:09:59.000It didn't make it into Tiger King, but we filmed in southern Nepal, a place called Chitwan National Park, where tigers are doing very well.
02:10:06.000And they actually have armed guards with machine guns to protect the tigers from poachers.
02:10:13.000We filmed there, but it's pretty remote.
02:10:17.000I don't remember how many people get killed.
02:10:19.000But yeah, where there are tigers, people are going to have problems if there's high densities of people.
02:10:26.000You know, there's a reason why human beings don't live.
02:11:07.000And so they're living in sort of a traditional way, out exposed, and then they have to figure out how to protect themselves from these enormous, stealthy cats that are sneaking around everywhere they go.
02:11:53.000But it's so crazy that they stick to this one thing.
02:11:56.000Like, I was just watching this news report of this...
02:12:00.000A group of people that were not Hindu, I think they were of some other religion, and they lived in India, and they got arrested for killing cows.
02:12:11.000So they had cows in their yard, they were arrested for them, and they bulldozed their homes.
02:14:04.000It's almost the only thing that makes sense.
02:14:06.000It's almost the only thing that you could, especially if you have, like, ancient stories of soma and these different psychedelic compounds that the Hindus would eat.
02:14:19.000And these different psychedelic notions or potions rather that were talked about where we don't really know what the composition of them was.
02:14:28.000But we do know that psilocybin mushroom has a long history of use and it's really common to find them growing on cow manure.
02:14:35.000Why will so poor people that don't have any food not eat this one animal?
02:14:41.000I don't know, but I've seen mushrooms in cow manure.
02:14:43.000Getting very confusing information on the burger and India situation.
02:15:40.000Well, cities, as much as I love them, they are perverse.
02:15:44.000They're strange and they've done us a lot of harm psychologically.
02:15:49.000They've created people that are much more vulnerable than they've ever been before.
02:15:53.000They're soft and lazy and entitled and everything comes easy to them and I don't think that's normal for human beings either.
02:15:59.000And you can get food anywhere you want and all the worst kinds of food.
02:16:02.000And you're in a prison of your own choosing.
02:16:05.000You're going from one closed environment to another closed environment, riding around your car or the subway or whatever you're doing, and we're completely disconnected to what it meant to be a human being for hundreds of thousands of years.
02:17:24.000I mean, I would imagine if you went to a city, your average city, like a New York City or Los Angeles, the average person there, what percentage of them spend any time at all alone in the woods?
02:18:09.000The fact that so few people engage in it is also interesting to me.
02:18:14.000Because I'm fascinated by whatever the pull of urban life is.
02:18:22.000Like, what is the gravity of urban life that's changed us into these soft...
02:18:27.000Non-self-sufficient beings that is completely relying on some strange system that's ultimately polluting the world and decimating of its resources.
02:19:04.000It gives you a vitamin that you didn't know you needed.
02:19:08.000The feeling that you get when you go out in the sun, like maybe you've been indoors in the winter and then there's a nice sunny day in the spring and everybody's outside in the park.
02:19:19.000You're lying down like, give me my vitamins.
02:19:21.000That's what it feels like on a nice sunny day in like Central Park, right?
02:19:26.000There's a vitamin that we get in the wilderness that we don't know we're lacking in.
02:19:34.000I think it's a part of being a person.
02:19:35.000I think it's a part of being interconnected to every life form that exists Wherever we are and we don't think we are because we live in an apartment and we play Nintendo and we you know We're locked into this thing that human beings have created,
02:19:52.000but we're missing something and it's not as Extreme as Tonka being trapped in that lady's basement, but it's in the neighborhood.
02:21:32.000I mean, you guys did an amazing job of capturing it, and thank God you found that one nutty lady, because she really glues it all together.