The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #942 - Dan Flores

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00:00:06.000 Boom! 0.99

00:00:07.000 We're live!

00:00:08.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:09.000 I'm very good, Joe.

00:00:10.000 It's good to meet you, man.

00:00:11.000 Great to meet you, and thank you very much for doing this.

00:00:13.000 I've learned more about coyotes over the last couple of months, reading your book and listening to your podcast with my good friend Steve Rinello, which was amazing.

00:00:22.000 What a crazy animal that is.

00:00:25.000 You know, I have coyotes all around my neighborhood, and it became very close to me when I saw one of my chickens get captured by a coyote.

00:00:35.000 I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth. 1.00

00:00:38.000 I'm like, God damn these motherfuckers. 1.00

00:00:40.000 They're just all around us. 1.00

00:00:42.000 Especially, I live in a fairly rural area around here, about 40 minutes outside of LA, so the nights are quiet and you hear them screaming in the night.

00:00:53.000 I didn't know much about them until I started reading your book, man.

00:00:56.000 Yeah, they're an amazing animal.

00:00:58.000 I mean, I think there's not really another mammal aside from us that has a biography like these animals do.

00:01:05.000 And that's kind of one of the reasons I got fascinated with them.

00:01:10.000 They were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana.

00:01:16.000 And that's sort of the beginning of my getting captivated by these little small wolves because they were suddenly showing up in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana when I was 12, 13, 14 years old.

00:01:31.000 And as far as I knew, this was an animal that was supposed to be in the deserts of the West.

00:01:37.000 And so that seemed to be something that, you know, commanded one's attention that this critter is appearing in places where you would never expect it.

00:01:49.000 And now, of course, everybody in the country is dealing with them.

00:01:52.000 That is so fascinating that in our lifetime, they have spread from the American Southwest to every single state and literally every single city in the country.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:02:03.000 And I just got a, somebody sent me this yesterday that somewhere in Georgia, they have some sort of a bounty on these wolves, you know, coyotes.

00:02:14.000 That's one thing a lot of people don't realize that a coyote is a wolf.

00:02:17.000 Yeah, it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves, but it's out of the North American wolf line.

00:02:27.000 I mean, coyotes are distinctively North American animals.

00:02:31.000 They come out of canid evolution that began here 5.3 million years ago.

00:02:35.000 So, yeah, they're small wolves.

00:02:38.000 Did I send you this, Jamie?

00:02:39.000 No.

00:02:39.000 No?

00:02:40.000 You found it?

00:02:40.000 Oh, beautiful.

00:02:41.000 This is the Georgia Coyote Challenge.

00:02:42.000 Apparently they're offering some sort of bounty for each coyote killed.

00:02:47.000 Now, what's fascinating about this, and one of the things that I learned from your book, is that when a coyote yells when they're doing their call in the night, they're essentially making roll call.

00:02:58.000 And when one of them doesn't respond, the female generates more pups. 0.99

00:03:04.000 Yeah, it's one of the many things that's probably happening when they're howling.

00:03:11.000 I mean, they are taking a census, basically, of coyote populations in the area.

00:03:17.000 And the result of that census can very well be.

00:03:23.000 It produces some sort of chemical or metabolic change in the females, the breeding females, the alpha ones.

00:03:32.000 We're good to go.

00:03:53.000 They were arguing that, and they had some pretty good science, that coyotes are taking, in some areas, as many as 60% of the whitetail deer fawns.

00:04:05.000 And so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to To take a whitetail.

00:04:14.000 So South Carolina hasn't moved to the step that Georgia has of trying to impose some kind of bounty and encourage people to go out and shoot these animals, to take them in any way they can, but mostly shoot them.

00:04:30.000 But, you know, I think these states in the South and in the East have a lot to learn by the Western or from the Western experience, because the truth is, we've been trying to eradicate, and I mean totally exterminate coyotes in the American West.

00:04:50.000 Well, I think.

00:05:09.000 I think?

00:05:25.000 And, you know, I mean, if they do, you can imagine those endangered naneys on the Big Island are totally done for.

00:05:31.000 But they are not only in every single state in the Union except for Hawaii, but they are 7,000 miles now north and south in North America from above the Arctic Circle all the way down to Central America and beginning to colonize into South America.

00:05:50.000 So the attempts to exterminate them, and I can explain why this happens, has to do with their evolution and the particular adaptations they have.

00:06:00.000 But the attempts to exterminate them, or even to try to control their numbers, almost always produces exactly the opposite effect.

00:06:08.000 So Georgia is going to end up with more coyotes than they've ever had before in their efforts to try to suppress their population.

00:06:17.000 Isn't that fascinating?

00:06:18.000 Yeah, it is.

00:06:19.000 It's so contrary to logic, what you would think would be the solution for something like that.

00:06:24.000 I mean, and when you go back to the American West, before the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in the 1990s, we had essentially extirpated them from a vast majority of the United States.

00:06:37.000 There's very, very few left, right?

00:06:39.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:06:41.000 Well, if you could please explain the relationship that the gray wolves had to the coyotes, which is one of the reasons that the coyotes became so adaptable.

00:06:50.000 It's true.

00:06:50.000 I mean, coyotes didn't become so smart.

00:06:53.000 In the Southwest, the Hispanics say the only thing that's smarter than a coyote is God. 0.66

00:07:01.000 But they didn't become that smart and that adept at surviving anything almost that happens to them.

00:07:10.000 Because of us.

00:07:12.000 I mean, we've only been trying to wipe them out or control their populations for a little more than a century now, and that's too short a time for them to evolve these abilities to adapt and survive.

00:07:25.000 They evolved those abilities because they were the small dog in a big dog's world.

00:07:33.000 And, I mean, gray wolves have this very interesting story, too.

00:07:38.000 Gray wolves come out of North American canid evolution, but they're one of the canid species that ended up leaving North America for a time and evolving for a couple of million years in Asia and in Europe.

00:07:50.000 And they didn't come back.

00:07:52.000 Gray wolves didn't start coming back to North America until about 25,000 or 30,000 years ago, during sort of the height of the late Pleistocene.

00:08:00.000 And when they did...

00:08:02.000 Coyotes, of course, had been here and had evolved into their present species about 800,000 to a million years ago.

00:08:09.000 And when gray wolves returned, I mean, they basically just started kicking the crap out of coyotes.

00:08:15.000 And so coyotes evolved their ability to survive being harassed and persecuted as a result of being basically harassed by gray wolves.

00:08:28.000 So this is why when you hear about the coy wolf that you hear on the East Coast, this is a coyote that bred with the red wolf and other Eastern wolves, correct?

00:08:37.000 That's right.

00:08:38.000 That's correct.

00:08:38.000 Yeah.

00:08:39.000 And that's, I mean, it's a very interesting story and it's kind of one of those instances where A modern event that we're all getting to witness, the emergence of the coy wolf, has its origins in the evolution of mammals in North America a million years or more.

00:09:01.000 Because the reason, I mean, if you think about this, the reason coyotes, red wolves, and other eastern wolves like the Algonquin wolf We're good to go.

00:09:37.000 But the reason they do that is because those animals, red wolves, eastern wolves of various kinds, and coyotes all seem to have come out of a group of animals that, unlike the gray wolf, never left North America.

00:09:51.000 And they probably...

00:09:53.000 Didn't separate from one another until 300,000 to a half million years ago.

00:09:58.000 So that separation is recent enough that whenever they encounter one another today, they very readily hybridize.

00:10:06.000 I mean, it's sort of...

00:10:08.000 The result of coyotes spreading across the South has essentially kind of killed our hope that we were going to save the endangered red wolf as an independent species because red wolves so quickly and easily hybridize with coyotes that coyote genes swamp pure red wolf genes.

00:10:29.000 So, I mean, that's something that, you know, is millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years old in evolution, but we're getting to see it play out right around us in our own time.

00:10:40.000 And meanwhile, gray wolves and coyotes in the West aren't hybridizing at all.

00:10:45.000 And so that's the explanation, is that gray wolves left and didn't come back until a while.

00:10:49.000 Do we know why they left?

00:10:51.000 Well, they just, they happen to be, in evolutionary terms, one of the groups and jackals did the same thing.

00:11:04.000 We're good to go.

00:11:18.000 So they had sort of separate migrations back to North America.

00:11:21.000 So the Mexican gray wolf, the Western gray wolf, the Arctic wolf, these are all It's a gray wolf species, but they're separated at the subspecific level, and they all seem to have come back to North America at different times.

00:11:39.000 But they had left North America like about three and a half million years ago, and so they became different animals in Asia and Europe.

00:11:47.000 By the time they came back then, they were different enough from coyotes that they not only couldn't interbreed with them anymore, But they sort of are mortal enemies of one another.

00:12:00.000 I mean, when we reintroduced great wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, coyotes had had 75 years in Yellowstone without any wolves.

00:12:09.000 I mean, that served as a wonderful laboratory to study them, too, because it gave us a sense of what happens with coyotes when nobody is harassing them, when people aren't harassing them, which, of course, we didn't in Yellowstone Park.

00:12:23.000 I think?

00:12:45.000 But it doesn't – they don't – their population sort of levels off and stays at a carrying capacity.

00:12:52.000 And so we got to watch that happen in Yellowstone for like 75 years, and it's become sort of the – We're good to go.

00:13:30.000 This sort of model of what happens when you just leave them the hell alone.

00:13:35.000 And they just kind of rise to a particular population level and are really stable at that level and don't really go beyond it.

00:13:47.000 And they don't expand their territory that way either.

00:13:49.000 No, they don't seem to.

00:13:50.000 I mean, one of the things that has happened, obviously, in the last hundred years or so, the last 75 years at least, Is that as a result of persecuting them, we've sent them into this kind of colonization strategy where they have larger litters of pups.

00:14:09.000 When their populations are suppressed, it's easier for them to get the pups that they do have to adulthood.

00:14:17.000 I mean, in Yellowstone, for example, one of the things we saw in that period when they weren't being harassed in the 60s, 70s, 80s is that We're good to go.

00:14:54.000 And then they have this marvelous ability.

00:14:58.000 I mean, I talk about it a good bit in the book.

00:15:00.000 It's called fish infusion.

00:15:03.000 They're one of the few species, and we happen to be one of the other mammal species around the world that does this, where they have the ability to exist as a social animal, in the case of coyotes, as a pack animal, of course.

00:15:18.000 But whenever they're pressured, they tend to split apart into singles and pairs, and they scatter across the landscape.

00:15:28.000 And that's what sends them colonizing across the continent. 0.76

00:15:33.000 The fact that they can do that is what separates them really from wolves, right?

00:15:36.000 And that's why they weren't able to wipe them out in the West? 0.97

00:15:39.000 Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:15:40.000 I mean, if you think about what happened with gray wolves, I mean, we started this sort of decided effort to eliminate gray wolves from the American West in Russia.

00:15:53.000 I mean, just ordinary people started putting out strychnine bait for them in the 1860s and 1870s.

00:16:01.000 Was it ranchers at first that started that?

00:16:03.000 Was it because of livestock?

00:16:04.000 Yeah, it was ranchers and just travelers on the Oregon Trail and on the immigrant trails. 0.85

00:16:09.000 I mean, people sort of regarded...

00:16:12.000 Because they came out of Europe with a background with wolves.

00:16:16.000 That's one of the things that distinguishes us Americans and coyotes, is that we didn't have coyotes in Europe.

00:16:23.000 So we didn't arrive with this preloaded preconception about the role that coyotes played in the world.

00:16:30.000 But we did with animals like bears and wolves.

00:16:33.000 And so people just, from the very beginning, whenever the Atlantic seaboard was settled, There were wolf drives and wolf roundups and every kind of attempt to wipe out wolves as competitors with us for our stock.

00:16:55.000 So in the West, people just threw strychnine bait out.

00:16:58.000 I mean, strychnine was invented in Pennsylvania in 1848, and it was widely available in places like Missouri when you set out across the West, and people would just buy a bunch of baits.

00:17:09.000 I mean, if they hung around long enough to get the animal, they would skin it and try to sell the pelt.

00:17:14.000 But they just poisoned them like crazy.

00:17:17.000 Then, starting in 1915, this government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which positions itself as the solution to predators, first decides that it's the wolf that we need to take out.

00:17:34.000 And, I mean, they managed to take out the last probably quarter million wolves in We're good to go.

00:18:07.000 But coyotes responded to that kind of pressure in a very different way.

00:18:11.000 I mean, when you started pressuring them, their packs tended to break up.

00:18:17.000 They tended to scatter and go into this fishing mode.

00:18:20.000 And so, indeed, as you said a minute ago, that's exactly why we were able to take out wolves by the middle of the 1920s.

00:18:29.000 We pretty much had resolved the wolf issue in the West.

00:18:32.000 But Year after year after year, as wolf numbers decline, I mean, I'll offer an example in Montana, for instance.

00:18:40.000 1899, the state of Montana bountied 23,000 wolves.

00:18:46.000 That was 1899. 21 years later, by 1920, We're good to go.

00:19:09.000 In Montana, they were bounding 30,000 coyotes in 1899. In 1910, 30,000 coyotes.

00:19:15.000 In 1918, 33,000 coyotes.

00:19:18.000 I mean, the number of coyotes never dropped while wolf populations just plummeted.

00:19:23.000 That is so fascinating.

00:19:24.000 What a crazy little animal that is.

00:19:26.000 It is, man.

00:19:29.000 It's so wonderfully counterintuitive in the whole kind of environmental story of America, because what you always expect is that any time we put our mind to taking on some creature and taking it out,

00:19:45.000 I mean, we can do it.

00:19:46.000 I mean, you know, the only time this never really happened was in Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab is driven mad by his inability to control the great white whale and to control nature.

00:19:59.000 And that, in a lot of places, that seems to be where we land when people realize that you can't do anything about coyotes.

00:20:09.000 It kind of drives people out of their minds, because this is just not the American way.

00:20:15.000 We can always deal with an animal.

00:20:18.000 Yeah, it's got to be very frustrating to people in a lot of ways, but it's kind of amazing.

00:20:24.000 I mean, it's really kind of magical in a lot of ways that they're so adaptable.

00:20:30.000 And that all came, you're saying, because of their relationship with the gray wolf.

00:20:34.000 Now, how do we know that the gray wolf left?

00:20:38.000 Well, we know that...

00:20:40.000 There are still wolves in America.

00:20:43.000 There's no question about that.

