In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I chat with wildlife biologist and wolf expert, Dr. John Rinell. We talk about the reintroduction of wolves to the wild, the history of wolves in the United States, and the challenges of reintroduction in the wild. We also talk about some of the challenges facing reintroduction efforts to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park and other places in the lower 48 states. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you want to go out and catch a wolf! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts, and I'll send you a link to the episode if you do! Thanks for listening and Good Luck Out There! -Jon Sorrentino and Happy New Year, everyone! -Jon and Steve Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience by day, by night, All Day, All Night, by Night, all Day! by Jon Rogan Podcast by Night! Jon Rogans - is a podcast about hunting, fishing, and all things related to hunting, catching, and everything in between. Jon talks about all things hunting, hunting, and fishing. Steve Rogan's podcast by day and night, all day by night. by night by night! is all day, all night, by day! . What's up? All day all day? , all day! by night? ? all day , by night ... nday? n a good day, n n day , n day n n , and so much more! , etc. ...and so on and so on I hope y'all have a great day, etc.. Thank you for listening to this podcast? I love you, bye Jon's podcast, bye, bye! ! Jon thank you, good night, bye... bye! bye, Jon & Good Night, bye Bye Bye Bye, bye. - Jon & Rory ~ Cheers, Bye, Bye, bye, Bye Bye JON & RYAN Love, -SORRY! -JON & EJEAN - EJ Podcast
00:00:39.000How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?
00:00:43.000Well, I grew up in Minnesota and probably tell from the Fargo accent, but I grew up in Minnesota and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career...
00:00:52.000Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in Wisconsin.
00:01:01.000And so I was interested from the beginning with that.
00:01:04.000And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meech, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus.
00:01:12.000So I just stopped by and kept bugging him.
00:01:14.000I wouldn't go away like a good parasite.
00:01:48.000And I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the Western states and the reintroduction of them.
00:01:59.000So you were there for all of it, right?
00:02:01.000So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out, except, as you said, in Minnesota.
00:02:07.000Is that the only other place that had them?
00:02:08.000No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior.
00:02:11.000It's actually technically part of Michigan.
00:02:12.000They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like, 1949, 50s, early, and they stayed, and they got seated there, and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat.
00:02:26.000So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that.
00:02:48.000There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently, genetically, there was no influx of new genes.
00:02:55.000So the wolves that came and went didn't breed...
00:02:57.000And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies.
00:03:02.000And eventually, just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father-daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over.
00:03:11.000And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally.
00:03:16.000So they just did a reintroduction to Iowa oil, too.
00:03:19.000That's been relatively new, just a handful of years.
00:03:22.000So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.
00:04:40.000So we didn't know if a farmer shot it in July.
00:04:44.000If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her.
00:04:47.000But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park.
00:04:53.000So clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far.
00:04:58.000The other interesting thing about that wolf Is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia.
00:05:11.000And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were.
00:05:19.000So this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon.
00:05:32.000We just didn't, back then we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals.
00:05:38.000But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently, and it was from the Midwest.
00:06:30.000I mean, if she wanted to find other wolves and start a pack or join a pack, she could have gone any direction 50 or 100 miles and found other wolves.
00:06:53.000So now that we have satellite callers, we've been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them.
00:07:01.000In the old days, we just had VHF callers and you had to physically be there within range, like from an airplane or track them.
00:07:09.000I mean, my gosh, we've got wolves going from Washington to Montana, and one of the wolves from Wyoming went all the way down to Arizona to just north of the Grand Canyon.
00:08:04.000Scan to get started or visit BetterHelp.com slash JRE today to get 10% off your first month.
00:08:13.000That's BetterHelp.com slash JRE. So when they're doing this and you track them, how long do those collars' batteries last?
00:08:24.000Well, sadly, for the VHF callers, the wolves generally die before the callers do, because wolves don't live very long.
00:08:32.000An average VHF caller lasts about four years.
00:08:35.000An average satellite caller, one to two years, and I don't understand why the technology is not...
00:08:43.000Better to prolong some kind of a new battery.
00:08:46.000Because once you put all the trauma of going through the wolf with a helicopter and catching it or whatever, you'd think they could get some kind of a super battery that would last a long time.
00:09:38.000I always, when I do have a talk, I ask the audience, how long do you think the average wolf lives?
00:09:43.000So if you guess from the time they're visible from the den emergence, like you start to see them at four weeks, and a few die before that, until they die.
00:10:19.000They usually die sooner because they burn up so much energy in years of mating and breeding that they get worn down and then, you know, they die.
00:10:37.000I think the longest I had a wolf, a wild wolf, that I knew her age, because I caught her as a pup, and I recaptured her and we tagged her, 12 years.
00:10:45.000That's extremely long for an old wolf.
00:10:49.000Yeah, there's a few in Yellowstone that I got that old.
00:10:52.000We had one of mine that dispersed to Idaho, and he, kind of interesting, I caught him in 1990, and he dispersed about a year later on his own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of non-return wilderness.
00:11:07.000There were no other wolves at that time, and he just hung around.
00:11:10.000We'd see him once in a while for an airplane.
00:11:21.000Trying to pull down an elk with your teeth?
00:11:22.000Is it because the old males don't get accepted into a new pack?
00:11:28.000He went to where there weren't any wolves, interestingly.
00:11:31.000But he had a success story because he just waited it out.
00:11:34.000And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in 95 and 96, a little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just...
00:11:43.000Hits the road as fast as she can go and she bumps into this wolf and they set up a territory in Kelly Creek and they became a breeding mating pair for years and years until he died of old age.
00:12:07.000Because he could have gone to Montana and found other wolves, but he didn't.
00:12:11.000Was there any understanding of what he was basically, because they usually hunt in packs, so it was probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer.
00:12:24.000I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawns, some deer.
00:12:29.000And if he got lucky, if he had a really deep snow winter, it's the advantage of the wolves because they got big snowshoe feet and elk, you know, punch through.
00:13:07.000A month, month and a half, it was healed enough, and it was in the process of killing another elk, and wolves came along and killed the wolf.
00:14:01.000And they got all the claws to hang on.
00:14:03.000But a wolf can only go with its teeth.
00:14:05.000And so it generally takes numerous wolves to successfully hunt an animal, especially something big like a moose or bison.
00:14:11.000What a friend said to me, so I want to run this by you to find out if this is true.
00:14:15.000He said that mountain lions are killing more elk because of wolves, because what happens is the mountain lion will kill the elk, but then the wolf will scare the mountain lion off and steal it from them.
00:14:26.000And so the mountain lion then goes and finds a mule deer, finds another deer, and so the mountain lions are killing more animals because in the areas where mountain lions and wolves cohabitate, the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills.
00:14:41.000That does happen, and I saw some in Glacier Park too, but...
00:14:45.000To that end, I'll say there are three times more mountain lions than there are wolves in northwestern Montana.
00:16:55.000You were just talking about what it's like out there, no electricity, no water.
00:16:58.000So for years I've lived without, and I haul water from the spring, and in the winter I melt the snow because we get a lot of snow.
