Dan Flores

00:03three two boom we're live how are you sir I'm very good Joe it's good to meet you man great to meet you and thank you very much for doing this I've learned more about coyotes over the last couple of months reading your book and listening to your podcast with uh my good friend Steve renell which was amazing wo what a crazy animal that is you know I have coyotes all around my neighborhood and uh it became a very uh um is very close to me when I saw one of my chickens get captured by a coyote and I I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth like God damn these they're just all around us especially I I live in a fairly rural area around here um about uh 40 minutes outside of La so it's you know the nights are quiet and you hear him screaming in the night and I didn't know much about them until I started reading your book man yeah they're an amazing animal I mean I think

00:58uh there's not really another mammal aside from us that has a biography like these animals do and that's kind of one of the reasons I got fascinated uh with them U they were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana I mean and that's sort of the beginning of my uh my getting captivated by these little small wolves because they were suddenly showing up in the bayu and swamps of Louisiana when I was 12 13 14 years old and as far as I knew this was an animal that was supposed to be in the deserts of the West and so that seemed to be something that you know commanded uh one's attention that this Critter is is appearing in places where you would never expect it uh and now of course everybody in the country is dealing with them that is so fascinating that in our lifetime they have spread from the American southwest to every single state in literally every

02:00single city in the country yeah that's true and I just got a uh somebody sent me this uh yesterday that somewhere in Georgia they have some sort of a bounty on these wolves uh you know coyotes that's one thing a lot of people don't realize that a coyote is a wolf yeah it's a it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves but it's out of the North American wolf line uh I mean coyotes are distinctively North American animals they come out of canid evolution that began here 5.3 million years ago so um yeah they're they're small wolves and did I send you this Jamie no you found it oh beautiful this is the Georgia coyote challenge apparently they're offering some sort of bounty for each coyote killed 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

02:57making roll call and when one of them doesn't respond the female generates more pups yeah it's uh it's one of the you know one of the many things that's probably happening when they're when they're howling I mean they are taking a census basically of of coyote populations in the area and the result of of that census uh can very well be it produces some sort of uh chemical or metabolic change in in the field Fales the breeding females the alpha ones and they end up often times having larger litters of pups which is why something like this you know I was just in South Carolina two weeks ago and there was a lot of conversation about this this Georgia Bounty because in South Carolina it's another place where coyotes are are fairly new they've only been there in the last 20 or 25 years they were arguing that you know and they had some pretty good science that coyotes are

03:58taking you know in some areas as many as 60% of the wh tailed deer fawns and so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to to take a white tail um 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 uh to take them in any way they can but mostly shoot them uh 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 uh we spent the years from about 1915 through about 1972 in an allout War attempting to exterminate them and the only result of that uh as a result of their particular kinds of adaptations and their evolution in North

05:06America uh is that we spread them across the entire country we not only spread them across the entire country I mean they're in every state they colonized their 49th state Delaware in 2010 so the only state they're not in is Hawaii just because they haven't stowed away and made it across the Pacific yet and uh you know I mean if they do you can imagine those endangered Naes on the Big Island are totally done for 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 so the attempts to exterminate them I mean and I can explain how this why this happens has to do with their evolution and the particular adaptation they have but the attempts to exterminate them or even to try to control their numbers

06:05almost always produces exactly the opposite effect 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 isn't that fascinating yeah it is it's so contrary to logic or what you would think would be the solution for something like that I mean and when you go back to the American West um before the reintroduction of wolves in into Yellowstone in the 1990s we had es essentially extrap them from a a vast majority of the United States there's very very few left right that's true and the well if you could please explain the relationship that the Grey Wolves had to the coyotes which is one of the reasons that the coyotes became so adaptable it's true I mean they didn't coyotes didn't become so smart you know and in the southwest the Hispanics say the only thing that's smarter than a coyote is God but they didn't become

07:02that smart and that Adept at surviving anything almost that happens to them uh because of us 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 to adapt and survive they they evolved those abilities because they were the small dog in a big dog's world and I mean greywolves have this very interesting story too grey 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 and they didn't come back uh Grey Wolves didn't start coming back to North America till about 25 or 30,000 years ago during sort of the height of the late pis and when they did coyotes of course had been here and had evolved into their

08:05present species about 800,000 to a million years ago and when Grey Wolves returned I mean they basically just started kicking the crap out of coyotes and so coyotes evolv their ability to survive being harassed and persecuted as a result of of being basically harassed by greywolves so this is why when you hear about the koi wolf that you hear on the East Coast this is a a coyote that bred with the red wolf and and other Eastern wolves that's right that's correct yeah 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 coywolf has its origins in the evolution of mammals in North America a million years or more because the reason I mean if you think about this the reason coyotes red wolves and other Eastern wolves like the Algonquin wolf uh in Eastern Canada and

09:14and Northern New England the reason those animals can all hybridize and readily do I mean they there are no behavioral barriers at all to them breeding with one another and so whenever a coyote shows up um and it's in the cinity of uh an Algonquin wolf say a female that comes into heat I mean she'll readily pick a coyote as a mate 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 grey wolf never left North America and they probably didn't separate from one another until 300,000 to a half million years ago so that separation is recent enough that whenever they encounter one enough one another today they very readily hybridize I mean it's sort of the result of coyotes spreading across the South has essentially kind of killed our hope that we were going to save the

10:17endangered Red Wolf as an independent species because Red Wolves so quickly and easily hybridized with coyotes that coyote jeans swamp pure Red Wolf jees 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 and meanwhile grey wolves and coyotes in the west aren't hybridizing at all and so that's the explanation is that greywolves left and didn't come back until know why they left well they they just they happen to be in evolutionary terms one of the groups and Jackal did the same thing they ended up leaving North America and in their absence while they were in another part of the world they evolved into the present subspecies we've got four subspecies of grey wolves in North America all of which seem to have come back to North America by the way at

11:16different times so they had sort of separate migrations back to North America so the Mexican grey wolf uh the the Western grey wolf the Arctic Wolf these are all grey wolf species but they're separated at the subspecific level and they all seem to have come back to North America at different times but they they had left North America like about three and a half million years ago and so they became different animals in Asia and Europe 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 I mean when we reintroduced gry wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 coyotes had had 75 years in Yellowstone without any wolves I mean and 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

12:19when people aren't harassing them which of course we didn't in Yellowstone Park and when wolves aren't harassing them either and what we realize is that they create these really St territories they create very stable packs and their population Rises to a particular point the carrying capacity of the landscape based on what they eat which is mostly rodents and rabbits and things and and some fruit and and berries but it doesn't they don't their population sort of levels off and stays at a carrying capacity and so we got to watch that happen in Yellowstone for like 75 years and it's become sort of the the example of what would happen if we just left them alone I mean some people think well if we don't try to control them hell they're going to you know they're just going to be Millions upon millions of them running everywhere but that's actually they only do that

13:17when you try to persecute them and they go into this colonization mode and generate more and more and more pups and have more and more pups survive so Yellowstone in that period from 1925 to 199 95 was this sort of model of what happens when you just leave them the hell alone and they just kind of rise to a particular population level and are really stable at that level and uh and don't really go beyond it and they don't expand their territory that way either no they don't seem to I mean one of the things that you know has happened obviously in the last U 100 years or so 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 they have larger litters of pups when their populations are suppressed it's easier for them to get the pups that they do have to adulthood I mean in Yellowstone for

14:18example one of the things we saw in that period when they weren't being harassed in the 60s 7s 80s is that they would have a litter of five or six pups and they could only get a couple of them to adulthood but whenever you try to control their populations and momentarily suppress their populations I mean the result is that there's more more food for coyotes out there for the coyotes that that have survived and that makes it possible for them to have a litter of seven or eight pups and get six to seven of them to adulthood and then they have this this marvelous ability I mean I talk about it a good bit in the book it's called U fish INF Fusion 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

15:17course but whenever they're pressured they tend to split apart into singles and Pairs and they scatter across the landscape and that's what sends them colonizing across the continent the fact that they can do that is what separates them really from wolves right and that's why they weren't able to wipe them out in the west yeah that's exactly it I mean if you think about what happened with greywolves I mean we started uh this sort of you know decided effort to eliminate greywolves from the American West in roughly I mean we started just ordinary people started putting out strict n bait farther in the 1860s and 1870s but was it ranchers at first that started that was it because of livestock yeah it was ranchers and just Travelers on the Oregon Trail and on the Immigrant Trails I mean people sort of regarded because they came out of Europe with a background with Wolves I mean

16:16that's that's one of the things that distinguishes us Americans and coyotes is that we didn't have coyotes in Europe so we didn't arrive with this preloaded preconception about the role that coyotes played in the world but we did with animals like bears and wolves and so people just from the very beginning whenever uh the Atlantic Seaboard was settled uh there were wolf drives and wolf roundups and every kind of attempt to to wipe out wolves as competitors with us for our stock so in the west people just threw strick n bait out I mean strick n was was invented in Pennsylvania in 1848 and it was widely available uh in places like Missouri when you set out across the west and people would just buy a bunch of baits I mean they would if they hung around long enough to get the animal they would skin it and try to sell the Pelt but they just poison them like crazy then in

17:18starting 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 and I mean they managed to take out the the last probably quarter million wolves in the West in the space of a little more than a decade and they do it as you just mentioned primarily because wolves are such pack animals so pack oriented that if you could kill or trap one member of a pack you could use the scent from that animal and end up catching every single animal in the pack but coyotes responded to that kind of pressure in a very different way I mean when you started pressuring them they tended their packs tended to break up they tended to scatter and go into this fishing mode 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 19 19