00:20:45.000 And so, I mean, that is a tricky question.

00:20:49.000 I mean, there is, you know, so I would hasten to say, first of all, I'm not a geneticist.

00:20:54.000 I'm not even a biologist.

00:20:56.000 I'm basically an environmental writer and somebody who uses history a lot.

00:21:05.000 And there is unresolved science out there, and what I mean by that is that there are a couple of different camps that have advanced positions about the relationship between all these different wolves that we have in North America and coyotes.

00:21:26.000 So there is a guy at UCLA here in Los Angeles His name is Robert Wayne, and he has done genetic work on canids.

00:21:40.000 One of his papers is called, the title includes the phrase, Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids.

00:21:48.000 And he's done genetic analysis on coyotes, red wolves, gray wolves, and eastern wolves.

00:21:55.000 And his argument is that Gray wolves, red wolves, and eastern wolves are all actually some version of gray wolves.

00:22:13.000 So that's a different argument than the one that I made for you just a few minutes ago.

00:22:17.000 I've been following, and I've followed in my book because I found it a more compelling argument, one advanced by a group of geneticists from Canada led by a guy named Paul Wilson.

00:22:29.000 And that's the position that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its Endangered Species Division takes.

00:22:37.000 And their argument is that the gray wolf It's a separate animal from the red wolf, the eastern wolf, and the coyote.

00:22:47.000 They argue that coyotes, red wolves, and eastern wolves all come out of a clade.

00:22:54.000 It's the biological term, C-L-A-D-E. A clade of animals that are purely North American in origin and that had probably a similar ancestor as recently as maybe 300,000 years to 500,000 years ago.

00:23:11.000 So we've got two different arguments about the relationship of coyotes to wolves.

00:23:18.000 And I don't know who's going to win it, but one of the reasons I tend to sort of favor the Paul Wilson line of argument and the one that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using is because they use evidence beyond just genetics.

00:23:34.000 They also use morphology, and they use fossils.

00:23:39.000 And Robert Wayne and the group of geneticists who work with him all seem to just rely specifically on genetics, and they don't ever try to verify their findings by looking at the fossil record, for example.

00:23:55.000 So I don't know how it's going to play out between these two groups, but I find the argument, the Canadian geneticist that has informed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's strategy a little bit more compelling right now.

00:24:11.000 But, I mean, it's something to pay attention to.

00:24:13.000 We'll see how it goes.

00:24:14.000 Well, it seems like you need some sort of a really comprehensive way of looking at it because you're dealing with so many different factors, right?

00:24:21.000 If you're trying to acquire evidence based on 25,000 years ago, it seems like there's got to be a lot of different...

00:24:28.000 It's very odd to me that we know as much as we do know.

00:24:34.000 I mean, and to try to figure it all out has got to be incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with so little evidence.

00:24:40.000 And you're looking at the fossil record, I mean...

00:24:43.000 A lot of the animals that died 25,000 years ago, there's zero evidence of them, right?

00:24:47.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:49.000 I mean, 25,000 years ago, for example, in the late Pleistocene, the evidence from La Brea Tar Pit indicates that coyotes were a slightly different animal than they are now.

00:25:02.000 At the time, we think gray wolves were coming back into North America, returning to their evolutionary homeland.

00:25:10.000 Coyotes were much bigger, more strapping, had larger dentition, stronger jaws.

00:25:16.000 And what looks like happened is when gray wolves arrived in the West and began competing with these larger, more strapping coyotes, coyotes sort of sought a different path.

00:25:29.000 They sort of stepped back away from outright competition with an even bigger competition.

00:25:35.000 Canid, and evolved into a smaller, more gracile animal that was not so much just a pure predator and scavenger, but more omnivorous, and so became our modern Canis latrans species.

00:25:51.000 But yeah, and I will say, as you mentioned a minute ago, it's hard to know all this.

00:25:57.000 Much of this information is fairly recent.

00:26:01.000 I mean, we just got...

00:26:04.000 A kind of a reappraisal of the taxonomy of the North American wolves, essentially in the last seven or eight or ten years.

00:26:13.000 Are other wolves omnivorous, or is it just coyotes?

00:26:17.000 Well, wolves can be omnivorous, but they're pretty much really carnivorous pack predators.

00:26:25.000 I find coyote crap in my yard all the time, and it's got berries in it.

00:26:30.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:30.000 They eat a lot of these little red berries that grow out here.

00:26:33.000 Yeah, they eat junipers.

00:26:35.000 I mean, the same thing is happening on my place in New Mexico, starting essentially about in August or September.

00:26:41.000 All the coyote droppings that I've found on the place, and I've got a lot of coyotes on my place in New Mexico, has just been filled with juniper berries.

00:26:50.000 That's what they've been eating.

00:26:52.000 I mean, they still are, you know, running down rabbits and eating rats and mice and things.

00:26:57.000 But, I mean, when they move into cities, they tend to eat, I mean, and they have access to fruit trees.

00:27:03.000 They tend to eat a lot of fruit.

00:27:05.000 So they'll, I mean, you know, people have posted photos on the Internet or YouTube videos that show them plucking apples and peaches and things off trees in their backyards.

00:27:18.000 I mean, they really go for that sort of stuff.

00:27:20.000 So bizarre.

00:27:21.000 It's just such a strange animal.

00:27:24.000 And so do we know if wolves do anything like that, or is it just a coyote characteristic?

00:27:29.000 It's pretty much a coyote characteristic.

00:27:31.000 I mean, you know, as we've been saying, the coyote in an evolutionary sense is a small wolf.

00:27:43.000 But it is different, especially from gray wolves.

00:27:48.000 And one of the ways it's different that the biologists, the behavioralists who have watched coyotes interact with one another and watched gray wolves interact with one another is an indication of how much more pack-oriented,

00:28:04.000 hence sort of predatory carnivorous, wolves are.

00:28:09.000 Wolves, because they exist mostly despite our cultural motif of the lone wolf, actually wolves are such pack animals that they have a much wider range of expressions that they convey to one another in their interactions with one another.

00:28:28.000 And they basically will...

00:28:34.000 Sort of engage with one another in a repertoire of grimaces and grins and showing their teeth or curling their lip, of course, all sorts of body language where they curl their tails under and they'll drop their heads and drop their ears.

00:28:53.000 Coyotes have a similar repertoire, but it's a much more limited one, and the argument that the behavioralists make is that that's an indication of an animal that's not so pack-oriented.

00:29:05.000 It's not living exclusively in a social group.

00:29:09.000 It can go off on its own or as a pair, and therefore it doesn't really need all those facial expressions to convey emotion.

00:29:18.000 So how do we know that all these animals, all these canids, evolved in North America and then spread out and went to Asia and Africa and all these different places?

00:29:28.000 Yeah.

00:29:29.000 Well, that's out of the fossil record.

00:29:32.000 And, I mean, there's a good science in the fossil record of canid evolution.

00:29:38.000 As I said a bit ago, it seems to...

00:29:41.000 Go back to about 5.3 million years ago, and all the canids all around the world seem to have come out of this singular origin, much the way all the primates of the world came out of an origin in Africa.

00:29:57.000 And so, you know, and the horses, for instance, same thing.

00:30:00.000 Horses came out of an evolutionary origin in North America and then spread across the land bridges to become zebras in Africa, for instance.

00:30:09.000 And so that's how it happened.

00:30:11.000 And some of these animals...

00:30:16.000 Like jackals, for example.

00:30:18.000 The golden jackal seemed to have separated from the small canid, the coyote, the line that led to coyotes about a million years ago.

00:30:27.000 And it crossed the land bridge into Africa, southern Europe, parts of Asia.

00:30:35.000 And Became an animal that never returned to North America.

00:30:41.000 And because of its separation from coyotes by a million years, it became a different creature.

00:30:47.000 So crazy that they all did that on foot.

00:30:49.000 Yeah, they did it on foot.

00:30:51.000 Somehow or another, the animal came from North America and made it all the way to Africa.

00:30:55.000 And I want to bring something up that you talked about just now.

00:30:59.000 Horses evolved in North America and became zebras.

00:31:03.000 I mean, all that started here, but then they weren't here anymore.

00:31:07.000 And then they were reintroduced to the Native Americans by the Europeans.

00:31:11.000 Now, what happened to the horses that were here?

00:31:15.000 Well, that's one of the great mysteries of North American evolution, actually.

00:31:22.000 I mean, the frank answer is we don't really know what happened to them.

00:31:26.000 So this is maybe somebody out there listening.

00:31:32.000 Joe, in the next 10 or 15 years, we'll solve this problem, because here we have a group of animals whose evolutionary, in the case of the horse, their evolutionary origins go back 56 million years in North America.

00:31:51.000 So 10 times greater depth in time than the canids do.

00:31:56.000 And so they're here We're good to go.

00:32:10.000 Well, I think.

00:32:35.000 Enamel on its teeth in order to resist having its teeth being eroded down by sand.

00:32:40.000 It becomes ultimately, by 15,000, 20,000 years ago, an animal that we would not be able to tell humans.

00:32:53.000 I mean, I've seen skeletons of some of the horses that were in North America down to about 11,000 years ago, and even the paleontologists would have a hard time telling which was the skeleton of a North American horse and which was the skeleton of a modern domestic horse.

00:33:12.000 But these animals had We're good to go.

00:33:40.000 We Europeans returned them to North America 500 years ago. 1.00

00:33:44.000 One of the reasons they become such a success and just spread across the western part of the continent and multiply into the millions is because they're already pre-adapted to the landscape.

00:33:56.000 This is where they had evolved.

00:33:58.000 And so they've already got the hooves, they've got the teeth, they've got the running ability, they've got the ability to buck off predators.

00:34:20.000 I think?

00:34:36.000 You know, and they became, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to kind of imagine, because the West, 10, 15, 25,000 years ago, had been a place where horses had made up in some parts of the West as much as a third of the biomass of all the grazing animals.

00:35:00.000 And in the 1700s and 1800s, they were doing the same thing again.

00:35:07.000 They were multiplying into the hundreds of thousands, the millions, gradually spreading.

00:35:13.000 New Mexico is where the domestic European horse first got loose and began to spread.

00:35:19.000 And they had reached all the way up into Montana, to Wyoming, into California.

00:35:23.000 And to the edges of Canada by 1850, 1860 or so, and there probably were at least two to three million of them at that point.

00:35:32.000 So they were just re-inhabiting their old landscape and fitting themselves into an ecology now that had been dominated by bison for a long time, and now horses are back in the mix.

00:35:44.000 And horses today are a very controversial animal.

00:35:48.000 Wild horses are.

00:35:49.000 Yeah, they are.

00:35:49.000 And, you know, people trying to think of them as an invasive species.

00:35:53.000 But essentially, they're just a reintroduced species.

00:35:57.000 And because of that, there's a lot of controversy on how they should be dealt with.

00:36:01.000 Like, some people want to deal with them almost like they deal with wild pigs.

00:36:04.000 Yeah, right.

00:36:06.000 Yeah, and so, you know, there are plenty of people out there who...

00:36:10.000 Who argue that the domestic horse, the feral horse in the West, which is the rootstock of most of our population of wild horses in the West, essentially it's a European animal that has become an invader.

00:36:29.000 I mean, I always, and I've had, you know, arguments on stage with people who express this position, I always say, well, what you have to say about the horse, first of all, is that it's an American animal with an asterisk.

00:36:46.000 It's gone for about 8,000 or 9,000 years.

00:36:50.000 That's actually not a huge amount of time in evolutionary terms.

00:36:57.000 And even though we did domesticate them and began to produce some breeds, horses left to their own devices pretty quickly breed back to the wild look and the wild state.

00:37:09.000 I mean, they'll acquire those dorsal stripes down their backs and zebra striping on their legs.

00:37:17.000 Zebra striping?

00:37:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:37:19.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:37:20.000 There's a lot of controversy as to what the zebra striping is for, right?

00:37:24.000 Is it to distract predators?

00:37:26.000 Is that the idea behind it?

00:37:27.000 It may have been that.

00:37:28.000 I'm not quite sure I can say whether the zebra striping evolved for a specific reason, although most...

00:37:37.000 Changes in animals do.

00:37:39.000 But yeah, they will fairly readily go back to this early wild horse look, which is probably what horses looked like in North America 10,000 years ago.

00:37:51.000 James, see if you can find some pictures of wild horses with zebra stripes.

00:37:55.000 I don't think I've ever seen that before.

00:37:56.000 That's fascinating.

00:37:57.000 Yeah, look in the Pryor Mountains wild horse range in Montana, and you'll see a whole population of animals that come out of that That background.

00:38:07.000 They have a very interesting history because it was a group of animals that Lewis and Clark acquired from the Indians, and they were going to take back and trade in the Mandan villages.

00:38:19.000 And a guy named Pryor, who was responsible for the herd, was driving them through the Wow.

00:38:41.000 Wow.

00:38:43.000 Wow.

00:38:51.000 So whatever the mass extinction event that took place somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago that claimed the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, all these different animals, the horse was amongst that as well?

00:39:02.000 The horse was one of the ones that disappeared, yeah.

00:39:07.000 So, I mean, we've got some pretty good explanations for what happened to the mammoths.

00:39:12.000 The mammoths probably were taken out by human hunters, because this was a version of the American West that basically had emerged in the absence of people.

00:39:27.000 We're just like every other mammal.

00:39:29.000 You mentioned a minute ago you were amazed at the fact that the wolves were able to spread around the world and the horses were able to spread around the world.

00:39:36.000 Well, we did the same thing.

00:39:37.000 We started in Africa and we spread around the world, getting to Europe about 45,000 years ago.

00:39:44.000 Didn't get to North America, which was one of the last places except for the islands out in the Pacific, that humans got to until about 15,000 years ago.

00:39:53.000 And so when we arrived, we confronted a landscape that was full of animals like mammoths.

00:40:03.000 That had no experience with human hunters at all.

00:40:07.000 And what we think is that these early arrivals from Siberia were probably really accomplished big game hunters.

00:40:15.000 And I mean, like all elephants, mammoths had really long gestation periods.

00:40:21.000 It took them, once they were impregnated, it took them two years to have a calf.

00:40:24.000 Wow.

00:40:25.000 And so they have a really...

00:40:26.000 They're pregnant for two years. 0.97

00:40:27.000 Yeah, they're pregnant for two years. 1.00

00:40:28.000 And so they have a really low population recovery ability.

00:40:33.000 And biologists call this case species that have a kind of a low reproductive rate.