00:17:05.000But three summers ago now, I was there alone, and I fell down the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot.
00:17:14.000And I said, you know, this isn't going to be very fun for a while, because I've got to close up the cabin, and I have a propane fridge and stove, and I've got to undo the propane and empty the fridge, and I've got a lot shorter, because I'm not going to be back.
00:20:54.000Well, I bet you if you live in the woods a long time, you get a little bit of superstition, a little bit of intuition, a little bit of you feel the woods a little bit differently than you could measure on a scale.
00:21:04.000I can think of twice only in my life, before I built my little cabin, I lived up this very, even more remote outpost called Moose City, loosely Moose City, because it was not a city at all.
00:21:16.000It was an old homestead with a lot of empty cabins.
00:21:20.000Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside.
00:22:47.000But if you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods and you see another person, There's this moment where you're like, what's this guy up to?
00:23:00.000Yeah, and I think that's because we're all raised in an urban environment, more or less, nowadays, and so having lots of people around is normal, but to have one person in a pretty remote area, we don't experience that very often anymore.
00:23:11.000Well, there's also no one is going to help you there.
00:23:13.000Like, if you're at the mall, it's very difficult for someone to get away with attacking you.
00:23:17.000If you're alone in the woods, there is this weird, like, if you're some crazy serial killer guys out there, like, and you, you know, you're backpacking, you're like, uh-oh, like, now I'm at the mercy of this person if they're crazy.
00:23:29.000I have a chapter in my book, early in the book, where I describe an event that I've basically been a real private person all my life until this book came out.
00:23:39.000And once I wrote this book, I had to bring up stories that are very personal to me.
00:23:44.000And I had an event one night that was terrifying.
00:23:48.000Probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my life.
00:25:51.000And I had been working—it's a long story— I was working behind the customs station right on the Canadian border and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the customs station.
00:26:03.000They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck and then the Canadian trucks would go back.
00:26:07.000And I temporarily took a job as the knot bumper at the log deck landing, which means my job was to run a chainsaw, trim off the branches.
00:26:17.000Trim the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed.
00:26:20.000Anyway, so I was around, so these loggers knew who I was, and I was cordial enough.
00:28:49.000You're living in the majestic mountains and wilderness of Glacier National Park, and everything is new, and there's tracks to find, and on and on and on.
00:28:57.000Well, it's all amazing stuff, but I would be lonely.
00:29:02.000Well, that's why you're really good at what you do, because you're a social person, you like to engage in conversation, but I didn't used to be that way.
00:29:10.000You wouldn't have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago, let's put it that way.
00:29:20.000I mean, it's just I would have been fascinated by who you were then because I'd be fascinated by a person who doesn't want to talk to people.
00:29:28.000If I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that's like.
00:29:34.000Because I would imagine there's a very different relationship with nature when it's just you and nature alone by yourself for prolonged periods of time.
00:29:45.000It's very different than taking a jaunt, taking a weekend excursion, hiking, even camping for a week.
00:29:52.000There's a big difference between that and living there for years.
00:32:00.000I mean, I've just come back from bird hunting.
00:32:02.000I just was 31 days on the road, and I just got home three days ago, and now I'm here.
00:32:07.000And I was out bird hunting with friends, and I said, I told them, I said, so when I'm hunting with my pointers, I got a graffon and a wire hair.
00:32:20.000Just watch and enjoy and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs.
00:32:25.000If you see them getting birdie, get ready.
00:32:28.000Because so many times you hunt with people and they're hacking their dog, they're calling, they're hollering, they're talking to you about something going on over here and, hey, did you watch the Vikings game?
00:32:37.000Well, nobody watches the Vikings game.
00:34:05.000But we did see a lot of elk and a bunch of bison.
00:34:10.000And the elk was strange because, I'm sure you know this, but for the people at home, elk understand that wolves don't come to these community centers, these areas where There's vending machines and buildings.
00:34:24.000So the elk are all over the place out there.
00:35:12.000And so they just like in the rut, they're walking down the street and there's like 30, 40 elk and they stop traffic and they're sitting on people's lawns and it's wild.
00:35:22.000The same things happen to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where they don't see people and they had never exposure to livestock.
00:35:32.000And then they can't get away from humans.
00:35:35.000So after a while, they just start disregarding people.
00:35:38.000And like if they have to cross the road, there's a wolf jam and everybody's crowding with their cars and they're trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot.
00:35:46.000And they can't even get through because of everybody.
00:35:48.000So they get kind of laissez-faire about it and they get used to people conditioned or habituated.
00:35:55.000And that's passed on to the next generation next.
00:35:58.000And then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down some open public land spot where there's a hunter with a rifle, they don't think anything about it.
00:36:20.000And the unfortunate thing is, a couple of years ago, there were 25 Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around.
00:36:30.000Anyway, that's like out of 100, so it's about a quarter of the population.
00:36:34.000And there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and I think?
00:37:02.000You should really be concerned because every year there's about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana, but you don't know them.
00:38:37.000So we went along with it, but we used the names and we did the scientific stuff with numbers.
00:38:42.000But then when you go into the park, people would want to know what's going on and you talk about these different wolf numbers, 8654, and they say, well, who is that?
00:39:07.000And I know the wolves in Yellowstone, they don't have names, they have numbers, but they're so identifiable by 907 or whatever that it becomes like a name.
00:39:34.000It's been interesting to me because for my career, I've done everything.
00:39:39.000My first year, my first job, I worked up in northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300-person farming community, and I was hired, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help.
00:39:51.000Prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove, which meant trap and hollowly and they were euthanized.
00:39:59.000And when there weren't depredations, to go out and research trap and put collars on the other wolves.
00:40:06.000And it was, I mean, this was big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, starry-eyed and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of Northholm from the wolves, you know?
00:41:09.000This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana, too, that when you translocate or move a wolf who's causing a problem...
00:41:21.000That wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves.
00:41:29.000It moves on to another farm or ranch and does it again.
00:41:32.000They don't generally survive, and so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them, and it's a good facade for the public to believe in, but sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year until they die anyway.
00:42:05.000I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that's going to kick me in the teeth or taking the cow, I'd pick the slow, dumb groceries every time.
00:43:06.000It's not natural to not have those predators there, and you're going to get an overpopulation of elk, and that's going to lead to starvation and disease.
00:43:15.000Yes, and so kind of the die was cast when those wolves were removed, and basically by the 1930s, there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore.
00:43:27.000There were wolves here and there and a pack here and there, but there weren't thousands.
00:43:30.000And they went inside the national parks.
00:43:33.000They have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are like seven, eight weeks old.
00:44:34.000But number two, in the winter of 96, 97, we had some of the deepest snows ever recorded in the mountains, ever.
00:44:43.000And so many of the herd died from snowfall.
00:44:47.000And I have hunters tell me, yeah, the population elk went from 20,000 to 10,000 in two years to damn those wolves.
00:44:53.000And it's like, do you think 35 wolves killed 10,000 elk?
00:44:57.000Come on, let's just do the math a minute.