18:2820s we pretty much had resolved the wolf issue in the west but year after year after year as wolf numbers declin I mean I I'll offer an example in Montana for instance 1899 the state of Montana bountied 23,000 wolves that was 1899 21 years later by 1920 they only paid bounties on 17 Grey Wolves because they had basically wiped them out and then the government agency the biological survey came in and cleaned up all the rest of them but every year from 1899 through 1921 and right on into the 1930s in Montana they were bounding 30,000 coyotes in 1899 in 1910 30,000 coyotes in 1918 33,000 coyotes I mean the number of coyotes never dropped while wolf populations just plummeted that is so fascinating what a crazy little animal that is it is man it's a it's so you know wonderfully counterintuitive in the whole kind of environmental story of America because what you always expect is that anytime

19:40we put our mind to taking on some creature and and taking it out I mean we can do it 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 and that in a lot of places that seems to be where we we land when people realize that you can't do anything about coyotes it kind of drives people out of their minds because this is just not the American way we can always deal with an animal yeah it is uh it's got to be very frustrating to people in a lot of ways but it's it's kind of amazing I mean it's really kind of magical in a lot of ways that that they're so they're so adaptable and that all came you're saying because of their relationship with the grey wolf now how do we know that the gry wolf left well we know that there are still wolves in America uh there's no question

20:44about that and so I mean that is a a tricky question I mean there is uh you know so I would hasten to say first of all I'm not a geneticist I'm not even a biologist I'm basically an environmental writer and and U somebody who uses history a lot um and there is unresolved science out there and by what I mean uh what I uh mean by that is that there are a couple of different camps uh that have advanced positions about the relationship between all these different wolves that we have in North America and coyotes so there is a guy at UCL La um here in Los Angeles uh his name is Robert Wayne Uh and he has done uh genetic work on canids um one of his papers is called the uh the title includes the phrase enigmatic wolflike canids and he's done genetic analysis on coyotes red wolves greay wolves and Eastern wolves and his argument is that gry wolves red wolves and Eastern wolves are all

22:08actually some version of greywolves so that's a different argument than the one that I made for you just a few minutes ago I've been following and I followed in my book because I found it a more compelling argument one Advanced by a group of uh geneticists from Canada led by a guy named Paul Wilson and that's the that's the position that the US fish and wildlife service and its endangered species division takes and their argument is that the grey wolf is a separate animal from the red wolf the Eastern wolf and the coyote they they argue that coyotes red wolves and Eastern wolves all come out of a clay it's the biological term CA c l a d a CLA of animals that are purely North American in origin and that had uh a probably a similar ancestor as recently as maybe 300,000 years to 500,000 years ago so we've got two different arguments about the relationship of coyotes to to

23:18wolves and I don't know who's going to win it but one of the reasons I tend to sort of favor the the Paul Wilson line of argument and the one that the US fish and wildlife service is using is because they use some they use evidence Beyond just genetics they also use morphology and they use fossils uh and uh Robert Wayne and the the group of uh geneticist 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 um so I don't know how it's going to play out between these these two groups but I find the argument the Canadian geneticist that uh has informed the US fishing wildlife services strategy a little bit more compelling right now but I mean it's something to pay attention to we'll see how it goes well it seems like you you need some sort of a a really comprehensive way of

24:18looking at it because you're dealing with so many different factors right if you're trying to acquire evidence based on 25,000 years ago it seems like there's got to be a lot of I like what it just it's very odd to me that we know as much as we do know I mean and to try to figure it all out is got to be incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with so little evidence and you're looking at the fossil record I mean a lot of the animals that that died 25,000 years ago there's zero evidence of them right yeah that that's right I mean uh 25,000 years ago for example in the the late plasa scene uh the evidence from laa tarpit indicates that kyot IES were a slightly different animal than they are now they were uh at the time we think Grey Wolves were coming back into North America returning to their evolutionary Homeland coyotes were much bigger more strapping had larger dentici

25:14stronger jaws and what looks like happened is when greywolves arrived in the west and began competing with these larger more strapping coyotes coyotes sort of sought a different path they they sort of stepped back away from outright competition with an even bigger canid and evolved into a smaller more grass ale animal that was not so much just a pure predator and scavenger but more omnivorous and so became our modern canis latrans species but yeah it's a and I was will say you know as you mentioned a minute ago I mean it's hard to know all this much of this information is fairly recent I mean we just got a kind of a reappraisal of the taxonomy of the North American Wolves essentially in the last seven or eight or 10 years are other wolves omnivorous or is it just coyotes well wolves can be omnivorous but they're they're pretty much really uh carnivorous pack

26:24Predators I find coyote crap in my yard all the time and it's got berries in it oh yeah yeah like they eat a lot of like these little red berries that grow out here yeah they they eat junipers I mean the same thing as happening at on my place in New Mexico starting essentially about in August or September all the coyote droppings that I've found on the place I mean and I've got a lot of coyotes on my place in New Mexico uh has just been filled with juniper berries that's what they've been eating I mean they they still are you know running down rabbits and eating rats and mice and things but I mean when they move into cities they tend to eat I mean and they have access to fruit trees they tend to eat a lot of fruit so they'll I mean you know people have posted photos on the internet uh or YouTube videos that show them plucking apples and peaches and things off trees

27:17in their backyards I mean they really go for that sort of stuff so bizarre just such a strange animal and so do we know if wolves do anything like that or is it just a coyote characteristic it's pretty much a coyote characteristic I mean you know as as we've been saying the coyote in an evolutionary sense um is a a a small wolf um but it is different especially from greywolves and one of the ways it's different uh that the biologist the behavioralists who have watched coyotes interact with one another and watch greywolves interact with one another is an indication of how much more pack oriented hence sort of predatory carnivorous wolves are wolves because they exist mostly As despite our you know our cultural motif of the Lone Wolf actually wolves are such pack animals that they have uh a much wider range of Expressions that they convey to one another in their interactions with one

28:27another another and they uh they basically will 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 uh and they'll drop their heads and drop their ears 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 it's not living exclusively in a social group 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 so how do we know that that all these animals all these canids evolved in North America and then spread out and went to Asia and Africa and all the different places yeah well that's out of the fossil record um and I mean there's

29:33a there's a good science in the fossil record of canid evolution as I said a bit ago it seems to go back to about 5.3 million years ago and all the canids all around the world seem to have come out of this this singular origin much the way all the primates of the world came out of An Origin in Africa and so you know and the horses for instance same thing horses came out of an evolutionary origin in North America and then spread across the land bridges to become zebras in Africa uh for instance and so that's how it happened and uh some of these these animals like Jackal for example the golden Jackal seem to have separated from the small canid the coyote the line that led to coyotes about a million years ago and it crossed the land bridge into Africa uh southern Europe uh parts of Asia uh and became an animal that never returned to North America and because of

30:42its separation from coyotes by a million years it became a a different creature so crazy that they all did that on foot yeah they did it on fo someh or another they the animal came from North America and made it all the way to Africa and I want to bring something up that you talked about just now the horses evolved in North America and became zebras yeah I mean all that started here but then they weren't here anymore yeah and then they were reintroduced to the Native Americans by the Europeans that's right now what happened to the horses that were here well that's one of the great mysteries of uh North American evolution actually I mean Frank answer is we don't really know what happened to them and so this is um you know maybe uh somebody out there listening Joe uh you know in the next 10 or 15 years will Sol it will solve this problem because here we have

31:41uh a group of animals whose evolutionary in the case of the horse their evolutionary origins go back 56 million years in North America so 10 times uh greater depth in time than than the canids do and so they're here in all sorts of forms everyone has heard you know of the three-toed horse uh U eohippus is what it's called now that gradually becomes bigger and uh its Hooves fused together and they become hardened because it's running over Rocky ground and so it has to have hard Hooves and because it begins to it starts as a browsing animal in forest and ultimately becomes a grassland animal and it's eating grasses that are often coated with wind blown sand so it has to evolve very strong and hard and Nel on its teeth in order to resist having its teeth being eroded down by sand it becomes ultimately by 15 20,000 years ago an animal that we would not be able to

32:50tell uh would be any different from a modern horse it would look exactly like a modern horse same size 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 but these animals had had traveled across the land bridges uh the bearing land bridge when it was open had ended up in Asia and Africa and Europe where they survived but for some bizarre reason sometime between about 10,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago in North America they disappeared they completely went extinct in North America and so when we Europeans return them to North America 500 years ago one of the reasons they become such a success and just spread across the western part of the continent and

33:51multiply into the millions is because they're already pre-adapted to the landscape this is where they evolved and so they've already got the hoofs they've got the teeth they've got the running ability they got the ability to Buck off predators and they get back here in North America and within the space of about after they get loose from the peblo Revolt in 1680 within the space of about 50 to 60 or 70 years they're all the way up into Canada uh and there are within a 100 years probably as many as two million of them spreading across the West reinhabiting their old ecological niche they just fit like a glove fit like a glove man and um 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 of as a third of the biomass of all the grazing

34:59animals and in the 1700s and 1800s they were doing the same thing again they were multiplying into the hundreds of thousands the millions gradually spreading New Mexico is where the domestic European horse first got loose and began to spread and they had reached all the way up into Montana to Wyoming into into the edges of Canada by 1850 18 60 or so and had probably were at least 2 to 3 million of them at that point so they were just reinhabiting 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 and horses today are a very controversial animal wild horses are and you know people trying to think of them as an invasive species but essentially they're just a reintroduced species and and because of that there's a lot of controversy on how they should be dealt

36:01with like some people want to deal with them like almost like they deal with wild pigs yeah right uh yeah and so you know there are plenty of people out there who who argue that the domestic horse the feral horse in the west which is the root stock of most of our population of wild horses in the west um you know is a essentially it's a European animal that has become an in an invader um I mean I always and I've had you know arguments on stage with people who who uh Express this position I always say well what you have to say about the horse first of all is that uh it's a it's an American animal with an asterisk it's gone for about 8 or 9 thousand years uh that's actually not a huge amount of time in evolutionary terms and even though we did domesticate them and began to produce some breeds horses left of their own devices pretty quickly breed back to the wild look and