00:40:40.000 And so whenever humans arrive and, you know, and we take a look at the situation and, I mean, cow mammoths evidently were a lot easier to deal with in a hunt than the big bulls were.

00:40:53.000 And so these hunters seem to have concentrated on cows.

00:40:57.000 I mean, that's, of course, obviously going to be detrimental to the demographics of the population.

00:41:04.000 And so probably in the case of mammoths, it was human hunting of an animal that had no prior experience with human hunters and not very many defenses against us that took them out.

00:41:16.000 The other animals, though, a lot of them, I mean, some of the predators, we think, they went because their prey species disappeared.

00:41:23.000 But I mean, the amazing thing with the horses is just hard to fathom because we haven't found very many sites.

00:41:31.000 There was one recently discovered near Boulder, Colorado, of what appeared to be an early Indian kill of horses.

00:41:40.000 But, you know, if you tried to argue that the same thing happened with horses that happened with the mammoths, you'd think you'd be finding kill sites all over the place.

00:41:49.000 You just haven't really found them.

00:41:51.000 Have you ever looked into, oh, is this one of the animals?

00:41:53.000 So it's got the front paws, got a little bit of zebra stripes, or front legs, rather.

00:41:57.000 But you're saying it's the back legs?

00:41:59.000 Well, it's both, see?

00:42:00.000 Oh, look at that.

00:42:00.000 Wow, that's fascinating.

00:42:02.000 Yeah, they have the zebra stripes on the legs.

00:42:04.000 Oh, wow, that is wild.

00:42:07.000 And they have this black stripe down the back.

00:42:11.000 The dorsal stripe is coming, so, yeah.

00:42:14.000 Well, I read something about zebras that it makes it very hard for predators to differentiate between individual zebras, and that they had put an ear collar or clip on one of the zebras, and immediately that zebra was taken out.

00:42:31.000 They had singled that zebra out.

00:42:33.000 It was very obvious to the predators that that was an individual, and they went right after it.

00:42:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:38.000 Well, it could be something like that.

00:42:39.000 I mean, it's pretty clear...

00:42:42.000 From these North American horses that the zebra striping trait originated here and then ended up being taken by the animals that migrated into Africa and perhaps elaborated on over time where they're dealing with lions and cheetahs and leopards and things like that.

00:43:07.000 And they had a lion in North America at one point that was even bigger than the African lion.

00:43:12.000 That's right.

00:43:12.000 Panthera, the step lion, was a lion that was one and a half times the size of the African lion.

00:43:19.000 And we had a short-faced bear that was probably even more ferocious than modern-day grizzlies.

00:43:27.000 For one thing, it seems to have been this really gracile animal.

00:43:31.000 It looked far more nimble and Yeah, we've talked about that thing many times since I heard you talk about it and we pulled up pictures of it and the size of the things and the length of the legs.

00:43:46.000 Yeah, I know.

00:43:47.000 They're amazing.

00:43:48.000 It's a huge animal.

00:43:49.000 It's a huge animal.

00:43:50.000 I mean, it's bigger than a polar bear, right?

00:43:52.000 There's a Canadian biologist named Valerius Geist who has argued for a long time that he thinks until short-faced bears became extinct, Wow.

00:44:16.000 Wow.

00:44:24.000 Well, they look like a monster.

00:44:25.000 I mean, it doesn't even look like a real animal.

00:44:27.000 It looks like something in a movie.

00:44:29.000 And then you see the short-faced bear, and what is that?

00:44:32.000 How do you say that?

00:44:34.000 Deodon?

00:44:35.000 Yeah, Deodon. 0.99

00:44:36.000 That's, what do they call that, the hell pig? 1.00

00:44:38.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:44:39.000 That's an animal even bigger than the short-faced bear.

00:44:42.000 So all these animals that existed in North America, when did the short-faced bear go extinct?

00:44:46.000 Look at the size of that thing.

00:44:47.000 Jesus, that's terrifying.

00:44:49.000 Yeah, I think probably about 14,000, 15,000 years ago.

00:44:54.000 And as I said, at least one biologist argues that it's no coincidence that that's about the time that humans began showing up, is that once this bear is gone, then it makes it possible for people to...

00:45:08.000 Is there a hypothesis as to why that went extinct?

00:45:10.000 Is that human intervention as well?

00:45:12.000 No, you know, I think what's happening, you know, there's a bunch of pretty wild swings in climate.

00:45:24.000 We're good to go.

00:45:52.000 And a true, perfect spin on its axis.

00:45:56.000 It has a wobble in it.

00:45:58.000 And sometimes when it wobbles, this is called...

00:46:02.000 Precession of the equinoxes?

00:46:04.000 Well, it's called the Milankovitch Cycles, a European... 0.98

00:46:08.000 I can't remember if he was a geographer or probably a geographer...

00:46:14.000 I was the first to speculate that this is why we have this climate history of a procession between ice ages and pluvials in between, is because the earth wobbles, and as it wobbles, it will at certain times Position the northern hemisphere farther away from the sun for a period of 30,000,

00:46:35.000 40,000 years.

00:46:36.000 And during that wobble and that position, you get an ice age.

00:46:42.000 And then the wobble will take it back so that the northern hemisphere begins to point more directly at the sun.

00:46:48.000 And in between, you get what are called pluvials, sometimes quite warm episodes.

00:46:54.000 I mean, we had one about 5,000 years ago that was probably 6 or 7 or 8 degrees warmer than today.

00:46:59.000 I would love to get you together with a guy named Randall Carlson, who's an expert in astroidal impacts.

00:47:07.000 And he's got some pretty compelling evidence and some fascinating theories about the end of the Ice Age.

00:47:13.000 And the end of the Ice Age corresponds to a lot of nuclear glass sites in Asia and Europe. 0.89

00:47:20.000 The nuclear glass is essentially the same stuff they find when they do nuclear test sites that also happens when they have meteor impacts.

00:47:27.000 And it's all throughout Asia and Europe, and he believes there was a significant impact in North America, not once, but twice.

00:47:34.000 And it directly corresponds to our planet passing through essentially a comet storm.

00:47:43.000 Really fascinating stuff.

00:47:44.000 I haven't heard this, actually.

00:47:46.000 I would love to get you together with him, because he's got some compelling evidence.

00:47:49.000 He believes that the woolly mammoths and, what was it, 60-something percent of the large mammals that died off during that very distinct time period, he says that directly corresponds to physical evidence of this tritonite stuff and all these diamonds that they find,

00:48:05.000 micro-diamonds that come from these impacts.

00:48:07.000 Very fascinating.

00:48:08.000 Is it a possibility that you've ever considered?

00:48:11.000 Well, I mean, I've read about it, and I think, you know, as in so many questions out there, you know, we haven't figured out the answers to things in a lot of instances.

00:48:21.000 And so, yeah, this is a possibility.

00:48:23.000 I mean, what I was sort of leading to by tracking that Milankovitch cycle procession through time is that That sort of change tends to produce among animal species and plants,

00:48:40.000 too, really, a lot of speciation.

00:48:42.000 In other words, it generates a lot of new, because you're often isolating populations, and when populations get isolated from their parent populations, they'll Evolve some new traits and maybe even become a new species.

00:48:55.000 And so you get a lot.

00:48:57.000 It's kind of a cycle where you end up with a lot of different new animals.

00:49:02.000 But when change comes, you often lose a good many of them.

00:49:07.000 And so these extinction scenarios that are associated with the ice ages and the pluvials in between, the interglacials, Do tend to produce quite a number of extinctions.

00:49:24.000 And the short-faced bear, I mean, I wish I was more of an expert so I could directly address exactly what happened to it.

00:49:32.000 But all I can tell you from my limited knowledge of it is that it seems to have disappeared in North America around 15,000 years ago.

00:49:41.000 And that's at a time when the Wisconsin Ice Age is beginning to wind down.

00:49:47.000 And so, you know, we still haven't – I mean, there are a lot of scholars out there, a lot of people out there who are arguing climate is the primary explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions.

00:50:00.000 Most people sort of concede that, okay, in the case of the mammoths, our evidence tends to point more towards human hunting.

00:50:09.000 But we don't know about all these other animals.

00:50:12.000 I mean, the predators, as I said, they seem to disappear because the prey disappears.

00:50:17.000 But, I mean, why do the camels disappear?

00:50:20.000 Why do these giant ground sloths disappear?

00:50:24.000 When the things that they ate, the globe mallows that are still in the West are still out there, but the animal that fed on them isn't there anymore.

00:50:35.000 So...

00:50:36.000 It's something, you know, that people have been sort of hammering around over beers in laboratories for actually more than a century now, and we still haven't answered all the questions.

00:50:48.000 It is so fascinating, but it's so amazing that you could even formulate that much information based on something that was 25, 15,000 years ago.

00:50:56.000 Yeah, it is.

00:50:57.000 I mean, this whole country that we live in today...

00:51:02.000 As far as Europeans are concerned, we've only been here a few hundred years, which is really kind of amazing.

00:51:07.000 We've only been here for a few hundred years, you know.

00:51:09.000 And, I mean, as you know from the other recent book of mine, American Serengeti, One of the animals that you can observe today that gives us maybe our best sense of what the Pleistocene is like is the pronghorn antelope,

00:51:28.000 which is still out on the plains and, of course, across a lot of the West.

00:51:32.000 They nearly disappeared at the turn of the 20th century.

00:51:36.000 We've managed to bring them back in a lot of Western states.

00:51:39.000 But that's an animal that Is essentially a holdover from the Pleistocene and is kind of still fighting Pleistocene ghosts.

00:51:51.000 I mean, it's an animal, as everybody knows, that can run 65 miles an hour, and yet for the last 10,000 years, the fastest animal that can chase it, the gray wolf, only runs 45 miles an hour.

00:52:05.000 And so that leads to the obvious question, why the overkill in terms of speed?

00:52:11.000 What you would think is all you need to do is run 47 miles an hour and you got it covered.

00:52:18.000 But here are these animals still among us that run 65 miles an hour, that can't jump over fences.

00:52:24.000 That still congregate in what people call the selfish herd, where they'll group up as a herd of adults, and the dominant animals will end up in the middle, so that if there are any predators, they get the ones on the edges, and the dominant ones survive.

00:52:42.000 And yet, they don't have any predators except as fawns.

00:52:49.000 And so what we think is happening is that in the pronghorn, we've got an animal that has survived into our own time that preserves how evolution shaped it.

00:53:10.000 We're good to go.

00:53:23.000 When they were adults.

00:53:24.000 And all those animals have disappeared.

00:53:27.000 They're all ghosts and have been for 10,000 years.

00:53:30.000 And yet pronghorns still preserve the ability to run away from a cheetah and to group up as a selfish herd and preserve the dominant animals in the middle against a hyena attack.

00:53:42.000 I had no idea they could run that fast.

00:53:44.000 They could run 65 miles an hour?

00:53:46.000 I only think some of the females... 1.00

00:53:49.000 Which are a little bit lighter than the males are.

00:53:52.000 Some of them may be able to run 70. That's insane!

00:53:57.000 Imagine going on the highway, you're violating the speed limit, and a pronghorn passes you. 1.00

00:54:02.000 And a pronghorn passes you, that's right. 0.56

00:54:05.000 That's incredible.

00:54:06.000 I did not know that there was hyenas that lived in North America as well that could run that fast.

00:54:11.000 Yeah, we had a fast running hyena that was a major predator of creatures like this.

00:54:19.000 I mean, if you think about it, this is why I use the term American Serengeti for the title of this book.

00:54:24.000 What we had in North America were these versions.

00:54:30.000 Look at them, Bill.

00:54:30.000 Yeah, look at this.

00:54:31.000 I'm looking at a video of them right now and they're just, someone's driving in the car and they are just flying by.

00:54:37.000 Yeah, Meriwether Lewis, you know, famously said their running motion more resembles the flight of birds than it does any mammal.

00:54:46.000 Yeah, I've seen them.

00:54:47.000 I saw them in Montana, and boy, do they book.

00:54:50.000 It's kind of crazy to watch in real life.

00:54:52.000 You see them take off when they get spooked, and you're like, whoa!

00:54:55.000 They're our version of, you know, impalas and gazelles in Africa.

00:55:00.000 And so, what other...

00:55:02.000 There was this cheetah.

00:55:04.000 Now, does it resemble the African cheetah?

00:55:06.000 Did it look like an African cheetah?

00:55:09.000 It did resemble it as a result of kind of convergent evolution.

00:55:13.000 I mean, it was an animal that pursued these pronghorns that could run 70 miles an hour, so it had to be able to run that fast.

00:55:23.000 Did it develop independently of the African cheetah?

00:55:25.000 It did indeed, and in fact, it developed from the cougar, the mountain lion line.

00:55:32.000 So it doesn't come out of, you know, I mean, the cheetah is a cat that famously, many people say it's a dog-like cat.

00:55:44.000 And it's its own independent entity in Africa.

00:55:49.000 And so our version of it came out of the same line that produced mountain lions.

00:55:56.000 Except mountain lions 15,000, 20,000 years ago produced this very fast-running version that was, in effect, an American cheetah.

00:56:07.000 Wow.

00:56:07.000 And did it have the same sort of front paws as a cheetah?

00:56:11.000 Because cheetahs, they're more almost dog-like, right?

00:56:14.000 Yeah.

00:56:14.000 No, this North American animal didn't have dog-like pads like the African cheetah does.

00:56:22.000 At least I'm not, you know, there may be some cheetah or North American cheetah expert out there who would contest that.

00:56:28.000 But I don't think so.

00:56:29.000 I've not seen any evidence anywhere in anything I've read that it did.

00:56:32.000 So it essentially just developed this ability to run very fast to catch pronghorns. 0.80

00:56:36.000 To catch pronghorns and catch, you know, and there were other animals that could run.

00:56:41.000 I mean, horses run pretty fast, too.

00:56:43.000 Yeah.

00:56:44.000 And cats, I mean, the reason horses buck, of course, which we, you know, translated in our own time into rodeo sports.

00:56:52.000 But the reason they buck is because that's their strategy for dislodging a cat attack. 0.96

00:57:00.000 We're good to go.

00:57:19.000 A, they're not on the Great Plains anymore, which was the primary horse range during the 1700s and 1800s.

00:57:30.000 They're in the deserts of places like Nevada, so they're in a much more arid country, not in a lushly grassed plain setting, but in a desert setting.