00:44:59.000Yeah, that is the problem with people that don't have a nuanced perspective on what's happening because they have a vested interest in it being a problem that the wolves are keeping them from being able to be successful on an elk hunt.
00:45:17.000Like the place that I was just telling you about before the podcast that I was in in Utah, they lost 80% of their mule deer population a year ago.
00:45:55.000You know, I have to think back to what people say about wolves killing all the deer and elk.
00:46:00.000I think if you look to statistics in Montana and Wyoming, which both have had a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits.
00:46:10.000I just was reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana's got basically in most of its management units more elk than ever.
00:46:18.000I just say there's more going on than wolves.
00:46:21.000And to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat.
00:46:26.000You know, there's a lot of places where hunters want to go shoot these elk, but they're on large private ranches and you can't get on them.
00:47:25.000So they stop these corner crossings and it's a giant disaster because then you have these areas that are public land that should be available to all of us and no one can get in there.
00:47:38.000I mean, if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard and you're trying to get from one black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square to get there, right?
00:49:15.000I, as a single individual person, can't do a lot about it, and I'd like to see, you know, hunting organizations, many really good ones, help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter-landowner relationships.
00:49:26.000You would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement.
00:49:31.000Well, I would understand that if you've been burned a few times and people have poached on your land and there's this attitude that people who don't have anything and they see someone who has so much and they're like, screw this guy.
00:49:59.000There's people that are amazing plumbers and they're real honest and they work hard and they're sweethearts and you're happy to hire them and call them.
00:50:06.000And there's people that are just liars and they're crooks.
00:50:10.000It's just like any other group of people.
00:51:53.000And so people like, I remember there was a documentary that came out, how wolves changed rivers in Yellowstone.
00:52:02.000And they made this incredibly rosy picture of wolves coming in and it brought in beavers and they changed the rivers and the lakes and everything was better.
00:52:41.000And it's been shown since that video came out, the movie, that that might be true in a short time period in small places, but it's not the global picture for Yellowstone Park.
00:55:23.000I think wolves are not a problem when you deal with civilization, when you deal with agriculture and people have guns and people have land and they have property.
00:55:32.000But I think at one point in time it was a much bigger deal when there were larger populations of them and they would hunt people.
00:56:04.000So the story, I don't remember where I heard it from, but the story was, you know, the thing about war, especially trench warfare, the horrific nature of it is that you don't necessarily always kill people.
00:56:15.000You shoot them and hurt them and wound them.
00:56:18.000And these wolves were aware that these people were living in these trenches and that they were wounded.
00:56:22.000And so they smelled blood and they came in and there was so many instances of people getting dragged out of the trenches by packs of wolves.
00:56:31.000And there were so many instances of parties going out, like two or three men, and then they just find a boot with a foot in it, and they realize, like, oh boy, an animal's gotten them.
00:56:42.000And so they decided to have a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans to just get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other.
00:56:50.000I'll have to look that up, because I haven't actually heard it.
00:57:19.000February 1917, a dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire in the forests of Lithuania and, I don't know how to say that word, Volhynia?
00:57:50.000Recently, they were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded, reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article.
00:58:00.000Hostilities were at once suspended, and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about 50 wolves.
00:58:06.000So one of the things that happens in Russia is you get these super packs.
00:58:10.000I'm sure you've heard about those, where they've had problems with them descending on, whether it's a cattle ranch or horses.
00:58:21.000Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successfully tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance, according to a 1917 New York Times article.
00:58:45.000It says, though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate.
00:58:49.000Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war and that the surviving wolves fled to escape a carnage the like of which they had never encountered.
00:59:28.000Within a few years ago, there was a problem with these super packs where they, I don't remember what the theory was as to why they had formed such large packs.
00:59:40.000But there was large packs of up to 100 wolves that were going into farms.
00:59:47.000So my question about this story, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm just saying I'm skeptical.
01:00:19.000One of the remotest inhabited areas of the Northern Hemisphere, more than 30 horses were killed in just four days.
01:00:24.000And I remember reading about this in 2010. It said, according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on site.
01:00:34.000Animal experts suspicious of the claim say that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals.
01:00:39.000Although the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves' usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals.
01:00:45.000This was multiple sources had this story, and I remember it about a decade or so ago.
01:00:51.000Well, I'd love to look up more detail, but I can't tell you about the news source, and I'm not familiar with that, and I don't read that kind of stuff usually.
01:01:53.000And could you imagine a scenario where resources were so diminished that wolves recognized that killing each other had no benefit and that moving together as a group, they could do something to these farms.
01:02:07.000It's like if you are a pack of 400 wolves and you choose to attack horses, that seems to me a lot more success than three wolves or five wolves trying to do that.
01:02:17.000I get you saying, but you ask, would I believe it?
01:02:19.000And I have to tell you, no, I wouldn't believe it.
01:02:20.000Well, this is based on your real life lived experience.
01:03:05.000But my thought is that in perhaps unusual circumstances like Siberia, where it's so incredibly harsh, That if you do find a population that had been surviving because there was a sufficient amount of wildlife for them to kill,
01:03:22.000and then all of a sudden there wasn't, but there was farms, they all might kind of like descend on these farms and perhaps not even fight for resources because they realized there was no benefit in that.
01:03:33.000You asked me, I just said, I don't believe it.
01:03:59.000And I know in Yellowstone, like I said, I know one year they get up to 34, and I think that probably the largest I've ever heard of being recorded that I know is factual.
01:04:09.000It might be 40, but that's extremely unusual.
01:04:16.000But 34 in Yellowstone, that's unusual.
01:04:19.000Do you think the large number in Yellowstone was because of the unusual circumstances of the reintroduction and a bunch of animals that weren't used to having wolves around?
01:04:30.000On average, they have six pups, seven pups.
01:04:33.000So there's recruiting right there, 18, 20 pups, right there.
01:04:37.000In addition to the adults that were there, they had a good year, they had lots of prey, and so all those pups presumably made it to their first year.
01:04:46.000They were a huge pack and then mortality happens.
01:04:50.000Wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. Packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and the wolves are smaller, they live in smaller packs.
01:04:59.000In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Average pack might be somewhere between 10 and 15. And every year, you've got to remember, every year they have six to seven pups, and by the next spring, they're back down.
01:05:13.000That's six or seven through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting.
01:05:25.000Another thing, I've heard lots of people, well, I've heard several people, and people I know quite well, tell me stories about they encountered a wolf, or they encountered a wolf pack, and they were really frightened because they had their dog with them,
01:05:40.000and the wolves were interested in the dog, like little Carl there or something, and the wolves were circling around, and these people were terrified.
01:05:47.000And when they told me this story, two people, they told me this story, and they said, yeah, they could have killed me.
01:06:08.000And I don't know how good the reporting was way back when.
01:06:12.000But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns, or at the very least muskets, and you're dealing with people that are completely isolated, and you're dealing with harsh climates.
01:06:48.000I don't mean to be offensive, but a better base of information, with all the opportunity in the world for all those things you just set up, remote living, no protection, harsh winters like the winner of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle were starving...
01:07:02.000You didn't have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing everyone.