37:08the wild State I mean they'll acquire those dorsal stripes down their backs and zebra striping on their legs and so zebra striping oh really oh absolutely now is that there's a lot of controvers as to what the zebra striping is for right is it to to distract Predators is that the idea behind it it may have been that you know I'm I'm not quite sure I can say whether the zebra striping evolved for a spec a specific reason although you know most changes in animals do but yeah they 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 Jamie see if you can find some pictures of like wild horses with zebra stripes I don't think I've ever seen that before that's fasc yeah look in the uh prior mountains Wild Horse range in Montana and you'll see a whole population of animals that come

38:05out of that that background 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 uh and a guy named uh prior who was responsible for the herd was driving them through the today's prior Mountains and the Crow Indians raided his camp and chased off a bunch of those horses and they're now in those mountains and they represent this early sort of uh dorsal back stripe zebra leg look that probably came right from the Spanish horses of New Mexico wow uh up into the the Northern West so the whatever the mass extinction event that took place somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago that claimed The Woolly Mammoth saber-tooth tiger all these different animals the horse was amongst that as well is that the horse was one of the ones that disappeared yeah and uh

39:07you know so I mean we've got some pretty good explanations for what happened to the mammoths you know the mammoths probably uh were taken out by human Hunters because this this was a version of the American West that that basically had emerged in the absence of people you know and we're just like every other mammal you mentioned a minute ago you're amazed at the fact that the Wolves were able to spread around the world and the horses were able to spread around the world well we did the same thing we started in Africa and we spread around the world getting to Europe about 45,000 years ago and 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 and so when we arrived we conf fronted a landscape that was full of animals like mammoths that had no experience with

40:05human Hunters at all and what we think is that these early arrivals from Siberia uh were probably really accomplished big game hunters and I mean like all elephants mammoths had really long gestation periods it took them once they were impregnated took them two years to have a calf wow and so they have a really they're pregnant for two years years yeah they're pregnant for two years and so they have a really low population recovery ability uh biologists call this Cas species that have a kind of a low reproductive rate 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 and so these Hunters seem to have concentrated on cows I mean that's of course obviously going to be detrimental to the the demographics of the population and so probably in the

41:06case of Mammoth it was human hunting of an animal that had you know no prior experience with human hunters and and not very many defenses against us that took them out the other animals though a lot of them I mean some of the Predators we think they went because their prey species disappeared but I mean the amazing thing with the horses is just hard to Fathom because we haven't found very many sits there was one recently discovered near Boulder Colorado of what appeared to be an early Indian kill of horses but you know if you tried to argue that the same thing happened with horses that happen with the mammoths you'd think you'd be finding kill sites all over the place and just haven't really found them have you ever looked into is this one of the animals so it's got the front paws got a little bit of Zer strikes or front legs rather but you you're were saying it's the back legs

41:59well it's both see oh look at that wow that's fascinating yeah they have the zebra stripes on the legs and oh wow that is wild and they have uh this black stripe down the back the dorsal stripe it's called so yeah well I read something about zebras that they're um that it makes 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 yeah and they had singled that zebra out it was very obvious to the Predators that that was an individual and they went right after it yeah yeah well it could be something like that I mean it's it's pretty clear 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 with lions and and

43:04cheetah and leopards and things like that and they had a lion in North America one point time that was even bigger than the African Lion that's right panthera the step Lon was a lion that was one and a half times the size of of the African Lion and we had a you know a short-faced bear that was probably even more ferocious than modern day grizzly for one thing it seems to have been a this really grass ale animal it looked far more Nimble and fast uh and its ability to run and so forth and Grizzlies do yeah we've talked about that thing many times since I heard you talk about it we pulled up pictures of it and the size of the things and the length of the legs it looked like it could run it's a huge animal it's a huge animal was bigger than a polar bear sorry there's a there's a a Canadian biologist named valerious G who has argued for a long time that he thinks

43:59until short-faced bearss became extinct humans were not able to actually colonize North America that those things were so fearsome that they basically kept Siberian Hunters at bay on the other side of the bearing land bridge and finally when they began to disappear then people began trekking across and getting into North America wow well they look like a monster I mean it it doesn't even look like a real animal it looks like something in a movie and there you see the short-faced bear and what is that Nar the de how do you say that Deon Deon yeah Deon that's uh what do they call that the hell Pig yeah that's a an animal even bigger than the short-faced bear so all these animals that existed in North America when did the short-faced bear go extinct look at the size of that thing Jesus that's terrifying yeah I think probably about uh about 14,000 15,000 years ago and you

44:55know 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 is gone then it makes it possible for people to come into North America is there a hypothesis as to why that one extinct is that human intervention as well no you know I think what's happening uh you know there's a bunch of pretty wild swings in climate uh as a result of the the steady progression of ice ages and then what are called the the inter pluvials in between the ice ages and the reason we think we have sort of a a steady record of ice ages and then a warming period in between and then a return to ice ages and then warming and that goes back in the record for a very long time is that the Earth actually doesn't spin uh in a in a true perfect spin on its axis it has a wobble in it and sometimes when it wobbles this is called

46:02uh procession of the equinoxes well it's called the uh the milankovich Cycles a a European uh uh I can't remember if he was a geographer or probably a geographer was the first to speculate that this is why we have this climate history of A procession between iages and plal 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 40,000 years and during that wobble and and that position you get uh an ice age and then the wobble will take it back so that the Northern Hemisphere begins to point more directly at the Sun and in between you get what are called plal uh sometimes quite warm episodes I mean we had one about 5,000 years ago that was six or seven or 8 degrees warmer than today I would love to get you together with a guy named Randall Carlson who's an expert in asteral uh

47:05asteroidal impacts and he's got some pretty compelling evidence and some fascinating theories about the end of the Ice Age and that the end of the Ice Age corresponds to a lot of nuclear glass sites in Asia and Europe that the nuclear glass is essentially the same stuff they find when they do nuclear test sites that also happens when they have meteor impacts and it's all throughout Asia and Europe and he believes there was a significant impact in North America not once but twice and it directly uh corresponds to our uh Planet passing through uh like essentially a comet storm really fascinating stuff but heard this actually I would love to get you together with him because he's got some compelling evidence that he believes that the willly mammoths and the what was it 60 something per of the large mammals that died off during that very distinct time period he says that

47:59directly corresponds to physical evidence of this Triton night stuff um and all these uh diamonds that they find Micro diamonds that come from these impacts very fascinating it's is it a a possibility that you've ever considered no 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 and so yeah this is a possibility I mean what I was sort of leading to by tracking that malanovic cycle uh procession through time is that that sort of change tends to produce among animal species a lot and plants too really a lot of speciation in other words it 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 and so you get

48:57a lot it's a kind of a cycle where you end up with a lot of different new animals but when change comes you often lose a good many of them and so uh these Extinction scenarios that are associated with the ice ages and the plal in between the interglacials uh do tend to produce quite a a number of extinctions 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 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 and that's at a time when the Wisconsin Ice Age is beginning to wind down um 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 as the primary explanation for the plast toine extinctions most people sort of concede that okay in the case of the mammoths

50:04our evidence tends to point more towards human hunting but we don't know about all these other animals you know why I mean the Predators as I said they seem to disappear because the prey disappears but I mean why do the camels disappear why do the the you know these giant ground sloths disappear when the things that they ate the globe mows that are still in the west are still out there but the animal that fed on them isn't there anymore so 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 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 yeah it is I mean this whole country that we we live in today for as far as Europeans are concerned we've only been here a few

51:05hundred years which is really kind of amazing we've only been here for a few hundred years you know and uh I mean as you know from from the uh the other uh recent book of mine American serengetti U one of the animals that you can observe today that gives us maybe our best sense of what the Pline is like is the pronghorn antelope which is still out on the Plains and of course across a lot of the West I mean actually they nearly disappeared at the turn of the 20th century we've managed to bring them back in a lot of Western States but that's an animal that is essentially a hold over from the ply toine and is kind of still fighting Pline ghosts 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 grey wolf only runs 45 miles an hour and so that leads to the obvious question why the overkill

52:10in terms of speed what you would think is all you need to do is run 47 mil an hour and you got it covered but here are these animals still Among Us that run 65 mil an hour that can't jump over fences that still congregate in what uh 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 they're any Predators they get the ones on the edges and the dominant ones survive and yet they don't have any Predators except as fawns 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 to deal with the predators of the pine when there actually was a cheetah and a running hyena that could run almost 65 mil an hour and there were predators that went after their herds when they were adults and all those animals have

53:26disappeared they're all ghosts and have been for 10,000 years 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 I had no idea they could run that fast they could run 65 miles an hour well I think some of the the females uh which are a little bit lighter than the males are some of them may be able to run 70 insane imagine going on the highway you you're you're violating the speed limit and a prong horn passes you that's right that's incredible I did not know that there was hyenas that lived in North America as well that could run that fast yeah we had a fast uh a running hyena that uh was a major predator of of creatures like this you know I mean if you think about it what you know this is why I use the term American serengetti for the title of

54:24this book what we had in North America were these you know yeah on the yeah look at looking at a video of them right now and they're just this someone's driving in the car and they are just flying by yeah Maryweather Lewis you know famously said their their running motion more resembles the flight of birds than it does any mammal yeah I've seen them I saw them in Montana and boy did they book it's kind of crazy to watch in real life you see them take off when they get spooked and you're like whoa there are ver of you know Impalas and gazel in in Africa and so what other there was this cheetah now is it does it resemble the African cheetah was it did it look like an African cheetah it it did resemble it uh as a result of kind of convergent evolution I mean it it was an animal that pursued these pronghorns that could run 70 mes an hour so it had to be able to run that fast did it develop