00:57:42.000 And We don't have their predators around anymore.

00:57:46.000 I mean, we've taken out gray wolves, which certainly did prey on cults.

00:57:52.000 We've almost wiped out mountain lions.

00:57:55.000 Their mountain lions are coming back, and that was always one of the major predators of cults.

00:58:01.000 But horses don't have the sort of predators anymore that they had during the Pleistocene, or even in the 1700s and 1800s.

00:58:11.000 And so without their predators on the landscape, and also being out in a desert setting rather than out in the much lusher Great Plains, they've become an issue in terms of We're good to go.

00:58:37.000 In the 19th century, in the 1800s, I mean, where they were were out on the Great Plains.

00:58:44.000 They were in eastern Montana and eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico in this much more lushly grassed setting.

00:58:52.000 And there, of course, still were wolves and still were mountain lions to take out the cults and sort of keep their population and suppress them.

00:59:00.000 It seems, you know, I mean, I'm incredulous that human beings that didn't even have bows and arrows could kill off the woolly mammoth.

00:59:06.000 But then you stop and think about what people are able to do in the few hundred years that we've been here.

00:59:11.000 When we arrived in North America, when Europeans arrived in North America and just essentially swept through the country and almost extirpated everything we found, like white-tailed deer, antelopes, buffalo. 1.00

00:59:24.000 I mean, we almost wiped the whole thing out.

00:59:27.000 Elk.

00:59:28.000 We got it down to just...

00:59:30.000 I mean, at the turn of the 19th century, or the 20th century, rather, it was a sad state.

00:59:36.000 Yeah, it was a sad state.

00:59:37.000 And it was a...

00:59:38.000 You know, it's one of those instances in history where...

00:59:41.000 I mean, I think I say this in the introduction of that American Serengeti book.

00:59:46.000 That was the largest...

00:59:49.000 destruction of wildlife that I've been able to discover in world history.

00:59:55.000 When Europeans came to North America and proceeded, as you just described, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific and essentially wiped out Just dozens of animal species, 0.79

01:00:11.000 in most instances, not completely exterminating them, but dropping them to numbers that were so low that, you know, you worried that this animal was going to survive.

01:00:25.000 And, I mean, some animals we did go extinct.

01:00:28.000 The Carolina parakeet, for example, was this beautiful animal.

01:00:33.000 A gaudy, green and yellow, large crow-sized parrot that was in North America all the way up to the Great Lakes, and they became extinct by the 1930s.

01:00:46.000 People hunted them?

01:00:47.000 They were regarded as agricultural pests, and so farmers basically...

01:00:53.000 Killed them and enlisted government agents, as had happened with wolves and coyotes, to wipe them out.

01:01:01.000 It's fascinating, and I guess it makes sense, but it's just fascinating that just a few hundred years ago they lacked the foresight to understand that any sort of intrusion into the ecosystem, any sort of, you know, eliminating one predator or taking out one thing, causes a cascade of events that can be disastrous.

01:01:18.000 No, people didn't know anything about ecology.

01:01:20.000 I mean, you know, we don't have ecology emerge as a science until the 1860s.

01:01:25.000 It makes sense, but it's amazing.

01:01:27.000 It really is amazing that we knew so little.

01:01:30.000 We knew very little, and we tended to, you know, I mean, with a complete lack of knowledge.

01:01:38.000 I mean, we did the same thing with the coyote attempt at exterminating them.

01:01:45.000 We passed a law in Congress in 1931 to provide for the extermination of coyotes and to appropriate the money to do it.

01:01:54.000 I mean, we spent probably $100 million over the next 40 or 50 years attempting to do it.

01:02:00.000 And passed that law at a time when we'd never sent the first scientist out to do any study of coyote natural history.

01:02:09.000 We had no idea what they ate, had no clue about them.

01:02:14.000 But before we even have any science to go on at all, we just go ahead and take the step up.

01:02:19.000 Okay, we're going to...

01:02:20.000 This is enamel.

01:02:21.000 We're going to completely weed out of the North American setting.

01:02:26.000 We're going to eliminate it. 0.72

01:02:27.000 Don't know a damn thing about it, but... 0.98

01:02:30.000 We're going to make sure that this thing does not survive through the 20th century. 0.62

01:02:34.000 It's fascinating in your book the accounts of the early explorers who are trying to figure out what the hell a coyote was.

01:02:40.000 They thought maybe it was a jackal, they didn't know what it was, and then they finally decided it was some sort of a small wolf, and then the initial description of it.

01:02:49.000 Well, they called it a prairie wolf.

01:02:50.000 Prairie wolf, that's right.

01:02:52.000 Yeah, a lot of people don't know this.

01:02:53.000 For most of the 19th century, I mean, I've seen references to this name as late as, like, 1915. Americans called coyotes prairie wolves.

01:03:05.000 That was the name Lewis and Clark gave them, and so that's what everybody called them.

01:03:09.000 And it wasn't until we started getting out into the southwest In the 1840s and 1850s, especially around Santa Fe, where there were Indian people who had come up with the Spanish colonization of the Southwest who spoke the language of the Aztecs.

01:03:31.000 That language is called Nahuatl.

01:03:34.000 The word coyote comes from the Aztec language.

01:03:39.000 So when Americans were first getting into New Mexico in the 1840s, they began encountering people who were using a different name for the animal.

01:03:52.000 And over the next 30 or 40 years, that name sort of overtook the term prairie wolf and finally completely replaced it.

01:04:03.000 So the original name was an Aztec name?

01:04:05.000 Yeah, it was an Aztec name.

01:04:07.000 Yeah.

01:04:08.000 And it's pronounced in the Noot language.

01:04:11.000 It's spelled in their language C-O-Y-O-T-L. But the L on the end is silent.

01:04:20.000 And so the way they pronounced it was Coyote.

01:04:25.000 And, I mean, the Aztec language, because they, you know, they were an empire, and they defeated a lot of peoples, and they imposed their language and their customs on a lot of people.

01:04:36.000 There were all sorts of Indians who weren't necessarily Aztec who spoke that language.

01:04:41.000 And there were evidently enough of them in places like Santa Fe and Tucson that when Anglo-Americans got out there, they were encountering not only Native people who were using that word, but the Spanish people.

01:04:57.000 Not being privy to the American use of the term prairie wolf, the Spanish had just adopted the Indian name for the animal, and they had Hispanicized it, and they gave it an extra syllable, so they called the animal a coyote.

01:05:14.000 And that's what these early Americans were hearing.

01:05:18.000 They were largely hearing the Spanish pronunciation, the three-syllable version coyote.

01:05:24.000 And Mark Twain comes along in the 1870s and writes a very famous book about the West, Roughing It.

01:05:30.000 Of course, he's America's most famous writer at the time.

01:05:33.000 His book is a bestseller.

01:05:35.000 And Mark Twain not only kind of, because we, as you mentioned a minute ago, we don't really know what to make of these animals.

01:05:43.000 Americans have never had any experience with an animal like this, so we don't know what to think about them. 0.93

01:05:48.000 Mark Twain is the one who provides us with kind of a take on them as these cowardly, despicable animals. 0.55

01:05:58.000 Little creatures that have this, you know, overgrown wolf skin and this despairing look. 0.97

01:06:06.000 And he says, you know, they're such scoundrels and such scavengers that a flea would desert one for a velocipede.

01:06:15.000 You know, and he's Mark Twain.

01:06:16.000 He's humorous.

01:06:17.000 So he gets on this riff and he goes on for like three pages in this vein so that by the time you end up reading it, you're So our modern

01:06:48.000 pronunciation comes from Mark Twain.

01:06:51.000 Yeah, well, he's the one who at least popularizes it.

01:06:55.000 And everybody who read his book basically kind of, I think, absorbed that pronunciation of it.

01:07:02.000 Why did these Native Americans have such a great respect for the coyote? 1.00

01:07:05.000 Like, what was it about that animal that created so many legends?

01:07:10.000 Oh, that's a great story.

01:07:12.000 And as I argue in this book, I mean, what I try to do with Coyote America is to tell the biography of the animal from its evolutionary origins through its history up until the present time when,

01:07:28.000 of course, it's in everybody's backyard all over the country.

01:07:30.000 And so we're all dealing with it and having to figure out what it is and how you coexist with it.

01:07:40.000 I mean, it goes, you know, for a million years of its evolution, confronting at certain times the return of gray wolves to North America, which clearly don't like coyotes and beat the crap out of them,

01:07:55.000 and even probably influenced their evolutionary direction into a smaller, more jackal-like animal.

01:08:03.000 But then, also, it has this story that's associated with us.

01:08:08.000 When humans arrive in North America, I mean, coyotes get this wonderful period that lasts like 14,500 years or something, where native people look at them and say,

01:08:25.000 that's the most intriguing animal on the continent.

01:08:31.000 It's, for one thing, Mammoths, camels, horses, all these big charismatic animals are dying out around us in the Pleistocene Extinctions.

01:08:43.000 Somehow, these little guys don't seem to be perturbed by it.

01:08:48.000 They're surviving while all these big creatures, these big impressive creatures are going away.

01:08:54.000 And I think they also, at least this is what I argue in the book, they had this sense that Coyotes live by their wits.

01:09:05.000 And I think that provided them with a model that they thought was valuable.

01:09:10.000 Because I think living successfully because you're smart...

01:09:16.000 You know, that's a trait that humans in any age, including ours right now, could very well follow and find to be an effective way to go about facing your future.

01:09:33.000 So they see this animal as being particularly smart, particularly adaptable, a survivor.

01:09:44.000 I think?

01:10:03.000 At some point in time, and who knows when it was, I mean, it could have been 10,000 years ago, they convert it into Indian people in the West, everywhere coyotes range, convert this animal into one of their principal gods, their principal deities, and make it this sacred creature.

01:10:22.000 I mean, they have no reason to kill them or harass them or anything.

01:10:26.000 And so instead, they look at it as this Avatar, this stand-in for humans in the world, study it really closely, and they proceed to create this body of literature.

01:10:40.000 It's our oldest literature from North America in the form of oral stories that have coyote...

01:10:49.000 As the central character, but it's not the little coyote that's trotting through your camp.

01:10:54.000 It's a coyote man.

01:10:56.000 He's a character who stands on his hind legs.

01:11:00.000 He has a pointed nose, and he has erect ears, and he has a tail.

01:11:03.000 But he's standing up, and he personifies all the traits, both good and bad, of human beings.

01:11:11.000 Yeah.

01:11:13.000 It's so weird that, you know, the way we look at coyotes today is this nuisance and this pest, and that's directly attributed to agriculture, right?

01:11:21.000 Directly attributed to us having livestock anywhere near them, deciding we'd want them out.

01:11:25.000 But if you look at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, when I was there, I took a photo of it because it was so weird.

01:11:31.000 I put up on my Instagram...

01:11:34.000 The stuffed coyote that they have there, they have all these different animals.

01:11:37.000 They have African animals, they have gorillas, chimpanzees, all these different stuffed animals.

01:11:41.000 I'll just sort of give you a sense of what they would look like with this mock natural environment.

01:11:46.000 The coyote's natural environment, they show a porch, and the coyote has a cat in its mouth.

01:11:51.000 I mean, this image right here, that is my photo that I took from the Museum of Natural History.

01:11:59.000 It's like, what?

01:12:01.000 That's the natural environment?

01:12:02.000 Is a porch with a cat in his mouth?

01:12:05.000 It's so bizarre.

01:12:06.000 But that's how human beings, especially in and around L.A., view them.

01:12:11.000 When I had my situation with the...

01:12:14.000 The chicken. 0.63

01:12:16.000 Before I started reading your book, I thought about killing that coyote. 1.00

01:12:19.000 I was like, I'm going to kill that fucker. 1.00

01:12:21.000 He killed my chicken. 1.00

01:12:22.000 I'm going to kill him. 0.99

01:12:23.000 Then I found out, I believe, I'm pretty sure that it was a female, because this female kind of honey-dicked my dog. 1.00

01:12:31.000 Into jumping the fence and converting with her.

01:12:35.000 And that's how they got the chickens. 0.98

01:12:36.000 Because my dog's huge.

01:12:38.000 I have a mastiff.

01:12:39.000 And he knocked over this...

01:12:41.000 See, when chickens, when they brood, do you know about chickens brooding?

01:12:47.000 Do you know what happens?

01:12:48.000 Yeah, my dad had chickens in Louisiana.

01:12:50.000 So yeah, I kind of, you know, hanging out with him.

01:12:52.000 When I would go back and visit, I came to know a little bit about chickens.

01:12:58.000 Well, for people who don't know, what happens is chickens think that their eggs...

01:13:02.000 The only way...

01:13:02.000 Chickens have eggs every day, pretty much, or sort of every day, every few days.

01:13:06.000 And when they have an egg, those eggs are non-viable.

01:13:10.000 That's one of the reasons why vegetarians can eat chicken eggs and get protein from them.

01:13:13.000 You're not hurting anybody.

01:13:14.000 They have the eggs, whether or not there's a chicken there or not.

01:13:18.000 They always have the egg, and it has to be fertilized by the rooster in order for it to become a chicken.

01:13:24.000 I didn't figure that out until I was almost 40. But...

01:13:28.000 My stupid head. 1.00

01:13:29.000 I was like, oh, the egg means there's a chicken in there. 1.00

01:13:31.000 You just got to cook it before it becomes a chicken. 1.00

01:13:33.000 No, stupid. 1.00

01:13:34.000 Anyway, the chickens sometimes are convinced that these non-viable eggs will become chicks. 1.00

01:13:41.000 And so they sit on them and they start plucking their feathers out.

01:13:44.000 Yeah.

01:13:44.000 And it takes the entire cycle that an egg would be viable and become a chick for them to get out of it.

01:13:51.000 The only way to stop them is to put them on a perch and put them in a smaller cage.

01:13:55.000 So we put them in a perch in a smaller cage.

01:13:57.000 We separate them from the chicken coop.

01:13:59.000 And the coyote had figured this out.

01:14:01.000 That this chicken was by itself and convinced the mastiff to knock the cage over because it was too small to knock this coop over.

01:14:09.000 But the mastiff is 140 pounds. 0.99

01:14:11.000 He's like, I'll fucking take care of it. 0.99

01:14:12.000 Boom! 0.99

01:14:13.000 He knocks the coop down.

01:14:15.000 The coyote says, thanks, grabs the chicken and then jumps and hops the fence.