01:07:28.000They would go out there, and they would just go with a dog, and they would go live by themselves in these cabins that they had fortified for the entire winter.
01:07:37.000And just live out there amongst the wild.
01:07:59.000I'm trying to remember the name, but it's a story of a predatory tiger and these guys, a story of the tiger's life and how they go to finally try and kill it.
01:08:46.000Just as they're scared if they survive a situation.
01:08:49.000The second story of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill.
01:09:00.000The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated.
01:09:05.000The tiger stalked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.
01:11:41.000It's strictly to vanquish a competitor, just like the tiger.
01:11:44.000It's interesting because wouldn't you think that food is scarce and that meat is precious and that if they did kill the mountain lion, they'd realize, why don't we eat this thing?
01:14:21.000This is the reason why most people think, when they think of grizzly bears, grizzly bears have a very similar size, but then you get to coastal brown bears.
01:14:35.000I've been up to McNeil to watch the bears, and oh my god, they're just enormously fat.
01:14:40.000They're almost obscene waddling around with their Having a good old time hibernating.
01:14:48.000They're so content because they have endless food resources.
01:14:51.000That's why you can have tourists go out and sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you sometimes, eating salmon and you're under no danger.
01:15:01.000Why would they bother you when they have thousands of pounds of salmon in the river?
01:15:08.000I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's a photographer and he's got like a little lawn chair set up and he's photographing all these enormous brown bears that are feeding off salmon.
01:15:18.000And this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jamie is to us.
01:16:15.000And the bear just sort of walks off, like, see ya, bye, because he's got so much food.
01:16:20.000I kind of had a similar experience, McNeil, not that close, but close enough that I was uncomfortable.
01:16:26.000I live with bears because I'm used to bears that have skinny resources, and they're voracious, and they're pretty aggressive in the fall, they can be, because they're getting into hyperphagia where they got a good enough calories to hibernate.
01:16:41.000And if you keep them from getting their calories, It's you or the huckleberry badge, maybe, or you or the...
01:16:46.000The elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get.
01:18:29.000And one guy, our friend Dirtmouth, was actually on his back.
01:18:33.000The bear plowed through the camp and through the people and just, I don't think it recognized how many people were there, so it didn't know exactly what to do.
01:18:41.000So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for like 10 to 15 yards.
01:20:26.000Imagine a head that big, that close, and you hit it with trekking poles.
01:20:30.000And it just ran past them, probably not knowing which one to target or what to do.
01:20:36.000And then they got their guns out, and then I don't know exactly how they eventually got to a point where they felt confident enough that they could walk and then walk with meat on their back.
01:21:24.000And then we have this happen a lot in Montana.
01:21:26.000Every year, at least one person is killed by a bear or many can be injured.
01:21:32.000And the thing that's common is they say the bear charged them and, you know, before that it was woofing.
01:21:37.000And a lot of times they do what's called a bluff charge, but people don't want to wait until a bear is 15 feet away to figure out if it's a bluff charge or not, so they shoot them.
01:21:47.000And bear spray is very, very effective because you can do a longer distance, and it's accurate, but I personally don't...
01:21:57.000The science shows, and many of your listeners won't believe this, the science shows that average hunter is better off with a bear spray than a firearm.
01:22:36.000Actually, it was tear gas, now that I'm remembering.
01:22:40.000So what we did, we put these people in this cement structure, and it was like, how long can you tolerate it?
01:22:47.000I forget exactly what the stunt was, but the wind took a lot of it and blew it through the crew, and we were all running away, and it was in your eyes.
01:22:55.000And I'm sure tear gas is probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray.
01:23:01.000I think pepper spray, yeah, it might even be worse.
01:23:04.000Otherwise, they'd have tear gas for bear repellent, and they don't.
01:23:09.000But I'm just saying, and people can argue this, and it all depends on the situation, but in general...
01:23:15.000Bear spray is a more effective tool because you can spray it three times past where you're sitting and the bear hits that spray and they run away.
01:23:23.000And I guess I've heard the bear biologists say to me, try shooting a rolling tire at 40 miles an hour and see how accurate your shots are because that's what you're shooting at if a bear is charging you.
01:24:35.000I think if you had infrared vision for the heat detector and you could see what's out in the woods, you'd never go outside to take a leak when you're at your cabin.
01:25:17.000I don't want to kill anybody's business.
01:25:18.000But as you were with the wolf thing, I'm super skeptical that a deer or an elk is not going to smell you if you spray some junk that you bought from Cabela's on you.
01:25:30.000I don't want to kill anybody's business either, but I can tell you from traps, too, I do the same thing.
01:26:10.000Someone tried to explain it to me in a way that actually resonated, that it's similar to how you can smell skunk, except much more directional.
01:26:20.000A skunk can die a mile away, and you can smell it, which is really weird, because there's no other scent like that.
01:27:21.000And then one day, you see where a wolf has come by, taken its paw, and dug at the backside of the trap and lifted it out by the spring and pulled it up onto the trail.
01:28:00.000My imagination and my theory is that maybe this is a wolf that's already caught, been caught, and it's got other pack members that are naive.
01:28:42.000So they maybe done that just to make a viral video, but it's still pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out it can take a stick and it moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap.
01:29:43.000They're domesticated in some sort of a weird way.
01:29:45.000Well, you know, there's as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City.
01:29:51.000By weird estimations, which I'm sure they don't have a good, accurate account of how many rats there are, but there's so many of them.
01:29:56.000And there's an amazing documentary called Rats that's on Netflix, and it's really good.
01:30:02.000And it shows you how intelligent they are.
01:30:04.000And one of the things they do is they take the young, brash rats, and they let them go try the food out first, see if it's poison, because they've been poisoned so many times.
01:30:23.000But they have some very bizarre survival instincts that's highly tuned to this recognition that they're being at least tried, not preyed upon necessarily, but sometimes trying to kill them.
01:31:00.000I'm sure you're aware of this, but there's a very bizarre study that they've done Where there's a thing, there's a concept called morphic resonance, and the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier.
01:31:16.000And that this is scientifically proven, and that the idea is that there's some sort of a sharing of information that is not local.
01:31:27.000So the concept is, the way it's been proven is that rats on one side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country will go through the maze quicker.
01:31:43.000Like, you know, I think we have a very naive belief that the senses that we have recognized, all of them, whether they're sight, sound, touch, taste, whatever they are, this is it.
01:32:32.000So, according to the hypothesis, formative causation, there's no difference in kind between innate and learned behavior.
01:32:39.000Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance.
01:32:42.000The hypothesis, therefore, admits a possible transmission of learned behavior from one animal to another and leads to testable predictions which differ not only from those of the orthodox theory of inheritance, but also from those of the Lamarck So,
01:33:07.000animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in a characteristic way.
01:33:15.000They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times.
01:33:18.000X-Hypothesis, the new behavioral field which will be reinforced by morphic resonance, Will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, though less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus.
01:33:34.000The larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for the subsequent similar animals to learn it.
01:33:42.000Therefore, in an experiment of this type, it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in the animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.
01:34:48.000No, they have specific tasks where they have wolves that will get on the top of the ridges and let themselves be known so they get these animals running.