55:23independently of the African cheetah it did indeed and in fact it developed from The Cougar the mountain lion line so it doesn't come out of you know I mean the the cheetah is a cat that famously many people say it it's a doglike cat uh and it's its own independent entity uh in Africa and so our version of it came out of the same line that produced mountain lions except mountain lions 15,000 20,000 years ago produced this very fast running version that was in fact an American cheetah wow and did it have the same sort of front paws as a cheetah cuz cheetah they're more almost doglike no this this this North American animal didn't have doglike pads like the African cheetah does uh at least I'm not you know there may be some cheetah or or North American cheetah expert out there who would who would contest that but I don't think so I've not seen any evidence anywhere in anything I've read

56:32that it did so it essentially just developed this ability to run very fast to catch pronghorns to catch pronghorns and catch you know and there were there were other animals that could run I mean horses run pretty fast too yeah uh and cats I mean the reason hes Buck of course which we've you know translated in our own time into Rodeo sports but the reason they Buck is because that's their strategy for dislodging a cat attack they were always a prey of cats and so you know and so I mean when we were talking about horses a minute ago I mean one of the points I was going to make and I can make this point too is that one of the reason horses reasons horses are an issue now and a problem in the west is a they're not on the great PLS anymore which was the primary horse r during the 1700s and 1800s they're in the deserts of places like Nevada uh so they're in a much more Aid

57:37country not in a lushly grass plain setting but in a in a desert setting and we don't have their predators around anymore I mean we've taken out Grey Wolves which certainly did pray on Colts we've almost wiped out mountain lions their mountain lions are coming back and that's was always one of the major predators of of Cults but horses don't have the sort of predators anymore that they had during the pine or even in the the 1700s and 1800s 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 you know they've become an issue in terms of uh how they compete compete with cattle how they compete with sheep how they compete with mule deer and Wildlife and that's why we were sort of you know endlessly rattling the cage around wild horses now but in the 19th century in the 1800s I mean where they

58:42were were out on the Great Plains they were in eastern Montana and Eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico and this much more lushly grassed setting and there of course still were wolves and still were mountain lions to take out the Cults and sort of keep their population suppress them it seems you know I mean I'm incredulous that human beings that didn't even have bows and arrows could kill off the Willie Mammoth but then you stop and think about what people are able to do in the few hundred years that we've been here when we arrived in North America when Europeans arrived in North America and just essentially swept through the country and almost extrap everything we found like white tailed deer antelopes Buffalo me we almost wiped the whole thing elk when we got it down to just I mean at the the turn of the 19th century or the 20th century rather we it was a it was a

59:35sad State yeah it was a sad State and it was a you know it's one of those instances in history where uh I mean I think I say this in the introduction of that American sarin Getty book that was the largest destruction of wildlife that I've been able to discover in world history 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 in most instances not completely uh Exterminating them but dropping them to numbers that were Soo that you know you worried that this animal was going to survive and I mean some animals we did go extinct the Carolina Parakeet for example uh was this beautiful uh Gody 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 people hunted them they were

60:48regarded as a agricultural Pest and so farmers basically uh killed them and enlisted govern agents as had happened with wolves and coyotes to to wipe them out 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 now people didn't know anything about ecology I mean you know we don't have ecology emerge as a science until the 1860s so me it's I it makes sense but it's amazing it really is amazing that we knew so little we knew we knew very little and we tended to you know I mean and with a complete lack of knowledge I mean we did the same thing with the the coyote uh attempt at Exterminating them we we passed a law in Congress in

61:481931 to provide for the extermination of coyotes and to appropriate the money to do it I mean we spent probably 100 Mill million dollar over the next 40 or 50 years attempting to do it and passed that law at a time when we had never sent the first scientist out to do any study of coyote Natural History we had no idea what they ate had no clue about them but before we even have any science to go on at all we just go ahead and take the step of okay we're gonna this is an anal we're GNA completely weed out of the North American setting we're going to eliminate it don't know a damn thing about it but we're going to make sure that this thing does not survive through the 20th century it's fascinating in your book the accounts of the early explorers who were trying to figure out what the hell a coyote was they thought maybe it was a jackal they didn't know what it was and then they

62:44finally decided it was some sort of a small wolf and then the initial description of it yeah what they call it a prairie wolf prairie wolf that's right yeah you know a lot of people don't know this for most of the 19th century I mean I've I've seen references to this name as late as like 1915 um Americans call coyotes Prairie wolves that was the name Lewis and Clark gave them and so that's what everybody called them and it wasn't until we started getting out into the Southwest uh in the 1840s and 1850s especially around uh Santa Fe where there were uh Indian people who had come up with the span colonization of the Southwest who spoke the language of the Aztec uh that language is called noat and the word coyote comes from the Aztec language so when Americans were first getting into New Mexico in the 1840s really they began encountering people who were using a different name

63:51for the animal and over the next 30 or 40 years that name sort of overtook the term prairie wolf and finally completely replaced it so the original name was an Aztec name yeah it was an Aztec name yeah and it's pronounced in in the noat language it's it's spelled in their language C yo T L but the L on the end is silent and so the way they pronounced it was coyote and um I mean the ASC language because they you know they were an Empire and they they defeated a lot of peoples and they imposed their language and their Customs on a lot of people there were all sorts of Indians who weren't necessarily Aztec who spoke that language uh and there were evidently uh enough of them in places like Santa Fe and Tucson that when uh anglo-americans got out there they they were encountering not only native people who were using that word but the Spanish not being privy to the American

65:00use of the term prairie wolf the Spanish had just adopted the Indian name for the animal and they had hispanicized it and they began they gave it an extra syllable so they call the animal a coyote and that's what these early Americans were hearing they were largely hearing the Spanish pronunciation the three syllable version coyote and Mark comes along in the 1870s and writes a very famous book about the West roughing it of course he's America's most famous writer at the time his book is a bestseller uh and Mark Twain not only kind of because we as you mention mentioned a minute ago we don't really know what to make of these animals Americans have never had any experience with an animal like this so we don't know what to think about them Mark Twain is the one who provides us with kind of a a take on them as these cowardly despicable uh little creatures that have

66:00this you know overgrown wolf skin and this despairing look and he says you know they're they're such Scoundrels and such scavengers that uh a flea would desert one for a velocipede you know and he's Mark Twain he's humorous 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 basic con ition is okay this is a Despicable little creature that's just breathing up good air so we should just get rid of it but he does in the course of that book tell Americans how what the animal is called and how you pronounce it and he says uh in the west this animal is called a a coyote and he spells it out phonetically giving us our modern pronunciation of coyote so our modern pronunciation comes from Mark Twain yeah he's well he's the one who at least popularizes it wow everybody who read his book basically kind of I think uh

66:59absorbed that pronunciation of it why did these Native Americans have such a great respect for the coyote like what what was it about that animal that created so many Legends oh that's a you know a great story and you know as I I argue in this book I mean I what I try to do with coyote America is to tell the the biography of the animal from its evolutionary origins through it history up until the present time when of course it's in everybody's backyard all over the country and so we're all all dealing with it and having to figure out what it is and and how you coexist with it but it's a real roller coaster ride because I mean it goes you know for a million years of its Evolution uh confronting at certain times the return of grey wolves to North America which clearly don't like coyotes and beat the crap out of them and even probably influenc their evolutionary

67:59Direction into a smaller more jackal likee animal but then it also it has this story that's associated with us 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 that's the most intriguing animal on the continent it's for one thing mammoths camels horses all these big charismatic animals are dying out around us in the Pline extinctions somehow these little guys don't seem to be perturbed by it they're surviving while all these big creatures these big impressive creatures are going away and I think they also at least this is what I argue in the book they had this sense that uh kyes live by their wits and I think that provided them with a model that they thought was valuable because I think living successfully because you're smart you know is that's a trait that

69:19humans in any age including ours right now uh could very well uh follow and and find to be uh a an effective way to go about facing your future so they see this animal as being particularly smart particularly adaptable a Survivor and because it was a social animal it has pups the pups don't know how to F for themselves in the world and coyotes have to teach the pups just as humans do with their children how to become full grown coyotes and how to survive that it seemed to have a lot of traits that people found familiar and so at some point in time and who knows when it was I mean it could have been 10,000 years ago they converted into Indian people in the west everywhere coyotes ranged convert this animal into one of their principal Gods their principal deities wow and make it this sacred creature I mean they have no reason to kill them or harass grass them or

70:25anything and so instead they look at it as this Avatar this standin for humans in the world study it really closely and they proceed to create this body of of literature it's our oldest literature from North America uh in the form of oral stories that have coyote as the central character but it's not it's not the little coyote that's trotting through your Camp it's a coyote man he's a character who stands on his hind legs he has pointed nose and he has erect ears and he has a tail but he's standing up and he personifies all the traits both good and bad of human beings it's 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 directly attributed to us having livestock anywhere near them deciding we want them out but if you look at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles

71:28when I was there I took a photo of it because it was so weird I put up on my Instagram there the photo the the stuffed coyote that they have there they have all these different animals they have African animals they have gorillas chimpanzees all these different stuffed animals just sort of give you a sense of what they would look like with this mock natural environment the coyotes natural environment they show a porch and the coyote has a cat in its mouth I mean this is this this is this image right here that is a my photo that I took from the Museum of Natural History it's like what like that's the natural environment is a porch with a cat in his mouth it's it's so bizarre but that's how human beings especially in and around La yeah um view them I you know when I had my situation with the um the chicken uh before I uh started reading your book I thought about killing that coyote I was