01:14:19.000 And I was talking to my neighbor about it. 0.99

01:14:20.000 He's like, oh man, I fucking hate coyotes. 0.99

01:14:22.000 I go, do you like rats? 0.99

01:14:25.000 Because if you don't like rats, you should thank the coyotes.

01:14:27.000 The reason why we're not infested with rats, I mean, we're in the hills.

01:14:31.000 When you're in the hills out here in California, there's rats and rodents everywhere, but they're not.

01:14:36.000 And the reason why is because these coyotes, like...

01:14:39.000 We make that mistake so often where we think that we're smart and we're going to eliminate one thing in this system and it's going to be fine now.

01:14:49.000 All we have to do is take out this coyote and everything will be great.

01:14:52.000 But no, you're going to have a rat infestation.

01:14:54.000 And that's one of the things that you talked about in your book about farmers who had chased off the coyotes and they had rabbit infestations.

01:15:03.000 Yeah.

01:15:03.000 And they were praying for coyotes.

01:15:05.000 I mean, this happens just over and over and over again.

01:15:08.000 I think one of the reasons that we tend to endlessly make the same mistake with animals like this is because we don't try to spend any effort to understand the ecological world around us and to understand their role in it in particular.

01:15:28.000 I mean, I've been going around the country a lot over the last eight months talking about this book, because obviously everybody is dealing with them, and some people are brand new in dealing with them, and they're alarmed, first of all, that there's this small wolf trotting down the street or through their yard,

01:15:45.000 and then, of course, they immediately hear, well, it's going to get your cat, it's going to get your small dog, it's liable to grab your three-year-old.

01:15:53.000 I mean, you just...

01:15:54.000 So the horror stories...

01:15:56.000 Through kind of urban legend, make the rounds at an accelerated rate, and Sort of basic good information about the animal doesn't make the round very effectively at all.

01:16:12.000 It's not fun.

01:16:13.000 No, it's not fun.

01:16:14.000 But what you have to grapple with, first of all, is you've got to start with a position, which I'll admit, this is not the American position to take.

01:16:23.000 It's the position that, in this instance, we have confronted a part of the natural world that we are not able to control.

01:16:31.000 We can't control coyotes. 0.78

01:16:36.000 Resistance, basically, is futile.

01:16:39.000 They're going to be among us no matter what we do.

01:16:42.000 I mean, you can certainly take out, you know, coyotes are individuals, and so if there's a bad actor in the neighborhood, and very few of them, by the way, in the studies of coyotes in urban settings are bad actors, but occasionally there's one that starts catching cats or starts chasing dogs or something.

01:17:00.000 I mean, you can take that one out and perhaps improve the situation.

01:17:04.000 But just blanket going after coyotes.

01:17:08.000 Any coyote, because you're afraid of something like your cat might disappear, is going to boomerang in every instance because attempts to persecute them, as I try to point out over and over in Coyote America, result in Every case in more coyotes and and excuse the populations so that what you end up with are often youngsters teenagers that like human teenagers get in more trouble than adults do so

01:17:38.000 the thing that I mean, I keep trying to do, and of course there's a group in California, in San Francisco, called Project Coyote that's been at this, trying to help people understand how to coexist with coyotes for the last seven or eight years.

01:17:56.000 Well, I think.

01:18:16.000 You don't let your cats out in the morning to go hunt songbirds.

01:18:20.000 You don't let your cats out at night.

01:18:22.000 I mean, the coyotes are, in most instances, not attacking cats or small dogs because they want to eat them.

01:18:31.000 They regard them as competitor predators in their territory.

01:18:35.000 And so they're attacking them because that's how they see them.

01:18:41.000 But they do eat them, right?

01:18:42.000 Well, they will eat them We're good to go.

01:19:07.000 We're good to go.

01:19:21.000 And I've told people for most of this year, I mean, this is from my own experience, because I've lived in the urban wildlands interface for almost all my adult life, out in the countryside, away from town.

01:19:34.000 Whenever you find your cat, that's probably a coyote, and it's attacked the cat because it thinks it's a competitor, and it attacks it, kills it, leaves it.

01:19:46.000 If the animal disappears, if your cat disappears and you never see it again, Either that's happened in the time when they're provisioning pups, or if it happens in the fall or the winter or the early spring and your cat totally disappears,

01:20:02.000 that probably was a great horned owl that got your cat. 0.87

01:20:05.000 I mean, owls pluck cats and take them to their roost and devour them, and so your cat disappears and you never see it again.

01:20:14.000 But what almost everybody does now that we know we've got coyotes is you hear coyotes howling in the hills.

01:20:21.000 The neighbor had a cat disappear.

01:20:22.000 Of course, it was a coyote.

01:20:24.000 Coyote got it.

01:20:25.000 Yeah, but it might not be.

01:20:26.000 I would say in a pretty sizable percentage of cases, it was actually a great horned owl that got the cat and not a coyote.

01:20:35.000 There's a great video that I found online that I put on my Instagram of an owl snatching some other raptor right out of its nest.

01:20:42.000 Have you ever seen it?

01:20:43.000 I haven't seen it, but...

01:20:44.000 Someone had a trail cam video up, a black and white trail cam, and you see the owl flying in in the distance.

01:20:52.000 I've heard stories of this.

01:20:53.000 You see the eyes, and then you see it snap, and the other bird in the nest doesn't even know what happened.

01:20:58.000 Watch this.

01:20:59.000 It happened so fast.

01:21:01.000 First of all, do you know what kind of animal that is, what that bird is?

01:21:05.000 Can you tell by looking at it?

01:21:06.000 It looks like a hawk of some kind.

01:21:08.000 It looks like a fledgling.

01:21:09.000 Boom! 0.99

01:21:10.000 That's it.

01:21:10.000 And look at the other ones, like, what happened?

01:21:13.000 Yeah.

01:21:13.000 What?

01:21:13.000 What's going on?

01:21:14.000 Yeah, that's a hawk of some kind.

01:21:15.000 Maybe a redtail. 0.99

01:21:17.000 And the fledgling.

01:21:18.000 Just the eyes in the distance are amazing.

01:21:20.000 Look at these eyes sneaking up.

01:21:21.000 Look at this.

01:21:22.000 Here it comes.

01:21:23.000 Oh, my God.

01:21:25.000 Yeah.

01:21:26.000 It's so funny that we think of that thing as, oh, the wise old owl, give a hoot, don't pollute. 1.00

01:21:31.000 Meanwhile, those motherfuckers are as evil as it gets. 1.00

01:21:34.000 Well, they are definitely major predators, and they, you know, I mean, there's the stories about them in New Mexico. 1.00

01:21:39.000 I mean, I've got friends who were sitting out at an outdoor bar a couple of years ago with a railing on it.

01:21:46.000 It was a late afternoon, and a cat was walking along the railing while they're sitting there with their drinks, shooting the shit, and all of a sudden, an owl comes in, and in a Flash plucks that cat off the railing and the next thing they see is the owl flying off through the cottonwood trees over the creek with this cat dangling from its calves.

01:22:04.000 Yeah. 0.78

01:22:05.000 While they're all sitting there with their drinks poised in the air.

01:22:08.000 I was driving home one day.

01:22:11.000 And I saw this owl fly right above my head, and I must have...

01:22:14.000 Apparently, while I was driving, it must have got this rabbit somewhere close to it, and I startled it.

01:22:21.000 So it's flying off, and it decided to drop the rabbit.

01:22:24.000 So right in front of me, in the highway, or in the road, was this eviscerated rabbit.

01:22:29.000 No, big rabbit, too.

01:22:31.000 And that was one of the first years that I lived here.

01:22:35.000 And I remember thinking, well, I've got to recalibrate my idea of what an owl is.

01:22:39.000 Oh, no kidding.

01:22:40.000 Because it was just torn apart.

01:22:41.000 And it was a big rabbit.

01:22:43.000 And I saw this...

01:22:44.000 I mean, it was a big owl, too.

01:22:46.000 So the whole thing was like, whoa, this is a predator.

01:22:48.000 This isn't just a bird.

01:22:50.000 And that's the way they kill, too.

01:22:52.000 That's what they do with cats. 1.00

01:22:53.000 They eviscerate them. 1.00

01:22:54.000 They put a talon, basically, into their ass and just rip it all the way up to their sternum. 1.00

01:23:01.000 Boom! 1.00

01:23:02.000 Yeah, spill their guts out.

01:23:04.000 There's a wildlife sanctuary near here, and we visited a couple of times, and they have owls there, and you get to see them and check them out up close, like animals that have been injured and things like that, and you just see the talons on those suckers, and you just...

01:23:16.000 Woof! 0.98

01:23:17.000 Yeah, they're serious.

01:23:18.000 Yeah, it's fascinating how we anthropomorphize some of these animals and turn them into these cutie pies.

01:23:24.000 You know, like polar bears are selling Coca-Cola and Klondike bars, and owls are selling Tootsie Roll pops.

01:23:30.000 Meanwhile, they're out there jacking cats, you know?

01:23:34.000 There's a video in Los Angeles, and one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about this is because I'd heard you say before, I think on Rinella's podcast, What you just said about cats and dogs, essentially the coyotes think of them as competitive predators.

01:23:50.000 But there's a video in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, of a coyote eating a cat on a lawn.

01:23:59.000 And these people are in the car watching, and they're filming it, and they're freaking out like, oh my god, oh my god!

01:24:06.000 Coyote's just sitting there eating that cat.

01:24:08.000 So you think that the reason why it's eating that cat, I mean, is it just hungry maybe, or is it an occasional meal that they think of them as prey, or is it primarily because, is there a bunch of different factors, or is it primarily because they're competitive predators?

01:24:23.000 Well, I think it's primarily because of that.

01:24:30.000 Coyotes are so individualistic. 1.00

01:24:32.000 Look at that sucker. 1.00

01:24:33.000 Just hanging out right in LA. Hi. 0.99

01:24:35.000 How are you?

01:24:36.000 Wild animal.

01:24:37.000 Walking by the car.

01:24:38.000 Right in Los Angeles.

01:24:39.000 I mean, it's just so bizarre that they're so comfortable around people.

01:24:43.000 Look at all those streets.

01:24:44.000 Look at all those city streets.

01:24:46.000 I mean, it's thinking about walking across the street with all those cars.

01:24:48.000 And they know how to navigate streets like that, too.

01:24:50.000 So strange.

01:24:51.000 How does it figure out how to make it across the street?

01:24:54.000 You know, there's a biologist in Chicago who argues that in rush hour traffic on the interstates of Chicago, nine million people there, that he's seen coyotes cross four lanes of the interstate and stop in the median and sit there and wait until the traffic lightens up.

01:25:14.000 For the other four lanes and then cross that way.

01:25:16.000 So this is, uh, the coyote goes and gets this cat that apparently it had already killed before and he starts eating it.

01:25:24.000 So it's got it right there.

01:25:25.000 That thing at his feet is a cat.

01:25:28.000 Yeah.

01:25:29.000 Well, what I was going to say about that is that...

01:25:32.000 Look at that.

01:25:32.000 Yeah.

01:25:33.000 It's all stiff.

01:25:34.000 Yeah, well, he's...

01:25:35.000 So, what a strange animal.

01:25:39.000 You know, so two things I would observe about this particular video is, first of all, you know, everybody is making the assumption that the coyote killed the cat.

01:25:50.000 That cat may have been hit by a car, and the coyote found it and is scavenging it. 0.95

01:25:56.000 How about that other stupid cat behind him going, uh, that's my friend! 1.00

01:25:59.000 Uh-huh, right behind it. 1.00

01:26:00.000 Hello!

01:26:01.000 Why are you eating my friend?

01:26:05.000 The other thing I would say is that they're so individualistic that sometimes cats, they develop, I mean, coyotes develop a yin for cats.

01:26:17.000 Like a taste.

01:26:17.000 Yes, they develop a taste for them.

01:26:19.000 And so, I mean, there are examples.

01:26:20.000 There was a coyote pack in Seattle and also one in Tucson that basically did this very thing.

01:26:28.000 They decided that cats were, you know, going to be their target.

01:26:33.000 Now, most coyotes, you know, that's not how they react to cats.

01:26:37.000 Well, cats do kill an unbelievable amount of rodents and birds.

01:26:42.000 Yeah, and people don't want to hear this, of course, but the truth is that in all cities where coyotes have spread, which is literally everywhere now, we have, from the ornithologist, a decided record of numbers of nesting songbirds going up dramatically as a result of the appearance of coyotes.

01:27:02.000 Yeah, there was a statistic that we quoted on the podcast, and it's something insane, like 3 billion birds a year in North America alone are killed by cats, by house cats.

01:27:16.000 B. With a B. When you tell that to people, they're like, there's no way.

01:27:20.000 But look, these are biologists.

01:27:22.000 These are people that are actually studying this.

01:27:23.000 And it blew them away.

01:27:25.000 I don't know how they study it.

01:27:26.000 Maybe you could enlighten me.

01:27:27.000 Well, I don't either.

01:27:28.000 3.7 billion years annually.

01:27:31.000 3.7 birds.

01:27:32.000 In the continental U.S. That is so crazy.

01:27:34.000 That's U.S. That's not Canada.

01:27:36.000 It's not Mexico.

01:27:37.000 Continental U.S. And I read a similar study in Natural History Magazine a few years ago about Great Britain.

01:27:44.000 Same kind of thing.

01:27:46.000 I don't remember the figures anymore.

01:27:48.000 But, yeah, I mean, cats, you know, they devastate bird populations.

01:27:52.000 And so letting your cat roam out through the neighborhood, you know, seems like this very compassionate thing to do.

01:28:02.000 Fluffy wants to be out.

01:28:04.000 Fluffy needs some space to roam.

01:28:07.000 But you're releasing an extremely effective predator into the world, and that's the result of it.

01:28:15.000 And when coyotes have shown up in town, it's suddenly getting a lot harder to make a living as a bird-killing cat.

01:28:24.000 And so we're getting a sharp uptick now in songbirds.

01:28:30.000 Yeah, it's interesting how it all just cycles.

01:28:32.000 It all just makes sense.

01:28:33.000 It all figures out.

01:28:34.000 It all seeks its own level.

01:28:36.000 One of the things that I found hilarious is we were talking on Rinella's podcast about a group that approached you and they were doing a documentary on saving the coyote.

01:28:45.000 Yes, indeed.

01:28:46.000 They were.