01:34:55.000And then the other wolves are ahead of them.
01:34:57.000And then they have wolves that fall behind them.
01:35:00.000Yellowstone's been a great place to observe hunting.
01:35:02.000I mean, when I was working up northwest Montana, it's heavily forested.
01:35:07.000Almost never got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we were in the airplane.
01:35:11.000But in the Lamar, you got scopes and everybody's watching it.
01:35:14.000And I've seen some pretty incredible chases.
01:35:16.000And there's certain, in some packs, certain individuals are the chasers, the younger animals.
01:35:22.000And some of the individuals are the coup de grace.
01:35:26.000They go in for the kill after the animal's been tired.
01:35:28.000And I guess there was some older animals that are too valuable potentially to risk being injured early on.
01:35:34.000But they join in the chase and they know how to kill an animal.
01:35:38.000So one thing I've always wondered, I don't know if this is with the morphic resonance, but that's something different maybe, but I've always wondered when wolves were first walking down from Canada and dispersing from Glacier before wolves were reintroduced and there was a very thin population of wolves out there,
01:36:00.000For example, there is a wolf pack in the Nine Mile, it's a river drainage, outside of Missoula, and this pair of wolves had formed a mating system and they had a litter of pups.
01:36:12.000The female was poached on Memorial Day, which is, those pups are born in middle April, so they were pretty young.
01:36:22.000And the concern was that the dad wouldn't be able to raise those pups because he's got to go out and hunt and maybe they're just being weaned and blah, blah, blah.
01:36:30.000Well, two weeks, two weeks after the female was dead, my colleague, Mike, who was working down there, says, hey, Diane, are you missing any collared wolves from Glacier?
01:36:41.000I said, yeah, I'm missing several that I don't know where they went.
01:37:16.000And that happens in Yellowstone, too, where one of the breeding animals will be killed, and very soon after, a wolf of unknown, well, there they know a lot of the wolves, but a wolf will just show up, the right gender, the right age, and potentially bond and start a new pack.
01:37:34.000And I guess all I can say is with that there's scent, the wolf smelling the urine and the scat can detect all kinds of things hormonally and the dominance of an animal.
01:37:44.000If the female went missing, all of a sudden they won't smell it anymore and maybe it's a female coming in and she knows it.
01:37:49.000But geographically, how do they know to migrate?
01:37:53.000200 miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears.
01:37:57.000Well, they've been trying to figure out forever what's going on with birds and how birds, like sandhill cranes, for example.
01:38:29.000But it's fascinating and full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places and like a particular important flat in China that was critical habitat for a group of birds suddenly gets developed and it's like the wintering ground for half a million of these birds or whatever it was and certainly where do they go?
01:39:12.000I remember one winter night I was at my little remote cabin and it was at Moose City and it was stormy and it was like November and it was stormy.
01:39:23.000I went outside to use the outhouse and I heard this calling and it was dark and stormy.
01:39:29.000It was calling and calling and it got closer and closer and I put my bright flashlight straight up And there was a flock of snow geese.
01:41:43.000I would hope the day would come with wolves and other large carnivores where people learn about the science and they get just as excited as this instead of the wolves have killed all the deer now.
01:41:55.000Well, I think there's a narrative in this country, right?
01:42:03.000A long time ago by poison, by ranchers, and by settlers.
01:42:06.000And because of that, we grew up with this narrative that they had to kill off the wolves.
01:42:11.000So then these damn hippies come and vote, and I wanted to ask you about that too, what your feeling is on biology that's done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote, how emotional is this, and how much of these decisions that people are making.
01:42:29.000One of them being that I think was particularly egregious was the delisting of grizzly bears in BC. Because I have a good friend who lives up there and he's like, there's a lot of grizzly bears up there.
01:42:41.000They still allow black bear hunting, but they're not controlling the grizzly bear population because of the people in Vancouver.
01:43:56.000They're a lot smarter than you or a lot better at living in the woods than you are.
01:44:00.000But we have these ideas that are ingrained in us that the wolves were killed off for a good reason and they're only being brought back because of morons.
01:44:49.000But I am not in favor of reintroductions, and I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the Central Idaho reintroductions, which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation.
01:45:01.000But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada, and before those wolves were ever reintroduced, by 1995, we had like eight packs of wolves in the state of Montana, 70, 75 wolves.
01:45:13.000And you can Google that with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service early reports.
01:45:16.000They were making it, And I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening because of ballot box initiatives like Colorado, wolves are already starting to get to Colorado and the people who are wolf proponents say we want them reintroduced because they'll never make the great desert across Wyoming.
01:45:55.000So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp of natural recovery.
01:46:00.000If it's going to be one year or 10 years or 50 years, it's a time issue.
01:46:04.000And I think the same was true for Yellowstone in central Idaho.
01:46:08.000They were already getting to those places.
01:46:10.000Wolves had already been seen, two of them confirmed, in and around Yellowstone Park in 1991 or two before they were reintroduced, and my wolves going to Idaho.
01:46:21.000It's just a slower wave, and people want to jumpstart this with reintroducing wolves.
01:46:27.000Well, in my humble opinion, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that Social tolerance of humans for anything is better when it isn't forced on them.
01:46:37.000I don't like having things forced on me.
01:46:54.000The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf-loving hippies pushed to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho.
01:47:05.000I'll just say Yellowstone, but it's the same.
01:47:08.000To some point it is that faction, but the reason it happened was because two conservative senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Wyoming, Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base, promoted to Congress to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced.
01:47:31.000Because they could see the writing on the wall that the wolves are coming anyway.
01:47:35.000And if they walk down there on their own, they're going to be fully endangered.
01:47:39.000Well, if we introduce them, they get a different classification called non-essential experimental population.
01:47:45.000Meaning because humans put them there, you can manipulate them and kill them if they're taking livestock.
01:47:57.000So yeah, that's a little bit of the interesting background that people aren't aware of with the reintroductions, that it was really people way on the right and way on the left coming towards a common goal for different reasons.
01:48:10.000Want to see a crazy video of a wolf that was in Bakersfield?
01:49:13.000So this wolf was very cool looking like this very big black wolf and he's like wandering around these cows and then someone comes and shoes him away and he runs off.
01:50:32.000But they live anywhere because they can...
01:50:35.000Eat anything, but mostly what they need is four-legged hoofed mammals, usually deer elk, caribou, moose, whatever, occasionally livestock.
01:50:43.000They need a place where they can secure that they can whelp and raise pups.
01:50:48.000And then they need a freedom of persecution from humans, being in traps, poison shooting, whatever.
01:50:53.000If you have enough of those three factors, they will be there.
01:50:56.000I mean, they've been showing up in Iowa and Missouri and the Dakotas for years and years now, but they don't make it because they get killed.
01:52:23.000I mean, it's amazing to hear them howling.
01:52:26.000One thing we did come across when I was hunting in BC, we were moose hunting about 10 years ago or so, and we found a calf that had been killed.
01:52:34.000And it was really interesting because they had stripped it down to the bone, and what was wild was all the hair.