72:20like I'm want to kill that he killed my chicken I'm going to kill him then I found out I believe pretty sure that it was a female because uh he this female kind of Honey my dog into jumping the fence and converting converting with her and that's how they got the chickens cuz my dog's huge I have a Mastiff and he knocked over this uh see when chickens um when they uh they they brewed do you know about chickens brooding do you know my dad had chickens in Louisiana so yeah I kind of uh you know hanging out with him when I would go back and visit uh uh uh I came to know a little bit about chickens well people don't know what happens is chickens think that they're eggs the only way CH chickens have eggs every day pretty much or sort of every day every few days and when they have an egg uh those eggs are nonviable that's one of the reasons why vegetarians can eat

73:11chicken eggs and get protein from them you're not hurting anybody they have the eggs whether or not there's a chicken there or any or or not they always have the egg and it has to be fertilized by the the the rooster in order for it to become a chicken right I didn't figure that out so I was almost 40 but I just my stupid head I was like oh the egg means there's a chicken in there you just got to cook it before it becomes a chicken no stupid anyway um the chickens sometimes are convinced that these nonviable eggs will become chicks and so they sit on them and they start plucking their feathers out and it takes the entire cycle that an egg would be viable and become a chick for them to get out of it the only way to stop them is to put them on a perch and put them in a smaller cage so we put them in a perch in a smaller cage we separated him from the chicken Coupe and the coyote had

74:00figured this out that this chicken was by itself and convince the Mastiff to knock the cage over cuz it was too small to knock this Coupe over but the Mastiff is 140 lb he's like I'll take care of it boom he knocks the coupe down the coyote says thanks grabs the chicken and then jumps and hops the fence and I was talking to my neighbor about he's like oh man I hate coyotes I go do you like rats cuz if you don't like rats you should thank the coyotes the reason why we're not infested with rats I mean we're in the Hills when you're in the Hills out here in California there's rats and rodents everywhere but they're not and the reason why is cu these coyotes like we make that mistake so often where we think that we're smart and we're going to eliminate one thing in this this system and it's going to be fine now all we have to do is take out this coyote and everything will be great but no

74:52you're going to have a rat infestation yeah and that's one of the things you talked about in your book about farmers who had chased off the coyotes and they had rabbit infestations yeah that's and they were praying for coyotes I mean this happens you know just over and over and over again and so and I think you know one of the reasons that we tend to make 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 and you know I mean I've been uh 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 you know they're alarmed first of all that there's this small wolf trotting down the street or through their yard

75:45and then of course they immediately hear well it's going to get your cat uh it's going to get your small dog it's got It's liable to grab your three-year-old I mean you just so the horror stories uh through kind of urban legend make the rounds you know at a an accelerated rate and sort of basic good information about the animal doesn't make the round very effectively at all it's not fun no it's not fun 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 it's the position that in this instance we have confronted a part of the natural world that we are not able to control we can't control coyotes uh we resistance basically is feudal they're going to be among us no matter what we do I mean you can certainly take out you know coyotes are individuals and so if there's a bad

76:48actor in the neighborhood and very few of them by the way in the studies of coyotes in urban settings are bad Act but occasionally there's one that starts catching cats or uh starts chasing dogs or something I mean you can take that one out and perhaps improve the situation but just blanket going after 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 it skews 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 the thing that I mean I keep trying to do and of course there's a group in in California in San Francisco called project coyote that's been at this uh trying to help people

77:51understand how to coexist coexist with coyotes for the last seven or or eight years what you have to do is first of all accept the fact that okay resistance is feudal these animals are here they know how to live in an urban setting they know how to live in the hills around me now I've got to figure out how I live with coyotes in my life and I mean the obvious thing is you don't let your cats out in the morning to go hunt song birds you don't let your cats out at night I mean the coyotes are in most instances not attacking cats or small dogs because they want to eat them they regard them as competitor predators in their territory and so they're attacking them because that's how they they see them but they do eat them right well they they will eat them in some instances when they're trying to provision a litter of pups so the times when cats will be snatched by coyotes

78:54and will dis appear and you don't see the cat again is often the period from basically about now from April through about July that's when they have their litters and I mean it's sometimes hard to come up with enough protein to raise five or six little coyote pups and so occasionally a cat or a small dog will be taken away but usually what happens with cats and small dogs is that kyotes attack them and they just leave them there and I've told people for uh for most of this year here 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 whenever you find your cat that's probably a coyote and it's attack the cat because it thinks it's a competitor and it attacks it kills it leaves it if the animal disappears if your cat disappears and you never see it again either that's

79:52happened 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 that probably was a great horned owl that got your cat 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 but what almost everybody does now that we know we've got coyotes is you hear coyotes howling in the Hills the neighbor had a cat disappear of course it was a coyote coyote got it yeah but it might not be 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 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 have you ever seen it I haven't seen it but it's uh it's someone that had like a trail cam uh video up a black and white

80:49trail cam and you see the owl flying in in the distance heard stories of this you see the eyes and then you see it SN and the other bird in the nest doesn't even know what happened it watch this yeah it happened so fast so what first of all do you know what kind of animal that is that what what that bird is can you tell by looking at it it looks like a hawk of some kind but like a fledgling boom boom that's it look the other one's like what happened yeah what's going on yeah that's a hawk of some kind maybe a red tail and the fledgling just the eyes in the distance are amazing look at these eyes sneaking up look at this here it comes yeah it's so funny that we think of that thing as oh the wise old owl give a hoot don't pollute meanwhile those are as evil as it gets well they are definitely major predators and they you know I mean there the stories about them in New Mexico I mean

81:40there I've got friends who were sitting out uh at an outdoor bar a couple of years ago with a railing on it it was a late afternoon and a cat was walking along the railing weather sitting there with their drinks shooting the and all of a sudden an owl comes and and in a Flash plucks that cat off the railing and the next thing they see is the ow flying off through the cottonwood trees over the creek with this cat dangling from its pets yeah while they're all sitting there with their drinks poised in the air I was driving home one day and I saw this owl fly right above my head and I must have apparently while I was driving it must have got this rabbit somewhere close to it and I startled it so it's flying off and it decided to drop the rabbit so like right in front of me in the highway or in the road was this eviscerated rabbit a big rabbit too and I was and that that was like one of

82:33the first years that I lived here and I remember thinking I got to re I got to recalibrate my idea what an owl is oh no kidding cuz it was just torn apart and it was a big rabbit and I saw this hu I mean it was a big owl too so the whole thing was like whoa this is a predator this isn't just a bird no and they and that's the way they kill too that's what they do with cats they eviscerate them they put a Talon uh basically into their ass and just rip it all the way up all the way up to their sternum yeah spill their guts outo there's a wildlife sanctuary near here and uh we visited a couple of times and they have owls there and you get to like 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 just woof yeah they're serious yeah it's it's fascinating how we um anthropomorphize

83:22some of these animals and turn them into these Cutie Pies you know like polar bears are selling Coca-Cola and Klondike Bars and owls are selling Tootsie Roll pops meanwhile they just they're out there jacking cats you know there's a video uh in Los Angeles and one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about this is cu I'd heard you say before I think on rell's podcast what you just said about cats and dogs that essentially they're they the coyotes think of them as competitive Predators yeah but there's a video in Los Angeles uh in Hollywood of a coyote eating a cat on a lawn and uh these people are in the car watching and they're filming it and they're freaking out like oh my God oh my God it's coyot is just sitting there eating that cat so you think that the reason why it's eating that is it just hungry maybe or is it is it an occasional meal that they think of them

84:16as prey or is it primarily because is there a bunch of different factors or is it primarily because they're competitive Predators well I think it's primarily because of that but I mean they're so you know they're coyotes are so individualistic look at that sucker oh yeah just hanging out right in La hi right how are you wild animal walking by the car right in Los Angeles I mean just so bizarre that they're so comfortable around people look at all those streets look at all those city streets I mean thinking about walking across the street with all those car they know how to navigate streets like that too so strange how does it figure out how to make it across the street you know there's a there's a biologist in Chicago who argues that in rush hour traffic on the interstates in Chicago 9 million people there that he's seen coyotes cross four lanes of the

85:08interstate and stop in the median and sit there and wait until the traffic lightens up for the other four lanes and then cross that way so this is uh the coyote goes and and gets this cat that apparently had already killed before and he starts eating it so it's got it right there that that thing at his feet that's a cat a cat yeah well what I was going to say about that is that look at that yeah it's all stiff yeah well he's so what a strange animal you know so 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 that cat may have been hit by a car and the coyote found it and is Scavenging it how about that other stupid cat behind him going that's my friend right behind it hello why you eating my friend but the other thing I would say is that they're so individualistic that

86:10sometimes cats they develop uh I mean coyotes develop a Yin for cats like a taste yes they develop a taste for them and so I mean there are examples there was a a a coyote pack in Seattle and also one in Tucson that basically did this very thing they they decided that cats were you know going to be their target now most coyotes you know that's not how they react to cats but well cats do kill an unbelievable amount of rodents and birds 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 a decided record of numbers of nesting song birds going up dramatically as a result of the appearance of coyotes yeah there was a uh statistic that we quoted on the podcast and it's something insane like three billion Birds a year in North America alone are killed by cats by

87:14house cats B with a B yeah when you tell that to people they're like there's no way but look these are biologists these are people that are actually studying this and blew them away I don't know how they study it I don't maybe you could enlighten me well I don't either I mean one of 3.7 billion years annually 3.7 birds in the continental US that is so crazy that's us that's not Canada it's not Mexico Continental us and I I read a similar study in Natural History magazine a few years ago about Great Britain same same kind of thing yeah uh I don't remember the figures anymore but yeah I mean cats you know they devastate bird populations and so letting your cat roam out through the neighborhood you know seems like this very compassionate thing to do you know fluffy wants to be out fluffy needs you know some space to roam but you're releasing an extremely