01:28:47.000 It was a couple of women who were pretty fresh into the southwest in Santa Fe. 1.00

01:28:55.000 They hadn't been in town for very long, and they were interested in doing a documentary to save the coyote.

01:29:05.000 I mean, there's a way to approach doing something like that.

01:29:09.000 I mean, you could say, okay, so I want wildlife services to stop killing 80,000 of them a year on behalf of agriculture.

01:29:19.000 But what these women didn't seem to quite have a handle on was that Coyotes don't need our help in saving themselves. 0.97

01:29:31.000 They're perfectly capable of doing it.

01:29:34.000 And so this is not an animal you have to worry about, for example, going on the endangered species list.

01:29:45.000 That's not going to happen.

01:29:46.000 As one of the people who blurbed my book, in fact, it was Bill McKibben, the nature writer, now that I think about it, one of the things he said was that in his blurb was that a biologist once told him that when the last human dies on Earth,

01:30:03.000 a coyote will be sitting on that human's grave howling at the moon.

01:30:11.000 I've always loved that thought because, of course, it's an indication of what great survivors they are.

01:30:18.000 Well, you are starting to see a resurgence of wolves in Europe and there was actually an article recently published in Paris about it where I guess the mayor of Paris was telling people not to be alarmed because they only look for four-legged prey and people shouldn't be worried about these wolves.

01:30:36.000 But the idea of these animals intermingling with our civilization.

01:30:41.000 We have decided, we put some hardscape down, put up some houses, and we go, this is our stuff.

01:30:47.000 You've got to stay out.

01:30:48.000 And they don't recognize these boundaries, and now you're slowly starting to see these animals creep back into Paris, France.

01:30:55.000 Into Paris, that's right.

01:30:57.000 Wolves! 0.60

01:30:57.000 Yeah. 0.60

01:30:58.000 Well, you know, I think when we moved into cities 5,000 years ago, one of the things we thought we were getting away from by living in cities was predators.

01:31:07.000 For the most part, we have.

01:31:09.000 Yeah, for the most part, we have.

01:31:10.000 And we don't have, you know, at least not so far, we don't have leopards, you know, patrolling the alleys in Denver.

01:31:17.000 Yeah.

01:31:19.000 I, you know, I'm intrigued by one of the stories I uncovered in the book, which is an argument that I make.

01:31:26.000 It's based on the work of a graduate student I knew at the University of Montana.

01:31:31.000 His name is John Hall, and he was doing a A dissertation in history on what he was calling the Great Dog War in the 19th century and what it was all about.

01:31:41.000 And the more I dug into it, I realized this is one of the explanations for why you don't see accounts of coyotes in cities much, even in L.A. I mean, the first accounts I've seen of coyotes in L.A., for instance, are in the 1920s.

01:31:57.000 But it's because in the 19th century, until about the 1870s, we let dogs, our own pets and packs of feral dogs, roam through American cities at will.

01:32:14.000 And so every city in the United States had a large population of feral and sort of loosely owned dogs roaming around cities.

01:32:24.000 Our cityscapes.

01:32:25.000 Pharaoh meaning they were totally wild or people would feed them?

01:32:29.000 People would feed them.

01:32:30.000 I mean, they were just basically stray dogs that would roam the city.

01:32:35.000 They would find things to scavenge behind restaurants and behind houses, and they would knock over people's garbage.

01:32:44.000 But this happened, I think, in the late 1840s.

01:32:49.000 Boston had An epidemic one year of rabies attacks from these kinds of wild dogs in the city.

01:32:59.000 And so Boston began to institute what became our modern system of dog catchers, dog pounds, leash laws, dog control.

01:33:11.000 And It was at the moment when the Boston model began to spread to Philadelphia, to New York, eventually to New Orleans, eventually to the cities in California.

01:33:23.000 And we sort of instituted this new model of, okay, a dog is properly meant to be in an enclosed yard, on a leash when it's with its owner.

01:33:35.000 It's not supposed to be running through the streets with packs of other dogs scavenging garbage and stuff.

01:33:42.000 When we did that, what that, in effect, did was to open up the niche in American cities for wild canids.

01:33:52.000 And the wild canid that was able to take advantage of it was the coyote.

01:33:56.000 That provided them the opening.

01:33:59.000 That hadn't been there before because a coyote wandering into a city in the 1860s or 1830s would end up being, of course, assaulted by coyotes.

01:34:10.000 Suddenly, all the dogs were put up, and that opened up the cities to the arrival of coyotes in our midst.

01:34:23.000 The interface between human beings and the wild, and our interaction with the wild, and then just our ability or inability to manipulate it, it's just so fascinating to me.

01:34:34.000 And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is what they're trying to do right now in, I guess it's Wyoming and parts of Montana, this American Serengeti project that they're doing.

01:34:45.000 Please explain that.

01:34:47.000 Well, so this other book that we've talked about some of mine that has been out now just about a year, it came out last March of 2016. That's a book.

01:35:04.000 American Serengeti is a book that's about the story of the Great Plains and the fact that we had, up until about 125 or 130 years ago, in North America, what was widely regarded around the globe as one of the great wildlife spectacles of the world.

01:35:27.000 These enormous herds of bison, of re-emerging wild horse bands, of pronghorns, maybe 15, 18 million pronghorns, not quite as many as bison, but almost as many.

01:35:44.000 Half a million gray wolves that were their predators, and of course coyotes playing the role of jackals.

01:35:50.000 Grizzly bears that roamed, I mean the original range of the grizzly bear was actually out on the plains.

01:35:57.000 We're good to go.

01:36:25.000 That prevailed 150 years ago.

01:36:28.000 But we ended up basically wiping all those animals out.

01:36:35.000 I mean, we wiped out probably as many as 30 million bison through the 19th century.

01:36:40.000 Almost all, we got the pronghorns down from 15 million to about 13,000.

01:36:46.000 We drove the elk off the Great Plains.

01:36:49.000 Their primary range was the plains.

01:36:51.000 We drove them off and up into the mountains, did the same thing with the grizzlies.

01:36:55.000 So we basically reduced this American Serengeti, which Africa didn't do with its Serengeti or its Maasai Mara or its Veld. 0.77

01:37:05.000 It preserved all its great animals.

01:37:07.000 But we destroyed ours and We ended up not ever successfully creating any kind of wildlife preserve to sort of save at least a part of it.

01:37:21.000 I mean, we got Yellowstone, but of course Yellowstone is set in the Rocky Mountains.

01:37:26.000 And so what this American Prairie Reserve is about now, it's based in Bozeman, Montana.

01:37:33.000 It's only about a dozen years old, but it's been pretty wildly successful in trying to do this.

01:37:42.000 It's had the imagination, this group of people has had the imagination to try to recreate this American Serengeti that our government and our statecraft never did preserve for us.

01:37:56.000 And so what they've got in mind in central Montana is taking a couple of large pieces of existing public lands.

01:38:06.000 One is the Missouri River Breaks National Monument that Bill Clinton created along the Missouri River.

01:38:14.000 And then just downstream of it, still along the Missouri River, is the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

01:38:21.000 And together, those two public lands that are along the Missouri River and mostly on the south bank of the Missouri River in central Montana...

01:38:35.000 I think?

01:38:50.000 We're good to go.

01:39:14.000 We're good to go.

01:39:33.000 And hoping and letting wolves come out of the nearby Rockies and grizzlies, which every spring now, are coming out of the Rocky Mountain front in Montana and getting out sometimes as much as 100 miles out of the plains.

01:39:50.000 What the American Prayer Reserve wants to happen is for these animals to get all the way out to this preserve, find this recreated American Serengeti with all the animals that were there, and give us, in our own time in the 21st century,

01:40:06.000 this chance to not just read about this in history or maybe see some version of it on a late-night old Western movie, but actually to experience it ourselves.

01:40:19.000 Now, how are they going to reintroduce these animals, and where are they going to get them from?

01:40:22.000 Well, I mean, getting the bison is not too difficult, because they're surplus bison pretty much around most of the West.

01:40:30.000 I mean, we've got a larger bison population in North America right now than we've had since the 1890s, more than 300,000 of them.

01:40:39.000 So it's fairly easy to come up with bison. 0.97

01:40:43.000 Pronghorns are already there, and so all you have to do is just sort of make conditions beneficial for their herds to grow.

01:40:54.000 Same thing with mule deer, with elk.

01:40:57.000 With bighorns, they'll have to reintroduce bighorns, but that was an original range.

01:41:01.000 There were bighorns out in the badlands of the Great Plains. 0.95

01:41:05.000 And then, as I said, they can't deliberately, on their own, reintroduce gray wolves or grizzly bears, but their idea is that if wolves and grizzlies get there, then they're welcome.

01:41:19.000 And the idea is they probably, once this preserve exists with all these grazing animals, that the wolves and the bears will find it.

01:41:30.000 Wow, that's so fascinating.

01:41:31.000 And do they have a timeline they're trying to accomplish this in?

01:41:34.000 You know, as I said, they've been around for about 10 or 12 years now.

01:41:39.000 I mean, they've raised more than $130 million.

01:41:44.000 And they've got major donors on both the coasts, along with lots of, you know, just people like you and me who give them $10 and $15 or $25 dollars.

01:41:54.000 I've got lots of friends who, once I sort of alerted them to this, who have joined American Prairie Reserve and are donors, small donors.

01:42:04.000 The timeline is basically whenever they can make it happen.

01:42:08.000 I mean, there's some considerable resistance from the ranching community, not only in Montana, but kind of across the West, because ranchers don't want to see bison, and especially bison and predators,

01:42:25.000 replace cattle herds.

01:42:27.000 So there's kind of an ideological opposition on the part of ranching people.

01:42:32.000 But And that's two-fold, right?

01:42:34.000 That's one because of the food that the bison would eat, because of the battle for resources, but also because of brucellosis?

01:42:41.000 Well, brucellosis, of course, especially in Montana...

01:42:45.000 And explain to people that's a disease, a cattle disease.

01:42:48.000 It's a disease that bison and elk have, and that if cattle get it, their beef cannot be sold in North American markets.

01:43:01.000 All beef that's sold in our supermarkets has to be brucellosis-free.

01:43:06.000 And how do they determine that?

01:43:08.000 Do they have to test each individual animal when they slaughter them?

01:43:10.000 Well, I mean, they would if there was a real threat about it.

01:43:14.000 The truth is, there has never been an instance in the wild of either a bison or an elk transferring brucellosis to cattle.

01:43:22.000 How would they transfer it?

01:43:23.000 Do they have to eat the same food?

01:43:24.000 No.

01:43:24.000 Basically, it comes through largely from afterbirth.

01:43:29.000 Whenever a bison cow, for example, that has brucellosis gives birth, if cattle come through the area, say, within a few days and graze the same grass where afterbirth has been dropped from a brucellosis-infected bison,

01:43:48.000 then the theory is that A cow could get the disease.

01:43:53.000 It's been made to happen that way in laboratories.

01:43:58.000 We have no record of it ever having happened in the wild.

01:44:02.000 When they made it happen in laboratories, did they force feed the cows? 1.00

01:44:06.000 I don't think so.

01:44:08.000 But I have to say that I've not read the study, so I'm not quite sure how they pulled it off.

01:44:15.000 But they did make the transfer happen in a laboratory setting.

01:44:20.000 What's been bizarre about the whole brucellosis thing is that elk are infected with brucellosis far more than bison are.

01:44:27.000 But the ranching community doesn't seem to be concerned about elk.

01:44:31.000 It's bison that they don't want. 1.00

01:44:33.000 Why is that?

01:44:34.000 Well, I mean, part of it, it seems to me, almost dates back to the 19th century when we destroyed...

01:44:40.000 The original American Serengeti and killed all these bison and converted the Great Plains into largely a ranching country with cattle. 0.92

01:44:50.000 I mean, the idea has been from the ranching community ever since that bison are a direct threat to the existing ranching community.

01:44:59.000 That if you get too many people enamored of bison, You know, and I'm not sure I can track the logic of their arguments, but it somehow seems to lead in that direction. 1.00

01:45:13.000 They don't like people introducing bison into the middle of a ranching setting.

01:45:22.000 Particularly what they don't seem to like is someone with an old Montana ranch of 40,000 or 50,000 acres and We're good to go.

01:45:40.000 We're good to go.

01:45:59.000 So this is, I think, the most exciting conservation project that's out in the West.

01:46:08.000 In our time.

01:46:32.000 Like that.

01:46:33.000 Just like that.

01:46:34.000 In just the space of a few decades, we completely wiped it out.

01:46:37.000 And as I said a minute ago, what seems to me to be the largest wholesale destruction of wildlife discoverable in modern history.

01:46:46.000 And so right now, the American Prairie Reserve, they're just taking that land and buying it up, and they haven't started this project yet?

01:46:56.000 No, they have started the project.

01:46:57.000 Yeah, it certainly exists.

01:46:58.000 And I've got a map of it in the book, in American Serengeti.

01:47:03.000 And they've reintroduced animals already?

01:47:04.000 They have reintroduced animals.

01:47:06.000 They're trying to come up with 12,000...

01:47:08.000 So they have an Instagram page.

01:47:10.000 Look at that.

01:47:11.000 Oh, yeah.

01:47:11.000 American Prairie Reserve has an Instagram page.

01:47:13.000 Absolutely.

01:47:13.000 Only 1,700 followers.

01:47:15.000 How dare they?

01:47:16.000 So click on that picture of the bison down there, below that.

01:47:19.000 Below that, Jamie.

01:47:20.000 Lower right-hand corner.

01:47:21.000 There you go.

01:47:22.000 Lower right-hand corner.

01:47:23.000 Yeah.

01:47:24.000 Yeah.

01:47:25.000 Look at that.

01:47:26.000 Wow.

01:47:27.000 Interesting.

01:47:28.000 So there's a lot of bison there roaming around and this is land that they occupy.

01:47:33.000 And so these bison have essentially very few predators and they're just wandering around and they're going to repopulate.

01:47:40.000 We're going to repopulate.

01:47:41.000 And so one of the things that American Prairie Reserve does when they acquire these ranches is that they remove the fencing from them.

01:47:51.000 I mean, they've been fenced, of course, to create pastures for cattle, but they remove the fencing in order to let bison roam freely.

01:47:59.000 And, of course, the idea is you ultimately have to have the predators back.

01:48:04.000 You're not going to have a complete ecosystem.

01:48:06.000 Right.

01:48:07.000 Unless you have the predators there as well.