01:56:24.000But they're very different and they have to make a living.
01:56:27.000I mean, if you had to make your living picking huckleberries and eating gut piles in the fall, it'd be skinny and they have to put on a lot of weight.
01:56:35.000Well, that to me is so fascinating how animals change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available and whether or not they're safe.
01:56:45.000Like the Yellowstone elk that are habitualized, that are just around people hanging out with them.
01:57:00.000And people just pull over to pull their phones out and film them.
01:57:03.000Yeah, I think I've heard of occasionally wolves find out and they sneak into town at night.
01:57:08.000Well, weren't you telling a story on Steve Rinella's podcast about a very nice neighborhood of like these nice homes and these wolves had decided to set up shop?
01:57:17.000It was a closed-gated community between Whitefish and Kalispell, and they had their pups in this closed-gated community because there's no hunting.
01:57:26.000It's unlimited green space and undeveloped forest because people have McMansions and they have huge acreage, and it's just quiet time.
01:57:33.000There's not a safer place, and the people there like them because they don't have livestock.
02:00:10.000So the white chevron, pups, younger wolves have that, and as they get older, like the rest of us, they get gray, and that doesn't stand out so much.
02:00:18.000So it would probably be a yearling, maybe a two-year-old wolf.
02:00:22.000So what their speculation is, you know, he works on a ranch.
02:00:26.000Their speculation is that someone released that and they think these rogue wildlife lovers are releasing wolves to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into central California.
02:00:46.000I know for a fact that there was a wild wolf that was tracked going down through Central and Bakersfield.
02:00:51.000I don't know if it's black or gray, but I know there was one.
02:01:09.000And there's lots of conflict because they can't, I'm pretty darn sure, they cannot kill the wolves that are killing livestock.
02:01:16.000So it's set up for a conflict, kind of like in California.
02:01:20.000They're having some management flexibility in California, I mean in Colorado.
02:01:24.000But so far, I mean they just now, so a pair of wolves that they reintroduced, Found each other and made a pack and they had the only litter of pups known to be in Colorado this year.
02:01:38.000I believe both of those wolves came from Oregon and they both had livestock killing experience before they chose them to release, which is really unfortunate.
02:01:50.000So the dilemma was, okay, they did okay until people started calving.
02:01:56.000And now there's little calves on the ground and now the wolves are coming in and they're starting to kill calves and then they might kill a heifer or something.
02:02:07.000You got a male and a female and a litter of pups and they have started a history of killing livestock.
02:02:14.000What do you do with them when the slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff, Want to see all the workers protected and a slight minority, it's like 49 and a half to 50 and a half or something, want them removed.
02:02:29.000And the people in the middle are trying to figure out what to do.
02:02:32.000So they went and captured them and put them in a holding facility for a while.
02:02:36.000Then they're going to release them later.
02:03:33.000I was watching a documentary about this guy who lived with wolves, like lived with wolves in some contained environment and he would like set up a fake kill where he would eat the liver so he could be like the dominant male and he would growl at them.
02:03:49.000Anyway, this gentleman who was a wolf expert was then recruited to try to help a sheepherder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock.
02:03:59.000And one of the strategies they used is giant speakers.
02:04:03.000So they took speakers and they played sounds of wolves to scare off these other wolves.
02:04:08.000And so then he goes back to the pack and tries to be the alpha again and they corner him and snarl at him and he had a whimper and It's a very weird documentary because this is some sort of a strange fenced-in environment that they've created where these wolves are living.
02:04:24.000Sounds a bit like Timothy Treadwell and Grizzly Man.
02:05:01.000What I'll say is captive wolf facilities, and I'm going to have many people who love their captive wolves, but captive animal behavior and wild wolf behavior have some parallels, but they're not the same.
02:05:13.000And that guy doing this thing would never happen with wild wolves.
02:05:50.000The idea being that these wolves would eat this bait wrapped with string and taste all this wonderful beef burger and taste the hide and then associate that bad experience of vomiting your guts out for 24 hours or whatever to the animal on the hoof out there.
02:06:06.000That's a great idea for how your human brain works.
02:06:09.000They just ate every bait we put out and there's piles of puke everywhere.
02:07:01.000So I was out working with this pasture guy in northern Minnesota and he had a long skinny pasture and I had out, got highway blinking lights that came on at night and the fladry and he was so kind.
02:07:12.000He let me, this is a lot of years ago, it's just this young story I think.
02:07:14.000So I stopped in to visit him and I said, Well, I know you had a loss.
02:09:09.000And all those wolves came from this introduced population, some from Montana, but they'll never be considered native.
02:09:18.000Which is crazy, because they used to be native.
02:09:21.000And the wolves that were taken for the sources, like I explained earlier, they're taken from an area that wolves from Glacier Park walk to.
02:09:28.000They are one population, but there's a belief socially, because they were put there, they're not native, they're Canadian super wolves.
02:09:36.000I've heard the crazy stories, like these wolves weigh 175 pounds, and they were selected out of all the wolves captured.
02:09:42.000They took the ones that were the most aggressive, so that when they put them on the ground, they would survive everything.
02:09:50.000Well, that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of crazy to me that if you wanted a wolf reintroduction to be successful, why would you take animals that have a history of predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction wolves?
02:10:03.000I think that kind of mindset or that ignorance, whether it's willful ignorance or whether it's on purpose, whether it's a fuck you to the ranchers, whatever it is, that is why people have this negative perception I think you're alluding to, right?
02:10:16.000And I don't think it was an F you to the renters.
02:10:19.000I think what happened was because of the ballot box initiative.
02:10:24.000The state of Colorado was required by law by December 31st of 2023 to get 10 wolves or so on the ground.
02:10:58.000And the only place they could get source wolves, they got them from Oregon.
02:11:02.000At that point, Oregon gave them 10 wolves.
02:11:05.000Half of them, roughly half of them, happened to have some livestock experience.
02:11:09.000So this time, right now, they're already gearing up for the next reintroduction, this winter probably.
02:11:15.000They're working with British Columbia, I believe, and they're going to take wolves, presumably that have not had livestock experience, and let them go, like they did with the original introductions into Yellowstone and Idaho.
02:11:26.000And I really believe because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline...
02:11:33.000That the people who were really pro-wolf, it was forced that they had to take the wolves that they got.
02:12:30.000See, all this stuff has to do with the time frame, the mistakes and the rewards.
02:12:34.000So the most positive pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame.
02:12:39.000So like if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone, It may have taken 10 years.
02:12:47.000It may have taken 50. I mean, it happened in Montana pretty quickly once they hit critical mass, but it took them a few years to get there, and then they just started, you know, the curve.
02:12:58.000But people didn't want the time window, and we had a presidential administration that was in favor of it.
02:13:04.000We had conservative congressmen that were in favor of it.
02:13:06.000You had the Wolf Groupies in favor of it, and it It's just like all came together in the timeframe and the window of opportunity opened about four inches and they shoved them through.
02:13:16.000And Colorado, mandated by citizens' ballot initiatives, which is not a really great way to, I don't think, to do business on any bill.
02:13:25.000I mean, we have bills in Montana coming up now for voting.