88:10effective Predator into the world and that's the result of it and when coyotes have shown up in town it's suddenly getting a lot harder to make a living as a bird killing cat and so we're we're getting a sharp uptick now in songbirds yeah it's interesting how it all just Cycles it all just makes sense it all figures out it all seeks its own level um one of the things that I found hilarious is we were talking on rell's podcast about a group that approached you they were doing a documentary on saving the coyote yes indeed they were it was a a couple of women uh who uh were pretty fresh in into the South West in Santa Fe they hadn't uh been in town for very long and they were interested in doing a documentary to save the coyote and um you know so I mean there's a way to approach doing something like that uh I mean you could say okay so I want wildlife services to stop killing

89:14880,000 of them a year on behalf of Agriculture uh but what these uh women didn't seem to quite have a handle on was that coyotes don't need our help in Saving themselves they're perfectly capable of doing it and so U this is not an animal you have to worry about for example going on the endangered species list uh that's not going to happen as one of the people who blurred 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 uh in his blurb was that a biologist once told him that when the last human dies on earth a coyote will be sitting on that human's grave howling at the moon uh and I've always loved that thought because of course it's a it's an indication of how what great survivors they are well you are starting to see a Resurgence of wolves in Europe and uh there was actually an article recently

90:25published in uh 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 but the idea of these animals like intermingling with our with our civilization you know we we have decided we put some Hardscape down put up some houses and we go this is our stuff you got to stay out and they don't recognize these boundaries and now you're slowly starting to see these animals creep back in into Paris France into Paris that's right Wolves yeah well uh 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 yeah and for the most part we have yeah for the most part we have and we don't have you know at least not so far we don't have lepers you know patrolling the alleys and and

91:16uh Denver but I you know I'm intrigued by one of the stories I uncovered in the book which is an argument that I make is based on the work of a graduate student I knew at the University of Montana his name is John Hall and he was doing a a dissertation in history on uh what he was calling the great dog war in the 19th century and what it was all about 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 uh even in in La I mean the first accounts I've seen of K in La for instance or in the 1920s 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 and so every city in the United States had a large population of feral and sort of loosely owned dogs roaming around uh our cityscapes Pharaoh meaning they

92:27were totally wild or people would feed them and people would feed them I mean they were just basically stray dogs that would roam the city they would find things to scavenge behind restaurants and behind houses and they would knock over people's garbage and but in the this happened in I think in the late 1840s Boston had an epidemic one year of rabies attacks from these kinds of wild dogs in the city and so Boston began to Institute what became our modern system of dog catchers dog pounds leash laws dog control 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 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 it's not supposed to be running through the streets with packs

93:37of other dogs Scavenging uh garbage and stuff when we did that what that in effect did was to open up the niche in American cities for wild canids and the Wild canid that was able to take advantage of it was the coyote that provided them the opening 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 dogs suddenly all the dogs were put up and that opened up the cities to the arrival of coyotes in our midst wow just this the the interface between human beings and the Wild and and our interaction with the Wild and then just our our ability or inability to manipulate it it's just so fascinating to me and one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is what they're trying to do right now uh in I guess it's Wyoming and parts of Montana this uh American serengetti project that

94:44they're doing yeah please explain that well uh so this this other book that we've we've talked about some uh of mine that has been out now just about a year it came out uh last uh last March of 2016 uh that's a book American serengetti 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 one of the what was widely regarded around the globe as one of the great wildlife spectacles of of the world and these enormous herds of Bison of uh reemerging Wild Horse bands of pronghorns maybe 15 18 million prong horns uh not quite as many as bison but almost as many uh half million grey wolves that were their predators of course kyotes playing the role of Jackal uh grizzly bears that roamed I mean the original range of the grizzly bear was actually out on the plains they were all the way out into

95:58Kansas uh and into Nebraska and I mean everybody saw the movie Revenant of course uh which the filmmaker said in the Rocky Mountains but that was based on an actual event that happened in history uh a guy named Hugh glass getting mauled by Grizzly that happened in South Dakota though not up in the mountains because the Grizzlies were out on the plains in this version of the serengetti that prevailed 150 years ago but we ended up basically uh wiping all those animals out I mean we we wiped out uh probably as many as 30 million bison through the 19th century almost all we got the pronghorns down from 15 million to about 13,000 uh we drove the elk off the Great Plains that was their primary range was the plains we drove them off and up into the mountains did the same thing with the Grizzlies so we basically reduced this this American serengetti which Africa didn't do with its serengetti or

97:02its msai Mara or its veld it preserved all its great animals but we destroyed ours and ended up not ever successfully creating any kind of wildlife preserved to sort of save at least a part of it I mean we got Yellowstone but but of course Yellowstone is set in the Rocky Mountains and so what this American Prairie Reserve is about now it's based in Boseman Montana it's only about a dozen years old but it's been pretty wildly successful uh in trying to do this it's had the imagination this group of people has had the imagination to try to recreate this American serengetti that we are are government and our statecraft never did preserve for us and so what they've got in mind in Central Montana is taking a couple of uh large pieces of of existing public lands one is the Missouri River breakes National Monument that Bill Clinton created uh along the Missouri River and then just Downstream

98:15of it still along the Missouri River is the Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge and together those those two public lands that are along the Missouri River and mostly on the South Bank of the Missouri River in Central Montana make up about 1.6 1.7 million acres and what American Prairie Reserve is trying to do is to as they come up for sale to acquire the private ranches on the north side of the river with the idea of ultimately creating uh a preserve that's going to be maybe as big as twice the size of Yellowstone Yellowstone's a little more than 2 million acres and American preer Reserve is shooting for a preserve that would be something like 4 million Acres with the idea of recreating this American serengetti of repopulating it with bison uh with pronghorns with elk with big horn sheep with mu deer all the animals that were there and then because they're

99:22a private entity and and you know it's not the fishing Wildlife service so they can't on their own merits reintroduce wolves or grizzly bears just sort of sitting back and hoping and letting wolves come out of the nearby Rockies and Grizzlies which Every Spring now are coming out of the uh the Rocky Mountain front in Montana and and getting out sometimes as much as 100 miles out on the plains 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 serengetti with all the animals that were there and give us in our own time in the 21st century 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 now how are they going to reintroduce these animals and where are they going to get them from

100:22well I mean getting the Bison is not too difficult because they're Surplus bison uh pretty much around uh most of the West I mean we've got a larger B bison population in uh North America right now than we've had since the 1890s um more than 300,000 of them so it's fairly easy to come up with bison um pronghorns are already there uh and so all you have to do is just sort of you know make conditions uh beneficial for their herds to grow same thing with mule deer with elk with big horns they're going to they'll have to reintroduce Big Horns but that was an original range there were Big Horns out on the in the bad lands of the Great Plains and then as I said they can't deliberately on their own reintroduce Grey Wolves or grizzly bears but their uh idea is that if wolves and Grizzlies get there then they're welcome and and the idea is they probably once this

101:23preserve exists with all these grazing animals that the Wolves and the Bears will will find it wow that's so fascinating and now do they have a timeline what they're trying to accomplish this in you know it's uh as I said they've been around for about 10 or 12 years now I mean they've raised more than $130 million uh and they've got major donors on both the coast along with lots of you know just people like you and me who give them 10 and $15 or $25 uh I've got lots of friends who once I sort of alerted them to this who have joined American Prairie Reserve and are and are donors small donors um the timeline is basically whenever they can make it happen I mean the there's some uh considerable resistance from the ranching Community uh not only in Montana but kind of across the West because ranchers don't want to see bison especially bison and predators replace cattle herds uh so

102:28there's kind of an ideological opposition on the part of of ranching people but and that's twofold right it's one because of the food that the Bison would eat because of battle for resources but also because of brucelosis well brucelosis of course is especially in Montana they explain to people that's a disease cattle disease it's a disease that um that bison and Elk have and that if cattle get it their beef cannot be sold uh in North American markets all beef that's sold in our supermarkets has to be brucelosis free and how do they determine that do they have to test each individual in when they slaughter them well I mean they would if there was a real threat about it the truth is there has never been an instance in the wild of either a bison or an elk transferring brucelosis to cattle how would they transfer it to the they have to eat the same food no they basically it comes

103:26through largely from afterbirth whenever they uh whenever a bison uh cow for example that has brucelosis gives birth if cattle come through the area uh say within a few days and graze the same grass where afterbirth uh has been dropped from a brucelosis infected bison then the theory is that a cow could get disease it's been made to happen that way in Laboratories we have no record of it ever having happened in the wild when they when they made it happen in Laboratories did they force feed the cows I I don't think so I mean but I have to say that I've I've not read the study so I'm not quite sure how they how they pulled it off but they did they did make the transfer happen in a laboratory setting uh what's been bizarre about the whole brosis thing is that elk are infected with brucelosis far more than bison are but the ranching Community doesn't seem to be concerned about elk

104:31it's bison that they don't want and why is that well I mean part of it it seems to me almost dates back to the 19th century when we destroyed the uh original American serenti and killed all these bison and converted the Great Planes into largely a ranching country with cattle I mean and the idea has been from the ranching Community ever since that bison are a direct threat to the existing ranching community that if you get too many people enamored of Bison uh you know and I'm not sure I can track the logic of their arguments but it somehow seems to lead in that direction they don't like people introducing bison into the middle of a ranching setting particular L what they don't seem to like is someone with an old Montana Ranch of 40 or 50,000 Acres selling that ranch to somebody like American Prairie Reserve which clearly is going to introduce Wildlife