01:48:09.000 That is really tricky, right?

01:48:11.000 Because you're not allowed to reintroduce grizzly bears.

01:48:14.000 They are not allowed to as a private organization.

01:48:17.000 No, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to do this, and the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't actually, even the public lands that are there are not managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

01:48:27.000 And good luck getting cooperation from people in Montana.

01:48:29.000 They're still stinging from the wolves being introduced into Yellowstone and the The decimation of the elk population and all the other livestock issues that they've had there.

01:48:38.000 Yeah, so they argue, at least.

01:48:41.000 The last few years I was in Montana, and this was about 10 years after the wolves had been recovered.

01:48:47.000 We had about 1,700 gray wolves in Montana, or in the northern Rockies, actually, by about 2012 or so.

01:48:57.000 So...

01:49:00.000 The hunters in Montana were up in arms, sort of the way these white-tailed hunters in South Carolina now are up in arms over coyotes.

01:49:09.000 The hunters in Montana were up in arms because it wasn't so easy to get an elk anymore, and they blamed it all on wolves.

01:49:16.000 And someone from the University of Montana did a study of a particular herd that had been singled out as one that was just being harassed by wolves, and it was impossible to kill a bull there anymore.

01:49:26.000 And concluded that actually most of the production that was taking place on that elk herd was from mountain lions and not the wolves that had been reintroduced.

01:49:35.000 But it's become for the hunting community, the sport hunting community, which has had, of course, a century now of getting to hunt elk.

01:49:45.000 Elk and whitetails and mule deer and everything else, without competition from predators, this has become kind of the new excuse, you know, of why I didn't get my elk this year.

01:49:57.000 Right, that makes sense.

01:49:58.000 And also, I think it's super important that the hunting community step back and understand that these animals are supposed to be preyed upon by wolves, and that without them, you're going to get to these enormous overpopulation situations.

01:50:10.000 Which we had happen in.

01:50:12.000 In that hundred-year period when we were reintroducing elk with no predators.

01:50:15.000 They developed diseases.

01:50:17.000 Montana has no shortage of elk.

01:50:19.000 I was there this summer, and we drove by this house, and we had to pull over, and luckily I had binoculars in my car, and I gave them to my kids.

01:50:26.000 And the first time they saw elk, there was a hundred elk on this lawn.

01:50:29.000 A hundred.

01:50:30.000 They were all over the place.

01:50:32.000 And one of the women who lives there was explaining to us that they had wolves come through just a couple nights before, and it was really exciting, and everybody's looking out the window.

01:50:42.000 If you're a person who's an elk hunter, especially if you're a lazy one, I get where you could see that that would be something you would complain about.

01:50:50.000 But I think the elk adapt.

01:50:52.000 You know, they figured it out.

01:50:53.000 They don't call as much, and people are complaining about that.

01:50:56.000 You don't hear the bugling as much.

01:50:58.000 But that bugling was probably a little unnatural.

01:51:01.000 They got a little too cocky that they could just scream and yell whenever they were breeding.

01:51:05.000 You know, they got preyed upon, right?

01:51:07.000 Right.

01:51:07.000 Well, you know, what we have to remember is that we are newcomers to North America.

01:51:13.000 This is a very old place.

01:51:17.000 And wolves and coyotes.

01:51:21.000 And mountain lions have been part of the ecological equation here with all of these animals that we like to hunt, with pronghorns, with elk, with mule deer.

01:51:31.000 I mean, they've been co-evolving with one another for hundreds of thousands of years.

01:51:37.000 I mean, pronghorns, I talk about this in the American Serengeti book.

01:51:42.000 Pronghorn females always have two fawns. 0.98

01:51:46.000 They basically have little litters of two.

01:51:50.000 And the reason they have two is because coyotes prey on pronghorn fawns.

01:51:55.000 And so you basically have an heir and a spare.

01:51:58.000 And the spare is the one that you assume the coyotes are going to get.

01:52:02.000 Wow.

01:52:03.000 And they evolved this ability hundreds of thousands of years ago.

01:52:07.000 So I think part of it is just coming to terms with the fact that We're brand new here, and it's going to take a while for us to actually truly become Americans in an ecological sense.

01:52:22.000 And one way to do it is to think in terms of these long patterns that extend back through time.

01:52:27.000 I want to talk to you about your paper on bison.

01:52:30.000 Is it called Bison Diplomacy and Bison Ecology?

01:52:33.000 Yeah.

01:52:33.000 Or is it the opposite?

01:52:35.000 Bison ecology and Bison diplomacy, yeah.

01:52:38.000 And what you were saying was, and this is what I found incredibly fascinating, was that when we came along, when the, I say we, obviously, my grandparents were immigrants, it wasn't me, but when Europeans, when, you know,

01:52:53.000 people that we consider Americans now came Along a few hundred years ago and then when they started doing the market hunting and killing off all the bison, what we had done was something that the Native Americans were already on their way to doing. 1.00

01:53:08.000 Well, I mean, so let me sort of offer a revision of that.

01:53:15.000 Native people and bison had coexisted, and that hunt had been going on for 8,000 or 9,000 years with the modern bison.

01:53:26.000 I mean, if you track it back to...

01:53:28.000 You know, the large Pleistocene bison, bison antiquus, and bison latifrons, the big longhorn bison.

01:53:35.000 Longhorn bison?

01:53:37.000 Oh, yeah.

01:53:37.000 What is that?

01:53:37.000 Jamie?

01:53:38.000 Yeah, it was bison latifrons, it's called.

01:53:42.000 Lanifrons?

01:53:43.000 Latifrons, yeah.

01:53:45.000 Wow.

01:53:45.000 And so it's a longhorn bison.

01:53:48.000 And then there was a slightly smaller one that existed farther into our own time.

01:53:55.000 The bison that we experience today, are these pure bison? 0.97

01:53:59.000 Well, some herds are.

01:54:00.000 Wow, look at that thing. 0.84

01:54:01.000 That's amazing.

01:54:03.000 Yeah.

01:54:03.000 So that's bison latifrond.

01:54:06.000 I'm sure you're aware of the scrub bulls, like particularly in Australia where these animals get free and they become feral and then domestic cows change their characteristics.

01:54:15.000 Look at the size of that thing.

01:54:18.000 Good Lord!

01:54:19.000 Yeah, so what that graphic shows is...

01:54:24.000 The contemporary, our bison, over on the right side of the graphic, and you can see how much smaller it is than the animals that were here during the Pleistocene.

01:54:36.000 Bison latifrons is the animal over on the far left, and bison antiquus is one of these in the middle.

01:54:44.000 It's probably the very middle one right there.

01:54:46.000 These animals were hunted by early human hunters here, too, because they arrived before the Pleistocene produced that extinction scenario.

01:54:55.000 So they hunted these large forms of bison.

01:55:00.000 But about 8,000 years ago, bison, the large ones having become extinct, bison sort of evolved into the smaller...

01:55:10.000 I mean, some people actually refer to the modern bison as a dwarf compared to these older ones.

01:55:16.000 And so what I argue, and I've got a chapter on this in American Serengeti, too, sort of my most recent take on this bison ecology, bison diplomacy piece, which came out in a very fancy journal, academic journal, about 25 years ago now.

01:55:33.000 But what I argue is that that hunt had been going on for 8,000 years.

01:55:41.000 And Probably the reason that bison never, that Indians never hunted them to extinction is because bison were actually better adapted to the grasslands than people were.

01:55:55.000 So they were more successful as a grassland species than humans were until we get the introduction from the European arrival of a couple of things that changed the equation.

01:56:10.000 One is The reintroduction of the horse to North America, which Native people in the West quickly take up, and gives them an ability to hunt bison far more efficiently and to become just as well adapted to life on the grasslands as the bison was.

01:56:29.000 But the other thing that changes the equation is the market, the introduction of the market economy.

01:56:34.000 And so what that article actually argued and what my chapter in American Serengeti argues, too, I haven't changed my mind over the last 25 years about this, is that The market became a force for Native people,

01:56:55.000 just as it did for people all around the world in Africa and India and everywhere else, that they found difficult to resist.

01:57:04.000 And one of the primary reasons they found it difficult to resist was because If you were hunting with flint arrowheads, your best arrowhead maker could maybe produce 15 of them through hard labor in a day.

01:57:20.000 But you could go out and kill a bison and have your wife tan its pelt and make a robe, a softly tanned robe out of it. 0.78

01:57:35.000 And you could trade that to a white trader.

01:57:39.000 From the Hudson's Bay Company or the American Fur Company, and they would give you 150 steel arrowheads that were far better than the Flint ones that took your best arrow maker a day to produce,

01:57:54.000 and you could get 150 of them for the work of 30 minutes going out and shooting a bison, and of course your wife had to spend a week working on the pelt.

01:58:08.000 Basically, the European market had so many labor-saving technologies, steel arrowheads, steel knives, steel hatchets, firearms,

01:58:26.000 that it became almost impossible for Indian people to resist trading for those things.

01:58:36.000 I mean, if you didn't trade for them and the tribe down the river did, then they suddenly had guns and you didn't.

01:58:43.000 And so you were going to be out-competed by your neighbors.

01:58:47.000 And so, in effect, what happened was that the lure of the goods of the industrial world and the market economy drew Indian people into the market hunt.

01:58:58.000 So that by the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, they were still killing buffalo in order to Provide meat for the family and to provide, you know, hides to make a teepee and all that.

01:59:11.000 But they were killing an additional percentage of animals to trade to the European market.

01:59:18.000 And so they became actors in the market economy that was basically wiping all these animals out.

01:59:26.000 So it also was the reintroduction of the horse as well, right?

01:59:30.000 Because before that, they were hunting these animals on foot and they were far less effective.

01:59:35.000 Yeah.

01:59:36.000 And their beast of burden was the dog.

01:59:40.000 And so you couldn't travel nearly as far, obviously, by using dog-propelled locomotion as you could horses.

01:59:49.000 And you couldn't carry the kind of burdens, the kind of goods that you could carry on dogs that you could with horses.

01:59:57.000 And so the transformation from being a dog-propelled people to being a horse-propelled people was a revolution in their lives.

02:00:07.000 I mean, one of the things that happened as a result of it was that there were people all around the borders of the plains, many of whom were agriculturalists who were farmers, Who ended up, especially their young men,

02:00:23.000 ended up abandoning farming Because they realized that the potential for rising in status and for creating a better life was much higher if you mounted up on a horse and rode out of the plains and hunted buffalo.

02:00:40.000 And so, I mean, there were entire groups, like the crows had been relatives of the Mandans and the Adatsas and had been agriculturalists, and that entire group of people I mean,

02:00:59.000 during the period from basically about 1720, when a lot of the people in the West began to acquire horses, and what spread horses, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, was basically in 1680. The Pueblo Indians down in New Mexico rose up against the Spanish colonists and drove them out of New Mexico.

02:01:24.000 And in the process, they captured all their herds of livestock.

02:01:29.000 They captured their goats, their sheep, and their horse herds.

02:01:33.000 And some animals, some of the horses, got loose.

02:01:36.000 And that's sort of the origin, at least one of the origins, of the wild horses that spread across the West.

02:01:42.000 But the Pueblo Indians trade the sheep and the goats to the people who become the Navajos, who become the herders of goats and sheep. 0.83

02:01:49.000 And they start trading the horses, which they have now in great surplus that they've liberated from the Spaniards, up the mountains from one tribe to another, to the Utes, to the Shoshones, to the Nez Perce, to the Blackfeet, to the Assiniboines.

02:02:05.000 And so from 1680 through about 1720 or 1730, just about everybody in the West ends up getting horses.

02:02:13.000 And you have to have the culture with it, too.

02:02:16.000 I mean, you can't just hand the animal over to somebody.

02:02:19.000 I mean, there's a famous story where the first horse that the Blackfeet see, they offer it buffalo meat to eat.

02:02:27.000 And somebody has to say, as a Kalispell Indian who's riding the horses, no, no, not buffalo meat.

02:02:33.000 It eats grass.

02:02:34.000 It grazes them.

02:02:35.000 They feed it grass.

02:02:37.000 And they have to be shown how to take care of horses and how to gale stallions and how to ride them and how to break them and the whole bit.

02:02:46.000 So there's a culture that goes with it.

02:02:49.000 But once they acquire them, and this period that only lasts for about 200 years of the famous horse-mounted buffalo hunting plains Indian emerges, that lifestyle becomes, which is kind of a backward step, really, in anthropological terms.

02:03:05.000 You assume that, you know, you go from hunting to being a farmer, and you go from farmer to being a city dweller.

02:03:11.000 This is a step going back the other way, but it proved to be so...

02:03:22.000 We're good to go.

02:03:36.000 Coming here and offering up the market and creating this environment where it was really profitable.

02:03:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:03:43.000 And it became kind of something that Native people almost couldn't escape. 1.00

02:03:48.000 You couldn't get away from it because, I mean, there were some groups that said, okay, we're not going to participate in this, you know.

02:03:54.000 But that immediately disadvantaged them compared to the group right down the river.

02:04:01.000 And so people who didn't participate were pretty quickly overrun by the people who became fully engaged in the horse hunt and the market hunt.

02:04:12.000 And, I mean, there are instances where, I mean, like the Siouxan people, you know, in the movies, the Lakotas, I mean, they basically march across the northern west like Pac-Man.

02:04:24.000 Once they acquire horses, they come out of Minnesota and out of the woodlands and march across the west, gobbling up one tribe after another and taking away their buffalo hunting territory.

02:04:34.000 I mean, and they're still doing it down to the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

02:04:38.000 That's why the crows fight on the side of the United States at the Battle of the Little Bighorn is because...

02:04:45.000 The Lakotas are seizing their countryside. 1.00

02:04:49.000 The Lakota is what they call themselves, and the other Native Americans call them the Sioux, which means enemy.

02:04:54.000 And the word that we've used in history is the Sioux.

02:04:58.000 But, I mean, on the Southern Plains, the Comanches did basically the same thing.

02:05:03.000 They created this empire.

02:05:05.000 That was really on a par and able to compete with the Spanish Empire, with the Republic of Texas, and even for a while against the United States.

02:05:15.000 And they created it around this horse-propelled bison hunt that provided goods for the market economy.

02:05:26.000 Now, you were talking about steel arrowheads.

02:05:30.000 Did they, or when did they, start using firearms?

02:05:35.000 Well, they started using firearms.

02:05:36.000 I mean, that was an early trade item, and it was usually in the very beginning of contact between Europeans and Native people.