02:14:37.000And the show Apex Predator was all examining the behavior characteristics of Apex Predators and seeing what they did.
02:14:44.000And one of the things that some of the Native American tribes used to do, they would take a wolf skin And they would wear it, put it on their head, and they would crawl on four legs, hands and knees, up into bison.
02:17:03.000This long history of hundreds of years of hunting them this way.
02:17:07.000So they do all these different things to dry out the meat.
02:17:09.000And they make these thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat.
02:18:29.000But Dan has a very interesting theory about the population of bison and why there were so many.
02:18:36.000And he thinks it's tied into the plague, into when Europeans came across the country and 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of disease.
02:18:45.000And he thinks that's why there was millions of bison in the field, this overpopulation of bison, because the predators had gone away.
02:19:13.000It's Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy, the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850. So his theory, which I think is a very valid one, and it should be researched, it should be at least considered, that the reason why the early European settlers did not see enormous herds of bison Is because the bison were in enormous herds back then.
02:19:39.000Because bisons have a long gestation period.
02:19:41.000They're fairly easy to hunt because they're very large animals.
02:19:57.000So right here in this area, they're just nothing but bison, eating bison constantly.
02:20:03.000And so they probably did a really good job of keeping the population in check.
02:20:06.000Then along come Europeans and their dirty diseases.
02:20:09.000And, you know, this is what the primary theory is what wiped out the Maya, wiped out the Aztec, wiped out the people that lived in the Amazon jungle.
02:20:17.000It's all European settlers and their dirty diseases.
02:20:20.000And so that when that happened, then you have what's similar to no wolves in Montana and you have 20,000 elk in a place that really has a carrying capacity for like, what, six?
02:20:30.000What do you think was like the correct number when there was 20,000 elk there?
02:20:35.000What's the correct number of What would be like a healthy population that the food sources could support?
02:20:40.000I would say right now there's about 6,500, I think, elk in the northern herd.
02:20:52.000There's lions and people outside the park and wolves and bears, all these things, and that's where it's at.
02:20:59.000And that's with everything, and it hasn't changed because the number of wolves, too, went from, you know, zero to 35, 31. To 160, 165. In the last 10 years, it's been right about 100 wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending the resource.
02:21:50.000Sometimes you may have a benevolent pack leader that just kind of has the wolves chase it off.
02:21:55.000But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think it's like 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, non-pack members.
02:22:04.000Is their action dependent upon the amount of resources that are available?
02:22:07.000Like, would they be more reluctant to kill a wolf if there was plenty of food for everybody?
02:22:12.000Whereas if they were struggling, they'd go, this is a real problem having this wolf around?
02:22:16.000So you'd have to go to the Yellowstone researchers to look at it.
02:22:19.000But I would say genetic relations, if it's closely related, they're more likely to not kill it.
02:22:26.000And if there's abundant food, they'd be more likely to probably not kill it.
02:22:30.000I think it's a combination of the two.
02:22:32.000One of the things that Dan Flores talks about in Coyote America is the expansion of coyotes, and that the reason this took place is that coyotes were targeted by gray wolves.
02:22:43.000So they had developed this ability to recognize when one of the pack had been killed, they would expand their territory, and the females would have more pups.
02:22:54.000So the wolves are killing the coyotes.
02:22:56.000This is why there's coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now, where there wasn't 100 years ago, is that because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves, because they don't breed with wolves, but they do breed with red wolves.
02:23:11.000So where you get your coy wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the East Coast, right?
02:23:20.000The animal up in the northeastern part of the U.S. is called a coy wolf, and it's a coyote mixed with a wolf of unknown origin mixed with dogs.
02:23:28.000And there's lots of theories out there, and I'm not up on the most current theory.
02:23:31.000The original wolf up there was more like the red wolf.
02:23:57.000Well, up in the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that's where we started doing wolf stuff, they look a little bit like coyote, and the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote, but it's very uncommon.
02:24:07.000When a wolf encounters a coyote, they kill it.
02:25:41.000I don't, you know what, I haven't followed that.
02:25:43.000I don't track that that closely, but I would guess most of the time not, unless they're incredibly hungry.
02:25:48.000I would guess it's a strict eliminating a competitor situation.
02:25:52.000I've seen, I mean, you can look at the data in Yellowstone.
02:25:54.000They have witnessed tons of times of wolves going up to coyote dens and digging out on killing all the pups and trying to kill the parents.
02:26:05.000I could be wrong on that but I don't think so.
02:26:08.000It's interesting because that's one of the theories about why it was originally one of the theories why coyotes kill dogs and coyotes kill cats is that they're competitors but then they started eating them.
02:26:19.000So I think maybe originally that was the case because again the expansion to urban areas is fairly recent.
02:26:26.000Yeah, and urban coyotes are not real wild.
02:26:35.000Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how amazingly versatile coyotes are, because I am starting to see wolves being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily,
02:26:51.000like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision.
02:27:44.000One of the most interesting books I've ever read, but this is true.
02:27:48.000I'm not saying that the 400 wolves is not true, but I doubt it.
02:27:51.000But this is true science, supported by photos, that in the 50s or so, this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes, and he wanted to select simply for tameness.
02:28:05.000And by selecting the tamest male and female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with, That he would see if their morphology or their physical appearance changed.
02:28:16.000So he went to fur farms and he was picking just for tameness.
02:28:19.000And eventually, after many years, he'd go to the fur farm and this fox would lunge at him and snarl.
02:29:20.000And it was one of the most amazing pieces I've read.
02:29:22.000Because if you think about humans domesticating animals, we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep, and we got our breeds now.
02:29:32.000For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in King's Castles and riding the bicycles in the circus and whatever.
02:29:41.000But in terms of North America, of course, anywhere in the world, nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog.
02:29:52.000Nobody has successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren't friendly, and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.
02:31:10.000But there seems to be some sort of a strange history of comfort where this animal that's a 10-pound animal is comfortable around a 150-pound man for no real reason.
02:32:04.000I have a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens, and we have to shoo him out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise.
02:32:32.000It's kind of interesting to think about the early relation of people with wolves.
02:32:38.000I talk about that in A Woman Among Wolves, my book.
02:32:41.000There was a couple of paleontologists or sociologists that speculated, and I can't say if their theory is correct or not, but they speculated that When people were still living in caves and having spears and atlatls, that they would watch.
02:32:56.000So people were living in a family group, in a pack.
02:32:58.000The wolves were living in a family group or a pack.
02:33:01.000They would watch the wolves chasing through a herd of whatever animal they were at that time, depending on where they lived.
02:33:11.000Getting one tired enough, or maybe it was a cripple, had a bad language, they would surround it and eventually kill it.
02:33:16.000And then they speculate that the humans would learn that, you know what, we can go up to that killed oryx or whatever they had just killed, the primitive horse.
02:33:31.000So then it changed to where maybe those wolves had come around when the animal was cornered, but not dead.
02:33:39.000And the humans would come in and do the final blows and drive the wolves away and take what meat they wanted and then leave.
02:33:46.000And the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken.