105:41on it and remove it from as an active sort of livestock ranching uh economic Enterprise it's interesting because it's a superior meat too bison's better meat yeah it's a meat better meat for you much less fat in it yeah it's yeah it's so this is a I think the most exciting conservation project that's out in the west uh in our time uh this is something that we didn't get and a lot of people don't know that that's kind of why I wrote this American s Getty book is I wanted people to understand that only 125 130 years ago we had the equivalent of the MSI Mara in places like Nebraska and South Dakota and eastern Montana and wow and we destroyed it and like that just like that in just the space of a few decades we completely wiped it out and as I I said a minute ago what seems to me to be the largest destruction wholesale destruction of wildlife discoverable in modern history

106:46and so right now the American Prairie Reserve is just they're just taking that land and buying it up and they haven't started this project yet no they have started the project yeah it it certainly exists and I've got a map of it in the in the book in American serengetti and they've reintroduced animals already they have reintroduced animals they're trying to come up with 12,000 so they have an Instagram page look at that American Prairie Reserve has an Instagram page absolutely only 1,700 followers how dare they so what click on that picture of the Bison down there below that below that Jamie lower right hand corner there you go L right hand corner yeah yeah look at that that one wow interesting so um there's a lot of bis in there roaming around and this is land that they occupy and so these bison have uh essentially very few predators and they're just wandering

107:38around and they're going to repopulate they're going to repopulate and uh so one of the things that uh American prair Reserve does when they acquire these ranches is that they remove the fencing from them I mean they've been fenced of course to create pastures for bison but they removed or for cattle but they removed the fencing in order to let bison roam freely and of course the idea is you ultimately have to have the Predators back you're not going to have a complete ecosystem unless you have the Predators there as well that is really tricky right because they you're not allowed to reintroduce grizzly bears they are not allowed to as a private Organization no the fish and wildlife service would have to do this and Fish and Wildlife service doesn't actually even the public lands that are there are not managed by uh the US fish and wildlife service and good luck getting

108:28cooperation from people in Montana 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 yeah so so they argue at least you know you know when I was the last few years I was in Montana and this was about 10 years after the Wolves uh had been recovered we had about 1,700 greywolves in Montana or in the northern Rockies actually by about 2012 or so and U so the hunters in Montana were up in arms sort of the way these white tail hunters in South Carolina now are up in arms over coyotes the hunters of Montana were up in arms because it wasn't so easy to get an elk anymore and they blamed it all on wolves 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

109:22by wolves and you know and it was impossible to kill a bull there anymore and concluded that actually most of the predation that was taking place on that elord was from mountain lions and not the wolves that had been roduced but it's become the for The Hunting Community the sport Hunting Community which has had of course a century now of getting to hunt elk and white tails and mu 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 right that makes sense and also uh I think it's super important that The Hunting Community step back and understand that these animals are supposed to be prayed upon by wolves and that without them you're going to get to these enormous overpopulation which sit had happen in that 100-year period when we were reintroducing elk with no

110:15Predators they develop diseases and look there Montana has no shortage of elk I was there this summer and we uh drove by this house and we had a pull over and luckily I had binoculars in my car and I gave them to my kids and they the first time they saw elk there was aund elk on this lawn 100 there's they were all over the place and uh one of the women who uh 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 and I think if you live there if you're a person who's an elun especially if you're a lazy one I I get where you could see that that would be uh something you would uh complain about but I think the elk adapt you know they figured it out they don't call as much and and people are complaining about that you don't hear the bugling as much but that bugling was probably a little

111:00unnatural they got a little too cocky that they could just scream and yell whenever they were breeding you know what they they got prayed upon right well you know what we have to remember is that we are newcomers to North America this is a very old place yeah and wolves and coyotes 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 Muer I mean this is they've been co-evolving with one another for hundreds of thousands of years I mean prong horns I talk about this in the American syan GTI book Pronghorn females always have two fonts they basically have little litters of Two And the reason they have two is because coyotes prey on Pronghorn fawns and so you basically have an heir and a spare and the spare is the one that you assume the coyotes are going to get wow

112:03so and they evolved disability you know hundreds of thousands of years ago so I think part of it is just coming to terms with the fact that we're we're brand new here and it's going to take a while for us to actually truly become Americans in an ecological sense and one way to do it is to think in terms of these long patterns that exting extend back through time I want to talk to you about your paper on bison uh it's called Bison diplomacy and bison ecology or is it the opposite bison ecology and bison diplom and what you were saying was and this I found incredibly fascinating was that when we came along when the Mark I say we obviously my grandparents were immigrants it wasn't me but when Europeans when you know 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

113:02something that the Native Americans were already on their way to doing well I mean so let me let me sort of offer a revision of that okay um Native people and bison uh had coexisted and that hunt had been going on for eight or n thousand years with with the the modern bison I mean if you track it back to you know the the large pine bison bison antiquus and bison latifrons the big Longhorn bison Longhorn bison what is that Jamie yeah it was bison L frons it's called LF frons lron yeah and so it's a long horn bison and then there was a slightly smaller one that existed farther into into our own time are the Bison that we experienc today are these pure well some herds are wow look at that thing that's amazing yeah so that's that's bison lron I'm sure you're aware of uh the scrub bows like particularly in Australia where these uh animals get free and they become feral and then

114:13domestic cows change their characteristics look at the size of that thing so what good Lord yeah so what that graphic shows is 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 plyto scene bison L frons is the animal over on the far left and bison antiquus is one of these in the middle it's probably the very middle one right there these animals were hunted by early human Hunters here too when the pl CU they arrived before the pine produced that Extinction scenario so they hunted these these large forms of Bison but about 8,000 years ago bison the large ones having become extinct bison sort of evolved into the smaller I mean some people actually refer to the modern bison as a dwarf compare compared to these older ones and so what I argue and I've got a chapter

115:20on this in American serengetti too sort of my most recent take on this bison ecology bison diplomacy piece which came out in a very fancy uh Journal academic Journal about 25 years ago now but what I argue is that that hunt had been going on for 8,000 years 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 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 one is the reintroduction of the horse to North America which Native people in the west quickly take up and gives them AB an ability to hunt bison far more efficiently and to become just as well adapted to life on the grasslands as the as the Bison was but the other thing

116:30that changes the equation is the market the introduction of the market economy and so what that article actually argued and what my chapter in American Serengeti argues to I haven't changed my mind over the last 25 years about this is that the market became uh a for Force for native people just as it did for people all around the world in Africa and India and everywhere else that they found difficult to resist 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 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 and you could trade that to a white Trader from the Hudson Bay Company or the American Fur Company and they would give you 15 steel

117:48arrowheads that were far better than the Flint ones that took your best arrow maker a day to produce 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 but basically the European market had so many labor saving Technologies steel arrowheads Steel knives Steel hatchets uh firearms that it became almost impossible for Indian people to resist trading for those things I mean and if you didn't trade for them and the tribe down the river did then they suddenly had guns and you didn't and so you were going to be outcompeted by your neighbors and so in effect what happened was that the lure of the good of the industrial world and the market economy Drew Indian people into the market hunt so that by the 1820s 1830s 1840s they were still killing buffalo in order to provide meat

119:07for the family and to provide you know uh hides to make a teepee and all that but they were killing an additional percentage of animals to trade to the European market and so they became actors in the market economy that was basically wiping all these animals out so it also was the reintroduction of the horse as well right because before that they were hunting these animals on foot and they were far less effective yeah yeah and they their their Beast of Burden was the the dog and so you couldn't travel nearly as far obviously by using dog propelled Locomotion as you could horses uh and you couldn't carry uh the kind kind of burdens the kind of goods that you could carry on dogs that you could with horses and so the transformation from being a dog propelled people to being a horse propelled people was uh it was a revolution in their lives I mean and one

120:07of the things that happened as a result of it was that there were people all around the borders of the ples many of whom were agriculturalists who were farmers who ended up especially their young young men 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 and so I mean there were entire groups like The Crows had been relatives of the mandans and the adotas and had been agriculturalists and that entire group of people uh ended up abandoning farming mounted up on horses rode out on the planes become Buffalo Hunters I mean during the period from basically about 1720 when a lot of the people in the west began to acquire horses and the the what spread horses as I mentioned earlier uh in our conversation was basically in

121:141680 the Pueblo Indians down in New Mexico rose up against the Spanish colonist and drove them out of New Mexico and in the process they captured all their herds of livestock they captured their goats their sheep and their horse herds and some animals some of the horses got loose and that's sort of the origin at least one of the origins of the wild horses that spread across the west but the peblo Indians trade the sheep and the goats to the people who become the navajos who become the herders of goats and sheep 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 UTS to the shonis to the npers to the black feet uh to the asins and then on out into the Plains and so from 1680 through about 1720 or 1730 just about everybody in the west ends up getting horses and you have

122:14to have the culture with it too I mean you can't just hand the animal over to somebody I mean there's a famous story where the first horse that the black feet see they offer it buffalo meat to eat and somebody has to say as a Callis Bell Indian who's riding the hes no no not buffalo meat it eats grass it grazes on you have to feed it grass and they have to be shown how to take care of horses and how to Gil stallions and how to ride them and how to break them and the whole bit so there's a culture that goes with it but once they acquire them and this period that only lasts for about 200 years of the famous HSE mounted buffalo hunting planes Indian emerges that lifestyle becomes which is kind of a backward step really in anthropological terms you assume that you know you go from hunting to being farmer and you go from farmer to being a city dweller this

123:11is a step going back the other way but it proved to be so compelling to so many people as I said earlier especially young men who often in these farming communities didn't have much opportunity for Upward Mobility but you could Mount up on that horse and ride out and become a buffalo Hunter and man you know the world was your oyster wow so it's essentially the influence of the Europeans coming here and offering up the market and and creating this environment where they where it was really profitable yeah yeah and so and and it became kind of something that native people almost couldn't escape you couldn't get away from it because I mean there were some groups said okay we're not going to participate in this you know but that immediately disadvantaged them compared to the group right down the river and so people who didn't participate were pretty quickly overrun