02:05:45.000 A firearm was, you know, maybe a couple of them were given to the head men, to the leaders of a particular tribe, as a status item.

02:05:53.000 One time I was an editor for an anthropological journal called Ethnohistory.

02:06:01.000 And my task as an editor, I was an assistant editor or associate editor or something, but my task was to read the incoming manuscripts that were submitted for publication.

02:06:12.000 And one of the ones I read, I've never forgotten this, was an account by a trader in South America Who was turning his trading post over to a newly arriving trader.

02:06:29.000 I think they were Portuguese.

02:06:31.000 And so this trader who had experience in the area was queried by the new guy.

02:06:37.000 He said, so how do I get the Indians to trade with me?

02:06:41.000 And the guy who had been on the scene for a while said, nothing to it.

02:06:47.000 Ride out 15 or 20 miles into the wilderness and take a steel axe and suspend it from a rope from the branch of a tree and then leave.

02:07:02.000 And then two weeks, three weeks later, go back.

02:07:08.000 And this guy, this new trader, did exactly that.

02:07:11.000 And he went back two weeks later to this spot, this clearing in the forest, in the Amazonian forest, where he had tied this double-bladed steel axe.

02:07:20.000 And there were hundreds of Native people gathered around the spot wanting more.

02:07:28.000 Of these objects, more of these axes, because steel, I mean, there's a famous story when Captain Cook first puts off the coast, off the Waimea Coast of Kauai, and the Hawaiian people paddle their outriggers out and climb on board his ships and immediately start pulling all the nails out of the planking on the ship and diving off into the water with the nails because they want metal. 0.96

02:07:58.000 They realize this is such an advantage over the technology that they have.

02:08:05.000 And so, I mean, they're willing to trade what do you want for an axe?

02:08:11.000 Wow.

02:08:12.000 What do you want for a box of nails? 0.89

02:08:14.000 So they just let the people know that the axe was a thing, hang it from a tree, leave them for a while, let them play with it.

02:08:21.000 And go back.

02:08:23.000 Wow.

02:08:25.000 That's a mind-blower.

02:08:27.000 So that's how Native people kind of all over the world who hadn't progressed to the Iron Revolution, to the Iron Age, were seduced into the market economy, is that they were offered items that were so compelling.

02:08:46.000 And as I've said a couple of times now, if you didn't participate in it, you kind of, within a decade, you were disadvantaged because everybody around you was going to end up doing it.

02:08:59.000 And so you got caught up in it.

02:09:01.000 And so that's what I was arguing in bison ecology and bison diplomacy.

02:09:07.000 And the argument is slightly revised in American Serengeti, but it's the same argument.

02:09:13.000 And it's become the prevailing argument about what happened to bison in the 19th century.

02:09:19.000 We used to think that, okay, there were still 100 million of them by the end of the Civil War, and then guys go out with rifles in the space of 20 years, they shoot them all down, and that's the end for their tongues and for their hides.

02:09:31.000 But what the story actually is is a much more believable and real story that it has to do with The introduction of horses which drink water and graze grass, and so that reduces the carrying capacity for bison.

02:09:46.000 Once there are two or three million horses out on the plains, there can't be as many bison anymore.

02:09:52.000 It happens because there is a Climate downturn in the 1840s, for about 15 years there's a drought and that reduces the carrying capacity for bison, so climate plays a role.

02:10:05.000 We know that diseases like anthrax and ultimately brucellosis get among the buffalo herds, and those diseases probably got among the buffalo herds because oxen and other animals on the overland trails took these European exotic diseases out among the bison herds and infected them with disease.

02:10:26.000 And then there's no question that the way the market worked, it was...

02:10:32.000 And there's, of course, no regulation of it.

02:10:35.000 This is before we ever regulate, you know, we have any environmental regulations.

02:10:39.000 It's just a free-for-all capitalist world.

02:10:43.000 Also no refrigeration.

02:10:45.000 No refrigeration. 0.94

02:10:45.000 So you had to kill it and eat it within a certain time period. 0.94

02:10:49.000 Yeah.

02:10:49.000 You can dry the meat in that dry climate.

02:10:52.000 You can dry it and preserve some of it.

02:10:55.000 But, yeah, there's no refrigeration.

02:10:59.000 So, you know, I mean, the no refrigeration thing really plays a role in the famous buffalo jumps that happen in the West because, you know, you couldn't control how many animals were going to go off those jumps.

02:11:12.000 And so if you wanted to run 10 off in order to provide you with buffalo for the next month and a half, your tribe of 125 with buffalo.

02:11:21.000 When you say buffalo jumps, you mean running them off cliffs?

02:11:23.000 Running off cliffs, yeah.

02:11:24.000 And you wanted to run off 10, and instead you got into a herd of, you know...

02:11:30.000 1,300.

02:11:31.000 1,300, and they all went off.

02:11:34.000 And it even became this thing.

02:11:37.000 I mean, we know about these buffalo jumps that Indian people regarded this as a stratagem that you don't want to let surviving buffalo...

02:11:48.000 Go out onto the planes and inform other buffalo that there's this thing called a jump that you want to avoid. 0.93

02:11:56.000 And so they end up wanting to make sure that they get every single animal that you're driving so that you don't have buffalo go off and tell other buffalo how this works.

02:12:08.000 This is going to sound crazy, but it makes you wonder if it was ignorance on their part that these animals could communicate like that, or if they had some sort of an intuition about how instincts and how certain fears that animals had were developed.

02:12:26.000 Well, I think, you know, and I spent some time talking about this in the Buffalo chapter in American Serengeti.

02:12:36.000 It has to do with what we would call native science, what you mentioned at the last there, that they do understand and they've probably seen examples of an animal learning very quickly how to avoid a trap.

02:12:54.000 But it also has to do with the cause-effect explanation that they have for how the world works.

02:13:02.000 And they don't have this kind of, you know, Western explanation for this is a cause and this is an effect.

02:13:12.000 They have a cause-effect relationship, to be sure, but it explains the world in a different way.

02:13:18.000 And Indian people pretty generally believe that bison were a people.

02:13:27.000 That they were a family of animals, and they had families that were very similar to the families that Indian people had. 0.99

02:13:34.000 And they had a controlling master animal, sort of a buffalo master, who you had to appeal to to get the animals to give themselves up to humans for the good of humanity.

02:13:50.000 And so the idea...

02:14:05.000 Welcome to my show!

02:14:11.000 People and animals interacted with one another.

02:14:14.000 But it was informed a little bit by kind of native scientific observation, too.

02:14:19.000 And I think, in particular, this one where the argument was, and from what I've read, it was pretty widespread, that if you did a buffalo jump, you needed to kill all the animals that went off the jump.

02:14:32.000 You couldn't let any of them get away.

02:14:34.000 I think that probably was more in the line of kind of native science.

02:14:39.000 Because they maybe had observed there being instances where an animal that had gone off a jump and had survived, the next time you encountered that animal, it might be particularly marked with a white patch on a hip or something,

02:14:54.000 and a few months later you saw that particular animal in another group of bison, and when you try to do a jump, it led that herd off in a different direction.

02:15:03.000 And so I think there was kind of native science in that.

02:15:06.000 But, you know, where we got to in talking about this was no refrigeration.

02:15:11.000 So if you ran 1,300 of them off and it's August, then all you're going to get to do, and you've got a group of 125 people, all you're going to get to do is to basically take the best pieces off about 25 or 30 animals,

02:15:27.000 and you're going to lose the rest of it because you can't preserve the meat of all those animals.

02:15:33.000 So would they find these sites where they'd just be mass carcasses or mass bones?

02:15:37.000 Oh, yeah.

02:15:38.000 Yeah.

02:15:38.000 There's a site in Texas.

02:15:40.000 It's called the Bonfire Shelter Site.

02:15:43.000 And the reason it's called that, anthropologists gave it, or archaeologists gave it this name, is because there was a bison jump that was so big there, we think about 10,000 years ago during the Folsom period, And so many animals went off that jump,

02:15:59.000 and only a few of them could be harvested by the people who did the jump, that that big mass of animals sat there and basically, over two or three weeks of time, We're good to go.

02:16:36.000 Realized about it when they began investigating it was that it had been a huge mass of bison driven off a cliff that had burst in hot weather into spontaneous combustion and probably burned for four or five days.

02:16:48.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:16:49.000 How does that happen?

02:16:51.000 How do they burst into flames?

02:16:53.000 Well, I mean, in hot weather, with that much decay and fermentation of all the juices that are in intestines and stomachs, you basically create a condition where you've got flammable chemistry that lights.

02:17:09.000 But what causes the ignition?

02:17:12.000 You know, who knows?

02:17:13.000 I mean, I think the explanation I've read is spontaneous, but, you know, somebody may have walked over with a torch and...

02:17:21.000 Tossed it onto the pile of animals and burned them.

02:17:24.000 Wow.

02:17:26.000 Thousands of animals.

02:17:27.000 Yeah, thousands of them.

02:17:29.000 You know, it's interesting what you're talking about with explaining this idea that if one of them survived, that they would inform the other ones.

02:17:37.000 There was a study that was done recently on mice, and this is a direct genetic study, so it might not be Totally related, but it might be in some ways.

02:17:46.000 They took these mice and they sprayed a citrus smell in their cage, and then when they smelled the citrus smell, they shocked them.

02:17:56.000 They shocked their feet.

02:17:57.000 The bottom floor of the cage was electrically charged.

02:18:01.000 And every time they sprayed that citrus smell, they would give them a zap.

02:18:05.000 Then their ancestors, who had never experienced this before, they did the same thing to them, just sprayed the citrus smell, and they had a physical reaction, a heightened sense of danger, fear.

02:18:20.000 They realized that a shock was coming just by the smell of that citrus.

02:18:24.000 They were terrified of it.

02:18:25.000 It makes sense that instincts are passed on.

02:18:29.000 Well, you know, we've sort of concluded from studies that have been done primarily in Italy over studying families through the generations in Italy that Descendants of a particular group of people will preserve evidence in their genes,

02:18:54.000 sometimes four, five, six generations down a timeline, of an ancestor who went through a famine or a starving time.

02:19:05.000 And so that famine would produce a physiological effect on the body, and that would be passed down so that geneticists could discover effects of it several generations down the timeline.

02:19:21.000 So it's sort of similar to what you're describing with mice.

02:19:26.000 And I think that's probably...

02:19:29.000 You know, we haven't studied, at least I'm not aware, that there have been a lot of studies of this kind of thing.

02:19:34.000 But what it really kind of means is that we're the products, you know, in our modern world of things that happened to our ancestors maybe two or three hundred years ago.

02:19:47.000 And maybe even the fears, like they think that arachnophobia and aphidiophobia and a lot of the, you know, fears of snakes and bugs and things that people have might be directly attributed to ancestors being bitten or poisoned by those things or us seeing someone getting bitten or poisoned by them.

02:20:02.000 I mean, speaking of that sort of thing, you know, there's a section I do when I'm talking about the development of poisons to try to eradicate coyotes in the Coyote America book where The reason during World War II we decided,

02:20:18.000 or the government, what is now called Wildlife Services, this agency that was trying to solve the predator problem by exterminating coyotes, the reason they used our new chemical insights during World War II to come up with new poisons Yeah.

02:20:52.000 And coyotes are really smart about cause and effect, and so a coyote that was in the presence of an animal that ate a bait cube and then suddenly went into convulsions, and strychnine produced these really sort of bizarre and grotesque deaths.

02:21:12.000 That those animals would not take a strychnine bait after they saw that happen to one of their pack members.

02:21:21.000 And so in the 1940s, we came up with three new poisons.

02:21:28.000 One of them was called sodium, let's see...

02:21:36.000 Sodium fluoracetate, which is the one we now call 1080. And it was called 1080 and it was used for the next 19...

02:21:45.000 In fact, it's still used in limited application today.

02:21:48.000 But it was a poison that was developed after 1,080 tries by this laboratory that since 1920 had specialized in developing poisons to kill wolves and coyotes.

02:22:01.000 It's called the Eradication Methods Laboratory.

02:22:05.000 So, 1080. Another one, sodium thalmium, was a poison that killed coyotes so slowly that they would often survive for a week after they ate the poison.

02:22:23.000 And in that week, their pads would fall off, their hair would fall off, the Peelage would come off their bodies.

02:22:34.000 There's one story where a farmer in Colorado found during the winter of about 1947 or 1948, he found seven or eight coyotes in his barn with no pads on their feet,

02:22:51.000 no hair on their bodies, all huddled together trying to stay warm.

02:22:55.000 Jesus. 0.99

02:22:56.000 And he killed them with a pitchfork. 0.99

02:22:58.000 Oh my God.

02:23:00.000 But the reason we introduced these poisons, and there was a third one, too, which was a cyanide, basically the one that we call M44s now, that are little cartridges that fire cyanide mist into their mouths, is because these poisons killed them slowly enough that other coyotes witnessing the victim taking the bite of the poison bait didn't put two and two together.

02:23:31.000 Yeah.

02:23:31.000 I mean, so we even had these kind of insights about how animals will observe something and preserve a memory of what they've seen and then try to actually come up with a poison that plays against that.

02:23:47.000 Absolutely fascinating.

02:23:50.000 The whole subject.

02:23:51.000 Absolutely fascinating.

02:23:52.000 Listen, man, I'm so glad we got together.

02:23:54.000 I want to get you together with Randall Carlson, though.

02:23:56.000 Would you be interested in coming back and doing another podcast?

02:23:58.000 Sure, man.

02:23:58.000 I'd love to do that.

02:23:59.000 I would love to have you get together with him and compare notes, because he has some really interesting observations about these asteroidal impacts, and I think...

02:24:07.000 The two of you together would have a fascinating conversation.

02:24:10.000 So let's do that down the line.

02:24:11.000 But until then, your book, Coyote America, is fantastic.

02:24:15.000 I loved it.

02:24:16.000 Thank you very much for that.

02:24:18.000 And I haven't started reading it yet, but American Serengeti is your other book.

02:24:21.000 I'm sure it's equally awesome.

02:24:23.000 And I really enjoy this.

02:24:24.000 Thank you so much.

02:24:25.000 Really appreciate it.

02:24:25.000 Thanks for having me, man.

02:24:26.000 It's been great.

02:24:27.000 All right, folks.

02:24:28.000 See you next week.

02:24:28.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 05, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #942 - Dan Flores

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