02:33:52.000And this is their theory, that there was this relationship Just because it's a brutal world, not synergy and not altruistic and not, oh, aren't this cute?
02:34:02.000It's just like, hey, people, look at those wolves got an animal, a camel cornered over there.
02:34:50.000The ones who were least afraid hung around.
02:34:53.000What they did with the foxes over just the course of a few generations, this took a few thousand years.
02:34:58.000Yeah, and then people would grab one of those wolves or let them hang around and then, you know, they would clean up the offal around the camp and whatever.
02:35:30.000Livestock was like 11,000 years ago, roughly, of all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, sheep.
02:35:36.000So was it possible that the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a very game-rich environment where they didn't have fight over resources?
02:35:49.000So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals Again, I'm not saying it was to help each other so much, but they took advantage of each other's strengths and weaknesses.
02:35:59.000The wolf's strength was being able to run something down.
02:36:01.000It's also tired that people didn't do that.
02:36:03.000And then people say, oh yeah, that thing's crippled over there.
02:36:05.000Let's go kill it and we'll get our meat and the wolves can have the rest or whatever.
02:36:08.000Was there also a consideration that during these times, this was a hunter gathering time where they really didn't have a preservation of meat.
02:36:59.000And eventually people took, when livestock became a thing, then eventually people would take a wolf-like canine, a dog that we domesticated, and then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins, away from the livestock.
02:37:17.000Humans are so creative with what they can do and dogs are so plastic.
02:37:23.000I mean you take a wolf and you put a lot of pressure on it and eventually you come up with a golden retriever and a griffon and a poodle because they have a lot of domestic, they have a lot of plasticity genetically, morphologically, behaviorally that I don't think a lot of the other species have or would show up when we try to domesticate them.
02:39:05.000So I was trying to read on what was going on.
02:39:07.000So some people think that they might not be being raised, that it's some sort of play, but I think this is taken from a trash pit in Saudi Arabia.
02:39:15.000But did you see that other larger dog that was over there?
02:39:36.000So I think the theory that I remember reading was that they had figured out that if they keep these dogs around, the dogs are good watchdogs.
02:39:44.000Well, I'm going to have to Google that and look up the...
02:42:23.000So he wrote it in, I think, 2017. It's an older book, maybe 2012. And he wrote, it's a spillover from wild animals, this Q-U-A-M-M-N, wild animals to human populations.
02:42:35.000And it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes some extremely viral, terrible disease in humans.
02:42:41.000And he actually traces back the origins of HIV. And all this happened before COVID. Wow.
02:42:48.000And it just was so set up because COVID is the same kind of a deal.
02:43:04.000They're 99% sure now at this point that it was all gain-of-function research that was done.
02:43:11.000There's the obscuring of the data was done purposely to try to absolve guilt from the people that funded the project because the project was funded and canceled during the Obama administration.
02:43:22.000And then when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it through another ecosystem.
02:43:27.000It was very sneaky about it, and when grilled, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain-of-function research they were doing in the first place.
02:43:36.000There's emails back and forth, but that's beside the point.
02:43:40.000Well, I'm not going to go there, because we have different...
02:43:42.000But natural spillover is clearly real.
02:43:44.000But spillover, it documents many, many species, and actually, it's fascinating.
02:44:46.000And I think they eventually reverted back to the same sort of typical aggressive alpha male behavior as being the primary leaders of the groups.
02:44:54.000But for a long time, they existed in this very strange, atypical environment where kind baboons were taking care of each other.
02:45:05.000Well, it'll be really interesting with the resources of the Yellowstone researchers who do amazing stuff to see what the long-range outcome is from this realization that, you know, there are 46 more times, likely more times to be a leader of the pack.
02:45:19.000And what do these risk-taking behaviors entail?
02:45:24.000And how many of them, unfortunately, are going to get hit by cars because of this?
02:45:28.000Wasn't the first ever released mountain lion, or a wolf rather, that got killed, killed by a car?
02:45:34.000The first one, my understanding, the first one in Yellowstone that released wolf, the first mortality of a wolf, was getting hit by a UPS truck.
02:46:22.000Not only that, there's a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis or in countries that have toxoplasmosis that have successful soccer teams.
02:47:12.000So when wolves first encountered parvovirus and distemper, it came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping, and the disease came into being in the 80s.
02:47:26.000But we started documenting it in Glacier.
02:47:28.000And the first year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, they're off the chart in their immune response, the antibodies, to that particular disease.
02:47:39.000And we had most of our pups all die that year.
02:47:44.000And people don't think about, yeah, I got my little dachshund up at, you know, McDonald Lake and he pooped and you don't pick it up and the wolves get it.
02:47:50.000But the same thing happened in Yellowstone and they have certain years where they have horrible pup survival.
02:47:56.000It's called recruitment and they don't make it into the fall.
02:47:59.000But the other thing of interest, so they've been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in Yellowstone, that genetically the ones who carry the gene for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolves.
02:48:16.000And it's certain, maybe Jamie could look that up, but certain times when the disease prevalence is higher, the wolves will select a mate of a certain color because their genetics We're good to go.
02:48:47.000And now they've got black color genes.
02:48:49.000And there are changes with the population density.
02:48:52.000But what I learned, to my best knowledge, it's a K-locust gene.
02:48:57.000And they think that when people domesticated dogs from wolves, and we took the wolves into captivity, and we mutated the mutations that we helped survive, that gene for black color coat was from dogs.
02:49:11.000And then dogs got bred a little bit into the wolves occasionally.
02:49:46.000I was just getting to, like, if you're thinking about a place like the Pacific Northwest, for example, where you have dense rainforest, it would probably be a benefit to be darker.
02:50:16.000The titular character rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her that she had transformed a previous lover, a shepherd, into a wolf, thus turning him into the very animal that his flocks must be protected against.
02:51:03.000And I suspect from people living in northern latitudes, the Inuits and the Native Americans throughout Russia and across the north, you know, they kept dogs too and they bred them to wolves and made better sled dogs.
02:51:15.000But an early reference told me that the dog native to North America was brought over here.
02:51:24.000The Native Americans didn't have dogs here thousands and thousands of years ago.
02:51:48.000They don't know exactly why, but probably during that mass extinction event where 65% of all the megafauna died.
02:51:53.000And then the Europeans reintroduced horses.
02:51:56.000And so the Native Americans initially didn't have horses, and then some were really good at it, and those are the ones that thrive, like the Comanche.
02:52:02.000The Spaniards brought horses in the 1500s, and that's how they got their horses.
02:52:06.000But the horses came from here originally.
02:52:09.000Even the horses in Africa, even zebras, originated, genetically originated in the North American continent.
02:53:28.000And they're still here and the cheetahs are gone.
02:53:29.000But they're one of the very few of those weird animals, like the North American lion, like all these different, like there was a North American lion that is way bigger than the African lion.
02:55:42.000I signed away the rights for movie, audio, etc., etc., but I get a share of the royalties and stuff.
02:55:50.000So when somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced, and I didn't hear about it for a while, and by the time I'd heard about it, they had just started producing it.
02:56:04.000And I said, well, I'd like to read for it.