124:05by the people who became fully engaged in the horse hunt and the market hunt and I mean there are instances where I mean like the the suan people you know in the movies the lotas I mean they basically march across the Northern West like Pac-Man 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 I mean and they're still doing it down to the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn that's why the crows fight on the side of the United States at the Battle of the Little Big Horn is because the lotas are seizing their Countryside the Lota is what they call themselves in other Native Americans called the Sue which means enemy and the word that we've you know used in history is the Sue but I mean on on the Southern Plains the commanches did basically the

125:02same thing they created this Empire 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 and they created it around this this horse propelled bison hunt that provided Goods for the market economy now you were talking about steel arrowheads did they or when did they start using Firearms well they started using Firearms I mean that was an early trade item and it was usually in the very beginning of of contact between Europeans and Native people a firearm was you know maybe a couple of them were given to the the headmen to the leaders of a particular tribe as a status item one time I was an editor on a for a anthropological Journal called ethn history and um my task as a an editor I was a assistant editor associate editor something but my task was to read the the incoming manuscripts that were

126:10submitted for publication and one of the ones I read I've never forgotten this um was an account by a Trader in South America who was turning his Trading Post over to a newly arriving Trader and he I think they were Portuguese and so this Trader who had experience in the area was queried by the new guy said so how do I get the Indians to trade with me and the guy who had been on the scene for a while said nothing to it right 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 and then two weeks three weeks later go back and this guy this new Trader did exactly that 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 ax and there were hundreds of native people gathered around the spot wanting more of

127:28these objects who more of these axes because steel I mean there's a famous story when Captain Cook first puts off the coast off the yaa coast of kawaii 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 they realize this is such an advantage over the technology that they have and so I mean they're willing to trade what what do you want for an axe wow what do you want for a box of nails so they just let the people know that the axe was a thing yeah hang it from a tree leave them for a while let them play with it and go back yeah wow that's that's a mind blower so that's how how native people kind of all over the world who hadn't progressed to the iron Revolution to the Iron Age were

128:39seduced into the market economy is that they were offered items that were so compelling and as I I've said a couple of times now if you 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 and so you got caught up in it and so that's how that's how what I was arguing in bison ecology and bison diplomacy I mean I I the argument is slightly revised in American serengetti but it's the same argument and it's become the prevailing argument about what happened to bison in the 19th century is we used to think that okay there were sell 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 of for their tongues and for their HIDs but what the story actually is is a much more believable

129:35and 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 once there are two or three million horses out on the planes there can't be as many bison any more 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 um we know that diseases like Anthrax and ultimately brucelosis 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 and then there's no question that the way the market worked it was I mean and there's of course no regulation of it this is before we ever regulate uh you know we have any environmental

130:39regulations it's just a free-for-all capitalist World also no Refrigeration no Refrigeration so you had to kill it and eat it within a certain time period and so the you can Dr the meat that in that dry climate you can dry it and preserve some of it but yeah there's no Refrigeration so you know and I mean the no Refrigeration thing really plays a role in The Bu 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 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 buffal you say buffalo jumps you mean running them off cliffs running him off cliffs yeah and you wanted to run off 10 and instead you got into a herd of you know 1300 1300 and they all went off and it even became this thing I mean we know

131:37about these Buffalo jumps that people regard Indian people regarded this as a strategy that you don't want to let surviving Buffalo go out onto the planes and inform form other Buffalo that there's this thing called a jump that you want to avoid wow 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 this going to sound crazy but it makes you wonder if it was ignorance on their part that the these animals could communicate like that or if they had some sort of an intuition about how instincts and how how how certain fears that animals had were developed well I think you know and I I spent some time talking about this in the Buffalo chapter in American serengetti uh uh it has to do with what we would call native science what you mentioned at the last there that they do

132:45understand and they've probably seen examples of you know an animal learning very quickly how to avoid a trap but it also has to do with the cause effect explanation that they have for how the world works and the they don't have this kind of you know Western explanation for this is a cause and this is an effect they have a a cause effect relationship to be sure but that it explains the world in a different way and Indian people pretty pretty generally believe that bison were a people that they were a family of animals and they had families uh that were very similar to the families that Indian people had 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 and so the idea was that you had this kind of um you know ethereal tie to these animals it was a tie that we would

134:04explain now looking back on it we would say okay it's a religious thing this was some sort of spiritual kind of understanding of how people and and animals interacted with one another but it was informed a little bit by kind of native scientific observation too and I think in particular this one where the argument was and it's from what I've read it's been it was pretty widespread that if you did a Buffalo Jump you needed to kill all the animals that went off the Jump you couldn't let any of them get away I think that probably was more in the line of kind of native science 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 be particularly marked with a white patch on a hip or something and a few months later you saw that particular animal in another group

134:58of bison and when you try to do a jump it led that herd off in a different direction and so I think there was kind of native science in that but the you know where we got to and talking about this was no Refrigeration 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 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 and you're going to lose the rest of it because you can't preserve the meat of all those animals so would they find these sites where there just be Mass carcasses or mass bones oh yeah yeah there's a site in Texas it's called the bonfire shelter site and the reason it's called that Anthropologist 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

135:55folsome period that and so many animals went off that jump 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 three weeks of time burst into spontaneous combustion and scorched the cliff that they had gone off of of and so when whites first saw it they thought somebody has built a giant bonfire at the base of that Cliff look at that it's streak 100 feet up the side of the cliff and what archaeologists 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 whoa how does that happen how do they how does it how do they burst in Flames well I mean in hot weather with that much Decay and fermentation of all the juices that are

137:00in intestines and stomachs you basically create a condition where you've got flammable chemistry that lights but what causes the ignition you know who knows I mean I think it's uh the explanation I've read is spontaneous but you know somebody may have walked over with a torch and tossed it onto the pile of animals and burned them wow thousands of animals yeah thousands of them you know it's interesting what you're talking about with um explaining this idea that if one of them survived that they would inform the other ones there was a study that was done recently on mice and this is a a direct genetic study so it might not be totally related but it might be in some ways they took these mice and um they sprayed a citrus smell in their cage and then when they smelled the Citrus smell they shocked them they shocked their feet they had the uh the bottom floor of the cage was

138:00electrically charged and every time they sprayed that Citrus smell they would give them a zap then their ancestors who uh had never experienced this before they did the same thing to them just sprayed the Citrus smell and they had a physical reaction a a heightened sense of danger fear um you know they they realized that a shock was coming just by the smell of that Citrus they were terrified of it yeah it makes sense that instincts are passed on well it you know it does I mean we we've sort of concluded from studies that have been done primarily in Italy uh over uh studying families through the generations uh in Italy that descendants of a particular group of people will preserve evidence in their genes sometimes four five six Generations down a timeline of an ancestor who went through a famine or a starving time and so that famine would produce a physiological effect on the

139:11body and that would be passed down so that geneticist could discover effects of it several Generations down on the timeline wow so it's sort of similar to what you're describing with with mice and I think that's probably you know we just we haven't studied at least I'm not aware that there have been a lot of studies of this kind of thing but uh what it really kind of means is that we're the products uh you know in our modern world of things that happen to our ancestors maybe two or 3 hundred years ago and maybe even the fears like they think that Arachnophobia and IOP phobia 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 I mean speaking of that sort of thing you know there's a a section I do when I'm talking about the

140:07development of poisons to try to eradicate coyotes uh in the uh coyote America book where the reason during World War II we decided uh or the the government what is now called wildlife services uh this agency that was trying to solve the Predator Problem by Exterminating kyotes the reason they used our new chemical insights during World War II to come up with new poisons uh against coyotes was that they began to realize that strick nine which had been the poison of preference for the previous 70 or so years was a poison that killed coyotes to too quickly and coyotes are really smart about cause and effect and so a coyot that was in the presence of an animal that ate a bait Cube and then suddenly went into convulsions and strick N produce these really sort of bizarre and grotesque deaths that those animals would not take a strict nine bait after they saw that

141:18happen uh to one of their pack members and so in the the 1940s we came up with three new poisons uh one of them was called um sodium uh let's see sodium uh flu acetate which is the one we now call 1080 and it was called 1080 and it was used for the next 19 in fact it's still used in limited application today but it was a poison that was developed after 1080 tries by this laboratory that since 1920 had specialized in developing poisons to kill wolves and coyotes it's called the uh eradication methods laboratory so 1080 uh another one sodium thelium was a poison that killed coyotes so slowly that they would often survive for a week after they ate the poison and in that week their pads would fall off their hair would fall off the pelage would come off their bodies uh there's one story where a farmer in Colorado found during the winter of about 18 or 1947 or 48 he found seven or

142:46eight coyotes in his barn with no pads on their feet no hair on their bodies all huddled together trying to stay warm Jes and he killed them with a pitchfork oh my God but the reason we introduced these poisons and it was a third one too uh which uh was a cyanide uh basically the one that we call m44s now that are little cartridges that fire a cyanide Mist into their mouths is because these poisons killed them slowly enough that other coyotes witnessing the victim taking the bite uh of the poison bait didn't put two and two together wow yeah I mean so we had 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 with a poison that plays against that absolutely fascinating the the whole subject absolutely fascinating listen man I'm so glad we got together I want to get you

143:55together with Randle Carlson though would you be interested in coming back and doing another podast I'd love to do that 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 the two of you together would have a fascinating conversation so let's do that down the line but until then your book coyote America is fantastic I loved it thank you very much for that and I'm going to I haven't started reading it yet but American Serengeti your other book I'm sure it's equally awesome and I really enjoy this thank you so much really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me man it's been great all right folks see you next week bye